Brian Casel is a software company owner and founder with a background in software product design and web design. Brian has found, operated, and sold 4 different businesses and is now focused on his company ZipMessage, a tool for swapping video, audio, or text messages with clients and customers asynchronously.Brian started out as a professional designer for the web, offering this as a consultant to a variety of businesses before leveraging these skills to design and build products that power businesses he starts up and operates.Brian also regularly hosts podcasts where he shares notes about his work in the software and design industry, and hosts conversations with friends in this industry. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Product Launch:The decision process involved in selling a business.How to work on multiple businesses at the same time.The differences between working on multiple businesses compared to a single business.The benefits of working on multiple different businesses.How coaches can automate their workflows.Different approaches to finding a product market fit.How to research your ideal client profile.The problems with real-time meetings.Resources:ZipMessageBootstrapped WebAudience OpsRestaurant EngineSlackNxtStepPodcast ChefConnecting with Brian Casel:LinkedInConnecting with the host:Sean Boyce on LinkedInSean Boyce by EmailQuotables05:02 - “In 2021 I essentially sold 6 different businesses but some of them were tiny just a couple of thousands of dollars, others hundreds of thousands of dollars so that was over the course of 5 or 6 months there I exited everything other than ZipMessage.”13:08 - “You’ll hear a lot of advice out there like yes you have to just focus on a single business and even though that’s what I’m doing today I don’t necessarily agree that’s the right advice for most people in their career especially if you’re earlier in your career I think you’re actually much better off doing multiple things whether they’re small products or service business, plugin products, SaaS products, courses you gain so much experience and just chops when it comes to copywriting, or putting up websites, or talking to customers, or doing sales, these are skills you’re going to need no matter what business you settle into.”14:22 - “I’ve really enjoyed being able to experience working on multiple things because it enables me to make progress more quickly and figure out the right overlap of passion proficiency demand of what it is I really want to focus on so like you said as you get a little bit older and little bit more experience that stuff starts to become clear and then you can always focus from there but you’ve got that experience and a lot of these skills are really important in product.”22:19 - “I do research in a number of different ways and sometimes it’s different at different phases of the business and I’ve launched multiple new businesses over the last 10 years and at the very beginning when it’s a brand new business may be in a pre-launch mode before the product is even ready I usually start with a landing page that has an email capture for an early access and after they enter their email it goes straight to a survey with a bunch of detailed questions where I’m asking them to freeform write and after reading every one of those survey responses I usually invite people to interviews based on their responses to the survey and that’s usually how I start with early market research for a new potential product.”27:00 - “There’s a bigger benefit to using asynchronous, it’s not just that it’s more convenient and we can do it across time zones and things like that it’s also having space in between our messages gives us that space to prepare notes, I often put a list of talking points on the screen before I hit record, we have the ability to pause and continue, we have the ability to edit a message before sending it back, you can discard it and re-record it if you want to say it a little bit tighter, I’ll receive a customers question or some feedback and then I’ll go take a walk or maybe respond the next morning so I’m coming back to them with a much higher value response and I’m getting the same back from them.”

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