Bootstrapped Web

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Today, Brian and I have our good buddy Ruben Gomes here with us, and we all have something in common. We have a lot of things in common actually, but one thing that we want to talk about today is that all of us are working on a second product, the second service.

Basically, we started off with one thing and then we're adding another. All of us are dealing with challenges on that front. We're all looking at bigger opportunities, otherwise we wouldn't be doing it. We figured that would be a good conversation to have on what we're doing right, what we feel we're doing wrong, what's working and not working, about adding a second line of business to our, to our existing business.

Yeah. Looking forward to this one. So, you know, welcome Ruben. And I think obviously most people know you in these circles by BidSketch, which has been, you know, a well established SaaS for many years. But I think it'll be interesting to hear what what you have in store for a second product.

I I don't know that you've been very public about it. So we'll see what kind of info we can we can get out of you today.

Bootstrap web exclusives. Right? Thanks for thanks for inviting me. Yeah, it's you're both doing second line. See, mine is not really a second line to the business.

Okay.

It's a second product, it's new, and maybe for a little bit, for a year, maybe a little bit more, it will be a second line to the business. It'll just be two products at the same time. Then eventually, it'll just be one product.

Okay. Okay. Really I mean, that's

Focus.

You you're big on focus? Okay. So so you see a transition period. Right? But the but the ultimate vision is that this second product will end up being your your company.

That's what you work Exactly. Okay. So that's that's interesting just to dig into on what do you do assisting customer base. Yeah.

I wanna unpack that question a little bit. I guess before we get ahead of ourselves, like, Ruben, how much can you tell us about the new product? Like, what is it? What or can you give us any any hints? Yeah.

Can I can tell you tell you a good amount about the new product? There are a few things I can't tell you about, but I think we can cover most of the basic stuff. Like it's a So this new product is an electronic signature product. So in that category, it's already a big category. There are a lot of products that exist.

So going into it, the interesting challenge is finding our positioning and distribution, which is very different than what we were doing with BidSketch. The proposal category did not exist. So BidSketch was the first product in there. And we had no examples, nothing to look at. We didn't know how big the market was for the lower end.

And all throughout any new competitors that came in, they were copying us, looking at us for what we were doing. And the whole time, we're just thinking, is this the best way to solve this problem? How big is this market? Will people pay for this? How much will they pay for it?

We were thinking about all those problems. It's really nice going into something that's already there with a lot of competition and a lot of products, because we know we already know the answers to all that stuff. And that stuff I think is the hardest. Mhmm.

Really like doing the market research and kind of figuring out

Creating a category.

Right. Right. You're going up the hill first, you're gonna get all the arrows.

Risky. It's and it's super risky. Most of the time it didn't work out. So this way, we eliminate a lot of the risk. We know that the market's way bigger.

We know how big it's like the biggest company in it, like DocuSign. It's like over a 100 times bigger than anyone in the proposal category, right? So it's really becomes more of a position positioning more of a, you know, finding taking a unique angle with the with the product, and then finding distribution.

So before before I get into like the specifics about like how the products may or may not be connected and all that, I guess I'm wondering maybe more like a from your perspective personally, like, what what led you to start thinking about doing a new product and and how did you start thinking about, well, if I'm gonna do a new product, what kind of product or what what size of market do I need to go after and those kind of questions? Like, how how do you think about that?

Well, it came from just talking to people about doing, I think it started from doing jobs to be done interviews about BidSketch and jobs to be done interviews, switch interviews are basically where we take somebody who switched, who used to use another product, we take a group of people, usually like 10 or 15, we've done several batches of this, they used to use another product and switch to our product, Right? For the proposal category, almost it's the other product is not really, it's Microsoft usually. So it's not like another SaaS app. And then we also did switch interviews from people that were using our product and switched to something else. And usually, that something else is back to Microsoft Word or Uh-huh.

They use. So one of the things that we that came up during those conversations, well, it just had always come up in cancellation comments. We asked people why they're canceling. And we we initially just made a free form, and then we had them select and ask them in a text box why. And a lot of people just said not using it, which is a really common thing to say.

And it's one of the biggest segments for most SaaS apps. But it's, it doesn't really tell you anything. Like there's a why behind that. That's just a symptom. So in these switch interviews, we were able to discover, especially for the people that just signed up, that there was a disconnect between what the entire category of proposal absolute is doing, and what they were thinking when they were signing in to use these.

And a lot of it revolves around what people are thinking when they use the word proposals. Right? So basically, it turned out that with our app and this entire category, we're just servicing one sliver of what customers need when they're closing deals a lot of the time. Just just proposals. But there are a lot of other things that are going on with and sometimes they don't even need proposals, sales proposals.

A lot of times they're just talking about a contract or or, you know, something smaller, right? Simple estimate.

So it almost sounds like you went from a from a very niche product and and a market and I know that BidSketch kind of serves a lot of segments, you know, but people who are doing proposals that that's kind of a niche, somewhat large niche, but it's a it's a niche product. A signature app, signature that that seems like a much more wide open space and you can niche down, but you can also take it in many different directions and many applications.

Right. And the view that we started taking is more more of a job to you. What do we need to just ensure because our goal initially going into it was, okay, we need to get more people using the product. What do we need to get them to use the product more? And it had nothing to do with improving the product, right?

You could spend a ton of time, and we did spend a ton of time like improving onboarding, and, you know, trying to do whatever you could messaging and trying to do demos and trying to just a bunch of stuff. But when you and this is the thing, this is this is where it gets kind of difficult. If you don't really dig in and uncover the why, then you're never gonna get there. You're gonna spend years working on that and you'll never get there. So for us, it's it was this discovery that we're only serving the sliver and there is nothing else for that they can use the product for unless we change the product in a really big way.

So this new products was sort of a first step towards that. And that's why I said initially, it's going to be it's going to have its own name, its own website. It's really going to be a separate product just competing in this market that's already defined. But over time, we will get it to a point of where it's able to help people with just all of their sales documents.

Yeah. So it sounds to me like that's like you following your nose, right? Talking to people, looking at the market and understanding. But then once you have that view and you say, okay, there's an opportunity here. There's something that we can expand beyond addressing a very specific problem and and moving upstream or opening up to different to a larger problem.

But then when you look at that, how do you make the decision to say, now I'm I'm actually gonna go for that. Because that that necessarily means taking your eye off the ball of the current product, investing money, losing time. So is it something that clearly, I assume you see an opportunity for the business to grow doing it? Is it being able to charge more? Is it going to a larger market?

Is it a combination of those?

Well, it's never it's not straightforward. It can be really difficult. It's that whole thing like when do you know when to quit or do something else, right? Right. Which is really the toughest thing to know.

And for us, it was just a lot of different signals. So that was the beginning of it, right? We spent a lot of time trying to trying to we've spent a lot of time in this category growing it and and and you're always asking yourself, well, how many people are in this category? How many people are in this market? A lot of people.

And how many people create proposals? A lot of people. So we should have products that are really big. But there were several signals like we were the we were leading this and we're not that big. And there were several other funded competitors coming in spending a ton of money, and then like having to change either because they weren't growing quickly enough.

So having to go enterprise or having to become a different type of product or it just over and over, I saw that happening. So that was another pretty good signal. Just to me, the thing after, you know, six years, not seeing a product that's that's pretty big, it was a really good signal that maybe the way that we're solving this problem, it's at least the way that we're solving this problem, in the way that we're solving this problem, the market's just not that big.

You know, when you described here on today's call, you're describing it as a completely separate product, separate names, separate website, and that makes sense. When you told us about it a couple days ago, just when you when you'd said that you're going into an electronic signature product, to me like it the connection made total sense. Like, was like BidSketch does proposals and the second product from your BidSketch company or or the BidSketch brand or whatever would be a signature app. I mean, those kind of go hand in hand. I mean, I I think I even saw that BidSketch has like a signature feature built into it and it but any like, you could theoretically sell the same product to those to that same customer base.

So I guess the question is why not because it like when I look at cart hook, you know, cart abandonment and you know, ecommerce cart funnels. I mean, those kind of go hand in hand. It kind of makes sense to offer them from the same CartHook brand and like audience ops, a content service, we're doing a content calendar, we're doing a content training product. I get multiple products serving the same or at least overlapping segments of the same customer base. Like, why not go that direction with this next product?

You mean sort of like a that?

Like, BidSketch signatures.

Yeah. Yeah. Or even if it's like a different name and different domain, at least keep them under the same brand.

Because I wanted to experiment with the new distribution strategy. I wanted to experiment with freemium.

Interesting. Is that the norm is that the norm in that in that competitive space?

No. It's not. It has it has been done. It has it was done by EchoSign. Was done it's being done currently by HelloSign, and it was really good for them early on.

They have a nice distribution deal with with Google and Google Docs, so they're not pushing the freemium that much nowadays. But no one else is doing it. So I saw an opportunity there from a distribution standpoint to try something, and I always wanted to try it again because I did it I tried it with Bidsketch, but this this category is just a very different type of product. The the time to value is much faster, and the sort of like viral component of it, there's a lot more there than there than there was with with Bidsketch.

So like if you if I ask somebody else to sign a document, they see that I'm using this awesome tool to sign it, and

then they they see it

too. Yeah.

Yeah. So it I know that it has worked for at least a couple, and also, I didn't wanna I can't try that with if if it's BidSketch, if it's another BidSketch tool, whatever, I don't wanna eat into our existing revenue.

Yes. That's tricky. So so you don't see your existing customer base. Do you see the existing customer base as potential new customers?

Yeah. I think so this might completely change depending on what we do later on. But right now, what it's looking like is that some of them will be customers. There's some overlap there for sure. Because we have a signature feature built in, and we do integrations with RightSignature and people, you know, pay and use that, and we know that we send them new customers.

Right. So that's gonna happen, but it's not gonna be that much of as much of a overlap as as you would think. So I think especially because of the frequency thing, if we do freemium, a lot of those people are just gonna fall into the free plan.

Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. It's such a it's a little scary. Is it not?

It's it feels like starting a second business. You know, I I know It for us

is. It is. A second business. But it's Right. Me, it's not scary at all.

I'm actually very yeah. I'm super excited. Like

So are you. That's good.

I I was excited like three months ago.

So I know that you're big on focus, and I guess I guess when you talk about focus, it's like the end game. Like, you want these to be standalone focused businesses on their own. But today and between now and getting to to that point, it's gonna be a lot of being split in two directions. Like, are you how are you handling that?

Right. So we have three Rails developers, and it seems so far that it's going to be two of them really are going to be able to work on the new product. And one of them is gonna be busy with like support or new features. We just had to do a FreshBooks integration because they just launched a new product and our customers were asking about that. We spent like we have a super deep integration, so we just spent a month working on that on the, you know, so there there's, we're not gonna be able to go as fast as as I want to.

Like, no, you never go as fast as you want to, you guys know this. But considering that I have three full time developers on the team, I definitely would like to have been going faster, but it's not gonna happen with with another product that's out there right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So you are using clearly your your own the BidSketch team to work on the second product. So in that sense, they're not really separate, at least not today. Like eventually you'll have different You need teams?

Yeah. Oh, no. Eventually, this new product will be what people on the BidSketch website sign up to.

I'm confused. I thought BidSketch was gonna be BidSketch and the new product was gonna be its own thing.

Yeah. For for about a year, maybe a little bit longer than that, until we get the new product to a point of where it can do what BidSketch can do.

Oh, I So you're rolling BidSketch into the new like the the proposal functionality features that come into the new product. I okay.

You're gonna you're gonna integrate with yourself.

Well, it's good.

It's gonna you're you're talking about making Bidsketch the new product.

The features that are in Bidsketch, the what it can do. So basically, what's missing from these electronic signature products is sort of like document creation. You can upload existing documents. You got

to bring in your own docs.

Yes. So it's document creation and being able to style and design these documents. Right?

Okay. It sounds to me like a beautiful unfair advantage. Is that where you're going on the positioning?

From a positioning standpoint, once we're there, it'll be definite. It's just way more unique. And there's not, you know, that's that's that's a very unique product. It's easy. It's kind of like in the early days of Bitsketch.

There was nothing there. So we were and you kind of have have this as well to where you can just kind of say what the product does. Right? It's it just does it's just proposal software for designers is we used to say. That was enough.

You can't really say that like going into this electronic signature space, I can't say. Electronic signatures. Yeah. Period. Yeah.

You need more. So but when you're when what your product does is kind of unique enough, you can lean a little bit more on that. Eventually, we'll be in that position again.

Yeah.

Not for a good, it's gonna be a while. Maybe we maybe never get there. Maybe the pull is just so strong in a different direction. Who knows?

Yeah. We we, you know, especially my side of things where I communicate with, with prospects and customers. On one hand, it's amazing to say something unique, on the other hand, a lot of times requires explanation.

Right.

When I say something, we have one gigantic misconception about our product that I have to talk about every single time. I get on a demo and I said, the first few minutes, just so we're clear, it doesn't do this, it does this. Some people go, Oh, then that's not for me. I say, Thank you very much. We just saved each other half an hour.

Have a great Because it's unique, I unfortunately feel the need to bring it up every single time because I have gone through a thirty minute conversation and then brought up at the end and they say, oh, but that won't work for me. And I say, I'd like to go shoot myself now. So so, you know, I just like close the deal and you're gonna start a trial and then it's something you didn't expect. So the unique aspect, what I found is that I have to show. When I show it on screen, I get, oh, that's amazing.

You know? But before then, if it's wrong for them, I have to like explain it. So Yeah. The unique unique thing has been double edged.

I've been thinking a lot about that lately. Like the I hate this term, like the the elevator pitch for for the product. Right? And think about this audience ops calendar product a lot and and the quickest version is like, it's a content calendar. But there are other unique benefits that I'm that I I keep kind of writing and rewriting in in my notebook about like how would I explain this in a really concise way to get the the unique benefit across.

And and I've got a couple different variations, but but I think that's a good exercise for everyone because, you know, if you were to be a guest on somebody's podcast or or if you meet someone at a conference, how would you describe your product in in a way, not to say like what it is, but to really focus in on like, what is the problem that it solves that that makes you go, oh, like, you know, because when I take when I take two or three minutes to start to explain it, then I get the, oh, I get, oh, wow, that's interesting. But how do I make that more concise into like a quick one sentence? Just fire it off, you know?

There are already other content calendar products out there.

Right? Right. And if I only say content calendar, that's the reaction. Right? So the next step is getting into, well, it has these checklists and you can automate and have like relative due dates based on where it where the content is in the calendar and and you can kind of automate the like recurring tasks and then there's tracking performance of content from your calendar looking back.

So like already that's like way too long.

Right. Lost three sentences ago. So Ruben, you have the same issue. How why is someone gonna currently use DocuSign and then look over to you and say, oh. You know, in one sense, you explained to me why I should consider moving off DocuSign.

Right. Yep. And having a category that already exists is a good, it's good, you know, shorthand. It's a good thing to lean on to quickly get some more, but yeah, you need you need a hook. You need something that's different.

And I feel like you need one thing that instead of like, instead of trying to come up with a bunch of other things because there could be other things that make you different. But when you're talking about it or showing or explaining it, it's best to like, the way that I feel is that it's best to lead with something. Lead with your strongest thing. The most Yeah.

Interesting. We we we were forced to do that and you know, my instinct was to keep it wider because I want to attract more people. You want to sell things through a funnel, that's one thing, but there are a few competitors that do that. We're the only ones that do it specifically for physical products. If the you go marketing site, the first thing it says is sell more physical products through a funnel.

Then people look at it and say, that's what I need because I'm already using ClickFunnels to do upsells but they don't work for physical products so I'm bending backwards and now you're telling me for physical that that one thing that differentiates is the fact that it's for x.

Yeah. Yeah. And depending on your product and you know, the market out there, that could be enough and that could be perfect. That could be just all you need. So we're still working on figuring that out.

The positioning aspect we did recently, sent out a identified for having calls and conversations with people identified four different features of things we could maybe lead with, and sent out a survey to sort of verify and just gauge gauge the interest, the real interest on these features. So there was some interest like just going off of conversations and world phone calls. But then the survey, I guess, was based off of I just copied something that I saw from Kissmetrics, Keenan and Neil Patel doing. But I think it comes from a tactic that Patrick from the price intelligently guy talks about, which is you give them a set of options. So as an example, these features, we listed the four features we we asked them pick the one that's the most valuable to you of these four.

Then they pick the most valuable feature, but only one. Right? And then the very next question is pick the least valuable feature, And they pick the least valuable feature. So it was great that we did ask that least valuable feature because then we saw that the thing that I was most excited about and several people are most excited about was the thing that most people just didn't care about. So if we hadn't asked that question, it would have looked like, oh, okay.

So more people are excited about these other features, but there are some people still excited about that thing, that very unique thing that we're planning. So maybe we should still build it. We just won't lead with it. And the problem is that other feature, it would have taken a very long time to build them. It would have just been a ton of time.

Just being able to see that almost everyone said, I don't care about that feature.

It's so important. Mean, I'm gonna go do that today. I'm gonna ask that question to our beta customers group like right now. And I mean, because it it saves you time on development, which basically means you're saving money and you can get to market faster. But it's also from marketing standpoint, you can, you know, you figure out what to lead with, what to go in your headline, how do you describe it verbally, how do you how do you talk about it, how do how do your customers recommend it, oh, it's this type of tool that does this and it's unique, you know, so so valuable.

I guess I'm I'm wondering, how did you start to do that validation process and the customer development, customer research? Did you go straight to BidSketch users or did you look for non BidSketch users intentionally or how did you go about that?

Non BidSketch users on our list.

On your list. Okay. And

then BidSketch users on our list. And what we're doing right now is I'm targeting people that are using these these electronic signature products. So right now I have Twitter ads running, targeting people that are using DocuSign, and it asked them if they if there had been a doc DocuSign been paying for DocuSign less than ninety days. They if they help us with some research, they get a $50 free $50 Amazon gift card.

How can you can you take us through that? Like, you don't have to share the website or anything, but like okay. So they see a Twitter ad. What what's on the Twitter ad? What what did you set up a website or a survey or what what are they seeing?

They're seeing so once they click through on the Twitter ad, they get taken to a Typeform survey. So the Typeform survey asks them questions just to verify that they're the type of people we wanna talk to. Ask them have have you been using how long have you been paying for DocuSign? Like one of them is like, I'm not paying for it. One of them is like, I'm still a trial user and over ninety days, under ninety days.

So we wanna do what we're doing now is switch interviews, people that just switched to DocuSign. Mhmm. Because we get so much insight from that.

That's interesting.

Product marketing standpoint. And then the next question after that, it's like how many documents do you send it in a month regardless of what they answered. And then and then from there, if they're the right type of person, then give them a link to schedule the appointment. Here's the, you know, with a little message saying, you know, what are the deals? Something like if they're willing to do a thirty minute, short thirty minute call with us to help us improve the electronic signature space, then we will get a free $50 Amazon gift card.

How many how many of those are you doing?

So just started the ads, but have done so far three interviews. Have another one coming up. So all you need typically is about 10 to 15 interviews and around 10 you really start to see all patterns. Even now, you know, you start to see the patterns. So you don't need that many interviews when it comes to this style of interviews, which is good.

Yeah. The the switch piece of it is interesting. Is that because it's like fresh on their minds, or they they're very in touch with with what they're excited about and why they left?

Well, it's

I mean, just the fact that they switched.

Yeah. It's because they they it's fresh, right? It's within the first ninety days, so they know why what happened, and when we're doing these interviews, we're we don't ask them, why did you buy? Because people tell you just, you know, what they tell you is not true. What they tell you is what you what they think you wanna hear or what they told themselves about why they buy.

Instead, we just ask them, so what did you do? What did when were like, what were you using? Oh, you were using, you know, whatever, another product. When did you first start to like what happened the first time that you thought, no, like, I don't know, maybe I should look for something else. Right?

So you just dig into the story. Like what did you do next? So, okay, when did you start looking? Why did you start looking that day? What happened that day that made you start seriously looking for?

Why did you sign up for the trial that day? Why not the day before? Right? So all these all these, and you'll like follow along, it's it's never like, oh, within the same day. It's always months.

It's always like a, it started months ago and several things happened. And so you get to see what are the things that are actually pushing people towards buying a product. You get to see what they're deciding about, like when they're what are they looking at when they're evaluating a product? And what are they saying, This isn't important enough for me not to try this out or not to pay.

Mhmm. Yeah. We we all tend to focus on the actual point of conversion. And we think that the the thing on our site and the way our pricing grid is set up and like that that's gonna make

You just make the button yellow instead of green

then Right. Right. Or it's all this lead up that goes onto it that you don't see it, you know, beneath beneath the surface that actually makes the decision.

Right. And even with even when they buy with with a lot of SaaS products, you have a trial period. And and so it's when they enter their credit card information, it's not when they buy.

Right? Right. Because if you do credit card upfront

Later. So it's but it's also not when you build them later. That's not when they decided to buy either. So a good question for just uncovering that after walking through the entire thing, how they evaluated, what happened, all that stuff is asking them, when did you, at what point, like throughout this whole, you're going through these steps, you're sending out this document and at what point did you think to yourself, okay, yeah, this is gonna work. And then that's that that's basically the point when they decided to buy.

That's the thing that pushed them over the edge. Interesting. You

know, when when you have the the list and a customer base and and a and kind of like leads who never converted to customers for BidSketch, I I mean, it's obvious to start there, but I think it's really smart to go after cold traffic who's never heard of you before. And that's something like with with the audience ops stuff. Almost well, no. I I should like all almost all the the paid the prepaid customers for it basically came from my list or they've been following audience ops or my personal list. But I did do some cold outreach to people on social media, just like using, like, Twitter search and searching through Facebook groups and just basically stalking people and being really kinda creepy on Facebook.

Be like, hey, you don't know me, but I wanna ask you something. And I mean, that that definitely helped give me some good insights and and a few conversations and some long email chains and things. But I I do feel like I need to do more of that in in the next couple of months to get people who are outside of my network.

You do get a different perspective, especially if if you have any type of brand, whether it's, you know, personal or product. And people people will often want to buy your next thing because they trust you and they like you.

So it's good, but it can only get you so far.

Yeah. And it's tough to get very honest feedback that way. So it's it's great to just start or very early on talk to people that don't know anything about you or your products or anything like that. And I've told some people about the some other founders about what I'm doing or people just starting, just trying to get started. Some of them have mentioned like, oh, that'll be a lot easier for you because you already have a bunch of customers, you have a list and all that stuff.

Yeah.

Almost hear it like an excuse. Like you'll hear a lot of times people say, well, this person, yeah, of course, they they were able to do a product or a new product or make that SaaS successful because they already had an audience. So obviously

Easier to dismiss, you know.

Makes it

makes us feel better. I I'm I'm guilty of it all the time. So I wanted I wanted to get into the the the money side of it. It sounds like a pretty engineering approach to figuring out who the right audience is and the messaging, the positioning. But what about the pricing and the distribution?

You said you you're almost like just as excited about experimenting with new distribution as you are about the product and what it does and and the audience it serves.

So what

what do what do you mean by that? Is that I've looked at that also and I say, oh, I can't wait to do to do outbound because then my contract size is high enough and that's you know, but then what what if that doesn't work as expected? Like, it's gotta rest.

As expected. Doesn't. It it never does. So Okay. Like, I I like I like David Cancel's thinking on it, which he he he says, for anything pretty much, for any effort, most efforts, think about it in terms of it's wrong.

It's going to be wrong. I just need to know how wrong. Is it, you know, how often is it? Is it 5%, 10%, or is it 90% off? It just gets you in the mode of, like, knowing that what you're putting out or what you're doing first is not intended to be your final thing.

It needs be

shouldn't expect it.

To be analyzing it yet. Because if you once you start, like, and I've done this in the past a lot, especially with split testing, just things that I think are, oh, this is up. This is amazing. Like, this is gonna work. I'm gonna get so many customers from it.

And then it doesn't. I'm like, what? What? How can it not work?

Yeah.

But yeah, changing so I've started changing my thinking around when it comes to that and it is much better because it puts you in sort of mindset to like think about, okay, why didn't it work? What can I change here? Maybe I can and and not just say, okay, this didn't work. Let me move on to something else.

Yeah. I do. I guess I just wanna echo Jordan's question about how do you make this financially viable and do you have a timetable or a runway in mind or do you have any sense of, like, how long is development gonna take to get a a sellable version out shipped or are you thinking about those kinds of things right now?

So BitSketch is profitable. It's paying for the for the team. So it's way that I'm thinking about it is just that Bitschedule is funding this new product. When I didn't have a product, I just I did it nights and weekends. So essentially my job was funding the product.

It's how I thought about it. So as far as the timeline, as fast as possible always, I'm not so stuck on trying to come up with a specific like with VidSketch, I was very I I had a, you know, a very specific date in mind. Or I thought, okay, we're gonna hit beta here. We're gonna and it's pretty close to that. This time around, the I'd say the approach is a little bit different.

So we just do week weekly sprints. So I'm looking more at velocity and learning. And with the mindset that that we're going to keep iterating and improving on the product and until we get it to a point where it's good enough to start selling. And good enough to start selling doesn't mean perfect, so that would take forever. It would never come out.

It just it just it just needs to be able to make the marketing possible. Right?

To actually fulfill on some of the marketing promises.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. If the marketing promises can pull people in, and you can fulfill on those core promises, then you're good enough.

It does no good just marketing something that's too early. And at the same time, you'll you know, if you wait till it's perfect or it just, you know, yeah, it's just gonna take too long. You'll never get there.

And is there anything to the to the, you know, the numbers? So right now you look at at existing business in BidSketch and you say, okay, we have x number of clients and our average revenue per user is y. Is there do you look at that and say, do I improve that? Or, you know, or which one do I try to improve? Like more customers and at a higher price point?

Or is it just just a higher price point? Like which one drives what? I know when we went into our new product.

Yeah.

We we knew we needed to figure out a way to go up market on on the pricing.

Yeah. I'm I'm pretty sure we're going to increase our average revenue per customer but not initially. Our average revenue per customer might actually go down initially, especially with the distribution strategy that we're thinking of. Yeah. We're so one thing that that that I'm very comfortable with and we're pretty good with is so there are a lot of different there's SaaS products that are very different.

So you have SaaS products that are enterprise, you have SaaS products that are little more they're not quite enterprise, but they're more kind of like what you're doing, Jordan. Mhmm. Both of you actually. And then you have the the SaaS products that are like $30 a month, $20 a month. Right?

And those products rely way more on volume. And pretty good at that, or very comfortable with that. So just talking about the premium distribution, it's also all about all about volume. That's where we're starting. And I'm going to be very loose and I'm okay with I like to starting low and then just increasing pricing and seeing where we stop making as much money.

But I'm also very good with one of the things that I learned from doing Bitsketch and doing a lot of price testing, one of the best things that we did unintentionally early on, just because I didn't know any better was that I gave away way too much the very first early product, early days of the product. Meaning I didn't try to limit like users and features and all this stuff. And that was a good thing because later on, I was able to look back at the data and say, okay, naturally, if you don't limit people, where do they naturally like, oh, you know, we have big groups of people adding three users, then the next, know, next breakpoint is like five, then it goes to 10. And then there's a big chunk of people using this feature. It's basically you're not artificially limiting usage based off your pricing grid or any limits like that.

It's just you get to see it and it helps you design the pricing.

So when you said kind of start in terms of pricing, kind of start low and and build up, maybe test up over time. Are are you talking about basically, kind of start with one initial price and test price increases on that same plan or same or same whatever's included in that in the pricing? Or more like aspirational pricing where over time you start to build more and more features to add more value and kinda justify a higher price or maybe a little bit of both?

I wanna see what I wanna see the value what the value is of what we have at the time that we're that we're testing the pricing. So I think that it's both. I think that we there's a minimum in mind that I wanna hit, but that's gonna come later. In the beginning, it's going to be, okay, what can we charge for this? And moving that pricing up, and seeing where where things stop to work start stop working as well.

And and and that's a function of what looking around at the market. Right? Because that's if you have an existing market, you have all these different price points. I always find that so fascinating how very similar products can have hugely different pricing. Yeah.

Try to try to look under the covers like what is why are you charging 10 times more for what looks like the same thing?

Well, it it depends depends on the market. It depends on what people are thinking and how people are evaluating products going into it. Because if they're not evaluating a lot of the same products, products that to them look identical, and several products like that, then it doesn't really make sense to charge what everyone else is charging or keep it in that zone.

Right. Right. Right.

So that part of what we're looking to discover through these switch interviews here is like how do they evaluate things.

Right. Some markets people really you know all of your competitors. That's your job to know them.

Yep.

But some markets, the the person signing up doesn't care at all. I I mean our So

so yeah. With BitSketch, it was it was we so when we first we were the first app that did proposals, and then there were several competitors that followed through. And we all the other competitors were pricing a lot less than we were.

Right. I I which I hate. I I always respect someone who comes out, copies you, and then prices higher. Thank you.

Well, we've started pricing low really low in the beginning when we first came out and then we, you know, moved pricing up and then we found a spot that worked well. But then everyone else followed in and they're pricing low. The problem so you would say, well, then people are gonna start using the other products or whatever. Or people are gonna look at those other products and think maybe, you know, this is this is the product we wanna use because this this is, you know Even though it's the difference is $30 a month and $10 a month, this is more of a premium product.

It's Yes. That's all relative. It's all relative.

I've had it. Good.

None of none of that stuff even matters if they're not even looking at the other products. So what we found was that they weren't even looking at the other products. So it like, their the pricing from the other products didn't matter one bit because they weren't aware of it.

Yeah. As long as it's tolerable. As long as it makes sense on

the top. We all like, we all know exactly who all of our competitors are and everything that they all do, but there are a lot a lot of people out there and they have they have better things to do to than analyzing every every

competitor It's out it's that it's not just that. It's also distribution. Like, the the early competitors that were out there sucked at distribution, really. They weren't very good at it. So they couldn't get in front of people to to let them know that there were alternatives.

Nowadays, it's very it's a very different thing. Nowadays, almost everyone that tries our product, BidSketch, is looking at other products. So nowadays, it is much more competitive. And the pricing, there is a lot of comparison shopping.

I do wanna ask you about that, like on that same note with competitive. So we are entering a very competitive space. You already listed off a few potential competitors. There's probably many more on that list. Yep.

How do you think about that from a feature road map standpoint? And and I'm I'm thinking about this too as we're building, you know, version one of this SaaS. Like, I don't I I don't think that we're entering a a hyper competitive space, but we definitely have a few competitors that I would say are that people would would compare us to, and and that that has already come out in in the interviews that I've done. So how much of your time and energy this early on is spent just saying, okay, these features are baseline must haves that when people are evaluating this product against other competitors, they're just gonna have to see them. Otherwise, it's kind of a deal breaker Yeah.

Before you get into, oh, that's the unique differentiator feature. You know, how do you think about that?

This is one of the really nice things about going into a market that has a bunch of a bunch of products already doing this. That's why I'm excited about this. It's just so much easier to to do all of this stuff to come up with a baseline. So there's this book called Ready Fire Aim that I'm following the first, probably the first, you know, three or four chapters of it. I'm sort of following that strategy, which is you go out there and you look at all the products that are doing this thing, and you evaluate their features, were they doing well, were they not doing well, what people are saying about them.

And then from that, you sort of get a baseline of of what features do you need to have and where the gaps are. What people what people are missing, what they want that they're not getting from these products.

And I

think it works the other way too. I think there are plenty of well established competing companies who just have feature bloat and some percentage of their features, their customers just aren't using and it harms the the overall experience. So

Yeah. That's super common.

And it can lead you down that rabbit hole. Alright. Let's copy these features, but, you know, a lot of those can be a waste of time and maybe take you in the wrong direction. Well,

the thing is not to you don't just copy just, you know, to copy, which happens a lot in SaaS. A lot like, there are a lot of competitors that copied things of ours that they shouldn't have copied because they weren't that good. And we are always like, you know, we should be should just kill this or or something like that. Meanwhile, other people are copying it. So I think that's where the conversations with customers and the additional research comes in.

Just to make sure that you're not, you know, taking stuff like putting in your baseline to stuff that is not is not worth doing.

Yeah. That's one of I've been asking I've been having a lot of conversations and there's there's one competing company who definitely comes up more than any other in in these conversations. And I find that actually really, really helpful because as soon as somebody mentions that name, I I basically jump on that and I'm asking, why did you try that product? What do you love about that product? What like, what's working for you?

What's kind of falling short? And I mean, they're talking like they came to my form looking at my product now. So clearly they are not completely satisfied with the other one. So

Yeah. That's perfect. That's perfect.

There's a there's a reason. There's a reason why they're doing that. Yeah.

Yeah. We've had a funny experience over

the past two weeks. So we've

been playing with our pricing. So our pricing now is $300 a month. So there's only one competitor that does something similar to what we do, and they're $37 a month. So we're 10 x. Right?

So I have had, and we're forcing demos at this point because a conversation with me just works better than letting someone sign up on their own. That's just this stage we're at in terms of the onboarding and experience and explanation all that. I've had the, you are aware of how much they cost. Right? Like, where they were like baffled like, I don't understand how you could price it.

What at 300 if they're at 37? It's forced me like you have Brian, you have one other competitor to look at and you start to differentiate with one instead of this giant market thing, hundreds of features out there in the market, You're looking at someone coming from one product and doing a demo with them or they just ran a trial with them. So it's like, it's head to head ish.

Yeah. There's in in my case, that ish is is pretty broad though, because I I would say roughly 40% 30 or 40% of people are naming other competing tools that they've tried. And of those people, most of them say this one tool, but there's another 50 or 60% that that have used spreadsheets or or, you know, or nothing, you know. And and I'm and I'm digging into that too, you know.

How many how many would you say that mention or know that, like, out of the people that you talk to know that one competitor?

I've made the mistake before of mentioning them assuming that they know about it and they're like, who? Never mind. Never mind.

What's that website again? The

the the truth is that the the so there's like a range. There's there's one band of the market that doesn't know about them at all. Then there's an the largest band of the market knows about them and is active and and understands the market. It's trying to accomplish very specific goals, very knowledgeable, and then I have a conversation. It's more direct.

It's more open. Like this is what they do. This is what we do, and here's wine. Here's what's better about theirs and what's better about us. You have to think what's best for you.

But the highest end of the market, the part that we want to go for, our best customers don't even care about them. Even if they most likely don't know they exist, but they're just going on like, you and me are talking right now Jordan. I'm trying to figure out if I want to do business with you. And it's not about features. It's not about competitors.

It's not about pricing. So that's so that that's what we found. Like the middle of the market knows and is comparing, but the actual higher end of the market is more is more relationship oriented. And the 37 a month hurts them because they know they're gonna get $37 a month worth of service.

Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. It's scary for them probably. Like, if they're thinking about it, they're like, oh, I don't know.

Right. Meaning, about paying so little for per product like

Yeah. And and the thing is if they're a company that's call it let's say they're spending $50,000 a month on advertising, for them to to try to accomplish something so important as like having people check out on something and pay $37 a month for it is like it is scary for them.

I I guess I have one more question. I'd love to hear both of you on this. I know we're running a a little long here, but if I think back to restaurant engine, that was very offline customer base, offline audience, low tech savvy bar to me. We we had a small segment of customers who are a little bit younger, more and more savvy. They they would look at different competitors, but for the and we had many direct competitors specifically doing restaurant websites.

There were huge companies doing TV commercials for that kind of stuff. And almost all all of our customers are just were just not aware of other competitors. And really our our competition was like hiring a freelance web designer or or an agency or something. So that offline piece, I think made made it easier to to not care so much. And I specifically positioned us as like, had a we had like a comparison table, restaurant engine versus hiring a freelancer, not restaurant engine versus using Squarespace or something like that.

You know? And so I'm wondering about how how you guys are thinking about it because with audience ops, we do have a very online tech savvy, web savvy, like whatever options are out there, they've probably looked at them or or tried them or at least that's the assumption. I mean, Jordan, you're you're focusing on physical products, which makes me think there there's probably half and half like some tech some tech ecommerce store owners who who kinda know their way around things. But, you know, you're if you're selling, you know, like a hunting gear, like are they how tech savvy are they,

you know?

Our general assumption when we market is that we are introducing a new concept and and we're we're talking about it in that way. And and in in many ways, it's like an enviable position that I used to envy other people. I used to see even competitors in the card abandonment space and I know that there are 25 existing competitors, but they're talking about it like it's the newest thing I just discovered. Check this out. It's gonna change your life.

And I was always like, damn, that's good for you because why why bottle yourself up? So in this situation, by default, on purpose, that's our approach. Our approach is we need to start from scratch. We need to assume the person does not know anything about this and we're introducing a new concept and a tool to achieve that new concept in a marketing strategy. So that that's kind of our our approach.

Ruben

Are you reaching how are you reaching them? Are you reaching it's it's online, right? It's not offline.

No. It's it's online and it's what we're assuming is the peep our targets are just not the type of people who live inside of Facebook groups who discover every new tool as soon as it comes out. Assuming these people are heads down running multimillion dollar e commerce businesses, and they're looking at their campaigns and their metrics and their distribution, and that's where their focus is. They're not a 100% up to speed on every new tool. When we approach them, it is online, but we are just about to start outbound, which is a combination of email and calls.

I feel like if I think about Bidsketch, especially like a designer or something, they're savvy. They're gonna they're gonna look around and they've probably tried different things. They design their own proposals. Right? But the signatures, you can go much more broad.

Right? There are plenty of industries who who would at some one point or other need electronic signatures or maybe start to think about how can I take my offline business online with signatures? I'd like

Yeah. It's super broad. We're we're likely starting with with a specific segment. So there's there there are a few that are really big with electronic signature apps. One of them is sales.

Another one is real estate. Then you have legal, stuff like that. So for us, the the one with most overlap to our existing audience because we have do have some salespeople using BidSketch, this would be sales. So that's where we're going to start. And from a positioning standpoint, it'll still, you know, that's why we we spent so much time trying to identify the gaps in the current products that are out there.

So we built built it into the product, even into our distribution strategy with with Freemium and and just make it something that's hard to compare to other things that are out there.

Right. So there's like the base assumption that someone under when you say electronic signature, you don't have to explain that part. The focus can be on how it's done.

Right. Exactly. Yep.

Cool.

Awesome. Well, why don't we wrap it up there, fellas?

I wish us luck on all of our second multi product adventures. Let's do it. Ruben, thanks very much for coming on.

Yeah. Thanks for thanks for hanging out today, Ruben. Of course, you guys can check out bidsketch.com or, Earthling Works on Twitter. Is that right?

Yep. Earthling Works. Awesome, guys.

Cool. Alright, everyone. Have a have a good one.

Take care.