In today’s episode, we talked with Jake Kaempf, the Founder of The Everyday Company, and we discussed how his creative background and curiosity in business helped him navigate the challenges of putting together a team for his newest venture.
In today’s episode, we talked with Jake Kaempf, the Founder of The Everyday Company, and we discussed how his creative background and curiosity in business helped him navigate the challenges of putting together a team for his newest venture.
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Hatchet Ventures website: https://www.hatchetventures.com
Hatchet Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hatchet-ventures/
Chet Lovegren’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetlovegren/
Connect with Jake Kaempf on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmckaempf/
Check out Everyday Company's Website: https://www.everydaycompany.co/
Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/36ub3fpy
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/ystuxubt
Listen on Google Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/bdee8y9h
[00:00:00] 1, 2, 3, 4. Are you a founder, co-founder, aspiring entrepreneur, or just someone who loves to hear about how companies are built? Then join us as we talk with founders and CEOs who have been there and done that. Welcome to the Founders Formula Podcast, sponsored by Hatchet Ventures, and now your host, Chet Lovegren.
[00:00:31] Chet: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Founders Formula podcast. You know the deal. This is the show that's designed to bring in the latest and greatest insights from founders and CEOs worldwide, brought to you by our sponsors, Hatchet Ventures. As always, I'm your host, Chet Lovegren, aka the sales doctor, and I'm thrilled for this episode in our season three today, because we have a really interesting guest. He's got a little bit of a different background than what we typically see. He doesn't come strictly from the technical world or just strictly from the go-to-market world. He held titles from senior art director to account executive to creative director, and even president, and he's also the co-founder and CEO at the Everyday Company.
Please welcome Jake Kaempf. Jake, how you doing?
[00:01:13] Jake: I'm doing well, Chet, how are you? Thanks for the intro.
[00:01:16] Chet: Yeah, I'm doing great and I really appreciate you carving out the time to have a conversation with us today. Really want to dig into your background your experience up to the point of founding the everyday company, and then we'll talk about the relationship you have with your co-founders at the Everyday Company.
We'll talk a little bit about what the company does, who you're helping, what the problem is you're solving for. How you decided to solve that problem. Cause I always think that's really interesting from founders and their story. And that's something that always is really unique in every single scenario.
And then at the end, we'll taper things off and talk a little bit about your investor approach, especially as you're working with a community like Hatchet to understand the investor approach in connecting those dots. But first, let's talk about you, Jake. Give us the 411.. Tell us the story, what talk, walk us through your background and bring us up to the point of founding the Everyday Company.
[00:02:03] Jake: Yeah, man I definitely, I love to share the story and as you pointed out in the intro, it's a little bit of an atypical approach for a lot of founders and a lot of people in the tech industry. So I actually, I could say it started in high school, right? Where, I wasn't always the best student, best kid doing everything the right way all the time.
But what I had a passion for was was design. Actually, I just love the idea that the whole premise was taking something super complicated and making it simple and easy for everybody to understand. So I, that's actually the path I went. I went out to school in New York. Went to a place called the Pratt Institute, go Cannoneers.
And it's, a pretty revered top five program in what it does. And I started off going into architecture because I had some, math prerequisites done and then I switched over to advertising. Cause I was like, wait, I can do everything and explore this world. And I got introduced to all these gurus and advertising at the time.
Lee Cloud, who was responsible for The Energizer Bunny in the 1984 Apple Ads and, all those amazing ads. And he looked like surfer Jesus. He was great down in LA and I just saw this w wide world that I had no experience to, no exposure to in Oregeon. And then that led me actually to just the New York world of getting involved in that hustle.
I started, I joined another program. I was taking, one and a half time credits just working all the time. Not the traditional The traditional college experience and after college going through that, I actually went into finance. I, I started pursuing like subprime mortgages right before it, and I learned that I hated that whole ecosystem.
Cause I was like, wow, this is not what I want to do, not what I grew up doing. So I got out of that and I actually packed my bags and moved to Honolulu. And I had an opportunity to join a small team in in Honolulu, come on, as like an account executive start working accounts. And they were doing some c e ol work.
And if anybody has any familiarity with Hawaii, it was these very quintessential Hawaii brands. And one day I was meeting with the president of one of their big companies and they were redesigning a product and I just took all that knowledge of positioning a company and some of that insight.
And I said, Hey, what if we do it this way? And that led to us gaining the biggest account. We turned that into creating a creative division of this entire company. And then we, went through an acquisition of a production company, so on and so forth. And, it led me to being in this great this great position of rising fairly quickly in a small company, just built on opportunity and bringing ideas forward.
Now that jumped me into going and starting my own business which you saw, which was my first company. And what I really started off knowing was I was a creative, I was in advertising, and I would annoy the hell out of every one of our clients because I would just keep asking questions, oh, you wanna make your logo bigger?
Why? Or You want to introduce this product to this customer, but does it make sense to them? I'm like, what problem are you solving? And I was always a curious guy, so I just took this and I would annoy the hell outta my leaders and outta clients. But once I decided to move back to the mainland and start my last company I took that idea with me, which was how do we dive deeper and how do we look at real problems for people?
And solve them and bring them products that have some sort of authentic, solution for them that really helped them. And so in that, grew that from a small little studio just doing piecemeal work with clients that followed me to doing work with, global brands in Asia and the states, et cetera.
And then at the end of that, Chet, I kept seeing these problems. I kept that curiosity going and I kept seeing the same problems exist for my team. I saw it exist for all of our clients. I saw it exist for all of the freelancers and the people we worked, and it was this just inherent problem with how we were working and what was going on, and and yeah.
And so that, that kind of led us to what is now Everyday which is, the Everyday Company started off actually as a deep learning company. I hired some smart kids that were experimenting in the AI space to develop some models that would collect really good insight from across an idea right from across this ecosystem and compile that.
And produce an output for the creatives, right? The intuitive people of the world that jump from mountaintop to mountaintop instead of slogging their way down the hill and then back up it. And it was a way of saying, Hey I know a lot of really talented creative people that are overlooked in a room because they don't necessarily know all the business lingo.
And in that respect, I wanted to give them an idea to be intuitive. To be good at work and then have it ha and then have research like backfill around them to prove or invalidate their point. And that was fun. And we've actually been contributors to open AI for two and a half years. So we were doing some c e ol stuff there.
But I will say you know what really led to the Everyday Company was I was given a talk. And I, to my now co-founder and a big group, and I was talking about this idea that I have, which is a very terrible acronym called F V M S. And it's a frustration, vision, metric, success and or a solution.
And that is before you ever design a solution for anybody, you first have to identify what their frustration is, what the problem is. Then you have to identify what their vision is, where they want to go. And then from there you have to figure out how do they measure that vision and achieving it. And only then can you actually develop a solution.
And and so when I was talking about this, I met Hallie, my co-founder, and she has that energy. She's one of the most productive, diligent, positive people you'll ever meet. And I was like, I gotta work with her. We gotta do this. And we started doing user interviews and all of this and what led us to what Everyday is now.
Really started with all this input, all this research, all this collaboration was broken, right? And we found out that the way that people just take notes and draw out and share information is fundamentally broken. And we saw it, six dozen different ways that it was broken. And we tried to start off with that kind of, how do we solve this idea of people constantly switching between disparate tools and how do we make this better for people to get back to that intuitive, deep work, the, and the things that we were hired to do.
So that's a long-winded way of explaining my story up to now, which started as a designer. As a creative, as an intuitive, working my way up in every aspect of the business that I could to learn as much as possible, and then seeing a problem from those observations and taking a stab at solving it.
[00:09:30] Chet: Chet has been replaced as the podcast host because Jake just took us through the first two typical questions that we have, but that was in, go ahead. That was a great storyline. No, I loved it. And I think I wanna take it back to your background a little bit. Yeah. I think that's probably why we had such an incredible conversation before the podcast just shooting the stuff Yeah.
Is because you had, were really deep into the content and creative world, and then got your mix into the sales world. I came from the sales world, but was always creating content on the side, so I was like, c e ol. Was not a subject matter expert in the content. But then that's, it's weird because I've made that pivot and 50% of my business is creating content for companies.
But I love how we have those synergies where it's like we're on the same path cuz we both, have one thing that we were experts in, then we dipped our toe in another thing and then we're combining the two in our vision. But that's I can definitely speak to that. Your ability to talk about that process because it is it's really tough, and especially just, even when you go through a design process, it's just so hard.
And there's so many literally like napkins and scraps of paper. And even yesterday, like I, I had misplaced my notebook, so I was like working with someone. I was like, oh, here's a I don't even, yeah, I don't even know what this is. This was an invoice for a car rental I had in Chicago, a a.
A few months ago and I was like writing notes cuz it was just in front of me. But I was like, oh, where's my thing? And so it's just like this collaboration process is so tough to accomplish and there's so many different tools you can use and so many different things that can go awry. And then I love how you talked about, we dove into this deep learning side of things, discovered there were even more and more problems and then we've been working on Yeah.
On kind of solving those let's talk a little bit about your co-founders, cuz I know you have a couple co-founders you were talking about Hallie and how the two of you, let's talk a little bit about how the two of you met and then you just brought on Shawn as well, who's another co-founder.
Let's talk a little bit about how, like what are your different roles, who specializes in what different things and how do you find that working out? And then what are some tips you might give other listeners that are either. Hey, me and my buddy are working on something in the background while we still have our nine to five.
Or, hey, me and my buddy, we just went live with something. Or, Hey, even, we're tenured co-founders, but we're finding ourselves on the rocks a little bit. We need to fix this relationship. We need to work on some of these communication things. What are some tips you would give that you've seen be successful in your business as you cross collaborate and communicate with these other individuals?
[00:11:46] Jake: Let me sh, let me share the fact that I, my last business, I was the sole owner and I, it was me in charge and. I will tell you the thing that was the biggest trouble was not having a partner. It can seem great to own a hundred percent of something, but it's not, it. I would recommend everybody find a good partner or somebody that they can trust.
It's, it just works. And it works with trust right there, there's so many cliches around it, but it's true is you have to find people that fill. The gaps that you have in yourself. So it takes a little bit of of, hopefully self-awareness. So the first thing that I did when founding every day and going through this problem and looking for somebody was like I was able, I had the luxury.
Of knowing that I wanted a partner in a business because I needed somebody to be able to take up some of that extra effort. And I had a great advisor. Her name is Kate Del Hagan. She runs Oregon Sports Angels. She's amazing, phenomenal. Please everybody, go get advisors. She taught me this idea of an eight spoke wheel, and that eight spoke wheel was, you're at the center of it.
And you need to divide up all your needs into these spokes around you. Little pie pieces for anybody that played Trivial Pursuit is how I visualize it. And each one of those pie pieces is a different color and they represent a different aspect of a business that you need to fill in. And from an advisory group fill up with smart, intelligent people that know more than you and be aware of it from a co-founder standpoint.
Do the same thing. What am I good at? But also what do I like to do? What can I trust myself to do on a day-to-day basis? And then find somebody that does the other stuff that you don't wanna do, and lean on them and trust them. Cuz what I will say is like Hallie holy smokes. I don't know if we can curse on this.
I would curse if I could, but I'm not going to. But holy smokes I sound like a grandpa. She is so diligent, so smart, so able to process and get things done and write them down and do all those more task oriented things. That to me is the last thing I want to do. And if as a founder, Things that you don't like to do, trust me, it's the weirdest thing when you realize there are people that like to do those things.
Find that person. That's my recommendation.
[00:14:21] Chet: You're preaching to the choir here at the beginning of this year. Yeah. I said, I like the editing process, but I'm not an editor. I'm a sales guy. I gotta go find, I gotta run the business, I gotta do marketing, I gotta do finance, I gotta do operations.
I brought on an editor this year and yeah, holy smokes. Holy. Not only are they 10 times better at editing than I am just from au just audio quality alone. They're faster at it. And when I look at the time spend I was spending and what I have to pay them to do it, I'm actually 10 xing my ROI potential. Oh.
By going and doing other things. But it's a trust issue. I learned that very early on, and actually in indirect shout out to Dalton at Hatchet he was one of the people that said, look at the end of the day, you just, you gotta learn to lean on other people, but don't go hire someone for some big project right away.
Work on something with them. Yeah, go in, go and put a task in front of them and say, Hey, can we work on this? So that's what I was doing when I was scoping editors. I said, Hey, let's work on one episode. Let's see how it goes. I took that same episode to four other editors. Yeah I bit the bullet on the pricing to go pay four other people to do one episode.
But then I looked and I said, which one communicated with me the best? Which one showed the most drive, which one was on time, and which one delivered quality was actually my last. Thing that I cared about because I knew if they had the other three things, I could get them, I could get them, I could upskill them on the quality side of it.
And I found a guy, and it's like now we have this great relationship and he's just constantly churning content out for me. And so I love that you put it that way. It's such an important thing. If you're listening, you need to write that down. If there's something that you don't like to do in your business, as weird as it sounds, there is someone out there that's their favorite thing to do because it's so true.
Yes. Such a great takeaway.
[00:16:01] Jake: And I think that it lends itself also to the trap that you see all the time where people are like, oh, I need to replace myself. I need another me. It's you don't need another me, you need somebody. That's a compliment to you. And Chet you brought up another great point that I wanted to talk about, which is the idea of division of labor.
There's these basic concepts that are so good to have in your pocket, right? The, the old division of labor, Adam Smith or somebody laying it out was about like manufacturing matches. If you had one person trying to whittle down, chop down the tree, whittle it into a match stick, dip it into the right chemicals, make the book, it would take them, a day to make 10.
But if you have two people splitting it, somebody chopping down the trees and whittling it down, then somebody doing the books and the creation, you're gonna make a hundred in a day and you're gonna 10 x that ROI as you, if you wanna put it. So that's very important. And the last one is the equity side of it, right?
When you look at a partner and you think, oh no, I have this great idea and it could be big, is There's an old adage of, do you wanna own a hundred percent of nothing or 50% of something? Because 50% of something is a lot better. When you're talking about starting a business and finding people that you trust and that you can lean on and that you can drive towards the same goal and allow everybody to have that sense of ownership really goes a long way.
And not just the division of labor, but also in the sense of purpose and the, all of the things that you need to get through the troughs, not just the peaks.
[00:17:35] Chet: Yeah. And I, and I feel like bringing that to a founder, one, one caveat they would bring to that is yes, but the matchstick manufacturer has billions of dollars.
They can afford to divide that labor. But what's interesting right now, and correct me if you're saying things differently, but with everything that's going on in the economy, there are a lot of skilled people that are deciding to follow their passions. And to pay their bills, they're willing to do that skill.
They were getting paid on a nine to five to do on a contract basis. And so like content marketing's a great example. I don't like re I'm I like it because it's fun, but it's time consuming and I have three kids and a job and all this other stuff, right? And so repurposing content into a blog, into a newsletter, into a LinkedIn carousel, repurposing short form clips to create more short form content across different, creating Twitter threads, all that stuff from a source piece of material.
I could do it. But there are other people that are excellent content marketers who are currently out of work, and now they're going to sell pottery on Etsy, cuz that's actually their passion or whatever it is, right? But they still need to pay their bills, so they're willing to do contract work and it's very affordable.
It's a lot more affordable than paying $90,000 a year plus benefits, plus workers comp, insurance employee and liability insurance, all those things benefits to a content marketer full-time to just do the amount of work that you have. So I think there's a huge opportunity right now for founders to start using contractors and finding people that have skills that are looking to pick up d additional tasks that would not require them to be working in your business 40, 50 hours a week.
[00:19:05] Jake: Oh yeah. A hundred percent. I. There, the you're bringing up a situation that has a lot of dynamics to it. I will say, one thing to preach to the choir here, but nuance is very important for everybody to understand every situation. There's no magic pill, there's no magic moment.
There's very good guidelines, or as we used to say, like frames that you build around chaotic situations to keep them in. And To contract labor is really having that self-awareness as a business owner and a founder is important because you have to understand what's really important to now and applying it to the situation that you're in.
To shout out to Hatchet, they had a great point that, and shout out to my co-founder, Hallie that she's very good at, which is. We were just laying out our PLG motions and our go-to-market strategy and everything. It's you can talk to a senior leader at some company and they recommend these great ideas that are great.
They're phenomenal, they're proven. But is that relevant to your situation now? And do you have the budget now? You laid it out. I don't have billions of dollars. We're going out for investment to get there. So you have to digest what are the most important steps now? To get you to the next step, right?
The most I'll paraphrase author I love, but the most important step A Man Takes is his next one.
[00:20:33] Chet: I'm gonna have, get a quote. I'm gonna have to get a quote board. I gotta get a quote board up there. Now. I've been trying to figure out how to repurpose this TV for the podcast. I just I think I just figured out how, I'm just gonna get a second computer wire thing in there, and that's just gonna be my whiteboard quote.
I love that. I love it man. You bring up something interesting that I wanna segue into our next topic, which is typically like that investor approach. Cuz you're talking about, hatchet and some of the advisement there and things like that. And I know that currently, and I'm sure we can talk about this, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're raising a seed round, so you're approaching investors, you're having these conversations, you're getting advice from people in your community, you're taking things to the masses.
You're building those relationships. First, let's just talk about that experience. What are your, what's your sentiment behind it? What are you learning? And then maybe you can sh. Share a piece of feedback for the listeners, something that you go, Hey, three months ago when I started this process, I wish I would've known this.
This would've given me a better headstart. Let's give a little give a little feedback on the experience, and then let's share an insight with the listeners.
[00:21:33] Jake: Yeah, absolutely. To address one of your first points I would say that you get so much feedback from so many smart people, right?
And let's be honest, some people that. Don't really pay attention to what you're doing, and they're applying their own one size fits all solution. As a founder, you have to synthesize all of that information and decide, what is the best thing to take in, right? So again, there's no one size fits all.
But what I have found from asking lots of questions to lots of talented, lots of experienced people, do that first, measure twice, cut once. It's the, it's that old thing. If you can't tell, I spent time in a woodworking studio, but measure twice, cut once. It's really important and ask people around you.
The next thing is when you're going about it, the, you mentioned iterative pitch decks. You're gonna go with one thing and you're gonna learn. You need new information to, to come in and help you as you develop these conversations. So be open to input. But be rigid to your belief and your product if you believe in it, but be able to be iterative in the process the same way you would with product development. From an applicable standpoint, like things that I would actually apply and say, Hey, do this. It's talk to people and warm up the leads before you start actually raising. Get, practice your pitch.
Go through, make sure you have it timed down. Make sure it's short, make sure it's succinct. Make sure it touches on the points that you need to do, and then be very comfortable with the fact that you're gonna get a lot of nos, right? Rejection is part of the game. You've been in sales chat.
You gotta be comfortable with the nose and it's not always because your idea's bad. It can always be that you're talking to the wrong person where the thesis doesn't fit or they're don't have the money, or they're just generally not interested, or they woke up and had a bad day and something happened and they're just not in the right thing.
It, those things happen, but you have to approach it with that idea of, determination of learning, of critical thinking, and of being able to to speak to the room
[00:23:59] Chet: Yeah, it's, I think when people fail so often they think it's a skill thing and probably in a lot of cases it is. I've had discovery calls where I just go, man, I got my stuff rocked.
I gotta go, I gotta go read some discovery tips from Charles Muhlbauer or I gotta go figure this out. What makes me think about is the first time I tried to monetize my sales podcast when I had built a pretty big audience and I started taking sponsorship decks to people. You're, you were in the creative world.
This is a whole different sale than a B2B software, and just the questions I was asking was wrong. And, but over time I started understanding. You're talking to marketers. What are marketers metrics? You don't even understand that you need to go figure that out. And then I understood, oh, what's your PPC conversion rate?
How much are you spending on PPC every month? Let's talk about other partnerships you're doing. What's the ROI on that $10,000 corporate dinner that you just sponsored? We got eight leads. Okay. And how many people went to that dinner for a free steak to buy your product? People that are going to a dinner for a free steak to meet a cel LinkedIn celebrity are probably not in the market to buy your product, right?
They're probably not decision makers if they need a free steak. I started learning how to combat the narrative of what people thought they were supposed to do, but also understand their metrics and then use that as a source of truth for if their problem was their problem in marketing, or if it was a symptom of a bigger problem.
That was an upskill thing. But then there were a lot of times where I just realized that then I'd see something happen on LinkedIn. I'm like, that person quit. They quit a month after our conversation. No wonder they ghosted me. Because they weren't planning on being at the company that much longer, or, hey, their company just laid off half the marketing team.
Okay they probably weren't gonna invest 10 grand in a podcast if they were laying off half their marketing team. And so you call something really important out there that. It's all about having those gut checks with yourself and then to what extent you can review the game tape, review it, but it's not always a skill thing.
There are a lot of other factors that play when you get those nos. And I love that you called that out because I think founders can get too tough on themselves and go, man, I suck. Am I doing the right thing? My life and my livelihood is on the line. This is crazy. But it's it's not always that way.
There's the, Chris boss calls it the black swan. What's the thing that you don't know about that's going on? With your buyer or your prospect or your sponsor or investor.
[00:26:10] Jake: Yeah. Yeah. And I, no, and I love I think that gets back to that idea of nuance. The you hate to say it because it's not catchy and it's not the thing that sells, but, I tell everybody if somebody has an absolute solution they're lying to you or they're selling something.
That's just the truth of it. And nuance is very important. I speak to nuance. My my fiance, she she has like a tradition at the beginning of every year, she selects a word. And, it's a word to keep some sort of reflection on. And I tried it with her for the first year that, that we were together.
And I, I did nuance and I just paid attention to how often that came into our conversation. And what developed out of it was an understanding of everything we're talking about. That, if somebody's selling you a line. There's this perfect, easy solution that if you just get it, it does everything for you.
It's, it's that straight line that everything applies to. It's no, that's the absolute Es don't exist in the world. What exists is a frame, right? If you imagine drawing a framework and every decision that you're doing is this chaos, it's just bouncing off of this frame and nuances that thing.
So when you approach into, when you approach a new problem, when you approach a pitch, when you approach a sale or an investor or a new feature that you're developing, or the idea for a business. What you need to do is take it from one a listening standpoint, right? The you need to approach it in saying what are the variables and how can I isolate them and narrow them down?
And then how can I take okay, here's the problem that I'm seeing in those variables. Where does it ideally go? And you identify that vision and then as you start to work in, that there, that frame is like slowly narrowing. And you're gonna create a tighter frame.
It's never gonna be aligned, but it's gonna be a tighter frame for all of those problems that you approach. And I think to your point, Chet is, for founders that are approaching, like investment or any of these problems is you have to understand that you can only control. A little bit. You can only control your own elements.
You can't control what happened to them. You can't control what the market's doing. You can't, but you can adapt your situation to what's happening there. And that's the nuance approach is frustrating because it's oh my gosh, there's so many variables. Yeah. Being a startup founder, being a business owner is tough.
Yeah. It's time consuming. You have to be, the CFO the CEO, the CMO the c e o, the, the operations lead, the assistant. You gotta be at all at some points. And when you have co-founders, Hallie she's our COO and CMO, sometimes she's having a bad day, right? And you gotta make up for that and make sure that your team can trust you.
And you gotta be able to pick up the slack. And I think for growing a team, it's the same thing is, we having people is about, to me aside, trust, like you gotta have trust. It's about providing clarity in the communications and what you need. It's about establishing a sense of purpose. So you can share that when you don't know the absolute decisions that need to be made, that you're working towards the same general purpose.
And it's about establishing community and making sure that each member of your team has that shared trust in each other. And if you have clarity, purpose, and community in a business, it goes a long way to solving all that X factor work that you don't know how to handle.
[00:30:06] Chet: Yeah. I love it, Jake, this has been informative.
We're gonna close out today's episode. If anybody's interested in engaging with Jake or the everyday company, you can check out his company, the Everyday Company, at www.everydaycompany.co. You can also connect with them at linkedin.com/in/JMCKAEMPF. That is his LinkedIn handle. We appreciate you.
Stopping by and sharing all these insights and really digging deep onto some of these things that you've learned, some of the ways that you're working with your co-founders. For any of those that are repeat listeners or first time listeners, don't forget we publish new episodes every Tuesday at 9:00 AM Eastern time on all your favorite podcast platforms.
You can also connect with myself. And Hatch Adventure hatch Adventures further, we will have all the links to everything in the show description below. Jake again, really appreciate the time. Thank you so much and we'll see everybody on the next one. Talk soon. Thanks.