Pre-selling and Planning to Build 'Audience Ops Calendar'
Hey. We're back. Sorry for the, break there. We're back with another episode of Bootstrapped Web. Had a couple of weeks where where we were kinda traveling and doing different things, but
Jordan Gal:Just to be honest, we're on the Italian Riviera for the month of August, like all good Europeans.
Brian Casel:That would be nice.
Jordan Gal:My my dog just puked on the floor, by the way.
Pippin Williamson:Did he? Anyway Starting this episode off right.
Jordan Gal:We were away for for a few weeks away. Otherwise, yeah, unable to do the podcast. So I hope everyone had a great summer. And now we're it's September. We're back at it.
Brian Casel:That's right. Actually, was good to meet up with you in person. Had a quick lunch the other day in That's right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's fun. We were in Fairfield, Connecticut. I was down there visiting some some family and friends. Brian came down.
Jordan Gal:Yep. IRL baby. Good stuff.
Brian Casel:Cool, man. So so yeah, we're back at it. You know, again, we've got some guest episodes coming up in the next couple of weeks, but I think this week, it'll just be you and me. We'll we'll talk about some new developments in in audience ops, and I think we'll probably have another updates episode coming soon next week.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. We gotta catch up on on what we're up to, but but this week, we're gonna grill Brian on why he has the balls to launch a software product in the middle of everything with audience ops and kind of what convinced you to do it, where the idea came from, and where you are in the process.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I guess just like an official announcement if you will. The like, I know that I've been talking about this software product and writing about it to the email list. I haven't been totally clear about what it is and and and what's going on with it, but like, it's official. We're moving forward with it.
Brian Casel:It's called Audience Ops Calendar, and it's gone through a couple of iterations already just in in the design and the and the positioning and the focus of the product. But as of today, we now have 12 prepaid customers for the product, and we can talk all about the how how that went and and the process for for going through that and the next step from here. So so today, it's you know, we're getting into late September. Now I'm interviewing developers and and we'll be deciding on a developer and and starting off the actual sprints and the development cycles that to start off like October 1. And and then the goal is to ship an MVP of this thing to the small group of beta customers before the end of this year, which I think is maybe a little bit aggressive given the size and scope of this thing, but then really launch it to the public early next year, 2017.
Jordan Gal:So good for you for having that patience because I always assume anything in the development world it can't possibly take longer than two weeks and then I get frustrated that it takes longer than two weeks.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I mean everybody I could talk to even when I tell them that timeline they're like yeah, no you're looking at like twelve months and I don't know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I almost feel feel almost. I don't actually feel bad for my development team, but I almost feel bad for them for having to deal with me and and the the stress on the on the timelines.
Brian Casel:Well, like, you you kinda opened it up with that question of, like, why would I do this when I have Audience Ops going? And I guess I just wanna kinda talk about that just a little bit. So earlier today, was rereading an article like like a blog post that I wrote eighteen months ago right around the time when I was launching Audience Apps for the first time. I think that was before we even had customer number one. I was writing at that point that, you know, I I wanted to launch a productized service or I wanted to launch a new company using a productized service, mainly because I was not in a position to launch a software product at the time.
Brian Casel:I had just been coming out of the exit of Restaurant Engine and I didn't necessarily wanna invest whatever money I had from that into building software. Wanted to kind of, you know, get some security and buy a house and and kind of put that aside. So
Jordan Gal:Is that because you see software is inherently risky or just that the the day revenue comes in the door is extended outward in in software?
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's mainly that. It's not I've never been against this whole idea of of a SaaS. I think it's a I think it's a fantastic business model, but the reality is it's really hard to get to launch. And then after you launch, it's it takes a long time to build up as a significant amount of revenue to make it a viable sustainable business.
Brian Casel:I wasn't in necessarily in a position to seek out funding. I wasn't really interested in that. I'm I'm still not really interested in that right now. So I've always been going the self funded route. And at the time, eighteen months ago, I wanted to launch Audience Ops as a service because I knew that that would be the fastest way to grow revenue, and and it was.
Brian Casel:We had revenue within a month. And and so now we're eighteen months into it, and revenue and and profit continues to grow in the service. Got a team of 20 people. It's, it's it's basically providing for for my basic needs in terms of the, you know, like paying the bills and whatnot. So now and and we have a a bit of profit left over to to reinvest into new products.
Brian Casel:And so that's where we're at today. And and the new product that we're gonna be doing is this, is this software tool called called Audience Ops Calendar. I had been kicking around ideas for like a training product and we've been dabbling in the WordPress plugin stuff, but this is gonna be this is gonna kinda take over and be the the big new product from AudienceOps. The the service is not gonna go anywhere. That's gonna continue to run and even this product is actually gonna kinda power the service in in in many ways.
Brian Casel:It's kind of built out of our processes that we've been learning about and refining through the service. Now we're gonna build this software tool that that kind of automates a lot of what we do and and adds a new layer of of of stuff that we can do. It's called Audience Ops calendar, and it came out of our process that we've been doing for clients with content marketing, and it's essentially a a calendar. And and if you wanted to check out, we have like an explainer page over at audienceops.com/calendar. Not a whole lot in terms of screenshots are there, but we've got some very rough, like, Keynote, cartoony wireframe not even wireframes, just like illustrations of it and some some descriptions there.
Brian Casel:I do have detailed wireframes finished that I've been passing around to people. But, yeah, that's that's where things are at right
Jordan Gal:now. I think you start off in the right place. The the larger context of if you wanna launch a software product, you have to acknowledge that it takes a long time to get revenue. You need to be kinda in in the right place for that. So not going about that first and launching the service and now having the software product come out of the service, I I think that's a it's a good realistic smart way to kind of approach it the that that step.
Jordan Gal:It's almost like the the stair step model that Rob talks about. It's just instead of over a five year span, it's like a one year span. But it it is taking things one one step at a time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. It's, I I think now I'm in a much better position to venture into something like this than I was eighteen months ago.
Jordan Gal:I was about to say how how long has it been in the service? Eighteen months?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think almost eighteen months.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Alright. So now dig in. You're you're running audience ops day to day, and does this idea come out of like a pain, a a need? I wanna dig into the the calendar thing.
Jordan Gal:It's obviously not like it's not like Sunrise. It's not Google Calendar add on. It's it's its own thing. So what Right. Where did it come from?
Brian Casel:Yeah. It it is born out of several small pains in our in our process. We do a lot of we do a ton of things manually. You know, we've got a ton of systems and things that we've refined over the last year and a half with Audience Ops. There there are pains around tracking performance of content that Google Analytics really kind of falls short, especially when you start to try to track performance of individual blog posts.
Brian Casel:And you dig through Google Analytics and get the performance of one particular page on your site or one post. But what you really wanna do is is track the performance of every post, so you can start to compare performance and see what's actually working, what's not working. And so there are pains related to that and generating reports, but then another big part of it is just the planning aspect. And we use Trello a bit, we use spreadsheets for editorial calendars, we use WordPress to a certain extent. And what happens is and those are okay, but but really just the whole process is disjointed.
Brian Casel:We've got several different tools and we're doing different things in different places that little bits and and details kinda fall through the cracks. And what we wanna be able to do is see the the the whole point of of building kind of a project management tool, but building it in the form of a calendar is that we're focused on recurring content. Any so it's it's focused on helping you manage any sort of content that happens on a recurring basis, like articles, social media posts, podcast episodes, videos. If you're doing monthly webinars, if you're doing quarterly white papers, these things need to be produced with multiple team members doing different things, and those tasks need to be assigned on an automatic recurring basis. So the checklists, the the to do lists are a big focus of this, and and you'll have template checklists built off of, like, our recommended checklist.
Brian Casel:Of course, you can customize them and make your own. But basically, every time you have a blog article, it'll have this checklist attached to it. And and those checklist would have tasks with with milestone due dates assigned to different roles on your team, like the writer, the editor, the virtual assistant, the founder, whoever whoever's working on what. And as you move let's say you reschedule an article from one Friday to the next Friday, it'll automatically adjust all the recurring tasks to match up with with the schedule of your content. And you can you can push back articles that are behind it.
Brian Casel:So it just makes more sense to plan it in the form of a calendar than anything else, like like Trello cards or or spreadsheets and that kind of stuff.
Jordan Gal:Alright. I I'm getting the the visual of of what it does, stronger. Right? So if if I know I wanna publish a blog post on September 25, when I when I set that up, it's almost like, yeah, the calendar seems like the center of that. But then once you schedule it, instead of trying to think through or remember or find where where all the the process is laid out of what needs to happen before that blog post gets published, you once you set that up, that moves with you when when you set up a new blog post.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But you don't have to think about it for September 25, and then again on October 4, and then again in December. From the outset, you set up a schedule. You say, I wanna be publishing blog posts every Monday or every Friday, or I wanna be publishing a new video every Thursday. So so that schedule is built into your calendar, and then your calendar expects it'll have these like open spaces like, okay, we need a blog post for this Thursday, we need a blog post for next Thursday, then you can have a running list of content ideas that automatically populate the next available spot in your schedule to keep the whole thing kind of running like clockwork.
Brian Casel:And then as things get added to the to the calendar, the the relevant people get assigned the tasks and those tasks are assigned by date moving backwards from from when the published date is expected.
Jordan Gal:Right. So all all the pieces that need to get put in place before it's published are assigned ahead of time and to the right people. Alright. So who who's who's this for? At first glance, you're like, wait a minute, how many audience ops are there?
Jordan Gal:But it doesn't sound like it's just for you. Are you kind of tailoring it for an internal team? Let's say a software company or an agency or someone that any basically anyone that publishes content regularly.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So and and that's actually a a really good question because it's I I did a little bit of a slide deck that I've been showing to to those pre purchase customers, and that was one of the slides was like, who is this for? So I laid out three ideal customers for this, and and almost everybody kinda overlaps with at least two of them. There's the solo founder. So someone who's on their own, they're doing content all all by themselves, or they plan to do more more content soon.
Brian Casel:This tool helps them be more consistent with content and it just gives them a process and to be a little bit more standardized because they're, you know, they haven't done it or they're just not consistent with it. The next the next step up is the our teams. So if you're a team, it this could be anything from like a two person partnership up to someone who outsources to a couple of freelancers up to larger organizations with multiple people. So they're using, like different tools. They're very disjointed.
Brian Casel:They're flipping between different different places. They have, trouble measuring ROI from content. So the the whole process is just kinda disjointed for them, and this brings it all together. That's the second group. The third group would be agencies.
Brian Casel:So people doing kind of like what audience ops does. If you serve clients and you and you do content for clients or even social media or any sort other sort of like marketing recurring marketing work for clients, this tool is designed around our process or designed to give you that that process to enable you to manage lots of content for lots of clients and generate reports, white label them, you know, put your own branding on them, give your clients guest access to see their calendars, get approval on content from from clients. And, you know, it's it's really not just the the calendar and scheduling stuff, but there's also, like, automated social media postings based on the published date. There's automated email outreach, which is interesting. There are a couple other automation things built into it.
Jordan Gal:Out outreach to who?
Brian Casel:So for example, if you're doing like influencer outreach, let's say you have a a blog post and you wanna let five or 10 key influencers know, like, this article just went live. I think you'll be into it. You can prewrite those emails ahead of time and have the system just send them out three weeks later when the thing publishes. Or if you're doing podcast episodes, you're you're interviewing guests and you wanna let the guest know, hey, your your episode just went live. You can you can write that at the time that you upload the episode.
Brian Casel:You don't have to, like, set yourself a reminder and do it later. As I was doing these customer development calls, a person suggested, like, you can use that feature to let your whole team know. If you got, a team of 10 or 12 people, hey, everyone, we got a new blog post out today. Like it, share it, you know, you can just like queue up those emails ahead of time.
Jordan Gal:Or if you have your crew, you know, just a few friends, a mastermind group or anyone that that helps you promote regularly and and you help promote their stuff.
Brian Casel:Yeah, exactly. You can you can keep a common list of of people that you always come back to and send stuff to. And like, are
Jordan Gal:you looking at niching? Or is it because it sounds pretty wide, but the truth is this is a wide problem. E commerce companies use this, software companies, agencies. A lot of people these days look at investing in publishing their own content as just a normal part of marketing these days. A lot of companies that I know that is their entire marketing strategy.
Jordan Gal:That's kind of what they do.
Brian Casel:I think that to a certain extent, it is a little bit niche down, but it is broad. It really is designed for managing content marketing. And I mean and you can go a little broader than that. It's it's designed for recurring marketing tasks, but it's really best suited for for managing content. And that content could be in the form of articles or videos or or webinars or or podcasts and things, but and social media.
Brian Casel:But the the combination of feature sets here is really designed for if you're doing content in your company or if you're doing content for clients, that's really what it's best suited for. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I don't think it's necessarily bad that it's broader. This is a giant need.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I would say that our done for you service, the productized service, that is very niched down. You know, we're really focused there on on working with like b to b software companies and product and other productized services and mostly online online companies are serving online business audiences. And so and we've got a couple of clients who fall a little bit outside of that, which which we can work with, but it's not really you know, that's kind of our bread and butter. But this tool does go broader than that, like anybody doing content can can fit into this because we don't necessarily have to build up our own writing team with our own expertise.
Brian Casel:We can kinda allow you to to use this with your own writers and that kind
Jordan Gal:of Yeah. Writing content, managing that, it's kind of like a back end process, like internally into the company. It doesn't you know, it's it's very different from the the service where you're you're creating the content on behalf of people. You can't possibly find experts in every single thing in the world. So you kind of have to niche.
Jordan Gal:So so do you want to get into the like, I I want to hear about, okay, once you decide to do it, what what steps do you take to kind of make sure you've gone through the right process of, yes, this is actually viable idea and people wanna pay for it. It's not just me coming up with with something internally and and not double checking.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I can talk through that. I think I I brushed over some of these steps in in previous weeks, but I'll I'll try to give a little bit more detail here. So it started with just brainstorming ideas and and most of the ideas are things that I've been thinking about for over a year. You know, someday we might have a tool that might do something like this.
Brian Casel:And I had thoughts of like four or five different types of software tools related to content marketing that could potentially come from audience ops. And ultimately, this is this is what it boiled down to. And my first step was get the things out of my head and into notes. And then from there, it was get get it out of notes and into a visual wireframe form. So I spent probably a a good week or two designing the first version of wireframes.
Brian Casel:And at that point, I was calling it audience ops platform. And that was actually even bigger than than what it is now. And but my my next step from there, once I had about five or six screens wire framed out, I sent an email to something like 30 or 35 friends, people that I that I know and trust. And I showed them those wire frames and I asked for their feedback. I'm just telling them like, this is something new that I'm working on.
Brian Casel:I was basically asking them to be critical of it and and many people were critical of it, which was really helpful, you know, constructive criticism. That feedback helps me iterate and refine the the wireframes a little bit. But then at that point, what I also did was I went on to social media and I did some cold outreach. I I followed some advice that you gave me, going into Facebook groups, and I searched on Twitter and a little bit on on Quora, and I found something like 20 or 25 people actively searching or asking questions related to content calendar tools. And and at this point, by the way, I I I was still thinking in terms of it being called Audience Ops platform, but I found myself searching content calendar tools as like the hook.
Brian Casel:That's probably what people are searching for, and it's true. That's what I saw people actively asking questions about. And so that's what started to click for me that, like, you know what? People think of this in terms of a calendar. And and then if I really think about it, we think of it in terms of a calendar too, and that would be even more useful.
Brian Casel:So let's let's refocus it all around the calendar. And anyway, through the through the cold outreach to social media people, I got some complete strangers giving me some they're actually pretty receptive to the idea. Like, these are people who are not on my list, not listeners of this podcast, just strangers. And they were like, yeah, this this looks great. No nobody's saying like, yeah, take my money at this point.
Brian Casel:But they're but they're like, yeah, this is intriguing. I They're asking me questions. One guy sent me like five emails back, like five paragraphs each.
Jordan Gal:It's the best. And
Brian Casel:he's like, yeah, like these are the tools that we use with my team. And this is what sucks about them. And this is what we're looking for and all this stuff.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So that gives you some indication of the fact that there's a need. There is desire out there. People do have the problem.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So then so at that point, I came to the conclusion like, it should be a calendar. And then I basically redesigned. I spent another week and I redesigned the wireframes almost completely. I kept a lot of the core functionality, but but reworked it to to work as a as a simpler calendar.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Wireframes are so hard. Yeah. You have to
Brian Casel:I I love them. Like, that's that's what I love about abstract. If there's one thing that I like to spend my time working on, it would be the wireframes.
Jordan Gal:It's all conceptual.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The coding, I'm I'm not a coder anymore. Even designing in Photoshop, I used to be a lot better than I am now, but it but wireframing, I feel pretty good. The the next step was I think I I set up the the landing page for audienceops.com/calendar. And I I took a quick course from Udemy on how to use Keynote to create some some funny looking cartoon animations.
Brian Casel:And I spent like a whole weekend, you know, burning through that and playing around with Keynote, and I came up with those animations that you see on that page. And I wrote a bit of copy about it to try to you know, here's here's the pitch, here's the concept in the most simplest form that I can come up with. Here's the explainer page and here and sign up here for to request an invite for early access.
Jordan Gal:And and do you wanna give out the URL of that? Just I feel like people would be interested to see how you put together something that's almost like good enough to explain to people what you're working on.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's audienceops.com/calendar. Okay. That that that's what that is. And so on that page, it's it's not only the animations and a bit of copy, the headline and and the pitch, but then below that, I've got an FAQ.
Brian Casel:And giving you a little bit more detail about what's going on with this thing, what is it, and maybe most importantly, here's an indication of pricing. And it's not exact, it's a little bit vague, but it gives you a ballpark range. Actually, forgot what I wrote on there. Think, let me see what I wrote.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. See, it's it's kinda just detailing out the big not so much features, but like what people can actually do.
Brian Casel:I I try to focus it on like the these are the problems and these are the benefits. And with just really vague, like, cartoony animations to to put some visuals on there. But then in in that FAQ, I'm basically throwing out numbers, like, it'll mainly be around 99 a month. There will be an agency plan starting at $2.99 a month and a limited solo plan starting around 29 a month.
Jordan Gal:Which I will do my best to commit you to eliminate.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And actually, after getting a lot of feedback from people from from the next step, I can talk about, there's gonna be a middle ground around 49 or 59 a month. Because there's a lot of people who are just like a two person partnership and they're like, the 99 may not make sense for us, but but we would wanna do it around 49 or 59. So so I wanted to put out that pricing here on the page just to get it out in in in front. I mean, it's in small print, but you can read it.
Brian Casel:And that's a little bit of a pre qualifier before you even fill out the form. I didn't want to get a lot of people who just have no idea what the pricing is going to be. Then once you fill out the form, you get to the thank you page, which has a long survey on it. I I'd say about 50 to 60% of of people actually who who sign up for the list then fill out the survey, which probably takes them like five or ten minutes to fill out. So once I created this page, which I did pretty quickly, I used our landing pages plug in and just kind of the the thing that took most time was creating those animations.
Brian Casel:I sent a basically, just a big blast to my newsletter and, just showed it to everyone on my on my personal newsletter list. Oh, and that, I I created like a seven minute video of me walking through my detailed wireframes.
Jordan Gal:That's what you sent out to the list?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I said I sent I created a seven minute video of walking through like the stuff that I had created in Balsamiq, and it's now in the form of a calendar. So it's pretty focused on what it's gonna be. I sent them that, and then out of that, got a few 100 people signed up to this early access list. And out of those people, roughly half of them, maybe more filled out the survey.
Brian Casel:And through that survey, I got a good indication of like, one of the questions was, would you like to be invited to be an early access, what I'm calling the inner circle customer group? And there's only gonna be 10 to 15 spots in this group. I'm gonna add and I'm writing this on the survey. I'm gonna ask you to prepay. And is this something that you would be interested in?
Brian Casel:Yes or no? And most people said yes. And then based on the responses to that survey, I basically handpicked about 20 people who who I think are just the best fit for for this based on the survey results.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I will add in my 2¢ here that doing that, the the ten, fifteen person, let's just call it a beta group without using the word beta, is a really good idea. As we we we have not done that and we have eaten eaten dirt because of it. We we get people who sign on and we're like, oh my god, a dream customer. But guess what?
Jordan Gal:We're not really ready for them because we haven't worked everything out because things are early on and you almost you end up embarrassing yourself instead of just positioning it properly and saying, hey, everything's super early, you're in this early group, we understand everything isn't perfect, but that's why you're in this early group. And they kind of acknowledge that they wanna be in the early group and they expect it
Brian Casel:to not be perfect. Yeah, exactly. And I'm I'm just trying to do my best to set expectations as much as I possibly can throughout this whole process. But I mean, you're right. Having I mean, just on the so the next step, I'll talk about in a second.
Brian Casel:Having these calls with those people, even before they pay just getting their feedback as we go through this little presentation I gave them, like, I there are like five new tweaks to the functionality that I'm like, oh, that makes so much more sense that I wouldn't have that they're just giving me that, like, this is this is what would make it valuable for me. And I'm like, that's perfect. You know? It's so valuable. But anyway, the next step was, so I handpicked 20 people, I sent them a personal email each, here's my Calendly, I'm inviting people to these one on one calls.
Brian Casel:And I said something like, you had expressed interest in being in the early the inner circle group. And, so I'm doing these one on one calls on that call. I'll tell you about where things are at, and I'll ask you to prepay to to join the group. So that's what I write in the email. Out of the 20 people that I email that to, 15 scheduled calls.
Brian Casel:And as of today, I I've held no. More than 15. Maybe I sent it to like 25 people or something. Like 15 or 16 scheduled calls, 12 ended up paying, and I've got actually two more calls later this afternoon. But basically, so I've been holding these calls all of this past week.
Brian Casel:And what happens is I I created a quick slide presentation, probably lasts about ten minutes or so, and I'm laying out on this slide deck, the ideal customers, and I'm asking them like, do you see yourself, do you resonate with any of these pains? We went over the wireframes again, they gave me some feedback on the wireframes and then I said, here's the roadmap, here's the plan for the next couple of months. And September, we're filling up this beta group, October, we start coding, November, we're gonna keep coding and show you progress. December is when we're aiming to ship a first very simplified workable version that you could start using. January, we're adding more features.
Brian Casel:February is when we're targeting to to try to get a a full version out to the public. I don't think it'll be feature complete at that point, but it'll be ready to launch to the public. And then, you know, we'll continue adding features after that. So I'm like laying out this whole road map for them. And then I'm also laying out these features we're we're aiming to include in that first MVP version, and these features are coming a little bit later, and then these features will come a little bit down the road.
Brian Casel:So I'm just like laying it all out for them. And then and then I get into the the telling them about the beta program. Here's the pricing for that. You get, you know, a significant lifetime discount, you get a number of months using it for free. And and I was basically asking them to pay $200 today if they're a single team, like if they plan to use it on one site, or $500 if they're an agency and they plan to use it for multiple sites and for clients.
Brian Casel:Out of the 12 people got a mix of those amounts and so it's looking pretty good so far and most of them So full on pre selling? Yeah. Full on pre
Jordan Gal:taking money just based on wireframes idea and like The
Brian Casel:the first couple like, the first two people who who who bought, I I did not have the only thing I had was a Stripe account and I literally took their info over the call and I typed it directly into Stripe. And then, like, the third person was like, you know, I'm ready to buy it, but I just need to run it by my partner. Can you send me a link to to sign up online? And I was like, sure. I'll do that.
Brian Casel:And then got off the call and then I quickly whipped up a page and and I used Phil Dirksen's WP Simple Pay Pro to to slap on a Stripe Buy button on that page. Shot off that URL to the to the guy, and then, you know, he he bought later that night. And then that's what I was using for a lot of the other ones but
Jordan Gal:Just in time production.
Brian Casel:That's right. That's right.
Jordan Gal:And if you go to Phil Dirksen's WP Simple site and you abandon his purchase, you will get the cart hook email. Oh, there you go. Like they incestuous little circle. Hi, Phil.
Brennan Dunn:That's right.
Jordan Gal:Alright, cool. So now, so you've got money, you've got revenue for a software product and I hate you and everyone else hates you for it, but that's awesome. So what now?
Brian Casel:Yeah, I mean, and this is the first time I
Pippin Williamson:Actually have
Brian Casel:to build developers. I mean, you know, that's that's another thing that I started working on this week. But yeah. Just to about the pre selling real quick, like, I've I'll be honest, I've never been totally comfortable with with the idea. A little bit nervous to sell something that doesn't exist yet.
Brian Casel:Like in the past, I've I've built up email lists and but for this, it's like, it's such a big product, and it's gonna require so much investment and time that, you know, I just need that reassurance, you know, that that it's that it's right. I mean, it's I know that it'll help our team at audience ops, but I need to know that there are paying customers for this because we're self funding it and it's gonna be a big thing, you know, like that we're investing in probably over the next year and beyond. So so yeah, that that's my thinking on that. But you
Jordan Gal:know I hear I hear you on the discomfort, but I will say you can always give the money back.
Brian Casel:Yeah, exactly. Oh, that was a key thing, obviously saying, you know, 100% money back guarantee, just if you even if you just decide like, I wanna go a different direction, any anytime, you know, there's no time limit or anything, it's just just, you know, refund. So so yeah, developers.
Jordan Gal:Right. This is funny. This is very indicative, I think, of our experience. Not that we're so seasoned, but we have gone through so many different things and and screwed things up along the way. At least I I know for sure that I have that we are just now getting to the part of the conversation where it's about building the software.
Jordan Gal:Right? This is a lot of people get it backwards.
Brian Casel:I do feel so much more, confident now in in the process of launching a product and launching a business. I mean, I know that I I made I did it backwards a couple years ago. And, you know, it does and it's weird, like even even though you hear this process on podcasts and books and courses and stuff, like, until you've been through it a couple times, you don't really get how important it is, I think.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, because you can, I still do it? I don't know about you, still, not that I dismiss the importance of it, but you kind of gloss over it. You can say, okay, so I have my validation, it's kind of good enough. Let's just, I want to get to the fun stuff or the next stage. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's easy to commit yourself.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But so I you know, I kinda consider myself a nontechnical cofounder these days. You know, I I can design, I can code some HTML and CSS, not very good anymore, but but that's really about it. I'm not I can't I'm no back end developer by any means. And I I know the terms Angular and Laravel and and Node and these things that get thrown around, but I don't know what the fuck these things are or how to use them or what I'm what I'm doing.
Brian Casel:So that's a scary thing, you know. So what I'm doing about that is I mean, obviously, I'm I'm just asking advice from from a lot of more technical people, like and and I've been pointed in the direction of, you know, PHP Laravel seems like a good choice. You know, AngularJS and and a couple other frameworks and and recommendations that I've heard from people. But in terms of really making some high level decisions, when it comes to evaluating code and doing code reviews and things like that, I I really needed help. So so I asked a a trusted friend, seasoned software engineer background to to kind of consult with me on for, you know, the first couple of weeks.
Brian Casel:And basically, he's helping me he helped design the test project that I'll be giving developers, which will start today. And then next week, he'll help review the the code from those people. We did a review of the wireframes and he kind of tore them apart from a tech perspective and like, these are the things you need to be careful of and these are these things will take longer than others and and so he's kind of giving me a bit of a reality check and filling in the gaps where I just wouldn't know the right questions to ask.
Jordan Gal:Okay. That's very helpful. It's the the expectation management is is crazy difficult.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. Choosing the tech stack and that sort of stuff.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. And so what what do you what's it gonna look like? Is it one developer doing everything? Is it a designer to dev?
Jordan Gal:Is it a front end dev, a back end dev plus a designer or Yeah. So What's it gonna look like?
Brian Casel:Like? So for the design, I mean, the wireframes are already pretty detailed, but next week, the plan is I'll I'll be actually talking to Jane Portman, who was on this podcast a couple weeks ago, really talented designer UI UX expert. So she's gonna be helping out with just a little bit of of the of the UI. And and after she does a screen or two, I'm going to then take that look and feel and and I'll work on the rest of the screen. So basically, the design will be handled on on on my end, and then I'm I'll be hiring a development team to cover the back end development and the front end development.
Brian Casel:And so what I did was I put a I got a few referrals from some friends, but but I also put out an an ad on on Upwork and collected something like 50 applications over the past two weeks. I sifted through those and I narrowed it down to six top candidates. And I invited those six people to interviews this week, and I interviewed them. Five of them are in Eastern Europe, and one was actually in The US. And so, out of those six interviews, which are now finished, I I basically narrowed it down to a top three that I that I like just from a communication standpoint, and they seem like like they know what they're doing.
Brian Casel:And so those three, probably later today, I'll invite to start this test project. And then and then next week, we'll look at the code and see how they did on that. And we'll pick one and and we'll go from there. And so these these teams are they range from one of them is just a three person team. They're they're literally three guys in an office in Montenegro.
Brian Casel:And like one guy is a front end guy, one's a back end guy, one kinda does it all. Other teams are like there's like a team of 14 people in The Ukraine. There's a team of 25 in The Ukraine.
Jordan Gal:So you that's what you're you're not talking to individual developers, you're talking to teams.
Brian Casel:Right. There was one guy who's a solo individual, you know, says he's a full stack developer and which is great, but
Jordan Gal:In theory.
Brian Casel:In in theory, but it could even if he's great at front end and back end, it'll just take longer if he's doing both rather than having two dedicated people.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, for us going from one dev to two, like, it's more than double. It changes the whole thing. Our processes like polished and professional and careful and deployments are controlled by one person. It's not, it's just changed the nature of the whole thing. Right.
Jordan Gal:I really like the idea when you say a team of a few people in the same location that work together, they know what they're each good at, they communicate well, that's very promising.
Brian Casel:Yeah, so I really like that idea. So, you know, I've been pretty impressed with most of the communication just on the interviews. And then we'll see how the code goes and then we'll get rolling from there.
Jordan Gal:Alright, and how much flexibility, not flexibility, how much elasticity do you have in your budget? At what point are you like,
Brian Casel:you know, is it That's a good Thanks
Jordan Gal:for the budget, anything up to double than that and I'm still cool. Anything above that and
Brian Casel:I start killing people? Well, in terms of like setting expectations there, I've basically been you know, everybody has like an hourly rate and everyone seems to be pretty flexible like, well, we could do weekly flat rates or we could do like for this, a a full project fee would not make sense because it's just too big and and too long.
Jordan Gal:You can't tell.
Brian Casel:But what I've been what I would prefer on this and and what I basically agreed to with most of them is a weekly rate. And we'll just take it week by week. And this like, basically, this is the flat fee that I can budget and I need front end and back end covered. If that's two of you, if that's all three of you. Right.
Jordan Gal:If that's all your time or half your time or whatever
Brian Casel:it is.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:And and, you know, most of them are coming in on on budget, so it's looking pretty good. The advice that I had from from Justin, actually, Justin McGill was and I'm kinda thinking through the best way to do this, but there should be some incentive to ship the MVP or ship some set of features by a certain date, you know, rather than dragging it on. And I mean, it's hard to it's hard to really know before we even we haven't even broken ground on on code on the first line of code. So it's it's hard to make any hard predictions before I know what the pace is gonna be. But maybe like after two weeks in, we'll we'll kind of come up with some agreement there.
Brian Casel:Like maybe a bonus if you hit this milestone.
Jordan Gal:Right, something if it's by by a certain date.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I'm I'm not sure. I feel like I'd have to think through the that incentive piece because the it doesn't really work along standard incentive lines. Is there are times when you want people to hurry the hell up, and sometimes it's no, don't rush this part. Don't don't take the short route on this thing because everything's gonna be built on top of that and making it more flexible now will be better for later.
Jordan Gal:So I I I think it's a little I think you have to be careful with it. I feel like once you know exactly what needs to happen and when, then it's okay. We know what you need to do. If you can do it faster, then there might be incentive. But right now, I think it's still unclear.
Brian Casel:As as much as I do care about coding standards and best practices and building a firm strong foundation, this is still an unproven product. Even though we have pre sales.
Jordan Gal:It's more proven than than it's not at zero.
Brian Casel:It's not at zero, but and and I do I do wanna be careful and and do all the right things in terms of best practices. But I feel like shipping before the end of the year, a baseline MVP and not dragging it on beyond that, that is a high priority for me. I think that
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The timing. This is this is so challenging because I hear you say this and I agree a 100% with you. And yet my experience was very painful when I when I did it that way. Because we we built an MVP and it started producing revenue and we got up to 5 k in MRR and then it exploded.
Brian Casel:I don't mean but I don't mean, finish the product and then and then start selling it and not keep working on it. Like, it it the idea is just to get something usable and not even selling it to the general public yet, but something functional and usable and then continuing to build it throughout 2017.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's understood that there is no stop in the development. I mean, there are there are fits and and starts, but
Brian Casel:I I just think that keeping the momentum up and not letting all these technical hurdles drag on is just as important, if not more important to the business as a whole as dotting your i's, crossing your t's, you know, getting getting everything perfectly built.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. One one concept we talk about in in Cardhook is is like the relay race, and we we have a baton. And and we see the the baton right now is on the dev side, and we need to get to the point where you hand off that baton to me so I can start selling. Right? And that doesn't mean they're done with the race and they go take a break because they're but now what they're working on, I it's almost like the marketing side has no excuses.
Jordan Gal:The marketing side is no longer waiting on dev to get there. Marketing can start doing its thing and selling and pushing, building a list, doing whatever activities make sense. But it's that that initial transition that is it's just really hard to get to because there's there's this weird, back and forth because marketing wants the product to be able to do certain things. And there's this natural inclination to, you know, to add features and make better and functionality and all that. And so it's almost like, it's like you move in the goalpost little by little.
Jordan Gal:And at some point you just have to make that transition, hand off the baton and then say, okay, marketing is good to go on selling things, you guys keep improving. And then there's the feedback loop. But it's that that initial transition is is super hard.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I think that it's it's important to to to just break to segment the list, like, definitely push on on growing the list, but just get it reach certain milestones that you're able to invite five paying customers and then another five, and then another five. And it's not like, it doesn't have to be like we're building, we're building and it's dragging on and then we're gonna open the floodgates and and and let and let customer number one and and the rest of the thousand do it. It's
Jordan Gal:Which is hard. That's that's hard. In in our situation, I feel when we open the gates at all, when we launch marketing site blog post and a few ads, we're gonna have 30 sign ups. And that you can't handle 30 sign ups with a new product. Not not unless you've really spent it, you know, a a different version of building an amount of time and the size of your team and all that that that most bootstrap, right, companies our size don't don't go through.
Jordan Gal:So there's there's there's gonna be a wave, the fire hose at some point.
Brian Casel:I'm sure I'm gonna be in for a a rude reality check probably on multiple occasions in the coming months. But but, you know, I mean, I I guess I'm just saying, like, I've heard that just people looking at the wireframes are saying this is big. This is gonna take a long time. And and I hear that and I agree it will take a long time, but I I wanna make sure that I'm the one prioritizing the timeline and
Jordan Gal:What gets what gets done first? It's that's you can do everything, but what gets prioritized?
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I just wanna make make shipping a priority too, know. But and and I mean, that that's comes down to budget too. I this is it's gonna be tight, to be honest. You know, we've we've got a little bit of of budget from the pre sell from from the pre purchases.
Brian Casel:On top of that, I've actually been saving, like, probably for the last four or five months, I started a like a separate business savings account. And I've been trying to drop a, you know, a couple a little bit each month into that and kinda saving up for like, just having a nest egg for something. Like, five months ago, I didn't know that we were gonna do a software at this time, but I I just wanted to have I knew that we had, 10% left over after all the after the salary is paid and everything that we could do something with. Let's let's make sure that we're setting it aside and and have a bit of a a starting point. So we're we're covered for for at least the first couple of months and and we continue to grow the service, which, you know, drops off a a little bit of profit that we're reinvesting in.
Brian Casel:But it but I mean, to be completely honest, it's gonna be fairly tight, I think, to to keep
Jordan Gal:it going. Spend we're gonna spend a good amount of time on this podcast talking about that cash flow management, because we're we're in the same boat. We've spoken about it before. Getting people into your software product to pay for the monthly fee is not the only way to sell your software product. There are things you can do.
Jordan Gal:There are the annual thing you can encourage the webinar thing you can do. So I think both of us are gonna manage that over the next few months. It'll be interesting to see what what works and what just doesn't.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and at this point I look at our done for you service, the product I service as very purely our funding source. It's, I mean, obviously it keeps that whole side of the business afloat and running and the and the team and and everything, but we've got a couple of leads in the pipeline who are talking about annual service, like paying annually for the done for you service and I Yeah. That's healthy. That would be great cause it basically funds the next six months of this product, you know. And I'm still pushing on that, like I'm not really doing any new big initiatives on the on the service, but I'm all about selling it and growing it and and keeping that running because that's that's the engine right now.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Now you're you're gonna split your attention. Yeah. I think it's gonna be it's gonna be very interesting look over the next year. What what I like is that the market you're talking about is just enormous and growing, and the the significance of content marketing and getting it right is sufficiently high.
Jordan Gal:And I like that the people, this is part of why I wanna commit you to remove that lower tier. People who use a calendar and are managing multiple people, they have money and that that's a good audience to sell to.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's that's true. Yeah. I mean, know, pricing, I'm sure will will get tweaked probably a number of times as we go forward. But, you know, about splitting my attention, it's been like for the last couple of months, I'm I'm I've basically systemized almost all of audience ops.
Brian Casel:From the time someone signs up, they get handed right off to the managers and the team and they're doing the kickoff calls and they're doing the support and the and the writing and the production.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's what allows you allows you to even contemplate doing this.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I'm still I had a salesperson doing some stuff for a while, but I actually jumped back into sales myself. So I'm still doing the sales calls for for the audience app service, which I I like doing. And, you know, I just I I think it's like, I could I could fit in a handful of sales calls a a week. That's really the only time I'm I'm that and I do, like, a a team call with with the managers every two weeks.
Brian Casel:And beyond that, I do a couple of, like, escalated tickets that come to me and and I'll answer them. But that's just a couple hours a week. So the rest of my time, I'm focused full time on this and this gets back to the in the beginning, know, talking about like, I'm in a much better position today to to do something like this than I was a year ago or even three or four years ago because I or, when I was freelancing because I was so tied up in doing a lot of other work myself that projects like this would fall to like nights and weekends. But now, you know, the the business is is self sustaining and and I'm basically freed up to focus my time on building. And that's that's kind of what I where I think I'm I should be doing, you know.
Jordan Gal:I agree. Cool, man. So
Brian Casel:that's that's
Jordan Gal:New software, audience ops calendar coming at you. I like it, man.
Brian Casel:Cool, man. Thanks. Yeah. So and you know, anyone listening, of course, I'm hungry for feedback and thoughts if you take a look at it, shoot me an email and let me know what you think. But but yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, next week we'll do we'll do some updates get caught up on where things are in in each of our businesses, and we got some some cool guests coming up. Yep. Cool, man. Looking forward to that. Always a pleasure.
Brian Casel:Alright, Jordan. Have a good weekend, bud. See you.
