Show Notes
- Rob’s most recent Mixergy interview – story of growing HitTail
- MicroConf 2013 talk videos
The 12 Signs
- You have X customer who’ve committed to pay for it before you start building
- You see competition in the space but they don’t appear to know what they’re doing
- You’re have a concrete estimate of development time, and are making measurable progress towards launch
- You have a launch list of contact information for hundreds or thousands of interested people who have signed up to hear about your launch
- Your method for growing your list is something you can continue doing after launch
- You have some kind of marketing plan
- You’ve surveyed your launch list and now have quantitative data, in addition to the qualitative data you got from talking to your committed customers 1-10
- You’re receiving emails or tweets asking when the product is going to be available
- Your launch list is growing faster than you’re able to let people in
- The first customer who uses your product tells you “This is a no-brainer, I would like to start paying right away.”
- Many people are excited about your product and then cancel during trial, or within the first 60 days of use.
- Your family/friends make negative comments, but you have so much traction you don’t care.
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I look at 12 signs that you should continue investing in your product. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 172.
[00:10] Music
[00:18] 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.
[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:28] Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:33] Mike: Word on the street is that you hate desktop application writers.
[00:36] Rob: I got tweeted at least twice…
[00:40] Mike: I got a few instant messages here and there.
[00:42] Rob: What did they say?
[00:43] Mike: Just to let you know that desktop apps are not dead.
[00:47] Rob: I guess they were giving you kind of encouragement huh? You’re building your desktop app and keep going with it.
[00:51] Mike: It’s an extension of the original product and it’s just more of a different mechanism for using it so…
[00:57] Rob: Right. And if it’s the best tool for the job then there’s no reason not to use the tool. So hey, I wanted to point folks into the direction of mixergy interview, I was on mixergy this week. So if you go to mixergy.com the interviews are only available for a few weeks before they become only available to premium subscribers. So I talk all about HitTail, about growing it. It’s parallel to the story that I told last year at MicroConf and you can see that video at microconf.com in the 2013 speaker videos but there’s just different questions. There’s more mindset and emotional things that I dive into because Andrew went into those areas, so if you’re interested in checking it out, it’s at mixergy.com. How about you? What else is going on?
[01:35] Mike: I was looking through some of my analytics and I was trying to figure out why conversions were so low from my email signups through to my pricing pages and everything on Audit Shark and I realized last month when I had redone the pricing page, I broke all the URL’s and I hadn’t updated the email sequences to point to the right pricing pages.
[01:57] Rob: So could people not get to your pricing page?
[01:59] Mike: It would 404 error out so that was bad.
[02:03] Rob: I did the same thing on software by Rob probably 2-3 years ago. You just make a switch. You don’t think about it and pretty soon you potentially lose hundreds of emails of people who wanted to sign up.
[02:16] Mike: Right. I think the killer was if things had gone like if the numbers had dropped to 0, it would’ve been really obvious really quickly but I just noticed it like the numbers were lower and I’m looking at them. I’m trying to figure out I was like I wonder why that is. It just didn’t dawn on me that I pushed a new set of pricing pages and changed the URL schemes and it was coming in from the emails. It just wouldn’t have got there. With zero it’s easy to figure it out or easy to see what’s going on. But when the numbers are a little bit above zero, it’s just hard to tell.
[02:48] Rob: indeed. So we got some good comments on episode 170 and I actually heard from Dan Felker on Twitter who kind of thumbs up my approach of almost infinitely looping a single song to get in the zone. And surprisingly because I thought I was going to get called out for being crazy on that one but surprisingly got a comment from Jake on episode 170 and he says I totally agree with the music thing. Try high energy protons by Juno Reactor and the whole transmissions album itself. And then he says trigger songs are great. I like that term trigger songs.
[03:20] There’s another comment by Wolf Scott who said this is his first comment ever on a podcast and that he’s been looping songs for a long time and everyone in his office thought he was weird so it was good to hear that there are other folks who loop songs a lot in order to do that. I’ve actually heard Matt Mullenweg talking about how he did a lot of song looping. I remember in his mixergy interview Andrew Warner was kind of surprised by that, it’s a couple years ago but that was when I realized someone else does this.
[03:49] Last comment, Jim Monroe he commented he says great show. Definitely something I struggle with in terms of shiny object syndrome and he says his problem is books. He says I currently have a huge backlog of books I intend to read. I’m sure I’ll get to half of them but I buy them anyway. Basically I’m an addict. One thing that helps me with online content that seems actionable or tactical as you say is using Evernote web clipper. I have a pro Evernote account which does all OCR and saving content you can want. With this, I not only have a bookmark but I can also file it into a specific folder and it saves the entire web page in case the article goes offline. I may never get back to the article but it gives me some satisfaction knowing it’s saved and it reduces the temptation to read it at the moment. Used early and often it will reduced wasted time on things I feel I should be reading. Best of luck.
[04:36] So thanks for the tip guys and you can always catch us on Twitter on @robwalling Mike is @singlefounder or you can obviously call into our voicemail line, drop us an email of questions @startupsfortherestofus.com or post a comment on an episode.
[04:51] Music
[04:54] This week we’re doing a little bit of a counterpoint to last week’s episode. Last week we talked about the top 12 signs you should walk away from a project. And this week we’re looking at the 12 signs you should continue investing in your product. I wanted to kind of look at some signs. Some of them maybe obviously positive signs that you should keep going. Some of them actually appeared to be negative but it can actually have a positive underlying message. And so first one is you have X customers who’ve committed to pay for your product before you start building.
[05:27] This is something that’s being bandied around. It’s been talked about quite a bit these days of getting purchase commitments or of actually collecting money upfront whichever way you do it, if you can find people who are willing to pay you money before you start building a product, even if it’s just a commitment that is one of the signs that you continue investing in your product. Because not only does it show you there is a potential market for it but it will give you kind of the internal confidence to start breaking ground on code and it also gives you a small subset of people to talk to about when you have questions about what features should I be building first?
[06:00] Mike: Yeah. I mean this is something that I did a couple of years ago for my Altiris training site and I didn’t want to dump all the time and effort into recording all these videos and then launching it and having nobody be interested in it so I created a sales website and put 3 or 4 pages together and sold it to people and they just refunded their money as they ordered it. I got I think 10 sales over the course of six weeks, something like that. And they were all for monthly subscriptions so I decided to go ahead and actually build it.
[06:26] If you’ve got the people who are willing to pay for it before you start building something. I mean all it says is that they have not found something else that is solving their problem or it says to you that the competition out there is just so terrible that anything that you come up with is probably going to be better than the other stuff that they’ve tried or is already out there.
[06:47] Rob: And I think a question someone might ask is what should X be? As I said you have X customers who’ve committed to pay for it and that number varies. I think Jason Cohen before he started WP engine, I think he found 40 people willing to pay him either 50 or $100 a month. I don’t remember what it was at the time. With Drip, I wanted to get to 10 people willing to pay me $100 a month before I started. That to me is the range. I’ve never heard of anyone getting more than 40 one on one purchase commitments before starting but you certainly could and I think anything less than 10 and you haven’t done enough leg word and you won’t have heard enough reasons that they don’t want to move forward for it to be worth your while.
[07:24] The second sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you see competition in the space but they don’t appear to know what they’re doing. I like to say that you don’t have to be a better marketer than the rest of the world. You just have to be a better marketer than the other people in your niche. Even if you’re not substantially better than the competition that you see, if you can tell that they’re not doing a good job then odds are that you might be ahead of them or that you can at least learn quickly enough to stay ahead of them.
[07:52] Mike: And that’s the implication right? Is that you look at what you’re doing and you know more than them and I don’t think you necessarily need to know more than them but recognizing that they don’t know what they’re doing in some ways can give you that little extra boost that you need because you can look at that and say oh I just need to learn faster than those guys and you probably out maneuver them. And that’s the important part is being able to out maneuver them because if you can do that and you can start winning whether you’re taking sales way from them or preventing them from getting sales and you essentially out market them, then you can become the number one player in whatever the niche is.
[08:28] I think that applies a lot more to places where you’re not going against funded competition because I think once you start going against funded competition and you’re a boot strapper, it can be difficult to win a head on challenge against them but there are definitely ways to kind of spin your marketing a little bit so that your product is positioned differently against theirs.
[08:47] Rob: And I do hear people coming on the scene and saying there’s no competition, that’s a bad sign. You shouldn’t enter a market with no competition because it means the market doesn’t exist or the market’s too small. And I think it depends on your goals. I think if you’re in that early stage of the stair step process and you really are looking for that first win of getting to 500 or 1000 or a couple grand a month and you’re launching the mobile app, the WP plug-in, maybe a niche site, just an add on to something existing, I think it’s perfectly fine to not have competition in that space because the market is probably really small and you’re going for that early win to boost your confidence, learn marketing and get some revenue.
[09:25] If you’re going after something that you want to be, a mid six figure, seven figure business, you’re really trying to up the level, then yeah. There probably needs to be some, at least overlapping competition in the space right? There’s rarely a blue ocean market that’s that big that doesn’t have other people going after it as well. So take this one with a grain of salt. When you hear people say markets with no competition are bad, stay away from them, think of what size, company are they talking about? Are they talking about venture funded companies because yes, for them, they really do want competition because everybody kind of knows what the hot markets of tomorrow are going to be and there’s going to be a lot of players in those.
[09:59] The third sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you have a concrete estimate of development time and you’re making measurable progress towards your launch.
[10:07] Mike: Does anyone really have a concrete estimate of their development time?
[10:10] Rob: When I say concrete, I don’t necessarily mean it’s correct. Right? I just mean it’s your best guess and there’s a real number on things. Like I actually mean broken down into chunks that are one day or less, into tasks that are one day or less because you can estimate those. If I told you Mike how long is it going to take you to build a web page that allows someone to do whatever login to this thing or resets their password, you can estimate that within probably 20% accuracy. But I if tell you build this whole subsystem that’s going to build a ton of stuff, it’s too much unless you break it down into its subsystems and break it down into a point where it’s about a day per task and that’s when you’re going to get what I consider the best estimates, concrete estimates.
[10:50] Mike: Yeah. I mean that’s the difference between saying I’m going to build a product versus these are all the things I need to do in order to build a product.
[10:58] Rob: Yup. I mean you can imagine estimating how long is it going to take me to build this house versus how long is it going to take me just to pour the foundations versus just putting in the studs for the walls, just the electrical. I mean you break it into subsystems and then you break it down as far as you can go. Most people don’t do this honestly. Right? Unless you’ve been forced to create estimates, estimating is really hard and it kind of feels like it’s wasted time but every project that I do, I will put together the simple excel spreadsheet. Getting those concrete numbers and at least being able to see where your progress is stalling and being able to see where your progress is moving towards really quickly, it says a lot for your motivation.
[11:37] This isn’t a requirement. Yes, you can absolutely build a product and market it and be successful without this but I think this is one factor that will absolutely contribute towards you making it to launch.
[11:48] Mike: I think the important thing here is just the fact that you have this measurable progress that you’re making. If you can actually see how much progress is being made, it’s a little different than if you just have this block of work to do when you have no idea how far along you are. I mean if you’ve got six months left of development time and you know you have six months left, it’s a totally different story than if you’re sitting there and you’re six months in and you’re saying how much further do I have to go until I actually get to launch?
[12:16] In some ways I think it’s partly motivation but it’s also to help you understand how far along in the process you are and how much time there is left to finish and help you make decisions about what whether or not you should continue or not.
[12:30] Rob: I think that’s a really good point. I think it’s as much mental as it is anything else. So our fourth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that you have a launch list of contact information for hundreds or thousands of interested people who have signed up to hear about your launch. Notice I didn’t say you have to have a landing page, that happens to be the way I tend to do it. I think you should always have a landing page. But that’s not the only way to do it. You could feasibly gather a launch list of info at a trade show or you could do it with in person interviews or you could do it at a conference.
[13:02] I mean there’s a number of ways that you could look at doing this but the sentiment here is that you get hundreds of people who have opted in to hearing about the launch because that’s what it’s going to take to really get any type of sizeable snowball going from the start. You can’t expect to get 50 people in a launch list who have not already committed to pay, who you haven’t worked with one on one who have just kind of opted in to hear about the launch and then except most of them convert because it’s not going to work out that way. you’re going to be lucky if you get…
[13:31] I mean it depends on what you’re launching price point and all this stuff but I tend to see around 5% on the low end and I see maybe 30% on the high end. And again if you have a relationship with the audience and you’re selling something that’s super valuable to them and super targeted yes, you can get it up into the 50% but I’ve never seen software product get there. It tends to be information that closes that much of the list. Think about that.
[13:57] Let’s say most software’s between 5% and 20% just as round numbers if you only get 100 people on that list, then when you start, you’re going to have between 5 and 20 customers aside from the folks who you initially got to commit. And while that’s good and that’s a great start, it’s better than 0, it’s not enough momentum probably to get you super motivated or to allow you to quit your job on day 1. So getting into digging into that hundreds and hundreds and potentially getting into four figures with that launch list is really a good motivational thing for you. It also will give you a good first day launch, first day revenue number and it’s a sign that people are really interested. This is a sign that you should continue investing in your product because people are interested in hearing about it.
[14:38] The fifth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your method of growing your launch list is something you can continue doing after launch meaning it’s something that you think you could continue to drive traffic and actually turn into trials after you’ve done the initial launch to your list.
[14:55] Mike: And the important part about this is you’ve got something that is repeatable for acquiring new customers and it’s not to say that you can do these one off things that are going to help you for a little while and then you’re really never going to be able to do them again. So for example, submitting your website to a bunch of startup websites. That’s great. It will help give you boost in traffic and boost the number of people on your list but it’s not something that you can do over and over again. What you’re really looking for is those things that you can point to and say I created a landing page and then I was able to drive traffic to that landing page and get people to sign up by doing X, Y and Z and you’re able to do X, Y and Z over and over again whether its writing articles or whether its sending emails out to an email list or doing paid traffic acquisition. I mean there’s a load of different things that you could do.
[15:42] But as long as you’re able to do those things in a repeatable fashion and continue doing that over and over and not only refine the process ‘til the process gets better but also tweak it so that you’re more effective at it and it costs you less I mean because that’s really what you ultimately want to do after you’ve launched is you want to drive the cost of acquisition down. And as long as you’re putting those repeatable processes in place, you’re going to be able to do that.
[16:09] Rob: The sixth sign is that you have some kind of marketing plan. I hate plans in general and anytime anyone said marketing plan to me, maybe five years ago, I would turn the other way because I don’t like a lot of process. I don’t like a lot of plans and what I hated about marketing plans is what I learned is I hate all the BS that people would put in it. So when I was working as a developer, I would look at these marketing plans and it was a bunch of crap. It was fluff. It was paragraphs of pros. It was so ridiculous and it was prepared strictly to impress some executive about how much this person knew about online marketing these days. That’s not what I’m talking about.
[16:44] What I‘m talking about is these tight succinct bulleted list of marketing approaches that you have heard about that you have researched that you have ideas on that you have tried notes about them. It’s everything. It’s all the information gathering that you’re doing maybe by listening to this podcast and others, reading blog articles, all that stuff. That stuff will come and go very quickly if you don’t track it somewhere.
[17:10] The marketing plans that I put together have simply been a Google doc. I will have these in separate categories often it will be SEO and press and content marketing and paid acquisition and high touch approaches and I will put everything in there as I’m learning it. And so over time, I’ve honed that and every new app I get, I make a copy of that doc and I tweak it to the new niche and to the new market that it’s going to go after.
[17:35] Frankly, a lot of the high touch approaches that I’ve tracked and heard about, I have never done because I’ve never gotten to them because to me they’re lower priority. I want to find lower touch approaches that scale first. But having something, yours doesn’t need to be this 12 page extravaganza. Start with one page and put down the ideas you hear people talk about and make the notes so that you can keep them and implement them down the line.
[17:56] Mike: Yeah. The idea behind this marketing plan is really to give you a list of ways that you’re going to get in front of your customers and get them to try out your app and hopefully move them at some point along your sales funnel. I mean this isn’t about listing every single thing that you’re going to do. It’s about listing all the different things that you could do. And then when you get to a point where you say okay now I’ve got some time. I’m going to dig into this. I’m going to start going to my marketing plan and executing, you start picking off those things that you can identify as a high value or high return on the investment that you have to put into it.
[18:29] And again, I mean you don’t necessarily need to know everything about whatever that strategy happens to be. So if you’re going to leverage Facebook ads or you’ve never done Facebook before then that’s okay. I mean you can go ahead and try it. Just understand that your return on that particular thing is probably going to be a little bit lower than if you knew how to run a Facebook ad campaign right up front.
[18:50] Rob: I think that’s a good point. I had a lot of things in my early marketing plan that I had never done and what I would do, let’s take Facebook ads or ad words, as I would come to it, I would then right at that moment I would go and buy a course on it or buy a book on it and when I searched for strategy Facebook ads I think I bought 3 or 4 video courses and I bought 2 or 3 books and I kind of scoured the whole thing until I could get my arms around that trunk until I started hearing the same things over and over from the people so that I was sure that I had covered all the approaches. And I just dove knee deep into it, invested the time, I learned it, got it all in my head and then I just started cranking and trying the ads and learning on my own.
[19:27] That just in time learning which again is a concept that Jeremy of internet business mastery has talked a lot about, that’s the way to go with this kind of stuff. Don’t feel like you need to learn every approach upfront but at least, knowing that it’s there, knowing that it works for some people and then being able to give it a try because it’s very valuable.
[19:42] Mike: I think that helps kind of with information overload where people want to learn as much as they possibly can about how to launch a business or how to structure their business so they’ll go on this information overload where they’re just consuming all these different books and things like that but they’re not actually working on their business. They’re consuming information most of which they’re going to eventually forget anyway long before they’ve had a chance to apply it.
[20:05] Rob: Sign number seven that you should continue investing in your product is that you surveyed your launch list so now you have quantitative data in addition to the qualitative data you got from talking to your committed customers 1 through 10. Now obviously this is not a requirement. It’s just a sign but this is something that I did early on with Drip and what it allows you to do is match up those initial conversations with the first 10 people will give you ideas of what to build and you probably have intuition of what you want to build as well.
[20:32] Then as you start building up this launch list, let’s say you get to 500 or 1,000 people, you can now survey them and you have some pretty intelligent questions to ask them because you’re knee deep in this product. You know what you want to build, you know what you may not have time to build and getting another couple hundred people to weigh in on a survey not only gives them participation and makes them more eagerly anticipate your product but it can really help steer the direction of where you should go in order to hopefully get more of them to sign up when in fact you do your launch.
[21:05] Mike: This is just the difference between having an idea of what people are interested in versus knowing the specific features that are going to push somebody over the edge from this is an interesting product to where can I plug-in my credit card and get the full version?
[21:18] Rob: Our eighth sine is that you’re receiving emails or tweets asking when the product is going to be available. And then anytime you email your launch list you receive several replies letting you know that the product looks great and people can’t wait to use it.
[21:32] Mike: I think the primary thing behind this is people are still experiencing whatever the pain is that you’re trying to solve and if you’re trying to build a product that is geared for example around the holiday season or something like that, once that holiday has passed, the likelihood that those people are still interested in your products is going to be very, very low versus if you’re still coming up on it or if it’s a problem that they have continuously and they still don’t have an answer for it. That’s when people are going to be asking for your product, when it’s going to be available and when they can see more and when can they get their hands on it because that problem is painful enough to them that they want a solution and they’re still actively looking for one.
[22:12] Chances are good that they’re looking at your solutions saying I’m going to stop looking because it looks like this solution you’re coming out with is going to solve my problem and you don’t want to lose that. I mean you don’t want them to suddenly stumble across one of your competitors and start using them or following them instead.
[22:28] Rob: And I don’t think that receiving emails and tweets asking you when it’s going to be available is a necessity. I think you can launch a product successful without that. The businesses that I’ve launched that have had people kind of chomping at the bit are the ones that have that early success and it really boosts your confidence. Our ninth sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your launch list is growing faster than you’re able to let people in. I think this kind of goes without saying if your launch list is growing that fast, then it’s a good sign.
[22:58] Mike: The point about this is obviously this is much further along. You’re at the point where you probably have a product that is in beta or at very least alpha and you’re allowing people to use that whether its early access or whether you’re charging them for it, doesn’t really matter. I mean the fact is you’re much further along than the previous ones that we’ve talked about and most leads we’ve kind of structured in a way that are essentially in chronological order.
[23:22] So for this I mean obviously if your launch list is growing faster and you’re able to let people in, then you’ve got 1 or 2 problems either 1) you’re having trouble letting people in because you’re suffering from technical issues or your launch list is growing out of control and you just can’t satisfy the demand because you still want to give people that individual hand holding so that you do get some of the feedback that you’re going to need to make the product successful long term.
[23:44] And don’t discount how much that information can help you because even though you do have people chomping at the bit and signing up very, very quickly you do want to get that information back before you unleash it to everybody because you want to iron out the kinks. You want to make sure that whatever processes you have in place are solid enough that you’re going to survive contact with the enemy I’ll say.
[24:07] Rob: Our tenth sign is that the first person who uses your product tells you this is a no-brainer. I would like to start paying right away. Getting to the point where anyone will pay you money especially that first customer is a tremendous amount of work. And the earlier you do that, the better it will feel, the more motivation you have. But once you get to that point, to me that’s a big sign that you’ve solved that at least one person’s problem and now you just have to go out and find another and another and another and all of those are signs that you should continue investing in that product.
[24:40] Mike: Yeah. I mean this is about creating cookie cutter copies of your first customer and trying to figure out not only who they are but how do you find other people like that customer? How do you find other people who have that specific problem? And it involves talking to that customer and finding out as much as you can but you’re right. as soon as you get pass that hurdle of somebody willing to pay you money for a product then you know that you’ve at least solved part of the problem and it may not be the entire problem but you’ve at least solved a piece of it and that’s a very, very good starting point. That’s essentially your beach head for the product. And as you move that further down you can expand that beach head and you can grow that market to the point that is successful in the way that you want and need it to be.
[25:23] Rob: Our 11th sign is that many people are excited about your product but they sign up and they cancel during trial within the first 60 days of use. This one’s a little tricky because you might think to yourself why is it a sign I should continue investing in it if people are canceling? The thought here is that if people are excited about your product then it shows that you have in fact hit a paying point that people want solved.
[25:46] But if they sign up and then they cancel, you have something wrong it’s not something that’s so wrong that it can’t be fixed. What’s either happened is your product itself lets people down and doesn’t solve the problem that you’re claiming it does. Perhaps your on boarding isn’t good enough to get people actually using the product and getting value out of it or potentially your pricing is too high. And all three of those are fairly easily fixable and it just requires having conversations with these people who are excited to sign up and cancel and figuring out which of those causes it is.
[26:17] Mike: When you run into this situation, it’s definitely a case where you want to start digging and reaching out to everybody. As a general rule of thumb, you probably want to reach out to anyone who cancels regardless and asks them why they cancel and if there’s anything that went specifically wrong that is something you can address? And there’s a lot of different ways to phrase it to them but realistically chances are good that if they canceled you probably aren’t necessarily going to get them back as a customer.
[26:43] So in general a good tact to take with those types of people is hey, I understand you canceled but I’d really appreciate some feedback from you to understand why it is that you canceled so that we can do better in the future. Not that you’re trying to win their business back but your main focus right there should be to learn from that experience and figure out what you can do better in the future.
[27:04] Rob: And our 12th and final sign that you should continue investing in your product is that your family and friends make negative comments about your pursuits but you have so much traction that you don’t care.
[27:14] Mike: I think one of the things that’s probably difficult for most entrepreneurs to either understand or come to grips with is that your family and friends are not only your target market but at the same time they’re not really drinking the same Kool-Aid that you are. Their brains are not in the same places. So when you’re talking about building a business on the internet and making money selling your products online, they’re like that’s great. I don’t know how you’re going to do that but I’m going to go back to my 9-5 job and it’s just because There’s a difference between what you’re thinking and what they’re thinking, what your goals are long term and what their goals are long term.
[27:50] So for them to really understand what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, it’s not really going to jive because none of the friends and family that I’ve had over the years, except in people that I’ve met at MicroConf and various meet ups and things like that, none of them get it. None of them understand and it’s baffling to them how that could even possibly work.
[28:08] Rob: There’s a really good discussion of this conversation of kind of explaining the entrepreneurial world view to family and friends and that’s tropicalmba.com and its episode 229 of Dan and Ian’s podcast and it’s actually Dan and Damien Thompson discussing it. But it’s this exact concept. I don’t know that I’ve heard a better kind of discussion of it and thought process of what it’s like of just how different we are as entrepreneurs compared to the rest of the population.
[28:36] I would agree with you. The times when I feel most comfortable is when I’m at a place like MicroConf or another gathering of other entrepreneurs because we get each other and we understand where the priorities lie. They’re just these crazy comments that come out of these discussion. I remember at one conference, there’s an entrepreneur who said he had like a SaaS model and he’s made this kind of loud comment. He said I could give a crap about $70,000 in one time revenue. And all of us around were kind of nodding our heads like yeah, I agree.
[29:07] And then later on I quoted that to someone who isn’t an entrepreneur and that doesn’t make any sense to them like why would you turn down $70,000 but in the context of building up these recurring revenue businesses, one time fees, there’s this whole fake logic that goes with that and $70,000 yeah it’s a lot of money but it’s not that much money when you’re talking about this guy’s business. So it’s that kind of stuff that only other founders can really get their heads wrapped around and I think that’s what I liked about having a community. I think that’s one of the biggest benefits that we’ve gone out of this podcast.
[29:40] I don’t want to speak for you but one of the biggest benefits I’ve gone out of the podcast is having folks who I can talk to both in the mastermind group, MicroConf and then just Twitter and other places and the shared mindset makes me feel less crazy. I may be crazy but at least I’m in that subculture of other people who are as crazy as I am.
[30:00] Mike: I think that about wraps us up. If you have question for us, you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 171 | Top 12 Signs You Should Walk Away From a Project
Show Notes
- You’ve lost motivation to move forward
- You’re not making forward progress
- You’ve spent a lot of time into working on it and still haven’t talked to customers (time to reevaluate)
- You’ve had new competitors move into the space who are funded and you aren’t.
- You have no idea how to reach your market
- You’ve learned that many of your initial assumptions are incorrect and are having trouble compensating
- Your beta users aren’t using the product
- Your beta users are all saying that they would pay for it if it were $X, where $X is less than it costs to acquire a customer
- Your life goals have changed
- Your life situation has changed
- Fear of judgment from peers/family (either to quit or that it fails)
- You don’t have a good reason to continue, other than sunk costs
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about the top 12 signs you should walk away from a project. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 171.
[00:08] Music
[00:16] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:25] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:26] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:29] Rob: Feeling good. I just walked in the door from a two day retreat. I went to the central coast of California. I barely checked email. I admit I cheated a little bit but I didn’t take a laptop really just hunkered down and focused on evaluating last year, evaluating things that basically gave me life and the things that kind of sucked it out of me. And then I looked at the goals that I laid out. I looked at those goals, asked myself are those still in line with what I want to do? How do I accomplish them? I asked myself a lot of questions about what the end of the year looks like and even into 2015 and thinking about bigger picture stuff like where am I aiming now?
[01:07] I actually looked back at all my retreat notes from the past 3 years. I started noticing some trends of interests and things that I did well, that I implement and it was crazy to look back 3 years and be like wow, I haven’t even done yet. Like I haven’t even bought HitTail at that point. I mean there were just so many things that I’ve learned in this past few years. So I’m feeling good. I’m feeling very focused.
[01:31] I also got to try a new work style. I used the approach that impossiblehq had laid out last week where he says go to three different locations during the day and so I went to literally to the beach because I was doing just pen and paper and so I would sat on the cliff and over the waves and the surfers for about an hour and then I went to a couple different coffee shops and at the end of the day at a bru pub, doing a little happy hour there. But the whole time, basically the continuity was me thinking through all of this stuff and making notes in my notebook. So it was life giving and I’m pretty stoked to get back to work and really crank on some things and as well as to make some changes with several little things in my business.
[02:09] Mike: So I’ve been working on a new desktop edition of Audit Shark…
[02:13] Rob: Desktop? Nobody releases desktop software anymore.
[02:15] Mike: There’s a very specific strategy that I’m implementing for it. And it does tie back into the cloud version. Remember I talked before about the policy builder and how I ran into a bunch of problems with it. Essentially what we did was we took the entire code base for that and we copied it and then we made it more standalone than anything else so we still have that other code base that we’re still developing on kind of side by side. But this is essentially going to be the cleaner version of it. So it will still tie back into the cloud version and like I said there a strategy for this moving forward in actually two different directions. One is more towards the enterprise market and the other one is more towards people who are using the cloud version.
[02:55] Rob: Yeah, obviously I was joking. You’re not building a desktop app. You’re just building a desktop add on to your Saas app. It’s just like building a mobile app that interfaces with your Saas app. You giveaway the desktop edition for free I would imagine but it doesn’t do anything unless you have this monthly Audit Shark account.
[03:12] Mike: Yeah and that’s exactly. It’s more of an extension of it than anything else.
[03:16] Rob: Right. And the reason you went desktop is because the policy builder was such a nightmare in the web right? Or try to building a browser because there’s a bunch of complex stuff.
[03:24] Mike: Yeah. And we started going down that road and it realized that it’s not just about building that in the cloud because there’s lots of things that you can do these days that you couldn’t do 5 or 10 years ago and I don’t think it was s much about building it in the cloud. It was about – part of it was maintaining it but the other part of it was the fact that in order to test something, you need a machine out there that can test against.
[03:49] Right now, the way things work that’s not easy to do and it has a lot of latency and in order to use the policy builder, you really want to develop things and test them very quickly because these things are very quick. I mean you’re basically just slapping a bunch of function parameters together and you hit the button and say does this bring me what I want to see? And the problem is that if you are doing that in the web, there’s just so much latency involved in the time that task is created and sent out and picked up because of all the queuing and everything else, it was just wasn’t going to work. The experience was going to be awful. So at that point it was just like okay, well I can take this and move it in a slightly different direction.
[04:26] It actually ties in really well with a bunch of other people that I’ve talked to who want to use it for going into new environments where they want to take a look at that environment and get some information about it so there’s services providers. There are auditors who want to be able to take it on their laptop going into an environment and then just scan the environment and pull back the information without deploying agents and they don’t want to do this more than once. They just want to do it more as of a onetime scan and that’s a different market segment that I’m also trying to go after.
[04:55] Rob: Right. I mean I think that’s the question probably on everyone’s mind who’s listening to this is did a paying customer request this or is there a customer who is willing to pay you money only if you build this?
[05:08] Mike: There are customers who’ve told me in the past that they’re willing to pay money for this and there are very slight tweaks that need to be done to make it work in that fashion versus more of the enterprise market which I’m also talking to and this what the enterprise market is saying that they want.
[05:22] Rob: Got it. So I have a recommendation. One is a podcast episode, if you are thinking about canceling cable, the best discussion of this, kind of from soup to nuts services and tools and hardware and all that stuff is cordkillers.com and its episode 5 of that podcast. I’m a fan of that podcast anyway. It’s Tom Merritt and Brian Brushwood. In episode 5 they did a better job of describing it and how you can actually do it better than anyone else I’ve heard. We’ll link that up in the show notes.
[05:51] Music
[05:54] Mike: In today’s episode we’re going to talk about the top 12 signs that you should walk away from a project. In this episode, I’ve talked to a lot of different people who they’re trying to figure out whether or not they should keep going with something or whether they’re just trying to overcome a momentary hurdle in the development or they’re also just trying to figure out is this project going to go anywhere? Can I see myself working on this for the next 8-12 months? And there’s a lot of questions about what sorts of things you should be looking at? How should you approach that? I think in this episode we’re going to be answering some of those things.
[06:28] So the first sign that you should move on from a project is that you’ve lost motivation to move forward. If you’re spending too much time talking to people about the product but not actually trying to move things forward in terms of customer development and let me differentiate that a little bit. If you’re telling people what it is that you’re building versus soliciting information from prospective customers, those are two different things.
[06:52] If you’re just telling people all about what you’re building, if you’re talking about the developers and saying this is how I’m going to do to this and this is what I’m going to build and this how it’s going to work, that is more explaining what it is that you’re doing but you’re not doing customer development yet. You’re not learning from other people whether it is that they’re going to pay for it, whether it is that they use it unless developers are your target market.
[07:11] Rob: I think the question to ask with motivation is this temporary loss of motivation? Is this just a little bump that you’ve hit? For a few weeks you’re not motivated to work on this particular project or is it something that drags on for months and you just can’t get back at it. You aren’t interested in writing any code. You aren’t interested in writing copy and you kind of feel like maybe you don’t know what to do next or you know what to do next, you don’t feel like doing it. The biggest signs of that are I keep planning other things or making excuses why you can’t sit down and just crank into it and get it done. Or when you do sit down to dive in that you find yourself wondering and checking email and getting on the social network instead of actually getting things done.
[07:52] I think another element to this is people tend to be really good at either starting things or finishing them. People who are good at starting things tend to have a bunch of unfinished projects and they really don’t finish any of them. People that tend to finish, they have a real tough time either starting up a new project or getting back into a project they’ve kind of let go. Knowing that about yourself and looking at your history will also help you realize if you’re following your own natural inertia or if you really need to fight against that natural inertia and get back and try to get some of that motivation back. And we frankly talked about that in episode 170. It was about avoiding shiny object syndrome but part of shiny object syndrome is being distracted and maybe not having motivation.
[08:39] Mike: The second sign you should walkway from a project is that you’re not making any forward progress. And this is a little bit different than just losing motivation because you can still have motivation but you don’t necessarily know what to do. And you’re still doing things but nothing seems to be working. And a lot of times, that can boil down to the products is just not going to work out or you just have so many things that you have to do that you’re not sure what to work on so you don’t do anything and I think that’s extremely common amongst entrepreneurs as well.
[09:09] Rob: Yeah and we should probably take a step back here and say not any one of these 12 signs is an absolute red flag yes you should walk away from it but these are kind of – they add up. And so maybe having a lack of motivation is one thing but also a lack of word progress and then a couple of these others, they really start to stack up and point you towards walking away from a project.
[09:32] I think in terms of this sign, of not making forward progress, this will eventually lead for anyone. It will eventually lead to number 1, the lack of motivation. And for some of us, lack of word progress for two weeks leads to lack of motivation. For other people it may take six months of lack of work progress but eventually you will get to the point where you lose motivation so forward progress is definitely a sign that something is not going in the right direction and at this point, if I have like extended periods of not making forward progress or I see entrepreneurs who aren’t, I typically ask them to get a sanity check and to go outside of kind of their own head and talk to people either in their mastermind group, knowledgeable people, just someone that they trust that might have insight, not your friends and not your family who don’t understand what you’re doing but someone else in this world whom you’ve met hopefully at a conference or you have some relationship with that you can explain the situation to and get some kind of realistic viewpoint from the outside because I think good suggestions can come out of that.
[10:30] Mike: The third sign is that you’ve spent a lot of time working on the project and you still haven’t talked to customers. It could just be time to reevaluate what it is that you’re doing and where in the projects you should be focusing because if you’ve gone for too long without talking to any of your customers even if you talk to them upfront, their needs may have changed or you may have misunderstood things and then when you come back and you revisited, you may get a slightly different story or may get a completely different story based on the things that you have implemented so far.
[11:00] So make sure that you’re keeping in touch with people not just throughout the course of development but also making sure that you talked to them upfront to begin with and I’ve talked to a lot of people who have said while I’ve been building this for six months or eight months, I should’ve been building a mailing list and I should’ve been doing marketing but I haven’t done any of that yet so how do I go about selling this product? And we get a lot of comments from people listening to this podcast who email us in with questions like that and there’s really only so much you can do but at the end of the day you have to go talk to those customers. You have to find out if what you’re building is really what it is that they need.
[11:34] Rob: That might be the number one email that I receive asking for advice is hey, love the podcast. Enjoy the book. Unfortunately I didn’t read it and I went off and built, spent a year to building an app and now I’m here, how do I market it? And that probably is the biggest mistake that I see people making when they’re trying to get into this space. So yeah, I can’t agree with you more. Talking to potential customers. Every 6 to 8 weeks actually is there rule that I set for myself when I was working on Drip. I didn’t quite live up to that. I think I had a 3 month period where I didn’t email my list and didn’t keep them kind of apprised of the status of the project.
[12:15] But this goes all the way to landing page, collecting email addresses, that list I ideally would be emailed every 6 to 8 weeks with just a quick update, maybe a screen shot, something to build excitement. Then if you have early access customers aside from that list, that handful that agreed upfront to pay money for what you’re building then those I was sending personal emails to all 11 of them every few months and saying hey, still working on. I just want to give you an update. Those were almost – I didn’t even send screen shots. I just said I want to give you an idea that I’m still working on it. Just so people know that you’re alive and there’s some type of interest being maintained because when it takes you six months to build and launch and app, it’s a really long time and people tend to forget about what you’re doing.
[12:57] Mike: The fourth sine is that you’ve had new competitors move into the space who are funded and you aren’t. This could turn out to be a death blow for you but if you’re losing motivation or you’re not making a lot of work progress and then something like this happens then you could have serious problems. I mean you may as well throw in the towel at that point. Just because competitor moves into your space who is funded and you’re not funded doesn’t mean that you can’t proceed to move forward. You may very well be doing things that they’re not. Or they may burn through all of their funding very, very quickly trying to solve the wrong problem.
[13:26] But it’s something to definitely pay attention to because when funded people who are coming into your space have all this money to burn, they have the ability to run a lot of different experiments very, very quickly whereas you probably don’t especially if you’re running things on the side. On the other hand, this in some ways could be a good sign because it means that somebody out there with a lot of money decided that the niche that you’re going after is valuable enough to go after with some sort of funded company. So there’s two ways to look at that but again, if you’re having other problems, then it could be a sign that you should walkway.
[14:02] Rob: Yeah but this one depends on your situation. Obviously if you are an experienced founder and you have some marketing skill under your belt, you’re a decent developer, you have at least a little bit of money, I think you can outmaneuver even some funded competitors. But if you’re doing it right and you are maybe a first time entrepreneur and you’re just trying to get out of the day job, you should have picked a niche that really isn’t interesting to funded competition. We talked about it in our very early episodes probably in the first 5 or 10 about how to pick a niche where there really isn’t going to be a ton of competition to go pretty vertical with it just to cut your teeth out.
[14:39] So if you listen to that and you build a niche website or a WordPress plug-in or some folks who’ve built mobile apps and had success or you just go vertical with a smaller low maintenance Saas app, those are going to be so uninteresting to VC back companies that the likelihood of this one happening is very low. But if you made the mistake and you chased the Inc magazine dream and you build something, let’s say today you’re building something involving Google glass or bit coin or it was Twitter clients and Facebook apps a few years ago, Facebook games. It was so obvious that the venture funded companies were just going to flood into their spaces, that’s just not something I would do as a bootstrapper right now unless you really have the wind at your back and you have several of the items from our founder test at your back to kind of push you forward and give you a competitive advance.
[15:24] Mike: The fifth side is that you have no idea how to reach your market and this can just be a lack of marketing experience but it could also be that you haven’t talked enough to your customers to really understand where it is that they would potentially find out about your products. So if you’re pretty seriously into your development cycle and you still don’t have any idea how to reach your market, it could be a time to re evaluate things and stop the development and focus more on the marketing side of things because if you’re not marketing a product, it doesn’t matter how good it is if nobody hears about it.
[15:55] Rob: Yeah you don’t have to know for sure how you’re going to reach them at a cost that is going to be profitable for your startup but you do have to have some ideas and you do have to have those sketched out I would say in a Google doc even if they’re just a bunch of bullet points but its simple tactical approaches. It’s blocking and tackling of online marketing and software marketing. These are things like SEO content marketing, paid acquisition, joint venture partnerships, email marketing. There are several main stays that everybody talks about but you need to look into specifics and learn how to do these things well before you launch a product.
[16:33] Because if you build this product and you launch it to crickets and then you’re sitting there scrambling, trying to get these things together, it really isn’t that helpful. There’s too much pressure on you to learn these things in real time. You want to absorb them over time and that’s why we talk about getting those early wins with maybe a smaller product to learn enough that you can then parlay that into a larger product.
[16:53] Mike: The sixth sign is that a lot of your initial assumptions are no longer correct or were never correct and you’re having trouble compensating. In some ways, this is good to have because it means that you’re actually learning about your target market and you’re understanding what it is that they need because there’s a difference between learning about it and truly understanding what their needs are for the product. But if you’re going back to your initial assumptions and let’s say that you laid out a bunch of things in terms of how many customers you were going to get and you estimated you’d get 100 new customers a month and it turns out that realistically you’re only going to get 5 or 10 then that’s something that you need to look at and say is this business sustainable?
[17:31] Am I going to be able to continue this business or is it something that you’re still going to be able to work on even if it’s only for 5 or 10 customers a month? Is it still worth it for you to continue? Because at some point, there’s going to be a time where it is not worth it to continue but you have to understand based on which assumptions were faulty as to whether or not it’s worth continuing.
[17:54] Rob: What are some examples of initial assumptions being incorrect that you can think of?
[17:59] Mike: I’ve talked about this little in the past but one of the ones that I ran into with Audit Shark was that my initial target market was going to be banks because I did all the research and I figured out how many banks there were and what the approximate branch sizes were and everything. And I went and started talking to them and initially everything looked like it was good but then later on as I started building things and started talking to them a little bit more, I came to realize that what happened was I didn’t ask enough of about their accusation process so what turned out to be a situation where I thought I was going to be able to go to these banks directly and sell them the software turns out that was not going to be the case.
[18:34] What I would need to do is I would essentially need to go to consulting companies who then resold to the banks and I would essentially have to have some sort of reseller network and I’d have to sell through the consultants and I would have to sell it to the consultants who would then sell to the banks. And they may not even want to do that. Eventually I ended up coming to the point where I just said this is not the direction I want to go. Let me find a new direction. So in that case I didn’t completely walkway. I just said let me pivot. Pivoting is perfectly acceptable but that was one of the faulty assumptions was that I thought I’d be able to go direct to the banks and sell them the software. The other assumption that I had was that the banks actually cared about security. That turned out to be false as well.
[19:13] Rob: Apparently they don’t.
[19:14] Mike: No they don’t.
[19:15] Rob: There’s like a market pivot where you keep basically the same product and you just find a new market for it. I never called that pivot. I just called that learning like learning my marketing, honing my marketing. But yeah, I would agree with you. I don’t think a market pivot is that big of a deal. I probably done it with most of my apps.
[19:30] Mike: The seventh sine is that your beta uses aren’t using the products and if you have invited a bunch of people and they’re just not taking you up on the offer, then you need to find out what the fundamental problem is. Is it because they weren’t qualified well enough out-front? Is it not something that they’re actually having a problem with? Is it something that they can’t justify the time to spend on? Is it too complicated? Do they not just understand what it is that they’re supposed to be doing or what your expectations are for them?
[19:58] So there’s a lot of things that could be going wrong but at the end of the day you have to figure out what those things are and truly understand why it is that they’re not using the product. Because if nobody’s using the product and presumably in a beta, they’re probably using it for free. But if they’re not using it when it’s free, they’re definitely not going to use it when it’s paid so you have to find out what the problem is.
[20:17] Rob: I typically see this as being one of two things. Either you are not solving your user’s problems or you are not convincing them that you will solve their problem well enough for them to go through the effort of getting setup. And that’s two very different issues of whether you need to focus on building out more features or focusing on specific part of your product. The first one is pretty easy to figure out right? Because you just ask everybody is this solving a problem and then they’ll tell you why it’s not and you can build more features.
[20:48] The second one’s a little harder because if you’re not able to convince them that you are solving their problem so they can get over that setup hump, that initial on boarding experience is just too painful, then you need to think about alright, so do I need to make my marketing better? Do I need to convey the value proposition differently or convey it better? I’m not a good enough marketer to do this right now? Do I need to pivot it? do I need to not pivot the whole thing but just pivot the message to a different message or do you need to sit down and spend a lot of time on your on boarding process and try to either automate that or try to do a concierge on boarding to reduce the friction of folks getting value out of your product.
[21:25] Needless to say I have recent experience doing the latter, a lot of the latter, improving the on boarding process with Drip. We spent a lot of time on it both clarifying the value, I’m still in the process of that and then making the on boarding process both a simple wizard in the app itself and offering the concierge service. I know all of those things have contributed towards a pretty high number of our folks getting fully activated as we call meaning that they’re actually at a point where they should be receiving value from the app.
[21:59] And if they aren’t, then there’s something else of play either once they’re on board, if they aren’t getting value then it typically means that your app isn’t giving them all they need and that’s when you again go back to number 1 and you start looking at which features or what elements do I need to add in order to really solve the users problem?
[22:17] Mike: A somewhat related sign is number eight in which your beta users are saying that they would pay for it if the price were X and X is probably a lot less than what it is that you’re asking for the product. So at that point, it kind of ties back into one of your initial assumptions which was people will pay X dollars for it and they say well, I wouldn’t pay $50 a month for this but I might pay 10. If that number starts to dip too low then you have to evaluate whether the person who’s saying that is even a good fit for the product or whether they are a good fit and as Rob just said, if you’re not solving their problem in a way that they need or you’re not solving the problem the way that they need or that it needs to be solved for them so that it actually justifies the value, maybe there’s some extra steps that although you do solve part of the problem, there’s some other things that if you did those as well that it would be exponentially more valuable to them.
[23:0] There’s a lot of different things that go along with that but ultimately if they are coming back to you and saying that there’s a price issue of some kind, you may need to reevaluate what that price issue is and look at whether the price needs to be lower, do you need to modify your pricing tiers a little bit? That’s actually something that I’m looking at and evaluating right now is that the pricing tiers in how I offer Audit Shark. It’s a process you have to talk to the customers to find out and you have to talk to enough of them. You can’t just to talk to 1, 2, 3, you got to talk to a lot of people to figure out whether or not you actually have a pricing problem that is just too related versus the amount that you’re asking is not justifiable in their minds.
[23:49] Rob: Yeah. That’s where pricing is a tough one because you can either be priced too high or you are going after the wrong market because if you go after bloggers as an example, they don’t want to pay very much. They expect everything to be free. Whereas if you go after small businesses or enterprises, they tend to be willing to pay more and say you can have a higher price, you need to provide more value to them. So it could just be a market thing. You’re always going to have some people telling you that you’re priced too high but it should be a minority as soon as you get a lot of your beta users telling you that you know you have either a market problem or potentially a pricing issue. I think both of these last two signs that we’ve mentioned, the fact that your beta users aren’t using the product or that they’re all saying it would be too expensive.
[24:31] Neither of these is a reason to walk away from a product. I think only if these become unsolvable. Only if you iterate on them multiple times. They aren’t using the products so you redo your on boarding event features, still not using the products so you take another attack, you add concierge, still not using the product. I mean this takes some iteration. It’s not a first time it happens you turn your hands up and walk away. Same thing with pricing. It’s really about moving quickly and making changes and testing and figuring out what you can find that works but only after numerous tries and still nothing’s working then this does become a red flag.
[25:03] Mike: The ninth sign is that your life goals have changed and by life goals, I really mean if you decide at some point that you don’t necessarily want to own your own business anymore, if you’ve been building a product because you felt it was the direction for you to go and then you wake up one day and say well, you know what? There’s other things that I want to do in my life and I’m perfectly content having a full time job. Then bravo. I mean there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly okay and acceptable to say you know what, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to do that anymore or whether it’s living a location independent lifestyle or getting married and settling down at a given location something along those lines or if you decide that you hate computers because they change every two minutes.
[25:47] There’s plenty of reasons to decide that you don’t want to go in that particular direction and it could be that product just doesn’t fit in with your life goals anymore and that’s definitely one of the better reasons is think to walk away from product development than anything else.
[26:02] Rob: Yeah. I would agree. I think if this were to happen that you wouldn’t want it to happen just one day. You’d want it to be this feeling that comes at you overtime and that you probably have a realization one day and like wow that’s why I’ve been feeling this way about the product. I would then, if it were happening to me, I would then try to take a step back and get some time alone even if it was just for a four block one day but ideally be for a day or two to really clear your head and try to take a look at what it is that you want to do instead if you just want to simplify your life and if you can figure out ways to be basically be happy without a product that’s kind of what you’re feeling.
[26:43] There are a lot of ways to go about it and there’s a lot of stress trying to get a product launched and I think that could make you feel like perhaps it’s not in your life goal but I think it takes really some hardcore soul searching and some evaluation of which direction you want to go. And I think realizing that the decision is not permanent as well is probably a good thing. But putting a time frame on it, I would say hey, I can be happy without a product or one year or two years not a bad thing for a lot of people especially if you’re just at a point where it’s causing more trouble than your life is able to handle at that point.
[27:17] I think that leads us well into the tenth sign you should walk away from a project and that’s that your life situation has changed. I think this is a pretty common one that causes people to either want to start a product or want to close down a product is to get married or to have a child or to move or to sell a house, by a house, have a death in the family, there’s all these things that can happen to you and it changes your situation so dramatically that it’s time to almost reevaluate most of your major life choices and frankly launching a product can be one of those things that you need to reevaluate. So I can see this being a very solid reason for walking away from a project that you’re in the middle of.
[27:59] Mike: Yeah. All the things that you just listed, getting married or moving or getting a new job, all those things, they’re very stressful things and when you throw in launching a product on top of it or something eventually’s got to give. And if it’s the product, so be it. I don’t think There’s anything wrong with walking away from those things and I think that Rob made a very, very good point which is it doesn’t have to be permanent and that’s something you have to recognize. You can walk away from development of a product for a while and then once you cleared your head, once your life has kind of calm down a little bit, you can reevaluate that and say is that something that I still really want to do and come back to it in the future.
[28:38] Because if you’ve been working on code and the sales and marketing and stuff, it’s not like that stuff just magically goes away overnight when it comes to your mailing list and stuff, it might be a little bit hard to restart those things especially if you’ve grown one very, very large but presumably if you’ve been doing that, then the products is well on its way to success but if you’re struggling with the product in any way, shape or form and then you have these life situations that drastically alters where you are, you may want to walkway and at least for a little while and then clear your head and then come back to in the future.
[29:11] That takes us into number 11 which is fear of judgment from your friends or family or peers if you quit. If the only reason that you’re still working on that product is because your friends or family may think poorly of you because you quit something, it’s definitely something to take into mind when you are deciding whether or not to quit but it could be affecting your motivation as well because if that’s always in the back of your mind you’re going to have those thoughts, you’re going to have a lot of doubts about whether or not you should be continuing or whether like I said, the only reason you could be continuing is because you’re afraid of what your friends and family are going to think if you do quit.
[29:47] Rob: Yeah, the emotional parts of any decision are always the hardest. They complain to you, I mean this is like when you’re in high school and you’re considering whether to breakup with someone, it’s like you can write a pro-cons list but there’s always that relationship that really ties you to it and makes you struggle internally if you know it’s the right decision. It’s hard. Fair judgment is something that I think we all live with. What I found is the less that I judge other people in my head, the less I fear others judgment because I just forget that people do that. It’s always going to be an issue of course but I think it’s a good point that if the only reason that you’re sticking around that you can’t write any other pros down for continuing the app is that you’re scared that people will judge you then that’s probably a bad sign.
[30:28] And actually I think that leads us into number 12, our final point. And it’s that if you don’t have a good reason to continue working on your product other than sunk cost, other than the fact that oh I’ve spent six months working and I’ve spent two years working on it, if that’s it, if that’s the only reason you can think of, then you kind of have a problem. Right? There needs to be some other pretty prominent positive reasons for continuing to do this, some positive prospects for it other than just avoiding sunk cost.
[30:57] Mike: I feel like sunk cost get a lot of people because seems like it goes against human nature to put a lot of effort or time or money into something and then just walkway from it. It’s incredibly hard to do I think. I think that’s why you end up with these people who have gambling addictions for example. It’s like if I just do a little bit more, I’ll get out of this hole. It doesn’t necessarily workout that way. Similarly when you’re putting all this time and effort into something and you’ve gotten several thousand or tens of thousands of lines of code written and you look at it and you really don’t necessarily have anything to show for it except for all this code that you’ve written that either half works or the product mostly works and you still don’t have a market for it, it can be difficult to justify why you spent all that time and energy trying to build a product and ultimately it’s just not going to work out.
[31:47] And no matter how hard you try it could be that it’s just not going to work out and at those times, it’s better to cut your losses and walkway and either try something new or just kind of go down a different path than it is to continue sinking good time and energy after that.
[32:01] Rob: Yeah and this is hard to do. I’ve had to do it myself with multiple products I think 3 or 4 different ones come to mind. One of them was an eBook I wrote myself and tried to sell probably in 2006-2007 from my blog. It was about how to become a programmer and tried all types of crazy things and really it just wasn’t a good market. But I kept going after that and pivoting and iterating and doing all this stuff and just nothing really ever came of it and I eventually had dumped it and I certainly felt bad about the time I invested. And then I have a couple others, they were a couple two software products. One was a niche website, one was a software product and then eBook and those I acquired and so there was a real sunk cost of actual money. Luckily none of them was substantial. It was in the few thousand dollar range but eventually I wound up closing all of them.
[32:49] I’ve chalked it up to learning since then. Those were in the midst of I’ve had some success. Everything’s not a success and I’m still figuring things out in retrospect. I don’t think any of them would’ve ever been a real earner and really worth pursuing. So I know that this is a hard decision to make especially in the moment. If it’s the only reason you can think of to continue with your product then that’s not really a very good reason to do so.
[33:13] Music
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Episode 170 | 12 Strategies for Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome
Show Notes
In the moment
- Site blockers – Chrome extensions called StayFocused, ProductivityOwl
- Pause your email – InboxPause – same guys who make Boomerang
- Use triggers to get in the zone – loop the same song or playlist and work. That playlist will become synonymous with getting into the zone. Rob mentioned he’s recently been looping Lonesome Dreams by Lord Huron, and he’s also been known to endlessly loop pop punk songs.
- Pomodoro technique. Taking it even further: http://impossiblehq.com/workstation-popcorn
- RescueTime
- Timeboxing – Marketing Monday
Long-term
- Make an annual plan. Then break it down by quarter. Then by month. If you say “yes” to anything not on the plan…realize that you are bumping something.
- Weekly reflection on what you’re doing and why.
- Mastermind group accountability
- Focus on 1 thing at a time, and maybe (big maybe) a secondary, less important, side project. Anyone I’ve known who does more is chronically not completing things.
- Learn the difference between productivity and entertainment – examples: HN, Seth Godin Books, Malcolm Gladwell Books
- Temporary information diet
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discussed 12 strategies for avoiding shiny object syndrome. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 170.
[00:09] Music
[00:17] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:26] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[000:27] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Mike?
[00:32] Mike: I was looking through some of the comments that are left on startupsfortherestofus.com and there’s a recent one there from Mark Studebaker who says another solid episode guys. One thing I do to help get myself going with just coding is to always leave or find something easy to do. Sit down. Knock it out, it puts me in gear.
[00:49] Rob: I find that if I have an easy task that it will be a good on ramp for me to kind of get working and get focused but I’ve never intentionally left an easy task at the end and I think that’s a pretty good tip. That was to assist with a question that we answered a couple of episodes ago about staying focused and being motivated.
[01:07] Mike: So what’s up with you this week?
[01:09] Rob: I’m still struggling with this having too much work to do and having too many simultaneous tasks on my plate and I think we’ll touch on that in this episode when we talk about shiny object syndrome. I’m looking to see how quickly I can get out from under these I think. The fact that MicroConf is hopefully the planning begins to wrap up here in the next month or so and then my never ending quest to revamp HitTail and get it working again at full capacity is probably still a week maybe two out but I’m making a lot of progress on that over the last couple of days.
[01:40] And if I can get those things off my plate, I will be a much happier person because right now I’m frankly not very pleasant to be around and so kind of just labeling it as the struggling me I’m not nearly as say happy with work like I was even six months ago.
[01:56] Mike: I think part of the problem is you tend to be distracted at all times as well because you can’t even just sit there and have dinner without your mind wandering to all the other things that you have to do. You can’t necessarily focus on whatever the task is that you’re currently working on just because your brain is constantly thinking about all the other things that you also have to do.
[02:14] Rob: That’s right. And there are people who live in that perpetually and I’m not one of them. Most of my time, I am focused in one or two tasks and in general I don’t feel this way. So when I get into this kind of chaos, this mental chaos, definitely a shock to the system and it’s something I want to get out of as soon as possible because I find it being frankly not that productive. And the sooner I can get out of it and kind of get back to the old more controlled way of doing I think the better off I am.
[02:42] So we have 325 worldwide iTunes reviews now across looks like about 18 countries and thanks to comment cast for giving us the ability to see that. But we have a review from Bar Assam he says great focused podcast on starting your own business without venture capital. I’ve learned a great deal by listening to all the episodes. And our other one is from ASDF0987 he says weekend, week out these guys deliver the gold. I love following along as they talk about their experiences developing their businesses. Thank you so much guys.
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[03:23] Music
[03:27] This week are going to spend a whole episode answering a listener question. So listener Ryan Belong from Redding, California writes in and he says I’d love to hear some productivity or shiny object syndrome recovery tips on a podcast episode. As you know, entrepreneurs and startup folks are notorious for that especially in the tech space where not keeping up with the latest and greatest can cost you. So most of us have already formed bad habits that are counterproductive to building and growing a company.
[03:54] And when he says shiny object syndrome he just means seeing the next shiny object and basically walking away from what you’re doing now and putting too much on your plate. And as soon as you have 2, 4, 8 projects that you’re working on simultaneously, you can’t possibly be that efficient at it because you’re just splitting you time up too much and it becomes such a headache to manage.
[04:12] So today we’ve broken these 12 strategies for avoiding the shiny object syndrome into two sections. The first one is going to be in the moment. So it’s like how to get focused in the moment? And then the second half is going to be talking about longer term focus strategies, motivation strategies and that kind of stuff. And these are taken almost exclusively from our own experience. A couple of them have been referred to me and I don’t use them but I know they’re popular and a lot of people do. And so we’re going to kick it off with our first in the moment strategy and is to use a site blocker.
[04:46] So there are a ton of these out there. There are chrome extensions. There’s stay focused and productivity owl. There’s a bunch of them that are free but it allows you to block websites either at specific times or for specific durations. The notorious ones for us would probably be hacker news, Twitter, it might be your Twitter client. it might be Facebook. Anything, Reddit, anything that draws your attention away and allows you to accidentally wander. You click one link and you’re reading something for work and suddenly you spent 30 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos or reading a bunch of the latest post about how jQuery can do this and that.
[05:21] That’s bad. It really impacts your flow. It impacts your productivity and so the use of site blockers is something that I know is pretty prevalent and finding one and getting it in place if you have this issue of wandering off I think is something that can help with your focus.
[05:36] Mike: I’ve always thought that the idea of a site blocker would be helpful but the actual implementation of them, what I would like to see for them is just kind of like a warning that just pops up that says hey you’re about to do stuff that is probably not your best interest, are you sure you want to go on? So that way it’s more of like a click here to continue and it kind of disrupts your flow of going off into the weeds as opposed to just blatantly stopping. Maybe it’s more of a gentler way of saying hey, more on you’re doing things you shouldn’t be.
[06:05] One that I found recently that I just love this thing already, I barely used it and its called inbox pause and it allows you to pause the email that’s coming into your Gmail account. What it does is it takes all the incoming email and automatically sets it to a specific label. And then when you unpause, it will take all of those things and will put them back into your mail box says unread basically removing that label. And it comes from the same guys who make Boomerang.
[06:32] It’s just a little Gmail plug-in. You click pause and you can click unpause and your email has been queued up. It pops back to your mailbox. And to be perfectly honest, an email from me is probably a much bigger problem than going off to random websites because I really do need to be in my email and do a lot of stuff in there and it’s very distracting to know that there are emails that are probably still coming in that I have to deal with. So for me, to be able to just block my email for time periods of say a couple of hours, I know that if I go back and check my email, there’s not going to be anything there unless I go and unpause it.
[07:05] Rob: I like that one as well. I haven’t used it but it’s something I’ll be installing when we get done with the show. Next idea, and this is something I’ve used a lot and I’ve ramped it up and actually gotten better out of it over the years but it’s to use triggers to get you in the zone and to get you focused at the start of the day. About 5-6 years ago, I used to start everyday when I’d sit down to write code and I would turn on either a podcast or NPR, some type of talk radio and that always shifted my focus. It became synonymous with me starting to work.
[07:35] These days, since I’m doing a lot of stuff where I need the language center of my brain because I’m writing copy or writing emails, I need to do it via music. But what I found is that if I found a new song, if I hear a new song that I haven’t heard a bunch and I really like that song, I will sit down and loop that song, just that song, not a playlist but just that song over and over for a couple of hours while I work and I find that especially if I’m doing some coding or something and I can kind of get into a real heavy zone with, that song then becomes a trigger for me to get in the zone and it will last for weeks if not months depending on it. At a certain point you do just get sick of the song and you can’t listen to it anymore.
[08:12] but taking a new song and using it in that fashion will trigger parts of your brain that will allow you almost instantly to go into work mode. And I ran into some issues where I did this with a couple of songs. There’s a really good song called lonesome dreams by Lord Huron that I did it with and I probably listen to this song 600 or 700 times in a course of a few weeks. And we were at a friend’s house hanging out listening to Pandora and the song came on and I no joke totally started thinking about work and my to-do list came up in my head and it just triggered even though we’re sitting around having drinks and chatting. So use this one with caution for sure.
[08:46] I’ve also found this works with certain playlist of the music is all of the similar style. So I’ll put songs back to back to back with heavy driving drum beats or heavy driving guitar. You can have different playlists of these things and loop these. I find that it’s not as powerful as that single song but it does last longer because that playlist won’t burn itself out because you have a little more variety.
[09:08] Mike: Yeah. In iTunes I have a specific playlist called programming music and it just allows me to get into the zone and just really focus on whatever it is that I’m working on. I can use it for just about anything where I need to really think in depth about a particular problem. I feel like it works much better for things that are I’ll say not as creative because with creative stuff I kind of need to not be as driven. So if I’m doing coding, I’m actively thinking about a very specific problem that probably has a very specific solution versus being a little bit more creative with creating emails and stuff where that tempo has to be turned much further down so it doesn’t help me as much for those types of tasks. But for program it works really, really well.
[09:50] Rob: I’d agree with that. Yeah my playlist, I have a couple of them but I call them working.
[09:55] Mike: So the fourth one is using the pomodoro technique and I’ve talked about this a little bit before and the pomodoro technique there’s a lot of different iPhone apps that you can use or there’s even probably desktop apps or chrome plug-in that you can leverage but it’s really just a matter of picking one and it sets aside a time block for you to really get in the zone. And then after 25 minutes or so, and you can adjust the time a little bit but the default is typically 25 minutes you work and for 25 minutes then you take a 5 minute break and you work for 25 minutes, take another 5 minute break.
[10:26]And then after four of them, you take a much longer break which is usually 15 or 20 minutes and then you kind of go back into that so that way you’re doing blocks of work and about two hours at a time but you’re trying to squeeze as much as you can into these 25 minute increments called pomodoros. And I found that it works really well.
[10:43] Rob: Yeah and there’s a bunch of website tomato-dashtimer.com is a free one and it has just a 25 minute time where you can stop and start with a space bar. There’s plenty of options here for that. I’m seeing an interesting article. It’s actually just on hacker news right now. It’s on impossiblehq.com and he kind of takes this even further where he talks about how to become uber productive while working for yourself and he sits down at the beginning of a day and he breaks things up into three equal chunks of about 2 or 2.5 hours a piece and then he finds three locations to work from.
[11:16] So then he goes to this really killer coffee shop. He works there, just sprints for that 2.5 hours and I’m trying to see if he actually does pomodoro and just does 30 minute sprints or if he does the whole 2.5 but either way he gets that group done, then he puts on his iPod and he cranks up loud music and he goes to the next station. He says it’s ideal if you have to walk, ride a bike, do something physical to get do that next place that it’s actually not just another seat in the same coffee shop but it’s another coffee shop block or two up the road. And then he does that three times and he says it’s just incredibly productive for him.
[11:53] I’ve never tried this but I’m really interested to try this. I have accidentally or kind of just by virtue of schedule I have needed to bounce around to different work locations the same day a few times and I have found that it does make my mind not get stock in a rut. It adds to like the creativity or at least the ability to kind of see problems with a new view and not get stuck in the demotivational thing of sitting in the same bedroom for 8 hours straight.
[12:20] Mike: So the next one on our list is rescue time and rescue time is a Saas application that you can install and you put it on your desktop or your laptop and essentially what it does is it looks at the processes that are running on your machine and it will figure out what it is you’re doing and what you’re spending your time on. And then at the end of the week it will email you a report and will show you essentially where you’ve spent your time throughout the course of the week. So if you’ve spent a lot of time in visual studio, it will show you that. If you spent a lot of time on hacker news it will show you that as well.
[12:51] And then based on the type of takes that you are performing, it will assign a score to the task that you are doing because there are certain tasks that are considered very much work oriented. So for example, sitting in your compiler is probably very, very much work oriented. You’re not doing that too much outside of things you’re supposed to be doing. And then there’s things that you’re doing for example inside of a web browser that it could go either way. So being in your compiler might be worth say 2 points per minute and being in your web browser on a programming website might be 1 point, might 2 points, it kind of depends on the website.
[13:24] And then there are other websites where if you’re on that website its very, very bad and its definitely not work related. So things like YouTube are probably minus 2 for example. Hacker news I probably minus 2 but if your job is to do social media for example you might spend a lot of time on hacker news because you have to as part of your job and that’s you’re trying to get social traction on your website and different stories that you’re trying to promote. So you can customize it a little bit but what I found was it tended to be a little bit of work for me because of all the different things that I do I ended up kind of adjusting the different point values quite a bit based on the weeks that I was working just.
[14:07] Because some weeks I would be doing a lot of promotion so if I‘m doing those types of things then I have to bump up to the points that lean on those different websites as work. And then if you’re doing things like Facebook ads for example being on Facebook should theoretically be minus 2 but at the same time if you’re doing Facebook ads, you kind of have to be on Facebook in order to run them. So it can be a little bit of a struggle or a challenge in some of those cases but for the most part, if you’re really looking for a good cross section of where you currently spend your time, rescue time is definitely a good place to start looking because it will give you that snapshot.
[14:38] Rob: Our next strategy for avoiding shiny object syndrome is time boxing and I actually just did one of these. I had a task that I thought was going to take me an hour and I sat down 30 minutes before you and I had a deadline to talk and I just cranked on this thing and did it very fast like way faster than I thought. I’m pretty pleased with getting it done.
[14:59] And there’s other ways to do this time boxing. You can time box on a calendar. You can just look at 4 to 5 things you need to get done in a day, the larger picture things and put in 30-45 minutes, 1 hour for each of them. You do a quick estimate and you just pack out your calendar for the day and you only give yourself that much time to do it. Unless it’s absolutely critical that it be at a certain level of quality, I mean you crank until the time is up and then you send it off. I’ve used this for just success. I don’t use it all the time. I use it when I feel like I’m bloating my tasks and when I feel like I‘m in that rut and I am losing focus. I will resort to basically one or most of these tactics that we’ve named so far.
[15:41] Mike: One of the time boxing techniques that I’ve talked about in the past is using marketing Monday and just dedicating all of your marketing tasks for one specific day of the week. I think that helps a lot of people just because of the fact that a lot of the marketing tasks take time to see the results so if you kind of box all those in to one particular day of the week and then you don’t come back to it for another week, then by that time you’ll have presumably started to see some of the results and you can act on those the following week. But marketing Monday is definitely an example of one of the time boxing techniques.
[16:15] Rob: Now we’re going to take a look at a handful of more longer term ways to avoid shiny object syndrome and to stay focused. The first one that I‘m going to talk about is something that I’ve done every year for the past 3 or 4 years and it’s to make an annual plan. Look out at the next year and figure out what is it that you want to accomplish. What handful of things high level big picture goals do you want to accomplish? Then break it down by quarter and then if possible, if necessary, break it down by month.
[16:44] What this does is makes you realize that your year is packed with really interesting stuff that you chose at the beginning of the year. And it’s not that you can’t change from this. It’s not that you can’t say yes to something else but if you say yes to anything that’s not on that plan, you need to realize that you’re going to be bumping something else on your list and that becomes a deliberate decision because I see a lot of folks who especially us, founders and entrepreneurs, we start doing one task. We start doing one project and then either we hear about a new technology or someone brings an offer to hey, you want to be a cofounder of this? You want to just help me out? You want to do some consulting?
[17:19] These things come up and if you don’t have any type of say a time boxed year or any type of annual plan where you’re really trying to get stuff done that’s going to move your forward, you will wander all over the place. That’s just our tendency. And so making this annual plan is something I think is very important. It’s something I think a lot of people do not do and think it’s been a big mover for me to take – I typically look back at the previous year. I look at what I enjoy doing, what I didn’t enjoy. I look at what revenue it was. How much it grew, where I wanted to be in next year and then how I’m going to make that happen, try to make it as realistic as possible.
[17:55] Because I do this during typically a two day retreat that I take away from the family and it allows me to purely focus, I don’t check email during this time. I try to do paper and pen. Sometimes I use my iPad for things but in general I spend the days at coffee shops walking, thinking, I have a list of questions I’m trying to answer for myself, looking backwards and at the coming year. By the time I come out of that, I tend to have a really tight vision of what the next year is going to look like, what I want out of it, I say no to a lot of things after that. You might think oh that locks you in not taking advantage of opportunity. That’s not true. I have taken advantage of opportunity and you still can but that opportunity better be really, really good that one of the other 4 or 5 things that you have on that annual plan is going to get bumped and that it’s worth it to you to do that.
[18:42] Mike: But when you do that, do you kind of assign time blocks to each of those things that you kind of estimate that it’s going to take or do you just kind of wing it in terms of ball park like oh I think this will take about one quarter to finish. How far down do you go in terms of blocking it out or trying to make sure that the time estimates for a lot of those things are accurate?
[19:02] Rob: I don’t go that deep into the time estimates. What I do is I know that certain things like MicroConf have a tight deadline. It’s a definite deadline and then other things I will say – you know last year I said I want to get Drip out in the spring and I think I even said it was like by April 1 because MicroConf was at the end of April. And so I’ll throw that out as a deadline and realize whoa, suddenly I’m planning MicroConf and building Drip and I was still growing HitTail and realized that’s a lot. I really can’t take on anything else.
[19:28] Now Drip was pushed out. I didn’t launched ‘til quarter 3 that’s okay. I can live with that. I mean there are other reasons it didn’t launch. It wasn’t because I lost focus. it was just coz there’s a lot of work to do. But I’m in the same position again this year. I have four things going on right now and that’s not really not ideal but I’m seeing that two of them hopefully will be off my plate in the next couple of months and that it should free me up for the remainder for the year.
[19:53] But when I say month by month, I do try to plan which month something’s going to be done and then the month to month typically is if I’m talking about revenue goals, there’s a few other goals that I do break down and it just helps to not say I want to be at $50,000 a month by the end of the year. But it helps to break it down into how fast do I need to grow in order to get to that $50,000 goal.
[20:11] Mike: I think an approach that I’ve kind of gravitated towards is doing kind of a weekly reflection of what it is that you’re doing and why. And at the end of any given week, maybe this is more of a reactive strategy than a preventive strategy. I kind of look back at the previous week and previous month at the end of each week and say is this what I’m supposed to be doing? is this actually helping me? Is this moving things forward? And if it’s not, look at the things that need to be done in order to change that. I think it was Steve Jobs who at one point basically said I look in the mirror everyday and decide if today was the last day of my life, would I be happy doing what I’m doing today? And if there’s too many days in a row where the answer is no, then something’s got to change.
[20:56] Rob: Our next strategy for avoiding shiny object syndrome is mastermind group accountability. It’s having other people who are invested in your story who you’re talking with fairly frequently, keeping you accountable to not wandering around and not jumping on other ideas and objects. I got to be honest. I’ve had several points over the past say 3.5 years since I’ve been part of mastermind groups where I have had to convince the other people in my mastermind group that I was going to do something and that they pushed back and said why are you doing this? Give me a reason. And I did and I was able to – it helped me think it through. It helped them understand really why I had to do that. Why I wasn’t just going to sit there and work on that singe app for the next 10 years like other folks had.
[21:41] Mike: I think the mastermind group accountability, I think this really, really helps when you’ve got things going on that are not necessarily obviously to the average lay person because 1) you just can’t divulge certain types of information. In a mastermind group, you can. You can lay down all your cards on the table and you could say this is why I’m doing X, Y and Z and although it doesn’t make sense why I’m doing Z right now when I get done with X and Y then its going to make sense.
[22:10] The next one is to focus on one thing at a time. If you have a smaller secondary or less important side projects then you might want to take those and push them to the side a lot more and focus on your primary project. If you have a salary and a side project then you could kind of couple those together if you’re doing consulting or you’re building a product. There’s lots of different ways to combine kind of like your primary source of income and then something else that you’re building on the side or doing on the side but if they are competing too much with one another, one of them has got to give. And it’s okay to set aside your full time job in favor of a side project that you’re working to build up in an effort to supplant your full time job but you have to do that as a conscious effort.
[22:53] And when you start taking on more than one or two major tasks at a time, something’s got to give. So as you start going down the road where you’re building two side projects or three side projects, it’s ultimately going to end up a scenario where some thing’s going to fall on the floor because you can’t reasonably sub stand those for too lengthy a period of time before things just start to fall apart.
[23:18] Rob: Everyone I know who takes on more than one major project plus a small side winds up chronically not completing things. They just have a bunch of stuff sitting around that never gets done, never gets launched and winds up being a huge waste of time. If you abandon something because it’s not a good idea, then that’s okay. That’s justified. But if you abandon stuff because you just don’t have time because you just wander from one thing to the next, you’re never going to make any progress towards your goal. It’s pretty sad to be honest because I know some talented people who aren’t getting there and it’s not because they couldn’t get there if they focused but it’s because they’re just taking on too many fun things frankly.
[23:59] Next strategy we’re going to talk about is learning the difference between productivity and entertainment. I think there’s a lot of confusion. Some people think that let’s say being on hacker news is actually being productive or reading Seth Godin books, Purple Cow, Linchpin, love all these books. they’re not productivity though. you’re not actually moving your business forward. You may be learning something, maybe learning a lesson but I never once kidded myself that I was being productive while I was listening to it or pushing my business forward or even learning a lesson that was really going to make that much of a difference in my business.
[24:32] You might learn something ancillary but it’s so different than either sitting down to write some copy, to make a cold call, to setup a new ad campaign, to build out SEO, those are the things that push your business forward or even learning about those things in a very specific and defied way. Jeremy from the internet business mastery podcast calls this just in time learning. I’ve always liked that phrase. When I sit down, let’s say I’m going to take on a new ad network or I’m going to try a new SEO technique. That moment, that’s when I’m going to learn that technique.
[25:04] I have stopped listening to highly tactical podcast or reading highly technical blog articles that I’m not going to put into use in maybe the next week, maybe two because I can always find them later. Search engines are pretty good these days and what I found is that I was consuming so much information about putting 1/10th of it to use and by the time I put it to use, I had forgotten what I had read anyway because I had put so much information in my head.
[25:30] So I think the bottom line for this one is to not consume tactical information until you’re ready to use that tactic and to really learn that difference between productivity and entertainment and its okay to do entertainment. I listen to a lot of podcasts but I know that I’m doing it for fun and I read a lot of business books and I know that business books are not going to push my business forward. It’s much more of a form of entertainment than of actually being productive and driving my business forward.
[25:56] Mike: One of the things that I’ve found that kind of helps me differentiate and draw solid line between productively and entertainment is to gravitate more towards books that are clearly not productivity. I don’t tend to read business books anymore. I used to. I used to read a lot of them and then I got to the point where I realized that a lot of these things are more entertainment than education. So it’s not helping me move my business forward so why am I spending my time on that? Why don’t I spend my time doing stuff that for example would help me sleep at night? So what I’ll do is I’ll read science fiction novels at night on my kindle.
[26:31] And what it does is it actually helps me sleep better because then I’m reading stuff that is – I’ll say in some ways mindless because it’s not like I will think a lot about it. It’s not like I’ll try and glean some lesson from the story that I’ll try to apply to my business. if it’s just some science fiction novel that I’m reading, I can close a chapter and go to bed and I’m not dwelling on it a lot.
[26:52] Another strategy you can use is going on a temporary information diet and kind of like the difference between knowing what is productive versus what is entertainment, you can take a look at the website you’re reading whether its hacker news or Twitter pruning down your RSS lists, pruning down your podcast list. I’ve actually pruned my podcast list down to about half a dozen and I will alternate back and forth between them because quite frankly I don’t necessarily get a lot out of most of them anymore. So there’s only so many lessons that you can learn. There’s so many different ways that you can hear a specific piece of information before you’ve kind of really understand it.
[27:28] If you need to prune back on that stuff especially if you’re doing it temporarily because you really need to buckle down, then put a hard limit on what your RSS looks like or your podcast looks like. Maybe it’s a 5, maybe it’s a 10 maybe it’s a 20 but make sure that you put a limit on there so that you don’t feel like you have to go listen to them. And then one of the things that you’ll find is when you start limiting these types of things, part of the reason you want to put a hard limit on those is coz you’re going to start to feel pressure if you just let them build up. And this happens especially with RSS feeds. I found that this happened to me when I started to neglect my RSS feeds and not mark things as red and not actually go through them.
[28:07] I actually felt pressure to go in and read those because it almost felt like my to-do list was expanding. And it was in a weird way it was kind of stressful because I’m like oh, I’ve got all these things that I’ve subscribed to. I really should be reading these things and instead of letting those things build up, just trim them. Just get rid of them completely so that they’re not there and contributing to your to-do list.
[28:28] Rob: Yeah. I’m a big fan of information diets and when I’m on a big push like this quarter as an example, I backed way off on the amount of stuff I consume. And then at other times like let’s say I have a quarter later in the year that’s more relaxing and I hope to get there and intentionally make it just a more relaxed three months, I will push in and I’ll lean in to the stuff that’s coming out through my RSS feed and my podcast list and anything else. I’ll listen to a lot more books and such because I feel like that’s the time when I’m going to recharge and get new ideas and new concepts into my mind but I see it as an ebb and flow. So I like the concept that it’s a temporary information diet. I don’t feel like I need a permanent one.
[29:07] The other thing is I’m a little different than you with the podcast subscriptions. You have six and that’s pretty impressive. I probably have somewhere in the neighbor of between 50 and 80 that I subscribe to. But I’m listening to them every day at different times when I’m making dinner and doing dishes and such and anything that doesn’t look interesting or anything that’s not keeping my attention, I’m deleting. And so my actual queue of unlistened to episodes tends to be less than 5 because I keep that thing really prune. And even if I go away for a few days and don’t listen, I’ll come back. And the longer shows that are really just more entertaining I’ll just nuke those things and I’ll just keep the ones that I really want to follow the story of. Those are the two ways. It depends on your personality I believe.
[29:50] I’m able to kind of manage it and go in. now, I don’t do that with RSS though. RSS I just want to keep the list small and I pretty much ready everything that comes through. But with podcast I feel like I’m picking kind of the gems, the diamonds in the rough that may come through in this big swarm of new episodes just coming out every day.
[30:08] Mike: Yeah. I’m completely opposite when it comes to podcast. I feel like I’d rather stick with a couple that I really enjoy versus trying to sift through them and figure out which episodes I want to keep and which ones I don’t. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell. I feel like there’s certain episodes that you may very well get a lot out of but it’s hard to know until you’ve already listened to it I guess.
[30:28] Rob: I can typically tell. Assuming it’s going to be a single topic, it’s not a new show that’s going to bounce around, I’ll give some 3-5 minutes and that’s at time and a half speed. And if I’m in doubt, I delete it. The odds of me missing some gem that’s just going to change my business is very, very low. Typically I’m listening to it to figure out the continuity of the story and to hear some news and that kind of stuff. So I think either way will work and it’s just about knowing yourself and knowing what works best for you.
[30:56] So to recap, our 12 strategies for avoiding shiny object syndrome are to use site blockers, to pause your email, to use triggers to get in the zone, using the pomodoro technique, using rescue time, and time boxing. And our long term strategies are to make an annual plan, have weekly reflection on what you’re doing and why, have mastermind group accountability, focus on thing at a time, learn the difference between productivity and entertainment and go on a temporary information diet.
[31:25] Mike: If you have question for us, you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at question questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 169 | Getting Testimonials, Getting Inspired and Competing on Price
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: In this episode, Rob and I are going to be talking about getting testimonials, getting inspired and competing on price. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 169.
[00:08] Music
[00:16] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:25] Mike: And I’m Rob.
[00:26] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Rob?
[00:30] Rob: The word is don’t focus on more than one thing at a time. So I have a lot of apps. I have a portfolio of both training courses and the conference we run and the podcasts but I don’t tend to focus on more than one time. The exception is when MicroConf is coming up and I’m working on a single app. But for some reason I’m finding myself doing four things at once right now and it is nuts like it is really hard to keep up. I am either dropping the ball on things or I find myself staying up ‘til 1 in the morning just trying to keep ahead of the flow of tasks and emails and approval and stuff.
[01:08] Initially it was just supposed to be Drip this whole year. 2014 was going to be Drip and then planning to do two MicroConfs, one in Vegas, one in Europe. HitTail snuck in there because Google made exchanges not provided about 3 or 4 months ago and so now I’m trying to do a bunch of work on that and get the code written there and get things fixed up. And then we decided to do basically a revamp of the Micropreneur Academy. This has lead me down a path of doing too many things and so that’s kind of my thing for this quarter is to get out from under this and get back to a more sane working schedule because taking on too much is really just not fun.
[01:45] Mike: I totally know what you mean. I’m kind of in the same boat. Some of those things that I’m doing overlap because I’m obviously also involved in MicroConf and with the academy prelaunch and then there’s Audit Shark on my side of things plus I’ve got some consulting work that I’ve got going on right now. And you’re right. It’s an absolute nightmare. And I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that don’t happen in December that you would normally except to happen, they kind of get dumped into January.
[02:08] Rob: Yeah. I’m wondering that too. If it’s the time of year and if it will be gone in a few weeks. Since none of these things, I guess only one of my mine – hopefully HitTail is going to be fixed here in the next week or two and if that’s the case then I cross one off my list and things will ease up but aside from that, or things on your list, you expect them go away soon or are they going to be around until April?
[02:29] Mike: I think most of them will go away soon. Maybe it just feels more like I didn’t necessarily work on them as much in December. I kind of was aware of some of them but I just didn’t necessarily put any effort or thought towards them because I had other things going on. I think that they’ll start to go away in the next couple of weeks but it’s just hard to juggle it all right now is really the issue.
[02:48] Rob: Right. So word on the street is you lost a “bet.” What we bet, and I put bet in quotes because we didn’t actually put anything on it but I think you owe me baby sushi and steak dinner. So the bet was about MicroConf and last year we had sold out the early bird tickets in about 50 hours or so and this year we were doing the over under was 24 hours, it turns out it sold out – Twitter was saying 15 minutes. I calculated 26 minutes when I was looking at my stuff that was coming in. it was definitely somewhere under an hour, a lot faster than we had thought.
[03:22] Now we did two launches right? We did a launch inside the academy first. We sold out a block of tickets and then we sold the rest of them to the early bird list but it went fast. And you had mentioned there were some folks that were basically saying they were refreshing their browser just watching the number tick down.
[03:36] Mike: Because I clicked the button to make the tickets go live and I could’ve scheduled it but I wanted to actually just sit there and do it so that I know when it took effect. It was three minutes in and there were 30 tickets gone and 10 minutes in there were 50 that were gone and that’s from the public availability. But they do get locked for about 15 minutes so it’s hard to say exactly when they were purchased versus when somebody went in and kind of claimed it because there were tickets that would pop back out. And I did catch some of those. About after 20 minutes, that stopped happening.
[04:05] Rob: There was also discussion mostly on Twitter about well, you get a larger venue and grow the conference or you should raise your prices and we’ve talked through all of those things. None of that is news to us. I think the end result is that we will probably bump the price up again next year. We did not do that this year. Odds are go little, we’re trying not to make it unaffordable. We want new entrepreneurs, new founders to be able to come. We also want experienced folks. I find that mix is a positive thing for everybody.
[04:33] In terms of growing numbers, we definitely don’t want to grow past the point where it feels intimate and so that’s where we haven’t increased the numbers but demand has obviously increased. With that said, we are talking with the hotel about getting just few, maybe another 10, 15 seats in the room that would allow us to basically start to dig into the wait list. I think we’re approaching triple digits on our waitlist in November right now. So if we could get even a handful of tickets and lots of more folks, I think that would be a good thing.
[05:00] Mike: So we have a follow-up question from one of our previous podcast in episode 167 where we were talking about masterminds and it’s from Andrew Connell and he asked what’s your take on having your cofounder in the same mastermind group that you’re in?
[05:13] Rob: I would lean towards not because the idea behind a mastermind is that you can say almost anything about your business, about your employees, about cofounders, kind of a 360 view and that’s your place that’s very safe that you can come and you don’t have to feel guarded about something. I think if there was ever an issue with your cofounder that you couldn’t bring up in your mastermind, that who is it that you go to with that issue? You kind of cut off that avenue.
[05:45] I guess the odds of that happening are not something super likely to happen but I lean on the side of caution on these things so my gut feeling would be that I would want to be in different masterminds. I also think splitting you up will bring in more – if you’re in two different masterminds, it will just bring in more points of view. Because think about it, we said a mastermind should be between 2 and 4 people and so if it’s two of you guys in there for the same company, at most, you’re going to get 1 or 2 other opinions. Whereas if you split up, you’re just going to have more variety of possible solutions.
[06:16] Mike: The standpoint that I took it from was I wouldn’t want to be in the same mastermind group as a cofounder just because your stories are going to be very, very similar. They’re going to be just like the discussions you have any other time and you’re really not getting an external point of view from your cofounder in that mastermind group. So if you split up and you each go to your own mastermind group, then you can essentially distill the ideas from those and when you talk to each other, then it gives you that much more insight into your business or that many more ideas that come from outside that you may not necessarily have gotten if you were both in the same mastermind group. But that question was left on the comments section of that podcast episode. So just wanted to say thanks Andrew.
[06:57] So that’s kind of outside the realm of the questions that we’re going to be answering. The rest of these questions came in through our questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. If you have a question, you can send it into that email address and our next question comes from Gifford Hanes. He says hi Rob and Mike. First I love the podcast. It’s the highlight of my week. I read start small, stay small and was a member of the academy. I‘m working on a product for pet sitters. My question’s about the early phase of the product. And let me give you some quick background. I came up with the idea because my wife does operations and is a sitter for a pet sitting company. I saw a lot of inefficiencies in her workflow and she was getting frustrated.
[07:32] Then I looked around at the web for competitors and only two seem to be Saas based. From there, I did an ad words campaign and got a few sign ups of people to stay informed on the products development. I plan on calling some more prospects and talking to them about the features they need and the pain they feel in their business. My question is should I focus more on marketing the site or the product right now? I have a simple page with launch rock for the signup and landing page and this is where I point the traffic for the ad words campaign. Your thoughts and opinions on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Guildford.
[08:00] Rob: You should focus on vetting and validating this idea. I would not write line of code, not write a line of HTML, not write – well maybe I’d write along a copy. That’s what I’d start thinking about and I would definitely start talking to more prospects either on the phone or via email whatever works for them I guess is going to be more phone conversations. And I would do that early vetting that we talked about, get that list of 10 who are stoked to pay whatever price it is you’re asking, I’m assuming since it’s Saas its going to be 19, 39, 49, 99 somewhere in that range per month and you got to figure out that price point through these conversations and get 10 of them who are super excited that you’re going to be building this for them.
[08:41] Then, once that’s done, and that can easily take 6 weeks to do because you’re not – probably not going to be doing full time, it’s hard to get a hold of people. You need callbacks, I mean there’s so much stuff that you run into. Once that is done and even as you’re going through it you can consider – I would think about starting to write some copy, write some bullet points of features, even just in a text document based on the conversations you’re having and based on the paying points that you’re solving, try to focus it down to a single paying point for that big headline and then think about the other things that you’re adding and hearing from this folks.
[09:14] And to be honest, I think that updating your landing page which is great, it’s simple. Just updating that with a headline and one or two bullet points at most is going to be good for the time being.
[09:25] Mike: I tend to agree with you. I think the one thing that people tend to overlook is what sorts of ideas that they’re actually trying to – I’ll say validate. And when you start looking at say the lean startup methodology whereas build an MVP and kind of iterate from there, the thing that I think most people tend to heavily overlook is that an MVP is really not necessarily like a minimum viable product for your product itself. It’s you’re trying to figure out the least amount of work that you can do to validate what your assumptions are and currently your assumptions are people will pay for this. And the question really is what proof do you have of that? What is the smallest thing that you can do? What’s the least amount of effort that you can put into it to validate it? And that’s exactly what Rob put forth. It’s like that’s what you should be working on. That’s what you should try and validate. Will people pay for this?
[10:11] And you can kind of look to see what the other people are doing. Are there competitors in this space? And if there are competitors, that’s great. I mean it kind of validates that people are willing to pay for it but what it doesn’t validate is are you able to connect with these people and get in front of them and in front of enough of them so that they will pay you. And that’s really the part that you’re trying to solve.
[10:31] Rob: Right. And I think in general, I am a proponent of doing copywriting and building a marketing site before you build a product because it helps you think through the benefits and the points that you’re actually going to want to communicate. And so it helps you realize what the most important parts of the app are so then as you go to build it, you know what to invest the most time in. And with this, I would consider doing the same. Like once you vetted it and you have figured out that short list, sit down and either write a short or long form sales letter or sit down and try to put together that homepage, that Saas homepage with the screen shot and the benefits and the headline and that kind of stuff.
[11:08] Once you have just that singe page built, even if you go and buy a $10 themed forest template and put it together using that, that can work for you for quite some time. And if someone asks, if you’re on a phone call and they’re asking tell me more about this product or I’d like to see something of it, you say well it’s not finished but we do have this detailed description of it. And you can give them a URL to that, a link to that and it starts to give people an idea that it is something tangible. So I think that even before I really broke around with code, I consider doing that. That’s actually what I did with Drip. I really had the whole marketing side flushed out with most the copy written. It was really as the developer just started, the very early stages of code.
[11:47] I did have to change that later on because things did change as we developed it and I started on boarding people but that’s the process that I went through and I found that to be pretty helpful. It’s the whole market first. Right? It’s the marketing and market first approach rather than focusing on the product which we kind of all know that we can build.
[12:04] Mike: There are plenty of products out there that have all these features that very, very few people use yet they’re still there because nobody wants to delete them. And then if you go to competitor’s product, you’re going to end up copying all these features and you got no idea whether or not people are using them. That is the other side of the value of doing the marketing first is that you get to figure out from your perspective customers what it is that they’re finding valuable and you just implement those things as opposed to wasting your time doing things that nobody looks at and nobody uses. So Guildford, thanks for the question. Our next question comes in to us from Ryan Higgins and he sent us an mp3 of his question and here it is.
[12:39] Ryan: Hi guys, happy 2014. I am at a point now in my online endeavors where I’m making more money online than I am in my day to day work which is exciting and I’m hoping to leave my job sometime this year. My problem is that I for whatever reason have lost motivation. I don’t know how this happened or where it really comes from. It should be in an exciting time for me but I’m finding I don’t feel very inspired. And my question to you is how would you guys get into the zone? What are some of the strategies that you follow when you feel uninspired or demotivated? Thanks very much and have great year.
[13:16] Rob: Yeah. This is a good question and I think it takes two forms in my head. 1) They’re kind of these lolls that you’ll go through and if a dip or a lol or a lack of inspiration is lasting a month or six weeks and you find you can get out of it, I think that’s natural. I see those times where I’m just less motivated to crank and get a bunch of stuff done. Other times where I’m more motivated at the higher end of the curve. During those times, what I do is try to just attack the problem. You focus on the actual issue of just getting inspired for the next three hours.
[13:51] How do I get in a rhythm and break out of just my lack of desire to do the work and really the three things that I found that have helped me do that are 1) to drink a bit of caffeine. I’m pretty measured in the amount of caffeine I drink. The more caffeine you drink, the more focused you’ll be until you get jittery and can’t work. That is clinically proven. I think used in the right quantities and not abused, can be really helpful and it’s something that I definitely use in my times of low motivation.
[14:17] The other thing I do is I will meet and work with other friends. I’ll meet at a coffee shop or meet at an office, have them come up for my house and work there. Sometimes I find that helps with motivation. I also find that music is going to be your pick. For me, late at night, and the headphones is really loud. There’d be punk music and there’ll be metal, that, or almost always puts me in that zone and it can get me through those little lolls. And then the pomodoro technique I also like which is where you set a timer for 25 minutes and you do a sprint, you get as much done as you can and you typically, you can often pick a single task and limit it to 25 units, even if you think it’s going to take logger. When the timer goes off, you stop, you stretch, you get up or five minutes, you walk around and then after that five minutes you do another 25 minute sprint.
[14:59] Each of those is a mechanism for getting over that. It’s that little onetime thing. It’s kind of like imagine yourself as a car and if your car has a flat tire, you’re really just trying to patch it. That’s what this approach is. The next thing is if you have a longer term broader sense of really being uninspired and that’s when maybe – imagine your whole car like the frame is bent and you can’t just patch a tire. There’s really a deeper thing going on there and that’s where it takes I would say talking with trust friends, a mastermind group, asking yourself a lot of questions about what is giving me life and what is not, I think its Saint Peter – someone has a prayer called examine and its basically this thing you ask yourself what has given me life over the last week? What has not given me life? Some people do it over an entire year and take notes.
[15:46] It can shift the way that you approach your work and it can shift the work that you want to do. So if you find yourself being uninspired specifically with your product, then maybe it’s just the product. If you find yourself uninspired of work, it’s probably something else going on that is the leaking into your work. This has been in my experience kind of the two levels of uninspiration that I’ve encountered in my career.
[16:08] Mike: I really do think there are the two different levels and the shorter term stuff you can definitely – I’ll say lie to yourself in some ways to help make your brain do things that you wouldn’t otherwise think you should and the pomodoro technique is just one. I’m kind of partial to that one. And there’s a bunch of phone apps that you can use to basically help you manage that process. And I really like the ones that will show you kind of a graph of exactly how many you’ve done in any given day so that way you can try to match or beat what you did the day before.
[16:36] So at that point, it becomes something of a game not necessarily to do the work but to play the game. And in order to play the game, you have to do the work. So in some ways you’re tricking your brain into making the numbers and the timer go up and down but at the same time, as a byproduct of that, you’re getting worked on. So what that does is long term, it helps you get things moving along towards your goal and hopefully that helps break you out of the rut that you’re in over time.
[17:03] If this is the type of thing that’s been going on for a long time, it could be medical issue, it could be any number of things. One thing I’ll point out is that since this question came in recently, If you’re anywhere in the northern hemisphere, this is a bad time of year. There’s a lot of seasonal depression that goes around and it can be very easy to especially lose steam at the end of the year just because the holiday season and now its January and it’s like I’ve got all these work to do and I don’t know how I’m going to get it done and you look at just a sheer amount of stuff that you have to do and it’s so disheartening you don’t want to do any of it and so you’re now feeling unmotivated, so some of the techniques that Rob talked about can help get you through those, those are the types of things that I would think about.
[17:43] Rob: Yeah. I had a real tough time I did two New England winters when I lived in New Haven in Boston. I had a real tough time in the winter and I felt myself have a pretty sever lack of motivation and I had to buy the – there’s the happy lights, you know, to get your skin having the vitamin D, just had a tough time at the cold and being inside all the time. I think overall, what’s helped me the most during my entrepreneurial career is having these masterminds. That’s the one that most consistently has impacted my motivation and has given me that air space that I can talk about this in a way that I know I won’t be judged.
[18:14] And I know that other people will understand because they’ve probably been through it before or they know that they will go through it at some point and just being able to discuss it and have some folks help give feedback, even in terms of like well, let’s set one goal for the next two weeks. I’m uninspired but let me just try to achieve a minor thing. That kind of thing is stuff that can feasibly get you back on track.
[18:36] Mike: So Ryan, thanks for the question. The next one comes from Cal Damansky and he says hi Rob, quick question for today. When you’re running a few products, how big of a problem was collecting sensible testimonials from your clients and customers? I find myself in a heck of a lot of email exchanges about getting them since I started working with international companies and I was interested if you had a solution.
[18:56] Rob: The easiest way I found to get testimonials is any time someone emails you with a compliment. Right? So if someone says wow your support was amazing or wow I just love this product or you’ve done such a great job so far on this contract if you’re a consultant and I don’t always do it but if I happen to need testimonials I will just reply and say thanks I really appreciate that. It would help me a lot, would you mind if I just quoted you, link to your website the next time we update our testimonials or something like that? If they say yes, then I copy them to a Google doc with product name and testimonials and I pretty much always have kind of a cash of testimonials that way. And I find it, I almost never get into an email thread so I’m not sure if there is something else going here. Mike, have you had trouble getting testimonials and find yourself in email exchanges?
[19:41] Mike: I think the issue is really – I mean he specifically points out international companies and when you talk about international companies, the tendency and certainly not the rule, but the tendency is for those international companies to be large and they have rules in place that say they tend to be public companies. They tend to have rules in place to say what you can and can’t say publicly on behalf of the company and that I think is probably where this is coming from because if you go to a public company and you do any sort of work for them and then say hey, can I have a testimonial? They’ll probably give you a patent answer of no, they would have to go through their legal department because otherwise you’ve got a public company that’s endorsing some small firm. And that I think is the challenge that he’s running into. I could be wrong on those things.
[20:22] Rob: If you’ve gotten email exchanges and it’s a similar problem that each of them is saying like well, we can only give it if you have a specific testimonial for them, we’ll then create the testimonial for them or if they need a legal release in order to do it, then draft one up and have it ready for everybody or something like that. I don’t have any specifics beyond that because I haven’t experienced this kind of thing trying to get testimonials. I’ve gotten testimonials from large Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 companies and didn’t have an issue with it or perhaps that was an exception.
[20:50] Mike: I wonder if having just a very generic form that you put together to have somebody fill out would be sufficient or just those email exchanges hey, can I use this in a testimonial? I think that Rob’s suggestion of using any sort of compliments that you get and just say hey can I quote you on that in a testimonial on my website? I think that is probably the way to go. Thanks for the question.
[21:10] Our next question comes from Jim and he says hi guys, love the podcast. It’s still number 1 in my pod catcher app. You espouse and rightly so the method of finding your market first then building a product to suit that. Sadly I wasn’t listening to this podcast before I spent two years building my first Saas app which is called solopracticemanager.com. I built it on some suggestions and encouragement from several people in my primary target market life coaches. Since listening to these podcast, I’ve basically gotten my MVP done and have stopped any have stopped any new development work in favor of marketing and growing the user base.
[21:40] But I’m nervous that I’m not going to find a good market for this. I’ve been doing keyword research and coming up pretty much dry as far as popular keywords. I can even buy ad words for which is what I’d like to validate it first given the start of organic search traffic. Rob, since you’ve bought a bunch of existing apps, do you have any suggestions on ways to market a product that already exists? Thanks for your time. Jim.
[21:57] Rob: I have a few thoughts on this. I think the first thing I see when I come to this site is solopracticemanager.com looks like it’s built for freelancers or just kind of for everyone. It looks like a horizontal document management product and that doesn’t jive with the – I get the feeling it was niched towards life coaches. That’s a decision that I think you’re going to want to make even if it’s just your first crack at it like yes, this is for life coaches then the headline should be document management for life coaches or saves life coaches 20% or $500 a month or something right? You got to figure out what the value is for them and then gear the whole marketing approach towards it as well as all the features you’re building.
[22:34] If life coach is not the market you want to go into, figure out which one you want to do. But staying horizontal like this and trying to apply it to everyone, as a first time bootstrap and entrepreneur, not the best approach in my opinion. I guess Jim’s question actually said you bought a bunch of existing apps. Do you have suggestions on ways to market a product that already exists, almost all the apps I bought were not already successful. They were all apps that were built and had a tight vertical niche typically and that I then had to make successful and the way I did that was through applying marketing approaches pretty systematically through each of them and growing them. And that’s why I was able to buy them for such little money because the technology itself is not worth very much. It has real value once you actually have revenue and paying customers and all that. Most of my apps were not successful when I bought them.
[23:18] With this app the first thing I would do is to figure out who is going to really, really need it and who it’s going to save a ton of time or a ton of money or a ton of pain from. That’s really your job at this point. Keyword research, it’s definitely one signal but there’s so many other ways to approach this. Like if you decide to focus on life coaches, you can find and target life coaches demographically using Facebook ads as an example. Whereas you’re looking at Google ad words then it’s always intent driven. Right?
[23:45] It’s what did someone type in? What did they intend to do right now? Are they looking for life coach document management software? The odds of that having many searches are very, very low and I can understand why you aren’t seeing a lot of volume. So think in terms of a demographic that has buying capabilities and it has its paying point. And so again, if you focus on life coaches, my next step would be to start emailing and or cold calling a bunch of life coaches and talking to them about the solution and just ask and say I’m not selling anything. I’m a software developer. I’m an entrepreneur and here’s what I built so far. Does this help you? And listen to their feedback. And then say okay, consider scrapping this whole thing.
[24:24] If everybody says no, but they say but, I really have this pain or problem with managing client appointments and invoicing or something like that, well then perhaps this wasn’t the right choice for life coaches, and then you have to evaluate do I try to pivot this document management thing into a different niche or would I prefer to stick with the life coaches because certainly if you have more of a knowledge of that market space or you have several friends in that space, that might make sense to stay with and dissolve a different paying point. And those are the two major approaches I would look at.
[24:54] Mike: Rob’s really hit the nail in the head here with identifying who this is for. I mean based on the name alone, to me, it seems like it should for dentists or massage therapists or something along those lines. And maybe it’s just because of the word practice and it makes me think of some sort of medical field. To me, a life coach does not indicate a practice. I look at it and even if you’re driving traffic to this, I don’t see how it would help me out. I don’t even see if I were a life coach or even if I were a dentist, I don’t see how this would help me because the headline itself says I spent more time managing documents than seeing clients. And it’s really focused on the problem itself as opposed to presenting itself as a solution to that particular problem.
[25:37] So talk to these people, as Rob said, figure out who it is your target market is and then adjust your marketing messages to basically tell them that you solved that problem and whatever that problem is that you’ve identified and discussing it with them, tweak your marketing messages to tell them I solved this problem with this particular product and here’s why you should sign up and use that to essentially help you gather new users. So Jim thanks for the question.
[26:02] Our next question comes in through Luigi and he says I work in a company that operates in the energy sector and quality of INC Engineer. Over the years I have developed applications for the AutoCAD environment better known as AutoCAD add-in applications in order to automate the engineering process. I didn’t invent the wheel since a lot of the software is already out there but the software is quite expensive and its not available for other CAD platforms such as BricsCAD further more there’s a lot of headroom for improvement by adding other features.
[26:29] Since the applications I’ve developed have had a lot of success in my company with several instillations of various kinds, I’m well aware of the fact that there are tens of thousands of other CAD users around the world. I’m seriously considering leaving my full time job to develop professional packages and launching them thus beginning my startup activity. I was wondering if offer my software at a lower price and including special features that other software doesn’t would be a good way to sell my software. In addition, the possibility of going more vertical with my software and other CAD software applications that don’t have that functionality might be a good idea. What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance.
[27:03] So I think what you’re basically asking is you work in developing AutoCAD add-ins and there’s other CAD applications out there that also have kind of a plug-in infrastructure and what your real question is can you build the plug-in that basically are already built or can you take those and go into other CAD applications and essentially add them into those other application and make that successful? I would say that you probably can. The other question I think is a little bit more concerning to me which is should you be dropping your price on those to be competing with other plug-in manufacturers? I would say probably not. I would use their pricing as a basis for comparison but I don’t know as I would start taking your price and just tanking it in order to start landing business that you might not otherwise get.
[27:50] Because if these companies are already paying tens and thousands of dollars for CAD applications, they clearly have the budget for paying for some of these add-ins especially if there are other vendors out there that are making money from their plug-in. I see it as very similar to the WordPress community where you got all these plug-in or you can go buy plug-in for WordPress and just add them into your website and the website will do glorious things at that point. And you’re kind of in the same situation. You want to sell these plug-ins.
[28:15] But the real question I think is can you get in front of them? Do you have the ability to market your software in such a way that it’s going to be seen by them? I think that price is much less of a consideration than whether or not you’re going to be visible to them and be seen as legitimate in their eyes. And I think that if you drop your price too low you’re going to be seen as an illegitimate competitor to some of these other products even especially if you are better than they are.
[28:40] Rob: Yup. I would echo what Mike says. Eric Sink where he said if I were to build some type of niched down version of Microsoft office or even just word, he said Microsoft’s selling it for $100. Your intuition will be well Microsoft certainly does more than mine. Mine’s a niche so I’m going to sell for $35 and he said go the other direction. Go 10 times that if you build a niche version of excel, sell it for $1,000 when Microsoft sells it’s for $100. So I would do a similar type of thing. I’m not saying necessarily 10x the price but I would say go for the premium route because it’s going to set you apart and that the way to build a larger business rather than trying to discount.
[29:16] The other thing I’ll add is that I love add-ins as a stair step product approach. Add-ins to WordPress, to Drupal, , add-ins to CAD, any of this stuff where you have an existing ecosystem is such a nice way to get that initial bump because if there are folks using CAD, the odds are that they run into problems with a need expansion. And so if there’s a CAD directory of their add-ons and you get listed in that thing, you have that nice channel of traffic.
[29:41] Also, if people are going in and they’re searching for AutoCAD fix this problem or AutoCAD had this feature and yours does that, you need to rank for those things because those types of intention driven queries, getting in front of them will result in very high conversion rates because you’re solving such a desperate focused paying point for people. I wouldn’t expect this to be some huge business that you’d be able to figure on but it’s that great business to get out there, you learn your marketing chops. You learn how to write productions software, how to sell it and really stair step this up into the future ideas that get bigger along the way.
[30:15] Mike: So Luigi, we hope that helps and thanks for the question. Our next one comes from Nadias. He says hi Mike and Rob. My question is regarding building a web business around a community of X and I know this idea is geared for much more specific niche market for the sake of a question. Let’s say it involves building a site for artists to show their work. Aside from artists friends I know personally I’d be starting this community with zero users. My question is is it a good idea to go out on the web and gather established artists work and create a profile for them, then invite them via email to let them see how their work would look in the community site and how it would benefit their work or business? I’d give them the ability to join the community or delete their profile if they didn’t want to be part of it. Is this approach too invasive or is it a good way to get initial users engaged with a brand new community? I hope my question’s clear enough and thanks in advance.
[31:00] P.S. just out of curiosity, I’d love to know what you guys have to say about building a business that requires a community to function. I’d imagine that the community site takes a lot more ramp up time to get going and product revenue because you need a healthy number of users to bring in income.
[31:12] Rob: I think his P.S. is really the most important question. Building community sites is super, super hard. And anyone who’s actually done it, there are not that many that are actually that successful. And even the ones that are successful like the old school forums that picked a niche early and got it in before everyone else did, those forums have trouble monetizing. The ad rates are really low, the CPM’s they can charge are low. So community sites are a real challenge. You probably have a clear monetization path of selling prints or selling t-shirts or whatever it is. Even then, it’s tough to just take a cut. When you’re bootstrapped, taking a cut of transactions whether it’s a market – did you say a market place or whether its community is a really long way to go. There’s definitely a much more of a long haul than someone just paying you for it.
[31:57] I would never start a community site. I tried to do it once and it was a tremendous amount of work and didn’t pan out. That’s not a reason not do it. It’s the hundreds of others that I’ve seen that have also failed and how few of them actually make it. So there’s a lot of talk about how in the early days Reddit was just hacking their front page because it was all the dudes inside Reddit were doing fake folks just to make it look like people are there because until you have people there, it’s a ghost town. And getting over that initial hump, I would say if you really want to do it seriously, then go start either a blog or a mailing list or something and start creating content or writing original content and build up that mailing list.
[32:32] And when that mailing list hits 1,000 people who are devoted and ravenous fans of yours, then go instruct this site. Then, bring them in because then you’re going to have that community. But until you do that, I mean starting from scratches are a really, really tough way to go. So that’s your PS. The other question was pulling someone’s heart off their site and building their profile, if you did that to me, I would be pretty surprised. I would probably be taken aback and not appreciative of but I think artists are really sensitive about their work being stolen and even though you give them the ability to delete it and all that stuff, this basically public facing web page where you have taken their art without permission, my opinion is that if you do get a little bit of momentum and you want to start doing this is that you do a pitch and say hey, here’s our community. Here’s what your profile could look like. Here’s my profiles and stuff.
[33:17] So you put up your profile with the art and said would you allow us to do this for free to grab your art, build our profile for free and then you can look at it and you tell me or you can delete it at that point or you can just have a look at it so at least you get their permission out front and you have much more opt in rather than more of a opt out approach.
[33:36] Mike: Yeah. With regards to the two questions I agree with Rob. Building a community site from the ground up is pretty difficult. There are a lot of different hacks that you can do to help grow a community site and just one of them as Rob said, guys over at Reddit were uploading the stuff that they were posting just to make it look like there was more activity. The illusion of activity is going to help. I remember I started a web based game back in ’99 or 2000 and I grew it to a reasonably successful size of people using it. I think the first 40 or 50 people that site on looked at I and I’ll say it was sort of a ghost town but I’d say probably a quarter of those accounts that were logged in at first, they were all mine. I mean it was basically just interacting with people as 10 different accounts to make it seem like there were more people playing the game than they really were.
[34:24] And eventually got to the point where I didn’t have to do that because there were hundreds of people playing it and they were logging in every single day. So you get to a certain point where it will avalanche into a more successful venture but I think Rob’s approach of gaining a mailing list and gaining a following and trying to get people all in one place so then you can say hey I’ve created this site where we’re going to have a community. Then you start seeding that community. You’ve picked people out of the mailing list who you’ve had interactions with. You talk to them individually and say hey I’m going to invite 15 or 20 people in here and you basically have them use it for a little while and then later on down the road, then you start inviting people in.
[35:02] So that way, when people will go to log in on day 1, the place isn’t empty. There’s a bunch of posts already there and you’ve kind of seeded the community with people who are going to be interacting there. So those are a couple of different hacks that you can use. In terms of going out and gathering established artist’s work, I would not do that. I agree with Rob. I think what you’re going to find is people are extremely sensitive about their work and artists in particular I think are exactly that way and you may very well come across the people who are much more organic and they sell the experience with what it is that they do.
[35:35] So for example musicians, if you’ve ever looked at the history of the band Phish for example, they’re very successful. They’re probably one of the single most successful bands that you’ll find that has very, very organic roots but they don’t sell albums. They don’t sell their music. They sell the experience of coming to their concerts which is why their concerts sell out. So unless you find those types of people, you’re probably not going to have very much success with it because they’re going to look at it as if you’ve just gathered up all their stuff and you’re going to profit from it in some way, shape or form by displaying it somewhere else and they’re just going to be pissed off.
[36:11] I think that it’s going to leave a very bad taste in their mouth. I think that if you were to ask the upfront and say hey, can I do this for you? And then I will show it to you and if you don’t like it, you can delete it. That’s probably a better approach but I think that’s still going to be a very labor intensive endeavor. So we hope that helps and thanks for the question.
[36:26] Rob: If you have question for us, call our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 168 | Things That Don’t Scale (And Why You Should Do Them)
Show Notes
Do things that don’t scale by Paul Graham (July 2013)
- Recruit users manually
- Expect to be Fragile
- Delight early customers
- Start in a niche
- Consult
- Human automation
- The Big Launch Usually Doesn’t Work (and neither do partnerships)
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I talked about things that don’t scale and why you should do them. This ladies and gentlemen is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 168.
[00:10] Music
[00:17] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:27] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:28] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Mike?
[00:33] Mike: Well we had a listener write in earlier this week named Denis Hennessey and he suggested, he was listening to the episode where we talked about some of the different apps we used and I mentioned that I was doing Commit to make sure that I do certain things on a very regular basis. And he actually suggested that I try out Goal Streaks and I really liked Goal Streaks because I checked it out and essentially the idea is very similar to Commit except that you can put in what are basically skip days which I think would work out actually a little bit better for me because there are certain days of the week where I know that I’m not going to do those things.
[01:06] So for example, working out on Friday is just never going to happen. Commit doesn’t allow me to put that in and say no, I’m not going to do that so I can’t schedule those sorts of things. I’m going to give it a shot and see how things go.
[01:17] Rob: Very cool. Well first of all, this is an IOS app is that right?
[01:20] Mike: Yes.
[01:21] Rob: Okay. And then what kinds of things do you have in there? I guess working out is one?
[01:24] Mike: I have working out. I have writing and then I also have working on Audit Shark.
[01:27] Rob: Good. So yeah, give Goal Streaks a try.
[01:30] Mike: What about you? What are you up to this week?
[01:31] Rob: Well I was pleasantly surprised this week. We started selling MicroConf tickets to Micropreneur Academy members. They get a slight discount and then they get early access to the tickets before the general public. We sold out their allotment pretty quickly and in fact we got a few emails from academy members wanting to buy kind of after all the tickets were gone and so it looks to be a sold out crowd again this year. And by the time this airs, we’ll likely already be sold out.
[01:58] But some tickets do become available so if you’re still interested in going to MicroConf, you can always go to microconf.com and click on the ticket link. We tend to have a pretty hefty wait list and if you get in that early, you do have a high likelihood of getting contacted because we have some tickets that become available as the conference approaches.
[02:17] Then the other thing I’ve been up to, my wife right now is on her two day annual retreat and I’m gearing up for mine here in about two weeks and that’s where I go off and don’t check email and look at my goals for the year, figure out really verify those are the things I want to do and then map out as closely as I can over the course of two days exactly how I’m going to achieve them and figure out what it’s going to take on a monthly or a quarterly basis and basically setup my game plan.
[02:42] The reason I do this, I’ve talked about it before. But it’s because I like pursuing too many things. So once this list is locked, I will do almost nothing else that is not on this list for the next year and that’s the only way I’ve found that I’ve been able to stick to things and grow them without wandering all over the place as the next new fun idea comes my way. So needless to say I’m looking forward to that. Looking forward to the quiet time, the thinking time and really getting down to business in 2014.
[03:12] Mike: I’ve been working on Audit Shark and talking to a few different customers getting some ideas about what their needs are for moving forward with the product. It looks like I’ve got a little bit more work to do. There’s a couple of demos that I’m trying to schedule but in order to actually do those demos there’s a few more features that I need to implement because I know there are things that they basically already told me that these are things that they need. So in an effort to kind of make the demo align very well with what their needs are, then I’ve got a little bit more work to do on the product to make sure that can do those things before I can show it off to them.
[03:44] But the demos are for more in the enterprise space so I’m really hoping those go well but again I think that it can definitely go the route of software plus services to make those things work. So I’m pretty excited about it and just kind of looking forward to banging out some of that code and seeing what comes out of those demos. How are things working with Drip?
[04:03] Rob: Drip’s going good. I’ve really started diving in heavy to paid acquisition and just in the learning phase, as usual I’m pretty impatient with things and I don’t know how many months it’s going to take for me to find the Drip flywheel but I certainly haven’t found it in the past maybe 7 to 8 days since I started and yet I’m already wondering why I haven’t. They’re just trial and error at this point to get into the marketing plan, have a bunch of different things going on, an eBook that’s already been written. It’s being designed. I’m working on an infographic. I have a bunch of blog posts in the hopper, stuff that’s just things that I’m going to be experimenting with.
[04:39] But really over the past 7-10 days I’ve wrote some long form sales copy cranked out several variations of landing pages and then basically testing those the traffic that I’m able to generate via the various advertising venues.
[04:53] Music
[04:56] Today we’re going to be talking about doing things that don’t scale. And this phrase has been bandied about quite a bit. I think Paul Graham since he has the largest kind of platform, he wrote an essay on it on July of 2013 so that’s seven months ago. The interesting thing is Paul Graham has such a larger view right? Because he’s invested in hundreds of companies and he thinks very critically about this stuff.
[05:20] The first time I’ve read this because I’ve heard about this essay for the last seven months since it came out but the first time I read it was preparing the outline for the interview and I was surprised at how many things not just the title of do things that don’t scale but how many specific things in his essay align directly with things that we’ve said in the past on the podcast. So that was kind of a nice confirmation that when multiple scientists do multiple experiments and they all arrive at the same results, its multiple confirmation that this theory may at least be more correct than the things people have been saying for the hundred years before that.
[05:55] So that’s the idea here is that multiple people coming up with things independently helps reinforce it and makes me believe that these things are not just our thoughts or our opinions but they’re actually things that multiple experts are starting to embrace. So I think to kick us off, we have seven things that you should do that don’t scale. And to kick us off before that, there’s a little intro piece I want to bring up and Paul kind of attacked this on the end of the episode but he says that people should start thinking of startups as two dimensional objects instead of just one dimension and what he means by that is most people think of a startup as an idea. It’s what you’re going to build.
[06:29] He says the idea of doing things that don’t scale is so important that we need to start thinking of startups as two dimensional objects. Basically the first dimension is what you’re going to build and the second is the unscalable things you’re going to do to get that company going. Now what that means is that when you come up with a startup idea, he’s saying that’s incomplete. That’s not actually a full pledged startup idea that you actually need not just a product idea but the plan to get those initial 100 users or whatever it’s going to take to kind of get you out of the earth’s atmosphere and into orbit. I thought that was kind of a fascinating thought that he thinks this concept of unscalable things is so powerful that he’s actually saying that a startup idea is incomplete unless you’ve fought those early days through.
[07:13] Mike: Well we’ve talked about that as well though. I mean we didn’t phrase it as like a two dimensional thing but we’ve also talked about and say there’s the idea itself and the second is how are you going to bring it to market? How are you going to get in touch with your target customer base? And in a lot of ways, in order to do that, you have to do those things that don’t scale.
[07:31] Rob: Very good. So let’s dive in. Our first point of seven is to recruit users manually. So Paul Graham says that the most common unscalable things founders have to do is recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. And then he gives a few examples, Stripe, Airbnb and a couple others.
[07:54] Well it lines up with two phases of stuff I’ve talked about recently with Drip. There was that initial phase of just vetting the idea where I emailed 17 founders and I’ve got 11 go ahead of yes I would buy this. I mean that was a very manual user recruiting process. And then the second part of it where once I had a launch list in the end it was about 3500 emails and I basically handpicked some early users and started inviting them in but it was that slow launch. It was the heavy on boarding heavy customer development time of basically walking users manually through your app, manually boarding them, finding out what they like, don’t like. If they’re going to stick around and if not, why not. I view that a lot as relating to this concept that he’s saying about recruiting users manually.
[08:38] Mike: I think there’s a couple of different things there. In the early days, you really have to do that because if you just setup a website and you have people sign up and you don’t really know anything about them, what you’re essentially doing is you’re basically taking a stab in the dark at what resonates with people and you don’t get any of that feedback. And they may come to your site and they just leave and you have absolutely no idea why versus if you start a mailing list and you get people – you kind of give them a one or two sentence description of what it is that you’re building or you’re talking to people and you’re giving them invested in it as well that you get to close that feedback loop.
[09:16] So it’s no longer this open loop system where it’s just hitting the gas and you’ve got no idea whether you’re going in the right direction or not. And I think that’s really the important part here is that you have to be able to get that feedback loop closed so that you understand about what direction it is that you’re going in.
[09:33] Rob: The next point that Paul Graham makes is he basically says expect your startup to be fragile in the early days. He says the question to ask about an early stage startup is not is this company going to take over the world? But the question is how big could this company get if the founders did things right? And he brings up Microsoft as an example. He says Microsoft can’t have seem very impressive when it was a couple guys in Albuquerque writing basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists. But in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating micro computer software.
[10:05] And then he also brings up the Airbnb founders and how earl on they were just manually taking professional photos of their first host apartment and that they were just trying to survive. So you couldn’t see them taking over the world at that point. It was very fragile and it was basically a 30 day swing where he says going out and engaging with users as the difference between Airbnb taking off and completely failing.
[10:28] Mike: I think this thought from Paul comes from a little bit of a different perspective than kind of where we come from because most of the stuff that we talk about generally speak in a lot of the people that I talk to and interact with tend to be starting stuff on the side. So this idea of like a 30 day swing before you go out of business just isn’t there because we don’t have investors to account to. Yes there’s these few people who’s decide that they’re going to burn the bridges behind them, quit their job and they’ve got 6 or 9 months worth of money in the bank and that’s it but that is probably the exception rather than a role. So I think to people like us, this is a lot less of it in issue than it is for funded companies where they’ve got to get to a certain point and they have a very, very tight timeline to do it or they’re toast.
[11:14] Rob: Yeah. I’d agree. This one doesn’t apply as much to bootstrappers. The piece of this I do think applies is I would change the world fragile to unstable. And what I mean by that is in their early days as they’re recruiting users, trying to turn them into customers, trying to retain them, you just don’t have enough information to have any kind of stability in your metrics or even in confidence in your sales process, confidence in your user retention, confidence even at sometimes unfortunately in your app.
[11:42] Bottom-line is if you’ve launched and you’re in the first 60 or 90 days and a customer emails and says wow there’s a major bug and there was some issue when I clicked the button and did this, if you’re in the first few months of your app, you really don’t know if you’ve introduced a bug. If your app’s been running for years and its mature and all this stuff, you know that there’s stability there. But I would say expect instability in the early days and expect a lot of uncertainty when there’s any type of challenge. If someone says your pricing is too high, that creates uncertainty because suddenly like oh man, is my pricing too high? You just don’t know yet. Once you’re successful and once you have a lot of people using it, you know that your pricing is fine. If anything, it’s probably too low.
[12:21] The other thing that I’ve seen is in the early days of Drip, someone email and said I would totally try this out but you’re asking for credit card upfront. You shouldn’t do that. And tells me why I shouldn’t do that. Now I know that I want to ask for credit card upfront for a bunch of reasons and for all my trial and error with all my apps, this is how I’m going to start. And yet at that moment the uncertainty and kind of the instability of that moment made me question and think oh, should I take the credit card wall down? I had to think about it. And of course I didn’t because I went back to all the research and the data on this and decided not to. I actually asked someone in my mastermind and he told me I was crazy for thinking about it. Instead of thinking about fragility, I think its more about instability and uncertainty is something that you should anticipate especially in those early days.
[13:06] Mike: Yeah. I’ve definitely gotten already I mean I’ve gotten people saying that the pricing of Audit Shark is too high for them and for some of them I look at their situation I’m like you’re really not in my target market but then there’s other people who are kind of are and it definitely does make you think about it and it does give you that level of uncertainty about whether or not you’re doing the right thing. And part of it’s just because there isn’t this giant history of customers or people that I’ve interacted with to be able to say one way or the other.
[13:36] Rob: Paul’s third point is about delighting early customers. And he says you should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users but also to make them happy. And he says this whole concept of doing things manually to delight early users is counterintuitive for founders and then he gives three reasons why that is. 1) He says because a lot of founders are trained as engineers and customer service is not part of our training as engineers. Another is we’re worried that it won’t scale and then the third is that we’ve never received attention like that from other companies and so we just don’t feel like it’s something that you can do or should do as a business because frankly when you go into the Sprint store or call Verizon customer service you’re not going to see that kind service so naturally we think that it’s not something that we need to do off the bat.
[14:25] Mike: I agree that I think that this is not something that is widespread but I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen companies do it before and it makes an impression and I’ll give you an example. When I signed up for male chimp, after I had sent one of my first campaigns and made a payment with them, they sent me an email and said hey we’ve got a special gift for you. Click here. And I clicked there and I went to a page and it opened up just a form that I was supposed to fill out where I put in my name, address and everything else and then they would send me something. They sent me a mailchimp t-shirt. That kind of gave me the idea to do something similar for Audit Shark and it’s something that I’ve had kind of down the road.
[15:02] But I definitely wouldn’t say that those types of things couldn’t scale because I think one of the examples he uses is Wufoo sending each new user a handwritten thank you note. I think that if you start acquiring a thousand customers a week, that’s not going to scale as well but you can certainly – like if you’re sending people t-shirts for example, there are services that you can integrate with where they will print the t-shirts and send them and really all you need to do is give them an XML data feed that says hey, send this t-shirt here and here’s our information that says who to charge it to. There are ways to make other things scale but there’s definitely things that you can do that surprise and delight your customers that would not and I think it’s just a matter of hosing the right things it will.
[15:40] Rob: Yeah. I think delighting early customers ties back in with a lot of the manual on boarding stuff we’ve talked about. I do like the idea of t-shirts. I’ve been doing that with HitTail, with certain users when they hit a milestone they get it. Also people blog about it, they get a HitTail t-shirt. Drip, if you get your first conversion, you get an email that says roll out the red carpets. Your first subscriber converted to a paying customer because you can setup a goal in Drip and you can see when they convert and then we give them a link to a form where they can get a t-shirt. So that stuff does scale pretty easily. Once the t-shirts are printed it’s just like slapping an address label on it. So I think that all that rolls into it.
[16:17] Another piece of this and this is a little further down the essay but Paul Graham says over engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups, it’s a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good. Making a better mousetrap is not an atomic operation. Even if you start to weigh most successful startups have by building something you need yourself, the best thing you build is never quite right and so is conjectures that you need those early users to give you feedback on how to improve it.
[16:47] The fourth point we have from Paul Graham is to start in a niche. And he actually has an odd subheading for this. He calls it fire because he says it’s like keeping a fire contained before you go horizontal. But this actually lines up with the very fundamentals of the Micropreneur approach. What’s funny is he uses Facebook as the example of starting in a niche because it was a Harvard student network and then it was a university student network and then it went to everyone. I think more in terms of B to B startups so I think of like Kiss Metrics and how they really started as Saas metrics back in the day and now they’re much more all web and metrics and analytics.
[17:25] Another example that’s happening right now is Drip. Drip has started in kind of the Saas and software space and we’re building out some features that are going to move us more broader into the email marketing space. It’s more become marketing automation tool where you can move people to and from different lists based on their behavior. That is – it’s not completed yet but that’s kind of in the works right now and is the next couple of weeks we’ll be rolling that out.
[17:49] Bidsketch is another example I can think of. Ruben’s app. Remember when Bidsketch was proposal software made for designers? Well that for designers went away a long time ago because there was just so many consultants in a number of niches and designers and developers and all types of people are using it. And so he eventfully went horizontal and opened up this market. But what that niche allows you to do is it allows you to take advantage of those early niche things like the fact that the market’s small that you can out market everyone else in the niche that you can provide a tool that is so good just for that group of people that you could beat out a broader horizontal product.
[18:23] Obviously this is one that I definitely agree with and especially with a startup that doesn’t have early funding, I don’t know how else he would do it. I don’t know many if any horizontal startups that come out guns blazing without funding at their backs.
[18:38] Mike: I think this is one of those things that for people who are launching something on the side, they have this idea in their head that if they make it too small or if they go after too small of a thing then they’re not going to be able to get enough customers to support what it is that they’re doing. And the other challenge that kind of goes hand in hand with that is that when you start thinking of a product and then you go through the process of building it, you always have these grand plans for what it’s eventually going to become. And it’s incredibly time consuming to make those plans come to fruition but at the same time you’re always thinking in the back of your head I want to do this and I want to do this and I want to do this and because of that, you end up with a lot of scope creep in your products. It starts making it larger and larger and you take more and more time to develop it as opposed to taking it to market and really nailing it for one small group of people.
[19:31] This is something that I’ve struggled with Audit Shark because I have thoughts and plans for the product 3, 5, 8 years down the road that I know are going to take a very, very long time to implement. And I’ve got to focus on today, not five years down the road. And it kind of sucks because I can only do so much in the next two weeks or eight weeks or whatever but in the back of my mind I always have these thoughts about oh, what am I going to do for X when X is really something that’s not going to be implemented for probably another three years?
[20:00] Rob: The fifth point that Paul makes about doing things that don’t scale is about consulting. He says sometimes we advice founders of B to B startups to take over engagement to an extreme and to pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user. The initial user serves as a form for your mold. Keep tweaking until you fit their needs perfectly and you’ll usually find you’ve made something other users want to.
[20:26] I have a bit of a tough time with this one. I think it’s dangerous unless you really know that customer number one and you know that they have a clear vision of what they need and that you somehow have other inputs in especially if it’s a domain that you don’t understand or that you’re not familiar with. Taking direction from just a single client I think could be pretty dangerous and could get you into a pigeon hole where basically you’ve built a super specific app for a single client and the one that doesn’t generalize to other people. And that the second side of that is just validating that there’s a market for it. Because finding that one person or one company needs an app is really not enough. You have to go out and verify that need expands into a full pledged market and that’s something I would definitely do before taking this consulting approach.
[21:15] Mike: Yeah. I think the consulting approach can definitely work if you have a product and you have knowledge of that particular space where you already know the space. It’s not that you’re trying to validate a market or doing MVP. You know that there’s money to be had there and you know what types of products are going to be successful. The problem that you have is maybe cash flow or something like that or you don’t have enough of the products built to be able to sell it as a standalone product so you essentially need to couple some services with it. That’s the place where I see consulting working really well but if you’re still trying to validate the market because you don’t necessarily understand it and it’s not some place you’ve worked before, I think this really starts to fall apart because it’s going to be hit or miss depending on the company that you end up working with.
[22:01] Rob: Yeah. That’s a good point. The other thing he points out, I think it’s kind of cool with this consulting. He says another consulting like technique for recruiting initially lukewarm users is to use your software on their behalf. His startup that he sold back in the 90’s was called via web and it was an early shopping cart software. And he says when we approached merchants asking if they wanted to use our software to make online store, some said no. But they’d let us make one for them. Now this is concierge. Right? That’s really what we’re talking about here is essentially a free concierge service to get everything setup and to go beyond and do really manual things that don’t scale to get those early users involved. And if you show them that they’re a success then hopefully they’ll stick around with you.
[22:42] And I love this quote. He says we felt pretty lame at the time. Instead of organizing big strategic e-commerce partnerships we were trying to sell luggage and pens and men’s shirts but in retrospect it was exactly the right thing to do because it thought us how it would feel to merchants to use our software.
[22:58] The sixth point that Paul brings up is he calls it manual and he says there’s an extreme variant where you don’t even write software. You just do all the manual leg work behind it. I’ve called this human automation. I talked about it in my book. We’ve talked about it in the podcast in terms of if I were to launch something like HitTail, I would just do manual keyword research and manually email reports back to someone instead of having any type of software do it and frankly probably hire a VA to do it as well.
[23:22] I think that if at all possible, that’s how you start a startup. That’s how you vet that there is in fact a need and you can get so much information out of working with customers without writing a line of code and without spending anytime. If you’re not a developer, finding a developer and so by the time you do in fact go to find a developer you have so much more information not only about what you want to build but you have the validation that this is in fact going to work and that you can get money from people for it and that it provides enough value that you’re willing to do the cash outlay or the time out lay to go and build it yourself.
[23:59] Mike: I think one thing to keep in mind about that is it’s really about vetting the idea. It’s about testing your hypotheses and that’s really what lean startup is about as well. It’s doing that MVP. And the reason you do an MVP is because you don’t know what the answer is. And if you don’t know what the answer is then you have to figure out a way to test it. And what’s the least amount of work that you can do to test that? And this really falls under that umbrella but again it goes back to the idea like if you know that there’s money there and you don’t necessarily need to prove it to yourself then building software might be the right thing to do especially if you already know how to solve those problems.
[24:38] Rob: The seventh and final point we took away from Paul’s essay is that the big launch usually doesn’t work and neither do partnerships. This one made me pretty happy when I read it. I mean he’s basically saying the tech crunch launch doesn’t work and I’m sitting there squealing with glee because we’ve said this so many times and I get halfway down and he says partnerships too usually don’t work. They don’t work for startups in general but they especially don’t work as a way to get growth started. It’s a common mistake among experienced founders to believe that a partnership with a big company will be their break. Six months later they’re all saying the same thing. That was way more work than we expected and we ended up getting practically nothing out of it.
[25:16] I’ve run into this a number of times and this is why these days partnerships are last on my list for growing things unless I know the founder, unless I know that they have a lot of customers and experience and they’re going to be easy to work with. I would almost never partner with a much larger and impersonal Fortune 500 company as a way to try to stem growth. The partnerships that have worked for me have typically been when I’ve gone and sought them out and when I actually have something to offer. So I already have a large enough customer base that I’m able to cold email or try to get a warm introduction to a founder or somewhat high up in another organization but it tends to be a smaller organization.
[25:55] Even if it’s a multimillion dollar in sales organization it’s still run by one or two decision makers and there’s not a big group at the top where it’s all corporate. I can talk to a single person and they can make a decision as to whether or not we want to do a joint mail and or whether or not we want to do an integration and promote it to everyone or one of these things. I mean these are the partnership things that I’m thinking about that I’ve seen win and unless they bring a lot of traffic and or existing paying customers to the table, it’s almost never worth pursuing.
[26:26] Mike: I think if you look back at the growth curves for I would say probably any successful company, there’s very few where you can look at their growth curve and you see these giant spikes in there from pretty much anything. You’ll see these gradual curves where thing start to work and they figure them out and then they double down on them and you get what’s called the hockey stick growth curve. But there’s never a hockey stick growth curve that I’ve ever seen where things will be going along and then suddenly they vault up like by a magnitude of 3 to 5 and then they level out again and that just doesn’t happen. The great big launch as you said, it doesn’t really work. It helps you get customers but it’s more of a gradual thing. It helps get things started. And the same thing with partnerships. They will help get things started. I think with partnerships, there’s so much work and so much effort involved that early on it’s just not worth the time and effort.
[27:21] Rob: Yeah. This is why with Drip I didn’t go for a big launch. Really didn’t get mentioned via mini press outlets the day that the Drip launched but I’ve been marketing it for what? Maybe 10 months before that and during that 10 months, it was building the email launch list. Right? And then gradually doing that slow launch over 90 days was almost the opposite of the big tech crunch launch where you want to get mentioned on Mashable and the next web and tech crunch and 20 other places all in that one day but that creates A) a lot of headache B) it’s a huge time investment to try to work with all those venues. It’s kind of a crazy thing. People’s sites go down because they get linked to by so many things.
[27:59] If you haven’t already spent time on boarding and figuring out if your software even works and if it’s going to retain people, you can get let’s say get 100,000 uniques in two days and everybody poof goes away then what do you have? You don’t have any assets after that because you haven’t built up something over a longer term. Suffice to say that I agree with Paul’s assertion here that the big launch usually doesn’t work and neither do partnerships.
[28:22] Mike: Well the other thing about that is if you do get at that giant influx of traffic as you said, even if you get a bunch of sign ups out of it, you don’t really know what to over them next and you don’t know how to capitalize on those people who did visit but didn’t sign up to bring them back. I think Joel Spolsky at one point had a blog article where he put it out there where if you have this giant launch and tons of people come and they look at your app and they say it sucks, then they’ll never come back and that’s going to be a big problem especially if you try to make a huge splash in the market about an app that quite frankly is really still in the very, very early stages.
[28:59] So that gradual build up over time is the better approach anyway. I mean you don’t want to go too big too fast because with any given startup, if you grow too fast in too many directions well I mean there’s several directions you kind of have to grow in. But if you grow in a way that is skewed in one direction and it goes much, much further than any of the others, so let’s say that your revenue scales much, much faster than the number of employees. Well, you’re going to have some serious growing pains because you have to grow quickly which means you’re going to drop your standards to bring people on faster. Bringing in too much traffic all at once is very similar. You’re not going to be able to capitals on that in a way that is going to be effective for your business long term.
[29:42] Rob: So to recap, the seven points we pulled out of Paul Graham’s essay do things that don’t scale are number 1) recruit users manually. 2) Expect to be fragile or unstable as we put it. 3) Delight early customers. 4) Start in a niche. 5) Consult. 6) Try human automation and 7) the big launch usually doesn’t work and neither do partnerships.
[30:06] Mike: If you have question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 167 | How to Organize & Run a Startup Mastermind
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 167.
[00:04] Music
[00:11] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[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 the word this week Rob?
[00:24] Rob: You know, things are going pretty well. I’ve been spending some time in the code. I’ve been working on the HitTail keyword algorithm. I mentioned that since not provided came through. I found it through the Google web master tools, there’s another source of a bunch of keyword data and so I’ve spent a lot of time repurposing, tweaking that algorithm and it’s actually given me a better – before HitTail could say hey, here’s a keyword and yes it’s a suggestion you strut about or not.
[00:52] Now I actually have a gradient where I can give it a score and it’s a number on like a 1 to 100 scale. So it’s been fun to get back in the code ready to kind of get this thing out. Right now it’s in alpha and I have four different people who’ve sent me spreadsheets and I’m uploading them and seeing how it goes but it’s nice to be moving forward with the goal of getting HitTail back on track basically. Growth had really stalled and things starting to go sideways with it as the value that it provides is a lot less than it did 4 or 5 months ago.
[01:24] Mike: That’s really cool that you’re able to assign a score to those things that you use so people have some sort of ranking to help them decide what they should do next. That’s one of the things that people had asked me to do when Audit Shark was there like this information is great but I need you to score it so I know what to concentrate on. The analysis paralysis that people tend to experience when they just really don’t know what it is that they’re looking at and they don’t have a basis for comparison, that really hurts. And giving them those benchmarks or those ways to sort the data can be really, really helpful.
[01:56] Rob: Yeah. I agree. So hopefully, getting that out into production in the next couple weeks, I’m going to need to get a designer on board to make some minor tweaks to some stuff and then I’ll probably hire a developer. It’s just enough work. I think it’ll probably be 20 to 30 hours of work because there some complex stuff to actually implement it at scale. I’ve realized these days man, if I need to get 30 hours of coding done, it’s going to take me like a month to do it because I can’t get in the flow ever because there’s so many little things going on but hopefully fingers crossed, another few weeks maybe end of February have that all up and running.
[02:29] Mike: Very cool.
[02:30] Rob: How about you? What’s going on?
[02:32] Mike: Well I got an email from Wes O’Hare who put together a resource website for people who make web products and the URL, we’ll link it up in the show notes is produx.co. So check it out if you want. There’s a lot of good information on there. There’s a few couple things I’ve never heard of before. So if you’re building a web startup of any kind there are definitely some good resources there.
[02:55] Rob: I wanted to call out two things. The first is I was on a podcast this week. It’s the Linchpin podcast and I was talking all about email marketing and creating email mini courses so linchpin.net/podcast if you want to check that out. It’s a short one. It’s probably 25-30 minutes. The other thing is Brandon Dunn, lifetime academy member, he and I were emailing about some stuff and I loved the story he sent. He said hey, I set a new personal record. I had an idea for a WordPress plug-in last Friday, learned how to write said plug-in over the weekend because I’ve never really dug in a WordPress before. I’ve run paid ads today plus some inbound from my blog and so far I’ve admitted two new customers who weren’t friends or in my network. I love it. It’s like a super fast implementation. Talk about taking action. It’s at wordpressconversionfunnel.com.
[03:48] And if you do nothing else, checkout that URL because look at the way Brandon puts together this sales page. It’s a long form sales later. Its written from his perspective and it’s all about how the tactics that he’s included in these WordPress plug-in has helped his own business very elegant, well put together, very folksy, it feels like you’re just having a conversation with someone and they’re kind of just telling you about something while you’re sitting at a bar. I wanted to share that with the audience and kind of give an example of a way to get something done well and to do it fast and execute like Brandon did. So congrats sir.
[04:18] Music
[04:22] Mike: We’re talking about how to organize and run a startup mastermind. Over the past couple of months, I think that you’ve probably gotten just as many questions as I have if not more about what is a mastermind? How do I go about putting one together? What sorts of things go on? How can it help? So what we’re going to today is we’re going to take some time and set aside the entire podcast episode for talking about a startup mastermind and some of the different experiences that you and I have had in running our own.
[04:49] Rob: And to give you some background, the term mastermind as far as I know is first mentioned by Napoleon Hill in the book Think and Grow Rich and if you read through that, it’s going to almost barely resemble what we’re talking about today because A) things just have developed so far in the past 75 years since he wrote that book and B) we do some very specific things that work very well because we’re talking about a startup mastermind. It’s not just a generic group of people getting together to talk about something but really focus on a startup right on the startups that you’re all running with other founders. And so I think that’s something to keep in mind.
[05:25] The other thing I’d like to mention is that one of the reasons we’re doing this episode is because Mike and I have realized the value of masterminds in our successes and just the power of community through MicroConf and through the Micropreneur Academy and that’s one of the big reasons that we are revamping micropreneur.com this year and we’re going to put an extra focus on community.
[05:47] And this mastermind stuff will be part of that. I mean we want to foster, help people get involved in mastermind and help them run them well whether they setup local Micropreneur meet ups as we’re seeing spark up. Last count, they were approaching maybe 10 worldwide of these Micropreneur meet ups just people getting together. That’s a little different than a mastermind but there’s overlap there. I mean the flipside is setting up Skype masterminds, as we’ll surely talk about in this episode.
[06:13] Mike: So the first question that somebody might have is what is a startup mastermind? To me, a startup mastermind is a group of people who are business owners or have applications that they are selling online and they want to talk to other people who are in a similar boat, other people who are encountering similar problems have a similar type of business because if you’re talking to somebody who’s running a brick and mortar type business, they’re going to have very, very different problems than you would as somebody who’s selling software over the web. So you really want to make sure that you’re talking to people who are in at least a similar situation as you and these types of people will help you make decisions. You can open up to them. You can talk about the types of problems that you’re having. They can give you suggestions. It tends to be a lot easier to talk to these types of people than it is to talk to your customers or your employees.
[07:04] And as a business owner it can be very I’ll say isolating when you’re running a business and maybe you have employees or contractors and you need advice but you don’t necessarily know where to turn. And a startup mastermind can really help with that because you can open up and you can talk about a lot of different things and essentially lay all your cards on the table and get the feedback that you really need in order to move your business forward. And if you don’t have a mechanism for doing that, then you may very well reduced to talking to your spouse or talking to your friends who if they don’t do that sort of thing, then they don’t have any basis for making decisions or offering advice. It becomes very difficult to get anything out of those conversations.
[07:44] Rob: Your spouse, your employees and your non-founder friends will never ever understand what it is you’re doing at the level that you need them to actually provide you with helpful support and feedback. You must have someone who understands that founders are a different breed and what we’re doing in startups is such a unique thing that talking to your parents or god forbid your employees about this, it almost never yields helpful information.
[08:12] I think the point that you brought up about isolation is a big one and I just double underline that on the notes I’m taking here. Isolation is something you need to avoid. I’ve gone through it. I think a lot of founders go through it. I see a mastermind as a way to get a group of supportive people around you, a way to have accountability, a way to have people invested in your startup not financially but just mentally invested without having a cofounder. So if you do have one or two cofounders, I don’t know that you necessarily need a mastermind because that’s kind of you have your mastermind there. But especially if you’re a single founder, I just view the startup mastermind as a semi-replacement for having cofounders.
[08:52] Mike: So the next question you might have is how many people should you have in your startup mastermind and this number I think can vary quite a bit. I’ve heard a lot of people say 2, 3, 4, 5. I think I heard one group that had I think 6 or 7 people in their mastermind. I feel like that’s way too much. My mastermind group has three people in it and with three people, we each get about half an hour to talk and we talk about our own products and we used to talk about our own stuff every single time we meet so it’s not as if you’re going 2, 3, 4, session or something like that without talking.
[09:24] Half an hour seems like its enough time for you to be able to get through everything that you’re talking about. And if you go a little bit long, it’s usually not a big deal but to me, I feel like three people is a good number to have. I think it can work well if you have two people. I think that once you start getting to a 4 or 5 people I feel like the mastermind gets too big and people don’t necessarily have enough focus and you spend more time waiting than you do talking about the things that you’re working on and getting the feedback that you need to move forward.
[09:52] Rob: Yeah. I take a pretty hard line on this. I think a mastermind, its best startup mastermind only works with 2 to 4 people and I’ve been in one that was 2 people and it worked great. I think 3 is the ideal number because then you’re getting two perspectives on things instead of just the other person. You want someone to have 20–30 minutes to really get in deep because if each person has 5 minutes to talk, you just can’t understand really what’s going on with their business.
[10:20] Now I have heard of masterminds like you said with 5, 6 I’ve heard of 8 person masterminds. Those are just run entirely differently than what you and I do. Those are run where it’s like every meeting 1 or 2 people get to speak for a longer period of time. Maybe you get 20 minutes when you’re on the hot seat and everybody else only gets a 5 minute update. I can’t imagine being part of a group like that. That’s not called a startup mastermind. Maybe that’s some other type of meet up or something else but it’s not at the level that we’re talking about when we’re using the term startup mastermind.
[10:53] Mike: So the next question is how often should you meet? I’ve heard of a lot of other groups that will meet once a week or even a couple of times a week. My group meets once every other week and I feel like every other week is the right amount of time because with half an hour allotted to each person, you get to talk a fair amount but at then at the end of it there’s an accountability area and that gives you – or the week in between each meeting gives you enough time to really buckle down and work on those things. And if you run into any sort of issues, you still have time to be able to get some of that stuff done from one week to the next. If you’re meeting every single week, it almost feels like any sort of commitments that you have or that you’ve set for yourself, it may very well be very difficult to meet some of those commitments just because you don’t have enough time to do it.
[11:40] It’s like okay well I’ve got things that I’m going to work on and its going to take me 2 weeks to do or 3 weeks to do and your report for the week is for 3 or 4 weeks straight is going to be well yeah, I’m still working on that. I’m not done yet. I’m sure you can go into a lot of detail about it but to me it seems like meeting every other week has worked out really, really well for us and with that sort of schedule, you can still move it around a little bit during the week. It’s not that big a deal. I think that we’ve only had to move ours I think twice but we still resorted to email updates on those weeks where we just couldn’t meet. There are ways around that sort of thing but to me it feels like once every other week is probably ideal. I think you could get away with once every week. I think Rob you’re in one that meets every week right?
[12:23] Rob: No, both of mine are every other week and it’s for the reasons you’ve outlined. There just isn’t enough time to bite off a large enough chunk to make it interesting if you’d meet every week. Plus if your mastermind like you said, yours run 90 minutes and mine typically run between 90 minutes and two hours and that’s a big chunk to bite off every week just to sit down and talk about work and not actually work. And so to bite off two hours a week, I want to kill that time but certainly it’s helpful in the broader sense but to not be able to be productive for those hours would be a big deal.
[12:55] I agree with you pretty largely that every other week since to be the ideal tempo. If struggling kind of with your business or with the mental side of it that then it would feel like too long and that there’s not enough accountability that you could feel isolated so that’s where I feel the two week touch point that even if you’re having a rough time, that’s often enough that it can kind of get you back on track.
[13:17] Mike: So here’s another question for you specifically. Since I’m only part of one mastermind group, you said that you’re in two different ones. How does that work and how does that I guess correspond to when you were a member of just one because I imagine the experience is a little different but as you said, dedicating that time every week would be really hard but again you’re in two so you’re basically dedicating twice as much on those weeks where you do have the meeting and then none when you don’t. Do you find that it’s more helpful to have a second one?
[13:48] Rob: That’s a good point because since I’m in two every other week it’s kind of like I’m in one a week. The reason that it works for me is because I’m not in two Skype mastermind groups. I feel like for me, that would be too much time because that would essentially be two hours every week on Skype. One of them’s in person and one of them’s via Skype. And the Skype one is with some more experience founders who are in other parts of the country and we really dig into a lot of nuts and bolts and detailed stuff that literally maybe 10,000 people in the world have any interest in at the level that we’re talking about. I mean it’s just such a small – maybe it’s 50,000 but it’s just a tiny, tiny number. And so there are just aren’t that many people who can discuss the intimate metrics that we’re talking about and really understand the design element. So that’s where the Skype comes in as just finding people to do it is tough.
[14:36] The in person one is a little more casual, it’s a little more fun and we almost always do it at happy hour. And so we go to a pub and we’ll have a few drinks and we’ll have appetizers and then we’ll chat. Sometimes we’ll do it in my house and I’ll host but it’s basically the same thing. I’m pouring drinks and more hanging out in the evening. So that’s where I almost use it as its both a social/have fun type thing but we also, we do get into the nitty gritty of our business but our businesses aren’t as closely aligned as with the Skype mastermind. I think I’d have a tough time being in two intense hardcore masterminds like my Skype mastermind is.
[15:13] Mike: Do you find that you actually get anything done while you’re drinking like that or no?
[15:16] Rob: Yeah. We do. It’s not like we’re frat boys doing keg stands. I mean we’re having conversations. We’re reading from notes, taking notes, asking opinions. Definitely making decisions and helping each other. Yes. We definitely get things done. The nice part about being in person is a couple guys come over and we’re sitting there chatting and having drinks for three hours, it doesn’t feel that long because we’re just hanging out. But being on a three hour Skype call is pretty irritating. It just gets old and you’re sitting or too long and we can be more casual with the time and even at times go into more depth on certain topics just because you have the luxury of being there in person.
[15:57] Mike: So one of the things that we did which was actually a recommendation from you was when we were setting up our startup mastermind, one of the things that we did was we essentially setup expectations for what that mastermind should be and what we expected from everybody. And two other things that really came out was 1) an expectation of complete confidentiality from everybody. Anything that you talked about during that meeting or during those various meetings would not go beyond the people that were there. It was kind of regardless of the topic whether it was personal stuff that came up or whether it was business related or contracts and stuff like that because there are legal issues that you may need to discuss with people and those are the things that you don’t necessarily want going out to anybody else or discuss outside of your circle.
[16:40] The second thing that also came as a recommendation from you was having an opt out clause after some sort of a trial period. I think it was something like eight weeks to say is this working for me or is it not because eight weeks, it sounds like a long time but it was really just four meetings and I think that if you don’t really gel as a group within four meetings or so, it probably isn’t going to happen and you might want to go off and find other people to be part of your startup mastermind group. Are there other rules that you setup in your masterminds?
[17:09] Rob: I can’t think of any but the confidentiality I think is one that I want to underscore because if I’m going to do this, if you’re going to be serious about this, you need to bring it to the table. I bring everything. I bring my lifetime value, my customer churn numbers, revenue, net profit, super decisions I make. I bring stuff in there that I don’t talk about with anybody else and that means there has to be confidentiality. They can’t go talking to other people about it. I think that’s a key. And then you mentioning the out clause, that’s something that I’ve done with both of mine and I think the important thing is that you’re going to probably be setting this up with people you know. Right? It’s kind of friends. And so if it doesn’t work out, there really needs to be a no hard feelings opt out period for 6-8 meetings or whatever.
[17:56] So as you said, yours was four meeting and I think that’s the ideal duration to really figure out if you’re going to get value out of it because think about it. If you get in there and you’re talking and maybe let’s just say you think you know these acquaintances or these friends and you get in and one person just dominates and doesn’t really offer a lot of information and you feel like you’re wasting that 90 minutes every two weeks, you need to feel comfortable that you can say you know what guys, this just isn’t working out for me. I’m sorry. And be able to back out and have that no hard feelings thing. Just as anyone else who comes in, maybe they just don’t feel comfortable. They want to be on their own or whatever that you don’t have the judgment of them if they decided to leave.
[19:34] So I think those are some pretty key aspects of it to keep it less stressful because anytime you’re setting something like this up with friends, it always has the potential to kind of go downhill.
[18:44] Mike: So in terms of logistics, we talked previously about the schedule and for us, we have a very regular schedule. We meet every Tuesday night at 8:30 and it’s from 8:30 ‘til about 10 or 10:30. Do you use a regular schedule or no?
[18:59] Rob: So the Skype one is a regular schedule every two weeks Wednesday morning and then the in-person was regular for a while and now we’ve kind of let it flux and I’ll find that we, unless one of us thinks about it, it will go three weeks and its even over the holidays when I think a month. I was thinking the other day that we need to get it back because it used to be every Thursday afternoon at three o’clock at this one place. There’s a happy hour and so we probably just need to kind of pencil that in the game. I think there’s a lot of value to making it regular because if you have to plan it individually every time it’s so frustrating but if everyone just blocks this thing out for the next year and blocks out that same time on Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever, that’s really the way to go.
[19:36] Mike: Yeah and I think that you and I found that even just recording this podcast very, very early on, just setting that regular schedule really helps because it was like oh well, at this time and every single week I know that I have X planned so I can’t plan anything else for that as oppose to saying okay well I can move this around or always trying to find a place for it and it’s just logistically it’s hard to think and plan for stuff when its constantly changing every week. So I really feel strongly that having that regular schedule is extremely helpful not just for mastermind but for other things that you’re working on.
[20:08] So the same point, using the same type of media mechanism every week to prevent technical issues or from cropping up and switching let’s say between Google hangouts and then to Skype and then to something else, always trying to new things just because they’re new, I feel like that’s not really conducive to having a mastermind or we use Google hangouts every week. I think you said you use Skype?
[20:30] Rob: Yeah. We used Google hangouts for a while but they kept changing the interface and it was causing us problems. Just the technical part of it. People weren’t getting invites and all this stuff so we have switched to Skype. I paid for – you know you have to pay for a pro account for a year. It’s like $50 but then you can do the multiple video Skypeing with multiple people. And so I just forked it over and now at 10 AM we’re all there and I call both people.
[20:55] Mike: Yeah. We’ve definitely had some issues with Google hangouts. It depends on what everybody’s comfortable with whether you use Google hangouts or whether you use Skype, I would definitely recommend this and I think Rob, you’ll probably agree with me that you definitely want to use something that has video. I think that’s something that people might overlook when they’re beginning to build up a startup mastermind and I think that people don’t necessarily think about it but I think having that phase in front of you where people are talking and you’re actually seeing them talk and facial expressions and having them be able to hold stuff up and show you things, that is such a valuable experience because it just adds so much context to the things that they’re talking about. If you’re just hearing this voice on the other end of the line, it’s a little bit disconnected and it doesn’t necessarily give you the same impression that you get when you’re talking to somebody through video.
[21:44] Rob: Invaluable. Yup, I echo that.
[21:47] Mike: So what about accountability? We have our own mechanism for accountability but what do you do in yours?
[21:53] Rob: So we use Google docs. We have a single Google doc with bullet points and the three people’s names in the doc and then we talk about what we’ve done and what we’re planning to do over the next two weeks and challenges that we faced or stuff we need opinions on. I’ll admit that as of late, we’ve started to fall off the wagon with that. I have just started it up again with the most recent mastermind meeting and started updating their Google doc again but we did that for maybe six months and then just kind of we go from the top of our head now and it’s not quite as valuable I think to be able to look back through the history. It’s really interesting to look through the history and see what you’ve talked about and to think wow, you know, I remember when this was making $1,000 a month and now it’s making – that’s just crazy that I was actually at that point. It really gives you a sense of accomplishment and a sense perhaps of what the group has done for you.
[22:43] Beyond that, I know you guys touch base between or you have a message that comes out between your meetings and I think that’s a really good idea. I’ve never done that but I think it could be really helpful. Why don’t you tell folks how that works?
[22:55] Mike: Sure. So as I said before, our startup mastermind meets on Tuesday nights between 8:30 and 10 to 10:30 or however long it goes. And what I do is I essentially assign myself to be the scribe for the startup mastermind and what I’ll do is I basically keep track of who is supposed to be speaking and what the schedule is. So there’s three of us and everyone’s got I guess an assigned slot. And then if I spoke first this week then the next that we meet, I would speak third and I would speak second and then I would speak first again. And we just rotate so that everybody starts in different slots. So it does rotate and that’s definitely helpful.
[23:36] The other thing that we do is there’s essentially three different things that I take notes on. The first one is what people’s previous commitments were and those are generally copied from the previous week so whenever I start a new meeting, I fire up Evernote. I throw everything in there and I basically just write down everything that they said they were going to accomplish last time. And then I have a section for what people’s accomplishments were and then what they have said that they were going to accomplish the following week or the following time that we meet.
[24:04] And then what I do is once the meeting is done, I take the three sections for what people have committed to doing by the following meeting, I throw those into an email that I send out using boomerang that I schedule for the following Tuesday. I might do it on Monday. I forget which. But it’s basically early on the following week so that once about a week goes by you may have kind of forgotten about what some of your commitments were to the group for the next meeting and that email in your inbox basically becomes a trigger that says hey, these are the things that you said you were going to get done. Where are you?
[24:33] And I started this I don’t know, it was probably about after 6 or 7 meetings because I started to realize hey, I’m waiting until Monday to start working on some of these things and go back and look and see what it is that I should’ve been doing for the last 12 or 13 days. So instead, as a trigger to myself I was like well let me remind myself of the things that I should’ve been working on and I said well why don’t I just send this to everybody? And people loved it. I mean nobody complained about it. Everyone said hey, that’s an awesome idea. Thanks a lot for doing that. And it’s worked out really really well and I actually even get requests here and there for me to resend it on occasion if we move a meeting or if we have to skip one because of the holiday or something like that.
[25:16] Rob: Yeah. I really like that idea. I can see the value of it. When we’re having our masterminds, I’m taking notes and then I typically put them in my Trello board when I say here’s what I’m going to do over the next two weeks. I put them in Trello to do but that can get lost pretty easily if I come back and there’s a bunch of email and I really don’t get back to Trello because I’m too busy churning through a bunch of fires. It’s easy to forget that so I could see a lot of value and have that email sent out off week.
[25:40] Mike: The one thing that I liked about what you said was that you guys use Google docs and I don’t know, I guess I didn’t really think about that because I throw all of my notes into Evernote and then I just have a separate note for each of the meetings that we have but it probably makes a lot more sense for me to switch over and take everything, throw it into a Google doc and then share it with everybody so that everybody can see the entire history of everything as opposed to me just having the history in Evernote.
[26:04] Rob: Right. And then other people can modify if maybe you misquote by accident or you put some in there and they decide they want to add some extra things, it’s kind of nice to be able to collaborate.
[26:16] Mike: So next major question that I think somebody might have is how to find people for your mastermind and I think this is a hard question because you really have to look at who your peers are and you have to know the people that you’re going to invite. I mean you at least want to have some sense of what it is that they do. You want to make sure that they are doing the same types of things that you are and for me, I met the people who are in my mastermind group at MicroConf. So for me that made it extremely easy. If you’re going to MicroConf, definitely look around for people to join a startup mastermind with. But what about you? How did you go about finding the people who are in your startup mastermind?
[26:51] Rob: Pretty much the same way. It was through MicroConf and the academy and just kind of the stuff we’re doing. I can’t imagine starting a mastermind with someone I had not met in person. I received this question. How do you find people for your mastermind? And I’ve heard suggestions like well, go on forums or get to know people via email and this and that. And that might work but there’s always a large part to how to people interact and the intimacy of a startup mastermind and what you’re sharing, it really depends on interaction style. Do people listen? Do they always want to talk? Do they want to dominate? Do they just want to give advice? There’s a lot of subtlety there that you can’t pickup over a forum or another non in-person mechanism. So personally I would go to an in-person event.
[27:33] The most masterminds I’ve heard come out of anywhere is out of the MicroConfs. We’re these Micropreneur meet ups and masterminds just springing up out of MicroConf Europe a number of them have already come out of it and same with the Vegas one. And I think the other place where I have seen stuff start to spring up is of course the academy. It’s our membership website so there’s a community there. And like I said, this year we’re going to be doubling down on that and really focusing on building that community and expanding it and so that’s the kind of place that I think you can go.
[28:02] I don’t know if you can go to a public forum like the old business is software stuff or answers down on startups.com or those kinds of places. I don’t know if you can go and do that. I’ve never done it and I haven’t heard of it being done. I’m sure it’s possible but I really think that you kind of have to go to that in person aspect. The other thing I’ll say is when you’re looking for the types of people to invite, you really want to find people that are ahead of you.
[28:30] In an ideal world, the other two people would be just enough ahead of you that they still remember what it’s like to be where you are but that they can give you advice based on what they’ve learned. Now obviously, that’s not possible if there’s three people. Everyone can’t be a head of the other. But what I have found interesting is that in the masterminds I’m in, there’s typically some expertise in a certain area. So one guy might be really solid on UX and ahead of everybody else and another person might be a head in terms of high touch sales and another might be ahead in terms of content marketing, another ahead in terms of paid advertising. There’s these different aspects of it.
[29:04] And so I think when you’re setting up a mastermind, don’t just grab the first three people you know who are your friends who are also founders but think about who is doing what I’m doing? So if you’re running a Saas app, try to find two other Saas founders. If you have a WordPress plug-in, try to find two other WordPress folks and if you’re doing info products, try to find info products etcetera. It’s not to say that’s the only way to do it but I think that in the ideal scenario, if you’re B to B, they would also be B to B and the type of software and they would be relatively close to you within let’s say a year ahead or behind you in terms of the path you’re traveling as a founder.
[29:39] Mike: I found that even when you’re working with other people in the mastermind group it’s really nice to get that additional perspective because other people have different experiences than you especially if their background are different. So I don’t know as I would necessarily shy away from people who are not Saas founders for example because Audit Shark is a Saas based business and the people that are in my mastermind group, none of them have a Saas based business right now. So I still get a lot of good information from them though so I don’t necessarily know as I would shy away from them. I’ve gotten a lot of great things out of it and even just in how to deal with a recurring revenue business, they’ve had some really, really great ideas that I’ve been able to take and implement. There’s other sides of it as well.
[30:21] Rob: Absolutely. It can work both ways for sure.
[30:23] Mike: It depends a lot on the type of people but I mean we’ve kind of talked about that is like you need to have the right types of people and make sure that the personalities don’t clash and get that trial period or opt out clause in there so somebody can walk away with no hard feelings as long as things are working.
[30:38] Rob: I think what you’re saying is personality may trump similarity of business and I would agree with that. The personality mix in your mastermind is going to have 80% to do with whether or not it’s actually successful because again, if you get people, if you come into the mastermind and you feel judged or you feel put down or again you feel like someone dominates, you feel there’s personality clashes in any direction and people are trying to pull away, it can really degrade the experience of the mastermind and it ruins the trust.
[31:08] I’ve also heard that mastermind’s going downhill because certain people just don’t show up or they commit to stuff and they just never do it. I mean there’s a bunch of things that can really kind of degrade the experience so you have to think to yourself are these folks reliable and are they someone who I want to spend two hours talking to every other week and really invest this time? Because that two hours is valuable. As a founder you can do a lot with that and I think you really need to think hard before you get into a mastermind relationship and I think that you will need to make sure that the folks are going to be compatible with kind of your working style.
[31:40] So that’s our show for today. If you have question for us, call our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
Episode 166 | Quitting Your Job When You Have a Mortgage, How to Get 1,000 Pages of Content Indexed in Google, and More Listener Questions
Show Notes
Episodes for New Founders:
Mindset
Episode 4 | 8 Things We Wish We Knew When We Started Out
Episode 11 | The Five Biggest Hurdles to Getting Started
Episode 29 | 5 Steps to Beating Your Startup Demons
Mailing list
Episode 72 | 8 Tactics for Building Your Pre-Launch Mailing List
Episode 152: Strategies For Loading Up Your Pre-launch Email Lists
Choosing an idea
Episode 92 | 12 Rules for Building Your First Profitable Startup
Episode 130 | Capitalizing on Your Unfair Advantage
Episode 134 | The Product Test (9 Attributes that Will Determine the Success of Your Product)
Practical
Episode 17 | Eleven Ways to Make Ends Meet While Starting Up
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discussed quitting your job when you have a mortgage, how to get 1,000 pages of content indexed by Google and more listener questions. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 166.
[00:12] Music
[00:20] 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.
[00:29] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:30] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:35] Mike: Well I finally got all the new pricing code in place for my sales website for AuditShark this week but it was just a total nightmare. It should’ve only been a couple of days worth of work and it was probably 3 or 4 weeks ago and back and forth with one of my contractors and I think I just didn’t get what I wanted across very well and he didn’t understand how things were setup or how they needed to be changed. And I just got fed up with it at one point and I just said look, just check in what you’ve got, I’ll take care of it. And it took me probably 4 or 5 hours to get it done but it’s just all the back and forth totally killed my productivity.
[01:09] Rob: Yeah that’s a bummer. This is in your billing code? It’s like upgrading and downgrading people?
[01:14] Mike: It’s on the sales website so it gives me the ability to change the pricing options that are out there. It allows me to setup like custom billing entries for people like if they had a very specific situation or for enterprise pricing which is not something I had until now. And that was a big thing, it’s basically making it so that if somebody wants to sign up for an enterprise plan, they basically have to contact me. But I don’t have any way to put them onto any sort of enterprise billing plan unless they create an account and then I can go in and modify things which I’m not real happy about. So I’d rather give them an option where they can actually just signup for something directly from the website if they get in touch with me and just setup the pricing plans the way that they need to be.
[01:58] Rob: Right. Have you had any enterprise folks trying to sign up? You mentioned you had some calls or at least some discussion going on?
[02:04] Mike: Yeah, I have the discussions going on. Nobody’s followed through yet. I just didn’t want to be in a situation where they try to and I didn’t have a good way to handle it.
[02:11] Rob: Well, we’ve nailed down dates for MicroConf. MicroConf is on April 14 and 15 in Las Vegas at the Tropicana. If you’re interested in attending its conference for self funded startup founders that is at microconf.com. So in addition to that, I’ve added a yearly goal. Remember how we did our 2014 goals? My goal this year is to not file a tax extension again. I don’t want to be filing taxes in August or September. By March 15th corporate and April 15th I’m trying to do it for the personal stuff.
[02:42] Mike: And that’s really going to throw a wrench in things because of MicroConf because MicroConf is on the 14th and 15th of April which is when your taxes are going…
[02:49] Rob: Right.
[02:50] Mike: You’re going to have to do them even earlier.
[02:51] Rob: Exactly.
[02:52] Mike: And on that note I’m actually really close to handing off all of my book keeping and personal finances to my new bookkeeper so almost migrated to a completely new bank and incredibly excited about the handoff because it means I’ll never have to look at most of my mail ever again.
[03:05] Rob: That’s a really big deal. What a big time saver and a recurring time saver at that. So I haven’t had a bookkeeper do anything with my personal stuff. My personal stuff, I don’t know if it’s simpler than yours or I guess – see, I do all electronic bills. They go directly to my bank so I literally get just a couple physical paper bills in the mail each month from companies that are too small to do e-bills or even recurring payments I can setup online. So I haven’t done anything like that with my personal stuff.
[03:34] The business stuff I did as we discussed on the podcast, I hired a bookkeeper early in 2013 I had him go all the way back through pull everything out of indinero go into Xero and then we also moved some stuff in the outright for different business. I’m feeling good about it though. I was just looking at my profit and loss for 2013 and I know it’s all dialed in and the numbers are correct and I don’t have to go back and do a bunch of comparing with PayPal spreadsheets like I used to because that’s just been done, I hired somebody to do that.
[04:05] Mike: I don’t know if my personal stuff is any more complicated. It’s kind of all over the place. Part of the issue is because I got like investment accounts and I’ve got checking accounts and savings accounts, it’s just kind of complicated how things come into my bank account and kind of get spread out from there. Up here we’ve got these local vendors who come in for just various services for the house. For example, we have oil delivery comes in because we heat our house with oil and they just put a little thing in the door when they come and do an oil delivery. It’s not like they mail out invoices or anything like that. They definitely don’t do anything electronically. You just have to send it on your own.
[04:43] Rob: So a little update on what I’ve been up to in terms of my businesses. Drip has basically been just in development mode, haven’t done any marketing for the last couple weeks because it’s been Christmas and new years and so I’m going to resume marketing on it next week. I have paid acquisition and some content marketing, this can be starting. In addition there’s a potential partnership that’s in the works but I would say if you’re considering a partnership, really be critical about who you’re dealing with. The only reason I’m even considering doing this is because 1) the guy’s a successful founder. I’ve known him for about a year. I know that he’s at the goal and he’s ever to work with and he also has a large business with a large customer base. And so the upside for drink is substantial.
[05:26] I think upside for him obviously is there as well but this is not someone to contact me out of the blue. I almost find that none of those work unless it’s a warm intro or some kind of a relationship someone I know and can trust and verify what they’re saying is legitimate. It’s just too easy for someone to approach with kind of a sky high idea that requires a lot of work for me that isn’t actually going to yield you any customers.
[05:52] Mike: Its interesting you mentioned that because I just gave an Audit Shark demo to a consulting company that’s past week and they were really impressed by what Audit Shark can do and they’re looking at their customer base to see which of their customers would be a good fit for it and I’ve known these guys for probably 5 or 6 years so I totally agree with you when you say anyone who’s a cold intro or cold calls you to ask about partnerships is probably not necessarily a good fit. Funny enough, I recently was approached to be acquired.
[06:18] Rob: Wow. How did that check out?
[06:20] Mike: It didn’t because it was one of those things where they just said hey, we’d like to look at your finances because we’re looking to acquire businesses that are in your realm and I’m like you have no idea what I do.
[06:32] Rob: Wow that’s crazy. I’ve never been contacted like that. You think they were just trying to get an idea of your business so they could copy the model or what’s the story?
[06:39] Mike: It looked like it was some sort of investment firm out of Philadelphia or something like that and I really think all they did was they went through listings of domain names and businesses and just said okay which of these have been around for 5 or 8 years or something like that and how many of them are in this general region of the country and how many of them are in the software technology space. I think that’s all that they did because they did virtually no research on me what so ever. There was just a letter in the mail saying hey, would you be interested…
[07:07] Rob: Wow. And I happen to have the acquisition offers. I probably get an email a week from some unknown venture capital firm saying they’re looking to invest, wondering if we’re going to take investments. They send to the HitTail, to my email address at HitTail or the one at GetDrip and that’s always fun and I know a lot of Saas apps that are one or two persons that get those and aren’t looking for funding, so probably something similar it sounds like.
[07:32] Mike: Most likely.
[07:33] Rob: So we received a very nice email from Henry Oswald with the subject line you’ve helped my profitable bootstrap more than any other resource. And he says hey guys, one of the best parts about my bootstrap businesses is the nice user feedback I get from people saying it’s changed the way they work and how grateful they are for it. This is the way I feel about your podcast. My online LaTex editor sharelatex.com, it’s a software tool, says it targets the niche of scientific academics in students. A cofounder and myself went full time six months ago and are now making enough money to get by which we are really pleased with. Whenever I meet someone who wants to start their own business, the first thing I do is point them to your podcast. Thanks so much for your help.
[08:14] So I think we should add Henry to the list of success stories if he’s not already on there, on our website, startupsfortherestofus.com/successstories. We have several folks who have quit their job after being influenced by the podcast or implementing stuff we’ve talked about. So we only have a handful out there now. I know there’s literally several dozens of people that I’ve talked to so we need to get going and build that list out a little more.
[08:37] The other thing I wanted to mention before we dive into some really good listener questions is a productivity tip. It’s going old school with your bug and to do trucking. And this is from Carlos from Spain. He says I like to share a small productivity tip with you. I recently purchased a big white board and attached it to the wall behind my development computer. I track all bugs, features, to-do’s, etcetera there. It’s awesome. I turn my head from time to time to make indentations, erase things that are already done and draw small diagrams. Thanks for the podcast. Keep it up.
[09:07] So while I like this idea, it would be really hard if you were working with anyone else, if you’re working with a team because no one else can access those bugs. The weird thing about to-do is that to be able to reorder things, what are you really cumbersome, almost like having paper like I used to. So that’s where I like a software tool like Trello for that convenience but I totally wish I had a wall in my office that I could paint as a white board because there’s nothing like having that tact out feeling and having everything written up there where you can just use your own two hands to move things around. A lot of benefits to that, I agree.
[09:44] Mike: You know, I had the exact same thought that you can go in with a white board would be the thing to do and I have two of them in my office. I wish it worked for me. It just doesn’t.
[09:50] Music
[09:54] Rob: So let’s dive into questions. Our first question today is about quitting your job went you have a mortgage it’s from Chris Soils and he says hi guys, thanks so much for putting the time and effort each week into the podcast. It’s a big source of inspiration for me. Quick question, I know you’ve already done an episode a long time ago on how you quit your jobs but I was wondering whether you had a mortgage at the time and how you handled that both psychologically and financially. How much runway did you leave for yourself etc.
[10:19] Mike: When I first started out, I did have a mortgage and to be perfectly honest, if you have a mortgage already, it’s a lot easier to quit your job than it is to quit your job and then go get a mortgage just because the sheer amount of paperwork that the bank will send you in order to get a mortgage if you’re self employed is just astounding. You’re much better off just going and finding someone to pay them to hire you at whatever salary you want and in order to be on their payroll instead of having your own just because banks have this thing about you’re self employed, you’re risky. And it’s like you’re probably making decent money in order to be able to do that.
[10:55] But I think in terms of dealing with that psychologically I didn’t really have any issues with it because at the time, I was making enough money to be able to make ends meet and then some. So to me, I didn’t see it as any sort of risk to go down that path the money that was coming in was substantial more than it was for me to make ends meet and in addition to that, my wife was working at the time. So there were a lot of things that played into that. It felt comfortable. Now, things change over time of course but when I was first doing it, it was just not a big deal to me.
[11:28] Rob: And for me I definitely had a mortgage. I may have had multiple at the time because I was investing in houses in Los Angeles but those are rented out. So it’s fine. But yeah, I’ve had a mortgage the entire time I mean really since I got married in 2000. Financially, the way I handle it, so there were two breaks from me. One was from salary to consulting and then the next one is from consulting to products. The first time when I made the leap I was actually making more consulting than I was from salary. So financially it wasn’t a big deal nor was it really that much of an emotional deal because I knew I had a project that was going to last at least a few months and then I could get a nice stock pile in so that I could have a pretty easy 3 to 6 month runway within a month or two of starting consulting. I just honker down. I saved a lot of money really quickly and that gave me at least a bit of an unwary in case consulting work dried up.
[12:16] Making the leap to products was a little scarier since I wasn’t dealing with Saas at that time, I didn’t have recurring revenue for the most part. It was not as financially as much of a burden because I have been consulting then for several years and so I had a bit of a stock pile setup for myself that I could probably – I couldn’t have received zero income from my products but at the level they were at, I could’ve gone off 6 to 12 months at least and still made the mortgage without trouble. So that’s how kind of the financial part worked out. Psychologically I was a bit concerned. There’s always a concern especially me being less likely to bet the farm or to lose a house on this kind of stuff. I think psychologically I had to get to the point where I felt comfortable quitting and I knew I could get to the point where the mortgage was covered quickly.
[13:09] Different people have had their own risk tolerances. It really depends on what you feel good about and how much stress you can handle and live with. But for me, with consulting, I was making 2-3 times what I needed to live so what I did was look at how much product revenue do I actually need? I don’t need as much revenue as I was making consulting. I really only needed – it wound up being $7,000 to $8,000 a month at the time. And so it was much, much less than I was making as a consultant and so when I was about 70% to 80% of the way there with my product revenue and I realized I was going to have a ton more time once I quit in order to build that number up, that’s when I decided to take the plunge so thanks for the question Chris. I hope that’s helpful. Our next question is a voicemail from Dave in Ohio.
[13:56] Dave: Hi guys, this is Dave from Ohio, just calling with a quick question I’m actually traveling but I thought I’d give you a quick call. I just finished episode 163 and Rob says something really interesting I thought I’d maybe comment on. You mentioned something earlier in the podcast, unless I’m mistaken that HitTail now has like 1,000 pages of indexed content and that really struck me as a huge number for a web app where if you might comment on that a little bit more. Thanks so much. Have a great day. All the best.
[14:23] Rob: Yeah. So thanks for the question Dave. The quickest way to find out how many pages your site is indexing Google, I mean you just go to Google and type in site: and then your domain name. Site, colon, domain name. And you can put sub domains in there or you can just do the top level domain and it will show all the sub domains included underneath that. So as of today, at least via my search here, it shows HitTail with 889 pages indexed in Google. And what it amounts to, it’s around I think it’s between 150 and 200 pages are the actual core marketing website and then the rest are all blog articles because you remember when WordPress and most blogging engines, every blog post gets its own individual page.
[15:08] And so the question is how you get there? The first thing that the previous owner said all this up, I haven’t created that much content for it. Previous owners added a new page for each FAQ question that they answered. I think that’s a pretty interesting approach to it. It all depends on if you think that people are going to find those pages based on those searches are actually going to convert because if not, then having them as individual pages isn’t that helpful.
[15:31] The other way that people who started HitTail set this up is they used HitTail on itself. So they took the suggestions that HitTail was giving about what to blog about and the guy blogged 2 to 3 times a week on these topics and that grew the traffic over time and actually created a nice bit of a long tail flywheel. Now I would back up and say is your market right for SEO? Is this even a good place to head into? Because having a thousand pages in Google doesn’t actually do that much for you if your audience is not online, if your audience isn’t searching for some of the terms that you’re covering and if those terms aren’t going to actually convert into business, so that’s the first question that I would ask.
[16:11] But if the answer to all those is yes, then thinking about scaling content out, there’s a number of ways to do this. Mike, you’re trying one right now. I’ll give you in a second you can talk about that. But Patrick McKenzie’s talked at length about this. Brecht Palombo on bootstrap with kids. There are ways to do it where you just cover a bunch of long tail keyword terms and you’re able to generate the pages or you can do it the old fashioned way, use a tool like HitTail, get suggestions and write it short even if it’s a 200 to 300 word blog post, a couple of times a week and you can build that flywheel up over time or hire a writer which is what I’ve seen. There’s a couple other SaaS folks I know who’ve had success building up long tail traffic using hired writers.
[15:50] Because these articles don’t need to be as high quality as say a pillar piece or some type of big piece of content marketing. They need to be decent. They need to be readable. But they don’t have to be sharable as long as it provides solid information, you are likely to actually get someone in there and provide them value and hopefully guide them into signing up for your app. But Mike, what have you been up to with your scalable content stuff for Audit Shark? How’s that fairing?
[17:12] Mike: What I did was I went through in all the different things that Audit Shark looks for on people’s servers, basically what I did was I took every single one of those thing and I’m calling them controlled points because the idea is you just take a look at one specific question that you’re going to answer basically yes or no to does this conform to whatever the standard is supposed to be, yes or no? And what I did was I created a code that just generates a page from every single one of those. And if you go into Google right now just plug-in site: www.auditshark.com it comes up with says 746 results. So there’s 746 pages indexed and I would say probably at least 700 of them are all auto generated content over the course of the last month.
[17:54] And December is about the time frame that this went in, my organic search results have increased by around 50% or so. The last two weeks of December I had very, very little traffic to my site. It was substantially lower over the last two weeks of December than it was. It was probably half. Basically my traffic probably about doubled for organic search results over the course of the first two weeks of the month and then the last two weeks, it dropped back down to I guess what I would call normal levels. So it’s still kind of working its way through. I’ll probably have a better idea of it in the next couple of weeks but my guess is that over the course of January I’m probably going to see my organic search traffic double because of doing that.
[18:36] Rob: So thanks for the question Dave. I hope that’s helpful. Next question is about how to land your first paying customer and that’s from Sebastian. He says I recently launched my new startup queuerific it’s a queue management app to better serve as your waiting customer sousing their mobile phone and SMS technology. Although I have a couple of early adaptors within this open beta stage, I’ve researching sales strategies to get my first paying customer. How did you manage to get your firs paying customer and what sales techniques might be best when you’re starting out. Thanks and love the show.
[19:06] Mike: So Sebastian, if I understand you correctly, what you’re really asking is how do you convert those beta people or beta customers into paying customers? And I think what you have to do is have one on one conversations with them and understand that those conversations, it’s not about getting the money from them. It’s about getting that vote of confidence from them that you have something that they’re willing to pay for. And when you talk to them, what I’ve been doing for Audit Shark is asking people very poignantly are you seeing value from this and if not, where would you see value from it? What are the things that it doesn’t do that you would need it to do in order to see value?
[19:45] You have to phrase it in such a way that you’re asking them where is that tipping point? What feature is it that’s critical for them to have that they need to have in order to justify giving you some amount of money. And whatever that money is whether its $5 or $50 or $5,000 it doesn’t matter. What you want from them is the information about what the things are that are essentially pausing their buttons and providing them the value. And I’ve had conversations with people about Audit Shark where they’ve told me flat out this particular report will be really nice to have and that’s essentially what’s preventing me from paying for it. So what I did was I basically took that back and said okay, in order to get this person to pay then I need to build such and such report.
[20:24] And is that going to be generally useful? Most likely to other people yes. For me, the key piece of information there was that he needed better reporting. So whether it’s just that one report that he’s willing to pay for, are there other reports that other people would need that they would be willing to pay for? And this is going to be very dependent upon what your product is and what source of things that it does for people because those are the things that you’re looking for as what is the value that your product is offering to them.
[20:53] And those are the things that you want to hit on and you want to ask them leading questions but not ultimatums I’ll say because there are going to certainly be people that you talk to where they’re going to tell you flat out I don’t see the value in this or its not doing enough for me or I’ve got other options that are better. And you’re going to have to be able to take those on the chin and walk away and go find other customers who are willing to try it out.
[21:14] Rob: I think the important thing that you pointed out is its much less about sales techniques and sales tactics. It’s not really a sales job at this point if you don’t have a paying customer. You’re still really in product development as far as I’m concerned because until you have someone who’s willing to pay you, you don’t know that you have a product that anyone’s willing to pay you for. Now, let’s say you’re at 100 paying customers and you know your value prop nd you know that people are willing to pay for it, then knowing sales techniques is important.
[21:40] But as you pointed out and as we’ve done both with Drip as you’ve done with Audit Shark these early days, it’s about finding out what is that one more feature that you can build, what’s that one more piece of value you need to deliver? I was the same way. I was constantly asking people who were in my trial, my early access, is this providing enough value for you to pay $49 a month and I wait to her back. And if they’d say no then I’d say alright, what else does it need? And typically they’d be very forthcoming with well, it needs to do this. It needs to show me this. It needs to be able to integrate with this.
[22:10] I didn’t build all of those features because I had a general roadmap in my head of the market we were after and some people just went off the rails and they went in a very different direction than what we’re building. So you can’t just blindly listen to folks and invest a month of development just to get your next customer. But at the same time, if its something that you think you may be building ultimately anyway, then there’s no better time to build that right now when you can actually get someone to pay you some money for it. So I hope that helps. Our next question is a clarification of concierge services and it’s actually a voicemail from Nathan. He’s an academy member.
[22:40] Nathan: Hi Mike and Rob, this is Nathan Stuller from Unstoppable Software and I’m also a member of the Micropreneur Academy. So all the talk about concierge services, what approaches should be taken to make sure that service offerings don’t seem scammy? As an extreme example, some malware programs nag these computer users until they pay to have it removed. I assume there’s a balance between offering service as a value add versus giving the appearance that the product only exists to drive potentially un necessary service revenue. Thanks and keep up the good work.
[23:13] Mike: So I think there’s a couple of different factors here. The first one is that you can have paid concierge services and then unpaid concierge services. So with your example of malware where it’s essentially popping up all the time saying hey, if you pay us, we’ll get rid of these popups for you. That is definitely scammy and nobody wants to see that kind of thing. In contrast, when you’ve got a website where you’re trying to sell somebody something and you are offering them free services to help them get onboard onto the software, that’s completely different because for a couple of different reasons.
[23:48] The first one is that they probably came to you and it’s not like you’re already on their machine and popping stuff up. The second thing is you do have to strike some sort of a balance between how much you are I’ll say getting in their face versus how much you’re letting them come to you. And if you’re popping something up on their desktop or sending them emails every single day without any way of them opting out of it, then of course that’s going to come across as scammy. But if you setup for example a Drip campaign or an email newsletter or something like that and you have unsubscribe links in those, those are obvious ways to essentially opt out of the relationship.
[24:24] So as long as you’re offering those types of things, and you can be very clear about what it is that you’re offering, what it is that you’re trying to accomplish with those email campaigns, you tell them upfront we don’t like spam. You can unsubscribe at anytime. There’s all these things that you can do to essentially help people have trust in the information that you’re sending to them.
[24:45] The other thing as I said before, there’s a difference between paid services versus unpaid services. And when you’re trying to learn and do product development for your product, that’s the time when you really want to offer a lot of the free concierge services because you want to get people using your product with as little obstacle in their way as possible. For example if you have an email campaign software, what you might want to do is offer them hey, we’ll come into your existing software and we’ll export everything and import it into our software so that you don’t lose stuff.
[25:16] If you have an accounting software, you might offer the same sort of thing. That would probably be cost just in terms of the sheer amount of work but at the same time you would probably learn a lot of information about what sorts of other products people are using and you could use that to essentially build translation software to go from for example QuickBooks into your software or from any of the other accounting vendors into your software. So there’s a lot of different plays there that you could use but the bottom-line is if it feels scammy to you then it probably is.
[25:47] Rob: The thing to think about, does it push towards you value proposition? What is the value that your product offers and do your concierge services push towards that? Whether they’re free or paid, if its helping them take that next step, I don’t know how it could be viewed as spammy if you’re doing that. If someone signs up for an SEO tool and you offer to write articles for them or to build links or to do anything manual that is obviously not able to be done by a computer, people are either not going to expect them for free, not going to want to pay for it either way.
[26:24] I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a concierge service where I felt like oh man, these guys are just trying to sell me services. If it was an app that I was actually using and already getting value out of and they were just trying to help me get there faster or help me get there with less work on my part, it almost always comes across as a value add for the customer. So thanks for the question Nathan.
[26:43] Our next question is about blogging and it’s from Scott at digitaltrackandfield.com he says hey guys, I’ve been writing articles providing free small video segments and I occasionally write about another video on YouTube with some comments and tips. After about 18 months of almost weekly posts I’m wondering if it’s worth the time to do this, I make a small income from the website but if for an hourly wage it might b $2 an hour. So I wonder, is it better to have 7-8 great pillar type articles on the site that link back to specific products or should I post weekly content? Do weekly posts make it harder to navigate the site and potential customers lose focus and move on? Thanks for the help. Scott.
[27:19] Mike: I think part of the issue that you’re probably experiencing is when you’re doing blogging, there’s something of a disconnect between you and the end users and its difficult to figure out whether or not any given article that you’re writing is resonating with your audience. And that becomes a lot easier when you start migrating over to email lists. And I would choose to use email lists as more of an engagement mechanism than a blog. Because if it’s something like a blog, you’re going to want to us that for SEO, for attracting in bound traffic versus an email campaign where you may very well send the exact same articles from your blog to the email list but essentially what you’re doing is you’re using that to get that feedback look from people. You can interact with people ask them questions at the end of the email.
[28:07] You can also use it to drive traffic to very specific offerings that you have on your site or through an affiliate link or something like that. I think there’s definitely a lot of ways that you can leverage the content that you have. In terms of making it harder to navigate the site, I think that’s more of a design question than anything else. I don’t want to say it’s impossible to have too much content but there definitely ways to organize your content so that it isn’t something that’s completely overwhelming to people versus stuff that if its clearly organized and people can get to the things that they want, it really doesn’t matter how much content you have as long as you have the content that they’re looking for.
[28:44] So those are probably my thoughts on it but it really depends a lot on specifically what your goals are for blogging. And if it’s to attract traffic then great I mean that’s probably what you’re doing with it. If it’s to engage in a feedback look with people and connect with them, I’m hesitant to think that a blog is going to be able to do that as well as something like an email newsletter.
[29:05] Rob: I think the other thing to think about with a blog is is your market online and are they searching Google for this? Because if you’re looking to build an audience with your blog, that’s one thing in which case you don’t rely on a lot of long tail search traffic. But if you’re looking to build inbound search traffic by spreading out like we talked about earlier getting a thousand pages index in Google, then that’s a different approach.
[29:29] And so that’s probably the first question I would ask is are people searching on those keywords or is this more of a play where you can actually build an audience. Because if you’re working with more of offline audience and digitaltrackandfield.com, my guess is track and field audience is not going to be heavily online the I think you’re going to have to go for that first one, the inbound traffic thing of just trying to get a lot of long tail stuff. And if you’ve tried it now for 18 months, and you’re not making enough money to make it worthwhile then either you’re not hitting the right keywords. You don’t have great calls to action perhaps on your post kind of funnel people into an email list like Mike said where you can build a more sustainable relationship.
[30:08] Because if someone searches for a term and they find a single blog post, they’re going to read it and they’re never going to come back. So if you can’t get them onto an email list, get them to somehow subscribe, then the value of that visitor is very, very low. So that’s what I would look at. I would almost definitely would not continue to post weekly if I felt like I’ve been doing it for 18 months and I’m still not actually yielding that much revenue out of it.
[30:33] The last thing to think about is the time you spent on your blog. I wouldn’t consider it wasted because now you have so much content you realize that you can repurpose that and do all kind of stuff. You can make it into email courses, you can make it into a long auto responder sequence over time because those things that are a year old, people very likely will not dig through your archives and find them. And so packaging them together into an eBook that you giveaway when people sign up for your list or as I said, just turning it into an auto responder sequence is a good way to get continued value out of that content you’ve already created. So I hope that helpful Scott. Our next question is another voicemail and this one’s about high touch SaaS app.
[31:16] Robert: Hi this is Robert Hartline founder of callproof.com. Love the show. Your podcast keeps me pushing to make a better product. Over the last three years, we have built a SaaS app for sales managers to manage outside sales tasks. We currently work on android and iPhone and are only listed for North America in the app stores. My question is we know we can be listed in the app store for other countries and we’ll get more signups and increase sales but it seems that by adding other countries, we would be challenged with language barriers, time zone issues, not understanding laws for each countries and a list of other challenges. We have a long sales cycles and are high touch with our customers.
[31:59] Our team is less than 10 employees. It would take only a couple of weeks of development for our platform to go international but we don’t know if the signups would be worth the trouble. We’d like to hear your thoughts on going international with a SaaS product. Again, Robert Hartline here. You can reach me at Robert@callproof.com. Thanks again for the show. Keep it up.
[32:17] Mike: I guess here’s my take on it. If you have a business that is probably less than several hundred people and you’re thinking about going international I would probably advice heavily against it and here’s why. The idea that you have almost entirely saturated the entire local market is probably not well founded. Unless you really have saturated your local market to like 95% and every single one of them is using your product, then there’s still room for you to grow in the existing market.
[32:51] So that’s probably what I would caution you against because there’s open field for you to push your product and grow it bigger and bigger in the existing market where you do speak the language where you’re not going to have to deal with international issues. You’re not going to have to deal with international laws. You’re not going to have to deal with international taxes and international businesses and all that other stuff because that stuff gets complicated. And when you have less than 10 employees, that seems to me like it has so much overhead that it’s just totally not worth the effort.
[33:20] So I think as a general rule of thumb, if you have a small team and you’re considering going international, I would definitely take a really hard look at that and figure out whether or not you have saturated your local market. And if you haven’t, try and figure out how far you have to go in your market before you do saturate it. Now if you have saturated it, that’s a completely different story but looking at callproof.com I would say if a mobile app or field sales people, I would be hard pressed to believe that in the US market that it’s been completely saturated.
[33:51] Rob: It sounds like Robert you’re talking about app store listing as a marketing channel. It’s basically a search engine listing and you rank well for some terms. I think that’s really cool. So one way to think about this is as you said, just expanding to other app stores, kind of a no brainer. Another way to think about it is what are the other marketing channels that you can explore that don’t require you to go outside of the continental United States or North America as you’ve said. So obviously there’s SEO, there’s content marketing, there’s just straight up paid acquisition driving folks within the US to your site whether that’s through LinkedIn, Facebook ads, ad words, you know all the traditional stuff that we talked about with paid acquisition.
[34:32] There’s all the JB partnerships and all the tactics that we basically spouse here, how to get new customers for SaaS. Consider looking at those and keeping it within the US at this point rather than branching out into other countries. And I say that because I think there’s probably other marketing channels you haven’t explored. They may not be as low hanging fruit but if you expand into those you are going to be able to grow this business. Now with all that said, I’m actually a little bit more bullish on this than Mike is I think. If you aren’t already in Canada, I don’t remember if you said North America or Canada, but if you aren’t already in Canada I do think that’s a no brainer to get listed in the Canadian app store to give it a try because what’s the worse that happens? If things go sideways with it, you can always pull it out of the app store and just call it a failed experiment.
[35:19] I also think you can consider if you’re already in Canada, you can look at either England or the UK or Australia and New Zealand. Now, these markets are not huge but I think that they’re the easiest way to get out there without having to have your app translated because as soon as you get to other languages as you’ve said, the hassles of marketing sales and support in those other languages crops up. That becomes a large burden. So that’s not something that I would venture into as a 10 person company.
[35:44] But I would consider exploring if you’ve already approached amazing out all your other marketing channels or the app store marketing just seems more appealing and its really working for you, I would consider taking a test, maybe a one month test into Canada, England or Australia and New Zealand since they do share the same language and there would be very, very little localization you need to do on just stuff with dates and currencies and you would still be able to support it.
[36:10] And that way, you could run kind of basically a profit of concept and figure out is this going to work, is this even worth our time to be listed in these stores or maybe these customers don’t have the same process and culturally there’s a difference or something like that. So at least you could give it a try and worst case, pull it out at the end. So I hope that gives you a few ideas to think about.
[36:28] Our next question is from Arthur and he’s asking about episodes for people in the early stages. He says hi guys, I’m really enjoying the show and I feel it’s helping me avoid a lot of pitfalls that as an engineer I would tend to fall into. I’m still at the stage of looking at ideas so the episodes that help me most were episode 133 which was our founder test, episode 128 which is nine steps for finding startup ideas and episode 138 which is more tips for identifying startup ideas. And Arthur asked are there any other episodes that you think are especially helpful for people who are still in the early stages of identifying ideas?
[37:00] We’re going to include a complete list. It’s about 10 episodes. We’ll include these in the show notes. I did want to call a few out. I think I kind a grouped them up into a different areas. One we have the mindset group and this is about getting over the limiting mindset stuff that keeps you from actually launching and one of our most popular episodes for a long time was episode 29. If you haven’t heard, it’s pretty good. It’s called five steps to beating your startup demons. And this is about the fear of launching and really how to get over that. I have a couple other mindset ones we’ll include in the show notes.
[37:35] The next category is mailing list, it’s building your mailing list and episode 72 and 152 are basically the tactics that almost all the tactics we know on how to build mailing list, critical stuff if you’re thinking about building a product, then you’ll kind of want to know how to build that mailing list first. So I’d definitely go listen to those. Then the other episodes on choosing an idea were episode 92 which is 12 rules for building your first profitable startup, episode 130 which is capitalizing on your unfair advantage which helps you decide what kind of idea to pursue. And then episode 134 which is basically a companion to the founder test that Arthur mentioned and that was the product test. Nine attributes that can determine the success of your product. So as I said, there are a few others that I recommend that we’ll go through them all here. I hope that helps and thanks for the question Arthur.
[38:21] And wrapping is up for the day, our final question is about how to handle the frustration of a user canceling. It’s from Jeff Gaudette. He’s at runnersconnect.net and he says I really enjoy the show even though I’m not a technical founder. I have a potential question or topic for the podcast. How do you deal with the disappointment and at least for me, anger when a customer cancels after you spend a lot of one on one time with them? Or customer starts a free trial and then provides no feedback what so ever. For example, you personally emailed them multiple times and they don’t respond. For example, with both of your more personalized on boarding solutions right now, it must be extremely frustrating when you spend hours with a potential clients only for them to say no thanks.
[38:59] Well I know the feedback from why customer cancels is always data we can use to improve, I almost have animosity towards these customers and its one of the most difficult mental aspects of running a Saas company. Am I the only one or is this something that you deal with as well? I’m relatively new to this. I know these feelings will make I hard to stay in the ups and downs a startup must go through. Thanks and I look forward to your answer.
[39:18] Mike: I think when you’re evaluating the reasons that people cancel or they basically say no after you’ve gone through the free trial or if they don’t provide any feedback what so ever, there’s a lot of different reasons for that but at the end of the day its ultimately a form of rejection and nobody likes to get rejected. But the one thing that I point out to people who kind of go through this is that there are people who come to you website every single day and probably 90% of them leave without ever signing up, without ever doing anything. And for some reason, people just completely gloss over that fact and it doesn’t faze them at all its like oh I got 10 signups. For some reason, those 90 people who visited the website, they just gloss over that and they just let it roll off. They don’t think about it.
[40:04] There’s two sides of that. The first one is of course, getting rejected on a fairly regular basis and for whatever reason, you’re just blocking that out. The second thing is that when you do start getting into those relationships and started to talk to people you have to understand that whatever the final outcome is and it has to be a learning experience because you have to understand what are the challenges that people are running into? If they don’t have enough time to implement it, what are the things that you can do that will make it so that they don’t have to? Are there ways for you to make it easier? Can you offer a concierge service so that they don’t have to implement it and you can offer that implementation on their behalf? Is there data that they have to migrate in? Are there importers that you could create so that they would have to do a lot less work? What does your on boarding process look like?
[40:53] And then there’s going to be those customers where they sign up and it really just wasn’t what they thought it was or what they were expecting. In cases like that, it’s difficult to blame the customer because they didn’t understand it. What you really have to do is you have to go back and look at your own marketing material and try to understand why is it that they felt that way. What is it that your marketing material was saying that made them think that? Because it’s not like they plucked ideas out of the air and went to your website and said oh, I’m looking for database software. I’m just going to sign up for this random service and I’m going to get a database. Oh, you don’t do database? Oh I’m not going to pay for this. That’s definitely not what happened.
[41:30] What happened was they went to your website, they looked at it, they thought it was one thing, they signed up and they found out it was something else. What is it in your marketing material that made them think that? And those are the things that you need to look at and use those as learning experiences. And I understand that every single one of those is going to feel like a rejection. That’s actually a good thing. There’s something to be said for filtering people out who are not a good fit for you product. You don’t want to be supporting people who are going to use your product and say oh, well it would be great if it did X or it did Y or if it did X, Y and Z because then you’re going to be building this Frankenstein product that does a lot of things sort of well but nothing really, really well.
[42:11] Rob: I think that’s a good point in that figure out how to prequalify customers early. You know that the sales people who are doing high touch sales. They have basically lead ranking where they can take a list of leads and they sort them based on some criteria that they’ve decided. It means that customers are more likely to convert and more likely to get value out of the product. You have to learn to do that early. I’ll say with my Drip early access, very, very few customers didn’t work out. I spent a lot of time with a lot of them. I learned a lot from them. The ones that didn’t work out, I knew – I’ll say somewhat early on I had a gut feeling that they just weren’t going to be right for the product.
[42:45] Drip offers a lot of value for SaaS startups, for software companies, for info marketers, for the people who are into their lists and are using it as a marketing effort. Bloggers, not so much. And I had someone in early on who had a pretty successful blog and the features that he wanted and the things that he was confused about were so far separate from what everyone else was asking about that I knew he was an outlier and I had a pretty good feeling that he just wasn’t going to work out.
[43:14] And so I think getting that gut feeling that what later becomes a report, it later becomes kind of your customer happiness index, who’s going to cancel next, who’s going to convert next, who’s unlikely to convert, that will be a report that you build. But for now, it has to be that gut feeling of who is a good fit for a product and why and if they aren’t, trying to almost discourage them, I actually have a couple of snippets in our support software that we’ll send to people and I will heavily clarify you need to have X thousand visitors per month, our product starts at $49 a month so you should probably be selling something or that needs to be valuable to you, almost trying to clarify and discourage them from moving forward because you just get that gut feeling that wow, this person’s probably not the best fit for this product or they don’t understand enough to understand the value of this product.
[44:02] So that’s where I lean with it. I think Jeff’s original question is how do we deal with the frustration when someone does in fact cancel after you’ve spent a lot of time with them. And I did have a few of those. It was frustrating. I think the way I dealt with it was I thought to myself I’m going to try not to do that again. I’m going to take this as a learning experience and I’m going to probably not invest a lot of time into someone who has very similar attributes as that person and I’m going to focus on these other 10 people that did convert that I spent time with and chalk it up to a learning experience and then see how I can scale that up down the line.
[44:36] Now that is also helping me as I’m going to start scaling up my marketing efforts that I’m not going to advertise to the niches of those people who really didn’t understand the value of Drip or who didn’t really convert as high a level as the folks who are Saas and software and info and product marketers and that kind of stuff.
[44:56] Mike: One of the things that you can do to help identify those types of people is as soon as they start I’ll say haggling over price or pointing to the price and say well, if it was half the price I would consider it. Those are the people who you definitely want to discourage from using your products because they’re not buying it based on value. They’re buying it based on price.
[45:16] Rob: Yeah and I have an old blog article called how to detect a toxic customer and it’s tangentially related to this. I’d recommend you check it out. It talks about that, about the people who really want price or who want a ton of upfront time, they want high touch sales for $100 or $200 onetime product where you just can’t afford to give that kind of sales and they get really demanding and angry when you don’t give them that or they demand a phone number upfront and they want to talk to someone in sales and you explain we don’t have a sales department. We just don’t do phone support and they get upset about that.
[45:51] But it’s always like huh, then you’re not a good fit. I’ve stopped getting my feelings hurt about that kind of thing because I’m not a good fit for them and they’re not a good fit for us. They need to go talk to sales force or some huge company that can charge them $1,000 a month and can handle basically the high level of need and the high touch they need. But as lower end, less expensive SaaS app. You just can’t offer that kind of both upfront support and the ongoing support. So you don’t even want to bend over backwards to get them as a customer because then they’re just going to be as demanding once they’re actually using your app.
[46:25] And the last thing I’ll note is that down the line, once you start to scale, you’re going to want to remove yourself from that cancellation flow. You don’t want to handle it yourself because it is frustrating and its taxing and so as you start to scale up, and move on to other things and hire someone whether it’s your tier one support person or someone else but let them handle the cancellations obviously with trainings and such. But you need to remove that pain from your day to day because trust me, as you scale up, there’s going to be plenty of other pains in your life and you’re not going to want to be dealing with this one.
[46:54] Mike: So thanks for the question Jeff. If you have question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 165 | Our 5 Biggest Mistakes From the Past Year
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 165.
[00:04] Music
[00:16] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:20] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:23] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week Rob?
[00:22] Rob: I’m pleased to announce that Drip is now out ranking motelyfool.com for the term Drip and I didn’t think I was ever gonna get above that. Drip was on the second page for that phrase for a while and then it climbed up to number 10 and now it looks like as of today in an incognito browser from my current location, ranking for Drip isn’t gonna get me a lot of customers. It’s just gonna make it so that when people hear the product name on the podcast and don’t hear that the domain name is different because it’s getdrip.com, it will help them find it. It would be great to rank number one for that, not for the true organic traffic that it will get but just for the ease of finding me in Google.
[01:04] Mike: I’m looking at it now and you’re actually listed number 6 right below them. Ilovedrip.com is the first one.
[01:11] Rob: I know. I need to look at that site and figure out what they’re talking about.
[01:14] Mike: I think its things to do in Orlando. It says Drip is Orlando’s best kept secret. You now the Blue Man Group? I think it’s something kind of similar to that.
[01:22] Rob: Yeah. So that will be a tough one to outrank. They have quite a bit of authority and history in Google at this point.
[01:28] Mike: Yeah, most likely.
[01:30] Rob: How about you? What you been up to?
[01:31] Mike: Well I started working on some of the MicroConf sponsorships so I’m still trying to get the rate card all straightened out but that’s coming along pretty well and once that’s all done, then I just go out and start contacting the sponsors from last year and see if I can drum up any new sponsors for the conference.
[01:46] Rob: Yeah and that’s microconf.com if you are interested in coming, it’s the conference for self funded startup founders and it is gonna be probably in mid April is what we’re looking at the Tropicana. Our email list is about twice what it was last year so it’s probably gonna sell out fairly quickly again and we should be selling tickets in I’d say by mid January at the latest. Other news for me, I started paid acquisition last week which is a dubious proposition. I was doing it more to test out analytics and to kind of test some landing pages rather than actually get trials. The reason I couch it like that is last week was the week before Christmas and so I knew that getting people to click through and sign up for a 21 day trial when they’re about to probably go on vacation is not likely to happen.
[02:34] As such, as I started running the ads right away, I noticed that my Google goals were not firing when people converted to trial so that is a non starter when you’re running paid accusation so we had to troubleshoot that and figure out how to goals the to fire. It isn’t as simple as it used to be with Google. They made Google analytics so unbelievably complicated compared to what it was even 12 or 18 months ago that getting goals to work is by far more complicated than it was a while ago. So we do have it working as of today.
[03:04] Mike: That’s interesting. I kind of put all of my – not all but quite a few of my Audit Shark marketing activities, kind of on hold for the time being just because its Christmas and I really don’t expect a lot of people to come in and be using it or to sign up for a new trial or anything like that.
[03:18] Rob: That’s why SaaS is so nice right? Because people are still paying a subscription fee for December even though they’re not really gonna but anything new whereas when you have a onetime sale app like I have DotNetInvoice I mean the sales typically just plummet unless we do like a black Friday special or some type of Christmas special. DotNetInvoice takes a big hit in December because nobody really wants to buy go spend a bunch of money in the last two weeks of the year. They’re just thinking about other things.
[03:45] Mike: The counter point to that is the companies that have a giant budget that they lose at the end of the year if they don’t use it so there are some people who will spend the money but…
[03:53] Rob: That’s true. And there are certain pieces of software where it makes sense to start them on the first of the year like a tax software, an accounting software to make a clean break between one year and the next. I imagine that those sales could go up and if you had an app like that, it would make sense to do a special on December kind of saying hey, get setup by January 1, get your books in order, that type of thing.
[04:13] Mike: I’m working out some of the reporting bugs in Audit Shark and on another completely boring note, I’ve been analyzing my Audit Shark marketing efforts to figure out what I should be doing as soon as January starts rolling around and kind of what my priorities are gonna be.
[04:25] Rob: You’re analyzing existing efforts that you’ve made or you’re compiling a list of approaches and tactics that you’re gonna use in January?
[04:33] Mike: Yeah, that’s basically kind of figuring out what it is that I want to do and what I’m gonna do first. That’s more it than anything else. I have a drive to traffic but then I also have to make sure that’s converting and right now, just up until lately I haven’t had the page open for people to come in and sign up so that has been – I couldn’t even measure it before and now I can start to measure it but I still need to get people to decide and because its December, they’re just not gonna sign up or at least I don’t expect anybody to.
[04:58] Music
[05:02] Today we’re gonna recap our five biggest mistakes from this past year. You can look at some of these things and you can say that oh well, if you did something, so correct a mistake, then couldn’t you also see that is your biggest win? And I think there’s certainly cases where that’s true but there’s other cases where you may have strategically chosen to do something in a certain way knowing that it was a mistake but not necessarily realizing how big of a mistake it was.
[05:26] Rob: And you say that because you noticed that several or both of our mistakes are – start with the word not. In other words, it was not doing something or not doing it soon enough is the mistake we’re mentioning. There was a behavior that we realized that has been successful for us but the regret or the mistake is that we didn’t do it sooner in the year. And I think that the point of this episode is not for you and I to sit here and talk through our mistakes but the idea is to get you, the listener, to reflect on what perhaps are your five biggest mistakes from the past year and even looking out perhaps what are your five biggest wins from the past year?
[06:01] And then take the time to maybe analyze why they happen, to analyze how you can avoid making similar mistakes or the same mistake in the coming year and I think another piece to this is kind of asking yourself what gave me to life this year and what sucked a lot of life out of me. Both looking at this as a way to grow your business, as a way to not make the same mistakes because that keeps you going in circles, also as a way to structure your work and personal life so that they are sustainable that they give you life over the course of the next year.
[06:29] Mike: So to kick things off, one of my biggest mistakes was not paying enough attention to my health. Back in August I discovered this health issue that was impacting a lot of the things that I was doing and just my ability to get different things done. Discovering that and dealing with the situation has made all the difference in the world. I was actually able to get to the point where Audit Shark has been launched. There’s still a lot to do of course but I feel like I’m actually making progress at this point as opposed to before where I felt like I was doing a lot but I was spinning my wheels more often than not and not making forward progress. It’s hard sometimes to know the difference between when you’re doing stuff that is moving you forward versus when you’re doing stuff just to kind of maintain your current position that doesn’t actually get you moving forward.
[07:11] Rob: yeah. I’m guilty of this as well. It’s easy to do and it’s easy to just keep going on in auto pilot and ignoring things like really sore shoulders or the inability, people got carpal tunnel, you just charge through and you start taking Advil and you don’t address the real issue and get the fix done, and the longer you get it go on, not only does it get worse but you don’t even realize how much it’s actually impacting your productivity because you forget what it’s like to feel at 100%. Obviously really glad that you caught yours and something that I’m looking to not do in the coming year.
[07:46] Mike: Some of the different actions and I’ve taken since then and it’s just once you have taken those, you look up and it’s just wow, that made such a huge difference. Why didn’t I do this sooner which goes back to what you said? There’s lots of these things you discover them and you just think to yourself why didn’t I do this sooner and the fact is you just didn’t know.
[08:03] Rob: So my first mistake is letting email negatively impact my productivity. Now I have been able to maintain inbox zero now for several months and that has been helpful but it still has not freed me up in the way that I envisioned in my mind that I can someday be freed up from email. I get an enormous volume of email every month and anytime I take time off, I come back and basically lose a solid eight hour day of just going through email.
[08:33] I’ve tried a bunch of different approaches. I don’t think there’s anything feasible. There’s no solution. There’s no answer I have seen to date. A lot of these are coming from my apps and so my VA is already going through support issues and then they wind up in my email to show me that a support issue has been assigned to me so it’s not as if putting a VA looking at my email can handle that because there’s are things I have to do. It’s a mistake I don’t have an answer on how to fix it yet but my hope is that in 2014 this is something that I do figure out a way to reduce the amount of time that I’m sitting there, working with email.
[09:05] Mike: I do have a couple of anecdotal things. One is you could create an internal email address like secretrob@thenumagroup.com and those are things where the specific internal stuff needs to go to you and then you have somebody look through your regular email. And the other one Ramit Sethi was telling me at behavior con that he can usually tell at this point because he’s gotten so many emails that he can tell within the first couple of sentences whether or not something’s gonna be even worth reading.
[09:31] Rob: I like the secret Rob idea. I would agree with Ramit and I think I now have that ability because I’ve read so many emails. So it’s not the reading that takes the time. Its once I get into it, it’s the decision of do I act on this or not and then if I do act on it, then the real time starts. A lot of it is maybe an academy member, MicroConf attendee, a listener asking for opinion and feedback about their idea, asking about any number of things and since I like helping people and I’ve always felt like it’s a responsibility and something that I want to do to give back to the community, that stuff is quite time consuming. I record screen cast for people. I do all kinds of stuff. I don’t want to leave that behind but I’ve already reduced kind of the number and the time I spent on those responses, I don’t know how far I want to peel that back.
[10:18] Mike: Heard another strategy for allocating specific time blocks. So like an hour or two hours a week or something like that and then once you hit that time, it’s like okay, that’s it. I can’t spend any more time on that stuff. But inevitably, that kind of leads to what you said is letting things just kind of drop on the floor and there’s only so much you can do.
[10:34] My second biggest mistake was not starting a mailing list for my blog sooner. This partially is a result of not really paying attention to feed burner but where I just wasn’t writing for my blog anymore. I’ve talked to enough people where they said hey I really would appreciate it if you start writing a little bit more. Give me feedback on this and a lot of things that I see are just things that would make great blog posts. I haven’t been turning them into blog posts. So I started getting back into that but I started a mailing list several weeks ago and I’ve already got a ton of people who are on my RSS feed kind of converted over onto that. So that seems to be going pretty well.
[11:11] But it just seems like that’s something that I know on the back of my mind I should’ve started that much, much sooner and I just never did. I mean I never really made it a priority. So like as you said you like writing back people and giving them your feedback and thoughts on opinions on things that they’re working on in order to help them. And I kind of feel like this is exactly the same way is helping other people and just kind of giving back.
[11:34] Rob: My second mistake is related to yours. It’s not carving out more time for my Software by Rob email newsletter, the one that I already have. I started a couple of years ago. I’ve been building lists. I have probably 7,000 people, on it and I have emails that go out but not as many as I would like just purely out of the lack of time and of too many things going on in terms of conferences and apps and the podcast and all that stuff. But I’m hoping and I’m planning to give more time to this in the coming year because it’s something that I enjoy.
[12:08] Like you, you and I first met when we were bloggers and we met because we both liked to write and we enjoyed that. We enjoyed convening your thoughts through that medium and I have not written nearly as much in the past year to two years than I did over the previous 5-7. So its something that I’ve let go because it’s so damn time consuming, just sit there and crank out a really good piece of content but I did find that when I’m not blogging and when I’m just sending emails to my list, there are some time saving ways that you can do it in terms of doing a screen cast or just having shorter articles that I never felt comfortable doing with my blog.
[12:45] I think that with not a huge time investment that I could really continue investing in this list and getting solid info out to them. So if you are interested in that and you’re not signed up, it’s called Start Small, Get Big and that’s my email newsletter. It’s at softwarebyrob.com and it’s in the right hand side column. And yours is at singlefounder.com in case you haven’t signed up for Mike’s email newsletter.
[13:07] Mike: My third biggest mistake was not extracting myself from project implementation sooner than I did. And I’ve spent a good deal of time making sure that the people who are working for me on a part time basis have the things that they need to move things forward but I feel like I have spent a lot of time over the past couple of years doing probably way too many things myself. One of the things that I’ve done recently which has really helped out a lot is hired a bookkeeper and her and I sat down for about three hours yesterday basically going over all my business finances and trying to convert everything all over on to one accounting platform so that she only has one spot to go for everything.
[13:47] And then just putting the processes and procedures in place for how to deal with different situations and invoices and receipts. But one of the other things I’m doing is I’m handing her all of my personal stuff as well. So I’m giving her access to my personal bank accounts and whenever I get things in the mail, I’m gonna put them in a box and she’s gonna get them once or twice a week and she’s gonna handle all that stuff. I basically do not want to touch any of that stuff. So there’s all this day to day stuff that I just shouldn’t be handling.
[14:15] That’s something that I’ve been very glad that I’ve dealt with but it’s something probably was a long time and coming just because I didn’t feel comfortable just taking that stuff and handing that off to somebody else. And as I said, there’s a lot of stuff with Audit Shark as well where I worked on so much of it that I’m like oh, this is just this giant unwieldy thing at this point. I don’t know if somebody else can jump in and work with it and that’s definitely not the case other people can make progress on. It’s just a matter of me becoming comfortable with allowing other people to go and do that stuff.
[14:44] Rob: Yeah. So one of your biggest mistakes for the last year turns into basically outsourcing success stories. It’s several places where you are able to extract yourself from the details. And I feel like you started making a lot of progress with Audit Shark once you got other developers involved.
[15:00] Mike: And I think part of that is just the comfortably factor I mean because it’s not like I put somebody in there and said oh I need you to build this giant complicated thing. It was these little things here and there and then as they get more comfortable with the code base, I get more comfortable handing them stuff that’s more and more complicated. So there’s a give and take there. It is a progression. I think it would be difficult for somebody to just jump in right now and just hand them a complicated function. But it’s the on boarding process for getting a new developer up and running with any new code base. I mean the code base is sufficiently large, its gonna be a little bit complicated. You need to have some sort of ramping up period and need to be able to expect that.
[15:39] Rob: My third mistake for the past year was not focusing sooner on figuring out how to fix HitTail after Google’s not provided debacle where they said that they’re not gonna give us the search terms people use to find our website anymore. And this one, it’s a mistake or regret because HitTail is one of my big apps and its definitely lost a good chunk of revenue over the past 3 or 4 months since Google announced the not provided stuff.
[16:07] Kind of the counter point to it is I was looking before Google announced this, how to get keywords out of stuff and Google wasn’t giving this data anywhere else. And just within the past maybe 30 days or so, I’ve noticed that they are giving enough information through the web master tools and I now have an alpha version that I’ve coded up that basically will work around the not provided stuff at least as best as anyone can.
[16:32] And I’m gonna be working with an alpha and beta testers here in January. And I think that I should actually be able to basically get the value back or most of the value back that was lost during this whole thing. I wasn’t able to make this happen sooner before the revenue started to slide on it. I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to build it back up but every time you lose those customers, it’s just so hard to get them back. It’s so much work to replace them.
[16:58] Mike: My fourth biggest mistake was not starting a mastermind group sooner. And this is something that you talked about in the past, having a mastermind group can really be helpful in moving you forward and it wasn’t until I got into it and started having mastermind group meetings that I realized how incredibly helpful it would be. I think that one of the comments that you’ve made in the past is that having people who have kind of heard the story and have heard some of the guts of it from way back when, that helps give them a little bit more context as today’s and somebody that you just met, you kind of give them the story and run down what it is that you’re working on and problems that you’re having whereas if they don’t have that 6 or 12 months worth of history, there may be insights that they’re just not gonna have because they don’t have that history.
[17:43] Rob: So my fourth mistake is kind of funny. It’s almost trivial compared to these other ones we’re naming but basically within the past month I made a $1700 error with Amazon EC2 instances and I went to purchase some of their reserved instances, you can get them a lot cheaper than if you’re just paying hourly and I bought one that was five instances for a month instead of one instance for five months and it just sufficed to say over the course of the next 30 to 45 days it cost me $1700.
[18:17] And what’s interesting about this is the reason that I made the mistake is because we’re just moving so fast. I couldn’t spend the time or I tried to spend the time to research it, the documentation sucks. I emailed support, they were no help. The forums don’t tell you anything so at a certain point I had to make the call am I gonna do this or am I not and it’s on my task list and I need just hide this thing and I need to pay Amazon a higher price or I need to pull the trigger and buy this reserve instance what could possibly go wrong? It’s a result of quick decision making.
[18:47] Now kind of the defense in my mind of it as it happened, I mean when I saw it happened I was like that really sucks that I’m gonna lose this money but if this the worst thing that happens to me this year, if it’s the worst mistake I make this year, I will consider myself very, very lucky. It made me realize just how much I value time more than money. This $1700 error compared to all the decisions that I’ve made quickly or the amount of money that my apps will make me in a certain amount of time, it doesn’t compare.
[19:18] So I think there’s a balance here of like not making stupid or rash decisions but also realizing that if you make 100 or 200 decisions in any given month that being able to make them quick and then live with the consequence may very well be more valuable than sitting there and doing in depth research and never making a mistake but getting 1/10th of number of things done.
[19:38] Mike: I’ve looked at stuff like that that I’ve done before and I used to do this when I was looking at hard drives and computer equipment to buy and one of the things that I came to the conclusion was at one point I was spending so much time kind of agonizing over the decision between two different hard drives one of which was I don’t know, let’s say as $160 and the other one was $240 or something like that. Which isn’t a huge amount of money but if you spend more than hour making that decision then you’re essentially just wasting money and you extrapolate that over stuff where you’re making decisions over the course of 10 or 15 hours and you’re agonizing over all that time. And at some point, if you would just pull the trigger and chosen the more expensive one, it wouldn’t matter at the end of the day because you just wasted all that time where you’re paying yourself for that time. It would’ve covered the cost.
[0:20:27] And the fifth biggest mistake I would say that I’ve made is depending on Google too much for some of my data and services. And I think this goes back to what I’m referring to as the feed burner debacle right now where feed burner just seems like it is not working on my site. I’m looking at probably switching to feed blitz some time I the near future for RSS from my blog. But it feels like I’m relying so much on Google’s data feeds and services at this point that if something goes wrong and Google decides to change their mind about different things, I may not necessarily have ways of extracting myself and this isn’t just limited to like the Google glass that I got or my Gmail account. I mean there’s a lot of Google services that we use kind of everyday and it makes me worried to be perfectly honest.
[21:13] And I feel like it’s a mistake and I guess at the end of the day I feel like I have so many eggs in Google’s basket that if they decide they want to do something, it kind of goes against my goals then there’s just nothing I can do about it. And I’m certainly not alone in that I don’t think. I don’t know what other options have in some cases. I mean Google web master tools are what they are and they’re great for doing research and they’re great for all this different analysis but there are paid options out there for different things but they only take data so far.
[21:43] Rob: Yeah and anyone who built a rank tracker and has had that API shut down and then the scraping blocked or anyone who relies on Google keyword data for any reasons meaning pretty much every web master in the country and anyone who does email marketing and realize on the image tracking that Google’s now cashing and they didn’t totally break that but they certainly have an impact on it. All of us realized that the impact and the amount of control that Google actually has over a lot of things now.
[22:09] And I can imagine that these changes Google’s making about – I mean they’re kind of putting a quash on SEO and a lot of SEO’s are moving into content marketing. And Google’s starting – it seems with this image move maybe clamped down on email marketing as well but it seems that each of these probably drives incremental revenue for them because you can imagine that people will go out and buy more ads in order to make up for the loss of the traffic and the conversions and such. So it is a scary proposition as you’ve said.
[22:45] And my fifth and final biggest mistake from last year was underestimating the amount of work it takes to launch a new Saas app. I think lesson launching late, I think the bigger thing was how many other projects that launching Drip caused me to push off, just the sheer volume of attention and effort that I needed to spend a long with Derek my developer who was first working half time and then went full time and then I went full time on it, I mean that, I just didn’t anticipate that early on in the year and I always forget how much time it takes to get these things off the ground and get them built up.
[23:19] What’s interesting is that a mistake is different than a regret. I don’t regret doing this. I don’t know that I can put my finger on exactly the repercussions that it had aside from me pushing off a few projects but just remembering that Saas apps take hundreds and hundreds of hours especially if they’re in a competitive market like this where people are already ahead of you in features and you don’t necessarily want to do a feature battle anyways you kind of need to know going into it because I can imagine if I hadn’t started with momentum and someone coding on a full time, this would be a project that someone would think they can get done in a few months and would basically take them to the point where they would probably quit.
[23:57] If we didn’t already have momentum on it and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel within a few months I think it’d be a tough project to launch kind of a major Saas app in a competitive area. If you’re trying to do it on nights and weekends, these markets are definitely getting more crowded as times goes on.
[24:13] Mike: You mean Audit Shark wasn’t an early warning for you?
[24:15] Rob: Indeed. I’ve had a few conversations in the past couple months of folks who are launching Saas and they’re like oh man, I hadn’t realized there’s these many competitors or all the work it takes to actually get this done and launched and all the marketing and all that stuff. And then I think the last kind of honorable mention is kind of maybe a shared mistake you and I made is not starting a podcast mailing list in 2013 because it’s kind of a no brainer. We’re coming on here every week to talk about stuff. We should have a minimum an email signup form and figure out what to send to the audience at that point.
[24:50] Whether it’s probably not an update when every episode goes live because people are already subscribed to them but maybe a call out to some specific comments or some specific news items related to the podcast or just figuring out what it is that we’re able to keep people on the loop on because I know you and I don’t have the time to create a bunch of original content and to start another blog or another full email newsletter. But I still think that there are a lot of listeners out there who would love to keep in touch with what’s going on and having them on a mailing list would probably be beneficial for everybody.
[25:23] Music
[25:26] So give it some thought for yourself. Think about your biggest mistakes potentially how you can stop doing them in the New Year. If you have question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 164 | 50 Mobile Apps That We Use to Run Our Businesses
Show Notes
- Phone
- Gmail/Mail
- Chrome/Safari
- Podcasts/Music
- Trello
- Google Drive
- Simplenote
- Dropbox
- Skype
- Google maps
- Sunrise Calendar
- Evernote
- QuickOffice
- SugarSync
- Commit
- DocScan
- XMarks
- Basecamp
- Viber
- Banking app
- Paid for Stripe
- Xero
- American Express
- Amazon Store app
- Starbucks
- Dunkin Donuts
- eBay
- HootSuite (Twitter)
- Facebook app
- Kickstarter
- Yelp
- Audible
- Kindle
- Amazon Cloud Player
- Pandora
- Netflix
- Hulu+
- Amazon Instant Video
- Flixster
- HBO Go
- LastPass/1Pass
- FTP on the Go
- 2X Client RDP
- TurboScan
- Whitenoise+
- Roku
- Quickreader
- iSSH
- AirDisplay
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: In this episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike and I discussed 50 mobile apps that we used to run our businesses. This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 164.
[00:09] Music
[00:16] 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.
[00:26] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:27] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:32] Mike: Well, I’m in the middle of DDOS attack against my blog at the moment.
[00:34] Rob: You’re kidding me. What happened?
[00:37] Mike: I had my blog hosted over at WP engine. I think it was a couple of weeks ago where this first started happening. Today it got so bad that you just could not even get to the site and I sent in a support request and they’re like yeah, it’s still going on. There’s really not much we can do about it except we can change your IP address. So here’s the new scene name that you’re going to need to use.
[00:56] Rob: How interesting. And do you think it’s targeting you or its targeting you because you’re on the WP engine? I guess it’s hard to tell right? You just not have idea who’s doing it or why.
[01:05] Mike: I’ve got no idea. It’s not like I’ve gotten any sort of extortion emails or anything like that. It’s just nailed left and right and there’s really not a lot anybody could do about it.
[01:15] Rob: So we are up to 311 worldwide iTunes reviews. We have some awesome reviews recently from Esoterica, he or she’s in Australia. Don’t be fooled by the fact that these guys are develops. Startup for the rest of us is so much broader than that. The episodes are as regular as clockwork both on their release and the killer content. Actionable and realistic information that will keep you motivated in their journey. Really appreciate that.
[01:40] Also Laten in the US says I’ve listened to about five episodes so far and I’m now going back and working my way to the older ones. I’ve already really enjoyed Rob and Mike’s discussions and appreciate the valuable content they share. And then we have Penske also from Australia. Love the fresh approach to your podcast and that it’s full of information that is useful to my everyday business. I find I can listen to you both all day long and still be as hooked at the end of the day as I was when I started. And to wrap us up, we have what’s up dog LA obviously from the United States. He says I’ve never left a podcast review but felt compelled to because I enjoy this one so much just want to encourage Rob and Mike to keep doing what they’re doing and say thank you guys. So if you have not left us an iTunes review, please log into iTunes and we’d love a five star.
[02:24] Mike: Very cool. Thanks everybody.
[02:26] Rob: So MicroConf 2014 in Las Vegas is coming up. We’re just starting to get the details nailed down. Everything’s still tentative but we are talking to the Tropicana hotel again just where we had it last year and we have tentative dates in the middle of April. If you are interested in hanging around with 150 of your favorite web and mobile entrepreneurs, think about heading over to microconf.com and adding your email to that list. We sold out our tickets in about 51 hours last year and form the size of the list at this point, it looks like it will be that fast or faster so I would suggest that if you’re thinking about coming to MicroConf you definitely head over to microconf.com and enter your email. So I heard you’re a glass hole.
[03:10] Mike: Yes. Because I own a pair of Google glass.
[03:12] Rob: What do you think so far? How long have you owned it? I mean tell us the story like have you worn it out and about? Have people given you weird looks? Do you find that it’s useful? I’m just curious to hear your take.
[03:23] Mike: I’ve had it for almost to weeks now. It’s interesting to use so I find that it works really well if you have Wi-Fi or you have it connected to your phone because it uses all of the different Google services and I’ll give you some examples of where I found that it was extremely useful. I was flying home about a week ago and had them on in the airport. I was sitting down. I looked over at this TV screen that was on the wall and I’m trying to find out where my flight was and whether it was on time or not. With Google glass, you can either touch the side of it or you can look up and it will turn on.
[03:55] Well, I looked up enough because I was looking at the TV screen and it popped on and my flight information was right there. And it told me when it was taking off, that it was on time. I could’ve clicked on it and gotten more information about it but it was awesome that information was just right there. It knew I was at the airport. It knew that I had this flight coming up and I presumably wanted information about it. I think I looked up on Google maps on my desktop how to get to some place and then a short time later I was wearing them, I just happened to glance up at something and the map showed up and basically showed me the route that I had previously looked up on Google maps.
[04:32] Rob: Very nice. So sounds fairly useful. Have you worn them out and about and had people stare at you or do you look like a dork when you’re wearing them?
[04:39] Mike: I probably look like a dork when I’m not wearing them so I don’t know if it really makes a whole lot of different. Maybe it’s an improvement I’ve got no idea.
[04:45] Rob: Touché sir.
[04:47] Mike: I definitely noticed that people are looking at me so I see a lot of people doing like a double take. I was at the grocery store the other day and this kid like every time I turned around he was staring at me so you definitely get looks here and there. I’ve got a few people who have asked me about them, just wanted to try them on and check them out. By large, the people who were interested in it definitely wanted to try them out. It’s definitely interesting wearing them. I don’t know how else to describe it.
[05:13] One thing I have noticed is that if you have an iPhone, it tends to be a lot less useful unless you’re on Wi-Fi because it doesn’t integrate with the IOS GPS that is something of a problem. They’re supposedly working on it. I guess they’ve been saying they’ve been working on it for the past six months they don’t have a solution for it yet. And then the other thing is you can’t send text messages through your phone if you have an iPhone. So it makes it a little bit more difficult for that as well. But if you do sync it with your phone, whenever you get high important email through Gmail, it will ding and then you can look up and you can just read the email right there if you’re using Gmail.
[05:51] Like I said, if you’re using Google services, it extremely nice for that because it does integrate with them and it just shows you information like when it thinks that you want it or when it seems to be relevant. I’ve had some tweets that have come in that just kind of showed up there and they were marked as high priority and primarily because I was mentioned in them or something like that so I could go and take a look at them. And you can take pictures. It automatically syncs it with Google+ and backs up everything and them from Google+ you can share it with everybody.
[06:18] Rob: I think the question on everyone’s mind is how has Google glass helped you get Audit Shark to launch?
[06:23] Mike: I can almost give you an answer for that is with that, I could sit there looking at a screen and I could do a Google hangout and I could walk somebody through it.
[06:31] Rob: I mean I don’t relay have Drip or HitTail updates just because its towards – it’s almost Christmas and we’re working away but there’s no major – we’re just rolling out features for new customers as they requested and we have a plan of what we’re doing in January but really nothing new that I haven’t already talked about anything new with Audit Shark, new millstones you’ve hit?
[06:51] Mike: Well this week, we crossed the $1,000 follower threshold for Audit Shark on Twitter so pretty happy about that. The strategy I’ve been using there has been working pretty well and seems to continue to be working so still working on how I’m going to monetize that but I’m thinking it’s more of a marketing channel than anything else, just kind of get the word out to interact with people and get face time I guess.
[07:14] And then beyond that, I’m working on a bunch of different things for next month more or less just marketing strategies and this week we’ve got some more updates that are going into the software. We just put in some new reports, once those are bug free I mean we’re going back to some of my early access customers and basically asking them for money because those were the reports they were looking for but there’s a couple bugs right now we’re just trying to straight out.
[07:34] Rob: Cool. And once that’s done, you’re going to be pushing forward with early access and additional customers and that kind of stuff?
[07:39] Mike: Yup, a couple days from now, I’ve got a call with a reseller who wants to take a look at it and see how it might integrate into their business where there’s an overlap or fit between what Audit Shark does and what their customers need.
[07:53] Rob: Very good. Well as we’re sitting here talking this documentary called the startup kids that I had mentioned a while back, it’s been released and it’s a documentary about young web entrepreneurs in the US and Europe and it has interviews with the founders of Vimeo, sound cloud, Kip, Indinero, Dropbox, food spotting and others. And you can check this out at the startupkids.com.
[08:14] Mike: On Twitter, Damon Clinkscales had sent me a tweet. It was in regards to our predictions episode and they sent me a YouTube video of what looks like a Ted Talk where somebody was talking about all the different things that Google is doing and it basically related very, very well to what I had predicted about companies essentially going down to the micro level and doing micro individual advertisements and feeding people different information. That aligned very, very well of what I said earlier about Google glass whereas I just look up and the information that was relevant to me was right there.
[08:47] Rob: Right. So your predication of kind of personal behavioral targeted marketing…
[08:52] Mike: Has already come true.
[08:53] Music
[08:57] Rob: Today we’re going to be diving into 50 mobile apps mostly to run our business. Let’s dive in here. We had an episode back in February 2011, its episode 37. We talked about the IOS apps that we were using. I listened back to that and realized that it was really out of date. You and I had just gotten iPhones maybe a year before and there just wasn’t that much out. So a lot of things have changed since then.
[09:18] First thing I want to start with is my “bottom four” so those are my apps that are in the bottom row of my iPhone. And for me, I obviously have the phone app. I have the Gmail app instead of the IOS mail app. I have the chrome app instead of Safari and then I have the podcasts app because I listen to so many podcasts. How about you? I’m curios to hear what you’re bottom four are.
[09:42] Mike: Well I left mine to all the defaults. So I just have the phone and then I have the regular mail app and then Safari and music which I also think is the default. I’m curious to know two things. 1) Why you switched out the IOS email client and then why you also decided to just go with chrome? Because for me I don’t really see any difference between chrome and Safari on the iPhone. I know that there’s some rudimentary differences here and there but for the most part, Safari works enough well for me that it just doesn’t matter.
[10:12] Rob: Yeah. So the reason I have Gmail, let’s start with that one. Gmail allows you more flexibility with labels. The labels actually work the way they’re supposed to unlike with the IOS mail app. The labels are colored the same way they are in the web app. Gmail also allows you to actually search your entire library. If you go to search and you type something in, it brings all of your historical emails back whereas the IOS mail app only looks at what it has downloaded locally. It’s more of like an iMap or a local version of the last 100 emails you have whereas the Gmail app is just way, way more powerful like the search actually works just like the web version and I wind up using that quite a bit. There are also more gestures that you can do that can get you between emails really quickly that I don’t know if IOS is implemented or not when the Gmail app came out light years ahead of IOS mail app.
[11:03] Mike: With the IOS mail app, there’s actually two different sections when you’re looking at it, there’s the basically if you have multiple mail boxes setup, it will show you the mail box at the top and then underneath it will show you your accounts. And under the accounts, if you need to search for things on a server, you can go in there and then you can search there and what it will do is it will search your phone first and then it will start searching on the server.
[11:24] Rob: A) It didn’t use to have that and B) that still sounds pretty clunky like you can’t just hit the search thing at the top and type it in. You have to go searching forth through menus.
[11:33] Mike: As I said, it’s kind of similar to Safari where it’s like its good enough and plus I also have an exchange server mailbox.
[11:40] Rob: See, that’s an issue. If you didn’t have that, I don’t think the Gmail app would work with that but I almost guarantee you if you are on the IOS mail app and you switch over to the Gmail app for one week that you will not go back to the IOS mail app. There’s enough features and differences and swipes. There’s all kinds of stuff you can do that if you learn it, it just makes you much more efficient.
[12:01] Mike: Cool. Maybe I’ll give it a shot.
[12:05] Rob: And then the other question was about chrome versus Safari. I switched to chrome maybe a year ago. Safari crashed on me quite a bit. That was the original reason I switched. Tabbing was the other thing. Even now Safari on IOS has tabs, it didn’t when I started and there’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do with tabs in the kind of multi tab view on chrome on IOS. If you just swipe on it left it disappears and you can reorder them. It feels faster as well just like on the actual desktop or laptop. So that’s why I’ve switched. Again it’s a little nuances. When chrome came out on IOS, it was ahead of Safari. Safari may be catching up at this point.
[12:44] Mike: Cool. Like I said, I’ll probably give chrome a shot again. I’ll probably just swap it out on the bottom bar because I do have chrome installed. I just don’t generally use it.
[12:52] Rob: Right. The other thing I like about chrome is all your bookmarks are synced and all your open tabs. I can literally have open tabs on my Mac book air. I can leave and if I’m out I’ll just click it and it’ll say open tabs. I can click Mac book air, it will show me all the tabs that are open there and I can just pop them open or view them right there in the browser so in case I was in the middle of something looking at a doc or looking at analytics or something, pops right up.
[13:16] Mike: Yeah. I use Xmarks for that which is kind of in our next section of office and productivity utilities.
[13:21] Rob: Indeed. So we have quite a few office and productivity apps. My first couple are Trello which I use to manage obviously my Trello queue, my to do list and stuff and sometimes I’ll add things from my iPad or iPhone but most of the time I’m using it if I’m out and about and I want to read my to-do list and think about an item. If I’m going to add it, I will typically actually do that via email. I’ll just pop open the Gmail app and type it in there and send to my Trello address.
[13:48] Mike: Yeah. I also use Trello. Another one I use on the go is Evernote. I don’t think you use Evernote, that Evernote has the worst user interface that was ever designed and created but millions and millions of people use it which is kind of weird way that its gotten this success that it has but I definitely use Evernote on my phone to take notes while I’m on the road because it allows me to throw them into different folders and be able to access pretty much my data repository of all the various marketing and sales things that I’ve run across over the years.
[14:19] Rob: My next one is Google drive and this is basically this allows me to access my Google docs. I don’t use Google drive to store files that I use Dropbox for that but I do use Google drive to access Google docs and I have frequently used it to actually pop open the outline for our podcast and add things while I’m on the go. It was nice. Before they had this Google drive app it was pretty clunky to try to do it in the browser and the Google drive actually makes it useable on an IOS device.
[14:48] Mike: Yeah, I also use Google drive but I use Google drive in combination with an app called Quick Office and Quick Office is also from Google but allows you to create documents where Google drive just always you to access them which is kind of nice because if you’re using an iPad or an iPhone, it makes it very easy to be able to pop it open, start writing a document and then you can send it to you Google drive later on so that you can get it to it from anywhere.
[15:14] Rob: And that is crazy. Alright I‘m making a note to download that. I have never even heard of this.
[15:19] Mike: Yes. It’s very nice. I’ve used quick office a couple of times to write like entire blog posts on a plane and just from my iPad. That’s kind of nice.
[15:28] Rob: Very cool. My next app is called simple note and this is basically like notepad but it’s synced across the cloud and it’s much simpler to access and to open up a new doc and create one like Google drive is. And so I use it for a lot of things that I want to take quick notes about like a shopping list. My wife and I sync up our shopping list through all of our web accounts and through our iPads and iPhones and then we also have some other docs that we’ve created that we collaborate on like Christmas list and that stuff. It’s just a little harder to get to if you make them a Google doc that you have to go in and search and formatting and a lot of clicks and the interface isn’t as easy as simple note which is basically just like I said a note pad, it’s like a little text editor.
[16:15] Mike: That’s really cool. I hadn’t thought about being able to share lists and stuff like that between me and my wife. That’s definitely a good one. I‘ll have to check that one out. I use a combination of SugarSync and Dropbox on my end for syncing files. SugarSync just recently said that they are moving to a paid only model for obviously reasons. I mean you don’t necessarily want to be supporting a ton of free users kind of similar to the way Dropbox has been. I mean at some point it become financially unwielding and unfeasible to support that many free users especially when you’re giving them this space that actually does cost you money.
[16:51] Rob: One more company member we’ve talked about this works like companies start with this premium model and most of them get rid of it because of the pure burden of supporting it.
[17:01] Mike: Yeah, so I do pay for a SugarSync subscription but I also have a free Dropbox subscription so I wonder how long it’s going to be before that becomes no longer free. And I don’t know at that point where I would go Dropbox or SugarSync. I mean I use them both for different things. I have some stuff for one business in one place and then some stuff for another business in the other one. I don’t necessarily like or dislike either one. It used to be that SugarSync I thought have a distinct advantage in that you could specify specific folders that were going to be in it as opposed to Dropbox where everything is all in one folder and then kind of spidered on from there. But I think that has gone away at this point so that they’re much more on par in terms of features so I don’t necessarily have a strong preference either way. It’s just whichever one makes it easier to get the job done and has all the files I need.
[17:48] Rob: My next three apps are pretty standard so I won’t go onto them too far. One is Dropbox which you’ve already mentioned. The next is Skype and the next one after that is Google maps which is a no brainer but I don’t use the Apple maps. I just like the routing of Google maps and now that it has turn by turn directions. It’s a no brainer for me. And then the fourth one which is a little different is called Sunrise and it’s a calendaring app that has I’ll say it has a better UI than the IOS calendar app.
[18:17] So if you’re counting I pretty much use none of this talk IOS apps and I’ve actually heard it’s a pretty common thing that a lot of people use more Google apps and or just replacements for the IOS apps and I think it’s a real problem for them. I know they want to make the money form there in hardware but if they can’t kind of write the core software for their operating system, the best, better than other people, I think that’s definitely something that apple needs to work on. But it’s Sunrise is something it’s something you should check out. It’s a free app.
[18:45] Mike: A couple of the other apps that I have are the office and productive section is Basecamp that I’ve already mentioned I use Xmarks for synchronizing some of my bookmarks. I use an application called Viber which I think I used that primarily when we were at MicroConf Europe because what it allows you to do is allows you to send text messages through Viber to somebody else who has it and across nothing but a Wi-Fi connection. So that was helpful for me because have an iPhone and my wife has one and I just downloaded Viber and we’re able to text each other back and forth without me having to pick up a phone or try to get on Skype and it was just nice to be able to just leave messages.
[19:25] The other ones that I have are an application called Doc Scan which I used for scanning receipts so if I’m out on the road and I’m trying to track expenses for a client, what I can do is when I go out to dinner, when I get the check, I sign the bill then I just take a picture of it with Doc Scan and then at the end of that, weeklong engagement or whatever, I can just then take that, converted into a PDF, send it off to my bookkeeper and my bookkeeper can take that PDF, fill out the expense report and then send an invoice to the customers that I don’t necessarily have to deal with. And that’s worked out really, really well. I’ve been using Doc Scan for probably two years and I basically use it all the time.
[20:04] And then the last one I use is something from Nathan Barry and Commit, allows you to put in a goal that you have and something that you want to do or accomplish everyday and you just enter in a time that you want it to remind you whether or not you’ve done that or not and all it is just a button say whether or not you’ve done that on that particular day. And it allows you to go back one day but it helps you to commit to different goals or at least trying to reach different goals.
[20:32] So for example, if you want to lose weight, you might say did I go to the gym today and you just say yes or no whether or not you did it on any given day and it tracks how long you’ve been doing whatever that action was. So it kind of helps to motivate you because if you’ve done it for 30 days or 60 days you don’t necessarily want to break that cycle so it’s something of a psychological hole.
[20:55] Rob: Our next category is financial apps and I think we have four of them. One of them is just your banking app if you’re part of even small credit unions these days, they have an app especially the large like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and large national banks will have them. The cool part that I found about my banking app is not just that I can check balances and transfer money but I can now deposit checks just by taking a picture of the check using the app and it scans the numbers and imports the whole thing. So I almost never go to the ATM anymore only to pull out cash these days. That’s been a big time saver for me.
[21:28] And my other financial app that I use is called Paid and I’ve mentioned it in the past but it’s basically a Stripe IOS app. It’s not put out by Stripe. It’s a third party but they integrate with Stripe and they can pull down all your data and have some really attractive reports. The design work was done by Ryan Shurf which is your friend and mine. He’s a great designer up in Minneapolis. He’s done a lot of design work for me so the app looks really sharp and it gives you a lot of inside to kind of when you’re next transfer is coming and how much it’s going to be what your revenue’s been and your per customer. It just gives you a bunch of metrics on your iPhone.
[22:04] And the app I think is like $4 or $5. And the other cool thing is if you are doing live customer development say at a conference, you can just punch someone’s credit card number into Paid and you could charge a certain amount of money on it if you are in fact going to do pre-selling.
[22:18] Mike: Two others that I use, I also use banking app for my credit union and you’re right. It’s absolutely nice to be able to just take a picture of a check and just have it deposited automatically. The other two apps that I use are Xero and that integrates with the Xero accounting application. So I’ve started moving a lot of my accounting stuff and consolidating it for my businesses all into one platform and it looks like Xero is going to be that platform. So I’ve started using that and then the other app is the American Express app so I use that to check balances or make payments or whatever.
[22:54] Rob: Well, it seems like I need to download the Xero app because I use Xero and I don’t have the IOS app. Our next category is commerce and this isn’t necessarily stuff we use to run our businesses but we wanted to include it anyways because I use this the first one. The Amazon store app, I use that every day, every other day to order a crazy amount of stuff. And I don’t use it to run my business, what I do use it to do is save time. Since I have Amazon prime, I can get everything in two days. I’m constantly just popping it in to this Amazon app or right on the fly. You don’t need to combine your orders because you have prime right?
[23:28] The other app I have under commerce is my Starbucks app and here’s the interesting thing. I don’t actually go to Starbucks that much but what I like about this is two-fold. 1) I hate those rewards cards and I go to Starbucks enough that every few months I probably earn a free coffee but this app, if you pay with that Starbucks app it gives you that free coffee. It tracks it for you so you don’t have to carry around that extra card because I’m Mr. Thin wallet. I’m trying to get a really thin wallet.
[23:50] The other thing I like about the app is there have been a couple of times where I’ve left my wallet somewhere and I have no money and I’m super hungry, you can add money to it. You can store value on it like it’s a card and it basically bailed me out because there’s always a Starbucks around and I went there and I got one of their sandwiches but at least I had something without my wallet and it was kind of my emergency fund I’ve realized if I’m standard or out and about somewhere that I can always pick up a little bit of food if I’ve forgotten it.
[24:15] Mike: Yeah. I primarily use the Amazon store app to hunt for different things. I also use the eBay app. So if I’m looking, doing price comparisons or if I’m looking for something that’s hard to find, between those two, I can usually find just about anything for my phone and then I also have the Starbucks app and I also have the Dunkin Donuts app because if you’ve ever been to the New England area, there’s a Dunkin Donuts on like every single corner. It’s just crazy out here.
[24:39] Rob: Alright, our next category is social. First app that I use for social stuff is Hootsuite and that’s what I use to manage my multiple Twitter accounts and what I like about it is it has the swiping left to right of your different brands or your different searches or your different things that you’re looking at. So you can go through not only multiple Twitter accounts here you’re getting mentioned but you can have an embedded search. So anytime mentions MicroConf throughout the year, that’s just one of my tabs that I’m swiping through. So Hootsuite is a definite winner for me. It’s a free app and Hootsuite’s free as well unless you’re over a certain level of usage which I’m not.
[25:15] The other couple are the Facebook app which I use pretty infrequently. I’m not on Facebook that much. Then there’s the kick starter app I talk enough about. I’m checking out kick starter stuff. Yes I actually have checked that out of my phone. It’s quite a good experience. I actually like the experience a little more on my phone and iPad than I do on the desktop web version. And then the last one is Yelp, obviously good for finding a place to eat when you’re somewhere you don’t know.
[25:40] Mike: Yeah. I use an app called Urban Spoon on occasion to find new places to eat. I don’t think use the Yelp app. I also have Hootsuite and then I use the regular twitter IOS app. I use that one primary for my single founder account and then the other ones I kind of manage a little bit here and there through Hootsuite but I don’t tend to use Hootsuite on my phone nearly as much as I do on my desktop. Most of the ones overlap with yours. I also use Facebook but usually when I’m sitting in an airport.
[26:06] Rob: Our next category is media and so this is books, music, movies and TV. My first one is Audible but I listen to probably a couple audio books per month. And I used to sync them via iTunes. I download them to the laptop and then sync it over through iTunes and listen to it in the music app but I realized it was just such a better experience to be able to download it directly over Wi-If. And once audible had all the controls in that 1.5 and 2 times speed, it just made sense to do that. And now I’m actually completely free of iTunes. I don’t use iTunes on my desktop for anything.
[26:40] So my podcast or through my IOS podcast app, Audible handles my audio books and I tried using iCloud and uploaded everything. It scans through and it does the iTunes match and stuff and it was quite buggy for me. I’m on a Mac book air and maybe 50% or 60% of the time I go to play music, it just wouldn’t let me play it and it would blank out and I’d have to reboot the machine. I switched over to this is another app on my phone but I now use the Amazon cloud player and it’s the same basic thing as iTunes match. It’s just using Amazon’s technology.
[27:13] So I have all my music scanned again by Amazon. It matched everything and it uploaded whatever else I didn’t have. You can have it to a quarter million tracks in cloud for lie $25 a year and I think I have 5,000 or 10,000 it’s not that many. So now that is what I use to manage all my music which feels good. I think it’s an adobe air app, my Amazon cloud player on the desktop but their web player is decent and the IOS player is decent and it got me away from using iTunes which has just been an aggravation for me of years.
[27:48] Like everyone, I use the Kindle app. I use Pandora for ambiance music. I like Pandora a lot for music discovery. There’s a Netflix app and a Hulu+ app as well as Amazon instead video and those are the three ways since I don’t have cable. I haven’t had it for years. Those are the three ways that I watched TV shows. A lot of them stream for free or I have premium memberships to all those and I’m able to rent movies for $2 or $3 and I can either watch them on my phone or my iPad or my laptop computer anytime I want or through the Roku frankly.
[28:19] And the last one is Flickster and this is what I use when I’m out and about. I want to find out where’s the nearest movie theater playing this movie and what are the times? It’s just that GPS but modern smart devices where it just knows where you are and it can tell you the nearest theaters and what’s playing. It really is advancement in modern science and I think we take for granted.
[28:39] Mike: Of those apps, you know what, I have the Kindle app installed but I almost never open it up anymore because I bought a Kindle paperweight last year and since then, I almost never use it on my phone anymore. I only use it on my Kindle and I mostly read books. Like if it’s a business book, I’ll read it on there but I have a bunch of websites where I have the Kindle for chrome plug-in where I can send something to my Kindle and then read it later which is kind of nice and it’s just having that bigger screen is probably what really does it in for the Kindle on the iPhone. I also have Netflix on my phone. I have Hulu+ I have Amazon instant video but I also have HBO go.
[29:20] My wife and are actually looking at getting rid of cable between Netflix and Hulu+ and Amazon instant video. It will probably basically replace cable. But the one thing that I probably won’t be able to keep is HBO so I don’t know what I’ll do when the next season of game of thrones comes out.
[29:36] Rob: Yeah. That’s the one thing that HBO shows can’t buy them on Amazon and iTunes until the DVD’s come out which is like 9 months after they air. Our last official category are utilities and my first one in utilities is password management. So last pass or one pass or first pass, these are all things that help you have really exotic long passwords and being able to log into them on any device. Highly recommend if you’re not using one already to take the plunge and do it. It’s definitely changed my relationships with passwords and actually my relationship – I used to have that guilt of I know I’m not as secure as I need to be with the last pass one pass group, they really make me feel like I’m more source than I used to be frankly.
[30:15] Then we have FTP on the go which is an FTP client, some absolute emergency I need FTP in and I have done this a few times like at a conference. I also have the 2X client RDP which is just a remote desktop connector and it will get into a server so say the HitTail server or another window server where you need a remote desktop in. It’s a no brainer. It’s not great to do on iPhone because its screen is so small but I do have it on the iPad as well and again, only in emergencies I’ve had to log in and kind of swatch something real quick.
[30:45] Another couple are Turbo Scan which is basically just a scanner. So you can take a picture with your iPhone and it will scan the document in as a PDF or JPEG or a GIF and use that to email it to people so I don’t have to go find a real scanner. Then there’s White Noise+ which I use when I’m at a hotel if there’s a lot of noise especially if we’re there with my kids and I think it’s going to wake them up, I’ll just turn on the inside of an airplane noise or some type of white or brown noise.
[21:14] Last couple for me in utilities are the Roku app which is just a remote control for a Roku which allows you to watch internet television on your TV and there’s Quick Reader which is from our own Patrick Thompson at Inkstone Software which helps you learn how to speed read better. And the last one is Air Display which allows your iPad to basically be a second monitor over Wi-Fi. So it’s great for coffee shops if you really need to compare an excel spreadsheet or something you’re working on in two monitors. It’s not super fast, super responsive so you wouldn’t want to be really flipping back and forth a lot but if you’re just trying to compare data or you just want that extra little 10 inch screen sitting next to you, it also chose their battery actually. But if you do need that, I have definitely used this on occasion.
[31:58] Mike: I think out of those, one I would definitely add is I use something called ISSH which is a very similar to what you talked about with the RDP where if you need to SSH into a machine and its an absolutely emergency and it can’t wait for you to get to a laptop then that’s a good option. But I also have an RDP client so that I can get into my servers if I need to. And yeah, password management, tools, similar to last pass or some of those other ones that you mentioned. You said Turbo Scan. I think I mentioned it before, I use Doc Scan for that. How does Turbo Scan work?
[32:31] Rob: You just take maybe two pictures of the document and it just scans it in and spits out like a JPEG. It can do PDF’s and actually I just looked at it and it said you can just do the basic camera then you can do the sure scan 3X and that’s where you take three pictures of it and it merges them and makes completely sure that you have a really high quality image of it like doubles them up over each other.
[332:52] Mike: Yeah. I think its $3 but Doc Scan is $3 as well. That’s a lot of different apps that we just covered and hopefully we went through and helped you guys discover a couple of new apps that you never heard of. I definitely got a couple off Rob’s list that I’m going to take a look at.
[33:08] If you have question for us, you can call it into our voice mail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 163 | Our Goals for Next Year (And Why You Should Set Your Own)
Show Notes
Rob
- 5x Drip
- Get HT back on track
- Throw 2 MicroConfs in a sustainable manner
- Re-launch Micropreneur.com
Mike
- Go full-time on AuditShark
- Finish my security book
- Get back to blogging/writing. 26 blog posts/email newsletters for the year
- Take an extended vacation (2+ weeks)
- Make a conscious effort to improve my health.
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 163.
[00:03] Music
[00:10] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
[00:18] Rob: And I’m Rob.
[00:19] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Rob?
[00:24] Rob: December’s a good time to be post-launch I’ve decided. I feel it’s a little bit like a calm after the storm of launch and the calm before the storm of kind of restarting marketing in January. Obviously I’m referring to Drip. It’s just been kind of a time for me to come off of some pretty stressful and kind of high hour count weeks in November and I feel like things are starting to slow down, starting to ease into the holidays. We have a nice big back log of features that we’re cranking out. I keep saying this phrase of I’m cocking the crossbow. I feel like I’m pulling back that mechanism and loading up and having blog posts created and some content marketing stuff and banner ads and all types of ad campaigns.
[0:01:07] I’m getting suited up to do to just pummel the earth with, scorch the earth with in January. So that’s kind of what’s on my agenda. Nothing new in terms of actual marketing. I’m not executing anything right now but just building up that stock pile so I can start off 2014 with a bang. How about you?
[01:23] Mike: Well do you remember all the auto generated content project that I put together like a month or two ago and put out there and was waiting for Google to come in and index all that?
[01:33] Rob: Yeah. That was like Brecht Palombo and Patrick McKenzie had suggested that.
[01:36] Mike: Yeah. So I followed through with that and Google finally decided to come through and index everything. I’ve got something like 600 or 650 pages indexed in Google now. And my organic search traffic has increased roughly 50% to 100%
[01:50] Rob: Very nice. That’s awesome.
[01:52] Mike: The weird thing is that it seems like Google is slowly adding content to their industries over time so not everything – it’s kind of weird because I go into like the web master tools and they are showing that they have indexed 600 pages but it says that it’s not actually looking at more than I think 150 of them for some reason. It’s some weird number that they have in there. And you can see the graph of that number is increasing overtime and I’m not quite sure what it means.
[02:19] Rob: Yeah. I had this happen with HitTail when I first moved it over. I moved the blog to a sub domain and did some other tweaking and at first, Google wouldn’t index anything. The more links I built and the more people started talking about it in social media, the more of the site Google would index. It’s like if you have high authority, it would index everything, but you have to get there first. I think if you just released a brand new domain and you release a thousand pages of content, Google is not going to index that because they only have so many resources.
[02:48] And so that’s my guess of what’s happening is as your site is gaining authority in Google’s eyes and they’re able to slowly add pages into their index and eventually they’ll get after a while HitTail went from 200 and I think it’s up over a thousand pages indexed now so I’d imagine this same thing could happen to you.
[03:04] Mike: Yes so I’m hoping that will continue and I just kind of have to watch it for a little while.
[03:08] Rob: Very cool. Yeah, hopefully that traffic converts reasonably well. I know that long tail traffic in general doesn’t convert as well as more targeted traffic but if you get them on an email list, email mini course and funnel them into just kind of into your funnel I guess. This is a way to handle it and you can convert some of them and make it worth a while.
[03:25] Mike: Well I do have Drip installed so that’s certainly helping.
[03:29] Rob: So I wanted to mention a site, it’s called useronboard.com and it’s been getting some traction in recent weeks. It’s basically a critique of user on boarding for big sites that you’ve heard of like vimeo and Netflix that he did, Trello and less accounting and Basecamp and the site is getting a lot of buzz. It was funny. I followed it through and actually put out by my growth hacker intern and he didn’t tell me about it. I found it actually through social media.
[03:57] His internship ended with me about 10 days ago and he’s now back to doing consulting work and that kind of stuff so he launched the site. He and I had a couple conversations about it but I didn’t know what domain he was going to use and didn’t really know he was going to do these PDF’s critiquing it but apparently he said it’s really taken off and it’s doing well. So it’s a cool idea both from two sides. 1) Just to check out the on boarding, he knows on boarding like that’s what he’s done for a couple years. He’s very knowledgeable about it so it’s neat to see the feedback he gives.
[04:26] It’s also interesting to think about he went from zero audience to I’ll just say a sizeable little email list in a matter of weeks just by putting himself out there and leveraging his expertise. And he had already planned to write an eBook on this topic and release it but this just gives him even more of an excuse. He’s now validated there is a need for this type of content. So if you have a few minutes, checkout useronboard.com.
[04:49] Mike: The other thing I have going on is I went on my email list and invited a bunch of the Linux users into my early access program. So I sent out invitations directly to about half dozen of them. But one of the things that I’ve started to realize in talking to people – because some people would just email me back and say hey I don’t think I’m a good fit but really like what you’re doing and once my business gets to this point, that I’d really like to be able to see what Audit Shark could do and can help me lock down my servers because this is also a problem that I have.
[05:17] And I’ve had enough of these conversations that I’m leaning heavily towards creating a special bootstrapper tier specifically aimed at people who can’t necessarily afford the full pricing for Audit Shark and that’s primarily because I built Audit Shark to kind of raise the general bar of how secure the internet is and how secure people’s servers are out there. So for me it’s not necessarily all about the money. I mean obviously Iwant to make money from it and make a living and everything but at the same time I want to help other people secure their severs.
[05:47] And there are people out there who are building stuff which it may not necessarily be secure and they just don’t know what they’re doing who are freely willing to admit that but they still need help. So I’m looking at creating some sort of a bootstrapper tier specifically aimed at those people so they can get at least some sort of protection in a way that doesn’t break the bank for me. So it’s not necessarily a premium model. It’s kind of like a I’ll say some weird hybrid model I guess.
[06:13] Rob: Dharmesh called it a cheapium model where he said you basically price it kind of at cost to what it cost you for the resources and maybe to support it. But you don’t make any profit. I hear what you’re saying. I’m a little hesitant to endorse it. My big concern would be that if you get 50 or 100 people on this bootstrap startup plan and you really aren’t making any profit, it sucks a lot of resources away from your core profits basically. And given that you’re not venture funded and you do need to make money and that’s the goal, it’s a tough call. It’s not something that I would bite off early on in the products lifecycle.
[06:38] Mike: Yeah. I understand that. I mean the other side of it is it also gives me ability to talk to these people who would use it if it were priced for them and they’re more than happy to start using it and give me feedback because a lot of the I’ll say the solid leads and stuff that I’m getting from people are at much higher price points and they take much, much longer to make the decisions. So I’m getting a lot of bites in that area but its taking much longer to kind of push those people through the sales funnel and I’m basically looking for feedback now. I don’t want feedback in four months. I want feedback now.
[07:19] Rob: Yeah. That makes sense. My concern is you’re going to get feedback from people who aren’t willing to pay for it or aren’t willing to pay very much for it so I’m not sure, I don’t think that’s as good a feedback as if you can just find customers who are willing to pay the full price. I know what you’re saying you have enterprise people who are going to be in the four figures a month range. It’s going to take you six months plus to close them. It’s tough. You know the product better than anyone but I think the market itself is still unknown. And before I went to like a cheapium model I think you have other roads, avenues to explore.
[07:51] Mike: Well, like I said, I’m still looking at it.
[07:53] Rob: Yeah. Here’s the thing, you can do an unpublished version of that, you could let five people in and not make it something they can sign up through from the website. But as you’re having conversation just be like alright, I can give it to you for way less than the list price and basically break it even and then get their feedback. That can’t hurt.
[08:10] Mike: Yeah. I wasn’t thinking that I would put it out there as like click here and get cheapium price.
[08:15] Rob: Got it.
[08:16] Mike: I actually have my developer working on some stuff that will allow me to do some price testing. One of the things that the stuff is working on that would allow me to do is just create a code that I can send to somebody and it would create a very specific pricing tier from them to say okay, well you’ve entered such and such codes so you’ll get these many servers. This will be the price point etc. So that way it’s more based on one on one conversations. It’s not something that you go in and it’s like $5 a month per server or something like that because the business obviously can’t support them.
[08:46] Rob: Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Not a bad way to go. Remember when Richard White talked about launching UserVoice and we did an episode about that. He said that they discounted a lot of their tiers that they priced them high and then they offered pretty big discounts. I think the average discount was 40% or 50% not unheard of.
[09:05] I have one other topic of conversation before that. It was tweeted to me this week but I think both of our opinions probably valid – that was from Brecht Palombo. He’s @brechtify on Twitter. Brecht Palombo, he talked at MicroConf last year. He’s a longtime Micropreneur academy member, lifetime member and he has distressedpro.com it’s his business that he does full time and he also runs the bootstrap with kid’s podcast. He tweeted and he said I need a better business stats review regimen. Would love to hear about yours, maybe a podcast episode.
[09:42] So I don’t think we need to devote a whole episode to this because my regimen isn’t that involved. Here’s what I’d do. Basically I have businesses I’m actively working on. So today that’s Drip. And then I have businesses that are more in the background so that would be everything else that you see. If you go to thethenumagroup.com you’ll see the other apps I have. All of those other ones are basically – they’re not back burnered because that sounds like I’m ignoring them but they are basically moving along well. They are being supported but no major time investment is coming from me.
[10:10] And so with the first category, so Drip, the current thing I’m actively working on, I am pretty much checking stats daily. I have a bookmark. In chrome I have a little folder with a list of bookmarks and it says daily on it. That’s what the folder is called. I right click on the folder and I say open all bookmarks in new tabs and poof, it just opens them all. And this basically brings me into right in the exact page in Google analytics with a time, with a date range that I want to see.
[10:39] It has Google analytics. It has perfect audience which I use for retargeting. It has any ads. If I’m currently running ads on any networks, it has those pages in there. So this thing is in flux. When I stop ads, I will pull it out of this list and it also has my dashboard of Drip itself at other times as I’m doing they’ll make their way in here. So sometimes this will only 3 or 4 pages and other times it can open 6 or 7 different pages. And I will look at this at least once a day when I’m working with Drip and if I’m actively running ads and doing a high ads bend, I will sometimes look at it every hour or two, not all the pages but just the ads bend because things move quickly during the business day.
[11:18] In addition to that, when billing runs every night, I get an email and I almost always pop in typically from my phone because it’s in the evening and I checkout the dashboard to see what happened, see what the billing was, what the expected billing is for the month, see how things have changed, what the churn is, blah, blah. So yes, it all depends on risk tolerance. It’s like if you want to look at this only once every few days then something could go wrong and you could risk basically losing money or not making as much money. So when I’m actively doing stuff, that’s where I am.
[11:50] When I have a less active app like let’s say HitTail where I’m not out there actively hardcore marketing it and pushing it, I will typically check Google analytics once a week sometimes once a month. There are some of my apps that have been on autopilot even longer and those I really do about once a month right around the time that I’m doing end of month financials, I’ll go through all the Google analytics and just check through to make sure there was no big drop. Now again, this depends on your risk tolerance because you could feasibly lose 3 or 4 week’s worth of traffic or worth of sales if you haven’t been paying attention to that stuff.
[12:23] So you need some confidence that things are going to continue to go the way they have been if you are not looking at analytics or sales for 3 or 4 weeks at a time. Anyway, that’s how I break it down and that’s the process I’ve developed over the past couple of years. How about you Mike?
[12:35] Mike: Well, for Audit Shark I get a daily email that gives me all the important things that are going on. It will tell me for example off the top of my head I know that it tells me how many customers are currently in there, how many components which our component is either an agent or it’s an agent list audit that’s been setup for a Linux machine so I know how many servers that the system is designed to be auditing or to setup to be auditing. And then it also tells me the number of controlled points and check so as my developer adds in new ones, I can see that they’re being added in on a daily basis.
[13:09] And then beyond that, I’d say probably once a week or so, I’d go into post mark app and take a look to see the outgoing emails and just making sure there’s no problems. I also get a weekly report from them that tell me how many emails went out on the previous week. Beyond that, I also use dig my data to basically to keep track of the Twitter feed in terms of the number of followers that its gaining over time. I have more than doubled it, almost tripled it in about a month to a month and a half. So I went from around I think it was maybe 170 or so probably two months ago and right now it’s right around 950 or pretty close to a thousand.
[13:48] Rob: Very nice.
[13:50] Mike: Yeah, that’s going extremely well, just continues giving up. I mean there’s a huge jump kind of as I start figuring things out it just jumps dramatically. And then you know the standby Google analytics I take a look at that at least once a week if not 2 or 3 times a week just to kind of see what’s going on across some of the different sites because it’s nice to have that dashboard where it’s got everything in there. And then like I said, I do the same thing with dig my data where I use it as a dashboard where I keep track of multiple products and things that I’m working on.
[14:18] Rob: Very good. Thanks for the question Brecht. Hope that helps.
[14:21] Music
[14:24] Rob: So let’s dive into our goals. Let’s take a look back at 2013 look at the goals we’d setup for ourselves and then we’ll dive into what we’re looking to do in over the next 12 months.
[14:33] Mike: So my first goal from last year was to stop writing code and I think within a week or two of stating that as a goal, I said that I didn’t really want to do it because I actually enjoy writing code. I haven’t really stopped writing code. I still write code here and there usually for bug fixes or things that need to get done quickly, a lot of times I’ll take the stuff that needs to get done and outsource it. But if there’s stuff that is extremely time sensitive, maybe it needs to be done the next day or only a couple of days away and I don’t necessarily have the time to hand it off to somebody, I’ll just do it.
[15:04] I usually handle a lot of the smaller bug fixes as well like if a customer comes up with something and it’sjust not working quite the way that they want or if there’s errors that are getting thrown and I’ll handle those. But for the most part I don’t write I’d say a lot of the core code anymore. I’m basically handing that off doing much more high level design than most of the implementation.
[15:24] Rob: Very nice. Yeah, getting away from code is always hard I think for both of us. Even I’m still writing code at this point because I just enjoy it too much. So my first goal for 2013 was to grow HitTail by 2.5x and that was based on the October revenue which I think is when I had a personal retreat and made this goal. I didn’t make 2.5x. I did get to 2x HitTail from October revenue which was a five figure number already. So it’s not a small amount.
[15:53] The reason I didn’t hit 2.5 well there’s two reasons. One is I did start to back off of it to do MicroConf and then that lead right into Drip. So I didn’t have as much time as I’d like to devote to it. The other reason is that Google did their not provided thing and I saw it coming and started backing off of some of the marketing spend earlier even before Google announced it a couple months ago. And so that had definitely had an impact on the growth. Now I‘ve already talked about on the podcast some efforts that I’m going to be undertaking to kind of get around that but we’ll see how it goes in 2014.
[16:28] Mike: My next one was to launch Audit Shark publically and I would say that I’ve gone ahead and done that even though I’m still working through the early access list and slowly on boarding people and making sure the system can handle it as they come on. But I mean you can go to the site and sign up right now. There’s nothing stopping you. But like I said, I’m working through the early access list with people just to give them a little bit more hand holding and anyone who’s signing up through that is going to end up getting some sort of a discount I haven’t fully published any of that stuff. But there is different pricing for the early access people versus the public pricing.
[17:00] Rob: My second goal was to launch Drip in the spring and then I had a six month revenue mark that I wanted to hit and so I did not launch Drip in the spring. It really started having paying customers around June so it was more summer and then somewhere in there it’s hard to say really what launch was. You could say its November but it was already doing in the thousands a low four figures before then so I’d say it launched in late summer or early fall. I have not hit the six month revenue mark. I mean I really only worked through the list about 30 days ago so I do think I’m definitely on that track to meet or exceed that six month revenue mark but we’ll have to see.
[17:38] Mike: My third goal was to grow to a full time team of at least three people and nobody who’s working on Audit Shark is full time on it yet right now but I do have about five people that are working at least on a part time basis in some way, shape or form related to Audit Shark. So I would say that I definitely did not hit that goal but there was some partial progress on that.
[17:58] Rob: My third goal was to hold another MicroConf that changed the way people launched their companies and I wasn’t even thinking about MicroConfEurope. I don’t think it was an option at the time but I would say that we achieved that with MicroConf in Vegas because MicroConf 2013 in my opinion was the best one we’ve done. Looking forward to 2014 for another.
[18:17] Mike: My fourth goal was to help get my wife’s fitness business system stable and profitable. I’d say that it’s pretty profitable. It’s not necessarily stable. It kind of influx right now but I don’t know whether that’s just because of the different partnerships that she’s kind of looking at or whether it’s because of the time of year because anytime between thanksgiving and new years is not a great time to try and get people to work out.
[18:39] Rob: Yeah. It’s always hard. I’ve heard the fitness business is unstable by definition.
[18:44] Mike: My understanding is that things really pick up in January because people have put together all these new year’s resolutions and it’s kind of weird that I hear that a lot of fitness studios and gyms have these membership programs where it’s like you get subscribed to them on a monthly basis and then people will come for a month or two and then will stop coming for three or four months because they kind of fall off the wagon and then they go to cancel and then they find out that there’s like this $90 or $120 cancelation fee that goes along with it.
[19:15] So then sometimes they’ll delay a little bit more because they’re like I don’t want to have to pay that but at the end of the day they’re going to have to pay to cancel anyway which is kind of weird to me but you think that if you sign up for it then you’re good to go whenever you decide to cancel but that’s just not how it works.
[19:30] Rob: Right. Kind of like you mentioned when business hold their customers hostage.
[19:36] Mike: Yes.
[19:37] Rob: Sounds a little like that. So my fourth and final goal from last year from 2013 was to release three video training courses. The first was a video about hiring virtual assistants and that’s at startupvacourse.com I did get that one done. About three months into the year I figured I wasn’t going to make the other two. With MicroConf taking up as much time as it did and then with Drip being pushed basically back on the launch, it just didn’t seem like the best idea. I wanted to work on my software products instead of focusing on another video course.
[20:12] I would love to do another video course n 2014. I think three is just too ambitious. Recording it wasn’t the hard part. It was getting all the meta stuff together and getting it uploaded and I uploaded to you to me and getting the marketing done. The course was profitable but it’s not worth the number of hours that I spent time on it compared to what I can do with an app like Drip that has recurring revenue tied to it. So we’ll see what happens in 2014 if I do another one. It definitely was a lot of fun to put it together but I think like MicroConf, it’s a lot of effort for kind of a onetime pop or just a one time launch so I’ve kind of for now my site’s on the more recurring stuff.
[20:52] Mike: For my last goal, one was to write a security book who assists with the marketing behind Audit Shark and I’d say I pulled back from that pretty early on just because I knew that it was going to be a big undertaking so that’s still on the back burner at some point. I’ll revisit that. It will probably actually be pushed into this year. I just haven’t gotten back to it mainly because I’ve been involved with Audit Shark. And then the last one was to cut 75% of my travel consulting. And I haven’t cut 75% I probably cut maybe 20% so I’m still working on that. When customers are paying that much for an 8 or 10 or 20 week project, they kind of want to see your face.
[21:28] Rob: Very good. So let’s dive into what we have in mind for 2014. It’s early December so we kind of have 13 months to dig through these and it looks like we each have five goals. You want to kick us off with the first thing you’re looking to do?
[21:41] Mike: Sure. So the first one is obviously to go full time on Audit Shark and it seems like with the product actually launched at this point and on the path to having some real revenue I feel like that is something I should be able to achieve.
[21:54] Rob: Very nice. For me, my first goal is to 5xDrip. Since Drip is still in somewhat early stages, 5x is I think a doable goal. It’s definitely ambitious and it’s beyond what I had in the original marketing plan but things have been going well so far and so I want to set my stats high. So we’ll see if I can get there.
[22:13] Mike: My next one as I said before was to work on that security book so my goal for the end of this coming year is to finish the security book and have it out there as an additional marketing avenue for Audit Shark.
[22:24] Rob: My second goal is to do some work on HitTail. This is actually a short term goal. Really I expect to have HitTail back providing the full value that it was before the Google not provided fiasco. I hope to do that in the next 30 to 60 days. What that means is I’ll resume some of the marketing and kind of do another push. So the goal here is a little loose. It’s to get HitTail back on track. I don’t necessarily have a revenue growth goal because I won’t be hammering on it as much as I do Drip but I want to get it back to where it was pre not provided, get that marketing spend going again.
[22:57] Mike: My third goal is to get back to blogging and writing a little bit more. I’ve started doing this probably more over the last month than anything else. I’ve got a few different blog posts that I got cued up but one of the things that I did was I actually started putting together a real email list for my blog. So it’s not very large right now but if anyone is interested and wants to go sign up you can go to singlefounder.com. I will be posting probably about every other week. I do have several posts that are kind of already cued up. My goal is to publish 26 blog posts through that email newsletter by the end of the year.
[23:28] Rob: My third goal for 2014 is to throw two MicroConfs in a sustainable manner. And what I mean by that is in a way where you and I aren’t so tied to it in terms of all the labor being done. We were able – we were lucky to land Dan Taylor to help us run the MicroConf in Prague and that took quite a bit of the labor off of us. Now I’m thinking what are we going to do in Vegas because it just takes too much time and we want to keep doing it and we want to keep making it better every year but I want to figure out how to make that more sustainable so that it doesn’t detract from the other things that both you and I are trying to do.
[24:04] Rob: My fourth goal is to take a real extended vacation and by extended vacation I mean at least two weeks maybe more. I took a vacation earlier this summer which it was only about a week long. My family and I went out over to Niagara falls, took the kids out there, went on the maid of the midst and basically took an extended road trip through upstate New York and went up to Adirondacks and went camping. I guess I shouldn’t call it camping. I have a cottage up there so it’s not really roughing it or anything. But it was a lot of fun and it was very relaxing.
[24:35] I don’t think there was a time where I didn’t have internet access in some way shape or form through my phone but it was just nice to be able to relax in that way. So I think I’d like to extend that a little bit more and instead of just one week maybe do at least two, maybe more but we’ll see how things go.
[24:50] Rob: My fourth goal for 2014 is to relaunchmicropreneur.com, the Micropreneur Academy with you. We’ve been in some early talks to figure out what to do next because the Micropreneur Academy’s been around for four years now and it just needs some reworking. So we started putting some brain power into that looking at the changes that need to be made and no exact decisions made yet but I think that will be coming here in early 2014. I think our goal is to get it out before MicroConf Vegas. That’s definitely going to be time intensive to get that done as such I have it on the goals list here. And if you haven’t ever checked out the academy it’s atMicropreneur.com and if you have checked it out in the past, know that we will be expecting to release something new, kind of a revamp of it in the next several months.
[25:37] Mike: My last goal is to make a conscious effort to improve my health just in general but specifically one of my goals is to lose about 2.5% of my BMI by the time MicroConf. It’s about 10 pounds or so. There’s obviously differences between losing weight versus losing some fat off of your body and just becoming generally healthier. So I’ve actually been going to the gym quite a bit more than I probably have all year. Things are going reasonably well so far. So as long as I don’t blow up my ankle or anything like that then I should be okay.
[26:06] Rob: Nice. So my fifth goal is an honorable mention and what I mean by this is it was an unpublished goal in 2013 and I have it there in case I get everything else done and have extra time but it’s falling off the list the last two years and I frankly don’t think I will get to it in 2014 but it’s something that’s been on my mind and that’s to do a second addition of start small stay small. Like the academy it’s been out there for several years and it could use some updating and I just have so many new thoughts that aren’t in that book so we’ll see. It will either be late in 2014 or it may move up the list in 2015.
[26:43] Before we started mentioning these goals, we probably should’ve prefaced it but I guess we’ll just do a post script here. I think it’s important for people to understand why we set these goals. I know that as a goal oriented person, if I don’t have these on the list then I can tend to wander. It’s pretty easy when you’re bootstrapped especially if you don’t have a founder, you don’t really have a ton of accountability. And so these goals are part of what keeps me accountable to continuing to push hard over the next year.
[27:14] And I will show probably most of these goals to my mastermind groups. These are written down in my idea notebook that I always talk about and I will come back to them over and over this year. And although they’re not an exactly blueprint of what’s going to happen, I do have a general timeframe of how each of these play out. Probably the month or two, the 60 day period when I think they’ll each be completed and especially with growing Drip, I do have a month by month time table of where I think I can get and how hard it’s going to be to get there.
[27:46] I threw out I want a 5x Drip. I didn’t pull that number out of thin air because it’s a nice round number. I actually looked at how much traffic I think it can drive. I took a percentage of how many people I think will convert to trial. I looked at our trial to paid conversion. I looked at churn. I drew all these numbers into a machine and it gives you kind of a range and I picked the number that I think I can hit but that’s definitely ambitious. So these goals will absolutely drive me over the next 12-13 months and without them, I find that I tend to wander and I tend to hear about some new project or hear about a new idea. I get email pitches all the time to do stuff that sounds like fun.
[28:22] And the problem is if I don’t have these goals that keep me tethered to what I really want and to what I pick out by spending hours and hours of thinking what do I want in 2014, then I will tend to wander. I think most of us do too. It’s the entrepreneurial ADD. And we see a lot of folks who do just wander from one thing to the next and my guess is that having goals could be some type of tether to keep them centered around that. Is that similar to your reason for setting goals or do you have others?
[28:47] Mike: No, it is. And it’s funny you mentioned that you would show this to your mastermind group and let them know what your goals were because speaking of masterminds, one of the things that I do is I take a lot of notes for our mastermind group so usually what I’m doing is I’m taking notes and anytime somebody talks and says these are the things that I’ve done, these are the things that I plan on doing next week, I basically take all the things that everyone says that they were planning on doing next week and then putting them into an email and right after the mastermind group meeting is over, I send that email to everybody. So I sent it to all three of us.
[29:21] And then I also sent one using boomerang for one week later so that it goes out the following week and that way at the beginning of the week, everybody gets these. So it’s not like there’s two weeks in between and you’re rushing like oh its Monday. We’ve got our mastermind group meeting tomorrow. Let me try and squeeze all these things in that I was supposed to be working on for the past two weeks. And instead, they get that email and reminder right away these are the things you should be working on at least start on them sooner rather than later. And then you get that follow-up the kind of in between. And I think that helps people to stay on task because as you said, some of these things, there’s really long amount of time between them.
[29:58] You said that in order for you to 5x Drip, it’s not like that’s going to happen overnight. There’s different goals and milestones that you’re going to need to be able to meet. You got to get to 2x before you get to 5x. And there’s kind of a clear path of progression for being able to do that. And I think being able to refer back to these goals, helps keep you focused on the things that you should be working on. And if you’re getting pulled in directions that are not necessarily in line with those goals, then you really need to reconsider whether or not that’s something you should be doing.
[30:23] Rob: So if you’re looking for some perhaps public accountability, I’d encourage you to sit down, take a couple hours hopefully away from email and away from the distractions of family and try to think of what you hope to achieve in 2014 and we’d love to see a few of your goals since Mike and I have shared ours here, we’d love to see your goals in the comments section of this episode startupsfortherestofus.com and its episode 163.
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