April 28, 2026 – Matters Most Wendy Lipton-Dibner and Wednesday Product Engineering Co Ali Hafizji

0:04 Intro 1 : Broadcasting from am and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award winning school for startups radio where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk or passion. Jim Beach,

0:25 Jim Beach : Hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for startups radio. We have a fantastic show, one of our my favorite shows ever. We have my fiance I’m excited to announce. Or is it ex fiance or future fiance, I don’t know, but someone that I can’t wait to be married to is on the show. I will. I’m going to withhold any further information until then, but she was on the show over a decade ago, and I can’t wait to have her back. Gosh, that makes me feel old to say over a decade ago. So, you know, they say the hardest part of podcasting is sticking to it, and I don’t know if we’re going to do that or not. We might quit soon. Anyway, after that, we have another great entrepreneur who’s built a really, really cool set of products. Ali asfasji is with us. I hope I said that close to right. Hafaz cheek is with us. He has built, not only one of the coolest board games I can’t wait to play. It’s 100% for entrepreneurs, but a really cool project, digital development company that can build your software and the platforms for your company. They have a really cool model. Instead of charging you for the project, they charge you for two weeks a sprint. Let’s add one function to your existing and that changes a lot. So I’m excited for you to meet him, but let’s get started. I’m excited to welcome my first guest, Wendy Lipton Dibner, we actually got engaged or not. Olis phrase this correctly, I asked her to marry me, and she remembers that now, after being kind of reminded she was on the show 13 years ago, and we had such a fun time that we both remembered in the last five minutes what we talked about and reminisced about, the only thing that she forgot, apparently she blocked. It was the the marriage proposal, because that was so stressful for her, I keep checking on her husband’s health. But anyway, the whole thing is, I want to be married to Wendy beach. I just think that would be the funniest thing ever. So welcome back, Wendy. She is the world’s leading authority on organizational development through strategic and operational impact. Multiple best time, Best Selling Author. Think her. This is her fifth book out. Now, is that right? Wendy,

2:47 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Seven. But who’s counting?

2:48 Jim Beach : Okay, what matters most is the most recent. Is that correct?

2:52 Ali Hafizji : What Matters matters most two matters

2:55 Jim Beach : Okay, oh, they’re in a row that’s awfully confusing to a small mind like me. Wendy, welcome back. How you doing?

3:00 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Tim? I am so looking forward to this conversation. We had a blast last time, and let’s do it again.

3:07 Jim Beach : Yes, I do remember that we had a lot of fun. I’m still hurt, though that you won’t marry me.

3:13 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Okay, so here’s the good news, my husband is a psychoanalyst, so why don’t I connect you to

3:20 Jim Beach : Oh, that would be a really scary thing to psychoanalyze, wouldn’t it?

3:24 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Well, you could, you could sort of analyze each other. You could, you could, you could learn from him about how how lucky you are that you didn’t marry me. I don’t know what he would tell you, but in the meantime, I think, I think you guys would have a blast together. So I’m going to connect you. There you go.

3:40 Jim Beach : Okay, well, that would be interesting. I’ll get the insight from him, get the truth

3:44 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : For sure.

3:45 Jim Beach : But you are committed. I remember this, you are as soon as he passes and we give him a week, you’re, you’re gonna call me then, right?

3:54 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : I might need two weeks just, you know, because I have to have a certain amount of time. But then, you know, you’re on my list. Jim, you’re top of the list. You got me.

4:03 Jim Beach : I think another thing that we talked about was that we both like David Hancock from Morgan James Publishing.

4:11 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Oh my gosh. You know he has he is so so still going strong. Bless him. He is just doing amazing work out there.

4:19 Jim Beach : How many of your books if you published with him? Morgan, James,

4:23 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Oh my goodness, 123, now, four, four books with him.

4:30 Jim Beach : You must like him and trust him.

4:32 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : I do. I do. I mean, a lot has changed in his house. He’s, he’s, he’s made a lot of changes there and and change is always fun for everyone, and yet he is always there, right there, on top doing everything for everyone, caring, really caring and making sure that authors get heard. It’s a wonderful thing that he does for people, especially. For startups who who just don’t have a lot of experience in the author field, he is he’s magic for those people.

5:10 Jim Beach : Morgan James has a hybrid model. I’m not 100% sure what it is, so don’t quote me on anything, but it is not the same as McGraw Hill or then at the other end, the vanity press, where, you know, you just published pay people to print books for you. It’s not,

5:27 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

5:30 Jim Beach : Anyway, tell us about the new book. What matters matters most.

5:35 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : You know, this was not a book I ever thought I was going to write each each time I’ve written a book, there was, there was a real passion, desire. Got to do this book. Kind of feeling this book was be in response to a major problem that I discovered actually remembered and then became overwhelmed by at two o’clock in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. You know, what’s it? What’s an entrepreneur do at two o’clock in the morning when you can’t morning when you can’t sleep? What I do is I get under the cover so I don’t wake the the, sorry to say the word husband. But I get under and scroll. And I started scrolling. I think was Twitter at the time, anyway, I started scrolling, and I came across upon this amazing, amazing group of posts, and it just, it just went on and on and on, and, long story short, they were talking about how much they hate their jobs, and it just broke my heart. I just couldn’t stop reading. It just kept scrolling. And everyone had a different reason for why they hate their job, but it just went on and on, and I’m scrolling and scrolling, and all of a sudden I hit a post that actually made me cry. He said. I assumed it was a he he said, I hate my job. I hate my commute, I hate my colleagues, I hate my boss, I hate our products. I mean, he just went on and on and on and then he said, But you know what, if I only knew from someone, if someone would just tell me that what I do matters for that company, I would do anything for them. And I just burst out crying, and I realized that after all these years of helping people you know, make an impact, maximize their impact, measure their impact, capitalize on it. And this guy had never once been told he was making an impact, and it just moved me. So I sat down and I put together all 200 plus of the formulas and strategies that I’d used to help everyone else and showed them how to do it in one book, and we made a little parable. So that made it fun, too.

7:46 Jim Beach : So 200 strategies to do explicitly what make employees felt mattered

7:52 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : So. So here’s the thing, it depends on who’s the reader at the end of it all, there’s a lot of reasons that the formulas that are listed in this book actually make a difference for people. So if, if it’s if you’re a startup, it shows you what you should be focusing on if you’ve, if you’ve built a company, but it’s still small, it shows you how to make it bigger if you’re in a company as either you know CEO or all the way, all the way through the company, every department learns. What do you need to know to make sure that you are making a measurable difference in people’s lives? Because when you do that, that’s when the money comes. That’s what we talked about 13 years of Jim, when you focus on impact, the money comes well, when you measure the impact, everything shifts in an organization from from all of the problems they would have anyway, suddenly shift to Okay. How can we change what we’re doing in a way that makes it possible for us to have more loyalty of our employees, more everything we want from employees, but for ourselves. How do we make it that it’s meaningful and we have proof that we’re making a difference in people’s lives? And that’s what this does,

9:20 Jim Beach : And it’s a parable,

9:22 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Yeah, it’s actually a true ish story. So it’s the story

9:26 Jim Beach : Of real people. Stories, true.

9:28 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Yeah, true

9:30 Jim Beach : Ish. My daddy used to tell me,

9:32 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : There you go, there you go. It’s, it is an ish like, so the big so these people are real, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent, and at the end of it all, we really do meet very real people from every industry you can imagine, at every stage of their development, from just woke up with an idea to CEO of a multinational corporation, and they’re all in there learning. At the same time, that’s the parable part, how to measure and maximize and capitalize on their real world impact.

10:13 Jim Beach : How do we measure our real world impact? Is it how many awards we were able to get for ourselves in our career.

10:21 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : You know, it’s a lot. That’s what a lot of people do. It’s never been what I do. First of all, we have to make a distinction, right? So you know me with all of my my definitions, but at the end of the day, impact is the measurable difference we make in people’s lives as the direct result of contact with us and our teams and our marketing, our products and our services. The thing is, the key world word is measurable. So once you can measure it, the question becomes, what are you measuring? So that’s your question. I am all about measuring what happened after people use a product or service. So real world impact, that’s where we look at what happens after someone uses what you’ve created. And that’s where we see the impact. We see the classic pebble in a pond metaphor, right? So, so if your product is the pebble, and you throw it in your customer or patient’s pond at the end of it all, there are ripples, and each ripple leads to the next and the next and the next. And that’s what I call real world impact. It’s all the changes and the events and and the outcomes and the results and the experiences that would never have happened if they had not used your product or service. And as it turns out, there is almost no product or service that you can’t measure and capitalize on your real world impact ripples.

11:51 Jim Beach : All right, I don’t know if we talked about this last time

11:55 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : We didn’t

11:56 Jim Beach : My very, very first business, Wendy was a summer camp business, and we were at Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, UCLA, SMU, Sorbonne, Cambridge, Oxford, all the good universities all over the world. And we took kids that were not happy and not on the football team, not cheerleaders, and taught them computers and movie making and dorky stuff like that. And along the way, we taught them that they were actually cool and smart and they were going to be called the people like boss eventually and leader eventually. And they look you have a new friend here too. You thought you didn’t have a best friend. You now do have a best friend. He unfortunately lives in the town over, doesn’t go to the same middle school as you, but yeah, you now have a friend who agrees with everything you think you’re not weird. You know, that was the entire model, and it grew to 89 locations in six years, and 15,000 kids a day, and that kind of thing that was so easy to prove success, because mom would send me a letter saying, Wendy hasn’t smiled in two years. And Wendy came home giggling from your program,

13:08 Speaker 3 : Right,

13:09 Jim Beach : Right,

13:09 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Right,

13:10 Jim Beach : You know. So some program, you know, Wendy’s leg was broken, and she came to my broken leg office, and now her leg is fine, you know. And how do we do it for the unfortunate companies that don’t have this incredibly easy way to measure success, right, this emotional, deeply passionate thing. You know, I sell architectural services. I sell accounting software. You know, how do we make all of ourselves prove this self and make ourselves look sexy like this.

13:41 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : All right, so Jim, first of all, we have to make a really important distinction. When somebody breaks their leg and they go to a doctor, and then the doctor fixes their leg, and then they come back and they say, Thank you, Doctor, my leg is all better. Thank you. Thank you. It stops hurting. Yay. The question that I ask is good, what happened next? What happened because of that? So we have to understand that the distinction that not only truly proves your impact to the world and actually increases your revenue exponentially, the real reason we do this is because they the people that we serve, get to see things about their life that they never would have noticed before if they hadn’t been looking for what was the real world impact. So this, this actually has a double cause. What we want is we want to increase business of course, we want to increase business metrics. Of course, we want all of the things that you want for your business, but we also want the people who you served to learn about the 12 different areas of their life and how each area was affected by what you did. By. Your impact. How did it change their life ongoing over time, 12 months a year. How is their life changing as a ripple effect of what you did? And that’s what this does. How you measure it depends on whether you do it in analog or digital. So now we’re going to get techie in the analog version. That’s what what matters matters most. Teaches you. How can you do it by yourself at home and measure it? That’s what I did for we won’t talk how many years, a lot of years in companies where I would go and I would do surveys, and I would do interviews, and I would help them find out what is the long term impact of their products and services. But it took a lot of time. It took them a lot of money, because I charged them a lot for that service. It was proprietary stuff. Still is patent, patenting at the end of it all. They got a lot from it, but it was so expensive for them, and it took so much time. Then after that, thing happened two years ago where I was under the covers, I suddenly realized we can’t do that anymore. We can’t walk into organizations and invite them to let us measure every single piece of their impact and pay us six seven figures to do it. So I built an app which, if you had asked me back in the day when we were talking marriage, I would have laughed my I would have thought you were crazy. But it’s done, and the technology is magnificent, and it’s never been done, and nothing like this has ever been done. Who wants to be a startup more than someone who gets to do something that’s never been done? My husband calls it a fasoon, the first something out of nothing.

16:58 Jim Beach : So does the app? Everyone gets to download it at the company and answers questions.

17:06 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Yeah, so no. What happens

17:08 Jim Beach : Is we Yeah, so no,

17:11 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Yes and no. So here’s what happens. We put it on to the customers or patients. Customers, yeah, it’s either the customer or the patient or the beneficiary, depending on the type of organization, they get to play a lovely, wonderful, rewarding, enticing, exciting, unusual little game that is just a ton of fun to play, and that game follows them for a year and helps them notice every single little thing that changes in their life, and then they get to play the game and discover it, and they win points for it, and they win rewards for it, and at the end of it all, they get to find out how their life is changing in connection to the products or services they use from This one organization. All right, so that’s the customer side. On the business side, they’re getting reports 24/7 in what I call a dynamic dashboard. So in real time 24/7 all of the things that the customers are reporting are piling into this dashboard where the company can just push buttons and in five minutes a week, they can completely engage everyone in the department or in the entire organization all at once with another game that shows them, in five minutes everything that’s happened in the last Week because of all the work they did as reported by their customers, that creates unprecedented and passion, engagement and productivity and initiative innovation. It also creates a lot more new repeat and referral business, because now you have metrics that you’ve never had before to be able to use for marketing and sales, and it all happens by playing a simple little game.

19:10 Jim Beach : Wendy, can you walk us through a company that’s actually using this so that we can understand it a little better, a real world example?

19:19 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Yes and no. So I have to be careful because of privacy

19:23 Jim Beach : With

19:24 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Clients on this. Okay, so let me just kind of give you a sample of what it could be if this were happening,

19:32 Jim Beach : Right?

19:33 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Okay, yeah, just if it was potential. So right now, my major clients are in healthcare, so we’ll talk about them. Let’s talk about pain management. That’s really big. And the other is a plastic surgeon. And then, well, we can stop there. So when you start looking at when a physician or a practitioner or an esthetician, that. Does something to a patient, that patient has a change that occurs in them. With pain management, their pain manage their pain, it diminishes, but hopefully goes away all together. In plastic surgery, it’s, it’s something that’s awesome, but there’s, it doesn’t last forever, but some surgeries are really, really long lasting. So the question becomes, whatever product or service you received from either of those two healthcare organizations. Now we want to know what happened over time, and that’s what comes from these games, and that’s what they’re discovering in their dashboard, and then using those metrics not only to engage and entice and excite their employees and their nurses and their administrators and their doctors, but they’re also using it in the innovation department to say, If this is what these people are reporting about what changes they noticed that tells us that’s actually what they want. So how can we improve what we’re doing so that we can create those outcomes for people on purpose, by design, not just as a look what happened to Jane, right? Let’s innovate new products that show that lead to the kind of responses they actually had in the real world. So the innovation goes nuts. A lot of hospitals now have innovative centers in there and that those are the ones who are capitalizing on that. And then we say, okay, fine, so how did they feel about it? How important was it? So the question isn’t just what happened, but what it what did it mean to them? And you know, me, I mean, I’m a researcher from day one, that was how I started my career. So I put in all of the different measures for them to be able to just push a button and discover what was the level of importance of these things. What did it really mean to them? Did they give us credit for doing it, or do they think it just happened out of the blue and had nothing to do with what we did? All of the questions that a company could want to ask that’s just pushing a button and getting an answer by seeing the data from all of those people. So that’s what they’re doing, and that works in any organization that I’m working with. There are have been a couple of organization where I’ve said I don’t think this is right for you guys, but it wasn’t because the product was wrong or the service wasn’t a good fit. It was because their culture wasn’t the right fit for this. So it has to be a culture of people who recognize the challenges that are happening in their organization, and they really do want to change something about it, as opposed to just laying everybody off and scaling back,

23:02 Jim Beach : You know, I think the last time that I went to my aesthetician, that they were asking some of these questions,

23:10 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Really, very cool, very cool. You go to an esthetician that’s cool too

23:15 Jim Beach : Well, you know, once or twice a week just to control the the back hair and the eyebrows. Oh, god, that’s gross.

23:26 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : I think you took it one step too far. I think we were wishing you all the way to there, Jim, but thanks for playing.

23:36 Jim Beach : I dated statistician once. That was a fun conversation every afternoon.

23:42 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Oh, I bet, yeah. I mean that estheticians do more hard work than a lot of people. I know. You know, it’s not easy. It’s not easy helping people the way they do.

23:56 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : So what else you got? What else do you want to know? I’m right here

24:00 Speaker 3 : For

24:00 Jim Beach : You plastic surgery comments or those is that your way of suggesting that I need some surgery changes before our marriage.

24:09 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : You know, it’s been so long. How would I know?

24:13 Jim Beach : Well,

24:15 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : I mean, I would assume that with your background and your knowledge and your excitement and the way that you serve people, how am I doing? How am I doing? I think that you probably look younger than you think you look, because when you’re helping people, it just magic happens. That

24:36 Jim Beach : Is true. It does make one feel good. Yes,

24:40 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Exactly right, exactly right. And so for all of your listeners, please, I really want you to think about the importance of your impact and the impact that you’re making on other people’s lives, and how that’s affecting their lives, and how you can capitalize on that. Just measure your impact, whether you want to do analyze. Or digital just read the book.

25:03 Jim Beach : We only have time for one question, and I want to ask you about passion. We sort of started talking about all this with why people hate their job, and why so many people hate their job. And one of my thesis points is that if you hate your job, starting a business that you like is better than that hated job, and you don’t have to have passion for your business. Maybe that’s just, you know, icing on the cake for for some people, and that for a lot of business owners, it’s just the fact that you work for someplace better now than working for that horrible place that you hated so much. And maybe it’s you just take the job you’ve already got now and start a business that does the exact same thing, and you serve, you know, some of the customers you used to, and you like that. You don’t love it, but at least it’s better than working for that guy. And we need to rethink our idea of passion when we try to encourage people to be entrepreneurs, because, you know, maybe they should accept passion as that’s good enough. That’s good enough. I’ll start that business. I don’t love it, but, yeah, it’s good enough. What are your thoughts?

26:10 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : My thoughts are we? It is not our job to tell people what they should feel. But I will tell you that in my life, I have built 10 different companies. I have really, really succeeded and, oh my god, failed. I have done so many things, and I can tell you right now that the ones that really worked were where I was doing something that let me feel passionate about what I was doing. It may not be that I like the worked, but I liked the outcomes. It may be that I liked the people. There’s 1000 reasons, but you can always find passion if you look for it, and if you can’t find it, try to find something that will help you feel that passion, because it changes your life when you do

27:04 Jim Beach : Wendy, how do we find out more? Follow you online, get a copy of the book, hire your company to come and help us become happier, better organized. How do we get in touch?

27:15 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Easiest way is professional impact.com, or go to LinkedIn. I’m everywhere as Wendy lived in dinner or just go direct to the site, to Amazon and order what matters matters most, and read it and enjoy it and love it.

27:32 Jim Beach : Fantastic. I hope you’re coming back sooner than 13 years next time.

27:36 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : Good plan. Thank you so much for

27:39 Speaker 3 : Your

27:39 Jim Beach : Husband’s health, I will be praying for him.

27:42 Wendy Lipton-Dibner : I absolutely will. Thank you so much. Be Well, Jim, thanks for today. This was great.

27:48 Jim Beach : And yes, it was. I had a lot of fun, and we will be right back. We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. Very interesting guest with me. Please welcome Ali Hafiz G to the show. He is doing some really cool things. He is the creator of traction, which is a live startup simulations, like a game. I think that exposes real founder decision making under constraint. He is also the CEO of Wednesday, which is an AI native product engineering company, and they have worked with some of the top unicorns out there. Ali, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

28:35 Ali Hafizji : Good? How are you doing? Jim, it’s a pleasure to be here.

28:37 Jim Beach : I am. Well, thank you. Tell me about traction. It sounds like a really fun game.

28:43 Ali Hafizji : It is fun, and that’s that’s exactly why we built it, because we love board games. So traction is an in person experience, and it’s delivered through a board game. It’s meant for early stage teams, and it’s primarily meant to solve the problem that most entrepreneurs face during their early journey, which is, how do you stop being the bottleneck so early on, when a team is not really well formed, what we’ve noticed is most founders are the ones giving out tasks, and there is very little agency and ownership in their team. What traction does is that it brings in alignment so that different team members know what is expected out of them during that early journey.

29:26 Jim Beach : Okay, sounds like fun, and

29:29 Ali Hafizji : It is fun, yeah? Does

29:31 Jim Beach : It have challenges to things like your shipments burn up?

29:36 Ali Hafizji : Yeah? So Exactly, yeah. So think of it as a game of Monopoly, four people per board, and they play as product managers. And this is a digital product, so the one who wins is the one with the maximum number of paid users. Now, just in the journey of a startup, there are ups and downs. You’ll have other people on your board get funding, some people. Going to get a critical bug for which the system is going to be down. Everybody has different things going on as what happens in normal life. What matters most is your decision making capability. How do you act when the pressure is on? Do you trust insights that you see, that the market reveals to you, or do you make the decisions based on what somebody else is doing. All of this is tracked as you play the game. It’s just meant to be fun. And at the end of the game, what we do is we do a small debrief where we compare your decisions with how successful founders may make decisions. And that brings in, like, a sense of realization among the players, where they realize saying, Okay, this is what I did, but this is what a successful founder does. So maybe this is what is expected out of me. Maybe this is what I need to change. This is what the founder is supposed to do. This is how I need to behave in a startup.

30:53 Jim Beach : Interesting,

30:55 Speaker 3 : Yeah, does

30:55 Jim Beach : It give you a score at the end, or is there just one winner?

30:58 Ali Hafizji : It does.

30:59 Jim Beach : Okay. Tell me about that. What does the scoring look like?

31:03 Ali Hafizji : So the scoring is based on different parameters, but the primary like determinant, if you one or no, is just the number of paid users. But we measure a number of other things. So we measure the number of the amount of like coins that you spend. We call it build coins, but you can think of it as money, as an equivalent and monopoly, the amount of money that you spend to reach where you are. We also look at different parameters about the decision making that you’ve exhibited during gameplay. For example, are you making decisions from zone of scarcity, or are you making decisions from a zone of abundance? This is easily visible when you see people delay decisions versus actually act on insights. We also look at other parameters, like, how do they behave with the other participants? Were they a good player? Were they influenced a lot by how others are playing? How does their game actually evolve? All of this is then sort of compiled into a report which we sent to them.

32:04 Jim Beach : Did you use this for interviews to hire?

32:11 Ali Hafizji : You could, in fact, many, many people that have played this game have told us that this could be a very good way for them to filter especially early stage companies, because that’s what they really need. But we really designed this to solve the problem of alignment. Just make sure that an early stage team is actually behaving and acting like the founders, that the founder is not the bottleneck. We wanted to create, like the shared language among them, but it could be a tool that could be used to hire as well.

32:45 Jim Beach : How long does it take to play around?

32:49 Ali Hafizji : The entire game takes about an hour, and then the debrief after that takes about 20 minutes.

32:56 Jim Beach : Okay? And it’s online, right? It’s not a board game.

32:58 Ali Hafizji : No, no. It is the physical game. So you have to actually go and play traction. So we actually host these traction events in different parts. We’re currently in India, and we’re only doing it in India, but we are planning to come to the US next quarter, and we’re going to go to different cities and sort of try and arrange for a board game like evening. But yes, it is. It is supposed to be in person, you need to actually play with different humans, because at the end of the day, you do business with humans. So it’s not online

33:27 Jim Beach : Interesting. Well, I want to play as soon as you come to the United States, let me know. It sounds like a lot of fun. Is there a world champion?

33:38 Ali Hafizji : There isn’t. But you know what that’s that’s a that’s a lot of fun for us to create. And here’s a fun fact that we’ve learned as we’ve played this game, especially in the different cities in India, we’ve also learned that geography, or at least the place that you bought, you’ve sort of been raised, that has a very big influence in the way that you make decisions. So for example, when we look at the data of all the people who have played, let’s say, in Delhi, versus the number of all the people that have paid in Bangalore, there’s a huge difference in the way that they make decisions. People in Delhi spend a lot of time just negotiating with each other, whereas people in Bangalore spend a lot of time actually looking at what the market has to tell them, and then take decisions. So we feel like there are a lot of different parameters that play that influence the way that you, that you maintain decisions. I mean, I think this is just a classic nature nurture ideology. So, you know, nurture has a very big influence on how you behave, how you act, how you think, how you make decisions.

34:39 Jim Beach : Yes.

34:39 Ali Hafizji : So we might learn a lot as we, as we, you know, travel across the US. God knows what we’ll learn. Are

34:48 Jim Beach : There a certain part? Do you have to, like, raise money and stuff like that too?

34:52 Ali Hafizji : Yeah, there are different, different aspects of it. So there are like, you’ll get, for example, you need to build. Features for your product, you’ll need to get, like different users to sort of sign up for different features that you’ve built. You will have different trump cards where you might get lucky and you might raise money, or you might get the ability to let go of so well, we actually just just the way in life, there are ups and downs. So there are going to be cards that are going to be that are going to reduce different elements of the game. For example, it might affect the number of tokens, etc. So there are trump cards that help you get rid of those, those cards as well. So lots of just in the game, just in the game of business, the way that you would create a product or a service and take it to market, all of those events that happen in that journey are simulated in this

35:53 Jim Beach : Very cool All right, why did you decide to do this? Sounds like you put a lot of time and money into this. What was the reason behind all

36:02 Ali Hafizji : Of it. So Wednesday, so the agency that I run is a consulting company, and one of the reasons, one of the experiences that we had, was working with a series a company. Sorry, we started working with them when they were a seed stage business, but the core team was actually working together for about a decade, and what we realized working with them was they had an insane sense of ownership among each other. Each one knew exactly what to do, how to do, when to do. They sort of own their part of the business. For example, there was one person just owning marketing and sales, and then he would just do that. He wouldn’t really need permission from anyone to do anything over there. And we learned that this type of synergy actually takes a lot of time to get built in a team. So we said, like, how do we fast track this? Because most startups don’t really have the luxury of having a team that has been working together forever, and that’s how the idea of attraction was created. But really the way that we the way that we the reason for us to invest time and money and creating this experience is we think of it as as a way for people to know what it’s like to work with us through the game you you learn different parts of our consulting practice as well, as well as learn a little bit about yourself. So we really think of this as the top of the funnel for our sales process for Wednesday?

37:25 Jim Beach : Tell us about Wednesday Now,

37:28 Ali Hafizji : Sure, so Wednesday is a IT services company. Think of us as the version two of the typical IT services company that everybody is used to. We are an AI native engineering agency, which means we probably do we deliver 3x for the price that you would pay to a traditional IT services company. Our pricing is based per sprint. So I love your philosophy on this, Jim, where you sort of, I think you have this somewhere on your website where it’s mentioned that the business is not rocket science. You just take what already exists and make it better. Yes, and that’s, that’s exactly what we’ve done with Wednesday. So Wednesday is version 2.2 of IT services, traditional IT services, is just staffing services. People used to buy it because it was cheaper to have offshore talent. We’ve changed the model where we say that, well, sure, it’s cheaper, but what if you could actually own an outcome? For example, the traditional model you get, you basically hire a bunch of people, and then you become a project manager. You need to tell them what to do. But what if the model was more based on sprints, where you don’t really have to manage day to day, you could actually buy a sprint which moves some metric in your digital product? Let’s say it’s acquisition, retention, referral, revenue. We’ll figure out how to move that and get it done, and it’s priced on a fixed basis, so you pay for printed. There’s no hourly, nothing like that. And if we don’t deliver what we promise, then the additional time is on us. So there’s a little bit of skin in the game. We basically just done that to engineering services. It’s, it’s, it’s the same wine, but packaged in a different business model.

39:25 Jim Beach : Okay, very good. I like that. And so would you say that you charge by sprint? You mean like a two week run? Yes, one thing done, right,

39:36 Ali Hafizji : Correct.

39:37 Jim Beach : Okay, define sprint for people who don’t know, people who aren’t married to a project manager define help people what a sprint is.

39:46 Ali Hafizji : So a sprint is a fixed amount of time that is dedicated to achieving a certain output. So for example, we’ve just taken the. Taken the number two weeks, but it could also be, mean one week. But we agreed to achieving a certain output, which, for example, in the digital world could be, we’re going to build feature a, b, c, d, and this is going to help the business go from a, from some, for example, x, to y. And if that’s estimated to be finished in two weeks, and let’s say it takes longer than Wednesday, consumes that cost, that way the person buying the sprint is only involved strategically. They just work with us to figure out what needs to be built, and then we tell them, hey, this is going to take two sprints. And then they just buy those two sprints versus the traditional model, where they would actually be involved with the team day to day, tell them, Do this, do that, etc, and actually be a project manager,

40:54 Jim Beach : All right? And then how do those sprints cost, or the cost of those compare to hiring a normal developer,

41:04 Ali Hafizji : The cost would be so firstly, we need to understand that a sprint doesn’t just include one developer. So a sprint could include a couple of developers, a designer and a product manager. So each sprint can have a different type of team structure, but in general, it would cost at least 40 to 50% lesser. But also, we don’t just look at it as a, as a, as just a cost comparison. We also look at the output, because the delivery mechanism is AI powered, and we have a lot of AI frameworks that we’ve developed that basically help us build better making sure the quality and security checks are in place. We’re also able to deliver 3x the amount. What’s most important here, Jim is that the time of the person buying the strength is really spent in doing far more productive things. So this could the buyer? Could be any IT services buyer. Let’s, let’s consider it’s a founder for startup today. He’d rather spend that time doing marketing, sales and distribution and even fundraising, rather than spending all that time managing a team. Because those things in this day and age have become far more difficult.

42:28 Jim Beach : Yes, they have,

42:29 Ali Hafizji : All

42:29 Jim Beach : Right. You’re based in Pune, India, correct? Are you actually there right now?

42:35 Ali Hafizji : Yeah,

42:36 Jim Beach : Okay,

42:36 Ali Hafizji : But I care.

42:37 Jim Beach : Well, the call quality is great. Did you call in on WhatsApp.

42:42 Ali Hafizji : Yeah,

42:42 Jim Beach : Okay, for those of you Americans out there who don’t use WhatsApp, it’s got some great features. Everyone around the world uses it, except us Americans. But us Americans need to really adapt it, because it is just a great platform. It’s quality is obviously better than anything else, especially zoom, which I just despise. But anyway, Oli, how do you get customers around the world? Talk to me about your marketing from Pune to get a customer in America happy.

43:14 Ali Hafizji : Well, I think number one, we need to get the delivery right? So we wouldn’t be where we are unless we were actually doing really good work. Once you nail that down, I think the other channels that have really worked for us is a lot of social media thought leadership. We run a really, really good newsletter, so if you’re actually building anything digital, I would highly recommend joining the Wednesday newsletter, you can just find it on our website that has really worked for us, I think, top leadership, social media and newsletters, just doing good work. That’s what’s it.

43:55 Jim Beach : Very interesting. And do you spend a normal percent on marketing, or normal American companies spend 10% what are you spending on marketing?

44:07 Ali Hafizji : Oh, yeah. So we’re nowhere near 10% we’re probably about one or 2% on marketing spend because there is no, there is no sort of paid advertising that we do. We are dabbling with it. Though it’s not like we’re not open to it, but I guess we haven’t really gotten to exploring that channel so much. But yeah, there’s long way to go, especially in terms of marketing style for us,

44:32 Jim Beach : That’s great if you’re keeping it that low, fantastic. And how do American customers respond when you tell them your different model.

44:42 Ali Hafizji : Most of them really like it. So I feel like there’s a little bit of education that we need to do, especially for first time buyers, as well as veteran buyers who are so used to the offshore model where they’re like, Okay, just I’m gonna I’m gonna be the project manager. I’m gonna figure out how to execute this project from start to finish. Because it isn’t. My problem once they hear about, you know, the possibility of another model and how life could be easier, where they can actually do more with their time, rather than manage a team. A lot of them do buy, and I think that what are our offer says that, you know, just buy one sprint. Just start with one sprint. What do you have to lose if we if we don’t miss the timeline any day, we’re consuming the cost, right? So just experience it’s not like we’re going to lock you in for six months. It’s just two weeks. See what you get out of it. Most of them, especially after they buy the first sprint they’ve stuck on. So we’ve had customers who’ve been buying sprints for two years now, and they just really love it, because every week, every two weeks, we meet and we’re like, Okay, this is what I’m learning from the market. In fact, we’ve got one customer who has who basically, really utilized their time and went from like, I think, a few 100 followers to 1000s of followers on YouTube now, and they’ve really changed that channel into a customer acquisition channel for them, for their digital product. So they’re constantly just spending all their time creating videos and converting that traffic to the digital product. And they’re just hands off getting involved in like, how that is being implemented. They just talk to us strategically, we do the prioritization, and we’re like, this is gonna need three sprints. And then like, Okay, let’s do it. So I think that really works. And to be very honest, I think in this day and age, founders need, need to spend a lot of time in marketing and developing some kind of distribution channel. This is extremely hard.

46:36 Jim Beach : Yes, it is. Ali, take us back in time and tell us how this company was born. How did you get the idea for it? What did you do first? Talk to me about building the company.

46:48 Ali Hafizji : Sure. So the company started in 2020. I was getting done with another startup then, and I was actually working with a lot of banks, because the product that we were offering was a credit card, and we couldn’t really build a FinTech product without having a banking partner. So I would go and visit these large banks here in Mumbai, and every time I would go there, I would have to wait for like, months to just get access to one API. And even even if they would share the API with me, they would have, there would be different APIs, each returning a different format. And I realized it is just broken in the enterprise. And after I finished that company, I had decided during that company that, as I was building that product, that the next thing that I’m going to do is something in services. Because here we are, you know, two people building a product that was probably equivalent to 200 people maintaining those APIs. So I said, you know, it was broken in the enterprise, there has to be a better model that they can use. And hence, after I finished that, finished that company, we started Wednesday. Wednesday took its own time to actually find its footing. We weren’t doing anything new. We wanted to do something in IT services, but we wanted to package it and do something new with it. So we started, you know, just your traditional route. We we took what was working. There are enough companies that have sort of proved that this model works. So we started doing exactly what they were doing. And as we did it, more we realized, and as we sort of became more operationally capable doing it, we realized that this could actually the business model could be changed, and it could be packaged like this for this specific type of buyer. And then that became the identity for Wednesday, where we became the IT services company that uses a lot of AI that charges for output that doesn’t build per hour, etc. And that became the identity, and that’s pretty much been the growth story for Wednesday. And we kept building in public. I shared a lot of things on social media. I kept writing about it, and that’s pretty much it.

49:00 Jim Beach : Well, great story. I just had an idea. Oli, you should always start your sprints on Wednesday and tell all your customers, that’s what the name is about. The fact that it’s a week long, like your business day to Wednesday, every sprint is Wednesday to Wednesday, and that’s where their company name from, and implying

49:20 Ali Hafizji : More

49:20 Jim Beach : Week long work. Does that make sense?

49:23 Ali Hafizji : Yeah, that makes sense. We should have done this interview on a Wednesday as well.

49:27 Jim Beach : I should try to make sure that it airs on a Wednesday. I think that it airs on a Tuesday. So okay, if

49:35 Ali Hafizji : You have time, you can do the quick 10. Oh, do

49:38 Jim Beach : You want to play the quick 10?

49:40 Ali Hafizji : Let’s do it. I love games.

49:42 Jim Beach : Oh, that’s right, you’re the board game, man. What’s your favorite board game out there? The like risk or monopoly? What’s your favorite game?

49:53 Ali Hafizji : I’ve been having a lot of fun with Catan recently, and I also, I don’t know if you know about this game called A. Ah, forgot the name. What is it called? Sprinkle. I think, I don’t know why, it just skipped my mind, but it’s a really nice card game. But I think Katan is something that I really enjoy strategically. It’s, it’s a nice strategic long game.

50:17 Jim Beach : All right, all right. Quick. 10. Are you currently sober? I’m required by law to ask,

50:24 Ali Hafizji : Oh, yeah,

50:25 Jim Beach : All right. Do you want to accept the standard wager? The standard wager,

50:32 Ali Hafizji : Sure.

50:32 Jim Beach : There you go. I love the attitude number one. Your favorite creativity, hack,

50:38 Ali Hafizji : Copy, copy, what’s looking and then, as you do more of it, you will figure something new out.

50:46 Jim Beach : Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick,

50:50 Ali Hafizji : Sell before you build anything.

50:53 Jim Beach : Number three, name your top passions,

50:58 Ali Hafizji : Board games, reading, writing, building software, spending time with my family.

51:04 Jim Beach : Number four, the first three steps in starting a business are

51:10 Ali Hafizji : Find a problem that people are already paying for, sell it, build the smallest version of it to service it, and then, yeah, just do marketing word of mouth.

51:24 Jim Beach : Number six, your dreamiest technology is

51:28 Ali Hafizji : AI connect AI that can actually build pipeline.

51:34 Jim Beach : Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice.

51:38 Ali Hafizji : Distribution beats product.

51:42 Jim Beach : Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake.

51:46 Ali Hafizji : Well, in a previous avatar, I’ve spent two years building something before I figure figure out if people want it.

51:54 Jim Beach : Number nine, favorite entrepreneur and why

52:01 Ali Hafizji : I’d say Patrick Carlson. I think that he reads more than anyone that I know in his role, and it shows how strike makes decisions.

52:13 Jim Beach : And finally, number 10, your favorite superhero?

52:18 Ali Hafizji : I think Batman. I think he has no superpowers, but he’s still quite super.

52:26 Jim Beach : That is true very well. Said Ali, great information, and thank you for being with us while we calculate the score and find out the winner. Tell us how we get in touch with you. Find out more and signed up to norm. Know more about traction when it comes to the United

52:41 Speaker 3 : States.

52:42 Ali Hafizji : Sure, so we are currently, we have a Contact Us form on our website. You can go to play traction. Dot fun, and if you fill that out, we promise to get in touch with you as soon as we come to the United States or anywhere that you are in the world. You can also join our newsletter, which is called overheard at Wednesday, which is available on our website@wednesday.is

53:06 Jim Beach : Fantastic. Great information. Thank you so much for being with us, and I can’t wait to play the game. Oh no, I just got your score, Oli, and I’m so sorry you got a 9494 it’s an excellent score, but you have to have a 95 to win. Apparently, we had a judge from Delhi who didn’t like some of your answers. I guess that’s a regional thing, and so you owe us a Tesla. We always play for a Tesla, so I’ll look forward to you sending me a Tesla soon.

53:35 Ali Hafizji : Okay,

53:37 Jim Beach : That’s all you have to say. All right. Oli, thank you so much with us. We’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

53:46 Ali Hafizji : Thanks a lot, Jim, have a nice day. Bye, and

53:48 Jim Beach : We are out of time. But you know what we do? That’s right, we come back tomorrow, be safe, take care and go make a million dollars. Bye. Now you.