Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about SaaS marketing lessons you’ll wish you’d learned sooner. Based on an article on karolakarlson.com they break the list down to 9 key lessons including growth plans, mission statements, tracking metrics and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: I’m Rob.
Mike: We’re here to share experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word of this week, Rob?
Rob: The word this week is a little bit of wrestling with Google and they’re indexing in webmaster tools because I 301 redirected my entire old blog site, Software by Rob, and I got a new domain, Rob Walling, and I 301’d all that and got it all set up. There’s just always more complexity than you think there’s going to be. I had this seven-step checklist that I went through and, of course, parts of it went wrong and parts of it got cached while I was in the middle of troubleshooting and so you don’t know what the real version is.
I’m literally like–I texted Derek and I’m like, “Can you hit this URL and let me know what you see?” even though I flushed my cash and all that. It was just giving me–from different browsers, it was giving me different results. It wasn’t that big of a deal but then the redirect was fine, everything’s been working and then the Google indexing has really not started. It probably took–it’s been almost 10 days, maybe 14 days, and it’s just now picking up on the new domain. I’m looking at the search analytics and just starting to see 50 total clicks. It’s literally like one day’s worth of clicks or less than that, actually, has started to pick up.
Mike: The hard part about that is that, because Google has different Google-plexes all over the place, different people are going to be different ones so they’re not–the different indexes are in different places, which kind of sucks.
Rob: Yeah, I agree. This is just–it’s like try not to redirect stuff. You can totally do it and not lose traffic in the long term but, in the short term, it’s kind of always a bit more work and there’s always these loose ends that happen. By no means was it a disaster or anything; it was kind of a fun little thing to, I don’t know, stay busy with, but I’ll just be happy when everything’s moved over. Again, the whole site’s functional if you go to Rob Walling. You can go look around and everything’s there but, now, I’m just trying to get Google to make all the Google search results look use Rob Walling instead of the old site. How about you? What’s going on?
Mike: I was looking through some of the comments on some of our older episodes and there was one or a couple of episodes ago where we had talked about the moniker of “the Rest of Us” and how we should have trademarked that or something like that, not that we probably would have gone that road. Glen Bennett wrote and said that there was an Apple ad from the ’80s where they called it “The Computer for the Rest of Us” so we were beat by quite a lot on that.
Rob: Yeah, and that’s been a part of the English language for, I guess, 50 years. I have no idea what the first use of it was but I definitely heard it growing up, just people talking about that.
Mike: Yup. Yeah, so we definitely missed the door on that one.
Rob: Yeah, for sure. There were some other pretty interesting comments. There’s a comment from Rasmus on Episode 389, which was titled Pro Tips for Attending Conferences, and he says something else he does is go to the gym in the morning. It really makes your mind and body ready to listen and learn all day. That is something we forgot to say because I actually try to go to the gym when I’m at conferences, and it’s especially easy at MicroConf because of our 10:00 AM start time. When we used to start at 9:00, I never had time because I was too tired. That is something that I recommend, even to go for a short run, even if it’s only 15 minutes or something. I like getting up and getting out.
Another couple of comments on Episode 395, which was 20 Podcasts We Like, we had two more that requested. Kristoff Engelhart recommended How I Built This by Guy Raz. That’s at NPR podcast, I believe, and he said he specifically liked the episode with the Collision Brothers from Stripe, the guy from Home Depot and the one with the Founders of Ben and Jerry’s. I’ve listened to a few episodes of How I Built This and I liked it. I think I struggled with the fact there were some–the signal to noise for me was a bit low because it’s an NPR show and so it’s tailored to the masses and I always struggle to consume startup stuff made for the masses. Honestly, it’s a really well-produced show if you’re interested. It’s just in interview format, basically, and it’s as you would expect from NPR.
The last comment was from the same episode from Abdu, and he says, “I find it odd you didn’t mention Mixergy. Even Rob was a guest on it.” Yeah, I’ve been a guest on Mixergy six times, I think–five or six times–but it’s not something that I currently have in my rotation. I definitely used to listen to it but the volume of shows that comes out–it just hasn’t been on my radar for a while. Totally, I still see Andrew at conferences and every once and a while. When I hear that someone I know or there’s a particularly interesting interview on Mixergy, I absolutely download it and listen to it, but it’s not on my everyday podcast subscription feed anymore.
Again, that’s mostly due to the sheer volume of shows that come out of there and the interview format. Andrew was one of the early pioneers of that. They were folks who were doing startup interviews but he came on the scene and really revolutionized that, way before John Lee Dumas and several other folks who’ve done it since then. I have a ton of respect for what he’s built and, obviously, have enjoyed my conversations on Mixergy with him. I, in all honesty, listen to less interview shows than I used to. If you do look at that list of 20, there are very few truly just all interview shows. Even like This Week in Startups that we just mentioned, they do some interviews but I personally skip many of those and I listen to a lot more to the news round tables and even some of the pitching ones.
Mike: Going back to your blog redesign that you did for your website, there’s a missed business opportunity in there where somebody could have acquired Rob Walling and sold it to you.
Rob: Someone did. I bought it from another guy named Rob Walling.
Mike: Really?
Rob: Yeah, I bought it a couple of months ago.
Mike: That’s different. If you bought it from another Rob Walling whereas if you would have bought it from Mike Taber, then that would have been different.
Rob: I know. It was funny. When I emailed him, the guy was like, “Whoa, this is kind of weird.” He’s like, “I thought it was a trick email.” I was like, “No, this is actually another Rob Walling.” We had different middle names, of course, but he was funny. He said, “Well, I can tell by your name that you are a scholarly gentleman of great intelligence and manners,” or something. I was like, “Well done, Sir. This is going to be fun.” Just the negotiation and buying it from him was kind of fun.
Mike: That reminds me of when I was at Home Depot a couple of years ago. They paged Mike Taber over the intercom and so, of course, I go come to find out there’s a guy who works there named Mike Taber who lives nearby. It was interesting to meet another Mike Taber.
Rob: Yeah, totally. Very cool. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Today, we are going to be going over a blog article written by Karola Karlson, and it’s over at karolakarlson.com and we’ll link that up in the show notes. It is about SaaS marketing lessons. The title of this episode is SaaS Marketing Lessons You’ll Wish You’d Learn Sooner and what I did was I kind of consolidated a bunch of these things because there’s some things in here that overlap a lot with other topics, and there’s 35 different items in this particular blog article. We’re going to condense that down a little bit. I’m going to talk more focused about some of these different pieces where it applies specifically to the types of people who are listening to this show.
Rob: We have about 9, it looks like, down from 35.
Mike: 9 SaaS marketing lessons.
Rob: They’re making a listicle!
Mike: The first one is about finding your high expectation customer, and there’s another link that we’ll add into the show notes because there is a link over to a blog article that somebody else wrote all about finding what your high expectation customer is, and the basic definition of that is the type of customer who has very high expectations for your product and they know exactly what it is that they want to do. There’s a series of questions that you can answer very specifically about them. For example, “Who is it that needs the product? What does it do for them? How do they feel about it? What’s the true benefit for them?” and, “Will your product exceed their expectations?”
If all those criteria are met, then you have what’s called a high expectation customer because they know exactly what it is that they want and they need, and their bar is very high. If you can exceed that bar, then you’re going to satisfy a much larger number of customers. Early on, it’s going to be very difficult for you to meet that especially because they’re going to be an advanced customer; they’re not going to be an early adopter. Assuming that you can meet that bar for that customer, then you’re going to be able to sell to a much larger pool of people. This is going to help you to grow the business a lot just because of that much larger pool, and knowing those numbers helps you in a great number of other ways which we’ll talk about later in this episode.
Rob: Right, and when they define the high expectation customer, they say it’s the most discerning person within your target demographic. It’s someone who will acknowledge and enjoy your product or service for its greatest benefit, and that person needs to be someone who others aspire to emulate because they see them as clever, judicious and insightful.
Mike: The second lesson is to not sell to everyone. I think, generally speaking, this is obvious advice that’s repeated a lot by different people on the startups basis, but the real question is, “Why is this repeated so often?” It’s because it tells you who not to sell to, who should you not be targeting for your SaaS or your products, or your service. The real benefit of doing that is that, if you can get rid of those people in certain marketing channels or you avoid marketing to them because they’re not a great fit for your product, either that could be for a variety of reasons; either they churn out a lot or it’s an ancillary benefit to them, they’re not really looking for your products.
There’s all these different reasons why they might not be your ideal customer but, by removing them from the pool of people that you’re actively marketing to, then it’s going to yield a lot better ROI across all of your marketing channels and it allows you to focus much more on the types of people who are a good fit for your product versus the ones that are not as good a fit and you’re going to have to do a lot more work in order to sell them on your product.
Rob: Yeah, and, in the early days, this is all you can do, right? Especially if you’re bootstrapped but even when you’re funded. Five years ago, I thought about a venture-funded company and thought, “Man, they have infinite resources and they can just sell to everyone.” Then, of course, I worked inside Leadpages for 20 months and realized that, “No, even there, there are these massive trade offs. They just can’t hire enough good people.” Even with really high budgets, they can’t hire enough good people to sell to everyone.
I think your point about, “Yes, we hear this over and over,” is well-taken, but why do we hear it? It’s because people make this mistake over, and over, and over. In your early days, it’s really easy that anyone who gives you a dollar, you want to get the product to them because you want to maximize your revenue because every dollar means you can market more. The problem with that is you can quickly, especially if you’re a software product, go off the rails with folks who are requesting things that take you away from your core vision or the core vision that’s going to meet the needs of most people versus someone, again–if you’re selling to internet marketers or the SaaS founders and then a photographer who comes in, he can pay $1000.00 a year but he’s going to have totally different requests.
I went through this exact thing early on with Drip where we just got a request that was like, “We don’t really want to build that and that doesn’t help anybody else,” and so then that person was disappointed and they didn’t love the product. We eventually parted ways but it was a lesson I think each of us learns as we go, is just say no fairly frequently. If you don’t think they’re going to get value of it or they’re not in your core market, I would err on the side of saying no in the early days.
Mike: That kind of leads a little bit into the next one, which is to have a mission statement. I think, most of the time, this is probably not a great place to focus a lot of your time and effort but the reality is that when you have a mission statement about what it is that you are trying to do and what you are trying to achieve with the product and the business, then it allows you to use that as marketing collateral so you can tell your customers what it is that you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to do that for and who you are like and who you are not like.
By default, by having this mission statement, it allows you to decide what it is that you don’t do in addition to what it is that you are going to do. By having that mission statement, you can refer back to it when you’re trying to look at these customers who come in and one of them says, “Oh, I run a photography business.” You’re like, “Yeah, that’s probably not a great fit,” and you can tell that my going back and looking at your mission statement. I don’t think a mission statement is something that you can do on Day One just because it’s probably going to take some time to figure out what that is based on who your ideal customer is, and you’re not going to know that on Day One. That’s going to take some time and effort to figure that out over the course of many months or even, potentially, years. Once you have that mind, it gives you that reference point to go back and say no.
Rob: I would edit this one a bit. In the article, Kerola says that you absolutely must know your unique value proposition and your mission statement. For me, the unique value proposition comes way before a mission statement because the mission statement is that global thing of like, “Google wants to organize the world’s information.” I don’t think you know that from the start; very few people do especially if you’re bootstrapped, you’re doing customer development or even funded for that matter.
I know I often say that if you’re bootstrapped, then blah, blah, blah, but it applies to both in so many cases that if you’re just trying to figure out what to build, I don’t know that your mission statement matters as much as you’re honing in on a solution for your folks for the people who are using you or asking for you to make changes to the app. It’s like, “What separates you from the other solutions on the market?” and that’s what your unique value proposition is, the UVP. It’s UVP or USP, unique selling proposition, but it’s what makes you different.
When you’re building out an email solution, it’s like, “Well, how are you different than Yesware or than MailChimp, and you’ve just got to hone in on that because, if you’re not different, then it’s just a “me too” play. It’s possible to make a living doing that. It’s possible to build a business. Certainly, people have done it but it’s so much harder because you’re just going to be slogging it out for sales that you still don’t have enough of a differentiator. If you’re going to build something that’s a “me too” play, then you need to find a unique traffic source. You need to be really good at SEO and rank in the top three and outrank everybody else and just expect that a certain amount of people are going to sign up without looking at your competitions. There are ways to do this but, in my book, trying to figure out early on how you’re going to be differentiated from the competition is probably the number one thing I’d look at.
Mike: The next item on the list is that what you’re putting together your growth plans, you should focus on actions, not just not the numbers that you need to hit. I think both of them are absolutely important but, without those numbers, you don’t know what it is you’re trying to achieve but, without the actions, you’re never going to be able to achieve them because those actions are critical to being able to meet whatever numbers you put on paper. Based on the numbers, you can backtrack from there and decide what actions need to be taken in order to get that point.
I think in a previous episode, we’ve talked about, basically, mapping out what your goals look like and reverse based on the endpoint that you’re trying to reach and then backtracking from there. “What is it do I need to do before to I get to that point?” and continuing along that path but you need to have those actions and decide what order those actions need to be taken because, if you’re not doing it in the right order or you’re doing it in the wrong places–for example, if you want to do SEO on your website, that’s great and all in order to increase the footprint but what pages are the ones that you should start with. Certain pageants are just not going to matter at all versus other ones, and being able to prioritize those is critical.
Rob: I have mixed thoughts about this one. I agree that it should focus on both, in my opinion. I like focusing on actions, of course, because of exactly what you said and what she says in the article because, then, you’re just delivering–as Ellie said, you’re making those hard phone calls a day, not focusing on the end result and making X sails, but you’re just putting in the work. I’m also motivated by numbers and I’m motivated by the success of seeing things grow. I like to have a goal to strive for that’s not just going through the motions.
I know this is not just saying go through the motions but I think I could fall into the trap if I’m not also keeping my eye on the numbers of just doing things during the day. I think a lot of people can fall under that type. It’s like my actions are to tweet this and to do a blogpost. To do some Instagram on social media–and that could be your plan, but it’s like you have to then measure and make sure that’s moving the numbers, and maybe that’s where I’m kind of nitpicking this one, is I think it should be heavily correlated. You can’t attribute everything to numbers but, man, if you’re not getting out of the plan you’re doing, then you have to change that up. I think that’s where I’m saying–I think I focused on both actions and numbers.
Mike: Maybe focus is a wrong way to put it. It needs to include both as opposed to should focus on one or the other. If you have a growth plan and it’s just, “Hey, these are the numbers that I want to hit,” it’s going to be useless. You have to have those actions as well. If you’re going to go through those actions, you also need to do some sort of measurements and have numbers that you’re going to hit afterwards because, if you’re just doing actions, as you said, and you’re not getting any results of out it, then why are you doing those things? The critical piece here is where you have to have both; it’s not just one or the other.
Moving on, the next one is to optimize for growth, not leads, and it kind of ties back a little back to the growth plan. If you are optimizing for adding, let’s say, newsletter subscribes. That’s great and all, but how are you getting them through the rest of your funnel? Are you trying to optimize them to get them to become activated or sign up to download other things from your newsletter? Are you trying to get them over to the pricing page? What is it that you’re trying to get them to do next?
You need to track the customer or that prospect through the entire sales because, if you’re not doing that, then you can’t track those numbers and you have no way to identify how many people are moving from one step to the next. By tracking those things, it allows you to get rid of the lower IRO activities that you’re doing because those are time and money sinks, and it’s just going to take up a lot of your time and attention. You could be using to spend on other higher IRO activities because those are the things that are generated in better leaves and those and those better leads become better customers because they’re going to seek around for longer and because they’re a better fir for you.
Rob: This reminds me of a couple of conversations I’ve had over the years with folks who are measuring too early in the funnel. I was talking to one sort of founder who said, “Yeah, I have 10,000 uniques a month in my website. How many uniques do you have?” I was like, “That doesn’t matter.” It really doesn’t matter unless we’re talking about certain things but if we’re talking about just making sales, it’s like, “How many trials did you get out of that? How many converted to paid? How many stuck around for more than two or three months?”
It’s like, “Go deeper in the funnel,” which is essentially what this is saying: Don’t get hung up on these top-of-the-funnel metrics. Now, the top-of-the-funnel metrics can be important because they obviously feed the later metrics, but if you’re not closing and retaining people, you are leaking people out of the bottom of your funnel and you’re never going to grow the business. What’s funny is I think it was the same conversation. The guy said he had 10,000 uniques and, at the time, DotNetInvoice was doing 1000 uniques or 1500, but it was doing three or four grand a month, and he was blown away by that because he’s doing way more than his app.
I was like, “It’s because a lot of people who come–it’s highly-targeted traffic and so many of the people who come buy,” and it’s $300.00 a month. There all these reasons why the math work but it was just a head-exploding thing. Really, it’s just mass. It’s just, “Look at the top and you’re going to lose certain people out of each step of that funnel, whether it’s to a demo or to a trial, and then it’s to paid, and then it’s how long they stuck around. With the rules-of-thumb that we frequently covered in this podcast–have covered in talks, have covered in blog posts and such–you can tell which step of the funnel you need to focus on. That’s the biggest thing, is optimizing for growth means focus on that part of the funnel where you have the opportunity to make the biggest difference.
As you grow your app, that is going to move. It’s going to move down the funnel. Probably, early on, it’s going to be like, “Oh my, gosh. We’re not retaining anyone,” and it’s like, “Well, it’s because you don’t have product market fit,” and this can be like, “Oh my, gosh. No one’s setting up for a trial.” It’s because your marketing’s off with your product market fit now. Then, it’s like, “Oh my, gosh. We don’t have nearly enough people hitting our website. It’s like, “Yeah, it’s because you haven’t been focusing on marketing; you’ve been focusing on customer development and building your product.” You’re going to move up and then you’ll probably move the other way and move right back down one to two years in your product, assuming that you have something that’s reasonably successfully.
That actually takes us to our next one, which I think is Points 5 or 6, and it’s track the right metrics. It’s things like monthly recurring revenue, cost per acquisition, cost to acquire a customer and your lifetime value. You obviously need to look at top-of-funnel stuff like, “How many uniques to my website? How many trials am I getting? What is the visit-to-trial percentage? What is the trial-to-paid percentage?” You need to look at those, but those are not as important as the ones I just said, because the ones that MRR, cost per acquisition and the lifetime value are the ones that are optimizing for growth.
A loose rule of thumb is that lifetime value should be greater than or equal three times your cost to acquire a customer. That means it’s a solid acquisition channel if you can make those numbers line up. Now, one thing to say is that what holds true for funded companies and, typically, if you’re funded, you want to acquire a customer for less than one year of their value to you. The average revenue per user or even the revenue for this particular user is $20.00. Then, no matter how long they stick around or even if they stick around five years, if you’re funded, you tend to want to spend less than about $240.00 to acquire that person because it’s $20.00 times 12.
Now, if you’re not funded, cash is a real issue. Typically, I see folks wanting to keep their customer acquisition costs between two and four months of what they’re going to get back from that customer. I remember we hit tail on them on them with Drip as we got more money coming in, we extended that out to 5, and then 6, and then 7 and then you learn to manage your cash and you learn that this month’s cash is coming in and I can now spend more and more to acquire. The more you can spend, the more customers you can put through the funnel. You can’t do this without tracking the right metrics and you have to keep in mind not just these loose rules of thumb that are thrown around for fun in companies but, if you’re bootstrapped, it’s going to be a little bit of a tighter grip on that purse unless you have a big bucket of funding that you’re pulling from.
Mike: Just to reiterate on that piece that Rob had commented on, if you’re bootstrapped, you really want to get your money back a lot quicker if you can with Bluetick I’m going through the same thing where it’s very difficult to allocate a lot of money and resources towards acquiring customers in certain channels just because I know that it’s going to take a heck of a lot longer, and the reality is I just don’t have the money to be able to dump a lot in because if you–let’s say it costs you $500.00 to acquire a customer and, yes, you’ll get $1,500.00 out of it, but it’s going to take you a full year to get there. You can end up going broke if you try and dump all your money into that. You kind of have to play long ball there.
The point of that particular anecdote is that everything takes a lot longer than you want it to. You’re going to have to truck your funnel activity over a longer period of time, you’re probably going to get your lifetime value from these customers in a much longer period of time than you would like to, your tests will take longer to complete, then you’re going to have to analyze them and act on them, but everything is going to take a lot longer than you would like it to. That includes goals and stuff that you put forward as well. If you decide that, “Hey, we’re going to do this marketing campaign and we expect it to take 3 or 4 weeks,” it’s probably going to take you 5 or 6 if not longer just because of all the other things that are going on that are going to demand your attention in the business. Support tickets will come up, things like that, and it just takes longer to do just about everything.
Rob: Our second-to-last lesson you’ll wish you’d learned sooner is to publish with intent, and it’s basically to have a strategy behind what you publish to provide value in a consumable format, value quality over quantity and to track performance and double down on promoting content that does well. Five years ago, quantity actually went out over quality, not in every case but people just cranked out–companies that were cranking out 1 post a week, and then 3, and then 5, and then literally 10 a week twice a day during the week were winning the SEO game and the content marketing game.
That has switched. That’s changed up. Now, folks are focusing on much longer pieces of content, really pillar content, The Ultimate Guide to This and The Definitive Guide to That that might be 20-30,000 words, half the length of the book, and they make it available as a download but also, for the SEO, put it in HTML format. It’s fewer and bigger bats is what it is, and then you double down on the ones that work and you walk away from the ones that don’t. That’s essentially what Kerola’s talking about here.
Mike: The last SaaS marketing lesson you’ll wish you’d learned sooner is that prospects are people. Pretty much everybody on your mailing list that has signed up for it at some point, there’s a person behind every single one of those email addressed. People don’t generally like to be sold to; what they enjoy in going to a website is going to educate them because you’re the expert in a particular space and they’re trying to learn from you. Moving on from that, once you have established that trust, then you’re going to be able to sell your product to them, but it’s more of a situation where they’re the ones who are deciding that they’re going to take that next step.
This is mainly because it is an online marketing scenario. If you are in a direct sales demo, then you are essentially pitching, but you’re on that schedule within whatever the time of that meeting is, but when they’re coming to your website, they’re on their own schedule, and they can pick and choose when they’re going to move forward and you have very, very little control over it. The reality is you have to treat them like a person when you’re interacting with them through the mailing list and take time to build that trust; don’t try to pitch, pitch, pitch because it’s just simply not going to work. Going the education route, helping them to become better at whatever it is that they’re trying to do is going to be much more effective than trying to build all of the trust in a particular email and then sell them on a particular touch point. They’re not just going to go come to your website and buy something on the first shot.
Rob: Yeah, there are very few products that you can sell with one touch point. Often, info products are this way because they tend to be impulse purchases and you can put time constraints and reward pressure and all that stuff, and that is one reason that info marketers have these big splashy launches, is that it’s not a recurring payment. It’s just aspirational and you can sell a lot more of something when it’s aspirational. When it’s software, it requires people’s time and so, as you’re saying, folks are very unlikely to come and buy the first time and there does have to be some type of trust or relationship built up.
Now, there are ways to shortcut this. One of the ways is to have social proof, in essence, to have other people vouch for you. I should back up and say the first way to do it is just to build your own audience. You don’t have to do that to start a product. There’s a bunch of people who do it without ever having an audience of people that follow them. I’ve done it several times with several products, and it’s totally doable and it’s not a bad way to go. I don’t think building an audience is the only way to do it.
However, these days, it is easier than ever to build an audience if that’s your thing. You can do that to build trust in advance. The problem is you have to have a massive list. Let’s say you have a list of 1,000 people who are really following you and you want to sell a SaaS product that’s $10.00 or $20.00 a month. You’re not going to get to critical mass that way. You’re just not going to sell enough licenses or subscriptions to your software to make that work.
If you’re selling a book and you have 1,000 people really following you, you might sell 300 or 400 copies of that book. It would be an ambitious amount, but I’ve done it myself. My first book did that. That is enough to kind of get a ball rolling that could potentially result in stuff down the line. Those are kind of the two sides of building the audience yourself. Another way to do it, as I was saying earlier, is that the next step is to kind of have other people vouch for you, and whether that means testimonials or whether that means they’ll do joint webinars with you, in some way, endorsing your product, saying that they use it, assuming that they do.
That’s another way to kind of shortcut that trust and get growth faster than having to educate everyone individually about why they should trust you, and that was one thing that Clay Collins did really well in the early days of Leadpages, was to do the webinar model and to do with it a bunch of his internet marketing friends who would vouch for Leadpages because they were using it, and then, there you go, you have access to literally hundreds of thousands of people even though your audience is not that large.
That’s just one angle of this “prospects are people” but the real thing to think about is that every prospect, every person, makes their own decision based on what they know about you and the product and what they’ve heard about you and the product. It’s something to keep in mind, that just numbers and conversion rates can help you forget much to your detriment. To recap, the 9 SaaS marketing lessons you’ll wish you’d learn sooner are, number one, find your high expectation customer; number two, don’t sell to everyone; number three, have a mission statement; number four, growth plan should focus on actions and not numbers; number five, optimize for growth, not leads; number six, track the right metrics; number seven, everything takes time; number eight, publish with intent; and, number nine, prospects are people.
If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 8888-01-9690 or record an MP3 and email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by Moot, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit Startups for the Rest of Us for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 397 | Customer Acquisition Strategies
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about customer acquisition strategies. Based on a themarketingstudent.com article, they break down the difference between strategies versus tactics and how to think about your acquisition strategy.
Items mentioned in this article:
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, watching, and growing software products. Whether you 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 experiences to help you with the same mistakes we’ve made. So, trivia question for you, Rob. How many times do we say Startups For The Rest Of Us in the intro?
Rob: Three?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: That was a guess.
Mike: I remember so many commenting on that just because we’re like, “Oh, you say that a lot,” and I was like, “Three times, pretty close together but we just wish we did it three times.”
Rob: We should figure out how to shrink that. Should we also record an episode that is just a list of lists?
Mike: Sure. I think that sounds like great idea.
Rob: We got an iTunes comment. It was a four or five-star review but it’s, “Stop making lists. All your episodes are listicals or something like BuzzFeed.” So I went back and looked in the prior 20 episodes. We had three that said “X ways to do this,” or, “20 podcast we like,” or, “X approaches to this.” It’s 3 out of 20. I don’t know. That didn’t feel like everyone.
I also feel doing that list approach. I don’t do it for the BuzzFeed aspect, but I do it because I feel it helps listeners know what the episodes are going to cover. It’s a really concrete outline that people can get their head around and they know for it number three or number four, they just know how long it’s going to go.
For me, I have been using Zoom for a while. We were using it at Drip to do demos and such, and I really enjoyed it. It works well on low bandwidth. It is just a frictionless experience for people you’re trying to get on a call. I cannot stand Skype anymore. The user interface, that you have to link up with people, accept this invitation, and the fact that I can just drop a Zoom link somewhere and people just show up, and you’re there video conferencing is amazing.
I think I’m still on the free plan. With Drip we had to have a paid plan but now that I’m just doing stuff on my own, you can get quite a bit and really not have to pay for it. The other thing that I have signed up for, which I really have never done the whole Calendly send the link and then book the stuff. But I’m booking just enough things here and there and they’re all ad hoc that I decided to try it.
I actually send up for YouCanBook.me which is a bootstrap Calendly competitor. Bridget, the co-founder spoke on MicroConf a couple of years ago and then Anna, who was employee number three or four at Drip runs Customer Success for YouCanBook.me. I want to give it a try and see what the experience was like. I’ve been really pleased with it.
Again, I think I’m on their free tier as well. But it’s this combination of things that it is just saving me a lot of time and a lot of headache. I’m sure there’s pros and cons of YouCanBook.me versus Calendly versus the other 10 apps that do it but I’ve got a really good experience because it does everything I need. I has a lot of options in that app. I was impressed with it because I know it’s been around for a couple of years. But they built a ton of features into it so I just want to give them a shout out as a new user.
Mike: I think it is justified that you’re on the free plan given that you’re unemployed.
Rob: That’s right. It’s an income thing not a lack-of-features-that-I-need thing. You’re not going to let that go, are you?
Mike: No, not until you start to do startup. This could go on for as long as you want it to be.
Rob: The only way to make it stop, Rob, is to start another company.
Mike: I will shame you until you do that. No. just kidding. Other thing. I’ll make a pre-announcement for this because I don’t have a contract in place and I don’t have a confirmation on this. You can probably put it tentatively on your calendar. Hopefully we won’t have to make a correction to this. But MicroConf, you’re tentatively scheduled for October 21st to October 23rd in Croatia. Write that down, I’m hoping that next week I will not have to do a retraction. If you’re not in the mailing list for that, you can head over to microconfeurope.com and get on the mailing list for that. Just sign up and we will let you know when we have all the details worked out for everything and when tickets are on sale.
Rob: I’m stoked about this. Hope that comes together. We wanted to go to Croatia for the past several years. We almost hoped over there when we were having MicroConf in Barcelona. We never made it, so very excited.
Another thing for me and kind of a thanks and a high five from a guy named John Elliot with equipmentwallet.com and he says, “In 2012, I started a web product that I soon abandoned. As a single non-technical co-founder, I simply lack many skill sets at the time to get anywhere. However, I never stopped believing in the concept of what I set out to do. In August of 2017, I relaunched equipmentwallet.com, it’s a marketplace that matches businesses seeking equipment financing with lenders who bid for their business. Your podcast to me has been educational, tactical, and most of all motivational. It’s been part of my journey and helped me revisit my project and get it out there. Thanks to you both.”
Mike: That’s awesome. Thanks, John. We really appreciate letting us know about that.
Rob: Yup. It’s always good to hear success stories, people getting to launch, and revenue milestones and all that stuff. He also has PS, he says, “Are there any previous episode you can point me to regarding selecting or selling through affiliates, pros and cons, using a service like Commission Junction or not?”
Honestly, I would go to startupsfortherestofus.com and in that search box, type in ‘affiliates’ or ‘affiliate marketing’ and see what comes up. I am guessing in 400 episodes we’ve talked about this. I don’t know if we spent an entire episode on it, but even if you download a handful of Q&A episodes and listen through them at 2X, I think we have laid out a lot of our thoughts on this topic at some point or another.
Mike: That’s a little known hack on our website because we have all the transcripts available, everything’s searchable so you can go through and if you have a specific topic that you’re looking for, you can just go in, type in a couple of keywords, search, and see what episodes come up. Quite frequently there’s something there when you’re searching for something like affiliates or specific companies you usually find find it there. It’s nice to have that.
I remember you and I went back and forth of this number of years ago as to whether or not we were to continue doing transcripts and I always find them to be helpful to be able to go back and find them. I did see recently that Google is starting to take videos and MP3s that they find on the internet and if they have the links to them, then they also transcribed them.
Rob: Yeah. I would imagine that because they want index everything, right?
Mike: Right. They’ll do the speech-to-text translation and then make it so you can find those things and incorporate them into their search engine.
Rob: Yup. That is a little known hack that I use often. When people ask, “Have you ever spoken about this?” often times I can’t remember. I go to the site and I search it. So it is neat to have transcripts of hundreds of hours of us chatting
Mike: Definitely.
Rob: So what are we talking about today?
Mike: Today, we are going to be talking about how to pick a customer acquisition strategy. This is based very largely on an article that we’re going to link to over on themarketingstudent.com. It talks a little bit about customer acquisition strategies and difference in tactics, strategies, and how to think about them. What we’re going to do is basically run down the article itself, go through this, and use that article as an outline—come in give or take—on certain pieces of it.
Rob: Cool. Let’s dive in.
Mike: The first part is essentially differentiated between tactics and strategies because the article itself is on customer acquisition strategies. So it starts off by differentiating between those two. It says, “Tactics are the ones that you see all over the place. How do you use LinkedIn to contact people and scale up your outreach efforts or how do you reduce your onboarding by 17% and this is how such and such company did it.
But the reality is that, those are all tactics versus strategies are things that people don’t talk a lot about and they tend to be overlooked because it’s the tactics that people are going to be able to put into place that are actionable, versus the strategies which give you really a foundation for how you’re going to be approaching those things versus the tactics are stacked on top of it. That’s really how they phrase this. The strategy is the foundation and tactics are the things that you stack on top of strategy in order to make it work. If you don’t have a strategy for something then you are going to be drowning in a tactic because you’re going to be trying all these different things and they don’t necessarily all fit together well because they are not part of a cohesive strategy.
Rob: Yeah and that’s one comment I was going to make. Notice that the title of this article is ‘How to pick a customer acquisition strategy that will get you to $100 million,’ and I’m assuming ARR. I was going to say if that said ‘How to pick a customer acquisition tactic,’ that will get you there, that would be a misleading headline because I don’t believe there is—except in extremely rare cases—a single tactic that’s going to get you there. Whereas, if you have an overarching strategy for a bunch of tactics under there, then that makes more sense. I would like to think of strategy much like you said, it’s this umbrella under which a bunch of tactics fall.
Mike: The next piece that they lead into is how to think about your acquisition strategy and how do you come up with them. One way—it’s kind of obvious—is to look at existing companies that are the level that you want to get. So they use $100 million companies as the basis. If you want to get your own company to a $100 million, you look for other $100 million companies that have a similar business model to yours.
With that said, we’re going to dive into three different pieces of it that they talked about. The first one is identifying what’s your business model is. This is all about figuring out what your customer lifetime value is, how much you’re going to get from a given customer or account, or how you’re going to be selling your software or your services, how are they going to be packaged together.
From there you backtrack a little bit, say, “Okay, well how many customers or accounts is it going to take me at this number or this price point in order to get me there?” It can range anywhere from, if you have 100 customers each paying you $1 million, then that’s what will get you there versus if you have a million customers who are each paying you $100 a year, then that will also get you to $100 million. The whole point of this part one is to identify what your business model looks like and the price points that you were going to be expecting customers to come in at in order to be able to build your business out to get to that level.
Rob: And something to think about here is they keep talking about this $100 million mark because that’s what funded companies shoot for. That’s when you can get acquired for $1 billion, you can IPO or whatever. You don’t have to think like that. If you look around at successful competitors, even if let’s say they’re a bootstrapped fast company doing $2, $3, $4 million and they’re in an adjacent space but you see that they’re just killing it with a certain sales funnel, or a certain type of Facebook ad, or a certain ad network you haven’t heard of, or with affiliate webinar model.
There’s all types that you can see, and then you borrow, you adapt, and you use it in your space. But they’re not to be doing $100 million. They’re just throwing that out because I think that’s how people in the valley think. There can be successful approaches by people who get to $500K in ARR or $1 million in ARR. It may work better or worse in your space if you leverage it well and if it is something your competitors are not doing, which is a key thing. If they’re doing it, it’s not to say you shouldn’t do it but it just becomes harder because you guys are both similar products and marketing in a similar way. It just becomes a lot of noise but if you can figure out a way to again borrow something from an adjacent space and bring it into your market, that’s a good way to think about it.
Mike: And that’s what we’re doing with the way that they’ve laid out this customer acquisition strategy because you can take that number of $100 million and say, “Okay, let’s scale this down. Instead of shooting for $100 million, let’s shoot for $1 million.” How do you take this strategic approach and just chop off a couple of zeroes from that and say, “Okay, this is what we’re shooting for?”
I do find it interesting the way that they lay out the 100 customers paying you $1 million versus one million customers paying you $100 a year. The different levels they have are 100 customers, 1000, 10,000, 100,000, and then one million. They essentially map them to different types of animals. The $1 million a year customer is an elephant, and then the next one down, the $100,000 customer is a deer, then they have rabbits, mice, and then flies. That’s how they categorize these different types of customers. It’s really just a matter of scaling for them.
The second part of this is identifying the right hunting strategy that you’re going to be using to target these types of customers. They specifically call out Aaron Ross’ Spears, Nets, and Seeds Acquisition Framework for this. If you’re not familiar with that, we’ll have the links in the show notes for this. Essentially, the idea is that there’s different types of tactics that you can use to acquire those customers.
Spears is an acquisition strategy that you’re going to have to do a lot of leg work for this. You’re going to have to do outbound sales, you’re going to have to do business development, exhibits. I don’t want to call it manual labor, but there’s a lot of human elements or human labor that is involved in it that there’s just a lot of work. It’s hard to automate some of those things.
The second one is using nets and that’s something where you pull in a large number of prospects all the same time. These are things like blogging, or content networking, or webinars, or PR, things like that, and a lot of those people are going to end up being useless as prospects, but you’re going to get a lot of the ones that you’re also looking for.
Seeds is the strategy to grow your customer base essentially on its own because you’re gathering those up in such a way that you want to help them grow, and in essence they will then turn around and help you grow. It’s partly leaning on word-of-mouth, viral campaigns, and any other customer interaction where you get those people to help you grow. A very common example that people use is Dropbox where they would free storage space in exchange for you sharing it. That’s a viral campaign and it’s also customers helping you to acquire customers.
Rob: Right and they give an example of a few companies that do it and they say, “Salesforce did the spears model which is the direct human involvement, high-touch sales as we call it here. Xero, which is an accounting package just the nets model and that is blogging content, marketing, PR type stuff, and that’s what most of the B2B SaaS apps that we frequent. The non-enterprise ones that are not doing high-touch sales, that’s the common approach here. Then Dropbox and Facebook they’re doing the seeds approach.
I think this is a good through experiment. I think it’s probably pretty easy for you to answer. If your price point is going to be low, then yes, you need some virality or you need organic search or you need a traffic source that’s basically going to be free because you need customer acquisition to be very low.
I think a lot of the bootstrappers we know who do WordPress plugins, they get that free traffic in essence from wordpress.org for the plugin repo. Then they take that big wide funnel—it’s a freemium model—and they sell addons that are paid to that and you get get a nice little business based on that. That really is a net of sorts. It’s much less a viral approach so it wouldn’t be like seeds and it’s definitely not the one-on-one spears stuff.
But if you have a high purchase price, let’s say you have the potential to sell deals that are $10K a year, $20K a year and up, that’s when you really want to think about—you still want to do the nets stuff, which the where the blogging, content marketing, and PR, you still want to think of doing that and driving inbound traffic, but then using the spear approach, using the high-touch sales as much as you can because you’re just going to close a lot more sales once you do that.
I don’t remember what the exact numbers were, but I remember when we brought in on a drip, I have been doing some sales demos here and there and I really didn’t enjoy them. I wasn’t particularly good at them and always put them off because this wasn’t a think that I like to do but once we brought Anna in and started just really being customer success in sales, we started closing two times or three times the number of higher value deals.
At the time, high value was $150 a month and up or something. That’s like start moving your MRR in a hurry. If you can close 10, 20 of those a month and you’ve been growing at a few grand a month, you’re growing two, three grand a month and suddenly you can double growth by doing that.
Anyway, I see a lot of value in taking a couple of these approaches. I don’t think you need to be so focused or so differentiated between not doing parts of both. I think all three of these are good if you can make them work.
Mike: In general, I think that most of the SaaS companies that we tend to encounter on a regular basis in our circles tend to use the net strategy where you’re doing content marketing or you’re publishing articles and collecting an email list and that’s generally the way it’s done because I think with seeds, it feels to me like that’s the model that you almost need to have funding for because you need to be able to pay for that in some way, shape, or form. Like with Dropbox, they had funding so it was easy for them to pay for that.
With spears, it takes a lot of manual effort to drop a sales rep, to go to talk to some enterprise customer and six months to a year to land them as a customer, and you needed to be able to have the runway in order to do that. I feel like most bootstrap businesses tend to concentrate on the net strategy and that in some ways, dictates the types of customers that you’re going to attract as well. You can either pick which customer you’re going to go after and then hone the types of tools that you’re going to use, and the strategy that you’re going to use to get them, or if you it the other way around, then you’re going to be pointed specifically in one direction at the type of customer you’re going to end up with.
In part three of this article we’re going to basically skip over this because they drill into a couple of different things with those strategies. First one was spears. They talk about sales force, HubSpot. The second one with nets, they talk about Xero, and then with seeds they talk about Dropbox and Facebook. We’re going to go skip over those just because we’d rather talk about them a little bit. We’re going to talk more specifically about the types of approaches you can use in these areas, specifically like a bootstrap business because I think that’s going to be more relevant to people listening to us.
With spears, Rob, you did actually just had a great anecdote about how you had Anna doing some of those sales calls and those one-to-one customer success calls. Did you transition from having you do it to somebody else do it just because you didn’t like doing it or was it because you saw that there was potential there that you really wanted to capture and go after?
Rob: It was less about not liking it because frankly, if I didn’t like it and I didn’t think that there’d be very many, I would have just done them. But I felt like were leaving money on the table by not having someone who could get good at the demos, who could really work with customers, spend more time, and I did not have the time. That was much more of a time constraint.
The job of a founder over time is to fire yourself from every job, so when Derrick and I started, he was writing the code, he and I were doing product together, and I was doing everything else. There was a lot. It was marketing, it was sales, and it was demos. I was even doing email support early on before, before I brought someone else to do that.
So one by one I just started firing myself from those. Bringing Anna on I was going to hand her a lot of the marketing and the sales, and it turned out she was really good at customer success. She was good at the other things too, but customer success was where she really excelled. It turns out that there’s a nice overlap between sales and customer success if you’re doing it well and you’re trying to truly help someone understand not just what the product does but how it can help that person.
I think it’s a good example to think about in the early days you always have to be choosy about what you’re doing, but in the early days you have to be really picky about it. You have to just find that one channel, maybe two channels that are going to get you to the point where you have enough money to hire that next person. Once you have that next person, now you can either hand them one of the channels to manage, you can find them new channels, or you could hand them both the channels you already have going, and you go out and find the new ones. It depends on the type of person you hire and what you enjoy doing. Do you enjoy just walking and tackling on the stuff you already know or do you enjoy going out and finding those new strategies?
You’re not going to need 10 marketing strategies to get seven or eight figures in revenue. You can do it with really a very small amount. Often it’s between one and three that you really get working, it depends on app obviously, but if you really kept one to three cranking, you just wash, rinse, repeat, and you start doing it over and over. You look at how lead pages grew with their Clay’s affiliate webinar model. Look at how HitTail grew. It was a lot of Facebook ads and SEO were the two things that grew HitTail. We look at Moz, Rand Fishkin’s company, grew through a ton of content and content marketing. HubSpot was a combination of content plus having a sales force. It’s not like you need to master 10 different things in order to really grow a company.
Mike: I think the interesting thing here is that they talk about spears and relate them back to sales force and HubSpot. Those two are really focused on extremely large customers and they’re going after the elephants as they put it. People are going to pay them lots of money. But I think that in the very early days of the bootstrapped software company, you can use that strategy and almost you have to use that strategy because you have to try and figure out who your ideal customer is.
You don’t want to cast a wide net and end up with hundreds or thousands of people who are all the wrong fit for your company. You want to specifically pick and choose, like, “I want to go after companies that are making between $1 million and $5 million, these are the parameters, this is the person I want to talk to.” If that works and those people turn into customers, then you want to keep going after them. But if you’re casting a wide net and you’re trying to get lots of people into your sales funnel, then it’s a lot harder to do that because you’re getting a lot of data but you don’t have any way to quantify what is the right data from the right people. I think that using that, that spear strategy when you’re very, very early on to help you figure out, like are these the right people to talk to, that’s a very viable approach.
Once you gotten past the point of figuring out the attributes of your ideal customer, then you start using strategies and tactics that fall under the nets category. That’s because you know who it is you are targeting and you can run paid advertising, for example, and you can specifically target those people. You can write articles and blog posts and publish them, knowing that you’re going to attract the right types of people because in those articles, you can talk about the types of problems that those people are having. It allows you to grow the business and the number of people that you’re bringing in. Not only are we going to be a great fit but most of them will be because of what you learned using the spears approach early on.
Rob: Yeah and that’s the thing when you’re first starting out. This refers more to bootstappers because if you’re venture-funded, a lot of them setup sales forces. They do that, they do the spear stuff even to $100 million. But for bootstrappers, that is an interesting thing to think about, that progression of starting with spears, why you are doing customer development, moving to nets which is getting the phone going and getting a lot of customers in that funnel. Whether you’re closing them self-service, whether you’re doing low touch, medium touch sales, doesn’t really matter. I think the higher touch sales you can do—in almost all cases—leads to higher conversion rate, at least with people who want that kind of extra hand-holding.
With seeds, if you’re in super early stage, let’s say you have 50 customers, seeds don’t work because you don’t have the momentum yet. It’s when you get 1000, 2000, 3000 customers, that everybody starts talking about you, and then if there’s a referral program, or there’s a way to bring other people in, or you get that mini brand in that, either in the vertical or with those thousands of people, that’s when seeds stuff really start working. It is interesting to think about it as something they didn’t say in the article at all but it’s life-cycle. It’s step one, step two, step three, at least loosely.
Mike: The last one is seeds, which, it’s hard to get your customers or it’s hard to move the needle in your business if you’re relying on customers to help you let other people know they could become a customer of yours if you don’t already have customers. That’s really a classic chicken-and-egg problem. If you don’t have any customers, you’re not going to able to grow your business enough. Maybe if you got one customer and they refer one person, you can grow 100% but it’s really difficult to even get that level out of it.
So the seeds strategy is really something that you can’t really implement until after you have a customer base and you know that you’re solving their problem in such a way that makes them happy enough to be able to refer other people that they know into your application. That’s mainly because there’s a lack of trust there. You need to be able to get them to a point where you are solving the problem well enough that they trust you in order to say, “Hey, I’m willing to expend my social capital, invite some of my friends to using this product because it’s helpful or solves a valuable problem for me.”
I do think that there are cases where that is not necessarily as applicable, especially in a B2C environment. Social sharing, for example, that’s a very low ask for people versus referring somebody as an actual paying customer. So there’s a bit of a difference I think between a referral program versus, “Hey, invite somebody else to use this free app that you and 25 of your friends are already using.”
Rob: Yeah with B2B stuff, depending on how deep into B2B you are, is it truly B2C? Is it B to very small business? Is it B to prosumers, which is more like photographers? Or, are you getting into B to mid-sized business and B to enterprise? Each of those really has a different kind of seed model like a different virality. As we look, Facebook certainly is on the B2C, period. It’s not really a business platform, even though people are running businesses on it. Now I’m trying to promote them. But it spread because of the very much consumers linking up with one another. That’s going to be a different model than if for selling software that’s let’ say, $10,000, $20,000 a year. They’re not going to do things for the same reasons. They’re going to make recommendations because they go to trade shows and someone asks, “Hey, what software do you use for this?” or you can do affiliate programs. Can work, but really it depends on how much space is at that point. More as with consumers, I think the affiliate stuff and the giveaways makes a lot more sense.
We could probably do a whole episode. I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole too far but I think there’s a lot of different approaches you can use here if you’re trying to go with the seed route and go for virality.
I think that wraps us up for today. Again, we will link to the marketingstudent.com’s article that we talked through today. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. If you do it as an MP3 or another type of audio file, those always go straight to the top of the question queue.
Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt. It’s used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups. Visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript to each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 396 | Revisiting 2018 Goals, Raising Funding, Marketing at Events, and More Listener Questions
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike check in with their 2018 goals, and answer listener questions on topics including raising funding and marketing at events.
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.
Mike: I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, sir?
Mike: Well, I recorded a video this morning for Bluetick with somebody who’s starting a partner program and we basically walked through a process for doing LinkedIn prospecting and then feeding the prospects into Bluetick to do the email follow ups and get people onto a scheduled call, which is kind of the whole premise or at least the starting point for where Bluetick really started anyway. It’s good to see that it’s making, I’ll say, not really making a name for itself, but it’s going to be getting out there into much more people’s hands.
Rob: Do you consider Bluetick more of a cold email tool or a warm email tool?
Mike: A warm email. It does work for cold email, but cold email is basically a subset of warm email, so really like with cold email you’re just trying to make that initial contact and there’s lots of companies out there that do.
But, typically, once you’ve gotten them to reply, then they are completely hands-off, whereas, with Bluetick I’m trying to do a lot of things to structure it such that it will help you manage the conversation moving from the point where you’ve initially made contact, all the way up to the point where they become a customer, and then even after they’ve become a customer, still managing some of that sales communication, the upsells and things like that or even if somebody stops becoming a customer, you can add them into an email sequence that’s like an offboarding email sequence, for example, and feed that information back into the system, so that’s the general direction, I’ll say.
Rob: For sure. Cool. From my end, I have a couple of more podcast recommendations that came to us via Twitter and our comment thread for episode 395. Then, I have a couple of books I want to talk about that I have attempted to or have been listening to.
The two podcasts that came through, one is from Josh Duty and he is a longtime listener and MicroConf attendee, and he talked about EconTalk, which is a podcast I’ve never heard of.
He said it’s a must listen podcast for your list. I’ve listened to every episode and it’s probably the single most valuable intellectual resource I found. It’s great for understanding economics, but he’s branched out to interviews and lots of other areas over the past years. I can’t recommend it enough, so interesting podcasts. I’ll certainly add it to my list and listen to a few episodes and see if it strikes my fancy.
The other podcast is called Exponent and it’s recommended by Joe Hopkins. He says, “Hey, Rob and Mike, thanks for sharing your podcast list. You might like Exponent by Ben Thompson, the creator of the Stratechery blog,” I like the blog a lot. “It explores the business models and strategies of major tech players like Google, Apple, Uber, Facebook. Somewhat contrary, but provides a different point of view, more well-thought-out point of view than a lot of media.”
Those are two to potentially add to your podcatcher and then a couple of books that I’ve been listening to. One that I really like is called Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Valley and it’s the story of Theranos. Have you heard of Theranos, Mike?
Mike: Yes, I have.
Rob: So you know the story of how it imploded, so the author John Carreyrou is basically walking through the whole history and he interviewed a bunch of people and particularly got emails and he’s doing direct quotes. It kind of feels a little bit like a Nick Bilton, like a hatching Twitter or a book like that where week by week it tells the story.
The founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes was like 19, maybe. She dropped out started when she was 19, but it was definitely in her early 20s and she had this youthful hubris, and so young, and so naïve, and she basically was like faking demos early on with this.
It was basically a patch that was supposed to take blood samples and look at stuff in the blood and the product never worked is an essence what, it sounds like, this book is saying. They would fake demos even to investors and they would fake demos to potential clients like Pfizer and these big drug companies.
It’s just mind-blowing, it’s like you just can’t do that, but it was like she had this reality distortion field they were saying she was trying to be Steve Jobs and she switched to kind of a wardrobe of wearing black turtlenecks, and she would bully her people, and they would just turn over constantly, turned over the entire senior leadership team over the course of a year. They turned over most of the employees and then they would just hire new ones.
It’s just this insane tale of like mismanagement hubris and thinking that the end justify the means and they would sue anyone. Like the employees would leave and then they would like sue them if they spoke out at all. It was like they were trying to keep everybody silent to the fact that this thing didn’t work.
Anyways, I’m probably 25% of the way in. It’s a really good story. It’s a little bit aggravating, because she thinks she’s Steve Jobs and that always pisses me off. It’s so irritating when people take that tact of like, “Well, he did it and so I can do it, too.” But it’s like, “Yeah, but it worked for him and you’re not going to be able to reproduce that.”
Anyways, it’s something that if you can stomach it, it’s kind of painful to listen to but if you can stomach it, it’s a really well told story.
Mike: Awesome. Yeah, I’ve seen them in the news quite a bit and, obviously, like all of the stuff that’s coming out after the fact, so I definitely kind of seen the inside scoop on some of that. I totally agree with you about people who are going out and thinking, “Oh, I’m going to be the next Steve Jobs and the end justify the means.”
That can be true to an extent, but you have to be successful at it, because if you’re not then the whole thing is going to implode, like there’s no way around that, like you’re really skating on thin ice, and you can’t violate the law when you’re doing that either, you just can’t.
Rob: That was a big problem and that’s the thing. It’s like when you look at someone like Steve Jobs who people say really was very hard to work with and he was a bully, and he just had all these really odd traits, but he figured out a way to make it work. One of the ways is that he was a deca millionaire by the time he was 21, and that kind of helped like they have that success with the Apple 1 and the Apple 2.
If you don’t have that, and you try to have this attitude, and you basically burn all of these bridges, and you burn out all of your people, and you burn your relationships like it just crumbles, and the odds of you then even achieving that first success just plummet in my opinion, so it’s a tough one.
The other book that I started reading or listening to and then just bailed on it, if anyone is considering reading this book, I really didn’t enjoy, it’s called Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story and it follows like three or four aspiring founders in a sense, but it really doesn’t.
I get the feeling the book really didn’t know what it was about. It was just kind of wandering and it talked about the Thiel Fellowship and then it talked about these founders doing stuff, and eventually I was just like, “I just don’t care about the people and I don’t care about the stories that are going on,” which is a bit disappointing because I loved these tales of startups but, again, if you’re going to come out listening to it, I would probably or reading it, I would probably recommend maybe skipping that one.
Something else I wanted to do today Mike is revisit our 2018 goals. It is approaching midway through the year and I think we talked about them back in maybe February or March. We have listener questions that we’re going to dive into, but I think it’s always helpful to kind of get status updates a couple times a year as we progress to figure out where are we with our goals, have our goals changed, and just trying to check where we’re at.
Mike: I guess I’ll kick things off, one of my carryover goals was logging at least 100 days worth of exercise this coming year and I’ll say the first couple of months I was a little lax just because I had a lot of things going on, but I am happy to say I think the last month I logged 13 days at the gym, so slowly getting up there. I think I’m a little bit behind right now. I’m thinking around 130 or so something like that.
It’s June now, by the end of June, I should be at 50, so if I did 20 days which is probably unlikely this month, just because I know I’m going to be gone for a week for family vacation. Then, I would get to about halfway, so I’m slightly behind, but I think that I’m definitely optimistic that I’ll be able to catch up and hit that goal this year.
Rob: Very cool. My first goal was to write a virtual reality program that allows me to roll around in a mattress of bitcoins. Wait, that was the goal that you set for me, remember that?
Mike: Yes, I do. How’s that coming, by the way?
Rob: I’ve not started doing that yet.
Mike: You’ve got seven more months.
Rob: I do. It’s not even going to be VR, it’s just going to be an R program, a reality program, where I actually roll on a mattress of bitcoins, a bunch of thumb drives. No, my first serious goal was to be in fewer meetings, under 10.
Mike: I think you cheated on this.
Rob: Under 10 hours a week.
Mike: You cheated.
Rob: I didn’t.
Mike: You cheated.
Rob: I did not know in December of 2017 what was going to happen in 2018, but I have nailed this one, Mike, just nailed it.
Mike: I’m sorry, man. You cheated.
Rob: No, man, I love it. I love it. So for those who aren’t understanding what we’re laughing about is by leaving Drip at the end of April, basically, I’m in almost no meetings now. This is probably the only recurring meeting I have on my calendar now as you and I recording, so I definitely achieved that. I’m looking forward to maintaining that through the rest of the year.
Mike: My other carryover goal was to make Bluetick profitable, including my time. So far I’m cautiously optimistic on this one, revenue has been going up, cleared kind of another hurdle this past month, so moving things forward.
I don’t know, I’ve got a couple of annual plans that I’ve sold as well, so those are definitely helpful in terms of the revenue. Like I said, I’ll keep people posted on it. I don’t know how much of the numbers I’m actually comfortable sharing at this point, but we’ll see. It’s something I kind of have to think about.
Rob: Do you feel like you’re on track for this by December or is it, it depends?
Mike: I don’t know if it’s an it depends. I mean, obviously, it depends, but I think the issue is like there are certain pieces of it that I’d really like to have in place for teams. I’ve had a couple of conversations lately with companies that have teams and I know that they want to add multiple people in, and it sort of supports that right now, but it’s not a great experience.
I’m just curious or I question how interested they’ll be once they see how it actually works versus what their expectations may be, and it could be just like by the time I get them to the point where they’re signed on, and on-boarded, then I’ve got that stuff in place, and it doesn’t matter, but I don’t necessarily want to churn them out before then either, do you know what I mean?
Rob: Yup, I totally do. So if this happens, keeping this goal, do you feel like it’ll be in the last couple months of the year?
Mike: Yeah. I mean, I definitely think that it’s going to be a later rather than sooner thing. The other thing is like summer right now, so I don’t expect a whole lot of it, a lot of Bluetick to be sold over the next couple of months. But once the end of August hits, I would expect things to kind of start ramping up again.
It’s also like, because it’s summer though, and I know that companies feel like the summer kind of trends downward, email follow up––interest in it might go up, because they know that they’re going to have to follow up with people more, so it may save them time. I’m not sure. It’s hard to say.
Rob: It was interesting. What I was seeing seasonally with really most of my apps, that include SaaS, and non-SaaS that I’ve owned is certainly December tends to be a train wreck, with one time purchase software, it would plummet. I remember doing an invoice plummeting like 80%.
Not every December, but there were months when it would do 1/5 of the revenue that it had done in November. But SaaS apps tend to be pretty flat in December unless you specifically get around that and do promotions and such. Then, right around tax time, it was either April or May, it would tend to not be great months.
I never noticed dips in the summer and what’s interesting is growing up in California, we really don’t have strong seasons. I mean, there’s rainy season and then there’s a lot of sun and there’s drought season, which typically in the last seven years. But, really like my work didn’t slow down in the summer like it does now that I live here, like living in Minneapolis, like I want to work a lot less, and you’ve talked about this, too.
It’s like if you live in a place where it’s snowy and the winter sucks, I feel like I get more work done in the winter, because I’m indoors and then less work done in the sunny times of the year. Whereas, again, in California, that just wasn’t the thing. We just kind of work year-round, because it was kind of the same.
I guess it depends on where your customers are coming from. I would not anticipate that the summer is going to be flat for your growth. I just don’t think. I think people are still doing business and they’re still thinking about it now. Certainly, if you have a lot of Europeans as your market and you’re looking to do something in August, I bet that month is terrible because I know a lot of folks go on month long vacations then, and there are other factors playing to it, but all of that said, I would not count on any growth in December for you.
Then, I think from now until, basically, Thanksgiving, which is the last week of November, I think you’ve got a pedal to the metal this time.
Mike: Cool, that’s comforting, I guess, but we’ll see how the actual numbers shake out. Predictions are worth what you paid for them, I guess.
Rob: Exactly. My next goal was to do at least three days of exercise per week. I have far exceeded that. I’m probably averaging five days a week, and when I was still working the day job I was hitting three then. Sometimes a day of exercise is like it’s 10 or 15 minutes.
It’s just what I can get and it might be a quick bike ride around the lake, which is like 3 miles, so it’s not the longest ride of all time or I’ll do like a 10 minute CrossFit thing, but just something to get the heart rate up, and that’s been going. So I feel like I probably need to, I don’t know if I want to increase this for next year, but definitely I’m meeting and exceeding that goal, and it feels good to do that.
This is the first year, probably, ever or I mean since college that I have consistently exercised.
Mike: Next one on my list was to read one business book at least every two weeks and I think at this point I actually might kill this one. I’ve only read a couple, but with my backing off of podcasts earlier in the year, I’ve been backing off of like just consumption of stuff in general, I don’t know if this is even realistic even if I were to try at this point, like I just don’t see it happening, so I think I want to kill this one.
Rob: I think it’s a good one. I would agree with you. I feel like it’s a distraction from your real goal, which is to stay physically healthy with exercise and to get your business to the place of profitability. Cool.
My last goal for 2018 was to ship something. I wrote a little paragraph in December when we originally talked about this and it said this, I’m not sure what it’s going to be yet, but I’ve been laying low for about 18 months, 2017 was supposed to be a rest year, and it was a hard year. So the first part of 2018 is going to continue to be rest, but I need to start shipping, either consistent blog posts, a book, a new podcast, of course, software or something.
I will say that Sherry and I shipped the entrepreneurs guide to keeping your shit together, which Sherry did the vast majority of the work on that, but I assisted with the launch, and the promotion, and writing the copy and writing emails and stuff like that to market it. In addition, we have a course that is coming out.
It’s actually a good time to talk about it actually. I haven’t talked about it yet on the podcast, but if you go to ZenFounder.com, one of the products under the how we help menu is founder family date night video course, and it’s a six-part video course. It’s 20 minutes to kind of get you in the mindset of something and then there’s a handout that you take and you’re supposed to go on a date with your significant other, it’s all about keeping you connected.
Founders don’t have a lot of time and don’t have a lot of head space in general to connect with the person that probably is the most important to them, their life partner, their significant other, and that’s what this course is designed to do is just shortcut that and give you pre-built stuff to go and have a conversation about different topics. If you’re interested in learning about that, you can always go and sign up for the ZenFounder mailing list, and we’ll be selling that probably in the next few weeks, I believe.
I was involved to filming, there was a half day or full day of filming, and then I’ve been involved honing the landing page and the copy stuff. It definitely feels like I am keeping busy. It feels good, so I don’t know. I guess the verdict is out. I feel like those count towards this goal of shipping something in quotes to kind of ramp up, and I’m guessing in 2019 I’ll need to be a little more specific and perhaps a little more ambitious with this one.
Mike: The other goals on my list, the first one was hire somebody to take over Bluetick development, and the second one was to speak at six plus conferences or events this coming year. I’ve spoken at two so far. I’ve not reached out to people to expand my profile or whatever to get on the docket for different speaking engagements, so I’m not sure how that one is going to turn out, so we’ll kind of see how that plays out.
But the other one for hiring somebody to take over Bluetick development, I’m wondering if I should actually change this from Bluetick development to implementing certain marketing strategies, because I think at this point I don’t think that I could hire somebody at the level that I need to take over Bluetick development.
I just don’t think that I could afford it. I do think that I could outsource certain parts of like marketing, sort of like different marketing campaigns, for example like, “Hey, I need this to be done and these are the things that…” like scope out what needs to get done, and then hire somebody to do them.
When I had, for example, all of the copy rewritten for the website, that was something that was a lot easier to outsource, because it was skilled labor, but it needed to get done, and it was an expertise that was, I’ll say somewhat unfamiliar to me, and it was easier to just hand it off to somebody else versus with the Bluetick development, there’s a lot of stuff there and it’d be, I think, really hard it and really expensive to hire somebody. I don’t know that given where I’m at and my goals for making it profitable by the end of the year, I don’t think that I could get there, not without funding, for example.
Rob: What was the mindset behind that goal?
Mike: It was to allow me to do the marketing. That was it. It was because I needed time to do the marketing and the development stuff needed to get to a certain point and it is, I would say, that it’s not necessarily too far off. There’s a few, I’d say, two or three major things that need to get done in terms of development and then I could probably push much more harder on the marketing side of things.
I don’t know, it’s a balancing act, I’ll say, do you know what I mean? Because like I said there’s just tons of code there and it’s all in different technologies and it’s just hard to find somebody who’s familiar with most of them.
Rob: Yeah, it always is. I mean, it’s always a balancing act, like you’re saying. That’s like the struggle of starting up from a standing stop and trying to get something to the point that is profitable. These are definitely the hardest and most uncertain time, so you may adjust that goal then is to hire someone to help take over other stuff.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Cool. Well, now that we’ve done that, we’ll probably visit these again in three or four months. Let’s dive into a few listener questions. Our first voicemail is actually a listener success story.
Kevin: Mike and Rob, Kevin Wagstaff here from Spectora. I wanted to call in and give you guys a long overdue thank you. We have taken our company Spectora as a bootstrap startup from zero to 40 MRR in 16 months. We launched January 2017 after many months of listening to every single one of your podcasts and we have come out the gate screaming, so we’ve had ton of success I wanted to share with you guys. I hope to be on your success stories at some point and may be even be on the show. We’ve learned so much from you, thanks.
Mike: Congratulations to Kevin. That’s awesome news that you’ve gotten that far with Spectora in such a short amount of time. It sounds like you’ve really gotten a lot of value out of the podcast and really appreciate you just ringing back and letting us know that you’ve been able to take your business to the next level because of it.
Rob: Yeah, that’s awesome to hear. Just one note there, he said zero to 40 MRR, obviously, that meant 40,000, so that’s a perfect bootstrap startup to do that in 16 months, it’s pretty sweet. They’re in, it looks like, home inspections software space, which I’m imagining could be both challenging, but also a challenging vertical, would also one that if you got in there and you become kind of the name, it would be really, really hard to topple you from that.
The next question is actually a comment from Matthias Bedard from SWAAAP.com. It looks like SWAAAP has three A’s, SWAAAP.com.
He says, “Hey, Rob. I’ve thought I’d reach out and congratulate you on the Drip acquisition and your current unemployed status. I was listening to your parents on the Rogue Startups podcast, that was on a couple weeks ago, and I found your take on micro fundraising interesting, since that’s more or less what we have done. It’s cool because we’ve been able to maintain control on most of the company, but we have had to put in a lot of our own money, spent a lot of time applying for government grants, and take on a lot of side projects to keep the lights on. In the end I’m glad we took the route we took. We’ve definitely learned a lot doing so. I treasure the learning experience, but I think if we had an investor or someone on board with more knowledge of the SaaS base, and monetization strategies, we could have moved faster and take more advantage of some of the tech we’ve built, like our event matchmaking platform. I’m also an avid listener of Startups For the Rest of Us. I just want to say I really appreciate that you guys take the time to throw a bit of your knowledge out every week, cheers.”
It sounds like they didn’t take funding, but they wish they had that he feels like it would have kept them from having to do the side projects, the government grants, and, basically, they said they had to put a lot of their own money into it. It’s an interesting take on it.
Mike: Well, that’s always the trade-off, like if you take money, then you don’t have to do those things, but you also are going to have to give up some or probably more control of the company, so it’s just a matter of like how much you’re willing to give up, and sacrifice in exchange for that equity.
Rob: Our next question is a voicemail from a longtime listener and a question asker, his name is Owen, and we’ll roll that right here.
Owen: Hey, Rob and Mike, this is Owen from Bitesize Irish Gaelic. I’m a long-time listener, so I have to start by saying thanks so much for all of the information, and knowledge, and opinions that you have shared over the years.
I remember Rob talking about thinking about doing something different after HitTail, I think, and then it turned out to be Drip, and then it turned out to be selling Drip after growing it, and ending your time there, Rob. It was really cool to follow that whole journey, so thanks for sharing it along the way.
My question is, I have what you would say is against wisdom, it’s a B2C SaaS app for learning the Irish language. We tag people outside of Ireland, so they’re the people who emotionally want to make a connection to their Irish heritage by learning to speak some of that language. There are local groups that get together. They have immersion weekends, yearly events in different places.
My question is how would you think about trying to tap into those audiences to get our app in front of those people? Like, probably, I’m thinking sponsoring an event and getting our logo displayed just wouldn’t do anything. The one idea I did have was asking the organizers to send a direct email to attendees and offer some kind of discount for our app that they could click through. Anyway, if you have any thoughts, ideas, I’d appreciate it, and thanks a lot for your time, anyway, see you.
Mike: I have a bunch of thoughts on this, so there’s two answers to this. First one is a general thing that says that if you’re going to try and market at an event or sponsor an event that you’re not attending, it’s probably not going to work. I say that in reference more to larger events, so if you’re talking 100 to 200 people or larger than that, it’s probably not going to get you nearly as much as if you were to attend it.
But it sounds like Owen is after from the sounds of it like an immersion weekend where it’s probably not a huge number of people. You’re probably talking less than 50 and I think in those cases what you could do is you could approach the organizer and say, “Hey, I’ve got this workshop in a box that you could give to everybody there.”
Take an hour to go through and give them all of the materials for it, and then see if they’ll go through that workshop as part of like whatever your sponsorship is for the immersion weekend. From there, once the people are done with that workshop, then, you give them a handout of like, “Hey, here’s a coupon code that you can go and sign up for this if you’re interested in hearing more about it.”
That way they get to experience it and somebody is personally delivering it and that person is not you, but I think that you have to do a really good job about that, Bitesize Irish Gaelic in a box thing that you send to them. I wouldn’t shy away from sending them something physical, where they’ve got handouts and things like that, and just ask them, “Hey, how many people do you have?”
That can be part of what you’re doing as sponsorship, because when they walk away from the event with something in their hand, they’re much more likely to be interested and they have that thing that they can always reference as opposed to something when it gets sent in an email, which may easily get lost or overlooked, but it avoids the spam filters as well.
That’s probably my advice for something like that. Generally speaking though, sponsoring an event from afar isn’t something that generally works, but I was a member of Friends of Redgate program for a while.
One of the things that they did was they would send their Friends of Redgate around in exchange for giving them free software they would have them do demos essentially on their behalf. It worked out well in both directions, but it got them the marketing experience or the marketing exposure that they needed to smaller groups by having somebody just do the demo, and that person-to-person interaction is really the key.
Rob: That’s what I was thinking. If you could find a way that the organizer or someone there could do a demo and if you sponsor the food that they eat or whatever, even whatever amount of money you decide, it’s worth to test out. You have them do a demo and I guess the trouble there is if you think they’re not going to do a good job of it, then maybe you have to record your 60-minute Screencast commercial in essence that they play it at the beginning, and then they do get something. I like getting mentioned in the email, so that it’ll remind them, as Mike said, it could go in spam filters or could get misplace, but I think it’s the multiple touch points.
You want to get mentioned at the start. You then want to have that software somehow demoed, so people can get their heads around it, because typically most non-techies struggle to understand how software is going to help them and so seeing how easy it is or seeing what it actually does I think would be the game changer, and I think if you can’t get a demo, and like you said if you just get your logo somewhere or you just get a screenshot, I don’t think it’s worth even a small amount of money to do it, but getting the software working in front of them, I think, is a much bigger deal.
Mike: Well, that’s why I said the workshop in a box thing, because if it’s like an immersion weekend, you’re not guaranteed to have an internet connection either. So by having it there, it gets around that, and then if you give them a video file that they can play it locally through an iPad or a laptop or something like that, then that gets around to any internet connectivity problems that you might have.
I also wouldn’t go with like an hour-long demo. I might do five minutes to open like a video and you talking about it, and then have the organizers essentially manage the rest of it for whatever it is like half hour or 45 minutes or something like that. But it really has to be the right event for that kind of thing. I think it’d be hard to do it if it was immersion weekend for some other language or something like that, I think it would be tough.
Rob: I like your idea. I think that workshop in a box is a really savvy approach. Our last question for the day is about the IP of feature requests, IP standing for intellectual property. It’s from Scott and he says, “Can you guys talk about accepting feature requests from users of SaaS apps? Are there any IP concerns or something we should add in our terms of service to cover feature requests and ideas submitted by users?” What do you think, Mike?
Mike: That is a really good question and I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know. I don’t know, I would think like having an idea for something that should be added to a product is not something you could ever ask them to put in there and then have any expectation that they’re going to do it, and that you would own it, because it was your idea.
It seems to me like that’s a foregone conclusion, but maybe there’s something in most Terms of Service that say specifically that ideas submitted are not subject to that, and you’ll get no compensation for them. I don’t know, it’s not something I’ve really given a lot of thought to.
Rob: I’m also not a lawyer, but I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never noticed anything like that in terms of service and I haven’t read a lot of them, but I read enough terms of service, when I’ve had lawyers draw them up for me that I’ve never noticed that offhand. You could certainly just go to a big company, look at GitHub or Dropboxes or Leadpages or Drip’s terms of service, because they have big legal teams who draft these things up.
If there’s no precedent for anyone ever suing and somehow taking ownership of an idea they sent you or posted on some board, then there probably isn’t anything in this terms of service, and you’re probably fine.
Also if you wanted to throw one sentence in, just like any feature requests or ideas submitted become the property of us, you could do that. I want to say I’ve never heard of anyone being sued over something like this or even it being an issue where people requesting things feel like they own the idea or something. I don’t know, I’ve just never thought about it in all honesty.
Mike: I think that about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Out of Control by MoOt” used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups, and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 395 | 20 Podcasts We Like
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about the 20 podcasts they listen to. They separate the podcasts into three categories, bootstrapping, startups/business, and off topic/entertainment.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Podcasts mentioned:
- The Art of Product
- Build Your SaaS
- Bootstrapped Web
- Founder’s Journey
- Hooked on Product
- RogueStartups
- The Tropical MBA
- Indie Hackers
- ZenFounder
- This Week in Startups
- Startup
- Akimbo
- Stacking Benjamins
- Money For The Rest Of Us
- Planet Money
- Reply All
- Daily Tech Headlines
- Current Geek
- 99% Invisible
- System Mastery
Mike: It’s purple isn’t it?
Rob: Nailed it. Nice. You are a Star Wars nerd, sir.
Mike: Thank you.
Rob: This is Startups For the Rest of Us episode 395. Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us. The podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
Mike: And I’m Nerdy Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Nerdy Mike?
Mike: I almost got you laugh there. I almost got you to totally screw up.
Rob: You almost – to screw up the intro. The reason I ask that question is because A, I got it wrong when I came up on a trivia thing and both of my kids, my 11-year-old and 7-year-old, got it right. We’ve been watching the—I was going to say the Trilogy, but we’ve been watching Star Wars in machete order. So you go four five, two three, we’re about to hit six. I don’t know when we’re going to do Rogue One because it obviously fits between three and four, but you don’t want to watch it first because it’s not the early stuff.
Anyways, I’ve been immersed with Star Wars with the kids for the past couple of weeks. My 11-year-old is rewatching but the seven’s are basically seeing them for the first time. It’s been cool. It’s always fun to watch Star Wars with someone for the first time when they’re enjoying it. But aside from that, what’s going on with you?
Mike: Not much. I’ve got a couple of announcements to make. The first one is about Microcomp Europe. We’re going to be making some announcements in the next couple of weeks about when MicroConf Europe is going to be coming. If you want to hear more about that, make sure that you’re on the mailing list or you can go over to microconfeurope.com. Enter in your email address into the mailing list and if you’re not already added, you’ll be added into there. When you make the announcements in a couple of weeks, you’ll get the emails and start planning accordingly. We’re hoping to have the final location and dates nailed down hopefully in the next two weeks or so, but it’s just taking a little bit more time than we expected.
Rob: It always depends. It’s hard to find the right hotel in the right country on the right dates that don’t conflict with some major, major other event whether it’s another conference or a national holiday or something.
Mike: The other announcement is for MicroConf 2019, which will be in March of next year from the 24th to the 28th. The 24th, 25th, and 26th, that’s Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, that will be growth edition. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is going to be starter editions, so the 26th, 27th, and 28th will be starter edition.
Rob: Mark your calendars. That will be in the Tropicana in Las Vegas. We’ll have tickets available for that. I don’t know. We haven’t talked about when we’re going to sell them but certainly prior to the end of the year, now that we know the location and all that stuff. On my end, I wanted to mention, I am getting probably five emails a day right now from apps saying, “We’ve updated our privacy policy for GDPR.” Are you getting the same crap?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: I’m deleting them all. I’m not even reading them. It’s irritating.
Mike: I want to send an email that says I’m not updating my privacy policy.
Rob: Hey, everybody, look at this. I’m not doing that.
Mike: It’s ridiculous.
Rob: Yes. Now that I’m seeing it, we’ve talked about that on the show a lot from the kind of company perspective, or the owner, the founder perspective. But now I’m seeing from the consumer perspective, and I hate it already. It’s annoying. People check in the box because they got to check the box.
Mike: Which is interesting because I also see emails from people who are talking about GDPR and it’s clear from the emails that they don’t completely understand what it is that they’re supposed to be doing. I’ve seen all these email coming through. There’s a general trend or thread that you can see, and someone is wrong. I’m not saying I’ve done the research to figure out exactly, and in certain situations whether the vast majority of people are right or the vast majority of the people are wrong, but there’s definitely variations between what some people are doing versus others. I don’t know. It’s totally screwed up and there’s no good answer for it.
Rob: Yes, for sure. On a lighter note, I had mentioned my brother was in town last week. When we were kids, we played obviously, the original Nintendo, the NAS. We played the SEGA Genesis System. He bought it when he was in college. This was the one with Sonic, Altered Beast, and some of those early SEGA classics. Once they got ahead of Nintendo if I recall, and this was the console that—they eventually lost the battle. There’s a good book about this. I wasn’t sure I figure out what the name of it is but it tells the inside story of all that.
When MicroConf Vegas is here, we gave away some of these classic consoles where you spend—it’s between $40-$100 and you can get an SNAS, or an NAS, or a SEGA Genesis System, and it comes with the games built in right on some hard drive. I noticed the SEGA Genesis was $40 on Amazon, so I just bought it while he’s in town, and I’m probably going to sell it on Amazon as a used console here in the next few weeks because I don’t really want to keep it. We had a blast, man.
We hung out a couple of the nights he was here. Just drank some whiskey and played Altered Beast and all the old games you remember from that era for hours and hours.
One thing I was disappointed with, the console’s fine. It’s pretty cheaply made. It’s not made by SEGA. It’s made by some third party and they threw on a bunch of games. They say it has 81 games but it’s really like 40 SEGA games and then 40 games that this company made in the past 10 years that are kind of garbage, so you don’t even play those. But what I did notice is that games like Altered Beast, and there’s couple of adventure games you used to be able to on the original SEGA continue forever and that’s how you would win it. You would just keep hitting start and you had infinite credits, but on this classic console, you don’t. You have two or three credits and once you’re done with it, you’re done.
It took all of the fun out of it because we couldn’t win any of the games. It’s pretty hard to do, but be we just aren’t in our peak chops for these games.
Mike: You’re losers.
Rob: I know. It’s funny though to realize that, “Oh, this isn’t,” I’m like tempted to go buy a real console. The old console you see them on eBay for $20 or $30, get the actual cartridge then you know that you’ll get the original experience. It’s just a bummer that they modified the original experience. I guess that’s how I feel. Why would they do that? Why would they change it from the way it was in the 90s.
Mike: I don’t know. It’s funny you’ve mentioned Altered Beast a couple of times, but I remember in college, there was a contest at the arcade at college where you could win the full version or the stand up version of the Altered Beast game, the arcade version. All you had to do is you had to get the highest score in a certain month. I went down there with a couple of dollars and a friend of mine, and ended up getting the high score and won it for—I spent less than $10 trying to win it.
Rob: That’s crazy for you. Few weeks ago, we had a question from a listener asking what podcasts we are listening to, and every so often, we do this. We probably do it once a year but we do it probably once every 18 months to 24 months because this change, I know it changes for me pretty frequently and it depends on the phase of the product I’m in, or the phase of the business. I know once we sold Drip, I just couldn’t listen to all the growth hacks anymore. It kind of killed me because I wasn’t in the midst of that anymore, so I had to just weed myself off of those.
Depending on what phase you’re at, it depends on what you don’t want to listen to. We picked our top 20 podcasts. We just grouped them into three different areas. We have the bootstrapping crew, we have the startups/business area, and we have off topic. We’re just going to run through these 20 and we’ll list them in the show notes as well. These are what I consider the highest quality and most relevant to our listeners.
There’s certainly some podcasts I listen to that are really infrequent and we exclude them from here. I also listen to a bunch of podcasts about tabletop gaming or role-playing games. Well, we could mention those. It’s probably not interesting to the majority of folks listening, so we won’t cover those. In no particular order, because we just went to our podcast feeds and send them in.
The first product is The Art of Product, and this obviously my Drip co-founder, Derrick, and Ben Orenstein who’s been a MicroConf speaker. They put together a really tight show where they just talk through the updates from the other person, what they’ve been doing in the last week and they’ve gone from—Derrick is working at Drip and Ben had a full time job. Ben went out on his own and did info products. Derrick left Drip and Ben got a full time job and they swapped. Then Ben left and he’s now doing a startup and Derrick’s doing his startup. Really interesting conversation from two smart people who are discussing topics that would be highly relevant to you as a listener of Startups For the Rest of Us.
Mike: The next one on the list is Bootstrapped Web from Brian Castle and Jordan Gal. Brian Castle runs Audience Ops. Jordan runs CartHook, and I think you’re an investor in CartHook as well, right?
Rob: Yes.
Mike: Those two have some really interesting stuff that they talk about. For obvious reasons, they don’t talk about everything that’s going on in their businesses, but it is a fascinating look at the stuff that they are working on. I really like hearing them talk about the stuff that they’re doing and the challenges they’ve run into. There’s just some fascinating topics that come up. Sometimes it’s just not even directly relevant to their business, or about technology, or marketing itself. Sometimes it’s just people management. How do you deal with different situations that come up, or how do you negotiate, or how do you solve a particular problem that was not your own like if somebody got dumped on your lap from some other vendor or partner of yours. How do you move forward from that? How do you recover from a fiasco that is largely out of your control.
Both of them are super sharp guys. I really like listening to them and hearing about it, and then just reconnecting with them. I used to work at MicroConf and Brian also runs a big Snowtime in Conf, so I usually see him when I go to that and it’s a winner as well.
Rob: I’ve been a long time listener of their podcast. I’ve been on on a couple of times, two or three times talking about stuff. Really, can’t recommend it enough. Again, heavy overlap in terms of concepts, topics, and really goals of what you and I espouse on this podcast.
Another podcast, I just recently started listening to it actually, is called Build Your SaaS, and it’s Justin Jackson and his co-founder of Transistor.fm, which is a podcast hosting company. It’s cool. It’s early stage stuff. They’re talking about their pricing. They’re talking about funding versus not and just talking about the two sides of it. I think it’s a fun romp. It’s always fun to hear Justin’s energy on their podcast and they do a good job with it.
Mike: Next one the the list id Rogue Startups from Dave Rodenbaugh and Craig Hewitt. Both of these guys have been long time MicroConf attendees. Craig used to headspoke at MicroConf Europe. I believe it was last year. Dave Rodenbaugh has given an attendee talk at MicroConf in Vegas as well. Dave has transitioned over the years from running just a series of WordPress businesses over onto his SaaS called Recapture. Craig Hewitt has been running Podcast Motor for a long time and he’s starting to branch out into other types of products in the podcasting space.
It’s just interesting hearing the journey over time and the different perspectives that they both bring to the table, partly because Craig moved over to Europe. He lives in France at this point. He Brought his family and two young kids over there. Some of the conversations talk about what it’s like to bring them over, and the differences in the school systems, and the challenges associated with going back and forth as a family, and how to integrate into the local culture and essentially run the business as a location independent business.
Rob: I’ve been a long time listener of Rogue Startups as well and a fan. Dave has multiple WordPress plugins, as well as Recapture.io, which is a small SaaS up he acquired. Craig Hewitt is running a couple of things but really past those is what I know he really focuses a lot of his time on which is podcast hosting. It’s kind of fun to hear their trials, tribulations, victories, and defeats, much in line with the stuff we talk about here.
Next podcast that I’ve enjoyed is Founder’s Journey, and this is from Josh Pigford at Baremetrics. He basically reads his blog post which I enjoy because I don’t read many blogs anymore. Really, I don’t read any blogs. I actually like that I’m able to kind of keep up with his thoughts on entrepreneurship and renting a relatively small startup without having to read text. I can do it while I’m running or riding my bike. It’s cool. It doesn’t have a regular publishing schedule but it’s short. When it comes out, it’s like 10 minutes. Since it is packing a blog post into that 10 minutes, it’s very compact. It feels like a 30-minute episode packed into 10 minutes, which is something I enjoy about it.
Mike: Next one on our list is the Tropical MBA from Dan and Ian. This is probably the single podcast I’ve listened to the longest. I’ve started to listen to it very early on when it came out. I’ve been listening to it for seven or eight years at this point. They have actually more episodes than Startups For the Rest of Us.
Rob: That is unfair.
Mike: I know. I think the thing that strikes me as interesting is that it feels to me like they’ve been on a parallel path with us, or we’ve been on a parallel path with them. Only they were aimed mainly at location independent entrepreneurs versus we focus much more on software entrepreneurs. Their ethos, ideas, and approach towards business really feels like it very much aligns with us. I think that’s why I’ve felt like it resonated so much with me. Dan and Ian had spoken at MicroConf in Europe. It was either 2013 or 2014, I forgot. It was in Prague. It was great to have them up there.
It was the only time we’ve ever had two people give a talk at MicroConf and it was fantastic. They fed off of each other really well and it looked like they rehearsed the entire thing. I imagine that they probably didn’t just because they have that natural interaction between each other that works really, really well. I think that’s part of why I like the podcast so much.
Rob: I’m with you. I’ve started listening really early on. I describe Tropical MBA as our sister podcast. I say that all the time. I feel like we’re two siblings, you know, they say sister cities, that kind of feels the same but in different places. It’s very similar in terms of, like you said, the ethos because it’s about building a life that you want and building a business to help you do that.
Their early focus was on location independence. They were in Bali, the Philippines, and other areas of the world, and you and I are on a different situation. We already had wives and kids when we started this podcast, and so we didn’t talk about the travel aspect of it, but we’re all talking about building a business to help you build a better life. I agree. I really can’t recommend Tropical MBA highly enough and as you mentioned, it’s one of the very few podcasts that has more episodes than we do.
Mike: I think they’re also one of the few people who’s taken over the Startups For the Rest of Us podcast as well. Do you remember the episode—it was the April 1st episode. We let them take over Startups For the Rest of Us and we took over the Tropical MBA for that one day. I think the only other time was when we had our wives come on and do the episode instead.
Rob: That’s right. We need to do another one of those at some point.
Mike: Yes, definitely.
Rob: That was fun. Cool. Our next podcast is a newer one. I think they only have 10 or 11 episodes. It’s called Hooked on Products, and it’s from Phil Derksen and John Turner. Also folks we’ve met through MicroConf long time, actually long time Micro Academy FounderCafe members. They’re hustling, they’re WordPress plugins, they’ve both gone independent at this point after a few years of building and acquiring products. It’s fun to listen to their interviews. Their origin stories are pretty cool. They just released how each of them got to where they are, and that is always fun for me to hear folks talk about that, because the founder’s story, it kind of never gets old hearing how founders got to where they are today.
Mike: The last podcast in our bootstrapping category is Indie Hackers which is run by Courtland Allen who does all the speaking and interviews, and then his brother Channing Allen does all the backend stuff for Indie Hackers. I find this fascinating just because he talks to people that are very early stage all the way up to they’ve sold their business and maybe they made millions of dollars from it.
You get this broad spectrum of people who are building profitable businesses, and you hear about the trials, the tribulations, and the things that have gone really well. You also hear about the things that did not go so well and the mistakes made along the way. I just love hearing that. All the different stories and things that people have run into, because if you’re working on your own business, you have this one view of the world and of your own business, but you don’t necessarily get that perspective that other people might have.
Hearing all those different stories gives you that perspective and makes you think about things that you might not otherwise have thought about that relate to your own business. Did you notice, by the way, in our bootstrapping section, every single person on this list who has those podcasts, all of them have been to MicroConf?
Rob: I know. I know, as we were saying this, I was like, “That’s interesting.” I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if it’s because we know them, I’m more interested in listening to their podcast, or if just people who are going to start a podcast in the space are naturally going to gravitate towards our community because it is their people in essence.
Mike: I don’t know. I’d have to think about that a little bit more, but I just find it interesting and looking at the list afterwards like, “Huh, every single person here, I’ve met them at MicroConf.”
Rob: Yes, that’s cool. Our next category is the startups/business category and this is podcasts that are focused on bootstrapping but they are still relevant to folks who listen to Startups For the Rest of Us.
The first is, if you’re not tired of hearing me every week on Startups For the Rest of Us, you should check out ZenFounder. It’s the other podcast that I co-host. I co-host this one with my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling, who is a clinical psychologist, and I think we’ve been doing this I think three, three and a half years now. It’s crazy to hear that it’s that long because I think we’re on episode in the 150, 160 range. It’s some really good stuff. The Founder Origin Stories have been a big hit where we’ve interviewed founders. Sherry doesn’t jus interview them about how they got there in their business but in their life. Like growing up, all the adversity they faced, how they got to where they are, and there are some amazing stories about folks who were in jail, folks who were almost killed, folks who lost parents, and about how that impacted who they are as a founder. ZenFounder.com or ZenFounder on iTunes if you haven’t checked about it. There are some good stuff coming out of there.
Mike: I definitely recommend ZenFounder as well. It’s been three years. I think it came out in 2015 and I still listen to it all the time. It’s one of those other ones that’s kind of made it into the—I use the app called Cast and it’s in the category called My Top Podcasts, which basically those at the front of the list out of all the other ones that I subscribe to.
Rob: Well, that’s cool. Thanks for the endorsement, sir.
Mike: the next one on our list is This Week in Startups. I started listening to this a while ago. This is run by Jason Calcanis. If you’re not familiar with him, he does a lot of angel investing and talks about startups in the Silicon Valley area. I found that I didn’t necessarily resonate with a lot of the things that were said, but I felt like I needed to be at least aware of the things that were going on. It’s not like being in the Valley is something that I’m really particularly interested in. I don’t want to go out and raise millions of dollars, but I also feel that I shouldn’t be completely ignorant of the things that go on and the types of stories that come out of those.
Obviously, funding works for some people and it doesn’t work for others. I can’t say that I would take that swing for the friends’ approach right now just because of the situation that I’m in, but I can certainly appreciate the value of raising a lot of money and doing something where you wouldn’t be able to do that without that funding, but not everybody can take those chances.
Some of the things that they talk about, I don’t necessarily agree with, but Jason’s definitely got a say something of an over the top attitude about—attitude probably is not the right word, but approach, I’ll say towards business. You should definitely do this. I think it’s just more of him being an extrovert than me being uncomfortable being an introvert.
Rob: Sure. Yes, he’s definitely opinionated. He’s a really smart guy and hard working as well. He kind of pulled himself up by his bootstraps from a very working class family. At first when I listened to it years ago, I was so irritated. I thought he was obnoxious and now, I realize he’s a smart dude who worked his ass off his whole life. I’ve come to respect his opinions. I find that I agree with him more often than not now. Not sure that I did the entire time that I listen to it, but when I disagree with him I can at least say, “Yeah, we just disagree and we see things differently,” kind of in my head. He has such a unique take on a lot of topics. That’s what I like to see. He kind of challenges some of my thinking and some of his guests do, as well.
There’s a really good episode, probably my top three episodes of this podcast are when he interviewed David Heinemeier Hansson, and they talked about funding and they go toe-to-toe, because DHH is very adamant one way and Calcanis really was just like, “Here are examples where that just wouldn’t have worked period.” I actually felt like Calcanis won the discussion. He had really good points about it.
The other one, I liked, Joel Spolsky, he’s been on there once or twice which was always fun because I’ve followed Joel for so long. And then, Chris Sacca did a two-part where he talked about all kinds of stuff. That’s what I like because I never would have followed or even been aware of Chris Sacca, but hearing Calcanis interview him made me think about things in a way that I have never done before. It kind of expanded my horizons.
That’s what I look for in This Week in Startups. I agree with you, a lot of the stuff on there. There’ll be interviews with someone doing some drones startup and I skipped those. I delete those because I just don’t have that much interest. But the news roundtable’s keeping me somewhat in touch with a world that, you’re right, is not our world because it’s more of the Silicon Valley startup, but it is tangentially related.
It’s certainly not a sister podcast, but maybe it’s like a second cousin. There’s something out there that I think is important for us to be abreast of given that we’re in technology.
Mike: It’s the long lost Uncle Joe who comes over and gets drunk and causes a raucous. If we’re talking family relationships, that’s probably it. I think your description of him of being opinionated is probably the one that is most in line with what I was thinking. I couldn’t come up with the right word, the right phrase, and also place the right amount of respect on him, it’s opinionated, it’s definitely it.
He does things and says stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily do myself but I can certainly appreciate the value of going through those steps towards building a business or putting your startup out there. I’m not going to say that it’s for me but that’s partly because, like I said, I’m an introvert and it’s just not for me. It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just I wouldn’t probably approach it that way.
Rob: Right. And when we say opinionated, that’s not a negative thing. It just what it is. He has strong opinions and sometimes it can come off negative, but other times it’s like, “Wow, he’s really taking a stand here.” I appreciate that and respect that. Again. More often than not, I think he’s on the right track with what he’s thinking.
Our next podcast is really purely for entertainment so I debated whether to put it on here, but it’s kind of like you got to give a nod to Alex Blumberg. It’s StartUp and it is on Gimlet Media. It was Alex Blumberg’s podcast, but essentially, he left This American Life to do StartUp. The first season or two were phenomenal. The most recent seasons, two or three seasons have been less so. They’re interesting but they’re just following stories of stuff.
It’s like Planet Money for startups, but I struggle a little bit with the lack of reality. If you think This Week in Startups interviews a lot of people just raising $20 million, $30 million, at least that is actually happening. A lot of stuff Alex was looking at on the first couple of seasons at StartUp were such a beginner view of things which, I hate to say it that way, it sounds pejorative like I’m saying you should never be a beginner. But it sounds like it never examined the possibility of that bootstrapping or a small angel round is a totally viable option for most businesses. Maybe he wasn’t able to do that but it was never brought up.
It was kind of presented as, “Hey, if you want to start a company, you raise funds.” That really has been the message at the entire time. I don’t love that about it, and frankly I should probably write in or send something just to be like, “Hey, this is another take on it,” but all that to say, it’s entertaining and worth listening to, but I don’t think you can take any business lessons away from it.
Mike: I’m with you on that. I’ve felt the same way about it being and again, you used a phrase and you said, I don’t want to be pejorative about calling it very beginner focused or having that beginner view, because everybody’s got to start somewhere, but it felt like there was no research done to say what are the options here? It was just like, “Hey, go raise funding. This is what will make your business successful.” I don’t know. I listened to it for a while. I haven’t listened to the StartUp in quite some time actually, probably at least a year or so.
Rob: I don’t even remember what the prior season was. There’s one coming out right now that’s fine, but the one before it was okay. I don’t think you’re missing that much. Our last podcast for startups/business is Akimbo, it’s Seth Godin’s podcast. He had said for years he wasn’t doing a podcast because he just didn’t have the time. He has to be really choosy about his projects but he’s doing a podcast now. It comes out every week and he talks about a lot of stuff you’ve heard from him in his books and his talks and such, it’s solid. It’s not blowing my mind because I’ve heard a lot of this from him before because I’ve followed him for years.
I often find that he’s talking about a trend or an idea that I don’t know what to do with. All right, so you have a dip. So what? You know, there’s not enough detail or like, “Okay, culture changes and here’s how it is.” And it’s like, “Okay, so then what do I do with that?” That’s always been my struggle, but at the same time, Seth is a genius and Seth, he sees trends that others of us don’t see. He thinks and he talks about things in a way that most of us do not. I like it because it expands my mind and helps me think about things in a new way.
Mike: Bonus podcast here would also be Seth Godin’s Startup School. That’s a 15 episode podcast. He did it in the past. I think back in 2013 or so. It was an interesting look at the journey of entrepreneurship and all the different things that you could and should be thinking about when you’re trying to build a business. I think it was based off of—didn’t they have a group of people that went through, it was kind of a classroom or a little startup school as he put it, where they put people through this program and a lot of the things that come out of that, or clips from Q&A sessions with the people that were in there.
It’s fascinating to hear the types of questions that they come up with and then his off the cuff answers. Obviously, everything is edited, but still as you said, Seth’s a genius. He sees things that other people don’t and a lot of times, it’s stuff that is even just on the fly he sees it. It’s fascinating to kind of watch him work through something and bring you to a logical conclusion that is also correct and astounding that he came up with it on the spot.
Rob: And like you said, it was 15 episodes and it was done. It was back in 2013. It’s still on iTunes and you can listen to it. I should probably listen to it again because it’s been a few years, but I thought that was really well done.
So now we’re going to dive into our off topic podcast and we have a handful of them, seven or eight. These are things that we like to dig in to. The kind of nerdy pursuits or just edification. I listen to a number of personal finance investing podcasts because it’s always been a hobby. One all throughout there is called Stacking Benjamins, comes out three times a week. It’s got a big audience. They make it entertaining and kind of fun to think about. They look at the headlines. They interview somebody, and they have a discussion, and some trivia and stuff. If you’re into that kind of topic, if it’s a hobby, I think you should check it out and even if not, you can probably learn something about saving for retirement and some money tips and such.
Mike: The next one on the list is Planet Money. I got into this, I forgot how I ended up finding this one, but it’s an NPR podcast. They talk about all these different things related to money, whether it’s a class action lawsuits about civil rights cases, or they have one on called The Less Deadly Catch. The podcast traverses a lot of different business types, whether it’s the vodka industry, or Valentine’s Day, or Super Bowl, they look at money topics related to all different types of businesses, and they drill in specifically into particular problems.
Mostly episodes are pretty short. They’re anywhere between 15 and 25 minutes long. Some of them are a little bit longer than that. They talk about issues related to either having money available or how businesses make money, or things that you wouldn’t necessarily think are obvious. And because it’s an NPR podcast, they have the ability to do some investigative journalism and drill in to things that you would not normally learn about. They’ll send a reporter out to do interviews and find out information and they’ll interview people on the podcast.
Essentially, I find it just educational because there’s lots of business types that I’m not aware of. We’re in the SaaS industry or software industry, and you’ll hear about these things that, I think on the last episode they talked a little bit about Tree House Brewery near where I live and it’s a fascinating business model, but had I not been there, I would not have heard about it, but with Planet Money, you get to hear about those types of things.
Rob: Yes, and Planet Money is a spinoff of This American Life. They did that during a financial crisis. They did maybe a two-parter on what happened trying to unravel and explain, and it was so popular they decided to form an entire podcast and that’s when it started.
Mike: Got it. Yes, that must be where I heard it from.
Rob: My next podcast is another investing podcast. It’s called Money For The Rest of Us. Actually, when I stumbled upon it, I was emailed the guy, David Stein. I was like, “Hey, I run a podcast with a similar name.” He’s like, “I had no idea your podcast was out.” Because we were earlier, right? We’ve been since 2010 or 2011, and then I think his is maybe three years old. He’s like, “I’m so sorry. I hope you don’t feel like I took your thing.” He said he just came up with it out of his own head, so no hurt feelings.
If you go into iTunes and search for the rest of us, you’ll see buckets of podcasts with that name, so it’s not like something we own the trademark on it.
Mike: We don’t have a license to it. We did not trademark that.
Rob: Exactly.
Mike: That’s like a big mistake.
Rob: Exactly. But J, David Stein was an institutional money manager. He would advise these endowments and he would help them like colleges and universities. I think it was non-profits only and he would help just manage their money and keep the assets allocated. What I like about him is he’s super even keeled. He’s not sensationalist. He’s not saying, “Buy, buy, buy, sell, sell,” It’s all about asset allocation and big buckets. He’s very calculated and looks at a lot of indicators.
He says he invests at the leading edge of the present. He’s like, “I’m not guessing where the economy is going,” but he does move money in and out of these big asset classes based on, he sees that emerging markets are way overvalued and he’s probably going to eke a little money out of that. He’s pulled money out of that asset. He’s not trying to time the market per se, but like he said, he does at the leading edge of the present, so very smart guy.
The main podcast is good. It’s evergreen content. I don’t get a ton of value out of it. It’s just stuff to think about. His Money For The Rest of Us Plus which is the one you pay for, and it’s very inexpensive. I think it’s probably $20 a month or something like that, or $199 a year. It’s in that rance. In my opinion, is one of the most underpriced things that I pay for. I hope he’s not listening to this, but he could multiply the price by five and I would still pay for it because he gives his take on where the economy is. And it’s not just him making things up, he looks at PMI and all these data sources that he used as a professional money manager. It helps me think through, as I’m moving money in and out of things. I don’t necessarily do the exact thing that he’s doing but at least I have the context for it.
To me it’s more valuable than if I were to pay a money manager to actually be managing my money. He’s giving just tons of really solid information. In the financial investing space, he’s one of the people that I respect most.
Mike: You know what he should do is multiply his price by five and then grandfather people in. That should be your advice to him.
Rob: That should be as long as I get grandfathered, totally.
Mike: The next one on our list is The Daily Tech News. There’s also a spinoff of this to which I hadn’t actually been aware of that you had mentioned to me, which is called Daily Tech Headlines, which is a much shortened version of it. The Daily Tech Headlines is just the headlines themselves. The Daily Tech News Show, they go into the detail on each of the different headlines. I find that a lot of the discussions from The Daily Tech News Show very fascinating.
They have different people who come on and Tom Merritt kind of runs the show for the most part, and there’s different people that he brings on to have discussions about different topics on different days of the week. It comes out every single day. It is somewhat difficult to keep up with all the different discussions, but The Daily Tech Headlines is probably a better place if you just want to hear the headlines, and if you want to drill into those and hear a lot more detail about them, then you can go to The Daily Tech News Show.
Rob: The Daily Tech News Show is what, like 20-30 minutes?
Mike: Yes.
Rob: And The Daily Tech Headlines is four or five, and that’s why I switched. It is five days a week. I couldn’t keep up with the full discussion and I just backed off to the headlines and I’ve really enjoyed doing that. I’m the biggest fan of Tom Merritt. I respect the heck out of him as someone who just, he has opinions but he’s willing to have conversations about them. He’s very well-informed. He doesn’t make rash comments or extremist things in either direction. He’s always pretty even keeled and that’s what I respect about him. He worked with Leo Laporte at TWiT and then left to do his own thing with Daily Tech News Show.
Mike: I always liked how he can see both sides of the argument whether it’s talking about self-driving cars, for example, and what are the moral implications of those things. Not just around the classical question of who do you kill if there’s a mother and a baby in front of you and some construction workers to the side. The car is going to have to choose somebody, who do you choose? He can talk to those things but he can also talk about the fact that these self-driving cars are going to be putting people out of work, truck drivers, for example. And what are the implications of that not just on the economy but the moral implications moving forward.
He’s got very broad view. Like you said, I just respect his opinions on it and him being able to listen to those things and talk about them without necessarily coming down very hand-fisted on a particular point of view.
Rob: One of Tom Merritt’s other podcast that I enjoy is called CurrentGeek. It’s a weekly podcast that they used to do every week. We’ll look at the current weekend geek news, movies, and the light tech stuff. They recently, I think it’s every other week they do that, and now they’re watching some movies, some classic movies and talking about them which is still interesting. When I first heard that they were doing that, I was like, “Oh, no.” Tom and his co-hosts are so entertaining to listen to that I listen to those episodes as well, and then we’re going back and watching pilot episodes of things. They did pilot episodes of Lost in Space. They did Lost. They did Breaking Bad, and Seinfeld. It’s funny to hear them talk through. They do research on it and then they talk about the changes, and what went down. They don’t just talk about the show itself but a lot of the behind the scenes which is fun.
Mike: Next one on our off topic list is 99% invisible. I like this one because it doesn’t tell me anything about startups, or business, or anything like that, but it gives you insight on just interesting stories that you would otherwise have no idea that those things existed, or that somebody had even thought of them. One episode that sticks out of my mind is one where they talked about how buildings are made specifically for high rise buildings, hotels, and things like that. Like if you go to the stairwells, for example, they tend to be just like a giant cinder block. It’s almost like a chimney and their stairs metal is very barren. Almost every hotel that you go into, when you fo to the stairway, there’s nothing there. It doesn’t look pretty in any way, shape, or form. The reason is because they use those as fire escapes because they learned year and years ago that when buildings start to burn down, people need to get out. If those areas of the building catch on fire, people can’t get out. There’s building codes in place that they talked about. They just talk specifically about why those buildings are designed that way and structured that way, and it’s to clue you in. It’s just to help those people get out. Those are the last things of the building that will burn up giving people the most time to get out.
And then, there’s other things. There’s stairs that go nowhere that they’ll talk about or statues in a particular city. Again. It’s the things that you would not otherwise have any idea that they existed except for this podcast, goes out and drills into those things and talks about them. It’s just interesting stories. I use it for more entertainment value than anything else. It’s definitely one to check out if you’ve got some time. The episodes are very well done and very well researched.
Rob: Yes, that’s the thing. It’s an NPR podcast and it’s really well done. The title comes from, like you said, it’s things that most of us don’t think about. They’re kind of invisible to us.
Last three podcasts, I’ll run through quickly, really to do with an honorable mention. The first one is another Gimlet Media podcast called Reply All. I just heard an episode after StartUp at one point, recommended it and I’ve been really impressed with the hosts and the production value of it. It’s a podcast about—I cannot compare it to something.
It’s at a production level of a Planet Money or This American Life, but it’s dealing with more Internet, online stuff, online trends, and memes, and that kind of stuff in a pretty cool and interesting way.
The next podcast is Clay Collins’ podcast about cryptocurrency. It’s called The Flippening. He interview big players. He knows a bunch of the people in the space. It’s interesting to hear him talk to people who are pushing that whole space forward. If you’re already hearing about it, then you may want to avoid this one, but I think that Clay really has his finger on the pulse of where crypto is headed and I do believe that it’s around for long term.
The last one I just added, we we’re talking because I realized, the funniest podcast I listen to is called System Mastery. It’s vulgar as all heck. These two guys are cracking jokes. They will, week to week, I think the main feed is them reviewing old and even new roleplaying game manuals. They read through them and they talk about how the roles are good here and how they’re dumb here, but then they have all these feeds that they’ve combined into one. I hear System Mastery, which is them reviewing these role-playing systems. They also talk about, they do Expounded Universe where they read Star Wars expanded universe novels and they make fun of them because a lot of them are poorly written. They watch movies, which I think is called Movie Mastery. What’s funny is, I would say they make fun of them but they do it—when the movie’s good, they don’t just make fun of it. They talk about how much they like it, but they still do it in a humorous way.
For some reason, I have all that in one feed and I don’t know if that’s because I support them via Patreon or not. It’s either going to be your speed or it’s not because they use a lot of foul language but it’s also really funny. It’s funny if you’re a nerd and you get all their references because they make some deep, deep references. I really like what they’re putting together. I think most of it is improve, which is pretty impressive.
Those are our 20 or 21 podcast that we are liking these days.
Mike: I think that about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number, 1-888-801-9690, or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Out of Control by MoOt” used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups, and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Rob: Before we go, if you have a podcast you feel like should have made our list, please either email it in or post it to the comments of this episode, episode 395.
Mike: Rob, the interesting thing about recording this episode on the top 20 podcasts that we like is that, I actually stopped listening to podcasts about a month and a half ago.
Rob: Did you? You’re just cold turkey, just all of them.
Mike: It was mainly because what I realized was that as I would listen to podcasts when I was mowing the lawn, or when I was driving, or when I was going to the gym, what I realized was that it made me feel for the most part like I was still working. It just extended my workday especially with any of the podcasts that were about business, startups or anything like that. It just made me feel like I was working all the time.
Rob: Yes, because you’re thinking about work all the time. That makes a lot of sense. I’m glad I didn’t title the episode 20 podcasts we listen to. Podcast we like is accurate, right?
Mike: We, as in you.
Rob: Exactly. My guess is you’ll come back to them at some point, but I hear you. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to do for a season. I certainly have gone through spells where I have cut. I used to listen to 55 podcasts, not all of them get on every week, or whatever I called it way down. I was down to 10, and it was stuff like Daily Tech News Show that didn’t make me feel like I was working because it was more about entertainment and news. I had almost nothing in the startup space and then slowly, I kind of worked my way back into doing that. I think there’s a case to be made for both directions. I think you can swing too far with constantly shoving information in your head and not giving yourself space to feel like you can relax.
Mike: I think it’s also the ability to take a step back. I’ve noticed this in certain situations or certain times of the year where I will be heads down working and not really come up and look at the landscape from a broader perspective or a strategic view of things. If you’re always implementing things, you’re always working in the business, then you’re never necessarily doing the planning stages and looking at the big picture. The problem is I felt like I was getting too far into the weez with all the mechanics and the tactics, things like that, but never actually taking that step back to do any strategy and look at the bigger picture.
Rob: I agree. I think that you need quiet time to be able to do that. If you are busy, because you’re busy with your business, you’re helping with your wife’s business, watching the kids, doing all the stuff you have to do, if you don’t have time during the day to sit back and just think, I don’t disagree that dishwashing, mowing the lawn couldn’t be that time.
These days, I have time during my days now to do that. I’m sitting thinking during the day, so when I am doing dishes or mowing the lawn, I don’t want to keep thinking about stuff. I’m already doing some big picture thinking, so I think it’s kind of a phase you’re in.
The other thing too is a lot of podcasts, they aren’t that constructive. They aren’t necessarily pushing your thoughts or your business forward, whereas audiobooks could be. You can listen to fiction to make yourself feel like you’re really not working. Or some folks I know just go away from podcast and go audiobooks only because they an information dense resource.
Mike: That’s a big difference between something like an audiobook versus a podcast, whereas a podcast is much less directed and focused on a particular thing. You can get an idea of what a podcast is about from the title or from the description, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be helpful to you versus a book, where if you buy a book about a very particular topic like sales strategies, or how to use Facebook ads or something like that, it’s going to be very focused on that one thing that you intentionally and deliberately decided that you are going to learn more about versus a podcast, where you might pick up some things and you might not, but it’s probably not going to be terribly actionable versus something like a book or an instruction manual.
Rob: That totally makes sense.
Mike: The other thing is it kind of makes me think about the conversations we had on a podcast about the consumption versus production modes between people. Should we be making things or consuming, it’s hard to do both at the same time. Right now, I’m producing stuff so it’s hard for me to consume stuff at the same time. It just makes my brain go sideways a little bit I guess.
Rob: Big time. I put up a blog post at one point. It was producer versus consumer or something like that. If you Google that, you can find it. There’s a really good comment thread after I published it. It was a good conversation about this. What I proposed there, I don’t think I talked about phases. I said certain people produced a lot of stuff and certain people consume a lot of stuff, and what I’ve realized since then, it’s not people, it’s phases.
That’s what you’re talking about now. What I find is, when I’m done with a hurdle, let’s say I sold a business, or I’m done growing it, or whatever, then I want to consume a bunch of stuff because I’m trying to figure out what to do next and taking a lot of information helps. But as soon as you focus on the goal, because you know exactly what your goals are this year, right? You’re growing Bluetick and you’re doing it this way.
You don’t need a bunch of information. You just need that point in time learning. I’m going to do Facebook ads next week so I got to learn that—Boom, do it, launch it. You don’t want just a bunch of inputs about things that are going to distract you in essence.
Mike: I find that the podcasts in general are distracting because they’re making me think about things that are not nearly as relevant to me as I need them to be. It’s better if I just take that time to think about the business itself and what I’m going to do next versus what other people are doing in their own businesses. As entertaining as it is, it doesn’t actually help me.
Rob: That’s right. Cool, man. We should probably wrap this.
Mike: All right. Well, take it easy. Talk to you next time.
Rob: Peace out.