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thoughtbot's Incubator Program is back for a third round! This episode introduces founder Josh Herzig-Marks of Knect, and he will be sharing his journey from freelance work to joining the program and what happens throughout! So far, he appreciates the deliberate communication practices required for practical remote work, despite remote work already being second nature to him, and he understands the importance of proactive and transparent communication in a team setting. One critical insight for Josh so far was the misconception surrounding the term "CRM" in personal relationship management. His moment involved mislabeling a survey, which led to confusion about the project's intent. As the Incubator Program progresses and continues to scale, Jordyn expresses excitement about involving more teams with different geographic focuses. The goal is to foster a collaborative environment within the thoughtbot Incubator Slack channel, encouraging past and present participants to share experiences and advice. We invite listeners who resonate with any of the challenges heard or have potential solutions to reach out! Our next Incubator episode will introduce our other Session 3 participants, Mike and Chris, founders of Goodz. Follow Josh Herzig-Marx on LinkedIn or X. Visit his website at joshua.herzig-marx.com. Follow thoughtbot on X or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: LINDSEY: My name is Lindsey Christensen, and I head up marketing for thoughtbot. For anyone listening or joining who isn't familiar with thoughtbot, we're a product design and development consultancy that helps you make great products and help make your team a success. One of the very cool ways we do that is with the thoughtbot Startup Incubator, which is a program that we launched this year and that Jordyn, who's with us today, has been heading up. What's up, Jordyn? And today, what we're going to be doing is catching up with one of the latest founders who's participating in the incubator and seeing what he's been up to since the kickoff over these last two weeks. JOSH: It's been two weeks. It's been two really fast weeks. LINDSEY: [laughs] Josh, could you give us a little introduction to yourself? JOSH: Sure. I'm Josh. Hi. I've been in tech product management for, like, 20-ish years, 15 or so of those were in head-of-product roles. And a bunch of those early on were my own startup, where I discovered I was a pretty mediocre founder but really liked this product leadership thing. I had a very lucky exit, which I leveraged into a series of first product manager, first head of product, first product leader roles at a series of early-stage companies across a ton of domains: B2B, B2C, FinTech, mobile, Revtech. And then, a little over a year ago, my partner and I got to do this thing we've been talking about for a while, which was we swapped who the primary parent was. We have two kids, two teens, 13 and 15, right now, so that's eighth grade and ninth grade. I wanted to take over primary parenting so that they could focus as much or as little on their career as they wanted to in the same way they had allowed me to do for the first 15-ish years of our kids being kids. And if I were a better person, I would have found some kind of job that allowed for work-life balance, but I'm not. I have a whopping case of ADD, which we'll probably come back to later on in this conversation. And the way that I knew I'd be able to actually fulfill my responsibility as a primary parent was by retiring from salaried work. So, I did that a little over a year ago, last summer. And kind of keep me busy and occupied in between 8:30 in the morning, you know, school drop off and 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon school pickup. And when I'm not doing shopping, and cooking, and lunches, and doctor's appointments, and dentist appointments, and orthodontist appointments, and play dates, and soccer practices, and basketball practices, and soccer games, and basketball games, and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and all the other things that we do, I built a very small niche coaching mentorship and advisory practice around founders, solo product managers, and first-time heads of product. And that's pretty much up until about two weeks ago what I had been doing with myself. LINDSEY: That's a great update. I especially liked all the practices that you have to go to. [crosstalk 02:54] JOSH: I do like practices. We went to a co-ed soccer game for my middle school kid. And it was the first time that the boys' team and the girls' team ever played together, and they got totally clobbered by this other team. And what I loved about it at the end was the kids weren't bummed. They were like, "That was really fun." And, you know, for a lot of these kids, they've been friends since kindergarten. So, this is, like, nine years of being friends and playing recess soccer together. And they're not very good at soccer, but they just really love all playing together so much. And they just bring so much sportspersonship to the field. It was really a pleasure. LINDSEY: Okay. So, you're doing all this fun primary parenting and going to all the fun practices. You've got a coaching business that you're working on as well. But there was this idea, this idea that's needling. What brings you to us? JOSH: I think before it was an idea, it was a problem. And I knew this was a Josh problem. And the Josh problem was that I have a really big network, you know, built over the past, you know, more than 20 years of professional life. And, you know, one of the joke lines I have is that the solution to almost any business problem is found in talking to more people. I really value being able to, you know, call people up, message them, text them, email them, get together with them, ask them lots of questions, listen hard. And I try really hard to reciprocate, doing the same thing. I don't know what your professional network looks like, Lindsey or Jordyn, over the past, I don't know, couple years, decade, however long it's been, you know. But what used to be email and LinkedIn, maybe, and maybe getting together in some local meetups, has really spiraled what, to me, feels, again, whopping case of ADD, completely out of control, right? I have my LinkedIn network, which has not gone away, right? And now I'm a member of, I don't know, Jordyn, we share these a lot, a dozen different professional networking Slacks. Those are the ones that Jordyn and I share, probably far, far more than that, right? Product management ones, entrepreneurship ones, product marketing ones, engineering ones, tech company ones, ones geographically based for the Boston area, ones that are focused on things like climate change and climate tech. So, a ridiculous number of these. And as somebody with some experience and the privilege to have some free time, it feels kind of like, I don't know, an obligation sounds too grandiose, but it feels like a nice way that I can give back is by participating and trying to be helpful inside of these. So, that's happened. And Discord became a thing, you know, certainly, it had been a thing for gamers since before that. But since the beginning of the pandemic, Discord became a thing. I'm in, like, I don't know, a dozen different similar Discord groups. And I'm in WhatsApp communities, and I'm in Telegram communities. And in-person meetups have started to happen again. And I found myself kind of losing control. I was telling people, whether, you know, over the phone, or in Zoom calls, or direct messages, that I'd make connections to them, make intros, and it was getting increasingly hard to do that. I was forgetting about people, you know, like, it's hard to remember to stay in touch with all of your colleagues when you move on from past roles. And, you know, I would try to make connections to people to be like, okay, Lindsey, you know, you wanted to meet somebody else in marketing in the Boston area. And I remember that, like, six years ago, they worked at Rocket, and now they've moved on to something else. I can't remember what it's called. And, like, how do you, like, you know, page through your email and your Slack connections and your LinkedIn to find that person? And that was really hard, too. So, I have ADD. My family would say that I'm, like, moderately functional. So, how do I achieve that? By creating systems for myself. And I did all the things which other people have tried to do. I built myself, like spreadsheets and Notion databases. I have an awful lot of, like, Notion databases now powered by forms. I'm like, just put your information in, and it'll appear magically into my database where I try to, you know, push the work onto other people. And none of it was really working for me. And that was kind of the genesis of the idea and then trying to figure out, is this a Josh problem, or is this a broader problem? That's kind of how I got started. LINDSEY: Lots of people, lots of channels, not a lot of tracking or confusing tracking. And we chatted briefly before, you know, you were starting the program. And this really resonated for me. And I also ended up doing a user interview [chuckles] with the team about it. JOSH: Yeah [laughs]. LINDSEY: Because yeah, in my role, and moving from different companies or doing mentoring on the side, and being in investor communities and marketing communities, it gets overwhelming for sure. And I feel the pain. And I've had the embarrassing moments of not remembering how I know someone or a conversation we had, or someone I really respect asking me for an intro, and I'm like, I don't remember anything about how I know that person. JOSH: I mean, that was both gratifying and disappointing. Gratifying, like, oh, it's not just a Josh problem; we all struggle with this, and disappointing, right? And as I've had more of these conversations, just to realize, like, I know almost nobody who doesn't struggle with this. There's a few. There's a few outliers, a few weirdos, a few superheroes who are able to do this really well and who feel in control. And, like, literally, as they describe it, it sounds like...Jordyn, you're nodding, right? It sounds like a superpower as they're describing how they do this, how they kind of manage it. JORDYN: [laughs] JOSH: But for the most part, thank goodness it's not a Josh problem. The bummer is, nobody has, like, you know, the magic incantation, right? The spell or the secret or, like, the one weird trick, or the tool or, like, could I just give you money and solve this thing? And none of this really exists today. And that was kind of a bummer. I was hoping for, you know, better news that this was a solved problem. LINDSEY: [laughs] Yeah. Jordyn, heading over to you for a minute, Josh applied for the incubator with this problem that he was working on. We had a lot of great applications, I think, for this session. What made you think or you and the team land on Josh as one of our session three founders that would be a great fit for the programming? JORDYN: I'd say it was probably two factors; one is the stage. What's really tough was figuring out who's a good stage fit for us. So, like, what that means is you've identified a specific enough problem. You're not just, like, I want to solve world hunger or something, like, super broad. There's enough of a specific pain point or a problem that you're trying to solve that there's, like, we might conceivably make progress on it in eight weeks. But you're not so far along that you are basically like, "Hey, I've got the specs for an MVP. Can you just build it?" Which is, like, too late for us. And part of that is a discovery mindset of, "Hey, I've identified this pain point. I think other people have it. But I am very open to how we solve the problem or learning new things about it, learning that it is a bigger need in a market I've never thought about," like being open to the things we might learn together. So those things: stage fit, mindset fit. But, also, like, it is a problem that is addressable with software, right? thoughtbot's focus is software. Like, yes, we have worked on products that are not software products, but, like, our bread and butter is software. And my personal bread and butter professionally is software. So, is the problem on the table something that, you know, software is a big component in meeting the need? So, it's, you know, it's stage. So, I guess it's three things: stage, founder mindset, which is this combination of having conviction but being open-minded, a very weird [laughs] thing to find in a person. And then, you know, can we conceive of a way to address this with software without jumping to a solutionizing? That's sort of what we're looking for, and Josh checked all of those boxes. And I think, also, just had a problem that people really resonated [laughs] with, which is clear from [laughs] what Lindsey was saying and for me personally as well, I think I should [laughter] say. This is a problem I have. So, when Josh and I first talked about it, I was just like, yes, I would love to solve this problem. I also wish there was some spell, or incantation, or weird trick, or existing products, et cetera. JOSH: We might have spent an hour nerding out over all of the things that we've tried, yeah. JORDYN: The things that we've tried, emphasis on the nerding. JOSH: On the nerding part, yeah. JORDYN: Any of you listening [crosstalk 10:45] JOSH: Or what if we get sneakier connect Google Sheets to this, like, really weird web query and [laughs] -- JORDYN: [laughs] Exactly. And then giving up because it's totally unmaintainable or, like, [laughter] impossible, yeah. So... JOSH: Right. Oh, and it's all crap, too [laughs]. JORDYN: Right, right. So, if anyone out there listening is like, "Oh yeah, that's me," first of all, you're not alone. Second of all, please reach out to us. We would like to interview you [crosstalk 11:09] JOSH: Or, if anyone out there is like, "Oh, I have this thing solved," right? If you got the solution, please reach out to us. JORDYN: [laughs] Yes, also, please. JOSH: You can save us six more weeks of work [laughs]. JORDYN: If you know the solution, definitely tell us. Anyway, so to your question, though, Lindsey, that's how this [inaudible 11:23], and it just seemed like a great fit along those lines. LINDSEY: Yeah. So but, Josh, you mentioned...well, I think you kind of downplayed your founder history a little bit. But you've been a founder who had success, certainly a product team leader who has been very successful in the early-stage teams. What were you looking for from thoughtbot? Like, what attracted you to working with the thoughtbot team on your problem when you have all this kind of past experience already? JOSH: I think there's probably three parts to it; one is I know a bunch of people in the thoughtbot team pretty well. In past roles, I have actually hired thoughtbot; I think it was twice. And I've referred a bunch of your current and past clients as well. Like, I'm just generally a big thoughtbot fan. I think I've even used thoughtbot products long before I even knew, like, Chad or Jordyn, some of your old products from, like, you know, the early 2000s. So, we're going really OG here. So, I knew thoughtbot really well and think really highly of everybody who I've interacted with there. Number two is, I know, you say incubator, but, for me, the word that's really been resonating has been accelerator. It can…
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