In today’s episode of The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the value of overcommunicating. Communicating effectively in a startup is super important to the success of not just your startup, but also the businesses of those you serve. And it’s up to the leadership of a startup to communicate effectively. In this week’s episode, Steli and Hiten talk about why you need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate, why overcommunication is usually the reason projects succeed, the most powerful thing about “beating the drum” and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic. 00:33 Why this topic was chosen. 01:10 Why you need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate. 01:59 Why overcommunication is usually the reason projects succeed. 03:13 Why you need to learn how to overcommunicate. 04:56 How Hiten writes more of his ideas down than share it with people. 06:37 How Hiten continues to beat the drum. 06:59 The most powerful thing about beating the drum. 07:40 An example of beating the drum. 08:33 Why you want to guide people to beat the right drum. 3 Key Points: You need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate.Whenever I see someone managing a team or project properly, it usually means they are doing one thing very well – overcommunicatingWhen people overcommunicate in projects, those projects always do well. [0:00:01] Steli: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli: And today on The Startup Chat, we’re going to talk about the value of over communicating or how to over communicate and why you want to do it all or maybe why you want to avoid it. So here’s the setup for this topic, Hiten. So there’s two sides to this, two reasons why I wanted to talk about this with you and why I felt this could be really valuable to our listeners. Number one, a lot of times when people ask me I get this question asked a lot, and I know you do too. Which is, how do you run a remote company? How do you run a fully distributed team? Isn’t it really challenging? Is it possible to do it well? And one of the core things I hear myself talking about again and again and again and again, is that I’ll say a lot of things that are important about running a distributed team or remote company with a great culture. But one of the things that I keep repeating when it comes to that is. You just need to be incredibly disciplined about how you communicate, you actually have to constantly over communicate, right? And I think that that’s just a muscle that’s good in any company, in any team. I don’t think this is just for remote companies. But then remote company, you can’t be lazy with it at all. You can’t get away with anything. If there’s any kind of lack of communication, things break down instantly. So I’m just keep repeating this theme a lot. And then the other thing that I notice is that there are people, whenever I see somebody do really well in managing a team or managing a project or championing something. It always goes back to them doing one thing particularly well, and that is that they over communicate. They state what needs to happen in a very clear way. They communicated in different channels and they keep repeating the message to keep everybody aligned and keep everybody on the same page as well as everybody remembering this thing that we’re trying to accomplish, the deadline that we have, the date, the reason why we’re doing things. And when people over communicate in projects, those projects always do well. They always do well. And whenever I see somebody managing a project, or a team, and I wonder well, I don’t hear much, there’s not much communication going on. They said big goals last quarter, but nobody ever repeated them. I don’t even remember what they are anymore. And I don’t know if they’re accomplishing them or not. There’s just not a lot of communication going on. Those projects always go bad. They never go well. So I am of the belief that when you deal with humans, you have to be great at communication in one part of communication, especially in team situations where many humans are involved,in that you need to learn to over communicate. Let me throw that out there. We’ve never talked about this before, because I’m dying to hear you’re probably going to say something that I didn’t expect. What’s your reaction to the topic of over communication? Is it good? Is it bad? What’s your take on it? [0:03:15] Hiten: Aargh. [0:03:16] Steli: I knew you would react this, like I knew it would be aargh. It meant something brilliant will follow. [0:03:25] Hiten: I used to and it’s publicly out there because I wrote about it. I used to over communicate in all the wrong ways. [0:03:35] Steli: Oh you mean “Hiten bombs” [0:03:38] Hiten: Yeah, that’s an over communication. It’s a form of over communication. And so that’s why I sighed. I’m like, all right dude, let’s do this. So I used to take every reaction and thought that I had in my head, not every but most of them and go shoot it off to my team or the team or people on the team have multiple businesses so it’d happen across many different areas. And it was out of excitement, more than anything else. I was just excited. I learned this thing, I should communicate it, I should let everyone know, I got to tell them so that they have the information I have, right? Of course. That made the message that I was sending everybody unclear. That made their work less disciplined, that made them distracted, that made them confused. I have changed and it was all the hard way or hard ways. And I’m still changing on some of the stuff. But now I write a lot more down. I used to have the need to go talk to someone about it. Now I write a lot more down. Like a lot. And sometimes I don’t share it with anyone. And they’re just notes about what’s in my head about the businesses or what’s going on with a certain thing, or what’s going on in the world out there, or what this competitor did, or what this friend told me or this advisor told me or this mentor, or this, whatever or you even, right? If I ask you something, anybody. And I write a lot more down, and that helps me keep my thoughts clear but my notes messy, if that makes sense. That’s cool because no one’s seen them. They’re out of my head, they’re not in my head, no one’s seen them. And then they naturally bubble up again. And they bubble up so that I’m just timely with communicating those things that are in my head that I took notes on, or were in my head that I took notes on. So, I know this is a little bit of a like, off the beaten path of the topic, because I’m going to get back to it before I hear your reaction to what I say. So that’s what I do now. And that helps me a lot to be clear, and how that relates to communicating or over communicating, or what I would probably more call repeating, beating the drum. [0:06:20] Steli: Beating the drum, yeah. [0:06:22] Hiten: I was told recently that, “Hey, Hiten continue beating that drum.” Just continue beating that drum. And this was very related to over communicate and things like that. I’m like, Okay, cool. I’m going to continue. This is from the general manager, Suneet. He’s our general manager at Crazy Egg and runs the business. And in the past, I would talk to him about stuff, and probably wasn’t as productive. But now I just got a drum to beat. I got the same thing, same tone, same tune, and I’m just beating it and he’s like, “Yeah, just keep beating that drum” I’m like, Okay, cool, right. That’s all I needed to hear. And I don’t think anything could be said more clearly to me if I say something, right. If someone says, “Hey, keep saying that.” Great, I could do that, that’s easy. Just tell me that I need to do it though, right? And he’s like, “Yeah, keep beating the drum.” So I got a couple drums I beat. And so the most powerful thing about this beating the drum concept, which some would call over communicating, others would call repetition is one thing. And it’s really powerful. It’s this idea that we need people in organizations, they don’t have to be the founder, CEO, leader necessarily, or even some manager that are going to beat the drum and keep repeating the thing, not in an annoying way, not always in the same way. But they’re just going to keep beating that drum because then it spreads throughout the organization and people start hearing it, they start believing whatever it is, and they start becoming it. And so a good example of this is if your business is basically not, like let’s say this is a problem that’s very common, let’s say that you have a lot of tech debt. So you have a lot of technical debt in your business, there’s a bunch of engineering, and a bunch of code that’s written that makes it so something that seemingly...