Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about SaaS development shortcuts. They discuss the gap between what you think needs to be done versus what really needs to be done and give you tips on how to move faster.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about SaaS Development Shortcuts. This is Startups For the Rest of Us episode 342.
Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you built you first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: 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: It’s been a good week and it’s memorial day weekend coming up so we are flying to California for a couple of days, just like a three or four day trip to see some folks, just looking forward to it. We haven’t been on a trip for I guess since MicroConf which is maybe six weeks ago, it’s not that long ago but looking forward to getting some sun and it’s also nice and warm up where we’re going. Kind of just easing into it. How about you?
Mike: I have to go see a specialist and have some x-rays taken because I might have a torn rotator cuff.
Rob: That is such a bummer, man.
Mike: I know. It’s not bad. If it’s a tear, it’s really small. I think it’s not bad enough where they look at it and say, “Yes, this is obviously a tear. It might just be inflamed and some other stuff.” They’re going to start with some x-rays and see if there’s any fluid buildup or some bone spurs or something like that. If that comes back kind of inconclusive then they’ll move on and do a whole shoulder MRI and see what comes out of that.
Rob: Yeah, that’s a bummer. If they find it then they have to do surgery and then you’re not able to type with that arm for a while.
Mike: Yeah. They also said that because I still have good range of motion, it just hurts when I move in certain positions that physical therapy might be something that they could work with, anti inflammatories or various other things but I’m hoping that I can dodge that surgery bullet. To be honest, that’s not something I want to go through.
Rob: Yeah, totally. It’s always a bummer to get hurt. Nowadays, when I get injured, it’s not like we’re that old but it’s like I remember getting injured running track when I was 21 and you just heal quick, your body is in really good shape and you’re younger. These types of things now, it’s going to take you awhile to get over that. You’ve also had back issues. You just don’t heal as well as you did 20 years ago or whatever.
Mike: Yeah. That actually came to mind like, “I’m not as young as I used to be. I just don’t heal as quickly.” Back then, in your 20s, you can take the bumps and bruises and shake them off and you’ll be back at it the next day. This is just like that dull ache and I’m like, “Oh, this is just going to go on and on.”
Rob: Yeah, totally. Cool, what else? What are we talking about this week?
Mike: Today we’re going to be talking about SaaS Development Shortcuts. I pulled some of this from my MicroConf talk. The basic idea is that there were some parts of my talk where I highlighted where there are gaps between what we think needs to be done versus what really needs to be done. In these places, there are some shortcuts that you can take to avoid doing work now that you can presumably do later. Some of it, you can just avoid indefinitely but there’s other pieces of it that you can push off to the future because it’s going to either take a lot of work or there’s going to be a long time for you to see any results or benefits from doing that work.
There’s workarounds that you can put in place to avoid doing it now. In some cases, you’ll take on some technical data or some other types of work data that you just have to defer really. But by doing so, it allows you to concentrate on the more important things now versus delaying your launch or delaying getting sales or just delaying moving your product further than it would if you took the month or three months or whatever to implement the things that you were looking at.
Rob: Yeah. There’s a lot of these tradeoffs that go into building any type of software, that go into building any type of business. A lot of things that you have to think about and think to yourself, do we have to do this now? Can we push it off? If we push it off, does it create more of a hassle later on? Does it create more debt later on? Not monetary debt, obviously, but technical or business debt. Or is it the same amount? Is it the same amount in three months if I build the knowledge base today, if I build the knowledge base in six months, is it the same amount of work versus when you’re in code, if you take a shortcut, we all know that technical debt will actually get worse over time. There are some of these that get worse if you don’t do them and some are the same or maybe it’s a linear progression. These are the kinds of things you have to think about as you’re trying to figure out what you can delay.
Mike: What we’re going to do is we’re going to walk around some of the different things that we might think that we need but could be delayed with various workarounds and we’ll talk about what some of those workarounds entail and then we’ll talk about some of the things that are really difficult to find workarounds for. And then we’re going to dive into some general guidelines for deciding how to push things off and whether or not you should do them now or schedule them in the near future, kind of how to prioritize them.
To kick things off with the things that we might think that we need, the first one is a sales website. It’s interesting that I ran into this where my traditional thinking all along has been, “You need a sales website in order to sell your products, to tell people what it is, what it does, how it works, how they would use it, what the value is.” What I realized is that if you’re doing direct sales with people, you don’t have to do any of that. You can get away with a lot less than you need to.
For example, I’ve got Bluetick up over 20 customers, around 20 to 25 right now. I still only have I think 3 pages on my website. One of them is a privacy policy, another one is a terms of service and the third one is just the landing page where basically it gives you an overview of what it does and asks you for an email address either to signup, to get an invitation code or to join the mailing list and go through a five part email course. That’s it. I’ve got to this point really without having a website.
Rob: This is an easy one when you’re doing direct sales. With Drip, I wasn’t even doing direct sales but it was onboarding, it’s really what I think about it as. It’s like people wanted to try, always doing emails back and forth and all we had was still that landing page from months and months of onboarding and we did the same thing, got into the high teens, low 20s in terms of customers that way.
Given that you’re still probably trying to find a product market fit at this point, it almost doesn’t makes sense to build a website because you don’t really know what your positioning is, you don’t know what your feature set is, this is still early customer development. I think there are a lot better places your time can be spent than going and trying to hack together some entire website.
Mike: The interesting part about all the stuff that you just said is that because you don’t know what to put on the website, most of it is probably going to be wrong anyway. Going that direct sales route allows you to have the conversations and get people’s feedback and understand truly what it is that they are trying to solve for and what the terminology is that they use and what resonates with them.
Once you’ve done that enough, you get to a certain point where then it makes more sense to build the sales website because you have enough information from those conversations to be able to build something that is going to be effective and pitching towards people that don’t know who you are and you haven’t had a referral or had no conversations or had nothing explained to them, that’s really the position that it puts you in. That really leads into the second one which is marketing automation.
I think people look at marketing automation as a panacea for all types of sales problems but the reality is that it’s very difficult to automate a sales process when you don’t even know what it is that people think yet or what they’re really looking for and that’s what that direct sales approach is going to solve for you.
Rob: Yeah, I agree there too. As much of a proponent as I am of email marketing and marketing automation in general, which is more advanced form of email marketing, it’s just too early at this point. Until you hit the point where you really do feel like you have a good idea of your positioning, you’re going to start to feel like you know what content people need in order to understand your product. There are questions about how you use the product but there’s also questions about the higher level architecture like, “What are best practices for sales nurturing?” That’s what you’re going to get, Mike.
We kept getting what are best practices for email automation or marketing automation? How do I structure my tags? What should I use custom fields for? How is this different than email marketing? It’s a higher level stuff, that’s the kind of stuff that you’re going to either be sending to people via email or you’re going to start pushing some blog post out at some point. That’s at the point where I think you should tip into now I’m going to actually add lead nurturing stuff and build some workflows and start doing behavior tagging because at that point you just have such a better idea of where your business is.
It’s almost a waste of time if you only have 100 website visitors or you only have 20 customers. You really need to get to the point where you’re getting 500 or 1000 uniques a month to where you’re getting at least a handful of new subscribers to go through that stuff.
Mike: The caveat here is that marketing automation is a very broad term and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t certain tactics that you can pull out of the marketing automation playbook that would be beneficial for you. For example, I just saw that Drip sent out an email with a pointer to a mechanism used by Christoph Englehardt who’s a good friend of the show, comes to MicroConf Europe, has taken notes for MicroConf Europe as well. In that article, he went over the idea of using Drip to send an email to people after you’ve captured their email address to pull them back and help with abandoned shopping cart emails. That’s a tactic that you can use to help pull people back to your website.
I actually use it for Bluetick right now where if somebody goes in, they request an invitation code that pops them over to a survey page. If they don’t fill out the survey page, it sends them an email from Drip about 10 minutes later. My hope and intent is that they will fill out the survey because they’re right there. But if they don’t, then they get a follow up email from Drip a little while later. Interestingly enough, I got an email earlier this week from somebody saying, “Hey, how did you do that? Because I’d love to know a little bit more information about it.” We actually have a demo scheduled here pretty soon. It’s tactics like that that can really help. You don’t have to go out and implement everything that’s marketing automation related but there are certain tactics that you can pull from it.
Rob: Another thing that I tend to push off, because it doesn’t get harder to do this in three or six months, it doesn’t build debt, is documentation. At first, when you’re doing hand onboarding, you’re doing direct sales, really the documentation that I had was the emails back and forth with people. I just started gathering those up. First it was an FAQ doc and then I realized some of them needed to really be flashed out. That was the best way to kick off our knowledge base.
First there was nothing. As soon as we get to the point where I knew we’re going to be emailing several thousand people on our launch list, I knew we needed something. What I did is knowing that writing documentation was going to take forever, I went in and I recorded about maybe somewhere between eight and a dozen Screencasts. Three to five minute Screencast where I walk through. This is what a campaign is. This is just basic stuff. This is what this setting does, there wasn’t a ton in the app.
I just slapped up again, that was 8 to 12KB articles. It was in a WordPress, there’s a WordPress theme, I think, that allows you to make a KB and I just put up there and that’s it. We had 8, 9, 10 KB articles at the start. Screencast or not, the ideal way to consume that, it was very fast for me to make them but within the first few months people are saying, “I really want to be able to read through them. I was at the airport, the WiFi was bad and I couldn’t play them.” Overtime, I actually paid someone to turn those Screencast into documents, like actual KB articles.
That’s the progression. You don’t need to write all the documentation upfront. It would be great if you could but you just don’t have the time. That’s the idea, you start with nothing and it really is just manual and you’re going to have more support upfront because of that but then you move into something lighter, for me that was Screencast, for you it may be something different and then ultimately you build that out over time.
Mike: The next item on the list for something you can push off until later is a billing system. It sounds like a billing system is probably not something you want to push off because you want to be able to start getting revenue as quickly as possible. There are hacks around having a billing system in place. Instead of having an automated billing process in place, you could send people manual invoices. There’s tons of different pieces of software out there that allow you to send somebody an invoice and then have them pay you, you could easily do something like that through PayPal, you could send them a PayPal invoice once a month.
Yes, that doesn’t scale but that’s not the point. The point is to allow you to avoid building out that billing system until you get to a point where it is difficult for you to keep up. Another thing that you could do is you could manually enter people’s credit cards in Stripe using the backend. There’s a WordPress plugin called WP Simple Pay which is from Phil Derksen who’s also a MicroConf attendee and friend of ours. That WordPress plugin can be used to capture those credit cards and help you with that stuff without you being involved directly and taking the credit card and entering it in.
If you want to automate some things a little bit, as Rob said, there’s that natural progression. Over time, you can add more and more things into it until you get to a point where it is fully automated and it helps you move things forward. But until you need it, there’s no point spending a lot of time doing it because a billing system can be very, very complicated. At the start, you don’t need all that complexity.
Rob: With Drip, we didn’t actually use any of those approaches, we just had a little Rail script that Derick cranked up. I think it took him less than a day. We wind up building that five days before the first billing was going to run, we were signing people up and I think we got 30-day trial so we got 25 days into the trial and I’m like, “Alright Derek, we got to get something that’s going to bill people on a couple days.” It was super simple at first, it was literally this is an amount and this is how much you’re getting billed.
Again, over the coming month, you have to upgrade and automatic downgrade and prorating and whatever else goes along with it. We built that into it but we started pretty simple. I agree, you don’t need as much logic as you think you do in the early days in billing.
Mike: One of the more common things that you probably need to implement in a SaaS application is permission system. Depending on whether you’re going to do it like a single tenant or multi tenant model on the backend, you may need to implement permissions inside the system to allow certain people access some resources and then prevent others from accessing those same resources.
This can get very, very complicated, especially if you get into the idea of having group accounts and some people with certain roles or permissions. Again, there are lots of white papers and documentations you can read out there about different ways of implementing the permission systems or claim system and it does get complicated. But in the early days, you really don’t need any of that. All you need is the ability for somebody to login and see their data and not see somebody else’s. You don’t need to create all this additional complexity with groups and roles and permissions and stuff like that, you could really get started with one user.
To Rob’s point earlier, there are certain types of debt that you’re taking on. In this case, it’s a technical debt and that can be difficult to get around. But in the early days, if you need to get around that just to help prove out the idea and make sure that things are working and people are getting value out of the app, this is one of the shortcuts that you can take. You have to be forewarned that it is technical debts you’re taking on when you use this approach but it could be what you need to do.
Rob: Yup. When we first launched Drip, it was just one login and then people wanted to invite whatever teammates and so then we had to add the ability to have additional folks. The only thing we had was owner and I think we called it an admin or something was the other role. 6, 12 months down the line, we kept getting requests for like, “I don’t want some people to mess with our settings.” We added a member, there is three tiers, owner, admin, member.
We have been able to maintain that. We are tens of thousands of users and four years into a pretty substantial SaaS app. We do get periodic requests to add more granular stuff and we started talking about that internally, what that would look like. But the good thing is now, we really understand our customer, we really understand our audience and we have had enough request for it asking in different ways. I want people to be able to come in but not export anybody or not be able to view my subscribers or not be able to send anybody. There’s all these different things.
We’re not making it up in a vacuum, it’s not like we just dream up how we think that they might use it, we have real usage patterns and real feature requests. I’m very much in agreement with you on this one. If you need multiple logins, that’s fine but as soon as you get to anything granular at all, I would pump that so far down the line unless that’s a core, core competency of your app which I’m guessing it’s not going to be.
Mike: One thing that I recently did was I repurposed our impersonation mechanism and applied it to people’s accounts to let them have multiple users inside the same account. It works fine. It’s not great, there’s certainly a lot of work that needs to be done there but for the time being it allows people to use the products and have different logins physically associated with the same account. Like I said, it’s a tradeoff but it does work. Early on, your customers are probably going to be pretty understanding about that stuff.
Rob: Another one is password reset and account management type stuff, it’s a lot of time to implement versus the actual number of minutes anyone is going to use it or the number of times someone is going to use it in the first three months of your app. I know that pretty sure we had a reset password button and I think it may have fired off an email to us or something that’s like, “Reset my password.”
Again, this is very, very early on, you’re at 20, 30, 40 customers, you’re going to get one a week and you can just do it manually and people understand. It’s not until you go a little broader and again you’re going to have to really start to scale up that you need to build this out.
Mike: Funny enough that I had mentioned this is my MicroConf talk as well but the password reset in Bluetick did not work at all for nine months. We implemented it probably six months ago but it did not work for the longest time and we would just go in and manually do if somebody came back and said, “Hey, my password reset didn’t work.” There was literally only three people who would ask in those nine months. It’s one of those really low frequency things that is important and needs to be taken care of but you can manually handle it if need be. I did have a manual backend where I could go in and I could reset somebody’s password, they just couldn’t do it themselves.
The next one is a big thing which is reporting. I think in most cases, the challenge with reporting is that unless your app is specifically designed to provide reporting services for somebody, then you can probably get away with very little reporting in the first version. Most of the reason that you would want to pump this down the road is because you don’t necessarily know what people want to be reporting on. As you have conversations with people, you’re going to learn more about it. When you are initially looking at building reports, you’re guessing what people want and it’s just not going to be helpful to you because you’re going to build a bunch of things, people are going to say, “Hey, could you do this instead?”
Now you’ve built a bunch of things that essentially you have to support longer term because you’ve already built them and put them in the app and people are expecting that those things are probably going to stick around but now you’ve got all this legacy code there and it wasn’t really what people were looking for anyway. I think that in most cases it’s best to just put this down the road and not bother with the initially. [00:19:13] had done a recent episode in the Startup chat where they talked about killing features. You can kill features like this but if you only have two reports, it’s really hard to take away one of them.
Rob: Another thing you can push off to get further down the road is the classic marketing strategies, the ones that require long iteration cycles, higher workloads like SEO and content marketing. These are things that take a long time to ramp up to, it’s not something you should push off so long because it’s not like you’re going to launch a blog and then start getting traction with either content marketing or SEO immediately.
Again, when you are under that 50 person mark, it’s just not something that you want to scale to. If you are not doing these other things of building a password reset and building a billing system, you’re not there yet, you don’t actually want to drive this type of cold traffic to your site and stuff. Everyone talks about it, they talk about this, they talk about split testing, these are things that you need to do later on, you need to wait until you’re starting to scale up marketing and you feel like the app and your team is at a place where it can really onboard people, you have documentation and you’re ready to start dealing with really new users to see how they come in and how they get onboarded and how they convert.
Mike: The next one is new feature development. The rule of thumb that I’ve taken lately is that unless I get a certain number of people asking for something or saying that that’s important, or if they’re not a customer yet and they say that, “I need this in order to be able to sign on.” It’s a deal breaker to them, I generally push that off to the side in favor of other things that more people have asked for or are higher priority because it’s not something that is being asked for a lot, therefore, it’s just less important than those other things. I’m not going to spend my time building something that very few people are going to use or it’s not going to be used very often. Instead, I’ll spend my time working on those things that people are going to use a lot, that are getting asked for a lot because those are clearly most important.
The other ones are stuff that they’re nice to have sometimes, it’s just people are asking a question because they want to know the answer to it, not because they’re actually interested in using it. That’s an interesting side note that I’ve discovered is when somebody asked you something, a great way to deflect the question is to ask him if it’s important to them. Sometimes they’ll just say, “No I was just asking, I was just wondering.” If you have that developer mindset where how do I solve problem X that somebody just presented me? You can very easily find yourself going off into the weeds and trying to do something that’s going to take you a while to do when the person was just asking, they just wanted to know because they were curious, not because they needed it.
The last one is being able to provide real time results for people. This delves partially into reporting but also if you need to do any sort of complex calculations or you’re not sure how you’re going to get the data from one place to another and it needs to be done manually for the time being until you go to a point where you automate it.
This could be any sort of situation like if you have to deal with a government website, for example, and you have to feed data into it, those are notoriously terrible when it comes to APIs and being able to send data into them. A lot of times you have to resort to various hacks like using Selenium to automate a browser, to go plugin all the different fields and stuff. Instead of doing that, hire somebody to go in and type in stuff that customers have entered, you’ve made it easy for them to either import the data or put stuff in in a way that makes sense and then you have somebody that go in and type it all in.
Most people would say, “This is a SaaS application and that should be real time.” But it doesn’t need to be, most of the time when you’re looking at those types of things, there’s customer expectations about how long it should take and then there’s also what they really needed return to them. If the time period is a 24 or 48 hour window, it’s probably not that big of a deal. Unless your whole value proposition is that it is automated and very fast, in those types of cases you probably have to do all the leg work and automation upfront. But a lot of times you can get away with just pushing it down the road. Once it gets to a scale where you can’t handle it or it is causing you far too much to not have it automated, that’s when you go down that path.
Rob: Let’s take a look at three things that are difficult to get around, things that you’re going to have to implement upfront and the things that you should be focusing on. The first one are the core parts of your value proposition. Things like features, reports, if they’re absolutely needed, automation, if that’s really what your app does. Without this, you don’t really have much value. This is probably the core piece of finding product market fit and building something people want, you should be focusing on the features that are driving value for your prospects and customers.
Mike: The next one is probably a judgment call but I find that user impersonation is really difficult to get around. You can use screen sharing, so if somebody runs into a problem, you can get on a call with them using a variety of different tools and share their screen and look at what it is that they’re seeing. That type of thing is impossible to do without the other person being present and allowing you to essentially watch them as they login and go do whatever it is.
It’s a lot easier in many cases to have an impersonation mechanism in place so that you can flip a flag on your account or in the database directly and just say, “Hey, log me in as that person.” Then you will be able to see exactly what they would see. If they come back and they have questions about how do I do this or how do I that or why is this showing up in my account this way, it allows you to go into their account, take screenshots and then send them those screenshots or do a Screencast and explain to them what it is that they’re seeing. If you’re seeing data that shouldn’t be there, then it’s a lot easier to do it without the customer present and having you say why is this there? I don’t understand myself, we wrote it. You’re in a much better position if you have that impersonation ability.
Rob: By impersonation you mean like being able to login as one of your customers, is that right?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: I totally agree, this is a huge one. We call it ghosting, you ghost in as them. But it’s incredible to be able to see the app as your customers see exactly what they need. If you don’t have that ability, it’s like you’re digging through raw data that’ll send you a bug and you can’t reproduce it but as soon as you can login as them, that’s a big deal. This is something I would build very, very early on.
The third one that’s difficult to get around is not having any type of sales channel. You need to be able to get to customers somehow. Referrals can be one, this direct sales model, you could be doing outbound cold outreach, you could just have an email list of 50 people and you email them one at a time and you’re bringing them in. You need some type of sales channel to be bringing people in for this to be worth it. Until you get the feedback, you can get a little bit of revenue and you can start building something that you hope a broader audience wants.
Mike: Actually, emailing them individually, that’s what Bluetick does. It allows you to iterate through those people and email them individually as if it was coming directly from you and you can very quickly go through large numbers of people, personalized automation at scale. But I agree. It’s difficult if you don’t have a sales channel at all, you can’t do that with five people.
Rob: That’s Bluetick.io ladies and gentlemen.
Mike: Now we’re going to move on to general guidelines for deciding what to push off. There are a couple of different criteria you can look at. The first one is is there a manual workaround of some kind? It doesn’t need to be something that is quick and easy or automated. If it takes writing sequel and running against the database manually for an individual customer to do those types of things, then it counts as a manual workaround. It doesn’t mean that it’s easy but if it’s easier to do that than it is to spend a week or two writing code, then chances are good that you can start with that and not have to go through that couple of weeks of writing code that may not be used very often.
That leads directly into the second thing which is it’s not something that you or a customer would do very often. If it’s not used very much, then there’s no real point in automating it and writing the code to do those operations.
Rob: Another guideline for thinking about when to push stuff off is if it’s going to take a long time to automate. There are even things that happen fairly frequently that if it’s like two or three months of dev time to implement, you might still be doing manually or having someone on your team do manually a year, two, three years into your business. It’s always a balance. If you can build two killer features in two months or you can build this one background task that only happens once a week or once a day or five times a day, there really is a balance to human automation versus code automation.
Another guideline that leads right into is you’re not really sure what to automate. If you have some stuff that seems like it takes manual time but maybe you don’t know how to automate it or you’re not sure exactly how that would work, then it’s a good reason to push this off. What I found is things do become clearer over time. The more people you get, the more customers you get and the further along your app gets, things just mature and it becomes easier to tell how to automate things and what you should automate.
Mike: The last situation where you should consider pushing something off is if it’s a feature or a task that different customers are going to want different things or are probably going to want different things. This is where reporting falls square into this bucket but there are certainly other things where if there’s a presentation layer over the top of the data that customers might say, “I want to see these columns versus those columns. I want to be able to filter certain things out of the data right on the screen.”
Those are the situations where you can take the stands, here it is out of the box and we will get to those things down the road when they become more important or when enough people ask for them. But because different customers are going to have those different requirements or different needs around it, you can build a lot of customization around presenting data but people are going to want different things and it can take you a long time to build even just those individual pieces.
Rob: I think that about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, you can call our voicemail number at 888-8019-690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
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Episode 341 | How to Deal With Toxic Customers
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about how to deal with toxic customers. They give you some warning signs to help predict if a customer is turning toxic as well as some strategies to help deal with them if they do.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Spark
- Laravel Spark
- Delicious Brains post
- Future Hosting Post
- Rob’s “How to Detect a Toxic Customer” Post
Transcript
Rob: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and I talk about how to identify and deal with toxic customers. This is Startups For the Rest of Us episode 341.
Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Mike?
Mike: A couple of things. I’ve just pushed a major UI release for Bluetick to address some usability questions and stuff that kept coming up for people. It’s a massive improvement but it took forever to get it done. It was like a week and a half to get everything finalized, tested, and pushed out the door. It’s over and done with so I can move on from that side of things at this point.
Rob: Congratulations. That’s a big deal. It’s over and done with for three to six months until more usability stuff comes up.
Mike: It’s done for like three days. That’s what it really boils down to.
Rob: That’s a big deal. Congratulations. I know that this kind of stuff, it nags at you because you know it has to get done but it doesn’t exactly move things forward. It’s better than like doing taxes in terms of moving things forward for customers but it’s also not a new feature. It’s that balance of I got to push this.
Mike: Right. I think the part that made this piece so difficult was the fact that this was one of the areas that I knew needed to be rewritten for the past six months, to be perfectly honest, and I just didn’t get into it because I knew that it was going to be a hornet’s nest and didn’t want to deal with it at the time. But with that said, it’s like, I went through it, got most of the things cleared away, got all the code organized and commented properly.
Everything’s much more tested now more than it ever was before. It’s just so much easier to work with. I can go in and make changes now whereas before, I was afraid to touch anything because it might fall over and break.
Rob: That’s good. It’s nice to refactor as well. It sounds like it was a UI improvement as well as a code refactor. That’s two wins.
Mike: Now that that’s out of the way, now I can move onto more important things like the website and getting the signup process working.
Rob: Cool. For me, the only thing I have this week is we got a nice email from Victor Perolnick. He had listened to our previous episode where someone asked a question about resources for the engineering side of launching a SaaS. We had given a couple but it was mostly blog post and such. We did specifically say, “I know there’s going to be some out there for specific languages like if you want to do it in Rails, you’re going to find stuff. If you want to do it in PHP.
Victor called out Spark which is from Laravel which is a PHP framework for building a SaaS app. It’s spark.laravel.com. He also talked about Laracasts has a bunch of Spark screencasts if you want to see something really quick. And then link to a couple of blog posts that talk about it.
It gives you a head start if you’re going to build a SaaS app in PHP. Anyways, I wanted to call it out. We’ll link those up in the show notes. If you happen to be building in PHP, that’s probably where I would start.
Mike: I looked through some of those links that he had sent over and we’ll link them up in the show notes. The Spark system looked really nice for getting a SaaS app up and running and not having to deal with a lot of the fundamental plumbing that you would typically have to work with, the billing accounts, subscriptions, impersonation, and things like that. It looked like it was all kind of cookie cutter which is really nice.
Rob: This week we’re going to be talking about how to identify and deal with toxic customers. I wrote a blog post back in 2010, looks like December 2010 that we’ll link up. It was called How to Detect a Toxic Customer. It actually got a lot of traction on I think it was Hacker News at the time. It has like 72 comments or something on it.
I basically walked through a case study of what I had experienced with an invoice and a customer who is quite demanding and was just really combative. I talked about how to identify them and what to do. I find that this type of thing, it comes up every 6 to 12 months. If you’re running a SaaS app, if you’re selling software, it can be a challenge. You talk to anyone who’s been selling software for any length of time and they’ve run into something like this.
We’ve talked a little bit about this in the past on the podcast but I just want to walk through these steps of how to identify really early on, because one of the keys is being able to see it ahead of the actual person getting in and starting to use your app. Because once they’re using it, it actually becomes harder to force them to switch. It’s a really tough decision to do that. Maybe not at the same level of firing an employee that you mis-hired but it is in that spectrum of like, “Man, if someone gets in and they’re really using it and being a pain in the butt, it’s hard to make them switch.”
That’s where we want to start, early signs if you’re in conversation with someone that they may not be a good fit for you even before they ever get into your app. I have a big list here, mostly culled from this blog post.
You know what the first sign is that they view their “vendors” or they view you as like, it’s this weird attitude that you’re like somehow a servant or a slave to them. They’re extremely demanding. They treat everyone they speak with as if they’re an idiot. They talk down to your support people. They talk down to you whether you’re the founder or the salesperson, just this very demeaning tone. It’s like they expect everyone to bend at their will. It’s like they’re doing you a big favor for being their customer.
Mike: I think there’s a few different pieces to this part of it. Most of the time, you can identify this type of thing in the language that they use or how they reference the types of problems that they’re running into. Whether they say, “Oh, this is a massive problem in your app.” Or “Why doesn’t this work?” They get very angry and frustrated very, very quickly and things just escalate fast to the point that they see even just little, minute problems or UI glitches and things like that as a massive problem that calls into question everything that’s underneath the cover.
Most of the time, that’s just not the case. There might be a color that’s off or something is mislabelled or the documentation isn’t quite up to date and they’ll just blow things out of proportion and what you’ll find is that the language or the tone that they take with either the support emails that they send in or the calls that they make or even just the way that they get in touch with you.
If they send you an email and then five minutes later send you another one, that’s a classic sign of a toxic customer. The way that they communicate to you is heavily indicative of how they’re going to be to work with long term.
Rob: Yeah. I have that as a warning set number four in this article. This was an actual sequence of emails that I got from someone again with .NET invoice years ago. Warning set number four is unrealistic expectations. I got an email in support. It says, “Is your software localized for Australia?” And then literally, 10 minutes later, “I wanted to make sure you received my previous email. Is your software localized?” And then 30 minutes after that, “Hello, is anyone there? I haven’t heard back.”
It’s been 40 minutes since you emailed. This is insane. And then 20 minutes later, it was like an all caps thing of like, “Why aren’t you answering?” It’s like I have a feeling maybe I shouldn’t answer this one. If I answer the question and they spend the $300, how much more of a pain are they going to be later on? It’s unrealistic expectation, expecting everything to be answered or done yesterday.
Mike: I wonder if there’s a way like Brennan Dunn as you know is working on RightMessage.io, I wonder if you could somehow flag them and just jack up the price by like 10x to account for that kind of thing.
Rob: Yeah, that’s awesome. I think you make a good point about little things. You’ll have thousands of customers using an app and no one complains about a bunch of stuff and then one person will just have this such an issue and like, “This is a major issue.” Like you’re saying, it’s like all caps subject lines. Everything’s a bug instead of a feature request. It’s like, that’s actually the way you think it should work but everyone else is fine with the way it works. Or it’s like this fixed rigid mindset of you should do it this way because the only way to do it or that’s the way my old system did it.
It’s a bug since you don’t match the way my old system did it but it’s like that is a point of view but your point of view isn’t necessarily the right one. Again, telling back to toxic customers tends to think that way, the language they use early on and maybe the expectations that they have.
Another thing that I’ve seen and it was funny because I used to man support with .NET invoice and so I would answer a response and then I would get this threat to escalate like, “Can I talk to your support supervisor?” “Can I talk to the founder?” “Can I talk to the CEO?” Or “I demand to talk to the CEO is another one.” It’s like, “That happens to be me. How can I help you?” That would be my response but there’s always like really? We’re going to do this because there’s one misspelling or whatever it is. Like you said, the button caller doesn’t agree with how you want it to be.
To threaten to escalate, again, not always and each of these on its own isn’t the end of the world but it’s when you start seeing multiple of these go on over the course of a few interactions, your red flag should be going off.
Mike: I think the other interesting thing about these is that sometimes, it is just one thing that you can see and say, “This person is going to be a toxic customer.” And then there are other times where it needs to aggregate. You need to have several different data points.
If your first interaction is why doesn’t this work and it’s all in caps, it’s kind of a giant red flag but then, there’s other more subtle things that you get into and they add up over time. Sometimes, you don’t see them until much further down the road. As you said earlier, that’s when things become a problem because then they’re probably already in your app, or already using it, or have already paid for it. It becomes much more difficult to cut them off as a toxic customer.
Rob: Another potential sign of a toxic customer is that they provide way too much feedback. Every interaction with them is just a stream of consciousness of how they feel things should be different. We had people tell us like, “This word doesn’t make sense. You should rename that everywhere in your app to be this other thing. It should just say emails up there instead of broadcast or something like that.”
It’s like, “Okay, thanks for the feedback. We have four years of history of this being broadcast everywhere and that’s what all our documentation says. That’s what all of the marketing says.” It’s like everything calls it broadcast just because right now, you don’t understand that yet. In a week, you’ll know what that means and changing it to emails is actually more confusing.
I guess what I’m saying is it’s fine to get feature requests and it’s fine to get some feedback from someone but if every phone call you’re walking away with 10 different things that someone is asking for, there’s a potential there that that person may take their opinion a little, too seriously is not the right word, but it’s like they value it over your own or over the opinion of your company or your product.
Mike: The specific example that you just brought up about the name of a particular field, or a drop down menu, or just something that is presumably really just a label in the app, it brings up an interesting sideline about the fact that some people would go and say, “What can I implement and put in as a technical solution to this thing that keeps coming up where people wants to use different terminology?”
The thing I have seen a lot of apps do is allow you to rename things throughout the apps. So that instead of calling something emails for example, they’ll call it broadcast. If a customer comes in and says, “Hey, this should be called x.” You can go in and you could presumably change that inside of their user account, they would just propagate it throughout the entire app. But then, it makes it more confusing. It’s a little bit harder to support because all your documentation is probably not going to line up directly with that.
I think that you have to be a little bit careful about whether or not you put technical solutions in place for problems that are actually warning signs of problematic customers.
Rob: Totally, it’s like if everyone request that, then that might make sense but that’s a heck of a lot of work to do for one customer. If literally you have thousands of customers, no one ever complained about the naming thing and one customer gives you 10 things and a bunch of them are naming things, it’s like, “Really? Are you going to change that?
Everyone has an opinion and you’re building for the masses and a single customer coming in doesn’t understand the context, and they don’t understand that you do have thousands of other customers. I think that’s another kind of mindset thing with the hard customers that you deal with is they don’t have any context for the thousands or tens of thousands of other people who are already using it. I think that comes back to that fixed mindset thing I talked about earlier. That there’s only one way to do it and it’s the way that I think it should be done.
Another thing that I’ve seen is someone raising the same issues over and over. I guess it comes back to that email that I kept getting about the Australian dollar. They’ll just email back with the same issue everyday or every week even if you say like, “We’re working on it.” It’s like they feel somehow this anxiety or this sense of urgency and they need to, I don’t know, continue to force it on you.
I’ve also seen multiple contacts with the same issue through multiple channels. They email you. They call you on the phone and they chat. You’re like, “You’re actually making this harder on everyone because that mixes things up. Please don’t submit the same questions.” Something about urgency and expectations. It’s expectation of turn around.
If you’re a consulting firm, then maybe they’re paying you $50,000 or $100,000 and you have someone dedicated to them. If you’re a SaaS app and you have 10,000, 20,000 customers, even big customers, they likely will not be getting that level of turnaround time on their feature request. Again, if they were a consulting firm, then yes, they’re going to build what you say. If you’re a SaaS app, you’re not necessarily going to build everything everyone suggests.
Some folks have a hard time understanding that. Those tend to be the ones with misaligned expectations that turn into toxic customers.
Mike: The other thing that sometimes you’ll see is that they will, after a very short time period with your app, they will have several pages of “suggestions” for you to change. It’s partly just a lack of education on their part because they haven’t taken the time to learn how your app works and how it compares to things that they have used or done in the past, but they feel like they know better than you do about how this particular app should be built.
There are certainly exceptions to the rule here but generally speaking, you probably know the market way better than they do especially if you’ve been doing this, running an app, for any length of time and it’s a profitable app. They’re going to come in and they’re going to base all of their thoughts and ideas around their previous experiences.
A lot of times, you’ve designed around those because they weren’t good experiences or those other apps that you were competing against weren’t doing things in a way that made sense for most of the customers and really you’ve just been pushing yourself in a position to put in bad features because of their request. Those are the customers that you’re trying to avoid.
Rob: That’s a really good point. It’s a trip to see if you’re competing against apps and some of them will make what you see as poor design choices. Over time, you’re like, “Man, that’s pretty hacky.” Customers coming from those apps think that as the “right way” to do it even though it’s not. It tends to be a bad user experience for new customers but since they’ve been using something, they expect that to be the way, that’s the way things should be named, or that’s how it should work.
We see this with Infusionsoft to be honest. There’s just a lot of I would say questionable UX and design decisions but if you do it different than them, even in a what I would consider more modern or better way to do it, that’s much more efficient, it can confuse people who are used to thinking in the Infusionsoft mindset.
I think the last one for perhaps identifying toxic customers early is that they can expect a lot of special treatment. They’ll ask for extra services get thrown in and they’ll ask for almost always a big price break like they’re doing you a favor for being their customer. They get a price break that no one else asked for without giving a reason. There are just a lot of special favors that they can call in.
Again, if this is the only thing a customer does early on, alright that’s fine but if it’s coupled with these other things, it’s something to really be aware of and watch out for.
Mike: The big one here for like a SaaS app would be phone support or direct access to the founder which is justifiable especially in the early days when you’re the only one who is running everything or maybe you have somebody who’s doing some part time support. But it becomes a problem over time that can get bigger if you leave it unchecked. You have to cut those things off early if you can possibly help it but the people who have that expectation going in, that’s where you start running into the problems.
Rob: Now, we’re going to switch gears a little bit and talk about potentially how to handle this. Whether you detect it early or you get down the road a bit some strategies on what to do as this type of thing unfolds. I think I’ll start by saying that hard customers, toxic customers, they will by nature just absorb and suck away an enormous amount of your time. There’s someone out there who calls them time vampires.
I’ve seen folks that will literally just demand dozens of hours a week of your time based on the number of request and the number of the hand holding and the phone calls and all the stuff. It can really be chaotic especially if you’re running SaaS. If you’re selling downloadable software, I’ll tell you something we had to do with .NET Invoice a few times. It wasn’t often but it was maybe once a year, we would refund them. Tell them to keep the software, we refunded them and we basically ran away.
We told them, “Look, for $300, one time, we cannot provide this level of support.” And then let them be on their own. But with SaaS, it’s harder because if they’re already using you platform and you didn’t turn them away in advance, you have to force them to leave, to migrate away, which is a bit harder to do. We’ve only done it a very, very few times in the life of Drip. It really sucks, to be honest.
Like I was saying earlier, it’s close to but it’s not nearly as bad as hiring the wrong person but it can be a real drag which is why you’ll want to learn to identify these folks in advance, to see the signs early on in the sales conversation and try to cut them early because you have to ask yourself, is this going to be worth it in the long run? Trust your gut. If you see a bunch of these signs, it’s easy to talk yourself into, “We can work with it.” Or “We can manage expectations.” It’s likely going to get more complicated than that.
Mike: I think there’s an important distinction to be made here between the customers who are taking up a lot of your time because they have legitimate issues versus the ones who are being difficult. I’m in a situation now where there are certain issues that are taking up a ton of my time and there are some customers who are coming to me and saying, “Hey, can you do this?” Or “Can you do that?” I don’t want to say constantly but I’m getting fairly regular emails from them.
If you go through this list, you can say, “These people are problematic customers.” At the stage that I’m at, that’s actually not the case. It’s the opposite. I’m actually appreciative that I’m getting this feedback and these people are saying, “Hey, could you do this?” Or “Could you do that?” Because it gives me ideas and yes, I’m spending a lot of time on it but it’s also pointing me in the right directions. I need that right now.
If I were 100x where I’m at right now, that might be different but I’m not, so there’s a very big distinction between where your business is at in terms of how much time you’re probably going to be spending with the customers and whether or not they are problematic customer.
I don’t have any of those right now but you could certainly potentially mistakenly view some of those customers as all of these are problematic when the reality is your app is just not quite there yet and it still needs more work and there’s still a lot of effort that you need to put into it on the front end in order to be able to cut those issues off on the back end.
Rob: Totally. I am glad you called that out because especially in the early days, getting a lot of feature request feedback input, especially, there’s a tone element to it, if it’s not demanding. If it’s like, “Hey, have you thought about this?” Or “Hey, this would really help me out or this would be a great feature to build.” You’ll get emails like, “How have you not built this yet? I am shocked and appalled at the catastrophic way that your app does not do x, y, z. yet.”
It’s like it’s being shocked that it doesn’t, versus suggesting it as an improvement and realizing the software, especially SaaS, is an ever evolving thing, that everything is not perfect all the time, going to work exactly the way everyone wants 100% of the time. There’s a difference in tone. I agree with you. We’ve had a ton of people who give us a lot of really good feature suggestions.
You look at Brennan Dunn, he does it publicly. He does it via email. He gives us a ton of feature request, suggestions, ideas, and they’re damn good. These are things that really have leveled up Drip over the course of years. But he’s never been on that other side where he’s like, “I can’t believe Drip doesn’t do this.” I never heard the out of his mouth. It’s just this difference in attitude and tone.
Mike: A tell tale sign that they’re trying to be helpful is that if they apologize for sending feedback over. I’ve gotten that from several people where, “Oh, I’m sorry to keep bothering you with this stuff but it’d be great if you could do this or can this be done?” If they’re apologetic about writing into you for email support or anything like that, that totally puts them in a different category. They’re certainly not a problematic or toxic customer at that point. They’re the opposite.
But as Rob just said, it’s the tone of voice. You can tell from that whether or not that’s the case.
Rob: The thing to remember here, if you do have a really hard customer who’s demanding, is you have to keep your cool, you have to be kind, you need to be honest with them, and you need to be firm. The more you give in to irrational demands, irrational feature requests, there are actually things that makes sense, and you say, “Look, we are going to build that. That’s a great idea. Let’s do it.” And the person backs off, then you’re cool. You fixed the thing.
If they continue to still email everyday or every week like, “Why isn’t this done?” Then you know, maybe you’re tipping in that other direction of it being hard. If it’s rational stuff and you’re building it, then keep going. If it’s not rational stuff, if it’s stuff that you know is incorrect, bad for the product, bad for other customers, you’ve already tried it, it doesn’t work for whatever reason, that’s where you do have to be firm and you have to separate your emotions from the conversation.
If you can’t do it, you need to have someone like a support person or customer success person who can do that. Someone who is exceptionally good at this is Anna on my team. She would handle angry customers. She would handle toxic customers. Those two are different.
Mike: She’s talked to me a bunch of times.
Rob: Yeah, nice. Well done, Mike. But you know, you’ll have angry customers who are just angry about one thing. They get frustrated. You can smooth that over. Toxic is when they’re angry all the time. It’s the way I would put it. But Anna is really good at it. If you remember, I interviewed her, it may have been on ZenFounder actually, it was maybe 6 to 12 months ago, but we talked about dealing with negative emotions and how she was able to separate herself from the emotions coming from customers who are frustrated.
Like I said, this is by far the hardest thing to do especially if someone is making sweeping insults about you, your team, your intelligence, your application, but this is where you have to be kind, be honest, be firm, and not lose your cool, this is going to be the hardest thing to remember, and not let it derail you. Once you know that a customer is being particularly difficult, don’t let it derail your day, or your week, or your month because it’s so easy to do that.
In the best case scenario, someone who is difficult upfront winds up not actually being a toxic customer. Maybe they were just frustrated and they had several issues that you’re able to work with them, you’re able to fix them and they’re able to move on because there’s often this on ramping period where let’s say the first 30 days of using a new app, you’re confused by a lot of things.
Most of us go with it. We figure out how to use it. We don’t ask the app to change everything but some people are of that more fixed mindset. But if you handle a few of their issues and they like everything else, then it’s like you can move on and they really won’t be long term, won’t be that toxic customer.
I guess what I’m saying is often issues are clustered when someone first starts using your software. After that, they’ll calm down and people can understand how it works. That is the best case. I would say it’s not the norm but in the best case, if you do handle them with kindness, and honesty, and firmness, again, that’s the best case of coming out of this.
Mike: Something else to keep in mind with this is that dealing with customers is a learned skill. You might not be very good at it at first but you will get better at it over time. In addition to that, there are some people who just have a knack for this. Like you said, Anna seems to have a knack for it. She’s capable of separating herself from the problems and from the app itself and empathize with the customer.
Some people are better at that than others. Even if you train yourself and go through a lot of doing this type of support, and dealing with a lot of these types of people, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be better than the next person at it or worse than them. Some people just have a knack for it and some people don’t. But with that said, if you don’t have a knack for it, you can get better at it. You can learn to separate yourself. It just takes time and practice.
Rob: To wrap things up, we talked about the best case which is working with them early on and then being able to transition them into a productive, happy customer. The worst case of course is that you find yourself and your team just living through ongoing stress for weeks on end. There are a couple of ways to approach this.
Firing a customer is not unheard of especially with larger SaaS apps. It depends on how you want to handle this. Sometimes, I’ve seen folks just plain ignore and just say, “Look, even if this customer sends 10 emails a day, we’re going to respond once a day or once every two days to all of them.” That is one way to handle it.
Or you can fire them. If they start being abusive to you or your staff, that’s not cool. You have to protect your people and your loyalty to your people in my opinion is going to go so much further than loyalty to one demanding customer. This is a hard decision because it’s not always black and white. You can have a toxic customer that’s not abusive. You can ask your support team, are they abusive? No, they’re just a little demanding and it’s like okay, then maybe it’s not time to fire them.
But if people are really shaking up, and you feel like things are rattling around, you have to evaluate at what point you let this single person have so much control over your team. Again, this is a hard decision. It’s always going to result in people being pissed off but if you find that you’re at that point, and you feel like you’ve done everything you can over the long run, frankly, firing someone who you think could cause this level of headache for you, for months or years on end, it’s the right decision.
Again, it’s like making a bad hire. It’s not as bad as making a bad hire but once you’ve made a bad hire and you know you need to fire someone, it’s a hard decision but over the long run, you always think to yourself, “Why didn’t I do that sooner?”
Mike: I was thinking about this and trying to figure out whether or not there’s a specific turning point or a hard benchmark that you can look at to determine whether or not you should just turn the tables and cut a customer loose because. Early on, you really don’t have any history with the person so you’re not entirely sure whether or not they’re going to stick around to begin with but you probably have an idea of what your lifetime value is for that customer.
If you’re looking at that and trying to track it back to how much time and effort you’re spending with the support, that’s not the whole picture. The whole picture is actually the impact to the rest of your day. I think that that’s not something that any of us would really be measuring. You might only take 15 or 20 minutes to answer a support request but if you spend the next couple of hours with that stuff turning at the back of your brain and it’s distracting you from doing other things, the time for that to cost you weren’t 15 minutes, it was 2 hours.
These things can be exponentially more damaging than you initially realized and in some cases, you have to be able to identify those people as early as possible just because you don’t want it to get to that point where it is causing you 5x, 10x, or 50x what it is that they’re paying you or would even potentially pay you if they were to stick around for 10, 20, 30 months.
Rob: To circle back, we’ve talked about some signs to look out for. We’ve talked about what to do. Hopefully, you’ve heard that the best case is that you can actually work with someone and help turn them around. I guess that would be hopefully something you can shoot for if you do find yourself amidst “toxic customer.”
Mike: With that, we’re going to wrap up for today. If you have a question for us, you can call in our voicemail number 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for “startups” and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 340 | Hiring VAs, Struggling with Engineering, Bootstrapping vs. Raising Funding, and More Listener Questions
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike take some listener questions about hiring VA’s, struggling with engineering, and bootstrapping versus raising funding.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Gofccyourself
- Dear FCC
- Fearless Salary Negotiation
- Virtual Staff Finder
- Upwork
- Scaling SaaS
- Meet Edgar
Transcript
Rob: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and I discussed hiring VAs, struggling with engineering, bootstrapping versus raising funding, and more listener questions. This is Startups For the Rest of Us episode 340.
Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: 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: I have a website for you. It is called gofccyourself.com.
Rob: Really, I’m clicking on it right now. That sounds dubious. Is this safe for work, as they say?
Mike: It is safe for work. This is actually created by the Last Week Tonight show with John Oliver. The idea behind them putting together this website was that there’s some pending discussions inside the FCC about whether to deregulate certain parts of the internet specifically as it relates to internet service providers. It allows them to essentially self police themselves in a way that they decide whether or not what they’re doing is morally correct and net neutral, which is obviously not a good thing for net neutrality in general.
The FCC has made it very difficult to get to the page where you can actually leave comments in support or against this particular piece of decision making in the process. John Oliver and his team put together this website. It’s essentially just a redirect that takes you directly to the place where you can fill out the form and leave a comment.
If you’re interested in contributing your voice to that net neutrality legislation, then go over to gofccyourself.com. I’ve already done it. It does take a few minutes. I thought it would take two minutes so I’m hesitant to say that because it took me like 10 but I think that it’s well worth putting your voice into for them to hear it.
Rob: It looks like there’s another URL, dearfcc.org.
Mike: It’s the same type of thing except that, I believe, it sends a physical letter as opposed to just commenting directly on the FCC’s website.
Rob: Got it, very cool. Hey, we had a comment on last week’s episode. I thought it was a pretty thoughtful comment. I appreciate it. It was from a guy named [00:02:17]. He said, “Hey, first time commentary. Congrats Mike on reaching your MRR milestone. What makes it more impressive is you did it in spite of all the armchair criticism. All the more power to you.” I didn’t even read that part. That’s funny. He said, “I did want to say that hearing Rob talk about hiring an in house nanny and how everyone should get hired help was a little bit perhaps insensitive. Not sure if that’s right word but Mike’s response pretty much sums it up. Similar to a guy who could afford to fly first class and tells everyone they can’t imagine flying economy again and that everyone should fly first class.”
I appreciated his comment. A couple of things, first of all, I felt like the first class analogy was a little, maybe didn’t translate to what I was saying because flying first class is like 5 times, 10 times more than normal flights and the only value is comfort and perhaps snobbery whereas I was genuinely saying outsourcing stuff. It’s not about having a live in nanny. It’s about not mowing your lawn. That’s really what I was talking about.
I had switched topics by this point to if you’re a founder and you’re still mowing your lawn, and you’re pressed for time, and you don’t have time to spend with your kids or work in your company, and you’re still mowing your lawn, or shoveling you snow, or cleaning your own house, that’s not a money decision at that point if you’ve got any type of success.
I used to pay $55 every 2 or 3 weeks for a house cleaner. Most of us can swing that. None of this is stuff that I started doing after I sold my company. I started hiring small amounts of outsourcing over 10 years ago when I was literally making just a normal salary gig but I was trying to do stuff on the side. I wanted to clarify that and also say I apologize if I came off insensitive. Did you feel like I did?
Mike: I don’t think so. I actually thought it was kinda funny when you said I’m not advocating outsourcing your parenting of your kids and I was like, “Why not?” Isn’t that the point?
Rob: Mike’s like, “I am advocating outsourcing raising your kids.”
Mike: I was like, “When did we decide to go against that idea?”
Rob: Totally.
Mike: I could definitely see what you decide could be misconstrued. I don’t think that that was your intent. As you said, the conversation had shifted from one topic to another in the middle of it.
Rob: Right. I don’t think everyone by any stretch should have some type of live in nanny. Sherry and I have been talking about that for five or six years. We haven’t been able to do it. We just didn’t have the house that it worked for back in Fresno. It really doesn’t have anything to do with suddenly having more money. I’m not advocating everyone should get a live in nanny. It’s game changing for us but that’s a personal choice.
The part that I am saying entrepreneurs and founders should do if you’re strapped for time, and all of us are, is that you should be outsourcing more of your day to day groundwork. That’s a decision you’re going to have to make early on. It’s like hiring a VA, I’m going to pound that drum forever, but if you’re still answering your own email support and you’re more than about 3 or 4 months into your product, you’re making a bad choice.
You can try to tell me it’s not a bad choice but I’m going to tell you over and over based on my experience and the experience of everyone who I’ve told this to, who haven’t hired someone says, “Oh my God, why didn’t I do this years ago,” that you should be doing it. It’s a different thing but hopefully that clears it up and is a little more helpful who think I’m some type of pretentious d-bag.
Mike: Monster.
Rob: I’ve always tried to be on this side of that argument.
Mike: I do think that there are certain cases to be made where you don’t outsource that stuff. For example, like mowing the lawn. I find that sort of therapeutic because I listen to my headphones and podcast and stuff like that while I do it. That’s a regularly scheduled thing that comes up versus something like snowblowing the driveway and taking care of that where you’re much less in control of the weather and those things pop up and it needs to be taken care of. That is easier to make that decision on than something like mowing the lawn where it’s predictable, I’ll say.
Rob: Yeah. If you’re saying it’s relaxing for you, that actually is a good argument for it. I would say alright then, that’s not a bad choice. I actually cook quite a bit because cooking is not a chore to me. It’s actually something that I enjoy. I do outsource part of it. A lot of the prep, I use Hello Fresh or Blue Apron so I’m not going out shopping. It’s more expensive for sure but it saves me time.
Cooking itself, the act is similar to what you’re saying. I typically have a glass of wine and I have podcast playing and so it is actually relaxing. That’s a good point too to bring up. It’s only if this is something that’s detracting from your life.
Mike: I think that’s the point. If there are certain things that you can outsource because they are detracting from your life or they’re inconvenient, that was really I think the point that you were trying to make with the nanny. There are times where it’s inconvenient to drop what you’re doing to do something like picking up the kids at a specific time. You don’t have to be the one that does that. Again, that’s very different than being the person that are parenting your kids. Those are just two very, very different things. I think the distinction got muddled in a conversation, that’s all.
I just want to bring up a comment that we got. This one came from Josh Doody. Josh gave an attendee talk at MicroConf. One of the things that he talked about in his attendee talk was about SEO. This relates back to episode 338. He just said, “Hi, I just listened to episode 338. Summary of the Moz case study on ranking number one for competitive head terms. Really good stuff. I heard a couple of things that I’m going to try to keep improving the SEO on fearlesssalarynegotiation.com. I added the episode link in the case study that linked my MicroConf summary page. I think my talk in some of the links on that page could help people get started with SEO. My talk was a one on one level talk where I would say the Moz case study is 201 plus.”
He gives a website URL. It’s joshdoody.com/microconf. We’ll link that up in the show notes. Anyone who wants to go take a look at that, it’s a really good overview of what his talk was and it is some practical strategies if you’re not quite to the level of where that Moz episode that we did and all the different things that they did for SEO. If you’re not quite there yet, head over to this link. Again, it will be on the show notes. It gives a lot of the basic tactics and stuff that you can use to help your website rank in the search engines.
Last before we get started. I did not know this but apparently, for the past two or three years, there has been a Viking combat training facility here in my hometown.
Rob: Do they teach you to fight with the axes?
Mike: I think that they put stuff over the ends of them. I saw them training one day out in a parking lot. They have these giant bo staffs, they almost look like giant erasers or q tips or something like that. They are like padded on ends and they look like they’re ready to beat the snot out of each other in the parking lot.
Rob: That’s awesome. Your town is not that big so it’s kind of odd that you wouldn’t have known that.
Mike: I know. That was the part that struck me as odd. It’s literally called the Viking combat training center.
Rob: That’s fun. Last time we were in Italy, my son and I did gladiator training in Rome. It was like a one or two hour little adventure where we had foam swords and you wore the helmet. The stuff is bulky and heavy. It was super fun to learn kind of the different approaches to combat though.
Mike: What’s on the agenda for today?
Rob: Today, we are answering listener questions, trying to play catch up. I think we have one voice mail and a few written questions. Our first question is from Richard Gorbet. He says, “Hey Rob and Mike, love the podcast. Only one I have to auto download when a new one appears. A couple of years ago, there was a lot of chat about virtual assistants. Is it worth a new topic in one episode as I suspect the dynamics may have changed. I’m thinking from a help desk perspective but many, many uses for a VA. It’s come to my thoughts as my latest ideas about MVP in the next few weeks. Thanks.”
What do you think about this? I don’t know that it’s so much different than the previous thoughts we’ve had. Maybe the specifics of hiring have changed slightly but I think we talked about 15 ways to use a virtual assistant. I think all of that is still the same. That stuff hasn’t changed. What do you think?
Mike: I would agree. I think the specifics of how to go out and find somebody and vet somebody to do those things has definitely changed over the years but I don’t think that the types of stuff that you would have them do is going to change all that much. It’s probably going to be more of an evergreen topic to be honest. It’s just there’s always ways to save yourself time.
The one thing that I think that might change over time is that as the level of skills of people that are available at a certain hourly rate, that dynamic shifts over time. You might be able to find people who are more qualified to do things that are probably further along than what you would think that a typical VA would be capable of. Again, that’s going to be shifting the global economy in terms of who is available at what hourly rate and stuff like that. It’s not really a dramatic shift in what you would have them do. It’s just a matter of what people are skilled at, at a particular hourly rate.
Rob: I actually think the hiring process, at least the one I outlined most recently was through oDesk. That’s still where I would go today. I would use that or I would use Chris Ducker’s service, virtualstafffinder.com. It’s Virtual Staff Finder, that’s the URL. If I recall it was like $300 or $400 to pay them and they basically vet a bunch of candidates and then they give you the top three. They guarantee them, that if they don’t work out in the first whatever days, they’ll replace them and stuff.
If you have the funds, I would do that if you’re in a hurry. If you have less funds and more time, then the oDesk approach that we’ve outlined, I guess it’s Upwork now, the Upwork approach that we’ve outlined in the past is what I would go back to at this point. Thanks for the question.
Our next one is an anonymous question that he actually sent to me directly. He say, “Hi Rob, I’m in the process of creating a B2B SaaS app for universities but I’m struggling with the engineering of the application. What resources such as books, tutorials would you recommend for developing a SaaS app on the web? I’m a huge fan of the podcast and of your book. Thanks for all your help.” What do you think, Mike?
Mike: It’s funny, as I’ve been developing Bluetick, I‘ve come across various topics where this type of thing would be very highly relevant. I’ve looked around and depending on what you’re doing, it can be very difficult to find this type of stuff. It kind of actually spoke the idea of writing the technical side of developing a SaaS application, a book that basically covers that topic. The problem obviously, I just don’t have the time to do that kind of thing.
There’s also just a wide variety of topics that as a SaaS founder, you may run into them and you may not. It depends on the type of SaaS that you’re building and how data intensive it is, how much search you have to do, if you have to do data indexing. A lot of times, you can get away with just very basic stuff and then when it breaks, then you fix it.
I think it’s very easy to go down the path of trying to engineer something to work for the largest case that you could possibly envision your app doing and then get into it and realize that you’re not going to hit that for six months, or a year, or three years. You’ve over engineered the early stage stuff. There are certainly things in Bluetick where we’ve had to rewrite them two, three, there’s sections of the code where I’ve rewritten it four or five times just because the backend stuff has scaled to that point.
Had I sat down and just designed it on day one to try and reach that scale, it would have taken me so much longer to get something out there. I think you really have to just weigh what it is that you’re trying to accomplish and what those short term goals are which your primary ones should be get something working in front of people versus how do I make this thing survive in the long term.
Unfortunately, that’s something that’s sort of diametrically opposed to each other. You don’t want to have to rewrite code more than once or twice if you don’t have to but at the same time, in order to take those shortcuts, you almost need to build those sections of code as prototypes just to get to where you need to be and get that revenue in the door.
In terms of looking around and trying to find specific resources, I’ll be honest, I looked around and I could not find very many. There’s all the generic stuff on how do I build an application or how do I use this particular type of technology, and those are great and helpful but they don’t give you a much broader picture of how do I handle authentication or how do I handle permissions inside of a system.
There are different areas you can go into like claim space authorization and all these different things. At the end of the day, you got to pick what is right for your application and what is going to get you as far along as possible with the least amount of effort.
Rob: The hard part of this is if you get into like how should I do authentication, it’s going to depend from language to language. You should use the built in .NET stuff for .NET but in Rails, you should use the built in Rails stuff. You almost have to go one level higher and talk about concept.
I agree with you. I don’t know of a single good book or tutorial course about really the high level engineering side that’s not language specific. I went to Google and typed in how to build a SaaS application. There’s actually some decent stuff. There’s a good conversation on Quora. There’s a good article on Glenn Stovall’s blog. He’s a MicroConf attendee. He talks about all the technology he would use and it’s like 19 apps in a row. He made the list. Thanks Glenn. I haven’t even noticed that. That’s kind of funny.
That’s where I would start. Again, I don’t know of any tomes, any books, any dead tree of things that are out there. It’s much more going to be about blogs, article here and there. I do know that there are people out there like Derrick, my co founder, has a blog called Scaling SaaS. It’s at scalingsaas.com. He talks about challenges that he’s run into and how he’s fixed them but it’s not a step by step tutorial or a really deep dive into engineering a SaaS app. Perhaps, there is a gap in the market here that someone would be interested in filling.
Or if you have heard of some good resources for stuff like this, feel free to write in questions at Startups for the Rest of Us and we’ll be happy to mention them in a future episode.
Laura: Hi, this is Laura Roeder from Meet Edgar. Hey guys. I was wondering about Rob’s perspective on bootstrapping versus fundraising now that you are operating inside of Leadpages, a funded company. I’m a bootstrapper, I know you guys have been big proponents of bootstrapping over the years. What have you learned being inside of Leadpages about bootstrapped versus funded companies and has it changed your point of view at all about what you might like to do in the future? Thanks.
Rob: This is a really interesting question. The hard part is think about how I run a bootstrap company versus maybe how you run one versus Reuben Gomes versus Josh Pigford. I don’t know if you can say there’s one way to run a bootstrap company and so I can only compare the way I run them with the way that the Leadpages team runs them.
If you think about a funded company in Minneapolis run by Clay Collins and his two co founders, started as a distributed company and then raised funding and grew to 170, 180 employees at this point, it’s probably a different trajectory. They’ve always been profitable. Different trajectory than a funded company in the bay area that maybe B2C, has never been profitable and is hiring a boiler room of bros to make the phone calls.
There are a lot of different ways and thoughts around raising funding and different ways to run a company. I guess I want to couch that in advance by saying it’s only one person’s experience. It’s with basically two companies, comparing them to one another.
The base thing I’ve learned moving to a funded company is that it’s so freeing and amazing to not have to worry about resources, to not have to be concerned with adding a $200 a month server or upgrading the database over to a $2,000 a month box. You know it’s going to fix your problems but you just don’t know if you have the money to do it.
That is gone. I’m not saying money is infinite but compared to the bucket we were in a year ago, before the acquisition, money is essentially as close to that as you can get. Anytime we bring up a problem and we’ll say, “Here’s how to fix it but it’s going to cost this.” The cost is actually the afterthought in the conversation. That’s very freeing and it allows us to operate quickly. We can hire. We can pay market rates. It’s like having the resources, it’s crazy.
Especially because we’re not doing the crazy I’m going to raise $20 million and do the B2C shuffle where we just hire way out ahead of sanity. You hire 20 people before you hit product market fit. We’re not doing that. We’re literally hiring to scale. This is the perfect time at which I would have raised funding if we were going to. It’s a point at which you have product market fit, you’re growing quickly and you’re just pouring money into either scale the marketing or scale the engineering. That’s been cool.
The other thing I’ve learned is that specialization is amazing. The fact that they don’t have people who do support and customer success and marketing, we used to have a Drip when there were five of us. There was one person doing support. To be honest, there’s like eight people doing support for Drip. Marketing is divided into like some people just write blog posts. That’s all they do all day. And then there’s this person and all they do is all the social paid acquisition. There’s this other person and all they do is the search paid acquisition because they have the staff to do that.
Specialization is extremely powerful because you can get so good at stuff. This is when we see these case studies like we talked about last week. It was two weeks ago, about the SEO stuff, the reason those people are so good at that and can write that incredible case study is because that’s all they did. That’s all they did for 90 days straight, was work on that one problem and you can accomplish a lot doing that.
I think another difference and I don’t think it’s not a fun diverse thing but like Drip was an engineering driven culture because I’m an engineer and so is Derrick. Leadpages and marketing is different culture so it’s a different way to look at it, a different way to run a company but that’s not because they’re funded. It’s because they’ve always been that way. Clay, Tracy, and Simon bootstrapped Leadpages to, I don’t even remember what the number was, but it was several million dollars in annual revenue. They kind of are a bootstrapped company that then raised funding.
I think those are some cursory thoughts. I could probably do about a 20 minute rant, not even a rant, just a conversation of me talking about the differences but I think those are probably the most pronounced.
Mike: I think the only thing I’d add to that is that there’s this I’ll say sort of a pervading fallacy that when you start talking to not self proclaimed experts but the people who are leading the masses when it comes to startups, you look at them and your immediate thought is, “Oh, they know what they’re talking about and that’s the way to build a business.”
The reality is that that is true to an extent, however, there are lots of ways to be successful and there’s more than one path to do it. There’s no one true path. There’s no one silver bullet. There’s no one way to do things. There’s lots of ways to do it and be successful. Just because it worked for somebody else, it doesn’t mean it’s always going to work for you and that when you’re looking at those types of examples, that’s one path. There are lots of others that may or may not work for you. It’s about finding what will work for you.
Rob: It’s interesting. There’s always these big things about don’t raise funding because you’ll lose control, or you’re going to make bad decisions because you have too much money, or you’ll feel all this pressure from investors. I’m not the founder or the CEO of Leadpages but I don’t feel like I’ve lost control like we’re being pushed to make bad decisions because we have “too much money,” or that there’s all this pressure from investors. Perhaps the board or the CEO, Clay feels different than that.
It’s not this black and white dichotomy that so many people make it out to be. You and I have never done that. We’ve never been anti funding. We’ve always been anti the dumb B2C startups that have no product trying to raise all this money and go viral. It’s the stupid Silicon Valley stuff.
For 10 years, I’ve been saying there’s a right time and a right place to raise funding. I think it’s post product market fit. You bootstrap to that and then you add the fire to grow the company. Typically, it’s going to be more B2B although if you had a B2C that had hit, I think there’s a good time to raise it as well.
It’s really interesting. There’s a lot more to talk about. Maybe we’ll record an episode in the future and revisit that whole topic.
Mike: Yeah. I think you and I are more anti pipe dream where you have something that you’re putting out there but you’re not charging for it and you don’t have any way of making money. The reason you need funding is in order to increase your reach and get it in front of more people. And then, at some point down the road, you’ll figure out how to make money from it. If you can’t do that very early, then it makes it difficult to build a business out of it.
Rob: Right. We’re anti billing slide decks and asking for permission instead of actually building a company. You should be able to build your company to the point where people want to invest without any funding. It’s very, very rare exceptions. Maybe hardware, although even these days I would say do a kickstarter. Maybe there’s something with incredible computing power, something that you can’t have access to and I would say build something simpler first.
For the most part, most of what we all do, you can bootstrap that to the point where it becomes very interesting to investors.
Mike: I think that about wraps us up for today. If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for “startups” and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 339 | Updates on Bluetick, Drip and Other Madness
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike give updates on Blutick and Drip. Mike talks about some progress he’s made as well as his current MRR with Bluetick. Rob gives his update on Drip continuing to scale and fill new positions.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Mike: In this episode of Startups for The Rest of Us Rob and I are going to be talking about updates on Bluetick, Drip and other madness. This is Startups for The Rest of Us episode 339. Welcome to Startups for The Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching and growing software products whether you’ve built your 1st product or you’re just thinking about it, I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made, what’s going on this week Rob?
Rob: Well I’m back to feeling really good about Drip because for the last maybe month, prior to last week, which I talked a little bit about it. We just had you know scaling issues right, it’s like stuff comes up, you don’t know if it’s database, you don’t know if you can add more horsepower to it, code implementation, you know what it is. So, different times of day certain ques would back up and it’s like we’re shipping a lot of features, the team is kind of firing on all cylinders right now and I feel like we’re the most productive we’ve been in ages perhaps ever,
[00:01:00]
Rob: I mean just given that the time size is so much larger, we’re able to just ship stuff faster and yet, like every week was ruined for me because there would be this delay or whatever, this page load is slower, just whatever that like makes me feel like we’re aren’t living up to the promise that we make to our customers, but we turned like a big corner last week with it and I just feel great about everything. So that’s my week.
Mike: Yeah, I know what you’re saying. I think the best analogy, I might have heard this someplace but I kind of feel like I thought of it on my own at 1 point, is like when you’re working on a SaaS app like everything is in motion while you’re working on it, so it’s almost like being a heart surgeon like you have to make sure everything stays up and running while you’re still working on it.
Rob: Totally, that’s right, Reid Hoffman the founder of LinkedIn said building a startup is like jumping out of an airplane and assembling the parachute on the way down right, because you kind of in free fall and you’re burning through cash and the analogy works really well for running a SaaS app and having to do kind of performance improvements, refactors, anything like that that impacts a lot of things and this is where unit testing is such
[00:02:00]
Rob: a nice scaffold right, unit testing is like having good test coverage, it’s kind of like jumping out with the parachutes already half made or maybe the parachute is, I’ll just stop there because that was a really dumb analogy anyway.
Mike: I was going to point out, I wasn’t sure where you were going to go with that.
Rob: You’re like you’re really taking this too far, let’s ditch the parachute thing.
Mike: That’s almost like my analogy against a heart surgeon.
Rob: How about you, what’s going on this week?
Mike: Well minor champagne moment, I’ve recently crossed the 1,000 dollar a month MMR with Bluetick, so things are going in the right direction. Of course, because it’s the beginning of the month you look at the statistics for growth and stuff like that and they’re just tanked at the bottom which because it’s the beginning of the month instead of the end.
Rob: I know you’ve got preorders up front but this is active customers right, these are people that are actually using it and not people who have paid you and are planning to use it.
Mike: Yes, these are people who have paid me and are currently using it.
[00:03:00]
Rob: Sounds good.
Mike: Yeah, most of the people I had who had come in as preorders and then converted over into paying customers, a lot of them I had essentially applied credits to their account to give them credit for that preorder to some extent, mostly to kind of boost them over from being a preorder and kind of having an indefinite beta period over to like being a paid customer and those payments are I think going to be starting to kick in this month but even with all of that it’s still over 1,000 dollars a month and my goal for this month is to double it but we’ll see how that goes.
Rob: Wahoo, a 1,000 bucks a month man.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Are you going to Disneyland, are you going to go out and buy a new car?
Mike: No, I had a beer last night, that was about it.
Rob: Nice, that was your champagne moment, was to drink a beer.
Mike: Yeah, champagne, beer, I’m sure somebody’s going to have a coronary over that analogy.
Rob: Nice, do you feel like the pace is picking up in terms of how quickly you’re adding customers?
Mike: It is and that’s both intentional but also as a byproduct of people talking about it because they are
[00:04:00]
Mike: using it and they’re having good experiences so they’re turning around and referring other people to it and saying hey I’ve been using this and it’s been working really well for me, that and coupled with some of my outreach efforts, they’re either going on podcasts or talking to people who are on mail lists. It’s a combination of things but I’m definitely pursuing things a lot more in that regard as well and it’s unfortunately a juggling act too because there are things that come in and people say hey, can it do this or can this be modified, can we add a feature or a function over here that does X, Y or Z and it’s prioritizing those against all of the other things that are going on, it’s really pretty hard.
Rob: Yeah, that’s how it always is right, especially in the early days man, it’s tough. That’s why starting on your own and really being the single founder is such a hard road to go if you’re going to build an app like this that’s not in a small niche market where you can move slow and there’s no competition and you can kind of trudge along but building something like this, where there is competition and you’re going to have to be keeping up, you need to get to the place where you’re keeping up enough revenue to basically hire somebody
[00:05:00]
Rob: soon and essentially, Justin Calcian says hire your cofounders, right that’s what he does now. He doesn’t have cofounders but he hires really early because he races around and he has a little he can back it with and he’s able to give our less equity but he brings people in very early, you don’t see him building something solo or alone because there’s just too much to do when you’re launching something that you want to see grow pretty quickly and it’s in a big market.
Mike: Yeah, I meant there is definitely things that are kind of falling on the floor right now, I mean 1 thing that’s been sitting on my to do list for well over like a couple of months at this point has been working on the sales website and even people who come through the sales funnel when I start talking to them, the biggest chuck of questions that they have is kind of what does this actually do, because the website doesn’t explain it very well and really the website is just 1 page, so there’s not a whole lot of explaining that it can do on that 1 page, it doesn’t provide use cases or examples or screenshots really, I mean there is very little there to go off. Most people are really reliant on what they’ve been told by other people or what they’ve heard about either from me or from other places where I’ve
[00:06:00]
Mike: done like a podcast interview or something like that.
Rob: You know it’s really cool when you say that some of your new customers are coming from other people using like word of mouth was a big driver in the early days of Drip, not as much with hit tail but there was some but if you have that already, like if you have that when you only have low double digit number of customers, that’s a good sign, right it’s a really good sign because as you grow that’s just a snow ball that allows you to continue kind of leveling up and when you add 100 or a1,000 if you still get that same percentage of people, you’ll always be lower as time goes on right but if you can get folks talking about it, it’s a really nice way to be involved in every conversation right, you always want people to say remember how like infusionsoft and Ontraport, it was always just the 2 of them and just by nature of that fact Ontraport which is nowhere near the product that infusionsoft is, you know had all of this growth and then I remember when Drip started to be part of those conversations when they would say of infusionsoft or Drip and I would like see it, I would say it’s
[00:07:00]
Rob: not in every conversation about it, but I would see it in these online forms, these threads and then get thrown out and I remember when that started happening and it was gaming changing because you just become another viable option rather than a tool that no one has heard about.
Mike: Yeah, 1 of the things I do, I think it was 1 of the 1st questions that I ask in the survey when you go to Bluetick’s website and ask for an invitation code, 1 of the questions in there is where did you hear about this, so from that I’m finding out exactly who people heard about the product from, so it’s nice to be able to track it back to people who either placed preorders or are current customers, I even have 1 customer who like has a bunch of customers that he works with and he’s going to start recommending it to them because he’s had such a good experience with it and they wanted to use it internally 1st and things have gone well in that respect, so now they’re turning it around and going back to their customer base and say hey let’s get you on boarded with this so that we can help you more. So, what about you, what else is new?
Rob: Well, you know as I talk about most weeks most of my updates involve scaling
[00:08:00]
Rob: Drip and hiring people, right. That’s kind of a big focus of mine now, there is some other stuff, I might get into it later depending on how much time we have today but I feel you know we have been pretty consistently, just we’ve had an open job, at least 1 job opening since we got acquired and most times we have either 2 or 3, so we’re constantly, we’re hiring other new front end like IUIUX, new rails folks or new people to help with scaling and I feel like I’m kind of in the groove of hiring at this point, like I’ve gotten pretty good. You know it’s kind of this skill that you go in and out of because when you’re not hiring you forget how to skim through a resume really quick, how to do a quick phone interview, how to do a quick phone interview but we’ve just been doing so many recently that I feel like I’m kind of in the groove of it which I don’t know that I necessarily want to be, hiring people is not an aspiration of mine, like I think we’ve always talked about like my book start small stay small, the small was about head count, not about revenue right. I always want to grow revenue but it’s like I want to keep head count down, but
[00:09:00]
Rob: in this case it’s even just looking ahead as we’re Xing, 2 Xing, 3 Xing every so often it’s pretty frequent that we’re doubling our customer base, we just have to hire a little bit ahead of where we actually are, as well as like I said earlier, being in a competitive space we need to continue delivering features, which as we’ve talked about in the past is harder and harder to do the bigger you get because you spend so much time just maintaining what you already have right, making sure the database is ahead of everybody’s need and the code base and the ques and just all of the stuff that you’re running. So yeah, I guess to summarize we’ve been hiring a lot, I’m hoping we can slow down here pretty soon, we’ve found some really good candidates and I guess it’s getting in the groove of it. I do like doing a bunch of hiring and stopping so that I don’t have to constantly you know being doing it and can kind of focus on other things.
Mike: So, is that going to be the focus of your next book is how to hire people at scale?
Rob: Oh, my gosh seriously. No, it will
[00:10:00]
Rob: definitely not, and like I say it’s super cool when you get a new person on board and you get them up to speed and they start contributing and like Derek and I looked at each other and we’re like we are shipping a lot of features and it’s because there’s all these people you know doing things that used to be either in our lap or we just pull, hey we have a scaling issue so we’d pull 1 developer off of something and now we don’t have too, like we have dedicated people who that’s all they’re doing and I keep saying we’ve hit our stride. I hate to keep using that analogy but it really does feel like we’re getting the right people in the right roles and it’s kind of a good feeling when you do slot somebody in and you see them start shipping things, you’re like man I’m really proud of what we’re putting out even we’re not doing all of the work anymore because you think back when you’re crafting this software or you’re crafting the UI, with Drip that was really all Derek right, it was he and I deciding what to build and me handling everything else but for so long it was all bottle necked by 1 or 2 people’s bandwidth but now with the growing team it’s neat to see that
[00:11:00]
Rob: we’re able to maintain the efficiency and still continue that hiring more people actually means we can push out more software rather than in other companies I worked at where hiring more people actually makes things worse, you know it like slows everybody down.
Mike: Yeah, I definitely hear what you’re saying. Do you find that as you are adding more features that like the individual features that you’re adding tend to be more invasive throughout the entire course of the apps, so it’s not like a little surface thing that you can toggle here or add over there, it’s like you’re adding this feature that needs to be added throughout a large part of the pipeline of the applications?
Rob: You know that doesn’t come up too much to be honest. I think in the early days it did because you’re just trying to get to that point where you built something that people want, but I think these days our product is so much more mature that there are things we add now and again that impact everything but our architecture is really solid, so things are broken out into their own subsystems and such. While there certainly are some that come through for
[00:12:00]
Rob: the most part a lot of these things seem to be more self contained I’ll say, I mean it may impact 5 files or worst case 10 files and you have to go through all of these layers of something and those are the ones that get a little scary right because you’ve got to make sure you have unit test coverage like crazy on that but yeah, I would imagine you’re probably in that boat though right where kind of everything you add it’s like oh gosh I have to go rearchitect this thing in order to do it.
Mike: Yeah, and that’s kind of why I was asking because I find that a lot of the changes that I’m making tend to be stuff that have to be tracked down or tracked all the way through from the front end all the way through the API and then into the service layer and the security layer and then into the database and it gets to be, I don’t want to say frustrating but it takes a lot longer to get some of those things done than I would like especially because of all of the maintenance and ongoing requests or butt fixes and things like that, there are just tweaks and adjustments that kind of invade into that space while I’m trying to get those things done, it’s
[00:13:00]
Mike: just, it’s honestly like the juggling act right now is really pretty hard, so I was just kind of curious of whether or not you still ran into those things, so maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel for me.
Rob: Yeah, yeah there is but it takes a while. I remember we refactored Drip, like major database refractor probably twice before we got to launch right, so Derek broke ground on code December of 2012 and we really launched to the world in November of 2013 but we had kind of our 1st group of 10, 20 customers coming on as early as June of 2013, so that was 7 months in and I think within that 1st 6 months before we really had people he had to do a massive rip apart of things we just had made decision to couple and they shouldn’t have been coupled and then there was another 1 when we launched, automation right so that was early 2014 as he was building automation that was just painful, it was like 2 months of standing still and then he built automation, once he had it done the automation stuff was actually not so hard to build but it was like we have to rip
[00:14:00]
Rob: separate these 2 database tables and you know as you’re falling down making your parachute and it was gnarly but after that like once we hit there, we’ve had limited need to do that because I think the building blocks got in place and the product was solidified. Now us marking automation and we’re not going to add on shipping cart landing page, affiliate marketing management, you know what whatever else, that would all I think impact some of this other stuff where as you’re still figuring out, like where I would guess at your stage, we were still figuring out I should say, so really trying to figure out should I build this feature, what is this product going to become, what is the vision for the product and is my vision still aligning with what the market is asking for and that makes things very fluid, I think is probably a good word for it.
Mike: Yeah, I’m having the same types of general conversations with most people when it comes to either features that they want implemented, like the road map that I have in my head, it’s obviously different than I originally started out with but over the past several months it really hasn’t changed a lot and most of my time is spent trying to
[00:15:00]
Mike: get those things done, so that’s more of the challenge, it’s not trying to figure out what to do, it’s figuring out what order to do it in and how to get it out as quickly as possible without wrecking things along the way because like you said, there’s that issue where if you go to roll out a new feature or a new piece of the code, if it touches a bunch of different pieces of the application and you don’t have as many unit test around it as you would like than it’s a little scary to hit that deploy button. So most of the time what I do is I deploy it out to my development server and I just try to beat on it a little bit to see like can I break this or is there any obvious things that I might have missed that may not be covered by unit tests because the front of the UI, like there’s very little unit tests are on the front end stuff, like the services and all of the back end stuff, like there is unit tests there but the front end is not tested well but that’s also because I know that the front end is changing a lot, so it’s much harder to put something in place where I’m just going to have to change all of those things anyway.
Rob: Right, and
[00:16:00]
Rob: you know the front end unit testing, which I guess now becomes what integration or system testing, there’s like a different name for it when you’re going all the way from the top down, that’s stuff runs super slow right and I consider it a more advanced method of testing, not a bad thing to have for some critical paths, I think it’s just my opinion, others may disagree with me but it’s like your sign up flow yeah you should probably have, it would be nice to have a nice UI test for that and maybe sending a broadcast in the sense of marketing, I mean it’s your basically fundamental things but A I would not be testing settings pages or like little corners of the apple out that people don’t use and I’ve heard of folks who separate those front end tests that hit that UI into a completely different test sweep because they can take 30 minutes to run or an hour to run, because they are so slow because they have to speed up browser instances and click on things. So, I don’t know, I would say at this point you will be better off annually QA your stuff and then just having unit tests below the surface, that’s probably what I would have. I don’t think I would spend a bunch of time doing UI tests yet. I actually don’t think the UI
[00:17:00]
Rob: testing suites are that still, they’re still not that great.
Mike: Oh, they’re terrible.
Rob: I know, I was using Selenium in 2008 maybe, 2007 to 2009 in there to test on an invoice and it was horrendous and I’ve heard there’s like another layer now built on top of Selenium and I heard it’s still not that great.
Mike: Yeah, I poked around it a little bit but realized that there was just too many things changes to really make any sort of difference and it wasn’t worth going down that road. I mean the API and stuff gets tested and some of the different layers but you know once it’s passed that, I mean the front end of the app, it’s all this massive Java script application because it’s all written in angular so there’s not much there other than the smoke tests in that if I make a change on the front end UI I can be reasonably assured that the APIs and stuff underneath are working but that’s no guarantee that if you click on a button it’s still going to do what it’s supposed to do.
Rob: Sure, and that’s where I think about having code that doesn’t have a bunch of side effects on it or places on it so if you’re working in a
[00:18:00]
Rob: certain part of code you know that you don’t have to go test all of these other things right, that you can test this 1 thing and be fairly confident that you’re not going to break something in the UI and do a cursory test as you deploy it and then just let your customer finds your bugs, no I’m only kidding. That’s like the worst, some of our competitors do that and it has tarnished their reputation.
Mike: Yeah if I can find and fix a bug before the customer ever sees it or knows that it was an issue than that’s the probably ideal scenario but it’s still hard, I mean I’m just constrained on resources and time and speaking of time, things have gotten even worse for me because as of 3 days ago my wife acquired a larger fitness studio here in town, so commence schedule craziness at this point. It’s just her schedule is all over the place and obviously, mine is pretty swamped as it is, so just kind of trying to overlap enough so that we make sure that the kids are taking care of and dinner is ready and all of the other stuff that needs to be taken care of
[00:19:00]
Mike: is done and out of the way is really been super challenging in the past couple of days.
Rob: 2 people running business in the house, that is tough. I can imagine that is really complicated and having flexible schedules sounds great until you realize that like 2 people with flexible schedules is chaos, like Sherry and I have run into that in the past where it’s like I think I have a flexible scheduled but like you said, you actually have kids and you have like some other responsibilities to get kids picked up and get dinner made and this kind of stuff, so I totally get it.
Mike: Plus our youngest was sick yesterday, so it was either yesterday or the day before, 1 of the days this week he ended up staying home from school and then last night he had a fever and we thought he was going to be home again from school today and it turned out he was fine, but it’s hard to juggle all of that stuff and then plus with her new business, I mean it’s a larger business so she’s got multiple contractors that she didn’t have before and there are scheduling issues, and moving to a new space
[00:20:00]
Mike: and new software and all of this other stuff that goes with it, it’s a pretty large learning curve is what it comes down too.
Rob: Yeah, I bet man. Well good for her, big congratulations to the both you I guess for her acquiring that studio, sounds kind of cool. I bet that’s a good move for her to kind of up her game, she’s leveling up, stair stepping up if you will, boom.
Mike: yeah.
Rob: how involved are you in her business?
Mike: You know I help look at the business financials and stuff early on but beyond that stuff and just kind of verifying hey is this a good move to make, I really try to kind of stay out of it. Just kind of point out here’s something that you might run into or here’s something else that could be an issue or just don’t worry about this over here, but just kind of try and stay aways from it. I mean that’s kind of her thing so I’m not trying to get in the way, is really what it comes down too, trying to stay out of the way.
Rob: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, speaking of all of the scheduling madness and how to juggle that, Sherry and I made the decision early in the year actually, we were talking to
[00:21:00]
Rob: someone who said they had an au pair and an au pair is someone who is typically young woman who comes from oversees and wants to come to America and is basically like a live in nanny. So, we were talking to someone who had an au pair and said it was life changing and said it was the best decision ever and so I started noodling on it and we realized that we were both going to MicroConf and I was going to be gone for a week or like 6 days and Sherry was going to be gone for like 4 or 5 and every time we go away for overnights A, it’s expensive, really expensive to hire someone to watch your kids overnight and then there’s always they don’t know your routine and they don’t know your house and there’s just so much to communicate that it’s super stressful. So, we’re just like let’s hire a live in nanny, like let’s see if we can find essentially a local au pair, you know, someone who Sherry was like a young college student would be prefect right, and so we did. So, I interviewed, I don’t even know a dozen people here in Minneapolis and right before MicroConf, like the week before she moved in and she lives in, we have like a basement living suite, it has everything except
[00:22:00]
Rob: for a kitchen right, so it has a full bath or a 3 quarter bath and then it has laundry and a bedroom and then we share the kitchen but it has been game changing man and for exactly the reason you said, it’s like sometimes Sherry and I just are 30 minutes off of where we’re not going to be there and the kids are going to be there or sometimes we need to be in 2 places at once or Sherry goes out of town, she went out of town for like 4 or 5 days to Austin for a yoga, some training in aero yoga and it’s like during that time I could handle the kids but they get on the bus at 9 15 in the morning and so that would put me to work at 9 40 and now it’s like you don’t need to be around that much to watch the kids because they’re both in school but I can leave at 8 30 or whatever and someone is just kind of hanging out with them for 45 minutes, so it has been game changing for us.
Mike: Yeah, I can imagine. I mean that’s something that we’re kind of struggling with right now is just trying to manage schedules and it’s just really so early on, but you know hopefully that will straighten itself out but I would love to have a nanny.
Rob: I know, it’s something to think about long term
[00:23:00]
Rob: man, I mean especially 2 people running businesses right, the idea is your schedules are going to be gnarly and in the long run the business should generate a lot of cash, right. I mean it should turn out more money than you would make with a salaried employee and with those 2 things in mind it’s like all right, then we outsource as much as we can and that’s you know, if you’re still mowing your own lawn or snow blowing your own snow I think that honestly, I think that’s not a good use of our time as entrepreneurs. We moved to Minneapolis and 1 of the 1st things that I did, we already had a lawn service but I was thinking like I’m not shoveling walks and it’s not because I’m above it, I used to do it but now the time versus money trade off is insane. So anyway, that’s kind of my soap box about outsourcing stuff and of course I’m not talking about outsourcing someone raising my children of course, I know that’s probably the joke or what folks are thinking, but it is like outsourcing driving them from school to the house, or outsourcing our live in nanny like the kids go to bed at 8 or 8 30 and so she’s hanging out in her room reading and
[00:24:00]
Rob: Sherry and I are like it’s 8 30, we’re just going to go out for 2 hours and like have a late dinner and have drinks and talk and you don’t have to hire somebody, there’s no clock running where you’re paying somebody 15 bucks an hour while you’re sitting down the street at a restaurant. I think that about wraps us up for the day, if you have a question for us call our voice mail number at 1 888 801 9690. No one ever calls us anymore.
Mike: They don’t love us.
Rob: I know, we get like 1 call every 2 months. I tell you what if you want us to answer like go to the top of the queue of questions, just call it in because we get so few of them and they’re fun because you get to hear the person’s voice, you can remain anonymous, you don’t have to say your name or your URL if you don’t want too but it’s kind of nice to get those every now and then. You can also email us questions at questions at startups for the rest of us dot com. Our theme music is an exert from We’re Out of Control by Moot and it’s used under creative comments. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit Startups for The Rest of Us dot com for a full transcript of each and every episode.
[00:25:00]
Rob: Although you know what Mike, did you hear that our transcription service again, this is like the 5th 1 we’ve used, they just like disappeared. I know, this happens like probably once a year. I seriously think, we’ll we’ve been doing the podcast for 6 years maybe, 5 or 6.
Mike: Something like that.
Rob: And I literally think we’ve gone through more than a half of dozen of these.
Mike: Are we at 7 now, 7 years?
Rob: Are we? Was it 2010?
Mike: I think so, yeah it was.
Rob: Gosh, dude we are old.
Mike: I know, our podcast is older than most businesses who listen to us.
Rob: Yeah, I know our podcast is older than a lot of children. All right, so anyway transcription service I think Josh, our editor is looking for 1 right now, but it’s just funny how these things just come and go. I guess it’s just such a commodity you know, it’s tough to stand out.
Mike: Well I think that’s the issue with all of them and I think that’s why they come and go because you get the transcriptions and they go for a while and they have a really hard time raising the price because most of them tier their pricing
[00:26:00]
Mike: in terms of how quickly you get it, like oh if you need it in 24 hours this is what it will cost and it’ll be some outrageous number and then it goes down if you don’t need it for like a week or so and that’s the issues is that there’s that race to the bottom in terms of getting it transcribed and I think that most of them just can’t make ends meet and it’s not just because they don’t have enough business but it’s because they’re not able to pay enough for those people and the business just kinds of implodes at some point.
Rob: All right, back to the outro here. Visit Startups for The Rest of Us dot com for a full transcript of each episode. Thank you for listening and we’ll see you next time.
[00:26:36]
Episode 338 | How To Rank #1 for a High-Volume Organic Keyword in Under 3 Months
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about how to rank number one for a high-volume organic keyword in under 3 months. Based on a case study posted by Moz.com, the guys give their opinions on the eight steps listed in the blog post.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discuss how to rank number 1 for a high volume organic key word in under 3 months. This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 338. Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching and growing software products, whether you’ve built your 1st product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re going to share our experience to help you avoid the same mistakes we made. What’s the word this week, sir?
Mike: Well, I’m spending most of my time these days working on support issues and as I on board people more often, what I’m finding more often is that there’s certain usability issues that keep coming up and I have to keep going back and either help people get through them and then go see what it takes to fix them or just kind of implement the work arounds for them. Then on the other side of it is fixing some outright bugs that I found, which were not obvious. Most of them are just little things like
[00:01:00]
Mike: sorting issues or stuff like that that’s just affecting the UI, but it’s going pretty well so far. Kind of exciting I guess.
Rob: Yeah. There’s 2 sides to this, right? It’s like, on the 1 hand, you don’t want to be spending time working on this stuff and trying to work out kinks and improving usability and all that stuff because you just wish it was done. But on the flip side, you know that these are problems that, at scale, are going to be even worse, right? At 50, 100 or 1,000 users, you need to fix them now. There’s that needing to invest the time, but also it feeling really productive, you know? I don’t know. Like you’re ironing out the rough burs, the rough edges of the product and just smoothing it out over time. I think that this is where you want to be, right? You don’t want to be where you were whatever, 6 months ago and you have 0 customers and is there people using it? It’s like, you don’t know what you should be working on technically. You know? You’re kind of flailing around and it’s like, now there’s people using it and it’s probably pretty obvious what you should be fixing at what point in time.
[00:02:00]
Mike: Yeah. As you quoted, like the rough edges. That’s kind of what I’m spending part of my time on and then figuring out how to fix it. It’s 1 thing to know what is busted and where you need to spend your time, but it’s another to figure out how to do it, so that it’s clearer. Obviously, you wouldn’t design a product that you thought was confusing, but at the same time, when other people get in there and use it, they weren’t inside your head when you designed it. They don’t have the same perspective.
Rob: On my end, this actually is a pretty good week for us. We turned the corner on some scaling challenges that we’d been working on for well, I mean we’ve been working on them for years. You know? They just come back every 6 months. You get just enough ahead of them that you scale up again and then they rear their ugly head. Every time we, I don’t know. Maybe it’s 2 to 3 X, the user base, we see stuff again. In the early days like, well just add an index to the database or add more hardware. But you hit a point where you kind of start exceeding the physical bounds of a single database. You know? You’ll
[00:03:00]
Rob: get a quarter or a half terabyte of RAM and disc IOPS through the roof and it’s expensive. You still just, it isn’t making enough of a difference. We’ve had to circle back and we attack it from a bunch of different directions. We’ve re architected some things. We’ve actually piped some new relic stuff that allows us to really see some detailed traces and we’re seeing, you know? There are some query issues, but there’s also code issues that creep in as you write more stuff where you’re doing N plus 1 queries, in essence. So, we’ve just started to see those creep in and as we’ve been pulling them out, we’re seeing these incremental bumps. We’ve pushed like, 3 or 4 developers pushed 7 different performance improvements over the past maybe, there was a week where we did 7. Then this week, we’ve probably done 3 or 4. It just little by little, it is just making the throughput so much higher, so much faster. We’re sending between 2 and 4 times the volume of email right now than we were even 3 or 4 weeks ago. It’s pretty crazy when you think about it that way. It was
[00:04:00]
Rob: a bit of work to get there, but once this stuff started rolling, it really made a big difference.
Mike: Yeah, it’s funny you mention performance improvements and that. I just rolled one out this week where people can go through and they can identify who has sent them emails and who they’ve received emails from and how many of those in each direction. There was a performance issue earlier where it was just a little bit slower than it should have been and it wasn’t returning all results because there were so many. Just pushed out a fix this week where it’s lightning fast now. It’s amazing how much better the experience of the app is just from those little improvements.
Rob: Yeah. It’s super cool. Sometimes it’s noticeable by users and other times it’s not, but you know that even if users aren’t noticing yet that it’s eventually going to catch up with you. It’s nice to get that done. I remember the days where we’d have a customer with 3 or 400,000 emails in their account. They’d do a big send and we’d be like, man we can totally handle this, but as long as another big sender doesn’t send at the same time. Now it’s just common place. I mean, for 3 lists of 3 to
[00:05:00]
Rob: 500,000 to send within minutes of each other. We’ve gotten to the point now where it’s like, we can hammer through that stuff. It really is just like climbing that mountain and doing things that you never think you’re going to have to do. Denormalizing databases, starting to shard things. Right now considering stripping a table out and literally putting it into a different kind of data store. I mean, just crazy stuff you would never architect from the start when you’re building an app. It would be gold plating when you don’t have any users, but when you do hit scale and you have tens of thousands of people using your app, it is necessary.
Mike: Yeah. I was talking to somebody. I think it was Help Scout at Micro Conf and he was asking me about how some of the back end stuff of Blue Tick was done and I didn’t tell him because it just didn’t occur to me, but the back end data store for the mail, I rewrote it 4 times over the course of 8 months just because it needed to go bigger and faster and it just wasn’t doing it at the time.
Rob: Yeah. It’s crazy how the stuff that you need to do in order to make it work from an engineering prospective, you wouldn’t ever want to do because you’re like, I want to have referential integrity on these things. At some point, you realize that
[00:06:00]
Rob: speed trumps that.
Mike: Yeah. We interviewed a [UNKNOWN] architect this week. We have an open position for that right now to just help handle this because we’re trying to build the product and it just really is a completely separate discipline of being able to scale things to this level. One thing he brought up, which I hadn’t heard of, but as soon as he said it, it made sense. He brought up CAP theorem. C A P. C is consistency. A is availability and P is performance and you get to pick 2. He said, in most databases or most apps, you go for C and P and your availability is 99 point whatever percent and it’s fine because if you were to go down for like, an hour, it’s not catastrophic. But if you pick the other 2, it’s just trade offs, but he said at a certain point, once you scale, there’s a bunch of big companies in town, like Target and Best Buy who run these massive e commerce sites and he was saying once you scale one of those sites, you have to give up some consistency. You have to have availability because it’s millions of dollars per hour and you have to have performance because obviously being slow is costing money.
[00:07:00]
Mike: So, you give up consistency and you have to dealing with that. You have to start writing code and you have to start thinking about what happens when it all doesn’t sync up? There isn’t referential integrity in this certain instance and data consistency in the reports are just not going to be exactly matched across everything. It’s pretty fascinating. Today we’re going to talk about how to rank number 1 for high volume organic key word under 3 months and this is based on an article on moz.com, actually on their blog. It’s a case study that Pipe Drive co wrote with Moz and it was the former Director of Content Marketing at Pipe Drive is where the case study took place. This article is detailed. It’s very long. We actually won’t be able to cover in depth every step, but there are 8 steps that they talk about and we, at a minimum will cover the 8 steps and then go into as much detail as we can, given the time constraints. Then you, of course can come to the show notes at startupsfortherestofus.com. This is episode 338 and click on the link if you want to read the entire article. This thing,
[00:08:00]
Mike: I didn’t do a word count, but it’s got to be like 4 or 5,000 words. Pretty cool. The article starts by outlining the 8 steps and we’ll go through those 1 at a time. They talk about how much more difficult SEO has gotten and that SEO these days is much more about content and content marketing, whereas it used to be more about just straight up link building and it was a lot easier to game and Google has done a really good job of essentially closing those loopholes, much to the chagrin of a lot of marketers I know. Let’s dive right in with these 8 steps. They basically said they got a top search engine ranking position, which is a SERP spot. It was a focus of a 3 person team for a better part of 3 months to get this. It’s pretty crazy. They invested a lot of energy in it. Step 1 is to find a good topic, one that has significant key word volume and he goes right into the Google key word planner where he said when they ran the search, they picked a key word with 9,900 searches per month and we’ll go into why that’s enough later on. Now, the key word planner doesn’t even get you that close. It gives
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Mike: you like, 1 to 10 K range, which is like, horrendously helpful. He said the same key word, how to search volume of 1 point 7 to 2 point 9 K in the Moz key word explorer in case you have a Moz account. They give you tools to help do this kind of stuff to help rank for key words. He looked at a chart that Moz had published and they said that if you ranked 1st for a term, you’re likely to get, it was like 30 or 32 percent of the clicks. If you rank 2nd, it’s about 14 percent and if you’re a 3rd, it’s about 10 percent. They figured that if they can rank 1st for this 9,900 search term, they would get around 3,000 visitors a month for a top position. If they could convert 5 percent into leads, which I’m assuming they are trying to email capture. I’m assuming they’re thinking about that. That would net them 1,800 leads a year, which they said it would justify the time. That’s kind of the 1st part of the 1st step of finding a good topic, is to make sure there’s enough volume that if you rank 1st,
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Mike: given whatever it is you’re email capturing or trial rate or whatever it is you think you can do that it’s going to be justified time wise and financially.
Rob: I think the thing I take away from this, in selecting the right topic is more about doing the back of the envelope calculations to figure out what you should be going after based on what your return on that is going to be and it’s not so much about a specific raw number that you’re going for in terms of the search volume. It’s more about how many of those people you can convert to leads because if you’re conversion rate is higher than other peoples based on your content, then target search terms that have lower search volume because they’re going to be worth just as much or more to you than they would be to somebody else, assuming that you can convert them better. I kind of like that idea of starting from this side of it and not focus in solely on, what should we focus on for content or what should our ad line be or anything like that? It’s really about what your ROI is going to be on that.
Mike: Continuing with step 1, which was finding a good topic, the 2nd thing they looked at was to pick a winnable topic. This is actually where Moz is really handy. They said for example, if you’re trying for content marketing,
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Mike: the 1st page is dominated by the Content Marketing Institute and they have a domain authority of 84 and that is very high. It’s a scale of 1 to 100. What they did is they looked at Moz Bar, which is just like a Chrome plug in and you can check domain authority and page authority on the fly. It overlays them in Google. There’s a screen shot of it here in the post. They looked at a bunch of different key words that had search volumes between, I think it was like, at least 3 to 10,000. That’s kind of where they were thinking. They were searching for like, sales management. They were using page authorities in the 30’s and 40’s. Domain authorities, there was 40’s, 70’s, 30’s and 20’s. Given that some of these 20’s and 30’s, they knew that they could kind of get in and then they used Moz key word explorer to look at the actual difficulty versus the potential scores. Then they kind of outlined some loose ranges. You want your opportunity to be above 50 and your potential to be above a certain amount. There’s obviously a bunch of different ways to do this. I have always used Moz for
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Mike: this kind of stuff. I know there are other tools that do it, but their data is solid and they’ve been around a long time. At this point, they wound up with 4 key words. Sales techniques, sales process, sales management and sales forecast. One of them has 4,400 searches and then it goes up to in the 8’s and 9,000’s and they said any of the above would work for them, but for added impact, they added a 3rd and final filter to help them pick the key word and that is strategic relevance. If you’re going to turn your visitors into leads, they say it’s important to focus on key words that are strategically relevant to your conversion goals, and in their case, sales management is the optimal key word because Pipe Drive is a sales management tool. It described them perfectly. In contrast, sales techniques and sales forecast are key words a salesperson would search for, not a sales leader or a small business owner who would be a decision maker to decide to buy Pipe Drive. It’s pretty in depth here, but it’s something to think about, right? If you see a key word with low difficulty and high search throughput you think you can rank for, it may not actually
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Mike: be that helpful, right? If it’s not strategically relevant to your business.
Rob: I like the fact that they point out in the article that you’re looking for a competitive score of under 50 and a potential or opportunity score of above 50. I don’t know if that side of it is so important to me or at least it wasn’t when I started out, but knowing that under a score of 50 for difficulty is a lot easier to rank for and it is possible to get it than going over that. I mean, even trying for things that are in the 50’s or 60’s, those can be very, very difficult to get, especially if you’re going against certain types of companies, trying to rank against them for those terms can be really, really hard, but anything below 50 is not actually all that difficult to do, especially if you are kind of limited in the amount of time that you can spend on it in your budget, those things are definitely attainable for the average person.
Mike: Step 2 is to write a bad ass piece of content. That’s the words they use in the article. Theirs is broken up into multiple parts. The 1st is extremely thorough research of the
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Mike: existing ones that rank in the top and they kind of look through them and figured out what works, what doesn’t, what are they like both from a reader’s perspective and with an SEO eye in mind? When the pages had way too many headlines, it was over key word stuffed, basically. Then they looked for anomalies and 1 thing that caught their eye was 2 of the top 10 results were dedicated to the key word sales manager, so they realized all right, we know that we’re going to want to talk about at least sales managers in our article. Then this was 1 I hadn’t seen before. I went all the way down to the bottom of the SERPs and there’s a related searches thing that Google puts there. They looked through for those terms and they realized we probably want to include some of these in there. Part 2 of this, of writing the piece of content is the actual content creation. They say you don’t need to be a subject matter expert, but if you do a lot of research, you can put something together and they go through some steps on how to write, I don’t think it’s super relevant here, but it’s like, don’t multitask and work alone and put on some play lists and such.
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Mike: Personally, I like Spotify’s Deep Focus. They have a different one. Then they talk about going through and adding images and adding headers, subsections and all that. That really caps out step 2. As I said, they go into more detail, but it’s almost like its own little article on just how to write a decent piece of content.
Rob: Yeah. The 1 piece that I took away from this is paying attention to the part at the bottom where it says, searches related to, in this case, it was sales management and you can use those for kind of off shoots. If you want to create dedicated pages for each of those. In this case, they’ve got objectives of sales management and sales management PDFs. Those are the types of things you could target as a secondary page with a different article and trying to drive related traffic to those pages as well. I think that’s a perfectly vital strategy, especially when it comes to things like where people are searching for PDFs and you can give them a PDF of, like a template or something like that. Lots of people have used that strategy where it’s like they drive people to that page
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Rob: using SEO because they’re specifically looking for something that they can download. You give it to them in exchange for an email address and that’s one way to drive up the level of your email list.
Mike: Step 3 is to optimize on page SEO and engagement metrics. This is the steps they took to optimize the on page SEO. Number 1 is to fix the title. They wanted traffic from people searching for words related to sales management, such as sales management definition, sales management process, sales management strategies, sales management resources and so, their headline, their title and their H1 tag is Sales Management Definition, Process, Strategies and Resources. So, they covered them all right there in the headline. It says Google is now smart enough to know that a single article can cover multiple related key words. The common [UNKNOWN] to the list, they said should work for them.
Rob: I wonder how long it is before Google realizes that people are key word stuffing into headlines now.
Mike: I know. Well, it’s interesting because if that’s all you’re doing, it’s not going to work. You know? It’s all this other stuff they did that then propels that to work. You know?
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Mike: It’s writing this massive piece of content, spending months doing all this optimization. So, part 2 of that is to fix section headings. One example is instead of writing Sales Management Definition as a header, they actually wrote the header as, it’s a sub heading, but it is, So, What is Sales Management, question mark. It’s an actual question a reader might ask. 1, it makes the article easier and better to read, but 2, it’s a natural question, which makes it more likely to rank for voice searches and for Google’s answer. This is good stuff. They also peppered related key words in the headers throughout the article. Later on, they realize they key word stuffed, basically. They actually go back and roll this back a bit. Then the 3rd step was to improve content engagement, like they have colons and line breaks and internal links and outgoing links. They just make things kind of easier to skim and easier to read. The 4th thing, I had heard this as kind of a rumor that this might exist in the Google algorithm, is to shorten the URL. There’s this graph they include where the longer your URL,
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Mike: the less likely you are to rank for number 1. It’s fascinating. They have these really long blog URLs. They just shorten this way down. They essentially just have sales dash management, aside from the date in the URL. Then they improve the key word density. Obviously including the key word in the 1st hundred words of your content is kind of a well known thing, but then they talk about going through it and adding a glossary at the bottom, so they can include a few more key words. They do point out how important it is to make these as organic as possible because otherwise, it looks and feels like key word stuffing and Google and users are pretty smart about this stuff. They said, as a result of the on page key word optimization that their traffic went up and they have a screen shot of 19,000 page views. As they say, we over optimize key word density in the beginning, which slightly hurt rankings, but once we stopped this, we changed things around and saw an immediate improvement. We’ll get to that in a step or 2 later. They don’t show that 19,000 page views, they don’t show what the time frame is on that, but they did indicate
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Mike: that this definitely had a positive impact on the post.
Rob: You know, I do wonder if adding, what is blank and adding in the key word is something that Google specifically looks for. The reason I think that is, or at least I kind of have an inkling of that is when I was doing Audit Shark, I had a bunch of pages that said, what is blank. So, for example, what is compliance management and if you would look around for compliance just in general, then that’s a very difficult thing to rank for just because there is all these different compliance institutions and it’s government regulations and it’s really difficult to rank against those, but if you go out and search for, what is compliance management, Audit Shark’s website actually ranks higher than the fdic.gov website for, what is compliance management system.
Mike: That’s crazy. Should you sell that? You should sell it to the FDIC. Hey guys. I have this site that ranks above you.
Rob: Right. But I wonder if that is something that specifically Google looks for. What is blank and whatever that key word is.
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Mike: Yep. Totally. I would totally imagine that’s part of it, I think. More and more of these voice searches are happening in the Google answer stuff. I think it’s become more common for people to search like that as it has worked better. So, step 4 is to build internal links to the article and that means linking to this article from other articles that you have. It talks about how Google bot discovers your content by crawling your links and it also tells Google that this page is important if a lot of your pages link to it. You don’t want to just put a link in a header or footer. You actually want to link from individual pages in your site and kind of pick the right key words to link through. You look for high traffic. You look for high page authority and then they have a kind of site colon search you can do on your own website to find these key words that you want to use that appear in your other posts. You can link them out. This gives you just that basis of page authority on this new article.
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Mike: Step 5 is stepping out and finding external link targets, meaning external links that will target you.
Rob: So, just to kind of clarify what Robert said, this is a little bit different than putting a footer on your website and having pages that you basically put a site map in place. This is specifically looking through your site where you refer to these terms whether it’s in your blog posts or in different articles or white paper pages, point those back to the page that you’re trying to rank for. It’s very slightly different, but it kind of achieves the same thing. It gets those internal links back and forth inside of your website.
Mike: And as I said, step 5 is finding external websites to link to this new article and they outline using open site explorer, which is a Moz thing, I think. They allow you to crawl the top 10 search results for this term and look at those back links. They dug through a few pages of that, built up a list of a few hundred prospect websites they thought might link to it and it’s a very raw list. Then they
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Mike: only look at domain authority above 30. They eliminated sites that are free hosts, like BlogSpot and wordpress.com and put it in an Excel file. Then they go through finding the email addresses for people on these sites. They used Email Hunter, which is at hunter.io and they did their outreach. They don’t go through specifically what text they use or whatever. This is kind of a slog, right? It’s called outreach and I’m sure that most people, because I get these emails and I just delete them. But I think if you have a compelling case, apparently whether it’s the Pipe Drive name or whether it’s their approach, they said they just outreached like crazy. They used tools like, you could use one of these tools like Mix Max or Lead IQ or Tout, Perspectify. I suppose you could use Blue Tick as well. DO you allow outreach like this?
Rob: Yeah, it is because it’s going out through your own email server, so you could use that. I was actually going to recommend Links Spy, which is linksspy.com from Christoph Engelhard, who has [UNKNOWN] several times and been our scribe on a number of occasions and taken copious notes.
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Rob: So, I would probably point to that instead.
Mike: Instead of open site explorer, right? Because Links Spy views your competitor’s back links.
Rob: Yes, it does. You could use it in conjunction with it as well, but Link Spy also has the built in capabilities to reach out to people who have those other sites, so you could use it to do that outreach step.
Mike: Yep. I’m glad you pointed that out. I remember him building that in. I think he has like, boiler plate templates and everything to make it super simple.
Rob: Yep. All the templates and stuff are there already.
Mike: Awesome. This whole outreach step, I’m actually going to skip. I’m going to say you can look at it if you like or you should just go use linksspy.com. That’s links with an S at the end, and then another S for spy. Step 7 of 8 is, they say be prepared to guest post. Guest posting and then when you guest post, you can link back to, within the content of your guest post you can link back to this article. I was doing a ton of guest posting with the aid of the growth marketer, Zack that I’d hired at Drip and it was doing stuff for us. It was sending traffic.
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Mike: Traffic that converted. It was also building up some SEO juice in our blog and guest posting is most certainly not dead. I know at one point, Google said they were going to start penalizing guest posters, but high quality posts on high quality domains, we have never seen any negative repercussions from all of that.
Rob: Yeah. I’m not sure how they would really find out, other than a manual review that it was done by somebody else. It just seems kind of crazy. I mean, don’t get me wrong. Google has got some really smart people that are way smarter than I am.
Mike: Nice.
Rob: Yeah. I don’t know how you would do that at scale.
Mike: I think it’s like byline stuff, right? You can say, this post was written by blah or this was a guest article, this was a guest post. There tends to be certain phrases that are used. They use machine learning. They’re like, translating languages to hundreds of crazy, exotic other languages. I feel like this is a pretty solvable problem using technology like that.
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Rob: All right. Well, let’s leave our idiocy in the dust and go on to step 8.
Mike: Totally. The 8th and final step is something I’d never heard of. They say fine tuning content with TF IDF. TF dash IDF, and it is Term Frequency dash Inverse Document Frequency. I won’t really go into what that means here, but basically it’s a way to analyze a document to figure out, what are the important terms based on how many times they’re used and in what context. They just simply counted up the number of times that sales management occurred in their article. They said it occurred 48 times and their article was 2,500 words and they thought that was just way too much. They hypothesized that they were actually being, not penalized, but they weren’t ranking as high as they should because they looked like they were key word stuffing. They backed it off to 20 and they replaced it with terms that have high lexical relevance to sales management, but were not the exact phrase, sales management. They said that it
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Mike: bumped them up. Their organic page views went from 0 when they started, to over 5,000 in just over 8 months. So, they ranked number 1 for the term in 3, I guess based on the headline of the article and then got these 5,000 recurring page views in 8 months.
Rob: I think if you’re trying to be objective about this, it’s a little difficult to take every single piece of this at face value when it walks through and says this is what we did and this is exactly what happened because there’s so many factors that come into play. Over the course of 8 months, there’s a lot of different things that can happen. Even though they backed off the number of times that sales management came in to the article at a certain time and yes, the search volume went up after that, but it is hard to say that’s exactly why because if you look at the graph that they show, it went up for 2 months and then it went down. Then it kind of meandered a little bit and then it went back up. You know? Over that time period, lots of different things can happen and a lot of them are just
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Rob: completely out of your control. You don’t have any control over the rest of the internet. It’s hard to say definitively like, hey we did X and Y happened, but there’s certainly correlations that you can make between them to say this is the general direction that we wanted things to go. These are the things we did and yes, it went that way. But you can’t put a velocity on those things or a hard metric on every single one of these things.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, that’s SEO. That’s been organic SEO since it became a thing. It’s gotten a lot harder over time. It used to be easier to gain, but you’re right. There is no way to know that this specific change actually did this or was it just coincidentally just something else? You know? So much of it is correlation and if you do it enough times and you can say I’m confident that it’s causation until Google does their next update. But yeah, you’re never going to know for sure, which is tough. That said, there are these best practices. I mean, there’s a lot of things in this article as I read through that I thought yes, that’s what I would do. That’s what I would do. Then there were a bunch of things that were, I kind of called them out. I was like,
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Mike: I hadn’t heard this, but this must be kind of a newer thing. I haven’t been knee deep in SEO for, I mean it was 2 or 3 years ago. I was doing it for Drip. It was a couple years before that, I did it for Hit Tail and I tend to do it in little bursts of, I get up to speed and do it, make a bunch of decisions and then kind of move away and work on the product, but people like this who are literally doing it full time, they’re going to always have, doing so many experiments that they’re going to be kind of at the bleeding edge of these tactics. I think there’s something to be said here, like yeah. You could game Google and you could try to get a piece of crap article up to the top of the results, but it’s like, I’ve always felt like we should all be trying to make the internet a better place. Even when I have used SEO and I’ve optimized to get there, I always thought my content was amazing. Like, it was really high quality content. I would either write it myself or pay a lot of money to have a good writer do it. I feel like if you’re trying to push crap to the top of the results, don’t bother. Don’t do it. It actually makes us all, it makes the results crappy, right?
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Mike: Then it makes the internet a worse place to be. I guess that’s kind of my recommendation. There’s certain people that say you shouldn’t do SEO at all because it just pollutes the internet and I believe that you can do SEO, but in an ethical and high quality way.
Rob: Yeah. That’s not really any different than how some people view marketing. I don’t want to do marketing because it feels sleazy or I don’t want to do sales because it feels scummy and SEO is exactly the same way. I mean, you kind of have to do some level of marketing in order to get your product out there. There’s wrong ways to do it and there’s right ways to do it. This article outlines a mechanism that works so long as you have content that is appropriate to be promoted. That’s it. I think we’ll wrap it up today. If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1 888 801 9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt of We’re out of Control, by Moot used under creative comments. 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.
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