Derrick Reimer
speaker
327 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 15 Sep
Derrick Reimer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So maybe bookkeeping or scraping some data to build a cold email list or even support, which I think is something that a lot of founders hold on for way too long. So there's kind of that bucket of things that's like, okay, my time's valuable and this stuff is potentially not worth my time. Then there's the stuff that's like, the business needs certain expertise in order to keep moving forward.
And though I want to hold on to this thing, like, Actually, I'm not the best person for the job. So then that's delegating stuff that's really not in your zone of genius. And a lot of times when you're just starting out, depending on what your resources are, how much funding you may have or may not have, you just got to... roll up your sleeves and do it.
But I think that, you know, that ends up holding you back at a certain point if you're, if you're just holding on too tightly onto something where you're, it's not actually in your zone of genius. So, you know, for that, I'm like, it feels like an obvious answer, but it's like, look for someone better than me at the job. You know, someone who has that particular specialty.
So I think about the initial branding for Zavical I did myself and it was fine. And then we came to the point of, I feel like this is holding us back in certain ways with being able to really push our marketing forward. And I looked to someone who is just this amazing brand designer and has just a ton of skills on the aesthetic side of things where I just get a little bit limited.
And it was so fun to work with someone who is actually an expertise in their field. So I feel like, I don't know, this one, it takes a while to get to the place where you're comfortable with it, but as soon as you embrace the fact that it really is a joy to work with people who are actually better at stuff than you, and you get to be a collaborator with them. It's not that you have to...
Totally offloaded and now you have no say. Ideally, if you're still the founder in the CEO driver's seat or whatever, you are still collaborating on important things, but you're not the bottleneck anymore on holding back that area of the business. Those are some initial rambling thoughts.
Yeah, because I think that's what a lot of us, when you put yourself in a position, maybe an artificially elevated position of like, I know best because I started this company and I have the vision for it. And I mean, I totally understand this like pull to like hold on tightly to everything. And I think sometimes that can lead you down a path of like, okay, I just need to find extra hands.
I just need extra hands to delegate, to offload some of the stuff that I'm still going to hold on tightly to and own. And I remember when we were acquired, Drip was acquired, we joined Leadpages, and we Brian Reed as our first designer. I never fashioned myself as a graphic designer, but I think I'm a pretty good UI, UX designer.
But working with Brian definitely opened my eyes to, okay, here's somebody who has worked in companies where we need to actually start to scale a design department. And that is a different thing than having the expertise to take something from zero into something that customers love and use, to then scale it into systems. So he started working on, what's our design system?
That doesn't necessarily mean spending a bunch of time working on something that's not actually moving the product forward, like a bunch of internal work. We did very lean on developing our design system so that we weren't just spending a bunch of time spinning wheels.
But he brought this experience on thinking about how do we scale this so that when we bring on more designers, they understand the system and we're working in a coherent manner. He had more expertise at that than me and it was really cool to work with someone then who who brought that to the table and it was a really fun collaboration.
So I think that's the, the big word of encouragement here is to like, to recognize that it doesn't devalue what you bring to the table, but like, you know, working with, with a subject matter expert on, on some of these disciplines is actually really fun. I think when you, when you get used to it. Yeah.
And I think just in general, this perfectionism quality that a lot of us have is, it can be a really helpful inclination because that's what allows you, drives you forward on performing your best work in certain areas.
But I also think the blind spot that comes from that is, especially early on, like you're talking about, when you don't have a lot of resources to go higher, like a world-class fill-in-the-blank, And you have to try to be a little bit more scrappy with bringing in extra hands. I think there is that phase where you just don't have the luxury of being able to go find an all-star.
And then it's an exercise in figuring out what stuff actually matters. And I think I'm still trying to grow in this area, to be honest. It's a big struggle for me because I tend to think that a lot of things matter a ton, especially as I'm competing on user experience. So all the details have to be on point. But the fact of the matter is, you can get by with certain things.
Just take, for example, an educational video that you send to a customer that explains how to do something. My inclination is to want to either not do it or do it at a very, very high degree of execution. And really, what matters most is that the customer understands how something works, that that knowledge is transferred.
And if it's lacking that extra polish that would come from something that's from a world-class video producer or something, that's okay in the early days. Maybe you want to work to the place where everything you put out is at that Adam Wathen level of polish. But most of us don't have Just the resources to be able to do that and it's not going to move the needle in that big of a way.
So you need to just convince yourself about what things are really, really important and what stuff is it okay to just be good enough on.
I think you just touched on this, but Jason Cohen's joy, skill, need framework, which has been a really helpful framing for me to think about this. He's proven to be the master at reinventing his roles. He's gotten his companies to much later stages than a lot of us have, so he's moved out of CEO into CTO and then into a strategist.
So he's very good at thinking about this and releasing the reins on control when he recognizes that he needs to reorient himself into kind of the ideal zone. And I think a lot of us can't necessarily be right in the middle of that Joyce Gill need Venn diagram because, again, resource constraints. But I think...
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