Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 165.
[00:04] Music
[00:16] 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.
[00:20] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:23] 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?
[00:22] Rob: I’m pleased to announce that Drip is now out ranking motelyfool.com for the term Drip and I didn’t think I was ever gonna get above that. Drip was on the second page for that phrase for a while and then it climbed up to number 10 and now it looks like as of today in an incognito browser from my current location, ranking for Drip isn’t gonna get me a lot of customers. It’s just gonna make it so that when people hear the product name on the podcast and don’t hear that the domain name is different because it’s getdrip.com, it will help them find it. It would be great to rank number one for that, not for the true organic traffic that it will get but just for the ease of finding me in Google.
[01:04] Mike: I’m looking at it now and you’re actually listed number 6 right below them. Ilovedrip.com is the first one.
[01:11] Rob: I know. I need to look at that site and figure out what they’re talking about.
[01:14] Mike: I think its things to do in Orlando. It says Drip is Orlando’s best kept secret. You now the Blue Man Group? I think it’s something kind of similar to that.
[01:22] Rob: Yeah. So that will be a tough one to outrank. They have quite a bit of authority and history in Google at this point.
[01:28] Mike: Yeah, most likely.
[01:30] Rob: How about you? What you been up to?
[01:31] Mike: Well I started working on some of the MicroConf sponsorships so I’m still trying to get the rate card all straightened out but that’s coming along pretty well and once that’s all done, then I just go out and start contacting the sponsors from last year and see if I can drum up any new sponsors for the conference.
[01:46] Rob: Yeah and that’s microconf.com if you are interested in coming, it’s the conference for self funded startup founders and it is gonna be probably in mid April is what we’re looking at the Tropicana. Our email list is about twice what it was last year so it’s probably gonna sell out fairly quickly again and we should be selling tickets in I’d say by mid January at the latest. Other news for me, I started paid acquisition last week which is a dubious proposition. I was doing it more to test out analytics and to kind of test some landing pages rather than actually get trials. The reason I couch it like that is last week was the week before Christmas and so I knew that getting people to click through and sign up for a 21 day trial when they’re about to probably go on vacation is not likely to happen.
[02:34] As such, as I started running the ads right away, I noticed that my Google goals were not firing when people converted to trial so that is a non starter when you’re running paid accusation so we had to troubleshoot that and figure out how to goals the to fire. It isn’t as simple as it used to be with Google. They made Google analytics so unbelievably complicated compared to what it was even 12 or 18 months ago that getting goals to work is by far more complicated than it was a while ago. So we do have it working as of today.
[03:04] Mike: That’s interesting. I kind of put all of my – not all but quite a few of my Audit Shark marketing activities, kind of on hold for the time being just because its Christmas and I really don’t expect a lot of people to come in and be using it or to sign up for a new trial or anything like that.
[03:18] Rob: That’s why SaaS is so nice right? Because people are still paying a subscription fee for December even though they’re not really gonna but anything new whereas when you have a onetime sale app like I have DotNetInvoice I mean the sales typically just plummet unless we do like a black Friday special or some type of Christmas special. DotNetInvoice takes a big hit in December because nobody really wants to buy go spend a bunch of money in the last two weeks of the year. They’re just thinking about other things.
[03:45] Mike: The counter point to that is the companies that have a giant budget that they lose at the end of the year if they don’t use it so there are some people who will spend the money but…
[03:53] Rob: That’s true. And there are certain pieces of software where it makes sense to start them on the first of the year like a tax software, an accounting software to make a clean break between one year and the next. I imagine that those sales could go up and if you had an app like that, it would make sense to do a special on December kind of saying hey, get setup by January 1, get your books in order, that type of thing.
[04:13] Mike: I’m working out some of the reporting bugs in Audit Shark and on another completely boring note, I’ve been analyzing my Audit Shark marketing efforts to figure out what I should be doing as soon as January starts rolling around and kind of what my priorities are gonna be.
[04:25] Rob: You’re analyzing existing efforts that you’ve made or you’re compiling a list of approaches and tactics that you’re gonna use in January?
[04:33] Mike: Yeah, that’s basically kind of figuring out what it is that I want to do and what I’m gonna do first. That’s more it than anything else. I have a drive to traffic but then I also have to make sure that’s converting and right now, just up until lately I haven’t had the page open for people to come in and sign up so that has been – I couldn’t even measure it before and now I can start to measure it but I still need to get people to decide and because its December, they’re just not gonna sign up or at least I don’t expect anybody to.
[04:58] Music
[05:02] Today we’re gonna recap our five biggest mistakes from this past year. You can look at some of these things and you can say that oh well, if you did something, so correct a mistake, then couldn’t you also see that is your biggest win? And I think there’s certainly cases where that’s true but there’s other cases where you may have strategically chosen to do something in a certain way knowing that it was a mistake but not necessarily realizing how big of a mistake it was.
[05:26] Rob: And you say that because you noticed that several or both of our mistakes are – start with the word not. In other words, it was not doing something or not doing it soon enough is the mistake we’re mentioning. There was a behavior that we realized that has been successful for us but the regret or the mistake is that we didn’t do it sooner in the year. And I think that the point of this episode is not for you and I to sit here and talk through our mistakes but the idea is to get you, the listener, to reflect on what perhaps are your five biggest mistakes from the past year and even looking out perhaps what are your five biggest wins from the past year?
[06:01] And then take the time to maybe analyze why they happen, to analyze how you can avoid making similar mistakes or the same mistake in the coming year and I think another piece to this is kind of asking yourself what gave me to life this year and what sucked a lot of life out of me. Both looking at this as a way to grow your business, as a way to not make the same mistakes because that keeps you going in circles, also as a way to structure your work and personal life so that they are sustainable that they give you life over the course of the next year.
[06:29] Mike: So to kick things off, one of my biggest mistakes was not paying enough attention to my health. Back in August I discovered this health issue that was impacting a lot of the things that I was doing and just my ability to get different things done. Discovering that and dealing with the situation has made all the difference in the world. I was actually able to get to the point where Audit Shark has been launched. There’s still a lot to do of course but I feel like I’m actually making progress at this point as opposed to before where I felt like I was doing a lot but I was spinning my wheels more often than not and not making forward progress. It’s hard sometimes to know the difference between when you’re doing stuff that is moving you forward versus when you’re doing stuff just to kind of maintain your current position that doesn’t actually get you moving forward.
[07:11] Rob: yeah. I’m guilty of this as well. It’s easy to do and it’s easy to just keep going on in auto pilot and ignoring things like really sore shoulders or the inability, people got carpal tunnel, you just charge through and you start taking Advil and you don’t address the real issue and get the fix done, and the longer you get it go on, not only does it get worse but you don’t even realize how much it’s actually impacting your productivity because you forget what it’s like to feel at 100%. Obviously really glad that you caught yours and something that I’m looking to not do in the coming year.
[07:46] Mike: Some of the different actions and I’ve taken since then and it’s just once you have taken those, you look up and it’s just wow, that made such a huge difference. Why didn’t I do this sooner which goes back to what you said? There’s lots of these things you discover them and you just think to yourself why didn’t I do this sooner and the fact is you just didn’t know.
[08:03] Rob: So my first mistake is letting email negatively impact my productivity. Now I have been able to maintain inbox zero now for several months and that has been helpful but it still has not freed me up in the way that I envisioned in my mind that I can someday be freed up from email. I get an enormous volume of email every month and anytime I take time off, I come back and basically lose a solid eight hour day of just going through email.
[08:33] I’ve tried a bunch of different approaches. I don’t think there’s anything feasible. There’s no solution. There’s no answer I have seen to date. A lot of these are coming from my apps and so my VA is already going through support issues and then they wind up in my email to show me that a support issue has been assigned to me so it’s not as if putting a VA looking at my email can handle that because there’s are things I have to do. It’s a mistake I don’t have an answer on how to fix it yet but my hope is that in 2014 this is something that I do figure out a way to reduce the amount of time that I’m sitting there, working with email.
[09:05] Mike: I do have a couple of anecdotal things. One is you could create an internal email address like secretrob@thenumagroup.com and those are things where the specific internal stuff needs to go to you and then you have somebody look through your regular email. And the other one Ramit Sethi was telling me at behavior con that he can usually tell at this point because he’s gotten so many emails that he can tell within the first couple of sentences whether or not something’s gonna be even worth reading.
[09:31] Rob: I like the secret Rob idea. I would agree with Ramit and I think I now have that ability because I’ve read so many emails. So it’s not the reading that takes the time. Its once I get into it, it’s the decision of do I act on this or not and then if I do act on it, then the real time starts. A lot of it is maybe an academy member, MicroConf attendee, a listener asking for opinion and feedback about their idea, asking about any number of things and since I like helping people and I’ve always felt like it’s a responsibility and something that I want to do to give back to the community, that stuff is quite time consuming. I record screen cast for people. I do all kinds of stuff. I don’t want to leave that behind but I’ve already reduced kind of the number and the time I spent on those responses, I don’t know how far I want to peel that back.
[10:18] Mike: Heard another strategy for allocating specific time blocks. So like an hour or two hours a week or something like that and then once you hit that time, it’s like okay, that’s it. I can’t spend any more time on that stuff. But inevitably, that kind of leads to what you said is letting things just kind of drop on the floor and there’s only so much you can do.
[10:34] My second biggest mistake was not starting a mailing list for my blog sooner. This partially is a result of not really paying attention to feed burner but where I just wasn’t writing for my blog anymore. I’ve talked to enough people where they said hey I really would appreciate it if you start writing a little bit more. Give me feedback on this and a lot of things that I see are just things that would make great blog posts. I haven’t been turning them into blog posts. So I started getting back into that but I started a mailing list several weeks ago and I’ve already got a ton of people who are on my RSS feed kind of converted over onto that. So that seems to be going pretty well.
[11:11] But it just seems like that’s something that I know on the back of my mind I should’ve started that much, much sooner and I just never did. I mean I never really made it a priority. So like as you said you like writing back people and giving them your feedback and thoughts on opinions on things that they’re working on in order to help them. And I kind of feel like this is exactly the same way is helping other people and just kind of giving back.
[11:34] Rob: My second mistake is related to yours. It’s not carving out more time for my Software by Rob email newsletter, the one that I already have. I started a couple of years ago. I’ve been building lists. I have probably 7,000 people, on it and I have emails that go out but not as many as I would like just purely out of the lack of time and of too many things going on in terms of conferences and apps and the podcast and all that stuff. But I’m hoping and I’m planning to give more time to this in the coming year because it’s something that I enjoy.
[12:08] Like you, you and I first met when we were bloggers and we met because we both liked to write and we enjoyed that. We enjoyed convening your thoughts through that medium and I have not written nearly as much in the past year to two years than I did over the previous 5-7. So its something that I’ve let go because it’s so damn time consuming, just sit there and crank out a really good piece of content but I did find that when I’m not blogging and when I’m just sending emails to my list, there are some time saving ways that you can do it in terms of doing a screen cast or just having shorter articles that I never felt comfortable doing with my blog.
[12:45] I think that with not a huge time investment that I could really continue investing in this list and getting solid info out to them. So if you are interested in that and you’re not signed up, it’s called Start Small, Get Big and that’s my email newsletter. It’s at softwarebyrob.com and it’s in the right hand side column. And yours is at singlefounder.com in case you haven’t signed up for Mike’s email newsletter.
[13:07] Mike: My third biggest mistake was not extracting myself from project implementation sooner than I did. And I’ve spent a good deal of time making sure that the people who are working for me on a part time basis have the things that they need to move things forward but I feel like I have spent a lot of time over the past couple of years doing probably way too many things myself. One of the things that I’ve done recently which has really helped out a lot is hired a bookkeeper and her and I sat down for about three hours yesterday basically going over all my business finances and trying to convert everything all over on to one accounting platform so that she only has one spot to go for everything.
[13:47] And then just putting the processes and procedures in place for how to deal with different situations and invoices and receipts. But one of the other things I’m doing is I’m handing her all of my personal stuff as well. So I’m giving her access to my personal bank accounts and whenever I get things in the mail, I’m gonna put them in a box and she’s gonna get them once or twice a week and she’s gonna handle all that stuff. I basically do not want to touch any of that stuff. So there’s all this day to day stuff that I just shouldn’t be handling.
[14:15] That’s something that I’ve been very glad that I’ve dealt with but it’s something probably was a long time and coming just because I didn’t feel comfortable just taking that stuff and handing that off to somebody else. And as I said, there’s a lot of stuff with Audit Shark as well where I worked on so much of it that I’m like oh, this is just this giant unwieldy thing at this point. I don’t know if somebody else can jump in and work with it and that’s definitely not the case other people can make progress on. It’s just a matter of me becoming comfortable with allowing other people to go and do that stuff.
[14:44] Rob: Yeah. So one of your biggest mistakes for the last year turns into basically outsourcing success stories. It’s several places where you are able to extract yourself from the details. And I feel like you started making a lot of progress with Audit Shark once you got other developers involved.
[15:00] Mike: And I think part of that is just the comfortably factor I mean because it’s not like I put somebody in there and said oh I need you to build this giant complicated thing. It was these little things here and there and then as they get more comfortable with the code base, I get more comfortable handing them stuff that’s more and more complicated. So there’s a give and take there. It is a progression. I think it would be difficult for somebody to just jump in right now and just hand them a complicated function. But it’s the on boarding process for getting a new developer up and running with any new code base. I mean the code base is sufficiently large, its gonna be a little bit complicated. You need to have some sort of ramping up period and need to be able to expect that.
[15:39] Rob: My third mistake for the past year was not focusing sooner on figuring out how to fix HitTail after Google’s not provided debacle where they said that they’re not gonna give us the search terms people use to find our website anymore. And this one, it’s a mistake or regret because HitTail is one of my big apps and its definitely lost a good chunk of revenue over the past 3 or 4 months since Google announced the not provided stuff.
[16:07] Kind of the counter point to it is I was looking before Google announced this, how to get keywords out of stuff and Google wasn’t giving this data anywhere else. And just within the past maybe 30 days or so, I’ve noticed that they are giving enough information through the web master tools and I now have an alpha version that I’ve coded up that basically will work around the not provided stuff at least as best as anyone can.
[16:32] And I’m gonna be working with an alpha and beta testers here in January. And I think that I should actually be able to basically get the value back or most of the value back that was lost during this whole thing. I wasn’t able to make this happen sooner before the revenue started to slide on it. I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to build it back up but every time you lose those customers, it’s just so hard to get them back. It’s so much work to replace them.
[16:58] Mike: My fourth biggest mistake was not starting a mastermind group sooner. And this is something that you talked about in the past, having a mastermind group can really be helpful in moving you forward and it wasn’t until I got into it and started having mastermind group meetings that I realized how incredibly helpful it would be. I think that one of the comments that you’ve made in the past is that having people who have kind of heard the story and have heard some of the guts of it from way back when, that helps give them a little bit more context as today’s and somebody that you just met, you kind of give them the story and run down what it is that you’re working on and problems that you’re having whereas if they don’t have that 6 or 12 months worth of history, there may be insights that they’re just not gonna have because they don’t have that history.
[17:43] Rob: So my fourth mistake is kind of funny. It’s almost trivial compared to these other ones we’re naming but basically within the past month I made a $1700 error with Amazon EC2 instances and I went to purchase some of their reserved instances, you can get them a lot cheaper than if you’re just paying hourly and I bought one that was five instances for a month instead of one instance for five months and it just sufficed to say over the course of the next 30 to 45 days it cost me $1700.
[18:17] And what’s interesting about this is the reason that I made the mistake is because we’re just moving so fast. I couldn’t spend the time or I tried to spend the time to research it, the documentation sucks. I emailed support, they were no help. The forums don’t tell you anything so at a certain point I had to make the call am I gonna do this or am I not and it’s on my task list and I need just hide this thing and I need to pay Amazon a higher price or I need to pull the trigger and buy this reserve instance what could possibly go wrong? It’s a result of quick decision making.
[18:47] Now kind of the defense in my mind of it as it happened, I mean when I saw it happened I was like that really sucks that I’m gonna lose this money but if this the worst thing that happens to me this year, if it’s the worst mistake I make this year, I will consider myself very, very lucky. It made me realize just how much I value time more than money. This $1700 error compared to all the decisions that I’ve made quickly or the amount of money that my apps will make me in a certain amount of time, it doesn’t compare.
[19:18] So I think there’s a balance here of like not making stupid or rash decisions but also realizing that if you make 100 or 200 decisions in any given month that being able to make them quick and then live with the consequence may very well be more valuable than sitting there and doing in depth research and never making a mistake but getting 1/10th of number of things done.
[19:38] Mike: I’ve looked at stuff like that that I’ve done before and I used to do this when I was looking at hard drives and computer equipment to buy and one of the things that I came to the conclusion was at one point I was spending so much time kind of agonizing over the decision between two different hard drives one of which was I don’t know, let’s say as $160 and the other one was $240 or something like that. Which isn’t a huge amount of money but if you spend more than hour making that decision then you’re essentially just wasting money and you extrapolate that over stuff where you’re making decisions over the course of 10 or 15 hours and you’re agonizing over all that time. And at some point, if you would just pull the trigger and chosen the more expensive one, it wouldn’t matter at the end of the day because you just wasted all that time where you’re paying yourself for that time. It would’ve covered the cost.
[0:20:27] And the fifth biggest mistake I would say that I’ve made is depending on Google too much for some of my data and services. And I think this goes back to what I’m referring to as the feed burner debacle right now where feed burner just seems like it is not working on my site. I’m looking at probably switching to feed blitz some time I the near future for RSS from my blog. But it feels like I’m relying so much on Google’s data feeds and services at this point that if something goes wrong and Google decides to change their mind about different things, I may not necessarily have ways of extracting myself and this isn’t just limited to like the Google glass that I got or my Gmail account. I mean there’s a lot of Google services that we use kind of everyday and it makes me worried to be perfectly honest.
[21:13] And I feel like it’s a mistake and I guess at the end of the day I feel like I have so many eggs in Google’s basket that if they decide they want to do something, it kind of goes against my goals then there’s just nothing I can do about it. And I’m certainly not alone in that I don’t think. I don’t know what other options have in some cases. I mean Google web master tools are what they are and they’re great for doing research and they’re great for all this different analysis but there are paid options out there for different things but they only take data so far.
[21:43] Rob: Yeah and anyone who built a rank tracker and has had that API shut down and then the scraping blocked or anyone who relies on Google keyword data for any reasons meaning pretty much every web master in the country and anyone who does email marketing and realize on the image tracking that Google’s now cashing and they didn’t totally break that but they certainly have an impact on it. All of us realized that the impact and the amount of control that Google actually has over a lot of things now.
[22:09] And I can imagine that these changes Google’s making about – I mean they’re kind of putting a quash on SEO and a lot of SEO’s are moving into content marketing. And Google’s starting – it seems with this image move maybe clamped down on email marketing as well but it seems that each of these probably drives incremental revenue for them because you can imagine that people will go out and buy more ads in order to make up for the loss of the traffic and the conversions and such. So it is a scary proposition as you’ve said.
[22:45] And my fifth and final biggest mistake from last year was underestimating the amount of work it takes to launch a new Saas app. I think lesson launching late, I think the bigger thing was how many other projects that launching Drip caused me to push off, just the sheer volume of attention and effort that I needed to spend a long with Derek my developer who was first working half time and then went full time and then I went full time on it, I mean that, I just didn’t anticipate that early on in the year and I always forget how much time it takes to get these things off the ground and get them built up.
[23:19] What’s interesting is that a mistake is different than a regret. I don’t regret doing this. I don’t know that I can put my finger on exactly the repercussions that it had aside from me pushing off a few projects but just remembering that Saas apps take hundreds and hundreds of hours especially if they’re in a competitive market like this where people are already ahead of you in features and you don’t necessarily want to do a feature battle anyways you kind of need to know going into it because I can imagine if I hadn’t started with momentum and someone coding on a full time, this would be a project that someone would think they can get done in a few months and would basically take them to the point where they would probably quit.
[23:57] If we didn’t already have momentum on it and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel within a few months I think it’d be a tough project to launch kind of a major Saas app in a competitive area. If you’re trying to do it on nights and weekends, these markets are definitely getting more crowded as times goes on.
[24:13] Mike: You mean Audit Shark wasn’t an early warning for you?
[24:15] Rob: Indeed. I’ve had a few conversations in the past couple months of folks who are launching Saas and they’re like oh man, I hadn’t realized there’s these many competitors or all the work it takes to actually get this done and launched and all the marketing and all that stuff. And then I think the last kind of honorable mention is kind of maybe a shared mistake you and I made is not starting a podcast mailing list in 2013 because it’s kind of a no brainer. We’re coming on here every week to talk about stuff. We should have a minimum an email signup form and figure out what to send to the audience at that point.
[24:50] Whether it’s probably not an update when every episode goes live because people are already subscribed to them but maybe a call out to some specific comments or some specific news items related to the podcast or just figuring out what it is that we’re able to keep people on the loop on because I know you and I don’t have the time to create a bunch of original content and to start another blog or another full email newsletter. But I still think that there are a lot of listeners out there who would love to keep in touch with what’s going on and having them on a mailing list would probably be beneficial for everybody.
[25:23] Music
[25:26] So give it some thought for yourself. Think about your biggest mistakes potentially how you can stop doing them in the New Year. If you have question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email 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 164 | 50 Mobile Apps That We Use to Run Our Businesses
Show Notes
- Phone
- Gmail/Mail
- Chrome/Safari
- Podcasts/Music
- Trello
- Google Drive
- Simplenote
- Dropbox
- Skype
- Google maps
- Sunrise Calendar
- Evernote
- QuickOffice
- SugarSync
- Commit
- DocScan
- XMarks
- Basecamp
- Viber
- Banking app
- Paid for Stripe
- Xero
- American Express
- Amazon Store app
- Starbucks
- Dunkin Donuts
- eBay
- HootSuite (Twitter)
- Facebook app
- Kickstarter
- Yelp
- Audible
- Kindle
- Amazon Cloud Player
- Pandora
- Netflix
- Hulu+
- Amazon Instant Video
- Flixster
- HBO Go
- LastPass/1Pass
- FTP on the Go
- 2X Client RDP
- TurboScan
- Whitenoise+
- Roku
- Quickreader
- iSSH
- AirDisplay
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discussed 50 mobile apps that we used to run our businesses. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 164.
[00:09] Music
[00:16] 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.
[00:27] 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 sir?
[00:32] Mike: Well, I’m in the middle of DDOS attack against my blog at the moment.
[00:34] Rob: You’re kidding me. What happened?
[00:37] Mike: I had my blog hosted over at WP engine. I think it was a couple of weeks ago where this first started happening. Today it got so bad that you just could not even get to the site and I sent in a support request and they’re like yeah, it’s still going on. There’s really not much we can do about it except we can change your IP address. So here’s the new scene name that you’re going to need to use.
[00:56] Rob: How interesting. And do you think it’s targeting you or its targeting you because you’re on the WP engine? I guess it’s hard to tell right? You just not have idea who’s doing it or why.
[01:05] Mike: I’ve got no idea. It’s not like I’ve gotten any sort of extortion emails or anything like that. It’s just nailed left and right and there’s really not a lot anybody could do about it.
[01:15] Rob: So we are up to 311 worldwide iTunes reviews. We have some awesome reviews recently from Esoterica, he or she’s in Australia. Don’t be fooled by the fact that these guys are develops. Startup for the rest of us is so much broader than that. The episodes are as regular as clockwork both on their release and the killer content. Actionable and realistic information that will keep you motivated in their journey. Really appreciate that.
[01:40] Also Laten in the US says I’ve listened to about five episodes so far and I’m now going back and working my way to the older ones. I’ve already really enjoyed Rob and Mike’s discussions and appreciate the valuable content they share. And then we have Penske also from Australia. Love the fresh approach to your podcast and that it’s full of information that is useful to my everyday business. I find I can listen to you both all day long and still be as hooked at the end of the day as I was when I started. And to wrap us up, we have what’s up dog LA obviously from the United States. He says I’ve never left a podcast review but felt compelled to because I enjoy this one so much just want to encourage Rob and Mike to keep doing what they’re doing and say thank you guys. So if you have not left us an iTunes review, please log into iTunes and we’d love a five star.
[02:24] Mike: Very cool. Thanks everybody.
[02:26] Rob: So MicroConf 2014 in Las Vegas is coming up. We’re just starting to get the details nailed down. Everything’s still tentative but we are talking to the Tropicana hotel again just where we had it last year and we have tentative dates in the middle of April. If you are interested in hanging around with 150 of your favorite web and mobile entrepreneurs, think about heading over to microconf.com and adding your email to that list. We sold out our tickets in about 51 hours last year and form the size of the list at this point, it looks like it will be that fast or faster so I would suggest that if you’re thinking about coming to MicroConf you definitely head over to microconf.com and enter your email. So I heard you’re a glass hole.
[03:10] Mike: Yes. Because I own a pair of Google glass.
[03:12] Rob: What do you think so far? How long have you owned it? I mean tell us the story like have you worn it out and about? Have people given you weird looks? Do you find that it’s useful? I’m just curious to hear your take.
[03:23] Mike: I’ve had it for almost to weeks now. It’s interesting to use so I find that it works really well if you have Wi-Fi or you have it connected to your phone because it uses all of the different Google services and I’ll give you some examples of where I found that it was extremely useful. I was flying home about a week ago and had them on in the airport. I was sitting down. I looked over at this TV screen that was on the wall and I’m trying to find out where my flight was and whether it was on time or not. With Google glass, you can either touch the side of it or you can look up and it will turn on.
[03:55] Well, I looked up enough because I was looking at the TV screen and it popped on and my flight information was right there. And it told me when it was taking off, that it was on time. I could’ve clicked on it and gotten more information about it but it was awesome that information was just right there. It knew I was at the airport. It knew that I had this flight coming up and I presumably wanted information about it. I think I looked up on Google maps on my desktop how to get to some place and then a short time later I was wearing them, I just happened to glance up at something and the map showed up and basically showed me the route that I had previously looked up on Google maps.
[04:32] Rob: Very nice. So sounds fairly useful. Have you worn them out and about and had people stare at you or do you look like a dork when you’re wearing them?
[04:39] Mike: I probably look like a dork when I’m not wearing them so I don’t know if it really makes a whole lot of different. Maybe it’s an improvement I’ve got no idea.
[04:45] Rob: Touché sir.
[04:47] Mike: I definitely noticed that people are looking at me so I see a lot of people doing like a double take. I was at the grocery store the other day and this kid like every time I turned around he was staring at me so you definitely get looks here and there. I’ve got a few people who have asked me about them, just wanted to try them on and check them out. By large, the people who were interested in it definitely wanted to try them out. It’s definitely interesting wearing them. I don’t know how else to describe it.
[05:13] One thing I have noticed is that if you have an iPhone, it tends to be a lot less useful unless you’re on Wi-Fi because it doesn’t integrate with the IOS GPS that is something of a problem. They’re supposedly working on it. I guess they’ve been saying they’ve been working on it for the past six months they don’t have a solution for it yet. And then the other thing is you can’t send text messages through your phone if you have an iPhone. So it makes it a little bit more difficult for that as well. But if you do sync it with your phone, whenever you get high important email through Gmail, it will ding and then you can look up and you can just read the email right there if you’re using Gmail.
[05:51] Like I said, if you’re using Google services, it extremely nice for that because it does integrate with them and it just shows you information like when it thinks that you want it or when it seems to be relevant. I’ve had some tweets that have come in that just kind of showed up there and they were marked as high priority and primarily because I was mentioned in them or something like that so I could go and take a look at them. And you can take pictures. It automatically syncs it with Google+ and backs up everything and them from Google+ you can share it with everybody.
[06:18] Rob: I think the question on everyone’s mind is how has Google glass helped you get Audit Shark to launch?
[06:23] Mike: I can almost give you an answer for that is with that, I could sit there looking at a screen and I could do a Google hangout and I could walk somebody through it.
[06:31] Rob: I mean I don’t relay have Drip or HitTail updates just because its towards – it’s almost Christmas and we’re working away but there’s no major – we’re just rolling out features for new customers as they requested and we have a plan of what we’re doing in January but really nothing new that I haven’t already talked about anything new with Audit Shark, new millstones you’ve hit?
[06:51] Mike: Well this week, we crossed the $1,000 follower threshold for Audit Shark on Twitter so pretty happy about that. The strategy I’ve been using there has been working pretty well and seems to continue to be working so still working on how I’m going to monetize that but I’m thinking it’s more of a marketing channel than anything else, just kind of get the word out to interact with people and get face time I guess.
[07:14] And then beyond that, I’m working on a bunch of different things for next month more or less just marketing strategies and this week we’ve got some more updates that are going into the software. We just put in some new reports, once those are bug free I mean we’re going back to some of my early access customers and basically asking them for money because those were the reports they were looking for but there’s a couple bugs right now we’re just trying to straight out.
[07:34] Rob: Cool. And once that’s done, you’re going to be pushing forward with early access and additional customers and that kind of stuff?
[07:39] Mike: Yup, a couple days from now, I’ve got a call with a reseller who wants to take a look at it and see how it might integrate into their business where there’s an overlap or fit between what Audit Shark does and what their customers need.
[07:53] Rob: Very good. Well as we’re sitting here talking this documentary called the startup kids that I had mentioned a while back, it’s been released and it’s a documentary about young web entrepreneurs in the US and Europe and it has interviews with the founders of Vimeo, sound cloud, Kip, Indinero, Dropbox, food spotting and others. And you can check this out at the startupkids.com.
[08:14] Mike: On Twitter, Damon Clinkscales had sent me a tweet. It was in regards to our predictions episode and they sent me a YouTube video of what looks like a Ted Talk where somebody was talking about all the different things that Google is doing and it basically related very, very well to what I had predicted about companies essentially going down to the micro level and doing micro individual advertisements and feeding people different information. That aligned very, very well of what I said earlier about Google glass whereas I just look up and the information that was relevant to me was right there.
[08:47] Rob: Right. So your predication of kind of personal behavioral targeted marketing…
[08:52] Mike: Has already come true.
[08:53] Music
[08:57] Rob: Today we’re going to be diving into 50 mobile apps mostly to run our business. Let’s dive in here. We had an episode back in February 2011, its episode 37. We talked about the IOS apps that we were using. I listened back to that and realized that it was really out of date. You and I had just gotten iPhones maybe a year before and there just wasn’t that much out. So a lot of things have changed since then.
[09:18] First thing I want to start with is my “bottom four” so those are my apps that are in the bottom row of my iPhone. And for me, I obviously have the phone app. I have the Gmail app instead of the IOS mail app. I have the chrome app instead of Safari and then I have the podcasts app because I listen to so many podcasts. How about you? I’m curios to hear what you’re bottom four are.
[09:42] Mike: Well I left mine to all the defaults. So I just have the phone and then I have the regular mail app and then Safari and music which I also think is the default. I’m curious to know two things. 1) Why you switched out the IOS email client and then why you also decided to just go with chrome? Because for me I don’t really see any difference between chrome and Safari on the iPhone. I know that there’s some rudimentary differences here and there but for the most part, Safari works enough well for me that it just doesn’t matter.
[10:12] Rob: Yeah. So the reason I have Gmail, let’s start with that one. Gmail allows you more flexibility with labels. The labels actually work the way they’re supposed to unlike with the IOS mail app. The labels are colored the same way they are in the web app. Gmail also allows you to actually search your entire library. If you go to search and you type something in, it brings all of your historical emails back whereas the IOS mail app only looks at what it has downloaded locally. It’s more of like an iMap or a local version of the last 100 emails you have whereas the Gmail app is just way, way more powerful like the search actually works just like the web version and I wind up using that quite a bit. There are also more gestures that you can do that can get you between emails really quickly that I don’t know if IOS is implemented or not when the Gmail app came out light years ahead of IOS mail app.
[11:03] Mike: With the IOS mail app, there’s actually two different sections when you’re looking at it, there’s the basically if you have multiple mail boxes setup, it will show you the mail box at the top and then underneath it will show you your accounts. And under the accounts, if you need to search for things on a server, you can go in there and then you can search there and what it will do is it will search your phone first and then it will start searching on the server.
[11:24] Rob: A) It didn’t use to have that and B) that still sounds pretty clunky like you can’t just hit the search thing at the top and type it in. You have to go searching forth through menus.
[11:33] Mike: As I said, it’s kind of similar to Safari where it’s like its good enough and plus I also have an exchange server mailbox.
[11:40] Rob: See, that’s an issue. If you didn’t have that, I don’t think the Gmail app would work with that but I almost guarantee you if you are on the IOS mail app and you switch over to the Gmail app for one week that you will not go back to the IOS mail app. There’s enough features and differences and swipes. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do that if you learn it, it just makes you much more efficient.
[12:01] Mike: Cool. Maybe I’ll give it a shot.
[12:05] Rob: And then the other question was about chrome versus Safari. I switched to chrome maybe a year ago. Safari crashed on me quite a bit. That was the original reason I switched. Tabbing was the other thing. Even now Safari on IOS has tabs, it didn’t when I started and there’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do with tabs in the kind of multi tab view on chrome on IOS. If you just swipe on it left it disappears and you can reorder them. It feels faster as well just like on the actual desktop or laptop. So that’s why I’ve switched. Again it’s a little nuances. When chrome came out on IOS, it was ahead of Safari. Safari may be catching up at this point.
[12:44] Mike: Cool. Like I said, I’ll probably give chrome a shot again. I’ll probably just swap it out on the bottom bar because I do have chrome installed. I just don’t generally use it.
[12:52] Rob: Right. The other thing I like about chrome is all your bookmarks are synced and all your open tabs. I can literally have open tabs on my Mac book air. I can leave and if I’m out I’ll just click it and it’ll say open tabs. I can click Mac book air, it will show me all the tabs that are open there and I can just pop them open or view them right there in the browser so in case I was in the middle of something looking at a doc or looking at analytics or something, pops right up.
[13:16] Mike: Yeah. I use Xmarks for that which is kind of in our next section of office and productivity utilities.
[13:21] Rob: Indeed. So we have quite a few office and productivity apps. My first couple are Trello which I use to manage obviously my Trello queue, my to do list and stuff and sometimes I’ll add things from my iPad or iPhone but most of the time I’m using it if I’m out and about and I want to read my to-do list and think about an item. If I’m going to add it, I will typically actually do that via email. I’ll just pop open the Gmail app and type it in there and send to my Trello address.
[13:48] Mike: Yeah. I also use Trello. Another one I use on the go is Evernote. I don’t think you use Evernote, that Evernote has the worst user interface that was ever designed and created but millions and millions of people use it which is kind of weird way that its gotten this success that it has but I definitely use Evernote on my phone to take notes while I’m on the road because it allows me to throw them into different folders and be able to access pretty much my data repository of all the various marketing and sales things that I’ve run across over the years.
[14:19] Rob: My next one is Google drive and this is basically this allows me to access my Google docs. I don’t use Google drive to store files that I use Dropbox for that but I do use Google drive to access Google docs and I have frequently used it to actually pop open the outline for our podcast and add things while I’m on the go. It was nice. Before they had this Google drive app it was pretty clunky to try to do it in the browser and the Google drive actually makes it useable on an IOS device.
[14:48] Mike: Yeah, I also use Google drive but I use Google drive in combination with an app called Quick Office and Quick Office is also from Google but allows you to create documents where Google drive just always you to access them which is kind of nice because if you’re using an iPad or an iPhone, it makes it very easy to be able to pop it open, start writing a document and then you can send it to you Google drive later on so that you can get it to it from anywhere.
[15:14] Rob: And that is crazy. Alright I‘m making a note to download that. I have never even heard of this.
[15:19] Mike: Yes. It’s very nice. I’ve used quick office a couple of times to write like entire blog posts on a plane and just from my iPad. That’s kind of nice.
[15:28] Rob: Very cool. My next app is called simple note and this is basically like notepad but it’s synced across the cloud and it’s much simpler to access and to open up a new doc and create one like Google drive is. And so I use it for a lot of things that I want to take quick notes about like a shopping list. My wife and I sync up our shopping list through all of our web accounts and through our iPads and iPhones and then we also have some other docs that we’ve created that we collaborate on like Christmas list and that stuff. It’s just a little harder to get to if you make them a Google doc that you have to go in and search and formatting and a lot of clicks and the interface isn’t as easy as simple note which is basically just like I said a note pad, it’s like a little text editor.
[16:15] Mike: That’s really cool. I hadn’t thought about being able to share lists and stuff like that between me and my wife. That’s definitely a good one. I‘ll have to check that one out. I use a combination of SugarSync and Dropbox on my end for syncing files. SugarSync just recently said that they are moving to a paid only model for obviously reasons. I mean you don’t necessarily want to be supporting a ton of free users kind of similar to the way Dropbox has been. I mean at some point it become financially unwielding and unfeasible to support that many free users especially when you’re giving them this space that actually does cost you money.
[16:51] Rob: One more company member we’ve talked about this works like companies start with this premium model and most of them get rid of it because of the pure burden of supporting it.
[17:01] Mike: Yeah, so I do pay for a SugarSync subscription but I also have a free Dropbox subscription so I wonder how long it’s going to be before that becomes no longer free. And I don’t know at that point where I would go Dropbox or SugarSync. I mean I use them both for different things. I have some stuff for one business in one place and then some stuff for another business in the other one. I don’t necessarily like or dislike either one. It used to be that SugarSync I thought have a distinct advantage in that you could specify specific folders that were going to be in it as opposed to Dropbox where everything is all in one folder and then kind of spidered on from there. But I think that has gone away at this point so that they’re much more on par in terms of features so I don’t necessarily have a strong preference either way. It’s just whichever one makes it easier to get the job done and has all the files I need.
[17:48] Rob: My next three apps are pretty standard so I won’t go onto them too far. One is Dropbox which you’ve already mentioned. The next is Skype and the next one after that is Google maps which is a no brainer but I don’t use the Apple maps. I just like the routing of Google maps and now that it has turn by turn directions. It’s a no brainer for me. And then the fourth one which is a little different is called Sunrise and it’s a calendaring app that has I’ll say it has a better UI than the IOS calendar app.
[18:17] So if you’re counting I pretty much use none of this talk IOS apps and I’ve actually heard it’s a pretty common thing that a lot of people use more Google apps and or just replacements for the IOS apps and I think it’s a real problem for them. I know they want to make the money form there in hardware but if they can’t kind of write the core software for their operating system, the best, better than other people, I think that’s definitely something that apple needs to work on. But it’s Sunrise is something it’s something you should check out. It’s a free app.
[18:45] Mike: A couple of the other apps that I have are the office and productive section is Basecamp that I’ve already mentioned I use Xmarks for synchronizing some of my bookmarks. I use an application called Viber which I think I used that primarily when we were at MicroConf Europe because what it allows you to do is allows you to send text messages through Viber to somebody else who has it and across nothing but a Wi-Fi connection. So that was helpful for me because have an iPhone and my wife has one and I just downloaded Viber and we’re able to text each other back and forth without me having to pick up a phone or try to get on Skype and it was just nice to be able to just leave messages.
[19:25] The other ones that I have are an application called Doc Scan which I used for scanning receipts so if I’m out on the road and I’m trying to track expenses for a client, what I can do is when I go out to dinner, when I get the check, I sign the bill then I just take a picture of it with Doc Scan and then at the end of that, weeklong engagement or whatever, I can just then take that, converted into a PDF, send it off to my bookkeeper and my bookkeeper can take that PDF, fill out the expense report and then send an invoice to the customers that I don’t necessarily have to deal with. And that’s worked out really, really well. I’ve been using Doc Scan for probably two years and I basically use it all the time.
[20:04] And then the last one I use is something from Nathan Barry and Commit, allows you to put in a goal that you have and something that you want to do or accomplish everyday and you just enter in a time that you want it to remind you whether or not you’ve done that or not and all it is just a button say whether or not you’ve done that on that particular day. And it allows you to go back one day but it helps you to commit to different goals or at least trying to reach different goals.
[20:32] So for example, if you want to lose weight, you might say did I go to the gym today and you just say yes or no whether or not you did it on any given day and it tracks how long you’ve been doing whatever that action was. So it kind of helps to motivate you because if you’ve done it for 30 days or 60 days you don’t necessarily want to break that cycle so it’s something of a psychological hole.
[20:55] Rob: Our next category is financial apps and I think we have four of them. One of them is just your banking app if you’re part of even small credit unions these days, they have an app especially the large like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and large national banks will have them. The cool part that I found about my banking app is not just that I can check balances and transfer money but I can now deposit checks just by taking a picture of the check using the app and it scans the numbers and imports the whole thing. So I almost never go to the ATM anymore only to pull out cash these days. That’s been a big time saver for me.
[21:28] And my other financial app that I use is called Paid and I’ve mentioned it in the past but it’s basically a Stripe IOS app. It’s not put out by Stripe. It’s a third party but they integrate with Stripe and they can pull down all your data and have some really attractive reports. The design work was done by Ryan Shurf which is your friend and mine. He’s a great designer up in Minneapolis. He’s done a lot of design work for me so the app looks really sharp and it gives you a lot of inside to kind of when you’re next transfer is coming and how much it’s going to be what your revenue’s been and your per customer. It just gives you a bunch of metrics on your iPhone.
[22:04] And the app I think is like $4 or $5. And the other cool thing is if you are doing live customer development say at a conference, you can just punch someone’s credit card number into Paid and you could charge a certain amount of money on it if you are in fact going to do pre-selling.
[22:18] Mike: Two others that I use, I also use banking app for my credit union and you’re right. It’s absolutely nice to be able to just take a picture of a check and just have it deposited automatically. The other two apps that I use are Xero and that integrates with the Xero accounting application. So I’ve started moving a lot of my accounting stuff and consolidating it for my businesses all into one platform and it looks like Xero is going to be that platform. So I’ve started using that and then the other app is the American Express app so I use that to check balances or make payments or whatever.
[22:54] Rob: Well, it seems like I need to download the Xero app because I use Xero and I don’t have the IOS app. Our next category is commerce and this isn’t necessarily stuff we use to run our businesses but we wanted to include it anyways because I use this the first one. The Amazon store app, I use that every day, every other day to order a crazy amount of stuff. And I don’t use it to run my business, what I do use it to do is save time. Since I have Amazon prime, I can get everything in two days. I’m constantly just popping it in to this Amazon app or right on the fly. You don’t need to combine your orders because you have prime right?
[23:28] The other app I have under commerce is my Starbucks app and here’s the interesting thing. I don’t actually go to Starbucks that much but what I like about this is two-fold. 1) I hate those rewards cards and I go to Starbucks enough that every few months I probably earn a free coffee but this app, if you pay with that Starbucks app it gives you that free coffee. It tracks it for you so you don’t have to carry around that extra card because I’m Mr. Thin wallet. I’m trying to get a really thin wallet.
[23:50] The other thing I like about the app is there have been a couple of times where I’ve left my wallet somewhere and I have no money and I’m super hungry, you can add money to it. You can store value on it like it’s a card and it basically bailed me out because there’s always a Starbucks around and I went there and I got one of their sandwiches but at least I had something without my wallet and it was kind of my emergency fund I’ve realized if I’m standard or out and about somewhere that I can always pick up a little bit of food if I’ve forgotten it.
[24:15] Mike: Yeah. I primarily use the Amazon store app to hunt for different things. I also use the eBay app. So if I’m looking, doing price comparisons or if I’m looking for something that’s hard to find, between those two, I can usually find just about anything for my phone and then I also have the Starbucks app and I also have the Dunkin Donuts app because if you’ve ever been to the New England area, there’s a Dunkin Donuts on like every single corner. It’s just crazy out here.
[24:39] Rob: Alright, our next category is social. First app that I use for social stuff is Hootsuite and that’s what I use to manage my multiple Twitter accounts and what I like about it is it has the swiping left to right of your different brands or your different searches or your different things that you’re looking at. So you can go through not only multiple Twitter accounts here you’re getting mentioned but you can have an embedded search. So anytime mentions MicroConf throughout the year, that’s just one of my tabs that I’m swiping through. So Hootsuite is a definite winner for me. It’s a free app and Hootsuite’s free as well unless you’re over a certain level of usage which I’m not.
[25:15] The other couple are the Facebook app which I use pretty infrequently. I’m not on Facebook that much. Then there’s the kick starter app I talk enough about. I’m checking out kick starter stuff. Yes I actually have checked that out of my phone. It’s quite a good experience. I actually like the experience a little more on my phone and iPad than I do on the desktop web version. And then the last one is Yelp, obviously good for finding a place to eat when you’re somewhere you don’t know.
[25:40] Mike: Yeah. I use an app called Urban Spoon on occasion to find new places to eat. I don’t think use the Yelp app. I also have Hootsuite and then I use the regular twitter IOS app. I use that one primary for my single founder account and then the other ones I kind of manage a little bit here and there through Hootsuite but I don’t tend to use Hootsuite on my phone nearly as much as I do on my desktop. Most of the ones overlap with yours. I also use Facebook but usually when I’m sitting in an airport.
[26:06] Rob: Our next category is media and so this is books, music, movies and TV. My first one is Audible but I listen to probably a couple audio books per month. And I used to sync them via iTunes. I download them to the laptop and then sync it over through iTunes and listen to it in the music app but I realized it was just such a better experience to be able to download it directly over Wi-If. And once audible had all the controls in that 1.5 and 2 times speed, it just made sense to do that. And now I’m actually completely free of iTunes. I don’t use iTunes on my desktop for anything.
[26:40] So my podcast or through my IOS podcast app, Audible handles my audio books and I tried using iCloud and uploaded everything. It scans through and it does the iTunes match and stuff and it was quite buggy for me. I’m on a Mac book air and maybe 50% or 60% of the time I go to play music, it just wouldn’t let me play it and it would blank out and I’d have to reboot the machine. I switched over to this is another app on my phone but I now use the Amazon cloud player and it’s the same basic thing as iTunes match. It’s just using Amazon’s technology.
[27:13] So I have all my music scanned again by Amazon. It matched everything and it uploaded whatever else I didn’t have. You can have it to a quarter million tracks in cloud for lie $25 a year and I think I have 5,000 or 10,000 it’s not that many. So now that is what I use to manage all my music which feels good. I think it’s an adobe air app, my Amazon cloud player on the desktop but their web player is decent and the IOS player is decent and it got me away from using iTunes which has just been an aggravation for me of years.
[27:48] Like everyone, I use the Kindle app. I use Pandora for ambiance music. I like Pandora a lot for music discovery. There’s a Netflix app and a Hulu+ app as well as Amazon instead video and those are the three ways since I don’t have cable. I haven’t had it for years. Those are the three ways that I watched TV shows. A lot of them stream for free or I have premium memberships to all those and I’m able to rent movies for $2 or $3 and I can either watch them on my phone or my iPad or my laptop computer anytime I want or through the Roku frankly.
[28:19] And the last one is Flickster and this is what I use when I’m out and about. I want to find out where’s the nearest movie theater playing this movie and what are the times? It’s just that GPS but modern smart devices where it just knows where you are and it can tell you the nearest theaters and what’s playing. It really is advancement in modern science and I think we take for granted.
[28:39] Mike: Of those apps, you know what, I have the Kindle app installed but I almost never open it up anymore because I bought a Kindle paperweight last year and since then, I almost never use it on my phone anymore. I only use it on my Kindle and I mostly read books. Like if it’s a business book, I’ll read it on there but I have a bunch of websites where I have the Kindle for chrome plug-in where I can send something to my Kindle and then read it later which is kind of nice and it’s just having that bigger screen is probably what really does it in for the Kindle on the iPhone. I also have Netflix on my phone. I have Hulu+ I have Amazon instant video but I also have HBO go.
[29:20] My wife and are actually looking at getting rid of cable between Netflix and Hulu+ and Amazon instant video. It will probably basically replace cable. But the one thing that I probably won’t be able to keep is HBO so I don’t know what I’ll do when the next season of game of thrones comes out.
[29:36] Rob: Yeah. That’s the one thing that HBO shows can’t buy them on Amazon and iTunes until the DVD’s come out which is like 9 months after they air. Our last official category are utilities and my first one in utilities is password management. So last pass or one pass or first pass, these are all things that help you have really exotic long passwords and being able to log into them on any device. Highly recommend if you’re not using one already to take the plunge and do it. It’s definitely changed my relationships with passwords and actually my relationship – I used to have that guilt of I know I’m not as secure as I need to be with the last pass one pass group, they really make me feel like I’m more source than I used to be frankly.
[30:15] Then we have FTP on the go which is an FTP client, some absolute emergency I need FTP in and I have done this a few times like at a conference. I also have the 2X client RDP which is just a remote desktop connector and it will get into a server so say the HitTail server or another window server where you need a remote desktop in. It’s a no brainer. It’s not great to do on iPhone because its screen is so small but I do have it on the iPad as well and again, only in emergencies I’ve had to log in and kind of swatch something real quick.
[30:45] Another couple are Turbo Scan which is basically just a scanner. So you can take a picture with your iPhone and it will scan the document in as a PDF or JPEG or a GIF and use that to email it to people so I don’t have to go find a real scanner. Then there’s White Noise+ which I use when I’m at a hotel if there’s a lot of noise especially if we’re there with my kids and I think it’s going to wake them up, I’ll just turn on the inside of an airplane noise or some type of white or brown noise.
[21:14] Last couple for me in utilities are the Roku app which is just a remote control for a Roku which allows you to watch internet television on your TV and there’s Quick Reader which is from our own Patrick Thompson at Inkstone Software which helps you learn how to speed read better. And the last one is Air Display which allows your iPad to basically be a second monitor over Wi-Fi. So it’s great for coffee shops if you really need to compare an excel spreadsheet or something you’re working on in two monitors. It’s not super fast, super responsive so you wouldn’t want to be really flipping back and forth a lot but if you’re just trying to compare data or you just want that extra little 10 inch screen sitting next to you, it also chose their battery actually. But if you do need that, I have definitely used this on occasion.
[31:58] Mike: I think out of those, one I would definitely add is I use something called ISSH which is a very similar to what you talked about with the RDP where if you need to SSH into a machine and its an absolutely emergency and it can’t wait for you to get to a laptop then that’s a good option. But I also have an RDP client so that I can get into my servers if I need to. And yeah, password management, tools, similar to last pass or some of those other ones that you mentioned. You said Turbo Scan. I think I mentioned it before, I use Doc Scan for that. How does Turbo Scan work?
[32:31] Rob: You just take maybe two pictures of the document and it just scans it in and spits out like a JPEG. It can do PDF’s and actually I just looked at it and it said you can just do the basic camera then you can do the sure scan 3X and that’s where you take three pictures of it and it merges them and makes completely sure that you have a really high quality image of it like doubles them up over each other.
[332:52] Mike: Yeah. I think its $3 but Doc Scan is $3 as well. That’s a lot of different apps that we just covered and hopefully we went through and helped you guys discover a couple of new apps that you never heard of. I definitely got a couple off Rob’s list that I’m going to take a look at.
[33:08] If you have question for us, you can call it into our voice mail 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 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 163 | Our Goals for Next Year (And Why You Should Set Your Own)
Show Notes
Rob
- 5x Drip
- Get HT back on track
- Throw 2 MicroConfs in a sustainable manner
- Re-launch Micropreneur.com
Mike
- Go full-time on AuditShark
- Finish my security book
- Get back to blogging/writing. 26 blog posts/email newsletters for the year
- Take an extended vacation (2+ weeks)
- Make a conscious effort to improve my health.
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 163.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] 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.
[00:18] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:19] 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: December’s a good time to be post-launch I’ve decided. I feel it’s a little bit like a calm after the storm of launch and the calm before the storm of kind of restarting marketing in January. Obviously I’m referring to Drip. It’s just been kind of a time for me to come off of some pretty stressful and kind of high hour count weeks in November and I feel like things are starting to slow down, starting to ease into the holidays. We have a nice big back log of features that we’re cranking out. I keep saying this phrase of I’m cocking the crossbow. I feel like I’m pulling back that mechanism and loading up and having blog posts created and some content marketing stuff and banner ads and all types of ad campaigns.
[0:01:07] I’m getting suited up to do to just pummel the earth with, scorch the earth with in January. So that’s kind of what’s on my agenda. Nothing new in terms of actual marketing. I’m not executing anything right now but just building up that stock pile so I can start off 2014 with a bang. How about you?
[01:23] Mike: Well do you remember all the auto generated content project that I put together like a month or two ago and put out there and was waiting for Google to come in and index all that?
[01:33] Rob: Yeah. That was like Brecht Palombo and Patrick McKenzie had suggested that.
[01:36] Mike: Yeah. So I followed through with that and Google finally decided to come through and index everything. I’ve got something like 600 or 650 pages indexed in Google now. And my organic search traffic has increased roughly 50% to 100%
[01:50] Rob: Very nice. That’s awesome.
[01:52] Mike: The weird thing is that it seems like Google is slowly adding content to their industries over time so not everything – it’s kind of weird because I go into like the web master tools and they are showing that they have indexed 600 pages but it says that it’s not actually looking at more than I think 150 of them for some reason. It’s some weird number that they have in there. And you can see the graph of that number is increasing overtime and I’m not quite sure what it means.
[02:19] Rob: Yeah. I had this happen with HitTail when I first moved it over. I moved the blog to a sub domain and did some other tweaking and at first, Google wouldn’t index anything. The more links I built and the more people started talking about it in social media, the more of the site Google would index. It’s like if you have high authority, it would index everything, but you have to get there first. I think if you just released a brand new domain and you release a thousand pages of content, Google is not going to index that because they only have so many resources.
[02:48] And so that’s my guess of what’s happening is as your site is gaining authority in Google’s eyes and they’re able to slowly add pages into their index and eventually they’ll get after a while HitTail went from 200 and I think it’s up over a thousand pages indexed now so I’d imagine this same thing could happen to you.
[03:04] Mike: Yes so I’m hoping that will continue and I just kind of have to watch it for a little while.
[03:08] Rob: Very cool. Yeah, hopefully that traffic converts reasonably well. I know that long tail traffic in general doesn’t convert as well as more targeted traffic but if you get them on an email list, email mini course and funnel them into just kind of into your funnel I guess. This is a way to handle it and you can convert some of them and make it worth a while.
[03:25] Mike: Well I do have Drip installed so that’s certainly helping.
[03:29] Rob: So I wanted to mention a site, it’s called useronboard.com and it’s been getting some traction in recent weeks. It’s basically a critique of user on boarding for big sites that you’ve heard of like vimeo and Netflix that he did, Trello and less accounting and Basecamp and the site is getting a lot of buzz. It was funny. I followed it through and actually put out by my growth hacker intern and he didn’t tell me about it. I found it actually through social media.
[03:57] His internship ended with me about 10 days ago and he’s now back to doing consulting work and that kind of stuff so he launched the site. He and I had a couple conversations about it but I didn’t know what domain he was going to use and didn’t really know he was going to do these PDF’s critiquing it but apparently he said it’s really taken off and it’s doing well. So it’s a cool idea both from two sides. 1) Just to check out the on boarding, he knows on boarding like that’s what he’s done for a couple years. He’s very knowledgeable about it so it’s neat to see the feedback he gives.
[04:26] It’s also interesting to think about he went from zero audience to I’ll just say a sizeable little email list in a matter of weeks just by putting himself out there and leveraging his expertise. And he had already planned to write an eBook on this topic and release it but this just gives him even more of an excuse. He’s now validated there is a need for this type of content. So if you have a few minutes, checkout useronboard.com.
[04:49] Mike: The other thing I have going on is I went on my email list and invited a bunch of the Linux users into my early access program. So I sent out invitations directly to about half dozen of them. But one of the things that I’ve started to realize in talking to people – because some people would just email me back and say hey I don’t think I’m a good fit but really like what you’re doing and once my business gets to this point, that I’d really like to be able to see what Audit Shark could do and can help me lock down my servers because this is also a problem that I have.
[05:17] And I’ve had enough of these conversations that I’m leaning heavily towards creating a special bootstrapper tier specifically aimed at people who can’t necessarily afford the full pricing for Audit Shark and that’s primarily because I built Audit Shark to kind of raise the general bar of how secure the internet is and how secure people’s servers are out there. So for me it’s not necessarily all about the money. I mean obviously Iwant to make money from it and make a living and everything but at the same time I want to help other people secure their severs.
[05:47] And there are people out there who are building stuff which it may not necessarily be secure and they just don’t know what they’re doing who are freely willing to admit that but they still need help. So I’m looking at creating some sort of a bootstrapper tier specifically aimed at those people so they can get at least some sort of protection in a way that doesn’t break the bank for me. So it’s not necessarily a premium model. It’s kind of like a I’ll say some weird hybrid model I guess.
[06:13] Rob: Dharmesh called it a cheapium model where he said you basically price it kind of at cost to what it cost you for the resources and maybe to support it. But you don’t make any profit. I hear what you’re saying. I’m a little hesitant to endorse it. My big concern would be that if you get 50 or 100 people on this bootstrap startup plan and you really aren’t making any profit, it sucks a lot of resources away from your core profits basically. And given that you’re not venture funded and you do need to make money and that’s the goal, it’s a tough call. It’s not something that I would bite off early on in the products lifecycle.
[06:38] Mike: Yeah. I understand that. I mean the other side of it is it also gives me ability to talk to these people who would use it if it were priced for them and they’re more than happy to start using it and give me feedback because a lot of the I’ll say the solid leads and stuff that I’m getting from people are at much higher price points and they take much, much longer to make the decisions. So I’m getting a lot of bites in that area but its taking much longer to kind of push those people through the sales funnel and I’m basically looking for feedback now. I don’t want feedback in four months. I want feedback now.
[07:19] Rob: Yeah. That makes sense. My concern is you’re going to get feedback from people who aren’t willing to pay for it or aren’t willing to pay very much for it so I’m not sure, I don’t think that’s as good a feedback as if you can just find customers who are willing to pay the full price. I know what you’re saying you have enterprise people who are going to be in the four figures a month range. It’s going to take you six months plus to close them. It’s tough. You know the product better than anyone but I think the market itself is still unknown. And before I went to like a cheapium model I think you have other roads, avenues to explore.
[07:51] Mike: Well, like I said, I’m still looking at it.
[07:53] Rob: Yeah. Here’s the thing, you can do an unpublished version of that, you could let five people in and not make it something they can sign up through from the website. But as you’re having conversation just be like alright, I can give it to you for way less than the list price and basically break it even and then get their feedback. That can’t hurt.
[08:10] Mike: Yeah. I wasn’t thinking that I would put it out there as like click here and get cheapium price.
[08:15] Rob: Got it.
[08:16] Mike: I actually have my developer working on some stuff that will allow me to do some price testing. One of the things that the stuff is working on that would allow me to do is just create a code that I can send to somebody and it would create a very specific pricing tier from them to say okay, well you’ve entered such and such codes so you’ll get these many servers. This will be the price point etc. So that way it’s more based on one on one conversations. It’s not something that you go in and it’s like $5 a month per server or something like that because the business obviously can’t support them.
[08:46] Rob: Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Not a bad way to go. Remember when Richard White talked about launching UserVoice and we did an episode about that. He said that they discounted a lot of their tiers that they priced them high and then they offered pretty big discounts. I think the average discount was 40% or 50% not unheard of.
[09:05] I have one other topic of conversation before that. It was tweeted to me this week but I think both of our opinions probably valid – that was from Brecht Palombo. He’s @brechtify on Twitter. Brecht Palombo, he talked at MicroConf last year. He’s a longtime Micropreneur academy member, lifetime member and he has distressedpro.com it’s his business that he does full time and he also runs the bootstrap with kid’s podcast. He tweeted and he said I need a better business stats review regimen. Would love to hear about yours, maybe a podcast episode.
[09:42] So I don’t think we need to devote a whole episode to this because my regimen isn’t that involved. Here’s what I’d do. Basically I have businesses I’m actively working on. So today that’s Drip. And then I have businesses that are more in the background so that would be everything else that you see. If you go to thethenumagroup.com you’ll see the other apps I have. All of those other ones are basically – they’re not back burnered because that sounds like I’m ignoring them but they are basically moving along well. They are being supported but no major time investment is coming from me.
[10:10] And so with the first category, so Drip, the current thing I’m actively working on, I am pretty much checking stats daily. I have a bookmark. In chrome I have a little folder with a list of bookmarks and it says daily on it. That’s what the folder is called. I right click on the folder and I say open all bookmarks in new tabs and poof, it just opens them all. And this basically brings me into right in the exact page in Google analytics with a time, with a date range that I want to see.
[10:39] It has Google analytics. It has perfect audience which I use for retargeting. It has any ads. If I’m currently running ads on any networks, it has those pages in there. So this thing is in flux. When I stop ads, I will pull it out of this list and it also has my dashboard of Drip itself at other times as I’m doing they’ll make their way in here. So sometimes this will only 3 or 4 pages and other times it can open 6 or 7 different pages. And I will look at this at least once a day when I’m working with Drip and if I’m actively running ads and doing a high ads bend, I will sometimes look at it every hour or two, not all the pages but just the ads bend because things move quickly during the business day.
[11:18] In addition to that, when billing runs every night, I get an email and I almost always pop in typically from my phone because it’s in the evening and I checkout the dashboard to see what happened, see what the billing was, what the expected billing is for the month, see how things have changed, what the churn is, blah, blah. So yes, it all depends on risk tolerance. It’s like if you want to look at this only once every few days then something could go wrong and you could risk basically losing money or not making as much money. So when I’m actively doing stuff, that’s where I am.
[11:50] When I have a less active app like let’s say HitTail where I’m not out there actively hardcore marketing it and pushing it, I will typically check Google analytics once a week sometimes once a month. There are some of my apps that have been on autopilot even longer and those I really do about once a month right around the time that I’m doing end of month financials, I’ll go through all the Google analytics and just check through to make sure there was no big drop. Now again, this depends on your risk tolerance because you could feasibly lose 3 or 4 week’s worth of traffic or worth of sales if you haven’t been paying attention to that stuff.
[12:23] So you need some confidence that things are going to continue to go the way they have been if you are not looking at analytics or sales for 3 or 4 weeks at a time. Anyway, that’s how I break it down and that’s the process I’ve developed over the past couple of years. How about you Mike?
[12:35] Mike: Well, for Audit Shark I get a daily email that gives me all the important things that are going on. It will tell me for example off the top of my head I know that it tells me how many customers are currently in there, how many components which our component is either an agent or it’s an agent list audit that’s been setup for a Linux machine so I know how many servers that the system is designed to be auditing or to setup to be auditing. And then it also tells me the number of controlled points and check so as my developer adds in new ones, I can see that they’re being added in on a daily basis.
[13:09] And then beyond that, I’d say probably once a week or so, I’d go into post mark app and take a look to see the outgoing emails and just making sure there’s no problems. I also get a weekly report from them that tell me how many emails went out on the previous week. Beyond that, I also use dig my data to basically to keep track of the Twitter feed in terms of the number of followers that its gaining over time. I have more than doubled it, almost tripled it in about a month to a month and a half. So I went from around I think it was maybe 170 or so probably two months ago and right now it’s right around 950 or pretty close to a thousand.
[13:48] Rob: Very nice.
[13:50] Mike: Yeah, that’s going extremely well, just continues giving up. I mean there’s a huge jump kind of as I start figuring things out it just jumps dramatically. And then you know the standby Google analytics I take a look at that at least once a week if not 2 or 3 times a week just to kind of see what’s going on across some of the different sites because it’s nice to have that dashboard where it’s got everything in there. And then like I said, I do the same thing with dig my data where I use it as a dashboard where I keep track of multiple products and things that I’m working on.
[14:18] Rob: Very good. Thanks for the question Brecht. Hope that helps.
[14:21] Music
[14:24] Rob: So let’s dive into our goals. Let’s take a look back at 2013 look at the goals we’d setup for ourselves and then we’ll dive into what we’re looking to do in over the next 12 months.
[14:33] Mike: So my first goal from last year was to stop writing code and I think within a week or two of stating that as a goal, I said that I didn’t really want to do it because I actually enjoy writing code. I haven’t really stopped writing code. I still write code here and there usually for bug fixes or things that need to get done quickly, a lot of times I’ll take the stuff that needs to get done and outsource it. But if there’s stuff that is extremely time sensitive, maybe it needs to be done the next day or only a couple of days away and I don’t necessarily have the time to hand it off to somebody, I’ll just do it.
[15:04] I usually handle a lot of the smaller bug fixes as well like if a customer comes up with something and it’sjust not working quite the way that they want or if there’s errors that are getting thrown and I’ll handle those. But for the most part I don’t write I’d say a lot of the core code anymore. I’m basically handing that off doing much more high level design than most of the implementation.
[15:24] Rob: Very nice. Yeah, getting away from code is always hard I think for both of us. Even I’m still writing code at this point because I just enjoy it too much. So my first goal for 2013 was to grow HitTail by 2.5x and that was based on the October revenue which I think is when I had a personal retreat and made this goal. I didn’t make 2.5x. I did get to 2x HitTail from October revenue which was a five figure number already. So it’s not a small amount.
[15:53] The reason I didn’t hit 2.5 well there’s two reasons. One is I did start to back off of it to do MicroConf and then that lead right into Drip. So I didn’t have as much time as I’d like to devote to it. The other reason is that Google did their not provided thing and I saw it coming and started backing off of some of the marketing spend earlier even before Google announced it a couple months ago. And so that had definitely had an impact on the growth. Now I‘ve already talked about on the podcast some efforts that I’m going to be undertaking to kind of get around that but we’ll see how it goes in 2014.
[16:28] Mike: My next one was to launch Audit Shark publically and I would say that I’ve gone ahead and done that even though I’m still working through the early access list and slowly on boarding people and making sure the system can handle it as they come on. But I mean you can go to the site and sign up right now. There’s nothing stopping you. But like I said, I’m working through the early access list with people just to give them a little bit more hand holding and anyone who’s signing up through that is going to end up getting some sort of a discount I haven’t fully published any of that stuff. But there is different pricing for the early access people versus the public pricing.
[17:00] Rob: My second goal was to launch Drip in the spring and then I had a six month revenue mark that I wanted to hit and so I did not launch Drip in the spring. It really started having paying customers around June so it was more summer and then somewhere in there it’s hard to say really what launch was. You could say its November but it was already doing in the thousands a low four figures before then so I’d say it launched in late summer or early fall. I have not hit the six month revenue mark. I mean I really only worked through the list about 30 days ago so I do think I’m definitely on that track to meet or exceed that six month revenue mark but we’ll have to see.
[17:38] Mike: My third goal was to grow to a full time team of at least three people and nobody who’s working on Audit Shark is full time on it yet right now but I do have about five people that are working at least on a part time basis in some way, shape or form related to Audit Shark. So I would say that I definitely did not hit that goal but there was some partial progress on that.
[17:58] Rob: My third goal was to hold another MicroConf that changed the way people launched their companies and I wasn’t even thinking about MicroConfEurope. I don’t think it was an option at the time but I would say that we achieved that with MicroConf in Vegas because MicroConf 2013 in my opinion was the best one we’ve done. Looking forward to 2014 for another.
[18:17] Mike: My fourth goal was to help get my wife’s fitness business system stable and profitable. I’d say that it’s pretty profitable. It’s not necessarily stable. It kind of influx right now but I don’t know whether that’s just because of the different partnerships that she’s kind of looking at or whether it’s because of the time of year because anytime between thanksgiving and new years is not a great time to try and get people to work out.
[18:39] Rob: Yeah. It’s always hard. I’ve heard the fitness business is unstable by definition.
[18:44] Mike: My understanding is that things really pick up in January because people have put together all these new year’s resolutions and it’s kind of weird that I hear that a lot of fitness studios and gyms have these membership programs where it’s like you get subscribed to them on a monthly basis and then people will come for a month or two and then will stop coming for three or four months because they kind of fall off the wagon and then they go to cancel and then they find out that there’s like this $90 or $120 cancelation fee that goes along with it.
[19:15] So then sometimes they’ll delay a little bit more because they’re like I don’t want to have to pay that but at the end of the day they’re going to have to pay to cancel anyway which is kind of weird to me but you think that if you sign up for it then you’re good to go whenever you decide to cancel but that’s just not how it works.
[19:30] Rob: Right. Kind of like you mentioned when business hold their customers hostage.
[19:36] Mike: Yes.
[19:37] Rob: Sounds a little like that. So my fourth and final goal from last year from 2013 was to release three video training courses. The first was a video about hiring virtual assistants and that’s at startupvacourse.com I did get that one done. About three months into the year I figured I wasn’t going to make the other two. With MicroConf taking up as much time as it did and then with Drip being pushed basically back on the launch, it just didn’t seem like the best idea. I wanted to work on my software products instead of focusing on another video course.
[20:12] I would love to do another video course n 2014. I think three is just too ambitious. Recording it wasn’t the hard part. It was getting all the meta stuff together and getting it uploaded and I uploaded to you to me and getting the marketing done. The course was profitable but it’s not worth the number of hours that I spent time on it compared to what I can do with an app like Drip that has recurring revenue tied to it. So we’ll see what happens in 2014 if I do another one. It definitely was a lot of fun to put it together but I think like MicroConf, it’s a lot of effort for kind of a onetime pop or just a one time launch so I’ve kind of for now my site’s on the more recurring stuff.
[20:52] Mike: For my last goal, one was to write a security book who assists with the marketing behind Audit Shark and I’d say I pulled back from that pretty early on just because I knew that it was going to be a big undertaking so that’s still on the back burner at some point. I’ll revisit that. It will probably actually be pushed into this year. I just haven’t gotten back to it mainly because I’ve been involved with Audit Shark. And then the last one was to cut 75% of my travel consulting. And I haven’t cut 75% I probably cut maybe 20% so I’m still working on that. When customers are paying that much for an 8 or 10 or 20 week project, they kind of want to see your face.
[21:28] Rob: Very good. So let’s dive into what we have in mind for 2014. It’s early December so we kind of have 13 months to dig through these and it looks like we each have five goals. You want to kick us off with the first thing you’re looking to do?
[21:41] Mike: Sure. So the first one is obviously to go full time on Audit Shark and it seems like with the product actually launched at this point and on the path to having some real revenue I feel like that is something I should be able to achieve.
[21:54] Rob: Very nice. For me, my first goal is to 5xDrip. Since Drip is still in somewhat early stages, 5x is I think a doable goal. It’s definitely ambitious and it’s beyond what I had in the original marketing plan but things have been going well so far and so I want to set my stats high. So we’ll see if I can get there.
[22:13] Mike: My next one as I said before was to work on that security book so my goal for the end of this coming year is to finish the security book and have it out there as an additional marketing avenue for Audit Shark.
[22:24] Rob: My second goal is to do some work on HitTail. This is actually a short term goal. Really I expect to have HitTail back providing the full value that it was before the Google not provided fiasco. I hope to do that in the next 30 to 60 days. What that means is I’ll resume some of the marketing and kind of do another push. So the goal here is a little loose. It’s to get HitTail back on track. I don’t necessarily have a revenue growth goal because I won’t be hammering on it as much as I do Drip but I want to get it back to where it was pre not provided, get that marketing spend going again.
[22:57] Mike: My third goal is to get back to blogging and writing a little bit more. I’ve started doing this probably more over the last month than anything else. I’ve got a few different blog posts that I got cued up but one of the things that I did was I actually started putting together a real email list for my blog. So it’s not very large right now but if anyone is interested and wants to go sign up you can go to singlefounder.com. I will be posting probably about every other week. I do have several posts that are kind of already cued up. My goal is to publish 26 blog posts through that email newsletter by the end of the year.
[23:28] Rob: My third goal for 2014 is to throw two MicroConfs in a sustainable manner. And what I mean by that is in a way where you and I aren’t so tied to it in terms of all the labor being done. We were able – we were lucky to land Dan Taylor to help us run the MicroConf in Prague and that took quite a bit of the labor off of us. Now I’m thinking what are we going to do in Vegas because it just takes too much time and we want to keep doing it and we want to keep making it better every year but I want to figure out how to make that more sustainable so that it doesn’t detract from the other things that both you and I are trying to do.
[24:04] Rob: My fourth goal is to take a real extended vacation and by extended vacation I mean at least two weeks maybe more. I took a vacation earlier this summer which it was only about a week long. My family and I went out over to Niagara falls, took the kids out there, went on the maid of the midst and basically took an extended road trip through upstate New York and went up to Adirondacks and went camping. I guess I shouldn’t call it camping. I have a cottage up there so it’s not really roughing it or anything. But it was a lot of fun and it was very relaxing.
[24:35] I don’t think there was a time where I didn’t have internet access in some way shape or form through my phone but it was just nice to be able to relax in that way. So I think I’d like to extend that a little bit more and instead of just one week maybe do at least two, maybe more but we’ll see how things go.
[24:50] Rob: My fourth goal for 2014 is to relaunchmicropreneur.com, the Micropreneur Academy with you. We’ve been in some early talks to figure out what to do next because the Micropreneur Academy’s been around for four years now and it just needs some reworking. So we started putting some brain power into that looking at the changes that need to be made and no exact decisions made yet but I think that will be coming here in early 2014. I think our goal is to get it out before MicroConf Vegas. That’s definitely going to be time intensive to get that done as such I have it on the goals list here. And if you haven’t ever checked out the academy it’s atMicropreneur.com and if you have checked it out in the past, know that we will be expecting to release something new, kind of a revamp of it in the next several months.
[25:37] Mike: My last goal is to make a conscious effort to improve my health just in general but specifically one of my goals is to lose about 2.5% of my BMI by the time MicroConf. It’s about 10 pounds or so. There’s obviously differences between losing weight versus losing some fat off of your body and just becoming generally healthier. So I’ve actually been going to the gym quite a bit more than I probably have all year. Things are going reasonably well so far. So as long as I don’t blow up my ankle or anything like that then I should be okay.
[26:06] Rob: Nice. So my fifth goal is an honorable mention and what I mean by this is it was an unpublished goal in 2013 and I have it there in case I get everything else done and have extra time but it’s falling off the list the last two years and I frankly don’t think I will get to it in 2014 but it’s something that’s been on my mind and that’s to do a second addition of start small stay small. Like the academy it’s been out there for several years and it could use some updating and I just have so many new thoughts that aren’t in that book so we’ll see. It will either be late in 2014 or it may move up the list in 2015.
[26:43] Before we started mentioning these goals, we probably should’ve prefaced it but I guess we’ll just do a post script here. I think it’s important for people to understand why we set these goals. I know that as a goal oriented person, if I don’t have these on the list then I can tend to wander. It’s pretty easy when you’re bootstrapped especially if you don’t have a founder, you don’t really have a ton of accountability. And so these goals are part of what keeps me accountable to continuing to push hard over the next year.
[27:14] And I will show probably most of these goals to my mastermind groups. These are written down in my idea notebook that I always talk about and I will come back to them over and over this year. And although they’re not an exactly blueprint of what’s going to happen, I do have a general timeframe of how each of these play out. Probably the month or two, the 60 day period when I think they’ll each be completed and especially with growing Drip, I do have a month by month time table of where I think I can get and how hard it’s going to be to get there.
[27:46] I threw out I want a 5x Drip. I didn’t pull that number out of thin air because it’s a nice round number. I actually looked at how much traffic I think it can drive. I took a percentage of how many people I think will convert to trial. I looked at our trial to paid conversion. I looked at churn. I drew all these numbers into a machine and it gives you kind of a range and I picked the number that I think I can hit but that’s definitely ambitious. So these goals will absolutely drive me over the next 12-13 months and without them, I find that I tend to wander and I tend to hear about some new project or hear about a new idea. I get email pitches all the time to do stuff that sounds like fun.
[28:22] And the problem is if I don’t have these goals that keep me tethered to what I really want and to what I pick out by spending hours and hours of thinking what do I want in 2014, then I will tend to wander. I think most of us do too. It’s the entrepreneurial ADD. And we see a lot of folks who do just wander from one thing to the next and my guess is that having goals could be some type of tether to keep them centered around that. Is that similar to your reason for setting goals or do you have others?
[28:47] Mike: No, it is. And it’s funny you mentioned that you would show this to your mastermind group and let them know what your goals were because speaking of masterminds, one of the things that I do is I take a lot of notes for our mastermind group so usually what I’m doing is I’m taking notes and anytime somebody talks and says these are the things that I’ve done, these are the things that I plan on doing next week, I basically take all the things that everyone says that they were planning on doing next week and then putting them into an email and right after the mastermind group meeting is over, I send that email to everybody. So I sent it to all three of us.
[29:21] And then I also sent one using boomerang for one week later so that it goes out the following week and that way at the beginning of the week, everybody gets these. So it’s not like there’s two weeks in between and you’re rushing like oh its Monday. We’ve got our mastermind group meeting tomorrow. Let me try and squeeze all these things in that I was supposed to be working on for the past two weeks. And instead, they get that email and reminder right away these are the things you should be working on at least start on them sooner rather than later. And then you get that follow-up the kind of in between. And I think that helps people to stay on task because as you said, some of these things, there’s really long amount of time between them.
[29:58] You said that in order for you to 5x Drip, it’s not like that’s going to happen overnight. There’s different goals and milestones that you’re going to need to be able to meet. You got to get to 2x before you get to 5x. And there’s kind of a clear path of progression for being able to do that. And I think being able to refer back to these goals, helps keep you focused on the things that you should be working on. And if you’re getting pulled in directions that are not necessarily in line with those goals, then you really need to reconsider whether or not that’s something you should be doing.
[30:23] Rob: So if you’re looking for some perhaps public accountability, I’d encourage you to sit down, take a couple hours hopefully away from email and away from the distractions of family and try to think of what you hope to achieve in 2014 and we’d love to see a few of your goals since Mike and I have shared ours here, we’d love to see your goals in the comments section of this episode startupsfortherestofus.com and its episode 163.
[30:50] If you have question for us, call our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us atquestions@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. See you next time.
Episode 162 | Our Predictions for 2014
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I will be discussing our predictions for 2014. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 162.
[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.
[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:28] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Mike?
[00:34] Mike: Well, I got some exciting news. I sent out an email this morning to my launch list and invited a bunch of people to come out and test the Linux functionality.
[00:43] Rob: Of Audit Shark. Very cool. So Audit Shark is now live right? If people go to auditshark.com they’re able to sign up for a free trial, download the installer and get their server audited.
[00:54] Mike: Yup.
[00:55] Rob: Congratulations.
[00:56] Mike: Thanks. So yeah, all that stuff’s up and running but like I said, in last week’s episode. I mean I’m still going to my launch list and I plan on individually emailing people and trying to get them on boarded and making sure that anyone who’s on the launch list will get some extra special attention just because they were there first and I feel like they deserve a little bit of extra hand holding. I’ll also just established in that relationship I’ll make sure that I’m getting the feedback that I need from people to help flush out anything else that people need. So it’s not like I’m just throwing this out there and saying okay, Audit Shark has launched and hands off and doing nothing but marketing at this point. I almost feel like it’s still sort of a beta launch.
[01:34] Rob: I saw you use the word concierge in the email. I hope people get you’re like up to one hour, my concierge service – so that’s cool. That’s a nice offer. Good luck doing that in December when B-B slows down so much in December so obviously if there’s not a big response to this email, picking stuff back up in January is not a bad way to go.
[01:52] Mike: Yeah. In the past week I’ve had two different companies tell me hey I’d love to look at this but right now is a bad time. Get back to me in the first quarter or January whatever.
[02:00] Rob: So the first month of Drip, of the public launch just ended. So I sent out the big launch email November 6th. We have a 21 day trial so that will close at the end of November and quite pleased with revenue growth. I probably won’t talk much about revenue after this but I did want to say that first month of revenue was $7,000.
[02:21] Mike: Very nice.
[02:22] Rob: So yeah, I’m quite pleased with that. I figured that with the launch list as big as it was, if I didn’t get over 5,000 I was going to be quite disappointed and so to hit just over 7,000 and that looks like it may even grow a little bit, flat line or grow in December which is saying a lot because that’s always a pretty stagnant month but I’m happy with that. Now the real work begins.
[02:43] Mike: That’s one of the down sides of like launching a product is that you’re fighting all this time to get to the actual launch and you almost feel like you should be able to take a break at that point and it’s just totally not even remotely close to accurate.
[02:55] Rob: Yup. Now it’s all the experimentation, getting all the marketing engine going. How about you? What else is going on?
[03:02] Mike: The other thing in terms of Audit Shark, several people had actually asked me to prioritize a lot of the things that Audit Shark is doing so that’s probably about ¾ the way down right now. Everything on the Windows side is done and then there’s a lot of stuff that is on the Linux side that is probably halfway done at this point. But I would expect the next week or two that stuff will be completed and then my policy developer is going to continue working on all that stuff.
[03:24] Some of the attendees at MicroConf Europe had kind of challenged me to do a little bit more of a fundraiser for a charity based on the talk that I gave. And if you’re interested in doing any sort of year end donations to charities, go to kazoochallenge.com and I’ll be running a fundraiser there to help small children who have gotten cancer and basically just need a little bit of extra help. And you’ll be able to sign up for a mailing list. I’ll be doing a write-up and analysis of all the marketing efforts afterwards probably in January, so just going to talk about what sorts of things worked and what things didn’t. The website again is kazoochallenge.com and you can go sign up there if you’re looking for any sort of year end donations or if you’re just looking to help out people with cancer.
[04:05] Rob: Right. And this ties into your kazoo story that you made during MicroConf Europe and about how different messages sold more because it was in person or didn’t sell. If someone’s wondering what the heck you’re talking about go back and listen to our MicroConf Europe wrap up episode.
[04:19] So I have a couple of things. One is regarding HitTail and I actually want to send a shout out of thank you to Brendan Dunn of planscope.io. He’s a HitTail user and he’s also actually been one of the big early supporters of Drip and a really good first customer there. He has made a suggestion on how to get some value back into HitTail or get more value back because obviously HitTail has lost some value to customers because of Google’s recent not provided move. And at one point I had considered tying into the only place that Google still provides cure and that’s inside the Google web master tools area. But I hadn’t done it because there was a lack of data in there.
[04:58] But recently they’ve actually beefed that up surprisingly enough as they’ve killed off all the other SEO tools and made SEO harder. They have added some data in there and I now have enough that I can run the HitTail algorithm on that data so I’ll be implementing some stuff here in the next couple weeks and I’m pretty excited at the thought of being one of the few keyword tools that can get value out of Google keywords frankly.
[05:19] The other thing is there’s a really interesting article. It’s called the Saas analytics lifestyle. It’s at dirtyanalytics.com we’ll link that up in the show notes but it’s basically an expansion of what you and I talked about when we answered Andrey Butov’s question about how to do the early stage Saas marketing before you have enough volume to split test. What should you be doing? This guy talks about the three stages and the first stages like before you can see trends, it’s kind of like the things that don’t scale stage. And then there’s the seeing trends stage and then there’s the optimizing stage. And he talks about which tools and approaches you can use in each of those. Again, we’ll link it up in the show notes but that’s at dirtyanalytics.com.
[06:00 ] And finally I just read a book that I wanted to recommend to the audience called Masters of Doom and it’s about the guys who started id software, the two Johns who built Doom and Quake and a bunch of other games. Fascinating book, awesome startup tale and then of course like with Twitter and Facebook and these other startups the egos get in the way eventually and after these guys bought a bunch of Ferraris, they wind up kicking each other out of the company. And the company doesn’t work because the two geniuses behind it aren’t together anymore and overall it’s just a really inspiring story. In terms of the early days of when they’re actually cranking 100 hour a weeks in a beach house somewhere, there’s like 4 or 5 – it’s a lake house and they’re building these games, it’s such a fun ride.
[06:41] Nothing in here will help you launch your business aside from motivation. There’s no tactical stuff. There’s nothing that you should follow in terms of marketing approaches or anything because these guys, they were just crazy 20 year olds who coded so much and discovered these amazing game engines. So they invented them. And unless you’re going to go do that, there’s not much overlap with the kind of stuff we do. Overall, one of the better audio books that I‘ve listened to probably in the past six months.
[07:05] Mike: I think I remember hearing or reading recently that John Carmack is officially no longer associated with id software.
[07:12] Rob: How interesting. Yeah because John Romero got kicked out and left years before. I didn’t know. Because the book was written in 2003 so you kind of lose the last 10 years.
[07:22] Mike: I think the story was just he kind of stepped away to do other things but yeah it’s interesting to see how somebody can kind of come so far and say okay I just want to do something completely different.
[07:30] Rob: Yeah, I can totally see it. I mean that guy basically worked from the sounds of it he worked 80 or 90 hour weeks for 15-20 years on just gaming and building gaming and all that stuff. I can totally imagine it. And he made millions of dollars if not tens of millions of dollars and like I said, they literally bought Ferraris. They were like 21 or 22 and they’d go down to a leadership and pay cash. One of them owned multiple Ferraris and would invest six figures into souping them up. So it is that crazy kind of 1980’s excess lifestyle tale, that part of it. But none the less, I have a lot of respect for Carmack in particular. He was the programmer behind it whereas Romero, he’s like the game and level designer but Carmack, it sounds to me like without him I don’t think any of it would’ve have happened.
[08:12] Music
[08:15] Well, every year in around December time we like to talk about our predictions for the next year. And this year I thought it’d also be fun to review the predictions we made for 2013. So about a year ago, you and I went through think I made five predictions and you made four and we’ll run through those pretty quickly and talk about whether or not we feel like those happened or didn’t. And then we’ll talk about what we see coming up over the next 12 months. So I’ll kick us off with my first prediction for 2013 and I said that 2013 would be the year of Pinterest.
[08:43] I’ve been making this kind of the long haul on Pinterest for a couple of years. If you listened back two years ago I think I made a similar call like Pinterest was just going to grow. I think 2012 was a great year for Pinterest. 2013 I feel like although it continued to grow and they raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital at an exorbitant evaluation, I didn’t feel like it was as mainstream. At least I didn’t hear about it from the non-techies that I know as much as I did the previous year. But I do think Pinterest is kind of finding its niche and with the recipes and food, restaurants and there’s design there’s this whole tattoo and clothing and there’s a lot of niches where it’s a big deal.
[09:24] I do think that Pinterest is a gold mine. I think they’re much more commerce based even though they don’t have a lot of like commerce stuff going on. They’re testing like paid advertisements and I think they have the potential to be much more valuable than Twitter. I would say that my predication did not come true that it wasn’t the year of Pinterest that I actually think it could carry over and sometime in 2014 we’re going to be hearing more about how much money Pinterest is making. Even though they may not be as large as Twitter in terms of reach, I think they could actually be much more profitable.
[09:53] Mike: Yeah. I don’t think that I heard about Pinterest from anybody.
[09:56] Rob: Crazy and yet they did raise 2 to 300 million based on a really high evaluation and they released their API within the last month. There’s a lot going on there but it is like you said. It’s not as mainstream as Twitter or Facebook.
[10:12] Mike: One of the other ones I came up with was Google was going to continue to host people for using marketing techniques. They’ve advocated that people use for years with various algorithm updates. And I feel like they’ve done this.
[10:24] Rob: Yeah.
[10:25] Mike: Rob do you feel that way?
[10:26] Rob: Yeah. They’ve done so much. We’ve talked about how they blocked the scraping of their results so you can’t get rank tracking anymore, the not provided that they’ve done additional updates. I think there was a humming beard update. Absolutely. That goes in line with one of my predictions. My prediction was more Google changes that will hammer the SEO’s and I don’t just mean algorithm updates and I think that plays in well with what happened.
[10:49] Mike: Another one of mine was I don’t foresee Apple releasing any brand new products this coming year at least not at the scale of the iPhone or iPad or anything like that.
[10:57] Rob: Right. I think that’s correct because they just released some incremental updates to iPad and their normal laptops and the desktop and then they did iPad mini but I would call that an incremental as well. I think when you were talking about new products, you were basically saying they’re going to release a watch or a television. Those are the kind of things we discussed.
[11:16] Mike: Yeah.
[11:17] Rob: A couple of mine had to do with WordPress. One of them was WordPress will become even more prominent than it already is and I feel like – it’s a fairly safe prediction but WordPress continues to climb in its and how much of the internet it powers and the numbers vary but I think its somewhere around a fifth of the internet like 19% of the internet runs on WordPress so I don’t see that trend subsiding anytime soon. The other prediction was that subscription WordPress plug-ins would start to come around, would gain a little bit of prominence. I don’t think I’ve really seen that and I’m surprised. I’m surprised someone hasn’t figured out how to make that work yet but perhaps it will be in 2014.
[11:57] Mike: Yeah. I haven’t really seen that either but you’ll never know. I feel like it will come around at some point but one of the problems I see with it is just I’ll say the culture around people who are buying WordPress plug-ins because they expect that they buy it once and that’s it. It almost feels like you have to have an additional service behind it that going to continually be updated and used for other things because if everything’s coming into your website it feels difficult to justify pain like a monthly subscription for something that you’ve installed and its running on your servers and the data isn’t really going anywhere. You really need that integration someplace else that’s doing something on the back end.
[12:34] Rob: Right. Yeah. You need an external service that you’re paying for. So my last prediction for last year was the startup bubble would become more evident. Inflated evaluations would continue to rise and there would be either bursting in 2013 or 2014 and then I said this would only mean good news for those of us who don’t need to be acquired in order to build a successful business. Now start evaluations have continued to rise and become inflated as I’ve kind of stepped newly on to the angel investing scene and have been looking at evaluations people are asking. It is absolutely insane to me to see these $5 million evaluations on a company that’s basically two people with an angel list profile.
[13:12] Now nothing has burst at this point. I don’t know if it will happen in 2014 or not but the acquisition of Instragram for a billion dollars and I don’t know, there were few other this year that were just outlandishly in my opinion overvalued based on the value they bring. I’d say this one came through the bursting whether or not that happens this year I guess it remains to be seen.
[13:36] Mike: My last prediction was that Windows 8 was not going to take the world by storm
[13:39] Rob: I would say that was correct. That was probably a pretty safe prediction at the time.
[13:44] Mike: The thing is I haven’t tried Windows 8 yet at the time I played around with it on the surface pro like best buy and things like that so it’s not terribly exciting. It’s new and it’s different but it doesn’t have – there’s like the refinemence that I think that it needs that it still just don’t have yet.
[14:00] Rob: Let’s dive into our 2014 predictions. We each have a handful here. My first is that Twitter will become profitable because they have an IPO so they have to release their info and they are not a profitable company. I think they will become profitable in 2014. I also think they will piss off their users in the process because it’s going to mean ads. One way or another it’s going to mean catering to advertisers. Now the good news is that I think there’s going to be a solid opportunity for paid placement and promotion. They’re already pushing their paid tweets, their sponsored tweets but what we have seen with early ad networks, like when ad words first came up, when Facebook ads first started and now looking at Twitter and I think Pinterest is another one where this could happen. There are opportunities for small entrepreneurs like us to get in and really learn the system before other people know it and there’s a lot of arbitrage opportunities to get in there at those early clicks.
[14:56] Remember the five cent ad word clicks that people talk about? I think there’s potential for Twitter and Pinterest to potentially have those this year. But those things eventually go away. Facebook ads have become more expensive overtime. They’re still workable but they were cheaper two years ago. They were more I’d say more effective based on price a couple of years ago so keep your eye out for that.
[15:18] Mike: My first prediction for 2014 is that Apple releasing any sort of a new product is sort of a give me.
[15:25] Rob: Indeed. So you’re saying like a watch or a TV or something.
[15:28] Mike: Yes. Something along those lines. I mean just something that is completely different than the things that they’ve put out in the past. It’s going to be something that is not an incremental update.
[15:37] Rob: Got it. Yeah and that ties into my second prediction which is that Apple will release an I-watch or some type of wearable watch device. There’s so many rumors about that being in development that I think you’re right. I think they’ve taken a year off from releasing new products and that they kind of got to get back in the game or else stock market’s going to start punishing them.
[15:57] My next prediction is for Saas business that concierge services will become a requirement if you’re in a crowded market. We’ve talked a lot about this software plus a service plus a concierge service and on-boarding service and a hand holding service. And I think that’s going to continue to become – maybe it won’t be the norm in 2014 but the exceptional companies are going to do that in 2014 and I think it will become the norm past that because the market is just they’re getting too crowed. There’s a lot of Saas apps. The secret’s out that Saas is subscription revenue and that it’s a really good way to go if you want to launch a software company. And so in order to set yourself apart, you have to do things that other people won’t and a lot of developers who can write code don’t want to do any type of – basically the schlepping.
[16:45] Remember Paul Gram talked about this? He talked about the problems that are hard that you have to schlep through. And a lot of developers are going to avoid this and so that makes it more lowing fruit for people who are willing to do stuff that doesn’t scale in order to get their business off the ground and concierge is one of those efforts.
[17:03] Mike: So this one for me is a two part one. The first part is that investors are going to pour a lot more money into startups. I feel that way because there’s one of two things that’s happening is the evaluations are going up so investors are just naturally going to start pouring more money into it until it’s just no longer financially viable for them to do so or that bubble just burst. So either way they’re still going to be dumping money into them but I think another reason why they’re going to start doing that is because a lot of the safe haven investments are starting to go away because the economies of the world seem to be coming out of the recessions of the past couple of years.
[17:38] So when that happens, investors naturally start seeing okay well I’m going to start taking more risks because these other safe investments, they’re no longer paying off for me so I’m going to start taking those risks because they will start paying off. And then the second side of that is that I think you’re going to see a lot more of the high profile acquisition attempts start to be turned down. And one that struck me as bizarre was Snapchat turning down or allegedly turning down the $3 billion offer from Facebook.
[18:07] Rob: What were you thinking?
[18:08] Mike: Yes, I know exactly. What were you guys thinking? I have no idea. Sure, it’s yours. I would’ve taken 2 ½ but hey, who’s going to split hairs over that?
[18:17] Rob: Man, my prediction for 2014 is that Snapchat, we won’t even be talking about it by the end of it. I just can’t imagine actually being a viable social network in 12 months and I think that this may go down as one of those major business mistakes not taking the $3 billion check from Facebook.
[18:33] Mike: But I can also see a lot of other people saying well Snapchat turned it down and there must be a lot of smart people working over there so it must make sense at least at some level to turn down outlandish purchase offers especially when Facebook is offering $3 billion because if that’s the case, then Facebook obviously saw something they wanted and they wanted bad. So I can see other companies putting themselves in that position and holding themselves up to that standard and saying well, we have a better product than Snapchat or we’re worth that much too. So I can definitely see people turning down those high offers whether it’s a mistake or not will kind of remain to be seen but I really do think that Snapchat made a big mistake.
[19:17] Rob: My next prediction is about kick starter and I’m a major feened. I’ve probably backed 20 different kick starter projects and in fact over thanksgiving I think I backed like 5 or 6 just surfing around my iPad during that weekend. But I predict that this year kick starters can have a product that is a major multimillion dollar failure and what I mean by that is a project that raises a bunch of money and then doesn’t deliver. They’ve toyed with this in the past. This has happened on smaller levels kick starter has increased kind of their verbiage and their risk verbiage and you have to say there’s a lot of risks in this project and blah, blah.
[19:56] But these kick starter projects are getting bigger and bigger and they’re raising more and more money and it’s just bound to happen based on odds that tens of millions that were raised in 2013 that are basically pledged to be delivered in 2014, my prediction is that something’s going to happen with one of those and then it’s going to be all over the news when that happens. I don’t think it would ruin kick starter and I don’t think it’s the end of the world but I do think that we’ll be hearing about it at some point in the next 12 months.
[20:23] Mike: Wasn’t there a project to fund the company to develop a basically competitor to Facebook? I think there was a group of 5 or 6 people who they were college kids I think out of New York city that raised something like $100,000 and I could see that totally going south because the level of engineering effort that people would underestimate needs to be done to support an infrastructure like Facebook has, I would imagine those type of people just don’t have the understanding of the infrastructure needed.
[20:55] Rob: I don’t even think it’s a technology problem. It’s the momentum problem. It’s the market place problem because what’s the Facebook clone when you have 50 users? For them to get to critical mass would be insanely hard. Even if they can code what’s needed to duplicate Facebook and I don’t particularly doubt that they can, it’s going to be the getting critical mass that’s going to be a problem and we’re seeing that with app.net right now. They’re doing okay but they are struggling to build quickly. And if you get in there, you don’t – there aren’t very many people that you know in there because well, it’s just not big enough.
[21:30] Mike: Unless there’s some sort of integration with Facebook and Facebook has kind of locked everybody out at this point so I don’t see they’re going to be able to suck those users out of Facebook and nobody really wants to float back and forth between multiple social networks I don’t think. Another prediction that I have is that I don’t think we’re going to see a clear winner in either the game console market or in tablets. I think it’s going to go back and forth a little bit especially in the console market juts because of the difference in some of the games that they have because there’s platform specific games for the Xbox 1 or the Play Station 4 and I think depending on what games come out is going to dictate a little bit of that back and forth but those really aren’t going to hit their strive for probably 4 or 5 years just the same way that their previous consoles did.
[22:12] Rob: I can’t comment on the game consoles. I don’t follow that closely enough. I think with tablets, depends on how you define a clear winner because android is out selling IOS now by 2 or 3 to 1. And so if you mean a clear winner in terms of android units moved in 2014 versus IOS, I think android’s going to win. Now on the flip side, Apple has way higher profit margins than any of the android companies, the companies putting out android tablets. So if you go based on the actual amount of net profit produced, then I think Apple will probably continue to be the winner in 2014. Now as we slide into 2015 I think that the margins could be squeezed. I don’t think iPad’s going to suddenly go away in 2014.
[22:54] Mike: I don’t see either android or IOS pushing the other one out and I understand that they’re fighting pretty hard for market share against each other but I just don’t see either one of them dominating the other and I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon because there are some people who prefer a much more open market place where they can install anything they want and then there others who would much rather have Apple take control over the ecosystem and say these are things that are allowed and these are things that are not. And just because you’ve got what seems to be a critical mass of each faction, I don’t see either one of them going away.
[23:28] Rob: We have a lot of Apple predictions here because my next prediction is that Apple will continue to lose market share in the IOS market specifically both with phones and tablets as history starts to repeat itself. And what I mean by that is Apple and Microsoft competed with Windows and the Mac OS back in the 80’s and the open version one in terms of market share. And we are seeing a similar trend right now and we’re seeing android take it over. I think android is over between 70% and 80% of the – it’s the mobile OS market, if it’s combined phone and tablet or if that’s just phone. But they are just swarming the market.
[24:07] Now again, the net profit is still with Apple right now for the time being but the net profit was also still with Apple in 1982 and ’83 as they were battling back and forth against the DOS stuff and IBM’s PC. If you look at the trending lines, it’s an interesting trend. Now I say this as someone who essentially owns in this house right now there are eight Apple computers including laptops, iPads and mobile phones and so I am an Apple supporter and someone who like being in that ecosystem. But it’s going to be interesting times over the next couple years to see how this plays out and to see if in fact history does repeat itself with android and IOS like it did with Mac OS and windows.
[24:50] Mike: Why don’t I switch over to Google in a little bit and say I think that the Google glass is going to become publicly available in either really, really late 2014 or early 2015.
[24:59] Rob: How about more of a prediction not like when it’s released but do you think that it’s going to become a mainstream thing? Do you think that a lot of people that is going to sell well or that it’s going to be a flop?
[25:08] Mike: I think that there are going to be certain applications for it that it’s going to do extremely well and I think that they’re going to be in places where you wouldn’t necessarily think that they would be or that they should be and I’ll give you an example. In warehouses, I can see them being very, very huge and the reason for that is back 12 or 14 years ago, I worked on a project for a warehouse where it was basically they were switching over from a paper base system to voice recognition system.
[25:36] So I implemented all these API’s and everything to talk back and forth between databases and a voice recognition unit where instead of somebody using all these papers to walk around the warehouse and get all the stuff they then just would talk into this unit and the unit would tell them where they needed to go and how much of the stuff that they needed to get. And I can see them taking something like that and switching it over to something like Google glass where Google glass shows them the information as opposed to the talking into a headset and having it being voice recognition only.
[26:06] So I think that applications like that where you need to display a lot of data and you really do need to have your hands free in order to do other things construction jobs, I’ll say a lot more of the blue collar type jobs that are out there for that type of experience where they do need that data, anything where they can get rid of the paper, they’re going to start doing that.
[26:27] Rob: So then the answer to my question of do you think they’ll be successful is no because if Google is only able to get Google glass into niche professional applications. It is not going to sell 100 million units which is the kind of success that the iPad and the iPhone and recent innovations have. That’s like the big mark of holy crap, this is an amazing hardware success. If Google sells a couple million glass units, I would guess that it would be dubbed a failure. And I think if it’s a niche thing like you’re saying where you had doctor’s offices or with people in warehouses that those would be the kind of numbers that hits.
[27:06] Mike: That’s a niche that I could see it definitely going in but I mean you think about all the different applications for something like that, you could say oh well, used in doctor’s offices so that the doctor doesn’t have to go back to his computer or go over some place to log in. That would be one application of it or traders on Wall Street. That would be another application. So there’s all these I’ll say really tight niches that it could be used in but I think that there’s a lot of them and I think that Google’s going to depend and rely heavily on their developers to develop products for those different industries to help them sell Google glass.
[27:39] And then obviously Google is going to want to be able to display advertisements and stuff like that later on the future but I could definitely see it becoming a big thing but I don’t think it’s going to become the big thing overnight. It’s going to have to wait until the ecosystem is there for the applications for those different niches.
[27:57] Rob: This is actually a good time that I was going to mention something about catching a wave as its going up and that’s one thing that id software did in that book Masters of Doom I mentioned is they caught the video game wave and they wrote it and they did really well with it but they worked hard and they basically cut a growth market. And in the 80’s that was PC’s and it was PC gaming. In the 90’s that was the internet. In 2000 it was mobile. So talk is that in the 2010’s to 2020’s is going to be wearable’s and also I think drones like flyables and stuff, attaching cameras and different delivery stuff to drone.
[28:32] So if you are looking to get way out there, you’re probably going to need funding to do this or you’re going to need to basically work your butt off to learn the infrastructure ahead of people. Google glass is a place I would look. I would look also at these wearable watches and stuff. These are super risky right? Because you could spend a bunch of – spend a whole year investing time, money, effort into being at the forefront of these things and anyone of them could tank. There’s no guarantee they’re going to work.
[28:57] But those are the places where the biggest Greenfield and is essentially that if you’re out ahead of other folks just like the people who are out ahead of IOS and got their apps on early are the ones that eventually had the amazingly successful games and actually mage quite a bit of money from mobile apps. So my last prediction for 2014 is that integration marketing will pick up steam as more companies offer API’s and become more interconnected.
[29:21] Integration marketing’s something I’ve talked about several times where you essentially integrate your software with other software in order to do two things. 1) to provide value to your users of course but then also so that company will promote you to their audience and that allows you to bring in some of their users to come use your app. I see more and more people doing this successfully and they’re just more API’s. It’s expected now that everybody’s releasing API’s and the need to have integrated data between all these dispersed apps is as high as it’s ever been. And so I think that integrations themselves are growing but I also think there’s opportunity here for entrepreneurs to use these integrations as integration marketing.
[30:03] Mike: So where’s the Drip API?
[30:05] Rob: I have a Drip API. We have a JavaScript one and a rest API. If you got getdrip.com and look at the doc’s link in the footer.
[30:13] Mike: Well I stand corrected then.
[30:15] Rob: Very good.
[30:17] Mike: My last couple predictions are the first one is more of our listeners are going to start to fly solo. I think that as the economy recovers and people become a little bit more stable in their jobs are going to start to look elsewhere because they’re going to become a little bit more risk tolerant just because the job market is improving and they’re going to see a lot of opportunities. Whereas before, it would’ve been a much bigger risk to quit your job and go do something and I think that just based on the general trend that I’ve seen, I think a lot more people are just starting business in general. So I can see a lot of our listeners kind of going that road and doing their own thing.
[30:52] And then the last one that I have I think target marketing at individuals is going to start to become more of a reality. And by targeted at individuals, did you ever see the movie – I think it was Minority Report?
[31:05] Rob: Total Recall is the one I remember but it may have been Minority Report as well where they could look at your eyes and it would speak to you by name.
[31:12] Mike: Yeah. It was Minority Report and I could definitely see that type of tracking mechanism start to become a bigger thing and I’ve seen it a little bit right now. So for example if you have an iPhone and you have the Dunkin Donuts app installed, it can pop up and give you special offers when you’re close to their store. And there’s a bunch of other apps that are doing very similar things but I can see either Apple or Google starting to take some of those things and making them generally available within the platform itself and allowing other applications to hook into those and start just popping those off so that when you’re close to them, there are going to give you that targeted marketing.
[31:53] Rob: Right. So that’s more location based marketing than individual marketing.
[31:57] Mike: It is. But if you have – for example I have the Dunkin Donuts apps so they have an idea of 1) they could figure out where I live just based on where I’m going and then 2) if I’m taking the same route every day, they could basically pinpoint what my route is going to be and then say hey, you’re going to go pass this Dunkin Donuts anyway. Let me pop this up 20 minutes or 30 minutes in advance of when we think that you’re going to go buy there because you go buy here at 8 o’clock in the morning every day. So half an hour in advance I’m going to pop something up that gives you a special offer so that you think about it before you even get on the road.
[32:33] Mike: Right. I would say that’s – I don’t even know that’s a prediction because I think that’s already happening. You’re talking about behavioral based marketing that it looks at your behavior, it looks at your location overtime and basically pitches you things. I think that’s a big part of Four Square. Isn’t it? Isn’t that part of their revenue model? is that if you check into a bunch of places it knows that you’re like a customer of those things and then it makes you offers based on that behavior and location?
[32:59] Mike: It could very well be which makes me correct.
[33:02] Rob: You’re correct already. This is awesome. Congratulations Mike.
[33:05] Mike: Thank you.
[33:06] Music
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Episode 161 | 6 Steps for Building an Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 161.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] 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.
[00:17] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:18] 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?
[00:23] Rob: Well I’ve had a pretty good week in terms of working on Drip. Last week I think I mentioned there were some things went down in terms of email sending and something being shut off and we spent the last week basically diversifying our sending points. So now we’re across 12 domains and multiple email back end providers and all that stuff and then we got that done last week. Its crazy how quickly two people can jump on something like this ad get like an entire new sub system written. My memory kept going back to when I worked – I worked at a credit card company. I also worked at the city of Pasadena.
[00:58] And what we did in 3 ½ days last week would’ve taken probably three months at either those places because so many people needed to be involved. So many meetings had to happen. So many specs had to be written. So much approval had to be gained and here it was like oh crap, we fixed this thing. Last week we had a couple hours where emails weren’t sending and we quickly got that fixed but then it was like how can I make sure this never happens again? And like I said, in 3 ½ days Derek wrote all the code. He and I worked together on getting everything architected and figuring out a bunch of details but that’s pretty much how last week went and it feels good. It feels good to once again knock another one of those things out where it’s solved for the foreseeable future and now we can really move back into building out features that customers want.
[01:42] Mike: I know what you mean especially the part about trying to fix things so that those problems don’t happen ever again or at least that they do then you’ll be able to address them in the future. One of the things I started working on this past week was a support tool box that is specifically designed to call back to some of the API’s that we’re using to do different things so for example regenerating all the reports for either a given customer or for every customer because we have several different reports and they’re all generated based on a series of cues so it’s like just grab the message off the queue and generate the report.
[02:16] Well what happens if in the middle of generating that report, something breaks because our code doesn’t necessarily handle it very well if a partial report is generated or if a piece of it is generated like the place holder and not the rest of it. So I built some support utilities that will allow us to go in and just automatically rebuild some of those which is kind of nice.
[02:35] Rob: Yeah. It’s crazy that typically my dad just told me the last 10% of a project takes 20% to 25% of the time because you always have these little loose ends you didn’t realize were there until you roll some into production and then you have to spend a lot of time troubleshooting. I guess the other update is revenue in November since we did launch to the public. I have a 21 day trial so a lot of revenue, big revenue spike happening as that rolls out. So that feels good. It puts a concrete success metric. It’s not all about revenue but it really does say wow, people are willing to pay for what you built.
[03:10] And so I’m feeling really good about where it is and also being realistic about December is going to be a big slow down as it always is and so long as we can stay flat is my hope during December that heading into January, I’m pretty optimistic about where we’re starting out with. And I’m happy that we got launched. I mean I at one point debated not launching Drip in November and pushing it off ‘til January but given how things are going, it’s just such a motivational thing to have people in there using the app and having pay us money and seeing the bank balance come in.
[03:42] Mike: That’s an interesting point you make about revenue and looking at that as sort of a bench mark because when you got a new product and you’re trying to figure out is it addressing the needs that people have and people start asking you questions about that product, that’s almost always the default benchmark that people go back to. It’s like well, how much money is it making because it’s kind of common number that you can just track across almost any application just like well how much money is it making? It tends to be cut and dry obviously if you’ve got like a Saas model versus a onetime fee. I mean it can be very wildly between them. But there’s still some general I’ll say consensus, ideas about whether or not you’re doing well and it’s only been out for a week or a month or something like that.
[04:23] Rob: Right. How about on your end what’s new?
[04:24] Mike: Audit Shark I suppose has become public knowledge on another podcast but Audit Shark is live at this point.
[04:30] Rob: Can I go to auditshark.com and sign up for a production account?
[04:33] Mike: Yes you can.
[04:34] Rob: Indeed except for I heard a little rumor that I won’t be billed. You don’t have the billing code.
[04:39] Mike: Well the billing code is there. It just tracks it like a Striped ID right now and I’d have to go in and manually do it. That’s more because I just have – I don’t feel like I’ve thoroughly tested the billing code enough so I’m not confident and just flipping the switch and turning it on. That’s not to say that I couldn’t turn it on. It’s just I haven’t tested it to know exactly what’s going to happen if I did.
[04:55] Rob: Right. So you’re taking cards upfront. You’re sorting the token. You run them through Stripe. They say it is a valid card. You’re storing the token locally so that you could run a charge at the end of your trial you just don’t have the schedule tasks up to run the job.
[05:09] Mike: The job is written. As you said, I haven’t turned it on. I haven’t scheduled it to actually run. But I mean aside from that, you could go out there and you could sign up for it but it’s not something I’m actively promoting right now. Literally before this podcast I got an email from my developer saying that he finished one of the reports. And we’re still going to have to work it into the code base over the next day or two. Now that that’s done, that’s one of the things that was holding up some of the people in the early access right now that says this is what is stopping me from pulling the trigger and say yes, I’m willing to pay for this.
[05:38] Rob: Very cool. So now you could go back to your early access list and start working with those folks one on one.
[05:44] Mike: I’m going to go through that list anyway and try to work with people one on one just to use it as a learning experience because those are the people that I feel that I’m going to learn the most from and those are going to be the ones that I can work with. So if they have questions or specific problems, there’s going to be I’ll say a little bit more of a warm relationship already because they’re already on the email list. They’ve already gotten a couple of emails. I’ll be able to go to them and say hey this is who I am. Can I get you to sign up and create an account and walk them through it and try and find out if there’s any specific problems they’re having and get those addressed. And in the mean time, if somebody comes through and signs up for an Audit Shark account, I have no problem with them doing that. It’s just the cold customers right now are still just not necessarily my focus.
[06:25] Rob: Sure and at this point that wouldn’t be my focus either. I just read two books. One is Hatching Twitter. It’s written by a journalist named Nick Bilton and I liked it a lot. It’s a journalist degree telling of the origins of Twitter. And if you’re into that kind of thing, The Facebook Effect was another book and In The Plex was the one about Google. These are all just retellings and reconstructions of the early days of a company. It’s fascinating. It’s a good read. I listen to it on audio of course. It definitely keeps you captivated. Nick Bilton is both a respected journalist but also just a good writer, an engaging writer.
[07:03] And it’s crazy the life that these founders went to to screw each other over and kicking each other in and out of the company at different times. It’s pretty intense. I’m thinking Facebook may have been an exception in terms of the turmoil between the co-founders but Twitter was maybe not quite as bad but there was a lot of chaos and a lot of “best friends” starting this company and then basically screwing each other over and kicking each other out. So I’d recommend it if you’re into that kind of thing.
[07:32] The other book that I’m just wrapping up with is called Remote and it’s by 37 Signals and it’s about working remote and how to manage people remotely and that kind of stuff. All of 37 Signals books, I’m pretty lukewarm about it. There’s nothing new in it that I either don’t already know or haven’t heard before and so I’m always trying to figure out am I too entrenched in this world already since I worked with remote people that this isn’t even written for me. I’m wondering who is this information really shocking to? Are there Fortune 500 companies that read it and think oh my gosh this is news to me because it totally was not news to me. It feels like its stuff we’ve already talked about and we all already know. It’s kind of common knowledge in our field.
[08:12] Mike: I’ll let you know what my thoughts are. I bought it probably several weeks ago and I haven’t had a chance to get to it. I was reading the E-Myth Revisited. Somebody in my mastermind group was reading that so I started reading that. Got I’d say 15% or 20% into it and I understand the gist of it. It actually makes a lot of sense but I don’t know how the rest of it turns out. I don’t know if I’ll keep reading it or just kind of start skimming through it [Cross-talk] a lot of things that are really repetitive.
[08:36] Rob: Yeah. I was going to say if you have the gist of it, my guess is you have the gist of it and you’re not going to get anything out of the rest of it. It feels pretty introductory. I think today we’ve just talked about this stuff so much that it’s going to be pretty obvious to you.
[08:49] Mike: I feel like a lot of the concepts and the things that it goes over obvious but I guess what it brings to the forefront of my mind is more the fact that it puts labels on certain things that I had never really had labels before for. So it makes them a little bit more tangible and not that it didn’t make sense before that I didn’t necessarily know about them in my subconscious but having those labels helps. I think Seth Godin is a big proponent of just creating names for things whether they make sense at the time or not, just create names for something so that it helps you to understand it a little bit better.
[09:19] Rob: Yup. I would agree with that. It’s kind of a common naming scheme for these elements. That’s what we talked about with lean startup. Right? That was kind of one of the benefits of lean startup while it has some of the pros and cons and some things we don’t agree with. The fact that they’ve put a label on a bunch of stuff helps us further the cost so that you can say one word and everybody understands kind of the deeper meaning of it.
[09:42] Mike: Yeah. It creates like a fundamental baseline for terminology. And once you have everybody using the same terminology, it makes it easier for everybody to talk about the same thing because then using the same terms everybody means the same thing.
[09:54] Rob: Yeah, there you go. So last thing for me, I appeared in Techzing episode 246 it’s the most recent episode and I talked a lot about Drip, about the launch, went more in depth to kind of the slow launch approach and then just updated on a number of things. So if you’re into a longer form podcast, a little over an hour but it’s a pretty fun casual conversation where I can go more in depth on stuff, go head over to techzinglive.com and checkout episode 246.
[10:20] Mike: Maybe I’ll check it out. My new iPad air at some point, I’m a little disappointed with the Nexus 7 I think I mentioned a while back that I gotten the Nexus 7 to kind of open myself up to the android ecosystem a little bit and I don’t know whether its android or the apps that are running on it but it just seems like the device crashes more often than – it’s just more noticeable I think than on the iPad.
[10:44] Rob: Right. And so do you have the new iPad air? Did you order one?
[10:47] Mike: Not yet. I’ll probably get it in the next day or two. I’ve looked at it a couple of times here and there just kind of deciding between the iPad mini with the retina display and then the new iPad air and be done with it.
[10:59] Rob: Right. Are you able to return the Nexus 7 or you’re going to give it to your wife or kid?
[11:03] Mike: I’ll probably keep it around just so that I have it. I mean maybe they’ll come up with some operating system updates that will fix some of the minor issues that I’m having. I mean it’s still nice to have because it’s kind of small but I just don’t use it for my email. You can’t really type on it. It’s nice to surf the web for stuff real quick because it’s bigger than my phone but beyond that I just don’t find myself using it very often.
[11:24] Rob: Right.
[11:25] Mike: And today’s geek note of the day is that there’s – did you ever play the lone wolf adventure games like you read them and it’s almost like choosing adventure but you actually have to keep track of some stats for your character like back in the 80’s.
[11:38] Rob: You know, I never did. Its lonewolfthegame.com and they put it into IOS and android.
[11:45] Mike: So it will be interesting to see how that turns out. I think it’s like $5 so it’s a little bit on the pricey side for most apps but…
[11:52] Rob: I’ll drop $5 just to check something out because the visuals are nice. Honestly this attitude in the mobile space is so irritating to me that $5 is a lot of money like that. I buy so many apps just because they’re 99 cents and I just want to check them out. It’s like we – I feel like developers should be paid for what they’re doing.
[12:09] Mike: Compared to the other ones out there and I feel like it’s expensive. And I think that’s changing over time as well.
[12:15] Rob: I’ve heard it’s going down though.
[12:15] Mike: Really?
[12:16] Rob: Yeah, that basically everybody’s giving them stuff away for free and that’s why there’s so many in-app purchases now because people are getting free so they could get on the free charts and they can get the distribution and then do an in-app purchase because not only does it allow you to have a free app but in-app purchases are kind of recurring revenue. They’re not subscription based but they are a long term revenues base versus if you charge upfront it’s a onetime sale to everybody.
[12:43] Mike: I don’t know, there’s a few games that I’ve bought that are like $3 or $4 for the game and it’s just like I would’ve paid $5 or $7 for the game because it’s such a good game but then they have like the in-app purchase. I’m not a big fan of the in-app purchases. They don’t necessarily give you that much more enjoyment out of the game.
[12:57] Music
[13:00] Today we’re going to be talking about how to build an effective content marketing strategy. I’ve seen a couple of things about this over on Twitter and Quora and a few other places. I thought it might be interesting to kind of put together an outline of some of the things that you might want to do if you’re looking at putting together a content strategy and it is something that I’m looking at right now. So some of these are pulled from the work that I’ve been doing but some of them I just did a little bit of extra research just to make sure that we had some more information for the podcast.
[13:27] Rob: Got it. And this is different than SEO.
[13:30] Mike: So with SEO, what you’re really doing is you’re to target specific keywords and trying to draw traffic into your website. So for Audit Shark for example I might say okay, well I want to do SEO because I want people when they search for server security monitoring to come to my website and then signup for Audit Shark. But with something like that, you’re really keying in on very, very specific things that you want because you want those people to be searching for specific key terms. Whereas with content marketing what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to cast a little bit more of a wider net.
[14:03] And primarily the reason you’re doing that is because people who are coming to your website aren’t necessarily always at the same level or same stage in your sales pipeline. Some people are going to come to your website because they just have no idea what they’re looking for, no idea what they should be doing with regards to solving whatever that problem is that your product addresses. So sometimes they’re just doing it for education purposes. Sometimes they’re a little bit further along and maybe they’re doing market research to compare competitors against one another and say which one of these two or three or five am I actually going to purchase?
[14:34] So depending on the stage of the pipeline you might create content for your website or for your newsletter or your blog such that it addresses some of the people who were in those different stages versus SEO where you’re trying to get just like one piece of it. Somebody search for X and I want to draw them to my website.
[14:53] Rob: Very cool. Let’s dive in. It looks like we have six steps here.
[14:56] Mike: So the first step is to plan and really what you want to do is you just need to know what it is that you want to do before you start randomly creating content. What is the purpose of the content that you’re creating? What gaps is it trying to fulfill? Who’s the ideal reader for that content? How is going to help them? Is it going to help them make a decision? Is it going to help educate them? Is it going to help position your product against somebody else’s? Are there certain features that your product has that somebody else’s doesn’t? Can you map specific concerns the buyers might have into their needs?
[15:29] There’s all these different things that go into it but you have to plan these things upfront and there’s six steps that we’re going to talk about here but the first one is planning. You need to know what it is that you’re trying to do before you set out and start randomly creating the content.
[15:42] Rob: Yeah and I think you actually have a really nice set of bullet points here that you just ran through. Let’s include those in the show notes because otherwise somebody’s going to have to frantically take notes on this but you touch on a lot of good points about who is your ideal reader, what stage in the buying process is this content targeted at? If you don’t think that through, you’re going to have exactly what you mentioned which is randomly created content but doesn’t have any type of cohesion or any type of sequence to it. The people who know how to do content marketing and execute on it well, there’s a lot of thought given to this stage, just sitting back and thinking how exactly is this going to help people what stage?
[16:18] And even as you put here, you didn’t mention this but it’s an outline. You said what are the marketing channels you’re going to use? Are you going to put on the blog? Is it going to be an email newsletter? Is it going to be an eBook or a white paper for people download? Are you going to create a tool? Because all of that is content marketing. Anything that folks want to share with each other, you look at hub spot and there’s an SEO site grader. There was some other type of site grader that Dharmesh built. These are all forms of content marketing. I think that sitting down and giving this some thought early on can save you a lot of time. Because if you build something that isn’t helpful to people then no matter how good it is, you’re wasting your time.
[16:54] Mike: That you just touched on in terms of the tools is a very important distinction when you talk about content. Content is not just blog articles. It’s not just text on a page. It can be videos. It can be tools. It can be audio. It can be all these different things that are content but they’re designed and put out there so that they help somebody accomplish something whether it’s their job or educate them about something, it does not necessarily have to be just text. Tools are really, really good examples of things that can draw people in if they’re executed well. But the problem with the tool is of course that it could be very time intensive to build some of those tools.
[17:31] Rob: Yeah. I mean even another example, I have two pieces of content that are interlinked for Drip. I haven’t pushed them out yet but probably will in early December and I’ll try to come back and update these show notes but we basically had a marketing intern for the last couple months and he wrote a really solid blogpost about how to calculate a gold value, how to calculate what a new trial or a new purchase is worth, try to get LTV out of things. So we wrote this post and the more we talked about he said you know, I could build a pretty nice calculator out of this that just asks a couple of questions and then calculates their LTV.
[18:06] So now we have a blog, article and a calculator that he created that set like a pretty good example. I mean everything doesn’t have to be two things that tie together but it’s kind of an example of how this content marketing stuff can run the gambit between like you said, words on a page and actual code being written behind the scenes.
[18:23] Mike: Yeah. And some of that’s cross promotion which kind of goes out towards step four which is publishing. So step 2 is create the content. And unless you’re a deep expert in a very specific field you should probably source it out to somebody else who has the time cycles to dedicate to building this content. The problem with building the content yourself is that its time consuming and its very mentally draining to create long pieces of content or even short pieces of content if you’re trying to build a bunch of them. You’re much better off giving somebody some ideas and guidelines and letting them know what it is that you’re trying to accomplish and letting them go out and actually do the work and then come back to you with it so that you can curate it from that point on.
[19:08] So the actual creation of the content I would probably advise most people to outsource that if you can. But in terms of getting ideas or the content there’s a lot of different places that you can go to. You can look at your keyword searches. You can use questions that are coming in from customers based on your FAQ’s or just your support questions. You can look at social media discussions. You can look at top 10 lists that are out there on the topic that you have your products around. You can also take a look at some of the different customer resources that you’ve put together or you can build customer resources for them.
[19:39] So for example you might want to build a checklist or a template for solving a particular problem like for example with Audit Shark I might create here’s a template or a checklist for locking down your server and these are the steps that you need to go through and oh, by the way this product can do it for you but if you’re going to do it on your own, these are the things that you want to do and these are the important pieces that you really need to pay attention to.
[20:01] Rob: The interesting thing is that creating this content can be done fairly quickly. I think it’s all a balance between how much budget you have and how much time you have. And like you said, if you can, then finding someone who’s an expert in the field and hiring them to do this is fantastic. But if you don’t have the budget to do that, there are ways go getting that same expert on Skype and doing a 10 minute, 15 minute interview with them. And if you ask them multiple questions during that interview you could realistically get one question and turn that into a 2 or 3 minute audio snippet and you’re at least one a week and you get them transcribed. Maybe you do a video interview but you have actual multimedia versions of this that you’re releasing and if you get people involved, that becomes a sequential thing and it can get people really involved.
[20:50] The other thing is to do case studies to interview your customers and find out not just how your product helped them because that’s boring marketing crap. But actually figuring out some tricks and tips that they’ve used to help them in their journey as it relates to not just your product but kind of the field you’re in. So with Drip, I might interview someone not with how Drip helped them but what are some things that they did that really kicked off their email marketing campaign or how did they use email marketing to improve their business and increase it? And other people could think whether they’re going to be a Drip customer or not, they could take and use it with any email marketing software.
[21:25] And another example is something like downloadable landing page templates like that Clay Collins talked about on the podcast a few episodes ago or with Drip, I’ve definitely considered having downloadable email templates, not visual email templates because we don’t do the visual newsletter stuff. But having actual pre-written templates that you kind of fill in the blank like an mad libs, things for five day mini courses and that kind of things that we already have in the app but to be able to give those away to noncustomers all of that is sharable content that someone might be interested in both consuming and then thinking man, this is cool someone’s giving this away for free and they want to tell other folks about it on Twitter. That’s really the goal.
[22:06] Mike: Step 3 in the process is to curate and optimize the content. And for this, if you have newsletters or blog articles, things like that, what you’re going to do is you’re going to want to use attention grabbing headlines and the general rule of thumb that I hear all over the place is spend a lot of time on your headlines because those are the pieces that you will draw people in. And obviously the content itself has to be good but make sure you spend a lot of time on the headlines so that you are attracting the eyeballs in the first place. But also look for places where you can leverage that content for SEO purposes and I really liked your question before about contrast this versus SEO whereas SEO just has one purpose but your content strategy can feed into your SEO strategy.
[22:47] Another thing that you want to do is if you have text for your newsletters or your blog articles, you definitely want to include photos or video or screenshots, slideshows, pretty much anything you can to make it more engaging and then in addition to that, you also want to make it easy to consume for people who just scan content. I’ve talked to other people who they’ve told me flat out they’re like yeah, I don’t read anything on the internet. I just kind of scan for the bullet points and just skip everything else. That is completely foreign to me because I have a tendency to just read things straight through but that has something that there are definitely a lot of people out there who do that.
[23:22] Rob: I think another thing you can do in this kind of curating and optimizing point is to link to external sources. Not only does this give you credibility but those external sources if they’re let’s say a blog or a podcast or some type of one person gig, it’s not some huge company, you can actually contact them and say hey I referenced you here, thanks for the data – that type of thing. They are very much more likely to actually share it to their audience. And if you use them as a reference, it’s likely that they are actually within line of your target market and the people that you’re trying to get this shared too.
[23:54] So you don’t want to go out and be the jerk who says hey, I used your thing. Now can you share it? Now you don’t want to be presumptive but at the same time I think there’s a lot of value in linking to eternal sources and letting folks know that their data is being used to kind of create a derivative work in something that hopefully improves upon the sources that he uses.
[24:16] Mike: The fourth step is to publish your content based on some sort of calendar and consistency can really help draw people back to your side. One of the things that I hear from a lot of different people about the startups for the rest of us podcast is that they love the fact that its every single week and they can always depend on it being out there on Tuesday. That consistency can really help feed people’s desires to have that information. If they know they’re expecting that email on Thursday, there are cases where there are certain emails that I get in my mailbox that I’m always looking forward whether it’s a weekly report or a weekly newsletter about certain topics, there are some that I actually really do look forward to.
[24:54] You can also reuse some of that content for things like social media or your email newsletters, any sort of auto responders or some of your webinars. There’s a lot of different ways that you can – I’ll say cross promote things between one piece of content and another. And then in addition to that, using that calendar can help you with any sort of complicated sales process. So if there are things that people need to do, you can create some content like you can create a video and send it to them and say hey I saw that you started using this feature in our product. Here’s something that might help you. Here’s an educational video that helps people use that and directs them on how best – how to get the most value out of it.
[25:32] And there’s other things that you can use that for as well. If they’re on a pre-sales newsletter for example you could send them a video about how your particular tool helped them solve a specific problem. In terms of publishing your content, you also want to make sure you’re keeping an eye out for ways that you can promote it. One of the obvious was is to ask the people that you’re sharing this content with to promote it. Ask them to share it, send out tweets or Facebook likes or even follow you on LinkedIn or the various other social media circles. There’s a lot of different ways that you can get your message out and get people to share it.
[26:07] And in addition to promoting it yourself, I mean obviously you can do any sort of paid marketing but reach out to influential people in your space whether its bloggers or podcasters, anyone who could help you get the message out in a way that is relevant to their audience and that’s something that is really key. You want to make sure that what you’re talking about or what you’re pitching to people is relevant to their audience and explain to them how is it going to help their audience. Because if you just go to some random blogger and say hey I’d like to be on your show and you explain all the great things about you, well then you haven’t really told them anything about why you should really be on there. How is it going to help their listeners or their viewers?
[26:42] So if you’re not pitching to their audience and their audience’s needs then the chances of them saying yes are probably much slimmer than if you explain it in a way of how it’s going to provide vaulted to their audience.
[26:53] Rob: Even something as simple as having that tweet button and the Facebook like and or share button and a G+ button on your blogpost, your infographic or whatever it is, the piece of content you have, this is something that I see people overlooking and frankly when I’m on my mobile phone, I’m on my iPhone, I click through – if there’s not a button there that I can click to retweet it, there’s no way I’m going to copy and paste the URL out of there, open the Twitter app, write something, copy and paste it in it, it just doesn’t happen.
[27:21] And a lot of folks now are on their phones when they’re looking at this kind of stuff. So you really want to enable one click sharing. And one click sharing is not – it’s a magic silver bullet that’s going to instantly mean everybody shares it but it just pulls away that little bit of friction and allows people to be able to be able to share it more easily.
[27:40] Mike: Yeah, I’m exactly the same way. If it’s not right there if I’m on my phone, chances are really good that I’m not going to bother to come back to it later.
[27:48] Rob: I think the other thing you touched on that I liked – let’s talk about content reuse. What’s interesting is I use to think that you have this blog and you write hundreds and hundreds of posts over several years and people – they’re just digging through the archives or its just dead material. But I finally realized there’s a lot of meat and if you have timeless stuff that doesn’t rely on particular time periods, it’s not a current tech news or something, you absolutely can reuse that and you could compile your old posts into an eBook. You could take old blogposts, put them into your auto responders sequence. I mean there’s so much that can be done with that. Don’t forget.
[28:26] And you can go even further and let’s say you can repurpose a blogpost into a podcast outline or sequence a blogpost into an infographic if you had research stuff. There’s a lot of ways to do this so that if you put time into creating content in the past, you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel today when you do start to upgrade their content again.
[28:45] Mike: Step 5 is to engage with your audience after you’ve published the content. You can ask people to comment or tweet or respond in some way. What is your content ultimately supposed to do? What action is it that they’re supposed to take? And that’s one of the things that you want to address in your planning stage but make sure that you follow-up with it and engage with the audience and really ask them to take those extra steps and as you said in the previous step when you publish something, make sure that you have things like Facebook or Twitter buttons. If those things aren’t there, make sure that you’re putting them there if that’s the way that you want them to share it.
[29:17] Something else that you can do is are you hearing what other things that people are looking for from you for content? Are they asking questions? Are those questions something that you can turn into something else that could be published as new content? Are you asking them to contribute their own content? Those are the types of things that help you I guess fill up your funnel of content that you you’re generating. And then the last piece of step 5 and engaging with them is actually thank them. There’s a lot of people that will just do something because they like the stuff and they think that it’s nice to share. But going back and going out of your way to thank them is actually a very, very effective strategy
[29:55] As part of what my Twitter strategy, what I’ve been doing is taking the people who follow me back or – and this relates specifically to the Audit Shark account, following me back or retweeting things, we’ll go in and we will send them a message hey, thanks to so and so for retweeting this or for favoriting this or for following us back. And it is accounting to me the number of people who when we sent out a tweet that says we just want to say thanks to these five people for following us, it’s astounding to me the number of people who actually turned around and would retweet that. It’s just crazy. And it gets retweeted to like tens of thousands of people which I don’t know why that happens but it just does. It seems like it’s working really, really well and it just feeds that loop because people see that in the other Twitter feeds and then they come back to s.
[30:40] Step 6 is to measure and incorporate feedback from people. What content is it that you put out there that was actually shared with other people? How much was it shared? How many readers did you get from publishing a new piece of content? How many people took the action that you wanted them to take? How did some of that content relate back to your bottom-line revenue? I mean are you able to track some of that information? Those are the types of questions that you want to ask and make sure that you’re measuring different things related to your content strategies so that you know what’s working and you can double down on it and you know what’s not working and back off from those things.
[31:15] Rob: Yeah. But trying to measure ROI on content marketing is very difficult near impossible. The people I know who are doing content marketing successfully and I was actually doing this on HitTail for quite some time was getting a lot of buzz around the blog and it was driving visitors. But it’s so hard to figure out precisely how someone found you and you can see when they convert but it’s hard to attribute what the last click was versus the first click versus the steps they took in between that.
[31:46] And so the measurement is actually a challenge and Google analytics doesn’t do it very well. I know they’re branching into that and looking at attribution models. They would have multiple attributions meaning of someone originally found you through a tweet and then they continued to engage with you maybe through your email sequence or your auto responder or your newsletter and then later they typed your name into a browser window and just came in and converted that it tries to attribute those steps along the way. But don’t get too caught up in trying to get every nook and cranny nailed down.
[32:19] The thing is figuring out how many people you drive to that post initially is going to give you a baseline of what you can expect. And so if you’re only able to drive hundred new uniques to this blogpost you published that’s probably not going to be enough to warrant the cost or the effort. But if you’re consistently getting in the 500 or over 1,000 unique for a piece of content or let’s say you’re getting 100 retweets, I mean there’s some measurement that you’re going to start seeing and it’s just going to start to make sense that you should continue doing this.
[32:51] But I’d say minimum if you’re going to start content marketing, you have to commit to minimum 60 days and maybe 90 days of consistent publishing. I don’t know anyone who does haphazard here’s an infographic now and then a blogpost in a month and then a video interview in two months. It doesn’t work because you don’t build any kind of relationship and you don’t build any kind of longer standing narrative. If you just throw out these pieces of content there’s already so many around that without them being connected to one another and having some consistency, I don’t see how your conversion rate could really increase. The people I know who are doing it are doing it very consistently for a long period of time. And the longer you do it, the bigger that snowball of basically of ROI builds up.
[33:35] Mike: Yeah I mean that’s an important piece that you allude to. It’s just looking at the trend itself not necessarily getting caught up in the fine grain details, you want to look at that trend itself and make sure that what you’re doing and how much time and effort your investing into the content strategy is somehow in some way shape or for really impact your revenue. And as long as your revenue is going up and as you said, if you start out and you say okay well I’m going to try this for 90 days or 180 days I’m going to publish once a week or twice a week.
[34:05] If you can take a look back six months and you see that three months previously after you go this 90 days you saved from three months ago, there’s almost like a clean rise in your revenue for example or this website visits and all these other metrics. You may not be able to individually say well I sent an email to Joe at such and such domain and he came in and signed he up after this particular blogpost but if you can see a trend of some kind and you can see that your traffic or your revenue is going up definitively and you can almost attribute it to when you started your content strategy, then you generally know that it’s working.
[34:44] Rob: And that is the hard part isn’t it? Coming to me, I’m super into analytics and ROI and that’s why I like SEO and paid acquisition because they are so easy to track or they’re easier to track and so content marketing just has fuzzy things around the edges and it’s not super easy to really nail down every aspect of the ROI which makes it not for the faint of heart to be honest. And the fact that you really need to do it for 90 days or more to start seeing the return, you want to do some research into it before you just dive in and think that you can crank out one infographic and suddenly have the success that a kiss metrics is having.
[35:22] Mike: I think part of that problem is the engineer side of most software developers is like you want a concrete answer, math and science is you’re either right or your wrong or there’s some tolerance in which as long as you fall in that range you’re okay. But when it becomes very subjective, it’s very fuzzy around whether or not you’re on the right track and so think that’s what you’re kind of alluding to.
[35:43] Rob: A little bit. Yeah.
[35:44] Music
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