New Products First Steps & Next Steps
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, we skipped a week last week. I've missed you. It's nice to be back together again.
Brian Casel:Missed you, buddy. Good to be back. So, yeah, we're back at it. You and I were just talking before the show. I think it'll be interesting today and probably for the next few weeks because I'm getting rolling with a new with a big new product push and you're rolling along fast and furious on a on a big new product from from CartHook.
Brian Casel:So we'll be yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think you're at the early stages of a new product and I'm at the final stages before it actually, you know, launches and and gets out there into the real world. Yeah. There's a whole load of things that come along with that. All these little decisions and micro decisions.
Jordan Gal:It's a little exhausting. It's very stressful. It's hard to know if you should even be focusing on this instead of the existing service and product that that's working. Is it like a shiny object syndrome that we're all very susceptible to? Is it the right strategic move?
Jordan Gal:There's definitely a lot of, you know, rolling around in your head.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I think we also have that in common where we're both we're not starting new companies. You're still working on CartHook. I'm still working on AudienceOps, but it's a it's like a second iteration from or or a second line in the product line.
Jordan Gal:And it it could be it could be the right thing. It could be the thing that you've, you know, that you've been in business all along just to find this thing and that's actually the the big idea that that that helps you take off. Or it could be a distraction and you'd be left further along if you just didn't do something new and focused on what worked. But we are optimistic in our nature, otherwise, we would be doing these things. So one way or another, you convince yourself that the scale comes out, you know, 51%, 49, a little bit toward the the optimistic of this is this is gonna work.
Jordan Gal:This is a good thing to do.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So, you know, before we really dig into what's new on on that front, like, what any other, updates you wanna you wanna share real quick before we
Jordan Gal:Sure. I've got two. The first is I'm going away on vacation, real vacation, not like conference travel, like actual vacation with the family. Yeah. It's definitely gonna involve working just because we're in these final stages.
Jordan Gal:But I end up really in Michigan, up to Traverse City, Michigan. We have some really good friends from college there. We're gonna meet some family there and hang out and barbecue and fish and, you know, just get out outdoors. So I I kind of end up enjoying like a few hours to myself every day. Go to the coffee shop for two, three hours, do email.
Jordan Gal:It helps focus my time. I don't have all day. I'm not just gonna be standing here in front of my desk between nine and five or whatever hours I end up working. So it condenses it and kinda clarifies like, no. These are the only things that actually actually matter and the rest is not worth missing out on beach time for.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Totally. Last week, we took a mini vacation for three days. We drove up to Upstate New York where my brother and his wife have have the farm that I mentioned earlier. So we visited them, saw their farm for the first time, which is pretty cool.
Brian Casel:And then we drove two hours further over to the Finger Lakes where, I've never spent any time there before, but it's it's a pretty cool area. We had a little B and B looking at the lake and did some wine tasting and, you know, spent three nights over there. It was was a good getaway.
Jordan Gal:Wow. Sounds like very normal. Very, you know, like like you actually care about yourself and your time. It's it's very good.
Brian Casel:I mean, was totally like on the on the laptop doing email and you know, working while my wife is, you know, taking care of the two kids. So my fault on that
Jordan Gal:but That's that's the price of freedom. And my other update is now I can announce it now that it's in the past tense, but we we raised more money.
Brian Casel:Oh, very nice.
Jordan Gal:Kinda loaded up the coffers to be able to focus on the long term thinking on this new product instead of, just the short term revenue. Obviously we're focused on revenue, but it does allow us a little bit of breathing room to make decisions a little bit more strategically, like what's the right thing to do for the six month time horizon or twelve month time horizon as opposed to how do we get MRR to where it needs to be ASAP.
Brian Casel:So is that the same amount and is it the same investors or more or? Similar amount, same investors. Got it.
Jordan Gal:Yep. So a lot of lessons in there. One of them, write good investor updates that keep people informed on exactly what's happening because we we definitely went through some drama and some ups and downs and and a severe down, you know, with the Shopify app episode, being able to communicate through that and explain everything what we're doing and why, I think is really what helped, the same existing investors be confident and excited enough to to to re up.
Brian Casel:Got it. Something new on my end is this Friday notes email. Today, I just sent my third third one of these. Every Friday, I'm trying to send out one of these notes. Obviously, it's inspired by, know, the Tim Ferriss email and I've seen it come from a couple other people.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I read yours and I stopped reading Tim Ferriss'.
Brian Casel:Oh, there you go. I I think, know, everybody who I subscribe to who does these kind of things, you know, has different bullet points that they include. So so I I really enjoy doing this. So here's here are the bullet points that I've been in including in mind. Let me just pull it up from today.
Jordan Gal:It's a funny thing when when you know that there is nothing business related, even though it's a business relationship, like with your email, like I associate you with some something having to do with business, and then all of sudden I know that that Friday email isn't really business related. It makes me, you know, more more excited.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And that's some of the feedback I've been getting from readers.
Jordan Gal:I just wanna get to know you, Brian.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I know. I'm putting more of myself out there. I mean, it's obviously I still talk about business and but anyway, my bullet points here are the problem that I solved recently, my upcoming goal, this week's picks, which is always a mix of, like, a podcast episode I heard or music I'm listening to or a book I'm reading, and then question for you to think about. And and then from my archives, which I I try to find, like, maybe an old episode of this podcast or something from my personal blog from a while back or the Audience Hops blog that's kinda relevant.
Brian Casel:And so that's that's all it is. I really like it for, like, a selfish reason, which is, like, it's it's starting to really keep myself even more accountable. Cause I I need to report and this is a it's the subscriber base is getting up there now. So I I feel a little bit nervous sending these these out every week.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's funny. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But it's it's been good. I've been getting a lot of good feedback and yeah, I think I'll keep going with it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I like it. Cool, man. So today we're we're gonna talk about issues that have come up for us over the past few weeks with with these new products. That's basically the only thing on on my mind.
Jordan Gal:So you you tell me if you wanna start a
Brian Casel:little Yeah. Well, let me start with this. I mean, I actually wrote this in in the email today, which is I recently decided that it's time for me to let go of the service side of Audience Ops. And obviously, that doesn't mean we're stopping it. It it continues to grow.
Brian Casel:It is growing and I'm and I still attend to it. But I've stopped actively working on it. And here's what I mean by that. Like, up up until just recently, for the past, like, eighteen months or so, I've spent my full time focus on creating the systems, building the team, and then updating the systems and our processes and making things better and improving the way that we sell it, improving the way that we deliver it, solving all the little problems and the headaches that come up. And then it got to a point where I kept doing that.
Brian Casel:I kept tweaking processes and I kept trying out new tools and and I kept improving things when, you know, I didn't really need to be improving things. Like things are working pretty pretty smoothly. And so I think that was an indicator that like, I'm ready personally to start really focusing my time on what's next. You know, the the big new product or products, but I'm really focusing on one right now. But it's like giving myself permission to
Jordan Gal:Yes. Make you feel guilty?
Brian Casel:Well, at first it did, but but then I I I started to realize that, you know what? I'm still bootstrapping this and totally self funding this. And in order for for this new big product to get off the ground, it's going to require my full time effort on it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The first turn of the snowball.
Brian Casel:Right. And I and I have to accept the fact that, you know, I'm in a pretty good position now, to the productized service because that's up and running. It it it's profitable. The team is in place and they're doing really great with it. And my my basic needs are covered from this business.
Brian Casel:So I'm now freed up to to focus full time on developing the new product and planning it and and working with different people on it. That was kinda like the big revelation over the last like two two to three weeks, I think is is giving myself that permission.
Jordan Gal:Okay. That's necessary. It's I I
Brian Casel:mean, just like to be clear, like on the service side of things, my whole role is just involves, okay, a couple sales calls and one call with my managers every other Thursday. So it's like every two weeks, I've got a call for an hour. We just give me an update on what's going on with clients. And and then week to week, just a couple of questions that get escalated to me from my team. And I and I deal with those.
Brian Casel:So it's a couple of hours a week, and then the rest of the week is focused on on new stuff.
Jordan Gal:That's that's very impressive, man. That's sounds like a a a good a good scenario. Yeah.
Brian Casel:I think you're you're doing
Jordan Gal:the right thing. There's it's unlikely that a new product is gonna get off the ground in any reasonable amount of time. The best decision we made as a company over the past few months was to stop focusing on the replacement of the Shopify checkout and actually pursue the the funnel functionality that we wanted. That since that day, everything has gone so much faster because it we just said, okay. Let's just stop splitting our attention and let's just focus on what we actually wanna accomplish.
Jordan Gal:Now now we're almost there, maybe six weeks later.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's amazing how how much just a mindset shift for you and your team, just accelerates, you know, the pace and like, you're all working towards a much clearer goal rather than trying to, like, balance five, six different things.
Jordan Gal:Right. Little this, little that. Yep. Cool. Well, I'll tell you what my biggest theme over the past two weeks has been has been education.
Jordan Gal:What happened over the past two weeks was at some point, I hit a wall. I'm I'm also going to sneeze at some point, so I'm just gonna mute this, but it's gonna be it's gonna be cool when I do. So that that's the explanation for the mute.
Brian Casel:Good to know.
Jordan Gal:Thanks. At some point, I got really frustrated at the speed, and I didn't know what to do. I didn't have the tools, the vocabulary to deal with the technical aspects. This is Lauren.
Brian Casel:I was gonna say that is the weirdest looking sneeze I've ever seen. No. It wasn't a sneeze. Was trying to look
Jordan Gal:up at the sky at the light,
Brian Casel:so I'd sneeze, It's not happening. Got
Jordan Gal:it. Alright. Bear with me. Bear with me. So so I didn't know what to do with it.
Jordan Gal:I didn't know how to push a tech team. I didn't have the experience, the knowledge. I just didn't know what to do, and the only thing I I basically resorted to violence. I didn't know what else to do, so I started yelling You took
Brian Casel:out the whip and you and you whipped over Skype and
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and even as I was doing it, I knew it wasn't the right thing. I just didn't know what else to do, and and it it was a very strange situation. I ended up being very apologetic about being overly aggressive and frustrated and then doing it again the next day. I was in a very strange spot.
Jordan Gal:I didn't know what to do. It's just one of those things. I'm not a product manager and I don't understand the tech to the same degree as the other guys. So I I felt like this rift being created between us. So it was kind of a little hairy.
Jordan Gal:What what ended up saving the day was this this new full time developer Jan that we're bringing Jan. He's kinda working with us part time right now until he's able to join full time. So he's been on our stand ups though to just start getting involved. His perspective was like an outsider's perspective and he could almost tell us and say the things in a certain way that we couldn't to each other because we've like, we're friends, Ben and I, and Rock and I, it's like we're very close now. So Jan coming in and basically saying, look, the previous company, here's how we did it and here's why it happened.
Jordan Gal:Jordan, you're not wrong that it's going slow, but it's not like Rock and Ben are working slowly. It's that this the nature of this thing. And so he like came in and just helped me understand what was happening and what I should be doing with my frustration.
Brian Casel:Well, sounds like really good person you you got on. Mean, that's that's the sign of a really strong person, especially a developer. It's it's not just about development talent. It's your ability to communicate about it.
Jordan Gal:And he was willing to be honest with me Yeah. Who, you know, presumably am the boss and kinda tell me you're not you're not wrong, but you're a little wrong, and here's how you're wrong, and that kinda helped me understand, and so I started channeling it into more constructive things such as we're we're now doing more rigid two week sprints. And what ends up happening is I'm in the marketing guy, so I talk to people all day. And so I bring market feedback into the conversation. The problem is I do that and I throw a wrench into things.
Jordan Gal:I get all excited about a particular feature or functionality or what someone wants and it's fine to do that, but people are currently working really hard on getting one thing straight that's very complex. So we've started getting into this more rigid like, no, I don't just throw that bomb into the mix. I put that on a list for us to talk about to then decide whether or not it's included in the next sprint. But right now there's a sprint happening, let it happen. Right.
Jordan Gal:Let's finish, don't keep throwing things off.
Brian Casel:So how does your sprint work? Like two weeks sprints. Yeah. I assume like at some day like a Friday or a Monday at the end of a sprint, you you regroup and you you discuss the findings.
Jordan Gal:Right. We're still in the experimentation phase in terms of we don't have it down exactly to the T like Monday through Thursday we code and then Friday we all test and then Monday. We don't have it that way. Right now we're trying to figure out that structure. What Jan came in with was just breaking it up into realistic segments of like, if you have a two week sprint, you're not building for two weeks.
Jordan Gal:You are building for a week, you're testing for two days, and then you're fixing bugs and issues for those last three days, and that's your two week sprint. So that helped me be more patient and just kind of take a step back. Like there's no sense in breaking up what's happening right now to throw in another feature. It's just gonna it just frustrates everyone and it slows things down. As much as I yeah.
Jordan Gal:Don't want things to happen sequentially. I want things to happen at the same time, but the development needs to happen sequentially. It's this and then this and then this. So it's kind of been an education over the past few weeks in product management overall. Yeah, totally.
Brian Casel:You know, I guess that speaks right to this like stress factor that I've been thinking about lately. And it's like for that first year and a half working on Audience Ops, like, it wasn't all that stressful. And that's because it was working and it and it continues to work. And we have paying customers and you've got problems and things that you need to overcome, but okay, we need to tinker with this and restructure that process here, get a different person to come in here. But like, we've you know, it's working.
Brian Casel:So that's not a stressful thing. I I just have things to do to make it keep working. But now that I've like launched myself back into the entrepreneurial mindset of starting a new product that does not have customers yet, that adds this whole like cloud over my head every single day of like, I'm working on something that people are not paying for yet. And that is extremely scary and stressful. And that is what pushes me to work as fast and make as much progress as I possibly can to get myself out from under that cloud as soon as possible.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The the no man's land we've talked about. Right. Where it's like it's it's unhealthy to be there because you get in your own head.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:So what I was gonna ask you is what are the stress points for you? Is it is it the validation part? Like, is this are people even gonna wanna pay for this? Like, what what are the stress points? Is it am I distracting myself or
Brian Casel:Well, okay. So I've already made the decision that I'm going to work on a big new product. I've I've come to that conclusion that we need to have another product to grow audience ops further. So I'm okay with that decision. That's that's been made.
Brian Casel:I'm doing that. The question now is, what is that product? And is this product, the one that I'm working on now, is this the right thing to fill that space? And I think the stressful thing is, yeah, I guess it's the validation process, which is where I'm right in the middle of right now. But like, I've been through this several times now.
Jordan Gal:Right. Are you addressing that specifically, to help yourself out? Like to try to get validation first before you keep building?
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I could talk through all the steps that I've been working on and what's coming up next.
Jordan Gal:I'm curious what you're doing to to alleviate that stress. Because it's it's it's a healthy stress. Yeah. You can't just go building for the next three months without getting feedback.
Brian Casel:I think part of it is, and again, this is because I'm I'm not new at this now. It's A, recognizing this the pieces of a new product that I have strengths that I can bring to the table and do myself, and then the pieces that I that I know that I'm gonna need to bring others in to take care of and and hire others to do. It's also knowing when to tell myself to stop and show it to somebody and get feedback. And then then work a little bit more and then stop and then show it people for feedback.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So not not being in isolation for two
Brennan Dunn:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like not getting sucked into ice. Because there are pieces of this that I spend a lot of time personally on. Like I do a lot of design work and product specs and wireframes and mock ups and marketing work. And then there's also the factor that, you know, I'm I am self funding this and I need to budget accordingly and I need to do things in a smart way. So I guess I can run through the process that I've gone through so far.
Brian Casel:So the and this was probably came out in like an episode from two weeks ago when had all these ideas swirling around in my head. I kinda have a sense of what this it's it's essentially gonna be a SaaS product with a small service aspect attached to it. But I I've had like all these different potential ideas for a SaaS that comes from audience ops. And I needed to get it all out of my head. The first step of that was just writing tons and tons of notes.
Brian Casel:And then the next step was, like, I'm a visual person. I need to see what this thing would actually look like. So I took out Balsamiq and I created lots of wireframes. I iterated on those several times. I spent about, I'd say a full week to week and a half every single day working on these.
Brian Casel:So that's like that's like a lot of hours. Right? Even through like through a weekend, I'm so like gung ho about this that that like I'm working on a Saturday, you know.
Jordan Gal:It it isn't it fun? I I think the the wireframing process is I think it's fun. I I draw it out by hand. I must have drawn out a 100 pages by hand just because I don't like the balsamic thing. The just drawing by hand is easier for me, but but you're you're going through the same process with balsamic.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I like balsamic. And so I but so I sent I spent many hours on this, and that whole time I know full well, and I'm saying this to myself every day, like, I'm spending a lot of time on this, and it's just me right now. Nobody has seen this yet, and that is scary. There's this fear.
Brian Casel:I was just listening today to to Steli and Heaton on their podcast talking about MVPs. This isn't relating to anything that they were saying on on that podcast, but just MVPs in general. There's this fear out there, I think that people are you know that you need to do something super super minimal. And you don't wanna work too much until you have some level of validation on things. Right?
Brian Casel:But I I also think that that can be a crutch and that can stop people from actually taking action. In in my case, I get the ball rolling by by getting some wireframes together and they're pretty detailed. Don't know. I I guess that's just what I wanted to say. It was like, you need to do some sort of first action to get this thing out of your head and and and into a presentable form that you can go show to someone and say, hey, what do you think about this?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and that comes in different forms itself. You know, I I told you I've been doing a lot of Facebook group mining, and so I when I when I see someone write about the exact problem that we are solving, you know, there are literally people on these in these groups saying, I'm trying to accomplish x and I can't find a tool. And then there are like 20 comments underneath it that are like, yeah, me too. How do you do it?
Jordan Gal:How do I do it? Who's going to fix it? So I reach out to those people. And for me, even just the explanation, like the two paragraphs explaining what we're doing is a little bit of validation. That's like the first level.
Jordan Gal:Where it's like, oh, that doesn't make sense for me or oh, that sounds really interesting. Can you tell me more about how this part of it works?
Brian Casel:In my case, I'm trying the the new product is essentially aimed at solving the same problem that we've been solving with Audience Ops. So in that in that sense, I do know that there are companies that need to do content marketing, and they don't know how or they don't have the tools or the people to do it. Right.
Jordan Gal:So it's not a shot in the dark, totally Right.
Brian Casel:Mentality. My goal here is to create a better, more efficient way of solving the same problem. Okay. So that was step one. I I made those wireframes, spent about ten days on them, and at that point, I I find and they weren't even finished.
Brian Casel:There were plenty of screens that were like, alright, I'm just not gonna spend time on that. I had to just tell myself, okay, stop. It's at a good enough point that I can send it to someone. And I so I said, stop. I need to get feedback on this.
Brian Casel:So my next step was, you know, sent out an email to twenty, twenty five friends, people I've, you know, met in person, people I consider friends now, and we and we talk on a regular basis, people I trust who are doing this sort of thing, who I who I know will give me some critical feedback. That's that's what I was seeking. I sent that email out to to all of them with the wireframes. I created a video to to walk through and just just talk through, my thinking behind this to kinda present it. Not like, this wasn't like a marketing explainer video at this point.
Brian Casel:This was like, hey, check out this thing I'm working on. Here's what I'm thinking. I need help.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But you you you work hard on it. It's it's not crappy. I've seen it. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's it's good. So you you put the time into it to actually see Yeah.
Brian Casel:Because I
Jordan Gal:take real reaction.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I really wanna get the full vision across. So so the other thing that I should say about this is that I put all the thoughts that were in my head about this new product into these wireframes. All the features, the whole set, like and I'm not this is not gonna be the MVP. This is not even gonna be version one.
Brian Casel:You know, this is just just to get the vision out of my head and into into something tangible.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:A big part of sending it around for feedback was and one of the questions I asked was, know, tell me like which part looks most interesting, what's not interesting, or put another way, what would you include in version one? You know, I'm trying to see like what where where I should start with this thing. I sent that email about, I don't know, ten days ago, and then I I went on that vacation Upstate New York and I processed a ton of really helpful feedback from people. I'm still in the process now of replying to everyone.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Being honest with people when you give that type of feedback is is so critical because it's so easy to just be nice to your friend and hopefully the people that responded back to you with it were were able to be critical and Yeah. You know, help actually help
Brian Casel:Yes. And and they were, and I really really appreciate that. And I know how busy everyone is, and and I've I'm always hesitant to ask for people's time like this, but, sorry, my dog is, freaking out back there. So okay. So I got a lot of good feedback.
Brian Casel:Most of it pointed to, okay, this thing is too big and not focused enough. And I and I kind of agreed with that. I stripped some things out of the scope and refocused it. Okay. So now my next step, and this took me all of last week, I created an an explainer video.
Brian Casel:It comes in now at at about ninety seconds. I bought a quick course on Udemy, like how to how to use, Keynote to to do some animation stuff in a in a a explainer video. I I knew ScreenFlow pretty well. I got a music track on AudioJungle. I did the voice over myself.
Brian Casel:I put the the the blanket over my head to get the good audio around here and, like, my neighbors walking by thinks I'm a total crazy person, but that's okay. And so so I I I got that out the door. I I probably spent three or four full full working days on producing that. Again, a little bit freaking out because I'm putting all this work into something that's still, you know, I would not consider like totally validated yet. Anyway, I put that together.
Brian Casel:I put it up on a landing page. I used our landing pages plugin which made that really easy at least. And then so I created this landing page, which I'm not gonna share with the audience today because my next step for next week is we're running some Facebook ads to some targeted cold audiences. People like not retargeting audiences, so people who have not necessarily heard of me or heard of audience ops before.
Jordan Gal:Okay. And where are you driving them? To the video? Yeah. To that landing page which has the video on it.
Jordan Gal:Just to see total strangers. What what what are they how do they react?
Brian Casel:Total strangers, see if they will opt in for for early access. And then on the back end, on on the success page, there's a survey. And it's like a long survey. It's like, probably like 20 questions. So I wanna get their responses to those questions and then those people who fill out the survey, I will reach out and try to talk to on on calls.
Brian Casel:Okay. Yeah. You you got you got a bunch of steps to go. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:So and I and I have our our marketing guy on the team at audience ops. So he's he's gonna be managing those Facebook ads. That's usually an area, like, talking about something where I'm just not it's just not my thing. Like, I know the basics, but really to run Facebook ads, you need somebody who just really lives and breathes that stuff. So Jeff is gonna be handling that for for the next week and making some adjustments and then we'll you know, I'll look at the results of that.
Brian Casel:So that's really the next step is to get feedback from cold audiences. But then the other thing that's I'm not pulling the trigger on yet, but I'm starting to talk to people is finding a developer. And I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this, you know, on a budget, but also balance with, okay, this thing needs we need to make the right tech decisions. We need to not cause huge problems down the road. So what I'm leaning towards is some combination of a, like, a North America US based CTO type person.
Brian Casel:Not a CTO partner, but just someone to consult maybe just for, a one month, maybe one or two month basis to help me make high level decisions. And then and then outsource the ongoing coding development work probably to an offshore development shop. I'll I'll probably seek an agency, I think, for to just have reliability and and consistent, you know, consistency on that. And I expect that to be, you know, long term, six to twelve months, month to month retainer kind of thing. Spend a few months on that and if there are users and then if there are customers, obviously, we keep going.
Brian Casel:And if it really grows, then I look into really building a a dev team and CTO. But the early on, I'm just looking at ways to to self fund and bootstrap this.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Very interesting. So it'll be yeah. Right now you're playing with Fantasy. You're how how would this feature be?
Jordan Gal:And then at some point when it turns into reality, then you have to start making compromises with, okay. So this should not be in scope for version one. And this should because it's critical and it's the key piece of value and this is tangential, it gets held off and yeah, damn software. It's it's it's this imaginary stuff on the Internet, but it's very real in terms of building it and the compromises you need to make away from what your ideal is.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And actually, an idea that I took from you, we were talking about on on the show, I think last time, is this idea of like an inner circle customers group. Right? So there there will be an early access list and all those people will be invited to use it in beta. But even before that, I wanna find around 10 customers.
Brian Casel:And I already have a list of about five just from people that I've been emailing privately. But I wanna build this up to about 10 who are they'll they'll be like the pre sell group. Probably ask them to pre sell, you know, a couple of months of of the service and or the or the software. And I'm gonna be going to them on a weekly basis or so to get feedback on screenshots and features while we build them and what should we build next or is this ready or is it not ready? What's missing?
Brian Casel:And they'll be the the kind of the mastermind for this new product. And and because they'll be users of it. So
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I don't know what I would do without that. I feel like that's like I don't know if if other people see it as critical. I just don't know. I wouldn't know any other way to do it other than just getting people in the door early who are super interested in getting the feedback.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So everything you're talking about sounds familiar, from, like, you know, a few months ago. And so we're just on the other side of the of of the, you know, of the tunnel. We're we're the we see the light. We're almost there.
Jordan Gal:Now all those micro decisions that you put off because they're not critical in in the early phases, now we're actually being decided. And it's it's stressful because these things seem like little micro decisions. Like to you, pricing is a big decision. In reality, you're just putting a number on the site and that is your pricing. Like all the thought that goes on to it, you just decide what to put on there, but it's that and another decision is when to take credit cards.
Jordan Gal:Should you take it at sign up? Should you take it at launch? Did you have the two step sign up? So you create an account first screen, second screen is the credit card so that if they go between step one, step two and abandon, then you send them effectively what abandoned cart emails for software. It's like all these micro decisions are very stressful because they feel like they make they can have a big impact on the company, but you just have to decide.
Jordan Gal:So it's it's actually really hard. So Yeah. Well, where where
Brian Casel:are you at on that? Like, in terms of I'm curious if, like so you have some customers and people interested, like, did they prepay or or at least give their credit card or how are you thinking about that?
Jordan Gal:No. So the only people who have who have paid for it were the people on the webinar who pre purchased. Got it. And so everyone else we've just laid in without without credit card just to get feedback. Got it.
Jordan Gal:But now we're actually
Brian Casel:But you do have people who've paid like so that's Yes. Like people have paid to solve this problem.
Jordan Gal:Yes. But now it's new marketing site is coming out next week, and along with it, all the details of the pricing and how it works and all that. So my my team kinda loses their mind from hearing me like, so can we just talk about pricing again real quick one last time? They they that sentence, they really would prefer never to hear ever again, but I'm trying to go as simple as possible. Basically, the explanation of this product is difficult enough, so I'm trying to keep everything else simple.
Jordan Gal:So we're starting out with one pricing tier. You could do monthly or annual, but just one tier. Even though I think mathematically, it's smarter to have multiple tiers and charge more for people who make more. Yeah. And price anchoring
Brian Casel:and that sort of stuff.
Jordan Gal:Right. We can always do that later. Right now, it's just whatever requires the least explanation. Yep. So so we're doing one pricing tier at $97 a month, and then we're taking the credit card.
Jordan Gal:Don't quote me on this because it might change between now and the time we launch it, but I think we're gonna do the the two step registration.
Brian Casel:So sign up and then start using the app and then when?
Jordan Gal:No. What you do is your sign up form is two pages. The first page is just email and password, and then you submit that. So we capture your email address, and then the second page is credit card information. So some people will drop off and then that at least helps you measure the number of people who are dropping off because of the credit card requirement.
Jordan Gal:So at least that gives you an indicator like, okay, if we took the credit card requirement out, we kind of know how many people we would get in cause everyone who who finished step one would have been a free trial account.
Brian Casel:Got it. Right.
Jordan Gal:See, it helps you measure that way. There's a bunch of companies that do it. If you go to drip right now, go to getdrip.com and go to sign up, you'll see step one email password, step two. And then if you complete step one, but don't complete step two, you'll, you should expect an email about an hour later.
Brian Casel:That's interesting.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Saying, hey, what happened? Basically an abandoned cart email for software.
Brian Casel:Right. And are you doing a free trial or?
Jordan Gal:We are doing a free trial, but the one of the biggest mistakes we made with the card abandonment product was that we didn't require a credit card upfront. That I think was the right move because of the nature of the product. But then when the free trial ended, that was like the first time we actually asked for a credit card. So the thinking behind it was, hey, we wanna want you to make money. And then every week we tell you how much money you're making.
Jordan Gal:And at the end, we're telling you, this is how much money you've made. If you want to keep going, put it in your credit card. And that worked when there were like 20 trials a month because there would be like, they call it 10 successful people. And we could manage that. Now that there's so many more trials, we can't follow-up individually and so if those like two or three emails go by, we kind of lost them even though they had a successful trial.
Jordan Gal:So I'll reach out to them like two weeks later saying, Hey, what happened? I never got your credit card info and they'll be like, oh, I'm sorry. I meant to sign up, but we're not following up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's just a second action they have
Jordan Gal:to take and Exactly. Right. It's it's a proactive action and it should be the opposite. Right. It should be you need to proactively cancel before you get charged.
Jordan Gal:Not you need to proactively put in your credit card before you get charged. Yes. So that was a painful lesson learned. So that's like you know, but
Brian Casel:you have to balance that with what you learned about the sign up process. Right? Like, what if removing the credit card doubles, triples the number of trials you get? You know, that then it's like you gotta look at it.
Jordan Gal:Right. And you also have to think internally, you'd think, what can we handle internally? Because my my fear is that without credit card require for sign up, we're just gonna get a bunch of people who wanna see what the hell we're talking about because this is a unique product. And so we're gonna end up spending a lot of our time helping people get set up, answer questions, all that for people who are not good prospects that are not gonna turn to paying customers anyway.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:So that's a little a
Brian Casel:little I do always default to ask for the credit card upfront.
Jordan Gal:Right. Yeah. There's there's one way that's a little clever way to do it, where you basically let people sign up and register and get set up, but then you require credit card at the point of value. For us it's when you launch your first funnel. So if you've gone in, you've connected your Shopify store, you've set up your funnel, you've connected your payment processor, you've done all this work.
Jordan Gal:You're so invested and committed. Then when you go to launch your funnel, that's when you get the pop up saying you need to put your credit card information in. I think that would work. I don't know what to call it. Forget being nice.
Jordan Gal:It's it might be annoying or not ideal.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, actually one thing on the technical aspect, this is really a question that tech people would know the answer to that I don't. But like, you you probably wanna set it up in a way that's easy to test and switch strategies. Because I like, back in Restaurant Engine, we had our registration process set up in a way that like, in order to I think we were able to change prices easily, but if we want to change models, like, that required redeveloping the whole registration process.
Jordan Gal:Right. You know? My experience has been once you put those things in, they don't get changed that often. Yeah. So, you kinda wanna just leave it for a while because it's not realistic to be like, oh, we'll just change it real quick in two weeks because it's it's not gonna happen.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But on the You you get too busy. On the onboarding stuff, I think I talked about how with those mock ups that I that I was working on, I designed the onboarding screens first before anything else because I feel like that informs the rest of the app. And the way that I set it up or my thinking at this point, I'm sure this will change 10 times before it's even built. But the very first screens is like, you start to work on setting up your goals and and key settings.
Brian Casel:So I think it's something like, are your traffic goals and your conversion goals? And then those are saved in the next step. What's your publishing plan? Those are saved in the next step. And not inviting teams, but like, what what does your team roles look like?
Brian Casel:And so you're putting all this work and you're and you're building this profile, but it hasn't even asked you for your name and email yet. And then that's like kind of the final step is like, put your name and email and then and then ask for the credit card details, and then you you're dropped into the into the app, which is the same kind of view, because it's it's built around a timeline view. So like, you're you're still in that timeline view and at the bottom of the timeline were those onboarding steps that you had started. So, like, you've already done some work. Like, it it takes a minute or two to get up to the point of of registering.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I mean, I I love that. I think it's hard to accomplish technically, and right. You wanna get people to the moment as soon as possible. Right?
Jordan Gal:That's the saying. So if you can start that on the front end before they even register, that I mean, that's awesome. In my in my mind, that sounds it sounds overly complicated, but if you can get it done technically
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it might even be too many hurdles for a person to get started. Like, I'm designing it in a way to be kind of valuable and get them into the app and drawing them in. But a bit of the feedback that I've had from people is like, I was a little confused by some of those questions.
Jordan Gal:Right. Just show me the damn thing.
Brian Casel:Show show it to me. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I I like I like doing it, in that way where you have your onboarding flow that you want people to go through, but you don't you don't lock them out of other screens.
Jordan Gal:We want people to connect their Shopify store first thing. But if someone wants to come in and see what the funnel screen looks like, let's let them click on it. And then when when you go to add your first funnel, it says you need to connect your Shopify store, and it kicks you back into the loop back around to where we want
Brian Casel:you to go. I mean, another thing that I'm that I'm thinking about though is it's not like onboarding should not just be a tour of like, here's where you do this and here's where you do that. And it's it should be productive. You should be doing things. And and so I'm building it in a way that like, the things that you're setting in these very first couple of steps are like your goals.
Brian Casel:And those goals will be entered into the goal tracking system. And and so like you're you're making progress toward, you know, doing something with it.
Jordan Gal:You're also learning how to use it by actually using it as opposed to looking. I don't look at those tours at all.
Brian Casel:No. Yeah, me neither.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Sometimes what happens is I wanna I want that tour back after I've played with it for a little while. Yeah. You know, that's but but not at first. Just let me let me see the thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The other thing that I I read an article recently. I forgot where it was, but the idea that dashboards are kind of a like app dashboards tend to be kind of a wasteland of useless features and buttons and links to things that nobody ever uses. So people just throw them in the dashboard when and and then that dashboard is the very first thing that every user sees when they log in. So so my thinking there is just not just don't have a dashboard and make the default screen like the most useful screen of the app.
Brian Casel:Whatever Okay. Whatever that is.
Jordan Gal:Like Okay.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm thinking around this like timeline view. You know, it's different for every app but
Jordan Gal:Right. Could be your calendar. Like, because that that's home base.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:To to see what's coming up and and what's what just got done, what needs to get done this week. Yeah. For for us, it is revenue based. So I I think we'll end up with the dashboard as the default just because we want that that provides more value to them and makes us more valuable to them as opposed to directly into the, you know, the funnel screen or or something like that. But yeah.
Brian Casel:But I
Jordan Gal:I hear what you're saying.
Brian Casel:Cool. Well, so what's what's next for you guys? What what what is your next step as you're getting toward making this thing a reality?
Jordan Gal:It's it is it is staying completely focused on this sprint and this set of features and and not letting anything come up that that throws us off. The way I phrased it to the team was on September 1, I want 10 people to be able to sign up and become paying customers. So whatever that means for your particular realm that you're responsible in, make sure you think through everything that's required. So if that means someone needs to get to the marketing site, so that needs to be done. They need to be able to sign up, so that needs to be done.
Jordan Gal:Give us their credit card information, so that needs to be connected. Set up their funnel, set up their Shopify store, connect, build, launch, sell something for fourteen days, and then turn into a paying customer. So every one of those steps has a million things that come off of it. So think through all those things, but on September 1, you pass the baton from tech and product to marketing. If I start sending customers in because I'm doing my job on the marketing front and they can't sign up and it doesn't work, whatever, then now we have a problem.
Jordan Gal:So you got plenty of time. On this particular date, make sure 10 people can come in and sign up and become paying customers. Whatever that means to you, get it done. Yeah. Yep.
Brian Casel:And of course, you know, it's if you're not if you're not a little bit embarrassed by your first version, you're you launched too late. Right?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's that's an interesting thing. I have that written down in my notes to talk about today, like launching ugly versus launching ready. And I'm with you. My default is always launch ugly, but this this has been an, again, another kind of learning experience in the nature of this product where, you know
Brian Casel:I mean, it's for the first 10 customers, it could just be, look, the thing works. We've tested it and you can go through the whole flow, but you're probably gonna be handholding those first 10 customers anyway. So if they get hung up or if some bug pops up that you couldn't foresee, you could manually get them past it.
Jordan Gal:Yes. For us there's a split.
Brian Casel:The
Jordan Gal:consumer facing piece where people land and put their credit card in and buy and see upload pages and see thank you pages, that needs to actually be solid and not ugly. The internal piece of our actual app that they interact with, bunch of shit's gonna be wrong and features are gonna be missing and that matters less. So it's like we gotta get the consumer facing part right that you can't skimp on, but our app itself, it's it's all about, no, we can't do recurring upsells. That's later. No, we can't do PayPal with upsells.
Jordan Gal:That's a little later. And then that's that's the ugly part. That's fine. Yeah. So now it's just coordination.
Jordan Gal:It's getting the marketing site done right around the same time that the UI and UX update is done, and all these different things just kinda happen there at the same time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, for me to, you know, keep myself accountable in public here. Let's see. September 1, I like that as a good date. The way I'm thinking about that date is by then I should have learned quite a bit from these cold Facebook campaigns, which are starting up on Monday.
Brian Casel:I may or may not fully launch the landing page and video to to the wider audience by then. I I might. But I should be I should be getting more and more feedback between now and then, and that should help me decide whether or not September is the month that I'm ready to start pulling the trigger and spending money on developers and getting the very first bits, like breaking ground on
Jordan Gal:it. Okay.
Brian Casel:You know? And that so that that would happen in September if the feedback allows me to keep going.
Jordan Gal:Right. If you're not you're not too far off, basically. Right.
Brian Casel:If if it's a total I mean, the initial feedback I've already had is already pointing in that direction. Like, four four people have said, like, I'll be a customer of this already. That that that's just verbal. That's not totally valid yet,
Jordan Gal:but Good start.
Brian Casel:So it's pointing in that direction. I think we've got a lot of work to do, and I still need to be a little bit I need more reassurances. So that'll be between now and September 1.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Nice, man. So by the time next time we talk, I think, we will probably have been launched because we won't be doing an episode next week because I will be drunk on a boat somewhere in Michigan.
Brian Casel:As we should.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Alright. Cool, man. Well, good good catching up. Good luck in, in your endeavor in the next step.
Jordan Gal:Alright, buddy. And, hopefully, cardhook.com is an updated site by the next time we talk.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I had a look at that thing. It looks pretty slick.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Thanks, man.
Brian Casel:Alright, guys.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Be good. See you.
