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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Bootstrap Web. Brian and I are, as we usually do, we start talking before we hit record and we're deep in the middle of a conversation machine recording the whole time. So we're just not even gonna stop. We're just gonna jump right back into it.

So what Brian and I are talking about is Cardoc has had this new funnel product in the market for a little over a month. Kind of haven't made a big thing about it and just kind of very quietly released it and emailed our list about it. But it's been a few weeks now and we have paying customers. We have people signing up and canceling and paying and ask a million questions. And one of the things that has come up over the past week is the desire from individual customers for us to do custom stuff for them.

So right, there's a software product and then some people see it and they say, this sounds great but I need some special stuff because I'm special and I have a budget to be special. Can you accommodate?

Correct me if I'm wrong but are you hearing this looks great but it looks like a lot of work to get set up and start?

There are questions around that that allude to that's what people actually need but they're not saying that. They're not saying can you help me finish? Can you help me get set up? They're saying, so what do I need to do in order for this thing and that thing? So it's the same.

It's the it's questions in the same direction. So so that's one side of it. The part that has had a bigger impact on my thinking is just having demos and conversations with people. If you don't have a demo form on your website right now as a software company, I would strongly recommend doing that. Just that existing We have a contact form but having a demo form definitely attracts higher end people because that's kind of what they're used to in the process and that has definitely been the case this past week.

So I've spoken to three people over the past three days.

Actually just real quick on the demo I definitely noticed the same thing with audience ops and I start I've been talking about this earlier. I've been I've been doing demos before it was just sales calls. Now I've had like legit demos and I've been doing that for about three months. And what I noticed was a lot of people who who kind of sit through my one on one demo that I do with them, I get the sense from them that that's like they're used to this. Like they've been through many demos like this before from other companies and other products.

And that just kind of gives me the sense that people who buy products or productized services at this price point, this is kind of what they expect and they've been through it before and this is normal to them so you should accommodate that.

Yeah and it's for a variety of reasons. It's not just a budget thing, it's also a relationship thing and how they want to start things off and

yeah, I think it's also a time saver for a lot. Like I would look at it like a time saver, know, I don't want to spend the time digging around your website and trying to figure it out myself. Ten minutes, show me what I need to know. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. One of the things that I have on my list, right? We launched this new website which I'm very happy with.

One of the things that's missing from it is is real screenshots of the app And and normally that would, I would never do that. I would never launch a website without showing the product more, but it didn't make sense because we're we're so actively changing it and the design of it that we figured let's just not put screenshots up. We'll add that later. And what that has led to is people just looking at the promise of what the product can do and then becoming curious. I'm like, I'm really curious to see how this thing works.

Yeah. We're kind of not really showing exactly how it works. We're like just giving the promise and the benefits. Like the end product. Right.

Right.

Cool.

Cool. So yes. So what I was saying was I've had three conversations over the past three days of people saying, have budget and I want a custom solution of what you have. Can your team accommodate? As the CEO is the person responsible for bringing like revenue in that has kind of shook me up a little because I see opportunity to make money but I don't want to throw the tech team into disarray.

Don't want to mess up the product development. So I've been like, what what do I what do I do here?

The things that they're asking for are require coding?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

It's not just like setting up your tools for them. No, it is Or maybe like connecting other tools, landing pages, Zapier, like just shit that maybe you can hack together yourself or no?

Whatever it is, it wouldn't be me doing the work. Right. Which means someone else needs to do the work. So that's where, that's kind of where Brian and I are in the middle of the conversation. Like how do you do this

the right way? Like thinking through like a, some sort of done for you or a productized service component or a concierge onboarding. I guess this is a little bit more than concierge onboarding. I

think it's more but but I think you make a good point that the the concierge onboarding and and like the like done for you customer success almost might be a logical first step before just jumping into full blown consulting project.

Just from a high level strategic thinking on this, I I would not think of this like you're jumping into consulting on the side to boost revenue or just for just temporarily. I would think of this more like, what can we do to better support this product, the checkout product? What I'm saying is any sort of service that you decide to offer should be in support of getting customers onboard into the checkout product and and into that?

So I'm not thinking about it that way. The way I'm thinking about it is this is potential new line of business for the company and and what the software, the software product can actually be a front end offer. The, that's the lead gen for the moneymaker, which is services. It's not consulting in the service of the product to get people on the product. It's almost like the product in service to the consulting.

What do they ask for? What are these people asking for specifically?

Gnarly stuff.

What's the problem that they have?

This system. So I talked to a company the other day and what they're telling me is what you have is awesome. And what that would allow us to do is allow us to process payments the way we want instead of the way Shopify forces us to. And if you could build a checkout that has level two merchant processing, you're gonna save us half a percent in processing that Shopify won't do for us and that will save us hundreds of thousands of dollars and that's worth a ton to us. So that's just a whole bunch of bunch of stuff to do.

But that's not Wait, so are they I'm not as experienced with the e commerce checkouts but the are they looking to replace Shopify or

No, no, no. They want to use Shopify as their backbone, as their back end but they want the pages to look exactly the way they want. So it's custom coding and design for their checkout pages, upsell pages and thank you page and all that stuff.

And then

they want to connect to a payment processor other than Stripe and PayPal that we support currently. Then you can see where it's going to balloon out from there. Then the other day I had another conversation with someone who wants to pre sell products. There are apps called Celery and Tilt that help people who are doing like crowdfunding. They help them pre sell physical products like a drone and that type of thing.

So they're coming to us and saying, we use Celery and we use Tilt, we're going to have to have two systems because we're going to pre sell using their system and then we're going to move. Then we have to like export CSVs and move over to Shopify. If we can use your product to pre sell, everyone will be in Shopify right away, off the bat. Can you basically build a pre sell version of your product? Not in my mind, I'm like, oh my God, that's a like a different product.

That's a new line of business people that would be very desirable in the market.

I mean, it's almost sounds like both of those things are products in themselves that like if you build it for one person, you could, you could offer that to other people. I mean the question is of course, you know, you don't want to be investing time and money into like three or four different products developments at the same time, right?

Well, if they're paying for it, why not? Right.

So that's so I mean

right now is like okay, I got to focus, I got to take a deep breath.

I think getting all these requests from clients is definitely a good thing. It's it's market research, it's, and you know, I think there's a lot of these requests that you know, mean so far I've only heard like two of them and I'm not even that familiar with with the details, but it's probably gonna be a mix of just putting stuff to the side and not not really touching it, maybe noting it down somewhere and then some stuff that might have legs. But but I think still from a high level, like you still need to think of it in terms of like what's the what's the higher level goal for the company? And that's not just revenue and profit but it's also like we're going to build out a product line and these products need to work together at the end of the day.

To an extent but it's really revenue and profit though. That's in my mind it's if you've got five

or six different requests from clients, four of those might make 20,000 for a one time project but they'll be more difficult to sell to more people later Whereas two of them might make 20,000 revenue one time and they happen to be perfect upsells for the checkout product for for these people that are coming to you. Like, it just fits with the with the product line and the product ladder and the, and the user's intent from the time that they discovered Cardhook to the time that they read your blog to the time that they try your product, sign up for it, and then purchase the logical next step high, high priced upsell.

I hear you and that's, that's where my mind normally goes. But what's been, what's been changing that is just, you know, just trying to expand the option set. Why not start a consulting company? Not even a consulting arm of the company that gets fed projects based on people being attracted to what we're doing on the software side. And what's wrong with that division, that line of business just kind of living on its own and has a project manager and it has developers and has designers and it brings in a 100 ks in revenue month and it costs the company 30 or 40 ks month in revenue.

You know, I'm this is funny timing that we're having this conversation today. I literally today was starting to think through, an idea for a new article that I'm gonna write soon. I'm gonna write some time.

How to lose focus and destroy everything?

Have a five hour train ride to DC this weekend so maybe I'll write it then. But the tentative title for this thing is like the anti agency and what I've been finding and I'll loop this back around to what you were just saying I promise. In audience ops, I've noticed a few things whether it's working with the team but also talking to some customers, where the initial assumption is like, well, we're an agency so this is how agencies are supposed to operate.

And in

my mind, we are an anti agency. In many ways we're the opposite of an agency, even though we're providing a done for you, manually delivered service. And you know, that's, that's doing one thing for one type of customer and doing it in a standard systematic way, you know, not doing anything and everything, which I've been talking about a lot. It's also the way that we handle certain requests. Like I've been, I've been kind of coaching my managers on, you know, when you get a special request from someone that doesn't really fall into our normal workflow, even though that thing is so easy to deal with, you have to escalate it to me and another and our team manager so that we can figure out, all right, how are we supposed to deal with this question?

Because it probably comes up other times and it's not, even though it's easy to deal with in the moment, it's gonna cause so much more complexity later because then we have to remember to do it every month because it's request. So so like there are all these little things about running a productized service that are an anti agency that go against what a typical project manager is supposed to do and what a typical client relationship is supposed to be. Clients come to us initially because we solve one problem and they had that problem that's why they filled out our form in the first place.

It's very much like a product like that. It's like

You have to think about it like a product and the reason why it's an anti agency is because agencies are not efficient and and a lot of agencies, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them are not very profitable and it's because they had so much bloat in terms of projects and account managers and miscommunications and using a thousand different tools to do a thousand different things. And at the end of the day when you're doing everything custom, one project does not match the next project, does not match the next project, you know, that's added hours. That's higher priced talent that you need to fill those seats because everything is custom and they need to figure things out on their own. So it just becomes a really, really expensive and slow beast to build and that's what a lot easier to grow.

But people do it all the time. Yeah, can grow revenue,

you can grow revenue but you're not growing profits and you're eating up a lot of your time and there's a, every day there's a thousand fires to put out. Whereas with a productized service, can define the service. It takes time to get here, but you can define the service and define roles and tasks and then just put people into those roles. You know, and then it just runs predictably. Then when little kinks come up like, yeah, it's a little bit little fire.

You put it out and then that's just dealt with forever going forward. It's built into the system.

There's no question it's more efficient and orderly does not, doesn't mean the other version of it can't, can't make you rich.

I wouldn't totally agree that it, that it will make you rich. It can, you know, but it's, it's a completely different business and goal set and

maybe it's personal experience. Just I have a few friends who are doing phenomenally well doing services, Literally selling things by the hour and making a $100,000 in profit personally from their agency every month.

Right.

Right. So it's there's no there's no rule.

In in a way what I'm saying is you can have it kind of both ways.

You

already have a software company that's doing revenue and customers and you have a brand and it's building and you have a strong team in place, and you're making progress, know. So you can add higher priced consulting services on top of what like under the brand of CartHook that fit in with the CartHook mission, you will. Yes. I would want to go about it in a more focused way rather than saying like we're just going be a general purpose e commerce consulting company. So say we specialize in optimizing checkout flows for e commerce.

I don't know if I misrepresented it, but all of this is based directly off of the product. All of this is what your product accomplishes we want but we want this also and this on top of it and this to work a certain way and this to look a certain way. It's all based on the core product. We wouldn't like be designing e commerce sites for people.

Right. Right.

It would be take your funnels product and make it work exactly in this way with our inventory system and our backend and our salespeople and all this stuff and we'll pay you $25 to have it done exactly the way we want.

So I mean that that kind of makes sense, know. I mean the thing in your space which I guess I'm understanding now is that every client is coming to you because they are already an established, e commerce company. So they have all these, they have an inventory system, they've got a merchant in place, they've got all these things that they can't really screw with, you know, that they need to integrate. Right?

Well, yeah. What we're finding is that our, the fact that our product exists is opening up their minds of like, I've always wanted to accomplish something very similar to that. And now these guys, I've heard it like several times over the past few weeks. I wanted to build exactly what you guys are building. And now that you're out in the market, why would I build it?

Why wouldn't I just ask you to help me accomplish what I want to accomplish?

I mean is it So to

say no to that and be like, no, just pay me $97 a month instead sounds like it's challenging to continue.

So is the alternative like if you were to turn down these consulting offers, is the alternative to say just pay 97 a month for the checkout product and you you and your developers have to go deal with integrating it?

Yes. Yes. We can we can

So it's so it's essentially like a hurdle to get them over to start using the checkout product. Like they'll, it'll need some sort of development.

Sure. You can look at it that way. That is true. But in my mind, bigger issue is like, that's just a $100 a month, You know, to us where that money is going to go walk away to another, another entity. They would go find someone themselves.

And they would just build a custom for themselves.

They would build a custom for them and they would get all that money. That's all that's going to happen. There's nothing wrong with like an ecosystem around the product. It's just that if I thought there were 10,000 people who we could get as customers and therefore make 10,000 times a 100 per month, then I would be much more okay with kind of letting that go. It sounds easier to get to the promised land with additional revenue other than just the software

because

I

know I agree. Believe in the whole software plus service model. I love it. Think that's what restaurant engine was. That's what audience options, you know?

That's, that's, that's exactly it. I think you're getting into the same thing I'm getting into just the other way. You go from services into software and looking at software into services and

I mean, I actually did it the other way

with restaurant engine, right? Probably on a lower scale but the what happened was we built the restaurant engine software first. We built the whole platform and the registration process and it generates your site and everything for restaurants.

That's right.

And then after the first year of kind of banging my head against the wall and and and how do I get customers to actually build their own site and stay on board and not cancel? Oh, the realization was if I set up their site for them and do it all for them, they're much more likely to stay on board for a long period of time and hey, they'll actually pay for that service too. And then that's what became more of a monetized service with some software underneath it.

Sounds very, very similar situation.

Yeah. So, so I guess we're back to the beginning of this, which is like, yeah, I mean, it makes sense to me because like, if the service that you're offering is in support of growing the checkout product or at least the cart hook line of products as a whole, you know, I think it makes sense. And then once you get into the services, then it's a question of, you know, how do you price it? How do you package it? And how do you standardize it?

Like, there standard inventory systems that you can build into repeatable processes or are there, standard check, like other other tools that come into play that maybe is not totally custom for one customer, but you can build into some sort of process. And I mean, there will be, areas where there's variability. I mean, we have variability in audience options. Some clients are analytics tools and other clients are real estate companies and it's, you know, completely different topic areas, but the way that we produce an article or an email course follows the same steps. And every client starts with a kickoff call and we do research in a certain way and we do drafting and we do publishing, but the content within the article is completely original and unique, but the process of producing it is the same.

Okay. That's that that's very helpful because I think that's what I lack. I don't have that right now. It sounds like, Oh my God, just a consulting engagement where the client just tells us what to do. That sounds terrible.

But in reality, you look at it, is a front end piece of how does the site connect to the checkout. And then there's the design and implementation of the checkout. And then there's the backend of how does it connect to the Shopify store and whatever store in the systems. So it's not this giant free ranging thing. It's really like it can be looked at and broken down into a few different steps, a few different areas, and then things can kind of, okay, what is our process for designing the actual checkout pages?

Like this is how we do it. So it can be more orderly. I think right now it just seems so unwieldy that I look at and I say, I want to pursue that but I'm gonna set off dynamite underneath the product team and screw So everything

you know getting from point a to point b like point a being like this is just an idea potential opportunity, point b being we have a bulletproof process and a team in place and price points that make sense and customers buying this thing. Know, it'll it's a it's a long span of time between here and there and there's a lot of trial and error and there's a lot of just like the first couple of times that you go through it with paying customers by the way, which is just good, like you can kind of fund these experiments as you go, it's gonna be messy consulting projects, not very orderly. You shouldn't really document any any processes before you start actually doing it. And then over the months as you go through these these say three to five client paying client projects doing these things, after the fifth one you start to say, okay, these are the things that went well. These, this is where we really get hung up and these are the things that we can actually standardize into a process.

Right. And you start to optimize from there.

Yeah. I think right now the best thing to do is be patient and the best thing I can do for the team in general is to choose the right project to do first. Because if the first project is a disaster that takes a lot longer and doesn't make us money, I think that will

I mean with the team, you know, that's the other thing about this is that I was saying earlier like, is it things that maybe you can just hook up yourself being even though you're nontechnical, maybe what they're asking for is just it's a little bit you just need a little tech savvyness and you know how to operate your products so you can do that stuff for them Or is it really gonna require like custom coding? And if it requires custom coding, then obviously you need a developer on that. But the risk here is pulling your your developers off of working on the product. I mean, you might want to take a slow approach to this and and, you know, maybe hire a like a junior developer or something.

Yeah. We we could hire two more, but even even hiring two more would disrupt the team because then they require teaching and there's an onboarding process. So so I think that's

Yeah. But you can hire them into this whole of like, they're not necessarily gonna be working on the product, on building the product features. They're gonna be working on consulting. Right. Right.

There will still be weeks of training them on like the ins and outs of how your products are built and how they and how they work. But but their main role is going into a client system and figuring out what's there and figuring out what needs to be done to achieve the goals. And so you might need a developer on that, but you also might need a project manager, a good communicator, a go between. And I mean, that that could probably be you in the early days and then, you know, and and it should be you because you can figure out the kinks in the back and forth and the areas where it will be sticky and and how it can be optimized over time. Then months down the road, once you really figure out, okay, every project should start with this, discovery call and out of that we should we should figure out x y and z.

And then we go into our pre development phase where we're just doing an audit and that takes two weeks. And then we go into the implementation phase and that takes another three weeks and we give clients updates every week with this kind of template. Like ultimately that's where you get to, but you you as the project manager will kind of work out those kinks and you're the go between between your developer and your client. And then eventually, you know, you you hire a good communicator, a good project manager to replace you.

Yep. So that's what's going on over here.

I I like it though. I mean,

I I'm happy. It feels like a lot of opportunity.

I'm just I'm just generally a fan of software companies incorporating a service element because it it solves so much of the problem for customers. Like so much of it is just like, it's great. I love it. I just can't implement it myself.

Cool, man. So what's going on over there?

Let's see. You know, we were talking before the before the recording. I've been a little a little stressed out myself, and if we're

going to make this entire episode just because it's going to be like this

is therapy. So you guys are all getting a, you know, get to peak in on this therapy session. But the thing that I'm running into now as sides a little bit of a lack of sleep from you know babies and two year olds in the house.

Oh yes.

Is, I feel like I'm lacking productivity even though I am getting some things done. I just passed a milestone, which is we've got the prepaid customers on board, hired the developers on the SaaS that we're building, and now the developers are off and running and they're working away. I actually saw some progress on it yesterday. I got a preview of the first couple couple of features like very bare bone, but like, yeah, this is really exciting. This is awesome.

I'm psyched. It's moving ahead. But now my issue is like, what do I do? What am I supposed to be spending my time on? My question that I'm trying to figure out is, okay, it's October, we have a prepaid beta group and I'm going to have a call with them next week to show them progress and eventually they'll have an MVP to start playing around with, but it won't be until 2017, probably February or March 2017 that I'm projecting out to have some version of this product ready to launch to the world.

And it won't be complete then, maybe maybe 80% feature complete, but it'll be at a point when I'll when I'll be ready to at least start inviting more customers in to start subscribing to monthly plans at that point. Yep. Okay. So between now and then we have like five or six months of development time. Right.

So what should

you be doing between now then?

So what should I be doing? You know, like I've, I've been talking about the product, I've been mentioning it in my Friday emails that I sent to the list. I've been, so I've got the landing page up for audienceops.com/calendar and trick a few trickle in every, every week, you know, new people joining that early access list and I've got a survey on the back end. I get a few of those a week so that that's good. I'm trying to figure out what do I need to do from a marketing perspective and building the list and, and building up to making this a successful launch.

And I don't think it's going to be the kind of thing where it's like February 15 is the big launch day. We're going to invite thousands of people. It's definitely gonna be a gradual.

Yeah. That's what I was going to ask.

Couple batches at a time, but, but I still, I just know how slow it is to build a SAS customer base.

If you can start off

anything that I can do to move that along. I feel like I should be doing.

It's the base. If you start off at zero, it's so hard. If you just start off a few steps above zero, everything is easier.

So here's if I have the systems rolling where I know that like I could just, like we've, we've built some momentums that we're going to get 50 leads a month and a 100, you know, like

right.

Really get it going. Cause it's a, it's a different thing than the productized service. Cause we only need a few, a few customer and a few new customers to sign up a month for it to keep growing. Whereas the SaaS, you know, I'm gonna be looking for, I don't know, ten, twenty, 50 sign ups a month.

So here's what I was gonna ask up. I've seen I've seen two versions of of launching a software product. I've seen work in isolation and get it polished and then release it to the world as a full blown, feature full product that looks good, functions well. And then that's the try to get as much activity around a launch as possible. And I've also seen the other way where it's just freaking launch it before it's fully like it's like a finished product and then just start getting customers and feedback and, and then, so, so that's, that's where we are right now.

For us, the product was so complicated that just waiting forever until it was perfect just seemed ridiculous. We would still be waiting. Right. If we waited for that, we would still wait another two to two months. And so I'm almost like I've, I've taken the pressure off of the quote launch and I'm just, it's just a slow burn and people are just signing up and they're giving us feedback and they're canceling because features are missing.

And we're just kind of learning and rolling. And this is probably true of the companies that I've seen with the big launch that they probably did this also like two or three months from today when I feel really good about where the product is and we have case studies of people being successful, then we'll do like the big push of like activity and energy around, Oh my God, this thing is coming out. Yeah. So you can take the pressure off of the like big launch thing.

Right. Right. I don't think that I'll do the like the big splashy launch thing But there will come a point when it when we have to make the jump from the the beta group, which is 14 people right now, plus on top of that is is is audience ops using it for ourselves. We have to make the shift from from that group using it in private closed doors and and then over to inviting other people to start paying for it on a monthly basis. We have the early access list, I guess that obviously I'll be pulling batches of 10 people at a time from that to invite them in.

So once the beta people are using the product, what's stopping you from just letting other people in just not to be overwhelmed? I

think, no, I think that the feature set of what we're building again, I'm not trying to build everything before I launch it to the public, but it has to be useful enough. It has to solve certain problems that you can't really like right now what we're building, we're literally in the first week of development of this thing. Mhmm. We're just building like the basic bare bones. Like we're we're building a calendar from scratch.

And I'm not just going to launch a calendar. You can use Google calendar. You could use whatever.

But it has to achieve

the promise. It has to

achieve the

promise, which has like checklists and automated templates and content types and social media scheduling and, and kind of putting all these, you know, managing content marketing in a calendar based format. And there are like nice to have features that we'll definitely get to later. And there's some analytics and conversion tracking stuff that some parts of that will come early. Some parts of that will be saved for later. Know, some, some email outreach stuff like automated email outreach stuff.

That'll probably come later. Then integrating with WordPress is kind of a very key thing, integrating with Zapier and a couple other things. So what the beta people will be using hopefully before the, before the 2016, like December 2016, they'll just be using a very bare bones calendar and you can schedule a couple of content items on it. And that alone, I don't think is useful enough yet. It's a little bit of the tracking features, the conversion tracking and the automation around checklists and teammate assignments and automated recurring teammate assignments.

That'll come between December and February. That end of the agency piece and the and the ability for agencies to use it for their clients with multiple clients and white labeling. Like all that stuff will be built a couple of months down the road. And at that point that's when I want to start to really bring in because that's when it'll really add value.

Right. Right. I mean, I want to ignorantly challenge what, your assumptions are of when it creates value or not because I certainly have been wrong on my side. I thought this and this are essential to what I call the base product and some of that stuff was not. But I don't know.

Could

see that for this. Like I think there are features in this that I think are useful that I'll probably learn.

People don't.

Like I think there are things that are in the plan that like we should launch before we build those things and see if people actually need them.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so what to do between now and then?

And part of it is like, so I also just got the first PSD back. Jane Portman was helping with that, and it looks really good.

I'm done with the design.

Yeah. But she only did like the start of it and a really good base baseline UI to work with, but I'm going to be Vocabulary as my designer calls it. Yep. Yeah. There you go.

The What do buttons look like? What does what does text look like?

Yeah. But now I have to now I have to kinda build all those into detailed mock ups that match up with the exact functionality that we need to give to the developers. So I I am gonna be spending a lot of time on that over the next few months. But my fear is I don't wanna get too hunkered down in to pushing pixels around and talking with the developers and and focused only on on code and design, I I know that my primary role in this thing has to be marketing. And so I need to be putting things in place now to get that that engine turning.

Good good luck with that balance. I lost my shit wanting to focus on marketing and having my nose all the way inside the product every day for weeks and I could not help it. I could not, I couldn't do it. Had real trouble with the balance and I really had a really rough July and August because I was marketing when I knew I should have been but I felt like I had to be in the product. How it wasn't going to get built the right way if that doesn't get built the right way then nothing works anyway.

Right, right. So I mean like two two ideas came up that I should start but it's just gonna take I mean time is it's so so challenging and I'm planning a we we have a big, travel plans lined up for a whole month from December to January. One thing that I've been meaning to do forever, which I would like to start now is launch an audience ops podcast, you know, interviewing founders about content marketing, maybe some behind the scenes stuff of what happens at audience ops, kind of talking about our strategies, but just talking content marketing on a podcast. Okay. And basically I'll host that, but my team will help with some of the support and production and repurposing the content and that kind of stuff.

Okay. So you

do have

a really nice advantage that everything you do in terms of content and list building for product is it's the same audience as the, as the service.

Yeah, pretty much. I have a meeting with one of my, content guys next week about updating that a little bit, you know, to position ourselves for the for the SaaS product.

So you don't have to feel like you're doing one and hurting the other, not not so much.

Right. I think they do go hand in hand, know, and we're gonna be using the the the product for ourselves too.

Right. So maybe you create a lot of content based off of the, you know, what, what the product addresses.

Yeah. So that was actually the other suggestion I got on my mastermind was, do a series of web, like what he was saying was this product is very opinionated. We're giving you our products because we're giving you our system and our methodology for running a content strategy. Right.

The way you do it.

The way that the way that we basically recommend doing it. It's flexible to do a number of things in the calendar, but out of the box we give you what we do. And so, and so we recommend you use it in the way that we would use it. And so that that's very opinionated. So the suggestion was, you know, I should run like a series of three or four webinars that each webinar kind of teaches the core principle that leads to why does this product exist?

And I think it's a great idea, you know? And I guess, I guess early on, like if I were to start doing that now, I could do that to build and the goal of just building early access lists through, through these webinars. And then later on just repeat those webinars and make them automated or something, you know?

I like the focus around that word opinionated because it, it would help for both. If you gave a strong point of view, it would attract the right type of people to the service because that's in truth how you actually execute on it. Right. And then at the same time, it would inevitably or naturally lead into the software being built to accomplish it in that same opinionated way. People who buy into what you're saying, so it sounds to me like the more opinionated and polarizing you can be, the better.

Right. Cause it just attracts

Only the right people. Right.

Yeah. I mean, I really liked that idea. Part of it is just like time and scheduling it and because every one of these webinars takes so much time to prepare and plan. And I do want to do the podcast because if I, if I could start that now that that'll take a few months to gain traction and and a listenership and that's a way of kind of doubling down on on content. Like currently we we publish a new article every week, but in addition to that we can be publishing an article plus a podcast plus like taking a quote from from the podcast and repurposing that into another post, you know.

Yeah. And and what we've done in audience ops has actually helped us with this tremendously is we we we promote our content into Facebook as as ads and then and then that builds our retargeting list. So right now, last week, this week actually, we launched ad ads for the first time for the funnel product and naturally

I see them in my timeline.

Right. So what's the first audience? People who have visited our site. So if you started the podcast now, helps so that when you do start promoting it, you can run very targeted ads that isn't just like shooting money out there and hoping for cold traffic to come in. All those people that are interested in that topic and those topics around what you're doing, you have a few thousand people to run ads to right away.

And that's, it's a very different thing than cold traffic. We just turned it on on Monday. And we're, we're getting several paid trials a day just on that because it's, it's a targeted list. It's people who have read our blog posts, listened to the podcast, seen our site somewhere before. Yeah.

So there's an email list to build. There's also retargeting list to build.

Right. Yeah. I mean, are all things that I need to be doing and, even like the whole like opinionated concept and the webinars, you know, I think that fits with what you're doing with checkout too. I think you're already doing that, right? Like you you're teaching, or you plan to do webinars where you're teaching them a whole concept of a multi step checkout flow, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. No, you're, you're a 100% right. Sometimes you don't realize it but people take it however they like. They come in and just by virtue of the way the product is built, it's, Oh, this doesn't replace the checkout on the Shopify store.

That means I need a landing page. So like if you're not into landing pages and you just want to like do PR and advertising and send people into your website then you don't like the product.

Right.

So it's just opinionated by default just by the feature set.

Right. Like that's why you're there you know because you want to do that thing. But yeah you know like I think the thing that that's you know just getting back to like it feels overwhelming and a little stressed out and every day I feel like what did I get done today, what am I gonna do. The idea of like launching a podcast and I think a lot of people probably deal with this. So what I'm kind of realizing, which I guess I've realized again and again over the years is you've got these big plans or you've got these big things that you want to ship.

I want to ship a podcast, I want to ship this webinar series, I want to ship this MVP. Before you've done any of the very first steps, it's like a huge mountain that like you don't even want to start because it's like so like, alright, this this podcast, I've literally, I've already written this the the intro script for it. I've made a list of the guests that I want to interview. I did this. I made that that list and those notes two months ago.

And then after that, I haven't taken one action step after that. Yeah. You know, so it's like

We all have those things in our list.

It's it's just I know that like once I get started, once I do the first few steps, like once I send out 20 emails and invite guests, it's like, alright, this ball is rolling. Now I got to work on it every day and then it'll get done. You know? Same thing with the webinar. It's like, alright, just pick a date, put it on the calendar, that's the day that I'm gonna do the webinar, now I've got four weeks to to get it set up otherwise it otherwise I'm gonna have people on this thing and I'm not gonna have anything to to show them, you know?

So it's it's, it's just getting those first few steps going then then everything starts to build momentum. But right now I'm in this like black hole of like trying to go from zero to one, you know? Yeah.

I think the first step is deciding which, which things are the right things to pursue. Yeah. You've mentally decided then how do you almost like physically force yourself into doing them?

Yeah.

Alright. Cool man. Well it was an interesting episode basically just recording our conversation without I

like it. We should, guess it's probably not too different from what we usually do, but yeah, it's true. Yeah, good one.

All right, man. Well it's Friday. You have a great weekend over there.

Yeah. You too.

I'm heading down to DC tomorrow for a wedding.

Alright. Nice, man. Thanks for tuning in everybody.

Alright. Later.

See you. Hey.

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