Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 57.
[00:03] [music]
[00:12] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:22] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:23] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What do think about the updated intro there, Mike?
[00:29] Mike: I love that you run it by me first.
[00:31] Rob: I just feel like our audience has been expanding from developers. There’s a lot of folks who e-mail or even post on iTunes and they’re kind of like, I’m not a developer but I’d still like this. So —
[00:40] Mike: Yeah.
[00:41] Rob: Like we’re gonna broaden our audience a bit.
[00:43] Mike: I do know a sad — the Business of Software Conference ’cause I ran into a lot of people who listened to our podcast there which was kind of surprising but just the number of people who weren’t just developers who listened to it. I found that interesting as well.
[00:56] Rob: Well, hey, we have some very special guests with us today. It is Justin Vincent and Jason Roberts from the TechZing podcast. He just wants to say hello.
[01:04] Jason: Hey, guys.
[01:05] Justin: Nice to be here.
[01:06] Rob: I imagine we have a lot of overlap so a lot of people probably already know you guys. This is gonna be a roundtable, TechZing for the rest of us. I think it’s what we’ll call this episode. The theme for today’s show is how to launch something on the side. And we wanted to pick something, kind of a topic to talk around that all of us have experienced and that we could all kind of lend some insights into.
[01:26] Justin: I think that you’re about to do some updates with — you and Mike.
[01:30] Rob: That’s right. Mike, what’s new with you?
[01:33] Mike: With AuditShark? Well, I spend some time working on the ability to support more than just a single customer. That’s coming along pretty well. There’s a few things that I’m looking at that have some — have you written in code and you made a huge number of updates and you’re pretty sure that it works but you’re afraid that there’s something in there that you screwed up? That’s kind of where I’m at right now. So I have to go back through and make sure that everything is actually working the way I wanted to ’cause I’d rather find the bug than have a customer find it.
[02:01] Rob: Perfect. Doesn’t that mean it works?
[02:03] Mike: Oh, of course, you know. And everything on the internet is true.
[02:06] Rob: Yeah. What about unit test? Don’t you have a suite — or do you have a suite of unit test, I should ask?
[02:11] Mike: I do but not for UI. So this is all UI-related stuff.
[02:15] Rob: Got it. That makes it tough. Well, cool. I have three quick updates, a couple of shoutouts actually. One is — many thanks to Dan and Ian of the Lifestyle Business podcast. That’s actually one of my other favorite podcast, very cool. We’re gonna have Dan on in a few weeks and they just continued to kind of be fans of Startups for the Rest of Us and talk about us on their show. And I’ve seen some folks come to the website from theirs and they blogged about us and all that stuff. So it’s just really cool to kind of be in that community.
[02:43] And there’s another podcast I want to mention called Coder Talk. It started just maybe about a month or two ago. Joey Beninghove and a couple of other developers and they mentioned us, talked about the podcast and talked about my book and then I picked it up in a Google Alert and wound up going on the show, I think episode 8 or 9. So anyways, if you haven’t checked that out and you’re a coder, it’s heavily technical. And if you’re into that stuff, it’s cool to a bunch of coders sitting around chatting about stuff.
[03:11] And then the last one is we now have 62 ratings in iTunes which I’m stoked about. It seems to be growing every week. And I really like the most recent review is by Strict9. I like the second paragraph. He says if you’re just starting out in the world of micropreneurs and single phone to startups, head over to the podcast website and start at episode one. It’s a crash course in almost every issue you will encounter along the way.
[03:35] And what I liked about it, A, it’s a nice compliment but B, I went back and tried to listen to our early episodes and they’re so painful, like we are so stiff and I don’t know. And I actually have feedback from other folks that it was that way as well and we really kind of keep into our own in the teens I think. So anyway, I saw that was funny.
[03:53] [music]
[03:56] Mike: As Rob said earlier, the topic is how to launch something on the side. So we’re gonna go through a list of about five, I guess, high level questions. And the first one is what to build. And, Justin, I’ll ask you specifically because you had this idea awhile back and then you went out, you implement it or you started implementing it and then you ended up changing the name of it and you finally ended up with Pluggio and I’m curious to know how you decided to actually go ahead and build that.
[04:23] Rob: And maybe to start with, you could just kind of give a brief-over of what Pluggio is for new listeners.
[04:29] Justin: Sure. Well, Pluggio is basically a Twitter social dashboard. So it’s actually a social media dashboard where you can author or make twits and you can also add in RSS feeds, get content. It makes it very easy to share content, very easy to create or follow it. And so where Pluggio came from was because myself and Jason started a podcast like you guys have started a podcast and we’re on episode 156 now which is about to be release. And when we started two years ago, we were wondering how we could promote it.
[05:01] And the very first thing we spoke about in the podcast actually, on episode 1, was Twitter. And I just got interested in Twitter and thought Twitter would be an interesting promotional tool. So when I kind of explored how to make the most out of Twitter, the first thing I thought was, well, what I need to do is put good content on Twitter so that if people are following me, they’ll get great tech content and then hopefully, when I post the podcast, they’ll go and listen to it.
[05:24] So that was one idea and I found that it was a pain to do that because I had to go around the net and find great content and then copy and paste the links, store them in a text file and then post them out a few times a day ’cause I didn’t want to flood my followers.
[05:36] So I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I just had this tool where I could plug in RSS feeds, hack a news name list what I was thinking about and just manually click a little button on any stories that I like, I could kind of go and view the story and then click a button and then we’ll put it to a schedule queue and roll those twits out during the day.
[05:54] So basically that’s what I built and I just bought it for myself in the first place. We didn’t really know at that stage that we were a bootstrapping show. We were not specifically a bootstrapping show but we just talked about it a lot.
[06:05] That kind of evolved over the first few episodes and then TweetMiner was what it was called originally. And I just thought of building it and over decisions for it and everything about it have been on the air over the last 156 episodes. And myself and Jason have been brainstorming it as this has gone along. Now, it’s not hugely successful but it’s earning around $3,000 a month and has about 225 customers.
[06:28] Rob: What made you decide to change the name?
[06:30] Justin: Originally, it was called TweetMiner and the problem with that is it’s just completely Twitter related and as time went by I realized that this opportunity was a bigger opportunity than just a Twitter opportunity, the social media opportunity. And you can with Pluggio, you can post to Facebook, you can post to any social network. So we needed to remove that name of Twitter in there, the twit reference. But also, TweetMiner, the reason I called it TweetMiner was because originally it was to mine the content but somehow TweetMiner just seems a little, I don’t know, a little spammy or something so that’s why I changed the name. And what I mean with Pluggio is it’s just you’re plugged in to every social network, that’s why I changed it.
[07:09] Rob: Got it. So the advice we heard a lot is things like scratch your own itch and that’s essentially which you did here, right? You built a tool that you needed to use. Now, I’ve seen the scratch your own itch thing bail a lot. I actually in general think it’s not very good advice. I think a lot of developers try to build tools for developers and the market is just oversaturated and developers don’t tend to wanna pay and they want to build it for themselves and stuff. But in this case, it has worked out reasonable well.
[07:33] Justin: I wouldn’t do the same again. I wouldn’t. I think that, I only did it because of my naiveté of being a bootstrapper at that time, an entrepreneur at that time.
[07:41] Rob: Got it.
[07:42] Justin: If I had the opportunity now, I would do some basically anthropological research around a specific niche and find a group of people who had a problem and I would build something to solve that problem because it’s just easier to get money that way. It’s been really difficult to create a revenue of Pluggio because of the space it’s in. It’s got so much competition, all the competition is free, no one wants to spend any money in that space.
[08:06] Rob: So you’d go probably more customer development style then.
[08:09] Justin: I would. That’s what I would recommend. If I was gonna start again, I’ll try and find — Jason said something — some problem that needs to be solved that people are willing to pay for.
[08:17] Rob: How about you, Jason? You’ve built many apps. You can give people a brief overview of any of them if you want or the things you’re working on now. But I’m curious how you — ’cause I don’t know if that you’ve ever talked about how you’ve come up with your ideas.
[08:29] Jason: First of all, I’d like to say this is the longest I’ve been silent on a podcast.
[08:32] Rob: I was — I could hear you. I could hear you almost jumping in and then like holding your breath.
[08:37] Jason: I did. I got your intro, there’s about three times. I was like, ah. I’m like, all right. Give him space to talk. So one thing I just wanna add to what Justin said, I think it’s possible to scratch your own itch or find something that you’re really interested in but also do something, anthropological research in finding a niche. I mean, I think it can be dangerous to build a product in an area that you just don’t care about because this is — the going gets rough. It’s easy to just bail. So it’s like, I don’t care about this anyway. This is stupid, you know.
[09:07] And a bit of a sudden you fundamentally are excited about and understand it can give you a real advantage but I think what happens with kind of what you guys are saying is that, a lot of developers, they just want to get developing. So they just start — they code like the first or second idea that comes to their head which is the same first idea that comes to everybody which is why it’s so oversaturated. But I do agree that selling to developers is a dangerous proposition ’cause they don’t wanna pay for much. So it’s just another topic.
[09:32] So what my first — I guess one of my products that I built that may be relevant to discussion was Prezzo [Phonetic] which was a web-based version of PowerPoint and I read an article on the web that went pretty big and a lot of people seem to read how I screwed up my Google acquisition. And it was about how I perceived an opportunity with the webification of the productivity tools. And this is back when Gmail just came out. So I built a — I thought, you know what, all this stuff is gonna go to the web. If I could build one of these tools, be one of the top one or maybe three, I would have a good shot of being acquired by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, that kind of thing.
[10:12] And I thought PowerPoint would be sufficiently complicated product that there wouldn’t be a whole lot of competition. So I built it over a period of 2 years and the acquisition almost happened but it didn’t. And the most interesting thing Google read the article itself. But the problem was I built something that I really never used or would care to use. So that’s kind of a problem. In some sense, I was just like — it was just something I was building to flip. I wanted to build something that would be bought by Yahoo or Microsoft for $10 million or $20 million and be done in three or four years. And I’m not sure that’s the best thing to do.
[10:55] Mike: I have a question. Did you essentially bootstrap it? I mean, you said you worked on it for 2 years. It sounds like you bootstrap. You didn’t go for funding of any kind, right?
[11:03] Jason: No. Actually I did. So a guy I knew, a friend of mine, who is a very successful entrepreneur and had a lot of capital, had been wanting to invest in another idea that I had. I’ve been working in the trading space, automated trading, algorithmic trading and what’s now termed by most people is high-frequency trading. And right around that time, I was starting to think that the web — I started to notice the web was wakening up again. This is like 2004 and I thought maybe it would be smart to do something in the web and so he was just like, whatever you wanna build, I’ll invest in it. He kind of — essentially brought me on track.
[11:42] So I went off and I started working on a couple of different ideas. The first one was sort of like a web collaboration platform, shared tasks, shared documents, contacts, that kind of a thing. But it seems like there’s a lot of — even then, there’s a lot of companies going after that. So I changed direction once or twice and then I sort of settled on the PowerPoint concept. So I was funded. I mean, I didn’t have to do any consulting or anything. I was able to pay myself a reasonable living salary and that’s what I did. That’s how I was funded.
[12:13] Justin: Hey, Jason. You should mention what happened to your friend who did follow the first idea, your first part.
[12:18] Jason: So when I first started thinking about the web concept, I asked myself, okay, what is the web good for and what is it not do well. And it was collaboration. People are still just e-mailing stuff around. And I thought this collaboration stuff should really work much better and so I started playing around with this collaboration. I think I called it Office G2. That was the name for it.
[12:40] But when — I read an article about Microsoft coming up with a web-based version of SharePoint and that kind of spooked me because the lesson that we learned in the ’90s was don’t compete with Microsoft. Once they’re gonna move in to a space, you might as well just get out and do something else because they’re gonna crush you. And I took that a little too literally. And so I immediately changed direction. I started going down this sort of Wiki round.
[13:02] And not too long after I changed directions, maybe within 6 months or year, I met a couple of other entrepreneurs who live right in my area in Pasadena and they started a company called Central Desktop and they were probably like 2 to 3 months ahead of me. And so when they saw that announcement about Microsoft doing a web-based for SharePoint they were too far in and they were just like, screw it, let’s just keep working on this. I mean — and as it turns out I don’t think Microsoft ever released anything of note if they ever did it and Isaac and Arnold kept pushing on and now, I just had lunch with him yesterday and I think they’re getting close to I think like 75, 80 employees or something like that. I mean, they are extremely successful.
[13:41] So yeah, I mean, I know the lesson is there but it’s just like, don’t worry about the competition or don’t worry about this big companies with what they’re doing ’cause you can’t control these forces and the markets are usually huge. If the market is big enough for a big company to go into it, then maybe it’s big enough to support lots of smaller companies ’cause they’re — not everybody is gonna choose to go with Microsoft or IBM or Oracle. There are a lot of people who are gonna choose other options for different reasons.
[14:04] And then in talking with Isaac and Arnold even if you went on the web and you looked at all the competitors in Central Desktop, there’s a lot of competitors in the space but it isn’t competing. It isn’t stopping them from being successful. They competed directly against the name Basecamp. It was sort of at least early on was a competitor of theirs and 37signals had all this love within text space but I mean, I don’t think they’re doing as well financially as say Central Desktop is.
[14:27] Rob: I think Mike and I talked about a lot about this on the podcast. We go back to episode 5 which is called how to find a niche. We talked about how to find a niche as you would expect but beyond that, I’ve done a lot of riding on it — there’s parts of my book to talk about it and I’ve blogged about this probably every few months ’cause it’s the most common question I get. I think there are way more people stuck at pre-product phase than they are actually working on an active idea. People just get stuck in the analysis of it.
[14:55] Mike: I think that both Justin and Jason agree though that just scratching your own itch is probably not the way to go in general. I mean, you really have to analyze the market a little bit and figure out — are people actually willing to pay for this and if so, what sort of revenue could you reasonably expect from that based on the amount of effort that you’re gonna have to put forward in order to build it or to have it build for you. And I think that’s really — the key is finding something, one, that you’re kind of interested in and, two, is actually gonna make you enough money that it is worth it for you to go in that direction.
[15:28] Justin: Can I just counter that with there’s something to be said for building something and creating some momentum towards moving somewhere. So even if you just stop making something, if you have no momentum and not doing anything and you’re stuck in that stage that Rob just described the kind of pre-product, pre-anything stage, I would say just give it a chance even for a few months to just move in a direction, to just get out of your lethargy and actually start making things happen.
[15:55] Mike: I definitely agree with that ’cause — I mean, there’s so many people who just sit down and they will not do anything thinking that they’re making progress because they’re reading blogs or reading books and learning all these different things, going to meet-ups and — unless you’re actually programming, you’re really not making any progress towards developing your product. And it’s not to say that you can pay somebody to do that for you but the bottom line is that you need to be working towards that and just learning and consuming the information is not gonna do it for you.
[16:24] Jason: If you’re gonna go after something, try and go after something that you can release in a reasonable amount of time because I’ve done this several times where I kind of promise that were so hard that it was just gonna take years of work. And that makes the whole thing, well, just hard, right? I mean, it increases the risk dramatically that you’re not gonna have anything ever that you can sell or make money with.
[16:47] So if you go after something simple and you whittle it down, even if you spent a month or two working on it, if it’s simple enough you might actually release even something, something simple even if it kind of sucks and only a few people are using it. That’s way ahead of like something massive that you’re like 5% done with.
[17:07] Justin: I actually take that one stage further and say if you start working on it, don’t stop programming it. Buy a copy of Balsamiq Mockups and mock that thing up in applicable format so you can start sharing it to people within a week and they can click around it and see what idea you’re thinking about and what product you’re thinking about and you can literally iterate, I mean, you can iterate on three or four products in a month and have an idea of whether people really wanted it. Are they willing to pay for it just through market research but at the same time building something that people can get their hands o?
[17:38] Rob: Yeah. My rule of thumb has been — if it’s beyond 4 to 6 months of development and marketing work to get it to market that it’s really — gonna be really hard for you to get there. I see a big drop off with entrepreneurs I worked with. Once they go past somewhere between 4 and 6 months, it depends on the person, the momentum just drops way off and they slow down. Very few people who have seen that never launched at that point. It is possible, of course, but I’m just talking an odds thing, trying to improve your chance of getting out there.
[18:04] Mike: So are you saying the odds of me actually launching AuditShark are minimal at best?
[18:08] Rob: Slim to none.
[18:10] Justin: Well, but you — here’s the thing. And this is a good thing about having a podcast and having a partner who you can readily speak to about your business. That essentially keeps you in the game, right? That keeps the momentum going.
[18:18] Rob: I agree, yup.
[18:19] Justin: If you guys didn’t have that, it probably be much harder for you.
[18:22] Rob: And you’re an experienced entrepreneur. You’ve been doing it for 11, 12 years now. You are doing it on the “side” but it’s not as on the side. There’s a lot of people where they have 40 or 50 hours a week of the job plus they commute on either end and you do have some flexibility where you take one or two weeks completely off and just work on it.
[18:40] There’s some extenuating circumstances that all make it more likely that you’re gonna get out the door. And I genuinely think that talking about it like Justin just said, talking about in the podcast period has made you publicly accountable to this thing. Like when we showed up at Business of Software last week, I don’t remember how many people came up and were like, hey, Mike, how’s AuditShark? Like guys I never met before. I have no idea who they were. And I’m like, man, you’re really on the hook. I mean, we’re both on the hook, you know. And that’s a good thing I think.
[19:05] Mike: Yeah. I was amazed at that as well. In fact, I’ve been getting people lately just twitting to me and saying, hey, how’s AuditShark coming? When are you gonna launch?
[19:13] Jason: That’s the thing with the product I brought on for almost 2 years now, that was AppIgnite which is an immensely complicated project. And I think if it wasn’t for the podcast, it would be much easier to just sort of bail. But now it’s like I’ve talked so much about it, I would feel really bad about just dropping it. But I have to say that — the couple of things that I have pumping, pushing forward — one of the podcast — the second one is I have a partner on it going on and we have sort of a regular thing where we worked together like an hour, an hour and a half every single work day. So he calls me up or I call him up on Skype and we screen share and work together. And I would recommend doing something like that.
[19:53] If you can — if there’s somebody that’s convenient to work with that you trust that maybe have complementary skill sets or whatever, at least have a very shared vision, just having someone else that you can do something with can really get you going because a lot of times what happen is work or life or whatever just starts getting in your way and it just starts pushing the startup idea further out of your daily habit and then at a point where you just lose all momentum. But if someone’s calling up, saying, hey, we’re gonna work on this tomorrow, we’re gonna work on this, or what’s going on, it just keeps you going.
[20:23] Rob: I think that actually segways really nice into the second — kind of second topic which was the logistics of working on a product, when, where, how much time, etc. And yeah, I think that what you’ve just talked about is kind of this accountability, this daily accountability that forces you to do it or not, not work it at your routine. Anyone else do that? I don’t have a daily accountability but I have a bi-weekly. Every two weeks I meet with a mastermind group here and for us now — I basically asked them to take me to task if I’m not doing the stuff that I should be.
[20:51] Jason: Like I said with AppIgnite I do have a daily schedule that I worked with going on and it’s usually right about 1:00, 1:30 to 3:00 PM every day. My time is kind of right in the middle of the day and then I also worked on the weekends on it. But lately like the project that Justin and I have been working on called AnyFu that is less of a daily through shared work session. It’s more of like we’re working on our different pieces and then we’re just communicating or either we’re talking about it in the podcast or e-mail or whatever.
[21:22] I think if you could get a regular work schedule on something I think it’s easier. I think it’s easier to keep momentum because I don’t think “let’s talk about it” is enough as the importance of that in place and just realizing our long term goal. If you do something every day, it goes so much towards pushing you through the hard spots.
[21:39] Sometimes you reach a hard point but if you’re just like, get on every day eventually, you’re gonna bust through it but if you work on it, you reach a hard part and then you kind of like don’t do anything on it for a week. It’s so easy to kind of forget about them or they won’t work on it and then it just kind of falls out of your mind space.
[21:55] Justin: I have this concept of banking enthusiast, I mean, how like when you gamble and you couldn’t bank your savings. So once they’re banked they’re not on the table anymore. I sort of feel like that same thing applies to enthusiasm. So when I feel very enthusiastic to work on Pluggio, I maybe working a class work — I’m fortunate enough that I’m a consultant so I can choose what I work on — when I get the enthusiasm like, okay, I’m gonna find this right now. I’m gonna switch over to Pluggio and work in that enthusiastic mode because I feel that it just makes it easier to get good work done.
[22:25] Rob: That’s kind of a cool idea. I have found myself since I have a bunch of different projects I’m working on all time. I’ve done the same thing but I’ve never thought about it in that respect.
[22:34] Mike: I don’t know. I think I’m kind of — approach to this sort of a Hybrid Mindset. I had a hard deadline for my master’s thesis at one point where you’ve only got so along to finish it and I had — you’ve got 7 years to finish it at least here in the U.S. and I was bearing down on that 7-year mark and I knew I had to get it done. And it was one of those sins where I didn’t want to do it. I pushed it off for so long and I’m like, okay, well, I’ve already dumped a ton of money at this college for this degree, I better get it.
[23:01] So I just buckle down and I’d wrote a little bit every day and I got a couple of books on kind of guiding you through the process of writing in and the consistent theme that I found was do a little bit every day even if it’s not a lot. And looking at a blank page when you’ve got a couple of hundred pages to write is really intimidating. But if you just concentrate on writing like one sentence, the next sentence is a lot easier than the first. And you kind of get on a role and just like Justin said, you kind of bank that enthusiasm and as you start working on it, it really can build on its own. It helps you get motivated and it helps you get through the points that get to where you need to be.
[23:41] [music]
[23:44] Rob: You know, I just commented that I have a theory about the 4 to 6 month time frame and how it drops off dramatically after that. And so if you look at it on a kind of the logistics of working on it and you think someone’s probably got to put in 10 hours a week at least during that time to get it and obviously more is better. So if we say 10 to 15 hours a week is kind of what’s gonna be required to get something out the door in 4 to 6 months, then you’re looking at 4 months of 10 hours would be like 100 — gosh, I guess it’s around 120 hours total. It seems pretty thin to me and then 15 hours a week, 6 months, the top end would be about 300 almost 350.
[24:20] So somewhere between 120 is a pretty wide range. But 120 to 350 hours to get the one point out the door and that include — that’s not just coding, right? That’s actually QA and it’s getting the marketing website down and it’s getting marketing going. It’s getting all those sales page up, the landing page, collecting e-mails and then doing a launch and all that stuff. What do you guys think about that about trying to limit yourself to something like that to get a one point out the door? Is that realistic?
[24:46] Justin: I’m just thinking that perhaps you’re almost defining a new kind of rule, that rule 10,000 hours to get — to become an expert at something. Maybe there’s a rule for how many hours you need to launce something.
[24:56] Rob: Right.
[24:57] Jason: Yeah. You could break it down to like, okay, work 20 hours for this, 50 hours for that.
[25:03] Mike: If you think about in terms of 40-hour work a week though I mean, that’s 9 weeks. I mean, 360 hours is about 9 weeks and —
[25:10] Rob: Like it’s too much work.
[25:11] Mike: Oh, yeah. And if you’re putting in that much time and effort on something, if you have your idea and you know what you’re gonna do, 9 weeks seems like it’s a lot of time to put something together that is at least sellable.
[25:24] Rob: Right.
[25:24] Mike: I mean, unless it’s extremely complicated. It seems like you could do it.
[25:29] Rob: I guess the hard part is knowing — you got to know that you’re building the right thing, right? So you almost have to factor in like customer development during that time or do it beforehand and really have a good idea of what you’re building when you start that.
[25:39] Mike: Well, I think you do it beforehand ’cause I don’t think you consider it as part of the actual development time because you have to do all this upfront work to decide what it is that you’re gonna build and how you’re going to present it whether there’s competition, whether people are gonna pay for it. And that’s more or less research time. It’s not even development time. It’s the R part of the R&D.
[25:59] Rob: Yeah. I had a spreadsheet that kind of listed all this stuff out. It has all the tasks and has the hour estimates and that’s actually in the academy. I dug that out. I haven’t looked at it in probably a year and I think I did have the estimate. It was 400 to 600 hours at the time. But I’d be interested to see now with kind of just the new paradigm of getting launches out quicker for the fact it could be edited down. ‘Cause I think this is helpful for people, right? If you’ve never tried to build a product on the side I get that question a lot.
[26:24] It’s like, well, how long is this gonna take? How long should it take? And it’s like telling someone you should plan on 4 to 6 months, 200 to 400 or 400 to 600, whatever it is, is actually as kind of weird is that sounds to us to talk about, I think that’s like a decent guide, a decent general rule. You can certainly fall outside of that. Obviously, AuditShark is, AppIgnite is, Pluggio, now, did you launch Pluggio which was Twitter manner at the time, did you launch it in less time than that?
[26:52] Justin: I launched it in 3 months I think.
[26:54] Rob: Okay.
[26:55] Justin: I went from an original idea that we spoke about it ’cause we actually — I think we thought about it on the podcast and I think within 3 months I had to beat the notion.
[27:03] Jason: I know it’s quicker than that.
[27:04] Justin: I think it could have been.
[27:05] Jason: You sent me an e-mail, like, I have an idea. I’m gonna make some money. I think what are you talking about? And he was like, yeah, yeah. Let’s gonna do this thing and you’re like, I have quick idea to make some quick cash. That was kind of how I feel.
[27:18] Justin: Oh, yeah. It’s really been quick cash I can tell you that.
[27:22] Rob: Well that’s an — yeah, it’s an interesting question because a lot of people would kill to have a product that brings in three grand a month. Would you say it’s worth it, what you’ve done?
[27:30] Justin: Okay. ‘Cause I spoke at you guys in the conference, MicroConf, and part of our presentation was that I expected just like Jason said, I expected to make a load of cash and I launched this thing and I kind of went to like $600 a month. And because of my lack of experience as an entrepreneur I didn’t really understand how much time needed to be devoted to marketing from that point forward. So I kind of gave up on it and just left it for 9 months and they just kept on at this rate of $500 and then people on the show got pretty angry with me just like I kept talking about trying to start a new business and they were like, well, you’ve got this one that’s making money. All you need to do is market it.
[28:08] So then I went back into the marketing of it and it kind of took another I guess a year to take it to $3,000, maybe $3,100 revenue per month. So I was never expecting that. If I had known that when I was starting, I better would have done it because it’s like, you have to put this much work in. I mean, it’s almost like diminishing returns. It’s like to reach the speed of light, you need to use more and more explosives to get there. And that’s what I feel like — it’s been like for me with Pluggio, partly why I would recommend working at a different space, the social media for anyone.
[28:40] Jason: So let me jump in here. I think Justin launched — I think he had a beta version like 6 weeks. I don’t think it was 3 months. I think he maybe had beta for a month but you got it done pretty fast.
[28:51] Justin: Yeah, that’s true.
[28:51] Jason: I mean, Justin — once Justin gets on to something like he can’t think about anything else and he’ll just code night and day. I think that’s kind of what you did, felt like a month or 6 weeks. Then you got it up and it was making more than $500. I mean, I think it pretty quickly got up to like $800. It is like $850 or something. And then it kind of sat there. So without a whole lot of work, you got to that $800. It was just getting past that. It was hard, right?
[29:15] Justin: Well, yeah. Because what I have was — at the time I had the ability for people to pay a year in advance in the signup from and I kind of felt once again because of naiveté I sort of felt like I was cheating myself by doing that. So originally, a few people were signing up and they were basically paying a $100 upfront. And so that was really skewing the figures. So one month I was getting $600, the next month I was getting $300, the next month I was getting a $1,000. So I didn’t really understand what on earth was going on. So I decided to just remove the ability to pay the year in advance which I probably should have kept but anyway, that’s the way that I stuck at it and I just only included monthly revenue from that point forward.
[29:51] Mike: But those aren’t problems. Those aren’t really the problems associated with building that. I mean the thing that comes to mind for me is the fact that when you look at like Y Combinator, for example, you’ve got these small group of people who are stuffed in a room [30:06] for like 2 1/2 months and that’s all they do, is they work on whatever their ideas. Now granted, they get more than their 40 hours a week and they’ve got a small team of people but they put these things together and like 6 or 8 weeks because they’ve got demos that they’ve got to do before their 12 weeks is up.
[30:25] Rob: Right. I think they have weekly — they definitely have weekly meetings where they all meet and they have training and they hear a speaker and they’re doing — they are doing customer development or some of them are at least so it’s not just sitting in the basement coding there.
[30:38] Mike: They also have a team of people. So the differentiating factor I think is —
[30:40] Rob: Some of them.
[30:40] Mike: Let’s say about 2 or 3 people and they’re working on it and each of them is putting in 40 hours a week. Say one person is doing the customer development. You got two other people who were doing the coding. What does it take to crank out a beta of something with 2 people working 40 to 80 hours a week on it? It’s like 5, 6 weeks. It depends on how complicated it is. But once they start to get funding, I mean, they can add people, they can start dealing with problems of scale and things like that. And most of those are dealing with much larger types of applications than I think that we’re talking about.
[31:12] Justin: Okay. So basically I’m earning $3,000 a month right now because 2 years ago, I decided to scratch my own itch and then I had the momentum of a partner talking to me about it on the podcast and fans bugging me about it in the podcast for 2 years. And that’s the reason why it’s there at this stage.
[31:28] Jason: But you also took a year off and didn’t do anything. The thing is — sometimes it’s dangerous to extrapolate too much like say, well, you know, it’s gonna be this hard for everyone because you might be that [31:40] Pluggio in a sense that it’s just a hard market to break into or to earn a revenue stream. I mean, you might be able to build something in 6 to 8 weeks and you put in some marketing effort and it just kind catches a little wind. I mean, you think of things like GetHub. They just —
[31:54] Mike: But that’s fine.
[31:55] Jason: It’s not just the right prom at the right time.
[31:57] Mike: Yeah, but I think that the issue that we’re trying to talk about is really how to launch something not necessarily how to deal with it after the launch. I mean, there’s obviously the post launch aspect of it but I think the getting to launch is the thing that a lot of people struggled with. I mean, there are so many people; so many developers out there who have half-written applications sitting on their hard drive that are just wasting space because they just didn’t —
[32:22] Rob: I’m included in that group.
[32:23] Mike: Oh, yeah.
[32:24] Rob: I have a bunch of apps from like 5, 6, 7 years ago. Yeah, all kinds of different ideas. I came across some the other day and I was like, crap, this is embarrassing. I should take a screen shot.
[32:33] Mike: It is.
[32:33] Rob: Of course, it’s public and so people can mock me.
[32:35] Mike: It is embarrassing but you know what, I think we all do it though. There’s tons of things that we start and we’re just like, nah, this isn’t gonna work and it’s not because you got bored with it or you didn’t do the customer development or somebody else came out with the product that you think would kill it. There’s all these reasons but the fundamental thing I think we’re talking about here is just how long does it take to actually get to launch from the time that you decide to do it to the time that you can get that minimum viable product out the door that somebody is going to actually money for.
[33:04] Jason: Yeah, the reason I was bringing that up, the thing about Justin, of how hard it is, it’s just that — and the reason I think it’s important is that, when you make things sound harder than they are then it just is — it can be discouraging like oh, he works so hard and he’s just came with $3,000. Well, he worked hard and he didn’t. I mean, it might have been just the idea. So I often see that people succeed and like don’t do this. It’s super hard and, oh, wa, wa. I don’t know if it’s that hard and I don’t know if you kind of take that much time.
[33:34] Sometimes if you have a better idea than other ideas, or an idea that is just sort of the moment people were more interested in or it’s gonna be more viral, people were willing to pay for. Don’t worry about it being so hard. In fact, the point that you’re bringing up, Mike, is just get something up quickly because there’s nothing that’s gonna give you more momentum quicker than having somebody write you — actually make a payment.
[33:55] So if can get something up after 2 or 3 months instead of quick and even if you get like 50 bucks in for a month or 30 bucks, it’s actually — you could feel pretty good and then I’ll get you to the next point we’re making $150 a month and then $300 and then you’re off to the races. So the sooner that you can get it up and get someone paying you, the better.
[34:12] Justin: Well, what I think has the been most important thing that’s happened in the last two years with Pluggio was very, very close to the launch time. So it really is about the early stage of the development of your business. And this doesn’t necessarily apply to every kind of business but I think that for a business where people are using your product, your SAS product a lot, this is very important. And that is getting to a stage where you have between 3 and 5 people who are like early adopters and it just takes like 3 people who just really loved the promise and the hope of what you’re doing. And they are e-mailing with you every day and basically you have this repetitive cycle where you build the features that they request. And you’re just working with just that tiny core group of people building the seed, grabbing it. That has been the most important thing I think for Pluggio.
[34:57] Rob: That’s cool. Sounds like customer development except that it’s not in person. You’re basically getting your control group together and just getting all the feedback from them.
[35:06] Justin: Well, because they’re passionate about it. They’re trying to build this thing. They got problems they want to get solved. And the chances are that if it’s gonna work for these 3 or 5 people and you’re solving problems for that tiny little group and they’re thinking, oh, well, I’ve got this person who’s building me custom software to solve my problems, then it’s gonna help you because it’s gonna work for a lot more people if they can work for even a handful of people.
[35:27] Rob: Right.
[35:28] Jason: And I got something to add to that actually. So you can actually get to that sooner. So when you have a product, great, you get this early adopters and strike conversation with them. But if you talk about your idea as you’re working on it and I don’t care if you’re talking about on Twitter or on your blog or Facebook or Google Plus, or whatever, then you can start getting some feedback from people because if — you don’t even have to ask for it outright.
[35:52] When you talk about something that’s of interest to other people, they’re going to respond and they’re gonna say, hey, that sounds kind of cool. And people don’t like to talk with their ideas ’cause they are so worried that people are going — that someone’s gonna steal it. But no one’s gonna steal your stupid idea because at this stage it’s just an idea and it hasn’t been proven that it’s gonna make any money. And if it’s already been proven so — but if you’re going after a space where there’s already people doing it, then there’s nothing to steal, right?
[36:16] If you’re gonna steal something, they’re probably gonna try and steal an idea or whether they’re gonna compete with an idea that’s already demonstrated that’s making money, you’re idea hasn’t demonstrated anything. So don’t worry about people stealing your idea. Start talking about it and then you can feed off the enthusiasm that you get back from people saying, hey, I can’t wait to do that. Sounds really cool. Let me know when it’s available, that kind of stuff. But on the other side, if nobody, if it’s crickets — like if you talk about it in your blog and nobody seems to care about it, then that might be an indication that maybe we’re kind of on our own thing.
[36:45] Rob: All right. I think another piece to that is that if you have an idea that’s so easy to steal, that someone could go out and build it and beat you to market then when you launched, you’re gonna launch and they’re gonna build it in two months and they’re gonna eat your launch anyway, right? It’s not really about the technology, it’s about — if they can steal your idea and out market you, then they’re gonna out market you now or in 6 months. Would you rather build it or not?
[37:12] Justin: There’s been a lot of times when people have said, well, I don’t want to tell you my idea. I don’t want to tell you my idea. And then — because it’s like you need to sign some kind of idea or whatever and then they ended up telling me that “their” idea and I just don’t understand it. It’s like, what the hell are you talking about? Like most of the time even when you have an idea or it’s probably not even well formed enough that people actually get it.
[37:33] Mike: Oh, yeah. I remember explaining AuditShark to you at MicroConf and it took a while before you understood what it actually was and what it did.
[37:41] Rob: It takes a while for —
[37:42] Justin: Because you missed out like the key piece of information about AuditShark. I think that — I know I still haven’t heard you say it which is that you actually have actual software that gets installed on each person’s machine and that’s the kind of key component that makes it just work really easy for them. They just install the software and then they don’t need to do anything else from that point forward. Just click a button, the software takes care of everything else.
[38:02] Mike: It’s actually the opposite. They install the software, one machine and they don’t have to install all the others but they still get the information from them.
[38:09] Justin: Right. But the longer the shorter is they don’t have to do anything. They just — it just works from that point forward and it’s like — it collects all their information and saves them an awful lot of hassle and boredom.
[38:20] Mike: Yup.
[38:21] Jason: But in terms of stealing idea, a good example is that the project that Justin and I are working on. We talked about the idea that we’re working on now, AnyFu, a year and a half ago. And not only that we talked about the idea that we thought it could work. We’re saying someone should go do this ’cause we’re working on our own. I was working on AppIgnite and he’s working on Pluggio and a year goes by nobody is doing it, right?
[38:42] Justin: But not only that but we’re talking to an audience of between 1,000 and 1,500 entrepreneurs.
[38:47] Rob: If anyone’s gonna take it, it’ll be them, right?
[38:49] Justin: Right.
[38:50] Mike: Well, but the thing is, those people are also your audience and I think that if they were to do that, and if they were trying to take it “from underneath you”, there’s a certain amount of loyalty that your listeners are gonna have and they’re not gonna want to do that too.
[39:03] Jason: No, no, we actually — we’re telling them that somebody should do this idea. We’re not gonna do it. Somebody should do it.
[39:09] Justin: We wanted it to exist.
[39:12] Rob: If people are curious if you’re listening and you don’t know what AnyFu is, you can go AnyFu.com.
[39:19] Mike: I wanna know, is that intentional?
[39:21] Justin: No, no. AnyFu, you know, Kung Fu, so Fu is — one interpretation is it’s an expertise. So basically any expertise dot com except it’s AnyFu.com.
[39:31] Rob: Right. So it’s just in time expertise. It’s kind of like a high level, hourly Elance or oDesk. So on their landing page, let’s say if Elance and oDesk are the 99 cents store, AnyFu is gonna be like a Tiffany & Co. So it’s high level experts. People who have published, are speakers, who are just super knowledgeable and as far as I know, you guys are gonna limit the number of folks who can be on any given expertise. So if you have a Ruby on Rails or a NodeJS or Backbone or whatever, it’s like the best of best.
[40:01] Justin: It’s people like you, Rob, but not Mike. Like you’re so offended.
[40:06] Jason: We outlined what we thought was a good idea why it would work, why we had paid people for something similar on our own and just by like we needed experts, we want hundreds of dollars web, went through all the problem of trying to communicate them from e-mail and hire them and all that kind of stuff but even though we outlined the business case and how the technology worked, it was still like, okay, so that might work, right? There’s still no proof that would be a business. And that’s why nobody would steal it, right? You can go on the web and you could look at any number of these little startups that are popped at Y Combinator or the other incubators. They’re making money. It’s a good idea. I’ll go compete with them.
[40:42] Mike: The problem with AnyFu I think though is that whoever puts it together is left with this problem where you have to bring two sides together and without one the other one is kind of useless.
[40:55] Jason: Right. It’s the market place problem, right, which is so —
[40:56] Justin: Yeah. And something else is — and I’ll just add to this discussion here is that when we first spoke about this idea, this goes to show you essentially it’s about execution rather than the idea. Because I don’t think that AnyFu would be as successful as I think it’s gonna be if we haven’t spent a year thinking about it, talking about it because it is not. By the time we’ve worked it all out and basically the product that we’re creating, I can pretty much guarantee you it is not put together in the way that you expect it to be put together. It’s completely different to what I had imagined it.
[41:27] Rob: But you know, something that I think listeners should take away from this is every time I’ve seen you guys whether it’s been one on one or at MicroConf, you guys are talking about the idea, you’re asking people questions and you’re listening to the feedback. Both of you guys, last time I was down in LA, we met for a couple of hours each and you guys have really pointed questions, very specific and were genuinely interested, you weren’t just talking about it to blah, blah, blah, here’s an idea. It was like, we’re working on this part, what do you think? Do you think people would use this? Would you use it? How are we gonna get around this problem?
[42:02] And it was like, you really have spent a lot of upfront time developing this idea and being very open about it and public and as a result you have the — maybe the best opinions from the 50 people you talked about whether it’s me or the group of people you were — you had a whole dinner table at MicroConf and you guys were all chatting about it, and they’re all giving you feedback and I know you change the idea because of these things.
[42:26] Jason: Oh, yeah. That was like a 2-hour, that was a 2-hour brainstorming session with I don’t know, 8 to 10 successful tech entrepreneurs. These are all people who would be potential clients and also potential experts and we went through and you sat down, Rob, for a while and we went through a number of like business models and how to make it work and we iterated through about 3 or 4 different versions of it until we hit on what was gonna work because every time someone says well, do you charge an expert to be on the side, and we’re like, no, that’s gonna make sense for this and this reason that a couple of people would throw out and then we’d go to another version and say that’s not gonna scale for this. I mean, like we iterate it so fast because it wasn’t just Justin and I talking. It was a group of 10 people for like 2 hours.
[43:07] Rob: Yeah, and that’s invaluable, right? If you’re sitting in your basement or even the two of you talking on the podcast, the idea would never have evolved that quickly or maybe never would have evolved to that point at all without getting the feedback.
[43:20] Jason: Right. Right, I agree. Absolutely.
[43:23] Mike: We definitely talked about your ideas.
[43:25] Rob: Yeah, man. I think that’s tech way right? Figure out a list of questions. Actually, at BOS last week, I had a list of questions and you know who’s good at this? It’s Harry Hollander and Ted Pitts. They are founders of Moraware software. Every time I go to a conference with them, they come and — they’re always at the beginning to say, yes, well, I have these two questions I’m asking everyone. We’re trying to figure out the, you know, this year it was like they’re trying to hire someone and figure out what the other one was. But that was their goal. It was to get that question “answered” by as many people as possible. And I think that’s a really kind of a cool way to do it.
[43:55] Mike: You know what Ted’s question for me was, why haven’t you launched AuditShark yet.
[43:59] Rob: Yeah, I know.
[44:00] Jason: Well, it’s funny bringing up Ted and Harry because they were at that table with us and I think Ted had a couple of very important points in that conversation and they’ve built successful business themselves so they had some great advise for us and then both of them were saying listen, whatever revenue model you have you got to make sure it scales with the usage because if the first is withdrawing out, it just weren’t gonna scale.
[44:22] Rob: It was like flat fees, right?
[44:24] Jason: Flat fees. It’s like give us a flat fee. You’re gonna charge that and you’re gonna be very sad. I’m saying that craziest — you’re gonna be sad.
[44:30] Rob: You’re gonna make your experts a lot of money and you will get $10 or whatever.
[44:35] Jason: Exactly.
[44:35] [music]
[44:38] Rob: We have three more points that Mike had planned that we answer but frankly we have to have you guys back on.
[44:45] Jason: I’d love to be — I’d love to do it.
[44:47] Rob: That’s the take away here is that we all have a lot to say and we have a lot of experience and stuff. So hopefully folks enjoy the episode and we can either finish up this topic sometime in the future or just choose another potential random one and go at it.
[45:02] Mike: Absolutely.
[45:02] Rob: I had a lot of fun. This is cool.
[45:04] Jason: Same here. It was great. Thanks for having us on.
[45:07] Justin: It’s really, really fun to be on the show.
[45:09] Rob: And if you’re a listener of this podcast and you haven’t checked out TechZing you definitely should. The URL is techzinglive.com. And of course, if you’re on iTunes in search for TechZing you can find both of these guys. And then guys, I know you both have — you both have blogs. You also both have products so each throughout one website, one URL where someone could get in touch with you or where you prefer that they’d go and checks out about you.
[45:34] Justin: Justinvincent.com. That’s my blog.
[45:37] Jason: Yeah, and for me would be codusoperandi.com.
[45:41] Mike: Interestingly enough if you also searched for Startups for the Rest of Us in iTunes, their podcast comes up. So with that if you have a question or comment, you can call it in to our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690. Or, you can e-mail in an mp3 or text format to Questions@StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under creative comments. If you enjoyed this podcast please consider writing a review in iTunes by searching for startups. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. A full transcript to this podcast will be available at our website StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 56 | Updates on AuditShark and HitTail
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 56.
[00:03] [music]
[00:11] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on, Rob?
[00:24] Rob: I am excited to be back recording again, knowing that we’re actually gonna publish this thing in a week or two. We got so far ahead of ourselves that I’ve had all the stuff to say. There’s been this big agenda building up whether it’s updates for my products or just people, you know, asking us questions on Twitter that they wanted to address on the podcast that I now have this huge bulleted list of stuff and so — I mean, it’s almost been — aside from the business software episode, we haven’t recorded in almost two months.
[00:51] Mike: Mm-hmm.
[00:52] Rob: Mm-hmm. That’s all he can give me.
[00:55] Mike: That’s the only response I could come up with. I’m on short notice here. Mm-hmm.
[00:58] Rob: Nice. I did notice that in our outline, I think I have like 17 bullets, and yours is none.
[01:05] Mike: Yes, well, you know, I lost power this past weekend so, you know, pretty much everything my world has come to a crash and halt. I just got power back yesterday. So it kind of sucked.
[01:18] Rob: Well, like for four days?
[01:19] Mike: Yeah.
[01:20] Rob: That’s brutal, man. I’ve actually have this neck problem, shoulder problem that has kept my productivity severely hampered for almost a month. I really haven’t posted in my blog. I’m having trouble just typing at all. And I’ve been to the chiropractor and, you know, it’s a neck thing ultimately but it’s kind of jacking up my shoulder, the muscles there. And so as of yesterday, I now have a standing desk.
[01:44] Mike: Really.
[01:45] Rob: Yeah. And this is on the recommendation of a chiropractor and, you know, it’s this big movement right now, right, in the tech world. My dad worked in construction and the construction tailors they always have drafting tables which were standing. And he said, yeah, it just keeps you from sitting down all the time which really is not good for us.
[02:02] So I was entertaining the idea of buying a full standing desk. There’s an expensive one but what I’ve heard is one of the best at geekdesk.com and I kept panning back and forth. It’s like 800 bucks plus shipping which wasn’t the end of the world but I have a really nice desk at home that I already like and I don’t really have room for another desk.
[02:20] So instead on the recommendation of a friend, I got ergotron.com. If you go there, it’s just a workstation which is like this big piece of metal that like clamps on the front of the desk and you can mount a monitor and a laptop and a keyboard and a mouse. So I have basically a two-monitor set up going ’cause my laptop is one of them. You can just push it and it goes up or you drop it down and you can sit when you want to.
[02:46] Of course, my legs are sore from standing, you know, last couple of days. But this one was only, gosh, I think it was about 385 bucks. I actually got it on Amazon with prime shipping overnight for 4 bucks. Yeah.
[02:58] Mike: I love that $4 thing.
[03:00] Rob: You know, when I’m buying like low and stuff, it doesn’t make sense but, man, you spent 400 bucks and this thing was a ton. So it’s like 4 bucks for overnight totally. It’s an interesting experiment. Everyone who I’ve talked to who’s done standing desks just swears by them now. You know, they love them and you don’t stand all the time, right? You can go up and down depending on when your legs get tired and stuff. But it just helps to change positions and still be able to work. It is a trip to — I mean, like writing code and writing blog post standing up is very weird.
[03:29] Mike: Yeah. I don’t think I could do that. And I think that’s more because I kind of have the opposite issue where if I’m standing for too long then I have problems and you seem like you’re the other end of the spectrum where if you’re not standing, you have problems.
[03:41] Rob: And that’s weird. Remember I was calling you Darth Vader — this is a suffer ’cause you have the “them” thing. It was like a box that was stimulating your nerves so that —
[03:50] Mike: Oh, yeah. It’s called the TENS unit. If you have muscle problems, you can get a TENS unit. And what a TENS unit does is you put these little pads on either side of the muscle that’s giving you problems. If I remember correctly, my understanding is that it sends electrical signals through the pads and essentially interrupts the pain signals that go to your brain.
[04:08] I mean, don’t get me wrong, it can hurt in that area if you jack it up too high. I only put it on 30% power and if I go to 32 or 33, it really starts to hurt. I’ve talked to people who’ve said, oh, yeah, I put mine in 100. I’m like, I don’t know how you do that.
[04:25] Rob: Yeah, that’s crazy.
[04:26] [music]
[04:29] Rob: Basically, this is the first episode of what we’re gonna call our update episodes where the content is not our typical actionable, instructional stuff. It’s more about updating on the status of our products, what we’ve been working on. We’ve gotten feedback from several people who said they wanted to hear more of that. And since we’ve only been releasing every other week basically every other week, we’ll be on normal format. And then every other week in between, we’ll be kind of an update format that could be shorter. They could be 10 or 15 minutes if we don’t have a lot to update on. Or, frankly they could be a full length if, you know, we just have a lot going on.
[05:03] And I’m sure it’ll lead us down interesting paths. I think there’ll be minimal outlines, so it’ll be a more fluid conversation and it’ll be a lot more focused on what we’ve been working on probably with AuditShark and HitTail and potentially, you know, stiffer blogging about or something like that.
[05:18] This is the first one. So if you’re listening to this and you think, well, I wanted some actionable stuff to play to my app, I don’t know. You can wait around but I wouldn’t guarantee it in an episode like this. We do have, gosh, I think I seriously have like 8 or 10 bullet points here in this outline now that are pretty interesting so stick around.
[05:33] [music]
[05:36] Rob: I listen back to our part one and part two of how we left our jobs and I realized that several times in my story I kept saying I’m risk-averse. And I’ve realized that I might have overstated that, that I’ve kind of realized over the years that I don’t like taking big risks but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I’m not actually risk-averse, I just never wanted to bet so much that it would ruin me since some entrepreneurs do that and I guess since some do and I don’t, I’ve been saying kind of in my own head like, yeah, I’m risk-averse ’cause I’m not willing to basically go bankrupt or to go 100 grand in debt to launch my app.
[06:09] And I guess I just wanted to kind of clarify that. It’s not that I don’t take risks, I definitely would — you know, I’ve risked frankly years of nights and weekends working on stuff. I mean, that’s a risk on to itself and I have risked big chunks of money but it’s money that I essentially can afford to lose. That if I lose it, I don’t lose the house. It’s money that I’ve built up for this kind of purpose.
[06:28] And I think one thing that made me realized it and I was listening to Richard Branson’s book called Business Stripped Bare. I mean, it’s decent. You know, not much applicable for me but one of the points in it, he says that he cashed it — he doesn’t use the term risk-averse but he basically said that he would never bet more than he could afford to lose even with his company.
[06:45] Like his record company was making $10 million a year and he was gonna make this big leap and start like producing artists but he couldn’t bet the company on it and so he had to take it slower and in essence he was kind of saying, yeah, I was risk-averse in the sense that I never wanted a loss to ruin me. And he talks about launching Virgin Air as well doing the same thing. But I’ve been kind mulling that over the last few weeks.
[07:09] Mike: That’s interesting. I hadn’t read that book so I didn’t know how to back up behind it. But I mean it makes sense. I mean, if you have spent all this time and effort building up a business. I mean, you don’t want to risk it all on something that could very well be a pipe dream. It’s not to say that you haven’t done your research or anything behind it but you don’t wanna put all of your eggs in that basket and then have somebody dumped it on you. I mean, there are things that can happen that are completely beyond your control.
[07:36] And even though you may think that you got all your ducks on a row, there are things that just come out of left field and there’s nothing you can do about them. There’s no way you could have foreseen them or change them. You know, like for example, me losing power this weekend. I figured I might lose power but I didn’t realize the extent of it. There’s things you just can’t necessarily plan completely for.
[07:54] Rob: Yeah, and that’s a good point. I think even experienced entrepreneurs, it’s like the more experience you get, the more you —
[08:00] Mike: The more afraid you are.
[08:01] Rob: Yeah. Because you realized that no matter how good you are at the stuff at launching companies, building products, whatever it is, your success rate is still 50-50. You know, if you get really good, are you one in three, one in two? I mean, I think Branson would say that like he launched — I’m trying to think what their failures were. I think maybe Virgin Cola was a failure and I think they have a couple of others. And he’s really damned good at it. And same thing with you and I, we talked about our failures all the time. Even after you’ve had your first success, you don’t necessarily have the string of successes then. I mean, some of them still fail even though you know “know what you’re doing at that point.”
[08:35] Mike: Well, that’s what — honestly, that’s what bugs me about these people who are out there and like, oh, you don’t learn anything from your failures and we don’t make mistakes and it’s like, well, you know, that’s a lot of crap. I mean, everybody makes mistakes and everybody goes through those times where you try something out and it either completely bombs or just does not work out the way that you thought it would and you have to adjust on the fly in order to make things work.
[08:57] And there are times when as I said something comes out of the left field and there’s just no way you’re gonna be able to make it work so you have to be able to — and I hate this word — where you have to pivot to be able to do something else and make things go your way or even just abandon that path completely ’cause you can’t always make it work.
[09:14] Rob: Right.
[09:15] [music]
[09:17] Rob: We got a cool shoutout from english.stackexchange.com. I’m sure everyone’s listening to this podcast knows what Stack Exchange is. Well, it is a network of question and answer sites. And so the English One is English language and usage. And someone asked, well, could the link in the show — but basically someone asked the question, “What does the phrase for the rest of us mean?”
[09:40] I’m coming across this one a lot recently. I Googled to find its meaning but with no luck. For example, from Startups for the Rest of Us and it links over to our website. He has a phrase — it’s our intro, right? Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products. I just thought that was cool. Then there’s, yeah, there’s a question and good answer. “For the rest of us” in the context of the above webpages indicates that the author has found other resources explaining what they’re explaining. It can also mean in layman’s term, for the common man, for the average Joe, that kind of stuff.
[10:10] So I thought that was a pretty — not only interesting that, you know, it came upon Google obviously. So it’s kind of neat to see it on the Stack Exchange site but like for the rest of us, I guess I’d always thought that that’s what it meant, right? It’s like for those of us who aren’t doing the mainstream VC funded thing that everyone kind of talks about in the media, right? And what the media talks about it and then we’re doing it for the rest of us, the rest of us who can’t move to Silicon Valley, raise a bunch of funding, you know, work long hours for lower salaries and hopes of stock options panning out.
[10:40] Mike: That’s exactly what I was — I kind of intended by it. I mean, I remember getting the domain name a long time ago and I remember thinking at the time, I’m not quite sure what I’ll use this for but then I just kind of threw it out there and say, hey, what about we use this for the podcast because I had it laying around and I’m like, I wasn’t quite sure what I was gonna do with it. I was thinking of actually using it for a blog or something like that but it really kind of fit in with the podcast.
[11:05] Rob: Yeah, totally. Speaking of the podcast, you and I were just talking the podcast is now pumping 500 gigs of bandwidth per month so that’s half a terabyte for those who’re calculating. That’s just all episodes, you know, whether we have 56 every episode downloaded on October was amounted to about half a terabyte. And if we averaged 35 Megs per episode which is probably a decent average, that’s about 15,000 episodes downloads last month so that’s cool. We’re also up to 49 ratings in iTunes and we really wanna thank people for that.
[11:37] Mike: 59.
[11:38] Rob: Yup, 59. It helps tremendously, you know, to grow our audience as well just give us motivation to keep doing the podcast. We also got several new reviews. We wanna thank James Montgomery, Fast Alana, KCDStine and Chris Yo for commenting in October. Oh, here’s a cool one. Look it actually mentions —
[11:56] Mike: And D112345, don’t forget him.
[12:01] Rob: Are you making that up?
[12:02] Mike: No, I’m serious.
[12:03] Rob: All right.
[12:04] Mike: October 4th.
[12:05] Rob: One guy, actually James Montgomery says, “I’m still on the Hamster wheel but these guys are helping me map my way to the escape hatch. Keep up the great work.” So that’s cool. I won’t read all of them but there’s some actually really complimentary reviews and we wanna thank folks for doing that.
[12:19] Mike: You mentioned earlier the question about the previous podcast. I actually — if you go to StartupsfortheRestofUs.com and you look at the episode 54 and look at the comments in there, I just got absolutely slammed on my —
[12:33] Rob: Oh, you did.
[12:34] Mike: — my consideration of offering phone support for AuditShark at some point in limited phone support ’cause obviously I said I’ve been toiling with the idea of offering phone support only on a couple of days or joining certain hours kind of like office hours. And we actually got a couple of people who called — two different people who called in within hours of when the podcast went live, wasn’t it? It’s like two calls and then three or four comments, you know, right away.
[12:58] Rob: People are all over it, yeah. This was our most contingent issue ever I think.
[13:04] Mike: Yeah, which is kind of bizarre I think. I think people got the wrong impression about what AuditShark is really meant for because people were really saying you can’t offer no phone support for an enterprise level product and AuditShark is not an enterprise level product. It’s basically the idea of taking an enterprise product and repositioning it for the small business.
[13:24] I have absolutely no intentions of selling it into the enterprise. It’s just not meant for that. Could I do it? I probably could but I have no intentions of going that route because there are other products that are positioned there. So what better way to take an existing product or an idea and grow it than to build something that does kind of the same thing and then just simply reposition it for the small business? I mean, there’s lots of products out there that have done that sort of thing.
[13:50] Rob: Yeah. I actually, you know, when I was at BOS, I was talking — I was sitting next Ruben Gomez of Bidsketch and he actually mentioned it at one point during one of the talks, one of the speakers brought up. Bringing an enterprise product essentially down to the masses, the smaller and medium size businesses is a great strategy if you can pull it off. And Ruben turned to me and he said, that’s a pretty good market opportunity to just look at what enterprise products are out there now that there is not essentially, you know, a SAS version like that $99 a month version of that and could you pull it off as a $49.99, $1.99 version.
[14:26] Mike: Or even just an equivalent in the small business. I mean, if you look at — I’ll use backup software because lots of people will go out and look for backup software for the enterprise and there’s these massive solutions that, you know, they’re designed to handle terabytes of information and be able to back them up on a daily basis. And if you run them — if you just run them, the numbers, the mathematics on, okay, well, how much data can you pump over a gigabyte connection, you know, per hour.
[14:51] It turns out that it’s actually kind of a difficult problem to solve once you start scaling but if you turn that into a SAS product and you target it at smaller businesses and say, look, I can give you, you know, backups or remote backups online for fraction of the cost because some of those products, they cost like $1,000 per server that you wanna backup which is absurd but these enterprise level companies will charge that because they can get away with it. You know, if Ruben kind of have that idea that’s definitely a great strategy. I mean, that’s kind of what I did with AuditShark and you can definitely apply it to a lot of other businesses.
[15:27] Rob: Yeah, and I think to get back to the like the listener comments, they were thinking you’re going after enterprise but I would still contend that you figuring after banks because you’re talking about going after small banks, right, to start with. I would say that having no phones support is gonna be better than like 4 or 5 hours a week than essentially having office hour phone support. My guess is they’re gonna look at office hour phone support as being a detriment, kind of like, oh, this guy is a small company. He can’t pull off a full phone support, you know so he’s doing this halfway. The more I thought about if after like really listening to the episode, the more I kind of wanted to express at.
[16:04] Mike: I forget why I even got the idea from it but I remember since then I was on the GinzaMetrics website and they actually have a pricing plan for I think it’s their highest level plan and as part of the support package, it says the founder’s cellphone number or something like that.
[16:21] Rob: Yup, it’s like the CEO cell number. Yeah, I think that’s a great thing. I’ve toyed with putting that in HitTail’s thing but I didn’t — but yeah I think that’s really cool. Yeah, it’s an expensive plan, you know. I think it’s several hundred bucks a month for that one.
[16:33] Mike: Oh, it’s like $2,000 a month or something like that.
[16:34] Rob: Oh, is it?
[16:35] Mike: Yeah. It was not cheap at all. Mine’s priced a little differently where that is based on levels whereas mine is based on per number of computers you have so I suppose I could just say if you’re the largest customer, you get my cellphone number but it’s not like I can take somebody’s cellphone number back, you know.
[16:51] Rob: But you could offer premium support too. You can offer premium support and you could do it with the Google voice number so they don’t get your actual number. And then if they call and they don’t have premium support obviously you can filter them out or whatever.
[17:03] Mike: Yeah. I think right you’re there. Just go on without a phone number of any kind. It’s probably the better way to go.
[17:07] Rob: You’re gonna be better off at least until, you know, they start saying why don’t you have phone support. We won’t buy if you don’t have phone support. Then obviously think about doing it —
[17:15] Mike: Yeah.
[17:15] Rob: — if you wanted some monetary. But I almost feel like I wanna get into hearing a little more about what’s going on with you on AuditShark. I’m gonna try to stay away from getting too technical ’cause I don’t think that our audience really cares about that stuff, right? I don’t wanna talk about — I’m not gonna talk too much about languages or new libraries or anything I’m using. I’m gonna be talking more about the events that are happening and maybe more marketing and just kind of entrepreneurial topics. I guess nothing’s new in the last week because you’ve been down for 4 days but you know, it’s been —
[17:48] Mike: No, that’s not true. That’s not necessarily true ’cause last week was the business and software conference and that was from Monday to Wednesday. And then Thursday and Friday, I actually got a lot of work done ’cause I didn’t lose power until Saturday.
[18:01] Rob: So then where are you? And let this be a warning to you, I am channeling Ted right now. So you better just — you better just come. You better bring it.
[18:09] Mike: Bring it, okay.
[18:10] Rob: Yup. Why haven’t you launched?
[18:11] Mike: ‘Cause I didn’t have power, that’s why.
[18:13] Rob: That’s why you didn’t launch? You’re not excused. What could you have done to get around not having power?
[18:18] Mike: I could have bought a generator.
[18:19] Rob: Yeah, exact —
[18:20] Mike: Unfortunately, they’re all gone. And you needed — and in order to run your computers off of a generator, you actually need to have — I forget what they’re called but they basically smooth out the power.
[18:30] Rob: Power cleaner and inverter.
[18:31] Mike: Yeah, something like that. I forget what it is.
[18:34] Rob: Anyways, let’s not go down that rabbit hole but well, yes. So what’s going on? How close are you to launching and selling? How close are you to selling to your first customer? That’s actually what I wanna hear.
[18:43] Mike: You know, I could probably be ready to sell to a customer today. I have to go through and make sure that certain things are correct. But between Thursday and Friday, I mean, Ted kind of booted me in the tail and really made me think about what needed to be done and what sort of hurdles I needed to overcome before I could start selling it. And I spend Thursday and Friday addressing those things.
[19:06] So between Thursday and Friday, I finished redoing some of the things on our built server so I can essentially click a few buttons or actually just click one button and it will check out all of my code, recompile it, put in the latest configurations that are for the production system, push everything out to Usher using you know, power shell and then reconfigure all the Usher services so that they are targeted for my particular deployment and then make it live.
[19:35] I mean, I actually had it live for several hours while I was just doing testing and I got all the SSL certificates working as well. That was something else that I had — I knew would probably be — I thought it would be pretty straightforward but it was actually quite a bit more work than I thought it would be just because the web services that I’m using on the back end but I got through that.
[19:54] At this point I could actually probably start selling it. As I’d mentioned to Ted, there’s some things that I don’t have right now which I don’t really need to have in order to get my first customer and there’s one issue that I would need to overcome in order to sign out a second customer but theoretically I could start selling it today.
[20:12] Rob: And so are you gonna make a sales call this week?
[20:15] Mike: I was going to try this week and then some things got in the way in terms of my schedule so I don’t actually have time to try and make a sales call for probably another couple of weeks. But in the meantime, I’ll be able to work on hammering out those last couple of issues. But I can certainly try maybe pet tapping to my e-mail list that I set up a while ago to see if there’s anyone who’s interested in signing on and trying to work through it.
[20:39] Rob: All right. So it sounds like you’re there except for you don’t have time to make sales calls. So that’s interesting then. It’s gonna require obviously to get this thing going since it isn’t just, you know, find me on the internet and buy my $29 product using your credit card while I’m sleeping product. Your first sale actually is gonna hinge on you. It’s gonna be high touch, you’re enough to visit in person and that essentially means you need to have the time to be able to do that in your schedule. Like you need to almost start scheduling that as part of your time.
[21:09] Mike: Sort of, but not necessarily. I’ve been tracking my rankings in Google for various search terms and I’ve actually been doing fairly well. I’m ranked on the first page for I think two or three different search terms. And then on the second page for probably two or three more. And the one would be really, really nice to have is compliance software and I’m finally ranked in Google for it. I’m unfortunately on the 28th page but I’m ranked.
[21:33] Rob: Yeah, yeah. You’ll get there. I mean, that will take 6 to 12 months I would guess even if you’re hitting hard.
[21:38] Mike: Right.
[21:39] Rob: This is just so generic, you know.
[21:40] Mike: Yeah.
[21:41] Rob: But so you can rank in Google for this stuff but I still think you’re not gonna sell $1,000 a month order over the internet. I think you’re gonna have to probably talk to someone on the phone. I mean, jeez, for DotNetInvoice we actually wind up doing at least medium touch sale where people will e-mail us before they’ll buy. Or I’ll have to talk to them on the phone. So I’d imagine that that’s almost gonna have to be a necessity. Do you have that —
[22:02] Mike: I’m not sure we’ll be though because I think DotNetInvoice is a little bit different in that you have to buy it in order for you to actually try and install it in your environment. With mine, you can — I mean, you get a 30-day trial for it and I’m not gonna charge you until after those 30 days are up so you can sign up for an account, you’ll be able to, you know, install that one window service in your environment and then try the software without talking to anybody.
[22:28] Rob: Got it, right. If people are finding your site right now, are they downloading it? Do you have the download available? Is it downloadable and usable or is that the part that’s not —
[22:36] Mike: That’s the part — I haven’t put that stuff live yet.
[22:39] Rob: Got it.
[22:40] Mike: But again, I can only support one customer at the moment because the way certain things are configured, there’s — which there’s nothing I can do about it so I want that for sale to be more of a high touch thing so — but people are coming to my site and they are signing up for the e-mail list.
[22:55] Rob: Okay.
[22:56] Mike: So I’m gonna probably tapped into that e-mail list either later this week or early next week and just put some feelers out there and say, hey, this product is — I don’t wanna say beta ready but I can say it’s basically live and then see who is willing to give it a shot and then work through any issues they have and just kind of do it as a one on one basis for each of them.
[23:16] Rob: Right. Okay.
[23:17] Mike: Just to, you know, one on one e-mail discussions instead of just a blanket, hey, this product is live instead of using MailChimp to actually just send them an e-mail. I’ll just go grab their e-mail address and send them a direct e-mail and said, hey, you know, this product is ready. Just want to let you know and by the way, if you’d like some help, I can walk you through it. And then just see what kind of responses I get.
[23:35] Rob: Right. And then in terms of the high touch with the in-person sale you’re gonna make, you kind of have first sale in mind. Were you looking at what, a week out or two weeks out from that?
[23:43] Mike: Probably at least a week if not two. Probably two weeks, yeah.
[23:47] Rob: So maybe two podcasts from now. That’s the next update podcast. You should either have done it or be ready to do it that week. Okay.
[23:55] [music]
[23:58] Rob: Well, cool. I’m gonna move on to HitTail updates. It’s been a couple of months, right, since we’ve updated. And I have been working a lot on this thing. I’ve been — although I’ve had the shoulder issue where it backed me off for about 3 or 4 weeks, before that I worked for the designer. I get a new marketing site design that I’m very pleased with. And I went high end on this one. Either if it’s really cheap I go with the WordPress theme and then if it’s kind of a mid-range, I have a design for my use offshore and they’re good, not out of this world but they’re very good value for the price. And this one I went way high end with the friend of a friend who, you know, is here in the States and he’s just a fantastic designer but he’s very expensive.
[24:35] But as a result I’m just super happy with the design and then I got the HTML, CSS created. I was gonna go with the recommended contractor but she was booked out almost a month. And so I went with PSD2HTML.com. I don’t know if you’ve used them before but they turned out some really solid stuff. I was very impressed with the work. I actually had the designer look it over just to make sure I looked right and he’s like, wow, these guys did a fantastic job. So that URL is PSD2HTML.com. A lot of people probably heard of them but I never realized it’s just getting so freak and complicated, the CSS stuff you can do now.
[00:25:09] And all the options that they have when, you know, in building the stuff out. I mean, it was like, there’s — it’s like mobile compatibility, IE6 compatibility, you want CSS 2, CSS 3, CSS — it was like 2.2, 2.3, all the stuff. I seriously just placed the order, I had to do research. Like it took me an hour to place this thing in order because I — you know, I really just want some PSDs turned into HTML but there’s so many options, so many ways you can SEO optimized it and then, of course, that takes longer so it’s more expensive to do that. But once I got it back, it is fantastic, very impressed with their markup and I don’t know if I just got a really good guy or what. But it took them about 8 days. They also get some jQuery. I mean, they kind of did what I needed to get done and they did it quickly.
[25:52] So now it’s in the hands of developer who I hired on oDesk and he’s an ASP developer, ASP and ASP.net ’cause that’s what the site is written in. And so he’s now integrating it into the marketing site, and marketing sites couple hundred pages so it’s gonna take him a few weeks to kind of get everything working. And then once I push that live, man, I have this 11-page marketing plan that I’ve put together and I don’t want to execute on it yet besides it already gets a decent trunk of traffic. It already gets, you know, several trials a day. But at this point I don’t want to start pushing traffic to it ’cause the site looks like crap and it’s not gonna convert, the funnel is not optimized, you know. I got — I wanna get that stuff down, so that it’ll not send in traffic into this leaky funnel.
[26:32] Mike: Oh, I have a question about it though. How are you going to verify that your new design is actually not a leaky funnel as well?
[26:39] Rob: I am gonna do a split test on some of the pages. The new design doesn’t look like the old one so it’s kind of hard, you know, it’s kind of hard to just split test because it’s a pretty dramatic difference from one to the other but I know right now I can kind of watch people just drop off and wander off, you know, looking at Analytics. I know that the form, it’s all rules of thumb, right? It’s like the registration farm is like 15 form fields and the pricing is confusing. It’s not well presented. There’s a bunch of different lengths. There’s just so many things that take people out of the — kind of out of the flow. And the new design doesn’t have that but it’s purely based on experience at this point because it hasn’t been tested.
[27:18] So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna role it out, well, first I’m just gonna look at how the conversions go based on — I already have the existing number and just take a peak of what the new numbers are and that’s obviously not a true A/B test because, you know, it’s gonna be different traffic, right? It’s gonna be like the last 3 months versus the next month or whatever. So it’s not the same traffic being split, however, I mean, I really can’t do what I’d like to do which is a page by page split test because it would just jar people too much that I think it would ruin the split test.
[27:48] Mike: Yeah, definitely.
[27:49] Rob: You know, ’cause they look different. So yeah. And then I’m gonna look — I’m gonna do traditional. I’m gonna do it as if it’s a normal site, right? As if it’s a brand new website where you roll it out and you watch it, channel it, you could crazy egg and you, you know, watch people baling, watch the high bounds rates and then really pound when people start a trial, then you actually contact them, you know. You send them an e-mail and say, hey, you’re in the middle of the trial and see you haven’t installed the code if that’s the problem.
[28:15] Mike: Right.
[28:15] Rob: It’s not — that is happening as of last night. So I just got that code live that actually e-mails people during their trial. Otherwise, they would just sign up and they would never hear from us again.
[28:26] Mike: Here’s my chance for a hard hitting question. When are you gonna change the copyright notice from 2008 and 2009 on the footer?
[28:35] Rob: The problem is they have — they do not use includes. So that’s on 250 places so I’m not changing it until the new design goes live. Yeah, no, there’s a bunch of stuff like that. I don’t wanna wrangle on this but it’s just like if I were to architect the site from scratch which I’m able to do now, I would do it totally differently than I did. They have just tons — they have images and CSS files and JavaScript files in the root, right? Just in the root, not in a JS directory.
[29:00] There’s like 7 CSS files just in the root so as a result you have like two, three hundred files in your root and it’s just a big mass. Also, yeah, they didn’t use service that includes or they kind of wrote their own. I’m not sure why did they did but they did it. It’s kind of confusing. I understand it, but it’s not worth explaining. They just didn’t use this traditional include this footer thing. And as a result I can’t go one place; I have to go to 250 places to replace anything in the footer basically. Anyways, I think the — a couple of the big wins that I’ve gotten over the past couple of months is one — trials now actually end after 30 days and they didn’t use to. I have people when I pick this up, there were — have been on trials for like two years.
[29:42] Mike: Have they been using it the whole time?
[29:44] Rob: Yeah. Some of them have, yeah. Yup, and it just — you know, there was no Cron, there was no script running that ended trials after 30 days. In addition, there were no e-mails being sent during the trial. So again, people could just wander off and they did. So now I’m actually looking in the database saying do they have any referrals coming in and then sending the appropriate e-mail based on what they have installed and how many suggestions they have and stuff.
[30:08] So other than that, man, I mean, my hope is that by the next time we talked about this stuff, that I’m close. I don’t think the new marketing site will be up just ’cause there’s so much to do. Well, you know, I know it won’t be up because I’m not gonna roll it before I can redesign the app because the app is so — again, it’d be jarring to be cruising to this marketing site and then go to the old app design. So the app is being redesigned right now. I just got the final kind of one page design today and now we’re gonna start on the other page. So I do think it’ll be about a month until this is all done but once it’s done I’m gonna turn on the faucet and try to get traffic.
[30:45] Mike: I’ll make sure I bet on you and make you commit to that month then.
[30:48] Rob: Yeah, yeah.
[30:49] [music]
[30:52] Rob: I think we’re about at time, Mike, for this episode. We saw up several kinds of shoutouts and some questions and other stuff to talk about but certainly we can cover them in the next episode.
[31:03] Mike: Yeah, definitely.
[31:04] Rob: If you have a question or comment for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can e-mail it to us at Questions@StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under creative comments. Please consider writing a review in iTunes by searching for startups and then you can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS, StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. A full transcript is available at our website StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 55 | Business of Software 2011
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: Coming to you live from Boston at the Business of Software 2011 conference, this is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 55.
[00:08] music
[00:16] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:25] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:26] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences and help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What is the word this week, Mike?
[00:32] Mike: It’s really strange looking at you from across the room and recording.
[00:36] Rob: Yeah. So Mike and I normally record across the country. We’re finally in the same room and we have microphone issues that when I talk it echoes. So Mike and I are sitting across this huge room from each other to try to avoid it. Aside from that, we are here in — we’re in Boston and we just wrapped up Business of Software 2011. It’s a two and a half day conference for what the founders call “real software companies” not like Startups that are just trying to do crazy stuff but it’s typically companies that are little further along in the process.
[01:04] I mean, we did this last year and had, you know, got a lot of positive feedback and had good fun doing it. So we kind of want to bring up some highlights that we had here in terms of the talks as well as share experiences of really great — the whole conversation of which, I think yours was the most valuable thing for me. So to start off, what’s your impression, Mike? You’ve now been to two Business of Software conferences, what are your thoughts?
[01:26] Mike: I really like the conference. The speakers and stuff are obviously — Business of Software is a somewhat expensive conference but the speakers for the most part were top notched. I mean, I really liked hearing their views and opinions on different things and obviously, you know, you get the range of speakers and you get more from some than others. And I think that the two that kind of pop out in my head is being the ones that were my favorites to listen to were Clayton Christensen and Jason Cohen. And Clayton Christensen talked about —
[01:56] Rob: What — to take a quick step back, Clayton Christensen is the author of the Innovator’s Dilemma —
[02:01] Mike: Right.
[02:01] Rob: — which a lot of people probably heard of and I think he’s written five other books and he’s a professor at Harvard. So yeah, go on.
[02:07] Mike: So he talked about building disruptive technologies and being able to identify those things that are going to come into a market and take the incumbents and basically push them out because they are building completely innovative technologies that are just completely disruptive to the existing incumbents. And it really struck a chord with me ’cause that’s what I’m doing with AuditShark to be perfectly honest.
[02:33] I mean, I’m coming into an existing formally entrenched market where enterprise sales is really where it’s at and the only place that you that you can get these, the types of offer that I’m building it is from an enterprise corporation and they have a very specific way of presenting their software and the way of selling it and nobody else is doing it. And that’s kind of what I’m doing is just being disruptive to their business model and it has really just struck a chord with me.
[02:58] He gave a lot of examples and the two that kind of stuck out was one was vacuum, two, it was some transistors and how there was a transition from vacuum tubes to transistors and, you know, obviously a different voltage level but they were just a lot smaller. And then for Digital Equipment Corporation where they rose a promise through great management but they fell through the same management. People looked at that as an example and say, well, how could that have possibly happen. And it wasn’t so much the management as it was that there was a new disruptive technology that was coming into the world which was, you know, personal computers where DEC usually made money from mainframes.
[03:33] And although they saw it coming, there was really nothing they could do about it because their hands were kind of tied. They couldn’t really destroy their existing business model without going into that business but at the same time by choosing to do nothing they killed themselves anyway. It was interesting to see that the incumbents in a business where there’s a disruptive technology, there’s nothing that they can do about it. There’s no good way for them to fight the fight.
[03:56] Rob: Right. Well, I would — where the story is about IBM and how they did it twice. How they went from mainframes to microcomputers and the way they did it, well, they basically started an entire separate business unit that almost acted like its own company. They located it like several states away and they have no contact with the old guys and so they were able to behave with autonomy. They moved to make computers and then years later, they moved to what — to PCs and they were the only — he said they were like 9 mainframe manufacturers and IBM is the only one that made it to microcomputers, all the 8 others died. And then — or mini-computers I think. And then there were 9 minicomputers and only one made it to PCs and it was IBM. And they did the same thing both times which is really a fascinating approach when you think about it.
[04:40] Mike: Well, I thought it was more fascinating that he was able to show this is what happens if you can’t do it and this is what happens if you can. He had solid examples to back up the analysis and hypothesis behind why that stuff happens.
[04:54] Rob: Yeah. So I’m really interested — like I said, he’s written several books and I read Innovator’s Dilemma probably 10 years ago and I don’t remember much of it so I’m making it a point to get at least one of his books and maybe turned them on audio and I’m gonna be listening to them in the coming weeks.
[05:10] Now, the stuff he talks about doesn’t particularly apply to me because I’m not — I don’t intend to disrupt large markets. It’s like all the examples he used are like IBM. I mean, they’re billion-dollar companies. So I’m like I can’t think of any true application to my businesses right now. He’s still a super smart guy. His talk was awesome. I know that his books are gonna be good. So yeah, I’m putting them on my list. I think maybe, well, for entertainment for me than the actual business changes but I think for you, I think you’re right since AuditShark is more of a disruptive force. Yeah, basically, the whole time he kept saying, this stock is to help people who want to kill a big competitor or what to not be killed by a small competitor. And you obviously are the small competitor. So that’s cool. Yeah, you also mentioned Jason Cohen’s stock, right?
[05:55] Mike: Yeah. That one definitely rang home as well because his entire talk was about you really need to be honest in your business and he talked a lot about how honesty makes money. And if you look at business in general, the lying is expected in the business, it’s expected when you’re making deals, when you’re doing sales. And, you know, he showed some examples of some various things where it just was very obvious that those things were lies like the Republic of Cuba and the People’s Republic of China. And when you look at these labels that people have slapped on and you go, ha, ha, ha, that’s funny ’cause you know that it’s just completely not true but it’s so commonplace in many areas that people just glossed over it. And it’s common knowledge that honesty is supposed to win but people don’t do it.
[06:41] He came up with several examples of how it was amazing that by being honest about who you are, what you do, that people respond to that and they will actually cut you slack for not being as bigger, not being able to respond as well to different situation and obviously he used all these examples. I think pretty much everybody use all these as an example for different things. It was just really great to see that sort of thing. It got me thinking about what I’m doing and saying, well, do I really need to act like a larger company here. Do I need to, you know, say, oh, well, I have multiple employees when I really don’t. It just rang home to say, well, you know what, I can just say flat out I don’t have any employees. I don’t, you know, have any sales support staff or I don’t offer these things and here’s why. And I think that he’s right. He’s absolutely right. People will respond to that and people will cut you slack for it. So he just kind brought those things to mind and said, you know what, I think I’m actually gonna do it.
[07:36] Rob: Yeah. Here’s what I like about Jason’s stock. He basically had one premise. And it was to be honest. And he was trying to show how companies who have been honest, meaning, that they actually don’t edit reviews of the products that they’ll let — there’ll be negative reviews even on their own website, that they succeed and that sales increase and that by — even allowing maybe reviews from people. That means you won’t have as many returns because when people buy something, if they write a review of it that it says, oh, this thing is good but, you know, this one part doesn’t work. But if you then buy it, then you already know that that one part doesn’t work.
[08:10] So he basically had some data and some anecdotes and was supporting basically a single thesis and I really appreciated that. In addition, I took away like you did a couple of points. I think one is that I’m gonna try on at least one marketing site for my products to point out what my product does not do. He said like going into sales call. If you say, look, my product doesn’t do this, it gains credibility. And right away you can then say but it does do this and it’s very believable because the press will know if he’s telling the truth. And what’s funny is after that, I went and did — I put on a workshop on copywriting and I had a landing page for my book before I publish the book. And the tagline for the thing, the main sentence of it was the book for people who don’t have $6 million of funding in their bank account.
[09:00] And I realized that using a negative is actually a great way to niche and to like raise your focus, your product and to say like, we don’t have these features. It’s not for this people. And I totally want to do that. And I actually think about what HitTail — like what can I say that it doesn’t do to show how simple and focused the tool is. So I absolutely took away actual things that I might not be using to modify the marketing website and at least for HitTail and I’m thinking about doing it for that invoice as well. So I’m definitely pushing that one.
[09:28] Mike: Yeah. And I do that actually on the AuditShark website where I say that it’s a client software for small business which in a way it implies is that it is not for the enterprise space and I don’t think that I’d ever really put those thoughts into words or analyze those things the way that he did and the way he illustrated it in the stock. So I appreciated it too. I thought it was a great way to put it.
[09:50] Rob: We’re not gonna go through all the talks, obviously, there were too many to fit into the show. But there was, let’s see Alex Osterwalder who has written a book called Business Model Generation. His talk was good. It was basically out of the book. I’ve read the book before. His material is about innovative and disruptive business models and do it didn’t and doesn’t apply to me per se. But I was actually thinking about you because of AuditShark. Does it apply? Do you think you’re bringing a disruptive business model to your space and did you find resonance in Alex’s stock or was it or not?
[10:22] Mike: I do and I did. And during the course of the talk he actually had people do a workshop and I was sitting next to a pair of guys, one of them was from AMD. So we said this really doesn’t apply to me so why don’t we do you instead. And we just walked through the exercise of setting up and specifying what the resources I need to succeed are, what are the inputs or the outputs. What sort of value propositions I have. I’ll say that it was an exercise that I’d already gone through in my head but it was not quite as formalized. The exercise that I’ve gone through in my head previously probably included every single one of those things. Like I said, it just wasn’t nearly as formalized but I had answers for every single one of them and I have them right at the tip of my tongue ’cause I knew exactly what my answers for all of those things were.
[11:08] And I think that being able to clearly identify what space you’re attacking and who your competitors are and how you’re going to go about beating them and what things you need to succeed, those things are extremely important to being able to put together successful business when you’re trying to bring it off the ground or if you’re trying to reposition it in the market, you know. How can you go about bringing this to market? What sort of things are necessary? What things can you get away without, etc.?
[11:34] Rob: Cool. That after new — two workshops which were different this year. The previous year, it had been at lounge tables that their, you know, you pick around people based on which talk that resonates with you and just discussed it. And that has — I mean, that has much of use. I particularly enjoyed that part. So this year they actually ask folks to give one-hour workshops based on a very specific actionable topic. And so as I said, I put one on copywriting and, you know, sales, marketing, copywriting for landing pages and home pages. And I thought that went really well. There are four to something people in it. So it wasn’t like I could sit around the round table and just talk. I did some slides but I have a lot of exercises as well and I’m hoping I can actually do that talk again just ’cause it was fun and I know I had to make it better now that I’ve given it once. Which one did you attend? What do you think?
[12:24] Mike: I went to the one on the characteristics of SAS application. I’ll be honest, I probably didn’t learn necessarily nearly as much as I thought I might have and it was mostly because it was talking in a more of a general fashion about the types of sales, models, some of the financials about custom acquisition cost, and you know, how to do marketing sales and how your customer lifetime value has to be greater than your customer acquisition cost. It seems like those were more of an intro to SAS. You know, it’s just not quite what was I expecting. It’s not that it wasn’t valuable information ’cause I think it’s certainly was. But I think I was probably further along than somebody who was really the target market for that particular workshop.
[13:04] Rob: Sure. Did they wrap up and attend the party? Was that evening at the Whiskey Priest here in Boston? I took awesome conversations. You and I actually talk for a while and that was cool. We talked with — I went to talk with Patrick Foley, with Ruben Gomez from Bidsketch. I talked with a guy named Jude who works at FogBugz and he does quite a bit of marketing for them. He’s also a developer. And then I had a good conversation with Jason Cohen. We round up sitting at a table with some folks from Light One Security and just discussing all types of — Patrick Foley was there and he was, you know, defending Usher and Microsoft and then Jason Cohen were like, lob fireballs at it if you like. You know, I developed dot net for years and it’s such a disaster, you know. It’s hard to keep up with everything and then I was interjecting that I just acquired HitTail which basically is like a classic XP with some dot net.
[13:55] And so it was cool conversation. We talked about business models. We also talked about programming and then, you know, just kind of wander around. But I got to be honest those kinds of conversations, those are probably the most valuable thing for me these days when I go to conferences. I always enjoyed the talks but I don’t get as much out of it. Yeah, these days I find that when I go to conferences, I keep the most value I get from them is actually in the hallways. I still learn stuff from the talks but I think as I gain more experience it — I just learn less and less. I must need more focus talk because I’m hyper-focused in my apps now. You know, I’m looking at very specific issues that I’m struggling with. And the broad stuff I kind of already uncovered.
[14:32] So the talks with Jason Cohen and asking specific things. Even if the guy’s from Formstack, if you have — I don’t know if you talked to those guys, but Formstack’s kind of like Wufoo. I mean, they’re online form builder. They’re SAS app and so there were these cool insights that they were able to lend. I had questions for them. Also, know we had taken from AppSumo course and Ruben from Bidsketch. And there were probably five others. Anytime, oh, you know what, I get to meet Ian Landsman for the first time. That was awesome from User Scape, HelpStop is the product.
[15:00] Again, ask them questions like what’s your biggest lead driver today. And we’re starting a lot of traffic to you. And talk about some approaches that I just had, oh, I haven’t heard those, you know. So I noted them down and I’m gonna look at implementing for HitTail. So the most notes that I have are from conversations like I had at the Whisky Priest and frankly just in the hallways and in between and after.
[15:24] Mike: Yeah. I found myself sending myself e-mails here and just so that when I was — you know, when I was sitting there listening to the speakers I had my laptop on. I was taking notes and everything ’cause there were times like the things last year that I just completely forgotten about or I said, oh, that’s really good. And I came out of speaker presentation feeling really great but not really remembering everything or nearly as much as I wanted to. And I found myself when I was talking to people about different things, I would send myself an e-mail just so that I made sure I reminded myself about whatever it was that they were talking to me about. But yeah, I totally agree. The conversations that you have with people in between the sessions and, you know, at lunch and dinner and everything else, those are insanely valuable.
[16:05] Rob: I know they Livestream — this is the software this year. I don’t know if they’re gonna have it online or whatever. I do want to revisit a couple of points of some of the talks but, yeah, overall I don’t feel like I need to watch it all again. You know, I feel like I got the most out of it and if you did watch the Livestream, I’m sure you got some cool stuff but I do encourage you to think about actually attending this or another conference. I’m just walking in to one of the sessions this afternoon and David Cancel who started Performable, they started it by HubSpot, is walking out and I go to introduce myself and he’s like, hey, Rob. Hey, ya. We just start — you know, we just got into this awesome conversation and he had this really it could be — like for me, it could be a game changing suggestion for HitTail. I could probably blew it up about this opportunity, you know, there’s no market place and blah, blah, blah.
[16:50] But it’s like crazy and it’s just like, wow, that was like two minutes of my time. That right there could make the entire three days’ worth it, right, just that two-minute conversation.
Well cool. Hey. So I have a question for you because I’m like — there were a couple of talks that I really, really wanted to see and one of them was Patrick McKenzie. I didn’t make it. I’m hoping that I could watch it online. I heard some people raving about it, talk about how specific he was. And now I also heard some folks saying that it was like too specific that it wouldn’t work for their business ’cause they are obviously in a different, you know, kind of different line of business. But what were your thoughts on it?
[17:27] Mike: I can see how people could have taken it in a way and said, well, yeah, that doesn’t apply in my business because it’s too small. But there were lot of examples that he gave and many of the things that he worked through were actually not from his business. They were from some of his consulting customers so I can understand. And maybe there’s just a missed perception about what things applied to their business and which ones don’t. But he talked a lot about the examples of different types of funnels. So, for example, e-mail funnels, trial funnels, you know, going through the sale cycle, figuring out the core usage of your products and who’s using it and how. And these are all things that have nothing to do with the actual checkout and sale of your product when you guys should be doing that too.
[18:09] But there’s all these other things that you can be testing and creating funnels with and he talked about how to do all those things and then, you know, what you’re supposed to be doing with a funnel, some of the different tools that he uses, you know, the general rules of thumb to follow like having a shorter funnel is probably better and, you know, removing steps in the funnel is definitely hopeful for your bottom line. But the fact that those little improvements that you make are multiplicative as opposed to additive so when you increase something by 0.5% in the beginning, you don’t get a 0.5% increase at the end, you get a 0.75% increase, for example. You know, and some statistics majors can figure out the actual math on it. And it depends a lot on how big your funnel actually is but a lot of was about how to — how A/B testing is not medicine. It’s medicine for example, it’s not a solution if you have a bad product.
[19:01] Rob: Well, cool. I apologized to the listeners for the background noise. Obviously, we’re at a conference in the side hallway and folks are walking by. So hopefully if you’ll just based on our great content on the day.
[19:15] Mike: Overall, the conference was well worth it. I mean, people talked about that, oh, it’s an expensive conference. Do I really wanna pay that much money for it? And it’s not so much the conference that you’re really paying for, it’s the interactions with people and I think we’ve talked about having Ted on at some point. But the very first night we were there, Ted was asking me some very difficult questions about why I haven’t launched AuditShark yet and that alone was worth coming to this conference for because it really made me think about what sorts of things I should be doing. What things are important and more importantly what things are not important.
[19:51] Rob: Yeah. That was actually really cool. So it’s Ted Pitts from Moraware software. And a lot of you may remember Harry Hollander was on — it was to more of Episode 40 talking about hiring like professional services companies. Well, his business partner is Ted and Mike had known him for a couple of years now. Yeah. He was totally decadent to you with accountability essentially and I was joking that like I should be doing this on a podcast ’cause Ted was doing a way better job of it of basically busting your chops than I do. Yeah, you’re right that was fascinating and it was actually really good for me to hear as well ’cause it was just he was asking good questions. And its good questions when you removed from a process, you can just put someone’s feet to the fire and say, why aren’t you doing this? And when you’re kind of too close to it, it’s hard to ask those questions.
[20:33] You’re right, that was really cool. There was a cool little thing at the end of this second day where Peldi from Balsamiq interview to getting John Nese who owns an entire store. It’s called the Soda Pop Shop and all it does is sell soda, right? Sounds like they have a 500 or 1,000 different kinds of soda. And it was just — John interview and afterwards we had a soda tasting where you just have to taste all kinds of crazy types of soda that you’ve never heard of. But you had mentioned to me earlier that you asked question during that talk and that it was — there’s kind of an appropriate answer. So I wanted to hear, you know, have you told the listeners what happened?
[21:11] Mike: Right. So the question that I’d asked him was that the context of it a little bit is that this person had a supermarket that he was selling a lot of different things then and Pepsi came in and said we would like you to — oh, I’m gonna sell you this palette of Pepsi for X and he said, well, how much am I gonna make on. And they told him. He said, well, why would I wanna do that? I don’t want to because, you know, I know that my customers can buy it somewhere else. And they said, well, you can’t tell us you’re not gonna care of this. This is — we’re Pepsi.
And a long story short, basically, over the course — of a couple of years I think it was, he essentially decided that he was going to start selling nothing but different sodas from around the world and one of the things that I asked him was that wasn’t he afraid of what was gonna happen when he sort of going down these roads and started going against Pepsi and Coke and, you know, the big soda companies. And he said, it’s very easy to make decisions when you’re going bankrupt and it was just the most appropriate thing I could possibly think of. I was just like, I absolutely know what you’re talking about, you’re absolutely right.
[22:20] Rob: Right. And it ties into your talk at MicroConf. You had talked about your business swinging from — I don’t remember. It was like plus 90K, they’re like negative 70K or something within a couple of months where you are based — I mean, you weren’t going bankrupt per se but your business was essentially not solvent. It’s like you said, you had to make decisions to fix that. It was just such an appropriate response and I thought I thought it was good.
[22:42] music
[22:45] Rob: You know what being here has made me excited about is starting to plan MicroConf honestly. We actually haven’t announced it on the podcast but we’ve decided to do MicroConf 2012. I finally after months I’ve talked you into doing it. Luckily he’s viewed it.
[22:59] Mike: And the listeners know that’s a lie because we’ve talked about it before.
[23:04] Rob: And I’m the guy saying, I don’t wanna do it. But, yeah, so we decided to do it and we’re actually gonna sit down right after this podcast and start talking about it. We’re thinking somewhere between April and June, Las Vegas, 2012. We’re gonna start looking at hotels and put together our shortlist for speakers and such. So it just got me excited to get the band back together. Frankly, it’s like people I saw here I haven’t seen any years since the last BOS and to revisit here about what the businesses are doing and in the show. You know, what I’m doing was it got me all fired up to do it again here in six months ’cause frankly, waiting another year to do it is just too long for my case. I think I can do this every three months, honestly like that would be like the ideal, not this particular conference but just different conferences where for software folks.
[23:43] Mike: Yeah. I totally agree. I mean, it’s just great getting in back together with people and being able to talk to them face to face and get their ideas because certain things kind of come to the forefront of your thoughts when you are talking to them directly versus when you’re just kind of conversing over e-mail and saying, hey, can you help me out with this or what is it you’re doing over here. You don’t necessarily get those conversations or talk about the things that are — I guess the most important to you when you’re doing it via e-mail.
[24:10] Rob: Yeah. It’s just hard. It’s so different to say that there was at least for an hour at a table with someone, you kind of have to start asking questions that you normally wouldn’t talk about at too many conversation. And you start warming up to folks and you’re willing to tell them more and they’re willing to tell you more and that’s when it really gets interesting, right? That’s when you start hearing things that can become game changers for your business is just hearing from the trenches. It’s things that are like so cutting edge or so experimental that they haven’t been written about or talked about it yet, and that haven’t been in talks but it’s like these guys, like I tried the specific thing and it’s crazy. You know, it happens to be working right now. I don’t know if it’s gonna work two months from now but it’s like, wow, I wanna try that or a variation of that, you know. You wouldn’t hear about that otherwise.
[24:56] Mike: Right. I’ll give you a very specific example was last night we went out to dinner. We went — it’s all the way over to Chinatown from here. And we had dinner at this French restaurant right on the edge of Chinatown. And we got talking about pricing and how to price a new product and I was very interested in how the guys at the table had priced their products and how they had gotten their start and one of them told me honestly said, our first hundred customers, every single one of them paid us a different rate because most of it was high touch sales, at least initially it was high touch sales. It’s not anymore. But it gave them an idea of what people were willing to pay based on the conversations that they had and one of his first sale, he said, we went it, we offered three different price points and I asked one, it was $500 a month. And they actually laugh and said, well, pay double that. And they did pay double that. And then next one, they went to and said, well, the price is $3,000 a month and that completely fell apart because the company said, well, our budget is like $20 a month.
[25:55] So it was just very interesting to see. It’s a very valid way I think of testing how you determine what your pricing is, is just by asking those people and sure you charge some people more and you charge some people less but they’re okay with that because you’re providing value to them.
[26:09] Rob: Right. Yeah. I know that’s good. That’s a good example.
[26:11] Mike: But that’s not something I would have ever learned from one of those speakers. I mean, maybe they would have mentioned it or something like that but it’s just something I don’t think would have come up.
[26:18] music
[26:21] Rob: My closing thoughts are obviously BOS is a great conference. Everyone — everyone hears that. We do that every year. There are several folks who really are doing something unique in this world that we’re living, the software and startup world. Obviously, we can make it 2012. Or, even catch the videos. I don’t know if they’re gonna be online or not. And they were Livestream but I don’t know if they’ll be there afterwards. But if you catch them I definitely recommend it and you know, if you attend it and you’re listening to this, feel free to give us a call or send us an e-mail at Questions@StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts and you know, we can obviously read them on the air next time. Oh, you know what, you and I had conversations here that were pretty valuable and it was about the podcast format. Our release schedule has been every two weeks and what we’re gonna start doing is we’re gonna start doing a weekly podcast again. But what we’re gonna do is — this is based on feedback we received here as well as over the past few weeks. But why don’t we — we’re gonna just do Mike and I discussing our products, right?
[27:17] It’s kind of our update of what we’re doing, steps we’ve tried, our thoughts on it. So those shows maybe short, if you have a lot to say. I could see some of being 10 minutes. I could some of being 30 or 40 minutes like a normal podcast. And the beauty is that, you know, people could hear our updates and such. And I also basically could use time I spent preparing. That obviously helps us because we’re busy. And every other week, one of you, the normal thing of what we’ve been doing for the past year. It’s obviously resonating with folks where we do more of a structure, tutorial type of thing. Basically, if you don’t like the update you’re receiving, you can skip them or something but we hope that people are just interested and wanna listen about them. Did we agree to that or did I just ambush you to that?
[27:55] Mike: No, that’s fine. I think we did kind of agree to it. We just never really formalized, said yes, we’re gonna do this. So I think we both just thought it was a great idea.
[28:01] Rob: All right. Well, that wraps us up for Episode 55 and we’ll see you guys again next week.
Episode 54 | How We Left Our Jobs Part 2
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 54.
[00:04] [music]
Episode 53 | How We Left Our Jobs Part 1
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 53.
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Episode 52 | Getting Off The Hamster Wheel
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 52.
[00:04] [music] [Read more…] about Episode 52 | Getting Off The Hamster Wheel
Episode 51 | How Traffic Quality Can Make A 10x Difference In Your Business
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 51.
[00:04] [music] [Read more…] about Episode 51 | How Traffic Quality Can Make A 10x Difference In Your Business
Episode 50 | Home Office Do’s and Don’ts
Show Notes
- Anything you want – Derek Sivers
- Aeron Chair
- Griffin Technology Laptop Stand
- Apple Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard
- Samsung CLX Series Printer
- Dell Ultrasharp U3011 30″ monitor
- Joe vs the Volcano
- SnagIt
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 50.
[00:03] [music] [Read more…] about Episode 50 | Home Office Do’s and Don’ts
Episode 49 | 6 Ways To Blow Up Your Conversion Rate and Keep Customers For Life
Show Notes
Transcript
[Read more…] about Episode 49 | 6 Ways To Blow Up Your Conversion Rate and Keep Customers For Life
Episode 48 | How To Run A Survey
