Questions on Pricing, Charging a Percentage, and Why Podcast?
Hello, everyone. Welcome back. Ryan, we've got another episode. This is number one thirteen. At this point, we're gonna try to keep those numbers straight.
Jordan Gal:That's it. Friday, we moved recording to Friday, which makes me very happy. Hopefully, it's it's doing the same for you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Good to be back. Episode one thirteen. And, yeah, I do like the the Friday episodes. You know, now now that I'm really getting fully back into the groove of, you know, living in a house and not traveling around the country and a regular schedule, I've been, well, in consultation with my wife who needs me who needs me around I the house little
Jordan Gal:like that.
Brian Casel:I've been tweaking my weekly schedule a bit. So Fridays are supposed to be like really kinda laid back and get off work really early. This for me, it's noon. For you, it's like 9AM. But after this call, I'm basically done on Fridays.
Brian Casel:Oh, nice. And then during the week, Monday through Thursday, I'm really making an effort to be done with work by four, 04:30 the latest. Before yeah. I mean, in the past, I've worked up until like 06:30, 07:00, but, know, just trying to get get totally out of the office, off of email, off of the phone and everything and focused on the kids and stuff after.
Jordan Gal:I like that. I've been, yeah, I've been just throwing in the towel. I like somewhere between five and 05:30 and just go hang out and make dinner. And then I come back to work inevitably at like eight or nine once the kids are asleep. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Lately, I've been very stressed about time. I just it's just too many things to do, and half hour chunks just I break my day to half hour chunks, and they just fly by, man. It's just I just look at them like, I have four half hour chunks left and I have like six things that are priority. Like, okay, so it's just not gonna get done. That's fine.
Brian Casel:Do you do like the Pomodoro thing with the half hour chunks?
Jordan Gal:Not really. I just kinda look at it as half hour chunks because it makes me feel organized. Yeah. Yeah. Just look you know, I just I can just break it up that way.
Jordan Gal:It makes sense to me for some reason. Half hour like an hour is just too long to break up and twenty minutes is too short. Yeah. Just I have a printout. I have like my to do list and then I have a printout of the entire day in half hour chunks and I just write stuff in at the beginning
Brian Casel:of each day. Nice. Yeah. I don't I don't really structure it that way, but I do like when I'm drinking coffee in the morning, I I kinda take a minute to figure out like what's what do I need to get done today? Like, one or two big things that have to get done before I stop working today.
Brian Casel:And then the day goes by and and if 04:00 rolls around and and this thing is not done, that's that's when things go off off the rails a little bit. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I I have been Ben and I okay. So so the mode I'm in right now, here's my very short update, is is laugh at myself mode. I find myself just kinda giggling at absurdity several times throughout the day. There's just so much going on at once, and it's, like, amazing and then terrible and then amazing and then terrible. Like, one thing after the other I just find myself just laughing and and I I always thought I usually think that saying of like enjoy the ride is is bullshit because the ride's only fun if it ends up somewhere glorious.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You know? But because
Brian Casel:this ride kinda sucks sometimes.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Exactly. But right now, it's kind of fun. It's funny. It's it's it's fun and funny.
Jordan Gal:It's like stressful, but I can't help but laugh and be like, this is this is a good time, man. This is definitely not boring. I'll say that. It goes from like a great conversation with an investor to some weird lawyer conversation about terms of service, what happens if this happens, we gotta change this thing. Then I'll get like the legal paperwork to bring on our developer full time with equity.
Jordan Gal:And then I'll have like a terrible phone call and then someone else will cancel an account. And then the next minute I'll have like an amazing phone call with a potential partner that's like a 100 times larger than we are that might like transform the business. And then the next minute something else. So at some point I'm like, whatever, this is just funny.
Brian Casel:It really is that, you know, we've talked about it so many times that the roller coaster, especially with for me, it's it's with sales. I'm sure it's with you the same way. Like, as as sales go up and down, which inevitably I feel like every business, inevitably, they go up and down. I mean, like, we went something like almost two weeks, a couple weeks ago without having any new client sign ups. And that's pretty rare for us at this point.
Brian Casel:And so, you know, for a two week period there, I'm mentally a little bit freaking out. Uh-oh. Know? And then and then the next week, we've got a string of like three new sign ups. So it's like, woo hoo, you know?
Brian Casel:And then it impacts me like at home, know? Even like, alright, well, let's go out to dinner tonight or let's not, you know? When really everything is just fine on that front, but it's like, it just you know, it like impacts all these different decisions you're making. So, but you know, yeah, like you're right. It is laughable like how crazy and how hectic all of our plates are, especially mine for sure.
Brian Casel:I mean, like, just today, we're preparing for this episode. By the way, we're gonna do a couple of listener questions or reader questions, you know, things that that that I've heard, that that we both heard, you know, the last few weeks. Yeah. We're gonna
Jordan Gal:We're we're sick of ourselves.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We're gonna we're gonna get into answering those. But before that, we we're gonna do updates. And so what I wanna mention real quick here is that it was really difficult for me to pick out, like, what is the update I'm gonna talk about today? Because there's so much going on in in an inside audience ops.
Brian Casel:You know, just all these ongoing projects and it's just getting to a point where it's really, really crazy. I mean, the great thing for me now is that I've got a a team and and each teammate is kind of responsible for rolling with with these projects. But for me, even though I'm not actively doing a lot of the work in those projects, I still need to like track them and think about them and get updates on them and give and give input here and there. And that's getting kinda stressful, but exciting at the same time. I don't know how to explain it.
Brian Casel:But it's like when I on Thursdays when I have team meetings, like, I'm talking to my sales guy and then my group of project managers and the marketing guy and the content strategist, all of them are working on individual, like, pretty big projects inside Audience Ops. And it's kind of, like, exhilarating to think that all this stuff is getting done all at the same time. But, yeah, it's just it's just a little bit crazy to wrap my head around it. The the the one update I wanted to mention here, I'm not sure if I if we talked about this on one of the previous updates or not, but something that we just I guess you can call this a launch, but it's it was basically a a big update to our service in audience ops. For new clients coming in, we're calling this the twelve month roadmap.
Brian Casel:And what it is, is on on day one, we're giving new clients basically a PDF, which is kind of like a slide deck that outlines a twelve month roadmap for for what we're gonna deliver every month for the next twelve months in this service that you're signing up for.
Jordan Gal:So it's a month to month commitment.
Brian Casel:It's a month to month commitment.
Jordan Gal:But you're showing, look, if you want real return from this, it's it's a long term relationship.
Brian Casel:Yes. It's a long term it's a long term relationship. Exactly. And we're not really changing too much in in what we do. Like the core of what we do is still the same.
Brian Casel:We produce blog posts, we do email newsletters, social media, you know, but we've structured this twelve month roadmap really into quarters so that every quarter we're doing something new, we're adding some sort of enhancement, we're building on the things that we've built up to that point. And the idea, like the message that I wanna get across to all of our clients, existing and new clients is the longer you stay with Audience Ops, the more value and the more benefits you get. And it's not artificially delaying some of the benefits until say month six, you know, just to incentivize. It's actually doing things that we can only possibly do in month six, like after a certain amount of time has gone by. You know, for example, one of the like, I I think somewhere around month five or six, we we build like a best of newsletters campaign where we'll take, you know, the the five or six best performing articles that we've published already and put them into a campaign so that all new subscribers get your best stuff first.
Brian Casel:You know, that's something that we can only do once we're into the
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's great. You know, so we've got a bunch of things like that. Like around month eight, we'll we'll like repurpose a bunch of your articles to create an ebook lead magnet and then launch that with a landing page. You know, a couple other things like that and and and some back end email automation enhancements that that we'll do. We we develop case study, interviews and then build those into articles and put those into a sequence.
Brian Casel:Should be charging so much more.
Jordan Gal:Well, we will be. You should be. I'm an audience audience ops customer and I just listened to this and I'm like, Jesus, seriously? Don't know. All that?
Brian Casel:You know, it's so it's a
Jordan Gal:better deal than most of the things I pay for.
Brian Casel:That's what it's designed to be. It's it's supposed to be a really good value
Jordan Gal:and By making a no brainer.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And making a no brainer. Know, the the reality is behind the scenes, we do things in a very, very streamlined way. You know. Everything that we're doing, it's not like it's not like we're creating a custom for every individual client every single time.
Brian Casel:We we do the same automation workflow template. We do the same production process and that's what makes it efficient and that's essentially what makes it still profitable for us to be able to charge not as much as you might think. So that's what's on the plate now. So I just wanted to get this idea across for anyone listening, whether you have a SaaS or a productized service, this idea of giving more value the longer your customers are on board, I think is really important. And that just started kind of clicking for me a few months ago, like really like last month when we started working on this.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, we look at it as lock in. Yeah. And it's funny how many of these things can be perceived as cynical, but in reality, in a business setting, it is cynical and it is better for the business, but it's also better for the customer. You can look at it say, oh, you're just trying to lock people in. So anyway, we call it lock in.
Jordan Gal:Look at it and we say, What are the things that do that? What are the things that add value the longer you stay? Because those things are important. So when we look at statistics and reporting, the longer you stay with Cardhook, the more data you have over a period of time. If you leave, you're leaving that behind also and that hurts.
Jordan Gal:So great products and great services have that built in. We look at our checkout app and we look at people who also install cart abandonment along with it and there's so much more bought in and we'll get so much more value out of it that they're just more likely to stay, be happy get value.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah, totally. So like any way that you can incentivize people to not only stay on, but just even to put them in the mindset from day one, that I I I understand what the monthly cost is, but really I'm getting into this for at least a year. And that's and it helps them envision like, is this gonna look like a year from now? And what what am I gonna get out of it?
Brian Casel:You know? And and it starts to help them plan really far and ahead with your product part of that long term plan for them.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I that's what I like about what you're doing there. You're not changing that much. You could do exactly that, but the fact that you talk about it and position it upfront as part of the user experience, part of the onboarding, creates a better relationship and a better mindset and expectations. So that's very interesting where it's just showing it and having a conversation around it changes the nature of the of the experience.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And we're doing things like behind the scenes and some of these things I told all of our existing clients about a couple days ago. Like what I just described there, it sounds like we're adding all these new things to the service and in some in some ways we are, but we're also like streamlining some some parts of it as well. Like our monthly reports, we used to manually grab data from from Google Analytics and put them in. Now we link to a custom Google Analytics dashboard, you know.
Brian Casel:So like like just things like that actually save our assistance, like fifteen to twenty minutes of work for each individual client, adds up to like a couple days of work. Yeah. You know? And just things like that, like as we're starting to grow, we've gotta find ways to to make it, you know, more manageable. So that's basically the one update that I that I had.
Brian Casel:Do you have any other updates before
Jordan Gal:we have is is horrifically boring, so I will take thirty seconds on it and then talk about what I actually wanna talk about, which is slightly related to to your update. I'm writing sales copy, and it is so hard. It's so hard. I'm working with Keith Perhak that we hired to do our webinar funnel and he's awesome. So we are just working on the sales copy and sales page and along with that the presentation and it is not an easy thing to write out 10 pages of copy and plan it out and kind of wrap your mind around it.
Jordan Gal:That was the hardest part. It took me hours to just be like, what are we selling and why does the person want it and how do we talk about it? And once I had that down and then an outline, then it's easy to fill in, you know, a few paragraphs to reach step on the outline. But it was a difficult process. And what I found was, you can't outsource that entirely because that knowledge is in the company because you know the customers best and what they're looking for and why they're looking for it.
Jordan Gal:So it's almost like Keith and his team took us from a blank slate to like something to work with. And I I don't know how I would have done it without that. So now it's like, it's so much easier to get something and critique it. Be like, oh, no. No.
Jordan Gal:That that shouldn't be first. That's not as important as this other thing. Then then you get the ball rolling. So that's basically the name of the game this week is just get the webinar presentation slides, pitch, script, how to make the offer, what the sales page look like, what the emails should have in them, just get all that ready to roll. And then the goal is to have the first webinar on June 29.
Jordan Gal:So I have like twelve days. So I think the next ten days should be pretty crazy.
Brian Casel:Nice. Yeah. We've got to hear a report on that next time.
Jordan Gal:I know. I want to say it publicly so that I more accountable to that twenty ninth because that that date has moved back once already and I wanna I don't want to move back anymore.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Copy is is like so important though. I I feel like that's a skill that really most founders should focus on, you know, and or at least understand it, at least understand the mechanics of what makes a strong sales copy, you know.
Brian Casel:I mean, I I I think of all the things in in Audience Hops, that's probably the thing that I put my own hands in more than anything else. It's like every word that you read everywhere, I I basically did that. But the mechanics of how things get put together, other teammates can work on that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's funny what what, like, what the general public sees is design in words. The design is very important, but the words are actually more important. Yep. This is interesting.
Jordan Gal:All right. So that's the boring update. What I want to talk about, I don't usually remember random blog posts that I read, but there was one this week I found very influential in in my mind. It kind of sad with me. I shared it with a bunch of people.
Jordan Gal:I really liked it. So Andrew Wilkinson is the founder of MetaLab, like the most successful agency ever. Know, the guys that did Slack and actually Flow also and and a a bunch of others. And he wrote an article called Lazy Leadership. He published it in Medium.
Brian Casel:Dude, I have that in my email inbox to read later and I've been wanting to read it.
Jordan Gal:You should read it. So it talks a lot about his journey through figuring out his style and what he's good at and what he's bad at and the guilt that surrounds a CEO who isn't good at doing everything. You want to kind of just like be the ideas guy and you want to manage people and you feel guilty because of that. And this is an interesting article and someone who's highly, highly successful basically like coming clean, like I'm a lazy bastard and what I've been able to do is engineer my companies to produce a product that I have a say in what the product should be, but I don't have a part in the mechanism that creates it. So it reminded me a lot of audience ops.
Jordan Gal:And in that article, he links to a book by Ray Dalio, who is the head of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. It's basically like 150 page PDF of like his principles and it's kind of similar. So it's just got me down this rabbit hole of like, I don't wanna feel guilty about not wanting to do everything. I wanna feel good about it. And it's this is, like, great justification from very successful people talking about how they've made it work and and why.
Brian Casel:That's awesome. That's I I've gotta read that later. I've I've been wanting to read that one. Like, just the just the the subject line alone, like, caught my interest. Was and I haven't read a word of it yet, but I was like, know what?
Brian Casel:I'm not gonna delete this one. I'm gonna get back to that later. But, yeah, that's that's good to hear, especially from somebody who who runs so many different products and companies and, know, I've I've always been amazed at people who who are able to do that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And that's and I think that's a good ideal for founders to have because that that is a an entrepreneur. That's a a business person who who owns and runs businesses, not plays one role in one business. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but but there is a distinction. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It makes me think of someone, a a partner of ours at Cardhook that I really admire. This guy, Rohan Gilkes. He started off by writing local case study on Reddit, basically just how he built up a successful, like, made service.
Brian Casel:And he's Was he on Mixergy a while back?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Definitely. On Mixergy, he he's he is phenomenal. He he is a great entrepreneur. He a bunch of different businesses, Launch twenty seven, Wet Shave Club, just a whole bunch of different businesses and you're kinda like, how the hell do you do all that?
Jordan Gal:And it's because he doesn't try to run them himself. He partners with the right people who have expertise and he gives them what they need and he builds a system and he keeps doing it. And it's it's it's a beautiful thing.
Brian Casel:It's awesome. Before we hop into questions and us answering them, I actually wanted to ask a question to everyone listening just because it's something that that I'm wondering about. Is anybody using Twitter anymore? Like, is that still a social network that people use or is it basically just dying off? Because I feel like it's it's kinda dying off and I actually see it in, like, a distinct decrease in activity, like, you know, replies and tweets and retweets than I used to see just a couple of like six months to twelve months ago.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think that's a fair question and you hear a lot of that. I was on an airplane recently and read an article in Vanity Fair about, the Twitter saga with Jack coming back and all that insanity. It talked about that a little bit also about, you know, what's gonna happen with this this company.
Brian Casel:Because I I mean, the reason why I ask is because I I use Twitter. I like Twitter.
Jordan Gal:I don't wanna do it. Like, I want it to keep going and growing.
Brian Casel:Don't I I feel like Twitter had like, historically, it has a a use in my in my daily workflow. Like, when I have a question about, like, what's the best tool to use for something? And I just wanna, like, crowdsource that and give me, a quick consensus. I go to Twitter. And I and I could still do that.
Brian Casel:I I did that the other day. But, you know, I don't know. Like, what's what is the replacement for that? Because we've we've got like personal one on one groups, we've got mastermind groups, and that's still more intimate and private. Then you've got like these Slack communities, which I I think some people are starting to use that as kind of like a Twitter replacement with like, you're in this community with like a 100 other like minded It's public.
Brian Casel:It's I don't I don't like that. You know? It's not
Jordan Gal:A room of a 100 people a group of 10 people that you're not, like, close with, it's it's just public enough that it prevents you from, posting, and it's not completely wide open enough that you don't care to just write whatever you want. So it's like, you know you know what the replacement is? It's it's sadly. No. Sadly.
Jordan Gal:Whatever. It's Facebook.
Brian Casel:Well, Facebook see, I don't know. I I can't see
Jordan Gal:I I was off Facebook for, two years, then and all of a sudden, a few months ago, I find myself on Facebook a lot more than
Brian Casel:than Twitter. Facebook, I have a I am on Facebook, but I that's it that serves a different role for me, a different use. That's Is it a personal role? Family and friends.
Jordan Gal:Oh, I ignore that entirely. No. See And it's 10% family, it's Facebook groups.
Brian Casel:Well, I'm in a couple of those too, but I I I tend to just bow out of them because they just there's noise in my family and friends feed.
Jordan Gal:Use them the same way I used to use Twitter.
Brian Casel:No, see Twitter is You can like do
Jordan Gal:group and click funnels group and all these other groups like that and it's a passive way to get new stuff.
Brian Casel:See, this is where it's breaking down for me. I I feel like this is, you know, because like Facebook historically for me has always been family and friends. You know, I'm I'm gonna post pictures of my kids there. I'm gonna, you know, get get updates from personal friends from my hometown and things like that. Lately, a lot of my real world friends these days are in our industry, like people we meet up with at MicroComp.
Brian Casel:So so then so in the past year or so, I've shifted my personal rule to like, if I've met you in person, then I will accept you on Facebook.
Pippin Williamson:But I'm
Jordan Gal:I've I've switched. I started following everyone and
Brian Casel:finding I don't I don't follow this. I feel like I I feel like Facebook for me, no. Like, there there are privacy concerns there that I don't want to be following or connected with with strangers. Like, still I
Jordan Gal:just friend them and then unfollow immediately.
Brian Casel:You know, because I don't know. There's, like, there's stuff with, like
Jordan Gal:don't post Like don't post images of of my kids and stuff.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But Twitter used to be that that world where you can where it's totally strangers and and also people in your industry and friends and just a mix of all that. But then, you know, then I know people will say like, well, there's Snapchat and there's what what else? You know, like, I don't know.
Jordan Gal:What do you think about Snapchat? Yesterday was the first time I went to the App Store and downloaded Snapchat.
Brian Casel:Dude, I I downloaded it maybe a couple months ago. I've used it maybe once. And and I haven't posted anything. Like, I I don't use it. I don't even know how to use
Jordan Gal:it. We're so old, dude.
Brian Casel:I know. This this makes me sound so old. There I don't I don't know how to use it, and I don't know that I want to learn how to use it. It's like it's like I don't wanna go through that wanna How do you even get started with this?
Jordan Gal:All I know is my my Ben and Rock just just what they described it as, they described it as the most fun app they use. And I was like, okay. So it's not a serious thing that's like value add. But if it's fun, I could use a little more of that in my life. Sure.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I don't know. I just like I I wanna like learn the the rules or the etiquette or the whatever it is. But frankly, I don't even wanna go through that shit. Just I just wanna keep using Twitter.
Brian Casel:So See, exactly. Everybody's gotta get back on Twitter. I
Jordan Gal:I totally agree. Alright. Alright. Fine. Fine.
Jordan Gal:Fine.
Brian Casel:Okay. Let's So move moving on. Question. Let's see. So I've got a couple of questions.
Brian Casel:I don't know if we'll have time to go through all of them, but I heard this one recently. Should I show pricing on my marketing site? And I I think we've probably heard this, you know, multiple times from multiple people over the years.
Jordan Gal:So let's try to limit our questions to like like sixty seconds each. So we're like, let's do this. Let's let's get through a few questions. Yeah. Not sixty seconds.
Jordan Gal:That's just not realistic. Let's be serious.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So show pricing on the marketing side. My my general answer is yes. I mean, I've always shown it on audience ops. I always showed showed it on restaurant engine.
Brian Casel:You know, don't be coy about it, like, contact us for for a price. You know, I I know that it it can be a little bit of a gray area if you're in a service business or even a productized service. But, you know, I run a productized service business and I really like showing the price and the basic reason is it qualifies every lead that comes in. They they essentially see the whole deal before they even request their consultation, which means before we even get on the phone with them, we know that that the numbers that that they've seen are at least palatable. You're not gonna waste your time.
Jordan Gal:So okay. Okay. So generally speaking, I agree. But your situation is a little bit different because you're showing pricing that's usually not shown. Once you get into, call it $500 a month or more, it's oftentimes not shown.
Jordan Gal:I think it's a rare thing to see a price on a marketing site that says like 2,500 a month. It's rare. Usually those are just hidden. Bounce exchange, they had their pricing on for a little while, but that's call me. I have set aside literally screenshots because at some point I wanted to see what does it look like when a company publishes higher pricing?
Jordan Gal:Because usually you don't see it very much. So here's the thing, depending on your market and your product, you should probably show pricing. But I always find myself a little jealous of the people that don't show. I think you're in a better position when you don't show pricing oftentimes because you can charge more and you can justify that and charge more and price based on the person you're speaking with or the company you're speaking to based on a conversation. I think you capture more value in the utility curve.
Jordan Gal:Like you can change pricing based on the company.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I think that, I mean, in my experience, that came into play more when I was doing consulting work. If I'm talking to two different clients, essentially, we might be doing the same thing, but if it's a it's a big company and, you know, you can probably charge more.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. And that that happens all the time. People do the exact same thing for $5,000 that others do for 50,000, like, literally the exact same stuff. But assuming it's a it's a SaaS product or a productized service, I think it depends on the situation.
Jordan Gal:I think the pricing is very useful for like you said, qualifying positioning. Like we almost accidentally did what I think is good with our pricing for the new checkout product. We said, you know what, let's cut off the bottom tiers. Our minimum tier is $300 a month. And I did that mostly to deter people from signing up because we weren't really ready for Showtime.
Jordan Gal:So So we just wanted as few people as possible. So I'd rather have 10 people sign up than a 100. So we could work with them one on one. What ended up happening was that people saw the price and it was like controversial in good and bad. So we saw a bunch of Facebook posts talking about, I can't believe how greedy these people are and then other people like defending us almost like Are you
Brian Casel:you showing pricing now or no on that?
Jordan Gal:Right now we just show one price, $300 a month and then a custom plan. So we're showing pricing, but it's almost like just a signal.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But that's the whole point of showing pricing. It's to set that signal.
Jordan Gal:Right. I think that's the key. You show pricing for you, for the company, to benefit your company, not to pander and say, Oh, look how affordable we are, look how cheap we are, look, we're cheaper than the competitors. I think that that's when it gets into a problem.
Brian Casel:Exactly. I mean, if if your play, which I almost never think is a good play is to compete on price and be the lower price option. Obviously, you have to show pricing because that's your only selling point. But I I generally favor the higher priced option and show that price to to scare off the lower tier and and I'm a big believer in like no hard and fast rules. I know there are scenarios where it makes sense to go another way, but I just think that if you're not showing pricing and you are being a little bit coy about it, yeah, you have more flexibility, you can negotiate with individual companies, high and low, but how much more work is that?
Brian Casel:And how much more work does and and complexity does that add in the qualifying stage? And then how do you scale that? Because if you're a solo founder or if you're the founder that's still in charge of all the sales, then you can do that negotiation all day if you want to, but eventually you've gotta have a sales team and the sales team is gonna have to have a standard process for quoting prices to customers.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Depends on the business model. We we know of cart abandonment providers that do a little more than what a cart hook does, but pretty much the same service, but it is 10 times more expensive. And it's mostly because they have a Salesforce that's selling to people who are used to buying from a Salesforce. And so that's the business model.
Jordan Gal:So they don't show pricing because why should they? They need to give the salesperson who's going to talk to that lead, they need to allow them to run run the right process and that involves price as one of the negotiating points, not as the, okay, so you know it costs this much and now let me tell you about the service.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. Cool. Well, so much for the sixty second answers here.
Jordan Gal:Fine. Fine. Fine. So
Brian Casel:here we go. The the next one that I've heard recently was how do you handle customer requests in a productized service? But I actually also wanna ask you because you just mentioned that you have the 300 plan and a custom plan. So may maybe that plays into this a a little bit here. So the way that I approach when when a customer asks for a custom request, I tend to approach it the same way that I think most software companies would approach it.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:Like a feature request.
Brian Casel:It's a feature request. And and the my answer is, well, let's see if that is that something that can benefit all of our clients? And is it something that really makes sense in our overall value proposition? If so, then thanks for that request. We're gonna take a month and we're gonna build up a process, test it out, iron out the kinks and then roll it out to all of our clients.
Brian Casel:In most cases, we're not gonna just do something special custom just for one client, because even though that might make that one client happy and it might cause them to stay a few months longer on their plan, It adds extra work for our team that they wouldn't normally be doing, which means higher costs for us. And it also means a higher likelihood of errors and making mistakes, because now now we have to kind of keep these special notes that, oh, don't forget that this client needs it done in a special way every single time that's different from 95% of our other clients, which means we're we're probably gonna miss that in in our QA process. So I that's why I tend to to say no a lot, but we still encourage requests because they could be opportunities to improve the service basically.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's tough. Yep. Yeah. We've had we obviously have feature requests every other day.
Jordan Gal:And my instinct is to say yes. But I I have learned over time that that that's just a dangerous thing, especially when I'm detached from paying the price for it technically, whether that's building the feature and then maintaining it. So now the default is no. We almost just keep an ear out like, well, we've heard that three times in the past two weeks, should look at that more seriously. So we kinda have like a standard sounds great.
Jordan Gal:Thank you very much for the feedback. We will consider it as as our initial response. So instead of just saying no right away or yes right away, if it's something that's blatantly obvious that we're not gonna do, we we say that, you know, we're sorry, but that doesn't make sense sort of thing. But if it's something that sounds like, oh, you want to do customization and you want to add the first name to the subject line. Okay, that's tricky and that's not easy.
Jordan Gal:We're not going to do it right now, but we're gonna keep that one on our list.
Brian Casel:Cool. So another one I heard recently, and I get a lot of questions relating to, how about this idea for a business? Or how about this? Or do you think I can form a productized service out of this x y z? But one guy asked recently, you know, I'm thinking about a service where I would charge a percentage of the sales.
Brian Casel:Do you think that would work? And, you know, I don't wanna get into, like, specifics of what the business would be. But just in general, what what do you think about charging a percentage of of sales rather than a flat fee for for some kind of service deliverable?
Jordan Gal:It's two things at the same time. It might be the best possible way to make a very large amount of money fast. Even if you have a relatively high average revenue per user, call it $250, right, higher than most like bootstrap SaaS businesses, You still need a thousand customers man to make $2.50 ks a month. $2.50 ks a month sounds like a whole bunch of money, but to maintain that you need employees. What is that?
Jordan Gal:$43,000,000 a year. You're like a little pipsqueak on the map. Good for you, but you've got to, so that's good money, but a thousand customers hardcore, that's a lot to maintain, it's a lot to acquire. Whereas a percentage of sales, you need a few big customers and you can make a lot of money faster. At the same time, it is a harder sell, especially if there are competitors that charge flat because some people are repelled by paying a percentage.
Jordan Gal:We very strongly considered charging a percentage for our checkout product because we're processing payments. And we heard from advisors, heard from really smart people that said, guys, the only way you're going to make big bucks is if you charge a percentage because you need to participate in the expansion of the overall amount being processed. If you can do it, it's oftentimes a good thing as long as you so we used to do it with Cardhook actually, but we did it from a position of weakness when we were first starting, we made it as a no brainer offer. We said it's a $100 a month, but that's the cap. So you pay 10% of recovered revenue capped at a $102.50 or 500 a month depending on your tier.
Jordan Gal:So everyone said yes. Why would you not say yes? Because if you recover $500, you pay us 50. If you recover $5, you pay us a 100. So that was like from a position of weakness and that made sense at the beginning, but that's not the ideal.
Jordan Gal:So if you can do it from a position of strength like I am, you know, Russell Brunson, the guy who runs ClickFunnels, he has a, he has like a service business where he charges a million dollars. He charges 500, I think, no, he charges a $100,000 to build the funnel and then he takes 10% of the revenue produced by the funnel up to a million dollars. So if the, you know, if it if it makes you $5,000,000 or something like that, then he'll charge call it 500 k. So if you can do it from that position of strength and participate in the success of what you're doing, then it's a great way to grow a lot faster than you normally could.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I feel like I don't know the percentage thing. I agree with you on all that. I just think that the scenario the the number of scenarios are so few where it really really makes sense to go that route. And and it's so it's so unpredictable too. I mean, you don't you you can't really predict how many sales a customer of yours is going to make, especially when you're a small guy, unless you I think that where it does kind of make sense is when you're so directly tied, like Cart Hook is, to the the transaction, the sale.
Brian Casel:So payment processing, obviously Stripe charges a percentage, Gumroad charges a no, they don't. Oh, yeah. Wait. Is Gumroad charge?
Jordan Gal:They might.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. They they charge 5%. Right? Most like ecommerce or just payment processing in general charges some kind of percent because it's so directly tied.
Brian Casel:But then, you know, if you're if you're charging a percentage for for like a marketing service, and I know that some people do this, but you can't necessarily attribute those sales to the one service. Like, it's not so directly tied to to the dollar, if that makes sense.
Jordan Gal:Yes. If you can justify it directly, it's tough.
Brian Casel:But even when you look at Stripe and Gumroad, so Stripe has been a massive success now. But if you go back to their first year, we saw Patrick Hollison talk at MicroConf, what he was talking about in that first year. I think the question was something like, how do you project forward?
Jordan Gal:Right. You have no idea.
Brian Casel:You have no idea. He was like he was like, well, we can we can figure out like how many users we're we're gaining every month, but we cannot figure out how large those users are gonna grow their businesses. And that's impossible.
Jordan Gal:That's another another downside is is the uncertainty.
Brian Casel:And then you look at Gumroad who has had pretty public problems recently, you know. I I think they're still making it work, but, they laid off a lot of it. Their business model with 5%, I'm guessing they probably have way way too many customers who are just selling $5 ebooks.
Jordan Gal:Right. So they went mass but didn't capture people who were putting a lot of money through the system for them to take a piece of, whereas Stripe is very different. My guess is that the average Stripe user processes many, many, many times the average Gumroad user. And so they're taking a relatively similar percentage but making a vastly more money. It depends.
Jordan Gal:I've seen right. The first business I was involved in, the business my dad started, the entire business model was a percentage business model. It was we will challenge your property taxes. If we succeed, we will take 50% of the first year savings. If we don't succeed, we take nothing.
Jordan Gal:So it has all the inherent risks that we just talked about, but a lot of the upside. But the truth is once you get to a certain scale, a certain number, it's still predictable. It's an interesting proposition. I think it depends on the situation. If you can do it from a position of power, hallelujah.
Jordan Gal:That's way to do it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So just a couple days ago, I think I cc'd you on this one. Somebody emailed in saying, you know, why do you guys still do the podcast? And I thought this was an interesting question because it made me think about it for a minute. And then, you know, I think he was framing it up like, you know, it kinda sounds like a mastermind call, but it also sounds like you guys talk offline about mastermind stuff.
Brian Casel:So why do you even do the podcast and it's all and you've done a 100 episodes, so why keep going? I've I've heard other people ask like, what's the business benefit that you get out of having this podcast?
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:So, yeah, what what are your thoughts?
Jordan Gal:If it weren't fun, we wouldn't still be doing it. Right? So there there are other benefits, and this takes a few an hour or two during the week, and there's never a good time to spend an hour doing something other than your to do list. So it's a sacrifice in terms of our time. But oftentimes I will email Ben or I will post in Slack and I'll just I'll post a screenshot of like an email or a tweet or something and I'll just say podcasting works.
Jordan Gal:It happens all the time. People reach out, they ask questions. I will speak to someone that I admire and I'm trying to maybe work a relationship and they'll say, oh yeah, I've heard your podcast, that's cool. And it opens doors and I'm working with Chris Ranzio who has been awesome as like an executive coach. That came through the podcast.
Jordan Gal:I could go on forever about the actual benefits, but if it weren't fun, we
Brennan Dunn:we wouldn't still be doing
Jordan Gal:it.
Brian Casel:Absolutely. I mean, I replied to him, that was the first thing I said was like, we really just do it for fun and I believe It it's definitely for me, it's one of my favorite things that I do every week, and but you're right. It it's definitely a sacrifice. I've got things that I do need to do today that that I have to push off a little bit. Yeah.
Brian Casel:And I think the longevity of it, a hundred hundred plus episodes, it only it only gets better over time. You know? The the audience grows, you you get more more responses. The the weird thing about podcasting is that a lot of the listenership is like silent. Like, don't realize that they're there until you hear from someone.
Brian Casel:It's like, there are people out there.
Jordan Gal:You do a much better job than I do of putting yourself out there and creating content and just kinda contributing into the big
Brian Casel:Well, these days, like this year, I've been so busy with audience ops that I've been writing a lot less and this podcast is becoming the one of the only ways that I'm doing like real time updates, you
Jordan Gal:know. Right. My my experience is that the more you put out there, the more benefit you get. And so this is this is the main thing I think that we put out there consistently. And it helps it helps with everything, helps networking.
Jordan Gal:It is a very different I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, but it it is amazing how easy it is to network at a conference like MicroConf when you walk up to someone and they say, listened to your podcast and then you shake hands. It makes things really easy
Brian Casel:It does. For
Jordan Gal:networking, you know, and not to be like be a dick about it, but it's an amazing benefit.
Brian Casel:It absolutely is. I mean, yeah, you're right. Whether you're at a conference, know, people just kind of email you out of the blue, you get invited on other podcasts, you know, that's a big one. I mean, just last week, I met up with a guy in Milford, Connecticut. I live in Orange, Connecticut.
Brian Casel:He saw me on Mixergy and another guy who actually bought the productized course. It was and listens to the podcast, total coincidence, lives in Orange, Connecticut. So I met up with these with these two guys, you know, in the past two weeks. And these are now like local local business friends. And if I was not out there on a podcast, these things would not happen.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You know? So the the last thing I I would end off by saying is that I think we don't feel it now, but five, ten years from today, we'll be able to look back and and we'll be very happy. I'm already unhappy that I haven't like blogged over the past few years to be able to look back on it. But this podcast we'll be able to look back on.
Brian Casel:Oh god, that's gonna be so weird.
Jordan Gal:It's an interesting thing to just kinda have this record of of these these journeys that we're kinda dealing with. Yeah. Who knows where they end up? Who cares where they end up? But it'll it'll it'll be cool to to have it there.
Brian Casel:Yep. Absolutely. Cool, man. So that's, I think that that wraps it up.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. That was a good one. Yep. Yeah. That's it.
Jordan Gal:Should we talk about the well, we'll see what happens with our our ideas for introducing some fun stuff into the into the into the episodes.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I mean, on that note, on on the last question, you know, obviously, we're gonna keep going. We're gonna keep recording every week and continue on with the updates and and just the ongoing story. I mean, really, that's why I tune into other podcasts is to hear what our friends are up to. So, yeah, I think we'll we'll we'll keep it exciting and and mix things up
Brennan Dunn:a little bit as well. We're gonna keep
Brian Casel:keep it vague. Vague for now.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Alright. Cool, man. You be good over there.
Brian Casel:Alright. Have a good one. See you.
