Matt Watson: 11:15
So it’s interesting as a business leader, founder, CEO, we get emails every week from people that are private equity or these people that are doing searches. They claim like, oh, I’ve got all this money, I want to buy one business and run it. Maybe I want to buy your business. Like we get all these messages. And I never took any of them seriously. And one of them randomly messaged me like that and I said, hey, I’m interested, but only if it’s serious, blah, blah, blah, basically. And, you know, kind of brushed broomed them to the side, kind of like, you know, whatever. And they replied back and like, no, we’re very serious. We got this kind of company. They’re looking for something in your space. We think it would be complementary to the rest of their business. And that’s how it happened.
And probably the wildest part, the wildest part of that whole story is it actually happened. Like during Covid, we never met the buyer once in person, which is mind blowing. Never once met the buyer, the people we were going to work with, not one of them in person. They were from California and they’re extra scared of meeting people. So I was like, I can wear a mask. Like, you know, the whole thing. No no no no no no. So it was wild.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:32
What was the lesson and what was your were you, did you stay on for a period of time. Do you step away after the exit? What did your role look like?
Matt Watson: 12:41
You know, my plan was to stay and potentially be like the CTO of the combined companies or whatever, because it was a company called Netro that we got kind of paired with. And honestly, I spent a while helping with one of the other executives, like a whole plan of like, okay, they’re going to raise some more money. They want to invest in the platform. We’re going to build this new big thing. What is that going to look like? How are we going to build it? And then they decided not to do any of it. And it felt like they were just going to put the whole thing in maintenance mode.
And maybe like a lot of other private equity, they were just there like, how do we make, how do we cash flow this thing? How do we make it profitable and not invest as much in it? And I just eventually I’m like, you know what? You guys don’t need me. If you’re not going to innovate and go do big things like, you don’t need me here to do this. So I decided to step away. And that was also one of the weirdest times of my life of like I had nothing to do for several months. It’s like kind of lost. It was the first time in my life like I had nothing to do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:47
So when did Full Scale become that next thing for you?
Matt Watson: 13:51
So what was interesting is Full Scale was going on at the same time. But my business partner, my original business partner, ran Full Scale and I kind of stayed out of his way. He didn’t want me in his way. And so I had been a customer of Full Scale the whole time, basically from Stackify. And I helped refer customers and did stuff like that. But I was not involved in the operations. And so yeah, I was not involved. And really until I bought out my business partner, you know, a couple years ago. But yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:23
At what point do you decide I’m going to get more involved with this? Right.
Matt Watson: 14:27
Well, that was the thing I wanted to be more involved. I felt like Full Scale was the perfect business for me. You know, it’s related to software development. I could help do sales and marketing stuff. I loved, you know, all of it. It was like I felt like it was a business made for me. But my business partner didn’t really want my help. So yeah, business partners are fun. That’s all I can say.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:47
It’s a marriage, right? Pretty much so.
Matt Watson: 14:50
Yeah. And you know what’s funny is I joke like it’s easier to get a divorce than it is to get rid of a business partner.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:58
I guess it depends on the operating agreement, right?
Matt Watson: 14:59
Yeah. I mean, it can be super difficult to get rid of a business partner.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:04
Are there any tips or things you have for founders on operating agreements?
Matt Watson: 15:10
Well, so my first company had major problems with that too, because we set it up stupidly to be like a super majority at that time. At one time we had like five business partners and basically everybody had to agree to do anything.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:25
Oh, God.
Matt Watson: 15:26
Which was like the dumbest idea ever. Yeah, don’t do that. And you got to keep it a simple majority. But I think one of the biggest things for early founders when you’re first getting in is potentially doing vesting, even with the founders, it’s like for whatever reason, it’s like, hey, we’re going into this thing together. But if it doesn’t work out, you know, if you leave a year from now, like you’re not still going to own half my company, you know, I think potentially it’s, it’s still good to do that kind of vesting because a lot of times a lot of companies fail all for these reasons or they lose a lot of equity for all of these reasons.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:03
Yeah. And people’s, you know, interests change too. You know, I mean, their focus changes. People could have a certain family life when they start in a couple of years that, you know, their personal circumstances change as well. So there’s a lot of moving pieces there.
You know, man, I’d love to talk about some specific examples. So with Full Scale, obviously you’ve learned a lot with, I mean, from your own companies, you were actually a customer and you started it. But maybe talk about, I’m going to pull up my screen because I was looking through some of the stories here and it could be AMC. I mean, there’s a bunch of companies here. Maybe let’s talk about one specifically and how like, how do they utilize Full Scale so people can understand how it works?
Matt Watson: 16:52
Yeah. So what we do is really called staff augmentation. And so a lot of times when people think about outsourcing, they think of more scoped projects. They’re like, okay, I have a statement of work or a very specific scope of what I’m trying to accomplish. And there’s a place for that. I mean, sometimes it makes sense to do that, especially if you’re like, I just need somebody to do, I need somebody to fix my WordPress website or whatever, right? Like that’s why you would go to Upwork and you’d find somebody like to work on something for a few hours or whatever, right? Or a big company might outsource a whole project. They’re like, hey, I need to do this giant thing. We don’t know how to do it.
We don’t want to know how to do it. We want to outsource it to somebody else who will run the whole project and do the whole thing right. Which could be thinking about like your Kohler and you make faucets or whatever, and you’re like, I need to build a smart faucet. But we don’t, we don’t do software engineering. We’re going to outsource that to somebody else who can build the technology for the smart faucet. Right. Which makes sense.
What we do is different. We do staff augmentation. So it’d be more like somebody like Kohler saying, no, we have people in, in our company that know how to do this. We just need more people. But we want to bring in contractors to augment our internal team. And that’s what we do is that kind of staff augmentation. So it’s really extending their in-house team. So whatever their in-house team looks like.
So AMC theatres, an example, they’ve got lots of different teams that do like the mobile app that all of us use to buy tickets when we go to the theater, to the kiosk where you buy popcorn, to all these different things. We have team members that work across all those different teams, you know, so they may have several in-house developers, and then plus 1 or 2 of our team members or whatever on those various teams. And actually, as we’re recording this, AMC Theatres is in our office in the Philippines. They believe so much in that sort of team mentality. They go see our team in the Philippines, and then they have a team in India, and they go to India every year to like creating like a real team culture and meeting those team members is important.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:53
So who are ideal clients for Full Scale? Because I noticed, I mean, it kind of runs the gamut here, right? When I’m looking at it, you have AMC. My favorite one on this page is with Luke here, Facility Ally. He just looks like a fun guy who’s like in the heart of Kansas City’s vibrant sort of ecosystem. So you have big companies, but it seems like you have smaller ones. Who tends to be perfect for Full Scale?
Matt Watson: 19:22
You know, it’s anybody that has a software development team. And that’s one of the struggles with business, right? Is when your customer is everybody, it’s almost nobody, right? It’s actually kind of a bad thing. So but yeah, it’s, it’s all over the board. We have a lot of startups and even small to midsize, just kind of growth companies, small to mid market growth companies. We do have some large enterprise clients like AMC and some other publicly traded companies. We just did a case study actually with a company called Basis, who’s the largest privately held merchant processor in the country, which is kind of cool. So they’re deep into the weeds of PCI and all that kind of stuff, and we help them. So it’s all over, man. Just anybody who needs software developers, basically.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:07
I want to talk about culture for a second. And, you know, you’ve hired you said from the states, from Russia, from India and the Philippines, and what should people know about integrating someone from the Philippines from a culture perspective into their into their team?
Matt Watson: 20:28
Yeah, so I’ve had employees also from Latin America and Belarus and, and all sorts of different places. Right. And I think culture, I’m glad you mentioned culture because it’s important to understand who you’re working with and their personality. And this even goes for local employees, right? Like people have different personalities, but stereotypes are usually stereotypes for a reason. And they usually hold true, especially for a lot of cultural things, like people in different parts of the world, for example, speak more direct or speak more indirect, right? And so that’s one thing you’ll see.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:02
East coast, Midwest, right? Yeah. East coast person, they’re just like, yeah, boom.
Matt Watson: 21:08
Yeah. I mean, there’s some countries around the world where people would walk right up to you and tell you you’re fat to your face, right? Like, and that would just be sort of normal in their local culture. And that’s why there’s just so different from one culture to another. So I think it’s no matter where you hire developers, it’s kind of doing a little research to understand the culture and kind of at least what the stereotypes of the culture are and just, you know, keeping an eye out for them. And we have content on our website specifically about the Philippines and all this. And I think the number one suggestion I would give to anybody is first, understanding that culture a little bit and just looking for some of the signals.
But the primary thing is don’t ever ask questions that are yes or no questions. That’s the thing that gets everybody in trouble is you ask your team member like, hey, are you doing well on the project? Yes. And then that’s all they say, right? And then that and the struggle for some of them culturally is they feel bad if they are speaking up or they’re asking weird questions from their manager, or there’s six people in the meeting and they don’t want to speak up in the middle of the meeting because, you know, how is that going to make them look? Are people going to judge them? And people of all walks of life do this stuff right? This is not just about the Philippines or different cultures like all humans do this, but certain cultures around the world do it more than others, right?
And so I think it’s just kind of understanding the type of people that you’re working with and their tendencies. It’s pretty easy as a manager to realize that about your team. Like, oh, they don’t speak up a lot, but if you have a one on one with them, they might talk your ear off, right? And in my book, I actually write about this. And because it’s really important for leadership of development teams, it’s like you have to realize not every team member on your team is ready to jump on stage and sing karaoke, right? They’re not all ready for that. Not every team member is going to do it. And so you’ve got to know who will do it, but who you’ve got to have the one on ones with.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:08
Yeah, actually, that part of your book I do remember, and I would be more towards. Yes, it’s in a group. Do it as a group. But I wouldn’t be the one going up there by myself for sure so personally.
You know, you’re deep in software AI, not only from, you know, the hiring perspective, but your own company. So I’d love to hear how you’re using AI in marketing and operations, being an integrator type, maybe we’ll start with the operations and how you’ve used it to streamline operations.
Matt Watson: 23:42
Yeah. So I wrote a blog post about this recently about MCP servers and how they’ve changed everything. So MCP stands for model control, model, context protocol, whatever it is. It first came out about 18 months ago, I think. And when it first came out, I didn’t understand. I’m like, why do we need this thing? It just sounds like an API, like a normal API we’d use for like how you integrate with some service, but it was designed more for agents to use it. I didn’t really get it at the time. But fast forward, you know, to today. Claude Cowork really changed the game on all this.
Like Claude Cowork came out, I don’t know if it’s like six months ago now, how long it’s been, but Claude Cowork kind of opened my eyes to that. And everybody started building these MCP servers. So for example, QuickBooks has one, HubSpot has one. Ahrefs was like a marketing tool has one. A bunch of these companies all have them. And what’s really powerful about it is I can go into Claude Cowork and I can just authorize those MCP servers. And now as a business owner, I can go into Claude and be like, show me what our revenue was last month, and it’ll automatically know to go to QuickBooks, get the numbers and bring it back. But then I could then I could just tell it, well, give me the revenue by our top customers or show me our top accounts receivables or whatever question I want to ask. And I don’t have to log into QuickBooks. It just gives it to me and I can ask it weird questions, right?
And where that gets really powerful is when you combine multiples of those tools. And that’s the example I gave in one of my blogs is like now we could build like a client risk dashboard that could go to QuickBooks and say, okay, well, who’s past due on their bill? But then also look at our internal system. So we built this kind of MCP server for our internal systems to pull in you know, customer feedback and different performance stuff that we have about our teams and our employees. So now we could build like our own client risk dashboard. It did not take a software developer to do any of this. Right. And that’s been the game changer of this is being able to use all these MCP servers is what they’re called. They’re basically just APIs or just integrations. But using Claude Cowork is really powerful for that.
And then what we did is built our own plugin. So using, you know, if you’ve used AI very much, you can build your own skill, and your own skill is basically just a text file that just describes what it’s supposed to do. There’s not any magic. It’s not any code. It’s just a skill, right? You’re like, when I write a blog post, I want to write it like this. It’s just the skill. But you can take all those skills and build a basically a plugin and then load that in organizational wide. So now all of our employees that use Claude Cowork, like all of our account managers or other admin team has that plugin just automatically. So when they go into Claude, they could ask and they could be like, what’s our vacation time policy? And it would know like, oh, here’s all this information from Full Scale. It can just go look that up. Like it has our internal documentation, but it also has these other, you know, tools and other things that we built into it to query things like client risk dashboard or all this kind of stuff. So it’s like really empowered all of our internal team to do different things and did not require any software developers.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:04
Is the plug in important, Matt, because the coworkers are working locally. So it allows people to use that universal.
Matt Watson: 27:14
It’s nice to share. Yeah. Share the skills.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:17
Share it across because people are running it locally in their computer. So it’s not necessarily in the cloud. So they can go, okay, here’s the shared skills with the plugin. They can deploy it in on their own computer.
Matt Watson: 27:28
It’s great because it enables you to share or sort of standardize some things, right? Like if every one of our team members built their own client risk dashboard, for example, like that’s great. But at some point in time, that’s kind of messy. It’s like, we need to create like one standard way that we want to do that. And then that’s where you can build it into that sort of skill. And people could send each other like they could email each other, whatever the skill, but by being able to do it as a plugin, now you can have like dozens or hundreds of employees potentially that just all have it. And if you update it, it just updates it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 28:00
That’s really cool. What should people be considering? I mean, you’re very technical. You’ve always been, even from college. What should people consider from a security perspective when using something like Cowork that’s running locally?
Matt Watson: 28:16
So I don’t stress too much about using Claude in regards to data leakage. You know, potentially. Yeah. When I’m using Claude, it’s got my employees’ information in there. When I do different kinds of searches, it’s got QuickBooks information there. Potentially you’re dealing with some kind of PII, you know, private information for some of this kind of stuff potentially flows through there. Right? So I think it really kind of depends on your company policy of how people are using it. You don’t want to put any like real secret credentials in there or credit card numbers or Social Security numbers or stuff like that. Probably. Right.
But it depends on how far you want to go with it, right? Like we use it with HubSpot. So it’s got a list of our clients. It’s got their email addresses. All that stuff gets sent to Anthropic. Potentially Anthropic, you know, has access to it. So it depends on how scared you are of all that.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:11
So yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was saying to someone the other day, Google has all of her information anyway. I mean, if you use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Maps, everything. Yeah.
You know.
Matt Watson: 29:26
They know where I’m at all times.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:28
100%, 100%. What about from a marketing perspective? I could see streamline. Thanks for sharing that. The MCP and the plugin stuff that’s really interesting. And what about from the marketing perspective?
Matt Watson: 29:40
So like a lot of people, including even HubSpot over the last year, a lot of us have lost like 50 to 80% of our web traffic, right? Like our web traffic has just died because most people probably don’t realize this. They do it every day, but they don’t realize it. 60% of people now that go to Google do a search and they don’t click a single thing on the page, right? Everybody is going to the you know, they look at the AI overviews, which just give them the answer or they ask a follow up question, the AI overviews, or my 11 year old uses ChatGPT all day long. He’s just asking it things like, the world has changed, right? And so like a lot of people, we looked at that and we’re like, man, this sucks. Like our website traffic has died. And what we ended up doing is we rebuilt our entire website, which used to be on WordPress with Elementor, which is a common, you know, UI plugin rebuilt the whole thing with AI.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:37
Wow.
Matt Watson: 30:38
With just like a Next.js app using Claude. We use Claude. We also at one point were using Lovable or Replit. You can use those too. But now we just use Claude for it. Replit is more visual. For some people, they might like being able to use that. But yeah, we rebuilt the entire website and that’s actually what I’ve worked on all summer long for like 3 or 4 months.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:00
Are you working on it or do you give instructions to your developer? Because I know like for people listening, like Replit or Lovable, I mean, you could do like vibe coding. Basically you’re just talking into it and describing what you want. It converts it. It’s unbelievable how quickly it spins up something beautiful. But I’m obviously that has to be deployed. I mean, you’re technical.
Matt Watson: 31:21
But nothing I have done with it over the last 3 or 4 months has been technical at all. So I’m just chatting. Yeah. I’m sort of vibe coding the website, but I’m never getting into the code part of it. It’s more just all design, like, hey, I want to build this case study. I want here, I want this heading, you know, I want this paragraph of text, I want this picture of our team, all that kind of stuff. But like today, I added two case studies to our website, which I’m going to push live later today. I gave it, I give it the URL to the YouTube video and it automatically pulls the YouTube video down. It transcribes the whole thing. You can click on one of those and.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:59
It goes, yeah, yeah. If you’re listening to the audio we’re on, you know, there’s a video here and we’re looking at it and you can see it looks beautiful.
Matt Watson: 32:07
So click on the AMC one, for example.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:09
Right here.
Matt Watson: 32:10
Yeah. So the AI creates this entire page. Like I didn’t do a single thing. I just give it the video and like a picture of Derek and it automatically wrote all of this. 100%. And then it, it kind of writes all of our case studies in a similar pattern, you know, theme now. And it just does it. So it just takes like ten minutes to add a new case study to the website. And it looks beautiful, right? It looks pretty good.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:37
Are you uploading like a skill? Like you want it to look like this or just learn from you what you say? You know.
Matt Watson: 32:43
For this, I don’t think I really have a specific skill for it. It must just, I don’t know how it memorizes the layout of these, but it seems to follow the same pattern. But yeah, it’s not very technical. You do have to commit, I do commit the way we deploy everything is to Vercel. So we commit the file changes for the pages and then it pushes them to Vercel through GitHub. But that’s all automated. Like you just push it and then like two minutes later, the site’s live.
And the biggest change with all of that man, is our website is lightning fast. And you may notice that here as you click around on it, it’s just instant whatever you click on. Dramatic difference in speed. We actually are still using WordPress behind the scenes to host our blogs. So you can actually log into WordPress still and like edit the blogs. But I don’t even do that. I edit them from Claude actually. And then Claude.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:41
Goes in and does it.
Matt Watson: 33:42
To WordPress. And I’m pretty close to just like getting rid of WordPress altogether and like, okay, we’re just going to take all the blog content and add it to the GitHub repo that the, the website’s in. But I mean, and this isn’t for everybody, honestly, because for some people, if you’ve got a big teams, you need a lot of approvals, a lot of workflows and different things, then doing this is a little more difficult because you’d have to go to the team like, oh, you need to submit a pull request and I’ll review your pull request and then I’ll approve it. Yeah, that’s probably over the head of a lot of marketing people. At some point. There are ways to help. There are tools and platforms to help do some of that too. But especially if you’re just one person and you’re going to edit the website all by yourself, man, this is so easy to do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:28
You know? Speaking of Matt content, right? We have blog. Let’s talk about the podcast for a second. There’s not many people who’ve done over a thousand episodes. You have over 1300 episodes. Who are some of the fan favorite guests that we can point people towards? And we’re here at the StartupHustlePodcast.com if you want to check out the podcast.
Matt Watson: 34:49
Yeah. So Eric Ries was a big name we just had on the podcast. You know, he’s the author of.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:56
Lean Startup.
Matt Watson: 34:57
Lean Startup, and he has a brand new book he just wrote called Incorruptible. That was really incredible having him on the show. I also had Jason Cohen on the show, who is the founder of WP Engine, was really cool. Which WP Engine is like a unicorn company?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:16
Yeah. We use WP engine actually for our site. Yeah.
Matt Watson: 35:19
Yep. So yeah, I’ve had some pretty cool people over the years. I mean, there’s been so many of them now it’s hard to.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:25
Any Kansas City? I know you’re a Kansas City guy. Who are some of my fun Kansas City entrepreneurs founders?
Matt Watson: 35:34
You know, it’s hard to remember it at the moment. But that’s how we started. When we first started doing this was.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:44
I’m going to pull up this post. You have “Kansas City Top Startups, 2023” to see if there’s any in here because like, I feel like, you know, the San Francisco ones get a lot of, you know, coverage, but, you know, some of the bigger, smaller cities, you know, don’t.
Matt Watson: 36:04
So and that’s where we started. We just interviewed when we first did this, it was only in person. People would come into our office and we recorded in the office back in like 2018, 2019 and stuff. And then when Covid happened, we had to go remote, right? And then ever since then, the podcast has been remote. And then we started, you know, having people from all over the country and even all over the world on the podcast. But back then, yeah, it was a great way to meet clients.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:29
Epigraph. Let’s see here. Beyond Warehousing. Devstride, Saile.
Matt Watson: 36:37
Yep. Couple of those are customer of ours.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:39
Great Labs, Facility Ally. There’s Luke. What does he do? So he’s pickleball and sports facility management. That’s interesting. That’s a good niche, right?
Matt Watson: 36:47
He builds software for scheduling. Like you want to rent a pickleball court and the leagues for the courts and stuff.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:54
Love it. Yeah. So anyways, these are interesting ones, but it’s always good to check out, you know, different episodes.
Matt Watson: 37:03
Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:04
You know, I would love to hear your take on education for a second because when you were in school, obviously you were in, you know, computer information systems, but you decided not to finish. Talk about and you have kids. What’s your viewpoint on college and education at this point? And I know there’s a lot of, it depends, but I’m just curious.
Matt Watson: 37:40
So like a lot of people I dropped out of college because I got my first job and I eventually went back and finished. I took some night classes and weekend classes and stuff because I think I only had like 16 credits or something left, and I just told myself, it’s like, I want a reason to pay the student loan. And I think now, you know, there’s definitely a bigger movement these days to the trades and other types of apprenticeship programs and different things like that. Like we have went way too far with college. And I kind of like what the government’s doing of saying, look, we’re not going to provide student loans to college degrees that pay less than what like minimum wage would be anyways. Like why are all these people taking on all this debt to get a job that doesn’t even pay, like what a high school diploma would pay, right? Like that’s the problem. Like there’s so many people that study all these things. And the way I look at it is like, you’re buying a college degree. So is that a good investment? You know, and I always, my oldest is 17 years old and I keep telling him I’m going to gonna, he should go to the Philippines to go to college because it only costs like $3,000 a year to go to college there.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:51
Wow.
Matt Watson: 38:52
And I’m like, it would be like the best experience of your life. And it would be like $3,000 a year. Like compared to here. It’s like 30.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:59
Does he know what he wants to study yet?
Matt Watson: 39:02
The last I talked to him, it was computer science.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:05
Okay.
Matt Watson: 39:06
But we’ll see.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:07
He’s just go work with you. I mean, that’s literally. But, you know, I always think of what won’t be disrupted with AI. Like what should I don’t know, when you’re having conversations with your kids, how do you talk about that with them?
Matt Watson: 39:24
Well, it’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than that. Because what’s not going to get disrupted by robots? I mean that that’s the next wave of this that nobody’s thinking about like AI. I mean, we already have self-driving cars. My Tesla drives me around every day. How long until we have robots in our house that do our laundry and our dishes or robots that do welding or we have my neighbor across the street has a robot that mows his yard. Like lawn care is going out the window, right? Like robots aren’t even I just as big of a threat, you know? So yeah, but we also have a declining population. Nobody’s having kids anymore. Are the robots going to save us?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:06
That’s your next book. I don’t know, man. And then, you know, on the school topic, Matt, talk about you, you talk openly about ADHD and how it’s affected you. And you talk about some of the advantages that you found having ADHD has been for you.
Matt Watson: 40:28
So I really want to talk about that. I think there’s one more thing I want to talk about with the education thing. Like we talk about software development, we’re still going to need software developers. Like, you know, I met with a founder the other day and right now it’s just him. And I’m like, do you see at some point in time, you’re like, you’re gonna use AI to build everything. Like you’re never going to need a software developer. You’re going to be a company of one. He’s like, heck no. Like, I don’t have time to do all this, right? Eventually, that’s the thing. Somebody has to use AI. It’s like, AI is like having an intern, but somebody’s got to manage the intern, right? Like you still need people, but you need people that have the judgment to own the work. Like, okay, the intern went and did this thing, but did they do the right thing? Did it come out the way I wanted it to? Like that becomes more and more of the job, right?
And what we need more than anything in software development is product managers. And they don’t exist. That is the problem. Product managers don’t exist. Like if we can build products twice as fast, we probably need like twice as many product managers and they don’t exist like nobody. You don’t go to college to become a product manager, you become a product manager because you worked in an industry for a long time, and you’re an expert in that industry. And somehow or another they roped you into helping with the product. But you’re still not a product manager. Then you have to learn, like, what does it mean to be a product manager? I have industry experience, but I still don’t know how to be a product manager. Right. Or you were a project manager before, or you worked in a customer service team before. And like I have all the product knowledge, but again, how do I still learn to be a product manager, right?
Like that is the biggest problem in software development right now is we don’t have enough product managers. And so that’s a lot of what my book is about is the software developers also need more product thinking, right? That is the skill now is it’s this, that’s the judgment. Like, what are we building? Why are we building it? Does the customer care? All that kind of stuff. That’s totally different than engineering typically.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:23
Maybe that’s the new major you’re going to come up with is the product manager major. I was actually talking to someone that like they, I don’t remember, they started, but they went Apple to Instagram to somewhere else and they were highly coveted, and they were a product man and learned it obviously at these positions. But they were a product managers, right? And product managing at a company like that is pretty remarkable.
Matt Watson: 42:49
Well, and something else I write about a lot I’ve wrote about before is all startup founders are product managers. If they realize it or not, they have to be the product manager. And so there’s a lot of people that are product managers that just don’t realize that there have to be a product manager as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:06
So so on the ADHD front.
Matt Watson: 43:10
Yeah, I got it. I didn’t figure it out till I was like 40. I was self-diagnosed from watching too many TikTok videos about it, I think. And then your.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:20
Wife diagnosed you?
Matt Watson: 43:22
And then of course, if I tell people like, oh yeah, I think I have ADHD, they look at me like I’m stupid. And they’re like, Matt, we’ve always known you have ADHD. And I’m like, but I didn’t know, I didn’t understand. But what I’ve learned over time is, like most startup founders have ADHD and some of the most productive people in the world have ADHD because they tend to hyper focus on a problem. They’re like a dog on a bone. You give me a challenge and I will literally kill myself trying to solve it like that. That is like such a special skill.
But I think the other one is, most people with ADHD don’t concern themselves near as much with the consequences of whatever they’re going to do, which can be negative. But it’s also why a lot of startup founders take more risk. They’re like, I’m excited about doing this unique, fun thing, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to go do this unique, fun thing because it feeds my dopamine. But I don’t know if it’s going to work. And like, the consequences just don’t register the same way. Does that make sense?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:31
Yeah, totally. Yep. First of all, Matt, I just want to thank you for sharing your journey, your stories. People can check out FullScale.io to learn more. They can check out the podcast. Over 1300 episodes at this point of time, StartupHustlePodcast.com. And also, as I mentioned, the book, you can get on Audible, Product Driven as well. So Matt, thanks so much.
Matt Watson: 44:58
Yeah. And the book is free on our website. If you go to Full Scale and click Product Driven, you can get the book for free.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:04
Yeah, I bought it on Audible, but yeah, you could, you can get it on the website too. Awesome. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Watson: 45:11
Thank you for having me.
