Dr. Jeremy Weisz 14:04
Talk about the playbook for a second. What are some of the things that you’ve learned from the previous SaaS companies that you know? Okay, we’re going to do ABC to grow this thing.
David Bitton 14:16
Yeah. So you know, there’s a sales playbook, a marketing playbook. So I’ll give you just a few of the highlights and big points. So I think one of the biggest lessons we learned after our last company, our last company got acquired by ASG venture capital firm in, in, in, you know, you know, San Francisco. And one of the things they did was start bringing in crazy talent to the company. Amazing leadership, amazing people in the team. Their hiring process was incredible. They have this A-player hiring process with top grading. There’s a great book they recommend called Who by Jeff Smart, and they taught us everything about hiring correctly and scorecards and job descriptions before we would be like, okay, 20 minute interview. You seem cool. When can you start? And now you know any position in the company? Five interviews, multiple assessments. Like it’s really hard to get into since day one of Dalton because of what we learned.
So the biggest lesson we learned was bring in really good people. And we prefer to pay double and have someone that is so much better than someone who’s just starting out as an example. And then we also look for a lot of skills and talent of someone that could grow and become a leader in the company. So I think hiring and the team was so important. We would never have grown this fast without the team that we have. Impossible. So that’s number one. Number two marketing, obviously SEO blog, which the whole playbook changed today with AI. So that was always a big thing from early on, you know, get as much content out there, be a thought leader as early as possible, show people that you’re that you’re pretty big, you’re established, you’re a thought leader in the industry. Do podcasts and webinars. Exactly. Because when people are searching online and you’re a brand new company, they don’t necessarily know that you’re a brand new company.
So they’re comparing you to all the other solutions out there. And if they start seeing your company everywhere on social media, on podcasts, on webinars, at shows, at events, with thought leaders, a lot of this stuff is free. They start associating you like, oh, wow, they must be big and they must be good because they’re everywhere. So that’s also a strategy. And then of course, you know, if you have some investment or money behind you, investing in paid marketing channels, PPC, Google ads, Bing ads, you know, meta ads, stuff like that. If you’re very good with that, like you really mastered it. Landing page optimization. You know, the whole funnel a B testing all the way through then you can be pretty successful if you know how to do all that really well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:41
David, I want to dig into the hiring one first for a second. First of all, shout out to Chris Marcel, who’s CEO of Top Grading. He’s been on the podcast. Great book. And obviously who’s a good book too. But yeah, they have a great methodology there. What do you do now as far as because like we were talking about before we hit record, you’ve raised money. You’re going to be hiring more people. You already have 200 staff. What are some of the key pieces in the hiring process that you’ve learned?
David Bitton 17:13
Great question. So for us, we always call them a players a term from ASG. And they always put people first. So that’s one other thing we could talk about but we love to see how much effort is someone putting into the application, the interview process? How badly do they want the job? How motivated are they? It’s not so much of like you have the best experience. You went to the best school. It’s more about do you know a player stand out. And I’ll give you some examples. We have a long application process when you just want to apply maybe 10-12 questions. Some are long answer format, paragraph format. We want to see how much effort people are putting into those questions.
Some people put one word answers. Some people put one line, some people put paragraph answers. And then we want to see, hey, are you taking the time and effort to correct your spelling and grammar? Or are you just being sloppy? If this is, if this is your work for applying to the company, then what is your work going to be like when you actually work at the company? Because now you should be putting your best foot forward. So we look at that also. After that process, we give them a little basic assessment, maybe 30 minutes. How much time and effort do they put into that. And if they don’t really want it, they’re gonna they’re going to self-select out. They won’t do it. So it’s just the amount of effort people are putting into the process. That sounds out — weeds people out. It weeds people out. But all the A-players really start standing out. You know, when you put them through all the hoops to get in.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 18:41
No thanks for that. I love that. And from a marketing perspective, right. I was reading somewhere and you’ve said this before. You’ve generated millions and millions of views to your content from Dr. Luke. So talk about that for a second. And some of the things you do there.
David Bitton 19:02
Yeah. So that’s changed dramatically over the years with AI now. And everyone can try to do it now. It’s a little bit harder because there’s just so much content online today. You know, five years ago you had to actually write the blog post yourself. And now you can go to ChatGPT, put a prompt in within 30s. It’s done. There’s even softwares that can automate everything for you. So today it’s more going towards the quality over the quantity because quantity has exploded on Google. So they’re looking for. Google’s looking for you know they say eat you know expertise authority and trust. And there’s another E they’re adding in what people are saying. They’re adding in which is experience.
Are you experienced. Should I listen to you if I’m writing a blog post about plumbing, but I’m not a plumber. Google’s probably going to rank another blog post higher that’s written by a master plumber as an example. They want the experience there, right? So early on it was about creating really, really, really high quality content that was ten times better than anyone else out there. Meaning, you know, if someone wrote a 1000 word blog post, we would write a 3000 word blog post with a video and infographics. Right? So how can you ten x what the competition is doing?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:12
Yeah, totally. And I would love to hear some lessons learned from the previous SaaS companies that you. It could be mistakes that you go okay on the next one. We’re not going to do this again. I’m sure you didn’t make any mistakes but yeah.
David Bitton 20:31
Oh boy, oh boy. So much so you know early on obviously we didn’t know much about like analytics or tracking. So we just throw money everywhere and like oh we think it’s working. So obviously you can’t improve what you don’t track. And you know you have to measure and track everything, every single thing. Especially if you’re investing your own money. You’re tracking it very carefully. So it’s amazing how many business owners I speak to. And they’re like, oh yeah, we’re, we’re doing wow. Like we have like 3000 followers on Instagram. I was like, wow, it’s amazing.
How much money did you make off that? I don’t know, I think it’s doing well. I’m like, so why are you wasting three hours a day posting on Instagram? You know, track and measure every single thing. And today it’s easy to do that. So track and measure everything. Hire incredible people. We made some, you know, big mistakes early on, obviously, but you know, you learn what to look for. Anything else.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 21:22
What about in the selling process that you learned. from the last company.
David Bitton 21:29
Yeah. Yeah. So okay. This is an obvious one. You know, in every company we always start off with like, you know, what’s the expression? Beggars can’t be choosers. So we’ll take everyone if you can breathe and. Well, you could be a client, you know. So I think as you keep growing, you start actually narrowing your target audience more to exactly the ideal customer profile that you want to bring in versus just trying to get everyone in the door. And then what happens is when you start trying to get people to use your software, product or service and they’re not really the right fit. It’s going to blow up in your face. They’re not going to be happy, they’re going to churn or cancel.
They’re going to demand refunds. They’re going to rant online on every channel you can imagine, and they’re going to destroy the reputation of your company. And they really shouldn’t have been, you know, a customer in the first place. So today we are a lot more honest with people. Early on in the sales process, we say, hey, you’re probably not the best fit for us. You know what you want to do? There’s actually like probably three workarounds that we can maybe make it work, but just disclaimers, you know, do other research, maybe we’ll even refer them to two other programs to look into. And if it’s still they want to join that they already know all the warning signs that we’ve given them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 22:42
What about from the acquisition process? What did you learn? I know with Practice Panther was acquired some you know, if someone’s right now thinking of selling or they will be selling in the near future, what are some, you know, kind of experience shares you would tell them based on your previous experience?
David Bitton 23:04
Yeah, get the most money possible. That’s always number one. You know, meet with a few investors. Don’t just take the first offer that comes on the table. You know, for us it was easier because we didn’t have to look for investors to acquire our last two companies. They came to us. And when your company gets big enough, you’re going to be getting solicitations on a weekly basis. You should be getting at least 2 to 3 emails a week of VCs looking to acquire or invest in your company, assuming you’re doing well online, assuming it’s a good market that they’re looking into.
And then the ball sort of is in your court like, hey, you came to me so you can sort of start, you know, entertaining offers, seeing if you really want to sell, seeing if the time is right, seeing if the valuation is right for us. You know, we weren’t always looking to sell, but along came a great investor with a great valuation. And you know they can be very they can work with you and be very creative to make sure that whatever you want they can do. Like, hey, I don’t want to leave the business. We can do that. Hey, I want to keep maybe x percent, maybe we can do that. So whatever you want with the right investor, they can make things happen for you. Now sell your companies for the right reason. You know, I think if I were to do it again, maybe we would have held on a little bit longer.
So there’s a lot of companies now that say, hey, it’s almost silly to sell your company when it’s on the rise. Like when you hit a certain amount of revenue, you’re going to keep going. It’s a snowball effect. There’s a funny thing where it’s like the first million is impossible, the next 10 million is whatever it is. And then from 10 million up, it’s 10 to 100 million. It’s inevitable. It’s going to happen. It’s already a snowball effect. Nothing can stop you. You’re so big. So we should have probably, maybe kept going because at that point, you know, you’re starting to dominate and it’s hard to slow you down. So yeah, maybe not. Maybe consider not selling if you’re doing so well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 24:51
How did you know it was the right time when you got approached?
David Bitton 24:55
You know, for us at that time in our last company, at least, there were some things that concerned us. And you have an out and you have an exit. So you’re saying, wow, look, look what just happened in that side of the market or that competitor really can take us. We were scared. You know, as every single entrepreneur is listening. They are always paranoid and if not, you should be. You should always be looking over your back shoulder. What is the competitor doing? What’s what can come and kill you tomorrow? Well, you know, there’s always the black swan, the unknown, unknown. Covid. Black swan. No one ever saw that coming. Some industries got decimated.
Some thrived. Who? Who knows? So for us, there were some scares like that. So we said, okay, you know what? We’re good. You know, we, you know, at least for us, we also have, like, our magic number in mind. If we ever hit this number, we don’t want to be greedy. So we hit that number and we were scared and we were paranoid. We said, you know what? We’re happy. Let’s just get out from here.
And the company was in really good hands. We chose a great investor that would continue the legacy, keep us on board for a little bit to ensure a smooth transition. And till today, this was maybe seven years ago. Now people that were there are still there today, which is a great sign. You know, 8 to 10 years later, they’re still there. They take such good care of them. So it was in really good hands. That was also something that was important to us.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 26:05
I want to hear about your transition. Shin, did you stay on? Did you leave right away from the previous company? And I want to mention I’ll just comment on that paranoid thing because I always think of. I did the interview with Rand Fishkin, who started SEO Mars and Mars. It was later named, and he definitely I don’t know if you’ve heard his story, but, you know, he was on the rise, just growing her and growing. He got an offer from HubSpot that would have been worth millions and millions of dollars. And he was like, no, I’m just going to keep growing. And so it is one of those stories that sticks in the back of my head about the paranoia that you’re talking about that can happen.
David Bitton 26:46
So, yes, everything at the right place, right time for everyone. Look, there’s also the opposite story, where Google offered 10 billion to this company and now it’s worth not even 1 billion. You. Right. So you never know. So when the time is right, you know you know you only you will know. Remind me again — the last question.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:03
Your transition period. What did that look like from the last company?
David Bitton 27:08
Right. So in our case, we wanted to stay on for a little bit. We wanted to stay on to ensure a smooth transition, but also to learn from them. You know, when a big company comes in, you want to see what are they doing, how are they going to grow this company. And also every startup founder will know this. This company is like your baby. You gave birth to it. You grew it. It’s a weird thing to say, but, you know, it’s really your baby, your pride, love, joy. You’re there every day. Blood, sweat, tears, midnights. You know, burning the midnight oil at 5 a.m. so it’s hard to leave at the same time.
And it takes some time to leave. Unless you are. You really just want out. That’s a different story. But for us, you know, you know, you want to stay. You want to hang on and see what’s going on. And then when the time is right, we felt the time was right. They brought a new leadership. They had things under control. We felt it was in really good hands and the time was right and that was it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:57
I want to give people, David, a bit of an idea, more about DoorLoop and what you do and. Talk about your father in law for a second.
David Bitton 28:09
Yeah. The story we were speaking about offline. So. People always ask you, you know, why do you do what you do? Why? Why is it so important to you? Why did you start Dr. Loop? And so, my father in law, this was one of the very, very, very early days where I recently got married. And then every Sunday we would go out to hang out with the family, hang out with my wife’s family. And my father in law was always driving an hour and a half every Sunday to manage his properties. And, you know, so the whole Sunday he was gone, managing his properties, collecting rent in person, knocking on doors, picking up checks or cash. And it was a very manual process. And it killed his family day every Sunday. So when we were launching Dr. Loop, I was excited to get into his hands and see how it would change his life. And I didn’t even realize how much it changed his life until actually Covid hit. Because Covid, you had to go in person. It was really scary.
Everyone’s wearing masks, right? And I was seeing him every day pretty often. And I’m like, wow. Like, hey, when’s the last time you went to your properties? Were you just there this Sunday? And he’s like, David, I haven’t been there in six months. I was like, what do you mean? He’s like, David has changed my life. Like 95% of my tenants pay on time, automatically on auto pay without me knocking on their door. Do you have any idea how much time I’ve saved? Thanks to you? I was like, wow. So that story hits home to me. And that’s a big reason why we do what we do and what gets us amplified and motivated to do this work because it just, you know, we see the effects personally and in our family life. So that was a really nice story that I always think about.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:44
In the very beginning. How did you get some of your first customers’ network?
David Bitton 29:50
Right. Your own personal network, friends, family connections. You know, early on we probably also offered it. I don’t even remember now, free beta in beta to a few people, maybe like 1020 beta customers. Come test us out and see what you think. Maybe we did some basic ads just to get some early testers in here and we told them the drill, hey, we’re an MVP, we’re in beta mode right now. The software is free. Don’t worry. Just give us your feedback. And there is that curve like the innovation adoption curve. Is that what it’s called?
So you have like the first 2.5% are like the innovators that are going to join your company. And then you have the early adopters, then you have everyone in the mainstream. Then you have the laggards who get an iPhone 20 years later. So we were looking for that 2.5%. Those innovators and early adopters that love like probably like me and you, we love trying out new software even if it’s in beta. Cool. That’s okay. It’s okay if it has some bugs. We’re willing to try it out if it’s new and cool, especially if it’s free. That’s nice. So. So yeah, we found those people and they helped us grow and they’re still with us today.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 30:50
And you know, we were talking about customers for a second. I know you have different segments of customers talk about the evolution of that. And that, and I’m going to pull it up for a second because I think it’s interesting to see here. You know, we have residential, commercial, community associations and affordable housing.
David Bitton 31:08
Yep. And when we started we were everything. If you manage boats, if you manage, you know, storage facilities, you know. So we had a lot more on our website that we were advertising against and it wasn’t a great fit. Like I said, you know, you can’t be the best in everything. So you have to start, you know, narrowing your focus, narrowing your niche, finding your niche market, your ideal audience. And can you be the best in the world at 1 or 2 of these audiences? And that’s what we decided to do. We want to be the best in the world at residential and commercial properties for 1 to 1000 units, for property owners and property managers. And as we grow, the unit count will grow, the features will grow, and we’ll be able to handle even larger portfolios. So I mean, we even have some that are over 1000 already today. But the majority, that’s what we’re looking for right now to to service.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 32:00
And then I want you to talk about pricing for a second. That can be kind of a tough nut for people to crack and to figure out how did you decide on different pricing and maybe how does it evolve from the beginning?
David Bitton 32:16
Yeah. So obviously you’re looking at all your competitors, right? You’re probably dropping them into spreadsheets or Google Sheets and saying, okay, A, B, C competitor, what do they charge? What are their packages? What, what features do they offer? And then early on, you know, some people might want to charge more, but early on it’s hard to charge more than your competitors if you don’t have a relatable software that can compare with competitors that are on the same feature parity as the competitors.
So if you offer half the features, you probably shouldn’t be double the price of your competitors unless you’re doing something so radically different and amazing that adds so much value that no one else is doing, that’s a different story. So for us, we started lower than the competitors. And then as we grew and as our feature set grew, and as we added features that our competitors don’t have, we became more valuable. So we started increasing the prices accordingly.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:05
And you also have an interesting story about a family friend.
David Bitton 33:11
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it’s always exciting when you’re building your company and you have someone use your software that you know, and your inner circle friend or family that doesn’t realize it’s your software. And then one day he’s like, oh my gosh, you’re not going to believe this. I just did business with someone and they use your software or I manage, you know. So I have a family friend and he had no idea that I was involved at all or, you know, let alone a co-founder of a for loop.
And he ended up moving his portfolio from Appfolio, another software company in our space to DoorLoop because he had issues with them and he loved our software so much, he became one of our biggest raving fans. And only months later did we actually make the connection that it’s me and it’s him? Wow. I can’t believe it’s you. You’re using our tool, and that was such a cool feeling to know that you have friends and family starting to use your tool without them even knowing that it’s yours to begin with. So that’s always maybe some validation that that’s always nice to get.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 34:10
I’m looking here. You actually have yeah raving fans page here who are ideal clients. Are they ones that other property management companies managing a bunch of properties. Or are they individual investors that have maybe ten properties who tends to be ideal for you?
David Bitton 34:28
You know what, it’s a combination of all those because there are two main customer types in our industry. It’s property owners. They own the property. They’re the landlord, you can say or real estate investor. They also own the property. Sometimes they will manage it themselves. Sometimes they don’t want to deal with the management. They don’t want to collect rent. They don’t want to deal with maintenance requests. They say, you know what? I’m going to hire a management company to handle everything for me, and they could take 15% of my rent in exchange.
So that’s the other side of the customers, which is the property management company that manages the properties for them. So you’ll see here a lot of them start off there’s like an industry term now called like accidental landlords. Like they didn’t mean to be a landlord. They fell into it. Maybe their parents had a property or they had a property that they’re now, you know, they bought a second home. So, hey, let’s not sell our original home. Let’s start renting it. And now all of a sudden, you are an accidental landlord. You fell into a property somehow. So we have a bunch of those, and they start collecting rent and they start making some passive income. They say, wait a minute, this could be a good business. And they buy another property and another property another. So that’s how a lot of real, you know, real estate investors grow. You know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 35:34
When you raise a series B for $100 million, what you know, obviously they’re asking what would you do with the money at that point? Okay. You’re getting this influx. What’s the plan? What do you tell them on what you’re going to do?
David Bitton 35:53
So first off, you know, you better know that answer before you even go out to consider raising money. So for us, you know, we had a very, very lengthy plan and spreadsheets and budgets and forecasts and everything you can imagine when raising that amount of money. And it all goes towards growing the company and making the customer experience better for both our customers and our customers. Customers, which are the tenants paying rent? How can we make their experience also better? Because if their experience is better, that means they’re going to continue renting and renewing their lease with the landlord. Everyone’s happy it’s a win-win for everyone, so we always think about that. So in our case, we had a very detailed plan of exactly what the money is going to be used for.
So as an example, hey, we want to start doing as I’m making this up. We want to start doing big trade shows. Wow. That’s going to cost us 2 million a year. Okay. Well okay. So we need at least three years runway. We need 6 million for trade shows. And we want to hire 100 developers. That’s going to cost us 10 million a year. Okay, so we need 30 million for that. Okay. Right. So just like you started coming up with these exercises. Okay. And if you had 100 more developers, what could you do with the product? How many more features can you have? Can you grow your customer base. You know, can you have add-on products? So all these things come into it. It’s months long of talks, months long of strategies before you actually start going out to raise.
So when that question comes up that’s already in your pitch deck, like, hey, this is exactly what we’re doing with the money. So and they know it, you know, no one raises that much money without knowing that. But that’s a good lesson even for Seed or series A, what are you going to do with the money? You should know and make sure you never have to. You never run out of runway and run out of cash, because then you’re going to be in big trouble, because you’re going to have to raise when you don’t, when, when you need to. And you don’t want to raise money when you need to because your valuations will get crushed. They feel it. So every time we raised we didn’t need to. We just wanted to. We didn’t have to, but we wanted to grow the company further.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:43
David, is there something in the answer? Maybe. be no, that you found that you had to defend more to the investors than other things. As far as growing the company, like what you would use it for like that you were getting questioned on, but you found they were bringing that, bringing something up on the plan, and you were adamant like, no, that actually we’ve thought about this and you defended it.
David Bitton 38:10
You know what, for us, anytime, you know, we love advice, right? You know, that’s why we’re partnering with a company like this with a VC or PE. You know, we want their advice. We want their expertise. We’ve only done this three times. They do this 20 times a year. They have hundreds of portfolio companies. They learn from all of them. So we love the advice. And for us the answer is always the same. Like, oh that’s that’s interesting feedback. Are you okay if we test that theory? Like, hey, as a made up example, we want to do a $100,000 trade show. Well I don’t know if you should.
Well, okay. You know, instead of doing ten of those, are you okay if we do one and we see the results and we go from there. Okay. Sure. In the question that you asked, nothing really major comes to mind. Obviously they want to know, hey, you know, our entire product team is in Israel, the most talented developers in the world. And there’s so much talent in Israel. So they always were curious, hey, what’s so special about Israel if they’ve never invested in, you know, in an American-Israeli company? And why can’t you hire developers in Miami or the US? What’s wrong with Seattle developers or New York or California developers? So, you know, obviously we explain the differences and we already have a team and a partner in Tel Aviv, and we already have an office and we already have the team there. And the talent is incredible there and everything is incredible there. So maybe you do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 39:25
Have people who are worried about that? Obviously there seems to be always some type of turmoil in Israel. Did you have any people question that or worried about that, that there’s people and staff and companies even based there for sure.
David Bitton 39:44
I mean, yes, always. That’s always a concern for everyone. Especially since the tragedy of October 7th last year. So it’s always on top of everyone’s mind. However, it’s an easy answer once they see that Israel really is a Start-Up nation. How much good has come out of Israel? How many changes to society have come because of Israel? You know, positive changes? How many massive companies are in Israel? You’re talking the Googles of the world. They’re all in Israel. Intel.
They all have offices in Israel. Monday.com I mean, really big publicly traded companies are in Israel hiring rapidly and expanding in Israel. So that alone gives a lot of confidence to a lot of people. Then when you explain the culture and the resilience of the people in Israel, they start to understand that, hey, nothing can stop them. They want to go back to life, back to normal. If a massive attack happens on a Monday, there might be back in the office on a Tuesday. They just want to go back to normal and work hard and hit their goals. And, and and there are winners in every sense of that word.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 40:47
I love what you said. Thanks for sharing that. I remember interviewing some, you know, Israeli founders after October 7th, and they were just wanting to go back and they were, you know, on doing an interview and some of them had to run back and forth to a bomb shelter during the interview. And there was like, I’m like, are you sure you want to reschedule this? Like, no, no, I don’t want to reschedule. Just just do this, you know?
David Bitton 41:11
So yeah, I totally started adding Wi-Fi to their bomb shelters. Bringing they’re working from there. It just became unfortunate, but it became the norm. And it’s the same in their homes, by the way. They wake up at 3 a.m. with a siren and they have to run, rush their kids over to a shelter or stairwell. But unfortunately, it’s the norm. And they’re used to it at this point.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 41:27
Yeah. I love what you said about how to make the customer’s customer’s experience better. And what are some features that you included for that purpose that you realize through this kind of journey, not just your customers journey, but your customers customers journey. What are some of the features you included to make that better and easier?
David Bitton 41:49
Yeah, so very important to us was to release a very, very, very easy mobile app for iPhone and Android because a lot of the tenants like to pay rent on their phone as user friendly, convenient as possible, along with desktop on the computer as well. So making sure we spend a lot of time on the tenant portal and not just the product that our customers use, but our customers’ customers use, that was very important and still is very important to us. I’ll give you a random example. Right now, you know, a lot of the tenants that pay rent speak Spanish. You know, in some states in the US, especially in Florida, so they don’t understand English so well, they may not understand the convenience fees or they can pay by credit card. They can, you know, it’s not a first language.
So we are now working on translating the tenant portal to Spanish and eventually other languages too, just to make it more user friendly for them. So things like that that help will also monitor what tenants are saying. Complaints we receive, maybe online or in person. Wow, that’s a really good complaint. It’s really good advice. Let’s go fix that. So we’re really, even today, as big as we got. We’re really big on the user voice. And we always want to listen and monitor all the chatter online. What are people saying? How can we improve? If someone puts up any bad review online today, I’m in charge of that and I disseminate that to over 15-20 leaders in the company. Everyone is reading it, everyone is taking note. And how can we fix that and make that customer happy and all customers in the future happy? Because if one person is complaining, they must be really upset. But a lot of people are probably thinking the same thing. So the user voice is really important to us.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 43:21
David, I have one last question and I’d love for you to share mentors. It could be distant mentors meaning like resources, books Or, you know, actually personal mentors or both. Before you answer that, I just want to point people. Thanks for sharing your journey, your knowledge and your stories. I want to encourage people to check out. Dot com if you know someone who could use it. Check it out. It’s a really slick platform and website and we’ve pulled it up multiple times here. So I’d love to hear mentors. It could be, you know, some of your favorite books or actual mentors or both.
David Bitton 44:06
Yeah. So I read a lot of books. That’s probably one of the biggest ways I’ve ever learned anything on-the-job learning and also books. You know, you have incredibly talented, successful, smart people that want to share their life’s work and lessons and experience, and they’re doing it for 9.99. It’s come on, you know, it’s amazing. Audiobooks, physical books doesn’t really matter.
So I’ve learned majority of what I know today from books and personally from YouTube doesn’t really matter to the channel doesn’t, you know, Instagram, TikTok doesn’t really matter. But I watch a lot of YouTube videos on learning whatever I want to learn. You can learn online. You want to learn how to do Google Ads. There’s a 500-page textbook, and there are thousands of videos you could watch, you know, for anything you want to do. So there is so much content out there and so many experienced people. So I do follow many. I subscribe to many YouTube channels, many people online. A lot of like SaaS channels, like Sastre is one of them as an example.
And on SaaS, they have their annual, you know, talks and events and they have amazing speakers that, you know, like Sam Altman, I’ve watched a thousand times, who’s now, you know, CEO of ChatGPT, OpenAI. So I’ve watched a ton of his videos and there’s so much to learn. There’s so many, you know, mentors you could have that don’t know you, but you know them and you just consume their information. So that’s like the learning side of it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 45:23
What are some of your favorite books? Are there, do you typically do audible or are you reading them? What are some of your favorite? I know you mentioned top grading and who and lean start up. Any other favorites? I don’t know if you use audible, but if you want to pull it up and share a few of your favorites, I’d love to.
David Bitton 45:39
Yeah, yeah, I got it right here. So. So I’ll give your listeners a little secret. That’s what they get for listening. They get a little tip. So I have a really hidden page. I’ve never actually shared this with anyone publicly, but all my friends and family, whenever they ask me for books, coworkers, I share it today twice already. So I have a list of my favorite books that I just keep adding to. It’s not even very long. It’s hard to make it into this list for me, and the link is David M like Maria. And then my last name baton.com/books. And so that link has my favorite books. Now I’m just looking at that list right now. Some of my — you know, so I like to read.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 46:22
Oh I see that.
David Bitton 46:23
I like to read physical books. You know I like to read it, I can highlight, I can remember.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 46:28
To share this right now or no?
David Bitton 46:29
Yeah yeah yeah, you can definitely share it. It’s okay. 80/20 Sales and Marketing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 46:35
That was Perry Marshall. Yeah. Perry Marshall’s been on the podcast. That’s a great one.
David Bitton 46:39
Really? Wow.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 46:40
Perry’s been on. We had Never Split the Difference. Chris Voss has been on the podcast. That’s really a favorite one. That was a good one. Love that one. Yeah. Perry. Perry. We’ll give Perry a shout out. I’ll let him know that.
David Bitton 46:52
We mentioned he is one of my favorite authors ever. I’m pretty sure I found him in, I think, Forbes. I think he was like a Forbes author, and I think I bought every single book that he wrote. It was.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:03
So he’s a smart dude.
David Bitton 47:05
Yeah, yeah, I think he wrote, I think, the Ultimate Guide to Google Ads — almost positive. That was —
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:12
He was early, early, early on to Google ads like one of the early people on to kind of really work that platform. Let’s see here.
David Bitton 47:26
Yeah. So I bought his book in June 2014, The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads. That book changed my life, changed my business. One of the best books I ever read 80/20 Sales and Marketing, Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ads. Like I bought a lot of his stuff. I love Perry Marshall. So highly recommend Perry Marshall Never Split the Difference. One of the best sales books ever. Raving Fans. Also incredible about customer service. Extreme Ownership by Jocko. Also great. I mean, there’s some good ones on here. Yeah. Love it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 47:55
I love radical candor. I had them on. That was a good one. Kim. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for sharing these. And you were saying mentors?
David Bitton 48:07
Yeah. I mean, that’s pretty much it. I mean, obviously throughout life you have some personal mentors. My father has always been a great mentor for me. Anytime I need to bounce ideas, he’s always going to give me, you know, as non-biased opinion as possible. He’s always directed me in many times of my life, like at those crossroads or those really pivotal moments. What do I do? He’s luckily given me like the right, you know, path.
So thank God there’s usually, you know, maybe five times in my life, but a handful of times in people’s lives that you can count on your hands of massive critical turning points in your life that you need to make the right decision. So when you realize those are those moments, try to get as many people as possible to weigh in on that decision. And that’s what I did. Friends, family, anyone really that can help you out in those points?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 48:50
David I’ll be the first one to thank you. Thank you for sharing. Everyone can check out doorloop.com and more episodes of the podcast and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks everyone. Thanks, David.
David Bitton 49:02
Thanks so much again.
