Show Notes
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[Read more…] about Episode 68 | How to Hire and Manage Virtual Assistants
Episode 67 | Specific Strategies For Growing and Managing Your Mailing List
Show Notes
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[Read more…] about Episode 67 | Specific Strategies For Growing and Managing Your Mailing List
Episode 66 | Six Reasons it’s Hard to Ship a Product (and How Mike is Going to Overcome Each One)
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:01] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 66.
[00:03] music
[00:12] Rob: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:21] 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 going on this week, Mike?
[00:27] Mike: Well, I’m in L.A. this week and it’s raining.
[00:30] Rob: Yeah. That’s the first rain of the year for us. Gosh, my last couple of weeks have been busy as usual. I think I announced that last time that I finally got the new HitTail design live and it’s been — actually, it’s two weeks to the day since it’s been live. So I’ve started the marketing engine. I’ve been on a couple of podcasts. I went on TechZing like I mentioned last week and definitely noticing the impact of asking for credit cards before the trial rather than before you could just sign up. And then at the end, we’d e-mail you begging for you to — please continue and sign up for PayPal.
[01:03] So it’s cut the number of trials in half but in my experience and from the experience of all the guys who I’ve talked to — this is gonna be totally worth it in two weeks when all the 30-day trials run out because it has just a dramatic impact on the number of people who convert.
[01:17] Mike: Cool.
[01:17] Rob: So yeah.
[01:18] Mike: That’s awesome.
[01:19] Rob: Yeah, I’m excited. It’s fun to just be able to — after all the work that I did on it to finally put it out and get — I’ve gotten quite a lot of positive feedback actually on the design and that’s pleasing. It’s good to work hard on something and then have folks like it. I did get one e-mail, just one — I mean, seriously I probably received 50 e-mails of people and tweets and said that site looks great, love the design. I got one today and it was a woman and she’s like, I can’t use your site. It hurts my eyes, like all the colors and all that. And I’m like, I don’t know. Maybe she has a weird monitor. I mean, it’s like kind of a muted blue. It’s not like I’m gonna redesign the site based on that one person’s feedback.
[01:54] But I did wanna — I do wanna point one thing out. I have billing code, like a billing cron job. It runs every day and charges the people who are due to be billed and that is totally not ready. So I have like 16 days left, yeah. I’m pulling it — I mean, talk about going lean. I really don’t have — I mean, I have obviously the credit card numbers, they’re stored on stripe and I have this little token I can use to charge it and that’s in my database. So I have a countdown. I have a reminder in my calendar to tell me like — it basically says, by this day, the billing engine should be done, is what the reminder is.
[02:25] Mike: Yeah, four days left to complete your code in order to charge people money.
[02:27] Rob: Seriously, yup. If you miss this, you will regret it. Yeah, yeah.
[02:33] Mike: So, hey, last week I was going through and I kind of switched over and started looking at more at the marketing side of AuditShark and I went into Google Analytics and I was poking around and I noticed they’ve made a significant number of updates but the two specifically that caught my eyes were if you’re going to [Inaudible] and then visitors flow it gives you a graphical view of exactly where people go on their websites.
[02:58] So basically what percentage of people come from different countries and then it shows like a bar that is larger or smaller based on the number of people that are going from that country into a specific page. And then out of that page, they show you this like red arrow that kind of goes out of the right hand side of it and then straight down if they’re basically dropping off your site. And then it continues like above that. It continues to the right and goes to one of several different places that are kind of vertically laid out. And it shows you where you’re losing people or where they’re going on your site.
[03:34] So for example, on my site, if I go to look for AuditShark over the past month. Of the people that come in from the United States, the vast majority of them, 48% of them from the United States goes straight to the homepage and then the other 52% go to various other pages that are on there. So they’re basically — they’re hitting other landing pages. And then from there, it shows me that I’m getting 30% that dropped off. But of the rest of them, almost 37% are going to my features page. And then from the features page, 19% of them are going to the Buy Now page.
[04:12] Rob: Got it. Yeah, I’m looking at it right now. That actually is pretty fascinating. I’ve never seen a [Inaudible] room like this. This is pretty cool. People should check this out. Go on to the new Google Analytics interface and audience and visitors flow. Definitely helpful to have a graphical thing. I wonder why they — oh, they just break it up by country by default. You could actually —
[04:29] Mike: Yes.
[04:30] Rob: — break it up by a bunch of other stuff if you want.
[04:33] Mike: Yeah, that was just the default view but it was — I found it very interesting how they actually show you the dropout rate at the end of every single page and then at the end of each additional interaction with your website.
[04:44] Rob: That’s neat.
[04:45] Mike: The other thing that I found in here was if you go down on their content and then In-Page Analytics and it shows you like over on the right-hand side, if you click on the — there’s a color bubbles button. It’s the middle button of the three. And it will show you actually what your web page looks like.
[05:02] Rob: Yup.
[05:02] Mike: It will show you percentages of what people are looking at on your site. So like — what percentage of people click through on specific things. And what I thought was really interesting was at the very bottom it shows kind of like an orange slider that says, approximately 14% of clicks are below this line. And as you scroll down, it shows you the number of additional clicks that are below that line.
[05:26] Rob: Right. So it shows you the below — the fold numbers. See, they’ve had something similar to this in the old interface but it wasn’t quite as fancy. You couldn’t scroll it like that. I think what I discovered with the old one and it looks like it might be similar, it’s not — when you do Crazy Egg and it’s in an actual heat map of where they clicked on the page, like you can see whether they clicked that. This is not like that.
[05:47] Mike: Right.
[05:48] Rob: I think the more you look around, like I have a logo in my upper left of HitTail and I’m looking at it right now in the [Inaudible] view and that goes to the home page and that says 12% of people went there. And then I also have the home link in the upper right. It goes to the same URL and it says 12%. And I bet that those were not actually clicked. It just says where the next path was from this.
[06:08] Mike: Yes.
[06:09] Rob: And they don’t know which one was clicked. So they just put the number there. That makes sense. It’s much less accurate in Crazy Egg but at least, it does give you — they’re kind of superimposing their data on to a visual view even if it’s not completely accurate.
[06:22] Mike: Yeah. But I just thought it was interesting — if you don’t use Crazy Egg or you just can’t afford it or something like that. I mean, this gives you a much better view of it — of the data than I thing it did for.
[06:34] Rob: Oh, absolutely. It’s way more visual.
[06:36] Mike: So I just thought I’d point that out.
[06:37] music
[06:41] Rob: So, hey, today our main segment is called Six Reasons it’s Hard to Ship a Product (and How Mike is Going to Overcome Each One). This episode is actually by popular demand. And when I say by popular, it’s basically Ted. Ted requested it. But we got some good comments on Episode 64. Basically, you mentioned doing — you’re going back to your forum software or something and Sandy posted a comment.
[07:07] She said, “This is a friendly comment. Why are you working on your forum software when you still don’t have a paying customer for AuditShark? Focus. Get this thing out the door. I’m basically hearing the same old stuff. You don’t know people are gonna actually use your software. We are rooting for AuditShark, but we need a deadline for you to commit to. How about a public commitment to a deadline?” So that’s what Sandy said.
[07:26] And then Ted Pitts from Moraware Software said, “I agree with Sandy. Here’s a topic for next week’s episode” — and we had already recorded next week’s. But his title is “Ten Reasons Why it’s Hard to Ship a Product and What Mike’s Going to do to Overcome Each One.” You addressed them in the comments but then basically e-mailed me and you’re like, “We need to do this.”
[07:44] The six reasons — I couldn’t think of ten reasons so I came up with them and then I’m gonna kind of throw them out and maybe you and I are gonna talk through them. That’s the thing, though. It’s like people will cut you slack. I mean, it’s hard to be publicly accountable like this, right? I don’t think —
[07:58] Mike: Well, I agree with that.
[07:59] Rob: I don’t think that anyone is sitting here and pointing fingers. I think we all do this stuff and so I genuinely believe — like I’m glad Sandy put it that way. She’s like, focus, like we are rooting for AuditShark so let’s make this thing work, you know. It’s funny, I have so many questions. I’m hoping they’ll come up during this. So maybe I’ll just dive in to the first one and make sure that we cover them. So the first reason it’s hard to ship a product is that it’s easy to lose momentum.
[08:23] Mike: Understatement of the year.
[08:25] Rob: Yeah. I mean, it’s easy to just kind of wander off, right? It’s like we talk so much about the four to six month rule of like, if you don’t get it out four to six months, it’s really, really hard to launch. And like we talked about a couple of episodes ago, I think it’s been two years for you?
[08:40] Mike: Well, sort of three really.
[08:41] Rob: Has it, really? Oh, yeah, because you were doing it long before you announced it on the podcast. So that’s just an insane amount of time, dude, to develop a product. So what can you do? Like what are you gonna do? Have you lost momentum? I’ll admit. Like it seems to me that you talking about going back to get your forum software developed or rethinking AuditShark and how you’re gonna market it or some features or whatever got me thinking like, well, I think Mike might be not wanting to finish this. Do you feel that way? And how are you not gonna do that?
[09:11] Mike: I’ll be honest. I mean, December was rough. I mean, I got to the point where I was putting in such an insane amount of time. I had the self-imposed mental deadline where I said I have to finish this to the point where it is usable by the end of the year. And I did that. But to do it, I had to put in an insane amount of time. I was putting in extra time at the weekends, during the week, before work, after work. It was just mentally jarring. It is a lot of mental effort and energy to get it done.
[09:38] And once I got it to the point where I was able to say, yeah, this is done. This is working and somebody could use it and it would be useful for them. That kind of made me back off a little bit to kind of take a break but at the same time, I basically shifted from putting my mental focus on the codes, to putting my mental focus more towards the marketing side of things.
[10:01] I mean, I think I mentioned that I have gone — I walked into four banks in my town and said here’s what I’ve been working on. I’d like to show it to you. And of the four, the one that I had thought was the — probably the biggest prospect, basically looked at it and said, “This sounds great and all. It’s interesting, what you’ve done. But what I really need is this.” And it’s an off shoot of what AuditShark can do and wasn’t really necessarily the main focus of what I was trying to build. I mean, what they meant when they said compliance was really more like vulnerability management and identification.
[10:34] I think when I was initially building this and talking to them last year about it, it was more of a difference in terminology and just not getting on the same page. So there’s obviously some disconnect between me and some of the people that I’ve been talking to. That said, I still believe there’s a solid market for this. I just think that in that particular case, I was taught — we just weren’t using the same language.
[10:57] Rob: I mean, how many banks have you sat down with? Not just got into, but like sat down with and actually talk to someone or show them screenshots or demos or just something to where you genuinely think that they have some interest in this.
[11:10] Mike: For banks specifically, it’s been these four banks.
[11:13] Rob: Have you gone to the other three then and clarified if they feel the same way?
[11:19] Mike: You have to keep in mind that the whole idea of going after banks was just an idea. And it’s not to say that — I mean, AuditShark can apply to a number of different market verticals. So for example, I decided to go after banks because I looked at them and said, okay, according to some of the statistics that I found, 70% of the money that’s tied up in banks is attributed to ten banks. Which means that there are 8,490 other banks that are probably [Inaudible] size of about three to five, maybe eight, something like that. So I was looking at it from a perspective of where is the market that I could probably get in to.
[11:56] Now, AuditShark can be used in any situation where you have either a compliance initiative so that’s either regulatory or self-imposed audits that you need to do that tends to be in either the health industry, retail, where you have PCI, or public campaigns where you have Sarbanes-Oxley, those types of places. But I looked at all of them and said I think banks is the most realistic to go after.
[12:19] Rob: Right. And so you built — you talked to the banks and you built the product based on presumably what they had said they wanted or what you thought they wanted. And I was asking like, did you go back to the other three and confirm that they were the same or different than that first bank? Did they also use the language differently than you thought? Or —
[12:41] Mike: No, I don’t think so. They had similar language and they — one of them just had no idea. They didn’t even have an IT department. So I basically disqualify them from being a customer but I did talk to them in general about the types of problems they run into, where they get their solutions from, who they talk to for their solutions. And one of the big things that I found through talking to these banks is that they generally rely on an outside consulting company to come in and help point them in the right direction.
[13:09] The other thing I found is that there’s a specific organization that they have come in and do audits on them. They have like a third party auditor usually come in once a year and that’s scheduled. And then they have — it’s like — I think it’s NCUA. It’s basically the national council that governs the banking industry. So they could come in and they send in their auditors once a year. And that’s generally not an announced time. They don’t know that it’s coming. But basically, they come in, they do an audit and then they say, these are the things that we think you should fix.
[13:41] And the bank that I was talking about that I thought was going to be probably the best fit, basically the auditor came in and said, in terms of compliance, we’re looking for you to use vulnerability scanner. So between last year when I had spoken with them and this year, that’s when the auditor came in and said, this is exactly what we’re looking for in terms of having a compliance tool in place. And it was more for a vulnerability scanner than it was for configuration management.
[14:09] Rob: Right. Okay. The second one is that it’s easy to think the product is the most important thing. I think that the product is actually a lot less important than figuring out which market you’re gonna cater to. And I felt like the whole time we’ve been talking about AuditShark for 18 months, two years, you really have been saying we can do a lot of things but banks, like pretty much banks.
[14:28] I mean, that’s what I’m going after, that’s who I’ve talked to, this is gonna serve them well, it solves their problem, that’s gonna be the product market fit. I’m gonna go after that kind of stuff. Is that still the case? And if it’s not, that’s crazy. That you’re here about to launch and then you’re gonna shift because I do feel like you’ve been maybe hinting at that.
[14:47] Mike: I have concerns. And I think that it’s justified to have concerns regardless whether you believe you’re going in the right direction or not. I don’t think it’s an issue of whether or not the product can do it. It’s more a question of, can I really get to that market. And the way that I need to and as short a time frame as I need to get to them in order to get things off the ground.
[15:10] Rob: It’s like the sales — the sales cycles are really long and the sales cycles are really high touched.
[15:13] Mike: Right.
[15:14] Rob: Exactly. It could take six to nine months to actually —
[15:16] Mike: I don’t think it’ll take that long. I really don’t because —
[15:20] Rob: By three to six — let’s say it’s three to six months. I mean, it’s not gonna be shorter than that, right? I mean, it takes me — the sales cycle on DotNetInvoice — it’s six to twelve weeks, I would say is the best estimate. So that’s a month and half to three months. That’s 300 bucks. You know what I’m saying for DotNetInvoice. I just got to imagine that there’s gonna be more.
[15:36] Mike: But it’s DotNetInvoice — something that they can download and just try out.
[15:41] Rob: So, no, they can’t just download — are you saying can they download just in EXE and tool around with it for free?
[15:46] Mike: Yeah.
[15:47] Rob: No.
[15:47] Mike: Yeah?
[15:48] Rob: But why does that matter? To me, it’s more about the price, right? Because a $10,000 product can have a longer sales cycle than a $50 product. And it has to do with the customer because a bank is gonna be slower moving than — a lot of my guys are single web developers or small web development firms or small cellphone companies. So they’re gonna be much — I imagine faster moving than banks. So I think banks would be slower in both points.
[16:13] Mike: I don’t know. And talking to the banks that I have, it didn’t seem to me like the price was really an issue. It was more — the questions I really got were more around the security of the data and what sort of things I’ve done to secure it. You know, is it SAS 70 compliant, for example. That was the number one question I got.
[16:32] Rob: Is it?
[16:33] Mike: Yes, to my knowledge it is.
[16:35] Rob: Okay.
[16:36] Mike: Because basically, that involves a lot of things around auditability of the physical infrastructure and making sure that those machines are, you know, wherever that data’s being stored is safe.
[16:47] Rob: Right.
[16:48] Mike: And honestly, SAS 70 wasn’t necessarily a requirement. It was more of a question of like, is this in a colocation facility where somebody could just walk in, any customer of the colofacility can walk in and do something? Or is it basically locked down? And I know for a fact that it’s all locked down.
[17:05] Rob: Right. But we’ve gotten a little off track because we were talking about, are you gonna do banks? And you said you don’t know and I think I threw out kind of a — is it because it’s a long sales cycle and a high touch sales cycle? I think that’s where we were.
[17:19] Mike: The original reason that I chose banks was because I felt like it was probably the most realistic place where I could go with AuditShark in order to get in to the market and get a start. And over the past six to eight months or so in talking with various people, I’ve started to wonder if that’s a mistake.
[17:41] Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m not gonna do it. It doesn’t mean that I’m gonna just completely go off in another direction without even trying it. I still think the best thing for me to do is follow through with that, whether I believe it’s gonna work or not. I mean, I really think I need to put the best foot forward and try to do it because that’s been my original fault all along. Because I think the worst thing I could probably do at this point is say, no, I don’t think this is gonna work. I’m gonna go in a different direction without even really giving it a fair shot.
[18:07] Rob: I don’t know. I could see both sides of it. I think that if it really is a bad decision and you have deemed that it is not the way to go then I don’t think you should stick with it just because you’ve been saying it for a year or two. But with that said, I also think that if you genuinely believe that this does — if it has problem-solution fit with banks and you have been talking to them, I am concerned you might be giving up too early on it.
[18:29] Mike: And I would say it’s a toss-up. I don’t have any definitive data or definitive answers from anybody that says, this is just not gonna work, especially from our prospective customer.
[18:39] Rob: I don’t think you’re gonna get definitive data. I mean, we’re on the startup scenario.
[18:42] Mike: I have been pushing forward with this. I mean, I have gone out and I’ve started looking to say, okay, well, how can I actually get to do — to the banks? Because in order for me to do AdWords, AdWords is just completely off the table. I mean —
[18:55] Rob: Yeah.
[18:56] Mike: — there’s absolutely no way. I mean, we were talking $30 to $40 per click. That’s just not gonna happen. I mean, especially for a customer that I’m only gonna get $300 or $400 a month from. It’s just not cost effective in order for me to be able to do that. Now beyond that, what I’ve started looking at was either buy in a mailing list so I could — I checked it out. Within a 50-mile radius of me, there are roughly 1,400 banks that I could buy their addresses for 12 cents each. I think it was $170 to buy 1,500 mailing addresses. So I could then send them postcards. Yeah, I basically have drawn up some leads. And that’s pretty cheap.
[19:35] Rob: That isn’t very expensive, you’re right. So it’s gonna be 12 cents apiece to buy them. Oh, so that’s 170. Yeah, and then you have them postage and you have design work, and you have whatever else you want. But Harry Hollander from Moraware, one of the things he said that had success with really early on was just almost — it was like a semi-personalized letter. It wasn’t a postcard because postcards look like marketing and banks get that crap all the time.
[19:53] But if you actually address and do a full envelope, postage is more expensive, it’s a little more put together time whether you hire a local student to do it or do it yourself. But you actually put them in envelopes and do a first class stamp and address it to the president, the banker, whoever you’re trying to get to. Yeah, it’s so much more likely to — to get it and then letter is — I mean, it’s printed out and it’s probably signed by you, because you can do that. You may not do all 1,500. Maybe you only start by doing a hundred or 200 or whatever. But —
[20:20] Mike: But as you buy those things, if you buy 50, it cost you less than twice as much to buy a hundred. It scales. I mean, as you buy more, it costs less and less to buy each one.
[20:29] Rob: I feel like until you’ve done that, until you really start to hit this hard, because all that’s gonna do is generate leads, right? If you send it out to all 1,500 or if you sent it out to 500 or whatever, you’re not gonna get 500 calls. You’re gonna get a handful of calls maybe, right? Like five. But then at least you have five people who are genuinely interested, assuming you’ve described it well, who are genuinely interested in this thing. And if you can close one of them, then you have your — you have your first bank customer, for crying out loud, which I think is what — that’s just gonna be so critical, right? And even that customer’s gonna take so much time for you to get set up. You’re gonna learn a bunch while you do it so —
[21:06] Mike: Right. I mean, I’m already learning quite a bit because earlier today, I installed my first Beta customer. So they had about 60 machines and —
[21:13] Rob: Is it a bank?
[21:14] Mike: No, it’s not a bank. It’s a reseller. So they’re interested in potentially becoming a reseller for they have an established customer base. And people who would be interested in this sort of thing but it’s more or less like they kind of want to take a look at it and see more or less what it’s all about. So I went through a couple of installation pains with them, found that — had they followed the instructions, it would have worked the first time but I had to walk them through a little bit more and found that just didn’t use administrator credentials on one place where they needed them. It was documented, they just didn’t read it.
[21:44] Rob: Okay, so that’s cool. So you have first Beta but it’s not — it’s tough. That’s more of a technical Beta, not a customer Beta. That’s what I want to see.
[21:51] Mike: Yeah.
[21:52] Rob: You wanna see you getting into an actual bank environment and have a —
[21:56] Mike: That’s true although I said that I finished the code back in December and it is functional. There are certain things that I found that going through just the course of this little tiny Beta just in the past 8 hours or so, there are certain things that just — that are apparently not working. And I don’t specifically know why because I don’t have the visibility into as far into the product as I need.
[22:18] Rob: Right.
[22:19] Mike: I don’t know what’s wrong. And these things would come up whether I install the Beta customer or somebody who will eventually become a paying customer. I prefer to find it on my own without a potentially paying customer, but it’s got to come up eventually and it’s got to get fixed. So —
[22:32] Rob: Sure. You talked to the one bank and they told you that they need something different. So they’re probably off your prospect list right now.
[22:41] Mike: They are tabled for the time being.
[22:43] Rob: It seems like finding out if other banks feel that way — like you may have missed the mark with the product.
[22:48] Mike: It’s possible, yeah.
[22:49] Rob: Right? That you’ve actually built the product that you thought — I forgot we have our six reasons to start to launch a product. One of them is that it’s easy to build something that you think people need but that customers aren’t willing to pay for. I’ll put it this way. You haven’t convinced me based on what you’ve told me that you’ve built something that banks actually need. What can you do to get that data? Like is it talking to these other three banks that you’ve talked to? It does seem like talking to the customers — before you write another line of code or install another Beta anywhere, it seems like you got to figure out if you’ve built something that they need.
[23:21] Mike: I think in a general case, I would probably agree but because AuditShark has the capability to do so many other things, I don’t think that it materially matters. And let me explain that a little bit.
[23:32] Rob: Yeah, you got to explain that, man.
[23:34] Mike: I will. The issue that I see is that AuditShark can be positioned in a number of different ways. So let me just throw out some of the different ways that AuditShark could be positioned and it could accomplish those things and do its job and do it well. The issue is there are gonna be a few things under the covers that would need to be technically toggled — not a huge amount of work but obviously a little bit of work. And then the bigger problem would be overhauling the marketing behind it.
[24:02] Now one problem space was obviously the one that it’s currently kind of set up for is for doing system configuration management and auditing configurations in some machines. Second one, as the original bank that I talked about, they were looking for a vulnerability scanner. Somebody pointed me to — I think it was one of our listeners actually sent me a private e-mail saying, “Hey, I actually run a vulnerability database. If you wanna chat about it sometime, let’s chat.”
[24:29] My assumption was it was more let’s just kind of feed me information about how vulnerabilities are identified and what sort of data they have available. Maybe it’s stuff that I could leverage, maybe it’s stuff that I could actually automate and create scripts and stuff that would import their data and create a set of vulnerability rules that I could plug into it. So that becomes, you know, kind of a second potential market. It would be a vulnerability scanner.
[24:58] A third one that I’ve looked at in the past was the potential for using it to audit WordPress installation because there’s millions of WordPress installations out there. Would people be willing to pay for a product that goes on to their machines and [Inaudible] those machines to see is this thing locked down the way it should be? Are there potentially holes in here that I don’t know about? Because most people who are running WordPress don’t necessarily want to know or want to care about any of the security concerns that go with it.
[25:28] Now, I’m not saying that WordPress in insecure because I don’t think that it is but there are certainly opportunities and potential for a machine to become misconfigured in a way that allows people to run scripts and things against your site which will basically compromise it. It’s not a something specific from WordPress, it’s more of a direct result of something’s not working, let me toggle a bunch of things and then when I’m done, hopefully it works and you don’t go back and change those things that you had modified and you inadvertently start opening the holes. And that was part of some research I did a couple of months ago about WordPress security. I did some stuff on my blog and I talked about it a little bit on the podcast. A fourth possibility —
[26:11] Rob: Hey, hold on. Let me stop you. We could probably come up with a dozen but it — does it matter? This goes back to the number two thing I said where it’s easy to think the product is the most important thing. You’ve listed off — your product is very versatile. Like, no, I totally don’t argue with that. It’s almost like if I built a general proposium essence that this thing could manage websites for banks, manage websites for accountants — you know, manage websites for all these different things. But as a one person shop, you have to pick.
[26:37] Mike: But that’s my point about all of these, is that I have to decide which of those places I’m going after. And you’re right, it’s easy to think that the product is the most important thing, and I totally agree that it’s not. My point of saying all of these with having all of these different ways that the product could go is that it has nothing to do with the products. It’s about the marketing and whether there’s a market for a product that does that thing.
[27:01] Rob: Exactly. And I think that’s what I’m getting at, is that for the last two years, you’ve been saying banks — like banks at the market. I mean, it just seems like we talk about starting marketing early. Start marketing the day you start coding, start building SEOs, start building a mailing list, start — you build the product to serve that particular market because if your product is too general, I mean, we know it just isn’t as good as if you built it with a specificity in mind of what an actual customer is telling you to build.
[27:28] And so if you think that it’s still banks for now, right? You said you wanna put your best foot forward and you do wanna try banks then all that other stuff you just listed, the other options are irrelevant right now. They may be relevant in six months. If this doesn’t pan out, and it — you know, you’re like this is not gonna work. Like, I’ve built a product that banks can’t use or I can’t handle the sales cycles, for whatever reason like — then you can go back to the drawing board. But I don’t feel like you’ve done this one to death yet. Like you don’t have enough data. Like what is your next step? Your next step I think — but you can correct me. I think it should be you got to talk to these other three banks or new banks and figure out if you built something they can use and that they’re gonna be willing to pay for. Does that seem reasonable?
[28:13] Mike: Well, it is. I mean, that’s what I plan on doing. But I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to consider other options as well or something else that could be added on. I’ve built the DBA in auditing tool, a compliance tool, and I talked to the first customer. They said, “We were really looking for more of vulnerability management tool.” And he did qualify this and he said, “But if you could combine compliance and vulnerability management into the same tool,” he said, “that would be extremely valuable to me.”
[28:44] Rob: All right. Number four is, it’s easy to think beyond your present reality. What I mean by that is it’s easy to just — to think too big. Or, it’s easy to think six months down the line, it could be this. Or six months down the line I might need to do this. And that’s kind of what you’re saying. And I feel like your present reality that has nothing to do with that stuff. If you wanna do the banks and you believe that that really is something you want to hit hard and prove or disprove over the next 30 days or 60 days, then do that. I don’t feel like you wanna kind of cloud your head. It just feels like it gets you scattered and going in a bunch of different directions. It’s easy to dream too big or just thinking too many directions at once.
[29:21] Mike: But that’s kind of why I’ve always talked specifically about going in the direction of banks. I built a general purpose tool. And I’m under no illusions that it can be used for a lot of other things. That’s why I built it as a more of a general purpose tool. I mean, there’s an underlying scripting language or so. All these stuff under the covers that can make it do virtually anything. If it’s programmatically possible on a machine, my software can do it. I think what you’re getting at is more or less don’t think beyond what your current problem is and that current problem is getting paying customers for the target market you’re at.
[29:56] Rob: That would be my like professional opinion right now. If you wanna get this thing out there, like someone needs — you need to have a paying customer because otherwise the product is gonna stay too general.
[30:05] Mike: Right.
[30:06] Rob: I truly believe if you find a paying customer and you get in there, that you are gonna find that it’s gonna become a much less general tool very quickly that you’re gonna add a bazillion very specific things that are specific to banks, you’re gonna need to add features, you’re gonna need to make some changes. And you may be able to do it with a scripting language or not but I still think there’s a lot of work to be done to make it specific to banks and specific to anyone. I still think there’s work to be done. I don’t believe that it’s so general that it’s just perfect for all these markets at once.
[30:36] Mike: I agree with that. I would say you’re probably mischaracterizing that a little bit. And I think that’s probably because you haven’t seen it. You’re right. Like for example, for me to go after WordPress security — it’s really not built for that right now in terms of the UI for the end user. Vulnerability management and compliance management, there’s very, very little difference between the two of them in terms of what I would need to display to the user. They actually overlap probably a lot more than you might otherwise expect.
[31:05] Rob: Right.
[31:06] Mike: But the marketing is obviously a lot different. And I don’t think that it is wise for me to try and do both at the same time.
[31:13] Rob: Right. My number five here is that it’s hard to ask customers what they want before you have a product, A, its awkward and B — especially if it’s a perspective customer you’re walking into a bank and you’re like, hey, I have a piece of paper with a screenshot. That just takes guts to do, number one. And number two, it’s often hard to actually communicate the idea. Do you think that 18 months ago, that if you had — do you think that there was something you could have done back then to be more certain about what you’re building and that they would need it?
[31:42] Mike: I think if I had scratched out screenshots and showed them instead of talking to them about it, I think that that probably would have helped. Because I had ideas in my head of what it was gonna do and what it was supposed to be. And the things that — going back to that bank where they said they wanted a vulnerability scanner, they didn’t use the word vulnerability scanner, I did. Because they didn’t know what it was called.
[32:06] Rob: I mean, let’s be clear here. I’m not trying to say, oh, you did something wrong. I’m trying to say what can we, you and I, and the entire audience learn from this? Like that’s the whole point of this.
[32:13] Mike: Oh, yeah, that’s definitely something that could have been done better. I mean, I —
[32:17] Rob: Yeah. It sounds like visually having something more visual than just being able to discuss it. It could have helped. That makes —
[32:22] Mike: And the issues that I had at that time was that I had a working product but it was all command line based. I mean, you basically run it from a DOS prompt.
[32:30] Rob: Right.
[32:31] Mike: So there was no interface to show them that would have given them any good indication of how the thing actually worked. It just wasn’t gonna happen. Now, what would have solved that was for me to just go into Balsamiq Mockups and actually start showing them that stuff but what I did was I built that stuff out and built the product from that. I didn’t necessarily show it to them though because I had the conversation with them and then I went and started designing the UI for it. I did it a little bit out of order.
[32:59] Rob: Right. Okay. The last reason it’s hard to ship a product is that there are a handful of danger zones that make it easy for you to wander, procrastinate or think about changing direction. I actually did a blog post about this a while ago and I think it was called the — I called it the three startup danger zones. I think there are more than three.
[33:15] Mike: What were the three that you listed?
[33:17] Rob: I’m pretty sure I listed when you’re looking for the idea that is the biggest analysis paralysis I’ve ever seen, is people just spending six months and going through idea after idea after idea and never actually committing to anything and overanalyzing.
[33:29] The second one is basically in the middle of development. Like if you have a six month development thing then like three to four months, it’s just brutal. Because you’ve been just working nights and weekends for that many months but you’re not close enough to the finish line to actually see anything and so I see a lot of half-finished projects that just get abandoned.
[33:50] And then the third point I pointed out was right after launch because basically at launching it can get a little bit of promotion, you might get a few customers and then most people think that, hey, I’m gonna get that TechCrunch link or you know, people are just gonna flock to the product and then two weeks after launch, your traffic is like five people a day and you know, someone doesn’t know how to do ongoing marketing. And so that’s when they throw in the towel. That’s actually when a lot of stuff ends up going up on Flippa or just being sold in general, right? It’s after that first month or two and there’s this big low and it’s like you spent six months or two years, you know, whatever — building an app and there’s these danger point. So I feel like you might want —
[34:27] Mike: I would say that it was really the middle to near end of December where I got to that point where I finished the codes that it’s usable, and I just said, I need a break. It’s been probably three weeks or so — three or four weeks. And I’ll be honest. I haven’t touched hardly any code on AuditShark. I’ve been thinking about doing some stuff with the website. I played around with the Twitter Bootstrap a little bit, more with marketing in mind than anything else. I mean, I think somebody commented to me that I shouldn’t be working on wasting time. Well, I was using it more for design ideas for, you know, could I use these to lay out — that’s kind of the underlying framework for laying out a marketing website. Well, I use it for other things.
[35:09] Rob: Right. I mean, I think — you know, you said you haven’t touched AuditShark code in a month. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at this point, man. Because I don’t think you have that confirmation yet. Like, you know, I’ve come back to this a few times. It’s like I think that until you’ve talked to customers that has to be your next thing before designing a website or doing anything else. If you really do wanna go down that bank road, I’m not convinced that you’ve built something the banks need yet, you know?
[35:32] Mike: And I could see how you’d think that because I have no proof.
[35:34] Rob: Not even proof but even if you told me —
[35:36] Mike: I don’t have any paying customers, yeah. I have no paying customers.
[35:38] Rob: But even if you said I talked to these banks and they’ve seen the screenshots and they’re like — they don’t even have to write you a check, Mike. If you showed it to them and you did a full demo and they’re like, yes, absolutely, we’ll buy that, you know, we can’t do it till next year, or we can’t do it in six months. At least there would be some validation there.
[35:52] Mike: Right.
[35:53] Rob: And then I think, yeah, obviously, the next step after that would then be the — you know, someone writing you a check but maybe you decided to bail on this bank thing. But it’s like you want to make a decision. Honestly, I would hate to see AuditShark but you failed it kind of for a month. I would hate to see it go away. And then for you to just kind of not want to not get back to it and leave it at this that would be terrible.
[36:12] Mike: No, I agree. And the thing is like the past couple of weeks have actually been pretty good for me because they kind of gotten my mind off of it a little bit. And they’ve really made me step back and start to analyze what decisions I need to make next.
[36:27] One of the hard parts about being an entrepreneur I think is that you don’t have a road map. You don’t have a set of instructions that says these are the 25 things that you need to do and then you’ll be successful. It’s like you’ve got an empty slate and you’ve got to figure it out. I’m at one of those points where I just have to say, okay, what is the next step? I will write it down and then that’s what I have to do. And that’s kind of the point that I’m at. I mean, I got to the point where December, I was a little bit burned out. You know, I needed a break from it. I’ve basically taken a break from it. And now, it’s time to start going back to it and I might fly down from here from Boston.
[37:01] I basically had a major revelation about what — how I need to essentially structure my marketing campaign. Because there’s been questions that — and talking to people I’ve said, these are the things that AuditShark can do and this is why it’s useful. The light just kind of goes on for me like, oh, I get it. That makes sense, exactly what you said. I understand why I would want this and you know, how it can solve my problems. None of that’s on my website. Not a single line of it. I mean, like why is none of this on my website? Like, because I’m an idiot, because I haven’t done it yet. I don’t think I would have thought of those two or three weeks ago.
[37:34] Rob: Right. Because you had to get away from it, yeah.
[37:37] Mike: I think I’m at the point where I’m ready to get back into it and really ready to start looking at that marketing side of things again and figure out how am I gonna get in and reach these customers because one of the problems that I have is that I’m on the road a lot and I do a lot of consulting and in order for me to actually physically go talk to a customer, I have to take a week off which if you’re a consulting company, I mean, that’s kind of hard. I mean, you —
[38:00] Rob: That’s a lot of money.
[38:01] Mike: Yeah, it is. For somebody who may not even want to talk to you. That’s the problem I’m dealing with and that’s probably part of why I’ve looked at some of these other options because a lot of them — it’s less offline sales. Like I don’t need to go into somebody’s office and say, hey, would you like to look at this product that can help audit work best for you? Or, hey, would you like to look at this vulnerability scanner? I mean, people know that vulnerability scanners exist and they look for them online. Audit and compliance is a little bit different. I think that it’s much higher touched —
[38:29] Rob: Absolutely.
[38:30] Mike: — and that’s part of the problem that I’ve had with it. And that’s part of why my mind has strayed I think a little bit.
[38:36] Rob: You’re actually thinking now about how this thing might actually have to be sold and that might be beyond what you can muster.
[38:41] Mike: Right, right. I have no doubt that it can solve a problem. I have no doubt that people would buy it. It’s a doubt about whether or not I have the time to actually go talk to the customers and can I pull that off.
[38:54] Rob: I still have doubts about those first two, honestly. You said you have no doubt that it can solve a problem and you have no doubt that people will buy it. And I still have doubts that you’ve found a problem that it solves. Like you haven’t found a customer who actually has said this solves my problem and you haven’t found someone who says they’ll buy it. So until those first two are solved, I don’t know. Well, I guess if you know that you’re not gonna be able to sell into banks and it’s not worth pursuing, but that’s a shame because I think you’ve been thinking about it like that. Well, I have, certainly for two years.
[39:25] Mike: The reason I know that it does solve a problem and that it can be sold into banks it’s because I know of banks that have taken what I’ll call competitive products that do largely the same thing that AuditShark does and have thrown them out because they’re too complicated and too expensive.
[39:42] Rob: Right.
[39:43] Mike: And unfortunately, I can’t go talk to them because I’m contractually barred from doing so. So that’s part of the issue. The ones that I know explicitly about, I just can’t go talk to them or I’ll get sued.
[39:55] music
[39:58] Rob: To someone listening to this, what we’re doing here — like what Mike is doing here is really, really hard. If you’ve never done this, especially — even just having this conversation in private is tough. This is not something easy to sit and discuss through because these are hard issues and then do it on the podcast, dude, I totally respect you.
[40:15] Mike: As I saw an e-mail, I’m gonna go cry myself to sleep.
[40:17] Rob: Yeah, exactly. I personally, dude, I want to thank you for doing this and agreeing to kind of talk about this stuff. I mean, we’ve done it now, three episodes maybe, four episodes where we’ve kind of talked about some hard topics. You don’t have to do this. You know, you could totally say like I don’t need your public accountability. Like you don’t have to and so I appreciate it. And I imagine listeners do too because I think we all learn from it. And I like what Sandy said. She said some other stuff but she was basically like we are rooting for you. You know, we’re rooting for AuditShark. And I think that’s pretty cool.
[40:46] Mike: Yeah, I’ll be honest. I think if people weren’t asking questions, I probably really wouldn’t talk about it. Realistically, the major reason that I talk about it is because people are asking me about it and they want to know. If people weren’t asking, I probably wouldn’t talk nearly as much about it as I do.
[41:01] Rob: Right. And we didn’t until — I mean, six months ago we didn’t talk nearly this in-depth about it. And it was because it wasn’t done and because people weren’t asking the questions. So my hope is that in two weeks that you have a better idea. It does sound to me like if you’re not gonna do — go after banks, that’s gonna take a big mental shift for me personally. Because I really have thought of AuditShark as this thing you’re building for banks and I know it can do all these other stuff. But if you make the switch, I need it to be clean and I need you to figure out what’s next. Yeah, try to figure out what I hope you have — I guess have some more data.
[41:40] Mike: I need more data. And I need a solid idea of how I’m going to start reaching out to — or not even start reaching out, how I’m going to get in touch with people who are going to give me yes or no answers on some of the stuff.
[41:53] Rob: Yeah, that’s for sale. Even if it’s a verbal yes and like, you don’t have a physical check, it’s like who’s gonna be your first sale.
[41:59] Mike: Like I said, I mean a lot of it is just the issue of it is a general purpose tool and it’s got to be built — the marketing has got to be aimed at somebody.
[42:07] Rob: Yup.
[42:08] Mike: That’s really what it’s come down to. So my next steps over the next couple of weeks, I’ve got some tasks I’ve got to knock out and one of which is a website redesign where it gives me a little bit not more control but makes it easier for me to kind of map out the paths that I want people to go on through my website. I’ve got to work on the actual text that’s on the website. It’s there but I can see just from the Google Analytics stuff that I was looking at, I mean, a lot of people go to the features and then a lot of people go to Buy Now.
[42:38] And then from Buy Now, they just drop out. I mean I’ve got a Sign Up page there. And it looks to me like people are just kind of dropping off from that Sign Up page which is ugly to be perfectly honest. But the fact that I’m getting so many people to go through that path from homepage to features to Buy Now, I like that but it makes me wonder the thing that none of these tools are ever gonna tell you is why.
[43:02] Rob: Yup. It does seem to me like you need to find out who’s coming to your website because if you already have traffic coming through organic search and you decide that you do, in fact, wanna target those people because it’s easier to do it online then you need to find out who they are and what value prompt they’re looking for because if you can then switch positioning to sell to them. To me, before you redesign your website, it’s like you have to talk to somebody who needs it. You know what I’m saying?
[43:24] Mike: Right.
[43:25] Rob: I imagine people out there have questions or comments and so they can call in to our voicemail number.
[43:31] Mike: It’s 1-888-801-9690, or if you feel more e-mail inclined, then you can just e-mail it to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under creative comments. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider writing a review in iTunes by searching for startups. You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com. A full transcript of this podcast is also available at our website. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 65 | Six Things We Learned In The Past Year
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 65.
[00:04] 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.
[00:22] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes Rob’s made. What are you doing this week, Rob?
[00:27] Rob: Well, I’ve got a lot of things going on. I was pleasantly surprised we got a mention by — I’m gonna butcher his name but it’s Piotr Soluch. And he named us the best podcast of 2011.
[00:39] Mike: I saw that.
[00:40] Rob: Yeah. Our consistency, honesty, and value — it’s pretty cool. He just did like a Tech Awards 2011 thing. So, thanks, Peter — or Piotr. And we’ll include a link in the show as to that.
[00:50] Mike: And you can include an apology, a written apology for butchering his name, I’m sure.
[00:55] Rob: Seriously? Yeah, sorry about that. How about you? You were mentioning you had spent some time looking for a developer?
[01:01] Mike: Yes. I actually sat down and wrote out a job description and put it out on oDesk to hire a developer to work on my form software a little bit because there’s some things that need to be finished off and I just don’t feel motivated to actually do them. And they’re pretty well defined — or at least in my head they’re more well defined than they are in paper. So I wrote up a job description and put that out there and within — I’d say probably nine or ten hours, I had over 70 applications. And within 24 hours, I had more than a hundred. I’m still trying to whittle them down. It’s kind of hard after you knock off about 60 or 80 people then you’re down to these last 15 or 20 and you’re like, okay, well, who do I just kind of axe from this list?
[01:44] Rob: Yeah.
[01:45] Mike: It gets really hard at that point.
[01:47] Rob: One thing I’ve started doing when it’s — because that’s an ASP.NET or .NET development. There are so many folks that do it that I make the listing pretty restrictive. So I would say like, four and a half stars and above only.
[01:59] Mike: I have.
[02:00] Rob: I would say build an hour in the last six months.
[02:02] Mike: I have.
[02:03] Rob: I would say, English is five. So you already got all that.
[02:05] Mike: I’ve already done that.
[02:06] Rob: Okay. So the next thing I would do is I would order them by price. If they really are all things being equal, I would order them by price and I’d take probably, you know, the cheapest five. I’d send all of them the same message — where you ask a few questions about, hey, do you work, you know. Or, do you have a full-time job and this is a side gig? Do you work from an office? Do you work from home? I mean, just kind of some basic questions just to see how good they — how well they communicate because you’re gonna do a lot of written communication.
[02:33] And I would — then I would see how those five come back. That’s typically what I’ve been doing because you’re right. It’s impossible when you have 15 — to possibly interview all of them. So at least that will narrow you. And if all five of those come back and they’re kind of crappy, you can ditch them and you can move to the next five. It’s nice to have a bigger pool at this point.
[02:49] Mike: Yeah. That’s a good idea. What I’d started doing was going through and trying to identify the people who would specifically called out a couple of things that I mentioned as opposed to just putting in this whole list of these are the things that I’ve done. So one of the things that’s big for me is ability to use entity framework. Some of them have done it but there’s a lot of them that haven’t and they’ve got all this . NET and C# experience but they don’t specifically call it entity framework or links to entity anywhere.
[03:15] Rob: Either just XNA people who don’t have that or include that as one of the questions. How many months of experience do you have working, you know, in production code with entity framework? And that’s a great one to include to those five and most people will answer honestly. And then if they don’t have it, you can just refuse them right there.
[03:32] Mike: Yup.
[03:33] Rob: That is a good thing. If you forgot kind of the core thing that you need, it does help with limiting the number of prospects you have.
[03:38] Mike: Yeah. The one thing I don’t like is that — especially with oDesk, it’s more of the interface than anything else. For example, some things that don’t quite work well is if you’re trying to sort by — and this is odd. If you’re trying to sort by the amount that the person’s charging, it doesn’t actually work all the time. And I don’t know why. It seems like it should.
[03:59] Rob: I think because there are two different amounts. There’s an amount in their profile that they have. And there’s an amount that they bid in your project.
[04:05] Mike: Right.
[04:06] Rob: And the one may be displaying and one may be sorting or something.
[04:09] Mike: That’s what I think is happening. I think it’s going by the — the one that’s showing is the one that they have in their profile versus the one that they’re bidding as —
[04:16] Rob: Right. Well, hey, I went on TechZing this week. I guess it’s episode 165 and it will come out — I don’t know, it will come out in the next few days. Basically it was a 90-minute discussion of like the HitTail acquisition. It was like the most in-depth info I’ve given about it, if you folks are interested. It was kind of cool because it’s tough with our podcast because we do make it shorter — 30 to 40 minutes.
[04:36] So we’d probably — even if we dedicate an episode to it, probably wouldn’t have gotten into as much detail as we did there. So if you folks are interested, check out techzinglive.com or you can check out TechZing in iTunes.
[04:47] In addition, I wanted to do just kind of an open call on Twitter. I’m gonna do it here but go ahead and tweet Mike and I or leave in the comments. If you wanna hear more about either the HitTail acquisition or you know — I guess we’ve already done AuditShark but certainly if you wanted to hear more about that, let us know. And on Twitter, I’m @robwalling and mike is @singlefounder.
[05:08] Mike: Oh, by the way, did I tell you that I bottled my first batch of beer on Sunday?
[05:12] Rob: You didn’t.
[05:13] Mike: So it’s been about two weeks. It was about two or three days ago when I just decided to actually start bottling it. It actually took surprisingly little time. It took me about probably 40 minutes or so and that included cleaning out all the bottles, making sure everything was prepared, and just bottling it all up. And now, it’s sitting over here next to my desk and I have to wait another couple of weeks for it to condition.
[05:36] And basically that conditioning process is — I’m not sure quite how to describe it but basically what I did was I put a couple of teaspoons of sugar into the concoction and then you just close the bottles up and you wait for it to mix up and chemically do its thing. And at that point, it will be carbonated. Because right now, it tastes like flat beer. And it smells fine, it’s just that there’s no carbonation in it.
[05:57] So this process will take care of carbonating the beer and you’ll know when it’s done when you can try and squeeze the bottle and it doesn’t actually squeeze. It’s, you know, very hard to squeeze into it just because it’s got the pressure coming from the inside. And then after that, I just throw it in the fridge and “condition it” for a while but I don’t have to. I can just throw it in the fridge for a few days and start drinking it.
[06:17] Rob: Suck a sixer down every night after nine? Hey, are you gonna bring it to the MicroConf? Is this MicroConf draft beer?
[06:24] Mike: There’s certainly not enough beer for me to do that. And I don’t know how I would even get it to MicroConf.
[06:30] Rob: Well, that’s cool. I’m excited to hear if this turns out — and if it does, maybe I’ll give it a shot as well. I’ve always been fascinated with the whole brewing of beer and making of wine but I’ve never tried it myself.
[06:40] Mike: Yeah. I’ve always wanted to do it and it was just one of those things where my wife got me a beer kit for Christmas and I decided, hey, I wanna do it as a little bit of a hobby. Why not?
[06:48] Rob: I’ve gotten this question a couple of times now, once on TechZing and then twice from either the e-mail or on Twitter. And someone asked me why I bought HitTail. And it was kind of an interesting question that I — I mean, I have a definite answer in my head. We haven’t talked about it in the podcast at all so I just wanted to take like 30 seconds and kind of go through the main reasons for folks who are interested.
[07:10] So the first thing is I had personal reasons for it. This question could be viewed as two things, right? Why did you stop working two days a week and go and spend a big chunk of change and buy this thing and revamp it and, you know, work hard for the last four months to do this? Why did you leave that semi-retired state or whatever? And for me — so that’s the personal side of it, right? It was for learning and personal challenge. I mean, I was starting to kind of atrophy in terms of how much new stuff I was learning and I felt like I was ready for the next challenge.
[07:37] But I think the more applicable and kind of the — maybe the thing more people would be interested in are the professional reasons of why did you buy it instead of either building it or building a different idea? And the reason I did is because given my situation where my time is so limited and with how many responsibilities I have, I wanted to avoid that 9 to18 months of building, launching, marketing, all that wait. I’m too impatient.
[08:06] And one way to get around that impatience is to just go out and acquire something. And if you can find something quality, it can save you tremendous, tremendous amount of time. So I mean, I’m not joking when I’m saying I literally think that if I try to build HitTail from scratch and get it to the point where it is in terms of paying customers and number of links and number of monthly visitors and all that stuff, it would easily take me 18 months of time.
[08:29] Even if I was doing it mostly full time and outsourcing a lot of it, the marketing side would just take so, so long. This domain has aged and it just has all these built in traffic and stuff. So as we know building the app takes time but, you know, either it’s a lot of time or it’s expensive and building a market takes a lot of time and it’s expensive. So you know, maybe that’s something we’d go into a little more detail in the future episode but I did want to throw it out here.
[08:53] music
[08:56] Rob: You’re travelling next week?
[08:58] Mike: Yeah. I’ll be in Pasadena for the next couple of weeks.
[09:01] Rob: Make sure you go out to Santa Monica for your — because you’re gonna be there on the weekend, right?
[09:05] Mike: Yup. Yeah, I’m flying in on Sunday and then I’m not leaving until Friday the 3rd, I think it is.
[09:12] Rob: It’s only three hours from me so we’ll try to connect. And then we should connect with Jason Roberts from TechZing. He’s in Pasadena.
[09:18] Mike: Oh, cool.
[09:19] Rob: So I’m gonna bet you’ll be staying — I mean, it’s not that big so I would guess you’ll be walking distance because he lives downtown as well. The last thing before we get into our topic for today, which is Six Things We Learned in the Last Year, I wanted to mention “forrst” in addition to “dribbble.” Because the last episode, I mentioned “dribbble” which is dribbble.com. Right? And it’s kind of like a social network for designers where they share design ideas.
[09:43] And Zach Tong from the academy, from the Micropreneur Academy, he e-mailed and he said dribbble is about posting teasers of your work in progress and it’s mainly for designers. But “forrst” which is f-o-r-r-s-t is about posting work in progress or announcements so you can get feedback and it’s also for developers and designers. So that’s cool. He says he has an invite of either you — or I would like to join them. I assume they’re in Beta right now and we’ll be watching soon. So if you’re listening, check out forrst.com.
[10:14] music
[10:16] Rob: Our title this week is Six Things We Learned in the Last Year. Mike and I each have three of them.
[10:22] Mike: I think the biggest thing that I learned was how to put together a conference because there’s just so much more that goes into it that you really don’t think about. And I dealt with a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff and you dealt with a lot of the front-end marketing and making sure that the website was all geared up. But I worked almost entirely with all of the sponsors and getting all that stuffs taken care of and straightened out. And it was pretty challenging. I mean, we didn’t have a whole lot of time to pull everything together and we got those USB keys that were doubled as pens and laser pointers and everything. And it was just a challenge to kind of bring all that stuff together at the same time.
[10:58] Rob: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, you also handled all the giveaways and the sponsorship, the badges. There was a lot of stuff that was going on behind the scenes that folks didn’t see.
[11:09] Mike: I don’t think I ever shared with anybody how much of a nightmare putting together those badges was because there were still people who were signing up within the last couple of days before the conference was to go on. I couldn’t just hand the list off to somebody and say, hey, go do this and I’ll get it back from you in three weeks.
[11:27] It’s not like it’s a marketing launch where you can kind of time it after you’ve got all your stuff done. I mean, we had that deadline and we were still selling tickets right up until that deadline so it was just kind of a challenge because, you know, one of the sponsors had paid to have their logo put on the name badges. So I had to have them. They’re for everybody.
[11:45] Rob: Right. Yours actually ties into my first one which is things that are worthwhile are hard. You think that I would have known that by now but I totally learned that in the last year. MicroConf was a big part of that. Afterwards, I was so glad we did it. Like I was really pleased with the outcome and that we had basically surmounted this enormous challenge but it was really hard while we were doing it. It was just so much work and mental energy.
[12:10] I think it relates to my acquisition of HitTail and what the last four months have been for me as well. And the tail into 2011 is there’s like this sense of accomplishment and happiness. I’m like happy with myself, like proud of myself that I was able to pull it off. But at the same time, I had to make, you know, quite a bit of a few sacrifices that I didn’t have to make. We didn’t have to do either of those things. You and I would have made a perfectly good living last year. And we didn’t need to do that, man. So making the decision to actually make those sacrifices is a big one.
[12:41] Mike: Yeah, definitely. I totally agree with what you’re saying though. I mean, things that are worthwhile are hard. It kind of puts things in perspective for me having put in so much time an effort on AuditShark and thinking to myself, is this actually going to be worth it down the road? I’m sure that it will. It’s just, when is that going to happen? How much further down the road do I have to go in order to get there? When can I kind of set my hat down and take a rest before things will start to get to where I want them to be?
[13:09] Rob: Right.
[13:10] Mike: Well, one of the things that I learned was that I should be outsourcing a lot more things that I currently do. There’s just a lot of things that I do that I probably don’t necessarily have to and it’s more because I have some probably latent issues, just kind of giving up control of those things. And some of it is just a time crunch where I just haven’t made the time to either make videos or tutorials or anything like that to be able to hand it over to somebody else and just say, here, you handle this because I don’t have the time.
[13:38] Rob: You know, I think that’s a really common mental hurdle. And I think it’s something that probably every two months I face again. Like I can convince myself, all right, outsource a bunch of this stuff. And I’ll go out and hire some folks and then like within 60 days or three months, I realize I’m doing now a bunch of new stuff that I don’t want to do. And so I think we almost need constant reminders to look at our to-do list and say what of this can be outsourced?
[14:02] I think with how many people experience these exact same feelings, it’s not only a common thing but it’s just something that’s pretty hard to get through. And I think you folks out there are feeling that. I mean, I think the thing to start with is to head over to probably oDesk or Elance and pick one or two tasks on your list. Like even if it’s a small task like doing some market research, I have a VA and I had him put together my list of 100 dream clients for HitTail. And these are based on some very specific benefits that HitTail provides and customer who are happiest with it based on conversations I’ve had and they have certain characteristics.
[14:39] And so I explain this to him and I put together a quick screen cast and, you know, bullet a list of some things. And then I said, go. And I think it took him three hours, four hours. And he put together a spreadsheet with all the info we need to basically start cording these customers. And so even if it’s something like that, three hours at ten bucks an hour is 30 bucks. Anyone can afford to do that. You know, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re gonna start a business, I think your first step is to kind of dip your toe in the water and figure out — it’s gonna be uncomfortable on how to get over that discomfort.
[15:08] Mike: Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been looking at doing is putting together just kind of a pre-outline to have a VA go out and do some web searches for banks that are near me. So that I had kind of a targeted list of places to go and maybe phone numbers to call or people to talk to so that I don’t have to go out and gather that information myself.
[15:29] Rob: Yeah. I agree. Something I’ve never done that I was toying around with last night is, you know, I’ve talked several times about my marketing plan that I put together. And as I started looking through it, I realized, wow, I liked it. I put together all the strategy and these lists of tactics. But it’s gonna take a ton of time to implement. And I started thinking about outsourcing, basically finding someone who knows marketing, who’s above the level of a VA.
[15:51] And they’re gonna be more expensive but to basically sit down with them — probably over Skype and show them the list, ask if they have opinions on it. You know, in terms of improving it. And then having them implement chunks of it at a time and use their marketing background. So I would essentially be — I wouldn’t be outsourcing my marketing but I would be outsourcing some implementations of some of the tactics, if that makes sense.
[16:14] Mike: Yeah, I think so. Essentially what you do is you’d find somebody who is familiar with doing online marketing and then have them take a look at your marketing plan and then have them pick off things that they believe that they can handle and can basically just take those things you’ve outline and just go actually implement them.
[16:33] Rob: Right. That’s right. Because — I mean, I have a feeling I like I have a handle on how I wanna market this. I mean, obviously, the amount of time this stuff takes is pretty extensive. So my other responsibilities even if spending the last day and a half doing MicroConf stuff, it’s like I really would like for some of these marketing stuff to be done at the same time and it’s certainly not so complex. These little individual tactics are not so complex that I’m the only person in the world that could do them.
[16:55] I mean, it was almost like thinking them up, discovering them, putting the strategy together. That was the entrepreneur’s job and now, I am gonna get into implementation and so I think stretching myself in this is finding someone to implement these things which I typically don’t like to outsource, you know, much of my marketing but I think I’m gonna dip my toe in that water and see how it goes.
[17:14] Mike: I’m seriously considering outsourcing somebody to read my e-mail.
[17:18] Rob: I have as well. Actually, I’ve talked to my wife several times. And I’ve been telling her I’ve been trying to go through my e-mail with that in mind. Like how much of this could I get away with not doing? Is there anything here that could be replied to or filed or whatever without me being involved? And I haven’t been able to — after getting, you know, the Micropreneur Academy stuff is now in the good hands of a capable VA and now the HitTail support stuff is in the hands of a VA as of last Friday. And those are going really well. But beyond that, like everything else, is pretty personal. It at least needs my intervention.
[17:51] Mike: E-mail is just so hard I think because you get so many different types of e-mails and it’s very difficult to classify it because some of it just takes your knowledge or might be better left to an answer from you versus an answer from a VA.
[18:07] Rob: Right. My second thing I learned the last year is that it’s easy to be great and it’s hard to be consistent. And I actually got that from a Steve Martin book. It’s his memoir called the Born Standing Up. And he uses that phrase “It’s easy to be great. It’s hard to be consistent.” And what he meant by that is that as a comedian, he would see guys just knock it out of the park but they couldn’t do it consistently. That it’s actually not that hard to have a great show and have everyone love you. But to do that every night takes years and years and years of work.
[18:38] And I’m realizing that consistency, whether in — like with this podcast. The fact that we’ve stuck around and that we haven’t shut it down, is a huge deal. And our follower continues to grow and continues to be engaged with us, a large part due to the fact that we’ve now been around going on two years, right? A lot of people don’t keep their stuff going long enough and they just — they shut it down.
[19:00] I feel the same way about — like my blog. My blog’s been around for six years now maybe. I actually think now is a way easier time to start a blog than 2006 because I have friends who have started blogs and with the few correctly placed post on Hacker News, they get 500 subscribers in a few months. Even in a few weeks, frankly.
[19:18] When I started, it took me six months to get the 66 RSS subscribers. It took me a year to get to 250. It was just painful. So few people — you know, there weren’t as many social networks. There was no Twitter, all these things that just — you either got to the front page to dig or you didn’t. And that was how I did it back then.
[19:35] Now, I feel like it’s better. If someone were to actually blog and be consistent and write good stuff, I really believe that they could build up a blog way faster than most of us who started five or ten years ago.
[19:48] Mike: I think that what you said there was really key because you have to dedicate the time to it and be consistent. So, for example, my blog. I’ve been blogging for five years or so. Five or six years at this point. And I don’t have nearly as many subscribers as you do but at the same time, I also almost completely stopped blogging for like probably 18 months, 2 years, something like that. So there’s this huge gap in there. And last year, I started getting back into it again. But I still was just not very consistent. I mean, I still only blogged maybe a quarter as much as I had intended to.
[20:18] I think that the consistency piece of it is probably what’s most overlooked by people. They just don’t put the effort into it and they don’t dedicate the time to it. And, you know, they’re trying and trying and trying. And they stop at some point along the way whereas if they were to continue going, things would probably be much, much better. I mean, I know for a fact that if I blogged more regularly, I would probably have far more subscribers than I actually do.
[20:42] Rob: Right. There’s this careful balance between kind of being stubborn and pigheaded and continuing to bang your head against the wall when things aren’t working and being consistent and banging through that wall and getting to, you know, thousands of subscribers or thousands of listeners or whatever it is.
[20:57] You know, Seth Godin is famously known for that book, The Dip. And the biggest question after people read it is how do you know when you’re in the dip or when you should just give up. And it’s a really hard question to answer.
[21:07] And so I think we’ve talked about this in the past. But it’s like if you tend to give up on things pretty quickly, then I would say you need to charge through and you need to dedicate like a year or two to something before you give up. And I think if you tend to be pigheaded and just do things over and over and not stop them, then maybe you need to lean — certainly lean towards the side of giving up sooner rather than later.
[21:28] But in general, I find that the amount of effort to get something done, whether it is a conference or to build an app, or to build a podcast, or to build a blog with an audience, the amount of effort is way, way more — every time, way more than I think it’s gonna be. That I always underestimate it. And I think most people do in general.
[21:47] And I think that’s why it’s easy to be great; it’s hard to be consistent. It’s easy to get that one post on Hacker News that, hey, I pinned it. But it’s like — can you do that every week? Or can you do something every week and, you know, keep that momentum going? And I really — I think that’s where 99.5% of people just drop the ball.
[22:06] Mike: Yeah. I’m in that kind of — a little bit of what you said. It kind of leads into mine which is apparently number five. I learned that July was an awful, awful target for getting AuditShark out of the door. And part of the reason for that is just underestimating how much time and effort it takes to do certain things. And with AuditShark, I just — honestly, it just failed miserably. And part of it was taking a look at this stuff and saying, oh, well, that should be easy to do and not really taking into account the time and effort that it takes to do prototypes and figure out how to actually implement something with a technology you’ve never actually worked with before.
[22:41] I mean, I’ve never done anything in Azure before. I’ve never worked with WCF Services before. I’ve never built an architecture for any of that stuff before. So I don’t exactly know all the pitfalls that I’m gonna run into. And I certainly ran into my fair share of them. But in addition to that, just having the time that, you know, I need to set aside to do those things and doing a good estimation of how much time it’s gonna take to do that stuff, it was just — I was just way off. I mean, order is a magnitude in some cases.
[23:13] Rob: That’s painful, man. It’s so hard to take on new technologies or unknowns, right? It’s like, you can put together a spreadsheet and you can run an estimate for kind of every element of a project, and I almost think you got to like put a huge red background on the ones that are new technologies. It’s like if you and I are going to sit down to map out, hey, we’re gonna build an app, we could put the prep time, the customer development time, all the little tasks — design the database, business tear, data tear, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And we can — I mean, you and I can probably crank out an estimate that’s within like 10% if we’re using just straight technology that we know whether it’s PHP, or .NET or whatever.
[23:54] But as soon as you introduce — well, we’re gonna use the entity framework or we’re gonna use some new templating engine. You almost have to add these two x-factors like a 200, 300% increase to that single line item. You don’t really want to do that on the estimate because it seems ridiculous but that’s typically what happens because you wind up running at some stupid bug that you just can’t fix, that you don’t know, that once you’ve found it, you’re gonna know that templating engine’s so much better. But it like — it throws you off for days and days. And I feel like until you’ve done something once, you know it’s like that hours column should almost just be a huge question mark.
[24:27] Mike: I just think I remember some issues I ran into with PowerShell. And then there were some things with the Azure tables. And it just — little things just creep up on you and it shouldn’t take as long as it does but, you know, you run into something that’s either an edge case or some weird bug that you don’t know that it’s a bug, but apparently everyone else has been working with it for more than you know, 20 minutes does. And it’s obvious to them.
[24:49] It was just hard. But it was — definitely something I got to keep my mind focused on that those sorts of things where there are unknowns, you have to add in a lot more time that you don’t want to but you’re gonna have to in order to get a more accurate estimate.
[25:04] Rob: Yeah. I think that honestly, that limiting the number of new technologies that you try to mess with in any given project, is a great way to basically reduce uncertainty because you’ve been off quite a bit with this one. I mean, you did, honestly. Like when you said Asure, you know, I just listened back to our episodes and I kind of had a reaction to that on the podcast and I was kind of like, well, I’ve heard that it’s hard to get this going. I’ve heard that it’s hard — complex, and blah, blah, blah.
[25:30] All that aside, it’s just that it’s new. Anytime it’s new it’s gonna be complex and there was gonna be that learning curve. And I think if you have just done Usher and everything else was standard, you would have been fine. But it’s like you said, you also did first time editing framework. You also did probably first time PowerShell because that’s fairly new. So it’s like, you added in a lot of new things and those kind of cascade and multiply.
[25:54] Mike: If I had to start numbering, I could think of five or six things off the top of my head that were brand new that I’ve never worked before that kind of all of that included.
[26:01] Rob: Right. And those — and if instead of doing that, you had done just a straight up ASP.NET app on SQL Server like —
[26:06] Mike: Oh, yeah. Easy.
[26:08] Rob: I mean, hundreds of hours shorter, I bet.
[26:10] Mike: Right, right.
[26:11] Rob: You wanted to use the new technologies both to learn them and to be more efficient and to have better performance and all that stuff that those add.
[26:19] Mike: Yup.
[26:20] Rob: Our last one here — this is the sixth thing. It’s that we are in the people business. What I mean by that is relationships have never been more important than they are today. I used to work for a guy who bought an electrical contracting firm in the 50s. And he bought it for like 50,000 bucks and by the time he retired, it was doing 600 million a year in sales. This was in the ‘90s. And he would always say — he would ask people, “What business are we in?” And they would say, “Oh, we’re on the electrical contracting business.” Or “We’re in the construction business.” He would say, “No. We’re in the people business.”
[26:49] And it was this funny — you have this old guy asking you and it’s kind of like, oh, that’s kind of cheesy. But the guy lived it out. He was basically like “Our customers are people. Our employees are people. Without them, we can’t make this work.” And I think I’m reflecting on 2011 and I’m realizing that without this podcast and the listeners, you and I probably would not have gotten as much done as we did. Because we are like accountable to this group of people.
[27:15] And I bet pulling off MicroConf would have been really, really hard. I bet selling the tickets, getting the word out, all that stuff. This podcast really helped that. And so beyond that, it’s like meeting new folks, the TechZing guys, Dan and Ian from Tropical MBA and Lifestyle Business Podcast. Like — meeting colleagues who are also doing the same thing as us has been a fantastic experience. And it’s great to be able to go on their podcast and, you know, increase our audience and do the same for them.
[27:44] And so I’m just realizing kind of a 360 degree thing. It’s like the people who listen to us, the people come who come to the conference, the people who are doing the same thing we are, these people are way more important than SEO traffic or doing some new tactic on my website. It’s like making that one new relationship is way more valuable than looking at more analytics.
[28:04] Mike: I can say without a doubt that I don’t think that without the podcast and without the relationships that we have developed, there’s no way that MicroConf would have ever happened. I just don’t think that it would have gotten the publicity that it needed. I think we would have lost money and we would have to shut it down the very first year that we even tried.
[28:22] Rob: Yeah, I would agree. I think the take away from this, what I’m trying to tell people is I used to think I could do everything alone. I mean, you and I, we’re single founders, right? This is what we do. We don’t hire employees. We don’t want to build a big team but at the same time, I think you need people like you need accountability whether that’s starting a podcast and building an audience that keeps you accountable or whether that’s having a mastermind group, which I’m now into. I would consider the third like it’s that valuable to me.
[28:47] I always thought I could be this lone ranger and I was a lone ranger for a while and I made it work. But it isn’t nearly as productive. You’re not as good, you don’t reach the same heights, you can’t do the same things without it. And you can’t do them as quickly. I think getting people involved and letting them in and letting them know what’s going on kind of in your internal world is a real boon to getting things done whether it’s in your business or in your personal life.
[29:12] Mike: That’s honestly a bit of a popular misconception about the single founder blog that I have and the moniker that I go by on Twitter. It’s just that it’s not that you can do everything by yourself, it’s that you can start things by yourself and move them further along on your own. You don’t necessarily need a co-founder. And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s not that you can do it alone, it’s about that you don’t need a co-founder or somebody to absolutely share everything with. You can get a lot of that advice, for example, a mastermind group.
[29:46] And I think I wrote a blog post about this at one point which was the argument against having a co-founder. You never get into an argument with yourself about whether or not you should do something. It’s just you either decide to do it or you decide not to. That’s a little bit different than spending a lot of mental energy arguing with somebody else when they have one opinion and you have a different one. And you just can’t come to a conclusion and then everything grinds to a halt because you’re so busy fighting over that one thing that you don’t start making decisions that move the business forward or move the other things forward that you’re doing.
[30:18] I totally agree that you need other input from people and whether that’s your customers or peers or podcast listeners, blog readers, other business owners. You need input from other people in order to make decisions. You can’t get all that on your own. And I think that most people would love to be able to say, oh, I’m gonna sell myself all these services. I’m gonna be able to pay all of them and I’ll make millions for myself. You can’t be both the customer and the provider.
[30:46] Rob: Yeah. I have this phrase that I’ve used in the past and it’s “data is my co-founder.” And I was gonna put it on a t-shirt. Actually, Patrick Foley said I should put it on a t-shirt and start selling it. I do like that phrase a lot. And I’ve realized that although there is truth in it, you know, that I can use data to convince me to do something, I realized that there’s also value in a mastermind group. Mastermind groups are all my other co-founder. It’s probably what I would put on the back of that shirt if I printed it.
[31:10] music
[31:12] Rob: To recap, Mike’s three things he learned in the last year are —
[31:16] Mike: The biggest things I learned were how to put together a conference, that I should be outsourcing a lot more things than I currently do, and that doing time estimations on things that you aren’t necessarily familiar with is just an awful idea and you should outsource that as well.
[31:31] Rob: And the three things I learned are that things that are worthwhile are hard; that it’s easy to be great, it’s hard to be consistent; and that we’re in the people business, that relationships have never been more important than they are now. Mike, we’re at 72 ratings in iTunes. We’re going up —
[31:46] Mike: That is crazy.
[31:48] Rob: Yeah, like every couple of weeks, we go up by ten ratings. So I’ve said it in the past, but it helps us rank in iTunes for the term start-ups. We ranked on the first page, we rank in the top three for the term start-ups which is, you know, a testament. To all the folks who are rating us, we really appreciate it.
[32:02] If you have a question or comment, you can always call it into our voicemail number, we’ll answer it on air, 888-801-9690 or you can e-mail it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under creative comments. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider writing that review in iTunes by searching for startups and you can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS. A full transcript is available at our website startupsfortherestofus.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 64.5 | MicroConf 2012 Announcement
Episode 64 | Hiring and Managing Remote Developers
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 64.
[00:03] [Music]
[00:12] Rob: Welcome to startups for the rest of us the podcast to help developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products. Whether you have built your first product or you are just thinking about it, I am Rob.
[00:21] Mike: And I am Mike.
[00:23] Rob: And we are here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. If you stick around to the end of the episode we are going to be discussing hiring and managing remote developers in depth. What’s going on this week Mike?
[00:35] Mike: The last week I remember you would you had mentioned that Google Adwords issue where if you go in you browse and you search for different things there was a little newsletter popup for somebody to signup directly through the Google Adwords. And I did some research on that and unfortunately it’s in beta but it’s basically just an Adwords extension that they have added on it. I mean they have added a couple of different Adwords extensions over the years and this is just one that is currently in beta. So I couldn’t get much info on it and you know there is a little bit of speculation here and there but it seems to be rather new its only been out there for maybe a moth or so.
[01:10] Rob: Yeah I have never actually seen it in the wild you are the one that stumbled upon it when we were having kind of an offline conversation. Explain to the… we didn’t talk about it at all on the podcast last week, explain to the listeners what it is.
[01:20] Mike: So when you go to Google and you do a search for something that Google does is in addition to showing the page search results right underneath well actually its embedded in line with some of the search results that are paid for you will have a just a text field that says ‘subscribe’. And there is a button off to the side I don’t know whether you can customize the ‘subscribe’ button or not and you basically it will fill in your email address if you are already logged into Google services. And I will assume that it goes through and you know signs you up for whatever mailing list that they have.
[01:55] Now if I remember correctly it also directly sends your email address to them. I don’t know if there is any sort of double opt in or anything like that but it looked interesting. The one thing I question is whether or not people are going to actively hand out their email address through something on that unless you explicitly say in the text of the Ad that you are giving something away for free and they can only get it if they sign up.
[02:20] Rob: Yeah it’s got to be a big you are basically selling to them in like what you have 50 characters or something. I mean that’s like ten words tops you know. So you really have to convince someone to give their email quickly. It’s not like you have even a sidebar with a little photo or anything like that its just very very tight. So we will see how it goes I think it’s an interesting experiment obviously but it’d be curious to try it out at some point. And its Adwords only I mean you know its kind of a bummer they don’t allow it in the search results. But I am sure they are going to they are not going to allow people to do that they want you to pay for it. Well hey my update the new Hit Tail design is up, it’s live.
[02:56] Mike: Really?
[02:57] Rob: Yeah, yeas I launched it yesterday. So everyone rush out to hittail.com and check it out, it’s a lot of work. Try to think I didn’t have nearly as many issues as I thought it would once I rolled it live. Because I have I did it kind of a commando launch you know I did not have the massive QA team doing all kinds of monitoring and all of that stuff. I just kind of I knew it worked pretty well and I tested the major functions. I put it up yesterday, I emailed everybody all the active users and said come check out and…
[03:24] Mike: Cool.
[03:25] Rob: I think the biggest issue has been caching of course like certain people’s browsers are still caching all the images and they have same names and so things look weird for them.
[03:31] Mike: Oh I see yeah that can…
[03:34] Rob: So once we clear cache and clear cookies and all that or open in a different browser everything has been working so.
[03:40] Mike: Cool.
[03:41] Rob: That’s been good I haven’t gotten a lot of emails about it which is both good and bad because I well its good because its nice that people are interested but its bad because I don’t have time to answer them all so. But I am excited yeah I moved to a whole new pricing model, I moved away from the PayPal payments where you know people have to go offsite so now its credit card processing through Stripe. I’m just excited to see how it impacts conversion rates because now soon I will ask for credit card up front instead of letting them to do a full trial and them like trying to beg them to signup. And it’s just totally different conversion rates when you do that right?
[04:14] Mike: Right.
[04:15] Rob: The credit card up front you are going to convert a lot more a lot more people. So its exciting its a new day and if anyone is curious and wants to see the old design they can go to old.hitttail.com I left it up just for posterity for now I am going to take some screen chats for presentations because its definitely going to be a case study, I am hoping that I can dramatically improve conversion rate and such and you know use it in my talks and blog posts and such.
[04:38] Mike: Yeah it’s a pretty dramatic difference between old.hittail.com and just hittail.com.
[04:44] Rob: Yeah.
[04:45] Mike: Cool I have been doing something similar I have been kind of working on my marketing sites for Audit Shark and for my forum software which I have profusely neglected for a far too long. So basically trying to do those more or less in parallel I have looked into a couple of different CSS frameworks and I have been experimenting with the Twitter Bootstrap framework have you taken a look at that or no?
[05:10] Rob: No I have never, I’ve barely even heard of it.
[05:13] Mike: So if you go if you just search for Twitter Bootstrap what you will find is a link to you will probably end up on GitHub or something like that. But basically you can download all of the CSS templates for the framework that Twitter is built it and everything looks very nice, its got very high quality layout CSS that you can throw in there.
[05:35] Rob: I have seen this I have seen it before yeah.
[05:38] Mike: Really yeah it’s really interesting to work with. I think the one thing that I find a little bit not disconcerting but a little bit challenging is the fact that if you want to use like a different color scheme for the background or for that’s top level navigation bars or for a photo or something like that you have to kind of work them in yourself. So you can’t really rely on the CSS that’s coming down from you know the CDNs that they provide. I mean you can some degrees I mean you have to supply your own CSS, custom CSS files but my question is to whether or not using their service is a good idea for that I mean you don’t exactly have quality control over that.
[06:15] Rob: So you are you building something from scratch them by hand instead of going with like WordPress or having a designer build something?
[06:24] Mike: I am, part of the reason for that is over the past probably I would say two weeks or so I have been a lot of debugging on my server to try to and figure out exactly why things seem so slow. And it’s all built on WordPress so you know obviously there is only so many places that there could be issues. And what I have done is I have gone through my entire WordPress installation, I have done massive optimizations I have streamlined everything, I have turned off as many possible plug ins as I can. And I have gotten the page load speeds down to a less than a second. Before they were going upwards of I don’t know five, six seconds depending on what page you were going to.
[07:01] Rob: Which website is this?
[07:02] Mike: For both singlefounder.com I did all these optimizations there because I knew that that probably had more traffic than Audit Shark and then on auditshark.com I did some optimizations there as well. But I think I mentioned it before like the Contact 7 plug in for example is loaded on every single page regardless of whether you use it on that page or not. So like all the CSS files and the JavaScript files and everything they get, you know for all those plug ins they tend to get loaded regardless to whether you use those plug ins on the page or not. So what happens is that that slows down your site as a whole.
[07:36] So I started out with singlefounder.com and tried working on my blog because I knew that I would see a lot more speed increases there just because there is so much more content. And I was able to get the initially the load times were in the neighborhood of five to six seconds, when I was done they were down to about maybe three quarters of a second but that was if it was cache. I signed up for a pingum.com account and started tracking to see how fast my different servers were because I have a Windows server out there and I also have a Linux server that you know I run most of my stuff on. But there are still some things I have to run Windows applications on.
[08:13] And what I found was that on singlefounder.com there were images that were not loading immediately. They were you know 10, 15k images but they were taking anywhere from three to four seconds to load. And when the page itself the entire thing loads in five seconds and you have got one or two images that are you know they are being loaded in parallel but they are still taking three to four seconds for just those couple of images you know there is something obviously wrong.
[08:40] So I tried figuring out okay well is it the fact that its WordPress, is it just these images and what I did is I pointed Pingum directly to those images, not even loading the page just loading those images and I found that there is something between some of the Pingum servers and my web server that are just causing some sort of issue. And I haven’t quite been able to track it down yet I mean for all I know it could be the server itself.
[09:03] Rob: Yeah and it’s just the server serving is slow I mean it will have to be right there is how can it be anything between Pingum and your static image coming off a web server?
[09:11] Mike: You know I don’t know I mean I can think of ways. I mean if that traffic is getting misrouted or if it’s getting you know rerouted based on some you know security firewall that it runs into and says, oh I will have to analyze this packet. Or maybe if the image itself when it gets requested the server says, oh I have got this image its you know its needs this specific requirements I have to you know zip it before I send it down, you know stupid things like that. And I am yet to be able to figure out exactly what the problem is because sometimes it loads very very quickly. I mean it will load that image I mean maybe 100, 150 milliseconds and then there is times where it will take three seconds.
[09:49] Rob: The big question in my mind is why are you doing this? Like why are you spending the time to speed all these stuff up? I mean I guess with singlefounder.com if its five to six seconds it’s your blog and everything I can understand spending some time on it. But I would just change web hosting at this point man…
[10:05] Mike: Well…
[10:06] Rob: Because if you have invested three, four hours into it its like such a not it’s not paying itself back you know what I am saying?
[10:11] Mike: Right.
[10:12] Rob: But it’s like Audit Shark isn’t even live yet you know what I am saying like why optimize now instead of just getting some up there?
[10:18] Mike: It was more a matter of trying to figure out where the problem is. I mean because if it’s a WordPress problem it’s not going to help to move to a different site. You know if it’s a DNS server issue which I have found that my DNS server respond depending on which one it is I have one that responds at about 80 milliseconds and another one that will run to 100 which is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But what I did find and through the process of digging was that within WordPress there were a lot of plugins that were active which you know I thought that wanted these plugins.
[10:47] You know for example one was Jet Pack which gives me these analytics on my site that tells me you know what people are searching for and gives me more of a real-time status of what people are looking at on my site and how many people are actually on it things like that. But what I found was that it was the cost benefit analysis you know it just shows it was just wasn’t worth it to have those things. I mean they were sucking up lot of time to load these pages. And I really think that people were coming to my site and just saying you know this takes too long to load I am out of here.
[11:16] And because that’s translates pretty much every single site that I had I am like well you know I need to at least spend some time here to figure out what’s going on. And I really wanted to revamp the marketing a little bit anyway. So it just seemed like an appropriate time to start looking at that stuff and do a little bit of digging and see whether or not it was a problem with WordPress or something else.
[11:36] Rob: Well if all your sites are slow I would bet that it’s your host.
[11:40] Mike: It’s not.
[11:41]Rob: And if it’s only some of them then it’s probably plugins in WordPress.
[11:44] Mike: Well what bothers me is that like as I said pointing to a specific image sometimes that image will load in a100 milliseconds and sometimes it takes three seconds.
[11:53] Rob: Yeah you know man…
[11:54] Mike: And I still think that that’s the server.
[11:55] Rob: I got an email last week from a WordPress architect and developer after he heard the last, well it was two episodes ago when you and I kind of made a call. He emailed me I think his rate is pretty decent I would recommend maybe hiring him. It sounds like there is just a better option than trying to troubleshoot this stuff yourself. When you are talking about doing like why slow stuff and spending hours and hours on it I just feel like there is a better your time could be better spent doing other stuff you know.
[12:20] Mike: No I agree I talked to somebody else by the way I don’t know whether it may have been the same person or not and I am just kind of chatting back and forth. He emailed about you know what sort of thing he has done for other sites and you know what sort of things he has used to help speed things up. And you know we were just going back and forth I was like I tried this, I tried this. And he was like you know I don’t see anything obvious that you have done that isn’t really doing it. I mean really it kind of comes down to at this point the servers I mean there is nothing else to try. So I think it’s a matter of just saying okay well you know either I have my host move, the move my VPS to a different server or ditch them entirely and go some place else.
[12:59] Rob: Right I went per your kind of suggestion I went back and I listened to a bunch of the earlier broadcasts. And you were right they are not nearly as bad as I had remembered they are actually pretty darn good. Yeah it was entertaining I actually like how we, I felt like the broadcasts get better as we go on because we share more about what we are doing and we don’t just talk about five ways to do this or X rules to do that. Like we actually share our experiences to help avoid the same mistakes we have made.
[13:27] You know but it really that’s when it gets more interesting for me listening to it. So but there were three loose ends that or three kind of funny things listening back that came up that I had totally forgotten about. One in episode eight which was…
[13:42] Mike: Oh no.
[13:43] Rob: Yeah way way long ago yeah you said I am, we are starting work on a SaaS app and I expect it to launch in September or October and that was 2010. Isn’t that crazy? And that’s audit, that’s what became Audit Shark.
[13:55] Mike: Wow yeah.
[13:56] Rob: So that was the very first mention of it you didn’t talk about the name at all obviously I mean I think it was…
[14:01] Mike: I didn’t have a name at the time.
[14:03] Rob: Right episode eight we would have recorded it in the early 2010. So you were expecting it to take like nine months in developments so just a little point for the…
[14:13] Rob: Now the other thing I noticed was in…
[14:15] Mike: Let’s just rename this episode to embarrass Mike with failures.
[14:17] Rob: Yeah exactly.
[14:19] Mike: Failed predictions.
[14:20] Rob: Yeah the other one was in September of 2010 in Episode 23 I predicted Boarders going out of business, not like anyone else wouldn’t have done the same. But I basically was like I think Barnes & Noble was going to stick around and Boarders is going to go out of business. I thought that was funny now that they have filed whatever Chapter 13. And then the last thing was in Episode Two you talked about re-launching your forum software. And that was actually something you mentioned several times in the first maybe five, six episodes and then it just disappeared. And so it’s funny you brought it up today because I was going to ask you about it like, what’s the update it on that? You know did it ever happen, did you decide not to do it what what’s the story?
[14:57] Mike: I held back to be honest and I don’t have a good reason for it. It was I will be honest it was fear of putting it out there because I am like, man I don’t really like how this is put it together. The reality is I probably should have just done it and kind of cleaned up afterwards. But being kind of the “perfectionist” I just said no I don’t want to put this out there yet. I never really made it a priority.
[15:18] So I have kind of gone back and said you know I have had this has been sitting here on the shelf for probably far too long and it’s really not that far from being able to be re-launched. So I don’t know how much work it is, I haven’t really sat down to figure that out. But I have been basically going through the marketing for it and saying you know I got I really got to just put this out there and be done with it. We will see how that goes I am kind of doing that in parallel with the Audit Shark marketing and a couple of other things so.
[15:41] Rob: Right. And then the last thing is I realized I used to give updates about my book sales I haven’t been in a long time. I am over 6500 copies sold.
[15:51] Mike: Good for you.
[15:51] Rob: Yeah thanks it’s for people who haven’t heard about it, it’s called Start Small Stay Small; A Developers Guide to Launching a Startup. It’s available at startupbook.net or you can get on the Amazon. But it’s basically my kind of my take on getting something out of the door without venture capital. And the reason, I had this big jump in probably in the last four, five months and I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. I kept getting this emails from Amazon at the end of the month and normally the Kindle payment would come through and , you know, it would be X amount, and suddenly it was like five times that.
[16:23] I was like why am I selling a tremendous amount of Kindle versions of this thing? And just suddenly you know I hadn’t done any marketing, anything like that specific to this. Well as it turns out if you go to Amazon you search for ‘lean startup’ yeah you go to Eric Ries’ Lean Startup book in Kindle version. The customers who bought this also bought as Start Small Stay Small, it’s like the fourth or the fifth one over.
[16:45] And so this is like a New York Times bestseller and so that’s my best guess is that there is much traffic to that page that it’s like selling hundreds of copies per month of my book. So you can just imagine how many his are selling. Just having some type of tie in that’s increasing your luck surface area I think so.
[17:03] Mike: Luck surface area that’s nice.
[17:05] Rob: Yeah that’s from Jason Roberts from texting.
[17:08] [Music]
[17:11] So today we have a listener question that is seven points and so we are basically architecting the whole episode after it. And we are going to be talking about hiring and managing remote workers. And the email which I am not going to read all at once because it is so long and we are kind of going to take it point by point, is from Glenn Jermaine and he is at mypractice.net.au.
[17:33] And he says I am the founder of a start up that has been going for six years, I am the sole developer and now I have one person working full time and two part-time that handle sales and support. We deal with non-techie people in the health industry, generally individuals and small practices. Sales are fairly high touch to coin a term you guys use. I am at the point where I really need help on the dev side of things as we have several integration points we need to address. We need to do this to remain relevant and grow in our market.
[17:59] I am keen to use Odesk, Elance or similar services; I can’t afford to employ a full time dev at present. The issue is that in feel there are several roadblocks and concerns. Point one, I feel as if the app and the requirements are complex enough that it would take me considerable time to bring someone up to speed. I believe this would require a great deal of hand holding. Point two, point one is not a show stopper I expect a ramping up period, the fear is that I will spend the time only to find the individual that company turns to be duds.
[18:26] In other words unable or incapable of doing the job to a satisfactory level and I would have to start again. And number three, so my concern here is that I could waste a great deal of time and money. Have you guys got any history or stories you could share or lessons learned you could discuss?
[18:39] Mike: In my experience the things that I run into there were exact same fears have essentially stopped me in several cases from pursuing that direction. You know other times I have actually gone through and said I know that I’ve got to do it. The problem is that if you don’t make the time it’s never going to happen and so you are never going to alleviate that pain. You basically have to just bite the bullet and do it. There is really not much you can do about whether or not somebody is going to turn out to be a dud or not.
[19:07] I mean you can try and do your best effort upfront to make sure that you are going to work through and eliminate people who aren’t just going to just walk away when things get tough or are going to dedicate the time to actually learn the things that they need to do to get the job done, but there’s only so much you can do. And it’s just like hiring somebody full time, I mean you are going to have to put in some time and effort and it may not pan out.
[19:28] You may end up hiring somebody full time you think you’ve gone through all this great process of eliminating all the bad candidates and you get down to one or two people and you hire somebody. And then three months later they so no this really isn’t what I signed up for I am out of here. This is something that you can potentially run into no matter what. But if you want to eliminate the pain that you are currently having where you just don’t have enough development cycles to get things done, you are going to have to do it. And whether you do it now or you do it two, three, four months down the road it’s something you are going to have to eventually get done.
[19:58] Rob: Yeah to give an example from some recent experience of mine, I have been doing quite a bit of hiring. I hired a DBA, I hired two…no I had three part time developers just to help with some smaller tasks. I have hired a couple of VAs in the past a couple of weeks. And in all those cases I went through the same process and the process was this, I happened to use Odesk. I like it because it tracks what people are doing and when I have a brand new contractor I just like to kind of know what they are up to and know how many hours they are billing and know that there is a limit on it and Elance doesn’t offer me as much flexibility with that, it doesn’t offer as much monitoring.
[20:33] Now when someone works for me a long time I don’t care about that stuff. But upfront Odesk has worked so I will use them in the examples. Basically I have posted a job, I get a bunch of applicants and it pretty obvious there’s typically about 20%, 25% that totally are not going to fit, and typically there is another 30, 40% that may be out of budget. And so I take the guys, guys and girls, and I start running through them and really creating a short list.
[21:01] And then I will email my top three, maybe top five. And what I do is I ask them specific questions that I specifically did not include in the job description because I want to see how well they reply. I want to see how well their written English is, I want to see how well they understand my questions. You know its typically things about like their working arrangements, where they work, if they work day time jobs and then they are going to do this at nights and weekends and that kind of stuff.
[21:27] So there is enough complexity there that I can learn pretty quickly if their cover letter of their profile was written by someone else or edited by someone else and I can get an idea of how good their English is. And this is true for native English speakers as well right, I mean I want someone who can communicate well. So I go from there typically I can narrow it down to an even smaller list and then I give them a trial project. That includes you know both VAs and developers.
[21:48] I don’t see any other way that you are going to do that here. I know later Glenn talks about only having large projects to give but there has to be something that you can pull out that’s like a two to four hour project, make one up if you need to. But if you have one give it to all three of them at once, hire them all. The pay rates are not so high that you can’t afford to that and then see who delivers. And that’s how I have been doing it and I have been having pretty good luck. The one exception and it does support what Glenn’s fear is, but this is out of five hires in the past three months.
[22:20] The one exception is I found a really good VA and everything checked out and I talked to her on Skype and everything worked. And then I hired her and on day one she just—day two or day three she just disappeared and that was a bummer. But I had my short list and I just went back to the other two people and I found out if they were available and I hired another one right away. So my big loss really was yeah it was a few hours of training her but I didn’t train her in person, I created screen cast and I wrote docs. And so when the new person came through I was able to just forward them the same links and I didn’t have to say all the same stuff again.
[22:55] So I think that would be a big piece of my advice, is that if you are going to hire someone you start small and then you do create repeatable stuff to train them at least for you know kind of the general stuff. There is going to be general stuff about your app you are going to want to explain, do not do that in person. Create a screen cast or a doc that describes this so you can reuse that if someone decides to bail.
[23:15] [Music]
[23:18] So the next question from Glenn, he says I am also unclear on the best methods for communicating my requirements. I have heard Rob mention doing screen casts for his VAs in previous shows and that sounds like a great idea. The idea of sitting down to spec out one of these integration points is horrifying as some of them require using APIs that are less than ideal. I feel if I am going to design and spec the whole thing upfront then I might as well write it as well. I feel I need someone who I can get started and then iterate with them as we flesh out the intricacies. So my question is how would you handle this?
[23:47] Mike: I would definitely go about building those screen casts and working through and scoping that stuff out because there’s a couple of different things that doing that will do. And the first one is that if your APIs right now are kind of hellish to work through because they are just very complicated, writing the documentation for them are going to make handing those APIs over to your customers a little bit less painful. I mean people are actually going to be able to work with them. In addition as you grow your team that documentation and those specs are going to help others in the future.
[24:20] So don’t think of think of this as you are writing this documentation or you are doing these screen casts for just one person. Think of it as these are training materials that you can hand off to somebody and say, hey I would like you to look at these and read these and get familiar with them so that you know how to do your job or do the things that we need you to do.
[24:37] Rob: Yeah I think that’s an important point there is such a big part of the reuse. You are not going to be able to reuse an exact spec of an exact project well I guess you would be. If you gave it to one person and he or she bailed then you would be able to reuse it with the next person. But there are going to be these assets you create like the general walkthrough of what your app is, what it does, basics of how it works, basics of the technology, like to me that is perfect for a screen cast because if you didn’t create a screen cast you would probably jump on Skype with someone right? That’s typically how I would want to walk them through in general.
[25:09]And so screen cast by far a better way to do it and it may run 20, 30 minutes but that’s okay because then you have it for the long term and you can reuse it. He said he heard me doing screen casts for VAs, I do. With VAs tasks in particular, everything is a screen cast unless it requires some pretty specific detailed step by step stuff then I tend to put it in a document and I tend to do it in both a screen cast and a document so that they can see can it once and then refer back to the document. So it’s a bulleted list.
[25:37] Now for development projects the only thing I tend to do in screen casts are more general overviews of this is, you know, this is the app. This is how it works, here is a look at it, here is the source tree, kind of just some overview stuff to get someone acquainted so they have an idea which way is up. I think the desire to not spec it out is something Glenn you might want to resist. In other words I think that you are going to want to sit down and try to do a screen cast walkthrough.
[26:05] And if you need a developer that is so good that they can you know kind of go through your code and figure out the API, then you will have to pay more money you know. But if it’s worth it to you then do that. You may be able to find just kind of a low end developer, a competent developer for 10 or 15 an hour and you may meet someone who is 30 to 40 an hour on Odesk. But if that keeps you from having to spec out everything in detail and you can basically just send him to a page and kind of have him walk through and figure it out, that may be what you need to do. So it really is a balance of time versus money and the level of effort that you want to put out.
[26:38] Mike: Yeah I can’t even begin to emphasize how helpful screen casts are. I mean one of the things that I was doing this past week that I didn’t really talk about earlier was that I had this idea for a SaaS application that I really don’t have the time to work on it now. But I am kind of looking at the market a little bit and saying, you know is this viable, is this something that I want to dedicate time to in the future. Or is it something that I could realistically put a spec together and then hand it off to a developer and say, here I need you to build this and while you are building it I am going to be working on Audit Shark and my forum software and just building up some of the marketing stuff behind it.
[27:14] But I sent it off to Dan over at the Tropical MBA and what he did is he actually sent me back a screen cast. He didn’t reply to my email, he sent me back a screen cast and walked me through an example of one of the things that he does and said here are exactly where my pinpoints are. And it was like a 10 minute video, took him 10 minutes to obviously put it together and just send it back to me and it was exactly what I needed.
[27:40] Rob: Yeah I would agree, I have really found value in screen casts, I actually now default to them. Unless it’s a very specific detailed process or it’s a true hardcore technical document that really needs to identify some specific points, I will defer to recording a screen cost. It actually winds up being way faster for you as the recorder because you can just sit down, you click through, you talk and in 15 minutes you can explain a heck of a lot of stuff where as describing that same amount of information in a document could take, I mean easily take an hour or two and it’s not as clear you know because you don’t have the visual elements you are trying to include screen shots and stuff like that.
[28:19] Just within the last maybe six weeks I hired someone to create the billing engine, the recurring billing engine for Hit Tail. And it was all in my head of how to do it and I knew that I could probably code it up and I had between eight and twelve hours in my head which is right on the line right. If I can code something in an hour or two I have really a hard time going out and finding a new developer to do it because just the hiring process is more time than it’s worth. But I already had someone who I know is pretty good and about eight to twelve hours it’s totally worth it to do that.
[28:50] So I recorded a quick screen cast explaining… yeah it was just explaining the current flow and then what the new flow would be. And then I sat down to the doc and you know what, the doc took me about two to three hours to write the spec. And so you might think well that wasn’t a great return on my investment right? But when I sent it to them we started getting into it and of course it grows and he points out some errors and he winds up writing some stuff that I hadn’t thought of and before long it was up over, I mean I think he would up spending 20 hours on it and I think I would have spent 20 hours on it as well. It’s not like I am some, you know, some super fast developer compared to him.
[29:24] So in the end I invested about maybe four hours tops and I basically saved that 16 hours. And so that was two days that I had to do something else. So I know as a developer it always feels like you can code it faster but it’s pretty ridiculous to think that if you spec out a massive thing. I mean even if you spend 15, 20 hours specing something out, if you spend that much time then it’s probably like a hundred hour project and there is almost no doubt that you are going to get back many times your time investment returned.
[29:55] Mike: Maybe one of the questions that he might have is what do you do with these screen casts once you’ve got them built? I mean do you protect them some place? And where do you host them? Do you use like Wistia? I mean I don’t know I just…
[30:07] Rob: Right, yeah no that’s actually a good question. So for VA screen casts I upload them to screencast.com and that’s put on by the guys who do Camtasia. That is I think its 99 bucks a year for quite a bit of bandwidth. There is a free plan up to a certain amount of bandwidth and then it goes to 99 bucks a year or something like that. And that way you can mark them as private because otherwise you are right. If you just upload them to a server you can send someone a link but then if someone else got a hold of that link or somehow found about it they can watch the screen cast. You would have to like password protect it specifically.
[30:37] So the nice part about screencast.com is you can either add a password to it specifically or you can just make it so you know you really—you need the link and it can’t be found any other way so. And then nice part there is its not sucking up your server bandwidth if you are paying for that and you can record pretty big ones, 1024 by 768 is pretty common for me and screencast.com host it really well. And if you are recording in Camtasia there is just a one click. It’s like produced, it just renders it and uploads it right there, logs in for you and it’s all done so you don’t even need to FTP and do all that.
[31:11] Well very cool, thanks Glenn for writing in I hope this was helpful for you and of course for you other listeners out there.
[31:17] Mike: So before we go the one last thing to mention is that we are finalizing the details for MicroConf. So this is kind of like your last chance to get to the MicroConf mailing list. Go to Microconf.com, M-I-C-R-O-C-O-N-F dot com, and you can sign up for the mailing list and those tickets should be on sale I would say pretty soon and this episode will go out next week and it should be shortly after that. So if you are interested in coming to MicroConf or just hearing a little bit more about it, getting some more details on it, definitely sign up for that mailing list.
[31:48] Otherwise if you have a question or comment you can call it in to our voice mail number at 1888-801-9690 or you can email it in MP3 or text format to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. 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. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We Are out Of Control” by Mute used under Creative Commons. A full transcript to this podcast will be available at our website startupsfortherestofus.com. Thanks for listening and we will see you next time.
Episode 63 | Listener Questions: Generic Product Names, Offline Marketing Techniques, and More…
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is startups for the rest of us episode 63
Episode 62 | Listener Questions: Landing Pages, Questions to Ask a Web Designer, and More…
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is startups for the rest of us episode 62
[00:03] [music]
[00:13]Rob: Welcome to startups for the rest of us podcasts to help developers, designers and entrepreneurs to be awesome at launching software products whether you have built your first product or you are just thinking about it, I’m Rob.
[0:00:20] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[0:00:22] Rob: And we are here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we made. What’s going on this first week of the year Mike?
[00:28] Mike: I am sitting next to a barrel of beer.
[00:31] Rob: Is that right?
[00:32] Mike: I’m sitting in my in my home office my wife got me a home beer making kit for Christmas.
[0:00:38] Rob: Oh that’s cool awesome. How long does it take to ferment and all that?
[0:00:41] Mike: The marketing on the box says two weeks but the reality is its four plus. It depends on you know how much time you want to give it, it recommends a minimum of seven weeks for like the first stage and then another, sorry seven days for the first stage and then another seven days for the second stage. And then after that you can condition the beer for however long you want.
[0:01:03] But you know you make multiple bottles of it kind of all the time, all at the same time in a single barrel. So obviously you put them in different bottles when you start bottling. But it’s kind of unclear ass to how long that conditioning process should actually take and I think it’s more of a trial and error sort of thing than anything else. As I said the marketing says 14 days but it’s really month plus.
[01:24] Rob: Right 14 days if you want to make really crappy unconditioned beer and if you want it to taste good it’s…
[01:29] Mike: Yeah.
[01:30] Rob: Well it’s just some…
[01:31] Mike: I think so.
[01:32] Rob: Well cool I am just coming off of vacation. I have been off for oh yeah I’m trying to figure out exactly probably a week and a half. I was going to be off for and I will be off later this week as well. But I am kind of coming back to work because I wanted to record the podcast, I had a mastermind meeting this morning and then I need to get I have like four between four and six hours of Hit Tail work left and then new side will be ready to go. And my goal is you know it’s to have it done by the second week of January until they launch it to the customer.
[02:03] So I just have such a tiny amount. I worked many 2:00 in the morning nights before vacation and in an effort to get this done because I really didn’t want to have this six hours work right I wanted to get it all done at once but just couldn’t swing it. So I’m very excited I finally I got the new design integrated into the back end which was it was definitely more difficult than I had anticipated. I don’t regret doing it I look at my other options which would hire someone to do it or to have it rewritten in another language and both of those would have taken five to ten times as long. In the end it took me little over a week and since I am on a pretty hard you know hard timeframe now I am glad that I did it. But it was a big man I put everything else on hold, I have tons of emails to answer and all that kind of stuff so.
[02:46] Mike: Yeah I remember we talked about the possibility of porting that completely to a different language and you know you pointed out that it’s really just not worth it to go to a completely different language.
[02:58] Rob: Yeah and even you know I started specing it out before I started integrating the design into the app itself I started writing a spec because I was going to hire a developer to do it, to basically rewrite it in ASP.Net or ASP.MVC. And sure enough the deeper I got into that spec the more I realized how complicated these pages actually are. Even though they seem to be simple grids with sorting and paging and you know hey you can do that in three lines of jQuery I mean that’s totally what I was thinking. But as I got deeper I was like wow there are some really complex stuff.
[03:27] I still have a spec that’s probably 60, 70% all the way done so if I ever you know need to revisit it but it gave me a good idea. I mean I guess this is where that whole you know there is the specs argument should you write specs should you not. What’s nice for me I write really lightweight specs for outsourced labor. I have developers work for me and they’re solid developers but I can write really lightweight specs but it allows me to fully think through the problem. And if I had not done that and I had just gone with the no spec approach you know I know 37 signals talks about that and a lot of other people.
[03:56] And I had just sort of moving forward with it it would have been I would have probably gotten a couple days in and then realized that this was way more difficult than I thought. I don’t know when I do stuff myself I don’t tend to write specs but in this case it actually helped me out quite a bit. So I was glad I did.
[04:10] Mike: Yeah and honestly I think that that’s exactly the problem that I run into with Audit Shark over the past few years so because I didn’t write a spec for most of it. I kind of had mentally had it in my head all this has got to get done that’s got to get done. And I never really dug far enough into write a full blown spec to really figure out exactly how long most of the stuff was going to take. So a lot of it I just said, oh it will take me you know three or four days to get through that or a week to do that. And the reality was it took me significantly longer just because I really wasn’t thinking through the full problem the way that I should have been.
[04:46] Rob: No exactly and even lately you know as I was writing code and trying to figure out how I am going to make all this work and trying to plan out the timeline my spec for myself at least consisted of a couple of sheets of paper and bullet points of task items. It could have been in Excel as well but I just happened to do it on paper. And then writing you know I will estimate next to it and break them down into tasks that are less than a day. And it will give me a much better idea of I mean I know people who don’t even do that right its all in their head. And I don’t know if that’s how you did it or not but I feel like that’s really cruising without anything if you don’t even have a bullet list of tasks left to go. You know you are burned down type of thing
[05:22] Mike: Right yeah what I did was I put everything into FogBugz as individual cases. And some things were really high level that I just kind of left as place holders and I knew that’s there was more of a major undertaking. So I just kind of left it as it is and just said implement X. And then there were other things where I went a lot further in and I implemented maybe 10 or 15 different cases for an individual feature that I wanted to accomplish. So I dug a little bit deeper on some of it but other things were just kind of a one high level case that I would kind of stay. And then as I started working on it then I would start generating more cases out of that.
[06:01] Rob: Right. Hey I had this tip I wanted to give listeners. With this Hit Tail migration there is the upside which is the backend reporting once you log in that’s what you see. But then there is the front side which is all the marketing stuff and normally when you know these days when I build a SaaS marketing site it’s a handful of pages right. It’s like five pages homepage, tour page, pricing page, maybe features, contact, about and maybe an FAQ you know it’s really a short list.
[06:26] Since hit tail already had a couple 100 pages of content the tip is if you acquiring a website and you are going to migrate the pages to a new design go onto Google and type in site colon and then your domain name so site colon and then hittail.com. And it will show you all the pages that Google has indexed for your domain.
In essence it’s how like 1000 or 2000 pages indexed so when I first ran that, ran a query I was like oh lord I have so many you know so many pages to migrate. But it turns out the bulk of those are form posts and blog entries which is cool because since those are blog and form engines you can kind of just change a theme and you are golden
[07:05] It turns out there is somewhere between 150 and 200 actual physical HTML pages HTML and ASP pages. So what I did next is I hired a developer he went through and migrated all these pages to the new design. But he is not a design expert and he definitely not a marketing guy. And so what I then did is I went into Google Analytics and got maximum use of my time since I didn’t want to go through all 150 of those pages. I looked at the pages, the content that gets the most hits. And so I took the top 20 to 30 pages and those got at least ten views a month from search engines. So I know people just kind of wander into them.
[07:40] And what I did is I took each of them and kind of first of all made sure they all look nice and it did take a little bit of tweaking here and there. Second of all at the bottom or at opportune places I put a like a nice button that says “now try our plants” or “now check out our plants” or “now try 30 day free trial” depending on what the page was and what it was talking about. So the idea is that I am trying to take this wide and this long tail of search traffic that I am getting and I don’t have time right now this week to fix everything.
[08:06] And so what I did is I took the low hanging fruit, the thing that most people see and I am funneling all of those users back into my main funnel that is really hardcore, good information about the project and that is going to encourage people to buy. You know it basically encourages them to do the free trial and such.
[08:22] Mike: Very cool
[08:23] [music]
[08:25] Rob: You talked to a perspective customer last week?
[08:28] Mike: Oh yes I did. I was able to get in and schedule a meeting with somebody who I have been kind of in contact throughout the past year or so. And I came into his office talked him for probably about half hour 45 minutes or so and started walking him through Audit Shark and showing him exactly what it was, what it did and how it could apply to his environment based on one of our previous discussions. And what I found was that what he is really looking for is more or less a vulnerability scanner as opposed to configuration management product.
[09:02] And from that I kind of extrapolated a little bit and I said, well wait a second maybe I am missing the mark a little bit. I walked through the path of what the progression is for people addressing security in their environment and I kind of realized that it really put in perspective when I was talking to him and showing him Audit Shark that progression is essentially IT managers start out with patch management because it’s really the lowest hanging fruit. And then once they have got patch management under control they start looking at vulnerability management.
[09:28] So they start looking at things that aren’t necessarily patches for but they want to be aware of those things so that they can you know address the risk with whatever the vulnerability is. And then once they have got that under control they kind of go to an advanced level where they are doing configuration management. Now Audit Shark can do all of these things but I was really thinking of addressing the configuration management piece not necessary the patch management or the vulnerability management.
[09:56] And based on our conversation it almost seems to be like I might want to I guess it would be shifting gears a little bit to go more towards vulnerability, scanning and patch management scanning versus going for configuration management. Because like I said the product can do all three of those it’s just really a matter of how do I want to market it to people.
[10:13] Rob: Sure that’s true so it’s a positioning more. Now is it setup right now out of the box that you can do vulnerability scanning patch management or would it take actual code different code?
[10:24] Mike: No it can do it. I would probably have to build some specialized reporting I need to enhance the reporting the product anyway so it’s not like that’s really a big deal.
[10:32] Rob: That’s pretty weak right now right?
[10:33] Mike: Yeah so if I wanted to do that kind of stuff it’s not a stretch for it to go after those areas. Because really when you talk about something like patching how do you determine whether or not a specific patch is installed? Well on Windows its fairly straight forward you look at the registry and you figure out whether or not that patch has been installed either through the ‘add remove’ programs. Or you go to where the files are supposed to be located on the operating system, look at those locations and check the versions of the DLLs or the executables.
[11:04] And if they don’t exist at all then chances are you don’t have the software installed that you know requires that patch. If they are installed you check the version numbers and say do they match this and if not are they of the lower version and if so then you have to have to have this patch. So it’s really not that much of a stretch to make the product do that because the product is capable of all of those things. The difference between configuration management and vulnerability management is really just the rules that you are write and what you are looking at. And because the core engine can do pretty much anything on a machine I have the capability to do that.
[11:39] Rob: So the good news is that you have the capability, the other good news is you get to talk to more customers to figure out if they are right because you don’t want to go on one customers recommendations. So you get to go and talk to how many more do you think you are going to talk to five?
[11:51] Mike: I think five on the high end probably three to five I don’t know if it should be more than that.
[11:54] Rob: Right I think it will be interesting to hear how it pans out as you go if one guy says, oh we would totally want it for freaking configuration management you know what you do if you just position it as configuration and go there first or how you handle that so.
[12:06] Mike: Yeah I think it really depends on what foot I want to lead with you know.
[12:10] Rob: Absolutely.
[12:10] Mike: Because I have looked out there at some competitive products and some of them say flat out we do vulnerability management and configuration management. It doesn’t seem like too many of them combine patch management as well but it’s certainly possible.
[12:23] Rob: Sure I would lean towards getting really good at one. I mean especially since you are one person trying to do this and its probably teams doing the other your competitors I imagine it’s larger companies I would consider really focusing on one and positioning it like the best X instead “we do X and Y look at us we are kind of good” but not great.
[12:42] Mike: Right I know what you are saying but as you said I mean its all about market and positioning at that point because its not a technological problem for Audit Shark. It’s a matter of how its viewed by people and how do I want to pitch it to people.
[12:56] Rob: Right
[0:12:57] [music]
[12:59] Rob: I want to give a shout out to Rudy and higherflow.com that’s higherflow.com. Just want to thank him he send me a really nice email that was you know, I’m very experienced MVC he has his own startup which is higherflow.com he just offered to basically have a conversation with me in terms of if I decide to move to MVC things I need to look out for and things I should keep in mind. So I just appreciate that it’s cool when listeners to do that you know offer their time for basically for nothing just to help us out.
[13:28] I’m stoked men we got 71 ratings in iTunes. And most of them are I think 6, to 7 or 5 stars. And we have a bunch of new comments from November and December and there was some really cool moments. One of them says it’s from Tess Falcon and it says I love this broadcast, I have heard too many stories of 16 year millionaires and they never failed at anything stories. This guy seemed so much more believable since they didn’t get started until they were older, didn’t hit a homerun with everything and actually failed before they were able to put the pieces together.
[13:56] And then the other one, gosh there is about a half a dozen I wont read through them all but this one said its from Wood in wire where and he says, listened to your episode six and updates today after finding you guys in a browse for interesting dev related podcasts,. Episode six was really helpful particularly the ‘when to pay someone to help you’. So I’m surprised that you guys stuck around because from what I recall our first half a dozen episodes were not very good.
[14:17] Mike: You know funny that you have mentioned that because when I ran out of podcasts I started listening to our old episodes and…
[14:25]Rob: Were they?
[14:25] Mike: I thought I would be yeah I really thought I would be completely appalled and I wasn’t.
[14:30] Rob: Oh that’s cool. So that’s the thing I haven’t listened back to them in a long time in well over a year and I remember feeling stiff doing them and feeling kind of ashamed of putting them out.
[14:40] Mike: Right.
[14:41] Rob: But that’s good you know I think I need to go back and listen to them so that’s I stop saying that because if they are not that bad then I need to not brag on them.
[14:45] Mike: Yeah.
[14:46] Rob: Some people might yearn for the glory days or they are like the first ten were the best you guys were terrible though.
[14:51] Mike: Yeah the first one was it seemed a little bit stiff a little bit forced but I think after that things straightened out pretty quick.
[14:58] Rob: Yeah so we got a bunch of new reviews where we encourage folks you know this is what helps us rank in iTunes, which gets us more listeners which encourages us too basically to continue doing the podcast. So if you haven’t been on there we would love a five star rating, a comment all that stuff it’s just awesome. And like I have said before we have such a high number of comments and ratings compared to other podcasts that have many more listeners than us. So we know that that’s you guys out there we appreciate it
[15:22] [music]
[15:24] Basically we are going to be answering as many questions as we have time for. As we talked about last time we still have a big backlog of listener questions from the past several months.
[15:32] Mike: Right.
[15:33] Rob: It’s been cool doing this every week. The first question is questions to ask a web designer prior to hiring. And this was on Twitter and it’s from @ReadTree and he says questions to ask a web designer prior to hiring from the point of view of a consumer wanting a website made. In essence I ask very few questions to web designers. To me hiring a web designer is the easy part because they have a visual experience right, they have a visual display that you can look at and says do I like that or not. Hiring coders, ten times harder even for me who write you know I’m a coder it’s still really hard to evaluate and all that stuff.
[16:09] But for designers the first question is always portfolio like if they don’t have one they are no go. So the first thing I look at is how much I like their designs, the second thing I ask obviously is rate because budget is important. I have four different designers I use depending on the project. Well four different ways I will design a site the lowest end is WordPress and getting the premium theme that’s under a hundred bucks. But it’s a little cookie cuter it’s not nearly as nice as the other three designers that I have you know who go up to ten grand for a website or more depending on how big it is.
[16:40] But with the Hit Tail design I went with my high end guy and I paid the front end design was six grand and the back end was a couple grand. And then it was PSD to HTML was you know probably two to three thousand more because I had to get high end or the low end HTML and I wanted super slim down markup and a lot of stuff. So I have never spent that much on design. But I totally don’t regret it in my opinion it’s a good design.
[17:00] The other question I would asks beyond budget is how long do you take to deliver designs, how many revisions do I get? That’s pretty much it and typically I will have a Skype call with someone even though I don’t do Skype very much I tend to do email. But when I am hiring someone like a designer I really need to know that we can work together. And it’s good to have just a little bit of face to face so that the person understands kind of where you are coming from because you are going to have emails we are going to be critiquing their work and I always want to have a little bit of relationship with them when I am doing that. I don’t tend to spend too much time worrying about what’s to ask when hiring designers because I do find that people who do really good design tend to deliver well for me.
[17:39]Mike: The things that are important to me at least are the number of revisions because some people will hand it over and depending on who the designer is I mean if they are, you want to avoid somebody who is a little bit flaky where they’re just like oh this is my work and its top notch and you get what you get. So you do have to be a little bit careful I mean most designers are not going to do that to you if you have never worked with designers before you just have to be careful you don’t get stuck with that.
[18:01] And then the other things are pretty straight forward, the only other thing I thought about asking on occasion but I have never really dug much into it in conversations is what their workload is like. Because I kind of want to know if I have revisions or changes or if I am under a time crunch for something are they going to be able to respond in the time that I need.
[18:21] Rob: That’s a good point you know there is a difference between turn around time on revisions which you are hoping is like a day or less ideally. The best designer I have worked with he would turn around in a couple of hours which was just sweet. There is a difference between that and the total timeline. You know you can kind of ask a guy what’s your typical timeline for your average five page web design? And they should have an idea right out of their experience they do this all the time, they know that it takes from your first description of it to when he delivers PSDs it could be two weeks it could be four weeks depending on his workload.
[18:54] Mike: So I think it also depends on what their typical timeline is for the mental discovery phase. You can describe something to a designer and they can say okay I have got an idea of what you are looking for at least conceptually let me think about it for a little while. And while they are designing other things maybe they toss around some ideas in their head or you know they are out to dinner one night. And they are just kind of thinking about it not too in depth but you know something just kind of crosses their mind hey that will be a great way to do this particular project.
[19:25] So you know you may get one designer who says three weeks and the other one who will say it will take me five, its not like its actually taking the person an extra two weeks. There is time that they kind of build into that for more of a creative process than anything else. And that’s as you said that’s not necessarily as important as what their actual turn around time is once you get to the revision events.
[19:46] Rob: Right and I think the other thing I will point out is these days I haves found that a lot of designers only go to PSDs. And then there is this whole other subset of folks very specialized who are doing PSD, slicing them and turning them into HTML and five years ago my experience was there were a lot of designers doing all of that, that whole even 10 years ago especially doing that all gourmet. But I found that it’s become more specialized. So I would recommend actually if possible finding a designer who just goes to PSDs and then using someone else who is very good in specialized that PSD to HTML. And we actually have folks we recommend inside the academy for that stuff and if someone has a question they can, you know ,email me directly.
[20:24] [Music]
[20:27] Question number two is examples of “coming soon” pages. So this is from Sumit Gulecha and he says thanks a lot for the podcasts and they’ve helped me and inspired me. Based on your advice the first thing I want to do is get the “coming soon” page out and start collecting emails, good move. There was a question about this that you answered on a recent podcast, it was helpful but I have a further question, I am wondering if I need to tell people about myself, my background. I got the gist of your answer that the goal is to tell people just enough for them to be able to decide whether or not to sign up for the notification mailing list. But I expect to figure it out soon as I proceed but it would be helpful if you can provide some examples. So I will answer his question about providing background about yourself, it depends.
[21:09] I would lean towards not, especially if you are selling a product like a SaaS app people care more about what does it do. They don’t so much care about who you are or what you do until you ask them to buy then I would prefer that you have an “about” page with a picture, you know it kind of makes it more personal. At this very early stage I would tend not to do that, the exception, the reason I say it depends is because when Mike and I put on MicroConf, we did mention on that page who we were because if people are going to be interested in the conference they do want to know who is behind it.
[21:39] And the fact that we both have blogs and podcasts and ran the academy and have the start ups, I mean this stuff is important to people. So we actually just linked out to our blogs, and when I did my landing page for my book and if I do future, you know, products like that in the future I always have a down at the bottom you know hosted or written by Rob Walling or something just that kind of mentions, because I do have some name recognition in the sphere and so the name actually is important.
[22:00] Mike: For most products or most applications you are not going to want to bother putting your own personal information on there especially if it’s just a “coming soon” page. But once you get down the road where you have got people on to your mailing list and you start emailing them, talking to them about the product and then when launch day comes a long when you are trying to actually sell to them they are going to want to know who you are. And for MicroConf and even your book I think those situations are a little different in that those are a bit more personal.
[22:32] Rob: Yeah it’s almost like they have something to do with personal branding. We do have some type of name in this space. And so if you somehow had written a bunch of articles for veterinarians and you were known in that space at least a little and you are putting out veterinarian software, then of course you are going to lend your name to it a little bit right?
[22:49] Mike: Right.
[22:50] Rob: It may not be the foremost thing but it’s like if people know you in that niche then yes it’s probably worth something or if you have some specific experience that really relevant. But even then we didn’t put an “about” page, anything like that on MicroConf. It was like one sentence and it said brought to you by, I think it was like brought to you by the guys by startups for the rest of us and the MicroConf Academy, Rob Walling and Mike Taber and it linked out to our about pages, like our you know respective blogs or blog about pages. So I don’t think you want to add a bunch of clutter, landing pages should be pretty darn slim till you get to the full site that I would recommend building out a full “about me” page.
[23:25] Mike: Yup.
[23:26]Rob: And if you are—Sumit also kind of asked about landing page examples, and there are some really good examples on bounce.com and we can link that up in the show. But frankly if you to Google and type in landing page examples you will see some pretty quick. There are also a lot of pretty decent WordPress themes at Theme Forest and Woo Themes that are landing page themes. And so you can kind of filter through them and even if you don’t use WordPress, they still look attractive and they show you, you know, give you an idea about how much text looks good on those pages.
[23:54] Mike: And speaking of WordPress and it’s completely, you know, not relevant to this, I doubled the load speed of some of my WordPress installations.
[24:03] Rob: How did you do that?
[24:04] Mike: I cut out some of the plugins, so for example there is the jet pack analytics that was kind of bargain things down. Then I also used the Contact 7 plugin.
[24:14] Rob: Yeah.
[24:15] Mike: And I found that the Contact 7 plugin loads a lot of CSS and additional files that don’t need to be loaded on every single page of your site.
[24:25] Rob: I see yeah.
[24:27] Mike: Even though you only use the Contact 7 plugin for one page for example like your contact page, it gets loaded on every single page so all those extra files get loaded every single page. So there were several plugins where I found that that was happening so I had to go through them and tweak some things. Then I am actually going in with my, with DreamHost right now and asking them some questions that I just got an email a little while ago saying oh this is potentially why some of your images are loading a little bit slow.
[24:52] Rob: Got it, well I’m going to need to talk to you more about that because my DreamHost virtual server has been eating more and more you know processing power and such and I just keep cranking it up. And I know that it’s got, it has something to do with or imagine it has something to do with my WordPress installs.
[25:07] Mike: Yeah.
[25:08] Rob: And I have gone through and disabled some of the plugins. But I use Contact 7 on a few, I didn’t realize it was hogging so many resources. If you find someone to hire to just handle that stuff for you let me know because I need someone you know good who can just go in and do these kind of stuff and optimize and all that.
[25:25] Mike: I was seriously thinking the exact same thing of just hiring someone to do that but…
[25:30] Rob: Yeah well I started to look on Odesk, I started a post one day and then I got side tracked with Hit Tail stuff. So of like someone who knows DreamHost and knows WordPress and can go in and do stuff without breaking it but they can make recommendations to me of like I think we should do X, Y and Z, Z, Y and Z. And then that person can then go do it, you know what I’m saying? Like the whole deal, I don’t want—I just want you to be a consultant and to take care of everything so.
[25:52] Mike: Right.
[25:53] [Music]
[25:55] Rob: Question three is a quick tip, it’s from Sean Murphy, he has written several questions and he has a landing page at hvacpracticetests.com. and HVAC is a it’s like mechanical contracting so there is electrical and then heating, ventilating and air conditioning is what it is. And obviously there is a test that people have to pass in order to become a contractor. He says the primary goal of the page is to collect email addresses and he had a secondary action that he wanted users to take which was to complete their survey.
[26:26] And originally he had just added the link to the survey to the bottom of the page with a bit of a call to action copy. But obviously it wasn’t working because people were entering their emails and going through and never coming back. So he changed the success message after the user submits their email and instead of saying okay we will be in touch, it says okay we will be in touch now go take the survey, and he linked that out. And he said the change worked really well, he now gets…he continues to get the same amount of emails and he now gets a good percentage of people taking the survey. And so he basically he went from trying to do parallel to serial processing right? He is now doing it in series.
[27:01] I love this idea; I’ve done this before with wanting people to take an action and struggling with it. I did the same thing, I put them both on the page and I knew before I lunched, I knew it just wasn’t the right thing to do, you know, to have these two calls to action. There was no…they are going to do one or the other and you are going to lose them. And so changing it up and giving that second call to action after they have already done the first I just think it’s a golden tip.
[27:23] So I want to thank Sean Murphy again and we will get back to him, I think he has another question in our queue somewhere that we will probably answer in the next few shows. Okay our next question is about having a physical address. It’s from Richard Cocovich at segal.org. It says hi guys I have been enjoying the podcast since the beginning and I regularly refer to Rob’s book whenever I can grab some time to work on my start up idea. I’m in the process of getting my mailing list and landing page set up correctly, according to CAN-SPAM I have to have a physical email address to associate with the mailing list or so MailChimp tells me.
[27:58] How do you guys handle this? Earth Class mail is not cheap, its 25 bucks to get started and 20 bucks a month. I am trying to spend as little as I need before I have income especially for thing like this that are not directly related to the product. Thanks for your time and keep up the great work on the podcast.
[28:10] Mike: You know Rob uses Earth Class mail and I use Mailbox forwarding which at the time was only $10 a month. I think their cost, I think the cost for that has gone up to $15 a month. So I am still fortunately on their $10 month plan. But I get virtually zero mail and that address is really just to satisfy those mailing requirements that for the CAN-SPAM laws. The other thing you can use it for is if you get, and I haven’t tried this yet but I’m expecting that it would work for like the extended validation for SSL certificates, but I’m hoping that that will pull through for me.
[28:47] Rob: Got it, yeah so I also use it for domain registrations because I have so many, you know, gazillion domains out there. So I’ve got to be honest…
[28:53] Mike: I used to use a proxy for that.
[28:55] Rob: Oh do you? Okay.
[28:55] Mike: Yeah.
[28:56]Rob: But that’s extra money right? That’s like 70, 80 bucks per domain?
[28:58] Mike: No like if you do it through Dream House it doesn’t cost you anything they do it for free.
[29:02] Rob: Oh how cool, so I’m through Go Daddy which if you’ve heard about the SOPA boycott I’m thinking about hoping from them. But yeah I know I have, I don’t know what is it? 70, 80 domains through Dream…through GoDaddy. So I try to keep them all registered in one place and yeah they charge of course, I don’t even know what it is, seven bucks a year or something for a proxy to keep it private. See I actually like, that’s interesting when its proxy does it show up as being private, because when they see that in the domain registry I get a little bit of a red flag because I’m like huh is that person trying to hide something?
[29:33] Mike: It shows up in the Who Is listing as some sort of proxy, it actually says proxy in it.
[29:40] Rob: Got it, okay so I would then prefer to have just a normal address instead of a proxy because my experience dealing with like affiliate marketing and there are some kind of shadier neighborhoods of affiliate marketing. And people always use those private registrations because they don’t want to give an address. So if I were to search for Who Is and see it, most people probably won’t see it but my inclination would be like ding! Huh a little bit of a red flag there.
[30:03] Mike: Right.
[30:04] Rob: So that’s why I already had, I mean that’s one of the big reasons I got an address is because I wanted to be able to put one there and not have to use a proxy.
[30:10] Mike: I think it’s because you are more technical. Let me ask you a question, I assume you bought Beyond Compare right, we talked about that before?
[30:18] Rob: Yes.
[30:18] Mike: Did you go do Who Is look up on them before you bought the product?
[30:21] Rob: No I totally didn’t. No I don’t typically do that.
[30:25] Mike: Right and that’s my point.
[30:26] Rob: I don’t typically so.
[30:28] Mike: Yeah I don’t think in the vast majority of cases it actually matters.
[30:30] Rob: But Richards’s question, so Mailbox Forwarding is 15 buck a month. You can go down and get a P.O Box for is it a 100 bucks a year for the smallest one?
[30:39] Mike: Something like that.
[30:40] Rob: Yeah at the post office it’s actually quite cheap and if you only use it for domain registrations and or, you know, this, the mail stuff you won’t get mail there and you don’t ever have to check it.
[30:50] Mike: You’ll still get junk mail though I think.
[30:52] Rob: That’s the reason why I went with Earth Class Mail even though its more expensive than the post offices because I never….everything is scanned in and it you know emails me GIFF of the front and I can see if its junk mail and if it is I just recycle it and if it’s not, because a few things have come through based on like state filings I have made that have actually been I wanted. And so then I can them forwarded to me or they will scan them in then I can just print them out at home.
[31:16] Mike: Yeah.
[31:18] Rob: So that’s nice, but I get Richard’s point right? He doesn’t want to pay 240 bucks a year on something he really doesn’t want, you know he doesn’t want to have to use.
[31:25] [Music]
[31:28] Rob: Fifth and final question is from Mathew Holmes and it’s about getting started in programming. And it say thanks for the great podcast with its excellent content, your insights have been great. I’m probably somewhat different than most of your listeners in that I am coming from a place of more experience with marketing and zero to little experience with programming. I was wondering if you could do an episode of resources for those getting started in programming.
[31:51] I am teaching myself PHP, MySQL and I am having some success using Tizag.com and W3Plus looking at blogs for specific questions. But I can’t help but feel I am missing the overall big picture basic grounding information. It’s not feasible for me to return to school so any tips would be appreciated, many thanks, Mathew.
[32:08] Okay so I have so many thoughts on this. My first thought is if you know marketing why are you going back to learn programming, like why do you need to do that? Because in my opinion having the marketing experience that’s really the hard part, outsourcing marketing, really hard, outsourcing development not nearly as hard even if you are not a developer yourself. If you get a basic idea of what it takes to do PHP MySQL and you have decent project management skills, I would not learn it myself. I just think it’s a time investment that could be spent doing other things.
[32:40] Mike: Well I wonder if the issue is that and this may very well apply to most people is that you know you want to get started building your own products and marketing them and you’ve got maybe the marketing experience because you’ve got no real background in programming. So how do you get something built? Well you and I would look at it and say well outsource it, pay somebody to do it. What if you don’t have the money to actually pay somebody to go do it? I mean you are kind of in between a rock and a hard place where how do you get started without money to get started because you know…
[33:09] Rob: Yeah so…
[33:10] Mike: You know what I’m getting at?
[33:11] Rob: I do, no totally. And we’ve actually talked specifically about this. So obviously there are two resources that you need. You need one or the other, you need time or you need money to get this thing going. So if you have an exorbitant amount of time, I mean a lot of time maybe 15 to 20 hours a week to teach yourself programming then go do that. But if you are trying to learn programming on five hours a week you are nuts, there is no chance.
[33:33] I remember I went through college and got a computer engineering degree which although it’s more hardware focused I had programming classes. I have been writing code since I was eight and when I got out and tried to build my first web app I had no idea how to do it. It took me weeks and weeks of nights and weekends to figure out how to build the app. Then I got my first job doing it, I was doing it forty hours a week and I learned more in a month than I had in the previous five, ten years of trying to do stuff once I had a real product I was actually trying to build.
[34:02] All that to say it is super time intensive to learn how to program if you’ve never done it, it’s very I mean very time intensive. And so I would encourage that if unless you have a huge amount of time and absolutely no money, I would encourage you not to learn how to do it. If you have even a few thousand bucks and you are a little more strapped for time I would lean towards trying to become more of the entrepreneur, of a project manager and a marketer and finding someone solid on Odesk who can build the product and then keep him around for maintenance and upgrades and stuff.
[34:35] What I am trying to think is the amount of money that you need to get started reasonably well right? And I don’t know what that number is I think it depends a lot on what you are trying to build. I think if you are trying to build iPhone apps you can get them fairly cheap because they are so small and self contained. And if you are trying to build some big SaaS application, I would say that you may be going down a bad path. If this is really your first app that you are going to build yourself and you have an idea for a really big app, I would suggest pairing it down or figuring out a different idea and finding something that can be built for under 5000 though a contractor. What do you think Mike do you think I am too heavy handed here?
[35:08] Mike: I don’t think so I think to become good at programming it takes a while. In your argument you come across very strong on it and I don’t necessarily feel compelled to argue against you because you know I’ve got that computer engineering background just as well as you do. And I think that the marketing side is, I mean I think we both agree on that the marketing side is a lot more important than the code. I mean you look at any enterprise software companies out there and if you look under the covers of the stuff that they’ve got most of it is crap.
[35:38] Rob: No I think you are right yeah.
[35:40] Mike: And the fact is it’s not very good code and it’s not very well written and it’s because those companies understand that they are not selling code, they are selling you know, they are selling a product. And if some things don’t work, okay well the support department can handle that. And I understand that you know when you’ve got your own products you’ve got to deal with everything. But what sells the products is not the product it’s the marketing behind it.
[36:00] Rob: This is our sixty second episode, I feel like we have said that at least once per episode for 62 episodes. That is our theme, I mean it really is and we have nothing, like we are coders, we love to code. If I had a, you know, my dream job it would be like to code half time and do other stuff the other half like I love doing it. The drive to code or the…everyone things they need to learn how to code to start a startup and coders think that all they need to know how to do to starts a startup. And we are basically here to say no it’s kind of the opposite.
[36:30] Mike: It is, I will be honest it’s painful to say that that’s not the case it really is you know because there is a program. I want to say yeah the code is important and the reality is it’s in many ways it’s not. I mean even for Audit Shark. I mean there is—and don’t get me wrong and there is a lot of good engineering and effort that went into it. But at the end of the day it’s not going to sell itself, it’s all the marketing effort that goes around with it.
[36:49] Rob: Right it’s important that you have some code, just getting it done and you having learned to code to write is not the critical part that’s going to make your business succeed okay?
[37:00] Mike: And I think that if you go down the path of validating, you know doing the marketing staff upfront and validating that there is a market for it, it’s a lot easier to plunk down $5000 that you are keeping close for, you know, a rainy day or you really can’t necessarily afford to spend it. But if you’ve got validation of a market and you know that there is a market there for that product then it’s a little bit easier of a pill to swallow to pay somebody to go do it. Even though maybe it’s your last $5000 but if you know that there is a market for it it’s not so bad because you can be relatively confident that you are getting it back. It’s not like you are going to Vegas and putting $5000 on black.
[37:36] Rob: Yeah I totally agree, instead of spending 10 to 20 hours a week for six months, and in fact if you don’t know how to code it’s going to take three months to figure yourself out and then six months to build. So I would put you in nine months of 10 to 20 hours a week to build this thing and its going to be such a hard road. Instead of doing that I fully agree with what Mike said, go out, do some lean startup stuff, cold call some customers, talk to people, get some data, get some demand, get your first five customers lined up.
[38:06] Once you’ve done that you can either be more confident that you can drop the money or with that data that’s the kind of stuff that you need to go to a developer and say look, let’s start a company together. Go to a developer now and ask him to partner with him, him or her, it’s not going to work. I get this question honestly, once a week I get an email through my blog or my book or whatever and someone says I am non-technical, how do I find a co-founder? And I always tell them it is very hard when you are not a technical co-founder, what you need to bring to the table is marketing experience.
[38:34] You need to have proven experience, you need to show people look you brought this years of coding experience, I bring all these valuable marketing stuff. And I validated the idea, I know it’s going to work let’s do it, you know what I’m saying? Like you are such a leg up, like go out and hustle before you want to build the product. Like build the product last, figure all these other stuff out first.
[38:52] Mike: Mhm, it’s all I have to say about that, Mhm.
[38:55] Rob: Yeah seriously. So that we answered five questions this time, we still have a big back log. I don’t know next episode that will be all questions or not but we appreciate everything joining us and we wish everyone a happy New Year. This should be out just a couple of days after the New Year and then we will resume our normal schedule starting next week.
[39:10] Mike: And if you have not gone and done so and you are interested, please go to www.microconf.com and sign up for the mailing list to find out about when MicroConf 2012 will actually be and you will be on the mailing list and get some of the first notifications of when tickets come out. Other than that if you have a question or comment you can call it in at our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email on an MP3 or text format to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
[39:38] Our theme music is excerpt from We Are Out Of Control by Moot used under creative commons. A full transcript of this podcast is available at our website startupsfortherestofus.com. If you enjoyed this podcast please consider writing a review in iTunes by searching for startups. You can also subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS at strartupsfortherestofus.com. Thanks for listening we’ll see you next time.
Episode 61 | Listener Questions December
Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 61.
[00:02] 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’s going on this week, Rob?
[00:26] Rob: I am within days of getting this new design launched on HitTail, man. I used so many bad words last week. I think I — not on the podcast but right before it and after it. Just burned in time but eventually I got through that within a day or two and feeling really good so I’m trying to — basically I’m gonna take at least two weeks off and basically trying to get this thing done and out before Christmas, trying to get it done.
[00:50] Mike: So it’ll be 8 to 12 days?
[00:52] Rob: 8 to 12 days, exactly, sir. It’s cool. I’m excited to take some time off but I’m not excited to take it off if this isn’t ready. You know what I’m saying? Like, it’s gonna be on my mind. So I’m hoping to take like I said two weeks off and then my wife today is actually on like, she took of yesterday, went to the coast. It’s about two and a half hours away and got a hotel room and so it’s — I’m watching the kids. And she’s basically thinking and mapping out like the next couple of years of her like personal goals and what she wants to do in her career. She’s a college professor and a therapist. She’s a psychologist. And so she’s looking at all this stuff and I’m gonna be doing the same thing hopefully the first week of January.
[01:31] So I’m gonna take off for just one overnight. I’ll have about 36 hours to myself and I will almost certainly have some updates on my plans for 2012 once I get back from that. So I really wanna leave and do that with a kind of a fresh mind, having HitTail pretty much ready to launch the new design when I get back. My goal is to get it launched before but there’s no chance I’m gonna finish this thing and push it live and then go on two weeks’ vacation because I know that there’ll be bugs and there’ll be little crashes and such and I don’t wanna be dealing with them over the holidays.
[02:00] Mike: Cool.
[02:01] Rob: Yeah. How about you?
[02:03] Mike: Well, as of last week, AuditShark has finally hit what I would consider to be MVP status so it’s minimally viable at this point. I could sell it and not feel terribly ashamed about anything that people see inside of it. I was working today to get — basically just walk through the installation process because I put together an installation guide or installation document to, you know, complete the screen shots and everything else to basically walk somebody through. Right after they’ve set up an account, it will walk them through install in the Windows server that sits on their machines.
[02:37] And I actually ran into a few issues in trying to do a clean slate deployment. So I have to figure out what those things are. I think it’s more in my build process than anything else. Everything works on my development machine; everything works on my other development machine. The only place that doesn’t actually work is on a clean slate.
[02:54] So I have to figure out exactly what’s going on there but I’m fairly certain that it’s just a configuration problem and once I get that straightened out then it’ll be all set and I’ve got somebody who has kind of volunteered to go ahead and install it in a lab environment and start running it and see how things go.
[03:14] Rob: Nice. And have you — you know, after our conversation last week that was Episode 60. We’re already getting some comments, some good in-depth comments. So if you haven’t heard Episode 60 already, I definitely recommend going back. Since then, have you talked to anyone? Have you kind of — what kind of progress or thoughts had you made on the marketing front?
[03:33] Mike: Not really much. I was just kind of finishing off the bells and whistles to get AuditShark to what I considered to be that MVP status. I did notice that there is a comment of there from Ted — I think it was more addressing my point about using resellers and stuff and how that was a giant, red flag. And I might have misused the term or misrepresented the term “resellers” a bit. What I really had in mind was people who essentially had customers where they already had an established relationship with them who would be willing to essentially walk me into their accounts and the purpose of that would be to essentially have them identify potential opportunities and then essentially put me in touch with those people.
[04:16] So it’s not really them necessarily acting as a reseller. I mean, maybe they’ll be there side by side or, you know, with me while I’m doing like a sales presentation or anything like that. But it’s not like I would be just be turning it over to them and saying, oh, here you go. Here’s something that you can resell. And there’s three main targets for that. One is for auditors who go into costumers and they have to go out into the customer environment and get the information and those people would be willing to identify their customers because then they wouldn’t have to actually go into the customer’s environment and do it themselves.
[04:47] The other two are very similar. One is service providers, manage service providers and one of them is consulting companies. Manage service providers essentially completely manage your environment. It’s almost like going with manage hosting environment versus unmanaged hosting environment where — I guess the primary difference is people are more hands-on with the manage hosting environment while with the manage service provider, you essentially outsourcing part of your IT operations to them.
[05:12] So they’re already billing people on a monthly basis and those people are already used to being billed on a monthly basis for various services. And in each of those cases, the idea would be that, you know, obviously I’m gonna be selling to the customer and they’re going to be working with me and what I was trying to get across in the podcast was how to compensate them but I’ve forgotten that one of the ideas that I had for essentially compensation for those manage service providers and those consulting companies was that once I’ve identified the problems in the customer’s environment, they’re gonna need to somehow fix them. And who’s going to be able to fix them? Well, that manage service provider or that consulting company that they’ve already got an established relationship with.
[05:55] The purpose of those — I don’t wanna call them reseller arrangements really. I guess the more appropriate term would be service providers but the purpose of those is really just to cut down on the number of false leads that I’m following up on because it’s very random to be able to just walk into a bank and say, hey, can I talk to somebody in the IT department. And you do, you get in or you don’t. I mean, it’s very time-consuming and the idea of using those leverage in those people, it’s to try and cut down on the number of places that I’m going into where I’m just — I’m not gonna get anywhere.
[06:26] Rob: So I think there’s a lot of — I mean, like I said, last time I think there’s a lot of complexity with that model and it’ll take a lot of time to get a reseller up to speed. I want to hear — I wanna see you try it and see it work for me to kind of understand more of what it’s gonna look like. I saw a lot of questions about how you’re gonna convince a company to spend the time to learn your software. I guess you’re going to have to offer him a nice chunk of commission and that kind of stuff.
[06:51] Mike: Well, that’s what I was originally thinking that like there’s a company near where I live that — and I’ve already talked to them about this. I mean, they have an $8 million a year manage services for they have all these customers that — probably two or three hundred customers that pay them on a monthly basis for various services. So they’re constantly talking to these people. They’ve got sales reps who are constantly working with them, trying to figure out what it is they need and what other services they can provide.
[07:17] And if I can go into their customers and — you know, they’ve already told me. We would love to have you work with us to help identify the problems in our customer’s environments so that we can then go in and charge them to fix those things.
[07:31] Rob: It definitely makes sense what you’re saying. My concern is that you now have two customers, right? You’re not selling to ends users and you’re also selling to resellers.
[07:40] Mike: Yeah, I’m not really selling to them though.
[07:42] Rob: But you do — you have to convince them that there’s enough of a market, that they should invest a lot of time into learning your product and into pushing your product and into supporting your — you know what I’m saying? Like you really are — you have to convince —
[07:54] Mike: I’d start saying — yeah.
[07:55] Rob: This is sales effort. They don’t have to buy it but there’s a sales effort nonetheless.
[07:58] music
[08:01] Rob: There was a couple other things. One is, you know, we’ve been kind of giving updates on how MicroConf is coming together and I wanted to let people know we’re planning to start selling tickets in January when we’ll have — you know, we’ll have the exact location and dates and all that stuff. But if you’re a listener and if you did not attend last year, I recommend you go to microconf.com, we’ll link it up on the show notes. We have a mailing list because we’re gonna give, well, two things. One, we’re definitely gonna give discounts to, you know, people who are on the early mailing list and anyone who attended last year and the tickets are going to be cheaper than if you’re just the general public.
[08:35] Second thing is we are limiting the number of tickets we’re selling. We got a lot of feedback last year that one of the coolest parts of the conference was how small it was and it was about 110 attendees. And so what we’re gonna do this year, we’ve talked about doing two to the seventh power which is 128. So we’re talking about limiting it to 128 attendees. And I don’t know, you know, at that level, with the level of interest that we have and the size of, you know, we have several mailing list. I’m pretty confident it’s gonna sell out fairly quickly. So if you are interested in coming it’s gonna be in Las Vegas in mid- to late April. I would definitely, you know, go to microconf.com and get your name on the list.
[09:10] Mike: You know, I told you last week that the previous week we’ve pushed off the podcast because of my medical issues with my back and my back has been doing a little bit better. I’ve been having some weird pains here and there in my leg which I may attribute to nerves, I may attribute to just not stretching out but I think overall things are a lot better and I’m open that that trend continues. We’ll see if it turns out that I eventually need surgery, I’ll probably find out some time next month. But one of the things that I found separate from that is that — how long have I been working on AuditShark here? You know, at least how long have we been talking about it on this podcast? Well, like 8 months, 10 months, something like that?
[09:44] Rob: Well, it’s December and you originally — I mean, we originally talked about you getting to Alpha in June which is six months ago so I know that it could easily be January. I can imagine it being a year.
[09:57] Mike: Right. And it’s not like I’ve really taken what I would consider a major break from it either. So I mean, I’ve really been kind of pushing hard ever since — I’ll call that missed deadline back in July or August or whatever it was that I ended up setting because I think I ended up missing the first one because of MicroConf and that set me back a couple of months. And then I ran into all these other things that I didn’t necessarily count for during the development and things that I needed to implement that I — that it took me just a lot more time than I ever thought that they possibly would. You know, having pushed through all of that, I’m at the point where — or I’ve gone to the point in the past couple of weeks where I’ve just realized like I am severely burnt out.
[10:36] So I tried to step back a little bit, maybe trying to figure out how to get my mojo back a little bit. So, you know, you and I both know that when you’re building stuff, you’re in this create mode and then in the past I basically cut off all my podcast, all my additional reading, all the additional information consumption that I was doing in order to focus on just churning out code and being creative about how I put things together. And over the past week or so I’ve taken a step back and try to get into the consumption mode a little bit again just to kind of — I guess recharge the batteries.
[11:10] And one of the podcast I really found to be helpful with that is the Lifestyle Business Podcast with Dan and Ian. And Dan was on a couple of weeks ago but I just want to say thanks to you guys for, you know, just helping lift my spirits and morale and everything because being in that constant mode is just, you know, it wears on you after a while and you don’t actually have customer, you haven’t actually launched yet. It’s funny all the parallels between their podcast and ours is just very similar but obviously I’m not here in own voice to talk.
[11:36] Rob: Right. No, I would totally agree on both points, man. When I cut myself off totally because we do. You go through the ebb and flow of a kind of being able to consume and being able to absorb it and process it and then you go to the times where you’re just so busy creating that you really can’t take any more input. And I find that when I get in the creation phases, it’s great but I can’t do it for more than a couple of months before I burn out pretty hard and then I need to go back to having some involvement in the community and I’ve done it a lot with audio with books and with podcasts. I totally know what you’re saying and it also give definitely — give a shoutout to Lifestyle Business Podcast.
[12:10] music
[12:13] Rob: So I have a couple of other things. The first is, I don’t know if you saw it on TechCrunch but WPEngine race a round of funding. WordPress Engine which is Jason Cohen of Smart Bear, his company. And I was one of the angel investors.
[12:26] Mike: Really?
[12:27] Rob: Yeah. Isn’t that crazy? He e-mailed me and mentioned — he said it was like a close round. It was like invite-only or something. And so he and I have known each other for a couple of years and I was obviously completely floored and very flattered. You look at the names. It’s like big name venture capital firm in Austin. Eric Ries, Dharmesh Shahand and then I’m like wait — and dot dot dot and Rob Walling. I mean, I still don’t get in that list. So I was totally, totally flattered that he asked and it was cool.
[12:52] So I don’t see myself becoming a big angel investor. I never would have approached him or anything but it was fun to be a part of it and now, I actually moved my blog there from DreamHost and that’s been nice. You know, as much as I like DreamHost I have so many sites on there. I am having problems with my virtual server at this point and getting my blog off there which is, you know, getting quite a bit of traffic these days has helped. So WPEngine, y’all.
[13:15] Mike: You’re gonna totally pimped it out now.
[13:17] Rob: But that and buying HitTail has really kind of tapped me out for a while so it’s been good that my other businesses can continue to do all right. Two more things. One is I have this 2012 prediction that I wanna throw out. There’s this website — have you heard of it? It’s called Pinterest. It’s like interest but with a P in front of it, pinterest.com.
[13:34] Mike: I have not.
[13:34] Rob: This site, my prediction is that 2012 is going to be the year of Pinterest. It’s a social network. It’s like a visual, social pinboard and so you create pinboards and you can just pin images to them and then you can share them with other people. The reason I think it’s gonna be big is within the span of maybe 30 days, three different friends in three different social circles who are not techies told my wife about it.
[13:57] It’s — right now, it’s a female driven website. I could totally — I mean, obviously there’s some men using it but I could see it, you know, becoming more gender balanced but guaranteed it’s pulling in — I mean, one of our friends is a physician. She’s our age. My wife’s a psychologist, a Ph.D. in Psychology. I mean, they’re educated there. They’re like the demographic that people want to attach to. So I seriously think Pinterest is gonna be big. The reason I mentioned it is they don’t have any PI yet but they’re working on one and I feel like some folks are gonna get in on the ground floor. Well, I guess we’ll see in six months if I’m correct.
[14:29] Mike: We’ll see.
[14:30] Rob: And you’re gonna try that out, aren’t you?
[14:31] Mike: No.
[14:34] Rob: And last thing for me, I’ve read two book in the past couple of months that I just really wanted to share with people. One is if you’re gonna be doing high touch sales because I’m kind of ramping up, you know. I’ve always done more inbound marketing and low touch sales and I’m looking to do some higher touch sales with HitTail. The book is called the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes that is ridiculously good. So I wanted to recommend that to people. I listen to it on audio which I have to do and I liked it so much that I bought the physical paper copy which I have not bought a paper book in months. But I just wanted it around for reference. I wanna be able to flip through it and take notes and do that stuff that I can’t do with the Kindle or audio version.
[15:12] And then the other one is more about finding goals and designing lifestyle and it’s called the Art of Non-Conformity: Chris Guillebeau has a blog that’s quite popular. It’s also under the same name. I actually recommended this book to my wife who’s not typically into this kind of stuff. She read it and she’s — now, she went on that two-day kind of vision quest and she’s using it as a guideline to help shape what she thinks she might do over the next couple of years. I’m probably gonna be doing the same when I go off in early January.
[15:40] If you’re wondering what the hell am I doing and what’s gonna make me happy? Like how do I wanna shift my career, how do I wanna shift my personal life? It’s a really good book. The guy is a really good writer. He’s done a lot of stuff. He has a lot of experiences. I highly recommend it.
[15:51] Mike: Very cool.
[15:52] music.
[15:55] Mike: So we’re gonna move on to some of the letters from our listeners for this week. We do have a number of questions that have been streaming in which we — I think I’ve been severely neglecting over the past several weeks partially due to the — how far had we got on some of our podcast episodes. So the first one is a discussion that I got into with a person named Tomas from planmysite.com. And planmysite.com is a web design company based on New Jersey and through the course of the discussion, we were discussing some web designs stuff.
[16:25] But one of the things that kind of stuck with me was the fact that e-mail is a notoriously terrible communication device and I know that like Jeff Atwood has serious reservations about using e-mail for virtually anything and absolutely hates it. He much prefers Twitter over e-mail but, you know, Twitter got its problems too. I mean, you’re limited to 140 characters.
[16:46] But I think that when you’re trying to use e-mail, the issue that comes up is you’re better off probably just getting on the phone with somebody because once you start writing more than a couple of paragraphs, the thing just go down real quick. I mean, things can easily get misinterpreted and you start making assumptions about what the other person meant. You know, it just start go down the wrong road. That’s one of the conclusions that, you know, he and I came to was e-mail was just awful.
[17:08] Rob: Yeah. I’m finding that the more I use e-mail over the years, the shorter my e-mails are getting and I think that’s a good thing. Have you seen the three sentences and four sentences that I have? For a listener who hasn’t heard, the domain name is like threesentenc.es or something like that. If you Google it, you can see that —
[17:26] Mike: It’s three, four, and five, actually.
[17:27] Rob: Yup. And so some people put the link to that — all that website says is, all of my e-mails are three sentences long and if you just put that link at the bottom of your e-mail and your signature, people might understand why you’re so brief. I don’t do that because I do like to preserve the right to go on and on and on. But at the same time, I find that when I’m e-mailing with friends or acquaintances or people I’m very familiar with, I actually find e-mail to be pretty good because people know your intonation. They know you’re not being an ass when you’re being sarcastic, you know, they don’t take offense.
[17:59] Whereas, yeah, if you’re on a discussion with someone brand new, who e-mails you, it is so easy to just — have things get out of control pretty quickly. It’s like, what is e-mail good for? I think e-mail is good for — it’s a brief message. It’s certainly when you wanna keep it private. I find Twitter painful to have a discussion over because of the 140 character limit. So I do like e-mail more than Jeff Atwood does. You know what I’m saying? I do still use it quite a bit. I would agree, yeah.
[18:22] Mike: Somebody should come out with Twitter that doesn’t limit you to 140 characters. It limits you to five periods.
[18:28] Rob: Google Plus doesn’t limit you although I used a lot of dot dot dots in my e-mails so that would kind of know me.
[18:33] Mike: It would, it would. Anyway, I do wanna say thanks to Tomas for having that discussion with me. So let’s move on to the next question. This question is from Ray. And he says, “Hi, guys. Finally got around to writing a review and hope you can help me with this problem. Gmail is fine but I really wanna be able to send and receive e-mail like it does in e-mail addresses for each of domains I own and manage. I think you said just forward everything to your e-mail but when it comes to sending, I don’t want my e-mails to come through as my name @gmail.com on behalf of so and so. I want to look like I’m an actual business. Outlook forces me to have separate e-mail boxes. I just wanna have one inbox and have the ability to send e-mail from a dozen or more e-mail addresses. Any suggestions? Is there a setting in Outlook that I’m missing?”
[19:14] Rob: And I actually applied to him via e-mail because it was about a month ago and I knew that it would take us a while to get to this but essentially in Gmail I’ve been using this setting for a couple of years now. If you just forward into Gmail and then reply, it’ll give you that stupid, you know, someone saw a Gmail as a whomever and that isn’t professional. But if you go into each address and you set up an actual like a mailbox instead of just forwarding into Gmail. You set up a mailbox on your mail server and then you can use Gmail to use POP3 and it will send as them and no one will know the difference.
[19:49] So I have probably a dozen e-mail addresses from probably ten different domains that all go into my Gmail account and then when I click reply, it goes out and uses the POP3 server of that domain. And I’m — I see we’re not gonna go into the specific details of how to do that in Gmail because it’s so painfully boring but if you go to Google and you type send using SMTP from Gmail — oh, I realized I’ve been saying POP3 to send the e-mail, what I meant was send using SMTPs.
[20:17] So if you go into Google, type send using SMTP from Gmail. You’ll get detailed instructions on that and you do have to configure each one individually but then you’ll have that professional look of, you know, a dozen addresses all going out in the same inbox.
[20:31] Mike: So the next one is from David Wilson. He says, “Hello. I love your podcast along with Rob’s book. It’s been a great help to me while developing my first SaaS app. My question is whether you guys have any experience using Google SMTPs server to send the e-mail for web apps, for appointment reminders, app notifications, etc. I have an e-mail address for my app to use from Google apps and I have set up the e-mail back-end to send the e-mail from this address using Google SMTPs server. This works well in testing and I like the idea of not having to run a mail server myself. However, I’m not sure if there are any drawbacks to this approach that I’m not aware of. Any thoughts on this configuration or sending an e-mail in general. Thanks, David.”
[21:09] There’s a few different things that you can use. We just switched the academy over to using one. I think it was — do we use SendGrid?
[21:17] Rob: We’re using Postmark at postmarkapp.com. Yeah, it’s a $1.50 for every thousand e-mails you send.
[21:23] Mike: Right. And then there’s other things like SendGrid and then there’s also Elastic Email I think it is.
[21:29] Rob: Yup.
[21:30] Mike: So there’s a lot of different options but basically they’re hosted SMTP servers and you sign up for an account. You promise to pay them, I don’t know, like a penny for every 10 e-mails you send or something ridiculously cheap like that. And your e-mails will basically go through their servers. You call it just as you would a standard SMTP server. Sometimes there’s additional authentication code or something like that that you have to include in your e-mail or sometimes there are changes that you have to make to your DNS servers to prove that you own a specific domain.
[21:59] But by and large it’s a pretty simple and painless process and it’s dirt cheap to send those e-mails. I mean, if you’re sending 10 million e-mails, obviously, that’s gonna go a little expensive but for the most part if you’re just sending notifications and reminders and things like that, it will not cost you very much and for something like a SaaS app, chances are you’re charging 10, 20, 30 dollars a month and you’re gonna be paying in pennies per customer that you have in order to use these services.
[22:25] Rob: Absolutely. I started using Postmark just maybe three or four months ago and I will never go back. I told you this, Mike, a couple of weeks ago. I mean, I just — the control that you have over it, well, there’s a couple of layers up but one is I can see every e-mail that goes out and they logged it in their web app and you can — if it gets bounced or if they marked it as spammed or if anything happens, it’s all marked there.
[22:47] In addition, I caught a bunch of — you know, when you’re writing code and you’re searching and replacing in an e-mail, you never really know how it looks. You send yourself a test and then that’s it, right? But some user’s data are different and all that stuff. So I was just flipping through a bunch of them and I realized that some people had a weird anomaly in their domain name and it was coming out funky in the e-mail and I went in then fixed it more professional.
[23:08] In addition, their deliverability is gonna be way better than if you try to run an SMTP server from your own server. It’s just night and day. How much better, how many more e-mails you’re gonna be able to deliver if you go through one of these services. So yeah, I will never go back especially for SaaS apps. I’m sending quite a few e-mails. You know, we’ve talked about I’ve been sending some blasts out to older groups of customers and so I — you know, I sent 4,500 e-mails. What was that? It was $6 or something. You know, I mean, it’s a complete no-brainer and I bet the deliverability, I bet between two and five times more e-mails got to people because I did not send it through my web server SMTP server.
[23:46] Mike: And just doing the math on that in terms of what your conversion rate is on those people that you got to versus that ones that you probably wouldn’t have. I mean, that pay is to $6 on its own easy.
[23:55] Rob: Right. It pays it for the rest of my life probably. And, yeah, so I would not use Google SMTP server. It’s just not designed to do that. My guess is if you actually started sending any kind of volume that they would flag you because they just don’t really want you using it as like an application e-mail address. I would just absolutely bite the bullet and I’m migrating — like you said, we migrate at the academy over. I’m looking at migrating a couple of other apps that I have over just so I have the control and the visibility and, you know, there’s just so much there for a low cost. So to me it’s a no-brainer these days.
[24:25] Mike: So the last question we have is from Justine Chimura who has e-mailed us — I think this is his third question but he says, “Hello. I’ve got a couple of ideas that I’ve been forming and iterating on. I’ve come down to choosing the web technology to build them off of — ASP.NET MVC or Ruby on Rails. They both seemed like really cool technologies. To preface this, I’ve been a consultant focusing on just .NET and I’ve started a new job for a fairly large city doing .NET work. So my primary business experience is on .NET. I recently picked up Ruby on Rails and I’ve been playing with it. It seems really cool but to build a working production app would take me probably twice the time as if I use .NET. With that all in mind, I know you guys are Microsoft developers and have built, maintained and enhanced .NET web apps. I would like some advice from people that doesn’t end with Microsoft sucks. I’m trying to take into consideration cost, difficulty of maintenance and time of development. Thanks, guys.”
[25:14] Rob: When he called us Microsoft developers, did you cringe a little bit?
[25:18] Mike: Just a little bit. I did —
[25:19] Rob: That’s funny, yeah. But we do — I mean, you and I do most of our development in — we both know other languages, right? I’ve done PHP and Java, ColdFusion and I prefer these days to use PHP but you and I both have apps written in .NET.
[25:32] Mike: Oh, well, I started off my response by basically saying that I work with pretty much everything. I own computers and devices running Windows, OS X, iOS, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux and ESX. So if it’s a good technology, I’ll use it but that said all technology sucks in some way shape or form. So, you know, it’s really important to understand what you’re trying to do and why. And the why is the most important part of it. And Justine, if you have any intentions of outsourcing your code, you should seriously consider Ruby on Rails. They’ve got a great community and you can generally find programmers who are much cheaper than .NET programmers. Or, at least that was true a little while ago.
[26:15] Rob: So Ruby on Rails programmers tend to be a little more expensive than PHP and less expensive than .NET and Java but they’re all out there.
[26:22] Mike: I mean the fact is that if you’re outsourcing the code, it shouldn’t really matter which technology it’s in because it’s not about the technology at that point it’s really about all the other things that go into it. In terms of cost, both can be completely free. Microsoft’s got their BizSpark and Web Spark programs. Those are dirt cheap to get into and sure they cost money down the road but you’re gonna be paying for things one way or another.
[26:45] So you know, do you wanna pay for those software licenses, yes or no? And if you end up with a host provider, it’s very possible that they could be providing those things for you. I mean, you don’t need to buy a sequel server license. You can essentially rent a sequel server database from most hosting providers.
[27:00] On the Linux side, yeah, you can run Ruby on Rails over there. My sequels are probably gonna be a little bit less expensive in terms of hosting cost but at the end of the day, you’re hosting cost are gonna be far less than either your cost of development and that’s in terms of the time that it takes whoever it is to develop the times or in their hourly rate.
[27:19] Rob: It’s assuming they don’t have some specific limitations, right? Like with HitTail, since I have such high IO, Disk IO, I actually do have some very specific hosting requirements and the Windows stuff is substantially more expensive than Linux but that’s a special case. For most SaaS apps that are just doing basic, you know, putting stuff in a database and taking it out, you’re right. You’re gonna get a VPS for, you know, 100 bucks or 150 bucks either way, right?
[27:45] Mike: I mean, the only thing I mentioned to him was that you really need to consider the time to market. And if it’ll take you in 100 hours to build in .NET, do you wanna spend 200 hours doing it on Ruby on Rails? And if you want the experience, go for it. You know, if you’re not looking for that experience since it really makes sense going through and making all the mistakes that you need to make in order to get the software to where it needs to be. That’s a judgment call that you’re gonna have to make either way.
[28:12] Rob: Yup. If you don’t know Ruby at all and you’re gonna outsource it, I would be hesitant to outsource a Ruby app only because if you’re a .NET developer, you’re gonna get it build and there’s gonna be, you’re gonna launch. There’s gonna be tiny little tweaks, tiny little fixes, little things you want to add and that becomes a pain in the butt when you can’t just go and tweak your own code. So I would say be careful of that. Again, I’m not saying don’t do it on Ruby. If you’re a Ruby developer looking at doing a . NET, I would give you the exact same advice the other way. So its language diagnostic, it’s more of what you know.
[28:44] Are you really interested in learning Ruby? Are you really interested in learning this moving forward? Because if you’re not, then I would probably not do it in Ruby. I would stick with the core competency because the technology doesn’t matter, right? No one’s gonna know when they’re using the app, what technology it’s written in.
[29:04] Mike: Well, they may know but they won’t care.
[29:05] Rob: They won’t care. That’s a good point. The bottom line is if you were, you know, a quasi-expert in Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, and Python, then there will actually be a question where we could say, well, which one actually has the best development committee. Which one is best for web development or SaaS app development? And we could get into a philosophical discussion about that. Probably not worth it. You could also say which might have the most if you ever plan to sell it, which one might be easier and it’s probably gonna be PHP or Ruby in my experience.
[29:35] That’s gonna be the easiest to sell if people are more willing to take over and if I — these days if I was gonna built something completely from scratch knowing the languages I know, I tend to lean towards PHP because I know it. I know that Ruby has a better web development framework and, you know, debatably from what I heard it does. I wouldn’t go with it just because I don’t know it and I don’t want to take the time to learn it right now.
[30:00] I think my recommendation, Justine, if you really want to learn Ruby then, you know, go ahead and do it. And if you don’t, if you’re kind of just thinking which technology should I use and you wanna get in fast then I think sticking with your core competency. If that’s what you know, and you really don’t wanna learn something new, you really just want to get an app out then that would tend to be my recommendation.
[30:19] Mike: On the surface, what you said earlier about if you’re a .NET developer then outsourcing to have somebody writing in Ruby on Rails is probably a bad idea and if you’re a Ruby on Rails developer outsourcing somebody to write something on .NET is probably a bad idea. You mentioned things like once you go into production you have to make little tweaks and things like that.
[30:38] Most people who are building businesses or who are entrepreneurs, you know, tend to be decent developers or the very least think they are and feel like they could probably go through and debug things. But the issue I think you run into is that there are going to be times where you don’t necessarily have the time to mess around with it. Somebody’s got a problem and you want to or you need to fix it quickly and because you’re not familiar enough with the development environment and the debugging techniques, it’s gonna take you much, much longer to do it.
[31:10] Rob: Right. And so I guess for, you know, we have a lot of listeners that are not developers and so for them, they would just ask the general question like what should I develop my next app in. If they’re really gonna built an app, I would actually base purely on availability of labor cost of developer’s ability to sell it later on if you want to and just go to frameworks. I would probably go with PHP, I may go with Ruby on Rails. I would go with one of those two. What do you think?
[31:37] Mike: I think I’d probably lean towards PHP or Ruby on Rails, something like you said and it’s more just because of the saleability later on and, you know, the availability of the programmers who do that kind of thing. I think that you’d have a much easier time finding them. I think that it’ll be significantly more cost effective, or at least, you know, more cost effective. And if you don’t know anything about it but what difference does it make with it’s written in because you can’t fix it anyway not because it actually makes technical difference. Because like I said, your customers don’t care. It could be written in VB6 or Delta in it. And I know that there are production applications out there that are still selling today that are written with those and they still sell and they still sell well.
[32:20] Rob: Absolutely. HitTail is written in classic ASP. Man, that was deprecated in 2001 when .NET 1.0 came out but it’s absolutely still functioning and going so — and no one, you know, who’s using it is gonna know the difference. If you don’t listen to this podcast you wouldn’t be able to tell.
[32:35] Mike: But Microsoft is trying to get rid of it. You can tell by — if you do a Windows 2008 install and you install IIS, ASP is not selected by default. You have to —
[32:44] Rob: Oh, totally.
[32:45] Mike: Yeah, you have to manually tell — let’s to say include this.
[32:48] Rob: Oh, I did. I did when we did the new server. And, in fact, obviously my ultimate goals is to get off the classic ASP and move to a different technology. Yeah, either ASP.NET MVC or something else. I mean, but it just goes to show you — I mean, HitTail has a pretty — it has a heavy volume. It’s gonna have a heavier volume than probably 99% of the SaaS apps that anyone’s gonna want to build and it functions just fine.
[33:09] Mike: But I do have a question. You said you would port HitTail to ASP MVC or something along those lines.
[33:15] Rob: Yup.
[33:16] Mike: Why wouldn’t you — if you’re doing a port, why wouldn’t you port it to PHP or Ruby on Rails.
[33:22] Rob: I have thought quite a bit about this. The migration path from ASP to like ASP.NET MVC is quite easy because they can both co-exist on the same server, easily share cookies. There’s a path there. Whereas if I go with PHP, I basically have to rewrite all the code at ones, create this monolithic new thing and then migrate everyone to it. Also, everything in the sequel server 2005 back-end, it’s a 250 gig database with literally more than a billion rows. I don’t exactly wanna move that into PostgreS or MySQL.
[33:56] So I have some reasons to stay with the Microsoft Stack just because — again, if I was doing it from scratch, I would probably go with PHP and I would go with NOJS as the, you know, the tracking part where the JavaScript calls back because there’s so much traffic going through there and NOJS handles a lot of request really, really well. I would wanna move to a Linux box I would use PostgreSQL and I would go with PHP NOJS and that — but that’s a massive undertaking even with this app is, you know, “small as it is” as I’ve looked at it and try to spec it out, it would be big.
[34:28] Whereas with moving to ASP.NET whether it’s web forms or MVC, I can do it gradually over the course of a year or two and just do a piece of — rewrite a piece of it at a time and kind of leave the database intact and leave everything else intact.
[34:42] Mike: I just thought that the listeners were probably finding this strange why you would not make that leap but —
[34:47] Rob: Yeah. And I’m —
[34:48] Mike: I know you have good reasons.
[34:50] Rob: Yeah. Yeah — no. And I would be totally up for discussing it at some point because I spent a lot of time early on. I mean, as I was gonna require to start looking through the code and I was like good grief, like I really wanna just get all this rewritten. I don’t wanna pay for the — like I said the hosting is — it’s absolutely more expensive maybe even twice as much on the Windows Stack since I do have such heavy volume and I need a full process or license or multi-process or license of equal server.
[35:13] I need a lot of things that would be much cheaper on Linux Stack. But, yeah, the cost and/or effort to do that would — it just would completely not be worth it at this point. It wouldn’t be worth paying itself back so I’m always open to discussions and stuff about that because I did put a lot of time and effort in, you know, figuring out how I would do that later on.
[35:32] Mike: Cool.
[35:32] music
[35:35] Rob: If you have a question or comment, please call it in to our voicemail number at 888-801-9690. You can e-mail it to us in text or mp3 format to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under creative comments. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider writing a review on iTunes. Let’s see, there’s at least 71 ratings for us right now. Just go to iTunes and search for startups and we’re in the top three podcasts. You can subscribe to it in iTunes or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com. And a full transcript of this podcast is always available at our website. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 60 | Delving into the Future of AuditShark
Show Notes
Transcript
[0:00:00] Rob: This is startups for the rest of us episode 60.
[0:00:04] [music]
[0:00:13] Rob: Welcome to startups for the rest of, podcast that was developed for designers and entrepreneurs to be awesome at launching software products. Whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[0:00:22] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[0:00:23] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes that we made. So what’s going on this week Mike?
[0:00:28] Mike: I am in full recovery mode.
[0:00:31] Rob: Yeah you’ve had like minor surgery right?
[0:00:34] Mike: I went in and I had some spinal injections done. You know it’s funny that I’ve talked to other people and they’re like, oh I didn’t feel a thing and I’m just sitting there thinking to myself “ yeah but you’re not immune to Lidocaine.
[0:00:43] Rob: Yeah so oh really, it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t make you numb?
[0:00:47] Mike: No.
[0:00:48] Rob: That’s not cool at all.
[0:00:49] Mike: And people don’t believe me when I, especially doctors don’t believe me when I tell them that that stuff just doesn’t work on me. But the last time I was at the dentist I had six Lidocaine shots plus two bone drills and that was when I finally stopped feeling pain.
[0:01:02] Rob: Wow. Well I’m sorry to hear that man you’re already on the road again right, okay sure.
[0:01:07] Mike: Just for this week and next week though.
[0:01:09] Rob: Okay but you’re able, at least you’re able to travel and such.
[0:01:13] Mike: Yeah.
[0:01:13] Rob: I was just thinking getting shots in your back would kind of hinder that for a while but it’s good you’re…
[0:01:16] Mike: It actually didn’t. Things were actually a lot worse before I had the injections so it’s a steroid cortisone injection because some of the lower discs in my back were having fragments that were breaking off and what happens is it gets inflamed and then they’re supposed to kind of dissolve on their own. But they haven’t been and it’s because the whole area is inflamed and not infected or anything but it’s just you know irritated. So they don’t naturally dissolve on their own and because of that it basically creates more inflammation which creates more swelling and everything just you know, the cycle just kind of repeats. So it gets worse and worse.
[0:01:53] The day I had the injections it was last Wednesday and things were actually pretty bad and then I took things easy for the rest of the day. And then the next day things were a little bit better and the day after that it was better. And I had a three hour car drive a couple of days ago that was pretty rough afterwards. But other than that I’ve been feeling pretty good.
[0:02:10] Rob: Yeah the astute listener will notice that we missed an episode last week, we didn’t release any and it’s because Mike had this procedure and took a medical leave, a medical week from the podcast. So hey I want to give folks an update about MicroConf, you and I were just talking about it before the podcast. Basically at this point we are we’re honing in. We had already talked about Tropicana and Hard Rock and we still are looking to making up our mind. But some dates I wanted to throw out for people to mark on their calendars for potential dates are April 16th,17th, April 30th May 1st.
[0:02:42] And those, don’t buy plane tickets yet obviously, it could feasibly still change and be a whole different month but that’s what we’re looking at. We’re upstaging it this year, last year we were at the Riviera which is an older hotel and we’re looking to just go you know quite a bit more upscale per popular demand. And we already have some awesome speakers lined up, keep your ears out we’ll be talking about that in the coming weeks.
[0:03:10] You know today we’re going to get pretty heavy into Audit Shark. I got a long email from a listener and a guy we both know of. I wanted to give folks an update on Hit Tail. So you might hear it in my voice I am pissed off right now because I freaking, I spent the last 12 hours basically until about 1:00 in the morning last night and then I got up and I just worked all day today. And all I’m trying to do, it’s a six page web application, that’s what Hit Tail is right. There is a marketing side, that’s 200 and something pages but inside in the back end it’s about six or seven UI pages and they’re very simple. They pull out of a database and they display in a grid.
[0:03:45] And I cannot get, I have a new design for those and all I’m trying to do is integrate one, the first one into the old code and I can’t do it. Everything is broken. There are so many includes, there’s like eight or nine JavaScript and ASP files to make a single page work. The structure of the code is so bad that it’s just a cluge and I have looked at rewriting it and it would take me several weeks. And so I don’t know there’s no simple answer but this is totally, this is like the lowest, probably the lowest point since I bought the app, you know I bought it three and half months ago.
[0:04:21] I just have to get through and struggle through it, this is the last thing that’s keeping me from basically re launching the site because I need to get the new look in before I market it because it’s so dated right now. I just feel like it’s going to be a pretty leaky funnel. Remember the big mailing I did last time? I mailed like 4000 people, they were old customers that had cancelled and such.
[0:04:40] Mike: Yeah, yeah.
[0:04:41] Rob: That turned out really well. I got somewhere around 50 or 60 new signups.
[0:04:46] Mike: Oh my God.
[0:04:47] Rob: Yeah. And anywhere between there’s some $10 plans and some I think I got a couple of $30 plans as well. So yeah it’s a SaaS app so it’s acquiring revenue so it’s pretty nice. It really really helped and then I have a recurring monthly now that essentially emails anyone who has cancelled but is still sending us requests and that we have new keywords for. And you know they get emails that says, hey we have new keyword suggestions for you if you want to check them out you can come sign up.
[0:05:11] So it’s kind of a nice little monthly reminder for folks who’ve cancelled. Yeah so things are going really well on that. I mean I’m really pleased with the new signups and I’m pleased with the way that the marketing has gone. People are pleased with the way the app is coming around, people who have used it. You know there’s a couple of hundred customers now, over a couple of a hundred actually.
[0:05:29] And that’s really good. It feels good in terms of you know, I feel like the app is validated and it’s working again. But in terms of getting this new look and I’m just like furious. I’m hoping by the next podcast I’m just done or you know like 80% of the way there because I had wanted to get this done sooner so that I can start marketing the thing. But looks like will, the big marketing push will definitely have to wait until after the first of the year now.
[0:05:54] Mike: Now are all these includes or they are all JavaScript includes?
[0:05:58] Rob: There is a bunch of Java Script and there is several ASP. It’s classic ASP so it’s Olean technology but…
[0:06:04] Mike: Got it, got it. I mean you could for the JavaScript itself if you’re having those sorts of failures you can download Firefox and use Firebug.
[0:06:12] Rob: Yeah.
[0:06:12] Mike: That would certainly help with that because you could step through all the JavaScript and find out where it’s failing and then make sure that those things are in there.
[0:06:18] Rob: Yep. Without Firebug I would have been sunk, I would have been sunk. I have been using that to look at the, you know http requests. You know the other thing that screwed me is Chrome will not allow you to set a cookie with the domain local host but it doesn’t tell you that. So I’m trying to log in for like two hours and I’m like, there is something crappy in the code it’s not picking up my cookie. And just over and over I’m like…and you can’t step through at ASP so I’m like the response not right, where is it failing, where is it failing?
[0:06:49] And finally I was just like on whim after seriously two hours of screwing with it I went and got into Firefox and it work and broke in a different way. And then I’m like, what is going on? So I went online and sure enough if you’re, since I’m running on local host Chrome won’t allow you to send a local host cookie. And not it [0:07:07][inaudible] yeah and it totally screws you so. Little things like that, there has been like ten things that have just been weird tricky Ajaxy, you know things that are so hard to see because you’re not able to step through and see them in a debugger and it’s all kind of guesswork that’s what going on.
[0:07:23] Mike: Mmhmm. Yeah that does kind of suck. I mean I ran into, not quite similar issues for AuditShark because I had to develop locally. But I’m using SSL certificates so that makes things a little bit challenging because everything, everything is done over SSL. So I have to make sure that in my Java environments I’m also using you know SSL as well. So I have an SSL certificate for my laptop, one for my desktop and then I also have one for my server a bit of challenge.
[0:07:54] Rob: Right. No, that makes sense. Yeah I’ve resigned I mean this is, this is the downside taking over a code base, and I know that I knew that going into it. You know that taking over someone else’s code is always hard and like I said this is the low point. I’m not saying, “ Oh I shouldn’t have done this”. I have no regrets like I’m very pleased with it. But I’m just at that low point where literally like two hours I was just spouting curse words at the computer you know, so pissed off.
[0:08:21] And questioning every hour that ticks by I’m thinking how I could rewrite this. It would take me several weeks but maybe you, should I do that should I do that. And so there is that doubt in the back of my mind of, do I just rewrite this whole damn thing? And so I started sketching out what might look like. I actually started writing a spec and recorded a screen cast for a developer who works me to rewrite it in ASP and NVC. And the more I go into it the more I realized although it’s only six or seven pages it is, it’s quite complicated.
[0:08:51] And it’s seems simple when you look at it but as you enumerate everything they’re going to have to do and how they have to do it because you can’t just use basic queries right? You can’t just say “select star from this” because one of the tables has 1.2 billion rows in it. So you have to have a very specific query structure. So there is just, at that point it’s like “ huh this gets more complicated”. And I’m going to lose, have bugs and I’m going to lose some features and you just now that goes when you go to rewrite something. It’s always more complicated than you think it’s going to be.
[0:09:19] Mike: No, I definitely know. I mean just look at how long I’ve been working on AuditShark, my original intention was to, what was it, have it out of the door and possibly….
[0:09:29] Rob: After ten weeks?
[0:09:30] Mike: I think I wrote a blog post about it a while back it was back in July or something like that. That was when I was looking to originally push things out and start going live with it and here it is five months later.
[0:09:41] [music]
[0:09:44] Rob: I think we want to get pretty deep into AuditShark and specifically some comments that I’ve heard both from this email I got from a friend of the podcast, Lester Burk as well as some stuff you know Ted mentioned, Ted Pitts mentioned base as a software and other people have mentioned you know offhand to both you and I think. And it seems like it might just a good discussion to kind of dig into some specifics, some points about AuditShark and some points about maybe some confusion about what AuditShark is. How you have, or haven’t been marketing it, have or have or haven’t been developing it, you know just different opinions that people have and kind of just hear your side of the story.
[0:10:19] Mike: Sure.
[0:10:20] Rob: Lester was at MicroConf last year, he is a Micropreneur Academy, I’m pretty sure he is a lifetime member. He sent a very long well written well thought out email to me. He’s like, I have concern about AuditShark and Mike and I’m concerned that you know he’s going to release and nothing is going to happen.
[0:10:37] And I read it and I was like this is good and I forwarded it to you and so Lester I apologize, I just, it totally didn’t occur to me. Because I thought it was just so well written but he’s really given constructive things. He just is, but he tells it like he sees it.
[0:10:49] Mike: I sent a couple of emails back and forth to Lester and I even told him the questions he asked are really good questions. I told him flat out, I said I don’t think you should temper those questions in fact they should probably be a little harsher because and not just for the questions he asked me but in general when you’re asking questions it makes whoever is answering them be spot on with their answers.
[0:11:09] And they have to have clearly thought through what their answers are to those things and being prepared for those types of things makes them truly think about what it is that they’re doing and whether or not they have seriously considered the ramifications of whatever path they’re on.
[0:11:24] Rob: Right.
[0:11:25] Mike: And I told him like I didn’t take offense to anything he said one bit and he asked me very good questions. So we’ll definitely get into those also.
[0:11:33] Rob: Cool. I don’t think I’m a great accountability partner. I don’t push things right? I ask your opinion you say, “Oh this is what I’m working on” and then I let it go. And it seems like other people they just tend to push more and for some reason that’s not like my personality. So even this email stuff I’m going to read is just like more forceful than what I would tend to say on the podcast.
[0:11:51] And so this is motivation for you to think about how maybe you reshape, how you talk about AuditShark and this is motivation for me to think about how I kind of push you in future podcasts. So first quote was from the last where he says “Frankly I hear myself in the things Mike says and thinking that reciting technical manouche is the same as business progress. Does Mike actually enjoy the marketing? In your book,” that’s my book Start Small Say Small “you come right out and say that it will be 15% coding and 85% marketing. But you let Mike of the hook with 85% coding and 15% marketing progress”.
[0:12:25] And then he puts in a quote kind of a you know kind of a chuckle, kind of like “But it’s so good it would sell itself”. So he’s just, he has a concern that you’re not working enough of marketing that really when we do our updates I do tend to talk more about doing marketing tasks and you tend to talk more about technical challenge that you faced.
[0:12:42] Mike: He’s absolutely right, I talk more about the technical side of the things that I have been working on primarily because they’re the things that I am most focused on at that time. And it’s not to say that I’m not doing any marketing because I certainly I am. I mean I’m doing like building, I’m building a mailing list.
[0:12:57] So one of the things that I haven’t really talked about so far is that I have been putting together a newsletter where it’s very leading to whoever subscribes to the newsletter. And the idea is to essentially teach the subscriber to the newsletter about compliance and the things that they should be looking for and the things they should be doing. And it’s not technology specific in any way shape or form, it doesn’t even relate to AuditShark at all. What it relates to is specifically how they should go about their job and what they should look in the tools that they use to get that.
[0:13:28] Now I’ve done compliance software before actually built compliance software and I know what sort of things people are looking for because I’ve done enough compliance consulting. And the things that enterprise companies look for are basically the same things that smaller companies look for. The problem is the enterprise companies tend to have external regulation that dictate what they need to do. The smaller guys it’s more of an honor system, they’re supposed to looking at certain things but in general they’re supposed to look at their environment and start identifying where there are regressions to their security policies.
[0:14:02] And it makes it difficult for them because there’s not necessarily established benchmarks for them to look at and it just makes it difficult for them to know what they should be looking at. Their first question is always “ what is everybody else looking at?” And AuditShark will help them with that. But I don’t necessarily say, “ hey AuditShark is going to solve your problems”. I say this is what you should be looking for. And then kind of let them make those mental leaps in talking about AuditShark.
[0:14:30] Rob: That newsletter or the series of articles you have is obviously, you can put it in auto responder where people give their email you drip it out to them over the course of a few months.
[0:14:40] Mike: Yep.
[0:14:40] Rob: Could you release that now? Do you need a product in order to do that?
[0:14:43] Mike: No I don’t. And what I’m waiting for that is to kind of finish out my thought process in the newsletter so I’m out to about four or five newsletter articles right now and I’m trying to think of how I’m going to mould it such that it comes to a logical conclusion. And say, “ this is kind of where this newsletter ends, if you have any questions let us know blah blah blah, etcetera”. But I’m kind of in a cliff right now. So until I address that cliff I’m not quite sure whether or not I should move forward with pushing that out.
[0:15:17] Rob: Why are you making it end?
[0:15:18] Mike: The newsletter is more like an introduction to compliance and an introduction to it kind of has to end somewhere.
[0:15:24] Rob: I guess honestly if I had a list and I’ve got a few hundred subscribers if it’s going to be a decent funnel I wouldn’t stop it. I wouldn’t say that’s the end of this thing. Because you know someone may not buy within two months right?
[0:15:37] Mike: Mmhmm
[0:15:37] Rob: I mean it make them six, you may have a six months cycle on this thing, you don’t know yeah.
[0:15:42] Mike: I think, you make a good point though. Why should it end at that point? And the idea is I guess it’s kind of like anything where you’ve kind of pitched enough of your products or the idea behind your products and what it can do for people. And granted in this particular newsletter I’ve been focused more on the problem of compliance in general. What I’m looking at for kind of the next set of newsletter articles is to trying to weave AuditShark into that such that it becomes more of a sales pitch.
[0:16:12] I mean initially its education, education from the standpoint of I’m an expert in this particular area these are the things that you should be looking for. And then morphing that into more of this is how AuditShark can address these issues that you may have thought of and oh by the way, here is a coupon code for a free trial for 60 days or whatever for being a member of this list. And then leveraging that over time to hopefully try and convert those people.
[0:16:37] And then obviously you have to measure how many people are, eight newsletters in who have purchased, how many people are 12 newsletters in who have purchased. And trying to figure out where is the inflection point of where people convert the most.
[0:16:51] Rob: Right. It sounds to me at least the feedback I’ve gotten is that people want to hear more about this kind of stuff you’ve been doing with AuditShark. You mentioned that you have been doing marketing with it. That you’ve done some link building, you’re working on some SEO and that you’ve written these lists, episodes of a newsletter. What else, like do you have, I mean I’ll throw out an example. Like with HitTail, over the past five months, six months since I started looking at it, I put up a Google doc and I started a marketing plan. And all it is a bunch of bullets, like I’m not into big formal plants.
[0:17:19] It’s a huge bulleted list and I started with Noah Kagan’s Mint.com marketing plan that he published online a year or two ago. And I morphed that towards HitTail and it includes low touch, high touch, all these different kinds of marketing approaches. Some of which, I mean obviously I did a bunch of his because I’m not going to do similar things it’s just not, you know it doesn’t translate.
[0:17:42] But then as I’ve been reading or listening to podcasts of blogs or books, anything over the past six months I’ve expanded that plan. And at this point I have 11 pages solid single space bulleted list. And that freaking thing is ridiculously good, like I’m not trying to pat myself on the back but I get so excited when I look at it because I have this ream of to me like interesting potentially valuable, hopefully highly valuable marketing approaches that are catered to HitTail.
[0:18:11] And it isn’t vague stuff. It includes specific tactics and it includes specific websites that I’m going to do this on or this with. Realizing that half of them, 75% of them eventually are going to fail but I’m going to basically find you know the approaches that work really well. What do you have in place for AuditShark right now? Do you have bulleted list, is it all in your head, are you just looking at like marketing through SEO in this newsletter? Is it going to be cold calling, is it going to be like, what is your plan?
[0:18:39] Mike: I haven’t formally written most of it. I keep most of it in my head. I will be the first to admit it’s probably a terrible terrible place to leave everything like that because I’m sure that there’s things that I’m missing. I do keep some things in Evernote probably not nearly as much as I should. I’ve got some things kind of distributed between my iPad, my phone and I should really use Evernote on all of them and I just don’t.
[0:19:02] So I could definitely do a better job in that regard. One of the things that Lester brought up was that he doesn’t hear me talking anything about customer development. Have I even shown this to people? I have done a demo, I did a demo for three people at one point all on the same call basically walking them through the interface, walked them through how it would work, what it does, what sort of reporting they’re going to be able to get out of it.
[0:19:24] They liked it, they were impressed enough by it that they wanted to continue the discussion as I got further down the road with it. But I was at least able to get some of that initial feedback. A couple of weeks ago I had a day off where I actually went to all four of the banks that are in my hometown. And just basically walked in and started talking to them and saying, “ you know I just want to talk to your IT department”. I got in and talked to them and said, “ This is what my idea is” and tried to kind of hash out the things that I had been working through my head in terms of what my plan is.
[0:19:55] But the target market, I’ve kind of talked about is really small business, small banks. And when I talked about compliance software being generally enterprise software, AuditShark is really not aimed at the enterprise. And by enterprise generally I think of a thousand employees and up. That’s not necessarily the number of employees or computers that constitutes an enterprise, really enterprise is just a label. I mean if you go out to small companies like Axosoft for example they have an enterprise version of their products, it is aimed at ten developer companies, ten developers or ten employees is really not an enterprise but that’s the label that they have placed on it.
[0:20:30] So that’s the expectation that people have for their software. With my software my target market is really companies between 50 employees and about 250 employees.
[0:20:42] Rob: So is that 50 nodes?
[0:20:44]Mike: Yes.
[0:20:44] Rob: And 250 nodes so obviously for those who are new AuditShark is auditing software, it installs on a server and then it’s charged per node. I think there is a little client piece that installs on each client Mike or not?
[0:20:55] Mike: No, no, you install it on one…
[0:20:57] Rob: Okay so it’s all on the server okay.
[0:20:58] Mike: Yeah you install it on one machine and it agentlessly queries information from all the other machines.
[0:21:04] Rob: So then if you have 50 nodes, they pay, the pricing is still five bucks per node per month, 50 nodes ten buck, okay.
[0:21:10] Mike: Yep.
[0:21:11] Rob: So it would be 50 nodes would be 500 bucks a month that they would pay you and obviously 250 would be 2500 a month. So these are definitely see, this is actually an interesting thing because I have been confused in the past and I’ve mentioned like, Mike I don’t think anyone is going to find your site through SEO and buy from you. I think everything, every sale is going to be high touch, definitely at first and probably for ever because it’s such an expensive price point.
[0:21:34] You may not be selling to enterprises but it’s an enterprise price point in my opinion, 2500 bucks a month for 250 person company is, you know it’s decent chunk of change, 30 grand a year. Would you agree with that or do you think that you’re going make sales off your website? Someone is going to click an “add to cart” button and buy this you know this $1000 a month software?
[0:21:51] Mike: I don’t think I’m going to make sales off my website. What I do expect to happen though is I’m going to get leads from the website…
[0:21:58] Rob: Absolutely.
[0:21:58] Mike: And I’ll be able to follow up on those leads. So that’s really what I’m looking at from the website perspective. My anticipation is not that somebody is going to browse through my website and I’m going to get a 1000 visitors and ten of those are going to say “oh well I’m just going to buy your software” and they’re going to plunk down $2500 a month, that’s just ridiculous it’s not going to happen.
[0:22:20] But what I would expect is that maybe somebody signs up for a newsletter. And they give me their email address which basically is permission to email them at which point I can personally email them and say “ hey just wanted to let you know if you’re interested in it, I can schedule a demo of the software and walk you through how it works or talk about maybe the compliance problems that you’re having and do more of some personalized one on one stuff”. Because at a price point for 500 or $2500 a month it is worth my time to go after them individually.
[0:22:50] Rob: Absolutely.
[0:22:50] Mike: A price point of $10 a month is not, it’s absolutely not worth your time.
[0:22:56] Rob: Right. I think the question you were getting at is enterprise versus not enterprise, I mean it’s just a label. I think you know Lester brought up he said when he’s spoke with you at MicroConf you had said you had a friend who ran like a bank with 500 nodes who may be interested in AuditShark. And then lately you have been saying you know that this is an enterprise software. So you’re saying like you don’t consider 500 nodes to be enterprise software even though that’s like five grand a month.
[0:23:20] Mike: I think for compliance software it’s not and the rationale behind that is that when you get into a much larger environment and it’s to step back and take a look at the industry of banks a little bit, there are about 8000 to 8500 banks in the United States. The average branch size is about ten. So ten branches you figure maybe ten employees per branch, about 100 employees on average.
[0:23:43] Unfortunately if you chop out like the top, I don’t know was it ten banks or so they constitute 70% of the market, that means that the other 8490 banks constitute the rest of them. So your average branch size drops from 10 to substantially lower amount maybe three or four. You go to any given town here in Massachusetts and you will see at least one local bank if not two. Here in my home town we have three, there are three local banks. And one of the ones that I went into a couple of weeks ago I went in and I talked to them, I just said “ I just want to ask some questions”, they sat down with me.
[0:24:22] And I said, “ what are you doing to manage your environment and how are you dealing with the compliance issues?” And they said, “ well we hire an outside consulting company to do that for us”. Which incidentally is something that I had heard before so that kind of goes to another point that I’ll make in a second. But to drive kind of deeper into this particular perspective where I’ll say, in discussing with them it seemed like I was having a hard time explaining to them what AuditShark was and what it did.
[0:24:47] So I tried to simplify things a little bit and say “ okay well you guys log into your machines you have a policy and you know you log into the computer by typing in your username and password and it authenticates with Active Directory”. And they said “ We don’t use Active Directory”. And I said, “ excuse me how do you manage permissions and everything? Do you use Novell?” And they said “ No what’s Active Directory?”
[0:25:10] And at that point I realized that this was not my intended customer. Because they had no idea what Active Directory even was and one of the things that my software relies on is the existence of Active Directory. They were using it, they just didn’t know it and the reason they didn’t know it is because they had outsourced it to this other company. The other thing I found out from them was that they were an 18 employee company which means they didn’t even have an IT department. So they’re relying on an outside consulting firm which to me leads me to something else I learnt from talking to other prospective customers that the smaller banks tend to rely on these outside IT consulting firms.
[0:25:46] And there’s a limited number of them and these banks tend to work with the same ones year after year. So one of my go to market strategies is actually going to be approaching firms and saying “ hey here is what I can do for your banking customers” and letting them kind of do the legwork a little bit or the introductions to help make into those accounts.
[0:26:09] Rob: Right so you’re talking then about into selling into IT consultancy IT auditors right?
[0:26:13] Mike: Almost kind of like an, I haven’t worked out all the details in my head about how that would work yet. But you can almost think of it as a high level like an affiliate program where they…
[0:26:22] Rob: Sure it’s like Symantec do that, Norton and those guys.
[0:26:26] Mike: They do but they don’t really offer software as a service. I mean they have resellers and in a way this is a reseller arrangement as well but because it’s a SaaS application it complicates things. You know whose customer is that at the end of the day?
[0:26:40] Rob: Microsoft does that actually. They do SaaS and its form or fashion so you may want to look at their model of how they do it because they have partners who go and sell and they split revenue some, I don’t think it’s 50 50 but in some form or fashion.
[0:26:55] Mike: Yeah I have seen for like for Exchange Server you can definitely by Exchange email boxes and stuff and there are different companies that will host it and then Microsoft has their Office 365 I think it is that you know there’s resellers out there for that I believe as well.
[0:27:09] Rob: Right. I like the approaches that you’re talking about. I like that you’ve talked to folks, it sounds like you’re learning stuff from banks. My biggest concerns as you go to sell Audit Shark is that it sounds like you have a lot of different avenues that you are trying to pursue and without doing it fulltime I am concerned that you are not going to be able to do any of them to the extent that they need to be. Because you know you and I both know how intensive, time intensive high touch sales are.
[0:27:32] And so you are going to get some leads through your website. I’ve not doubt that you’re rank first in terms, you will get some leads and you will be following up with those guys. But if you are not doing that 9:00 to 5:00, 9:00 to 9:00, five days a week and you are doing that evenings and weekends then how are you going to even begin to do out, you know basically external prospecting with these IT auditors and develop the product? And once you get it installed at an Alpha site or a Beta site you are going to be working with those guys.
[0:28:00] I mean it just seems like you are really going to be strapped for time and there is a lot of complexity, sounds like there is complexity or just a lot of different options for the sales channels. I don’t know, how do you plan to sort that out?
[0:28:12] Mike: Yes, the answer to most of those is yes, there is a lot of complexity and one of the things I am doing now in talking to people is trying to figure out what is going to be the most valuable in terms of my time. What’s going to be the most fruitful in terms of learning those first customers, those early people who are going to give me the feedback that I need.
[0:28:30]And it is not to say that I can’t somehow morph Audit Shark a little bit so that it is less aimed at banks or maybe uses the same backend and it’s something at a price point that people could afford. So I am not removing options like that from the table. I am definitely keeping them in mind. But I haven’t come to firm conclusions on how to deal with some of those things because you are absolutely right about the fact that those high touch sales are going to be very time intensive. I may have to do a lot of hand holding there is no doubt that I am…
[0:29:00] Rob: The installation, you are going to have to help with the installation especially early on you are going to have to…
[0:29:05] Mike: Installation, installation is almost a joke.
[0:29:05] Rob: You think it is, we think it is [0:29:09][inaudible] invoice. It is like FTP this and run a sequel script that’s all it is and we spend so much time supporting that because people do not know how to do it or they do it wrong. Or they have a server that is all jacked up and doesn’t have components that every other server should have and they don’t. I know you have an MSI and you have a really nice installer and all that…
[0:29:28] Mike: What I have at this point is once you have created an account in the website it directs you to go to a page where you download a zip file you unzip it, you run the executable with the command line of the install and that’s it.
[0:29:43] Rob: So they have to open the command line there you go.
[0:29:45] Mike: Right.
[0:29:45] Rob: That’s a support ticket right there, no I am serious dude it’s…
[0:29:48] Mike: I know
[0:29:48] Rob: I know that sounds so simple and I could do it. But so many people are going to screw that up, I guarantee it so…
[0:29:54] Mike: I understand and…
[0:29:55] Rob: Or it is going to crash or whatever you know there is going to be something there.
[0:29:58] Mike: Yeah.
[0:30:00] Rob: So but that’s neither here nor there. So yeah you’re going to have installation support you’re going to have sales, you are going to have lot of stuff going on.
[0:30:05] Mike: But it’s not like installation, if I needed to do the installation for somebody I could do it via a WebEx or go to a meeting or something like that and literally be done in about two minutes. It is not really that difficult and I have already got something to work on my list of things to do to put together a PDF that outlines exactly how to do it. And then I am going to take that PDF and I am also going to create an HTML format of it that goes on the download page that says, this is exactly how you install it complete with screen shots.
[0:30:31] So I am looking at ways to mitigate those types of problems. I mean one of the things that I spend some time on that didn’t need to be there kind of from my minimum products but it dynamically creates the zip file for the user when they go to download it. And it does that so that it can insert their customer specific data into it.
[0:30:52] Rob: Right, yeah.
[0:30:52] Mike: So that the user doesn’t have to do it because otherwise I would have had them open up an XML file and then modify some stuff that would have just been, it would have been a nightmare.
[0:31:00] Rob: Right, bottom line let’s just say they get the command line and they get it installed and they are going to run it and they are going to, stuff is going to come back, they are going to have questions for you right. Especially the first 10, 20, 30 customers you selling this to they are going to be all over you for support. And you need to be all over them supporting them just to keep this stuff going.
[0:31:18] So super time intensive and I guess the question that, that may be the question that has been in the back of my mind the whole time is, I mean Lester points it out several times. He says, “Mike says this isn’t enterprise software. But he talks about like long sales cycles, high touch sales, higher price points. You know having an auditor involved maybe selling through an auditor as a partner into these banks is definitely more enterprise than not”. Stuff like that, its like has a one person’s software shop ever successfully actually sold mission critical software to a bank. If the bank switches to Mike’s stuff and you are hit by a bus, you know what is his story to his customer.
[0:31:52] There are certain things that go along with enterprise software sales. Things that we have just covered that Audit Shark will have long sales cycles, higher price points, needing like a partner, you know having an IT auditor that is a partner but then you sell through, you have to recruit them, give them a cut and then you know get into the bank potentially cold calling, high touch sales in general.
[0:32:16] I mean so these all really are much more enterprise than say HitTail, right? Being a lower end you know price point SaaS App or done at invoice those are obviously not enterprise. And this is more it is sounding to me like it’s more enterprise than not. You may not be aiming at Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 but there are enterprise considerations that come with building this product. How do you plan to run an enterprise sales organization as a one person shop?
[0:32:43] Mike: I don’t believe it will stay one person forever. I have kind of resigned to the fact that if I wanted to actually grow this out it has to be more than me I can’t possibly do everything and I understand that. I mean if you look at the code base for the product, the code base alone is I think 65,000 lines of code right now. And this for what I refer to as my minimum viable product for this there is no way around it.
[0:33:08] And it sounds like a huge amount of code for what it does. But in many ways what I have done and how I have done it is necessary for what my long-term vision is which is not something that I have really shared with people because that vision kind of needs to come to fruition before I start talking too much about it. There are things that I want to be able to do that if I start talking about them I feel like it would not only derail me but would invite competition for things that I don’t necessarily want people to go after yet.
[0:33:38] And I understand that there’s lots of people who will say well you know, talking about your ideas it’s how you get them to become reality it’s, nobody is going to steal your ideas. I understand that but there are other things to consider. I think you are right in your assessment that there is a lot of things to consider and there are a lot of things that I am just not going to be able to do or handle as a one person shop and I don’t expect to be able to. But over time I also expect that this product is going to grow to the point that I am going to hire people to help me out with it.
[0:34:10] Rob: Right but I mean there is always that point where you like you have more support and sales efforts, prospecting efforts and all that stuff you have way more time than you do money. You may need 40, 50 hours a week you are working you know doing consulting and then you are doing this and other 30 plus hours a week. But you are not bringing in enough money to hire someone. I mean have you thought about that I mean like at what point you think you can bring in an employee or a contractor to help out?
[0:34:37] Mike: Not specifically it really, the money has to be there. I mean I can already cut my hours, and I have already talked to the company that I do a lot of subcontracting through and told them flat out I would like to cut my hours. And that is so that I can start working on Audit Shark on not necessarily a fulltime basis but on a more regular basis. And they are interested in potentially being a reseller for it because they have looked at it, they have seen what it can do and they know what my capabilities are.
[0:35:03] They have an established customer base I have no doubt that I could leverage them to start selling it to some of their customers. And that would cut out probably two thirds of the issues that you raised. You know for example how am I going to find time to do demos? I don’t need to find time to do demos, I could teach them how to do demos, I could teach them how to talk about the product.
[0:35:23] They already have the customer base I don’t need to find them. So there are a lot of those issues that basically get resolved by working with resellers and partners. The real question on my mind is how to structure of the compensation because it is a SaaS App how do you do that? And that’s not an answer I have right now.
[0:35:42] Rob: Honestly we could talk about this for like another hour. I have more questions and there is even more stuff Lester talked about in the email and I am sure you can certainly talk about it for hours. It seems like we might you know want to continue addressing this in future episodes and I think that…
[0:36:00] Mike: We could ask people to send in questions for me.
[0:36:02] Rob: Send in questions, yeah I think maybe sharing what you have in mind could potentially help other folks beyond just the kind of the development of it.
[0:36:13] Mike: Yeah I definitely agree, I mean I can certainly be more than happy to share the things that I can.
[0:36:19] Rob: I think people listen to podcasts because they want to hear our stories.
[0:36:21] Mike: Right.
[0:36:22] Rob: You know what I am saying, they want to hear what you are doing, what you are thinking and basically like how are you marketing this, how are you thinking about it because I think that’s why people tune into the show.
[0:36:29] Mike: Yeah
[0:36:30] Rob: It is to hear our trials and tribulations and they really hear the failures. It is not that everything has to work it’s just people want to hear us try stuff, you know.
[0:36:38] Mike: Yes. It really seems like the way that I need to go for this is leveraging resellers to get into those accounts where because it is high touch sales those people who already have their relationships that’s going to be important. That is going to be key to me pushing a product out and getting people signed on with it. I am not going to get those people driven on my website in the volumes that I need and be able to establish the trust that I need.
[0:37:04] Rob: Yeah I would agree. I think it’s going to be too time intensive and it’s going to take too long to ramp up. I think that resellers are obviously good, it’s intensive to do that right? You have, it sounds like you have some existing relationships so you won’t have to cold call to find resellers. But just finding resellers and managing them as an example with [0:37:22][inaudible] voice we have resellers and it is way more of a time sink than we have ever gotten money out of it. Obviously resellers work for some business but my experience as far has been that it is not that good.
[0:37:32] It seems like your like Audit Shark and the banking model is different and they may be more used to that and they maybe more of a viable option. But I wouldn’t underestimate the time that it would take to get them on board and trend and constantly reminding them to push your product right because otherwise they forget and they are not going to sell your product for you unless you kind of tell them to do that.
[0:37:52] Mike: Right, yeah and I have talked to three different consulting/service companies about Audit Shark and all three of them were interested in either becoming a reseller for it or talking to their customer about it and having them buy it directly. There are a bunch of different options there. It is just really a matter of me finding out what model fits because I have given a lot of thought to how different resellers models work, and I am not terribly happy with any of them that I have found really so far. I mean if you take a look at for example Microsoft.
[0:38:25] Microsoft reseller model is that if they sell direct to you, you have to buy at a significantly higher price point. I mean you buy the full MS RP and the reason for that is because they don’t want to undercut their resellers. If you look at other companies like Symantec, what Symantec does is they have, you know a two tier distribution model where they sell to distributors and then everybody else all their partners buy from distributors. And that is not really any big secret.
[0:38:54] But when you start talking to those customers or to those partners, you can go to any of those partners and you can ask for a price quote for something and then you can ask for a price quote from somebody else. And depending on you know what level of a partner somebody is with Symantec or you know what their discounts are with their distributor you can start playing price words between them. And you know their sales reps are going to go back and forth. And then you will end up with in fighting between your partners who are trying to resell your products because they are trying to make margins.
[0:39:27] And I don’t really like that model just because of the fact that let’s say you are a reseller for me and let’s say I am going to sell my software to you for $6 per node and then you turn around and resell it to you know whoever you want. If I make the same deal with somebody else and they are able to sell it for $6 basically the two of you if you are competing for the same customer you are going to be going back and forth with the price. And you are going to lower the price back and forth between each other to land this one customer and all it does is devalue the product.
[0:39:56] And I don’t like that whole concept because it basically just puts a minimum price on everything. And at the end of the day honestly it’s I am going to get whatever it is from the end customer and then you are going to get some cut of it. I don’t necessarily like that model. What I have been considering is something in more of a form of a rebate where I have a little bit more control over it where depending on the customer aligns with me directly. And then I turn around and provide a rebate back which almost fits in more with a SaaS model anyway.
[0:40:28] Rob: Right sounds like there is a lot of question marks around that model, I mean sounds like…
[0:40:31] Mike: There are…
[0:40:32] Rob: I mean you have talked to resellers have you demoed for resellers?
[0:40:37] Mike: Yeah.
[0:40:36] Rob: I mean it sounds like that is kind of your next gig if you are going to go that route. Like next time we record the podcast, do you have anything scheduled between now and then where you are going to demo or show it to a customer or anything like that?
[0:40:49] Mike: Not on my calendar last I think it was Thursday or Friday I had a conversation with one who was, they wanted to take another look at it. And just because they had some more questions about it and at the time when I first demoed it to them it didn’t have, it really wasn’t full featured at this point. As of last week sometime I would say that I am basically done with Audit Shark in terms of being able to install it for a customer and have them use it.
[0:41:14] There is one outstanding bug that I have to fix that I kind of introduced in the process of implementing the scheduler that where it doesn’t save the data properly. So I need to fix that but that shouldn’t take more than you know maybe an hour or two of work to fix. But beyond that the product is done I can install it in somebody’s environment and it will run on a scheduled basis it will run the audits it will, you can go to the website, you can click a button, you know just by choosing a couple of dropdowns, you specify the policy, the group of machines, you click audit and it will execute that audit as quick as possible against those machines and it will pipe all the data back up into the internet.
[0:41:50] So everything is basically working at this point, it is just a matter of tweaking some things in the UI to make things more comfortable adding some of the documentation, I have already had a lot of the documentation added into it. But having those as you pointed out having those conversations with those prospective resellers is probably going to be pretty important. And I haven’t, I don’t have anything specifically in the product right now that allows somebody to sign on a customer as kind of a subcomponent over their account so to speak.
[0:42:19] Rob: Right and that’s probably not something you want to build at this point, you want to sell at my opinion you want to sell before you even start writing any of that kind of stuff, you know what I am saying?
[0:42:28] Mike: Yeah.
[0:42:29] Rob: Get some money in the pocket.
[0:42:30] [music]
[0:42:32] Mike: The one thing that I would say for anyone who is listening is if you have questions or you want to hear more about what my plans are or thoughts are or something doesn’t make sense or if you think I’m way out and left you on something, feel free to let us know. You can call in a question or comment to our voicemail number at 1888019690 or you can email in an MP3 or text format to questions@satrtupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from ‘We are out of control’ by Moot used under Creative Commons. A full transcript to this podcast is available at our website startupfortherestofus.com.
[0:43:04]If you enjoyed the podcast please consider writing a review on iTunes by searching for startups you can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes or via RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com. Thanks for listening we will see you next time.
