Bootstrapped Web

Bootstrapped web, we are back finally. We're back. That's That's right. Jordan, man, how many weeks has it been since

It's been a few weeks, man.

I don't know.

That's right. It's been it's been a month or so. Yeah. Well, you since MicroConf. That's that's all I know.

Right. Right. Well, you and I hung out a bit there. And, so, yeah, so we'll talk about that. We've got our usual updates.

We'll try to catch folks up on on what's been up if you haven't, you know, if we haven't talked. I know many of you we we talked to at MicroConf or through email or elsewhere, but but yeah, let's let's get back into it here. So I thought maybe we'd just list off our updates that we have for today, know, right from the top so you know what's coming here. So Jordan, what do got today?

Yeah, I like this change. Let's talk about upfront what we're gonna cover on the show. Okay, cool. So I want to talk about number one, my biggest takeaway from MicroConf. Number two, we hired two more people, we're six full time, we're growing faster and just a whole new set of problems that are coming along with that.

And then the third thing I want to talk about is marketing, and really what's happened is that we have let our marketing muscle atrophy over the past few months and now we need to start things back up. So those are like the three big big things.

Very cool. Alright. So my my three updates today are kind of a big refocusing of my priorities for the rest of the year. I've got like a one, two, and three on that. I just recently redesigned my personal site, castjam.com, so I could talk a bit about, why and some strategies that I put into that.

And then, the marketing funnel for audience ops service. So I've got some Facebook ads running that that have been running for the past month that I think are finally starting to work. Got some issues with tracking it and and whatnot, but I'll I'll get into those a little bit later too. But, yeah, that's that's what we got. So why don't we why don't we hit it?

I mean, why don't we start with Microcom?

Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. So this is related to one of the one of the larger lessons that I've learned over the past few months. I went through like a few month period where I kinda didn't want advice.

I just didn't want to hear. I didn't want to read another blog post about another tactic. I kind of just thought, alright, I just know what I need to do, and I don't want to consume any more content and advice. I don't want to be distracted. I just want to execute.

And I'm starting to come out of that, and and MicroConf helped to do that. It helped me kind of just look back around and say, okay, I think I'm ready to be more open now to the fact that I'm not perfect, I have not been in this exact situation before, and I have things to learn. So I've been trying to be very humble with things happening in the business, so I it's almost like self deprecating, and I think it's been very helpful for the team to see me very freely admit shortcomings. So you don't want to overdo it and like put myself down too much. It now a very open part of our culture to admit, oh yeah, I have been doing that wrong, please help me.

So MicroConf kind of helped with that because you know, you just come across so many new ideas, it seems silly to go there and then be closed off to all those ideas. So of those, the biggest takeaway I had was from a talk by Russ Hanneman, who runs content over at Digital Marketer. I don't think about content marketing as like our main channel, I just didn't expect this particular talk to have the big impact and be the single biggest thing. The point specifically that he talked about that has stuck with me is looking at the content funnel, right, from top to bottom. So he talks about Tofu, MoFu, BoFu, and POFu.

If you can remember what the p stands for, it would be helpful. So Tofu being top of funnel, as in very generic, open ended content for your market at large, kind of like five ways you can optimize your ecommerce store, right, that would be top of the funnel. Then middle of the funnel would be like, you know, your cart abandonment optimization stuff, and then the bottom of the funnel would be like, here's a case study on how CartHook helped this person do x, or here's a feature, right, so from top to bottom of the funnel. And then POFU is for people who are already customers, so that's documentation, support docs, internal information about case studies and new strategies for the people who are already in your in your system. So he talked about that, and what he said was most people look at the top of the funnel and they say, oh, I need traffic.

I need articles that are more open ended and generic for my market. And his lesson was actually you should start at the bottom. Ignore the top of the funnel content entirely. You shouldn't give yourself the freedom to write articles like five things you can do to optimize your ecommerce store until you can handle the traffic that moves further down. So it helped us so much because we felt very confused on do we get more traffic and attract more people or do we work on our support documentation?

Because working on support documentation kind of feels like this thing that doesn't move the company forward.

Yeah. You know, lot of it is kind of like semantics and like and and putting different pieces of content throughout your entire website and even things that are off of your website and and email and knowledge base and stuff like that, like putting all of that under a massive tent of content marketing. Most people think of content marketing as just your blog or just your your emails or social media. That tofu sorry, top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. I think of top of funnel and some of the middle funnel stuff as most of what happens in blog content.

So like educational articles, stuff that might be found of like like broad interests that your target audience may be searching for or sharing on social media. Middle of funnel to bottom of funnel could be, like, your pricing page, like you said, case studies, feature like, feature tours, even, like, sales content. So like on on Audience Ops service, we have like a like an eleven minute video walk through, demo walk through of exactly how the service works. That's not even shown publicly on the site. You have to request a consultation first.

You fill out the form, and then it takes you to that, which is like a pre video before you even talk to to me or talk to a salesperson. So like that and that's a that's a very very important content piece that we have in our in our system.

Right. But it's not for the top. It's not what people generally think of like, oh, an article that gets SEO ed and gets shared. Right. It's not that at all.

Exactly.

Yep.

Yeah. So that was a

good what one. It helped us do is be patient. It helped us say, no, actually, investing two weeks in our support documentation is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it's been incredibly helpful.

Yeah and especially if that results in lower or more efficient customer support or happier customers, more referrals, you know.

Right. And what it really leads into is a higher conversion rate of trial to paid. And then when you go one step up into the funnel and you do a case study and you post that, you know, as a lead magnet and on Facebook, when people come in, you'll convert more of them. And then once that is in place, when you go up to the middle of the funnel and people come in and then opt in for the case study, you have like a track for them to go through. Yeah.

So that that was that was my biggest like single takeaway from MicroConf, like from a talk.

One of my big takeaways, and this is not like a new tactic or new lesson learned or anything, but I something struck me because we were at the growth, You and I attended the growth. You you spoke and hosted at the starter. But at the growth, in some ways, it it all came back to basics. There was like this theme across most of the talks where it's still all about the problem that you solve, the core problem that you solve for customers. As you progress further into your business, years into your business, it's more about really understanding like the the underlying why of of that problem in your customers' minds and how they talk about the problem, how they think about the problem.

And that to me, like, shine through in a lot of these talks. I liked

Just the focus on fundamentals?

The focus on fundamentals, but just really focusing on that on that problem solution and not trying to not taking that for granted. Like, people are so focused on like product market fit in the first year, first six months of your startup. But three, four years into your business, that still has to be your number one priority is really understanding that number one problem, understanding what your problems are not. So like, Natalie, I don't know how to pronounce her last name, Nagile from, Postmark app. You know, she was talking about how they kind of like doubled down on on speed and reliability of of their email delivery.

And like they didn't try to go compete on these all these other features that other email providers were doing. They they really doubled down on the on the specific reason why people feel like they have a problem and and feel like it's worth it switching to postmark. Right. It would have

been easy for them to add automation and little tiny things that they could have easily added.

Or you look at Johanna Weeb's talk about copy being more specific, not being afraid to write longer, more specific copy. That's what she's really getting at there is is talking more specifically about the specific problem that a specific type of person in a specific situation has and just really getting into their heads on a deep level. So that just kind of shined through in I think everybody's talk.

Then I It's interesting. It's almost like the more expertise you attain over time, the more you realize that it's nothing fancy.

Exactly. It's

getting getting the few things right and doing the fundamentals right.

Yep. And you know, like, something out in my last update here later on about the marketing funnel for audience ops, my whole goal in doing all these businesses over the last few years is get to a point where I know for a fact that I could put $1 in and I'm gonna get 3 or $4 back, and it and it works predictably. I mean, in in Natalie's talk from Postmark out, they're well established, you know, I think multimillion dollar, you know, revenue business. Everybody has seen their brand around. And one of her offhand comments in her talk was, you know, still our marketing is very wishy washy.

I remember her saying that, like, we kinda get a lot of customers, like, from referrals and, like, we're not really sure, like, about attribution and where which channels are working for us. Like, the this is a the the CEO of a multimillion dollar business, like, they still haven't nailed that down.

And, like, yeah. We don't know how to acquire customers.

Like, that's still that that resonated with me big time. Like and, you know, like, everyone's still trying to figure that thing out, and I certainly am. So, and I guess my last, note about microconf is I just really enjoyed the growth the separation of the growth and starter edition.

It was interesting being at both. So what what's your take on? Yeah.

Or So I

just the separation.

I had to fly out on Wednesday morning. I I I met a few of the starter folks at the Tuesday night party, but I I didn't spend a lot of time on that side of it. I really enjoyed the the time talking to folks at the growth, the dinners, the parties, the hallway track. Because I remember last year feeling like it was kind of the first time I I I left MicroConf. I went home thinking, you know, I didn't have enough time to talk to the people that I wanted to talk to and have the conversations that I wanted to have, and I definitely did not feel that this year.

I spoke to all the friends that that I catch up with and see again at MicroConf. I had a chance to to to say what's up to them and talk to them. And I got to meet a whole bunch of other folks and go deep with them in, like, long conversations about about running their business. Like folks that I I the most amazing thing about microcom is you meet you meet guys and girls who are running amazing businesses and they are completely unknown. They're they're not doing podcasts.

They're not doing blogs and newsletters, they're just killing it and you have these conversations you know at the after party, at the bar or something and it's just awesome. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it was the difference I felt being at both was that growth was like a more relaxed atmosphere. It was like a patient, we're hanging out with friends and people were there to network and talk to people and learn things from other people, and the talks were important, but wasn't the focal point of the conference. And then Starter Edition was the opposite. Starter Edition was the talks, people there were pumped up, they were give me the goods, I am here to learn what's going to get me to that, you know, to that first step.

So they wanted the content man. They were pumped up and the energy was super strong.

How were the talks in general, any like standout stuff? Talks were On the starter side, I mean.

Yeah, I remember. Yeah, the talks were great. There were a few of them that it was like, alright, I need those slides. You know how you know like, oh I wanna remember this stuff, like Sujan Patel talked about really sophisticated marketing in a really simple way, so it wasn't overwhelming, which is hard to do. So he talked about that, Justin Jackson talked a lot about just being prolific.

I focused my talk on failure actually, that's what I talked about, basically just trying to highlight the fact that to go from star tradition to growth isn't right, it's not like being smarter or better, it's just kind of going through it. And chances are going through it is not gonna be this perfect easy thing, so like get used to some bumps, that's fine, just the bumps are normal. The bumps don't happen because you're no good, the bumps happen because that's just the deal. Yes, that's what I chose to focus on. Yeah.

It was cool. I love the energy.

Awesome.

Cool, man. Alright.

Cool. So so yeah, we'll move on. Let's do it. Alright. So my the first thing that I had here today is refocusing my priorities for the rest of the year.

And this is something that I've been giving a lot of thought around micro comp, around the week after micro comp or so, and really before micro comp actually. But this is something that tends to happen with me right around this time of the year. I I think it's happened almost every year at some point, like at some point, like, right near the end of the first quarter into the second quarter, some sort of things change and I kind of reevaluate, alright, how am I gonna spend the rest of this calendar year? And so the the thing that I was have been facing, which I think I alluded to a bit in the previous podcasts, you guys know that ops calendar, the SaaS that I've been building, this is the year that it's rolling out, that we've been building it. And we did get our first cost like, first paying customers.

We we had prepaid customers, but actually this past month, we had the first, like, MRR come in from it. So that that was a nice milestone. And I well, I officially rolled it out to all of our clients on Audience Ops. So now it's, like, actually in action and in use for every client, and they all have access to it. My team is using it.

I'm using it for my personal stuff. But the service the the content service from Audience Ops over the last six or seven months took a kind of slow but steady stagnation and the MRR dipped down a little bit. So we had kind of a string of cancellations a few months ago. That was a result of months prior getting a bunch of clients who maybe weren't the right fit for us. And then and then that leveled off.

So the cancellations have have basically stopped. Like, we still have our, like, the core client base, which is a good fit. But also at the same time, you know, since January, February, the number of new leads and sales has also dipped. The combination of those things really made had a painful tightening on that whole business.

Right.

Luckily Where were those leads coming from? Is it

Well that so this is

How organic?

This is where the I think the big learning that I had about a month or two ago was that I think a lot more of those leads came from my personal audience than I realized before. You know, I looked at a graph of my personal email list and that since November, December was growing and then it and then there's a point where it just levels off and it kinda stopped growing. And that's because I was sending fewer emails to my list, writing fewer content, not being a guest on other shows as as much. I had my productized podcast last year, which I kinda paused right around that time. Okay.

So

so it's almost like you weren't giving all that stuff credit, but that that was that was the driver.

Yeah. So I I for the past year or so, I purposely like, I intentionally put my personal side of the business, my castjam.com off to the side, not giving it as much time and resources and energy because I felt like the more that I do that, the the more that I'm taking away from audience ops. When in fact, I think that actually hurt the lead flow coming into audience ops.

Why does it look obvious in retrospect, but not

not ahead of time?

So so frustrating.

Yeah. And there's also the hesitation, like, I don't want the leads to just come from my audience, you know. I want I want them to come from a marketing funnel and all that, but which I'll get into later. But anyway, like, the the conclusion that I came to about a month ago was that, look, Ops Calendar is a SaaS product that I feel is pretty far along in the validation process. We have paying customers now.

We've had prepaid customers. It clearly solves a pain for folks. We're using it, especially agents like marketing agencies are really getting the the best bang for the buck from it. But this is a fully self funded venture, and it did get to a point where the profit coming out of audience ops and and product ties and everything, that started to, you know, level off a little bit, which made it really difficult to keep sustaining paying for developers on ops calendar. So what I had to do was kind of slow down the development process of that and deprioritize OpsCalendar for the for like a period of the next few months now going into, you know, summer twenty seventeen.

I plan to pick it back up in terms of like investing dollars into it and really driving outbound marketing for it and everything near the 2017 and into next year. But between now and then, in in order to get to that point, I need to focus on the revenue generating and profit generating sides of my business, which are audience ops service, and I need to get back to devoting time and energy into my personal content. So basically, now my my refocused priorities for the rest of the year, one, two, and three. Number one, my personal content. So I just launched a redesign of castjam.com.

I started recording new new episodes of the productized podcast. That's gonna start becoming a weekly thing very soon. It's kind of like an interview show where I talk to other folks, not just about Productize services, but lots of different stuff. Started recording videos for my YouTube channel. I wanna get that fired up.

I haven't really embraced YouTube much, but I so basically, I'm I'm gathering questions from my audience. I've got a bunch of questions from my list. If you're listening to this show and you have a question about anything, like, literally anything, you you wanna hear me talk for five minutes and answer.

So so you just want a general, like, startup content on that front?

Yeah. You know, I mean, the things that I focus on. If you have questions about product high services, if have questions about content marketing, email marketing, design, websites, you know, pricing, business models, hiring folks, outsourcing, delegating, like anything like that, podcasting, whatever it is.

Video video is the thing, man. That's the thing. I see my my competition doing videos well on Facebook ads and I know like how am I gonna I'm not gonna compete with that with static images, so it's not gonna work.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, that's kind of a channel that I haven't really taken full advantage of and I get a lot of these I do get a lot of questions through my list, and I don't have a place where I just give, like, quick answers. You know, like, I write my long form articles on my blog. I do these podcasts. The Productized Podcast is more of like an interview show, But I don't have a place where I can just talk for like five minutes about pricing tiers, you know, or whatever it is.

So I think for the next few months, I'm really gonna focus on putting out a lot more free content on that side of things, growing my email list. On that business side, like my personal business side, basically selling the productized course. I wanna drive more sales of that. I mean, right now, it it gets a a pretty good chunk of, organic sales, just people coming through my list. And the nice thing about that, of course, is that it's it's basically an info product that's like, you know, pure profit self serve.

It's a good piece of my income. It's not the majority of it, but it's it's a good piece of it. I I would like to see that increase and get more systems driving to that. I thought about at some point maybe launching like a coaching program through through the Productize program. So I I currently offer like a one time coaching session through Productize.

I'm thinking about opening up like a limited six month group coaching program.

Okay. Not like not not one on one to like a handful of people. I I thought about this too. It feels almost silly not to do it, but but haven't done

And this is not a thing that I have launched yet or anything. I'm just this this is kind of like the concept that maybe I'll open up in a few months, is a small group coaching thing where I'll have one, maybe two groups of five people, And the the idea is that you commit to it for six months, and we meet probably twice a month. You get a private Slack channel with me and and the other five folks in your group. And and we have things that will cover like a kind of like a curriculum if you will, but it's also like part part that, part mastermind, making progress, you know, on especially if you're looking to do like a productized service. I put all that as like the number one priority, and then a close second will be marketing for audience app service.

I feel like at this point, we really have the service really, really nailed down right now. Like, we've got our systems running. We've got a really great team in place. We deliver content really well. The clients that have been on board for a long time are really happy with the service.

And

Now it's acquisition.

It's just acquisition. And and I started firing up Facebook ads a month ago. I think they're starting to work, and I could talk more about that funnel a little bit later. But I've got more work to do on that over the next few months. And then number three would be ops calendar, which I'm I'm not doing a whole lot of work right now except for, I'm still onboarding people from the early access list.

So there there are those people that I'm bringing in in in small chunks. And I'm using it, internally at Audience Ops, using it for my own stuff and but big time feature development on that is going to kind of hold off until probably later in the year.

Yeah. This is the the difficulty of SaaS. It takes so long for the revenue to get to a point where it's paying for at least a developer salary, and then ideally more than more than one person's salary.

Even at like MicroComp and like these different places where bootstrappers talk about that, basically bootstrapping a software business. I I don't feel like there's enough discussion around purposely taking it slow. You know? And and maybe this is something that I wanna write about at some point. But like

Purposely? What do mean?

Well, just there's this like, look, I'm I'll be like the first one to say, like, you need momentum, you need to keep pushing, you need to keep taking action and ship ship ship. I get that. And you need to be talking to customers and hustling to get your first 100 customers like

Keep firewall warm.

Of course. No doubt about it. But if you're self funding it, so if you did not take outside investment, like you're relying on a service business or other products to roll profit from those into your software business. Like you have to strategically think about how you're planning out your year, two years, three years. Like it's a different timeline than if you have investment or if you're coming off of like a big sale, like, you know, I didn't take the the money It's

a different timeline.

Like, when I sold Restaurant Engine, I did not take all that money and pump it into ops calendar, like, I it it was what helped me launch Audience Ops, it helped me buy a house, like, you know, it

I don't think there's a right way to do it, but guess if nothing else, my recommendation to people would be to not count on it being fast. Like if you're going to quit your job and you have like four months of savings in the bank and you think that your software is going to cover your expenses within four months, that's just very unlikely to happen. So I don't know if it's purposely going slow or just being realistic about the time frame, there's something, but the self funding route is most likely to be slow.

I went through a bit of like, what do I wanna get out of all this? Like, do I like

Oh, you're the big questions here? Is this

Yeah. I mean, well, no, like I you know, like launching something like ops calendar, like, to be honest, I don't intend for it to just overtake everything else that I'm doing, you know.

Okay.

Like I like I don't intend for this to be yeah. It would be great if it grows into a million dollar business, a $5,000,000 business, 10,000,000, like but I'm not expecting that to happen this year. I'm not expecting that to happen next year or maybe maybe not ever, you know. And I'm and and it's just one and this is just me personally. I know everybody

Right. You have a portfolio mentality.

I I'm taking it more of like especially now that I'm rethinking my priorities, I'm embracing that even more now is like that portfolio mentality of, look, I do I'm I'm developing this SaaS going the slow route on that on the side. I've got this productized service which grows pretty fast and that's and that's been running, got great people on it. I really love to teach and and write and podcast and do videos, and I'm doing that on my personal side. And and I like to not bust my ass and and I like to take off work at three, 4PM so I can go hang out with my girls and and travel. Like that stuff is that that's my portfolio right now, and I Right.

It's also it matches with what you're actually trying to accomplish. There isn't like a disconnect between the two, which happens sometimes. I have I have found myself with that disconnect sometimes, know. It's like, oh, you want to make millions off of this thing, but you also wanna play it a little bit safe on on the way you spent. Like, which what is it, bud?

Yeah. And like one thing that I wrote down, and like why do I actually spend the time to even write on my personal blog or grow my personal list and do that or teach courses and stuff. I think a big part of the actual businesses that I'm building, the products, the product I service, the SaaS, a big part of the value is not just the business itself, but the case study that comes out of it. That like building a business for the purpose of teaching about how that business came about is just as much of, like, a benefit or a byproduct of it than the actual business itself, the the revenue, the product, the value, the customers. Maybe I'm not really describing that as clearly as I want to, but that's that's kind of a thought that has been rolling around my head for a while.

But Anyway, that's that's kind of the first big one for me. So back over to you.

Alright, man. Alright. Let's see what we got here. What do we got? Okay.

So I don't know how it happened, but next thing I know, there are six people full time in the company. So we we had our biggest month ever last month, which was it was a thrill, man. It felt like a year of work all paying off all at once. Basically what happened was, you know, as we've talked about before, we were artificially suppressing demand by forcing people to go through a demo, and the Shopify market just does not buy that way. Most markets in the tech space don't buy that way, so forcing a thirty minute conversation with someone on a screen share was just going to slow down.

You know, if you get a 100 visitors and two people sign up for a demo, there are probably another five people who would have signed up if you just let them just try it already. So we did that for months until the software got to a point where we were comfortable and confident in its reliability. So it did get there, and we're now processing a much larger amount of revenue per day than we were just, you know, thirty, sixty days ago. So as we grew more confident in the product, we said, alright. It's time to open up registration.

So the only thing we have done is change two buttons on the site from schedule a demo to sign up for a fourteen day trial, and things just blew up. So it was, you know, it was obvious that we were we were suppressing demand, and there was demand. And then as soon as we opened it, so things are 100% inbound right now, which is cool, but nothing to be proud of because that means we're not doing enough marketing, which is the last point I'll talk about in a few minutes. So we opened up registrations, and things blew up. Hallelujah.

And if I remember correctly, is it still there's no credit card upfront and then Oh, there is.

There is. Is.

Oh, there is.

It is.

I thought it had like an activation thing.

No. It's super aggressive. I'm very happy about it. It's fourteen days instead of thirty day trial. It's credit card upfront and it's starting at $300 a month, which for the Shopify market is preposterously high.

But it's just the position we've taken in the market and we said we are the premium product. There's only one other product that does it, and they are at $37 a month. So it's just you take your choice. You either go with with the lower end product or the higher end product, you know. So it's almost like we just staked out this position and took a chance, and and it's working.

We just had a ton of sign ups, and then what came with that was just the amount of support that we've we've just never seen. It was just twelve hours a day of typing for just days and days and days in a row, and what we realized was two things. A, this isn't going to work. Right? We we can't do this ourselves.

The other thing we noticed was we don't have enough documentation, so we're answering really straightforward questions. It's not the user's fault, it's our fault. So that obviously needs to be a priority, and then the part where we took a little risk was, should we hire now or should we wait to see how many of these people turn into paying customers? And what we said was, let's just start looking for people to hire because so we basically just did it at the same time. So we started the hiring process, and then kinda kept an eye on the trial conversions, and then as they

started And you have a fourteen day trial, it takes at least fourteen days to even start hiring, let alone like interview and get somebody on board.

Right. So we just said, alright, let's just start it up. And we got pretty lucky. We had great advice from one of our investors that said, don't hire one, hire two at the same time. And we were like, hire two?

That's like too much. And he was like, alright. Fine. And then a week later, I was like, okay. You're right.

We need to hire two. So we hired one full time customer support person who's been just fantastic because they worked at at Apple, and then they worked at Google Glass, and Aaron has a systems mentality, so it's not how do I support this person right now, it's how do I build up the system to handle when we have five support people? Like how do things get tagged? How do things get moved around, assigned? So that's been amazing.

And at the same time, one of the things we noticed was if we had let's say a 100 sign ups, out of those 100 sign ups, five of those sign ups would be much higher value than the others, right? So people sign up that are making $50 a month and then all of sudden someone signs up that's making a million dollars a month, but those people were being treated the same as the other 95, and we said that's just not smart. So we also hired a full time customer success person. So we hired Mike and Aaron both at the same time. Mike on success, Aaron on support, and now we kind of have this very foreign situation where I am now officially just a bottleneck and I'm just in the way.

What what is the difference in role between the customer success and customer support?

Sure. So we look at it as as a funnel thing, as a sequential thing, like where in the pipeline does your responsibility start, and then when do you hand it off to someone else? So we look at it as Jordan is responsible for the front, getting leads into the pipeline. Right? So I'm responsible, like we have our own metrics.

So my metric is the number of sign ups. Number of people who start a free trial put their credit card in and start a free trial. That's my metric, and it's also where I hand off the baton to Mike, and Mike is in charge of success. What that means is the number of people that convert from trial to paid. So he's taking the baton when they when they sign up and start their trial, and he hands off the baton at the point of them converting into a paid customer.

He also keeps an eye on the high value customers after they're already customers because they should be treated differently and should be checked in on and how are things going, what can we do, that sort of thing, but his main responsibility, his main metric is the conversion rate of trial to paid. And Aaron, this is where there's some crossover. Not only does he support existing customers, he also does the tier one support for people who are in their trial. So that's where there's like a little bit of crossover. So that's kind of how that part of things work, and we're trying to isolate the development team to make sure that they're not handling the problem with technical support for a product like this is that it's not just communicating, it's also investigating.

So so when Ben does both, when Ben has to talk to the person and then do the investigation, he loses whole days to just investigating a problem and what's happening and why. So you can spend an hour looking into one person's problem. So at least now we have the tier one that says, this only gets handed off to Ben and the tech team after I have figured out what's going on, why. I have a bunch of notes, so their investigation time is shrunken as much as possible. I mean, went up, hallelujah.

Revenue went up by 60% last month, which is, you know, fun, hallelujah. Take a deep breath and keep going, but now expenses went up with it.

And so they are I forgot, are are they local to you, the the the two new people?

They are local. We're we're doing the remote local hybrid thing.

They're both in Portland?

They're both in Portland with me. And Ben was here after MicroConf, so we we had a good two weeks together. All four of us here, and then the dev guys in Slovenia were actually going off to Slovenia in two weeks to do our yearly retreat. Yeah, so things things are good, but now there are there's just a new set of challenges, you know, and yeah, we talk about it on this podcast regularly. You say you just knock down one set of problems and a new set presents itself.

It's never gonna end. It's not like the it's never gonna just be clear sailing. And you get that from everyone. The same you get it from Natalie who's running postmark. She has her own set of problems.

Everyone does. It just depends on which set you're you're dealing with.

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, one thing that I've that has consumed a lot of my time over the last, like, two weeks is project management. We're really managing the project managers. I didn't think that I would still be working on this after two plus years of audience ops, and we have really bulletproof systems and processes and people. But one of our two project managers went on vacation last week, and so I was kind of covering for her stuff that week.

And and that gave me an opportunity to look at our processes and see, oh, there's a bunch of stuff that's kind of the ball's being dropped here. That's not as efficient as it could be. And we are onboarding a bunch of new clients who signed up recently. And so now it looks like we're gonna need to bring on a third project manager pretty soon and a writer. So I need to have training in place.

And so I just worked last week on creating like a mini training program to train up a new project manager so that I can so that that system runs itself. So that we can, like, so we can onboard a new project manager because that's the the toughest it's it's much easier for us to onboard a writer or a virtual assistant, but the project manager is like it's so much harder to train for and and also like manage. And and so and like that thing with with Ben, like getting tickets escalated to him, like, that happens to me. Like, I'm the person that the project managers escalate to me when they don't know how to answer a question or handle a certain situation. And something that I've just been trying to, you know, drill into them is that, look, when you escalate something to me, you need to give me the whole backstory.

Yes. Don't make me look for it.

Don't make me look for it. You know, like, you gotta give me the here's the link to the help scout conversation. Here's the link to the Trello card. Here's the article that this is about. And if you remember, this is the client who has that special thing.

And, like, look, I don't remember that stuff. Even though even though I may have been in the conversation two or three weeks ago, just don't assume. And and and then the other thing that I'm trying to get across in in our systems and processes really is document everything. Like, there should be a hit a documented history of everything. So, like, every single article that goes through our production line has a documented history in the Trello comments because it we produce it over the course of three or four weeks.

I wanna know that, like, every milestone was hit or if there were any and then for individual clients themselves, like, each client has a card and we have a history going back for some clients now two years of, here's here's their update every month and and here's something new that happened with them and here and here's an issue to be aware of. So so if I ever reach out to a client, like, I can go and see, alright, these are kind of the latest developments. And so I I've just been working on that kind of stuff to like, and I'm putting a lot of hours into this stuff now, but the whole goal is to make it so that if something gets escalated, I'm super quick with it, but really just reduce the number of things that have to get escalated, you know.

Yeah. It is it's like you need to get more boring, you need to get a little more corporate, like you can feel the natural like path into it because it does make sense. Like what we've experienced in the past two weeks since hiring two more people was we have to change the way we do things. You know what we need? We need meetings.

We have no choice. We used to do everyone's meetings all at once in a one hour stand up. It's not even called a stand up. It's an hour every single morning, which was a little bit of culture and fun, and then what everyone's working on, and then we'd make like product decisions. It would just jam the whole day's worth of meetings at once.

Now all of a sudden, have six people. You're looking at six people's faces looking into a Zoom conversation for an hour every morning, and you're like, this is stupid. Like, we should just touch on what anyone needs or something really high priority for ten minutes, and then you and I should talk about what you and I need to talk about. We're not gonna make four people watch this. Yeah, it's like this natural tendency like, alright, we need more systems, more documentation, don't hand things up to Brian unless you have x y and z in order.

Right. Right. Cool.

More boring.

Well, one thing that I'm cautiously excited about right now is the audience ops marketing funnel. And I just sent out an email to my the Friday notes email to my newsletter about this.

Let let let's hear about this. Dig into this because my my third point is about marketing also. So it's it's along the same lines of what

Alright. So I forgot if I talked about it on the podcast or not, but a few like, six or six or eight weeks back, I was doing some Facebook ad experiments and I was pretty frustrated with them, you know, like they were just falling flat, cost per click were through the roof, like nothing was was gonna work like and I and I was looking for that glimmer of hope that would convince me to just keep it going and then you you could work on optimizing it. But back then, I did not have that. It was like, there's nothing to optimize here. It's just not working, you know.

And what were you advertising for? A strategy session? An opt in? Like, was the what was the goal of the of the ad?

That was also when I was testing out the express service, but but I was also doing some stuff to the to the main service and like

Oh, what are you doing now?

Okay. So right before microconf, my goal was to was to launch this before microconf. I was like, alright. I'm just gonna take one last stab at a Facebook ads funnel and put more time and effort into putting the pieces in place. And then once I launch it, I was like, I'm gonna give this thing thirty days.

I'm not gonna touch it for thirty days. I'll check-in on the stats, but I'm not gonna make any changes until May 1 after I've had a chance to fully assess all the data. Right? And that's what I did. So so today, we're recording this.

It's May 5, and I'm happy to say that the ads are still running thirty five days in, and I'm gonna keep them running because it's basically working, at least I think.

Talk us through the who's the audience? What's the ad? And what's the what's the call to action?

So I I wrote and I launched a really long article, kind of like a pillar article if you will or like a skyscraper article, whatever you wanna call it. It's about outsourcing, like how to outsource content effectively or or how to avoid the most common mistakes with outsourcing content. So I'm I'm I'm driving right at the core problem that we solve for customers. We we make outsourcing content more efficient. Right?

So that's what the article is targeted at. In that article, I put five different unique content upgrades. So, like, it's like a 5,000 word article and, like, every every, like, 800 words or so, there's, like, a new content upgrade that you could opt into.

And is it, like, in context? Like, the the opt in is related to what you're talking about at that part of the article?

Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's a whole section about how to how to, like, track results from outsourcing content and download the spreadsheet that you can use to track those results, like that that sort of stuff. So from there, like, they they get the content upgrade. It goes into, like, a thank you video from me, and then that goes into our standard email course, which we've had in place for a while and and has done pretty well, open rates and and drives leads into like a lead for the service.

So so that automation is all in place with like a thank you page and then drip. Then I ran ads to the content. So just promoted posts on Facebook to this article about outsourcing content. And I ran two campaigns. One is to cold audiences, which are a lookalike audience built from a list of people who had requested a consultation or became clients of Audience Ops.

Okay. So you uploaded to Facebook, created lookalike audience.

Created a lookalike audience off of those. So and and that's like the cold audience. So people who've never heard of Audience Ops before. The How

big does that lookalike?

Like 2,000,000.

5,000? Say again?

Like 2,000,000.

Okay. So so sizable.

Yeah. When you when you create a lookalike audience on Facebook, I think the low I think 2,000,000 might be the lowest. Maybe 1,000,000 is the lowest, something like that. And then it just, like, their algorithm goes through, like, little chunks of that larger audience to figure out which ones are most likely to click or whatever.

Former audience?

The other audience is is retargeting. So recent visitors to the site, like site wide, who are not a part of my email list.

Okay. And so what you're promoting, like I this is fascinating because I I've I've heard about exactly this very recently, actually at microconf, if I'm going to be entirely honest, from my competitor in my space. He was explaining this exact thing, but the logic behind it is very interesting and kind of makes perfect sense. When you drive so you're

driving Well, first of all, if I compare it to the previous stuff where I was doing stuff to landing pages for a lead magnet and that kind of stuff, cost per click on that stuff, even though you're giving away a free lead magnet or whatever, I think I don't know. I think audiences, especially business audiences are kinda smartening up to that stuff where it's like, alright, we know that that's a lead magnet for a thing. Like, I'm not gonna click your stupid ad. Like, that's why you see like $8 cost per click like on that kind of stuff. And so it's just an article.

It's just here's a here's the photo from the article and here's the headline from the article. That's it. But that's getting less than a dollar a click.

Oh, that's ridiculous.

So know, that's But

what it's really doing, the fascinating part is that you're like manufacturing inbound interest, right? Because you're not asking for an email address, you're giving the content, but then if they opt in, it's it's inbound. It's they are doing it themselves. They're deciding, oh, that's interesting enough, you didn't just try to entice me with this lead magnet, it's I'm reading this in my own context and I'm making my own decision to opt in to something that I want. It's like manufactured inbound.

Yeah, was a sponsored post, but it was just an article that showed up in their newsfeed, you know.

So are you is that an ad or is that a promoted post from your Facebook page? Because I don't know, Facebook changed so much. Last time I did it, it was it was like it was like better to to promote it as a post, but then you hide it, it's like a hidden post, I don't know.

I Yeah. I know I think I know what you're talking about. I don't know if there's technically a difference. I could be totally wrong about that, but

Whatever, but but it's not trying to sell

Like it is it is coming from the audience ops page brand. Yeah. It's not like my personal face on it or whatever.

And all you have there is really just talking about the article?

Yeah. It's just like, I don't think I even I I think maybe I wrote like one sentence at the top of the ad about like, here's an article about if if if you're looking to outsource content for your business, you know, that's it.

I wanna do this right now.

But then, like, on the bottom of the ad, it's just I think Facebook automatically generates, like, this is like the title and and like a one sentence blurb about the article. So so they click that, they get to the article. A couple problems with it that I that I need to work on over the next thirty days. Well, okay. First of all, in terms of results, I mean, probably the biggest problem that I have right now is that I I did not track correctly.

I thought that I was tracking correctly.

Set up track is a nightmare.

Well, there's Facebook tracking. I also set up Mixpanel for the funnel tracking. And I went through the process of I had a spreadsheet with, like, all the URLs and the UTM tagging that I'm gonna put on those URLs. And I checked my Facebook ads on, like, day 20 nine of this experiment, and I realized that the ad didn't have that correct UTM parameter on it. So, yeah, being able to track back to the source for the first, like, twenty nine days is not gonna work out.

So Alright. Alright.

Alright. But literally, since I've been running those ads, the number of leads has been double or triple what it's been the last few months, and the number of sign ups has been double or triple what it's been the last few months. Now I know for a fact that I can't attribute all of those sign ups to the the Facebook ads. Like some of them, maybe I met him at MicroConf, maybe it was a lead that that reactivated from months ago. But I know that there's at least like two or three clients who who I think somehow originated from the Facebook ads, but at least one verbally told me.

I I was like, how'd you hear about us? She was like, I saw your Facebook ads.

Mhmm.

And and Alright. And I was like, alright. Well, that's that's at least at least one conversion tracked. Like, you know.

I mean, the activity's going up as you're doing more advertising. Like it is having an effect.

Yeah. And you know, there's probably

better tracking, but but it's having effect.

Yeah. There's there's probably people who see the ads, they don't click them, but then later on they request a consultation or they maybe clicked an ad from their mobile phone, but then did the consultation from their computer later on. Like, there there's all sorts of stuff. Or or they sign some people sign up with me over the call and which means, like, the conversion happens on my computer. Right.

Right. So can can we let's can we finish the funnel? Yeah. It goes from Facebook ad to article. Article has multiple points of entry into content upgrades.

Mhmm.

Then what happens from there?

They get to unlike our other content upgrades on our other blog articles, I created a special thank you page just for this article that all five of those content upgrades lead to this thank you page. It's a, like, less than sixty second video from me on my webcam here talking into the microphone saying, like, hey. I'm the founder of Audience Ops. Thanks so much for, you know, getting this bonus download. I hope it helps you out.

I'm gonna follow-up with you right now over email with a crash course on how to automate content for your business. So look

out More content.

Yeah. But I'm like, I'm giving them like a personal like, hey, look out for these emails. They're coming. I'm telling Okay. Cool.

So

and then So the thank you page is basically, thank you for requesting that

Yeah. And like a like a two second intro, like and and like, you know, I'm I'm the founder of audience ops and we do outsource content. Yep. Just to put like, look, this is what my company does. Like, you know, just Right.

Just that you're aware because you're a you're probably a totally new person, you know.

Okay. And then, like, your normal standard email drip?

And then it goes into our email course, which is called, like, content marketing on autopilot, which is like a five part email course that teaches

How many days?

It's seven emails. The first five are educational. I think we drift them out every two days. So it's like ten or twelve days. The sixth email makes a pitch for the service.

So like, hey, we just taught you these five best practices on how to systemize content for your business. Here's what we do at Audience Hops. Here's how we make that really easy and efficient. And that leads into a pitch to click a link, takes you to our consultation form. Go fill out the consultation form.

And this is for anybody who requests a consultation, not just this funnel. But right from our homepage, they fill out the form. The next step is they book a time on my calendar for the sales call. And then the step after that is they get to the demo video, like a recorded ten minute video of here's how things that work at Audience Ops. Here's the pricing.

Here's what's included. So that they watch that, and it's all automated. It's like immediately after they book, they're now watching the video. And then, you know, two or three days later, we're I'm on a sales call with that person. But by the time I'm actually talking to them

They're sold.

Like, they've been educated and they've and they've gone through the whole video. They see the pricing. They know how it all works. And I'm just kind of meeting them and answering some final questions basically.

Alright. Wow. That's that's pretty badass, Congratulations.

Again, like, I don't know how much of it is working and how much of it is just kind of adding more activity, but one It's

a start.

Look, one client verbally told me that she signed up and one client makes this whole thing like way profitable.

So Right. If you get two clients a month from it, all of sudden you're you're making good money. You get three clients a month from it, all of sudden things things starting to be a real winner. At least now you can start though. Now you can start Exactly.

Yourself. What if I just put the demo thing in the thank you page? Maybe I don't even need the email course or at least now you're playing with

with Exactly. Exactly. Like now I have something to work with, you know. And so, like, my next steps that I have listed out here are I'm thinking about doing like one or two more of those big articles, like those pillar articles. Again, like targeting our our pain points that we solve.

Why?

If if you got a good one.

It's a good one, but I don't know. Something to a b test, maybe, like, and run Makes sense. Or or like for the first five days, they see ads to the first one, and then after that, they see ads the second one.

Yeah. I I guess that that does test the the what is right now the most important part of the funnel is just figuring out how to get people to the funnel.

Yeah.

Like, once you nail, oh, this article works for that part of the funnel, then it's how do I convert more of it?

Yeah. Like the other thing that I could do is AB test the existing ads that we have for that first article. Like maybe try a different photo and see see if I could drive cost per click down a little bit with with little optimizations like that. The other thing that I do wanna do though is add an automated webinar somewhere in this funnel. So currently, it goes through it goes into that email course.

Maybe I'll swap that out with with an automated webinar or put an automated webinar at the end of it or at the beginning of it. Like, some twenty minute video or so that they could go watch that leads into a more direct pitch to for the service. Because I I don't think I'm doing enough right now to really convert directly like leads for the service and and that would be aimed at that. And then the other thing is maybe doing more retargeting ads. So if you viewed the article but did not opt in, you should see a sequence of retargeting ads.

And maybe use like lead ads on Facebook, which I which I kinda like because they don't even leave Facebook, but that but if it's retargeting ad, they already know who I am or or they know who Audience Ops is. And so here's like a another lead magnet or or here's another pillar article, like some sort of like follow-up retargeting evergreen sequence. I wanna get that going.

That sounds to me like it makes sense for you to to focus on that. Right? If you can forcefully put in a dollar into the machine and get a baseline of every month, I can rely on my marketing to get me, you know, 10 consultations and close three or four deals every month, then whatever happens on top of that that's organic, that's a guest post or someone's podcast, that stuff that's less in your control just adds to it. But at least the baseline is in your control.

Yeah. Exactly. And And then the more that I can get that automated and scaled up, then audience ops is really, you know, growing and just throwing out more profit that I can then pump into the other stuff, the SaaS and stuff. So

Cool, man.

Yeah. That's it. To wrap

up my side in like two minutes because I don't think it makes sense to keep talking, what I made a mistake. In past six months, we were so focused on product and getting the tech to work right and doing demos and sales that I let our marketing muscle atrophy to the point where like we have we have very little marketing going right now. We basically have no ads running, it's like it's shameful. And now that we're in a good place that we can start marketing, I got to start from scratch, you know, and that's not ideal, that's my fault, that we should have just kept the burners going a little bit over past few months instead of going down to zero and now having to restart everything because going from zero to anything is is the hard part. So I think over the next few weeks that that a lot of my updates will focus on, alright, here's what we did first and why.

Here's what we did next and why. Here's what we really wanna get to but felt like we need to do these things first.

Well, a good thing that that you can do now since it's kind of like a restart of your marketing, you have all this new data that you should dig into. Right? Like that influx of customers who just came through your free trial system, like figure out who are the ones who converted and what's different about them versus the other ones who just tried it out or, you know

Yeah. I've kind of been waiting to be able to write an article like you wrote. I I want that to be more case study ish, and we've kind of been waiting to have numbers, and now we have a few customers that are like really successful that the numbers are kind of eye popping. So that that's that's what I've been waiting for, because I think that's what makes that article work. Yeah.

Yep. Cool. Cool, man.

Good stuff, buddy.

Nice to be back.

Yeah. Get a

Web back in action.

That's right. Good update here.

Alright, man. Be good. Have a great weekend.

Alright. Later. You too. Later.