Show Notes
- The RivalFox post
- RivalFox’s follow-up post, on how to connect with industry leaders
Transcrip
[00:00] Rob: In this episode for Startups for the Rest of Us Mike and I discussed how a SaaS app called RivalFox launched to $2,000 a month in recurring revenue. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 177.
[00:11] Music
[00:18] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:28] 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. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:34] Mike: It’s getting close to MicroConf. One of the things that we try to do every year is to setup a website where people can connect with each other. This year we’re doing something similar and this year again we’re on a new one but I’ve been neck deep in technical issues with the new site so that people can connect with each other and there’s issues with permission where people are trying to log in and create their accounts and they can get in and they create their account but then they’re not able to access the site for some reason. It basically just says permission is denied. So it’s taken up a lot of time but it’s one of those things where it’s time sensitive, kind of eating up a lot of time right now.
[01:07] Rob: And this is one of the struggles of doing multiple things since you are doing consulting. You’re working on Audit Shark. You do the podcast. You’re doing MicroConf. I mean it just – it does stack up and some weeks I find that some multiple week stretches I’m just not able to really focus on my business and it’s obvious that this week is one of those weeks for you.
[01:26] Mike: I’ve made some progress here and there but then you’re just running the technical challenges and it’s not like you can carve out an hour or two and say okay, this is how long it’s going to take because you just don’t know. I mean it might take those two hours, it might take 6 or 7 and you just go no idea until it’s over and done with.
[01:41] Rob: I want to call out a couple of complimentary iTunes reviews that we’re up to 331 worldwide reviews. David Solberg from the US says wow, they give solid no hype advice about running a small lifestyle tech business. In addition they let you know what they’re up to which gives you a window in the day to day or how to run this type of business. What sets this podcast apart is a lack of winning the lottery philosophy a lot of people seem to have. I’m actually a little upset that this podcast doesn’t cost anything. It seems unfair to the value I’m getting.
[02:11] And then Gavin Hamar from the United Kingdom says the tips I’ve learned from rob and mike have helped me grow my bootstrapped startup sendable.com to six figures in monthly revenue and from just myself working in my spare bedroom to a 10 person company. Although I’m no longer a solopreneur, the excellent advice they give applies to anyone running a small SaaS business. Really appreciate the reviews guys and if you ever reviewed us in iTunes, that’s the best way to help pay us back if we’ve done anything that has helped you in your business or just kept you entertained. Log it into iTunes and giving us a five star. We’d really appreciate it.
[02:44] Mike: Cool. What else have you got going on?
[02:46] Rob: Well the other thing I wanted to call out some places. I’m going to be out and about over in the next few months. So if you’re coming to MicroConf in mid-April I’ll obviously be there for several days. If you’re going to the copy bloggers authority conference in Denver in early May I’m going to be there. Ping me on Twitter or something, we can setup a time just to hangout and then I’m going to be speaking at the small is beautiful conference in Glasgow, Scotland in June. If you’re listening to this, you’re going to be at any of those, let’s make sure as the date approaches maybe a week or two before, just ping me and we’ll figure out a way to hang out.
[03:20] Mike: I’m looking at kind of scaling back some of the consulting that I’m doing, see how that kind of impacts different things.
[03:26] Rob: Sure. So I want to dive into today’s topic. We’re going to be talking about how a Saas app named RivalFox launched in $2,000 a month in recurring revenue. And this is based on a blog post on their blog. We’ll obviously link that up in the show notes. The blog post is titled how we grew our SaaS startups MRR, stands for monthly recurring revenue from 0 to over $2,000 in under a month.
[03:48] Now, you might be wondering why would we be talking about a SaaS app that “only” and I’m putting that in air quotes, it only grew to $2,000 a month in the first month. Because it’s a super realistic number to shoot for. Even without a big launch list, even without a ton of marketing experience, that’s a very viable thing to hit. Now if you’re not able to hit $2,000 I wouldn’t throw in the towel or I wouldn’t be too disappointed. I know many successful founders these days who launched to 500 a month in recurring revenue in the first month and now they’re doing literally tens of thousands of dollars. It’s just that the long, slow, upward trend of a SaaS app takes time.
[04:25] But what I liked about their post, their post is in line with a lot of stuff we’ve said in the podcast in the past but I liked that it’s their story and I liked that they lend some of their own insight and thoughts to it and it’s really not that complicated the way they lay it out. I have it broken down into eight steps that they took, it’s pulled right from their blog post and then there’s six key lessons that they point out afterwards kind of afterthoughts. So I want to walk through these steps and then Mike and I can obviously give our interpretation, some of these I definitely agree with and others I feel like they could have improved.
[04:56] Step 1 RivalFox took was to setup a landing page. And they used launch rock. Other options that I’ve seen work really well that are super easy are kick off labs. There’s the WordPress coming soon plug-in from John Turner and frankly there are bazillion theme forest static HTML landing pages. What do I like about this? It’s what I do with all my apps. It’s what I recommend everyone do even if you’re not really in an online niche. If you see someone in person or you talk to them on the phone, I’m sure you can get their email address or get their phone number, that’s awesome. But it’s like maybe a little bit less of a confrontational or hard sell way to say you know what, make sure to check out the website…whatever and email and we can let you know or you can actually go into people’s email in there if they give you permission.
[05:41] There’s a ton of ways even if you’re not doing strictly online marketing. Having a landing page up and at least having a presence that looks attractive and it gives you a value proposition is frankly a really good way to get started building that list.
[05:54] Mike: Yeah. I think the real value here is in some ways you’re validating interest in the idea and obviously there’s a huge difference between what you ultimately deliver versus what you kind of promise and when you’re preparing people on your landing pages for what it is that you’re eventually going to be offering. But at the same time it kind of gets you that foot in the door to open up the dialogue with people and really find out some of the subtleties of what it is that they’re really looking for because you might have a general idea and for RivalFox, I mean their tagline here is monitor competitors create opportunity.
[06:25] So the idea here is that they’re going to be monitoring your competitors and if you’re interested in that kind of thing you signed up for and they can initiate a dialogue with you that allows them to start asking more in depth questions for example like how would you like to monitor your competitors? What sorts of things would you like to monitor your competitors for? Is it social engagement? Is it how many times they’ve updated their website. All sorts of different things. But the key here is that you really want to be able to open up that dialogue with people who are coming to your website and that’s really what the purpose of these is for.
[06:53] Rob: The second step RivalFox took was to setup a blog and they said that they received well over 10,000 page views within six months and to quote them from their post they said “the traffic was great but the conversion rate from blog readers was lower than we had hoped as were newsletter signups. We decided that we needed more prominent calls to action so we introduced a screen for newsletter signups and linked with Aweber. This was featured front and center and increased our newsletter signups 100%.”
[07:20] We also introduced a popup which opens after 10 seconds and asks if they want to check out the RivalFox page. This popup increased the number of people going from the blog to the trial page from 5 to 15% which skyrocketed the number of leads. So these are good suggestions and you can use them as you feel that they jive with your audience. Some people don’t want to do popup at all. So they either have like an ethical aversion to them or they feel like it’s going to drive their audience away.
[07:44] And pretty much all the test when I’ve seen people use some kind of popup, some kind of motion whether it’s just a little like a Drip opt-in widget in the lower right that kind of pops up or it’s an actual in your face div kind of modal popup, those things will increase your signups dramatically over just having like a static widget in your right hand side bar or something.
[08:05] Mike: Yeah. I think this is one of those classic things that you come from a developer mindset you don’t necessarily want to bother people because you wouldn’t want to be bothered and it’s sometimes getting in people’s faces and asking them explicitly to opt-in to something that you have to offer is really going to make an impact in your business because the signups are going to be dramatically higher than if you didn’t do that. And I’ll say it’s one of those balances. It’s a delicate balance you have to make between your developer mindset versus the marketing mindset and really in cases like this, your marketing mindset, as long as it’s not negatively impacting the image of your company you really need to lean towards those things that work better even though they’re not things that you would be interested in or you they’re not things that you’d like to do.
[08:47] Rob: And I think I’d also like to comment on the step is to setup a blog. I don’t think that’s necessarily the step number 2 you want to take in every case. I think that if you are a good writer and you’re going to hustle and put together sharable and super valuable content the people are actually going to engage with, then I think it’s a no brainer and I think it’s a great way to start getting traffic and getting social media shares.
[09:10] Social media, for what it’s worth is a decent way to share. It’s a decent way to spread the word. It’s also a decent way to start getting Google rankings pretty fast. If a lot of people start talking about you especially they do G+ shares, Google takes notice of that and they know that people are talking about it. So if you’re going to put in the effort or you have the funds to hire someone who’s a really good writer, not like a $20 per article person who’s kind of just going to slam something together but really good content then I think that blog is valuable.
[09:38] On the other side once you start getting any traffic, if you use a tool like HitTail and you install it and you start getting some suggestions and you do want to go with some less expensive $20 articles you can do the Ruben Gomez approach which is to have your main blog with really highly viral content that’s high quality and then have a separate article section that’s not linked to or visible in the main blog feed because you want that to stay super high quality and you get articles for $20 a pop that are valuable but they’re just not as high end. They’re not as long and they’re not as in depth and you put them in this article section that’s just a separate category on the blog and then you put an article’s link in the footer of your website.
[10:16] That article section will start to build up that snowball of long tail traffic and for that purpose I absolutely think that it’s almost a no-brainer because it’s so cheap and because it’s not a ton of work to do that. I think that most companies, if you’re going to do any type of online marketing or any SEO effort, I think that is definitely worth it. The content marketing side where you do have the blog and you have the highly viral content, that one, it takes either more time or more money than a lot of folks have so that’s one where I would think twice about it really before diving into it too hard.
[10:48] Mike: All that stuff’s a balancing act is about where you spend your time and if you have the money to outsource the creation of that writing for your blog or for your website then sure, definitely, go down that path because you’re trading your money for time that other people are going to spend building that stuff and obviously there’s still also the creative side that you don’t necessarily have to worry about. But it’s always a balancing act like how much time do you have, how much money do you have and what sorts of things are possible and feasible given the constraints on the resources that you have.
[11:18] Rob: I think the other thing I would add to this step is there’s often something that you can give away on a landing page that could potentially have more value than actually trying to – I’ll constantly crank out a series of blog posts because that’s kind of a flywheel that you have to keep up with if you want the blog to stay active. And so if you look at giving away sample templates or an eBook or a tools list or a screen cast or something and then you setup a landing page that it is targeted at a specific Google keyword, something that a lot of folks are searching for, that’s another way to think about this as driving this inbound traffic. Blog is one way but I think a landing pages and then long tail SEO are probably the other two ways that I would look at early on.
[11:58] The next step that RivalFox took is they say to consider guest blogging and to quote their article, they say B to B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads per month than those who do not. Building an audience and establishing trust takes time but sometimes this can be sped up through guest blogging. Now, they said that they had taken two stabs at guest blogging. They did not receive a ton of traffic but they still thought that you should at least consider it if your niche lends itself to that.
[12:26] And I like this approach. I think that if you start a blog on your own site, that’s great for that long tail traffic and that’s great for the long-term traffic of building up a flywheel but it takes time to do that whereas if you go out and guest post you’re able to get guest posts on affiliated sites or sites that are in the same niche as you that’s a really quick way to get several hundred clicks through to your website either to a home page or frankly a landing page that gives something away is so much of a better way to do it to actually in your byline where it says so and so wrote this post is the founder of this, if that blog will allow you to give something away and to say – to receive my free 20 page eBook or my top 10 tools that you need to – in this case of RivalFox, the top 10 things you need to know about your competitors then they click through, they give an email address and they’re able to download that, that’s a great way to build that launch list.
[13:14] Mike: I heard an interesting interview with Nathan Barry on the product people podcast with Justin Jackson. Nathan had talked a lot about doing exactly that where he basically was trying to tap into other people’s audience as opposed to relying on SEO and various other mechanisms for building up his email list, what he did was instead he started tapping into other audiences that were kind of overlapping because they already have a built in audience and building one from scratch is obviously a lot more difficult than it is to go out and tap into these existing audiences. And one of the things that he did which struck me as interesting was he didn’t necessarily just rely on that byline. What he did was he actually asked hey can I put in a little widget here or something that basically allows them to sign up directly for his mailing list.
[14:03] So in that way, he’s essentially helping to limit the number of people who are kind of falling out of that funnel which I thought was a really great idea. I mean if that’s something that you’re able to pull off when working with anyone you’re doing a guest post for, it sounds like that would be a much preferable way to do things just because you can limit the number of people who are falling out of that funnel.
[14:22] Rob: Yeah. I like that idea although if I were letting someone guest post on my blog there’s no way I’d let them put an opt-in widget on any of the blogs that I have. But if you can find someone to do it, sure, it keeps them from having to click through.
[14:34] Mike: I don’t think it was specifically an opt-in widget but there was something specific that he was doing. He wasn’t just relying on the byline. I think maybe he has something in there that said if you’re interested in hearing more sign up on this page or something like that. So it wasn’t like it was just using the byline to come to his site. It was essentially taking that byline and directing them to more of a landing page.
[14:53] Rob: Right and I think there’s another really good way to do it is if you’re able to naturally just mention your product inside the blog post and you’re not trumpeting it or trying to market it but you really mentioned it as a example or somehow get a link in there, if that post does get a lot of traffic, you will get a lot more clicks than just having something in the byline. The fourth step that RivalFox recommended was to take advantage of social media. And they said for us, as a B to B company most of our social media leads come from twitter and Quora. We have plenty of views from LinkedIn but they didn’t convert. The LinkedIn visitors were in the competitive intelligence industry and while they might be interested in what we’re doing, our product is not geared for them.
[15:33] But then they go on to talk about a single Quora post someone mentioned them in and they received quite a few clicks and I guess the conversion rate was 15% from visitor to trial which is a really nice number. So I’ve definitely seen especially in the B to B space Quora, LinkedIn and twitter, those would be my three – Facebook and Pinterest are obviously better for the prosumer or the consumer markets but these are all decent channels and as much as I’m not a fan of trying to build up that following, I don’t believe in building up that big Twitter following to try to one day convert people, I really think that works well if we’re going to do a lot of content marketing and going to be putting out your own content just building the audience for the audience sake I think is a very long way to look at it.
[16:15] So certainly being on Twitter and sharing your stuff and other stuff is good and obviously Quora and LinkedIn can bring in traffic as well. So there’s something to be said about social media. It’s not nearly as valuable as direct paid traffic to a landing page or obviously building up your own email list.
[16:32] Mike: I think the interesting thing about some of those things is when you’re looking at websites like Quora, there’s generally a discussion that’s going on that if you can find the right discussions, you can kind of gently pitch your product in there as a potential option. So people are talking about a specific problem that they’re having, you can talk about your products and say hey, just as a disclaimer, I own this product but it addresses this particular problem. And anyone who’s searching on the internet is inevitably going to come across that as one of the options in Google or ping or wherever they’re searching.
[17:04] If they click on 2 or 3 different links and then those links come back to your site because they’re talking about solving that particular problem. Your product that solve it and then they link through their to yours, it essentially widens the net that you’re casting for attracting traffic. So I can definitely see how that stuff can help. I think with regards to Twitter, I totally agree with you. it just depends on why it is you’re creating that following. If it’s just creating a following to have a following its probably not going to do much for you but you I believe have to have a specific goal and set of strategies in mind for what you’re going to do with that audience once you’ve got it. Because again just attract people and then either not do anything with them or hope that they’re going to convert because you have to have a plan in mind for that.
[17:46] Rob: Yeah I would agree with that. The fifth step is to have a private beta. So they gathered some users inside and then they gathered feedback. They let people signup and then after 29 days they sent them a survey. I definitely think that this kind of early access private beta approach is the way to go and to not do a launch, I guess they had 700 people on their email list and they only let a few into this private beta and if you’re going to figure out people who are actually going to give you good feedback that can somehow get that info out of a survey or just because you recognize names on the list, that is a far better way to go than just emailing 10 or 20 people randomly because you are trying to get folks who are going to have a high correlation with your perfect audience.
[18:26] The idea in the old days if you’ve built up this launch list of 700 we would really just email that whole launch list let everybody in then just scramble to try to keep them around and if you have the time to go through this private beta and not only test out your app but test out your on boarding process, your support process, tweak your app, add features, get it to where you really are providing a lot more value that by the time you email those 700 people you’re going to convert so many more of them than if you have just emailed them all in day one so I do like that RivalFox did this.
[18:56] They don’t say in here whether they charge during the private beta. I think it’s fine not to charge but to make it upfront apparent that people who are in their beta are not going to get a free lifetime account because you don’t want people who are in their who want it for free. The best feedback is going to come from people who are willing to pay for it even if they don’t have to pay for it during that private beta but as soon as it’s out of that that they’re willing to dive in and become a paying – maybe a discounted but a paying customer of yours.
[19:22] Mike: Yeah. I think when you’re going through the private beta, one of the things that you can do is you can look for the people that are signed up to your email list or have kind of signed up early on and just go through them and look those people up by domain names. And this works a lot better if you have a B to B product because then typically those people are signing up under their business account because it can be really hard to tell unless you’re using something like report of whether or not somebody’s Gmail account is kind of associated with any given business.
[19:51] So it helps to be able to filter those down and figure out who they’re working for and whether or not they are actually going to have the problem that your product solves. And those are the people that you really want to target as your early access or beta users because they’re the ones who are going to give you the most valuable feedback as opposed to as Rob said, the people who are just kind of looking for some sort of a freebie or a very steep discount on software that they may or may not necessarily use going down the road.
[20:17] Rob: Step six is now that you’re in beta, submit to startup directories and services. What’s cool is they give a list of here of who they submitted to and how many signups they got from each. So beta list which is betali.st is one that I’ve had a lot of success with. RivalFox said they’ve gained over 400 signups in two days with a 30% conversion rate from visitor to trial. Then they said they submitted to CSS mania and they got 15 signups and then killer startups, they paid $167 to I guess be featured within 48 hours because killer startups has a 3-6 month review window unless you pay. But they said they only got 4 signups. There’s plenty of other places. They list them all here. We’ll link over to it.
[20:59 But this is a no brainer. Right? You’re not going to build a flywheel here and you’re not going to make tens of thousands of dollars but for the time that it will take you or the few dollars you have to pay a virtual assistant to submit to these directories, it’s a no brainer to do it. And one of our listeners Robert Gram has posted a more extensive list over on his website.
[21:18] Mike: It’s at whitetailsoftware.com.
[21:20] Rob: He put a nice list together. I think he had his VA do it and I definitely recommend submitting to as many as you can to help build that list.
[21:27] Mike: And the nice part about that is that a lot of that stuff you can use AVA to go through that list and have them kind of filter out which sites are probably not going to be a good fit based on the types of questions that they’re asking or have them go through and kind of aggregate all the different things that they are asking so that you can figure out what information you should be submitting. But as Rob said, that’s a onetime thing. It’s not like you’re going to get a flywheel out of this and it’s not like you’re going to do it more than once but it can provide some decent inbound traffic just because of the way that those sites work.
[22:00] Rob: Step seven for RivalFox was to have an open beta and they said use mailchimp or your email provider to announce it. They had a list of 700 people and they said that they got 300 signups which is really high. That’s very, very impressive. They must have a very targeted list and a nice sequence of emails. They also talk a little bit about – they say do you pay in advance or not? Should you ask for a credit card upfront? And here’s the quote from the post. He says “at first we started with credit card required which lead to 20 customers who signed up but only 8 which remained customers after the trial. After one month we switched to no credit card required. Many more people signed up for the free trial and our conversion rate grew 5 to 10%.”
[22:39] So obviously they’ve gone without credit card. I would like to dig in through their conversion rate a little more because he doesn’t say what that 5 to 10% rate is if that’s visitor to trial or if that’s trial to paid. The recommendation I mean the pass is my default ask for credit card upfront I think there are cases when you shouldn’t or when you get down the line and you understand your funnel and you have enough data to actually test, you should absolutely test. But in the early days my default is always to ask for credit card for you want to get the feedback from the people who are actually willing to pay for it.
[23:08] But with that said, I mean you mentioned a couple episodes ago, you’re going to be pulling your credit card down. I know two other people right who are testing without having a credit card upfront because they just want to get more people into their funnel and see what they can do. So there’s a case to be made for both.
[23:23] So those were the eight steps that RivalFox used to launch to $2,000 in recurring revenue. Now then they break down six key lessons that they took away. The first one is they take about their traffic breakdown and they said that they received plenty of leads on a daily basis and the average breakdown was 32% organic search traffic 13% referral traffic 28% social traffic and 26% direct traffic. So that gives you an idea of kind of the four areas that they were really aiming at and then one of their recommendations is to start blogging as soon as possible and you can imagine that since it worked well for them, that would definitely be a recommendation.
[24:03] Then they say connect to industry leaders for opinions and basically said that they were using social media to connect with industry leaders who shared their content provided invaluable insight into their product. I’d frankly be interested to see an entire blog post breaking down how they did that, what they did and what the results from that were. It’s a very high touch and time intensive thing to do especially pitching kind of industry leaders or just people with big social followings who you kind of know of. It’s kind of an outbound sales like an outbound reach approach of getting people to kind of retweet your stuff but it can obviously work.
[24:39] And their fourth takeaway was to experiment in a controlled way and they said that while reading advice by fellow entrepreneurs is helpful, there’s no perfect formula for how to launch your product. Do controlled experiments to see what’s best for you. And they said that they reduced their trial period to 14 days instead of 30 and they used intercom.io to contact people and they concentrated on people who signed up for the trial. They increased their conversion rate from 4.7% to over 14%. That’s a really nice way to go.
[25:05] And see if they’re not asking for credit card, you almost have to do that high touch inside sales stuff. I don’t know anyone who’s making no credit card work without using intercom or using phone. Email doesn’t typically cut it. It’s typically not enough but you actually need to really be touching base with folks who are getting into that funnel if you want to close them if they haven’t entered their credit card.
[25:26] Mike: I think the key piece of advice here to takeaway is that experimenting in a controlled way such that you’re actually measuring things and I think I did it as well but I would try something. I wouldn’t necessarily take a look at some of the stats associated with it. I’ve just kind of ballpark it or try go from a gut feel to whether or not it was working and that’s really not a good way to go. It sounds reasonable because you’re trying to say okay I’m trying to save time so I don’t want to setup anything to measure things.
[25:54] But at the same time I mean if you’re not measuring, how do you really know especially over a long period of time if you’re trying a couple of different things and you may be able to pay attention to it for a couple of days or for a couple of weeks but after that time period, if you don’t have systems in place that are going to be doing those measurements for you then it’s really, really hard to look back from 3-4 months later and say oh, I wonder how that went. And then you have to go back and try dig up statistics and it’s so much harder to try and retroactively do that than if you just setup the systems and software in place from day 1 to start measuring that stuff that you need to measure in order to figure out whether your experiments are working.
[26:29] Rob: Yeah, that’s a good point. And even without having to do a complicated setup you can go into Google analytics and create a goal using URL and that used to be easier than it is. Now it’s pretty complicated frankly. It shouldn’t take you more than 5 or 10 minutes to do that and of course I recommend doing that as soon as you have a landing page up, you create the goal of someone subscribing right away you’ll start seeing which traffic source is your message resonating with. As soon as you get into beta and you have a trial, it’s obviously a no brainer to create a goal for people signing up for a trial so that you can really see which traffic is converting.
[27:00] The fifth key lesson that they pointed out was to concentrate on inbound leads and they said connect your sales team to inside leads and concentrate on making those first customers 100% happy. And this is basically the high touch model we talked about. Getting those first 10 paying customers or 20 paying customers is so invaluable that its worth speeding a lot of time because you can learn a lot from them and it really helps shaping your product if you have some good folks in there early.
[27:25] And the sixth key lesson that they mentioned before they closed up the blog post is to not be afraid to ask people to pay early. They said if you asked people if they like your product, most will say yes. The real question is do they like your product enough to pay for it? The earlier you can get this information and the earlier you can start making revenue the better. So I feel like this conflicts a little bit with their thing of like to ask to pay in advance or not kind of credit card mentality upfront about not asking for credit card but I think maybe they’re only talking about in the early days of their product rather than in the early days of a trial.
[27:56] Mike: They did switch over their strategies. I mean they started asking for credit card upfront and then later on they removed that requirement and they start having those discussions and following up with people with intercom.io and in those cases if they asked if they liked their product then people say yes then they ask them if they’d be willing to pay essentially early before their trial period is up and I think in those cases – what’s your take on this? I mean would you offer them some sort of incentive for paying before their free trial is up or what?
[28:27] Rob: Yup. That’s a really good way to do it. That’s a common way to get more people signing up. It can skew metrics down the line. It can skew churn metrics and all that stuff. Yeah, early on that’s probably what I would do. Either a discount or hopefully not a discount but some type of something you can give away to them that is really valuable.
[28:46] Mike: Yeah, I was thinking that it might skew your churn as well because if they’re incentivized to pay early in order to get that incentive and they’re really not necessarily a good fit for the product then your turn will go up down the road and that obviously throws a wrench into the system but I’ve definitely looked to give them something. I just don’t know what it would be. I mean I think it depends a lot on your product, maybe some sort of educational or informational product that helps them use your tool better or allows them to grow their business in a way that the tool isn’t able to do explicitly.
[29:19] Rob: Yeah. I think overall I like their approach. What I like is this – I’m hoping that the blog post really lays out everything. I’m concerned that they may have left some stuff out. It’s pretty simple approach. It’s the landing page. They blogged. They did guest blogging. They use social media then they did the private beta, they listened to those customers. They submitted a directories then they did an open beta and that was it. They launched to 2,000 a month in recurring revenue.
[29:41] So while it’s not always that simple for sure, you have to build a product that people are actually interested in. Build a product people want. You have to have your pricing in check. Your marketing, your message, I mean there’s so much more to it but just in terms of kind of driving traffic and getting people in, seems like they did a pretty good job and I think 2,000 a month in recurring revenue on your first month is absolutely nothing to sneeze at.
[30:02] I do wonder if they vetted the idea before hand, if they had some early adapters or some people before they put up the landing page that said yes I really want that or if they just went off on their own and built it because if they did, it feels a little bit like a luck thing that they launched to 2,000 a month that they kind of got lucky with the idea. I think without getting some feedback early on and just taking an idea and running with it, the odds are that you’re going to build something that no one wants. I’d like to hear about that, about how they validated or if the validated early on.
[30:31] Mike: Yeah that would be kind of interesting to hear. I mean if you look back through some of their blog posts I mean it doesn’t seem like many of them are related explicitly to how they got started and how they’ve done things. I mean maybe the really, really early posts are but a lot of the later ones just aren’t. I think that wraps us up. If you have question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. 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 176 | Troubleshooting Early Customer Engagement
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 176.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:18] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:19] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:23] Rob: Things are good. I got two good pieces in use this week. One is we confirmed our final speaker for MicroConf. Many of you know Brennan Dunn from Planscope and he had done an attendee talk last year at MicroConf that got good reviews and then he had one of the highest voted antendee talks of this year and we decided to kick him up into the main stage. So he’s going to be talking about six tricks that helped him triple his SaaS growth rate and he sent me an outline of it and it looks pretty good. So I’m excited to have that nailed down and of course to have Brennan up there. So we have a good lineup this year.
[01:01] And then the other thing that’s going on is HitTail has just been doing really good in the past three weeks since I was able to get kind of the rewrite or the revamp done where I pull a Google web master tools keywords and work around the whole not provided thing. So I pretty much had a solid uptick in all metrics across the board. Trials are up, trial to paid conversion is up. Number of paying customers is up. Churn is down, all the things that you hoped for. So it feels good to have a win. I felt like I hadn’t one in a while. Good growth projected this month after maybe 4 or 5 consecutive months of either flat or minor decline.
[01:37] Mike: Very cool. I saw that HitTail started having a lot more I’ll say relevant keywords terms that it was suggesting because I hooked up mine to the Google web master tools and it pulled out something like 80 or 100 different terms that it said that I should take a look at whereas before it’s just not turning out very many.
[01:55] Rob: Right because there wasn’t enough traffic that was provided. Most of your traffic’s not provided so wasn’t able – didn’t have any data to work from. So it’s definitely way more valuable. Like I said its way more valuable to me in my own sites so I know it’s more valuable to other folks using it. So that feels good. How about you? What’s been going on?
[02:12] Mike: I want to issue kind of a correction from a couple of weeks ago. There was a website that I mentioned that I came across where I discovered the momentum plug-in for chrome was Scott Watermasysk. So we’ll put that in the show notes but I wanted to make sure we give credit where credit was due because I’m fairly certain that he was his. He did mention it on Twitter so I apologize for not saying it but at the time I just couldn’t remember.
[02:32] The other thing is that the inbox pause plug-in, it went haywire on me today so I couldn’t unpause my email and I freaked out because I had the check box clicked where it says hide the label that we put on all of the folders. So I couldn’t even go there to find it and I had to dig through the Gmail settings to figure out how to get my email back.
[02:53] Rob: Were you ever able to fix it?
[02:55] Mike: I guess the way that it works is when you click on the pause, what it does is it creates a rule. It removes the inbox tag from all of your incoming emails and then it adds them to this other inbox-pause-whatever the date is and it applies that label to it. But it hides that label if you clicked the checkbox. So I was able to go in and find it just by looking at all the tags and I said okay well, first of all delete this rule that is moving things over there and then I went in and took everything that was in there, moved it back into inbox and then I deleted that label and then everything showed up and then it said oh its unpaused. So I don’t know what happened. It just went haywire and it would not unpause for some reason. It just kept giving me this error message in Gmail. It was kind of freaky.
[03:38] Rob: Sure. So a warning to folks using inbox pause, it may not work all the time.
[03:42] Mike: Yeah but there is a way to get it back so it’s not a total loss. And then last thing is in terms of the marketing stuff for Audit Shark I think I’ve identified at least part of my marketing problem and I think that part of the issue is that I need to niche it down a little bit. One of the things that I found in talking to people is that Audit Shark is really implemented as a compliance product. And I’ve been kind of pitching it as a security product but security and compliance aren’t exactly the same thing. I mean there’s overlap but security’s much bigger market and compliance is just like a really small subset of it but a lot of my marketing materials talk about security.
[04:19] I mean if you go to my website there’s a drip campaign there for talking about securing your severs and it’s not about compliance or anything like that. And really, security in general is not what Audit Shark is good at. It’s good at compliance. So compliance is the name of the game that my target market is playing and I’m not speaking the same language. So I have to dig in there and start fixing that is really what the issue is.
[04:44] Rob: Yeah and I think this cropped up because you’ve done like a market. Originally it was going to be more about bank compliance and then you started looking into SaaS and kind of online businesses that have servers and that market is like larger and potentially easier to access and so I think probably those two messages have gotten mixed up in your marketing as you have attempted to make that switch.
[05:10] Mike: Yeah. That’s absolutely right. And there’s a lot of my site that needs to be updated and I’ve gone through and looked at my metrics and stuff for the SEO and things that I’ve done and I get a lot of traffic for compliance but once you get to my site it talks a lot more about security. So the reason you would click around on the site would be different that the reason you ended up on the site. So my bounce rate is probably higher than what I would like it to be.
[05:33] Rob: Right. So you mentioned that you’re going to niche it down to compliance from the larger security and compliance. What brings you to that?
[05:41] Mike: I have prospects who I’m talking to right now and in fact I have a demo for one tomorrow that they’re specifically looking for a compliance product. I’ve had conversations with some people who are in my early access program and try to figure out why it is that they’re not interacting with their software as much as I would’ve thought that they would or they’re not taking actions on things. Some of those conversations have really kind of lead me to the conclusion that what they’re looking for is security versus what the product provides as compliance. So do I educate them? I need to kind of figure out what the direction is going to be there. And I have some ideas about exactly what I’m going to do.
[06:16] Rob: Yeah and we talked a little offline. It seems like we should dive into that a little deeper in a couple of weeks I think just an episode where we really dive into where Audit Shark is. Be looking for something here and sometime in April where we will actually dive into this stuff deeper and address – there’s been some comments posted on the blog people asking what’s up with audit shark? What’s the status? And we’ll carve out a whole 30-40 minutes and really dive into that.
[06:39] Music
[06:42] Mike: Today we’re going to talk a little bit about troubleshooting customer engagement. One of the issues is if customers aren’t engaging with your product especially when you’re kind of in an early access phase, you really need to find out why. And it’s not just about learning what sorts of thing that they’re having challenges with. It’s about understanding it and figuring out where those customers fit into your future plans because obviously you want to make money from them but at the same time learning information from them is a lot more valuable than any money that they could give you. So if they’re pointing you down the wrong path, its probably worth a heck of a lot of money to find that out before you go too far down that path.
[07:21] Rob: So this is troubleshooting the lack of customer engagement is that right?
[07:24] Mike: Correct.
[07:25] Rob: So you mentioned early stage customer engagement. Is that what we’re going to focus on with this or do you think it applies even later once you’re already scaling up?
[07:32] Mike: I think that it applies much more when you’re early on because once you’re scaling up, you’re trying to do more optimization of where things are at and what things you can do to improve some of the different conversion rates and the different metrics that you’re looking at. But when you’re early on, you’re really trying to figure out is this the right messaging at all and are these the right people who are in my target market because there’s a difference between getting 5 or 10 people to pay for something and getting 500 to 1,000 people to pay for something.
[08:01] I mean once you’ve kind of gotten to that point where you have a critical mass, it’s not really a question of are you talking to the right people because you’ve kind of got the proof that you are talking to the right people. But before that point, there is that open question is like what are these people actually interested in and what’s the messaging you can or you should be using for discussing it with them and attracting people to your website and push them through you sales funnel and all that other stuff.
[08:26] Rob: Very cool. So it looks like we have 10 points of discussion here.
[08:29] Mike: The first one is that even before you started talking to them you have to clearly identify the problem that your product is trying to solve. List the specific pain points that your customers are having and try to map out what your application does and how it applies to each of the pain points. Because if you can’t map your product and the solution that you have on to their pain points, then chances are good that there’s going to be some sort of disconnect that you’re going to need to be able to deal with.
[08:57] And when you identify what your solution does before you talk to the customers, then you kind of have it in your head exactly how it maps for you and when you start having these conversations with them you can figure out from their standpoint whether it does or doesn’t do that because just having that in your head doesn’t necessarily mean that its true or they may see it very different than you do.
[09:19] Rob: I think that’s something that a lot of us miss because we have a vision for our product. We have a vision for what we think it should do and the problems that we think it should solve. And that’s all good but you need to hold that very loosely, really view it as a hypotheses and always be asking is this actually the pain point it solves? Is this actually how its going to accomplish the end goal? If you have verbiage that you’re using incorrectly you can really drive people away even if your suffer does actually solve their pain point.
[09:50] If you niche it down to the point where you say hey this is more for salon owners and then you realize oh there’s actually this other market that’s using it and they’re being driven away, it’s really important to find out. So that’s where keep it as a hypothesis not until you really find that fit where you know your product is being actively sought by a market and you can start scaling it up that I think that’s when you lock it into place.
[10:16] Mike: So the next step is once you’ve clearly identified the problem, you reach out to each perspective customer individually and you start asking questions. And I think the email is good but if you can get them on the phone that’s infinitely better because you can ascertain certain things about how somebody feels about some aspect of their product or their solution based on whether they pause for example.
[10:36] If you ask them a very direct question and they say “well…” and they pause for a couple of seconds before really giving you an answer then you know that you’re off base. You know that there’s something wrong and you need to start digging. Your goal here is to just get information. You want to ask questions and shut up. Because I had a conversation earlier today with somebody and I was talking to them and I asked a question and they said well it does this but it’d be nice if it did something else. It was just a slight variation on it.
[11:03] And I could’ve opened my mouth and started saying well I can do this, this and this. But then at that point you’re kind of talking them into what your proposed solution is rather than really listening to them and figuring out what their problems are with the software, with the solution that you have. Because the fact is that you can probably talk them into thinking that you can fix everything. The reality is some people are just not going to be a good fit for your product and you need to figure that out. And the only way you’re going to figure that out is to shut up once in a while.
[11:31] Rob: Man, I got into long email conversations with several early Drip customers. Some of them were 20-30 emails long back and forth. I jumped on the phone with a few of them but I learned a lot about the ideal market or at least what I currently think is a good market for Drip. And I also learned that there were some specific markets that I probably wouldn’t have entered into but it was some folks that were recommended from another Drip user. This is when I had about 10 people using it. I let the guy in because he was a higher profile person.
[12:05] I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be a fit and sure enough the feature request that he made were stark contrast to the software and SaaS entrepreneurs that are already using it and getting enough value out of it that they were willing to pay for it. I think that one on one stuff especially early on it gives you such insight. Way more insight or way more value than any money they would pay you. I do think you should charge folks that are using your product in the early days because you want them to have some skin in the game because if you just comp everybody then you don’t know whose feedback is more valuable. You don’t know who’s willing to pay for it or not.
[12:35] But with that said, you’re not charging them for the revenue itself. You’re really just doing that so you know their feedback is valuable enough that you should consider it. The idea is that if you’re in kind of early access or you’re in a beta and you have customers that are using it but they’re not really using it, they’re not actually doing that much n the app and you kind of feel like everybody’s just drifting away, you’re not learning much, that’s really when you start working down these steps that we’re talking through.
[13:00] Mike: So the third point is that you don’t need to ask the same questions of every customer. And in fact, asking the same question in different ways to different people can yield different answers. It’s one thing to ask the same question to five different people because you will get five different answers but you can take what you learned from the first person that you asked the question and use that to tweak the question and ask the second or third person something that is a little bit different or dives in a little bit further.
[13:26] Because once you get to a point where you are learning the same things, then you can ask the fourth or fifth person a variation of that question. You can start drilling in to find out additional information. Because you don’t want to overload those people. You don’t want to go back to the first person and say well I talked to these other two people, let me find out some more information about this one piece. Because the reality is that the context of that conversation is gone so it’s going to take you a little while to kind of get back into it and you don’t necessarily want to overload any given person who was in your early access especially if you want to be able to keep them around as a customer.
[13:58] Rob: The questions you asked will depend on the answer to the very first question which will typically be something like hey, so is product name working for you? Right? And you’re just trying to find out kind of a general thing. If you’re on the phone, this works really well because then they can respond and you can dive in and they might say no I haven’t really had the time to check it out. Oh you haven’t. Did you know it only takes 5 minutes to get setup? Would you like to do it o n the phone or on Skype together?
[14:24] And then you’re going to start seeing where they say well I would love to. I’d love to see the value it provides and then you get them to that next step, they’re a little more engaged and then you can find out if there’s kind of a deal breaker down the line. But if they say no, I just really – I don’t really have time to invest in the next – then you know that it’s probably not an aspirin pain point for them. It’s not something they need so desperately. It’s a lower priority thing. On the other hand if you say is product working for you and they say yeah. It’s doing a great job. It does exactly what you said. And then your next question is cool. Is it worth X dollars a month? And x dollars is your price point obviously and then you get to see what they say to that. And that will take you one of two directions.
[15:01] If they say yes then bam, you have your first paying customer. And if they say no then you try to dig in to why not? There’s probably some alternative solutions that they’re coupling together that are cheaper or it solve a pain point but the pain point isn’t worth your price. Maybe you have to lower your price or consider at least for this person lowering the price. There’s a lot of different rows you can go down but that’s how it spiders out kind of as a decision tree and those are the kinds of questions that they work really well on the phone. The amount of learning you do, you can do it in a short period of time even with half a dozen or a dozen people answering these questions is just mind blowing.
[15:34] Mike: So one of the things that Rob just brought up which kind of leads into the fourth point is what types of questions you should ask them. Because obviously you’re going to start out with is the software working out for you? But if people are not using your software, the thing that I found that works really, really well is to ask why using you software hasn’t become a priority for them. And there’s a lot of different reasons that they could give you. I mean it might be because you’re not solving their problem. You’re solving a related problem. It’s not quite what they need or just not a present issue for them. Maybe they don’t understand your products and are confused and in which case getting on a Skype call could probably walk them through the product and then you can use that as a learning experience to figure out what sort of help and tutorials or maybe video intros that you need for them.
[16:16] There was a blog post that one of their biggest competitors for fog bugs was actually just spreadsheets and pencil and paper because people just have that stuff readily available and it’s easy for them. If they have that as an alternative then you have to figure out how you’re going to overcome those challenges. But that comes back to the marketing that you put forth and how you portray that to the people. The last thing that asking that kind of question brings to the surface is they may have realized that they just don’t need it. And as you phrased it it’s a vitamin. It’s not necessarily an aspirin for them.
[16:47] Rob: And point five is to identify common themes across the customers that you speak with. So things like the customer size, customer industry, there’s specific needs or used cases for your solution, how badly do they need it? Is this a required task they have to do everyday and you’re going to save them 50% of their time or is this something that it’s nice to have that every once in a while they might need to do and it would make them sleep better at night but it’s not a requirement.
[17:11] There’s a lot of different examples of this. I think with my apps drip has worked out well with SaaS providers and software companies that are selling downloadable software also some information product folks that are using it. And it hasn’t particularly worked out well with bloggers and people who are used to getting stuff for free or people who are really price sensitive and it’s not worth the convenience factor to use Drip and HitTail is in a similar boat but I can pretty well nail down size and the industry and the use cases for my apps.
[17:46] Now in terms of HitTail, since it’s so much more mature, I have a much more concrete idea of who that is. But in the early days it’s hard to know. It’s hard to know who to listen to and so trying to identify common themes of people who are having success with your app and really going down that road is a big deal. It just gives you a lot of insight into who’s using t, who’s getting value out of it? Who’s not? Who’s willing to pay X for it and who’s not?
[18:12] Mike: And that kind of leads into a couple of other things, not just identifying common themes across the customers but identifying common phrases they use, common terminology because when you’re talking to people you need to be able to speak the same language and if you’re not speaking the same language then you either need to establish that with them and say this is what I mean when I say X and this is what I mean when I say Y. But the reality is you’re probably better off changing your terminology to match what your customer’s is rather than trying to educate them about what your terminology is. It’s just going to be easier.
[18:43] Your SEO’s going to be easier. Your marketing is going to be easier because you don’t have to try and educate people in your SEO campaigns for example. And then the other thing is that does your solution meet a very specific paying point is a necessarily thing or is it just nice to have? And I think these ties back really well to the talk that you gave in 2012 at MicroConf about the different types of apps and you kind of gave four different I guess categories that they fell into. There was an aspirin, a vitamin complex or new or entertainment.
[19:16] And depending on where in those categories your app falls, people are probably going to be willing to pay more or less for it or they’re going to view it as something that’s absolutely necessary. So aspirin type products, they absolutely need them. They have to have them in order to run their business. Versus the vitamin type product which it’s nice to have but not necessarily. They can probably get away with it. So very similar to bug tracking software. You can get away without a bug tracking software if you’re diligent about it or if you’re the only person using it then you don’t necessarily need it. You can get away without it. But obviously as your company grows you kind of need something like that.
[19:50] And then there’s the complex or new solutions that don’t really have an existing competitor that you can map it against and they’re so new that nobody’s able to compare your product against others because there’s just nothing else there. And then there’s the entertainment where the people are using it to waste time. It could be movies or songs or it could be games, those types of things.
[20:14] Rob: And figuring out how to make your software product an aspirin product if possible is a big win. If you find out that you’re in the vitamin zone and you can somehow move it into the aspirin area, it can have a stark impact on not only your ability to market it, to get more people interested in it but your retention rates. Because if you’re an aspirin app and people are already using it, they’re just so much less likely to cancel.
[20:42] Mike: I think that’s something important because there are definitely cases. Basically the early access in customer development that you did with Drip which was you found that there were certain types of people that Drip was a really good fit for and for them it was more of an aspirin. And then there’s other types of people that you found that it didn’t work as well for and those people kind of fell into the vitamin area. The product itself is not different in any way, shape or form. It’s just that how they view it is different. And that kind of falls into making sure that you are pitching your products to the right types of people.
[21:15] Rob: Yeah and this holds true no matter what you’re selling, if you’re writing a book or creating a course or writing software or throwing a conference, certain people are just going to be right in your core demographic and they’re going to absolutely love it and need it and certain people are going to be on the fringe right? It’s that vitamin area of like they’re interested in it but it’s just not critical to what they do and then other people, it’s not going to be good for them at all.
[21:40] So the idea is how large can you make that inner aspirin circle? That inner circle of folks who really need access to this or who really need the information that you’re building. That’s really the art of all this is figuring out how to build something that enough people want really badly that you can build a viable business out of it.
[22:00] Mike: So when you’re talking to people, that’s something you need to keep in mind is that are the people who are in your early access program or in your beta program, are they the right people or are they the wrong people? And if they’re the wrong people, how is it that they ended up in there? Is it because of your marketing? Is it just because you were comfortable talking to them? Is there a right person that you need to target instead? You can do that in some respects by making customer profiles and I think there’s a lot of different companies who’ve had different ways of setting up customer profiles or customer personalities.
[22:32] I think that Atlassian uses like a monkey that sits at their table at every meeting. They’re like that’s the customer. What would they think of this? That can certainly apply back to when you’re talking about the things that you do for the early access customers and the things that you’re putting on your website or your marketing materials like are you talking to the right people? Are you targeting the right people? Or – and this is kind of the worst case scenario. Is the product that you’re building simply not necessarily for any of them and is it a dead end?
[23:00] Rob: Yeah. And there are a lot of roads to go down before you get to that dead end place. I tell people if you still have motivation and you’re still interested in this product, don’t give up yet if you’ve maybe launched and you don’t have a bunch of interest but you really haven’t pounded the pavement to find out if with just a minor feature tweaks to the product, you can satisfy a different market’s need for that or with a few tweaks to your marketing, the exact same product could satisfy a different market’s need.
[23:29] Obviously if someone’s done that over and over and still is not finding it then that’s at the point where A) if you’re losing motivation that you should consider throwing in the towel. But I have to admit like five years ago I didn’t really understand the whole kind of pivot thing where you pivot a product from market to market or you’d even add features to kind of try to find a new target audience but I totally see that now of how a single product can provide different amounts of value to different markets if you look for them and if you talk about your product using the right language.
[24:01] Mike: So some things to keep in mind when you’re going through this process though is that this is time consuming. It takes time to schedule calls with people and get the emails out and even sometimes just to get responses. I mean there will be cases where you can send an email to somebody 2, 3, 4, 5 times and not get a response at all. And then suddenly somebody emails you back or they give you call back. It’s definitely something that is time consuming but at the end of the day you really need that information if you’re kind of floundering in terms of getting people to use your product and figuring out why.
[24:35] Because if you do need to make a pivot, you do need to know what it is that turned them off and kind of categorize them as a prospective customer and say okay, how do I tweak my marketing to avoid that type of person or avoid attracting that person initially so that I don’t waste a lot of time with them and classify people kind of across your customer base.
[24:55] Rob: Yeah. You’re going to need at least I would say 10-15 hours a week depending on how many customers you have and how in depth you’re interacting with them. That’s what I was spending during that early access time. A lot of emailing and some Skype calls and a lot of thought. Because then you take that data and you have to kind of look at it and analyze and figure out what to build or how to change the verbiage. You’re doing a lot of talking so it’s not something you can cram into 2 or 3 hours a week. It really is quite a bit of effort to go through this process and really try to figure out who’s engaged? Who’s not? How can you make those who aren’t engaged more engaged or are they just not a good fit?
[25:34] I guess that wraps us up for today. If you have question or comment, 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 175 | Your Product is Not the Hero (with Chase Reeves)
Show Notes
- Fizzle – podcast, membership site
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I have Chase Reeves on the show and we talk about how your product is not the hero of the story. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 175.
[00:11] Music
[00:19] 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.
[000:28] Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Mike?
[00:33] Mike: I’ve been going through spreadsheets and analytics and all sorts of stuff over the past week and kind of analyzing my conversion funnel for people who are coming into the Audit Shark site and kind of looking to see how many people are doing that versus going to the pricing page and then falling through with a trial for the software and I think I found part of the problem or at least what I believe is the problem. I think that there’s a big disconnect between why people end up on the Audit Shark website because I basically targeted all these keywords around compliance but then when you get there, product and the copy talks a lot about security, not necessarily compliance.
[01:09] So I think there’s a very big disconnect there where people are looking at that and saying oh well, this page maybe applies to me but the product doesn’t necessarily do so. Those are the things that I’m looking at right now and trying to address in the copy and I’m basically rewriting a bunch of the different pages that were out there. I just focus the marketing a little bit more.
[01:27] Rob: Right. And actually in this episode we interview Chase Reeves and we talk about that, about how hard it is to get that language right and to talk about your product in a consistent way you have like a single voice and a single tone and you’re still going after that consistent single message. I’m doing the same with Drip. I don’t have a consistent message because I’m still trying to figure out the right way that resonates with the largest block of folks who are coming to look at it so I feel your pain in that respect.
[01:57] Mike: How about you? What are you up to?
[01:58] Rob: Well I wanted to talk a little bit about the latest speaker we signed up from MicroConf. I’m super stoked. Her name is Annie Cushing. We’re lucky to have her. She’s speaking at Moscon this year and she’s just an analytics guru and this is what she does 24/7 is think about and act on and consult on and talk about analytics. So her talk is about secrets you can pull from Google analytics and she told me a few of the secrets and it will be on the speaker page in a few days because I’m going to be in her abstract.
[02:28] But there’s some crazy stuff that you can pull out of there. I have no idea. I mean I consider myself like an intermediate to lower advanced Google analytics user but there’s no chance like compared to her, she just thrown out all this crazy stuff so I’m excited to hear about it and I think there’s going to be a lot of value there. Then the other thing for me is I talked a little last week about how previous month or maybe two months I was kind of in a slump and what’s crazy is how quickly that’s turned around for me. I got the HitTail revamp live so that HitTail is once again providing all the value it used to, it’s importing keywords for people directly from Google web master tools and providing suggestions and within 48 hours of that, as a new customer started coming in and I’ve started sending emails to the list that are affiliated with HitTail and all the marketing lists and trial users and just kind of getting on boarding all we worked, my motivation has gone through the roof.
[03:19] And so I’m at that high again like manically rushing and helping and implementing new pieces of the support queue and new pieces of on boarding and everything but it feels great and I’m thinking about it at night and waking up every morning stoked to work on the project which is like the antiphysis of where I was 2 or 3 weeks ago. So it feels good to have kind of made it past that dip and back up into the place where I’m just excited to be doing what I’m doing again.
[03:47] Mike: Very cool.
[03:48] Music
[03:50] Rob: So today mike and I did an interview with Chase Reeves. We don’t do a lot of interviews but I wanted to bring him on the show because he just has such unique thoughts about how design impacts every aspect of your product and he made this great quote during the talk that I used as a title and it’s that your product is not the hero of the story. So I think he brings a unique insight. Our pack tends to be pretty left brain like Mike and I think about things in engineering terms. We talk about analytics and split testing and stuff. Chase is the exact opposite. He’s super creative, super smart. He’s just executing on this whole idea of how creativity and brand and tone can really build a business.
[04:26] And so I wanted to bring him on as –both just to hear his thoughts on it but also to expose our listeners to different points of view. I mean that’s not necessarily be the way that you’re thinking about especially if you’re kind of the engineering mindset. So today Mike and I are chatting with Chase Reeves. I first heard about chase on the Fizzle show which is a solid podcast you should go check out. It’s about online marketing and starting an online business. Chase also works with Corbett Bar and Caleb Wojcik on fizzle.co which is like an online membership website for learning how to launch an online business. What I like about Fizzle, both the show and fizzle.co, Fizzle is one that I consider to be exceptional.
[05:08] Chase: Thanks Rob.
[05:10] Rob: And I’m really glad you gave me a log in so I could actually verify that before I said that on the show. But my impression of it was always that it was solid. It was the same thing with copy blogger Bryan Clark. Everything they do, I respect. Everything that Corbett has done – because I followed him for a few years on think traffic. I’ve always respected so and I heard he and you and Caleb talking on the podcast I’m like man, these guys are doing ending up legit. And that’s really why we wanted to have you on the show. So thanks for coming man.
[05:31] Chase: Thank you guys for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. I’m a fan. I feel like you guys and then also my friend Justin Jackson kind of introduced me to this world of this in-between world because my background is sort of in between like being a blogger and then the other is looking at the big startup world. I’ve always kind of shimmied between those two worlds, things that are on this week in startups like those companies and working in startups and then like looking at my little father apprentice blogs, my little blogs that I startup and try to build an audience right?
[06:02] And then I see this bootstrapper crew kind of develop over the last few years right in the middle of it and it really kind of feels like the home base I never had and just in the last year I’ve gotten so inspired and interested in everything. You know as a designer I’ve always been looking at 37 signal so I’ve heard the term bootstrappers. I know about bootstrap profitable and proud. But that was always still like this in week in startups crowd thing for me.
[06:26] Rob: Right.
[06:27] Chase: And so being able to see the way that you guys have started talking about this sort of world and the products that you make and all that kind of stuff, like I spent a whole like two weeks in the MicroConf videos from the most recent session. I basically cancel all my calls Judith and I just spend forever watching through each one of those videos and I just love them. I felt like I was finding my people. So I’m really excited to be here.
[06:51] Rob: Awesome. There’s a really cool term. There’s a blog post called the third tribe that was written on copy blogger and it talks about that false dichotomy that you’re just talking about where there’s like kind of the startup people over here and they’re all trying to launch these huge B-C funded businesses that never work that 1 in 1,000 actually makes money or 1 in 100. And on the other side there were the internet markets, the affiliate marketers who are just all about money, money, conversions, conversions not really forward with society.
[07:17] And on copy blogger they said there’s this third tribe and it’s the people who want to do stuff legitimately online whether that is starting a blog and building up a real audience or whether that’s launching small software product but they also kind of need to make money because we’re bootstrap. We’re self funded. Right? You can’t just go for three years and giveaway your products. So if you haven’t read that, I recommend it. We’ll link it up in the show notes.
[07:37] Chase: Here’s my question for you guys. What are a handful of entrepreneurs that you guys are paying attention to?
[07:42] Mike: I listen to the bootstrap with kids podcast pretty much every week whenever they come out and do episodes. So I pay attention to Brecht and Scott, pay attention to the things that Ruben Gomez is doing and then I also pay attention to pretty much anything that Patrick McKenzie does. And then there’s kind of a core of I’d probably say 30 or 40 people who I kind of keep tabs on but I don’t necessarily follow absolutely every move that they make but they tend to be the people who show up at MicroConf, just people like Robert Gram, Nathan Barry and Brennan Dunn and various other people who have been to MicroConf and seen what it’s like and are doing things on their own but aren’t necessarily high profile people. They’re people who are in the industry as Rob was saying, kind of that third tribe.
[08:26] Rob: Are you looking for who we look up to or just who we’re in community with?
[08:30] Chase: I guess a little bit of both.
[08:31] Rob: Yeah. All the folks Mike mentioned and several other MicroConf attendees, Dave Rodenbaugh and Patrick Thompson from Inc Stone Software, just folks who are making it happen but they don’t necessarily have the big blog and a big following. The entrepreneurs that I’ve been following the last several years who are really rocking it and I tend to use them in a lot of examples because I respect the hell of what they’ve done in both the bootstrap and the venture space is Jason Cohen and Hiten Shah.
[08:57] Chase: Okay.
[08:56] Rob: And that’s one of the reasons those guys have been at every MicroConf because they just kill it. Anything they do, if they moved into the email marketing space I would be so sad because one of my apps is in that space. They’re the few people like if a venture funded company moves into my space I’m not actually that scared. I think I can kick their ass just based on pure will and just experience. But those are the guys who have it. They have both the knowledge and you have funding at a drop of a hat and all that stuff.
[09:20] Chase: Yeah. Jason’s video in the most recent MicroConf. There’s a point his presentation where he said okay, so hands up if in the next month if you didn’t do anything on your business, it would still make at least $10,000 and that question and realizing that if I was in the audience I would have my hands raised. It was the actual moment I became a big boy in my business because I never had put it together like that before up until that point like Fizzle like you said I’m really enamored by the fact that you would say such kind things about it since you’re someone that I respect. We’ve worked our [Inaudible] to make this thing. I’m really, really proud of it and yet I still was in that mode where like look at this thing I made, it’s incredible. I was still just in like yeah we’ve got a little thing. We’ll see if it’s going to be okay.
[10:05] In my crew of designers it’s not cool to talk about yours successes. That had bled out into its not cool to feel confident about what you’ve made in some ways. So when Jason said that, it’s like the diaper came off. I’m still in pull-ups but it’s not a diaper and I can do it myself now you know what I mean?
[10:22] Rob: Yeah. I definitely think like the thing that the press reinforces kind of this societal vision of entrepreneurship is from Shark tank and Inc Magazine and Fast Company and all that stuff and that’s one thing that we’ve tried to fight against and mention it often on the podcast is just like that’s kind of the fake reality. That’s the fake entrepreneurship in my opinion. I’m not saying those guys aren’t doing it because there are people on there that are doing it. But if you have to ask for someone’s permission to start your company, I think you’re doing it wrong.
[10:50] Chase: Though there are some businesses that just can’t be bootstrapped. If you want to start a new airline like it’s going to be hard to just try to roll your own in that way and I’ve got a buddy up in Canada who does a lot of big business and he’s always giving me BLEEP he’s like Chase, sometimes there are business where the idea itself in order for that idea to succeed it can’t be done on a bootstrap level just because I’m so one-sided about that, so I’ve learned a little bit from him in that capacity just because I mean to be able to be nimble and quick and live like we are, it’s sexy. It’s creative. It’s adventurous. It feels exciting. I really, really enjoy what it’s like to build businesses like this.
[11:26] Rob: And we do too. That’s why we’re here. I kind of want to guide us into the topic of today and what was cool was Chase you and I were emailing about it and you sent back I said hey would you like to come on the show? What would you like to talk about? And this was your exact quote. You said my honest to god wheelhouse is designed specifically how founders should be thinking about design, not conversion optimization or AB testing. That’s for people with spreadsheets and I don’t have those. I’m the creative director for Fizzle and that runs through a ton of writing, voice, tone, strategy, long term brand story etcetera. I lump all those in with design. And then you attacked on the end you said I also do a lot of teaching on defining audience and customer development.
[12:07] So that’s really what I wanted to get into is both of those things because I think they’re critically important to founders both bootstrapped and funded and I think both starting kind of a blog audience, just an online business that way or a software company. I think we can dig into why those things are important. So that’s what I want to kick it off is like you mentioned voice, tone and strategy so why should a software founder care about those when they’re launching a software product?
[12:32] Chase: There is a cultural momentum around design. I guess the aesthetics of a thing the way it feels in your hand, the message that it gives, the sense of cool or independent. Look at the difference between Apple and android. Android is like I want to be able to put my own apps on my thing. I don’t want to be in the walled garden so to speak and Apple’s like we control everything and that’s why it’s so good isn’t it? It’s never really been a satisfying answer to me. I think like I kind of said in the quote you read, design ends up being like the whole kitten caboodle. It’s like design itself, it’s weird because the design isn’t the thing. Design is nothing. Design is a container so you never would give someone like a piece of Tupperware and be like isn’t it amazing? Nobody’s ever said that about Tupperware ever. Right? So I think design is like Tupperware but what’s inside of the Tupperware, the leftover meatloaf that’s just sensation got better overnight, that’s the content.
[13:31] That’s the business goal in some ways and the whole purpose of design is first and foremost to get out of the way of the business. And then if possible, to amplify this sort of message of the business. What I mean by that is when you land on a site and you’re like this is good. I like this. You’re resonating with that thing. You like it. It’s speaking your language. You feel like it came from people like you or you’re one of the kinds of people who would pick this thing up or who would come across this website or who this thing was built for.
[14:10] Because I think of an intention that the designer or CEO or founder or whoever had to create that experience with you. So there’s an audience, we have pains, we have problems, we’re bored. We’re irritated. We have things we want to achieve, things we want to do. I have a rash on my rectal and I need a cream. And then I do a search on a cream and I land on four sites and these four sites could very clearly cater to very different audiences and it’s that point the catering to different audiences, that’s when I get really excited.
[14:31] Mike: Sounds to me more like a lot of the way you view it is not necessarily what I would term design. It sounds to me more like it’s about giving your company or your product a voice in a persona that resonates with other people because people who follows 37 signals tend to see things in a certain way. People who follow Microsoft tend to see things in a certain way. I think that’s reflected in the choices that they choose but also in kind of the positioning of those companies and the products that they represent.
[15:00] Chase: Yeah, very much so. That isn’t just design. But also you can’t separate design from the voice. So I kind of see three things. There’s the aesthetics. There’s the voice – so the aesthetics is like what color is it? And like just the general sort of look and feel of it, then there’s the voice, the way in which the thing was written, the tone and then there’s the actual content, the thing that it’s actually about. So I could write something about freeing slaves in a sort of happy go lucky way or in a super brute serious like this just has to change way. And then the kind of page that I’m reading that on, what types it sent in, how big the margins are, what the colors are, where I found this thing. Is it pasted up against telephone poll? Is it a website that I was searching for something else and found this? Was it on an advertising on Facebook?
[15:50] All of these things create this moment and my whole dream has always been to sort of engage the visitor in a moment of emotional authenticity. I want them to land here and be like oh my god yes, this is for me because it’s so incredibly hard to do that. There’s so much noise. There’s so much croft and crap on the internet that they try to reach through all these crap even though like any visitor who lands on your site is so well trained to hit the back button right? We come to sites with that posture. My dream, the challenge that I’ve always loved is how do I reach through that crap and that history that they have with websites and with salesman and all these sorts of thing and create sort of an emotionally authentic moment where they’re like oh my god I like these people. I like this person. I like this thing. This feels like it’s for me. I’m starting to trust this because that’s the other big thing about design is it crates trust.
[16:45] I think it’s getting harder and harder to do so but if I land on your site and it’s a typical WordPress theme and your copy is all about some big deal, look at this thing I found out, incredible – just not interested chances are. Unless you really, really, really nail it. And I think the copy is absolutely the most important thing on the site. I want to make sure that I definitely say that. Just like Justin Jackson’s words things, I did a course within Fizzle on the essentials of web design for business builders, so not for designers but for people who are building businesses. It’s the essentials. There’s like five hours of training. It’s crazy. And then we designed nerd fitness and while I was doing it I filmed most of the conversations that me and Steve Kim the founder of that site has.
[17:26] I brought in Justin Jackson’s words thing. I’ve never talked to him before. I just found the thing and I was like hey can I use this? I already made the video I hope that’s okay. And so then I put it out and luckily he was fine with it. Because that’s so powerful. The idea of this is – it’s really about words. It really is about words and words are the things that communicate and if you can tell me about my problem better than I can tell myself about my problem then I’m already trusting you. I’m already interested in the solution that you have to offer. I think that’s still the most powerful thing but now, why stop there? Why make it a black text on a white background when you can make the aesthetics of the page completely get that message across.
[18:06] Rob: I’m totally on board with that. I have my own thoughts of how to accomplish that. I’m curious how you go about it because you are obviously an expert in this. You’ve done it over and over and I’ve seen fizzle.co I’ve seen how coherent and cohesive that brand is that your aesthetic, your voice and your tone of that site, it matches up so well. So how do you do that? How can – again there’s a software developer listening to this right now and they’re thinking boy, I don’t know that I’m able to do that. So do you have a process? Is it just trial and error? Is it you have to do it for 10 years to get good at it?
[18:37] Chase: Yeah. That’s a great question. Here’s some notes that I have on this. First and foremost you got to care. You got to give a damn. If this is just another software product that you hope you don’t have to touch at all throughout the week or month and that it makes you a few thousand dollars a month and things like that, good luck. Kind of like you said earlier Rob, there’s this sleazy douche bag internet marketing folks who aren’t trying to push civilization in humanity forward at all.
[19:03] So if you want to make a little product that does a little thing that’s one of 10 things in you arsenal that you don’t want to have to touch, I find it very hard to try to create – I’ve worked with a lot of clients like that and I find it incredibly hard to try to create that. Not to be like you can’t make it good. Right? That thing is what it is. Like Drip Rob, what you have is what it is and the role of design is to make that thing the most what it is to everybody who lands on that page who’s right for that product.
[19:30] So it’s not necessarily just about making the world a better place but I do for me what’s always the center of what I get into, it’s like I care. I see nerd fitness and he’s got a few million people coming to his site every month and it is selling products but it’s this crazy Frankenstein of a brand and I really like Steve to say come up to my house. We’re going to spend a week. We’re going to redesign your site because this nerd plus fitness thing the way that story is kind of crashing together in my head makes so much sense and that’s not at all what I’m seeing on this page. So let’s try to make this thing what it actually is.
[20:06] That all came because I had a deep sort of intuition about this thing and really wanted to see that vision come to life and that’s kind of like my answer to everything, someone wrote a big post recently on personal branding and they interviewed me and I was like I have four steps. First one is care, second one is look at number 1 again and then do that for 2 and 3 or 3 and 4 as well. When your personality, when your humanity comes to the surface of any website experience, it’s at least interesting. So I always like that.
[20:34] Then, what else could we do? For me there’s this sense of story. There’s sense of a story and my friend Don Miller wrote a book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. He’s basically asking what would happen if we looked out are life the way that a director looked at a movie? And that’s always stucked with me because – then he gets into what is a story? This is a simple formula for that. A story is a character who wants something and overcomes obstacles to get it. So I always try to get myself in a story mode but here’s the big mistake that all of us founders end up making. It’s like so if the story of our business is like Star Wars. We always think of ourselves as Luke Skywalker but we’re not Luke. The audience is Luke. The person who’s using our software is Luke.
[21:20] Okay, they’re the ones who have to defeat the empire. They’re the ones who have some crazy DNA and back-story that they didn’t have any control or power over and now they’re thrust into this quest they couldn’t have helped it now. Who are we? We’re the Yoda or we’re better yet the Obi-Wan. There’s a scene where Obi-Wan gives Luke his dad’s light saber. I saw that and I was like oh my god this is the move right here. That’s the kernel of the whole freaking movie and that’s the scene that what I’m always encouraging founders inside Fizzle to do.
[21:47] So to take that posture of okay, I need to help look with this mission that he’s on because otherwise the whole universe explodes. It’s going to be horrible. It affects me when they don’t do it. So again kind of coming back to that care – but seeing them in that story, now there’s something at stake. Now it’s not just about how do I get them to use email better? Now it’s about these guys have to make money. They have to make money from the thing that they’ve made and I need to help them on that journey. So I’m going to help them in this little sliver of it just like Obi-Wan just helped one little sliver then there was Yoda and then there was Lea and Hans Solo and everybody plays their own roles.
[22:30] So for me that story, that is always what I get into and obviously there’s not like tactics in there. I find that I can empathize with the people in the otherwise more and that always – that’s what a lot of people would say design is empathy. So tell me what I’ve said so for because I feel like I’m not making any sense over here.
[22:47] Mike: You’ve said to know your audience and know them well enough that you can hear the internal conversation that’s going on inside their head and that you turn that around and make them the hero of the story that it’s a hero’s journey and that your product is not the hero. It’s the user.
[23:03] Chase: Yeah. Exactly. And you’re sort of the Obi-Wan. Your product is a light saber. The user is on this journey and if you care about that journey for them and realize they need to be successful in that thing for your product to be what it was meant to me, to be the light saber that is in the final climactic scenes of that movie that’s the story. But I’m the kind of guy – I just can’t help it. I always start there and from there normally there’s some inspiration that comes from it. There’s some sort of idea. there’s some little gimmick, some little thing so nerd fitness it was the comic book sort of elements that came to play for smart passive income they came just this idea of pat as the answer man. And as like the crash test dummy for trying a lot of things online.
[23:49] For think traffic it was making a huge big bold statement about what it’s like to have a website make it responsive because compared to the rest of the internet marketing world it was really, really bad. And so to put something on this huge massive 70 pixelled font size on the headline big broad sprawling pages, it really made an impression. All of those things serve those stories and so for Fizzle, our story, there’s another thing from Peldi, saw his Business of Software talk.
[24:21] In that he says don’t fall in love with your solution. Fall in love with the problem and you’ll be just fine. And that’s kind of I guess what I’m getting at here is if you fall in love with the problem, realize what’s at stake for the people on the other side who have that problem, it’s going to help you with your copy writing. It’s going to help you realize that you’re going to need to put together a design and test it over time. You need to see what works best. You need to hear back from your audience. There’s no borders between your design and the emails that you send your customer and the feedback that you’re getting from them and all this other stuff, it all shapes the direction of this thing so that in 8 months, 12 months, you’ve got a really, really strong understanding of what’s working extremely well for your audience.
[24:59] Rob: I’m glad you brought up Peldi because I think he’s a really good example of basically taking what you’re saying and he applies that in everything he does whether it’s his app itself, whether it’s the marketing, whether it’s his presentations or his Twitter background, everything. It’s about this design thinking but it’s a creativity and looking at every point of contact with his company or with his brand, he wouldn’t call it a brand but it really is a brand and you fall in love with Peldi and what he’s done with Balsamic because of that creative thinking and he kind of turns you into the Luke Skywalker.
[25:31] Chase: I have this video that I did on Ice To The Brim which is just my little personal blog where I’m talking about – call it the focus factor but I talk about how we all do this digging. This is just thinking personally. We do this digging where like maybe I’ll be this kind of good guy. Maybe I’ll do this for a living. Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I’ll be a designer. Maybe I’ll be a copy writer. Maybe I’ll develop frontend. Maybe I’ll learn some whatever you crazy people get into, python or boa constrictor or whatever’s the coolest thing right now. And we’re slowly spiraling around, getting closer and closer and closer to our center to find out kind of who we are and what we’re here for.
[26:05] And then when we be it, that’s not actually like our landing pad. That’s not the destination. That’s the launch pad for what I call like the story ark that explodes off of there. And now everything we do falls on that story ark. So if my story ark within Fizzle is to serve the independent entrepreneur. I’ve fallen in love with that problem, the problem of the independent entrepreneur kind of like the word indie because we’re dealing with this identity crisis of if we’re not taking on big money if we don’t have millions of users then who are we? We’re nothing because part of this story is people are telling us that. That’s not true.
[26:40] All this DIY stuff, all these problems that are coming at us, not only do I have to know how to code and think about these sorts of things or know how to find coders but then I got to think about differentiation and I got to think about web design and I got to think about web design and I got to think about an email strategy and I got to think about all this other stuff and it’s just so overwhelming. So there are things that we work out over the course of the 7 years that we get started and try these things out but I’ve fallen in love with that person who wants to build something and support themselves and earn a living something they care about and trying really hard not to burn out on it.
[27:09] That’s the problem I fell in love with according to Peldi’s advice. So that’s the story arc. You can easily spot where the sparkline, the Fizzle glance, it’s the big circle that doesn’t have a whole lot of revenue going on. And then one step further is the Fizzle show which is a much smaller circle but still pretty big. And then just to the right of that is Fizzle which is a really small circle but really high in revenue. And then beyond that, who knows what it will be next right? maybe some sort of small group coaching, maybe some sort of get 15 people together in Cancun for a 3 day intensive, maybe a live event of 300 people or something like that. But everything serves that story of the indie entrepreneur and they have varying degrees of audience members or revenue that thing is capable of. And designing that story was the first place I started in developing the Fizzle brand.
[27:58] Mike: Really what you need to do is you need to figure out what the story is that you’re going to be telling to people and along with that story I mean you have to have kind of an idea of what your audience is. So how do you go about developing or defining what that audience looks like because as you said, your customer is really the hero of the story and you want to make your products as basically the light saber. You’re providing the tool for them but you want them to be great with it and you have to figure out who that audience is. And how do you go about doing that? I mean what’s the hard part about defining what that audience looks like and who the ideal person I guess in it, I don’t want to say customer because in some cases it’s not necessarily customer but who’s the ideal person who kind of fits into that audience. How do you define them?
[28:44] Chase: Yeah. It’s a really good question Mike because really, that is the hardest thing in the whole world. But there are some tools and tricks of the trade. First of all you got to realize do I know this person already or do I not? Half the time we’re all developing for ourselves. We’re creating our product to scratch our own itch and that’s a really good place to be if we have a little bit of taste and a little bit of style especially if we’re the kind of person who thought through this issue a lot, this problem. If we know it really well, chances are we’ll be able to create a pretty good solution for it.
[29:15] Now it’s a question of whether I don’t know, we’ll be able to really market it all that well to other people like me but your chances are better than if you didn’t know anything about those people in some way. But a lot of the times, you might start thinking that to you and then you end up over time learning more and more that you’ve somehow hit some vein of people that you don’t know anything about but they really love your product and they need these three features that you didn’t even think about before. I’m sure you guys have experienced that right? Where you’ve built something and then the audience starts kind of pulling it in a different direction.
[29:44] Mike: Yeah, definitely.
[29:46] Chase: Like being able to listen to them overtime is a big thing. So the first thing I would say is number 1, give yourself some time. Allow yourself to listen for a little while and be okay with not having the answer. You can do sketches. Weirdly your mind thinks different things when you’re doing different stuff. So you can just take a piece of paper, draw like four people’s heads and just their shoulders on just a big weird thumb but then I would put on hair and this one had glasses and he’s carrying a messenger bag and what’s inside a messenger bag? He’s probably got a moleskin and a Nalgene and this lady she was earring some sort of blouse. She had a Blackberry. Why? Because she’s enterprise. Weird. I didn’t know I had any enterprise people on my audience. Okay, that’s interesting.
[30:28] But of course you’re just kind of sketching but it gets you opening up, thinking about who would be in it and which one of these would I really like to cater this thing too? That’s a really good tip is just to be able to sketch and draw. Another thing is finding out where the conferences are that someone like this would go to. Just doing the research on for instance if you’re doing research on web designers, there’s just a million web design conferences out there and there’s a big difference between the event apart audience and the future of web apps audience. And that’s an instructive difference and you can read through some of their marketing materials. You can look at things on their site and hear testimonials that they probably have featured on their site and they’re giving you language that glues you into who these people are, what they really are hungry for.
[31:12] You can find forums where folks are interested in your topic and just get involved, just start paying attention, just start listening, get the email updates. Try answering some questions. Try getting more clarity about what their struggles really are. These are all things and again none of it sounds sexy. Right? It just sounds like work and I would say limit yourself. Give yourself time but limit yourself because you can spend the rest of your days researching before you launch this thing. And what’s important is you do a good preliminary amount of work like 2-3 weeks of research and development on who your people are which is the same thing as saying understanding who your people aren’t.
[31:50] And then you launch with that. You go whole hog with that and you try it out for a while and then you start hearing from people you do the things that don’t scale for a while. You’re reaching out to everyone. You’re getting really – hopefully kind of like what you guys have both done with your products where you’re getting all that big feedback from your small crew of early users. That’s all big stuff. And then with one last bit, just the language that they use is incredibly important. if they say I’m really struggling with or I have a problem with, just the little tweaks on language, if you see any patterns in that or if you get any sort of clues into that, first of all, the only way you’re going to get those clues is if you’re really listening, paying attention is sort of keeping an Evernote list somewhere where you’re keeping notes on that stuff. But the language that they use matters a ton.
[32:39] Even if you don’t use the exact same language on your sales page, using things that are like it, using things that feel like they’re going to interpret as the thing that they mean when they say I struggle X,Y or Z. that ends up being a really big deal.
[32:53] Rob: There was a lot going on there. The piece that I want to touch on is the language point. I’m not sure if you haven’t launched a product that you really understand how different it is to call your product say let’s take Drip for example. That’s the email marketing software that I launched. I could have a headline that says epic auto responders. I could also have a headline that says more leads and more customers. I could have a headline that says easy lead generation. I could have one that says emails that convert. Double digit jumping your conversion rate. I’ve used all of these. The reason I know this, because they’re in front of me, because I have like 19 different headline that I’ve tested and that I’ve talked to people about.
[33:28] And the interesting thing is where Drip is right now, it’s still early but I can already see the different groups using it in a different way and referring to it as a different thing so that is a challenge because all of my customers are not calling it the same thing. They’re calling it different things but it’s as you said, you try to look for trends. You try to slice it and figure out if they’re Saas or a software company. Are they saying a certain thing? Are they talking about leads or conversion rate or ROI?
[33:55] Chase: Yeah.
[33:57] Rob: If they’re more of the email marketer, are they talking about how good the tool is itself and not talking about the results. So that’s to be honest the phase that I’m in right now. I did it with HitTail. We’ve done it with MicroConf, we changed the messaging there. I mean kind of every product that you go through I think at a certain point once you do understand that audience and you’re able to have a dialogue with them you wind up honing that message.
[34:18] Chase: Yeah, absolutely. There’s this great quote from Victor Papanek, one of these old school designers and he says design as a problem solving activity can never by definition yield the one right answer. It will always produce an infinite number of answers, some righter and some wronger. So just like with headline and maximum amount of headline tests. There’s normally mostly a winner. Sometimes you get a really clear winner and sometimes it’s like yeah this is incrementally better let’s just stick with that. But still even there, who’s to say you’re not going to come up with something more right than this current winner. Sort of this organic development over time and that’s why it’s helpful that it’s not like just some little thing that you hope to sort of fart out and just never have to deal with again because these ideas develop over time.
[35:04] So I guess I’m sort of pre-disposed. I dream about making a brand and making something that stands right next to mailchimp and square space in terms of look at this, it’s from the internet. It’s for the internet. It stands for something good. It says let’s make a better internet together the way that square space is saying that. I’ve got a background in advertising and that has always been the most interesting thing about advertising to me is that you have so much money to do something meaningful and everybody [Inaudible] they’re not doing it in an interesting way when they could.
[35:37] And so you should take everything that I say with a grain of salt but that’s like that’s always what I’m hungry for. I’m always hungry for some spec of the sense that maybe we’re not alone or as lonely as we all feel we are. It’s certainly in my DNA to build a brand more like Fizzle like hey let’s do something matterful and meaningful together. Let’s create something of our lives. Let’s harness what we know of independent business of the internet of connection with other people of needs and desires and all these things and let’s earn a living independently doing something that we care about versus just making money.
[36:08] Rob: Right. I’m interested you said that advertisers, they have so much money and most of them are doing it wrong. They’re not doing it in a meaningful way. What does it look like to do it in a meaningful way? What’s an example or what is a way to describe how you envision that?
[36:25] Chase: I mean there’s a lot of examples of people doing it really well. Do you remember the Chrysler commercials that featured Eminem? One of them actually had Eminem in it and the other ones just had that song, that building sort of driving song. What they did is they told a story of the rebirth of Detroit and American Motors. They reframed the story of Chrysler as the story of Detroit, as the story of America as an underdog. And they did it all with this driving, moving Eminem song underneath it. And then they told a bunch of little stories. One of them was a Portland some NFL player something and it was like his homecoming coming back to Portland like driving through the streets, gray, foggy, cloudy outside and he’s driving through Portland and it’s just some really mellow kind of deep, meaningful monologue that he’s having. They told these stories for the underdog and they made the brand represent that. That’s sensational. I loved that.
[37:20] And then here’s this other example that I found recently. There’s an advertiser called Howard Gossage. He’s an older advertiser in the 50’s and 60’s and it was said of Howard Gossage – I can’t remember the exact words but the most well rewarded renegade of the advertising you. But I’m just looking at this ad right now in this book that I have of Howard Gossage. There was a stereo company called KLH and he made this just the silly ad. All his ads were funny. They were like conceptual art and this is what it says, a recent survey sponsored by KLH has proven beyond doubt that when you buy KLH stereo equipment, you will love your wife or your husband more.
[37:56] And then he says admittedly it’s like a lot of copy on this ad by the way. He only did ads in the New Yorker. He said they did a survey where they asked respondents to assume that he was for some reason deprived of his wife or husband and to assume that dollars could somehow prevent a catastrophe, how many dollars would it be worth to keep your wife or husband? Well gentlemen, the findings showed that owners of KLH equipment said on average they’d spend $541,616.23 whereas owners of other equipment said a mere $362,000. The difference is $179,000.64 worth of favor for the average KLH spouse. It’s just a silly idea of saying that he made up some stats that are just outlandish and crazy and said this stereo company is going to make you love your wife more but it’s cheeky.
[38:50] It’s funny. It’s interesting. It’s I think more than anything else, it’s human. That’s what I feel like advertisers are telling us like look at you, you’re the crazy guy who loves Taco Bell at midnight. You’re crazy. We love that about you. Come get a burrito wrapped in a taco with a thick candy shell or whatever.
[39:06] Rob: So that’s what you’re saying. You’re saying there’s an element of humanity. The word human has come up several times when you’ve been talking. It also sounds like there’s an element of humor. There’s an element of creativity and cleverness that goes outside of the way everyone else is doing it.
[39:21] Chase: Yeah and that’s classic good copy writing but there’s just so much room to actually make someone fall in love with your brand, with your product, with what your product represents. Mailchimp or like square space right? They’re a super bowl ad for like here’s to like let’s make a better web together but it’s something like that. Great [Inaudible] really good advertisement. Really good advertisement really good story at least for us internet people, it’s a great story to get behind. That’s what I’ve always been addicted to. I’ve always wanted to create that experience when someone lands on one of my websites or something that I’ve designed for someone else but especially when I land on Fizzle, when they watch the video and they see the little joke, it gets very intentional that we have that little gimmick in the video about 15 seconds into it because that’s right around when you’re probably going to click away.
[40:05] But those kind of little human bits I find that if I landed on Drip Rob and it was cheeky and it said listen of course you have an email problem just look at your fingernails or I don’t know, that’s not a good example but something like that wherein you drew me into the story whereas like people who use Drip love their wives more or I see that you’ve got humor. You’re interested and I got to be clear that’s not always right. Probably rarely right but that’s the kind of experience that I want to have. So I want to give the visitor that kind of experience with the stuff which is why in the training and the courses that we make, there’s always jokes. There’s always little one liners and little sort of things that we pull in with the learning to kind of keep it interesting because these stuff can be tough to learn. We like to really accentuate the humanity.
[40:51] Mike: I think that makes a lot of sense and I don’t know where the line here is. It would seem to me that when you’re doing advertising and promotion you’re your product that you could overdo it. And I don’t know where you would draw the line I mean obviously it depends on exactly what you’re doing kind of what are your thoughts on them? Because it seems like you could only tell the same story so many times or so many different ways before you get to the point where you’re no longer eliciting a positive reaction from people. It can turn negative.
[41:19] Chase: Absolutely. It’s a really good point Mike because first and foremost I just need a cork screw. I think a lot of people who listen to this show, a lot of bootstrappers, we’re trying to build a great cork screw, something that’s useful, it does what it’s supposed to do. Like email Drip, like these sorts of things. We want to create a cork screw and I’m fully willing to pay $10, $15, $30, $90 a month for a corkscrew if it really opens the bottle of wine the way that I need it to.
[41:45] And so at the same time, you’re absolutely right about that. There needs to be a balance because when I buy a corkscrew, I don’t want to hear some cute long whimsical tale. It’d be nice if there’s five corkscrews on the wall. I know they’re all going to do the job. But one of them is shaped like a pipi or something like that, look at these guys. But then they have another one that I would actually want to put my hands on. But you’re absolutely right. Because if you land on something and it’s too cheeky, it’s too cute like I said, whimsical almost, then I’m losing interest because you don’t understand my problem.
[42:14] But if you can understand my problem, tell me about it in a way that makes me go not only yeah, he gets my problem but he does it in a way that feels right, that feels human. That also was actually surprisingly interesting. There was a one liner in there somewhere or there was some little vignette or some interesting story or whatever. And again, it’s not always going to be humor. It could be like the Chrysler ad where it’s actually meaningful, it’s motivational, connects it to my bigger motivation which is not to solve my email problem. It’s to have a life that I care more about that I feel more at home in, that’s more authentically me.
[42:46] Sometimes it’s just connecting it up that level of why or down that level of why depending on how you look at it. And that in it of itself also needs to be done tastefully. So you’re right in that these things can be way out of whack and off balance.
[43:00] Rob: Well Chase, it’s been awesome having you on the show man. I’m wondering folks want to get in touch with you, follow what you’re doing, how would they do that?
[43:08] Chase: If you don’t care about who you follow, if you have low standards for Twitter I’m on there with chase_reeves but probably the best place is the sparkline blog. fizzle.co/sparkline you’ll be able to find it there. we work very hard to keep the quality of stuff that we’re putting out there quite high and I think it’s pretty good stuff that your audience would probably like.
[43:25] Rob: Awesome. Thank again for taking the time man. Really appreciate you coming on the show and I think our listeners would get quite a bit out of this episode
[43:32] Chase: Alright man, I’m glad to be here. I hope there’s something intelligible in there. I kind of feel like I just kind of ranted and raved but that’s no new sensation for me.
[32:41] Rob: Very cool dude.
[43:43] Mike: Thanks Chase.
[43:44] Chase: Thank you guys.
[43:45] 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.
Episode 174 | Momentum, Stress, HitTail and AuditShark
Show Notes
- Momentum Chrome Plugin
- Facebook Ad Fraud Video
- Steve Pavlina on Becoming an Early Riser
- MicroConf Vegas Speakers
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I update you on our projects, HitTail, Drip, MicroConf and Audit Shark. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 174.
[00:09] Music
[00:17] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:28] Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Mike?
[00:33] Mike: I was on a bootstrapper’s website and they linked to a chrome plug-in called momentum. I love this plug-in already. I mean what it does is you install it and whenever you open up a new tab, it gives you a photorealistic background of some picture that’s been taken some place in the world and it tells you what time it is and when you first open it on any given day, it asks you what your main priority for that day is. So then you type it in and the rest of the day, whenever you open up a new tab, t will remind you that is your main priority today.
[01:07] It essentially has acted like a deterrent for me wasting time going and doing just browsing new sites or hacker news or anything like that. It’s really cool. I’d really recommend it to anybody but it also gives an inspirational quote and tells you what the temperature is outside. Today’s quote is never let your fear decide your faith.
[01:24] Rob: That’s a really cool plug-in. I love the idea that you enter your goal and then it basically keeps shoving your goal in your face all day. That’s a nice feature.
[01:33] Mike: It’s awesome and I’ve only been using it for about two days now. I love it.
[01:36] Rob: Cool. Hey, have you seen that video on YouTube? It’s called Facebook fraud but a guy lays out a really interesting case on how buying Facebook clicks to get more likes on your page is kind of a racket?
[01:47] Mike: Yeah I did.
[01:48] Rob: The video is really well done and I love the guy’s presentation style is just kind of matter of fact, he talks through arguments of Facebook is – the clicks to get likes by paying the whatever it is, 30 cents or 50 cents a click are worth about as much as if you just go and pay a click forum like in the Philippines or in India, you can pay a tiny amount of money. I think it’s a penny a click in order to get people to like and that those are basically almost equivalent.
[02:12] Now, I thought all that was cool. The problem I had with it is I kept seeing people posting it with the name. It wasn’t Facebook fraud. One person posted with a case for the uselessness of advertising on Facebook or Facebook ads don’t work. When I saw that title, I clicked through because I’m like how is this going to play out? But it’s only talking about buying likes on your page. So if you don’t buy likes on your page, this thing isn’t really that relevant to you. It’s not some catastrophic damnation of buying ads on Facebook because obviously a lot of us do well with Facebook ads.
[02:44] If you’re selling software and you’re sending your clicks off of Facebook onto your website and you’re getting people to buy your product, then obviously it’s a very different approach than what this guy was talking about.
[02:55] Mike: I mean unless you’re involved in internet marketing, you probably don’t necessarily understand the subtle nuances of what you actually do with Facebook advertising so people look at that and they’ll see this video and they’ll say Facebook advertising doesn’t work. But having never gone in there and looked at it, they don’t realize that there’s like several different ways that you can advertise and there’s different things that you can try to get people to do. So if you’ve never done it before, you’re going to see that video and say oh, Facebook advertising is a giant scam and fraud and that’s not what its saying. It’s saying that this particular thing is no different than using a link farm and yeah that’s right.
[03:32] Rob: I think that he says it’s like it isn’t much better. Like you’re paying a lot more and it’s only a little bit better. So you know, there’s been stuff about this about Google ad words having all these click fraud at Twitter, I guess it was ad sense. So if you’re placing ads through ad words that people would have ads on their website trough ad sense and then hire folks to click them. And yeah that’s happened. And people a few years ago said Google is done. This is going to ruin Google that they were just doomed and yet here they are inviting flying cars. I’m not saying that you should dismiss something like this but really think about the grand application to this and how much of an impact it actually has on Facebook and really our efforts as marketers. So what’s going on with you in terms of Audit Shark stuff?
[04:13] Mike: I’m in the middle of testing out removing the credit card requirement from the signup page. I haven’t fully flushed out exactly how I’m going to be working everything and kind of following people through but really what I’m trying to do with it is I’m trying to get people in there and actually using the products so that I can get information from them and I understand it like there’s going to be this large number of people who are not necessarily interested in it. They’re just going to sign up because it’s a free signup at this point.
[04:40] But what I’m interested in doing is finding out information from them about 1) why they came in to begin with, kind of what that messaging was that drew them in and got them to the point where they wanted to sign up and then find out from them why they’re not interested so I can essentially find out what the disqualifiers are because I want to know why the product doesn’t apply to them.
[04:59] Rob: And the idea is to get 5-10 times more people because that’s typically what it amounts to if we’ve moved credit card. 5-10 times or people into your apps so that you can get more feedback even realizing that maybe 80% of it is going to be less qualified than someone who would’ve entered their credit card.
[05:15] Mike: And I’m not really concerned about the people who are coming in and the fact that I know 80% of those people I’m going to get information from are going to say oh, well I didn’t need it because of XYZ and that’s good to know because it means that other people who have those XYZ requirements, those are going to be bad qualifiers as well and I can find out what language they might’ve used and then use additional language to essentially push those people away in the future if I ever go back to asking for a credit card which I assume I will do at some point but I really just want to get those people in there and find out what those disqualifiers are so I can call those things out to kind of push those people further away.
[05:54] Rob: I am less excited about this idea. I am a pretty big proponent of having credit card upfront and the times when I’ve seen folks not have credit card upfront is when they either are way early on and they don’t have enough customer like you’re doing. Typically it’s folks who don’t know what they’re doing or its someone who’s way far along like let’s say Mailchimp or a SaaS app that is growing and they know their funnel so well that they’re doing this as a test and they also have things in place where they’re going to basically have kind of a inside sales team where you don’t even need to enter a credit card but they basically have folks inside who are either making phone calls or they’re doing quite a few highly tactical emails that really bring folks in to the fold, get them on board and get them getting experiencing value.
[06:39] Because if you’re getting that 5-10 times the prospects, you don’t need to close all of them for it to be substantially more profitable for you but you do have to have a ton of stuff in place and you really have to know your ideal customer in order to even close enough of them to make the non-credit card piece work. I’ve tended to say I would always default towards having credit card upfront. You’re deviating from that this point and the reason is you want to do more learning right now. Is that right?
[07:05] Mike: Yeah. I’m probably giving up revenue in order to gain that knowledge but the problem is I don’t necessarily know what I don’t know. So I want to get people in there who are not well qualified to learn for those people so that in the future any messaging like I don’t want to attract the wrong people inadvertently later on. So right now I’m only attracting a certain type of person with my messaging and what I want to do is get everyone in there and then from there, find out who essentially falls out because they’re not a good fit and talk to as many of them as I can so that I can learn what is the good messaging that brings people in? What is the bad messaging that brings people in and how do I kind of guide people through that funnel? And it’s all about learning what things I don’t know at this point.
[07:51] Rob: I think personally I’m skeptical but I always have an open mind to stuff like this because if you go through this and you find out that you learn a ton and you wind up with a couple of value propositions that you wouldn’t have otherwise learn, then you go back to asking for credit card, I’m open to this being kind of a tactic early on that if you launched something and that credit card field is basically keeping too many people out or you’re just not getting enough sign-ups that you can’t learn anything, maybe this is a tactic that people can use. Maybe you can prove it out with this approach. It’s not something that I’ve had to go through.
[08:22] Mike: So what about you? What’s going on with HitTail?
[08:25] Rob: Man, such a big weight off my shoulders. You know the revamp that I’ve been talking about, walking around Google’s not provided where they no longer send keywords to your website, finally got that live like a soft launch last week to existing customers and it was kind of an innocuous link where you could activate Google keywords. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I just wanted a few people to try it. And then yesterday I rolled it so that all brand new HitTail trials, that’s all they see now. They’re basically dumped onto an on boarding page that says let’s get you connected to your Google web master tools account and there’s no more tracking code.
[08:58] There’s no more JavaScript. There’s no more real time traffic because that’s not necessarily now. The real value prop HitTail’s always had is provide keywords and then provide suggestions based on those keywords. And with a direct link into Google web master tools like HitTail now does, there’s no reason for you to have actual tracking code on your site anymore. So it’s been an interesting 24 hours. There’s not even 100 people who have activated it.
[09:24] If you don’t know, if you add your website in the Google web master tools, you can see a bunch of information about it. And in there buried somewhere are the keywords people are using to find your website. And so this is the information that they’ve pulled out of analytics. You basically can’t get that anymore. And so HitTail now on a weekly basis will go into assuming you give us permission, will automatically go into Google web master tools. We pull those keywords into our database. We run our algorithm on it and then we rank them on a 1-5 scale of these are the keywords that you should target.
[09:53] That part is done and it really feels good to have that going because new trials can continue to come in. This point I feel like they can actually get the value out of it that they were getting and frankly, even a little bit more like I’m super stoked. I ran it on my own sites and it’s given me insight that the old HitTail wouldn’t give you because the old HitTail said it’s a suggestion or its not. Whereas now it ranks them on a 1-5 star level and so I’m reverse ordering and I’ve already started ordering articles through HitTail and I’m going to be publishing on a few of my sites.
[10:20] Mike: That’s really cool. So does that decrease the server requirements because I know before, you used to have some pretty serious issues with at least initially when you first took over the product to me, had all those issues with the server. It couldn’t cope with some of the things that it needed to do.
[10:35] Rob: That’s right. It was getting on 20-40 inserts per second which isn’t that much if you’re running node Js and you’re using redis but this thing is using a 13 year old classic SAP over a sequel server database, a lot of disk IO. Yes, overtime, that will decrease. I still have this big customer base of people who are using the tracking codes. So it doesn’t go away over night. Those people I’m not going to kick them out of the tracking code usage. I’m just going to let that out peter out.
[11:01] But once I start emailing customers, I’m probably going to email 100 at a time starting next week, I’ll email 100 and say look this is the direction HitTail’s going in order to provide maximum benefit from Google, just link it up to your Google web master tools account. It will download them and do the things. Hopefully, over time, people will uninstall that tracking code and basically stop using that side of it and then as you said I can dramatically reduce my hosting cost because hosting cost is it about $800 or $900 a month.
[11:27] Mike: That’s cool.
[11:28] Rob: Yeah, feels good man. It took a lot longer than I thought but I think these things always do. How about you? What else is going on?
[11:34] Mike: The desktop edition that I’ve been working on for Audit Shark, the development for that is actually going really, really well at this point. I was able to give an initial demo of it within the past couple of days to a security analyst. That went really, really well. He’d look at and he understood the value of it and just immediately you just kind of watch me go through it and you can point it to any machine on the network, you don’t even need an agent installed and he’s just looking at and saying wow, he was just totally blown away by it.
[12:01] And I’ve shown a few other people as well and as soon as they see that, the value proposition for Audit Shark becomes much more clear. And I need to figure out how to take some of those screen shots and create a screen cast or something like that of the desktop edition and put it on the website to help make the value proposition more clear and why you would use that. Because I don’t think the messaging on the website is particularly clear. It’s technically accurate but I don’t think that it’s clear.
[12:30] Rob: Right. And that’s what I was going to ask you is how is the desktop edition going to help sell you more Audit Shark?
[12:36] Mike: It works very, very well as a demo for what the product is capable of and essentially the cloud version of it is you would take the things that you’ve built in the desktop edition and you load them into the cloud and then the cloud basically acts as your scheduler. So basically you’re building the scripts with a desktop edition and then you’re loading them into the cloud and the cloud runs them in the background on a scheduled basis. You can run them on the desktop edition, just not really on a scheduled basis.
[13:01] Rob: Right.
[13:02] Mike: It just gives you a much more interactive view of everything that’s going on so when you’re going through and you’re developing it, you can do things very, very quickly. You can iterate on things that you’re building versus in the cloud edition, you really can’t. There’s a much higher latency I’ll say so you don’t see things right away. It will lie taking visual studio and putting it into a webpage.
[13:21] Rob: Right. And that makes sense. I mean that’s from a future perspective, that makes sense. I know it’s a better way to do it but is it because there are people who won’t buy Audit Shark without this or is it because a paying customer is going to cancel unless you build it? What brought you there? What brought you to building a desktop app?
[13:42] Mike: It’s always been in the road map to have a desktop edition and I just haven’t gotten there yet. Right now I’m talking to a prospect who they basically told me flat out that they need something like that that will work offline because they have networks that are completely disconnected. They’re not on the internet and they don’t have a way to get the information that they need. So that reduces them to doing everything manually because they don’t have software in place that can do it. The desktop edition allows them to do that stuff in an offline manner that my cloud edition just simply can’t do.
[14:15] Rob: Got it. So you do have a prospect? That’s what you’re saying.
[14:17] Mike: Yes.
[14:19] Rob: If you’re listening to this and you’re early in your product or thinking boy, you should be focusing on how to get revenue, that’s what I’m trying to say is at this point, even with this step I’m building I rarely build a feature unless either a customer has requested it and I think they might cancel or I think it applies to a lot of customers or a prospect has requested it and I think they’re not going to continue with their trial or if we haven’t built it or if it’s something that I really think is going to differentiate us in the market and really allow me to kind of change the core value prop of the app because I think adding one more feature, some people will just add this, add multi-user support. Add other random stuff that you can think of but just adding a list of features in your website doesn’t sell any more of it right?
[15:02] It comes down to actively explaining the value prop or having people who already know about her or waiting on something and I guess that’s what you’ve clarified is you have someone who you think is not going to buy unless you build this thing. And it’s been on the roadmap for a while.
[15:16] Mike: Right.
[15:17] Rob: And these enterprise I assume if you’re talking about to them.
[15:20] Mike: Yes.
[15:21] Rob: So one thing I wanted to bring up, I’ve just gone through probably a month of pressure like putting too much pressure on myself. I setup these goals for 2014 and as always happens, things come up, the HitTail stuff took a lot longer than I thought it would and I’m behind on most of my goals for 2014. And I take that really hard and I started working longer and longer nights. I started thinking about work more and I basically stopped enjoying what I was doing. I was feeling a lot of stress but the only reason is because I want to basically live up to these goals that I’ve setup for myself that are not critical.
[15:54] When I took my retreat a couple weeks ago I took a step back and I said I need to back off on kind of the time famine I think is what I’ve been feeling of like I don’t have time to do anything because I’m just rushing around and I’m late with everything and I can’t respond on the emails and I actually wrote down in my notebook be thankful and I wrote down all these things I was thankful for. The funny thing was the week or two after I come back from my retreat I’m listening to bootstrap with kids and Brecht Palombo said almost the exact same thing. That he went on his retreat and that he realize that he has a lot more to be thankful for than he doesn’t.
[16:26] But it’s easy to get caught up in these. Their goals but is almost this false pressure that you put on yourself. And so I’ve been working the last couple weeks to fight against that self imposed kind of stress and really trying to enjoy the journey more. This is the life that I build for myself right? You have apps that you’re working on. This is fun. This is what we’re all supposed to love doing and yet at times, I think it’s pretty easy for me to wander away from that sense of just how cool it is.
[16:54] Mike: It’s interesting that while you seem to have been going down the direction of getting down on yourself and having all these things to do and working more hours to try and catch-up I’ve actually kind of go on in the other direction where I’ve started working less hours and its actually helped me because then I’m a lot more focused during the time that I am working and I’m sleeping better at night and I’m not thinking about work as much. And I find that the more I think about work, the worse it actually gets. I’ve definitely been there.
[17:22] Rob: that’s good to hear. I would wish for everyone.
[17:25] Mike: I found that not sleeping well is one of those snowball effects. Losing weight I feel like it’s the same thing it’s very much a snowball effect where as you start the process like you lose a few pounds and then you lose more and more and it becomes easier. However, if you start gaining weight, that’s a snowball in the other direction. It just gets worse and worse than it is to try and reverse directions. And sleep is one of those things where if you’re not getting enough sleep, then your whole day just suffers and is wrecked because of it.
[17:53] My best productivity hours re probably between 6 AM and noon and I hate getting up early. I can’t stand it. But if I do, I get so much done and I’m so productive and I’m very amped up and ready to get that stuff done and then I’m ready to go to sleep earlier which means I can get up early again the next day.
[18:12] Rob: I agree with you on the snowball thing with sleep because that’s been part of it and I’ve been waking up at weird hours at night. When your sleep’s interrupted like that, you’re just not at full force and then I was drinking a bunch of caffeine during the day which then of course adds to your – clinically, you get more stressed out. You have more anxiety when you do that, then your sleep is interrupted because you don’t sleep as well. It’s totally this cycle. And I actually busted it at the start of the year and I went to no coffee no alcohol for 14 days and it was purely just something to kind of reset the system. The first three days were kind of rough on both ends and I was all jacked up but pretty soon my sleep became – I undid the snowball basically.
[18:49] To be honest, the other thing that I did, it’s funny you say early riser. I’ve never been in my life been an early riser. My peak productivity hours historically have been between 10PM and 2AM always. My whole life I started giving more thought about how little work I get done in the evenings now. I used to always make up the lack of work I would get done in a day, I’d go home and work in the evenings. But now with kids, we stay up later and later. I’m getting almost nothing done.
[19:11] But I Googled how to become an early riser and sure enough, Steve Pavlina had an article on it written back in 2005 that really cool. And so I’ve started getting up every day at 6:30 in the morning. I didn’t even know that like 6:30 existed because I am totally a scrape myself out of bed at 8:30 or 9 type person. I followed his article which is called how to become an early riser. We’ll link it up in the show notes. Those are the only days now when I do that I’m getting to inbox zero and if I don’t do that, I’m finding that I never make it to inbox zero during the day.
[19:43] And what’s a trip is when I get up at 6:30 my kids get up around 7, I only get an extra half hour. It’s not even much time but it’s incredibly productive and I just zip through a huge list that without interruption and so by the time I make my kids breakfast and by the time I actually get into the office and really start working, I feel like I’ve accomplished hours of work by that time and it kicks off my day in a very different direction. And if I scraped myself out of bed and drink a bunch of coffee just enough to make my kids breakfast and I get to the office and now I have to start with email.
[20:16] Mike: Yeah, a lot of the kid duty in the mornings is split between my wife and I. for me I think splitting the email, try to do some of it before dealing with the kids and then doing more afterwards, I can’t say I have a good sense of whether or not it helps. I feel like I get a lot of the unimportant emails out of the way but I don’t get any work done on the important ones.
[20:35] One of the other things that I guess I’ll update people on is the Twitter strategy that I’ve been following. I’m up to about 1650 twitter followers for my Audit Shark Twitter account and I’ve started really zeroing in on security auditors and security specialists and probably over the past I’d say month to two months I’ve started getting a lot more retweets and a lot more shares from the things that I’ve bee putting out there. And I think that has to do with the fact that I’ve started interacting with these people who are involved in the security industry specifically as opposed to just kind of blanket trying to find people on Twitter.
[21:12] So I think that zeroing in on the type of person who would probably be an ideal user for Audit Shark has really helped me bring those people in underneath the twitter account and start those interactions. I’ll talk a little bit more about my strategy at MicroConf but speaking of MicroConf, one of the things that we did for this year was we hired a conference coordinator.
[21:31] Rob: That was like the best decision ever. I feel like it’s been definitely less than half the work for me. I don’t know, it’s hard to quantify but it’s less than half the work that I spent on Vegas last year we’re spending this year.
[21:42] Mike: Yeah I’ve taken a ton of stuff and handed it off to him as well and a lot of its just like the follow-up with people and trying to get information and saying hey, I need this and there’s a field in the replies and everything and I’ve been able to hand a lot of that stuff off to him and that’s been really, really helpful.
[21:58] Rob: Yeah. I think the other thing is we did attendee talks last year which is where attendees can pitch their talk or they basically put it into a Google form, Google spreadsheet and then we allow all the attendees to vote on those talks and then we pick – I think it’s the top 8. We may stretch it to 10 this year but last year we did top 8. That whole process was extremely time consuming last year and I was debating whether or not to do it again. It was really popular and so he just allows us to make it a no-brainer like yes we will do that because it’s not a matter of anymore time off our plate. It’s just a matter of him doing it. It’s us paying him to handle it.
[22:34] What’s also nice, we have almost all the speakers locked down at this point. You and I are speaking. Ian Lanceman from userscape is speaking about slaying the customer support beast and then we have Nathan Barry, we have Jesse Mecham from youneedabudget.com who grew a software company from 0 to $4 million a year. It’s a onetime purchase downloadable software kind of a could story. And then of course Hiten Shah is returning and Sherry Walling PhD, my wife’s going to be talking about stress, anxiety, entrepreneur, mindset, that kind of stuff. So there’s couple more that are still maybe’s and we’re still working them out but I’m hoping to get people dialed in here in the next week or two.
[23:09] Mike: One of the things that I found interesting for the attendee talks was the number that we got this year.
[23:13] Rob: It was 21 last year. 21 talks and then like I said, we picked the top 8.
[23:18] Mike: Well we didn’t pick. The attendees did.
[23:19] Rob: That’s right.
[23:20] Mike: But then this year what did we get? Like 42 or 43 something like that?
[23:22] Rob: Yeah, 43 twice as much, crazy ratio. Shows you what kind of crowd it is, its people. I mean our world, our audience in general and just the folks we hangout with, our colleagues, we are makers. We’re creators and people don’t just want to come and sit back. They want to participate and they want to make and they want to share as well. A lot of names I recognize in that list. I had a tough time voting because I vote for most of them.
[23:46] Mike: I did too.
[23:47] Rob: You could do like a whole another day of just short talks or something.
[23:51] Mike: Right. I had a conversation over Twitter with a couple about the sheer number of applicants and the fact of the matter is that the people who come to MicroConf, you can learn something from just about everybody there. So having that many people who want to get up on stage and share with everyone, I don’t think that’s a bad thing because almost everyone there has something they can share that other people can learn from and save themselves time or money or effort or make more money from their businesses.
[24:19] Rob: So I saw you, you put a nice little Drip signup form on the podcast website. I hadn’t seen this and I went to startupsfortherestofus.com and I see the Drip form there and I’m like how’d that get there?
[24:31] Mike: You know, the funny part was that I actually had a hard time finding in WordPress where to put it.
[24:37] Rob: Oh, we have a WordPress plug-in. All you have to do is install the plug-in and then cut and paste your user ID and it installs it for you.
[24:42] Mike: I was looking for that but the thing is I have Drip installed on my blog and so I went over to my blog and I’m like I know that they’ve got a WordPress plug-in or at least I’m pretty sure that they did but then of course if you go to install a WordPress plug-in then you should probably take a backup of the site and I didn’t want to do all that. I’m like okay, where did I do this over here? And I looked and unfortunately it was buried in the theme itself so I couldn’t do that on that. Honestly I’ve already forgotten where I did it. It took me 30 seconds to do once I found it but it took me probably 20 minutes to find it.
[25:12] Rob: Nice. Don’t do this at home kids. Use the WordPress plug-in.
[25:15] Mike: So if you haven’t had a chance to go over to the startupsfortherestofus.com website, go over there, there is a Drip campaign there. You can sign up for the podcast mailing list where we’ll keep people informed about anything that’s coming up that relates to the bootstrapper community whether it’s podcast or MicroConf or Micropreneur academy related. We’ll probably put some fillers out there. I mean it won’t be the primary MicroConf mailing list. Warning people now about that. But if there are things that are coming up like if we’re thinking about hosting another MicroConf or doing anything else then being on that mailing list is definitely the place to be.
[25:47] Rob: So last update for me, I reached a decision point a few weeks ago with Drip and the decision was around where to go in the market because Drip is kind of in between something like Mailchimp and Aweber which are for auto responders which are about 15-20 a month. And then on the high end, there’s infusion soft which is like $300 a month and it’s from what I’ve heard and see, it’s quite complex. I’ve gotten a lot of requests that people want just a little more email automation basically being able to move people in and out of lists based on things that they click in an email and being able to say well if this person has clicked on this link then now they’re tagged they have interest in SEO. So then you can kind of funnel them into an SEO campaign and then when they’re done with that, funnel them back.
[26:30] It’s just like I explained, email automation is basically a stripped down version of an infusion soft or maybe an office autopilot. And so we broke down on that feature and it changes the direction of Drip a little bit. It doesn’t change direction as much as it expands it. We still have the front end email capture. We still build the course for you. We solve the split testing and the goal tracking but we’re now adding in this kind of behavioral and rule and stuff which I admit was not at all on my radar when I’ve envisioned the product and wasn’t on my radar while we were building it and its purely come about because of customer requests. Wanting something that does more.
[27:08] The interesting thing is a lot of our customers are people, they’re kind of two camps. It’s either people who had never gotten an email course together because they just didn’t want to make the time or hadn’t spent the time to do it and Drip’s good for that of course because it’s fairly simple to get setup and we build that first course for you but then there’s also some experienced marketers who wanted the split testing and they wanted the email capture form and all the settings and stuff. And for these guys, we have a bunch of integrations they go out and keep it into their main email software. So they’re using other email software, another marketing software and then Drip is just kind of front end for it.
[27:40] But with both groups, we felt the push to move more and more into automating. The beginners, now that they have a course app are kind of stoked that they have this thing going and then they want to do more sophisticated things with it and they want to handle trial emails which require an automatic move in and out based on behavior or customer retention emails, I mean really moving through the space because right now it’s all about marketing emails.
[28:00] And the more experienced people know the power of email automation so that’s where it came about. So it’s definitely a huge undertaking for us. I bet it will be a simple, simple V1.0 its probably 2 maybe 3 weeks and then expanding on that, it could be easily but its 1-2 months of development. That’s really where we are right now and I’m feeling good about it. I mean I’m feeling like it’s going to expand the market substantially and it also allows me to change the marketing quite a bit, the whole value prop of Drip changes at that point. It’s not just this thing that increases conversion rate. It can actually do things that a lot of other tools aren’t able to.
[28:38] It easily answers that question how is Drip different from Mailchimp or Aweber which we get quite a bit. And I have answers to that already but if it’s not already painfully obvious then you’ve kind of made a mistake as a marketer if you get that question how are you different from X, if you get that over and over, then you’re not doing a great job as a marketer.
[28:54] Mike: One of the things that comes to mind when you were talking about that was essentially positioning yourself against the other products and it sounded just to me like you hadn’t really thought that fully through before you launched for Drip. You knew in your head what you wanted Drip to do but you didn’t necessarily think about it in relation to some of the other products that were out there and how you were going to position yourself against them kind of once you got the product out there.
[29:20] Rob: What’s interesting is I had thought it through. I made notes and I specifically have pieces in the FAQ and I have pieces in the marketing but I just don’t know how many people get it. Because there’s these nuances. There’s split testing within sequences and that’s something that you can call out but is that enough? There’s the email capture on the front end and there’s that we track goals that we allow conversion tracking and so you can see when someone hits your site for the first time, you can see when they sign up for your list, you can see every email they got and open and a timeline and you can see when they click on an email and then you can see when they purchase from you. So that’s pretty cool right? As a marketer, that something I’ve wanted for a long time.
[29:59] But some people, it isn’t enough. I have thought it through but I don’t know that it resonated with enough people and I think that’s what’s part of this whole being a founder thing is you just don’t know what’s going to resonate until you get out there and you take your best first stab at it and the value props that I set out converted well early on especially with the launch list. And since then it’s just been kind of – it’s obvious that I want this thing to grow faster than it is. That’s where the decision comes of like do I figure just a new way to talk about Drip or have I explored all of those and do I need a real differentiator here that’s going to I think set me really noticeably apart from the other competition.
[30:44] Mike: It’s more about like you know how you have mentally positioned the product against the other ones but it may not necessarily be as clear to other people who are kind of on the outside looking in. When you’re on the inside everything is perfectly clear to you. But other people, they only see what they happen to come across. So if they don’t go look at your FAQ then they don’t necessarily see all those things like the things that you pointed out why it’s different. That’s what I mean.
[31:11] Rob: Exactly and that’s always our job as the founder. It’s our responsibility to communicate that to those people because they’re the ones that are called prospect coming across your website for the first time, they need to understand that difference right away or you’re not doing a good job of it and that’s where I find myself.
[31:29] Mike: Yeah, and I find myself kind of in the same position with Audit Shark. There’s definitely better messaging that I need to be doing and I’m just in the process of figuring some of that out right now.
[31:38] Rob: Very cool. You have anything else for this week?
[31:40] Mike: I guess one last thing. Remember how I put together that auto generated content strategy a couple of months ago?
[31:46] Rob: Yeah. I do.
[31:47] Mike: In December, it was a little off. I wasn’t quite sure how things were playing out and traffic was up but I wasn’t necessarily sure how much it was up. I kind of wanted to wait a little while so I got a little bit more data but at this point I can definitively say that based on the traffic alone, my traffic is up about 2 ½ times over what it was in November so it’s just ridiculous the amount of extra traffic that I’m getting from all these long tail keywords based on all that auto generated content. And there’s probably about 900-950 pages of additional content out there and if I go through and I look in Google analytics, I mean I can see that a lot of those pages are getting hit and they are very, very well targeted keywords terms that are coming in for those things.
[32:34] Rob: That’s awesome. And to be clear, when you say auto generated content it’s not like a computer spitting out garbage. I mean it’s actual data in a database that you’re using to create long tail pages that have information about very specific topics.
[32:47] Mike: So just to give you an example, one of the pages that actually has people who were looking for the time in seconds before the screen saver grace period expires. And I actually have a page on my website that pertains specifically to how to do that and tells you what register key needs to be tweaked in order to toggle that. And there’s people who are hitting that page and coming to my website specifically looking for that. And there’s just literally hundreds and hundreds of different searches that are in my site for all of these long tail things.
[33:15] Now I don’t expect most of them to translate into customers but what I am seeing is that I’m seeing that on certain pages, they’re coming in and they’re seeing the site and then they’re signing up for the mailing list which is it’s kind of nice to be able to correlate those pieces of data because then I can say okay, well if people are searching for X, then they are more likely to join the mailing list and maybe I should do a little bit more to try and push them towards it there because maybe they’re good fit for the product. Maybe they’re not, I don’t know. That’s something I need to explore.
[33:47] Rob: You know with all this long tail traffic, I don’t know you’ve looked at HitTail recently or if you’ve linked it up.
[33:53] Mike: I have not activated the Google keywords yet but…
[33:55] Rob: you should do it. I activated it for Drip because I didn’t have an account for it because it didn’t make sense to have to before. I got this stuff out and it was really enlightening. I definitely recommend you getting there and check it out. Go to the suggestions tab and then order by five stars at the top. It’s pretty cool.
[34:14] Mike: I definitely have to go in there and activate that and after we get off the podcast I’m definitely going to go in there and take a look to see what it says. The other interesting thing that I find is I‘m actually getting a lot of traffic from Bing.
[34:24] Rob: If that’s the case then you will want to install the HitTail tracking. Snip it on because that will still work for Bing and Yahoo and all those and obviously web master tools will work just for Google.
[34:35] Mike: Yup. I think that about wraps us up of the day. 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.