Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike do a short series on e-mail list building from zero to a thousand. They talk about how to build an e-mail list and some of the different strategies that you can use to take it through the different steps.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike [00:00]: In this episode of “Startups For The Rest Of Us,” Rob and I are going to do a short series on Email List Building: From 0 to 1,000. This is “Startups For The Rest Of Us” episode 238.
Mike [00:17]: Welcome to “Startups For The Rest Of Us,” the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs, be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product, or you’re just thinking of it. I’m Mike…
Rob [00:24]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [00:26]: And we’re here to share our experiences and help people avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?
Rob [00:29]: Well, we got the MicroConf Europe contract signed. Very excited about that. Thanks to Xander for helping us out with that. And the dates are set: August 31st and September 1st in Barcelona, that is MicroConf Europe 2015. We also have six speakers on board already. We have myself, Sherry Walling, my wife who hosts ZenFounder with. We have Patrick MacKenzie and Rachel Andrew form Perch, Dave Collins from Software Promotions, and Peldi from Balsamiq. So it’s shaping up to be another good conference this year. If you’re interested in attending or even think you might be interested in attending, we’re probably going to sell out fairly quickly, so head over to microconfeurope.com, and we have a little Drip widget over there where you can sign up to be notified when we do our early bird launch.
Mike [01:15]: And we have a brand new website up there now.
Rob [01:18]: Yup, you can check out our re-launch because our old website was pretty long in the tooth. Although I think it was long in the tooth when we launched it.
Mike [01:23]: That’s probably true.
Rob [01:26]: How about you, what’s going on?
Mike [01:28]: Well, kind of the same as you. I started the process of getting us the MicroConf Europe sponsors. And if anyone is interested, we do set aside tickets for a sponsor’s pool. So if you’re interested, send an email to sponsors@microconf.com, and I’ll be sure to get back to you with details about that. Again, it is in Barcelona, so just the venue itself should be awesome.
Rob [01:46]: Indeed. Hey, we have a bunch of new reviews. We’re up to 418 worldwide reviews. We had one in April from Rob Vinning, and he says, “Learning packed into a tight 30-minute spot with no fluff. I can only wish every podcast listed, when I search for startups with this high quality. Keep it up guys.” And then we have one from Blogandarg, who says, “Not a wasted word. With so much great content out there to choose from, it’s often hard to decide which podcast to keep up with, and which are not simply worth the time and investment. Startups For The Rest Of Us is succinct content and consistently helpful, top of the heap. Keep up the great work guys.” So thank you so much for your five-star reviews. We’d love it if you haven’t, post a review for us, in the past, it helps us continue the momentum, and frankly motivates us to continue producing this podcast. What are we talking about today?
Mike [02:29]: So on today’s episode, we’ve gotten a couple of different requests for email list building strategies. And one of the ones that came in, actually had a really good idea, which was to essentially talk through how you would go about building an email list and some of the different strategies that you would use to take it through different steps or different tiers. So what would you do if you get an email list from ground zero, nobody on it, to like 10 subscribers? And then to 25, and then 100, and then 1,000? And what is the process that you go through for that? And it seems to me like there are a lot of different strategies that you can use along the way, and there’s a lot of different questions that you need to answer when you’re doing that. So it’s not really a one-size-fits-all approach. And just based on the format that we use for this podcast, it doesn’t really make sense to try and do it like we’ve done in the past where we have just one episode on it. So what I thought we’d do, is I thought we’d deviate a little bit, and we do sort of a short series on how to build an email list. And basically, walk somebody through the different ways to get to those different tiers inside of a list building activity.
Rob [03:31]: And what’s interesting is you often hear this question asked of experienced entrepreneurs on podcasts, someone will say, if you had to start over today, what would you do? And this is what I would do, I would build an email list, right? This is something that I’ve been such a proponent of for years, and it works in so many situations. And I think, we should talk a little bit about, there’s a bunch of different types of email lists, right? All lists are not created equal. You have Verizon building some type of big marketing email list, and that’s not what we’re going to be talking about today. We have people building personal brand lists. You imagine someone like a Brandon Dunn who has his list that sells a lot of his information about freelancing. Or you have maybe a Tim Farris who has 100,000, 200,000 people on a list. We’re not going to talk about that either, because it’s not as relevant to our audience. The two types of lists that we specifically want to talk about how to build is, number one, a product launch list. So whether that product is a piece of software like I did with Drip, whether it’s a book or information like you did with the single-founder handbook, and I did with my book when I launched it, or a conference or live event, like MicroConf, that’s our early bird list we talked about earlier, some type of product that you’re going to sell, it’s a no-brainer to build an email list in order to sell that product out quickly. So we’ll touch on that. And the other type of list that we’ll talk about, because they’re closely related, is an ongoing marketing list for a product. So if you go to Bizsketch.com, you go to KISSmetrics, their blog, you go to the Drip blog, this is an ongoing marketing list. It’s not a launch list because the products are already launched, but it’s a way to build a list that’s not based around a person or a personality, but it’s more based around people who want to learn from the folks who are producing content at that product, as well as perhaps to keep up to date with that product. Maybe there’s some updates and that kind of stuff mixed in.
Mike [05:15]: Right, there are people who would subscribe to that list because they’d look at the product and like, oh, that’s interesting, I want to learn more about it. But there’s also the side effect of just people will sign up for a list, because they’re not quite sure they’re ready to commit yet, and using that email list and communicating with them on an ongoing basis can just essentially help people trust, whether it’s that person or the company that is sending you those emails. And over time, you eventually get to the point where you decide, hey, maybe I’m going to take a shot and invest in this, because people aren’t going to come to your website and just click the “Buy Now” button. It just doesn’t usually happen that way. But if you get them on an email list, they see your emails on a regular basis, and eventually they get to the point where they trust you enough that hey, I’m going to give this a shot, and they provided me enough value. And in return, I’m going to try out their products, because it seems like it might be solving my problem, and I think that they are going to be able to deliver value to me.
Rob [06:05]: And I should also clarify, when I talked about there being an ongoing marketing list for product, this is different than your trial or your customer list, because you would be sending different emails to trials and customers. Those folks have already bought in. They either need to be on-boarded, or they need to be supported and told about new features and shown how your product is continuing to get better. Whereas, the folks on the front-end of your marketing funnel, they really need to hear more about, probably some content, some education, stuff surrounding your product. You don’t want to be all salesy – there might be a sales pitch now and again. But it’s quite different because you’re not trying to sell trials and customers, but this ongoing marketing list, ultimately, you are trying to sell them. I just wanted to clarify that.
Mike [06:44]: So we’re going to walk through these different tiers, and we’re going to start off on the 0 to 10. And there’s a couple things to keep in mind here. The first one is that there’s a few different types of strategies that you would use for these. There’s the one-time things, and then there’s the ongoing or repetitive tasks. And we’ll touch on those briefly as we go through each of these different tiers. But the 0 to 10 tier, essentially there’s a few different requirements that you have to even start this process. And the first one is that you need to have at least some idea of what your basic value proposition is. When somebody comes to your website, what is it that they’re going to be signing up for? What’s in it for them? You need to set expectations and be able to deliver on those expectations. But at a fundamental level, you have to know what it is that you’re using this list for. Is it the product launch list? Is it going to be an ongoing marketing list? Is it something that you’re going to start out with as a product launch list, and then transition into an ongoing marketing list? And the specific type of list that you use is going to influence some of the strategies down the road.
Rob [07:41]: Right. And so to kind of give an example with a product launch, when I was building the list for Drip, it was a very simple statement of the value that Drip was going to provide. There was a headline, and then there were a few bullet points describing why you might want to sign up, and just something about get early access, and there might have been a mention of a lifetime discount. If you’re selling a book, then you’re going to want to have a little more content about what the book is about, why someone should care about it, how it’s different from other products. And this works for software too. If you’re building more of that ongoing marketing list, typically you don’t have something to offer, right? Like be notified when we launch, because you already launched. So in that case, you’re going to want to come back to my fundamental, which is an email crash course, like a five-day email crash course, or a seven-day mini course. And you can also do as an opt-in reward, you can also do something like a top-10 tools to do this, or top-10 tips for something. I find that email mini course gets folks used to receiving and reading emails from you. And so that’s my personal preference, and that’s why we’ve really focused on that with Drip in providing that kind of thing, instead of helping people set up this one time PDF download. It used to be you gave away e-books to get folks to opt-in, I found that I had gathered a lot of free e-books into a Dropbox folder and never read them. And so I did get on the list, but since I didn’t get much value out of it, because I never read the book, I didn’t get used to reading the person’s emails, I typically unsubscribed. Whereas, if it’s done via crash course, you have a little more leeway, five days or seven days, to create some value there, and the folks are a little more used to hearing from you. So those are kind of the ways that I would think about trying to drive someone to want to sign up for your list, depending on which type of list you have.
Mike [09:17]: So once you’ve kind of established what your value proposition is going to be, you need two other things. You need a basic landing page to capture an email address, and possibly a first name. And then you need a back end email service provider to manage that email list, so you can use A-Webber, you can use MailChimp, you can use Drip, you can use Constant Contact. I mean, there’s probably 30 or 40 different options out there. But you need to settle on one and use that consistently through all the different pages on your site. And you don’t need to have more than one page to start off with, I don’t think. I think you can get away with just the one page, especially when you’re trying to go from 0 to 10.
Rob [09:50]: Yeah, and if I was going to set up a standalone page, I would either go to Theme Forest and download a $7.00 HTML template, which is how we launched the first MicroConf, and how I launched my book originally. Or you can set up a WordPress install and use John Turner’s WordPress Coming Soon plug-in. Or frankly, you can go to some place like Kickoff Labs or Lead Pages and sign up for an account there. These are all easy, quick options for getting a landing page out.
Mike [10:17]: So we’ve talked about some of the different requirements that you have to have in order to go from 0 to 10, but we haven’t talked anything about how to actually get people on to your mailing list. And I think with 0 to 10, it’s extremely straightforward. It’s not like you’re shooting for the moon and you got to get hundreds or thousands of people to that webpage, typically going from 0 to 10, is you can go to things like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, and just ask your friends and colleagues on those lists, or go through your personal contact list of people you email on a regular basis. And send them your basic value proposition in an email. And say, is this something you’d be interested in hearing more from me about? And most people have enough contacts that you can get to that 10 mark without a heck of a lot of trouble.
Rob [10:57]: You know, something to keep in mind is if you have any kind of audience already, you’re going to blow by 10 in like a millisecond. Even if you have a blog with 500 or 1,000 RSS readers, or you have any type of small email list, and you’re driving them to a landing page, you’re going to be in the 50 to 100 to 500 range pretty quickly. And the other thing to think about is that you really want people on that list, who have some type of interest in what you’re going to be doing. Because getting folks on who are not going to buy from you or are not interested in your product, is just going to lower your open rates, lower your click-through rates, lower your conversion rates. So this is not a vanity metric, when we say 0 to 10. We mean 0 to 10 quality, qualified people who may actually have interest in it. Because getting your mom and your dad and your brother on your list, may add three to the list, but it’s not going to do anything for you when you actually go to sell your product.
Mike [11:45]: Yeah, that’s a very important distinction to make. Is that it’s about quality, and you want those people who are coming on to the list to be qualified for whatever it is that your value proposition is.
Rob [11:55]: Last thing I’ll add is, I’ve talked a lot about the concentric circle marketing approach that I use, and this, in essence, would be the center circle. And that center circle is people that you know. And then typically, the second circle is the people that my friends know. And then outside is the cold leads, and it’s breaking outside your network. So depending on how big your inter network is, your audience, this could get you to 10, or like I said, it could get you to 5,000 if your audience is big enough.
Mike [12:20]: So let’s move on to the next tier, and that’s 11 to 25. And like the 0 to 10, there’s certain requirements. And the first one is that when you get into this tier, you really need to start iterating on your value proposition, and start using more landing pages. Now, what does that really mean? It means that you need to start playing a little bit with the language, and seeing if certain things that you say on your landing page is going to resonate with people a little bit better. And there is a little bit, I think of, measurement. But I think it’s mostly gut feel when you start taking a look at these things. Because you’re not going to have enough traffic yet, in order to make solid determinations or do some sort of real A-B testing. It’s more just gut feel than anything. And the other thing that you want to do, is you want to start engaging with people who are getting on your list. I mean, once you’ve got 10 people onto that list, you should start asking them questions. And one of the questions I really like to ask is: what are your current challenges with “x” whatever “x” happens to be? And usually, it’s got to be geared towards your product or towards whatever the marketing approach is that you’re using, or the information that you’re trying to share with people. But you want to learn from them what things they’re having problems with. And you can use that later on. You’re probably not going to use it right away, but you want to start gathering information from people, to figure out what things that you want to talk to them about later on. And the other question I like to ask is: why did you join this email list? What is it that you are hoping to learn? Because that helps you find out where the gaps are in their knowledge. And essentially where on the playing field or the experience level that they are. Because you might have thought that you were talking to these people who were, let’s say, advanced email marketers. And then you suddenly find out that you’re getting all these people on your email list that are very entry-level. And from there, you have to figure out, okay well, do I want to go after the advanced email marketers, or am I okay with those entry-level, basic people, and I need to tweak whatever it is that I’m going to be doing down the road.
Rob [14:08]: And just to clarify, you mentioned that you want to think about having multiple landing pages right now, and not split that thing because you probably don’t have enough traffic. But that depends on, if you are doing a product launch, or if you’re doing that product marketing list after you’ve launched. Because early on, if I’m launching a product, I’m going to have a one-landing page. And if I have enough traffic, I’m going to split test it. Otherwise, I’m going to use my gut feeling like you said, and I’m going to go with the best headline that I have, the best value prop. After you’ve launched and you are a – like I said, a Drip, a BizSketch, a KISSmetrics or a SassApp, that’s trying to build a list just to keep you people updated, that’s when I do have landing pages all over the place, right? I have opt-in forms, on the blog, after blog posts, you might have a little Drip or a SumoMe widget that’s asking at different places. And that’s where you can easily set up landing pages even to start ranking for Google, for different SEO terms. That’s when I think you really start doubling down. Now, I don’t know if you do that this early, because we’re talking 11 to 25 subscribers, and that tends to be pretty early. But I do think that’s the next progression for each of those scenarios.
Mike [15:10]: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. As I was thinking about this, 0 to 10, and 11 to 25, it’s almost like there’s different levels. 0 to 10 is a very specific set of strategies. And for up to 25, it’s a very different set of strategies. Just because early on, you say yourself, you might be able to tap into your own personal network, and suddenly you’re at 500 subscribers, which puts you into a completely different realm of things that you’re going to be doing in order to build an email list. So I almost feel like maybe instead of talking about these as this is 0 to 10, and this is 11 to 25, it’s like, this is the first set of things you do, this is the second set of things that you could do. Maybe that’s a more appropriate way to look at these numbers. But as Rob said, it’s absolutely right, that depending on the type of list that you’re doing, kind of the stuff that falls into this tier two, it’s going to depend on whether or not you’re doing a product launch list or an ongoing marketing launch list. And it’s pretty clear already that we’re only on the second tier here, and your strategy is already starting to diverge, which is why we decided to make this into more of a series about building an email list than just a single podcast episode.
Rob [16:13]: And to kind of wrap up this 11 to 25 portion, I think this is where you sit down and you draft a welcome email and maybe a welcome auto-responder series to introduce yourself, try to deliver some value to your new subscriber. Frankly, it encourages folks to start opening their emails. And you want to keep the list warm. That’s a big thing. Like collecting this list, doesn’t do you much good if you don’t email them. So if you’re going to launch your product six months down the line, now is the time to start touching base with folks and giving them updates. And an easy way to do that, at least early on, is to have an evergreen auto-responder that’s able to introduce yourself and then ask some basic questions just so people do in fact, are used to hearing from you. And if you’re doing more of the product marketing list, like I talked about, that’s where I do have that five- or seven-day crash course, and then I skip to probably weekly updates from there where you can update folks on other new stuff that’s coming out with your product. But much more than that, it’s like new blog posts or new content or new stuff that you’re giving away.
Mike [17:09]: Now, question for you. I have my thoughts on this. What are your thoughts on – during that auto-responder, you’re asking questions of people. Do you have a preference for having them reply via email or fill out a form?
Rob [17:21]: I like to have them reply via email, because A) it shows them that the email does in fact come directly to me. And what I’ve heard is that it’s also a really good anti-spam signal. Like in Gmail, as an example, that if someone replies to an email early on, it indicates that you’re essentially kind of becoming a contact. I would think of it as like a shadow contact. You may not actually be in their contact list, but they replied to you. So that’s a plus mark in your favor.
Mike [17:47]: No, that’s exactly how I felt about it. And that’s what I do as well. I thought about sending people to a form, and then I looked at the form itself in relation to what I had been doing previously, because I wanted to be able to have that information automatically associated with somebody’s contact. I was like, oh well, I’ll just send them to a form and have it automatically sent over via Zapier, and I started implementing it. And then I looked at it after the fact, and I was like, this feels, not wrong, but just different, feels odd to –
Rob [18:13]: It’s not super personal.
Mike [18:14]: Yeah.
Rob [18:15]: It’s like we’re almost having a conversation because you’re emailing like you’re a real person, and you’re talking to them like they are a real person. And then suddenly like, oh click this form and give me feedback. That’s not how we interact. We’re used to hitting keyboard shortcut, or the “A”, which does reply-all, and just talking to someone. And I think that’s a much better experience, and it makes them feel like there’s one-on-one communication going on, which is really what’s happening.
Mike [18:35]: Right, and the end result of that is if there is information or questions that they’re responding to, you have to end up copy/pasting them out into a spreadsheet or something like that. But I think the cost of doing that, in relation to making those emails personal, is probably well worth it, especially when you’re early on. And later on, you can maybe turn into some parsing application or something like that to go into your email or maybe forward them off to some place and have a VA do that sort of thing. But I think early on, I agree, I think you definitely want to have those people just hit reply and be able to respond to the questions directly.
Rob [19:06]: Yeah, even with thousands of people on a list, you’re not going to get so many replies in general, that you’re going to be overwhelmed. I’ve done this myself with several lists of that size and it’s manageable.
Mike [19:16]: So let’s move on to the third tier, which we kind of ball-parked it, 26 to 100. And I think this is where things start to get a little bit harder. Because here what you have to do is you have to start adding automated questions to your auto-responder. And you have to use information from previous discussions to start honing your messages so that you already understand what the challenge is people are having, so you have to ask questions around that topic, and provide them information around those topics. So this isn’t something that you can typically do on day one, because you have to wait until you get at least some level of replies back from people, and then you start crafting messages that relate directly to the challenges that people are having. And you can’t know those things in advance, you have to ask them and wait for them to reply, and then create that content that you can send to them.
Rob [20:01]: I think this is also the point where you start adding more emails to your evergreen sequence or you just send out broadcasts. If you’re going to do a launch, maybe you have an update that really is only time appropriate, and you don’t want it to go out in a few months if someone’s subscribed a few months later. So you just broadcast it out. My rule of thumb, if I have a launch list, is to email once every six weeks. I dropped the ball a little bit on that with Drip, but I probably averaged maybe every two-and-a-half months, I think. And most places I see doing product launches, don’t email at all. And they basically email you once when the product launches and that’s a big mistake. So this is the time to start offering some value around what people are having challenges with or you ask them what they hope to get out of your product, if you’re doing a launch list, and then if you’re doing that product marketing list, that actually should be either a weekly broadcast, or a weekly auto-responder campaign that’s kind of just going out in an evergreen fashion.
Mike [20:56]: Something else you can start doing as your email lists starts to build up, is you can ask your subscribers to start sharing the fact that that mailing lists exists with their friends. And if you can make it easy to share though Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram, Tumblr, or any of the 30 or 50 other applications that are out there, that social networks that people are using, then depending on which ones are appropriate for the offering that you have, then that can really help drive the number of subscribers up to the next level. Now it’s not going to double your subscribers overnight, but let’s say that it gives it a 20% or 30% boost, then that 20% or 30%, can take you from 200 to 240 or 250 instead of just the 200 that you were at. And it won’t be all in one shot either, it’s going to be a little bit here and there over time. And as you add more people, that extra 20%-30% lift is going to be important. One that I’ve seen from Noah Kagan specifically of AppSumo, is that adding a link to your email signature can be extremely helpful to help drive people through to that. I’ve seen him use this before. He always has this P.S., like hey, have you seen this, or why don’t – I think the specific thing he uses is like, hey, why you no use Sumo Me? And I remember seeing that on one of his emails before, and I was like, oh, that’s interesting. And then I went over and actually checked it out. But it was not something that was really on my radar to check out at the time, it was just I saw it in his email signature, and I was like, oh, let me check it out. And that’s something that if you’re just interacting with people, it can help drive traffic over. And some of those people are going to convert. So it could be just a nice little thing to add on there that is going to help you get some people over to your email list.
Rob [22:31]: And this is probably a good place to end this Part One of our look at how to build an email list to a thousand. We basically looked at the beginning steps of getting set up, how to do that initial circle zero discussion with your market, with your audience. And just try to get some folks on the list, try to hone that value proposition. What we’re going to step into in the next episode, in Part Two, is how to go from 101 to 1,000. And that’s really where you start leveraging marketing, you’re going to try essentially 10x your list. And we’re going to get into it. The big approach is that I think are used to really grow lists, because at this point, you’re still doing a bunch of stuff that doesn’t scale to get to 100, right? You’re just kind of scratching and clawing, and at 10x, you need to start branching out a little bit and doing more traditional marketing approaches. And with that, we’re going to wrap up for the day. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at (888) 801-9690, or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups. And visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 237 | The Biggest Roadblocks to Your Success
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about of the biggest roadblocks to your success. After 5 years of additional knowledge and experience they revisit the topic and share some new insights.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob [00:00]: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and I revisit a topic we covered back in episode 3 in April of 2010. We’re going to talk about the biggest roadblocks to your success. This is Startups For the Rest of Us episode 237.
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.
Mike [00:31]: And I’m Mike.
Rob [00:31]: 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?
Mike [00:36]: Well, Tom Fakes wrote to us about his new service called fhrnews.com, which is for helping American Express Platinum members make better use of their hotel benefits for the respective free night and the special offers that are often available. And, it’s interesting because Tom was at MicroConf Vegas, and it was him and me and Rich Buggy and I think Ken Wallace as well, but there were several of us sitting there talking to him, wee hours of the morning. It was probably 3:00 in the morning when we were sitting there talking about it and trying to help him figure out which direction to go with the products and figure out a monetization strategy. So, it’s good to see that he’s making traction with it. I’ve seen what he’s been talking about on Twitter and just gotten a couple of emails here and there that have said, “Oh, this is how many new subscribers I’ve gotten and it’s actually going somewhere.” So it’s great to see that those late night conversations were actually bearing some fruit.
Rob [01:22]: Yeah. Nice. I like the kind of long form approach although, Tom, I would tone down the yellow highlighter. That has actually become, you know how when people mock old web design, html design, they always say it’s the marquee tag, right, that made everything flash? Well, the same thing said for internet marketing is the yellow highlighter and that’s almost become like a parody of itself. So, I would dial that down and either use italics or bold just so that people give you more credibility, but other than that, looks good.
Mike [01:52]: I’ll have to disagree with you a little bit just because I think his target market might actually like that.
Rob [01:56]: Fair enough. It’s a good point. It’s always a good point to keep in mind who you’re targeting. If you’re targeting more advanced marketers or technical people, then the yellow highlighting is going to be irritating, but most other people who are having American Express Platinum Card, or whatever this is for, could very well may not know that whole meme.
Mike [02:14]: Yeah, I think it’s more for executives, like that’s what the service is aimed at is people who have an American Express Platinum Card using it for the corporate use. And it seems to me like that would actually fly pretty well with them. But I think Rob’s got a good point, something to test.
Rob [02:28]: For sure. So MicroConf Europe is coming together. We almost have dates. We actually signed a contract today, but we have not received the countersign version, so we don’t want to announce dates yet. But it’s looking like it’s going to be in Barcelona, and we’ll have dates hopefully by next week.
Mike [02:44]: You’re a total MicroConf tease.
Rob [02:46]: I know. I do that on purpose. If you might be interested in joining us in Barcelona in the fall, go to microconfeurope.com and enter your email address in the top right, and we’ll be sure to be in touch. Tickets will go on sale in a couple weeks, and there’s a good chance they could sell out, so you definitely want to get on the email list if you think you might want to come.
Mike [03:06]: Anything else going on?
Rob [03:07]: I’m in kind of the good news bad news mode. Drip is ramping up. The marketing is going well and accelerating because I finally hired someone for customer success and to help me with growth, and she’s already cranked out a bunch of KB articles and a blog post and is heading up the launch of our little educational area we’re calling Drip University. So it cleared out a huge backlog from my Trello list, and I feel like that flywheel is starting to spin just a little bit faster with another person helping. That’s the good news. The bad news is I’ve been discouraged about HitTail because I’m not able to spend enough time to grow it because Drip is moving quickly and it really should be my main focus. And so, HitTail’s is kind of sitting there, and I feel like it has potential to grow, but it’s just not working out. So, I’m trying to sort through that and figure out if there’s a way because I had hired someone a couple months ago to help out and within the first trial period, 30-day trial period, he said that he found out he didn’t have enough time to do it, so he backed out. And I haven’t revisited that, but that’s where it stands. So that’s kind of been my week, thinking about those two things.
Mike [04:08]: Cool. So today we’re talking about the biggest roadblocks to your success, right?
Rob [04:11]: That’s right. And way back in episode 3, which went live in April of 2010, we talked about four roadblocks. And so what I did was I put together this outline without looking at the old outline. I wanted to revisit this topic and see what kind of new insights we had, what different thoughts we had on it, and, frankly, most people don’t go back and listen to something five years old. So even if we say some of the same things, it should be a good reminder. What’s interesting is I made this new list and then I looked back and there is a decent amount of overlap, which shows that these are still consistent things like there’s consistent mistakes still being made in the community. The list we had back from 2010, the four roadblocks were choosing a product with no market, having a lack of goals, being inconsistent – meaning having a lack of focus and overcommitting, and believing that you have to do everything yourself. Today we’re going to be covering six roadblocks and to kick us off, we have lack of a clear goal.
And this is the one I always think about when I think about kind of self-sabotage and about people who are not making progress. It’s that not having a clear goal and knowing what you want to do makes it pretty hard for you to decide where you’re headed and what you need to do to get there. And it also decreases motivation if you’re not super motivated to achieve this goal. An example is, I hated consulting and salaried work back in 2005-‘06, as I was moving away from it. And my number one goal, above all else, was to quit that, and I focused on that. And all I needed was 8,000 bucks a month in order to quit that job. And the focus and the motivation of having that single-minded goal really drove me to it. And I think that I got there way faster than if I hadn’t set up that very concrete goal and worked towards it so hard.
Mike [05:58]: Yeah. I can’t agree with this more. I did consulting for a very long time, much longer than you did, and I think part of my problem was that I actually enjoyed consulting for a really long time. It was fun to just kind of drop into an environment that I didn’t know anything about and go in, solve problem, work with different people, and just get things done. Just kind of like you, after a while, I started to get burned out on it, and I got to a point where I started to really despise doing the consulting work. And I don’t know whether it was just about the work itself or the way it was being done or the technologies involved and things like that, but I got to the point where I just didn’t want to do it anymore.
Rob [06:31]: Yeah, and I think it gets old. Once you’ve done something 20, 30, 40 times, it kind of stops being fun.
Mike [06:37]: You’re solving the same problem over and over and over again just because everybody has that problem. It gets boring, and you just don’t want to do it anymore. Honestly, you get to a certain point where you know what the answers are before people even ask the questions, and you want to just give them the answers but you almost have to wait and let them tell you what they’re problem are because if you give them the answer first, they don’t want to hear it because then you don’t understand. It’s like, “No, I’ve seen this problem in 30 other environments. Trust me. You have this problem, and you don’t know it yet. You just can’t verbalize it.” And you have to be very careful about biting your tongue because otherwise if you speak too soon, they don’t want to hear whatever it is that you have to say.
Rob [07:11]: Right. Because you’re a few steps ahead of them, because you’ve seen this scenario over and over and over and you know how it’s going to play out.
Mike [07:16]: Right. But then it gets boring because then you have to listen to the same things over and over.
Rob [07:20]: It’s like Groundhog Day, right, Bill Murray in Groundhog Day where you’re so tired of it. If you’re listening to this episode and you have no product and you have no idea that your number one goal, I think, should be to validate a product idea and start working on it. And then, once you have that, your focus should be on getting that product out the door – that should be your number one goal. Then it should change to getting revenue for that product. And then it should change to a dollar amount like, “I want to get to 2,000 a month in revenue,” to pick an arbitrary example. And then once you have that, you should try to multiply that if you’re going to do the stair-step approach, just to try to get two or three more out, hit your revenue goal, and quit your job should become your goal. And then from there, it goes on and on and on. But that’s kind of the succession of steps that I would attack and the goals that I would have in mind if I were doing this all over again.
Mike [08:06]: And I think that that’s an interesting point that you made there about the fact that your goal changes over time because you’re going to have these different milestones. You may have this grand goal of, “I don’t want to work for somebody else anymore,” but at the same time, there’s these little, tiny milestones along the way that are going to become your mini goals, so that you have to, essentially work towards those first.
Rob [08:25]: That’s right. And every year, I go on a retreat, I talk about it on the podcast, and I find the next maybe three to five goals that I’m going to accomplish in the next year. And then, you and I do an episode, typically in December, where we talk about our goals, what we accomplished in the past year, whether or not we hit goals we set a year prior. And then, we talk about the next year’s goals. And I think if you’re wondering about how to set goals and that kind of stuff, you can go back and listen to any of those episodes to hear the kinds of things that we’re committing to hear. I’ve always been a believer in goals. I’m a goal-oriented person in general, but I think that if you don’t have something that you’re working towards, it really is a roadblock to your success. Second roadblock is something that I see all the time. It’s building a product before finding customers. I think there are some ideas that you’re able to validate in advance. An idea like HitTail or Drip or going around asking people whether they need a service and then building it, I think it is valuable. I think there are products that you can build quickly that you don’t need to pre-validate.
And I think examples of that could be something like Baremetrics where Josh was able to get a version out in a week, and it was just faster to get that out. Dan Norris with WP Curve, that’s more productized consulting if you think about it. You don’t need to validate that. The validation is that you just put up a landing page and start charging people. We have Craig Hewitt over at Podcast Motor, that’s another one where I wouldn’t have gone and asked people. Maybe I would have had a few conversations but getting that landing page up and just trying to start using your network to sell it, is the big step. But the days of going in your basement and coming up with an idea, and then sitting there writing code for six months – those should be gone. I know people continue to make those mistakes, and actually, we’ll see a lot of folks we have to get emails, we see them at MicroConf, they come into FounderCafe, and they say, “Yeah. I made this big mistake, this developer mistake of just coming up with an idea and building it.” And so, if you’re still doing that, you really, really should stop. The odds of it succeeding are like it’s like a crapshoot at that point.
Mike [10:26]: Yeah. I might even take it just a step further and say it’s not just about finding customers but it’s about finding a repeatable way to get those customers. So, if you have a product that you’re thinking of building and maybe it’s a clone of another product that is already successful, just because they’re successful with it doesn’t mean that you can be as well. And, even if you’re going to try to go at a different market segment for example, if you’re going to take a product that targets medium-sized businesses, and you’re going to say, “Well, I’m going to take this to bootstrappers.” Well, do bootstrappers need it? Are they going to pay you for it? Those are types of things that really factor into it that are going to indicate whether or not you’re going to be successful with it. So, don’t necessarily ignore the whole marketing aspect behind the customers as well.
Rob [11:07]: The third roadblock I’ve written down is lack of focus. Once you have this goal that we talked about two roadblocks ago, work backwards and develop a plan to get to that goal. Try to do a timeline. Do whatever it is that you can to make that structured, and then work through the steps. You really want it to be a step-by-step process to getting there, because that’s going to keep you from wandering. I would also take it a step further and really focus the media that you consume. So instead of continuing to listen to a bazillion podcasts, I actually whittle my podcasts down when I’m at a certain point in my sequence, and I will skip over a lot of irrelevant material. So back when Derek and I were first validating building Drip, I stopped listening to stuff that was talking about how to scale and how to grow and all that because it wasn’t relevant to me right at that time. And I was only listening to a lot of info and consuming info about validation. Once we launched, then I started looking more into the growth stuff. And now that we are where we are, I’m looking at topics that are relevant to me. So, I try to focus that media, including both the audio books, the blog posts, and the podcasts that I listen to.
Mike [12:11]: I think you also have to take a look at those in terms of the focus and figure out if you’re being distracted. And if you’re being distracted in any way, shape, or form, figure out why. Is it that you’re not motivated? Is it that you don’t know necessarily what you’re doing? Are you afraid of doing something that you’ve never done before? There’s a lot of reasons why you might not be making progress, and lack of focus is, I’ll say it’s kind of a bucket that people throw a lot of different things in, but there’s not necessarily just one cause for that lack of focus or lack of motivation. So, be cautious about the reasons why you might have a lack of focus in terms of approaching whatever the product is that you’re going after.
Rob [12:48]: I think another cause of lack of focus is that you’re just chasing too many approaches at once, you’re chasing the next shiny approach. You hear about info products, “Oh, I’m going to do those.” You hear about WordPress plugins. You hear about Sass. You hear about productized consulting. Or you hear about marketing on Facebook or on Twitter or on this or on that. You can’t chase all these things at once, and you have to pick one. You have to build a plan. You have to figure out what the goal is, and you have to try to work towards it and not wander all over the place. And so, kind of keeping in mind that the next shiny approach is probably not the best thing for you to do right now, and that sticking to your plan is, that’s going to help you get over this roadblock. Fourth roadblock we’re going to talk about is the unwillingness to move out of your comfort zone. So it’s things like not wanting to learn marketing, not wanting to outsource some development, not being willing to maybe buy an app if one presents itself, not being willing to hire a VA and outsource some basic tasks. It is possible to build and launch and be successful without doing these things. It just becomes way, way harder if you’re going to try to do everything yourself.
Mike [13:50]: Yeah and some of these things just tie into fear of doing the unknown. You have to be willing to try things out, especially when it comes to marketing because there’s always going to be things that you’re wondering about. If you’re not familiar with content marketing, you’re just like, “Is this going to affect my business? Is it going to move the needle for me?” And it could be something that takes your business to the next level, but it could be something that flops. And you won’t necessarily know that until you at least give it a shot. So, those are the risks that you’re going to have to be willing to take even if they’re outside your comfort zone because a lot of people are just afraid of doing things, because they’re afraid they might fail at them. And, you shouldn’t necessarily be afraid of failing at things. You should be afraid of looking back on them in 10 or 15 years and saying, “I wish I’d tried that instead of going down the wrong path.” Because, typically, when you go down the wrong path, you’re going to learn at least something from it. But if you never go down any of those paths at all, you’re probably not going to get anywhere to begin with.
Rob [14:39]: And the next roadblock that I see people hitting is having an unhealthy consumption to production ratio. And this just comes down to consuming too much stuff, the online media, hanging out on Twitter, Facebook, reading blog posts, listening to podcasts instead of working. So whether you use the term entreporn, whether you decide you’re going to go on a media diet, you kind of need to stop reading and start acting at a certain point. And I think this comes back to with lack of focus, this could be part of that. And it also comes back to once you have that goal in place that you’re working towards and you have some kind of timeline, that always helps me stay focused and basically, go on a temporary media diet where I’ll still consume some stuff, but I will back way off when I’m heads down trying to actually hit a short-term goal.
Mike [15:26]: Little historical anecdote here, but do you remember? I think it might have even been before we started this podcast that you and I had had a couple of discussions about this exact topic. And our thoughts at the time were, “We want people to listen to the podcast, but at the same time, we recognize that this is a problem, so we would rather them spend less time listening to our podcasts and more time doing things.” And that was one of the deciding factors that caused us to do heavy editing on the podcasts and offer transcripts and lots of different ways for people to consume the podcast as quickly as possible so they could get in and get out.
Rob [15:59]: I vaguely remember that. I’m glad you brought it up. That totally sounds like something we would say. I mean that’s kind of the digital behind this podcast, right? It’s that we try to maximize your time because we know that you should be building and launching.
Mike [16:10]: Right. And that was the catch-22 we were in is just we want people to learn something, but at the same time, we don’t want them to listen to us too much.
Rob [16:17]: Right. The sixth roadblock I have is ignoring the need for community and accountability. And this was one that was completely not on my radar five years ago when we did this the first time. But since then, having joined two mastermind groups, running the seven MicroConfs that we’ve run, the connections we’ve made through that, going to DCBKK, attending some local meetups, all of these things have had dramatic, dramatic impact on my progress and the people who I see embracing these communities and looking for accountability in them and looking for others who are doing the same so that we can all move in the same direction and help each other get where we’re going.
Mike [16:56]: Yeah. When we did that podcast episode originally, that was back in 2010, and the first MicroConf wasn’t until 2011, and at the time, the Micropreneur Academy was around, but it wasn’t nearly as, I’ll say, well-formed or as well-populated as it is today. And it was all a lot newer, a lot fresher. So, people weren’t interacting as much, and people didn’t really know what to expect. Now, like the bootstrapping community has kind of taken off and has developed legs of its own, and there are lots of different places to go for help and to talk to people and just learn from other people. There’s books and everything. And so you can go to a local meetup, or you can read books or blogs. There’s lots more resources than there were even five years ago. And it’s nice to see that there’s all these different communities around that are available to people regardless of the technology that you’re using, regardless of the marketing strategies you’re using. And, you can learn something from just about every single one of them. And it’s really nice to be able to leverage all the different data points of other people because you can’t possibly learn everything by yourself. It’s great to be able to leverage the experiences of other people and, quite frankly, the failures that other people have encountered and be able to use those to your advantage so that when you go out and try something, you’ve learned from other people’s mistakes, and you can do them better.
Rob [18:10]: And if you’re looking to join a mastermind group, check out Ken Wallace’s service. He’s a FounderCafe member. He started a service called Mastermind Jam, and he’s trying to link people up. It’s at mastermindjam.com. The last roadblock I have has come about because of several talks at MicroConfs, both from you, from my wife Sherry, and this one is working yourself into the ground. It’s basically working so hard that you burnout, that you cause health issues or you encounter them and you continue to try to work through them. It may feel right to work all day and then come home and work until 2:00 in the morning, and I’ll admit I did that back in the day and I do think there’s a time and a place for it, but you can’t do that forever. And you have to do this in sprints, and then back off and give yourself time to recover, both mentally and physically. Entrepreneurship is long ball. You have to play it as a long ball game, and you need to be aware of where you stand emotionally and physically because it can take a toll on you if you push this too hard for too long.
Mike [19:12]: This is something else that was totally not on my radar five years ago. And I’ve had some health issues here and there and talked about them at MicroConf. And it’s interesting how long it can take you to get over certain things. I’ve had some conversations with people at MicroConf who have had either similar issues to mind or have had related issues, and some of them are just hard to get over. You can’t just flip a switch and say, “Oh, this problem is solved.” One thing I realized was that, over the past 10 days or so, I feel like I’ve actually made more progress in the past 10 days than I’ve made in quite a long time primarily because I’ve been able to sit down and focus all day for the entire day. I’ve realized that I’ve got a streak of 10 days going now at this point, and I haven’t had a streak of 10 days where I’ve been able to do that in a very, very long time. And I think a part of it is related to moving my office out of the dungeon of the basement, to be perfectly honest. And having sunlight is actually quite nice.
Rob [20:04]: Well and I think this changing of the seasons is a big one. When I lived down the east coast, I had a really rough time during the winter. It was dark and cold for five and a half months, and when spring came, I remember my productivity shooting up, my mood shooting up, really just becoming more motivated. And that is one perk of being here in Fresno, California where it is sunny, whatever, 10 months of the year or something, and to such a detriment that we actually have a drought. But it makes it easier to stay motivated because you get that vitamin D every day.
Mike [20:33]: Right. I think there’s a seasonal affective disorder that goes along with that, and some people have it and some people don’t. And there’s these special lights that you can buy. They have a little special wavelength of blue light that they shoot out. I’ve got one of those. It never really felt like it helped all that much, but I did use it. But I really felt like moving out of the basement and up into an area where I get natural sunlight every single day now, it was tremendously helpful. And like I said, it could be coincidence. It could be the fact that I was burned out for a long time and now I’m kind of over a lot of that stuff. But, it’s amazing how productive you can be in two weeks when you aren’t distracted constantly and just getting pulled in different directions and able to sit down and just work for four or six, eight hours at a time.
Rob [21:14]: The thing to keep in mind is that, these are very common roadblocks. These are kind of the patterns that we see dealing with thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs as well as I’ve seen these patterns in myself, and I’m constantly figuring out how to stay focused, how to pursue these goals, how to go out of my comfort zone. It’s always going to be an ongoing struggle. You don’t just conquer this and then suddenly you’re successful and you’re not going to hit these roadblocks. But, what happens is, in my experience, the first time you encounter them, you don’t know how to get around them. But once you’ve overcome them, it gets easier and easier each time you face them after that.
Mike [21:48]: And part of that’s just a recognition problem that that is a problem to begin with. You might not necessarily realize that the reason you’re not doing something is because you’re unfamiliar with it and you’re unwilling and uncomfortable going in that direction, or that consuming too much media, so you don’t realize that you’re consuming much more than you’re producing. And just being able to realize that some of those things are a problem is, in itself, part of the solution. But you have to recognize that it’s a problem before you can do anything to solve it.
Rob [22:17]: That’s a huge part of it is I think recognition is got to be more than half of the issue, and then the other half is actually solving it. But, that first time, you don’t tend to recognize that it’s a problem and then once you’ve achieved some modicum of success and you’ve overcome it, you’re able to see it so much faster the next time and identify it, because it’s similar, when we interviewed Ruben from BidSketch, what five, six episodes ago, he talked about being able to now look ahead and see where his next plateau is going to be, and then he can start trying to get around it early. I feel like this is a similar scenario.
Mike [22:50]: I totally agree. And I think on that note, we’re going to wrap up. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can e-mail us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We‘re Out of Control by MoOt, it’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, and we‘ll see you next time.
Episode 236 | Making a Full-Time Income With Online Training
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike interview Andrew Connell and talk to him about making a full time income with online training.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Pluralsight
- Product Hunt
- A Startups Guide to Hiring a Virtual Assistant
- Kajabi Next
- Udemy
- Summit Evergreen
- The Single Founder Handbook
- Andrewconnell.com
Transcript
Mike [00:26]: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be interviewing Andrew Connell and talking to him about making a full-time income with online training. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 236.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob [00:28]: And I’m Rob.
Mike [00:32]: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week Rob?
Rob [01:08]: You know I’m fresh back on the scene after going to San Francisco last weekend for Microsoft’s Build Conference, and Derek and I took a ride up there because we sketched out a little partnership between Drip and the Office 365 team. And they started a new program where, for the Office 365 developers, they are providing them with some software components and other stuff to help them build better software and sell more software, frankly. It’s just kind of like, if you have ever heard of the BizSpark program that they had for startups, it’s similar to that but it’s just for Office 365 developers and Drip is a part of that.
Mike [01:09]: Very cool.
Rob [02:00]: Yeah. It was nice. They essentially purchased a bunch of licenses from us and we went up and had a booth there and met a bunch of folks. Like any trade show, there is a lot of discussions that probably aren’t going to lead anywhere, you’re not going to get a lot of individual customers from there. But the ones that were really key were, the conversations we got in with a few Microsoft folks and as well as some affiliated folks of these other partners who then partner up with us. One company said, “Look, if you integrate with us, we’ll pitch you out to all of our customers, who might even add you as an add-on to one of our plans.” And these guys have a hundred times the reach that we do at this point, in terms of customers. If any of those pan out, that’s an enterprise sale cycle. This could take four months, six months to pan out. But if any of those work, that would be worth all the time plus more that we spent up at the conference.
Mike [02:02]: Cool. Congratulations and good luck with all those.
Rob [02:15]: Yeah. Thanks a lot. The other highlight for me was I got to say hi to Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley from Windows Weekly. I have been listening to that show for a couple of years. And I was able to hang out with Andrew Connell, who we’re actually interviewing in this episode.
Mike [02:18]: Well, on my end, the Single Founder Handbook launched this week.
Rob [02:19]: Yeah. Congratulations, man.
Mike [02:20]: Thanks.
Rob [02:22]: It’s a big deal. Got it out in, what? Four months flat.
Mike [02:37]: Yeah. It’s about four months. It was done in probably two and a half to three and then it took a while for the editing process, and I did a private launch just before MicroConf, and then this week was the public launch. I did something new, I don’t know if I mentioned it last week, but I ran what’s called Thunderclap campaign.
Rob [02:38]: Yeah. You mentioned it.
Mike [02:44]: And I got it up to 475,000 for the reach according to their stats.
Rob [02:45]: Do you think it drove sales?
Mike [02:55]: I’m sure that it drove sales but not nearly as many as I would’ve hoped or would’ve liked. Because the reach, it just didn’t seem to drive as much traffic as I would have liked to have seen. It’s really [crosstalk]
Rob [03:12]: It’s the social thing like, “Hey, I have 10,000 Twitter followers, I’d tweet this and 200 of them see it, and of those 200, ten of them click it.” It gets really small really quickly. Facebook’s the same way with the algorithm that your posts only show up to five percent or ten percent of the people you follow.
Mike [03:40]: Yeah. But, I mean, I ran the math on it and I still expected a heck of a lot more from it. I’m actually going to go through these numbers in a lot more detail then probably publish them, most likely, publicly at some point. But just to kind of give you rough numbers of what I’ve looked at so far, if it was about 500,000, I was expecting around five percent of the people to have seen it. So you figure that’s what, 25,000. And of those, how many people would actually click on it. You think maybe one in a 100 or something like that. So that will be –
Rob [03:41]: I would like a little more.
Mike [03:54]: – yeah. I ended up with about 500 people clicking through. At least that’s what I saw. I guess maybe two percent, maybe that’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would’ve been initially when I was looking at those numbers. I seemed to have expected more for some reason.
Rob [03:57]: Because half a million sounds like such a big number.
Mike [04:04]: It does. It was about 500 click throughs, it’s really what it came down to, so divided by thousand.
Rob [04:09]: Mm-hmm. Yeah, with social media for sure. I mean with the e-mail, I would’ve expected to have been ten times that, maybe twenty.
Mike [04:13]: Oh, yeah, definitely. My e-mail was definitely surpassed that, that’s pretty clear.
Rob [04:16]: Right. And you also get some love on Hacker News.
Mike [04:52]: The interesting thing is that although the Thunderclap campaign itself didn’t directly do anything, somebody saw it through that and then they’re like, “Oh my God, what is this?” and then they posted to Hacker News and it ended up at number two on Hacker News. Somebody else posted that to Product Hunt. Got up to like number five or number six in Product Hunt and then it ended the day in the top ten. Because of that, it ended up getting included in the daily e-mail that Product Hunt sends out. So I got the e-mail from them this morning even though it was posted yesterday. As soon as that e-mail went out, I went over and I started taking a look at my server, and sure enough, people started showing up on the server and inside of my analytics.
Rob [05:04]: That’s cool. And that’s the kind of stuff where would that have happened if you hadn’t have had all the tweets go out? Maybe the tweets didn’t result directly in sales, but if they result in you making it to Hacker News and Product Hunt, there’s a lot of value to that, right?
Mike [05:05]: Right.
Rob [05:08]: Because those places, I do think you could find some people who will buy a book.
Mike [05:39]: Right. I was looking at my server at one point and it was pushing between twenty and thirty megabits a second at one point, just because there was so much traffic coming in and people were signing up for the free chapter that I put on the website where you could just put in your name and e-mail address, just click the button and it would basically add you to the e-mail list, and then you could download a free chapter from it. And that was directly through my website, so, of course, had I thought about it a little bit more, I probably would’ve put it on like a CDN or something like that, but didn’t think too much about it. I wasn’t expecting it to have that much traffic that quickly.
Rob [05:41]: Right. Are you talking about sales numbers publicly?
Mike [05:43]: Not yet. I’m sure I will though.
Rob [05:46]: Have you been happy with the sales numbers or did you expect more?
Mike [06:06]: I would say they are probably a little bit low below what I expected, but the week is not over. And I also have a ton of e-mail signups that could theoretically lead into sales. I’m kind of in the neutral phase at the moment. I think if I were looking at just the raw numbers, I’d probably be disappointed. But because there is all this additional follow up that I foresee that can happen, I’m fine with it the way it is.
Rob [06:07]: Very good.
Mike [06:28]: In today’s episode, we are going to be talking to Andrew Connell, and he worked as a corporate developer for several years. He has been a member of Micropreneur Academy for a couple of years. He has been to MicroConf. He started a training company back in 2009 and he has his own podcast called the Microsoft Cloud Show, and he is going to be here today talking to us a little bit about how to make a full-time income with online training. How are you doing today, Andrew?
Andrew [06:30]: Doing great Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike [06:42]: Excellent. So why don’t you just give us a little bit of your backstory. We know some of the details ourselves, but I think the listeners are going to want to hear a little bit about where you came from, what sorts of things you’ve done in the past, and what has gotten you to where you are today?
Andrew [07:45]: Sure. We always do long bios but I started as a corporate developer, classic, just an employee at a big company building stuff internally and for outside customers. In about 2007, I went to go work full-time for a company as a contract instructor. After a year of that, I kind of split out on my own to do contract instructing, but as kind of like a 1099 or an independent contractor. It was really appealing because, with training, essentially, you get ninety percent of the revenue before you even deliver the services. So it wasn’t that big of a jump to go from a full-time job to a contract instructor. After I did that for about a year or two, the guy that was doing it, guy by a name of Ted Pattison. I was contracting mostly for him. The two of us started a training business that we ran for about four years. They’re still in business but about two years ago, I decided that I wanted to go back on my own and sold my interest to him. And so for the last two years, I have been doing a lot of video-based training and then content generation for various customers. Very little consulting. I do almost zero consulting these days.
Mike [07:55]: So how did you get started with the online training. It sounds like you got rid of your interest in the training company, which I assume, was that doing on site training at different locations?
Andrew [09:04]: Yeah. And I still do a little bit of that. We hold a public course. We’d rent out a training facility or a hotel ballroom over the span of a week. And then people would register at our company and we’d show up with manuals and virtual machines. I just sit there and teach them all week. But while I was doing that, while I was running the training company, we started to stand up a side business or another line of business, where we were going to do on-demand training, where we would record the courses and then people would come to the site and pay us for the courses. But it was one of those classic things that it was more important to focus on the revenue generating activities, and at that time, it wasn’t. So we were never getting it off the ground but the silver lining in it was that we had a ton of video content that we just weren’t using, we just had no way to go through and deliver it. About that time, there was another company, that where all my stuff is today, called Pluralsight. We partnered with them to essentially do our video trainings. So we gave them all of our videos and just kind of got seeded with being one of the authors there that had a lot of content, because we just gave them, I think that’s 76 or 80 hours of content right out of the gate. We did that, I think, late 2012 or something.
Rob [09:11]: To give listeners an idea, these videos, is it like Screencast with you talking over them or is it an actual camera set-up and you teaching a classroom?
Andrew [09:21]: That’s a great question. There is no camera. It’s essentially like a Screencast. So it’s like PowerPoint slides and then Screencast and then people can download a code samples and stuff like that.
Rob [09:47]: Cool. So it seems like this was a natural transition for you from in-person training to moving online. You already had the skill set, you already have the content. Because you are a software developer at heart, was there ever something in you that said, “I’m releasing an info product rather than an app.” Is that like an ultimate goal of yours to release a software, to build a SaaS app or build plugins or whatever or is the info product probably the right path for you?
Andrew [10:46]: Well, it’s funny you say that. In the last few months, I’ve been wrestling with myself about that. I thought that my goal was to build a software product. I’d always loved the idea, I’d always wanted to build something. But I think recently, I’ve looked at it and said, “I’ve got a knack for this info product stuff.” And as much as I really want to build a product, I had started on the SaaS product but let’s do the podcast for, I guess the better part of the last two years, something told me that say, “You’ve never done this” and these other guys were all saying that it is the hardest thing to jump into and you’re finding it’s the hardest thing to jump into, you should pretty much stop and focus on the thing that’s going to be the best revenue generating for you today. So right now, I’m solely focused on doing info products or video-based training. And there is a lot pieces to it. I’ve got two other friends that are doing software products that I hear the challenges that they’d run into and there are certain things with an info product, specifically around video training, video on-demand training, that I don’t have to deal with at all as far as a software product goes. Major headaches that are just not going to be an issue at all.
Mike [10:48]: Could you give us some examples of what those are?
Andrew [11:28]: Yeah. Sure. The big one is support. I don’t have support. So what I can do is people may send in questions from watching course and I can answer those questions, but there is no ongoing support. There is nothing that breaks, [it’s a video?]. Sometimes you have code samples that don’t work after whatever you’re basing them on is the technology has changed, but it’s not that big of a deal to go fix those. So I don’t have like outages or anything like that that I have to deal with. Because right now where I host my courses, you could think of it like a book publisher model where I just give my videos to a company and then they have a master catalog and people subscribe to their catalog and I get paid royalties based on the amount of minutes that they watch of my courses.
Rob [12:09]: Interesting. I think this is such a fundamental question that if you are listening to this, you should ask yourself. Are info product is something that you are interested in doing? Because I know that some software developers absolutely have no desire to teach and they don’t have, whether it’s the skill or the desire and they don’t want to do it. And that’s okay, and if that’s the case, then I would think about doing like stair-step approach that we’ve talked about here. I think that if you are interested in teaching, that the benefits that, Andrew, you’ve laid out, of the no support, of you can create it, it tends to be a little more evergreen, doesn’t need maintenance, that stuff is a real benefit of info products. And I think putting info products into the stair-step approach, is absolutely a viable way to go especially if you have the skill for it.
Andrew [13:30]: I completely agree. I definitely don’t want to put across the perception that this is the way to go. I mean, it is a way to go and for me, I have a knack for doing this and I enjoy doing it. One of the things I always really enjoyed was standing in front of a crowd or at least a small room and teaching some people, is that I get a satisfaction or endorphin rush or whatever you want to call it when I explain something that someone was confused about and you see that light bulb go off in the same way that when someone purchases a product and that solves the business problem for them or makes their lives easier, the same way that a software developer does. I get that same rush as well and I’ve just decided to say, “For me, this one kind of works.” I just finished three brutal weeks speaking between Europe and the U.S. at a couple of different conferences and I really get a lot of satisfaction from explaining something to someone that was really confused and seeing all these light bulbs go off and having people come up afterwards saying, “Thank you. Now I understand this stuff.” To me, I feel like I have helped someone and so the video training kind of helps that as well. Yesterday, I was doing a presentation, had a bunch of people come up afterwards and they’re like, “I’ve been watching your videos, super helpful. Thank you very much.” I definitely don’t want to put across that, like what you said, Rob, that, “This is the way to do it.” It is a way. There’s so many different ways of going through and doing this solopreneur or entrepreneur kind of lifestyle. This is just the one that works for me.
Mike [13:46]: One of the things that you brought up earlier, which kind of contrasts against my experience doing training was that, it sounded to me like you develop the training courses yourself. You started your training company and you were doing the training for people, it sounded to me like you were saying, you created all that content yourself. Is that the case?
Andrew [14:32]: That’s true. Yeah. It’s a bunch of companies where you can actually buy content and training courses from vendors. I have Microsoft background and Microsoft has a thing called the MOC or the Microsoft Official Curriculum, and you can purchase that each book or each kit. One kit would go to a student from Microsoft and then you can teach it, you can re-sell it. But for us, what we did- we founded our company more of a boutique style where we built our entire training course and then we turned around and we would sell it as our stuff that was better than what you will get from vendors. We also repackaged it and sold it to other training companies to go through and teach. We did all of our own stuff and I tell you, it was quite the learning experience going from building a five day course to building an on-demand course that the packaging and the delivery and how you structure courses, is just so radically different.
Mike [14:46]: Yeah. Different experience that I had was that we were basically mandated. We had to teach the official courses and if we didn’t we would have our training certifications yanked. So we had no options at that point. It was use their stuff or don’t be a training company.
Andrew [15:30]: Yeah. And that was a decision that we had to make. Because, I primarily have been teaching SharePoint or .NET or Office 365 over the last six, seven years, eight years. And with Microsoft, when companies would buy a lot of software from Microsoft, they would usually get training certificates that included as part of their purchase and we had to make a decision that we are going to do only our own stuff. But what that meant is that, we couldn’t accept any other training vouchers that these companies had because we weren’t teaching the MOC curriculum and we weren’t certified as Microsoft trainers. We went the different model of saying, “We’re not going to sell a Ford or Chevy style training, we’re going to sell a Lexus or a Ferrari style training and be a little bit more specialized.” And that worked out really well for quite a few years.
Mike [15:36]: But at the same time, you’re almost an off brand as well because you are not necessarily officially sanctioned by Microsoft either, right?
Andrew [15:59]: We weren’t. We were actually brought in by Microsoft quite a few times to help teach a lot of their developers and a lot of their consultants would send people to our courses. But you wouldn’t get a discount by Microsoft sending you to us or anything like that. We didn’t have any way to accept any of the vouchers that Microsoft was giving their customers. It was just a business decision and which way we want to go and how we wanted to structure the company.
Mike [16:13]: Yeah, the vouchers is the thing that I could see where that would be a painful decision to have to make, because you don’t know what the result of that decision is going to be and ultimately, it could torpedo your company. But at the end of the day, it may also turn out completely fine, you just don’t know in advance.
Andrew [16:44]: You really do. I can’t take too much credit for this one because the guy that I was teaching with as a contractor, he had written his own course where when he quote, unquote “hired me,” I did that in quotes because I wasn’t an employee, I was just a contract instructor, he told me he’d keep me busy at least one week a month and that was like that for a year, which was just a fine income and so, at least on the training side that was a fine income. I saw that that business model already worked and so we just ran with it and just said, “Yeah, we’re not going to take vouchers.” I wish I could take a lot more credit for that, but I can’t.
Mike [16:55]: So in transitioning to doing online training, you said that you use Pluralsight. Are there other training platforms that you evaluated that I guess or was it just what was available at that time and seemed like a good option?
Andrew [18:42]: At that time, we didn’t look at anybody else. And the reason why is because, at the time they were known as a Microsoft Development Training Services Company for on-demand training, but where they were lacking was where we were strong and that was in the SharePoint content. They had a bunch of content that was already there, but they had a ton on-demand and they were trying to get it in there and they couldn’t really get it in or it was going to take them a lot more time to grow it organically. And so we just worked out a deal with them where we provided them all the content that we already had to see their catalog and grow it by, I think it was either, two or three [X?] in that one category. And it made a lot of sense for us because the model that Pluralsight follows is that they essentially, like a book publisher, they do all of the marketing, they do all of the sales, they do all of the customer management and stuff, and you just provide the content and you get paid royalties based on the amount of content that people watch over the course of a month or over the course of a quarter. Since then, I have looked at a couple of different options. There’s other companies out there that follow much more of a, I guess you’d call it a self publishing model, like Udemy or Kajabi. These companies, you provide your course to them, they host it for you, either for a monthly fee or they just take a special cut, and then you are incentivized to sell it yourself, to advertise it yourself and to grow your customer list yourself and in exchange, you bring back a much bigger percentage of each sale than what you would with someone that’s doing more of a hosting model. It’s almost the exact same model of the difference between publishing a book with a publisher, like an O’Reilly or somebody like that, versus doing a self publishing. You keep more of the profit for you when you self publish, but in exchange, you also put a lot more of the leg work in the marketing and the sales and the customer generation.
Mike [18:47]: So how was Pluralsight set up for the customers who are purchasing the training packages?
Andrew [19:46]: Pluralsight’s got a huge catalog of courses and they just pay a subscription to the entire catalog. There’s two different levels. There is one for if you just want to watch it online, and then there’s another level that you get additional things like code downloads from the courses that have them, evaluations, and access to the mobile clients where you can cash courses offline if you are like on the subway or something and you want to watch it. So they pay a subscription and then they get access to the entire catalog. The authors get paid based on the amount of minutes watched, and so it breaks it down. The really simplest way to explain it is that, if Pluralsight pulled in a pool of money over the course of a quarter and they looked at how many minutes were watched of the entire catalog, if you are responsible for, let’s just say, ten percent of that, then you are responsible for ten percent of the entire revenue from the quarter and then they look at your royalty number and they say, “Oh, if your royalty number is,” let’s just pull a number out of the hat, let’s just say it’s fifteen, “Then you get paid fifteen percent of the royalty amount that you are responsible for for that quarter.”
Rob [20:01]: Do you think that Pluralsight was something that worked really well because you got in early or have the terms changed? Meaning, if I came in today, let’s say I went and launched ten or twenty Pluralsight courses of my own, do you think I could achieve similar success to what you’ve seen?
Andrew [21:10]: Yeah, you could. The terms are essentially the exact same as far as I know. Each time I put a new course in, I have a separate contract. So the process they work, again, it’s just like a book publisher, I submit an idea to them for the course, I have to make sure that is not already covered in the catalog because that would be cannibalizing one of the other authors. We go back and forth a little bit, they generate a statement of work, and then we agree to an upfront payment when the course is complete and a royalty percentage. And so the higher upfront payment you get, the lower your royalty is. But the higher your royalty is, the lower upfront you get. So you can say, even though it’s a lot of work, you say, “I only want to take like $250 or $500 when I complete the course in exchange for the highest royalty percentage I can possibly get.” That’s a bit of a game that each author has to play. It’s funny there is a constant debate that each author has amongst each other. Because if you pick a topic that you think is going to be somewhat timeless, I would think you would want to maximize your royalty instead of getting a big upfront payment. But if you pick a topic that might be a flash in the pan, then you may want a bigger upfront payment to get more revenue upfront.
Mike [21:15]: So you are kind of gambling as the author either way. It’s hard to tell which way to go sometimes.
Andrew [21:38]: Yeah. Most of the authors are doing it part-time. They have other jobs they are doing. Most of them I think are trying to get more of the upfront payment in exchange for the amount of work that you put in. Because it’s definitely not a trivial task to put a course together. It’s taken me quite awhile to optimize my development and production process to get it down to a number that I feel really works in profitable way for me.
Mike [21:44]: So with that question, how long does it take to create a course and how long are the different courses?
Andrew [23:08]: Generally speaking, they try to keep courses anywhere from one hour to four hours. And if you are outside of those parameters you have to have a pretty good case and have a back and forth with your editor. For me, I think that most courses work best if they are between an hour to two hours long. Partly because, a lot of authors or a lot of customers use on demand courses as the same way to use textbooks. We don’t go grab a textbook out of the bookstore and sit down and read it like a novel. We pull it off the shelf and look at the index and find that answer that we need or hopefully find the topic what we are struggling with at that time. And so you really have to be creative and smart about how you structure the course and that you also chunk little videos together in maybe two to five minutes segments, so that someone who needs an answer can just dive right in real quick. If you go through and you have a problem with something, you’re trying to figure something out, you find a course that looks like has the topic of what you need, the last thing you want to do is find a video that looks like it’s about 25 minutes long that may have the answer you want. You want to go dive and find a two minute video that explains what the problem is and how you can fix it and maybe has other videos that build off of that. But watching 25 minutes in hopes that it going to answer your question, that’s not a good way to package your course. You want to make sure that it’s easy for someone to get in and out and to be able to take advantage of your course a lot more. So I rarely see courses of, at least of mine, that you watched it all the way through.
Mike [23:21]: So are these videos, are they separated into little subsets of videos? So if you have a course that’s, let’s say ninety minutes long, are there like nine, ten minute videos in there or how does that work structurally?
Andrew [23:32]: So you have course and then each course is structured into modules. So a module would be like a major topic or like a chapter on a book, and then inside of that module, you have multiple clips and each clip is a video file.
Mike [23:33]: Got it.
Andrew [23:47]: I try to make mine anywhere from 45 seconds to no more than five minutes at a max and if it’s a demo that’s going to take a lot longer than that, I try to chunk that demo up into multiple clips into different components and different pieces.
Mike [23:50]: So for a one hour training course, how long does it take to put one of these things together?
Andrew [25:28]: Not to change the question, because it makes it easier for me to answer, but let me explain why I’m doing this. It’s hard because some modules you spend more time explaining than you do actually showing. A module that is mostly slide or is explanation and animations, is a lot easier to put together than a module that is much more demo heavy. And I’ll give you a couple examples. The last four or five courses I’ve done have been anywhere from two to four hours. I first started out with my four hour courses, took me anywhere from 120 to 140 hours to finish the course and that’s from planning the whole thing out, building the all the demos, building the slides, recording everything, cleaning up all the audio and stuff and then editing the videos, producing them and then rendering them all out and writing the questions and such. I have been able to get that workflow down anywhere from a 90-minute to 120-minute course, I can get it done in about 36 to 40 hours. But it’s a process that each author struggles with it. We see a lot of people talking, not just in Pluralsight but I see other people as well, how do you get your process down, how do you take advantage of sites like oDesk, now it’s called Upwork, and how you can take advantage of contractors to help you with the audio clean up, how to help you with the video? The hardest part of this entire thing of doing these video training courses is by far the audio. It is incredible how hard it really is to get into and get it done the right way, audio levels, background noise, good equipment. A lot of people think you can and say, “Oh, mine is just fine” but you can’t get a headset with a microphone on it and think that, “Hey you’re just fine.” You really need some professional equipment both hardware and software to get a really high quality sound out of it.
Mike [25:34]: I laugh because that’s exactly what we do for this podcast, we have had headsets with microphones on them.
Andrew [26:09]: For the podcast that I run, I use my recording rig. But for the headset mics and everything, what we find is that a lot of the background noise, a lot of the extra stuff that comes through that’s not on a dynamic mic or directional mic, that you don’t get from the headset ones, when you’re listening to it for a very long time, which is different from a podcast, but when you’re listening to it for a very long time, it can get to be pretty challenging for people. So the research has shown that it’s a little bit better to have a higher quality sound to get a much better output. So I have invested somewhere around $400 or $500 in the hardware that I’ve got sitting on my desk now.
Mike [26:16]: Now for the courses, you don’t have any control over pricing in any way shape or form, right? That all goes through Pluralsight, correct?
Andrew [27:29]: That’s correct. So for the company that I’m with right now with Pluralsight, I have no control over the pricing and it’s one thing that I have been kind of struggling with or I have been thinking about recently. I do a lot of work for one major software company and I would like to have the ability to package up a bunch of my courses on one topic and sell them to that company for them to either use internally or for them to give away to their customers. Today, I don’t really have that ability. I have the ability to give away free trials. This is the part where it’s a little bit different from a book. Any of the marketing that I do for my courses where they currently are, I’m really marketing the catalog and then trying to convince the people to go watch my course once they have bought a subscription. If I don’t do that, if they just go through and the buy a subscription and I’ve tried to get them into the catalog and then they go start watching someone else’s courses, there is nothing in it for me. It’s challenging because I have no visibility on when I send somebody there, I have no visibility into who my customers are. So that’s another thing that I know that, at least as a listener of the Startups podcast, and I’m sure some of the other listeners are too, that’s something I’ve always kind of struggled with and that I have no way to talk directly to my customers unless they ask a question through a little discussion form that we have on each one of our courses on the Pluralsight website.
Rob [27:36]: Right. It’s kind of like the app store model where you can’t really build a list or an audience and you’re a little bit at the whim of Pluralsight, essentially, in terms of communicating with them.
Andrew [27:56]: Yes. It’s exactly like the app store model. It’s just something that, anybody that’s built an app like that and you want to talk to your customers and do research, you’ve just got to hope that they will interact with you on the comments. So that can be challenging. You have a beat on what people want, you have a beat on what the market needs and stuff and you do your research, but no replacement for talking to your customers.
Rob [28:02]: Right. And just to give folks an idea, you have almost thirty courses in Pluralsight, is that correct?
Andrew [28:10]: That’s correct. But thirty courses, and I would say, ballpark, about anywhere from 100 to 115 hours or 110 hours, something like that.
Rob [28:11]: Of course work?
Andrew [28:13]: That’s correct. Yeah, across all of them.
Rob [28:32]: Andrew, I’m curious. You’re using Pluralsight, you’re obviously having success with it, making a full-time income from it. How much though have you given to looking at a platform like Udemy? There’s several others that are less of a publisher model and they are more of direct connection with your audience where you get a bit of high royalty rate on it, but it probably wouldn’t be as lucrative for you upfront. Have you thought about doing that?
Andrew [31:37]: Yes. So I have a Google doc with about ten different options that I have been doing a ton of research on and spending a whole lot of time looking at it and trying to do the whole like pros and cons on each one. I have the opportunity to speak at a bunch of conferences and I have the advantage of followers on Twitter and something of an audience and I would like to be able to take advantage of that a little bit more than just putting courses inside of a catalog and letting somebody else market them. It’s nothing negative about who I’m with right now, the part of building a software product that is appealing to me is the marketing side. Because I find that it is something I don’t know and it’s a challenge that I’d like to try and tackle. And what I’m doing right now, I don’t have the option of really doing that. So there is two of them that I have been looking at a lot recently. One of them is Udemy. They have a very different model from what I’m doing now where you build the courses, you publish them on the Udemy platform and you don’t pay anything for hosting them there. But if you sell the course through one of your promotion codes, then you keep a hundred percent of the sale minus the credit card transaction. If a customer finds your course organically through Udemy’s advertising or they’re an existing Udemy customer and they find your course by just going to their catalog, then you receive only fifty percent of the transaction. Udemy collects the other fifty percent and you split the transaction cost. So Udemy’s advantages to having a huge catalog and then they can turn around and they can sell their catalog to customers and make fifty percent on each transaction. But I have the ability to market straight to my customers, and let’s just say, if I did a course and sold it for $100, if I sold it, I may sell it for fifty bucks. If Udemy sells it, I’m only going to get fifty bucks as well. So either way, it’s splitting the difference. It works good for me. There are some downsides to that though, where with Udemy, you don’t get your customers. You have a way of talking to them either through broadcast messages or, I’d compare it to like a Facebook style Messenger chat where I can see their name and I can see that they subscribed, but I can’t get their e-mail address. There’s another one that I have been looking at called Kajabi Next. It’s a little bit different in the sense that you pay a subscription per month for hosting a certain number of courses. You get five for one level and you get unlimited for another level. But with that one, all of your transactions happen through Stripe and whenever someone registers for your course, you can do a Webhook to where it get sent out. So if I’m using any other mailing list to go through and maintain a list of customers, I can immediately capture all of my customers that purchased my course. They don’t have a whole discounting model or a whole promotion code model like Udemy does, but I could stand up my own little store or even if I wanted to go, I could use something like Groupon and sell my courses and then get their e-mail address and go into Kajabi and then, it’s called inviting an individual to your course. It’s basically like saying, “Give us their e-mail address, we will send them an e-mail. They can get it for free now.” So I’m kind of going between the three different options. I’m looking at them for a couple of different things. I have a few courses I’m still working on with Pluralsight, but I’m looking at just a couple of different options to see what different challenges are. I really want to take advantage of marketing my own stuff and see what I can do with that, just to see if I can do any better with that kind of a business.
Rob [32:12]: Yeah. I really like that the options are laid out. I used Udemy with my Startup VA course, that’s startupvacourse.com, if folks want to check it out. And I had good results, but it’s as you said, you don’t have access to your people. You don’t know who bought and aside from kind of the internal broadcasting stuff, it’s been fine. If I were to do it again or if I were to release another course, I would probably look at something like Kajabi Next, just because it’s such a no brainer to have that Stripe, [Hookfire?] put it into Drip, right, because we integrate with Stripe and just have that list there and you’re constantly adding to your audience. I think there is a lot of value with that.
Andrew [33:57]: The two things that are bugging about that one. I agree with you, that’s the one I lean towards. But the two things that bug me about that, one of them is that when someone registers for your course, let’s say that they do it outside of Kajabi Next. And so you’ve set up your own store to where if you have courses and you want to package them together and you want to sell them for one rate, you would have to make that sale outside of Kajabi Next because they don’t have a way of doing that. So I would have my own store, I’d sell them those five courses, but then it would be a manual process for me to go grab their e-mail address and go invite them into each one of those different courses and I have to keep track of which ones they have access to. It’s not that big of a deal and it’s something that you could definitely outsource that to a VA, but my fear in that is that if I go down that approach, that someone is going to purchase a course, I’m going to be unavailable for a little bit and I’m going to definitely need to have a VA. They’re going to want to jump in and start looking at that course right away. And will it [out?] being automated, it can be a challenge. The other one though that’s a big one and you just cannot discount this one enough. So Kajabi, they have a bunch of courses, but I don’t think that there is a tremendous population that goes to Kajabi looking for a course. They’re going to find the course through your ads and through your different ways of marketing your course. At Udemy, they’ve got six million people that are looking at their courses. And I’ve got friends that have told me that they have courses there and that, anywhere from three quarters to two thirds of their revenue comes direct from Udemy and not through their own marketing efforts. They are not marketing their courses as much as I think that I would do it, but six million is hard to just say, “Yeah, I’m not going to look at that. I’m going to do it on my own.” That’s the one that really keeps pulling me back and just saying, “Maybe you can live with the fact you can’t talk directly to your customers.” But I’m not sure where I stand on. I keep going back and forth everyday.
Mike [34:27]: I think there is a spectrum there. There’s a tipping point in the middle where early on, it doesn’t makes sense, so you lean more towards something like Pluralsight, where they’ve already got the audience versus much later on when you’ve got your own audience, then you would lean more towards building it and hosting it yourself or doing through something like Kajabi Next, where you kind of maintain control of that audience. But there’s that middle phase that it’s like, “How do I go from this side over here to that side over there, so that I can make more money doing the exact same thing.”
Andrew [35:18]: It really falls down to the person that’s doing the course. If you are doing a development style course, like all my stuff is all about development, software development, and if the traditional developer may not have the desire or the skill set to do the marketing and they may just want to say, “I want to build the course and I want to put it somewhere and let you guys go through and sell it.” To me, I’d like to have the opportunity to try the marketing and to really figure out how to talk to my customers and how to get them to come in, how to re-sell to certain customer and how to do special deals for the companies I do a lot of work for. Or if I’m speaking at a conference, I’d like to be able to say at the end of the conference, “If you like this, here is seventy percent off of this course that I have.” And if they get in there, then I can up sell them on another courses. It just depends. I think it’s part, what you said Mike, and then it’s also part of do you want to go through the effort of trying to market it. It’s just to each their own on this one.
Mike [35:24]: Another platform you might want to look at is called Summit Evergreen. Keith Perhac is behind that. He was one of the sponsors at MicroConf this year as well.
Andrew [35:55]: There’s a [slot?] group that stood up around the Founder Café and I think he was the one or someone else was the one that actually pointed me to them as well. And so I haven’t dug into them as much just yet. It’s on my list of like seven, eight, or nine that I was looking at. For me, I know that I’ve got two things ahead of me before I can actually make this jump if I decide to make this jump to somewhat another platform. I’ve got about at least three months or four months before I can actually do this, and so that’s another one of my research that I have to go through and take a look at.
Mike [36:03]: Well, if you want to hear more about Andrew Connell, he has the Microsoft Cloud Show that you can go listen to, that’s a podcast that he runs, and Andrew, where can people follow up with you?
Andrew [36:12]: Two best places, I’ve got a blog that’s just my name, Andrewconnell.com. Two n’s, two l’s. And then also on Twitter, same thing, just @Andrewconnell.
Rob [36:13]: Sounds great, man. Thanks for coming on the show.
Andrew [36:16]: Absolutely. Thanks a lot for the opportunity, guys.
Rob [36:36]: If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can e-mail us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We‘re Out of Control by MoOt, it’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we‘ll see you next time.
Episode 235 | When Is It Time To Level Up?
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike help you answer the question, when is it time to level up? They address how to think through the process and what concerns there might be to leveling up.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob: In this episode for Startups for the Rest of Us Mike and I answer the question “When is it time to level up?” This is Startups for the Rest of Us episode two hundred thirty-five.
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 are just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
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?
Mike: Chris Kottom who had suggested our episode on stair-stepping had sent us in another link. He’s got a book called Minitest Cookbook and it’s aimed at helping Ruby and Rails developers write maintainable test cases using mini tests. I went over and checked out the website. It’s pretty cool. It’s got a lot of stuff in there. He’s got a nice little eBook that goes along with it and looks like it’s got a lot of good information in there.
Rob: Congratulations, Chris. We’ll make sure to link that up in the show notes. We also received some praise for episode two hundred thirty, which is our fifth anniversary episode where we had our wives come on and do the show. It’s from Patrick [May?] and he says, “Hello, folks. First off, I love the show and it’s real business life theme, no baloney for sure. I’ve never emailed you but after the spouse episode today I had to comment. Ladies, it was so great to hear from the other or better half of an entrepreneurs life. As a small scale farmer and entrepreneur I felt connected with this episode. My future wife and girl friend of eight years supports me, helps me tackle tough decisions, and keeps me focused when I wander. You guys rock and keep it up. Thanks.”
Mike: Thanks, Patrick. We really appreciate that. I’ve heard a lot of people have been pointing their spouses toward that particular episode and having them listen to it.
Rob: I know. It seemed to have resonated to hear that side of it. I’m glad. We were obviously inspired by Techzing’s two hundredth episode where they had their wives come on and Sherry was actually on that episode as well. But the format seems to speak to a lot of people and I think it tells maybe this other side of the story. It’s like the other business partner’s side of the story that isn’t told enough, I think.
Mike: The unsung heroes.
Rob: I think exactly. People who put up with us in the day to day life.
Mike: Well the only other thing I’ve got is my book is coming out for its public launch next week. So that will be out, I think about the time this episode goes live.
Rob: Very cool. So if folks want to check it out where would they go?
Mike: Singlefounderhandbook.com.
Rob: Nice. All right. Well this week’s episode Mike and I are going to be talking about when is it time to level up. And it’s actually based on a question from Simon at Small Farm Central. Simon writes, “I have a couple of products that I feel are pretty mature. They’re growing ten to thirty percent a year but I can’t grow them super fast because the market’s a bit tapped out. The vertical is very small and we rule the vertical pretty well. I have some new products that I’m working on but I’m wondering when is it time to reduce investment in these more mature products and focus on the new ones that probably have more growth potential. Even if I stop investing and pull back on my existing products, they will keep generating cash since they are SaaS apps.”
So the question is how do you know your product is mature, how do you now when to move on, and really we’re boiling it down to when is it time to level up? I’m using that term level up in the context of our stair-step episode a few episodes back, and also in the context of Patrick McKenzie’s talk at MicroConf where he talked about moving from Bingo Card Creator, which was a small price point, one time purchase and most of his traffic was a single channel. It was SEO with some ad words. And then he leveled up to Appointment Reminder, which was SaaS, and now he’s leveling up to [?] Starfighters.io. And it’s really in line with the stair-step approach that I’ve been talking about for awhile and that we’ve covered a few episodes ago. I think there’s more to dig into this, the specifics of when you should think about leveling up and what some of the concerns should be, and how to think through that whole process.
Here’s some thoughts about when to consider leveling up. And by leveling up I mean moving from that step one, which is typically a single purchase priced product up to multiple purchase priced products, and then up to recurring revenue.
Now in Simon’s case in particular he actually owns two small SaaS apps in this same space and he helps small farmer manage their web presence, is one of his apps. Imagine Squarespace for small farms. And the other one helps them manage their CSA programs. CSA is where a consumer you could pay the farm a monthly subscription and you get a basket of fresh produce every week or every other week. It stands for Community Supported Agriculture. But he knows this market really well. It is a very small niche market so it’s not going to be something that grows like an app for marketers or an app for designers. It’s a good point he brings up, says his growth is not super fast. It’s ten to thirty percent a year. Which is slower than a lot of apps that we might hear about. And I think that’s the first point at which you should consider perhaps moving on, is when revenue has essentially flatlined or is growing very slowly. And if you’ve spent six to twelve months trying to increase it and investing time and energy in trying to find new traffic sources or trying to improve conversion rates and they’re not going up, that is, to me, a leading indicator that you might want to think about adding another product to your portfolio or leveling up.
Mike: Yeah, I think that’s all about a balancing act, too. The ten to thirty percent a year, call it twenty percent, and if you try really, really hard and you get twenty percent but then you don’t try hard at all for the next six months, say, and you still get twenty percent growth, then it’s indicative that there’s not a lot of, I’ll say external influence, that you can provide that’s going to push that business forward. It’s going to move on its own but I think a lot of this also boils down to the fact that just certain types of markets, they take a long time to essentially tap into to get those customers onboarded. And I would imagine that this is not a very tech savvy crowd, so you’re probably going to have to do a lot of hand-holding in order to get those people on board. So, even if you are to try and scale those efforts up, it’s not as though you probably have the man power to be able to get as many people onboarded as you would like.
Rob: I think this relates to the law of diminishing returns. Early on as you’re building and you’re starting to market, you’re going to increase revenue month after month. And then at a certain point you’re going to hit a plateau, and we have talked about this in the past about breaking through plateaus, and there can be any number of causes for that, but if you’ve been working on an app for a number of years and you can see the pattern of it has been slow growth all along, and it’s going to continue to be that, then maybe that’s not a time to bail on it, right? Because it’s just the status quo and that is what this market looks like. But if you’ve had years of eighty percent growth, fifty percent growth, and then it’s slowly tapering off and you feel like you’ve peaked in the market and you might be starting to lose interest, then that’s the time where I think that you’re starting to perhaps lose momentum.
That takes us into our second point of when to potentially consider leveling up, is when your momentum has died down for an extended period of time. Basically, when you’re own personal interest is starting to wane. And I find that this often happens around the time when plateaus start to come up. Because when your business is growing like gangbusters, you’re momentum doesn’t tend to die.
Because the problem with losing momentum is that if you don’t care, if you don’t love this business any longer and you’re starting to maybe lose interest, you’re going to start wandering. You’re going to start thinking about other ideas, you’re not all in anymore, and the business is naturally going to suffer because of this. And so that’s the second thing, is if your revenue has peaked or is flatlined, or if your personal momentum and desire to grow the business has flatlined, both for an extended period of time, those are the points where I really start thinking about should I be making a transition out of this.
Mike: Yeah, I think those things are tied pretty well together in terms of the motivation and how fast you’re growing, because if you’re growing fast you’re motivated to keep doing it, but as your returns start diminishing on the same effort, you’re just not as motivated. And I found that even with the stuff I’ve done. I don’t know if there’s a specific name for that, but it almost seems like there should be.
Rob: Yeah, I know. I think there’s a judgement call to this because every business is going to hit some plateaus and every business is going to lose your interest for different periods of time. So you might have two weeks or three weeks or a month where you hit a plateau and where you’re bored with it and you’re fed up. And to me that’s not long enough. It’s got to be something like six months where you’ve tried everything you can think of and nothing is working, and you’ve asked for advice, and you’ve talked to advisers or mastermind forks or whatever community it is that you have, and you’ve tried everything that you can think about and you’re at the end of your rope and you’re still not growing. That’s the point where, I’d say, are pretty solid indicators that you either need to seek more help, like you need to pay a consultant to come in and help, or you need to start thinking about potentially moving on/leveling up.
Mike: I think something else that factors into this is how much money you’re making from it. There’s a difference between whether it’s something you’re doing on the side or versus whether it’s something that it’s completely your full-time income as well.
Rob: Yeah, I agree. And I think this begs the question of do you always have to keep growing, because there’s a lot of talk in the venture funded startup space about growth, and I think there’s also a lot of talk in the bootstrap startup space about growth, and I’m not sure that growth is necessarily an end goal for everybody, nor should it be. I think depending on where you are in your life, let’s say you’ve just had a child, you may not care about growing for a year or two, or you just want to rent a trailer and drive around the country and hang out with your family. Growth is not necessarily the end all be all of all this stuff. I know I talk about it a lot. It’s been a personal goal of mine to grow businesses over the past few years but if you hit the point where you’re making ample money to live on, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with living the life. Like in quotes, “Living the life,” for awhile and really evaluating whether or not you want to start another app.
You and I were discussing this before, not to use the word coast, because coast has a negative connotation, but I coasted on revenue for a solid eighteen months. It was around 2010, maybe, 2011, we had our second child and there was a solid ten months where I worked a day and a half a week, two days a week. Nothing grew but nothing flailed either. And then there was about another six months where I was just enjoying it and doing things and that’s when I wrote the book and that’s when the Academy really got built. I don’t think that a constant push for growth necessarily should be the goal for everyone at all times. I think it depends on your situation.
Mike: Yeah, growth for the sake of growth shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. It’s what are the things that you’re trying to achieve and why. Why is it that you want those things? If you want growth in order to make more money so that you can do X, Y, and Z then that’s fine, but at that point it’s not growth that’s the goal it’s that X, Y, and Z, whatever that happens to be.
Rob: Right. So I think what I’d do if I were in Simon’s shoes is to go on a retreat and I would get the heck out of Dodge for forty-eight or seventy-two hours, try to be alone and basically ponder this decision and its ramifications and ask a bunch of questions. There’s actually a good podcast episode. It’s Sherry and mine’s podcast called ZenFounder. And you go to zenfounder.com, episode two. We outline the things you should ask in a retreat. But one of the questions that I would be asking is do I still have interest in this niche? Do I still want to grow these apps? Do I really want to start over with a new product in a new market? Because I think that’s what Simon’s asking about because he’s saying his market is too small, currently. Because starting over with that new product in a new market is very, very hard and don’t underestimate how much of a challenge and how long that takes. Looking backwards at the past two plus years, that Derek and I have spent building Drip from scratch, it’s a ton of work. I think that’s something to really think about. It sounds great at the beginning and there are going to be some hard times again. So ask yourself, are you in a place in your life, and mentally where you want to take that leap and go through the hardship of starting something new.
Mike: And I think that if you’re going to do that that’s something that you have to really commit to because it can be very easy to become complacent when you’re in a place where you’ve got money coming in, you don’t have to work terribly hard to get that money coming in the door, and you can essentially drag out other things that you’re working on for an extended period of time because there’s no push or drive for you to complete it in a short amount of time. So just be mindful that if you’re going to go in that direction then you need to commit to doing it or not bother because otherwise you’re going to waste a lot of time and something that you could have easily finished in eight or nine months is going to take you three or four years to finish.
Rob: Right. And the good part is that Simon has a lot of experience. He’s basically grown these two SaaS apps to the point of success. I don’t know what his revenue is but I know that he has a few employees and he owns this market. So he definitely has a lot of experience under his belt and the true stair-step approach of learning these things early on. So I think he does have some advantages under his belt. But I do think that going on a retreat and thinking through do you need to keep growing right now, is it time for you to maybe live the life for a little while, take four or six months and coast and enjoy it, or are you geared up to really start something and hammer it out, start a new app. I think this ties into thinking about it, in terms of fast growth versus slow growth. Because every app and every market is not going to be fast growth. The vertical of small farms or catering to restaurants, or selling into hotels. There’s a bunch of niche markets that we can think of, especially if you’re building a niche piece of software for those markets, where I just don’t really think it’s feasible to have this hundred percent or two hundred percent year over year growth every year. Your growth is going to be slow the entire time, and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing as long as you have the patience to do it and it’s not driving you crazy.
Mike: Yeah, and we had an extended conversation about how to essentially present that fast growth versus slow growth. We talked about auto pilot, we talked about coasting. All these different words that have different connotations depending on how you use them. And I don’t know what the end words for them really should be but it comes down to what your growth curve looks like. Fast paced marketing startups, you’re going to have a lot of heavy growth and it’s going to be easier to onboard people, and you’re going to be able to move them through your sales funnel quickly, versus these other things where the growth is significantly slower, in the neighborhood of, as we said earlier in the episode, the ten to thirty percent year over year growth. That is much slower but the question also comes out as to how far down the road does that growth look like it’s going to go? Is it going to tap itself out in a year or is it going to be ten years or twenty-five years? I think there’s a very big difference between some of those different numbers. And it’s going to influence, in some ways, what you decide to do moving forward. I think that ultimately what you do is also going to be heavily influenced by what you’re interested in.
Rob: Yeah, I think it ties into personality as well. Certain folks are more patient and more willing to just hang out an build a successful, highly profitable app but not feel like their always tantalized into going into that next high growth niche market that everybody’s talking about. I have a lot of respect for the folks that are doing that and can stick with one thing for years on end. So I think that’s an interesting way to think about it.
I think the stuff we’ve talked about so far can be summarized under “Is this something that you want to do?” You need to think about it from your personal perspective. I think another question I would ask myself is is there another opportunity that you can think of where each hour of your time will be worth five X, or ten X more than with your current business? Because if that’s not the case and you don’t have your finger already on something, I’d be less inclined to back away from this. Again, unless you’re really fed up with where you are and you want to make a quick exit, I’d be thinking about what’s next and thinking about how that will be different. Without that “What’s next,” it makes it a little harder. I think just leaving a business behind without having an idea of what you’d be up to next maybe leaves a question mark in my mind. For my personality I think it would leave me concerned but maybe that’s not a general feeling.
Mike: One thing that just jumped in my mind was, for this particular business, have you set out everything that you’ve achieved to do?
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: And I think that if you have then I think it’s probably definitely time to look around and see what else you could do and maybe move on. But if there are things that you set out to achieve originally that are still within the realm of possibility and you just haven’t done them yet, I think you may very well run into a place down the road where you’re like “Gee, I wish I had done that.” Maybe not. It depends on what those things are but it seems to me like that’s something else to keep in mind.
Rob: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I think the last thing I’ll throw in here because it tied into my decision when I moved from HitTail and moved onto Drip, was is there an external dependency that could potentially render your product moot like you’re integrated with Twitter and they’re going to jack with your API, or you’re integrated with Google and they keep changing everything every six months. In Simon’s case, I don’t think it is, but in the case of HitTail, if Google’s going to be changing things and breaking your app altogether then it might be a good time to think about diversifying.
So I think those are the thoughts and concerns and the questions that I will be asking. And I know Simon asked a little bit about how do you know when your product is mature or how do you know when you own the market. I feel like you have a better sense of it than we do, just because we don’t know your market. And my guess is if you ask yourself or you look at the data, how many small farms there are and how many you’ve reached, you have a pretty good sense of whether or not you can accelerate growth or whether or not this is just a solid business that is hit maybe a plateau. I do think that I would think of it in terms of a plateau and not as the end all be all of the business because my guess is someone somewhere could take this business to the next level. The question that I would ask is what would it take to [?] X this business and do you think that’s possible? And that can play into this decision of if you think it’s possible and these are the steps then do you want to do those?
Mike: I think my sense of that is just very slightly different, which is just that is there a possibility for this business to double or triple in size within a reduced time frame than what you’re currently looking at? As I said, I think it’s slightly different than what you just said, but it boils down to is it even possible, not just for you but for anybody? And if it’s not that might be your indicator to say okay, let’s go do something else or, as we talked about before, maybe you’re just happy where you are and just keep running this business for the next fifteen, twenty years.
Rob: Right. Which I do not think is a bad thing because the pains of starting over are not to be understated. So if you decide to stick with it, that’s great. We wish you the best of luck. If you decide to use this as a time to have an exit and level up, I thought about three different options for how I’ve seen this done and two of them are good choices and the last one is pretty much a bad idea, but we’ll walk through each of them.
The first choice that I’m throwing out, and these are in no particular order, they’re not in priority or anything, the first option is to sell the app. What’s nice is that there is a market that has started to coalesce over the last couple of years for these higher end SaaS apps, especially, but pretty much bootstrap software. And even eCommerce and product test service and all that stuff. There’s now becoming a bit of a liquid market that is more than just the low end flip of market where everything’s twelve months of revenue or twelve months of profit or whatever. So there are definitely solid website brokers out there that are dealing in this type of stuff and the multiples vary depending on growth and all types of stuff, but frankly with a SaaS app that is fairly systemized I think you can get at least two and a half times your annual net profit and potentially up to three, three and a half. Which it becomes an interesting number at that point. If you’re doing a chunk of change each year and you’re able to get 3X that change then realistically your choice is do I take this money off the table now and give me time to start thinking about what my next idea is, potentially acquire something that is more interesting or build it from scratch, or do I stick around for the next three years and try to manage this thing on the side in order to earn that same amount of money?
The second option that I’ve seen people do successfully, but only a few times, is to actually put someone in charge of the app. [Heaton?] Shaw did this with Crazy Egg where they hired basically a CEO to run it, full-time, that person was not focused on other apps. I attempted to do this with HitTail, and I had Derek working half-time on HitTail, half-time on Drip. This is way back in the early days of Drip. The problem was is that Drip quickly grew. It became a bigger app, bigger opportunity than HitTail so I pulled him off and we both started working on Drip, and as a result it didn’t work out for me because I wasn’t willing or wasn’t able to find someone who I thought could totally run it on their own and run it, but perhaps Simon’s in a different situation here where he could really hire more of a CEO or COL level person who can continue to run the app in his absence.
Mike: Yeah, I think that’s the difference between whether or not you have somebody who is going to be involved in your old business that’s also in your new one. Because I think that with Crazy Egg, I don’t think that [Heaton?] and Neil had had anyone who was actively involved with KISSmetrics when they decided, essentially to relegate that to the back burner. So that may be the deciding factor, I’ll say there. But I think that this route is possible but I think that you also have to do it right. You have to make sure that you’re not stepping on an opportunity either forward or backward when you do it.
Rob: And the last of these three options for putting an app on the side is to try to do both. It’s to try to start your new app and just figure you can manage the old apps on the side and not hire someone who is not fully in charge of them. And this, from what I’ve seen and from what I’ve experienced, is not a good idea. Patrick has mentioned this with Bingo Card Creator that trying to do it on the side basically revenue dropped every year since he did that. I saw this with HitTail when both Derek and I stepped away from it, revenue dropped. It’s really, really hard to do two things well at once. The exception is early on when I had a bunch of small apps, I had little apps like [?] and Voice and Beach Towels and little eBooks here and there, those really didn’t need much management. They didn’t have a high touch sales process like I imagine the Small Farm Central does. They didn’t have nearly the moving parts that a real SaaS business did. They just really got leads through a single channel and they converted those leads and all of the stuff was really an automated process either through a virtual assistant or through code. So that’s an exception that if you have something that really, really can be automated, almost ninety-five percent or whatever, then I think you can put that on the back burner but it’s definitely much, much harder to do and I don’t know of any models I’ve seen successfully doing it with a more complex app like a SaaS app that’s doing five figures a month.
Mike: Yeah, it feels to me like that’s a function of the support and the onboarding. So for example, Bingo Card Creator, the onboarding is not very difficult but the support could potentially be much, much larger so you have to have somebody there who can manage the support side of things. And you have to be able to continue staying on top of the SEO because it’s such a low margin business. Because of the low margins you’re not going to be able to take your focus off of it because if you take your focus off of it, immediately your margins are going to plunge, your support costs are going to overtake everything else. And I think you probably experienced something similar with HitTail where you had Derek working on it half-time and then you pulled him off of it but them there wasn’t really anybody there to backfill that. It just seems like that factors into it heavily.
Rob: Yeah, the thing is most of us are running businesses that change frequently even though it may not feel like that. And if you have a business that relies on SEO for a lot of your traffic or relies on ad words, that stuff is changing every six months, so you can lose a lot of your rankings when Google decides to do an update or ad words get more expensive. Or if your using Facebook ads, as an example, they change algorithms and they change the way things are done and suddenly a main source of your traffic goes away and if it was your main business you would spend the time experimenting and figuring it out. But if you’ve now moved on to something else it’s really hard to shift your focus back and spend the week or two weeks or three weeks, whatever it’s going to take, to completely rediscover another traffic source or to reoptimize an existing traffic source that you’ve lost. And so that’s where, in every case that I can think of, trying to do an old somewhat complex app and to start a new one, it breaks down eventually. It may work for six months, it may work for twelve months, but eventually you’re probably going to hit a roadblock with one of these many changing things that we see that you’re then not going to have the time or desire to go back and fix.
Mike: Well, Simon, I really hope that that helps answer some of your questions. 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 Out of Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.