Show Notes
- Small is Beautiful Conference. June 4 & 5 in Glasgow, Scotland
- Brennan Dunn’s podcast – Episode 13: Establishing a work-life balance with Sherry Walling
- Book recommendations: Pitch Anything, The Year Without Pants (both are also available on Audible)
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about hiring sales consultants, scaling offline acquisition and keeping data safe in the cloud. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 173.
[00:10] Music
[00:18] 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.
[00:25] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:27] Mike: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Rob?
[00:30] Rob: I have a couple updates. I’ve just accepted a little speaking gig in Glasgow, Scotland in June and so if you’re near anywhere near Glasgow there’s a conference called Small is Beautiful that is looking at kind of staying small, the bootstrapping ethic and it’s not just going to be software people. It’s a lot of makers and even crafts people and like selling on Etsy and that kind of stuff. So it’s June 4 and 5. It’s pretty inexpensive. Its 199 pounds. If you’re interested in coming, we’d love to hangout. I’m going to be there for a few days. So smallisb.com.
[01:04] Then the other thing is I want to call out Brennan Dunn’s podcast, its Business of Freelancing. Episode 13 had my wife as a guest and it’s called establishing a work life balance with Sherry Walling. So if you are interested in hearing more about work-life balance which I think all of us probably need, you’ll hear it there. and then Sherry is also just been confirmed as a speaker for MicroConf Vegas and she’s going to do basically a one hour session on that kind of stuff, on mindset on anxiety, depression, checkout the podcast episode 13. We’ll link it up in the show notes and then hopefully if you’re come to MicroConf, you can hear more about it there.
[01:41] Mike: I feel absolutely awful. I’ve been sick for probably four days now. I was all set to buckle down and actually get a lot of work done this week because I have a down week. So I mean we’ve talked about it before on this podcast where it’s some of the beauty of having people that you have working for you is even if you decided to take time off or you get sick, they’re going to continue working and one of the disadvantages of doing everything yourself or doing specific things that have to be done by you is if you’re not doing them, they’re just not going to get done. This week I’ve basically been in bed as much as I possibly can just because I felt so awful and a lot of the stuff that I planned on getting done this week has just not gotten done.
[02:21] Rob: Yeah. But like you said, it’s good to have folks that keep the machine running whether it’s you being on vacation or being laid up in bed. It’s nice to not be doing everything yourself. So I have a couple book recommendations. I’ve listened to a few audio books in the past couple months and each of these are kind of applicable to a different scenario.
[02:39] The first one is called Pitch Anything. It’s a really well written book. Specifically if you’re going to be doing in person either negotiations or sales or pitching, stuff like that, it’s fascinating about the dynamics of how to take the frame of a meeting and how great stories in there and just a great way of thinking about how to come into a room with other people and to take control of the situation if you need to, or to give it up if you need to.
[03:08] The next book is called The Year Without Pants. It’s by Scott Berkun. I read pretty much all the books that Scott has written. This one is about working for WordPress but frankly its working for Automatic which is kind of the parent company of WordPress. He worked for a year. There’s not a ton of actionable stuff. I think folks kind of in our circles will have heard a lot because a lot of it is about remote teams and working remotely and it is a lot of storytelling project management building software I mean that’s kind of cool thing.
[03:37] But with all that said there are some interesting characters in there. It’s definitely a nice story, Scott toes a good job of communicating it. So if you like stories like the Hatch of Twitter, startup stories of Amazon and that kind of stuff, The Year Without Pants is a good one to add to your collection.
[03:54] Mike: Scott talked at the Business Of Software and there were a couple of really good things that I took away from your sock which was kind of largely based on his book one of which was the way that Automatic hires new employees is they essentially give them a starter project and they always bring them on as a consultant first and one of the things that they do is they say here’s access to the repository where you can get all the source code and everything and here’s access to our internal IRC chat. And here’s you project. And that’s it.
[04:23] They don’t get code walkthroughs they don’t get anything and it’s basically up to the person who is being hired to go out and find everything that they need to do because that’s part of the culture there. You get things done or you’re not going to succeed. And I thought that applies relay well to a lot of the things that we’ve talked about in the past where you have a starter project that you bring people on to kind of vet them as a person who may or may not work out for your team and then based on how well they perform and the types of things that they do and how they interact with the other team members, that’s kind of how you decide to give them I’ll say an escalated project or do more with them.
[05:01] Rob: Yeah, exactly. That was one of the things that I took away from the book. There are a few other tid bits as well in addition to the fun story line of just seeing how the year pans out and kind of the insecurities of Scott, returning to work after basically being an author and a speaker for several years and wondering can I really hack it with kind of the new development culture that’s going on.
[05:20] Music
[05:23] Mike: Today we’re going to be taking some time to answer some listener questions and the first one comes from Alex. He says good morning Rob and Mike. I’d like to get your expert opinion on something. I just built an online B to B product for a particular industry. I have one customer ready to go live. The product is ready to be introduced to a wider audience. Offline marketing will work better for this product in the industry. I’m employed full time and I don’t have any sales experience. I was thinking about hiring independent sales consultants to resellers on commission but I’m not sure where to start. I can probably find people with background in the industry on LinkedIn but how do I make sure they won’t start approaching the same leads?
[05:57] I know it’s a pretty common thing to assign sales people to geographic regions to make sure that they won’t step on each other’s toes but in the beginning if I only have 1 or 2 sales agents, I don’t want to restrict them to a geographic area. I want them to start selling aggressively nationwide especially if they already have industry contacts all over. I don’t think I can just make independent sales agents or resellers to start using a centralized CRM and put their leads there. Want to know what your thoughts were on this. Thanks, Alex.
[06:23] Rob: I kind of feel like he’s putting the cart before the horse here. Alex, you’re worried about people having overlapping geographic regions when you only have one customer at this point. You said you’re not really a person with any sales experience. In my opinion, the CEO or the founder has to be the first sales person and so there’s a couple questions that I don’t feel are answered in this email.
[06:47] The first is is your product actually saleable yet? Does it solve a pain point? having one customer isn’t enough to convince me of that until you have personally sold maybe 10 and gotten them signed up, that’s when you’re going to know A) what the objections are when you’re trying to sell it, B) where your product maybe lacks features and where you need to invest more time in development because it’s not as if you finished the product and you’re never going to have to write a line of code these days. This stuff, it’s never done especially for a SaaS product.
[07:22] So I think that you need to spend quite a bit more time upfront getting more people on boarded and getting more people to say yes so that you have a better idea of what tat sales process involves because then you can take that and bring it to maybe someone you find in LinkedIn or craigslist, wherever you’re going to look and you’re going to have a much better idea if they’re going to be capable of doing this. Because just like when your non-technical hiring developers is really hard, if you don’t have a sales experience, hiring a sales person is pretty hard because you don’t know – you’re going to go with the guy who feels most salesy, the schmooze guy and he very well may not be the right person. He or she may not be the right person to sell your software.
[08:02] I’m dubious about the whole idea of trying to – you’re basically trying to outsource all of your sales effort and as far as I know, I have seen people tried this, I’ve never seen it work especially when it’s full commission because why shouldn’t that sales person just go take a salary gig somewhere, a commissioned sales job with someone who’s more proven. I guess what would really be the benefit why should they work with you?
[08:22] Because if you’re offering the same thing that some large company is, then the other people are going to go with a large company and only the people who can’t hack it there or who basically aren’t very good at sales are going to be the ones that you’re going to be able to convince to come work for you. I really question this thought of trying to just outsource sales from day 1 until you have a better handle on what that sales process looks like and have done it yourself multiple times and have enough experience that you can then vet someone who you’re hiring to do it.
[08:51] Mike: I agree with everything that Rob just said and in an addition, you’re worrying about problems that you don’t even have yet. So you’re worrying about trying to keep the sales reps from stepping on each other’s toes and in my experience, that doesn’t tend to happen a lot unless you have people who are located almost on top of each other. I think that if you’re finding these people on LinkedIn, chances are really good you’re not going to find five people all in the Boston area to go sell your product.
[09:18] In addition to that, there’s a lot of things that Rob said which you definitely need to pay attention to which are along the lines of the fact is you don’t have a proven sales methodology yet. So my concern would be that you’re going to start attracting the drags of the barrel of the sales reps who are willing to do just about anything that it takes in order to land the sale and those things may not necessarily jive with how you want to run the company, they may not even be true. I mean you may end up with people who are buying a product that the sales reps made all these promises about and the products just isn’t going to be able to deliver.
[09:51] Going back to the book that Rob talked about earlier, the Pitch Anything book, you pick up a copy of that, pickup a couple different books on how to do sales and do it yourself. You have to do this yourself at least a couple of times. You can’t just outsource things that you don’t like if you don’t understand them because they’re inevitably going to be things that slip through the cracks and you’re not going to know how to handle them because you’ve never done it before. So Alex thanks for the question.
[10:15] Our next email comes in from Carl Sutherman and he says hi Rob and Mike. I really enjoy listening to your podcast. You’ve given me so many things that are valuable for me while starting up Ingredient Matcher. You’ve been talking so much about mastermind groups that I’d really like to have one. So I started this meet up group in Stockholm and we’ll link to this in the show notes. But it’s at meetup.com/stockholm-micropreneur so if anyone out there listening is in Stockholm or a nearby vicinity, definitely go checkout that meet up group, I think they were going to be putting something together to kind of help people coordinate between different meet up groups and different people getting together at different places of the world.
[10:49] We don’t have anything setup just yet but that is something that we are working on, so kind of stay tuned, listen to the podcast, check the podcast website at startupsfortherestofus.com wherein we put together a mailing list out there in a little while people are going to be able to get more information about not just those meet-ups but some other things that we’re working on in terms of the micropreneur community. So thanks Carl.
[11:08] Our next email comes from Andrew and he says hi guys, just wondering if you have any recommendations regarding organizing your emails such as creating tasks from email etc. I seem to recall that you talked about this one in your podcast but I can’t remember which one it was. Thanks. Andrew.
[11:21] Rob: The best way that I found is to use Trello and then you get an email address that’s unique to a specific Trello board and from the Gmail, if I want to add something I can just forward it even from my phone is where I typically do this and I’ll just forward things off to that address. I have it as my Trello contact in Gmail and then it appears on top of my Trello board and the next time I can go and reorder it and work on it. It’s not ideal. As I’ve said in the past, I think that having a way to reorder emails within Gmail and then add additional tasks so that it really does become a to-do list in your inbox, that’s how I would prefer to do it but this way of kind of the emails into Trello is the best approach I’ve found this far.
[12:02] Mike: I think part of the answer to this question depends on what tools you’re comfortable with using and what tools you already use so I use a combination of half a dozen things. So I use pipe drive, I use Trello, I use Evernote and then I also use Fogbugs and I also have a pivotal tracker account. So depending on what you’re doing is going to dictate what you do with those inbound emails. Rob has a great idea there with setting up the different email aliases. You can do the same thing with Basecamp, that’s another tool that I use. And all those things, it depends a lot on your specific workflow of how you work.
[12:34] I think the one thing I would probably mention is that as you’re getting these things into your mailbox that need to be taken care of what I would do is I would pull them out of your mailbox, put them in that other location whether it’s another tool, there’s Trello, Basecamp or what have you and then get rid from it from your mailbox so that way you use your mailbox as things that you’re working on right this second that you need to kind of actively deal with and anything that doesn’t need to be there, just archive it or delete it or get rid of it. I use Gmail. I know that Rob does as well. But the search capabilities there are phenomenal. So being able to pull up your email from several years ago is very easy to do. So Andrew, hopefully that helps.
[13:13]Our next question comes in from Igor and he says hi Mike and Rob. I’m a graduate student and long time listener from Helsinki, Finland. I’m interested in applying the problem or pain identification process to find an idea for a B to B Saas app but I’d like to know your opinion on an issue I’ve been researching heavily for a long time. Here’s my question, can you really scale customer acquisition for an online app with an offline market or a vertical niche as its target audience. Examples would be a small hotel or hostel owners or photographers. A few sources say it’s not feasible since you would need to do some form of high touch selling but that wouldn’t be justified by the low price points that SMB’s are comfortable with.
[13:39] For example, Jason Lemkin writes that customer acquisition cost have to be almost 0 if one target’s very small business. But I’m curious whether things would be different if the target business have relatively few decision makers and the app is an aspirin type product. This way even if one on wood sales calls would be necessary, the number of sales per rep or founder might be higher than the traditional 8-10 closed deals per month estimate for enterprise great products. Thanks and really looking forward to hearing your perspective.
[14:15] Rob: I think you’ve stumbled upon a big catch 22 of trying to sell to offline audiences who are also price sensitive because if that’s the case then it is really, really hard to scale up customer acquisition. But it’s if they’re either online and price sensitive or they’re offline and not price sensitive where this can obviously work. And I would make one correction Igor mentions. Photographers and photographers are actually online. I know a number of people who make a lot of money selling software and services and other things to photographers and the marketing is solely done online. I haven’t done this and I don’t know anyone who has truly done an offline product and done offline sales on a low price point product but the mass just not going to work out.
[15:03] The thing that I’ve noticed, if you’re going to have to do high touch sales and make in person sales calls, I think your minimum price point has to be low four figures if it’s a one time sale and it has to be low three figures if it’s a monthly recurring product. And that would be my rule of thumb. If you think you’re going to be able to charge $29 a month that actually have in person feeling going around selling the economics of that just don’t work out. But the question of can one scale customer acquisition for an online app in an offline market, the answer to that is absolutely its once you get the low price point piece integrated, that becomes a real problem.
[15:41] Now, with all that said, Gail Goodman from constant contact did a talk at business and software a couple years ago and their price point is $39 a month and they did scale at offline but they did it in kind of clever way and they also had funding. They had a ton of money to kind of back it up. They got sales reps out holding meetings and training sessions and marketing of meeting up groups and all kinds of stuff and this massive infrastructure for that.
[15:04] You as an individual without funding are going to have a real tough time doing if not being able not to do it at all frankly. I think in general to answer your question is probably not unless you already have an in or you can always do outbound marketing that’s not in person so of small hotels or hostels, you can do lead gen using things like direct mail or one on one outbound email, that kind of stuff. But all that’s kind of require experimentation to see if it works in the niche.
[16:33] Mike: The question itself is yes it can definitely be done. Of course the follow-up question to that is well how much money do you have to actually make this happen because if you don’t have the money to make it happen and I think you brought up an excellent point with constant contact is they were funded so they had the money to be able to do that kind of thing and they were doing it early on when it was – I would say probably more cost effective to do it that way because they could probably do combination of offline and online marketing to help acquire some of their customers and back then, Google AdWords was still very early on. Online advertising was dirt cheap and the cost of acquisition for those customers was probably economical at that time especially for the online market.
[17:15] But in going offline, its labor intensive. You got to be able to schedule things. You have to be able to get enough people there to any given meeting so that you are able to close enough deals that is worth the time and labor investment. And that really takes funding. You have to have some sort of either revenue or cash on hand or something in order to be able to make ends meet while you’re doing that because it’s going to be a long slow slog in order to get those people and to achieve any sort of critical mess and I don’t know as you can do it without some sort of funding. So Igor, thanks for the question.
[17:50] Our next one comes from Carl and he says hi guys, what’s up? I love the show. I run a small SaaS business called clinic metrics and I launched it this year. I need an accountant. Question for you is it important for your accountant to be local? If you have a referral I’d love one. If not, how did you find yours? Thanks.
[18:08] Rob: This depends on two things. 1) Are you comfortable with your accountant not being local and 2) is your accountant able to work with remote people and if the answer to both of those is yes, then I don’t think you need your accountant to be local. I have had remote accountants for several years. Currently I have one who is local but if I moved away I probably would not switch but he happens to be really good at email and he’s a little bit of a techy-guy. Same thing with my bookkeeper, he lives across the country. All we’ve done is a video Skype or two, everything else is via email.
[18:34] Now but if you’re working with an old school accountant who is all paper and pencil and wants to talk on the phone and meet in person every time then obviously you’re not going to want to hire them. These days, I think you can find both accountants and bookkeepers who should be able to work remote without an issue. An in fact, that opens you up to basically being able to find the best person for the job rather than trying to find the best person for the job within your city.
[18:54] The way that I have found mien with the accountant I found based on a referral just talking to some local entrepreneurs figuring out who is startup friendly who knows SaaS, who knows software that kind of stuff and then went and talked to a couple of those people. But if you’re going to do your books specifically through Xero, I would actually recommend that you go to Xero’s website and there is like a Xero providers area where there’s a bunch of certified providers and that’s where I found my bookkeeper was through them.
[19:21] And so it sounds to me like you may want a bookkeeper rather than an accountant because a bookkeeper’s going to do it on a monthly basis and then the accountant would file the tax at the end of the year. I think you may want to start with a bookkeeper that’s probably going to save you more time on a recurring basis and for that I would definitely go to Xero and look through those certified folks and just pick one that you think looks good and you can give them a shot.
[19:43] Mike: There is a difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant. The accountant just files your taxes at the end of the year. At least that’s what I use mine for and then I have a bookkeeper who balances the budget, pays all the bills and then make sure that all the financial stuff is in order at the end of the year for the CPA. And I did that for two reasons. One is because a bookkeeper is significantly cheaper than having an accountant do it and then the second reason is you essentially have a double check at the end of the year because you’ve got your bookkeeper doing all the books and then at the end of the year your accountant kind of goes over everything to make sure that nothing’s been done that’s too far out of whack and is able to kind of point you in different directions wherein mistakes might have been made.
[20:21] So those are the differences between them but as Rob said I mean if you’re going to be using Xero which Carl had mentioned that in the PS is Xero does have a dedicated section where you can hire bookkeeper who are familiar with Xero. That said, Xero is not that complicated. My bookkeeper actually picked it up and was able to learn how to use Xero because she was familiar with other things. She started out with QuickBooks. She’s used less accounting for one of my business and she’s also familiar with outright. So between those things the basic concepts are fundamentally the same it’s just a matter of how do you do the specific things that she wants to do.
[20:56] And with Xero they have tons and tons of video tutorials. So just about anything that you need to know how to do, there’s portably a video for it. So you can go in there and worst case scenario, just contact their support and ask them questions.
[21:07] Rob: Yeah. I wasn’t saying that you should go to Xero certified because those people know Xero better than anyone else. It’s just a nice pool of reasonably competent bookers to start with. I think you can also go Odesk or eLance and these other places where I have looked for bookkeepers there as well but the Xero pool just seemed to be pretty competent people. I talked to a couple of them and anyone of them would’ve worked for me.
[21:32] Mike: So our next question comes in from Elliot Sykes. He left us a voicemail. Here it is.
[21:38] Eliot: Hi Rob. Hi Mike. My name’s Eliot Sykes and I’d like to pick your collective brain about guest blogging. In the last week or so, Matt Cutts announced that guest blogging is a promotional tool. it’s on Google’s spam team hit list. Given this, what’s your advice to people thinking about guest blogging as one of the ways to make their projects. And does this change anything for the way you’re going to handle guest blogs on your own site? I’d love to her your thoughts on this and thanks for continuing to make such a great show week after week. Bye.
[22:07] Rob: Yeah. Thanks for the call Elliot. It’s nice to hear from you after seeing your name online over these years. So Matt Cutts who is the Google spam team’s leader talked about guest blogging. Now he also talked about infographic six months ago and basically they’re going to go after anything that they see people overdoing and exploiting. So I think that question of how I’m going to handle it is until I see backlash, I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing because I’m not doing spam and guest posting and I’m not doing spammy infographic.
[22:41] I think that when you get to the point where you’re just doing them at high volume and it’s obvious there’s no social sharing is an indicator they’re probably going to look at, there’s going to be these signals that make these things look legitimate and signals that make things – it’s usually the lack of signal that makes these things look less legitimate and more spammy. So it’s always hard to tell to see how they’re just going to tune the algorithm.
[23:04] I’m not that worried about. I think if it was my number one way of getting the word out then yes, I’d be seriously looking at what I’m doing because let’s say you had 50 guests posts out there on a bunch of blogs, that might be a problem but I don’t think its just surely the number of them. I think it’s going to be these patterns that they recognize and so I think if you really are handcrafting good quality blogs whether your blog posts, whether you’re doing it yourself or you’re hiring someone to do it and you really are dealing one on one with reputable blogs that actually have an audience and things are actually being shared and you’re actually publishing them on these reputable blogs, I really don’t see how they can crack down on that.
[23:45] How did they not just crack down on kind of all links everywhere. I think what they’re going after is the people when they have 1,000 guest blog posts and a lot of them are on these really crappy almost link farms. There’s basically these link blogs where people can pay to guest post on and surely if you’re doing that, I would avoid it. But again if you’re doing kind of the handcrafted approach to it, my gut feeling is that’s going to be okay for the foreseeable future. And just like I said with infographic they talk about crack and done on that, I don’t know if that ever happened because I haven’t seen anyone that’s really gotten hit by that but I also typically see people doing pretty non-spammy infographics as well.
[24:23] Mike: I think that anytime Google issues one of these statements and the collective internet freaks out when this kind of stuff comes out because they’re like oh my god we can’t do this anymore. What are we going to do for our marketing? And if you go back and you actually look at Matt Cutts blog, he says flat out on there “there are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging. Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future and there are absolutely fantastic high quality guest bloggers out there. I’ve changed the title of this post to make it clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization purposes. I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs. High quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web and they can be compelling, wonderful and useful.
[25:07] I just want to highlight that a bunch of low quality or spam sites have launched on to guest blogging as their link building strategy and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism or at least caution when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.”
[25:21] So based on that, it’s not that they’re looking at this and saying guest blogging is bad and that’s just very black and white. What they’re really doing is they’re really coming out and saying look, if you’re doing these things where you are essentially spamming the internet with content, we will find out about it and we will shut you down. It’s not that they’re going after the people who are doing legitimately for exposure, branding or increasing their community size, that’s not what they’re after. They’re after the people who are trying to exploit the system and that’s really the way that Google has always been. They’ve always been going after those people who are trying to exploit the rules and the loopholes and I don’t think this is any different than it has been in the past. So Eliot I hope that clarifies a few things on what Matt Cutts’ announcement means.
[26:01] Our last question comes in from Zack and he says thanks for your wonderful podcast which is full of pragmatic gems. I’m now working to start a SaaS app. I’ve spoken to a business owner about my idea and he questioned how I can ensure that his company’s data is safe in the cloud and that no one has access to it. He’s worried about leaking his company’s strategic information to others. He’s more comfortable installing my app on his server rather than storing the data in the cloud. How should I go about convincing him?
[26:26] Rob: My first thought is don’t convince him. He’s probably not a good fit for SaaS apps and that there are a ton of other people out there who if you truly do solve a pain point for them, are going to be fine putting their data in the cloud. Second thought is if you go to 10 other potential customers and they all have the same objection, then you really are going to need to figure out how to get around it or you’re in a bad market right now and you need to find a market that is more willing to go online or you need to kind of wait these guys out because over time everyone is going to move to the cloud. I think it’s inevitable and it’s just a matter of do you have kind of the time and the money to wait them out so that they are willing to go to the clod. Or you’re going to have to convince each one of them to do it and are you willing to do that?
[27:11] I think convincing some if their data is in a cloud frankly I would probably Google this exact topic and look what are the three elements of it there’s going to be security of data from a technical perspective. There’s going to securing the data at the server side, securing it from hackers, there’s a bunch of stuff like that and I think that it’s probably not something you’re going to get in a two minute podcast answer but it’s going to be something that you’re going to have to research. I think his inclination, he’d rather install it on his own server than storing the data in the cloud. I would encourage you that if you want to start a Saas app not even to entertain that idea in the least these days trying build an installable version of your web app is frankly more trouble than it’s worth unless you’re in a specific niche where you’re going to need that specifically.
[27:53] If you do need that, then you need to make a choice and it’s like are you going to be downloadable web and syllabus software or you’re going to be SaaS but as single founder which I’m assuming you are, I would not try to do both.
[28:03] Rob: I think when you run into these types of people, you almost have to dig a little bit to find out what the underlying issue is is really that they’re not comfortable putting their data in a cloud or is it that they’re not really aware of the dangers that they currently face or do they just not want to pay monthly subscription fee for it. So definitely hammer those out but at the end of the day if they’re not necessarily educated about the risk that they face today, I mean what’s to prevent one of their employees who on their way out going to the file server grabbing everything and then just emailing it out to everybody.
[28:34] Do they have software in place to stop that? Do they have technical controls? Are they actively checking for that kind of thing? My guess is to answer all those question is no they don’t. So realistically, they face that today. He’s using it as a way to essentially skirt the issue and in some way say no so you need to kind of dig a little bit and find out is that really the problem for him? Is he really actually concerned about it or is there something else and he’s just throwing that up as kind of a smoke screen to say I’m not really interested in doing that because all my other software is all in my servers.
[29:09] Rob: Yeah, I would agree with that sentiment. I could also see let’s say you provide him with a ton of information and these are the standards of sales force and of the big Fortune 500 SaaS businesses and this is what everybody does and you can show him all the proof that you do exactly that and you have all these audits in place. You have all this checking that it’s still not going to convince him. So it’s kind of a decision you have to make for yourself and figure out if you really do want to convince this one individual or if you want to move on and find someone who’s maybe more open to SaaS software.
[29:39] Mike: I think my advice in this particular case would be move on and find somebody else because you’re essentially looking for the path of least resistance to success. You don’t want to make things harder for yourself than they have to be and trying to convince somebody who’s not real keen on the idea to begin with is probably not in your best interest. You’re better off finding people who experience that pain and who are comfortable with putting their data in the cloud and leveraging those people is kind of your beach head into the market in order to expand and get other customers on board.
[30:09] And then in the future when you’re better established, you have money coming in and revenue, you can start dedicating time more towards educating people about why their data is going to be safe in the cloud with you versus trying to convince person after person that it may not necessarily be the best fit for your software.
[30:26] The second question that Zack has is have you ever seen any non-US company successfully operate SaaS businesses as targeting US customers? I’m based in Singapore and planned to offer my SaaS app to US customers. So in terms of non-US companies, one that comes to mind is Xero. It’s the accounting software which we briefly touched on earlier in this episode. It’s Xero. I actually have two different business with all my accounting and financial information into here. So it depends on the person or depends on the person you’re marketing to and what sorts of data that they’re putting in there.
[30:59] Now with mine, I’m putting in financial information and they’re able to pull my accounts and see how much money I have and how much I owe but it doesn’t necessarily have the ability to issue checks on my behalf for example. It’s not like it’s banking. It’s not like they have the ability right now to send the money out of my accounts. Now, it is sensitive data theoretically but I’m comfortable enough with all the things they’ve done they are probably keeping it securely. But again that’s a mentality thing, it’s not necessarily going to apply across the board. You’re really going to have to find the customers who are comfortable with that sort of arrangement and I think at that point it doesn’t necessarily matter where you are based rather are you offering a good service that’s valuable that people are going to subscribe to and be interested in.
[31:43] Rob: I think some other companies that are overseas that do a really good job are Atlassian, Balsamic is in Italy and they have a lot of customers all around the world. Campaign Monitor is in Australia. 99designs not a SaaS app is also in Australia and there are quite a few. So big commerce is another one. I think that this is less of an issue than you might think. I think especially if you don’t call it out prominently, we are the Singapore based SaaS app, I mean you can have it on your about page for sure but when I go to look for SaaS, I’m much less concerned.
[32:17] Unless you’re dealing with Fortune 500 companies that are going to move slowly and have a bunch of objections anyway, I think you’re going to be okay with being located overseas. I think that’s becoming less and less important over time. And you can even look at Patrick McKenzie doing appointment reminder from Japan. He has a lot of US based customers.
[32:34] Mike: So Zack I hope that answers both of your questions.
[32:36] Rob: If you have question for us, you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can find a full transcript of this episode at 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. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 172 | 12 Signs You Should Continue Investing In Your Product
Show Notes
- Rob’s most recent Mixergy interview – story of growing HitTail
- MicroConf 2013 talk videos
The 12 Signs
- You have X customer who’ve committed to pay for it before you start building
- You see competition in the space but they don’t appear to know what they’re doing
- You’re have a concrete estimate of development time, and are making measurable progress towards launch
- You have a launch list of contact information for hundreds or thousands of interested people who have signed up to hear about your launch
- Your method for growing your list is something you can continue doing after launch
- You have some kind of marketing plan
- You’ve surveyed your launch list and now have quantitative data, in addition to the qualitative data you got from talking to your committed customers 1-10
- You’re receiving emails or tweets asking when the product is going to be available
- Your launch list is growing faster than you’re able to let people in
- The first customer who uses your product tells you “This is a no-brainer, I would like to start paying right away.”
- Many people are excited about your product and then cancel during trial, or within the first 60 days of use.
- Your family/friends make negative comments, but you have so much traction you don’t care.
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I look at 12 signs that you should continue investing in your product. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 172.
[00:10] Music
[00:18] 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: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:33] Mike: Word on the street is that you hate desktop application writers.
[00:36] Rob: I got tweeted at least twice…
[00:40] Mike: I got a few instant messages here and there.
[00:42] Rob: What did they say?
[00:43] Mike: Just to let you know that desktop apps are not dead.
[00:47] Rob: I guess they were giving you kind of encouragement huh? You’re building your desktop app and keep going with it.
[00:51] Mike: It’s an extension of the original product and it’s just more of a different mechanism for using it so…
[00:57] Rob: Right. And if it’s the best tool for the job then there’s no reason not to use the tool. So hey, I wanted to point folks into the direction of mixergy interview, I was on mixergy this week. So if you go to mixergy.com the interviews are only available for a few weeks before they become only available to premium subscribers. So I talk all about HitTail, about growing it. It’s parallel to the story that I told last year at MicroConf and you can see that video at microconf.com in the 2013 speaker videos but there’s just different questions. There’s more mindset and emotional things that I dive into because Andrew went into those areas, so if you’re interested in checking it out, it’s at mixergy.com. How about you? What else is going on?
[01:35] Mike: I was looking through some of my analytics and I was trying to figure out why conversions were so low from my email signups through to my pricing pages and everything on Audit Shark and I realized last month when I had redone the pricing page, I broke all the URL’s and I hadn’t updated the email sequences to point to the right pricing pages.
[01:57] Rob: So could people not get to your pricing page?
[01:59] Mike: It would 404 error out so that was bad.
[02:03] Rob: I did the same thing on software by Rob probably 2-3 years ago. You just make a switch. You don’t think about it and pretty soon you potentially lose hundreds of emails of people who wanted to sign up.
[02:16] Mike: Right. I think the killer was if things had gone like if the numbers had dropped to 0, it would’ve been really obvious really quickly but I just noticed it like the numbers were lower and I’m looking at them. I’m trying to figure out I was like I wonder why that is. It just didn’t dawn on me that I pushed a new set of pricing pages and changed the URL schemes and it was coming in from the emails. It just wouldn’t have got there. With zero it’s easy to figure it out or easy to see what’s going on. But when the numbers are a little bit above zero, it’s just hard to tell.
[02:48] Rob: indeed. So we got some good comments on episode 170 and I actually heard from Dan Felker on Twitter who kind of thumbs up my approach of almost infinitely looping a single song to get in the zone. And surprisingly because I thought I was going to get called out for being crazy on that one but surprisingly got a comment from Jake on episode 170 and he says I totally agree with the music thing. Try high energy protons by Juno Reactor and the whole transmissions album itself. And then he says trigger songs are great. I like that term trigger songs.
[03:20] There’s another comment by Wolf Scott who said this is his first comment ever on a podcast and that he’s been looping songs for a long time and everyone in his office thought he was weird so it was good to hear that there are other folks who loop songs a lot in order to do that. I’ve actually heard Matt Mullenweg talking about how he did a lot of song looping. I remember in his mixergy interview Andrew Warner was kind of surprised by that, it’s a couple years ago but that was when I realized someone else does this.
[03:49] Last comment, Jim Monroe he commented he says great show. Definitely something I struggle with in terms of shiny object syndrome and he says his problem is books. He says I currently have a huge backlog of books I intend to read. I’m sure I’ll get to half of them but I buy them anyway. Basically I’m an addict. One thing that helps me with online content that seems actionable or tactical as you say is using Evernote web clipper. I have a pro Evernote account which does all OCR and saving content you can want. With this, I not only have a bookmark but I can also file it into a specific folder and it saves the entire web page in case the article goes offline. I may never get back to the article but it gives me some satisfaction knowing it’s saved and it reduces the temptation to read it at the moment. Used early and often it will reduced wasted time on things I feel I should be reading. Best of luck.
[04:36] So thanks for the tip guys and you can always catch us on Twitter on @robwalling Mike is @singlefounder or you can obviously call into our voicemail line, drop us an email of questions @startupsfortherestofus.com or post a comment on an episode.
[04:51] Music
[04:54] This week we’re doing a little bit of a counterpoint to last week’s episode. Last week we talked about the top 12 signs you should walk away from a project. And this week we’re looking at the 12 signs you should continue investing in your product. I wanted to kind of look at some signs. Some of them maybe obviously positive signs that you should keep going. Some of them actually appeared to be negative but it can actually have a positive underlying message. And so first one is you have X customers who’ve committed to pay for your product before you start building.
[05:27] This is something that’s being bandied around. It’s been talked about quite a bit these days of getting purchase commitments or of actually collecting money upfront whichever way you do it, if you can find people who are willing to pay you money before you start building a product, even if it’s just a commitment that is one of the signs that you continue investing in your product. Because not only does it show you there is a potential market for it but it will give you kind of the internal confidence to start breaking ground on code and it also gives you a small subset of people to talk to about when you have questions about what features should I be building first?
[06:00] Mike: Yeah. I mean this is something that I did a couple of years ago for my Altiris training site and I didn’t want to dump all the time and effort into recording all these videos and then launching it and having nobody be interested in it so I created a sales website and put 3 or 4 pages together and sold it to people and they just refunded their money as they ordered it. I got I think 10 sales over the course of six weeks, something like that. And they were all for monthly subscriptions so I decided to go ahead and actually build it.
[06:26] If you’ve got the people who are willing to pay for it before you start building something. I mean all it says is that they have not found something else that is solving their problem or it says to you that the competition out there is just so terrible that anything that you come up with is probably going to be better than the other stuff that they’ve tried or is already out there.
[06:47] Rob: And I think a question someone might ask is what should X be? As I said you have X customers who’ve committed to pay for it and that number varies. I think Jason Cohen before he started WP engine, I think he found 40 people willing to pay him either 50 or $100 a month. I don’t remember what it was at the time. With Drip, I wanted to get to 10 people willing to pay me $100 a month before I started. That to me is the range. I’ve never heard of anyone getting more than 40 one on one purchase commitments before starting but you certainly could and I think anything less than 10 and you haven’t done enough leg word and you won’t have heard enough reasons that they don’t want to move forward for it to be worth your while.
[07:24] The second sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you see competition in the space but they don’t appear to know what they’re doing. I like to say that you don’t have to be a better marketer than the rest of the world. You just have to be a better marketer than the other people in your niche. Even if you’re not substantially better than the competition that you see, if you can tell that they’re not doing a good job then odds are that you might be ahead of them or that you can at least learn quickly enough to stay ahead of them.
[07:52] Mike: And that’s the implication right? Is that you look at what you’re doing and you know more than them and I don’t think you necessarily need to know more than them but recognizing that they don’t know what they’re doing in some ways can give you that little extra boost that you need because you can look at that and say oh I just need to learn faster than those guys and you probably out maneuver them. And that’s the important part is being able to out maneuver them because if you can do that and you can start winning whether you’re taking sales way from them or preventing them from getting sales and you essentially out market them, then you can become the number one player in whatever the niche is.
[08:28] I think that applies a lot more to places where you’re not going against funded competition because I think once you start going against funded competition and you’re a boot strapper, it can be difficult to win a head on challenge against them but there are definitely ways to kind of spin your marketing a little bit so that your product is positioned differently against theirs.
[08:47] Rob: And I do hear people coming on the scene and saying there’s no competition, that’s a bad sign. You shouldn’t enter a market with no competition because it means the market doesn’t exist or the market’s too small. And I think it depends on your goals. I think if you’re in that early stage of the stair step process and you really are looking for that first win of getting to 500 or 1000 or a couple grand a month and you’re launching the mobile app, the WP plug-in, maybe a niche site, just an add on to something existing, I think it’s perfectly fine to not have competition in that space because the market is probably really small and you’re going for that early win to boost your confidence, learn marketing and get some revenue.
[09:25] If you’re going after something that you want to be, a mid six figure, seven figure business, you’re really trying to up the level, then yeah. There probably needs to be some, at least overlapping competition in the space right? There’s rarely a blue ocean market that’s that big that doesn’t have other people going after it as well. So take this one with a grain of salt. When you hear people say markets with no competition are bad, stay away from them, think of what size, company are they talking about? Are they talking about venture funded companies because yes, for them, they really do want competition because everybody kind of knows what the hot markets of tomorrow are going to be and there’s going to be a lot of players in those.
[09:59] The third sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you have a concrete estimate of development time and you’re making measurable progress towards your launch.
[10:07] Mike: Does anyone really have a concrete estimate of their development time?
[10:10] Rob: When I say concrete, I don’t necessarily mean it’s correct. Right? I just mean it’s your best guess and there’s a real number on things. Like I actually mean broken down into chunks that are one day or less, into tasks that are one day or less because you can estimate those. If I told you Mike how long is it going to take you to build a web page that allows someone to do whatever login to this thing or resets their password, you can estimate that within probably 20% accuracy. But I if tell you build this whole subsystem that’s going to build a ton of stuff, it’s too much unless you break it down into its subsystems and break it down into a point where it’s about a day per task and that’s when you’re going to get what I consider the best estimates, concrete estimates.
[10:50] Mike: Yeah. I mean that’s the difference between saying I’m going to build a product versus these are all the things I need to do in order to build a product.
[10:58] Rob: Yup. I mean you can imagine estimating how long is it going to take me to build this house versus how long is it going to take me just to pour the foundations versus just putting in the studs for the walls, just the electrical. I mean you break it into subsystems and then you break it down as far as you can go. Most people don’t do this honestly. Right? Unless you’ve been forced to create estimates, estimating is really hard and it kind of feels like it’s wasted time but every project that I do, I will put together the simple excel spreadsheet. Getting those concrete numbers and at least being able to see where your progress is stalling and being able to see where your progress is moving towards really quickly, it says a lot for your motivation.
[11:37] This isn’t a requirement. Yes, you can absolutely build a product and market it and be successful without this but I think this is one factor that will absolutely contribute towards you making it to launch.
[11:48] Mike: I think the important thing here is just the fact that you have this measurable progress that you’re making. If you can actually see how much progress is being made, it’s a little different than if you just have this block of work to do when you have no idea how far along you are. I mean if you’ve got six months left of development time and you know you have six months left, it’s a totally different story than if you’re sitting there and you’re six months in and you’re saying how much further do I have to go until I actually get to launch?
[12:16] In some ways I think it’s partly motivation but it’s also to help you understand how far along in the process you are and how much time there is left to finish and help you make decisions about what whether or not you should continue or not.
[12:30] Rob: I think that’s a really good point. I think it’s as much mental as it is anything else. So our fourth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you have a launch list of contact information for hundreds or thousands of interested people who have signed up to hear about your launch. Notice I didn’t say you have to have a landing page, that happens to be the way I tend to do it. I think you should always have a landing page. But that’s not the only way to do it. You could feasibly gather a launch list of info at a trade show or you could do it with in person interviews or you could do it at a conference.
[13:02] I mean there’s a number of ways that you could look at doing this but the sentiment here is that you get hundreds of people who have opted in to hearing about the launch because that’s what it’s going to take to really get any type of sizeable snowball going from the start. You can’t expect to get 50 people in a launch list who have not already committed to pay, who you haven’t worked with one on one who have just kind of opted in to hear about the launch and then except most of them convert because it’s not going to work out that way. you’re going to be lucky if you get…
[13:31] I mean it depends on what you’re launching price point and all this stuff but I tend to see around 5% on the low end and I see maybe 30% on the high end. And again if you have a relationship with the audience and you’re selling something that’s super valuable to them and super targeted yes, you can get it up into the 50% but I’ve never seen software product get there. It tends to be information that closes that much of the list. Think about that.
[13:57] Let’s say most software’s between 5% and 20% just as round numbers if you only get 100 people on that list, then when you start, you’re going to have between 5 and 20 customers aside from the folks who you initially got to commit. And while that’s good and that’s a great start, it’s better than 0, it’s not enough momentum probably to get you super motivated or to allow you to quit your job on day 1. So getting into digging into that hundreds and hundreds and potentially getting into four figures with that launch list is really a good motivational thing for you. It also will give you a good first day launch, first day revenue number and it’s a sign that people are really interested. This is a sign that you should continue investing in your product because people are interested in hearing about it.
[14:38] The fifth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your method of growing your launch list is something you can continue doing after launch meaning it’s something that you think you could continue to drive traffic and actually turn into trials after you’ve done the initial launch to your list.
[14:55] Mike: And the important part about this is you’ve got something that is repeatable for acquiring new customers and it’s not to say that you can do these one off things that are going to help you for a little while and then you’re really never going to be able to do them again. So for example, submitting your website to a bunch of startup websites. That’s great. It will help give you boost in traffic and boost the number of people on your list but it’s not something that you can do over and over again. What you’re really looking for is those things that you can point to and say I created a landing page and then I was able to drive traffic to that landing page and get people to sign up by doing X, Y and Z and you’re able to do X, Y and Z over and over again whether its writing articles or whether its sending emails out to an email list or doing paid traffic acquisition. I mean there’s a load of different things that you could do.
[15:42] But as long as you’re able to do those things in a repeatable fashion and continue doing that over and over and not only refine the process ‘til the process gets better but also tweak it so that you’re more effective at it and it costs you less I mean because that’s really what you ultimately want to do after you’ve launched is you want to drive the cost of acquisition down. And as long as you’re putting those repeatable processes in place, you’re going to be able to do that.
[16:09] Rob: The sixth sign is that you have some kind of marketing plan. I hate plans in general and anytime anyone said marketing plan to me, maybe five years ago, I would turn the other way because I don’t like a lot of process. I don’t like a lot of plans and what I hated about marketing plans is what I learned is I hate all the BS that people would put in it. So when I was working as a developer, I would look at these marketing plans and it was a bunch of crap. It was fluff. It was paragraphs of pros. It was so ridiculous and it was prepared strictly to impress some executive about how much this person knew about online marketing these days. That’s not what I’m talking about.
[16:44] What I‘m talking about is these tight succinct bulleted list of marketing approaches that you have heard about that you have researched that you have ideas on that you have tried notes about them. It’s everything. It’s all the information gathering that you’re doing maybe by listening to this podcast and others, reading blog articles, all that stuff. That stuff will come and go very quickly if you don’t track it somewhere.
[17:10] The marketing plans that I put together have simply been a Google doc. I will have these in separate categories often it will be SEO and press and content marketing and paid acquisition and high touch approaches and I will put everything in there as I’m learning it. And so over time, I’ve honed that and every new app I get, I make a copy of that doc and I tweak it to the new niche and to the new market that it’s going to go after.
[17:35] Frankly, a lot of the high touch approaches that I’ve tracked and heard about, I have never done because I’ve never gotten to them because to me they’re lower priority. I want to find lower touch approaches that scale first. But having something, yours doesn’t need to be this 12 page extravaganza. Start with one page and put down the ideas you hear people talk about and make the notes so that you can keep them and implement them down the line.
[17:56] Mike: Yeah. The idea behind this marketing plan is really to give you a list of ways that you’re going to get in front of your customers and get them to try out your app and hopefully move them at some point along your sales funnel. I mean this isn’t about listing every single thing that you’re going to do. It’s about listing all the different things that you could do. And then when you get to a point where you say okay now I’ve got some time. I’m going to dig into this. I’m going to start going to my marketing plan and executing, you start picking off those things that you can identify as a high value or high return on the investment that you have to put into it.
[18:29] And again, I mean you don’t necessarily need to know everything about whatever that strategy happens to be. So if you’re going to leverage Facebook ads or you’ve never done Facebook before then that’s okay. I mean you can go ahead and try it. Just understand that your return on that particular thing is probably going to be a little bit lower than if you knew how to run a Facebook ad campaign right up front.
[18:50] Rob: I think that’s a good point. I had a lot of things in my early marketing plan that I had never done and what I would do, let’s take Facebook ads or ad words, as I would come to it, I would then right at that moment I would go and buy a course on it or buy a book on it and when I searched for strategy Facebook ads I think I bought 3 or 4 video courses and I bought 2 or 3 books and I kind of scoured the whole thing until I could get my arms around that trunk until I started hearing the same things over and over from the people so that I was sure that I had covered all the approaches. And I just dove knee deep into it, invested the time, I learned it, got it all in my head and then I just started cranking and trying the ads and learning on my own.
[19:27] That just in time learning which again is a concept that Jeremy of internet business mastery has talked a lot about, that’s the way to go with this kind of stuff. Don’t feel like you need to learn every approach upfront but at least, knowing that it’s there, knowing that it works for some people and then being able to give it a try because it’s very valuable.
[19:42] Mike: I think that helps kind of with information overload where people want to learn as much as they possibly can about how to launch a business or how to structure their business so they’ll go on this information overload where they’re just consuming all these different books and things like that but they’re not actually working on their business. They’re consuming information most of which they’re going to eventually forget anyway long before they’ve had a chance to apply it.
[20:05] Rob: Sign number seven that you should continue investing in your product is that you surveyed your launch list so now you have quantitative data in addition to the qualitative data you got from talking to your committed customers 1 through 10. Now obviously this is not a requirement. It’s just a sign but this is something that I did early on with Drip and what it allows you to do is match up those initial conversations with the first 10 people will give you ideas of what to build and you probably have intuition of what you want to build as well.
[20:32] Then as you start building up this launch list, let’s say you get to 500 or 1,000 people, you can now survey them and you have some pretty intelligent questions to ask them because you’re knee deep in this product. You know what you want to build, you know what you may not have time to build and getting another couple hundred people to weigh in on a survey not only gives them participation and makes them more eagerly anticipate your product but it can really help steer the direction of where you should go in order to hopefully get more of them to sign up when in fact you do your launch.
[21:05] Mike: This is just the difference between having an idea of what people are interested in versus knowing the specific features that are going to push somebody over the edge from this is an interesting product to where can I plug-in my credit card and get the full version?
[21:18] Rob: Our eighth sine is that you’re receiving emails or tweets asking when the product is going to be available. And then anytime you email your launch list you receive several replies letting you know that the product looks great and people can’t wait to use it.
[21:32] Mike: I think the primary thing behind this is people are still experiencing whatever the pain is that you’re trying to solve and if you’re trying to build a product that is geared for example around the holiday season or something like that, once that holiday has passed, the likelihood that those people are still interested in your products is going to be very, very low versus if you’re still coming up on it or if it’s a problem that they have continuously and they still don’t have an answer for it. That’s when people are going to be asking for your product, when it’s going to be available and when they can see more and when can they get their hands on it because that problem is painful enough to them that they want a solution and they’re still actively looking for one.
[22:12] Chances are good that they’re looking at your solutions saying I’m going to stop looking because it looks like this solution you’re coming out with is going to solve my problem and you don’t want to lose that. I mean you don’t want them to suddenly stumble across one of your competitors and start using them or following them instead.
[22:28] Rob: And I don’t think that receiving emails and tweets asking you when it’s going to be available is a necessity. I think you can launch a product successful without that. The businesses that I’ve launched that have had people kind of chomping at the bit are the ones that have that early success and it really boosts your confidence. Our ninth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your launch list is growing faster than you’re able to let people in. I think this kind of goes without saying if your launch list is growing that fast, then it’s a good sign.
[22:58] Mike: The point about this is obviously this is much further along. You’re at the point where you probably have a product that is in beta or at very least alpha and you’re allowing people to use that whether its early access or whether you’re charging them for it, doesn’t really matter. I mean the fact is you’re much further along than the previous ones that we’ve talked about and most leads we’ve kind of structured in a way that are essentially in chronological order.
[23:22] So for this I mean obviously if your launch list is growing faster and you’re able to let people in, then you’ve got 1 or 2 problems either 1) you’re having trouble letting people in because you’re suffering from technical issues or your launch list is growing out of control and you just can’t satisfy the demand because you still want to give people that individual hand holding so that you do get some of the feedback that you’re going to need to make the product successful long term.
[23:44] And don’t discount how much that information can help you because even though you do have people chomping at the bit and signing up very, very quickly you do want to get that information back before you unleash it to everybody because you want to iron out the kinks. You want to make sure that whatever processes you have in place are solid enough that you’re going to survive contact with the enemy I’ll say.
[24:07] Rob: Our tenth sign is that the first person who uses your product tells you this is a no-brainer. I would like to start paying right away. Getting to the point where anyone will pay you money especially that first customer is a tremendous amount of work. And the earlier you do that, the better it will feel, the more motivation you have. But once you get to that point, to me that’s a big sign that you’ve solved that at least one person’s problem and now you just have to go out and find another and another and another and all of those are signs that you should continue investing in that product.
[24:40] Mike: Yeah. I mean this is about creating cookie cutter copies of your first customer and trying to figure out not only who they are but how do you find other people like that customer? How do you find other people who have that specific problem? And it involves talking to that customer and finding out as much as you can but you’re right. as soon as you get pass that hurdle of somebody willing to pay you money for a product then you know that you’ve at least solved part of the problem and it may not be the entire problem but you’ve at least solved a piece of it and that’s a very, very good starting point. That’s essentially your beach head for the product. And as you move that further down you can expand that beach head and you can grow that market to the point that is successful in the way that you want and need it to be.
[25:23] Rob: Our 11th sign is that many people are excited about your product but they sign up and they cancel during trial within the first 60 days of use. This one’s a little tricky because you might think to yourself why is it a sign I should continue investing in it if people are canceling? The thought here is that if people are excited about your product then it shows that you have in fact hit a paying point that people want solved.
[25:46] But if they sign up and then they cancel, you have something wrong it’s not something that’s so wrong that it can’t be fixed. What’s either happened is your product itself lets people down and doesn’t solve the problem that you’re claiming it does. Perhaps your on boarding isn’t good enough to get people actually using the product and getting value out of it or potentially your pricing is too high. And all three of those are fairly easily fixable and it just requires having conversations with these people who are excited to sign up and cancel and figuring out which of those causes it is.
[26:17] Mike: When you run into this situation, it’s definitely a case where you want to start digging and reaching out to everybody. As a general rule of thumb, you probably want to reach out to anyone who cancels regardless and asks them why they cancel and if there’s anything that went specifically wrong that is something you can address? And there’s a lot of different ways to phrase it to them but realistically chances are good that if they canceled you probably aren’t necessarily going to get them back as a customer.
[26:43] So in general a good tact to take with those types of people is hey, I understand you canceled but I’d really appreciate some feedback from you to understand why it is that you canceled so that we can do better in the future. Not that you’re trying to win their business back but your main focus right there should be to learn from that experience and figure out what you can do better in the future.
[27:04] Rob: And our 12th and final sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your family and friends make negative comments about your pursuits but you have so much traction that you don’t care.
[27:14] Mike: I think one of the things that’s probably difficult for most entrepreneurs to either understand or come to grips with is that your family and friends are not only your target market but at the same time they’re not really drinking the same Kool-Aid that you are. Their brains are not in the same places. So when you’re talking about building a business on the internet and making money selling your products online, they’re like that’s great. I don’t know how you’re going to do that but I’m going to go back to my 9-5 job and it’s just because There’s a difference between what you’re thinking and what they’re thinking, what your goals are long term and what their goals are long term.
[27:50] So for them to really understand what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, it’s not really going to jive because none of the friends and family that I’ve had over the years, except in people that I’ve met at MicroConf and various meet ups and things like that, none of them get it. None of them understand and it’s baffling to them how that could even possibly work.
[28:08] Rob: There’s a really good discussion of this conversation of kind of explaining the entrepreneurial world view to family and friends and that’s tropicalmba.com and its episode 229 of Dan and Ian’s podcast and it’s actually Dan and Damien Thompson discussing it. But it’s this exact concept. I don’t know that I’ve heard a better kind of discussion of it and thought process of what it’s like of just how different we are as entrepreneurs compared to the rest of the population.
[28:36] I would agree with you. The times when I feel most comfortable is when I’m at a place like MicroConf or another gathering of other entrepreneurs because we get each other and we understand where the priorities lie. They’re just these crazy comments that come out of these discussion. I remember at one conference, there’s an entrepreneur who said he had like a SaaS model and he’s made this kind of loud comment. He said I could give a crap about $70,000 in one time revenue. And all of us around were kind of nodding our heads like yeah, I agree.
[29:07] And then later on I quoted that to someone who isn’t an entrepreneur and that doesn’t make any sense to them like why would you turn down $70,000 but in the context of building up these recurring revenue businesses, one time fees, there’s this whole fake logic that goes with that and $70,000 yeah it’s a lot of money but it’s not that much money when you’re talking about this guy’s business. So it’s that kind of stuff that only other founders can really get their heads wrapped around and I think that’s what I liked about having a community. I think that’s one of the biggest benefits that we’ve gone out of this podcast.
[29:40] I don’t want to speak for you but one of the biggest benefits I’ve gone out of the podcast is having folks who I can talk to both in the mastermind group, MicroConf and then just Twitter and other places and the shared mindset makes me feel less crazy. I may be crazy but at least I’m in that subculture of other people who are as crazy as I am.
[30:00] Mike: I think that about wraps us up. If you have question for us, you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or 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. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 171 | Top 12 Signs You Should Walk Away From a Project
Show Notes
- You’ve lost motivation to move forward
- You’re not making forward progress
- You’ve spent a lot of time into working on it and still haven’t talked to customers (time to reevaluate)
- You’ve had new competitors move into the space who are funded and you aren’t.
- You have no idea how to reach your market
- You’ve learned that many of your initial assumptions are incorrect and are having trouble compensating
- Your beta users aren’t using the product
- Your beta users are all saying that they would pay for it if it were $X, where $X is less than it costs to acquire a customer
- Your life goals have changed
- Your life situation has changed
- Fear of judgment from peers/family (either to quit or that it fails)
- You don’t have a good reason to continue, other than sunk costs
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about the top 12 signs you should walk away from a project. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 171.
[00:08] 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.
[00:25] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:26] 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?
[00:29] Rob: Feeling good. I just walked in the door from a two day retreat. I went to the central coast of California. I barely checked email. I admit I cheated a little bit but I didn’t take a laptop really just hunkered down and focused on evaluating last year, evaluating things that basically gave me life and the things that kind of sucked it out of me. And then I looked at the goals that I laid out. I looked at those goals, asked myself are those still in line with what I want to do? How do I accomplish them? I asked myself a lot of questions about what the end of the year looks like and even into 2015 and thinking about bigger picture stuff like where am I aiming now?
[01:07] I actually looked back at all my retreat notes from the past 3 years. I started noticing some trends of interests and things that I did well, that I implement and it was crazy to look back 3 years and be like wow, I haven’t even done yet. Like I haven’t even bought HitTail at that point. I mean there were just so many things that I’ve learned in this past few years. So I’m feeling good. I’m feeling very focused.
[01:31] I also got to try a new work style. I used the approach that impossiblehq had laid out last week where he says go to three different locations during the day and so I went to literally to the beach because I was doing just pen and paper and so I would sat on the cliff and over the waves and the surfers for about an hour and then I went to a couple different coffee shops and at the end of the day at a bru pub, doing a little happy hour there. But the whole time, basically the continuity was me thinking through all of this stuff and making notes in my notebook. So it was life giving and I’m pretty stoked to get back to work and really crank on some things and as well as to make some changes with several little things in my business.
[02:09] Mike: So I’ve been working on a new desktop edition of Audit Shark…
[02:13] Rob: Desktop? Nobody releases desktop software anymore.
[02:15] Mike: There’s a very specific strategy that I’m implementing for it. And it does tie back into the cloud version. Remember I talked before about the policy builder and how I ran into a bunch of problems with it. Essentially what we did was we took the entire code base for that and we copied it and then we made it more standalone than anything else so we still have that other code base that we’re still developing on kind of side by side. But this is essentially going to be the cleaner version of it. So it will still tie back into the cloud version and like I said there a strategy for this moving forward in actually two different directions. One is more towards the enterprise market and the other one is more towards people who are using the cloud version.
[02:55] Rob: Yeah, obviously I was joking. You’re not building a desktop app. You’re just building a desktop add on to your Saas app. It’s just like building a mobile app that interfaces with your Saas app. You giveaway the desktop edition for free I would imagine but it doesn’t do anything unless you have this monthly Audit Shark account.
[03:12] Mike: Yeah and that’s exactly. It’s more of an extension of it than anything else.
[03:16] Rob: Right. And the reason you went desktop is because the policy builder was such a nightmare in the web right? Or try to building a browser because there’s a bunch of complex stuff.
[03:24] Mike: Yeah. And we started going down that road and it realized that it’s not just about building that in the cloud because there’s lots of things that you can do these days that you couldn’t do 5 or 10 years ago and I don’t think it was s much about building it in the cloud. It was about – part of it was maintaining it but the other part of it was the fact that in order to test something, you need a machine out there that can test against.
[03:49] Right now, the way things work that’s not easy to do and it has a lot of latency and in order to use the policy builder, you really want to develop things and test them very quickly because these things are very quick. I mean you’re basically just slapping a bunch of function parameters together and you hit the button and say does this bring me what I want to see? And the problem is that if you are doing that in the web, there’s just so much latency involved in the time that task is created and sent out and picked up because of all the queuing and everything else, it was just wasn’t going to work. The experience was going to be awful. So at that point it was just like okay, well I can take this and move it in a slightly different direction.
[04:26] It actually ties in really well with a bunch of other people that I’ve talked to who want to use it for going into new environments where they want to take a look at that environment and get some information about it so there’s services providers. There are auditors who want to be able to take it on their laptop going into an environment and then just scan the environment and pull back the information without deploying agents and they don’t want to do this more than once. They just want to do it more as of a onetime scan and that’s a different market segment that I’m also trying to go after.
[04:55] Rob: Right. I mean I think that’s the question probably on everyone’s mind who’s listening to this is did a paying customer request this or is there a customer who is willing to pay you money only if you build this?
[05:08] Mike: There are customers who’ve told me in the past that they’re willing to pay money for this and there are very slight tweaks that need to be done to make it work in that fashion versus more of the enterprise market which I’m also talking to and this what the enterprise market is saying that they want.
[05:22] Rob: Got it. So I have a recommendation. One is a podcast episode, if you are thinking about canceling cable, the best discussion of this, kind of from soup to nuts services and tools and hardware and all that stuff is cordkillers.com and its episode 5 of that podcast. I’m a fan of that podcast anyway. It’s Tom Merritt and Brian Brushwood. In episode 5 they did a better job of describing it and how you can actually do it better than anyone else I’ve heard. We’ll link that up in the show notes.
[05:51] Music
[05:54] Mike: In today’s episode we’re going to talk about the top 12 signs that you should walk away from a project. In this episode, I’ve talked to a lot of different people who they’re trying to figure out whether or not they should keep going with something or whether they’re just trying to overcome a momentary hurdle in the development or they’re also just trying to figure out is this project going to go anywhere? Can I see myself working on this for the next 8-12 months? And there’s a lot of questions about what sorts of things you should be looking at? How should you approach that? I think in this episode we’re going to be answering some of those things.
[06:28] So the first sign that you should move on from a project is that you’ve lost motivation to move forward. If you’re spending too much time talking to people about the product but not actually trying to move things forward in terms of customer development and let me differentiate that a little bit. If you’re telling people what it is that you’re building versus soliciting information from prospective customers, those are two different things.
[06:52] If you’re just telling people all about what you’re building, if you’re talking about the developers and saying this is how I’m going to do to this and this is what I’m going to build and this how it’s going to work, that is more explaining what it is that you’re doing but you’re not doing customer development yet. You’re not learning from other people whether it is that they’re going to pay for it, whether it is that they use it unless developers are your target market.
[07:11] Rob: I think the question to ask with motivation is this temporary loss of motivation? Is this just a little bump that you’ve hit? For a few weeks you’re not motivated to work on this particular project or is it something that drags on for months and you just can’t get back at it. You aren’t interested in writing any code. You aren’t interested in writing copy and you kind of feel like maybe you don’t know what to do next or you know what to do next, you don’t feel like doing it. The biggest signs of that are I keep planning other things or making excuses why you can’t sit down and just crank into it and get it done. Or when you do sit down to dive in that you find yourself wondering and checking email and getting on the social network instead of actually getting things done.
[07:52] I think another element to this is people tend to be really good at either starting things or finishing them. People who are good at starting things tend to have a bunch of unfinished projects and they really don’t finish any of them. People that tend to finish, they have a real tough time either starting up a new project or getting back into a project they’ve kind of let go. Knowing that about yourself and looking at your history will also help you realize if you’re following your own natural inertia or if you really need to fight against that natural inertia and get back and try to get some of that motivation back. And we frankly talked about that in episode 170. It was about avoiding shiny object syndrome but part of shiny object syndrome is being distracted and maybe not having motivation.
[08:39] Mike: The second sign you should walkway from a project is that you’re not making any forward progress. And this is a little bit different than just losing motivation because you can still have motivation but you don’t necessarily know what to do. And you’re still doing things but nothing seems to be working. And a lot of times, that can boil down to the products is just not going to work out or you just have so many things that you have to do that you’re not sure what to work on so you don’t do anything and I think that’s extremely common amongst entrepreneurs as well.
[09:09] Rob: Yeah and we should probably take a step back here and say not any one of these 12 signs is an absolute red flag yes you should walk away from it but these are kind of – they add up. And so maybe having a lack of motivation is one thing but also a lack of word progress and then a couple of these others, they really start to stack up and point you towards walking away from a project.
[09:32] I think in terms of this sign, of not making forward progress, this will eventually lead for anyone. It will eventually lead to number 1, the lack of motivation. And for some of us, lack of word progress for two weeks leads to lack of motivation. For other people it may take six months of lack of work progress but eventually you will get to the point where you lose motivation so forward progress is definitely a sign that something is not going in the right direction and at this point, if I have like extended periods of not making forward progress or I see entrepreneurs who aren’t, I typically ask them to get a sanity check and to go outside of kind of their own head and talk to people either in their mastermind group, knowledgeable people, just someone that they trust that might have insight, not your friends and not your family who don’t understand what you’re doing but someone else in this world whom you’ve met hopefully at a conference or you have some relationship with that you can explain the situation to and get some kind of realistic viewpoint from the outside because I think good suggestions can come out of that.
[10:30] Mike: The third sign is that you’ve spent a lot of time working on the project and you still haven’t talked to customers. It could just be time to reevaluate what it is that you’re doing and where in the projects you should be focusing because if you’ve gone for too long without talking to any of your customers even if you talk to them upfront, their needs may have changed or you may have misunderstood things and then when you come back and you revisited, you may get a slightly different story or may get a completely different story based on the things that you have implemented so far.
[11:00] So make sure that you’re keeping in touch with people not just throughout the course of development but also making sure that you talked to them upfront to begin with and I’ve talked to a lot of people who have said while I’ve been building this for six months or eight months, I should’ve been building a mailing list and I should’ve been doing marketing but I haven’t done any of that yet so how do I go about selling this product? And we get a lot of comments from people listening to this podcast who email us in with questions like that and there’s really only so much you can do but at the end of the day you have to go talk to those customers. You have to find out if what you’re building is really what it is that they need.
[11:34] Rob: That might be the number one email that I receive asking for advice is hey, love the podcast. Enjoy the book. Unfortunately I didn’t read it and I went off and built, spent a year to building an app and now I’m here, how do I market it? And that probably is the biggest mistake that I see people making when they’re trying to get into this space. So yeah, I can’t agree with you more. Talking to potential customers. Every 6 to 8 weeks actually is there rule that I set for myself when I was working on Drip. I didn’t quite live up to that. I think I had a 3 month period where I didn’t email my list and didn’t keep them kind of apprised of the status of the project.
[12:15] But this goes all the way to landing page, collecting email addresses, that list I ideally would be emailed every 6 to 8 weeks with just a quick update, maybe a screen shot, something to build excitement. Then if you have early access customers aside from that list, that handful that agreed upfront to pay money for what you’re building then those I was sending personal emails to all 11 of them every few months and saying hey, still working on. I just want to give you an update. Those were almost – I didn’t even send screen shots. I just said I want to give you an idea that I’m still working on it. Just so people know that you’re alive and there’s some type of interest being maintained because when it takes you six months to build and launch and app, it’s a really long time and people tend to forget about what you’re doing.
[12:57] Mike: The fourth sine is that you’ve had new competitors move into the space who are funded and you aren’t. This could turn out to be a death blow for you but if you’re losing motivation or you’re not making a lot of work progress and then something like this happens then you could have serious problems. I mean you may as well throw in the towel at that point. Just because competitor moves into your space who is funded and you’re not funded doesn’t mean that you can’t proceed to move forward. You may very well be doing things that they’re not. Or they may burn through all of their funding very, very quickly trying to solve the wrong problem.
[13:26] But it’s something to definitely pay attention to because when funded people who are coming into your space have all this money to burn, they have the ability to run a lot of different experiments very, very quickly whereas you probably don’t especially if you’re running things on the side. On the other hand, this in some ways could be a good sign because it means that somebody out there with a lot of money decided that the niche that you’re going after is valuable enough to go after with some sort of funded company. So there’s two ways to look at that but again, if you’re having other problems, then it could be a sign that you should walkway.
[14:02] Rob: Yeah but this one depends on your situation. Obviously if you are an experienced founder and you have some marketing skill under your belt, you’re a decent developer, you have at least a little bit of money, I think you can outmaneuver even some funded competitors. But if you’re doing it right and you are maybe a first time entrepreneur and you’re just trying to get out of the day job, you should have picked a niche that really isn’t interesting to funded competition. We talked about it in our very early episodes probably in the first 5 or 10 about how to pick a niche where there really isn’t going to be a ton of competition to go pretty vertical with it just to cut your teeth out.
[14:39] So if you listen to that and you build a niche website or a WordPress plug-in or some folks who’ve built mobile apps and had success or you just go vertical with a smaller low maintenance Saas app, those are going to be so uninteresting to VC back companies that the likelihood of this one happening is very low. But if you made the mistake and you chased the Inc magazine dream and you build something, let’s say today you’re building something involving Google glass or bit coin or it was Twitter clients and Facebook apps a few years ago, Facebook games. It was so obvious that the venture funded companies were just going to flood into their spaces, that’s just not something I would do as a bootstrapper right now unless you really have the wind at your back and you have several of the items from our founder test at your back to kind of push you forward and give you a competitive advance.
[15:24] Mike: The fifth side is that you have no idea how to reach your market and this can just be a lack of marketing experience but it could also be that you haven’t talked enough to your customers to really understand where it is that they would potentially find out about your products. So if you’re pretty seriously into your development cycle and you still don’t have any idea how to reach your market, it could be a time to re evaluate things and stop the development and focus more on the marketing side of things because if you’re not marketing a product, it doesn’t matter how good it is if nobody hears about it.
[15:55] Rob: Yeah you don’t have to know for sure how you’re going to reach them at a cost that is going to be profitable for your startup but you do have to have some ideas and you do have to have those sketched out I would say in a Google doc even if they’re just a bunch of bullet points but its simple tactical approaches. It’s blocking and tackling of online marketing and software marketing. These are things like SEO content marketing, paid acquisition, joint venture partnerships, email marketing. There are several main stays that everybody talks about but you need to look into specifics and learn how to do these things well before you launch a product.
[16:33] Because if you build this product and you launch it to crickets and then you’re sitting there scrambling, trying to get these things together, it really isn’t that helpful. There’s too much pressure on you to learn these things in real time. You want to absorb them over time and that’s why we talk about getting those early wins with maybe a smaller product to learn enough that you can then parlay that into a larger product.
[16:53] Mike: The sixth sign is that a lot of your initial assumptions are no longer correct or were never correct and you’re having trouble compensating. In some ways, this is good to have because it means that you’re actually learning about your target market and you’re understanding what it is that they need because there’s a difference between learning about it and truly understanding what their needs are for the product. But if you’re going back to your initial assumptions and let’s say that you laid out a bunch of things in terms of how many customers you were going to get and you estimated you’d get 100 new customers a month and it turns out that realistically you’re only going to get 5 or 10 then that’s something that you need to look at and say is this business sustainable?
[17:31] Am I going to be able to continue this business or is it something that you’re still going to be able to work on even if it’s only for 5 or 10 customers a month? Is it still worth it for you to continue? Because at some point, there’s going to be a time where it is not worth it to continue but you have to understand based on which assumptions were faulty as to whether or not it’s worth continuing.
[17:54] Rob: What are some examples of initial assumptions being incorrect that you can think of?
[17:59] Mike: I’ve talked about this little in the past but one of the ones that I ran into with Audit Shark was that my initial target market was going to be banks because I did all the research and I figured out how many banks there were and what the approximate branch sizes were and everything. And I went and started talking to them and initially everything looked like it was good but then later on as I started building things and started talking to them a little bit more, I came to realize that what happened was I didn’t ask enough of about their accusation process so what turned out to be a situation where I thought I was going to be able to go to these banks directly and sell them the software turns out that was not going to be the case.
[18:34] What I would need to do is I would essentially need to go to consulting companies who then resold to the banks and I would essentially have to have some sort of reseller network and I’d have to sell through the consultants and I would have to sell it to the consultants who would then sell to the banks. And they may not even want to do that. Eventually I ended up coming to the point where I just said this is not the direction I want to go. Let me find a new direction. So in that case I didn’t completely walkway. I just said let me pivot. Pivoting is perfectly acceptable but that was one of the faulty assumptions was that I thought I’d be able to go direct to the banks and sell them the software. The other assumption that I had was that the banks actually cared about security. That turned out to be false as well.
[19:13] Rob: Apparently they don’t.
[19:14] Mike: No they don’t.
[19:15] Rob: There’s like a market pivot where you keep basically the same product and you just find a new market for it. I never called that pivot. I just called that learning like learning my marketing, honing my marketing. But yeah, I would agree with you. I don’t think a market pivot is that big of a deal. I probably done it with most of my apps.
[19:30] Mike: The seventh sine is that your beta uses aren’t using the products and if you have invited a bunch of people and they’re just not taking you up on the offer, then you need to find out what the fundamental problem is. Is it because they weren’t qualified well enough out-front? Is it not something that they’re actually having a problem with? Is it something that they can’t justify the time to spend on? Is it too complicated? Do they not just understand what it is that they’re supposed to be doing or what your expectations are for them?
[19:58] So there’s a lot of things that could be going wrong but at the end of the day you have to figure out what those things are and truly understand why it is that they’re not using the product. Because if nobody’s using the product and presumably in a beta, they’re probably using it for free. But if they’re not using it when it’s free, they’re definitely not going to use it when it’s paid so you have to find out what the problem is.
[20:17] Rob: I typically see this as being one of two things. Either you are not solving your user’s problems or you are not convincing them that you will solve their problem well enough for them to go through the effort of getting setup. And that’s two very different issues of whether you need to focus on building out more features or focusing on specific part of your product. The first one is pretty easy to figure out right? Because you just ask everybody is this solving a problem and then they’ll tell you why it’s not and you can build more features.
[20:48] The second one’s a little harder because if you’re not able to convince them that you are solving their problem so they can get over that setup hump, that initial on boarding experience is just too painful, then you need to think about alright, so do I need to make my marketing better? Do I need to convey the value proposition differently or convey it better? I’m not a good enough marketer to do this right now? Do I need to pivot it? do I need to not pivot the whole thing but just pivot the message to a different message or do you need to sit down and spend a lot of time on your on boarding process and try to either automate that or try to do a concierge on boarding to reduce the friction of folks getting value out of your product.
[21:25] Needless to say I have recent experience doing the latter, a lot of the latter, improving the on boarding process with Drip. We spent a lot of time on it both clarifying the value, I’m still in the process of that and then making the on boarding process both a simple wizard in the app itself and offering the concierge service. I know all of those things have contributed towards a pretty high number of our folks getting fully activated as we call meaning that they’re actually at a point where they should be receiving value from the app.
[21:59] And if they aren’t, then there’s something else of play either once they’re on board, if they aren’t getting value then it typically means that your app isn’t giving them all they need and that’s when you again go back to number 1 and you start looking at which features or what elements do I need to add in order to really solve the users problem?
[22:17] Mike: A somewhat related sign is number eight in which your beta users are saying that they would pay for it if the price were X and X is probably a lot less than what it is that you’re asking for the product. So at that point, it kind of ties back into one of your initial assumptions which was people will pay X dollars for it and they say well, I wouldn’t pay $50 a month for this but I might pay 10. If that number starts to dip too low then you have to evaluate whether the person who’s saying that is even a good fit for the product or whether they are a good fit and as Rob just said, if you’re not solving their problem in a way that they need or you’re not solving the problem the way that they need or that it needs to be solved for them so that it actually justifies the value, maybe there’s some extra steps that although you do solve part of the problem, there’s some other things that if you did those as well that it would be exponentially more valuable to them.
[23:0] There’s a lot of different things that go along with that but ultimately if they are coming back to you and saying that there’s a price issue of some kind, you may need to reevaluate what that price issue is and look at whether the price needs to be lower, do you need to modify your pricing tiers a little bit? That’s actually something that I’m looking at and evaluating right now is that the pricing tiers in how I offer Audit Shark. It’s a process you have to talk to the customers to find out and you have to talk to enough of them. You can’t just to talk to 1, 2, 3, you got to talk to a lot of people to figure out whether or not you actually have a pricing problem that is just too related versus the amount that you’re asking is not justifiable in their minds.
[23:49] Rob: Yeah. That’s where pricing is a tough one because you can either be priced too high or you are going after the wrong market because if you go after bloggers as an example, they don’t want to pay very much. They expect everything to be free. Whereas if you go after small businesses or enterprises, they tend to be willing to pay more and say you can have a higher price, you need to provide more value to them. So it could just be a market thing. You’re always going to have some people telling you that you’re priced too high but it should be a minority as soon as you get a lot of your beta users telling you that you know you have either a market problem or potentially a pricing issue. I think both of these last two signs that we’ve mentioned, the fact that your beta users aren’t using the product or that they’re all saying it would be too expensive.
[24:31] Neither of these is a reason to walk away from a product. I think only if these become unsolvable. Only if you iterate on them multiple times. They aren’t using the products so you redo your on boarding event features, still not using the products so you take another attack, you add concierge, still not using the product. I mean this takes some iteration. It’s not a first time it happens you turn your hands up and walk away. Same thing with pricing. It’s really about moving quickly and making changes and testing and figuring out what you can find that works but only after numerous tries and still nothing’s working then this does become a red flag.
[25:03] Mike: The ninth sign is that your life goals have changed and by life goals, I really mean if you decide at some point that you don’t necessarily want to own your own business anymore, if you’ve been building a product because you felt it was the direction for you to go and then you wake up one day and say well, you know what? There’s other things that I want to do in my life and I’m perfectly content having a full time job. Then bravo. I mean there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly okay and acceptable to say you know what, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to do that anymore or whether it’s living a location independent lifestyle or getting married and settling down at a given location something along those lines or if you decide that you hate computers because they change every two minutes.
[25:47] There’s plenty of reasons to decide that you don’t want to go in that particular direction and it could be that product just doesn’t fit in with your life goals anymore and that’s definitely one of the better reasons is think to walk away from product development than anything else.
[26:02] Rob: Yeah. I would agree. I think if this were to happen that you wouldn’t want it to happen just one day. You’d want it to be this feeling that comes at you overtime and that you probably have a realization one day and like wow that’s why I’ve been feeling this way about the product. I would then, if it were happening to me, I would then try to take a step back and get some time alone even if it was just for a four block one day but ideally be for a day or two to really clear your head and try to take a look at what it is that you want to do instead if you just want to simplify your life and if you can figure out ways to be basically be happy without a product that’s kind of what you’re feeling.
[26:43] There are a lot of ways to go about it and there’s a lot of stress trying to get a product launched and I think that could make you feel like perhaps it’s not in your life goal but I think it takes really some hardcore soul searching and some evaluation of which direction you want to go. And I think realizing that the decision is not permanent as well is probably a good thing. But putting a time frame on it, I would say hey, I can be happy without a product or one year or two years not a bad thing for a lot of people especially if you’re just at a point where it’s causing more trouble than your life is able to handle at that point.
[27:17] I think that leads us well into the tenth sign you should walk away from a project and that’s that your life situation has changed. I think this is a pretty common one that causes people to either want to start a product or want to close down a product is to get married or to have a child or to move or to sell a house, by a house, have a death in the family, there’s all these things that can happen to you and it changes your situation so dramatically that it’s time to almost reevaluate most of your major life choices and frankly launching a product can be one of those things that you need to reevaluate. So I can see this being a very solid reason for walking away from a project that you’re in the middle of.
[27:59] Mike: Yeah. All the things that you just listed, getting married or moving or getting a new job, all those things, they’re very stressful things and when you throw in launching a product on top of it or something eventually’s got to give. And if it’s the product, so be it. I don’t think There’s anything wrong with walking away from those things and I think that Rob made a very, very good point which is it doesn’t have to be permanent and that’s something you have to recognize. You can walk away from development of a product for a while and then once you cleared your head, once your life has kind of calm down a little bit, you can reevaluate that and say is that something that I still really want to do and come back to it in the future.
[28:38] Because if you’ve been working on code and the sales and marketing and stuff, it’s not like that stuff just magically goes away overnight when it comes to your mailing list and stuff, it might be a little bit hard to restart those things especially if you’ve grown one very, very large but presumably if you’ve been doing that, then the products is well on its way to success but if you’re struggling with the product in any way, shape or form and then you have these life situations that drastically alters where you are, you may want to walkway and at least for a little while and then clear your head and then come back to in the future.
[29:11] That takes us into number 11 which is fear of judgment from your friends or family or peers if you quit. If the only reason that you’re still working on that product is because your friends or family may think poorly of you because you quit something, it’s definitely something to take into mind when you are deciding whether or not to quit but it could be affecting your motivation as well because if that’s always in the back of your mind you’re going to have those thoughts, you’re going to have a lot of doubts about whether or not you should be continuing or whether like I said, the only reason you could be continuing is because you’re afraid of what your friends and family are going to think if you do quit.
[29:47] Rob: Yeah, the emotional parts of any decision are always the hardest. They complain to you, I mean this is like when you’re in high school and you’re considering whether to breakup with someone, it’s like you can write a pro-cons list but there’s always that relationship that really ties you to it and makes you struggle internally if you know it’s the right decision. It’s hard. Fair judgment is something that I think we all live with. What I found is the less that I judge other people in my head, the less I fear others judgment because I just forget that people do that. It’s always going to be an issue of course but I think it’s a good point that if the only reason that you’re sticking around that you can’t write any other pros down for continuing the app is that you’re scared that people will judge you then that’s probably a bad sign.
[30:28] And actually I think that leads us into number 12, our final point. And it’s that if you don’t have a good reason to continue working on your product other than sunk cost, other than the fact that oh I’ve spent six months working and I’ve spent two years working on it, if that’s it, if that’s the only reason you can think of, then you kind of have a problem. Right? There needs to be some other pretty prominent positive reasons for continuing to do this, some positive prospects for it other than just avoiding sunk cost.
[30:57] Mike: I feel like sunk cost get a lot of people because seems like it goes against human nature to put a lot of effort or time or money into something and then just walkway from it. It’s incredibly hard to do I think. I think that’s why you end up with these people who have gambling addictions for example. It’s like if I just do a little bit more, I’ll get out of this hole. It doesn’t necessarily workout that way. Similarly when you’re putting all this time and effort into something and you’ve gotten several thousand or tens of thousands of lines of code written and you look at it and you really don’t necessarily have anything to show for it except for all this code that you’ve written that either half works or the product mostly works and you still don’t have a market for it, it can be difficult to justify why you spent all that time and energy trying to build a product and ultimately it’s just not going to work out.
[31:47] And no matter how hard you try it could be that it’s just not going to work out and at those times, it’s better to cut your losses and walkway and either try something new or just kind of go down a different path than it is to continue sinking good time and energy after that.
[32:01] Rob: Yeah and this is hard to do. I’ve had to do it myself with multiple products I think 3 or 4 different ones come to mind. One of them was an eBook I wrote myself and tried to sell probably in 2006-2007 from my blog. It was about how to become a programmer and tried all types of crazy things and really it just wasn’t a good market. But I kept going after that and pivoting and iterating and doing all this stuff and just nothing really ever came of it and I eventually had dumped it and I certainly felt bad about the time I invested. And then I have a couple others, they were a couple two software products. One was a niche website, one was a software product and then eBook and those I acquired and so there was a real sunk cost of actual money. Luckily none of them was substantial. It was in the few thousand dollar range but eventually I wound up closing all of them.
[32:49] I’ve chalked it up to learning since then. Those were in the midst of I’ve had some success. Everything’s not a success and I’m still figuring things out in retrospect. I don’t think any of them would’ve ever been a real earner and really worth pursuing. So I know that this is a hard decision to make especially in the moment. If it’s the only reason you can think of to continue with your product then that’s not really a very good reason to do so.
[33:13] Music
[33:15] If you have question for us call 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. 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 170 | 12 Strategies for Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome
Show Notes
In the moment
- Site blockers – Chrome extensions called StayFocused, ProductivityOwl
- Pause your email – InboxPause – same guys who make Boomerang
- Use triggers to get in the zone – loop the same song or playlist and work. That playlist will become synonymous with getting into the zone. Rob mentioned he’s recently been looping Lonesome Dreams by Lord Huron, and he’s also been known to endlessly loop pop punk songs.
- Pomodoro technique. Taking it even further: http://impossiblehq.com/workstation-popcorn
- RescueTime
- Timeboxing – Marketing Monday
Long-term
- Make an annual plan. Then break it down by quarter. Then by month. If you say “yes” to anything not on the plan…realize that you are bumping something.
- Weekly reflection on what you’re doing and why.
- Mastermind group accountability
- Focus on 1 thing at a time, and maybe (big maybe) a secondary, less important, side project. Anyone I’ve known who does more is chronically not completing things.
- Learn the difference between productivity and entertainment – examples: HN, Seth Godin Books, Malcolm Gladwell Books
- Temporary information diet
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discussed 12 strategies for avoiding shiny object syndrome. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 170.
[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.
[00:26] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[000:27] 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, Mike?
[00:32] Mike: I was looking through some of the comments that are left on startupsfortherestofus.com and there’s a recent one there from Mark Studebaker who says another solid episode guys. One thing I do to help get myself going with just coding is to always leave or find something easy to do. Sit down. Knock it out, it puts me in gear.
[00:49] Rob: I find that if I have an easy task that it will be a good on ramp for me to kind of get working and get focused but I’ve never intentionally left an easy task at the end and I think that’s a pretty good tip. That was to assist with a question that we answered a couple of episodes ago about staying focused and being motivated.
[01:07] Mike: So what’s up with you this week?
[01:09] Rob: I’m still struggling with this having too much work to do and having too many simultaneous tasks on my plate and I think we’ll touch on that in this episode when we talk about shiny object syndrome. I’m looking to see how quickly I can get out from under these I think. The fact that MicroConf is hopefully the planning begins to wrap up here in the next month or so and then my never ending quest to revamp HitTail and get it working again at full capacity is probably still a week maybe two out but I’m making a lot of progress on that over the last couple of days.
[01:40] And if I can get those things off my plate, I will be a much happier person because right now I’m frankly not very pleasant to be around and so kind of just labeling it as the struggling me I’m not nearly as say happy with work like I was even six months ago.
[01:56] Mike: I think part of the problem is you tend to be distracted at all times as well because you can’t even just sit there and have dinner without your mind wandering to all the other things that you have to do. You can’t necessarily focus on whatever the task is that you’re currently working on just because your brain is constantly thinking about all the other things that you also have to do.
[02:14] Rob: That’s right. And there are people who live in that perpetually and I’m not one of them. Most of my time, I am focused in one or two tasks and in general I don’t feel this way. So when I get into this kind of chaos, this mental chaos, definitely a shock to the system and it’s something I want to get out of as soon as possible because I find it being frankly not that productive. And the sooner I can get out of it and kind of get back to the old more controlled way of doing I think the better off I am.
[02:42] So we have 325 worldwide iTunes reviews now across looks like about 18 countries and thanks to comment cast for giving us the ability to see that. But we have a review from Bar Assam he says great focused podcast on starting your own business without venture capital. I’ve learned a great deal by listening to all the episodes. And our other one is from ASDF0987 he says weekend, week out these guys deliver the gold. I love following along as they talk about their experiences developing their businesses. Thank you so much guys.
[03:12] So we really appreciate these reviews. If you have not logged in to iTunes, left us a five star review, we’d really appreciate it. It helps us out. It helps us grow our audience, we’d appreciate your help if you can.
[03:23] Music
[03:27] This week are going to spend a whole episode answering a listener question. So listener Ryan Belong from Redding, California writes in and he says I’d love to hear some productivity or shiny object syndrome recovery tips on a podcast episode. As you know, entrepreneurs and startup folks are notorious for that especially in the tech space where not keeping up with the latest and greatest can cost you. So most of us have already formed bad habits that are counterproductive to building and growing a company.
[03:54] And when he says shiny object syndrome he just means seeing the next shiny object and basically walking away from what you’re doing now and putting too much on your plate. And as soon as you have 2, 4, 8 projects that you’re working on simultaneously, you can’t possibly be that efficient at it because you’re just splitting you time up too much and it becomes such a headache to manage.
[04:12] So today we’ve broken these 12 strategies for avoiding the shiny object syndrome into two sections. The first one is going to be in the moment. So it’s like how to get focused in the moment? And then the second half is going to be talking about longer term focus strategies, motivation strategies and that kind of stuff. And these are taken almost exclusively from our own experience. A couple of them have been referred to me and I don’t use them but I know they’re popular and a lot of people do. And so we’re going to kick it off with our first in the moment strategy and is to use a site blocker.
[04:46] So there are a ton of these out there. There are chrome extensions. There’s stay focused and productivity owl. There’s a bunch of them that are free but it allows you to block websites either at specific times or for specific durations. The notorious ones for us would probably be hacker news, Twitter, it might be your Twitter client. it might be Facebook. Anything, Reddit, anything that draws your attention away and allows you to accidentally wander. You click one link and you’re reading something for work and suddenly you spent 30 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos or reading a bunch of the latest post about how jQuery can do this and that.
[05:21] That’s bad. It really impacts your flow. It impacts your productivity and so the use of site blockers is something that I know is pretty prevalent and finding one and getting it in place if you have this issue of wandering off I think is something that can help with your focus.
[05:36] Mike: I’ve always thought that the idea of a site blocker would be helpful but the actual implementation of them, what I would like to see for them is just kind of like a warning that just pops up that says hey you’re about to do stuff that is probably not your best interest, are you sure you want to go on? So that way it’s more of like a click here to continue and it kind of disrupts your flow of going off into the weeds as opposed to just blatantly stopping. Maybe it’s more of a gentler way of saying hey, more on you’re doing things you shouldn’t be.
[06:05] One that I found recently that I just love this thing already, I barely used it and its called inbox pause and it allows you to pause the email that’s coming into your Gmail account. What it does is it takes all the incoming email and automatically sets it to a specific label. And then when you unpause, it will take all of those things and will put them back into your mail box says unread basically removing that label. And it comes from the same guys who make Boomerang.
[06:32] It’s just a little Gmail plug-in. You click pause and you can click unpause and your email has been queued up. It pops back to your mailbox. And to be perfectly honest, an email from me is probably a much bigger problem than going off to random websites because I really do need to be in my email and do a lot of stuff in there and it’s very distracting to know that there are emails that are probably still coming in that I have to deal with. So for me, to be able to just block my email for time periods of say a couple of hours, I know that if I go back and check my email, there’s not going to be anything there unless I go and unpause it.
[07:05] Rob: I like that one as well. I haven’t used it but it’s something I’ll be installing when we get done with the show. Next idea, and this is something I’ve used a lot and I’ve ramped it up and actually gotten better out of it over the years but it’s to use triggers to get you in the zone and to get you focused at the start of the day. About 5-6 years ago, I used to start everyday when I’d sit down to write code and I would turn on either a podcast or NPR, some type of talk radio and that always shifted my focus. It became synonymous with me starting to work.
[07:35] These days, since I’m doing a lot of stuff where I need the language center of my brain because I’m writing copy or writing emails, I need to do it via music. But what I found is that if I found a new song, if I hear a new song that I haven’t heard a bunch and I really like that song, I will sit down and loop that song, just that song, not a playlist but just that song over and over for a couple of hours while I work and I find that especially if I’m doing some coding or something and I can kind of get into a real heavy zone with, that song then becomes a trigger for me to get in the zone and it will last for weeks if not months depending on it. At a certain point you do just get sick of the song and you can’t listen to it anymore.
[08:12] but taking a new song and using it in that fashion will trigger parts of your brain that will allow you almost instantly to go into work mode. And I ran into some issues where I did this with a couple of songs. There’s a really good song called lonesome dreams by Lord Huron that I did it with and I probably listen to this song 600 or 700 times in a course of a few weeks. And we were at a friend’s house hanging out listening to Pandora and the song came on and I no joke totally started thinking about work and my to-do list came up in my head and it just triggered even though we’re sitting around having drinks and chatting. So use this one with caution for sure.
[08:46] I’ve also found this works with certain playlist of the music is all of the similar style. So I’ll put songs back to back to back with heavy driving drum beats or heavy driving guitar. You can have different playlists of these things and loop these. I find that it’s not as powerful as that single song but it does last longer because that playlist won’t burn itself out because you have a little more variety.
[09:08] Mike: Yeah. In iTunes I have a specific playlist called programming music and it just allows me to get into the zone and just really focus on whatever it is that I’m working on. I can use it for just about anything where I need to really think in depth about a particular problem. I feel like it works much better for things that are I’ll say not as creative because with creative stuff I kind of need to not be as driven. So if I’m doing coding, I’m actively thinking about a very specific problem that probably has a very specific solution versus being a little bit more creative with creating emails and stuff where that tempo has to be turned much further down so it doesn’t help me as much for those types of tasks. But for program it works really, really well.
[09:50] Rob: I’d agree with that. Yeah my playlist, I have a couple of them but I call them working.
[09:55] Mike: So the fourth one is using the pomodoro technique and I’ve talked about this a little bit before and the pomodoro technique there’s a lot of different iPhone apps that you can use or there’s even probably desktop apps or chrome plug-in that you can leverage but it’s really just a matter of picking one and it sets aside a time block for you to really get in the zone. And then after 25 minutes or so, and you can adjust the time a little bit but the default is typically 25 minutes you work and for 25 minutes then you take a 5 minute break and you work for 25 minutes, take another 5 minute break.
[10:26]And then after four of them, you take a much longer break which is usually 15 or 20 minutes and then you kind of go back into that so that way you’re doing blocks of work and about two hours at a time but you’re trying to squeeze as much as you can into these 25 minute increments called pomodoros. And I found that it works really well.
[10:43] Rob: Yeah and there’s a bunch of website tomato-dashtimer.com is a free one and it has just a 25 minute time where you can stop and start with a space bar. There’s plenty of options here for that. I’m seeing an interesting article. It’s actually just on hacker news right now. It’s on impossiblehq.com and he kind of takes this even further where he talks about how to become uber productive while working for yourself and he sits down at the beginning of a day and he breaks things up into three equal chunks of about 2 or 2.5 hours a piece and then he finds three locations to work from.
[11:16] So then he goes to this really killer coffee shop. He works there, just sprints for that 2.5 hours and I’m trying to see if he actually does pomodoro and just does 30 minute sprints or if he does the whole 2.5 but either way he gets that group done, then he puts on his iPod and he cranks up loud music and he goes to the next station. He says it’s ideal if you have to walk, ride a bike, do something physical to get do that next place that it’s actually not just another seat in the same coffee shop but it’s another coffee shop block or two up the road. And then he does that three times and he says it’s just incredibly productive for him.
[11:53] I’ve never tried this but I’m really interested to try this. I have accidentally or kind of just by virtue of schedule I have needed to bounce around to different work locations the same day a few times and I have found that it does make my mind not get stock in a rut. It adds to like the creativity or at least the ability to kind of see problems with a new view and not get stuck in the demotivational thing of sitting in the same bedroom for 8 hours straight.
[12:20] Mike: So the next one on our list is rescue time and rescue time is a Saas application that you can install and you put it on your desktop or your laptop and essentially what it does is it looks at the processes that are running on your machine and it will figure out what it is you’re doing and what you’re spending your time on. And then at the end of the week it will email you a report and will show you essentially where you’ve spent your time throughout the course of the week. So if you’ve spent a lot of time in visual studio, it will show you that. If you spent a lot of time on hacker news it will show you that as well.
[12:51] And then based on the type of takes that you are performing, it will assign a score to the task that you are doing because there are certain tasks that are considered very much work oriented. So for example, sitting in your compiler is probably very, very much work oriented. You’re not doing that too much outside of things you’re supposed to be doing. And then there’s things that you’re doing for example inside of a web browser that it could go either way. So being in your compiler might be worth say 2 points per minute and being in your web browser on a programming website might be 1 point, might 2 points, it kind of depends on the website.
[13:24] And then there are other websites where if you’re on that website its very, very bad and its definitely not work related. So things like YouTube are probably minus 2 for example. Hacker news I probably minus 2 but if your job is to do social media for example you might spend a lot of time on hacker news because you have to as part of your job and that’s you’re trying to get social traction on your website and different stories that you’re trying to promote. So you can customize it a little bit but what I found was it tended to be a little bit of work for me because of all the different things that I do I ended up kind of adjusting the different point values quite a bit based on the weeks that I was working just.
[14:07] Because some weeks I would be doing a lot of promotion so if I‘m doing those types of things then I have to bump up to the points that lean on those different websites as work. And then if you’re doing things like Facebook ads for example being on Facebook should theoretically be minus 2 but at the same time if you’re doing Facebook ads, you kind of have to be on Facebook in order to run them. So it can be a little bit of a struggle or a challenge in some of those cases but for the most part, if you’re really looking for a good cross section of where you currently spend your time, rescue time is definitely a good place to start looking because it will give you that snapshot.
[14:38] Rob: Our next strategy for avoiding shiny object syndrome is time boxing and I actually just did one of these. I had a task that I thought was going to take me an hour and I sat down 30 minutes before you and I had a deadline to talk and I just cranked on this thing and did it very fast like way faster than I thought. I’m pretty pleased with getting it done.
[14:59] And there’s other ways to do this time boxing. You can time box on a calendar. You can just look at 4 to 5 things you need to get done in a day, the larger picture things and put in 30-45 minutes, 1 hour for each of them. You do a quick estimate and you just pack out your calendar for the day and you only give yourself that much time to do it. Unless it’s absolutely critical that it be at a certain level of quality, I mean you crank until the time is up and then you send it off. I’ve used this for just success. I don’t use it all the time. I use it when I feel like I’m bloating my tasks and when I feel like I‘m in that rut and I am losing focus. I will resort to basically one or most of these tactics that we’ve named so far.
[15:41] Mike: One of the time boxing techniques that I’ve talked about in the past is using marketing Monday and just dedicating all of your marketing tasks for one specific day of the week. I think that helps a lot of people just because of the fact that a lot of the marketing tasks take time to see the results so if you kind of box all those in to one particular day of the week and then you don’t come back to it for another week, then by that time you’ll have presumably started to see some of the results and you can act on those the following week. But marketing Monday is definitely an example of one of the time boxing techniques.
[16:15] Rob: Now we’re going to take a look at a handful of more longer term ways to avoid shiny object syndrome and to stay focused. The first one that I‘m going to talk about is something that I’ve done every year for the past 3 or 4 years and it’s to make an annual plan. Look out at the next year and figure out what is it that you want to accomplish. What handful of things high level big picture goals do you want to accomplish? Then break it down by quarter and then if possible, if necessary, break it down by month.
[16:44] What this does is makes you realize that your year is packed with really interesting stuff that you chose at the beginning of the year. And it’s not that you can’t change from this. It’s not that you can’t say yes to something else but if you say yes to anything that’s not on that plan, you need to realize that you’re going to be bumping something else on your list and that becomes a deliberate decision because I see a lot of folks who especially us, founders and entrepreneurs, we start doing one task. We start doing one project and then either we hear about a new technology or someone brings an offer to hey, you want to be a cofounder of this? You want to just help me out? You want to do some consulting?
[17:19] These things come up and if you don’t have any type of say a time boxed year or any type of annual plan where you’re really trying to get stuff done that’s going to move your forward, you will wander all over the place. That’s just our tendency. And so making this annual plan is something I think is very important. It’s something I think a lot of people do not do and think it’s been a big mover for me to take – I typically look back at the previous year. I look at what I enjoy doing, what I didn’t enjoy. I look at what revenue it was. How much it grew, where I wanted to be in next year and then how I’m going to make that happen, try to make it as realistic as possible.
[17:55] Because I do this during typically a two day retreat that I take away from the family and it allows me to purely focus, I don’t check email during this time. I try to do paper and pen. Sometimes I use my iPad for things but in general I spend the days at coffee shops walking, thinking, I have a list of questions I’m trying to answer for myself, looking backwards and at the coming year. By the time I come out of that, I tend to have a really tight vision of what the next year is going to look like, what I want out of it, I say no to a lot of things after that. You might think oh that locks you in not taking advantage of opportunity. That’s not true. I have taken advantage of opportunity and you still can but that opportunity better be really, really good that one of the other 4 or 5 things that you have on that annual plan is going to get bumped and that it’s worth it to you to do that.
[18:42] Mike: But when you do that, do you kind of assign time blocks to each of those things that you kind of estimate that it’s going to take or do you just kind of wing it in terms of ball park like oh I think this will take about one quarter to finish. How far down do you go in terms of blocking it out or trying to make sure that the time estimates for a lot of those things are accurate?
[19:02] Rob: I don’t go that deep into the time estimates. What I do is I know that certain things like MicroConf have a tight deadline. It’s a definite deadline and then other things I will say – you know last year I said I want to get Drip out in the spring and I think I even said it was like by April 1 because MicroConf was at the end of April. And so I’ll throw that out as a deadline and realize whoa, suddenly I’m planning MicroConf and building Drip and I was still growing HitTail and realized that’s a lot. I really can’t take on anything else.
[19:28] Now Drip was pushed out. I didn’t launched ‘til quarter 3 that’s okay. I can live with that. I mean there are other reasons it didn’t launch. It wasn’t because I lost focus. it was just coz there’s a lot of work to do. But I’m in the same position again this year. I have four things going on right now and that’s not really not ideal but I’m seeing that two of them hopefully will be off my plate in the next couple of months and that it should free me up for the remainder for the year.
[19:53] But when I say month by month, I do try to plan which month something’s going to be done and then the month to month typically is if I’m talking about revenue goals, there’s a few other goals that I do break down and it just helps to not say I want to be at $50,000 a month by the end of the year. But it helps to break it down into how fast do I need to grow in order to get to that $50,000 goal.
[20:11] Mike: I think an approach that I’ve kind of gravitated towards is doing kind of a weekly reflection of what it is that you’re doing and why. And at the end of any given week, maybe this is more of a reactive strategy than a preventive strategy. I kind of look back at the previous week and previous month at the end of each week and say is this what I’m supposed to be doing? is this actually helping me? Is this moving things forward? And if it’s not, look at the things that need to be done in order to change that. I think it was Steve Jobs who at one point basically said I look in the mirror everyday and decide if today was the last day of my life, would I be happy doing what I’m doing today? And if there’s too many days in a row where the answer is no, then something’s got to change.
[20:56] Rob: Our next strategy for avoiding shiny object syndrome is mastermind group accountability. It’s having other people who are invested in your story who you’re talking with fairly frequently, keeping you accountable to not wandering around and not jumping on other ideas and objects. I got to be honest. I’ve had several points over the past say 3.5 years since I’ve been part of mastermind groups where I have had to convince the other people in my mastermind group that I was going to do something and that they pushed back and said why are you doing this? Give me a reason. And I did and I was able to – it helped me think it through. It helped them understand really why I had to do that. Why I wasn’t just going to sit there and work on that singe app for the next 10 years like other folks had.
[21:41] Mike: I think the mastermind group accountability, I think this really, really helps when you’ve got things going on that are not necessarily obviously to the average lay person because 1) you just can’t divulge certain types of information. In a mastermind group, you can. You can lay down all your cards on the table and you could say this is why I’m doing X, Y and Z and although it doesn’t make sense why I’m doing Z right now when I get done with X and Y then its going to make sense.
[22:10] The next one is to focus on one thing at a time. If you have a smaller secondary or less important side projects then you might want to take those and push them to the side a lot more and focus on your primary project. If you have a salary and a side project then you could kind of couple those together if you’re doing consulting or you’re building a product. There’s lots of different ways to combine kind of like your primary source of income and then something else that you’re building on the side or doing on the side but if they are competing too much with one another, one of them has got to give. And it’s okay to set aside your full time job in favor of a side project that you’re working to build up in an effort to supplant your full time job but you have to do that as a conscious effort.
[22:53] And when you start taking on more than one or two major tasks at a time, something’s got to give. So as you start going down the road where you’re building two side projects or three side projects, it’s ultimately going to end up a scenario where some thing’s going to fall on the floor because you can’t reasonably sub stand those for too lengthy a period of time before things just start to fall apart.
[23:18] Rob: Everyone I know who takes on more than one major project plus a small side winds up chronically not completing things. They just have a bunch of stuff sitting around that never gets done, never gets launched and winds up being a huge waste of time. If you abandon something because it’s not a good idea, then that’s okay. That’s justified. But if you abandon stuff because you just don’t have time because you just wander from one thing to the next, you’re never going to make any progress towards your goal. It’s pretty sad to be honest because I know some talented people who aren’t getting there and it’s not because they couldn’t get there if they focused but it’s because they’re just taking on too many fun things frankly.
[23:59] Next strategy we’re going to talk about is learning the difference between productivity and entertainment. I think there’s a lot of confusion. Some people think that let’s say being on hacker news is actually being productive or reading Seth Godin books, Purple Cow, Linchpin, love all these books. they’re not productivity though. you’re not actually moving your business forward. You may be learning something, maybe learning a lesson but I never once kidded myself that I was being productive while I was listening to it or pushing my business forward or even learning a lesson that was really going to make that much of a difference in my business.
[24:32] You might learn something ancillary but it’s so different than either sitting down to write some copy, to make a cold call, to setup a new ad campaign, to build out SEO, those are the things that push your business forward or even learning about those things in a very specific and defied way. Jeremy from the internet business mastery podcast calls this just in time learning. I’ve always liked that phrase. When I sit down, let’s say I’m going to take on a new ad network or I’m going to try a new SEO technique. That moment, that’s when I’m going to learn that technique.
[25:04] I have stopped listening to highly tactical podcast or reading highly technical blog articles that I’m not going to put into use in maybe the next week, maybe two because I can always find them later. Search engines are pretty good these days and what I found is that I was consuming so much information about putting 1/10th of it to use and by the time I put it to use, I had forgotten what I had read anyway because I had put so much information in my head.
[25:30] So I think the bottom line for this one is to not consume tactical information until you’re ready to use that tactic and to really learn that difference between productivity and entertainment and its okay to do entertainment. I listen to a lot of podcasts but I know that I’m doing it for fun and I read a lot of business books and I know that business books are not going to push my business forward. It’s much more of a form of entertainment than of actually being productive and driving my business forward.
[25:56] Mike: One of the things that I’ve found that kind of helps me differentiate and draw solid line between productively and entertainment is to gravitate more towards books that are clearly not productivity. I don’t tend to read business books anymore. I used to. I used to read a lot of them and then I got to the point where I realized that a lot of these things are more entertainment than education. So it’s not helping me move my business forward so why am I spending my time on that? Why don’t I spend my time doing stuff that for example would help me sleep at night? So what I’ll do is I’ll read science fiction novels at night on my kindle.
[26:31] And what it does is it actually helps me sleep better because then I’m reading stuff that is – I’ll say in some ways mindless because it’s not like I will think a lot about it. It’s not like I’ll try and glean some lesson from the story that I’ll try to apply to my business. if it’s just some science fiction novel that I’m reading, I can close a chapter and go to bed and I’m not dwelling on it a lot.
[26:52] Another strategy you can use is going on a temporary information diet and kind of like the difference between knowing what is productive versus what is entertainment, you can take a look at the website you’re reading whether its hacker news or Twitter pruning down your RSS lists, pruning down your podcast list. I’ve actually pruned my podcast list down to about half a dozen and I will alternate back and forth between them because quite frankly I don’t necessarily get a lot out of most of them anymore. So there’s only so many lessons that you can learn. There’s so many different ways that you can hear a specific piece of information before you’ve kind of really understand it.
[27:28] If you need to prune back on that stuff especially if you’re doing it temporarily because you really need to buckle down, then put a hard limit on what your RSS looks like or your podcast looks like. Maybe it’s a 5, maybe it’s a 10 maybe it’s a 20 but make sure that you put a limit on there so that you don’t feel like you have to go listen to them. And then one of the things that you’ll find is when you start limiting these types of things, part of the reason you want to put a hard limit on those is coz you’re going to start to feel pressure if you just let them build up. And this happens especially with RSS feeds. I found that this happened to me when I started to neglect my RSS feeds and not mark things as red and not actually go through them.
[28:07] I actually felt pressure to go in and read those because it almost felt like my to-do list was expanding. And it was in a weird way it was kind of stressful because I’m like oh, I’ve got all these things that I’ve subscribed to. I really should be reading these things and instead of letting those things build up, just trim them. Just get rid of them completely so that they’re not there and contributing to your to-do list.
[28:28] Rob: Yeah. I’m a big fan of information diets and when I’m on a big push like this quarter as an example, I backed way off on the amount of stuff I consume. And then at other times like let’s say I have a quarter later in the year that’s more relaxing and I hope to get there and intentionally make it just a more relaxed three months, I will push in and I’ll lean in to the stuff that’s coming out through my RSS feed and my podcast list and anything else. I’ll listen to a lot more books and such because I feel like that’s the time when I’m going to recharge and get new ideas and new concepts into my mind but I see it as an ebb and flow. So I like the concept that it’s a temporary information diet. I don’t feel like I need a permanent one.
[29:07] The other thing is I’m a little different than you with the podcast subscriptions. You have six and that’s pretty impressive. I probably have somewhere in the neighbor of between 50 and 80 that I subscribe to. But I’m listening to them every day at different times when I’m making dinner and doing dishes and such and anything that doesn’t look interesting or anything that’s not keeping my attention, I’m deleting. And so my actual queue of unlistened to episodes tends to be less than 5 because I keep that thing really prune. And even if I go away for a few days and don’t listen, I’ll come back. And the longer shows that are really just more entertaining I’ll just nuke those things and I’ll just keep the ones that I really want to follow the story of. Those are the two ways. It depends on your personality I believe.
[29:50] I’m able to kind of manage it and go in. now, I don’t do that with RSS though. RSS I just want to keep the list small and I pretty much ready everything that comes through. But with podcast I feel like I’m picking kind of the gems, the diamonds in the rough that may come through in this big swarm of new episodes just coming out every day.
[30:08] Mike: Yeah. I’m completely opposite when it comes to podcast. I feel like I’d rather stick with a couple that I really enjoy versus trying to sift through them and figure out which episodes I want to keep and which ones I don’t. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell. I feel like there’s certain episodes that you may very well get a lot out of but it’s hard to know until you’ve already listened to it I guess.
[30:28] Rob: I can typically tell. Assuming it’s going to be a single topic, it’s not a new show that’s going to bounce around, I’ll give some 3-5 minutes and that’s at time and a half speed. And if I’m in doubt, I delete it. The odds of me missing some gem that’s just going to change my business is very, very low. Typically I’m listening to it to figure out the continuity of the story and to hear some news and that kind of stuff. So I think either way will work and it’s just about knowing yourself and knowing what works best for you.
[30:56] So to recap, our 12 strategies for avoiding shiny object syndrome are to use site blockers, to pause your email, to use triggers to get in the zone, using the pomodoro technique, using rescue time, and time boxing. And our long term strategies are to make an annual plan, have weekly reflection on what you’re doing and why, have mastermind group accountability, focus on thing at a time, learn the difference between productivity and entertainment and go on a temporary information diet.
[31:25] Mike: If you have question for us, you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at question 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. We’ll see you next time.