Show Notes
- The Founder Test – based on episode 133
- Study from Totango about asking for credit card up front
- Swell iOS app – Pandora for talk radio
- TweetQureet – top tweets from your timeline in a daily email digest
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: You know, I’m really irritated. Miley Cyrus goes out there and gets naked and licks a hammer and it’s called art. I do it and I get kicked out of home depot.
[00:08] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 151.
[00:11] Music
[00:19] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:29] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. So aside from twerking, what is the word this week sir?
[00:35] Mike: I want to send out a thank you to Julian Corlett for putting up a website based on episode 147. Instead of giving you guys the long URL for it, we decided to just register foundertest.com. So if you go to foundertest.com it will take you over to the site. It’s a really good – I guess a summary of that episode. It takes you through all the different questions that you can answer and basically gives you a score at the end as to how well prepared you are to meet the challenges of starting your own business.
[01:01] Rob: Very nice. So last week I spoke about that I was going to be sitting with a glass of bourbon waiting for the Drip early results to come in, the trial conversions and things did in fact go well. I’m quite pleased with it. So Drip is now in the low four figures of revenue so that’s a good milestone to cross over from three to four. Then I think we’ll be doing another launch similarly. I say a launch, it’s basically an email to another small group within the email list.
[01:27] I originally planned to do 10% or 20% of the list basically send them an email and then send to the other 80% to 90% but given all the work that it took to do that first small chunk, I think I’m just going to kind of break it down into small pieces because since our on boarding is pretty intensive, I just can’t imagine trying to handle eight or nine times the load that we handled to get everybody up to speed.
[01:51] And so in order to not sacrifice people’s early user experience with Drip, kind of take it as it comes and then it will be nice because MicroConf Europe is in two weeks and so I’ll get another group in and before that, probably try to get someone in mid to late October once I feel like we really have it down.
[02:07] Mike: Very cool. I’ve got all the new UI code that we’ve been working on for Audit Shark out live. There’s a bug that’s in there right now that we know about that is not displaying the instructions for fixing problems that it finds and that’s just a problem with the angular js. It strips out all the HTML tags that we basically put in there used in mark down language and angular just strips it out just more for safety considerations than anything else. So we have to figure out a way to either put them back or to strip out that piece a bit.
[02:38] But the other thing that I’ve done is remember how you’ve been asking me if there were any other pieces that are essentially preventing people from moving forward and actually paying for it. And I’ve asked those questions. Right now I’m just waiting for the feedback from them to see where things stand right now with this new code in place is what they’re looking for or if it’s not and we’ve got more work to do.
[02:58] Rob: Very nice. So if I recall you had two things left to get done before you felt like you could start charging. One was the new UI, and you’re saying that’s live and the other is remediation and you said you guys just found a bug that you’re technologists, I’m sure you’ll figure that out in the next week here. Once remediation is done though that’s kind of where you think the line in the sand is drawn but I guess you’re going to wait to hear back. You’ve already asked the question and you’re waiting to hear back if that is in fact the line at which people will start paying.
[03:26] Mike: Yeah. I asked if that was the line and if it’s not then they’ll let me know. But I truly believe that it is and even without it showing some of that stuff right there, I can hack in a little bit. It just won’t look as pretty. It will still give them the information. It just couldn’t probably look a little bit better. That’s a fix. It can be put in on the next day or two so I’m not real worried about that. But really it’s just a matter of getting their feedback and I’m going to start putting more people onto the system regardless of what they say and start getting more than just a few people’s feedback on that.
[03:54] Rob: Yeah. I definitely think that will be helpful. I’ve noticed that the more folks that I get using Drip, the more data points I have and it’s hard to make decisions when you only have 5 or 10 people using your app because everybody’s just kind of all over the place and their specific needs come at you and you feel those are the most important things to do. But when you have 100 or 1,000 people using it, it’s actually easier right? There’s more data coming at you but it’s easier to pick out the things that are most critical and that you should tackle next.
[04:23] So I ran across a really interesting study. It was actually emailed to me by Ruben Gomez in bidsketch and the studies from totango.com and it has something to do with whether you should ask for credit card upfront. And we’ve talked about that time several times on the podcast and so we will link this up in the show notes but it basically supports the stands we’ve taken on the podcast of when in doubt, ask for credit card.
[04:46] But if you have a higher touch sales process and you have people in place, you have the labor force there to make phone calls or to actually close sales, then you can think about not asking for credit card and you will close more people if you’re doing it right. So that was the results of the study but it was nice to see it point out in numbers and totango just did a really good job of putting the study together. What else is going on with you?
[05:10] Mike: Well I bought a Nexus 7. It’s based on the Google android OS and it’s just a seven inch tablet.
[05:16] Rob: So what do you think about android versus IOS?
[05:18] Mike: I feel like it’s harder to find things in the android store and I’ve only used it for a day and a half so I probably don’t have a good basis for saying that just yet. But it feels like it’s a little bit more difficult to find apps that are like business related. It feels like the android ecosystem is trying to push pretty much anything at me like saying go over here for movies, go here for music and here for apps, here for games. And I’m not really interested in most of that other stuff. It’s just having to navigate around in the android store.
[05:58] Part of the reason I bought the Nexus though is because I’ve started to realize in some ways my knowledge of technology is starting to become a little bit obsolete because technology’s just kind of progressing so fast and I really haven’t taken the time to stop and update my skills or familiarize myself with different ecosystems and operating systems in quite some time.
[06:21] So I figured it would be a nice idea to kind of sit back and go through android a little bit because I don’t have an android phone. I’ve got an iPhone. I’ve got iPads and I got a Mac book pro and I also do a lot of stuff on the window side. And android is really just not something that I’ve delve into so I thought it would be a good idea to kind of invest in myself a little bit.
[06:38] Rob: Very nice. Yeah, I’m also taking a tack with that since Drip is written in Rubyonrails I’m actually going through one month rails which we mentioned a few episodes ago, about half way through that course, it’s been good so far. And I also have been working with Git in GitHub. Learning a lot there, just trying to get up to speed so that I know enough to be dangerous and make some tiny changes to Drip now.
[07:00] And again since it is technology that I have never developed in full time, the ruby on the rails syntax makes sense. It’s easy enough to learn now but it’s kind of the larger paradigms I think that are hard to learn when it’s not something you’re doing 30 or 40 hours a week.
[07:16] Mike: I think that learning that stuff is just it’s not just a matter of being comfortable with it but it’s also the matter of being able to make technology decisions for your business moving forward and that’s really the reason why I picked up the Nexus. I know that I think in a month or so there’s rumors that the new iPads are going to be coming out and I’ll probably pick one up then at that point just because the iPad that I have now is from several years ago. It’s the iPad version one. I haven’t bought a new one since then because it’s done everything that I needed it to do.
[07:45] But just from a standpoint of familiarizing myself with different technologies, that’s where I see it as kind of a necessity. Like I’ve said, I’ve looked at some of my skills and I feel they’re becoming a little bit on the obsolete side because I just don’t know enough about these other things to make decisions.
[08:02] Rob: Sure. And that happens fast. So our podcast is now inside an interesting app. It’s an IOS app called Swell and it’s basically Pandora for talk radio, that’s their tag line. So you have to apply to become part of it as a podcaster but as a listener you can just download it for free in the app store. So I’ve heard about it on this week in startups so I emailed them and they let us in which is cool.
[08:27] I’ve been using Swell for a few days and it is pretty good. It starts to hone in on your taste. I wish it had more podcasts. There’s a lot of NPR and like ABC news audio and BBC and stuff so it is definitely more geared towards talk radio at this point. I think they’re trying to keep the quality high. But if they make it a better discovery engine for podcasts, I would absolutely be listening to that a lot because frankly I seek out new podcast and if they do in fact crack this, make it the Pandora for podcasts instead of just for talk radio.
[08:59] Mike: Hey we’ve got another thank you from Joseph Blackman who says hey, I’ve been a listener for over a year and I’m thankful for the breadth and depth of your knowledge. I don’t code. I don’t have a Saas app and I don’t have a startup. I just like the core values and thought processes that you two have. I bought a business in the east bay area because I don’t have any cool ideas of a startup but I know once I get into the corridor it will start to flow. Thanks for being yourselves. Don’t change. Don’t conform. Joseph.
[09:22] So thanks Joseph. It’s really great to hear when people quit their jobs and kind of go down the road of being a bootstrapper.
[09:28] Rob: Yeah. On that note we should add him to the success stories page on the website.
[09:32] Music
[09:35] So today we’re going to be diving into a number of theirs listener voicemails, listener questions, some just listener comments helping other folks out who have written in the past. So we have some good stuff. We’re going to be talking about getting paid before you build a product, dealing with entrepreneurial angst, figuring out how much to charge and a few other things. So let’s kick it off on voicemail to comment on Mike’s recent explanation of Audit Shark.
[09:57] Voicemail from Dave: Hey guys! This is Dave from Ohio calling. Listen. Love the most recent episode. Mike, hats off to you. Hope you are feeling better. It takes a lot of courage to come out and talk about that on the podcast. And certainly hope you’re feeling better. Don’t worry about the Nay Sayers. Screw those guys. Second thing, I really loved the most recent episode because I really have a great idea now of what AuditShark does. I was in that camp of not knowing exactly what it did. It really really helped to understand all that work. And Rob would love to hear the exact same detailed kind of talk about Drip as well. So, listen love the podcast. Guys take care. See ya. Bye-Bye.
[10:30] Rob: Thanks Dave for the voicemail and certainly for the encouragement. I’m glad we did that explanation of AuditShark because I got a couple other comments that said it really enlightened them and gave them a better idea of the problem, the pain point that AuditShark is going after.
[10:43] So Dave asked basically what is Drip and I kind of have it boiled down to just maybe 60 seconds. In essence, so Drip is an email marketing app. It’s the easiest way to capture drive by website visitors and engage with them using an email mini course. So most of us know we should be engaging with prospects via email but it’s time intensive to do that. So Drip’s single purpose, the sole reason that I came up with the idea and then wanted to build this is to fix that time issue with setting up an email mini course and capturing email addresses on your site.
[11:16] So it goes all the way from capturing emails to helping you create a mini course and then to tracking your trial and purchase conversions from the mini course. It’s basically three steps. The first is you install one snippet of java script code into the footer of your website and then you have an email capture form that appears on every page of your site. So you don’t have to modify any code and you can go into the Drip web app and you can modify that headline, moving forward in the description and we’re going to be adding the ability to split test that form against itself. And you can go to hittail.com and you’ll see it in the lower right that’s an example. You can also go to planscope.io and getambassador.com to get an idea of it.
[11:51] So the next step, after you’re capturing emails into Drip is we offer what I think is the fastest way to get an email mini course live. We literally spent weeks building and honing and making it simpler and simpler and I think we have the simplest email sequence or auto responder management flow. So basically creating an auto responder is very simple and I’ve used mailchimp, I’ve used Aweber campaign monitor and I like to say we’ve turned auto responders into a first class citizen instead it being just a bolted on piece like it is with the other providers.
[12:25] So the kicker is so yeah, we’ve given you a tool but now we’ve put something on your to-do list. It’s to put together a five day email course. So for free originally I was going to charge for this but I figured out it’s just to our benefit to do it for free so no charge to people signing up. We will compile a five day email mini course for you if you have some existing content that we can pull from. So if you have five blog posts or an eBook or something we can grab, we have templates that we just put them into. Basically the end goal is to increase your conversions right? Either to trials or buyers, that Drip should pay for itself every month. And so we track those as well.
[13:01] So you can see if someone originally hit your site from say a Google search, searching for particular keyword, then went through your email sequence, clicked on a link and email number five and then converted. That’s another piece of function I haven’t been able to get out of any other – all my analytics tied together, I still can’t see that. And that’s what Drip has given me. It’s given me insight into hittail’s flow.
[13:24] And then yeah, the last point is we do offer split testing within email sequences which is not something that I’ve seen in any other product. So the most common question after I kind of – that’s the pitch right? And the most common question I get is should Drip replace something like mailchimp or does it add on? And it can do both. We have broadcast emails. We have all the basic functionally with something like mailchimp but we also integrate with mailchimp in case you want to – if you’re really invested in mailchimp or Aweber, sales force or something else. We have an integration where we push every Drip subscriber to your either system. Mailchimp’s done and then we’re working on Aweber and sales force and they should be done in the next couple of weeks.
[14:00] Mike: When I got started with Drip, it was very easy to set up an email campaign where if I want to be able to teach somebody and get them on a mailing list, it allows them to do that very quickly and it automatically builds all the codes to put that widget on my site to capture that information. So that’s not something I’ve seen from other email marketing tools that are out there. And then in addition, the sequencing that is in getdrip is I would say superior to a lot of the other things that I’ve seen out there. Not to say there aren’t things that are comparable but it was just very, very easy, very intuitive to get in, get started to do it and I wasn’t even asking for any help.
[14:34] Rob: Nice. So yeah, it’s at getdrip.com it’s just a landing page right now but we are letting people in slowly like I talked about earlier in the episode. Next we have a voicemail that’s about getting paid upfront before building your app and it actually refers back to comments we made a couple episodes ago.
[14:52] Voicemail 2: Hey guys! Love the show. At the end of episode 147 you answered a question about a listener who wanted to know about getting money upfront before a product was built. Your answer did a great job of explaining the options. And your thoughts on the viability of that technique but I would like to see you spin that in a different way. Maybe more in the way that this guy actually asked the question which was what he heard a lot at MicoConf. That means people were really a proponent of that technique. And also if it’s a needed avenue if you need the development money upfront in order to get the product created. And you really feel like it’s the best way to go. What are some of the things to consider as you actually enter into that strategy? Anyway, love the show. Looking forward to the next couple episodes. Have a great day. Bye-Bye.
[15:37] Mike: I think that’s a great question there. From my standpoint, what you’re really trying to do is you’re just trying to validate that people actually are willing to pay for it. When you ask your friends or your peers whether something’s a good idea, nobody wants to hurt your feelings. So they will probably agree with you in many cases when if you were some random person off the street, they may very well disagree with you.
[15:58] And when you’re talking to those types of people that you do have that relationship with, asking them for money is essentially that dividing line. It’s the red line where the rubber meets the road where they’re going to say is this something that I would actually pay for versus something that I just say hey, I think that’s a great idea. And oh yeah, I think you could definitely charge and make money for it.
[16:19] But if they’re not willing to put their money where their mouth is, that’s where it becomes different. I think that’s in many cases the dividing line between when you’re talking to people that you know versus you don’t know as to whether or not it’s a good idea. If you’re talking to just random people and they’re telling you that it’s a good idea and they would pay for it, then you can take them – I’ll say a little bit more face value because they’re not so invested in a friendship relationship with you of any kind that they’re going to say things that will in some ways appease you. And you don’t have that level of investment with people that you’ve just met I’ll say.
[16:50] The second piece of it is whether or not you want to ask for money when you’re trying to fund a product. I think that one’s a little bit harder for me to answer because I’ve never gone down that road. I would have to say that if you absolutely need some level of money to make it work because you need to invest in tools or what have you, I would be doubly sure that what you’re doing is actually going to be received by the market and there are people willing to pay for it and then if you can fund it through your own personal finances.
[17:18] Because really what you’re doing is you’re investing in your own future whether it’s tools or training or infrastructure what have you, those things are an investment of the future and it’s going to be difficult to get to where you want to go if you’re always looking at things as if they were expenses rather than investments.
[17:37] Rob: First comment that Dave made was about a lot of people mentioning about MicroConf, if I recall, only one person mentioned it and then some other people referred back to it. So I don’t take it as something that’s like super popular or that a lot of people are doing. I know Nathan Barry has done it. He’s the only one that I know who’s done this in recent memory and actually had success with it and got I think he had 1,000 in presales or 1,500. It wasn’t a huge amount. It wasn’t enough to fund the development of it for sure.
[18:02] The question that I have about is because I’ve never done this and I don’t plan to do it. I have some reservations about it. I think we mentioned that. But I’m not even sure it’s legal to take money that far in advance when you haven’t even built anything. I know it’s not legal to take money if you don’t have a physical product to send someone. Do you know if it’s even legal to do it if you haven’t built software?
[18:19] Mike: I don’t know if it’s legal but I’ve done it.
[18:21] Rob: Okay. Well, there you go.
[18:24] Mike: I mean it was for my alteria’s training product. I put it out there, had people – they were able to pay for it, they were willing to pay for it and people were actually making payments and then after they made the payment I had to go and refund their money because I didn’t actually had a product. But it was just because I wouldn’t to put that hard line in front of them to say will you cross this line? And if so, what is the bend for that?
[18:43] Rob: Got it. So that’s a good point. You took the money but then you refunded it right away and that’s different than what – Dave’s talking about doing it in order to fund the product so that you would actually be keeping it. I don’t think that’s legal. I’ve never heard anyone do it to fund a company. The other thing is it could get complicated. Let me give you an example. We started building Drip last December and I had emailed folks in like October, November and said here’s the basic idea of it. Would you pay X dollars a month for it and I gave them a specific price and some people said yes, some people said no.
[19:13] The people who said yes I said okay, I understand it has to have value for but I am going to hold you to that. I wanted them to make a commitment. And that’s the key thing you’re trying to get here is an actual commitment for someone to buy it when it does come out. I felt like since I knew these people, some of them anyway, that their commitment was worthwhile. And if I had taken money at that point for the first month or the first six months worth of the service, it would’ve kind of a crazy ride because I expected it to be done in 3 to 4 months, that was the original development cycle and here we are 10 or 11 months later and the product is just about to launch.
[19:45] I mean we do have paying users at this point so I guess early access would’ve gotten it a few months ago but bottom-line is if you take money from someone then you are really on the hook for something very quickly. Like you can’t say alright I’ll be back in a year, give me your first six months of payments. You need to turn something out quickly. So you’d have to have a pretty small product or be pretty sure about your development cycle.
[20:08] Again, I tend to be a little more risk averse than some people. Some people put $20,000 on credit cards and I won’t do that. And this is also an approach. I don’t think there’s as much value in it as some people might think. It might sound great to get this money upfront and be able to pay for it but I have I serious reservations until I see someone pull it off and pull it off well. I also think just doing it on a landing page which is how I’ve seen it done leaves money on the table. I think that you will get more people to buy if you just collect emails and you actually build a product that you have to show to them and then they can decide whether to buy it or not.
[20:37] If you force them to pay five months before the product’s done, you’re going to get less money upfront during your launch. I don’t know if that still answers the question. Thanks Dave for calling in and getting us to discuss it again.
[20:48] Mike: I think the real point is just getting that firm commitment. And when you ask them for money it doesn’t mean that you take the money. It just means that you’re asking them for money. That’s the very subtle difference I think that most people are kind of skipping over in their minds like oh you’re asking for money so you’re taking the money. It’s like no, I’m asking for money and you’re just trying to get that extra level of commitment.
[21:06] Rob: So our next email is actually a comment from MicroConf attendee Tim Kohl. He says hi Mike and Rob. I was catching up on old episodes of your show today and heard your listener Scott Underwood in episode 147. He described how he was contemplating doing a consulting engagement as basically a product development exercise. I actually did the exact same thing last December so thought I’d share my experience.
[21:29] Tim basically goes on to say that he found a company that approached him to make basically a plug-in and it didn’t have the money to pay his full consulting rates so he says so what I did was charge him 25% of my normal hourly rates with the understanding that I’d be building a mini product that I could resell at my leisure. I made sure to bill in my normal way with an invoice at the end of the month listing the full hour rate and then adding a clear 75% discount at the end.
[21:54] This way the client perceived a tremendous value in the work but didn’t have to pay more than they could afford. It had the added bonus of controlling scope while the discounted hourly rate wasn’t huge, it was still large enough to discourage scope creep and motivate the client not to want to add every little custom feature that wouldn’t necessarily make sense to have it when I resold it. The development portion worked beautifully and all told it took only 50 hours to build and I now have a super niche product for which there’s a real need ad no competitors. Mostly everything I developed is easily applicable to other businesses also in his line of work.
[22:28] So that part was a resounding success. But here’s where I messed up. I figured I’d need to resell the solution to 10 people to break even on the 75% hourly rate discount. And if I only count development time then that turns out to be accurate. But I didn’t allow for any time to actually make sales because users in this market are relatively on sophisticated lot. So they’re very hard to find on the internet and it sounds like it’s just much more of a high touch sales process.
[22:51] I spent almost as much time/money in gathering a list of a few hundred phone numbers and having an assistant prequalified leads as I did developing the software itself and now actually making those sales is held up on me finding the time to make those few hundred phone calls. Anyway if you’d like to forward my contact info to Scott feel free. I’d be happy to talk to him if he hasn’t already pulled the trigger. All the best.
[23:11] Rob: So thanks very much Tim for writing and definitely enlightening. I like the way Tim handled that. I also think a difference is Tim’s product only took he said about 50 hours of development where Scott’s if I recall it’s a Saas app and I imagined it’s several hundred hours worth. Our next email is from a listener in southern Indiana and he’s emailing us about dealing with the angst of being an entrepreneur with a good full time gig and he’s wondering how to get out of the 9 to 5 mindset and frankly whether he should.
[23:40] So he says hi Mike and Rob. I’m 33 years old, married, one kid and a nice house with a big mortgage and a full time gig as a systems consultant. The pay is very good for the area in which I live. I like everyone I work with and everything’s going well. There’s nothing to complain about other than it being mundane sometimes. I always say it’s the best job I could have if I liked working for someone else but I’m not happy. What’s wrong whit me here? I have a deep seeded desire to quit worrying about the mundane details that go on in my job and do something more important with my life.
[24:07] I’ve listened to your podcast and consumed a slew of other resources during this time about moonlighting, working for yourself etcetera but I’ve never made a mental commitment to actually seriously think about quitting my job. It’s comfortable, routine, easy and I have little responsibilities like on call schedules. I also have no real support from my wife, family or friends. My entire social circle is made up of 9 to 5ers that either think I’m “interesting” for running my side business or think I’m selfish and should spend more time with my family.
[24:33] I realize I should go out and meet others like me. They do exist in my community but it’s hard for me. I’m a major introvert and I really hate the schmooze sessions. I’d much rather be coding. It’s also hard because they’re outside of my typical social circle. Frankly I have no idea where I go this bug from. I know no one close by that has any desire to do anything else with their lives. I could go on forever but I’ll spare you. I appreciate any advice or assurance you can give me. I just hope I can get my mindset changed and actually take you up on it.
[25:00] Mike: Well there’s a lot there. Where to start? I think that if you look around the country there are probably tons of other places that would provide you with the same experience where there’s not many people who are in your social circle who are interested in doing those kinds of things. I think that unless you live in or around a major city then chances are really good that you’re not going to have friends who are also trying to build a software based interest business. So that’s the first thing. Definitely don’t feel like you’re alone in that regard.
[25:33] The second thing is that you have to really decide whether or not it’s something that you want to do or if it’s just something that you’re interested in. I’ve heard a lot of people who basically looked at different things that they were interested in doing in their life and decided hey, do I want to build a business around this? If you’re interested in let’s say golf, do you want to go out and become a professional golfer? That may or may not be realistic depending on your skill set but the same time, once you decide to do that full time, it becomes a job.
[26:01] So is that what you want to do to yourself? Is that the position you want to put yourself in terms of billing a product? It sounds to me almost like you might be in a better position if you have a co-founder who can do a lot of the customer development side of things and push on that side that you’re not necessarily comfortable with or that you don’t want to do because you’re going to find that when you own your own business, there’s a lot of things that need to be done and if you don’t do them, you’re going to have to find somebody else to do them or they don’t get done.
[26:30] So those are just some of the challenges that you’re going to probably run into going down this road. But I definitely feel like this is a mindset thing that a lot of people have. It’s very difficult to give up a 9 to 5 job that’s very steady, very stable and pays very well. I think if you don’t have the support of your friends and family, I mean your friends are one thing because they may not necessarily understand what it is that you’re trying to do but definitely if you don’t have the support of your family, is very, very hard to try and do anything substantial or make it into anything more than a hobby.
[27:00] Rob: I think the first question that you should ask yourself is how unhappy are you at your job? It sounds like you like your job but there’s some restlessness going on. But how burning is that restlessness? Is it just killing you? Because the people that I know who have left their jobs and made this work, they had to do it. Like in all caps, THEY HAD TO DO IT. It wasn’t a matter of I’m comfortable, I might want to do something – wouldn’t that be fun to do it? Because you’re just not going to make it. You’re not going to make it through the long nights, the weekends, the comments from friends and family, all that kind of stuff.
[27:33] If you have to do this you absolutely – you view it as kind of a lifelong regret if you don’t do this, if in 30 years you look back and said you know what, I had a good life as a consultant and you imagined that that’s going to make you happy then do that. But if it’s a burning desire, and it’s something that you absolutely cannot live your life without doing, then take this more seriously.
[27:52] Second question I would ask is really try to get down to the nuts and bolts of like why do you want to leave your job? Where does that come from? I think like Mike said, is it just an interest or is that something like a burning desire? Is it a hobby? Because I was into startups in the 90’s when I was in college and it was just this fun kind of diversion. It’s something like I don’t know, watching reality TV or reading a romance novel on the plane. It’s just kind of a fun entertainment thing and is that what it’s like for you or do you feel again this burning desire to kind of have a legacy that’s different than the path you’re traveling now.
[28:25] I know it’s complex. It’s not something that we can answer in a single podcast episode here but I hope that helps and definitely thanks for looping us in on your decision. I imagined that a lot of other listeners might feel this way as well. Alright, our next question is about how much this person can charge for their twitter digest service.
[28:43] This is from Andrew Bonnello and he says hi Rob and Mike. I wrote TweetQureet to scratch my own itch and we’ll link that up in the show notes because the name is hard to spell. He said my own itch is too many interesting people to follow, no time to monitor my timeline for top stories. Lists are manual and need maintenance. Tweet recommenders I’ve seen send to use social signals like retweets rather than subject and theme. Can daily tweet filtering based on the user’s own interest be automated?
[29:08] Once the user signs up, they get a daily email digest of up to 10 top tweets. If there are more they can explore a timeline page with the full list. I’ve completed the initial bare release and I’m looking to grow rather than branch the product in new directions. For enterprise customers I want to figure out how much can I charge individuals who get value out of the service. I’m not looking for exponential growth in user numbers or a high profile buy out. I just want a solid engaged user base and a recurring monthly revenue stream of three or four figures. Do you have any suggestions?
[29:36] And a little bit of background, he says I’m a software developer formerly at Google and DreamWorks animation. I quit full time work about three years ago to try and use my software skills to build a sustainable online business for myself.
[29:46] Mike: It sounds like this is geared more at the consumer market than at the business market. Twitter already sends out emails on a daily basis to say hey here are top tweets from people you follow or people you might be interested in hearing from. But it sounds like this is positioned a little bit different where they’re essentially data mining the people you follow to find out what stories are trending within that list of followers that you might be interested in hearing from or hearing more about.
[30:15] Obviously if you’re following a lot of people then there’s tons of tweets that fly by on a daily basis that you never see. So this is essentially a service that will help you filter those down a little bit. It’s hard for me to just generalize and say this is how much you could charge for but because it’s a consumer based product or at least that’s kind of the way that I see it, it seems like you probably could not charge very much.
[30:37] I think that probably $10, $15, $20 is probably the top range. I hate saying you should charge $5 or $6 for it because you start getting down to the point where one support call just blows your entire profit for the entire customer. I think that the $10 to $20 range is probably something you could pull off but again I look at something like this and I would probably not use it. I don’t know if I’m the best person to be asking for pricing advice on that.
[31:03] Rob: I think that’s the key is asking us, you can get our opinion but I probably wouldn’t use this either so I think you really need to find people who are willing to pay you for it. They’re the only people who can tell you what they’d be willing to pay because they get some kind of value out of it. If you’re trying to bootstrap and app like this, you need to find revenue. And in order to do that you have to provide value. So who do you provide value for?
[31:27] I can imagine this as a funded IOS app that’s given away for free when someone raises a million bucks, builds it and then tries to sell it to a twitter or raven tools or Google or someone. So I just don’t even know there’s a revenue model here until you have someone paying you money, I don’t know that I think that there actually is a group that’s willing to pay you unless you do go up into the B to B space. Right?
[31:51] You try to make this – I think we talked a little bit about on twitter but try to make it a brand monitoring or some kind of system that actually helps a company save some time, makes them money, saves the money that’s sold on value. Without that, I just don’t know. Without really knowing who desperately needs this, if it’s just all consumers can use it, then it’s not going to fly.
[32:12] Mike: Yeah. I think the biggest problem that I see with this is that essentially you’re showing people tweets that presumably they’re probably already getting in some way, shape or form and you’re aggregating them in some special way that allows them to see things that are most interesting to them which is very subjective to begin with. So essentially what they’re paying you for is a level of trust that you are searching through the tweets that they’re already supposed to be getting and presenting them with ones that you feel would be interesting.
[32:39] And because those things are already available to them, then you’re somehow saving them time of searching through these. But you’re bridging that gap between how much time are they spending on it versus how much effort does it take to find those. I think that in the consumer space people value their time a lot less than in the business space.
[32:58] Rob: Our next email is from Doug Martin. It’s on the value of consistency. He says I’ve been a long time listener. As I hit refresh on iTunes this morning I had to smile as I saw you guys have put up yet another episode. My podcast list is cluttered with shows that’s repeated out over the years. It is good to know I can count on you guys for great content regularly. Keep up the good work.
[33:18] I just wanted to read that not so much that it’s a compliment to us but it’s more of a testament to like putting something out every week. Remember that it’s easy to be great. It’s hard to be consistent. A lot of people come out and they put out a flurry of 7 or 9 episodes and then poof, they’re gone. And unless you have some kind of idea in mind, some kind of vision, some kind of revenue model, like you have to have things in place, just coming out and putting out a podcast for a week is a nontrivial thing. So definitely appreciate it when folks take notice. I think that’s the reason that we have been able to build an audience over these years is just showing up every week, every Tuesday morning right? Right in their iTunes feed.
[33:52] And our last email of the day is from David Lepont and he says hi guys, I have a comment about your episode where you talk about AB testing. He says I have a reaction to the part about calling customers which as he said is supposed to raise conversion rates. So he’s talking about if you asked for credit cards upfront, then you get a good conversion rate, but if don’t ask then you’re supposed to call customers. That’s kind of the rule of thumb. It’s what I see working with Saas apps who don’t ask for credit cards.
[34:17] He says personally I hate being called by a software company and I find that really aggressive and it would very likely have the opposite effect on me. Many people of my age in their mid 20’s really hate to speak on the phone and feel like every interaction originates from the web or the software world should continue as a communication method on the computer or on the internet. Emails with incentives are really more appealing to me. I don’t know your thoughts on that but that’s my opinion.
[34:39] Mike: David thanks for the reply in that. I do want to point out that just because that’s the way you feel doesn’t mean that that’s the way other people feel. There are definitely people that feel the way that you do and it would probably push them away. But when you’re looking at the numbers and analyzing them kind of independently of feelings, if you’re looking at those numbers, if you’re getting a 20% to 30% measurable increase in the performance of your sales campaigns by reaching out and calling people or if the average dollar amount of a particular sale is going up by calling people then it’s very difficult to argue. Well we shouldn’t do that because there are few people that we’re going to make angry or they don’t like it.
[35:19] Because at the end of the day, you’re in business to stay in business. You’ve got to make money in order to stay in business. And if you’re not making those sales calls and you have to let people go because you didn’t do it because it would make you feel bad to call people when the other side of the coin is you have to let people go then chances are good you should be making those calls. This just kind of continued upon you actually offering a product that has value and the fact of the matter is that you’re running a business and the number one goal of the business is to stay in business.
[35:47] Rob: Yeah. I think a couple of things. One is remember that you’re not your customer. So what you prefer isn’t necessarily what everyone prefers. In aggregate, numbers don’t like. So like Mike said, if it raises your conversion rate overall, that’s something to really keep in account of. I hate phone calls myself. I don’t answer my phone during the day at all. But I have noticed that when software companies have called me and at first, it does kind of put me off but it does remind me that I signed up for their trial and some of them have converted me not by talking to me on the phone but it reminds me to go back in and yeah, that’s right. I have to cancel that or I want to take another look at it. And frankly it’s probably worked more times than it hasn’t.
[36:27] So there’s kind of this fallacy. Developers fall into this a lot. It’s where they say well, I hate signing up for email lists and getting all the spam. So email doesn’t work so I’m not going to have an email signup form and yet we know that email is one of the best, if not the best marketing approaches out there today. And so don’t fall into the trap of thinking because you don’t like something that it doesn’t work.
[36:39] Mike: Yeah. There’s a lot of things that coming from the world of developers and then kind of moving over and doing marketing and sales, there are lots of things that as developers they always irritated the crap out of me and then in going over and seeing the other side of the world is not like everybody’s a developer. There are tons and tons of people who are not developers who don’t fall into that mindset. And you kind of have to keep an open mind when you’re looking at those things.
[37:13] Music
[37:17] If you have a question for us you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 150 | Ten Ideas for Things You Can A/B Test
Show Notes
- Follow @AuditShark
- Andy Brice – Successful Software
- Neil Patel – QuickSprout
- 7 Simple A/B Tests that can increase conversions by 10% or more
- Unbounce.com
- KISSmetrics
- Hub Spot
- ChatterLime
- CrazyEgg
- Inspectlet
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 150.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:20] Mike: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:25] Rob: Well a day or reckoning is here for Drip. Remember the prelaunch email I sent out to 300 something folks a few weeks ago?
[00:31] Mike: Yeah.
[00:32] Rob: Well, we got a bunch of them into trials. They got on boarded and late tonight, sometime after midnight a bunch of them are either going to convert or not convert to paying customers. It’s been exactly three weeks and we have a 21 day trial. So rest assured you can imagine me this evening sitting with very large glass of bourbon and waiting for the news and watching for the billing email to come in. Either way, it’s either going to be a great news and I’m going to celebrate or it’s going to be very bad news and I’m going to drown my sorrows in that glass.
[01:03] Mike: I see. I mean do you have it setup so that people can cancel before it gets to that point? Are they notified or…
[01:08] Rob: Absolutely. Yes. So three days before typically with like a 21 or a 30 day trial, emailing goes out three days prior and it says look, you’re going to be billed or if we don’t have their credit card on file because there’s a few folks that got a no credit card trial early on then we ask them hey, if you want to continue you need to enter your credit card. So everybody gets notification. That’s the idea.
[01:29] And as always, with all of my apps, if they do get billed tonight and they come in tomorrow and they’re like I meant to cancel, we refund them and we cancel their accounts. So it’s not about tricking people into doing it. It’s about letting them know and keeping them happy as customers.
[01:44] Mike: Right. But do you have any sense of how well it’s going?
[01:47] Rob: I do. I’m the cautious optimist. I am excited about it. I’m very pleased with the numbers that I have but I hate talking about things in public like that because if they don’t turn out I feel like I made a big mistake or I misjudge things and then be able in retrospect to talk about it in and the lessons I’ve learned.
[02:04] Mike: Cool.
[02:06] Rob: How about you? What’s the update with Audit Shark? After last week’s episode we’ve already gotten several comments and a couple emails. So I’m interested to hear what’s new?
[02:13] Mike: Well I’m labeling the new UI overhaul of Audit Shark as code complete enough. Essentially that means things are well enough that I can basically push it over the top of the existing version. I haven’t had time to do that. I just haven’t had time to try and push that out to the cloud yet. But there’s remediation steps are being added in to the database and should be done in the next week or two. I talked to the policy developer about that. There’s a few things that need to go into the dashboard but those can be added in over time so I’m not real worried about that.
[02:43] And then there’s other little things here and there like in app walk through, some documentation need to be added. But I think those are minor enough that I can push it out over the top of the existing version and just kind of be done with it and call it code complete enough.
[02:57] Rob: Cool. I re-listened to last week’s episode after the editing and there are a couple of things that I think I’d ask that wound up on the cutting room floor so I wanted to bring them up. One was regarding remediation and you know that customers want that but from what I’ve seen, you haven’t asked the customers who’ve used it if they will pay you at that point if it’s worth it or if – I talked about this is your biggest risk right now. Right? Is not knowing if they’ll pay you.
[03:21] So I guess in the back of my mind it’s like that being your biggest risk, it seems like if you asked them before you implement it then at least you have an idea of whether or not you’re going to be able to charge them for it once remediation is in. Have you thought about that?
[03:33] Mike: I didn’t because I looked at it from a perspective of some of the early feedback I got was okay I’ve done this stuff, now what do I do? It’s like if you used the application and you get to the point where it gives you the results and you just don’t know what to do then that’s a failure on my part. It essentially means that I need to present the information about how to go about fixing that stuff.
[03:55] And when somebody sent me a screencast it actually had some of that information in there. And they just said I’m trying to match these up between what the rules are and what the results are and it’s hard to do and it doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do to fix this. I don’t quite understand. I knew that was kind of a gap but I wasn’t sure if I’d b able to get away with it. But it seems pretty clear just from the – you know how you can hear things in a screencast or a video that are a little bit – you get the intonations and things like that you definitely don’t…
[04:22] Rob: Nuance.
[04:23] Mike: Yes. The subtle nuances about how somebody says something and it gives you the impression that’s really, really important. So I have not out right asked but my impression was yes, this is extremely important. It’s got to be there.
[04:38] Rob: Right. And I don’t doubt that, that remediation is something you have to have in advice, at least information on how people can fix their stuff. The thing that I’m wondering is is it that enough? Is that the point at which Audit Shark provides enough value that someone will pay you? Or in say two weeks to get remediation done, is it okay? Here’s my early access people. Now we have remediation. Now are you willing to pay for it? And they’re like well, not really because you still have to build out these other few things. And that’s where the launches just go on and on and on or you kind of never get to launch.
[05:07] So that’s what I’m curious about. I’d love to see you do either some emails or just some interviews, quick Skype calls with some of your early access people and ask them if Audit Shark had this in it, is that the point at which you’re willing to pay my price for it?
[05:22] Mike: That’s a great question. I definitely have to do that. That’s kind of next up on the docket. I mean I have to start reaching out to them and finding out more of that information. One of the things that has come up, a lot of the stuff in the news lately about the NSA spying on people and gathering information from them and there’s questions about sending data from their servers back to mine which are stored on Microsoft’s azure platform. So it’s like well if the NSA has access to those then do they have access to my data and it’s just kind of an open ended question that in some ways has to be addressed in a technical level but it also has to be addressed in a marketing level too.
[05:56] But it did give me an idea about if I can address it at the technical level, would that be a leverage point that I could use to get into additional customers. Hey do you want to make sure all of your stuff is protected from the eyes of the NSA? Not that it’s a guarantee but I can certainly help lock down those machines so that people can’t get in inadvertently…
[06:17] Rob: Very good.
[06:18] Mike: But I totally get where you’re coming from where like there’s certain questions that I have to start asking and that’s definitely one of them.
[06:23] Rob: So in other news, I’ve started doing a little bit of angel investing. It’s interesting. I looked back about 8 months at some goals that I have for 2013 and I really wanted to get more involved with just a handful of startups. I’m only going to do maybe four or five a year and they’re very small amounts like $5,000 to $10,000 certainly until I get the hang of it. But I don’t know, I just find it intriguing to be kind of part of other startups that I’m not running and to have some kind of stake in them even if it’s a small one, I really enjoyed being part of the WP engine investors just hearing the news and watching the growth.
[07:01] It’s that interesting thing of taking those steps up the ladder where you’re an employee and you’re self employed then you’re a business owner and then you’re an investor. Those are kind of – I think of Robert Kiyosaki. He did lay that out. And I liked that idea. So to me I see investing and being able to make money from that is really kind of a high tier of doing things. And I have some cash sitting around from all of my businesses and since I’m not acquiring my next one I feel like it’s just not working for me. Right? It’s not actually doing work. It’s not earning anything sitting in a bank account.
[07:35] So I’ve invested in one here locally that’s pretty cool, kind of a little tech hub software cluster thing that’s going on. And then I think about 3 or 4 others in the last couple of months.
[07:43] Mike: That’s really cool. Yeah, you have to let us know how that goes. I mean I understand there’s only so much that you can say about them or how it’s structured and everything but it’d be interesting to see how that progression goes because I totally get the idea of being a full time employee and moving up to starting your own company and building your own stuff and going on to invest in other peoples.
[08:02] Rob: You know I’m a bootstrap founder right? I certainly believe in raising funding and I think there are cases when funding is a good thing. I think at some point I’ll probably – once I get the hang of it and have any type of insight into it, I’ll probably talk about it on the podcast. But at this point I’m just such a newbie at it and it’s not even worth really hearing my thoughts yet.
[08:21] Mike: The only other things I have going on as I talked about before I was doing some paid advertising campaigns through Facebook and they still need some refinement. Last week I was getting a lot of noise because some of the links that I had pushed out there to some of the landing pages I wasn’t using the right query strings so now at this point I’m starting to get good data but one of the other things that I’ve tweaked was the twitter strategy that I’m using.
[08:45] In just the past week, the twitter followers for the Audit Shark account have kind of stalled out about 180 followers or so. And over the past week I’ve added another 75 followers. The traffic is – I can see it in the analytics its actually translated back into website visits for Audit Shark and a landing page sign ups and that’s nice to see.
[09:04] Rob: That is nice. Instinctively man, I would totally not do twitter at this point. I think it’s too early. Just the value of email, I would say it’s ten times more valuable but I really believe that and I know you’re saying it generated some people on your email list but I think prelaunch, I have a Drip twitter account but at this point it’s really just to kind of gather some followers. We’re not pushing anything out because I just don’t know the real value that’s going to get you at this point right? So early. Unless we’re going to do content marketing or you’re going to be really pushing a lot of stuff out which then gets really time consuming. I think focusing on building that email list is the way to go.
[09:40] Mike: Well the thing is dripping out that content on the Audit Shark twitter account is outsourced at this point. I don’t actually do it. I’m having somebody else do that. The other thing that I found is of the links that go back, about 30% of them are converted into emails.
[09:52] Rob: That is nice. That might be worth a thing. Yeah.
[09:57] Mike: So yeah. I mean it is worth it but there’s a question like how many twitter followers do I actually have and how many am I reaching? Right now that number is really small so that 30% I don’t put a lot of stock in it just because the sample size I think is too small. But it may turn out that if I’m able to amp this up over time, if I am able to kind of get a sustained following week in week out and scale this up then that could be a viable strategy moving forward and it could conceivably help take it to the next level.
[10:29] But because some of that stuff is kind of automated right now, I’m not too worried about spending my time on it. I obviously got a lot of other things to do but I’m just looking at the numbers themselves and making sure that I’m capturing all the information I need to make sure I understand whether it’s worth it or not.
[10:44] Rob: Right. And by automated you mean you have someone doing it. It’s not a bot.
[10:47] Mike: Yes.
[10:48] Rob: Right. Cool. Last point of discussion before we dive into kind of the main feature point of this episode, MicroConf Europe speaker Andy Brice, you might know him from successfulsoftware.net long time blogger he’s a solo founder and he has Perfect Table Plan which is his desktop software that helps people plan their seating charts at weddings. And he’s made a full time living off this for years, offers a lot of good insight on his blog successfulsoftware.net.
[11:15] He is hosting a two day training in Witlshire England in late November. I’m only getting up in the show notes. He has tested a ton of marketing approaches over the years. He has kind of that B to C desktop product. So if you’re anywhere within driving distance of Wiltshire, England, I would definitely consider taking him up on that offer.
[11:34] Music
[11:36] Mike: Today we’re going to be talking about 10 ideas for things that you can AB test in your business. I’m in the midst of working on a bunch of different landing pages for Audit Shark. In doing some of the landing page research, I started coming across a lot of AB testing sites which offer ideas on things that you can test that were not necessarily specific to landing pages.
[11:56] So in episode 148 we talked to Clay Collins specifically about some of the different marketing trends. We talked a little bit about the types of things that do and don’t work but I also wanted to discuss some of the specific tactics that I’ve come across. Not all of them are related to landing page design but some are just simply AB testing you can use to test out your marketing funnel or to use on your pricing page and things like that.
[12:18] I thought it would be a good idea to talk about some of these different things that you can try, not that anyone who’s listening to this is going to try all 10 of them but they’re just interesting ideas that may work in your business or they may not even be applicable but I thought it’d be interesting to just kind of highlight some of the different things you could use.
[12:35] Rob: Right. So these are 10 things aside from headlines right? Because the headlines are the first thing that you should start with. That’s going to tend to be set the messaging up and everything so that’s kind of like number 0 and then starting with number 1, what do we have?
[12:49] Mike: So the first one would be to test whether or not a free trial button is going to work out and we’ll link this up from the show notes because several of these come from a blog article from Neil Patel. But one of the things he highlighted was that if you have a free trial button there, try taking it out or adding one in and letting people know that there is a free trial and seeing if those people go through your funnel and covert. I think the example that he had shown, there was something like 160% increase in signups by adding in a free trial button.
[13:18] Rob: And is that oppose to like a download now button if you’re trying to get say get someone just to get their email and to download something or versus a buy now button?
[13:28] Mike: It was versus a buy now button in that particular case.
[13:31] Rob: And I’m curious about all these. Right? I mean I’ve seen people send – let’s take paid acquisition or SEO traffic. I’ve seen them send it to a landing page and just asked for the email with a download now button offering some type of template or report or something like that. And then track those conversions over time versus just having that try now versus having the buy now.
[13:54] The interesting thing is that depending on the niche, depending on how good your messaging is, there no rule of thumb that I know of the best way to do that. Right? It really depends on you price point, how well you pre-sold someone with an ad, how well your landing page copy is. I think those are maybe some variations that you can think about not just the button itself but actually the whole kind of message of the landing page.
[14:16] Mike: Yeah. That’s exactly right. And again you have to think about this list that we’ve got here are things that you can try that some may make sense for your business, some may not. In terms of the question that you pointed out, is it a free trial versus a buy now or download now or sign up for an email list. The specific example that we’ll link to as I said was a buy now, but take that into consideration about what it is that you’re exactly trying to get people to do.
[14:39] So obviously you’re not going to have a free trial for an email, when you’re trying to capture an email. Free trial versus buy now and even the text on that free trial you may have some other text other than a free trial, 30 day trial or something along those lines. You can try different things.
[14:53] So the next one we have is asking for credit cards upfront versus later on. I think my inclination is to believe that if you’re collecting the credit cards upfront it’s going to essentially disqualify or weed out the people who are not interested in your product or they’re just kind of kicking the tires a little bit. They see that there’s a free trial to sign up for it but they may or may not necessarily be engaged with the product.
[15:14] And depending on how you kind of walk them through the sign up process and on boarding process, it’s going to have a lot of influence over whether or not they ultimately become a customer of yours. That said, I think collecting those credit cards reduce this friction later on and it’s not to say that having friction upfront is a bad thing or having it later on is a bad thing. It depends a lot as you said on your product. But this is certainly something that you can try. My inclination is to believe that capturing them upfront is probably better but it’s something you should definitely test in your business to figure out whether or not it does make a difference and how much of a difference it does make.
[15:49] Rob: I know companies who make both of these approaches work. I’ve said on the podcast before many times that I always default to asking for credit card upfront but the companies who make not asking for credit card upfront do some very specific things. They’re very experienced. Just reminds me a little bit of having a free plan in the sense that free plans can work in certain circumstances if you’re an expert. I feel like credit cards are the same thing.
[16:13] If you punt and you say I’m not going to ask for credit cards then you have to do some specific things during the trial. Most of the companies I know who are making it work are actually getting telephone number instead of credit card and they are having people call them. So if you’re not going to do that or you’re not going to have a well crafted trial email sequence that provides a lot of value that gets people on boarded and then that encourages them heavily towards the end to enter their credit card then you have failed. I don’t know anyone who is not doing that who is making the no credit card approach work.
[16:44] So credit card eliminate tire kickers. They bring in more qualified leads. They bring in people who when they request a feature from you, you can say well at least this person was into this, the value prop of my app enough that I can listen to them. Let’s say you run an experiment and you didn’t ask for credit card and you get 100 people in your free trial. Then you run the same experiment a month later and you get 20 people. So it’s 20%.
[17:09] Who are you going to listen to when people ask for features? You should listen to the people that are more qualified as a rule. And so especially in the early days of your app when you really are not sure what your value prop is, keep trying to figure out what to build. You want more qualified people because those are going to be the people that are more likely to pay you and the people that are more likely to get value out of your app long term.
[17:28] Early on, you don’t need more feedback. Trust me. I’m going through this right now. I have a feature list a mile long and my biggest task these days is weeding that down to which one should we build for the very specific audience that we serve and it’s going to get value from my app. So that’s where especially early on I think asking for credit cards is critical and then testing later on is definitely worthwhile but only once you know what you’re doing and you’re able to handle it with some expertise.
[17:55] Mike: I think the important piece that I heard out of that was the part where if you’re not asking for a credit card, you have to ask for other information. I was at a business software conference a couple years ago where there’s a company and I won’t say their name but they had a software that you could download and you had a trial. As part of that, they would ask you to fill out this information and then you’d get your free trial.
[18:18] Part of that, they would ask you for your contact information and they would actually have developers call and talk to the prospective customers and find out what they liked about the software, what they didn’t, whether they were going to purchase it or not. And they find out that by making those calls, their conversion rate increased something like 60%. It was ridiculous. And their average price point for those purchases was something like 40% more than if somebody had just simply purchased off the website.
[18:45] Rob: Right. So if you have the expertise and the man power to do that, if you think of some of the big venture funded startups like at Kiss Metrics, they don’t ask for credit card upfront but let’s be honest, they have a lot of money. They have a lot of people and they have a lot of folks making phone calls. They’re really kind of working it exactly the right way. And yeah, take another example like Hub Spot. It doesn’t look like they ask for credit card before free trial but go to their free trial page. They ask for first name, last name, email, phone, company name, website URL, number of employees on and there’s like four more questions literally and they’re all required.
[19:17] So yeah you’re right. They’re not asking for credit card but they’re asking for that all information. They are pre-qualifying people because they don’t want to waste their time chasing after tire kickers.
[19:25] Mike: And I’d be willing to bet that they have probably AB tested the heck out of that page just because I know how Dharmesh is in giving his predilection for going after stats and statistics and measuring everything.
[19:37] Rob: Absolutely.
[19:38] Mike: So the third idea for something that you can AB test is to try using trust symbols such as hacker skin and icons or SSL certificate icons, maybe even an extended validation certificate so you get the little green bar in the website browser. And I think these are more applicable on a landing page or where your – to actually taking order information, you’re trying to get them to follow through with an action and you’re trying to inspire confidence and trust.
[20:03] Sometimes you can do that with text but obviously there’s all these different trust icons that you can use from different vendors that will help inspire trust and confidence in your company and in your website.
[20:13] Rob: This is something I’ve never tested. I have added trust symbols to my pages but I’ve never tested conversion rates with trust symbols and without – I heard they work and improve and all this trusted app but I’d be interested if someone has data. I was having dinner with one of the founders of Foxy Cart who sponsored MicroConf last year. They have hosted shopping carts software.
[20:35] And one of the things he said was payment preferences like offering PayPal versus Amazon versus just entering your credit card number and the major differences that they see and one of the things he said was having a buy with Amazon button when someone’s purchasing a product on an e-commerce definitely raises conversions. So I think that’s another thing that you should consider is offering – it’s that easy low friction ability to pay by clicking that one button since you already have your credit card on file with Amazon.
[21:01] Mike: So the fourth idea is to use a live chat widget. This is actually something that I’m testing right now. I’m working with a company called Chatter Lime and essentially what they have is they have a live chat widget and I haven’t integrated into the site yet but the time this episodes goes live, it will be out there.
[21:18] But essentially the idea behind having a chat widget is if somebody has questions about your product, they come to your website, they’re not really quite sure what to do nobody’s going to go to the FAQ page and actually read it. But if there’s a help widget there that either pops up dynamically and asks if they have questions or if it’s just off to the side that they can interact with if they decide that they want to, then they can go ahead and do it.
[21:42] And the difference with something like Chatter Lime is that they actually have people who are manning that behind the scene so I don’t have to do it essentially off loading the capabilities to them and essentially providing them with script. But they can provide me with transcripts to let me know what the conversation was like, what sorts of questions were asked and then essentially enhance whatever the database of answers is that they’re going off of.
[22:05] I feel like this is a huge win in terms of being able to interact with your customers not just for me in Audit Shark but I think in general, most people would find that to be very, very helpful. Obviously I’m going to test it. They’ve see 30% increase in conversion rates in some cases but it seems like it’s definitely worth testing.
[22:23] Rob: I agree. An interesting part is there are a lot of these widgets coming out that you can stick in your site. We were talking before we started recording that you could have a Drip widget in the main area of your site and then once you get into kind of a checkout flow you could add the chat widget. So right when people are at the decision point they have questions about your pricing or your registration page, that’s when you can add a chat window and bravo to Chatter Lime because they’re following this trend that I brought up a couple episodes ago about the DFY versus DYI. It’s like done for you versus do it yourself.
[22:54] And it’s going up market. It’s basically charging more but then they don’t just provide a widget like a bunch of other places do. They’re actually adding that concierge element. So as a founder of Audit Shark, you’re willing to pay them more so that you don’t have to man it yourself or have one of your people doing it. So I definitely think we’re going to be seeing more and more of that kind of business market where you’re going up market and doing the software and service as a single offering.
[23:19] Mike: So number five is to evaluate the number of form fields. As you mentioned before with Hub Spot on the free trial sign up, they’re actually asking for a lot more information and the general rule of thumb is to ask for less. I think that with Hub Spot, what they’re doing is they’re asking for a lot more and in some cases especially if you’re selling any sort of products that deals with sensitive information, it almost seems like asking for more information is going to inspire more trust from the person who’s making the purchase because they’re essentially giving more information.
[23:50] Their vendor is prequalifying you. Maybe they’re looking into seeing who they’re actually working with. They’re doing a little bit more to protect the information. And whether that’s true or not is kind of immaterial. The ideas that if you’re giving them more information, then chances are you’re checking it out. And I’ll give you a very specific example of that. How would you feel about going and buying let’s say an eBook where all they’re asking for is your credit card number and the expiration date?
[24:16] Rob: Well maybe I’d want them to get my email so they can send me the book.
[24:19] Mike: Right. But if they’re not asking for like the CCID number or your name or address or zip code or any of that stuff, wouldn’t that strike you as a little bit odd?
[24:30] Rob: It wouldn’t to me but only because I know that all you need is a credit and an expiration to charge most cards and then you need CVV maybe as some added validation. So I don’t actually ask for address often times like if you go to the HitTail registration from, I don’t ask for address. I don’t think we ask for zip because stripe indicated at a zip is not – if I’m not doing AVS it’s not needed to do just the basic charging and it’s not going to help me get more charges through.
[24:54] Mike: I can definitely see that from programmer’s perspective but I think that from the average user’s perspective they don’t necessarily know all that stuff.
[25:01] Rob: Right. And I’m the man behind the curtain in that scenario.
[25:03] Mike: Right. And that’s kind of my point. But until you actually try this you don’t necessarily know. I think it depends a lot on your product and the type of service that you’re offering and price point and all that other stuff. But again it’s something else that you can test.
[25:15] One thing that I found interesting and this is number six that I came across was adding a sign up form directly to your home page. Have you seen people do that before? Instead of having a call to action where they click through and go to a pricing page or something like that, they actually have their sign up for embedded right into the home page.
[25:33] Rob: I have seen that. You can see an example at outright.com which is an accounting package. If you go to basecamp.com at least the version I’m seeing, I know they split test quite a bit. That one has start your free trial form right on the home page.
[25:46] Mike: Yeah. That’s not something I actually thought about a lot but I did come across something that people are testing to find out whether or not that works and converts or not.
[25:55] Rob: I think it’s an interesting question. I would tend to not do that. I think it’s worth testing but to me I want to optimize the site for first time visitors or for maybe returning visitors who are thinking about potentially signing up. So for first time visitors it’s very unlikely they’re going to land at that page and know that they want to sign up. You have to give them some information about what you are, what your pricing is, what the app does, what the benefits are.
[26:20] I’m not necessarily convinced that having that form right in front is really going to be that useful now. If Basecamp is testing and it’s worked for them and maybe they have kind of a different market or if they’re sending certain types of traffic to it, I think this comes back to something Clay Collins said a couple episodes ago where he talked about the two step opt in process and he talked about like a giving page versus a taking page.
[26:42] And if you arrive at a page and it’s instantly asking you for information, it may put some people off. So actually not having the form there but having that sign up for free trial then you’ve made them click a button to get to that next page in order to – they actually initiated some type of action in order to do it.
[26:58] Mike: I almost feel like there might be other stuff that’s probably lower hanging fruit that you could probably go after and push this off to later.
[27:04] Rob: Yup.
[27:05] Mike: So number seven is to test your testimonials with or without photos and names and websites and company names. This one struck me as a little bit odd. I wouldn’t have thought to start removing some of those things. I would’ve thought that the most compelling types of testimonials would be ones that have pretty much everything. It’s got the name. I think put in a face and a name and a company or a title or something along those lines, giving prospective buyers the confidence that other real people are actually using your product would be the way to go.
[27:36] Rob: I would agree. In my experience, video and photos with testimonials have increased conversions. Adding all the other stuff, adding a bunch of text, name, website, company name, all that stuff, maybe. I mean if people will recognize the company name that it has a meaning but really just having kind of a first name in a website URL or giving them an indicator that they’re legit is one thing but then adding a bunch of text to, I don’t know how much that helps. I think you’re going to have much more impact when dealing with a visual element. Like having that nice headshot there versus not having one or even having a very short small video testimonial.
[28:13] Mike: Number eight is to leverage different types of directional cues and directional cues can be anything from giant arrows that you’ve actually put on the screen or people looking or pointing on different stuff on the page. You can find these in a variety of different places. And I’ve actually done this on the Altiris training website where’s there’s a picture in the lower right corner of somebody who’s actually looking at the view pricing button.
[28:38] I haven’t done a lot of testing to see how much that has really affected it but I have kind of learned over the years that if you use those directional cues, they can help. And because the site doesn’t get enough traffic it’s just not worth AB testing it. But if you do have enough traffic then that’s something that you can look at.
[28:55] Rob: The directional arrow is just kind of an old internet marketing tactic people have used for years. I did hear that Brecht Palombo over on distressedpro.com he said he’s sending some – I think it’s paid traffic to a landing page and it has a head shot of a woman and she’s looking at his button like the call to action button and that’s something that I’ve heard people do. I’ve never used the arrows or people looking at or pointing that stuff but that’s not to say that it doesn’t work.
[29:21] Mike: Yeah. I think for something like this you really need to have software installed that actually takes a look where people’s mouse pointer is going like CrazyEgg or Inspectet or something along those lines so that you can get a much better sense of whether or not that’s working. Because I think that just judging the numbers may be a little difficult but if you can pin point on what people are actually moving their mouse over then that would help give you a better indicator whether or not it’s working.
[29:45] Number nine is to display honest reviews of your product or filtered reviews with your product. And there’s obviously a difference between filter reviews essentially tell everybody the good things about your product. But if you notice on Amazon.com there’s a lot of reviews there that tell you how awful a product is and all the different things that are wrong with it. If you go back, I think it’s still on the MicroConf website but there’s a talk that was done by Jason Cohen of wpengine.com where he talked about honesty.
[30:17] There’s some pretty compelling evidence into here that suggested that if you’re providing all of the negative reviews along with the positive reviews then you’re going to increase sales. I think one of the example he used was Kodak. Another one was Amazon, I mean there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that suggest that using those is going to increase the conversions. I don’t know whether that translates directly to just using filter reviews. I would think that in the beginning you want to portray your product as well as you can. But it almost seems like if you’re selling something, it’s much more of a commodity you would want to show the negatives as well as the positives.
[30:52] Rob: Yeah. I haven’t seen software vendors do much with reviews. I guess if you’re a B to C vendor, well certainly if you’re mobile then there are going to be reviews in the app stores. But if you’re a B to B vendor, unless you’re on a market place like Capterra or some larger market place, on your own marketing websites, if you don’t have enough volume of actual reviews, you do get emails from people who cancel and they may say your product needs this, it didn’t do this.
[31:19] But that’s not really a review it’s more of maybe this product wasn’t a good fit or it’s just a complaint or something like that. So it’s a little harder to translate I think in the kind of B to B Saas space that I think about.
[31:28] Mike: And the tenth thing that you can AB test is using videos versus text and images. Virtually on any website you can take the content that’s there and translate it into a video of some kind. I don’t see a lot of people doing this to be perfectly honest. Don’t get me wrong. There’s tons and tons of video out there but it’s pretty rare for me to come across information where people are actively testing video versus text. I’ve seen it done a couple of times but there’s not a lot of yes I’ll say case studies that I’ve seen out there doing this.
[32:00] Rob: Yeah. I’ve done this once. I did it what DotNetInvoice with a landing kind of a squeeze page with a video versus a standard Saas landing page which had more text and images. And the video site or the video page just got crushed. But there could be a number of reasons for that. It just happened to do that. I ran it twice and at the time even the number of people who watched the video was less than half the people who hit the page.
[32:25] So that just killed my ability to get people interested in a trial and that’s what I was surprised by. I thought that with a short video that it would be easier to get people to watch it but my rule of thumb is to do text and images, build a standard page, start with that and from there, iterate. Because it’s like you said. It’s pretty easy to go from text and images and create a video out of that like an explainer video, a quick screen cast, something like that without even having to pay a lot of money for it. Those two things are not difficult to test back and forth once you have that video created.
[32:56] I would be interested in seeing some data on this. And I am in talks right now with my growth tech intern started and we’re trying to figure out the best way to test this with Drip because I am interested to see how that test would react to this audience.
[33:08] Mike: Yeah. I’ve definitely heard of cases where it goes the other way. I think that one that I’ve heard talked about in the past is Fog Creek where they’re selling fog bugs and they’ve tested it with Joel giving a talk and a presentation of fog bugs versus one that did not have him doing that. And the one with the video, the engagement was really high and it just absolutely crushed the text only version. I don’t have the numbers for it. I don’t think they published those but I’ve heard anecdotal evidences suggested in that particular case, one of the thoughts behind it was well people just loved to hear Joel talk which is entirely possible. I think it does depend a lot on the video that you’re offering and the audience.
[33:46] So just to recap, the first idea is to test free trial buttons and see if including them or excluding them is going to make a difference in your conversions, asking for credit cards upfront versus later on, using trust symbols. Number four is to use a chat widget of some kind. Number five is to evaluate the number of form fields that you have. Number six is add sign up fields directly to your homepage or landing page. Number seven is to test testimonials with or without some of the different information on them. Number eight is to use directional cues. Number nine is display honest versus filtered reviews. And Number ten is to test videos versus text and images.
[34:23] Music
[34:26] Rob: If you have a question for us call our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 149 | AuditShark and Drip Updates
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I are going to be talking about launch dates for Drip and Audit Shark. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 149.
[00:09] Music
[00:17] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:25] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:26] Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Mike?
[00:29] Mike: Well I kind of wanted to address some comments that were on the podcast blog from episode 147. There was a lot of discussion there. Some of it was based on Audit Shark and what’s been going on with it. It said basically Mike and Rob as co-host is just ignoring what’s going on, pretending everything is fine when Audit Shark hasn’t even been launched after several years. 50 so I kind of wanted to take a couple minutes and address that issue. I think it’s only fair to address it for the listeners.
[00:56] Rob: Yeah. Fire away.
[00:57] Mike: I don’t want to go too far into the details just because they’re not entirely relevant but at the same time one of the things that I haven’t really been forthcoming about on the podcast is that there’s a medical issue that I’ve been dealing with for the past several years which has severely impacted my ability to work on the product. There are some things around motivation as well that are associated with this medical issue.
[01:10] It was probably about I’d say three weeks ago that I was actually diagnosed with it. I’ve been going to a doctor for a couple years trying to figure out what’s going on, finally switched doctors and it was probably only two or three visits and a couple of tests and they were able to pinpoint it. Right now I’m on treatment for it that is a radical change if nothing else.
[01:38] Rob: Right. It was all kinds of symptoms that have impacted your ability probably not only to work on AuditShark but on your consulting contracts I’d imagine to get a lot of stuff accomplished.
[01:49] Mike: Yeah. I mean it’s totally been severely affecting my life in general. You’re encountering the same symptoms over and over and the doctor you’re seeing says oh, I think you should do this, this and this and you do those things and it doesn’t help. And he’s like well you’re not doing them enough. You’re its like there’s something else going on.
[02:04] So, eventually I just decided okay I need to go see somebody else and I did and like I said, I figured out what the problem is and I’m on treatment for it already and things are going extremely well. I mean literally the very first day of treatment, absolutely radical change. I don’t think this is the sole contributing factor. I think it’s a major contributing factor but not the only…
[02:21] Rob: Right. I think that’s important. I mean specifically you emailed me and one of the things you said is I’m not sure I want to talk about it because I don’t want this to turn in some kind of pity party and I don’t want people to think I’m scapegoating this health issue. I would’ve launched Audit Shark years ago if I didn’t have this health issue going so I think we should be clear that’s not what you’re trying to do here.
[02:42] Mike: Like I said, I feel it has been a major contributing factor but it’s certainly not the only one. One of the big things is obviously with AuditShark it’s clearly a much bigger product or project that I would not necessarily advice people going after for their first or second time out but it’s a huge, huge product. There’s a lot of moving parts. It’s very complicated and it’s just hard to put certain things in to focus for everybody in general and make it understandable.
[03:08] Rob: Let’s throw out a couple of mistakes that you’ve admitted to me and I’m sure I will have no problem talking about on the podcast. Bit off, probably a more complex product than you originally thought it would be like I’d bet in your head when you first started you said I’m going to run some auditing stuff and this can take me a few months to cobble together and then if you spent 1,000 hours working on it, it’s probably larger than you originally envisioned.
[03:30]Mike: Definitely. One of the things I did was I built a command line version of it first and that did not take me all that long to do. I was like this is going to be easy. This isn’t going to be very difficult to put something together that I’m going to be able to push out and its going to be a short timeline to get it out to market. And that turned out to be completely not the case and I made several mistakes. I started delving into a bunch of different technologies that I just wasn’t familiar with, I’ve never worked with them before. Windows Azure was one of them, SQL Azure, WCF services.
[04:00] Right now we’re kind of steeped in the middle of MVC and all these other things that are associated with it. They’re all things that I’ve never worked with before and it’s hard to estimate how long something is going to take when you’ve never done it before, anything you’ve been remotely close to it. I’ll be honest, those were just huge mistakes I would say in terms of the implementation, are they the wrong decision ultimately? I don’t think so but they certainly contribute to the amount of time that it’s taken.
[04:25] Rob: Yeah. I think they contribute. You can look at that as maybe mistake number 2 is like you’re going to build a new product and then you’re also biting off the learning curve of multiple technologies at once. They’re probably the right technologies for the job. I think in the end like you said it’s the right decision but it just meant that you spent 2, 3, 4 X what you would’ve spend if you were using the tools that you already had experience with.
[04:46] Mike: Definitely. That’s probably an underestimate.
[04:49] Rob: Yeah. I think another misstep was kind of your early focus on banks and financial institutions. You had some leads there. You talked to a few banks but when it came down to it and you finally had an app that really worked, the sale cycle was going to be really long. There was just a lot of complexity and you needed a high price point to sell into them and so you needed a much, much – I’ll say a much more valuable app. You need an app that provides a lot of value if you’re going to sell it for $10,000 or $20,000 a year than if you do if you’re going to sell it for $500 a year.
[05:16] Mike: Right. Some of it was my own fault for not asking the right questions once I was in there but even in discussing with them they’re like oh well that sounds like a great idea and I’d be interested to see how it goes. But they were more interested I found out later, they were more interested in finding out about how my business worked and how I did it because I was a local entrepreneur. It wasn’t that they were actually interested in solving their own problems. It was they wanted to know how it went because I was a local entrepreneur in their area and it had nothing to do with solving problems.
[05:46] Rob: Right. So if someone’s out there listening now and they probably have heard a lot of the steps over the past few years that you’ve talked about AuditShark, I still get questions. People come up to me at MicroConf and other conferences and say what is Audit Shark and what does it do? Can you explain it in one sentence in a way that I would understand and someone who’s not steeped in security really understands what it does like the simple value proposition. Not the engine behind it, but the value prop.
[06:17] Mike: Sure. So AuditShark allows you to get a second set of eyes on your server that essentially looks at all of the important things that you should be looking at from a security perspective but you probably aren’t for two reasons. One is you don’t know what you should be looking at and two, there’s just so much stuff that you should be looking at that it’s just not worth becoming a security expert to go look at it.
[06:38] Rob: Right. So you sent me this document. The reason I’m asking these questions is you and I have a conversation offline hashing through all this stuff and you sent me a document from cisecurity.org which is like a self funded or a nonprofit that sets up all these agreed upon security checkpoints. So if you have a windows 2008 server, maybe there are 250 different things, knobs that should be checked and they should be set to a certain thing in order for that server to be secure.
[07:02] What AuditShark does is you install it on your server, you install a little client piece on your server and then AuditShark has a web admin that I can log in and I can look to see if everything’s setup correctly. And if it’s not, you’re going to show me, at least give me a little bit of information. This where the remediation part comes in that you’ve talked about. You’re going to give me at least a little bit of information about how I should proceed to go on and fix that.
[07:27] And you’re going to have an up sell where I should be able to subscribe at a higher level or pay you a one off thing to have you or someone like another security expert on your team come in and fix that. Is that correct?
[07:39] Mike: Yeah. That’s pretty accurate.
[07:40] Rob: Okay so that’s your value prop today. So this is the thing that I haven’t understood because you’ve talked about like building your rules engine – this is like 18 months ago. Talk about how you had to get your roles engine built. And that didn’t make sense in the context of just this kind of vague auditing thing. But now that we’re really talking about nuts and bolts of what AuditShark does it’s like oh I get it, the rules engine really just looks at your control points. That goes out and looks at is this bit flipped in the registry or is this port closed or whatever. Is this security setting appropriate?
[09:09] So not only did you build the rules engine, then you went to the cisecurity.org document and you took the things they recommend and you implemented those in Audit Shark. So that the value to Audit Shark to someone like me like the Numa group or another small Saas app is not that I can install an auditing tool. The value is that you’ve pre-programmed all of the specific checkpoints in so that I don’t need to know about security. I can run it, get a report and then either fix the stuff myself if I know how or hire someone to do it.
[08:39] Mike: Exactly and it will give you a score essentially. Let’s say that it runs 250 different control points and you pass 200 out of 250. Well there’s some percentage compliance score that you’re going to have based on that. And you may go trough those extra 50 and say well, this applies or this doesn’t and you can mark them as exceptions or something like that. But basically you can boil that down to a score that says I am 85% compliant according to this policy and over time, your goal is to raise that from 85% to 90% to hopefully close to 100%. I mean there’s certain things you’re not going to do for business reasons and I’ll give you a very specific example.
[09:18] One of the recommendations that they generally have is don’t install a web server on the servers on your environment. It’s like well if you’re running a web server you kind of have to install a web server on the machine. So there are certain things you’re going to just blatantly ignore and you’re going to say I don’t need to listen to this because it’s not important and I have business reasons for doing what I’m about to do.
[09:37] Rob: Okay. So you said you’ve figured out this health issue hopefully and you’re hoping kind of the treatment that you’re on is going to sustain you and your motivation is going to stay up. You’ve been cranking on it for three weeks. What have you gotten done on the past few weeks and where does AuditShark stand today like a realistic assessment of what needs to get done to get it launch?
[09:58] Mike: Sure. I’ll give you a rundown of the things that I’ve done over the past couple weeks. I started getting familiar with Facebook ads and is it just me or the more ads you run, the more they bump up the suggested…
[10:10] Rob: I haven’t seen that. I’m wondering if you run them with different times with the same demographic, sometimes you’ll have other competitors that will bump up or are you using the demographic or have you changed that at all?
[10:20] Mike: I’ve changed the demographic a little bit but on one of them I was running every time I went to save it and this was throughout the course of an hour or two. Every time I went to save it, they would bump it up.
[10:31] Rob: Yeah. I’m not sure to be honest. I’d have to look. Now if your click through rate is going down, every time you click through rate goes down as it decreases, the minimum bid will bump up.
[10:43] Mike: I haven’t paid attention to how much it went up or down. I think it’s actually gone up so I don’t know. I’ve started exploring the Facebook ads. I created a Facebook page so I could actually do paid advertising on Facebook and get it into the news feed area.
[10:58] Rob: The news feed ads are doing a lot better than the right hand side stuff.
[11:02] Mike: yeah. I got very, very little traction on the right hand side. It did show some of them but the click through rates were abysmal. So I didn’t even bother.
[11:11] Rob: So you’re running Facebook ads to do what? Are they going to like an Audit Shark landing page to collect an email address to build a launch list?
[11:16] Mike: Yeah. I actually have two different landing pages that I setup specifically for this and basically I’m funneling people in to those two. I’m testing a couple different marketing pitches kind of for the tag line to see what resonates with people. I tried targeting just computer programmers and that did not work out. That thing just tags hardcore. People click through but they wouldn’t actually convert. I literally got zero people converting to the point I was like well is there something technically wrong that’s preventing them and I couldn’t find anything so I think it’s just the wrong demographic. They’re not interested.
[11:48] So I targeted pretty much every single security related interest that you could find through their specific interest area. I’ve got about a 30% conversion rate when people hit that page so it’s doing I think reasonably well. I did an HTTPS redirect on the page which messed up all of my referral conversions for kiss metrics so I had to undo that. I was thinking well it’s a security product. I should probably make it HTTPS and then anyone who hits it, if it gets flipped over to HTTPS then it messes up the referral. So kind of small mistake there.
[12:25] I also got AuditShark featured on beta list a couple days ago. That drove in a bunch of subscribers on the launch list. I’d say in the past 30 days or so I’ve roughly doubled my launch list. I want to triple it again before the end of September but I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to go about doing that.
[12:41] Rob: I think paid acquisition if you want to do it that quickly and I have some other ideas for you not Facebook that I think could work well with AuditShark.
[12:49] Mike: But I am committed to actually putting forth a good effort to try and make that happen. Right now I’m working with the new UI design with my lead developer and I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to actually have it not only in place but on the build server and being pushed out directly through the web by the end of this month.
[13:07] Rob: Right. And just to clarify them, you wrote a new UI because you’re using 3 or 4 year old technology that was clunky and the legacy code was making it very hard for you and your team to build new features so you basically re factored your UI and that’s done and you’re launching that.
[13:24]Mike: Right. The other thing is that over the past four weeks, traffic has consecutively every single week been higher than it was the previous week. Now it looks like it will be higher this coming week. I don’t know for sure but it depends on what other things that I do.
[13:37] Rob: Right. okay so that’s what you’ve done in about the span of three weeks which is probably more than you had done in maybe the few moths prior to that.
[13:42] Mike: Right. That’s an understatement I think.
[13:45] Rob: Okay you’re rolling again and you’re ready to get this thing going. Where does AuditShark stand? How soon can you launch it and what’s left to get people using and paying for AuditShark?
[13:57] Mike: So I have a signup page that’s in place where I’ve sent the URL to a couple people to sign in, install it on their servers. As I said before I got some people using it for early access. The biggest complaint that I’ve seen so far is that there’s no instructions on how to remediate things. So if you look at the reports and it says X is wrong then how do I fix that? The UI doesn’t give any indication of how to do that. You basically have to go back to the policy builder or you have to go back to the reports from the source of where these control points are from.
[14:28] It’s not going to work for the customers. Essentially what I did was I went back to the policy developer and I said hey I need you to start putting these in. He put a bunch of them in. It started working out and then something busted on the policy builder and it took a few days to get that fixed. Right now it’s fixed and I’ve told the policy developer he should be able to go back in and start adding those in. Right now he’s only got 5 out of about 500 done but I’m hoping he’ll be able to go back through the rest of them and put those in place such that when the policies execute against the machines that the customers are running then they’ll be able to see in their reports exactly how to fix these things.
[15:01] Rob: Got it. So that’s where you stand today. You need to get this new version out and do you think you’re going to have it done in the next week and then is that it? Are you all integrated with stripe like you have a sign in page where its going to put a credit card token and all that stuff. All that code’s written?
[15:18] Mike: All that code is written. We ran into a slight problem where somebody couldn’t sign up for early access because Stripe was denying it but it turns out that…
[15:27] Rob: I’ve seen that too. That’s not your problem. I’m seeing that not all over the place but especially with international cards, really get problems with Stripe.
[15:35] Mike: That’s exactly what it was. What happened was the card was entered and then the bank denied it. They just blocked it and the person in the early access didn’t really know what was going on. They said well I tried it and gave him another fake card to use and they were able to get in and actually install it and start working with it and it was probably a week or two later they said hey by the way just to let you know this is what happened and it turns out that their bank has locked the account and locked all other things that they were using it for.
[16:03] Rob: Yeah. We haven’t seen it that bad but I definitely seen one or two people trying to get in. It was our post early access. It was the actual mini launch and we’re still dealing with their bank trying to get them to approve the charge. So you setup on the payment side then. So is there much else to do? Could you flip the switch? Let’s say you get this version two UI live next week. Are you going to launch next week or what’s holding you back?
[16:29] Mike: I’m trying to get the marketing message right. I really want to try and figure out exactly the type of people who I guess would be the initial core market. What tag lines resonate the most with them is really what it comes down to. Because in between the two that I’ve done so far, one of them clearly resonated but I think that the other one was on the wrong demographic. Right now I got them both targeted at the same demographic and I want to test to figure out which one would resonate more so I can do more paid advertising and paid acquisition. But beyond that, there’s not a lot that’s stopping me from just kind of flipping the switch other than the marketing side.
[17:02] Rob: Right. You want to make sure that if you send people to the site that at least a few of them are going to convert into trials. Right? That you’re communicating it well. Now in terms of your early access list, I know you have a launch list and you have some people who you have let in and are using the app. Is it at the point where you think that people will be willing to pay for it as of next week when the new UI comes out? Or do you think that there still more has to be done with remediation in order for it to be worth X dollars a month to folks who are using it?
[17:34] Mike: The remediation information has to be there. I don’t think that it’s a viable product without that remediation information there and that’s reliant upon my policy builder putting that stuff in there. I can certainly talk to them. I probably will and say hey, can you really make an effort to get as many of these possible as you can in this week and next week? Then I’m sure he’ll be able to do that that’s not going to be too big a deal.
[17:55] But its going to take him time. I mean there’s 500 of these things and he’s got to go into every single one of them individually, look it up on the PDF and say okay well what is it that needs to be added in?
[18:06] Rob: Right. 500 control points. Right? 500 settings that you’re checking across two different OS’s like Windows server 2008, Windows server 2012 and you’re checking all these points so you have to basically have some simple instructions on how to fix that or at least resources.
[18:18] Mike: Exactly.
[18:20] Rob: Got it. So sounds like from what you’re telling me is you are honing in on a launch like a true point where people can sign up, use AuditShark and that you think you’re going to be providing enough value that some people will start paying for it very soon.
[18:34] Mike: Yes.
[18:35] Rob: Got it. So MicroConf Europe is coming up in just under a month. You think you’ll launch before then?
[18:41] Mike: I would like to. The question is kind of time…
[18:43] Rob: What are you big risk that are going to keep you from launching here in the next – it sounds like 2 to 3 weeks is the window you’re talking about. What’s going to keep you from doing that?
[18:55] Mike: Right. I think the biggest risk that I face right now is how long its going to take to get the build server to push the new version of the code because it’s a completely different repository. So I’m going to have to reconfigure a lot of different things. And I’ll probably have to basically build a new build script for that to push that out. It leverages all the same data underneath so I don’t have to worry about inconsistencies there because we didn’t make any structural change. It’s basically just a new GUI over the top of it.
[19:21] But obviously I’m going to have to touch base with the early access people and say hey, just letting you know all these stuff has changed a little bit. It’s just going to take time to verify that just because there’s so many moving parts. There’s a bunch of different libraries. There’s the policy builder to which is self updating. There’s the agent which is self updating. I need to make sure that all of the interactions back and forth between work as well as all the self updating capabilities because that’s one of the key pieces that makes AuditShark easier to use so that you don’t have to go in and constantly update the agents every time there been a new build.
[19:51] Beyond that, there’s also a risk with adding all the remediation information. It’s not really a risk so much as it’s how long is that going to take and I don’t know what the answer to that is because of m contractor. He’s not full time. It’s not like he’s doing this every single day for 40 hours a week. So he’s only been able to put in probably 10 to 12 maybe 15 hours a week on any given week and I don’t know how long its going to take him to do all of those.
[20:14] Rob: Kind of thinking out loud here because we haven’t talked about this part but there’s this interesting question of is it more important to get to launch to where people can publically sign up or is it more important to get to where people are paying you for something in private? You know what I’m saying? Because if you think about how I did Drip, I did the ladder. Though we still haven’t launched. And yet I have 100 people in there trying it out. I have a handful of people paying for it and so I would almost…
[20:41] It’s funny that in the comments that we’ve seen there’s always this push towards launch like when are you going to launch it? I would actually say not when you’re going to launch it but when are you going to get that first paying customer? When are you going to get that 10th paying customer? Those are more important than having a public web page that someone can come and sign in and download Audit Shark in my opinion.
[20:58] Mike: I totally agree. It’s definitely important for me to get to the point where people are paying for it because that means they’re seeing value out of it and if they’re seeing value out of it then I can essentially backtrack and say okay well why are you seeing value out of it? And then take the words and phrases of why they’re seeing that value and use those to get more people who would also see that value.
[21:18] Rob: Right. It sounds like you could feasibly – in theory, if you were to go crazy, you could send out an email tomorrow, dear launch list, you could start running ads tomorrow and you could just send people in. They could sign up. They could give their credit card and you’re all set up to do that. They could download it. They could install it and it would do something. It actually audits their server and it tells them hey these things are wrong. And you could say look at me, I launched. But what does that do? Right.
[21:43] It doesn’t do anything because you probably know those people are going to pay because you’ve launched without the value that you need to provide in order to charge someone. And so it sounds like getting the remediation piece in there, that information in there so that people actually hopefully at that point are willing to pay, and I think that’s maybe a bigger risk than anything else you named I think. You named getting V2 UI out and I think you’re going to do that. I have no doubt you get technical issues, I know you can handle. Less than a week that will be done.
[22:14] I bet that remediation stuff will take a couple weeks like you said. The biggest question mark in my mind is once you get remediation in and will then that be enough value for people to pay because if it still isn’t then you have to think about it more. That’s where you have a big question mark of what can I do? What can AuditShark do to make it worth the monthly fee?
[22:37] Mike: Right. And actually that kind of leads back to what I mentioned a couple weeks ago in an episode where I said I’m really thinking about going with a hybrid solution where I’m essentially offering security as a service or to people such that when AuditShark finds something I can go in and then essentially analyze to figure is this applicable to your environment? Is it going to be right for you to do? How do we actually go about remediating this?
[23:02] Because right now, AuditShark is really just an information tool. It tells you the information. It doesn’t actually do it for you but there’s this concern. Obviously these are production servers that people are using. Do you go in and you just automatically fix something? If you find something that’s busted, do you undo it do you bring into compliance and it’s a very hard question to answer because it depends a lot on what you’re looking at.
[23:27] Rob: Yeah.
[23:26] Mike: Even if it’s a new user, oh, well somebody created this new user so they could run a service account for this new software that they installed. And then if I delete it then it just breaks that software. And if it was something they were legitimately using, then of course that’s not going to be a good thing. I could disable the account but I’m still going to break that piece of software that they installed.
[23:43] Rob: Yeah. I don’t see any way that you can just automatically do things like that on a production server. I wouldn’t install something on a production server that did that, that actually made changes without me understanding what it was doing.
[23:56] Mike:And the question that I’ve actually talked to other people about it is would you feel comfortable with a system where it allows you to do that? So like for example there’s this thing that’s wrong and maybe it just gives you a big red button that says this is wrong would you like to fix it? Do you click that button?
[24:12] Rob: I think there’s got to be more info though because fix it, what does fix it mean? That means revert it to what this security doc says it should be but what if I have it that way so that my connection to XYZ, API works or so that a certain piece of software works. I just think there are too many exceptions.
[24:29] Now I get it and I hope if you listen to this, I hope you get the complexity of this and that your tool audits and it actually does something valuable and it shows you information but it’s probably not valuable enough as of today for someone to pay for. So you’re moving trying to push that bar forward and saying in a week or two then I’ll at least have remediation instructions into the app. Hopefully that will be enough for people to pay for.
[24:56] I think your biggest risk is definitely not the technical issues but the question about what point does AuditShark provide enough value that people will pay your monthly fee for it. And it sounds like your hypotheses is that it is having the remediation steps in there will at least convince some people to do it and then offering that value add of you to came in and fix it for an additional cost is maybe even another step up in the value chain.
[25:22] Mike: Right. There’s definitely other things that it have thought of that I think would add value to it and would help push people into the direction of saying yes this is valuable enough for me to pay for but some of them are complicated to the point that there are entire products built around just that functionality. So it’s not like I could say oh, well let me just throw this in there and I’ll wait for that to be done before I launch and so that I know its valuable enough because some people may not care about some of those things. I really need to just get it to a point where its I’ll say valuable enough and then kind of take things from there.
[25:56] Rob: Right. And to clarify, you’re marketing towards small software and Saas businesses is that right?
[26:03] Mike: I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s just small Saas businesses. It’s more of the businesses who are advanced enough to actually be interested in looking to protect their servers because they have something to protect. One of the things that strikes me is the people who are really interested in AuditShark have been hacked before. The people who have gone through that experience and have gone through the pain to say oh well, what happened on my server? Why did this thing get hacked? Those are the people who have this burning pain to say oh well, I need to actually do something about my servers because my entire business rests upon having these things up and running and if I lose those servers, I lose my business.
[26:41] Rob: Right. People are going to have a dedicated server because they need to be able to install an actual EXE so it’s not shared web hosting or something but it’s a dedicated typically a web server I would imagine. Sure it doesn’t have to be but my guess is the people you’re going to find using the content marketing SEO kind of the online marketing techniques you’re going to go after are more likely going to be small businesses on the web at least to start with. And then it’s like you said, its people who are aware enough that they need to be secure that you can have the notion that they need to lock some stuff down and the willingness to spend the time to do it.
[27:13] Mike: Right. I’ve seen a couple show up on my launch list over the past couple weeks who are healthcare related or financial related whether they’re banks or loaners and some things like that which is interesting to see they’re the people who actually take it seriously. If you’re just looking for a scan of your servers because you want to do it once, probably not a good fit. But if you’re the type of company that’s a little bit paranoid but you don’t necessarily have a security expert on staff and that’s really what it comes down to is if you don’t have a security expert on staff or you don’t have tools that you’re already using to help lock down your machines, then AuditShark is probably a good fit because it can at least point you in the right direction.
[27:53] Rob: Right. Because its runs a scan everyday right? That’s the thing. You install it once and then it gives updated information because you can download – I’m sure I could go online and find like a $99 scanner or a free scanner or something that will scan my server for security holes but yours is as a service.
[28:08] Mike: Right.
[28:09] Rob: And what’s the pricing?
[28:10] Mike: On the low end for two servers, its $79 a month and it basically goes up from there if you get to eight servers a month that’s $199 a month and then for 20 servers its $399 a month. Those are kind of initial prices right now. There’s other functionality that I want to add in but I don’t think that bumping up the price point would be justified until I start adding those other things.
[28:32] Rob: Right. You got to get the first customers in there first paying you for it.
[28:35] Mike: To be fair, I’m not necessarily as interested in saying oh well I have all these people paying me $199 a month. What I’m really interested in is making sure that they are getting the value out of it to say hey $199 a month is a no brainer. So like okay, well what about $299? What about $399? And then trying to find the ideal price point, no that there really is one.
[28:55] Rob: You’re not saying you’re going to raise prices. I mean I would imagine you’d grandfather people in but it’s kind of as you find it’s a no brainer for people to do it then you want to potentially raise prices on future folks.
[29:06] Mike: Right.
[29:07] Rob: So we’ve kind called out a few steps that need to fall into place for you to get to launch. We talked about the V2 UI you’re trying to get out, that’s a technical issue. There’s getting remediation in and that’s a technical issue. Then there’s kind of the risk issue of with remediation, are people willing to pay for it, does it provide enough value and then you want to hone your marketing message right? You want to get like a headliner, a tag liner or a way to describe Audit Shark in just a couple sentences basically or a couple of words frankly because that’s all you have in a website headline or an ad headline.
[29:36] You want to find a pretty good one that converts well for you. Do you feel like if you get those four things dialed in that you’re ready to basically get people paying for it and asking early access customers for money and seeing what happens and then maybe releasing it to the world assuming that they say yes?
[29:54] Mike: Yeah. I think so. The remediation piece is big. I would like to kind of pursue figuring out how to work in services is kind of that hybrid model that I talked about but I haven’t really put any mental time or effort into figuring out how that might look.
[30:09] Rob: Anything else you want to add because I think we’ve kind of done a decent run down of basically the last three years as well as what we hope to see here in the next month or two.
[30:19] Mike: I don’t think there’s too much. I understand the sentiment from people that it’s been a very, very long time and I haven’t launched AuditShark and I’m not exactly a shining example here of how to launch a Micropreneur business but at the same time I do want to point out this is not a Micropreneur endeavor. I’ve said that upfront. I don’t want to scapegoat everything on to the medical issues that I kind of eluded to earlier. But it’s been about three weeks since I started the treatments and everything.
[30:46] So I think that things are going reasonably well and I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t continue to go well. I can keep people posted as what the progress is. I don’t think it’s going to be very much longer though. So now what we’ve talked a lot about AuditShark do you have any updates of Drip?
[31:02] Rob: Yeah I have 90 seconds of updates. I’ll keep it short. Basically nothing has changed with Drip since we last talked because I’m in the middle of 1) waiting to see how many of our trial users convert because until I see that, I don’t want to send an email to the other thousands on the launch list. In the mean time we’re just building out stuff like cancelation logic and on boarding assistance and FAQ, email support snippets and it’s just trying to get Drip to scale up just a little bit.
[31:32] We’ve had our hands full for the past couple weeks and I just couldn’t imagine emailing ten times what we emailed a couple weeks ago. We couldn’t handle it. So we’re trying to get things like support and on boarding and cancelations automated enough that we can essentially move forward. I don’t have an exact date in mind when we’re going to email that. I’ve been kind of brainstorming of do we maybe just email another 300 in a couple weeks and see how that goes? It’s a super slow way to take it but I just don’t feel like we’re there yet.
[32:02] Development is – I’ll say it’s a bottleneck the most things that need to get done are in the development queue. Marketing is now moving forward. My growth hacker intern started this week and he’s in the ground running so marketing stuff is great. A lot of stuff in place for the launch. We’re stoked about it but we just have to get – there’s more features that have to have to get done that aren’t even features like parts of the app but it’s things that just have to be done in order to bring in several hundred trials all at once. So that’s really it.
[32:31] Next week will probably be boring too because we’re just going to be cranking away at this queue of things that people have asked about. There are also things, we are building a couple things that people have canceled for and I’m concerned that 10% or 20% of the new trials will also need that feature so I’m not building them just to build it. I probably have hundred features that we could build just to build but there are a handful that basically are deal breakers for folks so we want to get those done before I also let the masses in.
[32:55] Mike: Yeah. I know what you’re saying. There’s hundreds of features that I have are in FogBugz that I just have not decided to pursue at the moment. There’s just a huge list and it’s just not worth it right now. Nice to have.
[33:06] Rob: Yeah. They’re nice to have. I’m in a milestone that just says future. It says like V 2.0 future and they’re just all assigned to that.
[33:13] Music
[33:17] Mike: If you have a question or comment you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 148 | Online Marketing Trends with Special Guest Clay Collins
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, we are going to be talking about online marketing trends with startup founder Clay Collins. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 148.
[00:09] Music
[00:16] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:24] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[000:25] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:30] Mike: I had a great weekend. I spoke at Behavior Con down in Stamford Connecticut. It was a really great conference. There were about 150 people there and they had a bunch of different researchers who came up. They had people who ran different online communities and sold information products and Hiten Shah was there Derek Halpern. I’m sure a bunch of our audiences has heard of those people. But there were a lot of people there who I’ve never heard of before but they had some really good speakers and some really good information to share. So it’s a lot of fun.
[00:56] Rob: That sounds cool. Was that mostly like a marketing conference? Is that the idea? Like to learn marketing techniques?
[01:02] Mike: Not really. It was actually more or less the study of how people buy things and why people buy things. Some of the different speakers did, was they would analyze behaviors that people were performing and then kind of backtrack a little bit, try to figure out why it is they were performing those actions. And then what sort of tweaks could they do or what things could they toggle to get people to do different things to modify or change the behavior that the people were doing.
[01:30] And naturally this really falls underneath the marketing umbrella because as a marketer you’re really trying to influence people’s behaviors to try and get them to buy things but you also want to be able to present them in a way that makes sense to people that is going to make them feel good about whatever that purchase is.
[01:45] Rob: Very cool. Sounds like fun. Well, last week when you were going to Stamford Connecticut, I was doing the Drip prelaunch. So we basically emailed about 12% of the Drip launch list. It was a lot of fun, a lot of work. Derrick and I came in the day the email went out. We were sitting here as it went out and of course nothing happens because nothing happens right when it goes out. But then the following day and the next several days, that’s when all the onboard and the support request come in.
[02:13] So overall, the conversion rate from the email went well. It went better than I expected so I’m happy with that. We tested out all the basic functions of getting people signed up in an automated fashion. So instead of me creating their account, they’re actually entering credit card, signing up through a form and then we also have steps, I call them on boarding steps but it’s just steps for them to get setup and start to get value from the app.
[02:38] We just broke the 100 registered user mark. So that includes paid customers and trial users. Obviously the majority of those are trial users at this point because we have a 21 day trial so more in a few weeks. But as I said in a tweet a couple of weeks ago starting line. Now the real work begins.
[02:53] Mike: That’s awesome. And you still got a huge list to go back to for the rest of the launch right?
[02:58] Rob: Yeah. And that was the idea is I’m taking it slower than maybe if we had our backs to the wall or we’re running out of funding or really need to get out for some specific deadline, it’s a little bit of a luxury to be able to do that because we already saw some things that didn’t go as well as I would like. I’m going to tweak some copy on the landing page some copy in an email that I realized. We had a tiny little numbers mistake on one thing that we tweaked. We’re writing some extra features that people have said that they’re going to cancel because of that.
[03:28] So if we can hone that and kind of move the app up just one more level and really remove the friction then my hope is that once we email this couple thousand personal list that it will be an even better conversion rate. It’s just kind of one more layer, one more iteration before really going live.
[03:45] Mike: That’s really cool. Today I pushed out some code in the vein of getting things done and moving things forward. I pushed out some codes live today that will help address some of the problems that I heard back from people who could blame that when they got results back from Audit Shark they just didn’t know how to fix things that were there.
[04:01] There’s still a fair amount of work to do but what we’ve got so far is we’ve started putting in the remediation info so the people know what needs to be fixed and how to fix it. And then that is being now displayed on the results that people are looking at after the audits run, it pulls back all the results and it will show them right in the UI. It will show them exactly how to fix the things that need to be fixed. And the next step will be to put some sort of a report there that they can actually click on and get a downloaded PDF or something along those lines to make it easier.
[04:32] Because right now it’s just available when you hover the things but I really want to make it so that they can download it and take a look at those things and either hand it off to someone and say hey can you do this or can you do that?
[04:41] Rob: Very nice. You know, I ran across a site. It was actually referred to me by a friend of mine, was in the most recent YC batch. He actually has an interesting startup. It’s a crowd funding commercial real estate site. It’s called realcrowd.com so if you’re an accredited investor and you just want to put in a small amount of money say $10,000 and own part of an office building in San Francisco, it’s a really interesting idea and I’ve been in there looking at what they have to offer.
[05:07] But he referred me to this site called onemonthrails.com it’s a YC company. It’s designed to teach you just enough rails to be able to build like super stripped down prototype of something. So it’s designed for people who are not developers to learn just enough to build kind of a product that maybe they could then use to either recruit a developer or to get some funding so that they could hire a developer that kind of stuff.
[05:30] Now you and I were talking offline and one of the rails is $49 and there’s 5 to 10 hours of training in it, of video training. I see this as that very first step. If you just want to figure out – if you even want to kind of experiment this because the cost is so low. But then that next step after it I think would be Tealeaf Academy. They teach you rails but they take it to another level. They teach you how to build the right production code where you could actually – I think they have a full four month curriculum that you could do one month at a time and pay for them. It’s a little more expensive but it’s a lot more rigorous and there’s a lot more to it.
[06:04] So if you’re out there, you’re non technical and you’re like I just want to learn enough code to kind of tool around, I would consider looking at onemonthrails.com and then if it really drives with you and you want to keep going and get a little better I would recommend Tealeaf Academy. They’re actually a MicroConf sponsor last year. I just want to throw that out because we get that question so often from people who don’t know how to code, should I learn to code and how would I do it?
[06:24] Mike: So have you seen the Chromecast devices that Google quietly started selling a few weeks ago?
[06:30] Rob: Indeed. I bought one the day it came out and it came a couple weeks ago.
[06:35] Mike: what do you think of it?
[06:36] Rob: I like it. I have watched – I’ve never had a way to watch YouTube videos on TV because I have a Roku and they don’t have a YouTube app for Roku. So that’s been really neat to be able to just pull out my phone and basically sling YouTube videos up to the screen but it would be the ideal travel device because it’s as big as a thumb drive and that’s all you need, is a Wi-Fi and a thumb drive.
[06:58] We have a small little apartment that we go to near the coast and for that it works really well. I just plug it in the back of the TV and it can play Netflix and YouTube natively without really much interaction.
[07:10] Mike: I was a little disappointed. I wasn’t terribly impressed by it.
714 Rob: How are you using it?
[07:15] Mike: Initially I was just trying to get the thing working and the instructions just didn’t really seem to make sense. I got it installed and up and running on my Wi-Fi and then I’m like okay, now what do I do with it? I was in the chrome browser trying to add it as a device. It wouldn’t let me and it turns out it’s not a supported device. You can’t add it to chrome browser. I’m like are you kidding seriously? And it turns out it really isn’t. You have to be using it from some sort of a mobile device. It doesn’t work from your chrome browser like a desktop.
[07:45] Rob: No, it works from my Macbook air. I mean it’s not a desktop. It’s a laptop.
[07:48] Mike: That’s the problem. Because you’ve got Wi-Fi on there. Because I don’t have Wi-Fi on this even though it’s all connected in the same network, I couldn’t do anything.
[07:54] Rob: I see. It’s only over Wi-Fi. Yeah, that actually makes sense. Dude, who plugs in anymore? I haven’t plugged in to a cable for years except for when we do the podcast.
[08:05] Mike: What was really odd to me was I was able to do this like its walked me through the process of setting it up and I was able to kind of initialize it through my desktop browser and then it just stopped. It wouldn’t work after that. I got everything setup and then like I was trying to send stuff to it through the browser and it says you can’t install the Netflix app because you don’t have any devices. I’m like I just set it up. What the heck’s going on?
[08:30] Rob: It sounds like you had a weird news case to be honest.
[08:32] Mike: Maybe. Could be right but it seemed really awkward to me that there was nothing anywhere that said you need to set this up on Wi-Fi.
[08:41] Rob: Right. For me it was seamless because I was on Wi-Fi and I’ve had the setup process, it worked for me so it was just easy enough. I thought they did a good job with it. And then I was able to frankly – I watched a bunch of movie trailers because that’s what on YouTube that I’m going to be interested in.
[08:55] Mike: You can’t get it on like a hotel Wi-Fi because they have the pop-ups and stuff. I’ve been able to get my Kindle on a hotel Wi-Fi before because I think there’s something in the routers that recognizes when a device can access those types of things and when it can’t. And like the Kindle just logged in and it just kind of bypasses those things even though all the other devices that I have, it’ll pop up like my iPhone, laptop and stuff. They popup and say hey please enter such and such and log in but I’ve had my Kindle and put it on the hotel network before and it didn’t even ask.
[09:28] Rob: That’s weird because I brought my Roku to many hotels and I’ve never been able to get it on. You have to buy a device – basically it’s a small travel router that you get that travel router onto your laptop and then you use that Mac and the rest to hook into your Roku. It’s like a pole production that I never went to but I found that’s the only way to do it. I wonder if the Kindle has some kind of work around or fancy logic to be able to do that.
[09:50] Mike: It might just be that it says it’s a Kindle and doesn’t have a browser when it connects to the Wi-Fi and maybe there are certain ones that are able to insert and ones can’t.
[10:00] Rob: So we got a pretty cool email this week from Jordan Sherer. He said I’m a Micropreneur academy member and recently full time boot strapper. I wanted to drop you a note today and let you know where the Micropreneur academy has taken me the over the past six months. I’ve been bootstrapping small software products on the side since 2007. It’s been a lot of fun and was the perfect avenue for me to explore things outside of my day job. And of course learn a bit about building products that solve problems and marketing to customers that need a solution.
[10:24] My main desktop app had done well over the years and I was finally able to pull the record and jump out on my own. This is where your podcast and the Micropreneur academy came in and I finally took the leap back in February. Thanks for all your support (even though it wasn’t directed directly to me). After February I tried to figure out where I wanted to take my business. After evaluating a couple of ideas I finally hit a sweet spot with a landing page describing my perfect Google reader replacement called Minimal Reader and that’s mnmlrdr.com.
[10:59] My offering resonated with a lot of people. I had thousands of people sign up and say that they would for my offering. This was definitely encouraging so I pursued development and brought it to life. The product has been complete since June and been an early access since July and I’m finally launching publicly this week. Just wanted to say I really appreciate what you’ve done with startups for the rest of us, Micropreneur academy and MicroConf. It’s been encouraging and a big help in pursuing my dream of growing a software academy.
[11:24] I actually bought a lifetime membership. He has a limited number of lifetime membership to minimal reader. Because I haven’t been widely into RSS for a few years so when Google reader shutdown I wasn’t really disappointed. But I have realized I do want to keep tabs on a few blogs still. They’re kind of these key blogs. What I like about minimal reader is it is super minimal. It’s just black on a white background. It’s got enough features to make it work but there’s not a lot of design to it and it’s responsive. So I log in using the exact same log in through a browser both on my phone and my laptop.
[11:55] I don’t know how long he’s going to have that. It’s like $99 for a lifetime and then he’s going to do a few of those to raise some money to get started and then shut that down. And after that its $36 a year that he’s asking for.
[12:05] Mike: that’s really cool. Great job Jordan.
[12:07] Rob: Yeah. Thanks for writing in and letting us know. And I’ve actually already added Jordan to our success stories page that you added to the website. I think we have a handful of folks on there. This is basically people who’ve listened to the podcast and or attended MicroConf and or have been in the academy and have quit their jobs. I guess we only have four right now but I can list another probably 20 off the top of my head so maybe I’ll email those people and start getting permission and expanding the success stories page.
[12:33] Mike: yeah definitely. That’s would be great.
[12:35] Music
[12:38] Rob: Today we’re going to be talking about online marketing trends and tactics with a guest named Clay Collins and Clay has his own podcast. It’s how I heard about him. It’s called The Marketing Show. And he was gracious enough to spend a half hour with us really diving into several different tactics that he’s learned. I love his unique insight that he has into conversions landing page because he runs a company that’s essentially a Saas business that is a landing page provider.
[13:05] And so he has access to a lot of data that the rest of us don’t have. So we really wanted to bring him n the show and both enlighten us and the audience on online marketing trends for 2013 and 2014.
[13:12] Music
[13:18] So I’d like to welcome clay Collins. He is the founder of Lead Bright which is a software company that makes web applications to help you grow your audience. Their flagship product is lead pages. It’s a Saas app and it’s the easiest way to create landing pages online. I first heard about Clay from his podcast. It’s called The Marketing Show. And in my opinion its one of the most underrated marketing podcast I know of. It’s super tactical. Is it your co-founder clay that you’re on there with?
[13:44] Clay: It’s actually just one of the people that we work with here internally. His name is Andy. Super sharp guy, runs a number of different business. We’ve decided to do a show together.
[13:54] Rob: awesome, yes. So they have just kind of open conversations about online conversion and Clay is just steeped in the world of landing pages, email marketing. I think he comes out of info marketing background and he’s in software now so he has a lot of skills that a lot of software people don’t. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you on the show today clay.
[14:12] Clay: Rob and Mike, it’s great to be here.
[14:15] Rob: Awesome. So what we’re going to do today, we’re going to be talking about some online marketing trends. What I’ve done is I’ve gone through a number of Clay’s older episodes from probably the past 4 to 6 months. And I had notes in my notebook of things they have talked about. It’s a real kind of poignant lessons and some interesting tactical things.
[14:33] So I’m going to throw out a topic. I’m sure you’ll remember talking about it already and then probably ask some questions around that and Mike and I will just bat it around. The first thing is you made a statement you said design is the new copywriting. Basically indicated in an episode you said that design is more important today than it has been in the past for conversions. Tell us a little bit more about how you’re seeing that and what that means to us.
[14:57] Clay: Yeah. So there used to be this phrase in direct sales marketing and people would say if its ugly as hell, it will probably sell. And what they meant then was that you really didn’t need to focus on design, that if you focus sort of the bulk of your efforts on copy writing and making sure that you really nailed the messaging and nailed the hooks and the bullet points and hypnotic NLP wizardry what not that that is what was going to drive conversions for you.
[15:26] I think for a long time that was actually true until we started developing sort of as an online culture the sense of what looks scummy and what didn’t. And then at that point, design kind of took over. I don’t know exactly when that happened. So I was listening to guy I know, this acquaintance Vishen Lakhiani who runs a publishing company called Mind Valley and he was telling me about an experiment that he did. He went out and hired a top flight copy writer. I believe he paid around $25,000 to have a sales letter created from scratch so you have that person rewrite their sales page.
[16:05] And then he took his existing sales page and he had a top flight designer redesign that page. And what he found was that the top flight $25,000 copywriter showed no notable improvement when they split test sort of the old version versus the new version. So he spent a lot of money, didn’t get an improvement. However, when he took his sort of in-house minimally trained copywriter that I guess started out as an intern and rose through the ranks and had hat page redesigned by a top flight designer, conversions went up about 30% on the sales page.
[16:40] I started thinking about that and what was going on. It was around that time that we in our own company hired a designer, a full time in house designer and we just found him on 99 Designs. It’s a best way to interview a designer and anyone who’s bidding for a job on 99 Designs just like necessarily looking for work. Like why would you subject yourself to the whole process of 99 Designs if you weren’t somewhat willing to put yourself out there in order to get some work.
[17:06] We got a designer and we started just systematically going through all the pages in our business and redesigning them changing no code, doing nothing else. And we had just a huge growth in our business as a result of this and a huge lift in our conversions. What was funny is that the designer, I had to communicate almost nothing to them other than here are four other pages that I think look good. Can you make ours kind of look like those?
[17:33] So I did that and I had hired copywriters in the past and it just took a whole lot of just going back and forth with them about the way things are communicated and the subtleties of language. I just came to this conclusion that is far cheaper, far easier and just far more effective to grow your business by focusing on design rather than conversion and good designers now on this global market place are just like incredibly easy to find relative to copywriters and relative to developers.
[18:02] Mike: Do you think a part of that is just that there’s a – I guess I’ll say a minimum barrier to doing the copy versus design where it’s very easy to look at design and this design looks just positively scamming versus this other one which looked really sharp and professional. And when you get into copywriting it’s very difficult to differentiate between somebody who came in and has a lot of education and has a lot of background in doing copy versus your Joe off the street because at the end of the day English words are English words. But there’s a huge difference that’s very visual between a good designer and a bad designer.
[18:40] Clay: Yeah. I think that you can almost immediately tell almost in a deep gut level whether or not someone is a good designer. With copy, a lot of times you can’t tell until you get the split test data back. So even being able to iterate and judge the fruits of someone’s work it’s very difficult with copy and a lot of times, even the best copywriters don’t create a notable result even though they’re charging quite a lot. It takes a lot more domain expertise to nail the copywriting and certainly it takes a lot of training in order to be a developer.
[19:19] But a designer can be a designer for a whole number of industries and it doesn’t necessarily require domain expertise for them to create lift in conversions. They simply need to make it look better. I’m not undermining what designers do. I’m doing quite the opposite. I’m emphasizing it. So yeah, I think what you’re saying is spot on.
[19:36] Rob: I’m curious about the redesigns you mentioned that you hired the designer and had him do and saw some increase in conversions. Were those on the landing pages that you have or was that inside your app itself?
[19:50] Clay: It’s actually both. One of the things we found both with copywriting and with design is that good marketing is often merely a matter of highlighting the things that are most important to highlight. And one of the things that copywriters do is they’ll make sure that things that are bold are bold and things that should stand out are in some cases annoyingly highlighted and bold and underlined and italicized.
[20:18] So what you’re doing with the design is you’re merely highlighting things that are advantageous for you as a business to highlight. And so for example inside of our apps, we highlight things that differentiate us. We highlight things that are advantageous for us to highlight. For example with lead pages we handle, we make it very easy for someone to deliver a lead magnet.
[20:42] So someone opts in and we will deliver that lead magnet. Someone doesn’t have to go in and create a new form and then create a new list then upload the file and then create a new auto responder for that list. Like you just uploaded to lead pages and we just handled delivering it and you can send everyone to your central house list and we’ll handout the bribe. And when you do that or the lead magnet and when you do that at the very bottom of the email, it says digital asset delivery provided by lead pages like at the very, very bottom.
[21:08] So whenever anyone uses that, we kind of get a mini little – there’s not a link or anything but we get a little mention there at the bottom of the email. So it’s advantageous for other people to use our digital asset delivery service. So we do do things like highlight that feature not only because it saves people a whole lot of time but also because it helps us out quite a bit as a business. That’s only something that we’ve recently started doing.
[21:34] Originally what we were doing was – sort if it’s all in our landing pages and it was simple things like I’ll just give you some topics. A call to action should be above the fold. They should be visible without you having to scroll down. That’s a big one. The color of call to action buttons should be yellow. We’ve tested a whole bunch of different colors. When you have an opt-in box or some sort of action you want people to be taking, those just do much better like time and time again when the call to action is on the right side of the page as opposed to the left side of the page, just some basic things like that.
[22:09] We also experimented with hiding the opt-in box and only showing it when someone clicks on a button and then a pop-up shows. So there’s a lot of design things that we did that I just created some style guidelines around and rather than having to explain some complicated series of messaging and branding metaphors and instructions, I really reduced it to use two separate opt-in boxes. Use this color for calls to action. Have things on the right side instead of the left side if you do need to put the call to action on side versus another.
[22:42] It was super easy to communicate these things to a designer and getting the same level of effectiveness out of a set of rules. That would be so much more difficult to do that with copy.
[22:52] Rob: Thanks for dropping that awesome tactical knowledge there.
[22:55] Mike: I have a question about the color thing that you were just mentioning having yellow call to action buttons. Is that specifically related to your site because of the color scheme you used or did you test it against a variety of backgrounds and find that in general yellow works better than say orange or blue or whatever.
[23:11] Clay: So it is a mixture of yellow and orange and it works better provided that it’s not ugly. So if it clearly conflicts with everything then it doesn’t work because it doesn’t look good. But provided that it does work with the color scheme in some way, that it doesn’t out right conflict with the color scheme, we found that yellow works better than red, than blue, than green. In some cases these changes are 2% to 3%. In other cases it’s more like 15% to 20%. But we have found this as a consistent result.
[23:44] Mike: I was kind of curious because I’ve seen a lot of call to actions which are either yellow or orange and I just wasn’t sure whether that was an across the board rule or whether it really depended a little bit more on the color scheme that you’re already using.
[23:58] Rob: What else is interesting is you look at Amazon.com and you look at their add to cart button and that’s always been some type of orange. They’ve changed the shape of it now but it’s still like a yellowish orange. And even their wish list, add to wish list button is a lighter – it’s almost grey but it’s yellow in some places. I haven’t even thought about this because I never did split test button colors on Hit Tail but all of our buttons there are an orange. It does fit on the color scheme. It’s a blue and orange color scheme but that’s something good for me to take home.
[24:28] Clay: Yeah. I think there are findings like this that are really more stable than others. For example, for a long time, the best opt-in lead magnet was like free reports or white paper something like that. So everyone was giving those away. And then at some point when online video was big and sort of the average person could produce a decent video, people realized that if they gave away some sort of video course or series of videos or a video lesson that actually people would be much more likely to opt-in for that. So then everyone was giving away videos and that was working better than free reports.
[25:07] And then someone found out that if you just write something on a piece of paper by hand like a flow chart or some kind of diagram and scanned it and it just looked kind of jenky and handwritten that actually would work the best because it was a pattern interrupt. It was different than what most people were seeing so it’s unique.
[25:25] In marketing, there’s times when there’s like arms races when people are just jumping from thing to thing and everyone becomes immune to the new thing until someone figures out something else that’s different that works and everyone jumps on that bandwagon. And so far, the button color thing seems like it’s not one of those bandwagon things that it’s actually a stable consistent finding that isn’t a subject to marketing fads.
[25:50] Rob: Awesome. That actually leads us really well into the next topic we’re going to talk about which I’ve titled opt-in rewards that work and this is again from another podcast episode you talk about. Talk to us a little bit about what used to work and what isn’t going to work moving forward and then maybe trends you see of what is actually working better from now in the future?
[26:09] Clay: It seems to be – we look at a whole bunch of different landing pages and opt-in bribes and things like that and we’re fortunate with lead pages that we can actually see platform level data. So we can for example with lead pages test button colors across the entire platform and run like across platform split test. We haven’t been able to do this with lead magnets justly yet because it’s kind of hard to figure out how to run this test but it’s something that we want to do.
[26:36] But individually and certainly in our business, we found a shift in what works. When it comes to lead magnets, people are wanting tools and resource lists and things that require very little amount of effort but get a maximum amount of result. So things like spreadsheets where you can plug-in something and get something out of it that’s useful. If I ran a cooking site, I would want to give away a list of recipes right? Because you don’t have to read a lot. You don’t have to process a lot of content. You don’t have to synthesize much. There’s just sort of a list of things on a page and you look at them and you make the recipe, follow the instructions.
[27:18] What’s working really well right now are resource lists. So lists of resources you need to get results in your specific area. I sort of realized this when I was looking at the best selling issues of magazines like back packer magazine and golf digest and photography magazine and reliably with these magazines the best selling issues of these magazines are the gear guides right?
[27:43] So the guides where they’re telling you the top golf clubs to get if its golf magazine to hit a long drive or the best cameras to get or the lenses to get and the tripods to get. People love this stuff. It’s because as humans we have this belief that if we only have the tools the pros had then we would get the same results that the pros have. And in a lot of cases that’s actually true. So what we found really works is just a page or two listing the top resources that a new person or someone approaching a topic should acquire to help them get results as quickly as possible.
[28:19] So life if you’re at a yoga website, you might want to list for a man and a woman what shorts should you buy, what shirt, what yoga mat to get. If you don’t have access to a local yoga studio sort of what DVD set to start with? Because this is really just what people want. They don’t want to have to figure out all this stuff and if you just give someone a list of resources that give them a reliable proven starting point and it’s based on your research and your expertise, that kind of thing can get an insane opt-in rate compared to some like 50 page long eBook that someone has to pour over and carve out time to read.
[28:56] So generally things where people can consume a very small amount of information and get a fairly significant result but software lead magnets do incredibly well. I remember back in the day when I was blogging quite a bit, I remember writing a series of 1500 word blog post where I would painstakingly make some point that I thought was so important. I would get a whole lot of comments but I wouldn’t get a lot of people opting in.
[29:27] Once I spent an entire month writing an eBook and I spent three weeks once making an entire video course showing people how to do something and yet a WordPress plug in that one of our developers made over a weekend blew all of those away in terms of list growth and the number of opt-ins we got because people just value tools. People are sick of long winded eBooks. They’re sick of 15 minute long talking head videos and they just want something that’s going to give them immediate value and isn’t going to require a whole bunch of their time.
[30:02] Mike: That sounds a lot like giving people the information versus giving them the actual tools to do something. Obviously if you give them the information they can do it themselves but if you give them the tools to do it then not only are they a lot more likely to do it but its going to take them a lot less time and effort to do it. So it seems like those things would be much more valuable to them and would therefore convert a lot better.
[30:24] Clay: I think you hit the nail on the head. I think done for you just really out performs do it yourself and I think that’s part of the reason why developers are in such high demands right now is because we are craving as a society tools that automate the information we’ve been given about how to do things. So whenever you can automate an instruction set, that just has a much higher value than just giving someone the instruction set. I think you’re absolutely right.
[30:55]Rob: The next one is email on mobile devices. You mentioned in an episode that over 1/3 of emails are opened on mobile devices. I looked it up today and Litmos is saying of their emails that it’s about 44% so it’s growing. Its going to overtake the majority of emails certainly within a year or two are going to be opened on mobile devices meaning tablets and mobile phones.
[31:17] What are the implications of that for those of us who have been basically been doing email marketing and know how to do it, I’ve been doing it for years. We’re used to larger screens and used to the same basic strategies. What do we have to do differently for mobile devices?
[31:32] Clay: Yeah. A few things. I think the first is you have some big huge complicated template, don’t. If you want some sort of graphical branding or HTML branding on your emails, kind of have something thin and minimalistic and that’s at the top and that sort of establishes whatever you want to establish by having a graphical email in the first place but make that sort of limited because its affecting your screen real estate so that’s one thing.
[31:58] The second thing is that just like you want calls to action to be above the fold, make sure the calls to action in your emails are above the fold that they are clearly visible without anyone having to scroll down on a mobile device. Right? Usually you want to get the click without someone having to move through the email. They should be able to do that without reading a whole lot of information.
[32:22] So don’t have huge overly graphic email templates that you use to send out your newsletter. Make sure the call to action is above the fold. Those are sort of the two rules of thumb and make sure that when someone does click on the link that they are sent to a landing page if you’re looking to get an email address or get someone to take some kind of action, make sure you are sending them to mobile responsive landing pages and that those landing pages don’t require them to input a lot of data.
[32:49] So if someone’s coming from a mobile device, maybe you shouldn’t ask for a first name last name phone number address, email address, location, zip code, nobody’s going to fill that out from their mobile device. Maybe just ask for an email address and then you can follow-up over time by asking for more information or you can move that to a phone call. Maybe just ask for their phone number but I would encourage you to not ask for more than one piece of information when someone’s coming to a landing page from a mobile device.
[33:20] Rob: Awesome. This is especially relevant. My newest product is called Drip and it’s at getdrip.com and we’re launching next month and one thing we really focused on is putting together a single template. We don’t even offer fancy templates at this point. We may never offer them because this is focused on email marketing, not email newsletters. And so it’s good to hear you say that. I’ve always despised that fixed width newsletter templates that have the fancy border around them and now I’m on my iPhone, my finger is over the delete button when those things get there because you try to resize them and the text stretches and it doesn’t wrap right and so it looks really goofy on a small screen.
[34:00] Mike: One of the things you brought up was about having things up above the fold. I’m just curios what your thoughts are on how much that applies to mobile devices and also to desktops general. I was just at a conference called Behavior Con this past week. And one of the researchers who had presented essentially said that at this point, having things above or below the fold doesn’t matter nearly as much because people are doing things on their mobile devices and when they’re browsing web pages they basically expect to have to scroll up and down.
[34:29] So they’re much more comfortable and much more sued to scrolling up and down. I was just curious what your thoughts were and what you have kind of seen out in the field.
[34:38] Clay: Yeah. I think there are a lot of opinions out there. I can tell you that our data has consistently shown that generally speaking and there are huge diversions on this. The more work you require of someone to do something, the less likely they are to do it. Unless you’re being very intentional about requiring more work and its sort of a strategic component of your marketing. We found that when you’re in the context of a trust relationship that you have with someone on your email list, you’ve built up a relationship with them.
[35:09] So given that they’re sort of a context of trust, you are an effective copywriter so you know how to communicate the value of what you’re providing in a very short period of time if you have the links above the fold you’re going to do better. It may or may not be true that people expect to do more scrolling. I think that’s probably true. I don’t think it’s accurate to say that it doesn’t make a different what so ever whether or not the links are above the fold. Certainly in our experience it does make a difference.
[35:36] Rob: Yeah that’s been my experience as well. That could be changing. I guess Mike was saying that the person at Behavior Con was saying that now that mobile is around, people are so used to scrolling but in the past as I was testing it, to me it’s a rule of thumb at this point until I see data otherwise I’m going to have a hard time moving my calls to action below the fold.
[35:54] Clay: We’ll often times do both. So we’ll have a call to action at the very top sort of below the headline and the core messaging and sometimes we’ll have a bunch of bullet points and we’ll have a call to action at the bottom. It’s not really in my opinion one or the other often you can do both. I think generally speaking most businesses have a variety of personas on their website.
[36:17] There’s been this debate like should I give away a free course or an eBook, something like that or a webinar opt-in and we’re like do all of them. Address the variety of psychological profiles that could end up on your website and do various things. I think it’s the same with calls to action. I think it’s the same with the emails. Have a call to action at the top of the email and have one at the bottom so when they’ve scrolled to the bottom and they can no longer see the top that they don’t have to scroll to the top again to hit the link.
[36:46] So I think when in doubt, put more calls to action in your marketing pieces provided that it isn’t overkill and it doesn’t become obnoxious and so in your face that it actually repels people.
[36:57] Rob: Alright. Good advice. Clay, well we’re getting close to wrapping up here. I have 4 or 5 more topics in the outline. If people want to hear about those, these are things like whether you should ask for first name in your opt-in forms. I’m betting a YouTube URL in an email and why that’s a really good way to get a lot of YouTube views as well as a definition of a never ending sales funnel. If people want to find out about those, that they can subscribe to the marketing field podcast and I’d say go back 6 to 12 months and listen through those and you’ll hear all about that stuff.
[37:27] We only have time to tackle one more thing and that is a two step opt-in process. I have never heard of this. You mentioned that you’ve been doing it. Tell us what it is and why it’s working so much better than traditional one step opt-in?
[37:40] Clay: Yes. So I have this realization and I have these hypotheses that when people go to a website or to a landing page for example, they’re making a determination about whether or not it’s a giving page or a taking page. And when all they see is front and center is an opt-in box and they probably never been to that site before, they’re probably going to assume this is a taking page. So how can we change that?
[38:08]And one thing that I tested that ended up working incredible well is taking that opt-in box and only displaying it after someone clicks on the call to action button. So let’s say you’re doing a webinar. Rather than having the webinar opt-in box right there front center on the registration page, have a button that says sign me up for the webinar and when people click on that button you immediately show a popup that allows people to opt-in.
[38:40] I was at a farmer’s market the other day and someone was selling t-shirts at the farmers market. They didn’t have my size. I wore a medium. I went up to the guy and I said hey do you have the shirt in a medium and he immediately reached below the table and handed me a medium shirt. And I was a little shocked at how quickly he did it but because he gave it to me immediately when I asked for it, I ended up buying somehow. It was almost like this hypnotic response. It’s kind of the same way with a two step opt-in form.
[39:10] It creates a yes ladder. If you say yes to clicking on the button that says sign me up for this event, then the probability that you’ll say yes to opting-in as soon as the opt-in box appears is much greater. If you can get someone to commit at a low level of commitment by clicking on that button, the likelihood that you’ll commit at a greater level by opting in when that opt-in box appears as a popup is much greater.
[39:36] Usually when you’re on a landing page, you have to fill out the forms and then you click the submit button. But what if you added an additional step of having someone click a button that triggered a popup that allowed someone to opt-in right? It just puts a really easy step before a more complex step or a more sort of difficult and I guess emotionally taxing step.
[40:00] So there’s a variety of reasons why this works. Another reason why this works is that when you click on a button that says register me for this event and a pop up appears where you can actually fill out a form and opt-in, it really brings the decision to a head. Usually when you’re just looking at a landing page, you can browse the content on the page. You can look at different things and you might leave the page or click on a header link and leave that page.
[40:27] But when you click on a button that says register me for this event and a popup appears with two or three fields that you fill out and then submit, you have to make a decision one way or another about whether or not you’re going to opt-in. you have to make a decision. You can’t just ignore that all together. And by getting a much greater percentage of people who visit a landing page, to make a decision one way or another about whether or not they’re going to opt-in you get a lot more opt-ins.
[40:58] If everyone in the entire world had to make a decision about whether or not they were going to opt-in to your landing page, you would have the world’s biggest email list. But because most people don’t make a decision one way or another when they end up on a landing page, you lose a lot of people. So there’s a variety of reasons why this works we found with our pages we’ve gotten huge bumps in opt-in rates just by adding two step opt-in processes. And sort of the average that we’ve seen is about a 30% relative increase in conversion rate by taking one step opt-in processes and making them two step opt-in processes.
[41:33] Rob: So let’s say someone has a Saas app or a website selling software of some kind. We’ve encouraged them on this show is they should have email opt-ins on their blog and sometimes on their homepage and all that kind of stuff. For a software company, more of a Saas business, what kinds of upfront question or upfront thing would they put on that button? Or what would they be asking to get that first step of the opt-in.
[42:00] Clay: So you’re asking what would be the text on the call to action button.
[42:04] Rob: Yes.
[42:05] Clay: So if you’re doing webinar and I encourage everyone who’s in the Saas business to be doing webinars to drive sales. It could just be like quicker to secure my spot. But if you’re offering a white paper, the best text we ever have found is just the phrase download now. It used to be the winner of all these split tests was the phrase free instant access. There was something about the phrase about combining the word free and instant and access and yielded the highest opt-in rate for a white paper whatever you’re giving away provided that its downloadable.
[42:41] But recently we personally found a doubling of the opt-in rate by changing the words free instant access to download now for white papers and such. It all depends on what you’re giving away. I prefer things that are downloadable because we have this psychological need as humans to possess stuff. If it’s in the cloud and it’s not on our hard drive, we’re not possessing it.
[43:04] If you can give something away that someone can just have tucked in a folder somewhere like even if they never opened it in the rest of their lives, the fact that they can download something and put it on their hard drive to keep and to hold and to hoard or whatever they’re going to do with it, that’s just really powerful. So if you can put the phrase download now on a button, please put that on a button. That’s just working incredibly well.
[43:27] Rob: Yeah when you said there’s throw phrases, free instant access to me sounds just so overplayed now. I feel like I saw that on buttons for years and download now absolutely, I would be much more likely to click on that. That’s awesome. Thank you.
[43:40] To be honest Clay, this has been a real pleasure. You’ve brought a lot of very actionable – that’s what I like about the stuff I’ve heard from you is its super tactical. It’s very focused and some people could say these are like little things, little tweaks you could make but I think they’re big tweaks. These are the things that really once you get a business going, can really take you up those double digit conversion rate increase type things. So I really want to thank you for your time. Mike and I, we know you’re busy running your company Lead Bright. How would folks get in touch with you?
[44:10] Clay: I would encourage people to go to blog.leadpages.net and about once a week we give away a tested and proven landing page template that folks can download and add to their website and do whatever they want with. All of these templates that we give away are ones that we’ve tested internally. We’ve used on multiple client and customer site and that we’ve sort of proven to work.
[44:36] So we provide kind of a free downloadable lead magnet to people on a weekly basis via our blogs. So that’s a good place to find the latest of what we’re doing in terms of our conversion lab. So that’s probably the best way to find me.
[44:51] Rob: Awesome. Very cool. Well thanks again Clay for coming on and yeah, I guess we’ll be chatting with you soon.
[44:58] Clay: Absolutely. Thanks Rob. Thanks Mike.
[45:59] Music
[45:03] Mike: If you have question for us, you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.