Episode 831 | Written vs. Verbal Ad Copy, Selling Into a Low-Awareness Market, and More Listener Questions (Rob Solo)

Rob Walling (00:00): Their feedback while valuable, it’s not anywhere close to how valuable your software can and will be for them if you solve a desperate pain point. And what you really want is you want customers, even if they’re customer zero, to be desperate to pay you for what you’re building. Welcome back to another episode of Startups for the Rest of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. And in this episode, I answer questions from listeners just like you. I have a great range of questions today, including whether to have my customer zero pay me or whether I should comp them, kind of in exchange for all of the work that they’re going to put in helping me figure out what to build. Whether writing ad copy to be spoken, like on a podcast, is different than writing written copy, metrics for a transaction fee-based SaaS that has no subscriptions, and more listener questions. 

(01:02): Before we dive into that, I built a course. It’s called the SaaS Launchpad, and it is by far the best course I have ever built. I spent months architecting and creating the content that was the basis of this course, and then producer Ron and I spent almost six months diving deep and flushing out all of the modules. It has almost 10 hours of video content, and it is the best course I know for early, early stage SaaS founders. It’s called Launchpad because the idea is that if you have no idea for a product you should build, it helps you look at ways to generate ideas. It helps you look at ways to validate ideas, to pre-validate them so that you don’t go into a basement and build for six months and regret your life choices. Even with AI these days, can’t I build it in six minutes? 

(01:53): Maybe, but should you build it in six minutes? Or should you spend 20 minutes doing some type of Googling to see what the competition is like? So it’s called SaaS Launchpad. It’s at saaslaunchpad.co. And if you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it. As I said, it’s kind of all of the wisdom and knowledge that I’ve learned over the years, both launching products and watching founders launch products. And so it has the biggest mistakes. It has a list of, I think it’s like 18 factors of what I would see in a perfect SaaS business that effectively almost no SaaS businesses actually have, but it gives you an idea of things to watch out for and a path to take if you want to bootstrap a SaaS. saaslaunchpad.co. And with that, I want to dive into my first listener question. 

(02:42): This one is actually not a question. It is a thank you email from a longtime listener who asked to remain anonymous. And they said, “I just went full-time on my business. I just wanted to write a quick thank you for your guidance, both direct and indirect, that has helped me build my SaaS to the point where I can quit my day job. Four years ago, I tweeted you asking about one-time payments versus subscription payments, where you obviously, in parens, directed me to charging an annual subscription versus charging one time. Ironically, I emailed DHH around that time and he told me the exact opposite. I’m glad I listened to you.” That’s the point the business really started to grow and compound. While I did get rejected from TinySeed when our revenue was smaller, we also chatted last year about going full-time and how best to get there beyond just raising cash. 

(03:34): The reason I’m reaching out to say thanks now is two weeks ago, I quit my job and started working full-time on my product. Six years to overnight success. $35K MRR and growing four to 6% a month. Wouldn’t be here without your recommendations, both in person and via books and the podcast. So thank you. Keep up the good work. I love emails like this. I read them on here because they bring me so much joy and they’re honestly the reason that I keep doing this. I could sail off into the sunset and sit on a beach in the Caribbean, but it’s so fun to have an impact on people’s lives. It really juices me up. What I like about this email too is there’s a PS at the end. Open source freemium funnel numbers are brutal. Low annual contract values and low conversion rates. 

(04:24): Probably should have taken your advice and started a different business, LOL, but thankfully I’m making it work. So it just goes to show you can make it work, but this is the whole, I’m going to go against the advice, and then once I get there, I’m going to be like, “Oh yeah, I should have listened to the advice.” But either way, this longtime listener and their six years to overnight success is something that we can all celebrate. And with that, let’s dive into my first listener question. 

Luke (04:55): Hey, Rob. My name’s Luke. I’m a super big fan of the podcast and listening to it has really helped me begin my journey in entrepreneurship. I am starting a SaaS company that is an ed tech product aimed at secondary schools. And the nature of such a product is that I think it really needs a trial on a secondary school before I start delving into sales, marketing, et cetera. Should I have the trial school pay for this product or should I give it to them as a service for free as they’re participating in a trial? I know from what you’ve said on the podcast, I’m likely to get better and more real feedback if they’re paying, but I do feel as though there’s a chance that issues arise in terms of what the product is providing when tested on a live school environment. Thank you. 

Rob Walling (05:46): Yeah, so Luke, you mentioned that I have commented on this in the past, and my default is always to charge something. Even if you give them a significant discount, you want them to have some skin in the game and you want to know that this is something that they are willing to pay for. I knew an entrepreneur who built a launch list in a small niche of like 10 or 20 emails and he was in touch with them. And when it came time to kind of launch into what he called beta, I said, “You should call it early access.” But when it came time for him to do that, he comped all of them, I think for life. And I was like, “No, those are your…” Let’s just say of those 20, you could have gotten 10 to become customers. I don’t remember what he was charging, but even if you were charging $250 a month, so $3,000 a year, if you could have gotten half that, that’s still $15,000 a year. That would have been a great little kickstart. 

(06:40): $1,000, a little more than that of MRR for an early stage bootstrap SaaS is a big deal. So I would have a really, really tough time not charging something for this. Now, if you have an idea of what your pricing is going to be ultimately, whether you see competition out there that you are not competing with per se but basing your pricing on, or if you have some idea and you’re like, “It’s going to be $5,000 a year or $20,000 a year,” whatever it is, even if you give them 50% off, 60% off, getting someone to pull out a credit card is really quite a bit of validation that they actually want that. I think it’s a trap to comp them. How much buy-in are they going to have when they’re not paying? How much confidence do you have that anyone will pay for this? But also, their feedback while valuable, it’s not anywhere close to how valuable your software can and will be for them if you solve a desperate pain point. 

(07:39): And what you really want is you want customers, even if they’re customer zero, to be desperate to pay you for what you’re building. Now with that in mind, of course, there’s going to be issues during development. And it’s kind of like, well, if they’re not paying anything, then I can say, “Oh, sorry about that bug. Remember, it’s free.” Or, “It’s taking a while, but remember you’re not paying for it.” Don’t do that. I think you own up and be very clear early on that, hey, this software is early access. There might be bugs. We’re doing the best we can, but there might be issues. It might take us a week to build a feature. We can’t necessarily build every feature you want, et cetera, and couch it upfront instead of hiding behind this shield of free. 

(08:21): Therefore, they can have low expectations. I’d say set their expectations realistically, but then ask them to pay. So thanks for that question, Luke. I hope it was helpful. My next question is about written marketing content versus spoken marketing content. 

Dave (08:42): Hey, Rob. I’ve got a marketing question for you. I’m considering sponsoring a season of a podcast that is listened to by my exact ICP. The way the math works out, if I only get a single sale at the price of sponsoring the season, it’ll end up being a 15% ROI on my investment, and I feel very confident I can get at least one sale out of it, but of course I want to have multiple sales. My question is, do you have any advice about writing copy or marketing materials for something that’s going to be read out loud as opposed to read on a website? Also, knowing that I have a very specific audience for this, is there anything I should be doing or advertising that takes advantage of the fact that it’s not a generalist audience that’s listening, but rather people who I really believe could be champions for purchasing my product? 

(09:45): Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks for entertaining my question. 

Rob Walling (09:50): So this is a great question. The answer is yes, it’s different. It’s very different. I mean, the one thing I learned early on, I remember the first time I read something that I wrote, is that the word “probably” is hard to say. Probably, probably. You just stumble over it and now I almost always write “likely” because they’re basically synonyms and I’ve just gotten in the habit of writing “likely” instead of “probably.” That’s just one tiny thing I’ve learned writing copy that is going to be read aloud and not written. On this podcast and the YouTube channel, I believe we have 40 or 50 different sponsor ads, maybe more than that, that we have coordinated with sponsors on and either written the copy or certainly worked with them to refine and hone it. And so the expert on that topic is actually our very own producer, Ron. 

(10:41): The Startups for the Rest of Us written ad copy remote correspondent. Over to you, Ron. 

Ron (10:46): Thanks, Rob. So first off, I think it’s worth calling out that podcast ads are voice, right? They’re not going to be read silently. They’re being spoken out loud. So whatever you write needs to flow off the tongue naturally. So after you’ve written your script, read it out loud to another human, or at least record it on your phone and play it back. You’ll find where there’s natural stumbles and words that don’t flow nicely. If you’re using Claude or some other AI to help write the script, then actually even in the prompt, say, “This is going to be spoken out loud by a host.” And that generally helps with the outputs. With written ads, we get to rely on things like headings and bullet points and visual formatting, and you don’t actually get that in a podcast ad. So I think it’s important that things flow and that it makes sense as you’re listening through. 

(11:34): You’re kind of building towards that CTA at the end of the script. I think leaning on a scenario or a story works better than just listing features. For example, something like, “You know that moment when you’re struggling to juggle three clients and you realize you forgot to send an invoice,” you’re trying to put the listener in those shoes so they think, “Yeah, that’s me.” You want them to raise their hand and recognize themselves in the ad. Just like written content, if there’s a testimonial you can wrap into the ad, that can work really well too. Imagine something like, “Derrick at SavvyCal said conversions went up 18% when they started using our plugin.” I think this is extra powerful when the testimonial is coming from somebody that the audience would recognize within their industry. I like to keep it to just one simple, easy-to-remember call to action. 

(12:18): A lot of people are walking or driving or doing something else while they’re listening to a podcast, so help them out. Use a vanity URL. Same goes for promo codes. Keep them short and simple. Depending on your web address, it might actually make sense to have your host read out the URL, especially if you’re not using standard spelling. So if your product is called Sendly but your domain is SNDLY.com, you probably want to spell that out for people, otherwise they’re just going to type in whatever they heard and end up somewhere else. I think it’s worth offering something special to folks who are coming from a podcast ad. So don’t just send them to your website and say, “Go to CRM.com and learn more.” Give them some reason to act. So maybe that’s an extra month free or $1,000 off their first contract, or whatever makes sense for your business. 

(13:07): And it doesn’t always have to be a discount either. You could do a bonus offer like a free onboarding call or access to a special resource that you put together for the audience. That incentive gives the listener a reason to actually use your link and it also helps you track whether the ad is actually working. Since you mentioned that you’re sponsoring a whole season of the podcast, you have some extra options. You might consider mixing up your message from episode to episode. So if you have a six or eight episode series, maybe you have two or three different messages that you can test out over the course of the season. Since you’re committing to a full season, I’d recommend building out a dedicated landing page just for that podcast audience. On that landing page, you can give a little hat tip to the show, something like, “For Startups for the Rest of Us listeners, we’re offering an extended free trial plus priority onboarding,” or whatever it is. 

(13:57): It makes the audience feel like they’re getting something special and it reinforces the connection between your brand and the podcast that they already trust. I’d also ask the podcast producer or host if they’ve seen any good results from anything in particular. They know their audience better than you do and they’ve probably seen what’s worked for other advertisers. Maybe it’s a certain type of offer that converts better, or maybe their audience responds well to a particular style of ad read. At the very least, you can ask them if they would recommend tweaking the script at all. There might be something that the host would never say, but they’re willing to do it if you put it in the script, but they would tweak it slightly and then it’ll just sound more natural as they’re reading it. I think the last thing is that it’s worth matching the energy and tone of your ad to the podcast itself. 

(14:43): Some shows are going to be more buttoned up for a professional audience and while you might get away being a bit more casual with other industries. All right. I hope that helps. Best of luck with the sponsorship, and now back to Rob. 

Rob Walling (14:57): Thanks for that, Ron. I really appreciate you weighing in, and thanks for sending that question in, Dave. I hope it was helpful. My next question is about metrics for a transaction fee-based software company. 

Sean (15:14): Hey, Rob. I’m Sean, the co-founder of a B2B SaaS platform for outdoor rental and experience operators, things like bikes, skis, kayaks, and tours. We charge a percentage-based booking fee instead of a monthly subscription. The upside is our average account generates roughly five to 10 times what operators in the space would be willing to pay for a flat subscription. We have zero churn and steady account growth, but the trade-off is the seasonality. Comparing month to month and calling it MRR doesn’t really work because it’s not recurring on a monthly basis. It’s recurring annually. So our main pulse check has been month-to-date revenue versus the same period last year normalized to our active accounts. Net negative churn has been built in: as our shops grow, our revenue grows. What other metrics should we be watching for a transaction fee model? And as a follow-on, do you think MicroConf would still be valuable for someone not running a traditional subscription SaaS? 

(16:07): Thanks. 

Rob Walling (16:08): Yeah, it’s a good question, Sean. Thanks for sending it in. I guess first of all, I don’t consider you SaaS because SaaS to me is subscription software. If you refer back to, gosh, what was it, four episodes ago where someone asked, are they SaaS? And I said, SaaS is subscription software where the majority of the value comes from the software itself. And since this isn’t a subscription and it’s just usage-based, I wouldn’t call it SaaS. That’s kind of a nitpick and I don’t know how much it matters, but I did want to clarify that upfront. Not only do you have this monthly revenue that isn’t recurring, right? It’s not an agreement where it happens every month, it’s usage-based, but you also have seasonality, which makes it even harder. Before the seasonality, I had a whole diatribe I was going to give on this. 

(16:54): And then when you said, “Oh, it’s seasonal,” it’s like, yeah, you kind of have to look at the prior year. So of course, month-to-date revenue numbers versus the same period last year, I think is a great way to go. Is it truly seasonal, or is each individual month different? Meaning, is June, July, August all approximately equivalent, or does June map to June, July to July, August to August? That’s one thing that gets me thinking about this: are there shoulder seasons, like spring and fall, where revenue is half or a quarter of the peak summer season, but June, July, August should effectively be almost approximately the same. I would give some thinking on that, but if truly it is really individual months, then yeah, you just have to look at the growth from the last year. 

(17:51): I don’t know what else you would look at. The other thing I’d be thinking about is the customers that you have who are paying you. You can look at churn. It’s not churn in a traditional sense, but it’s churn as in: which customers paid us last June that are not paying us this June? That shows they churned because they’re not using you anymore. I would be thinking about how to set up customer success to reach out to them and nurture them if in fact they have not returned. I would also be looking at your top five, 10, or 50 customers in terms of the revenue they generate for you, such that the aggregate is great, but then knowing your individual customers is important too. 

(18:40): The other thing I’d be thinking about is that a lot of businesses started as transaction fee only, and they do eventually move to subscription plus transaction fee. And when you pay that subscription, the transaction fee goes down. So if you pay a couple hundred dollars a month, then instead of paying 8% of GMV, you only pay 6% or 5%. We saw Shopify do this in the early days. We’ve seen Gumroad do it. I’ve seen many companies think they’re going to make it with GMV only and they eventually do move to subscription. Of course, you’ve heard me talk on this show about how when you go to exit, subscription revenue will be valued at a higher multiple than just transactional GMV processing. I’ll add two other things. I do hear you on the fact that you can charge more on a percentage basis than you could as a flat subscription. 

(19:36): And so there’s a challenge there, but I feel like if you were charging an annual subscription, not a monthly one, and it gave them a discount or other perks, they get some special stuff plus the processing fee goes down, is that worth pitching? And lastly, you asked about MicroConf and whether that would be worth it. And I think absolutely. I mean, we have one-time download software folks, especially in Europe, who attend MicroConf. We have WordPress plugins, Shopify plugins, all types of businesses. And so while MicroConf, of course, is focused on bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS, I’m guessing the challenges that you face are 80%, 90% the same as someone with a recurring revenue model. So I think you’d get a lot out of it and meet some great people to boot. My next question is about selling into low-awareness markets. 

Mark (20:38): Hi, Rob. It’s Mark here from Australia. My co-founder who is technical and I, as a domain expert, launched our B2B SaaS about 18 months ago. It’s a lightweight risk management platform that replaces spreadsheets and manual reporting and uses AI to guide non-experts through risk identification, treatment, and reporting. We’ve been deliberately learning the sales and marketing fundamentals. So thank you so much for The SaaS Playbook. We’ve read Traction as well, and we’ve been running through a mix of content and SEO, LinkedIn outbound, some paid ads. We’re looking at some conferences and sponsorships later this year. We’re seeing some engagement, but we’re struggling to turn that into consistent meetings. Specifically, what I’m noticing is that the market is generally low in awareness of risk. They have limited internal capability and the people who are responsible for risk are typically wearing multiple hats, and risk might not be their core capability. 

(21:41): That was really a key part of why we built the product in the first place, but now it seems to be turning into a sales hurdle. So I guess my question is, if you’ve seen this kind of situation before, do we just stay focused and continue executing consistently in terms of those traction methods I mentioned, or are there other things that could work and help us get more traction at this early stage? Thank you so much. I really appreciate the show and everything you do for the community. Cheers. 

Rob Walling (22:11): Thanks for the question, Mark. Yeah, I mean, this is a tough one. This is where you are fighting an uphill battle. I talked a lot in Start Small, Stay Small, my first book, which I wrote in 2010, and I talked a lot about how as a bootstrapper, you really want to find demand. I wasn’t familiar at the time with the five stages of customer awareness, but in my experience at that time, having some successes and a bunch of failures, the successes had online demand. They had some type of search volume. Even if I wasn’t going to win the search volume challenge, it showed that there was demand somewhere. And if there’s demand somewhere, you can usually get in front of it by being on Reddit, by placing ads, by gasp, maybe building an audience, probably don’t want to do that, but maybe you do, by SEO, of course, cold outbound, all the 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. 

(23:09): I don’t need to go through them all here, but when there is that actual demand and the awareness that they have a problem and that there’s a solution, that’s the best place to be in. And of course, not all markets have that. And there are founders, mostly bootstrapped, who are making it work where folks don’t have the awareness that there is a solution, but usually they know they have a problem. And it sounds like in your case they’re not even problem aware, because they’re like, “I don’t really know what risk management is.” I can’t tell you to shut a business down or to pivot, but aside from becoming a media company, starting a podcast or YouTube channel to educate people, writing a lot of articles, or publishing a book, you’re essentially educating them that they have a problem. Because even a cold email is, “Hey, do you know you have a problem?” That’s going to be a brutal uphill battle. I have a tough time imagining enjoying building mostly bootstrapped SaaS if that were the case. 

(23:53): So while I can’t tell you to pivot or bail on the idea, I know of very, very few examples of bootstrappers who have been successful when folks don’t even know they have the problem that needs to be solved. At least if they’re aware of the problem, it’s still an uphill battle, but you mention it and then they’re like, “Oh yeah, I do have that problem. Oh, I didn’t know there was a solution.” And then you can kind of present that to them. But in the case you’re in, it really does sound like a tough situation. 

(24:46): And I’d be thinking about, are there any adjacent markets that are aware they have the problem, so that you don’t have to completely bail on everything that you’ve built? I mean, with AI these days, we can all build every app in what, 20 minutes? Obviously I’m being facetious, but realistically, if you have subject matter expertise in this space, I find that it can be a bit of a trap to say, “Well, there’s a bunch of products in this space for the advanced users, but there’s a lot of less advanced users who don’t use those because they’re too expensive or they need a simpler version of it.” I’ve heard this before. The challenge is that those folks usually don’t have a budget, or they aren’t actually that interested in solving this problem, or they don’t really know how to solve the problem, or the tool has to completely solve their problem in a way that is almost impossible for software to do. 

(25:46): So I say that to let everyone know who’s listening: just be careful with that assumption. There is likely a reason that the simpler version doesn’t exist today. You could totally give it a try. I’d love it if you’d prove me wrong, but I think it can be an easy trap to think of building for folks who don’t have the budget or the real interest. And this is kind of a side project for them, right? I don’t mean a hobby, I don’t mean on nights and weekends, but if their main focus of their job is X and then 5 or 10% of their job is Y and you’re like, “I’m going to build for the people where 5% of their job is Y and I’m going to solve that Y problem,” you’ve got to be really sure that they’re going to be motivated to care enough to invest any time or money into that solution. 

(26:46): So thanks for the question, Mark. Hope that was helpful. And our last question for today has two topics: one is about freelancers, about finding them and general thoughts on them, as well as the music for this podcast. Let’s roll into this question. 

Bernard (27:09): Hey, Rob, this is Bernard. I love the show, and as a small off-topic start, one thing that I also really like about your show that I don’t think many people mention is your intro music. You have multiple songs and I noted down that my favorite song is in episode 810, for instance. So please bring that song back more often. It’s a really good song, and maybe also talk about where you got the song from, who made it, give them a shout out. So my question is about freelancers. I would just generally like to hear your thoughts about freelancers, how you think about the topic when it comes to bootstrap founders. Some things I’m specifically interested in: first of all, pricing. How do you know what is a good price for something that you have maybe never ordered before? 

(27:55): Should it be hourly, result-based, or maybe a retainer, and just what is a good amount? Then also discovery: where do you find freelancers? Obviously Fiverr and Upwork are some options, but what else do you use? And then more generally, I would just like to hear your thoughts on the topic. Maybe you have some strong opinions that come up when you think about the topic. Yeah, that’s all. Thanks. 

Rob Walling (28:17): So I’m going to start with the music. And that particular song in episode 810, I’m going to drop just a little sample of that here to remind you. So thanks for noticing that. Folks have actually commented that the podcast kind of had a soft reboot in 2018 when I went from having a co-host to going solo. And at that point, I wanted to introduce some higher production elements. And I talked to my editor, Josh, who we’ve worked together for, it’s got to be more than 10 years, probably like 12 years now. And Josh has edited five or 600 episodes of this podcast. You think, dear listener, you think you’ve heard my voice for hours and hours. Imagine having to edit this podcast at 1X and hearing all my foibles and cutting all of the times that I misspeak. But all that said, I tasked Josh with just finding some royalty-free tracks. 

(29:32): And one of the tracks Josh brought, he actually wrote. And this track, Zellewave, he wrote back in 2013. And so I asked him to give me a little background on it. Josh himself is a musician and an engineer and a music producer. So he told me that in the early 2000s, many indie developers were creating their own mobile games. Me being just a few years graduated from college, I’d be checking job boards to see if there was any audio-related work out there. I found that many of these developers were looking for sound effects and music for their games, often looking for 8-bit or chiptune-style tracks. That’s an electronic style inspired by the sound chips of vintage computers and game consoles. When people say “vintage,” it makes me feel old, Josh, because that was me growing up. 

(30:24): I eventually got my hands on a chiptune synth plugin and Zellewave was the first track I created with it, really as an attempt to just get familiar with the plugin. From there, I went on to compose music and sound effects for several mobile games during that time. However, Zellewave itself was never used, as most projects required simpler, loopable, game-level music that fit nicely in the background. Fast forward to when we were overhauling the production level of the podcast and adding more music. In addition to the royalty-free music service you had, you asked me if I had any instrumentals and I threw Zellewave in the batch of tracks for you to review, and it made the cut. And it now lives on in the podcast as part of our music rotation. Not sure if your listener is interested in listening to the full version or not, but it did manage to find my old portfolio work SoundCloud account I created back then to host these compositions. 

(31:15): And of course, we will link that up in the show notes. In addition, at the end of this episode, after I sign off, I’m going to ask Josh to put the entire track because it’s less than two minutes long. Just append it to this episode. I had never heard the entire track. I’ve just heard the intro part, and it’s a cool groove. Yeah, it’s a jam. So thanks for asking that question, and thanks Josh for giving us all the background and for composing some awesome music for the show. Now on to the second question. This is about freelancers. So there were many questions in the voicemail: what is a good price, should it be hourly or results-based, should it be a retainer, what is a good amount, how do you find them? There’s a lot of questions here and we could probably spend a whole episode on it. 

(32:00): It just would be kind of boring, I think. So let me give you the 80/10 of what I’d be thinking about. Upwork is really where we go to hire freelancers. That’s where I’ve gone for a long time. I don’t know of some magical other place. I know that a lot of people go to Fiverr. I’ve used Fiverr a little bit, but really Upwork just tends to have a really good selection. You could also check out dynamitejobs.com. Dan and I have a good crew of contractors over there as well. For me, freelancers are to fill either a temporary gap or what I call a black box role. And what I mean by that is if I could put a black box on the desk and you could feed it some kind of input and you know the output you want, it’s a great role for a freelancer, especially if you don’t have that on an ongoing basis or don’t have a full-time amount of that. 

(32:55): So give you an example: Josh. Josh is a freelancer. He’s a contractor. Now we’ve worked together for ages. I mean, Josh may in fact be the person I’ve worked with the longest out of everyone. He basically takes in an audio input, my maniacal ravings, and he tightens it up. He cuts out all the misspeaks. He queues it and the end result, that output, is a black box result that we know we want. And just to give you an example, Josh and I have never met. Josh and I have never even done a phone call before. We always communicate in writing. It’s kind of a trip to think about that, right? Video editing is a great example for this. Copywriting can be this too. 

(33:43): I happen to know Leanna Patch, who writes a ton of copy for TinySeed and MicroConf and has done the copy for my Kickstarters. I happen to know her in person, but I have worked with copywriters in the past that I just find. And the end result I want is good copy. If I can feed in the information about our brand and, “Hey, this is the book or the whatever that I want you to promote,” and they write good copy, I don’t need 40 hours a week of copy, 52 weeks a year. I really just need an output, a result that we can take and move on. Design is another amazing use of freelancers. Whether it’s visual design for a slide deck or for a PDF or for your website or for your app or for your logo, most companies of our size don’t need a full-time designer. 

(34:29): And the good news about design is when you see the result, if you like it, that’s it. It’s done. There’s no legacy. There’s no technical debt with it. And the reason I bring up technical debt is the moment I start thinking about software developers building my core product, I start getting a little uneasy with freelancers. Now, if you don’t have the money, you don’t have the budget, you have the constraints, you might need to use freelancers. But if I were building a SaaS today, I would try to avoid it. I would want a full-time person dedicated to it, whether that’s me or whether that is someone I hire. There’s a certain amount of ownership of the codebase, and technical debt will screw you. I mean, you hear me talk about this on the podcast all the time. Getting three or four freelancers to come in and build three or four designs for me, or write the copy, or edit a bunch of audio, or design a T-shirt. 

(35:24): You can think of all these examples. If the results are good, it’s done. There’s no huge negative. But if I get three or four different developers, especially freelancers, to just pop in and build a little feature here and there and build this part of the app, and then we’re just going to tie it all together, that is a recipe for disaster. It’d be like hiring three or four different companies to pour the foundation of your building and then trying to, all right, you build this floor and you build the second floor with a different contractor, and you build the third and fourth floor, and expecting that building to have any type of structural integrity or to look halfway decent. So those are kind of the two buckets that I think about, right? These things that are easier to outsource where the results come back, but there can be some technical debt tied to it. 

(36:09): In addition, the big question is: what is your core competency as a company? What really are you selling? What do you want to do better than the competition and what are you selling to your customers? If you’re a SaaS app, your product is such a core part of what you’re offering. And so anyone building that product, I don’t particularly want a freelancer who’s flitting in and out of my life to come and build that. Now, there are elements to this, right? What if I want an operations manager who’s just going to do a bunch of admin work, or an executive assistant, whatever term you use? Could they be a freelancer? Could I do 10 hours a week with someone and either pay them hourly or just pay them a monthly retainer? 

(36:52): I think you could. In fact, I have done this. We have worked with folks where we have a 10-hour-a-week retainer and ongoing work, and as long as the results on a week-to-week basis take a lot of work off my plate and there’s no kind of legacy sitting around, I don’t think this is the worst idea. The question of hourly versus results-based versus retainer: it really depends. Retainer is if you need ongoing work, that’s it. If you need someone to write copy every month, if you need design work every month, we’re in a position where we actually do need a lot of web design work. Not a 40-hour-a-week web design work, but five to 10 hours a week. We’re launching enough stuff and tweaking it. And so we have had a web designer on retainer for a while. 

(37:39): We have a copywriter on retainer. And of course, the downside of not having someone on a retainer is you don’t have their availability and you may have to find new freelancers to do work that you need. So there’s a lot of questions. Pricing is so hard to say because if they’re in the Philippines versus the US, the pricing can be five to 10 times different. And of course, pricing is all over the place: what is a copywriter versus a designer versus an executive assistant versus an editor versus a producer? The pricing is just all over the place. The way that I know pricing is typically by looking at Upwork or Fiverr or asking ChatGPT or asking in my network. I would go into the TinySeed Slack and say, “I’m looking for this role. I’m thinking $40 an hour, $50 an hour. 

(38:24): Does this sound reasonable? What are people paying for this?” So it’s a market system, and sometimes you can be clever and pay under market with someone early who is more junior. Usually that means they’re not going to be as experienced and it’s going to be a lot more work on your part. And so you can be clever and be cheap. I used to do that when I didn’t have much money, but you want to break that habit at a certain point. I really these days do believe in getting what you pay for. And when we go in to post a job, I will not take the low-end bids on Upwork at all because I don’t think the quality’s going to be there. So if we post a job and we get bids in the $30s and $40s and also a bunch in the $10 to $15 range, I won’t even look at the $10 to $15. 

(39:11): And it’s not that we have infinite money or that I’m immune to cost. I’m really quite frugal, actually, but I just don’t want the headache of the $15-an-hour freelancer. But I like this question. Overall, I think freelancers are a boon for bootstrappers. I mean, I remember when I was first starting out, we were talking 2003 to 2005 and 2006, and there was no Upwork. It was really hard to find freelancers. I remember going to Craigslist and posting job ads and trying to get people. Remote work wasn’t a thing. It was a hassle and it was expensive. Anyone you hired usually was in your local city, and going overseas, even trying to pay someone in Canada or the Philippines, was really hard. 

(40:01): Therefore, it was really expensive to do all this stuff. So I see a lot of value in freelancers, especially as bootstrappers where we don’t have the budget to hire people 40 hours a week and we don’t have the work to give someone 40 hours a week of a given task. Oh, and that reminds me. The big trap I see some other people falling into is: cool, I’m going to be all freelancers because I don’t want any employees, or I’m going to have five or 10 different freelancers all doing different things. And it’s like, now you’re a project manager and you’re a traffic cop and your entire job is keeping people on task, reviewing work, herding cats, managing all these people who don’t really have loyalty or ownership. They don’t have loyalty to you and they don’t have ownership of what they’re building because they are just going to move on to their next thing. 

(40:41): That is a nightmare. So don’t overdo it. You do want core team members. This idea of not having any core team members is a mistake I’ve made and it’s a mistake I see some other entrepreneurs make. And once you make it a few times, you realize, oh no, I’m going to hire core for the things that I want to be really exceptional at and that we want to own, and then I’m going to have these ancillary resources for the other stuff. And they have the freedom to build an awesome life for themselves and they can provide great results, much like our editor Josh has been doing for the past 12 or 13 years. So I hope you’ll join me in celebrating all of Josh’s contributions to this podcast, because it would not be what it is today without him showing up consistently week after week. 

(41:26): I talk about shipping 52 episodes a year since 2010. That doesn’t happen on its own and it doesn’t happen without an extremely reliable editor like Josh. So thanks for all the amazing listener questions today. If you have a question for the show that you’d like to hear me or me and a guest answer, head to startupsfortherestofus.com and click “ask a question” in the top nav. I actually recorded a new video for VideoAsk because the old one was recorded with a backwards baseball hat on. I was unshowered. I didn’t really think we were going to keep VideoAsk around, and that was seven years ago. So we recorded a new one just a few days ago. You can check that out at startupsfortherestofus.com. And as a reminder, we are going to put the full Zellewave track after I sign off here in just a minute. 

(42:14): Thanks for listening to me this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 831.