Bootstrapped Web

Alright. We're back with Bootstrapped Web. Jordan, how's it going, man?

Here we go, Brian. We're back.

Here we go. That's good. We are back.

Few weeks in a row. Cruising.

Yep. Yep. And so yeah. I mean, I'm I'm feeling good now because, you know, it's funny. I was talking to my wife.

We're always traveling, and we're always, like, looking forward to that next trip. Right? Yes. Right now, I'm finally back home and I think we're both really excited to just be home for a long stretch going over the next few months. Like just not going anywhere.

I mean, am going to Vegas for microconf, but other than that, just at home, regular schedules, back to the normal routine and that feels great for once. I agree.

Yeah. I'm I'm in that period right now also, and I get it this whole month. And then April is like, I have two conferences and my wife goes away for something and that we're like, we're playing like relay. Like I come home from the airport, we hang out for a few hours, slap smack each other five, and then she goes for like a few days. So a few weeks of that, I think it's gonna be painful.

So right now, just feels good. Get a routine, being productive, getting some work done. Yeah. Alright. So we've got some cool things both of us are dealing with.

Where do you wanna start? You wanna talk about your new new service?

Well, I've got a couple things to to talk through today. A brand new service, haven't talked about it anywhere before. We'll get into that. Renaming the SaaS that that we're that we're launching. I'll I'll tell you a little bit about that.

Before I get to that, I wanted to kind of touch base on what I talked about last time, the Facebook ad campaigns, which were kind of a total fail. Maybe a a little bit of a learning experience here. So I'll just kind of talk through that real quick. So, basically, I so this was like last week or last week and the week before, I was doing some Facebook ad tests and the idea was to try and see if I can drive leads for our done for you service, our content service. And this has kind of been an ongoing goal, but especially this year, one of my big big goals throughout the whole business is just build a paid marketing funnel that I can put $1 in and get $2 or more back.

And and so this was kind of an effort to really get that going for the product that I actually have in place and that I've had in place, which is the content service.

Makes sense.

So I ran a couple of tests. And first, like my expectations going into this. I'll say I'm not new at Facebook ads. Like, I've tried them before. I I do know the ins and outs of it.

I'm not a complete newbie. Mhmm. I'm definitely not an expert by any means. There are people who really specialize in this stuff who know way better than I do.

So it goes pretty deep.

Yeah. So like going into it, I had the expectation like, look, this is not gonna work really well out of the gate. I know that. And what I

was Just get a a glimmer of hope to work

Yeah. Exactly. That's all I was looking for. It's like, doesn't even have to be profitable out of the gate. I just not I wanna see like, okay.

There's something here. Like, there it it can produce at least a couple of leads, and that'll tell me like, There's this is something that I can keep working at, and I can build on it, and it'll get better, it'll get profitable and all that. That that was my hope. And? I ran three tests.

The first one, kinda starting off simple, just a retargeting ad, which was a video ad pointing to the service page only shown to people who have viewed the service page before and haven't requested a consultation, it kind of brings them back. That got zero opt ins for the consultation. So that was kind of a failure. I thought it would do okay because, you know, I've had some success with retargeting historically, but I don't know.

So let's get this right. This was an audience of people who had already been to the site and you were just making a straight up offer, hey, sign up for a consultation.

Yeah, and remember the new site has a couple different pages like, so this is only shown to people who viewed the service page. So it's like come back to the service page. You know, it got a couple of clicks. It was a video ad. It got a couple of like video views, a couple of clicks, but no sign up for a consultation.

Test number two was okay. Let me go with, like, the the advice that we hear everywhere. Like, don't try to sell something with this Facebook ad. Just do a a lead generation thing. Right?

So so I went with Facebook lead ads, which I used for the first time, which are kinda cool where you can offer like a lead magnet and they fill in their they they opt in for it without ever leaving Facebook. The form is there and and it actually like uses your Facebook email and all that. So so what I did was I offered like a free downloadable guide. After that, they get like a drip email sequence aimed at getting them to request a consultation for the service. This actually worked okay for gathering emails fairly cheaply.

Think not great, but I think I was paying, like, around $3 per email. And it was It's not bad. It's not bad. And I think if I had kept running with this, like, maybe over a long period of time, I I I could have worked. But on the back of that, like, none of them, at least not yet.

It's, you know, it's only been about a week or so. You know, they haven't converted into leads for the service. It's it's just growing the email list. So I don't know. Maybe that has some potential and that can like be a way to to, you know, grow the email list a little bit more.

But so that was that. And then and then just as a test on the third test, I was like, you know what? Screw this. Let's let's just try to put the offer for the thing that I'm trying to sell in front of as many people as possible. No lead magnet.

No

funnel. Test see if

the straight forward works. See Just if it'll work. So I I put a basic image ad together, used like the copy that has worked really well for us for for a long time. Had a a couple different ad groups, you know, but like a huge audience, different interests, a lookalike audience, a couple different things. Yeah.

Like zero, zip, you know, no no leads coming out of that. So, I mean, I guess that was kind of expected, but you might as well test it. Right? So I I I tested it. The disappointing thing is like, like, look, none of these tests, like, they've all resulted in zero leads.

Like, if if there were maybe two leads or

three And how much how much money spent? Because you can afford a decently high Right. Amount of money for to spend on a conversion. Well, it's gotta be a customer, not on a conversion like a demo.

I think all in all like, maybe I didn't spend enough, but I but I think all in all across these three tests, I I probably spent, like, 6 or $700. That's that's

that should be enough to to get some indicator.

Yeah. Like, just to test. Right? Like yeah. And and maybe I didn't let it run for long enough.

Like, I I've been getting feedback from a lot of people who you know, I I sent this same story to my email list this morning in in the Friday notes email.

I saw that.

And and I get a lot of replies to that. It's funny. Like, half the replies are, oh, you just didn't let it go long enough. Oh, you gotta you gotta do this. You gotta optimize Like, the other oh, you should you should have done this.

Like, whatever. And then I'm like, okay. Then the other half is like, man, same deal with me. I've tried Facebook ads. I tried again and again and again, and they always fall flat.

And I don't know what all these people are talking about, but like the cost per click is way too high. Like it just I I haven't cracked that code yet.

Yeah. That's tough, man. I feel like a lot of it's kinda luck where you start off too.

Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, a couple

skill and and knowledge and all that, but a lot of it is the luck of where you if you pick the right thing in the right audience and the right copy and you start things off with an inkling of hope, you you keep going.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I mean and, like, fate like, these things change so quickly. Like, the best practices change so quickly.

So, like, whatever we learn about it today is probably gonna be irrelevant tomorrow. But just like I I guess a couple conclusions about this just to wrap up this piece. Like, I think Facebook is not the best place to sell a b to b service, but and that's historically true. Obviously, like Facebook is probably more of like a consumer audience. But now today, Facebook is so huge that like if you're gonna do pay per click, like you have to kinda do it on Facebook.

You can do it in different places. But

Yeah. What a what a strange thing how that happened over a few years. It was AdWords only, and then it was Facebook is silly, and then it's now it's

How like do you not put ads on Facebook if you're doing advertising? Right? So so people who run businesses, they are on Facebook. Right? Like, they have families and friends and they use Facebook.

Right? I always wonder if it's the right people though. I know for for us, we try to go a little higher up in the market, and the Facebook groups around Shopify and around ecommerce are so powerful and strong and, like, the raucous man is rocking in there, but not necessarily our our targets.

But that's the thing that it it kinda leads to my other conclusion here is that like, this is strictly for b to b and and especially for high ticket stuff, like selling like a 2,000 a month productized service. You're not really just gonna drive leads and sales through a Facebook ads funnel directly. It's it's more about just grow using Facebook ads to grow the email list, lead magnets into webinars, into ebooks, into content, and then just over time nurturing and they're in your network, they're in your ecosystem and months go by and you can eventually kind of convert them into leads when they're ready, when they have that need.

Yeah. There's also something to just awareness, just seeing the same brands over and over even if it's just retargeting. I know like SamCart is in our space and they just do it really well. Like, okay, I've been to their site, they're retargeting me, but there's so many different types of ads and different types of offers and videos and webinars and giveaways. I don't take any of them, but they're just in my brain.

They they own a little piece of property on my brain

Yeah.

Because they spend money on the awareness. They just keep going.

Well, that's also the thing. It's like what most of us in the in this audience are doing, we're we're running a self funded bootstrapped business or even even with, you know, angel investment, like, it's still you're still a budget conscious business. And like so we don't have the funds to just throw thousands and thousands a week at at advertising until it it works. Like, what I'm looking for in these tests is just like give me like an inkling of hope to tell me like, okay. I should keep investing in this to optimize it.

And, I just didn't quite see that. But I do I do see it as like, I'm not giving up on Facebook ads, but I think I'll use it more as just, you know, throw a little bit of extra resources at growing the email list with lead magnets.

Right. Or as a supplement to the traffic that you're already getting and retargeting and awareness and

Yeah. Branding. Content and follow-up and branding and all that stuff. Yeah. So that's that's the wrap up of what I was talking about last week.

Alright. Alright. More more lessons learned, just stacking them up. Yep.

That's right. What's up on your end?

So I guess I'll start off really briefly with the personal thing and then get into the business thing. At some point this week, I just kinda looked around metaphorically speaking and felt like, oh, wow. I feel more like myself. I'm more outgoing and happier and joking. It is the haircut, first of all.

No one can see it right now, but it's so fresh and so clean clean right now. Right. But I thought back, like, what's going on? Why why do I? It's not the weather because the weather here still sucks in Portland.

And what I realized was I'm just not worried about running out of money, and I feel like the past year was so stressful. I didn't even realize how much. Right? I keep all that inside because I have, like, a family and kids. So it's not like I'm just throwing it out constantly because it's not fair.

So you end up keeping it inside too much, and I don't do I work out, but I don't do the whole meditation. I don't know that many outlets.

We we've kinda touched on this in the in many past episodes. Is is this change correlated with with an actual, like, rise in revenue in in the business? Yes. Is. Yep.

Yep. Direct correlation with revenue and prospects and optimism and just just the whole feeling around the business is just more forward looking and not like, what do we need to do to make sure we don't run out of money? So I I so that that's been a very interesting change and

I totally totally relate to that. Yeah.

And it it bleeds into everything. And now the conversations I have when people are like, so, you're 10 times more expensive than your competition. And I go, yep. It just like it adds this confidence layer. And so I I hear myself the way I'm talking to people.

It's like, It's really

Yeah. I mean, just on the pricing piece, even when you're priced higher than competitors, which I generally take that route to. Once you get people buying it at that price, it's like you feel so much more comfortable and validated that like even though you know that you're not competing on price, there are people out there at at your level. I totally relate to that emotional thing and I'm kinda going through it right now as well. Maybe on the opposite end of the spectrum, like, you know, when when things get tight or you know what you know what it is?

Like this week, and and this will kinda frame up my next thing in a few minutes, but we had something like three new clients sign up for Audience Ops and two clients cancel. Like Okay. In the same three days.

Yeah.

Talk about like an emotional roller coaster for me, you know, like. Yeah. And it's just like the these these big highs and these big lows, and it directly impacts my mood on the whole day, the way that I'm hanging out with the family and and my focus, and it's just it's trustful, man.

Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Like, look bad at it and you're like, okay. That's cool to acknowledge, but how do you how is that useful? And I have no idea.

It's you're kind of at the whim of of these things that are happening and, yes, you gotta, you know, center yourself and all that so that you're not just going back and forth. But when I look back at it, I'm like, I I don't really know what I could have done to be, like, happier along the past year or to be more even keel now. I don't know. This is kind of like looking at it like, that's that exists. Okay.

That's

true. The things that I keep hearing about that, that I don't do myself and I probably should or I don't do enough of meditation, which I've tried a couple of times. And from what I understand, I've just never been able to get into a good practice for myself. But from what I understand it, it can help you to get to step back and see every moment, like take it moment by moment and not get so swayed with with these things. And the other thing, I was listening this morning to the Gary Vee podcast and he was talking to to Tim Rob Tony Robbins?

Tony Robbins. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. The machine.

Right. And they're just talking about, like, grateful. Like like, gratitude. You know? To how to be great.

And and Robins has, a, like, a routine that he goes through every morning to specifically focus on how grateful he is for certain things. And, like, I I I do need to do more of that. Like, you know, we do have a really good business even when it has bumps and challenges. Like, it's both of us, you know, are running. Like, if if I if I looked at the business that I have today three years ago, like, I'd be ecstatic.

Right. You know?

Right. It's it's But on a day on a day when somebody cancels the service, I'm like, everything sucks.

Yeah. Alright. So so the the the the second half of that is is more business related. It's it's kinda related actually to the the pricing. So lately, every once in a while, I get I get like a ping on intercom or something, and I get put on the spot by a potential customer.

And they're like, tell me why you're better. And and my initial reaction back in the day was to explain why we're better. Lately, I'm like, honestly, I I don't I don't I don't wanna take the time to explain it to you. Like, you you're not a good customer to begin with. I didn't like turn you on.

Right? You didn't like get to carthook.com and get all excited. And so to try to get you there is like, I don't know. I look at it. I'm like, no, I'm not explaining it.

Yeah. I'd be like, well, what do you what do you need? What's your what's your thing? What's deal breaker? What's your You want

me to like take twenty minutes of my day to, like, write out why our features are better? No. So so what happened was I I did a demo with a great prospect, for the funnels product. And then afterward, he just said, look, my developer was talking to your competitor. Like, can you just tell me why we should go with you?

So I thought about it. I didn't want to just totally dismiss it. It's a really good prospect. So I'm like, all right, what should I do here? So I ended up writing an email that didn't focus on price at all.

Then after I wrote it, was like, Oh, I never actually heard myself explain it in this way. I shared it with the team and we were like, Oh, okay. It's kind of like a macro view of what we're doing. Basically what I wrote to him was, let's assume features are the same because features can be added. Let's just assume if we have this one thing they'll add it to, and if they have this one thing we'll add it.

So all that being equal, let's look at price and what that does. Basically what I said was we have staked out the premium position in the market. We are 10 times more expensive. What that tells you is that we are expecting fewer customers, higher price, and what that will presumably lead to is higher quality and better service. I didn't say anything negative about the customer, Excuse me, about the competitor.

I didn't need to say they're lower price, therefore x y z. That's like, you you do that yourself. What I said after that was, we are going to promise you these these things, the higher quality and the better service. And if we don't deliver on those, then we don't have a right to charge you more and then you're going to leave. After I wrote that, was like, Oh, that's actually the intersection of marketing and product.

That is you stake out a position in the market, you stake out a pricing, you stake out a business model, and then marketing needs to make that promise and then product needs to deliver on that promise. So it helped me and it helped the product team look at that and say, oh, that's how we work in conjunction. And if one side fails the other, it doesn't work. The product team can make the most amazing, stable, perfect feature rich, whatever product. But if marketing doesn't effectively make the promise of how good it is, it's not gonna work.

And then vice versa, marketing can talk all at once. If the product doesn't deliver, it's all gonna fall apart. The response was we're going with you. I'll I'll set up an appointment. What that effectively did is it put them on the spot to say, you want better or do you want cheaper?

Your your your call. And because they were a good prospect that has budget, they think about it and they say, so $300 for the page that that actually charges credit cards. Like if I'm trying to run a million dollar plus business, that's something I'm not going to skimp on was effectively the argument, but it was much more useful internally in the team. Because it was like, oh, okay. That's how I'm accountable to my spot and how you're accountable to each other.

It was like this it was very interesting kind of revelation that came up by mistake from being annoyed and not wanting to talk about features. Yeah. That's really what it from.

Yeah. That's really interesting. Actually, that kinda like, so I'm starting to get in more of conversations about the calendar product that we're just rolling out now. I literally have an email in my inbox right now with someone. And she said, like, the deal breaker for me is that it needs to post to Instagram.

And we we currently post, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Facebook pages. But and I'm like, well, Instagram is on the road map. You know, it's just not in there yet. It it it will be in a few few weeks. And and I was like, so, like, just assuming that it's in, because it will be in, like, in a matter of weeks, like, are there any other deal breakers for you?

Like, what are the key features that you're looking for in this? And so that Instagram request was like a one line. It started on on intercom, like one line question, and then my kind of one or two line response. And she replied back she replied back with like five paragraphs of like, okay. It's gotta do this this this and this.

And this is this is what I like about about my current situation, this is what I hate about it. And Mhmm. It but it was gold. It it was

You just scratched. That's just one one layer Yeah. Under one layer with all this. Exactly.

Yeah. And and and this has happened kind of a few times now with people who like fill out the survey and stuff, but like, yeah, it's all about just asking the right like, coming back and asking a question and getting them to talk, and you learn so much.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Alright. So that's that's my macro situation.

Yeah. Cool.

Well, what was next on your on your list?

Okay. So about three days ago, I launched an entirely new productized service.

You did the I'm gonna go upstairs to the hotel room and write a business plan. I'll be right back.

Believe it or not. Okay. First first of all, before I even tell you all about it, I basically planned this entire thing while I was traveling with my family on a snowboarding trip at Hunter Mountain last week.

Okay. So the

snow trips are paying off, man.

Like, kinda like on a chairlift and bit and these are these are just with friends. This is this is not like a business trip.

Was about to say like, were you like, honey, just just be quiet for like like five minutes.

Well, you know, there was like some downtime. People were like taking naps and other times I was like on a chairlift and then it's just like this idea. And you get like these two days of and I'm kind of, in a way, kind of like locked on this trip where I can't really do much work, but I've got my iPhone with me so I can just jot down like page after page of notes.

Oh, this is interesting. Alright.

So the new thing is called Audience Ops Express. And it's a lower priced version of the Audience Ops service. Let me kind of frame it up here. So our main service, our done for you content service, which we've had since day one continues through today. It will be continuing on for for a long time to come.

Fully done for you where we do all the writing and and all the proofreading and editing and images and setup and scheduling and social media and email, the whole start to finish process for your content. That's what we've been doing. But the the thing that has happened in in just the last couple of months is that service has kind of plateaued in terms of revenue. And that's been a little bit painful, especially since I'm investing all this. Whatever little bit of profit is left from that goes into building the software basically.

So why is it plateaued? Right? And that's this is what I've been trying to figure out and trying to diagnose and fix for the last, I'd say four months. It's a combination obviously of of some churn and a slowdown in new leads and sales. And we still get new leads and sales, but with but with that kind of slowing down and churn, I'd say ticking up a little bit, you know, that that's basically made the whole thing kind of plateau.

So the common reasons why clients cancel when they do cancel, it kinda comes down to one of these three reasons. Number one is they're really happy with the content that we've been doing for them, but and and then they wanna continue doing content, but then they decide to take content in house. Either they hire a full time marketer or they decide to hire a freelancer or freelance writer instead of continuing on with Audience Ops. That's one common thing. The other cancellation reason is maybe blog content isn't quite the thing that's working for them.

So they decide to go with like a podcast or video content or webinars or something else. And the other reason that comes up a lot is just, clients like can't afford it anymore. They they kind of run out of money and or they wanna put their budget elsewhere.

Okay. So what would that all lead to?

So I started thinking like, First of all, it took me a while, like several months of just trying to make this our service as it exists better. Like, we made a lot of changes to try to reduce churn and and add more value for clients. And and I think those are kind of working. But I finally got to a point in the past week where I was like, okay. It has plateaued.

It it was growing like crazy for the first eighteen months. I'm not maybe it's a change in the market. I don't know. But alarm bells are starting to go off a little bit.

Right. Don't just keep doing exactly

what do. Don't just tweak around the edges. It's time to start thinking a little bit bigger on this. And so I literally wrote this down and this is what sparked the whole thing. And I didn't know where this was gonna go, but I wrote down in my notepad, what would we do if this done for you service just went away?

Like, what would we do? What would audience ops be? What would it sell? And just thinking about that question started to make me think like, well, you know, we've had actually requests from quite a few clients over the over the time we've been doing this for what the the common request is, you know, you the content you guys do for us is great, but we also have some extra blog posts that we're producing in house. Can we just send you guys those blog posts?

And and you put it through your system. You do the the proofreading, the images, the the scheduling, the setup, and and and do it for like, can we send you our extra content for you to prepare and and publish? And my answer to that, and I've been requested that like maybe five or six times from from other clients. My answer has always been basically no, because we have a very focused done for you service and it would just really throw a wrench in our whole process. Right?

It wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would just be a add complexity and the team would be a little bit driving them crazy and like, it it would just be a little bit hard to manage if we're gonna bolt, like, fit it into our existing process. But now that I'm thinking bigger about this, I started thinking like, well, what if we launch that as its own standalone service? Yeah. How do you sell that? So, you know, the idea of, like, calling it Audience Hops Express, you know, what would that look like?

I think the way that we could offer that type of service is if we made it a completely separate piece, a separate service. Even put dedicated team members on it, its own set of processes, its own systems, really separate from our content service. And then I started thinking like, how could that actually be really valuable for clients? The idea is to make it not just about blog articles, but any kind of content that you're doing. So it could be articles, it could be podcast episodes, videos, slide decks, landing pages.

Documentation.

Yeah. Knowledge based documentation. If you if you've got placeholder content on on your website, basically, the idea is is just send us your draft content or your almost finished content, whether it's a Google doc or whatever you have or or recording. Send that to us and we'll do all the extra legwork to get it proofread, polished, looking good, set up, optimized, launched, scheduled, whatever needs to happen.

Mhmm.

And so, you know, how do you make this valuable? Lower price, you know, it's starting at like half the price of our content service of $3.99 a month. The other idea here is to go with that unlimited model. So, instead like, where our content services, like, you get four pieces of content a month, this is unlimited

content You just

send it to us, we put it in your queue, we work on one thing at a time, three to five day turnaround on each content piece, and, you know, that's it. Mhmm. And so the idea with with that is I think I think that this kind of service model actually overcomes those three objections. Those three reasons that people would cancel the content service. So again, those things are like the content goes in house.

They they hire someone in house or they hire a freelancer. You can use our service to do all the all the production work. You just send us your content from that person. Yeah. Or they start to do other content like a podcast or something, we can support your your pocket.

We we don't necessarily do the audio editing, but if you send us the finished audio, we can set up and do the show notes and do the Right.

The the freaking hard part.

The busy work.

Yeah. That's honestly what it is.

Yeah. And I mean, the other thing is like the, you know, our service was just too expensive. So this is a this is at half the price. Lower. Know, it's a it's a lower price.

Yeah. It yeah. I want as soon as you showed it to me, it, like, hit right on the nail for me. It's like, oh, because that's those are the excuses I have for not producing more content. All that stuff.

Because if I look at writing a docs article, I write in a Google doc in twenty minutes, but getting it published is like another hour and a half.

Yeah. Or even as if you an email, like to a customer, could forward that to the service and we would just put it into your knowledge base.

So when I look at it, I look at it as a two hour task and I say, never. Right. Goodbye. Exactly. But that that changes it.

I went through the list of all the clients who were previously clients and then they canceled of audience ops. And and and so so far, you know, before this podcast publishes, so far, that's the only group who I've shown it to. You know, so I send them an email. Hey. How's it going?

I wanna tell you about a new thing that we've had some requests for, AuditOps Express. And and out of that group of emails, five people signed up for the oh, and by the way, set it up so that that this actually has a free trial.

So Like the the first task?

Yeah.

Effectively? Oh, that's nice.

You get one task for free. Right. You know, you enter your email, you start the free trial, you can send us your first free task. Like one one guy sent us a podcast episode. We did a transcription for it, and we're setting up the blog post for it.

Another person sent me like a draft slide deck, and we're basically creating an a nicer looking slide deck and putting it in SlideShare for her and and getting that up and running.

So here's the only thing that I wanna say as I hear you get into more details about this. I think you should not just view it as a, as a fallback for people who cancel. I I think it's a it's a standalone service that can be that can grow a lot faster than than the done for you service.

Oh, mean, it is. I mean, I'm I'm mentioning it here because I'm launching it on the site, like, in the next few days.

Right. But it's it's so interesting. The the origin of it and then what it turns into will be very interesting to see because the as soon as I saw it, I thought Design Pickle. Right? You know design pickle?

Oh, yeah.

Like like 200 a month or something. They just did a podcast.

Yeah. I mean, I know I know Russ and and and like Right.

You might have introduced me to him.

Yeah. And so it I mean, that's that's also where that unlimited model came from. It's like Design Pickle, WP Curve. I've seen a few other of these that that model for different types of things work. And I've been fascinated by it.

And it was only until last week that that I that I realized like, if we're doing that sort of service, then that unlimited model fits kind of perfectly.

Yeah. And you guys are already good at it. So yes. It's I'm really excited, man. That

am too. And it's also if I start to think about how scales up, and already have a sense of like how the processes and the team are gonna work, it is it's lower priced, but it's way more profitable. It's way easier to scale. It's Right. You know,

it's And a much larger potential audience for it. Yes. Because the the the objections that you don't get to the done for you service that you I'm sure you're aware of, but don't hear every day is the but I don't wanna give up my content. I I need to write the content. Right?

We need the content. It's it's very specialized to our field and in our industry and in our niche. And so the people in company need to write the content. You take that away and it opens up the a much, much larger pool of prospects. The other thing I love about it is that it is so hard to look around at what you already have and and maximize using what you already have.

Like, it always drives me nuts internally when I look at how much money we make and I look at what we are currently doing and the knowledge that we currently have and what we could be making. It always drives me out of my mind. I'm like, okay. So we're a SaaS, but if we just built checkout pages with funnels for people, we could probably charge like $50 a pop. And we'd be making 10 times more money, but we don't do it.

It drives me nuts. It's like a lot of times everything you already have set up if you did in a different way would be infinitely, not infinitely, a lot more profitable. So this sounds to me like that. It's like this rejiggering of something you've already built.

If we have the infrastructure in place already, like we've got the team. So we've got a few team members that I'm already dedicating to it for these first people, you know, these first few clients have come through and I mean, we'd probably end up hiring more more people to to work on it, but

Yeah. I think you're gonna get the people who pay you. You know, when I look at it, I'm like, okay. So he's gonna have a speed issue. That that's gonna be your thing.

Yeah. I think because you have

to do one thing at a time. You can't do 10 things at the same time, but then you're gonna get pushed. People are gonna push you. You're gonna say, I want this. Now I want this.

Now I want the next thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And But that's just hiring. There is some so the way that I in terms of the model, it's basically $3.99 a month, unlimited requests, but we work on them one at a time. If you need just a high volume of of content for whatever reason, there's, like, add on plans that you can that you can, you know, will will charge more for.

It'll definitely be a learning experience, but at the same time, we have a lot of this process and infrastructure and people already in place in audience ops, and we've been doing this sort of thing. And I've been doing productized services for a couple years now, so I'm I'm really in tune with, like, how to do the the systems and the process. And and I think that's actually been a big strength of the audience ops service aside from the quality of the content. It's really about the efficiency and the and the delivery of it all. And so I think that's I think it can add a lot of value.

I'm I'm actually really excited about it. And I think it'll it will like you said, it will grow into like a a main focus of the service on audienceops.com. I'm launching it on the site, you know, in the next few days. I think what'll probably happen is, you know, I'll I'll I might need to like close sign ups as if if you know, because we have five five on board right now and then Right. Maybe You wanna give a

Good first impression.

Yeah. Like, make a a waiting list while I get the people and processes in place and get that all worked out and then and then, you know, really open it back up. But that's

Mhmm.

That's kinda rolling out in the next few weeks.

Very, very interesting. So we'll we'll get updates on that over the next few weeks.

Yeah. That's at, audiencehopsexpress audiencehops.com/express.

Alright. Alright. Very cool. I might be a customer to be, you know, to be honest. I look at that and I say, oh, it takes excuses away, makes me produce more content.

That's that's worth money. And then and I spend money on it, means I'm using it.

Right.

It's like it's a good good combination.

Yep. Very cool.

Alright, man. The the other thing on my end is we are the team is rocking. We're a bunch of assassins right now. The things the the pressure is there, the energy, the optimism, like everything that we are getting back from the market is that we are just inches away from nailing it. So we're doing one more monster release in in in ten days actually.

So everyone's like up late working, working through the weekends. It's just one of those periods and everyone's excited about it. No no complaining. So that that feels good. Everyone's just doing a killer job, is, you know, feels good.

You look around, everyone's happy and joking in the middle of all the stress and work, so that's good. But we're basically just taking a lot of the, feedback from the past few months, and it feels like we were talking about this yesterday internally on our stand up. We're just looking back at the past six months, what did we do right? What did we do wrong? It definitely feels like we could have done some things better, but it felt like this journey that was going to happen no matter what if we wanted to get to, for lack of a better term, product market fit.

We just started out with something, people signed up, it was all broken, they yelled at us, we got a bunch of feedback, then we opened up sign ups and that was too early so we closed it, then we required demos. It looks like a mess because it felt like a mess, but in reality it just was this inevitable process of, okay, feedback, feedback, feedback, improvement, improvement.

Exactly. I think he did it right even though it may be painful at in the moment of of those early stages, like, that's how you get the best feedback to make it as as good of a product as possible.

Yeah. So the and then the last stage was the past, like three months working with early users. We got all the feedback. We looked at it and said, so we can put a bunch of patches on our existing app, or we can just rewrite it, do it right now that we know what we need, and then just be able to sit on a much stronger foundation. So we decided to do that about a month ago.

Oh, you rewrote it? We rewrote it. Wow. Yep. It's not the entire thing, it's basically the front end we rewrote.

But the front end effects, the way things are charged, the way tracking happens. If if if these different integrations are server side or client side, it affected so many things that we said, let's do it right now that we know what to build. That is being released along with too many things at the same time, which means there's no way it'll go perfectly. But we've kinda done this a bunch of times, so we're kind of all the lessons Brian, you emailed me and and and Ben Right. Asking about production

Like development process. Yeah.

Right. And Ben responded to you with like this, like, I don't know how else to say it. It's a professional.

That was awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. And and that is from a lot of pain. Yep. Real pain and pushing things to production that didn't work and then understanding, oh, this product you can't mess around with.

Just clear up for people listening. I was asking you what happened with us because we're developing our calendar software and we have multiple features in the in that are being worked on at the same time. We wanna push some live, but then we have a few that are still in progress. And when we push stuff live, it it pulls with it, like, bits and pieces of the stuff that we've been working on. And so, we since we're still kind of in beta, like that's okay to to not okay.

But it's we've been publishing like half finished features to the live app. Like next week, we're rolling out the live app. We need a better process. And that's why I emailed you guys. Like, do you guys handle that?

How do you separate, like, releases? And actually, maybe we'll do a different episode on this. But so so I think the way that you framed it here is, like, you guys are making a next release. Right? Like you say like this is whatever release number 3.7 and like we're Mhmm.

Like this is coming out March 15 and like all your work leads up to that. Is that how you

Yes. Because because we've had we've had a bunch of features that we've been looking at and saying, okay, so we need to fix this, add this, take this away, do this differently. So much of it depended on the front end templating system, and we had a JSON based templating system where it was pulling data in and it was relatively rigid on the HTML and CSS because it's a checkout page with a credit card form. So you can only give a certain amount of customization to the to the end user because you you cut you're paranoid. You're worried about these forms.

Everything needs to be submitted to Shopify perfectly, all this other stuff. So we realized that that was not good enough. That that people want customization and they want more HTML control and CSS control, so we figured out a way to lock down the form fields that we need, but then give a bunch of control around it. And then all these other features depend on that and the Facebook tracking depends on that and when charges go through between the first checkout and the upsell. So we just kind of looked at it and said, we just need to rewrite our front end system and then all these features will be much easier.

So it's kind of like, yeah, it's a release, but it's like all this stuff on

the

It's

like a whole bunch of features packed together.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So it feels a little crazy, and we know it's not gonna be perfect, but we're kind of, you know, we've been through a bunch of battles. So there's no real the confidence is a 100%.

Alright. Whatever's not perfect in it, we'll get it, and we'll communicate with our customers properly and it'll be better for it. Yeah. So that's that's in two weeks. Yeah.

We really should consider an episode with Ben to talk about that process because that that process goes all the way through. It goes from me talking to a prospect and then coming back to the team with a feature request, and then how that goes into the planning, which sprint that goes into, and then how that gets on testing, how it gets tested, how it goes to development, how we bang on it, how it goes to production, how it gets released. It's kinda like this whole conveyor belt.

Yeah. Totally. I mean, I I we should do that episode with Ben. And I think my process is probably a little bit different. And and we're taking some ideas from you guys.

We do some some things a little bit differently in terms of how we manage, like, git and and different branches and development and staging and stuff like that. It's heavy. Yeah. But, like, in my case, I'm I'm a little bit I'm more involved in the design and the like, I do all the front end design. And

Yeah. And I contribute to it. Throw up that beautiful page in three days. Takes us like three weeks.

Well, it's, yeah. I mean, it slows me down though. Like like Yeah. Then I'll lose a whole day freaking working on like one pixel when I should be marketing.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

But yeah. Yeah. We should do that.

Cool. And that's it. My update for next week will be going from requiring a demo to self serve. So we'll see. I am open minded on if that's the right thing or not.

I don't know for sure that that's the right thing.

Oh, and by the way, on the Audience Hops Express thing, that's another benefit. It's it's like the content well, yeah. It it can be it's it's more potential for self serve. Like, all the those first five customers Oh, for

the business internally, I mean, it it's it's an advantage to have the onboarding and customer acquisition more

Yeah.

More friction.

I mean, the content service, I do a sales call with every person. Yep. And this one I can do either over chat or over email or they just sign up. Like, it's it's there. You could sign up.

Yeah. I'm officially at the point where I I when I'm in the demo, I enjoy the hell out of it. When I wake up in the morning and I look and I I see three demos scattered throughout my day, I'm like, I'm not getting anything done today. I'm gonna have to work late night to do anything. That's

it Yeah. I mean, sales calls, it's like and I I I also enjoyed doing them and I and I like meeting all all of our clients obviously. But

like Yeah.

When you're talking, it's fun.

Yeah. It's fun. But those are calls that like you can't reschedule. Like, it's on the calendar. You've gotta show up.

Like you're in. You know? If it's a if it's a call with you, like, I'll probably like, let's just skip today. You know, I'm gonna go take a day off, whatever. Like, you know, you got a sales call in the books, you have to show up, you know, and it's it's kind of annoying.

But anyway, I mean, my my last thing though real quick is so the calendar software that I've been working on the last six months or so, it's Yeah. Where is it? It's rolling out now. I guess by the time that this publishes next week, we will be rolling it out to, I'm calling it like a public launch, but it's but really it's I'm just inviting people from the early access list, not just in in small batches starting next week. And we're renaming it from it it it's been called audienceopscalendar.

Now now it's becoming just opscalendar.

And And what's the logic behind it?

I'm moving I'm moving it to its own domain, opscalendar. Okay. So it'll it'll become opscalendar.com. The thinking there is I just wanted it to be on its own domain. I I felt like having all these different products all on audienceops.com is just a little bit too confusing, especially with, like, the new audience ops express and the main thing and the there's the training product that's still coming coming out later on and, you know

You could you could connect to it, but not as, you know, as intertwined as on the same as on the same site.

Yeah. And that's why I went with Ops Calendar. I actually made a list of like 20 different completely different names for it, you know?

Right. To really spin it out as its own thing.

Yeah. Really just its own name and its own brand. And I ran all those names by people in the beta list, like the beta customers of it, my team, friends, other other things, like, everyone was like, no. I don't really like any of those names. But then like ops calendar, that's the one that everyone was like, yeah.

Mean, that kinda makes sense because it's connected.

Because it works on its own and it's still connected.

Yeah.

Alright. So Yeah. I mean, we I think you're making the right move there. If you look at the express service, the done few service, the training, like, that's a lot to handle right there. And then the software thing is the thing that doesn't fit in quite as easily with with the rest of those.

Yeah. But if if we could go back, we would probably create its own site for the funnels product, but we just didn't wanna, a, we didn't wanna take the time to do it because it didn't seem like the right, thing to focus on. And then you get the domain, you got everything's like done. It's it's hard to make that decision.

Yeah. Mean, actual changeover for us is not very difficult. Like, I'm not redesigning the site. I'm literally just, like, swapping in the logo with a new version of the logo and taking our existing design, putting it on the ops calendar domain and just making it focused on the calendar and, not the service pages. And then DNS changes and a couple of tweaks on the app just to change the domain.

But I talked to the guys and they're like, it'll take a day to just do. And so that's happening in the next couple of days. And then, yeah. I mean, that's that's basically it.

Nice, man. Alright. We we got we got a lot going on, Brian.

Yeah. We do. It never ends.

Alright, man. And microconf is coming.

Yeah. I'm excited. Looking forward

stresses me out is I I get my my speech, talk, whatever it's called presentation. Get Zander. Me and Zander. Zander stresses me out. Yeah.

Love Zander.

Are you able to share and maybe that we're getting late here, but like, I need to share what you're talking about.

I don't know.

Alright. To be determined.

That's that's the stress.

I threw in a an attendee talk topic, like, right at the deadline. I actually, a little bit late for the deadline. I hope it gets in.

Okay. Okay. Cool. Yeah. The voting will come out soon.

No. I I don't I really don't know because the the last time in Europe I spoke about, like, the freak the drama story, I don't wanna talk about that. Moving on, baby. Moving on. We got we got bigger things.

So I don't know. I'll probably I'll probably email you sometime next week to ask what what you think I should do.

Yeah. Cool. Alright, dude. Alright, buddy.

Take it

easy over there. Alright. See you.