Fractional
Fractional
Jonathan Wold: Curiosity creates opportunity
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Jonathan Wold appeared as the first guest on on our show, and we had a lovely time chatting about his background and experience in this world.
Shownotes
Hello, welcome. I'm Joshua. My co-host is Lance. And today we have our first guest of the podcast, Jonathan Wold. And yes, he is a relation. I've known him for 35 years now. And we are excited to have you here. Welcome, Jonathan.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Joshua. Lance, good to see you guys. Welcome to the show. I'm honored to be your first guest.
SPEAKER_00We realized that I've been on a podcast with Jonathan years ago. Lance and I have this podcast now, so let's bring this together. I'd like to ask a couple of questions so folks can get to know who you are. I'll start off with, how would you describe yourself?
SPEAKER_02I'm really curious, and that curiosity in general leads me into a lot of interesting directions. Sometimes it gets me into trouble, but I'm curious. I love learning. And that curiosity to me has been a very, very entrepreneurially laced, right, from a young age and including many of our own collaborations together.
SPEAKER_00How would you describe yourself in contrast to your two other wool brothers?
SPEAKER_02I wish I could say I was the best looking. I don't know who. Yeah, I'm just going to acquiesce on that title. I'm the oldest. And so I've had a little more experience than the two of you, but barely. Okay. Yeah, I think I like to think of myself in general and in our collaborations, we've worked together closely on things. We've also had many of our own things over the years. So there's like an ebb and flow. I like to think of myself as someone who like tends to open doors. And as I'm a starter, like I'll go into things, I will wrestle with the follow through and the maintenance of things. But in general, and this is a lot of what drives my interest in the fractional world of things. I like having lots of fractions of lots of different things. Yeah, I tend to be the person who see opportunities and go into and open doors. I'm also really good at strategy games.
SPEAKER_00We have a history of playing strategy games and me struggling against you with that.
SPEAKER_01I'm just going to give a disclaimer that I'm likely going to derail this a few times here because there's interesting stories that I just know are under the surface I want to dig out here, which are not on the agenda. So I want to hear about... childhood entrepreneurial exploits. Oh, yeah. Where Jonathan exploited Joshua or
SPEAKER_02Josiah. We baked banana breads at a young age, right?
SPEAKER_00He tried to convince me that pennies were worth more than quarters because they were gold.
SPEAKER_02That was a scam. That's not entrepreneurial.
SPEAKER_00So that was the foundation for something really good. So yes, the breads. Go for it. Wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I was picking that up from our older cousin. I was like, hey, you got me, so I'm going to go get
SPEAKER_00them. I had to kind of do something with my kids recently where I realized the older one was picking up that pattern.
SPEAKER_02Well, and I think that goes back to mom being frustrated at the deal making that we were doing with Legos. I'm like, mom, listen, Joshua and Josiah are both happy with the deal that I made them. And somehow I would end up with like the best pieces and like the, the bigger, like the sets. And I'm like, mom, we're all winning here. Like, what's the, like, why are you intervening in this? It's like a market regulations coming. I'm like, we're all happy with this. It's like,
SPEAKER_00Joshua is happy being second player on Nintendo. Josiah is happy having an unplugged controller, watching the two of us. We're all happy.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, The banana breads, mom would bake banana breads. And I appreciate it. She encouraged us from a young age. So we got involved. We learned about the cost of goods sold, which is pretty depressing. The margins are pretty thin on banana breads relative to the labor. But the sweet spot that we had going for us is that I would do the talking and you looked really cute. We would go to these businesses and it would say like, no soliciting. We didn't know what that meant. No soliciting. But we asked mom, she said, don't worry about it. And so we could walk in, these two cute boys like holding a box of banana breads josh looked adorable i would talk to them it's like and we would sell many of
SPEAKER_00them for context we were like six and seven at the time where she would park right outside we'd march in i would hold him you'd be the salesman i'd smile and hand out the breads and do you remember the pitch you had a one sentence pitch
SPEAKER_02one for three two for five
SPEAKER_00yep yeah and they always bought they i don't think pretty much always
SPEAKER_02yeah
SPEAKER_01why eat bread when you can eat banana bread
SPEAKER_02It was delicious too. Like it helped that it was actually really good. So we got, we would get repeat customers are like, that was good. You did. Did your mom tax your earnings there? Like, She did not. However, once we got into it, that's when we were introduced to Cost of Goods Sold. And I think our interest began to wane not too long after. This is very poor margins. Wait, we got to pay for this
SPEAKER_00first? Once we realized it's not 100% profit, that there's a production and everything. But that helped us buy some stuff. And I think foundationally, it helped us realize that time does not have to be tied to money. Yeah. Sales can be a part of that. And Jonathan and I worked for this guy. We called him the peacock guy where he had a peacock and we were doing landscaping for him. And he paid us the equivalent of two bucks an hour in the early. It was less than that, dude.
SPEAKER_02He paid us $2 for hours of work, hours of work. And we learned a lesson. You negotiate before you do the work. I remember that look on his face when he handed us like the dollars, and he pointed to his vending machines and was like, with that smirk on his face, was like, go get yourself a soda. I'm like, what? Mind you, at this point, I'd already been paid 20 bucks an hour for other work. And of course, our Eastern European friends were just laughing, like, back in our day, we would have been happy. I'm like, well, it's not our day. This was terrible.
SPEAKER_00When we were behind the Iron Curtain, we paid to have money and to work. Yes, we decided not to do that again. What would you say that you're most excited about right now, Jonathan, in anything? And I'll caveat this with Jonathan is excited about a lot of stuff a lot of times. I'm sure Lance can validate that we'll get on a call, talk to Jonathan. He's like, oh, I'm so excited about this thing. I have appreciated how that energy and passion has often made things happen. Kind of like a little bit of a mini reality distortion field. I appreciate when I see you excited. I do wait to see, will he be excited about this particular thing the next time we talk? If he is, there's probably something here.
SPEAKER_02I was thinking about that the other day because I called you and I was talking I just like went at it for like 15 minutes and you're just like listening. And at the end I was like, wow, I just, that's what I did. And it's part of it. Part of what's happening is that I'm processing it in the process of telling you about it, like, which I value a lot. Like having someone who I, whose perspective and opinion I respect and, And yeah, so it is hard to answer. There's a lot of things I'm excited about. I've got a decent amount of travel coming up. I'm going to be in Austin with you gentlemen next week for CloudFest. And then I'm heading to Athens for WordCamp Europe. So I don't know if excited is the right word because it's mixed. It's a lot of work. I'm excited in general about the process of creating momentum. We've done this many times in life in different ways, shapes and forms, tackling bigger projects now. Yeah, just that process. I'm excited to see some of the payoff of the efforts of the past couple of years.
SPEAKER_00Do you have any books that you often like to share about, anything you're reading right now that you enjoy? Talking about books is something you and I have done for many years. So yeah, curious, anything on books?
SPEAKER_02I'm really enjoying a book right now by an author, Richard Moss, called Shareware Heroes. It's a history of... just the software and this concept of shareware authors who'd create software and like give it away and ask people to pay if they liked it. And a whole sort of ecosystem that evolved around early players in this were folks that we know today, like Tim Sweeney of Epic games and Fortnite fame, John Carmack of id created doom. And this, this entire sort of ecosystem that was spawned around that a lot of interesting similarities to the world that I play in, which is WordPress. And so I'm quite enjoying that. Got to, Good collection of different books I'm working my way through, but Shareware Heroes is top of my list. I'm quite enjoying that.
SPEAKER_00I know we've talked about this, and this is something that... Trying to understand how ecosystems work and app stores work. They are such a part of our world today, the entry point for customers into a thing. And so I'm curious about this book as well, because I remember one of the first games Jonathan and I played on the PC was called Scunny. We got it from America Online and it was a little shareware game and it was incredibly hard. I don't think we ever paid for it. Eventually we came back and paid for it, but we played the free version and that was a really popular shareware game.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it was interesting to see some of our childhood. A number of games that were, oh yeah, I remember that. The Exile RPG series that we were quite into was notorious for this. And a part of what it did, it had like an interesting challenge. It was so good and you could do so much in the free version that it actually had a pretty long time until people would upgrade because they were enjoying all the free content. So interesting things to balance out. Authors who are motivated by different means. And this is at the time where they were going up against traditional retail. The Sierra Broderbund, et cetera, that were cranking out games. And some of the ones that came into the scene, like Doom, ended up just changing the genres entirely. And they were from independent authors. So I find it really interesting. A lot of lessons to learn from that. And I see similar parallels to what's going on in WordPress today that I like applying. That's a general thing I do. What can I read over here that's interesting on its own? And also, how does it connect to other things that
SPEAKER_01Did they happen in the book to mention the game that came for free in the box of Czech cereal? Did you ever play that game? I did,
SPEAKER_02yes. They did not mention that. That would be an example of retail distribution. It was owned by the cereal company, presumably.
SPEAKER_00Age of Empires was a game we got.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I guess you had to buy the cereal to get access to the game. So it wasn't actually free. But I played very, very few PC games as a kid. And that was one of them. And that was fun. The slime throwing. And yeah, I got into that.
SPEAKER_00I would argue that it actually was close to free, right? Because you're going to buy cereal anyway. And as a little kid, you better believe you were going to point to your parents and say, I want this one, not this one. So it was pretty ideal.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, what box has the coolest toy, right? This one's got a computer game in it. I'll take it.
SPEAKER_02No, that would be interesting to think about the economics. Like what drove that? Was it a brand loyalty play? What was the other side? So I don't know about that one.
SPEAKER_00What got you into your current line of work and what is it that you do?
SPEAKER_02So I've been in the world of WordPress now for like right around 18 years. And it was fairly accidental. I'd been doing a series of internships, been doing stuff on the web and nurturing some of my entrepreneurial interests. I got into WordPress for an internship that I was in to complete a project. And then in the process of completing that project, I wrote a tutorial about my experience. Part of what had happened is I had gotten stuck. I had reached out to the WordPress community. There was still pretty nascent early days. WordPress was coming up on two years and I'd reach out and got help from folks and was really impressed with the folks who took their time to explain and like help me get to success in WordPress. So got it up and running. That was good. And I remember this moment where I don't know why I just felt inspired to like, I'm going to write about this experience. I'm going to take this stuff that I've figured out and make it official, like And share it. So I didn't really think much of it. I wrote up a tutorial explaining the process. I went to that thread and posted a thank you and said, hey, I wrote a tutorial about it and just kind of left it at that. I didn't have any commercial interests, any intentions other than just like it felt right to do. Within a couple of months, I was beginning to get a fairly steady stream of people reaching out and saying, hey, you wrote this. Can you help us do it? And at the time I had no, the first couple of ones who reached out, there was no reference to my availability, my willingness. They just reached out. Can we hire you? Can you, can you help us do this? I was like, sure. The entrepreneur in me is like, I think this might be better margins than banana bread. So let's, let's give this a shot. So for the next couple of years, I had a steady stream of what ended up being hundreds of people from around the world who reached out to me and said, Hey, can you help us with this WordPress thing? And with each one, I got to experiment and try different things. I remember I would I'd draft an email with a price. This is going to be $12,000 for this project. And then I was like, you know what? I clicked undo. It came back. I changed the price to 15 and pressed send. He got back to me within a couple hours and said, all right, we're in.
SPEAKER_00That's actually really relevant to conversations Lance and I have had as well where you're about to send it. And in the past, sometimes I would just call up Jonathan to say, hey, here's my price. And he'd say, ah, tack on an extra 30%. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. But when it worked, it's like you just got so much more and the value is still there. Nothing changed. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And that was the thing. And in the end, it ended up being like a sweetheart deal for them. Anyway, it was a win-win. So I just kind of followed the lead on that. Did hundreds of projects. Eventually hit a peak. We worked on some things together. Eventually I hit a peak where I'm like, okay, I'm managing like 20 different projects. I'm making good money, but like kind of going crazy and also getting a bit bored. I started to go into the enterprise. I had started to take on some more challenging, interesting projects. And that led to a foray into an agency where I spent about five years doing big enterprise stuff. We got to work together. Actually, this is the first place the three of us worked together and quite enjoyed that. And then ultimately peaked in that as well. And fast forward in a few years since. I love WordPress. I love the ecosystem. I love the ecosystem problem set of being in the decentralized space. And my focus today is working with product companies to help them grow in the WordPress ecosystem.
SPEAKER_00So if a product company is interested in WordPress, already involved with WordPress, you will come alongside and kind of relaying back what you've said, you'll help them understand what are the ways that their product can better interact with WordPress, that users will appreciate that maybe partnerships they can make with other companies in the space. That's where you come alongside and help.
SPEAKER_02That's the heart of it. And with product companies, I tend to notice that they And I focus on three particular problems. There are products, especially if they grew up in WordPress, technical founder, whatever the case might be, they're not good at monetization. That's problem one. And there's a lot that we've learned from the world of software as a service and just in general, like all these experiments in pricing where there's basic things that just often don't get applied. They're not good at monetizing. Their business model may be misaligned. They tend to have a quite a bit of difficulty with compatibility amongst products in the space. Like how well do they work together within WordPress? And the third and where I tend to focus most of my energy is on the distribution side. And this is like where the share, share where heroes reference comes in. There's great products out there that just people don't know exists because it's a big decentralized space. So that's what I tend to focus on with, with product founders is like, okay, let's make sure you're ready to make sure your business model is aligned. And then let's, A little bit more.
SPEAKER_00you working across different areas at once, being a fractional type person, do you have any tools that you'd recommend to help other people, whether it's software, hardware, ways of thinking, ways of communicating? And this might be obvious to you, but maybe other people would benefit from that.
SPEAKER_02So let's just touch on the fractional for a moment. The role that I often find myself playing with these products is coming in as effectively a chief strategy officer, which many of them just wouldn't have, where I'm coming in and saying, okay, what's going on? Where are we at? What's the game plan? How do we win? What does it look like to win? And I'll come in and I play that role. I might have a day where I'm playing that role for three, four, five different products and our partners and just playing that. And I love it. And part of what makes me good at it is that I do it fractionally. One of the things that I set out to do, because I've done individual work for products and just focus on one product. And I was like, man, I think it's actually, it seems counterintuitive. It's more efficient to work on five at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Why do you say that?
SPEAKER_02Yes, because at least for me, you begin to notice patterns and you're able to identify inefficiencies amongst them. In general, a lot of what I tend to look for is opportunities to just make things more efficient, to cut out things that just don't belong there, to clarify what we're trying. What does winning look like? Let's cut off the superfluous things that aren't going to help with winning. At least for me, I find because I'm always looking at patterns, I'm always curious about things. Solving something for one tends to spark new thoughts and ideas for the other. It scratches a general interest of mine, but I find it's objectively better. As a whole, working in a set, taking this fractional role across multiple products, I feel like each one benefits more than if I were to just focus on them, which seems counterintuitive, but I'm convinced.
SPEAKER_00Do you find that the people you're working with ask your advice on how other people have solved the problem, a particular problem? Because this happened to me where, hey, Joshua, we're trying to do this thing. What do you see in the space from other people? What would you recommend?
SPEAKER_02I'm usually leading with that. Here's what I'm noticing with this other company. I tend to bring them those matches directly where it's like, hey, what you're doing here is similar to what I'm seeing over here. So I tend to be in the... We get there, but I'm tending to be the one who initiates that where they're coming to me because they know that I already work with others in the space.
SPEAKER_00You've already been kind of hinting at this, How would you answer kind of on a grand scale of why you're interested in splitting yourself off? You touched on that versus focusing on us with a single company as a nine to five employee, which I know you've done. So, yeah, I'm curious your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_02So I think there are some personal and personality aspects that are worth like touching on. As an individual, I like a lot of variety. I like change. I tend to have a hard time holding attention on something for more than a few months. So there is probably some aspect that my own personality and aptitude lends itself to this type of role. A day where I'm switching contexts a bunch of times is a good day for me. I consider that a positive. And I know that that's not universally the case. There's people who are perfectly happy to maintain a context for a long period of time. I have a hard time imagining that. I can do it if I'm motivated. If it's a really hard problem set, there's a lot there, then I can do that. But I'm looking for shortcuts. I'm looking for ways to cut through that to make it as efficient as possible. If it's taken me more than a few days of focus, I'm like, okay, then something's off. It's how I generally feel about it. So there's that part where I think my personality and Like aptitude, like aligns with this idea of a number of things at once. Like I feel more stable and more grounded when I have like lots of things on the table.
SPEAKER_00If you were required to spend 40 hours on a problem, that's probably less interesting to you than can you solve the problem regardless of the amount of time, right? That's interest you. And I've seen you look at something, sit on it for 30 minutes and come up with a solution that you didn't need to spend days, weeks, months on. provided you've set up an engagement in the right way to have that value. That's a great thing for you and a client.
SPEAKER_02That's key for me. Pretty shy of ever doing any hourly work anymore. And if I do, I treat it more as like a loss leader in some ways where it's like, okay, if you insist, like I do some advisory work where they'll pay like $3.50 an hour to just like have an hour with me to talk about something. I do that because I find it interesting. And it's a curious challenge, but like my effective rate is like, I look at like a thousand dollars an hour. And to just say that out loud doesn't make sense, but people are happy to pay that all day for the value side of it when the value's there. That's, yeah, it's really hard for me to go back.
SPEAKER_00How do you like to handle asynchronous working with folks versus synchronous? Like where do you find that balance of time on a Zoom call with someone or in person with someone versus email, Slack?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is an interesting one because Joshua and I have both. Joshua, you said, I'd be happy if I never had a meeting, right? On my side, so much of the work that I do really thrives because of meeting. So yeah, I'm curious too, really curious where this falls for you.
SPEAKER_02This is a good one. And I'll bring this back to tools as well, where we open the conversation. I get a lot of my work done in meetings, right? So a key part of what I tend to do is I'll have a conversation, I had several of them today, with executives, with key decision makers, where I'm opening something, I'm painting a picture for something, I'm working towards buy-in, I'm working towards this alignment of interest, I'm working to help a product founder see something. So there was a product founder, it was the third conversation that we had where he's like, ah, okay, I get it now. And each time, there was no particular rush, but I was poking and prodding and asking and exploring until I'm looking for that aligning of incentives, aligning of interests. And to me, those happen more dynamically in conversations where I'm listening, I'm asking, I'm curious. I tend to struggle at times with what happens after that, because I'll get to that moment or the aha, I can see it. They begin asking questions, they get it, they're affirming it directly. That was the magic. That was the work for me. And that happened dynamically, whether it's on a call or in person. And then it's like, okay, now what? Now what do we do with it?
SPEAKER_00That's actually a really great contrast, and I'm glad you talk about enjoying that because it's a little bit closer to Lance. What I enjoy is what happens after the call is over, where I can go get to work. You are happy to have the call, but, and I know this because we've had conversations, you'd be excited if someone else was like, all right, Jonathan, I saw the call. I'm on it now.
SPEAKER_02When the call is done, I want to go play a game. Like I need to, or lay down or take a nap or something like that. So what I've gotten better at doing lately is like, I will tend to do my followups like instantly after. So it's like, I'm writing the same piece of momentum, send the email right now, make the introduction right now, make a couple of them and just be done with it. So I'll kind of loop it as a set. I personally struggle with like, like to me, like that was the work. So like I'm done. Oftentimes it's not, there is a lot more work. You have to actually prepare the contracts and kind of all this stuff, which is a lot to be said about the value importance of being part of a team, which is the only way that I would do this now. The tooling side though, coming back to that, one of the things that I've enjoyed lately. So I take walks, I make use of Otter. It's a, it's a transcription. It's a voice notes tool that also has transcription capability into it. So I will often, I'll be going, I'll go out and I'll think while I'm walking, work on a problem set. record notes for myself a couple of minutes. What I've been playing with lately is taking those notes and going into chat GPT, basically dropping in my transcripts and explaining like, hey, these are my notes. These are two conversations I've had with myself. Summarize this for me into a document that I can share with this person and who has this interest. And I found that to be a pretty incredible shortcut for me. Like the transcription part's done. It has my words, my tone, my context. I've done the thinking work in a way that I'm happy with, which is like to walk and just process it. And to me, like that's the key value proposition. That's the stuff that you can't, that's the high value, the stuff that you can't just create, but you got to get it out there so someone can actually see it. And that's where I found it to be pretty effective to have chat GPT, like process it, create something that's like readable, that makes a lot of sense that I then just go and edit down and then share.
SPEAKER_00Do you feel that it's made you just get more stuff done because you don't feel that friction?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I had an example where I've been asked to do a talk and I was exploring the idea of a panel as well. I went and thought about it, had a hypothesis. I didn't really want to like put a, it takes time to put these things together. So I went and just like recorded myself talking it through. Here's who I want and there's how it would work. I dropped that into chat GPT and asked to just write an abstract and for me and like do all these things. I had like roughly fleshed it out and it gave me a completed document that I refined down in a couple of minutes and sent. We ended up not using it. It was still a very worthwhile exercise that would have normally taken me like an hour that I was able to do instead in like five minutes and didn't feel any emotional burden when we ended up doing a different direction, which ended up being better. That was a massive win. I'm like, okay, this was good.
SPEAKER_00And it's also the strength. Lance and I have been talking about this, like where does AI come in to help us, but where is our unique strength as humans to continue to provide value? And you've kind of described that there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And for me, it's the thinking. My process, so I use paper. The flow these days tends to be think about something, maybe record a couple notes, sit down with paper and sort of loosely structure something out. And now what I begin to do is then I'll just go open to my recorder and talk through the, the, the thing. And I won't even worry that much about the order of things. Like I'll just sort of talk it through. I'll get a five to seven minute recording of me. Like that's me creating the value. That's me. Okay. This connects to this and this does this. And then I'll take a transcript of that, paste it and say, okay, summarize this for me. And then that gets me something that I can then begin that that's in a more accessible form to others than just giving them my unstructured recording.
SPEAKER_01Sounds like it, um, It's really aligned super closely with David Baker's newest book on you being a trusted advisor. You're getting paid to think and write. And if Otter and ChatGPT makes the writing part of that happen, then...
SPEAKER_02And I think it's key to point out too for me, the process of writing is precious to me. And it's something that I don't see ChatGPT and these language models in general as taking that from me. Instead, I see this, especially for things, there are things that are my core, that I'm gonna write, I'm gonna think this through. And there are other things that just have to be produced, that the thinking is what mattered. versus the actual sort of like the, how exactly it came out. And also I get to see things, oh, that's even better than I would have done. That's great. Like, why would I take time structuring this when the thought was the opening part? So I'm impressed and excited. And I think for me, it's just increasing how much time I can focus on the core value piece versus trying to create another slide
SPEAKER_01deck. We've been talking a lot lately about building connection and relationship and a completely digital work environment. So what about for you? How do you make connections as a primarily remote and not in person you know professional and you know have you made and what are some of those lasting connections people that maybe you didn't meet for a very long time
SPEAKER_02I was going to say, like, for me, this is part of what I value about the meetings side of things is that the conversations that I have with people, often what makes it a key part of it is me expressing my curiosity, getting to know them, which is part of the relationship forming, right? Like taking an explicit interest in like, what do they find interesting? That's often where I lead is in making that personal connection. It's a big part of developing trust, which is key when you're making big moves. I think for me personally, yeah, it's like the connecting part isn't so hard. And I enjoy that. I definitely value the social aspects of things and the work, like getting to talk to lots of cool people. I've noticed more lately in the past year, it's like, okay, I also want more depth in at least a few closer relationships. And for me, that's where the in-person really comes in, where you're sharing context together. We've been able to watch a couple of games together lately, which has been cool. That's something that I'm starting to value more now than I think I did over the past couple of years. At least in my world, I get the opportunity of a lot of like initial connections. And now what do I do to cultivate that in more depth? And I think a lot of it's just recurring conversation, having some consistency in place that to me is then accentuated by the time in person. It's not like time in person is just what adds like flavor and dimension to your relationship, adds additional depth to it.
SPEAKER_00What I've appreciated about you over the years is you'll tell me about someone and say, oh, they're just so great. They're so amazing. You see possibility in most people. And there's been a few times in our life you're like, oh, that person, nope, they're no good. Blows me away. Like I could probably count three or four people you've done that with like, oh, whoa. So there is some people that he doesn't get along with. I think that's such a great trait. And I think you having that belief in people has been really cool to watch over the years.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it That's interesting.
SPEAKER_00One of the questions that isn't maybe a direct relation to what you do, but I'd love to know how you would answer it. And you talked on it earlier with the blog article you wrote years ago, but how do you find new work? What are your typical engagements for you look like maybe today, exactly as they are, or in the past when they were more related to a type of fractional?
SPEAKER_02There's two ways I tend to think about this. So the one is like, how do you create demand for something? And you referenced Lance David Baker, David Baker, Blair, and also Mark O'Brien of Newfangled. This is a a group of guys that to me are to do some of the best work in the agency and expertise world. There are great references for anyone interested in digging into that further. The one side of things is like creating demand through thought leadership. So if I'm wanting more work in a particular direction, I will create value about it. I'm a big fan of Seth Godin's work, give away the ideas for free, right? And then charge handsomely. And that to me, I remember one of the first comments I got was like, why are you giving this tutorial away? And I can't take credit for it because I didn't have a commercial interest driving my motivation, but I was like, because I can, I want to. As time went on, it was like, that's what opened the doors for me. If I had charged for it, maybe I would have made a little bit, but I gave it away and charged handsomely for the execution for those who said, hey, A small percentage. Some people said, thank you. A lot of people shared it and passed it on. And then some said, can we hire you to do this for us? So that's the one side of like figuring out, okay, where do I want more opportunities? I want to work with more product founders. I want to invest. So I'm like, okay, cool. Let me see what problems they have. Let me just offer my best guidance for free out there for them so they can benefit whether they work with me or not. And some are going to reach out to me. The other side of things is that I will just Like, who do I want to work with? And I'll just go and ask them. So that's like, okay, if something's interesting to me, let's go do some business together. And there's a number of different approaches to it. But in general, because of my approach is to find an aligned interest and a win. If I can get to the place in my head where I want to work with someone, I need to find the way that I'm doing them a favor and asking them to do business with me. That's what it tends to be. It's like, I'm not asking them for a favor. I'm offering them something and they're happy to write the check.
SPEAKER_00Lance had a pithy little statement, which I've forgotten exactly how he said it, but we've talked about this for a couple episodes now of do something good for people, right? Like be willing to just put yourself out there and don't worry too much about the results. That's kind of what you're describing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That's the general strategy. And then there are times where I specifically want something. And then that's where I'll focus on like, okay, cool. What's this going to take? What do they need? What's the problem that I can solve? When I find that sweet spot of feeling like I'm doing them a favor, then it's like, okay, now I've got something. Yeah. You have something to give, not something to prove.
SPEAKER_00That's it. It's going to stick eventually.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I was pretty fortunate early on. And because I had multiple people per week reach out to me about doing WordPress. So that was a privileged position where I was in a demand spot. And eventually we just like turn it away. Like all these things.
SPEAKER_00Well, and that actually helped me a lot too. You'd say, hey, Joshua, I've got this person looking for this thing. Are you interested in working with them? That actually led to a lot of business for me.
SPEAKER_02And eventually I started to look at, oh, how do I, like I didn't plan for that scenario, but I reverse engineered it to say, okay, how do I create more situations like this where people are reaching out? And it was rooted in providing value. If I'm looking at a particular market where I want to create some business, it's like, all right, well, how do I create value first? So that starts the demand side of things where people are reaching out. And then if I want to work with someone in particular, then it's like, okay, that becomes just a
SPEAKER_01problem to solve. We've got a few different... career trajectories, areas of focus represented here, like Joshua's has a skill set as a designer, right? Where that can very easily lean towards individual contributor. However, in a way that can impact the strategy of an entire business, I'm more focused on shaping the experiences that happen within a workplace. And so it's more advisory, less tactical. Who do you see fractional working well for? I mean, both of us have had a good experience with it so far. Do you think there's kind of a sweet spot for someone to work as a fractional? And do you think there are some that like this just isn't going to work for the kind of work you're trying to do.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely. So speaking of the first, I think it tends to be higher value, like where you have an opportunity to create high value. And in general, to what we were touching on earlier, I think especially when the value goes up, the more of it that you do. There are situations where I think objectively for someone wanting to work with any one of us or someone on the fractional side, you're bringing more to the table because you're working with others at the same time. It's worth more to them than if you were like fully dedicated on their project. So it ends up not being about the volume of time that you put in, but the value of what you're bringing into the mix. Yeah. It's, it's definitely more strategic types of work and it can be, I see work like where you're focused on a particular problem set as an individual contributor and just like getting, getting something solved. But I think it starts to fall apart when there's a, if there's an expectation of you doing 40 hours a week for a particular like output that, that you're after, it becomes harder to split yourself up like
SPEAKER_01over, overdoing multiple of those. There's a distinction between maybe somebody who has two part-time jobs versus somebody that works fractionally across more than one client.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a way to put it. Two part-time jobs is not the same as doing fractional work. To me, the fractional work summed up is where the value that you bring is especially sharpened because it's fractional. Whether it's the fact that an organization is able to access you who wouldn't be able to otherwise, they couldn't afford you full-time, or you're just not available. It's like, no, I'm not willing to just lock myself down to something for multiple reasons, including the fact that I bring more value when I do this as a set. It especially shows up in strategic situations. lines of work.
SPEAKER_01I'm fascinated around this definition of fractional because the nomenclature is relatively new, right? The practice I don't think is, but people are trying to figure out like, well, does this qualify? Does that qualify? And as you're talking, I'm thinking about like a pie, right? If you're a part-time employee, employer dictates how big of a slice of the pie they're going to get, right? As a fractional, I'll guarantee you that you're going to get a piece of the pie, It'll be the size of the pie that you need when you need it. It's like I divvy the pie, right? You don't divvy the pie.
SPEAKER_02You know what? I think the investor world is probably a good proxy for this because that sort of fits into your analogy nicely. The pie is the available total monies that you have. The recipients of investment aren't dictating from the investor like what they're getting, like how the total pie is being allocated. I think that's a helpful way to think about it is that these things that you're doing are your investments. You're not trading your time. you're trading the value as a whole. You're bringing your experience, your connections, your perspective, your ability to solve problems. That's what you're exchanging. If you think about it as an investor, you're going to look at it from a portfolio perspective, not just a solo investment.
SPEAKER_00I'm reminded of a meme that I'm texting to you both now, put it into the show notes, where Michael Scott asked Rainn Wilson, the actor, I would like your undivided attention. And then he's like, you couldn't handle my undivided attention.
SPEAKER_02Yes. I love that. Yes.
SPEAKER_00one of my favorite memes related to fractional
SPEAKER_02yes that is so true
SPEAKER_00yes i'll put it in the show notes i'm curious we've had a lot of layoffs in tech over the last four months a lot of people who thought they had incredibly stable jobs suddenly finding they don't that was me a little bit last year lance has been through that somewhat you've been through that in the past Where do you see our relative industry going in terms of fractional work opportunity versus, and Lance and I talked about this last week, the stability of having a full-time job or what doesn't, it actually isn't that stable. So I'm curious your thoughts on all that.
SPEAKER_02Man. So one of the things that I've noticed from being in the decentralized ecosystem is that it's actually really hard to have anything close to an accurate view of what's quote unquote really going on around you. Because even with all these layoffs, people might just, oh, that means there's little opportunity. That's not true. There's still a lot of opportunity. Anytime you have lots of change and volatility, opportunity just sort of skyrockets. There can be an unfairness in the opportunity. There's a number of different factors you have to parse your way through. But I think what's hard when there's a lot going on, especially for us as humans, is we tend towards focusing on a particular thing. I can't get a job. This just isn't working for me. And we miss the opportunities to think differently about it or to look for shortcuts. I think it's actually really hard to get anything close to an accurate view of what is the landscape today. I think it can be quite helpful to focus on particular subsets or particular industries. One of the books that I quite enjoyed back that I know at least one of you has read, is how Newport's so good they can't ignore you. And I think there's a lot to be said about building career capital in a direction and sort of what that looks like. When I look at the industry as a whole, I would argue, as you said earlier, Lance, that I think fractional as a concept has always been here. There's always been this dichotomy between exchanging time versus value. Perhaps as a byproduct of the industrial revolution, there's been more of an emphasis on the time exchange. And we're perhaps seeing a bit of this countering to that. Time to me is ultimately something that it's just not our greatest leverage as humans in terms of what we should be being paid for, but rather the value that we create. It's going to be really painful. A lot of people I think are really going to be hurting right now if they've built their career on a fairly simple time exchange. And what I'd be encouraging folks is if that's where they started, thinking about things fractionally is Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's a great way to look at it.
SPEAKER_01If you had a word of advice, somebody who is just getting into this, I mean, maybe you've already shared it with the concept of time and some of the experience comments you just made, but anything else that you'd want to say to somebody who's finding themselves interested and want to jump into this fractional world?
SPEAKER_02I start with curiosity. Be curious. Continue to cultivate that curiosity. My guess is that people who are interested are probably already curious, but They might be starting from a place of like, okay, what do I do? I got to do something. I think for me, the starting point is cultivating curiosity. Reading is a great way to do that. Talking to others, just asking without trying to prescribe the outcomes, without trying to get a particular thing out of something. Curiosity to me is its own reward. So I will have conversations with someone that I have no idea where it's going, that I just want to see and just be open to things. That can be hard when you're trying to solve a finding When you're trying to bring some stability about that can be very difficult to do. That's the starting point for connection, the starting point for trust when you're able to be open and curious about things. And you can see opportunities that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise. That's what's been key for me. throughout my experience, and that's where I always encourage people to start.
SPEAKER_00Is there anything we haven't covered that you want to share, want to chat about? Let's talk about Polytopia. It's a fantastic game. I won't play one-on-one with you. So
SPEAKER_02Polytopia, for those who don't know, is a turn-based strategy game. It's a simplified version of civilization. So you start out with this little tribe and you grow it. It's been interesting to me to see parallels. I enjoy it I don't tend to play a game for more than a couple months max, but Age of Empires, which is... a longtime favorite in Polytopia. There's a few games and they tend to be strategy games that I'll continue to play. And what I love about those games, and I don't like chess that much for comparison. Why? What's
SPEAKER_00the difference?
SPEAKER_02Chess is a strategy game as well, but chess is a fixed rule strategy game where there is an optimized outcome. There are many, many variables to it. There's a lot of opportunity to innovate and be creative with it. But at the end of the day, it's fixed. It's a very solvable And if a computer can do it easily, then that to me is a good example of, whereas game real-time strategy games tend to have even so much greater number of possibilities and permutations and complexities. For me, the key moments that I'm after and that I connect to the real world experiences of when I get to the middle of a game, this is where I tend to win. Taking it all in subconsciously. I know the mechanics, I know the basics, and I start to listen to instinct. What feels right here. So I'm basically letting my subconscious make connections and I stay at it until I find like a thread. Like, okay, I think this is the direction through it. That's what I like about games and why I keep coming back is to get to that place. The basics were good here. Like I'll play with someone I'm pretty evenly matched, but then I'll get to that middle part and I'll focus on what's my instinct telling me here.
SPEAKER_00The other part of that is a computer at Polytopia can't beat you, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Like I can play against eight of the
SPEAKER_00hardest
SPEAKER_02ones.
SPEAKER_00And you love knowing there's a human on the other side. Yeah. There's that dynamic of you both figuring each other out.
SPEAKER_02I'll play a game. Okay. polytopia or something else. And then I'll go back to a problem that I was solving, like a product that we're working on investment, like whatever might be a client can find patterns between them. That's which is driven by the curiosities.
SPEAKER_01Well, we've got a pretty robust audience expecting that to grow significantly in the coming months. Somebody listens to this playback and says, man, I want to know more about this guy. I want to ask him about shareware and Polytopia and WordPress. How do they find you? What's the best way to reach out?
SPEAKER_02JonathanWold.com. Contact me there. And yeah, I'll play Polytopia with anyone who wants to. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here, Jonathan. Awesome having you on the show. Thanks for having me.
