Show Notes
- Quora Thread: What are the best ways to think of ideas for a startup?
- Paul Graham: Startup Ideas
- Jason Cohen
- Joel Spolsky: Platform Vendors
- Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I are going to be talking about more tips for identifying startup ideas. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 138.
[00:09] Music
[00:16] 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.
[00:26] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:26] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Mike?
[00:30] Mike: I have spent more time in airports and traveling this past week than I have actually working.
[00:37] Rob: [Laughter] Really? What – have you – had delays or cancelled flights?
[00:40] Mike: Both. Last week I was supposed to take off from San Antonio. I ended up trying to fly out in the morning. So, I got to the airport. I got up it was like 5 o’clock in the morning to get there and I get there and my flight had been cancelled. I was so ticked.
[00:54] Rob: That’s brutal. So, did you just waited for one later in the day?
[00:57] Mike: They put me on a later flight and then my connection was delayed. Then they had like mechanical problems, then on my way down here this week, I have more mechanical problems. And then they had a flight attendant who couldn’t make the flight and they had to find somebody else. So, it’s just like…like I said I’ve spent probably 45, 50 hours on travel [Laughter] over the —
[01:15] Rob: Wow.
[01:15] Mike: …past week.
[01:16] Rob: Yeah, that’s —
[01:17] Mike: It’s ridiculous.
[01:17] Rob: That’s – ugh, feels like such a waste of time too.
[01:20] Mike: It is, it’s totally a waste —
[01:21] Rob: We –
[01:21] Mike: …of time. The delays I’ve been encountering recently had been mostly weather-related. There’s been a few mechanical problems. You know, they got to wait for the weather to clear or they got to go around it or —
[01:31] Rob: Hey, so I’m back home after I was on the coast of California around Pismo Beach, Shell Beach area for ten days. I was out there with my 6-year old. That’s also the reason that the quality wasn’t so great last week is the WiFi. No matter where I went, no matter how good the WiFi tested on speed test, there were something wrong with it. I was in a café, the WiFi was screaming fast and then there were so much background noise that it was…it was literally going to be a huge distraction on the podcast. So, I switched to another café and the WiFi was terrible.
[01:59] So, I drove back to the apartment that we stay at and the WiFi went down. At that point normally it would be fast enough but it went down. The owners went there to reboot the router. So, I had a MiFi 4G LTE router that was clocking it like 11 megs down and 5 or 6 up which is ample, ample, should be ample to record over Skype and yet, it just wasn’t working. Yeah, that was the final quality that you did here with all the breakups, you know, if you’ve heard how crappy Mike’s — the buffering and all of his voice quality was, that was recording on that. So, it feels good to be home to a connection that works and that is solid.
[02:35] Mike: Yeah, that’s what we refer to as gremlins in the machine when just when you’re trying to get something done like the whole thing just falls over on itself [Laughter].
[02:42] Rob: Right and I had spent a lot of time thinking about. I recorded two different podcasts last week and I was scoped out – I mean I went to all these coffee shops and scoped out the speed test, you know, “Oh, no problem. This one is fine.” And then I had backup options and yet, they just all seem to fall through.
[02:56] So, I’m not sure if the 4G MiFi if it was its fault or if it’s still, you know, you’re on a hotel connection, it’s the combination of the two things but I’d be interested to try it again at some point because it just feels like the 4G MiFi should be able to handle it. But of course, it really didn’t.
[03:12] Mike: I mean you might also think that it’d be the latency between that machine and the router on the internet or you know, with Skype and everything and that didn’t seemed to be a problem either for either you or me. So, I don’t know really what the issue is. Like I said, you know, just gremlins or ghosts in the machine.
[03:27] Rob: Right, right. And so, an update on stuff I’ve been working on recently. You know, at the beginning of the year I said I wanted to launch three video courses this year and I just launched my first one today, finally, that How to Hire a VA for Your Startup Training Course launched to my e-mail list. And so, it’s just in early access right now so to speak. Surely, I’ll have a public URL here in the next week or two that I will announce on the podcast. It feels good to get that out. We filmed it late last year and had all the editing done by January and then I’ve just haven’t had the bandwidth basically to get it all up and get all the resources up there and had to record some companion screencast and then the – you know, draft the e-mails. And it’s just – it’s always more work than I think it’s going to be to get the product out the door you think “I’ll just use an e-mail template I already have,” but you really want it to be good and you really want to customize it when you’re e-mailing people about it. So, I’ve spent several hours last week and drafted it up and you know, kind of in the middle of launching it. Just feels good to have it out there.
[04:19] Then the last thing is with Drip after a couple of rocky weeks, customer number one, a new customer number one with a pretty simple use case is getting set up as we speak. And so, that’s the other kind of victory for the week. But hopefully by, you know, next podcast recording I should have some news about customer number one. I’m potentially working on a customer number two. There’s definitely – I have a list of people to get going. It’s just all about, you know, picking ones that can use the app based on the features it has right now.
[04:46] Mike: Very cool.
[04:47] Music
[04:51] Mike: So, today we’re going to be talking about more tips for identifying startup ideas and I – should it really be the problems you’re thinking about trying to solve because an idea, you can sit there and have all the ideas in the world but then when you sit down and you build something unless you’re actually solving a problem, it’s very difficult to get people to pay for that solution of the problem because they would never had it to begin with. I mean we get a lot of e-mail from people saying, “Hey, I built this products. How do I market it? How do I sell it?” And it’s like, “Well, who were you talking to in order to…to find out if they were interested in paying for it to begin with?”
[05:19] And if the answer is nobody, then you’ve got an immediate problem that you’ve got to deal with. So, at that point, it’s not just the marketing problem, it’s trying to find out whether people even want what you built because even though you may value the time and effort that you’ve put in to it, other people don’t necessarily value it.
[05:35] Rob: I think my advice would be at this point after going through the stuff for years with different entrepreneurs is that if you have an idea that doesn’t solve a problem that people know they have or if you are such a forward thinker that, you know, you want to innovate, you want to be a Steve Jobs or an Ev Williams and come up with things that are just ahead of the curve, then you need to go raise funding because that’s what those people do, right? You need millions if not, tens of millions of dollars to make it that long .
[06:00] I mean if you look at what Ev Williams did with Blogger and with Twitter and what did Steve Jobs did with Apple and NeXT and Pixar like they needed enormous sums of money and they were a visionary you’er right, but they had to outlast all the years of not having revenue essentially. And so, if you are going to go the bootstrap route which is what we talk about, then you absolutely need to start with problems, not ideas.
[06:22] Mike: So, the idea for this episode came from a Quora thread that was all about trying to find and identify ideas for startups and we’ll link to that in the show notes. The three things that kind of factor in to this are luck or spontaneousness and that’s – if you’re trying to sit around and just think of ideas and an idea comes to you or you’re not even trying to think about ideas and then you just think of a startup idea, that’s where the luck or spontaneousness comes in to it.
[06:46] The second one is insider knowledge. So, if you’ve worked in an industry or you know somebody who does, that’s what is considered insider knowledge. And then the third one is just doing research and trying to figure out different problems that people are having, talking to people and generating the ideas for problems to solve from there in a way that you address those ideas, you look at them and trying to figure out which ones will and will not be profitable and then choose the path that you want to go down.
[07:11] Rob: Yeah, so these might sound familiar, you know, these are all related to what we talked about in episode 128 which is where we analyzed Paul Graham’s essay on finding startup ideas. While these aren’t direct repeats, they definitely tie in and you’ll notice that as you research finding startup ideas, you will start to see some repetition and that’s a good thing, right? It means that there are repeatable ways and there are some best practices or at least some good ways that people do come up with multiple startup ideas.
[07:35] Now, there’s always a way like Mike said to be spontaneous or to get lucky but since it’s not a reliable method, it’s not something that I like to teach, right? It’s not something that you want to tell people to do because you are – that’s kind of the other, you have it or you don’t. You’re either Steve Jobs and Ev Williams or you’re not. We’re going to try to keep this to repeatable things that most people can do.
[07:57] Mike: I think the other part that kind of goes in to luck is that you have to think about the ideas that you’re trying to come up with and come up as many as you possibly can so that you do have good selection to choose from because when you’re out in the dating world or you know, you don’t marry the first person that you meet. I mean most people don’t but – and sometimes there are people who that it works out for. But for the vast majority of people that just — it’s not going to work out. So, why would you run the first startup idea you have? Definitely takes some time to look around, try and figure out which ideas are viable and which ones are not and from there, that’s where you’re making your choices. And that applies not just to the luck factor but also insider knowledge and then researching.
[08:34] So, let’s talk about the insider knowledge piece. One of the things that you can do to tap in to problems that, you know, you would have the access to as part of the insider knowledge is not only looking at the businesses that you’ve been involved in but tapping in to your network of people. So, whether you’re using Facebook or LinkedIn, reach out to the people that you know and ask them the types of problems that they’re facing because that’s a really good way to try and figure out what sorts of businesses are having those problems.
[09:02] And we’ve talked about B2B versus B2C in the past and what you’re really trying to focus on is what problems are [Audio Glitch] having it work. You don’t want to ask what problems that people are having in general because you’ll get this gamut of things that is not really going to help you very much. Ask them specifically for what types of problems they’re having at work. And this may not be something that you just want to blast out or you may want to ask some very specific people especially people who tend to be up in the management level who are – or actively thinking about these things and looking for solutions to the types of problems that they encounter at work.
[09:34] Rob: So, when it said – the insider knowledge in this Quora thread I thought it actually meant you’re – that you have the insider knowledge and that the research piece was you contacting people.
[09:44] Mike: I’ve kind of looked at that and said – that’s only one side of it. I don’t think that it’s – I don’t think it’s the whole picture. I think that there’s…there’s two sides of it. One, you can look at just the problems that you’ve had the access to but you know, I’ve done a lot of consulting over the years and one of the things that I’ve run in to and find is that I tend to know about a lot of different environments whereas most companies I’d go and do consulting work for, I’ll walk in there and they’ll say, “Well, this is how we do things.” And I’ll say, “Well, have you thought about doing this way or that way or et cetera?” And they just have no idea.
[10:14] So, for me to go in and be able to recognize that this is one way that they’ve done it and there are fifty other ways of doing it and they look at that same exact problem, they only have one or two ways in their head. So, it’s a different mentality of being able to – of searching out in to your network of people that you know and asking them for advice because obviously, there’s piece of your experience but then there’s also the network or people that you have. And I just feel like it’s a lot more valuable for you to tap in to that network than to just solely rely on your own experience.
[10:47] Rob: Yeah, I think…I think there are two sides to it. We’ve talked a little bit about it in the past for sure but I think one – a big factor in the success of your product or one factor is if…if you are customer zero. I think it can be a big benefit because you do know what to build and you do know how you wanted to work and you do know the problem that you’re trying to solve. The other side of that coin is like you said, you can feasibly then solve it to narrow, right, to narrow a problem or build to narrow a solution because you’re only solving your problem. If you don’t listen to any external feedback, then that’s when you can get in trouble and build something that no one except for yourself wants.
[11:24] And I mean you and I both seen founders who they build an app and they say, “Well, I’m going to use it anyway, so I’m going to go ahead and build it and then I’ll see if there’s a market for it.” And that’s okay if you truly do mean that and that the 400 hours you’re going to spend building a simple project management app or something, if it’s truly justified and you really are okay with that, then…then so be it. But what I typically find is that they build it and then they – it’s so much maintenance headache and it’s so much ongoing, you know, anytime they need new feature, they need to build it that they wind up switching to Basecamp later anyways because it’s easier and they don’t have to maintain hosting and all that stuff.
[11:56] I guess what I’m saying is there’s an easy trap to fall in to if thinking that being customer zero or eating your own dog food or solving your own pain point like people say is not necessarily the golden ticket, right? It’s one factor but it can also be kind of a trap. So, I guess the insider knowledge is vital and it’s absolutely a way to increase the chance that you will succeed but it’s also something that you need to watch out for as you’re searching for ideas and especially as you’re building them out more importantly.
[12:24] I’ve been dealing with this with Drip because I had an original idea and I vetted it with, you know, a dozen people and then we got months down the line. And I realized that, you know, I built something that I really wanted, do these people still want it and that’s where I had to send out a big e-mail survey and I validated that assumption. But there was a point when I sent that e-mail when I thought wow, it could come back and they could say, “You know what? You basically screwed up and you solve your own problem.” And it wouldn’t have been to scrap the app but it would have been, okay, we need to spend two to four weeks here and build a bunch of features to make up for the lack of direction that we’ve had. Luckily, it didn’t turn out that way but I can see how insider knowledge can easily kind of blind you and make you overconfident in your idea to build something that people want.
[13:05] Mike: Yeah, I completely agree with that being a trap that you could fall in to where you’re building something that is for you and that you turn around and resell it to other people. I mean I think that that’s…that’s part of the – I’ll say the issue I have with a lot of people who have looked at what 37signals has done and it worked out great for them but it’s not to say that it’s going to work out great for everybody because there’s lots of people out there who build something to scratch their own itch. And it just never goes anywhere because it’s just so narrow and they don’t want to genericize it. They want to solve their own problem.
[13:36] So, it’s definitely something to look out for and that’s part of why I kind of brought in this idea of tapping in to your network because if you’re actively looking for somebody who has that problem and you’re working with them to solve their problem, one of the things that you want to do is make sure that you’ve got more than one person lined up who has the same problem. And that’s how you would kind of gauge which types of problems you’re going to go out and try and solve. You’re not going to solve a problem that only has one person who says, “Yeah, I’ll pay for solution to this,” when you have a second idea where there’s like 10 or 20 or 30 people who say, “Hey, I have that exact same problem or something very similar and I’d like to pay for it as well.”
[14:10] Rob: Right and I think instead of having one person who has that same problem, my rule of thumb these days is I want to find ten people who not only have the problem but are willing to pay the price that I name upfront. And that’s kind of my rule of thumb. I think Jason Cohen did 30 before he — you know, he found 30 people before he did WP Engine. I think the number is somewhere between 10 and 30 is my guess and it depends on how much time you want to spend, how much confidence you have in the idea, how much risk you’re willing to take on and how much time you’re willing to invest upfront before you start writing code.
[14:37] Mike: Yeah, I’ve talked to Jason Cohen about that at one point and he said that one of the things that he did was you just keep asking the questions or he kind of felt that if you keep asking people the question about whether or not they have that problem when you start hearing the same responses over and over again and you’re not really learning anything, then that’s about the time to stop and then you go back and you start listing out the exact features that you’re going to build for your minimum viable product and move forward with that.
[15:04] So, we’ve talked a lot about the insider knowledge piece of it and now, let’s talk about researching. And one of the big issues with doing research to find a product idea is that it takes work. There’s just no way around it. If you can’t come up with problems that you’re interested in solving from your friends or from yourself, then you need to look for people that you don’t know. One of the ways that I think would be a really good way to find problems that need to be solved is to troll customer forums for any large company. You’re going to find that in those forums, there are a lot of people who were making complaints to the company about different things that are not working or that things should be different in the product, these are things that you can kind of leverage as ideas.
[15:41] But one of the things that you have to be careful about is that you’re not going to build a piece of functionality for that product that the company is then going to come in and implement themselves that’s going to put you out of business. What you really looking for is an add-on product or plugin or something along those lines that you’re going to be able to leverage from that customer base such that it’s going to help and assist those customers and it’s going to be such a small piece of revenue that that company is not going to go ahead and implement it out from under you and kill your business.
[16:12] Rob: First of all, I like the idea of lurking on large company customer forums because you’re…you’re going to see all the complaints and a lot of things that need to be fixed. I think the point you raised about building just an add-on is a really good idea. I’ve been thinking about this concept and I heard it on a podcast and someone said, “Are you building a feature or are you building a product or are you building a business?” And especially if you’re early on in your career and you’re trying to get that early win under your belt, that first app that takes hold and makes you some money and allows you to quit your job or at least gets you part of the way there, I think you need to think about features rather than building products or businesses because they’re faster to get out of the gate, they are more easy to be acquired. If you build an add-on to another system and it takes off and does well, then that system is much more likely to buy you.
[16:58] So, if you built something great that hooked in to MailChimp or that hooked in the Basecamp or that hooked in to, you know, Norton Antivirus or anything that needed an add-on, it could be a real benefit to you. And so, I think in the early days, I think features — in the old days, I had kind of a negative thought about this like, “Oh, if you only build the feature, then the main app is they’re just going to build it and put you out of business.” But I don’t believe that anymore like it’s pretty rare that a large company is going to move fast enough to put a little guy like you out of business especially, let’s say you build a little WordPress plugin or a tie in the Basecamp and it’s making you a thousand bucks a month or 3,000 bucks a month, the odds of them implementing that are actually pretty small.
[17:37] And if you do have success and you’re doing a good job supporting it, you’re either going to build a relationship with them to where they’re not going to want to put you out of your business or where they’re going to be more likely to acquire you and then build it themselves. Give that more thought and then once you’ve built some smaller plugins that you’re kind of stair stepping your way up like we’ve talked about, that’s when you can think about building more full-pledged products. That’s when you – you know, you do start bringing other people in to the mix because that’s just requires a lot more development, a lot more support and a lot more things than you can do on your own.
[18:06] Mike: Yeah, I was thinking back to Joel Spolky’s blog entry on platform vendors and they’re talking about the copy paste feature that wasn’t on the iPhone and how there were…there was kind of a rush of people who are trying to create all these different apps that will allow you to basically hack your way in to creating some sort of a copy paste feature in iOS. So, there’s a bunch of these things that came out and then the Apple came out and implemented copy paste. And none of those products probably ever sold again.
[18:34] That’s what I was thinking about when I was talking about trying to make sure that you’re not doing things that that vendor is going to come in because if you are building an add – a true add-on for that product, then they really are the platform that you’re building for. So, you have to just be aware of what sort of repercussions could come down the road from them.
[18:51] Rob: That’s true and that is a counter example to what I’ve just said actually, I was saying that, you know, you would have some success and they would acquire you. And obviously, Apple didn’t in those cases. So, it can happen. I know Twitter has done the same but I think more often than not, it’s unlikely to happen especially if you’re not playing in those waters in particular. If you’re playing with a little smaller player or a player who’s maybe more aware of their ecosystem and cares more for it like some of the, you know, Basecamp and MailChimp and those guys, I think they’re just a lot less likely to do something so drastic.
[19:21] Mike: Oh, I agree. So, another thing that you can do in terms of research is do some consulting work for a while. Well, I have a hard time advising people in many cases to switch over and do consulting but the reality is that if you’re doing consulting work, large companies always have problems that need to be solved. And most are willing to pay for solutions to those problems and working as a consultant for a lot of different companies, you get to see a lot of different problems. You get to see a lot of different situations where people are having problems with things. There is a huge, huge number of people who have just a wide array of skills and not everybody is going to be able to do every job and not everybody is going to be able to use the different pieces of software that are out there.
[20:01] So, you can take a look at the software that they’re using today and say, “Well, what do you like about it? What do you not like about it?” And I’ll give you a prime example, one that I’ve seen at many large companies is Service Desk Software. If you’re working with these companies where they have a ticketing system of any kind in their IT Department, every single one of them will tell you that they hate it and they’re more than happy to tell you all the things that they hate about it. But if you look on the market for Help Desk Software for that is geared for large enterprises, there are tons of options out there. They are configurable to the end of the world.
[20:33] So, that’s not an area that I would advice going in and just trying to build but at the same time, that’s just one example of all the different types of things that people are more than willing to tell you about. They’ll tell you that they don’t like their ticketing system. They’ll tell you that they don’t like, you know, their asset tracking system. They’ll tell you that they don’t like their software deployment system. And if you just start asking questions about, “Well, why don’t you like this? What doesn’t work for you? What does work? How does the vendor treat you,” you get to get a feel for how the competition acts, how they build features, what their release schedules are and you can gain a lot of that insider knowledge that you’re going to need to beat them in your marketing collateral.
[21:11] Rob: I think that’s an interesting example you bring up about Help Desk Software. Something just popped in to my head and it’s that you need to pick a niche that’s small enough that you are going to be one of the best marketers in that niche but the niche has to be large enough that you can gain enough revenue to make it worth your while. And so, if you are an experienced marketer and or you have a lot of money at your back and or you have the insider knowledge, you know, you have all those…those founder qualities, what do we call it, the founder test? If you have a lot of those in your favor, then you can pick a larger more competitive niche. If you have experience in starting these businesses and get them going, then that’s where you dive in.
[21:48] I do think that, you know, a knowledgeable experienced founder with the wind at their back could do some damage in the…the Help Desk Software space. But if you’re a first time entrepreneur and you don’t have the wind at your back, you don’t have the money, you don’t have the insider knowledge and you are just trying to get your feet wet with this, then diving in to the general Help Desk space, you’re – you’re probably going to get creamed. And what you want to do is instead niche it way down and maybe just build a WordPress plugin that duplicates some Help Desk functionality or build just a single add-on to an existing Help Desk functionality and just get out there and learn the marketing and learn what it takes to get an app out the door.
[22:26] And then as you’re marketing prowess grows and as maybe your bankroll grows and there’s all those founder test attributes grow, that’s when you can dive in to the larger and larges niches. You can’t just look at the successful founders that we all look at, you know, Peldi, Patrick McKenzie, Jason Cohen and say, “Wow. Well, he does it, then I’m going to do it,” because you don’t have the experience that they do and you don’t have the money and you don’t have the contacts. You don’t have these other things that play in to their favor.
[22:50] So, that’s where you do it. You have to start small I believe. You know, if you really want to be in the Help Desk space thing, you just niche it down to the point where you are one of the best, if not, you know, the best marketer in that small space and then you work up from there. And at the same time, you do want to make sure that that niche is large enough that it’s worth your time to build it.
[23:08] Mike: Well, another thing that you can do in terms of researching is ask the company that you work for what they’re spending money on every month. The accountants maybe a little bit tight-lipped about this but you can ask them in a general sense because they’re not going to come out and say, “Well, here’s our payroll information.” But if you work in a large enough company and I tend to think of like some small to midsize companies anywhere from, you know, 20 to 70 or 80 people, if you work in a company that size, you can generally get on a first name basis with whoever is running the books. And you can ask them say, “You know, what are we spending money on every month that could possibly be done a little bit better? What amounts of money are we spending on different things?”
[23:43] And if you can get in to those types of conversations and ask them those questions and you obviously have to tell them why you’re asking but, you know, you’re looking for problems to solve. You’re looking for ways to save them money. And if you phrase it like that to them, they may very well be willing to share that information with you and you can find some interesting things like you might find, “Oh, well, we’re spending 500 to a thousand dollars a month on Help Desk Software that we’re leasing.” And as I said before there are lots and lots of Help Desk companies out there and that’s just one example but there’s all these other things that the business has as problems that you could look at and based on what you’re currently spending money on, you could use those as a list to figure out what sorts of things that you might want to build because if your company is paying a significant amount of money for it, chances are really good that other companies are as well.
[24:30] Rob: So, you’re basically saying look where the companies are already spending money and try to get between them and that – and the money they’re spending.
[24:37] Mike: Yup, that’s exactly right.
[24:38] Rob: Cool.
[24:39] Mike: Some general guidelines that you might want to keep in mind are when you’re looking for problems to solve, make sure that you find that problem space interesting. The last thing you want to do is go in to a space where it is the most boring thing on the planet to you because you’re probably going to lose motivation for going after it. Even if there’s a lot of money there, it can be very demotivational to have to work on something that you just do not have a feel for and you have no interest in working with.
[25:03] Another thing that you need to do is make sure that you keep in mind that if you’re going against the gorilla in a space, make sure you choose a very narrow niche in that – inside of that market. You don’t want to go after like the…the enterprise Help Desk market because that’s going to be too much for you to try and go after. But what you could do is you could say, “Well, I’m going to build Help Desk applications for the metal manufacturing space.” Maybe that’s something that would yield it in appropriate level of customers in that area that would allow you to put together a business.
[25:34] Rob: I would also add that I would much prefer to go against a gorilla, you know, and niche it down than to go against another startup or another single founder because they are way more dangerous. They are more agile and they’re going to care much more about you trying to do your several thousand dollar a month business than some 10 million, hundred million dollar company as they’re not even going to notice you until it’s – well, not until it’s too late for them but until you basically had enough success that you can then move on.
[26:03] Mike: And the last tip as always is to talk to customers before you write any code.
[26:06] Rob: Yeah, I think I’d add one more here, it’s to keep a notebook so that you remember the ideas and not only ideas. So, I’ve started instead of just writing ideas down, now what I do is I’ll write the idea itself and then I’ll say, “Problem:” and I’ll write down what problem does it solve and then I’ll say, “Audience.” Or for whom, you know, whom does it solve and having those three factors in place when I think about it so that I can refer back to that in the future is helpful.
[26:29] And I think I bring it up everytime we talk about startup ideas but this act of writing them down and keeping them for the long term, it’s definitely been very helpful for me not only in taking ideas and launching them and moving forward but just in sparking even offshoots and you know, all kinds of stuff. It just unleashes creativity that you didn’t realize that you had and that you will quickly forget and having them written down and be able to reflect on them again later is more benefit than I think I can communicate.
[26:57] Mike: You know, what you were just telling me reminded me of the book of Business Model Generation, a handbook for visionaries, game changers and challengers which kind of walks through deciding whether or not you have a business based on a variety of different factors and you know, some of the things that you just called out there in terms of…of audience and how you would reach them and what the problem is. A lot of that stuff is covered in that book. So, we’ll link to that in the show note because it’s definitely interesting to read for people who are still looking for ideas.
[27:24] Rob: So, to recap there are – we gave three tips today for identifying startup ideas. The first was luck or spontaneity. The second one was the insider knowledge and the third was researching your niche.
[27:34] Music
[27:37] Mike: If you have a question for us, you can call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or 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 us 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. And we’ll see you next time.
Episode 137 | Startup Feedback, Finding Better Consulting Gigs, and More Listener Questions
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 137.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs to 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. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:24] Rob: Well, I’m at inbox zero for perhaps the first time in my life. Yeah. Yeah, after getting back from MicroConf there were just this mountain of e-mail, hundreds and hundreds of e-mails. I was so far behind and I decided that like long-term, this isn’t how I want to do e-mail. Decided that I would shoot for this inbox zero thing. To me, I’ve always viewed this maybe a faddish thing or like the – it’s the flavor of the day for was it like personal organization or time management. But frankly, it feels good. It’s been about 10 or 11 days now and once I got through all that e-mail, got it to zero, I used, you know, Boomerang to remind of stuff so that I didn’t have to leave it in there and see it all the time.
[01:02] And then I also moved tasks directly from Gmail in to Trello. So, if I need to respond at some thing later or if it’s a lower priority than right now, then I will say like respond to this e-mail in Gmail, you know, I copy that as a Trello item. It’d be nice to have like a one-click way to do that but for now, just getting to this point is kind of my minimum viable strategy and then I’m sure I’ll go out and look for a better tool to do it at some point if I keep this up.
[01:28] Mike: Well, personally, I have subscribed to inbox dozen or so. So [Laughter] I tried inbox zero for a little while and it worked really well and so, I got the certain things that were either longer term things or things that I couldn’t respond to right away for one reason or another and I really needed to keep them there because otherwise, I would just use Boomerang for them.
[01:47] So, certain things I haven’t quite been able to do that for but there’s definitely stuff that I just keep it in my inbox just to keep it kind of at the forefront of my mind I’ll say because certain other tools like if you use your e-mail as a to-do list, it’s just eventually gets too long and you get overloaded and you just can’t keep up. And then if you shift from taking your inbox stuff and move it at someplace else, eventually that other thing seems to get overloaded because there’s always more work to do. So, I think that there’s this balance you have to strike about stuff that you decide you’re just not going to do it and you just throw it away.
[02:18] Rob: No, there is a huge amount of stuff that I over the past couple of years as my, you know, e-mail and just all the management tasks that I have to do have increased. I’ve made a lot of decisions to blanket not reply to certain things and then I’m not able to address certain things. I’ve also started to bulk reply to a lot of things where I shouldn’t say bulk, I should batch reply. You know, everybody who asked for advice, I put them under advice tag and then I throw them to Trello and say I respond to all the people under advice and I’ll take 30 minutes or 1 hour each week and I’ll just go through them all.
[02:53] And if there’s 10 of them, then I know that I have 6 minutes per and that’s all I can give. In the old days, I used to sit there and respond with 5-paragraph essays to everything. But it’s just making adjustment, you know, as the volume increases. How about you? What’s going on on your end, anything new?
[03:06] Mike: Well, I have my first mastermind meeting got-together and we used the Google Hangout and things went really well. And we’ve all got things that were tasked for doing the next time we meet and we’ll be meeting again next week. So, we’re going to do it every other week as opposed to every week. It seemed like it was a good meeting. Everyone kind of threw out some feedback afterwards and it looks like it’s going to go well. So, we’ll see how it goes and you know, four to six weeks or something like that. And I’ll report back with the status report of how things are going.
[03:32] Rob: Yeah, definitely and then we could, you know, since the two of us are involved in masterminds and we could in a couple of months probably share our thoughts on how we think they should be run, some potential mistakes we’ve made, pitfalls and that kind of stuff just our structure that we have in mind for like a software or startup mastermind. A lot of people have talked about masterminds but the specifics of them aren’t talked about that much and when they are, they tend to focus on other niches.
[03:58] So, hey, Derek Sivers e-mailed me and he actually e-mailed me because he’s launched a new venture. It’s WoodEgg.com and they’re basically startup guides for 16 Asian countries that he co-wrote with some folks who were on the ground in those countries. And he e-mailed because he said he’s hiring people to help create the 2014 editions because the 2013 ones are just out and he wants to update him every year. And I’d just wanted to throw it out there as a call, you know, if you’re in one of these 16 Asian countries, go to WoodEgg.com/help. Get in touch with Derek. I mean he’s awesome to work with and it’s certainly a good opportunity, good thing to have on your resume number one. You can make a bit of change for sure some good experience to kind of be involved with someone like that who’s really executing on stuff.
[04:39] If you don’t know Derek, he had CD Baby and he built it up over several years and sold it for 20 million bucks in 2007, 2008 and since then, he’s been kind of globetrotting and preparing to launch some new ventures. And this is really the first thing that’s come out since then. So, definitely, wish him luck with that and again, if you’re on the ground in any of those countries and at all interested in working with Derek, go to WoodEgg.com/help.
[05:01] Remember back to episode 115 when we talked about Proposition HN, it was a guy who had made a post on Hacker News. He did it anonymously and he said, “I’m going to fund a couple of ideas. I have enough money to give.” It was like 5 to 8,000 bucks per idea and, “We – I own half and you own half. You’re a developer. I’m a marketer and let’s kind of build some MVPs and see what happens.”
[05:23] Well, he has given an update. I guess he has a blog. It’s HNProposition.blogspot.com. Last update was in February which was what, four months ago now and basically he updates that he’s gotten 250 something e-mails, kind of the break down of people who are interested or not or had more questions and then he talks about there’s basically five ideas that he plans to – or that he plans to green light. And there’s one SaaS app aimed at businesses, one SaaS app aimed at consumers, two games and a productivity app and so as of four months ago anyways that’s where it was.
[05:59] Mike: If I had to make a guess, I would say that the one SaaS aimed at business probably has the most chance of success. The other ones – the one aimed at consumer is probably not going to do as well. The games are going to be either completely hit a mess and then the productivity app, I mean there’s, you know, a million and one productivity apps out there and I would have a hard time believing that that one would do well in terms of monetary value.
[06:21] Now, I guess from my perspective is this a good deal for the person doing it? It depends on what their experience level is. I mean if you’ve never had any experience or doing any of these – any of the marketing side of things, getting the inside view on how that stuff is done if this person actually follows through with all of this stuff then, you know, you’re going to probably learn a lot.
[06:40] Rob: Yeah and I like that he signs up his blog post with, “Never forget premise number one, investors incubators overestimate their ability to pick good ideas and startups.” So, that’s what he, you know, basing all this on, just that he wants to have multiple things, multiple irons in the fire.
[06:53] Music
[06:57] Rob: Today, we’re going to be talking about some listener questions. We have a lot in the queue and I picked five or six that we’re going to run through. The first is about enterprise 2.0 SaaS startup looking for feedback. It’s an e-mail from Dustin DeVries and he says, “Hey, Mike and Rob. I’ve heard you guys talk about software consulting several times on the show and wanted to get your advice on finding certain types of software consulting work. I’m primarily PHP, Python and frontend.”
[07:21] “I’m currently trying to build an internet-based business to bootstrap it and provide for my family so, I do consulting work in the meantime. This has worked pretty well for me. I average rates of 75 to $85 an hour while there are plenty of jobs for remote consultants within the software industry. Most of the ones I stumbled across are part of a bigger team. So, I’m one of many developers building an app for a company. So, I have to be on Skype 9 to 5, engaged in daily scrum meetings, et cetera.
[07:45] While this is definitely better than a salary gig, I prefer to find gigs that are more goal/milestone-based where I’m building an app to a specification with weekly and or monthly deadlines. This allows me to work on my own pace. I managed to find a few of these gigs and they are awesome but they are usually through networking, word of mouth or wherever else. Do you have any suggestions for finding this type of work? FYI, I’m not real intrigued by things like oDesk because they feel like a sweatshop for developers. I also suspect that I wouldn’t be able to command the rate I’m used to charging at least not until I build a reputation. Thanks for the advice, Dustin.”
[08:15] Mike: Yeah, I have to agree I don’t think that oDesk is the way to go with this. I mean you really need to be able to build a name and reputation for yourself and I think that that is going to involve – getting involved in a couple of different communities. And obviously, if you’re in the PHP and Python space and as well as the, you know, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, all that stuff that goes along with it, you’re going to want to get involved in the communities that, you know, cater to that kind of work. So, that’s probably the first place that I would start. You have to find some way to attract their attention get involved in such a way that you’re going to sort of build a community around the things that you do.
[08:49] Now, whether that’s creating tools that the community uses or becoming a recognized expert in that area, you know, those are all ways to kind of establish a reputation there but I would definitely agree that going to the type of communities like oDesk where you’re essentially bidding and trying to end up, you know, what – amounts becoming the lowest bidder for many of these jobs. And it’s not to say that everyone is going to hire the lowest bidder for the job but the vast majority of the people on there are going to be asking for rates significantly lower than what you’ve specified there.
[09:21] The other thing that you can do is you can hit up your network. Definitely leverage LinkedIn a little bit. You could probably try some advertisements on there that might get you some work. Introduce yourself to some recruiters and the LinkedIn obviously had some tons and tons of recruiters on there. And they have tons and tons of contacts. So, if you could get in with a couple of them, then those realms as an expert in PHP and Python that could lead itself in to more projects for larger and larger companies.
[09:46] The other thing that I would do is I would probably look at raising your rates if you’re going to be going down that road because you don’t want to be seen as the run of the mill PHP, Python consultant. What you want to do is you want to kind of separate yourself from the pack a little bit. And I’m not saying you raise your rate across the board, you could try it with a couple of strategic customers that you would like to acquire and see what happens, see if you can position yourself as that expert. And if you can, great, you’ve just increased your rate. If not, then, you know, maybe you talk to them about lowering your rate a little bit back to, you know, “90 to $95” an hour which is still more than, you know, the 70, 85 – the 85 that you said.
[10:19] Rob: Yeah, I would agree, oDesk is not the place. If you’re already billing 75 to 85 an hour, I just really don’t see that being a good fit for you. It’s also just a lot of hourly work. So, it’s kind of getting away from what you want. The way I look at this and when I was doing consulting, as I looked at is as we used to call it body shop work versus project work. And body shop is when you are a body and you put on a project to work on a team like you are – and they’re so much more of that work available. There’s tons of it because enterprise development shops all over the country, all over the world need you and that’s a lot of software built is just internal business apps and there are teams working on it. So, there is so much more of it available.
[10:58] Project work on the other hand which is what you’re talking about where you have milestones and goals and stuff where you’re working autonomously and independently, it’s so much harder to come by as you found. And so, the bottom line is you have to stand out. You have to either be as good as you are now and do the project work at a lower rate so that you are better than the other people in that rate or what I would say is you have to start building yourself a personal brand a kin to what Mike said.
[11:22] The way I did this because I went to the same path, I went salary then I did body shop work and then I did project work. And for me, it happened to be the blog, I blogged Software by Rob. My early days were about software development technical stuff and there were enough people finding me through that. I had enough of a name in that that I was able to basically score a project work for a bunch of random startups all over the country. It was all remote. It was all milestone and project-based.
[11:47] I’m not saying that that’s the only way to do it but that is definitely one way to do it. It’s building a name for yourself within a community. You know, very much like what Mike said just a different approach but that’s one way to kind of make yourself stand out and get yourself because this is the premium work. Everybody wants this work, right? There’s no coincident that you want to do. Everybody who’s in your position wants to do it. And so, you have to stand out from the others and you just have to figure out the best way to do that. So, I hope that helps, Dustin.
[12:13] Our next question is an enterprise 2.0 SaaS startup looking for feedback. This e-mail is from Edward Anderson at ProcessSmith.com. He says, “Hey, I’m a longtime listener and my startup Process Smith has been shaped by your guys’ awesome podcast. Process Smith is a platform running reoccurring business processes. Process Smith takes user creative flow charts and runs them. It’s sort of a lightweight BMP engine. I launched it the beginning of this year and I still need to increase my users. You can check it out at process-smith.com. I’m a programmer not a sales person and I struggle to find a good method to sell Process Smith.”
[12:48] “I think part of my problem is that it’s such a generic tool. It doesn’t scream, “I will fix X.” But I also think that is one of its strengths. I’m trying SEO but the keywords for my product are really competitive. I’ve been putting off inside sales but it’s increasing and becoming a last resort option. Given my product to either of you have a suggestion on effective marketing plan to get users. I know it’s a really broad question. Any other feedback would be extremely valuable to me.”
[13:11] Mike: I have a couple of thoughts on this. I think one of the things that you need to do is focus in on a couple of very specific problems that you think that larger businesses are having that are more general purpose. So, one that I can think of for example is an onboarding process. So, when a new employee comes in to the company, what does it take to get that person up and running? What sort of things do they need? Do they need new hardware? Do they need new software? Does the HR Department need to have things filed? You know, does the person need an active directory account? Do they need an e-mail account? There’s all these things that kind of go in to onboarding a new employee.
[13:46] Now, on the flipside of that, you could also go with the employee termination – now, whether the employee is terminated, you know, because they quit or because they did something wrong or because there are layoffs, things along those lines. Those are the two types of problems that jump in to my mind as to things that you could target and if you position your product in such a way that it says, “Hey, this is a general purpose tool but these are things that it does really well. We can do an onboarding process. We can do termination process.” And that kind of leads more in to the realm of creating processes for like the HR Department.
[14:21] So, both of those two things, there’s a lot of crossover between the HR Department and the IT Department because obviously, the IT Department has to handle the account creations and things like that. But I would probably try to go after those people in HR Department to try and make their lives easier because the IT people already have all these different systems that will do things for them and track the stuff that they have to do. The HR Department probably not so much.
[14:43] So, I would look at those types of HR problems that you could create a workflow or a process for that is going to vary from company to company and that’s where your engine comes in and it’s extremely valuable because although it’s geared for these types of processes, you don’t want to present it as, “Oh, this is a very general purpose tool. You can use it for anything.” What you need to do is focus it down and tell people, “This is what you can use it for. Sure you’re using this for all this other things but this is what you should use it for. This is what it’s really good it.” Does it have to be really good at that? No, it doesn’t because that’s marketing issue. It’s not a technical issue at that point but you’re trying to position it in such a way that people are going to find it for a very specific problem that they’re having.
[15:23] Rob: Yeah, you nailed it on the head. The phrase that every – using his e-mail where he said, “I think part of my problem is that it’s such a generic tool. It doesn’t scream “I will fix X.” But I also think that’s one of its strengths,” that is the problem. No one – I mean I looked at the website and there are a bunch of uses listed and that is completely not helpful because if it’s not built for me, then there’s no reason that I’m going to sign up and pay 50 bucks, hundred bucks, 200 bucks a month for this product.
[15:48] I think that is the number one thing that you have to figure out before you do anything else. Do not write another line of code. Figure out who’s using your app, who is paying you for it and what do they using it for and then just go after that market. Since you don’t have funding, I’m assuming you’re number one thing right now is to find a problem, a desperate pain point that you can solve for people. And I would build an entirely new – I go to an entirely new domain name, entirely new website, entirely new value proposition and focus on that and get 100 customers paying you a hundred bucks a month and there is your ten grand. Quit your job and then move on to, you know, either broaden that. Go horizontal. Look at other verticals.
[16:25] That’s where you can really start playing the game because for now you have this very general purpose tool. We see this a lot. I see this app builders, these things that make it easy for HR Department to build an app or to build some type of web app or a website builder or something and there’s a bazillion of these and they have all their unique takes on it but none of solves such a desperate pain point that are more focused tool doesn’t solve better. I think you need to find a desperate pain point and go after that and once you have solved that problem, hopefully, you will have what we call problem solution fit, then you can actually figure out how to market that. And that’s then you’re going to take your product. You’re going to map it to a market. So, I hope that helps, Edward.
[17:05] Our next question is about whether the internet is lot more competitive than it was three to four years ago. It’s from Mitesh Chauhan. He says, “Hi, guys, great show. One thing I’d like to ask you, Rob started out by having a few niche sites which in the end help him quit his job. However, would you say that back then the internet was a lot less competitive? Can we still apply the notion of several zero niche sites to bring in 400 plus dollars a month given how competitive the internet is these days in 2013?”
[17:33] Mike: I think that as time marches on no matter what the internet is going to become more competitive, this year is more competitive than last year. Last year was more competitive than the year before and you can go on and on. It’s just doesn’t matter. It’s always more competitive today than it was yesterday. I distinctly remember thinking this probably 10 or 12 years ago and I was like, “Oh, if I’d only been born a couple of years before, I would have gotten in on this particular wave of the internet and I would be in such a great position.”
[17:58] And that’s just totally not true. That’s not how the world works. There’s always new markets that are coming out. There’s always new problems to be solved and as long as you’re building solutions that people find valuable, you can build a niche for yourself and you can build a product that goes out to the market and is successful. But you have to start some place. If you don’t ever start because you’re afraid that it’s too competitive then you’ll never going to finish, you’ll never going to succeed.
[18:20] Rob: I agree. It’s always more competitive than the prior year and that’s been the case since it came out in ’96. Do I wish that we could have, you know, built an e-commerce website? Would had it been less competitive to try to build an online store in ’96? Well, absolutely. Problem was the tools were so ancient at that point. And so, now in 2013, you have so many more tools at you’re disposal. You can get websites built faster. We have tools like WordPress that weren’t around in any type of former fashion and let’s say 2005. They just – they weren’t usable. Now you can bam, get a website up with one click. We have keyword tools that are far, far better than we had five, ten years ago.
[18:58] So, you have – it is more competitive but you also have these tools at your disposal. It feels a little bit like it could be use as an excuse of like, “Wow, it’s just too competitive and this stuff doesn’t work anymore,” right? Launching an online business is all done, you know. You can’t really do it these days because every niche has competition. Every niche might have competition now and it probably didn’t five years ago.
[19:17] So, going back to the original question, “Can we still apply the notion of several zero niche sites bringing 400 plus dollars a month given how competitive the internet is these days?” I do think that – I still think that you can build niche sites. I know that the AdSense Flippers were doing it. I know that there are people who do this and make money at it. Now, is that an interesting problem to solve? You know, is it something that excites you or that something that you think has longevity for you? Or is it just something to get you out of your job?
[19:46] Figuring out the answer to that question will help and I would say that if you do have something that’s really excited and really passionate about, then I would lean towards doing that because I do think that launching these niche sites is harder than it was five years ago. But at any point in time since the internet has launched, there’s always opportunity and that’s our challenge it is to find that opportunity and attack it. So, I hope that answers your question, Mitesh.
[20:09] Our next question is about the quality of a pre-launched landing page. This e-mail is Tom Nguyen and he says, “I know how you guys say we need to create an MVP which is the bare minimum to collect e-mails and gage interest before I really start working on my product. I created a launch page but now I have customers saying my design is bad and needs work. Should I ignore them or listen to their feedback and fix my design? Does the launch page still need to be nicely designed since that is a part of marketing?” What do you think, Mike?
[20:39] Mike: I think that having a launch page that looks reasonably nice is fine. I don’t think that it needs to look spectacular. I mean really the purpose of the launch page is just to get people at least some information about your product or your proposed product enough to the point that they’ll give you an e-mail address. And if you can’t get those e-mail addresses basically for free and just by showing a couple of pages of information about what it is that you’re trying to build or what it is that you’re proposing as a solution for a problem, then you need to go find different problem. I would not worry too much about what people think of your design. You know, you really need to focus on talking to those people figuring out whether it’s a problem that they have that they’re going to pay for.
[21:22] The design I mean if you go back and look at one of the early forms of my Altiris training site, it looked awful and I still got people to pay for it. I mean it was, you know, it was great that I had all this traffic coming through and people were paying for it but I had to go through and refund their money. It looked…it looked okay. I mean it was a theme that I bought but it was not the greatest in the world. The website didn’t have a lot of great information on it. It’s significantly better today than it was then but then I didn’t have a product. I was just kind of testing the water to see if it was actually viable.
[21:51] And that’s what your – the purpose of your launch pages. The purpose of your launch page is to communicate with people not solely to look good. And it’s not to say that, you know, you can put something out there that looks like Craigslist and you know, be widely successful with it. But you…you have to at least pay attention to some things. You have to tweak some of the text. Try and market it as best as you can but in terms of the design itself, I don’t know that I would worry too much about it.
[22:14] Rob: Yeah, in my opinion if people are complaining, that is a problem because if these are actually people that are in the niche that you’re trying to serve and they care enough design and you’re kind of violating that design sense, then it means that you don’t have credibility to them and I do think it’s going to impact your conversion rates.
[22:29] Now with that in mind, good enough is good enough like it doesn’t need to be spectacular. There are a number of options that work just fine for you. Install WordPress and download the Coming Soon plugin from John Turner. Go to LaunchRock.com. That’s where our MicroConfEurope.com landing page is right now. It’s LaunchRock and I think it’s free. Man, I don’t know, maybe 10 bucks a month or something. And I got that up in 5 or 10 minutes and it’s collecting e-mail and has an image in the background and it looks fine. It’s very simple. Easy to get…get a website like that up. Go to themeforest.net. Look for single landing page HTML template. They’re $7. Any of these options are going to be good enough in almost all niches.
[23:10] The thing you have to remember is that certain niches are really going to care about design. So, a lot of freelancers, designers, web people, they care more about design. Photographers are the same way. If you’re a non-technical niche, then they’re not going to care as much about it. So, if people are complaining, I do think that’s a problem. I do think it impacts your credibility. But the good news is that getting a landing page up that doesn’t insult someone’s design sense and hopefully can and create conversion rate is really, really easy these days. This goes back to our previous answer to the previous question of the tools that are available today are things that, you know, it would have taken a custom design and you know, 500 or a thousand dollars or more five years ago to get a landing page up. And today you can buy one a really attractive one for 7 bucks from Theme Forest. So, thanks for the question, Tom.
[23:56] Our next question is asking about a retirement plan for an entrepreneur. He says, “Hi, Rob and Mike. I’m a big fan. I discovered the show around episode 50 and listened all the way back to the beginning. The content you put out is great and I really appreciate it. You’re obviously successfully at generating and maintaining multiple revenue streams and that’s admirable. I would like to successfully do that as well.”
[24:14] “My question is what are your long-term plans regarding a steady income and something to live off when you retire? The idea behind multiple revenue streams is it if one fails, the other act as sort of a safety. So, your entire income doesn’t depend on just one stream. I think in the ever-changing world of technology, many products have a life expectancy of no more than a few years. I’m aware of the fact that I won’t be young forever and that the tech world is constantly changing.”
[24:35] “It’s reasonable to expect that when I’m 40 I’ll have less understanding than I do now of whatever the internet will evolve to and of course even more so at 50 or 60. I don’t want to be an old man trying to execute products in a world I barely understand anymore. What I’m getting at is what are your long- term plans? What do you see yourself living off when you’re 50 or 60 and in retirement? Thanks. Keep up the good work.”
[24:56] Mike: I think that over time, you know, if you’re building a portfolio, the level of success that you achieve with those products tends to go up and it’s not to say that every single one is going to a hundred thousand dollars the first one and 300 with the next one, you know, three and a half million with the next one. You know, you’re going to have some failures here and there. There are some things that you’re just going to tank after a few years. There are some things that you’re going to get bored with that you’re going to sell them off.
[25:17] If you kind of follow up pattern though, if you’re trying to build the portfolio products, eventually as you get more and more successful, the ones that you started out with, you’re going to essentially let them fall by the wayside. And whether that involves just letting them die or selling them off and reapping the rewards from that to plug in to your next venture, you’re going to be building bigger and bigger things. If you were to talk to an entrepreneur who went out and created a company and he sold it for a million dollars and you asked him what he’s going to want to do next, if he’s comes back and says, “Well, I want to build another company.” Your immediate thought is, “Oh, he’s going to go out and build another million dollar company.”
[25:53] And chances are really good that that’s not the case and chances are more likely that he’s going to want to go out and build a 5 million dollar company or 10 million dollar company because he’s already done that once, so why would he do it again and it’s not to say that, you know, it’s not financially blow off successful but people want new challenges. So, as you proceed in your career, you’re going to be looking for bigger and bigger things. And I think that, you know, over time as you progress from 30 to 40 to 50 to 60, you’re going to be building bigger and bigger things assuming that you’re successful with those previous products.
[26:25] Rob: Yeah, I think I’ll start by talking about my concept of retirement. I don’t intend to suddenly stop working one day when I’m 60. I went down to two days a week for about 10 months when my second son was born and I got really bored like I need to create things. I mean I think a lot of us do as entrepreneurs. So, I kind of reject the notion of one day I’m just going to suddenly not do any of that, any of the work that we do and any of the company running or company starting or all that stuff because that is one thing that actually excites me, right? It actually is interesting. Now, I do imagine that I’ll scale work back but even…even these days, I don’t work fulltime. And so, I don’t feel like retirement is going to be this massive change of stepping back and like letting all these companies go.
[27:10] The second thing, I don’t intend to really fall out of touch with the tech world. I mean I know people who are in their 50’s now who really live in technology and they understand it still. They may not be programmers, they may not be writing every line of code and they may not, you know, understand how to design hardware but they have a sense of it and they know where opportunities are. And so, personally, I kind of reject that premise that when I’m 50 or 60, I’m naturally going to be like our parents are now.
[27:36] The thing is we are although we’re not digital natives, I started writing code when I was eight. And so, to me technology is a huge part of my life and I think it will always be. Now, I may not understand, you know, there’s going to be a social network college kids or something when I’m 60, yeah, you’re right, I’m not going to get that. But that’s not where my business opportunities are going to lie anyways.
[27:55] So, the next thing I’ll say is that I do contribute to retirement accounts. I do have savings that is building up. So, aside from my businesses that provide me income now, I do have that traditional, you know, the IRAs or the 401(k)s that we call them here in the US but it’s just a big retirement savings account so that I do have money to live off of. When I get older, I plan to run my businesses as long as it’s fun to do so. And at this point if I really backed off and wasn’t creating anything, if I didn’t do a podcast, didn’t write, didn’t, you know, have the e-mail newsletter, didn’t grow the businesses and just put them in maintenance mode, I wouldn’t have to work very much.
[28:30] And so, that to me is a long-term strategy but I don’t want to do that. That’s actually boring to me now. And so, I’m going to run them as long as it’s fun and in the end maybe sell them to someone for cash at that point and you know, put that in to retirement to live off of. But I think that people like us, most people listening to this podcast, you always going to want to do something. You’re always going to be building and whether it’s you writing code or whether it’s you building businesses with other people, I just – I don’t know that that’s ever going to stop cold turkey for any of us.
[28:59] Mike: Yeah, you brought up something I forgot to mention. I contribute to a SEP IRA account and you know, that works out pretty well as well. I mean it’s part of my retirement strategy. I’ve got some other things that I do. When you get to a certain level with your products, it’s not as if you just are not contributing to some sort of retirement because you can treat that retirement as kind of a secondary or back up strategy for whatever you’re doing. You know, as long as you’re making a fulltime income from your products, you know, you should treat it as if it is your fulltime job, you should be putting some of that money away or for a retirement fund of some kind.
[29:30] Rob: And our last question comes to us from Ben Feldman. He says, “Hi, Mike and Rob. First off, I’d just wanted to say that I love the podcast. I’ve listened to every episode. I listen to similar podcasts and yours by far is the most informative and enjoyable to listen to. I’m looking for feedback on my startup idea. My idea is to “employ” the world with crowd sourced development. With the far reach of the internet and the reason boom in crowd funding startups, I believe that you can get any job done by outsourcing it to the world. That’s why I created a platform where someone can build a project or a startup idea for a software product and my team and I will breakdown the entire idea in to organized intangible development and business tasks then we crowd source the execution of each task where each task will be worth a monetary value for a paid project or a percent of equity for startup.”
[30:19] “Unlike other crowd sourcing tools like 99designs or designers compete for each task, here only one person at a time can work on a task and each person will be reviewed and tested before it’s marked complete and the person gets credit for his or her work.” I’ve summarized Ben’s e-mail here. It’s pretty long. This reminds me of tweaky.com. If you haven’t checked that out, it’s a pretty cool idea. It bills itself as the number one place to customize your website and it’s basically to design tweaks. If you send like a spec or a brief they break it down in to the series of tweaks and they charge $39 flat rate per tweak. They actually organize the tweaks in to $39 groups and then they will execute them one by one.
[30:57] So, it does seem a reminiscent of that which is an idea that, you know, as far as I know is working. Yeah, we can critic the business idea based on what we think but that’s almost less important than would you use the service? Or…or do you have reservations about using it as, you know, as a business owner.
[31:14] Mike: I don’t think I would have reservation using it as a business owner. I think that having it as a crowd sourced platform for building software that you want to get done for free, that seems like it probably may not work out very well, offering people a percent of the equity to get a project done that you’re interested in having done, it seems to me like it wouldn’t work out so well and I think that the primary challenge would be if you get let’s say ten developers who each, you know, say they’ll sign up and they’ll do 10% of the project to each 10% of it, that’s – so those 10 people own it.
[31:49] First of all, would be the question of how do you get paid for this? How are you getting compensated for running this and putting everybody together? And then the second thing would be, well, how does it get sold out in to the market and how are these ten developers going to see any sort of return on the work they put in to it? So, from that stand point I don’t know is this idea has a lot of legs but if there was a service out there that, you know, where you’re breaking ideas down in to manageable chunks and then outsourcing those individual chunks, the problem I think that you may run in to with doing something along those lines is that what happens if somebody comes along and says, “Here, please scope out this project,” and they do it and maybe it takes you 25 hours or maybe it takes you a hundred hours to scope it out and break it down in to those little bit size pieces. And then they say, “Oh, well, this is too much. I don’t want to have to pay for it,” and they just walk away.
[32:40] So, maybe you charge upfront for that sort of thing but I think that more of Rob’s question would I use something like that? I probably would but it really depends on the specifics of how you’re going to go about dividing up that work and how you’re going to go about charging for it to get done. I think the other question I would have in my mind what are the qualifications of the people who are designing and building it. And what sort of technologies and things like that. But I think that all of those are road blocks that have solutions for them and you can figure them out. I don’t know as I feel real good about, you know, handing out equity for people doing from pieces to work though.
[33:14] Rob: Yeah, I think the equity plus the pricing thing makes it a little too complicated from the start and I probably just focus on one or the other. The other thing is that design is tends to be let me say it’s simpler. It’s more visible. So, Tweaky focuses on tweaks to designs and they’re making it work. But you’re talking about building an entire app and that’s really complicated and they’re like an iceberg, right, where there’s tiny bit visible on top and then all the code could be crap behind it. But if it happens to work for a few weeks then there’s a person get credit for it who maintains the code like you don’t tend to maintain the “design.” Once the landing page is done, it’s sliced, you put it on the internet. If you need more changes, you go back to Tweaky.
[33:53] But code is not that way. A lot of code will have bugs in it that you’ll discover or it just constantly needs updating and I guess you could say you have to keep coming back to your service. But there’s a lot more added complexity with all that. I also think that this idea in general, this sounds way too complicated for unfunded startup. I know that this is one of those that you would need funding for and you need to build a team. You need to move really quick. Kickstarter didn’t just sprout out of, you know, some guy’s garage as a single founder idea. Pretty darn sure they raised quite a bit of money to get it off the ground. And this idea sounds like that. The number of moving parts, the two sided marketplace problem, all of that stuff, you’re just going to need raise funding.
[34:33] So, if you’re trying to bootstrap this, I would almost guarantee that this is not going to work. It’s just going to take too long. It’s going to take you years to solve all of these problems that we’ve brought up. It’s not to say that it’s impossible to solve, you have to move so fast that you’re going to need money.
[34:49] The last thing I’d say is prove it out, right now that it can work. Put up a landing page and instead of – you don’t need to write code. You don’t need to build an app to coordinate. You don’t need to do any of that. Prove it out with e-mail and you finding some people manually on oDesk and trying to sell this idea to someone who will actually pay you money, an end customer who wants an app built and just try to do a single app. Don’t even try to do the whole crowd funding part of it because that’s a whole other added layer of complexity. Just try to get an app built using this approach and see if it’s possible, see how hard it is and see how much you’re going to have to charge to make it worth your time and to make the business profitable because once you do that, you’ll have a much better idea of what this is going to take and whether the idea will fly. Thanks for the question, Ben, hope that was helpful.
[35:31] Music
[35:34] Child: So, that wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or e-mail us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commotions. May I please have something to eat?
[36:02] Rob: Subscribe to us 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. See you next time.
Episode 136 | AuditShark, Drip, and HitTail Updates
Show Notes
- Tom Fakes – http://blog.craz8.com
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I are going to be talking about AuditShark, Drip and HitTail. This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode 136.
[00:09] Music
[00:17]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.
[00:25] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:26] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help people avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the good word this week, Mike?
[00:31] Mike: I’m sweating in Texas.
[00:33] Rob: And it’s swampy.
[00:35] Mike: Swampy is a good way to put it.
[00:37] Rob: Well we’re going to be talking today on the show. It’s going to be an update show where we talk a lot about projects we’ve been working on recently, progress we made or lack thereof in some cases. We got a comment on last week’s episode, episode 135 where we answered several listeners’ questions. And Ray piped in. He put a comment on the blog.
[00:55] And he said the question about the 19-year-old who doesn’t have any programming experience. I think I’d be tempted to suggest that he try and complete some of the free online courses that are all the rage at the moment. They are available I think for HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails for example. It might be a quick way to build some basic skills quickly.
[01:12] It would be difficult to pick a technology stack if you have no experience. I would do that first then look at some freelancing job. With no skills I think even finding the right freelance jobs and getting them would be almost impossible. I thought we said that. Did we skip that step? Because that’s the first thing we should have said is first learn something and then go to oDesk and try to get contracts.
[01:31] Mike: Part of the comment also kind of includes that idea that he doesn’t know the technology stack, so he doesn’t necessarily know where to start. And we kind of give some ideas about where to start, which was go to the Ruby on Rails route or PHP or something along those lines just to get your feet wet in a way that’s not going to overwhelm you.
[0 1:51] Rob: Thanks for the clarification there, Ray. The other thing we got was an email from Matt Vanderpool and he attended MicroConf last month. The subject line of his email is heartfelt thank you for putting on MicroConf. And he says, hey Rob and Mike. I wanted to extend a heartfelt thank you to both of you for organizing MicroConf.
[02:10] I also wanted to tell you a little about what MicroConf has done for QAtab. Matt has an app called QAtab that’s at QAtab.com and it helps company improve their QA process. He says in the four months before MicroConf I did nothing with QAtab. I was too busy and didn’t have the time to work on it. In one month since MicroConf, I have reduced my consulting time so that I could work on QAtab.
[02:32] Added support for integrating with external ticketing systems based on information from Tom Fakes who I met at MicroConf. Set up a weekly meeting for product accountability with Najaf Ali who I met at MicroConf. Identified and reviewed competitors to help me determine what makes QAtab different. And then he list five or six other things all dealing with either dealing with information he got from MicroConf or people he met at MicroConf.
[02:54] He says I don’t know if I would ever make this progress without it. The talks were great and the networking was even better. Almost everyone who I explained the QAtab concept to immediately got it and that was very helpful. I think it was this kind of feedback that I was missing and that I really needed to keep going. Again thank you.
[03:11] So, we want to extend obviously a thank you to Matt for writing such a detailed email. Yeah, really just for letting us know the difference it makes and that’s frankly why we’re starting to do two of them. Certainly if it works out and it continues to make this kind of difference for people it’s kind of a no brainer.
[03:27] Mike: Yeah. We’ll have to take into account those people who are trying to get us to do three or four a year but we’ll see what happens.
[03:34] Rob: I saw an Asia request and an Australia, New Zealand request come through. We’re going to need some staff to help with those.
[03:40] Music
[03:43] Rob: So Mike, we haven’t heard much about details of AuditShark. What’s going on with that probably for a couple of months?
[03:51] Mike: So for people who haven’t heard much of what I’ve been working on AuditShark is a product designed for auditing web servers. Basically your infrastructure servers to make sure that you’re following best practices for security. Cause there are literally thousands and thousands of ways to configure a server. But not all of them are necessarily the right way or good way that isn’t going to end up in your server getting hacked.
[04:13] So, AuditShark is designed to check all this different pieces of information on your servers to make sure that the server is configured correctly out of the box, you know when you first start configuring it. And then to continually make sure that it’s still configured the right way in case those baseline recommendations change or if the server changes itself.
[04:30] For example, somebody actually does get into your server and hacks into it, chances are good that they’re going to start making some changes to it. And those are the type of things that you want to be notified about. These are not things that you’re going to go back into the server and check on a daily. You’d rather have software that will do that.
[04:47] So that’s what AuditShark is designed to do. From a problem standpoint obviously it’s giving you some at least piece of mind that at somebody is going in and taking a look at these servers, making sure that it is set up correctly. Those are the type of things that people I’ve spoken to find fairly valuable about it.
[05:03] So, over the past few weeks, I’ve been making a very focus effort to kind of get the product more or less the feature complete where it is enough to put in front of somebody where they would actually get value out of it. So to help with that I hire a developer to start building some of these control points. I spent some time doing some training for them.
[05:20] Over the past couple of weeks, he’s put together roughly between 100 and 150 different security checks that are built in the product now and they’re all targeted at Windows 2008. That’s just more or less the starting point. Next up on the docket is going after sequel server 2008. And then after that, I’m going to start taking a look to figure out whether we want to do more Windows checks and go down the route of Windows 2012 and the sequel 2012.
[05:46] Or, if we want to start going more towards the Linux side of things with Linux, Linux-based apps such as Apache or MySQL. Or, if we go after more of a platform specific approach where we’re going to maybe say Ruby on Rails, Gems or things like that. But essentially in order to make those decisions, I have to do a little bit more customer development.
[06:06] Rob: And does that mean are you are able to ask them in advance and figure it out or do you have to go through the process of actually installing it on their server, getting them to use it and then making a decision.
[06:16] Mike: No, I can just talk to them. I can ask them the questions. I can look at my spreadsheet to figure out what the numbers are of the people who are interested in different things and just go after the largest pieces. Figure out who is, one, willing to pay the most for it, and then two, what the largest number of people who are willing to pay that amount.
[06:35] You know just do a little bit of multiplication, you can figure out what’s going to be the most profitable area to go after next; at least for my launch list and the people that I talked to so far. Obviously, if I start progressing and marketing a lot more then that could change dramatically very very quickly. But it’s at least a starting point to give me an idea.
[06:53] But the fact that he was able to put together roughly 50 control points a week indicates to me that over the course of the next month or two months, it wouldn’t be a stretch to have like another 250, 300, 400 control points build where these are all each individuals checks and security checks that are being done on somebody’s machine that would be reported on a daily basis.
[07:14] And I think that regardless of the system that you’re running, there’s going to be value in that. And that’s really what I was – I spent a lot of time and effort getting to the point where I know that the system actually provides that value because that is the value proposition. If it doesn’t deliver, it’s very difficult to justify charging for it.
[07:31] Rob: Right, that makes sense. And have you limited this to or do you know yet who’s going to get the most value out of it. Like is it SAS operator, is it downloadable software companies. Is there any group or demographic that it’s particularly resonated with?
[07:46] Mike: Not that I have differentiated it. I mean I can certainly make guesses about it. My suspicion is that any company that basis 95% to 99% of its revenue off of its web servers they would be a good candidate for it. Because they’re going to want to make sure that those servers don’t go down whether it’s because of bad configurations or hackers getting in.
[08:09] We talked a little bit about Rudy a couple of weeks ago where his backups were failing. And he didn’t know that that was going on. I could very well build a control point that checks and validates your backup for example. And if your backups are failing, let’s say I check the log files for backups or there are very specific things that I can look at, I can tell you whether your backups are failing.
[08:29] And then it’s not six months, nine months down the road when your entire server crashes and then suddenly you find that your backups were failing seven months ago and you’re completely toast. Then something like that would provide a lot of value. But it is for those types of people who have the vast majority of revenue of their revenue come in from those servers.
[08:48] Because they basically are mission critical. If you lose those servers, you lose your business. Now again that’s just hypothetical, theories. I can stay here and talk till I’m blue in the face and say, “Yeah, that’s sounds reasonable.” But until I go talk to customers and say is this why you’re buying this product, it’s hard to make those judgment calls.
[09:04] Rob: Right. Cause the answer you gave me was the problem that you solved. You talked about a problem someone has and how AuditShark can solve it. And that totally make sense. Problem solutions [feed] I think you’re going to find that. What I’m asking about is the next step, product market [feed]. It’s what market are you going to focus on first with your limited resources being a single founder. You can’t go after every one who has 90% of the revenue from their web server cause that’s a huge huge market, and you just can’t possibly market to them. So that’s what I was probing after is who is that demographic.
[09:37] Mike: It’s probably going to be SAS operators initially just because I’m kind of plugged into that network to some degree, so I understand kind of the pulse of the market a little bit. And I understand a lot about how web severs work. What the problems around running them are. What the remediation issues are. I can certainly offer a value of there in terms of not just my knowledge but in the products applicability to solving those situations. So, it seems to me like that’s a reasonable place to start. Whether I stay there or not, it depends a lot on how the market responds to what I’m offering.
[0:10:09] Rob: I like it. That’s a good answer. At least you have one that’s not broad cause that is definitely a market that you have reached into.
[10:17] Music
[10:18] Mike: You’d mentioned a while ago that you were working on a couple of information products and I know that one of the first things was the video course on hiring a VA. I think you’d done a bunch of stuff back in January where you had somebody come in and do a lot of videos of you. How is that coming along?
[10:35] Rob: It was ready to launch. I mean I had all the videos by January and I was hoping to launch it in January. And then HitTail had a big spike and a bunch of press. You know it was great stuff. HitTail grew very very fast early in the year, and it took my attention off of the video course basically. I have kind of a goal to launch three courses this year, just smaller things that really focus on particular pain point.
[11:00] And so I put the video, the VA video course on hold. But I’d been getting emails about it probably one or two a month from you know whoever, listeners, people who hear about it and asking if I’ve launched it yet or where I’m going to launch it. Cause I don’t have a landing page for this one. This is probably the first time I’ve ever done this. I just plan to send it to basically my email newsletter list.
[11:23] It’s softwarebyrob.com. I have a newsletter for that. I’m going to test that out in thinking that in the next – it’s going to probably be 7 to 14 days that I’m going to get it out. It’s all uploaded. I have transcripts. I have audio versions. I have course notes. There’re really just one or two final pieces. I have a job description that I use, already uploaded that I use to hire VA’s.
[11:44] And then there’s just a couple like I want to get a sample screencast and a sample Google doc that I share to showing how simple it actually is to train someone to do something. So I’m excited. It’s fun. I like sharing this kind of information and being able to justify going into such depth. You can’t do it on a podcast. You can’t really do it in a talk at a conference going deeper than I’ve gone probably since my book. You know that’s the last time I really dove into something with this much detail and being able to handover so many like accompanying resources.
[12:15] Mike: That was really cool. I’d be interested in seeing that. I know there are a lot of people who I reply to and there were several people I talked to at MicroConf who were asking me. They’re like you’re involved in a lot. You do a lot of different things. How do you get all this stuff done? And I’m like the magic of it is I don’t actually do most of it. So as you said it’s through VA’s and you get other people to basically work through your processes.
[12:38] Rob: Yeah. That’s right. With HitTail, it’s kind of been a trip. One of my main marketing channels just stopped working very abruptly. It’s an algorithmic thing. Its paid acquisition that I’d been doing for about eight or nine months. And I stopped it for MicroConf because I was too busy. And when I came back and re-uped it just like ads aren’t appearing even with the same bids.
[13:00] It’s been kind of a shocker. It’s not the majority of growth but it has been the longest term and most stable, and it is a big chunk of the monthly growth that’s been happening over the past probably eight to nine months. And so the nice part is that it’s a SAS app. And SAS is beautiful because the money keeps coming in. It may not gross substantially this month.
[13:25] It’s been growing between 10% and 30% a month for 15 months. And the growth this month will be single digit at best. But it’s SAS. Like the revenue still comes in. It’s not like with the single download software product that I’ve had were when growth stops it really drops down substantially and you lose 50% or 80% of your revenue in a month.
[13:45] Mike: That’s nice to hear. As long as you’ve got that growth coming in, I think the thing that would concern me and obviously I’m not, you know, seeing all your numbers and everything. But if I were in that position what would concern me is the fact that if you lose like a major growth engine, does that mean that in another month or two because that growth engine is lost, now as you start to shed people who came in through that engine, are you going to start going in the other direction. Are you going to start to shrink because that growth is no longer being powered by that particular channel?
[14:17] Rob: Absolutely. If your churn is too high and you don’t have that large funnel of trials coming in, you will start to shrink. I’ve plotted it all out cause it’s been going on for about six weeks now. And it’s funny. I’m like working with an ad provider and all this stuff and they don’t really know how their system works. It’s like this black box algorithm.
[14:35] And there’s no flags on my account. There’s nothing. They’re like we don’t know why it’s not running. I mean it’s bizarre. So I’m doing all types of crazy testing like running the same ad but pointing it to just a completely different website like pointing it to my blog to see if the ad shows up. You’re right. If you lose a major growth engine and your churn is too high then of course a SAS app will shrink over time.
[14:57] This is obviously a concern. It’s not something – I don’t want to play it off and say since it’s SAS I’m immune to X, Y and Z cause it certainly not the case at all. And this is a major major issue on my play right now which is a bit of a bummer because I had all these processes in place that essentially are ensuring the growth, the continued growth of it daily even though I’m not focusing on it.
[15:17] And when something like this happens this is where I’ve had to pull away from what I was working on which was Drip. And I had to pull away from it and come back and so now I’m getting less done on the new project. That’s just a balancing act. When processes failed and you have to step back I think it’s the part that I don’t enjoy about having a lot of spinning plates is when one that I started spinning a long time ago that’s been going well for a long suddenly starts to wobble and I have to take my attention off of the new ones.
[15:45] Mike: Yeah. That’s always hard. That’s also one of the reason you don’t automate everything upfront because if that automation fails for whatever reasons, it’s going to take a long time to begin with, but then if that automation fails then it’s going to take you exponentially more time to figure out how to go back and fix everything especially, depending on what it is if it’s complicated or somebody changes your API or changes their webpage and your parsing it. It could just be really difficult. But, yeah, when those processes breakdown sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. You have to back and take a look at it.
[16:15] Rob: Right. So let’s bounce back to some of the things on your list. What else is new?
[16:20] Mike: Last week I was trying to get a customer installed. And basically run into a couple of things because I wanted to get some of the control points that I talked about that I was having the new developer worked on out into the system and test it. So we were making a lot of changes all at once. And I don’t know whether it was directly related to something that we did or whether it’s just the sheer number of control points that were added to the system that basically results were not coming back anymore. So I just basically found this out over the past day or two because the policies that I put in place to go out and audit my test machines, they’re just not sending the results back anymore. They used to. They were doing it fine every single day and now it’s a black hole.
[17:01] Rob: That’s not good.
[17:02] Mike: I think that I’ve got enough log in code in place to figure it out. It’s just that I haven’t had the time to sit down on the servers and figure out exactly what’s going on. I mean it may very well be something as simple as a configuration change in a config file some place on the server. But it could be something that’s a lot more complicated than that.
[17:21] And I know that this whole mechanism for passing that data back has got to change at some point. I think it was Gabriel Weinberg had written an article talking about scalability and how it can usually see the next order of magnitude of growth, but two orders of magnitude things are going to be so completely then it’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on or what it’s going to look like.
[17:42] And I think that it’s kind of at stage right now where you know before I was always passing back a handful of control points where it was less than ten. And at this point, I’m sending back pretty close to a 150. So, it really is a full order of magnitude higher than it was before. I don’t know what the problem is. It could be something simple.
[18:02] It may require some radical changes. I’m hoping its not radical changes. But again, it’s a problem where I’ve got to deal with it and I’ve got to deal with now. Because obviously I don’t want to start putting a lot more customers into this and then having them log in and have them not be able to do anything at all because the system just doesn’t work anymore.
[18:20] Rob: Right. That’s a pretty major one to find early on. This is exactly why we roll out to one customer at a time and test things. I mean it is a beta test in this case. But it’s also it’s also I guess one of the other big benefits that we talked about a lot is you’re learning what features your customers needs. And they push the limits of these things, right. Cause you just wouldn’t likely test with that many control points.
[18:41] Mike: Oh no, I would. I could easily foresee somebody running 500 or a 1000 or even 1500 or 2000 control points against a single machine because you’re not going to want to do those manually. Cause even if it took you like 5 seconds to check each one of them. I could easily see somebody doing that in a production environment. And this is only a 100 to 150. So, it’s got to get fixed. It absolutely has to get fixed.
[19:05] Rob: Very good. So basically the month since MicroConf has not treated me well at all. I just know after a month, just about out from under the email load that had piled up. Then the HitTail growth is stalled and now Drip…
[19:18] Mike: Is this tales from the dark side?
[19:20] Rob: It is man. It’s just one of those bad months. I was down like last week and the week before, I was really bummed about these things and they were impacted me. I was really shocked by it and surprise and everything. And I’m just kind of like dealing with it now. I’m realizing I’ll figure out a solution eventually. And the same thing with Drip.
[19:37] So with Drip probably three and a half to four weeks ago, we started with our customer no. 1. Cause HitTail has been using Drip for a while and it works and Drip is sending email and everything works great. We try to get customer no. 1 on the system and right away it was like you don’t have this feature that I absolutely need. So we implemented it.
[19:56] Then there were a couple more that he needed then we implemented them. As we went down the line, it just turned out his use case was way too complicated. He had so many landing pages and list and the interactive and he had custom segments and he had API calls. Not that stuff is that bad, but at this point in Drip’s lifecycle, it’s just not there. We can’t build all that.
[20:16] We could spend another month building it for him. And maybe it’s 1 out of 50 or 1 out of 100 potential customers has all the problem he did. So the cool part is that he is able to switch, since he’s a founder as well, he was able to switch pretty quickly from customer to kind of adviser. And we had a long hang out with myself and Derek who’s coding it and customer no.1.
[20:39] And he’s basically like you know you really got to think I don’t know if I would build all these features yet. And so that’s what we decided to do. We basically pull the plug on just on getting customer no. 1 on the app. And so we’ve had to switch up the plan a little bit and take evasive action and I have 16 other early access customers.
[20:57] And so now I’m choosing one who has a pretty simple use case and we started talking. And I would love to get him on board like today. But as this is going on, Derek and I started talking and he realized this just during the conversation that we have to do some refactoring of the data model that it was… Yup, you know how painful that’s going to be.
[21:17] Mike: Yup.
[21:18] Rob: So it felt like a one two punch man. Basically Derek, he’s like do you have time to chat. And I’m like this is not good. We never chat unless something is wrong you know. We started talking and it was basically a 90-minute Skype chat of me trying to figure out how we could avoid doing this. It’s about eight working days. Once we get data in the system and we have users on it, it would be one of those changes where it would literally take three to six man months to fix down the line if we have to migrate everybody.
[21:47] So it was that kind of thing where its like this gets us 80% of the way there but it’s going to be catastrophic if we ever had to add one additional variation of this or one additional piece of flexibility. We just saw quickly how that architecture had max itself out. So we’re several days into that. I think probably 3-4 days from now that would be done.
[22:08] And then we’ll be circling back and getting our next customer no. 1 on. But the good news I realized is that feature we built for our first customer no. 1 we are going to need. We’re going to need for ourselves or for this next customer no. 1. So we didn’t lose time per se. We didn’t waste time.
[22:29] Mike: Yeah. I think the one thing that you’ve mentioned that’s really important for some people to think about is that you may have your heart set on signing on this customer no.1 But understand and realize that it may not work out with that customer. They may have use cases or needs that are going to be so far above and beyond what the rest of your customers are going to want or need that it’s actually not worth building it for them.
[22:52] Because you’re going to end up doing all this customizations that are never going to be used by anybody else or going to be very difficult or going to be so time consuming that it’s going to set you so far back from launching that at the end of days it’s not going to be profitable. Or, you’re going to lose motivation or you’re just going to have the money to be able to make ends meet to roll it out to everybody.
[23:09] So being able to walk away from that customer no. 1 and say, “Look we just can’t help you right now. We maybe able to do it at some point in the future. But now is just not the right time.” In some cases, that’s the right decision to make. It’s not an easy decision to make. But sometimes it’s the right one.
[23:24] Rob: That’s what I was going to say. It was not an easy decision at all. It was not clear cut. At a certain point, it just starts feeling institutively wrong like you were doing so much work. And I kept asking myself the question how many other users of my first hundred are going to need what we’re building here. And that answer was like none or one.
[23:45] It was just such a small percentage that I know we can get quite a few people using and paying for the app without these features. And again it’s a judgment call. Someone else may have made a different one. But the thing that struck me was no matter how many emails and how many times I discussed it with customer no. 1 and tried to thoroughly understand his use case, there were still these little things that creep up once he tried to implement.
[24:07] It just goes back to that recommendation of get people actually using your app cause expect things to come up that you haven’t accounted for. I don’t know if I honestly believe you can account for things until they really start touching the code.
[24:21] Mike: There’s always the difference between like you know you can explain an idea to somebody else. And until you’ve explained it to them three or four times and actually showed them what you’re talking about, it is so hard to convey some of that stuff. I mean that’s part of why when we’re talking about outsourcing code to developers, that’s why it makes the screen mockup so incredibly important.
[24:41] Because it allows you to show them quickly what you’re talking about. Versus having them read a spec that they’re only going to skim anyway and they’re not going really understand it even if you’re talking to it right in there ear. So hey, I’ve got some of my own tales from the dark side. I’m letting go one of my developers. I had to get on to him a number of times over the past several months.
[24:59] And it’s really just not working out. I mean the relationship just kind of limp along for about six months. And I feel like I’ve tolerated it because I felt like I didn’t necessarily have a choice and I didn’t want to put the time and effort in to finding somebody else. But I’ve decided to just kill the relationship and focus more on people who are actually working out.
[25:16] Rob: That’s a bummer. I’m sorry to hear that. You have a couple of domestic developers, is that right?
[25:21] Mike: Yeah.
[25:22] Rob: Here in the US.
[25:23] Mike: He’s not one of them.
[25:24] Rob: Oh, he’s not. Okay.
[25:26] Mike: No. No.
[25:27] Rob: Well that’s bummer. I mean you have other help. Are they able to step up and make up for him or are you going to have to go on a search for someone?
[25:33] Mike: The lead developer who I have working on the policy builder and then the other developer I have who is using the policy builders, that’s really where a lot of the problems are. And we’ve had these discussions internally where we’re looking and all of the problems with the policy builder with the synchronization, and none of it is really major but collectively it tends to be a pain.
[25:55] So we’re actually looking at that stuff in trying to figure out what is the future of this going to look like. What are we going to do in the future? How is it going to work? We’ve talked about some different architecture consideration. It almost seems like the original thought that I’ve had a long time is to take the policy builder and put it in the web, so you didn’t have to have this additional downloadable component.
[26:12] And it looks like that’s probably the direction that we’re going to go. For now, we’re going to leave things the way that they are just because it would be an incredible waste of time and effort to back off and put things on hold and go back and rebuild it in the web. So, we’re just going to leave things the way they are. We’re going to basically work through the issue as we best as we can.
[26:32] The developer who’s building a lot of the control points had a lot of good feedback for me in terms of what the policy builders needs. But a lot of those suggestions are directly applicable to taking it and making it web base as well. She’s like in jQuery or something along those lines.
[26:47] I think that that that’s ultimately the direction we’ll go. And if that’s the case then this developer was working on that policy builder. So, if I basically halt the development there and put it in maintenance mode, it doesn’t necessarily matter that I’ve kind of lost him.
[27:01] Rob: That’s funny. I haven’t realized that the policy builder wasn’t web base yet. I can see the headaches of trying to build it on the web instead of as a desktop app. But I agree with you. I think it’s no brainer long term cause then you don’t have to support people downloading it and installing and running into all those issues that are hard to troubleshoot as opposed to you having kind of a SAS thing that you can maintain and fix right on the fly.
[27:24] Mike: Yeah. I mean the other thing with the policy builder is that there’s going to be people out there who have Mac. I mean there’s going to be a lot of people who have Mac and its Windows only right now. So moving it into the web it solves a lot of those problems. The other thing that it does is it allows us to avoid any database synchronization problems.
[27:42] You don’t have to have a sequel server on the client to run it. There’re some things along licensing that I can probably get away with a couple of components that I won’t need anymore. The major issue that it kind of brings in is how to test things. So once you’ve built a policy or control point, how do you test it?
[27:59] And for something like that I think that we’re going to move more towards an always connected model where if you push task down to a machine, because it’s going to maintain a constant connection out to AuditShark and the Cloud then it will always be able to contact it. Will you be able to do it through the UI, which will be pretty neat if we can get it working?
[28:17] And I don’t see any reason why we can’t. It’s just a matter of wiring all that stuff up and that’s a nontrivial amount of work. So that’s kind of the reason for putting things kind of in a maintenance mode for that while in parallel we walk down the road of building this other stuff.
[28:31] Rob: Absolutely. At this point man, I mean we’re both kind of in the same boat, right. We’re approaching launch on something. And I find myself everyday saying that’s a great feature. I’m entering in FogBugs and putting it in at priority 6 or 7. Like a great feature. We’re going to build it in six months. That’s typically the timeframe. You know I’ll say we’re building for 2.0.
[28:49] There’re some awesome features. I can think of a hundred of features I would want in an email marketing tool. But we can put them in a bug tracker and implement them later. Cause right now we just to go to implement the shortest path to providing actual monetizable value to people and that’s the same boat you’re in. Writing less code and doing more things to get you closer to launch frankly.
[29:13] Mike: Yeah. And the nice thing about that is if you can get to launch and it starts to gain traction then obviously you’re going to be gaining revenue from it. And you can bring more people on to build that version 2.0 kind of in parallel while you got version 1.0 in maintenance mode.
[29:28] Rob: So my last update for the day is also dealing with Drip. I have this really interesting experience last week. About two weeks we bailed on trying to get customer no. 1 on. And then we decided to re-factor. So we were in kind of just stand still mode, and I was looking at the future set and really asking myself what exactly are building and is this still in line with my original vision of Drip that I had way back.
[29:52] Is that still something people are willing to pay for? Does it provide value to a market? The answer was I think so but I don’t really know. And so I was trying to think how do I answer this better. How do I find out what people really want because I’ve had so many one off conversation whether it’s at MicroConf or whether it’s over Skype or whether it’s one on one via email.
[30:12] And when people say, “I’m really looking forward to Drip. I asked them, “What exactly do you think it does?” Because I haven’t spelled out what the features are and everybody has a different answer. Some people want behavioral email. Some people want workflow based email. You know there’re all these things that people want and I was trying to figure out how many of them each of these things.
[30:29] So realizing that the launch list. I have an email list of about 1400 people who’ve expressed interest in Drip. And they’ve come from all different sources from probably listeners of this podcast to people who heard about it at MicroConf to ads that I’ve run sending them through a landing page. And so I created a Google forum. I love Google forum. It’s like Wufoo but its super simple.
[30:53] You create this form. They have quite a few options. Nothing like Wufoo cause it’s free and everything goes into a Google doc spreadsheet when the info comes in. So, I created one of those. I send out a link. I’m trying to keep it as short as possible and I got a lot of responses. I got 22% response rate answer some really key questions.
[31:13] And some of them were directly in line with my hypothesis and other send me in a different direction frankly. But the most important thing is it really improves my mental state of like are we wondering here. Are we really building something people want and it totally confirmed that. Because an overwhelming number of people who responded and the percentage of people responded want exactly what we’ve already built to be honest.
[31:38] If we were refactoring right now based on what Drip is today and based on how I described it in this survey, we have a kind of critical mass in that group. But the key thing that we asked that I almost didn’t ask I added in last was question no. 1 was basically saying are you a and then there were choices. Are you a startup founder/software entrepreneur or are you an email marketer or a general marketer or other.
[32:04] And then there was a text box. So other wound up being like consultants and just kind of some random people. That was key because then all of the other responses I could segment in that Google spreadsheet and I could just order by one thing. And then I could look at how many startup founders said that particular thing and then how many email marketers said that particular thing.
[32:26] And that was a key insight that I’m glad I’ve done. So folks out there if you are going to send out a survey, try to get – you don’t want to ask five questions about who they are. You want to boil it down to one so that it doesn’t really clog up the survey.
[32:39] Mike: Yeah. That’s a good thing to ask. One of the things I’ve been doing is talking a look at the email addresses of the people who’ve been signing up for the AuditShark launch list. And using Rapportive you can basically backtrack their email address to see who they are, where they work at and what their title is at that company.
[32:55] And that’s extremely helpful for figuring out whether it’s more of a qualified lead than somebody who is just kind of idly interested. I mean if they sign up for AuditShark and they got like a Gmail account, chances are pretty good so far that I found that they’re not necessarily interested. It’s more because it’s a podcast listener or they’ve heard about it from a blog or something like.
[33:14] They’re kind of idly curious. Whereas I’ve gotten a lot of other emails that have come in and I’ve been able to backtrack it to companies for legitimate corporate email addresses and some of the titles are like operations, engineers or sys admin at such and such company. And it’s clear that they’re looking to solve a very specific problem. And you can reply to those people.
[33:36] You can go back to them either one on one with a survey like that with some very detailed and specific questions. By cross segmenting those types of people, you can send them different questions. So that you can essentially say okay sys admin are interested in these types of things.
[33:50]Let me drill in for the next sys admin who comes along let me send them a survey that kind of drills in to try and get more information about what a sys admin would look for as opposed to somebody who is just kind of curious or kind of drive by person.
[34:05] Rob: Yeah. That’s a really good point. I’m glad you mention that cause I’ve forgotten to mention that one of the choices after identifying who they were, I asked them what’s the no. 1 you think Drip is going to do. Like what are you most excited about. Give them a few choices and one of those choices was I’m just curious about Drip.
[34:20] And having that alone I think like 20% of the respondents said that and that was great. Because I was able to basically not listen to their opinion as much cause it’s not as important as a founder opinion who can actually use this today and really has a desire to use it.
[34:35] Mike: Yeah. And that’s definitely a differentiating factor between them. If you know what they do or what they are interested in, it helps you determine whether or not to ignore the things that they have to say. And it sounds a little callous, but at the time you have to as a startup founder you have to choose what advice you listen to. And you have to have some way of doing that. And that’s a good way of doing that.
[34:55] Rob: Right. I wouldn’t say ignore. I’d say prioritize. It just has to be prioritized lower than some of the other groups that I look at. There were a couple of other things I learned from the survey. I won’t go into too much detail but the one I already said so far which that is all the features that we have built so far including the ones for customer no. 1 are important to people. And that was a nice confirmation.
[35:16] Another one is that there were a lot of startup and software founders which I would have expected. You know confirmed it basically with data. And then another one was it was kind of the opposite side of the coin. There was an advanced feature which is like split testing, right. Splitting testing auto responder sequences against each other as well as subject lines. I mean really going in depth.
[35:38] It’s a very hard thing to build but it was on our docket and we pulled it off because our intuition was that people didn’t want anything that complicated. But it was the exact opposite. People are like this is a major feature that I want now like it was a big deal. So we’re turning around on that.
[35:54] And then another one was email workflow and trying to almost like infusion stuff. Not quite behavior but where you have really complex rules engines. I’ve heard from so many people that they wanted that. And so, I was entertaining the idea, wondering if we have to go down that path cause that’s not a fun thing to build. Frankly, we found that a smaller percentage wanted that than almost anything else.
[36:15] So, although, it’s a vocal group or it’s a group of people that I’ve talked to a lot cause I’ve heard that suggestion a lot, it’s not something that we’re not going to build tomorrow. And so again, we’re not going to ignore that feature but it’s prioritized lower than some of these other things that we’re talking about.
[36:30] Mike: The feature for AB testing or split testing any of the email campaigns not just the content of them but like the headlines and stuff to drive people in, yeah that’s definitely a feature that you should be working on for a second. I totally agree with the people who responded in that survey.
[36:47] Rob: Yeah. It was a long thought process. I won’t go into it. That was originally one of the value props I had mentioned when I was pitching Drip to anybody was it could do that. Because I don’t know of any other system that allows you to split task sequences, its auto responder sequences.
[37:01] It’s always you cans split test individual campaigns, individual blast emails but not sequences. But I have fought through; I had a series of discussions and such. We’ve moved it off cause it’s a lot of work to build. But as you said a lot of folks are interested in it so we will be building it.
[37:16] Mike: Cool.
[37:17] Rob: Yeah. This really reminds me why having a launch list is so crucial. I’ve been doing one on one interview with people like I said we email and Skype. But it’s really hard to get like a higher level idea from that. You get specific request and it’s hard to know how many others have that same problem. What the survey data did combined with those interviews is it gives me a much higher confidence in the direction we’re taking.
[37:37] It makes me feel better about what we’re building and it makes me, I don’t know. Just have a better outlook on it. It makes me want to move fast and get things done. So it’s not like we don’t already tell people to have a landing page and a launch list but one more reason to have something like that in place.
[37:52] Mike: Maybe you should have one for the VA videos.
[37:54] Rob: Oh my god. We’ll see how that goes. It’s going to be such an I told you so. Everyone is going to point.
[38:01] Mike: I can see it as the twitter hash tag right now.
[38:04] Rob: Hash tag I told you so.
[38:06] Mike: No we’ll see how that goes.
[38:07] Music
[38:10] Mike: I was reworking some of the marketing stuff on the website right now as well. I reworked the sign up process a little bit to emphasize some of the things that I took away from MicroConf like the 60 day money back guarantee versus a free trial, giving people a little bit more information on the sign up, doing annual plans versus just a monthly plan.
[38:30] Offering that to them upfront as opposed to basically offering it after they’ve already signed up. So I’m looking at doing those types of things. And the only other thing I have going on is about an hour after this podcast ends I’ll be doing our first mastermind group call this evening.
[38:45] Rob: Very nice. That’s a good move. Are you excited about it?
[38:49] Mike: Yeah. I am. I mean it’s just kind of exploratory at the moment. I mean we’ll do a couple and see how thing go. Maybe do one every other week the next every for the next six or eight weeks or something like that. And then I think everybody will kind of evaluate where things are at. Whether its meeting everyone’s needs or not or if we need to change anything. But I’m kind of excited and interested in seeing how things go but we arrange it at MicroConf, so another notch on the plus column for MicroConf.
[39:16] Rob: Yeah. Very cool. I’m looking forward to hearing how that goes and I’m sure listeners will be interested in updates in the future.
[39:22] Mike: Well if you have a question for us, you can call us into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email 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 us on 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 135 | Five Year Startup Plan, What the Best Podcasts Get Right, How to Spend $10k on Marketing, and More Listener Questions…
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 135.
[00:04] 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. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:24] Rob: Well, we got a pretty cool write-up by Toby Osbourn. He did a really good write-up about episode 133 where we talked about the Founder Test. Not only did he write it up, he actually added his own insights. He summarized our points and then added like extra resources that he would offer for each of the 11 points we raised.
[00:44] So, I basically in the show notes for 133, I was going to put — Toby already did a better job than we will writing this up but I did and I just said for, you know, an exceptional summary and additional points go here and so, I just linked him right over. Obviously, we’ll link it up in the show notes for this episode since I’m mentioning it as well. But I did brought it for this out there. If you hear an episode and you do a write-up like this and you basically do a better job than our show notes, I mean we don’t tend to write detailed show notes. So, you find compelled to write about this, you’re highly likely to get some type of a link or a mention like this.
[01:19] Frankly, having a good write up like this helps everyone. It helps us because then there’s a good documentation of it and we don’t have to create it and obviously, it helps you because it will get you some traffic. So, if a bunch of people start doing it every week, you know, have a little bit of a problem but I can imagine that that actually will happen.
[01:35] Mike: So, definitely, do let us know if you’ve done a write-up on any of the episodes that we’ve done. In terms of the stuff, I’ve been working on, I’m still working out how to outsource all of my bookkeeping. The paperwork and website log ins are the biggest pain in the neck. I called American Express to find out what my options were in terms of creating an account for somebody and they said, “Oh well…” one of their suggestions was to give the person my username and password to log in as bank —
[01:58] Rob: Oh my gosh. It’s the worst ever. [Laughter] Yeah, I’ve been surprised at how hard this role-based access control is, right. PayPal actually does a decent, a reasonable job. It’s not great but compared to the other financial providers, they do probably one of the best jobs. I agree and anytime I’m getting a bookkeeper set up, it’s a pretty painful process. It takes a lot more time.
[02:19] Mike: The biggest problem I have is just all the paperwork, the actual pieces of paper that I’m still getting in trying to figure out how to get them over to my bookkeeper. Well, I could have it to come in through e-mail but at the same time, it’s like how do I have my bookkeeper go in and actually pay my American Express bill and things like that. I still haven’t quite figured out exactly how I’m going to deal with all that stuff.
[02:36] I mean I could have it, you know, sent to like mailbox forwarding and have it sent over as a PDF and then they pay it somehow but at the same time, then they’re going to have to deal with going in to QuickBooks or something like that to print out the checks and everything else and then actually mail them out as opposed to do everything electronically and online.
[02:53] Rob: Yeah. So, at my credit card, I pay it obviously which is like a direct deposit or an ACH thing and that’s one click for me so, I’m going to – I’m not having my bookkeeper do that. Everything else is paid through an automated fashion, either online or through the credit card. Hey, so you’re in Long Island.
[03:10] Mike: Oh, yes, I went to a wedding this past Saturday and it was absolutely insane. The wedding itself, you know, it’s very nice short ceremony but once the wedding was over, we went out and you know, they have like a pre-dinner reception. Well, we went to this reception and there were 11 different food stations.
[3:27] Rob: Wow.
[3:27] Mike: So, three of these stations were nothing but alcohol. There was like a tequila sunrise stations. There was a vodka station and a tequila station. Oh, that doesn’t include after we got in to the actual reception area where, you know, there was a sit-down dinner where they have a shot bar and it was literally called shot bar.
[03:43] Rob: Wow, that’s crazy. Who…who are these people? I need friends like this.
[03:47] Mike: I was thinking that too. I need more friends like this.
[03:50] Rob: Yeah.
[03:50] Music
[03:53] Rob: There’s two patterns that I’m seeing emerge that are kind of starting to irritate me. I’m irritated by two things in this kind of startup space, the startup training space. First thing is since everybody is interviewing people and putting it out as like some type of book or e-book or video training course or something, it’s – you know, this was something new 5 or 6 years ago and now, I’m getting contacted once or twice a week to be somehow written up in someway. It used to be flattering but now it’s just like there are too many – it’s not, oh, I’m popular, it’s there are so many more of this been created. And so, that’s a little bit – it’s kind of like, huh, when does this stop? And then there’s kind of a glut I think or going to be a glut of that.
[04:30] The second thing that it’s irritating is people are doing something once and then writing a book or creating a course on it. If you’re really good at like synthesizing, doing something once – synthesizing what made it work and what made it fail, okay but typically, you have to do it a few times. You have to have some failures. You have to kind of experience what someone who didn’t do it right the first time felt and then so that you know kind of how to address the course.
[04:56] Mike: There are certain people who make excellent teachers and there are certain people who don’t and I definitely can see where you’re coming from in terms of, you know, seeing a lot more of these types of courses coming out. You know, some of them are good. Some of them aren’t and I think the issue is that the market will be sort of flooded and it’s going to be difficult for people to figure out which ones are worth going after or which ones are worth purchasing. And what’s going to happen is the people who have the bad ones are going to end up selling some and they’re going to be encouraged to make more and you’re not really going to get the leaders who are really rising at the top.
[05:31] And it’s not to say that the people who aren’t really good at building those things or doing those things – so for example, take Patrick McKenzie. He has an e-mail course. It’s fantastic. I can see somebody else coming out with one that is not as good but because somebody might be outside of Patrick McKenzie’s circles would buy that other one and may but two or three other ones and realize, “Oh, well, these all suck.” And then either give up on that whole, the genre of info products or just, you know, keep buying them and essentially leading on the people who are not building good stuff so that it encourages them to build more bad stuff.
[06:06] Rob: Yeah, I think some key points about Patrick McKenzie’s course, number one, he didn’t interview people. He did it from his own knowledge. And number two, he had done e-mail marketing so many times. He didn’t try to do it once and then teaches. So, he is the exact opposite of kind of the two things I just said which I think puts him in this camp of – my hope I guess is that the market decides, right, that an expert like him, an expert in this field will have success and will sell really well and that someone who’d creates a lesser course or just more of a copycat course that’s just kind of grouping some expertise, I just feel like the interview stuff, it groups expertise and tries to draw patterns across them and – well, that can be useful. I don’t feel like it’s nearly —
[06:48] Mike: Not universal.
[06:48] Rob: …as good as – yeah.
[06:50] Mike: It’s almost the difference between doing the research yourself versus trying to extrapolate an end result from what other people have encountered because essentially you end up with this natural bias or self-selection bias. In some ways, I almost see there’s like you’re going out and doing a master’s degree to build this book versus somebody who’s just kind of picking and choosing from what other people have encountered or have done and not necessarily really doing the research themselves and going through those, you know, months or years of failures and successes to really figure out what works and what doesn’t based on their own testing.
[07:24] Rob: Right and maybe it’s that the people, you know, some of the people who are doing their own testing are just they’re too busy, right, so they aren’t putting out these products. And so, there’s someone on the outside who’s come — more of being a journalist and just asking questions and then compiling it. I’ve seen the volume of e-mails go up and actually have this—there are conversations with a couple other founders and we’re just trying to decide like why they’re suddenly spiked up when they’re, you know, there were none of these things a year ago and then all of a sudden there’s this big thing to interview people and compile it together as an info product or a book of some kind. And I guess a few people who had early success with it now everybody is jumping on. The market will decide.
[07:58] Mike: Hopefully, hopefully.
[07:58] Rob: Yeah.
[07:59] Music
[08:02] Mike: Today, we’re going to be answering a bunch of listener questions. So, the first question we have is from Michael Schlacter [Phonetic] and he says, “Hey, Rob and Mike, I have a bit of an odd question to ask you guys. Do you think it’s possible to learn programming and start attempting startups within 5 years for someone with no prior programming experience? This is coming from a 19-year old working at Target as a fulltime cashier. I’m locked in a dead end job at minimum wage. College is not an option as I was expelled from my previous college and as a result pretty much disowned. I can’t afford to transfer out of community college to learn Computer Science. Do you guys think it’s possible to learn enough programming in a few years to start making money off of it and if it is, any recommended methods of learning? Sorry for asking this ridiculous question, I understand if you don’t have an answer.”
[08:39] Rob: So, first of all, that’s a bummer and I’m glad Michael gave us a lot of detail because someone in his position the answer is probably going to be different than if he was a 45-year old person out of a desk job.
[08:48] First of all, don’t think – I mean we talked a little bit in the past about how the value of college in getting like a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science is just not anywhere near worth the time and the effort versus just going out and either teaching yourself from books going to like a focused training course or a technical school, something that really focuses in getting you actionable skills.
[09:10] But I was in Michael’s shoes. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering but I didn’t have any marketable skills really. I have some but I didn’t really know the languages that people are using in web development. And I was working construction during the day. I was a Project Manager and then at night I was going to the library and getting books on Perl and HTML. This is 1998. So, technology is a little bit different.
[09:34] These days it would be Ruby, PHP, I mean I would do pick one of those because all the tools are free and as long as you have a computer at home, you can download all the development tools and I would start teaching myself one of those languages. But I would get on Craigslist, oDesk, Elance and I would try to take on some low end jobs meaning jobs that are small and jobs that don’t pay heck of a lot and that maybe, you know, 5 hours or maybe they’re only paying 5 or 10 bucks. But if you are working at Target making minimum wage then this is, you know, a decent amount of money at least it’s worth your time to learn on them.
[10:07] And then slowly build up, slowly build up that reputation, build up your experience, build up your portfolio. And I absolutely think that just trying to go to startups within 5 years is possible but I think taking in smaller first steps first. I think you learn to do what, you know, what I just said and then you slowly ramp that up and you raise your rate. So, you’re making 20, 40, 50, 60 bucks an hour and it’s actually that’s when you can obviously get out of the job, you know, of making minimum wage and you can build up just yourself build up a brand and be a freelancer.
[10:38] And that’s probably the first goal I would set is to try to meet your current income maybe within a year, maybe within 12 months of today working nights and weekends teaching yourself to code and then trying to build a client base. Say 12 months from I want to have met that income and once you get there and you can – you’re able to quit that Target job, then you’re going to start learning much, much faster and I think from there, it will accelerate.
[11:01] Mike: Yeah, I don’t – I don’t really have anything to add. I mean Rob hit the nail on the head. If you’re making minimum wage now, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t very quickly get to the point in programming Ruby or PHP or something like that where you would be able to supplant that income on oDesk. Now, granted I don’t think that that’s a long-term strategy, you know, outsourcing yourself through oDesk but at the same time if you are based here in the US, you should definitely be able to supplant that minimum wage salary reasonably quickly and reasonably quickly to me would definitely be within a year. It maybe as little as 6 months or 3 months —
[11:35] Rob: I agree.
[11:36] Mike: …it really depends on exactly what it is that you’re trying to do.
[11:38] Rob: No, I agree and that’s a good point you raised is that the oDesk strategy is it’s just to get your foot in the door. That’s not a sustainable thing. You want to find clients outside of that because that’s where you’re actually going to not be just in a low dollar competition.
[11:50] Mike: So, Michael thanks for your question. Hopefully, that helps out.
[11:53] Rob: Our next question is more about – it’s a link from Brian Casel and Brian, you might know him. We mentioned SweetProcess.com a few months ago. It’s a SaaS app. He is looking at starting a startup podcast, a BootstrappedWeb.com. And so, in prep for that, he wrote a blog post and it says, “What do the best podcasts get right?” And he dropped me an e-mail with it because he wanted to hear our thoughts on this and potentially some other thoughts, you know, as he’s starting to get his podcast going, I’m sure he’d love to hear some other things we, that you and I know that maybe make this podcast worked or other podcast that we listen to.
[12:28] And so, we’ll link this up in the show notes for sure but basically he said, “What makes a podcast great?” And he goes down the list. He says its consistency. It comes out – he said, “Startup for the Rest of Us comes out every Tuesday morning, every Thursday it’s Lifestyle Business Podcast and Mixergy is pretty much everyday.” So, having a consistent release schedule is one. Having a consistent structure whether it’s content, lengths, segments, topics, advertisement, guest or no guest is another one that he likes.
[12:52] Pre-recording preparation is the third. So putting some time or thought and tweet in advance so that it’s not purely loosen it’s spontaneous. It actually makes better use of the listener’s time. And then the last point he said is vulnerability. It’s actually getting a little bit personal. So, not just always talking about what other people are doing or just talking about five ways to do this but actually starting to get in to your own experience.
[13:15] I definitely agree with his four points here. The consistency is a big deal. For me, I love having a podcast. I know the Lifestyle Business is every Thursday and I look forward to listening to it. I think structure of episode itself is something that a lot of people don’t realize when they’re starting a podcast and the ones that don’t have that pre-recording prep and that wander, they’ve just make it harder like I have to really like the host and like what they’re doing on a personal level in order for me to engage. Otherwise, I’ll last one or two episodes and I’m gone.
[13:43] I also think that having some type of pretty tight time constraint typically in my head it’s between 20 and 40 minutes, that’s where a podcast should be. When it gets too short, there’s not enough value and once they started getting to an hour, I really need to be delivered a lot of value in order to listen to something for an hour even when it’s on time and a half or double speed.
[14:02] I also think one other thing he mentions vulnerability here. I know that our podcast actually took a bit of a jump up once you and I started talking more about the projects that we were working on because at first we were just educating people on five ways to do this and seven ways to do that and then we really started talking about some project we were working on and I think that drew people in and made us more human. It added the vulnerable element.
[14:24] So, I think that having a mix of both education and vulnerability is good. I think sticking to just one I don’t know. It kind of makes it more of one sided thing and makes it less interesting. And I think the one thing that’s left off of this list in my head is almost no podcast with just one host works unless it’s an interview show. I listen to some podcast where it’s just one person talking and it gets old really fast not having the back and forth banter. I think if you’re trying to start one and you’re just starting as one person, you kind of have to do interviews even though I think interview podcast have kind of been done.
[14:54] Mike: I think structure is a little bit less important. I think that in terms of the content — I think in terms of the length itself that kind of structure to it, I think that that should probably be consistent because I totally agree with you that if it’s too short, you don’t get enough out of it. If it’s too long, it tends to ramble. The structure itself can be different from one episode to the next. So, for example, our podcast sometimes we’ll talk about specific topics, other times we’ll do listener questions. We’ve had a couple of guest on. I think that that doesn’t necessarily matter as much as the length. I feel like the length is probably a lot more important than the actual structure of the podcast.
[15:29] The other thing I think of is, you know, in terms of vulnerability I think one of the things that we do is not only do we talk about some of the things that we’re working on but we also talk a lot about other people. We talk a lot about the community. We talk – and we try to involve the community. We do a lot of listener questions and I think that really helps to engage the listeners because if you don’t engage the listeners, if you’re not talking about them, it doesn’t necessarily help them because you have your own thoughts and views on the things that you’re working on and if all you do is talk about those things, eventually it gets boring. I mean you can’t talk about yourself 99 days out of a hundred. It’s just people aren’t going to listen.
[16:05] It’s not necessarily that interesting and you can’t possibly be doing enough that, you know, it’s going to be interesting all the time whereas I find our community very interesting. It’s fascinating seeing all the different things that people are working on and how they’ve tried things and what things have worked, what things haven’t. And there’s just not enough hours and day for me to try all those different things which really for me, listening to our podcast is nice just because it’s interesting to hear what other people are working on. We don’t talk about ourselves constantly and I think that that translates to having a good podcast as well because a lot of the podcasts you listen to that are very successful don’t talk about themselves all the time, they talk about other people.
[16:39] Rob: So, our next topic is an e-mail I received from Barry Welch [Phonetic] and he’s a long-time listener and he e-mailed a link to a Hacker News’ post. It’s about a guy having a rough time and the title of the post, it’s an Ask HN and the title is “And Now What?” And basically the poster does an anonymous post and he says, “I’m desperate. I’m almost 38. I start a programming at age 10. I spent 7 years in a video game industry.” And he worked up from a programmer to a CTO.
[17:06] And he says, “I tried during 5 years to create a startup. I still have a halftime job that pays the bills and it gives me enough time to create stuff and during these five years I’ve created all types of stuff, a game, tools, B2B projects. I’ve created some projects alone. Each time I had find that no traction. I got negative feedback. It’s demotivating and I stopped. So, I don’t know what to do. It’s horrible because I have all this time and skill but nothing to do. I have no motivation. All the failures kill me, what I waste.”
[17:32] I mean he kind of goes on for a while. He says, “If you have any advice, that would help.” There are some decent responses in the Hacker News comments but I know both you and I had some thoughts on it. So, let’s talk a little bit about it.
[17:43] Mike: So, I think the first thing that strikes me is that the post itself if you read through it and we’ll link back to it in the show notes. But in reading through it, I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is probably uncommon from, you know, the perspective of somebody who’s tried numerous times and never really succeeded. It almost [0:18:00] strikes me as just like a classic case of depression. I mean, you know, the person is depressed severely about having trying for five years to build a startup and almost nothing has worked.
[18:10] And I see a lot of emphasis here on, “I’ve done this. I’ve done that.” I don’t have any ideas and it’s very focused on I and I don’t see any focus on anyone else. So, to me it almost seems like the person is really focused on himself as opposed to focus on other people. But when you’re trying to build a product focusing on yourself is bad because you’re not solving anyone else’s problem and you can build a product for yourself. But what are you going to do? Are you going to pay yourself for it too? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not going to work that way.
[18:38] So, you need to build something that other people are going to use and if you’re not talking to other people or about other people, how are you going to get there? So, in this case if I were offered by so be like start focusing on what somebody else needs, you know, don’t focus on yourself. Don’t focus on where you are, where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing and try to find people who are also in a position where they have that same need so that you can build a product that meets those needs.
[19:04] Rob: A lot of people have been in this boat. I was in this boat. I may never felt this bad at the time but a lot of people try for five years to create something and it doesn’t pan out the startup stuff especially if you’re trying to go for more of the big bang. I mean he built like game at one point. Like if you’re trying to go down that road or trying to raise funding, the odds are that you’re not going to succeed. So, this should not be a surprise. So, I think the first thing is to adjust expectations. Don’t be so disappointed with the failure and see it as one more step on the road to actually getting this done.
[19:34] The next thing I would do is probably take a couple of months off from any side work or any thinking about the startup idea. Maybe take I’d say somewhere between two and four months off and you might also want to try to get away for a period of time and go to, you know, more of a remote place and spend some time just thinking and not stressing about this.
[19:54] And if you find that you can’t do that, that you cannot stress about it, then you have something going on like that’s where it’s – you have like a clinical something that’s bothering you whether it’s depression or whether it’s an anxiety disorder or something. Consider seeking professional help because if you have thoughts that are just constantly on your mind and you – that you can’t get off of under them no matter, there are folks out there who can help you with the stuff.
[20:16] The last thing I think is after taking that break of several months and just getting away from it, my guess is that you’re going to have a bunch of ideas to start cropping up again. Keep a list of them and figure out if in fact you do actually want to do this. So, that would be the next question. If you have this halftime job that pays your bills, so why do you want to do a startup? Why not just work halftime for the rest of your life and enjoy what you’re doing? Like what is it that you really want out of a startup? I would take a step back and ask yourself that.
[20:43] And in the mean time, take that halftime that you have for a week and spend it doing something fun. But find something else that’s interesting that you can spend your time doing so that you’re not so caught up in this startup space. I think you need a little bit of distance and then probably need to come back to it full force at a time in the future once you got time to kind of reconcile up.
[21:03] Mike: Our next question comes from Jeremy and he says, “Hey, guys, I e-mailed you a question back in January about doing door-to-door marketing for local organic produce delivery campaign that you answered in episode 117. The company is now expanding to the majority of Orlando along with a complete redesign of the website that’ll be launch in a couple of weeks. The question we have for you guys is how to best spend our budget? We have $10,000 that is dedicated to marketing for the next three months and our goal is to hit 100 users. It should be a realistic goal but without conversion numbers from our new website, there’ll be a bit of trial and error at first.”
[21:31] “We’ve approached the local ad agency and they tell us they think they can get us there. Do you think it’s worth money spending to hire a professional agency to do all the heavy lifting or should we just take the $10,000 and put it towards search engine marketing and hire a blogger and social media person? Remember that this is a local business so search engine marketing for anyone outside of Orlando is useless. Should we invest a lot in local advertising, flyers, sponsored events, et cetera? Thanks. My wife and I are both still enjoying your show. It’s Jeremy.”
[21:56] Rob: Since marketing is such a key part of your business long-term and since these are the first days and you don’t really know how you’re going to acquire customers, I would lean against hiring agency to do it unless they show you exactly what they’re going to do and it’s believable.
[22:12] I cringe to think of handling $10,000 to an agency and just expecting them to do the heavy lifting and having it work out because if it doesn’t, you really haven’t learned anything. At least if you spend the 10 grand, you’re going to learn what works and what doesn’t, you’re going to take a lot away from that and my guess is you’ll get close to that 100 if you don’t, you know, make it all the way.
[22:33] So, I would lean towards doing it myself but that’s only because marketing is such a critical piece of your business. If you guys want to focus on all other aspects of your business, I guess you could consider outsourcing the marketing but think about it this way, if you spend this 10 grand, you’ll get these hundred users, what then? How do you acquire your next hundred because you probably don’t have another 10 grand to spend? But if you spend this 10 grand and you learn from it and you get the hundred users, then you can probably parlay that knowledge in to figuring out how to reduce the cost of the marketing or how to do some more guerrilla tactics that may get you the same results. So, that’s what I consider.
[23:09] I would definitely consider search engine marketing, pay per click on Facebook because it’s awesome because you can do, you know, GO stuff. So, you can go to local and Craigslist, of course because it’s free. I would not hire a blogger at this point. I don’t know what the use of that would be. I think long-term you do want to have a Facebook page, getting some likes. You want a Twitter account, of course but I don’t — I wouldn’t focus on that for my first hundred people. I would do some stuff that doesn’t scale before I did that.
[23:36] Mike: I would definitely not go the route of hiring an ad agency because even if they do a bunch of stuff and it turns out that it’s wrong, obviously, you wouldn’t have learned anything like you said but even if they do something that is right, how do you know that it’s repeatable? I mean if you don’t have all the insight in to exactly what’s going on – I mean there’s subtle nuances just in talking to somebody and if you’re not the one who’s doing that, then it’s going to be harder for them to convey that back to you.
[24:01] So, the other thing that weighs in on my mind is the fact that they’re going to be paying somebody on an hourly basis to go out and do bunch of stuff for you and they’re going to be burning money whether it works or not. Whereas if you do it yourself, you don’t necessarily have to pay yourself while you’re out there burning this money. I mean you can print flyers. I mean printing flyers is nothing. It doesn’t cost hardly anything but if they hire somebody to go do that, it’s going to cost you the $50 to print these thousands of flyers and then it’s going to cost you $5000 just to go out and distribute them.
[24:30] So, it’s a difference in how far your marketing dollars are going go to. So, I would definitely lean towards doing everything yourself because as Rob said, I mean marketing is going to be a key piece of your business moving forward and you have to be able to understand all the ins and outs of it.
[24:45] Rob: Yeah, there also is some pretty good local marketing using like Google Local and Google Maps so when people search for stuff although I don’t know if people are going to be searching for this. I think it’s more of an outbound thing. I think your thought of doing flyers because, you know, you had print out some flyers before and gone door-to-door and obviously, that’s not long-term scalable but at this point if you have 10 grand to spend, I would certainly give that a shot for a few days and see how well that works. And if no one signs up, then you wasted your time but like Mike said you really haven’t wasted any money.
[25:13] But if that starts working and you know you convert 1 out of every 50 houses, then now you have numbers to start working with and you can then hire someone to do it and know what you can pay them per hour and still make money or you can just make it, you know, I think for two days a week, you go out and do that. Those are certainly my initial thoughts. I imagine there’s a lot more in the local marketing space that neither Mike nor I have ever tackled.
[25:36] Mike: So, thanks for the question, Jeremy. Our next one comes from Pierre and he says, “Hi, I’ve been reading lately about the B2B versus B2C startups specifically most startup founder seemed to favor B2B businesses. Two items from Jason Cohen emphasized this point recently. First, was a recap of his MicroConf presentation where he says B2C is not worth it. Customers complain about cost all the time. Every speaker at MicroConf is in B2B that should tell you something.
[25:58] And he also wrote a blog post called “Bootstrapped CPC Rule of Thumb” which paints a very bleak picture for B2C paid ad revenue. Since B2C tends to bring in less money for customer, there’s less money to put in to acquiring customers. However I went back and listen to episode 10 of your podcast which was about B2C versus B2B startups. You both seemed considerably more optimistic about B2C startups than the current mood in the startup community. This episode was recorded almost three years ago. Have your views of B2C startups changed or are people just underestimating B2C startup potential? Thanks. I love the show, Pierre.”
[26:28] Rob: Two things, I think a lot has changed in the startup space or knowledge of how to launch startup has changed in that three years. In addition, I’ve learned a bunch personally in that three years. And yeah, I won’t do another B2C startup personally. I’m not saying no one should do them but the support cost or paying customers complain about price like Jason said, it’s just a hassle. It’s a hassle to keep people around and that’s not to say the B2C doesn’t work because obviously, Facebook and Twitter and Google, you know, these are B2C companies but you have to go a whole different route if you’re going to do that. I think bootstrapping of B2C company to profitability and to that, let’s say your number is 10 grand a month that you need to quit your job, it’s a lot harder to do with a B2C.
[27:11] Now, mobile is an exception here and mobile was not nearly as prominent as it, you know, as it is today three years ago when we talked about this. So, that would be the exception that if you can get in front of a lot of consumers all at once and that’s through something like a mobile app store, iOS app store, it’s also through like WordPress.org.
[27:30] If you can get a big channel of people and have a low one-time price point and not support, then yeah, you can certainly do this but to build a larger business and business that consistently grows and generates several hundred thousand in to the millions of dollars a year, you’re not going to do that as a single founder. I can count on one hand the number of single founders that I have ever heard of that have done B2C startups and been able to do this but there are dozens, literally dozens and dozens, if not, hundreds that I could think of that are, you know, one and two-person teams who have done this in the B2C market. It’s just — it’s a whole different game.
[28:04] Mike: The one comment that kind of sticks out in my mind from about B2C versus B2B businesses is from a Business of Software Conference I went to where somebody was trying to launch a business and one of the things that they found out afterwards is they were going after the B2C business and what they realized afterwards was something like 92 or 95% of all money that spent on software is spent in the B2B space which means that there’s very few people who are consumers who were spending money on software.
[28:36] So, if you’re trying to monetize those people, there’s much lower dollars that are being dedicated to that. So, why would you want to go after that? You can look at and say, “Well, there’s going to be less competition,” but I don’t necessarily think that’s true because I think that there’s a lot of people who are still going after that B2C market and because there’s less money, there’s actually more competition.
[28:54] I mean you can count on one hand the number of people who have gone after that market and been successful and it’s not to say that you can’t do it. Mobile is an exception. You can definitely do those types of things there but it’s difficult. It’s a lot easier to find a B2B business that is going to work and is going to scale because all you need to do is you need to find a problem that people are willing to pay for.
[28:54] There’s a very limited number of problems that people in the consumer space are willing to pay for. And again, it’s not to say that they won’t pay for things, it’s just that it’s very hard to find some very specific problems. If you want to build a game or something like that, that’s definitely a B2C business but at the same time, you’re competing with all of these other things for sources of entertainment.
[29:34] So, you know, what other types of things can you charge them for then the list of things that you can charge them for is actually very, very small. So, there’s a lot of competition there. It tends to be high dollar items, you know, like real estate software searching for new apartments and things like that and maybe you’re monetizing them directly by charging them or maybe you’re trying to do ad-based things.
[29:54] But even building a business off of advertisements I don’t necessarily think that that’s a great way to go either because it’s very difficult. I mean you have to be able to know what your numbers are. You have to be able to tap in to the different ad sources of revenue and you have to deal with privacy concerns and customers are very antsy about handling over personal information.
[30:12] So, those are all the things to consider whereas in the B2B space, 95% of those problems just go right away. You don’t have to worry about them and the dollar amounts are much higher. So, your profit margins are going to be higher.
[30:23] Rob: Right, yeah. It’s not that there aren’t problems in the B2B space, it’s just that you’re able to charge five to ten times more and so, it’s worth the dealing with the problems that are in the B2B space. In terms of building a business around the ad revenue, you just have to get so much volume. It’s not that it’s not possible, it’s that it’s really, really hard and by the time you get there, you’re talking millions of page views a month to really build a nice sustainable business and it’s a long shot. That’s a hit-based business. It’s not the repeatable business types that we’re talking about here.
[30:52] Mike: So, we have time for one more question. This one is from Todd and he says, “Hey, Rob and Mike. I love the show. I have a few questions. How can you test for various media formats on different devices such the Galaxy, iPhone, iPad, et cetera? I know Adobe Labs and BrowserStack but that doesn’t show media renders. Second question I have is when you’re making app for products, did you ever plan out the lifetime viability of the product such as 1 year, 2 years, et cetera? Anyway, keep up the good work.”
[31:16] So, Todd, I have a very quick answer for you and I’ll link to it in the show notes, there’s an article on SmashingMagazine.com that lists a ton of cross browser testing tools. So, there’s free tools out there and they do list the Adobe Browser Lab on there. They do not have BrowserStack but they do have I don’t know probably 12 to 15 different tools on here that do what seems like what you’re looking for which is being able to display what the media is going to look like and all these different formats and different browsers. There’s various pricing on there but we’ll link to that in the show notes and hopefully, that will be what you need.
[31:50] Rob: In terms of his second question, it was, “When you’re making app, do you ever plan up a lifetime viability of the products which is a year or two, et cetera?” I don’t know that I build products that I don’t feel are likely going to be evergreen. Obviously, if you build against an API or you build, you know, interfacing with some large powerhouse like Google, then you know the lifetime is not infinite because you know that API may change or you know, that Google could change the way that they pass search engine data, you know, as I’ve seen with HitTail already because HitTail relies on some of the query string data that Google sends.
[32:21] But I never think, oh, it’s going to get shut down in a year or two because frankly I just wouldn’t I mean it’s so much time and effort to get something going that if I know it has a pretty short lifespan, it’s not something I would be interested in doing. I think if you’re doing a funded startup or a super high fast growth hit-based startup, then yeah, what’s the cycle for that? It’s like a 1 to 2-year growth and then you sell.
[32:41] So, maybe it doesn’t need to be as much of a sustainable business. Or if you have something let’s say you’re just writing an e-book or 50-page e-book, yeah, I guess that that’s sold for 12 months and then went out of style. It was a hint guide for a video game or something. Sure, if it only takes you, you know, 12 to 15 hours to put together, that’s one thing. But to truly build a like an actual business, you know, build the SaaS app or you put in hundreds and hundreds of hours or the tens of thousands of dollars and you put in 12 to 24 months of your life to do it, it’s just not something that that I would only do for an opportunity window that’s only a year or two long.
[33:15] Mike: Well, I have my Altiris Training website which sort of falls in that boat. I mean if they come out with Altiris Client Management Suite 8 and they completely redesign the interface, then most of the stuff that I have developed tends to go out of the window. I mean basically I’d have to go in and I have to re-record, you know, pretty much every video in there because, you know, all the screens are going to be different.
[33:36] And then they may make some minor adjustments and changes and stuff between screens even between version 71 and 72, for example, but I don’t necessarily know as I would go back and re-record every single video based on that. And you know, the chances that some of those changing, it’s not really that big a deal but if they do a complete overhaul, I’d have to seriously consider whether or not I’d go back and even bother with all that.
[33:58] Rob: Right. I think that’s different though because it wouldn’t wipe out your business. You would – all the traffic and the marketing copy and all that stuff that you built would still be valid. And if it was bringing in enough money, you could just either hire someone or record it yourself and the business is still totally solvent. It doesn’t wipe you out.
[34:16] Mike: Right. I mean the other issue is that even – the people are still going to own version 7 for a long time. So, they – then I would just have to build, you know, videos for version 8 and then I could host them side by side and say, “Well, if you have version 7, go here. If you have version 8, go here.” Yeah, I don’t know — I don’t own any other businesses that are, you know, have a low lifetime viability. I don’t think that I would go down the road of building something where I thought the whole business was going to die out in a year or two unless, you know, it was some massive return for not a heck of a lot of investment.
[34:47] Rob: Yeah and I think we almost need a specific example to be able to really evaluate this but —
[34:51] Mike: Yeah.
[34:52] Rob: …you know, it’s like a friend of mine has a Pinterest plugin, right? It’s a WordPress plugin. He’s an Academy member. We talked about it and I said, “You know, Pinterest may take a nosedive. It could pull Myspace or Friendster here.” But he knew that the upfront investment was not – it wasn’t hundreds of hours to build this plugin. And he’s made enough money that already that it was well worth. You know, he’s like six or seven months in to the paid plugin and it’s like boom! If it was – if his plugin was wiped off the face of the earth, it was such a learning experience and he made a decent chunk of money that it was worth it.
[35:23] But at the same time he’s not planning. He didn’t look and say, “Wow, this thing is obsolete in a year and I’m going to go build it,” because I probably would have said, “You know what? Find something else that’s not obsolete in a year and spend your time doing that.”
[35:34] Mike: I think even with that, Pinterest plugin though the future is unclear for it. I mean so, you’re essentially trying to predict something that you have no way of knowing. I mean Pinterest could nosedive tomorrow and then their whole business could tank but we’re kind of guessing at that point, you know. We have no idea whether or not that’s going to happen. I think it’s a little different if you know for a fact that there is a – end of life for a product that you’re trying to build an add-on for. That product is going to go away.
[35:59] You’re going to build this add-on but on – let’s say, it’s an add-on or Windows XP. Well, Windows XP is end of life next, what was it, next spring some time? You know, when I go build something, it was very much Windows XP specific, probably not at this point. I probably wouldn’t have done it five years ago either because, you know, all these new versions of Windows have come out. I’d built some thing for those but not necessarily for Windows XP. In the context of the question, I wouldn’t go after something that has an obvious end of life. I would definitely lean towards stuff that is more evergreen.
[36:29] Rob: That wraps up our questions for today. If you have a question for us and you’d like to hear us discuss it on air, you can 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. Subscribe to us 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.