Client Management For Nice People: Jaw-dropping client experiences (and how they changed us.)

Transcription of Jess McCarter’s episode (That time your client was so smoothly turning into your BFF, you didn’t realize he had made up all his investors)

Transcription of Jess McCarter’s episode (That time your client was so smoothly turning into your BFF, you didn’t realize he had made up all his investors)

This transcription belongs to Episode #11: Jess McCarter’s client horror story gone unexpectedly well for Morgan Friedman‘s (Our Beloved Host) surprise and, of course, ours too. Please watch the complete episode here!

 

Morgan (Host): Hey, everyone. Welcome to the latest edition of ‘Client Horror Stories.’ And I’m honored today to have the always awesome and well-just McCarter on with me to talk. Let’s dive right into his story.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Thanks, Morgan! I appreciate you having me. I would like to flashback to my early days when we were just getting started with our web application development company, Sagebit. We had been developing our products for two years and unfortunately, we were too early with everything. We were on YouTube too early before YouTube even started its growth. While we waited for the market to catch up with us, we thought about doing development projects to pay the bills.

Therefore, we also did little tiny contracts for companies; a one-off project to do some web scrapers, a one-off project to do a website. We cut our teeth in Ruby on Rails full-stack development, which was brand new back in 2004 or 05, with a few full-stack web applications for clients. Our contracts were short; our scope was limited. And we needed to ramp up our development operation. We hired trained developers from some of the local schools.

I lived on the East Coast then, even though the company was in Indianapolis, Indiana, and I was headed to the east coast to drum up clients. And I did some RFQs (Request for Quote) and answered some advertisements. And then I found the big fish. The referral came from a friend, and we all went to Dartmouth College together. It was the first warning sign. And he said to meet him and spend some time doing due diligence. However, we did not do as much due diligence as we needed to perform. You can see where this may lead.

Morgan (Host): So, what kind of due diligence do you recommend? Usually, people Google to find any obvious Red Flags. He was not a terrible lawsuit. But beyond that, what sort of due diligence would you recommend?

Jess McCarter (interviewee): It goes beyond that because this client was amazing on paper. We are talking about a math and music prodigy project from a different country that has enjoyed great success in New York so far. We got the idea from the background on paper that this is something well funded, well-capitalized, and has a good bit of runway to go. I wish I had asked my friend who made the referral. How long have you worked for this guy? How big is your contract? Is your contract fixed scope? Have you had any problems?

Because if I had asked those questions more, I would have learned that he had just started working. Within a few months, he had five or six change orders. There was already one missed payment. And he was doing wireframes for the client. Wireframes are not an entire website, nor are they ambitious projects like this guy was planning. So at this point, I will introduce some background on the project without going into details because, you know, we are keeping it anonymous. It was a shopping project which was to build in 2005, 06, or 07. Web commerce had already gone through one boom and bust cycle. More things were moving online for buying.

And it was a very ambitious idea to do all of the shopping across multiple sites and make a shopping list, all of which were housed within one grant site with a single login. So it was ahead of its time. How long did Google take to roll out single login or Facebook to other websites? It was almost a decade later. How long has Amazon been working on building a product like this? More due diligence is required for such a large and ambitious project.

Okay, there would have been some warning signs if I had interrogated the friend more closely. So, the acquaintance who brought us this referral was clearly under pressure from this guy. He was appointed to do the front-end design, wireframes, and investor pitch decks for a long time. And part of his job was due to his connections with developers. He required some developers.

I could have asked my friend to describe his experience nicely. What was the referral process he had been working on? Was that a cooperative, mutually agreeable relationship so far? Was he under stress as a result of his problems? 

And he probably would have told us that he was looking for some developers, and we could have taken that point in print back then, and this was not an irredeemable project, and almost no project is unredeemable. But we really should have put some more guardrails in place.

Morgan (Host): I will talk about guardrails and what happened next before I want to add a comment on due diligence. I adore your point about due diligence. Interestingly, phases like due diligence make people feel worried. Your insight is just as significant as the lawyers’ research. Asking a mutual connection how and when they met can often serve as due diligence, and it is simple, but that little bit goes a long way toward alerting you to Yellow Flags.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): And it does not need to be a full-blown background investigation. But, a few questions about finance are appropriate. For instance, I have also done a lot of Real Estate transactions. And one of the things we do when we buy or sell a property is if a buyer, for instance, says, “Oh, it is an all-cash offer.” It is acceptable at that point to say, “That is fantastic. We look forward to it. Would you please provide the documentation that funds are available? We are not asking to put all the money into an escrow account right now. Let us have a little peek behind the curtain and make sure that some of the things you are saying match up?”

Morgan (Host): Often, a simple screenshot goes a long way.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): One must have a bank account screenshot or an MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) from an investor who has not given you the funds yet. You can sign the NDA and can keep everything confidential. And when you are confident, ask them to disclose a few names of the investors in the project so that you can do some quick background research to ensure legitimacy. 

You need to sit down and have an hour meeting with your investor to double-check that this person exists. Because some people are a little more Flim-Flam than others, there might not have been as many investors behind this project as you believed initially. And in our case, we did not ask any questions, and we did not get any verification. It became a tough spot later on when the bills came due.

Morgan (Host): You are teasing me about what happens next. I understand you got this introduction and did not do your due diligence.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Therefore, we do not have to be diligent. So, we were so excited back then as we needed a big client. And, this was the first big, big client that was there on the road. During previous negotiations, we lost some significant contracts. And now we had a chance to get down the due diligence road. There had been two or three big misses that happened over that summer. And this was the height of New York City’s summer. It was hot and humid. 

I was a salesperson at that point who had to visit offices and have that last stage meeting face-to-face. So, it was a long hot summer of riding the subway to client meetings on and off, and, at that point, I was not at my peak. I was a bit rundown from having the sales cycle bust me a few times, so I was excited to push a client through the sales funnel. 

That is a warning to you on your app or research; never be so eager and anxious that you forget to do the fundamentals because, you know, the only thing worse than no contract is a bad contract.

Morgan (Host): I love it. It might be the title of the podcast.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Go for it. In my notes, a big client is also a big mess. It was our first big client; we had never worked with anyone this big before. Before, we did not have a contract this big. And all the previous projects had a fixed scope. It was all about neglecting due diligence.

Morgan (Host): So far, this seems like a good lesson. You were eager back then, so what happened afterwards?

Jess McCarter (interviewee): So, without fully doing our due diligence by asking some cursory questions about financing, we leaped into mistake number two. So, next on my list were payment and scope. We had always asked for deposits with our contracts. We always had good legal advice to set up our contracts. The contracts were sound. You can get at different companies that offer boilerplate legal contracts online. You can get a really good contract for a development deal like this, and it works great for you. We had these customized. We have gone one step beyond boilerplate. No one can define an overall project cost unless they have the scope right.

We knew from the description from the client that this was going to be a grand scope. And you cannot get a proper down payment unless you have defined the project scope. Our initial meetings should have taught us that when we were doing our background research and developing the proposal, you do the first couple free to meet with someone to get those specifications. And then some point, you need to flip the flag.

For instance, you are a New York City taxi driver, that meter needs to start running. But our client did not want the meter to start running. He wanted to have as many meetings as possible. And they just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. He was just so grandiose, and we are talking about a brilliant prodigy. I was constantly impressed with how his mind worked. But it was all over the place. And it was hard to rein in and get focused on setting an initial scope of the project.

And it is okay to have an ambitious project. However, if you are doing development for hire, or even if you are working on your startup, you must phase out your design. So the concept of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) certainly existed at that point. And we kept trying to steer the conversation back to an MVP. And this guy wanted to launch with everything. Okay, so let us walk through everything.

Morgan (Host): So I want to backtrack 30 seconds because you mentioned something in passing. I think it is another risk factor that is worth calling out; is working with brilliant prodigies. Or I will say, definitely being seduced by someone’s intelligence. So it has happened to me before where I have worked with people and have seen these different Yellow Flags.

But I would be so in awe of how their minds work. “Oh, my God, I did not think of this idea; it is eight steps ahead, this is brilliant, it is kind of sexy.” And you get so excited. You claim that you emotionally ignore all of the other risk factors. So I think a valuable lesson is that when you see yourself getting seduced, doubly be careful about the Yellow Flags that you do see.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): For sure. The odds that you are in conversation with your future life partner and that person intends to build that next great startup with you are slim to none, even if you are doing a development deal. I completely agree with you. He completely seduced us. I love good conversations with interesting people. And I love a mind that can be analytical but also leap from those pounds and get expensive. But there is a time and a place for everything, and I was only trying to sit down and define the project scope.

It was not the time or place to brainstorm the solutions to all the world’s problems. If the other day it was shopping, we would not try to solve the world’s problems or shop. When you look at yourself, you need to not just focus on your strengths, but you need to understand your weaknesses; weaknesses that you will never truly overcome. So, work hard to steer around those weaknesses so they do not become muddled. And that is one of my views.

You are right. This podcast right now could go off the rails because we can have a conversation that goes on for three hours and touches on plenty of different topics, none of which have anything to do with client horror stories from someone. It was our first big project back then. Before I went down that path myself; it should have been a warning sign when we could not get a good scope on paper because we decided to move forward anyway. We made a guesstimate and talked about a monthly burn rate. We talked about all other minute contract details at that point. But we put the cart in front of the horse there. Because what you need is the horse out front, it was the project’s scope.

A person doing development to hire, or working on their own startup company, with a fixed amount of resources, must make those decisions upfront before beginning work. Because once you start working, it is impossible to pull it back. Once we started working on brainstorming sessions and tried to work on scope, it was a warning sign; Things got way out of hand. We are talking about someone who is a mathematical and musical prodigy. We would have meetings in Reezy Midtown loft. 

He had dinner and musical equipment, and he lived in Manhattan in the 1930s. Once at dinner, he pulled out a keyboard and a noodle, like a noodle signature musical phrase, and was like, “Okay, we are trying to develop the feature, set that matches this tonal feeling.”

Morgan (Host): Full-on seduction mode!

Jess McCarter (interviewee): We are not in Kansas anymore. We have gone way off the radar here. And the problems will amplify if we do not continue our due diligence. If you are a startup client or a startup yourself, you are still in fundraising mode. Keep a balance between anticipating burn rate and raising rate. You cannot let your burn rate go down in front of your raise even if you are doing development for hire. It is not your pay raise; it is their kindness.

So, as a result, we sent our first bill without a hitch and on time. And then, after the first period of engagement, we got our first bill paid. We had more money coming in the door to ramp up development. He asked us to bring an extra developer with more money in the way. Still, the scope was in flux, and due diligence was also pending. He told us that he was raising more money and gave us the names of the investors who would be the best source of information.

In a startup business, investors put money before procuring more investors because they want to see their investment leveraged into something bigger. And likewise, if someone has invested in a company that you are doing development for hire, they will be the most honest about the amount raised increased, because they are the ones that care even more than the founders. Startups are known to fail, but they like to keep their failure rate low. So they try to manage a lot of different startups at once. Most of the time, they are only concerned with making more money. It is progress making. It is all they are only checking on.

Whereas when you run the company yourself, you get 10,000 other problems. So we should have checked in and done a little extra due diligence at this point. We could have even asked our buddy who brought us in. Are all of your bills paid? Do you still get paid? Because it turns out he had not had his last bill paid because that money went to us. We were in the middle of a fundraising Ponzi scheme.

Morgan (Host): Oh, no.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Oh, yes. So, we got a crazy mad genius coming up with an ever-increasing scope, spending money he does not have. I was in New York City as the first person on the ground, going to all meetings and meeting the next group of people. That was when my alarm bells started going off a little bit.

We had a contract to do all of the primary developers, however; he started interviewing during sessions with our company’s interviewing people to be hired on by the company itself. He made direct hires, which was our job. If he does not honor the terms of our contract, does that mean we will run into some problems with payment? It was our first alarm bell.

 Morgan (Host): I want to observe this narrative. He was interviewing people to hire directly, despite the exclusivity in your contract, and brought you to the meetings too. I think it implies no maliciousness. If he was purposely trying to rip you off, he would not invite you to the meetings and secretly be hiring people directly. But it implies more cluelessness, which is just as dangerous. So he was just a different type. It was like dealing with an asshole or dealing with the guy whose head was in the clouds.

 Jess McCarter (interviewee): Mendacity and cluelessness go hand in hand, and they walk down a road together, and that road is the road to nowhere. He was not going to understand. And this was not a successful project. In the meantime, we were having brainstorming sessions for names, because there was no name for this product yet. We used to look up the DNS to find available domain names. And he registered dozens of domains in the first, hundreds in the second session. And these are getting registered under our account. So, now I have all of these domains.

At that point, it was not a big deal; any of these domains could get sold. But, he tried to take the sold ones too. “Take it from the guy who owns liquid gold nails.com.” We did manage to auction off almost all the domain names and cover them to cover the costs but, at one point, I had several 1000 domain names, which was crazy. So that was the end of the scope. We started to allude to some things to get out of it.

And now, part three of the story is to start finding the upside. The rock bottom came right after the submission of our second bill. We had a very long phone call; he was not willing to see us in person. After hiring and fundraising calls with us, that person suddenly did not want to see us. Our bill number two was pretty huge. So, he called to talk about the bill. I was around the corner and offered to meet up; he was not ready to meet in person.

 Morgan (Host): By the way, I want to say that there is a more general version of the pattern with any client you have, whenever they say let us have a call. There is this ominous music that starts playing in the background.

 Jess McCarter (interviewee): My stomach still drops. You know, I graduated from college in 1999. I have been doing things professionally for 23 years. And to this day, when someone says, “Hey, let’s have a quick call about that,” my stomach drops as I could physically feel nothing.

 Morgan (Host): Even when contrary, things do great with no problems. And you have no reason to fear and, the client says, “Hey, can we have a quick call?” Sometimes, I wish that clients understood how we feel about that.

 Jess McCarter (interviewee): So, we talked on the text, which was worse than the email. He texted about a quick call. He needed to give us some clarification. Were we getting fired? Was there a meteor hurtling towards Earth that was about to knock us out like the dinosaurs? I had no idea what was coming next because I was scared. I was confused about what was going on? There was no subject in his quick call. Passing back and forth, he would ask to move into a phone call for a quick talk instead of meeting in person.

Morgan (Host): I am also sensitive to this situation. On disease Zoom, it happens a lot whenever I ask people for a call. I always put in not urgent parentheses, so the clients take things easy. There is no need to worry; everything is fine. The meteor is not going to come to wipe out the human dinosaurs.

 Jess McCarter (interviewee): I am super sensitive to this. I like spoiler alerts to confirm it is not bad news. It is okay if someone has a good surprise and does not want to spoil it. But if you are about to drop the hammer on someone, let them know that you got some bad news. One must be prepared to receive bad news so they can have a box of tissues. But if someone urgently says, “Let’s talk!” Should I be super worried that they don’t want to talk to me right away? Should I be super relaxed? They gave me no clues.

The bills came due. We got fired over the telephone. We were told that we weren’t going to get paid. And, we could go ahead and sue. Then we found out that the founder didn’t have any backing funds and was about to lose that well-off person. There had only been one investor. It was not an institutional investor. When I told you it was family money, that did not mean they got a billionaire to manage his family. Literally, a family member was writing the checks. That all came crashing down instantaneously.

And so we started looking for the upside right away because it was our first big contract. We made a list. We did a post mortem. And, I was able to write my notes for this meeting Morgan, from my memory, 15 years later. It was an important lesson to learn. You can be friends with your clients and coworkers, but only after establishing your company. In a framework for business, friendships become a hindrance as hell. Set up your business framework first, and then become friends with each other. If you are friends before business, pause your friendship during the project. It will save you from ruined friendships, a lot of heartaches, and potentially some expensive financial mistakes.

It was a big mistake for us, that could destroy our firm. But we did not go crazy on the guy. We did not threaten to sue him. We took him at his word that there was no money, especially when some revelations were made. They were embarrassing. They had built up the idea of a company with no backup investors. Frankly, his suggestions were exceptional and, the way he introduced himself, he was able to seduce us all.

Morgan (Host): The best and strongest types of liars are those who enjoy lying to themselves.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): If you buy it at all, maybe.

Morgan (Host): Totally.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): I can see Bernie Madoff laying out papers in his financial office. He alludes to it in the movie, and I can see him look at those papers and be like, “Well, these could have been profits. If we made that trade, you could have made this money, but you didn’t. You’ve sold yourself before you sold everyone else”, which is the founder, who sells themselves first and fakes it till they make it. It was the beginning of the “Fake it till you make it error era.”

And, I could see in his head what he wanted to do. His idea was great. He rushed into the development process, the fallout of what it would do to him that people had hired, and the product itself, which never came to be named, died right there. I got to the point where I still had some domain names. I kept them to keep the memory alive of the lessons filler, but we didn’t go crazy; we didn’t burn any bridges. Because the man was smart and there was a chance for him to come back.

Since the joy of calling this guy a cretin for misleading himself and us would have been short-lived. But the consequences of that could have been quite long. So, I waited. I wasn’t looking at him but, don’t become friends with your client on social media. And there was a lot of business done on it back then, which is thankfully no longer the case. All involved learned from this problem client, who nearly destroyed our business. Actually, he didn’t nearly destroy our business; we nearly destroyed our business.

Morgan (Host): I like that you own it.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): It was us who made poor decisions. We were overly eager. And we were ready to be seduced. We maintained cordial relationships with the person. In case of a lawsuit, they would not have the financial means to recoup those funds. It was not yet the era of ubiquitous video in everyone’s pocket. It was a few years too early for YouTube still. And we might say we forgave, but we didn’t say we forgave their debt. We agreed to hold on to the project as a promissory note. And we’ll see what comes of it.

So, this smart and ambitious person who was well connected in the technology scene all up and down the East Coast landed a CTO position at a well-funded private social network. Due to guilt, love of what we had done, and maybe a wish to give him this code if he paid the bill, which will never happen. I was not sure about the motivation. Although we didn’t talk about it much, he brought us in, didn’t give us any money, and just said, “I’m the CTO, and they’ll be outsourcing some things. I know you guys are still active in that space.”

He brought us to the table and asked us to make a good pitch. He acted as our advocate because we worked with him. He was willing to speak honestly about our company’s level of quality and thoughtfulness. And so the upside of this whole debacle is that we got signed into a much larger contract through which we were able to double our developer size. There was an upside. This guy came back in his way to redeem things.

Morgan (Host): What’s also interesting is that it reveals that he acknowledged that he fucked up. Too often, when people are like that, their ego gets so high that they will justify their biggest failures in the world and blame them on others. By the way, there’s an implicit acknowledgment of a mistake on his part there.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): 100% true. I have raised myself partially as a defensive person. I consider the other factors that may go wrong. Then those factors will always go wrong then. As a result, you, yourself, are blind to what may go wrong in the future, thus preventing you from the follow-through and diligence you need to execute a project. Things that are inside, always come first. You can’t get rid of them.

Morgan (Host): I think the internal struggles are the hardest ones.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Yeah, even though my friend brought us the client, it was pretty much my fault. I got too excited as I was the salesperson and the first boot on the ground. I was the one who was supposed to do the due diligence. I should have been more insistent on extending our contract with our lawyers; for better advice on payment and scope. But I was the one who got seduced.

It was just a tip moment. We should have ensured some protection with a specified scope of a contract. At that moment, I was naive. I didn’t have much experience with mendacity up to that point. I am not an honest person myself. I’m just not capable of lying. Anyone can tell in a heartbeat that I’m lying. I am bad at this. One of my hobbies in high school was acting. I was in the theatre department, but I was a terrible actor.

I was not good at portraying others’ emotions. I’m an empathetic person. I love to listen to human beings and empathize with their struggles, but I’m not capable of it. Anyway, this wasn’t a client from hell. It was a horror story for a person starting out to have a client like this. And if you know the warning signs of a client like this, you can avoid this horror story. We were not able to avoid it.

And it was only by doubling down on our grit and our determination to land contracts that got us out of the hole. And then, in a year, he circled back around and brought us in for something much bigger. And that enabled our team to grow. It all worked out for us in the end. But it was touching for a while. Every horror story about a client is your own horror story. You’re the one who deals with the aggressive client. I haven’t watched all of your other episodes yet, Morgan, and I haven’t heard all of your horror stories yet. Every horror story is that element of what you did. I don’t want to blame the victim ever. Especially in business, when you get those warning flags, you can walk away.

 Morgan (Host): A few things first: I forgot how poetic you are in your typing, but I like this. A few observations today, including that every client horror story is your own story. The hardest thing to deal with is that you are considered a demon in every horror story. Do you know the famous line from Stalin about killing one person?

Jess McCarter (interviewee): “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

Morgan (Host): It’s like when you watch a million other people dying with other people, they say, “Oh, it’s just statistics.” But when you have to deal with your horrors, and your psychologies and your issues, then that’s the tragedy of not just your own life, the tragedy of human life. We’re over-created flawed, and we struggle to figure out how to overcome or circumvent our flaws.

And I also think this is one of the emphases behind the podcast, in my head when I started this initiative, it was hard for people to talk about their flaws and their weaknesses, which is fundamentally why, until this podcast, no one was talking about this stuff. It’s much easier to blame the annoying people over there. And it’s much harder to blame ourselves.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): If I wanted to assess one more piece of the blame on myself, I wouldn’t have to look for the horror stories. All I was optimistic and sunshine. I was not prepared for the downside. But it helped me avoid more downsides with a lot of the lessons, especially due diligence lessons, and be extra careful with friend referrals because they come a little too easy sometimes. After talking to a few people and getting the advice of friends, I sit down and think about the potential downsides. Because, especially in business, not everything is sunshine and lollipops. There’s very likely to be some rain that might not happen. But bring your umbrella in every case. When you come to a halt and consider the possibilities or stories, maybe you’ll never be on Morgan’s podcast.

Morgan (Host): I reached out to a few people for the podcast; they were like, “Oh, no, I never had any horror stories. I’ve made lots of money. I’ve done great. And I’ve never had a problem.” And when people tell me that, I don’t believe it. I think they don’t want to be on the podcast. And they don’t want to admit that to me directly. As I said, we all have our share of horror stories as a part of the human experience.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): It makes no difference whether it’s a soft or hard no. No is still a no. You’re hearing it either way. So, you need to listen and be like, “Yeah, I hear no in there somewhere. I should stop now.”

Morgan (Host): And that comes to your core point; he was doing all things. He was putting up all Yellow Flags. You were just too young and naive to realize that the color was yellow. You thought that the color was green as yellow and green are pretty similar. They’re on the same spectrum.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Yeah, they’re right next to each other in the rainbow.

Morgan (Host): Your opponent’s speaking is influencing me today. It was great and these lessons are awesome. It has been a fantastic episode. Thank you for your time!

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Absolutely, a pleasure to be here! I know that this is a podcast to discount the ground. But as I alluded to earlier, I still own the main names from this horror story. So the one I kept was the worst of all the brainstorming sessions. It was a shopping list and a shopping bag program. That is why I am still the proud owner of listbag.com.

Morgan (Host): That’s not as exciting as golden ale.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): ”Liquid gold nails” was like a nail parlor.

Morgan (Host): Oh, it’s a nail

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Yeah, my wife, her friends, and I were all sitting around, and they were talking about how they walked in a parlor and got their car washed and did their nails. So, nail parlor clicked our brains. The one lesson that I didn’t learn from that brainstorming session was that when someone comes up with a good idea, it’s cheap to register so; I just went out and registered it as they were brainstorming.

I enrolled several variations of the business idea they were coming up with and just got the domain names. I hope that they still do this concept. I would go there. I will get my nails done but, I’m not a manicure guy. I love a good pedicure now and then as I’ve got gross feet. I run around all the time. I would get a pedicure and have my car washed. I would do that.

Morgan (Host): By the way, in Latin America, there are car washing cafes because I have seen so many of them, where you can enjoy a normal, cool cafe while they wash your car but, I have never seen that in the USA; it happens in the same universe.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): It is a very European style. Sometimes on a long road trip, if you need car service, the service stations do not offer just petrol, but also repairs, with a real cafe with fast food. So, European and Latin American long trips are more relaxed. They can take a break, have a glass of wine or coffee, and can enjoy more things while getting their cars washed.

Morgan (Host): So, let’s live in that style.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): I left this podcast for years. Let’s pick some numbers of downloads. What is the average download so far?

Morgan (Host): This is so new.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Okay, let’s set a milestone of 500 downloads because I see download milestones all the time. My son is a big Lily Hevesh domino YouTube channel fan. She had 500 subscribers celebrating domino fall. I will put listbag.com up for auction and, we will contest to pick a charity. I will choose three different charities and put them up there to see what money comes through this bag. I will finally unload my horror story demon. Though I wish you much success on this, your podcast is an amazing idea. I hope that people get a lot of use out of this. And I hope that our mistakes help someone to avoid them.

Morgan (Host): So, they can make a whole different classroom of mistakes.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Yeah, make you make your own mistakes; I have already made this one.

Morgan (Host): We can redefine progress. You know the famous quote where they say, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” 

Jess McCarter (interviewee): The mistakes they make are becoming more and more unique.

Morgan (Host): If you love it, it might be a domain that you want to buy. Let’s register some domains.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): I will see if “customer mistakes” is available.

Morgan (Host): It was great fun catching up. And these are great stories, and they are in the podcast notes and on the site. I will mention the $500 target to see if we can raise a bit of money for charity.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Let’s see if we can hit the downloads, then I will see if we have a successful auction. I’ll tell you what, no matter what happens, listbag.com, will be doing something more than what it is doing now, which is nothing.

Morgan (Host): Love it. It has been fun.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Pleasurable! Be well and good luck.

Morgan (Host): And thank you, everyone, for watching.

Jess McCarter (interviewee): Thanks, everyone. Be well!

 

This transcription belongs to Episode #11, please watch the complete episode here!