Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about the one metric that matters. The idea of focusing on one metric at a time, the metric that is helping move your business forward.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike [0:00:00]: In this episode of “Startups For the Rest of Us,”
Rob and I are going to be talking about the one metric that matters. This is “Startups For the Rest of Us” Episode 260.
[Theme Music plays]
Mike [0:00:16]: 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.
Rob [0:00:23]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [0:00:24]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?
Rob [0:00:28]: MicroConf 2016 in Las Vegas, the dates are set. We signed a contract, although we haven’t received the counter-signed as of today, but as far as we know, everything’s in place. Las Vegas, April 3rd through 5th. So if you’re interested in hanging out with about 200 of your closest founder friends, a lot of bootstrapped founders heading over there out in early April. Go to MicroConf.com, enter your email address. The tickets every year sell out way before they make it to the open market. So if you are interested in coming, you want to get on the list.
Mike [0:01:01]: You know, it’s always a little disconcerting talking to people about the dates before we have that counter-signed contract.
Rob [0:01:06]: I know, I know. I’m such a more conservative in terms of stuff, and I like to have everything signed and known, but boy, we’ve been talking to the hotel for months and the odds are pretty good it’s going to go through.
Mike [0:01:17]: Yeah, I think I even remembered that there’s a clause, kind of early on that they kind of throw in there that just says that if they kind of offer us right of first refusal. So if somebody else comes in and says, Oh, we want that date, they have to come to us first and offer it to us, or at least try and get something signed. But because we don’t have a counter-signed contract, I guess it’s, I don’t know, I guess it seems less official.
Rob [0:01:39]: Sure. Well it is, it’s not legally binding at this point. So feasibly there could be a screw up at some point, where they get our signed contract and go to hand it to whatever the VP in charge of signing contracts, and someone else hands him one for the same dates, and they’ve just totally screwed up. It’s within the realm of possibility. But knock on wood, this is what our eighth or ninth conference? And we haven’t ran into any major issues like that. How about you, what’s going on?
Mike [0:02:02]: Well, I’ve been doing a little bit more customer validation on the new idea I’ve been working on, and that’s been going well. I’ve had a couple more conversations this past week. And right now, something else I’m working on is I’m testing whether or not it makes sense for us to move Founder Café off of the Communifire platform and onto Discourse. So I don’t know how that’s eventually going play out, but so far it seems to be going reasonably well. I don’t know all the details of it. It’s kind of the unfortunate part. I know about half of it, because I don’t know the Discourse side of it, or Rails or Postgres. But I’ve got all the Communifire stuff that I’ve been working on. I’ve been working with a contractor to help with the other side of things. And we’ll see how things work out. I’m not real sure it.
Rob [0:02:45]: All right, cool. You mentioned that you’ve been doing a small amount of validation for your new idea. How come so little? I would imagine that you’d be fired up, cranking away on it.
Mike [0:02:55]: So what I did, when I was going through my validation steps, was every conversation I was having with people, I would basically just take a ton of notes during the conversation. And I’m starting to get, probably more towards the end of my list of people that I’m talking to, and I’m starting to hear the same types of things over and over again. So I’m going back through and I’m probably having less conversations now than I have in the past couple of weeks, but it’s more because I’m sifting through all that data I have to try and find overlap between different people and figure out exactly where to go. And I’m at the point right now, where I’m probably going to start – I am at the point where I’m starting to kind of draw up designs for what it’s going to look like and then take those designs back to them as kind of a double check.
Rob [0:03:37]: Is that your next step?
Mike [0:03:38]: Yeah, that’s what I’m working on right now is, as I said, just sifting through the things that they’ve told me, figuring out where those overlaps are and seeing what the lowest common denominator is that I can put in front of them that they’ll say, that they’ll still continue to say, “yes, I’ll pay for that.” And then kind of get the commitments from everybody to move forward.
Rob [0:03:55]: What’s your ETA on doing that?
Mike [0:03:56]: I’d probably say, I started working on the designs this past week, and it’s taken longer than I expected it would to go through some of those designs. So I want to say one week, but I’m guessing it’s probably going to be closer to two or three.
Rob [0:04:10]: Those things are always hard to estimate, kind of like building software. We’re working on some pretty cool stuff inside the Drip walls, and our end growth is continuing like as it has been for the last several months, things are going well. We’re actually hiring another developer, more of a front-end emphasis. And we just have so many features that need to get built, and now there’s even marketing stuff that I want to do where you just need some code and you need some design work and you need some Javascript and some CSS, so that it’s just enough that I can’t sit down and bang it out and I can’t get everything else done that I’m trying to do, so we’re probably going to hire someone and have him or her help do the majority of their time in hardcore development, but then also helping out with kind of marketing tasks, because that need front-end work and development.
Mike [0:04:58]: Cool. So this week, what we’re going to be talking about is the one metric that matters. And this is inspired by a couple of articles that I’ve come across online, one of which is from the Kissmetrics blog, and the other one is from leanstack.com, and then a third is from the leananalyticsbook.com. And all three of these articles refer back to the one true metric that matters. And essentially the idea here is that you should only focus at one metric at a time. And that metric is the one that is supposed to be moving the needle in your business. And we’ll link up all three of these articles in the show notes. But again, going back to this point, the idea is that you can track other metrics, but there’s one that’s going to be the most critical to you, which is going to depend a lot on the goals that you’re trying to reach at that time. So for example, the one key metric that I’m tracking right now is the number of prospect conversations per week. And because I’m kind of moving into the design phase, that’s probably going to change. But that’s the one metric that I was tracking over the past three weeks.
Rob [0:05:55]: And for me, I haven’t given it any thought in advance of recording this episode, and I guess we’ll see as we go through this if mine fits this criteria because I know we have some kind of does and don’ts of how to do it, but I would say it’s MRR for me. And so you might look at that as MRR growth, how much did it grow this month and is it going to grow more next month than last month. But really the one I look at is just MRR since it is a recurring metric itself, that’s what I have tended to focus on. And I think if I were to commit, of course, there’s everything then falls below that, right, of I could look at the trial count for the past 30 days. I could tell you if we’re going to grow and by how much at this point at the trial. The paid conversion and what we’re going to turn out and the upgrades and all that stuff. But the real focus that all feeds into, MRR.
Mike [0:06:39]: So the first thing we’re going to talk about is why? Why is it that we’re only looking at one particular metric? And the first thing to keep in mind is that these metrics encourage focus. If you only have one metric that really matters, then you can essentially ignore everything else that’s going on, whether – and in your case, for example, you’re tracking MRR and that’s the one metric that matters the most, then you can essentially ignore all these other things like the conversion rate and the number of visitors to your website. A lot of those things can just go right out the window because they don’t necessarily matter. And sometimes these metrics will play into one another and influence each other, so that’s something else to keep in mind when you’re looking at these metrics. And it’s especially important when you’re looking at something like MRR because all those things do essentially influence MRR, but not directly.
Rob [0:07:26]: Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think being able to focus on one thing and not be distracted by trying to chase after a lot of things all at once is going to be a good thing. One point, early on, when Noah Kagan was building AppSumo, I had talked to him and we were talking about kind of what you’re focused on, it was like focusing on one thing. And at the time, I think I was doing, it was early in HitTail, and I was talking about, yeah, it’s just MRR I was focused on. And he said, I’m focused on growing my list. He said, it’s the number of subscribers total and the number of subscribers we’re adding each week or each day. And I remember thinking, oh, how interesting that he wasn’t focused on – there was not, he wasn’t focused on revenue, wasn’t focused on profit, wasn’t focused on deals per month, there’s a bunch of other things that you could look at, but at that point he knew that to get where he wanted to go, he had to build that list. And that’s kind of why I look at MRR as SaaS founder, is that to get where I want to go, I need to get that to increase. Now there’s a bunch of ways to do it, but it does give you focus. The other thing is it tells me what not to look at. As an example, I don’t, at this point, when we’re in heavy growth mode, I don’t look at profitability. Now, we are a profitable company, but I’m not measuring my success based on how much cash we can make in a month on a net basis. I am looking at that growth number as long as we are not doing stupid things like paying more than our customers’ lifetime value in order to acquire them or something like that. If you keep that in mind, I think that focusing on that one thing and then looking at all things that lead to it is a good way to go.
Mike [0:08:49]: And that’s the second on the list of why you should be looking at just one metric, because it helps narrow the field of things that you need to pay attention to. And even if you can’t pick just one, if it really boils down to like two or three, then at least it’s eliminated a lot of the other things that could potentially be distracting. If you’re looking at too many of these different metrics, essentially what happens is it just becomes noise, because it’s hard to get everybody to look at the same thing at that particular moment. If you have everyone looking at the same thing, then what it does is it helps create accountability for everyone. Everyone’s all focused on the same goal, and it becomes very easy to relate the different things that people are working on to the projects or the tasks that other people are working on.
Rob [0:09:30]: This also creates accountability for your team because folks can kind of focus on a single metric and then all be working towards a higher level metric. When I say that, to come back to the MRR example, that as a founder of a SaaS company, that’s what I’m looking to grow. But perhaps the person sitting next to me is working in marketing, her goal may not be to grow MRR directly. Her goal may be to drive more trials. I know that is going to feed towards the company goal of increasing MRR. But then she doesn’t have to look at her job and say, boy, how did I myself increase MRR this month? She can just say, I know I drove this many trials and directly measured that based on her efforts, so I think that having a single company goal as well as individual goals for each person or kind of individual metrics based on what they’re working on that they can directly influence, that all lead up to that company-wide goal, is I think a good way to do it. Or it’s at least something that we found success with at Drip.
Mike [0:10:24]: It also encourages people to kind of experiment within the guidelines of that because you can always look at something that is not necessarily related to that KPI and say, well, I’m going to do this A-B test over here. And that could be very well be optimize a specific part of your sales funnel, but it’s not necessarily related to your goal. And it’s not to say that doesn’t help the business in some way, shape and form, but if it’s not what you’re focused on, then essentially what you’re doing is you’re spending time improving something that isn’t directly related to the company’s current goals. So the next part of this process is figuring out which metric matters. And essentially, there’s four tenets of how to pick the metric that does matter. There are four pieces of this. There are things that you know, which are essentially facts. There are things that you don’t know, which are questions that you have, which you know the questions to ask. Then there’s things that you don’t know that you know. And those are essentially things that are driven by your intuition. You have a gut feel about something. And then the last one is probably the most mysterious of all these is those are the things that you don’t know, that you don’t know. And a lot of times if you start exploring these areas, this is where you’re going to find those unfair advantages. You’re going to uncover things that other people in the market haven’t really figured out yet, and those could substantially drive your business forward.
Rob [0:11:39]: I’m not sure I understand these four in terms of how they relate to picking that metric.
Mike [0:11:45]: So the idea with these four tenets is that essentially what you’re trying to do, is you’re trying to distill all of the things that you do know and that you don’t know into a mechanism for identifying the analytics and the metrics that you should be looking at. So for example, if you are able to directly measure what is going on in your website, the number of visitors that are coming, then you can interpret those as facts. So if you have Google Analytics installed you can, with giving some credit to Google for actually being accurate on all of this, you can look at that and say well, yes, I know that I’m getting ‘x’ number of visitors per month or per week to my website. So those are the facts that you know. And then there are things that you don’t know that you could answer by reporting, by saying, okay, well, we know that we’re getting this number of visitors to our website, how many people are coming over and viewing our pricing page, or visiting our pricing page and then going in and signing up for a trial? And for something like that, you might use Kissmetrics or Mixpanel or something along those lines. But those are questions that you have that you could ask that you just, you know the question, you just don’t know the answer because you haven’t gone and looked at the data yet. And then there’s things that you don’t know, that you know, which are things that you just have a gut feel about. So for example, you might say, well, I think that we’re getting a lot of our trials coming in through word-of-mouth. If your products are growing and your customers are telling other customers about it, then you might have an intuition about that. But you don’t necessarily know that, and it can be very difficult to figure out exactly how that’s happening without doing a lot of analysis of those people that are coming in and having direct conversations with those people one-on-one, for every single person who signs up for your service. And then the fourth category are the things that you don’t know, that you don’t know. And those are things that, honestly it’s going to change a lot based on your type of business, but you might find out that maybe you believe there is a viral component or that people were sharing a lot of information about, oh, you should sign up for this service and your customers were talking to other customers about it. But you may just find out that, oh, it was posted on some forum someplace, and you didn’t even know that that was a great way for people to find out about your service.
Rob [0:13:53]: Okay, cool, that helps clear it up. Finding the metric that matters also depends on what kind of business you’re in. If you’re running a SaaS app, maybe it’s MRR, maybe it’s MRR growth. Maybe if you’re at an earlier stage, it’s just trying to get some customers in the door, customer count. If you’re like in a collaborative or a community software company, maybe something like StackExchange or Reddit, then maybe it’s the number of votes, the number of comments, the number of new content pieces that are created for you by the community. If you’re a media company, maybe it’s the number of page views that you’re getting. If you sell games, maybe it’s the number of in-app purchases. Or if you sell apps and maybe don’t have direct access to your customers, you’re obviously going to have less data than if you’re dealing directly with folks, so maybe you sell a mobile app through the iOS app store, then you might have to look at a higher level thing, like the number of downloads of your free version and then the number of purchases or number of dollars coming from your paid version. And finally, if you have just a transactional business with like one-time sales, so maybe you have desktop ftp client, or you have invoicing software that someone can download and install and it’s not a subscription, obviously your metric is going to be different than a SaaS app, because you don’t have monthly recurring revenue. At that point, maybe it just is total revenue per month of total downloads of your free version, if those tend to highly correlate with getting more downloads and more sales of your paid version.
Mike [0:15:20]: The other thing that factors heavily into this is what stage of your business are you at. So are you really in the early, early stages where you’re just talking to people and you’re just trying to get attention for a landing page that you’ve put up. Are you actively having conversations with people and doing a needs discovery? Are you at the validation stage, where you are creating an MVP for the product? Or have you even gotten past that point and you’ve launched the product and now you’re looking at doing feature optimizations and implementing customer requests, or even further than that where you’ve got a stable app and you’ve hit product market and you’re really just trying to optimize the entire business, based on which of those stages you’re at, your metric that you’re looking at is going to change kind of dramatically from one stage to the next.
Rob [0:16:03]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re pre-launch, then I’d say a big metric is how many email addresses can you get on that pre-launch list. If you have a few customers, beta customers in there early and you’re doing customer development, maybe it’s the engagement, maybe it’s like the amount of times they log in or the amount of features that they’re using. Or even like the number of features that they suggest that kind of fit within your vision. I mean, it could be as simple as that, when you’re trying to get to that next step, it actually comes easier and more clear once you’ve broken past, I’ll say product market fit, but once you know that you’ve built something that people want, it becomes easier because then you tend to just have a pretty straightforward metric that you’re trying to grow. It’s going to be probably revenue or trial downloads or there’s something there, but before that at each stage it’s going to be changing pretty frequently as you move between the stages.
Mike [0:16:53]: Right, I remember kind of a specific example from when Facebook was kind of building up in the early stages. One of their metrics was that they wanted somebody to sign up and add, I think the number was like 10 or 20 friends, within seven days. And those people were going to have a dramatically experience and be more “successful” with their product than the people who did not. So that was one of their key metrics that they used very early on. So it was very feature driven at that point. They said if somebody uses this particular feature which is just adding friends, then they will be more successful with the product, and we want to be able to identify those people and figure out how to get more of those people. So the next thing to think about is who is this metric for, you know, who is the intended audience for this metric? If it’s MRR, then it might be to management, but there are different metrics that you can track that could go to internal groups. It might go to the marketing team or the developer team. You might have metrics that you’re developing for investors or for the press, or as part of a marketing campaign. There’s lots of different reasons why you might have these metrics, but you want to be able to make sure that you are identifying these metrics for a very specific reason. And you want to know who those metrics are going to, because that’s going to make a difference. And the specifics of which metrics you’re tracking.
Mike [0:18:10]: So let’s start talking about what makes a good metric. And the first part of this is make sure that your metric is a rate or ratio, because those are going to be better than an absolute or a cumulative value of any kind. So, I’ll give you an example, from earlier in this particular podcast I talked about the fact that I was measuring the number of conversations per week. Now, if I were just measuring the total number of conversations I had, then that wouldn’t necessarily be a good metric. But the fact that I’m measuring them on a per week basis, I’m able to relate one week to the next and figure out whether or not I’m maintaining progress or declining or exceeding the expected rate.
Rob [0:18:51]: And I think it’s interesting to think about with the SaaS app, we never even talk about what’s the total aggregate revenue that the app has ever generated, right? That would be a very bad metric, that’d be an absolute number and it would grow every month, right, because as long as you have revenue coming in, you would just add it to it. And that number could be hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars, but that doesn’t give you a really good picture of what the business is doing because there’s no rate or ratio to it. So I think, if you think about MRR as it’s basically the recurring revenue that you have at the end of that one month, so that gives you kind of a rate there, and then I think growth, like MRR growth is a ratio as well, right, because it is the amount of new revenue, new MRR you’ve added compared to your total. And so, I know that a lot of start-ups look at their month over month percentage growth, and that’s a big thing that [YEC?] looks at and a lot of these accelerators look at. I personally don’t track, I’ve gone back and calculated it for particular purposes when the audience, whether I’m giving a talk or whether I know someone is actually looking for that number, it’s easy enough to calculate going back, that is not a key driver that I look at when managing the business, but that’s not a bad thing. I think if you are a startup like Paul Graham says, growth is everything, and so for them, even if you’re doing revenue growth, they probably lose sight of the absolute revenue because that’s less important than the growth and the rate of growth that they’re experiencing as they’re working on it. Because growth has a lot to do with whether or not you have traction. And traction has a lot to do with whether or not you’re going to be able to raise that next funding round. So if you’re in the V.C. space, the venture funded space, about every 18 months you tend to have to raise a round. And even if your MRR is going up, if your growth numbers don’t hit the ranges that they need, it’ll be pretty hard for you to raise a round. So you can see how for those guys, given their audience, they’re tracking more growth, whereas someone who’s maybe boot-strapping a business, and probably has other goals, might look at something a little more solid like monthly recurring revenue or some people might even look at monthly net profit.
Mike [0:20:56]: But I think the key point that you’re making there is that those are monthly numbers, that it’s monthly recurring revenue or monthly profit. And it’s important to have that monthly piece of it, because if you don’t have a time period of any kind, then really it’s just a number, it’s a vanity metric at that point, which is essentially meaningless to the business. You can’t compare it to other time periods because it’s just a number. If you are able to compare it to other time periods, that’s when it becomes meaningful, that’s the important piece, and that’s what makes it a good metric.
Rob [0:21:25]: Yeah, it also makes predictions a lot more easy to come up with and probably more accurate. If you’ve been tracking this number over time for these small time periods, so let’s say weekly growth or monthly revenue, you get a sense of where this thing’s going. You can notice pretty early on if you’re looking at the rate of change, you’ll notice on a graph or even intuitively in the numbers, if you’ve been following this, you can kind of feel the pulse of it. And you’ll notice as things are changing, you’ll be able to predict out a month or two. I don’t tend to do predictions for predictions sake, but there are a few conversations I’ve been in where people have asked me, now where do you think you’ll be in three months or six months or whatever, and I have a decent idea. And so far the predictions that I made during the summer were hitting those, barring some unforeseen circumstances, you can get pretty good, if you’re doing this ratio per time period, you can project out and be reasonable as long as a major roadblock that’s unexpected doesn’t crop up.
Mike [0:22:18]: Another thing that makes a good metric is that it’s easy to understand. So for example, monthly recurring revenue, is very cut and dry. You can easily understand that. Same thing when it goes to like profit or conversion rates. But I think that once you start getting into some of the super advanced metrics that are much more difficult to understand, so if you’re aggregating a bunch of data, and then trying to use that to compare against other aggregated data over different time periods, as soon as it becomes a lot more difficult to understand, it becomes much more difficult to also figure out what it is that you need to do in order to start making changes to that number or how to influence it. So you want to try and choose a metric that’s simple and easy for everybody in the organization to understand so that they know what their capabilities are around influencing that number.
Rob [0:23:06]: And another piece that makes a good metric is if the metric helps you make predictions more accurate. I already touched on this a little bit, but I kind of went about it the other way, saying that if you have a good metric, it makes it more accurate. But you’ll want to choose a metric that actually helps you make better predictions. I think that’s a key piece. If you find that yours is not, then it’s probably not a very good metric.
Mike [0:23:30]: And the last thing that makes a good metric is that, the metric has to change your behavior. And one of the things that I’ve seen a lot over the years is that when people are doing A-B testing, for example, they’ll do A-B testing just to do A-B testing. And it doesn’t change what they do. They’ll pick it up, they’ll do it for a little while, and then they’ll stop. And whether they see results or not, the fact is they don’t carry that forward. So it doesn’t change their behavior. So the fact of the matter is, like why are you even bothering. If those numbers that you’re getting out of that aren’t going to change or influence what you do, then why are you even tracking that. It’s essentially immaterial at that point.
Rob [0:24:05]: If you’re interested in learning more about finding your one key metric, we have three links for that we’ll put in the show notes that Mike used to help put together this episode. And if you haven’t read it, you’ll probably want to check out “Lean Analytics.” It’s a book from O’Reilly Press. It’s written by Ben Yoskovitz and Alistair Croll. And it is worth looking at, if you are looking for the single metric that matters. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our them music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for “startups,” and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 259 | Making Your First $2k from Products, Whether to Look For a Co-Founder, Rehabbing an Existing Product, and More Listener Questions
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike take a number of listener questions including talking about making your first $2k from products, whether to look for a Co-Founder, and rehabbing an existing product.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob [00:29]: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and I talk about making your first $2,000 from products, whether to look for a co-founder, re-habing an existing product, and more listener questions. This is Startups For the Rest of Us, episode 259.
Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast 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.
Mike [00:30]: And I’m Mike.
Rob [00:34]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, sir?
Mike [00:39]: Well, tomorrow at precisely 4:29 p.m., Marty McFly arrives from the past.
Rob [00:46]: Very nice. I’ve heard a lot of folks talking about it, and then asking where the hoverboards and the nuclear fusion thing that straps to your car.
Mike [00:47]: And the fax machines, you know, don’t forget those.
Rob [00:49]: Indeed. What else is going on?
Mike [01:40]: So I spent the past couple of weeks doing, essentially market validation for a couple of the different ideas that I’ve had, and I’ve been focusing really in on the one-to-one email sequences. And so far I’ve had 23 conversations with people, and of those 23 conversations 11 people have said that they would pay me for it. So I’m still trying to work things out because from one person to the next there seems to be a lot of variation between the specifics of what they are looking for and the problem that they’re trying to solve. They’re all very, very similar, but trying to nail down exactly what would work for the vast majority of them is, kind of, the hard part. I’m figuring out where that is and where I can get the most traction, I guess that’s the challenging part right now. And people are using different terminology for the same types of things, too. So that makes it even harder.
Rob [02:15]: For sure. For sure. And that’s the hard part about customer development is that you’re either going to get 20 different opinions, or you’re going to get several opinions that are the same but you don’t realize they’re the same because they’re using different vocabulary. And it’s hard if something doesn’t exist and you can’t just show it to them to figure out if it’s actually A, going to do what they want, or B- the little subtleties with email. It could be cold email, it could be warm email, it could be bulk email. There’s so many things. So until you can figure out which stage they’re using it at and how much value it has to them. Like, have you talked price point at all?
Mike [02:19]: I have. I’ve talked price point with virtually every single one of them.
Rob [02:19]: Good.
Mike [02:38]: So I have a ballpark idea so far of where the MRR would come from if they were all to sign up today. But I’m at the process where I’m still just gathering information right now, and then once I have a better idea of what it is that the solution would look like, then I’m basically going to draw up the designs, go back to every single one of them and say, “Can I get a pre-order for this?”
Rob [02:45]: Mm-hmm. You said you have 11 commitments, how many are you going for before you start moving forward?
Mike [03:12]: I want to be able to get to the point where I have at least 10 who are willing to move forward on that commitment. So it’s kind of nebulous as to how many I have to get to. Is it 15, is it 20, is it 25. It really depends on one, how far I want to take it, how much variation I see between people. If I think I have something that is going to fit for at least 12 to 15 people, then I’ll probably start moving forward. But, again, like I said, some of them are all over the map, so it’s still up in the air right now.
Rob [04:21]: For sure. Well while you’re in the process of adding to your product portfolio, I’ve actually been in the process of paring mine down so that I can focus on, essentially, on Drip and MicroConf and the podcast, and my blog and the other stuff. But really have been either selling or I’ve actually given, DotNetInvoice to my business partner. And HitTail is up for sale right now through Thomas Smale at FE International. If someone is interested it is still on the market. So it feels good to be able to focus more on the things that are really working. Double and triple down on Drip in essence, because that is where I’ve been spending the bulk of my time, and it’s where I think it should be spent for the next “until it’s done”, is what it is. And if that’s five years or ten years, that’s where I’m at. I’m not in the mode anymore of the “starting the next one after one to two years”, which I was for a while, and building up the portfolio. I think I’m ready to head in the opposite direction and really build this one up. There’s just a lot more opportunity and a lot more growth going on than anything I’ve done in the past. So I’m doubling down on that.
Mike [04:30]: Do you think that’s a byproduct of the type of product this is in relation to some of the previous ones, or is it more of a career trajectory sort of thing?
Rob [05:05]: Yeah, you know that’s a good question to ask. I think it’s partly both. Certainly, I’m at the point in my career where I do want to focus on some things that I really enjoy, and I kind of want to take things to the next level because it allows me to learn and that’s when I’m happy. That’s one of my definitions of success is learning a lot of stuff and being in control of what I’m working on. But I also think that if you look at Drip, and you look at how large the market is, and if you look at the opportunity here and the price point, the average MRR per customer. Just all these things are completely different than everything I’ve done in the past. So I think it’s some of both, to answer your question.
Mike [05:06]: So what are we talking about this week?
Rob [06:16]: We have a slew of listener questions. We’re actually backlogged. Some of these are from almost a year ago. And apologies to folks who sent them in and haven’t had us answer them yet. But we still want to answer ones that are general enough that I think they’ll apply to most folks listening. Our first question is from Daniel McCraty and it’s actually not a question. It was just an email to say thank you. He says, “Hi Mike and Rob. I really wanted to say thank you. I’m a long time listener who’s starting to see some success from your advice. As a full-time developer and now a technical lead, I don’t get a lot of experience with marketing in my day-to-day job. Listening to your podcast has helped fill in some gaps and kept me from going down the wrong path. I’ve created a minimal product and nice clean landing page that people actually purchase my product from, and I’m getting great feedback on feature enhancements that the customers want. I know I have a lot of work to do but 20 sales in the first two months is a success in my book.” And his subject line was “I made $2,000 in the first two months.” Yeah, thanks a lot for writing in, Daniel. His app, if you want to take a look at it is at Woo Ticket Studio, that’s W-O-O, ticketstudio.com if you’re interested in checking it out. And thanks, as always, for writing in with success stories. We love to hear from folks who have been long time listeners and have implemented what we said, whether to launch product, make the first couple thousand online or to quit your job.
Mike [06:17]: Yeah, great job, Dan.
Rob [06:37]: All right. Now let’s queue us up for our first question. So this is from Justin McGill and he sent it over a year ago. Sorry about that Justin. But he asked us “What do your daily and weekly schedules look like? Rob with his multiple projects and Mike with whatever he’s working on at the time. I think both perspectives would be helpful.” Why don’t you kick us off, Mike.
Mike [07:42]: I guess, in terms of my daily schedule, I try to get up before eight o’clock, and there are definitely days where that just simply does not happen. A lot of times, my schedule for the day tends to be dictated by how late I worked the previous day. So if I were working until five or six and then spent time with the family, and then if I decide for whatever reason to go back and sit on my computer and do some work or fool around or anything, there are definitely times where I stayed up until 12, one o’clock in the morning. And that will have a severely negative impact on my following day. So I try to avoid it as much as I can, but it does still creep in there one and a while. And then for the rest of the time, I try to stick to a schedule where roughly from eight to five I’m working, and then after that lately it’s been up until about three to four o’clock, where after that it’s been difficult to get things done, just because my office has now moved upstairs. So the kids get home at three, so there’s definitely a lot more pressure to get everything done by three o’clock or four o’clock because the kids will start to interrupt. So that’s generally what my schedule looks like. I try to avoid working on Saturdays or Sundays, just kind of out of matter of principle. What about you?
Rob [09:56]: I think I’m pretty similar to you. My schedule used to be very different. Obviously it was all nights and weekends for a long time, for the first several years, because I was typically doing salary work, or in the later days, consulting, you know, in 2000, let’s say, 5, 6, and 7. I was doing 30, 40 hours a week consulting during the day, and then working on products on the side. And then I hit a certain point where I just decided I really didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t want to do the night and weekend stuff. And so I will do some work in the evenings, sometimes. And especially if Sherry’s out with the kids and I’m home alone, unfortunately, I will tend to veer by the computer and either do email or work on something that needs to get done. I’ve been trying lately to not do that, because I find that if I work too much, I just become not productive. Your work expands to fill whatever time you give it. And so I’ve really been trying to avoid that. I listen to a lot of audio books, I read a lot. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I do find myself thinking about work, jotting notes down, doing a lot of strategy type stuff in the evening if I have free time, or on the weekends if I’m out and about running errands or just doing stuff around the property. I wind up coming up with a lot of, what I think, are my best ideas when I’m not sitting behind my desk – because that’s when you’re actually getting work done – but I’m out and about, I’m doing stuff. So I wouldn’t say I work on the weekends or the evenings, but I do get kind of strategic thinking done. In terms of the daytime, I’m up by 7 a.m.. I make breakfast for the family and then take the kids to school, one or both of them. And then I head into the office two days a week, three days a week, it depends. And work from around 8:30 until whenever it’s done, which is between 3 and 5 depending on the day. And so if I don’t get a full workday in during that time I will add a little time in the evening or on a weekend to make up for it for sure.
Our next question is about entering a competitive SaaS market. And it’s from Scott Underwood and he said, “Here are some podcast ideas for you.” He says, “Do you have any thoughts or tips on entering a SaaS market with large competitors?” Meaning you take someone else’s SaaS app or niche and you innovate on it?”
Mike [11:32]: I think there’s some interesting opportunities in going into these types of markets because you can essentially build, not necessarily features, but add-ons or plug-ins for other vendors and essentially build on top of their platform or on top of their application. And there’s lots of people who’ve done this very successfully. I think the one thing you have to really be careful of is, I think, what Joel Spolsky at one point called “snatching nickels from a steamroller.” And his reference point was the fact that people were building a lot of copy-paste applications back when iOS was first released and it didn’t support copy-paste. And then all it takes for that entire business to go away is for them to implement that one feature. So there’s got to be a compelling reason for them to not do it. And if it’s a feature that is compelling enough for them to implement, you have to be careful just because they will eventually kill your business. So if you’re bolting something onto those larger applications, you do have to be a little bit careful of that. The other thing I’d say is if you’re taking a much larger application and just taking off a tiny little slice of it, you could probably do a much better job then they are. But you also have to find people who are willing to pay for just that tiny slice of the solution as opposed to the entire thing. So those are the caveats around it, I think. In terms of my general thoughts on it, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with it, but you do have to pick and choose which of these battles you fight, because some of them are going to be worth it, some of them aren’t. And there’s going to be some where that larger competitor comes in and essentially, squishes you just because they come in and they have the resources to bare on a problem, and if it’s important enough to them and to their customers, they’re going to do it.
Rob [12:14]: So you were taking that from the angle of building like add-ons for larger products or in their ecosystem. I would look at this, I mean he’s asking more about how to take on a larger competitor. Yeah, obviously marketing automation would be an example. I’m not building add-ons for HubSpot or Infusionsoft or one of those guys, but we are taking them on kind of directly as a one-on-one competitor. So actually I do have a lot of thoughts on this. I got an interesting email. It was probably about a year and a half ago, from Drew Sinaki, a long time listener of the show. And he asked are you trying to do an innovators dilemma to Infusionsoft? And I thought that was a really interesting way to put it. Have you read that book?
Mike [12:15]: Yes, I have.
Rob [14:13]: So the “innovators dilemma” is where you’re a big company in a market that’s existed for ten or 20 years and the market’s starting to shift and there’s a lower cost or an easier solution that’s coming in front of you, but you won’t cannibalize your business in order to take advantage of that new market opportunity. And so IBM has seen this, Microsoft is seeing this. It happens with a lot of larger technology companies, in general, as the technology changes. And I thought it was a really interesting way Drew put that in the email. It got me thinking. I actually went back and listened to the book again. I hadn’t listened to it in a few years. And I think that that’s the tactic that you need to take if you’re going to go after. Or I think it’s probably the optimal tactic. There’s probably many that you can do, but that’s the approach that I would look at doing is to basically [couch?] yourself as the opposite of whatever they are. So if they are big and cumbersome and clumsy and they don’t have a lot of features and they’re expensive, well, start off as being the opposite of all that. And you can be pretty intentional about marketing yourself as that. If you go to the Drip homepage, there’s a couple thousand words on that page that really are positioning us as the opposite of the larger players. And after that, it’s execution, right? I mean you actually have to really build a better app. You can’t just build a clunky app and expect that since you have fewer features you’re going to be easier to use, because that’s not the case. So you need to focus a lot on usability and really double down on your differences and also try not to get the feature bloat that a lot of these larger apps have. So you can’t build everything that everyone’s asking for. So those would be my thoughts about kind of early advantages when heading into a market with heavy competition.
The other question Scott had for us, he said, “Do you have any data or lessons learned from Drip for the most effective opt-ins for building an email list? I know you don’t like the exit pop-up forms but I’ve seen several people tweeting how effective they are.” He’s talking like a bounce exchange exit intent pop-up. Do you have thoughts on those? Do you use one of those?
Mike [15:28]: I have tested them. I’d have to go back and look. I think that I might actually have it on my blog. I don’t remember if I ever went back and either disabled that or changed it. But I do remember testing it. And now that you bring it up, I don’t remember if I ever actually went back and looked at the results of that test, because I probably got distracted so that’s totally on me. I’ve heard similar things like people have said over and over and over again that the exit intent pop-ups convert better. Now I think the one point of caution I would say is they get you more email addresses, they don’t necessarily convert to sales any better. They may, they may not. I think that it depends on what your industry is. But at the same time if you don’t get an email address then you have no opportunity to sell to them. So in a way it makes more sense to get as many email addresses as you possibly can. There are, I’ll say, certain people, myself included, who kind of feel like, “Well I don’t want to be too intrusive about it.” But at the same time, if you’re offering a product of a solution that is extremely helpful to that audience, then it’s kind of an obligation to get in front of those types of people in any way, shape or form because you can give them a lot of value. So there’s different schools of thought on that. I’m kind of in the middle. I think that it really depends on what type of product that you’re selling as to whether or not I’d do it.
Rob [18:00]: Yeah, I have a personal take. I don’t like them as a user, and so I won’t put them on my sites because I find them irritating and I have heard that, like you said, you get more emails, but I use the justification of they’re probably not going to convert as well because you kind of forced people into it. I haven’t tested it. It’s just one of the things that I’m not willing to do. I think when I was back in the day, reading a bunch of Dan Kennedy stuff about copywriting, he’s a very good copywriter, I adopted the things that I was willing to ethically take on and the purchases I was willing to do and feel good about myself. I never say something in a sales letter or on a marketing website that I wouldn’t say face-to-face to someone at a conference or at a cocktail party, frankly. And that’s just a personal thing so that everyday I wake up and I feel good about myself, and I can tell my kids and my wife that this is stuff that I’m- I’m really proud of what I do and the value I give back. Now in theory, are you leaving, perhaps, something on the table by not using one of these exit intents, or by not using a more aggressive form of marketing? Yeah, in theory, sure. Is that extra five percent or ten percent or 20 percent over the course of your life, is it going to make a huge difference if you feel like you are sacrificing something internally? Whether you call it like a moral code or just something that you’re not comfortable with, that you don’t feel good about. It’s your choice. Different people have different lines. I think there’s a lot of things in business like that, right? There are some absolute lines of legality and illegality, and then a lot of things that have gray areas. And I feel like this is one of them. So certain people shout from the rooftops that exit intent is the way to go. And obviously they feel comfortable with it. Now when I visit their sites and I get irritated by it, I’m much, much less likely to go back to their site. And I also have never, I don’t think ever in my life, entered my email address into an exit intent pop-up. And I typically make a note like, “All right, this is definitely a site that I’m not in love with.” I don’t feel like they treat me with respect when they use it. I feel like they’re interrupting my flow and they’re bothering my flow of web surfing and consuming content on the Internet. But maybe the site owner doesn’t feel like that. And to kind of wrap it up, for a long time we didn’t build an exit intent pop-up, or exit triggered pop-up, in Drip. But we found that in certain industries and certain niches and just based on different marketers, certain people like them, and they work for them. And so I realize that applying that piece of judgment on exit triggered stuff wasn’t necessarily the way to go. And so we do offer it as a service if you enable it in Drip, but it’s not something I would personally use myself.
Mike [18:31]: Yeah, I went back and just double checked while you were talking. I disabled it. I don’t recall whether or not I looked over the details of what it was, but I definitely tried it out. I don’t think that there was a massive increase for me. It just didn’t seem worth it for wrecking the user experience, as you said. Because I’m kind of in the same camp as you, like when I start seeing those exit pop-ups, I just close the browser or if it’s an article I really want to read then I’ll read it or click by it. But if I have to enter an email address to read, out of principle, I just won’t.
Rob [20:32]: Yeah, and there may come a time when it’s the norm and you have to deal with it. There may be a backlash at some point. I mean ad blockers are coming up because of this type of thing. Because of the more aggressive advertising and these marketing approaches, ad blockers are being used by more and more people. And I think that’s kind of a shame, frankly. I think that if we were able to all agree on a decent level of advertising and marketing, I think that the Internet becomes a better place, and I think people don’t necessarily use that kind of stuff. I’ve been trying to go to just some basic news websites. Drip got written up on the Huffington Post yesterday. And just surfing around that site, it’s like there’s so much stuff. The site is slow. There’s Javascript, there’s videos autoplaying in front of me. It was crazy. I really haven’t read news online in a long time, because I consume most of it via podcast, but I hadn’t realized the state that we’re in and now I realize why these pop-up blockers are becoming so prominent.
Our next question is from Richard Garside. And his question is on breathing life into an old product. He says, “I really love the show and I find it very interesting. I’m setting my goals for the next year and one thing I’m thinking about is whether or not to breathe life back into an old software product of mine called Font Picker, Thefonticker.net. I created it when I had some spare time and it did quite well. Since then I have not had as much free time and I’ve just left it for almost two years. Sales have slowed and they continue to do so. I think I could both improve the product and the marketing. I continue to get good feedback and feature requests from customers and the app has a really good ranking in the Mac app store. In some ways, this is kind of like buying an existing product that you think you can improve. I think you’ve covered everything I need in various shows, but how would you approach saving an existing product from a slow death and bringing it back to full glory? Some things I’m thinking about are : improving the user interface design, improving the website, adding more features and just improving my marketing ability. As a developer, I want to get stuck into new features but perhaps that’s not the most important thing. I’m also fighting the urge to rewrite it in Swift. Time is limited and I don’t have time to do everything I want to do. Thanks for the shows and everything.” What do you think?
Mike [21:23]: Well I think the first thing I would say is do not rewrite it. If you’re trying to breathe life into an old product, especially one that’s on the decline, then I don’t think that rewriting it is going to make any difference. Your customers are not going to care that it’s rewritten. Unless you’re looking for some wholesale, complete UI redesign, which I don’t think entails a complete rewrite in a different language, then that’s probably not the way to go. In terms of a lot of the things that you mentioned, improving the UI, improving the website, I’m not so sure about adding new features but definitely getting better at the marketing aspect of it. Obviously, those are all good things to pursue. But I think at the end of the day you also have to ask yourself is this something that you really want to do, because if it’s not something that you want to do then you’re basically either going to half-ass it or just not be committed to it. And at that point the product itself is going to suffer.
Rob [25:21]: Yeah, I’d agree with Mike. I would not rewrite it yet. If you decide to get into it and it starts making quite a bit of money and you decide that it really is a hassle to add features, you could consider it at that point. But at this point, all you want to do it figure out, can you even rehab this thing? Can you get more sales out of it? Because if you can’t then none of the other stuff is worth doing. So the first thing I would look at is how are you going to drive more customers to it? That’s really what I would think. It’s like if you get a lot of your leads from the web, then I would probably redo your marketing website or at least improve the copy, make it look more modern. And if you have enough traffic to split test, that’s fine, but if not, just go with your gut on this and try to improve it there. Or if you get most of your customers from the Mac app store, then do some research on how to get your rankings up there. And if it’s releasing new features gets you mentioned or gets you reviewed or gets you whatever, then I’d do new features. But if not, then I would not be writing any code at this point. I would purely be looking at how to take the existing channels that are already driving customers, double down on those. How could you grow those by 50 percent, 100 percent, 200 percent, over the next three months without writing any code, right? Any production adjustments to the app. You can obviously write web code if you’re redoing the marketing side. So that’s the first thing I would do. Second thing I would think about is are there other marketing channels that you can start looking at? So with a small price point, obviously you’re not going to be able to do something like advertising, but if you’re not ranking well in Google, is there an SEO play here? If you’re not ranking well in the app store, obviously, that’s kind of a no-brainer to do it. Or there’s some JV partnerships where you could email your list and someone else emails their list. These are the types of things that I would start off right off the bat and attack. These are your early wins. It’s your low hanging fruit. Some of it’s not going to scale, but if it gets you a nice little bump in sales it all just aggregates and will build up over time. And then, if you’ve proven that you can grow this thing and it is doubled, tripled revenue, it’s making enough money to make it worthwhile, then you can think about, “I’m going to add a bunch of features,” and then you have something to talk about to your list. That’s the other thing I would do. I would definitely get – I don’t know if you’re already collecting email addresses – but build the list, right? Build the list on fontpicker.net for something really cool that folks would want to know about. They’re looking for font pickers then I’m assuming it’s a design audience so add a five day mini-course on how to pick the best font or how to have fonts interact with color, whatever it is. There’s certainly something off the top of your head that you’ll be able to do because that list will be huge for you. If you get a few thousand people on that, every time you release that new version you can email that list and get that bump in sales. But that’s probably where I would start. There’s obviously a lot to it.
Our next question is from Josh and he’s asking for some advice on either starting up a UX productized service, or buying an existing business. He says, “Hey guys. I love the show. Started dipping into old episodes and saving out things that you’ve talked about recently. Namely what to not focus so much on when you’re just starting out, etc. Here’s my dilemma. I used to run a UX consulting firm. It wasn’t scalable, and if I did it today I would do it way differently. I would offer it as a productized service to startups and small businesses. So I’m considering that as one route. Then I was listening to one of your episodes which mentioned buying existing business. I did some research and found that I would need around three times my salary to make this happen. This shouldn’t be an issue as I have some money saved up from investments that I can use and I can get 50 percent as a loan from the bank. So I’m debating either starting a UX productized service, or buying an existing company for cash flow and running both of them in tandem.” He has, “And/or, buying an existing company and running both in tandem. My question is, how do I structure this as a business? Right now I have a LLC and have it registered as doing Internet services. Would I be able to buy a company and roll it into the existing LLC or should I do another corporation?”
Wow, actually I don’t think that’s your question. I think your question is should you do the UX consulting thing or acquire a business. I obviously have a lot of thoughts but why don’t you kick us off, Mike.
Mike [26:12]: Yeah, I wouldn’t do both of them at the same time. I think the big red flag that pops out at me is buying something for three times your current salary when it seems to me like you’d also have to get a loan. I think that’s what he said, is that he’d also have to get a 50 percent loan from the bank. And that seems to me to be a huge chunk of money to go out and plunk down on something where typically the returns on those, you’re not going to get a full return on that for quite a while because you’re probably going to buy it for 3x the annual revenue or something along those lines. So I would have a really hard time going out and plunking down that kind of money for something that either I wasn’t necessarily passionate about, or didn’t necessarily know enough about. And I haven’t bought anything at that level. I think Rob, you, back in the day, you bought HitTail and that was for a good chunk of money, but at the same time it still had a lot of potential to it, I think.
Rob [26:14]: Yeah, it wasn’t nearly that amount.
Mike [26:43]: Yeah, so like the dollar amounts, I think, are significantly different. I wouldn’t personally feel comfortable dumping that much money into something if I wasn’t really, really sure. And for me to be really really sure, it would probably take a lot more than just a month or two or even six months of looking at the books and stuff. I’d want to be involved with the business before I bought it. I don’t have any good advice on that other than don’t do both at the same time. The other thing that does come to mind is look for something smaller to buy that you could run on the side.
Rob [26:43]: And grow it.
Mike [27:07]: Yeah, that seems to be like a better way to go because then you could at least learn, too. I think the last thing you want to do is essentially learn on a bigtime production app. I mean you’re basically saying, “I’m going to go play in the majors when you haven’t even really played around in the sandbox.” so to speak. It seems to me like a big risk. I wouldn’t be comfortable with it. Your mileage may vary on that one.
Rob [28:26]: Right, yeah, it’s funny. The corporate structure, I think, is certainly the least of your worries. I’ll talk a little bit about that in a second. I’ll cover it last because it’s the lowest priority. I wholeheartedly agree absolutely do not do both at once. Pick one and go all in on that thing and grow it and grow it as large as you can. And then either have an exit from that or use the cash flow to do your next thing. But I really, really would encourage you not to try to do both at once, to grow two things. It just does not work. In terms of acquiring, I agree, buying something for three times your salary, if you’re not already versed in marketing products, is quite a risk. I wouldn’t say never do it, but it’s a big risk. Probably bigger risk than I would be willing to take. It doesn’t feel like you’re stair-stepping up, you know. If you already had a few WordPress plugins or a small SaaS app and you were looking to buy something for $200,000 or $300,000, I’d say well you have the experience to do it. But just jumping up and trying to do that is really a big deal. I do know that in terms of, Mike you were concerned about the numbers not being valid or maybe the revenue not being there or whatever, I know that when the reputable brokers like FE International, they do a ton of vetting. So I think the odds are pretty good. Obviously it’s possible that there be an error and not have it actually be as successful as you want. But in my experience, the risk is going down now that these brokers are in here and actually doing a lot of vetting.
Mike [29:03]: Yeah, I don’t think it was the risk. For me I don’t think it’s the risk so much of like you getting ripped off or not a good valuation. But just the time that it would take to get a return on that, it seems to me like if you’re looking for something to just provide you with a stable income that you can grow incrementally over the next several years, great. But somebody got out of that business for a reason, and it may very well be that they took the business as far as they could and what guarantees do you have that you’re going to be able to do any better with it. And it’s not saying that you can’t. I’m just pointing out that there is an inherent risk that says that you can’t.
Rob [32:30]: But I think that’s kind of the entire opportunity of buying a business is that you may get someone who, like me is selling HitTail to focus on other things. I’ve seen HitTail do three or four times the revenue it’s doing right now. It was very successful, but I haven’t had time to focus on it. So the potential is there. I think you could also get someone selling- like a lot of the ones I’ve acquired where someone built it and it had a single traffic source and the developer didn’t know how to grow the thing. They didn’t know how to 5x it or 10x it. And that could be an opportunity. So I think that’s just part of the process of buying something based on an opportunity that you see. And so if you know how to do SEO or AdWords or content marketing or you have a skill that you can apply and you see that someone’s not doing any content marketing in a niche where it totally makes sense to do so, I think that’s an opportunity. That’s how I used to buy and grow things. But with that said, we don’t know Josh’s toolbelt. And so Josh, if you don’t have any marketing skills that are proven at this point that you’ve done really well in the past and had success with, then it is a bit of a risk. Now I will say that I’ve been surprised- you can actually take out an SBA loan, at least in the U.S., there’s a small business loan, and they just changed the rules in the past year to where you can now take it out to buy software products, or I’m assuming income generating online stuff. And the loan payment on a loan for, let’s say 200 or $250,000 is a lot less than the revenue, or even the net profit you’re going to make, from an app that costs that. So there is margin there. I don’t know if it’s enough to live on, but it’s an interesting approach. Personally I’m not the type to take out a loan to buy a business. It’s just not my style. I’m going to be more stair-stepping up to doing it. But if you’re all in and you need to go towards it right now, I do think it’s an interesting and/or creative way of doing it. The other approach I saw recently is someone actually raising a small seed round from friends, family and a couple more notable kind of adviser folks. Basically like a little angel round to go acquire a SaaS app that has a ton of potential. And I know about this because I talked to him as a potential investor. And it’s really interesting because the app already has product market fit, and with the team I think there’s a lot of potential there, and so it’s kind of a no brainer. Because getting to that point is always costly and takes a lot of time, but if you can buy something that already has it, I think you’re in a good boat.
I think to wrap it up, the product, as consulting, to be honest, is probably – I don’t know that I’d say your best bet – but I think it’s more of a sure thing. And I actually think that waiting around and trying to find something to buy, it could take a while. You can’t just make something appear in a niche that you want to be in. So if you’re in a hurry I’d probably do the productise. If you’re willing to wait around and take the risk, you could consider acquiring the app. The last piece of your question was, “How do I structure it as a business?” You said, “Would I be able to buy a company and roll it into the existing LLC?” Don’t buy the company. You don’t want to buy a company because a company comes with liabilities, meaning if someone did something, got sued later on for that time period, you now have taken that on because you own the company. All you want to do is buy the product, essentially the assets of the company. And so once you have a product you can of course roll that under an LLC or an existing corp structure. I am not a lawyer so you’ll want to consult one, but that is how I’ve seen it done many times here in the U.S..
Mike [32:51]: Thanks for the question, Josh. I think that about wraps us up for time today. If you have a question for us you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690. Or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by Moot. Used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 258 | 9 Common A/B Testing Mistakes
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about the common mistakes people make when A/B testing.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike [00:00]: In this episode of “Startups for the Rest of Us,” Rob and I are going to be talking about nine common A-B testing mistakes people make. This is “Startups for the Rest of Us” Episode 258.
[00:07]: [music plays]
Mike [00:15]: 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.
Rob [00:24]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [00:25]: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?
Rob [00:29]: You know, at this point, it’s almost October 1st, and that gives us just about six weeks to get our stuff done before Thanksgiving happens here in the States. And frankly, the world goes into kind of holiday mode, it seems. So I’ve really been thinking about what the next six or seven weeks holds. I know by the time this goes live, it’ll probably be mid-October. So you only have a month, but think about that with whatever you’re doing. If you have another two to three weeks left to develop a big feature that you wanted to launch, you’re probably not going to launch it until January at this point. Maybe you could launch it first week of December, but it’s just so choppy from here on out. And I know there’s still three months left in the year, but it just starts getting touch-and-go here over the next few months as kind of the retail space – it’s great for eCommerce, not typically that good for B-to-B apps in terms of growth, and in terms of finding new customers. Because our heads are with plans of hanging out with family and doing other things. And a lot of folks are not necessarily like about, what’s the new app that they can sign up with and have a new trial running over your Thanksgiving break or your Christmas break. How about you, what’s going on?
Mike [01:35]: Well, I went on a personal retreat last weekend. And I found it really helpful. I came out of it kind of settled and at peace with myself on a number of different fronts, and more or less really raring to go and go after a couple of different key points that came out of my retreat. So kind of looking forward to the next six to twelve weeks and see what happens.
Rob [01:53]: When you say personal retreat, was it, you thought about work stuff or personal as well?
Mike [01:58]: Personal and work, so like I kind of dedicated some time to think about like things that were going on in my personal life and then also, in terms of like the business, and where I want to go and kind of what I want to do next. So I definitely sat down and analyzed a lot of things that have gone on over the past few years. Again, both on the personal front and on the business front. And then just helps me to make decisions on where to go next.
Rob [02:19]: And where are you going next?
Mike [02:21]: Well, it’s going to be validation for a couple of different ideas. And I basically went through a process that I had laid out in my book last year, and started ranking some of the different ideas and trying to figure out which one I should start validating first. So I kind of got it narrowed down a little bit. And right now, I’m going through the validation process with a bunch of people. I’ve had half a dozen conversations, and I’ve got at least half a dozen more scheduled over the next several days. And basically, like every day one of my tasks is to go through and start lining up more people to talk to for those conversations. So they’re going well so far. And I’ll just kind of see where it takes us. Until I get further through the process, I’ll probably just keep it quiet, I guess a little bit quiet for the time being. But I will talk about it probably a lot more on the podcast as things progress.
Rob [03:03]: Very nice. We have a slew of new iTunes reviews, and I won’t go through them all, but we had one from a couple of months ago, and it says, “I listen while I eat sandwiches. Really enjoy listening to the show, general candor and advice. Your knowledge is being used directly to introduce [Deli?] Empire, which includes a couple of different brands,” he says, “called Sandwich [Knob?] and Seafood [Dial?] to the world. Looking forward to catching up on the newer episodes. Another review says, “The last couple of months has been like watching Netflix.” And EA760 says, “Binged on all Rob and Mike’s past episodes and now have to wait a whole week for new episodes. Each episode is full of so much great info for the self-fronted entrepreneur. It’s the only podcast I listen to at 1x speed, because I’m constantly rewinding to take down notes. Thank you for the consistently invaluable advice and insight.” So thanks so much for your 5-star reviews. Even if you don’t want to write a full commentary like that, if you could log into iTunes, Downcast, Stitcher and plunk us a 5-star if you get any value out of the show, we would really appreciate it.
Mike [04:03]: One other thing to note: about a month ago, I did an interview with Matthew Paulson on email marketing demystified. And his book just came out, so it’s listed on Amazon right now, and we’ll link that up onto the show. But I just wanted to mention that because the episode did come out a little while ago. So before we dive into today’s episode, there is a listener question that we want to address. And this one comes in from Christian, and he says, “Blockers like Ghost Read, Privacy Badger, etc. are blocking third-party widgets like Qualaroo, Mixpanel and others. As content blockers grow in popularity, do you think this will kill Java script widget products?”
Rob [04:35]: So I think that the answer is no. I do think it can have an impact on them. I also know that some of these third-party blockers are getting a little, I’ll say ambitious, and they’re blocking things that aren’t exactly ad widgets. And that if you report – like at one point, the Drip JavaScript got blocked by an ad blocker. And when I reported it, they said, “Oh, you’re not an advertising platform. That’s okay.” And they unblocked it. So I don’t have experience with Ghost Read, Privacy Badger, to know if they’re doing this intentionally or if it’s accidentally, because technically most of these guys don’t want to block non-ads. They really just want to block ad networks and that kind of tracking and cookie stuff. I think some of them are getting, like I said, a little ambitious. And if they start to dive in and block things like Qualaroo or Mixpanel and other things, they’re going to start breaking the web at some point. Because people are relying on these services often to have some mission critical functionality. So in my estimation, number one, most people aren’t going to install these ad blockers. I mean, it’s a lot of people in our circles. But if you look at the total number of people on the internet versus the total number of people with ad blockers, it’s a tiny, tiny percentage. And then secondarily, I think that it’s kind of like you can go around the internet with cookies blocked and JavaScript blocked, but it breaks a lot of things. And that’s where these guys are going to have to find their line, because if they push it too far and it actually starts breaking things that require the site needs to do the fundamental functions, then they’re going to have to back off with that. And I think there will be backlash if they push it too far. So to answer that, the original question, I don’t think these are going to kill JS widget products. They may put a small damper on it on the short term as things adjust, but long-term, I feel like these things are going to continue.
Mike [06:17]: Yeah, I’m in agreement with you. I don’t think that they’re going to take over the world and get rid of every JavaScript widget product that’s out there. The fact of the matter is there’s a bunch of these products out there, and these types of products have been around easily for at least 10 years. And so like ad blockers of some kind, and this is really a variation of those, is like an ad blocker. But those have been out for at least 10 years and like I still don’t use an ad blocker. I can’t name anybody off the top of my head who does. I know that people do use them and I know that historically I’ve seen them advertised around and seen different places where they are present. But the bulk of the internet is not using them, and I just don’t think they’re going to become popular enough to make that significant of a dent in the businesses that they’re trying to I guess go against.
Rob [07:02]: So what are we talking about today for the main topic?
Mike [07:04]: Well, today’s topic is nine common A-B testing mistakes that people make. And this topic doesn’t come from any specific source, but I did use a bunch of different resources from Kissmetrics and kickSprout and ConversionXL to essentially put together this list. So some of the things are repeated on their list, but they have, I guess if you were to total up all of theirs, there’s probably 25 or so. It seemed like there was a bunch of low-hanging fruit that were highly overlapped between them. So I essentially concentrated on those for the outline for this episode. But the main gist of this is that a lot of people will advocate that you do A-B testing, but when you start getting into A-B testing, there is a ton of things that people will simply accept as true or fact. And unfortunately those things have a lot of subtle nuances to them. And I think that the main idea that will become a little bit more clear as we start going through these different mistakes that people are making.
Rob [07:54]: Let’s dive in.
Mike [07:55]: So the first one, is testing random stuff. And everyone’s probably heard about the 41 shades of blue test at Google where they were testing 41 different shades of blue to figure out which one would convert better on one of the Google buttons. And I would classify that as essentially random stuff. Because I look at something like that, it’s like, why would you even test that? What would possess Google to do that? And the fact is that they’ve got that kind of time on their hands to be able to do something like that, and they don’t know what else to do. And my question would be, is that really the best place in your sales funnel to be testing. And in their case, it may very well have, because they’ve only got a one-page website that they want people to click through on that button. So for them, it kind of makes sense. But if you’re going to start A-B testing, really figure out where you could make it the biggest impact on your sales funnel. Don’t just randomly test stuff on your website, changing buttons from one color to another. Really look at your sales funnel and try to analyze where could you make the biggest impact. So for example, if you have a 10-stage sales funnel, and you have let’s say 10 sales per month, and at the last stage of your sales funnel, you have 60 people. Well, if you can increase that last stage by just 10%, that conversion rate from the last stage to the paying customer, then you’re going to convert an extra six customers. Well, that just raises your revenue by 60%. That 10% conversion rate increase will raise your revenue by 60%. So your definitely key piece is where you can increase revenue, but knowing where to tweak those buttons is really, really important.
Rob [09:25]: Yeah, and I mean, to answer your earlier kind of ponderance of Google is I think the reason they test all the shades of blue is because they have such an enormous volume, that they can, and they can get definitive results and they can repeat them. Whereas, with someone, if you have 10,000 uniques a month or 20-30,000 uniques a month, you can’t test that many things, and it does become a waste of time. So the point you’re making here is don’t test things that aren’t going to have a really big impact on your numbers, on the numbers that matter too, right? It’s what’s going to have the biggest impact on revenue or on trial count, and look at those. Focus on those first, because that is your low-hanging fruit. And you’re not off wandering, trying to test button colors, which at some point may be worthwhile, but with our meager 30-40,000 uniques a month, it might take you quite a long time to get any type of result from that.
Mike [10:13]: Yeah, and all of that is about, just having some sort of a methodology that you’re following and knowing where you can get the most reward for the things that you’re doing or identifying whether you’re at a local maximum to do broad testing or if you really need to narrow down your focus on to those little things, like as you mentioned, the button colors. I mean, maybe that’s the best place for your time. But again, just testing random things, is not a good strategy. Like, you have to have a strategy going into this.
Rob [10:40]: And the second common A-B testing mistake is assuming that tests other people have run are going to turn out the same for your business. So it’s basically looking at a website, reading a blog post about someone who ran a test where the red button outperformed the green button, and then just changing all your buttons to red without testing. The point here is that you shouldn’t take the stuff as face-value that you read on the internet. Not that it would be fake, but it’s just not going to work for your audience. So good examples of this are, do you ask for credit card up front, or do you allow credit card without a trial, right? So that could be one thing that you might read about and you hear the rules of thumb. We talk about them here on this show for sure, and there’s other discussions. And you can take that as a default and then test it. Same thing with button colors. There’s all this debate about what button colors work well and orange and yellow are often cited as the best. So that’s kind of the design rule of thumb that I would start with a my control, and then I would test from there – even long form versus short form, landing pages or home pages, same thing. You’ll hear certain copywriters swear by long form, and then you’ll hear people run tests and have there be no difference and even have the long form perform worse. We actually had this with Micropreneur.com landing page, where we had a short form, a long form and basically a medium form. And the middle one outperformed the other two in repeated split tests, and that’s never something that I’ve heard in particular, kind of a mid-form page would work. But once we tested it, we realized that was the best result for us.
Mike [12:10]: The third common mistake people make is not running tests long enough. Your tests need to be run long enough in order for it to be statistically significant. And I’m not going to go into the math behind that, but essentially you need to be reasonably sure and confident that enough people have gone through that test that you can look at that and say, yes, this is statistically significant. I would say rule of thumb for using something like this, is if you’re not sure what that really means, then you should have at least 100 conversions coming through on the tests that you’re running. And that’s not 100 visitors, it’s 100 conversions actually going through in both directions. And then you also want to run those tests for at least one to two weeks. Don’t run a test like over the weekend or for a partial week. Running it longer is generally better. Obviously there’s exceptions to that, but you want to run it for at least one week, if not at least two weeks, so that you’re not dealing with any sort of variation where you get this influx of traffic from a particular website, and then it drops off very quickly, because those types of events that happen can radically alter the skew of the numbers and the percentages and how those number map out inside of you’re A-B test.
Rob [13:13]: Yeah, the formulas for A-B testing and getting the statistical significance are a little bit complicated. And there is a website out there, and I forget who does this, but he basically split-tested the same two pages against each other, and they will have different statistical significance, like one will outperform the other by 10 or 20% with statistical significance. And that’s just kind of a downer to think about it, that split tests are not, they’re not fool-proof basically, right? You’re not going to get the exact same response from the same page if you split the audience. It is fallible. And that’s how I kind of think about split testing, is it’s like a good guide, it’s the best we can do, but there’s always room for error, not in terms of the math itself being wrong, but just that the way the audience is split is not going to be identical. And there’s room for it not to be statistically significant, even if it looks like it should be. It’s kind of easy to trip yourself up on that, I think. The fourth common A-B testing mistake is not killing insignificant tests. What you’ll notice is that most of the tests you run are not going to show statistically significant differences. And if you have a bunch of tests running or even if you have one test and it’s running for a long time, and there’s not a significant difference, then it’s basically a distraction, right? It could negatively influence other tests. It could also be a waste of your time because you only have so many visitors and so much time to run these tests that you really want bigger wins. You don’t want marginal ones that are going to take forever to identify themselves, but still not be significant. The nice part about getting something drastically different in terms of results is those tests tend to run very quickly, and those are the kind of wins you want to go after. So if you start a test and things are close, I tend to shut them down pretty early and try to do something more dramatic to get a more dramatic result.
Mike [15:02]: The flip side of that is that you don’t want to ignore small gains if they are significant. So if you’re able to get a small statistically significant gain over the course of two weeks or four weeks or something like that, there’s no reason to not implement it. Because if you can get a 1% day over day gain, then over a course of a year, that’s a 37x yearly gain. So there’s clearly benefits to doing that, but only if it actually is statistically significant. The fifth mistake is to not consider the needs of your prospects. So when you’re looking to determine which tests you’re going to run, think about how this test is going to impact your prospects. When they’re looking at a website that you’re changing, what information are you taking away or adding to the site, and specifically why are you doing that? How is it going to help them or how is it going to benefit them? Is it going to move them closer to a decision faster or is it going to do so at the expense of making them feel tricked down the road and experiencing some sort of buyer’s remorse. So that’s something you have to be a little bit careful of. And you could recognize that if you have higher conversions, but also a higher churn down the road. And unfortunately you’re not going to see that churn until they get past the point of paying you, and they’re going to ask for refunds or cancel your service. So you will see those a little bit further down the road, and you may have to back pedal on some of your tests, especially if it showed that significant increase and you implemented it as kind of a permanent change, and then down the road you see that churn. You’re going to have to back that out. But those are the types of things that you need to watch for and be mindful of what it is that the person who is looking at the website are seeing.
Rob [16:33]: Our sixth mistake is trying to move too fast. What we mean by that is testing too many things at the same time on the same page is really hard. This is multi-variant testing, you need a lot of traffic to do this. And you kind of need even more of a plan because of the complexity you run into. Same thing with running too many simultaneous tests, right? If you’re testing headlines on the homepage and then something on the tour page and then something else on the pricing page, these things can interact with each other. And it’s easy to make a mistake and either misattribute something or, like you said with the fifth mistake, it’s easy to make a change and then not realize there’s a kind of a downward element to it that doesn’t show up for two or three months. So if you’re just starting out or you’re really not an expert in split-testing, this is always something I say, tell people to do, is not to jump into multi-variant testing, but to kind of run one test at a time until you feel comfortable with it, and you feel like you’re able to make progress and interpret the results before you jump in to try to do any type of multi-variant stuff.
Mike [17:30]: The seventh mistake is to not use any widely accepted A-B testing tools. And there are a lot of A-B testing frameworks and libraries out there. Some people will decide that they’re going to build their own. I would question whether or not that’s a good use of your time, because there are so many good tools out there. In terms of the A-B testing frameworks and libraries themselves, I would be somewhat cautious about using something that was an open source library or something that was freely available, just in case the math behind it doesn’t work. And I did run into a case where I started using a library and then realized after the fact that some of my results didn’t seem to quite be matching up with what I would have expected, and I started digging. And I found out that the way they had implemented the A-B testing framework itself, was actually wrong. It wasn’t a real A-B test, it was actually kind of, I forget the specifics of it, but it literally did not work right. So you do have to be careful when you start going out and doing those things. The common wisdom is to basically do an A-A test where you’re testing the same thing against itself to be sure that the tool you’re using is a valid tool to be using. But there’s a lot of different things that you can use like Google Analytics, Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, Unbounce, all these types of things make your life easier when you’re trying to do A-B tests, and make sure you’re getting statistically significant results.
Rob [18:48]: Our eighth mistake for A-B testing is that your tests should have a specific hypothesis. In other words, don’t run a test just to “see what happens.” Run it with a desired result in mind, typically this is to increase the number of people who click to the next page, or it’s to increase the number of trials that you get out of this, or increasing engagement with a particular page. The problem with running one just to see what happens is it’s hard to learn anything unless you actually have a goal in mind. So you might see the result, but you aren’t able to match it against your beliefs about what is actually going on. And frankly, if you’re just testing to see what happens, your time is probably better spent elsewhere rewriting copy on another page or just doing some other type of marketing activity.
Mike [19:30]: Yeah, I think the basic idea behind this is to really kind of challenge what your own beliefs are. To make sure that, one, you’re on the right track, and, two, that if you’re not on the right track, that you can be corrected. As Rob said, if you’re just running the tests to see what happens, the reason you’re not learning anything is because there’s no opportunity for you to be wrong. And that’s really what you’re trying to do is try to find those places where you believe something to be true and you can either verifiably prove it, or verifiably disprove it. If you just do it to see what happens, there is no opportunity for that to happen. And the last A-B test mistake that people make is to ignore the potential for skewed or broken tests. Don’t ever assume that all your data is correct. There’s plenty of opportunities for either bad tooling or things to be blocked sometimes within the communication framework. There could be seasonal shifts. So for example, if you run a test in the middle of December, for example, then there’s probably a very high likelihood that that test is going to be dramatically impacted by the amount of online shopping that’s going on. There’s definitely seasonal things that can happen throughout the year. Over at the summer for example, people are searching for different things than they are in the winter. You can also run into issues where if you’re sending out emails to your email list, then those subscribers are going to have a bit of familiarity of who you are and what your website looks like. So those people are going to have different conversion rates than a new visitor to your website. And then of course, you have to also deal with the fact that there’s sometimes parts of your website that are just going to be broken within a web browser. And you may or may not know that. So those are the types of things that you need to be at least mindful of and realize that A-B testing itself, it does generally work mathematically, but there’s always those things that you have to be careful of because it’s not a foolproof mechanism. It’s a tool, and like any other tool, it can be broken in certain ways. So you have to be careful that you just don’t accept everything as fact, and dig a little bit to make sure that nothing’s going wrong. So to do a quick recap, the nine common A-B testing mistakes are: 1) Testing just randomly instead of having a plan. 2) Assuming that other tests are going to be valid for your business. 3) Not running tests long enough. 4) Not killing insignificant tests quickly enough. 5) Not considering the needs of your prospects. 6) Trying to go too fast too quickly. 7) Not using A-B testing tools. 8) Not having a specific hypothesis in mind when doing A-B tests. 9) Ignore the potential for skewed or broken tests.
Rob [22:02]: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at: (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 on iTunes by searching for “startups.” And visit: startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.
Episode 257 | Mistakes Founders Make in Getting Traction
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike interviews Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, about the mistakes founders make in getting traction. They also discuss Gabriel’s new book “Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Exposlive Customer Growth”.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike [00:00]: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, I’m going to be talking with Gabriel Weinberg about the mistakes founders make in getting traction. This is Starups For the Rest of Us, Episode 257.
Mike [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 built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Gabriel [00:25]: Hey, I’m Gabriel.
Mike [00:26]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How you doing this week, Gabriel?
Gabriel [00:30]: Great. Thank you for having me come back.
Mike [00:33]: Yeah, no problem. So to give the audience a little bit of preview here, we’re going to be talking to Gabriel Weinberg about the mistakes that founders make in getting traction. We talked to Gabriel back in Episode 199 about a year ago, and for those of you who don’t remember or didn’t listen to that episode, Gabriel was the co-founder and CEO of Opobox which sold for ten million dollars back in 2006. In 2008, he started DuckDuckGo which is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers’ privacy and avoiding the filter bubble that is offered by personalized search that you would be most familiar with from Google. So you’ve co-wrote the book ‘Traction’ with Justin Mares and people can find that at either tractionbook.com or Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The new version comes out today. In that book you talk mostly about the bullseye framework that people can apply to help them get traction. Because the second edition of the book is hitting shelves today, can you give us a little bit of a refresher for those people who didn’t catch that episode about the bullseye framework and what the book itself is about?
Gabriel [01:32]: Yeah, sure. I actually started working on this book a long time ago, back in 2009, when DuckDuckGo was just starting to get traction itself. I was trying to figure out how do I get more traction, which is obviously what almost every business sets out to do once they launch their product. How do I get this thing traction? I found out that there was no great framework for getting traction. There was nothing like a procedure you could do to really think about how to pick the best marketing channel for your business at the time. So I went out just to investigate that myself. Then after interviewing lots and lots of people, really hit upon this framework, and extracted it from their successes and called it the bullseye framework because of all the channels that you can use, and we identify 19 in the book, you’re really trying to hit that bullseye, the right channel for you to grow your startup and meet your traction goal. So once I had the framework, I realized there’s really a need in the market for this book just so that startups can use this. That’s when I got my co-author, Justin Mares, to help really flesh out the book. From then, I thought I was 70 percent done, but I was really 20 percent done and I had to really write the book, edit it, and put it out last year. People started using it right off the get go and it starting working really well for people. We sold 35,000 copies, sold out our three printings. Then I started talking to people, doing events, and all sorts of things and really understood where people were getting it wrong and where people were getting it right. From that, I wanted to do a re-write that more crisply helped people get traction and that is what this second edition is. In that context, the bullseye framework in the first edition was a five step process and we simplified it in the second to a three step process. That three step process is simpler and it is the following: the first step is to go through all the 19 channels, these are all the different ways you can get traction, SEO, search engine marketing, trade shows, etc., there’s 19 of them, and really brainstorm a test in each channel where you could possibly get traction from that channel. Then the second step, and we’re talking about this, but the visualization of this framework is a bullseye, like a target, with three rings. So that outer ring is these 19 channels. Then the middle ring is you pick three that seem the most promising tests to run then you run those tests. Those tests are meant to be very small, simple tests, take less than a month and $1,000 to figure out how many customers you can really get through that channel, how much it would cost to acquire the customers, and are those the right customers you need right now to achieve your traction goal. So you run those tests in the middle ring. Then hopefully we assume one of those middle tests look really promising. One of those channels seems like it could be the channel to move the needle for your business. Then you go down to the inner ring, the bullseye, and you double down on that channel and focus on it and try to achieve your traction goal through it by running additional sets of tests within the channel to discover the best strategies to do that. So that’s why it’s called the bullseye framework is because you’re trying to hit that bullseye and find that one channel of the 19 that is going to make you hit your traction goal.
Mike [04:49]: When you went about this new edition of the Traction book, what areas were you seeing where people were making mistakes in implementing it? Was it a result of the fact that it was a five step process and it needed to be cut down to the three step process or were they just kind of misinterpreting different things? Is it the difference between optimization or understanding?
Gabriel [05:07]: The three step process really simplified it and people were a little confused by some of the steps that we had cut out. They were things that you needed to do, like ranking the channels and prioritizing them; really we combined into just one step. There was a little confusion around that, but the bigger issue was in each of these now three steps there are ways that people routinely messed them up. We tried to reorganize those parts to really make it clear to not mess it up in those ways. They’re non-intuitive ways and I can go through each of those. Besides, that’s all in the intro, the first five chapters. Then the last 19 chapters are a chapter for each of the channels. For those, we updated them and we really tried to edit down the parts that were kind of too fluffy. We just did better editing. We ended cutting out about 50 pages of the book even though we added two additional sections, a preface which explains kind of my history of getting traction and some of the mistakes I made, and then a testing addendum at the end which is one of the things people really wanted and were messing up of how to do cheap tests in each of the channels. We have a list of all the channels and we give you a way to do cheap tests in each of them.
Mike [06:20]: I think those extra tests are extremely helpful just because it may not necessarily be clear for some people, for example, offline ads or viral marketing and things like that. You kind of have a conceptual idea of what it is, but you don’t necessarily know how to go about doing it because you’ve never done it before or you’ve never considered it before. I think the addition of those things can certainly help a lot of people. What are some of the broad non-intuitive mistakes that you were seeing people make over the last year of talking to people that are pretty common?
Gabriel [06:52]: Right. There’s four of them. Three of them relate to each step in the new process. The first one is over-arching before that and it’s not starting traction early enough. People think that they need to, and we did say this in the book, but you know now it’s says a lot more crisply, people think that you really need to launch a product before you start going to get traction. The reason is the ‘Leaky bucket’ metaphor. We reuse that in the book and try to use that to explain it. The ‘Leaky bucket’ metaphor is when you start your product it has a lot of holes in it, right? It’s essentially a leaky bucket and if you pour customers on the top, and you can think of customers as money because it costs to acquire customers, then that money is leaking out. So the intuitive answer is I should not spend money on traction efforts until my bucket holds water. The problem with that is that what people do instead is they get beta customers and they get these beta panels and they iterate on the product just off these beta customers. Those beta customers, they’re too close to you. Not only do you become friends with them and you kind of know them, but they are not getting first impressions of your product at any time. They are seeing this evolution of the product and they are primed with what they previously know whereas if you have a steady stream of cold customers coming through, through some traction efforts then you’re constantly seeing real market feedback and whether your product is really going to resonate in the market. You want that so you can really figure out where the holes in your bucket are or else what happens is, this is what usually happens, you then launch your product, start to get traction, try to get traction, and realize, “Oh, I thought my bucket wasn’t leaky from my beta customers but it really is still leaky.” So you really want to start that traction effort right away, right at the beginning of product development. We try to argue strongly in the book that you should spend 50 percent of your time on it. Just to make it even more clear of why you should do this is you think that you might be getting a lot of this information from your product development methodology from your beta customers, but what you’re getting in addition to finding the holes is when you’re testing these traction efforts, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on it just to get a few customers coming through cold, you’re figuring out what messaging is best. You’re figuring out what niche to focus on when you launch. So when you do launch you can figure out the right channel to launch with, the messaging, the niche to focus on, and you can really hit the ground running with a real useful product launch.
Mike [09:27]: Yeah, as you were talking, and I’m not sure this is a good analogy to make, but the whole leaky bucket, I think that people have this whole conceptual idea of like all the holes are exactly the same size and I just need to put a patch over each of them, but the reality is that depending on your product those holes can be different sizes. They can be different shapes and the solution to patching each of those holes can be completely different. You need the customers going through that bucket in order to get the information you need to figure out what the patch is for that. So whether it’s a new feature or whether it’s a new marketing message, every single patch is going to be different. You can’t just take a blanket approach of, “Oh, let me create this product and implement all these features because I think that’s what people want.” Those customers coming through and leaking out of the bucket is where you’re going to get the information you need in order to patch those holes. You can’t do it in advance. If you try to, your patch is not probably going to be the right size or shape and you’re going to end up doing too much work or not enough work. In either case you’ve either wasted effort or not done the things that need to be done and you’re still going to be leaking things out the bottom.
Gabriel [10:31]: That’s exactly right. I think the real known intuitive piece is that you have a false sense of security with beta customers. That’s been the product development methodology for a long time and it’s a good one. You should have beta customers, but it’s just not enough.
Mike [10:46]: What are some of the mistakes that people make in terms of the different channels? Because obviously there’s 19 different channels that you can choose from but there’s going to be certain ones that people are much more familiar with. Shouldn’t people be focusing on those?
Gabriel [11:00]: Right. That’s the number one mistake in the first step. When you’re brainstorming all these channels, people navigate towards the ones they’re already familiar with. That’s just availability bias. We saw more and more that people just wanted to ask us and say, “Okay, which of the channels are great for my type of business. Which are good for SaaS businesses, which are good for this offline retail business. That’s the wrong question to ask because you almost want to ask the opposite question. This is the non-intuitive piece of which are the most underutilized channels for my industry or business. Often those are the ones that are greenfield that you can have huge traction opportunities in. Unfortunately, the piece that people mess up is they often ignore these underutilized channels because they’re not familiar with them because they’re from that industry. Say everyone in that industry is using search engine marketing so therefore they need to use search engine marketing. That’s usually a bad idea because that channel is very competitive because all your competitors are using it. If you could find something better to do, even offline, that would be a good choice. A good example of this is WP Engine, the Word Press and hosting company which we profile in the book. They are an online hosting company for word press. A very competitive industry. They ended up going for two very underutilized channels through different parts of their growth. One was offline ads. So they ended up a lot in magazines which no one else was really doing. Then two, they built a side product, a speed tester for word press which we call as a channel engineer and as marketing where you build this other tool that’s completely free on another website that’s complementary to your product. Then everyone started using their speed tester and then they could capture their e-mail and upsell them on the hosting product. If they had just focused on the regular channels, search engine marketing is what people mainly use and SEO, they would have had a much harder time growing.
Mike [12:53]: Now isn’t the risk of doing that also that you are choosing channels that your existing competitors have tried to make work and were unsuccessful doing? That would be my natural inclination. My fear would be, “Oh well, I’m not sure about doing offline ads because there must be a reason that my competitors aren’t doing it.” Is that a fear that people should be concerned about? Is that a real fear or is that more imagined than anything else?
Gabriel [13:19]: I think that’s a fear that people really have. It’s an imagined fear in the sense that almost everyone has the same availability bias and so, quite honestly, no one is really testing these under utilized channels for the most part. But, you make a really good point which is it’s almost the highest leverage tactic you can do. Go talk to other founders, not currently competitors, but failed competitors in your space who are very willing to talk to people usually. They’ll go tell you about all the things they tried and why they failed. It may be the case that they did try something five years ago that didn’t work for x, y, or z reason that may work now or you may discover they tried a bunch of things that for good reason won’t work now. This is kind of the other broad area where people fail in this first step of brainstorming is that they don’t really brainstorm deep enough. You really want to have a good sense of your competitive landscape, whatever you think, marketing channels everyone’s tried, go talk to people of things they haven’t tried, go talk to complementary industries to see what they’re trying. There may be some overlap there. Really spend a lot of time thinking about each channel and how it could be used whereas what mostly happens is people say, “Oh, I don’t know much about that. I guess maybe I could use that for something,” and they give it maybe a minute of thought. The problem with that is that underutilized, overlooked channel may be the one that could just jump you to success.
Mike [14:46]: But I guess how would you know? That kind of comes back to the question of how to test these different things. If you’re looking at a particular channel and you’re not entirely sure how to go about testing that channel, there’s, I think, this bias towards not spending a heck of a lot of money or time doing it because you don’t know what you’re doing. How do you come and get past that? How do you scope the tests that you’re doing such that you’re not wasting time and money, but you’re still doing what would essentially be a definitive test to find out whether or not that channel is going to work for you?
Gabriel [15:18]: Right. That’s exactly why in the second edition we added this testing addendum where we’re giving you suggestions of how to test these channels. In the scope of these tests, you’re trying to answer three things again. You’re trying to answer how many customers could I get through this channel and how scalable it is; how cost effective it is, how much does it cost to acquire customers through the channel; and are these the right type of customers that I want right now because each channel can bring in slightly different demographics and types of customers. You’re measuring those against your traction goal which is also a hard number, which in the beginning is often how much traction do I need to get to profitability or financing. Say I need 1000 customers and I run a test and this channel we only think it’s going to give 100 then that’s probably not going to be a good one to focus on whereas one of these that say, “Oh, it seems like I can get 10,000 if I really blew this out.” That might be a good one to focus on. So what you’re doing in that first step is really identifying tests you can run in each of these channels and then you look at them and you say, “Okay, based on my guesstimates of these tests, I think these three tests are the most promising to run.” Then you literally run them in the second step. The part that people mess up in that second step is trying to optimize too early, premature optimization there, and if Facebook ads are the channel you’re going to test, you run 40 ads. You really shouldn’t be doing that. You should be running four ads and what we say in the book now is don’t run a test longer than a month or more than $1000 except in extenuating circumstances. Then from those tests you can have data to dump to the next step. So to really answer your question is you need a good way to run a cheap test in these channels and if it’s cheap and short then it’s really easy to test these underutilized channels because you have a good sense of what you can do that doesn’t take a lot of time or money to really bear out whether that’s going to work or not.
Mike [17:12]: Now are there any guiding principles around that $1000 versus the month of time? Is that just an arbitrary cap or is that something that is helpful for a founder who is trying to boost up a company and they have much more time than money versus somebody who says, “Hey, I really need to find this out fast, let me just blow $1000 in a week to try to test out say paid advertising or something like that.” Are there guiding principles around striking that balance or is it more just kind of what resources are available to the founder?
Gabriel [17:42]: Well we look at all, we try to come up with good cheap tests for all the channels. We looked at them and we said, “Okay, that cutoff seemed appropriate and it encompassed all these test ideas.” Then where we saw people messing up was they were spending either too much money or too much time on these tests and not cutting them off sooner when they had the information they needed. So, yeah, it is a guiding principle. I think that particularly is guiding for early founders trying to initially find their traction channel. The caveat there is like DuckDuckGo or I Am Now, we’re running tests of much greater magnitude because our traction goal is so much higher and we want to get the error bars down on our estimates so much lower. So we’ll run bigger tests that take longer and take more money. When you’re first starting out or just going into a channel for the first time, I think you should keep it really small, even if you had a lot more money and time. There’s no more reason because you reach diminishing returns very quickly on these tests.
Mike [18:43]: Got it. So the purpose of those principles of $1000 or no more than one month of time are really for newer businesses that are just going into a channel and those limits can fluctuate between the different types of channels that you’re going into. So when you’re targeting blogs, for example, you wouldn’t probably be spending $1000 but it might take you several weeks of back and forth with the relevant blog owners in order to get your product mentioned on their site or to kind of get through their process of doing guest posts versus something like paid advertising where you may very well spend up to $1000 and you can do it within a couple of days, but those bounds are really to encompass all of the different channels that you might try.
Gabriel [19:27]: That’s right. Exactly. A lot of the tests will be free. Some of them you can do very quickly. Yeah, they’re more like guidelines of limits. If you see yourself going over these limits early on, you might be doing something wrong.
Mike [19:39]: Right. That totally makes sense. I just wanted to make sure that we clarified it for the listeners. So are there any other mistakes that people are making when they’re going into specific channels? If you’re testing a specific channel, what sorts of things should you be focused on? Obviously there’s also the potential to focus on multiple channels. Why wouldn’t you try to do more than one at a time?
Gabriel [20:00]: Right. So in the testing phase, the things that people really messed up are the premature optimization, going too deep while you’re just trying to get error bars around these numbers, and the second is not really doing it quantitatively which we really haven’t mentioned. You have these three questions you’re trying to answer and you really should be trying to get hard numbers against them and then compare those numbers to another hard number which is your traction goal. Once you identify the right channel that is really promising that seems like it might actually work in the sense that the numbers look good, and if it looks like you started to optimize it and scale it, it would reach your traction goal, then you’re doubling down. This is the other area people mess up. This is the inner circle now. You hit the bullseye and you’re working on that channel not getting rid of the other channels. It’s really non-intuitive because say you have three promising tests in channels. Say you did a little PR and you did some social ads on Twitter and you did some offline meet ups. All three, they were promising. They had a little bit of success, but the Twitter ads were just well and above the rest. The right thing to do in our framework is to double down the Twitter ads and really focus on that. What people often do is they still focus a bit of their time on the PR and the meet ups because they know they are going to get some results out of them. The problem with that is their marginal benefit of focusing on the Twitter is much higher and when you really focus on it, what you’re really doing then is now focusing your testing effort on that one channel so now you’re uncovering the underutilized strategies and tactics within that channel. The only way to do that is to really focus. The time you’re spending on these other channels that yeah, they get you a little traction, but that’s time taken away from uncovering the best tactics you could use on the main channel. That’s the other area that people messed up when they’re focusing is not really doubling down on the one channel and getting rid of the other tests they were running.
Mike [22:03]: It almost seems like by focusing on the one channel you’re getting exponential results versus some of these other channels where you’re getting incremental or multiplicative results which are not comparable if you go far enough into that one channel that you’ve dug into or that you’ve identified as the one that’s going to give you the most traction. Is that an accurate way to portray that?
Gabriel [22:22]: Yeah. Not everyone can get the exponential growth, but that’s what you would hope. To do that, what you’re doing or advocating is you are becoming a worldwide expert at that channel. If you’re really focusing on say social ads via Twitter and Facebook, you’re really digging into all the case studies, all the forums, what people are on the platform cutting edge, what they’re saying about their own platform. For example, so right now Facebook video ads are kind of outperforming everything because Facebook is really focused on competing there. That may not be the case a month for now, but you want to be first to those tactics because when you’re first to those new tactics, those are where that exponential stuff really happens, the really high click-through rates and things like that. You want to be on the cutting edge of those. This just goes more into saying that going to underutilized places in the world gives you great conversion rates both channels and then tactics within channels. The only way to really do that is to really be in optimization mode and that requires a lot of effort and all that other effort is distracting you from getting there.
Mike [23:30]: Now one of the things that you talked about earlier was that you have to be in each of these channels and before you even do that you go and you define what your traction goal is going to be so that you have some sort of basis for measurement. Now how do you define that traction goal? What should that look like? Are there some ideas that you can share about how to define what that is or is that more specific to the type of product that you have?
Gabriel [23:54]: Yeah, I totally agree. That’s basically step zero. The other thing we added to the book was a preface about a little more of my history. That’s something I messed up early on. To give you a good example, I set out early on to get traction via SEO because that’s what I knew from my last business. But it turns out that I was pretty successful at that and spent a lot of time doing it and so I ranked really highly for the term new search engine to get to duckduckgo.com. I got number one on it, but it was just not enough people to really move the needle for what my traction goal really needed to be which ultimately was like 100,000 searches a day, not 10,000 which is where that ended up getting me. If I had sat down initially and realized my traction goal should be 100,000 searches a day, then I would have looked at SEO and either changed my SEO strategy completely or not done SEO to begin with. So it really is important to take a step back initially and figure out what your traction goal is. What I think that should be is a hard number that really moves the needle for your business and achieves some kind of significant inflection point of your business. That could be a number of things depending on what your situation is. The number itself, of course, will vary depending on your business, but for most people starting out that number is often one of three things. It’s how much traction do I need to get profitability, how much traction do I need to get financing, or what do I need to prove that I have product market fit. Those are usually specific numbers like I can look in the market and see which companies are getting financed and see how much traction they have in terms of growth or revenue or whatever the metric is in your industry and say, okay that’s what I need to hit. Then you can back out from that from your pricing about how many customers I kind of need and that’s the number you should be evaluating against these tests. You should definitely start identifying what that goal is. It goes right back to what kind of business you’re running too because if you’re not concerned with high growth or financing and you’re really concerned with paying your bills at a certain level of profitability, then that should be your goal. You should say I need to take home x amount a month and from that I can back out how many customers I need to do that then that should be your traction goal.
Mike [26:10]: Yeah. So those traction goals can either be the revenue that you’re specifically looking at or could be tied to a piece of functionality in your product. For example, a search engine, number of users is much more important, or not even users but like searches per month is important versus if you’re in a situation where you need to be able to pay the bills, you need to have that revenue coming in and you need to be able to tie those marketing efforts directly back to those revenue goals. You can tweak the numbers in terms of the price and the number of people coming in and just do some multiplication there to figure out is this really working for me, is this going to be a channel I can leverage or do I need to go someplace else? Depending on which of those situations you’re in and which of those metrics is important to you, you can then find what your traction goal is.
Gabriel [26:57]: That’s right. That exercise, that’s basically saying what is your business model and trying to clarify that initially, which is really an exercise everyone should do because, like you said, you can think about the pricing of your product. There’s a good post, I’m forgetting who wrote it, about the ‘hunting’ metaphor, but like hunting deer and elephants and different things, but it’s basically saying how much it’s going to take to get to a million dollar business which is what most people’s goal is initially based on what your price point is average revenue per customer. There’s wide ranges of businesses that get $0.10 a customer to $10,000 a customer and knowing where you are on that scale really influences what your goals are in terms of how many customers you need, which then changes everything about how you’re going to get traction.
Mike [27:44]: That article that you just mentioned was from Kristoff Jans and he wrote the blog article on ‘Five Ways to Build a One Hundred Million Dollar Business’. It’s kind of a graph of the size of your customer and how much money they’re paying you versus the number of customers you have. Obviously there’s this graph that goes along with it. I think the two extremes that he uses are one thousand enterprise customers each paying you $100,000 a year or, on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got 10 million active people who you’re monetizing at $10 a year by selling ads for example. The metaphor is essentially you’re hunting elephants or hunting mice and how many of them do you want to go after and what’s your business model look like? I think it’s an interesting metaphor he used.
Gabriel [28:26] Yeah. He’s got a follow up too. He adds three more things there and he goes down to hunting flies because people wrote him back and they are like what about some of these other businesses? So he has an addendum article. It’s even a wider range. It’s really interesting because each of those categories are very different businesses, but has very direct implications for how many customers you need and how much traction you need and what your traction efforts are. So it’s really good to think about that ahead of time and think about really which type of business am I in? Which category am I on the scale?
Mike [29:00]: I think that leads back to another interesting point about if you start bringing that type of model in and start looking at, for example, a SaaS business versus a services business. Services businesses fit into this model where you’re probably charging them a heck of a lot more because you have to, because you’re interacting with them. You have to sell them on an engagement and it might be five weeks, it might be five years, but the reality is you’re charging them a heck of a lot more and those are kind of your elephants versus a SaaS model where, I guess, traditionally you want to charge as many customers as you can smaller amounts of money. But the problem is that it takes much longer to get that mass of customers. That kind of leads back to the analogy that Gayle Goodman from Constant Contact called the ‘Long, Slow SaaS Ramp of Death’. Getting that mass of customers that you need takes a long time. You can get there faster if you can charge fewer customers more money, which lends itself more toward the services model, but a lot of people are trying to get away from that if they’re trying to build product. There’s this balance that kind of needs to be struck and, as you said, it depends a lot on the model that you have behind your business. I think it’s interesting how that should be what is the piece that’s influencing what your traction goals are. I think that sometimes it’s a little confusing because the type of business that you want does not necessarily match up to the type of business that you’re going to end up with.
Gabriel [30:23]: Yeah. Right. What you’re getting at is people end up going through this and not doing this early and then they meet with kind of that harsh reality a little later on. That’s why I think it’s good to do this early and really think about hard numbers, what your goals are, because that will inform everything. Maybe you want to change what you’re doing initially.
Mike [30:44]: I think that’s a super important point to make just because going through this process you may very well find out, hey this isn’t the business that I thought it was, maybe I should go do something else. So what startups have impressed you with their ability to gain traction and why? What is it that has made them so successful?
Gabriel [31:00]: So we profile a bunch of ones in the book and each kind of has an interesting story that they did something really cool with traction. This concept, I was talking earlier with WP Engine and this engineer and his marketing I really liked because we literally had to name that channel because no one else really had named it. HubSpot and RJmetrics are two other companies that have really embraced that channel and does it pretty well. Moz would be another one. They’re all making complementary tools and sites and they’re using some of their engineering resources. The reason why it’s so cool is it’s non-intuitive that engineer resources are so sacred in a company that everyone thinks they should always use their product, but this is taking a little of those resources and using them for marketing. Developing this other tool that then drives the whole business. So HubSpot recently IPO’d, did that with their site called Marketing Greater where you could go type in your domain name and it would tell you all about how you’re doing in online marketing which basically every business who goes online needs. So they got millions of businesses through there and then from that they had a great lead channel to do inside sales and sell them on their main product. Moz has done the same thing and RJmetric which is a kind of cohort analysis company in data analytics, has done it with a bunch of different sites where a lot of their target audience is in house data development and teams who independently need to do database queries and things like that. So they made all these database kind of tools for these developers and then on there they educate them about RJmetrics. So I really love businesses go after these kind of underutilized channels. Another good example of another under utilized channel is publicity stunts which most people completely shy away from because it seems like they would be unscalable and repetitive. To some extent that’s true. There’s been a lot of ones that happen just at launch. A great example, an old example, but I like it also because I’m in Philly, for example is half.com, Josh Kopelman who currently runs First Round Capital. When they first launched half.com they had a city in Oregon renamed to half.com, Oregon, which was Half, Oregon, and they gave two jobs to the of the people there. The whole thing cost maybe $100,000. Got them national TV across the board, 40 million impressions before there were any social media. So back in 1999 and immediately vaulted them up. Six months later that company was sold for 300 million dollar plus. Then another company who does publicity stunts, Grasshopper, they really have invested in this over time and they have two employees completely dedicated to thinking up these publicity stunts and things they can do, run contests and things like that. Half of them fail, but they’ve gotten most of their traction through this effort because when they do take off it’s such a great press story. They get so much press it makes up for everything.
Mike [34:05]: Now at what point do you start taking into account the ROI on some of these channels because some of the things that you just used such as HubSpot, they have these different website marketing graders and things like that, but their price point is also substantially higher than I think your average run of the mill SaaS application. I think that their pricing starts at $200 a month and if you kind of extrapolate and say, “Ballpark it, I don’t know what these numbers actually are.” If an average customer sticks around for two years with them, that’s $4800. So for them it makes sense to fill that pipeline with as many people as they can because each of those customers is going to net them $4800. It becomes this awkward situation, especially for the people who are running really small businesses where the look at that and say, “Well that sounds great, but I can’t really afford to have an inside sales team calling these people even if that is going to be successful because I just simply can’t afford it.” How do you take those types of considerations into account?
Gabriel [35:01]: This is where the testing really comes into play. When you’re running these tests you’re trying to assess those three numbers, what the scaleability of it is, how many customers, how much it’s going to cost to acquire the customer, and is it the right customer? The second one, how much does it cost to acquire the customer, is the key one here. In this scenario, say the engineer and his marketing, they don’t need to have an inside sales team necessarily. It could be an off the shelf product that you sign up for in some kind of signup flow and that’s the test that you’re running. Will people convert from this and sign up and then how much would it cost to get them? How much contact would I need to have with them. You’re absolutely right. If you’re a small SaaS company you can’t afford any kind of personal contact like that. It costs too much money. So you need to be testing whether it will just work for your regular signup flow. I think that all comes out in the testing. That relates back to your traction goal and kind of knowing how much you can spend to acquire a customer.
Mike [35:57]: I think that’s a pretty good place to wrap it up. This book comes out, I believe, today you said, correct?
Gabriel [36:02]: That’s right. Today. October 6th.
Mike [36:04]: So if anyone’s interested in buying that, they can go over to tractionbook.com. We’ll link it up in the show notes. They can also get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, correct?
Gabriel [36:13]: That’s right. We have a couple other retailer links like IndieBound. They’re all at tractionbook.com.
Mike [36:18]: Great. If anyone wants to follow up with you, where would they do that?
Gabriel [36:21]: Twitter is best. My handle is @yegg. Y-E-G-G.
Mike [36:25]: Awesome. Well thanks for coming on the show Gabriel.
Gabriel [36:27]: My pleasure.
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