Show Notes
- SuperNBack – An implementation of the NBack brain training algorithm
- Sama Vritti Pranayama – Equal Breathing
- Greek Yogurt substitution chart
- PB2 – Peanut butter substitute
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about life hacks for entrepreneurs. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 186.
[00:06] Music
[00:14] 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.
[00:22] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:22] Mike: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we have made. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:26] Rob: Drip email automation is done.
[00:29] Mike: Oh, congratulations.
[00:30] Rob: Fantastic. Yeah, thank you. We have some early access folks in using it. I have to check a box in the admin console to give folks access to it but just trying to get some more feature requests and figure out what use cases we can and can’t implement at this point.
[00:44] But I’m currently in the process of basically building out Drips entire trial email sequence that I send out which is pretty complex. There’s a lot of dynamic fields. We’re building that out inside the drip email automation engine. It’s pretty interesting just to see this. I’ve never seen this done.
[00:59] Because it’s not just about moving people here and there based on behaviour but we actually have dynamic pieces inside each email. And since we use a Liquid templating engine I can write little snippets of code inside the emails and based on if this custom field is set then put this message. Otherwise, tell them they need to get on board with this other stuff.
[01:17] So it’s been really fun and interesting to dog food it ourselves and we’re just diving into that right now. It is a big weight off my shoulders. Drip email automation is finally done after literally months of toil and work. Now it’s just time to get some folks in using it and get the marketing ramped up for it.
[01:32] Mike: That’s always scary when you’re like manipulating stuff in that production environment and it could potentially impact the guys who are currently using it. Even just inside those emails and things.
[01:41] Rob: Yup.
[01:42] Mike: It’s just a little disconcerting.
[01:43] Rob: Well, and I think that, specifically with making dynamic stuff inside the email, there’s a lot of room for people to make mistakes so we kind of have to help folks out a lot. It’ll be increased support burden, right? There is just more complexity in this. It’s probably why more email providers like MailChimp or whatever wouldn’t allow people to do it.
[01:57] I think there’s a need for it. I think the direction that we’re all headed with email is that we’re becoming – it’s not one to many anymore. It’s like one to a few or one to one at this point and you really have to be customized and customizable based on the things that they do in order to really get impact from it. So that’s the goal with all this.
[02:13] So as I’ve said before, we’re kind of entering this market of on the lower end of Infusionsoft or Office Autopilot. It’s kind of exciting times. We have to do so much stuff though. All the marketing is now – it’s not completely non-usable but it really is a market that we’re entering into anew, so I have a lot of copy to write, trial emails will be new, onboarding has to be all redone because now there are different goals. So we still have a bunch of work ahead of us but it feels good to get the feature out there and have folks using it.
[02:39] Mike: I think that’s one of the hesitations that some people have for launchings. It’s just that they know that if they have to change stuff then they don’t want to have to do a lot of that marketing stuff over again. Especially when it comes to pivots, it’s like I don’t want to pivot because I’ve got all this stuff that I’ve done. I won’t throw it away.
[02:53] Rob: I have to admit it’s daunting to think of redoing stuff we just did six months ago. But what’s nice is the stuff we did six months ago worked well enough to get a critical mass and to get enough revenue to make it worth our while. I mean, it’s not like we’re at $500 a month in revenue and now we’re trying to pivot again. The revenue is coming in justified those initial effort so now it’s just time to kind of step up the game.
[3:12] Mike: Cool.
[3:13] Rob: How about you? What’s going on?
[03:14] Mike: Just wanted to make a couple of announcements here. If you’re a listener who was inspired to quit your job and you’re working full time on your own stuff, let us know. We’ve got a success stories area of the podcast website and we’d be happy to give you a mention and a link back to your site.
[03:28] Also, if you haven’t been to the website lately, our mailing list as well. So we haven’t sent too much to it yet but with the upcoming MicroConf in Europe and a few other things that we have in motion, that’s probably going to change pretty rapidly.
[03:38] Rob: Well, I have some exciting stuff coming down and of course you get to try out Drip if you use that because we are using Drip to collect the emails.
[03:43] Mike: The other thing I have is I unloaded a ton of computer equipment this weekend. Guess how many computers I offloaded out of my home office?
[03:49] Rob: First of all, when you say “unloaded,” do you mean trashed or sold?
[03:52] Mike: I recycled them.
[03:53] Rob: Okay.
[03:54] Mike: I still have some things left that I’m actually going to sell outright but there’s a bunch of stuff that I just took it to the recycling
[03:59] Rob: Yeah, and over under is at ten computers.
[04:03] Mike: Double that.
[04:03] Rob: No! Oh, my gosh! What are you? A pack rat? You had 20 computers?
[04:09] Mike: Yup. I have a server rack and there were all these servers in there and I’m just like there were ten servers in there I just did not need and then there’s all these old desktops and stuff that I’ve kind of gone through over the years and I just kind of left them around for parts and stuff. I got to the point where I’m just like I’m never going to do anything with any of these things. Let me just take it to the recycling, get rid of it all.
[04:27] Rob: Anyway, on to some podcast reviews. We have a bunch of new reviews. This is awesome. We have 217 reviews worldwide with a 4.9 star average. We have a review from Tyler Dow and he says “It’s a pivotal part of my week. Rob and Mike provide outstanding content each week and have found a way to become a regular part of my week. I can’t thank you enough for putting out the great work you do.”
[04:47] Next one is from Ryan Battle here in the U.S. He says, “informative, practical, and to the point. I’ve been listening to this podcast for several months now and it is one of the few that I consider a must listen. The length is perfect, and I love that Rob and Mike don’t waste any time getting to the point. It shows that they are organized and respect the time of their listeners.”
[05:04] And the last one I’ll read today is from our very own Patrick McKenzie, patio11, and he calls us, “one of the best SaaS-focused podcasts. Simply the best, most consistent podcast about running a software business. It’s focused on solopreneurs and folks just getting started in their businesses, but I regularly find things which are useful to me 8+ years in, and I’ve recommended individual episodes to senior folks at companies with tens of millions of dollars in revenue and up.” And then he includes a disclaimer. “I know Rob and Mike in real life, and would consider them friends.”
[05:31] So thanks to all of you for leaving us a review on iTunes. It definitely helps keep us motivated to continue doing the podcast, helps us build a listenership which means that we can just provide more value to everyone. If you haven’t left us a review that would be the best way to pay us the back if you can log in to iTunes and give us a five star.
[05:47] Music
[05:51] Mike: Well, today we’re going to be talking a little bit about life hacks for entrepreneurs. I thought we’d go through and take a look at some of the different things that could be useful to some of our listeners which are a little bit outside of the realm of technology and marketing and more applicable to life in general.
[06:04] The first one is a life hack for relieving stress and anxiety. It’s essentially a breathing exercise. I think that your wife, Sherry, had given a little bit of a brief demonstration about this at MicroConf which was really cool. There was a room of about 200 people who were doing this very thing. I went through it and I glanced up at the time to kind of look around to see who else was doing it and virtually the entire room was doing it.
[06:27] Afterwards, you do this breathing exercise and I really felt a lot calmer and a lot less anxious. It’s called Sama Vritti but essentially it means “equal breathing.” The basics of it are that you inhale for a count of four and then you exhale to a count of four all through your nose. While you’re doing this, you concentrate on paying attention to the motion of the air. You repeat this ten times.
[06:47] So as you’re breathing in, you concentrate on the air coming in, and then as you’re breathing out, you concentrate on the air that’s going out. And if you do this ten times, because you’re only counting to four, it’s about four seconds each way, it’s really less than a minute and a half. Afterwards, you feel much more at ease. Your stress levels seriously drop after doing this and you can really focus a lot more on the things that you’re doing.
[07:10] Rob: This is one of those things that I think you can hear and say, “Oh, what a bunch of crap.” People have mixed feelings about this stuff. In my experience of this kind of stuff, this breathing and exercise and yoga and all the stuff we’re going to talk about today is tremendously undervalued, like taking care of yourself. It has crazy long-term effects, not just healthwise but like on your motivation and it’s things that you don’t even notice until you get six or 12 months down the line and then you realize you’ve been driving yourself into the ground, eating fast food, not exercising, being stressed out.
[07:41] And so this kind of thing, like you said it, it’s 90 seconds. The one we did at MicroConf, I was actually particularly stressed out at the moment that Sherry said we should start doing it and it did have a noticeable impact. I felt my pulse go down. I felt my stress go away for the time being. If you haven’t heard of this or you haven’t taken this kind of thing seriously, I think this can really do well if you do have anxiety and/or stress going on in your life, to just take this breather and kind of reset everything for the moment and even if you have to do it every hour or every two hours to kind of get rid of that stress.
[08:10] Mike: What I find is that if you’re considering doing something like this and you’re using any sort of time tracking techniques, whether it’s Pomodoro or anything like that, if you set aside time explicitly to do this, either in between work sessions, it’s much more effective in helping you because it becomes something of a habit. You work for a little while and then you do this, your stress levels drop and you’re able to really focus on the things that you need to get done as opposed to worrying and stressing out about them impacting your productivity. So definitely try it out. Let us know how it goes for you.
[08:40] Our next one, it’s essentially a way to increase the amount of working memory that you have. There was a semi-famous blog post by Joel Spolsky where he said that he can only ever keep so many variables in his head at one time and if anything comes in and tries to take up more space, it rolls off the desk and gets eaten by the dust bunnies. Just the fact that you can only remember so many things and after that you really just have to start archiving them someplace.
[09:06] Well, there was a Wall Street Journal article that was coupled with a University of Michigan study that talked about this learning technique called SuperNBack. Essentially, what it is is it looks like a game. You can get various implementations of it. There is one that you can get at supernback.com. You download it. You put it on your Windows or OS X machine. You can run this program and you dedicate a little bit of time to it and you just do it a little bit each day.
[09:33] Essentially, what it does is it works on increasing the available working space that you are able to process and hold in your brain. So essentially what you’re doing is you’re trying to remember sequences of events that are going on on the screen. When you’re first doing it, you can only remember one or two or three.
[09:50] It gets real easy after you start to figure out what you’re supposed to do, but then you kind of top out at like three or four and it’s really hard to kind of break through that. You’ll look at it and you keep trying it and trying it and you can’t remember more than three or four of these sequences of events. Then you get to a point where your brain just kind of breaks through that and you’re able to remember so much more substantially faster. Like I said, this is all backed up by the University of Michigan study and there’s anecdotal evidence that it improves your IQ, improves your ability to process complex tasks.
[10:21] But it is something that you have to dedicate time to. It’s not something you can do a little bit of and then come back to it in three or four or five months or something like that. You really kind of have to keep on it. But once you’ve done that, after you’ve kind of made those breakthroughs, your brain will maintain the ability to remember all of these things in the future. So even if you stop for eight months and then come back to it, your brain will still be functioning at a very high level as opposed to where it was when you first started. A lot of the applications that you can use to take these measurements that you used to leverage the SuperNBack technique, it will show you your progress over time.
[10:53] Rob: Right, and all of us can use something like this but I think it becomes especially important as you age and your brain loses its elasticity. Typically, late 30s, as you move into your 40s you just start losing a little bit of an edge. It doesn’t happen by accident, right? It’s not people who sit around for ten years watching TV and then come back and try to do it. And so this type of stuff is what can keep you sharp.
[11:13] There’s another one called Fit Brains and it’s by Rosetta Stone and I’ve used it. What’s nice about it is it feels a little bit like a game so it does kind of take your mind away but the idea is that it’s supposed to be helping keep your brain fit and keep those elastic pieces moving around and I think as you get older that’s important.
[11:32] Mike: Yeah. I was going to say it’s kind of like exercises for your brain. Obviously, physical exercise helps your body but mental exercises will help to kind of keep your brain in shape. The other one that I’ve heard a lot about is called luminosity.com.
[11:44] So we’ve already talked a little bit about mental exercises but then we get into physical exercises so getting into exercise routines and general fitness. One thing that I found really helpful is to – if you hire a personal trainer and I know that personal trainers can be expensive but if you hire a personal trainer to essentially build a workout program for you and not necessarily go to the gym with you all the time. Because, really, the personal trainer is there to kind of help motivate you and correct your form and things like that but if you’re already comfortable with that stuff and you don’t necessarily need the motivation to go to the gym, what you really need is a workout program that works for you.
[12:17] When you’re first getting into fitness and trying to get your body in shape and you can work with a physical trainer and say, “Hey, I need an exercise program and I would like you to develop one for me,” so you can have, you know, if you’re going to go to the gym two or three days a week, you can have two or three different programs.
[12:31] I’m in the process of actually having five of them done right now so I can go to the gym five days a week. It’s working out pretty well for me. They’re pretty intense too. They don’t take a whole lot of time to do. I think that my first exercise program was about 20 minutes but it’s hardcore 20 minutes. It’s very exhausting to do. I need to take care of my body so I think that doing that upfront investment in something that you can kind of put into a process to move forward then that will really help you out.
[12:57] Rob: Yeah. If you’re like me, it’s not the exertion of the exercise. It’s the time that’s so hard to carve out. I grew up playing sports and lifting weights six days a week, and then I ran track for nine years. I played football. I mean, that’s what I did. It was a huge part of my identity was working out, being fit, and that kind of stuff.
[13:15] And then after college, I got a knee injury. I had surgery and then I just kind of stopped doing it. So after 20 years of a semi-sedentary lifestyle, it’s really interesting to try to get back to that. Every year, for the past several years when I go on a retreat, I will put down kind of a goal of start exercising again at all. I should try to do something. The time has been a challenge.
[13:35] So whats finally worked for me and I’ve been doing this for four or five months now. I decided not to try to do any type of stuff that I used to do because all the stuff I did was intense. I mean, I would do two hours a day six days a week. I just had the time. I started with, “I’m going to do 30 push-ups a day.” That was it. That’s all I was going to do and not in a row even. I would do as many as I could. And so the first day, I did five push-ups in one set, and then I did six sets of five push-ups.
[14:01] But over the course of even a week, I was able to do ten at a time, and now I’m able to do more than 30 at a time. So I’m going to start upping that. But what’s nice about that is for me it takes almost no time because I can fit it in around other things. Like if I’m going to think about a program in our marketing problem, I will just go on the floor and do enough push-ups. Do 20 or 30 push-ups. Crank them out.
[14:21] It’s crazy how quickly my body has adapted. It’s crazy how that little piece, that little in to that habit has started it so that the other night – this happens a couple of times a week – it’ll be 11 o’clock, I’m getting ready to go to bed, and I remember that I haven’t done the push-ups and I will just go down and do them right then just to get them done to make sure that I’ve done them every day.
[14:41] But what that’s led into is that I’ve started running on an elliptical and this is not something I’ve ever done. I’ve always been a runner. I’m actually running on ground and even if I only do 30 minutes, the great part is I’m motivated because I typically will watch a show that I’m drawn to doing that if I can multitask. I think not everyone’s like this but that’s how I am. I have such tight time frames that I’m the guy that double speeds podcasts and so for me to be on an elliptical for 30 minutes not working my mind somehow is too much of a time investment every day for me. But if I can somehow do something else at the same time, it has made it much more palatable and, for me, much more sustainable.
[15:21] I’m on this elliptical now I’d say about three days a week and it’s been consistent for several months. I know that I am on to something, at least kind of a regimen that works for me and if you’re similar to me, it might work for you.
[15:31] Mike: The other thing you can do when you’re on an elliptical is either listen to podcasts or you can also — if you have a Kindle, you can read books on a Kindle as well so you get two different things going at once so you’re kind of multitasking there to make good use of your time while you’re exercising.
[15:44] Next on our list is increasing the quality of your sleep. If you increase the quality of your sleep, it increases your overall wellness and you are able to think more clearly, you’re getting enough rest such that your brain is able to kind of put all the pieces in the right places while you’re in deep sleep and you’re able to remember things better and you generally feel better.
[16:01] If you look at general advice out there, they essentially consist of things like no caffeine after certain times of the day and no screens within a couple of hours of going to bed and things like that. What I found is that that “no screens” does not apply to my Kindle Paperwhite. And I think that’s because it doesn’t have an LCD screen. It has essentially a backlighting capability so it doesn’t really create the same effect in your eyes and it doesn’t cause your brain to kind of go haywire just before you’re going to bed.
[16:31] The other thing I do when I’m reading books at night is I avoid any kind of business or self-improvement books. I exclusively read science fiction or fantasy books to kind of get my mind away from the rest of the day. And I’ve really noticed some considerable improvements in my sleep quality when I’m doing that, especially if I’m doing it before bed.
[16:48] What I’ve started doing is making a habit out of going to bed at a certain time every night. I have found that by setting aside that half hour or 45 minutes for reading a book that has absolutely no relation to my life in general, it helps reduce the stress on my brain and it helps keep my mind off of the things that would otherwise keep me up at night because then I’m focused on this book which, as I said, has nothing to do with reality. I can just read the words and kind of pay attention to the characters and I don’t have to think about solving any particular problem that goes along with the content.
[17:19] Rob: I think the tip about not having screens, especially LCD screens in front of your eyes right before you go to bed is a big one. I don’t think a lot of people heed that. I know that when I work on my laptop and so right before I go to bed that I do have squirrely sleep patterns and that I wind up thinking about work. That’s a good tip.
[17:36] I think another one is called F.lux and it’s justgetflux.com. F.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day so basically it’s warm at night and it’s like sunlight during the day. It’s a pretty interesting thing so as you move into the evening, it will lighten up.
[17:54] The thing I found myself doing for years is once the sun sets, I will actually walk around the house and dim all the overhead lights or turn them off. So I use uplights so that no overhead lights are kind of blaring down because we’re not doing task-based stuff anymore. So I found that that actually changes the mood and it kind of enters us into this cycle of the day that’s like, all right, you’re easing out of all your productivity and you’re kind of easing into an evening of relaxation. And so that’s another approach that I hadn’t even realized I did and then Sherry pointed this out to me.
[18:24] Mike: Yeah, I used to use a Zeo sleep tracker to help kind of monitor my sleep and I did find that, based on what the sleep tracker was telling me, if I read before I went to bed, I definitely got better sleep. I just felt better in general the next day as well but it gave me kind of a number to look at. That number, I kind of tested it over time and it seemed like it worked out pretty well. Unfortunately, they ended up going out of business so I’ve kind of been looking around for a new sleep tracker, kind of an updated one but I still have my Zeo around and it still works pretty well.
[18:51] The last hack that we have is around food and nutrition. There are several hacks that kind of fall into this category. The first one is to plan your meals and snacks so we can advance. What this does is it helps you to avoid having to make choices throughout the day.
[19:03] We’ve talked in previous episodes of this podcast about how, if you limit the number of choices that you have to make, then it helps you to increase your brain glucose levels during the day and helps maintain them at higher levels so that you’re not wasting valuable mental energy on certain things. For example, if you’re trying to get a lot of things done, don’t check your email first thing in the morning because then you’re using up valuable energy on that where you could be using that decision making power for things that are much more important like your marketing or your sales funnel and things like that. So if you plan things in advance during the day, you don’t have to make choices about that stuff. Your choice would actually be: do I follow the plan or not?
[19:42] Rob: Meal planning is something that I’ve found to be way more valuable than I thought it would be, to actually plan dinners and then have stuff thought in advance and have stuff kind of in mind. It’s crazy to not have to go into the kitchen, whether it’s breakfast or dinner, and look around and kind of salvage and put something together. It really has made a difference for me.
[20:03] Mike: Another one is that when you’re eating dinner, one of the things that a lot of people who are kind of leading a sedentary lifestyle like entrepreneurs are, especially software entrepreneurs, is that you tend to eat a lot and especially because you’re sitting down and you don’t really think about how much it is that you’re eating especially if you’re not tracking it which most people don’t track.
[20:21] There’s tons of apps out there that you can use to track. I would advice using one of them. I’ve tried Lose It before, and I’ve used Fitness Pal. Both of them are actually pretty comparable in my opinion. The real key here is if you’re not tracking those things, use smaller plate for dinner and for lunch.
[20:35] There’s actually been studies shown that people will eat nearly 50% less when they’re using nine-inch plates versus when they’re using 12-inch plates which is why, when you watch a dinner, people tend to eat a lot more than they otherwise would or should because at almost any restaurant I’ve ever been to, they tend to give you very, very large plates. Unfortunately, of course, that adds to the amount of calories that you’re intaking, especially if you’re not watching.
[20:55] Rob: Yeah, this is one that I had heard before and we started doing it about maybe a year ago and now I always default to the smaller plates and it totally works. I need to piggyback on this. Derek, who I work with, he is doing things where he’s like not eating out at restaurants as much because just restaurant food tends to – they tend to give you bigger portions and they tend to be higher in calories and fat and all that kind of stuff.
[21:19] Mike: Yeah. One thing that a lot of restaurants will do is, to help make their food better, they add fat to it. But aside from that, most of them add a significant amount of oil or butter to help increase the flavour and of course that adds calories and, as you pointed out, it just increases the portion size and increases the calories and you end up eating too much.
[21:38] So when you’re eating at home, one of the things that you can do is that – and I know not everybody’s a big fan of this but Greek yogurt can be used as a substitute for a lot of different things. You can substitute Greek yogurt for things like sour cream, oil, butter, mayonnaise, cream cheese, buttermilk. There’s a whole list of different things that you can use Greek yogurt for. So if you do like Greek yogurt, then you can use it to kind of increase your protein intake and decrease the amount of calories that you’re intaking because of using Greek yogurt as a substitute for some of the ingredients in the foods that you’re making for lunch or dinner.
[22:12] Another one that you can use as a food substitute is something called PB2 which is a little bit more expensive than peanut butter. It’s essentially a peanut butter substitute but it has about a quarter of the calories of real peanut butter. It comes in a powder. You have to make it yourself but you make it in these tiny little batches of a couple of tablespoons at a time, and it has about 50 calories instead of 200 calories for the same amount of peanut butter.
[22:35] Another one that you can use for substitute is, instead of using bread for sandwiches, you can use giant lettuce leaves. So if you’re making a wrap or a sandwich or something like that, use the lettuce itself as your bread for your sandwich instead of bread and that’ll help to cut down on the amount of calories.
[22:50] Rob: But what I found is for every ten of these life hacks that I hear, there’s about one or two that really resonates with that I’m like, “Huh, yeah, I don’t really mind it that much.” I like a good piece of French bread. I’ve started doing a lot of lettuce wrap hamburgers. I haven’t really gone back. On occasion, like a nice restaurant and there’s some place for some awesome gourmet burgers, I will have a burger with a full-on bun and it’s amazing. But when I’m cooking now, I’ll give our boys the regular buns if they want them and then Sherry and I typically do lettuce wrap burgers and it just goes along with the kind of cutting down on your carbs thing.
[23:21] I found that I personally haven’t missed it as much as I thought I would or as much as I did early on. You kind of get used to it, you know, weaning yourself off of things. I don’t eat ranch dressing anymore. I love ranch dressing but at one point I switched over to like an Italian or a light balsamic. The less I eat something, the less I really crave it.
[23:39] Mike: Another little trick that you can use is if you’re hungry because you are planning out your meals and maybe you’ve reduced the amount of food that you are eating and you find that you are hungry is that you can just drink water. And if you drink water and then wait 15 or 20 minutes, the feelings of hunger tend to go away. They tend to be reduced enough that you can essentially prevent yourself from going out and binging on that bag of potato chips especially if you still have those in the house.
[24:05] The last thing that I found – this is one of the things that I’ve had trouble with in the past which is snacking after dinner especially while I’m watching TV. For me, watching TV is sort of a conditioned response. It’s like if I’m sitting down, I’m going to watch TV, oh, I should get some popcorn and then of course I binge on popcorn and, depending on whether you got the microwave stuff which isn’t necessarily good for you, or the pre-popped stuff which who knows how that was made, the issue of course is that you’re eating a lot of things after dinner when you’re not necessarily hungry. You’re not eating it because you’re hungry; you’re eating it because you’re bored and you feel like you need something to do.
[24:40] So those are a couple of things that you kind of watch out for them and understand that your body is sort of conditioned to have this response to a certain stimulus which maybe it’s watching TV, you feel like you need to eat. Do you really need to? Probably not. But if you’re watching out for that stuff, it can really help with the calorie intake.
[24:57] Rob: See, this is what – remember how I said like out of every ten of them, there’s one or two that I adopt? This is one I had not adopted because nothing pleases me more than this: sit down to an episode of The Walking Dead with a bag of tortilla chips and some guacamole. Like that. That is it for me.
[25:10] Actually, to be honest, that’s why I finally decided I need to start exercising again because there are certain things that I don’t want to give up. One of them is having dessert. I love eating dessert. I love ice cream. And so I realized I either needed to cut those things out as I’m getting older or I need to start some exercise so that I can then not feel guilty or not feel bad about the times when I do indulge. And so I think it’s up to each person to decide for themselves.
[25:35] Mike: It’s interesting the way that you put that because you said that you want to be able to eat the chips and guacamole so you work out in order to do that. I’ve read some interesting quotes from athletes and the general gist of them is that they don’t necessarily work out so that they can eat more. They eat more so that they can work out. We want to be able to eat more because we have this more sedentary lifestyle so our rationale for doing it is a little different.
[26:03] Rob: Right, and back in the day when I ran track in college, I ate an enormous amount of calories. And you hear about these athletes, the swimmers who eat a dozen eggs for breakfast or whatever and it was that kind of stuff. I mean, the food bill was – I remember eating entire pizzas on my own. I mean, I think a lot of us did this and then burning it off the next day and still being very fit and everything. Those days, unfortunately for me, are now behind me.
[26:26] Mike: Just remember, Rob, every pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard enough and believe in yourself.
[26:30] Rob: There you go. If you have a question or a life hack for us, you should call it into our voicemail number. That’s 888-801-9690. And also email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. You can subscribe to us in iTunes or Stitcher or Downcast typically by searching for Startups. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt and that’s used under Creative Commons. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
Episode 185 | Moving from Windows to Mac
Show Notes
- Elias Baez from Charity Sky
- MicroConf Europe
- Copyblogger’s Authority Intensive
Moving from Windows to Mac
- VMware Fusion
- Flexiglass
- TotalFinder
- Ultraedit / SublimeText
- Camtasia Studio
- Call Recorder for Skype
- Amazon CloudPlayer
- Transmit FTP
- Pixelmator
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I talk about moving from Windows to Mac OS 10. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 185.
[00:07] Music
[00:16] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:24] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:25] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:29] Mike: I got an email from Alias Base from Charity Sky and he’s running an indigo go campaign to convert his company from an LLC into a 501 C3 registered charity. And the reason I’m bringing this up is because primarily our audience is kind of focused on developers and this company Charity Sky is trying to focus on providing software development training to K-12 students. So if you’re interested in supporting that effort, head over to their website. Its www.charitysky.org if you’re interested in helping fund that cause or some information there, it links over to their indigo go campaign.
[01:04] Rob: Very cool. Well I just got back from Denver. I was at Copy Bloggers Authority Conference and I had a nice dinner with several local Micropreneur there and then the conference was Thursday, Friday and the highlights for me were Seth Godin. He’s definitely a good speaker and he’s a motivational inspirational and then Joanna Weeb of Copy Hackers. She delivered a really, really good talk. We may ask her to do it at a future MicroConf because it was just good. It was a lot of stuff about split testing buttons but not just a bunch of examples it was like mindset of how to get inside the head of someone and how to structure buttons split test. So it was really well done and those were my two favorite ones.
[01:42] To be honest, the rest of the conference, it was so-so. I wasn’t really wrapped up in it. I’ve been a fan of CopyBlogger and Brian Clark for years but it wasn’t a great fit for me and neither was the audience. I was kind of going out on a limb, going to a place where I didn’t know anybody and there were just a lot of freelance copywriters and some copywriters for Fortune 500 companies and there were some info marketers and that kind of stuff but it wasn’t necessarily an audience that I really need to connect with. Aside from those two highlights I didn’t take a ton away from the conference. So to be honest best part were the long conversations.
[02:15] Joana Weeb was there, Lance Jones and Ruben Gomez and actually decided on like a completely new pricing structure for Drip, some headline ideas, how to describe what Drip is becoming, that was really the value but its funny we could’ve just kind of hung out for a weekend and probably gotten the same value out of it.
[02:30] Mike: That was cool. But I mean at the same time you knew going into it that you were kind of going out on a limb and it was outside of the industry and the types of people that you typically hang out with so you know, it was a risk one way or the other.
[02:42] Rob: Absolutely. And for people you know for copy writers or the info marketers or people who are more in that space, I think it was a really good conference and I think there were some talks that probably resonated with them more than with me.
[02:52] Mike: Cool. Well speaking of conferences, tickets for MicroConf Europe are going to be going on sale shortly so if you’re interested in that, head over to microconfeurope.com to get on the early bird mailing list and you can be notified when those tickets are made available. Tickets aren’t expected to hit the public market so if you’re thinking of going, you should definitely be on the mailing list but that said, if you signed up for the mailing list last year you’re all set. You’re already on there and we’ll be sending out those emails and within a the next couple of weeks I think.
[03:18] Rob: Yeah and the speaker lineup is shaping up. So far it’s you and I, we have Dave Collins who’ve spoken at several MicroConfs and has always been a fan favorite and then we have Rachel Andrew from Perch and she does a lot of speaking. I’ve seen a few videos of a few of her talks. She’s top notch. So very excited. Perch is CMS that they sell and the design element to it is really high quality so excited to have her speaking to our audience.
[03:44] I got to be honest man. Last two weeks have been really crappy. I got hit by the tax man this year. I had a pretty big tax bill and then I had a couple other things come through unexpectedly, big expenses so it’s just hard to see cash that you’re stock piling go poof but I feel like I’m kind of recovering from that and I’m trying to get my bearings and, adjust my business frankly because I don’t have as much – I don’t have as large a stock pile that I have that I was going to be using to fund the growth of Drip and HitTail so I’m having to adjust to a few of my approaches.
[04:14] Mike: That’s demoralizing. When tax time rolls around you know that it’s coming but I think the issue is that you don’t necessarily know at any given point how bad it’s going to be until it’s too late and it’s like you can’t really mentally prepare yourself. So it can take a little while to get over and then you have to play around it and move some things around and hopefully it doesn’t hurt too bad but it’s rough.
[04:34] Rob: Yeah. I think demoralizing is probably the best way to summarize it.
[04:36] Music
[04:40] So today we’re going to be talking about moving from Windows to Mac and you and I both done this in the past couple years. I did it just over a year ago.
[04:47] Mike: I started using a MacBook Pro back in 2005 or so and this was back when I was doing some consulting work for Dell and Dell was actually very upset with me because I refused to trade in my MacBook Pro unless they were able to give me a comparable Dell machine and they couldn’t do it.
[05:03] Rob: Nice. So have you used a Mac since then?
[05:06] Mike: Well I used it for a couple years and then I went off of it because at the time they were having a lot of driver issues and it would just overheat to the point that I literally could not even touch the machine. So I kind of abandoned it for a little while. And then I went over to a MacBook Air about the time that my back was really giving me a lot of trouble. Been on Apple hardware ever since.
[05:27] Rob: Right. For me it was the switch was when Windows 8 came out because I looked at Windows 8 and I thought you know, there’s going to be a decent learning curve there. If I’m ever going to make the switch it’s probably best to do it now. And I was already being drawn in by the amazing hardware and the gestures and the other stuff we’ll talk about today kind of the pluses of moving over to OS 10 and to the Mac hardware. What I found is that the more people I’m talking to these days, a lot of developers and kind of the early adaptor tech crowd are either already on Macs or they’re moving there.
[05:58] And there’s quite a bit to think about when you’re evaluating this decision and I didn’t find any great resources on it so now that I’m kind of a year past it I had a bunch of software that I have to buy. I have a bunch of stuff that I replaced with free tools. I know what the benefits and drawbacks are at least for my usage of it and it’s probably comparable to yours if you’re listening to this. So that’s really where we’re talking through is kind of another source of up to date information for you. So I wanted to start off by saying you know, when I was using Windows, I was on Windows 7 and XP before that I kept thinking man, when I move over to OS 10, because I’d use Macs back in college right in the late 90 and I kept thinking when I move over to OS 10 it’s just going to be like all unicorns and rainbows and just amazing.
[06:36] But what I found is the two are quite comparable. There are obviously big differences but they each have their pluses and minuses. I have not felt like OS 10 is some magic silver bullet that is like way, way better than Windows. I think it has its own flaws. Have you found the same thing?
[06:50] Mike: Definitely and that’s why we run them both side by side because there are certain things that I like how OS 10 handles a lot better and then there’s other things where I like how Windows handles them better.
[07:01] Rob: Right. I consider myself Mac first. When I moved from Windows to Mac I wanted to be on OS 10 most of the time and only moving to Windows emulation when I needed to and so that’s really – because I still have some legacy.net code that I tool around in and I have some times classic ASP obviously for HitTail and you can’t do those on a Mac. So I replaced all my apps in the Mac world. I got the Skype Mac and I got an FTP program and I’ve got a bunch of other stuff and spent several hundred bucks to start with to kind of get that up to speed but since then, everything’s worked out. But I think your Windows first. When you boot up you have most of your productivity and stuff in the Windows emulator.
[07:41] Mike: For me it depends a little bit. If I’m using my desktop because it’s a custom built machine obviously that’s just Windows so there’s not even the option for OS 10. On my laptop I’ve got a MacBook Pro and for that, I run Windows on top of VMware Fusion and I don’t have Windows startup unless I need it. So the majority of the time I’ll be doing most of my stuff inside of OS 10. There will be times where it’s like if I need to fire up Visual Studio obviously I’ll just go over to Windows. I don’t use Unity or anything like that. I just – I basically three finger swipe and then I’m in Windows and then just use it directly all inside of one window.
[08:16] There’s not a lot that I do over on the Windows side other than using Visual Studio. There’s not much else. I mean I will do some browsing but I’ve got Skype on both Windows and on OS 10 and then there’s not a lot else though where I really need it. It’s just if I’m doing software development, I’ll use Windows. If I’m doing anything else, I’ll use OS 10. And that’s only because all of my development stuff is in Csharp.net.
[08:40] Rob: Right. And I’m in a similar boat. My .net development is very, very limited now. It’s really only bug fixes. I don’t do really major features anymore so it’s probably less frequent than you. But I’m the same way. I bought VMware Fusion. We’ll talk a little bit about that later. There’s a bunch of different ways to kind of have Windows in a VM on Mac hardware. That’s the best way that I found after doing a bunch of research and per your recommendations. So I think lets maybe talk a little bit about some drawbacks of moving and then we’ll talk about the benefits. And I think I actually have more benefits than drawbacks here.
[09:12] But the first drawback and this is one of the reasons that I wasn’t going to do it was because you have to rebuy a lot of software. There’s some stuff that’s just not free you like Camtasia Studio and if you want Snag It or something like that you kind of need to rebuy Mac version. Because once you have the Windows version it doesn’t port over and there’s probably several other apps that are like that. We’ll get into them a little later.
[09:33] Mike: I think one of the bigger things for me especially early on was the learning curve of understanding what some of the different buttons did in OS 10 and realizing that just fundamentally the way that they worked is different than in Windows.
[09:47] Rob: You know for me, that was a big mental issue. I didn’t want to switch because I didn’t want it to hammer my productivity and I found that I switched pretty quickly. It was less than a week of disruption. I mean within a day or two I was moving at like 80-90% speed and then within a week I was really not noticing the difference anymore. Having been on Windows now for what? 13 years before then, having your shortcuts, your control C instead of command C I thought would be a big issue for me but turns out it wasn’t. I was able to relearn it pretty quickly.
[10:17] Mike: Yes, see I didn’t have as many problems with things like that like when I’m in OS 10 I just know that its command C and if I’m in Windows its control C. For me the bigger issue was that certain keys like all along the top. OS 10 has all the function keys that if you hit those typically like you’ll change the sound volume or you’ll increase or decrease the brightness. When I’m in Windows, when I’m doing software development, I need to be able to use those function keys when I’m in Visual Studio so I actually remapped all those so that in OS 10 I actually have to hold down the function key in order to increase or decrease the sound and things like that. So slightly switched but it just worked out that well for me.
[10:56] Rob: Got it and yeah, I hold down the function key when I’m in Windows, to do the same thing since I’m in Windows less but those function keys have gone in a way when I’m trying to hit F5 to do a build or something and I’m actually just lowering the brightness of my keyboard. I think the other thing that I’ve run into that was unexpected is my MacBook Air and a bunch of the other MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs of friends and family have wireless and or Bluetooth difficulties just like here and there they’re intermittent but almost every time I flip my MacBook Air open it takes 30 seconds to a minute to connect to wireless and often I’ll have to turn it off and turn it back on. And I was thinking I must have a defective MacBook but a lot of folks have told me they run in the same thing. So this was unexpected. I didn’t think about that but I do think that it’s something to be aware of. Have you run into any issues like that?
[11:44] Mike: Yeah, mostly around the wireless stuff. It’s irritating. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s just there’s times where you just expect it to just function right out of the box and just do what it’s supposed to do and it just doesn’t. One thing I found that seems like it had helped with that is I bought one of Apple’s Time Machines with the built in wireless end router and 2 or 3 terabyte hard drive or something like that and that seems to be flawless. I don’t ever have problems with that. Whenever I’m at home, it’s never an issue. When I’m out on the road and trying to connect to Wi-Fi at hotels or customers and stuff like that then it seems like it’s more of an issue but whenever you get into enterprise Wi-Fi there’s – I don’t know why but for some reason I always have these weird quirks and they don’t necessarily work very well when it comes to Macs.
[12:29] Rob: Right. I only work from home one day a week anymore because we have an office and often work from the apartment at the beach on Fridays and so if I bought an Apple router it wouldn’t help me that much because I’m connecting to other people’s Wi-Fi so often. But the Bluetooth thing for me too is I have a wireless keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse both at home and work because I prop the monitor up so that its good – ergonomics right? So I have the wireless stuff and that’s where the Bluetooth has been funky. It works most of the time. It’s reliable but it will cut out now and again just in the middle of me doing something and I’ll just have to put my hand on the laptop until it stops. It will only cut out for 20 seconds but it might happen like once a day and each thing disconnects. This is kind of like not the end of the world but it is an odd kind of side effect.
[13:18] Mike: I’m surprised that happens because I have a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad and I don’t have any issues with that. Just starting up it takes a few seconds to sync but it never has an issue so surprised you have the issue on the laptop.
[13:32] Rob: I think the next drawback is potentially expense. It’s like you can get a decent Dell laptop for $400 or $500 that’s what my last Dell cost me and it was solid. It moved fast and it had a nice screen and all that stuff and obviously getting a MacBook or a MacBook Air is going to be 2, 3, 4 times that. Now on the flipside the Macs and the Mac books, they really retain their value like when you’re done with them the resale value is very high.
[14:00] Mike: I think you have to seriously qualify decent Dell.
[14:04] Rob: Yeah that’s true.
[14:05] Mike: I think the issue is when you’re buying – like I went with a high end MacBook so with that, I mean I got a 512 gig SSD drive and 16 gigs of RAM. So to get something similar on the Dell side I guess you’re not looking at $500. You’re looking at easily $1200 to $1500 if not more. And that’s it if you don’t just buy something low end and then rip some of the components out and then replace them with your own.
[14:29] Rob: Right. I think the next drawback potentially is I found the windowing like the window management and the maximizing and moving Windows around and general its gotten better with the newest OS 10 Mavericks but frankly I find it to be not as good as Windows.
[14:44] Mike: Yeah I think out of the box it’s not as good but there’s a lot of third party apps that you can use. There’s definitely ways around that.
[14:51] Rob: Right. And the last throwback I listed is that if you are Windows or .net developer obviously you are going to need a VM, virtual machine of some kind in order to run Windows and do the development. That’s not a major drawback. It’s actually less painful than I thought it would be and like you said if you just have it in a separate desktop and you do a three finger swipe into it, it’s pretty seamless aside from the keyboard shortcut switch and needing to hold down the function like it’s barely noticeable.
[15:16] Now let’s dive into the benefits. The first thing that got me was the hardware is amazing. It’s gorgeous. It’s an aluminum body. The keyboard just feels like a dream. It has backlighting. It’s just perfect. It’s such a well constructed product. The track pad is the best I’ve ever used hands down. The keyboard is probably the best I’ve ever used hands down. The screen is probably the best screen on a laptop I’ve ever used so I mean it is top notch and I could not find for any price, I could not find a comparable Windows laptop. This was about 14-15 months ago. I was looking for the same type of thing aluminum really good keyboard, really good track pad and as far as I know it just doesn’t exist.
[15:50] Mike: Yeah I think for me the look of it wasn’t so much a big deal for me. I didn’t really care that it had an aluminum body. For me it was like the hardware specks, the keyboard took a little getting used to so I wasn’t necessarily used to the little chiclet keys and things like that. And then the tack pad I have to agree with you totally on that one, I mean the track pad on the MacBook Pro is awesome. It’s better than any other track pad I’ve ever seen on any other laptop. And then of course as you said the screen. You can’t find a screen that is good as what Apple ships with theirs.
[16:20] Rob: The next benefit I have is the gestures and the clickability of the track pad. They make it completely useable. I’m almost as effective and as productive just using the track pad as I am with the full mouse and keyboard setup and I’ve never even come close to that with any type of Windows setup. And it’s purely because there’s so many gestures you can do with the two finger scrolling, the three fingers swipes back and forth between desktops, even with a single monitor at a coffee shop I can do things that would typically take me multi monitors at home because you can swipe back and forth so quickly to compare things.
[16:53] Mike: Yeah I found the same exact thing, just the multi finger gestures is really what makes that even possible because I’ll find myself when I’m using other people’s laptops I’ll find myself trying to use two finger scroll and things like that and it just doesn’t work in Windows and it’s not that you would expect it to but on my MacBook because I have things over on Windows and running through VMware the two finger scroll does work in Windows. So its disappointing to go to somebody else’s laptop that track pad just doesn’t support it because they don’t expect you to be using multi finger gestures.
[17:26] Rob: My son uses my old Dell and whenever I get on it to help him out it is painful to hit a webpage and then have to just tack pad over to the scrollbar on the right and drag it down to move anything. It just feels incredibly inefficient. The next benefit I have is I don’t feel like I need to download a Windows update every week. There are some OS updates that come through but it’s not all the time and I always felt like with Windows every time I was booting up there was like a Java update and Adobe update, all the stuff that I was downloading all the time and they were huge updates and they took forever and the computer would reboot and all that stuff.
[17:59] The updates on Mac are just they’re fewer and far between. They seem to download really quickly and every once in a while one will require a reboot but even that, when it reboots, it brings everything almost back to where it was before it rebooted like I’ve been kind of impressed with that, that it doesn’t impact my productivity as much as rebooting a Windows machine where you just come back to the bare desktop and all your Windows are closed.
[18:23] Mike: I think the two things that you said there are Adobe updates and Java updates. I think that’s the killer. I don’t think it matters what operating system you’re actually on. But in terms of Windows updates I mean the other thing I’ll point out is I almost never reboot my virtual machine on my MacBook. I’ll do the Windows updates when they come out but I don’t tend to restart that machine. What I’ll do is I’ll just suspend it and then I just close my Mac book and that’s the end of it. It’s like I don’t even have to restart the machine most of the time.
[18:49] Rob: Another benefit is that you don’t need to run virus scanning software antivirus because there just aren’t that many viruses for OS 10. I don’t know if that’s a huge benefit for me. It’s probably a bigger benefit for someone who’s less technical because I always just ran antivirus and was careful what I clicked on but I think it could be a benefit especially for like family members as they’ve asked me what computer they should get, I’m a little more willing to recommend a Mac even though its more expensive that I think it could be potentially be safer for maybe someone like my mom.
[19:16] Mike: Yeah I don’t necessarily see this as a huge benefit either. I guess it’s nice to know that you’re probably not going to get one but I don’t know as not running antivirus software at all is really going to make that any better.
[19:27] Rob: Yeah and I think the last two benefits that I see, these I didn’t know in advance but like OS 10 has some pretty cool stuff built into it that I had to get add ons Windows to get and it’s like if you hit command space in OS 10 you get the spotlight search and you can search everything on your computer not only documents but you can search programs and everything. So I don’t have many programs in actual apps like in my bottom bar to quick launch. I just hit command space start typing the name and hit enter and it brings it up. I had an add on called I think it was Simple Run or something like that that I use on Windows but then every time that I reinstalled Windows which I did every two years I’d have to reinstall that and configure it and I had a special config file I had to move and it was just kind of a pain and so to have this working is a really nice hack for me.
[20:14] And then the other thing is the Preview in OS 10 works really we like if you open a PDF doc in there, I don’t even download Adobe Acrobat because preview works so well and you can even manipulate Adobe Acrobat documents, PDF’s if you have two you can merge in together, you can swipe pages between them and you can delete pages out of a PDF. You can add pages to it. I mean its pretty darn powerful just the simple – what I thought was a pretty simple Preview app built into OS 10 is actually more powerful than I thought it would be.
[20:44] Mike: Yeah I don’t find that in Windows that finding the apps is really all that much of a challenge because you just hit the widows button and then start typing and you can do the exact same thing that you’re doing over in OS 10 with the command space. It’s identical. It works the exact same way. The one thing I have noticed that you haven’t mentioned is that backups on OS 10 if you’re using Time Machine and you have a Time Machine device on your network, it’s just almost flawless and I actually ran into issue with one of my earlier MacBooks. I had a MacBook Air and it looked like things were going a little flaky with it so I took it back to the Apple store and they took a look at it and said oh yeah we think your video card is fried and I’m like great, I’m now going to move everything over and all this stuff.
[21:26] And they just said okay we’ll just swap it out and they just plugged a thunderbolt cable into a new MacBook and then they plugged it into mine and they ran this program that just moved everything over, had all my programs, all my settings, all my data, everything and I didn’t have to worry about it at all. And just in looking back at Time Machine Time Machine is very similar, obviously it will be a little bit slower but I would say functionally equivalent.
[21:48] Rob: Yeah, that’s really nice. And that’s what you get with– you get iCloud backed up on your phone, your iPhone or iPad and it’s amazing. I have problems with an iPhone and I brought it in and they nuked it, gave me a new one and everything was back pretty much the way I’ve had it and I was really impressed with that. So I didn’t know time machine could do it to that extent but I will likely be looking at getting one. Because I have Crash Plan and Dropbox and stuff so I’m backing everything up but it would still take me all the time to reinstall the apps. If Time Machine can handle that for me and actually does more of like an image, that will save me a lot of time and it will definitely be worth it.
[22:21] I think the last benefit that I was looking for is with Windows, you get this cruffed and it’s either the registry or there’s just something about it when you install and uninstall apps they leave stuff and OS slows down over time. If you have a Windows installation that’s 5 or 10 years old, it gets really, really slow and you have to repave it. On my laptop I would reinstall Windows every 18 to 24 months. From what I‘ve heard, from what I’ve seen, OS 10 does not have the same issue. So I’m not very – I’m only 15 months in but I’m looking forward to having this install of the OS around for quite some time.
[22:57] Mike: Yeah I think part of that is on the Windows side at least most people don’t defragment their registry and the registry just it’s kind of like a database where the file itself gets locked on disk and it grows over time and shrinks and there’s stuff being inserted into it and it doesn’t have a really good way of defragmenting it. So I’m sure that somebody will write into us and say that I’m totally butchering the explanation but I have seen that where if you just defrag the registry it can seriously speed up your machine especially on older ones. But then again if you’re going over to an SSD, a lot of those programs just go away anyway.
[23:32] Rob: So now we’re going to take a look at a couple things, one is software and I also have a little bit of hardware and its basically stuff that we either had to buy to make the transition or stuff that was free and we’re able to just easily replace. So the first section here is stuff that was free so on my Windows machine I use certain apps like Chrome, Skype, Remote Desktop to get into Windows serves remotely, all that stuff is available for OS 10. So Chrome and it works almost identically, Skype, the UI was all different but I get used to pretty quick and then Windows Remote Desktop is there, Crash Plan which is what I use for backups that had a client for both and Dropbox and Audacity which I us for audio editing. So all of those apps were easy free downloads and I was able to just seamlessly replace them.
[24:16] Mike: Well there’s one thing that you mentioned in there that I don’t think a lot of people know is that you can get a Remote Desktop for Windows client on the Mac. Most people don’t realize that there is a Mac version of that that allows you to connect to Windows machine so like if you have a windows server you there you can just RDP into it directly from OS 10.
[24:34] Rob: Right.
[24:35] Mike: I think other than that, I also installed Evernote. I have Evernote, Dropbox and Sugar Sync on both my Windows and on my OS 10 machines. And I use that to sync back and forth between my desktop, my virtual machine and my OS 10 machine. Other than that, I also have Microsoft Office installed which get it through MSDN but if you have an MSDN subscription it comes free with that whereas the Mac version of office did not use to come with that.
[25:01] Rob: Right. That made sense. I do have Office as well. Because word and excel, the UI’s is better than Pages and Numbers. I do use Keynote though now instead of PowerPoint and like you I get the Office suite for free with MSDN. Now let’s talk a little about stuff we bought. The two hardware things that I bought when I moved over to OS 10 was 1) I bought a smart mouse which is like $70 or $80 but allows you to have the gestures because you get so spoiled by the track pad being able to flip between desktops and do all kinds of scrolling and stuff that a normal mouse would almost feel like subpar to the track pad. And so instead of trying to get a Bluetooth track pad, you don’t have quite as much settle control I got the smart mouse and to me it’s like the best of both worlds. I get the gestures but I also get the fine grain control of a mouse. Do you use a smart mouse or an external mouse or do you only use a track pad?
[25:53] Mike: I use an external USB mouse that connects – it’s got like a little USB dangle that I just plug into it but it’s a Microsoft Arc Mouse.
[25:59] Rob: So you use a Microsoft mouse with you OS 10 laptop?
[26:03] Mike: Yes.
[26:03] Rob: Perfect.
[26:05] Mike: I tried using one of the external track pads though but I didn’t feel like it worked as well as the one that’s built into the laptop.
[26:10] Rob: The other thing I bought was I upgraded my external monitors because the display of the Mac book is so nice that I couldn’t use these old crappy four year old Dell monitors that it had. So I upgraded to like the brand-new Dell IPS monitor which is quite similar. It’s not exactly the same as the Apple cinema display but it’s about as close as you can get to it not paying an exuberant amount. So at both home and the office I upgraded that and using the thunderbolt cable just gives you the best quality external monitor experience I’ve ever had.
[26:40] Mike: Yeah I don’t really use an external monitor for my MacBook working off of my desktop anyway.
[26:44] Rob: The rest of this is really software and this is stuff that I had to buy in the transition. 1 was VMware Fusion that we talked about earlier which is the Windows emulator and I researched this a lot and I took your recommendation but also went out and read all the articles and there’s these different pluses and minuses between Parallels and VMware Fusion and then there’s an open source free version of this. As I got to this, VMware Fusion was I think the right choice and I have had no qualms or issues about it.
[27:11] Mike: I stand by my decision to use VMware Fusion as well and it’s not that I think any less of parallels or anything like that. I know people who’ve used Parallels but I just haven’t really had any problems with VMware so it’s worked out well for me plus I use VMware on Windows as well so it’s just familiar to me.
[27:28] Rob: Natural fit for sure. The other software I bought was Flexi Glass and it’s just a little utility you can get in the Mac app store kind of emulates some of the Windows widowing stuff so when you actually close a window with a right click, now in OS 10 if you’re running Flexi Glass it actually closes the entire program so that you don’t close these Windows out and then have all these programs running in the background which I think to me is like a drawback of OS 10 that everything stays running where as in Windows if you click the X, the program actually shuts down. And so Flexi Glass does that in a few other kind of advanced windowing features that I think Windows beats OS 10 on but Flexi Glass does a pretty good job of emulating that and I actually bought that based on your recommendation.
[28:08] Mike: I still love Flexi Glass. One of the other things that it also you to do is allows you to just use keys to snap Windows around on the screens so you can make them use the right half or left half of the screens and things like that. And it just makes the experience a little bit nicer and slightly more Windows like and especially just in terms of being able to lock those Windows onto ½ of the screen or the other or center them or go full screen and things like that it just gives you the shortcuts, keyboard shortcuts to make that stuff easier to do.
[28:34] Rob: Another app I bought was Total Finder and that’s from Micropreneur Academy’s own Antonin Hildebrand Total Finder is cool now since then like I think Mavericks introduced tabbed finder windows and total finder has had that for years but Total Finder still have some other advantages. It has keyboard shortcuts like I hit option E to open my finder window and I use that constantly, constantly doing it kind of like I used to use – I guess it was Windows E to open explorer. It’s basically the same thing. I know they’re competitors and I know that mavericks has played a little bit of catch-up with it but I would still recommend checking out Total Finder. It’s dirt cheap for all the value I get out of it.
[29:13] Mike: I use Total Finder as well. The other one I use is a program called Text Wrangler and Text Wrangler is probably a little bit different than Ultra Edit but it gives you the ability to write text documents and search them easily. I almost use it in some ways it’s kind of like a glorified note pad ++ application.
[29:34] Rob: Yeah that what I use Ultra Edit for. So I’ve Ultra Edit since 1999 or 2000 on Windows. It is better on Windows because they built it there first but they have an OS 10 version and aside from a few bugs here and there, it’s pretty comparable. So since I know all the shortcuts and the ins and outs of it, I got a copy of Ultra Edit and then Sublime Text is the other one. It’s kind of a famed Ruby text editor I know programmers in languages use that as well so I have both Ultra Edit and Sublime Text for my text editing and like you said I use Ultra Edit. It’s kind of like a little note pad thing that’s always there and that’s where I’m keeping a lot of notes and the when I move them into permanent places they’ll go into Google docs or presentations or such.
[30:11] Another thing that I bought was FTP software. I learned that Transmit which you can get I think it’s $20 on the Mac app store, just works great. You can edit files on the server, do some basic stuff like that. Ultra Edit has advanced file editing on the server capabilities so if I’m going to do a lot of stuff I’ll use Ultra Edit because it has all the syntax highlighting but Transmit is perfectly adequate. I wouldn’t seek out a free version I’ll put it that way just because for the $20 one time you get the updates and you know the program’s going to be around.
[30:41] Mike: I don’t even think I bothered installing anything on OS 10 for that. I just do those things over on the Windows side.
[30:47] Rob: How about for image editing? I used to use Paint.net in Windows which is an open source app that it’s like a simplified version of Photoshop which is perfect. I don’t need all the features in Photoshop and I don’t really want to – I don’t do enough image editing that I want to pay for something. So I looked around for quite a while and I found Pixelmator and I love it. I don’t remember how much it was, $30 or $40 it wasn’t very much. It was in the app store and I use it probably every day or two just to edit a photo or to mock up a screen cap, mark something up. It’s pretty powerful. If you do any image editing in OS 10 or do you it do all in Windows?
[31:22] Mike: I don’t do it all I just hand it off to somebody else to do.
[31:24] Rob: Nice. Yeah. I take probably 5 or 10 screenshots a day and send it to people and I have to call things out and that’s typically what I use this for.
[31:31] Mike: Okay, on OS 10 I use Snaps Pro because most of the stuff, if I’m doing that, usually I’m on the Windows side and I use Snag It and Snag It has built in capabilities for annotating images as you take the screen shots.
[31:45] Rob: Yeah I have Snag It too. I bought it for OS 10 and I don’t use it because I use the built in stuff from the Mac just because its keyboard shortcut it’s so simple. What is it like command shift 4 I think. So that’s what I use. I should probably use Snag It since I bought it. Just a couple more that I bought. I had to buy Camtasia Studio because I do a lot of screen casting for both VA’s and other purposes and I had it on Windows and I had to rebuy it in the OS 10 app store and that was I think $300 on Windows and I think the app store version is like $99 but if you can get a more full OS 10 version for like $300 and it’s actually better.
[32:21] So I don’t really know the ins and outs since I don’t do a ton of editing anymore if I record and I need to edit I typically send it to someone else to do the edit so there’s certainly some ins and outs but to only pay $99 for it was pretty cool and now I can do native screen cast because the first few weeks I was like flipping over into VMware Fusion and the Windows every time I want to record a screen cast and that was just a little bit of a pain because your USB stuff, the headset wasn’t connected and I’d have to disconnect and reconnect and stuff. But do you record screen cast in OS 10 or you do it all in Windows?
[32:50] Mike: No, I do it all in Windows. If I’m doing a screen cast its usually I’m doing stuff inside of AuditShark, the desktop edition or the web edition but typically in the desktop edition and I need it to run on Windows anyway.
[33:00] Rob: Got it, last couple things that I bought when I moved to OS 10 are I bought Call Recorder to record Skype calls primarily for this podcast frankly and I had used Pamela on the Windows side. And then I actually moved away from iTunes. I’ve heard iTunes works better once you’re on OS 10 because it sure didn’t work very well on Windows. I’m purely in the Amazon world now the ecosystem so for all my music is up on the cloud player. iTunes match did not work for me. It would not license a bunch of my files and pretty often I would not be able to play my music for multiple devices which is just amazing to me even on Apple hardware it wasn’t doing it so eventually I just moved all the way to Amazon and it’s been really nice. I have not missed iTunes one bit and I do my audio books now through the Audible app on my phone.
[33:43] I do my Podcast app on my phone and then all my music’s in the Amazon cloud player and it has a desktop client for Mac, Windows and I think Linux and has a web client and has all the mobile OS that you would need. I think that about wraps up things that I purchased when I transitioned over. Do you have any others that I left off the list?
[34:01] Mike: Like you said I’m probably more slanted towards the Windows side and I use this stuff on OS 10 primarily to I’ll say do offline thinking when I’m not directly working on a product if I’m working on marketing stuff or trying to creatively think about solutions to marketing problems and things like that. But if I’m going into the technical side I go into Windows. So I think that about wraps us up. If you’re thinking about switching over from Windows to Mac hopefully this episode will give you some things to think about.
[34:31] If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail 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 184 | When to Pivot, Gaining Trust From Early Adopters and How To Handle Credit Card Expirations
Show Notes
- Copy Blogger’s Authority Intensive conference
- Dreamhost
- Amazon Web Services
- Rackspace
- Digital Ocean
- Windows Azure
- Grou.ps
- Chargify
- Recurly
- ChargeBee
- KISSmetrics
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 184.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Rob?
[00:24] Rob: Things are good. I am in Denver for copy bloggers authority conference. I think it’s called the authority intensive. So this is more about copywriting, content marketing and that kind of stuff so I plan on knowing almost no one who’s attending which is always a good thing to kind of expand the network and then hoping to obviously meet some folks and learn more about the modern day tricks and stuff that content marketers are using and so fun so far.
[01:49] Mike: Cool.
[00:50] Rob: Yeah and had a good dinner last night with several Micropreneur, MicroConf attendees, academy members just folks who follow the podcast. Ruben Gomez was there and Dave Rodenbaugh and Rudy from higher flow which is now square hire I guess and several other folks. So it was a good time.
[01:06] Mike: That’s awesome.
[01:07] Rob: How about you? What’s going on?
[01:08] Mike: I’m trying to wind down my consulting a bit and my schedule has shifted a little bit. So I said that I was originally scheduled to be done or at least be taking a break from it for a while in September and it looks like it will be next month instead of September. Shaved about three months off that schedule, kind of looking forward to it.
[01:23] Rob: Very nice. Congratulations man. Very nice. You’re going to have more time than you know what to do once that’s all over.
[01:29] Mike: Well that is the plan.
[01:31] Rob: Yeah indeed.
[01:32] Music
[01:35] Mike: This week we haven’t done it in a while so we’re going to go through a bunch of listener questions. They’re kind of stacked up but we’re going to try and do our best to work through them. And the first one comes in from Brecht and he says Mike and Rob I’m a faithful listener by having found you only about a year ago I can’t say I’ve listened to all of them. I was wondering if you’ve ever discussed online storage in detail. I’m working on a web app for the construction industry. I’m wondering where this should ultimately be hosted. I find myself wanting to know more about services such as AWS and I thought others might have some similar questions. If you think it’s appropriate, I’d love to hear more about where you guys host your apps and the cost that you guys have. Tanks for all the free info you guys provide.
[02:10] Rob: Yeah I mean there’s a ton of options out there. I don’t think there’s any one right answer. I’ve always thought and I’ve used shared hosting on Dream Host for years. Dream Host is not a fantastic host but they’re very inexpensive and if you’re going to be building your app for six months, then it’s a great place to pay – is it $10 a month now? I don’t know what it is but it’s very, very inexpensive and you can host rails there. You can host PHP. Some Linux hosting so you can do a bunch of stuff. That is where I’ve had an account there for 7 or 8 years.
[02:38] As your server gets older, they don’t upgrade it and it gets slower and slower especially for the first several years it will work really well but I see Dream Host as a place to go, get cheap hosting and then once you get traction on something, and then once you get traction on something, once you’ve launched then you move over to one of the more expensive providers like an AWS or like Rackspace. Now I’ve heard bad things about Rackspace’s cloud servers from a friend of mine, a startup founder. He said that the performance isn’t that great so he may have to go and Hostit like an actual dedicated box or something. I haven’t done it. I haven’t used their cloud servers. We use Amazon EC2 now and that works great but it’s pretty freaking complicated. You know?
[03:15] It’s not something like Dream Host you enter a few things boom you have a website up. So if you’re more of a beginner, that’s a good place to go. Amazon is a learning curve just to learn how to provision boxes and you get bare metal and you have to install everything. So there’s a lot of time investment there but it’s certainly a good solution long term. And then what’s nice about doing with Amazon ultimately is that if you do need to store files, you have S3, if you need DNS, they have DNS service so they have a whole ecosystem around it. The one other place that I’ve heard about that’s pretty up and coming is called Digital Ocean and it’s simple cloud hosting built for developers. That’s their headline.
[03:49] And I know some folks using them. They have really cheap VPS. You can get like a $5 a month VPS through them. It’s only half a gig of memory and 20 gig SD drive but they’re scaling up really fast. So that’d be someone I’d keep my eye on and for $10 you can get 1 gig of memory so I haven’t tried it personally I do know a founder who’s using it to great effect so maybe if you have the experience, I’d kick it off with Digital Ocean instead of Dream Host and give it a try if you’re willing to experiment with it.
[04:18] Mike: Just to kind of piggy back on the things that you said about Dream Host I use Dream Host as well and I’ve also kind of encountered some of the speed issues that Rob has over the years because they don’t tend to upgrade those machines terribly often but about a week or two ago, I got an email from them saying that they were going to be upgrading my machine. So they took my VPS and they actually moved it to another machine that has an updated hardware platform. So things seem to have gotten reasonably fast on that machine. So they do upgrade them on occasion but Rob’s definitely right. I mean they will go for years without upgrading it especially if nothing breaks.
[04:53] On the Rackspace side, what I found was that their version 1 cloud servers were quite a bit slower. Recently they’ve started doing everything on their version 2 of their cloud platform and their version 2 servers are all backed up by SSD drives. So there’s a huge difference between version 1 and version 2. You do have the option to migrate from version 1 to version 2 but I haven’t done it yet because I have a lot of stuff on there and there’s a lot of DNS entries that I would probably have to upgrade because they are switching things from IPV4 to IPV6 and I don’t know all the implications about the additional IP addresses that I’ve had there.
[05:28] So the last thing that I used is Microsoft’s azure platform. So I’ve got some servers out there. Initially they seemed like they were a little slow but I think that it’s in many cases very similar to what rob experienced with AWS is especially when you’re going towards the hosted platform for azure where there’s a huge learning curve to be able to spin up and spin down those machines and get all the software and everything else that you need installed on it and be able to deploy new builds and things like that. It can be extremely complicated so there’s a huge learning curve there.
[06:02] If you can get away with avoiding all that stuff, I totally would before going to that. I think that it’s great for having the back end and all the different storage options and load balancing and all that kind of stuff but I almost feel like its overkill for I’ll say entry level Saas applications because you don’t necessarily need all that stuff. You can get away with just a single server at Rackspace or something like that. And you can also get just a single server as a VPS over on the azure platform but it’s just a sort of different technology there.
[06:30] Rob: Yeah. This is such a form of premature optimization or can be. Unless you have paying customers or a decent size launch list then I would choose cheap hosting. I would go with Dream Host or I would take a flyer on Digital Ocean do a $10 a month thing and build and deploy on that. Until I have a reason to move off of it and bite the bullet. That means until you have enough load or until you’re having enough problems that you need to do a migration. We had to do a migration of the drip database within the first few months because we got a bunch of customers, had a bunch of load and we moved from a Roku post grade instance so I moved into EC2 and it did suck like it was I’m not going to paint a pretty picture of it but we got it done really quickly and I don’t regret the fact that for the previous year we weren’t on this enormously expensive database server which is what we’re on now.
[07:20] Because a, it saved money and B, we didn’t need to get a DB involved because the post grade one, we had to do the backups and did a bunch of other stuff for us. So at this point it was like well this idea is viable. we have paying customers and it justified me A) getting a DB involved then paying him to get everything setup with backups and all that kind of stuff and B) just to do the move and to really get a beefy server. So this is one of those things to put off as long as possible within reason I mean if customers are having issues, that’s the time to start making a quick move to a new server platform.
[07:51] Mike: Anything where you’ve got a virtual machine of any kind, you always have the option to throw money at the problem and buy yourself time and that’s kind of the bottom-line here. If you can buy in to a VPS at the lowest possible level you can always throw more hardware and more money at the problem later when you do have paying customers. So thanks for the questions Brent.
[08:09] Our next one comes in from Joel and he says hi Mike and Rob. My question is how do you know when to pivot? I’ve been putting it off because I feel that many entrepreneurs pivot too early. My Saas app launched three years ago and is making a steady income. It’s a horizontal membership management tool for nonprofits but I found that 80% of my customers are youth ministries. Targeting this market specifically might have an upside but it’s not a guarantee and I don’t want to lose the other 20%. So what’s the rule on when to pivot to a specific vertical? Is it 80-20, 90-10 60-40 or something else? Thanks. Joel.
[08:38] Rob: I guess it really depends on the growth. So first of all I don’t think there is a role. I think it’s got to be a gut feeling. I think that putting it off as long as possible is probably a good thing because I also think a lot of entrepreneurs pivot too early. With that said, if you’ve been flat in terms of earning for 6-12 months and you’ve tried all the marketing approaches and the optimization and I mean whatever approaches you can to grow this and its not growing, then that’s where I start thinking about not pivoting but about either niching down which is what you’re looking at or niching out, deniching and going to a more horizontal.
[09:13] Since you’re already horizontal, I would consider just putting a landing page or kind of a mini marketing side together for the niche for the youth ministry niche that you’re looking at. And experiment with starting to drive traffic to that page and set to the home page if they’re coming from the youth ministry places. Or if you already have a bunch of organic traffic and it’s all going to the home page, then switch the home page and then add a separate landing page for everybody else for the generic version and start trying to send your generic traffic there.
[09:41] I don’t know if that’s as much a pivot as just trying to position yourself. Right? Trying to hit different audiences with your marketing. It actually requires major feature revamps, that’s what I would consider that’s a product pivot. You’re talking more about a market pivot, a market or a marketing pivot and those two are of different levels of effort because market and marketing can be changed fairly quickly whereas product involves getting developers involved, writing new features, changing on boarding, changing on boarding email sequences, it’s a whole different deal. So if it has been a while and you haven’t had growth I would first look at trying to do a market pivot but almost splitting it like I said where you have multiple sites and landing pages and you can cater to multiple markets and only kind of worst case would I then think about okay am I really going to change the app in order to cater to this audience?
[10:31] And I would also ask, is there a way that you can find this out without going and writing code? What’s the quickest way to validate this assumption? Could you ask your existing customers? Could you ask your existing trial users? Do you have an existing email list of people who’ve been going through a mini course that are just prospects and not even trial users. Could you try to survey those three audiences with questions that will get rid of this assumption so you’re not just guessing but you’re actually getting some data upfront that can help guide this whether you make this pivot and then what kind of pivot it needs to be.
[11:02] Mike: Yeah as Rob was talking, one of the things that I thought about was there’s a website that I’d look at a while back for managing membership website called groups is grou.ps and if you go to their website, they have – it seems like if you start looking at their website, and try and figure out whether or not it’s applicable to you, they have like all these different landing pages all over the place that target all of these different niche markets that might want to use their product like they’ll have specific areas and landing pages for youth ministries. They’ll have one for coaches, college coaches, high school coaches. They’ll have some in there for like ballets, just all this stuff in there that they’re trying to market to all of these different things.
[11:41] And it seems to me like if you’re a small business, it seems like doing a lot of those all at once is probably very, very difficult to do and I think that Rob’s kind of on the right track going down and in figuring out whether or not you can validate those assumptions about whether or not the specific markets are going to be more applicable or kind of the valuable area to go after even if you ignored those other ones. I mean can you market much more effectively the app to just youth ministries versus that other 20% was your message getting deluded by trying to gather that other 20% and increase that percentage.
[12:14] It almost feels like if you’re not doing that already and you’re kind of originally gathering that 80% already, it almost seems like doubling down on that would probably be the way to go. I mean it seems like if you focus on them, you would probably attract a lot more than you already are because they may not be finding you. How are these people getting to your website? I would start backtracking a little bit and see if maybe your marketing message is getting spread through these ministries? I mean maybe that’s where a lot of the source of your marketing efforts are coming from, it’s not from you directly it’s from these people sharing the word. They go to conferences or talk to each other and say hey, well how do you manage your membership? How do you get people to come in a lot more? And maybe they’re sharing it. So it maybe has this sort of viral component to it that other industries that might use your products might not have. So Joel, hope that helps. Thanks for the question.
[12:58] Our next one comes in from Stefan and he says hi guys long time listener here. I have a question for you about Saas billing. Do you use a specialized payment provider such as Chagify, Recurly or ChargeBee to handle recurring payments done in retry management or do you manage all this through custom code? I’m looking to switch to one of these providers as my biggest headache right now is managing failed payments. It’s turning into a real time sync. As you know, customers do not like updating credit card details. All the best, Stefan.
[13:26] Rob: So I don’t use Chargify or Recurly. In some apps we use PayPal subscription which I don’t recommend. In other apps we use Stripe and we custom code everything because I want to be in full control of everything. I would actually recommend going to Stripe and using their subscription API. They will handle a bunch of that stuff for you. They handle the dunning emails. The retry manage all that stuff and it just requires – there’s no extra cost for that. The nice part about doing that is its cheaper than using Chargify Recurly or ChargeBee me because they add an extra percentage on top of a service like Stripe.
[14:03] In addition, once you get that going, there are some providers that are now tying into Stripe that are doing like phone calls to your customers to get them to update credit cards. So one that I know of is called Churn Buster. Its churnbuster.io I’ve had a look inside that but I can’t use it. I would use it in a heartbeat but I can’t use it because with Drip and HitTail we don’t use a subscription API. We just use the bare bones make a charge API and we have all the scheduling and the retry and stuff built into our code.
[14:33] Now the reason we did it that way is 1) because it didn’t take that much time to write. We already had it built for another app but we’re able to just move it in and 2) because there’s some really fine subtleties that I wanted to be in control of in terms of upgrading and downgrading on a monthly basis based on usage and if you have that it does get a little more complicated because you have to keep hitting and updating subscriptions through the subscription API but all that said, if you can, let’s say you have a reason not to, I would consider using that subscription API because not only do they give you the basis for it but then there are these other services tying it into that I think can help with the dunning emails and the retry management that you’re talking about.
[15:10] Mike: Yeah. The only downside to using that which I use it for one of my apps is you basically have to create web books on your side to be able to handle those call backs to your application to be able to perform those different actions which is not a terribly big deal I don’t think because you’re still going to have to write code to handle a lot of the stuff anyway. Another option is to use bestunning.net and they have basically a mechanism that hooks into that stuff for you and again you’re probably going to have to write some code there as well.
[15:38] Personally I kind of went the custom route just like Rob said to just kind of be in control of the entire process from beginning to end and you know exactly what’s going on and if you have special cases, you don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to worry about working around somebody else’s API. You don’t have to worry about somebody else doing something that’s going to break your stuff. The biggest thing that I have to worry about is whether or not Stripe is up and running and whether everything works properly. As long as they’re making sure that all their code is backwards compatible with other API’s I really don’t have to worry too much about it. If you don’t have the time then definitely use one of those other options but I think that if you do, then investing in writing that code yourself is probably a better option. So thanks for the question Stefan.
[16:15] Our next question comes from Khalil and he says hi Mike and Rob. I’m building a startup in Saudi Arabia which involves a centralized website to act as a portal for patients in the kingdom to create appointments with any medical provider in the region online. Currently we’re looking for an early adaptor for our system but all medical centers that we’ve visited so far is skeptical of having an integration with our system. What do you think we should do? How do I get enough trust form these people to have them act as an early adapter for a medical application?
[16:45] Rob: As a first time bootstrapper, I don’t know that I would go after medical applications. In the US they have HIPAA laws which are the health privacy act laws and they are very, very strict and it requires a lot of work and typically medical providers won’t work with some bootstrapper like a single founder with no funding and just kind of person off the streets so to speak. It’s tough to say. I would hate to tell you to bail on this idea but this seems like an uphill battle. If you can’t even get people to talk to you about how are you actually going to make sales on the long run?
[17:18] Mike: It sounds to me like the value proposition doesn’t overcome the trust issue. I don’t know exactly how you would overcome that trust issue, I mean really, maybe you go after universities where they have a little bit more openness with regards to the information that they’re sharing for example. So there’s any sort of clinical research or something like that on going on where they’re going to be publishing and sharing the results of those things, then potentially that’s an avenue but I think that going after those medical centers directly would probably be difficult just for the reasons that Rob pointed out.
[17:48] Rob: Try an alternate route first because you’re trying to attack that problem head-on right now. Right? You just go into the big medical place trying to go in there but if you can figure out someone who maybe doesn’t have the restrictions of the medical privacy like Mike said, people are doing research or someone who’s already make it public or just somewhere where it’s a little bit of an easier in, that’s what I would look to do because the value proposition outweighs the risk.
[18:10] If you’ve tried to validate that and you’ve talked to 10 facility and they all basically said no chance, then to me you’ve kind of validated that the assumption is incorrect so then the next step is what do you do? I don’t think it’s well how do I build trust? How you build trust is you’d raise a bunch of money and build a huge product and I mean that’s how you build trust. You say we’re backed by so and so. What are they going to trust? What name can you have on your board or what name can you have as an investor or what certification do you need? I mean these are the things that would build trust but all of those things has completely changed the shift of your business. They’re expensive, all of these things make it really, really hard. To me it’s a non bootstrapper friendly business at that point.
[18:50] And so that’s what I would look as how can you take this idea and move it into something that is not either so heavily regulated or just so heavily not as willing to move forward with new technology like the medical field probably is.
[19:01] Mike: My thought with modern pivot there was that you could essentially leverage the university’s name and say we’re working with this university over here and they’re using it. So it’s good enough for them. And a lot of those universities have relationships with hospitals and medical centers in the region because if they trained doctors at the university then those doctors need to go to do their residency some place and you can kind of leverage their name.
[19:28] Now, it’s not say that you don’t go after that and just stay there. I mean that’s entirely possible. It maybe that it’s very lucrative to stay over there but I think that would probably be the easiest way but as Rob said, just going head on is just probably not going to work. It seems like you’ve validated that’s not going to work. I think that the appropriate thing to do would be to kind of pivot a little bit and then see if that works and if not maybe look around and see what your other options are. So thanks for the question Khalil.
[19:52] Our next question comes in from Paul. Hi Mike and Rob. I love your podcast. I’m very happy I found you guys. Here’s the issue I have. I run an ecommerce business in the past that I started from scratch that allowed me to learn every aspect of the business from marketing and technical to customer service and operations. It also helped me identify many gaps that are there in the ecommerce business. One of the gaps I identified was the inability for smaller merchants to obtain a discounted shipping rate from major couriers unless they ship large volumes. Also here are only a few order management systems that allow multichannel processing and provide shipping discounts.
[20:23] So about six months ago I decided to build a system that will integrate with multiple sales channels so that will multiple sales channel such as eBay, amazing, magenta, big commerce etcetera as well as shipping carriers. The system provides merchants with a simple way to print multiple shipping labels using discounted shipping rates. I was able to negotiate volume discounts with DHL and UPS and I’m now negotiating with the United States postal service. About halfway through development and I’ve dropped a significant portion of my savings into it which has put me in a slight state of anxiety. I find myself jumping around constantly changing scope from starting small and building a system for eBay only and for DHL.
[20:57] The next day I wake up and feel that customers would not be interested in only those two options and I changed the scope to eBay, Amazon and a major shopping cart working with DHL, UPS and FedEx. Listening to your lean startup episode kind of put things in perspective and I’m more confident about the strategy now.
[21:12] Rob: My first advice to Paul is I don’t think that you can go based on your gut feeling because day to day your gut feeling will change especially if there’s a lot of money on the line and you’re stressed about it. I think you should stop writing code and I think you should talk to people who are willing to pay you money for this. I would try to connect if you’re not already connected with the tropical MBA audience, there’s ecommerce podcasts, there is the Dan and Ian’s DC. There’s a lot of ecommerce folks in that space who are they’re nice folks. They’re willing to lend an ear and if you run an ecommerce site you may know a few but that would be my question is what are they doing and what can you build for one customer or five customers who are willing to pay you money?
[21:53] So if they only need eBay and DHL and they’re like yes I would pay X amount for that, find them and build the product for them. But if they say no, it has to have all these things, then either decide to build all those things which sounds like a ton of work to me or find someone who has a little simpler use case.
[22:07] Mike: You get those first couple of customers that need one of them. I mean I can’t imagine that a small retailer would have a preference for who they want to use. Do they want to use DHL or UPS or FedEx or the postal service? It seems to me like they would have a preference and on their website they’re probably only offering one or two of those options. So build those options for that one customer and then expand from there. I don’t think that you need to launch with all of them. You need somebody to pay money of course but starting with one customer, two customers or three customers who have overlapping needs, that helps gets you where you need to be and eventually down the road sure you can put those other things in the roadmap but I don’t think that they need to be there on day one.
[22:45] Rob: Right. And this is something that Dan Norris had talked about who launched informally where he built 15 integrations or something. He said he regretted doing that he should’ve started with one, figure out if it was valuable and then expanded from there. So I will link towards that. I would also say you mentioned the value proposition. There’s these two sentences. You said one of the gaps that I identified was inability for smaller merchants to obtain discounted shipping rate unless they have large volume. So that’s one value prop. Then you say also there are only a few order management systems that allow multichannel processing and provide shipping discounts. So we have discounts and we multichannel processing. Which of those is most important? Which one is the wakeup in the middle of the night what are the ecommerce people really want? Do they want discounts or do they want multichannel?
[23:27] Because my guess is it’s not both. And if you dump one of those, you make this a lot simpler because if you dump the multichannel, and you just go after discounts then I would just start with one provider. Right? But if you find out that no, these guys really want multichannel and discounts would be nice, obviously discounts are always nice. Right? But the multichannel is super important, then your revenue model comes into place. Because if the discounts aren’t as important then you can take the cut or you have some play there. But trying to offer both discounts and multichannel I guess there’s a reason that hasn’t been done already either dealing with complexity or price so I think you kind of want to nail then that single value prop of these early stages of bootstrapper you can’t serve too many masters with your product.
[24:08] Mike: Yeah. It seems like going overboard on simplifying it would probably be appropriate because if you get rid of the multichannel and then just focus on the discounts it makes your marketing proposition a lot easier too because you can say hey if you sign up for this service, we’ll be able to get you volume discounts and well be able to save you X dollars a month on your shipping based on whatever percentage is and we’re only going to charge this month to you. So it’s a no brainer at that point. It makes selling people very, very easy at that point.
[24:34] Rob: Right. Get big company discounts even if you’re low volume. Right. I mean that’s kind of the headline that I would start with if that’s truly the value prop.
[24:43] Mike: So second point was I want to your opinion about my business model. Most of the competitors out there are all based on monthly premiums ranging from $50 to $150 monthly. I thought that I would not be changing my customers anything but take a small cut of the shipping labels that they print. Being that I’m providing a discounted rate I thought I would charge a small percentage of the label cost without the customer ever feeling impact.
[25:02] I think this is a bad idea and the reason is because you almost get into the situation where you’re going to end up with a lot of people signing up because they want to check it out because they’re not paying a monthly fee and whether they use it or not is almost immaterial to them because if they only pay for it when they use it then if they’re going to use it a lot then great. But you may very well end up attracting a lot of the people who don’t necessarily have a lot of money. They don’t have enough volume and you’re going to have a thousand customers that give you like pennies on each month. And I would be very concerned about that.
[25:38] I mean you’d much rather have 50 customers paying you $50 a month than 1,000 or 2,000 customers each of whom you’re only getting maybe $3-$5 a month because they’re only shipping out one or two things. That would be an area of big concern to me.
[25:53] Rob: I have concern I think this could work but I think it needs a specific couple things to fall into place. 1) That percentage should not be small. You need to make a substantial amount on each package and that’s where I was saying if you can nail it down that they really just want the multichannel, you don’t even need to talk about discounts. There’s a company right now and I forget if there called shipped or ship it, they are making all their money because they give these massive volume discounts and they will take your stuff and ship it for you but they just charge you the rack rate, the list price for the UPS stuff and they take the entire float in between that and that can be several dollars per shipment and that’s the kind of revenue you’re going to need especially if you’re going after small ecommerce sites so what do they ship? 10 things a month? 30, 40, 50 things a month? We’re not talking about thousands a month or else they’d get the volume discount.
[26:44] So if someone’s only shipping 20 things a month and you’re making 20 cents per then you’re making $4 a month off you customer. You’re done. You’re never going to be able to acquire customer for less than that. So if you are going to try to go after this model, I’m talking a buck, $1.50 per shipment that you need to make and so then those 20 shipments actually makes you $20-30 a month and if they stick around then you do have some kind of lifetime value there. I like the idea of trying to go around the monthly subscription model that the other guys are doing however you’re a bootstrapper and that makes it a lot harder because the clearest path to revenue and profitability for you is to have recurring revenue.
[27:25] And so to me, this can be something to try out but in the first month or two, if you have people signing up and their volume is really low and you’re not making enough money, I have seen a number of companies including shoppify. When shopify first launched, all it was was a cut. It was a percentage. There was no monthly fee. Within six months they had a $20 monthly fee and now if you look at them, their monthly fees are pretty substantial to be honest based on volume. And the reason they did that is because that’s the way you grow and that’s the way you actually build a profitable business is having these monthly fees for better or worse I know that some customers may not like them but the customers that do and the customers that actually are willing to pay it are going to be the best customers. Those are the ones that you really want to get in and use the product.
[28:08] So I’m a little concerned about it. The ones that I know that take that percentage are typically funded companies and they can outlast. And in fact if you go back and watch Jason Cohen’s talk from MicroConf 2013 he talks about the idea of bootstrapped business and he says don’t build a business where you’re taking a small percentage off of each transaction because you’re probably not going to get to the level of volume. And so that’s what I’m saying. If you do take a percentage, it needs to be a large one.
[28:32] Mike: His third question is what do you think is the best approach to make this type of product? I thought it was just starting out with 1-2 customers and have them running with it for some time. I could also use my ecommerce business for testing.
[28:41] Rob: That’s two different questions. Right? One is how do you market this and two is like you’re talking about doing customer development. For customer development I would hope that by this point that you have 5 or 10 people lined up that are really chomping at the bit to use it. If you don’t, please stop writing code and please go find these people whether it’s through your network which is probably where I’d start, whether it’s their forums, whether it’s through writing into tropical MBA podcast, whether it’s I don’t want to get down and send a bunch of email but it’s that’s type of audience where there’s going to be people who can at least tell you if they need it or not. Right? It’s going to be an easy discussion when you talk to 30-40 of ecommerce vendors and they all say hey, this is fantastic. Heck yes, build this. This is what I need. Or they all say this isn’t really solving my problem. And that latter response is going to be really disappointing to hear but it’s better than continuing down a path that may not yield you anything in the end.
[29:34] Mike: Right and those discussions are going to help you formulate what the best approach to market the product is because they’re going to tell you where they would’ve searched for it or where they already searched for it and what sorts of things that they’ve looked at and what they found lacking. I mean just talking to customers and asking them bluntly what else have you tried or what else have you used to solve this problem that has not worked? You get that answer back from people and they will tell you not only what they’ve tired but why it didn’t work for them.
[30:00] And that can guide you to figure out how your products needs to be positioned in terms of the negative marketing effects to say this is not how we work. We do this other thing over here and you tell that to people upfront because chances are really good that other people have encountered that same problem and they tried whatever the other solution was, it didn’t work for them and the reasons were the same. And you can leverage that to your advantage with your own application.
[30:26] Rob: Yeah and I think the answer to the first part which is what is the best approach to market the separate product, its every marketing approach that I would use for any SaaS app because that’s essentially what this is. There’s SEO. There’s content marketing. There’s paid acquisition. I mean it’s all the stuff that I would use. There’s no best approach. It’s that you have to try a bunch of stuff, figure out what works and double down on them.
[30:45] Mike: And his last question is my other concern is the competition. These guys were all pretty big with deep pockets and provide many more features in a shooter period of time. I would argue that’s probably not true. The fact that they’re bigger means that they’re probably going to ignore you and even if you come out with some great feature, they’re probably just – even if they do see it, they’re probably just not going to bother implementing it because it’s just going to take so much time to implement it in their environment because of corporate red tape. If they are that big, they will largely ignore you until you start stealing enough business and any given market where they have sales reps and they will notice at that point.
[31:21] But I remember talking to the VP of marketing of several companies that have been purchased under his watch and he basically said flat out he’s like large companies will not notice you until multiple sales reps have their deals stolen from them and they tell their manager in the same quarter because there’s relatively high turnover there and you just will not get notched. I would not worry about that.
[31:46] Rob: I think the only thing you need to figure out is how are we going to answer the question when someone says how is your product different than big competitor? Right? You need to be able to answer that in one sentence very quickly and not need paragraphs of like well we have these other features and we have blah, blah it’s like what is the value prop? You can say well they only do one shipper and we do all five or they don’t gave you bulk discounts even if you’re a small vendor. Those are the two things that you’ve mentioned that peaked my interest the most.
[32:15] So if they do both of these things then I don’t know what your competitive advantage is. And if they don’t do those things but those things aren’t important to potential customers then you’re going to have a real struggle. But in terms of big competitors, I would not even worry about them at this point especially if you’re building something that is different enough that small businesses will take notice.
[32:36] Mike: So Paul thanks for the question and we have a second Paul for our last question. He says hey guys, I started listening to the show a couple months ago and its really changed how I think about my startup. Want to say thanks to both of you for such an awesome podcast. My question is this. I sell downloadable shrink wrap software, analytic tools like Kiss Metrics make it possible to see that Joe visited my website, browsed some pages, subscribed to a mailing list and downloaded the software. But then there’s a disconnect. Joe works for a big company and his company only buys software from approved vendors so the person who enters their credit card to buy the software usually isn’t Joe. They may even work from a different company. From analytics point of view, are there ways to know that it was Joe who eventually bought a license even though someone else actually paid for it? How can I test ways to increase the chance that Joe will buy a license if I can’t tell whether Joe did buy a license? Thanks. All the best.
[33:20] Rob: Well, first thing is you can’t. I mean there’s no way to do it for sure. But the first thing I would do is start doing email domain match ups. I know you said it could be from a separate company. My guess is that’s less of the time. So if you can start matching up the domain name of the email address, cross everything right across your marketing funnel, your trials, your downloads, your page, your customers and just match those up then it can at least give you some insight that there were multiple people from the same company looking at and buying.
[33:49] We’ve done this. I’ve done this with .net invoice because we see similar stuff or multiple people from the same company evaluated and a different person buys. So that’s a decent way to do it. The other way I would do is when someone buys a license, I would either have a question right there when they buy it or I would have email follow-up that basically says how did you hear about this? Can you please let us know if you’re buying this? Are you buying this on behalf of someone else? How about that question on the purchase page? Ask if they’ll enter a name or enter an email or enter a company name. Just try to get a data point there. But that’s the only way.
[34:20] Mike: I mean in terms of something like Kiss Metrics, you’ve got all the data down to the point that where they downloaded the software, what you don’t have is the person who came in and actually made the purchase and should be able to basically hand some of that information off to a VA or something like that to have them basically take a look at that very last stage in the funnel where there’s a purchase being made.
[34:41] The other thing you could do is you could also try and match it up on the licensing itself. So when you send them a license, ask them to register the software and as part of the registration for the software ask them for their email address and you may be able to open up a browser something like that and get their cookie information that way but obviously that’s not going to work if they’re installing it on a server and they downloaded it from their desktop so there’s some issues there. But you may very well be able to get them to enter in their own personal email address there and use that as essentially a mechanism for feeding some of that information in. It’s not full proof. It’s probably the best you can do but I think that in general, I think this entire problem is pretty hard to solve.
[35:20] Music
[35:24] Rob: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
Episode 183 | 5 Startup Rules to Live By with Dan Norris
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I have Dan Norris on the show and we talk about five startup rules to live by. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 183.
[00:09] 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.
[00:26] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:27] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Mike?
[00:32] Mike: I’m experimenting a little bit with some various bio hacks to help improve my overall health. Some things are just basic things like just going to the gym on a very regular basis but some of them are I’ll say a little bit out there and so far though it seems to be working. There are certain things that I’ve noticed for example. I’m working less hours and it feels like I should pull back on spending time working out but at the same time I recognize that if I do that then what’s going to happen is I’m going to spend those additional hours working on my products and stuff but at the same time, my productivity is going to drop. So it’s this weird state where I know in the back of my mind that I really shouldn’t do that but it’s like I want to.
[01:16] Rob: I’m a little confused. You’re working less hours by choice and that makes you feel like you should workout less?
[01:21] Mike: No. I’m working less hours and I’m spending that time instead working out.
[01:26] Rob: I see.
[01:27] Mike: So in the back of my mind I’m like I wish I had more time to work on this stuff. Where can I get that time from? and the natural place to get it from would be to stop working out.
[01:37] Rob: Exercise.
[01:38] Mike: Exactly. Exercise. But I know that if I do that, it’s going to negatively impact my productivity when I am working.
[01:42] Rob: When you are working, right.
[01:42] Mike: And the other thing, my wife’s a fitness instructor so she actually put together one of the workout routines for me and I tried it out and afterwards I gave her a call and I was like I think you’re trying to kill me because that was really rough. And she’s like it couldn’t have possibly been that bad and then she tried it and she’s like sorry.
[02:00] Rob: Nice. She was trying to kill you.
[02:04] Mike: I think so.
[02:06] Rob: Hey, I have a couple things this week. The first is a congratulations to a three time MicroConf attendee, his name’s Robert Grzesek and he writes software that controls mills which are little wood – well sometimes they’re very large but sometimes smaller, things that cut wood to make cabinets and to do really intricate cuts and he said that they take in the software, he’s been doing it full time for years. They’ve taken it as far as they could so they decided to actually launch their own mill to build some hardware. So we launched a kick starter and they wanted $30,000 and it was funded the first day. They’re now a $61,000 and they have 29 days to go still as the recording of this podcast. We’ll link it up in the show notes or you can also search on the Nomad CNC mill. So check it out for sure and congratulations to Robert for getting that up on kick starter.
[02:56] The other announcement from the community is Brennan Dunn is going to be on Edinburgh in Scotland in June. He’s going to be talking at the Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. disruption and publishing conference on June 20th. Brennan’s also looking at putting together a workshop about online marketing and starting a business so if you’re interested, if you know Brennan and you’re in the Edinburgh area, I would recommend that you drop him an email at brennan@planscope.io and let him know that you’re interested so that when he tours there he can be in touch.
[03:22] Mike: Very cool.
[03:23] Rob: So today Mike and I have the pleasure of welcoming Dan Norris on the show.
[03:27] Dan: Hi guys, thanks for having me. I’m super excited. I’m a huge fan of the show so I’m looking forward to the conversation.
[03:32] Rob: So Dan, if you haven’t heard of Dan, he has his own podcast. He has a blog. He has a startup or 2 or 3 at any given time. Dan I know I’m not doing what you’re up to justice. You want to get folks a little 30 second intro to what you’ve been up to the last year or two?
[03:47] Dan: I at the moment really got one business and that makes me very happy because in the last year we’ve had about 4 or 5. Most of them have failed. At the moment our business is WP Curve. I’m on the web press small jobs for $69 a month and we operate 24/7. About 10 months ago I had just kind of a big failure with my last startup and those were a couple of weeks away from needing to get a job. And I launched WP Curve in that time we signed up 250 customers and we’re up to about $16,000 a month and sort of experienced in the last 18 months a massive failure and the opposite of that as well.
[04:18] Rob: You tried to validate along the way. You built a list and then in the end it didn’t work out that well and so you wrote a post kind of postmorteming that and we walked through some of those steps and talked about lean startup and startup validation and stuff like that.
[04:29] Dan: Yeah and I contacted you guys recently because I’ve sort of written a book that talks about that journey that I went through about that failing business and what I got right with the current business and it talks about the validation aspect and the book’s called The Seven Day Startup so it’s about launching quickly and I think what we’re going to talk about today is some of those lessons.
[04:49] Rob: Yeah. That’s right. It was episode 142 called the startup validation work and then we did a follow-up episode 145 which was this lean startup work for bootstrappers. As Dan said, he contacted us, one chapter in particular stuck out to me. It’s either 13 or 14 business rules to live by, startup rules to live by. Which is it Dan? Is it business or startup?
[05:09] Dan: Well I talk about that a little bit in there. I think it depends what you like but I like the word startup because I think it sort of feels as if you’re working on something a little bit more exciting than just creating a job for yourself. So I like that word better than business.
[05:22] Rob: Cool. So today we’re going to be talking through a handful of these rules to live by. Obviously we won’t be able to get through all of them so I guess let’s dive into the first one. You have a rule, it says test every assumption. The biggest question I have about it is how is it possible to test every assumption?
[05:38] Dan: I mean this is being one of my biggest lessons and I think it’s the whole reason why I kind of had a year working on the business but didn’t work and seven days working on a business that did work because the business that I worked on for seven days I didn’t make any assumptions because I didn’t have time. So I simply just launched and didn’t know what the right pricing was. I didn’t know where the people wanted this. I didn’t validate it. There was no time for validation or pricing or anything. I just launched it and then I worried about all that stuff afterwards. As a result, the kind of hidden benefit was that all the decisions I made ended up being made based on real information from real customers rather than assumptions.
[06:14] So I suppose there’s a lot of ways to do it but I think especially for bootstrappers, the best way to do it is to launch as quickly as possible. That way, every decision you’re making is based on how people are responding whether they’re getting their wallets out, what they’re telling you about the product, how to improve it rather than sitting around kind of debating is this a big problem? Is it valid? Do I need to run some paid ads to test email opt-ins or whatever all that stuff and cutting a lot out of it and instead just making decisions based on real information from real people.
[06:42] Rob: You know what would you say to a founder who might be listening to this or an aspiring founder for that matter? Who he was in your shoes a year ago where you were working on a software product and you had to spend some time building something. You couldn’t just launch in seven days because you were building a Saas app. Whereas your new product is more of productize consulting. You have a staff who are doing things but you really didn’t need to spend time to build software upfront.
[07:06] Dan: Well, we’ve also launched a web press plug-in within one week during that period, it failed but I still followed the same process and I’ve got examples in my book of people who’ve launched businesses very quickly. A week is hard for a software business. It’s probably one of the harder ones to do but I think that’s a consideration for a bootstrapper. One other chapters in my book I go through like what is a good idea for a bootstrapper and the amount of time it takes to build the product is a consideration I think whether or not it’s a good idea. If you’re in a situation like you are where you’ve got a bunch of success and you’re kind of free to explore, you don’t need your next startup necessarily to be a big success. If it fails, you’ll be fine. That’s a different situation that I was in and probably a lot of your audience are in. In that situation, I think you’re better considering an idea that enables you to launch quickly and don’t think about a startup that’s going to take you 12 months to build for at least for your first one.
[07:53] Rob: Yeah on the show here we often say 4-6 months of part time work that’s kind of been the rinse that we’ve thrown out. You’re bringing the ball way back to the seven day thing. I suppose if its software maybe you’d give them a break and let them spend a month or something.
[08:07] Dan: No I think with the example that I run through with my own product it’s actually really cool because when I started my business informally it was effectively a analytics dashboard. It took me about 10 months before I really knew that it wasn’t going to work and it took me 6-8 months of full time work and many tens of thousands of dollars to get my first paying customer. And to run about the same time, Baremetrics, have you talked about Baremetrics on the show? Their stripe analytics?
[08:32] Rob: We haven’t but the owner Josh Pigford or the founder, he did an attendee talk at MicroConf.
[08:36] Dan: Yeah and that’s one of the examples I got for my book. He was able to start a business that was very similar to what I started but he was able to build it very, very quickly and he’s done extremely well in a very, very short timeframe. And there’s other examples as well. There’s a company called launch rock truck that launched on startup weekend and with a couple of days they’re on tech crunch and the within a couple of months they were funded. It’s difficult with software but it’s not impossible.
[08:59] Yeah, if you’re running a service, it’s definitely easier to launch quickly but I still think you’ll be better off at figuring out a way to test your assumptions properly. There’s another good example in the book where I talk about a guy who started a deal site for wine and his assumption was people didn’t necessarily need discounted wine. What his assumption was people would get a bunch of different wines and they didn’t know what they were going to get. So they pay $15 for a bottle of wine, they might get $100 bottle of wine or they might get a $15 bottle of wine. So it wasn’t necessarily cheaper but those surprise elements, so what he needed to test was will this side actually work? And he tested that by having a party and everyone who walked up at the party paid $15 for a bottle of wine and some people got a $15 bottle of wine, some people got a $100 bottle of wine.
[09:40] And he just looked at what people did and what they talked about, whether they engaged with each other, what they’re excited about the process and that was enough for him to get some validation around that the concept was right before you actually spend any time on software.
[09:51] Mike: It sounds to me like the whole premise behind testing every assumption is not necessarily about testing the assumptions. It’s about more about moving quickly and doing things as fast as possible so that you get to that point where you do have the data.
[10:05] Dan: Yeah. I think before you launch, I think it’s more about not having assumptions. If you can launch quickly and not really having assumptions before you launch, but after you launch, we just keep coming back to this in our business. it’s like every time we make a decision, we just think about okay are we making this because we are sharing something that we don’t actually know and if that’s true then what I’m going to actually ask your customers is it important that we offer 24/7 service? Is it important that we offer unlimited fixes? We assume it is but why don’t we just ask people make sure this is actually something that they care about before we kind of make decisions around those things. I think there’s a way you can interpret it before you launch, after you launch in every decision we make we try to do it without assumptions.
[10:40] Rob: I’m curious. You mentioned Josh with Baremetrics and how he did it in a week and that it took you 10 months. What was the difference there? Were the products really that similar or did you build a much larger product?
[10:52] Dan: I definitely built a much larger product but I did that because I was working on assumptions. The difference is before we launched, I built something that I thought I needed. He built something that he thought he needed but neither is new. So I spent a long time – like mine had a lot of integrations with about 15 different other products. So it was the analytics dashboard that brought in data from a whole bunch of places so it’s much more complex to build I imagine than Baremetrics was when he started. But at the same time, I only built that because I thought that’s what people wanted.
[11:19] So I made a massive mistake there in assuming that people actually wanted to pay for that. What he did was he thought people wanted to pay for it but he didn’t waste time trying to figure that out. He just launched it and then kind of just gained that natural momentum which is something we’ve noticed with this business but never happened with my last business. It just didn’t hit that point where it just started to kind of build on its own.
[11:38] Rob: Right. I like the idea of launching quick. I love hearing the story of Brennan Dunn launch a WordPress plug-in in a wakened and Josh obviously launched Baremetrics in a week. I just don’t know how far you can take that that. In terms of the analytics package you were developing, I know you were developing, I know it was large and let’s take a look at drip. I mean we basically spent four months half time and then another two months full time before we got it to market because it was just a bigger package. It sends email. It does real-time analytics. I validated it before hand as much as I possibly could by going outland having the conversations. I’m sure you’ve heard the story sending emails, getting people to commit to paying and all that’s tuff which I think you did some of that as well but it didn’t work out quite as well. I like the idea of what you’re saying like trying to get something out in seven days. I just don’t think it’s possible in every situation.
[12:24] Dan: Sure. There’s a few things on side to that. One is that what I needed to do with informally was to find out if people had this problem and I could’ve done that without software. I could’ve created a form where people clicked the button, connected to analytics, chose a bunch of their favorite services, click save and then give them a message and say your report will be ready in 24 hours. I mean with WP Curve, I had a live chat on my phone that sat next to my head every night I bed in case it went off for the first two months because I was offering 24/7 and it was just me.
[12:53] I could’ve done something exactly like that with – formally I could’ve said your report will be ready in one hour service and just processing the report and I could’ve just easily done it manually and presented the report to them and then asked them to pay. I couldn’t have done that in seven days as opposed to 10 months to build the actual whole application.
[13:09] Rob: That I like. That makes total sense. I’ve talked about doing that if I were to launch HitTail from scratch I wouldn’t go build software. I would do exactly as yours saying. I would have someone on the back end manually grading and ranking things based on the data someone submitted or Drip, we didn’t need – we really didn’t need to spend that much. It’s like you said, I was at a place where I could have a developer working on it but we could’ve won off – I already had the thing built on HitTail. I could’ve installed the widget manually on the next person’s site and we’ll link it up to a Mail Chimp account that I had secretly sending auto responders. I mean I totally could’ve cobbled that in a week so that I like. It’s the idea of an MVP is not a prototype that people get confused thinking MVP is a prototype. The MVP is just the minimum way to check that next assumption to validate…
[13:52] Dan: That’s exactly right and one of the quotes in the book was something like people focus on the minimum and not the vital which is I think the problem is they treat it like a product like you say and they focus on doing as little possible but is this actually viable for someone to actually pay for it and does it solve their problem? And that’s what you need to focus on and to do that quickly sometimes it’s not software you need to build. Sometimes there’s another way to build it. But the other thing I’d say about drip is I think it’s worth considering whether or not drip is a good idea for particularly a first time entrepreneur who’s bootstrapping.
[14:23] So in the book as I mentioned before, a list of criteria for good ideas and one of them is the ability to build it and test it quickly and Drip might be a good idea for 3rd and 4th time entrepreneur but it may not be a good idea for a first time entrepreneur because it might be just too hard and too competitive to build something like that. I’m sure a lot of people have come before you and in fact I know people who build similar products to this and they failed so I think that’s worth thinking about as well.
[14:48] Rob: Yeah I think that’s a good point. I have recommended people against going into this market because it is so competitive. So you’re right. I don’t think a first time bootstrapper should dive into this. Cool. I think that piggy backs really well on a second rule which is solve problems as they arise. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like?
[15:04] Dan: I’m very big on this. Again, I mean the first 10 months of my last business, I mean I spent so long trying to get the perfect payment gateway. I could’ve set a pay – with this business I set a PayPal in 30 minutes. With the last one it took me six months to setup a US bank account and to setup brain tree and to get a really nice integrated seamless payment from within the app but why? It wasn’t a problem. So why was I even working on that?
[15:27] So now, as an example, we’re a support business and we didn’t have a support help desk until we got to 250 customers a couple weeks ago. We literally just got a support desk and we’ve been using Trello and it’s been working perfectly fine until it began a problem in which case we knew that we would have to upgrade and solve that problem. There’s a lot of examples like that in our business where if you focus on problems you actually have, you end up doing what your customers want you to do rather than kind of acting on assumptions and just working on a whole bunch of stuff that really doesn’t matter.
[15:56] Mike: That’s more about solving the problems that you have versus solving problems that you’re going to have.
[16:01] Dan: Exactly. And predicting the problems again I have is part of the problem is that people end up being very, very bad predictors of what’s going to happen in their business because there’s just way too many unknowns. Some people think of it like it’s some kind of experiment entrepreneurship but there’s just too many unknowns. When you launch it – because you don’t even know six months down the track if you’re going to be doing the same thing that you’ll be doing. So why on earth would you plan for like anything, a hosting, I’ve heard you talk about Rob with your setting up service or what not. It’s generally these problems. They’re easy to solve quickly then they shouldn’t be solved in a way where you’re trying to predict what’s going to happen because 99% of the time you’re going to be wrong and it will mean that you’re working on the wrong things.
[16:35] Rob: Yeah that’s right. It’s pretty mature optimization. And about how it’s so easy to prematurely optimize credit card payment gateways hosting. I mean I’ve seen people with $500 hosting plans, $500 a month dedicated hosting plans, signed a one year contract and then not get any traffic for six months and it’s just a waste of resources at that early phase.
[16:54] Dan: Yeah. The optimization thing is a big – I have a friend too who’s debating what help desk to install and he’s got – and I asked him how many customers do you have and he said I’ve got about 10 customers. And he spent a couple of weeks evaluating what help desk to install and I’m like what’s wrong with email? I mean we’ve got 200 customers and we have a help desk. Like that’s not a problem you should be solving. The problem you should e solving is you need more customers. You can’t have a business with only 10 low fee monthly customers.
[17:20] So I think if you try to solve problems that you don’t have, you end up not working on things that are really important. You kind of get distracted and optimization’s a big one like everything you read online is about optimizing through conversions or setting up your analytics or improving the SEO and everything’s about fine tuning something that’s already working. But when you start out, you haven’t got to the point where it’s working yet so you need to be focused on getting it working before you do any of the optimization stuff which I know you guys talk about a lot.
[17:46] Rob: Yeah. I think especially if software developers are starting businesses, we tend to gold plate our software because we’ve often worked in enterprises where you know, as soon as you deploy, a million people are going to be using it tomorrow. So you know that it has to be robust. So then when you step aside and you go to build your startup, your prototype basically or your MVP I should say, we are naturally inclined to gold plate it because we think we’re going to have a million users and we don’t want to have to change stuff down the line. And think it’s been a big lesson certainly for me 10 years ago as I stated learning these but if there’s something that you can easily or even with several days of work change later, then make the decision really fast. Right? Do the minimum amount of work and then fix it later.
[18:26] There are certain things that you can’t do that with data models are often really hard to change so I do tend to put a little bit flexibility to those and there’s certain other things. But for the most part, you can get around a lot of things later.
[18:38] Dan: Yeah.
[18:37] Rob: Cool. So let’s dive into our next point, your next rule which was look for sources of momentum. You want to tell us what you mean by that?
[18:46] Dan: Yeah. This is another interesting one. We’re talking about the Baremetrics story before and just the fact that – because I wanted to cover like the marketing that he did in my marketing chapter because I’ve got a chapter that talks about 20 different ways to market a business and I wanted to kind of learn how he marketed that and he basically emailed me and said all I did was told people about it after they signed up, people tweeted it and then it just grew. He tried a bunch of different ways of marketing it but what worked was people talking about it.
[19:12] And like with my last startup I focused so much on different ways of marketing and I think I had 25 different ways I was testing and I had a big post on your blog about all these different ways I’ve build an email list and different traffic strategies, everything else. But I just couldn’t get that point where I was getting any momentum. The only thing I’ve got momentum with was my content and that ended up being a big asset. But the actual business didn’t get any momentum. And with WP Curve, the opposite is being true like we haven’t done any marketing other than just doing what we do, our content, our podcast and what not. We haven’t done any paid acquisition. All we’ve done is encourage people to tell people about it and try to do a good job.
[19:47] Yeah, and the momentum itself is brought forward. So I think when people start businesses, they kind of hope they’re going to get to that point of momentum and that’s why I like the idea of launching very quickly so that you can tweak things or maybe you can just completely kill an idea just for whatever reason is just not getting that momentum and it’s hard to predict but when it happens, you’ll notice it and it happened with Baremetrics and this happened with us. I think that’s really what people want when they start. So looking after those, it might not be like in your actual business as well like I said without content I noticed that traffic momentum was really good like I was starting to get rankings and traffic and mentions and back links and everything for our content.
[20:24] So we really doubled down on that and that’s when I ended up kind of building our list and enabling us to keep up WP Curve. For other businesses, there might be something else but for me I noticed content and I noticed this particular idea was starting to build momentum and then it just sort of gets a life of its own.
[20:38] Rob: Got it. So to be clear, you’re not saying that you should focus on word of mouth with this. You saying you should try several approaches and really pay attention to whichever one starts building momentum.
[20:48] Dan: Exactly. And I think that part of that as well is just relying on your own data or not making assumptions based on other data as well. So with the marketing, there might be 20 different ways you could potentially market something. 19 of them might not work for whatever reason. I mean it might work for someone else. They might not just work for you. Sometimes it’s just not a good fit with the founder and that’s something I’ve found like I’m just not good at certain types of marketing but I am good with other types of marketing and testing a bunch of stuff basically enables you to widdle down what’s working and find something where you can get that natural momentum and you just get an uplift that its sort of bigger than whatever you’re putting into word.
[21:25] And that’s when you really need I think to kick your business off. I think it’s very difficult to do the typical sort of four hour work week, send a bunch of ad words traffic to a page and then work out that you can make more money than you’re spending. I think that’s much, much more difficult than people realize and I think businesses do need that natural momentum so try a bunch of options, workout what works for you and for the business and stick with what works.
[21:44] Mike: Another thing I want to point out to our listeners is what you’re talking about here in terms of looking for sources of momentum is really about marketing and business momentum. It doesn’t really have anything to do with your own personal momentum, your own personal motivations which kind of leaves us directly into the next one which is managing your own motivation. We’ve kind of talked a little bit about that and what you mean by managing your own motivation versus the momentum of the business.
[22:08] Dan: Yeah, I think momentum covers every aspect of business. Motivation is so important that you can’t oversight how important it is. I don’t know exactly how to go about keeping that passion for the whole time you’ve got a business but you really need to love what you’re doing. You need to visualize what you’ll be doing everyday in your business. That’s one thing I kind of point I’m trying to make in the book is what will we actually be doing during the day? Every day in your business. And do you love doing that? What would you do what job doing that? I’ve started businesses where I’m doing cheap E-commerce type stuff like iPhone cases and stuff like that. And it meant that I had to sit around packing envelopes all day and it was horrible and I hated it and it failed.
[22:47] I mean that’s very, very easily avoided because I knew that I just didn’t want to sit around packing envelopes. So I think it’s definitely worth thinking about how your idea is going to manifest in terms of your daily work. If you were thinking about a cofounder, I think that’s been a huge motivation factor for me and momentum has role as well. I mean even just the success of our content is a really big motivating factor for us, the vanity metrics all going up is a motivating factor. Relationships and networks, all that kind of stuff. And helping other people, all that kind of stuff really helps you wake up in the morning and love what you do and that’s something that’s kind of a rule that you need to live by otherwise you’re just going to burn yourself out and fail or just want to get back and get a job because it can be tough.
[23:52] Rob: Yeah, I think a big driver for me in terms of motivation lately especially has been community. It’s both my mastermind groups as well as the Micropreneur in the academy and at MicroConf and then here at my local tech scene. I live in Fresno, California and 3-4 years ago there really wasn’t much of a tech scene but one has formed here down town. And I have a little office with 26-27 other software companies and that is it’s amazing to go down with the energy and just being able to be around other people. So I’m a big proponent of being around others who are doing interesting things and are not – the more you hangout with other folks who are doing salary gigs and you’re trying to do something interesting it’s like they just talk about different things and they think about different things and they complain about different things. Not the same mindset that we do. I think community really plays a big part of that especially for me.
[24:15] Dan: Yeah and one thing that a lot of people do is work from home by themselves and they kind of think that working from home is going to be this amazing thing but it’s actually not that much fun to sit around by yourself at your computer working. That’s definitely consideration for motivation. I’d like to talk to you about what you’re doing locally because I’d like to do something here. Just get that same.
[24:33] But I think what you guys do with the content as well and with the event, you’re helping a lot of people and that’s sort of – because you’re putting into the community you’re also getting back from the community and I think that’s probably a really big thing for people to consider. And we try to like be generous with our time and give a lot of our content out to other places and do lots of interviews and just take calls of people who have questions and that kind of stuff is a really big motivator as well.
[24:57] Rob: The last rule we’ll look at today, Dan you have many more in your book as I mentioned, is manage churn. You want to tell us what that’s about?
[25:04] Dan: Yeah. I like this and this assumes you’ve got kind of a recurring business where you know when someone stops using your service. People will leave and I like the idea of really focusing on that because it gets you focusing on exactly what your customers think about your service. It might be a better way of putting it is lose retention rather than focusing on the negative. But we had Sean Ellis on our podcast and we were kind of looking for a bunch of growth hacks from me to work out how we could grow the business and his basic message was you need to look at retention and referral. So you need to look at do people want to stay on as a customer? If not, why not? And do they tell other people about it and refer other people and that’s what’s growing our business despite all the content we do and everything else we do.
[25:46] It’s literally just about making sure that what we’re doing is good quality and the customers care about it and sometimes it’s difficult to know that but if customers start leaving which they will then that’s a really good point to work at exactly why. And what we did there is just send them a really simple email. We’ve tried a bunch of things. This one works better than the others and we just send them an email with the subject did we do something wrong? And it’s just one line that says I noticed you canceled. Did we do something wrong? That forces most people to reply. We ask them why. They left, they won’t tell us. But if we asked them did we do something wrong, they’ll tell us exactly why they left.
[16:15] And that encourages the appeal of your service to customers because you’re effectively stopping people from leaving which means you’re making them happier and improving your product and that’s probably – I mean focus on product was another thing I had in my list. It’s effectively the same thing. It’s focusing on making sure people love your product so much they stay and they refer to other people.
[26:32] Rob: Yeah. I really like how Sean Ellis [0:26:33] [Inaudible] there with. Are they telling other people and are they sticking around? Right? Because I think there is a lot more discussion online about optimization as you said, driving traffic, those are the approaches. There’s less and less said the further down the funnel you get. And as you get to the point of I actually have customers, how do I keep them and then how do I get the customers to tell other people. Those are super advanced things and we don’t tend to get into them. And I don’t mean advanced by they’re complicated. I just mean that I don’t think there’s nearly as much information about those topics than the ones at the front end and I think the reason is most people are in the beginning stages and they’re not the point where worrying about churn maters because like you said they only have 10 customers or they have 0 customers and they’re still building and just driving traffic at that point is perhaps the bigger concern.
[27:19] But I definitely like the one line email that you’re sending with Drip we do the same thing when people cancel. The email is a little different. It’s two lines. And it’s from me, from the CEO and it basically says please respond even if you only have time to write one line, I’d really appreciate it and it’s an enormous reply rate. And I get a lot of good feedback about pricing or just that they’re in a different situation. they’re a blogger and it’s too expensive and they can use a free plan or some other tool or even if it’s not something that I’m directly going to build a new feature, at least I have an idea of who our product is really working for and who and why it’s not working. And the audience of who and why it’s not working for them.
[27:53] Dan: That’s right. You learn a lot from there. There’s a lot of problems that you can solve that come as a result of asking people that like we have a lot of people – not a lot of people. It’s not uncommon for people to sign up with us and then cancel after a day because they assume something in that service like I assumed it was some multiple websites or the [0:28:09] [Inaudible] agency and we can support all their clients for $69 or whatever. So those problems can be easily fixed. We wouldn’t have necessarily known that but because they arise occasionally then that can be easily fixed by changing the copy on the website.
[28:21] And as you said, a big factor in churn is who are the people to start with? Who are the people you’re attracting in the business to start with and are they the right people? And once you start realizing the types of people that leave, you can start honing in on the types of people that don’t leave and therefore getting those to your side on the first place and focusing on working on how you can get those people as customers which is going to increase your retention overall.
[28:42] Mike: I think the other thing about churn that most people don’t necessarily think about out-front is if you got 100 customers and you lose five of them in a month it’s like okay well that kind of sucks but I can probably scrounge up five more customers but what happens when you get to 500 customers or 1,000 customers because then, those things, the churn starts to scale up as well as the percentage may stay the same but the actual number of customers increases.
[29:07] So if you have a 5% monthly churn, by the end of the year you’ve actually got a 54% yearly churn which is just abysmal for your business. I mean it will kill it and you have to be able to address those issues and make your product or your service better. And if you’re not doing those things, if you’re not actively focusing on reducing and managing that churn it will eventually kill your business because you’ll get to a point where you’re losing more customers than you’re gaining.
[29:30] Dan: That’s right. And I think the solution may not be simple either and I think some businesses have more churn and others like a service. With ours, it’s always going to have a bit more churn and like hosting for example where people just aren’t going to leave unless the provider does something bad. They’re just going to stick around. Whereas with ours, we need to keep our value. So the solution to churn might be totally different but it’s something that we’re really, really conscious of. It’s kind of a complex thing. I don’t know if you talked it on your show about metrics and stuff with churn but if you haven’t I’ll send you some notes and links that might be useful for your audience.
[29:58] Rob: Yeah. We probably need to dive into it in a future episode because it is very complicated. Even just building a churn dashboard is hard because you have to have all these cohorts and there’s a lot of different ways to interpret things. Do you include annual plans? Do you include comp people? I mean there’s this whole if people can’t cancel, if they churn because of credit card failure versus voluntary churn, tons of stuff. And then as you said, it’s never one thing that you need to do to fix all your churn. There’s typically like 8 different things to serve 8 different audiences who are cancelling.
[30:28] And as a note, folks if you listen to think one, there’s an Saas app or planning to launch one, there’s an app that’s called keepify.com and it helps at least does some predictive work for you to figure out who’s going to be canceling soon based on behavior.
[30:43] Dan: Yeah I think like you can get carried away with all the metrics and that may not be so useful to someone who’s just starting. But what is useful is focusing on your product and working out why people are leaving. And that’s why churn is useful because you’ll get direct information from customers that tells you honestly why they left and that’s something that you should be focusing on because it’s product and if you improved the product then you increase retention and you increase referrals.
[31:05] Rob: Very good Dan. Thanks for joining us today. Do you want to give folks an idea of where they can find a book? Because obviously we’ve just spoken about 5 of the 14 rules you have and then you have another dozen or so chapters and I think the book is free. Is that right?
[31:18] Dan: Yeah. It’s not out yet but it shouldn’t be too far off. If you go to wpcurve.com/sevendaystartup at the moment it’s just a landing page for an email opt-in, that’s the list that I use to email. I send one weekly email and I’ll send the book through to that list. When the book’s actually out, we’ll just put it up so people can grab it. Might be able to send you a direct link but it’s still a few weeks away.
[31:37] Rob: Very cool. Well thanks again for coming on the show man. It was good to have you.
[31:40] Dan: Yeah hopefully it’s useful if people got any questions I’m just dan@wpcurve.com feel free to send me an email.
[31:45] Rob: And you also blog at…
[31:47] Dan: Yeah everything’s wpcurve.com so I didn’t really delve into that but that’s some – we’ve kind of put all of our stuff on to that site now so wpcurve.com/blog and there’s about 300 posts up there. Just eBooks and email courses and a whole bunch of stuff. A lot of that stuff is not really WordPress related. It’s kind of startup and business type related so that’s going to be useful for your audiences podcast with Sean Ellis and Noah Keg are portably the two recent one that we’ve done are the best for your audience.
[32:14] Rob: Yeah. You put out a ton of content. You’re very open with what’s going on and over the last year or two as you’ve started businesses so it’s definitely a lot. If folks haven’t been over to WP Curve I would recommend checking out all your content.
[32:27] Dan: Thanks. I’d love to have you guys on the show soon as well.
[32:29] Rob: Yeah absolutely.
[32:30] Dan: Sounds good thanks for having me.
[32:32] Mike: Thanks Dan.
[32:33] Music
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