Episodes

Show Notes

• Rapportive Gmail plugin
• Boomerang Gmail plugin
• Rob’s Startup Acquisition Post (part 1)
• HitTail Keyword Tool
• Verelo
• This podcast on iTunes
• Influads
• BuySellAds
• LaunchBit
• Mixrank

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[Read more…] about Episode 72 | 8 Tactics for Building Your Pre-Launch Mailing List

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• Business of Software
• LessConf
• MicroConf
• Dreamhost

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[Read more…] about Episode 71 | Premature Optimization of Your Business

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[Read more…] about Episode 70 | Marketing a $1 App, What to Do When You Die, and More Listener Questions

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• HitTail
• AuditShark

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[Read more…] about Episode 69 | The First 5 SEO Steps for Any Website

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• MicroConf
• oDesk
• HitTail
• AuditShark

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[Read more…] about Episode 68 | How to Hire and Manage Virtual Assistants

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[Read more…] about Episode 67 | Specific Strategies For Growing and Managing Your Mailing List

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.

Show Notes

• HitTail
• TechZing
• dribbble.com
• forrst.com

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.

Show Notes

• MicroConf

Show Notes

• HitTail
• AuditShark

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.