EPISODE 127 of the Boom Your Biz Podcast.
Building Better Startups with Tiffany from the Product Bus
Sonya:
Hello. Today I'm here with Tiffany from the product bus. Is it the product bus or product bus? It's the product bus and the one and only. And don't you have such fabulous branding and website, so everyone go have a little stalk. Now while you're listening to this, but Tiffany and I were at a marketing meetup last week with Maddie Birdcage, Maddie Avery, who has Birdcage Marketing School and we didn't actually get a chance to talk, but everyone sort of connected afterwards and you reached out and here we are. I just love that, The power of the internet. Incredible. So I guess why don't you give everyone a little bit of an introduction? Who are you? What is the product Bus?
Tiffany
Yeah, absolutely. So hello, I'm Tiffany. I'm co-owner and co-founder, COO at the product bus. So the product bus is a consulting firm designed to work with early stage bootstrapping founders, startups in particular. So we worked with lots of tech companies, but a little bit of background about me, I ran my own software development company for two and a half years called Sym. It was a rostering and scheduling app for performing arts companies, but orchestras generally. And throughout that I learned a lot about product management and business strategy generally and decided to wrap it up in July of last year and stumbled into the wonderful opportunity of the product through meeting my co-founder Scotty through a Facebook group actually The power of the internet, again,
I think a lot of trust in the power internet being able to connect me with people, but basically the product bus came about because I had been working on pho and got to a point where it was no longer viable, but I had learned so much and I wanted to go out and basically shout it from the rooftops and I didn't have an avenue to do that and Scotty and I connected and he was talking me through the fact that he had been talking with it with Sage founders about the very things that I had learned and kind of trying to teach them from the product manager's perspective. And I was approaching it from an ex founder perspective and everything blossomed from their, so now we've been working together for a couple of months. Time is flying by, just released a membership and some other programs and things for startup. So it's been very exciting.
Sonya:
Fantastic. What do you find is the one thing that these startups don't know that they need to know? Do they come in with an idea of, hey, I need you to help me with this, but an actual fact they need to get an earlier stage sorted first or what are you kind of finding?
Tiffany
Absolutely. So many people come in and actually from a marketing perspective, we need help with doing our marketing for this new feature or this whole product, but it's often some groundwork needs to be done before that where it is what kinds of customers are you actually trying to serve and how are you doing that. Even more rudimentary than that though, we find that a lot of startups we work with need to do some validation of the problems first that they're trying to solve. They might, the typical thing, people come up with an idea for an app and want to run with it, but they haven't actually found other people that have the same problem that they're trying to solve. They don't know enough about the people themselves or what it looks like to actually face the problem. So we do a lot of work in that space.
Sonya:
Yeah, fantastic. Okay. With these businesses being startups, obviously they're very tight on funds. You've mentioned the word bootstrapping. How then do you guys get paid for your services? How does that work? Particularly in the early stages with these startups? They don't have a viable product a lot of the time yet, is that right?
Tiffany:
Yeah, absolutely. We work right up to NVP with most startups and then we'd probably consider scale ups from that point of MVP where we'd work with them. But in that early stage we actually we're different in terms of a lot of consulting firms for startups or organizations that work with startups in that we don't take equity, we push firmly on the fee for service because we believe that it is immoral actually to try and take things from someone when they don't even know what that thing is. It might be something that somebody spends eight, 12 weeks and a couple of thousand dollars working out that the idea isn't going to go anywhere and we'd rather have them spend that money there than give up equity and time and find that they've now given away ownership of something that they really wanted for themselves and really wanted to be able to control. It's one of the things that we see across the startup ecosystem that is a little bit predatory to be completely honest with you. Organizations taking large parts of the ownership of an organization. It's just starting out on founders just needed a bit of help.
Sonya:
And so do you just work with tech companies?
Tiffany:
No, not just tech companies. Product development generally. So we're working with an organization at the moment to develop that food product. We've worked with beauty products in the past. Very cool. The team is brilliant because I'm much more on the techie side than the physical product side, but certainly not just technology.
Sonya:
Fantastic. So if someone does have an idea for a new product, whether it be a tech product or physical product, what is the best time for them to get advice or reach out to someone like the product bus?
Tiffany:
I would say after they've done some initial research themselves and gotten to a point where they know that they don't know the next step or they need some objective perspective. Something that we commonly see with startups when they're going through the problem validation stage is that they start asking friends and family, oh, I have this idea and I have this problem. What do you think? Do you have this problem? Do you think this is the right way to solve it? And our friends and our family are lovely, but they'll like to you, we recommend people reach out at that stage as well just so that they can get some impartial customer feedback, potential customer feedback and make sure that it's not getting that phenomenon.
Sonya:
It's something that we see a lot as a marketing agency. We'll have a company come to us that they've created a product, right? And we've built their website from scratch and we're trying to push out marketing and it's just getting no traction. And a lot of the time it comes back to not having that product market fit or there are a million competitors in their space, they're priced 10 times higher, but there's no real discernible difference or identified. And I often think, oh, you've gone so far down this track and I'm trying to help you, but way back when you first conceive this idea is when that kind of all needed to be sorted out. So it's very difficult for us as a marketing agency to go, well, yeah, we're pushing this, but there are these fundamentals missing. So it's great to know that. I was about to say, it's great to know that there's somewhere that when people have these ideas, they can go and actually consult with people.
Tiffany:
Absolutely. And I think it's just about mean for me it's a personal ethos of if you're going to bail bail early, I want to know and it's not going to work at the start, and it's not to discredit perseverance, but it is about knowing where you stand and I think honoring the time that you are spending on something and the money that you're spending on something, I'd much rather someone, like I said, spend a couple of thousand dollars validating, oh, this is viable with this amount of work I think I need to put in, or this is not going to be viable because the problem only exists in my organization for an example, because we see lots of successful business owners coming to us actually to work with us on an idea that they've had to solve problems for their industry. But you'd be surprised the number of times that the realization is brought to them that that problem only exists for them because they're doing something else in a certain way. It doesn't actually apply to the rest of the industry. Sometimes we have this uncomfortable conversation where you have to go, oh yeah, that's because they have this other better system in place that solves that whole problem. So your product probably isn't necessary Or it's a feature of another product in another.
Sonya
That's a tough pill to swallow, particularly if they're paying you for service. That's a very tough pill for a founder to swallow.
Tiffany:
Exactly right. We often joke that it's first time that somebody will be told that their baby is ugly. Businesses differ. You'd rather know than not, but it's uncomfortable.
Sonya:
So it sounds to me like the product bus has a bit of a framework that you take them through depending on the stage that they come to you. Can you give me a quick rundown on those stages within that framework?
Tiffany:
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean everything, It's fantastic on brandIs through a roadworthy assessment, Like A one project, kind of getting a lay of the land. What team do you have, where are you at, what do you have, why does this exist? Do you want to retire a billionaire like Canvas founders or are you happy with, I hate to say it a lifestyle business, but are you happy with a, are you looking to get funding that you got? Those kinds of things. We run through that as a team in a workshop style format to understand where the founders and the teams are at. And then we go away as a team, run through that together, brainstorm any of the what if or how does this work type questions. And then we present our findings back to founders and then they have the option to purchase bus paths, which are blocks of hours designed to run either specific project or be used as a fractional product manager or someone more in the business to be able to help with the product management.
Sonya:
Fantastic. So you are based in Hobart. Where is your co-founder based?
Tiffany:
He's in Melbourne. I could not tell you which side of Melbourne. Very well traveled lady. He's in Melbourne.
Sonya:
Yeah. Fantastic. And how are you finding working from home, but when the rest of the team's across Melbourne, is everyone kind of remote working from home?
Tiffany:
Yeah, everyone is remote occasionally things that I would love to get to, we're working a little bit with a couple of different universities, incubators and innovation faculty teams and not getting to go along and see talks that a team is presenting is a little bit sad, but I'm holding down a here basically and they bring suburbs to Melbourne, so I'm just plane every couple of weeks.
Sonya:
Very, very short. Easy flight, isn't it?
TIffany:
Exactly right. 55 minutes wifi great. But I much prefer working at home than in an office, so The travel To me is worth it when it's needed.
Sonya:
Now with your last tech product, your scheduling tool, do you have a background? Are you, I'm going to say this completely wrong and this is awful. I went to band camp for a melody. No. Are you a musician?
Tiffany:
Oh no, I'm not. Actually. I knew almost nothing about music before I started that. My Co-founders, of which they were three, was a professional double basis in Australia.
Sonya:
Okay. So that's where it came from. Fantastic. I was like, ooh, I feel like there's a hidden talent or something here.
Tiffany:
Do lots of things with no-code tools and highly recommend actual business owners. I think they do a lot in terms of being able to unlock productivity.
Sonya
Alright. Tell us a little bit about your favorites and was it you at the breakfast meetup that was talking about automation?
Tiffany:
Yes.
My favorite things because I think you can bit overused nowadays, but it feels like an extra team member sometimes. All of the stuff that computers can do, I think computers should do so that we can leave the do the real humans. So I love automating things like onboarding processes or offboarding processes or setting up a project management kind of workflows so that the team doesn't have to think about, oh, where do I need to record? Where do I need to record what the next step is?
Sonya:
What's your favorite project management tool?
Tiffany:
I love clickup.
Sonya:
Same. I absolutely love it. And I've gone from Asana and used that for so many years and then found Clickup and I was like, oh my god, where has this been? Spain?
Tiffany:
I cannot think of their name now, but they have a great working with Asana course and every time I
see it, it has beautiful marketing assets and I see it.
Sonya
I'm like, yeah, exactly. And I feel like the capabilities, and again, the automations within Clickup and the reporting you can pull from it. Asana's such a basic version. I think if you are just you and a team, a solopreneur is fantastic to keep track of everything, but as my team grew, we made the jump to click up and I must say a hello to the team, hated it to begin with. They're like, oh my god, there's so many bits and pieces and moving parts and things, but I just feel like you've got to get in there and once it's set up properly and I've developed SOPs around how we use it now. I love it. Yeah. All right. Tell me about some of your other tech tools, automations, non-coding tools. What is that?
Tiffany:
Moms? I think it just works so well. Basically what it is is an AI empowered scheduling tool, but the way that I use it personally is that it collates all of my many calendars into one that I can manage myself just in Google calendar.
Sonya:
Oh my gosh, I need that.
Tiffany:
The way that it's really helpful for me is can set default visibility. So for example, if I have my home calendar that me and my husband are managing childcare and who's cooking what dinner and birthdays, all of that kind of stuff, and my product plus calendar, for example, I can feed my product plus my work calendar over to my personal calendar and limit the visibility so that the event for work aren't always completely visible to anyone who can see my personal calendar, but they are still in there as appointments, not like toggling off and on different calendars so that you can see meetings and that helps so much. But you can also add in things like habits. So I have exercise in there three times a week and it'll move it around based on appointments that I have
Sonya:
That is highly recommend. Fantastic. So it's called Reclaim because I have my Apple, I cal for my personal stuff and I've got shared calendars with my partner in that, but then I've got different calendars within that for exercise and appointments. Then I've got my linchpin calendar and then I've got another Subbrand calendar as well and trying to do the syncing between all of them, particularly when they're some Google calendars and I cal, they don't think both ways a lot of the time and I've done that many hours of troubleshooting and I'm fed up, so sign me up, recommend,
Tiffany:
Think that I just save literally hours because I have many a calendar depending on the work that we are doing. We might end up with client calendars as well where we have their user so easy to add systems and things like that. And yeah, again, you can sync everything to one. They also do meeting link, so instead of having a calendar or something like that, you can just run it through replay and it will, if you have, for example, lunch booked in, and so it would normally be blocked from a scheduling appointment. It will let someone pick that lunch slot and just move your lunch a little bit later or earlier or shorten their time at a minimum so that you have at least 45 minutes, for example. But it really does help with trying to fit everything in, especially as a mom, it's a lot.
Sonya:
Fantastic. Well, what we'll do, I'm sure you've got some others for us, but I'll just say what we'll do is we'll add a link to all of your favorites and obviously the product box links as well in the show notes. All right. What else do you love?
Tiffany:
I love is the casual for things. Do you know what do you
Sonya:
Use? We use it all the time in our marketing campaigns. Even like say we're running a lead generation campaign on Facebook, I'll have a Zap set up, so it alerts the client via email, it links to a spreadsheet that's populated, and then they have to fill out how their contact went with that lead. We've got it set up so if someone inquires on our website, they're added to different automations and things, so love it.
Tiffany:
Yeah, absolutely recommend it like how things work there. But at home, the idea is basically that there is a trigger and an action or many actions that you can set up so that if something happens in your business, you can go off and tell it to do other things. And that's a new outline. There's many different use cases for it. A step up if you do have a good handle on Zapier is using Resell. Not sure if you've,
Sonya:
No, I haven't. AI
Tiffany::
Over AI her way put me onto that one and I'm still learning about it myself to be completely honest. But it can do things like take a CRM contact and complete web research based on that contact
Sonya
Wow.
TIffany:
Website. Go find.
Sonya
My goodness. So if I say get an inquiry, it can go into a whole like the stalking piece for me. It give me the information for me to review.
Tiffany:
Yeah, exactly. So I hesitate to use the word stalking.
Sonya:
Well, guys, if you inquire exactly, if you guys inquire with me at linchpin, I will stalk you. It's research. Exactly, exactly.
Tiffany:
It's just a different word, right? Call it research.
Sonya
Yeah, exactly. But yes,
Tiffany:
You can go and do things like that. You can tell it to write reports using language models based on the output of the report, and you can link it up to things like HubSpot and Slack and a whole bunch of other tools. But that can be really helpful for research pieces. It can be great for responding to different leads. I'm always a little bit hesitant with that because you can get a bit spammy with AI responses to messages. So I often just get it to draft things for me instead of responding directly. But all of those pieces of the puzzle, if you can find ways to streamline it, you're getting time back in your day.
Sonya:
Yep, fantastic. Talk to me a little bit more about AI and how you are using it at the product bus. At the moment,
Tiffany:
We're using it to be completely honest in a very limited way because I'm still learning about it. The rest of the wider population is still coming to terms with this realization that it's here and there are ways that we can use it always. I'll refer to Penny, the product bus conductor, which is our chat GPP for the product, for a starting off point for emails or proposals, that kind of thing, just because I find it easier than staring at a blank page. But we're not doing a whole lot with AI internally. We often work with startups that have AI embedded in their businesses, and so that's an interesting perspective to have, but I'm still definitely Learning. I think
One of the big things that I'm mindful of as I learn about AI is just the fact that it can continue on our unconscious bias for or against people. And I'm not totally across how I manage that myself. Obviously I'm doing the best job that I can to manage my own personal bias, but putting that in a programmatic way I think without strict review can be quite damaging for a brand. So
Sonya
Yeah, look, we're exactly the same. I'm using chat GPT-4 and I've also tried a number of different marketing GPTs too, but it's definitely just if I've got writer's block a starting off point, or I'm also finding here when you staring at a page and you're like, all right, well I've got all these dot points here and know what I want to say. Here are the key points. Here's the format that I wanted in and getting it to polish it for me from there. And I hadn't, sorry, you go. The
Tiffany
Other way that we're doing it is to take transcription of meetings and get the key points out of that because sometimes we can get a little bit distracted. We, that's analogy little caught up in that or other things, but having a transcription and being able to run that through a chat GPT or is very helpful because we can see, okay, we agreed we're going to get this report out on the day of next week, let's get that on the action items. Makes it a bit easier than trying to remember or taking our own notes as well.
Sonya
Okay. Talk to me about practically how you do that. I've got one team member who does their best meeting notes. She structures it beautifully with templated, all of that. Now got another team member who, not his strong point, maybe I get him to record the meetings and we get this happening. How do we go about doing that?
Tiffany
Yeah, absolutely. So depends on what you're using to record the meeting, but if it's Zoom or Google Meet, then there are a whole bunch of different tools. I think there's one called Assembly, which we've used in the past. I'm not sure what the pricing of that is like, but you can opt in and opt out for different meetings to have the transcription generated and then you can jump in there and look at the action item. If you want to do it a little bit more manually and not have something, although join for example, you can just transcribe the meeting and then drop it into chat GT and say, please provide a meeting summary from this transcription to highlight any action items using the chat GPT and ZAIA automation. You can also set it up to add tasks to your clickup from meeting description.
Sonya
That's what we need.
Tiffany
Yeah, highly recommend. I can give you a link
Sonya
Notes. Look if you can, yeah, give me all your favorite tools, that would be fantastic. I'd love it to share it with everyone. Now, you mentioned before that you or the product Bus has a membership. Talk to me about that as, I mean that's a bit of a different business model to doing your one-on-one consulting side of things is how does the membership fit in with everything and what do you go through on the membership?
Tiffany
Yeah, absolutely. So the membership came about because there were points where because of the stage of founders exploring their ideas and trying to validating and bootstrapping, the cost was prohibitive to be able to get the support that they were after. Sometimes people just needed to be pointed in the right direction to get the starting point. But we also strongly believe that you don't always need to be working with a consultant, for example, to be progressing the business. And you should not always be working with someone. That doesn't mean that you don't need some kind of accountability or some kind of education that you can dip in and dip out of. And so we created the membership, we call it the station.
Sonya
Love it.
Tiffany
The idea of the station is to be a place that you can come and stop before you go on a journey with your bus and you can rest and recuperate and be in community or you can be looking forward to what trips you're planning. That's kind of, I guess analogy we have when we think about it, but it's a place really for people to come as founders and focus on actually progressing their ideas. We found a lot of memberships out there for business owners can be a bit wishy-washy to be completely honest with you about what you actually get from them and how you might be propelled forward. And so we have things like accountability groups where we are literally asking you, what is it that you're working on today? What will you be working on next week and what should we ask you if you've done so that the baby is ugly? Methodology, productivity, making sure actually doing things.
Sonya
Yeah, no, and there's a lot to be said for accountability groups, that's for sure. It's so easy to get caught up with all the other things. I think particularly founders with so many ideas all the time, so just sticking on the one course. Beautiful. Alright, well what I'll do is I will get all the key links for social media, the membership, all those tools that we spoke about as well. I'll pop them in the show notes, but if someone does want to reach out to you or the product Bus is the best way to do that through the website?
Tiffany
Yeah, the website or drop me an email directly, Tiffany at chat to you there, and then Sunny will put the links to everything else in the show notes.
Sonya
Fantastic. Well thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Tiffany.
Tiffany
Thank you for having me.