Marcelo Calbucci is an entrepreneur, innovator, technologist, and author. He’s been building software products for over thirty years, having sold his first software at age fourteen. He has worked at Microsoft (Exchange Server & Bing) and Amazon (People eXperience & Technology), leading software engineering, product, data science, and UX.
He has just released a book titled “The PRFAQ Framework.”
The book adapts Amazon Working Backwards’ PRFAQ Framework to work for you. It’s a complete system to develop the spark of an idea that helps you think, articulate, and inspire.
He has founded six startups in Seattle and London and launched a dozen tech projects.
He’s the inventor of eleven patents.
Marcelo has been a community builder in Seattle, organizing dozens of meetups, events, and conferences. He has written over one thousand blog posts and articles on his web-site and other tech publications.
Outside of tech and startups, Marcelo loves to cook elaborate meals for friends, run marathons (eight and counting), and travel with his wife and kids.
What you will learn
- Learn how the PRFAQ framework helps create a clear vision and strategy for any product or business idea, fostering collaboration across teams.
- Discover how AI tools like ChatGPT can be used to assist in research and brainstorming, but why human critical thinking remains essential for innovation.
- Understand how Marcelo’s adapted PRFAQ framework is more flexible and iterative, making it suitable for smaller businesses and startups.
- Hear how startups can use the PRFAQ framework to evaluate and decide on new business opportunities, even before launching.
- Gain insights into how the PRFAQ process can help refine ideas, solve real-world problems, and guide businesses through successful pivots when necessary.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:05 – 00:00:54
Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas show. Today, I have with me Marcelo Calbucci. Marcello is an entrepreneur, innovator, technologist, and author. He’s been building software products for over thirty years, having sold his first software at age fourteen. He has worked at Microsoft (Exchange Server & Bing) and Amazon (People eXperience & Technology), leading software engineering, product, data science, and UX.
He has just released a book titled “The PRFAQ Framework.”
Jeff Bullas
00:00:54 – 00:01:29
The book adapts Amazon Working Backwards’ PRFAQ Framework to work for you. It’s a complete system to develop the spark of an idea that helps you think, articulate, and inspire. He has founded six startups in Seattle and London and launched a dozen tech projects. He’s the inventor of eleven patents. Marcelo has been a community builder in Seattle, organizing dozens of meetups, events, and conferences. He has written over one thousand blog posts and articles on his web-site and other tech publications.
Outside of tech and startups, Marcelo loves to cook elaborate meals for friends, run marathons (eight and counting), and travel with his wife and kids. Marcello, welcome to the show, it’s great to have you here.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:01:29 – 00:01:35
Thank you for having me, Jeff, and I didn’t know it was your birthday, so happy birthday. Thank you.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:35 – 00:01:40
Yeah, I’m 35 again, um, been 35 for the last 33 years. So yeah,
Marcelo Calbucci
00:01:40 – 00:01:41
sounds good.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:44 – 00:02:30
So, Marcello. You’ve got quite a rich heritage. You’re of Italian heritage. You’ve actually, I think were born and raised in Brazil, and now you live in Seattle. So, um, I’m always intrigued by people’s stories, in other words, what brought them to where they are today. Marcela, you’re obviously a, a, basically a born entrepreneur and you’ve been living and breathing the digital tech in the digital tech industry. So where did this all start? This was there when you were a young child, a teenager, was there a curiosity, um. About technology, where did this curiosity about tech start?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:02:32 – 00:03:01
Yeah, so basically, you know, it’s, it’s a story of, of many kids, um, you know, when I was a teenager, 1213, I got really curious about computers. It was the 80s, so computers were not prevalent in people’s households, uh but I was lucky that my father, you know, worked in technology, telecommunications, so he always brought home interesting pieces of gadgets, um, and I got my first computer at age 13.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:03:01 – 00:03:31
And I love it, I fell in love with it at the time, there wasn’t a lot to do with computers, right, you couldn’t connect to the internet, there weren’t that many video games and like at one point you’re like, well, I have to code this thing to do something interesting, so you learn to code and you start developing software and I just fell in love with, you know, solving problems through software, right, so that’s how it set me off on this journey, um, working tech companies and startups, basically software is my weapon.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:31 – 00:04:13
Right. So, um, yeah, well, you’ve been given a gift that I wasn’t given, right? So I started to use computers in the 80s as well, but I needed programs and frameworks for me to use, and I needed a nice friendly user interface because I tried to actually do, you know, programming using basic. And it just made my brain turn to mush and my eyes glazed over. So, um, I really have not tried to program since. I don’t know if I ever will, but, um, and I, and, you know, for me, just that sort of gift in a technology world is something that’s quite precious. So, and obviously you’ve used it to good effect.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:04:15 – 00:04:42
Yeah, I think things have evolved quite a bit as well. Like if you would try to learn how to code today, it would probably be easier. There’s a lot more tools, uh, a lot of software that assists you on like writing the code, even Chat GPT like you can ask chat GPT to write a piece of code for you, you copy and paste into, you know, another interface and you run it. I mean, it might not work exactly the way you expected, but like to get started it’s very useful.
Jeff Bullas
00:04:43 – 00:04:59
So you. Use computers and software coding to actually solve problems, right, and so, and you’ve been involved in doing startups, so you’re at 14, you write some software, you, who did you sell the software to at age 14?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:05:00 – 00:05:29
Well, the first buyer of my software was my dad. So he asked me to write a software to catalog all his vinyl collections. Uh, so not only I wrote the software, but I typed in, he probably had like 400, 500, you know, vinyls and I typed in all the data, all the songs and all the musicians and the albums and like we could easily search and index everything. So he was the first buyer of my software.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:29 – 00:05:32
Right. Well, that’s, it’s very convenient. So I hope you got a good deal.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:05:33 – 00:05:39
Yeah. Yeah, when you were a teenager, you know, like, any money is good money. Yeah, I know.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:39 – 00:05:58
Well, my dad was a plumber, so I actually just used to go and dig holes for him during my school holidays. So that was my, um, I didn’t do any programming for him. But, OK, so you, you’re into tech. So, what was the next major step that came along? Did you decide obviously to go to university and study technology?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:05:59 – 00:06:40
Yeah, so I always felt that technology could solve a lot of uh people’s problems, my personal problems, professional problems, um all kinds of problems, so uh I had this passion of figuring out how to use software. Um, to address, my family is very entrepreneurial, like they had a lot of small business, my mom had a PR agency, my uncle had an insurance agency, and in the 80s, early 90s, there wasn’t a lot of software there, so I started building software for them and got that satisfaction of seeing it work for them, right? uh and so I went to computer science, got a degree in computer science, shortly after that.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:06:40 – 00:07:11
Uh, Microsoft went to Brazil in the late 90s to hire people to come to Seattle to work here and this is how I ended up in Seattle, um as part of that recruiting program. um and I worked at Microsoft for seven years as a software engineer before deciding that really I was more of an entrepreneur and I needed to do more innovative things, um, so I left and I was a founder and a startup leader for almost 20 years.
Jeff Bullas
00:07:11 – 00:07:15
Right, so what was your first startup? You’re in, I just started in Seattle.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:07:16 – 00:07:56
Yes, so my first startup was, I tried to convince Microsoft to do it, actually, uh, it was the early 2000s and the web was just exploding, um, and I wanted. To create a system where it was really easy for small businesses and for people to build websites, you know, in the early 2000s, if you wanted to build a website, you had to learn how to program, you had to learn HTML and CSS and JavaScript, and you need to, if you wanted to have a database, you need to learn SQL and all the tech tools out there, and I felt that was not necessary. I’ve been building websites for my family for a long time.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:07:56 – 00:08:34
And I felt like I could build a tool where anyone could build any website without doing anything. Uh, now you have tools like Squarespace and Wix and Webflow that allow you to do that. At the time there was nothing. So my first startup was actually that, um, in the beginning was to build any website, then we narrowed down to build family websites, a website about, you know, a wedding or a baby or a family. Um, that you want to publish articles. This was before social media as well. So if you want to share stories or pictures with your family, there weren’t really mechanisms to do it back then. So that was my first startup.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:35 – 00:08:55
OK. So, for me, a lot of websites are built with WordPress, and there’s been a lot of competitors for that, but WordPress still has a huge installed base, doesn’t it, around the world. I think it’s in the hundreds of millions of websites. So you, did you start at a similar time to WordPress?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:08:55 – 00:09:31
Yes, we started very similar times. Um, it was a time there was an explosion of new ideas around the web. Um, Squarespace started around the same time as well, and we started at the same time as well, uh, and they became very successful companies. My company didn’t because we moved into families and then Facebook came along a couple of years later. And like families didn’t need to have a website anymore, they could simply share on Facebook, share their story, share their pictures, share their videos, uh, build community, um, so, so that was what disrupted my first startup.
Jeff Bullas
00:09:32 – 00:09:52
So let’s fast forward to the inspiration behind PRFAQ, which is your new book. Tell us a bit about, so what was the inspiration for that, and I believe it could have been started at Amazon. Tell us where that inspiration came from for the book, um, let’s find out more about that framework.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:09:53 – 00:10:45
Yeah, I was an entrepreneur for a long time, working with startups for a long time and innovators. Uh, in 2022, I joined Amazon to lead a new team uh for a new product at Amazon and uh Amazon is very peculiar. It has lots of frameworks that were invented and used internally. Uh, one of these frameworks is the PRFAQ, which stands for Press release and frequently asked questions, uh, and it’s part of their working backwards. Um, practices and you know, I was exposed to the PRFAQ and you, you sit in a meeting and they provide you with a six-page document and you read the document in silence, um, and everyone is reading the document and only after that 20 minutes, we start talking about the project. Uh, so the PRFVQ is a way to capture, you know,
Marcelo Calbucci
00:10:46 – 00:11:21
An innovation or an idea or initiative and to discuss the merits of it, right, to decide if we should do it or not. Um, and I was like after the 2nd or 3rd 1 that I was participating like the first few weeks at Amazon, I was like, huh, this is really interesting. Maybe founders, you know, should use this to capture their ideas. Uh, then I realized, wait a second, this is not about founders, this is about any kind of innovation project or initiative because it’s a really good tool to uh discover uh debate and decide on a strategy and a vision.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:11:21 – 00:11:50
It’s not a planning tool, right? It’s not like a framework to decide what to do, like OKRs, for example, or, um, you know, a brainstorming tool, uh, like design thinking, um, it is a tool really to focus on strategy and vision to make sure that everyone is aligned and agreeing on like, that’s a direction we should move towards and I felt it was brilliant, so I kind of like really fell in love with it, right, so I use extensively at Amazon.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:11:50 – 00:12:13
And when I left a couple of years later, I was like, I want to evangelize this framework. So initially, it wasn’t supposed to be a book, it was just supposed to be a series of articles that I was going to write and tell everyone about it, uh, were very little written about PRFEQ uh and then it grew into a book, um, because I felt there was a lot of things that I could uh include there.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:14 – 00:12:42
So, this is the concept of Amazon, so, obviously, it sounds like you’ve actually made your own, I suppose, evolution of that. Right. So, what, what was, what have you, you’ve taken this core idea, which worked, and obviously worked well for Amazon, and used for Teams. And one, a friend of mine, she used to work for well, does AWS and she’s talked about this framework, which I’ve looked at. I haven’t really applied it.
Jeff Bullas
00:12:42 – 00:13:05
So what have you, you’ve taken this core idea at Amazon and say this is really good for a whole range of things, not just projects or an idea within a new product line, for example, at Amazon, which I think is one of the reasons they developed it. So what, what did, how did you evolve that, um, and or is it better for you to describe what the PR FAQ framework is?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:13:06 – 00:13:32
Yeah, let me, let me quickly describe what the, the, the document, the PRFQ document looks like, uh, and, and how I adapted it from the Amazon style to make it more useful, more practical for other people, right? So, the PRAQ is a six-page document, right, so the first page is a press release, so you write a press release that you’re not going to send to the press.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:13:32 – 00:13:59
Uh, but you write on the present tense as if the product or the business or the service was already here, right, uh, or a program or anything that you are talking about, um, so you make it, uh, like a visionary statement about this product, like today we are launching blah blah blah, we are announcing blah blah blah, uh, we’re releasing blah blah blah, and you explain what it is, explain the problem that you’re solving, how you’re solving, you include some fictional customer quotes, so that’s your
Marcelo Calbucci
00:14:00 – 00:14:54
Press release, right? Um, then you have one page of customer FAQs. So imagine that a customer of that product would ask some questions like, how do I get started? What is the price? Do I need to import my data, uh, or am I eligible to participate in this program? So you write one page of that all fictional, right, because you’re painting a vision of the future, uh, and then you have 4 pages of what’s called internal FAQs. And what these internal FAQs are, they are answering questions about the feasibility, uh, the viability, the problem, the solution, they go to market, uh, distribution of this product, some hard choices about what we are not doing what we are doing, and then you use the six pages, um, to have review sessions with your peers, your team, uh, your leadership, stakeholders in the organization.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:14:54 – 00:15:36
Um, to adjust and discover things that you haven’t thought about and then find gaps in your logic, right, but always at a very strategic level, right, like you’re not talking about the details of the activities that you’re going to do, you want to make sure of what you’re doing. Uh, is valuable for the organization, is valuable for the customer, uh, and it’s worth pursuing as an opportunity, as compared to all other opportunities that you have on your table, right? So, you keep on that high level. So what’s different from what I wrote in my book and what Amazon does is Amazon really doesn’t have a method for you to create a PRFVQ and for you to review PRFAQs.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:15:36 – 00:16:17
Um, because it’s part of the culture, like everyone knows how to do that there, or learn how to do it by observing other people doing it. So I codify a method to do that. Uh, and on the document side, I simplify a few things as well. So Amazon has a lot of resources, so they can spend months working on a PRF EQ do custom research, uh, user research, you know, qualitative research that as a Founder or a product manager or a program leader in a small organization, you don’t have that many resources, so you have to deal with less, uh, to present that that document. So that’s how it differentiates from what Amazon does.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:18 – 00:16:51
So the thing I’m thinking about too here is talking about brainstorming, peers, reviews, everything else, um. So, with the rise of Chay BT and its evolution, in terms of almost like tapping into the wisdom, knowledge, information of the planet, in other words, it’s collected and curated and there’s still um. Uh, you know, all the information that’s uploaded to the web, so AI Chat GBT wouldn’t exist without that. So could you use AI or Chat GPT to help you accelerate developing a PRFAQ?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:16:53 – 00:17:39
Uh, yes and no. So yes, you can accelerate if you use it the right way, meaning if you use JTPD to uh do some research for you or to evaluate gaps in some of your thinking, that’s great. But the purpose of a PRFEQ is that as you write, as you’re answering questions and you’re writing the press release, like you are thinking through the problem, right? Like it helps open your mind to like, oh, I haven’t thought about that. Now I need to think about it, right? So you spend your time like processing and digesting thinking critically about your idea until you arrive at a coherent proposal. If the chat deputy is doing that work for you, the chat deputy is doing the thinking.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:17:39 – 00:18:13
Uh, not you, uh, you’re not learning how to articulate ideas, you’re not finding some, uh, wedges in the market or the opportunity that the chattyPT will not think about. ChattyPT is great at answering common knowledge and average. Content, right, but not thinking outside of the box, um, it’s a funny way of saying it because it is a box actually, right? Like you said, it’s based on the content that is available out there. So if you want to innovate, sometimes sharing GPT is not as good as copying stuff that already exists.
Jeff Bullas
00:18:14 – 00:18:44
Mhm. Yeah. So, in terms of, you know, copying what already exists, in other words, what I, what I quite often like about chain AI actually comes up with combinations that I hadn’t thought of. In other words, it, and then it comes down is the art of writing the right prompt to actually almost help you brainstorm. So, have you had any experience with that in terms of using it to brainstorm PR, you know, using chat to brainstorm with your framework?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:18:45 – 00:19:08
Yeah, so you, you have to uh pick apart, you know, the PRFAQ and segment the sections, right? So you might be thinking about, I want to solve a problem for veterinarians, um, let’s say, um, and if you don’t have a lot of experience with veterinarians, we don’t know what problem you’re going to solve, uh, you can use chattyPT to say like what are likely problems that
Marcelo Calbucci
00:19:08 – 00:19:36
Veterinarians have and GPT is going to give you an answer, but you shouldn’t really trust it, right? Like after they give you some answers, you should go out there and figure out if that’s true or not, right? And it’s not only on the webs, you should talk with veterinarians to understand if that’s a valid concern or not, right? on the solution side of the house, that’s where things get more interesting. So you can go to ChatDT and say veterinarians spend a lot of time doing accounting.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:19:36 – 00:20:06
Right, like, how can I solve this problem for them? ChatterBT actually is going to be pretty good at giving you some ideas, uh, but more likely than not, these ideas, even if you think they are new and innovative, these ideas are are likely, uh, already out there, right, um, so like, are you really creating something new? Um, the best way to do that is actually to talk to your customers, to talk with other people, to think critically about it, to create hypotheses and go test those hypotheses.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:07 – 00:20:28
So, let’s have a look at some practical examples of the use of, um, you know, using PRFAQ outside of Amazon that companies have taken the model, taken the framework, and applied it. Are there any, can you provide some uh successful case studies of this model being applied, this template framework being applied outside of Amazon?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:20:28 – 00:21:16
Yeah, absolutely, uh, I know many, many startup founders and many startups that have adopted uh PRFAQ as part of the planning process, right? So, uh, objectives and key results became very popular, uh, maybe over the last 5 years or so, and lots of startups use that to do planning. Um, however, there is always something missing when you do OKRs, which is what is the story behind why we’re doing, what’s the purpose of this, and this is where PRFAQ fits in. So I think startups that have adopted PRFAQ as uh preliminary work before you do your quarterly planning or annual planning, right, so people can debate um and discover strategies and visions that sound interesting and then use that.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:21:16 – 00:22:07
You know, as a guide to say like, yeah, let’s pursue that. Uh, we already have a vision and strategy in place, um, and now we can have our quarterly planning that we define the activities and the objectives and the key results that we want to measure, um, from that. So I think startups are using that. Uh, a more concrete example is a friend of mine, um, he’s a founder, um, he spent a year deciding which startup to found next. Uh, and each idea that he had, he would write a PRFAQ, uh, and review with a few folks, um, and to decide if it was worth pursuing or not. So one of the advantages of PRFAQ is, if you cannot write a coherent story about a new startup or a new idea, it probably is not a viable one, probably not one worth pursuing.
Jeff Bullas
00:22:08 – 00:22:18
So what if you actually had an idea, you started it and things aren’t quite, you’re getting a little bit of traction, but not much, could you basically retrofit PRFAQ into it?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:22:19 – 00:22:53
Yeah, you can ideally write the PRPQ before you start anything, right? So you, you, it’s helping you find the gaps in your thinking, like, do I really understand the problem? Do I really understand the customer, do I really understand the solution, how to get out there? Uh, but if you’re already halfway there and you’re finding some gaps, it’s still worth going back and saying, can I write a coherent story?” You know, uh uh about this opportunity that we’re pursuing, and often what you find is like, you find there is an adjustment, like a course correction on, you know, the direction that you’re going.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:22:53 – 00:23:18
Um, so that level of clarity is very valuable, particularly if you have a team that you’re working with, right? There is nothing more than a team where each person is thinking slightly differently about the project and going in a slightly different direction, so it creates a lot of friction and you have to have a lot of meetings to like realign and clarify things, uh. Um, that’s a problem that, you know, if you start from PFAQ, you usually don’t have as much.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:20 – 00:23:54
The test in any marketplace with being an entrepreneur is actually, OK, so you can have all the planning, you can get the framework, you can do the PRFAQ and you go to market and people, you know, there’s a big yawn. Um, so like, no one’s, you know, it’s crickets, no one’s buying. Um, so quite often companies, a lot of startups do pivot. Like, I’ve heard that quite often. That it takes two pivots to get the right, you know, product to market. So, how do you use PRFAQ for maybe to help you in pivoting, is that because it’s a living document rather than a static document?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:23:55 – 00:24:15
It’s not a living document. The idea is once you establish a vision and a strategy, basically, you set out the direction in the North Star for a project, uh, you pursue that until you decide that it’s time to pivot or something is not working, um, and you need to establish a new strategy, so you write a new document.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:24:15 – 00:24:43
Um, and that document becomes the, the new thing. The idea is you don’t want to spend months working a PRFAQ. It’s really a document that you should be doing like in a week or two, like to bring things together, like to, to converge on the ideas and the decisions that you are making for what you’re going to pursue next, and you go and you execute and then you’ll learn what’s working and what’s not, and then you come back and you’re like, you were just a strategy in the vision if you need to, right? Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:44 – 00:24:55
So let’s go back to um your evolution of the PRFAQ. So is yours more about storytelling, um, in other words, weaving a narrative into the PRFAQ. Is that the main change you’ve made?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:24:56 – 00:25:24
No, that’s, that’s like the Amazon. Amazon is about a narrative of the same thing. Um, I think what my proposal is PRFAQ should be lighter. Uh, and accommodate assumptions and hypothesis, even if you don’t have the information, and then you go and you build and you test and you bring back and adjust if needed, right, on Amazon because it’s a big company, you know, they prefer to have a PREQ that is more um accurate.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:25:25 – 00:25:49
So it takes longer to discover the information that needs to go into a PRVQ before we start executing. Um, so the way Jeff Bezos talks about is like start slow so you can move fast later, right? Um, but for many companies, you can do the opposite, like you can do uh the the fast thing now, uh, and learn and adjust as you go, so it becomes more iterative because the
Jeff Bullas
00:25:49 – 00:26:40
The challenge is, you know, with startups versus Amazon, Amazon can just almost. It’s got, you know, almost bottomless pits of money. In other words, you can go slow, um, you can invest a lot of money like, you know, um, there’s a lot of startups that do that and still fail. Um, so certainly when they started his, um, I think, I’m trying to think of what, um, his business was with the AI product, raised $1.5 billion and then got, you know, taken over by Microsoft. So despite, um, enormous almost bottomless bits of, you know, money pit. Um, so, So what you’re saying is Your PIFAQ is a little bit more, you gotta move a little bit faster, not slow. In other words, test, test faster, in other words, be more iterative and quicker, is that right?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:26:40 – 00:27:20
Yeah, that’s right, that’s right, and like I said, Amazon has a lot of money, so, you know, a PRP and Amazon might be talking about 200 people working on a new project, right, if it is approved, uh, at a startup, you might be talking like you and your co-founder, you know, deciding to pursue an idea, so you don’t want to spend 3 months talking about it, like, but it’s good to spend a couple of weeks talking about it, right? Uh, before you jump into the idea, just to make sure that the two of you are aligned and you found the gaps that you don’t understand, and it’s OK to have gaps, right, as long as you know they are there, um, so, so that’s what I, I talk more on the book.
Jeff Bullas
00:27:21 – 00:27:29
So if you woven a little bit of MVP, minimal viable product into the PRFAQ, is that what you’re saying as well? Yeah,
Marcelo Calbucci
00:27:29 – 00:28:11
yeah, absolutely, and you know, like there’s multiple stages for PRAQ. You can write your first PRAQ which is, you know there is a problem, but you don’t know if the solution is going to work or not. You have a hypothesis about a solution, right? Uh, so that’s the MVP stage, uh, of a product, for example, you’re going to build something, you’re going to put it out there and you’re gonna test and see if it works. When it works, right, uh, when you found a product that works and is addressing customer needs, you can write another PRFAQ to say like, OK, how we go big on this, right, so it’s talking about the strategy is more focused on, on go to market and distribution and expansion of the product line versus, you know, proving a hypothesis about the solution.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:12 – 00:28:46
So let’s have a look at, so, today, you’ve, you’ve done startups, you’ve developed the, you’ve written the book, which is great, you know, well done. Writing a book is not easy. Um, um, it’s basically, you know, and then you get an editor turns up and you give them 300 pages, and they look at it and they, you know, remove 100 pages, you know, and like 30%. And it’s like it’s like, you know, Stephen King said, it’s like killing your children, um, because you gave birth to the words and the ideas, so sometimes, so did you have an editor involved to help you?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:28:46 – 00:28:56
I did, I did, yes. And when you get that copy back from the editor, it takes 24 hours to open the copy because you’re afraid of what you’re going to see.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:57 – 00:29:18
Yeah, exactly. So it can be a very painful process, but it is very, very necessary. And I’ve also discovered that editing your own work, um, even though some people say you should do it, I think, well, you’re obviously gonna do some editing. But I think, uh, you need to hand it over to an expert who’s, you know, very good at editing, and, uh, shut your eyes and hang on.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:29:19 – 00:29:20
Yeah, that’s right,
Jeff Bullas
00:29:21 – 00:29:33
yes. So, you’ve done the book, uh, is this a framework for a business as well that you’re doing? What are you doing today in the entrepreneurial world apart from writing books and writing blog posts?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:29:34 – 00:30:23
Yeah, so, you know, right now I’m spending my time evangelizing, you know, this framework, I think it’s a great framework, I think it’s going to help people build better products, build better businesses, uh better programs. I also think it works for the nonprofit and the government agencies and research institutions. Uh, because a lot of what they do is like paint a vision of the future and request grants, right, or support or approval, uh, and the PRFAQ is really good at that, right? So, uh, regardless if you’re doing for yourself or for a big organization, um, you know, it works on getting people around an idea and, you know, inspiring people um as well. So my primary focus right now is to evangelize the framework, uh, and, and promote the book.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:24 – 00:30:32
So as the next step of generating a course, doing coaching, what’s the next step after the evangelism stage?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:30:32 – 00:31:15
Yeah, uh, definitely, I’m, I’m thinking about putting a workshop together to teach people how to do this and how to use this framework. Uh, I also have a few ideas around AI and how AI can be used to help. you think through your PRFAQ and your product idea and your business idea but not do the writing for you, right? So you can imagine AI as a coach is a great tool today uh and like you mentioned that you like that, I use like that, uh, instead of asking you to do the work, you ask AI to help you think through the work or evaluate your work. I think that’s a great approach to that. So I have a few ideas on that space.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:16 – 00:31:23
So, um, have you, are you currently running a startup or you’ve sold them all and just said I want to write a book, is that what happened?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:31:23 – 00:31:42
Yeah, uh, that’s what happened. Yeah, right now it’s all the book. Uh, I, I was going to do the startup with writing the book, but writing the book took longer than I expected and more effort than I expected, so I put all my startup initiatives on, on the back burner to focus on the book for now.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:43 – 00:32:00
So with the book, did you sort of someone approach you and say, this is a good idea, you should write it, or, you know, a publisher turned up and knocked on your door, or an agent and said, Heard about what you’re doing, we want you to write a book, or did you decide to write the book and then go and look for a publisher or an agent?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:32:00 – 00:32:25
Yeah, I, uh, I, I decided to write the book by myself, basically, I always wanted to write a book. Uh, I think writing is, uh, it’s a great way to learn. Uh, and to teach, of course. So I, I took the time this time around to like sit down, write the book, you know, put a lot of ideas on paper, uh, and publish it. So that’s how the genesis of the book came to be.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:26 – 00:33:05
Right. Yeah, because the ability to self-publish today is actually, you know, 20 years ago before Amazon self-publishing was more difficult, um, and then you had to put it in paper form whereas self-publishing day. Um, and I’ve had a good friend of mine, you know, Mark Schafer, that, uh, worked with publishers, and then he had a real struggle trying to get the rights to his own book back from them so he could take control of it. Yeah. So. Alright, so can, just to wrap things up, um, can you distill what the PR FAQ framework is with, you know, for each page or each step, can you outline that for us?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:33:06 – 00:33:48
Yeah, you know, the, the, the best way that I like to think the, the overarching way that I like to think about PRVQ is, is a tool to help you discover, debate, and decide on a vision and a strategy, right? Uh you still own that vision strategy, you as the person writing the PRFAQ but you collaborate with lots of people, you know, that have different expertise. To, uh, infuse the PRFAQ uh with the right answers, right, or with the right assumptions. So, uh, by the time it comes for you to do the planning and execution of your idea, you know, you are not lost, you basically have a direction.
Jeff Bullas
00:33:48 – 00:34:00
Right. So it’s important, especially if you’ve got a team, you’re going to actually bring them along with you because you’ve mentioned the power of narrative and a story to, to bring your team with you. How, how important is that?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:34:00 – 00:34:44
It’s very important. 11 of the benefits of PRAQ is actually, you know, in traditional, uh, project planning, you, you do a lot of work and then you, you go to your manager or to your executive or to your peers and you go like, tada, here is the document, let me present this slide and the presentation, you know, and like I’m trying to sell you on an idea with the PRFAQ it is not like that because everyone was involved in the creation. Uh, of the document, right? So they revised it multiple times. They edited multiple times and they were part of it. So there was a sense of ownership. Um, so collaboration is, is, it’s built into the method to create a PRP. Right.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:44 – 00:34:48
So what you’re talking about is you’re not trying to sell something, you’re trying to educate people.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:34:48 – 00:35:00
Oh, you’re trying to educate yourself. You, you’re trying to learn what is the right thing to do, what I don’t know, like what are the gaps in the information that I have that are gonna come to bite me later.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:01 – 00:35:22
So for me too, I actually write to learn. Writing is such a powerful way to learn because you’ve got to make sense of what’s inside your head, which is all these ideas, different things. To put them down on papers that makes sense to an audience, um, is the art and science of writing, isn’t it?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:35:23 – 00:35:46
Yes, it is, and, you know, a lot of people are scared of writing, they feel like I’m going to have writer’s block, uh, the good thing is the PRA is quite structured. So the writing comes more naturally, right? Like you don’t have to be a creative writer to write a PRFAQ right? And at the end, what you end up with is a narrative, is a story that actually makes sense.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:47 – 00:36:05
Do you provide a free framework, like a PDF that people can download so they can actually see what the. looks like I have a website www.pfaq.com or
Marcelo Calbucci
00:36:05 – 00:36:12
you can search Google for PRFQ and I have examples, I have templates. I have other resources available on the website as well for people to learn how to do it.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:14 – 00:37:00
So we’ll share that link in the files. So, the other thing I’ve just read, the most fascinating book, um, which was written by two AI scientists which talked about that, um, is that we live in a world of setting objectives. And especially we start and basically a Power FAQ whatever is actually going, I want to get from them. To Z or A to B, right? So a big project, it’s complicated, and with our imperfect humanity, the reality is that what you thought was going to exist, the stepping stones are actually, it’s not straight ahead, it’s to the left or it’s to the right. Um, and they use an example of like, the journey to achieve a big objective is actually more like,
Jeff Bullas
00:37:00 – 00:37:26
Um, following your curiosity into the, yeah, so they use an analogy of you, you go out into a lake, it’s covered with mist and all you can see is one stepping stone in front of you, which is something you may be curious about. So they’re going that almost, and yet, and he’s talked to people like, you know, Steve Jobs, uh, he didn’t start out with building a big company like Apple is today. His idea was, um he got really bored.
Jeff Bullas
00:37:26 – 00:38:14
And uh he said I’m doing stuff I really don’t like, I’m wasting my parents’ money, they sent me to university. So he actually, he actually stopped going to classes and what he did was he actually went to classes that were interesting to him, and then discovered calligraphy and out of that came Apple. Yeah, and there’s and also I mentioned before, there’s Joseph Campbell. Um, who wrote the hero’s journey, which is the inspiration behind Star Wars, which I mentioned to you earlier, and it’s a story arc, the hero’s journey. And he said, there’s no great purpose in life, he said, really, except to follow your bliss, which is what Steve Jobs did. He actually followed, he actually just took the next step into what was of interest to him. How does PRFAQ fit maybe into that philosophy?
Marcelo Calbucci
00:38:14 – 00:39:01
Yeah, that’s, that’s great, you know, um, I think the, the way I would approach that is, and it’s what I recommend in the book is you don’t want to paint a vision that is too far into the future, like what you want is what is the next stone that you’re going to climb to, right, so think about 6 months, 12 months, maybe 18 months, uh, but not a 10 year vision, right, like, um, so you, you. You use the PRFAQ by building this, what is the next thing that we’re gonna do, uh, that feels like a mission was accomplished, right? Uh, it’s not so small that it just feels like a few activities that we got done, it’s more like a little bit of a mission, right? Uh, and then once you get there.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:39:01 – 00:39:09
Did it work? Maybe it didn’t work, maybe it worked better than expected. Then you can think about what is the next mission on this journey.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:09 – 00:39:41
OK. So in other words, don’t overthink it, don’t rush too far into the future, just make it a little bit more, uh, chunk it down so you actually, you’re not trying to predict the future, because basically a big objective way out in the future, like, Um, I don’t know if Uber had that vision in mind. Quite often they didn’t. Um, Amazon is a different beast to what it was when it was just going to be a bookstore. So, um, so I think the funds are in dreaming and following what’s interesting, and as Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss. Yeah. So yeah,
Marcelo Calbucci
00:39:42 – 00:39:42
That’s right.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:43 – 00:40:02
So just to segue off that, um, if you had all the money in the world, um, what is the, what would you do every day, or range of things you would do every day that would bring you joy and would be following your bliss. Um, I’d be interested to see what that looks like for Marcello.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:40:03 – 00:40:18
Yeah, that’s an interesting question and my answer is going to be very boring, because I really like software as a way to solve people’s problems. Um, so if I had more money, I would think of more problems that I could solve with software,
Jeff Bullas
00:40:19 – 00:40:19
right,
Marcelo Calbucci
00:40:19 – 00:40:26
uh, and address the needs in the market, both for professionals and personal needs.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:27 – 00:41:02
OK, that’s fantastic. And, um, that’s one of the questions I always ask at the end, is OK. So, um, and it sounds like you’ve been doing it for most of your life anyway, so you have been following your bliss, um, from selling your bliss to your father first off back when you were 14. Yeah, that’s right, yeah. Masala, thank you very much for sharing your story, um, your experiences and your expertise, and um it’s a framework I think would be useful to all of us. I’m certainly gonna check it out a bit more, um, and thank you very much, it’s been an absolute blast. I’ve learned a lot. Thank you.
Marcelo Calbucci
00:41:02 – 00:41:04
Thank you, Jeff. It was a pleasure to be here.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:05 – 00:41:05
Thank you.