Planning vs. Execution
Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrapped Web. This is the the leaving for microconf in twenty four hours episode. Brian, how's it going?
Brian Casel:There you go. Hey. How's it going, Jordan?
Jordan Gal:Good. Good. It's beautiful. It's 90 degrees and sunny. My wife just took the kids to the beach.
Jordan Gal:I'm in my office.
Brian Casel:You're inside the office on on a microphone.
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's been I get some things
Jordan Gal:done before I go back to back to Europe.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Awesome, man. I'm I'm totally jealous. I wanna get out there in Barcelona. Loved it out there.
Jordan Gal:I I am excited. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I'll definitely be back one of these years for sure.
Jordan Gal:Dreading the travel which I usually don't do but just coming back from Berlin so recently, know it's so painful. I'm looking forward to, you know, MicroConf is different. There are conferences, know, I just went to this affiliate conference. MicroConf is different I'm going alone, but I know I'm like, I'm just gonna see friends. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So that's just exciting.
Brian Casel:Just came in
Jordan Gal:to kinda get there and you know, just meet up. I'm trying to get as much work done as possible now, including my talk, so that when I'm there, don't have to think about that. And I'm so happy, I go first. My talk is first.
Brian Casel:Oh, are you?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Remember that whole like nervousness around like, oh my God, when am I coming up next and watching other people and am I gonna do as well as they are and it's just like, no, I just go first to get it done.
Brian Casel:That's huge. That's a great spot to be in. And, you know, I mean, definitely being on the first day, especially in the morning is an ideal spot. And that's where I was when I spoke at MicroConf Europe last year. But the only problem with my spot was that I was the second speaker and I followed Justin Jackson.
Brian Casel:And and he's like super high energy, great public speaker, kinda kind of a
Jordan Gal:tough act to follow there. Yep. So I'm I'm hoping to be the tough act to follow. Yeah. Gotta step it up.
Brian Casel:Cool.
Jordan Gal:Actually, speaking of Justin, I just saw him tweet something which was so I was so grateful that I saw it. He tweeted something from Derek Sivers, something about public speaking. As I'm obsessing and starting to get nervous about this, he said, cut out everything that isn't surprising. So microcom talk is basically like the story of the past year. Like what does a year in the trenches look like?
Jordan Gal:And we've had some interesting, exciting, nerve wracking things happen over the past year. So Rob thought it'd be a good way to kind of start off the conference to basically, instead of like teaching something, it's just like, we're all in this crazy ride. Here's here's one person's ride and some lessons learned from it. So reading that like cut out everything that isn't surprising was so helpful. I'm like, how do I make a story?
Jordan Gal:Of course, I'm interested in it. It's my story, but how do I actually make it interesting? But like cutting out the things that aren't like that word surprising.
Brian Casel:That's a really good tip. I like the way that's put. And it makes me think of this thing that I've been trying to get a little bit better at myself, which is you don't have to tell the whole story. Your your listeners or your readers, your audience, they can fill in the gaps on their own. And you you can leave certain parts of the thing vague and let them either draw their own conclusions or or make their own connections.
Brian Casel:And and you only hit on those key points that are surprising or or really insightful or whatever it is.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And I I couldn't figure out, like, how do I know what to leave off and what to add? And that that guidance of, like, keep what's surprising was just perfect. It was like, yes, that's that's good guidance for
Brian Casel:I mean, the best thing when it comes to creating any kind of content, whether it's a talk or podcast or article, whatever is the editing. It's it's all in the editing. Just just get the whole thing out and do a brain dump and then try to cut it down by 50% or more, you know, just cut cut out the the fat.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. All the, you know, professional level editing that we do on this podcast. Everyone everyone feels yeah. I can really tell.
Brian Casel:That's that's why our audience has like basically like flatlined in the last six months. Oh, it's just we don't edit at all.
Jordan Gal:Here. That's all.
Brian Casel:So I guess that's kind of the kickoff for this episode is is you're thinking of of what's going into the talk in a way.
Jordan Gal:Well, what it's forced me to do is think about the past year and and also think about what's useful from the experiences. Like, right, the whole point isn't to just like talk about our story, it's to actually extract these lessons. And I ended up, like, breaking it down into into months. My, like, concept for the talk is basically to show, like, what happened, what the lesson is, and then, like, a reality check, meaning, like, what's your MRR? How much money do you have left in the bank?
Jordan Gal:Right? Because that's like this, not cloud, it's like this layer on top of everything that's like reality. Know, your day to day stuff and your week to week, but then there's like reality, the bank account. That's kind of my concept to like go through. Okay.
Jordan Gal:So this month, you know, I decide that if I really want to go for it, I need a co founder who knows the shit. So finding Ben, right? And then all of a sudden, like the reality check there is you got nothing in the bank. You're before you raise money. And so then once you team up and you raise money, that's like a new reality is like, now you got money in the bank and all the world is possible and you're optimistic.
Jordan Gal:Right? And then all these like lessons along the way. So it's basically made me think about the past year and what happened. You and I were talking about it. Just kind of briefly went through like the highlights and it sounds like so much has happened.
Jordan Gal:You you know, it's it's hard to believe that was only like twelve, like fifteen months, whatever it was, like, is so much stuff.
Brian Casel:I know. It never ceases to amaze me that that thing where it's like, you if you look back on what has been accomplished or or just how the road has gone in in the last year, it it's incredible how many things happen. But when you look ahead like, oh, I wanna do this, I wanna do that, I wanna do that, it's intimidating. Or or it's like you kind of assume like, well, that's a three to five year plan. But in reality, most years, all that stuff happens, you know, in one year.
Brian Casel:Yes.
Jordan Gal:And and at the same time, as you're going through it, you feel like you're moving so slow. Right? Like now, I cannot believe that we've been working on this, like, on this checkout product for months. I cannot believe they feel so slow. And then six months from today, we're gonna look back on and be like, and it was just like one experience.
Jordan Gal:Sure. Lasted a few months, but it's one one highlight or one episode.
Brian Casel:I think it's so important to to just remind yourself to to step back and assess what has happened and where things are at and and working on the business and what's gonna go forward. I was just talking to my brother last week, he and his wife are are just now in the process of starting up a farming business. They're they run an organic farm in Upstate New York. And this is brand new. They they just moved into this new farm couple months ago.
Brian Casel:They got their first customers in their CSA program and everything. And so it's exciting and they've been doing farming for many years, this is the first time that they own their own business. And so they're really taking like these kind of first baby steps of what it's like to to call the shots and make these decisions run something from, you know, from day to day. And and I was asking him last week, was like, know, how how's it going so far? Like, is it is it more or less challenging than than your last position when you were just the manager at a farm?
Brian Casel:And he was like, oh my god. It's like a thousand times harder, you know. And it's not even so much the physical work. It's just that that what he's saying, it's hard to move the ball forward because I've got so much shit to do every day that I can't I can't build new stuff. And and I was like, you know, that doesn't really get easier.
Brian Casel:That's that's
Jordan Gal:how it goes.
Brian Casel:This is the game, you know. It took me a few years to really get this and I'm still not great at it. But every month I try to assess like, alright, what happened last month? What is going to happen this month? Every week?
Brian Casel:What's happening this week? And then it's a way to just step back and and be like, that's a thirty day chunk that actually a lot of stuff has happened despite some some of those days feeling like they were shot because some some fire had to be put out, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But we're generally, we're so bad at estimating. I I I always hear you talk about like a few months into the future, And I'm like, why you know, is he planning out that far ahead? And it's really it sounds to me like you're lot better than I'm at at estimating. Because I look back at the past month and I say, alright.
Jordan Gal:We we we got a lot done, but we didn't get as much done as I wanted to or as I expected. And then at the same exact time, I look forward to the next month and I'm like, oh, we're gonna be able to do so much this month. And it's why? It's we you just had the thirty day experience going backwards and it showed you in reality, you worked hard the whole time. You only got x amount done.
Jordan Gal:Why do you think you're gonna get two X done the next thirty days? It's every single month, it's the same thing. It's just, I don't tell you, it's like a human a human characteristic.
Brian Casel:It it is. It is. It's it's hard to see. It's it's just hard to see hours in the day. I mean, every day.
Brian Casel:I I put things on my to do list every day, and pretty consistently, I I only accomplish half of them.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I get But but in the morning
Brian Casel:when I when I do it's a kind of a routine when I when I'm drinking my coffee, I go into Trello, I set these are the the things I wanna hit today. Usually like three or four things. But only thing number one and maybe thing number two get done. And then three and four, was like, oh, wow. Actually, there are no more hours in in the day.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:But it's bad. You can't add hours. I mean, you you of course, you can work more, but that's that's not the answer. What what what drives me nuts is I I do that in the morning and then I also match it up with the with the schedule. I break out the day into half hour increments.
Brian Casel:And I can't do that. I because a half an hour goes by like that.
Jordan Gal:The day disappears on me.
Brian Casel:A half an hour to me is nothing. Like, I feel like it takes me half an hour just to choose the song on Spotify that I'm listen to today.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But some some some tasks really are a, very important and b, don't take more than half an hour. So I I don't wanna do it in hour chunks because then I'm gonna fill in either multiple things in that same hour or I'm gonna fill it in with something that really shouldn't take an hour and then I give myself the slack to take the hour or or not, whatever it is. So I I do my to do list. I I then I match it up on the calendar, and this is why I hate I hate scheduled calls so much, even though I've been doing so many of them and have enjoyed them so much, which which we can talk about.
Jordan Gal:And I just look at the day and I'm like, I I can't there's no it's the day's done. It's gone. I I have I have support to do for for for something in particular, and that's gonna take an hour. And then I have lunch, and then I have something else, and I got the podcast, and I have a call, and I'm like, got, two hours to play with. What am I supposed to do with two hours?
Jordan Gal:And then I'm like, okay, you know what? Tomorrow, tomorrow is the day that's when I'm gonna set aside, you know, four hours to get to focus on this really important thing. And you get there the next day and and it's just being chopped up into pieces.
Brian Casel:One thing that I try to do is separate planning from execution as much as I possibly can. And, know, this past week I've been doing a ton of kind of creative thinking and planning. It this this this past week has been a total planning week. Like not a lot has actually
Jordan Gal:Like in your head?
Brian Casel:In my head, but that also results in just writing tons and tons of notes. In in in my day one app that we talked about in the tools episode last week. I could literally go into that app and see periods throughout the year when my mind was just racing with ideas because I've got like entries, some like multiple entries per day for a whole week. And then I'll go like two months with like no entries at all. So this was definitely one of those weeks where I was just just doing brain dumps of of ideas because we're gonna start embarking on internal software product at audience ops and maybe some external stuff, training product.
Brian Casel:It all come together a little bit more cohesively later on. I'm not gonna talk too much about it because it's again, it's still kind of all up in my head and a little mixed up in the moment. But the idea is to get as much of this stuff out of my head and and written down somewhere. And you know, a lot of times I'm I'm even just like writing the same note again and again. Like, I'm I'm I'm planning it on Monday and then some new ideas form and then I just rewrite rewrite that note or I write a second note on Tuesday and then another one on Wednesday, and then it and then now the idea becomes clearer and clearer.
Brian Casel:Obviously, the the problem at this stage is that it's it's still just all in my head and I'm trying to get some feedback from like people in my mastermind and and some friends and stuff, but
Jordan Gal:And and then you need some time away from it Yes. Look back and say that was just a stupid idea or okay, that I'm still at the same place I was.
Brian Casel:Right. The idea is is planning and taking as much of the strategic work out of the equation as possible and getting to the point where like, okay, I've just done all this brainstorming, all this note taking, all this planning. Now I've come up with with with a plan that that I've determined is is is a good first step, then everything becomes execution. It's like, okay, I've decided I'm going to hire a developer to do x, y, and z, or okay, I I need to talk to 20 customers to get feedback and validation. Okay.
Brian Casel:Now now action is, okay, scheduling calls, making sending emails, you know, doing those things.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's that's my favorite part. And that that's what I've been doing the past two weeks. So we've had a bunch of these ideas and we talked about them internally. So we on the morning standup, we go through what are you doing today?
Jordan Gal:What'd you get done? What's the priority? What's next? And then at the end we'll kind of have this like rolling conversation about, okay, so last time we left off, this is where we were on the kind of evolution of the idea because we're, I don't know how unique the situation is. We have a product that's very recently launched.
Jordan Gal:So it's, there's a lot of uncertainty around like where should this thing go and what should come next. But I think that that just happens at any point in time, regardless of if you just launched a product or not. What I like to do is just get it back to the market as quickly as possible. I have been doing at least a call or two a day. Basically anyone that hits me up on intercom, who's like, hey, I have a question.
Jordan Gal:I'm like, cool. What's your Skype? Let's get on the screen share. So I've been talking to anyone and everyone. And then all of a sudden, you get these core we have these core, like five or six people who are so excited about what we're doing that they're like, I want in and I want to help and I want, you know, a say in the process.
Jordan Gal:And so I just have this rolling, these rolling conversations with these five or six people. I just ping them any time in the day and say, what do you think about this? Is this the right way to do upsells? I literally like drew out a graph and I pinged it to everyone and I said, is this the right approach for upsells? And then just get feedback.
Brian Casel:Yeah, kind of like an inner circle of customers who Yeah. Who can help. That's that's so smart. I'm I'm gonna use that idea.
Jordan Gal:One one of them like one of them like help change the direction into such a better place. You know, because our our product was supposed to be landing pages, then checkout page, upsell pages, thank you, right? So this like funnel builder. So we kept looking at the landing pages and saying to ourselves, that's essential, that's where you send the traffic. But all these people that we were talking to, they're super excited about the funnel functionality of the checkout.
Jordan Gal:They're already using landing pages. They're using Leadpages and Unbounce and Instapages and whatever else. And we just keep talking to them and one of them was like, dude, Unbounce is better. You're not going to beat Unbounce at Landing Pages. And so now we chopped off Landing Pages completely for the time being.
Jordan Gal:It's simplified, it's reduced our scope by like 50%. And now all we do is we create a user that can create a checkout funnel and that creates a buy link and they can take that link and put it anywhere. And that just adds the product directly into our checkout page. Now all of a sudden we went from having this huge amount of scope and basically having to build a landing page editor and builder. Now not only do we chop off that scope, now we can go to the landing page companies like Leadpages and amounts and integrate with them and get distribution through them.
Jordan Gal:Like it's all these from these conversations, from this inner circle of people just giving us reality.
Brian Casel:It's amazing how beneficial it can be to just subtract addition by subtraction. Like just remove features or remove ideas from the plan, from the roadmap and it makes the whole thing better. Actually, like it actually makes it more more valuable.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You know? Now it's like this sexy, sexy thing that's like a buy link you can put anywhere. Then I'm like, Oh my God, it's the same thing as Cardhook. We're good at integration marketing.
Jordan Gal:Instead of looking at competing with Leadpages on Unbounce, now we're like, That is our distribution strategy for God's sake. So that inner circle and that dialogue of like, here are my ideas that are evolving. And then instead of just letting them evolve and evolve and evolve internally, it's just immediately shooting them off to these people who are kind of like in the know. I mean, these people are psyched to be in the know. They're like, this is so cool.
Jordan Gal:We get to see what you're doing. And I'm like, look, I'm gonna, you're gonna get it all. It's gonna be a little ugly. It's gonna be a little disjointed in one week. I'm gonna say something in the other, but you're gonna see it.
Jordan Gal:And because of that, they're just like, they're in on it then. And they give real feedback.
Brian Casel:That's awesome. I need to do more of that for sure. And, you know, like like I said, I'm I'm going through this phase where I'm kinda brainstorming and and mapping out ideas for kind of a software plus service iteration of of audience ops. I'm not gonna get too too much into the details there, but it's and it's still so so early on in in this whole process.
Jordan Gal:But what's what's the kernel? Is is that you guys need software internally?
Brian Casel:Well, okay. I'll I'll give the kernel, which is the idea is not to reinvent the wheel in terms of what Audience Ops is. So whatever we do, we still need to solve the same problem. Audience Ops still exists for the reason that it exists, which is to help founders and their teams actually do content marketing and implement it, whether that means, you know, giving them writing power, giving them, you know, the systems and the processes and and the execution and and the strategy and, putting all that in place where it hasn't existed before. That's the mission behind Audience Ops.
Brian Casel:And so up until now and continuing in the future, we're doing the done for you service of that. And that's how we've gotten now. How we've grown the team and the MRR and the cash flow. But now the next iteration is how can we do that even better, even more efficiently? And it starts with some internal software, it can become an iteration of how the service is delivered, but we still solve that problem for customers.
Brian Casel:So, you were talking about onboarding a little bit and UI, UX and feature roadmaps. I'm now in this process of writing notes, but I'm starting to to kind of work on some mock ups and wireframes for for how things are gonna work. I've done this a few times in the past for different software things that I've worked on. But this time, the approach that I'm taking is just work on the onboarding flow first.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:For the very first thing and probably the most important thing that I can possibly work on, even in the earliest earliest wireframes, before I get into like the main homepage dashboard or even like the key features, the first thing that I wanna work on are the onboarding screens. What's the very first experience, the first first, second, third and fourth screen that the person is going to be presented with and how are they gonna walk through that? What I'm learning as I'm going through this is it's not just about getting them from point a to point b, like into the app and using it. It's the decisions I'm making in the onboarding actually impact the feature roadmap. Like, as I'm working on the onboarding, I I can say like, well, if we establish this concept on screen two, we can make that a key feature in the reporting later on.
Brian Casel:I think it helps to to start with the onboarding because I I feel like a lot of SaaS treat onboarding as an afterthought and that's that's a huge problem.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's it's easier to work on functionality than it is on guiding someone by the hand in into that functionality. It's really hard. It it's this strange creative, challenge. You have to like close your eyes and picture you're a user who doesn't know your software has never seen it before.
Jordan Gal:And what's their mentality and what are they trying to do and what are their expectations when they signed up?
Brian Casel:Yeah, but I think every one of those decisions has to be has to start and end with what is the problem that they have? Why did they come to you in the first place?
Jordan Gal:Yeah, but it's easy to lose that. It's easy for that to get lost, especially when you're just marinating in your own software for so long.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
Brian Casel:That's It's easy to think about bells and whistles, the real thing
Jordan Gal:is You like have to be able to connect to shipping, right? That's like this core thing. Oh my god. If that doesn't work and discounts have to work. But then how do you like tell people?
Jordan Gal:How do you how do you get someone to connect the shipping information from their Shopify store into our app in a way that makes sense. That isn't just like off on the settings page and that you would never see it and never know about it. And it's meanwhile, it's this essential thing. It won't work without it. It's like you you almost, you know, as you're communicating with with with the tech side, you're giving these requirements and it's really easy to forget about, yeah, okay, so that works.
Jordan Gal:The shipping, we can pull it in, that works. But if it's essential for the app to work, it can't just be off in some screen. It has to be part of first experience. And then if they skip the first experience, it still has to be part of the building a funnel or launching it experience. So it's that that's much more challenging than what should we build and how to build it.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. So let let me ask you something. I think you kinda touched on this for a second about thinking through MRR and cash flow and then budgeting for what's possible and what's coming up next. So you guys are going through the the new product.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm thinking through some new things in audience ops. In terms of planning, like, how do you think about budgeting and allocating cash and time? Like, before before you know what what the real costs are going to be, how do you get an idea in your head, like, what what do I feel comfortable spending on to make this thing happen?
Jordan Gal:Right. Everyone's situation is different. Everything's unique. So all I can talk about is what we did or the situation that we're in. What we tried to do is make sure that our expenses were as fixed as possible.
Jordan Gal:That the range of expenses from month to month was as small as possible. So I pretty much know within 5% how much we're going to spend this month. Once I know that, because we have a full time product guy in Ben and a full time developer in Rock, building stuff does not cost anything more. It costs us our time. It costs us focusing on one thing versus the other.
Jordan Gal:But in terms of budgeting, I know how much we're going to spend this month and I know how much is in the bank and I know how much is coming in. So it's it kinda Right.
Brian Casel:Since you have full full time people on it, it's really a question of how much time or of how much of their time you're allocating.
Jordan Gal:It's about focus. It's about if we take our eye off of the recovery product and put it onto the checkout product, that means revenue will suffer on the recovery product. But still that doesn't affect budgeting that much because it's the expenses obviously. I mean, it's both, obviously, but that's how we try How to about for
Brian Casel:things that you don't have in house resources for?
Jordan Gal:So that is five ish percent per month that sometimes you just have unexpected expenses. Sometimes it's more than 5%. Sometimes it's you go to a conference in Berlin with all three of you guys and you drop an extra four k that month you know, because you thought it made sense, but it wasn't budgeted. And it's the same thing for for the product now. I just basically give the guys a budget.
Jordan Gal:I say, we want to go fast. If we want to go fast, here's an extra $2,000 to spend on freelancers. Don't come to me telling me that we are waiting on wireframes and stuff like that or you can't do it because you're too busy. Spend the $2,000 so we can go faster. 90% of our expenses are fixed so I know what to expect and then there's a little bit of wiggle room every month on what to spend extra.
Jordan Gal:And then you look how much money is in the bank and you say, okay, that's what we can do.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I guess the thing that when there's a question mark, probably for a lot of people is like when you plan to hire a contractor, a freelancer to do one job, price quotes just range all over the board, whether you're hiring a developer or a designer or a UX person or a marketing person, you know, going into it, you can get a low quote, a medium quote and a high quote and you you won't like, before you start talking to people, you won't have an idea like, well, what should I spend on this and what and what do I wanna get out of it?
Jordan Gal:And now and then the the most expensive quote is always attractive for one reason or another. Whether you heard the person's really good to work with, or you can commit yourself, okay, working with this contract
Brian Casel:There's a psychological thing that's Right.
Jordan Gal:This will only take thirty days and so, okay, maybe the quote is higher than the others, but it's better to get it done right and so that's it's it's difficult.
Brian Casel:The way that I've been approaching it more more and more in the past year, whether it's hiring people like part time people onto the team or thinking about like bringing in like a a project based contractor to to do one thing. I I basically think of the product high service that I wanna buy, you know. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's always attractive because it because it's predictable. Your your expenses are fixed.
Brian Casel:It's Exactly. Like, I'm kinda going through this process right now. You know, I'm think again, I'm thinking through some some software stuff that we wanna build internally at Audience Ops and and, you know, a lot of it is, like, high level and and and starting from the ground up. So with that in mind, I know that I need a high level kinda CTO type person with with with with that kind of background. Of course, I can't necessarily afford a, full time CTO or anything like that.
Brian Casel:So so I'm thinking through like, well, what could like a CTO as a service look like? You know, for
Jordan Gal:Sure. Would can that make sense? Yeah. For
Brian Casel:for, you know, x couple thousand dollars, these are the deliverables that I would need to to get done because I can't handle them myself or we can't handle them in house. And and then, you know, maybe have like a separate developer do a lot of the the coding.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. This this is why we have we have gotten addicted to our our man in Slovenia, Rak, who's now a partner in the business, and then we're about to hire a second full time developer in Slovenia also. Because not that it's a product like service, but it's somewhere between a product like service and a full time employee. It's just not as expensive as a full time employee, but again, you get a fixed amount of money that you know you're gonna spend and then it's easy to budget.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I've got, you know, people on the team who've been fantastic and we basically just agreed, okay, this is gonna be the monthly fixed fee. Right. It's a monthly contract
Jordan Gal:and Some months you'll work less, but it's better off to just
Brian Casel:Well, actually no, like a lot of their the things that they work on are regular, like just every month. These are the deliverables that we know that you're working on.
Jordan Gal:Right, but you're not paying hourly? No. Right. So as the business owner, you know what you're gonna spend.
Brian Casel:Right. Exactly.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:Yep. And and I know what they're working on and and what they're what we expect to be delivered, you know. Product has services, easier to buy, easier to sell, you know
Jordan Gal:what I mean? Yep.
Brian Casel:So, so what else? What do we got? Anything else?
Jordan Gal:I don't know. I got tapas and and red wine on my on my brain. I it it has been a very interesting, week. On on Monday, I made a decision. I probably should have made two weeks earlier, but I wanted to give it a little time.
Jordan Gal:So we've had this checkout product in the market that replaces the Shopify checkout page. It's been in the market for about sixty days. It's part of a larger product, that funnel product I described. That's where we think the real value is and the real money is. But because we had already built all the tech to replace the Shopify checkout page also, we said to ourselves, there's so much demand for that in the Shopify marketplace.
Jordan Gal:Nothing else exists like it. Let's see if we can combine the two. If someone can build a funnel and then it works on the Shopify site or off the Shopify site with a landing page. We tried to do that. It didn't work.
Jordan Gal:It simply is too damn complicated. You know what? It's not that it's too complicated. It's just it's the wrong battle. I think maybe I talked about this last week.
Jordan Gal:I don't know. The the the war analogy. Remember? If here's the battle, but if you don't win the battle, what's I mean, even if you win the battle, what's the point of winning the battle? Right.
Jordan Gal:Basically, I gave the tech guys as We had a bunch of people launch, we had hundreds of people sign up for a product that costs $300 a month. Okay? So we knew that the demand was there and we knew that if we got it right, we could make some significant progress in revenue, but it wasn't working that well. And it was consuming all of our energy and time and stress because it's a really sensitive product.
Brian Casel:When you say it wasn't working that well, what do you mean? Like
Jordan Gal:the lot of technical problems, lot of implementation problems, difficult to launch. It wasn't even buggy. Look, every time someone goes from the cart on Shopify to our checkout page, we have to do an API call to Shopify and then get information back. Shopify's API is getting hit up like a billion times a second. So it just was not as fast as it should have been and there were some other type issues and whatever else.
Jordan Gal:There is one other company who's doing it and we just kept getting people coming from their product, coming over to us saying their product doesn't work, it's so buggy. Can you guys work? We were experiencing the same things. And they're I'm thinking their software is buggy. This thing is just really, It's really API.
Jordan Gal:Right. And so on Sunday was like the last straw. Somebody pinged us on Intercom and there was yet another very similar type issue about the connection between Shopify and our product. And I was like, all right, I'm done. I gave the guys the extra two weeks.
Jordan Gal:And on Monday, we came into stand up and I said, we are shutting it down. Everyone whose checkout page is launched on their Shopify site, we are shutting down. Everyone else, we are no longer launching. It was a stressful thing, it had to happen. Like I'm just staring at tens of thousands of dollars in MRR, but
Brian Casel:And it's not a lost cause. I mean, you're kind of rolling that into a different product iteration,
Jordan Gal:right? It was always part of the larger funnel product. So we just said, you know what, we're going to come back to that in the future if and when it makes sense, but we're going to focus on the functionality that makes us unique in the market, in the funnel and then the connection to Shopify afterward. So I sent out an email to those hundreds of people who signed up. I sent out an email yesterday saying good news and bad news.
Jordan Gal:Bad news is we're no longer supporting the replacement on the Shopify site. The good news is we're going to be going a lot faster on this other thing because we're no longer going to be focused on it. And it got like a crazy mix of responses, but it felt so good. It was like, it clarified things. It felt like me like telling the guys that this is what needs to happen.
Jordan Gal:It felt like I was putting my foot down as the CEO sort of thing. In reality, they were like, thank you. Thank you.
Brian Casel:There there are things in in audience ops too that like just aspects of our service that we do that we we've changed in in recent months. And just because they they don't produce enough of an ROI for our clients, and at the same time, it's like a huge huge burden on our team. And yeah. You just keep
Jordan Gal:it going because you've kept it going and then sometimes you need to actually make that hard decision of
Brian Casel:Announcing some of those things, especially and like sometimes the team gives me the nudge. Like, you know, maybe we should think about this a little bit.
Jordan Gal:That's good
Brian Casel:that they
Jordan Gal:can say that. They they should be able to say that. Sometimes
Brian Casel:you gotta really work to get those kind of responses out of of the team. How how did your team react to it?
Jordan Gal:They understood. Look, they were engaged in a technical challenge. Wanted to make it work. Right. Right there you see multiple signups every single day for a product that costs $300 a month.
Jordan Gal:It's like, yo, if we get this right, things move a lot faster. So they wanted to get it right, but at some point it just becomes obvious. It becomes, we're gonna spend all of our time on this. And maybe that makes sense, maybe it doesn't.
Brian Casel:A lot of times, whether you're the the non technical founder or or the technical people, it's you can get so engaged in trying to solve one problem that that you blind yourself to to the thought of like, well, what if we just didn't do this?
Jordan Gal:This is that's the battle thing. Are you engaged in the right battle?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because sometimes, if you could just step back and say, what if this thing did not exist? What if we did not do this? A lot of times, that opens up all new possibilities that you would would have not even thought about before. We've talked about it, I don't know if we really talked much on the podcast about the funnel product or have you announced much about that?
Brian Casel:Like I
Jordan Gal:don't know if I have, I can get into a little bit, we should probably get further into it once it's like fully there.
Brian Casel:You don't want to give a taste of like what the value prop and what
Jordan Gal:it The value prop is almost like, it's identifying a trend that I think is inevitable and getting out in front of it and almost trying to accelerate it. Right? So what's happening in the marketplace, and this is kind of like the market insight side of it, which is what leads into wanting to build the product to enable that. So what's happening in the e commerce market right now, a lot of like the cutting edge type marketers, they're starting to make a lot of money by undercutting competition on price. Imagine a scenario like this.
Jordan Gal:Remember back in the day I used to sell solar lights. Okay. There was a niche for solar flag lights, right? So I put in these terms because it's easier for me to like imagine. So at that time, there were probably five or six competitors selling the same type of lights for call it a 100 a pop.
Jordan Gal:And there was a market for it and there was competition who's got the better AdWords ad and what position you are in AdWords and SEO and all this other stuff. Right? So it's a pretty finite market. Call it a 100 products a day gets sold. And it's being shifted between these five or six competitors.
Jordan Gal:Let's just use round numbers. And who's winning, who's losing. Then of course, price is obviously a big factor. How much are they pricing it at first? What are we pricing it at?
Jordan Gal:You can't be that much more expensive. Don't want be that much cheaper and kill the margin. So there was like this market equilibrium. There was like a set amount of value in the market and people were capturing it and there was like this game of who's going to capture the most value. So imagine in that scenario, somebody comes along and sells the same product for half of what the market price is.
Jordan Gal:So one's for 105, one's for 100, one's for 89, one's for 92, one's for 97, right? Everyone's competing, all these different things. Someone comes into the market and prices that are $50 Everyone looks over to them like, what the fuck are you doing? I know you're not making margin because I know how much I get it for, we're selling the same product. Right.
Jordan Gal:What's gonna happen? That person's gonna gobble up a lot of the market demand, not necessarily that much of the market value. I see. Right? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So what happens is
Brian Casel:They get them into the ecosystem, they sell them other stuff.
Jordan Gal:Right. Not only do they sell them other stuff, they sell them other stuff in the same transaction. That's the the funnel mentality, funnel strategy. It's I'm gonna get this person to buy for me. I don't care to make a profit.
Jordan Gal:You guys are trying to make money. You guys are trying to make a margin on the sale. You you're trying to capture the you you get it for $50, you sell it for a 100, you're trying to capture $50 worth of margin. I'm gonna say, don't want any of that. I'm going to buy it for $50 and sell it for $50 and get zero.
Jordan Gal:The reason I'm going to do that is because if I get a lot of buyers in my funnel, what I'm going to do is offer them additional products and services in the same transaction. When they come in and they buy on Cart Hook Checkout, the next page they see is, Hey, do you want a second light? The second light's only $60 So now they've captured an additional $10 of margin. Hey, do you want a warranty? I'll sell it to you for $19 and it'll be protected for a year.
Jordan Gal:They might capture more there. And I'll say, hey, do you want expedited shipping to get it there in two days? That'll be $9.95 So they took what looked like a loss or a zero sum purchase and now they've expanded it and maybe they're making $10 or $20 in margin after all is said and done, after someone goes through the funnel. And then of course they add them to the email list and all that, that's fine. So you have these guys who are playing, they're playing slow, trying to make money on the first sale and you got someone coming in fucking up the whole equation.
Jordan Gal:And that's a lot of what's happening with these free plus shipping offers. And so that's what we identify. And if you look at something like that, that's so not nasty, it's so capitalistic, meaning it's so inevitable that that's going to happen. So we are building the tool to allow people to do it.
Brian Casel:Yeah, it's smart that that you're seeing that trend. Know, I just it made me think of the other day, just booked some some plane tickets and for better or for worse, you know, the same kind of thing is happening with, you know, with shopping for airline tickets. Right? So, you know, I usually use like Hipmunk or something to to compare flights and compare prices.
Jordan Gal:It's less about the initial purchase. You're on the money. That's the analogy.
Brian Casel:I think the new trend that I'm only seeing in the past couple of months airfare, I'm sure you've seen it, is the cheapest option that's like, you know, $10.20, $30 less than the others. You go through the checkout process and then all of sudden it's like, you wanna pay $20 to choose your seat?
Jordan Gal:Uh-huh. Know, like choosing your seat
Brian Casel:is not free anymore.
Jordan Gal:No, was gonna I don't wanna upgrade. Like, no, no, no, no, Upgrade, you need to pay to sit. Yeah. But because you have already accepted the initial transaction
Brian Casel:Yeah, you're already through it.
Jordan Gal:The mind set, the decision making process along with it, the conversion rate
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Nathan Barry:Is You
Brian Casel:could and, you know, add some urgency into it, like, well, these seats will be gone in the next five minutes and
Jordan Gal:it's Right. So it's it's the same insight as email marketing. It's the same. The sophisticated people care less about the initial purchase. They care about the lifetime value of the next year because they do well selling over email over the next year.
Jordan Gal:We just can't compete with the we can't compete with Mailchimp or Klaviyo and all these. So we see the space of the actual checkout, the initial purchase expanding the average order value there. People are starting to do it on like the info product side and we're going to be the first people to do it on the physical product side. And if we get it right, I think we'll be rewarded. So that's what the funnel product is.
Jordan Gal:It allows someone to build a checkout funnel, a post purchase funnel. Someone comes in and buys a product, their credit card is stored, including PayPal, very important that it works with PayPal, and then you can build an upsell and down sell funnel after the initial purchase that the person, anyone buying or adding to the order does not need to reenter their credit card.
Brian Casel:I wonder if that same concept can, I'm sure it does in some cases, can it can apply to a SaaS or even like WordPress plugins or, you know, think if if if you're in a space that's super competitive and there and you can identify by name, five competitors that you know that your customers are all identifying by name and comparing. Yeah. Undercut on price. Undercut and then upsell Upsell. Upsell a product type service, upsell more software, upsell more features.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And you'll see so this is happening more and more in that world. There's a software called EasyVSL, Easy Video Sales Letter. You go there and it's $50 and you buy it and then you go on a little adventure after you purchase. It's do you want the training for $197 and it's really well done and a great sales page with a video convincing you why you need it. And then, hey, do you want consulting?
Jordan Gal:And that's $997 and we'll write you the script for you and we'll do the video production. And it's just taking average order value and expanding it dramatically. So there's a company called Samcart that does it for info products. So we're just doing the same thing for physical products. Then Shopify piece is that there's another company called ClickFunnels that does the same thing, but it's not really built for physical products.
Jordan Gal:And so when you sell physical products, you need inventory shipping, all these mechanisms that right now the most popular platform for doing that is Shopify. So what our funnel product does is it when the order is finished, when the person checks out on our checkout, we take the order data and put it into Shopify to be handled there like any other order. So that's the part that people are like, what did you just say? Right. Because they've been they've been struggling with these other products and they're selling 50 units a day and they they they're they're exporting to a CSV and then uploading to ship station.
Jordan Gal:Like, they don't they're spending all their time.
Brian Casel:Are you planning or maybe you already do some educational stuff in to lead people into this funnel? Like educating about the concept of a of an ecommerce funnel strategy?
Jordan Gal:Yes. So I haven't had time to do any of that. It's just been
Brian Casel:I guess eventually that'll become like webinars and
Jordan Gal:That's what the webinar strategy is. It's kind of blowing people's minds to
Brian Casel:But have you thought about selling an info product? Even if it's just like an ebook or something that's like the funnel strategy, teaching you the the the methodology and the strategy. And then it's like, well, if you wanna do that strategy, go to Yes.
Jordan Gal:I think inevitably that will be that will be our content marketing. Our content marketing will be, you're going to get smoked if you don't do this. Right? It will be like the webinar I did and the webinar I plan to improve on is just showing the math. Look, if you're spending X amount on ads and you're making X amount revenue, if you add a post purchase upsell and make 20% more revenue from it, I mean, if you don't do that, your competitor's going to do it and then they're going to smoke you.
Jordan Gal:That's why I think we can hang out on this product for a long time. This is a trend we're trying to get ahead of And fortunately, have been some other companies like ClickFunnels that have been really successful in selling this type of thing. They've educated the market. So we don't have to do that part of it. But we are going to have to kind of break through from not just the info marketers, but into retailers.
Jordan Gal:And I think I think later on that's when, you know, the outbound sales will come into play. We really have to like hit people in the head and say, hey, have you heard about this thing? Are you using paid traffic? If you are, then you should you should be doing this.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. Awesome. Well, there's there's some valuable nuggets in there. I think that I think there's some good stuff in this episode.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So we got some some more guests coming down the pipeline in the next few weeks. Looking forward to that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I guess we'll we'll talk next week. Alright, man. You take it easy over there.
Jordan Gal:I'll tell Barcelona you said hi.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Alright.
Jordan Gal:Have fun out there. Alright. Be good, man. Yeah.
