- Hey, this "Overpass Insights,"
my name is Eric and I make apps.
So, today I wanna talk about how working hard
doesn't guarantee success, but it is the price of entry.
(intense rock music)
(upbeat digital music)
Okay, so today I'm coming to you from central Cheltenham
which is where my son goes to university.
I'm here to pick him up
and bring him home for a couple days.
And it's a nice city, right?
It's really nice, it's a wintry, gray day, all right?
So, now that we're into 2020,
I'm spending a lot more time
doing outbound marketing.
So I'm doing a lot more prospecting,
trying to do more proposals, get more stuff out there,
whereas last year a lot of the stuff was inbound.
I mean, there's inbound stuff this year,
so people who find Overpass through SEO
or through YouTube videos or whatever,
but this time I'm trying to be more active.
That's my goal this year is be more active,
so reach out and actually prospect a bit more.
And so I've been doing a lot more proposals, right?
Last year, towards the end of last year
we had some really big deals come in,
and some of them we got, some of them we didn't.
So we had things we were pitching for,
some proposals that we did.
Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't,
but there were two in particular that we didn't get, right?
And it was kinda like, ugh, right?
It really got me because we worked pretty hard on them.
But to be honest, we worked harder
on one than we did on the other.
So we had two different deals, one of them,
and both with pretty large companies.
One of them was, I think we were one of five or six
different app development companies they were looking at.
So my confidence in that job was not
as high as it was in the other one.
There was one of them I think we were in the short list,
we were like one or two companies,
and the other one we were like one
of five or six different companies.
So I spent, to be totally honest with you,
and I'm not proud of this, I worked
a lot harder on the one where I thought
it was more of a sure thing, right?
The proposal was really good.
I worked a lot harder at reaching out to them
to make sure that I kept the contact points
and everything right, which, yeah, as you should, right?
And made sure, go to all the meetings,
try to make all the trips.
And the other one, I kinda half-assed it a bit.
This is where I talk about
my New Year's resolution to be more active,
I don't wanna half-ass anything anymore, right?
And even though we were, I wasn't as certain at that one,
I probably should have given it the same amount
of energy that I did the other one, right?
I didn't get either one of them,
but it's almost like that's the price of entry.
If I had just accepted that I was gonna get both of them
I probably would have had a better chance of doing it.
It's like doing an app.
If you put an app out there and you convince yourself
that it's gonna work, you're gonna work harder on it.
If you think it might work, it might not,
you'll half-ass it and you'll just do,
you'll do enough, right?
And I don't really wanna embarrass myself,
I don't wanna put something out there and not work as hard.
And it's the same when you're working for a client, right?
I've worked with other people where we've had contracts
where we were gonna both do the app for somebody
and my partner companies, they would get really angry
about the fact that we did all this work,
we did that proposal, we did the specification,
we did all that and nothing went through, right?
And they would get really angry about it,
like, "They're just stealing ideas,
they probably went to a cheeper developer,"
and all of that stuff.
But, really, that's part of the game, right?
The market for app developers, or for software developers
in general, and for apps, and for everything else,
the markets are so crowded that hard work
is just a price of entry, right?
And sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't,
and it just means you have to do more, right?
One of my New Year's resolutions,
to be more active this year,
and part of that means treat every job that we get,
every possible job that we get,
every prospect we talk to as, try to make myself
as certain as possible that we're gonna get it.
Because we're not gonna get them all,
but we have to behave as if we are.
We have to act as if we are.
We have to give everything, because there's no shame
in trying your best and failing.
For me, I think the shame, and,
dude, I've got this all the time, myself,
is half-assing it and failing, because,
could be the reason we failed,
could be the reason we didn't get those jobs,
especially the one, is 'cause I half assed it.
You know, I could have made more calls.
I could have put more stuff out there.
I could have worked harder on the proposal, but I didn't.
So, in this year I think we just need to work harder.
And for those of you guys who's,
and I talked about this earlier in the week or last week,
we can't be certain about anything, right?
You're gonna learn software languages
that you might not use as much.
You're going to work on apps that maybe
never even make it to go live, or maybe they go live
and nobody downloads it, but that's the price of entry.
It's like, if you don't do that, you don't get anywhere.
If you work really hard and make yourself certain
that it's gonna work, you're gonna give it your all.
And even if you don't get it,
you're gonna be better off next time.
At least, that's what I believe to my core.
Anyway, I hope you guys are having a great day.
I will talk to you guys again tomorrow.
(upbeat digital music)