First Customer Demos, Paid Marketing Funnels, Team Communication
This is Bootstrapped Web. We're back at it. How's it going, Jordan?
Jordan Gal:Good. Good. Brian, nice to speak with you again. We're we're we're being consistent. We missed one week, but we're we're back, baby.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We're, you know, we're we're still at it. You know, we'll we'll we'll miss some weeks here and there. You know, it's kinda busy running some businesses and taking care of little kids and and traveling and all that fun stuff.
Jordan Gal:But But if if the kids can go back to school, you and I can go back to podcasting. Exactly. Exactly. Cool. So what what are we talking about today?
Brian Casel:Yeah. It seems like a lot of stuff is happening on both of our ends as usual, but I mean, on my end, I've got some movement. Some some things are happening on ops calendar. I can talk about some kind of fun updates, things that are happening there. Audience ops is having a pretty good month, which feels good after a couple of not so good months.
Brian Casel:And I'm running some tests that I haven't tested before over there. And I'm I'm hiring for a developer right now, and that's always fun and challenging. So that's what's happened on on my end, we'll get into it. How about you?
Jordan Gal:On on my side today, we launched the first paid marketing campaign for the checkout product. So we've been working on this for, I guess it's over a year now. It's really been in the market being pushed without that requirement for a demo for about six months, and now is the first time we are going to proactively reach out and and pull people into a funnel. So I want to talk about what that funnel looks like and how we had it built and the key pieces, and and then we can kind of keep track of it over the next few months on how we make adjustments and how things work. The other thing to talk about is just just some new challenges.
Jordan Gal:We're we're 12 people full time now, and that's starting to require a new level of planning and budgeting and estimates and onboarding people. Yeah. That sort of thing, and we're starting to feel the effects of people specializing instead of having 10 things on their plate. Now each person has two or three things, all of sudden people are getting better at their thing, and more expertise in their field, some of the challenges that I'm having with starting to feel out of touch. It's already 12 people and I already feel like I'm out of touch with people, so how do I come back to that?
Jordan Gal:I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on like how to do one on ones and how to I don't know, want to have strong relationships with people and I don't want to be surprised by bad things, people being unhappy, or weird conflicts that I'm not aware of, so I I like don't wanna fall out of touch.
Brian Casel:I yeah. I'd like to talk about that too because I don't know what the hell I'm doing either. So Yes.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Last time we spoke, we got into we got into details about off calendar, about your pricing, the naming of the pricing, the positioning, the demo, all this stuff. So give us give us an update on what's what's been going on on that front. You remember you made some changes right away?
Brian Casel:I'm pretty excited today, like literally today because I looked at the numbers for this past month of September, and in a in a lot of ways, ops count, like this big marketing push was kind of starting from literally zero on the September 1 in terms of like zero traffic. I wasn't really talking about it much for a while there. Wasn't doing any content. Wasn't doing any any push. To today, I have been talking about it more.
Brian Casel:We posted our first of many weekly blog articles. I started making updates to the features on the app. And now we're getting a few 100 visitors a week, both organically, some coming from our list, some coming from this podcast, some some elsewhere. It's just cool to see those numbers start to tick up. And as I talked about last time, the only way to try out the app is to request a demo, basically.
Brian Casel:And I did take your advice. I I took the word requested demo off, and I made it, like, get started. Still, it's a form that gets to my calendar, and you book a time with me one on one.
Jordan Gal:Right. That's with the understanding that fewer people will do it, but but more qualified people.
Brian Casel:Yes. And still this is our this first month of of the push, and I did not expect I'm not running any ads. I did not expect a ton of traffic. I certainly really didn't expect many demos to come through. But I think at least 10 have come through this month.
Brian Casel:Just demo requests, filling out the form, and then booking a time on my calendar. Now many of those are people who've been in my audience or been on the list for a while and they're and they've heard me talking about it and they're like, yeah. I I think now's a good time for me to check this out. I think I I could actually use this. But there have been a few who literally just started googling for this tool and landed on OpsCalendar and requested the demo.
Brian Casel:I mean, an hour ago today, I had a call with this guy in Germany. He's never heard of me before. He's not does not even know what AudienceOps is or CastJam or this podcast or anything. He was literally Googling for, like, content calendar software or something like that. Landed on it.
Brian Casel:He thought we're, like, this well established company. You know? And Yeah.
Jordan Gal:The looks good. The product looks good.
Brian Casel:And, you know, had a great call with him. I mean, the the the feedback was, okay. It looks great, but it's still missing a few features. And he gave me a few competitors that he was, like, kind of comparing. He was like, you know, those guys, they have those features that we're looking for, but their interface is shit, and we don't like it.
Brian Casel:We really like yours. We like where you're going with it, but we're looking for something a little bit more mature.
Jordan Gal:Conversation with a stranger. That's a win.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I see that as a win. He was really cool and open about this feedback. But I mean, that was one guy. The other demos, I had two demos yesterday, two the day before, I mean, they ended up signing up.
Brian Casel:What was really exciting for me is I would be talking to the founder of the company, and they would usually, for most of these, they would pull in their head of marketing on the call with them to see the thing that I'm showing them. The head of marketing, the person who's kind of like managing the blog, managing the writers and everything
Jordan Gal:The person who
Brian Casel:would actually be using the tool on a daily basis. Yeah. The the reactions I've been getting from that person again and again is like, wow. That is awesome. I'm I'm getting that, like, that, like, oh, that's the thing that I've been missing.
Brian Casel:Like, that that reaction is just so it's gold, you know?
Jordan Gal:I just got the tingles.
Brian Casel:It's awesome, you know? And it's calls like that, and the fact that these calls are just literally dripping in inbound organically, and we haven't even really started pushing much yet, these just feel like good signs to me. Right?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And that's what keeps you motivated. Because if you are convinced by other people that you're onto something, and if you just keep going with it, it'll hit, then then that's that's the motivation. Want to see that feedback. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That's that's why I love the demos in the early stages. Men, you just talk to people, and those reactions of, oh, that's what I want. Yes. Those those things have to be going.
Brian Casel:And I've got live chat on on the site. I am the person manning the live chat. I don't care how busy I am. I'll get interrupted to talk to anybody who who wants to talk about it, you know. I mean, this is all, like, inbound stuff is well and good, but I know that I need to do more to push on outbound.
Jordan Gal:Right. So what what do you
Brian Casel:see is
Jordan Gal:the the initial outbound?
Brian Casel:My fur and I kinda started doing this this week. I went to Quora, and I just started searching for keywords like content calendar tools, and there are like 10 plus Quora threads, like that are perfect for me to answer. I mean like, and this actually went into my initial research a year ago for like, should I go into this product or not? And being able to see that there is so much activity of people actively asking for recommendations for this sort of tool on Quora, on Facebook groups, on other communities, on Twitter, that's a really good sign that these are places where I can insert myself and actually outbound go reach out to these people, get my voice heard in these threads. And so I started doing that yesterday.
Brian Casel:I wrote a really long answer to a Cora question, and then I asked my whole team to upvote it and everything. Then right now it's like the top of like this this big thread, there's like 30 answers, and mine is there. It's got some videos on it, and it's got a link to the ops calendar. And there's like 10 more questions on Quora just like that one that I have listed out in a document that I'm going get to and start answering.
Jordan Gal:So that's something you can do and pick up some traffic
Brian Casel:Yeah. Just
Jordan Gal:based on doing the work once. That's nice.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I think that Quora is not the kind of thing that's, like, just sustainable every month forever. It's the kind of thing that you'll do, like, a big spurt of activity
Jordan Gal:To get rolling.
Brian Casel:To get rolling. But I think it's also a good jumping off point for some outbound outreach. So like, I could just click through and see the people who've been active on this thread and start to hunt down their contact info.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's it also sounds to me like there is there's a good amount of search happening already. So I I would consider bidding on competitor names in AdWords?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Would like to get into some paid ads at some point. I haven't started that yet. The one thing that I did start is content. I've got the Audience Ops team writing content for Ops Calendar.
Brian Casel:Just that this past week, we we published the first article of we have like about 13 or 15 articles planned out in in the calendar going forward from here. So so that stuff will start to help with the organic traffic and and these assets. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And and opt in onto the page?
Brian Casel:Oh, Some content content upgrades everywhere. Right.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But but what I did already published, like, two weeks ago, I think I talked about this is how I I had I I expanded from like a one page website to like the tour page with five dedicated pages. Like this is where I was really surprised. I did not expect that change to pay off in any way anytime soon. But I'm looking at the numbers, our organic inbound traffic of new first time visitors has been up ever since I launched those pages. And mean, literally today I had a demo call with a guy who told me that he Googled some random you know, search term, and that got them onto this onto the site.
Brian Casel:And, like, these pages are, like, two weeks old. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. Very nice. Very nice. Yeah.
Brian Casel:That stuff feels good. It's not it's not making a ton of money right now, but it's, like, a lot of good activity. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. You just gotta build on that momentum. You go from three demos a week to five to 10, then you do three a day, one per day signs up, you get five new trials every week, you're you're starting to get somewhere. I am terrible about looking at Google Analytics and trying to look for insights, but we did it recently and found that the number of uniques that go to our homepage has skyrocketed, and only about 30% of them make it to the actual product page that we want them to. So we might just replace our homepage with the product page.
Brian Casel:Okay. Here's a little hack. I am terrible about reviewing analytics and metrics, and how are things doing, and making those optimizations. But I know that I need to. I know that I need to look at this on a weekly basis and see how are the numbers, how do they compare to last week, what changed this week.
Brian Casel:So I'm trying to force myself to get into this habit. So I've made a few hacks. I know that other people are great at this stuff. For me, it's just one of my weaknesses. I'd rather be working on a site somewhere, designing something, writing something, than pouring through analytics data.
Brian Casel:That's just me. One thing is I've set up a I did set up a reporting spreadsheet for myself, like the key metrics that I'm going to track in this launch of Ops Calendar. In terms of new visits, organic visits, paid traffic, new demo requests, new trials, MRR, churn. I need to be looking at those on a weekly basis. So I set up a spreadsheet and then an automated weekly email every Friday, Hey, go update your spreadsheet to remind myself, right?
Brian Casel:Now, the the other thing is to try it. And I wasn't really going to talk about this on the podcast, but I will. I am recording these these video journal entries And I have not released any of these. I don't know if I ever will release any of these. But the thought is, if I record these every week of me literally going through my metrics and giving a total update of everything that happened, everything that's stressing me out, everything that I'm excited about, showing you the real numbers, showing you the things that we're working on and where we're at in the launch of this SaaS product.
Brian Casel:It's like a little ten to twenty minute update every week that I'm recording, and I'm dropping into a folder somewhere. And who knows? Maybe a year from now, I'll release this as like a as one of those, like, long form kind of watch the story unfold in real time.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I like that.
Brian Casel:But it's also a way to kind of give myself pressure of, like, it's Friday. I have to record my journal entry. And and I'm, like, keeping myself accountable to an audience that may or may not ever see this, but it would be cool if they do Sunday. You know? I think you
Jordan Gal:you should keep that up. I think you'll be happy if you can keep that up. Yeah. I had a
Brian Casel:And, like, if if nothing like, it it is taking more time to do that, but at the same time, it's keeping me doing the right things, which is, like, checking in on progress. Progress.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I like that combination of pressure plus actually doing the right thing along with it. Yeah. I've had advice. Tim Connelly actually gave me the advice that every Friday, I should make a five to ten minute video for basically a quick State of the Union and send it out to the whole team.
Jordan Gal:So in I I wanna talk about our marketing campaign first, but after we talk about that and try to be in touch with everyone, and I heard the analogy that I I sounded accurate, but I didn't like the feeling of that it's like spinning dishes. You gotta give you gotta give a little one each love and then keep moving on to the next one, but you have to you can't go too long without giving a dish some love. And and I feel like it's becoming a little transactional, where I talk to someone for like five minutes and be like, alright, cool. Good with them for a few days. You know, like that's that's that's not how I wanna do it.
Jordan Gal:It's not it's not enough.
Brian Casel:Yep. Alright. Well, over to you. What how does me about this marketing funnel.
Jordan Gal:Well, I just wanna say it's great to hear that momentum talking to people, know, just just yeah. Let's keep doing it.
Brian Casel:That that stuff is fuel, man. It's like, if everything was completely quiet, and I'm doing all this work on it, then I'd be really, really freaking out.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's tough. But Tough to keep going.
Brian Casel:But there's nothing like hearing people give feedback and ask questions, and you can tell that they have pains that they want solved. Know, that stuff just keeps you going.
Jordan Gal:I love that situation of a a CEO and their marketing person on a call, because that's that's something that that what I keep telling individual people on my team is think like an owner. Don't don't think, oh, this sucks and I can't do it. Think about what do I need to to fix this? And don't a lot of people, lot of employees don't think about spending money because they assume that they can't spend money because they're an employee, they're not the owner. When in reality, I would love to spend a $100 if it makes it makes your life easier and the job done better.
Jordan Gal:So I can really see that situation of it's happened before. I'll find a tool. I actually found the editor that we're using. We're rebuilding our page editor. It's actually a MicroConf guy who built the software, and I found him, connected with him, hit him up on Skype, Twitter, Facebook until I got him on the line, and then I brought in my tech team, and I said, look at this, we could use this as a starting point instead of starting from scratch, and then it's like, how much money is it?
Jordan Gal:The question is how much money is it is it's the question to your team. In your situation, the CEO is looking at the marketer saying, would you use this? Would this make our content launch on time? And then it's like, forget the money. It doesn't even matter.
Jordan Gal:I'm paying this person thousands of dollars a month. You're talking about a tool that costs $50 a month that would make their job done better. It's like the price becomes Totally.
Brian Casel:And it and it also speaks to the power of selling to businesses, and and to selling to the mid to upper tier where the person using the tool inside the company may not be the actual decision maker, the person paying the credit card bill, but getting that buy in from both ends. Because then it becomes like this is just part of their system in their business, and once it becomes solidified and it's into their workflow, it's like that's that's gold, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of LeadFuse. You know, when you look at the pricing page, you're like, that sounds expensive. If if you're running a solo business, it's expensive.
Jordan Gal:If you have a sales team of 10 people that you're spending tens of thousands of dollars on, $2.03, $405,100 bucks a month is is not actually expensive if it makes their job more profitable. Anyway, alright. So I wanna talk about the marketing campaign. I've learned a lot in the process of launching this thing. I have learned about my limitations and how to hire away from those limitations.
Jordan Gal:And so it's a little hard to describe, so I'm gonna try to talk about it so people can kind of visualize what we're doing. If it gets confusing, help me out because you'll you'll probably understand what I'm trying to do. So the first thing I did was I got myself out of the way. So I said, I'm not gonna be responsible. I'm not gonna write the content.
Jordan Gal:And no matter what we do, we launch it on time. Because I always have this tendency of like, wait, let me just check it out to make sure the copy is just the way that I would write it. And so what I told everyone involved was, you give me to me ahead of time. If I don't get back to you, it gets published the way it is. Right?
Jordan Gal:So, like, I tried to set it up for success from the beginning and got myself out of the way. So I hired our buddy Keith Perhak and his marketing agency, and he his stuff is just awesome. The the the level of professionalism, the design, everything, super impressive. And then what I did is I connected him with a marketer that we just hired full time. So we have a first marketing hire.
Jordan Gal:Hallelujah. Somebody actually focused on marketing. They're here they're here in Portland. And so what what we did was I hired them for a two week project. And that project wasn't you do everything, that project was you coordinate with Keith and the marketing agency.
Jordan Gal:You're not responsible for doing everything, you're responsible that it gets launched and done. Right? So I like got myself out of the way. Like somebody internally in the company is responsible for getting it done, someone externally in the company is responsible for doing the majority of the actual work.
Brian Casel:I got two quick questions. So when did you start this like initiative? Like, okay, we are gonna start our paid marketing funnel. Like, how how much time ago was that?
Jordan Gal:Six weeks.
Brian Casel:Six weeks ago. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Six weeks. We we talked about it, and I hired Keith, and then we really started cranking on it three weeks ago. Cool. Yeah. But there was some lag time and and and all that lag time, always my fault.
Brian Casel:And the goal the goal of this is to drive what new trials for the checkout product?
Jordan Gal:Yes. So we have a significant amount of of MRR signing up every month as trials through inbound, and my goal is to double it. My goal is to take that and add another half, basically double it with our own efforts. So I don't really care how that happens, I mean, I do care, but I just want it I want it to double. So our first attempt at getting it to double is is paid ads.
Jordan Gal:So here's what here's what we're doing. What we're doing is we are writing case studies. These are these are just blog posts with good design and a lot of work put into the blog post. A lot of screenshots and very intentional in what they're doing. So we're launching three different blog posts.
Jordan Gal:We're starting off with one, but eventually we'll have three. The first one we call the iPopper. So we have we have several merchants that do multi millions using the Cardhook checkout, so we we chose one, we talked to them, got a lot of detail. So our first one is the eye popper, like see how this company made $5,200,000 last month with Cardhook in their Shopify store. Then the next blog post will be credibility.
Jordan Gal:So see how this well known Shopify store uses Cardhook. And then the third blog post will be feature specific, the feature that we want everyone to know that we have that nobody else has. So that'll be, look how this other well known Shopify store uses this specific feature and how they do it. Right? So it's like, we're trying to educate but in steps.
Jordan Gal:So first, eye popping attention, the second one is credibility, and then the third one is drill down into a feature. So they're gonna be like layered in over the next few weeks. The first one that launches is the eye popper.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so those are those are kind of positioned as case studies, but still very much like talking about cart hook. Like, is kind of Always,
Jordan Gal:yes, in the context of of benefits and results. And then like, it's almost like the second half of the blog post is see how they do it in Cardhook. Okay? So so that's the blog post. So that's layer one.
Jordan Gal:The opt in on that blog post is to see an instant webinar on how they do it. So, basically, the blog post is the what, and then you get to opt in for how. And that how is a twelve minute video of me running through a very quick demo of the product, but not like a boring, hey, first you click here and then you click here. It's more about here are these companies that use it, and here's how they do it and here's how easy it is to do this and when you do this, this is the benefit you get out of it, and just kinda running through the highlights of the product for for twelve months.
Brian Casel:So so that that's like a prerecorded Yes. Thing?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So it's not it's not like positioned as live. It's not pretending to be live when it isn't. It's just like a like register for this instant webinar thing.
Brian Casel:And and all three of those Blog posts. Blog posts all point to that. All link to that.
Jordan Gal:All point to that. Exactly.
Brian Casel:And are you doing any sort of is it an email opt in to get to that, or or can you just click to it and see it?
Jordan Gal:It is. It's an email opt in, and so when you opt in, you get redirected to the video page, and at the same time, you get put on a campaign in drip that hits you up over the next seven days once per day that sells you on the free trial. And the video does the same thing. The video sells you on the free trial, and once you sign up for the free trial, that email sequence stops.
Brian Casel:Got it. Yeah. I I have similar a similar sequence set up in drip for audience ops. I'm curious, what do you put into that everyday sequence? What, like, what what are you sending in those emails?
Brian Casel:What
Jordan Gal:we're doing is we are we are highlighting the key features, and we're doing it in the in that same context of, like, here's what it does for you. Right? Use like, increase your average order value with upsells. Improve your conversion rate with a customized checkout. Recover more sales using automated cart recovery.
Jordan Gal:So it's always like feature benefit, feature benefit, feature benefit, and then testimonials along with it and credibility, and of course, the call to action in the emails is sign up for a free trial. Then and if you sign up for the free trial, you get taken off of that email sequence, and now, so you get on the onboarding sequence, which is which is different. So what you what you end up having is you have three different pages that people land on. You have the case study, then you have the webinar page, and then you have the registration page. Right?
Jordan Gal:When we actually have a we don't link directly from the video to the registration. What we do is because at this point, the person hasn't even seen the home page. Right? They they went from a Facebook ad to the case study, the case study to the webinar opt in page, then they've opted in, they get they go they go to see a video. So at that point in time, they haven't seen pricing, so what we did is we we have this in between page where if you're on the video and I say, if you wanna get started, start your fourteen day trial by clicking the button below, you click on that button instead of sending them directly to the registration page that just has like fields and then they're gonna get sticker shock with the price, We have, like, an in between page that just highlights benefits, testimonials, key features, pricing, and then the sign up page.
Jordan Gal:And then what that also what that also does you you you've heard of something like that, like, an in in between?
Brian Casel:I think yeah. I mean, well, I think that makes sense. But do you have some sort of check-in place to say, like, we know that this person has not viewed pricing or viewed the homepage before?
Jordan Gal:No. Not yet. I guess we we we can do that, but but right now
Brian Casel:But but I mean, if that if that intermediate page has pricing and social proof and then a link to sign up, like, that's good to have anyway. So
Jordan Gal:That that's the thing. It it that page ends up being really valuable because then the other part of this whole funnel is the retargeting strategy.
Brian Casel:Right. And that was the that was what I was gonna ask about. So you haven't gotten into the ad side of this yet. You're you're just talking about the assets that you put in first.
Jordan Gal:Right. I I think that's important to establish first, and then and then because those go along with the retargeting strategy because there's a different ad based on where you last went, which page, how deep into the funnel did you get, that determines which ad set you see.
Brian Casel:Okay. So do you wanna get into the ads?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So top level is cold traffic, and that that we are the intention is to grab attention. Right? Just are you the type of person that this appeals to? If so, when you click on it, you get to the case study, all of a sudden, you're now on a different phase for the ads.
Jordan Gal:Once you've clicked on the case study but haven't yet opted in to the webinar, you get ads that are the call to action is to opt into the webinar, and it's selling the webinar. It's what you'll see on the webinar, what you'll find out, what we teach you, what step by step. So it's all about the the next step. It's telling the next step in the funnel.
Brian Casel:Alright. So couple questions. The the retargeting ads, before we get to the cold ads, the the retargeting ads, are those only shown to people who viewed the article, or are you showing to, like, any recent visitor to to the whole site?
Jordan Gal:Right now, we're let's talk about it separately, because because the right the the the first thing is to establish, the okay. The intentional traffic, the people in in the funnel.
Brian Casel:Alright. So the the cold traffic that that's just promoting the articles, the case study articles, that's people who have never heard of CardHawk before. How did you target that? Is that like a lookalike audience? Is it an interest?
Brian Casel:Or how how did you target that?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's a that's a combination of things, and that's the biggest guesswork in the whole process, and that's the part that we will be experimenting with over the next few weeks.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm running some ads right now for audience ops, not for ops calendar yet. It's somewhat similar structure in the whole funnel. And I've been that's something that I've been working on this week is like, how to target the the top level cold ads using like a a lot of times I've used the lookalike audience, but then I'm like filtering that even further with interests, and I'm comparing different interests, that's been kind of tough. But the goal there, of course, is just to get the cost per click low and make sure that the the visitors are relevant or quality. And Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That part is that's the guesswork. So we're starting with what we think makes sense. Right? So we have we have our email list, and we can remove existing customers. Then we can take both our email list and the existing customer list and create lookalike audiences based on them, and then we can start to do there's a there's a lot of interests that are related to ecommerce and Shopify specifically.
Jordan Gal:There's a lot of Facebook groups, there's a lot of fan pages, so that that's that's our start. People who have already identified as associated with Shopify. That that just makes makes the most sense.
Brian Casel:Very cool. So then they they've already clicked to the case study, they have not they they chose not to click to the webinar, then they're gonna see ads for the webinar.
Jordan Gal:Right. And then as soon as someone opts into the webinar and hits that webinar page, then the ad set changes again, and now that's selling the free trial. The same way the email sequence is selling the free trial and that webinar page itself, the video page. Yeah. So it's like this multi layered approach, which I don't think I ever would have gotten done myself.
Brian Casel:How many how how much time has it been since since they've like pressed go on on the ads and on launching that stuff?
Jordan Gal:That's that's at 4PM today, so that's
Brian Casel:Oh, okay. So it's starting to happen.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Happens this afternoon. So Okay. Cool. I've vacillated between getting the team excited about it, but not getting them too excited, because like we've said before, if you get ROI from an ad campaign from the day you launch it, you kinda got lucky.
Jordan Gal:So we we expect that it'll take a few weeks of spending and tweaking and optimizing and changing and guessing.
Brian Casel:And how do you think about like lifetime value of a customer right now? And like like, how how profitable like, how do you know when this campaign is breaking even or not? Like, how are are you just considering, like, three months? Like, nine months is is the customer's lifetime? Like, how are you just what kind of assumptions are you making there?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. This is one of the things I like most about about the new marketer we hired, Ed. The the beginning of the conversation before I was like ready to dive into all these details, the first thing he said was, first, let's establish the business goals. How do we want this to contribute to the business? What does it need to contribute to the business in order to be considered successful?
Jordan Gal:So that that just focused us on, okay, we didn't start off with how much we're willing to spend, we went backwards. We went how many new sign ups do we want, what's that gonna lead into in paid customers, how much MRR does that add, and then what's realistic of an expectation on how much right. So we went, if a 100 people sign up, how many are we gonna keep? And then based on that, how much MRR that that adds, so then you can work backwards and say, okay, so for a 100 sign ups, I'm willing to pay x. The the way I thought about it was the fantasy, the ideal, is is a one month payback period.
Jordan Gal:Right? But that is at least we have a decent chance of that because our first month is $300. So so if someone signs up So if if you can keep
Brian Casel:cost to acquire the customer through this funnel at 300 or less, then you're good.
Jordan Gal:Right. Then then then I can't complain. Right. So then so so then it's okay, $300 for a paid customer. And so let's just say for example, our conversion rate is from trial to paid is 33%, then we need three sign ups.
Jordan Gal:So basically willing to pay a $100 per sign up, which turns into $300 per customer.
Brian Casel:Right. And So that and that's still like that's still like a conservative thing to say like one month is is the lifetime. Because obviously, if they're if if they pay for one month and they're happy, they're gonna probably stay for multiple more months and they're they will be worth more. But if you just think about your math in terms of that first month value
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Well well, this is this is the the bootstrap version of the math. Right? If if you have 3,000,000 in the bank, you're kinda willing to spend six months worth, and then you have more money to acquire customers, which leads you to beat your competitors, you know, and if you can get profitable in in before you run out of money or raise more money. So the way we're talking and thinking is getting profitable, not just beating the market.
Jordan Gal:I'll look forward to reporting back next week and then the week after, whether it's good or bad, I'll talk about what we think is working and what's not working.
Brian Casel:Know, I guess I'll pick it up with what's been going on with with Audience Ops because it's actually pretty similar. First of all, this month was supposed to be all about Ops calendar. I was supposed to not really work on Audience Ops for a while. But I was I was talking with somebody in my mastermind group and he was like, you know, he was asking me, I wonder what would happen if just didn't show the pricing for Audience Ops and put it behind like an email opt in. And I was starting to think about that, was like, know, I feel like I've tested everything on audience ops except for that.
Brian Casel:I've never tested not showing the pricing. And I've always just worked under the assumption that like it's better to show pricing and qualify all the leads before they fill out the form so that I don't waste my time on people who don't have the right budget. But you know what? I was like, I might as well test this out. And while I'm at it, build a whole paid marketing funnel around.
Brian Casel:So that's what I did. And and and it was a bit of a distraction. It kinda slowed me down a little bit on on the ops calendar front, but I I worked on that for a week about a week or two, and it's now up and running and launched. It's not totally a distract distraction because if I can get this funnel working the way that I want it to, then that is the funding source to keep everything else going. So what I did first before I started setting up the ad campaigns, which are actually pretty similar to what you set up with, like, cold and then retargeting.
Jordan Gal:You just get in a week, it takes me six months. Whatever.
Brian Casel:Well, the okay. So what I did was I started by hiding the pricing. Right? So now the home page, as of today, I don't even know if I'm going to keep this. Maybe by the time this publishes, I'll revert it.
Brian Casel:But I'll probably let this run for at least a month. We'll see.
Jordan Gal:I'm glad I see it.
Brian Casel:So, you know, the site looks basically the same, except it's missing the pricing section on the home page. Like that's no longer there. And now there's a little pop up. I'm using a drip pop up standard widget on the bottom. It says looking for pricing.
Brian Casel:Enter your email address. We'll send you a pricing and demo and some other good stuff. You enter your email address there, and then you have to go check your email to get the link, which then takes you to the pricing page. And the pricing page then has our standard demo video, which I recorded months ago. And then followed by some testimonials, followed by our pricing table, which used to live on the homepage.
Brian Casel:Now it's living in this kind of like hidden pricing page or, you know, hidden, I mean, like, just not linked to from anywhere. And then there's a consultation form there as well. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Hold on. Time out. Time out. Time out. So so pricing isn't on the homepage, but you do show pricing after somebody watches the the the demo video?
Brian Casel:Basically, the demo video is kind of just just there on the pricing page. You can watch the demo video or you can scroll down and see the pricing.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So so you are willing to show the pricing before someone talks to you, but not before they opt in?
Brian Casel:Right. Okay. Yeah. Right. Like right now, I'm an email address just to see the pricing.
Brian Casel:But but then all before you ever book a consultation, you'll you'll will have seen the pricing, you'll have seen the demo video.
Jordan Gal:So this is in between because is generally the concept is, I don't wanna show you the pricing because it's high enough that I need to show you the value before I reveal the pricing. And usually, that's done by a salesperson on a call.
Brian Casel:Right. Goal here is the goal with this or the thinking is that it will drive more email subscribers into the list, then dripping out the pieces that that would lead them toward a consultation, like requesting a consultation rather than just blurting out the pricing point right on the home page and letting them be like, ah, forget it. You know, I'm going off somewhere else. At least here, I'm getting their email address. I'm showing them a video and showing them the pricing so they can see some of the benefits.
Brian Casel:And I have drip automation in place so that after they enter their email address to request pricing, it checks for like if an hour goes by and they still haven't requested a consultation, because that was kind of like the next step right after that, Send an email saying, Hey, did you want to have a call about Audience Ops? And then a few days later, if they still haven't requested a consultation, it sends another email that says, Hey, I know you asked about pricing and you saw the demo. Which of these options do you fall into? Right? And they can click any of these trigger links.
Brian Casel:One is, Yeah, looked, Audience Ops looked awesome. I want to talk to you guys this week. Click here to schedule a consultation. Next one is like Audience Ops looks awesome, but not quite ready yet. Maybe in a few months.
Brian Casel:Click here. There'll be automation in place to follow-up in a few months. The third one was like, looks awesome, but it's out of my price range. They click there. It takes them to a page that promotes lower priced things like ops calendar, like some other, you know, lower priced options.
Jordan Gal:WordPress plugin.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like a fourth one was just like, yeah, you guys don't do anything that I was looking for. Takes them to like a contact form. Like, okay, tell me what you want. So so that's so at least, like, we had that automation in place.
Brian Casel:And then even after all that, then they get dropped into lead nurturing sequences, newsletters, you know, like it just gets them into our funnel. Then who knows? Maybe months down the road, more of these leads will convert into actual consultations and sales. So that's the thinking. I'm going to test it out.
Brian Casel:So that's been running for two weeks now, and we've had more leads come through. Like, we're having a really good month right now. And now granted a lot of the sales were leads from before the change, but they just start they just started closing more in in September. But new leads are up as well. And some of those leads I've been checking each each and every one, like looking at their history and drip, like when did they find out about audience ops?
Brian Casel:I'd say probably half, maybe more than half, have been on the list for a while, and they and they just started coming around now. But the other half are brand new and, like, they saw the pricing and then they requested the consultation. So it's it's still too like still too early to tell, but I think signs are looking good that at least I'll continue the test for a bit longer. And then to go along with that, about two weeks ago, did one week ago, I launched some paid ads for audience ops, cold traffic, cold Facebook ads going to two pillar articles. And those articles are like really focused on like how to outsource content or the benefits of selling to strangers by doing content and building trust and that sort of stuff.
Brian Casel:So it plays into like the value proposition that we offer. And then we have retargeting ads, both from Facebook and for the first time in a while, I'm using Google remarketing as well to try to follow people around after they've visited the site in the past
Jordan Gal:two weeks. Think it's important to do that because too many people get your brand gets stuck inside of a Facebook page. And that's the only place to interact, and I think now it's almost a differentiator to not be there.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I noticed that too, and like other other friends I'm checking out their like marketing agency sites, and like after I visit, I'm seeing their ad on New York Times, you know? And it's like, I do think that it's important because it keeps that reminder there, but it's also like, when you're inside Facebook, yeah, you can reach a lot of people in Facebook, but those people are looking at baby photos and stuff, and they're not really in the mode of opting in to anything at that point. So I'm testing that out, and again, like leads are up this month. There's more activity, I still don't know for sure if those leads originated from a clicked ad, like that attribution, the tracking, I kind of have it set up, but it's sometimes not working right. Yes.
Brian Casel:But I but I do know that when I'm running ads, we're getting more leads. Like, I don't know if they're just seeing the ads and then becoming a lead or or they've been on the list for a while, and then they saw an ad, and then that reminded them, like but I don't know. It's it's hard to track, but we're having a good month, so maybe I'll just keep it going. Like, that's that's where I'm at with it.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right. You know, a 100% why things are working, but they're working, so don't change too much. No. But I like it.
Jordan Gal:Also think you have you've got more room to experiment with that pricing thing. I think what what you did was, you know, it makes sense as a first step. I am just so curious of what you can do with the price if you put it in the context of of a of a conversation, you know, an actual
Brian Casel:Like you have to have a conversation.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But then you're you know, my fear is that like, I don't have a whole sales team and a prospecting team and a qualifying team in place.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's a different thing. Different thing.
Brian Casel:You know, we would have to spend all this energy just qualifying leads, you know.
Jordan Gal:Right. Then you have to jack up the price by three, four, five x just to make that worth it, and then you kinda don't change the actual math of the business that much.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and right now, my everything all resources, all energy has to be going into ops calendar. Get the SaaS off the ground. I'm not trying to change anything with AudienceOps in terms of the product, in terms of our process. That stuff is just smooth sailing.
Brian Casel:That has been awesome. We've got a team who's amazing. We've got a process for growing the team. We've got a team manager in place. We've got everything.
Brian Casel:I'm just trying to tweak like how can we get more leads into the funnel? Because I know we have a really good conversion rate once I get on a sales call with them, like a high percentage are converting and it actually doesn't take very long for them to to to convert. We just need more leads. That's it, you know. So Nice.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. If you could do just the right amount of work to increase that. Alright. So now let's asking about your team and I gotta boogie just a few minutes here, but what what have you been doing to to keep in touch with people? I'm getting a little worried that I'm turning into like, oh, there's boss guy, he's he's real busy, know, can't can't really talk to him that much.
Jordan Gal:And then I know, I'll
Brian Casel:just say that I am guilty of or at least I feel like I'm guilty of the same thing for sure. Especially since since I've been working so much on OpsCalendar, and I tell people that, like, know that I'm focused on that. It's it's technically part of, like, at least it's kind of related to AudienceOps, but the all the people on the team in AudienceOps are not really working on ops calendar. They're they're writing, they're, you know, they're They treat as
Jordan Gal:a client. Right? You you guys you guys write content for it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have we have writers and a manager assigned to ops calendar as one of our clients. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Don't know.
Jordan Gal:I think this is something I'm really gonna explore.
Brian Casel:Well, I guess I have a again, I'm not good at this, or at least I feel like I'm not good at this. But part of my thing is that I don't like to have meetings. I just don't like them. I don't like going to meetings. I don't like having to have a lot of stuff on my calendar.
Brian Casel:I basically have the least I possible have a meeting with my managers every two weeks, and that's the only standing call that I have with teammates. All other interaction between me and them is in Slack on a daily basis.
Jordan Gal:I think I overdo it. I I have I have two to five meetings every single day, but that's my strength. Talking to people, it's kinda like the best thing I can do for the company is talk to people about the company every single day.
Brian Casel:We do a lot of communication over just a lot of written communication, which is not which is good and bad. Like, it's good because it gives people a chance to really think through what they wanna get across, and it makes it does ensure that all the details get communicated and we have a documented history. We have a lot of like threads in emails and in like help scout conversations and in Trello where we can go back and reference something we talked about a month ago. We have a lot of that, but it does lose the face to face kind of all the communication that goes along with that. Thing that we've done for a while, sometimes off and on, just to keep a bit of culture and fun, because in the random channel in Slack every Friday, our team manager would send a question to the team.
Brian Casel:Like, hey, everyone, just random question. What's your favorite travel memory? Post a picture of your pet or what TV shows are you guys watching right now? Today's Friday. So today she asked, what did you think you were going to do for your career before you got into what you're doing now?
Jordan Gal:That's good.
Brian Casel:And like just questions like that just start off these like day long conversations about kind of cool stuff here and about people's lives, you know.
Jordan Gal:Right, not about your company that they work for. That's the key. Yeah. I definitely, I take everyone out to lunch like every two, three weeks, That's that's been fun. We have some a lot of funny shit in Slack.
Jordan Gal:That's the truth. Slack is the substitute for corporate culture. Like one of the one of the our guys is he's so good with GIFs. He's so fast.
Brian Casel:I'm jealous of people who are like awesome at GIFs. I every time I try to do it, I end up like searching for like a half an hour. I'm like, ah, fucking the moment
Jordan Gal:is Within so thirty seconds, the perfect perfect one. So you get kinda known for funny stuff like that. We have an anger vent channel that just you could just come in by, I just spent half an hour on the phone with Bank of America, can't believe you know, just like get it out there. And then that was funny for a while, and then we just started a love vent. So you can be positive, know.
Jordan Gal:We have fun stuff like that, and I think in person, it's easier. And then, yeah, think I've just been thinking about it just because as as the team just keeps growing, I just kind of have this sense of like, do I really know what's happening right now? Like I kept talking about one on ones and just never actually got around to do it, so I created a Calendly link, and on Wednesdays from like two to 4PM, that's basically what my job is. So I just tell everyone, okay, grab a slot. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And and what I'm hoping for the conversations, I haven't done a session yet, next week's the first. I hope that it is not just work talk, that it's more how's it going? How are you? You know, you just moved to town. How how's that going?
Jordan Gal:And how's work? And how's the you know, so I I I hope it's like this open channel so that if something happens and it's like this person is really bothering me because they keep asking me to help them on something and I wanna help them, it's not my job. Don't know what to do. I hope people can comfort me with that stuff.
Brian Casel:One thing that I found, and maybe this is a fault of, I'm doing something wrong, but maybe it's working is, I found that whenever I used to have full team meetings, or even in my managers meetings, those are getting kind of big now too. Most of the team is just super quiet. In these group settings, they're not really giving a lot of feedback. And then there was a time when I was doing one on one calls with people on the team, just to kind of check-in. And most of the time, they're pretty like I mean not much things are going pretty well like I don't have any feedback good or bad like that's it like and So what changed was our team manager Kat has a part of her role is to do one on ones with people on the team.
Brian Casel:And she also does these like writer sessions where she'll pull in like two writers at a time, and they'll just do like a like a talk over the topics that they're writing about that week and help each other out and give each other constructive feedback and stuff. But she's also done one on ones with everybody on the team on a regular monthly basis. And then she just kind of reports up to me just like general trends or like this person kind of complained about this thing or it seems like this person has been having trouble doing this. And like, I think that the team tends to be more open with her than they are with me. You know, there's just something about the boss being in the room that, people don't really talk.
Brian Casel:And they know that, do try to be transparent about the fact that, first of all, everything discussed is pretty transparent, and they know that Kat does report stuff to me. But it's I think there's just like a comfort level of like not necessarily complaining, but just talking about any sort of issues or, you know, the feeling of like no, and also like people don't want to throw other people under the bus, especially to the boss. But sometimes you need to do that. Sometimes there are issues that need to be brought up, and there's got to be some way to get get that stuff channeled somehow. And that that's what we've been doing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's tricky. Alright. Cool, man. I I think we need to call it a day.
Jordan Gal:I I think next week, I'd like to talk about product and product decisions. That's that's that's our biggest theme is features to add, how quickly, how slowly. Want to faster. I'm
Brian Casel:in that boat too without calendar right now too.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. So if you want to go faster but not too fast and to prioritize and how much should be based on data versus gut feel. So yeah, I think that that's a good topic for us for next week. Good stuff.
Jordan Gal:Alright, man. Have a great weekend.
Brian Casel:Alright. You too.
