Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike do their annual goals episode. They revisit goals from 2017 and rate how they did as well as look ahead at goals for 2018.
Items mentioned in this episode:
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: Well, when this episode airs, I will be with my family in sunny Florida. We’re planning to hit Legoland and spend a few days at the beach. It’s gonna be a nice time to kind of warm up a bit. It’s supposed to be highs in the single digits here in Minneapolis during that week, so it’s nice to get out away from it, get warm. We actually enjoy Legoland a lot, not just our kids, but I don’t know if you’ve been there, but I enjoy it even as an adult.
Mike: Yeah, I haven’t been to Legoland. We’ve gone to Florida a couple of times for Disney World but I haven’t gone to Legoland yet.
Rob: Yeah, I like it more than the Disney stuff. Less hectic, it’s a little bit less expensive and it’s more building things rather than kind of idolizing characters. I mean there are characters in it but they’re so much about creating things and being constructive. I think that resonates with me as a maker and with our kids as well. Like I said, it’s lower key, there are some rides in there and there’s stuff to do but it’s not like volumed turned up to 11 like I feel – a lot less crowded – I feel Disney is.
Mike: Yeah. The other thing I found with Disney is, like you said, it’s very crowded but also getting to everything is just rather difficult. You kind of have to hone in on the things that you want to do and you’re gonna end up waiting for pretty much anything anyways.
Rob: Right. The park’s so big. The parks are separated. On and on, we had never been to Disney World. We went last year, and I was kinda like, “Yeah, I don’t know if we’re gonna come back. That may be the last time.” Disneyland is fine, it’s a lot smaller but it’s still crowded, and you have the long lines. Legoland, to me, is much more calming and relaxing experience. How about you? What’s going on?
Mike: Well, over the last 20 days, because we’re recording it’s the 21st of December right now, but I’ve had 20 Scotch Whiskeys for my advent calendar. So far, the Glenfarclas and the Peat’s Beast have been the best ones so far, but there’s several other runner ups that are pretty good, been a lot of fun. Interesting so far. There’s some of them that I actually really did not like but most of them I would say, are middle of the road and then there’s a couple that I really liked, and then there’s a couple that I really just did not like.
Rob: That’s super cool. You wake up every morning and have that with your cereal?
Mike: I put it in my cereal.
Rob: That’s awesome, yeah.
Mike: No, I usually have it at the end of the day.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. Other update for me, I’m listening to the book by Tim O’Reilly. It’s called WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. I’m kinda struggling with it. I thought it would blow my mind and so far, I feel mired in kind of theory or just academic thought and I’m hoping that it picks up because I like Tim O’Reilly. I like his writing, he’s a futurist, he sees things before they happen. He’s the guy that named Web 2.0 because he saw what the movement that was happening. I know there’s good stuff in here but I’m about maybe a fifth of the way, maybe 15%, 20% of the way through the book. I’m kinda struggling with it so I’m hoping it gets better because I really wanna make it through. I don’t wanna quit the book.
Mike: Are you listening to the audio book?
Rob: I am, yep.
Mike: I’m surprised that the audiobook is not as, I’ll say, riveting. I mean, business books are not riveting to begin with. But it’s interesting that even the audio book, you think that the pace will be pretty good and it’s not, it sounds like.
Rob: I’m 1.5, no, I think, I’m actually 2X it too. I think a small part of it could be that I was listening to it while I was shoveling, moving some snow out of the driveway. I don’t know. I was paying attention to it but maybe not enough. It’s one of those things where I’m questioning just cause I know how sharp Tim O’Reilly is and how much of his writings have…. Kinda like is it me or is it this book, is the question I’ve been asking. I’ll try to remember to update folks once I’m all done with kind of a final verdict.
Mike: Got it. The only other thing that’s going on for me at the moment is I’m working on a scholarship program for MicroConf Starter Edition. If you’re listening to this and you’re interested in becoming a sponsor for a scholarship ticket or if your company’s interested in just sponsoring MicroConf, drop me an email sponsors@microconf.com and we’ll talk about it. I’m just kinda hacking things together this year. But trying to put something together in place that we’ll be able to kind of reuse moving forward and make things better year over year.
Rob: Yeah, because sponsoring a scholarship is a big deal. It makes an impact on someone who typically can’t otherwise afford to go. We’ve had several people do this now to great success. We can get some people coming to MicroConf who, I think, really get a lot of value out of it but are just early enough in their entrepreneurial journey that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to make it.
Mike: Yeah. We’ve been doing scholarships for probably the past four, five years, I think, at this point. But it’s always been on a very small scale. This is kind of a concerted effort to take things to the next level and not just involve the people who approach us or just hand out scholarships on their own but to involve corporate sponsors and kind of expand the reach of the program a little bit more formalized, I don’t know. I think it’ll turn out to be really interesting. It’s just a matter of how is this actually going to work. There’s a lot of logistics to kind of straighten out. I had a lot of good conversations with people and answer some, I’d say, some difficult questions so far. It’s looking good so far.
Rob: Awesome. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Well, today, we’re gonna be going through our goals for 2018 and to kick us off, we should probably talk about our goals that we set back in episode 318 for our 2017, and see how we did on those.
Rob: Right. Every year we like to do our goals episode where we visit the old ones, look ahead at the next year, and then we also do our predictions episode which we did a couple of weeks ago. How about you? What is your first goal for 2017?
Mike: Well, my first one was to log at least 100 days of exercise this year. I would say that – are we giving ourselves points like one out of five or one of out four on these?
Rob: Seems like one to five scale.
Mike: I would say on this one, I’d probably have to give myself about, I’d say I’d go with a three. I logged about 50 days worth of exercise, and if you remember, I had a partial tear on my rotator cuff, basically four months of that, I just really couldn’t go to the gym. Between my back and my shoulder, there was just no way I was gonna be doing anything. Even with that I still got to 50.
Rob: Good for you.
Mike: How about you? What’s your first one?
Rob: My first one was to not start any new projects in 2017. It was to run the three MicroConfs with you, to continue shipping the two podcasts that I do, to continue working on Drip and to just take a break from the chaos that have been my life when I set this goal, the acquisition had only closed five months or later. I was still reeling from that, looking ahead at 2017 as basically like a rest year or recovery year from just the hard work and the stress and the chaos of growing Drip and then through the acquisition.
I had one exception that I indicated was that I would consider being second author on the Zen Founder book which is now launching very soon. If you go to zenfounder.com/book, you’ll see a landing page there, and you can get on the launch list. It’s turned up really well. It’s called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Shit Together, How To Run Your Business Without Letting It Run You. Sherry did the vast majority of the work but I was involved with writing some copy in it and then contributing a few stories to the book.
I, on this one, give myself a five out of five. That’s not too hard given that part of this was a non-goal that I didn’t want my perpetual restlessness push me into starting something new. But I feel like I did accomplish this just like I set out to do.
Mike: Awesome. My second goal was to make Bluetick profitable including my time. Let’s see here, if I had to give myself a grade on this one, I’d probably give it a two out of five. I definitely did not make it profitable including my time but it is profitable. I feel like there’s at least some level of credit there especially given that it started at basically zero for MRR at the beginning of the year.
Did that public launch back in August to September timeframe, spent the last couple of months working out issue with getting people onboarded and working out various, I’ll say, problems associated with the onboarding process and getting people connected and making it so that they get that value upfront as opposed to much further down the road. I still don’t feel like it’s at a level of like three or four because I just don’t think that I got far enough.
Rob: My second goal was to do one to three angel investments and I give myself a five on this. I was trying to remember exactly how many, but I think, I did three. Yeah, I did three. A couple of them were subsequent, follow-up rounds in existing startups that I’m invested in. Then, there’s at least one new one. I think I kind of accomplished this and it was fun.
I think I don’t have this as a goal for 2018 not because I don’t wanna continue doing investments but I kinda wanna be pretty choosy. I always have been pretty choosy about the businesses that I invest in. I’m kind of just taking them as they show up on the radar. If I hear about them at MicroConf or hear about them on a podcast or someone approaches me. I think it makes a lot of sense for me to do it but I’m not going out seeking. It’s not like some active goal anymore I have.
I think it’s 11 angel investments that I’ve done so it’s not an inconsequential number. I think two or three of those are already out of business which is how it should be. But yeah, I’ve really enjoyed the angel investment and to be honest the best part is that I’m able to live vicariously. I’m still involved in a startup and I can still talk to the founder and I can offer advice. I can be involved in this business but I don’t have to run it day-to-day. That’s been the fun part of it.
Mike: My third goal was to blog publicly at least every two weeks so it’s a total of 26 blog posts. If you recall, I think about three or four months into the year, we’ve gotten together and we kind of pointed out like, “Hey, this is probably not realistic.” Because I haven’t done it so far and it wasn’t something that was really going to make me towards my main goal which was really making Bluetick profitable. We essentially canned that but then in August or September when I did that launch, I did a 21-day video series. That right there is pretty close to having that completed even though I basically canned it several months before. Should I give myself a five on this or are we not just not gonna count it?
Rob: I don’t know. It’s kinda like a ‘not applicable’. Goals changed a few months in. I remember when you first mentioned this I was like, “Really? Are you sure you wanna commit to this?” Then a few months in it was like, “You need to focus on Bluetick. The revenue source.”
My next goal was two days of exercise per week. I definitely accomplished this especially once I learned, through Sherry actually, I learned about the High Intense – Is it High Intensity Interval Training, HIIT? It’s just what I always struggle with is I don’t have a lot of time and I often don’t have the extra time to gear up and run out to the lake and run back because kids are here in the house and I’m watching them. There’s just complexity with me being able to work out. The fact that I can throw on a YouTube video and just get my heart rate way up and be exhausted in 10 or 15 minutes in my own house while my kids are playing legos upstairs, it really changed the game for me.
In addition, I was also riding my bike to and from work three days a week which is five, six miles each way, it’s was a great 22-minute workout each way. Pretty much hit this with flying colors, exceeded it actually, so I give myself a five here. I had many weeks where it was three and four days of exercise per week. I competed for nine years in track, I ran the hurdles, and I competed against people who went to the Olympic trials. We were legit. I trained 30+ hours a week almost year round. Once track ended, I realized that I actually don’t like running.
It was always about the competition. It was the competition and the team that I liked. But I didn’t liked running itself so I struggled to get out there and run even though I used to run a mile warm-up, mile cool down. Then do two miles of intense 400-interval training, just stuff that you would throw up after practice, it was super intense. But exercise is not something that I have ever enjoyed doing in a non-competitive basis. This is probably the first time in a decade or more that I’m actually kinda keeping up with some type of a regimen.
Mike: I guess with that stuff in mind, why don’t we dive in to our 2018 goals? Do you wanna go first?
Rob: For sure. First goal for 2018 is to write a VR program that allows you to roll around on a mattress of Bitcoins. How did this get in here? Are you messing with my list again?
Mike: Maybe a little bit.
Rob: That’s a good one, Mike. I like this.
Mike: I had that idea when I was writing down my goals on our outline. I happened to see some advertisement for some sort of a VR Helmet or VR Goggles or something like that. I was like, “Oh, Bitcoins’ a rage right now. VR is the rage. Why not throw them together?” The part of the advertisement was also the dual-end lightsabers with the VR Helmets.
Rob: I’ll tell you what. This Bitcoin mattress thing, that could make you a thousand-aire overnight.
Mike: Yup. Definitely.
Rob: A thousand-aire idea. My first goal for 2018 may sound odd when I first say it but bear with me on this one. My goal is to be in fewer meetings each week, to get my meeting count to basically under ten hours a week. This is not a symptom of being acquired. It’s a symptom of growing the team, whether I was independent or not, I would be in a lot of conversations. I’m pivotal to a lot of decisions that happen and as the team has grown, I’m called into more and more things to lend my insights, my opinions.
I’m often brought in and I almost feel like a consultant who has knowledge of the space and knowledge of the history of Drip and ‘we wanna run this by you’ and I have another unique insight. Right now I’m in a lot of meetings, don’t enjoy them. I really think back to when we were 5, 8, 10 people, hover at any of those points and we just had so few meetings and I really enjoyed it. Parts of that was to my detriment, to be honest. I think that some of the folks who worked remote, they would’ve preferred to have more kind of Facetime but just the way that we’re running Drip was be heads down and create the product.
I’m working to get some things in place to decrease the number of meetings I’m in right now. I don’t think they’re gonna take hold for a couple of months, part of it is hiring someone. I’ve already hired a senior director of product who started maybe three months ago who’s taken a bunch of responsibilities off my plate. I’m looking to just kind of fire myself from other positions that require me to spend a lot of time in conference rooms.
Mike: On my side, I actually have two carry over for goals that I wanna put on there. First is log in 100 days of exercise this coming year and then, the second one is making Bluetick profitable including my time. Those I definitely wanna carry over. In addition to that, my first goal is to read at least one business book every two weeks. I think this is more of to kind of get back involved in learning things because, I feel like I’ve stagnated to some extent.
I’ve had my head down for so long on various things that I’ve probably kinda lost touch a little bit with a lot of either things other people are exploring and obviously I don’t have the time to do everything myself so I think that just finding time to carve out, to explore ideas from other people would be helpful to me, not just from a personal growth standpoint but also in helping to grow Bluetick.
Rob: That’s interesting if you have some particular topics or a particular topic that you kinda wanna start with, let me know because I have literally this list I went to where I read hundreds of business books in the past 20 years and especially recently I just do a lot of Audible. If you have specific things you’re looking for, I can certainly make recommendations. I suppose you could also ask our listeners here if you have a suggestion of a good business book that you’ve read in the past 12-24 months, maybe send it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com and we may even mention it on the show.
My second goal is three days of exercise per week. It’s just upping the game from last year to the level that I’m at now. Like I said, I think with the fact that it’s pretty convenient for me to do right now, I’m hoping, kind of crossing my fingers, that I’m not cursing myself by upping the goal. I do have a tendency to achieve a goal, and then increase it the next time, and eventually make it too much, more than I wanna commit to or whatever, and then I just say, “Ahh, I’m gonna stop exercise altogether because I’m not achieving it.” My goal’s to not do that.
Mike: My second goal is to hire somebody to take over Bluetick development. The downside of this when I think is that it really is heavily contingent upon making Bluetick profitable including my time. Because, unless I get to that point, it’d be really hard to hire somebody. But I also recognize that doing the development for it is just so incredibly time-consuming, and it’s not just the time itself but it’s the mental energy associated with it because there’s all these little things that you kind of have to keep in your head. When I switch over to do other things, it’s really difficult to focus on them or concentrate on them. Even when I’m able to do that, if I have to go back to the development side of things, I’m really almost starting over again because of all the different things that I had in my head at that time.
I’ve noticed this with a couple of different major pieces that I’ve been working on where I had to go back and kind of relearn how certain things work. I struggle to do that just because sometimes so much has passed between when I stopped working on that piece and when I started working on it again. I think that just having somebody dedicated to working on the development side of things is really gonna help out.
Rob: Just as you make Bluetick profitable, you’re going to make it not profitable again by hiring someone?
Mike: Yeah. That’s kinda what I’m thinking.
Rob: Such is life as a founder. I think getting the development off your plate will be a huge win for you this year. It would allow you to focus on the things that frankly you should be focusing on more. It’s like development is, what’s funny is, we come up as developers, and we wanna build products, and then when you get to the point where you’re building it you’ll realize, “Ha, development is not, a, not the most important thing, and b, it’s not driving revenue the way that so many other things will.” That’s obviously where you find yourself.
Mike: Yeah. That’s really the problem is that there’s so much development work to get done but it doesn’t directly drive revenue. I can definitely see when, different periods of time, where I pull the focus off of marketing and go into development and I could see the revenue growth level off or decline. That’s just what’s going to happen because I can’t do both at the same time because it’s really hard.
Rob: My third and final goal for 2018 is to ship something. I’m not exactly sure what it’s gonna be yet but I’ve been laying low for 18 months like I said. 2017 was supposed to be a rest year to recover and 2017 was not a rest year on the personal side. Number of health issues, and extended family, the chaos with two new kids joining the family a few months ago. You can go listen to zenfounder.com if you want all the details of what went on there.
But it was a very hard year so I don’t actually feel rested yet. I don’t feel like shipping anything now. I plan for the first part of 2018 to hopefully continue to be a restful period because it has now for about four weeks. It’s been pretty calm and I’m starting to feel a little more relaxed and I know that once I do that kind of clear the mind, that I’ll start to think about something that I wanna ship about.
I don’t know if it’s gonna be consistent blog posts, if it’s gonna be a book, if it’s gonna be a new podcast, if it’s gonna be a course of some kind, or a software, or something. I really doubt it’s gonna be software just because I keep saying that Drip was my last one and I still think that’s true. I’m guessing it’s gonna be one of these other things or maybe it’ll take a form that’s completely different, but that’s my goal. Ship something in 2018 aside from the three conferences, the two podcasts, and a bunch of…
Mike: Partridge and a pear tree.
Rob: Exactly.
Mike: Well, you like to fiddle with stuff too. I can definitely see you just diving into stuff to kind of try and figure things out and then suddenly a product kinda springs out of it. I can see that happening too.
Rob: Yup. I can totally see that. I’ve been fiddling with stuff for months. No product ideas yet or no desire but I do feel like that could happen. I also, to be honest, as I’m doing more investments, and asset allocation, and even dealing with collectible stuff like comic books and such. I’m running across websites where I’m like, “Ahh, I should probably just own this website because I could do it so much better.” I would improve this, and this, and that. It’s profitable and there’s a revenue stream I want. It’s pretty old and they’re not maintaining it. That’s where my mind gets going.
It’s like boy, maybe shipping something actually means acquiring and rehabbing something that I’m kind of doing for a hobby/investing. But it’s in a space where I also have a personal interest and it wouldn’t be to acquire it and rehab it to turn it into some huge money-making thing although that would be an element of it, but it would be because I also actually enjoy, like you said, tinkering with things. I would definitely include something like that, buying a little tool on the side and improving it, shipping something because it would be quite a bit of focused effort to get that done.
Mike: Yeah, because it would be easier to acquire something and then either repurpose it or grow it as opposed to building something from scratch. I could definitely see you go down that road instead.
Rob: For sure.
Mike: My last goal for this coming year is to speak at six or more conferences or events this coming year. This is more of a personal growth side of things because I know I enjoy speaking but I also feel like it’s an area where I could do better at and I think that just practicing more is gonna help me do that. Then the other side of it is to help me to focus my communication a little bit better.
There are certain times where I could just be long-winded or over communicate. Some of that is just a matter of me wanting to make sure that somebody else has all the facts but over communication is something of a detriment sometimes just because then it leads into providing facts that are irrelevant or not important to the person that I’m speaking to. I think that doing the additional conference talks will help me to focus in just my ability to hone the message based on who I’m talking to and just writing talks in general helps you to do that.
Rob: Are you gonna cheat and speak at both Starter and Growth and Europe so that three of them are knocked out by your own conferences?
Mike: Well, that’s a good idea.
Rob: Because the hard part is, well, one of the hard parts is just getting noticed and getting on the docket of conferences. Writing the talks is also a lot of effort but you’ve done that enough. That’s cool.
Mike: I only have two scheduled so far at the moment. I hadn’t really thought about kinda cheating that part.
Rob: I know, I know. That’d be pushing it. If you’re out there and you’re interested in Mike speaking at your conference, drop us a line at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
I think that’s a pretty cool goal, man. I know that I’ve done this in the past where I’ve spoke a lot in one year and it really does condense your learning and it kinda gets you over the plateau of, I think if you speak once a year or twice a year, you just don’t get enough repetition in a short enough time frame to get better at it, I think this is a good goal if you can swing it.
I would also think about if you wanna become a become a better speaker, there’s a couple of really good books that I’ve read on how to craft talks. One is by Carmine Gallo, I think that’s how you pronounce it, it’s like The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, I’m pretty sure. He kinda talks about how Steve Jobs would craft presentations. Carmine Gallo also wrote Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds, it’s kinda like how to do TED talks. I think I’ve listened to both of those. The other one I would recommend, and I am recommending these because they’re all in Audible and if you’re gonna read or obviously get physical copies of them, and if you’re gonna read 26 books, these may be some good ones that kinda kill two birds with one stone.
The other author I like is Nancy Duarte and the book that I read which may not be in Audible because it’s so visual is called Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. She also wrote Slide:ology you may have heard of. But I really liked Resonate. It talks a lot about how to craft presentation by telling a story.
Mike: Yeah, those are great recommendations. That’s definitely an area that I’m gonna be doing research into and try to figure how to craft a better message and put together better presentations and things like that. I think you are absolutely dead on about the fact that like if you don’t do it often enough in a year, it’s very easy to kind of lose the experience and develop a little bit of rust, I’ll say.
Rob: Those are our goals for 2018. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.
Episode 371 | Launching to $4K in Monthly Revenue with Laura Elizabeth from Client Portal
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob interviews Laura Elizabeth from Client Portal about the launch of her WordPress plugin and getting to $4K monthly revenue.
Items mentioned in this episode:
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.
Laura: And I’m Laura.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes that we’ve made. Laura Elizabeth, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for joining.
Laura: Thank you, wonderful to be here.
Rob: I wanna give folks a little bit of background as we dive into your story. For those of you who are listening, Laura is a designer, a writer, a speaker, and a cross stitch addict. What exactly is cross stitch?
Laura: It’s sewing. It’s where you saw in little crosses and you make it beautiful.
Rob: Yes, I’ve seen that.
Laura: It’s very therapeutic. It’s very fun.
Rob: When Laura is not teaching developers how to design, she has a site called Design Academy, it’s a course that’s coming out soon, designacademy.io, or working on her client management product which we’re gonna dive into pretty deep today. It’s a WordPress plugin called Client Portal. You can find her writing, speaking, or watching Star Trek. Which Star Trek? There’s five of them.
Laura: Voyager or Next Generation, usually.
Rob: There you go, perfect.
One of the reasons I wanted to have you on is because a year ago, you were consulting full time and over the last year, you’ve launched Client Portal, that’s client-portal.io, if folks wanna check it out. It’s a WordPress plugin that helps freelancers and agencies interact with their clients and manage their projects. You launched that, it’s now doing about $4000 in monthly revenue. You were telling me before we started recording that it basically, almost single-handedly, has changed the value that you are able to bring to clients and it has allowed you to charge a lot more money and take on fewer projects. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Laura: Yes. This is something that I really wasn’t expecting. I launched my first product which was Client Portal. It was really only ever meant to be a side project that I was doing. It quite quickly actually became my full time gig. What ended up happening was I was sharing all this stuff about Client Portal. I was sharing how I was doing my email course, how I was getting really good conversion rates and all this stuff. It made my design work, my freelance consulting work, much more valuable. Suddenly, people were far more willing to pay me a lot more money to do consulting work.
What was really good is I could then start actually picking and choosing what projects would I be working on. I went from having sometimes five to seven projects on any one time, having five to seven projects is actually why I ended up making Client Portal, to only taking on about two or three in the last year. I’ve only been taking them on because they were particularly fun to work on or something like that. I really wasn’t expecting how much valuable making a product and selling a product is going to make me as a consultant.
Rob: That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s two facets to that too. One is you start to develop almost a personal brand or it’s people associate – they see a product, they see that it’s successful, they see that it’s well designed. Then they find out that they can hire you to help them with a product, this is a no brainer. It’s a portfolio that speaks for itself. I think that the second aspect to that is you talked about you were doing this in public. You were talking about it on Twitter, you were talking about your process, and you said that a number of opportunities have come out of that, of people kinda coming out of the woodwork. You wanna tell us about, you mentioned a joint venture that you have done recently.
Laura: That’s really been, I’d say, probably the biggest thing I’ve learned this year, is the importance of really building in the open, sharing things in public, and it’s something that I still don’t actually feel very comfortable doing because when I post things on Twitter, I post things on Facebook saying, “Hey, look at what I’m working on.” It feels a little bit one-sided, “look at me” type of thing. I’m a little bit uncomfortable doing that but it’s actually been, probably, one of the best things that I’ve done for my business.
To give you an example, I was recently building the UI for an app called Write Message. I was posting everyday in the Write Message Facebook Group screens that I’ve been designing. I’d post things about the features that were happening and just sharing previews to its customers about what’s coming, and I got an email from Robert Williams who runs Workshop saying, “Hey, I’ve been following what you’ve been doing in the Facebook group. I really like the designs for Write Message, by the way, how’s Client Portal going for you?” We started this email exchange and we actually ended up doing a joint program where I did my client onboarding email course to his list and we sort of split the revenue 50-50 when we did the pitch, and we’ve actually got a webinar for January where we’re gonna do it again, launch to his list of about 10,000 freelancers.
Robert was someone I’ve had on my radar to reach out to because I thought his audience would benefit from Client Portal. I had no idea that he even knew who I was. Me just sharing the design that I was doing for Write Message, which is completely separate to Client Portal, ended up actually him coming to me and starting the conversation about pitching and launching to his list. That was a really cool thing that happened from just sharing things, building things in the open, and just talking about what I’m doing even though it makes me a little bit uncomfortable.
Rob: I think, a lot of us as creatives, and I include designers, I include a lot of entrepreneurs, and obviously developers in that. I think we’re introverted and/or don’t wanna be showy, don’t wanna feel braggy. I’ve often felt that way as well. I totally sympathize with that. But I think breaking through that a bit and getting stuff out there, that’s one of the hard things about shipping your first product. If you take us back to building Client Portal, and then the day or the week you launched it, what was that experience like? How did that feel emotionally, and then what was the ride like?
Laura: It was a bit of a whirlwind. Client Portal was something that I made for myself, like I mentioned, I had a lot of client projects on at one time, and I really wanted something to help keep those in sync and just somewhere that clients could go to see where we’re at with the project and seal the deliverables without having to email me, and me having to find the files and send them to them.
It was something I made for myself, just a really simple dashboard. I went to Double Your Freelancing conference and I was doing a talk on how to work remotely with clients. I very, very briefly mentioned that I made this little dashboard for myself. What happened was after the conference, Brennan, the organizer, went around the room and said, “What’s the number one takeaway from this conference? What’s the number one thing you wanna go back and implement?” Over 50% of people said, “Laura’s Client Portal was a eureka moment for me. This is exactly what I need in my business.”
I have never intended to sell Client Portal and that was really what made me think, “Okay, maybe I should sell this thing.” It took quite a long time for me to get the courage to do it. I had a lot of fears, which I imagine most people have, what if no one buys? Or what if, worse, people buy, and then they say, “This is rubbish. I want a refund.” I’m publicly humiliated. I was really worried that was gonna happen. I was like, “Why would someone pay money for this little thing that I made?” What I did was, I already had an audience of developers, and a lot of them were freelancers anyway. That was for Design Academy which, I think, we’ll talk about in a while which is a course for teaching developers how to design. Brennan said he will launch, if I made Client Portal into a product by, I think, Black Friday, he’d include it in his Black Friday deal. I literally had a week to make this into something that I could sell.
Where Client Portal was, at that time, it wasn’t too sellable. It was literally just an HTML template. It wasn’t a WordPress plugin, and I’m not a developer, there’s no way I could have made that happen without hiring someone. What I did was I tidied up the HTML template a little bit, I created some documentation, I put up a really, I’d say kind of bad but just a really amateur looking landing page. I had that done in just a few days. This was my validation to see whether this product would actually sell.
I launched it to my list. Brennan launched it with his Black Friday deals. Over the course of three days, it made just under $10,000 which was insane.
Rob: That’s what I was gonna say. Didn’t that blow your mind when you saw that?
Laura: It was crazy. I was thinking if I make three sales, I’m gonna be happy. I just couldn’t believe it. I was still nervous, I was still thinking what if people used the product and they don’t like it? But really, I wasn’t selling the product as it was. I was saying you can buy the HTML template now, I’ve put together documentation on how you can use it, but what I’m gonna do is over these next few days is I’m gonna open up sales and I’m gonna close them again and I’m gonna use the revenue to pay for the development of the WordPress plugin. You’re essentially just pre-ordering a WordPress plugin.
That’s basically how I ended up launching Client Portal. It was a pretty wild ride. I do often think back and wonder whether if I haven’t had the opportunity of Brennan saying, “I’ll include this in my Black Friday deal if you can get this done by Friday,” whether I would have talked myself out of ever selling it. That thought kind of scares me a little bit because then I would not be here right now. I’m very, very happy with how it’s going.
Rob: It literally changed the path of your professional career. It leveled you up from freelancing to products which I imagine is something you’d wanna get into for a long time. There’s so much to be said from that story. I imagine that when you were first asked to speak at Double Your Freelancing, did you have some second thoughts and thought to yourself imposter syndrome, what do I have to teach people, I really don’t wanna get up there, and I’m scared, but you decided to do it anyway?
Laura: Yeah, I did. It was kind of interesting. I was very unstrategic when I first started putting myself out there. Like I said, I was freelancing and it seemed like every successful person I saw was doing something, they were writing a lot, they had a blog, they were doing guest posts, they were going on podcasts, they were speaking at conferences. I kinda thought, “Oh, I should probably do that too.” I’m not quite sure why but I feel like this is gonna come in handy in the future.
I started doing that. I started writing on Medium and I was sharing the stuff I was writing on Medium. An editor from Site Point saw my writing and said, “Hey, I really like your writing style. Do you wanna guest post on Site Point?” I was like, “Yeah, sure.” I guest posted on Site Point. Then, somebody from a conference saw my guest post on Site Point and said, “Hey, do you wanna speak at our conference? I really liked your guest post here.” I said, “Sure.” I spoke at that conference and it just kind of snowballed from there. Suddenly, people were coming to me and asking if I wanted to speak at these different conferences. But I really had no reason other than it just felt like something that I should be doing for me doing that.
It all sounds quite accidental and in a way, it was. But what I think is really interesting is, and what I’m actually really happy about is that I was putting myself out there and not necessarily knowing exactly why I was doing it but I was just testing things. I was just wanting to see what could possibly happen and what could possibly come of it. Just by doing all of these experiments, I was speaking at Brennan’s conference talking to freelancers, I had nothing to sell. I didn’t know I had anything to sell to freelancers at that point. I didn’t even know Client Portal was gonna be a product. But I did it anyway.
Then, something came out of that so I’m really glad that I didn’t wait until I had something to sell before testing the waters with these different mediums because I think that’s probably one of the really big reasons, probably, the biggest reason that Client Portal took off so quickly. I say took off, I know $4000 a month might not be what a lot of people would aim for, and may aim a lot higher. But for me, it was really life changing. I really credit that to just putting myself out there early rather than waiting until I have something to sell.
Rob: Yup. There’s a lot of lessons from your journey. You were willing to kind of get over the fear and put yourself out there and do things in public. You said yes to every opportunity that came up, it sounds like. That’s something some people aren’t willing to do. It’s hard to do at first because you’re scared and then each opportunity just lead to the next thing, and the next thing, and this whole bizarre series of events that again, have essentially changed your professional career. I don’t know if it goes too far to say it’s changed your life, but I imagine that your life looks a lot different today than it did 12 months ago.
Laura: Yeah, it definitely does. Having the freedom to be able to work. When I was a freelancer, I could always when I wanted to technically. But I did have people checking in with me, people who needed things by a certain date. My life’s a lot less time-restricted now. I feel like I’ve got a little better work-life balance. I can do things that I really enjoy like cross stitch, Star Trek in the middle of the day if I want to, not that I do that very often. But I can which is really nice.
Rob: Look at independence or freedom on three axis. There is mobility or location, there is income, being able to make more money, not necessarily just based on more hours worked, and then there is time which means during the day or like you’re saying, you have the flexibility of time. When I first became a consultant, I thought I would have all three of those. As it turns out, I had income and mobility. But the time thing really bothered me. The clients wanted to be able to talk during the day. It was always like, “No, I actually, I need this time to be a creative.” Totally hear you. I think that’s something that a lot of folks trying to get into products actually seek.
Laura: Yeah, it definitely works. One thing for me is I found that for some reasons, I work really well on weekends. I don’t know if it’s because my email isn’t going all the time or Twitter’s a bit quiet. I work so well on weekends and during the week, I don’t work very well at all. I usually take off Tuesday or Wednesday or something like that.
Back when I was doing client work, I really couldn’t do that because I’d be having to check my email every hour or so to see if they needed anything. Similar to you, I didn’t feel like I had as much freedom as I thought I would when I was doing consulting. That’s really the big draw to products for me.
Rob: Yep. Another lesson I feel like we can take away from your experience there is that Brennan giving you that deadline really forced your hand and kind of forced you to ship something which I think a lot of us resist. There’s this resistance to shipping because of all the fears of failure and all that stuff. But you shipped something, and you were creative with it. You couldn’t get a WordPress plugin built in seven days and so you just pre-sold it which I think is a genius move. To give folks an idea of the pricing of Client Portal, it’s a WordPress plugin, it’s $199 for a single site license and then it’s $399 for unlimited sites.
After the Black Friday stuff, what did the next couple of months look like? How long did it take you to find a developer to get it developed? When you delivered it, what was the reception like? Take us through the timeline a little bit.
Laura: After I launched it, it was a little bit underwhelming. The launch went really good and I thought, “This is it. I’m in products. This is amazing. I can fire all my clients.” Not that I would really want to do that. But I thought I’ve done that. What really happened was after the launch, I started looking for a developer. I found a fantastic developer who’s still working for me and for Client Portal today. I just found her by going into different Slack groups. I can talk a little bit about the process of hiring a developer if you’re interested but what really happened was I got the plugin developed, I was sending it to existing customers. My focus was really on existing customers because these people have paid me money. They didn’t know who I was and I was really grateful.
I wanted to make sure they had a product that was good as quickly as possible. But then I sort of opened the doors to selling Client Portal again. Because I didn’t have that urgency, because, I didn’t have ‘this is closing in three days’ and the price is never gonna be as good as it is right now because essentially you’re putting your faith in me making this WordPress plugin. Sales just didn’t happen. Nothing happened for quite a while. I was working on freelance projects and I wasn’t doing much for Client Portal. I knew there was opportunity.
I really needed to think about, “Okay, what do I do now?” What I ended up doing was I decided that I wanted to start putting myself out there again. I decided that I needed to start going on podcasts. I needed to talk about things like freelancing and just talk about remote working like I was doing at the conference because the conference talk that I did ends up being quite a good pitch for Client Portal. I thought, “Okay, I need to do that.” But I don’t wanna just sell them Client Portal. I need something else so I created an email course, it was a five-day email course on how to onboard your clients. I put a lot of effort into it because I see a lot of people making email courses and I‘ve taken a lot of them. Often, they feel a little bit rushed. I really wanted my email course to be valuable whether they actually bought Client Portal or not, so I put a lot of effort into that.
When I launched Client Portal with the Black Friday deals, what worked really well was having that urgency. I wanted to put that urgency in my email course. What happens is every Tuesday, I essentially have a sale for Client Portal. Anyone who’s in my email course on Tuesday, once they’ve finished the email course, I’ll open up a window saying, “Okay, from Tuesday until Thursday, you can get a 30% discount for Client Portal.” I do that and that kind of gets me back the urgency and it means that my goal then is to get people into that email course.
I tested this email course a lot. I’ve got it to the stage where it converts really well. I posted a tweet about it a while ago, I can’t remember the exact numbers but it’s got a really high conversion rate. What I realized was, “Okay, now I need to get people into the email course.” What I do is I go on podcasts, I’m trying to speak at conferences but actually, I’m typically leaning more towards podcasts just so I don’t have to travel as much, talk about freelancing and then I say, “Hey, if you wanna know more about my process, I have this email course, you go to clientexperiencecourse, I think, .com and then you sign up there to the email course,” and then you get pitched on Client Portal.
That’s worked really well for me. That’s probably been a really good thing that I’ve done to keep that urgency that I got from the initial launch. It means that I don’t feel like I’m constantly selling. The only thing I’m selling is getting people into a free email course which I don’t feel too bad about because I am confident that the email course is helpful.
Rob: Right. That’s a good way to do it, it’s to put your best foot forward. Basically, you’ve created a course that some people might sell as a tripwire course. You put so much time into it and have built this thing that when someone takes it, they’re blown away by the quality of it. You were correct with the URL, clientexperiencecourse.com, it’s aimed at agencies and freelancers, for organizing their client projects and a process for interacting with the clients.
Laura: Yeah, exactly.
Rob: It sounds like you have so many of the building blocks of what makes a product person successful. You obviously have the design background. Your design on all of your sites, lauraelizabeth.co, designacademy.io, and Client Portal, really, really sharp designs and just really, really well put. Copywriting is really good. Now, you’re modelling the entrepreneurs that have come before you that one of the things that so many of us say is, email, email, email, and you see the value of building that email list. To have something that’s repeatable like that that you have created, by repeatable, I mean, you’ve kind of started to build the flywheel. As long as you can get people on the course, they’re gonna buy Client Portal, and if you have other stuff that’s then related to that such as Design Academy, I know it won’t be relevant for your entire audience because it’s really aimed at developers, but then you have all these related products. You have this whole ecosystem that you can really offer a ton of value and more value than people are paying but it becomes kind of a system. You’re not just floating out on your own trying to run Google AdWords to some page somewhere. You have credibility and you offer value upfront and then you show that you offer stuff that’s such high-quality that for people who need what you’re selling, it’s a no-brainer.
Laura: Yeah, exactly. I think the ecosystem thing is a really good point. That’s pretty much where I’m taking it next. I’m trying to figure out how I can make everything that I’m doing, I’ve got things in a lot of different places. I still have my consulting and I have my Design Academy, I have Client Portal. I’m kind of working out how I can make this into something that I can cross sell between different people.
For Design Academy, I think around 30% of my Design Academy audience are freelancers, it would be relevant to them. Most of them are in-house designers so Client Portal wouldn’t necessarily be relevant to them. But me knowing that 30% of my Design Academy audience are freelancers, it means that I can cross sell Client Portal to them. Now, I don’t have all these systems in place yet but that’s sort of the next step where I’m taking it, to try and figure out how I can link everything so it’s not as sporadic as it feels right now.
Rob: Sure. Another lesson that I’m taking out of this conversation is something that I screwed up in the early days, 2005 to 2008 as I was building and acquiring products. It’s a mistake you are not making, and you are building products that have shared audiences. At one point, I had ten websites and products, and web services, and really almost none of them shared the same audience. It was designers, people getting married, there was a wedding site, and I’m trying to think what’s the other one, people interested in bonsai trees.
Laura: Duck boats.
Rob: Yeah, duck boats. It was random stuff. You’ve built stuff with overlap so you can build that ecosystem. I like your headline at designacademy.io, it says, ‘Design principles for developers taught in a non-pretentious, non-bullshitty way.’ Did you come up with that?
Laura: Yes. It’s based on a frustration, it’s actually a frustration that I had and I know a lot of developers share. When I was learning how to design, I really struggled and took me so many years to get to a level where I thought I was half-decent. I found all design teaching to just be so unhelpful but so pretentious. It all sounded really good but putting it into practice was just virtually impossible. It sort of came out of my frustration of that. Most of my freelancing clients were developers who had this issue where they wanted to, I was working on a project with developers and they always had side projects going on.
One thing I’ve learned about developers is they’re very creative in that they always have tools that they’re building and they always have stuff that they’re doing. Where they really feel held back is their ability to design. They really love good design but they don’t necessarily wanna become a designer. But they want enough knowledge to just make it so they can create their side projects and have them look decent and maybe sell them, and maybe once they’ve been selling for a while, they can then reinvest some of that money into actually hiring a designer.
Really the goal of Design Academy is just to teach developers enough design knowledge to be dangerous without turning them into a designer.
Rob: Very nice. Laura, you mentioned that you actually have a discount code for our audience if folks want to get a discount on Client Portal?
Laura: Yes. If anyone’s interested in checking out Client Portal, you can use the discount code ‘startups’ and get 30% off which is the same discount as I do in my email course.
Rob: Sounds good. That’s client-portal.io. Laura, I’d like to switch it up and do something we’ve never done before here on Startups For The Rest Of Us, a lightning round of bizarre questions. You could do it?
Laura: I’ll give it my best shot.
Rob: It’s gonna be awesome. Alright. These are quick answer questions. First one. What is something that is really popular now but in five years, everyone will look back on and be embarrassed by?
Laura: Chatbots.
Rob: Chatbots. If animals could talk, which would be the rudest?
Laura: Flamingos.
Rob: In 40 years, what will people be nostalgic for?
Laura: Oh, I don’t know. People are nostalgic about television right now, live TV. I don’t know. Mouses. Mice, the plural to the mouse.
Rob: You don’t mean the little animals, you mean the computer?
Laura: I hope not. Yes, I do.
Rob: Last one. What’s the most ridiculous fact you know?
Laura: I was looking at interesting facts the other day. Can I Google it? I don’t know. I suck at lightning rounds.
Rob: No, I pulled really hard questions. That’s the fun part.
Laura: I have one on the tip of my tongue. I was literally on Reddit last night and I remember seeing something about something that was really – I was on ‘Today, I learned,’ that Reddit thread, and they have a gazillion things.
Rob: I figured, knowing you, having hung out with you a few times, I figured you would have something, I don’t know, some weird thing about pixel kerning, or what is it, font kerning or something like that.
Laura: Yeah, possibly.
Rob: Anyways.
Laura: Possibly. But, I’ll think of a bunch and then I’m just gonna be emailing you which, perhaps, for the next year.
Rob: Oh yeah, that’s great. This was definitely a curve ball so I appreciate you participating in the lightning round there.
Laura: No problem.
Rob: That wraps us up for the interview. If folks want to keep up with what you’re doing, is it Twitter, Dribble, what’s the best you think?
Laura: I’d say Twitter, it’s twitter.com/laurium. It’s where I’m most active.
Rob: Sounds great. I expect I’ll see you at another MicroConf here soon?
Laura: Yup, we’re going to Vegas. The Growth one, I think. I’m looking forward to that.
Rob: Very cool.
Laura: If you have question for us, call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups. Visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 370 | Our Predictions for 2018
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike revisit their predictions from 2017 and score how they did. They also make new predictions for 2018.
Items mentioned in this episode:
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 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: I was reflecting on the past couple of months and I feel like I’m coming out of kind of a rough patch. If you go over and listen to Zen Founder which I believe came out last Friday, Sherrie and I talked through some personal stuff that is going on, you already know about this, I talked a little bit about it at MicroConf Europe.
I realized that kind of stuff like, you can become the frog in a pot of boiling water, where just slowly you descend into stress and chaos and, as I’ve come out of that, I was just looking back and thinking how thankful I am for so many things right now, and how, I guess, thankful I am that I am not where I was a month ago. Coming out of dark times, it was both personal stuff and even at work — I don’t know.
You hit a certain point, some months, some weeks are just hard and it’s hard to wanna show up everyday, and it’s hard to deal with whatever it is. The cues haven’t backed up for a while but there’s just stress building a software company, and running a big team, and hiring people. I don’t know. Other than that, that’s what’s been going on with me. I was just thinking about it today I’m like I really feel positive and excited and I’m like really happy right now and it’s such a contrast to what I was feeling even three or four short weeks ago, and part of that was getting away. Was going to Europe, even running MicroConf Europe wasn’t stressful. It was super. I had a great time there, I was there with my kids, and Sherrie joined us. When I came back, the reentry week was tough. But aside from that, I feel like things are on the upswing. Hopefully, heading into the end of the year and beginning the next, it can continue to feel that way.
Mike: I have to laugh at myself every time I hear that analogy of the frog and the pot of boiling water because I’ve used it myself but if you look into it, that’s actually not true. If you put a frog in a pot of hot water and you slowly turn up the temperature, it will jump out. It’s not that it doesn’t realize it, but it’s a great analogy because it makes sense to everybody.
I think that’s kind of, I’ll say, par for the course, like everybody goes through that on occasion. It sucks to be there. The contrast between where you hopefully end up eventually is quite striking I’ll say. It’s nice to be able to kind of move past that.
Rob: I think move past it and then be better equipped to recognize it early and deal with it as best you can because these are always going to happen. Whether it’s one week every couple of months, whether it’s one month every couple of quarters. You’re just gonna have these down times. If it’s high-stress time, like you’re negotiating the sale of your company, or you’re in a super high growth, or there’s a competitor that’s pissing you off and trolling you, this can be constant for months. It’s trying to figure out how do I go on this journey and deal with hard things and not let it poison the rest of my life, or negatively impact the rest of my relationships, and just go and have fun?
Mike: That can be hard, especially if your income is tied so much to your business and your business is the cause of your stress. There’s almost no getting away from it at that point. It’s not like its a 9:00 to 5:00 job where you can just go and clock in and at the end of the day you can just walk away and all the problems are not yours to deal with it. It intrudes on your life to some extent.
Rob: Absolutely. This relates back to the listener question we had last week, where he says, “My emotions are tied to my business. How do I get away from that?” And our answer was kinda like, “Well, you do the best you can but it’ll probably always will be.” That’s my short answer to that. How about you, what’s going on?
Mike: My oldest is playing basketball right now and they had to do a fundraiser. It was interesting because as part of the fundraiser, they’re basically just standing outside the store and asking people for donations. I took him aside at one point, after he kind of gotten the hang of it and basically asking people for money, and I was like, “Here, let me teach you the art of the upsell here.” Kind of worked with him for a couple of minutes and I was, unfortunately, not paying attention because I was working with one of the other kids at the time when he actually did it but he upsold some woman on a hug to get some extra money for a donation.
Rob: That’s cool. That’s awesome. Bravo!
Mike: I was told by the coach, she’s like, “He did it flawlessly.” Perfect execution and everything. He listened. Followed all the advice and everything, and he only did it three times. It wasn’t like we were there for an hour and a half, and he didn’t do it all the time. He only did it three times but everytime it worked. It was really good.
Rob: Like father, like son. I’ve seen you.
Mike: I sold lots of hugs…
Rob: I know you did. “Buy this software product and I will give you a hug.” Cool.
For me, I also had this interesting experience in the past week, I often talk about we’re always hiring because the app is growing quickly so the team’s growing slowly which is good, that’s how we like to do it. We found a candidate who came highly recommended and we met with him and he was the right fit, good personality and everything. But as we move forward in the actual kind of hiring and negotiation process, it quickly became apparent that yellow flags started creeping out and there were little things. He’s asking for more money than he should get because he was transitioning careers, transitioning from this role to that role. He’s asking for the same salary that he had at this other thing that had five years of experience in and is basically coming entry-level junior for us.
Then, he wanted a title that was actually quite a bit above, that implied he had years of experience and he actually has three months or something. That’s a really interesting one. Then there were two more things but it just kept unfolding. He went from being this amazing candidate to being, I use the word I’m disenchanted as these things keep coming. To his credit, he has two other companies that are interested in him so he’s probably gonna wind up getting everything he asked for and that’s great. But it showed me, there was particularly the specific way he handled a few things showed me that he was, it wasn’t just a negotiation, there was a bit of high-maintenance, demanding or entitlement I think is probably the right word. It struck me that that alone is a deal breaker, even though he checked all the other boxes. He’s either a “hell yes” or he’s “no.” He quickly became not a “hell yes” as these things unfolded.
Mike: Yeah, that’s kind of disappointing. I guess I’d say the process isn’t complete yet or I don’t know fully whether you kind of went through and offered him the job or passed that point. It’s easier or better to find those things out in advance as opposed to after they’ve started working or even a week or two down the road. Sometimes, you don’t find out for six months but those problems can come up at any time.
I remember somebody who I had interviewed at Pedestal Software and there was another team that had actually interviewed him and they’re like, “We think he knows his stuff but we’re not sure. Can you come help us out?” I went in and basically grilled him on all this UNIX stuff because the other team didn’t have as much experience with it. I grilled him, I remember going back to the management team and I was just like he knows his stuff but he is kind of a jerk. you don’t want to hire him. That was the bottom line and they’re like, “Okay, let’s hire him.” I’m like, “Wait a second, he’s gonna be a pain the in ass to work with.” And he was, it sucked.
Rob: I’ve had that happen before. At high growth startups where they’re like, “Does he have technical chops?” “Yes, but I don’t want to work with him” “That’s okay, we can manage that.” They didn’t put me with him but the engineers who worked with him didn’t like it at all. I was like, “This is interesting.” This is 14 years ago. I remember being like, “I don’t think this whole funded thing is for me,” because if that’s what we’re doing, I’m not gonna like my job here.
Mike: Right.
Rob: In my opinion, you need to like the people who you work with because you spend too much of your life at your job so whether you’re hiring them yourself or they’re just people, if you work at a big company and other people are hiring, if you don’t like your coworkers, I think you need to get out of there.
What are we talking about today?
Mike: Today, we are gonna be going through our predictions for 2018. To kick us off, we probably should take a look back at our 2017 predictions and see how we did before we start making other wild ass guesses.
Rob: Indeed. And that’s just what these are, wild ass guesses. Every December, and we’ve done this for many years, I’d say five or six at this point, I went back and listened to a few of our old predictions and it’s pretty funny. Pretty funny how the world changes. Keep in mind that when we can, we make predictions in the startups space or in the tech space but these are not limited to just startups. We like to have fun with this episode. It’s more about entertainment than it is about these are areas to start a business in.
Next week or in the next couple weeks, we’re gonna be doing our goals episode where it is truly your and my goals that we set for 2017. We’ll review those and then we’ll look ahead at our goals for 2018. Those will be obviously, there’s some personal ones but there’s also startup business specific ones. But, for these, you know, again, there are some tech related and then others that are just kind of fun ones to think about, talk about.
Mike: With that in mind, let’s dive right in. My first prediction for 2017 was that health insurance rates are going to become a much bigger issue for self funded companies and I would say, what are we doing with our scale of like is it 1-100 or 0-1 or 50/50?
Rob: One to five?
Mike: One to five, I guess.
Rob: Yeah. Five is like “nailed it” and then one is “completely missed.”
Mike: Alright, one to five then. I would say on this one, I got a five.
Rob: In the US, specifically.
Mike: Right.
Rob: Because the US’ healthcare system is so messed-up, especially for small companies. Well, just for everybody, it’s messed up.
Mike: Yup. I’ve been hearing people over the past three or four months where at the beginning of the year it wasn’t so bad, I don’t think, and then as the year has kind of progressed, as people start to renew their insurance, I’m hearing people say that in some cases it’s double or triple what the rates were previously, the previous year. It’s kind of gotten out of control. I don’t know what people are doing about it. I’m glad that I renewed back in April, but at the same time, I’m going to have to renew next April and I’m kind of afraid of what is going to end up happening.
Rob: Yeah, I agree. I’m happy. It sounds weird to say I’m happy that I’m working for someone else, that I don’t have to deal with this. Essentially, Drip/Leadpages handles this for me now. I don’t have to administer it. They, like a typical employer with good funds, they cover most of the expense. I know it’s gotta be super expensive for them to maintain that. My first prediction for 2017 was there will be another high-profile acquisition in the bootstrapped space. My idea was that it wasn’t going to be someone that sold their app for 3-4X multiple of net profit but that it was gonna be another kind of Drip-esque acquisition where someone that we know in the MicroConf spaces that acquired by a big startup.
Mike: How did you do?
Rob: As far as I know, this is a one. I don’t know of an… Do you know of anybody in our space that got acquired?
Mike: I know of some but nothing at that level.
Rob: Yeah. Maybe a two or something. I was on the lower end of being right. I had the impression that, or I was thinking that there would be a kind of a bare acquisition in that but it really did not happen.
Mike: If I remember correctly, you did say on the episode last year that you didn’t have any inside knowledge, it’s just what you thought was going to happen.
Rob: Yep, that’s right.
Mike: My second prediction was that the SaaS bar is going to continue to be hard to reach which is obviously very generic but I kind of couched it by saying that startups are gonna start offering a service as a first base approach followed by implementing the SaaS once they figure out the process in order to be able to offer those services at scale.
Rob: It’s the product as consulting first and then turning into SaaS. I think when you said this prediction, I said, “Isn’t this already happening?” This was Brian Casel’s talk in October of 2106, was about productize service moving to SaaS.
Mike: Craig Hewitt went on this road with Castos as well. The idea there is to really make it easier for people to host their own podcast and they do a lot of this stuff internally with PodcastMotor where they do all the editing and everything else but they basically turned that productized service into more of a SaaS product and offer additional things which is more of a self serve model then the productized services which is done for you. I would say those two are the things that I would say come to mind, but I don’t see too many others. I probably have to give myself a two, possibly a three, but I wouldn’t say that this was as accurate as I thought it would have been.
Rob: I’m sure more people are doing it. I know Brain Casel has his productized course and I’m sure he knows other people doing it through that but you and I just haven’t necessarily heard about them or been around them.
My second prediction for 2017 was that start up crowdfunding will fizzle out. Lower end startups will use it but the best startups will continue to use their networks, AngelList, and that kind of stuff. I’m going to give myself a four on this because I don’t know if it fizzled out as much, it just has not really taken hold very well. It just hasn’t had the impact that I thought it would of people being able to buy small chunks of equity on accredited investor, non-accredited investors being able to buy small chunks of equity. I thought that it would have this big kick early on and then like I sad fizzle out. It kind of didn’t. I think that there have been several platforms that have launched to facilitate it. It’s kinda shoulder-shrug right now, like wait and see. Mostly if I removed the fizzle out, I was probably a five. “Crowdfunding won’t really do much,” if I had phrased it that way, it would be much more accurate. Was that your sense as well or you think I’m misreading it?
Mike: I feel like that there was an initial inclination that was going to happen, that people were going to do it a lot. Non-accredited investors were gonna be able to throw money in and start funding these companies. I don’t think that the types of businesses that were maybe brought before them were attractive enough for them to say, “Yes, I’m gonna throw my money in.”
Rob: Cool. That makes sense.
Mike: My third prediction was that more small scale entrepreneurial meetups are going to be starting around the world, and that the entrepreneurship for small-scale businesses is going to pick up steam. I probably don’t have a lot of data to back this up. I would say that I’d give myself a four out of five on this. I heard recently that FemtoConf over in Germany just recently sold out. Congratulations to those guys.
Rob: Wait, what?
Mike: Did you not hear that?
Rob: Oh, sold out. That was interesting. I took sold out as not selling all their tickets but selling the conference to someone else. I was like, “What?!”
Mike: Oh, no. No.
Rob: Did you hear that shock in my voice? Okay, sorry. Keep going.
Mike: No. Sold out as in sold all of their tickets. I feel like that’s going to become not really the model but more prevalent over time as people, like start these really small meetups and then grow it. I think last year’s FemtoConf was only about 10 or 15 people and then they went from 10 or 15 to I think around 30 this year. I just think that there’s gonna be a trend in that where you get these really small meetups that start out tiny and then they start to grow just because of the audience that they build and they’re growing off their success as opposed to trying to build something where they get like 100, 200, or 500 people to it the very first year that they start. It’s really just stair stepping their way up.
Rob: Congrats to you guys. My third prediction for 2017 was that there would be a 20% or more correction in the US stock market. On a scale of one to five, I give myself a zero. Have you heard this expression, “I’ve predicted five of the last two bear markets.” That’s essentially what I’ve done here. I think like all of us, things seem overvalued, but everyone’s been saying this. I know someone who pulled all their money out of the stock market in 2013 or 2014 and they have missed tremendous amounts of gains. Timing the market is so, so hard. We all think we can and it’s always a little bit later, you can’t quite outlast the market in terms of the irrationality of it going up or going down. I would probably say this will happen in 2018 but I’m not going to cheat and use that prediction again. I was dead wrong.
Mike: I thought you were going to say the 20% market correction was going to be upwards instead of downwards. I thought you were gonna…
Rob: I should have. It corrected from it’s low. It corrected upwards. My fourth and final prediction for 2017 was that the first consumer purchase package would be legally delivered with a man drone somewhere in the world and I believe, if I recall, that I made this prediction it was late November, early December, and it was within a couple of weeks that this happened. It was even before 2017. Is that your memory?
Mike: I think that’s correct. I think that happened before the year started. I think we were debating about whether or not you got credit for it because it was not in 2017.
Rob: I would give myself a five on this one even though maybe technically it should have happened two weeks later for it to be in 2017. We should call this our predictions from between right now and the end of the following year.
Mike: You’re just trying to get credit for that one.
Rob: Alright, let’s dive into our predictions between now and the end of 2018.
Mike: What’s your first prediction, Rob?
Rob: Hey, wait! I didn’t even type this one. Let me read this one. Rob will buy a bunker in the Swiss Alps, establish a micronation with his 11-year old son as the benevolent dictator. How did this show up in our outline, Mike?
Mike: I don’t know, I have no idea.
Rob: I think that’s a really good prediction.
Mike: Must have been the elves.
Rob: Messing with my predictions. That was a joke prediction. Please don’t hold me to it. What’s your first one?
Mike: Mine is there’s going to be an economic downturn. I think that it’s probably going to be, I don’t wanna say that it’s gonna be major. But I think that it’s gonna be substantial enough that people will notice. It’s not gonna be like 2008 where the entire economy crashed but I do think that there is going to be that, you kind of called it for last year, the 20% stock market correction, I feel like that’s gonna be this year. I think that it’s going to be driven kind of by a lot of the factors around healthcare, at least in the United States, and various policies that are kind of going into effect. I don’t see like a sustained economy is going to be moving forward this coming year. There is bad stuff on the horizon.
Rob: I want to get more specific with this because when I think of the phrase “economic downturn,” I think of the economy as multiple factors. You could say is that a stock market correction, is that a recession which implies a lack of growth of businesses which don’t necessarily, it often causes a stock market correction, but the two can be non-correlated. That typically also leads to unemployment. And then there’s the housing market which I see as a separate thing.
There’s three or four different things; unemployment, GEP growth, stock market, and housing. In 2008-2009, they all plummeted, but in 2000, the housing market took a little hit but it wasn’t that bad. What do you mean when you say economic downturn? Let’s define it and then let’s update, so we know next year, whether you are accurate. If it’s any one of those four, it’s a pretty broad prediction. But if you’re saying its like three out of four or something…
Mike: I think it’s going to be a couple of them. One, I think there’s going to be a lot of small services businesses that end up going out of business partly because of regulation but partly because they’re just not going to be able to make ends meet. They’ve got other things to adhere to in terms of tax laws, health insurance, and things like that. I think that’s going to have a pretty big impact on them, along with all the legislation tied to the healthcare industry. I think that’s going to have a pretty bad impact on them as well, just in general, you will see a lot of small-services companies end up going out of business.
Then that’s going to lead to unemployment which impacts a lot of other things. I don’t think that the housing market is really gonna go down very much. It probably will stay relatively the same. It’s certainly is not going to be a big growth area. Then what was the last one that you said? Oh, the stock market. I think that it will level off a little bit but I don’t think that it’s going to go down.
Rob: I’ve updated your prediction with a few bullets that kind of captures that so when we come back next year, we can measure it correctly.
Mike: What’s your next prediction?
Rob: My first prediction, the Swiss Alps bunker one, is not going to come true. I think 2018 will be the year of non-institutional startup funding. I think this has already begun. We’ve seen more and more angel investments coming out. The more I get involved with this, the more I realize the power of money that comes from angels, rather than going the traditional institutional route. Jason Calacanis’ book, Angel which came out a few months ago, it was really good. I think some people will probably dive into it from there.
Crowdfunding, this is maybe my opposite of my prediction for 2017, but I do think that crowdfunding will continue to build some steam. The ICOs are a bit dubious as to whether they’ll stick around. But I know that’s a big push right now, people are trying to fund startups using ICOs. Through those three avenues, I think it’s gonna be easier, and even more prevalent, and become a more common thing for people to invest in early stage startups. I think it will become easier as a startup to raise non-institutional funding. This is kind of tied to fund strapping a little bit. It will be easier to fund strap because of that. Fund strapping being raising a small round of funding without the intention of the implied series A, of having to then go to institutional money in 18 months but to actually become profitable with that initial round.
Mike: My next prediction kind of revolves around in app purchases. One thing that I’ve heard talk off is about legislating that. Mainly because when Star Wars Battlefront 2 came out, there was complains about how much the game costs, and then the fact that inside the game, you could go in and you could purchase basically, a loot crate and you had a chance to get certain items but you are not guaranteed to get something specific. The rationale people were putting forward is well, that’s actually gambling because you’re buying a chance to get something that may or may not be valuable and it is being presented in such a way that that fits the definition of gambling.
I don’t think that we’re going to see legislation around this. I think that there’s a lot of talk about it. The companies that are behind these types of games are smart enough to be able to avoid that kind of stuff because they’ve got the legal teams to both defend them and point them in the right direction and say, “You should or shouldn’t be doing this. Here’s what we can get you out of and here’s what we can’t.” I don’t think that there’s going to be any actual legislation around it but I do think that you’re going to see gaming companies come to better definitions and I would say be a little bit more careful about how they’re putting those offerings together for those in app purchases.
Rob: My second prediction for the year is that artificial intelligence/machine learning will continue to be marketed as the next big thing in terms of enterprise SaaS and even small and medium size SaaS and software, but once again, it will not deliver in 2018. By not deliver, what I mean is it’s being touted before it can really provide value for most people and most businesses.
One of the big issues is especially with machine learning, you need such large datasets to actually train the algorithms. I see these SMB tools saying, “We’ll use our machine learning to help you do…” That’s over promising and I think it’s gonna burn people out on it. I’ve already had conversations with a guy who used to run a big ecommerce store and he’s like, “We’ve been sold artificial intelligence for 15 years and it’s still not as smart as me sitting down and whatever, building out a funnel or a campaign.”
I think there’s danger of it becoming a complete marketing fad. I do think that eventually, this stuff’s gonna work and it’s gonna be genius. There’s examples of it. We use what I call artificial intelligence to detect spammers when they come into Drip based on behaviors. We have all these signals we look at and we auto-flag and our accuracy is really high. We’ve developed that algorithm over the last several years and I know that there are other startups that do this internally. This stuff can work. There’s just certain approaches that you need to take to it. We have stuff that we’re already thinking about inside Drip like, “How could we automate this? How could we make this smarter?” People have been saying it for many years, it’s not there yet, and some people will actually do some intelligent things this year. Hopefully, we will release something, but it’s not going to be the promise of everything’s done for you, and you just sit back and press one button and all your marketing is essentially automated, which is what so many of people in the mar-tech space are claiming.
Mike: I think that’s a difference in the bounds of the problem too. For example, detecting that somebody is coming in and going to be sending spam, or is a fake account that signed up, and their intent is to do that. There are certain patterns that you can recognize very easily because there’s only so many things that you can do or that can be done in the app. You can do time-ins around when one request happens versus when another. It makes it easier to scour that and kind of detect whether or not somebody’s doing that. Versus in an ecommerce, how do you predict whether somebody’s gonna come back and buy something else, or how do you predict the best thing to upsell them to. That’s a lot more of an open-ended problem with no real bounds versus, “Is this person going to be a spammer? Yes or No?” Does that make sense?
Rob: Yup, totally does.
Mike: I think that the two things are very different. I totally agree that enterprise companies are being sold to this type of stuff and it just doesn’t work.
Rob: Yep. How about you? What is your last prediction?
Mike: My last prediction is actually about Uber and it is that Uber is not going to regain the ground that they have lost. Lyft is a lot smaller than they are, but I think that because of all of the, I’ll say, political fallout and loss of goodwill towards them – not that they probably had a ton of it to begin with, but I think that they have really lost a lot of the leverage points that they probably had. They’re going to have to work harder to do the same things that they were able to do last year, and the year before. Just because of the fall out from the allegations of misconduct and all of the internal stories that have come out of how badly they’re treating people. I just don’t think that they’re going to recover as well as they probably think that they are. Like I said, the big problem is it’s going to take them a lot more effort to do the same things that they were able to do last year with substantially less effort.
Rob: When you say not regain the ground they’ve lost, do you mean in the valuation? Because, as of this writing or as of this recording, their valuation is like 30% lower based on a round that they have to raise from SoftBank. I think Uber’s burning $1 billion a month. It’s a lot of money. Is that much money?
Mike: I don’t know.
Rob: It’s a lot of money. Yeah. They’re in a place of having to raise capital and with this kind of tarnish on them, and they’ve lost their CEO, SoftBank offered them 30% less than the previous round. Are you thinking that in terms of evaluation or you’re thinking in terms of market share? I know we don’t know their market share for sure but there are estimates and such and they have taken a big time hit with people deleting their app altogether.
Mike: Yeah, that’s more what I’m thinking. Market share, because we don’t have the actual numbers, it’s gonna be a little bit difficult to, I’ll say, measure that in a year. When I say that they’re not going to regain the ground they’ve lost, as in the people who have deleted their app will probably not reinstall it unless they have no other option. I don’t think that they’re going to win those people back even if the company changes its tune and goes out of its way, I’ll say, to overhaul their culture. I don’t think that they’re going to win those people back which will have an impact on their market share and their ability to grow as a company.
Rob: Sounds good. My third prediction is that there will be an enormous crash in Bitcoin’s valuation. Right now it’s on a huge rise, but long term I am still bullish.
Mike: Wait, didn’t it crash three days ago?
Rob: It crashes every few days but it comes back. I’m saying more of, I don’t wanna say sustained crash, but if you look back over its history a couple years ago, it built up into the 400, 500, 600 range and it crashed and it was down for a year, just fumbling around. Maybe even more, it might have been 18, 24 months. It’s kind of bumping around and around a few hundred and then there’s this more recent rise. I’m a person, I’m long Bitcoin. I own several Cryptocurrencies and not in small quantity either. It’s not like I bought one. I’m kind of keeping my eye on it and it’s tough, this is similar to my prediction of the stock market correction.
I think the way Bitcoin is going up right now is like no mania that we’ve ever seen, the volatility is just crazy. I do think that the next 12 months, that is likely to end. I of all people would be ecstatic if it didn’t, if it kept going up, doubling, tripling. Bitcoin has had a 2100% return in the last year. That’s kind of tough not only to sustain but even sustain the current valuation. With that said, long term, even as I sell some of the Bitcoin as it gets really high and my assets get way out of allocation, or out of the percentages that I like. I’m certainly not exiting those positions at all because I think I’m long Bitcoin and I’m long cryptocurrencies in general.
As you look out 5 and 10 years, it’s kind of like being here at the advent of the personal computer, the advent of the internet, the advent of smartphones. Bitcoin and crypto in general is this movement and long-term is going to stick around even after a crash. If we think about the 2000 Dotcom crash, there was all this hype around it from ‘94 from the IPO of Netscape, ‘94-’95, all the way to 2000, and then everything crashed, and people said, “Boy, Dotcom, those internet sites, they’ll never amount to anything.” Now, here we are. The biggest companies in the world essentially either came out of that or have something to do with that. If you had just been long the whole time, you’d have to wait through that decade-long trough, essentially, when it all bottom-dropped out of it. I guess I see there could be a similar frenzy around Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, where there will be a big crash, but long term it will be a viable store value or a way to move money around.
Mike: I think the volatility of it is kind of a big turn off to me. I saw a tweet earlier today from somebody who said, “I bought a USB cable from Newegg with some Bitcoin ones. Feel free to ask me sometime and I’ll show you a $3500 USB cable.”
Rob: So funny. That’s the thing, I don’t think Bitcoin is a currency. I think cryptocurrency is a misnomer and I view it much more as a store value in a way to get money out of a situation… I view it more as gold. I wouldn’t go buy bread with gold. I wouldn’t go buy USB cable with gold and I won’t do it with Bitcoin either. I do believe it’s a great way if your currency is going crazy and this happens every several months to just get money out of my currency because the government won’t allow me to exchange it for US dollars, that’s much more stable, and I don’t want to see this hyperinflation. People are dumping their money into Bitcoin or into other cryptos. It’s a great way to, I shouldn’t say great, but it is a way people are using to not lose all the value of their money during this currency crisis.
And then you look at when Brexit happened and there was this uncertainty. When there is economic uncertainty, obviously, there’s a lot of volatility in Bitcoin. It’s been lucky enough to keep going up. It’s a way that if you had a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, or I should say a hundred thousand Argentinian pesos or whatever, hyperinflation hits and it’s 100% a weak inflation, you can’t go buy $100,000 worth of gold because everybody goes and buys it and they’re trying to get stable assets. But you can go buy $100,000, in theory, of Bitcoin quickly. That’s been one of the ways that people have seen these big rises.
Mike: Do you think that long term digital currencies will replace gold as the asset to go put your money in for stability?
Rob: No. I think they will both co-exist because gold has just been around too long, it does have a small amount of value in manufacturing, some amount of value in jewelry, but more than that, it’s just that we’ve all agreed that it’s worth something. I don’t think any time soon everyone’s gonna agree that it’s not and agree that crypto is. I don’t think that it’s realistic but I do see that it’s just another asset to hold. That’s how I did asset allocation or I do asset allocation. That’s how I have money in all of these things, all amounts divided between them, although my cryptocurrency is no longer a small amount. I kind of laugh because it’s a good problem to have when it goes up, but it also completely jacks your plans when you’re like, “Oh, I don’t actually want to own. I don’t want that much of my networth to be tied up in something that’s this volatile.”
With that, my fourth and final prediction is that cryptocurrencies will be regulated by several large governments. There’s already been statements from the US government about what Bitcoin is but there is no SEC oversight of Bitcoin exchanges. There’s a bunch of regulation that could be in place. I don’t know that it will happen in the US government, I know it’s happening in smaller governments. I think that this will be the year where government really starts stepping up and putting legislation or more regulation in place to get involved with cryptocurrency and get out ahead of it to make sure that for whatever reason, they pass regulation, they’ll be doing that. They probably would have done it this year but large governments move slowly and I think they’re all waiting to see what happens. I don’t think that it’s going away anytime soon, this will be the year that things will really ramp up.
Mike: I wonder if any of that legislation is gonna be based around security standards. Banks have security standards that they have to comply to. There’s been no shortage of stories of these cryptocurrency sites that have gotten hacked and they lose millions or tens of millions of dollars. I can totally see some government agency coming out and saying, “Hey, in order to be able to trade in whatever the digital currency is, you have to follow certain security standards in order to be able to do it.” I think it’s gonna take them a few years in order to be able to nail down exactly what those are. They’ll sit in their committee for like a year or two at least before they get to any sort of concrete implementation guidelines.
Rob: When they’re first announced, it might be a big negative hit to Bitcoin and the crypto valuations, “Oh no, government’s gonna get involved.” Then long term, it could feasibly make it more stable or it could make it less likely to get stolen from marketplaces. It’s hard to predict what it will do. I think there will be mixed reaction to it.
Mike: Yeah. It depends on whether they legislate it or decide to back it as they do bank transactions. Because with banks, it’s federally insured versus Bitcoin it’s not. If it’s a digital currency and it all gets stolen, it’s the government going to step in and say, “We will back this up to $250,000,” or whatever, but my suspicion is no, they’re not going to go down that path.
Rob: That wraps us up for today. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening, we’ll see you next time.
Episode 369 | Staying Motivated, Improving Onboarding and More Listener Questions
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike answer a number of listeners questions. Some of the topics include dealing with contractors, improving conversion from trials to paid, and time management.
Items mentioned in this episode:
But before we dive into the intro, Mike, I have a question for you.
Mike: Oh, boy!
Rob: Why doesn’t McDonald’s sell hotdogs?
Mike: They have, actually.
Rob: Really?
Mike; They’ve done a bunch of experiments with selling hotdogs. I think I’ve seen them in Texas but I’ve also seen them in other places where it’s certain times of the year. They’ll just test it out to see whether it’s going to work or not. It’s usually just like a limited edition item. But they have tried it, I know that. And now you know.
Rob: 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 your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: I’m Mike.
Rob: Really?
Mike: I had something on my throat.
Rob: What happened with your throat? We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Oh, this is a good week for the intro.
Mike: Perfect, yes.
Rob: I realized something because I was flying to and from Europe and I downloaded just some older episodes, in the 200s, I just wanted to check out what we were talking about back then. The intro was different. It was like building software products or something, instead of building, launching, and growing. I think I like our new one. For a long time, it was just developers building software products, and now it’s developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. For sure our audience has expanded over the years. It was just kinda funny to hear it and for it to trick something, click something in my brain and I’m like, “Ugh, that’s not the intro.”
Mike: Yeah, definitely. Things have changed over time but it is interesting sometimes going back and reviewing things that you remember from a long time ago. It definitely is a different tone or connotation with it. Actually, Benedikt mentioned something about the fact that he was thinking about MicroConf Europe and how over time, his view of the conference has changed but also, he has changed as a person after several years of coming to MicroConf just based on the things that he’s learned, the things he has done. Although the conference, in many ways, stayed the same, he has changed and evolved.
Rob: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for bringing him on, by the way. It was a bummer week. You and I couldn’t discuss MicroConf Europe but I felt that you guys did a really good job of covering the topics.
Mike: Yeah, we ran a little bit out of time at the end there. We didn’t get the chance to cover end of the attendee talks which all of them were I thought were fantastic, but it would have been nice to have a little bit more time to dive into those.
Rob: Sure. That’s my updates for the week, I guess for the past few weeks, because I haven’t been on the show for a bit due to the travel. Really was going to Lisbon and I really enjoyed getting to know Lisbon. It’s a very livable city, obviously a lot more relaxed than Barcelona. There’s not as much there in terms of museums and sites to see but we really enjoyed it. We got a great little Airbnb. I was there with my kids and a nanny and we were just hanging out doing some travel. It was a lot of fun. Then, I did MicroConf Europe obviously, then met Sherrie in Rome the following week. We all hung out there for an additional week.
I just got back in town about six or seven days ago. It’s good be back in the States but travel’s always fun. It expands your mind. I found myself being way more creative and seeing things with new eyes. This is my second time back to Rome, really the whole family’s second back to Rome. It was neat to see our kids seeing the Colosseum, seeing these museums, and these sites, and remembering and talking about the last time we were there.
Since they were older, it was so much easier. I think it was three or four years ago we took them, the youngest was three or four years old and I just remembered it was hard and it was tiring, this trip was not that. It was so much more. They’re really good at travel now because they’ve done it a few times. Even on the long flights and the time change, it was a seven or eight hour time difference, they just handle it now. It was a really good trip. It was a really relaxing two weeks and I didn’t know if it would be, you’re travelling with two kids, and a nanny, and sometimes the wife, and sometimes not. There were multiple plane flights, there was a six-hour layover in Canada and we were all off time and we got tired at times but overall, it was such a worthwhile thing to do.
Mike: Awesome! Our kids today are much better traveller these days than they used to be but we still don’t travel too much, I don’t think. We went to my sister’s house for Thanksgiving, and that’s a five-hour drive or so but it’s not too bad. We spent about three days there and drove back.
Rob: How about you? What’s been going on?
Mike: Well, my wife got me a scotch whiskey advent calendar for Christmas.
Rob: Oh, man! Best gift ever!
Mike: Yeah, so that starts tomorrow, which I’m very excited about.
Rob: An advent calendar for those who don’t know, it starts in December 1st and there’s a little door that you open each day and it’s supposed to count you towards Christmas. The original advent calendar were pieces of a nativity scene which is the birth of Jesus. You open it and you built the scene over the course of the month. But now, there are lego advent calendars, chocolate advent calendars, and I had not heard of a scotch one but that is gonna be awesome. Every morning, you’re gonna open up and drink scotch with breakfast, is that the idea?
Mike: I was gonna wait until the evening. But, the others…
Rob: Probably…
Mike: There’s 24 different ones in here.
Rob: Oh man, that’s gonna be good. Are they like the little airplane bottles?
Mike: They are like little 50 milliliter, or actually, I think 30 milliliter drams. It’s about a shot or so. It’s just a regular size but you know, there’s 24 of them in here and I saw the list of them and a lot of them are things that I’ve never tried before. It will be really interesting to try some of them.
Rob: For sure. 30 milliliters, Mike. That’s a third of a shot for me.
Mike: Well, I know. It depends on your hands.
Rob: Cool. Today, we are gonna be answering a slew of listener questions. We actually have four listener questions left over from MicroConf Europe. They’re not listener questions, they’re attendee questions.
You and I did a Q&A session at Europe and we asked folks for questions in advance and we ran out of time to answer them all. Maybe we’ll start with those and then go into our store of questions.
The first question is from Mark and he says “Rob, have you thought about integrating Drip with CRM platforms? Something like Salesforce, MS Dynamics, other more enterprise things. Often, a simple UI is missing the error.” We have discussed it. We do integrate with Pipedrive, with Close.io, we have a basic web-to-lead with Salesforce where a new subscriber comes in and you can just push them into Salesforce. I think we have Insightly as well, so we do have some CRM integrations.
There’s a couple things to this question. One is what do you mean by an integration? Do you just mean when they hit a certain lead score, you can push them into your CRM? Because we already do that with several systems. But if you mean a full two-way integration where it’s syncing up the data and tags and all this stuff, that kind of stuff is extremely, extremely complicated. The Salesforce alone would probably be about nine months of business development and partnership and development work. A huge amount of effort. That is one reason why I have not done it.
Another reason is our core market is not people with sales teams. That’s a whole other problem that other tools solve. We focus on people who are driving digital commerce, it’s like ecommerce, people who are selling things online, or if you take credit card online, we definitely work with SaaS apps and ecommerce sites and info marketers. Once you have a sales team, it’s less in our core competency and it’s not something that we really wanna double down on or spend the time on at this point.
Mike: One of the reasons this type of question comes up is because once you put your product out there and people start using it, they’re going to use it in ways that you didn’t necessarily envision, and you make changes to accommodate what seem like reasonable requests, but they start down a path of allowing people to do things that the product wasn’t necessarily designed to do from the very beginning. You just didn’t have the vision in it for it. To give you a prime example of that, which is in Drip, you’ve got the lifetime value that you can assign to somebody and that’s built right in. I wouldn’t say it’s front and center, but it is right there, kind of a standard option. That translates back to a CRM where you say, “Oh, what’s the lifetime value of these particular people?” It starts people down that path. It leads to questions like this, like how do you do the full two-way sync integration between Drip and whatever CRM that you have.
I think you have a great answer for it which is really trying to focus on what the things are that you do best and leave the other things to somebody else because you don’t want to try to be everything to everyone.
Rob: Yep, you have to focus.
Our next question is from Johannes and he says, “Hey, at the breakfast this morning, we discussed driving traffic either through side projects, and that was part of what Alex Yumashev had talked about which is kind of engineering as marketing. It’s building a tool that you launch on a weekend that does something; a website creator, an SEO creator, and then use that to drive leads, or through blog posts on subjects close to your product but not mainly about your product. Questions came up about how to convert these visitors into paying customers. What is you experience there and do you have any good advice?”
What do you think, Mike?
Mike: I wouldn’t say that I have any specific experience with taking side projects like that and trying to drive traffic. For context, because not everybody was there to listen to Alex’s attendee talk, but he talked about how he had built a number of side projects and then through those side projects had linked back to his main business website, and ended up getting traffic to his main website and converting those people into paying customers down the road, just by virtually the fact that he’s doing a lot of stuff in the open source community and people can browse that and they end up back in his website.
You have to treat is as something like a landing page or a lead generation mechanism as well. If people are there for a particular project, and that is in some way related to your primary product or set of products, then you have to think about how would you get them to basically buy into the commercial offering that you have. Is it related? Is the side project something that is tangential? Is it like a limited form of your main product? There’s a lot of variability there based on what the side product actually is versus what your main business does. Thinking about those things, and then using it as more or less like a landing page or launching area where you get those people over to your site, and whether it’s a specific landing page you have, maybe giving them additional resources on your website, get them on your mailing list. That’s really an entry point into your sales funnel is what you’re looking for. That’s probably the best approach for that. What do you think, Rob?
Rob: Yes, it’s all about if you’re driving people, his question is specifically if you’re getting people to these blog posts or getting them to the side project, how do you then convert them to paid? It’s all about email. It’s all about getting their email address, typically these side project things ask for an email upfront before they can use it, or you give them some results, and if they enter their email they get the rest of it then they’re on your list. There’s the WP Engine website speedgrader, there was the HubSpot website grader which I think was like SEO stuff that Dharmesh built, you had to enter emails for those. It was a nurture, education, and then it gets you through to become interested in using the product ultimately.
Mike: Right. I was actually thinking of it from a standpoint of you have a project on GitHub and it’s an open source offering versus what you had just mentioned, most of what Alex’s talk was about. The online tools that are free, engineering is marketing at that point, and you are absolutely right. You need to get that email address.
Rob: Our next question is from Paul and he says, “As a founder, I found my emotions get entangled in the success of my business. Any advice for emotionally distancing yourself from your business so you can make decisions more rationally?”
It’s obviously a longer answer but my short answer is go to zenfounder.com, listen to the podcast, click Contact Us link and talk to Sherrie Walling. That’s my quasi-joking answer but it’s actually a learned skill and someone who’s good at it can teach you. What do you think, Mike?
Mike: I agree with you that it is a skill. I have a hard time buying into the idea that there’s one set of things that you can do and those set of things are gonna work for everyone. Just based on who we are, our backgrounds, what sorts of things we’re interested in, and how involved we are mentally in our business and whether or not you are able to shut that off easily is gonna greatly impact the things that will work for you and what won’t.
It’s just like exercise for example. Some people have a really easy time getting up and going to the gym, other people don’t. Same thing with going to sleep at night or a variety of other things, whether it’s weight loss or what have you. There are different things that are going to work for each person, and there’s probably a lot of experimentation that you’re gonna have to do to figure out what those things are that work for you. You can get ideas from other people but that doesn’t mean that everything you hear is gonna work for you or is gonna work as well for you as it did for them.
Rob: This is really hard. This is the age old question and it’s one that I think every founder probably struggles with. I know that I did and I still do. I never quite was able to completely conquer this. I don’t think anybody has. That’s part of being about a good founder is that you care a lot. I used to joke, well half-joke, when my apps are unstable, I’m unstable and say things like my happiness is based on my MRR growth and while that isn’t totally true, it was…
Mike: There’s a lot of truth there.
Rob: There’s a little more truth than I would care to admit. I do think it’s learning, it’s becoming self-aware, or being able to gauge when you are really stressed out and then asking why. I’ll tell you what I do. What I’ve learned is that when I’m stressed out or when I’m angry or when I’m frustrated, I stop and I say, “Why do I feel this way? Is it something real or is it something that is fake, that is manufactured?” Someone said something stupid on Twitter that pissed me off, or someone is attacking this, or someone said something negative about my product and it hurt my feelings, and then I say, “That is a very real thing, but do I need to still be thinking about that now or is it time to let that go?” This all sounds very simple but this is how I cope with it and then I will totally be done, I’m gonna be done with that thing and I’m gonna make myself feel better. It’s actively thinking why do I have this stressed out feeling?
Also, a lot of people swear by it, I don’t do it but I did do meditation when the acquisition talks were going on because I probably have never been that stressed in my entire life. I would sit in the parking lot and I would meditate for four or five minutes each morning. It’s just listening to your breath and being aware of what’s going on with you rather than having your mind race about other things. That would help me get centered going into the day. I know that a lot of people swear by that. There’s a lot of different skills.
Deep breaths is something else I’ll do. I’ll sit there for 30 seconds and take three or four deep breaths if I wanna calm myself down in the moment. These are all small things that I do when I’m actively stressed. Trying to disconnect to yourself from the business as the original asker was asking is you don’t want it to trainwreck you when things go sideways, but it should impact you in some way. You care about that a lot, it’s kind of like losing a game that you’re really interested in. You’re playing soccer, or you’re playing chess or whatever and you’re really into it and then you lose the game. You should be a good sport about it but I personally believe that you should be pissed off too because I’m a competitor. You’re playing the game to win, that’s why I play games. If things are not going great in your startup, that you should feel a little stressed out, but it’s finding the balance of not feeling so stressed out that it just dictates your day-to-day mood based on your MRR growth or whatever.
Mike: That is probably the more common issue is being too invested in the outcome versus the journey along the way, as you’ve mentioned, that ties a lot back to the financial aspects of it. It’s really hard to disconnect yourself from it when things are not going well or not as well as you would like, really.
Rob: Last question from MicroConf Europe and then we’ll get into some other questions, is from Alex. He said, “Do you have any advice on time management as a solo founder? Is it better to dedicate to specific skills, like marketing, for example?”
Mike: Going back to my comments about the fact that different things for managing your emotions are going to work differently for different people. The same kind of advice generally applies here as well. Doing stuff on individual days is gonna work for some people, just doing time blocks, for example, is gonna work for other people. I do think that there are certain types of tasks that you need to do that timeboxing within a day is not necessarily going to work as well. For example, programming tasks or anything where you really need to get into deep focus and be able to spend a fair amount of time in order to make good progress on it, those are things that you can’t spread throughout the day. You really need to be able to schedule those things better. That’s the fundamental piece of time management is being able to figure out when you’re going to be effective at certain things and when your decision-making skills are just totally shot and you really need to flip over to something else.
Rob, we’ve talked about this in terms of managing your glucose levels throughout the day. It seems like an optimization but being cognisant of when you are better at certain things that other times of the day is extremely important.
Rob: Yeah, we’ve covered this on the podcast and we’ve had guests. We talked about the timeboxing approach that some people use, there’s a couple of guys at my work that do that, they swear by it. I have to done it when I’m derailed. I do it as a short term fix to get me back on track if I’m unmotivated or I’m struggling to figure out what to do.
Personally, time management for me is about priority management. If I know what I should be working on and then what I should be working on next and I don’t have to evaluate that every time I finish a task, I’m highly efficient. What derails me is if I finish something and I look around, and I go through my email, then I go to Trello, I wind up going to Amazon or Twitter and then I look around and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be doing and that’s where I lose, that’s where I mismanage my time, is if I don’t have these clear-cut priorities. Like you said, if I do have the clear-cut priorities and it’s the morning hours when I happen to be most productive between let’s say, 8:00AM and noon or 9:00AM and 1:00PM, then that’s it, that’s where I’m killing it. I try to push all of my meetings to afternoons, I try to push all of my calls to one day per week because those are distracting and interruptive for me and it doesn’t allow me to do deep work.
Alex’s question is is it better to dedicate specific days to specific skills like marketing for example. I think if that works best for you, then you should do it. I don’t think I ever did that. I don’t think I’ve ever blocked stuff off like that, like a whole day just for marketing then a whole day to just do development, but it was because when I have, let’s say I have this Trello board of 20 tasks, one was to whatever, go in and fix the forgot password thing that broke, and then the next one is to go start a Facebook Ad campaign. For me, that’s not a hard context switch if I finished one and then I move on to Facebook. I didn’t feel like I had to stuff all the marketing stuff on one day, it was just about which priority it needed to be. If I was switching back and forth between tasks when they’re undone, then there’s the big switching cause. But if I’m actually finishing and moving onto the next thing, I don’t feel like I need to separate the disciplines to different days, personally. But your mileage may vary for yourself.
Thanks again for the questions, guys. I’m glad we were able to get through the last four here on the podcast. Our next question is not actually a question, it is a thanks to us from a Nathan. He says, “Thanks for all the motivation. Thanks for the show, it’s been really motivating to get me started on my journey into the world of startups. I haven’t released a product yet but I’m working on building a public reputation and a mailing list. I just released a plugin for the Craft CMS which I use to run my personal site because I couldn’t find a good way to add events and tag emails to my Drip account for people who filled up my contact form. Releasing something even though I’m not selling it directly feels amazing. Can’t wait to release even more things in the future.” Thanks so much.
Mike: Thanks for that, Nathan! I find it interesting that the first thing you did was integrating it into Drip, especially given the other question about CMSs and you integrating with CMSs from MicroConf.
Rob: That one was CRM actually.
Mike: Okay, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. Sorry
Rob: Different TLA, three-letter-act.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Alright, our next question is about how to take over duties from your contractor, it’s from John Hollows. He says, “Howdy, I started my SaaS at the time when I didn’t know much about frontend development but I was focused on backend data handling and product decisions. I hired a contractor and it’s been great but it’s become a roadblock to development. I can’t update the frontend without sending him a Slack message and waiting a few days for a reply.” That’s a bummer. He says,” I’ve gotten good enough that now, I can do it for myself. Could you cover how to manage scaling down or letting go a contractor? I foresee requesting things to be more documented, then gradually taking back ownership of different aspects while giving him modular work, like creating a frontend module that handles the new feature. Thanks and keep up the great work.”
What do you think?
Mike: I think this is an interesting one just because a lot of people find themselves in this situation, whether it’s for financially-related reasons or because somebody just isn’t working out. They want to basically take over control or responsibility for the things so they can move faster. This I think is a really common problem if you’re early on and you’ve got money to spare and you’re hiring people and maybe they are not putting the time because you, obviously, don’t have enough money to pay them full time but at the same time, you’re beholden to their schedule. Even if you want to move faster, you can’t necessarily do it. I think that it’s just a very common situation that people find themselves in. The key to this is not to be put in a situation where you have to go back to them afterwards and start asking for documentation and start cleaning things up, and putting things in order so you could transition from one person to another, that person being them and transitioning it back to you. One thing you can do is you can go through yourself and start understanding it.
If you really are gonna take it over, then you have to understand it to begin with. You going through and doing some of that documentation work yourself might be at least a good start but you also want to put together a framework or a process for how the documentation should be put together. What sort of processes need to be put in place or documented so what when you get to a point and after you’ve taken over and you’ve been doing it and you need to shift onto something else, and you need to take this and hand it off, then you’ve got all the documentation put together and you’ve been keeping it up-to-date. If you get everything documented and then you take it over and do stuff for six months or a year but you don’t maintain the documentation, you’re gonna be back exactly where you were when you first took it over.
It’s important that the stuff that you’re putting in place are things that you are going to continue doing as part of the process and you are not opposed to doing them because if you don’t, it’s just gonna fall apart for you later on.
Rob: The way I would approach this, I’m gonna assume you have a good relationship with your contractor. You’re gonna have to judge if you tell the contractor totally honestly upfront, “Hey, I’m gonna look at taking over all the dev work. Could we start by having you create some documentation and have you walk me through the thing to get me up-to-speed, and then I’m slowly gonna take it over, over time, over the next three to six months. And let’s just transition it.” If he can do that, great. Most of the contractors that I’ve worked with have no problems with that.
If you think that the contractors is gonna be a pain in the ass about it then you can take a different tactic and let him or her know that, “Hey, I’m gonna be taking over some of the front end development work. I just find that I have more time and I wanna do some blah blah blah…” You don’t really say that you’re gonna basically be letting him go in six months. You could also say, “We may be thinking of bringing more contractors or other people and I really just want some documentation, could we put together some documentation and then walk me through it.” It’s pretty standard stuff as a contractor, I would totally expect someone to come to me and say this. You’re thinking process here that you’re gonna want some documentation, you’re probably gonna want a walk through, you’re gonna want to slowly take over more, slowly shrink the contractor’s sphere of ownership, and then eventually just take over all the work.
My guess is if the contractor is pretty good, you’re always gonna have some lower priority stuff that can wait a few days. Then there’s the high priority stuff but if the contractor saw it and knows the code-base and has delivered for you, I bet that by the time that you get to a place where you’re doing all the frontend work and you’re doing the, I should say, the high priority stuff that needs to get done quick, that you’re gonna have enough lower priority stuff that still needs to get done that you may want to actually keep the contractor around, whether it’s the amount of hours that they’re doing now or fewer, it’s always good to have another resource to help out with this stuff. There could be a lot of truth in this statement of, “I wanna learn this so that we can share the burden rather than you taking over everything.” I hope that helps. Thanks for the question.
Our next question is from Tim, it’s about improving conversions. He says, “I’ve been tracking signups across the board and about 50% of the people that come onto my pricing page follow through to signup and they use the app. However, the number of converting paying users is very low.” He has a trial obviously, he says, “I’m talking under 1%.” His trial to paid is under 1%, I’m gonna assume with a 50% signup rate of people who visit the pricing page that he is not asking for credit card in advance of the trial. “Can you point me to a resource I can use to take the first step to tackling this problem?”
Instead of pointing him to a resource, Mike, why don’t we just become the resource?
Mike: He has two different products here. One of them is called Article Insights and the other one is SEO Content Machine. I don’t know which one he’s specifically referring to. It’s probably a little bit difficult to drill directly into those. But there’s two approaches that I would take.
One is to take a look at the people who have converted and ask them why they started paying, what was important to them, maybe analyze how long they stick around and see if their lifetime value is extremely low for what you would expect, maybe you expect them to stick around for three months or six months and they’re staying around for a month or two. That’s a warning sign that either they’re signing up for something and they thought that they were getting something else or it’s just really not delivering the value that they thought they were gonna get out of it.
The other thing is you can go and start talking to those people who have signed up but if you put an offer in front of them, for example, after seven days that they could convert into a paid account, ask the people who didn’t why they didn’t or what were the biggest turn offs to them. Whether you ask them to respond to an email or get on a call with them. If you can get on a call with them, great, but I understand that a lot of them are probably not going to. But if you’ve got 99% of them who were not converting into paid then you’ve got a lot of opportunities to get them onto a call. It’s really about understanding what it is that they thought they were signing up for and what value they thought that they were gonna get, what their position is. Are they just kicking the tires, is the reason you have really high sign up rate is because they’re just tire kickers and it’s free so they figured, “What the heck, I’ll throw my email address in there,” or is it that they actually had a business problem that they were trying to solve and that’s the part that you’re really trying to get at is what are the pain points that they’re actually trying to solve and does the product actually deliver those things. Or is it that you think that it does but the reality is that their situation or problem is a little bit more tangential than your product delivers on.
Rob: Yeah, I recommend checking out a talk that I gave back in, I’m guessing it was 2013 at MicroConf. It’s gonna be on Vimeo. It’s called How to 10X in 15 Months, or it might be How I 10Xed in 15 Months. It’s basically the story of acquiring HitTail and then 10x-ing the revenue. Some part of that had a pretty noticeable impact was getting the trial to paid numbers way up. I did that using email sequences, event-based emails that would hit people up if they didn’t get onboarded, and then I’m trying to think, I should have had in-app stuff, I don’t know if I did, but that would have been another one. It’s just about getting people onboarded. I think your approach, Mike, of talking to people has gotta be the first step just to try to assess why are people not doing it. I do think that adding email reminders is going to absolutely have a pretty substantial impact, even before you know why people getting onboarded versus not getting onboarded. I still think email will have an impact if you’re not sending any today. That’s where I would start.
I enjoy these kinds of problems because it’s like you know that you’re a lot lower than you should be and it’s just a puzzle. How do you get that 1% up to 3% or up to 5%. Even 5%-15% for no credit card, it’s somewhere in there. Maybe it’s even 5%-20%. You should be able to substantially increase this and it’s just figuring out where the break is. If you can fix that, this is how you scale a business. This is where you go from trudging along, growing at a $100 or a couple $100 a month to suddenly really, really being able to hockey stick this thing if the numbers are right.
Our last question for the day is from Alex Sommerfeld and he says, “Hey, Mike and Rob. This one if more for Rob. What do you think about the newly-launched Drip service from Kickstarter?” D.rip is the service.
In essence, what’s interesting is it’s not actually a launched product that Kickstarter launched. It was a startup that started after Drip. Drip, basically, we worked on code in 2012, we launched in 2013, and I think it was some time in mid to late 2014 that this company called Drip launched and it was a music social network and it was a startup that raised a bunch of money and they bought the drip.com domain name because I couldn’t afford it, they bought it from a squatter. Once I saw that they owned it, I remember telling Derrick that I’m just counting and counting the months, 15-18 months they’re gonna be out of business because it’s a music social network, the odds of it working are just miniscule. You typically raise funding for 15-18 months of expenses.
Sure enough, sometime in, don’t quote me on this, it was sometime in 2015 they basically went under and I actually contacted their CTO and their CFO, all of the people involved and eventually was talking about trying to buy the domain name but it turned out that Kickstarter had basically just acquired the assets of Drip, of that social network, and some reason either didn’t buy the domain name or I don’t know if they didn’t want to or if it didn’t come with the package, or what happened.
The drip.com at that point got separated from this music social network but Kickstarter acquired the assets and I don’t know what the assets of it, if it was a team of people or if there was any type of software. But in essence, they turned it into a Patreon competitor. That’s what it is. Kickstarter is launching a way to do subscription-giving to support creators.
This name has been around for a long time in bizarre context. The end of the story is my Drip got acquired by LeadPages and we bought the drip.com domain name, maybe four or five months ago. Now, if you go to drip.com, it’s our website, all our email addresses are now using drip.com, I don’t know how I feel about it. It sucks to have two things and the exact same name, you can’t trademark that name drip because it’s too generic. I should’ve tried to do that back in 2014-2015. It is what it is. There’s gonna be some confusion. We have the .com, I feel like that’s a win, it all depends on how given that we are not competitors at all. Drip does seem to just be, that word and phrase, is being used in marketing and it’s being used in juts to mean something that is released over time because that’s what this is. It’s subscription, it’s payments to creators over time versus dripping out email over time. I don’t know, I have strong opinions on it, I’m not terribly offended by it. I wasn’t super happy when they launched three years ago but I’m over it just because they’ve been around, I’ve watched the whole thing play out. You have other thoughts on it?
Mike: It’s interesting that the color schemes and everything else are extremely similar. Drip, where you work is LeadPages, it’s capital D, they’ve got a lowercase D and their I is upside down but other than that, it just looks very similar.
Rob: Yeah, when you think of of drip, you’re gonna tend to use blue, so we both used blue and startup blue is a common thing anyway.
Mike: Yeah, I don’t know. I can foresee there could be a lot of confusion, to be honest, which sucks. As many domain names as there are, there’s only so much you can do.
I think that about wraps us up for today. If you have a question, 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 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, we’ll see you next time.