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Resources

Claire Lew

By Josh Pigford on February 18, 2019
Last updated on February 07, 2024

Table of Contents

 

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This week I talk with Claire Lew, Founder of Know Your Team, where they build software and and produce resources to help you become a better manager! In this episode we talk about culture shock of moving a lot as a kid, how painting and art play a part in being a better leader, how an intervention at her first company led to what she’s doing today, how a random meeting with the guys at Basecamp led to her becoming the CEO of Know Your Team and a whole lot more!

Show Notes

  • 1:00- Painting
  • 3:14- Helping people deeply
  • 4:57- Hobbies to keep you sane and be a better business owner
  • 5:38- Therapeutic outlets vs. an escape
  • 9:05- Childhood
  • 10:45- Moving, growing up, and making friends
  • 13:43- Cultural differences
  • 15:27- Learning to relate to others
  • 17:21- “Don’t go to college”
  • 19:44- Biggest influences in entrepreneurship
  • 20:21- Building and starting your own company is a job
  • 21:16- Student government and entrepreneurship
  • 22:58- Paying attention to what you’re scared of
  • 24:40- A desire to please and external validation
  • 26:37- “What did you study” vs. “What did you learn”
  • 27:58- Shifting to entrepreneurship while in college
  • 29:30- Brainstorming all the problems they wanted to solve in the world
  • 30:49- Building an in-person software school- The Starter Week
  • 33:45- Intervention from co-founders
  • 34:55- Most important lesson — self awareness
  • 36:02- Self identity and means of motivation
  • 37:15- Reflecting about what to do in life
  • 37:42- Inspiration for the journey
  • 39:40- Learning and organizational change. The science of leadership
  • 43:15- Testing a hypothesis on solving the problem
  • 44:08- Getting honest insights from people within the company
  • 44:45- Intro to Jason Fried (Basecamp)
  • 47:29- “Time is ticking and I’m running out of money”
  • 49:30- Everything lining up perfectly
  • 51:17- Moving into the CEO role and talking to customers
  • 52:22- Creating a vision
  • 54:00- Having a functioning piece of software
  • 56:22- Transitioning and changing the business model for Know Your Team
  • 58:18- Switching from speaking to writing
  • 59:50- 700 demos
  • 1:01:01- Organic traffic
  • 1:01:55- Mismatch of audience and product…let’s change the product
  • 1:04:13- “We’re not growing”
  • 1:07:29- Writing and releasing guides
  • 1:08:16- Responses from existing customer base
  • 1:09:36- Running out of time
  • 1:11:52- How much of this stuff matters?
  • 1:13:02- The next year for Know Your Team
 

Josh Pigford

Josh is most famous as the founder of Baremetrics. However, long before Baremetrics and until today, Josh has been a maker, builder, and entrepreneur. His career set off in 2003 building a pair of link directories, ReallyDumbStuff and ReallyFunArcade. Before he sold those for profits, he had already started his next set of projects. As a design major, he began consulting on web design projects. That company eventually morphed into Sabotage Media, which has been the shell company for many of his projects since. Some of his biggest projects before Baremetrics were TrackThePack, Deck Foundry, PopSurvey, and Temper. The pain points he experienced as PopSurvey and Temper took off were the reason he created Baremetrics. Currently, he's dedicated to Maybe, the OS for your personal finances.