Bootstrapped Web

Hey. Hey. We're back here at Bootstrapped Web. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?

Good, man. Good to be back.

Yeah. So, here we are in the February.

I'm Two weeks in a row.

Two weeks in a row. We made it. Here we go. I'm here in Connecticut sitting under about two feet of snow. We just got dumped on yesterday, and I drove straight through the thick of it because I was driving home from Big Snow Tiny How was that?

I wanna hear about it. I saw some pictures on Twitter or Instagram, whatever it was. Yeah. So it was a good time. This was the fourth annual Big Snow Tiny Comp in Vermont.

There there are now three trips. There there's one happening out in Colorado, one was out in France, but this one is in Vermont. And, yeah. Always a good time, and it didn't disappoint this year. Either Brad, Tunar, and I have have been organizing it, been going back to the same house.

Got a really great group this year. What we always try to do is is invite back five people from previous years and then keep five spots open for new people. So it's always always a good mix, and and that's what we had. Two two pretty good days of of snowboarding up in Vermont, pretty good conditions and everything. So that was a lot of fun and just really great talks on the chair lifts at in the house.

You know, we always basically, we tell all attendees to to prepare some sort of talk, like a half an hour you get a half an hour session.

Or share something that you're working on that's working, something that you've learned, any anything of that sort?

Exactly. It's like think of it like part mastermind, but but part attendee talks at micro count kind of thing.

Right. That's so great to be able to do that with a group of 10 people. You can really get into it, ask questions, and ask for detail.

I think we leaned more on the mastermind side of things like like, you know, show what you've been working on, show what you're focused on right now, and then just get feedback from the group. And and everybody just, you know, chimes in with ideas, questions, and, you know, tear downs and that sort of stuff. Yeah. I've been I've

been really interested lately in the idea of I think it was Tim Ferriss' podcast I was listening to with Kara Swisher, which is very it a great episode actually. And she was talking about, you know, rejecting the duality of choices where it's like, you can have a or you can have b. I'm really interested in the ability to be like, well, I like I don't like either of those. And if we are more creative about it, we force ourselves to be more more creative, then there's possibly a c that's better than a and b. So don't don't make me choose between those two.

And I feel like that that mastermind environment let lets you do that because you get outside perspective.

Yeah. Yeah. And and I think it's also really energizing for everybody in the room to to think about other people's businesses. And that and that's the true of any mastermind. But but here, we're also, like, meeting people for the first time.

So it's, like, exciting. I get to hear about all I I get to hear, like, on a pretty deep level all about somebody's business over like a three day period and either someone that I just met or someone I I haven't seen in a while. And that's just really fun.

Yeah. It's cool people come up with these days to Oh, yeah. To run a business, to make money, to

Oh, man. Do what they wanna do. And we had a really great group and the diversity of of businesses, you know. We had, you know, Chad Deshaun who's who's selling boardgametables.com. So, you know, been manufacturing or creating custom tables, and then now he's he did a pretty crazy successful kick starter to to start building, you know, manufactured in China board game tables.

So that was pretty crazy. Robert Hartline came back this year. He's doing call proof SaaS, like, application and several other, you know, very big businesses. Chris Neville was doing he just started up this and basically validated the this app for people interested in in political issues and they wanna send a letter to their congressman or their senator or their local representative, his app makes it really really easy to do that, like with one click. He can like kinda connect to some APIs and then actually write, print, pack, and mail a physical letter to to the correct person.

And and and he's kinda set it up so that it's, like, shared through Facebook, so there's, a viral aspect to it. Like, hey, I just sent this, you know, this this letter to to my congressman. Here's what it is. Like, you should send one too. And and then we and the feedback that we were giving him and I don't know whether he's gonna do this or not, but if I wanna send one letter, I can also, instead of paying $1, pay $10 to fund it for 10 other people to send.

So it's free for them

because you wanna do it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's just an interesting thing. We, know, we batted that around for a bit.

Yeah. There's there's a lot of energy in that sector, let's say.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Oh my oh my god. Some of the conversations.

I mean, we were like, you could you can connect that to Zapier to Trump's Twitter account. So every time he, like, he sends it out, could blast out a newsletter. You know? Oh, man. That was crazy.

You know, Mike Taber was there talking about BlueTick. That was cool. You know, Brad Tunar with his WordPress plugins and just a really good good mix of of conversations. And I just love the the format where it's like you get your session and we plan a schedule so everybody gets a dedicated thirty minutes. Let's all talk about your business.

But in addition to that, we're we're hanging out on chairlifts, we're doing dinner, we're doing breakfast, we're doing you know, so you you get to have these like these extended conversations and you just really dig in. I I actually got some pretty good ideas for running Facebook ads because that's kind of like my next step on the marketing side of things. And a couple of guys there have had been doing Facebook ads for a while, they they had some pretty good insights. Yeah. It's just a lot of a lot of lot of good good ideas.

Now now I'm like, today, it's Friday. I'm I'm I'm back to work and and, you know, really energized to get to get back into it. But then, of course, tomorrow, my family is heading back in the car, back up to Vermont. We're going on another trip, hanging out with my brother and and and his wife. So

he just like came home, just touched your bed for like a little bit of sleep and then go back.

Came home, shoveled out my driveway, and slept one night, and now we're gonna go back to to Vermont. Alright. Alright. Let's keep moving. Yep.

Cool, man.

Yeah. What's up by you? No ski trips, but been been been hard at work. I have done a good job being productive lately, which is which feels good. I've tried to take on a new system.

First of all, I have like two parts of my working life. I have the side that's like what I think is valuable. You know, Working on the product, working on marketing, doing sales, talking to customers, doing support, talking to the team, moving things forward. And then I have this other side that I just dread and I always talk about. And it's the taxes, and the filings, and business insurance, and updating my terms of service, and the stuff that nobody sees and nobody cares about.

Just finished up my taxes finally.

Right, but you like have to do this stuff, and I end up putting it off, and I feel guilty about it, and it weighs on the other, whatever. So, I kind of tackled that this week, and that felt so good, and it's never as bad as you think it's gonna be, but I just made, I made piles, I said this is the state of Oregon, this is a pile for the state of New York, this is a pile for insurance, just went, and and I said one day, one pile. Today I'm going to finish any issues with the state of Oregon, and then I stopped. Instead of looking at it and being like, oh my god, there's so many different people to call, things to pay, things to keep track of. I just like separated out.

Was like, state of New York is gonna be on Wednesday. That's it. So now it's Friday, I'm almost done with all of that stuff. It feels good. I have some few things to check up on, but that felt good.

It's amazing. Something that you hate and like weighs on you, you just get it done and everything feels better to move forward with the stuff you actually care about.

Do you use a bookkeeping service or bookkeeper?

I have a lawyer, bookkeeper and accountant, and I still feel weighed down by everything.

Drives me nuts. Yeah.

You know, I I it's as someone I get frustrated and I just take pictures, you know, I scan with my phone of like letters from New York State Department of Workers' compensation.

Shoot it

up to somebody.

I I do that all the time, and I send it to gusto support. I'm like, do I need to care about this, or do you guys handle that? Like yeah. And I've been using a bookkeeper for over a year now, which which was not like, I started with her in the 2015, and we were working out our systems then, but it was complicated because, like, half the year was not her, half the year was. And then the good thing was, like, 2016 from start to finish was was her, and we kinda worked out our categories and and all that.

So that definitely made it easier this time around. But there there were like, the yeah. Me too. Like, the last two weeks, I was doing a lot of back and forth with her to kinda reconcile a few numbers and and answer a few questions from my accountant and get that all squared away. But literally today, before this call, I I signed the e file and like it's So good to go for you.

Yeah. And the the the more important side that's more interesting is we we hired a new developer. We've been talking about it. I've been telling the team to hire us since September, and we didn't do it. And then all of a sudden we just we just we just got to the point where we know what we need to do and what we need to build.

It's just a matter of how long it's gonna take us. And it was just didn't make sense anymore for what was on our current plate. You know, why are we going slower? It doesn't doesn't make sense. So we kinda put out some feelers.

I used the same recruiter actually as the guy who initially found Rock, our lead developer in Slovenia. And we tried really hard to make sure the person was in Slovenia also, so they could be in the same office.

Who's the recruiter?

It's a friend of mine. It's a guy Mitte, and he's just really dialed in to that community over there.

Oh, okay.

So he does he does a recruiting for me. It's it's actually phenomenal. I can't recommend him enough.

So so is he like, do you do any sort of like test projects or is that like something that he does?

He he does. He sends them insane math questions that I would never ever ever ever get. And he sends back the responses and you're like wow, these people are so much smarter than I am. It's great. There's an odd satisfaction in hiring people.

I never thought about hiring as something I liked or you know, don't know, just don't think about it.

You like it when you're not doing the vetting.

Well, yes, but then there's like a second part to it, which is like sales. It's like personal sales, because especially people who are talented and smart, they have options. So it's like you need to make a good first impression, and that we've been good at. So we've gotten lucky twice with our two developers, Rock and Yan, and we're hoping to get lucky again. So this kid is 21 years old, like a whiz kid who's been coding since he was, like, five sort of thing.

He's done a bunch of Techstars and SF startups and then went back to Slovenia and and then did some freelancing, and now we kinda just you know, he's just kind of interested in what we're doing. It's a small team that he wants to be a part of. So we're hoping to get lucky again. So that that was an interesting process to so along with that came the the the feeling for the first time that we need a little bit more structure to our management. Right?

Right now it's effectively a group of friends. I'd say about two weeks ago, I pulled out the boss card for the first time in a long time. And I basically gave the I don't like giving these speeches, but every once in a while I have to give the speech, and I did one of those. And along with that, Ben, right, as my co founder, the person on the inside with me, we started talking about, okay, we need to do weekly one on ones, we need to check-in with people, we need to make sure people are happy, know, and it's still really small, but we like, we have to do this. Right right as we're hiring someone else, we're like, we we kinda have to start getting that in order.

I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but what I've been doing is I'll just preface it with that.

Not sure if this is gonna work,

but No. No. I mean, so we've been doing this for like six months at least. One of the managers on my team, we almost, I don't know, a year ago, we transitioned her into being a team manager. So now instead of being client facing, now she's like the internal team manager.

Literally, her whole role is there to support everybody else on our team. And she holds one on one calls with everyone on a monthly basis. And then she also does like small group calls with with writers. That's supposed to be more of like a writing support group every week. She also does one on ones with everyone and then she gives me a report coming out of those.

Like, she'll just like write up notes and and I also have a call with her to get the lowdown. And I mean, of course, I talk to the team on a fairly regular basis too, but it tends to be more on Slack and email and occasionally some group calls, but it's not like a regular check-in that I have with with employees. Like, she kinda does that, and then she gives me that that report.

Big responsibility.

Yeah. I mean, you know, like, she's not talking about, like, compensation or anything like that. She's just talking about, like, they're like

Yeah. But you want people to stick around, you need to if they're unhappy for some reason, you need to be aware of that as early as possible. Right? Because someone's leaving someone leaving is a disaster. Someone valuable to your team is leaving, and it was preventable, and that's a disaster.

I think part of the benefit of this is that she's able to spot issues that are sometimes invisible to me. I think that the team might sometimes feel a little bit more comfortable airing their issues and problems with her rather than because I have found that when I have calls with people, everything seems to be going great. And then a few weeks later, these issues pop up. You know? So sometimes like that, like, you know, being the boss or whatever is

Yeah. How many people you have on the team total now?

You know, we have, like, different departments, so it's it's and and different But

still, like, oh, with all the tentacles, what does it include? We're going from four to five, and I'm like a little I I I know it's gonna start to get more complex. You're you're you're way beyond that.

Alright. So there are 13 people, not including myself, on the audience ops service today. 14 sorry. 14. 14 on the service side of things and then there are four developers that I work with.

Oh, wow. You you have complexity.

Yep. So it's like a total of of, you know, like 18 people. But like, it's in a lot of ways, it's like two teams. It's the service team, the the 14 people there, and then it's like me working with the four developers.

Right. Right. They're separate. Yeah.

I mean, they're all in the same Slack chat room and everyone knows everyone's name, but like, they don't really interact too much.

Cool. I got I got more. Let me keep going. Yeah. Go for it.

I'm gonna make another Josh Pigford appearance here two weeks in a row.

We got it. We should get him on.

I I I was thinking the same thing. He wrote another great medium article, and he touched on something that I haven't been able to articulate, but that I talk about regularly with Ben, begs a big consumer of startup content. What's happening in the startup world, new technologies, new blog posts, what are Heaton and Sully talking about and that's good and I did that for a while also. But somewhere about a year ago, I just stopped consuming advice. Every once in a while I'm like, oh I'm washing dishes, let me just, I don't know.

So my default is entertainment. My default is not business. I listen to Joe Rogan and whatever else. Every once in a while I consume it and I haven't been able to touch on like, why am I allergic to it? Am being a pussy?

Is it like, do I just not want to hear from people who are more successful than I am? And I'm trying to like diagnose, is it from a negative point of view that I don't want to hear about people having more success? I don't want that to affect me emotionally or what? What is it? So Josh wrote this article about like the startup echo chamber.

They talked about there's just so much advice that is just, you can't take because it worked for them in their situation. And he was basically saying that he kind of stopped consuming also. And it helped me put my finger on like, yeah, it's not that I'm like scared of hearing about other people's success. It's really more like, kinda kinda it's fun it's business fundamentals. Right?

You need to attract customers,

give them something valuable. It's kinda like how much more do you really want? It's it gets overwhelming. I have cut down a lot on the consuming content that's, like, educational. And I guess I'm the same with, like, business books too.

Like, I I I don't really read or listen to a ton of business books. Maybe just a couple every year, but only in bits and pieces. And so I the podcast that I tend to tune into are one of two things, like entertainment and I would throw I I listen to a lot of news, like, you know, world news, politics, that kind of crap, and some comedy stuff. And and then, like, the the business stuff is like what our friends are up to. What I'm I'm interested in in hearing the week like like our podcast that It's like like a Like, like a like, kind of the week to week update.

I like to listen to, like, what, like, Dave and Craig are up to, what Rob and Mike are up to. Frankly, I don't think that there are enough podcasts that are doing that are using the model that we're using here. Like, Bootstrappers out there, I want you guys to fucking start up some more podcasts so I can listen to to more of these. I mean

I wanna hear about the journey. Don't don't tell me what I should don't tell me what I should be doing.

Brechtin and Scott, you know, turned theirs off. Justin and and Greg turn are have just ended theirs. It's like, dude, come on. The in some ways, like, this is how we communicate all years is over the air. You know?

So I I wanna hear more more of those. And if anybody's going to MicroConf and they have a a podcast that they don't know about, I wanna hear about it. But then there are bits and pieces when I'm just starting to work on some initiative that I that I need to get up to speed on, that's when I seek out targeted material. Like, right right now, I'm thinking a lot about it and I'm planning Facebook ads. So I am devouring John Loomer's blog.

Right. You know? And then it's like for you, like I have decided to implement Facebook ads. Now I'm gonna educate myself on what's going on in that world. It's not like I'm just gonna go my merry way and then a Mixergy interview is gonna convince me that I should be doing some type of outbound this or that, and then all of sudden, you're derailing my week based on that.

Like that that doesn't that doesn't feel right.

Yeah. The other thing that I do sometimes is is I'll listen to like Gary Vee really just to get like pumped up in the morning and get the get the like adrenaline and the inspiration juices going, you know? And it's kinda that is like borderline just entertainment just hearing to this, you know, these like just crazy rants like incoherent like My worlds

collided last week when Gary Vee went on the Joe Rogan podcast. And I was like, yes, this whole thing.

Yeah. I haven't listened to Rogan. I've I've seen him around but I haven't gotten into his podcast. I like listen to WTF every now and then. Yeah.

Some of the news stuff at the New York Times podcast, that that kind of boring stuff. So well, actually, thinking about talking about hiring, I I kinda touched on this last week, I think, about we how we also hired a second developer.

That's right. To go faster.

Yeah. To go faster. I I don't use, like, Toptal or or or an outsourced recruiter like you do. I've always got or at least lately, I've been going the Upwork route specifically for developers. I don't really use Upwork for anything else except for hiring developers.

That worked out really well. You know, I I I just put up a an ad. I narrowed it down to like three top candidates based on their ability to to respond to the ad and their communication. So, like, three guys that I I got a good feel for, and they claimed that and they showed some examples of of the specific experience. The other good thing about hiring the second developer rather than the first developer is like now we know the exact technologies they need to be fluent in.

I I know that we need a Laravel and someone who who's into Vue JS. Those are the two that we've been using. So we've got a couple there and then I I basically gave him the same test project that my first developer went through. And then I just had my first developer and he's like the lead guy on on this team now. Like, he reviewed the code and showed me like these are where some some holes, but overall it's looking good.

And then so brought him on. He's been great communication, you know, been picking things up really well. We we came to an agreement and and he's been working out well and and we are we are definitely moving faster. Like, was problem solved. Like, I think he's been on the team for almost a full month now.

Oh, wow. And so There's danger to slow down with the new developer. Right? At least in the beginning, there's some there's some time to ramp up.

Yeah. I was afraid of that too. But it there really wasn't. Like, I gave him some low hanging fruit, really simple tasks that have just been on on our list of two things to do. So he tackled those first and then I gave him a slightly bigger project.

And right now, he's tackling like a really big multi week project. And I have our first developer working on a separate big project. So I can so we can have two big features being built simultaneously, which

Oh, yes.

We couldn't do that before.

Yeah. We we

just did our planning stand up this morning before. We do from like 08:30 to ten on Fridays. And we look at what got done this week, what didn't get done this week that was supposed to, and then what does next week look like. We put some hours next to tasks to kind of make sure everyone's schedules full in the right way, not overly full, leaving room for issues that pop up that are unexpected, and then all of sudden we look at a new developer, all of sudden it's like a third stream. It's like now we have a third place to put tasks.

If I looked at those tasks, and I was like, if those get done, that's magic. Everything stays the same, but now these get done when they would not have gotten done. And then once you establish that, you can't imagine going back to being slow.

I guess maybe on the same note, I was just writing I'm in the middle of right now of writing my usual Friday notes email that I'm gonna send out later today. And the thing that I'm writing about is making that decision, drawing that line between going from from prelaunch to launch.

Okay.

In in terms of the feature roadmap.

Mhmm. Alright. What you what actually needs to get done before you launch and what can happen after?

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, really my goal from the start was to build like start like the first lines of code to get to launch a six month period. And we're right in the home stretch right now. I you know, maybe thirty days behind schedule, I'd say.

But, you know, March it's looking like March where I'm gonna start inviting more paying customers in into the app. And, I mean, I'm pretty happy with that. Like, this is a pretty complex application that that we managed to to build and and hustle with. But I think we put I I got into a really good groove with the developers in terms of our workflow and assigning tasks. And and also, like, we got on a really good communication level where we know exactly how technical we need to be when we communicate with each other.

And we know that and and they are super clear on the fact that speed is my number one priority. And and

Right. It's good to communicate that. Yeah. Because there there's there's compromises to be made between speed and perfection. Yeah.

Absolutely. Good to know which way to lean.

Yeah. And and like like the other day, you know, he he brought up like, hey, you know, Vue two point o just came out. We might wanna think about upgrading all of our code. There are some performance benefits in all this. And and I was like, yep.

So Yes. It it sound sounds like a good idea, but but it sounds like something we'll push off for a couple months because we don't have we don't need it for launch. And he's like, I knew you were gonna say that. So, yeah,

I'm on Yeah. That's I'm laughing specifically at that because we we had the same thing come up with Angular too. Right? Just came out. But we we have made a decision to implement.

Yeah. Move to Angular two.

My question to him was, I was like, alright. So it sounds pretty good. Are are there any like noticeable differences that users will see and like, well and he was like, I mean, probably not, but it but it will help us build features faster, which which makes sense. And I was like, alright. I mean, at some point, it it's something we should do, but it's not this month.

I know. Yeah. For for us, it it didn't make sense to do. It did. We've had challenges and we have some really big challenges coming up around speed.

We want our checkout page to be instantaneous. That's the word I use. Instant. I don't care what the correct terminology is. When the page loads, I want it to be an instant.

Bang. You go to Shopify, you go to Shopify store, you hit checkout, it is instantaneous. There is zero delay thinking throttle, there's nothing. And so we demand that of ourselves, but at the same time, we want people to like be able to edit that page with an editor. And so there's all these layers of HTML, and then CSS, and then JavaScript, and then JSON, and all these different things involved in that page, and off the bat we didn't build it perfectly.

And then all a sudden Angular two comes along, and we're like, alright, so gives us a better ability to do templating. We can separate a bunch of things out. We can get as close to that instant load as possible. We are bringing on some really large customers in March and April. So like, you know, one of our developers, all they're doing is infrastructure, servers, databases, all this stuff.

So it made sense to do that and move to Angular two for the front end pages at the same time. And just kinda like, I guess we're confident enough in the product market fit side of things that we no longer feel like let's just make sure people want to pay for it. We're now saying to ourselves, let's not build it for a 100 users. Let's just build it for a thousand users because it's just a matter of time. So we're, like, over investing, which feels a little risky, but it feels right.

Yeah. But like you said last week, I mean, now you're at that point where you're you're further along, you have users in it. You know, you like, you're not trying to get to launch like where I'm at right now. And we have areas of the app that are too slow in my opinion too, but it's about getting the core features built, you know. And and I think, yeah, in your case, you're you're getting up to, that optimization and

Well well, here's the thing. Alright. So actually, this is like a problem I have coming up. It would be great to get your take on it and just kind of talk about it publicly. I think a lot of people have the same issue.

Okay. So, so we're, we're past launch, but we're, there's almost like a second launch that needs to happen, which is like the actual marketing push. Right now I'm facing a very similar situation than you and saying what needs to happen before the marketing push can happen and what can wait till after. Right? So everything works now and it works well.

So we're not gonna wait for Angular two rewrite. We're not gonna wait for all the crazy scaling infrastructure. There's no reason that marketing should wait for that stuff. But there are certain things that marketing needs to wait for. Right now our marketing site only talks about one side of our product.

So we need to update that. That's kind of obvious. The other big thing is the signup process needs to change. Right now we require a demo and we don't want to require demo. We want people to sign up.

So right, there's like a few things that are genuinely blocking the ability to start spending money on marketing.

So you're talking about like building things on the marketing side, not like these features of the app need to be shipped before we open up to the masses?

Right. The the like there's one feature that we wanna finish up before we start pushing marketing. That'll go to production on Monday after some QA testing. Then the other things are just some UI updates that we need to do, and then the marketing side. So it's like, okay.

Right? So it's almost like another launch list of, like Yeah. When you could actually when you feel comfortable.

I think in some ways, I jumped not jumped to the gun, but I I did work the last two months on putting all these marketing pieces in place, like the the website redesign, redid our drip campaigns, you know, recorded that that recorded webinar and and the video lead magnets and all that stuff is like now that stuff is done and and ready, but I have not pulled the trigger on on the Facebook ads and everything.

Right.

Okay. So I did it I did But we haven't but I'm I'm I'm also thinking, like, it's not ready to to start firing up Facebook ads, except I I do know that it will take several months to Facebook ads working, so I should just start it sooner. So yeah, I'm I'm kinda on Right.

Right. So it's a tricky thing. So I did I did it in the reverse way where we we focused much more on the product. And okay. So now I'm getting to the point where I need to do all that marketing work that you said you just did.

So here's where I would like advice. How do you think I should go about creating those assets? Should do it myself? Should I hire a marketer like in house? Should I get an intern?

Should I hire hire marketing agency?

The two things that you just mentioned, maybe there's other stuff, but you said there's you need to tweak the website redesign to to focus on the full product, not just one side of it?

Yeah, that's as good as done. We have a designer that we work with, I go through with him and Ben, we think about the copy, we think about the whole thing. That we can do internally, no problem. Right. We just update the site.

Good. And the same with the signup process. It's just kind of thinking through what we want to do. Do we want to force someone to talk to us before they launch whatever. But once that let's assume that's in place.

Now you need stuff. You need landing pages, you need PDF documents, you need case studies, you need videos. So those those like marketing materials, that's what I'm I'm looking at. I'm like, should I just put it all on on myself?

Yeah. Like the way that I thought about it was, I just kinda started with the end in mind and and I just use notepads and like bullet lists. I don't just start listing the assets that I needed to build. I basically first, mapped out the funnel. And and the the life cycle that an email subscriber will go through, that that that was like the very first thing that I kinda mapped out.

This was during the trip. In my notes document, just like, you know, these are the entry points where new subscribers come in. These are the lead magnets that will attract them, and then they go through a sequence. And if they have not done this yet, then they're gonna be pitched on this webinar. And and and if they indicate interest in this product, then they're gonna go down that funnel.

And for that, we're gonna need five case studies. And for this one, we're we're gonna do some sort of like video series. And like I kinda optimized it from there. And then once I have that like ideal end product marketing funnel in place, then literally that same bullet list I are like check mark lists. So then it's a matter of spending the next two months like building each of those assets.

And I still have things in my marketing funnel and drip where it's like, that's like an open space for like a case study that I haven't created yet.

Right. So the mapping out, I enjoy. Now the the issue is, I'm concerned that if I put it, if I expect myself to actually create all the assets, the case studies and the email sequence and all that, I feel like I'm gonna go slow because I get so busy during the day with what's happening in real time. Right, like support and sales are like active fires. Like during the day it's so easy to just get sucked into them because they're right in front of you, the people emailing you, you're doing a demo.

But the the marketing the marketing starts like get pushed to the side, and I don't I don't want that to happen.

I did delegate some pieces, but like the marketing and the design and the messaging, that's a big part of my role on the team. So I I handle a lot of it myself. Like case studies for the Audience Ops service, those were written by our our writers and they and and they interviewed our clients and they did the case studies. And then I just put them into the drip sequence. So that was delegated.

And like on the on the website redesign, you know, like, come from a web design background, so and I wrote all the copy and I did the design, but the illustrations, I had my designer create those illustrations, you know. Like, so little pieces that I know that I'm not ideal at doing it, I'll I'll let somebody who's better than me do that.

Yeah. It's almost like if if I could just create everything in Google Docs, and then hand it off, I I would be so much more efficient. Because it my problem is I could write in the Google Doc, no problem. Whether it's an email or a case study, Then once I start getting obsessed with how it looks, the end product, that's when I get bogged down and I don't finish it. It's almost like I just need to hand off the Google Doc and say, here's an example of two case study formats that I like.

Take what I wrote and put into that. Yeah. That's how it actually get done.

Yeah. I mean, case studies, you know, they should probably

be built off of like an inner interview with the with the client or with the customer. Right?

Yeah. It depends. It depends. The case studies that I've done are I I wanna frame them. I I want control of the narrative.

So I don't I don't interview. I ask for a testimonial. So there's a direct quote from the customer inside of the case study. But I want to present the case study the way I wanna present it. So, you know, so I I make it much more rigid where it's like it's like, here was here was the problem, and then here's the results.

We kinda did that too. Like, our our writers did do interviews with a couple of our clients, and then out of that, they drafted the article, which I thought were was really good because it had multiple quotes about multiple aspects of it. It wasn't just one testimonial. And and then I went back and I I read their drafts. I don't I don't normally do a lot of editing of our articles, but for these, I I heavily looked at them and and I especially edited, like, or or I asked the writers to edit, like, you know, change the intro to make it more about, this was the problem and then frame it up and and this was, the end result and here's the story of how we got there and and and that and that kind of stuff.

So

And so did you did you build out multiple funnels in your outline or did you try to tackle one funnel at a time and like to completion?

Yeah. So again, I have three products, we talked about this a little bit. It's basically one funnel and then they can go down different routes as they raise their hand or as they take certain actions. So

And that's all in drip with tags, basically?

Yeah. But but the other thing is that some of our like, two of our products really, all three of our our products overlap and they can be sold together in many ways. So like the training product and the and the calendar software are very much companion products. Like, don't have to buy both, but they are both designed for each other. If that if that makes sense.

So the webinar that I put together offers a bun a package deal for the two of them together. That's that's the the deal at the end of the webinar. So most of the the funnel as I set it up for this year is they come into the top with a with like a short video, then they get invited to the to the recorded webinar, which is a longer recorded video that teaches a bunch of stuff and it kinda showcases our calendar software. And then at the end, it it pitches our training product plus our calendar software. And I also kinda mentioned, like, and we do some done for you content if that's and so like, I think they're through their life cycle, like, leads will naturally drip into the content service.

I'm not actively promoting that, but it's it's known that it's it's there and and it just attracts attention anyway. So but then so so basically, the way that I set it up is there are multiple entry points where new people can enter the list. So content upgrades, downloading the sample articles off of the homepage, you know, getting the free video, getting into the webinar. These are entry points where new people can come in. And then they go through a life cycle, they get onto our newsletters campaign, which is a weekly evergreen campaign that lasts like over three months where they're getting a new blog article sent to them every week, and we optimized it so it's like our best performing 20 articles are are sent to them first.

They get that every Monday. But then on, like, Wednesdays or Thursdays, not every week, but, like, maybe every, like, after ten days, if they have not opted into the webinar, pitch them on the webinar. After thirty days, if they have not become a trial customer of the software, you know, pitch them on on the software and kinda show video case studies about that. But then the other thing that I did was and I I got this idea from from Brennan Dunn. He does this, like, times a 100, but I just did a little bit where if you download the sample articles of for our content service, you get a custom field in drip that says interested in content service.

If if you did the same thing on the on the calendar software or like if you join the early access list, you get interested in calendar software. So then in that in that life cycle workflow in DRIP, there's a section of it that says, you know, send a case study and depending on which product you're interested in

Send email. Send case study.

Yeah. Send that case study. And then I also have a section in there where it's like, if if if that interested in custom field is not filled in yet, send a survey. It's not even a survey. It's just an email that says like, hey, you know, I forgot what I wrote, basically there are three links and say like, which which one of these best describes you?

Click click the link, you know, and that leads to either the training product, the calendar software or the service, but that fills in that.

Right. To flag them as interested in that.

Yeah. So that's basically how how we do it. And and like, if after two months, like, we've shown you some some pitches that you haven't, you know, you haven't opted into yet, like Right. You're still gonna receive our blog articles every week.

Newsletter.

Yeah. And like maybe like two months later down the road, we we repitch you on the calendar or something like that.

Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. I hear you describing what what you're doing and it sounds good and it sounds like, man, I don't know how in the world I'm gonna find the time to do that. So I a lot

I spent almost that that was my biggest project to do during my trip to Asia. It was I was mostly working on that. It took like a good four weeks.

Yeah. It makes sense.

It's not even done right now. It's, you know.

Yeah. I I think I almost wanna, like, take a smaller bite at first, where it's just like, okay, let's just build one one funnel that I wanna get started with. Right? Where it's just one piece of content that leads into an email sequence that leads into a webinar and an offer. That's it.

That's like, okay, I can do that in a week and it makes sense and we can start pushing traffic and start spending money on ads.

But that's essentially what I built too. Like, I really only have one funnel and that's getting them into the webinar and then an offer at the end of the webinar. But then I just embedded that funnel within the lifecycle of a subscriber.

Right, the larger context once once they're on the list.

Yeah, like once they're on the list of like, eventually, you don't want all these subscribers to to end up never seeing that funnel. Like, if they didn't explicitly opt in for that funnel on the front end of your website, but then they get into your list somehow, you still need to have the routes in place to get them back to that funnel. You know?

Yes. Regardless of the entry point.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. So

yeah. But, you know, that back to that, like, road mapping stuff, the way that I think about that that I've been thinking about it is, like, when to invite the first beta customers, which I did back in December. And I did that once the app was just like, the basic infrastructure was in place and it's like usable at its most basic level. Like, you could use it for something productive. It's not like super valuable yet, but it's just productive enough to start inviting a couple users and get some feedback.

It's not ready to start really selling yet, but it's Right.

It's a starting point from which all of your feature requests come from.

Pretty much. Yeah. And then now we're inching closer to that launch date. And I think the hurdle that I wanna get over there is like, get a few of the really valuable features in. Like, the ones that like really make this tool worth the the price tag.

Yeah. We we like to say that there are like two types of important features. One one type of feature that will actively help us sell the product, and then the other type that actively helps us keep people. It's like they're they're kinda, they're different. So a lot of the the marketing promise upfront that gets someone in, and then like for us it's the ability to do upsells after the purchase.

But then once you get in, if Facebook pixel tracking isn't working, you just can't use the product. Right? So Facebook pixel, you look at that and nobody makes a buying decision based on that because they just think, oh, it's obvious, it has to work. But then once you get in, if you don't get that feature right, then they will leave because they can't spend money on paid ads if they can't track their ROI. So we have like these two problems, like one more important to get people in, and one more important to make sure people can keep using it.

It's like a market. Right? Like a feature that you can market that you're actively gonna push.

That point to get to paying customers is like, there should still be plenty of those features that it will come later, you know. But there's still a few that like need to be built and that's where we're at right now. And it's still buggy and slow and there are things we wanna improve, but yeah. It's just like drawing that line and having that urgency to get to the finish line as fast as possible so that, you know, don't lose that momentum. That's where we're at.

Well, we're also at Friday at eleven. I would normally be like, you know, have a nice chill Friday. Instead, I have like a presentation to do in front of a 100 people tonight. So my Friday is not gonna be chill.

What at that the co working?

Yeah. It's like Portland startup week. And so, yeah, I'm doing a presentation to a bunch of the other founders in in the startups group, where it's like you like present. Basically the idea is to show them what you're working on so that those founders can talk about it with other people. Almost like educating them enough where if someone comes up to them and says I have a Shopify store or we're working, we're a Shopify agency, we're doing this.

They could be like, I actually heard about Karthook the other day, you should look into them. So like, just enough so they know what you do, that they can talk about you and other people. Yeah. Cool cool concept.

Yeah. I like it.

Very cool. Alright, man. Have a great weekend.

Yeah. You too. Back to snowboarding. I wish

you luck. Drive careful.

Thank you, sir. Yeah. Looking forward to it. Alright. Have a good one.

See you.