Episode 84 | Five Traits of Successful Founders
Show Notes
- Ultimate WordPress Coming Soon Plugin
- The Winner’s Brain
- The 5 traits:
- Opportunity Radar
- Optimal Risk Gauge
- Focused Goal Laser
- Effort Accelerator
- Talent Meter
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups For The Rest of Us: Episode 84.
[00:03] [music]
[00:11] Mike: 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.
[00:21] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What are you doing this week, Rob?
[00:24] Rob: I’ve been working pretty hard on refining some parts of the HitTail article, the one-click article feature I mentioned last week. So I got some good feedback from early users. I had about ten, ten orders so far for articles. And it’s crazy and so I’m saying it’s a two to three-day delivery window but with the amount of writers that are available through this partner that I have, one article came back in three hours.
[00:47] Mike: Wow. [Laughter]
[00:48] Rob: That — is it — yeah.
[00:49] Mike: That’s crazy.
[00:50] Rob: They’re only — they’re 400 -word article so I’m, you know, specifying it pretty low because at this point they’re kind of just SEO blog post type things but they’re high quality writing. I mean they’re all, you know, native English speakers and that kind of stuff but yeah. But I think the average is probably been like eighteen hours. A lot of them are coming back in less than a day. There was only one that was on that really assertoric topic that took — it took like almost two days for someone to claim it and they wrote it like six hours or so.
[01:16] Anyways, that’s one good. It feels really good to get that out and get it out in to the wild and to make some refinements to it based on suggestions. So I’m feeling like that’s wrapping up pretty quickly and got to kind of be moving on now to more marketing stuff because this is really — this completes the operation retention that I talked about last week. And so I am really redoubling my efforts and kind of refocusing on doing things more in public. I’ve kind of been under the radar for a good month or two, really, I haven’t done much. Other than the podcast, I haven’t done much of anything in public. And so I’ll be heading back to that.
[01:48] Mike: Yup.
[01:48] Rob: How about yourself?
[01:50] Mike: I read an interesting blog article on the SmartBear Blog by Jason Cohen and it talks about the mid-market briar patch and how going after to been market is generally, not always but generally a losing strategy as opposed to going after the enterprise or small business market because if you’re going to go after small businesses, then obviously the way to do it is generally through SEO and you know, online marketing techniques. But if you’re going after the enterprise market, then you’ll have to scale up and it cost a lot more time and effort and energy in order to land those customers. So some people look at that and they say, “Well, I don’t want to go after that out. I’ll go after the mid-market” which is kind of what I try to do initially with AuditShark and the article basically goes on to say that the mid-market is essentially a briar patch because you spend just as much time, effort and energy going after the mid market as you do going after enterprise customers because by the time those customers are mid-market sized, they already have all these processes and purchasing procedures in place and everything that makes it just as difficult to raise them as it does to get in to an enterprise customer but your return on it is like a hundred times less or thousand times less than it would be if you’re going after an enterprise customer.
[03:03] So you’re much better off going after those enterprise customers than the mid-market customers because it’s the same amount of effort but your return on it is, you know, a hundred extra or a thousand extra or something like that.
[03:15] Rob: Got it and this struck a cord with you because of your early direction with AuditShark of going after banks, right?
[03:20] Mike: Yeah, definitely because I mean my target market for banks. I mean I talked about it upfront was, you know, anywhere from fifty to a couple of hundred employees. It was a little bit more difficult than I originally anticipated. I thought it’ll be a lot easier just based on my early experiences talking to a couple of banks. It turns out that it’s just a lot more effort and it’s just not cost effective to do it.
[03:41] Rob: Right. So what’s in line with exactly his premise at article and that’s cool. Hey, we talked a couple of weeks ago and I had mentioned that I wanted to start mentioning some, some Micropreneur Academy members more often, people who have had success because literally dozens of folks that I know have launched products and, you know, either quit their jobs or enough money to quit their jobs and just don’t and just basically have two incomes coming in. I know a few folks doing that.
[04:07] Anyway, so there’s a guy name John Turner and we mentioned him last week. seedprod.com is his URL and he has a WordPress theme, the ultimate coming soon plug-in for WordPress and it allows — it’s a lot, you know made a lot for the startup movement of having the landing page and collecting e-mails so it ties in a lot before we say but he’s starting in a very elegant way. You know, at one point he turned down a job with, I think WooThemes. I mean he turned down a job with a pretty big WordPress development company. So he — this guy is a very sharp WordPress developer. He has built over the past six months specifically, he’s been working on a little longer than that but he launched and his growing revenue and frankly, you know, he’s not at the point of having recurring revenue up to the point of quitting a job but I think like last month he has enough that seriously considered doing so.
[04:57] So but it just really impressive and cool to see someone come in to the Academy, used the lessons that we’ve laid out and really take a lot of way from. He expressed that he learned a lot from the Academy. So a folks are, you know, interested in that type of thing and so maybe we’ll mention it every, every few episodes just to give people idea of what’s going on there and who’s coming out of it. I’d like to kind of do some little spotlights here and there. But if you’re interested in finding out more about it, it’s at micropreneur.com.
[05:24] Mike: Yes, I’ve looked in to what he’s got for a plug-in and the model that he used to kind of promote was really interesting. He actually didn’t even mean to build a product out of it, what he done was he released this plug-in for a WordPress as a coming soon plug-in and he got — I forget how many tens of thousands of downloads but it was a significant number of downloads was — I think he started out with — about 10,000 and that’s when he decided that he was going to turn it in to the WordPress plug-in in to having a like a professional version of the plug-in. And it’s more or less like an up sell and at this point, I think his free version has something like 70 or 80,000 downloads according to WordPress.
[06:03] Rob: .org.
[06:04] Mike: There, they just, you know, show you how many downloads are and some ungodly number. I mean it’s ridiculous. I mean that’s where a lot of his sales come through because there are certain things that are in is professional version of his plug-in that are not in the free version. I mean I think that’s just a really great way to do it. I mean it seems to fit really well with the WordPress community.
[06:24] Rob: Right. That’s this kind of a standard way I’ve seen evolving. I shouldn’t say standard. It’s kind of becoming the standard way of releasing the free — it’s almost a premium model but the audience is so big and if you can actually get found in that WordPress.org search engine, it’s a lot like ranking high in Google. I mean it’s just another discovery engine and so you can get enough kind of free users that, you know, it can turn in to a reasonably high income stream for folks like us who are solo entrepreneurs. I mean if you are some enterprise company, this wouldn’t even be a blip, right? The amount of income you could make from it but that’s that not the game here.
[07:00] Mike: One of things I’ve been working on lately is I’m working through the website designer with the new site design for AuditShark, my new developer for AuditShark has just kind of come onboard. He’s got about a day’s worth of effort in so far. So he really hasn’t done anything yet but you know, he’s certainly starting to pick some things up and you know, we’ll see how things go. I’m hoping things work out on this side just to help get things moving a little bit quicker.
[07:25] Rob: And at the same time, I think I’m going to have to let my developer go who’s been working on HitTail for a little while. He had just seemed to — he’s a solid developer but he’s not working as far as I’d like and sometimes he just kind of disappears and doesn’t answer e-mail for a few days. So, you know, I have higher standards at this point so I may be looking for another developer which is tough because HitTail is in Classic ASP and it’s not easy to find good Classic ASP developers because of them have moved to .NET by now.
[07:51] [music]
[07:54] Mike: So what we’re talking about today?
[07:56] Rob: Today, we’re talking about five traits of successful founders. So I’ve been listening to the book Winner’s Brain and it’s by Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske. And basically, these guys are two researchers. So they are, you know, they’re fairly academic in the research but they’ve written kind of a layman’s book and it’s about people who succeed and how their brains are different from, you know, a lot of other people and it’s not just people who succeed and it’s people who perform at high level.
[08:22] So they not only took all the research in the space but they also look at interviewing people like Kerri Strug, she was a gold medal gymnast, and a bunch of other high performing athletes, musicians, that kind of stuff. They — as far as I know I think they may have one or two entrepreneurs in there but it really is a lot of it is focused on performance and achieving goals and so, you know, in my opinion it totally applies to what we’re trying to launch companies and such.
[08:49] Now, there are five traits that they named. There’s actually — there’s eight lower level traits that they go through and they called them Win Factors and we’re not going to talk about those because they’re pretty — there are kind of low level stuff. There is like self awareness, motivation, focus, emotional balance but they are the higher level skills that we’re going to talk about today.
[09:06] And the first one, I’ll just dive right in to it. It’s called Opportunity Radar. Basically, their premise in the book is that having these five traits dramatically improves your chance of succeeding at achieving goals whether that goal is to win a gold medal, whether it’s to, you know, play at concierto at some place or you know, what we’re saying here is whether to launch a company. I mean it kind of all goes — goes in that same thing. So the first trait that we’re going to talk about is Opportunity Radar. And the way they defined it is as someone with good opportunity radar recognizes that opportunities don’t always come in gift wrapped that more often than not, they come wrapped in a problem or in an idea that everyone else has missed.
[09:47] So as I was thinking about that I was realizing like in our world by the time something is written about in Inc magazine or Fast Company, it’s too late, right? The opportunity has passed because everyone knows about it. You have to do these things when they are still hard. Do you remember in like the late 90’s or mid 90’s, websites are really hard to build, right? You had to hand code the HTML, there weren’t many resources. It was just hard to do. [Laughter]
[10:11] So I was in college at the time and I remember building static HTML websites and it was really hard to do them. It was hard to make them look good and if you knew how to make them look good, you could charge a lot of money to do that but to build a similar thing now, would cost one tenth of the price if that. Same thing with web applications, when they start coming around dynamic code and such with Perl and C++ and then there was, you know, PHP and Classic ASP. Those things were a pain to work within the late 90’s and now, today, you can build stuff five times, ten times faster. But if you went back and build that old functionality, you know, the opportunity has gone. You have to take things way up to the next level and be at the edge of the game and be building things that are hard today.
[10:53] The last example is like buying apps and websites before there was Flippa. You know, that’s something I did. I’ve continued to do it on Flippa but there is a lot more competition, a lot more people talking about it now. It’s not that the opportunity is gone but being able to recognize that opportunity four or five years ago, you’re just going to be much better off if you’re able to recognize that when everyone else is not flocking to it, you know, it’s a gold rush mentality that’s being in there before everyone else is starting to mine for gold as well.
[11:19] Mike: That kind of reminds me of Bill Bither story. Bill Bither was one of the speakers at MicroConf and he talked about how his company Atalasoft had — he started it when .NET was first coming out and he started building .NET imaging components because he looked at that, you know, upcoming opportunity and realized that .NET was probably going to be the next big thing and because it was this new platform that people were going to need tools and libraries in order to build other things so he build this .NET imaging platform and he ended up selling it last year for something like $10 million.
[11:55] So you know, definitely having that opportunity radar and recognizing when those things are going to come up, obviously, can potentially make you millions of dollars but at the same time it doesn’t have to. I mean it can be one of those things where you’re in the right place at the right time and you recognized something that other people are just kind of missing or you recognize that, you know, there’s something there and it may not be, you know, the next Facebook but it could certainly justify putting in some time and effort in order to make you a full time income or you know, supplement your income.
[12:25] Rob: Right. And I think another example of that is this whole micropreneur movement that we’ve kind of spearheaded here it’s that getting in to WordPress.org and getting, you know, 10,000 or 20,000 downloads and then turning that in to an income stream even if it’s 5,000 or 10,000 bucks per month that’s a great income stream for a solo individual but it’s an opportunity that everyone else meaning all the other businesses, you know, small business, medium sized enterprise, they’re ignoring it. It’s fitting in to a niche that other people are missing and so many other micropreneurs that I’ve seen succeed are doing that, right? That’s why we kind of push people to look for a niche and what do that niche — I mean often times I’ll say, you know, it should be a vertical niche but sometimes that niche is more horizontal or something like a launching plug-in like John Turner has is a bit horizontal but it still has that niche of being in WordPress and being easily discoverable and having a decent user base.
[13:18] So it’s in that opportunity right up always be on the look out for opportunities, noting things down. I mean I don’t think everything has to be a novel idea like I know that it doesn’t, you know, I still have DotNetInvoice that is completely not a novel idea and that still does well for me. HitTail is, I mean is reasonably novel but it’s, you know, has a unique algorithm but it’s not like some groundbreaking new technology that no one else has ever conceived of. It’s really just an opportunity and space that other people have overlooked.
[13:46] Mike: I think one of the things we should definitely mention here is that just knowing that having the opportunity radar is a good thing, as a little different than how do I develop that and I think that one of the things that you need to look at when you’re trying to develop your opportunity radar is to figure out what problems people have and if somebody is trying to do something and they’re having a hard time doing it and they ask for your advice and you can’t find a solution either, then chances are there maybe a good opportunity there and you should definitely start looking around to see if there are other people who have similar problems but, you know, opportunities as you said at the very beginning of this, they don’t land on your lap, they don’t come gift wrapped and you know, you do need to look for them a little bit and a lot of people will focus on the problems that they’re having not necessarily developing a solution to the problem. They want to find a solution to the problem and if you get in to the mentality of looking for problems to solve versus looking for a solution to those problems, then you’re going to hone that opportunity radar a little bit.
[14:43] Rob: Absolutely and if you don’t already have an idea notebook, you really, really need a place where you can capture them because you will forget to create ideas you have I guarantee it. Nothing please me more than going back through this little black notebook I have and seeing ideas that I really like, you know, that I came up with a few months ago and it’s — some of them are terrible. 80% of them are terrible or they just aren’t going to ever pan out and when I go back through it I can totally tell that they are but that for that 20% that is pretty darn good, it’s like kind of having this gold mine in my opinion of just being able to run through it and think about what’s the viability of this idea and kind of taking — taking it to the next level, you know, in a mental exercise.
[15:20] So trait number two for successful founders is having an Optimal Risk Gauge. The idea of having an Optimal Risk Gauge involves being able to recognize what risks there are, determining how much risk you can tolerate and whether or not you are willing to pay the consequences if you fail. So some questions that we see pretty commonly are things like at what point should I quit my job, how much income should I have before I do that and how large of an idea should I attack, you know, is this niche good enough, how mush risk is involve going to the niche.
[15:52] And all those things, yes we can — you can try to put some numbers together. You can put calculations together and try to engineer it but ultimately you have to have a risk gauge and you have to know how much you are willing to put up with. That’s one big reason that I always say, try to keep your app, your V1 between four and six months of your time because most people should be willing to risk that. If you’re not willing to risk that and you probably shouldn’t do, you know, launch a software product, do startup at all.
[16:18] Some people look out and say, “Well, I’m going to do a twelve to twenty four-month product” and to me, that’s just an outrageous amount time and we see a huge drop off for people actually able to complete that. So taking about in terms of four to six months and are you willing to make that risk, you know? Are you able to calculate how much it’s going to be and tolerate it if that time does go to waste?
[16:38] I took some big risks early on. I shouldn’t say big but they were, you know, four to six month, seven month risks, a few thousand bucks which at that time was quite a bit of money but the biggest one I took early on that did pan out was when I bought DotNetInvoice. So I paid 11,000 bucks when I first bought it and that was a huge amount of money at the time. Now, I still want a salary and doing a little bit of consulting and stuff. So but at the time, I determined that I was willing to take that risk, right? But if I lost it, I would be very disappointed but that I was willing to pay the consequences if I failed.
[17:08] And you know what? Flanking that money down and buying DotNetInvoice turned up to be a great thing for me because when there were bunch of things wrong with it, right? There were like twenty four show stopper bugs after I bought it, bunch of other things. Revenue wasn’t as high as they told me but once I closed, the fact that I was on the hook for that money that I had spent made me ultra motivated to get those things fixed and to get them fixed very, very quickly. And that resulted in, you know, I’ve talked about before but I basically was able to triple revenue in the first few months and that got me to the point of making back that eleven grand in, it was less than six months if I recall. You know, being able to gauge the risk that you’re willing to do, being able to gauge the risk of the action you’re about to take is a super valuable traits of entrepreneurs.
[17:52] Mike: And of course, you’ll have a problem with a risk gauge is that humans are notoriously terrible in actually estimating what the risk levels are and I don’t know specifically why that is. I think that it’s because we put it in our heads that there’s a certain amount of risk involve in something and we try to relate it to other things and unfortunately, because we’re bad at doing some of that Math in our heads say, oh there’s one in twenty chance of this or you know, one in thirty chance of that. You’re like, oh that doesn’t seem that high but then when you start trying to do those numbers in your head, it turns out that that’s actually a reasonable amount of time that those things are going to happen.
[18:32] The whole point is that it’s very hard to figure out how to put those assigned numbers to those risks and I don’t know if it’s a good idea that’s to actually try the assigned numbers to the risks of the things that you’re doing but it is important to think about what you’re willing to lose and what you’re willing to put on the line and whether or not there’s an opportunity for you to get any of that back. So if you spend, you know, six months trying to get something off the ground and it doesn’t work, you have to remember there’s — there’s two things that you’ve lost at that point. One is the money that you put in to and the second one is your time.
[19:04] And I think that the time is probably a lot more important than the money because you can always make more money later on and if you start to become successful then, you know, the money is just going to flow naturally with your other successes and will probably far out strip whatever money that you put in to those failures but the time is something that you’re never going to get back. So it’s really important to make sure that you’re not risking a heck of a lot of time when you’re doing those things.
[19:29] Rob: Trait number three of successful founders is a having a Focus Goal Laser and that’s being able to stay focus on goals long enough to execute. I think we all know people who decide on something and then wonder. I think we all know ourselves to do that at times. And this is again while we come back to that four to six-month time frame of if you set a goal out one year, I’m going to work every night and weekend to build an app for a year. The odds of you achieving that goal, they — they go down.
[19:56] What’s interesting is that I’ve found three things have really personally helped me stay on focus lately over the past probably two years. One of them is being in Mastermind Groups. Those biweekly meetings have kept me on task and motivated and wanting to hit these goals that I set in the previous meeting. So that’s been a big motivator. The other one has been the podcast, this thing you hear me talking on right now and the fact that I’m able to come down together with you, Mike and the listener and basically kind of publicly commit. I mean I don’t come out say I’m going to have this thing done by this particular date but just being able to look forward to talking about what I’ve done is actually a big motivator to me and to be able to talk about both the successes and the failures. I mean if you recall back in February, I had a major disappointment with in terms of trying to hit some revenue goals and there were three or four episodes in a row where I was just down at the times about it and just talking about how I didn’t know how I was going to pull out of it and eventually, I did but it’s a good venue to be able to think that stuff through.
[20:54] And then the last one that helped is I came out of MicroConf both years but specifically this year, super charge. It’s been about five weeks since MicroConf and I have not — I barely been on Twitter, I barely been on Hacker News. I’m so not distractible right now because I have this amazing focus goal laser on HitTail and on getting these things done and it came — it’s stemmed out of a few conversations that I had with a few of the speakers and some of the attendees that just got me so laser focused on getting the stuff done. So that’s been what’s helped to me stay laser focus. I think you need to have the, what the author said is like you have to hone this ability over your lifetime and that it will wax and wane and I’ve totally seen that. The entire months go by where I will just struggle to stay on focus with the goal and you have to know yourself well enough to come back to those things that do help you get focus on your goals again.
[21:52] Mike: I think one of the things that you talk about there was with the Mastermind Groups I mean you are essentially you have this accountability to the people that you have in that Mastermind Group and you know, one of the things that I have seen is that when I’m putting things together for different people to work on for AuditShark or doing different things for, you know, like the mailing list and things like that. What I’ve noticed is that if I know that there is somebody depending on me to get something to them that helps with my focus because I know that they can’t continue until I finish with my part, take enough time to make sure that those are done right. But at the same time I know that it needs to get done. So I’m motivated to get those things done and by the time I get them done, there’s somebody else who needs something. And putting yourself in to that, you know, perpetual motion machine where you’re constantly in a state where you have to move forward. You can’t just slack off. That’s really important to try to achieve and I think that that will help a lot of people with, you know, maintaining that laser focus on getting things done.
[22:53] Rob: So trait number four is Effort Accelerator and this is being able to move from intention to action. So it’s being able to have an idea and setting goals like number — like trait number three said but then actually being able to move from that intention in to action. So we all know people who are thinkers versus doers. And I think actually in my life at times, I’ve been more of a thinker than a doer. I think that reading TechCrunch and Mashable and kind of Inc Magazine and Fast Company, all that stuff, you can really get in to the entreporn thing and be just the thinker, the dreamer but moving yourself in to action and actually taking a step towards getting something done anything, doing anything in public that doesn’t just require you to, you know, kind of sit in your basement, write some code and read articles that other people are writing but to actually do something that’s risky and that scares the crap out of you, that’s what the effort accelerator is about.
[23:42] So I actually knew this really smart guy and I’ve known several in my life but I knew an exceptionally smart and creative guy when I live in Sacramento. He was a filmmaker. He was a musician. He wrote stories like he just was super creative but he never really finish anything. And he would talk about — he’s actually in a band with me and he would talk about writing songs and making movies and we would see clips of stuff and I’d hear like a verse he would write. And was really impressed with what he did but he would never put a chorus to that and he would never commit to sitting down and being disciplined and turning that that intention in to action.
[24:13] So it’s not that — he’s not a bad person and it’s actually not a bad trait to have as long as you know that about yourself and he didn’t know that and he would talk about like, “Yeah, I’m going to write this song. I’m going to write the stories.” And we would sit around and said, “Man, I know that you’re not going to do that just having to look back at the last year of your life.” So knowing that about yourself is a huge deal because it’s being able to then combat that everyday and to realize that that is your natural inclination is to lean towards being a thinker than you rather need to find kind of a job or a place in life where being a thinker is really good or you need to figure out how to just do yourself in to being a doer if in fact, you know, you want to do things like to start a company.
[24:51] Mike: One word that you mentioned that was entreporn which is not entrepreneur but essentially it’s the idea of going out and reading all these books and articles and magazines on things that you want to do but never actually getting around to doing any of them. There are certainly an ad been flow when you’re running your own business of that type of activity but there are always times where you are much more creative than productive and vice versa. So the point that you made a little bit there was that there are people out there and you know, there are mentalities of people can get in to where they’re doing a lot more of the thinking about stuff rather than actually doing that one of those things is, you know, consumption of what other people are creating.
[25:31] You do need to make sure that you’re not falling in to that trap of constantly thinking of ideas and thinking of things that you’re going to do versus actually sitting down and taking the next step in doing them.
[25:42] Rob: I wrote this blog post. It was in 2008. I’m looking at it. It’s about four years ago. It’s called the Single Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself and it basically comes down to the dichotomy of consumers versus producers and it says “Are you a consumer or are you producing things?” It totally fits in to this dichotomy, right? And it’s not that you aren’t 100% a consumer or a 100% a producer. Most will have a mix of both but if you really want to get things done, you have to stir yourself. You have to figure out how to motivate yourself to consume less and produce more because everyone I know who — who’s doing it like who is executing, who is starting companies, who’s being successful, they consume way less than the other people I know. They are so focus on their business that they’re totally motivated and they’re, you know, they kind of have that single focus laser vision.
[26:31] So the fifth and final trait of successful founders is a Talent Meter and this is being able to gauge yours and others competence and incompetence. So there’s this phrase the authors used and it’s the “double whammy of incompetence” which I love. It says that when you’re incompetent and you don’t know that, that it’s twice as bad. And I would actually say it’s exponentially as bad. I know that I am incompetent at certain things and hopefully, I don’t have a lot of incompetence that I’m not aware of because being aware of something means you can either avoid it. You can outsource it. You can try to improve it.
[27:08] There are a lot of options but it’s when you think that you’re great at something and you know, you go on American Idol thinking you’re a great singer and you really aren’t and then everyone laughs at you, man, that’s kind of a lame example of it but thinking that you really are, you know, the person who’s able to write the code and design the website and execute all the marketing for your startup when you have a major deficiency in one of those three areas, it’s a bad thing, right? Being able to gauge yourself and others in a competence and incompetence and it’s going to come in to play when you hire, when you outsource, when you find partners and when you’re trying to overcome your own weaknesses.
[27:44] I think most things on the podcast that we talked about like most of the questions we get comes down to — I typically say if you know that you tend to procrastinate, then lean towards the side of this, you know, then overcome that. I mean I can’t — I can’t even recall how many times in the last 84 episodes that I’ve said that exact phrase “if you lean towards this, then do the opposite” and so the presupposition in there is that you know that you lean towards this. I mean it really does come back to, they call it Talent Meter. I call it Self Awareness. It’s being able to know yourself and to gauge yourself and gauge your abilities both the positive and the negative ones and then really focusing like we talked about on the strengths finder episode really focusing on the positive ones and writing those to the success and shaping your success so that your positive traits fit well in to that and not trying to chase some success where, you know, you have to overcome all your negative traits in order to get there.
[28:38] A good example would be if I wanted to be an Olympic gymnast, that would be a terrible thing for me. I’m 6’2 and a half and I’m rail thin and you know, I don’t have a lot of upper body strength. I mean it’s basically, yes, I can set that goal up and I can work towards it but I’m setting myself up for failure by not realizing. You know, I’m kind of incompetent. I’m not set up to succeed in that arena whereas if I know I’m much more I have an engineering mind set and I’m goal-driven and I’m focused, then I can set up my startup ideas. I can even choose the ones that fit really well in to that framework and I wouldn’t go after something like a social network or something that we take a ton of creativity to build because those aren’t my strong suits.
[29:18] And so being able to evaluate yourself and know whether you’re a really good product builder, whether you’re a really good engineer, you can engineer marketing well so you might wanted to do more SEO and AdWords types of stuff or whether you really in to interacting with customers and interacting with the community in which case you’re probably not going to use those engineering-type marketing approaches but you’re going to go more towards, you know, relationships and partnerships and starting community type of stuff, that’s where this talent meter comes in.
[29:44] Mike: And I think there’s two different things that are kind of going on here is one is that you have to know what your strengths and weaknesses are be able to acknowledge them and the other one is being able to gauge how you relate to other people in those strengths and weaknesses. So for example, you know, the example that you gave was going on to American Idol and thinking that you are a strong singer when you’re not. And there’s thing two different things going on there.
[30:08] One is you are not a god judge of your own strengths because chances are good that there’s a lot of other things that you’re good at. And two is not being able to relate your strengths and weaknesses to those of other people. So I think there’s two different subtle differences between them but they are certainly important to keep in mind.
[30:25] One of the things that I find is in a way very fascinating is that when you start asking people, you know, how attractive they think they are in relation to other people or how smart they are, you know, studies statistically show that the majority of people say that they are above average and statistically that’s just not possible. The Math does not show that that’s correct but people still feel that way. So it’s very difficult sometimes if you’re in that position to be able to figure that out and I don’t know what the answer to that is to be perfectly honest. I mean I don’t know how you would go about addressing that problem. Do you? Can you think of anything?
[30:59] Rob: I think — yeah, I think you have to look at where you’ve succeeded in the past, what you’ve really enjoyed doing in the past and focus on the areas that you’ve been naturally drawn to. So if you’ve had great successes with on engineering Math mind set then that’s going to lean you towards, A, writing code. B, focusing probably more on the engineering-type marketing stuff which is, you know, funnel optimization, SEO, AdWords. I mean more of the Patrick McKenzie and you know, quite a quite a bit of the stuff that I do or I’ve done a lot of in the past.
[31:28] Mike: But I think — I don’t know if that solves the problem because you may be very good at marketing but you have never really had a lot of success at it because you haven’t tried and it makes it difficult to be a judge of that or figure out whether it’s something you should try or not.
[31:46] Rob: Yeah, I don’t think you had to — have to — have actually try the marketing. I just think, you know, I’ve known for a long time what I have certain strengths and certain weaknesses. I mean I would come out and say that I don’t enjoy managing people. I would call that a weakness of mine. So I don’t think you necessarily have to fail at something but you have to maybe do it and really not want to do it or be, you know, be kind of force away from it. And then I think that you do succeed in and you find yourself having a lot of success doing and getting a lot of enjoyment out of, you need to keep track of that stuff and see how that can fit in to a new business venture.
[32:18] So yeah, you maybe never done marketing but if you really enjoyed the things that are, you know, similar to that, you really enjoy talking to people and building a community and partnering it up, then that’s probably the kind of marketing that you want to look at doing and you want to look at doing things more through social networks and building partnerships and such rather than getting in the nitty-gritty of funnel optimization and churn rate and conversion rates and that kind of stuff.
[32:42] Mike: Yeah.
[32:42] Rob: I keep naming the same examples. It’s a little overly simplified but it’s hard without having some right in front of us, you know, to say like what really are your successes and what do you really enjoyed doing and then trying to actually translate those in to things.
[32:54] Mike: Right. But I mean I think what I’m trying to put in to words as more of one of the lines like software developers which is, you know, a lot of our audience consists of software developers and they are software developers because they like to an engineering and building things and they like writing code. And the problem is once they get in to doing things like marketing task like building mailing list and form that in web pages or finding somebody to make something look good for them, those are the things that they don’t necessarily enjoyed because they’re not good at them. What I wonder is how much of that and again, it can be activity related but, you know, how much of that is they just feel uncomfortable doing it in relation to the coding versus they just have an — had a lot of experience at it. So you know, is it something that they should try or not?
[33:40] Rob: Yeah because the first time you try anything, it’s going to scare the crap out of you. I mean the first time I outsource something, I was scared when I wrote the guy the $500 check. You know, it’s like this is a lot of money, what if this doesn’t work out, there’s all these doubts. And then you either get better at it or maybe you discover that you really aren’t good at it and really don’t enjoy it.
[33:56] So yeah, there is a certain level of needing to try things that are outside your comfort zone and seeing if you enjoy it and you feel like you would, you know, enjoy doing that long term. Yeah, I’m not sure there’s an easy answer to that one but I do hear what you’re saying. It’s like if you’ve never tried something and you’re scared of it, how do you know whether it’s going to work out even based on past experience.
[34:17] Mike: If you tried it a couple of times and not really been successful, how much of that is because you’re afraid of putting in a lot of effort in really making a good shot at it or is it just you really not that good at it.
[34:30] Rob: Right. My advice, join the Micropreneur Academy because we talk about all the stuff in there and we can give feedback right? You can interact with us, you can e-mail and you can get on the forums and ask questions. So I do, I do think like someone needs to have that third party, you know, whether it is the Academy, I was kind of joking but it’s like or Mastermind Group or some other folks who there — who there in the crunches with you can give some feedback on things.
[34:51] Mike: Uh huh.
[34:53] Rob: Awesome. So the five traits of successful founders are number one, Opportunity Radar. Number two, having the Optimal Risk Gauge. Number three, Focus Goal Laser. Number four, Effort Accelerator. And number five, Talent Meter. And again, those are from the book Winner’s Brain. It’s by Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske but I really do like the concepts that I’m taking away from it and I am, you know, taking quite a new notes.
[35:17] [music]
[35:20] Mike: So hey, by the way, did you notice that we are up to almost 200 reviews in iTunes?
[35:26] Rob: That’s crazy. I’ll tell you what, our review competition with texting really paid off because we were — were we under a hundred when we started? I mean it really did take a big jump.
[35:35] Mike: Yeah, it did. I think right now — I checked yesterday or the day before and we were up to, I think it was a 192. But it was pretty close to 200.
[35:43] Rob: Some awesome comments too. We have something from Craig McKeachie. It’s in iTunes. It says, “Skipped the NBA. Listen to this podcast. I received an MBA from a school that ranks in the top ten percent of US universities for return on investment and got a great deal out of going through the program. But I can honestly say, I’ve gotten more actionable real world advice from this podcast and it’s a thousands of dollars cheaper.” Awesome. Thanks, Craig. He also came to MicroConf.
[36:08] Mike: Uh huh.
[36:08] Rob: And we have one from a Dan Delario [Phonetic] who says, “I still can’t believe you can get this kind of advice for free. Thanks, Mike and Rob.” [Laughter] But wait there’s more. Richard Chen says, “I’ve been listening to the podcast for a year. I only wish I knew about it sooner. Rob and Mike are down to earth guys give valuable, practical advice to any internet business bootstrappers. Best podcast of its kind.” Awesome. And the last one Jonathan Richman [Phonetic] from just yesterday says, “Outstanding practical advice to a very candid look at starting your own company with great insights and advice to anyone who can use it immediately.” So thanks a lot, guys. Keep those reviews and comments coming in iTunes. You can just search for us, search for startups and we’ll be one of the top three.
[36:47] So if you have a question or comment, you can call it on to our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or e-mail it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. And you can find a full transcript of each episode at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
Episode 83 | HitTail & AuditShark: Integration Marketing, Logo Design, Survey Analysis and Leaky Funnels
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups For The Rest of Us: Episode 83.
[00:04] [music]
[00:12] Rob: Welcome to Startups For The Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:22] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:23] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What is the word this week, sir?
[00:29] Mike: I am undertaking a lot of work to create work for others right now.
[00:32] Rob: Yeah. [Laughter] Yeah, this is the work that you can’t outsource, isn’t it?
[00:36] Mike: Yes.
[00:36] Rob: It’s outsourcing your work you can’t outsource outsourcing your work.
[00:39] Mike: Yup.
[00:40] Rob: So what have you been up to?
[00:41] Mike: So I’ve been going sort of a hiring binge lately. I hired somebody to build out the AuditShark sales website for me. And essentially just come up with the design for it. I’d say for the last year or so, I basically have the same sales website out there. I really haven’t spent a lot of time or effort on it. Right now, I’m kind of focusing my efforts on building something that actually looks good and addresses the paying points that have been kind of brought to my attention that people are willing to pay for from that Wufoo survey that I ran. So I hired somebody for that and right now I have a job opening for another .NET developer to add to the person who I already have working full time on the AuditShark code that he’s working on. So hopefully, by the end of this week, I’ll have two people working on that and the other person will be working on the website. And then I’ll have to start generating the content and stuff that’s going to go in to the framework that he’s building for the website.
[01:34] Rob: You have a WordPress site up right now, right? Just a WordPress theme that you customized like a year ago or something —
[01:39] Mike: Yeah.
[01:39] Rob: And you had the logo design, you know, by someone. So what’s the rationale at this point to go back to the drawing board? Do you have like a much better design for it or I guess why would you spend a time now to go back and do that rather than use what you have?
[01:53] Mike: There’s a few different reasons. One is to kind of switch it off of WordPress and I’ve started integrating KISSmetrics to kind of all throughout my website. And one of the things that is — I don’t know. I won’t say it’s a real pain in the neck to do it with WordPress but I don’t like the — the look and feel that comes out. I’ve seen the — the particular theme that I’m using quite a bit out there and it’s starting to wear on me a little bit. So I’d like to have a little bit more control over it. And the other thing I’d like to do is I’d like to make the sales site and the application itself look a little bit more like they were built together because right now, they just don’t. But you know, it’s — it’s something that I’m going to have to do eventually and if I get started now, then it’ll be ready in like the next couple of months because it’s not like you can just say, oh well I’m going to redesign this and a couple of days it’s done. I mean it takes time to get it done.
[02:44] Rob: Right.
[02:44] Mike: So I’m spending the time now to find somebody to do it and then, you know, hopefully, in the next couple of months that it’ll — that it’ll get done and I won’t have to worry about it.
[02:53] Rob: Got it. And in the meantime, are you continuing — you had some survey results and you had fifteen or twenty e-mails I think and you were going to contact those folks and kind of do some customer development interviews to find out more in depth about maybe their needs and how you would structure your copy on your marketing site as well as potentially what you would build in to the product. Have you continue with that?
[03:16] Mike: Yeah. So I started talking to people and getting a little bit more of an understanding of specifically what they’re looking for. And one of the things that I’ve come across is that in both the copy that’s on the website and in my discussions with people, it’s not inherently obvious exactly what the product does and why it’s important. So one of the things that I came across was that the fact that AuditShark will dynamically look at your machine and figure out what it’s supposed to be looking at is now something that’s clear.
[03:45] So for example if you have a patchy installed in your website, then it will run all these different things on your machine to make sure that the patch is lock down and you know, if it’s a Unix or a Linux machines, it will track different places to find out what user accounts had been created and then we’ll monitor those overtime to make sure that they haven’t changed because one of the things that people should be looking at in order to secure those systems is our new user accounts being created. And if so, you know, what are those user accounts? It needs to notify you and those are the things that you should regularly do at some point anyway but most people don’t. But if a new user popped up on your machines, obviously, that’s something you would probably want to know about. If you did it, that’s fine but if you didn’t do it and you just get this notification that says, oh, there’s a new user account that’s been created and has got, you know, UID of zero, well, that’s probably a problem.
[04:36] Rob: Got it. Hey, I have a question. How many hours do you estimate that you’re going to have to spend to basically kind of repurpose the code that you have the AuditShark code or expand it to fit the new product idea that you’re exploring? Or do you know that yet? You know, the full feature set.
[04:50] Mike: I don’t specifically know that yet. I mean a lot of the stuff is going to stay the same and I haven’t even really look at what needs to fundamentally change in order to meet that new model. I don’t believe it’s a lot but not a lot is not quantitative I’ll say. I would say maybe fifty to a hundred hours but it’s probably fifty to a hundred hours that I mostly likely would have spend anyway because there were a lot of things that just weren’t done. So if the things would work and they would do what they’re supposed to do but there are use case scenarios that I hadn’t accounted for yet and this particular one is one of those — use case scenarios that I had thought of them like, hey, I think the people would want to use this for, you know, their web servers and I didn’t have a use case scenario for them being able to install at on a web server. It was solely around them installing it and like an active domain environment and then running there.
[05:42] So this is a use case scenario I had always scoped out and thought of ahead of time and I don’t look at it as being extra work that I wouldn’t have done had I gone in this direction. I think I would have done it anyway. It’s just the matter of timeline I guess.
[05:54] Rob: Right, that makes sense. Have you thought about just putting up a landing page? While you’re doing these interviews, you know, you do have a decent idea what people might want but you could get a pretty attractive landing page that’s not use by anyone, you know, like off of themeforce.net. They have, I don’t know, like seven to twelve bucks in there. There’s some pretty nice one of these days. You know, John Turner has — he’s an Academy member and he’s doing really well selling his ultimate coming soon plug-in which is cool because you can then have a theme on the back end and then just have this plug-in that’s, you know, swaps at a landing page as your home page. But I guess you’re moving away from WordPress but for now, you know, you could keep the WordPress install and use his plug-in and just have a few senses describing the specific paying points.
[06:34] Mike: Uh huh.
[06:34] Rob: And then push off the website construction until — the marketing site construction until after you’ve had more time to talk to these customers and potentially have even gotten started on updating the code with the final feature set and then kind of set someone off on — on building it. Have you consider that route?
[06:50] Mike: Not specifically, I mean one of the things that I was a little bit concerned about in doing something like that is the SEO that I’ve done on my existing web page but I don’t know is that’s a huge hurdle to overcome. The bigger issue is kind of putting things on to that coming soon page that makes sense in — and or in line with what people are looking for. You know, some of that I think I’m still kind of straightening it out but I think that there’s probably enough interest in what I’ve talked about so far. I mean virtually every single person who answered the survey with I think two exceptions out of about thirty that said, “Yeah, add me to your mailing list.” That side of it I think turns out pretty well. But I don’t have a good reason for not doing that so —
[07:30] Rob: Yeah, I mean —
[07:30] Mike: … that’s probably something I move forward with.
[07:32] Rob: I see two kinds of benefits to doing that over going at in building the full pledge site right now.
[07:37] Mike: Just a correction though, I’m —
[07:38] Rob: Yup.
[07:38] Mike: … I’m not having the whole site built up. I’m having basically a template build for me with all these different HTML and CSS Snippets for different things that I may want to put in to the site —
[07:48] Rob: Yup.
[07:48] Mike: … and those will go in to like a full blown .NET web application that I’ll kind of put together. Why I put the contractor on is just basically building out the design for it but not the actual content.
[07:58] Rob: So I guess that I want to see the benefits in the landing page. Does it focus you’re — you’re just going to get more e-mails from it, period. You know, any visitor you send there is going to read it, read the few bullet points you have and then either give you their e-mail or not or is it if build out more of a full site after navigate through to give you their e-mails. So you have a higher conversion right there. In addition, I think — I think you’re right. You’re still kind of an early in the journey of figuring how exactly what AuditShark is going to become. And so not too hard to put together some bullet points a few senses to describe again. Probably harder to build out, you know, the full three, four, five page site with the tour and all that stuff.
[08:31] Mike: Right. That’s a good suggestion. I think I’ll do that. What about you? What have you been up to?
[08:31] Rob: About a week and a half or two weeks, I mentioned that I had rolled out Chinese character support and actually Chinese Search Engine Support which is the two different things but they’re related.
[08:45] Mike: Uh huh.
[08:45] Rob: I rolled them out with HitTail. So now, like these search engines like Baidu and this one called the Sogou and just a bunch that I can’t pronounce frankly, they now worked with HitTail which is cool and I have an “enterprise client”. My first four figure a month client trying it out now.
[09:02] Mike: Cool.
[09:02] Rob: So we’ll see how that appends out. I’m like cautiously optimistic. I tend to be skeptical when like really good things happening or like a “big break” but it could be — it could be a nice one, you know, it can be good for revenue. So he’s about seven days in to a trial. I just touched base with him so…
[09:18] Mike: Cool.
[09:18] Rob: That’s kind of the update on that. Now what I’ve really been working on for the past seven to ten days is this one-click article support because I mentioned last time that one of the main reasons that people were — were canceling their HitTail accounts was because it was adding stuff to their To-Do list, right? It gives them the suggestions that they should target but they don’t want them to go out and either try to write themselves or hire a writer. And so there are a few services that basically have these big pools of writers and you know, they offered to write articles for you and there are a few of them with API’s.
[09:51] Mike: Oh really?
[09:51] Rob: And so — yeah. So integrated with — with one of them that has 80,000 writers, not all are active but they have huge pool of writers. And so, you know, it’s kind of a no brainer for someone like me to — to integrate there. There are some other services, a lot of by the services that integrate with them and kind of use them as their back end Mechanical Turk almost, right? It’s like the turnaround is one to two days depending on the length and get a full pledge article and there’s like a bunch of different pricing tiers and all that stuff. But I made it super simple. I’m calling this an MVF. It’s a Minimum Viable Feature.
[10:21] Mike: [Laughter]
[10:21] Rob: Instead of actually — and when I sketched to that, of course, you know, I’m the developer entrepreneur. I was like “Oh man.” I want there to be all these choices and you could do 300 to 400, 500, 600-word. You can say I want SEO or not. How many times should it, you know, should these keywords appear in there. I want the people to be able to submit it and then review it and preview it and accept it or reject it and that — you know, there’s always options available to their API and I kind of cranked up at estimate and realized there’s no way I want to build all of that. So I just — I chucked it all. I said, “When you click this button, we charge your card on file 18 bucks for one 400-word SEO article and it comes back in two days.” And there are a few options, you know, you can change the title and change the keyword and do a few other things but it is super, super stripped down and if this works and it appends out and A, it helps retention and B, it actually, you know, generates the revenue because obviously I’m marking up the service a bit so there’s a little bit of margin for me.
[11:15] If that works, then I will go on and expand it and certainly add it, then adding it, you know, and making it a 300 and 500-word options. It’s not actually that hard at this point. I mean I kept all that stuff in mind while I was coding but I just — to do all UI work to support that would also really make the form a lot larger. So I pushed that live yesterday and it, you know, I’m super stoked that that’s finally done. It’s just — it’s kind of the biggest new feature that I built since I acquire the HitTail.
[11:39] Mike: Uh huh.
[11:40] Rob: And I haven’t launched it like I haven’t announce it to anyone. It’s soft launched now. I had placed one order myself just to make sure everything works. And so far that’s good. And then I think I’ll slowly start e-mailing customers in like ten or twenty person chunks and just kind of see how it goes before I really do a big blast in the promotional campaign.
[11:58] Mike: Uh huh. Now, you’re going to be measuring how many people kind of go through that funnel whereas you start telling more and more people about it.
[12:05] Rob: Yeah like how many people see the page —
[12:07] Mike: Yeah.
[12:08] Rob: … and click versus not. Yeah, I will be. Yup. So I have — I have KISSmetrics to install. I also have Google Analytics. But you know what? Good point I should actually install maybe Crazy Egg or even Inspectlet. Inspectlet is like the inexpensive version of ClickTale where does a screen recording of people doing stuff.
[12:23] Mike: Uh huh.
[12:24] Rob: And Inspectlet supports JavaScript and divs and all that because I have — it’s basically a Lightbox that pops up. So I probably should do that just to watch people on that specific page. I may —
[12:34] Mike: Yeah because if they’re not seeing it, then they’re not going to, obviously, click through it but you want to make it visible without being I’ll say intrusive.
[12:40] Rob: Yeah. And I’m planning on adding like a little new, you know, icon at the top in HitTail, you know. There are grids that you can sort and you can page and do that stuff but there’s not a lot of adornment on purpose because we want it to be simple and fast but if I put a big new icon at the top, I’m hoping it’ll draw to people’s eyes.
[12:58] Mike: Cool. Hey, did I tell you that I’ve did a contest on 99designs for new AuditShark logo?
[13:03] Rob: You did. You mentioned that to me.
[13:05] Mike: I finally went through and actually approved one and got all the files and everything transferred. So I’ve got that. I already sent that off to the designer who’s working on the sales website template that I’m going to using and hopefully, he’ll be integrating that in shortly. And I’m hoping to get some screen shots and stuff back just to kind of see what he’s working on in the next couple of days. But the logo I think turned out really, really well. I ended up with I think 110 different designs to choose from. There were probably three that I thought were in my top three. [Laughter] It was basically those three that I kind of work through a couple of different iterations and there was a fourth one that I kind of threw in at the end just making in to the finals.
[13:46] If you’re not familiar with how 99designs works when you’re doing a logo contest, basically, you pay a specified amount whether it’s a bronze, silver or gold contest and you pay more for the gold contest than you do for the bronze. And the one I did was I think $500 and the people who just start submitting their designs to you and you get to rate them and comment on them and send them back for revisions or whatever and they’ll just keep submitting them to you as long as you are I’d say pretty diligent about providing feedback about what you like, what you don’t like when it gets to a certain point, I think that’s about three and a half days in, they kind of draw the line. You have to pick your designers, who you want to move on to the finals.
[14:24] There are certain designs that people would come up with and you just don’t like anything that they come up with. So — those are the people you wouldn’t want to bring on to the finalist stage and then of those, I just picked four to go on to the finalist. And then of those four, I picked one of their designs and I had them tweaked a couple of things and what was it — I think five or six days and it was done.
[14:41] Rob: How cool. How much to that one have cost in?
[14:43] Mike: It was 499. So —
[14:45] Rob: Cool.
[14:46] Mike: … $500. One of the things that was kind of interesting was I put it on Twitter that I had been drawn in this contest and somebody called me out on it over episode 71 via Twitter. And if you will recall episode 71 it was “Things you shouldn’t pay for early on in your business.”
[15:02] Rob: [Laughter]
[15:03] Mike: You have that?
[15:03] Rob: You know, it’s funny. I was just going to mention this because that’s one thing I don’t pay for. I don’t have logos for anything, like I do it on purpose now. Like the Academy has no logo. The only reason HitTail had a logo is because the designer who’s designing had said, “I need to put a logo here.” And I said, “Just put a text.” And he said, “No, I have to do it.” So he just did one off logo. But yeah — so I was going to ask you about that and give you a little crap about it but I’m glad someone else [Laughter] headed me off.
[15:27] Mike: No, I mean he did and — you know, it’s a good point. I think a lot of the things that I said, there are still a whole true. I mean which was primarily if it’s not making you money and it’s not going to make you money, then what difference does it really make? But at the — at the other end of the spectrum is, you know, I would still have to have something there and I would have to have some. The very least stylize text and you can look at stylize text and say, “Well, that’s a logo.” And as like, “Well, I don’t really want that.” It was more of a personal preference on this particular product. In looking what I ended up choosing, I think that it fits really, really well.
[15:59] Rob: And here’s the thing, you can make general rules like we talked about 71, you shouldn’t spend money on stuff, you know, before you need to spend it. But the bottom line is there are a couple of things, one, as an entrepreneur, you can have some indulgences. If you really wanted a nice logo, then go buy yourself a nice logo, you know. But when you’re doing it, you know that it’s not going to dramatically increase your click-through rates to your signups or anything.
[16:19] Mike: Right.
[16:19] Rob: Just know that going in to it that you spent that 500 bucks and it’s not necessarily going to have a high ROI but if you needed that to like feel excited about the project, then do that. That’s not a big deal as long as you know it.
[16:28] Mike: Well the other thing that does — as you said, I mean if it excites you about the project to actually do that and it really did. I mean seeing the logo kind of help energized me a little bit and put me in the right frame of mind to kind of go on and tackle a lot of other things that I kind of had on my plate for AuditShark. So I think it was helpful for me but at the same time one of the things that I think is important about AuditShark is because it is kind of a security product, I think that it lens credibility to it by having a nice logo. In many cases, a logo is probably not necessarily going to land you any sales but at the same time I think for this particular product, having a logo is going to help it land sales that might have otherwise been on the fence.
[17:06] Rob: Right. You can definitely take it too far and you know, I talked about indulgences and doing stuff just to get you excited and you can spend a hundred of hours or a thousand of dollars doing something stupid just because it gets you excited. And obviously you don’t want to go that far. But you’re not doing that here. And I would agree with you like we’ve talked about different ways kind of a tiers of building sales websites and at the very bottom by an HTML template right above that you can buy a premium WordPress theme. Above that you can get a — a kind of a low end custom-design and you can go a higher end and we’ve done — I’ve definitely done all of those tiers and I know that they impact click-through rates and they impact conversion rates but for some of them like when I read at HitTail, I paid top dollar.
[17:45] I paid the most that I ever paid for a design ever, [Laughter] you know, in all of the sites that I built. And that was a little bit of an indulgence but it was also a little bit of me getting really excited about the idea and wanting something that I could be proud of. And third, it was like you said, it was about building some credibility for this thing because it is kind of an — it bring you something to another level, right? It’s not some really tiny niche product. It’s something that you do want to have a lot of credibility and therefore, there are some — there’s some give and take there. There’s some things that may be on the boarder of, you know, how early you should have them done and how much you should pay for them and if you have the money and you really are going to — kind of go bigger and go with the bigger idea, then some of those things can be done earlier on or you can invest more money than you otherwise would have if you might be going after, you know, more of a niche idea or you’re a more cash strapped.
[18:30] Mike: Because I know that there’s money here, I think it makes it a little difference. So if this was a new idea that I didn’t know if it was going to fly, that’s when I would probably be a lot less likely in a way to spend the money on, you know, the logo. In just drawn in the survey, I’ve got anywhere from 1500 to $2500 worth of commitment so far based on, you know, the survey. I can definitely see that there’s money there. So it doesn’t bother me to spend $500 on making it looked nice.
[18:58] Rob: Right. Now, you said something that you said because I know this is going to work and I think, I personally think that’s taking it too far at this point.
[19:05] Mike: Uh huh.
[19:05] Rob: I do feel like you’ve gotten some positive affirmation of your hypothesis —
[19:09] Mike: Uh huh.
[19:09] Rob: Like to me, at least maybe I’m a pessimist or something, in the back of my mind it’s like, no, you still need to prove this out.
[19:14] Mike: I guess no, it’s probably not necessarily 100%. It’s I’m fairly confident that I’m on a right track. Not necessarily that this is going to work and I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s more of that I’m on the right path. That’s more what it is I think.
[19:26] Rob: You’re encouraged, yeah.
[19:28] Mike: Yeah.
[19:28] Rob: And that I would agree with.
[19:29] Mike: Uh huh.
[19:30] Rob: So I went in to a little indulgence of my own last week. I was knee-deep in code doing that one-click article feature and just for kicks, I wanted to try a little bit of paid customer acquisition so I set up some Facebook ads and had kind of a blast with it. I forgotten how much work it is to set up and maintain Facebook ads because they just burn through people so quickly.
[19:53] Mike: Wow.
[19:54] Rob: For those who have — yeah, for those who haven’t —
[19:56] Mike: I like the — stock price as it goes down, right? [Laughter]
[19:58] Rob: Oh my gosh. Tell me that’s a disaster. [Laughter] Anyways, that’s a whole other podcast but —
[20:03] Mike: Yup.
[20:04] Rob: … but it was fun. With Facebook ads, you target a demographic and you tried to get the demographic to a certain size and then you really got to go for the visual — the visual and the headline or — for the most part, all accounts to get the — the attention. But then you basically, a Facebook just shows the ads over and over to the same group. If you niche it down properly, then your number of people that you’re displaying it to is not huge. And so Facebook will repeatedly show it to those people. And so if your click-through rate goes high, your cost per click goes low but then pretty soon, your click-through rate just plummets because people get blind to the ad because they’ve seen it so much.
[20:36] So realistically, like if you put an ad up and you have, you know, an audience size based on the demographic you’ve chosen of around a hundred thousand people, it’s like two or three days and the ad is done. And so, I put up three or four ads, A/B testing a bunch of different stuff and they were just gone in like two and half days. And then I put up another — I put up like nine the next time. And I had a bunch of, you know, image I was — images. I was using different headline combinations and testing and it was fun.
[21:01] I was spending about twenty to thirty minutes a day on it and in total, I’ve dropped — I guess it got pretty good click-through rates about 50 cents a click and I spent about 300 bucks. Yeah, it was a fun experiment. I wound up getting a bunch of customer, well, a bunch of trials, anyways. And that my current trial to paid conversion rate it looks like I will be about — it was about six months of a cost of the average revenue to acquire a customer. So if that makes sense so I —
[21:28] Mike: Yeah.
[21:28] Rob: … it’s about six months of my average revenue number in order to acquire each of those customers assuming they convert the way my other — my other customers do from trial to paid. So now, I want to get that down to below that. It should — I wanted to be more around three. Since I’m bootstrapping, I don’t have this huge pool of cash to dump on it but —
[21:44] Mike: Uh huh.
[21:45] Rob: … it was a fun experiment. I shall of — it was way too much work. The thing was is for the amount of work and even, you know, kind of the money I was investing there are so many other options at this point that would work better than that.
[21:58] Mike: I can see that. So when you’re I guess doing this Facebook ads, I mean do you have a lot of control over how much I guess gets spent or how much they get showed to people? I guess how much control over the process do you have?
[22:11] Rob: So first, you specify all types of demographic information, right?
[22:15] Mike: Uh huh.
[22:15] Rob: What they’re interested in and what they have in their profile and their age range, their gender, you know, all these different stuff. And then you can do cost per click and then Facebook will just show it as much as they think — they have an algorithm obviously that shows it and if your click-through rate is high right off the bat, then it’ll drop your cost per click and they’ll show it a lot more because they want to make — it makes them money and it makes you money.
[22:38] Mike: Uh huh.
[22:38] Rob: And then you can also choose cost per thousand, right, CPM —
[22:42] Mike: Uh huh.
[22:42] Rob: … where it just — it’s not cost per click but it’s actually cost per thousand impressions. And that way with a little different, they still had an algorithm but they seem to show it a lot more. They kind of didn’t care about the click-through rate, right? Because that’s not they’re billing on and so that was — allow me to get to add in front of more people and so I tolled around with both of them. I got on this one, I got the better click-through rate using the cost per click and in the other campaigns I’ve done, I’ve had CPM worked better. So it varies from time to time. I’m sure there’s — as a rule, certain people can get a phenomenal click-through rates or CPM I’ve heard and I’ve seen that happened on one or two campaigns. And then from there, you set your daily budget. That’s how you — how much you show, right? Once it’s out of money, then it stops showing.
[23:25] Mike: Got it. Yeah, I was just kind of curious how Facebook’s model for advertising stuck up against like Google AdWords. So…
[23:32] Rob: Yeah, it’s definitely getting more sophisticated. It was pretty simple about a year or a year and half ago but they’re adding more features and I think the algorithm is getting a little better. I mean I imagine now they have IPO’ed, you know, they really need to kind of take this up a notch.
[23:45] Mike: Yeah. And I would imagine that they probably have a lot more data about the users that they’re showing this too to figure out whether or not that’s going to fly for them or not. So…
[23:45] Rob: Yeah, it’s so with me.
[23:54] Mike: Yeah, I’ve been doing some data analysis on my end for the Wufoo surveys that I’ve did for AuditShark and one of the things that I found that it’s interesting but not surprising is that the people who have Window servers are willing to pay roughly twice what the Linux admins are for the same thing.
[24:12] Rob: Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense, right?
[24:14] Mike: It makes sense but it also makes pricing difficult, you know?
[24:17] Rob: Yeah.
[24:17] Mike: I mean I had roughly the same amount of people who had Window servers as had Linux or UNIX servers. So it’s —
[24:17] Rob: I was going to ask you that.
[24:26] Mike: Yeah.
[24:26] Rob: But that’s some — you know, I was talking, I mean this was a couple of years ago but Joel Spolsky had said — we’re at the Business of Software Speaker dinner. He and I were sitting two chairs down from each other and there was this whole discussion about Linux versus Windows users and all that stuff.
[24:40] Mike: Yup.
[24:41] Rob: He basically said that their Linux users of FogBugz were only — it was a very small percentage. It were somewhere around 15% or 20% but the day, at least for them for their market and actually accounted for a substantially higher percentage of their support issues. They must have — some people had said, well it’s because they are more hobbyists, you know, they’re in to PHP or whatever so they’re not going to be in to the Microsoft stuck looking for a cheaper solution and they don’t or maybe not as enterprise. You don’t know what they’re doing as much. Other people had said, well maybe your Linux product isn’t as good or it crashes more something and he, you know, contented that it didn’t. So that’s an interesting thing to think about too. I wonder if there will be any kind of ease of views or higher support burdens if you go Linux versus Windows or go both.
[25:27] Mike: Yeah, that’s one of those things that — it worries me a little bit just because if — if I kind of go down on the price in order to gain those Linux customers is that they’re going to kill me on support side of things.
[25:38] Rob: Yeah, seriously. And so you’re not going to charge 99 bucks for Linux and 199 for Microsoft Window?
[25:44] Mike: [Laughter]
[25:46] Rob: I would have to lean towards going Windows only when you launch then.
[25:49] Mike: Yeah.
[25:49] Rob: I got to go for the higher end to start with, right?
[25:52] Mike: Right, right.
[25:53] Rob: Especially if you have the equal amount. I was going to say if you have more or the same amount of Windows.
[25:57] Mike: Yeah. I think I have to go back and double check the spreadsheet but I think that they were — it was roughly equivalent in terms of the respondents. And I know that there was one person who had come in and said, “Yeah, I pay for it” but it really skewed the numbers because they had like, you know, 75 Linux servers or something like that. So that made up the bulk of them. But in terms of the actual number of people who chose them, it was significantly less. But yeah, I mean the distribution I am looking at it now. There were eight who had said Windows on this spreadsheet. So on this particular one, there’s eight of them in here that say Windows and then sixteen who said Linux, you know –
[26:36] Rob: That’s not 50-50. [Laughter]
[26:38] Mike: It’s not but the people who had Window servers tended to have more. So for the couple of exceptions there was the one that like I said have 75 that skewed at pretty far on the direction of Linux but otherwise, it was — it was mostly the — and the other thing is people going to answer more than one thing. So there were several people who had both Windows and Linux.
[26:56] Rob: What are you going to do? Do you think you’re going to come out Windows only and do the higher price to start with?
[27:00] Mike: I’m still trying to figure it out because one of the things I’m looking at is a lot of the competitive products that are out there I mean because I asked what are you currently use for monitoring on your server because Ted from Moraware had I kind of ran my survey past him first and just to get some feedback on it and he’s like, “This looks good.” The one thing I’d asked is what other monitoring solutions people pay for already because that might be kind of a self selecting crowd of people who are willing to pay for those types of things which —
[27:26] Rob: Sure.
[27:27] Mike: … gave me a great idea. I was like, oh, well if you’re already paying for those things then, you know, it would makes sense for me to either integrate with them or partner with them in ways that would allow me, you know, use my software alongside of theirs, et cetera. People pointed out what other tools that they use to monitor those servers. So I got a lot of information that I probably wouldn’t have gained otherwise and you know, just been looking at some of those offering or what they do. And some of them I just never heard of before and then other ones like, you know, Pingdom and Cloudwash . I mean those things, you know, pretty straightforward and I call them more well-known. You know, it’s just interesting looking at all that data.
[28:02] Rob: Yeah, it is. And you know what that helps you is this concept that I’ve been telling in one of my talks called Integration Marketing and there’s a few entrepreneurs doing it really well right now and I’m actually diving in to that my next marketing/technology challenge with HitTail is I have four different companies that want to integrate with me so — that I will either create an API and have them ping in and grab some keyword suggestions or you know, go out and integrate with their app market place.
[28:31] And the cool part of it is that I’m only integrating with people who already have customer basis and are willing to either e-mail or blog about the integration. And so I get this link and a mention and it sends a bunch of traffic, you know, it’s not — it doesn’t have a long fly wheel effect but you know, it — what it brings is this nice big chunk of people who kind of signs up for the — for the product and since it’s a SAS app, you get the recurring revenue from them. It’s not I mean really the cause is to do the integration, you know. So either I pay someone to write the code or I write the code myself and that’s where you in your survey have just asked about future integration partners, right?
[29:07] Mike: Uh huh.
[29:07] Rob: And if they’re already using Pingdom and these other things, whether you actually do a physical code integration with them or you just basically just to have these customers and I’ll them know about you and you have your customers and kind of do a joint venture e-mail type of thing. That’s a great way to go. It’s kind of a low cost guerilla marketing tactic but it works out really well. That’s the next steps for me after I get this whole article thing launched and I’m going to do a little promotional over the Chinese character thing as well and then move on to these things which had been on the book since like February. I started getting contact to them in November-December from a few shopping cart vendors and a couple other companies that will remain nameless right now but I’m pretty excited about — about doing that. These companies have few of intensive thousands of active paying customers. So —
[29:52] Mike: Uh huh.
[29:53] Rob: … could be — could be a nice — nice expansion of the customer-base.
[29:56] Mike: Yeah, definitely building an API that people can kind of interface with and [0:30:00] get data in or out of your product is helpful in leveraging your product is more of a platform, you know, as more people do it, it’s just gives you a larger breath, increasing your luxe surface area I believe.
[30:13] Rob: Right, from texting. But you know, in terms of the API I would never go out and just build an API and say, “Hey, here’s API. People can use it” because that’s an — that requires marketing too, right? You have to go out and recruit people to do it.
[30:25] Mike: Right.
[30:25] Rob: Only reason I’m building one is because I have four people onboard ready to do it now and I vetted them. They have, you know, between 500 and tens of thousands of paying customers and they are ideal integration partners because they are like shopping cart vendors who are great candidate for HitTail because e-commerce sites get a lot of value out of it and then there’s a few others that are marketing type software that were just the keyword suggestions really, you know, would work well and a couple of them, again, I am integrating in to a very consistent and a couple of them are going to pull for me and need an API from my end. So but yeah, I would never just go out and build — you do see this kind — it was like the web 2.0 thing, right, was to become a platform and build an API and I don’t think that’s a good move straight upfront. I mean I think you have to — you have someone to need it before you build it.
[31:09] Mike: And those people who need it, you simply work with them to figure out what it is that they need and you build —
[31:13] Rob: Exactly.
[31:13] Mike: … from that stuff in to an API and then as other people start using it and leveraging it, then you build out other things on top of it. You don’t —
[31:21] Rob: Exactly. Dude, that’s right. And my API right now it’s all built. It’s one call, one method call, get suggestions.
[31:28] Mike: [Laughter]
[31:29] Rob: You know what? There’s authentication and then they’ll get suggestions because that’s all I need right now. And now and some days someone will lead some dynamic tracking code and then — then we’ll build that out so it’s an MVF as well, Minimum Viable Feature. I think I need to write a blog first about MVF because I Googled for it. I’m not — someone surely has talked about this before and of course, it’s nowhere to be found.
[31:47] Mike: [Laughter]
[31:48] Rob: Maybe we’ll rank for it with the transcript to this podcast.
[31:51] Mike: Yeah, maybe. It’s funny that you mentioned building an API because with AuditShark a way a lot of the data is pass back and forth that’s all done through web services. So in a way, I almost have an API that’s kind of sit in there. It’s just not documented for anybody else to use.
[32:08] Rob: And you need the authentication later on their security authorization authentication.
[32:13] Mike: You do but I use a token for just about everything.
[32:15] Rob: Oh nice.
[32:16] Mike: And that token is built in to the product. I think it can be pretty easy to surface that in other locations but I think mine is probably different than most API tokens and that my token is only valid for about an hour. So —
[32:29] Rob: All right.
[32:30] Mike: … most — most services you signup for, they have this API token and you know, you can click a button and reset it at any time but otherwise, it’s valid until the end of time. My system when you pass things back and forth establishes a token which is randomly generated for you and that token is valid for the next 60 minutes. And if it times out while you’re in a middle of doing something, then the next function call will basically say, “Hey, this token has timed out, you’re going to have to request a new one.”
[32:55] Rob: Nice.
[32:56] Mike: So —
[32:56] Rob: Yes, it sounds like you have something that built in already.
[32:58] Mike: Yeah.
[32:59] Rob: Yeah. Have I talk about operation retention?
[33:01] Mike: No, what is it?
[33:02] Rob: This was like the big movement. In January when I relaunched HitTail, I got this big influx of traffic and then thirty days later when the trials ended, I got to start seeing the conversion rate from trial to paid and then I started watching the churn rate of paid customers how many canceled per month. And right away, it was not good. I was just clutching my eyes as I watched [Laughter] these numbers go in the wrong direction and they were just bad. They weren’t anywhere near the goals that I had. So I’ve started doing a bunch of marketing and a bunch of people coming in but I have this leaky funnel, right? And it was better than the old HitTail design. It was better than the old HitTail trial, all that stuff but it wasn’t where I wanted it to be.
[33:41] So I sat down and wrote in my notebook. I said “Operation Retention.” All I’m going to focus on, I’m going to stop all marketing. I’m going to stop anything that takes my time and I’m going to focus on getting the churn rate down, driving the trial to paid conversion rate up because the number of visits to trials was great like that’s — it’s totally in a rate of where it should be. I could tweak and get a little more out of it, you know, just test copy and A/B and stuff but their big glaring bottlenecks the big holes where the trial to paid conversions and the cancelation rate early on.
[34:14] So I wrote down eight things. I contacted customers. I had my VA contact everybody who canceled to ask them why they canceled. I put together a spreadsheet and I figured out that there were seven or eight main reasons people were objecting and some of them included things like it adds things to my To-Do lists. I want to have to be able to one-click an article and that’s why I built this feature. Other said they said things that alluded to the fact that they didn’t understand how the product worked. So they would say like, “Well the suggestions are all around the same topic and that doesn’t help me” whereas that’s actually a really good thing. And so I realized I needed to educate. And so there were three or four that were like that where I needed more education. I needed the people who were using it to understand how it works, to understand the benefit they could get out of it.
[34:55] So I listed these things out and one by one, I’ve been scratching them off and with the release of the one-click article feature, it’s done. The education I did through screencast during the trial and so people they had a few e-mails during the trial and I basically just had a question in there and would have – and once they answered and then the link went off to a screencast. Now since I started operation retention, my trial to paid conversion rate is up 100%. It has doubled.
[35:21] Mike: Wow.
[35:22] Rob: Yeah, in three months and I’m super stoked about that as you can imagine. And then the other thing the churn rate is one half of what it was when I started. So I’ve 4x’ed the funnel in essence.
[35:32] Mike: Nice, very nice.
[35:33] Rob: Yeah, I’m going to go in to more detail about it. I’m probably going to write maybe a book chapter under it. They just, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that I tried that works, some of them didn’t work. There are still tweaks to be made and it is kind of a minimum viable effort, an MVE at this point. Now, I’m just getting ridiculous with that.
[35:50] Mike: [Laughter]
[35:50] Rob: But no, it’s like some of the screencast, I mean they’re not like fantastic. They’re not well produced. It was me sitting there recording for forty five seconds and then just pushing it on to the server because I wanted to get the stuff done as quickly as possible. But even with that kind of home brood effort of really not having stuff professionally done and not spending a ton of time thinking it through, they had dramatic impact on, on these numbers. So, I’m super stoked. I’m also — I’m just stoked that it — I’m stoked that it worked. I’m stoked that kind of the hypothesis was validated. And just that, you know, all the stuff that we talked about it holds true, man.
[36:20] Mike: Very cool.
[36:21] Rob: You’re building the funnel, plug in the holes.
[36:22] [music]
[36:25] Mike: So if you have a question or comment, you call it in to our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can e-mail 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 the podcast 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 82 | Mailing Lists vs. Facebook, the Coder/Entrepreneur Dichotomy, and Other Listener Questions
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 82.
Episode 81 | An Outsourcing Success Story, HitTail and AuditShark Updates
Show Notes
- Mike’s AuditShark survey
- Trello
- FogBugz
- HitTail
- Ambassador
- Adii
- Altiris Training website
- Mike’s forum software
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups For The Rest of Us: Episode 81.
[00:03] [music]
[00:11] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:21] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:22] 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?
[00:27] Mike: I am reorganizing a billion things. [Laughter]
[00:30] Rob: Yeah.
[00:31] Mike: Mostly my to-do list and how I’m kind of managing things and how I’m assigning myself tasks and things like that. I started using and I’ll say I started playing around with Trello from Fog Creek a little bit.
[00:41] Rob: Yeah, I’ve heard — I’ve heard a lot about it. I’ve even heard it in like some non-techie podcast and such. People talking about the reason and when they said I’m like “Hey, wait a minute. That’s — that’s for us nerds, right?” Like normal people aren’t supposed to use that that kind of stuff. Some people are saying it’s pretty cool for like task management or to-do list management or how does it work?
[00:57] Mike: Yeah, it’s really good for list management of any kind. I mean they have — if you have like an organization that wants to manage a set of tasks or you have a project going on and you can do, I don’t want to say everything that you can do with and something like Basecamp because there’s obviously things that you can’t do but I think that it would be really good as either a supplement or you know, a compliment for Basecamp or possibly even a replacement. I’m not sure. I haven’t really taken to that extreme yet. You know, you can create this little card, basically a virtual card and you can move the cards around in the screen, you create all these different lists and you can put in votings or if you have something that you’re working on — and there’s a kind of goes in to like KanBan where you put things, if you have like a case for a new feature or something like that, you can have people voting on them. And you can make some of these things public, some of them private, et cetera. And then you can create organizations where, you know, you have your organization and then you can invite outside people to view the things that you’re working on.
[01:55] It’s really cool but it’s very much a horizontal application not so much for a cool application like FogBugz is a vertical and this could be use, you know, as you said not just by nerds but by pretty much anyone.
[02:06] Rob: Right. And when it first came out, you know, it was on Hacker News eight months ago like the day it launched and —
[02:12] Mike: Right.
[02:13] Rob: … it looked to me or it was either be just with the way it was discussed or the way it was positioned it looked like an agile development tool and I thought it was a project management thing for software projects. And so I kind of poked around it a little bit and then just bailed on it but the fact that people are now using it more as task management or to-do list management is actually intriguing to me because aside from pen and paper, I have never found a better way to manage my ongoing to-do list and I’ve tried pretty much everything. I mean I’ve tried GTD and Excel spreadsheets and I have a lot of stuff in FogBugz but that doesn’t work that great for me either. So if you actually get in and start using it, I may take a crack out of.
[02:50] Mike: One of the things that you can do in it is like you can take a FogBugz URL and paste it in to a card and then it will put like the little kiwi logo as a little button on top of that card and you could take the cards and you can drag them around and so you can — essentially reorder things so you know how if you’re looking at a project within FogBugz, like if everything has the same priority, you can’t really organize them within that priority for example but you could do that here.
[03:16] Rob: Yeah, you can in FogBugz but it’s not easy. You have to add —
[03:20] Mike: It’s kind of [Indiscernible].
[03:20] Rob: … you have to add another column that’s caught in it. It’s called like burn down or order of. It’s for agile development and they — I just added that in the last couple of years that wasn’t there for years. And then you add numbers. Yeah, it’s not a visual way to do it at all. So —
[03:32] Mike: Uh huh.
[03:33] Rob: That’s — that’s a nice touch then.
[03:34] Mike: Yup.
[03:35] Rob: I forgot to give something away at MicroConf.
[03:38] Mike: [Laughter]
[03:38] Rob: [Laughter] I e-mailed you this week and I was like “Why I just get this e-mail from Amazon that I’m getting a copy of Diablo III like [Laughter] I didn’t order this. I haven’t played video games in years and we were just going to give away the, you know, obviously there was no box or anything because Diablo III just came out yesterday. So we’re going to give it away in spirit and then send it to someone later. We forgot to do that. So we’re going to run a contest on the podcast here. [04:00] I should have this box in my hand I think today actually. So we are seeking topic suggestions for future podcasts, topics that we haven’t already covered and the 15th topic. We’re going to randomly choose that topic. The 15th topic suggestion we get is going to get this copy of Diablo III assuming you actually want it.
[04:17] Mike: It sounds good. And I think we’ll —
[04:19] Rob: We’re having this to send us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Hey, did you meet Glen Germaine at MicroConf?
[04:25] Mike: Yeah, I did.
[04:26] Rob: Yeah. So he had e-mailed in and he runs mypractice.net.au but he asked a pretty detailed questions. You know what? He did e-mail in and it was a long e-mail that basically outlined our entire episode on the outsourcing, on outsourcing to developers. So you never recorded that episode and he took that information, that advice and he actually went and put it in to play. And so he flies in from New Zealand to the Vegas for MicroConf which was just awesome. So he took like 25 hours of time. And then he introduced himself to me and told me the whole story of like how he had used our advice and how it worked out pretty well for him.
[05:01] And so I was going to talk about it today anyways but then I noticed it looks like you already have him in the list like he wrote us an e-mail and kind of summarized his outsourcing experience.
[05:10] Mike: Yeah, he did. I verify it for as a lot of what he said. Basically looked at everything that we laid out in episode 64 and then first step that he went through is he placed the job on oDesk for a Dot Net Developer. And since it was his first hire, he decided to keep tight range on the entire process. So he created it as private instead of doing it publicly so only the people who he wanted to invite would have be able to apply. And he sent invitations to about 20 candidates and then received 12 applications out of those. And I think that I had talked about it before and the last time I went through this process for Dot Net Developer, I got something like 80 or 90 applications in the first 24 hours. I had considered making it private and just inviting people but then I decided to just go ahead and make it public just based on, you know, what people’s availability might be.
[05:54] But what he did was he went and he limited the search for the people who were in the Eastern Asia region because he wanted somebody who’s close to his time zone because, obviously, he lives in New Zealand. And he also limited the search to people who rated themselves a four or five in English proficiency it’s because he wanted somebody who had really good communication skills and then he set up a Google calendar with a range of times over the course for about a week and invited all twelve of the applicants to a Skype interview. And of those twelve people, two of them didn’t have microphones so he just kind of rolled them out. And then in going to this process, what he found was that the radium for the English proficiency was basically pointless because until he actually talk to somebody, you know, looking at their e-mails is one thing but talking to them is a completely different story.
[06:42] So, he spent about ten or twenty minutes doing each of the Skype interviews. And it wasn’t really technical interview he was doing. It was just kind of get a feel for them and their ability to communicate and he judged their technical ability based on some of the previous projects they did. And he said that it only took him three or four minutes on Skype to be able to rule out a lot of the applicants and identify those who really stood out. And at the end, he had two of them who stood out and he, you know, he offered the job to the first who’s his first choice and that first choice took the job. And then he just set up a time and said, “Look, we’ll try this out for four weeks and then we’ll kind of review how things are going.” And so far he said he’s been really pleased with the quality of work and everything else has been a complete success and you know, the rate that they agreed on was $12 an hour.
[07:25] Rob: And that’s awesome, right? It’s like an article success story —
[07:27] Mike: I know, I know.
[07:27] Rob: … that he actually took all of these and put it in to play because when he wrote, he had concern — I mean tons of concerns about the process, understand and please so. It’s not super simple and he handled it really well. But he also had concerns because his — his app is complex. He can’t afford to hire someone full time to work on it and he was concerned that it would take him as much time to explain the task as it would for him to do it but he basically said no, all like all that’s behind him and everything is — everything is working out great. So, awesome. Nice job, Glen. I’m really and — and you know what? It makes me feel really good because it’s like we invest time and effort in doing this podcast and it’s like no one is actually — I know people are listening to but if no one is actually implementing it, then there really isn’t a huge point. So to hear success stories like this is really encouraging.
[08:08] Mike: Yeah, definitely.
[08:09] [music]
[08:12] Rob: I’ve been spending the past it’s been about a week and a half. It’s pretty much since I got back from MicroConf making HitTail support Chinese characters. I had a bunch of cancellations or handful of cancelations several months ago when I re-launched it. And people were canceling because it wouldn’t support like even basic Eastern Europe or Western Europe like Umlaut and you know, it’s pretty simple unicode stuff. And so I got that dialed in fairly quickly but to get to support Chinese characters and Chinese search engines is a lot of work. Let me just say it’s way more work than I thought it would be.
[08:45] It’s basically trial and error and you know twelve hours into something I finally figured it out. And I also figured out that like Java script and DB script, Classic ASP, they cannot handle certain types of encodings. They just aren’t completely not built to support it whereas Dot Net can with one liner code can basically translate between every encoding anyone is using in the search engines. So I actually had to resort to some crazy Hackage and I have Classic ASP Calling .NET at one point.
[09:14] Mike: Are you serious?
[09:16] Rob: Yeah.
[09:16] Mike: Really?
[09:16] Rob: And COM Interop, yeah.
[09:17] Mike: Oh.
[09:17] Rob: I know it’s brutal. It’s not actually that complicated to do but it was just the last resort because you know, there’s that barriers that’s going to be performance ahead on it. I tried to do Ajax and just have Java script call in to an ASPX page but there was cross domain issues there because there’s security implication. So all that to say I genuinely was like Chinese characters, all I need to do is get an nvarchar, you know, unicode column in my database and I’m all set. And that was completely, completely wrong. So it took me about two twelve-hour days. So I’m almost 24 hours of work and then there’s still some little like little bugs, maybe 1 out of 10, 1 out of 15 are coming through which is weird encoding. So luckily, I’m able to knock those out now but it’s such a monumental effort, dude. Not only just to support all the characters but to like to deal with, you know, search engine query strings and it feels good to almost be done.
[10:06] Mike: That’s kind of crazy. I can’t imagine, you know, having to support Chinese characters. I mean it’s do you get a lot of requests to your site from Chinese websites?
[10:15] Rob: Yeah, well that’s the thing is, I mean I would not have spent a time on this if I hadn’t. I actually had a couple of people cancelled because it wouldn’t support it and then I have a site on deck who’s basically going to be, you know, if he comes on board there — probably my first and “enterprise customer” that just have a huge website. It’s a consumer web facing website but it’s China and it gets, oh to say gets millions of hits per month and since my pricing is cured based on the number of visits you get, it’s, you know, several thousand dollars in monthly revenue if I’m able to get him onboard.
[10:47] Mike: Wow.
[10:47] Rob: So that was almost exclusively, the reason I spent so much time getting this done. And now I’ll see if he actually, you know, comes through and gives it a shot and everything but I had originally hope, oh, I’m going to bang this on for hours and then you know, get him using it but obviously it took longer than that. So hopefully, it still comes through.
[11:05] Mike: Uh huh. Cool. Earlier, I started using Trello a little bit and one of the other things that I did to kind of reorganize some of the things that I’ve been doing is I created a virtual users in FogBugz. Have you ever done that?
[11:18] Rob: I haven’t. Are they users that you don’t get charge for?
[11:22] Mike: Yes. You basically —
[11:23] Rob: When’s that –
[11:24] Mike: You create these virtual users and they don’t have a log-in. They can’t actually get in. It’s typically use for assigning cases to like a group or to this queue that is unassigned that hasn’t been kind of taken by anybody and people can just kind of pop them off and start working on them as they get time or whatever. What I did was I actually took a bunch of cases that were in there and created virtual accounts for several, the different things that I’m working on and took all the things that were assigned to me and assigned them off to these virtual users and the idea being that once I get to the point where I’ve hired somebody to actually performed these tasks, then I’ll just basically take them and reassigned them to that user and set up to this virtual user.
[12:04] Rob: Yeah, that’s a nice way to do it just to get things off your plate and kind of clear it up. Now is one of your tasks that you’ve added to your task list to hire someone to do that.
[12:12] Mike: Yeah, it was three of four different virtual users that I added and in exchange for adding those three of four new cases to my queue I got to offload like 250 things.
[12:22] Rob: Now, that’s nice. Are they development tasks or should they more VA like admin staff or is it a mix and you actually need to create an admin user and a development user and …
[12:31] Mike: No, most of it is development task to be honest.
[12:34] Rob: Got it.
[12:34] Mike: I’ve been considering adding an account for the VA that I use but I don’t know. I have reservations about paying an extra 25 or $30 a month for a VA to use FogBugz if they’re not doing like support task, you know.
[12:46] Rob: Right. If it’s just simple one off step, you can e-mail it anyways it might…
[12:49] Mike: Right, yeah.
[12:51] Rob: I think this is a really good exercise that if someone is using any type of project management software, they start assigning stuff to a non-existent person and it — it’s like future VA. That’s actually a pretty good exercise to see what you think you could outsource. I have to do this about every 30 to 60 days, I have a calendar reminder that pops up and it says, “Go to your task list and take off everything that you don’t want to do, you’ve been procrastinating on. It’s been on there longer than a few weeks and try to assign that to someone.” And so it’s an exercise I go through because I always fall back in to the trap of wanting to do everything myself. This is an intriguing way to do it and if you’re managing or introducing with FogBugz anyways, it’s certainly would work.
[13:29] Mike: Yeah, we’ll — I think the problem that I ran in to was just that there were so many cases assigned to me that I’m looking at and I’m trying to figure out, “Okay. What should I be working on next?” And there’s just this massive pile of things that need to get done and it’s almost back to that and mountain of stuff that you’ve got no idea where to start. And I just look at the number of cases assigned to myself and it’s just like this is way too much. I’ve got to figure out some way to whittle this down the things that are, the important things that I need to be working on versus the things that I could presumably there outsource or have somebody else do. And it actually gave me a much better perspective on the things that I’m able to outsource. So in doing this, I created these other virtual users and it gives me this basis to be able to say, yes, I have enough work to be able to keep somebody busy doing these things for the next three weeks or three months or whatever.
[14:19] Rob: I set up a HitTail affiliate program and it’s through Ambassador, getambassador.com. And I wanted to find out what your thoughts are on the percentage, a fair percentage of recurring revenue. So HitTail, you know, it’s like 10 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month for kind of the bottom two plans and it goes up from there based on traffic. But I’ve seen, you know, you see web host where they give the big payment upfront it’s the $50 or $100 bounty to sign up but I’d almost prefer to do, you know, just a percentage of the recurring revenue because I think it’s a nice thing to be able to offer to people. Most affiliate programs don’t do that. So I’m bouncing around. I feel like 15% is probably as low as it can go and still be reasonable, you know, still want make people want to — want to promote it at all. And I feel like going over 30% is probably tough. It’s, you know, just tougher for the margin right to give right off the top to just someone. So I’m — I think — I’m thinking I’m going to start it around 25% and move it based on feedback I get and …
[15:21] Mike: I don’t know to me, you know, 30% seems low but at the same time it is recurring revenue so it’s not really just 30% and that lifetime value could theoretically be fairly high. So —
[15:32] Rob: Right. That’s — that’s the thing when you’re selling an eBook, you know, it’s typically between 30 and 50% that — that you’d see on commission but this is obviously, you know, a much higher lifetime value. But I don’t know if everyone will understand that or not. I’d just I feel like giving away 40 or 50% of our top line revenue.
[15:49] Mike: Yeah.
[15:49] Rob: It is a top sell for me to do it.
[15:51] Mike: That seems — yeah, I think 40 or 50% seems high for a SAS app, you know, on that recurring model. You know, it’s I would think that 20 or 25% would be reasonable.
[15:59] Rob: Uh huh. Yeah. And that’s what I think. I think a webber and lot of like MailChimp and those or in that range as well. So, you know, the lucky thing is that since I’m small, I can still make adjustments pretty quickly. Obviously grandfather and people and who get sales but it’s like and it seems like it’s too much or too little. It is enough to make adjustments. So, I think I’m going to start at 25.
[16:19] Now, this is mostly, I mean, so Ambassadors mostly they’re trying to give affiliate marketing a good name. It’s essential with their doing. It’s mostly for like your customers to market your app. It’s actually pretty cool idea. And so if you go to, to getambassador.com, I know the guys who owns it but I really like the tool and the thing is that it makes it feel not like someone is slapping your product but like they’re genuinely excited about it. Although I do have a public facing there’s, you know, if you go to HitTail.com there’s an affiliates link in the very bottom footer but more than that I’m going to be promoting it inside, you know, once you’ve signed up and you’ve actually become a paying customer.
[16:53] It’s those people who really do have a good testimonial to give. And so Ambassador allows me to just kind of pop something up to those folks that says “Hey, you know, here’s – your link is or you’re already signed up because you are customer and if you put this Facebook link, then, you know, it’ll just post it on your wall. If you click this Twitter thing, it’ll post it to your Twitter feed or whatever.” So the people do want to promote it, they don’t really have to. It’s not like they’re true affiliate marketers when they have this big list. They really just want to kind of talk about it to their friends and that’s more of the – of the goal that Ambassador facilitate. So …
[17:22] Mike: Right.
[17:23] Rob: It also serves as a public facing affiliate program too. So it’s – it’s an interesting – interesting experiment. I have it had good luck in the past with – with affiliate programs like with DotNetInvoice and there was one other product that I – that I tried it on and it was just kind of – it was kind of to me, you know, just the results for were so-so and it was more work that it was worth.
[17:41] Mike: Yeah. I think that was definitely a good potential for this as opposed to some other things that maybe get lower traffic or that you don’t necessarily have people involved a lot more with the products.
[17:52] Rob: Yeah. Like it’s too tight of a niche other products or if you really tightly niche it that almost a question if it works as well as something like this where a lot of more people could use it.
[18:01] Mike: Like for example, one thing that I think would not work well is something like QuickBooks, you know, it’s –
[18:06] Rob: Got it.
[18:06] Mike: … a horrible application and everyone uses it but it’s not like anybody is really invested in the success of the product, I mean, nobody cares, you know –
[18:16] Rob: Right.
[18:17] Mike: … it’s in to it, you know, who cares about how they do.
[18:21] Rob: Right. Right.
[18:22] Mike: So you’ll definitely have to let us know how that goes.
[18:23] Rob: Yeah, I will. I will. I’ve already – it’s already all implemented. It just a matter of fitting it in to my marketing queue because I want to, you know, let the customers know about it and kind of do a little campaign around it. So, should be here in the next month or so.
[18:35] Mike: Cool.
[18:36] Rob: Do you have an AuditShark update?
[18:38] Mike: So, one of the things that I did at MicroConf was I walked around and I had these little business cards that I had created that I printed out, you know, they just basically had a space for a name and e-mail address and it just said “Yes, I would pay X dollars a month for that.” And one of the things that I’ve been looking at over the past couple of months was whether I’m really going in the direction that I want to go with my – with AuditShark and to – I guess to give you a better idea of what I was looking at was I was actually considering going after funding for it. And, you know, I talked to different people, you know, whether the idea was fundable or not, it was told that basically, you know, it is a fundable idea. I knew people who could introduce me to the right people but it wasn’t something I really wanted to do.
[19:21] What I was trying to figure out whether or not going in the direction of banks was even, you know, something that was going to be ultimately viable and more for my goals and anything else. I mean I know that I could get to them and talk to them but it would almost require that I have money. And it’s just – it’s gotten to the point over the past six or six months or so that I just – I don’t really want to go in that direction anymore. And part of it came about because of looking it, talking to some of the different banks and getting some of their feedback and, you know, figuring out who it is that they deal with.
[19:50] So, what I’ve been trying to figure out is, you know, what do I want to do with AuditShark? I’ve got this great utility that can go out and gather information, is there a way that I could essentially turn it into SAS model where I’m going after I guess smaller dollar sizes versus smaller number of customers we have but with large dollar amounts because, you know, the examples I’ve used in the past were if you have, you know, 80 or 50 or 100 machines then it’s $5 a month per machine and, you know, you’ll look at that and you’re talking to 400, $500 price tag which almost requires that you go talk to these people in person.
[20:26] So, what I’ve been looking at is well, okay, cool. How can I turn this around a little bit and maybe charge $25 a month for a single machine and go after a much larger audience, you know, because obviously HitTail is kind of in the same ballpark in terms of pricing. I mean, you charge anywhere from –
[20:44] Rob: 10 bucks. $9.95 and it goes up, up in to —
[20:46] Mike: Yeah.
[20:47] Rob: … in to the hundreds.
[20:48] Mike: Okay. So, I was looking at doing possibly the same sort of thing and I’m like well, how can I kind of twist this around and then I went to talk to some people at MicroConf and I actually got commitments from people to pay me $350 a month for it, the total.
[21:02] Rob: With total, right. Not each.
[21:04] Mike: So, but basically the idea would be that, you know, they were concerned about the security of the web servers, you know, are things configured correctly, are there ways that people could get in? Are there vulnerabilities on my web server? And Adii had actually talked about getting hacked at MicroConf, I mean, that was one of the – I don’t want to say it was the – the whole theme of his talk but, you know, it seriously affected his business. I mean, and getting hacked like that can completely put you out of business. And the people I talked to were kind of worried about that and one of them had actually said “Oh, when I heard you were taking AuditShark to bank, I was a little disappointed because it sounded like it was something that I could use.”
[21:41] So, just in discussing it with them, you know, I got three different people to basically put down “Yes, I would be willing to pay for that if you came out with it and, you know, ended at me as a target customer.” And so I’m looking at possibly shifting things over and going after the market of people who have web servers that they want to make sure it locks down.
[22:02] Rob: Okay. Cool. So, you’re talking about doing a pivot then. You’re talking about taking the same code base. You obviously need to make some changes but it’s not like some completely, right?
[22:10] Mike: Right.
[22:11] Rob: And doing a market, essentially market pivot, you’re solving a different problem
[22:16] Mike: Uh huh.
[22:17] Rob: Right? A related problem but it’s a different problem for different market. How many people combined into that 350? Is that three people or four people?
[22:25] Mike: Just three.
[22:26] Rob: Okay. So, are you going to, yeah, so I guess the next step in my head would be to talk to more people, right?
[22:32] Mike: Right.
[22:32] Rob: It’s like three people is great but –
[22:33] Mike: Yup.
[22:34] Rob: … are you going to talk to more people and how do you find those people? Because when you’re at the conference, that’s awesome, but, you know, you’re only going to be at conference once or twice a year but, you know, kind of what’s — what’s the marketing channel that you would look at finding more of these people?
[22:46] Mike: What I’ve done in the past was – and I was looking for something a while back when I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go with this. One of the questions I’d asked on my blog was about WordPress security because I was considering at that point going and, you know, auditing machine specifically for a WordPress vulnerabilities or examining the files and stuff that were on those machines for permissions error, some things like that. And I got a fairly reasonable response from just my blog, so I think that’s probably the first thing that I’m going to do is I’m going to put it on, on my blog and say “Hey, is this something that you’d be interested in and just go to Wufoo.com and just create a very quick little survey and just post it there.” And see what kind of response I get from people and see if there’s a genuine interest there because what I’d really like to do is get commitments from at least ten people before I actually decide to go in that direction.
[23:33] Rob: Right. And obviously the podcast if there are any listeners out there, I could announce it on the next episode and Twitter and all that. Yeah, so that’d be – that’s probably a pretty good first step for getting that customer development started. So you want ten commitments, is that what you’re saying?
[23:45] Mike: So, looking – definitely looking for ten. Obviously if I can get more than, that’s great. It’s just more of a testimonial that I’m on the right track with that idea and that it’s something that people are genuinely interested in doing.
[23:54] Rob: Right. How do you know that what you’re describing to each of these people is what they are imagining?
[24:01] Mike: One of the issues with the banks was just that “Oh, well. It kind of was what they needed but they still wanted that third party person to come in and whereas I was looking to replace them. I think that the people that who would be reading my blog and, you know, listening to this podcast quite frankly or probably a bit more technical than managers of banks, you know, the other thing that I’d be looking at is the target market is probably people who don’t, not necessarily spend a time and effort but they’re concern enough that they want to spend the time but they don’t want to spend the time. You know what I’m saying?
[24:30] Rob: Sure. Yeah. They’re concern if that they want it done but they don’t have the time. They want to outsource that time to hopefully an app.
[24:36] Mike: Right.
[24:36] Rob: Because they had gear rather outsourced it to you through the app.
[24:39] Mike: Right.
[24:40] Rob: That make sense. Are these enterprise folks that you’re talking to –
[24:43] Mike: No.
[24:43] Rob: Let’s say that you talked to twenty people and you get ten commitments or however many people you talked to, you get these ten commitments that you want and so out of the gate hopefully most of them come through so you have a nice, you know, small chunk of recurring revenue when you launch. From there, you know, you’ll want obviously a scalable marketing channel of some kind and you have plenty of time to figure that out but I’m wondering if these guys aren’t enterprise kind of what is the marketing channel beyond the blog and the podcast and Twitter because that was – that was going to run out pretty quick where you think you might be able to go from there.
[25:14] Mike: I’m still kind of working that out because I mean I really want to see if it’s something that people are interested in and if so, then trying to figure out how to reach them.
[25:21] Rob: So, it’s more of a build something people want. If they want it, they’re willing to pay for then you’ll – and if it’s – if the price point is enough, frankly you can afford to do even do some outbound stuff and more medium and, I don’t know, hi-tech sales but yeah, at least medium to higher tech sales.
[25:36] Mike: Right. I can still go to outside consulting companies who do manage services for example for some of their customers and one that comes to mind is the company down in Providence where I’ve talked to them a little bit about AuditShark kind of early on and they have this established customer based where they’re bringing in, I forget what it was. It was like six or eight million dollars a year where all they’re doing is manage services for all these different companies that are in that area.
[26:02] And, you know, one of the things that they don’t really do or do well is checking the machines for security. So, like people’s web servers and things like that and they would definitely be able to leverage that in to their customers. Something else that somebody had mentioned to me was they’re like “Hey, if this was like an add on from my hosting provider and for an extra 20 or $30 a month or something like that, you could check my server to make sure that it’s not configured in a manner that it’s, you know, terrible for security then, you know, that’s almost seems like a no brainer to me to just say, oh yeah, I’ll take this option for an extra 49.95 a month.”
[26:41] So that really there’s a lot of different ways it could go. It’s just kind of getting to the point where I have people who say “Yes, this is something I’m definitely interested in.” And then kind of going after it. But I want to make sure that that demand is there first.
[26:53] Rob: Right. So, right now, you have the blog and the podcast, you have your consulting work, your – you’re still working on the form software AuditShark, anything else?
[27:05] Mike: The AltirisTraining.com site.
[27:06] Rob: AltirisTraining.com. Okay. [Laughter] Remember when Hiten Shah — [Laughter]
[27:10] Mike: Yes.
[27:11] Rob: Remember when he said focus? Now, I’m the pot calling the kettle black here because I work on too many things.
[27:15] Mike: I know. It’s funny that you mentioned focus because literally just last night, I printed out in, I forget if it was 160 or 260 point fund. The word focus with an exclamation point and I’ve got two of them hung up in my office right now that I can see from here. [Laughter]
[27:29] Rob: Got it. Okay. So, is Altiris Training still going to happen or you’re going to move forward with that or you’re going to put it in the form on hold while you do the AuditShark stuff.
[27:39] Mike: I’m not doing much of anything for the form software right now and then with the Altiris Training’s website, most of the legwork for that has been done. I have to post some videos, I have to sign up for, you know, a Wistia account. I actually had somebody go sign up for it and they couldn’t complete the process of signing up for it because I didn’t have everything configured right. So I have to go back to that person and see if they’re still willing to sign up but, you know, that stuff is I think still going to move forward. I don’t see any issues there. I mean, I think I’ll spend maybe an hour or two a week building out some of the content but other than that, I’ll be able to outsource a lot of having that posted to the site and basically integrating all the content. My sole responsibility will basically be to record it and then kind of maintain the SEO progress.
[28:24] Rob: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. It’s the marketing I’m more concern about because I know you can automate almost everything except for this green cast but getting enough people there to make it, you know, worth your time and to kind of grow the business.
[28:34] Mike: But I also have somebody who’s the company I do consulting for or through, they’re willing to put it out to their customers. I already have somebody lined up to pay for as soon as it’s done. So I’ve got a $500 sale basically sitting there waiting for me just as soon as I’m done.
[28:48] Rob: Nice.
[28:49] Mike: I am juggling a lot. I’m trying to figure out, you know, and that was part of the things that I’ve been doing over the past week to try and figure out how I’m going to get better organized and kind of get more things done with less effort.
[29:01] Rob: Right. You know, I have this rule that I go back to people say, you know, “Rob, you’re totally unfocused because you work on all these things at the same time.” But the secret that I have is that I never build two apps at once like if I buy an app, I stop pretty much everything else I’m doing except for the blog and the podcast. And I work on that app. And I work and work and work and then once I’m done, like once I feel like it’s in a good place, I find some good people to do the development, to do the support and, you know, sometimes the marketing and then boom, you kind of pass it off and then I watch it and then as fires come up I’ll have to deal with the stuff. But I never tried to build two businesses at once or two products at once because I find it just – it’s just too hard.
[29:41] Mike: I’ll be honest, I’m kind of in a position right now where I – I know that building the things that I’m building right now is going to be too difficult to manage building all of them at the same time. So I’m trying to pipeline them a little bit where I’ve got AuditShark in a position where I’ve got a developer who’s working on some back end utilities and code for it and I’m doing more the upfront customer development to make sure that when, let’s say down the road in a month or so, I get to the point where I say “Yeah, I want to go in this direction and this is something I’ve at least proved out the concept, the people are willing to pay for it then I can switch over to working on that a little bit more and hit it more on the marketing side.
[30:021] But for the time being I’m spending probably more time doing marketing for the form software for Altiris Training. Because the Altiris Training stuff, I don’t feel like I have to do a lot of marketing because there are such little search engine traffic for it, I think that a lot of it is going to be driven by either word of mouth or by direct sales which that stuff is essentially being handed off for me, anyway. I don’t have to necessarily worry about that stuff. So I’m in this weird situation where everything is kind of bit a different stage and right now it’s manageable and my concern is that things catch up to one another.
[30:54] Rob: Yeah. If everything ramps up at one and then you’re like you’re in over your head
[30:58: Mike: Yeah, that’s my biggest worry right now, is that when something catches up with something else.
[31:02] Rob: Right. So are you planning by next week show then or do you think you’ll have done more of this customer development research for AuditShark?
[31:10] Mike: I will definitely have created the survey and put it out there. I don’t know how many of the results I’ll have by then. What I’m actually thinking of doing is not putting the survey out to my site until this episode goes live so that when people listen to the episode, if they have some thoughts on it or if they actually want to come check out the survey and take the survey then they can go to the survey and check it out. I’m sure that I’ll just launch it straight from my blog and I can put in just a note in the show notes this episode that’d be pretty quick and painless to do.
[31:37] Rob: Yeah. Sounds good.
[31:38] [music]
[31:40] Rob: So I know we intended to answer listener questions.
[31:43] Mike: [Laughter]
[31:44] Rob: But we basically have just given some updates. I think we wrap up this episode and then maybe next week we have – looks like we had four questions queued up and we usually have 20 something in the pipeline.
[31:56] Mike: Yeah, we’ll definitely do listener questions next time. If you have a question or comment, you can call it on our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt used under Creative Commons. If you enjoyed this podcast, you can subscribe in iTunes by searching Startups or via our RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of this episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 80 | Microconf 2012
Show Notes
- MicroConf 2012
- Pictures from MicroConf
- Montabe (provided the picture slideshow app)
- WildBit (sponsored Monday night’s party)
- WP Engine (Jason Cohen’s Company)
- Balsamiq (Peldi’s Company)
- Software Promotions (Dave Collins’ Company)
- Woothemes (Adii’s Company)
- Eliza Brock Software (sponsored the little red notebooks)
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 80.
[00:02] [music]
[00:10] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps 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. How are you doing this week, Rob? Are you getting sleep?
[00:24] Rob: I am getting so much sleep now that MicroConf is done. It feels good. I had a really tough time sleeping the night before and the two nights of even the night after, you know, you and I were up till probably 3 in the morning with that band of what, maybe 20, 20 folks you stock around that late. I went upstairs and I was thinking “Oh, I’m going to sleep till noon. No kids, no flight till 4 pm and sure enough I’d woke up like, kind of like anxiety where in that like 8 in the morning.
[00:48] Mike: Yeah. When I got there Saturday night, the next day I slept I got nine hours of sleep I think and then for the next three nights I got around 4 and half to 5 hours of sleep each night. [Laughter]
[00:59] Rob: Totally worth it, man. I had a blast.
[01:02] Mike: Yeah. What was your favorite part?
[01:03] Rob: I really enjoyed connecting again with people who we’ve seen last year as well as meeting a bunch of people who I’ve already met through the Micropreneur Academy who have called and e-mailed us through the podcast, comment on the blog, bought the book and e-mailed me. I mean, there’s all these ways that I meet people virtually and then finally meet them face to face, it’s really cool. This is like the original reason I think we started talking about putting MicroConf on period is that we have this kind of network around the world of people we wanted to connect with and there was really no event where we can all get together and so our excuse for doing that is getting really good speakers and putting us all in a room for three days.
[01:41] And so my favorite parts were, you know, the breaks and hanging out in the evening and just hearing what people are up to, giving feedback, getting advice, I mean I, you know, pitch some ideas to a bunch of people just to get thoughts on, on how I should move forward and I think my biggest takeaway is I’ve come back way more motivated like I had just had been attacking my list specifically a lot of stuff on HitTail because I got some comments and feedback and thoughts and both from speakers, you know, Jason Cohen and Hiten Shah and those guys as well as just, you know, all the attendees. There were a lot of really knowledgeable attendees this year. That was cool. How about you? What was your favorite part?
[02:15] Mike: I really like just talking to everyone who was there. I mean, there were a lot of people there who had just never been there. I mean, what do we have? Probably 50 people or so from last year but because we grew the conference by so much, it was a much smaller percentage of the people that were there but yeah, just talking with everybody, getting ideas, feedback from things that I’m working on and talking to them about things that they’re working on.
[02:38] I sat one night, I think it was the last night we were there and Patrick Foley and I just sat there and hashed out what the problems would like he has this idea for our products and I walked him through it and talked to him a lot about it and I was like that doesn’t really solve our problem from me and I didn’t get it for a long time and then suddenly things started to click for us and I was like “Well, that could solve this problem that I have, you know, could just kind of organized in the conference everything.” And he, you know, one of the things it was talked about was, you know, marry the problem not the solution so he was kind of thinking a lot about the thing he wanted to build versus the problems that it would be solving for people and I’m like, well, you know, this is the problem I have and he said “Yeah, I can do that.”
[03:18] It was really great to talk to people about the problems that you’re having and then frame them for them or help them out in any way that we could. I mean, I connected on so many people like somebody said “Oh, I’m having a problem with this.” I’m like “You should talk to so and so …” It was just in all these conversations that I had with people. I was just connecting people left and right. That was really cool.
[03:37] Rob: Yeah. I have to admit I enjoyed that. It’s kind of like having your whole network or at least like the best of the best of your network there in person. But it really was, all right? Like people would ask you questions. It’s like I don’t know the answer but this guy totally does like he’s also doing mobile apps right now. Have you met Patrick from Inkstone Software, you know, it’s just that great feeling of like knowing enough people that we could really help them out [0:04:00] as well as being help to ourselves like I ask a lot of folks about their thoughts on a bunch of… on a whole slew of topics and it was cool.
[04:06] Experts, man. I mean, seriously there were — I didn’t even realized there were attendees there who were founders of, like the guy from YouNeedABudget.com, there were like 17 person, 20 person software startup and he was just an attendee and I had no idea and he introduced himself, that was awesome. I mean, there were – and there’s a guy named Sameer from ProProfs.com –
[04:24] Mike: Yup.
[04:25] Rob: … who again, I had never met, hadn’t heard of and he, I mean, their company’s doing really well. He’s explaining to me how many millions of visits they get a month. I mean, there were some, you know, really cool attendees and there were some, you know, really high end people in attendance as well as all the people, I mean, so many people we know from the academy, the academy who have like awesome businesses that you know, totally support them and, you know, they’ve left their jobs because of. And I’ve actually realized that’s something we don’t do enough and I think we might want to start on the podcast or either bringing them on or at least mentioning them.
[04:54] I had forgotten how many people in the academy have actually, I mean, I basically lost track and as I start to meet them I was like “Oh yeah. Antonin Hildebrand from TotalFinder.com. I totally [Laughter] – I remember you but I kind of forgotten that.” It’s success story like he did never product when he join the academy and then he launched it and he totally quit his job and he’s like travelling the world now.
[05:15] And there’s a lot of those people and so I think that it was a reminder of like yeah, you know, we need to be better about kind of bringing, bringing those stories to light because I think they’re inspirational.
[05:25] Mike: Yeah. I was surprised that a sheer number of people from the academy that were there. I brought one of those little stamps and I had the guys at the – who were working at the front desk every time somebody would come up to register just asking if they were an academy member, we stamped in their name tags so that you and I could identify who the academy members were but also say can identify each other. Kind of connect people together to some degree and I was just oddly shock in the number of people who were there who are also in the academy.
[05:55] Rob: I agree. By the way, that was genius [Laughter] to do that because I was keeping my eye at the whole time but yeah, how many, I mean, there were 164, 165 people including speakers, sponsors, attendees, I mean the whole deal. My guess is there were 30 to 40 Micropreneur Academy members —
[06:12] Mike: Probably.
[06:13] Rob: You think there were that many?
[06:14] Mike: I —
[06:14] Rob: Yeah. I mean, I saw a lot of, lot of the smiley face stickers.
[06:17] [music]
[06:20] Rob: So today we are going to be covering basically going through MicroConf 2012. We’re going to talk about some of our favorite moments, favorite speakers, just, you know, different stories that came out of it. Do you have anything else you want to cover before we dive in?
[06:33] Mike: I probably talk about AuditShark a little bit. I talked about AuditShark to a bunch of people who were there and kind of got some good feedback on future directions for it, so …
[06:42] Rob: But I thought it was cool because A, you were doing customer development basically on the spot, right? You were asking some folks and then B, at the very end of the conference as it was closing before their kind of last party you basically said like if anyone’s interested in the service that does this like come up and talk to me and you said like I’m thinking about pivoting AuditShark to this but I want to hear about it.
[07:02] So, that was – that’s like the perfect example of what you should come to the conference with. It’s something like that, right? Because you’re going to get a ton of value at a very quickly and that’s something that’s hard to do virtually or harder to do virtually than it was to just do in person.
[07:14] Mike: Yup. And I actually got commitments from people to have pay for it.
[07:17] Rob: That’s cool. So wait, we’ll cover that —
[07:19] Mike: Next time. [Laughter]
[07:20] Rob: … in Episode 81, yup. We’re talking about 2013 although of course as usual I haven’t decided that I’m actually going to do at 2013 conference. We – we already have 156 people on the e-mail list, the early bird list for next year which —
[07:33] Mike: That’s the crew and squad if you say no and then get —
[07:35] Rob: Yeah, I know.
[07:36] Mike: I’ll tweet out the address. [Laughter]
[07:38] Rob: I’m going to get hurt. Yeah. So, but last year we only had I think 250 e-mails throughout the whole year and now, we now already have 150 and it’s only a couple of weeks after, so it was obviously, obviously doing something right. I think the Twitter stream was a lot – lot hotter this year as well, seemed like if we’re picking in on it.
[07:55] Mike: That 150 number or 156 number kind of scares me though for next year because it’s like what do we do to —
[08:02] Rob: I know.
[08:03] Mike: … maintain the quality, I mean, I – I had at least half a dozen of people come up to me in just various times and say “Hey, this is the best conference I’ve ever been to. “ And I’ve been, you know, one guy made a point to say “And I’ve been to a lot.”
[08:16] Rob: Right.
[08:17] Mike: And somebody else said he’s been, you know, 25, 30 conferences and he said that the MicroConf is by far the best. In a way it’s kind of scary because it’s like okay, we’ll now … How do we tap this next year or can we tap it or, you know, —
[08:28] Rob: Right.
[08:29] Mike: … can we at least meet expectations.
[08:31] Rob: Right. I think, well I think there’s a couple of things that are going on in my head. I think one thing is that we take what we learn from this year because we changed a bunch of things from last year, right? We had two more tear downs, we had shorter talks, we had longer breaks and I felt like all that went well and then moving forward. I think next year we may want to have one or two panels, shorter panels that are done well. I think we may want to consider having fewer speakers and longer breaks. I think we may want to have let the audience do some short talks, like do some 15-minute talks, 10 or 15-minute talks because there were a lot of very knowledgeable people who I think could lend inside but who may, you know, who aren’t like tap your big names speakers or whatever they know but they have a lot of knowledge in there, in their domain.
[09:11] And so I think there’s, there’s ways that we can continue to kind of keep it varied hopefully without diluting it, right? Because you don’t want to go so far work just like all panels, all workshops and it just kind of not – it’s not as valuable. I think the other thing is we need to be pretty consistent about — if you attended this year, we kind of need to let you know first and let you in first because I do, I mean, it sold out in two and a half weeks this year. My guess is since we’re talking about not growing it, not making it larger that we’re going to sell out in that time or shorter next year. And so I do think that previous attendee should kind of get some priority.
[09:46] I mean, I talked to a lot of people about whether we should grow the conference another 40 or 50 people or whether we should raise the price a hundred bucks and there’s a bunch of things we can do like we want to make the conference better but we need a coordinator to do that. We need – we should need more resources to do it and [0:10:00] moving to the Hard Rock this year was a lot more expensive than it was last year and so, you know, if we raised the price to hundred bucks which basically became the just of what everyone who I talked to one-on-one told me, that they would prefer to just pay a little more and keep the conference small and keep the quality of the — of the attendees high was a big concern.
[10:17] Mike: One person e-mailed me and said that they’d be okay with adding another 40 or 50 people so long as it was, you know, the same type of crowd.
[10:27] Rob: Yeah. And that’s – I just don’t know how can you guarantee that. We get a certain number of thousand bucks, 1500 bucks and then it’s like that were a bunch of enterprise people start coming in and you’re going to start getting, you know, C level folks from Oracle and Microsoft not that that’s bad but it just not what we would, that’s not the conference we want to throw.
[10:42] Mike: Right.
[10:43] Rob: So hey, let’s pop in to day one and just look at maybe your favorite speaker or two, what you took away and that kind of stuff to give listeners an idea. Day 1 was – it was Jason Cohen from A Smart Bear, Hiten Shah who found the KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. And then we did some website tear downs and then I spoke and Peldi did an “Ask me anything” and then you spoke and then the last was Dan Martell who a lot of people may not have heard of but probably one of the most inspirational if not the most inspirational talk in my opinion. So of those folks what – who do you like best? What did you takeaway?
[11:21] Mike: Well, I’ve heard Jason Cohen talk about – he talks about honesty and I heard that talk at the Business of Software and I liked it again, I mean, it’s not like a lot of stuff changed from, you know, when he gave it there. But it still resonates. I mean, it’s still a great talk and it’s still great and great topic. The other one I liked was – I like Peldi’s just because it was very free form. It was very different than a lot of them and Peldi is just entertaining, I mean, he’s great to listen to, great to talk to and has a way of portraying things or putting things at in a ways off-the-cuff but it seems like he’s thought it through in his head. I don’t know how he comes up with some of the stuff that he does but it’s – it always seems like he’s thought it through and maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he just thrown it out there as ideas but I really like his as well.
[12:05] Rob: And for the listeners, Peldi did “Ask me anything” so he had 45 minutes and it was purely Q&A. He didn’t do a presentation. He put up some topics and people got to ask him anything about it. So, he’s businesses, I mean, it’s growing. He’s with eleven people now and so he has a lot of experience going from basically a single founder all the way up, up to where he is now, multi-million dollars in revenue.
[12:24] Mike: Yup.
[12:25] Rob: Well cool. Yeah, I really enjoy it. So I’m very pleased we had Jason Cohen go first. I think he kicked off the conference. I just don’t know if there could have been a better speaker in that slot, you know, he kicked it off with the honesty thing and it really kind of resonated through all the talks I thought and a lot of people who I talked to said he has was one of the most compelling talk. It wasn’t a ton of takeaways. It wasn’t like here’s how to market your business but it was just a way of thinking about kind of running your business and being really honest with kind of with everything you say and that that’s actually better for your bottom line. He tries to prove it through a series of a stories and stats and all that stuff, definitely enjoyed it again.
[13:03] And that’s why we had asked him to come there, right? I mean, we had seen his talk and wanted him to come and share with the gang at MicroConf. I really like Hiten’s. I was like I like what he has to say but —
[13:13] Mike: Yeah. That was the – that was the other one that I really like as well was Hiten’s.
[13:15] Rob: And he of course had a bunch of stuff, I mean, he’s grown KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. One was venture founded, one is bootstrapped and he’s just done, you know, really well with both of them and so tons of knowledge. We did have videos taken of all the talks and our current plan is to release them inside the Micropreneur Academy to Micropreneur Academy members, so it’ll be – we’ll probably release like one a month as they come out. And then, you know, we don’t have plans beyond that at this point.
[13:43] My other favorite talk and the one I heard a lot about when I ask people was Dan Martell’s. And his is about again, not a ton of actionable stuff but it was really, it was inspirational –
[13:53] Mike: Yeah.
[13:53] Rob: He had this anecdote about his brother who was basically going bankrupt, trying to be a homebuilder. It was customer development as what it was with [0:14:00] homebuilding. He realized that like women typically make the decision when buying a home. If a couple is buying a home, the woman typically makes a decision and so he got a bunch of women, got them together and took them out to all these homes and asked them “What do you like best about it?” And basically the designed the best home based on the opinions of these women and just has it amazing homebuilding business now because of this customer development approach.
[14:25] Mike: Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that he threw out was his brother. He went in to go see his brother and his brother’s house was virtually empty and he went in, you know, there’s no couch, no carpets, no lamps, no, nothing. And he goes in and asked his brother if he got robbed and his brother said “Well, these houses, I was told that these houses display better if they are furnished and I don’t want to go buy furniture so I took all of my furniture out of my house and put in, you know, just the display house” which is getting things done that need to get done in whatever way you possibly can.
[14:56] Rob: Hey, so how did you feel during your talk and after? Did you get any feedback? What are your thoughts? How did you feel overall?
[15:02] Mike: My talk?
[15:04] Rob: Uh huh. Yeah.
[15:05] Mike: It resonated for some people. I don’t know. I didn’t get a huge amount of feedback. I have seen a couple of people who have tweeted out things here and there. One of the conference goers put out a blog article and have us written through it. It was really funny. He said that Mike had what was surely the best “I’m an entrepreneur but I’m also a computer science geek” moment of the conference. [Laughter]
[15:27] Rob: Nice. Yeah. You had the coolest Scott Adams quote. It was –
[15:31] Mike: Losers –
[15:32] Rob: Losers have goals, winners have systems.
[15:34] Mike: Yup.
[15:34] Rob: Is that right?
[15:34] Mike: Uh huh.
[15:34] Rob: Yeah. That was a good quote. I saw that on Twitter several times after you talked.
[15:39: Mike: Yeah, so that was the legist of my talk and for the people who weren’t there, I mean, I basically talked about being able to pipeline the processes that are in your business and relating it to how a processor does things and being able to pipeline that stuff so you can get more things done faster and not lose work that you’ve done and the idea that you really have to position yourself as a builder of processes in your business not necessarily the person who is executing them.
[16:07] And honestly like when you’re building a software product, it’s the exact same thing. You’re building a process and you’re letting something else to execute it and not something else as the computer.
[16:15] Rob: So, I thought the tear downs went pretty well like we had thrown them together kind of last minute last year and it felt like a nice break to me. For the listeners tear down is basically the audience just starts calling out website so you’ll just call out your website and whoever’s up there, the first day it was Jason Cohen from A Smart Bear and the second day it was Dave Collins from Software Promotions and Patrick McKenzie from Bingo Card Creator and his blog and they just basically look at it and they give their advice on things you should test basically it’s like your button should be bigger, the copy is off and I don’t understand what that saying. Here’s maybe you could rewrite it like this, they kind of click through it and it’s just as really interesting. Public, evaluation of your site and, you know, people call out their URL and they just sit there and just scribble down notes like crazy.
[17:00] And I even saw people approaching like Jason Cohen after his talk and after the conference saying, “Hey, could you do a quick tear down of mine?” And then he would run through theirs in two or three minutes, you know, just one-on-one.
[17:10] Mike: Yeah. I think those tear downs are definitely a must have at the conference from now on. They are nice changer pace and they definitely break up the day. What did you think about your talk? Did you get any feedback on it?
[17:22] Rob: You know, I didn’t get much feedback which tells me it was probably one of the last memorable talks of the conference. I think we had such – we had such an amazing group of speakers and I’m not just saying that because we put the conference together but it really was the conference that you and I wanted to attend, right? That’s what we’re building here, is every conference I have felt like “Oh, you know, this speaker or that or that part of the schedule just didn’t work or whatever.” And we’re trying to do it exactly how we want and obviously that’s resonating, you know, within a people that it’s working but I think I’m a pretty good writer now. I think you and I do a good podcast. I think I’m a good entrepreneur. I think my public speaking is actually maybe one of my lesser abilities.
[18:02] Mike: Your speaking is pretty good. [Laughter] I would say it’s better than mine.
[18:05] Rob: Oh, well, thanks. I appreciate that.
[18:07] Mike: I think what you’re probably seeing is that I got this a little bit as well, people didn’t necessarily want to come up and talk to me too much about my talk or other things that were going on. They just didn’t want to bug me because they could probably see that I was busy and there were lots of stuff going on, I mean, we got a conference to manage.
[18:23] Rob: You know, Mike, I hope that’s the case. I didn’t really think about it. I just — normally when I speak afterwards like a lot of people approach me and we talk about the stuff and then for the rest of the conference I went up talking to people about the contents of the talk and that didn’t happened a single time of MicroConf and so maybe you’re right. Maybe it was just the people were giving us, you know, leeway so to speak or more concerned about giving us feedback on the conference rather than the actual talks that we were giving.
[18:48] Mike: Yeah. I mean, some of the feedback that I got was more – I don’t want to say it was in passing but it was like the hallway thing like “Hey, I really like your talk. It resonated with me and, you know, I really –
[18:57] Rob: Got it.
[18:58] Mike: … like this and that.” I didn’t get a lot of feedback right away but then at the very end of the conference, I mean, somebody went – I think you were up there asking what people had gotten out of it, you know, the first two things that were called out were both from my talk. It was –
[19:11] Rob: Yup.
[19:11] Mike: … marketing Monday concept and then the other one was building processes instead of setting goals.
[19:16] Rob: Yup.
[19:17] Mike: But –
[19:17] Rob: No, I thought that was really cool.
[19:18] Mike: I didn’t get a lot of feedback during the conference. I really think it’s just because people wanted us to focus on having a great conference as oppose to talking with — specifically what our talk was but I can totally see how, you know, you might be a little concern about it because I mean, I even have my concerns about getting up there and talking because you’ve got all these great speakers and it’s a little intimidating, I mean, I was looking at the conference, you know, the line up of the speakers and I’m like, you know, usually you want to go just after somebody who might or might not be so good or, you know, kind of average and I’m looking at the speaker line up saying “Man, there’s no good place to go.” [Laughter]
[19:53] Rob: Yeah. Yeah. I was before Peldi and basically after Hiten Shah and you’re after Peldi and before Dan Martell.
[19:59] Mike: Right.
[20:00] Rob: Like that’s brutal.
[20:01] Mike: Uh huh.
[20:02] Mike: But I’m –
[20:02] Rob: Yeah.
[20:02] Mike: … there from other speakers too though, you know, like —
[20:04] Rob: Yeah.
[20:04] Mike: … I’d say probably we close to half of the speakers. Basically said it’s an intimidating line up to speak in because everyone, you know, they all look up to each other. So …
[20:14] Rob: Right. That was the cool part is like at the speakers dinner. So we have the speakers dinner Sunday night and you get these people together and they — they either all know each other or they know of each other and they really wanted to meet one another.
[20:24] Mike: Right.
[20:25] Rob: And so you’re basically getting this really talented group of folks together and the conversations are just riveting. And that’s actually, oh next year, I think we want to do a — we only did a 2-hour speaker dinner. I think we want to do a 3-hour speaker dinner because I felt like I had to bail too early and that we — that we can sat there for another hour easily.
[20:42] Mike: Uh huh.
[20:43] Rob: What did you think — we get on the day two in a second but I wanted to get your thoughts on like our giveaways. We had a couple of candles, we had a candle fire and then we had a couple lifetime memberships to the academy, we had software from sponsors. In general, how do you feel like all that went?
[20:57] Mike: It went smoother than I thought it would to be perfectly honest. And I think a lot of that had to do with switching from — last year, I just drew numbers and had everybody — I had a number put on the back of everybody’s badge. So everybody had to look at it. And this year, I just drew names out of a box and that —
[21:15] Rob: That was better.
[21:15] Mike: … was so much easier. I was surprised at how well the Swingline stapler went over. [Laughter]
[21:20] Rob: Yes, you had a red Swingline, right?
[21:22] Mike: Yeah.
[21:22] Rob: From Office Space?
[21:24] Mike: Yup.
[21:24] Rob: People were so — that was the runner-up prize that you — the last thing given out was the XBox with connect, the XBox 360 with connect. Then the runner-up prize was the red Swingline. That was really cool.
[21:33] Mike: Yup. People loved that. So hey, what do you think about the party over at Rumor on Monday night?
[21:40] Rob: Definitely, yeah. WildBit sponsor this party, definitely higher class than we’ve ever done, you know, our MicroConf stuff is a — it’s always good and solid but we typically are like, “All right, come to a bar and have some drinks.” But they had orders. It was out on a patio. It was really a nice, nice venue. I was happy that we were there. And in fact, if we stay at Hard Rock, if we do it at the Hard Rock again next year, I would want to inquire and find out about the venue again because I just — it was nice through its outdoors.
[22:06] Mike: Uh huh.
[22:06] Rob: Yeah, it was 8 degrees until 10 at night which was nice. And it was just good to be outside for a while, right and not be inside casinos the whole time —
[22:14] Mike: Yeah, it was definitely — it was definitely nice to not hear the cha-ching from [Laughter] from the slot machines —
[22:20] Rob: Yup.
[22:20] Mike: … all night along.
[22:21] Rob: Now at the Hard Rock actually, I never heard it because of the music. It was kind of cool to have a soundtrack playing of, well, just good music from the last 30 years.
[0:22:28] Mike: Uh huh.
[22:28] Rob: Did you notice that? Like it was — they have the slot machines from way, way down and the music was turned off because that’s their vibe, you know?
[22:35] Mike: I didn’t notice.
[22:37] Rob: Yup.
[22:37] Mike: I was too busy, you know, doing other things. I did —
[22:39] Rob: I was too busy putting on a call.
[22:40] Mike: [Laughter] What were you doing?
[22:43] Rob: I think overwhelmingly people were like, yes, better venue, right? We did the Riviera last year which was an older hotel. Hard Rock’s newer or hipper. It’s just — it was nicer. Do you think in terms of about the feedback you got and your impression of what we want to do next year, do we want to — do you think you — would you go back to the Hard Rock? Would you look at a similar hotel, you know, in Vegas about the same level? Or do you think we should move up? What do you think?
[23:03] Mike: I would say the same level is fine. I would have, you know, definitely, consider going back to the Hard Rock and the fact that Rumor was right across the street was definitely a plus. I got some feedback from people that they said that it was — they liked that it was off the strip a little bit.
[23:17] Rob: How interesting, okay.
[23:18] Mike: Uh huh. So —
[23:20] Rob: I think for some folks, some folks had never been to Vegas and they want a block in to the strip because they obviously, you know, you need to see it if you never been but I had not thought about that though because we were secluded and that’s probably a good thing —
[23:30] Mike: Uh huh.
[23:30] Rob: … because people didn’t tend to wander off, right? We did tend to stay close and kind of stay as a group and do a lot of chatting. Is that — was that the implication that people were saying since it was off the strip, it was less distracting?
[23:40] Mike: Yeah, that was part of it I think. I think it was just the fact that it wasn’t — because on the strip things tend to be a little bit, I’ll say over the top, I guess. And it didn’t seem like that at the Hard Rock at all. So I will definitely —
[23:51] Rob: Right.
[23:52] Mike: … go back there. I think the only downside that I saw was getting across the street to Rumor was actually a little bit of a pain in the neck. [Laughter]
[0:24:00] Rob: It was like a game of Frogger.
[24:01] Mike: It was. It was something —
[24:02] Rob: Right? [Laughter]
[24:02] Mike: … like Frogger.
[24:04] Rob: I did like that it’s like a $12 cab ride from the airport instead of a $25 cab ride like the north end of the strip is.
[24:09] Mike: Or a $40 if, you know, if they ask you if you want to take the highway and you say yes and they get off the south side and then all the way around. [Laughter]
[24:15] Rob: Awesome. That’s a trick question. Let’s talk about day two of the conference. So it was the WildBit sponsor the party at Rumor which is just — it was a boutique hotel across the street. So then day two, who were your favorites and most memorable?
[24:29] Mike: I mean I like them all. Patrick’s got a way with words, I mean way with his stories and you know, it’s hard to discount any of those. I mean because they’re both entertaining and educational at the same time. I mean everybody had great things to say. I learned a lot from listening to Dave talked about Google AdWords.
[24:46] Rob: Right. So that’s Dave Collins from Software Promotions. He’s been doing Pay Per Click stuff for ten years I think he said. Yeah, it’s a long —
[24:52] Mike: Something like that. He added up the hours on screen and amounted out to something like 11,000 hours —
[24:59] Rob: That’s right.
[24:59] Mike: … that he spent working in Google AdWords. And he had some really interesting insights that I guess I hadn’t considered before and honestly, it makes me think that, oh, maybe I’ll go back and give AdWords a try because I’ve honestly, you know, avoided going in to Google AdWords just because it’s not that I don’t understand it really, it’s more that I don’t have the time to dedicate to it. It’s not like I can sit there on top of the campaigns that I’m running and manage them and pay attention to them a lot and part of it is just not knowing how everything all fits together but the other side of it is I just don’t have the time and I wonder if using some of the techniques and things that he talked about would make it a little bit easier for me.
[25:39] Rob: Right. Well, that was the other thing he said that you should spend one to one and a half hours, maybe it’s one to two hours a week managing your AdWords and I had never done even if when I was working from it and spend not much time. So that’s an interesting, kind of an interesting mind set shift that if I want to run a successful campaign these days, that’s probably where you need to be.
[25:57] Mike: Uh huh.
[25:58] Rob: It just occurred to me we have not mentioned MicroConfPics.com. If people go there, there’s a picture slideshow and it was basically any picture that was tweeted with a hash tag MicroConf is added to that slideshow. And that was provided for us by Chris at Montabe, montabe.com and he’s a Micropreneur Academy member and he has this product called Montabe that allows you to have people basically just submit photos in to the stream. And it’s pretty cool. It’s — I don’t know if you sipped it through but I was watching it while I was waiting for my flight and there’s a lot of good stuff, just speakers and there’s some other random stuff for like people, you know, saying “On my way out of MicroConf” and so it’s a picture of, you know, the gas station or something but there are some good ones in there.
[26:38] Mike: I’m looking at it now. It’s pretty awesome seeing all that stuff —
[26:41] Rob: Yeah.
[26:41] Mike: … on there.
[26:42] Rob: Won’t leave it up till I think till next year, you know.
[26:44] Mike: Yeah.
[26:44] Rob: There’s a longer URL. It’s like montabe.com/ you know, whatever but we just have MicroConfPics.com directing there.
[26:50] Mike: Right.
[26:51] Rob: When I talk to people about what they thought was the most inspirational talk because I guess you should back up and say like one of the first things that I said when the conference open was you should get — I want you to get at least one piece of inspiration and three actionable takeaways from the conference. So do that, write them down and then at the end, I’m going to ask people about it. And so then at the very end we got, you know, hands raised and people are calling out all these things that they were going to do next week based on what they’ve learned at the conference whether from the speakers, side conversation or whatever.
[27:16] And so in asking about the inspirational stuff, a lot of people mentioned Adii. Adii is the founder of WooThemes. A lot of folks use it. We use it in the academy. And he had flown in from South Africa. It was like 31 hours of travel each way. And he had a great story just of really bootstrapping and starting small and then getting big very quickly. He had a big growth curve and even like the week before MicroConf, they basically got hacked. Someone deleted everything from their servers including all their backups and he almost didn’t come in to MicroConf but he did and he adjusted his talks so that it included some stuff about his hack. It turns out they move to WP engine because, you know, they’ve been hacked so they moved over there and then they got DDOS at on WP Engine so it took some of their servers down.
[28:00] So we had basically speakers because Jason Cohen, you know, is the founder of WP Engine and two speakers who had basically had sites down within the day or two before MicroConf and I told them both, you know, you and I both told them like “You guys don’t need to be here if you need to go take care business.” But they had their teams on it. That was a cool story to hear. And neat to see that they were able to come in and I felt like they were enjoying themselves and weren’t too hung up on that. And obviously, you know, everyone is back up now. And to summarize like Adii’s — the title of his talk was “How I went from zero to seven figures in 13 months”. So that’s pretty, pretty impressive.
[28:34] Originally talked with, it was like two years but then when he looked, he said, oh it was only 13 months. And there were a couple of volunteers I really wanted to thank. Robert Graham, he’s an academy member. He volunteered to help out with the AV stuff. Just hope to getting people miked up in with the sound. And then Dave Rodenbaugh who was the photographer last year also an academy member and listener of the podcast and such, he helped out. He took all of the official pictures and I don’t think those are on MicroConfPics yet but once I get them from him, I will submit them because that will be — he took like the speaker group photo and you know, bunch of stuff on stage and really had the run of the place.
[29:12] And so we had no plans. We had a welcome reception Sunday night. WildBit sponsored something Monday night. And then we knew that we would throw something together Tuesday night but it was like two hours beforehand and we walked in to this sports bar and basically said, “Can we come in here in two hours throw down an American Express and get a 120 people in here?” and they told us yes. So we round up going in there, having some drinks, chatting and just kind of wrapping up the conference and exchanging ideas and thoughts and such. What was your favorite part of that, that part of the evening?
[29:40] Mike: I would say that it was near the end of the tab that we put together where I got an itemized bill for everything that if I look around, I’m sure that I still have it but it was probably about three or four feet long and there’s — there’s actually a picture of it they got tweeted out and it’s on that on the Montabe site at MicroConfPics.com. But it shows me just holding it up and it’s, I don’t know, down to like my waist easy. [Laughter]
[30:06] Rob: Yeah, I like that. Eliza Brock that one —
[30:08] Mike: Yeah, I think so. Speaking of Eliza, she also — she made this really, really cool little notebooks. She had those made and sent them over to the hotel to hand out to everybody. And it’s this tiny red notebooks and they say “Think Small” on them.
[30:23] Rob: Yup. And there are like nice leather bound. She got in touch with us in advance and asked if she could basically sponsor the conference in that way and she put, you know, business card in there. She’s a Ruby developer I’m thinking. We got more positive feedback about that than probably any other giveaway I thought. I mean people are really taking them. My wife is still has hers and is using it as a notebook. She really liked it.
[30:42] Mike: Yeah, I used it for throughout the conference just because I needed something to, you know, write down all of — all the different giveaways and things like that so that, you know, I wouldn’t forget them when we were up on stage and everything else. And you know, she made various notes about different things I want to make sure we covered.
[30:56] Rob: Typically you get this big bag and it’s full of a lot of paper and a lot of, I don’t know, t-shirts and other books and stuff and we do all almost all digital aside from that little notebook we did. And we talked about it quite a bit more the first year but I don’t anyone really ask the second year but we just do that because we don’t want to create a bunch of waste, right? We don’t want people throwing the bag away and throwing the t-shirt away and all that stuff.
[31:16] Mike: Yeah, I mean there’s not much point to, you know, conferences generate a lot of waste so there’s not much point to giving people stuff that you know is just going to end up in the garbage. And I see that in other conferences I’ve gone to where I get a bag and you know, some t-shirts or books or things like that and I look at most of it and I’m just like I’m not really crazy about any of the stuff. So, we’d tried to, you know, minimize as much of the impacts as we can. And there’s a couple of different ways we do that and obviously, one, we don’t give away things that are just going to ultimately end up in a trash. And the second thing is that the conference badge holders that we used, they’re actually biodegradable.
[31:53] Rob: That’s right. I brought them back last year and composted them.
[31:56] Mike: Uh huh.
[31:57] Rob: I was just reminded, my wife came just for 24 hours and we left our kids with some friends. And so she came out. She did my intro, right? She introed me before my talk and we got a lot of positive feedback about that. And then [Laughter], people were saying, she’s a psychologist, and they were saying that she should talk next year. And then I saw a thread on Twitter and it started getting retweeted. And it was like, “I want to see Mrs. Rob Walling.” [Laughter] And this was @robwalling, you know, that’s my Twitter name. And someone says, “I want to see Mrs. @robwalling talking next year about the Psychology Entrepreneurship.” And then one was like, “I want to see Mrs. Rob Walling talking next year about the Psychology of Raising a Family and how to do that and you know, be an entrepreneur.” And it was pretty cool. I would actually — and then Hiten actually came up and he was saying like, “You should write a book” and it was kind of fun. Her intro kind of blew me away because I totally did not expect the heartfelt intro she gave.
[32:37] Mike: Uh huh. Yeah and that kind of brings up something else we didn’t, you know, talk about so far is that the conference itself, even among the speakers, it was very family-oriented. That’s not the vibe that you get from most of other conference. I mean honestly from any other conferences I’ve ever been to, it’s just not the vibe you get from them.
[32:37] Rob: That is interesting like because basically, didn’t Jason Cohen have a picture of his daughter? Yes because he talked about one of her toys broke and it fit in to that context of the conversation. And then almost every — every speaker after that had a picture of their child. But MicroConf is not like the YC crowd, the Y Combinator crowd. It is more people 25 to 45, maybe a little older. It’s that range, right? Because of most of us have families, have a mortgage, are not in the position to raise venture capital. I mean that’s why we’re doing it. And so it’s people who are going to be more likely to listen to this podcast rather than, you know, this week in Startups with Jason Calacanis or to apply for YC funding and be able to live on Ramen and then move to Boston for three months.
[33:46] And I think I got several attendees. I had them tell me that they were maybe surprised by that, that they thought they would come and it would be, you know, more of like the Startup funded-type of conference and just the entire attendee-based was different.
[33:59] Mike: A couple of speakers made it a point to mention that, you know, the reason we do this isn’t necessarily to get rich. It’s to, you know, make a living and support our families and you know, so that they can in turn support us. I mean making money is great and all but it’s not necessarily the “and all be all” of why you do what you do. I mean it makes for a nice score card I guess but ultimately, there’s a lot of things in life that are much more important than money.
[34:23] Rob: Right. That comes back to the freedom and the lifestyle, right? And that’s what we — I mean we don’t — we don’t bang on the lifestyle there in too much because it’s kind of cliché these days. But we do, you and I do talk a lot about like putting your, basically putting your life before your business and using your business as a way to support that and they provide the frame for you and you know, your family and just flexibility and the happiness you can get from that without having to go after this huge eight figure pay out or raise, you know, huge amounts of money and put your family through the ring or during — during the course of it.
[34:54] Mike: Yeah, that’s not something I think I could do. I mean I’ve considered in the past going after funding but, you know, looking back on it, I really don’t think that it’s something that I could realistically do.
[35:06] Rob: I try — we tried to raise angel funding. I say we, there’s a couple of a MBAs I met in New Haven. We tried to raise angel funding a couple of times, it didn’t work. And then Y Combinator, I applied and got to the second round. I mean I was in that whole cycle thing, you know, that’s back in 2007. And these days, it would be easier. I bet, you know, I wouldn’t have a hard of a time raising funding but I just don’t — that’s just not the path that I think either of us want to travel these days and obviously, there are a lot of folks that agree with us because MicroConf is the conference for self-funded startups and single founders. It’s not about raising money. It is about building businesses that are profitable and that don’t require that kind of sacrifice to your life in order to get them going.
[35:45] Mike: And I think that’s what resonates with so many people. I mean I think that’s why we’re able to go to a conference for a 40% year over year and it looks like conceivably we could probably grow out more if we really wanted to but there’s other considerations there as well.
[35:59] Rob: What do you think we could improve next year or what are the things you thought while we were doing it like hey, this isn’t working or we should add this or that?
[36:07] Mike: Ugh, tough question.
[36:08] Rob: Because we did everything so perfect.
[36:10] Mike: No. You know, it’s interesting because Monday night after the party that WildBit had thrown at Rumor, I was talking with a bunch of people there specifically about the conference and they said that this year’s conference was so much better than last year’s. And I started pushing for information skill. I started asking, you know, what makes it better, why is this year better than last year. And nobody can give me a concrete answer for anything. I mean obviously —
[36:36] Rob: That makes it hard.
[36:37] Mike: The venue itself was obviously an upgrade and I asked, well, does everything seem better because the venue is better. And the answer was no but, you know, nobody could really put their finger on exactly what made things better. You know, maybe it had something to do with the speaker line up, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was the location. Maybe it was the atmosphere. I mean because the atmosphere at the Hard Rock is significantly different than it was at the Riviera. So I tried to dig in and find those things. I think it’s probably going to take some time because I don’t have anything at the top of my head that I can come up with that says, you know, we screw this up. It’d be nice to have a coordinator and that’s part of what, you know, raising the price with allow us to do is to have a coordinator so that we can spend our time connecting people together rather than managing and running the conference itself.
[37:25] Rob: Yeah, I would agree. Now, we’re going to be sending surveys out to the attendees. So that’ll help us well getting more feedback. I got lot of in person feedback and some via e-mail and most of it was from stuff that was in my head or it was — it’s minor tweaks. It’s like, “Oh, you should maybe add a panel here. You should maybe do some shorter talks here and there.” It was stuff that I think could visibly make it better but would also be experimental. It’s not like, “Oh there was a big …” Like last year was year, it was obvious that the talks, they were too long, they were back-to-back, there weren’t enough breaks. I mean I feel like we fixed that this year, you know, we shorten them down and we made a lot of tweaks [0:38:00] that I think really improve the experience at the conference. I think the venue was also a lot better. The room was just it had a better feel to it. It was tight but I thought that was cool. I thought there was a lot of energy in the room because it wasn’t this huge open space like last year’s conference room was.
[38:15] Mike: Yeah, I think that that’s definitely something that I think we should maintain is making sure that the space is kind of tight. I mean not that we really have much choice about it this year just because the space was — I mean that they had available so the things really worked out in that regard but definitely having only — what do we have? I think three seats available in the entire place and that was it. And that definitely help with the vibe and the atmosphere of the place.
[38:41] Rob: Yeah, so I guess we have to take a look at the surveys once we get them back. Obviously we do already have a running list of potential speakers for next year, some thoughts on some tweaks and minor improvements but overall, man, you know, I’m glad it’s over this year and I had a blast, obviously, a lot of work. Are you up for doing it again next year?
[39:00] Mike: Yeah, I am. It’s interesting because how was it? It was probably about three days after the conference I got — I was really depressed like all weekend. I’m like, oh the conference is over and I’ve got — I’m really energized and you know, motivated that I’ve got all the great ideas and stuff. And I think I was depressed because I’m like, oh no, where do I start? [Laughter]
[39:20] Rob: Yeah.
[39:20] Mike: I think that was it —
[39:21] Rob: That makes sense.
[39:21] Mike: … more than anything else. It was — it took me I think most of the weekend to get out of it. I think yesterday I kind of solidify things and today’s even much, much better than that. So I’m at the point now where I’m like, kind of gone whole again but it really took a few days for me to kind of swing out of that. And I don’t know why. I mean that just seems countered through to me. I didn’t expect that at all.
[39:41] Rob: I think I went to the same process. I think maybe I was — I had a little easier time because I took a lot of things people said and channeled it directly in to like, “What am I going to do with HitTail?” because HitTail has been my goal project to work on once MicroConf was done. So I was already thinking in those terms. So it’s maybe a little easier to translate that. But I agree. It took me [0:40:00] — I mean jeez, my wife and I actually went on, well with the kids, went to Yosemite just drop off a hat and she’s like “Let’s go up. It’s about two hours from here.” And so we went up and then we just stayed and we stayed until through Monday. During that time, it was just kind of rest and relaxation to kind of regroup. And so it was almost a week after MicroConf before I could even sit down and to e-mail again. And of course, I had I don’t know 400 unread e-mails or something but there’s definitely some recovery time afterwards to kind of regroup because I think you’d just have so much going on in your head, you know, thinking about the conference and just try to participate and provide value and get some value yourself.
[40:34] Mike: Yeah, I was listening to episode 74. I think it was last week or the week before. You know, we were talking about the number of things that we each had that we were working and I’ve said that after MicroConf is basically over and it drops off our list of things to do and I don’t know what I was thinking saying that because all the stuff now that MicroConf is over that still needs to get done. [Laughter]
[40:55] Rob: All the clean up by now, me too. I’m reimbursing speakers and you’re dealing with sponsors and thanking, I mean, doing all that stuff. Yeah, there’s still another, another week or two of it.
[41:00] [music]
[41:07] Mike: If anyone is interested in signing up for the MicroConf mailing list, go to microconf.com and we’re already taking e-mails for the launch for next year. And as Rob said earlier, I mean unless you’re on that list, chances are good that, you know, tickets are going to be gone by the time they get out to I call it the General Press of people out there.
[41:27] Rob: And if you have a question or comment, please call it in to our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or you can e-mail it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes if you just search for Startups or you can subscribe via RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com where you’ll also find a transcript to each episode. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
Episode 79 | Top 5 Reasons Your Business Will Fail
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups For The Rest of Us: Episode 79.
[00:03] [music]
[00:11] Rob: Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast to help developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching the Startups whether you built your first one or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:20] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:20] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. It’s MicroConf day. What’s the word this week, Mike?
[00:29] Mike: Beer makes you smarter. [Laughter]
[00:30] Rob: Wait, what? I’m confused.
[00:32] Mike: I’ve saw this article and it basically said that beer makes you smarter. And it was based on — pretty sure it was a formal study from the University of Illinois in Chicago. And they basically took 40 participants and took 20 of them and gave them a couple of beers before putting them in to this game and then challenge them to — they’ve give them three words and a series and then they would challenge them to name a forth word. And the people who had a couple of beers were dramatically better at naming that forth word than the people who hadn’t.
[01:03] Rob: Right. So, it doesn’t actually make you smarter. It makes you better at this very specific task.
[01:08 ] Mike: Yeah, it — and they actually thought that it had a lot to do with coming up with ideas. If you have a couple of drinks then and there’s something about the way that, you know, the chemicals react within your brain that make you better at problem solving. I saw a variation of this particular article someplace else that had some different theories on it. So there was nothing actually concrete on it and I’m sure that it would take much more studies which I would be more than happy to part take in. But —
[01:33] Rob: Me — [Laughter] This fall off — this falls in line with something I’ve read years ago and something I’ve done quite a bit is when I want to sit down and do writing and I really want to get a lot done in 10 in the evenings especially, I will have a glass — one to two glasses of red wine to help me do the first draft and just get it out unedited and then when I revised, I will tend to want to be more empt and really in to the material more detail-oriented. And that’s when I do like a cup of coffee or some kind of caffeine [0:02:00]. And I read years ago that it’s like one glass of red wine to write, one glass of coffee or a cup of coffee to revise. And now I’m seeing other people, I think Tim Ferriss was on the TV show the other day called A Day In The Life on Hulu. And he does the same thing. He’s basically like I have one to two glasses of red wine in the evening right before I start my writing. And I thought it was, that covers this I mean this fits in to that, right? It’s the whole creativity and kind of left brain versus right brain like activating certain censors. I’m sure it’s what it does.
[02:26] Mike: Yeah. I’ve found that I’ve been able to like if I have a couple of beers, I’ll be sitting and writing code and stuff. And I’ll be — I haven’t measured it but I feel like I’m a lot more productive could be just the beer talk. [Laughter]
[02:37] Rob: Right.
[02:38] [music]
[02:41] Mike: As you were saying, today is MicroConf. What’s the — what’s the word on your — your end?
[02:44] Rob: Today is MicroConf. We obviously recorded a week earlier but actually it’s going live on the day that the MicroConf is happening. So hopefully, we’re having fun right now and everything is going well. There may be a week off next week and then the week after, we’ll come back with our — our MicroConf wrap up episode. And I also wanted to give a shout out to Steve at digitaltoolfactory.net and actually a thanks because he talked about one of our episodes and he basically said I love the title, “Startups for the Rest of Us has the greatest quote ever on entrepreneurship”. [Laughter] And the quote was from a couple of episodes ago and it was the “Employees complain entrepreneurs to get it done”. So that was cool. Thanks for quoting us there, Steve.
[03:20] And then the other thing, there were several comments on episodes 77 and 78. These are on the actual blog sites startupsfortherestofus.com. And Justin Jackson said a couple of things based on we were talking about forums and CRM Software and such. And he — he reminded us that Basecamp isn’t CRM Software. It’s Highrise with the CRM Software. Basecamp is Project Management. So, we just misspoke there. And then the other thing he said is that we’re making assumptions about visiting a competitor who is an — who has an outdated website. He said that they just updated their site, which they haven’t really touched since 2004. What were they doing? Serving customers. “Our business was growing so fast from referrals.” They literally didn’t have time to update it. So they’re at industrymailout.com.
[04:05] And I have — I have some thoughts on that because I still think — I think it depends on whether your market is online or offline —
[04:11] Mike: Right.
[04:11] Rob: As other — you can tell, you know, if that business is really hitting it and whether you can out market them online. If their site really is old and they’re growing by referral, that’s good for them. But if — if there is demand online and they’re not going after it, I do still think that what you said which was, you know, old sites can be an indicator that they’ve kind of check out their online marketing and I think there could be room for you.
[04:32] Mike: Yeah and again, I mean that list that we talked about was just things that you can look at. I mean, not any single one of them is going to be concrete proof that you’re going to be able to evaluate them effectively. I mean you really have to combine a bunch of different things before you can come to those decisions. But again, it goes back to beating them online and if their site hasn’t been updated, it doesn’t matter how well they’re doing offline, you know, the fact is you should be able to beat them with the online marketing. But — I mean he does bring up a very valid point that if they’re doing great business offline, then it probably doesn’t take much more than a site redesign for them to kind of bump themselves up in the search engine rankings especially if they’ve had a site for a while.
[05:10] Rob: Yeah. So thanks, Justin for that comment. We appreciate everyone who’s — who’s participating whether they’re e-mailing us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, calling in to our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or posting to the blog.
[05:25] Mike: Are you front loading that stuff now?
[05:27] Rob: I —
[05:27] Mike: [Laughter]
[05:28] Rob: It’s a one final comment. This was on episode 78 and it was by Mark Stephens. This was the episode titled Things You Should Give Up. And he said, “One thing I would add to your list of things to give-up (especially for startups) is to give up the need for everything to be perfect. Some things just need to be okay and you can then focus your efforts for perfection where it matters. Geoffrey Moore did a brilliant talk on this a few years ago at Business of Software.”
[05:50] Mike: That’s a fantastic point. [Laughter]
[05:52] Rob: I know. I know this.
[05:52] Mike: Really, really is.
[05:53] Rob: That’s a good one. Yeah, we should’ve maybe if we had time we could added a few more to the list but I second that thought.
[06:00] [music]
[06:02] Mike: Today we’re going to be talking about the top five reasons that your business fail. When you talk about Startups, the issues of success and failure tend to come up. And what we’re going to be focusing today on is business failure rather than product failure. There’s nothing inherently wrong with your product idea failing but when the business itself fails, there’s fundamental flaws in the execution of the business and the business going after or certain products.
[06:26] So, that’s kind of the — just to what we’re trying to get at today is that there’s differences between product failure and business failure. And we’re focusing today on business failure.
[06:34] Rob: Are you — are you talking about like if a business has multiple products that one of them can fail or you’re talking about just a single product not working, doesn’t mean that your business fails, you can launch another one?
[06:45] Mike: Yeah, sort of. So if you have — if you start a business and you start pursuing a product and that product fails for whatever reason, you can pivot and go to a new product or you can launch a variation of that product or a completely new product. And your business hasn’t failed but the product has but that’s okay. I mean, building and launching product is kind of a process that you have to go through and some products are going to do well and some of them aren’t. But you obviously want to minimize the product failures as much as possible because that minimizes the amount of time that you have to, I guess meander through business trying to figure out which products are going to do well in keeping business and which ones aren’t.
[07:22] But if you have fundamental flaws in your business and in the execution of the plans for those different products, then you’re going to have much more serious issues and it doesn’t matter what products you have. Then you’re eventually going to fail because the business itself fails. It’s not necessarily the product failing.
[07:39] Rob: Yeah, let’s dive in.
[07:40] Mike: The first reason that businesses will fail is because you don’t actually get started. And this one I think a lot of people fall in to this. Too many people spend too much time building up the idea of a business rather than actually building the business itself. And we talked about some of these things back in episode 71 where we talked about all the different things that you shouldn’t pay for early on in the business. And by doing all of those things instead of trying to build the business and build the products that you need to launch, then you’re never actually building the business itself.
[08:10] Rob: Yeah, this reminds me — I published a post a couple of years ago now probably and it was called Lesser Known Traits of Successful Founders or something. And one of the traits that I listed was how quickly do you respond to opportunity. And I feel like that has a lot to do with people who I’ve seen succeed, right? It’s — there’s a difference between sitting with a notebook and making list of 10, 20, 50 business ideas over the course of many years which I used to do and I think a lot of wannabe founders are guilty of doing. And I don’t say wannabe in the native way, I really just mean people who want to start companies. I think that it’s more about, you know, having a bunch of ideas and really thinking them through too far before you actually just start putting some feet on the ground and you start talking to customers and get an idea of people want to do it.
[08:57] I’m actually, you know, in typical entrepreneur fashion, I have my notebook and even in the last week I’ve been adding new business ideas, new product ideas to it as I’ve read a few essays that have got me thinking and already I’m looking at them and saying what can I do this week or next maybe after MicroConf that can give me an idea of whether or not this will succeed without me mauling them over for six months like I used to like. Over analysis is just — it’s so painful and it’s so, so common I think with a lot of us.
[09:27] Mike: It’s something else that goes along with that that you didn’t directly mentioned was if I need too much time trying to think of the perfect idea because it’s going to be really difficult to find the perfect idea these days. I mean you’ve mentioned it another of times on previous podcast where the best time you started business was five years ago and then the next best time was four years ago. I mean, you really — you’d just need to get started and if you’re not getting started, then you never going to get anywhere.
[09:51] So, number two on the list is giving up too early. This is the almost the opposite of not getting started. It’s just giving up way too early. When you run in the hard times, you basically have two options. You have to either give up or you push through. And it’s a lot easier to give up than to push through as hard times.
[10:07] Rob: This is a very tough question to answer of whether or not you should give up or push through when you hit a road block. And I’ve actually been having conversations with a few different entrepreneurs over the past couple of months, the guys who were just getting started. They’re early in idea phase. Some of them had written code launch and then got their initial customer base and realized that they needed to pivot. Basically that it wasn’t a viable business even though you had a market research show that it was. There’s obviously a lot of uncertainty but I would say that there’s a lot of art in there being entrepreneur. But others are still in the idea phase and the question that comes up most often is when should I dump this idea. There’s no answer, right? I mean it depends. There’s no one answer.
[10:48] The biggest realization that I’ve had as I’ve talked to these guys is that sitting there, having them go often do some research, pound up the numbers, give it some thought, talk to some customers and then come back to me and have a conversation. For me to then try to get to the meat of the question has worked out really well. And the reason is because the person doing, the entrepreneur doing the research is too close to the problem. They can’t actually see the forest for the trees and I’m removed enough from it. I haven’t done all the research. I haven’t spend only hours in it but then I’m basically able to ask of these the key questions and we can sit there together and obviously not making the decisions for these guys but to kind of push them in the direction of doing some more research or maybe think about when they are really passionate about the idea. And almost — there’s almost never a yes or no. It’s almost always comes down to if you’re really passionate about this and you really think it can succeed, then even though some of the signs are saying no, you should do it.
[11:44] And then on the flip side, there are even some minor road blocks here and you just kind of aren’t that interested in the idea? Maybe if you found out that the idea is viable and there is a market for it but it’s going to require a lot of say cold calling or in person sale and you’ve just not or not sure you want to do that, then maybe even though it could [0:12:00] be a viable business, maybe you should think about not doing it. And that’s typically where it winds up, right? It winds up being a personal choice because it’s almost never a yes or no. It’s more option than not a weighing of different positive and negative factors. And getting that list of positive and negative factors on to a piece of paper is challenging but I really recommend the two-person approach that would kind of stumbled upon here in the past few months.
[12:23] Mike: And just to be clear of what you’ve said so far is completely focused on giving up or not as opposed to taking the product and pivoting, right?
[12:31] Rob: Yeah, that’s right. So that’s also been part of the conversation. These days, I would never — almost never tell an entrepreneur to totally give up not unless you really don’t want to be a founder anymore. To me, that’s — that’s when you give up but almost — in almost all cases, it’s been pivoting the thing. And even, you know, one guy like pivoted from something to help with documentation and he was almost pivoting, going to pivot like in to a completely different vertical but there was at least some code base he was going to reuse and there was some knowledge that he had learned about how businesses make purchasing decisions that he had learned by talking through some initial prospects and the couple of customers that they did purchased from them. So, it’s really — I guess I’ve heard the phrase like a pivot is just, you know, a switch to another product idea and a leap I think is when you really probably keep the same company shell but you just almost revamp the product entirely, maybe moving in to a completely different product.
[13:19] So, I think if we say that giving up is doing a leap or doing a pivot, then — then that’s what more of what I’ve been talking about. I haven’t been telling anyone to give up being a founder.
[13:27] Mike: The number three on this list was being unable to pivot. But again going back to the original topic for this particular podcast, it was giving up too early on a business, not necessarily on the products because products, you can — you can obviously give up on a product because as you said it just doesn’t appeal to you anymore. But if business itself and running the business doesn’t appeal to you anymore, then that’s, I would say a much more serious fundamental issue than just not being interested in the product.
[13:54] Rob: Yeah, this actually relates back to another one I’ve post Lesser Known Traits of Successful Founders that I’ve mentioned and it’s how flexible are you. You know, if you’re married to a product idea or business idea and you’ve been following it for — in your head for years, it’s hard to let it go. You become married to it and that’s a real dangerous especially with how quickly things move these days. And so having the flexibility to just say I’ve built this awesome, you know, whatever it is a CMS or invoicing software and it’s totally not working out in this vertical and I’m just going to switch and I’m going to now do it for mortgage brokers. To be able to do that, if it’s the right business decision, it can be a real indicator of whether or not you’re going to succeed as a founder.
[14:33] I think every startups story that you read involves several adjustments to the vision. And even though you read and you think oh PayPal and Netflix and all these companies that achieved big success where with that from the start Facebook is the same way. When you really read the story and you get in to it and you heard the founders talking about it, they almost all started as pretty different ideas then they’ve eventually round up and the founders were smart enough to noticed that they needed to change course and they had the flexibility and the willingness to perhaps give a part of their initial vision or all of their initial vision when they realized that, you know, another part of the business was essentially taking off.
[15:11] Mike: So number four on the list is you don’t make the business a priority. And I think this trap is really easy to fall in to for a lot of people especially when you’re first getting started because you always have time down the road and if you keep telling yourself that there will be time later, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it and you don’t make time for the business if you don’t make the business itself a priority for yourself, it just never going to happen. I mean, you really need to buckle down and execute on things because that’s insanely important for being successful.
[15:39] Rob: And I think the big question that, you know, you should ask yourself if you can start to this, “Can you focus long enough to deliver? Are you focusing on the business or are you letting other things become a priority?” We talked about in the past about how it’s really fun to watch TV and go hang out with friends at Happy Hour but those friends typically aren’t the ones that are starting a business on the side and so, if you have a 9 to 5 and you want to start a business and you want to go out every night, something has to give.
[16:04] The other thing I’m seeing is the phase of innovation and the phase of how fast things are moving, it feels to me like it’s accelerating even more. Even in boring niches where there was no competition 5, 7 years ago. They’re starting to be some competition and then as you edge in to even minorly interesting niches, there’s a lot more competition and that was a couple of years ago. And then as you get into the bay hot tech areas, you look at things like Pinterest or any type of Facebook or location-based mobile apps, all that stuff.
[16:35] Like if you wait 30 days, the landscape has changed substantially enough but if you have not acted quickly and gotten something out, you may have miss the boat. It’s that fast like it’s a matter of months before the really hot niches are changing and we don’t necessarily recommend getting in to the hot niches because they do change so fast and they tend to have people working 24/7 on a move, raise funding and all kinds of stuff. But as I said, this trickles all the way down and even in the medium to low interest niches that aren’t that sexy, they’re changing so fast that you really need to think about how quickly you can move and get to market these days.
[17:09] Mike: And the last reason your business will fail is because you aren’t building processes for your business. This goes back more to making sure that you’re building things that can be repeated. You know, you need to build a business process for handling whatever it is that it can be handed off to somebody else to be repeated and that comes to just about anything whether it’s your sales process, your funnels, the code itself, I mean what you’re trying to do when you’re building your business is build processes that can be followed that can later be skilled and by skilled I mean either hand them off to somebody else so that one other person does them or you handed it off to a computer. But then you take those things and you can essentially off load them from yourselves so you can concentrate on other things.
[17:51] Rob: Have you heard the term “Earn out”?
[17:53] Mike: I have heard the term, I don’t recall specifically what it is.
[17:56] Rob: So an earn out is if you sell your business and the acquiring company makes you stick around for what’s called an earn out.
[18:04] Mike: Oh yes. Yup.
[18:05] Rob: So you get some of the money upfront and then if you stick around for two years, you get another big check or one year, you know, whatever the term they decided. And I was actually talking to a founder whose business got acquired probably about a year ago now. I was just e-mailing with him this week and he said that they had so many processes in place and so much of the stuff was — I won’t say automated but it was basically documented and enough was automated that he was able to walk away with the holy grill of acquisitions which is where you get your money and you walk away the day of the sale closes. That’s very rare.
[18:38] The thing is these processes, they don’t just make your life easier while you’re running your business. They actually make you way more attractive to an acquiring company if you ever want to sell it and it will basically increase your revenue, your income per hour work. Because the more you automate, the less you have to work in your business and the more you can really, you know, work on your businesses as Michael Gerber says.
[19:00] There is the book called Built To Sell. It’s called as like a parable, like just a story of this guy who’s selling his business and when I first started listening to it, I kind of groaned like this is going to be terribly cheesy but it turns out by the end I was really rooting for the guy in the story. The author covers things that you should do if you ever plan on selling your business and how to make it more saleable and talks about getting repeatable processes and getting paid in advance and having recurring revenue and being specialized and just some things like that.
[19:25] It’s pretty sure a book. It’s worth to read but the most important thing I took away from it is even if I don’t want to sell my businesses, all of the things he says in there are ways to make your business more efficient and just make it a better business for you to run. So that you can spend your time doing things that are more interesting to you that could include maybe potentially, you know, starting launching other product line or doing something else that is fun. I mean as entrepreneurs we’re creators and we want to do the new stuff and so, you don’t want to sit there day to day doing things that you could essentially just processes for and hand off to other people peacefully.
[19:56] Mike: Yeah and everything that you said was kind of a whole point of that is, you know, if you’re putting these processes in place, then those processes can – they can be followed by you but they could be followed by somebody else or by one or more people that just scale out and help make your business that much more profitable so you’re working, as you said, on your business as supposed to in it.
[20:16] Rob: So, hey Mike. I want to add one other. I know we said top 5 reasons but one occurred to me as we were talking. And it’s one – we definitely covered this before because it’s more of a psychological or mind set one. But the question I throw out is do you have confidence in your ability to execute? The question is not “Can you execute?” Because I believe most people can execute on ideas and most people can eventually be successful if they work hard enough at it and trying of ideas that will eventually happen.
[20:42] The question is do you have confidence in your ability to execute? Do you really believe that you can do this? And are you going to stick around after the first 6-month low, you know, where your sales drop, do you believe that you can correct that? Because if you don’t, then the odds are that you are going to do number two which was give up too early because the less confidence you have in your ability to execute, then the more likelier are going to be to basically close up shop.
[21:07] Mike: Yeah, I found there were things that I’m either not interested in doing or that I feel like I don’t have the ability or knowledge to do it. I tend to procrastinate with those things and put them off in a way that’s not much different than just giving up. I mean, it’s amazing how little time that it actually takes once I’ve made those decisions to buckle down and do it. There was something I was trying to get through, I don’t know, maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago and I kept putting it off and putting it off and then finally I just said “Look, I got to get this done.” And I just sat down and did it and it took me like two hours to do.
[21:39] Rob: Yeah. Have those all the time and so frustrating. It is crazy, huh, when you’re gifted at something or when you’re skilled at it like writing code, I think that’s why we all fallen to the developer’s trap of I can write codes so I’m going to go build the product because that’s what I know had to do whereas the marketing staff talking to customers, market research, whatever, you know, all these other things are going to building the product that may in fact be more involved with the success of the product than the actual code you’re going to write. We ignore that because we procrastinate.
[22:06] I think we do it on purpose as much as just maybe not having confidence in our ability to execute on these things or feeling like you’re wasting time because learning is time consuming. I mean if you go out and start doing talking to customers and you’re not very good at it, you almost feel like “Oh, I’m just wasting my time. I could be back home, you know, just writing tens of thousands of lines of code.” It’s so much more efficient but I mean as we know, it’s like yeah, it’s efficient unless you’re building something no one wants and the way to find out if they want it is by talking to those customers.
[22:34] Mike: You know, that’s one of the challenges that you kind of have to overcome is just buckling down and working through those tough times or do you have confidence in your abilities actually execute on those things.
[22:44] Rob: I think what’s interesting is you don’t necessarily have to have like the utmost confidence and I am a brilliant marketer if you’ve never done it, you know, or I am great at customer development if you’ve never done it. But you have a confidence in your ability to go over on those things.
[22:56] Mike: I almost want to say that even comes to that, I would almost say that it comes down to your ability and willingness to go out on the limb and actually making attempt and if you’re making an attempt then chances are good that you’re probably doing more than the guy next to you.
[23:12] Rob: Yeah right. When you’re reading Hacker News articles, it is probably equivalent to two weeks of actually launching a startup. Right? I mean I’m making up numbers —
[23:21] Mike: [Laughter]
[23:22] Rob: … a little bit of something like that, it’s like a 100 to 1 ratio of the amount of progress and learning and understanding you will achieve by actually doing it and failing than you would by just reading about other people doing it and failing.
[23:35] Mike: Or just being mediocre at them and you don’t even have to be the best in the world at it as long as you’re actually trying it and that you are making progress. I mean, that’s the important thing as you’re making progress towards those things.
[23:46] Rob: Yeah and if you look back at anyone’s story, yours and mine included, I had a number, I think yeah, I never actually set the timeline out until I was on Mixergy a couple of months ago but it was like I had five or six failed ideas that I actually launched. I had ten more that I met, you know, [0:24:00] never been satellite the day that I had mentioned but I had a number that I spent months and months building and then launch and they failed before I have my first success. And you even look at these gaming companies that have sold for hundreds of millions recently but bottom line is like OMGPOP which is sold for a hundred something million. They had nothing in the bank like the dude had just laid off a half of his staff and he add $1800 in the bank and they had been around for six years and had 15 failed games and then this one was the fastest growing iPhone app ever in terms of downloads.
[24:31] Now, that’s hitting the startup lottery in a way and getting acquired but the bottom line is if you didn’t have skin in the game and if you didn’t keep coming back at it and have some failures, you know, that wouldn’t have happened. And the same thing with Rovio. Rovio had over or at least 15 games in mobile games and that kind of stuff. And by all accounts, they were not doing that well before Angry Birds and then Angry Birds is, you know, it’s basically a multi-billion dollar franchising now. They’re doing a TV show, they’re doing a movie based on Angry Birds, all the licensing. My kid has gummy Angry Birds that he bought at the Candies. I mean, they’re going all out on this thing and again, I’m not saying “Oh, do this and you will have a billion dollars because that’s not the goal. The realization is these guys failed a lot just like all of us have. Very, very few entrepreneurs come out of the gate and — and hit it big their first time. Every entrepreneur I talked to has had failed ideas before they succeed.
[25:23] Mike: Yeah, and even if you look at the — I don’t want to set a gold standard of, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, a lot of the high profile bloggers that you probably write over the years Fog Creek at Joel Spolsky at their home. What was one of their first projects [Phonetic] is I think CityDesk I believe.
[25:38] Rob: CityDesk, yup but it was like a CMS.
[25:39] Mike: Yeah. And that thing failed. I ended buying it at one point because I wanted to see what it was like and you know, started using it for my blog for wall and I was just like “Yeah, there’s just some contents that’s not working out the way that I want it to.” But, you know, that’s one of those examples where you look at somebody like him and say “Well, you know, he’s done all these things over the years. How could he possibly gone wrong? He worked at Microsoft and …” But that right there was one of those failures that, you know, nobody talks about and I think it’s important to realize that everyone has those failures. It’s just a matter of how you react to them.
[26:09] [music]
[26:13] Mike: So I think that about wrap us up. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons.
[26:19] Rob: Hey, did you know there’s a live version of “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt on Youtube?
[26:23] Mike: I did not.
[26:24] Rob: We should totally look it up, yeah, I’ve been seen it on Twitters and people were like they were mentioning that there’s a live version of “We’re Outta Control” on Spotify. I went on Youtube and search for it and they’re performing it live like it’s kind of cool to hear it. Of course I listened to the verse because we never actually play that part. Yeah, so we’ll link it up on the show now and so people can just search Youtube for MoOt “We’re Outta Control” to see that video.
[26:43] Mike: And you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by searching for Startups or via RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 78 | 8 Things You Should Give Up
Show Notes
- Podcast mention on Code My Own Road
- 15 Things You Should Give up to Be Happy
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups For The Rest Of Us: Episode 78.
[00:03] [Music] [Read more…] about Episode 78 | 8 Things You Should Give Up
Episode 77 | How to Determine Competition
Show Notes
- MicroConf 2012
- 37 Signals
- Rob’s book, Start Small Stay Small
- Compete.com
- Archive.org
- UserVoice
- Usenet
- SpyFu
- MixRank
Transcript
[00:00] Child: This is Startups For The Rest Of Us: Episode 77.
[Read more…] about Episode 77 | How to Determine Competition
Episode 76 | Why It’s Easy To Be Great But Hard To Be Consistent
Show Notes
- Rob’s Keyword Tool
- Altiris Training
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 76.
[00:02] [music]
[00:11] Mike: Welcome to the Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching the Start-ups, whether you’ve build your first one 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. So what’s word this week, Rob?
[00:25] Rob: Hey, did you notice the change I’ve made to the intro?
[00:27] Mike: A little bit, yes.
[00:28] Rob: Yeah, I just changed it. But I feel like we need something that’s more broad because I think that in, you know, that we’re 76 episodes in you look at our listener base and it’s not just people launching software products.
[00:38] Mike: Right.
[00:39] Rob: Like it’s far from that. So I feel like we’ll find a better word for the next few weeks.
[00:43] Mike: Yeah. I think, you know, it’s just kind of naturally come out. But I see what you’re saying, I mean because there’s a lot of people who are asking questions with me that are not necessarily software Start-up related or, you know, there are other products or even, you know, I mean we’d — I think last week we got a question from somebody about — they’re asking about physical products.
[01:00] Rob: Yeah, it was now and again, musicians, there’s inventors, there’s lawyers, there’s CPAs. I mean they’re really is — it runs again and so — anyways, hey so yeah quick update for me. I have this revenue goal for HitTail and it was for February. So it was for, two months ago. And when I missed that goal, I was, you know, depressed and disappointed and stuff. And that’s when I had my little– it was about three or four episodes when I kind of had the crisis of faith with HitTail and just talking about revamping it and really coming back to my goals for them such. Well I round up hitting that goal at the end of March except not exactly.
[01:34] [Laughter]
[01:34] Rob: I was actually — no it’s a several thousand dollar goal and I was $20 shy.
[01:38] [Laughter]
[01:38] Rob: So it was pretty brutal. And to make matters worse, I noticed there were two refunds that had been delayed that should had gone through in February that came through in March and they for $9.95 each. But even with those refunds, I was still — I would have been like 26 cents shy.
[01:53] Mike: You should have put up some Google ads sense. You could have at least made like a dollar.
[01:58] [Laughter]
[01:58] Rob: No. But it really made me realize and I was talking to someone about it and saying, you know, it’s like the goal is a big round number but like hitting that round number, doesn’t matter. It’s like being $20 shy of it is close enough. So I’m — I’m actually quite pleased with — with doing that as long as next month goes up from there. I have this weird thing with HitTail because it has annual subscriptions in addition to monthly subscriptions. And it actually makes it kind of a pain.
[02:22] There are some accounting tricks that you’re supposed to perform but they’re fairly time consuming. You’re supposed to take all the annual stuff divided by twelve and spread it out over your revenue over the course of the year but there is just no way I’m going to do that because it’s a manual thing to do at the end of every month. So as a result, I have — you know, so far that’s fairly choppy revenue that will move up and down by several hundred dollars a month. I wanted to always increase essentially, right? That’s the goal. So I’m working on that.
[02:46] Mike: Cool.
[02:46.] Rob: How about you?
[02:47] Mike: Well I’m off this week. So I’m trying to get a bunch of automation systems in place for the year. And I know I’m not going to see the payoff for most these things for a little while but it’ll definitely kind of contribute to the things that I’m doing this year.
[03:00] One of the things that I started doing this past week also is I outsource some of the AuditShark programming. So that will start to pick up this week and next week. And I know it’s going to take some time for the contractor to kind of get up to speed on a lot of the stuff but I feel comfortable with having him do that because he’s the same person I put in charge of putting my form software over and having look at the work that he did, I feel pretty comfortable just kind of hand him this piece and saying, “Here, go to work on it.” And you know, “Here’s some screencast that kind of help you get started. And the intent is to have work on it full time and I know that I can keep him busy for the first seeable future on it because there’s a lot of little details and stuff that need to be taken care of. So I’m looking forward to kind of getting that process going.
[03:45] Rob: That’s crazy. Yeah, that’s just the first time you’ve outsourced any AuditShark development …
[03:49] Mike: Yup.
[03:49] Rob: … right? Because we’ve talked about this in the past.
[03:50] Mike: Yup.
[03:51] Rob: Wow. Congrats. Congrats for the making the stuff.
[03:52] Mike: Yes and most of the stuff that he’s doing is all UI related. I’ve got all the core stuff done but the UI stuff as you know, I mean anything UI related tends to take a while because you have to get things just right. And there’s always these little nuances that you have to deal with. So yeah, I’m looking forward to it though.
[04:07] Rob: That’s cool. Yeah I actually had kind of a cool thing. I think I’m going to be able to lower my hosting cost as I’ve mentioned in the past like the hosting cost for HitTail is almost 2000 bucks because of the massive amount of disc space that I need …
[04:19] Mike: Yup.
[04:20] Rob: As well as quite a bit of RAM and stuff. And so we, my DBA and I, he — like pulled it on a lighter and I work till 2 in the morning one night and we got clearance from our host, from Micolo to basically do a bunch of high intensity work that would really hammer on the SAN — they gave us certain, certain time frame we could do it that really reduced rate because we get billed based on IOPS, based on IO per second that we hit the SAN. So the more volume I send in a month to the disk, the more I pay.
[04:51] You know, I haven’t really gone over in the past but doing — I was basically archiving like 600 million keywords …
[04:58] [Laughter]
[04:59] Rob: For people who had canceled. Yeah, it’s crazy and that just hammers things, right? Because it’s not just moving data, it’s not copying data. It’s actually hitting indexes. It’s writing to logs and it’s copying from one to another. So I got this very tiny window of like 12 hours on a Sunday and we basically just hammered away this thing and they give me a big break on the pricing. And so my database went down. It was 300 gigs before. It’s right around 80 gigs now.
[05:24] So, it feels so much better like all the indexes had been rebuilt. The database is a way faster. I’m going to be able to shrink my hard drive space because I have almost terabyte of SAN of rate 10 SAN high-speed disk or hard drive space. So this is very… That’s why it’s a thousand bucks and it’s all cloud-based.
[05:41] So yeah, I’m going to be able to, hopefully, cut my hosting bill down. I don’t know if I’ll quite get it in half but it’ll be some, you know, it’ll be 30 or 40 percent down. And the nice part is that it goes right to the bottom line like the apps are already profitable so anything that I can cut out of it does improve the probabilities. So, I’m pretty excited about that. It was a lot of work but it was something I knew we’d — we’d only have to be once. Probably once every few years, we’ll have to do that. So it’s a big project. But I’m stoked that it’s done. And actually, the other benefit is I didn’t think we’d be able to add a non-ASCII character support. So meaning right now, we can only support like the Latin languages but I’ve had several folks e-mail me.
[06:19] One guy actually has a Chinese website and it has multiple millions of visits per month which since it hit they’ll charges based on the number of visits you get, this guy is a big — this guy is a “enterprise client” for me. Like he’s — he’ll probably be four figures a month, you know, somewhere between one and three thousand bucks a month just for him to use HitTail. And we got Unicode support in. We’ve made them in to our cards over the weekend. So super stoke had start approaching now. We’ve had cancelations because people, you know, weren’t able to use foreign characters and — excited. I feel like there’s been kind of a couple breakthroughs right in a row.
[06:52] Mike: That’s cool. Did you actually test it with all that and the non-ASCII characters? Because I mean I don’t have any foreign language websites to even test something like that on.
[07:01] Rob: Right. Yeah luckily, I do have — there are some folks in Western Europe who use HitTail still even though it was kind of jacking some of their stuff update, it was readable. It just wasn’t a hundred percent. And so yeah, I’m actually working with them right now to verify because I can’t read the language, right? I don’t know if it’s — it looks okay to me but I don’t — I want to make sure the right characters on the right places.
[07:21] So — so it’s not fully tested but yes, it is. I knew that the data structures are now and if there’s anything messed up, then it’s only going to be some, some code tweaks which is much easier than trying to change a column from, you know, one type to another in a — in an eighty million row database.
[07:35] [Laughter]
[07:36] Rob: So …
[07:37] Mike: That’s funny. Eighty million row database. That’s probably just one — one table or two, isn’t it?
[07:42] Rob: That’s one table. Yeah.
[07:43] [Laughter]
[07:44] Rob: Yeah so it’s a big one.
[07:46] Mike: Yup. Cool. The only other thing I’m doing is wrapping up the MicroConf sponsorships and I’m hoping to wrap everything up with those this coming week and there are might be one or two that kind of slip in under the wire but for most part, I’m just kind of [0:08:00] draw line this Friday and say that’s it. We’re — we’re kind of done and then work with the existing sponsors who’ve signed up to make sure that they’re getting the exposure that they want, that they need for the conference and go from there.
[08:12] Rob: Cool. Yeah, same for me. Most of my staff starting to wrap up until we get right close to it, you know, with all the last minute stuff has to happen but pick up the menus this week and just did some other miscellaneous tasks. So it’s starting to feel good.
[08:24] Mike: Very cool.
[08:25] [music]
[08:28] Rob: This week we’re talking about why it’s easy to be great but hard to be consistent.
[08:32] Mike: That sounds familiar.
[08:33] Rob: And I had a blog post that I wrote with almost the same title. It’s basically based on a quote from Steve Martin and he wrote a book called Born Standing Up. I’ve talked a little about it on the podcast in the past but I want to talk more about it because A, I wanted to hear your thoughts on it and B, I just felt like there’s more to say on this topic than I said in that blog post. So we’ll probably follow the similar outline. But I think this is an important message and I know there are a lot of folks, you know, who maybe listen to podcast but don’t actually read our blogs.
[08:59] I can’t remember the last time I’ve gone to my RSS reader. Do you — do you check our RSS anymore?
[09:04] Mike: You know, I used to do a daily export just to make sure that the trend was going up. I used to do like a 30-day rolling average just to make sure that it was going up and I haven’t done that in probably six months, maybe eight.
[09:16] Rob: Oh no, I was wondering if you read blogs via RSS.
[09:20] Mike: No. I haven’t — I haven’t read a blog via RSS in years.
[09:24] [Laughter]
[09:25] Rob: Yeah, it’s that funny So I use too. I mean this is like, “Is our RSS dead?” Like obviously, it’s not dead. I still look at my RSS subscribers, you know, at least a couple of times a week. I mean that’s kind of a metric — I measure and look at. Make sure it’s increasing but at some point, I just stopped. Like I stopped checking my RSS reader and I looked at podcast more now.
[09:45] Mike: I know what you’re saying. I look at FeedBurners well just to kind of see what my subscribers look like but I don’t actually read blogs through RSS anymore and I haven’t for a very long time.
[09:54] Rob: That’s a trip. So anyways, that’s — that’s a bit of an aside but I think that’s why I want to about on the podcast is because I know that there are a lot of people who listen to podcast who probably don’t read every post that you and I post. So today’s podcast is based on Steve Martin. He wrote a book called Born Standing Up. It’s awesome. It’s his memoir about from when he is born until he finished standup comedy. So it doesn’t cover after that which is all his movies. And you know, honestly, I mean this guy is really smart. Like Steve Martin is very intelligent. He also said that he was not naturally funny which I think is kind of cool. He basically talks through the story and talks about how he learned to be funny. And so he really had to look at it from a scientific approach. And I listened to the audio version of it, of course and he narrates it and it’s very good.
[10:37] But one of the quotes probably one of my favorites is he says, “It’s easy to be great and it’s hard to be consistent.” And what he meant by that is there were tons of comedians that he would run in to who would have these knockout shows like that one show that was fantastic. They killed the crowd but that person could not duplicate that success. It was easy to be great once but it was hard to be consistently great. You know, even extrapolating on that, I realized both through — through Steve Martin’s stories but also through just my own start-ups and products and the blog and basically, anything that — that I’ve done as an entrepreneur that it is easy to be a one hit wonder. It’s easy to get a link from TechCrunch. It’s easy to get one post to the top of Hacker News. It’s easy to start writing a blog and get to 300 subscribers in a few months. I’ve seen several people do that recently. It is really hard to stick around for the long haul and do consistently deliver quality material.
[11:34] Basically, I have three reasons outlined of why it’s easy to be great and hard to be consistent. And so the first reason is that there are no big breaks. So Steve Martin talks about that. That was fascinating. And he said he thought that going on The Tonight Show was his big break and he thought that from the time he was really little. And when he was finally invited on, he goes on for the first time and he expects that this to be it like — once he does this, he set for life. You know, he’s like a career entertainer and it makes his [0:12:00] career and it didn’t change a thing like he still went back to his job of doing magic shows and playing the banjo. And you know, he’s kind of — just a small time entertainer. He said after the second time it didn’t change. After the fourth time, he got recognized on the street by one person but they didn’t remember who he was or where they had seen him. And then he said on and on he kept going back. And after the tenth time, his tenth appearance on The Tonight Show is when he started to consistently be recognized but people didn’t know who he was still. And it took like 15 or 20 times until they like his name was actually there.
[12:35]: So it’s just — this incredible story of like there is no big breaks. The analogy is The Tonight Show or TechCrunch or Mashable or Hacker News or any of these things. They just don’t have the impact than a lot of people from the outside think that they do. Yeah, he would do a standup. You know, this is back when Carson did The Tonight Show. So they would have them on once and then it’d be a couple of months later, they had appear. So this is over the course of a couple of years probably but he was on fifteen times.
[13:00] Mike: Wow. No, I think that that’s, that on, I mean it takes a lot of exposure to get people to recognize you. That’s hard. I mean most people will see that sort of thing. And they’ll, you know — I mean even if you’re getting an e-mail from somebody, you might recognize the e-mail, you might not. I mean just this past week, I had somebody e-mailed me and say, “Hey, I’ve heard this name before but I can’t remember who it’s from. Can you help me out? You maybe you know who it’s from?”
[13:23] I think it takes a lot of exposure in order to for people to recognize who you are and that kind of falls in to, you know, there are no big breaks. I mean that TechCrunch link is going to get you a little bit of notice but it’s not going to necessarily land you a heck of a lot of business from it. At least not just from them. I mean you have to have a lot of different sources of where that traffic is coming from which is why it’s so important to not rely just on Google for example for all of your traffic.
[13:48] Rob: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it in like you — you almost have to have this diversification of traffic. Most successful businesses that I see have some kind of traffic diversification where they don’t have more [0:14:00]: than maybe 80, 85 percent from any single source, right? So they have at least 20 to 30 percent from multiple sources. And those were actually the ones that scale the best, right? Because then if you can figure it out how three of four different sources scale, you better often, like you said relying solely on Google and then having Google — you know, they did their Panda 3.3 Update about a month ago. And it’s just wreaked havoc on a lot of — lot of folks I know.
[14:24] So reason number two it’s hard to be consistent is that — and this is specifically with start-ups and you know, thinking of ideas and launching products. It said it’s easy to think of ideas but it’s really hard to finish them. We all love to sit around and think about ideas and we all love — even if we’re not sitting around. Ideas are constantly hitting our minds for a new businesses. I have a whole notebook full of them right here.
[14:45] And it’s easy just to think about them and it’s even really easy to start sketching them out. It’s easy to start writing some code if you’re a developer. But what’s hard is finishing them and that’s when you have to kind of face the music. You have to get people to pay you for it. And that’s when you have to launch it to the world and those are the really scary things. Right? Those are the things that like put the terror in your heart because if they don’t work, then you’ve invested a ton of time into it. And you have to go do something in public which is typically scary for folks, you know. If you haven’t done it a lot, it is something that — it’s just a natural thing for us to want to become vulnerable and post this thing you’ve been working on for several months. Anyways, yeah. So it’s easy to start things and it’s a lot harder to finish them.
[15:29] Mike: I wonder if that falls in to the kind of the same boat as public speaking. I mean most people would rather be dead than being on stage which means it’s great for the person who’s up there because everyone out there would rather be dead than be where he is. You know, it makes me wonder why is that. And I think that it’s because people don’t necessarily like to be publicly accountable. You know, they don’t want to be the center of attention. I mean you get people on small groups and stuff. They thrive on that sort of thing but when you put somebody on a stage in front a hundred or two hundred people and it’s a completely different story. So [0:16:00] I wonder if having all of that attention drawn on somebody and launching a product is really no different than that because you’re putting yourself out there and people are looking at you and they’re looking critically at the things that you do and or evaluating and judging you basically on whatever the product is that you’re putting there out there. So I could see how people would push off from that and get to the point where they’re about ready to launch and they say, “Well no, I’m going to pull back. I don’t really feel comfortable putting this out there yet.”
[16:30] Rob: Yeah. You know, I think another reason folks don’t want to launch and I think is that it can finally mean that like your failure is complete. I think that’s we’re all scared of failing that launching is when, you know, if you tank at that point, then it’s kind of unequivocal, “Okay, I really have wasted the last six months.” Whereas if you never launch, then you never get that for sure, no. You can almost perpetually push it out and say, “Well, maybe this thing is still going to work, you know.” And I think I — I really think that’s a wrong way to look at it. I’ve had a couple of friends recently who have launched and it hasn’t taken off in the way that they wanted. And you know, that they’re doing their pivoting. You know, that word is overused now but I think that — gives folks a lot of leeway as entrepreneurs. It’s like you don’t have to fail anymore. You can pivot — you can pivot to a new market. You can even tweak your, you know, your idea altogether but you don’t necessarily have to scrap everything you’ve done. You can — with one friend, he’s keeping the domain name because he has great, the incoming links are ready. He’s working in a similar market. He is going to start building an e-mail list again and he’s going to, you know, redo the product and re-launch it. And it’s not going to be — I think it took him eight months to develop it, originally and it’s only going to be one to two months worth of effort to pivot. But think about any old days like I would never have thought of that like five or six years ago. I would have launched and if it failed, I would just tank it and started a new idea where as now, it’s like there’s much more of a trial and error mindset due to the lean start-up that I actually think that’s a pretty good way for entrepreneurs to go because it leaves you an out to where you [0:18:00] can launch. You can “fail” but as long as you learn from that and then you, you just changed direction, you don’t have to lose all the work you’ve put in so far.
[0:18:08] Mike: Well said.
[0:18:09] [music]
[0:18:12] Rob: The reason number three it’s hard to be consistent is that even after a lot of folks launched like Mike and I were just talking about, it can be even worse once you launched because either you have some success, you get some customers and now, you’re trying to market it, you’re trying to support it and you’re trying to add features to your product or you launched and nothing happens. No one cares and you have this huge let down, right? And you get depressed. You get bombed that you spend all this time on it. And so either this as you ramp up in terms of the amount of work you need to put in to it and to this point, you probably even think “Man, launch it.” Once I get to launched it, I hear this all the time, right? Once I get to launched it, then the work will just decrease dramatically and they won’t be able to kick back. And that’s actually when a lot of really hard work starts because now you have paying customers, now you’re dealing with the people factor, you know. Everything is great with your start-up until this pesky customers get involved. This is when the hard work starts. So …
[19:06] Mike: Can I quote you on that? “The pesky customers.”
[19:09] [Laughter]
[19:09] Rob: Yeah, please don’t do that. A friend of mine said that to me at one point, they really made sense. It’s like obviously, we love customer. The customer is why we have our businesses. But it is much easier to sit in a basement to write code and write docs and even to do some marketing than it is to deal with actual real life customers who are paying you money. They had that that weird factor, the X factor of some customers that are demanding. You will often have to spend a lot of time with them and other customers are less so. But it — it really just adds complexity.
[19:36] So the bottom line is that even once you’ve launched, it’s not like you’re finished. I mean that’s really when the work starts. I think we’ve often said that getting to launch is like the halfway mark. And most people don’t think about that and so what happens is when someone launch a start-up, they’ve put all this work into it and then, you know, if it takes off, it’s a ton of work. And if it doesn’t, it’s a let down. But either way, it really is hard to be [0:20:00] consistent to pass that, right? Because they ought to have so much work to do or they’ve been let done. It’s just hard to continue investing and then another six months and to think, “Wow, I have to start this whole process kind of over again and get this product off the ground.
[20:11] Mike: Part of that is just that you have this idea in your head that you get to launch and your work is going to decrease and that’s not the case. So, your expectations were not necessarily in line with reality and I think that that’s probably what disheartens a lot of people because they get to that point and there’s, you know, their expectations are just not what reality is and they can’t handle it. They don’t really know what to do or what to think about it at that point.
[20:33] Rob: And I think on the side note, I realized how much this applies to kind of everything in life. I have friends who create art like they paint, and they will do a really good painting every now and again but they’re not consistent with it. That’s okay if it’s a hobby, right? It’s the same thing with playing guitar. Might have friends who would play guitar and they really wanted to be good at the guitar and they could play one song really well. They wouldn’t invest a time to be consistently good at it. And I think another great example is like with bloggers. I’ve heard this set a lot of people who say, you know, you want to have a popular blog? Start your blog in 2005. Implying that like the only reason that you have a popular blog is because it’s been around for a long time, and that is not true. It is easier to build a blog audience now than at any time in the past with Hacker News and Twitter and all these social sharing things. When I started, it took me 6 months to get the 66 RSS subscribers. It took me a year to get to 250 RSS subscribers. Who today would just have to spend a year day to 250. I bet starting a brand new blog, you can get to 250 in about 2 months, maybe less. If you write some stuff that works well in Hacker News and write with that audience, you know, this consistency, this whole theory, it applies across most things you will do in life whether it’s business or, you know, hobby or anything. If you want to be really good at it, it is going to take consistency.
[21:50] Mike: And part of that comes down to efficiency as well because as you do things over and over again, you make this little tweaks, I mean, it’s not any different than SEO or anything [0:22:00] like that, I mean you’re making this little tweaks that you have to consistently make across all your sides or, you know, across every page on the website or whatever. And each one provides you with those incremental improvement so that when you add another page, “Oh yeah. I’ve got to do this thing that I did before that converted a little bit better” or that made people want to stay on the page or read it. And the same thing with blog post, I mean you have to continuously add in new content, add in new blog post and when you do that, you submit it to all of these different websites and, you know, you’d gain traffic from those and oh, by the way, I found out there’s this other website I can also submit some articles to and they’ll be happy to post the link and share with their audience.
[22:40] Rob: Right. And that make sense what you’re saying about tweaking and constantly almost like split testing constantly because that’s what comedians do, Steve Martin talks about doing that constantly of just trying jokes and they fail, right? And this is why you’ll see a comedian rise to fame and they have this great act. Chris Rock did this. They had these great acts and they become huge and then they record it, they release it on CD and then they can’t go back to the bars. They can’t start over again. Their next show, they have to write from scratch, write a whole show and go back to the, basically playing to big amphitheaters. Almost all of them fail at that because they don’t have the years of trying material of starting with 2 minutes of crapping material, turning it into 2 minutes like good than turning it into 5 minutes of good material which can take months to do. They basically have to just say “Well, I guess I’m good enough now to write a one or two hour show from scratch and the whole thing is going to be funny.” And it just doesn’t work that way.
[23:36] And actually Seinfeld talked about this as well. There’s awesome documentary called The Comedian and he basically scraps all of these material that he had used for, like his – he have kind of one show that he did consistently, that was funny. And his scraps it all and he starts over. It’s after the Seinfeld Show and he just start to playing the show up like a New York club and try material on people, and a lot of it bombs. And that’s it. Right. It’s trial and error. That’s the same [0:24:00] thing we’re talking about like being an entrepreneur is there are a lot of parallels to you because they’re always trying to improve it.
[24:07] Mike: So given all that, one of the ways to improve consistency because it sounds like, you now, you have to try a bunch of different things and some things are going to work and some things aren’t. But, you know, how do you go about making everything better?
[24:19] Rob: Yeah. I think that’s kind of the nuts involved to this thing, right? It’s like how can we help improve that and I have three ideas that I want to throw out. The first is that as entrepreneurs, there is this thing we have called “The Madness”, I think Justin Vincent quote that on texting. You know, when you think of an idea and you’re like “Man, that is the best idea ever.” And you go and write away you like buy a domain name or five domain names and then you start writing code and you’re like write respect and then you put out thing on oDesk, I mean this is all within an hour? And then next day, you wake up and you’re like “What was I’m thinking that? The idea was terrible. And so you basically have invested some time, invested some money into this idea that was basically just madness taking you over. I mean, you’re stepping to be a lot more. I feel like I have better control of it now. But that’s one way to be really in consistent, is to think of ideas, jump on them, work on them for a day or a week and then just loose esteem because they aren’t actually that good of an idea and you acted too soon.
[25:13] One way to get around that is to basically give yourself a cooling off period. And so the cooling off period, I have, I roll over myself and I never spend money on an idea in the first 48 hours of the idea. And typically it’s much longer than that. I’ll sketch it down on my notebook and then come back to in a few weeks but that helps me keep on clouded judgment once I start plunking down money in time because I really want to use, you know, my money in time to the best of its ability. I think giving yourself a cooling off period is probably a good way to start.
[25:40] Mike: That’s interesting that you bring that up because that Altiris Training website that I came up with, it wasn’t something that I just said “Oh, I’ll go on and buy this domain name or I’ll search for this.” It was something that I kind of out of my mind for, I don’t know, a couple of weeks or a couple of months and said, you know, it’d be really nice to be able to just record a lot of the stuff once and I kind of kick the tires on a while before I actually got the domain name or [0:26:00] even started searching for a domain name for it and then I just happened to see that AltirisTraining.com [Phonetic] was not taken and, you know, it’s kind of an instant “Okay, yeah. I got to do this and I’ll do it right now.” And then putting together the website. I was just, I was literally just fooling around with some plug-ins and I’ll be honest, I kind of accidently launched the product more than anything else because I was just playing around with some plug-ins that I wanted to check out and say, you know, how do these things work and can I use them on some of the just existing AuditShark stuff that I’m doing and before I knew it within a couple of hours, the website was actually done and I said “Wow. This is going to be a lot easier to launch than I thought it would be.”
[26:35] Rob: Right. And that so much better way to do it, just stretch out that time frame but be more kind of more confident that the ideas are rational one. It would have been cool to do it while you’re all passion about it and do it in the first five hours of you thought about it but you have the potential to kind of just waste that time.
[26:49] Mike: Yeah. I’ve done that as well. I think Justin’s absolutely right when he calls the “The Madness”. I mean because you’re just not thinking clear, can you really need to wait a little while and kick the tires on that idea or run it by some other people or at least do some market research on it at the very least before you poke your head up and say, “Wait a second, was this even a good idea?”
[27:09] Rob: The second way that I have for improving consistency is to get affirmation early and often and by this I don’t mean someone telling you your idea is great but I mean by potential customers telling you your idea is great.
[27:25] Okay. If I could tell you with a hundred percent certainty if you came to me with an idea for say a small software product and I could tell you with a hundred percent certainty that “Mike, if you go full time for 6 months or half time for 6 months and build this and go through your all the toiling but it will succeed absolutely on equivocal way.” There would be a lot less out in your mind, right? It would actually be a lot easier to be consistent I think. I don’t think that we are as entrepreneurs are scared of the work. It’s not the hard work that scares us, it’s the fact that we might be investing hard work into something that’s going to fail and that’s going to waste our time and that we’re misusing our time and our money and our resources.
[28:02] So if I could tell you for sure, it would be a lot easier trip, right? It much less of a mental battle. While no one can tell you for sure, can we get above 20 percent certainty? Can we get above 50, 60, 70 percent certainty? I think we can and the way you do that is by starting to tell customers about it. Building a mailing list, starting to do the marketing. Seeing how many people you can drive to a sight seeing how many e-mails you can capture? I mean, this is the problem, right? It’s like if you’ve don’t do that in advance, it’s not just about having that customer list when you launch so that you get a bunch of revenue. It’s actually about fighting the mental battle that we all fight as we spend 6 months in a bedroom trying to write this code. And it really is helping deal with the mental aspect of it because if you have 500 people on your list, then you’re pretty confident that you’re going to be able to sell few of those and you’re pretty confident of the people have an interest in it. This is why I didn’t start writing my book until I had 5 or 600 people on the list. This is why you and I didn’t start planning a conference until we had several hundred people on the mailing list.
[29:02] These days, I don’t do much without talking to a lot of customers whether it’s in person or, you know, via the marketing trails and getting into sign up for the e-mail list. And there are people like Jason Cohen also did this with WP Engine, WordPress Engine. He said that he had 30 people committed verbally to pay him, I think it was — I think you and I had a price. It was like 30 people, 50 bucks a month before he invested in real time in the idea before he started hiring and pursuing the idea. The first step for him was not, there will be infrastructure. The first step was finding those customers because that gave him early affirmation.
[29:38] Mike: Yeah, that’s essentially just validating your idea has legs and, you know what Jason did was making sure that he had paying customers and, you know, you just do the ballpark math on it and if you get 30 people who are each willing to give you $50 a month, that’s $1500 a month. And if you extrapolate that from, I mean, those are people that he just know and those are essentially personal [0:30:00] contacts at that point but if you can take that and say okay, but what if I can anonymize this a bit and just pitch it to people that I don’t know, how far could I grow this, how far could I take it? And those initial customers are essentially just the validation of the idea and then you can, you know, you grow things from there.
[30:18] Rob: So the third and final way to improve consistency, something we’ve talked about a lot before but it’s about finding accountability and it’s finding some type of accountability group, a start-up community, some people who are going to be able to support you as you go through the struggles of launching and who you’re going to be able to support. I like doing it in person, if possible, if I live in the big city that’s definitely what I would I do. I’m also in a mastermind group, the Over Skype but, you know, it doesn’t just have to be a mastermind group. It can be something like you can go to a meet up group as long as it means consistently and it’s the people who you feel like you can really talk about your idea with. I have actually know a couple of guys who found entrepreneurs locally by going on Facebook and searching for tech entrepreneurs in your area.
[31:02] You know, I think with something like this, it’s commonly called the Mastermind but I think you really want to keep the group fairly small like to 3 or 5 people because as it gets larger than that, you kind of can’t share stuff and be vulnerable without being concern that someone is not going to get what you’re saying or not going to understand it you get into larger groups and everyone doesn’t have a time to just kind of talk about what they’re doing on the projects. And so, you basically want to set up something that meets fairly like consistently, somewhere between 1 and 4 times a month and you want to get 3 other people together on a Skype chat or in person and you want to be able to talk to them, you know, to tell them what you’re going through and support them as well. Like do you think this can also happen in a larger setting? I mean I’m thinking like forums like the Academy Forums or something or do you think that it needs to go beyond that and always be, you know, kind of a private smaller group.
[31:48] Mike: I don’t think that it has to be a smaller group but I think that the key things to make it actually work are that you’re going back into this entire podcast episode, I mean, it has to be consistent and if you’re not consistent about [0:32:00] being accountable to people then, you’re not going to be consistent in implementing your ideas and part of that is also the people that you choose to participate in this accountability whether it’s a forum or Skype chat or whatever, they need to be serious about it as you are. I mean, you can’t have people in there who are just like “Oh, well, yeah. I’m serious about this. I want to have an accountability group.” And then week after week they don’t do something or they’re very inconsistent about actually committing to following through on the things that they say that they’re going to.
[32:30] Rob: That’s a big part of it. Absolutely it’s that other people have to be as serious as you. That’s a big reason I see that groups fall apart is that you get this varying thing, you get someone who’s just starting out and has 10 ideas and then you get people who are way late in the game, you know, and they were basically already have profitable ideas going and you really can’t, probably can’t team those folks up too easily because they’re just such different places. Yeah, so I think like you said, consistency is a big thing. And it also say I think that, you know, I’m thinking about the Academy Forums versus something like the answers that on start- ups or having a mastermind group. I think it is going to depend on your personality a bit as to what feeds you the most but I think for the most part, having multiple outlets. I mean that’s what I d these days, right? I’m on the Academy Forums. I do frequent in a couple other online communities and then I also have the mastermind and that’s a lot to commit to. I think that as someone who works at home has no co-workers and, you know, I don’t have a ton of personal contact during the week that that’s helpful for other folks who do, you know, who can tend to feel isolated that having multiple outlets can also help with consistency.
[33:36] [music]
[33:40] Rob: If you have a question or comment, call into our voicemail number. It’s 1-888-801-9690 or e-mail it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider writing a review in iTunes by searching for “startups”. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Or you’ll also find a transcript of the podcast. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
