Bootstrapped Web

Hey. Hey. This is Bootstrap for Web back at it. Jordan, how's it going, man?

Brian Castle. How are you, my friend?

Doing okay. You know, the ups and downs.

The the roller coaster.

That's right. One one month is great. One month is tough. The next month is great. That's that's how this goes.

You know?

One one day. One one hour.

Exactly. Exactly. It's It's it's beautiful outside, and I'm gonna try to keep pushing along here.

So As as Lord Peter Baelish would say, the climb. The climb is all there is. It's all about the climb.

That's right. Game of Thrones is back.

It's back.

Alright. Cool. Look, we got we got we got some things to cover. We haven't spoken in maybe two weeks or so. Look forward to catching ourselves up on things, kind of exploring some issues, things that are coming up, some things that kind of identified as cool things that I want to share that we've been doing.

So where do you want to start my man?

Yeah, I mean, you know, like on my end, just the one thing in terms of updates, I'll just I'll just talk about getting back into the swing of things with ops calendar, some some thoughts around that. But then, you know, if if time allows, I thought maybe I'd I'd grab a couple of articles that I've just been reading that are kind of random just about other stuff out there in the world that I that I think is it it caught my interest, so maybe we'll just talk about something that's not related to the usual updates. So yeah.

Yeah. One article in particular by Justin Jackson that I'd love to go into.

Yeah. That was a good one.

Cool, man.

So why don't we start it off? Like what do you want to start with?

So first, I just want to you know, we we often talk about things that we find difficult, right? The things that are easy and then working, it's worth exploring or at least sharing what or why we think it worked for us, so that other people can learn from it and kind of gain the experience without having to go through it. Oftentimes, we end up talking about like the problems, what we're struggling with. I do want to take a second to just share like a win, just a straightforward win. I had like a career highlight last week.

Know, it was one of those moments where you like stop and reflect and you know, some emotion, was just kind of intense man. Had, I got invited to an event. So these two guys put on an e commerce event teaching people their system for e commerce, and the way they teach their system with a landing page on Shopify, only CartHook that we're the only product in the market that connects landing pages into Shopify. So before the event, they sent out an email to all 150 of their attendees saying before you come here, make sure you have CartHook set up. So so this one event drove a 150 sign ups, and then of course they wanted me to go.

So I did like a two hour presentation in front of a room full of a 150 people all logged in and using Cardhook all at the same time.

That's ridiculous.

It was a trip, man. It was a trip. You know, thank God for AWS, whatever the hell you cost, thank you, it's worth it. So I did the presentation and I went to the back of the room, and I just got a picture of just, you know, the guy up on stage with with the Cardhook app, you know, on display, and then just a 150 laptop screens all open to the app. I was like, wow, man, that's it was a trip, man.

Alright. That's that's ridiculous. Like how how did that how did that happen? How did it come about?

They started using the product themselves, then they introduced it

to Like they found it, just randomly?

They found it because people want to use our product when they send traffic to a landing page, most often in ClickFunnels, but they still want the order to go into Shopify. We're we're the only product that allows you to do that bridge. And so that's how they run their traffic, so they started using our product, introduced it to their mastermind of like eight people, all eight of those people signed up, and they're having success with it, so they said, when we do this big event, let's we wanna teach this system. So I became friends with them and you know, now they're like VIP customers and now obviously they're VIP affiliate partners. You know, I was there personally, so it was like a little bit of my own experience, but it was very much me as a representation for the work of you know, five people for a long time.

So I kind of sent that picture out to everybody and it like, guys, what we're doing has an effect in the real world, you know, like this is we took it from this thing that we conceived and we all kind of put our effort on it and and it is real. It is real.

That's beautiful, man. Congrats, you know. And and it's like to to literally see in the flesh, a 150 people sitting there who who fly to some place to talk about how they are like really seeing results in their business and and you know, your product is is a key piece of that. I mean, that's that's pretty inspiring.

Yeah. It was a trip. So that that was just a win, you know, and it's not boasting, but it felt really good. It's important to acknowledge, know, you put a lot of work in and you talk to people over the phone and on a computer, there are people out there using our products, right? And they're trying to make their lives better, their families better, their income, their business, whatever it is, it does have an effect out there.

Absolutely.

Like meeting people at conferences is is amazing in person. Same goes for emails. You know, I love hearing from people over email, you know, Twitter, but, you know, I'll get a lot of email feedback. And and I just feel like for everyone out there who's using something, whether it's a product or you've read a blog post or you heard a podcast or you've bought a course or whatever, take an extra second to shoot that person an email and just be like, look, your thing actually resulted in in this change in my in my life and my business. Like, that's what that's what business owners really, really wanna hear.

Like, you you think that, like, oh, they're on some podcast or on some email list that, like, they're so big, they get a thousand of these emails a day. Like, no. That's not true. And the ones that they that really inspire them the most are just to say thank you and to actually show them, hey. This this is what happened to me.

Thanks to your thing. So take take the extra moment to do that. It's it's awesome.

How about you, man? What what do got going on?

I think I'll just start with with, one of these articles that that caught my attention. So everybody knows that that Amazon bought Whole Foods a couple weeks ago. I'm a fan of Amazon. I'm a fan of Whole Foods. This is kind of exciting news for, you know, everyone.

I read this article from Ben Thompson. He runs the the blog Stratachery or Stratachery.

Stratigery or something like that.

Yeah. It's and this guy is an awesome writer. I've only kind of become a fan of his in in a in the last couple of months, but he basically takes whatever's happening in tech news and and writes really in-depth strategic analysis on on the latest tech news, basically. So he wrote this this article. This is back on June 19.

He wrote this called Amazon's New Customer. And just really walking through this I I like I just I just love this stuff like this. Like this why did Amazon choose to buy Whole Foods? Right? Like, what is the strategy?

What is their big master plan there? So the article, like, it's called Amazon's new customer. And and so the idea is that if you think about how Amazon has evolved over the years, so obviously, it started with like selling books and then selling all sorts of products. And then they started to really make a lot of money with AWS, their their cloud services. So there's like two two big buckets of how they make money.

There's like the the cloud services, AWS. The other big one is these fulfillment centers, letting third party ecommerce sellers, you know, use their fulfillment centers to to sell. Right? And the way that those were successful was that Amazon itself was the first and best biggest customer for AWS and then they were the their first and best biggest customer for these fulfillment centers. Like, it it it was like selling their byproduct.

Like, AWS is like, you know, hey, they were like, hey, we've got all these cloud servers and all these cloud services that we happen to be using just for our own site to you know, we're paying for it for Amazon. We might as well sell this to other people. So, like, them being the first best customer allowed them to, like, self fund in a way and and then scale up that side of the business. And then same thing with the fulfillment centers, you know, we have to build out all these fulfillment centers because we sell stuff, other people can do it too. And and because we're the biggest customer on it, we can pump so much resources and money into it.

Right?

The economies of scale, get the better shipping rates from the carriers because it's all coming from the same place and

Exactly. Okay. So so then you you look at Amazon Fresh, which is which they've been trying to get off the ground for the last couple years. They're trying to dabble in this like grocery business, but that's been kind of falling flat for them because they were missing that first best customer. Like they Amazon themselves did not they were just trying to dabble in this thing and see where it can go.

They didn't build out the system themselves and Yeah.

Like they weren't

efficiencies and and and lend them out effectively.

Exactly. They they they they weren't able to make that a byproduct of something that they were already doing anyway. So by buying Whole Foods

Just shortcut, force it.

It's like now we have this massive grocery stores business that that needs the the funds and resources to grow. And now using that, like making Whole Foods their first best customer for this whole thing, they can then build it out into even more, you know, services.

That's an exciting thing. Well, my wife and I talk about it all the time, there's no way we are shopping for groceries five years from now the same way that we do now. And it is a horrific, horrible, inefficient process right now. Going to the store, dragging three kids, clamoring and throwing things at you is is so much pain, and we've tried delivery services and it's just not there yet. So the prospect of Amazon's power and process and discipline combined with Whole Foods quality, it's like, alright, take take my money.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And you know, obviously that's a massive scale, but just on a much more miniscule scale, I was thinking about like, you know, my own business and how I'm moving into this ops calendar SaaS product, which never would have come about if I wasn't already doing the audience ops content service. And we're already using OpsCalendar in our service for our clients. And so I I look at our service as like that first best customer.

We're designing the product for ourselves. We're built like, even if we don't sell it to any other customers, we still need it for ourselves. It's that self it's self funding, but also, like, the ability to to pump those resources into a new product like that because you're already using it anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. And to understand the intricacies of what the product needs. Right? That's where it's hard to do it on your own, hence the whole lean process and customer development and so on, because if you aren't building it for yourself and you don't have direct experience, and I assume a lot of product owners and companies in our space, there's a thread that runs through historically, right? My thread goes from starting an e commerce store to an abandoned cart app to the checkout process, there is a very, common thread.

I assume a lot of people had the same type of thing. Yeah. Cool, man.

Yeah. So what else

Let's on your see what I got. First, something really brief, like a little a little tip or at least something that we've been doing, and then we can get into something slightly different. So one thing that I have seen, we hired a head of customer support and Aaron is outstanding. He brings this very founder like energy where there's no like, just tell me what I'm supposed to do at my job and I'll do it, it's very proactive. So one of the things that he has been doing that has inspired all of us on the team to do more of, is he just reaches out to other companies and just talks to them.

So these aren't customers, they're not partners, these are just people who are in a similar situation, and these are like their counterparts in other in other companies that are doing the same thing. So here in Portland, he basically has been reaching out to other software companies that we like and admire, and just gets their head of customer support on the phone or on a call or an in person meeting, and just asks them how are you doing it? What's the evolution of how you started doing it, and how did you end up doing it the way you are right now? And he'll do that for several companies, and he just like amasses what in each conversation, it's like a year or two of pain to get to where they are right now, trying this system, trying this software, trying this other method.

Is he recording me? Like is this for content or is he just

No, this is so we know how to handle it because we are in we're in new territory, right? Every month is this new thing and how do we handle customer support is like the biggest focus right now in the company. It's customer experience, right? It's the documentation, the onboarding, the support, the tech support, the sales support that it's just people signing up, that's one thing, but getting people to be successful, so all that customer experience stuff. So what it's done is it's kind of inspired other people in the company to do the same thing.

So Ben has been talking to like product people at other companies, and I've been talking to other founders, and all of us are like, yeah, we should just kind of get out of the building more because you learn you learn these lessons faster. Yeah. Absolutely. I like it.

Obviously, I've been a fan of mastermind groups. I think I met you originally through a mastermind group and just in the past year, I've I like, the ones that I was in started to fizzle out, and I felt this just that void of, like, I'm not in mastermind groups right now. You know, I've I've been in and out. I've got, like, friends that I that I catch up with every now and then, but so I just recently joined one, and then I I sent in a a like, kind of like an application for this other one. But Like, it it it just felt that that need to, like, connect with more people on a regular basis to it's just like it's like not that I'm looking for anything specific, it's just like, I don't have that right now.

I know that it's benefited me in the past.

Right. And it starts

there again. Gotta get back gotta get it back going again.

Yep. The other thing, the the theme, right, from from my point of view as as CEO, when I put on like the the business hat of what I'm responsible for in the company, I remember Rob Walling, I remember his talk at MicroConf and going back on the history of DRIP, one of the one of the themes that I noted in his talk that I remembered to kinda keep an eye on was the fact that revenue in SaaS, revenue and expenses, they just climb in lockstep for a while. Right? As you get more revenue, you just need to spend more money on handling that level of customers. At some point, the efficiency of software starts to have a bigger impact where you can have a lot more revenue than expenses, but for a while, they grow in lockstep.

I remember him describing that and saying to myself in the audience, I'm gonna make sure that doesn't happen. And it is exactly what's happening.

You know, every yeah. I mean, every SaaS that that's grown to, you know, that starts to really take off. When I hear the stories about their expenses, I'm always, like, floored. Like, how does that even happen? Like Right.

Yeah. And so I guess it's a combination of like server costs and people and like developers and customer It's really it's really just people.

Yeah. Like the the the percentage of the budget that goes toward services, software, hosting, and so on, just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks to the point of almost inconsequential.

Right.

It's people. But it's just people and salaries and and there there is

like But there's also like a speed aspect to it, right? Like like especially when you're for like Drift, when you're in a such a hyper competitive market, like, you have to ship feature after feature as fast as humanly possible, which is why you need more developers. Whereas, like, I I feel like and I I can be totally wrong about this, but, like, I feel like if you if you're not as in such a cutthroat competitive space, you can get by with a slower road map.

It it seems to be from what Rob said and from what I'm experiencing, that it is a conscious decision. You don't have to keep building new features, you can make more profit, but it's gonna hurt you. Right? It's gonna hurt your potential. It's gonna hurt how fast you can grow, how big you can grow, and the danger that you're putting yourselves in with competition.

So it's your decision. If you want to just keep pushing and keep expenses in lockstep with revenue, you can definitely do that, just keep hiring people at some point in time, and that's kind of what we're in the middle of right now. Right now we're team of six, we can handle x amount of revenue, you know, because that goes with x, y amount of customers and so on. So I see us moving to like eight or 10 people, but in my mind I'm like, okay, once we get to 10 people, can we handle a disproportionate increase in revenue? So not a little more, but three or four x in revenue because we have the systems and people in place, that's my hope.

You know, it it comes to that question like, when is something like feature complete? And I know that that that term feature complete will change from year to year as the as the market changes. But at the end of the day, like, the core product exists for a certain reason. Like you can keep enhancing it, you could add extra features around the edges, but like the the core reason why people buy it doesn't drastically change unless you're gonna create a completely new product.

Yeah. This is a I think it's a tough concept and there's a million ways that it can write little factors that make it difficult to put your finger on. I mean, our our cart abandonment app, we haven't really added a feature for about a year. You you call that feature complete because people use it, sign up, pay for it, get value out of it and so on. But right now, in a competitive space with our checkout product, in my mind, there is so much more to build.

Right? Audience ops, you think about it like, are you trying to get this feature completeness or are you trying to get to like good enough and then but you still know that you do need these other features?

Well, so like with ops calendar, as of right now, I think it's like 50 or 60% to that point in my mind currently that I would consider like feature complete. And 50 or 60% is certainly good enough to start selling it to customers, and we have some paying customers on it already.

I just signed up this week.

Yeah. I saw that. Thanks.

I got the question too. Yep. Thank you. Yep.

But I've already noticed, like, during during the development of this stuff that, like, I have 10 features that I wanna build in a month and I only have one developer, 10 features are not gonna get built in the month. Like, it's there's just no no way. Even once we, like, you know, hustle and bootstrap our way up to 80%, 90% feature complete, and and we don't have any, like, big features to to build anymore, I think the next big expense people wise will be just performance. Like, we're the version of it now, like, we're gonna have to rebuild it at some point or just refactor under the hood at some point once it once it reaches a certain, you know.

Yeah. We we we've done that, I think I think three times. Yeah.

That's that's Like, at some at some point, that's gonna be a massive expense just in time and people,

you know. Right, but I guess you you only undertake that after it's proven itself as a sellable product. Yeah, that's what you think. But Ben and I have trouble with this on a principle level. At base principle, he and I disagree a lot because and I can acknowledge that his way is the right way, right?

He wants to build only what will basically make people sign up and what makes people leave. Right? He wants to build as little as possible. And in theory, that that sounds right. The problem is what do you do when you know what the market wants?

So I feel very much like I know what an ecommerce merchant that's very focused on marketing, I know what they want. They don't just want our product, they want additional templates, they want AB testing, they want that's what I would want. But from Ben's point of view, the person responsible for for building the product, it's no, I wanna put in as little as possible because the more we build, the more

The more

surface area we have to deal Yeah.

The more to maintain.

Right. And so it's like this we call it a health intention. How's that phrase? A nice way to describe it.

Well, like, for that example, I mean, templates, like, is that a common request?

It's pretty common. AB testing, very very common. More reporting, very common. Things like that. And and right now people are they're signing up, so does that does that mean you shouldn't build it?

It's like you should, but it's almost like in in what order and at what scope.

Yeah. So but it it is all also tough around like, people may be asking for it, but will they put their money where their mouth is? Like, there was a while with with Restaurant Engine. I'm not even sure whether or not this was the right move or not, but, like, I definitely stopped creating new design templates, like, pretty early on. Like, I think I launched with two or three, and then eventually grew it to, like, six.

And that was by, like, year two. And then, like, for year three and four, like, we still had six, and that was it. And, like, even of those six, like, everybody chose, like, just two of them, like, our most popular two. I was like, well, all these customers kind of want our most popular themes, there's I don't see a need to to grow a massive library.

Right. It's tough. It's I don't know, it's trade off. Yeah. I wanna build what people want because I don't know.

That that's what makes makes sense to me.

I guess but I I I guess, like, to Ben's point is like, are those things like, will they actually result in more sign ups? Like, are people starting a free trial and not converting because there weren't enough templates? Yeah.

I I think so. Yep. Yeah. It's and it's it's hard because when it comes to product, I'm not the expert on the team, but I am the expert on what the market wants.

So Maybe you could test it by like not building it, but advertising it, and like I I thinking like you could make it an upgrade, like pay an extra x dollars a month to get a a b testing and just see how many people click and like try to opt in for that, and then say, oh, wait, it's not ready yet.

I I saw one company recently just flat out just send a message to all their customers and say, should we build this? And then they just suggested the feature and said, we've heard requests for this, we're considering building it, what do you guys think? Should we build it? And I'm sure I'm sure they got a bunch of feedback. Yeah.

What else brother?

So you know, like speaking of ops calendar, I've been I think I I may have talked last time about how okay, I'm starting to kinda at least plan on ramping back into developing it and getting it out there. I think a month ago, I still had the mindset of like, okay, really gonna do more of a push like late twenty seventeen. But now I'm thinking like, let's go even faster and push now. Okay.

Can you dig into that a little bit?

So, know, I mean, audience audience app services, you know, chugging along. It's it's it it does what it does. I just recently grew the team by by a lot. And I'm now at the tail end of that whole really crazy hectic period of training new people and and all that. So they're all kinda settling in, and now we have a lot more capacity in audience ops service.

I am doing a few things around, like, driving more leads and to the service and whatnot. I've got a big content push coming out in the next few weeks there. But the ultimate goal is to get Ops Calendar launched with more customers and to break even and then to profitability. I mean, the main goal that I have in mind is is break even. Like, it to a point where I don't have to cut out profit from audience ops service to fund the development of ops calendar.

Right. That's base camp one on on the climb.

Yes. Yeah. And that's the the most painful and frustrating climb because I I'm not funded. It's it's completely self funded and and the progress on ops calendar all depends on the health of audience ops service, basically. There have been ups and downs in in the service, so I've had to kinda slow slow down progress on ops calendar.

Now kinda move moved past that and in a much better place to to start self funding again. And now it's just a matter of well, first, have to wait like another about six weeks for my developers to free up again because they took on other projects. So we're saying early September, they're gonna start coding again on ops calendar. Between now and then, I am designing the interface for a few more key features, specifically geared towards agencies, being able to better communicate with clients through the apps calendar interface to say, like, here's a piece of content. Does it have your approval?

Do you have edits for it? And kinda have like an official approval system, which we've had a lot of requests for and we we would certainly use in in our service as well. The other big piece that we're gonna develop is so actually, we already have this in place, our performance tracking. Right? So we and and this was actually my mistake.

This is probably like this is probably a similar back and forth that you've had with Ben, but a different Okay.

About whether whether you needed or not?

Not that just the the approach, the way that we implemented it. So we have this performance tracking feature, which basically allows you to install a tracking code on your website and track traffic page views, entry visits, and conversions on a post by post basis. So you can go go down your calendar, click on an article and see how many people viewed this particular article, and how many people who viewed that article also converted. And you can have all these custom conversions. And my thought early on, and the way that it actually still exists today is that, like, hey, let's build our own tracking pixel and our own traffic recording.

Right. As opposed to, like like, playing into Google Analytics.

Exactly. As opposed to integrating with Google Analytics. And my developer right rightfully pushed back on me pretty early on. He's like, you know, we could do all this with Google Analytics. I I just didn't believe that the integration would be as seamless as I hoped it would be.

Right? Like, I was because I I haven't really seen many other apps, like, really seamlessly integrate with Google Analytics to a point where it's like it's like where you click a button, you're connected, and then it's just like sucking data from Google Analytics and putting it into your own interface. I kind of thought that that wasn't really possible. Right?

Okay. Okay. I haven't seen seen that either.

And so I I so I was like, you know, I don't wanna just like iframe Google Analytics or any bullshit like that in inside our app. Like, you know so I was like, let's just build our own. And and so he found like a framework for to do some shortcuts and

all that.

Yeah. So we built that and then we had, like, 20 clients on it tracking their traffic, like, 20. And the thing was already slowing down to a to like a screeching halt, you know. Because we're we're tracking, like, all these website hits and then connecting those hits to conversions and it's, you know once I once we got into the thick into the thick of it and actually stood it up and and got it running, I was like, oh, yeah. I I I see now how complex I mean, he built it.

You know, it's all built out and it's actually working. And we got through the complexity. We had a lot of back and forth on it. But then once we got it all built, putting it out there in the wild, the performance just killed us. So long story short, we're we're gonna switch to the Google Analytics integration.

That that'll be a a kind of a big overhaul of that feature. But I it'll be much better from a performance standpoint. All that stuff is offloaded to Google's servers. And I I'm so stupid because like I've had that request from customers like, can it integrate with Google Analytics? And and it's better because like when you sign up for it, you'll be able to get all your historic data into ops calendar.

Yeah. And and less surface area for you to maintain.

Yeah. Yeah. And and, you know, the other day I found this like WordPress plugin that integrates Google Analytics in like a really really seamless way. And I was like, oh, man, like they did it, you know. We if if could do it in that WordPress plugin, it can be done by us.

Yeah. I hear you. We've we've made those mistakes bunch of times. Requires a philosophy to to stand by. That's that's the truth.

It requires our first option, if it's not 100% core to what we do, our first option will be to integrate with the big player in the field. And then and then beyond that is is the question.

Yeah. But the real like the main thing that I need to focus on now is like, aside from planning these features, I'm gonna do a bit of that work and then the developers are gonna get going, but I need to be get get moving on marketing and sales. And we we still have the the beta group of customers. We have our clients on on audience app service using it. And a lot of them are, like, really actively using it too.

So that's

pretty cool. That that's good.

And then we have like a couple of other new customers who've just found us. Like, I I I don't even know them. They just found the site and signed up.

That's good. Stranger.

And so that's been kinda cool. I mean, not a high volume, you know, like a handful, but but like I've been doing zero to market it. Right?

Right. If you wanna get the the snowball rolling downhill, the first few turns are gonna require effort.

Exactly. So I need to start just talking to more customers, you know, scheduling a lot more calls just to pick the brains and feel like what what are the most important features that you're looking for in this sort of tool. I've been having a lot of conversations about our top competitor. There there's one that just keeps popping up, and and I wanna really understand like why people are frustrated with that. I mean, I've I've tried it and I was frustrated with it too.

So and I like those situations a lot.

Yeah. We we live off that.

Yeah. Like we there over 50% have have mentioned this this name and they come in and they're and, you know

Right. They're bringing some

They're they're actively looking for a better solution. That's how they found it. I need to have more of those conversations. I I need to kinda update not redesign the marketing side, but, like, update some of the copy and some of some of the to highlight the new features. The other thing that I wanna do is, like, record these, like, two minute videos.

One, each one just focused on a specific feature and the pain point that that feature solves.

Yeah. I I like that version of marketing. These just show to me already. Every single one of our images on our marketing page for the checkout product was intended as a temporary image to be replaced with a video, and we haven't done we haven't done the video.

Right. Right. And I I was thinking like I would actually take these videos and use them out like elsewhere, like I would go into forums and somebody's asking about how do you, like, automatically schedule tweets and Facebook posts, like, in in a better way than Buffer. Like, I could reply with, oh, we have a video about that, you know.

Right. It's a content asset you can use other places.

It's not one of these, like, super simple SaaS tools that, like, just does one thing really well. It's there's really, like, five or six different key benefits to the thing. There's, five or six really painful aspects of planning a content calendar and tracking it and automating social media and and and, you know, automating the process and all that. And like, each one of those things like, I've explained each one of those things separately to other people, other like content marketers, and they're like, oh, that's what I've been looking for. You know, but they've had that reaction to like four or five separate things.

So so I can't like jumble all that in like one landing page or one video. I I wanna market these separate features as if they're like like focused micro SaaS, but they're really all features in the same tool.

Yeah. Yeah. We we we struggle with that same thing. Our our we don't know what which feature to highlight first.

I I think that's well, first of all, I think more SaaS I I I know Heath and Shah has talked about this. More SaaS are going in this direction of like, you do have to incorporate

Yeah. A bunch of stuff.

A more complete solution just because of competition and and all that, but Well,

people people have 25 different software subscriptions, and there is a very special version of joy in the world where you can cancel one tool because a tool that you already have does the same thing.

I've had those conversations.

Dissatisfaction of like, oh, now I can get rid of x.

I've had those exact conversations with with beta people and and others. Like, when I ask them flat out, like, do you think about, you know, 150, $200 a month for this? Like, how does that fit with your budget? They're like, I out loud, they're doing the math. They're like, well, I could cancel this tool.

I'm paying $70.79 for that. I could also cancel that tool. I'm already paying a 100 for that. So I mean, I think it makes sense, you know.

Yep. Yep. Same here. That's good to know. You know, those those might be the the valuable features, but they those also tend to be not the central feature.

Right? It's something that you happen to do that another tool does that they can get rid of, but for you it's it might not be the primary feature, it might be part of right, for you guys, like, okay, I assume a typical use case is being able to cancel buffer.

Yeah. Buffer and Edgar.

Right. So but but your your tool doesn't specifically it's not a social scheduling tool. Social scheduling is part of the whole approach and strategy.

Yeah. But that's I mean, know, it it is. Like, it it is a social scheduling tool, but it's not primarily that, You know? And so and so that's that's what I'm talking about. It's like, solves some frustrating issues with social scheduling, especially when you're doing social scheduling to promote a content calendar.

And so I think that the way to to approach that from a marketing standpoint is like, you'll have your standard homepage marketing site to kinda highlight the key benefits. But then either on like like maybe separate smaller landing pages plus these like social media videos, blog posts, make those hyper focused around one key feature. Right? Like like, we'll have one page dedicated to, like, a better social scheduling calendar or something like that. And like one built around, like, you know, smarter automated content marketing checklists.

You know, that's a big one. And like, like another big one for us is is this performance tracking, the the Google Analytics, finally, like you get your Google Analytics on a article by article basis laid out in your calendar. You know, that that's it's like a separate message to communicate.

Yeah. It's almost it requires an understanding of what solution you're solving overall. Sounds like, you know, buffer sound fixes just the scheduling piece, but for your audience and your ideal customer, the scheduling piece is as a result of the actual content creation and promotion.

Yeah. Like the pain point that that solves that that I wanna get across in a in a little video is like, when we have to push an article back by two days last minute, we already had buffer scheduled tweets that are gonna go out too early and then we accidentally post a broken link. Yes. This thing automatically prevents that, you know, like Yeah. That's that's like problem solved, And I want to just put that across in a in a simple video, you know.

That's the hard part. The hard part is how do you have that conversation? I don't think there's anything nearly as good as video to convey that in an appropriate amount of time. Right? No one's gonna stare at your copy and image for ninety seconds, but they will watch your video for ninety seconds.

Right. Right. But yeah, I gotta get that rolling and and I mean, even just more conversations just to figure out like which ones to focus on first, and then just start experimenting with leads, you know, how do I get more because I know that's gonna take several months to get rolling. So, just gotta get that back up and running and and

Gonna hook you up with two guys in Canada that just giving stuff out left and right, do a little affiliate promotion for you. Yeah. Awesome. Alright. So I think the last thing before I got a boogie for a sales call, Justin Jackson wrote a very interesting article, I think everyone should read about the actual buyer's journey, not what the person selling the software or the product is thinks the person is going through on their buyer journey, but what it actually looks like.

So I I read it at just the right time where we internally were going through a similar buying process. We use intercom for support, but then we're overwhelmed with the volume because chat encourages conversation, and chat also gives off an expectation of immediacy. So you can't have a chat button that the person says, hey, I I have a quick question, and then you don't respond for twenty four hours. Right? That's not okay.

So we to try to handle the volume, we moved over to Zendesk, so it's more of an email experience instead of a chat. People were not happy with that, we're not happy with that either, so we're going back to Intercom, but we found an app called FrontApp that takes your inboxes and puts it into like a unified inbox for everyone, for your entire team. So intercom chat can come in, emails can come in, right, email to support at Cardhook, orders at Cardhook, building at Cardhook, you can have it's like different folders. It's just this unified inbox for the entire team to use. So our journey of how to go from intercom into Zendesk, out of Zendesk, back to intercom, but with a layer of front app was was, you know, it's like a month long journey.

I I think I heard about Front App like because they raised money and they have some cool story or something. But Justin Justin's article kind of touched on all these little tiny things that even put a service or product in your mind to begin with, and then all of sudden you have the need for it and you remember them and you come back and you try it and how's the sign up experience, it all goes into this crazy decision making process that's impossible to define. Totally. I'm pretty sure you and I reviewed WP Pusher.

That's right.

So we took we took a little we'll take a little credit right there. Exactly. Yeah.

We we made them who they are.

Peter, I think the founder is is is cool as hell.

Yeah. That's one of those things, like, solves a painful prop like, okay. I don't actually use it, but Justin had that issue where where he prefers to use Git when he updates his WordPress theme. That's the thing that solves that problem. That that's really painful if you work that way, you know.

Yeah. And it's and it's awesome. You know, and I think about that that customer journey, and that was a really great write up by Justin. But the customer journey thing is so important to really get inside their mind and and just but also really understand all of your touch points. I mean, you think about, like, a few months back, I was also experimenting with intercoms and Drift, which in some ways they kinda compete.

They're they've got some different features, but

Yeah. The Jackies.

And I've been a fan of of their podcast, David Cancel and and what's it called? Seeking Wisdom. It's a really, really good podcast. That's that's how I first came across their product, Drift. Right?

They're they're kinda like the newcomer to to the space. Intercom has been around for a while. And a few months ago, I tried them both, and then I ended up I think at the time a few months ago, Drift was still I mean, it it it was still developing and it was missing a few key features that Intercom had. So I tried them both, and then I went with Intercom for a while. And then I I definitely hit up that same problem that you had, just too many incoming inquiries.

And then I kinda turned it off, went back to my regular form and email, no more chat for a few more months. And now just last week, I get an email from Drift. I guess I'm on their email list. Tell me about like some new new improved version of their bot. Right?

And and I'm like, You know, I do I do need to I do need to grab more leads off the homepage of Audience Ops. I know we're getting a lot of traffic there. Not enough people are filling out the form. Maybe because we have like an eight question form on there. If I can convert it to just live like a chat where that could at least start Yeah.

That But I but if I did that and it and it's just a pure chat, I'm gonna get too many unqualified inquiries. So maybe I could slap Drift on there, put the bot up to kinda pre qualify, and then it gets to me. That's the thinking. I haven't actually set that up yet, but but it's like that journey like

Right. You're on your way there.

Yeah. Like And

like a failed free trial with them is actually part of the buying journey if you look at it in in the aggregate.

Yeah. Like, I'm I'm pulling for them. Right? Because I'm a fan of them. I'm a fan of their podcast.

I'm I am a fan of the product. I'm just not using it yet. And it didn't really work for me the first time. And now a few months later, it's like, this could be a good excuse for me to give them another shot, you know. It's like, it's like I want to use it.

I want it to be there and you know. Yeah. I think a few there's a few products out there like that.

Yeah. Cool, man. Well, I'm pretty sure you and I could go on like this until our voices are are sore.

Yep.

It's it's Friday. It's 04:47PM for you on the East Coast. It it is it's time. It is Shut it down.

It's it's bureau clock over here

for sure. It sounds it sounds right to me. Yep. Alright, brother. Alright.

Good to catch up. Everyone, thanks for listening in. Talk to all of you soon. Have a good one. Thank you.