Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Another episode of Bootstrap Web today. Brian, nice to be back with you.

Good to be back buddy. How you doing?

Doing well. How are you?

Doing good. Good.

We had to cancel last week because my face attacked me. Oh my god. It's not cool getting sick these days. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I know, right? Yeah, it was like migraine headaches, sinus headaches. It's, I get them like chronically, it's been a total pain in the ass but

Yeah, had the sinus infection that started affecting my teeth so I thought I needed a root canal. Just from all angles like dear face leave me alone. But we're back, we're back now and we've got two weeks of stuff to kind of talk about. Things are getting a little weird on our side if I should just kinda jump into it. Mean

Yeah. Before something think it's been actually, like we spoke, I think two weeks ago, but it's been like a good three weeks since we published something.

Alright. Sorry.

Yeah. So we we probably got some updates to catch people We're trying. Yep. So, yeah, start it off. Sure.

We'll start off and we'll talk about MicroConf this this episode that's coming up at just I actually did start for the rest of us podcast with Mike. Oh, did? Recently. Yep.

Well, you're coming out next week?

No. We did one for the can. So they just have an extra one.

Oh Yeah, I was just on with Mike, was it, did it publish last week? I think so.

Yeah, Mike and I talked about demos and our demo process and how it's evolved and why we even do demos and why require them and how they help, how they hurt, just all the stuff around it, automation. Sweet. You know, yeah, it was good.

Yeah, looking forward to listen to that.

Cool, whenever it comes out, I'd be like, who knows? Right, right. So the biggest thing on my side, so Ben is currently taking a course with Heat and Shaw about product prioritization and planning, and it has been incredibly helpful for us. So first what it did was, it basically identified the foundation being data. You need data, make sure you're capturing the right data, otherwise kind of hard to make decisions.

I had to fight my natural tendency to say, it's not about data right now. It's about, you know, sales or it's about getting the product right. Or it's about making sure the tech stable. I kind of had to just hold my tongue and just say, okay, if Ben's gonna go through this, let's, let's get the value out of it as a company and for him as an individual and so on. So I just went with it and Ben was right.

And Heaton and that mindset, it helped us uncover something more specific than we expected. So what Heaton does is he breaks the process down into three parts. It's ARM, acquisition, retention and monetization. Yeah, okay so what it did is it helped us identify where we are in the process. So not only should our focus be on acquisition, but it actually should be on the second half of acquisition.

The way we uncovered it was Ben just did all, he'd built out all these dashboards, just showing the funnel of when people sign up, when they put their credit card in, how many people get to the step of connecting with their Shopify store, how many get to the step of building a funnel, how many get to a step of actually generating the first dollar of revenue using our product. So with all of that, it became really obvious that we actually don't have a customer acquisition like getting new signups problem. That's actually kind of easy right now, and we're using the demos to purposely slow it down. So we could just take that away and increase that at any point in time. The issue is once someone signs up, it's that activation piece.

It's the onboarding, the documentation, the training, the support, the education, everything to get the person from the time they sign up to the time they make that first dollar. Basically what we found was that once someone makes a single dollar using our checkout app, they are hugely likely to stay on as paying customers. So what that means, if you made a dollar, that means you completed the onboarding. You have it live. You've taken all the steps.

So it helped us zero in on like, okay.

And so what are

they not installing the code or what's preventing them from getting that to that point?

Well, the first step was just identifying that that's actually the most important thing instead of thinking about like, how do we do webinars to do more people at the same time? How do we do one to many demos or right? Instead of thinking about that, it just has us focused in the right direction. That's first. And then once you're focused there,

I guess the idea like prioritization, right? Yeah.

Right. So now that we're focused there, we're seeing to ourselves, okay, where are people getting hung up? What's their actual problem? Is it bugs? Is it questions?

Is it education? Is it just, is it overwhelm? So that's like what we've been doing. And we had a good coincidence that happened earlier in the week, is that someone was at a mastermind group. So it's like eight people who are super into e commerce doing a multi day mastermind group.

One of them hears about our product and the whole group contacted me and says, can you give a demo to our entire mastermind group? I'm like, hell yeah, it's amazing opportunity. I do the demo. All eight sign up. Okay.

That's awesome. Now what that does is it turns into an opportunity for us to say, how do we handle when eight people sign up at the same time instead of one person time, the way we do with demos. And it challenged us. Created this, I don't know if the word is tension, it creates stress on the system. And so we had to address, oh, how are we handling support?

Coincidentally, you so much Intercom. They just changed around so much of their stuff to make it so much better. We dropped help scout immediately. We have our inboxes set up. We have chats coming from the website being assigned to me, chats coming from the app being assigned to Ben.

It's just like perfect timing, absolutely perfect timing. So now we're just addressing that system of who is responsible for what and when, and how do we, how do we handle it? Because next week we have a demo, excuse me, next week we have a webinar and it's gonna be the first time that we're gonna be talking to 50, a 100 people at the same time. And so everything we've been talking about this week is how do we handle 50 people signing up at the same time? What do we need in place?

What are the systems, Right. Cause what we were doing was like the person Ben would take the customer support issue in intercom or question or whatever, and then he would go try to address it. So he'd basically be spending between ten and thirty minutes each time intercom pinged. It's like, okay, that that's wrong. Is

so Ben is is kind of like the tier one support there? I mean, maybe I understand that because it's so early on in the product life that it's good to have him on the

front lines. That's what we did. We had me on the front lines doing the sales and tier one support with Ben. Now we moved it over to, I only do sales and now Ben's tier one. And now we just kind of put out feelers to hire someone full time for customer success is the way I look at it because it's really getting the person to success.

It's getting the person to that first dollar is much more important than, you know, I have this thing. How do I make my butt in a different color? That that's, that's not the issue. The issue is how do I guide people to that first dollar of revenue?

Are they getting hung up on installing the tracking code? Like either they can't do it or they just don't get around to going into their website and installing it. Is that the hang up?

I see it. My guess right now is it's more of a product education issue. So in order to use our product, you need to do some stuff. It's not nearly as simple as our card abandonment app. Just install a code.

Oh, see. Oh, because you gotta like set up the whole checkout

Customize a checkout page, which can be easy, but you know, once you, once you have an editor in front of you and you can do all this new stuff that you've never been able to do, all of a sudden you start experimenting and then all of sudden ideas come into your mind like, Hey, can I have a testimonial pop up that's only right for this particular product? So basically you text on the page based on the product they have in their cart. So we have to be like, no, not yet. And then they have to set up the upsells, then they have to go take the tag, put it into the product. So they're just not a 100% sure, and our documentation is how you say, not existent.

Right. Right.

I've been kinda running into similar things with with Ops Calendar as people are getting onboarded now. You know, I'm trying to play catch up with the onboarding. Actually, that's one of my updates here, Right. Yeah.

I have a Trello card with it's up to 41 now. Whenever someone asks a question that is so obvious that needs to be addressed, how do I connect PayPal? It's like, okay, that's a docs article. So my plan over the next week is to take those and make them into two to five minute videos, get them into the help docs. And then when, whoever we hire for customer success, ask them to write out the actual text and screenshot article.

So like we have it there as a video for everything, because that's the most efficient way for me to do it. And then write up the actual article based on the video. And that that shouldn't be me spending an hour in each article.

It's amazing how how many things like make, at least for me, like make me feel so stupid that I didn't think about it until a user reports it, you know? Especially during the onboarding stuff. Like, I spoke to one of our first trial users a couple days ago, and he was like, you know, I I went to I was logged into the app. I go we have an integrations page inside the app. Like, you go to settings integrations, but we haven't really added any information to that page yet.

And he was like, I was looking for the WordPress integration. And we just spent like weeks developing and launching this super slick two way syncing WordPress integration. And we don't have anything inside the app itself to go get the WordPress plugin and install it. Like, you have

to Awesome.

We we do have the information on our knowledge base. I I you know, I've been writing that stuff up as we go, but it's over on a different KB site. It's not like in the application.

Right. There's no discovery.

Oh, like, so, like, that's definitely on on the to do list for the next day or two, but, just stuff like that. It's like, how did I not even think of that? You know?

I I

think that it's completely normal. You just get your head inside of something and you don't see the same things that other people see. It's definitely time to hire someone for customer success. I am assuming I'd like to hear your take on it. That the only way to go is a full time person that's in the company.

I know there are services out there that do stuff like like co support. I know the founder of co support spoke at MicroConf and I've heard great things about what they do. I set up a call with them. Actually, my assumption is that I need someone full time, but

Well, I mean, maybe if you have other things that you want that person to be doing. Personally, I would look to hire a part time person to begin with, like contract, spend a few hours a day, know, I don't know, ten to twelve ten to fifteen hours a week to to do to be there on live chat, answer emails, do do do demos. I mean

I think we could fill forty hours. That's what I really think.

How many how many like people are onboarding at a given time?

Okay. So this is a bit weird as a response, but it's kinda as many as we want. That's looking down good. It's good, but it's also unbelievably frustrating because I know if everything, if all the systems were a 100% buttoned up and we could handle signups, I'd start doing webinars next week and, and, you know, would be making more money in a week than we do in six months, but it's not the right time to do that. We actually need to build the system as first, or that will be a very bad experience.

It'll it'll feel great on the revenue side, and then it'll be a really bad experience if people are requesting refunds.

And like there might be enough of that work there for a customer support success person, but like I would first map it out to like, alright, what are the processes that you're gonna give this person to follow or the the canned responses? And like, really, like, once you kinda document that stuff or set up the saved replies and intercom, whatever, think about like, alright, If that person is coming in fresh as a new employee here, like, what does that job actually look like? Because I I feel like like you might think of it of it as such a bigger job than it really is hours wise. Because in your in your mind, you're the you're the founder. It's such a it is a super important piece.

And so it has a a massive weight in in terms of the of the impact of the role. But for a new tier one person, like, there's probably gonna be a lot of issues that they find from users that they're gonna just escalate straight to you and then you need to deal with them. And then all of a sudden, like, that person is not really doing all that much work. You know? Like, they're doing the work of of the initial communication, but you know what I mean?

Do you think a service, an outside service could could do it the same way? First, even I in my head

would look for a single person. I would just look for a freelance person to work ten to fifteen hours a week, start there, and then they get a feel for the product and the company and then they ramp up to full time later on.

Is it super old school of me to want that person to be with me in Portland?

That's, you know, everybody has preference, know. I mean, personally, I've been fully remote. I know a lot of people really value having people in person. You know, that's it's it's different.

I wouldn't I wouldn't really care if the person was at the office. I'm not I'm not at the office every day. I'm at home right now.

Yeah.

I think it would help in that, that initial first month of just learning everything about the product. Just to mention it before we flip over to your side, BearMetrix and their head of customer success wrote a fantastic article basically called how to go from customer support to customer success. And he wrote about that process of Josh hiring him basically to just take care of support tickets and what it really turned into because it right, once you get support tickets, you realize it's not about fixing something. It's about helping them understand what they need to do, and how the numbers work, and the documentation behind it. So it's a really great article.

I've been getting a ton actually.

Yeah. I've been reading his stuff a lot lately Yeah.

His stuff lately is just like, alright. That's just really honest stuff. Some of it's a little brutal and it's it's really valuable. Mhmm. Alright.

Brother, what's going on?

Well, I guess I'll start with the good stuff that's going on and work through the the harder stuff as we get into the episode a little bit. But, yeah, ops calendar is is probably the thing that's looking up, you know, the most right now. It's still very early on. So I did start onboarding some some new some first customers, like we had our beta customers in there for a while. The truth is some of them have kind of, I don't know, lost interest or got busy and they're and and they're kind of getting like, half of them are are getting into it and using it and half of them are, not as responsive as they were early on.

But I I think I think they'll kind of come back to it now as we start to roll in more of the core features and now we're getting into, like, we're transitioning out of the beta phase into the public launch phase. But I did start inviting people from the early access list to be, like, actual first customers going through actual thirty day free trials. So last week, invited five people. Maybe I sent like seven invites, five people signed up. Two of those people actually entered their billing information, which is good.

And one of them is on the highest plan, the agency plan. So that was pretty promising. And then I had a call with with that agency client yesterday, which was really just encouraging for me. Mean, spent about a half an hour talking to them. They started put they're like an SEO agency and they and they put, you know, something like five of their clients on the thing already.

And they had some some questions about, like, features that are already in the road map. We're working on them, but they already see value in it. They see how it's gonna replace a couple of their tools and, you know, especially the reporting stuff. So that was really good to hear. And and I I I was just like flat out.

Like, they did already enter their billing info, but I was just like, the price point, like, what do you think about that? They're like, it's fair. You know? So that's that's feeling pretty good. And and the developers and I have been just cranking, you know.

Every day we're we're fixing bugs, which are starting now that we have more features built that produces more more bugs and different things are are intertwined and that's a little bit frustrating because it it's kinda slowing progress down a little bit. But

Yeah. How are you dealing with that? How do you how did the bugs come in? Is it like a intercom chat or email or something?

Part of it is is my own thing. Like the other thing that that happened this week is I officially started having my team on audience ops, the service start setting up ops calendar accounts for all of our clients. We've been playing around with it on our own blog for a while, but now, like this week, we're setting up all of our clients with an account of their own on Ops Calendar. And next week, I'm actually gonna be emailing all of them personally to say, hey, you now get this benefit of being a client of Audience Ops. Now you have a free Ops Calendar account, and this is where you can log in to see your

Oh, very nice.

Your traffic stats, your conversions, your, you know, traffic to each individual blog post. You can see the posts that we're planning, they're in the calendar.

So it's like a portal into the service.

Yeah, pretty much.

That's a nice add on bonus for the service users. Yeah. It's also will be really interesting to hear what comes out of in terms of like your basically your own feature requests.

Well, yeah. And so as we started to set that up for our clients, like we ran into some bugs with the WordPress integration and things that I was like, and and the per That's actually good. That's good.

Like, you run into it.

Well, yeah. And and like the performance tracking, and, like, had to get some things ironed out there before I'm able to really, give it to clients and and that sort of stuff. But those are today, now those are now all ironed out. We've got maybe half of our clients set up. They may be listening to this.

I I haven't actually emailed them to personally invite them to it yet, but like that's coming next week. And So I'm I'm really excited about that. And that is gonna just cut out such a massive bottleneck in our service. So every month, we we send out monthly reports to our clients where our team manually goes through every blog post that we created Oh, yeah. Finds the traffic.

Now it's here's your monthly stats. Log in here to see them.

Yeah. Exactly.

It's That's that's better.

And they're better stats. Like, we we give you more information now from the app. So that's so I'm pretty excited about that. The other thing is speaking of onboarding, that's becoming apparent that we need to have that. Like, all of our early users, they were like, it's pretty intuitive.

I mean, it's a calendar. It's it's pretty simple, but there is a bit of setup to get rolling with it. Like a few things that you need to do, like set your time zone, you know, set your install the tracking code, install the WordPress plugin. If you're using WordPress, you don't have to be. Connect to your social media accounts so that you can queue up your social posts.

So I have all that stuff documented in the knowledge base, but when you log in to the app, there's nothing that guides you through. So I just specked out having one of the like a typical tour for new users as as you log in, you know, the little pop ups that point to the different features take you through the thing.

Is is that how you're how you're doing it? Are you using a service or are you coding coding it yourself?

Coding it ourselves, but we're using a a jQuery, like a pre made

A library?

Yeah. Like a yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. We we looked at we looked at app queues.

Yeah. I I looked at that, but I I just don't see the need to pay for it every month when there's a perfectly easy and effective, like, jQuery library that

Right. I I think the reason to pay for it is is so that you don't take any technical resources. Like, I could build an app. Yeah. I mean, for me, like Even even then though.

I gave it to to one of our developers and he's gonna implement it. That'll probably take him like a day or two just to install the thing. And then after that, like, I'm able to edit the the jQuery and really customize the tour as as needed and and update it over time.

Once it's set up.

Yeah. Just he he just needs to plug it into the app, and then I can Yeah. And I handle all of the styling and all the all that kind of stuff already anyway. So

yeah. I'm interested to hear how that works for you. Our general take on it is that the UI should do that. You shouldn't need that type of a guided tour, but you know, that's nice in theory, but if you do that, you might spend the rest of your life on on your admin.

I think it depends on your product. I think in your case for the checkout, it probably makes sense that your UI should naturally Right.

Screens. It's like, this is the next step. Like the whole screen is about this step. It's it's not about discovery.

I haven't really seen the inside of your product, but it's it's like a checkout page creator, right? Like that's the main function of it?

It is, and and that the the the funny thing about that is that that's what the tool does. But that I

mean, obviously, after you create it, then it just runs. I I I get that. But I mean, like, when you for new users when they come in, their first, you know, thing to do is to go create your checkout.

No. No. We no. It's it's actually the way we set it up is that there's a setup page, and that setup page has three steps. And the first thing someone sees is that.

And we, when they, if they skip that and go to the funnels page, so like go build a funnel, we tell them like, go back there. Because it it's just what we do is So you have

like a dedicated onboarding screen.

Exactly. Right. Exactly. Right. And it's three steps.

So it's the first step is connect to your Shopify store. Then the second step, there are, there are a few things that need to happen and we kind of take the opportunity there to make things easier. So the first thing in step two is upload your logo. So when you upload your logo, it carries through all of your funnels. You don't have to upload your logo individually to every single page, right?

Then the next thing is like some form confirmation, like some settings in our app need to match the settings in your Shopify app. And if you don't do that, it won't work. So we push that out front and we say yes, confirmed. And then the third piece of that is heads up that we're gonna send you a request to access your store, to add our code snippet, because again, it won't work without that. So it's almost like we have to give these heads up things ahead of time.

I mean, I think in our case, like I've seen that done in many apps, like you described, like just a dedicated onboarding flow before you can even get into the app. And we maybe we'll get to that point and, do something like that. But but my thing is, I want the onboarding to also teach users where they can go back to to find these settings.

Yeah. We do a terrible job of that.

You know? And like, I don't want them to be like a different experience to set them up initially, and then later if they need to change stuff, it's in a completely different place. Like a lot of our onboarding stuff, like connecting your website, most users will not will wanna do it, but it's not required. You don't have to do that. Installing WordPress, you don't have to use WordPress.

Social media, if that's not important to you, you don't have to do that, but we do wanna show you this is where you'll do that. So I don't know. I think that's gonna be like the the first version of it is just using a basic tour, like pointing you through the app, set it up, and then it brings you back to your calendar. Well, like the other thing that we've had a lot of requests for is to for if you're a new user, you know, a checklist like these smart checklists are a big part of the app. They want us to give you a pre made checklist.

And now we have that. So Okay.

Like like Drip used to have those pre made campaigns.

Yeah. For us, it's like an article checklist. Like when you're producing a blog article, it should go like, these are all the steps that we use at Audience Ops. And it's like 15 or 20 steps. And we and in our system, you can have like dependencies, the the editing step can't be done until the draft is done.

And then you set number of days prior to the publish date. And so all those due dates get automatically applied based on when you schedule it in your in your calendar. So, like, now every new account gets a gets our auto article checklist built in. You can edit it, you can delete it, you can duplicate it, create new ones, all all that stuff.

Yeah. I love that injection of your opinion on how the process should be done. We we we have that throughout our app and sometimes we get pushed back on it and we've kind of taken the stance of at first we were like, how do we react? This is the way we think you should do Facebook tracking. Okay.

There's a million ways to do it. This is the way we think you should. And so what we yeah, where we kind of fall on it is like, it's okay to give your opinion. Ideally, it's easy to opt out of your opinion. So we say, is the way we do Facebook pixel tracking.

If you put your Facebook pixel in right here and we do it for you. If you don't want that, go use our script field in every page and do it yourself. So it's like, ideally it's both, but sometimes offering both complicates things.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, mean, that's kind of my first thing here is just I'm I'm really excited at the progress that we've made on ops calendar so quickly, especially the performance tracking stuff. I mean, that is that's one of the most valuable pieces of this app. And it's that we had the the core data there, but the presentation is really simple.

It's just like we give you the numbers. Later on, we'll have graphs and date pickers and all that. But right now, like just being able to see number of visits, number of entry visits to blog articles, and and you can set up conversion goals to see which blog posts led to conversions.

Oh, you mean like actual ROI on content?

Yeah. That's that's good. And so just having that that information being tracked now is is huge. And, like so these are, like, the some of the biggest features are already built. We've got some new some other features that we'll be building down the road, but, like, now I'm pretty confident about it's you know, it's rough, it's buggy, but it's I'm confident now to to start really inviting more users from the list and getting that rolling.

I said, this is an interesting trend or at least some people identify as the trend where things are moving toward all in one as opposed to these razor sharp specific tools. As you're talking, it's making me think of LeadFuse where LeadFuse started off with, give us an email address and you'll send a campaign with it. Then it goes into, we'll also help you find that email and identify the person and confirm that the email is good. And then we'll send it for you. And now it's like, just tell us your industry and we will go out, find people, verify their email address, send them on an email campaign.

So with you, it's starting to sound like there's an arc. It's from the time you have an idea for a post to the publishing, to promoting, to measuring. So you're taking on a lot, but it's a big promise to make if you can fulfill on it people, it feels like they're starting to gravitate toward those. Is that like a that's a thing. It is a thing.

Absolutely. Is. I hear it in my conversations with customers.

The desire to drop in the use of three tools

They are thinking about it like, alright, which tools is this going to replace? And what am I paying for those tools? And that's what they're that's what they're thinking of. It's I mean, SaaS is competitive now. It's it's so competitive.

It's competitive. And people ask us, they're like, do you do the landing pages also? We And said, no, you you need a landing page platform. And in the back of my mind, not forever.

Right. There are boundaries there. Like, are things that, like, I don't want to get into. We've had some questions from, like not really feature requests. They're just, asking if it's part of it.

And they're like, can you like edit the blog post? Is it a is it like an editor? And like, I'm not gonna get into it trying to replace a Google Docs or WordPress editor. It's it's about planning content, tracking it, measuring it, collaborating on it. But wherever you do the writing and the publishing like, you you can actually schedule stuff to publish from the calendar, but it's we're not gonna replace WordPress.

We're not gonna replace Google Docs. It's it's supposed to work alongside those.

Right. Like maybe we'll have an integration with that tool that takes a Google Doc and publishes it to WordPress or something like that, but it's it's tricky. You you need like a like a north star of what your product does, or it's easy to get pulled in different directions. The landing page thing, right? People want us to do the lit.

They're like, I'm using click funnels right now and paying them just for the landing page. And then I send the traffic to you to do the processing. Like, can I just could do that in your tool? You already have an editor. It like, it sounds like it makes so much sense, but but it probably doesn't.

Yeah. But like we said, like from idea to planning to publishing, distributing, you know, that's kind of the vision for this thing. That and that idea stage is the next feature that we're building in the next couple weeks where you can have a running list of ideas for blog posts, put them into your list, order them, and then like one click add to the calendar. And then when you when you add it to the calendar, automatically gets the checklist, automatically assigns the the writers, the people, you know, starts tracking it. And it's good to know.

I like the

fact that the agency, that signed up gave you good feedback because that sounds better to me than, you know, an individual person who's doing this for themselves. The fact that they're doing this for clients and the fact that you are going to be using it for your agency's clients, that sounds to me like a good trend to to keep to keep going after.

Totally. I I that'll be a big focus of it, but we we're also getting interest from just business owners who do a lot of content for their own business.

Yeah. I I don't. That's gonna be tough to figure out over the next few months for you. Right, looking at it from an outside perspective, I know we have made the mistake many times to say well we can we can satisfy both.

Yeah, I mean maybe it'll be a Yeah,

it's funny I have a running Trello card called special projects, and in there are like eight to 10 of the really high value, million dollar a month businesses that wanna use our app and would pay us several times more than what an individual would be paying us. And they don't get the attention they deserve because we are saying, oh, but we can serve everyone because it feels like, yeah, we can serve everyone. But in reality, you start to position yourself, listen to feature requests.

But part of it is that like, yeah. Like, we're clearly very focused on using this as a content marketing tool to plan your content calendar. But in a lot of ways, it's it's very much a project management tool built around a calendar. Like a lot of people who use Trello to manage an editorial calendar or spreadsheets, you know, they see this as like filling in all the missing gaps that those have, especially with Trello not being able to kinda conform to a calendar. And like you have a calendar view in Trello, but it doesn't you can't have like multiple due dates for a single item.

Right. What I'm looking I'm I'm looking at your site right now, and I'm looking at the pricing and and the copy and all that. I'm saying to myself, is there a point in time where instead of being a content marketing calendar, you are a content marketing calendar for agencies. Right.

Yeah. Maybe.

And and and the highest price point right now becomes the lowest price point.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's what's going on with ops calendar. Got a couple more things on the service side, but you wanna flip it back to you?

Yeah. That's that's really the biggest thing by far on my mind besides going away for the weekend, taking my kids away for a few days that that's actually on my mind more.

Yeah. Bet.

Yeah. I'm doing some legal stuff.

Doesn't

sound Oh like contracts, but it's for a big big customer so it's worth it, so that's fun. Besides that MicroConf, two weeks, coming up. That's exciting. I'm doing a talk, like the full on forty five minute talk, so definitely been stressing a little bit about that.

Did you figure out the topic?

I figured out the topic and I have it kind of mapped out in my head,

I need

to create some slides. I think those were due a week ago, know, sorry.

Very cool.

Yeah, but it's made me, it always makes you think backwards. It makes you look back. My general idea for the topic is to look at our story and focus on the failures.

That's what honestly, that's what people wanna hear about. That's what people connect with. And like the lessons learned, you know?

Yes. And at first I was like, all right, how do I talk about myself? Like my natural inclination is to highlight the good stuff. So I feel good about myself. But then I'm like, that's just not gonna be useful to someone sitting at the starter edition.

Especially the starter. Yeah.

Looking up on stage. I just wanna like disrupt that whole pattern. I just want to say everyone up here on stage. It is easy to talk about the good stuff and it's easy for, to be in the audience, which all of us are. And we'd look up at other people and we get into this weird thing of like, man, how am I ever going to get there?

Like how am I gonna do what they did? That's just, there's gotta be something you know, makes you feel motivated sure, but it also makes you feel bad sometimes. So I just want to disrupt that and be like, here's the version of our story where instead of highlighting the successes we'll highlight the failures and it's not a bad thing it's just the way it is and it's probably gonna go about the same way for you.

Yep. Yeah. I mean, I'm not gonna be there for the starter edition, but, yeah. Would have liked to see it or maybe see the video at some point.

Yeah. So

we record it. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I mean, I'm looking forward to to Vegas as always.

That's always a good it's a it's a good break and I feel like every year I come away with it in some some sort of change in my mindset than I that I did before I I went there. Like, even if I know what I'm kinda focused on this quarter or whatever, things tend to change when I leave MicroCon for some reason, usually in a good way. So, and it's unpredictable too. Right.

And it's one of the few, it's the only conference that I go into without any thought of, is this gonna be worth it? Right? Is this like, am I gonna get back the investment that I put into this? It's not even about that. It's just, let's just go into this and see what what comes out of it.

Right.

Right. I feel like I need to get out to more conferences though. And, like, MicroConf is the one that I always, you know, make a point of going to. Don't don't even think twice about it. Get the ticket.

Go. But, you know and I know that there are other other good conferences out there, but I always have that hesitation. Like, that's a new comic, I don't really know what to expect. Is it worth a

It's painful.

Is it worth a plane ticket in a hotel? Yep. You know? But, yeah, I should do that more. It's tricky.

What's what's up with you? You wanna

So I think last time I spoke about that new idea, audience ops express. That's right. Well, is no longer a thing. I shut it down. Okay.

How come?

Because it sounded like it had the bones of good potential. Yeah.

So a few things. I mean, number one, maybe I didn't give it long enough to develop. I ran it as an experiment for about two weeks. And in terms of promotion for it, I emailed a bunch of past clients. I spoke about it here on on our podcast.

I was a guest on Startups for the rest of us. I I think I mentioned it there at the time, you know, not knowing that I was gonna shut it down. And so what happened was I I had a bunch of and so basically with Audience Ops Express, the idea was we'll do all the legwork and set up for you. You just send us your draft content. So we do everything that we kind of normally do except for the actual writing of your content.

It was the the idea to offer a lower priced, unlimited model, you know, unlimited content support. We'll we'll set it all up for you. That was the idea. We had a free trial task with that. And we had a bunch of people sign up, maybe seven or eight people signed up for during that two week period signed up for the free trial task.

Think about four or five of them actually got up to submitting a task for us to work on. And then of those five I think it was like five tasks submitted. I think there were three that were like legitimately tasks that we would do as part of that service.

Right.

Okay. There were two that No. There were Just don't do. Yeah. They were like, yeah.

Can you write us a 1,500 word article? Yeah. Like, no. This is not that. Like, I don't know how much clearer I could have made it, but that that's not

what it is. Yep.

And and that wasn't just one person. Like, I I had three or four requests of people saying, like, can you can I give you a a rough outline and your writers turned it into a well written piece? And, like, no. Like, we we don't put that level of resources at this price point.

But that's the feedback you actually needed to get.

Yeah. That was the thing that that that was one of the big pieces of feedback that was like, either people are not quite getting it or it doesn't really give the value that they actually need and I wouldn't actually be able to make that work at that price point. So that was the biggest thing. The other thing was that, you know, of those free trials, they were happy with the ones that we completed, but then they didn't convert. Like, I'd send them a couple of follow ups like, ready to activate your account and But

it wasn't, oh, this is awesome. Let's let's pay for this and and be able to do this regularly. Right.

Right. So none of them converted. Again, it was only a two week period. Maybe if I kept it going longer, I even got some requests for it after I shut it down. My thinking was like, alright, two weeks, all the signs are not so great.

Like there was really no good feedback that I was getting at that point. So I was like, I could I could keep plugging away at it and try to fix all the problems or I could just stop investing time in it. And that's what I decided to do.

You do have enough going on Exactly. With the software and the software seems to be on the upward swing in terms of how promising it is.

Exactly. So, yeah, like I didn't wanna really start a whole new business stream, you know, and a whole business model. So what I decided to do on the service was stick to what we've been doing, you know, done for you content, seamlessly, and that's what we've been doing since day one. There is value there. We've we've delivered value.

Our our clients do see value in that. But I did make a change to our pricing. So our retainer services haven't changed. We're now calling those like autopilot. That's the autopilot plan.

But now we're offering on demand options. So instead of signing up for monthly, now you can purchase one article or a batch of five or a batch of 10 or have us, write a lead magnet for you. So those are now available as one off purchasable options, whereas before we would only do those as part of our monthly plans. I've always been a little bit hesitant to offer that option because like not recurring revenue and all that. But and by the way, the monthly plan is still the best value if you do the math on the prices and everything.

And you get a few extra benefits of being a monthly customer, like you get Odds calendar for free, a few other things. But my thinking with having the the one off options is a, it's kind of a lower priced entry point. Like, you could have us just do one article or just a batch of five to kinda I don't know, as like a initial purchase, but like entry point before getting into the monthly service. But it's also a way to give clients a little bit more flexibility to like ramp up and ramp down as needed. You know, I think some of the cancellations were like, we would like to kinda keep going, but maybe just pause it for a month or downgrade for a month and then back up and, you know, so I I wanted to try out, you know, having a little bit more flexibility there.

So it's only been about a week since I launched that and kinda seeing how that goes.

Yeah. That's an interesting way to get into it without the commitment. And then if you find yourself purchasing regularly, then makes more sense to commit.

Yeah. And and then again, like, it it avoids the whole rabbit hole of launching a whole new service. Like, we're not doing like, we're still doing what we've always done. We've got our system. We've got our people in place.

We do it really well. Really, at this point, I think it's it's a a matter of just getting more leads to the service. And that's something that I've been really focused on now. Like, right now, I'm working on kind of like a new content funnel for the service, where I'm writing like a big epic blog post, gonna run ads to that. It's got a bunch of content upgrades on it, brings them into a sequence that that then, you know, should lead into the service.

So I'm gonna see I'm gonna try to get that launched by by MicroConf hopefully, and and then see how that rolls, you know.

Nice, man. And I think you're gonna be plenty busy on the software side.

Yeah. I'm always busy on the software side kind of working with the developers on that day to day and but yeah, you know, the the service has been it's still been a tough side of the business. You know, it was growing really steadily and then it kind of plateaued. And I've been looking at why that that may have happened. And I did notice the other day that my personal audience kind of plateaued as well starting from November around November.

Like, it was growing pretty steadily, and then that kind of flatlined. And I think it has to do with me publishing less content over there. I've been sending Friday notes, but a little bit less frequently to my newsletter. So I'm starting to think about maybe If there's

a direct correlation there?

Well, I think there definitely is a direct correlation there. I think I know that a lot of our clients for audience ops came from my personal audience or somebody in my audience recommended us to somebody that they know, which happens a lot. You know, because what I noticed with the service was that our traffic hasn't changed. We've we've been getting the same level kind of steadily growing traffic throughout these past few months, but the number of leads coming in has has dropped. That's kind of the big data, talking about, like looking at the data back to the, you know, setting priorities and everything.

That's the one data point that I can actually see that there was a change in November in my list, and there was a change in the audience ops leads kind of slowing down since November. So I don't know. I'm thinking maybe in the next few months, I might start to put more time and resources into more of my own content, whether it's a new podcast or more writing or videos. It kinda making it little bit more integrated. Yeah.

Just maybe putting more time and resources on that side of things. Whereas up up till now, the last year, really, I've been hesitant to spend any time on that. I've been writing a lot less, sending a lot less to my list because

Right when when it when in reality that that might be the driver of of the lead flow into audience ops.

Yeah. You know, we'll see where that goes and and see how that plays out.

Alright, man. Well, look, I think we have another maybe just one more episode before microconf.

Yeah.

Yeah. Possibly two. Possibly two. We'll see. But we we will update when we can.

Brian, you have a great weekend over there. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Yeah. Have a

good trip. Alright. Take care, fellas.

Cheers, everybody. Bye.