Show Notes
- AuditShark
- HitTail
- MicroConf 2013
- Altiris Training
- Rob Walling at BOS 2009
- Micropreneur Academy
- DotNetInvoice
- AdRoll
- StandOut
- Double Double
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups of the Rest of Us, Mike and I are going to be talking about Audit Shark, HitTail and what we’re looking at doing in 2013. This is Startups of the Rest of Us: Episode 107.
[00:10] Music
[00:18] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:28] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What is the word this week, Mike?
[00:33] Mike: Well, I’m working on getting the AuditShark out the door to my early access customers next week.
[00:38] Rob: So to recap, it was – was it September 10th was the original early access date?
[00:43] Mike: Uh huh.
[00:44] Rob: You got an answer from a couple of people and then you ran in to an issue that if I recall took about six weeks to fix. There was – well, it was a bug or missing feature or something.
[00:52] Mike: Right, it was a missing feature that I thought would take a week and then I ended up taking six weeks.
[00:56] Rob: So that was September 10th. So, then somewhere around late October did you get it back in your hands or is there something that cropped up since then?
[01:02] Mike: I think it was just the matter of having the time to actually dig in to it and figure out what needed to be done and you know, there’s all these other ancillary things that needed to be done because I’ve got a couple of different components that have to pass data back and forth. So, between me implemented things on one side and somebody else implementing things on the other side, it’s just – it took a little bit longer.
[01:21] Rob: So, you and – you said you’re looking now on getting early access back in to the hands of customers, is that right?
[01:26] Mike: Yup. So, I think I’ve got all the bugs worked out in the database synchronization and that everything seems to be working properly now. There’s a lot of other bugs that I need to fix but the product is basically functional and I can – I feel like I can release it now. I mean it’s – I’m obviously not happy with how everything is all situated but at the same time I feel like I could give it to somebody and they would actually get some value out of it.
[01:48] Rob: Right, if you’re not embarrassed by your 1.0, you waited too long?
[01:52] Mike: Right, right.
[01:53] Rob: We’re good. So, next week when we record, you will probably – there’ll be some customers using it again you expect?
[01:59] Mike: I don’t know because this week is Thanksgiving. I don’t know whether or not I’ll be touching base with them this week. It may not be until Tuesday or Wednesday of next week. I anticipate within the next day or two having things able for them to actually use it. I don’t know if I’ll touch base with them just because it’s a holiday week.
[02:17] Rob: Yeah, that’s the tough part about this time of the year. I was just talking to someone about this at lunch and we have a couple of HitTail features that are just wrapping up in terms of ready to go live and launching market and I think I’m going to put a hold on them until mid January. You know, maybe there’s a week or two in early December or some people are kind of looking around, but historically December is just a terrible month for non-consumer apps, all my B2B apps just go in to hibernation and that’s why it’s nice to have a SaaS app. It does have recurring revenue because the growth goes in to hibernation but the income still comes in. The other apps like DotNetInvoice that just kind of take a dive since they’re one-time purchases. So, do you think you’ll be able to get the early access in to other folk’s hands in early December though?
[03:00] Mike: I don’t know. I have a few people who have already make created accounts in the system and I’ll probably talk to them and say, “Hey, you know, just letting you know the stuff is all out here and you can use it now,” and start sending in to their systems and it’ll be able to give them the results and stuff that I would expect. And right now, the big thing on my plate is to just build a policy that will allow them to pull those results back and start looking at them and say, “Oh, I should fix this,” or “I should do that.” There’s just tons and tons of other things that are in place. I hesitate to start going in and approaching new people who aren’t really familiar with it to be able to do any of that stuff because it is December.
[03:37] Rob: Yeah, for sure. So, what is your timeline then? What – what happens from there? Like are you ready to – to launch and start marketing by mid January? Do you think you’ll be there?
[03:50] Mike: I’m thinking mid January and to me everything looks like it’s a go. It’s just like the time of the year is just not good. That’s really what it comes down to. At this point, I’m embarrassed enough by it that I feel comfortable moving forward. It’s just – like I said, it’s just not a good time of the year. So, I feel like if I were to try and move forward right now, it’s probably just not going to work out very well and I would much rather take the time and effort to make things a little bit less embarrassing I’ll say and put things in people’s hands, you know, early January and move forward from there.
[04:20] Rob: Very good. So, I have some – a couple of cool announcements, podcast and MicroConf related. First is our RSS feed now goes back 100 episodes. Other one, hopefully, more exciting, we have super tentative MicroConf 2013 dates and a location. Don’t book any – any plane tickets yet but maybe pencil it in on your calendar. We’re looking at tentatively April 28th, 29th and 30th and in Vegas. And we did actually look at six or seven different cities this year. All signs are pointing towards late April having it in Vegas again. So, pencil it in and we’ll obviously, you know, be in touch more in the – in the coming weeks we’ll be talking about it and as always, go to MicroConf.com, being the first to hear about when tickets go on sale. We did sell out in about two and a half weeks last year. So, assuming the same thing happen you’ll definitely want to be on that e-mail list.
[05:12] Music
[05:16] Mike: So, I’m putting together an e-mail life cycle campaign for my Altiris Training site and I’ve been getting traffic but it’s just not converting at the rate that I’d like. It’s – it’s converting a lot lower. I mean it’s in the typical 1 to 2% range that I think most people would kind of expected to be but I really like to raise that quite a bit more. So, I’m looking to putting together a – I’ll say a pre-life cycle e-mail list so that when people come to the site, they can sign up for the e-mail list and get some more information about not necessarily the product that I offer but educational tips and things that they would be able to do with the software when they start learning the materials that I teach them. So, trying to get them to come back to the site as oppose to people who just come to the site once, they never come back.
[05:59] Rob: You saw my Business of Software talk in 2009, didn’t you?
[06:02] Mike: I probably did, yes.
[06:04] Rob: So, if you haven’t seen the video, search for I guess Rob Walling Business of Software and I honestly don’t remember if it’s 2009 or 2010. The entire talk focuses on using e-mail to get people to come back to your site. I’ve been like such a fist hounding proponent of that approach since then and it was something that I work – it had worked with the Micropreneur Academy. It had worked with DotNetInvoice and frankly with every one of my products eventually gets e-mail integrated in to that, that front end marketing cycle. And about six weeks ago, we launched something very similar. You know, you’re talking about what you’re doing in Altiris Training, we launched something on HitTail and if you go to hittail.com and actually it’s not – I have it off the homepage right now.
[06:41] But if you got to hittail.com/faq as an example, you’ll see the little thing in the lower right. It’s kind of like some – some sites have the chat window on every page. We have the e-mail signup widget. It has definitely worked well. It’s good that you’re – good that you’re working that in because, you know, almost guarantee to bring people back to your site and it’s returning visitors who, you know, are the ones that purchase. The other thing that you may want to think about is to do retargeting and just sign up for a service like AdRoll and you install a tracking pixel and then people when they visit your site if they are floating around the internet, then you can, you know, just play ads to them.
[07:21] Mike: Yeah, I thought about doing that just because I know Google has something very similar to that where it just follows somewhere around. I’ve seen how it works and I’ve seen the statistics on how well it works. It can be disconcerting. I’ve experienced it myself and I’ll say there’s a fine line that you have to make sure you don’t go over because if – if you see those ads on every single site that you go to, then there’s a serious problem.
[07:43] Rob: Yeah, it’s a stalker.
[07:44] Mike: Yes.
[07:45] Rob: A stalker.
[07:45] Mike: It crosses the line in to stalker though. I’m hesitant to start spending the time there because I don’t know if I would have this – the time to spend on making sure that it doesn’t cross that line.
[07:54] Rob: It’s really easy. You just flip a bit. [Laughter] It says how many maximum times to show to someone and you can just choose. And I actually wouldn’t – so I wouldn’t recommend using Google for it for a number of reasons I won’t go in to but there are other services. One call the AdRoll, AdRoll.com that actually uses like seven or eight different ad networks. Google is one of the ad networks they use and so, it has an umbrella overall these networks since you lot more exposure and you have more kind of more control over – over what gets displayed and stuff. So, anyway, just a thought. For doing any type of the advertising, retargeting is – is a necessity. I would not recommend by the way ReTargeter.com I tried and I didn’t want – I did not like them. They did not work out at all. So…
[08:31] Mike: Cool. So, what else have you got going on?
[08:33] Rob: Well, I was doing some review of what HitTail has been doing. You know, the year is coming to a close here and I was just kind of looking at goals for 2013 and trying to figure out where do I want to bring HitTail in 2013, what other things that I want do. You know, I’ve been kind of hinting around that I want to launch a new app and so I looked back at the HitTail growth curve. And over the past five months, it’s been growing 30% a month. It is averaged that. So, you know, someone has been hiring at some level but I hadn’t put it in those numbers because I look at everything in dollar amounts but it’s pretty freaking crazy to think about that. And actually it’s been over the past 13 months, it was 19% per month which frankly that it sounds – I mean it is a lot but it started pretty small, right? It wasn’t – it’s not like it was doing 10 or 20 grand when I acquired it. So, growing it 19% a month is good. I guess you do it for 13 months straight, that’s kind of a [Laughter] – that was surprising to me. It did sound like a lot.
[09:26] Mike: That is a lot. I think I’ve read something recently Paul Graham had advocated that for a lot of their Y combinator startups. They shoot for something like between 5 and 10% of growth rate per week.
[09:39] Rob: Yeah.
[09:39] Mike: So, that’s —
[09:41] Rob: So, 20 to 40% per month, that is crazy.
[09:43] Mike: Uh huh.
[09:44] Rob: That’s crazy in terms of a bootstrapper, you know. If you’re going after venture capital, then yeah, that’s like you said that’s where you need to go. And they measure it per week because they’re only air for twelve weeks.
[09:54] Mike: But if you think about that, that’s about 21% per month. If you start multiplying those numbers out I mean that comes out to a 21 1/2 % per month. So, you’re just not too far behind that —
[10:06] Rob: Yes.
[10:06] Mike: … in terms of HitTail growth.
[10:07] Rob: Right, over, over —
[10:08] Mike: Over 13 months, I mean that’s a crazy amount of growth.
[10:11] Rob: Yeah, so I mean obviously it has to slow down at some point because you just hit like eventually your churn when you have so many paying customers, even at a low single digit churn rate, you’re still losing a huge amount of – of customers and you just have to add them back in faster than you can’t find them fast enough. So, every business plateaus and then you have the lower churn and find another flywheel marketing approach. But I haven’t hit that next. When I hit the first plateau – revenue was around I think it was about 5 grand and I went a couple months there and then shut up and I haven’t seen – haven’t seen the next one. So, we’ll see when that happens. But I did want to say that I think the biggest reason all I know that there has been a couple of the biggest reasons for the growth. One is measuring the right things and actually looking at the data and focusing on these metrics like lifetime value and churn rate and paid conversions and then the other thing has been finding multiple marketing approaches, not a lot of them. It’s been trying probably twenty different marketing approaches but finding three that have really driven the bulk of the growth. And it’s – even if I name the marketing approaches, it’s not going to work the same for every business. You really do need to try a bunch of them and figure out which ones you can scale up.
[11:20] Mike: Yeah and I think that’s a hard part for most people’s figuring out what those three approaches are because you do have to try so many things and it’s not hard to try them. It’s mentally difficult to go through the exercise of failing so many times until you figure out what actually does work.
[11:33] Rob: Right and I think the first step before – the first step that I was able to leapfrog by buying HitTail is that I already knew that it’s solved the problem, right, it had problem solution fits so that I could kick — as soon as I get the redesign done and stabilized it, I knew that it solved someone’s problem. It was just me finding that market and figuring out the best way to market to them. And so finding that market took some trial and error and then once I figure it out, “Oh, these people really understand it, this group,” then trying those 20 marketing approaches in to that niche and figuring out all these three have are the ones that have worked in and some of them are not repeatable like one of them worked really well and gave me a big 30, 40% rise in a month but I can’t do it again. It was a one-time thing but that’s okay, right because it worked and got, you know, got me to the next – kind of the next plateau. It’s always an interesting ride and that’s why I mean one of the reasons, you know, you talked about doing AuditShark and I talked about doing HitTail, they’re bigger ideas but they – they are new challenge, right? It’s learning something new and that’s – that’s been the fun part of it for me.
[12:34] Mike: Cool. So, are you on Twitter very much anymore?
[12:37] Rob: So, I do check in probably once a day when I’m on my phone. I have to admit I haven’t seen you on very much at all and I’m kind of – I’m not seeing a huge point to it right now. Are you on it and I’m just not seeing or are you just not been checking in?
[12:50] Mike: I just haven’t really – little of both, I mean I check in once in a while but I don’t really make a concerted effort to post on Twitter or to actually pay attention to what’s going on and I don’t know whether that’s because I’m just not really interested or because I feel like I don’t necessarily have anything to say. I mean I feel like I do have things to say. It’s just I don’t have time to sit there and do it in a hundred and forty character increments. I mean I feel like if I’m going to provide somebody with value about, you know, insights or thoughts that I have on something, I’d rather do it on a forum that gives me more than a hundred and forty characters than, you know, something like Twitter.
[13:25] Rob: It’s more of a rare breed. I think the old school kind of blogger types you look at Joel Spolsky and you know, maybe Paul Graham and I don’t even know the – a lot of the guys that kind of you and I grew up reading, you know, during our formative startup years, they don’t really use Twitter that much. Joel is on there a little bit, you know, every – a couple of times a week maybe and even Jeff Atwood is not on there nearly as much as I would, you know, think he might be. When you blog for so long and you think your ideas through to that level, its – you’re right, it’s just hard to sound intelligent or to like be groundbreaking in a hundred and forty characters. Now, there are people who did it very well. Actually, I do more retweets and responding than I do sitting down to actually draft original Twitter content. I don’t know. It doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t feel like I can provide that much value. I feel like you and I can provide more value being here on the podcast just discussing stuff and it’s a lot less effort, a lot less strenuous than to sit there and think, “All right, what can I say that’s intelligent and groundbreaking in these hundred and forty characters?”
[14:20] Mike: I think that’s why I’ve shut away a lot more recently than I have in the past from writing bog articles as well just because I share so much on the podcast that it’s like okay, well, I can rehash this particular idea on my blog but kind of what’s the point.
[14:32] Rob: Yup, we’re both on that route. I haven’t blog nearly as much in the last year than, you know, that I had in previous years and one of the reasons because the – podcast is just more fun. It’s like a less time consuming thing and I actually feel like it could – it provides more value to the people who are really in to it like it’s just a closer medium. It’s more intimate.
[14:50] Mike: It’s a different medium because when – when you’re writing a blog post, you can write whatever it is that you’re going to write but within any given sentence, you can say it in like ten different ways. I mean you can put intonations on different words and the exact same words can have different meanings based on what you emphasize. So, I think that doing a podcast, the words that you say are completely different than the words that you would write down even if it was going directly from podcast to transcript. I mean you listen to a podcast versus reading the transcript of that podcast. They’re two entirely different things and you can read the transcript first and then you go back and listen to the podcast say, “Oh, that’s what he really meant.” And I think it’s just a different mental image that people are getting from that podcast versus the transcript.
[15:33] Rob: Have you thought about your goals for 2013 yet?
[15:36] Mike: Not really, I really haven’t.
[15:38] Rob: Do you set – do you tend to set goals?
[15:40] Mike: I usually do but the problem that I find is that I don’t actually get around to set in them until some time in January or February. So, at that point, I’m already short changing myself by like a month or two. So —
[15:51] Rob: Yeah.
[15:52] Mike: … I don’t know. I wonder if this year I should probably take a couple of hours or days or something like that at the very end of this year to say, “Okay, let me sit down and actually figure out what it is that I want to accomplish this coming year.” I mean I have a few things in minds but nothing that I’ve really written down and I committed to myself.
[16:09] Rob: Right, I have not tended to do annual goals. I am a goal-oriented person but I haven’t tended to say – tended to say, “Oh, I’m going to do it, you know, next year.” Just start to thinking what I want to do in 2013 and the interesting part is I didn’t have to think very hard. It kind of just – it all just fell out because its things that I am right on the verge of working on now and I know that they’re going to take longer than I think, you know, all of them. So, I have some things – you know, one thing is like, “Oh, I’m going to get that out here in about 90 days,” but it’s like well, it will be 90 to 120 days. And then I’ll be working it on after that for several months.
[16:41] So, it really is more of a 2013 goal. I did want to throw out these three goals that I have. One is to I want a 2.5X HitTail in 2013 and I have a plan to make that happen. And then I have three info products that I’ve been – that have been sitting on my list, on my back burner percolating for about 18 months and I just have not done another – really haven’t done an info product since probably maybe my book a couple of years ago. So, I mean by the time we do the podcast and do MicroConf and you know, run my apps, I just haven’t – haven’t meant – made a time for it. But I am now taking the step forward and have a date set in the next couple of weeks to sit down and do one of them and I’ll probably launch it after the first of the year. And so the goal would be to launch the other two later in the year and they’ll be on, obviously, start up at later topics.
[17:29] Mike: Info products are interesting because as a developer you look at it and you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t a real product, you know.” It’ll cross [Phonetic] around the real product part of it. And it’s just like it really is because if it’s bringing in revenue, then what difference does it make how you got there and I think that when you’re just starting out, you look at those info products. It’s like, “That’s not a real product. That’s not a software product,” but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter as long as it’s actually bringing in that revenue.
[17:52] Rob: Well and providing value. You can often provide as much or more value giving someone information and you can trying to build an app to help them do something. A lot of the times it’s not that they don’t have the software to do it, it’s that they don’t have the knowledge to do it and sometimes you need both but I actually think there’s a – there’s a lot of value to be having and there’s a lot that’s not being said on certain topics that I feel like I have – I’m assuming unique inside in tiers so. I agree this ties in to the stair step approach that I mentioned last time when we’re interviewing or discussing with Brennan Dunn and how he has a couple – he’s like – what is it? An in-person seminar that he gives and then he has the E-book he has written that have helped him bootstrapped his way to being supported by products. And I guess to wrap that out, the last goal that I have for 2013 is something I’ve mentioned already, it’s to launch a new app and I have a specific revenue goal as well on the first six months after launched. Were you and I really going to build the same app?
[18:44] Mike: I think so. It’s interesting that we have that conversation because I saw in the outline that you’re building something and I’m like, “I wonder if it’s this,” because you were pretty vague and I’m like, “This is what I’m building in the next couple of weeks.” You know, is this is the same thing that you’re building just based on the notes that you said and it’s basically the same thing.
[19:01] Rob: Yeah, it’s similar. It’s probably got 70% overlapped I’d say.
[19:04] Mike: Right.
[19:05] Rob: I’m at the point I’ve well in the customer development. I have eleven commitments to – I’d say they’re purchase commitments. So, basically commitments to sign up for the app and to pay at this price point assuming it does this, assuming it has a positive ROI and its say – it’s a marketing tool and the e-mail marketing space which is something I have – I have a lot of experience and I feel like I, you know, could lend some expertise to and there’s – there are several things that are lacking in today’s e-mail marketing tools. So, yeah, it’s good. I know the numbers have ROI works out. So, I have high hopes for this. I should know – I’m sure there’s people out there thinking we struggle at the entrepreneurial ADD thing, right? Because it’s a lot of people bounce around from one idea to another. I mean I never get one off the ground or they get off one of the ground and get it to a point, I mean get bored off it and jump to the next one and leave the other one to die. And that is not what’s happening here.
[19:56] My whole approach of having a portfolio of product is that I build an app, buy an app. I spent 12 to 18 months on it and then I either automate it, I hire someone to manage or I sell it. I do want of those three things. I have almost never let an app die unless there’s been some specific instances where Google has, you know, done some things and the app will kind of die on its own but it’s nothing that I could have – I couldn’t have saved it by focusing more time on it. It’s just been kind of a consequence of relying on Google for traffic for that particular app. But I do have – I’ve talked about having a product manager for HitTail and we have a plan in place to continue growing HitTail. Like I said my goal is to 2.5X from where it is now over the next year. So, I’m excited.
[20:25] Mike: The thing that I’m looking at building is more specifically for my needs versus I had in it mind to productize it I mean because I’m so focused on AuditShark right now that I know that productizing what I was going to be building was not necessarily in the near term but obviously, you’re much further along in that than I am. So, and I think it’s probably best if I build what I have to do for myself versus trying to productize it because I need it for Audit Shark. I need it for some of the other things that I’m doing. At the end of the day, I don’t necessarily know of what you’re going to be building is what I need.
[21:13] Rob: Exactly. We do have different goals as we describe the thing we’re going to build. Yours is focus on kind of a different end goal. I think they’ll be overlap of functionality but the fact that you need it now and not in three or four months and that you have a developer, you know, you said you’re training or kind of working with the new developer to find out if he can stick around with you long term, it just seems like – like be a natural fit for that.
[21:34] Mike: Uh huh.
[21:35] Rob: Cool though I’ll be mentioning probably putting up a landing page and breaking ground the first lines of code here in the next few weeks.
[21:42] Mike: So, you had mentioned that you have a product manager for HitTail, right?
[21:46] Rob: Yeah.
[21:46] Mike: How did you go about finding a product manager for that? I mean what was your – your thought process behind that? I mean you said that you – you kind of have a plan in place for at least a mental concept of what you’re going to do with a product after 12 to 18 months but isn’t it difficult to kind of hand that off to somebody and just say, “Okay, well, this is going to be something that you’re going to be working on,” and do you have them working at full time or…?
[22:08] Rob: Yeah, so what I did was I had known – I’ve known this guy for over a year, about a year and a half and we’ve – we’ve hang out a lot. I would not — I mean I would have a hard time. I shouldn’t say I would not but I would have a harder time if I was just posting a job description somewhere, you know, and saying, “Looking for a product manager,” because it’s such a unique skills that you need to run these kinds of products because we don’ have a team of developers and designers and people, marketing people. It’s like you need to have all of those skills in one person or be able to work with my contractors, you know, who I’m already – who I’m already using for the skills that I lack. And so, it just so happened that I wasn’t specifically seeking a product manager. I was just going to keep working on HitTail and then once I realize that, you know, this guy that I knew had the ability and was going to – he’s going to go start doing consulting and I just said, “You know, long term, do you want to launch products, you’ll – you can learn more from me by working for me than doing anything else. And if you do this and you’re able to handle the product, then it only makes sense that either we can grow it twice as fast or that I can then branch off and build another product which obviously ultimately means that I can grow revenue for the whole company twice as fast or more for that matter.”
[23:18] And so, it really was a – I’ll say it was a trial run, you know. I basically brought them on half time about 20 hours a week. He’s a contractor. He evaluated me as a client and I evaluated him as a guy who’s running — running the app. Overtime, he’s just proven out that he can – that he can handle a job and so I’ve given him more and more responsibility. Until at this point, I’m doing – I’m actually doing the last several weeks doing very little on HitTail and it’s, you know, it’s continuing its growth and he’s managing making – he’s making now high-level decisions on the thing. I think ultimately long term, we will likely it’s possible we move towards like an employee arrangement.
[23:55] Mike: That’s interesting. I mean one of the things I’ve had some issues with lately is just letting go of certain things. I think part of being a programmer is just being a little bit OCD about certain things and you know, sometimes it’s just hard to let go of things that are you look at and say, “Oh, that’s not actually important in any way, shape or form,” but for some reason you still it is. And I feel like product management in some sense is one of those things where if you get somebody who’s good and they know what they’re doing and they can actually do the job, you can just kind hand it off to them and they’re going to do as good job as you and don’t get me wrong, it’s not that it’s not an important job but it needs to be done right and you have concerns about just handing that off to somebody.
[24:37] Rob: Yeah, definitely requires the right person, right? Because if you hire the wrong person for the job, there’s no chance they’re going to do it as well as you do. You mentioned having those deal over certain things and not being able to letting them go. Do you have any examples of that?
[24:50] Mike: I think one example that comes to mind is probably like the backend database design for AuditShark and how everything fits together. I mean because there are so many different moving parts within AuditShark, it’s very difficult to just for me to just hand that off to somebody and say, “Okay, well, I expect you to start making architectural decisions about how the stuff is going to interact with each other,” because I have a visual studio project or solution file that has I think 10 or 12 different projects in it. And most of them compile down in to a DLL that is then use in other projects and it’s just very difficult for me to conceptually just hand that off to somebody and say “I would like you to start making some of the decisions about how these pieces are going to interact with each other.”
[25:31] And then that also comes in to play with like, for example, the database design where I did all the database design for not only AuditShark but for the AuditShark pro version of the software that I haven’t really talk a lot about. I mean it’s mostly just the policy build or piece of it that I’ve talked about to people but that I can envision being its own product in the future for a different market segment. So, those are the types of things where I look at and say I have visions long term of where this is going to go or where it can go and I want to make sure that I’m not shooting myself in the foot with certain decisions down the road.
[26:06] Rob: Oh, absolutely. It’s been about two months since – since he started, the product manager, and he originally was just doing tier two support because I have a virtual assistant who does tier one. And I say it’s a virtual assistant. It’s guy who’s work – work for me now for a year and he actually does our Academy Support as well and he’s really good. I mean he’s not just – he’s not just that. He’s actually stepped up in to – in to a true support role. And so, the product manager starts just doing very basic tier two support and learning the code and it wasn’t until three or four weeks in where he made a small code change. And then six, seven weeks in, we needed some new database tables and so, I said go design them and run them by me. And that was it. He went in all the leg work. That’s for – it was the Basecamp integration.
[26:49] So, he went and looked at Basecamp, looked at their API and then he put – showed me to create scripts and I looked at them and I actually ran them on production myself. And so that’s the level of control that I – that I maintain. Now, probably with the next one – you know, I better – I’ll continue to review them because it doesn’t take me much time but I don’t feel like I need such hard core control that, you know, I need to keep maintaining the naming of everything or something like that and but maybe you do with AuditShark and if you do, you could still do it in a review process. You know, you don’t actually need to do the design as much as just confirm that it meets your design standards and the standards of your future vision for the product which is what I’m able to do with just a few minutes.
[27:28] Mike: Yeah, I totally understand what you’re saying. I mean there’s one contract where I have had working for me for almost a year now on a piece of AuditShark when I send him something. I said, “Hey, can you make sure this gets done for this piece of it?”And he wrote me back and he’s like, “Well, here’s the code. This is what you asked for but I have a concern about X.” And that literally sat in my inbox for almost a month before I actually had time to go back and look at it and I said, “Well, let me try and figure out what it is that he’s actually saying here that should be done and if there’s a different way to do it,” then he’s like, “Oh, well I’ll come back to you and let you know.”
[28:00] And I look at it and it took me probably 45 minutes to an hour to kind of review what it was that he was saying and what he have done but at the end of the day, he’d made the right decisions like there – there’s nothing different that I would have done but it was a very, very important piece of the product. So and at this point, I mean there were some other things that he came back to me with like there were probably half a dozen things I went through today and looked at them and said like – and after looking at that one thing, I just looked at the other ones and like, “Yup, I’m just going to approve this one.” I’m not even really going to look at it. I’m just going to approve because I’m sure that he did a right thing there.
[28:34] Rob: And that’s a thing, if you hire someone or you bring them on, you can’t trust them to make decisions from day one, right. You have to – no matter how smart they are, no matter how quickly they learn, they’re going to make some mistakes and you have to help them learn why that, you know, that was a mistake and just course correct them and you’ll know within a month after you course correct them a few times, certain contractors no matter what – which job they’re doing whether it’s development, design, support, they will continue to make similar mistakes and those are the ones that you know probably never going to be you’re A players. But it’s once – you correct them once, twice and suddenly after that, you’re not correcting them at all, they slowly build your trust that they’re going to make good decisions over and over and over again.
[29:15] And then it comes down – we talked about this before but they’ll make a 19 decisions exactly like you would and then maybe they’ll make the 20th decision “wrong” in your opinion. You know, that you would made a different one that probably would have been better. But the fact that they didn’t have to check with you on all 20 of those is totally, totally worth the fact that one decision is made slightly differently. And I would venture to say if you hire really smart people and that’s how I feel like I’ve done here, they actually will make quite a few decisions better than you would. They’ll make some better and some worse and honestly, you know, it’ll – it’ll even out overtime or but you hopefully, above or you would be if you’re trying to run everything.
[29:52] Mike: Well, I think the other part of that is that by them making reasonably good decisions, it freeze you up to not have to make those decisions because I spent probably 45 minutes to an hour trying to figure out, it’s like, “Okay, well one, what are our options here and two, what sort of decisions should be made?” And after reviewing everything, I was like he made the exact same decisions I would have made and it was not – it was not a trivial decision either. I mean it was actually pretty complicated and it’s just he made the right decision. I mean what else can you say at that point?
[30:22] Music
[30:25] Rob: So, I have two kind of book reviews or two books that I’ve read recently I just wanted to mention what it’s called StandOut and it’s from the guy who did StrengthsFinder but it’s a new test. We did an episode about StrengthsFinder where you and I both took this test and it kind of defined your strengths or determines your strengths and then it allows you to kind of focus on those moving forward and that’s the theory. This – what StandOut does is instead of having 36 different strengths, StandOut has basically 9 clusters of strengths and so it’s the same thing. It’s like 9 or 10 bucks to get the Kindle version and then you can take this 20-minute online test and then it spits out to – it spits out all 9 of yours in order but your top 2 is really what’s highlighted.
[31:04] So, it’s fine. It’s definitely something I recommend. With the test I’ve taken, they definitely hit the nail on the head in terms of who I feel like I am and what I feel my strengths are. And so it reinforces things. It’s a reminder to me. I redo the reports and I think, yeah, I should be doing more of this. And that’s actually one of the reasons why I have the goals that I do for 2013 of launching a new app and doing info product and growing HitTail but not just trying to sit there and focus on one thing. It’s that I’m – one of my aspects, the StandOut aspects is I’m a creator and I’m like I need to be creating new things or else I’m not living optimally and I’m not doing my best professionally. And so, it definitely fits in line with what I’m doing.
[31:41] The other one, the other book I had recommended to me a couple of times is called Double Double and it’s from the guy who started 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and College Pro Painters and he’s an entrepreneur that’s grown to businesses very large. And the premise is about doubling your revenue and your profit in three years and that’s why it’s called Double Double. And it actually sounded pretty intriguing but I definitely would not recommend it for our crowd. It’s water down because he was basically trying to write – I hate it when people do this. They try to write these very general entrepreneurial books and say super high level, you know, you should be persistent and you should set a goal and then do some stuff to achieve it, you know, but it’s like there was no really action that I could take on it.
[32:22] You know, aside from, all right, set some goals for next year, it was just – it was pretty water down because he was trying to make it so general. I think the advice I would say skip it and I think the advice to take note of is to be more laser focus if you really want to build kind of a hard core constituency of fans and whether that was his goal here or not, I just – I feel it kind of leaves – leaves a lot of people out on the cold if they actually want to do take action on your advice.
[32:43] Mike: Is that kind of the – the four steps of success and the third one is a bunch of question marks and fourth one is profit?
[32:49] Rob: [Laughter] Exactly. Yeah, it’s that kind of thing. It’s actually a decent book. I listen to it and I listened to the whole thing which means it was – it had my interest but I just found it lacking in terms of truly, you know, getting value out of it. As in I’m not going to recommend it to other people because I don’t think they’ll – it’ll actually improve your business if you listen to it.
[33:05] Mike: Got it.
[33:05] Music
[33:08] Mike: If you have question for us, you can call us to our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can e-mail it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from ‘“We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 106 | Moving from Consulting to Products (with Brennan Dunn)
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 106.
[00:03] Music
[00:11] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. So, what’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:24] Rob: Well, we just launched the HitTail Basecamp integration that I talked about last week. So it’s all live. If you go to hittail.com/basecamp, you get a brief walk through, some screenshots of how that works. And I’m pretty excited. Like I said, it’s really – I’ve mentioned it was the first integration we’ve done but it’s actually the second I realized because the first one was with kind of the – the one-click article service but that one was written by me. On this one my product manager really banged this one out and it’s all architected well and I think I told you he wrote OAuth and OAuth Library in Classic ASP from scratch. I can’t imagine. I wouldn’t definitely not have been that just — I wouldn’t have that coding forwarded to to sit down and do that. But anyways, we’re excited, you know, we’re both doing – going to start a little of bit promotion. We’re kind of doing a soft launch right now. We’d just want to get more people using it just to make sure it’s all good and also have a little bit of paid acquisition with some HitTail and Basecamp stuff going on. So, it’s pretty good. How about you?
[01:17] Mike: Well, I have this new developer starting in a couple of weeks. I just kind of worked out some arrangements with him. We’re going to try – we’re going to try doing some stuff for about three weeks or so and see how it works out and then kind of reevaluate things from there. So, hopefully, that works out.
[01:31] Rob: AuditShark?
[01:31] Mike: He will be working on other stuff first and then if that – if everything works out, then probably transition him over to working on AuditShark.
[01:38] Rob: Got it.
[01:39] Mike: As I said, it’s a trial period and we’ll just see how it goes but I really need somebody who I can put on AuditShark to work on some of the core guts of it. I’ve been working on a lot of this database synchronization code for AuditShark and I’m about at the point where I can actually start testing it but I have all these to-do comments and they’re like different events and things that should be logged. So, you know, some of them have security implications. Some of them just have synchronization implications and I haven’t actually implemented any of the login code behind it and if I had to go look, there’s probably close to a hundred places where I’ve literally documented to do log this or, you know, to do make sure that you double check this data or et cetera. So, to be honest about it, it’s not necessarily worth your time to be doing that. I mean there’s other places that your time is better spent.
[02:27] Rob: Right and that’s the thing is, you know, my 12-year career writing software, I’ve always gold plated everything especially as a consultant and working for – I was a salary employee for credit card company for years like you wrote things to the nines and so when I say I’m a hack what I mean is a hack compared to that where I would spend weeks writing this, the single routine and testing every possible option and doing all kinds of stuff and I just don’t do that anymore. Get kind of the minimum viable function out and then revisit it later. And the thing is that I can – I can just move so quickly, right? If there is actually a bug or any types of problem, I can go in and edit the stuff and it’s not a – a 2-day process to get a change in to production like it used to be. So, it’s more of taking advantage of your agility as a very small startup or a very small software company. You can really be much more, more fast moving than – than larger competitors. So, you have different pros and cons than a larger company maybe doing or building the same software.
[03:21] Mike: Right, I mean there’s just different priorities when you’re working on stuff. That’s really all it comes down to.
[03:25] Rob: Well, hey, if you haven’t checked out episode 36 of the Stock Exchange Podcast, it’s definitely worth a listen. It retells in great detail their Hurricane Sandy story of logging those buckets of gasoline up the stairs after they lost power. We’ve briefly mentioned it last week but I heard the episode. It’s just to hear that kind of that, they had like eight or nine people on this podcast since it’s a round table and they’re just telling their story of, “You know, it’s midnight on this day and then the power goes out and then you just…” One guy had a knife and another guy had a plastic vodka bottle that they cut the bottom out of and used as a funnel for the gas. I mean it was just so cool to hear the innovation and just the get it doneness of the entrepreneurs, right? They didn’t sit around complaining. They just figured out how to make it work and how to log this gas up the thing to keep – it was Fog Creek Software and Square Space were the kind of the two people on this podcast. So, pretty – pretty cool story.
[04:18] Mike: Yeah, that is cool. I haven’t – I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet. I’ve got some time up in New York and I’m going to be spending down there again. So, I’ve got a 3-hour drive back and forth and I definitely be listening to that though.
[04:28] Rob: Nice, what else is going on?
[04:29] Mike: Oh, you know what? I think that you had said that you tried the Facebook ads.
[04:34] Rob: I did, indeed.
[04:34] Mike: I’m going to be doing that soon. My wife is kind of venturing out to actually start her own business at this point. She’s going to be – she’s a certified Zumba instructor. She’s had enough people approached her to teach at different places that she has decided to kind of take the next step and start building up her own fitness company. She was asking me about how to not necessarily how to drive people to her, you know, to her classes and stuff but she’s kind of talking about some of the issues that she’s got with that, “Oh, well, I’ve got to make sure that I have this number of people there and if I don’t, then I either break even or lose money.” And I just kind of offered to help her drive some people there and my first thought was, well this seems perfect for using Facebook ads.
[05:15] Rob: Absolutely, I really agree. I think that’s a good choice because it’s definitely a consumer-type thing. Now, for people who don’t know what Zumba is right —
[05:22] Mike: Yeah, it’s kind of a dance fitness. There’s kind of a Zumba fitness organization that oversees it and there’s all these rules and regulations about how you can use their logo and brand and everything else. So, she can’t have a brand name that says Zumba and or anything like that. But it’s – it’s very well tied to overall health and fitness and incorporates a lot of dance moves. So, she’ll teach at Curves which – Curves is a fitness facility that is exclusively for women and she has to teach it like the YWCA and there’s a couple of independent fitness studios around that she goes in to. So, she’s been subbing for different classes and somebody had said, “Oh well, I can’t do this class anymore. Can you do it or do you want to take it over?” And she said, “Well, I’ll take it over if you’re not going to do it anymore but I kind of want control over everything at that point, you know, I’m no longer going to be just doing it as a substitute.” So, she’s going to essentially expand from there.
[06:14] Rob: That’s cool. And Facebook is neat for geographically targeting like that. A mutual friend of ours was actually trying to relocate and his wife worked for a government agency that would only transfer her job if she could find someone at the new location to swap with her and so he went on to Facebook and targeted that location and that government agency because you can say people who work for —
[06:34] Mike: Oh —
[06:34] Rob: … and type it in. And so, he did that and was showing ads to like say, “Do you want to move to X,” you know, where they currently live and he got some people to come through. I don’t know that he ever actually – if that’s where they actually found the person or not but he definitely got inquiries and he just had a like a Google doc form or some, you know, e-mail link or something and people can drop a line. So, it’s pretty cool with local stuff. It’s super easy to target across a lot more demographics than any other system I’ve ever seen.
[07:02] Mike: Right. She was – she already has like a Facebook fan page set up that, you know, she’s going on there and letting people know because one of the issues she has is if there aren’t enough people attending that sometimes they have to cancel depending on the location, so, there are, you know, there’s usually post that go out on Facebook that says, “Hey, if you – please RSVP or let us know if you’re going to be able to make it tonight,” and then they’ll cancel class within like an hour so that people aren’t driving there and then find out that it’s canceled. And that was what she was thinking that she would be using Facebook for and I said, “Well, you have access to or you can get access through the Facebook ad system to all the people in this geographic area and you can advertise explicitly to those people.” And I don’t think that was something she’d ever really considered before and I don’t think that any of other instructors she’s worked with have done anything like that either. It would be interesting to see how that turns out.
[07:49] Rob: I agree. Keep us posted. I want to give a shout out thanks to Andrea Conti [Phonetic]. He put together a detailed list of the podcasts that we mentioned in Episode 104 because I just had it as kind of a bulleted list and he put up all the links and he put it in to nice HTML table and so, that’s now live in Episode 104 in the show notes. So, I’d just wanted to thank him for that.
[08:11] Music
[08:14] Rob: So, Mike and I are very pleased to have with us today, Brennan Dunn. He’s a long time Micropreneur Academy member. He also runs his own consulting firm, founder of Planscope and that’s at planscope.io which is project management software for freelancers. It’s a software service application. You know, he’s also written an E-book for freelancers. He has a podcast. He does workshops, all kinds of stuff but before we get in to that, I wanted Brennan to say hi to everybody.
[08:38] Brennan: Hey, everyone.
[08:39] Rob: So, talk to us a little bit about just maybe a 1 or 2-minute intro kind of where you come from, what you’ve been up to the last few years and how you found yourself launching Planscope, you know, having the E-book and workshop and everything.
[08:49] Brennan: Sure, six years ago, I went out of my own became a freelancer. And a little over two years ago, I decided to grow a company. Well, really, I got it so much work than I really had to scale. I kind of went out on a whim and just decided to open up a brick and mortar consultancy. And we grew to ten people and it was a rush but really, I was bit by the product bug and I really wanted to escape consulting once and for all and just kind of build products that I owned and produced recurring revenue for me because consulting can be extremely draining. Yeah, so I decided to – really what happened first was I took Amy Hoy’s 30×500 class and I also at the same time signed up for the Micropreneur Academy. So, I did my research. I discovered that there is a need for something like Planscope and I built it and launched it at LessConf last year, I believe last February.
[09:43] And it’s been growing pretty steadily but the problem with SaaS revenue is even at a 10% growth rate, when you started from zero, it’s still going to take a while to kind of become really that profitable. So, basically I promoted somebody at the consultancy to run it in my absence and I’ve been heads down on products ever since. And last summer, I released a book which in turn led me to managing a newsletter for freelancers and just recently I launched my first online workshop. So, all of it really appeals to the same audience, freelancers and they all kind of feed off to each other. So, that’s kind of my last six years in the nutshell.
[10:22] Rob: Very nice. So, your consultancy is still running kind of in the background, is that right?
[10:27] Brennan: It is. Most of the people that used to work for me fulltime had now been converted back to independent contractors and the guy, Zack who used to lead business development, I really promoted him the COO and really, I get a once a week phone call with updates and how we’re doing and everything else.
[10:44] Rob: Very cool. So, you are very much working on your business not in your business, I would say.
[10:49] Brennan: Correct.
[10:49] Rob: We’re going to be talking about moving from consulting to products and this is something that all three of us on this podcast here, you know, might have done or in the process of doing. And I think it’s a very common path and even if folks are simply moving from salaried employment to products, it can often be, you know, a similar type of set up or you’re just trying to buy out enough time, enough of your time to actually get an app off of the ground. And as you said, if you have a SaaS app, you do tend to need a pretty long runway in order to make it there. So, I guess the first question and you partially addressed this already but you mentioned that, you know, consulting obviously brings in good revenue. So, what is your motivation? Why do you – why do you thirst to own products?
[11:32] Brennan: I think because I know a lot of product owners and I know that they are significantly happier than I ever was working 12 hours a day managing a consultancy, going through the churn of client after client and really having no ownership at the end of the day of anything I produced. So, products were always kind of, you know, the light at the end of the tunnel and people were paying me to build products for them. So, I had everything I needed to build my own. The problem of being that, you know, consulting like an illicit drug gives you an immediate benefit whereas products tend to take a little longer.
[12:03] Rob: Right, so consulting is like an illicit drug and products are like exercise perhaps?
[12:08] Brennan: [Laughter] Yeah, I’ve always actually compared consulting to crack cocaine.
[12:13] Rob: How about you, Mike? What are your thoughts?
[12:15] Mike: It’s really hard to breakaway from consulting once you’re there though. I mean, I really admire what you’ve done in terms of being able to be in a position to I’ll say essentially walked away from that consulting business without having to pay attention to it because you had somebody there who you could rely on and essentially help maintain the business.
[12:34] Rob: Yeah, for sure. I think I’ve, you know, my thoughts on this as well as are similar to Brennan’s and that I was always doing it for the lifestyle element but more for the freedom of it initially and I thought that once I have the freedom that, man, I would just totally be happy and it turns out that the freedom was part of that but I also needed to continue to have challenges as well and you know, I’m certainly in the same boat as you, as you guys. So, the next question I have for you guys to throw on the table is after you realized, you know, let’s say you’re a consultant or even a salaried employee, what’s the first step you recommend once someone has made that decision that they want to go all in and they want to move to building products and they want – essentially, I think, obviously, the first step is replacing their income but, you know, even before that like what do you think now that you guys are both, you know, in the midst of it, what would you recommend someone do?
[13:19] Brennan: So, I’ve seen a lot of consultants who try to enter to the product space and the ones that fail, end up treating their product really like a side project. What I realized earlier on was that if I wanted any of my products to actually succeed, I would really need to treat it like first-class client project, not I”ll deal when I have time or I really had to make sure that I dedicated two days a week to doing nothing but working on my product while spending the other three days really fulltime heads down on, you know, paying my own personal bills. Now, I’ve kind of had it a little easier because in running the consultancy, my employees were paying my bills. So, made it a little easier to write Planscope but had I been a freelancer, it would have taken longer but the same outcome, hopefully, would have occurred.
[14:04] Rob: Very nice, yeah, you definitely have the luxury of having that consulting and it isn’t like something that was hand to. You had built the company but it certainly was a benefit to you when making that transition. For my perspective when I was transitioning from consulting and trying to replace that income with products, I was supporting the family. I had one child and a mortgage and the wife and she was an intern at the time. And so, I was consulting during the day and I was actually doing a lot of side work in the evenings and weekends to try to be able to work on my products. And so I hear what you’re saying about having it work on the side is actually a big challenge and that tends to be a recipe for failure. Somehow I has able to make it work but it do take me several years obviously and a lot of failures to get there.
[14:49] Mike: Well, I think that the way Brennan put it was a little bit differently than I would have thought of it where he said that he really has seen a lot of people failed because they don’t treat their side projects as essentially a first-class citizen and you know, basically treated them as if it was consulting work that absolutely had to be done. And what I was going to say before he had said that was essentially talking about a mindset change because when you’re doing consultant work, you get this immediate benefit from whatever it is that you’re working on and you get paid by the hour on a weekly or monthly basis and there’s a tangible reward that you know is going to be coming with the consulting work. When you’re working on a product, you don’t necessarily have that and it could be months or even years down the road before you start to make enough money that all of the time that you put in previously starts to pay off.
[15:38] So, it’s – if you’ve been consulting for a long time, it’s a serious challenge to get over that mental block that he just says, “You know, I’m going to put some time in to this. I’m going to put in 10, 20, 50 hours and I’m not going to see any return or whatsoever for a very, very long period of time and I think that’s just a mental block.” But I think the way Brennan put it was extremely good and that you have to treat it as if it was a first-class citizen as if you are doing work for someone else and that it needs to get done.
[16:05] Rob: Yeah, for sure. I think that was something within the first six months of starting to get some product revenue, I actually toned down my consulting hours right away and I knew that being able to do that with lend a lot of freedom. It will basically lend some acceleration to getting that, that product revenue going. Even when I was salary, like a couple of years earlier when I started having a little bit of revenue, I actually went down to part-time at one point, my salary job. So, we’ve talked about that on the show before but I definitely think that that’s something that people should – should consider. It’s not an all or nothing game of working 40, 50 hours a week for an employer or clients and then only being able to work on the side on your app. There is an in between and it sounds like, you know, we all have different ways of achieving that.
[16:47] So, I want to switch the discussion over to this thing that I’m calling the stair step approach to replacing – essentially replacing your income and I’ve mentioned that a couple of times because that’s kind of the first goal. I feel like if you’re a bootstrapper, you need to replace this income of, you know, your salary job or consulting. And a lot of people hunker down and try to build this big SaaS app and they want to make the big splash and you know, start generating that recurring revenue right away. But what I’ve seen and the approach that I took and what I have actually seen a lot of people having success with is not relying on a single product and having some easy wins early on. So, either writing an E-book, having a WordPress plug-in, running a workshop like you’re doing, Brennan, to fund some of your time so you’re able to work harder and focus more on your longer term win like a SaaS app.
[17:34] And so I had – I have crazy websites people have heard about like justbeachtowels.com where I, you know, I had beach towels that were being drop ship to people and I had a CMS theming service early on and I had some other information products that I don’t even own anymore by there were my stair step products just to get that income replacements so that I had enough time to then really focus on this long-term goal of building the products with more longevity. You, Brennan, are already attacking that. Can you tell us a little bit about how that’s worked and whether it was intentional or whether you’ve just kind of, you know, stumbled in to having these multiple smaller products?
[18:08] Brennan: Yes, so it’s actually a pretty funny story. One of the misconceptions I think is that consultancies have a very high profit margin. It really tends to not to. So, now that I’ve kind of given the reign to somebody else, the income from the consultancy isn’t nearly what it used to be and what it used to be wasn’t that significant either. The thing is Planscope right now we’re kind of slowly growing it about 10% a month but that translates to maybe $400 a month in growth which isn’t going to pay my mortgage and my kids’ schools and everything else anytime soon.
[18:35] So, I had two paths. I could go full steam consulting and really throw away a lot of hours because consulting, you spend an hour on a client project and that hour doesn’t benefit your product or your audience at all. So, that was path one and path two which really came really accidentally I think. I had a bet with Amy Hoy where I really wanted to go to a conference in Ireland and we had some medical issues, you know, in the family and I didn’t have anything budgeted to go and I know Planscope wasn’t going to be able to give me the money I needed to do that. So, she convinced me to write a book. The book actually came pretty easily because I had developed really good relationships with my Planscope customers and determined that a lot of them were kind of unsure about to price their services.
[19:19] So, I wrote a book. I collected pre-sales and I actually sold $6,000 in product before the book was done and since then, it sold another 25,000. Now, it’s brought in 30 grand which I’m pretty happy about considering that’s nine months or eights months of Planscope at its current state’s income. And then that actually led me to realize that there was a smaller need in the subset of people who wanted to learn me from me about building a consultancy. So, I up the ante and actually charge a thousand a seat. I sold 25 seats. That added another 25,000 to my runway of capital. So, the benefit overall I think of the second path is that all of this feeds in to each other.
[20:02] So, I’ve gotten Planscope customers who found my book because the book is much – it’s hard to convince somebody to drop their current project management software and use yours but it’s a lot easier to an impulse buy to get somebody to find your book and if your book is about – like mine is doubling your freelancing rate that’s a quick and easy buy. They read the book. They either like or they don’t like my philosophy on things, then or are much more willing to check out my other products because they like me. They like the mentality I have towards consulting. So, they all kind of worked out really well and it still is. I mean the book is still selling. The workshop is still selling and Planscope is still selling. So, the diversification for me at least has yielded a lot of returns.
[20:42] Rob: Yeah, that’s really cool to hear. I think we’ve seen similar things with, you know, the podcast tying in to the Academy and tying in to MicroConf and then, you know, I wrote the book, my book on a similar subject, then I certainly see the same thing of there are just being a lot of crossover with people finding one and basically liking it enough that it kind of gets them in to your world. And if they respect the work that you do, it’s pretty easy for them to then say, “Oh, well, I paid 19 bucks for a book. Next, I’m able to actually invest a little more and maybe I even, you know, spend a thousand bucks and go – go to the conference and that happens in the next spring.”
[21:12] Music
[21:15] Rob: So, our next topic is going to be talking about the pros and cons of moving to software products from consulting versus moving from a salary gig. And this is actually one thing that Mike and I get this question a lot from a lot of different people. It’s a challenge. If you’re working at a salary gig and you’re really unhappy, the choice of moving directly in to products or moving first to consulting and trying to build that business enough to support you and then moving the products, it’s a big question and it doesn’t necessarily have a right or wrong answer but I want to throw that out there and kind of have — maybe Brennan, you can tackle it first and then Mike and I will give our thoughts as well.
[21:49] Brennan: Sounds good. So, I haven’t been a salaried employed for six years now. So, I really wouldn’t know what it’s like to go from salary to products but what I do think is it’s probably easier to go from consulting to products specifically because as a consultant, you really are a small business owner. And secondly, one of the really interesting things that came out of the workshop that I discovered was a lot of the students wanted to end up building products one day and a lot of them currently productize their consulted services. So, they might have different packages or these retainer agreements and they are already getting experience in pricing and how to market their services which I think is giving them a huge advantage when it comes to building what we might call traditional products, info products or software.
[22:34] So, that’s my thought on it. I think also one of the benefits that I think of being independent is you can kind of – it’s almost like a scale. As your product revenue increases, you can then taper down your consulting time but likewise when you’re just starting out, you’re probably going to doing more consulting because you don’t really have any product income to begin with and usually as an employee, you can’t really — you’re stuck nights and weekends usually to work on your side projects.
[22:58] Rob: Right, it’s a lot harder to taper, taper down your hours. What are your thoughts, Mike?
[23:02] Mike: I think if somebody will come to me and ask my advice on whether they should jump from a salary gig in to consulting and then use that to leverage it in to products or just go straight in to the products, I probably advice them to go directly in the products. And I think the reason for that is more along the lines of when you’re doing consulting especially if you don’t have a subcontractor arrangement where work is essentially being handed to you at all times, then your focus tends to be divided. And by divided, I mean you’re essentially trying to make sure that you have enough consulting work in order to make ends meet and if you don’t, you have to work twice as hard at it. And that is very detrimental to being able to put – set aside time for working on your side project versus if you have a salaried engagement, you don’t – there’s all these other stuff that you don’t really have to think about. You can just say, “Oh, well, you know what? I’ve got a couple of hours free. I can just work on my own product,” versus if you are running your own consulting company and you’re doing independent consulting, a lot of times you have to spend that extra time thinking about, “Well, where is my next paycheck going to come from? Where is my next project going to come from?”
[24:10] And those things tend to get in the way. Now, there’s definitely a benefit to running your own consulting company and getting the experience of running your own business. I could certainly see the benefits of trying to work through pricing and things like that and getting an external view of that because most of the time developers who are working in the company don’t see like the sales and marketing sides and things like that. But I think that having that paycheck, that weekly paycheck that you don’t really have to worry about where it comes from and being able to fall back on that, I think that’s really, really beneficial.
[24:41] Rob: I certainly see both – both sides of the coin. I think when – when I get this question, I say that if you’re already consulting, it’s a no brainer to keep doing that purely because of the freedom that you have and the timing flexibility and the ability to kind of to filter down your hours or funnel down your hours as Brennan said. But if – I think if you’ve been a salaried employee for years and you’ve never been a consultant, there’s a lot to learn and that first three to six months that I tend to recommend people don’t try to jump in to it because it’s going to take them several months just to figure all their stuff out. New experiences of taxes, new experience of finding projects, managing projects, billing clients, making sure they get paid, you know, there’s all that stuff. And once you’ve been doing it for six months to a year, all that becomes a natural but it is a learning curve upfront.
[25:24] And I also think that if your added job that doesn’t have you working a ton of hours, that it’s actually more beneficial like if you’re working 30, 40 hours a week at a salaried gig and they’re not pushing you to 70 or 80 and you’ve been there for several years and you already have the clout and you kind of the trust of people, it actually gives you a lot of time to kind of go and decompress and work on stuff on the side. You know, there is kind of dependence on how your day gig actually is and how they actually treat you and if you do have the autonomy outside of it and you do have the mental space outside of it to devote to your product because certainly if you are working 70-hour a weeks and have you doing on the weekends, then my answer would be to put – potentially I have to find a different salary job or to move in the consulting from there.
[26:06] Brennan: The last time I had a salary job, I was working 80 hours a week and there’s just no way I had any mental energy left to do anything else. So, I think if I had a very cushy safe and secure job, then you’re right. I think not needing to jilt with business development or anything is useful in a lot of ways. So, I think Mike actually has a really good point.
[26:24] Rob: So, obviously, you’ve had several successes both with your – your SaaS app that you’re building up. You’ve had a successful consultancy you’ve built, your E-book, your workshop, are there any major missteps that you feel like you’ve made along the way that other people would be likely to make?
[26:39] Brennan: I know one thing that I made a huge mistake of and that was letting my initial Planscope mailing list got cold. When I initially tried to cross sell the new book to that list because I haven’t literally spoken to them in months, the reception was not nearly what it should have been. You know, conversely I did keep my list warm for the book. If you buy the book, you get on my newsletter and I send three advices once a week which people seem to really like. Within hours when I announced the workshop and kind of ramped up anticipation about the workshop, I literally almost sold out the workshop within a few hours because the list was warm. That’s one huge mistake that I made with Planscope because I didn’t really understand the value of relationships outside of a user entry and a database.
[27:23] Rob: Yeah, the power of that list is not to be trifled with. Mike, do you have any missteps?
[27:30] Mike: Yeah, I mean the one that I kind of harp on that I ran in to was getting in to a consultant arrangement where you getting paid as contingent upon somebody else getting paid. That was more of a contract issue than anything else. Sign something and not really thinking about it and you know, they’re like, “We’ll pay you within seven days when we get paid by our customer.” And that was just sounded great. Their customer doesn’t pay them, then I’ve got no recourse to go to them because they didn’t get paid. And you know, I sat around for it was probably close to six months before I got 30 some thousand dollars in– invoice is straightened out.
[28:02] Rob: Okay, well cool. Let’s talk about myths and all that – there’s a lot of startup advice out there and as soon as you start actually working on a product, working on a startup and launching something, having people use it. Instantly, some of that startup advice becomes essentially a myth in your mind because it’s just not true, right? It maybe had been true with that person who said it, it may have been true for that person, but there are some common things like eating your on dog food, you must be part of your target audience, you know, build something people want and all these things that may or may not turn out to be true if you launch and have a different experience. Anything come to mind that once weren’t true but now is nothing more than – or maybe a startup myth?
[28:40] Brennan: So, I pointed out three different things that I used to believe and no longer believe. The first is that I used to believe that you realistically couldn’t consult or do something else and bootstrap a product. There’s a huge emphasis on you need to take outside money so you can stay focus 100% on your product and that I just think that’s simply not true. I think you can — you can multitask. You can work on both. So, I mean again it’s a slow growth, tortoise and hare type of raise but in the long run, I think it’s better, at least for me than the alternative. The second thing that I think I’ve come to realize is you really don’t need a business co-founder. I’m a developer. I’m also a designer but when it comes to things like Planscope, I run support. I do all the marketing. I did blogging. I pretty much handle everything. No one else works on it with me and it might seem overwhelming but I’m very partial to low risk easy win B2B products that I’m not inventing new markets. I don’t need to have some crazy viral win to grow their product. What I found is that when you take that route, when you focus on solving things that businesses have, I think it is manageable by one person.
[29:48] So, my third myth finally and this is something that took me a while to realize is the myth that marketing is boring. I’ve actually come to prefer doing split testing over writing code. I just think it’s a lot more interesting. I mean it’s almost like people hacking. I mean you’re getting to see like how different variations are affecting things or – I recently redid my on boarding completely and I was able to see tangible financial results pretty immediately afterwards. That’s the stuff that really is interesting to me and I used to think that the marketing side of thing that’s left for a marketing department, you know. All I care about is code quality and craftsmanship and everything else which are important but I’m really enjoying the traction affecting things of the job.
[30:30] Rob: For sure. What I’m seeing with entrepreneurs who are — developers who are transitioning to entrepreneurs and I did the same thing is you start by disliking the marketing just because we consider the four-letter word in the development world because if you’ve ever worked with marketers, they’re always a pain in the ass because they’re always making you do stuff as a developer that you don’t want to do, you don’t understand what they want you to do. And so, first you start kind of your standoffish to it and then as you start learning it and you start to enjoy and see the – like you said, its people hacking, it’s engineering of business. There’s like all these different ways to look at it but once you get in to it, it becomes super addictive and I found that that entrepreneurs who – the bootstrappers who are actually making it happen, they eventually making the switch that you’ve said where you actually enjoy the marketing perhaps more than writing code. Writing code is still fun. Writing code is your first love but this new thing, shiny and new and it gives you the financial immediate feedback that you don’t get to see when you’re sitting or hacking away and creating a new business object or new database table. So, I could – I can totally see that. How about you, Mike?
[31:30] Mike: Well, I think Brennan talked about two of the three. I would have ordered them slightly differently. The first one was that you need the co-founder and I don’t think that’s true at all.
[31:37] Rob: Right, you’ve long been in time – you’ve long been —
[31:38] Mike: [Laughter] Yeah, I’ve long been an anti co-founder and it’s not —
[31:40] Rob: Yeah.
[31:41] Mike: And it’s not really so much anti co-founder is that not having the right co-founder is probably worse than having no co-founder and that’s really what it is. I just think that people really need to understand that you if you get involved with the wrong co-founder is infinitely worse than doing everything yourself. The second one is that you need funding in order to do anything interesting. I think that there’s a lot of people out there who are doing some very, very interesting things that they just don’t have funding for what they’re doing. They’re all bootstrapped or they got things to a certain point on their own and then they decided that they wanted to go after funding and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with funding but I think that there is this frequency of notion out there that you need funding in order to be successful and I just don’t think that that’s true.
[32:20] The third one is that if you read a lot of the – the successful people out there, it seems easy and you ready everything they say that they, you know, they’ll talk about some marketing technique or something like that and you kind of intuitively understand it. It’s like, “Oh, well, yeah, that makes sense. I would have done that.” But you wouldn’t necessarily have done that and what you come to realize is that those things aren’t necessarily hard but they’re time-consuming to learn and the reason that they’re time-consuming to learn is because you make a series of missteps before you kind of stumble on the right idea and then in retrospect everything should have been obvious to you but it wasn’t.
[32:57] So it’s just that things that should take a lot less time especially when you’re getting in to the marketing side of things, they’re going to take substantially more time than you think they will because you’re going to have to go through those series of missteps before you really understand what’s going on and it’s only in looking back out of it that you understand.
[33:15] Rob: Right, I think, I, too was a victim of reading the blogs back from about 2000 to maybe 2005 and it was – it was folks like Paul Graham, Eric Sink, Joel Spolsky and they talked about their startup days and they just sounded so awesome. It sounded just like this romantic vision of this peaceful villa where you’re just typing way some code and launching some products and I was totally a victim. So and I don’t think – certainly don’t think that was intentional on their part but it’s just you’re not going to write a blog post about the stuff that’s really boring and as it turns out, a lot of the stuff that we do [Laughter] is pretty darn boring. Don’t know if I would call a myth but definitely a misunderstanding of mine early on.
[33:51] Some folks say that you have to be a user of your app like you have to be the number one user that you have to build something that you will use. And well, I do think that is super helpful, I don’t think that’s a necessity and I absolutely think you can build something in other niches for other people, you know, still the low hanging B2B bootstrap ideas I’m a big fan of. But I still think you can have a lot of success with that even if you’re not necessarily in the niche that you’re building for.
[34:15] Brennan: I think it can be harmful to you to build something that you’re a little too passionate about. One of the things that I’ve tried to get pretty good at is putting my ear to the ground and listening to what people are saying and what problems they have day to day. And I think that is significantly better than the alternative which is you’re in the shower in the morning and a great idea comes to you and you go and build it. I think doing that kind of I won’t say market research but just listening to what people are venting it out, that’s where Planscope came from. I was basically crawling through internet forums for freelancers and I started from there.
[34:50] Rob: Very cool. So, the next question I have is do you have one or two traits that you think are the most important for a successful founder now that you’re kind of knee deep in it?
[34:59] Mike: I think one of the single most important traits of a successful founder is perseverance and understanding that you are going to make mistakes and that’s perfectly okay, you know. Nobody escapes from the business world completely unscathed. That just doesn’t happen. There are people who get really lucky but they still make mistakes along the way and it’s learning from those mistakes and adjusting and listening to what your customers are telling you that really makes a difference at the end of the day. You’re not going to hit homerun on the first day. That’s generally doesn’t happen. You can do a lot of things right but you’re still going to make a few minor mistakes along the way and overtime, the number of mistakes that you make is going to go down in certain areas and then as you start to thread new ground, you’re going to learn new things. You’re going to make mistakes in those areas and then you’ll essentially adjust in those other areas as well. So, I think that perseverance and in the phase of uncertainty is really the single key trait that somebody has to have.
[35:56] Rob: I think the willingness to fail and to actually go out with the intention of failing at a few things is important trait that I learned early on. I was just thinking about six months ago when – I don’t know, it’s about ten months ago, now when I relaunched HitTail I had this marketing plan and I put that in to a task list for myself and I was going to try about there are like 18 different marketing approaches, all different kinds of tactics. And I look at it and said, “You know, if 18 of this fail, and only 2 succeed, I am going to have a growing startup.” I’m actually going to have an app that works and even if 19 of them fail but 1 of them is like a huge success, you can get 10, 20, 30% growth a month in an early stage bootstrap startup with just a single – single successful marketing tactic. And it was actually in my head early on that most of them would fail but I need to try all of them.
[36:48] One, to get the updated experience with them and two, because I love learning, I love trying new things. And three, because I just didn’t know which one was going to work best and which one is going to drive the most traffic. And so running through all these things, I now have learned a ton about all of them and I know how this, you know, much brighter vision for what I can do both with HitTail and with future products that I have. So, I think that the willingness to go out there and to take some risks and to bet both some money and some time. And it’s not betting the farm on any of these single approaches but it’s vesting some money and some time and learning from that and being able to take that knowledge and then invest, you know, as you move forward.
[37:24] Brennan: Yes, I would point out cadence as being an important trait which goes along with what both of you were just talking about and what I mean by cadence is knowing that in order to be successful, it’s going to be a lot of very small victories or a lot of very small steps. And I see a lot of founders who they go away in to a basement and write a product almost in secret. They have this idea of this grand launch day. They launch it and crickets and then they get discourage and fades away. I’ve always been a big, big advocate of really a thousand launches, right? I never really saw my launch day as being anything really that significant except that now I had an avenue for getting paying customers in the door.
[38:08] But there is nothing spectacular on my launch day and I think you read TechCrunch or these different publications and you hear about these grand launches and people adding millions of users overnight. Like I think I mentioned earlier, it’s a long tail game. It’s steady march. It’s a cadence. It’s – I do my, you know, continual amount of blogging and producing content that helps me with my organic visibility where I slowly build out new features base on what my customers are actually asking for instead of thinking it as all or nothing way of looking at things.
[38:40] Rob: Right, as Dan Anders would say, “It’s playing long ball.”
[38:43] Brennan:Right.
[38:44] Rob: All right, so I’m going to wrap this up with one final question and I’m actually interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts on this. We’ll start with Brennan, where do you see your business or businesses one year from now? What do you envision?
[38:57] Brennan: I will probably have another book out because there has been, again, I kind of mind my customer correspondents to figure out what problems people have and they try to see between the lines and what I could offer to them, you know, initially. In a year I would like to fully live off a combination of my products and I would also like to really optimize. I would like to have a very grand funnel that works across all of my products and makes the transition between each product very seamless because the way it’s working now is all of my products really target a single audience. If I can pull that off, that will obviously help my growth of my sales which will, hopefully, get me even closer to cutting the cord on consulting.
[39:41] Rob: Very nice. How about you, Mike, where do you see yourself with AuditShark, Altiris Training, forum software, what else you have going on?
[39:50] Mike: [Laughter] Well —
[39:50] Rob: Where do you see that in a year?
[39:51] Mike: Oh, on top of that, I will probably have published a book in about a year. So —
[39:55] Rob: There —
[39:55] Mike: There’s a spoiler alert.
[39:56] Brennan: [Laughter]
[39:56] Rob: First announcement. Very cool!
[39:57] Mike: Yup, yup.
[39:58] Mike: I anticipate being completely wind off from a consulting probably within twelve months. I don’t know how quickly that’s going to go but I, you know, obviously have a lot of different things going on right now and it’s a matter of kind of figuring out which ones are working, which ones aren’t. I have probably three or four different things that are I’m obviously juggling at the moment. Between all of them, I’m just going to be figuring out what one works and which one doesn’t and then, you know, putting some extra effort in to the things that are working, hopefully, leveraging some partnerships that I’ve been working with people on and you know, like I said just getting on a consulting. That’s kind of my main focus for, you know, the next six to eight months.
[40:34] Rob: On my end, I anticipate or hope, however you like to say it, that HitTail will be a two at least 2X where it is today and with a potentially to be it about 3X it means growing at a pretty nice cliff right now. And I have a product manager in place that I’ve mentioned a few times and he’s taking on more and more responsibilities. So, over the next three to six months, I expected transition in to another product. More updates on that in the future.
[41:03] Brennan: Nice.
[41:04] Rob: Well, Brennan, thank you very much for coming on the program. We really appreciate your time in lending your insight. You know, someone who’s knee deep in this process of transitioning from consulting to products, I’m sure that there’s a lot of folks in the audience who identify with where you’re at inside this. I certainly appreciate it. If people want to get in touch with you, learn more about you, what’s kind of the number one place they can go to get – maybe get in touch with you or just read more about your trials and tribulations?
[41:28] Brennan: So, my – the Planscope blog has most of – I blog extensively and I do this because I’ve realized that for me at least Hacker News can be a pretty good source of new business and I’ve put up quite a few different blog post about – well, I’m very open and transparent with my numbers. Well – I’ll detail on boarding experiments and the results of that or one of the more recent ones was about how I built up this runaway of cash through these different products. planscope.io/blog is where you’ll find a lot of my writing. You can e-mail me at me@brennandunn.com or I’m on Twitter @BrennanDunn, B-R-E-N-N-A-N D-U-N-N.
[42:08] Rob: Well, very good. Thanks again for joining us.
[42:10] Brennan: Yeah, thank you.
[42:11] Rob: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail at 888-801-9690 or e-mail us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from ‘“We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 105 | How to Pick a Platform Partner
Show Notes
- DropBox
- SugarSync
- Backblaze
- Acronis
- Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups: Part 1
- Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups: Part 2
- Pre-Launch Traffic Strategies for Startups: Part 3
- Amazon Web Services
- Microsoft Azure
- Google App Engine
- Twilio
- CityDesk
- MailChimp
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In today’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I are going to be discussing some rules for looking at technology platforms, stacks, frameworks and API’s. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 105.
[00:12] Music
[00:20] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:30] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:30] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Well, I am glad that I have CrashPlan installed in my laptop. As of what about an hour ago, I’ve jumped online to look at the podcast outline you’d created and my laptop won’t boot up. It just locks up at the Window start screen. So, I’m messing around that I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it this evening but if I’m not stress about it like I’m more worried that I’m going to waste 3 to 4 hours screwing around either reformatting the hard drive or whatever but it really is so different than 5 or 10 years ago where like all your data was on a local disk and you didn’t have it anywhere else or you had like a 2-month backup somewhere but between Dropbox and CrashPlan which runs every night and upload my personal stuff and business stuff up to your cloud somewhere it feels — it feels much better.
[01:18] Mike: Yeah, I feel like I’m — I’m kind of in the same boat. I have probably like several different ways of like backing up all my stuff. So, I have — I have Dropbox running for a bunch of data and I have a SugarSync subscription which backs up another set of data and then I have Backblaze which takes an entire machine backup. And then I also have Acronis running which takes a full system snapshot like every night as well [Laughter].
[01:39] Rob: That’s the way to go. You know, as long as it doesn’t impact your performance, the computer performance day to day, it really is nice to have — have some options. What I wish though, you know, so I now how — have a spare router at all times on deck because I’ve now had two brownouts or thunderstorms in the past 6 years that have blown routers but I’m considering like getting an on deck laptop because I’m losing a bunch of time this afternoon. I guess I have this desktop sitting here but as soon as my wife gets home, she’s going to need it. But what do you — what do you think about that? Do you have a spare router and do you have a spare laptop?
[02:12] Mike: But I have extra switches laying around for exactly that purpose like what I do is I have everything going in to my cable modem and then from there, it goes in to my network and I have first thing that it hits is actually one of my servers. So, I can plug it in to either directly in to a switch or in to my server. Like my server I have behind — basically access another wall between, you know, my network and the outside world but I also zip for like VPN and everything else. So —
[02:39] Rob: Right, I got it. Yeah, this router — all the NEC routers that I use have firewalls built. They have a hardware firewall built in and maybe its software. I don’t know but it’s — it’s built in so I have that as well. I don’t have the VPN capability although there’s certainly routers you can buy with that.
[02:53] Mike: Right but I — I mean I do have extra switches and I don’t know if I have an extra wireless router around but I know what you’re saying and then in terms of extra spare laptops and stuff, I have a couple of spare laptops laying around. I think I have 1, 2 — I have 2 spare laptops on top of my regular one and then plus I have a desktop and —
[03:10] Rob: Yeah.
[03:10] Mike: Yeah, you know, I mean I have a whole army of machines here. I can hire like 30 people and every single person will have their own machine.
[03:18] Rob: Not need to scale up. Yeah, and I mean it seems wasteful to have just a laptop sitting around on deck at all times but I really want to get to the point where when this happens because what, this happens like once a year, you know, and I basically lose a day of productivity when I never — when I don’t have that day to give up. And so I’m trying to figure out a way where I can be completely virtual. I would just love to be able to step to the left and log in to this other laptop or this desktop and just not even notice the difference and that — that day is not here even with Dropbox and CrashPlan. I’ll get my data back but it’s going to take a bunch of time for me to, you know, sort this out.
[03:51] Mike: Yeah, I think you’re best bet would be to do something similar to what I do where I’ve got my entire machine being backed up to — I have it actually backed up to a local drive but I also have an external NAS device that I could backup the entire system to. And it would just store differentials everyday or every couple of days or whatever and if I need to go back to another instance of the machine from several days ago or a couple of weeks ago, I can probably do that. And with something like Acronis you can — depending on how you want to do it, you can back up to the exact same hardware which means you either pop out the hard drive and put a new one in and you restore back to that machine or if you have another physical piece of hardware that you would prefer to restore to, you can do that as well even if it’s slightly different. Basically all you need to do is you just need to switch out the hardware’s obstruction layer and mostly software packages that do that kind of backup have the capability to do that for you.
[04:44] Rob: Nice when someone starts that as a service, call me.
[04:46] Mike: [Laughter]
[04:48] Rob: So I was in Pasadena this weekend with the family. We went down and saw the Space Shuttle Endeavour. They retired Space Shuttle and they flew it all across the country and so and then they took 72 hours. They drove it like four or five miles an hour of down through LA from LAX to this — basically, it’s a science center and just awesome. If you’re ever in LA, you should take your kids there because I moved in Pasadena for five years and never went and this thing, it’s a free science center and it’s one of the best I’ve ever been to and I’ve been at at least half a dozen across the country and in Canada as well. So, it was a lot of fun. I also got to hang out with — with Jason Roberts and his wife and kids.
[05:23] Mike: Oh, cool.
[05:24] Rob: It’s a lot of fun hanging out and talking tech, man. You know, there’s just so few people that I ran in to day to day that I’m able to sit down and just engage in like pretty quickly get deep in to like conversation about serious things, you know, like what we do for a living and have someone understand when — when you talk about a really detailed concept about marketing or about a new idea and actually get realistic feedback and it was lot of fun. He’s a kind of — where I always I leave the conversation about — how long we’ve been talking, I leave feeling like we’re in the middle of a conversation. You know I’m saying? Like we — I have so much more to say but it’s like, “Well it’s been we just had a two and a half hour lunch. We have to leave, you know, I got to go pick my kids up.” It was really cool.
[06:06] Mike: That’s awesome. So, hey I came across a couple of different technology blogs say offering advice for choosing technology and both of them misspelled one of the technologies that they were recommending. It was just really bizarre to me that they were able to make recommendations about things that they — and I’m not sure whether it’s just a misspelling or what but it seems had to believe that somebody could make a recommendation about something like a specific distribution of Linux and then misspelled that distribution of Linux.
[06:35] Rob: Yeah, it’s hard not to discredit when people do that. Just like when I’m hiring people like I would send people e-mails or send them a message on oDesk when I’m thinking about hiring them. And if they reply back with like all lower case text with no punctuation and they’re using a letter ‘U’ instead of ‘Y-O-U’, that is a huge, huge red flag for me and I know the person can be, you know, super intelligent and might just be a style thing but I instantly basically discredit them like it’s a major red flag for me. And I feel like the same thing with this technology. If you misspell it, you’re right. You could just be bad at spelling. It could just be a typo but that — that is not both well for my confidence in your recommendation.
[07:14] Mike: Right and to be clear, this was — this was an actual blog post. It wasn’t like it was a transcript. Like I would understand if things come up in our transcript and I’ve seen it come up before where it’s just clearly misspelled and because it’s a transcript, you know and we are using a transcription agency, I don’t expect them to know the spelling of all these different things and that’s, you know, that’s one thing. But this was an actual blog post that was somebody was trying to convince you, “Oh, these are the things you should look at and this why you should use this particular thing.”
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[07:45] Rob: So I have an answer to one of our most frequently ask questions and that question that we both get on the podcast and I also get when I do public speaking and just, you know, I feel like it kind of floats around a lot is, “How do I get traffic to my landing page if I put up a landing page?” And Dan Norris from Informly which is inform.ly, he wrote a 3-part case study of 13 pre-launch traffic strategies that he’s used to market his startup Informly that hasn’t launched yet. And so it’s a 3-part post and it’s really in-depth. He gives like the actual conversion rates, how many visitors he got and it’s really cool. It’s on my blog, softwarebyrob.com. The third part just went live today and so that is actually the new place. Whenever — because — seriously, I get this question whether it’s in the podcast or I get it multiple times per month and that’s my new answer is to go look at this case study because Dan did a bang of job of running through the — all the topics.
[08:43] Mike: Cool. So what else is —
[08:44] Rob: In fact —
[08:45] Mike: … going on?
[08:45] Rob: Last thing quick HitTail update, just wrapping up the first integration that’s going live since — since I acquired it and we’re integrating with Basecamp. It’s a pretty simple integration. We have a To-Do list in HitTail. We’re just integrating with the Basecamp To-Do’s and it was going to go live late last week but you do some weird thing and you have 500 To-Do’s and certain page locks up, Ajax, you know, issue. So, we have a little bit more troubleshooting to do but that should go live this week and I’m interested to see what impact that has because I’ve said last week, it’s not that a bunch of HitTail people use Basecamp that we know about, it’s that we want to basically be able to kind of market to the Basecamp audience and to be promoted through Basecamp’s Twitter feed and they don’t have a product blog anymore but to be on their Basecamp integration’s page and to see what kind of impact that has. So, luckily it hasn’t been a ton of effort on our part so we don’t need a huge amount of signups in order to justify but I’ll definitely be updating that in the coming weeks. And we have 2 or 3 other integrations already sketched out if this one goes well.
[09:48] Mike: So are you going to make the decision to move forward on those other integrations base on how this goes or you just going to kind of do one or two with those extra integrations kind of regardless?
[09:57] Rob: Yeah, we’re going to do at least two of those others because the — those other two are much more in our — kind of in the wheelhouse of customers who would use HitTail so their marketing platforms like HubSpot, you know, they have an app area and it’s people who are already trying to create content and market their apps and such and so, HitTail is a natural fit for that. Basecamp, the reason we did it first is, number one, because it’s the quickest. It was just not a lot of work on our end and it’s the first integration we’re doing so I really wanted to kind of cut our teeth and learn how to launch it and learn how to kind of get everything going because we have to get OAuth going and there is no ASP, Classic ASP libraries for that.
[10:36] Mike: Really?
[10:36] Rob: So —
[10:37] Mike: Imagine that [Laughter] —
[10:38] Rob: So, we had — we had some work around there but — so we put in — put in some work to get that done and we’re hoping that we can, you know, rip the investment with the — the next couple integrations and that even if this one doesn’t work out and more like maybe an issue of target market and you know, we figured the next — next couple will be — will be solid.
[10:54] Mike: Yeah, I mean that’s a good idea to at least as you said cut your teeth on a couple of them just to figure out where the — the problem areas of your application for doing those integrations are going to be as well.
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[11:06] Mike: So, today we’re going to be talking about how to pick a platform partner and essentially this is going to be a guide for how to evaluate whether or not a technology or a solution provider is going to be a good partner for you long term. And the problem is that sometimes it could be really difficult to evaluate the solutions of a specific vendor or specific platforms. So, a lot of these are guidelines. They’re not really hard and fast rules and generally what you’re looking for is for red flags and the absence of red flag is something of a green light but obviously you can’t just take a blanket statement and say, “Well, I didn’t see any red flags based on, you know, what we talked about in this podcast episode so everything is going to be fine,” you know, there’s always going to be the potential for downstream something to happen where things are just not going to work out. And sometimes your hand is just going to be force to go in a particular direction due to price constraint or a specific technology that you’re using or timeline but basically, you’d just want to make sure that you are aware of what you’re getting in to.
[12:02] So, some of the things that we’re going to be talking about today are there’s three different types of platforms that we’re really talking about and the first one is a true platform. So, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, Windows, Linux, Google’s app engine, iOS, OS X, those types of things. The second one is technology stacks and frameworks. And this really falls under things like databases, program and languages, the model framework. For example, jQuery, MVC, Ruby on Rails, et cetera. And then the third category is a company or a product API. So, things like Twilio, Twitter, Facebook, Google, PayPal, Stripe or any other payment processor, Basecamp, et cetera. Companies that have an API that they have made available for their products that you could leverage to either do an integration point or to truly build upon the product that they already have.
[12:55] Rob: We’re just going to group all of those things you’ve mentioned in to one big bucket, right, and we’re calling anyone who provides any of those things platform partners.
[13:02] Mike: Yes. So, the first thing to keep in mind when we’re going through this is that there’s a difference between something that where you’re building an integration point between your product and their product versus someone who’s truly a platform provider where you are completely dependent upon them providing the service and this is the difference between like you said earlier in this episode, you doing an integration with Basecamp where you’re not completely reliant upon Basecamp with the exception of where that particular integration versus something like Justin Vincent’s Pluggio application where he’s completely reliant upon the Twitter API being available for him to leverage in order to make his product function.
[13:44] Rob: Right or even if you think about HitTail, it’s reliant on Google and other search engines passing certain information in their search query string. So, it’s not an — it’s an API of sort. It’s not necessarily a sanctioned one but if they all change that or they suddenly stop providing them information, HitTail really is based on their platforms functioning that way.
[14:03] Mike: That’s right. So, we have five guidelines that we’re going to go through. And the first one is that the vendor or the technology place well with others. The first part of it is especially true when you’re talking about service providers. Basically, you’re looking for somebody who isn’t going to steal the ideas of the people who are building on their platform or steal their revenue streams and I’ve seen companies out there where you’ll build a product on their platform or you’ll build a complementary product for their platform and then they’ll look at them and say, “Hey, that’s a great idea,” and then they go ahead and they either try to work with you to work out some sort of a partnership or arrangement where there is a revenue sharing but if that doesn’t work out for whatever reason, they’ll just say, “Well, you know what? We’re just going to implement that ourselves and we’ll take all the revenue.” And because they’re the ones selling that platform to begin with, they basically have first crack at the customers for that revenue. So, they can essentially push you completely out of the market and I’ve seen companies do this.
[14:56] So, what you’re looking for is people who are not going to do that and Microsoft in the 90’s, I think was a company that was really feared for this type of thing. People did not want to go head to head against Microsoft or anything. And Yahoo is kind of the prime example as a company that said, “No, we are not a technology company,” because being a technology company meant that they were going against Microsoft. They wanted to be known as a media company and that works great for a long time. It really kept them out of the sights of Microsoft. But there’s a lot of other companies that you have to be careful around when you’re making these types of decisions and Microsoft today is a lot more partner-focused than they were back in the 90’s.
[15:33] But today, I think in my opinion if you look at company like Apple, you have to be a little bit careful about them primarily because of the extreme secrecy around what Apple does and I think just recently even with iOS 6, the Apple came in and said “Well, Google has been providing the maps for us the longest time and we’re going to ax that. We’re going to create our own maps app.” You want to be careful about vendors who are going to come and swoop in and essentially try and replace you.
[15:58] Rob: Is this also like Twitter when they bought bunch of — couple Twitter clients and then they basically capping API usage so several of the other Twitter clients that are still out there can’t really grow that much?
[16:09] Mike: Yeah, that be — that be one of those in my mind. I mean because obviously they want to make money in some way shape or form off of this other — the Twitter client that they bought but in another way, they’re basically reducing the level of competition by limiting what those other Twitter clients can do on their platform.
[16:26] Rob: Right and it seems like in the 90’s, Microsoft was known as a predator and so, you’ve kind of — you threaded lightly and you expect that they might come after you if you entered the space that they would feasibly entered. With Twitter, it wasn’t really — I don’t think it was really telegraphed before maybe six or eight months ago that they were going to do the changes they recently made to their API’s. But I think until a company has a business model, until they have revenue, until you know how they’re going to make money, they could pivot at any time and basically, knock any of their partners out of the water and that’s essentially what’s happening with Twitter is now going after this advertising revenue model and they’re realizing that they want paid tweets and some other things where they need to control the client experience. So, that decision to go after that forced their hand and kind of made them pushed out their partners who were using the API.
[17:18] Mike: Right but there’s definitely ways to go about that without killing your existing partner. So, for example, they could have said, “Well, we’re not just going to accept any new partners. Nobody else can build on it.” If you are an existing partner you already have an API, you have an API key that you can reach in to our dataset, that’s fine. You could continue doing it.
[17:35] Rob: That’s basically what they’ve done.
[17:37] Mike: No, they haven’t. Actually, they put limits though on how many API calls those companies can do.
[17:44] Rob: Any they already had limits before. They’ve just changed the way they were calculated and then they said you can have no more than like what is it, a hundred thousand unique Twitter handles if you have like a client now or you could have twice as many as you have now. So, you’re right. There is a hard limit now and there wasn’t before.
[17:59] Mike: Right and that’s kind of what I’m getting at there as they basically taken a very adversarial approach to what previously with their partners and the people who helped them grow to the point that they are at now and now, those people are probably struggling at this point to just try and figure out, “Okay. Well, what can I do? How do I make money off of this that, you know, I’ve already invested whatever amounts of money and time in to this particular platform,” and the provider is kind of shocked, you know, maybe there’s not a whole lot that they can do about it.
[18:27] Rob: Probably, now that they’ve done it, people are really weary of Twitter and there are maybe like a — they are not as predatory as Microsoft was in the 90’s but I think they should be viewed with caution, right? A lot of people are now not building stuff on Twitter’s API because they know they can change it at anytime. But before they started making the changes, I don’t know if that they telegraph that much.
[18:45] Mike: So, I think you’re right. I mean that beforehand it would have been very difficult to make the call and say, “Oh well, Twitter would have, you know, is going to eventually screw you down the road.” I don’t think that that’s really a conclusion you could have justifiably come to. I think that by looking at the number of API changes that they made, you could say, “Well, they’re not necessarily — they don’t care as much about the partners that they have because they were breaking things quite a bit from what I understand but I could definitely see how somebody could look at that and say, you know, this isn’t really a good business proposition for us because they keep breaking things for us and they don’t necessarily care about that. And it’s not so much that they would have — you could look at said and well, Twitter is going to become predatory as just — they just weren’t playing well with others which is a little bit different and that’s kind of the real focus with this particular — the first one as they play well with others.
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[19:37] Mike: The second guideline for choosing a platform provider is that you find a company that really stays true to their core focus. And some companies are chasing multiple revenue streams or you know, in Twitter’s case, they weren’t chasing any revenue stream, it wasn’t obvious but in the case of companies where they’re chasing multiple revenue streams and they’re really not committed to anyone of them, you have to be at least a little bit cautious. There’s nothing inherently wrong with chasing multiple revenue streams but as buyer or a prospective partner, you should definitely be aware that without some level of commitment from them, they’re going to be less likely to be bothered by issues that you could consider critical to your business. One way to help to filter out the types of companies that stay true to their core focus is that the companies that you’re working with, they don’t try to be everything to everyone and you know, some types of customers are just not going to be right for them and sometimes the partners are not going to be right for them. And if you ask them, they’re going to be honest about it and tell you that upfront.
[20:33] And instead of trying to adapt themselves to meet your needs and do absolutely everything that you need or that you are looking for, they’re going to be able to just be honest with you and say, “Look, that’s not something that we can do right now.” And they may couch it a little bit and say, “You know, we may look at that in the future,” but those are the types of answers that you’re going to get from most people who are going to be honest about it. And if somebody comes back and says, “Oh yeah, we have that slated for next quarter,” and then next quarter comes along and then it doesn’t come out and then it gets push a quarter and gets push another quarter. Those are the types of things that tend to bring up flags when you’re evaluating these thunders.
[21:08] Rob: So, the danger here is that if a company isn’t staying true to their core focus, that they could easily move in to your area. Is that the issue?
[21:18] Mike: Well, that’s — that’s part of it. The other risk I think is that they go in a completely different direction and they just stop supporting whatever it is that you were doing. So, as an example, you can take a look at Fog Creek where they started building CityDesk and you know, they were selling CityDesk back in 2000, 2001 timeframe and then they started selling FogBugz. And they came out with version 2.0 of CityDesk and then they essentially dropped it. They never did anything else with it ever again and if you go to their website or you search around for it a little bit, you can still find it today and it looks like they still have in oral form for it but that product hasn’t been updated in probably close to 10 years at this point.
[21:54] So, because Fog Creek is a company was going after a couple of different revenue streams and then one of them took off the risk that I was talking about was essentially they have two or three different products or a company has a couple of different services and one of them takes off, chances are they’re going to double down on that one and if it happens to be the one other than one you’ve chosen, then you’re essentially out of luck. There’s not much you can do about it because they’ve just abandoned the one that you were relying on and it won’t make anymore forward progress.
[22:23] Rob: And this is a similar danger to building something in — if you build something in Visual FoxPro years ago or VB6 and then Microsoft up in — updates it, you know, .NET and kind of leaves your old coding paradigm in the past and all your — your framework they don’t — they don’t really update the language anymore.
[22:41] Mike: I think Microsoft is notorious on this front just because they come up with new types of technologies and you know, especially when it comes to new ways to access data or new frameworks, it could be really challenging to try and pick the winner I’ll say because they may decide, “Oh well, we’ve got millions of users and you know, only 200,000 of them are using this so we’re going to drop that.”
[23:03] Rob: Yeah, I think there’s an advantage to adapting technologies. It’s funny it’s that balancing act. If you adapt them too early, then you have the potential of dropping on something that never takes off. But if you adapt them too late, then you have these technologies only have a certain lifetime, right? I mean if you look back to where — where web pages were original built dynamic web pages in late 90’s, it was C++, CGI Scripts. Then it was — there was Perl and there was this couple of years of — it was like ColdFusion, Classic ASP 1.0 and PHP came up around then and then really PHP is now on 5.0 which is totally different. If you still had old PHP 1.0, it probably wouldn’t even run anymore. So, you had — would have had to move that up. There were desktop apps in VB6. Those got cut off at the knees when .NET came out in 2002. And so if you’re too early in the curve, something you can honestly really pick one bad, right and then take a nosedive and you really get a lot of support for it. But if you wait too late, the thing could basically not be — be use by many people anymore.
[24:04] And it’s not bad of a technology, I mean here I own HitTail. It’s in Classic ASP which hasn’t been updated since, as far as I know, 2001 or 2002. So, it’s at 10 or 11-year old of web technology which is just a crazy statement to say. But it’s not the end of the world that we’re dealing with that. I mean everything still works. The app still works. It’s just that there’s no community around it and if we run in to a hard problem and the solution is not online, we’re really at the mercy of spending hours and hours troubleshooting it. As well as the fact that there’s no ego system there anymore to develop things as — things like OAuth or integrations with, you know, REST API’s weren’t around when Classis ASP was built. And so that’s a trail off you have is that an old app will still continue to work but when you want to update it, you want to do cool and new stuff with it, you probably will have to use a newer language to then tie back in to it.
[24:54] Mike: Well, the other interesting this is that because ASP is obviously on the down swing at this point is that looking forward, I mean how many more versions of — of Windows servers are still even going to support ASP.
[25:08] Rob: Yeah, and I think Windows 2008 server didn’t have it in by default.
[25:12] Mike: It’s not.
[25:13] Rob: Yeah, I think it was the first year where they — you actually had to go in and install it yourself.
[25:17] Mike: I’m going to look at Window server 2012 to see what’s in there but, you know, that’s something you may have to deal with at some point in the near future.
[25:25] Rob: Uh huh, true.
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[25:29] Mike: The third thing to look at when you’re trying to choose a technology provider is that if it’s — especially if it’s a service provider that they take steps to be safe with and secure with your data. And this — as I said, it applies to a lot more to the platform service providers rather than to integration partners or to just technology providers. But you have to make sure that if, for example, there’s a data breach, they’re going to notify you and they’re going to let you know that there’s something wrong. And if they don’t notify you, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with that company and you really need to be careful about using them in the future. And I think that you can look kind of all over the internet for different companies who’ve ran in to these situations where they have a data breach and either it shows up on some web page somewhere and they just don’t tell anybody about it or they just kind of, you know, do that several weeks after the fact.
[26:20] And I think we ran in to that at one point with our mailing list provider. People started complaining that their e-mails were getting spammed and you know, come to find out it was — it took probably three or four weeks that we found out that our e-mail provider had a data breach and that was exactly what they did. They didn’t bother to tell anybody. They just put up a web page several weeks afterwards because people have been complaining so loudly and there was never an apology. There was never a notification of what was going on. It was just, “Oh, yeah, this happened,” and that was it. And I think you and I just kind of said, “No, that’s it. We’re done at this point.” And we moved everything off of them and then went over to MailChimp.
[26:57] Rob: Which was a painful transition that was AWeber which is surprisingly enough because AWeber has been around for a long time. I would expect that they would have behave better than that but it was — it was pretty shocking and that was, what, two or three years ago that happened. And it’s obviously, it’s painful to move your mailing list because you just, you know, you’re so in trench in to that API. You have the interface down. You have the form embedded. I mean there’s — it’s not a trivial move but that was enough for you and I to decide to — to move everything over to MailChimp.
[27:24] Mike: Right and that’s just a level of trust. I mean if you don’t — if you can’t trust them to do the right thing, then you definitely need to start looking elsewhere.
[27:32] Rob: Right and it’s not that they got breached, it’s just that they didn’t tell us they got breached and we had to wait for complaints to come in from our prospects and customers saying they were getting spammed essentially by, you know, using specific e-mails they had set up for our stuff and I’m so glad that was over.
[27:48] Mike: Also a part of being safe and secure with your data is that if they lose your data and by lose, I mean, you know, the data gets corrupted and they’re not willing to do whatever they can to try and help and they’re not staying in communication with you to let you know what’s going on, that’s a really bad sign. And again, this just goes back to the red flags and looking for things that — signs of things that could go wrong in the relationship down the road and some of these things obviously, you can’t know them in advance but you can search around and find history on companies that had been in business for a while and see what the — the reaction from their users has been over — over time.
[28:24] A lot of these companies have — there’s websites out there where you can go and find reviews and what other people’s experiences are with them. Don’t necessarily trust all the marketing stuff that’s on their website. Go out and find a legitimate third party reviews. Not to say that the reviews on their website aren’t accurate but they are obviously not going to publish things that cast them in any sort of a negative light as well. I mean you — that’s just not something you do on your own marketing material. But if there are user submitted areas, if they have forums, definitely look through those forums and see if you can find out how they would respond to those types of things.
[28:58] Rob: Twitter is probably not a good place to go to see who they have been responding to and look at those conversations.
[29:02] Mike: I think the only down side with Twitter is that you only get so much history there. I mean you’re only going to be able to look back so far. Really what this comes down to is just are these companies willing to own up through their mistakes and everyone makes mistakes and it’s not a big deal that people make mistakes. It’s really how they respond to those mistakes and you know, just keep in mind not everyone customer is a good fit for every single vendor.
[29:22] Music
[29:26] Mike: The fourth guideline we have is that they’re not stuck in the previous decade. Many people make judgments about a company base on their website and to some extent this is good because if you look at a website and it looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 90’s, chances are it probably hasn’t. And if the technology is visually stuck in the last decade, you have to wonder what’s going on under the hood and how long some of that code has been there. And not that code goes bad but problems change over time. And if the company has been changing everything under the covers overtime, then chances are that that front end UI should have as well. And if the front end UI isn’t changing, it may be an indication that things underneath the covers are not changing to meet the needs of new customers.
[30:06] Rob: Right and I think it depends on the business they’re in, right? If you’re looking at someone that’s providing you with, well I mean like an app like Twitter or like some cutting edge social type of thing, you expect to have a fairly modern UI and you expect to have modern REST API’s, not things that are, whatever like web services from 2001. Whereas if you’re dealing with someone or maybe you’re getting government data for something for housing prices or for some old metric that, you know, some — maybe the company is been up for 20 years, you’re going to give them leniency and they — they can have a website that looks older, an API that maybe was built in the late 90’s and you’re going to give them a little more leeway because, hey, they haven’t updated it and they may not have had a reason to do so.
[30:46] So, I mean I think an interesting look is if you look at MailChimp versus AWeber who we’re just talking about, AWeber API is old. They haven’t really updated their UI in years and I think they retain a lot of the customers that they’ve always had but I think if someone comes at the MailChimp website and looks around, they — there’s a very different feeling. There’s a lot more of a hi-tech startup like these guys are constantly updating their app versus AWeber which is more like I’d say very consistent. It’s a more classic aged app. I mean that’s only a bad thing if — if you want new features to be rolled out constantly. I think there’s these pluses and minuses on both sides. But I have heard complaints from people who are still using AWeber that they wish there — there were some new like split testing and you know, features that MailChimp has rolled out that they wish AWeber would get on as well.
[31:34] Mike: And the fifth guideline for choosing a platform provider is that they are able and willing to help you. If they’re honest and willing to tell you when they’re not going to be a good fit for you or if they have documentation and resources that are available that they can point you to and they will help you in the right direction, then they’re probably going to be of good fit for you. But if they are willing to yes you to death and do anything it takes to land you as a customer and then you find out after the fact that they just really weren’t a good fit or that you weren’t a good fit for their services, that’s obviously a bad sign. And you’re going to have to dig a little bit. Chances are good you’re going to have to get on their support.
[32:11] You’re going to have to ask them some questions. Ask them straight forward and say, “You know, will this work in your environment and if so, how is it intended to work?” If you have any questions about how it’s suppose to work or how your product is going to integrate in to their platform and they’re not able to give you satisfactory answers, I mean they don’t necessarily seem knowledgeable about it, either ask for somebody who’s a little bit higher up or you know, take what they’re saying with a grain of salt. Do some additional testing and this might even be a good opportunity to outsource some of that work to oDesk and see if somebody can build a very, very quick prototype using the technology and the ways that they’ve outlined to see if it actually works or not.
[32:47] Rob: In terms of them being able and willing to help you, how does that play in to something like Open Source Software in to like the Google app engine where there isn’t really support?
[32:58] Mike: Well, I think that those types of things when you’re looking at Open Source Software or anything, I mean is there a community behind it because if that community is there, then chances are good that they’re willing to help you but there are — and I can’t think of one off the top of my head but I can imagine that there is probably an open source community out there where there are very close and very not helpful [Laughter] I’ll say and you try building something would whatever the software is and they’re just like, “Oh, you’re doing it wrong. You have no idea what you’re doing just go — so go away.” I can’t imagine that there is very many of them because I wouldn’t — that they would last very long or get very big but I can imagine that there are might be a couple out there that are kind of on a bleeding edge and there’s just like we don’t have time for you, just leave us along figure it out yourself.
[33:42] Rob: Or if it’s a community that’s really small or virtually non-existent I could see that’s like kind of like not having support available.
[33:42] Mike: Yeah, there’s a difference between having dead air and somebody just being not helpful. I could see dead air being much more prevalent than something like, you know, just people just saying, “No, go away.” Really what you’re looking for is are they willing to try and make whatever it is that you’re trying to do work, you know, are they offering solutions or are they offering places you can go for a help. And not to say that they’ll do it for you but they’re trying to make your life easier as oppose to making you jump through hoops.
[34:15] Rob: Is there any way to tell before you integrate with them whether they’re going to be able and willing to help you because like you said they might yes you to death before the sale and then once you get in to it, you know, you build the thing and then they’re not very helpful. How do — how do you avoid that?
[34:28] Mike: Well, I think they’re building prototype is a good way to do it and for prototype you don’t necessarily have to build everything that you’re looking to do. Just try building one piece of it and if it’s something like doing and a lot integration and that’s just one piece of the entire thing and you think that that’s going to be a problem area, work on that one piece or go to oDesk and outsource it to somebody and say, “Hey, I need you to make this work,” and take a look at the output and see if, you know, is it remotely readable? If the person had to jump through hoops in order to get it to work and you know, if you put them in touch with the vendor and they’re not able to help or unwilling to help, then, you know, that says something about what level of support you can expect in the future.
[35:08] I think the big key is making sure that you don’t spend a lot of money before you kind of get in to it and I’ve heard horror stories from people about spending 15, 20, 30, $50,000 before — before they even get something installed and then having to do all these customizations and then coming to find out, “Oh, by the way, this isn’t going to work because of such and such bug that’s unknown issue.” So, I think that wraps up how to pick a platform partner and as I said before the things to keep in mind are when you’re evaluating the vendor, make sure that they play well with others, make sure that the company is staying true to their core focus, make sure that they are taking steps to be safe and secure with the data that you’re putting in to them or onto their services and make sure that they’re not stuck in the last decade and the fifth one is to make sure that they’re able and willing to help you.
[35:56] Music
[35:59] Mike: If you have a question or comment, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can e-mail it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from ‘“We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 104 | Podcasts For Startup Founders
Show Notes
Our 4 Podcast Classifications:
- Tactical (t)
- Motivational (m)
- Entertainment (e)
- Exposure (x)
(Interview) Startup Podcasts
- Mixergy – tm
- This Week in Startups – me
- Startup Slingshot – tm
- Startup Success Podcast – me
- Founders Talk – me
(Non-interview) Startup Podcasts
- A Smart Bear – me
- TechZing – me
- Seth Godin’s Startup School – me
- Customer Development for Smart People – m
- Startups for the Rest of Us – tm
- Kalzumeus podcast – me
Business Paradigms
- Actionable Books – x
- HBR Ideacast – x
- The Invisible Hand: Management, Economics and Strategy for the Thinking Person – x
Online Marketing and Online Business
- Lifestyle Business Podcast – me
- Tropical Talk Radio – te
- Internet Marketing: Insider tips and advice for online marketing – te
- Foolish Adventure – m
- Internet Business Mastery – mx
- Copyblogger Radio – tx
- SEO 101 – tx
- Talking Websites – tx
Storytelling
- This American Life – e
- The Moth Podcast – e
- This Developer’s Life – e
Tech News and Related
- TWiT – e
- Tech News Today – e
- This Week in Tech – e
- This Week in Google – e
- Frame Rate – e
- Windows Weekly – e
- Hanselminutes – xe
- Apps for Kids – e
- Everyday Einstein’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Making Sense of Science – e
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy
- 99% Invisible – xe
- Decode DC – xe
- NPR: Planet Money – xe
- APM Marketplace – xe
- APM Marketplace Tech (4 minutes) – xe
- Freakonomics Radio – xe
- TED Talks (audio) – xe
- NPR Topics: Pop Culture – xe
Thanks to Andrea Conti for putting together the table below:
Podcast Type |
Podcast Name | Tactical (T) | Motivational (M) | Entertainment (E) | Exposure (X) | WebSite | Podcast Download |
(Interview) Startup Podcasts |
Mixergy – tm | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | http://mixergy.com | |
(Interview) Startup Podcasts |
This Week in Startups – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://thisweekinstartups.com/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/twist-audio |
(Interview) Startup Podcasts |
Startup Slingshot – tm | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | http://www.thestartupslingshot.com | http://www.thestartupslingshot.com/feed/ |
(Interview) Startup Podcasts |
Startup Success Podcast – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://startupsuccesspodcast.com/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheStartupSuccessPodcast |
(Interview) Startup Podcasts |
Founders Talk – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://5by5.tv/founderstalk | http://feeds.5by5.tv/founderstalk |
(Non-interview) Startup Podcasts |
A Smart Bear – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://blog.asmartbear.com/ | http://feeds2.feedburner.com/blogspot/smartbear |
(Non-interview) Startup Podcasts |
TechZing – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://techzinglive.com/ | http://techzinglive.com/feed |
(Non-interview) Startup Podcasts |
Seth Godin’s Startup School – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://www.earwolf.com/show/startup-school/ | http://rss.earwolf.com/startup-school |
(Non-interview) Startup Podcasts |
Customer Development for Smart People – m | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | http://clearshore.net/feed/ | |
(Non-interview) Startup Podcasts |
Startups for the Rest of Us – tm | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/StartupsForTheRestOfUs |
(Non-interview) Startup Podcasts |
Kalzumeus podcast – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://www.kalzumeus.com/ | http://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/ |
Business Paradigms | Actionable Books – x | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | http://www.actionablebooks.com/media/videos/author-interviews/ | |
Business Paradigms | HBR Ideacast – x | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/ | |
Business Paradigms | The Invisible Hand: Management, Economics and Strategy for the Thinking Person – x |
0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | http://www.theinvisiblehandpodcast.com/TIH-Annual.html | http://www.theinvisiblehandpodcast.com/InvisibleHandPodcast_fb.xml |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
Lifestyle Business Podcast – me | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | http://www.lifestylebusinesspodcast.com/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/lifestyle-business-podcast/AdJF |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
Tropical Talk Radio – te | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://www.tropicalmba.com/podcasts/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/GetPaidToTravelTheWorld-TheTropicalMba |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
Internet Marketing: Insider tips and advice for online marketing – te |
1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/impodcast/ | http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/podcast/ |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
Foolish Adventure – m | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | http://foolishadventure.com/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/foolishadventure |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
Internet Business Mastery – mx | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | http://internetbusinessmastery.com/podcast | http://feeds.feedburner.com/ibm |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
Copyblogger Radio – tx | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | http://www.copyblogger.com/imfsp-radio-1/ | |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
SEO 101 – tx | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/seo-101/ | http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/seo-101/ |
Online Marketing and Online Business |
Talking Websites – tx | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | http://www.talkingwebsites.co/ | |
Storytelling | This American Life – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives | |
Storytelling | The Moth Podcast – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://themoth.org/radio/episodes | http://feeds.themoth.org/themothpodcast |
Storytelling | This Developer’s Life – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://thisdeveloperslife.com/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/thisdeveloperslife |
Tech News and Related | TWiT – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://twit.tv/shows | http://twit.tv/node/feed |
Tech News and Related | TWiT – Tech News Today – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://twit.tv/tnt | |
Tech News and Related | TWiT – This Week in Tech – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-tech | |
Tech News and Related | TWiT – This Week in Google – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google | |
Tech News and Related | TWiT – Frame Rate – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://twit.tv/show/frame-rate | |
Tech News and Related | TWiT – Windows Weekly – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://twit.tv/show/windows-weekly | |
Tech News and Related | Hanselminutes – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.hanselminutes.com/archives | http://feeds.feedburner.com/HanselminutesCompleteMP3 |
Tech News and Related | Apps for Kids – e | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://appsforkids.libsyn.com/ | http://appsforkids.libsyn.com/rss |
Tech News and Related | Everyday Einstein’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Making Sense of Science – e |
0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | http://everydayeinstein.quickanddirtytips.com/ | |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
99% Invisible – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://99percentinvisible.org/ | http://feeds.99percentinvisible.org/99percentinvisible |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
Decode DC – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.decodedc.com/decodedc-podcast/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/decodedc |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
NPR: Planet Money – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/ | |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
APM Marketplace – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.marketplace.org/ | http://www.marketplace.org/shows/85/podcast.xml |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
APM Marketplace Tech (4 minutes) – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.marketplace.org/ | http://www.marketplace.org/shows/55/podcast.xml |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
Freakonomics Radio – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.freakonomics.com/category/freakonomics-radio/podcasts/ | http://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
TED Talks (audio) – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.ted.com/talks/list | http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_audio |
New Ideas, Politics & the Economy |
NPR Topics: Pop Culture – xe | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | http://www.npr.org/sections/pop-culture/ | http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=1048 |
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 104.
[00:02] Music
[00:11] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:19] Rob: I’m Rob.
[00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How you doing this week, Rob?
[00:24] Rob: You know, I’m doing really good. I’m actually glad that I changed hosting facilities for HitTail from when I acquired it a year ago because back then it was hosted in Manhattan right downtown and now it’s hosted in Virginia somewhere far away from the Coast. Obviously, Hurricane Sandy has really done some damage to the power grid there on the East Coast. How you’ve been faring?
[00:43] Mike: Pretty good. It’s funny that you mentioned that you’re glad that you moved HitTail to a different server that was kind of further inland because I’ve worked with companies that are in, you know, Western Virginia and in the state of West Virginia and most people all know this but that’s a very, very big hosting area because like the geology is such that there’s very, very few earthquakes and although they have deal with snow, a lot of their income and power lines were all in the ground and so are a lot of the fiber optic cables so they don’t have to worry about stability of the infrastructure and that’s why a lot of the hosting companies that are in D.C. have a lot of their facilities based out in that general vicinity.
[01:19] Rob: Yup, I’ve also heard there’s a bunch of big pipes, big internet trunk pipes that go through there and maybe they put them there because of that natural geological stuff you’re talking about. But AOL, I think that’s like their worldwide headquarter is there and of course, laid a bunch of trunk lines back in the 90’s. I’ve found this cool quote from the Fog Creek blog. I guess FogBugz On Demand went down for part of the day. I think it’s freaking havoc on so many services are going down right now but one of their quotes was “The super human folks at our data center are hauling 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs.” Assuming they’re able to sustain a rate of transport that exceeds the rate of consumption that data center should run until electricity is restored and the current estimate is four days from now. That’s insane. Big, a major city like Manhattan going to have outages for — I mean they’re calling it a hundred year storm, you know, it’s pretty crazy. I actually have a confession to make. You talked me in to using Trello.
[02:16] Mike: Yes, I did.
[02:16] Rob: So, I’ve always been a pen and paper guy for my to do’s and no to do list has ever replaced it. There’s always something cumbersome about them. There’s just one thing that gets in to the way that doesn’t work as well as the pen and paper so I never make the switch. And last week, I finally decided as I was moving couple of the guys who were working on HitTail, everything is in FogBugz now instead of, you know, other means. We were communicating via e-mail and in Google doc and such. So everything is in FogBugz and I realized that I really need to — to make one more try at this and of course, since you had talked about using Trello, I gave it a shot. And so far, I’m impressed with it. It is very simple. It does exactly what I need, nothing more. There are really hasn’t — I mean I really don’t have a complaint.
[02:58] I’m always looking — when I started using a to do list thing, I’m looking for the one thing that’s going to make me stop using it and I haven’t found that yet. I’ve been using it for about a week straight and it’s great. I go to, you know, go to coffee shop or go somewhere else that I don’t have to remember to bring this paper that if I leave this piece of paper on my desk that, you know, actually still know what’s going on. So, so far, you know, big thumbs up for me and once they get — I’m assuming they got FogBugz integration at some point where I can actually move issues or at least, you know, reference issues between the two, it would be even better for my purposes.
[03:28] Mike: It’s just I got a way from it because I kind of ducked my head to work on certain things then I just never really went back to it. I store a lot of things in Evernote. So I think that once your — the big problem with to do list in general and it’s not specific to Trello or you know, paper or any given technology is just the fact that like as you start throwing things in to it, the more you add then it becomes, I almost say detriment because you look at this giant list of things that you have to do and it’s demotivational and that’s when —
[03:56] Rob: Right.
[03:56] Mike: … it really comes down to.
[03:57] Rob: Yup. If it becomes a dumping ground and there’s just a hundred things on it they’re not prioritized or it’s hard to prioritize them, you’re right. You eventually just ignore it. To declare to do bankruptcy and just shred that whole piece of paper. I’ve done that several times.
[04:10] Mike: Yup.
[04:10] Rob: So, yeah and that very rarely to happen to me over the coming weeks. So, I’m just hoping that this is one system that sticks. But what’s nice is it’s easy enough to switch back to paper.
[04:19] Mike: Right.
[04:19] Rob: What about you? What else has been going?
[04:21] Mike: So, one of our listeners named Matt Crider wrote us to let us know that he runs his website called Flapcast.com and that allows people to listen to their podcast online. And he recently started to listen to ours specifically and he’s come to realized how difficult marketing really is for developer and it’s really interesting to see our podcast up there because our podcast is syndicated in a couple of different channels and we have absolutely no way of figuring out like where it gets syndicated and how and any sort of statistics with that. So based on our RSS feed, we have kind of a round about idea of how many people are listening to the podcast but that’s really about it. I mean because all these other syndication channels, we just, you know, it could be exponentially greater and we just don’t know.
[05:04] Rob: Right because anyone who — anyone like Flapcast who might be cashing our mp3 file and letting a number of people listen to it, that means that each individual is not downloading it since Flapcast is a web — it’s basically a web-based podcast interface. It’s actually looks really nice.
[05:20] Mike: Right.
[05:20] Rob: It’s cool. I might — I actually might import my stuff if it allows me to just import directly just almost as a backup because Apple is doing such screwy things now with their podcast. It kicked them out of iTunes and the podcast episode on your iPhone is buggy as heck and I’m just waiting for it to lose my feed and not have a copy of it somewhere. So, I may use this as a backup. It’s pretty cool.
[05:42] Mike: Interesting. I haven’t run any problems with it, with the iPhone, I mean.
[05:46] Rob: Oh, really?
[05:46] Mike: Yeah.
[05:47] Rob: It’s the worst iOS app I’ve ever used. It — hands down. Actually, I’ve never given an iOS app a negative review. I intentionally went to iTunes and listed out all the bugs that it still has after what’s like 3 months later or 2 months after release and they have done a bunch of updates and it’s still downloads massive. I mean my — I will clean it out knowing no podcast showing as new, you know, as new needing to be listened too and within a couple of days as I sync, it’ll bring 2,000 new episodes from all of my feeds in and they’re all the things that I having marked as played before.
[06:20] Mike: Wow.
[06:20] Rob: And it’s just — it’s just a big bug. It also crashes on me a number of times a day. There’s a few others and that’s now slowly they were probably 10 when I started and listening to it about 2 months ago and they’ve slowly been picking those off. So there’s only about 2 or 3 really big ones left but still only makes me wonder about Apple’s ability to execute [Laughter] on this little podcast app or maybe not their ability to execute but their how high they prioritize it I guess.
[06:45] Mike: Yeah, well I can definitely add my own. I was searching for movies near Mulberry, Massachusetts. I said movies near Mulberry which the phone knows where I live so it really shouldn’t be that difficult for it to find movies near where I live and it came up and said, “Movies near Melbourne, Australia.” I’m just like, “Really? Come on.” [Laughter]
[07:05] Rob: I’m looking for movies on the other side of the world right now.
[07:07] Mike: Yeah, I don’t know. [Laughter]
[07:09] Rob: I have a HitTail update. We are now embarking on a series of integrations. If you recall for my talk at MicroConf last year, I talked about integration marketing as a way to kind of find new users and just connect with other apps and other owners. So our first one probably will go live later this week and maybe I’ll talk about it next week after — after we go public to talk about how we promoted it and kind of the, you know, the benefits we get from that. And I have also, man, I’m taking the step back and I’m doing a bunch of housekeeping issues because I have just been pushing forward, right, like it’s all about providing — basically, providing the most value for the customers who are using it and trying to get more customers. So that’s all I’ve been doing. So anything that’s like not customer-facing, I’ve been completely ignoring. So, there were a couple of minor long standing bugs that I fixed last week. Reporting was a mess. I was using the main database that gets all this incoming traffic. We don’ have any type of reporting database and I was starting my reports with then starting to slow it down and my nightly tasks that look at high volume users were starting to slow the actual production database down.
[08:11] So, we’ve just gone in and spent time to kind of pull that out in to something just for efficiency. To be honest, it’s that point, you know, we always talk about pretty mature optimization, I’m at the place where like growth is just starting to get to the point where I need to start optimizing because it’s — from where I bought HitTail a year ago, a little over a year ago, we’re at 10X, the number of paying customers. And it’s not that the servers have — it hasn’t had any problems. It’s not hasn’t slow down yet but our DBA has these inner workings of the database that he knows what’s going on and he shows me graphs and we’re going to get there if we keep up this growth for another few months. So, now is the time to optimize.
[08:51] Mike: That sounds a little scary. I mean if your DBA is keeping track of certain things and he said, “Well, this is going to be a problem and it’s going to most likely be a problem a lean 2 or 3 months, then you don’t have a whole lot of time to make those optimizations that is going to turn it in to not a problem.
[09:09] Rob: Right. Well, so he didn’t give me an exact timeframe. Yeah, maybe we’d see a little slow down in 3 months and maybe it’ll start to be a real problem in 6 months. The thing is we move quickly since we’re such a small team and we know the code base that — it’s actually not that hard. I basically asked them — I was like, “Send me all the queries that are causing any types of problems and send me the optimize versions. You know, send me the old and what you want it to look like.” And then he goes away and he sends it to me and I just go right in and infixed 10 queries that run all the time. I can fix all those in a couple of hours, you know, and deploy them to production. It actually isn’t that scary.
[09:42] In addition, we are on a cloud server and so I can double the realm tonight, you know. It’s a monthly fee. I can also add more processors. I mean we could go to 4 and 8 processes a box. There’s a number of things we can add hard that space. We can do a lot of things to beef-up the box that literally could be done overnight or you know, having forbid in the middle of the day if we hadn’t seen this coming. So, it’s less scary. To be honest without the DBA, it would be scary because this is — it’s a highly — it’s a high production database, right? It’s just – it’s high performance and I wouldn’t know — as developer, you know, just enough to be dangerous in my opinion. But having a DBA kind of on retainer really opens my eyes that he looks way ahead and helps out.
[10:25] Mike: Yeah, that’s kind of the advantage of having a DBA who kind of knows what he’s doing as oppose to somebody who’s learned about it but isn’t necessarily all up to speed on everything.
[10:34] Rob: Absolutely, that would be my description of you and I if we were [Laughter] trying to maintain the database.
[10:38] Mike: Right.
[10:38] Rob: We’ve kind of learned about it just enough to write code against the database but it’s just not the stuff that the reports and all that in knowledge this guy has of the specific database engine and it helps that he was the one that I originally hired to help me move data centers a year ago. And so he really has some ownership and he knows all the — all the inner workings of everything that’s going on so…
[10:58] Mike: That’s very cool.
[10:58] Rob: Yeah, so what else is going on with you?
[11:00] Mike: So, I had dinner this past week in Brooklyn with James Robert and he’s the one who you had mentioned a couple of weeks ago who is working on the Whicher. Talk shop I guess I’ll say [Laughter] kind of talked to him lot about the Whicher and then talked about the podcast and AuditShark a little bit and it’s interesting that those types of things that he’s been doing and seeing on the Whicher. So it was — it’s just kind of great to get out and talk to a podcast listener. Again, the invitation is open for other people who are in the Brooklyn area. I’m not there now but I will be in the couple of weeks. So by the time this podcast episode, you know, is released then, I’ll probably be back.
[11:31] Rob: The URL is the and then Whicher W-H-I-C-H-E-R .com and it’s a tournament split testing and I really dig this idea. So, it’s cool you get to sit down with him.
[11:43] Mike: So, you know, who Jason and Justin from the TechZing Podcast who were always talking about Jason has these tales that are coming from like from, you know, the dark side of humanity?
[11:52] Rob: Indeed.
[11:53] Mike: Yes. So, here’s one for you, “Disney just acquired the right to Star Wars.” And episode 7 is due out in 2015. So, can we all just cry together now?
[12:04] Rob: Are you serious this happened? Where have I been? Is that like on the front page of Hacker News?
[12:08] Mike: I don’t know. I mean —
[12:09] Rob: They’re going to acquire Lucas — it’s the — how is this possible? I am in a complete shock. I’m sorry I keep cutting you up. I just — I’m absolutely [Laughter] speechless right now.
[12:18] Mike: Yup, but apparently for $4 billion you could have bought it too.
[12:22] Rob: Whoa.
[12:23] Mike: Yup.
[12:23] Rob: Wow.
[12:24] Mike: So, apparently happened today and they are taking over not only Lucasfilm but they’re taking over Industrial Light & Magic as well.
[12:32] Rob: That’s — he must want to retire.
[12:34] Mike: Well, I think it’s more of a leaving a legacy because think about this way —
[12:37] Rob: Yeah.
[12:37] Mike: I mean if George Lucas died today, what would happen to Star Wars and all the other things that he owns?
[12:43] Rob: Someone would sell it to Disney for $4 billion?
[12:45] Mike: Well, maybe but I mean —
[12:46] Rob: Yeah —
[12:46] Mike: … I guess that by selling it himself, he can kind of rest assured that, you know, it’s going to survive beyond him.
[12:54] Rob: Oh, I need a moment of silence to absorb this.–
[12:57] Mike: [Laughter]
[12:57] Rob: I seriously. If you saw my tweet yesterday about my new t-shirt that I got with Greedo and Han in 8 bit format
[13:02] Mike: I did —
[13:03] Rob: you know, what a Star Wars fan I am so —
[13:07] Mike: That was a great tweet, by the way. Is your wife still talking to you?
[13:11] Rob: She —
[13:11] Mike: Or you not wanting her presence?
[13:13] Rob: I put it on Facebook and I said, “Wife is going to love this.” And she said that — her comment was one word, “Couch.”
[13:19] Mike: [Laughter]
[13:22] Rob: It was good. My wife is way funnier than we are. Yeah [Laughter] —
[13:25] Mike: Yes, yes.
[13:25] Rob: It was good stuff.
[13:26] Mike: Nice, nice.
[13:26] Music
[13:29] Rob: Today, we’re going to be covering Podcast you should listen to and why. What we’re going to do is run through — it’s a pretty big list. It’s almost 50 podcasts and the idea here is not that you should listen to every one of them but it’s to pick out the ones that’s based on our descriptions that interest you or that may had expand kind of your mind and your, you know, your vision of the world and technology. Now, we’re going to start by looking at the most relevant to this audience. So, we’re going to talk about startup podcasts, some interview or non-interview ones. We’re going to talk about business paradigms, online marketing podcasts then branch out a little bit to some that I’m familiar with and I listen to quite a bit and we want to both promote podcasts because every podcast needs new listeners. But I think before that, I actually wanted to mention a couple of things. One is the purpose of consuming podcast in my opinion and I really see listening to the podcast — I listen to podcast for four reasons and so I’ve grouped this list in to four different classifications.
[14:24] So first, there are some podcasts that are tactical and by that I mean they are very nuts and bolts, you know, “Here’s how to perform on page SEO and here are the steps.” And there are very few podcasts that actually do this and the reason is because they tend to be kind of boring and they’re less personal and they’re just less entertaining and so there aren’t a lot of them there. But we are going to call out which podcasts are like that. The second type of podcast that I think of is motivational and that’s if you think of like Mixergy or Founders Talk, you listen to them not to learn an exact technique but you listen to them more to get the story of what’s going and to feel, empowered and to just be motivated, right, to go work on your startup. And I know some people say that Startups for the Rest of Us does that for them.
[15:04] So the third kind is entertainment and anything on the TWiT Network, This Week in Tech Leo Laporte’s Network I would classify them it’s like tech news stuff. It’s not going to help you get your startup launch but at the same time, you can’t just work all the time, right? You can’t just stuff your mind full of constant tactical information because you just get overloaded. And so I find it when I have extra time if I am overloaded and I’d just wanted to do the dishes and listen to something fun, I listen to entertainment podcast. And then the last to the four is exposure. And this is something — I’m talking about exposure to new ideas. So something like the HBR, Harvard Business Review Ideacast where it’s not something that is going to directly help me launch a new business, not technical. It doesn’t motivate me. It’s not entertaining but it exposes me to new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts that can — maybe down the line or some way changed my thinking and can help me both in my, you know, day to day work in launching a new startup, in writing an article and creating a podcast outline. I mean anything like that. TEDTalks, the audio feed of the TEDTalks is also a great way to do that.
[16:10] Mike: So, one of the things that we want to point out here is that we’re going to talk about a lot of different podcasts and you have to think about when you can fit the zigs in because there are certain podcasts, there are certain types of podcasts that you have to listen to and you can’t really paid too much attention to any of other things that are going on because you kind of have to concentrate and really absorb the information whereas other podcasts which are more for entertainment, you can listen to them at any time. One of the other things you could keep in my mind is the speed at which you listen to these podcasts and one of the things that I really like with the iPhone is that recently they just added a new ability to listen to the podcast in one and a half speed versus double speed because double speed can be a little bit difficult to listen to but one and a half speed seems to be really kind of the sweet spot, at least for me it is. Some people can listen to certain things faster or slower. Some people don’t even speed them up at all but in order to churn through a podcast very quickly, you can crank it up, you know, one and a half or double speed.
[17:07] And primetimes to listen to podcasts tend to be when you’re on a car, when you’re traveling. A lot of people have long commutes so if you have a half hour or 45-minute commute, you can — at least set aside probably an hour a day, that’s 5 hours a week for podcast. Other times you can listen to podcast are when you’re working out or when you’re doing dishes or yard work or when you’re running or if you’re exercising, if you’re going out for a run, those are great times to listen to these podcasts. Now, one of the other things you have to keep in mind is that you do not have to feel obligated to listen to every single minute of single podcast. If you look at the title for a podcast or you look at the summary and description, feel free to skip it if it doesn’t apply to you or if it sounds like something you’re really not interested in.
[17:49] It’s okay to listen to a few minutes of it and then just skip to the end of it and go to the next one if it’s not kind of grabbing your attention. And that’s one of the things that you really need to be able to do and it can be hard. I mean if there is something on your list of things to do, it’s very difficult to just delete it and move on say, “You know what? This isn’t applicable anymore.” Skip on to the next one. Find something that is.
[18:10] Rob: Yeah, I think this is perhaps the most important tip of the day and it’s why I’m able to subscribe to so many podcasts and absorb what I consider to be kind of the best elements of all of them because as I went to this list, I haven’t realize how many podcasts I’m subscribed to. I think we’re going to talk about 40 or 45 today and I have at least another 20 that I’m subscribed to but some of these only release once a month, some of them are very erratic even less than once a month. A lot of them, I will listen to 1 out of 5 episodes because it’s just the others completely don’t interest me but that 1 out of 5 can and has changed the way I, you know, run a certain business or gives me an entirely new marketing idea that will absolutely have an impact on, you know, on my bottom line or my business or on the way we, you know, we do the podcast or the Academy or MicroConf. And so there’s a way — in my opinion, it’s having a broad home that reaches out to many different things and you can’t — if you’re going to do that, you cannot feel obligated to listen to every minute or it will just, it’s just too much audio and you’re going get overwhelmed and you’ll just give up on it.
[19:11] Music
[19:14] Rob: Our first category is startup podcast, of course, and these are Interview Startup Podcast. So, the first is Mixergy and we’ve classified that as a tactical and as a motivational podcast. The next is This Week In Startups and that is a podcast by Jason Calacanis. He’s actually also a video and has an audio feed. It’s fairly long. It has 3 episodes a week between 30 minutes and an hour. And I’ve gone back and forth with this podcast. I find some of the interviews really good. I definitely don’t listen to all the episodes because some of them just don’t apply but I think perhaps one of my favorite interviews ever with the venture capitalist was about two weeks ago on This Week In Startups and it’s Chris Sacca and the guy is — I’ve never even heard of him. He’s just incredibly smart and it was — Jason Calacanis is a really good interviewer, like him or not, he’s had some successes and he certainly has a lot of confidence in his abilities but he is absolutely a good interviewer and he really brings a lot out of people he’s interviewing. And he also is tends to be pretty honest and blunt and actually that’s pretty respectable. So we’ve classified this one as a motivational and an entertainment podcast. That was This Week In Startups.
[20:24] The next interview startup podcast is a lesser known one. It’s called Startup Slingshot and I’m going to put that in the technical and motivational. And Startup Slingshot is done by William Griggs who used to be in Nashville and now he’s in Austin, Texas. And I’ve been on there a couple of times. What I like about Startup Slingshot is that since it’s a smaller audience, he’s able to do things that maybe some of the larger interview podcast wouldn’t venture in to. And so an example, in my opinion the best interview on a podcast ever about lifetime value and customer acquisition cost, that kind of stuff for SaaS app is on Startup Slingshot and it’s the interview he did with Jason Cohen about 2 or 3 months. And I listened to that interview 3 times because there’s just so much knowledge pouring out of Jason. Good questions, good summaries, I mean he just nailed it.
[21:11] I also went on Startup Slingshot after I relaunched HitTail on January and William asked me stuff that no one else had asked and he asked about metrics, very specifically about metrics I was looking to optimize. I mean kind of get in to some detailed stuff and that’s why I’ve classified this as both tactical and motivational. Now, some of the episodes talked about how to raise money in Indianapolis or how to raise money in Nashville and obviously, those I don’t listen to because I’m not interested in the topic but, you know, fairly — regularly something comes out that really does push the boundary and I think William has a nice interviewing style that’s worth looking at.
[21:43] Mike: So the next podcast is the Startup Success Podcast and this podcast is run by Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley. Patrick Foley is a Microsoft employee. And Bob Walsh and Patrick had been running the Startup Success Podcast for around 150 episodes or so and the podcast itself right now is in kind of an inter media status right now. Patrick Foley is kind of moving away from the podcast to concentrate on other things and they’ll be coming back with a lot more episodes in the future but primarily it focuses on doing interviews with a lot of different startup founders and tech entrepreneurs who have been involved in various endeavors and this is really a motivational and entertainment podcast. You’re not going to find a lot of tactical tips although some of the startup founders that they do interview will provide some tactics and it is a way to get some exposure for some of the ideas assuming that you come on the podcast and give an interview. But those aren’t necessarily the prime motivations for listening to it. It’s really about entertainment and motivation for building upon your startup.
[22:45] Rob: And rounding out our sweet of interview startup podcast is Founders Talk and this is one I’ll call motivational and entertainment. It’s run by Adam Stacoviak and I’ve been listening to him since he was on the Web 2.0 Show and it basically interview startup founders both large and small. It’s mostly venture back stuff but it definitely is interesting if you have, you know, some extra time in your week.
[23:10] Music
[23:13] Rob: Our second category of podcast is Non-interview Startup Podcast. The first is A Smart Bear Podcast and that comes from Jason Cohen. He’s the founder of WP Engine. You hear us talk about him quite a bit. He started the podcast by just reading his blog posts and that was actually kind of cool because since I haven’t read blogs religiously in a while, it was a nice way to keep up with that. But he soon turned it in to — the way summarizes it, it’s like Love Lines for startups and what — it’s basically a calling show where startup founders mostly non-funded. I mean these people who are, you know, kind of bootstrapping. They can — they can call inter Skype with him and he’ll basically tear down their idea in a good way like in to a positive give them feedback and not just say, this doesn’t work, this isn’t good. He’ll actually say, “This doesn’t work but here are something to try…” you know, give 2 or 3 different things to try. So he’s very specific.
[24:00] So I give this one definitely motivational and entertainment value. There are also some tactical things but they’re not general tactical. It’s more tactical for this particular person’s startup and if you can take those and turn them in to something that you like, it’s definitely worth a listen. Now, Smart Bear doesn’t come out that often. It’s got a fairly erratic schedule. I think there’s only been maybe 6 or so episodes in the past 6 months. So, its hit or miss but it’s a nice one to have in the feed and certainly when it appears, it’s one of the first that I listen to.
[24:28] Mike e: The next one is TechZing and this one is hosted by Jason Roberts and Justin Vincent. Justin Vincent talked at the first MicroConf and he talked about his startup Pluggio which he had grown from probably 4 figures in revenue and tripled it in a —
[24:43] Rob: No, he took it from 3 figures in revenue to 4 figures —
[24:46] Mike: Ahh.
[24:47] Rob: … in 6 months, yeah.
[24:47] Mike: Yeah. The two of them talk about a lot of different things that they have been working whether they are consulting things that they have been doing or some of the startup ventures that they’ve had. If you read a lot of Hacker News and you probably seen either one of them posting different blog post.
[25:01] Rob: I think the best description of TechZing is the way they put it like Jason said Startups for the Rest of Us is like going to a conference and hearing someone talk about something and it’s educational. It’s outlined, you know, there’s 10 bullet points and things you’re learning. TechZing is like if you went to go to a conference and the room was packed and so you and your buddy went to a pub and start having a conversation about startups or conversation about Hacker News. Like it’s more of a casual thing, it’s less structured and it’s longer. I mean their episodes are typically 90 minutes long. So, you know, it’s not something you can listen to if you don’t have a lot of time in your week but it’s definitely one, I mean I’ve heard every episode for probably the past hundred episodes.
[25:38] I think the only ones that I skipped — they have both interview episodes and discussion episodes. And so the discussions are when they just talk about each other’s projects and differences from Hacker News and what they’re working on and I listen to every one of those. Some of the interviews if they don’t interest me because some of them will be about, you know, physics or like trading and writing high frequency trading systems, those ones I — I will tend to bow in and out of depending on how much they interest me.
[26:02] Mike: One of the primary things that they’ve talking about these days is their endeavor for AnyFu and it’s interesting to hear a lot of the things that they are running in to with AnyFu about how they’re dealing with the logistics of that application and how they’re planning on bringing that to market. And you know, quite frankly, hearing a lot of the honest discussions about what they should or shouldn’t do and what they want to portray to the users of AnyFu. So, if you’re interested in hearing the beginnings of a startup that may go some place, if you’re interested in hearing the inside story of how that is kind of playing out, definitely go to TechZing. Check out their podcast.
[26:37] Rob: Our next podcast in the startup non-interview section is Seth Godin’s Startups School and this one just came out about a week or two ago. It’s only maybe 4 episodes in and what it is it Seth doing an in person presentation. I guess he got some startup founders, entrepreneurs together for a few days or a week and he just did in person presentation. He said it was unrehearsed and without slides. So, it sounds like he’s just him kind of talking from an outline or something. And I would put this as motivational and entertainment like a lot of the other ones we’re mentioning but Seth Godin is so smart that it’s like everything he says gets you thinking. Now, often I found myself it gets me thinking and then I don’t actually know what to do with that thought because I don’t have any tactics. I don’t actually know what he’s saying. I will make notes and then it will like strikes something — spark something later on in my mind. There been about 25-minute episodes and so far, I’m very impressed. It’s just awesome to listen to this guy talking because he is so smart and he knows marketing so well and entrepreneurship for that matter.
[27:38] Next one on our list is Customer Development for Smart People and what this is it’s someone reading Steve Blank’s blog out loud. Now, this one I’m going to put under motivational only. Steve Blank is the customer development guy and he’s actually the mentor of Eric Ries. He was the professor of Eric Ries who is on Lean Startups. Customer Development essentially, you know, the thought that you should get out of building and you should talk to your customers before building an app, figure out people — that people wanted before building and that all kind of stuff and so this is one where maybe one in four or five episodes that really gripped me and I listened the whole way through but it’s still is nice to be able to keep up with what Steve is doing because he is so smart and he’s had a lot of success. He brought a number of companies public just has a great history behind him, very knowledgeable and he’s now an academic and so he’s pushing the boundaries, the research boundaries of startups.
[28:30] Mike: And the next on the non-interview startup podcast is Startups for the Rest of Us and I think that we kind of self classified ourselves in to the tactical and motivational classification.
[28:35] Rob: And rounding out this table of non-interview startup podcast is the Kalzumeus Podcast. It’s Patrick McKenzie’s podcast. It’s only had maybe 4 episodes over the course of 3 or 4 months. So it is erratically release. When it’s on, it’s good stuff. Patrick McKenzie, obviously, is very smart and then good — everything that, you know, we talked about on the show, definitely motivational, definitely entertaining.
[29:01] Music
[29:04] Rob: Diving in to our next category is number three which is Business Paradigms and so this is where we start getting in to things that are more of the exposure. So, if you recall I talked about four classifications; tactical, motivational, entertainment and exposure and all three of these are exposure to new thoughts and new ideas, things that might take you out of your comfort zone, things that might take you out of, you know, the discipline that you really want to focus on but they can — they can change your way of thinking and kind of open you up to new ideas.
[29:30] So, the first one is called Actionable Books and I’ve listened to several of this. What I like is that each one is 5 to 10 minutes and it’s an essay, someone is writing — someone in this podcast team is writing about a new business book. And so it just exposes you to a whole bunch of new books and you can hear the summary and to figure out, you know, if you might want to go buy the book and listen to it further. My one complaint is that there are all positive reviews. So, I don’t know if they only pick books that they like but there’s really never a critic and I actually kind of wanted a few of them to be critics and to talk about the negative side of things.
[30:05] And the next one is HBR IdeaCast, so it’s the Harvard Business Review IdeaCast, also, an exposure podcast. It looks at high level business paradigms, economics, politics, the economy, you know, stuff that may not necessarily relate directly to your business but absolutely, you know, opens your mind and they look at typically at someone who’s published something in the Harvard Business Review and they just interview them for about 15 minutes about that. So, I found maybe 1 out of 2 of those podcasts to be — to be really interesting. The last one is called is the Invisible Hand. It’s about management, economics and strategy for the thinking person. And this is a 30-minute podcast, also exposure.
[30:42] Music
[30:46] Rob: So, our fourth category is the Online Marketing and Online Business Space.
[30:50] Mike: And the first podcast on this list is the Lifestyle Business Podcast by Dan and Ian. And I really like this podcast. I listen to it for a lot of different reasons. We’ve classified this as both motivational and as entertainment. I definitely get a lot of good nuggets of wisdom out of this and it primarily revolves around making sure that you’re taking a high level view of things and not digging in too much in to details, definitely, shuffling things off to other people that you shouldn’t necessarily be focused on. I really enjoy this podcast. This is one of the few on my list that I listen to almost religiously. These guys definitely know what they’re talking about. And one of the differences between this podcast among the other ones is that is that these guys deal with physical goods and most people don’t tend to pay attention to podcast or to business that deal with physical goods but it’s really interesting hearing these guys talk about, you know, their business and how they push forward when they’re dealing with the types of, you know, supply chain issues that they’re having. So, it’s definitely an interesting podcast to listen to. I definitely recommend it to anyone to take a listen to this one.
[31:54] Rob: And the Lifestyle Business Podcast companion podcast is Tropical Talk Radio which has been coming out mostly weekly but it’s a more — it’s an unedited podcast and it has Dan and Ian doing different interviews. It tends to be more tactical and also is, you know, as entertaining. It’s on as polished and produced as Lifestyle Business. They don’t tend to have an outline. It tends just to be more interviews and discussion but I’ve heard every episode of it so far.
[32:20] Next on our list is Internet Marketing. And this is tough because there’s a bunch of podcasts called Internet Marketing but this was the first one and it’s — actually Internet Marketing: Insider Tips and Advice for Online Marketing. And definitely put this one in hard core tactical. There’s some entertainment that goes along with it but Kelvin Newman and Andy White run this podcast and it is top notched. The production value, just the content, it’s always very tight to the point I don’t think they edit it very much and they just — they’re really able to put together a good show. The topics vary from SEO to social to all kinds of stuff but it is probably hands down my favorite internet marketing podcast that I listen to in terms of getting tactical tips and new ideas and new thoughts in that space.
[33:06] Our next one is the Foolish Adventure and I’ve classified that squarely in a motivational and that is our good friend Tim Conley, started off with him and a co-host and then about 50 episodes in they decided to split ways. Tim now does interviews with people. He’s actually interviewed several Academy members. He’d interviewed Robert Graham and John Turner and Dave Rodenbaugh in the past month. So there are some pretty good episodes that have been coming out of there about some motivational and exciting stories, you know, and basically new entrepreneurs having lot of their early successes in the past couple of years and it’s been, you know, it’s been cool for me to hear in detail like an in-depth interview with some of these guys because Mike, you and I had followed their stories but you can only see so much in the forums, right and in the quick conversation at MicroConf but to sit there and hear a 45-minute interview with any of those guys, it was kind of a treat. So definitely, something to check out and it’s nice that Tim keeps the episode, you know, between 30 and 45 minutes so, definitely easily consumable.
[34:03] Mike: So, the next one on our list is the Internet Business Mastery and the Internet Business Mastery is run by Sterling and Jay. And it’s kind of aimed to beginners. If you’re kind of past the beginner stage, then this podcast probably isn’t quite for you but they definitely have some good insights about where to start with your business especially if you have no tech background. A lot of their listeners do not have a software development background. So if you’re listening to this podcast and you don’t have a tech background, you’re wondering where to start this might be a podcast that you want to listen to and pick up some good information from them.
[34:37] Rob: Yeah and we’ve classified this under a motivation because they have a lot of success stories that they talk about and exposure because if you’re in our world and you’re in software startups, it actually is good to hear other ideas and so Internet Business Mastery focuses more in information product marketing and they — they do run a good shift. They have this podcast going for I think 7 years now and I’ve been listening since 2006 and it’s just — it’s good to catch up, keep up with their stories and always to hearing new ideas about content creation and ideas for new content and that kind of stuff. So, you know, they have a good show going.
[35:07] The last couple in the online marketing space are Copyblogger Radio and that’s in between seasons right now but that’s definitely a tactical and an exposure podcast and a lot of you probably heard the Copyblogger Blog, well, Copyblogger Radio is an extension of that and they — it’s very well produced and they have excellent interviews and also just a lot of good tactics that they share about online marketing. Next is SEO 101 which is probably the most tactical SEO podcast I know. Now, this one is on Webmaster Radio which is a little irritating. The commercials are really loud and there’s a bunch of 3 and 4-minute commercials. It’s basically 2 SEO consultants just talking about recent Google changes. So it’s very, very detailed and if you’re not in to SEO, it’s going to be horrendously boring but it is the most detailed kind of in-depth SEO podcast I know about.
[35:07] And lastly an honorable mention in online marketing space is Talking Websites. I actually stopped listening to this podcast because I’m not looking to buy or sell websites right now but these guys it’s — one of them is Justin Gilchrist. He’s the founder of Flip Filter and I honestly can’t remember who the other one is but it’s very tactical and there’s a lot of exposure. If you’re in the startups space, this is definitely going to be exposure to the concept of buying and selling websites and domains and that kind of stuff.
[36:19] Music
[36:22] Rob: Our fifth category is Storytelling. And this is one of those things — these are all E’s for entertainment, right? It’s This American Life, the most popular podcast in iTunes, millions of listeners. It’s The Moth Podcast just 15-minute shorts of people telling stories on a stage and it’s This Developer’s Life which is Rob Connery and Scott Hanselman doing — it’s like This American Life but for software developers. All of these not only are great for doing the dishes, doing yard work, kind of just vegging but they actually show you how to craft a good story, how to use language very well and all of that can help you in writing, marketing, blogging, these are definitely podcasts, you know, I recommend if you — again, if you have the time, these are the more longer forms. These are getting further and further away from that core competency of actually getting your business off the ground.
[37:09] Our sixth category is Tech News and Related. And all of these are in entertainment as well. There’s the entire TWiT Network, the ones that I listen to personally are Tech News Today which I love. I listen to it everyday. This Week in Tech, This Week in Google and then Frame Rate which is about cutting the cord and like buying a Roku and not having cable anymore. And it’s pretty cool. It covers all the stuff you can watch online. And there’s a podcast called the Windows Weekly if you’re interested in that kind of thing. So the TWiT Network definitely, you know, highly network, most shows you find in there are going to be interesting and you’ll be able to get something out of them.
[37:45] Mike: The next one on the list is Hanselminutes and Hanselminutes is run by Scott Hanselman. And he primarily does the podcast on his own but he always has a guest speaker on and a couple of times in the past I’ve seen him actually have a guest on who has interviewed [0:38:00] him for specific things.
[38:02] Rob: That was a cool episode actually —
[38:04] Mike: Yeah, yeah and primarily it’s him interviewing other people about what they’re doing, what they’re working on. A lot of them tend to be Microsoft focus but he definitely makes an effort on occasions to go out outside of the world of Microsoft. And he will ask them from a point of view of somebody who has absolutely no idea what’s going on and it’s interesting because you can tell by the way he asks the questions that he definitely knows the answer to the question but he asks it such a way for the people who are listening to the podcast who don’t know what’s going on to give them an idea of what’s going on.
[38:36] Rob: I went on Hanselminutes about 6 months. Right before the interview he told me, “I’m going to ask questions that I know the answer too.” He told me exactly what —
[38:44] Mike: Did he?
[38:44] Rob: … you just said. That’s pretty cool. You picked up on that, yeah. I had never picked up on that during the show but he said that exactly.
[38:49] Mike: Really?
[38:49] Rob: “I’m asking them so the listeners can find out.”
[38:51] Mike: Really? I always find —
[38:52] Rob: Yeah.
[38:52] Mike: I always find that the way that he asks those questions seem relatively obvious because he would always stop people. They would start spotting off about different things and you know, he would just stop them and say, “Wait a second, let’s back up a little bit. Explain what this is.” And it was stuff —
[39:05] Rob: Yeah.
[39:06] Mike: … that like if you follow Scott Hanselman at all like he should know that stuff and like, you could tell that like he was just backing up a little bit for the benefit of the listeners which is a great attribute of somebody who’s I’ll say in journalism because, you know, they’re backing up not because they want to know but because they want to make sure the people who are listening understand what’s going on.
[39:24] Rob: Absolutely, and he is very eloquent and a great interviewer. He interviews mostly tech people and about like hard core programming topics like if they build a new frame — JavaScript framework or something which sounds like it could be really boring but somehow he manages to make it quite interesting. And rounding out our tech news and related, these are going to be more interesting to you if you have kids. One is called Apps for Kids, that falls squarely an entertainment and that is basically a father and his 12-year old daughter and they run through a new iOS app probably twice a month. And I have purchased at least 10 of the apps I’ve heard about on the show. It’s a great way to find out. It’s like a lot of them are new learning apps or physics apps. Some of them are just, you know, downright fun like subway panic, might some place at all the time now. But it’s a good way to just kind of have a new funnel of 99-cent entertainment and just that you can — you can pick up on.
[40:16] And the last one in tech news and related is it’s a little higher end in terms of age though. It’s called Everyday Einstein’s Quick and Dirty Tips For Making Sense of Science. And so each week they do 7 to 10 minutes about a specific Science topic and I thought this be great for my 6-year old. And he gets part of it but they often go in to more detail. It’s more like a late junior high or you know, potentially high school level of discussions.
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[40:43] Rob: Our seventh category for podcasts is New Ideas, Politics and the Economy. So we’re probably at the circle that’s furthest away now from actually needing specifics to launch your startup. All of these fall in to the exposure category in terms of exposing you to new thoughts and ideas and of course, the entertainment category if you like the topic that it’s on. The first is by far one of my favorite non-tech podcast and it’s called 99% Invisible. It’s an independent podcast and it’s about architecture and how spaces and design impact our day to day lives, very, very well produced. It’s a lot like This American Life and it’s only 15 to 20 minutes every week or so. If that sounds at all interesting to you, I highly recommend it. I was hooked after hearing the first episode of that two months ago. Its sister podcast is called DecodeDC and it looks in to — it’s trying to put like Washington politics in to a perspective. It’s only three episodes in but also well produced.
[41:42] The next couple are from NPR. One is called Planet Money and that is also a — I think they do 2 episodes a week and they look at — it kind of is the economy and the business landscape but they do really interesting specific stories about it and it’s very personable. It’s kind of like this podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us, was did stuff about the economy, it’s like two people chatting about something and you get to know the people. It’s not just news reporting. The next two are APM Marketplace which is also on NPR and that is a news reporting show and then APM Marketplace Tech which is a daily 4-minute podcast. That’s some pretty good tech news. I’ve been listening to that for about a month and it’s just a great way to start my day to kind of hear, you know, what happened the previous day or what happened that morning.
[42:25] And rounding this out are a couple of podcasts that some of these run a little long. They’re definitely in to the exposure — in to exposing you to new things. Freakonomics Radio if you read the book Freakonomics, they have a podcast comes out every week. TEDTalks, they released 4 or 5 new audio TEDTalks a week and this is the same stuff you could see if you went to TED.com and subscribe to their RSS feed there but they just put out the audio versions in podcast format and I skipped a lot of these. I probably listen to 1 in 5, 1 in 10 but definitely, you know, expands — expands my thinking. And the last one is To Stay In Touch With Pop Culture. I literally learned about them on this NPR podcast called NPR Topics: Pop Culture and it gathers up all the pop culture topics from the last week.
[43:08] Mike: I think I had mentioned this in the previous podcast that I purged my list of podcast that I listen to several months ago just to kind of focus on AuditShark but it’s interesting to see the sheer number of other podcasts that out there that I haven’t listen to. I did know about a lot of the other ones like Foolish Adventure and I just — that’s one of those things that’s been on my list to listen to. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet but there’s a lot of other ones like that I am somebody would like to This Developer’s Life and Internet Business Mastery and obviously, I listen to TechZing and Lifestyle Business Podcast. But you know, the sheered number of podcasts that are out there are in some ways I think overwhelming for a lot of people because you really have to be able to filter through what other people are listening and what is relevant to you.
[43:54] Rob: I agree and my hope is that this episode serves as a filter for people who are listening rather than the opposite. We don’t want to overwhelm you with 50 things you feel like you have to add it in to your iTunes feed because that’s not what we’re trying to do. What our hope is that you pick the ones that sound at least a bit interesting. You kind of filter through them and if you start — if you don’t like an episode, like Mike said, you skip it and if you skip a bunch of episodes in a row then you unsubscribe from the podcast. I know that without podcast, I would not have met a ton of great people that have become part of my network that are around the world and that have helped me with getting HitTail launched, certainly will help us promote things like MicroConf. I mean just in general, it’s just good to have this — this network of people and to hear about them whether they’re actual host of a podcast, whether they’re the actual – the person being interviewed, these are the people that are doing things in public, right? I mean this is like being in touch with them and if I hear someone on the podcast and it’s interesting, I feel we have something in common, I will totally drop them an e-mail and say, “Hey, I heard that, great interview. Let’s talk. You know, let’s talk about doing something or let’s you know, just whatever. How can I help you?” That kind of things.
[45:00] So, there’s a lot. It’s not just about consuming. It is about like giving back in the space and being able to connect with others and I think another point of value is as if you are looking to — to market your startup. The way I put together that whole HitTail marketing plan, for the most part, it was a lot of stuff off the top of my head that I had, you know, sticking in there but it was a lot of audio books and a lot of podcasts. It was pulling marketing ideas from this and I may not have implemented them exactly the way that they described them in the podcast but they would say one sentence about one idea, I would jot it down and I would later make it on to this marketing plan and those things have absolutely made a difference in how I built and launched and marketed HitTail.
[45:38] Mike: That’s a really great point that you make about being able to give back and just drop people an e-mail and say, “Hey, let’s talk,” or you know, whether you’re offering to do something for them because a lot of these podcasts just really thrive on hearing back from the community and even if it’s not just a question or “Hey, what can I do for you?” Even if it’s just a, “Hey, thanks for this episode. It really resonated with me.” I mean those things are great to hear as somebody who’s developing a podcast. So if there are podcasts out there that you’re listening to, I highly recommend that you just drop an e-mail to the people who are developing those podcasts and just say, “Hey, thanks. I really appreciate what you’re doing.”
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[46:15] Rob: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or e-mail us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from ‘“We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.