Bootstrapped Web

Hey. Hey. We're back from Bootstrapped Web. Good to be back. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?

What's up, Brian?

Good to be back, man.

Not much. I guess today, we'll do the usual chaotic updates episode. I think you and I both have a lot going on. We're we're heading towards the end of the year here and a lot to wrap up, lot a lot of things to build, a lot of things to to fix and update, and I think we got a lot of them. So

Yeah. And I I like that we don't do these, every single week now. So we've breaking up with guests and and screwing up our timing and traveling and all that. So we do these every few weeks, and it feels like there's more substance to it. The other thing, I have to admit something, Brian.

I feel like I've been not as open as I should be about I I I like when we talk offline, when I talk to other people offline, I like to talk revenue. I like to talk numbers. I like to, you know, not fluff. But it's a little tricky knowing how open to be about that stuff. So I think I'm still I still don't see an advantage in being completely transparent on revenue.

I don't understand people that do it. I just don't I do not see the advantage unless you're in such a comfortable position. And then it just sounds like bragging anyway. So it's it's strange thing.

I do I I agree. I think yeah. I don't see a specific need. I don't really see a a big upside to to being super specific about like like current MRR or how big a launch was or or, you know, the size of things. I I guess, but at at the same time, I think it's good to give some sense of of context and and where things are at and and relative Incredibly.

Right. It does give context and it's incredibly helpful if you are if you're trying to sell coaching, if you're trying to say, I will teach you how to build a consulting business, it's really good for you to be able to say, I've had six students over the past year make over 1,000,000. You know, like things like that that are specific. But when it comes to your specific business, especially in in our space, I don't really see that much advantage. But anyway, I I'm gonna try at least this episode to talk a little bit more numbers, Not so much of our revenue, but, like, what's happening in the pipeline and why custom services are formulating.

And and I'm starting to do another outbound campaign, which I'm paying a good amount of money for. So the math that goes into that. So I'm gonna I'm gonna try. I'm still not gonna tell what my revenue is, unless I see an advantage. But

Yeah. I I I tend to think on that, like, numbers can be helpful sometimes to give a a bit of context. But at the end of the day, you know, it it's not the numbers that are gonna really teach you anything. It's like like, that's not the takeaway. Like, the takeaway is the strategy and the tactics and your thinking and and your decision making.

I think that's what will help our listeners get more out of it. You know? So so, yeah, with that, why don't why don't you kick it off?

Alright. Cool. So what the first thing I want to tackle is seemingly small, but so I've recently had one of those experiences where you're like, damn, I did something smart. That's awesome. And then in the next breath, you realize, my god, how stupid am I?

Why didn't I do this six months ago? It's it could have saved me so much aggravation and made more money. So that change was I've talked about this before, the credit card. The timing of when we ask for the credit card on the card abandonment product, it seems like such a small thing, but it has made such a huge impact not only on my workload. So what was happening was we didn't require a credit card at sign up, and then people would go through their trial.

And the way we talked about it was we were selling drugs. We just wanted to give get just give them a try because then you start making money, and then once you start making money, you're hooked. So then we would have an automated email sequence that gave them updates every week. This is how much money you've made so far. This is how much money after two weeks, after three weeks.

And then after four weeks, we would turn the conversation into this is how much money you made during the trial. That means you're at the $100 a month tier. Please click here to put in your credit card. Right? So we would like let them let them run the campaign and let them make money and then ask them for the credit card.

So it's

almost like they the money.

Like initially when they signed up, they didn't really know which price tier they'll be in. You can't know yet. Right. Because it's based on revenue.

Right. So we were like, how do we ask someone to sign up for a plan? So we had issues with it. We didn't really know what to do. So what that meant is under that current, well, past structure, somebody needed to proactively decide, I'm going to click this button from the email you sent me and I'm going to put in my credit card and then I will continue on as a paying customer.

So that caused a lot of headaches. It was good for sales because we didn't require credit card upfront and people would only be shown how much money they were gonna pay after they've already made a lot more than that. So that was good, but what it meant was that we were losing out on a lot of sales from people who just didn't respond to the email. So we'd sent, we sent four emails, but then someone would just not respond and then it would be a problem. Because if somebody made $2,200 during their thirty day trial and they should fall to the $100 a month tier and they were successful in it, they should really sign up.

There's no reason that they shouldn't sign up. So if they got the email, they didn't respond, didn't put their credit card in, now I got a problem. I can either be a bad businessman and let it go and not do anything about it, or I can be a good businessman but bad for my time and follow-up with that person. Man, you figure out a way to get them on the phone, do something. Right?

Because they should turn into a paying customer.

Mhmm. But yeah. Yeah. It's it's an action that it's a second action that they need to take. The first one was signing up and then thirty days later, whenever they have to they have to go stop whatever else they were doing and go take this action.

Even even if it's been saving them money, like even if card hook has been working, I my go to strat like default has has always been like require the credit card upfront so that at least they only have to take one action. And and then maybe after speaking with you and and Ruben a couple weeks ago, I started to rethink that, like, as I'm planning the calendar product, maybe not require the credit card upfront and ask for it thirty days later, but it's it's this give and take. Yeah.

I'll describe what we ended up doing that I'm I'm ecstatic about. Not only has it eliminated it's done a few things. So here's first, me describe what we did instead of talking backwards. What we did was we allow you to sign up without a credit card and then you set up your campaign. But when you launch the campaign, right when you say yes, turn my emails live so that the next person that abandons a card on my site gets emails.

When you launch your campaign, a pop up would come up and say, put your credit card on file in order to launch your campaign. Oh my god. It has like we have we have more Stripe sign ups, not not account sign ups, but people in Stripe. We have like tripled in thirty days. That's awesome.

It's insane because everyone and and here's the thing. No one has complained. Not one person.

It that's like

is the

best of both worlds. You get the the low friction free trial sign up, and you get the higher conversion, and I and I think that the I think it's probably because you're you're getting them closer. I mean, obviously, they can't really get any value out of it until they they pay. That's number one. But they're But they're committed.

You're taking that action that second action of putting the credit card in. You're moving that closer to the day that they initially had signed up. Because that window when they signed up is when they're most engaged and they're like, alright, I have this problem today. I wanna get it solved like this week. And and if they can go from free trial to activating their campaign and paying within a week, they're still in that mindset of like, okay, I'm taking action on Cardhook.

Whereas if they before they do free trial today and then like a month from now, they do that action to start paying. It's like they're already on to something else by then. So

Right.

So now they no longer have to proactively put their credit card on file. They will now by default, the right the emails at the end of the trial will now say, you're about to be placed on the $100 a month here. It's not like click here to sign up to put your credit card on file. It's we already have your credit card on file. You've had this trial.

Here's how much money you made. You're on the $100 tier. In three days you will be charged a $100 for the first time. So now they have to proactively say, no, don't do that. Instead of proactively saying, yes, here's my credit card.

The secondary thing is done is I don't have to worry about it anymore. I don't have to feel guilty and look and say, someone made $600. They're supposed to be $50 a month trial. I just had too much going on and I'm just gonna watch that just walk away.

Yeah. And if they cancel in that three day period there, you get a reason.

Right.

Like, you're not left wondering why did why didn't you renew? I was saving you money. You just disappeared. You're not you're they have to actually kinda cancel and, you know, I I assume you have some sort of like field or something where they type in the answer or something. Like the reason or Yeah.

I don't I don't wanna talk about that.

Okay. Maybe not.

No. We don't, which we should. But anyway, so

that But at least they at least they need to get in touch about it and and that's still an opportunity to tell you There's

a there's a limit to my cynicism, Brian. We added we added a cancellation button in the app now.

Okay.

Now that we are doing it this way, we felt like, okay, we can't do that and also required them to email us to cancel because

that No. No. I I mean, I I agree I agree with that. I I just mean that, like, you're kind of eliminating the whole the free trial or who just mysteriously disappears and at least they have to kinda come to the surface and say and kinda there's some interaction there when they decide to cancel that you can get some data from that can help you reduce churn and all that.

So I think that was a great move that should have been done six months ago, but it wasn't, but at least it got done now, and I will give an update in next week is the first time that that batch of people who were required to put credit card at launch actually go from trial to paid. So I'll I'll give an update in like two or three weeks on how that's going because it might it might, like, it might, like, double the growth. It's so ridiculous. It's so stupid. But it might it might have, like, a very significant impact, which makes me feel very happy and really upset at the same time.

Yeah.

It's that's awesome, man. But like, I I think the other thing to keep in mind here is is like, these are hard and fast rules. Right? Like, this is not one of those thing. I think for your particular software, it's it has that activation step where it really makes sense to insert the credit card ask there.

I I'm wondering about, like, if can that actually map to that can that can map to a lot of other SaaS apps. I don't

know Let's look at your situations.

Because that's what I'm thinking about. Like

Let's let's just use it as as an example. Where is the point in time that things change from or activation is is the

I've been I've been a little bit on the fence about this and and it's not an urgent decision yet, so I haven't really decided one way or another. But so I'm pretty set on the idea that it's gonna be a thirty day free trial for for Audience Ops calendar. Other products that I've worked on can be like fourteen days, maybe even less. But I think this one you need a good month to get the the cycle of planning content and and process for for producing content. And I'm starting to lean more on the side of don't require the credit card upfront and let them just free trial and then do the painful second action thirty days later.

It's tough, it's really tough to know that stuff. We moved to fourteen days on the funnels product and it feels really short. Yeah. It feels short. It feels like people barely get a chance to really get into it and get value from it.

So I think one thing because I don't think that we have the same sort of activation event that you have, like, to activate the campaign and start sending emails, like, that's literally like night and day. Okay. Now we're turning the app on. It's gonna start doing what it's supposed to do.

No value to value.

With count with the calendar app, it's it's more of like an internal project management app, and it helps you become organized and it helps you streamline your process.

So where are where are the individual steps where real value is created? Is it like sharing with the team member?

See, that's the thing that I was thinking. It was like so in terms of the pricing tiers that I'm that I'm planning, there's gonna be a solo plan, a team plan, and an agency plan. And solo will be just your one person. And the idea is all features in the app are available to all plans. The only difference is the solo plan, you can invite any teammates.

The team plan, you can invite up to like five teammates. And the agency plan, you can install it on multiple sites, up to up to 10 sites for clients. As a solo user, you can start a free trial without entering your credit card and start using basically all the features in the app, get a feel for it, see see if it it's working with your workflow and all that. And then if you're happy with it, it's like, I'm ready to start inviting my teammates into this. That's when the pop up comes up to ask for their credit card, and then you can start inviting teammates.

Yeah. That's good.

But people on that lower tier, the solo plan who don't ever intend to invite teammates, they'll just get the pop up at at the thirty day mark.

Like what? When they when they log into their account after thirty days?

Yeah. Like they it's it's not gonna be an an unlimited trial. Like after thirty days, you have to kinda stop using the app or or start paying.

Yeah. I so we were doing a UX upgrade to the finals product because right now it's basically just an MVP. We got it out there. Now we actually wanna make it nice and onboarding and all that. So we've been looking around at other other apps and BearMetrix does this really well.

It's it's so simple, but you'll see like pro companies. Companies who have their act together, have real pros working behind it. You see a lot of upgrade opportunities on the back end. I don't just mean upgrade from one tier to another, I mean from free to paid. So biometrics, when you start trial, I would encourage people to start trial with biometrics.

It's a it's free, most people have a Stripe account. You can just kinda connect, just play around with it. It's really well done. So when you're looking at the dashboard, there's just a notification at the top. Your full featured trial has x number of days left, and then a link, upgrade now to save your business insights.

Right there persistently on the dashboard, it gives you the chance to go from free to paid at any time, and it positions it properly to save your business insights, not to become a paying customer. Then if you go to features that are locked out of free accounts, like like a like a team thing, you can still see the features, but then it shows you. It shows you upgrade here to to get access to these features.

Yeah. Like when you click the invite teammate button, it pops Right.

That's when it pops up.

Yeah. That's that's definitely

how it Right. It gives you all these different opportunities. So instead of just like after thirty days when they log in, they can't log in unless they put their credit card in. It should do that along the way, and it should probably be in like the PS of some of the emails that lead up to the end of the trial of like do it now to make sure you don't get locked out. So I I see those things can have can have a big difference once you have any sort of volume in in trials.

Yeah. I think that's probably I'm glad we had this conversation. I I think I pretty much cleared up how how at least version one is gonna be. Like, thirty day free trial, ask for the credit card when you invite a teammate or when you try to add a second site if you're an agency.

Right. Like that those points of additional value. Yeah. Yeah. Alright.

Cool, man. Very nice. Alright. So that's I got a bunch of sales stuff to talk about after this, but

Alright. What what's going on your way?

What I'm focused on right now this week, this past week is a redesign of audienceops.com, our marketing site.

Alright. How's it going?

It's going pretty well. Of course, it's one of those things that that I told myself, yeah, I'm gonna hustle and get this thing done in one week, then I'll then I'm gonna ship it. So hard. We're into we're into week two here. It's it's not launched yet.

And obviously, I mean, I you know, most most companies spend months doing a a website redesign. It's definitely a big improvement. But at the same time, I'm really prioritizing speed on this thing. I I wanna get it out the door and launched really quickly. And I may have already talked about it on the web on the podcast before, but just to recap, like, re like, why I'm doing a redesign.

Because currently, the site only promotes our service, our our content done for you service. The new site is going to have basically a general home page and then linking off to three different sales page sales pages. One for the calendar SaaS, one for our upcoming training product, and one for our service, the the content service. So we're going from one product to three products, essentially. So we need a new a new redesign to kind of present all that.

Yeah. I hear that. I

hear that. And, you know, I am trying to get it launched, you know, this month, like in the next week or so. And it's ahead of ahead of the launch of these products except for the service, which As it should be. So yeah. And like, I think right now, I just have the the land the the basic landing page, but now it's gonna be like a legit

You've you've given this some thought. I I want to ask you how you're thinking about it when you have multiple products. Do you promote them equally or do you lead with one?

It's a good question.

Right. What's the strategy here? I I know Justin from Leadviews is kind of is kind of playing with with some of this stuff also with a with a course.

I've been giving this a lot of thought and went down a few different routes as I was sketching this out. But in terms of the marketing funnel, so not thinking about the website structure quite yet, but just in terms of the marketing funnel, my thinking is all of all of our top of funnel advertising and marketing and webinars should basically be directed at our training product that will come out in in a couple of months.

So education basically.

Yeah. Because I think that's the easiest product to basically sell on a webinar.

Mhmm. Right. What's Brendan's philosophy? He nobody ever gets the offer for the higher end until they buy the lower end?

Yeah. Yeah. Think so. But

his is more his is more

But the the way that I'm I'm planning it is, it's gonna be an automated couple times a week educational webinar that leads into an offer for the higher level education, which is our give or take $500 training product. And that training product is a standalone product, but it also comes with an extended free trial of our calendar software. So I said, like, we're we're gonna do a thirty day trial. The training students will get like a sixty day trial, something like that. And and of course, the training kind of trains you on the best way to use the calendar software and all that.

They they go hand in hand. And and by selling the the training program, that kind of helps to pay for the marketing spend, like paying for ads to run to the that weekly webinar and all that. So that's kind of the high level funnel. And then I think in terms of leads for this for the content service, we're just gonna kinda just naturally get leads dripping into that. People who have maybe gone through either the free training or the paid training and they just decide that they want to do it all themselves or just from all the marketing that we're doing around our other products, they naturally come over to the service and and we'll get some leads for that.

But in terms of the website structure, the

way that I'm going is the homepage I guess, in a way, we're gonna promote all three equally. Right. It's funny, like, the site can do that, but but the entry point is usually not your homepage.

Right. Right.

Right. So I someone actually comes in

But the home like, home page is like, literally the I'm just gonna pull it up. Like, the the the headlines that I have like, the homepage is basically like a generic a general welcome to audience ops. We're a content marketing this is not the actual headline, but just the messages. We're a content marketing company and offering x So so the alright. Basically, the the very top headline is out teacher competition, which is the same headline that we currently have.

It's got kind of an illustration of our calendar and and an illustration of of a content article. Below that, in the next big section near the top of the homepage, it says, products to help you start and scale your content marketing. And then three equal callouts. You've got calendar, training, and service.

Right. With like some graphic representation

Yeah. Each each has a has a little illustration that our designer created, but they look pretty cool. And and, you know, calendar, one sentence blurb, and then learn more. Training, one sentence blurb, learn more. So so those three big callouts near the top, they link off to audience.audienceops.com/calendar, audienceops.com/training/service.

Yeah. Pretty much what we have with with Cardhawk. We we ended up in the same place. You go there, it says products built to make your ecommerce business more successful, and we have funnel with a one liner, card abandonment with another, one liner, and a button free to learn more, and that goes like their own little product pages effectively.

Yeah. And then once you get to the calendar page, the entire page, including the top navigation and everything, it's all about the calendar. So it it it is a little bit confusing. It it

It's a funny thing. It's it's hard to hard to do. We ended up with a global navigation, but like with these little pull down menus. So we have products, and then you can you can choose which one, and then you have login if you could choose which one. Then we have about

See, login is the other one that I've been debating over,

It's so weird.

Are you gonna because we're gonna have people who wanna log into the calendar, but also log into the training membership area and those are gonna be two different sites. I'm looking at yours. Yeah. Products. Yeah.

And that's and that's how I've seen other companies who have multiple products do it. They have like a product drop down. Mhmm. Oh, I see you have a login drop down.

Go to like like SEO mods, you go to intercom, like people who have to deal with the issue of multiple products. It's very interesting to see how how they do it.

Oh, man. Now I'm looking at yours. Maybe I wanna make mine like yours.

Feel free to steal because mine original.

See, I I also have a a call to action button in the top navigation. So it's like it's like link link link and then a button for like get a free trial or get a free demo. And that's gonna be specific to each page.

I see. I see. I wonder if we do that to some extent with like a no. We have like a sub navigation and scratch it. It's a it's a tricky thing to figure out Yeah.

How to make it not confusing, but still present what you want.

Yeah. So the the thing I wanted to share today about the redesign is that I'm doing this in the fastest possible way to ship a high quality redesign that I know how to do, given given my personal what I think are my strengths and the areas that I need to delegate to someone else. And so, you know, I I come from a background in in web design and front end development and WordPress development. So what I did was and so my my first I started out by saying, alright. I'm just gonna get a WordPress theme.

Like, I tried the Elegant Themes Divi theme, which is one of these, like, website like, page builders, very customizable, a lot of built in options. I thought, alright. That'll probably be the fastest way to get something out the door, so use something like that. I start I I spent a day on that. I came to the conclusion, which I've done multiple times in the past, like, you know what?

These page builders are not for me. I need more hands on in in the markup and the CSS. So I basically trashed that and and then I went to my go to framework, which is the Twitter Bootstrap framework. I know people debate these things, but for me, that's just the one that that I've been into for the last couple years. I started with a clean slate custom WordPress theme using the Twitter Bootstrap framework.

And I basically essentially made like a static HTML site, but wrapped it in a in a WordPress theme. It's not it's not like a custom CMS. It's just like custom page templates in a WordPress theme, fully doing the markup myself, CSS myself, and all the copy myself. Like, those are the things that I'm that that that are my strength, and I can work on and I've been working on those, every day for the past week. And then the one piece that I gave to someone else is our designer on the our illustrator on the team.

We need custom illustrations for these big That

makes such such a big difference.

Yeah. Like for the featured area, but also like those three products and and and different specific features, like he created these custom icons. And I basically had a very specific idea for what should be communicated in in these icons, and I gave them to him and he spent a week and and he created those and then I kind of, tweaked some of the coloring and then I put them into into the end of the site. So, as of today, I've got the homepage all done. I've got the new service page all done.

My next one that I'll work on the next few days is the is the calendar page for the SaaS, and then after that, the training page. And once those two pages are done, hopefully, by end of next week, I'll I'll be ready to to launch this thing. But but that's kinda my number one priority, because I feel like I can't launch anything else until I have the new site up and running. Like, I have I planned the automated webinar and and I wanna start really driving traffic to that and also to do do more to drive these, like, early access list sign ups, but I wanna have the site in place to to be the thing that I'm that I'm promoting. So I'm trying to get that out the door, you know, by next week.

Alright. Alright. So you're doing some some handcrafted artisanal, local, organic, cruelty free, open range software development for for the for the front end. But I I I think anyone in your situation gets fed up with the the page builders. They're they're great, but it's the you just run into

I'm I'm just so much, personally, I'm much faster writing the markup, the CSS, and and doing the copywriting all in a basic HTML page.

Nice, man. And how annoying is it that you have to basically build two websites? One one for mobile and one for

Oh, yeah. For desktop. That's So know, Twitter Bootstrap has some mobile responsive built into it, but obviously, you got it. But I I my like, was I dedicated the entire day to taking everything that I've built so far and tweak the responsive layout to make sure that that's all cool. So I I literally spent, like, five hours just doing responsive tweaks.

And But that's all squared away. Like, finished that yesterday. So now I can kinda move on to those other two sales pages.

Alright. Cool. And the webinar, that's that's what you want people to cold traffic.

Yes. So back to the the question of like, how do you promote these three different products? Do you do them equally? In terms of the website, people can basically navigate to whichever one they they feel drawn to. And we've got clear paths right from the homepage that they can do that, or maybe they heard about AudienceOff's calendar, they they land directly on that page.

But the pop up on the website is gonna promote the webinar. The the calls to action in the blog area are all gonna go to that webinar. The cold traffic that we run is gonna go to a landing page for the webinar. Probably retargeting ads or well, various retargeting ads, I think. But we'll we'll also build it into some email automation, like new subscribers get pitched on the webinar and Mhmm.

With some dynamic stuff there and

So there is like there is an escalation. There is relatively declined you're not gonna build out multiple different funnels, at least not a first.

Well, I but did build out, I did diagram out like the whole funnel and how it should work and so like if somebody kinda takes an action that indicates they're interested in the SaaS, like that should move them down that path. You know, whether they that was oh, the other thing that I learned from from Ruben, I I don't think this was on Bootstrap web, but I interviewed him as one of the training as one of the interviews that's included in the training package, talking about how he does content marketing for BidSketch. But he said one one strategy, this isn't really specific about content marketing, but he put an email opt in right at the very top of the BidSketch homepage to download a sample proposal.

Right. That's an entry point.

And that's his entry point. And he and he's built up thousands and he gets tons and tons of options into that.

Yep. He does.

And he actually goes an additional step of like, you can't even navigate anywhere else on his site until you enter your email address and get that free proposal down sample.

Yeah. I I it's like there there are some links in the footer. I I'm very intimately, familiar with this because I've told Ruben multiple times now that we're like buddies. We hang out in person here in Portland. I stole that so blatantly in the first Cardhook homepage.

The very first thing you saw was, you know, the headline, and then right below it, a big field for your email, and it said, you know, basically enter your email to get a sample abandoned cart campaign.

That's perfect. Yeah. Like, after I kinda heard that tip from him, I I just it's like we already had a sample articles download downloadable PDF for our content service that we give people. But currently, it's like a tiny link in the middle bottom of of the page. Now it's like front and center, email opt in, top of the page, you know.

And I'm trying to think through, like, what can that be for the calendar product. Like, maybe like download a sample editorial calendar, something like that. But like, yeah. Trying to prioritize the email opt in right at the very top.

Yeah. I like that. I'm actually it's funny you say that if you go to karthawk.com/funnel, our our most successful opt in is to download a template, a product page template. Right? But it's like, it's off to the side.

Like, look, it's blended in. It it it's not obvious. I'm actually working with our buddy Matt Ackerson at Peter Vero, who's doing a lot of interesting stuff with with pop ups and opt ins, to create opt ins for the page also. So an exit pop, just because that offer converts really well for the email, but you don't really see it very much. So we really need to make it make it more prominent.

So like Ruben did in putting it directly out in front, because I assume most of his traffic comes in through a blog post, and then when people say, what is this thing? They get to the homepage, and then the thing staring them right in the face is is the opt in.

Yeah. The other thing I'm I'm actually looking at your pricing section here. On my new site for audience ops, for all three products, I'm gonna show the the the pricing tiers, and I'm gonna do more of a typical monthly and annual layout that we're seeing in in most SaaS products now. I'm basically gonna show what is the price if you pay monthly, and what is the price if you pay annually but broken down by month?

Yep. I like that. I like that.

Because I I think you're showing

We're showing the year the the full annual price, then we we we show the 33% off. Right? You see that little thing appears? Yeah. I think our pricing is not conventional, and I think that's just right for our situation right now because we don't we don't yeah.

We have one pricing tier, and then the other pricing tier is custom, and we're for we're forcing a demo. That's really a reflection of the timing of where the product is. Like, we don't really know what we should be pricing it at. So we're using it's effectively a filter. It's just just so you know, it's minimum $300 a month.

That's the only real number there, and then you have to you have to get a demo. Yeah. And that that actually leads into my my next update. All all around the sales process and the pricing and all that, it's been it's been a really, really interesting few weeks. So overall, what I'd say is it really feels like like now is the moment.

Like, the company can either continue to grow, you know, okay, but not fast enough, or these next like ninety days is is where the breakout can happen. It really feels like all the latent energy that's been there for the past year with the new product is finally in front of us. So the product has come a really long way. A lot of tech issues behind us. People signing up and having success.

You know, we have like an internal dashboard and it's like it's starting to be exciting. Because we are effectively like an e commerce platform. Right? Because we do the we do the payment processing. So now we can see how much money is being processed on our platform every day, the past seven days, the past thirty days.

We have it broken down by user so I can always see, oh, this person made $8,000 last week but isn't sending any traffic today. Maybe I should reach out to them. So we're starting to build those things up. So on the sales front, I have been in beast mode. I have done an average of two demos per day every single day for the past two weeks.

This week, I've done eight demos, and right now it's Friday morning, and I have three demos scheduled for later on today. So that's 11 demos in the week. So more than average, a little more than two per day. And and those conversations have just been so fascinating. And you wanna talk to your customers, force the demo, and you look, you will get fewer sign ups, but you will get into a lot of conversations.

And so some of the biggest takeaway has been the opportunity on the services side. That's been the biggest takeaway from the demo focus. Every five or six conversations, it turns into a services conversation. Into, so can you guys just do this for us? So can you can we custom design this page and that page?

And can you link it up to our subscription thing? And you know, then they start to once you're in a conversation and they trust you and you're you're in like a a little relationship here, you're talking about their business, they start to come out with what they really want.

This gets back to like those specifics we've talked about from from the start. Yeah. Like, just to give folks an update, I know you talked about doing custom services a few weeks back. Where are you at with it now? I know you you closed a few deals.

Like, how how many deals? Like, how how many how significant is it at this

So so we closed a deal for 10 k, and that the check for 50% deposit arrived, and that was a trip. That's like, damn. That was, you know, a check for that much was as much as we made for many months in the beginning of the company, and now it's one deal. So it's kind of that that's exciting. And right now okay.

So let me get into the numbers. So two demos a week excuse me. Two demos a day for about two weeks. Every five or six conversations ends up talking about about the services side in addition to the software. So right now we have somewhere this has been, I guess, about three weeks where we've really focused on demos.

The past two words been cranking, but three weeks. We have somewhere between ten and thirty k in the pipeline on the services side. So, right, you assume maybe half of that closes. So what what the numbers that I'm looking at is, okay, if so all of this is 100% inbound, which is a completely new experience for us. I have never had that level of inbound interest.

I've always had to go and hustle and outbound and Facebook and networking and whatever to get people to come in, and now this is we're doing nothing.

Where is that coming from? Like Shopify checkout product, that's just a high search term and and you've done some content, you had a podcast, you had articles.

It's not a high search term, but it does get searched and we are the only only solution for it. So people are finding us just because they're searching. They're they're frantically searching for something. Something about their check out about Shopify upsell something, and and we're the only ones they're finding. I think people are coming through Facebook and people are coming through word-of-mouth.

So we're starting to get, you know, an intercom chat that says, hey, someone in a Facebook group I'm in told me that you guys can do upsells for Shopify. Is that right? I have questions. So just more more of that, and a lot of just straight up go to the website, fill out the demo form, book something on my calendar, and then I can see, okay, who are they, how much do they make, and all that. So the the math that that I'm looking at and aiming at, that's all inbound.

I'm just about to start spending $3,000 a month on an outbound campaign. So I'm basically hiring an outsourced SDR. So I went to BuiltWith, and I went to another list company. Ben did a ton of hacking on that list and we we ended up crawling a lot of these sites to figure out which apps they were using. We're just trying to find intel.

You go to Shopify, a list of Shopify has 220,000 stores. What are you supposed to do with that? So we've just been looking at that and say, okay, if we're going to acknowledge that the list makes all the difference, if you go after the right people, you get better results. So we said, you know what? I basically told the sales guys, you're to have to give me a week or two.

I'm just going work on this list because I think it's that important. So once we started focusing on it, we came up with some really interesting stuff. First, we came up with through the help of my my my buddy, Hood. I don't wanna mention maybe because it's a little questionable. We figured out how to determine if a site is a Shopify Plus site or not.

Plus are the guys that pay a thousand to $3,000 a month. So immediately, that's the best identifier. Someone who has that kind of money and has those kind of needs, those are our best people. So everyone told us you can't figure it out. You have to go there.

And we figured out a weird way to do it. I didn't figure it out. This this other guy did, but then we we ran it programmatically, and we basically uncovered all the Shopify Plus stores out of the list of 220 So really exciting. Now I know this this is the gold right here. These x number of stores are like so I'm not even I'm not even going after them first because I want to get the messaging right.

So we did a we just did a lot of work on the list. So now we're gonna combine outbound along with the inbound. So I think I'm just gonna be demo man. I'm already that's already basically what I do. I do demos and, like, and, like, email during the day, and at night, I do strategic work, and it's I like it because it's really exciting right now, but it's a little exhausting.

Yeah. So here's the math.

Well, how how are you, you have a lot of inbound leads right now. You're gonna start having more leads once you fire up the the outbound sales stuff.

Yep.

What about capacity?

I think the the

first Obviously, it'll be a good problem to have but Right.

But it's but it's still a problem. Doesn't mean it's you know, and if you let it become too much of a problem, it's gonna hurt the good side. If I'm giving the same attention to someone who makes less than 10 ks that I do, so I'm making over 100 ks a month, we have a problem. I think the first thing to do is separate the personalized demo from a recorded demo. Right?

So we ask when you sign up for a demo

I don't know. I mean like the custom work. Like, you have somebody to put on put on that one?

My capacity for doing demos? Oh, no. Which is an issue?

No. Dude, I know you could hustle all day long.

The truth is, I have been more energized and more more happy over the past two weeks. Just talked to people and it's so much fun.

Yeah. No, I mean, you close five custom jobs in a month, what happens?

Right. So the capacity of that, let's just say it when ask for the demo form, we ask how much revenue do you make? So what we could do is redirect based on that answer to here's your demo that's recorded or here's my calendar to schedule a demo. So that's the first thing on the the demo capacity. In terms of services capacity, I think that starts off at the math.

The the way I'm looking at it is if I can if an average deal is 5 k, if I can close one deal per week, that's 20 k in services revenue. And in addition to that, those people who do the services revenue have basically been saying yes to $500 a month after the services. Right? Because it's services on top of our software and then they run the software. So if I can do 20 k in services revenue plus $500 times four, 2 k in MRR, And then all the other demos that aren't doing services that's just for the software, that's let's say they average $300 a month.

Let's say we add another, let's just be, let's just call it five customers throughout the month, maybe about one per week. That's another 1,500. So if I can add 20 k in MRR, excuse me, 20 k in services revenue plus the 3,500 that's 3,500 MRR every month, then, you know, give give that six months to a year of doing that every month, then we're gonna be in in a good place. Right? So then I look at that and I say, okay.

Is that I'm gonna spend 3 k a month on the the outsourced SDR? I'm gonna end up needing a services team in Slovenia that I'll just silo off. That way, the the the product guys can just focus on building up the product, and then we can have, like, one developer and one designer on a services team, and that'll probably cost me somewhere in the vicinity of 8 k a month. So I was like, okay, I'm starting to see where this makes sense. And then the x factor will be if we can drive our average deal number from 5 k up closer to 10 and beyond that, then then we have a business.

Yeah.

Yeah. I like it. And I I mean in in the early months to a year, it's, you know, you could start with one guy, you could you could do a a short waiting list, you can schedule the custom jobs in, like this one will start next month and and kinda, you know, and then and then ramp up until you have the the the developers to do it and, I like it.

Yeah. So we'll see. I'll I'll look forward to giving updates on how close to reality the that that ends up being. Do we do do better than that? Do we do worse?

Yeah. But that's that's kind of the focus.

And I love that model, man. I'll I'll never stop saying it. The services plus software and You need the revenue, man. The the MRI Yeah. You need the revenue to sustain the whole thing, especially early on.

But then it's also like you said, those custom jobs turn into 500 a month each.

And Right. So it's not separate.

Yeah. It those those custom jobs are the higher end customers who are willing to buy into the higher end tier, and they pay for this custom work, so they're kind of locked in. And they're much much more much less likely to cancel anytime in the near future.

I love it. Yep. So I I see that and I know if that works, we're gonna be in great shape. So I basically that's why I said before like this really feels like this is it. If we can make that work over the next ninety days, then you know, we'll finally get to where we've been working to get to for for two years.

Cool.

It's crazy how long it takes.

It's exhausting.

I know. It is. Let's see. So my next thing here is the services side of things. We're doing some tweaking to our strategy that we do for clients.

And it's like, do we really need to take on this extra big revamping of something right now while we're trying to launch these other products? Yes. I guess I'm a crazy idiot who wants to do it right now. But right before I go on a month long traveling trip. Yeah.

I I think basically the goal now is we've been doing the content serve the done for you content productized service for almost two like eighteen months, maybe twenty months at this point. Learned a lot and had some really successful clients with it, had a bunch of clients cancel over time. And, you know, the thing continues to sustain and and and grow. There there have been some ups and downs, but it's been, you know, pretty pretty sustainable. But, you know, I'm just trying to learn about like the the various things that we do, what's actually moving the needle and how can we improve the the deliverable and drive more and better results for for clients.

And the the conclusion that that I'm coming to is to is for us to kind of embrace this, like, the hub and spoke strategy, if you will, of of content marketing. It goes by that name a lot. I've seen it kind of go by many different names, and and it's not really a new concept by any means. But I I think more and more, especially software and SaaS companies are going with this hub and spoke or like what we're calling like a resource hub model where yeah. You're you're publishing new content to your blog every week, but especially in the early months of your content strategy, it's about being really strategic and putting all of your resources into this one comprehensive multi page guide on on one high value topic that your that your customers are searching for, that there's some high search volume for that's directly related to the problem that your company solves.

And and it's really tackling that. And you see this being done really effectively on places like HelpScout, you know, Buffer, Zapier, like they these guys are all doing these these resource hubs, you know, if you I think Help Scout has has a whole page of them, but

like they have

Yeah. One Like Scout. All about, like like the founder's guide to customer acquisition. And it's a it's a big landing page, a deep dive article right there, but then it links off to, like, 10 chapters on subtopics, all about customer acquisition, tackling all the different angles and the specifics of that. And so basically and and the the nice thing about what we do is that we don't really have to change a whole lot in in in our process.

We we're now just gonna structure the first three months of a client's engagement to building out your first resource hub.

Okay. So I was gonna ask, is this like an optional strategy that people can choose or this is like

This is gonna this is gonna be the new thing that we do for all all new clients coming in. We're also gonna start doing it for existing clients, but but we're gonna start with with new clients first and then phase in everyone else. Alright.

I like I that very much. I like being able to to explain that in the sales process.

Yeah. And that's and as you know,

Good volume.

This comes back into the website redesign. Like it was also an opportunity to rewrite the whole value proposition of of the service. Know, some parts are kept the same, but but now it's, you know, I'm focusing on, like, we're gonna help help you build this content asset and keep keep building that. And then the other piece is we're gonna do more to make it like evergreen email automation. So all the all the little articles that we're producing, we're gonna add those to like a long evergreen sequence of content so that after you work with us for a number of months, you're gonna have this content stream that's just churning out to all of your subscribers and your leads and and and that sort of thing.

So what I'm working on right now is, you know, mostly on that redesign, but but I'm also working with the team on like how can we update our new client onboarding process and our content strategy early on to fit this new resource hub model. And so there are some tweaks to to our process that we need to make. I'm also tweaking my sales demo to to focus on this new strategy and and kind of get new clients on board. And and by the way, this is coming out of, like, direct requests. Like, a lot of our a lot of recent leads as as well as some clients have asked, you know, specifically, like, can we have more of like a resource hub instead of just weekly blog articles?

We still wanna have you guys create content on a weekly basis, but have it be more strategic.

Okay.

And so, you know, that's that's essentially where this idea came from. It's like somebody literally asked us for that. And I was like, you know

That makes sense. You know, like, it also elevates you. And you're not you're not writing blog posts. You're like creating the content like like Hive.

Yeah. Exactly. And and at the end of this three month process of building out your your resource hub, we repack we we package all that content into a downloadable ebook, you know, that's like 10 chapters long because it's like 10 articles long. And Right.

It it was thought out ahead of time to all be centered around a cohesive Yeah. Subject.

Yeah. And and, you know, we'll we'll go from like, alright, we spend the first three months doing resource hub number one, and then we move on to doing like a second resource hub on a different related or a different topic that's important to your business, and then kinda move on from there, you know, or or keep growing out the the first one.

That's awesome. You're basically writing a book. It just happens to be one chapter at a time every week. Yeah. And then load it up into the email sequence and then publish as a book at the end of that.

Yeah. And and we'll still do the content upgrades on every article setting all that up.

Are you gonna raise prices with it?

Someday. Soon. Probably once these other products launch, we we will be raising the prices. But I think for right now, it'll you know, again, it already fits our current pricing structure and same monthly, quarterly pricing, and it's just that now we're gonna kinda structure things in this more strategic way. And that's so it's it is a little bit of a a heavy lift to get these to figure out what what are the new step by step processes that we're doing and get the team on board with, alright.

This is how we did things before, and now we're gonna do things slightly differently and get all the different, like, the managers and the writers on board with that. And then me, like, how do how do I explain this to new leads as they come through? So it's a little bit of a of a process.

And trying to think it's worth it. It's worth it. It makes a lot of sense. It's very specific. It's a great sell.

It's gonna line up nicely with the with the training. Right? You you could you could teach that strategy as part of the training also, and then and then it makes a lot of sense to escalate that to, oh, really buy in that strategy. Maybe I could just hire Brian to do it for me, and I'll I'll just take the $500 I spent on this training and get a credit for that while that, and then I can also use Brian's software, and it's it's it's starting to line up nicely.

Yeah. That's how it's all that's that's the that's the game plan. It's just not enough hours in the day or days in the week, you know. Yeah. I hear you.

Did you have any other updates?

I mean, I could talk on and on forever, but we should probably call it a day.

Yeah. The only the only last thing I I just wanted to mention is real quick is that that Audience Ops calendar, my goal was to get that out to our beta customers this month, December. And we're close. We're I I think that we can do it within the next two weeks. We've built a lot of features.

He's he's come along much faster. My my developer has, except he recently had a had a baby, which slowed him down for is a great great thing, but, you know, for two weeks there, he he had to kinda take off.

Nice baby you have there.

I know. Come on. But we're basically one big feature away now. Like, he's building our our automated checklists feature. Once that's built, I'm hoping, you know, by around Christmas time is when I'll kinda send the email to our 14 beta, you know, prepaid customers there to get them into the app and and starting to use it, and then we'll we'll keep pushing along with with new features after that.

Cool, man. I I would I wanna talk about two things that have been very helpful for me, talking about the sales and the demos. The first thing is Steli, our homie from close.io, wrote a book called product demos that sell, and that is so so good. Right? You're just you're hearing from someone who does this stuff for a living and enjoys it in Steli, and then it just points out everything you're doing wrong.

You're focusing on the product too much instead of the instead of the the benefit, all these different things, and he gets tactical. How to make sure that as many people show up to the demo. So that book is a gem, and it's free. You get on Amazon, you can get it on their site. So we'll we'll link that up in the show notes.

That has been awesome. And the other one is from our boy Ian Landsman, over at Helpspot. He wrote a book called Securing the Five Figure Sale. Right? And it's very specific.

It's literally how bootstrap businesses can successfully enter the enterprise. So I saw a tweet from you actually, Brian, talking about that book. I downloaded it. I've been reading it, and I have a call with Ian today to kinda get into more specifics. So those two books, Product Demos That Sell by Steli, and then Securing the Five Figure Sale by Ian, hugely helpful in all the stuff that I've been doing on the sales front.

Yeah. Those guys definitely know their stuff when it comes to well, Steli selling to basically anyone and especially selling to the enterprise. And I was I was a guest on on Ian and Andrew's bootstrapped.fm. I don't I don't that episode has come out yet, but sometime in the next month or two. Cool.

Yeah. Good stuff, man.

Alright, buddy. Have a great weekend. I'm gonna take my kids sledding again today hopefully. Actually That's awesome. Our annual snow here in Portland, Oregon.

Sweet. Where everything shuts down and the schools close the night before at the threat of snow. They don't have any clouds or salts or sand.

Yep. Yeah. We're still waiting for it over here. But I'm

sure you'll get it. Yep. Alright. Cool, man. Good one today.

Yeah. Definitely. Later.