Price Fixing FTW!

**Justin Jackson** (0:10)
Welcome to The Panel, where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm.

**Brian Casel** (0:18)
And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods.

**Jordan Gal** (0:21)
And I am Jordan Gal, co-founder at heyrosie.com, and I'm hosting today.

**Justin Jackson** (0:27)
Yeah.

**Jordan Gal** (0:28)
Which is going to be a challenge for me, because I'm also hosting my house by myself with my wife out of town. And I'm getting a call from one of my kid's friends' mom. It's going to be chaos, but we're going to get through it.
All right.

**Justin Jackson** (0:41)
That's what people want to see, by the way. That real life stuff.

**Brian Casel** (0:44)
That sounds like good content.

**Justin Jackson** (0:45)
That's actually one of my favorite Bootstrapped Web episodes was, I think it was you, Jordan, when your kids came in, and Brian just let the recording run, and it was just you talking to your kid. I was like, yes. Breaking the fourth wall. I want to hear the real life stuff.

**Jordan Gal** (1:03)
I'm trying to text back, lose mom right now while you're talking to see if everything is okay, because they're at their house. They want to do a lemonade stand in my house, but I can't help them bring the lemonade stand out to the sidewalk. It's a lot going on. And I don't know about you guys, I am fried from the last few weeks. I'm fried.
I'm doing, I'm taking a lot of experience, basically from college graduation, AKA from the moment of like adult responsibility, all of those lessons up until now, to just keep my act together. Wow.
And get through whatever storm is happening around me, to just keep it rolling in the right direction.
That's been my internal conversation for like two weeks, is relax, relax. You've got it, you've done this before, one thing at a time.

**Brian Casel** (2:01)
Is this, is there anything specific like that changed recently, or is this just like general, like this is how this business is going this year?

**Jordan Gal** (2:09)
I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that there's this very strange effect that I get, that the better the business does, the closer it feels like I'm getting to like this, like these like goals, the more the pressure feels ramped up.
So I think that's a big part of it. I think I pay way too much attention to like, you know, international affairs and right, my family's in Israel. It's just kind of never leaves my mind. And that side of the world is absolute chaos, you know? Chaos. So like that in the mix. And then I got some family stuff going on over the last few weeks. That's not easy. And I think I mentioned also, I have been more willing to share my frustration with people and like, to be very blunt with people. And I can't avoid it. It keeps happening. I keep being put into these situations where I'm like, I can either, you know, take this and not react very emotionally, or I can just let them have it.
And I'm in the let them have it mode. So this week, it just happened over and over again. I'm like, I get to the desk, I'm like, all right, I'm going to have a nice chill day. I look at my calendar, I'm like, I got one call. I'm just going to be productive. Me and Claude are going to be hanging out, knocking things out. And then like that one call is like with our ad agency. And I'm like, guys, why aren't we spending as much as I want to spend? Like the beginning of June, we didn't grow as much as we normally grow. So I'm looking around, I'm like, is it a churn thing? Okay, churn's a little bit higher, but no. Really what it came down to after I did all this analysis was we're not spending our budget.
Right? If we grow based on ad spend, then you got to spend a certain amount if you want to expect a certain amount of growth. So you set that as the budget. And then I look at the actuals 10 days in, and I'm like, we're on track to underspend by like 30%.
So in June, all of my frustration and angst and what's going on, where's the growth basically came down to I wasn't spending enough money. And in business, not spending enough money is cannot be the problem. Yeah. That's the easiest part of business, spending money.
So I screwed me up for a day or two. And it's funny because it has this like mirror image of it, right? I get frustrated. I put my foot down. I'm like, fix this immediately. I'm done. I don't care about how slowly you want to ramp up budgets to be aware of the algorithm. I'm like, put the damn budgets up today when we hang up, period.