What happens when you stop trying to serve everyone, and start focusing on the right customers?

In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with Corey Quinn (yes, really) to talk about specialization, scaling service businesses, and the power of saying no. From growing a digital agency from $20M to $200M to escaping founder-led sales, this conversation dives into practical lessons for founders, marketers, and leaders looking to scale with intention.

Show highlights:

(00:00) Specialization Mindset

(00:21) Show Intro and Sponsor

(01:18) Two Corey Quinns

(02:39) Guest Background and Book

(04:41) Scaling a Service Agency

(06:28) Inbound Limits and Outbound Shift

(10:21) Cookie Gifting Breakthrough

(12:12) Making Gifting Work

(19:09) Retention Through Specialization

(25:20) Founder Bottlenecks and Wrap Up

Links:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyquinn/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should. In this episode, Ahmed Bebars, Principal Engineer at The New York Times, joins Corey Quinn to talk about real-world cloud decisions, Kubernetes complexity, and the constant trade-off between building your own solutions and buying existing ones. From home labs to enterprise architecture, they unpack what actually works, and what engineers often get wrong.

Show Highlights:
(00:19) Intro
(01:09) From Imposter Syndrome
(06:34) Honest Community Feedback
(09:29) EKS Versus ECS Debate
(21:32) Home Lab Reality Check
(22:40) Build vs Buy Long Game
(28:04) Focus on Core Business
(34:35) Uptime Tradeoffs and Standards
(39:41) Networking and IPv6 Debate
(41:28) Wrap Up and Where to Find

Links:
Ahmed's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmedbebars

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com

What happens when cloud economics meets the messy reality of business, AI, and human behavior?

Corey and J.R. Storment unpack why cloud cost management is less about math and more about psychology, the real difference between FinOps for AI vs. AI for FinOps, and why automation still struggles with edge cases (despite all the hype). Along the way, they explore multi-cloud complexity, the rise of consumption-based pricing, and how businesses are navigating massive, unpredictable spend across cloud, SaaS, and AI platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered why your cloud bill feels like chaos, or how to actually get value from it, this episode pulls back the curtain.

Show Highlights:
(00:00) FinOps Royalty Reunion

(03:06) Origin Stories and Naming FinOps

(06:32) AI for FinOps vs FinOps for AI

(11:05) Automation Hype and Human Psychology

(22:16) Contracts Multi Cloud and Commitments

(24:26) Context Beats Optimization

(26:06) Trust and Billing Clarity

(28:14) Focus Standard Flywheel

(30:11) SaaS Coverage and Conformance

(34:06) Contracts Multi-cloud and Wrap Up

Links:
FinOps: https://www.finops.org/

Sponsored by:
duckbillhq.com