Alejandro Rivas-Micoud believes that user experience (UX) eats strategy for breakfast. As the Founder and CEO of Userlytics, Alejandro helps companies optimize their user experience by making it easy to test the user experience of their prototypes, websites, mobile apps, etc. 

Join Jim and Alejandro as they explore why user experience holds a key position in determining the success and widespread adoption of any product or service. 

3 Key Takeaways

• The Irrefutable Power of User Experience: If you don’t think that UX is critical to a company’s success, then just think of Zoom. Their product and pricing wasn’t that different to competitors. Yet Zoom’s user experience was so seamless and intuitive that it quickly became the go-to video conferencing platform for millions of people around the world. Sorry Webex…😏
• Observe Customers Using Your Product: The single most important thing you can do for UX is to see users and their interactions with products. It’s not enough to blindly trust your design or development team, great as they may be. As Mark Twain says, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” You can’t argue with video evidence when it comes to UX.
• The Dilemma of Dealing with Average Performers in the Workplace: It’s easy to fire people who are terrible at their job. And it’s easy to keep and promote people who are excellent at their job. However, it’s extremely difficult to figure out what to do with people who are average at their job. Fire them? Train them? The thing is, you have to do something. Your company will never excel if it's full of average performers. 

Resources

Alejandro Rivas-Micoud on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandrorivasmicoud/ 

Userlytics: https://www.userlytics.com/ 

Userlytics on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/userlytics-corporation/ 

Userlytics on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/userlytics/ 

Userlytics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/userlyticscorporation/ 

Userlytics on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Userlytics 

About Our Guest 

A serial entrepreneur, Alejandro has been founding or co-founding companies since he launched a grocery delivery business in Spain at the age of 14.

A San Francisco native and Nuclear Operations Engineer with an MBA from INSEAD, Alejandro has lived, worked and launched companies in Japan, Europe, and the U.S. Some of his startups have had phenomenal exits, some have been learning experiences, but all of them had a strong international/global component to them.

Alejandro has had the experience of managing the preparation of an IPO, has launched and completed an MBO as well as a major corporate restructuring and turnaround, launched an innovative fixed wireless franchising business, and has successfully managed company acquisitions, mergers, divestitures and joint ventures.

With experience in the utility, telecom, and the B2B SaaS industries, Alejandro has learnt the crucial importance of a great user experience for the success of any company, whether a startup or a fortune 100 firm. His current venture, Userlytics, founded in 2009, is one of the global leaders in remote user experience optimization.

In his free time Alejandro likes creative writing, amateur film directing and producing, skiing, sailing, travel, and fine dining.

About The Dirt Podcast 

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

If you love what you are getting out of our show please subscribe.

For more information on how we dig into the dirt check out our other episodes here: https://www.orchid.black/podcast

About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses. 

Website: https://www.orchid.black 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orchidblack/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OrchidBlack 

All contents of this show are rights of Orchid Black©️ and are not to be used unless authorized by written consent.

When you interview people, it's gonna be much more difficult for you. than interviewing somebody from your own country that you're I mean, all the cues and invisible, intuitive things that you're talking to somebody, and you immediately know where they come from, what kind of person they are. You know, you know, all those things. You're gonna think maybe that you know them when you're talking to this other person from another country, but it's gonna be wrong. probably. And so it's very easy to make a mistake and think, wow, this person's fantastic and maybe it's a disaster or vice versa. So -- Right. -- I would say you'd probably be wise to spend more time and focus and energy in the interview process to really make sure you've got the right candidate for the for the role.

Welcome to the dirt where we get down to business with business owners. And the challenges they overcame in all things growth. I'm your host, Jim Barnish, and today, I challenge you to be a good friend. Send this podcast to someone that needs to learn a thing or 2 about user experience. Why user experience, Jim? That's a good question. So let's shift our focus to our guest today Aljandro Rivas Bacow, the founder and CEO of Userlytics. Alejandro's career has been an entrepreneurial roller coaster shaping his approach to building user litics. And my favorite part of today's discussion is where we talk about how UX eats strategy for breakfast. and the importance of investing in R And D for growth. Alright. A quick shout out to our sponsor Orchid Black Affirm that understands the importance UX play in the customer journey, and how to make that belief core to all functions in the business. K. Alejandro, welcome.

Well, thank you, Jim, for inviting me. Glad to be here.

Yeah. Glad to have you. Alright. So as as an intro to everyone, let's walk through one of your first forays into building companies and maybe 1 or 2 of the lessons learned from all that wealth of experience.

So you mean to tell me just because you have a 1 point something $1,000,000,000 valuation doesn't mean it gets bought the next day for that exact amount?

I didn't know that at the time, but you're right. It's not it's not automatic. I thought it was.

It is. It it so many people do. Right? you know, it's it's, you know, you try to push up for this this high valuation and you you think that's the right thing to do because it signals to the market that you're, you know, making ground and you're driving growth and and all these things and and the end of the day, that doesn't mean that somebody's willing to buy it for that. So that's a great that's a great story and valuation fluctuation, but also I imagine some incredible lessons learned for from from you. So thank you for sharing that. and I and I know that you've done, you know, you've done MBOs, turnarounds. You've done you know, almost IPO, you IPOs, right? You've you've gone public transactions, private transactions, and now you've got this awesome company that you've been growing for the last 14 years that is, well, I'm not gonna ruin the surprise. I'll let you talk more about it, but it's it's really kind of changing the game and user experience. Right? So when, you know, I I go to your website, userlytics.com, and I see user experience each strategy for breakfast. Talk to me about what that means.

Sure. That that was kind of upon on Peter Drucker's famous saying that, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And and we're actually a firm believer in what Peter said there. I I think that for a growing company having a culture, that empowers individuals and and brings out the best in them. that's that's more important than almost anything. but having said that, I did say almost anything. because, user experience, I think trumps everything. I I think a great example is zoom. If you think about zoom, you know, they came to the market 13, 14 years late. You know, there was a bunch of entrants before that. GoToMeeting, Webex, Skype, you name it. Their pricing model, their product was not really fundamentally different except for one thing. It was a slightly better user experience. and they own the market. Now it's, you know, they are the market essentially. And, and there's there's many examples of that. So user experiences is really a critical component of success for any company. So I would urge small companies. I would urge large companies. I would say, if you're spending, you know, $1 on marketing, $1 on sales, and 10¢ or 1¢ on user experience. Think about changing those ratios just a little bit. Doesn't have to be much. user experience will really, vastly, assist you in market share, competitiveness, pricing power, evaluation, you name it. I didn't really answer your question as to what we specifically did, but, you know, we we we try to help companies optimize their user experience by making it easy for them to test the user experience of their prototypes, their websites, their mobile apps, etcetera.

So when you when you look at your own business, right, and your own prioritization of of user experience. you know, success, or how do you really mix in, you know, the investment given that you've been really bootstrapped from the ground up? How do you how do you how do you balance your investment into user experience versus sales and marketing versus, you know, anywhere else that you could put your dollars?

It's a great question because the the temptation always is go for the new feature. Right? You know, your your business developer guys are saying, you know, these other guys have this feature or our clients have asked us for this feature or or this and that, or or maybe you're thinking, well, maybe we should spend more money on this particular sales and marketing initiative, or maybe we should invest in this new interesting research, r and d initiative. But, what we try to do in userlytics is have a really strong focus on improving the user experience. So when we do the budget every year, how much of our development resources are gonna be allocated. I'd say 60 70% is towards the user experience. And it takes time for that to show up in the results. So it's it's not one day to the next. it's always easier to say, well, if I just roll out this new feature, that'll take me, to Nirvana. but, I think it's it's worth considering maybe if I take my existing features and just make that really, really easy to use. Maybe that's a better investment of my time and money.

So when when you see other businesses that, you know, that I don't wanna say you're lecturing, but that you that you that you educate on on spending into user experience. You typically see it that they're you know, prioritizing what you just mentioned features features and fun, you know, over over the actual experience, or or do you see that they're you know, investing everything they have in the customer acquisition and maybe customer retention, but just ignoring R and D altogether or somewhere in between or kind of a Yeah. What do you what do you typically see?

Yeah. Exactly that. I was talking to a company today. They they, they have 357 employees. got one employee that is in charge of user experience research and that person is being asked to do everything and they don't have the resources and, you know, and and when she goes to the company and says, to the product manager, the CPO, whatever, and and says, you know, hey, I think you should, change this because, you know, the clients really want this or the users really need this. and they're saying, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. But we wanna roll out this other feature. So we don't have, we don't have time right now. We don't but we'll we'll it's a great idea. We'll we'll park that and we'll we'll get to that someday. So, you know, so someday it becomes, you know, never. I think a good analogy to think about this is if you imagined a world in which all of a sudden, the toothbrush, which had did not exist, was invented. So before the toothbrush was invented, how did people manage their teeth? Well, they waited until there was a big pain. Then they went to the dentist. The dentist pulled it out. And and that's kind of the world we live in before company started focusing on user experience. It's like you roll out features. You wait until somebody screams in in pain or in agony. And then you do something about it. whereas, you know, just paying attention, you know, brushing your teeth every morning. It's not a big deal. But we do it because we've been trained since we were little kids. If we were asked, you know, at a later age to start doing it, it would be tougher to do. So so it is difficult to get companies to change that mindset, but it pays off in huge dividends if they do.

Do you do you have any examples, whether it's at userlytics or another one of your your, your companies that you that you ran I'm sure it's probably at userlytics, though, that you, that you invested over invested. Some might call it in in user experience and that you saw a very clear, ROI or a very clear significant return for user analytics on the other end of it.

So, I have to say that before user Linux, I was not a convert to this whole thing of user experience. So user, you know, this came to me with userlytics and and I realized how important this was. so I I don't have, you know, examples of of previous to user litics. I I can tell you that our clients every day are making decisions that that have huge impacts sometimes in just their conversion funnel improves, sometimes their retention. Oftentimes it's both. their competitiveness. But I think if if if we look at different companies that have seemingly out of nowhere become hugely successful almost overnight nine times out of 10, the answer is the user experience. It's not because of the price. It's not because of this. It's always the users, it was easy for me to figure it out. It was easy for me to use or it was delightful. I mean, One thing is being easy. That's kind of like the the the lowest metric you can you can meet. But how often do you use an app or a website And you walk out of that and saying, wow. That was a delightful experience. That that's really what should be the goal. Now at the bare minimum, it should be easy, easy to use.

I I can tell you one thing that even though, of course, you know, there's There's a lot of room for improvement, but the US is largely far ahead of many countries I would say most countries in terms of user experience adoption. And and you see that when you travel overseas and you start using these websites from these huge companies that have the resources to spend and do something and their user experience, you're saying, oh my god. and it and it's and it's then when you really notice the difference. Now, we still have a ways to go obviously in the US also, but, but if when you travel to some of these other countries, you see, well, we have done quite a bit over in the US and the UK also. UK, US, Canada, Australia. they they've been kind of at the forefront of this revolution, so to speak.

So what is what is the best way for for business owners and and business leaders to to shift their mindset and get it right. Like, what's the what's the best first step? Let's say it's you 20 years ago before userlytics. Right? Like, what would have been the best step for you or for others to just, you know, really shift their mindset and get this right?

About user experience? The single most important thing would be for the owner CEO top executives to observe their clients or their prospects or their users. using their assets or trying to use their assets or or trying to do whatever it is, they as a company think they should be able to do. if they do nothing else, if they just do that, I don't need I or nobody else needs to tell them anything else. They'll they'll understand immediately. Wow. how important this is, but they can't just say I've got a fantastic designer. I've got a fantastic product manager. I've got a fantastic development team. I'm sure that's true. But until those people actually watch people using it. Right. That's when everything changes. Mark Twain used to say, you know, there's there's lies and there's damn lies and there's statistics, right? And If you get into a room where the developer, the designer, the marketers, they're all sitting around and they're arguing about statistics about we should change this because of this survey result. We should change this because of this or that. If you show to them, a video of somebody interacting with the prototype or the website or the mobile app. All the arguments go away. It's like, you can't argue with that. It's there. It's it's it's clear. You know? And then that's what we try to provide our our clients. with that, powerful video evidence.

Alright. I wanna talk about something that's hot in the world in general right now, just not not just in user experience, not just in in business, but just in in life in general, artificial intelligence, right, AI, and Obviously, the last 6 months since OpenAI kind of started to, you know, mass reach people. It's been to come just a an insane, almost commodity, not commoditization, but, you know, certainly, like, some sort of democratization, if you will, an ability to use it. And and, I wanna talk about how just general AI ties into what userlytics is doing now and in the future. Right? Like, how is how is AI currently integrated into user services. Let's start there.

Sure. We we, okay. We had been looking to use AI for years, but when OpenAI came on the scene, with chat GPT, it was like, all of a sudden, it became much easier to to do that. And, so we jumped on the bandwagon and we, launched an integration with OpenAI in April of this year. And what that does is it basically, we use artificial intelligence on the one hand to transcribe the video session. what the participants said as they were interacting with a mobile app or prototype or a website. and, and then we use, essentially chat APT 4.0 to, synthesize and analyze into, not exactly a full fledged report, but at least, you know, these are the key points. These are the key issues. These are the key themes. that emerge. So, you know, our company and and our peers when we appeared on the scene, 14 years ago, we compress the time required to launch a qualitative video based user experience study from what used to be weeks, you know, setting up a laboratory, getting people organized to a matter of days or even hours. However, somebody's gotta watch these videos. I mean, the we create quantitative data and all that stuff that you can watch and and digest easily, but at the end of the day, the the videos are really the heart of it because that's where all the the the rich insights are are laying there to be discovered, but somebody's gotta listen to them. So AI is is is allowing us to compress that time too. And, yeah, we're working on version 2.0 and version 3.0, etcetera. So ultimately, we think that AI, what it will do is it will lower the price and the cost and the time required to run one of the studies that we do so that people who may not have the budget to use our consultants to produce reports and and this and that, but they just want a basic AI produced synthesis. They can launch a study and get that synthesis within a matter of hours and, at a at a really low price point. So it'll compress the time and it'll compress the price and thus it'll expand the market. So we we think it's quite exciting. And in that sense, I think it's probably a good example of of many different ways AI is going to be impacting society and business at large. It's going to Is it going to affect some jobs? Yes. But it's also going to bring down the price and and compress the speed. So that's gonna expand demand for services. And so ultimately, I I think it'll be a net job creator. that's my optimistic take, I guess. we'll we'll see. Yeah. Well,

I I got a couple follow on questions to that because I love the optimism. What What what how do you see that impact? Like, let's start with first specific to user experience in businesses. Like, you can pick whatever 2, 5, 10 years down the road, whatever, you know, whatever period of time you think is applicable. But, you know, what how do you see user experience looking in a couple years? And and how does AI kind of affect that that future?

That's a great question. And that that's a little I I wish I knew the answer to that because,

don't have a crystal ball?

Yeah. The the the battery ran out. So and the heat melted it. But, yeah. So Bill Gates was saying the other day that he thinks one of the things that AI will bring is these, these AI powered chat personal assistants so that, for example, he thinks it'll have a big impact on entities like Amazon because he thinks people will no longer go to Amazon. They'll just go to their personal assistance and say, Hey, I'm looking for some cool stereo speakers that I can put in my walls and that do this and that and they'll they'll look for options and present, look, this is the best and the cheapest. This is the one you should go with. And do you want me to buy it? Yes. Go ahead. So, you know, if that future came to be true, then AI would have disintermediated Amazon, so to speak. Amazon is probably smart enough to say, you know what? I'm gonna get ahead of the game, and I'll I'll provide the the the AI personal assistance to avoid that. that faith. Right. But, but anyway, that has important implications for us because Who knows? Maybe the user interface becomes less important in the future because AI is doing everything in the background. So AI on the one hand is gonna be a tremendous assist to our business, but I also can see certain scenarios where it might be a threat to our business. but it's really hard. You know, like I say, the crystal ball is melted and and so I I don't know. Oh. Well, that's what you get for living in Miami and Spain, Alejandro. I mean, it's gonna melt. I gotta move north to Vermont, but then I'm gonna have to learn how to swim. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And and swim through ice nonetheless too.

Alright. Cool. So there's there's one last topic that I really want. I am been so excited to talk about with you because I think that you've been and incredible, incredibly thoughtful in the way that you've expanded your international footprint, and taking off in, in non English speaking markets. And and I'd just like you to walk us through, your approach at userlytics to expanding in in non English speaking markets, because I think a lot of folks could learn a ton from the way and the the challenges and the approach and and everything that you've done in in that expansion?

Thanks. I mean, we we do have now a very decent footprint, internationally. We've We've got enterprise customers in 35 countries. We've done projects in 79 countries. We've got 1,800,000 participants all around the world. when we first set out to internationalize which was about I'm gonna say 5 maybe 4 years ago at the time, I thought of it as more traditional approach. Like, okay, we're gonna have to go to Germany hire a bunch of German speaking, customer service, German speaking business development, set up an office there, then we do FRAX. And you know, so the costs of that kind of expansion quickly multiply. What we found out was that that wasn't necessary. We could hire German speaking customer service. German speaking, business development. within the country that we were countries, we were operating US and Spain. and they could service because, you know, it's the internet. It's a globally connected world. They could service our clients remotely as it were. from whichever location they were. And of course, we could translate our our websites and our dashboards and everything else into And in fact, we have it now translated into, I don't know, something like 30 languages. but then COVID came and this accelerated even further. because now people started moving all over the world and, you know, all these countries started coming out with these nomad visas trying to encourage people to come to Costa Rica, come to Mexico, come to Portugal, come to, you know, etcetera. And so there's this tremendous mobility of people around the world which means effectively that you can service clients all over the world using staff that may or may not be all over the world, but could easily be all over the world. I mean, we have staff in the Philippines and Finland, in Portugal, Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil. so you don't need to establish a physical presence in all these places. You can just, you know, have your headquarters and your 1 or 2 or 3, you know, key low locations and everything else can be done remotely. And that and that's that means that the cost of doing business oversees has radically come down and it becomes much easier to to work with with all these huge markets and, a lot of what US companies provide, there's a latent demand for their services and products overseas that is not being satisfied only because US businesses have not really, you know, being aggressive enough to go out there. I'm talking about small and medium sized business. Obviously, large US businesses have. so so I see a lot of opportunity there for for US fast growing companies to expand, internationally.

What are what are some of the challenges that you guys hit in when you when you first started doing that expansion?

So, and it details, really, things that you you you little by little learn, but so one one thing is that for example, in Scandinavia and in Germany, participants are much more adverse to being recorded, to having their face recorded, and they're very worried about data privacy. And, so, you know, putting their minds at ease that, you know, we are not gonna sell your data to the CIA and, you know, you're we're gonna follow the European regulations in terms of GDPR and, etcetera, etcetera. That that was super important. And, so, you know, there are these cultural nuances when you go from territory to territory. But then it's it's not only challenges. Sometimes you find opportunities because you you find, for example, that certain countries in the world that you think of as, for example, there, the the gulf countries in, you know, Saudi and, Dubai, etcetera. One tends to think of them as, okay, they're they're Arabic speaking. So there, you know, that would be a huge challenge from a language perspective, not just the the the verbal language, but the written language is, you know, It's completely different, script, etcetera. But English is kind of the language of business in those regions. So it wasn't as difficult as it might have seemed. So so sometimes, you know, there are opportunities that one would not suspect. in as you expand internationally.

When when you think of, somebody else or if you were giving advice to it, to another founder, maybe one listening in even that's that's doing this international expansion for the first time, what's, you know, what's one thing that, I guess maybe one thing that could go wrong and how to mitigate it that that you wish you knew.

One very important thing is that when you interview people, it's gonna be much more difficult for you than interviewing somebody from your own country that you're I mean, all the cues and invisible, intuitive things that you're talking to somebody and you immediately know where they come from, what kind of person they are. You know, you know, all those things. You're gonna think maybe that you know them when you're talking to this other person from another country. but it's gonna be wrong, probably. And so it's very easy to make a mistake and think, wow, this person's fantastic and maybe it's a disaster or vice versa. So, I would say you'd probably be wise to spend more time and focus and energy in the interview process to really make sure you've got the right candidate for the for the role. So that that would be an excellent one.

That's excellent. Yeah. That's excellent advice. And that's, you know, that's anyone that's a little bit different than you in in general. Right? Like, it's you gotta it's great for you to do it and to to drive that diversity and better understand that individual, but it's also gonna be more complex as communicating with them. so that's, you know, that's that's that's excellent advice. I'm I am curious. How does the How does the user testing process differ between English speaking and non English speaking markets?

there there are significant differences. So, for example, when you invite, say, a US or a UK participant or Canadian or Australian. And you ask them, hey, we want you to speak your thoughts out loud and do this and do that. they're generally not shy and, you know, they'll start, talking. And, well, you know, I I really, I didn't understand this, and I think you should have done this, and, you know, Yeah. Being outspoken in that way is is not necessarily part of the culture of many other non English speaking countries. So the difficulty sometimes is getting them to speak because they might just, you know, follow the instructions, but not vocalize their thought enough. So so that's one challenge. and And then there's another challenge is that, you know, sometimes you get people trying to cheat the system. So, you know, maybe we're looking for people in France and somebody connects from Africa pretending to be French And so we we we have all kinds of techniques and systems to to avoid that. but, you know, that that's when when working internationally, that that also is an issue. I mean, it can happen in the US too, but, yeah.

No. That is that's really interesting. Alright. so to to close off here on our founder 5, we've got a few quick hit that, I'm really excited to get your take on. So the first one is the number one metric or K that you are relentlessly focused on?

Net retention rate. So, you know, adding in there, upsell, downsell, churn, if if the sum of those three things is positive what that means is it's, you know, it's it's above a 100%. If that's true, then even if you stop selling to new customers, you didn't invest a dime in new customers, you closed the door, you didn't ask for any new customers, you would still grow. because it's above a 100%. So net retention rate hugely important in, re especially recurring business model like ours.

Yeah. Well said. second one, top tip for growth stage founders like yourself.

That's a tough one. I would say that At the end of the day, if your people are average, if they're the similar type of people as say a 10,000 person company or a 100,000 person company, You're not gonna win.

Yeah.

It's impossible. The odds are against you. So you have to have above average people Now, when you hire people, you can never be sure. Right? It's it's a theoretical exercise as you go through the interview process. Then you get the person onboarded. and then you find out the rubber meets the road. So if they're really bad, you're gonna know that soon and they're gonna leave. That's not the problem. If they're rock stars, you're gonna know that pretty soon too and you're gonna promote them and, you know, give them more more, compensation, etcetera. So that's not gonna be a problem. The problem is is when they sit in the middle, because then there's gonna be this inertia. You know, nobody likes to replace people who are not terrible. They're not you know, they're they're okay. They're they're part of the normal distribution curve. They're right in the middle. But if you stick to the normal distribution curve, you're not gonna win. you have to move it right. And so you have to slowly weed out the ones that are not that, you know, they're just average. And that That's a harder thing to do. It's easy to get rid of the bad ones. That's a piece of cake. Getting rid of the ones that are not so great, And that's that's kinda tough. And, you know, yeah.

Yeah. That's that's what I said. Everyone says, you know, hire higher slow, fire fast, but the the details of it, such as that, are are are so critical, to to understand. So that's well said. Third on here. Alright. favorite book or podcast or some other medium of your choosing that's helped you to grow as a founder.

I really love to book. it's it's a little bit dated. I think it I I read it maybe 14 or 15 years ago. It's called being wrong Adventures in the margin of error. And it's a fascinating book. It talks about how you know, he goes into biology and, you know, psychology and and all kinds of realms just to and it's got all these practical examples of how sometimes our our eyes deceive us. And and it talks about how the human being is conditioned. Like, we go into a cocktail party. We see a familiar face. The familiar face goes up to you and says, hey, Jim. How you doing? You know you should know that person, but you don't you know, you don't remember their name. So you say, hey, Mary, it's been a long time. You guess. because guessing is actually a very efficient way of doing things. The problem with guessing is that sometimes you're wrong. And that is not a problem. So it's almost like an MVP, you know, you know, fail fast type of philosophy, but but that is actually how the human brain works as opposed to a computer. A computer analyzes every possible combination or or at least he used to before chat to be And then, you know, that's not how the human brain works. It just guesses. So basically the book was saying, you're gonna be wrong. a ton of times every day. Don't worry about that. What you should worry about is just learning from it and and moving on, etcetera. So really interesting book.

Well, it's rare. Someone to talks about something I haven't read on here. So I, I'm excited to read it. Awesome. alright. A, a piece of advice that counters what one would consider traditional wisdom.

Okay. I don't know if this quite fits into the question, but it's it's something that I feel strongly about, which is that most, small company founders start ups etcetera tend to have a goal of raising money from institutional investors, like, you know, venture capital, and I think that is absolutely should be the last place they look for financing. I mean, it may be where they end up, and there's nothing wrong with, VC money or or private equity money for that matter. they they can be, you know, a great source of of wisdom and and and of help. but if you think about the implicit interest rate they're charging for their money, you know, they're looking for returns of 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 30 to 1. So, really, they're they're looking for above a 100% a year. Now if a bank came to you and said, hey, we're gonna give you a loan and we're gonna charge you a 100% per year, you wouldn't take that very kindly. you wouldn't that wouldn't be your 1st port of call, right? And that's the way I think we should think of that. Now the answer to that might be, well, yeah, that's easy say, but if you don't go to institutional investors, I mean, banks are not gonna give you loans when you're very small. You're starting out. So how do you finance your business? and there's one source of finance that I think is under utilized which is working capital because once you have a semi market product fit and you've gotta product that you know that people are willing to spend money on, then, you know, what's the gross margin that you have built into that product? Is it 80%? Is it 90%? Is it 50%? Is it 30 whatever it is? Okay. What if you just eliminate that in return for the company paying you up front for the entire year. Dave just given you a loan at a lower interest rate And, you know, it doesn't you don't have to necessarily give up all your gross margin. You could give up some of it. But what I'm saying is you could change your pricing model and say if you pay me upfront, I'm gonna give you a huge pricing advantage. Advantage for you, you're getting, you know, you're getting relatively inexpensive expensive finance as compared to VCs or whatever. And, anyway, so I think working capital is a, is, is a great source of finance. but, you know, if you have to, then you go to VC. You know? Yeah.

No. It's it's the it's that definitely does counter traditional wisdom. It's it that's a good one. Alright. What is, last one here? What is going to be the title of your autobiography?

Title of my autobiography. So I'm I'm thinking back to a a leadership course that I went to and and we did a little exercise. And out of that, the the the kind of title that was assigned to me was dancing on the edge. So, I think that's a good description of, of my adventures.

That's that's a good one. I here, I thought you were gonna say user experience, eats culture, eats strategy for breakfast.

Well, that that that would be the autobiography of of user litics of of of my company. But, yeah, That that's a different story.

That's a different story. But this was this was a good story. And despite the sweltering heat that both of us have, in our respective regions right now. I think we produced a pretty cool episode for everyone. So, you know, you've given a ton to our listeners today, Alejandro, I think, I always like to allow a little bit of time for self promotion at the end. So how how can those listening help you out?

Well, we would like to help them those listening. You know, if if you're out there and and you would like to improve the user experience of your website, of your mobile app, of your prototypes. you know, please visit, userlytics.com. because I'm sure we could find something that that fits your budget and and fits your needs. and as I as I mentioned about the toothbrush, you know, it's you don't you don't have to spend the money of, like, going to a dental visit. but, you know, you have to spend the money in relative terms of, you know, just brushing your teeth. Maybe not every day, but, you know, once a week or once a month or once every 2 weeks, but, it is truly well worth the investment of time and and energy and and money, of course.

Well, someone who just came from the dentist today and do that. Probably not taking as good of his teeth as he should have. I can concur with that. I'll tell you that. And I brushed it every time. alright. Well, this was this was so awesome, Alejandro. thank you for for everything. Thanks for joining us on the dirt thank you those for listening. reach out to Alejandro and, get your user experience on track. Thanks for joining.

Thanks so much, Jim.

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