Bootstrapped Web

Howdy. It's Bootstrapped Web. What's up, Jordan? How are

doing, man?

What's up, Brian? Good to be back.

Yeah. Back back in The States. How was your trip?

Trip was great. Europe Europe was good. Get to see everybody. You know, that was the the the most important thing of the trip was just seeing everybody. Yeah.

Getting all together.

So was it literally everybody on the team?

It was not everybody. The the brand new hires that have only been with the company for about a month, I thought it was a little Yeah. A little premature to kinda to do that, but I I hope that gets done. I think the next one will actually be here in The States. So now that it's it didn't matter, you know, between there and here.

And Ben is super nomadic, he's easy to travel. So he's actually in Slovenia for the next two weeks. So he's there for a total of three weeks, so that means just me kind of eating it and flying from Portland out there, which is like twenty six hours of travel, which hurts, especially when you're super old. So it was it was the four of us. It was myself and Ben, and then the the the two developers rock and yawn.

It was cool, man. We we had a great time, a lot of laughing, and, you know, the the the personal side is actually the more important for that that type of trip.

That's cool, man. I mean, I I definitely miss that, have having that, like, camaraderie and and being able to hang out with with coworkers. You know, I was I was just recording a video about this this morning. I still strongly favor building a a fully remote team, but it's just tough for us to do meetups, especially as the team has grown. We have, like, a pretty large head count at this point.

Still a lot of, like, part time people, but we just have a lot of people in all different corners of the world and getting everybody together is not It's

a big thing.

Yeah. I mean, the expense, the logistics, it's I've been able to meet up with certain people in certain places when I'm going through those parts. But It's our Hangouts are mostly just Slack, basically.

Right. And I look forward to being able to just put everything on the company and just get everyone together and that sort of thing. But even now, it's like, be careful with the budget. So we pay for airfare and and where we stay. And like the Airbnb that we all stayed in in Croatia, the company pays for it.

But then like the other stuff, we still pay for personally because it's just it doesn't make sense to just bomb out the company with this huge expense. Yeah. So it's a it's a little tricky, but it was it was worth it for us. The truth is we need to do it more often.

Yeah. So Yeah. So a little, like, rundown for today. I don't have a whole lot, but I'll I'll probably talk a bit about some retargeting ads that I just fired up yesterday. I'm hiring I'm still working through hiring a a project manager.

I think I'm gonna pull the trigger on that, send somebody the offer today. That's my goal before the weekend. And then I I'll talk about how I hired the podcast editor for my other podcast, Productize podcast. Gave him a process to get most of that work off of my plate. And I'm hiring a video editor, and I have a couple people doing a test project on that.

I could talk a bit about what I'm doing with video. And, yeah, whatever else comes up in between. What what do you got?

Cool. Sounds like a lot of hiring. I I like this little thing that we're doing where we kinda just talk about what's gonna be an episode in general. Yeah. It's good.

Because we have the list in front of us. Why not just talk about it?

Yeah. Hope hopefully, it keeps people tuned in till the end if

they if they want to or not.

Hey. If if people at this point, you know, aren't aren't into it, then, you know, what are you gonna do? I'm what am gonna change? Alright. So one of the best things about the trip in Slovenia was that we hit a big like revenue goal while while we were all together, which was a lot of fun.

And if it it helped in kind of bring a lot of positivity and pride and, you know, we are very far from done. But it did give us a chance to reflect back and be proud of you know, the last year was a crazy challenge with a lot of ups and downs. Down for a long time and now finally coming back up. So to to hit that revenue goal while we were all in person was a great way to kind of celebrate and take take a moment to to pause and appreciate everything that's been going on and be proud of it. And and along with that, the company is now experiencing just a new set of problems, you know, which we've talked about before.

So with the influx of customers has exploded our productivity to bits. So our our system just kinda just got overwhelmed. And so we're

Like the support, onboarding.

Yeah. Onboarding support, development, everything just got just jammed up by by new users and new issues and new problems and new bugs and new features. It's just like so so new features ground to a halt. It just feels like we're kind of winging it all of a sudden, right when we shouldn't be winging it. It feels like now systems are coming into focus.

Ben Ben's very system oriented and I'm not. And it's been a very straightforward like, okay, Jordan, that's nice for the first part of the company. And now it's just, you know, we have to have systems. So that's that's the big stuff. So I'm gonna talk about our project management issues.

I'm gonna talk about people issues. We we just let someone go yesterday, is a kind of difficult and emotional thing, especially when it's it's not like a clear cut, like, oh, you did something terrible, therefore, you must get fired. It wasn't that at all. And I'm gonna talk about my shame in not doing any marketing and how we're gonna try to fix that by hiring. Yeah.

So it's changing needs of the company, project management stuff, and then people issues of firing and hiring and everything that that's kinda gone with that.

Very cool. Yes. I mean, like, why don't I

just start off with, like, this quick thing about retargeting ads? It'll be maybe, like, the one one of the more tactical things we'll talk about today. Everything else would be the softer, more frustrating people stuff.

Yeah. But we can also talk about that softer stuff in the context of what we're what we're trying to do tactically.

Yeah. So I've been talking about how I've been running some Facebook ads and those are still running. I think they're going pretty well, although I'm still having a hard time tracking results, attributing clicks, attributing leads, attributing clients back to the Facebook ads. I think that's probably a problem that a lot of people have, but they're they're worth continuing. I know that.

Even without having hard data that I could look at, I could clearly see there there has been an uptick in client sign ups, like paying clients. There's been a definite uptick in

leads. So you think just the general awareness and seeing your brand?

Yeah. And and I mean, there have been at least two or three now clients who like told me or or wrote into the form that it it was a result of the Facebook ad. So I mean, that's attribution right there. They just tell you.

It's straight straight forward.

Yeah. And then I'm also really happy with the cost per click, which is something that I've always kind of struggled with, like running b to b ads on Facebook, seeing like fucking $10 clicks, and it's like, I can't do this, you know. But now I'm I'm I'm happy to see that our top of funnel cold ads are getting well under a dollar a click. I just checked it today and and for the last seven days, it's been at 60¢ or 65¢ per click. So, I mean, that I'm pretty happy with that.

And then, you know, I guess it's a few dollars per email sign up. So the ads that have been running consistently or continuing to run are just cold ads to free content or like articles. And I still have the one article that I did. I'm probably gonna start doing another cold ad to maybe another article or two. But the new ads that I fired up yesterday are the next step after the cold ads.

So it's a the first is a retargeting ad pointing to our video workshop or, like, recorded webinar, if you will, called sell to strangers. And so basically, if you've visited the site in the last fourteen days and you're not and you've never seen that video before, show show that ad to get you into the video.

Are you doing that in Facebook directly or or with a tool like Adderall or Perfect Audience?

Facebook directly. Okay. Yeah. I've used both of those before. I I used to use Perfect Audience a lot and I liked their interface, but I don't know.

I think now it just makes more sense to use Facebook. I think you have more control over the custom audiences and the little nuances in the ads and things. So and for that one, I'm actually running two ads. One is a lead ad, a Facebook lead ad. So they and and the content of the of the ad is the same, but the lead ad keeps them within Facebook and lets them enter their email address right there in Facebook.

And then that's the opt in for the video workshop. I integrated that with Drip. So as soon as they do that, they they get access to the video workshop. The other version of that is instead of the lead ad, it actually they click the link, they they come to our landing page on our site and they opt in there. It's only been running for a day, so I don't know.

But I I did see an opt in today which came through the landing page, not the lead ad. Although in the past in my tests, I I think the lead ad has been working a little bit better. So I'm I'm gonna give that some time and see what happens. That's step two. First was the cold ad.

Step two is retargeting to get them into the video course or video workshop. Step three, I also fired up a retargeting ad. So if they have seen the video workshop, now they're gonna see an ad to to request a consultation.

Okay. So it's like it's like an advertising funnel. Yeah. Right? It's from one step to the next Yeah.

With with display ads.

Right. Because because the video workshop teaches a bit, and then it clearly the call to action is, hey. Now next step is to request your consultation. And if they don't do that right away, then they're gonna start to see ads to say, hey. You can go request a consultation now.

It's such a valuable, like, piece of information to to to do ads that way, and it it's it's actually still hard to do. The I I saw a Shopify app come out that does this, where you can say, show this ad between x date and y date. Show this one, and it it allows you to build a funnel, but it's just for your Shopify store. Like, there's there's still no service or or course or blog post even to just show you how to do this. It's it's

kinda frustrating. You can you can. It's really complicated to set up in Facebook, but you can create like an evergreen campaign of ads.

That's how it should be. If someone hits your site, you should be in control of the different ads they see over, let's say, twenty one day period. You don't wanna show them stay mad for twenty one days. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. And we've seen results where they're much more responsive in the first week since visiting and then after that you want something else. So I'm actually starting to build that out a little bit. So far I have visited the site in the first fourteen days, and and that might even be long. I might shorten that to like seven days.

You see I

think the thing is you don't know which offer is gonna be right for them. So you you should

show in my funnel right now, everything I'm trying to get everything everybody into that video workshop. Like, no matter how you come in, content upgrade, email newsletter, like free samples. Like, eventually, if you hadn't requested a consultation yet, then the next thing you're gonna see is like, hey, check out this video workshop. We've got pop ups for it. It's that's where I'm funneling everything in.

So first two weeks, you see the video ad and then this and then between fourteen days and twenty one days, we retarget for a like a pillar article of ours. And then I wanna do like a another one, like the following week for another article and and just have this like evergreen campaign of ads. So yeah. I've got that up and running just yesterday, so I'm gonna give that some more time to get some results. And but I think overall right now, my my focus is marketing for audience ops.

I mean, obviously, it's always marketing for audience ops, but, you know, and I'll talk about next, like, getting project managers on board. I I need to get myself fully out of working with the project management team. And we have the service all nailed down, like what we do for clients. It works. It works well.

I'm not messing around with that at all. My whole goal right now is to just drive more leads into restaurant in restaurant audience ops. Know?

Last from a few years ago when

Exactly. You know? And I'm like, I I kinda wanna just double the number of I wanna double the number of client sign ups we get per month right now. I I would like to do that within the next six months, and I and I think that'll mean doubling traffic and doubling I don't know about doubling traffic, but at least doubling leads. Because I think our lead to sale conversion is pretty good.

So more more leads.

Just we need more leads. So, yeah, that's kinda my focus.

Alright. So you you're working on the right thing? Yep. Cool man. Alright.

Let's see. So I had I had this funny thought like a week ago, and I was like, what is this feeling that I that I'm walking around with? And the way the way I described it to myself, the way I, like, wrote it down to, oh, you know, this is for the podcast. So the feeling I have is that I have an exam later in the day, but I haven't studied. So so I I wake up in the morning like, oh, man.

How is this gonna work out? It's almost like, how am I gonna be exposed for not being prepared? Right? Like, it's like this thing, it's just it's on the way. I'm just dreading it.

And so it's a very strange kind of feeling and I I I don't like it, obviously.

What what is what is the exam?

It's every day. It's every day. It's all it's all this stuff that I haven't done that I feel like I should be doing or should have done or it's this weird feeling of being unprepared. It's a touch of the impostor syndrome thing. It's you know, so one of the things I don't like about it is it's clouding my ability to just be kinda happy.

Because if if I had told myself that we would be where we are right now in terms of the revenue growth, if I said that ninety days ago, I probably wouldn't have believed myself. And and then and then I would have projected and said, oh, if that actually happens, I'm gonna be walking around like super happy. And and the the weird feeling of being unprepared and like, it's clouding that. It's it's adding a negative touch to it. So one of the reasons, I think, is is because of disorganization.

So along with the influx of customers came a falling apart of our systems. And and I think one of the key things we need to figure out is is how we manage our projects. So let me know if you if you have the same type of experience. We have we have, like, these two worlds. We have, like, this tech world that the developers and and Ben and the sprint and features and bugs and all all and all that stuff lives.

And then we have the marketing support in, like, non tech. And we've been using Trello as like this unifying thing that both both sides of the company can use. And Trello, I feel like, is amazing and it works if you have discipline. But this influx of customers has erased all semblance of discipline. Like you you if you have to proactively keep this this this conceptual framework in your mind of like, here are my cards, here are my here's what I should be doing next, Here's where I should look because it's Monday afternoon, so I need to be doing this type of a task.

Like, there's so much thinking that I need to keep in my head. It's it's so abstract at all times, where I feel like now that things are chaotic. I need like no, nothing abstract. I just need to sit down and be like, here dummy, here are your tasks for the day.

Yeah. I definitely deal with that, but probably in a very different way because we're productized service and we have some software tools of our own and we certainly have bugs with those that need to be dealt with and the bugs arise from the service. But in your case, the whole business is the software. So I could I could see how it gets it get like, in in in our case, I work directly with our developers on our software tools. But the rest of my service team doesn't really interact with the developers.

The service team, if some if something doesn't work, if they're installing a plug in on a client site and it's not working, they're gonna escalate it to me. And I know that the client is waiting on this thing to get or or at least their onboarding process is is now waiting for this thing to be resolved. So it's on me to either go in there and fix the setting, or it's on me to say, okay, that looks like a bug. I need to go talk to the developer about that, and I need to file a develop a GitHub issue for the bug. But that's how we in terms of development issues, bugs and and things, we use obviously, we use GitHub.

And every every task that I need my developers to work on, I always give them a GitHub issue. I don't just ask them to like, hey, can you quickly do that thing? Like, you know, it's a very specific GitHub issue and I'll, you know, tag it with bug and Right.

But but your day to day, your work, it's it's it's funny to say, but you you almost have this added benefit, at least in this specific way, of client expectations. Like, you can't not do this task.

Right. And that's what's been frustrating on my end is that, like, I have other things. I'm I'm working on Facebook ads and stuff. Like, I don't these things just come out of nowhere and they hit me and I'm like, alright. Well, I it has to get resolved, you know.

So

so now we're getting we're getting somewhere. Okay. So so my diagnosis of all this stuff is what ends up happening is that the the urgent just overwhelms the important. So even if we have everything planned out, we have a sprint and we have all this stuff and and it's not organized, but even if it were organized, it still it still requires more work on our end to make sure that the that the urgent doesn't overwhelm the things that we set up strategically, that we say these are important. So the past few weeks that that we have just kinda it's been set on fire.

And I think that's where that feeling of unpreparedness comes in because I just wake up and I say, today I'm gonna try to do one or two important things. And the regular process of the day is that the urgent just comes in and just buries it. Just and I look at it and I just say, there's just not a chance that I'm gonna spend an hour and a half on this. And I know part of it is discipline and part of it is like, hey, you're the business owner. You need to kind of make the time for it.

But it's easier said than done.

I mean, I think so there are two things. And look, I definitely struggle from the same exact thing. The the urgent just knocking out whatever I wanted to do today, you know. One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of things can seem urgent and they're just not. And and we we think that they're urgent and they're not.

Usually, the urgent things are from new paying customers. Right? Like, wanna make new paying customers happy. You wanna get them through the onboarding process. Some some things are deal breakers.

They're show stoppers, you know? But there are lot of lot of things that customers are willing to live with because the tool still solves their problem. And you can just tell them like, yeah, you know, that's something that we're working on. It'll probably be a couple weeks, but we'll get it we'll get it fixed. In the meantime, here's a workaround, you know.

Right. You'll you'll live. Yeah. And and and it usually it usually does not result in a cancellation and and sometimes if it doesn't result in a cancellation, you can't do anything about it.

Yeah. And and also, like in your case with a high volume, you know, high volume of customers, it's like, alright. Well, how many customers does this thing actually impact? Like, if we lose one customer, not the end of the world. If we lose 20, then maybe it's something too.

That's a a bigger deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've we've looked at it throughout the entire company actually, And we're we're moving we're moving off of Intercom and going to Zendesk.

Is that right? Yeah. Zendesk. For for our support. Because the the volume of inter of chat through Intercom has has made us lose our minds.

Because I'm curious about that. Chat. Like, first of all, like, I tried out intercom for a few weeks about a month or two ago, and I I frankly didn't like it. You know? I know it like everybody uses it, but I don't like it.

It it's It depends. Depends. Depends.

Yeah. I mean Whole of whole bunch of different things.

We Yeah. Like I don't I definitely don't like it as a support desk.

That's the thing. It falls apart as a support desk. As a chat function, it's outstanding.

It's good for

On marketing site. Marketing site,

home page, live chat. Yeah.

And then and then triggered messages and being able to segment. I mean, I don't need I don't need any help. Right? I don't I can go in and say active users and trialers in the past x amount that have more than y revenue, send them this notification, hit send, done. It's that's amazing.

So that's even more advanced than what I was using it for. But but I was using it on the homepage of ops calendar. And then for a little while, was using it on the homepage of audience ops, our service. And I only intended to use it for marketing for like on the homepage, like just talking to new leads, try to get them to become leads. But I'd find customers come in and like send requests in there.

They want it.

You know, it's like it's there. Like somebody's there, somebody's on the chat like I have a question. Problem to sort it out. Yeah. You sort it out.

You forward it wherever it needs to go. And like, that was just really you know, so I just turned it off. I stopped using it. And Okay. And that's it.

But Yeah. We wanna turn it off, but we we need, obviously people need a way to get in touch with issues and questions. So we've like that that was one of our biggest issues in terms of urgent and important. It was just it's just overwhelming and be it's not even the user's fault. It's set up as a chat.

So people are like, hey, are you there? Because they expect. It's like an AOL instant message.

Yeah. Totally. And and look, I'm a I I visit tools that I pay for and stuff and I use their live chat all the

That's the problem. That's actually what you want.

I know. Like and and I know that, like, sometimes they might not be there and they're gonna get it later and I'll just shoot a bunch of questions in there, like, just email them back to me, you know.

Right. You're like a good and decent person, but other swads of humanity look at that situation and say, so if I'm the loudest and freak out the hardest Yeah. I know. They will actually respond to me. I know.

And that's it's so not cool.

I know. We we used

We one customer. It was it was too hardcore.

Yeah. We used live chat consistently in restaurant engine and it was a nightmare dealing with these like crazy restaurant owners. But I'm I'm interested to hear why Zendesk because we use Help Scout for, you know, for all of the email the the shared inbox and it's been great. And I've tested out a few different help desk tools. I haven't really used Zendesk except as a consumer and I hated it.

Right. In terms of that experience.

When I first heard that so our support our support guy, Aaron, who's outstanding is leading the effort on on how to fix it because he he knows best on how to fix it. And when I heard the word Zendesk, I was like, really, man? I I hear bad things. I hear it's old school and I hear it's annoying and all that, but it they've it looks to me like they've done a pretty good job of of updating it.

What I don't like about it though, and like WP Engine uses Zendesk or at least they did for a while.

Yep.

And and they're my host for all my sites and it's So you interact with it. Yeah. It's really annoying because it requires me to log in to my Zendesk account to track my tickets with you.

Whereas

That is an option. It is it is not the only way to use it.

Okay.

It's it's a big piece of software you can do a bunch of stuff with.

Because what I love about HelpScout is all my customers only need to remember our email address. They just shoot an email to them as just plain email and to us we've got tickets and organization and everything.

Yeah. Help Scout I mean, Helpspot Help Scout, excuse me, made us lose our minds because the yeah. The the email functionality in it drove drove us out of our minds, and you you you would assign things that the logic in it was very, very strange to me. Like, when something comes to my inbox, I wanna, like, assign it to someone. Just that process.

And then they and it's not in their inbox. It's under their assigned tab. It's and and the what we need, we need the concept of a ticket. That's that's the real issue because our our support issues come in as a question that then gets turned into a ticket that a developer needs to look at and then respond to, and then that ticket needs to be closed. Like, there needs to be that concept.

Otherwise, it's just a bunch of emails. And you know, we our our norm our totally norm is 50 to a 100 intercom conversations. So so we got that up to like 200 and had to work for like a week to get it back down to like 30. And it pops back up, know, it's 50 or so new ones a day. And so there's there's like management that's required.

Yes. It's tricky.

Yeah. And I mean, the other thing I was gonna say is like, need somebody on the on the tier one just to sort it all out. No matter like all these tools, they're they're all slick. They've all got the cool feature sets, but you still need a person to manually at that volume, you definitely need a person to just their only goal could just be assigning tickets to the right people. I mean, their only job, I mean, could just be that.

Right. Right. Yeah. And I I wanna give a shout out to to my buddy, Jared, who runs a point lit here in Portland. He would we we do like a monthly micro conflict Yeah.

Mastermind meetup sort of thing.

Cool. I use Appointlet.

Oh, awesome. Yeah. It's great. Great software. And he's very thoughtful.

Foundry's a developer that just started hiring developers. So now he's, like, relooking at his system as opposed to, like, oh, I just jump in and do whatever I want. So learn I've been learning a a lot from him on on on process and system.

I feel for them. Anybody in that space. Because at MicroConf, I met, like, five literally five different direct competitors in the calendar booking space.

Yep. Yep. Yep. It's a big it's a big market, so that's good.

Yeah. And I, you know, I use Calendly. Everybody uses Calendly these days for, like, and I use that for my personal, here's my calendar to book a time with me. But I do use Appointment for the one specific feature that they have. And appointment is embedded on my on my Audience app site so that when people book a sales consultation with me, they use that and not Calendly.

The reason I use that is because that was the only one that I tested that enabled me to automatically redirect the person to my page of my choosing after they book an appointment. Calendar doesn't do it, a bunch of the others don't do it, and I I can make it so that they book a consultation and then they go see my demo video. Right there.

Oh, very nice. Very nice. Yeah. They they've been around a while. It's pretty pretty established, And so the the product's built out and yeah.

I just have Shane around still using Calendly. Because I I know Jeremy is here in Portland. So I'm I'm gonna make that switch over. Yeah. So we keep going down that rabbit hole forever.

But how about you? What's what's next on your

Alright. Well, I guess, I don't know if this was were you just that was your project management thing?

Yeah. Look, it's it's really how to deal with urgent first important, and it flows from support into project management. It's like this

whole So so in your case there, it was mostly about tools and software and and systems. My case, I have a project management issue and that's just people. We need more of them. And so my so project management at Audience Hops is kind of like an interesting role and it's very different from what people typically think of what a project manager does. But I can't think of a better name for it than project management.

Right. Yeah. So

We're looking for a marketer, salesperson, support person, documentation person.

Yeah. Yeah. Basically. You know, like, we the thing is that we have a very streamlined and standard system and process, and the way that we deliver work, and we only do a very simple plan for all of our clients. Whereas a typical agency would do a thousand different projects, different sizes, different shapes, different clients, and a project manager's job there is to juggle all those balls and and take take that mess and make make it organized.

In our case, the PM is really just to be the person, like, moving our process along, making sure there are no roadblocks, you know, just, you know, nothing's gumming up the works and being the the relay person between the client and our team, but everything kinda follows our standard schedule and templates and and everything. So I try to aim to have our project managers each manage about 10 to 12 clients each. And now our our two project managers are are managing quite a bit more than that, and they're both going a little bit crazy.

Oh, okay. Yeah. That's that's a lot.

Yeah. And and the thing is it's still not even like a full time position even when you're managing that many clients. It because it doesn't take a whole lot of time. It's just a lot of little conversations to keep track of and and due dates and and different people and and, you know, different tickets and help scout, different Trello cards. It's just once you get well above the 10 to 12 mark, it just gets too chaotic.

So I need to get a third person in, and I think this time around, I'm I'm actually gonna hire two people. And I've done this before. Like, what I found is hiring and training a project manager is harder than any other role on the team. And we've had probably two I think two project managers who flamed out. Flame sounds more dramatic than it is.

I I mean, like, they they didn't they just didn't last as project managers more than two months, basically. And that's because as talented as they are, they just couldn't really fit with our system and they caused more issues than they were able to put away. And and yeah. And and, you know, it's it's kind of like anything else. As as great as somebody can see him on an interview, you never really know until they get in and start working the the process and everything.

So I think I'm just gonna hire two and we could frankly, we could probably use two more instead of just one. So so I went through and I I interviewed. I put up an ad like two weeks ago. I used weworkremotely.com, which I use pretty frequently for hiring people. And then I interviewed about six people and I'm narrowing it down.

My goal is to send the offer out today. I think I'm gonna I think I have an idea of who the two people I'm gonna hire are. But I've been going back and forth between like three different people, like, do I need somebody who can also write? Or do we need a project management person? And, this this one person is in Canada, and we try to make everyone in The US for that role.

And, like, I think we're still gonna bring the Canadian person on. Like, I don't know. It's, you know, because we've had two PMs in the past not not work out, and so it's definitely making me hesitant or taking more time than I should to decide who to bring on. There there's no real excuse for it other than that. So I I just need to kinda pull the trigger and get this person started next week.

And the other thing that I'm kind of happy about now is we have somebody on the on the team who's a team manager, internal team manager, and that's really like a tip for you really is to have somebody internally to kind of be the support person for the rest of your team and not client facing, you know, just somebody to kind of organize things and take a lot of those escalated issues off of your plate. That's what this person does and she's been on the team for a long time so she's Is gonna be

that a full time position?

Part time.

Okay. So, yeah. I mean, lately, my mentality is that we need full time people who are like obsessed with the company and the product.

You know, in my case, I'm just really careful about keeping expenses under control and and people and head count under control?

Yeah. I call it bullets. That's what we call it internally. We say we only have, you know, like we have right now we have five full time people. But I say we have, you know, we only have a certain number of bullets to fire in terms of people we we can have in inside the company.

Each bullet needs to have huge impact. So it's like I would I would love someone to take like certain things off my plate. Like the only part time we're hiring right now is someone to write documentation. Because that that generally sounds like it doesn't need to be full time.

Yeah. And I mean, I I definitely understand, like, having a full time totally dedicated owner of their role to like, I totally get that. I would love to have that. But I did let expenses get a little bit out of control, like six to twelve months ago, just hiring and and giving a lot a lot of people full time positions and and keeping them in those full time positions probably longer than I should have without inching them back. And that's when we got into some cash crunches and and things got a little bit tight.

Now we've kind of corrected all that and and and I'm and I mean, we're starting to grow again in terms of clients and and revenue. So with with that, I do need to bring on more people like to like project managers. So but I'm still trying to keep it lean as much as I can to not get back into the trap where I was twelve months ago. And so what I try to do now, this is like a productized service thing where I try to tie almost every team cost to specific revenue. Like people deliver our service.

We have people in place. I pay writers on a per article basis. Every article that we produce for a client, we're getting revenue for. So whatever So

you you only wanna incur expenses when you incur larger revenue.

Exactly. So we we pay editors per article that they edit.

Right. So an example of someone not connected to revenue would be like a project manager.

Well, even project managers I've adjusted in recent months.

To like number of clients?

Exactly. They get paid on a tiered basis based on the number of clients that they're managing.

Alright. So,

But there are a few roles like the team manager, that's that one's one of those roles where it's like, you know, that's like an extra expense and that's not exactly tied to to a revenue piece. But she's there to make kind of everybody's life easier and also just add quality. Like, helps to she supports the writers and we and she's kind of like a quality control person with the writing team and helps them make the content even better. And they have like writing sessions and critique sessions and stuff like that. So she's just there to like add quality and also be an ease on on me and like shield me from a lot of issues.

Yeah. Yeah. The shield thing is is very interesting. Like, how how are you viewing that? I I have this very strange relationship with it, where I'm like, I wanna be doing more stuff, and I think I should be doing more stuff.

And the other side of me is like, I should be doing nothing. I should be doing only the stuff that only I can do. And that is the weird relationship stuff and strategy stuff.

And that's what I'm trying to do right now for myself is like, I I need my job has to be just drive leads and sales and get people into the service because I have everything else managed. Like, that's in my mind, that's what I I wanna be doing that. But at the same time, project management issues come up, they don't know how to handle a client's question, or there's a technical something that's not working and I have to deal with that, or, you know, or I'm, like, hiring too slowly and the PMs are getting too overwhelmed and I need to get somebody on board yesterday, and it's like, that stuff slows me down, you know. But I'm I'm trying to get to a point where if I can double the number of new clients that we're getting every month within the next six months, our revenue and our profit is gonna really get to a more than comfortable point. And at at that point, I can truly invest in, a full time, like, general manager or really really invest into better software faster and, like, all that stuff.

But I'm but I'm, like, really close to that. I'm, like, really close to that hump. Like right now it's profitable enough, it supports me and everything, but I don't have that total freedom to just put people in charge of everything, you know.

Yeah. Alright. Alright. So. Well, it's good to identify.

Yeah. So so yeah. Tell me about your your team issue.

Yeah. It it has been it's been a big shift the past few months. You know, you hear about it where you're like, as the CEO, like, job is really hiring and making sure your team's happy, that sort of thing. And it really kinda started coming true recently where I look at the development team and I just think to myself, how do I make sure they don't get exhausted and frustrated? And how do I make sure that they're happy because, you know, that's like our most like talented or or skill heavy work.

Right.

So a a lot of that has come down to

And it's like Okay. It's the what they say, like, the core competency of the business. It's like you need software.

Right. It's it's the thing. Like, I I I might think of myself as as invaluable. Not really not quite as valuable as the guys who build the thing we sell. Like, the most value I added was knowing what to build.

But now that that trajectory is set, it's it's them. They are the thing. It's Ben and the tech team are are the actual that's where all the value is now. So what that has led into is when when we started growing and there was more chaos in the company, my my attention very quickly came to look at them and say, this isn't gonna last. Nobody can do what they're doing now, trying to juggle all the support stuff and all these features.

Nobody can do that forever. You can do it for a few months and things are exciting and all that, but everyone you're gonna get tired. You you you have to come back to a normal life where you have your weekends and you hang out with your girlfriend and you go hang out with your friends. And you need you need a a normal looking life. So so it has become clear that that this stage is now people.

It is it is staffing. So here's here's what happened. Okay? First, we hired a third developer. They lasted about two months and that and the fit was wrong.

It was the cultural fit was wrong. So perfectly competent person, didn't gel with the team, and so we we let them go. Okay. We we survived that just fine. And after that, we said, okay.

Now we need more help on the the marketing side of the company. I just call I just call it tech and marketing. Basically, means everything that's not not tech.

I don't

know how else to say

it.

Right. The the the practical side, the non tech side. Yep. So we hired two people on the advice of one of our investors here in Portland, Adam, who's very helpful. He said, I was gonna hire one.

He said, no, no, hire two, which was a very, very good decision.

Yeah. Kind of what I'm doing right now with the private company.

That's why I heard you say this. Said, that that sounds right to me. Yeah. So we hired one customer success person, one customer support person. My thinking was, we need someone on customer support to just handle the influx of just questions and issues and bugs and issue.

You know, just just that that that influx of of people. And

then

we needed someone on customer success whose whose whose focus was getting people from trial to paid. Because getting new trials was not an issue. Now it's starting to become like, okay, now how do we increase it? But the biggest issue in the company was trial to paid. And so I wanted someone focused on that.

It turns out, now two months later, that I thought a person saying, hey, you are the out of this cohort of a 100 people, you're the 10 most important. I'm gonna personally reach out to you and and interact with you as a person to increase the odds of you staying as a paying customer. It turns out that that assumption was wrong. And really the success part of getting someone from trial to paid, the customers don't really wanna talk to anyone. They just want the product to work the way they expect.

They want the integrations that they want. So it's much more tech heavy and support heavy at playing the role of success.

I could totally see that. Because I I I don't talk to customer success people when I buy stuff. Right. You know, and and like, yeah, I I do feel like that term that that late that job title, customer success, it's like, I don't know, it's getting a little out of control, I feel like. It's not

It it is. It's a legitimate role that that needs to exist or at least a process or or or a discipline. It it is.

I I don't know. I I don't know that I totally buy that. I I don't know. I mean, I think it

If you're selling if you're selling a $100,000 annual contracts for a piece of software that your accounting team of 25 people needs to implement, I think you do need someone that is focused on making sure that the project is actually successful and they

Yeah. But that's, you know, and and traditionally that's called the salesperson or the account manager, you know.

Well, I I think if you if you ask the salesperson to follow through all the way to make sure they're successful, you're gonna hurt the sales efforts. So

Right.

I do I do think it just depends on the situation. I thought because our price point is creeping up a little higher, whatever it was, I was wrong.

But I think you're right now about and I think this is probably the case for most SaaS, maybe when they're still at this stage where not huge yet, but they're not small. Customer success is support. And you know And tech. And and

and responding to issues and fixing bugs.

That's that's the thing. It's like how seamless is their experience in their during their free trial.

And Right. How closely do you fulfill the promise that your marketing made?

Yeah. And it's not and people don't sign up for a SaaS to have like a a hand holding nice comfortable experience. They sign up to solve a specific problem. They're trying to do something in their business. This tool is supposed to do it.

And like and and they just wanna get on with their day. And and like, SaaS is supposed to be efficient. You know? Otherwise, peep otherwise, companies would just build their own SaaS to solve their own problem.

Right. But if if you recall, we we did that whole demo phase for so long that we were building up these relationships, and I brought that mentality into this phase. And now we're like, do not request the demo. Yeah. I'll do anything to avoid doing a demo.

I recorded like a twenty five minute demo. Anyone who requests a demo, I say, watch this first, then let me know if you have any questions. So now we're getting away from it.

But is it the kind of thing now like where okay. So if you so got rid of the customer success person, sticking with the customer support, double down on customer support and put your best customer support person on the onboarding support and and then they have like backup.

Right. So now right. So that's that's what happened over the past week. I just kinda came to the realization like that, unfortunately, we don't have the bullets to spare. So while this person was awesome and super cool, smart, creative here in Portland with me, I enjoyed hanging out with them.

Like, all that stuff just made it super hard to come to the conclusion that like, damn, man. We we we don't we need a different skill set.

One thing I noticed from from hearing you describe it here, like, this probably goes to that, you know, working remotely far away versus working in person together.

Yeah.

You hired a developer and you didn't work out after two months, gone. No problem. You had you had a customer success, didn't work out after two months and it's like a huge pain like, you know.

It was actually if we dig into that for a second, we we had we had this mirror of an experience because the the the guys in Slovenia who worked with the guy, he's a 21 year old, like, you know you know, kid basically, but but but experienced. They had a much harder time coming to the conclusion because they're impersonal with them and they like the person. It's like you're incompetent or you're like doing the wrong thing or you're screwing off or you're doing something on the side, that that's easy.

Was your team pretty solid in surfacing to you, hey, this guy is not working out? Like how did that go down? Because I deal with that a bit in my team.

They they I got hints from it and and and I I hope I got better at paying attention and reading between the lines. Because people aren't gonna say, hey, I don't like what's happening or I don't fit you know, I don't want this person fine. No one no one says, don't think this person should

be with the company. People are so hesitant to throw somebody else under the bus. Yeah. Yes. Know?

And like and it's not so wrong. Yeah. And, you know, I I don't I'm sure you don't encourage that sort of thing. You know? Right.

But I do try to have some system where people can, like, look, if if somebody's not delivering, if they're consistently late, I gotta know about that.

You know. Yeah. So it's it it was tricky. So so they had the experience in Slovenia of of having a hard time coming to the conclusion because they were with them in person. And it was easier for me because I was emotionally detached.

And now here in Portland, I was completely emotionally invested. And they weren't. And so it was easier for them to come to that conclusion. It was much harder for me to actually pull the trigger. But I've read this great book while in Slovenia called The War of Art.

Steven Pressfield. Right? It's all about resistance. And and it is very interesting experience to read that and then come across this experience of my gut says we need someone different with a different skill set. And then dealing with all this resistance.

All these things that you come up with and create internally and emotionally and logically. You just create all this web of of cloudiness. And I just looked at that and was like, I'm gonna go right through you. But it took took me a few days.

Yep. It's a story of my life. I think it's natural for Yeah.

It's natural. So so now what we're doing is we are actually hiring two junior developers. And that is our support issue. Because what's happening is our our, you know, our hardest to come by skill sets, the guys who build features, and Ben, who does the planning, they're spending 50% of their time on support. And that I just looked at that while I was in Slovenia, and I was like, this is a disaster.

All all my my smartest guys are talking about is support. And I'm like, this is this is not this is not right. So we're so we're basically gonna hire two junior developers that the the customer support person can work with to hammer out the issues to protect the time of the other developers. And then what I need to do is I need to hire a a marketer on on my side.

Yeah.

Yep. Very

cool. I think that's I think

that sounds right. The the same, you know I hope so. Having the junior developers just, you know, just hunker down on the customer support issues and keep your main guys focused on building features.

I I I think it it has happened.

Yeah. More more hiring stuff. I'll just wrap it up real quickly here. I did hire the podcast editor for my Productize podcast. He started last week, and that was a really easy one because he he kinda reached out to me and just with the perfect timing and perfect pitch and everything.

So he's down in Brazil and he's working on and I've been recording. I think I have, like, now, like, 10 episodes in the can that are just waiting. He's working on those. I'm hoping to get that podcast, like, kind of relaunched June 14. And then from the and I'll have, like, three new episodes that day.

And then from then on out, I'll have a new episode every week going forward for probably a long time because I've got that pretty nailed down. Pretty good system in place where I'm just drop similar to what we do here, but it's it's a little bit more structured where I I drop the recording at the Dropbox. He he takes all the notes. He he does the editing, puts the music in, uploads it, creates social media, puts that out, creates an email for the for the episode, schedules that out. So got that all hammered out.

And then the other thing that I'm doing are some YouTube videos, and I've been trying to record two of those a week. And I've got, I don't know, maybe eight or nine of those recorded now. There are about ten to fifteen minute videos where I'm just kinda answering a specific question that I heard from from a reader or someone or somebody on Twitter. And so I'm hiring a video editor for that for same deal. I just dropped the iPhone recordings in Dropbox and and then they take it from there.

And I've been looking at a few different people's, like, YouTube channels and and how they do editing and how they put, like, titles and music and and make it cool and entertaining and and Mhmm. You know.

And this is all in effort to drive more leads?

This is not for audience apps. This is more for me.

Okay. The other side.

Yeah. Yeah. Like my personal

Yeah. The casting.

Blog and and productize and that kind of stuff.

So Which which ends up leading into audience ops leads. Yeah. Yeah. Mhmm.

But I'm talking about entrepreneurship and

Right.

Different things. Yeah. Hiring people, pricing, starting a business, that that kind of stuff. So hiring a video editor is kinda new to me, and I don't really know what to expect. So I just hired four different people to do it.

All all four of them are gonna edit the same first episode of this YouTube series. I gave them the same video footage and everything and and I

Where did you find them?

All on Upwork. So one person is in The Philippines, one person is in Serbia, one person is in Uruguay, and one person is in Canada.

Love the Internet.

Know? So and and those are, like, four different pretty different rates, and and, you know, they I liked all of their samples and so I'm getting them I I got the first one back today and it's pretty good. So I'm I'm waiting on the other three to see how that goes. I gave them kind of guidelines and I gave them some links to some other YouTube channels that I've been checking out for kind of, I guess, inspiration or like something along these lines, give them an idea of what I'm going for.

Yeah. Can can I hire whoever you hire? Yeah. You just do you just do all the vetting and the the best person, you just just let me know who they are.

Yeah. They're they're they're really good. Like, the the thing with video editors though is, like, there there's so many different types. Right? Like, there's a lot of guys who have like film, like cinematic experience.

Right. That's It is not quite and then there are a lot of people who do like explainer videos with animations, but I'm

not I need some of that too.

Yeah. But that's also a different thing, you know. So I'm looking for people who have experience with, like, person talking into a camera and especially people with experience, like, making YouTube informational videos, you know, like vlog style. I hate that word, but like vlog style, you know.

Alright. So my my brain hack isn't gonna work. That's not what I need. Fine.

But but yeah. So that that's kinda you know, I'm still getting used to, like, being on camera and using a selfie stick and, like, driving while talking on camera, that that kind of stuff. But yeah. This morning, I did a video out of my backyard and did one in my office, walking around. It's it's

good for you. Have you have you come across Russell Brunson's new book?

I heard about it. I heard it's pretty good.

Yeah. It is. It is it is it is pretty good. It talks a lot about that, that side of things of showing yourself and show how you normally live live your life and just kind of being prolific. Yeah.

He he did a ton of it when when, ClickFunnels was was getting started, and you could see a lot of people doing the same type of thing. And, you know, you read and sometimes you hesitate, but you you kinda know my business would be a lot stronger if I did it a lot more of it. I know that for sure.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I so I wasn't gonna talk about this, but I was listening yesterday to Seeking Wisdom, the podcast Seeking Wisdom with David Cancel from Drift. Oh, yeah.

Okay. And I love that podcast. Just always like Yeah.

It's good.

Short but smart conversations. Really really good stuff. So they were they were talking about this idea now, like, we're in we're now in this third phase of SaaS, and I think this applies to a lot of different online businesses.

Okay. Where's this going?

The first phase was like invention. Like so think back like ten, fifteen years ago. Let's take what was offline and let's invent the first tools to do this online. And so that's what marketed those tools was like, hey, this is like, now you can buy books online and through this site. Like so that's what sold the thing was because it's a it's it invented a new thing that didn't exist before.

The second phase was he had different names for it, but like, I think it was like efficiency. So there there are more players, but the the ones who who make it more efficient, like like you could have created a blog earlier, but then WordPress came around and that just made it more efficient and that and and and that efficiency made it more widespread and that's what sold more people on on using it. But now now we're in this third phase where it's so hyper competitive and there are so many every space, there are so many players, Even if it's like a relatively low competition space, there there's so many other options people can use to do the same thing.

The ecosystems are booming.

It's almost like like, yeah, we can we can all work on like marketing funnels and and and we'll do that. But at the end of the day, it's brand. And and I think that's the point that he was making is like, look, today, it's all about just doubling and tripling down on brand and trust. And I know that's like a wishy washy thing, but but look, like, we buy based on brand because you know the like, you follow the founder or or or that brand is just known for building great things. You know?

Like, there's plenty of cell phone he he made the the example in the episode, like, there's plenty of cell phone manufacturers that make perfectly awesome smartphones, but many of us buy Apple iPhones because Apple is the brand, you know. And so I anyway, I just bring that up because, like for me, like doubling down now into doing videos and doing more podcasts and writing more, sending more to my list, I'm starting to finally, I I backed off this for a while, but now I'm getting back into it because I'm realizing, look, this is this is what sells my products and services, is putting myself out there. The more I do that, the more things sell. Like, it's as simple as that, you know. And I know that it's not I'm not trying to necessarily make it reliant on me, but that's that's what throws so much energy into everything, you know.

Right. Yeah. Can I ask you your opinion on something that's very related to that? So if if you look at that and you say, okay. I believe that that's true.

I believe more content being more prolific is is better. I look at that and if I'm being honest with myself, I I'm not I don't know if I can turn myself into that. You know? I I might have a high opinion of myself and all that, but I I don't know if if I ever end up being prolific enough in in creating content.

Yeah. And like, I don't I don't know that it necessarily has to be the the founder putting their face out there.

That that's my question. Can I can I hire someone to be the face of my company? That sounds so dangerous.

You know, I think a lot of like, some people do it in different ways. Like, you look at what they're doing at Drift, like, yeah, David Cancel is the founder and he's on the podcast, but he's on it with his, like, marketing director, another David, David something. Sorry. I forgot his name. But so the two of them are hosting it.

And actually, the marketing guy is organizing it and planning all the episodes, and then David just hops in and talks for twenty minutes. And so like he that guy runs their content. They're they're hosting a conference pretty soon. Like, they're doing all these things around like, you know, like brand. Like, you look at what Nathan is doing Nathan Barry is doing with ConvertKit.

Like, he's putting on a conference. They they they do really strong content on on the ConvertKit blog. And like, yeah, he he kind of puts his face on a lot of stuff, but there's I think that a lot of us in in our circles know Nathan, but Mhmm. I have a feeling that like ConvertKit has grown to a point where a lot of their customers don't necessarily follow Nathan Barry, you know? Right.

And so especially in the early startup years, I think it just only helps to put yourself out there, invest in content, but just invest in in like inner like just more interaction and more more of your personal story. Like, we work with some clients who and I'm not trying to make this a pitch for like do content marketing with audience ops or anything, but we we work with a bunch of clients who do some podcasts of like, get the founder on a podcast and then they send us the podcast episodes and we we turn it into additional article content, you know.

Yes. Like, the only way I could see it happening is is just super efficient. Yeah. Right? Like like like my marketing manager sets the whole thing up and I just basically come in as like the designated hitter.

Like, let's do this episode together and then walk away. Yeah. That's that's the only only

way what Leadpages did. I mean, the early days, it was Clay Collins. Right? And and now they're so huge. They've they've they've got

Right. Tim Tim does the

web Yeah. Tim does the webinars. Tim did the podcast for a long time, you know.

That's right. So I guess that's that's the that's a good analogy right there. Like, we like, Clay didn't worry that all of a sudden the company was gonna be associated with Tim just because he does the podcast and does does other stuff and does the webinars. Yep. And and Tim did a great job of, like, being understated in that way, not trying to take over and be like, I'm I'm the main man and this is my product.

He was almost like it's almost like an audience member showing you like this check out what this product can do for you.

Yeah. And look, like, you look at ClickFunnels or you look at LeadPages, those are two of what hundreds of other solutions to create landing pages, you know, but why do people connect with them? Because Russell Brunson did webinars and Russell Brunson sells books. And and Clay Collins and his team have put webinars and content out and and and they're guests on other people's podcasts and, you know, they get out there, you know.

Yep. Alright. Yep. Alright, man. I think I think we that we took people for a good for a good ride for like an hour.

Yeah. That was fun. Alright, dude. So

It was a good mix. Yeah. Get back

a good weekend.

It's June. Hopefully, you get some nice weather over there in Connecticut. I'm coming out

your way. In two weeks, baby, I'll be in New York.

Are you? Cool, man. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be around.

Alright. Cool, man.

Alright. Thanks, everybody. Bye.