Bootstrapped Web

Hello, and welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian, we missed a few weeks, but we're back.

Hey. That's how it goes. Yeah. Good to be back, Jordan. It is what is it November already?

It's it's getting pretty cold out there.

It's November. I don't know what happened to October completely. It's it always feels like a race against the clock. It's not really a race against the clock. It's not really a race at all, but it kind of is at the same time.

It's like all of a sudden, like, 2017 is almost done. And it's like, I'm I'm starting to think about 2018 now already, and

it's it's kinda scary. Yes. There's a lot a lot of scary things. Yeah. Let's let's dig into some stuff today.

We've we've, we haven't talked in a few weeks, so there's almost, like, too much to catch up on, so let's try to dig into a few things, take a nice patient approach to this. Yeah, what are the big things that you want to talk about? And I'll say the same on my side and then we can kind of dig in.

So I guess, overall, my general focus has been on ops calendar number one. Everything is like in a priority order now. So ops calendar is like kind of number one, takes up most of my time and focus and energy. Lately, I've been starting to work a little bit more on the productized course. I could talk about that.

And then audience ops just takes a few hours of my time, but it's mostly kind of running and Yeah. Not not too much new going on there. But today, you know, I thought I'd talk about some progress on the on developing the product on OpsCalendar and that's really come along quite a bit and we have some, you know, the customer base is starting to grow. It's still very slowly, but it's, you know, activity. Things are moving.

And I wanna ask an open question to you and and to the audience today.

Freemium? Okay. Big big That's a big question, man.

And then and then I thought I'd I'd just touch on some ideas and things I'm cooking up for product highs in 2018. So that's that's on my plate today.

Okay. Very nice. What about you? What I what I wanna talk about is fattening up the company, going from from skinny to fatter as as a company and and in a good way, and I wanna talk about that, how we've been doing that. A painful lesson I learned over the past few months is is, like, figuring out when to be the boss and when to, like, put my foot down on certain things, and and how to do that ahead of time.

So like I'm currently in the middle of doing that on one topic while looking back at the mistake I made when when I didn't do that on something else. So we can dig into that. I hired a marketing consultant that's really been helpful in building out systems, and I got walloped in a mastermind group. And and I think that that can show the value of a mastermind group compared to the difficulty that people that you work with every day in being brutally honest compared to a mastermind group where you know, you talk, well, let's say once a month or something and they they feel much more free to be brutally honest. It's it's helpful in that way.

Couldn't agree more. Yeah. Excited to talk about that one. Yep. Well, let's let's let's get it started.

You wanna start?

Yeah. Why don't I talk about the the fattening? Yeah. Okay?

What do you mean by that?

Yeah. Okay. So so you know I'm not not that I'm not a big fan of processes and systems. It's just not my strong suit, not where I focus. And for a long time in the company, that was okay because we kinda really had to make sure we were building something people wanted, and that was the focus.

And so we had this run up in revenue from January to August that was, you know a lot faster than I expected. It was awesome. It was fun. It was one of those times where you know, okay, this is not gonna last forever, this like super growth, but while it's happening, let's enjoy it. And and then right around the August, September, it slowed down.

So we we we attracted a lot of people over the summer, and then some started churning out that weren't using it and getting success with it. And so revenue started to to flatten a bit, and we took that as an opportunity. We said, okay, if this inbound word-of-mouth is gonna slow down, then let's let's start putting the systems in place for the next phase of growth because we're not just gonna wing it to the next phase, to that next big milestone. We kind of have to get our act together. And so so looking around it, it felt like the company was thin all over.

Like it was it was it had tech and had support and success and marketing, but everything was very thin. And and now it feels like we are fattening up these individual departments by putting in processes and systems in place. And what it really feels like for the first time is like we're we're building value as an organization. Like, the company itself has more meat on the bone. And you can kinda see it, you know, in the context of, an exit or an acquisition, which, you know, you always have on your mind, at least I do in in this situation.

I could see how we're we're genuinely becoming more valuable as an entity to acquire. There's just more there. There there's there's there's less to do on the acquirers on the acquirer front. There's there's things that are up and running. There's things that are not dependent on individual people, so you could add more people or swap people or someone leaves and it's not the end of the world.

And so that's what I mean by the fattening up. It's kind of all over the place. I just see things just growing. And and what we're ending up doing is we're we're ending up with, like, two person teams. Right?

Because we're not gonna go hire 30 people, so there's, two people on support. We have one person on success, and I can feel that we need to. And and then on tech, and so all these individual departments are, like, fattening up their their value

Very nice.

Processes and systems.

If you read a lot of what Jason Fried writes about, both in his, like, in columns and on the on the Basecamp blog there, I think he's talked a lot about that idea of like your number one product that you're designing and building like actually is your company. You know?

Yep. It's interesting, but I I I never felt that way until until very recently where it's like, we're just not gonna go very far unless we do it. Yeah. Yep. I love it.

What is it? So so okay. So you got like two people on support, two people on success, couple people on marketing. I'm curious about the tech side, the developers. Like what does that team look like overall?

Yeah, that's been tricky. That's related to the other point that I'll hold off on making until you go. But we've struggled to come up with the right configuration. So Ben's the CTO and and head of product, but he's not in the same place as the guys in Slovenia. And so he's a different time zone, and so so he has he has some frustration when it comes to having certain pieces of data, certain questions answered that he needs to take into consideration as he plans things out in the next sprint and makes tech decisions and does research and so on.

I think that's the one part in the company that has gotten the fattest. Like it went from winging it with two engineers and Ben to a full blown, like, awesome process, which took a lot of work to figure out. And and now we're just in a much better place. We're hiring three more engineers, and then what we're debating now is do we need a director of engineering? Do we need to split the CTO responsibilities from Ben so he can focus on product?

So we're thinking about the management layer. Along with all this, the feeling I have had along the way was, oh, I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to the company building and management side. And all of us have been experiencing all of us have been experiencing this feeling where, okay, we're not bad, but we have a lot to learn. And so I never have the urge to, like, write blog posts. But lately, because I've had to learn so much, I'm like, man, this is, like, valuable.

I didn't know how to put together a marketing process that was in this way, and I didn't know how to do that for tech. So we have this we have this beautiful thing that takes account into qualitative data from the support team, quantitative data from feedback and like NPS scores and surveys and so on. And that flows into Airtable, then we prioritize, that flows over into Notion, and then we have this research that happens there, and then things only move over into Jira when it's like ready for it.

Mhmm. What I'm really what I'm kinda interested in and focused on a lot right now is the developers, the build building the product. We have a really, really active road map for for ops calendar. And I'm that's why I'm curious to hear from you. And maybe at some point, we'll get Ben on the show or something.

And I would just love to kinda pick your brains and pick Ben's brain about cause you guys are definitely further developed in a larger team and you have more systems and processes in place. Right now it's me and two developers in Eastern Europe.

But it's a good idea to start doing it the way you wanna do it.

Yeah, and I'm very much kind of like in Ben's role, think. Basically like the product manager and this is my everyday, like right now, most hours That's

where you're spending your time.

Most hours of every single day are just me and the two guys just working on the product. And audience ops, that's kind of happening in the background. Here and there, I have a question to answer, but it's mostly And the time zone is kind of tough, you know, because I have to make sure that I'm sending in whatever, sending them like whatever questions that I have or tasks for them to do by the end of my day, because I know they're gonna start working on it while I'm sleeping. And and then, like, by the time I wake up in my morning hours, that's when we have the overlap and we can kinda chat and we do some stand up calls then.

Yeah. Sounds familiar. And and this is this is an interesting role for for a founder that I see more and more. Sit right next to my buddy John Ewalt who runs Roaster Tools, and he's in the same role. He's the founder and, you know, you wanna be out there selling and marketing, but you kinda have to get the product right also, and you're best positioned.

Right? He used to run a coffee roaster just like you run audience ops, and so you know what the product needs. And so and so you end up playing this product role and making tech decisions at the same time and then talking to developers who aren't working the same exact hours, it's it's a challenging role.

Yeah. Yeah. And even between my two developers, even though they're both in Europe, one one of the guys kinda like this this younger, you know, 25 year old who just likes to code through the night, And the other guy's a few years older and he kind of has more of a normal business day schedule. So that gets a little tricky too. We've just been cranking.

I mean, the progress that I've made over the last month on ops calendar product has it's just really come a long way and it's it's just really exciting. Like, we we have a really good groove. Like, every every week, we have a a short sprint of about three or four days, like starting on Monday and then by Thursday, usually Thursday into Friday morning is when we push out that week's batch of new features. My my goal for the last thirty days and then probably continuing for the next month or so is is to do this like like a surge in development and get as much of the roadmap built out to get it from like the product was probably around 50 or 60% like two months ago in terms of like feature complete. I'd say today we're around 80%.

So like we're getting much closer to that point. By that, it's definitely like that challenge, that balancing act of like, I know we need features and I know that I need to be marketing this thing and going out and selling it. But I know that there are some things that are deal breakers, or I know that we can't exactly compete on features with some of the alternatives. But we're starting to overcome that now. The more demo calls that I that I am having, like, the more that I'm realizing we do have a lot in place already that people that people are like, that's all I really need.

That's been pretty cool. Like, actually yesterday, got a lead coming straight to opscalendar.com, Google search, you know, doesn't know me, doesn't know anyone. Like, it's always hard to tell, like, what they were searching for, even though I asked them, they're like, oh, I don't remember. You know? So she sends this email.

And right now, you know, I I don't have the direct link to sign up for an account. You have to go through the demo request form. So she filled out the form and she says in the form, she's like, I want to get started right now on your business plan. Like, start me up. And like, they haven't even tried the tool yet or seen it.

They're just like, we want to sign up for it right now. And then I had a demo call with her later that afternoon. This was yesterday. We had just pushed live like a bunch of like really, really big features yesterday, which ended up breaking in a bunch of stuff on the live app, of course. And of course, you know, by the time I had the call, I thought that we had fixed it all.

Then I'm on the live demo call with a complete stranger who's so excited about the product. And of course, I discovered like a pretty glaring bug specifically on the feature that she was interested in. So that was kind of fun. But she was totally cool about it and still signed up, and and, you know, likely to become a a business custom on the business plan.

Yeah. So you so you're still your your balance between product and marketing right now is basically whatever comes in inbound, you handle, but but you're not pushing out.

Not doing like outbound sales. We we have been publishing a lot of content for the last two months. So every week we've been doing blog posts. Those are gonna build up into like these content hubs. On Monday so by the time that this episode airs, we're gonna have this new article out that I wrote this week called how to automate recurring projects with you and your team.

And in that, I I wrote a really long article on like how to automate recurring projects using Ops Calendar. So this article is very much focused on using the tool for a certain purpose. And I recorded a video me showing this thing. And what's cool is that we just, in terms of the features that we just built, I'm definitely positioning the product as a content marketing planning tool, like a content calendar tool. But we've now turned this corner where because we just released this feature called custom content types.

So you can create a custom, you can have, if you're planning articles, or if you're planning podcast episodes, or you're planning lead magnets, webinars, or, but anything else that's recurring. So if you're doing like, if you're running payroll every two weeks, or if you need to make a new hire once a month.

Yeah, it's a bit like a sweet process, focused on content at first.

Yeah, and the difference is that it's very much built around the calendar, which is better because all you need to do is think about, okay, I know I need to launch this thing on December 15, Put it on the calendar for December 15 and then the software just automatically Gives you the checklist that you defined for that assigns the right people that you predefined for those tasks Automatically calculates the deadlines for everybody to work, you know leading up to December 15 If you move the thing back by a week, then everything else shifts along with it. So the the tool just automates all of that, like, management stuff so that you and your team can just kind of focus on the actual creative work, you know.

Yeah. A lot of that stuff is exactly what what I mean by the systems and processes. Like we're we're starting to launch features and we want to do the same thing for each feature. There's an intercom message, there's an email to the list, there's a blog post, there's then they're sharing

Like the the QA process, the Right. Testing

report doc that to be created and it's like repetitive, and it should be without thought. So like should be, oh, new feature, cool, and then just go along

Yeah, like we wanna ship this new feature a month from now, put it on the calendar, it gets the new feature checklist, and then

Right. Is it the type of feature that is good enough to warrant a blog post and email to the list, or is it not? And then it changes slightly in the process of whether or not we are publicizing and promoting it versus not.

Yeah, so like a lot of it, and what I put in this article and videos is like, you set up ops calendar and we give you some default stuff right out of the box, like our recommended checklist and a couple of pre created content types. But then it's just like you set it up once and then you set it and forget it based on whatever you do in your business. So if you're shipping product features or if you're doing monthly webinars or if you're doing whatever, you just create those that that checklist every single time that you will use every single time. And then that's it. The tool is set to go and you and your team can just do it like another cool.

I'm not going to like run through all the little features, like but another kind of cool thing, which is like getting us closer to this thing. And these are straight from conversations that I had with customers where where they're like, you know, okay, all those checklists are cool, but can I actually see them on the calendar and check them off on viewing the calendar? And, like, now we have that. And then you can, like, filter the calendar so that only show me checklist like, tasks that are mine, not everyone else's, you know, or articles that I'm involved in and stuff that I'm not just hide it, you know. Yeah.

Well, it's good. Sounds like you're excited about the the product itself, which helps in in the demos and and just being motivated to get the product right because it's it's a lot of work. It's a lot of deep thought on like why would we do this a certain way? How does that affect this other thing? It's it's kind of it's really fun work.

I admire people, and I'm a bit envious of people who are super product focused Cause I I think it's fun. It's so creative and interesting.

I love this stuff because it's, when I'm building the productized service, I I I kinda approach that just like building a software product. You're you're creating these systems. Like if this happens, then always do it that way. And this component has, or this person has to be in this role who does this job. That, it's so much like building a software product and then now building a software product to support that service and those processes.

You think

it is, man, you're going all the way.

Yeah, and so like, that's what I'm doing. What next? I mean, every day I'm, now I'm digging into the details of like how the functionality needs to work, how to make it as seamless and friction free as possible for the user. And I'm doing like the design and then I kind of hand it off to the developers to implement. I'm trying to get closer to that point where I'm ready to just like really do an aggressive push outbound, cold email, webinars, guest appearances, sponsorships, like ads, you know.

And I think it's getting a lot closer. And so yesterday I had this call with my managers on audience ops and I was showing them the tool where it's coming. And we already are using it for some things in Audience Ops, we're using the social media scheduling and that kind of stuff. And they pointed out like, you know, one kind of feature that we're gonna need to really get it to the point where an agency could use it, you know, kind of invite, like the ability to invite clients to access. Do you use that?

You're gonna say what? To to invite clients to to to coordinate?

Yeah. Like, we do invite our clients into ops calendar now, but it should have the ability to to give certain users limited visibility.

Oh, user roles. Yeah. User roles. Annoying technology to build. Yep.

You know, we we keep getting the same thing. We want multiple accounts, so we're we're starting to work with more agencies, which I'm starting to see as, like, this great channel for us, and and they have they need some weird features. And right now we're like, just go create a new account and it's got a little a little plus sign in the email address.

Yeah. Mean, it's that's really key, know, mean, it's, that's kind of like the next step that I'm planning out right now is is like, because we don't want clients to see every little detail that we're talking about in the comments thread, you

know? Right, Some of it is internal. Yeah. And are you using that as part of the story? Like when you do a demo, like, we run an agency and we took what we learned, and this is like, is that gonna be part of like the brand story overall?

Yeah, I have been using that a bit. The demos that I've been doing are not super formal or structured quite yet. It's really more like a call, like it's more from my research than anything else. I'm just picking their brain about like, what are you doing? What are you trying to do?

Which features are you most interested in? All right, now I'm going to go show you those.

Yeah, what's your overall process?

Yeah, I'd say right now, like half and half, like half the people that I talk to know me, know audience ops, they've been on my list, they're interested in ops calendar. The other half, it's been pretty cool to see like, you know, we're getting some Google traffic, just people coming to the site.

It's good you're in a market that there's search, people are looking for a solution.

Yeah, I think between the blog content that we've been publishing and the update to the website, like the tour pages that I added about a month ago, that's bringing in some random traffic. So with those people who are total strangers, I'm having more, I talk more about like, I also run this content service and we've been using it for that process. It's been really good.

So

Nice, man. Very cool. Yeah. I like it. I like it.

So back over to you.

Yeah. I've got I've got a few little things. I just like yeah. I write notes to myself. I don't know if anyone has discovered, I'm sure most people have, that you can Slack yourself, which is like the next evolution of evil

where You mean you mean reminders?

No. You can just start a DM conversation with yourself in Slack.

I did not knew that.

It's like yeah. It's like emailing yourself, but a lot worse. Don't have real time chat with yourself.

Well, it gives you like an unread count or something? Like what's the point of doing that?

I use it as reminders. I use it, I literally, as I think of stuff to talk about on this podcast, I go over there and I just numerically, I go one.

Because what I'm looking

right now is my notes in Slack to myself. It's mixed in with like a post that I wanna read or something like that. It's hilarious.

But it's

just like emailing yourself.

Yes. So I I have I have found that, like, Slack is be is definitely becoming my second inbox. Yeah. They they always talk about Slack. I go, it's the email killer.

No. It's like a it's like a just an additional email inbox. And I have to, like, I've got these questions, some DMs, some some public that I have to like constantly be like, alright, mark that message as unread. I know I have to like respond to that later. It's kinda getting annoying, but

Yeah. It's part of the deal. Yep. I don't see any avoiding it. I I do a lot of networking in different Slacks.

I know that that's the thing that I it frustrates me so much because I want to do that. Like, I I wanna be involved in I am in these other like Slack communities, these networking communities, but I can't keep up with it. I I, you know, I prefer so in terms of Slack, my day to day is in audience ops Slack, my team and my my mastermind. We have a Slack for that. And I'm pretty active on those because it's just a small group.

But then I like to browse forums, like the DC and Founder Cafe. I don't post a lot, but I like to read those. Whereas Slack chats, it's like when there's like 100 people in there, can't

No one ever does it. Yes, yes. It's a funny thing that happens. As soon as there's too many people or it's impersonal, you don't know them, everyone stops talking.

Yeah.

Yep. And then it ends up breaking up into smaller conversations in the same Slack, and it starts up again, and then once or two people are invited, it stops the conversations. Very strange.

Or there's, like, five super active people and, like, a 100 people just watching.

Yes. And everyone else is kind of annoyed by them at the same time.

So I have a bunch of

things that I Slacked myself over the past few weeks that we haven't talked. So I'll run through a few of them quickly, and then we could talk about, like, the mastermind thing. So I've always when I read articles about other entrepreneurs who are, like, nonconventional thinkers, I'm always like, man, I wish I could be more like that. And and recently, what what I've noticed is the less I consume, the less advice, the less content, which I've been, like, very very low on over the past year or two anyway, I think it helps doing unconventional things. If you just don't know what other people are doing, you're less likely to do the same thing that other people are doing.

Yeah. So it's just one of these things that dawned on me, and I was like, oh, maybe I'm making progress in being more like that. And part of it, I think, is just not looking for advice, like not consuming that much content.

Mean, gotta yeah. I mean, that's that's your intuition. That's your that's your gut. That's and that's solving problems that you have in your world. Because whatever they're writing about on their blog or their podcast, they solved stuff in their situation, and it's different.

And and it's also different from the way they solved it. Because when people write after the fact, they, even if it's unconscious, subconscious, they clean it up so that it makes sense. Because if you wrote out what actually happened, you would look like a schizophrenic because it never goes in a straight line. So even the advice that someone's giving in, you know, earnestly It's packaged to be, like,

teachable. You know?

Yes. And and so I've come across a few situations where I know the person writing. I know what happened. And when I read what they wrote is is not the same thing. It it's packaged, so it's consumable and helpful, but in some ways I I don't know.

Anyway, so that that's one of the little tidbits I wrote to myself.

That's totally true. And I like, right now I'm working on a new version of the productized course, and I'm and a lot of it is built out of my personal experience building businesses, but I do have to tweak to make it a consumable step by step process, you know, like Yeah.

That's one of these things where you can write and be helpful. You can read things that are helpful, but you you it got it's gotta go through a filter of you can't just do it exactly the way they they they suggest. The other thing I wrote down, which I thought in, like, negotiation, every once in a while you come across people who are, like, a bit hard nosed about it. They, like, want to win the negotiation. And what I find that I keep doing, sometimes I feel guilty about it.

Sometimes I feel that it's smart. I let people win as, like, my strategy. Like, I want people to feel like they're winning. As long as I'm getting what I want, then they can feel like they won. And and I've I I found that most people don't do that.

Most people engage in either the argument or the debate or they want to win. It's not productive. I've seen it happen in myself from salary negotiations to contractor situations to, like, you know, some negative things that happen. Yeah. So it's one of these things that I I've kind of been cool with.

Like, if you feel like you won, I'm I'm okay. I'm more okay with that. I don't know if that's like a I don't know if it's bad or what, but that I I have found that I end up doing it as my strategy to get what I want.

Do you have like a specific example? I'm trying

to think of one that's not like too hairy to share the details Okay. A simple one would be salary negotiation. Like someone comes in and we're thinking about hiring them and let's just use round numbers, make it up and say, some people would look, let's say a salary of $5,000 a month. Let's just like be super simple, straightforward. And what I will do is I will try to find out like what they made at their last job or something like that that anchors, and then I just give them a raise before they even walk in the door.

Like, okay. So you made 4,500 at your last job. I want you to make more. So we're gonna start you off at 5,000. And I like seated the whole negotiation upfront and they're like, dude, this guy is awesome.

In the back of my head, I'm like, I got you for $5, and now you're happy with me, and now we're in good terms, and you're gonna wanna work good for me. You know? And and like, I I won. I achieved what the company needs, and you feel like you won, and that's like, we're both good. And maybe I overpaid by $500 a month, but in the long term, it's the win.

It's the bigger win. Instead of approaching that as like, how can I pay as little as possible? I'm like, no, how do I make this person feel like they just won and they're happy and now they're loyal and and all this other stuff that actually is more important.

Yeah. That's interesting. I I haven't really thought about that in my day to day stuff. I I I feel like I don't come in contact with a lot of, I don't know, negotiations or arguments or anything like that. Because so much of what I try to do and what I try to build into my work and my team is that things are set.

Like we have systems, we have standard rates that we pay all the writers get paid the same, the like it's a standard thing and it's not for everyone. And I'm super upfront about that before I even interview people. Like these are the rates and 20% say, all right, I can't do that. I can't even do the interview. Then other people do.

And then what I try to do is I just try to be the best client that they've ever had consistently for the longest period of time. So, you know, I'm hiring a lot of freelance contractors and I know I've been a freelancer. I know how how up and down it can be and how like from one client to the next, the different personalities and the and the speed at which they pay and the and the the headaches that they cause in the in the products that you're working with them on. It just it's it's super highs and super lows and it's crazy. It drives you insane.

And and I just try to make it for my for my team. Like, this is the easiest thing you'll ever need to deal with. And you get to work on awesome work. You get to do your best work and work from home and make your own hours. And it's like, you know, and it's and you're paid on this day of the month, twice a month, no questions asked, like direct deposit, like, don't even think about it.

Like, it's like that like that's how that's how it should be, right? Like, but I don't

know. You're thinking through their their side of it and how how things impact them. It's like it's like an empathetic approach don't to working with someone that in a situation that that could be negative or or tends to be negative and you're like, you're making sure that doesn't happen from the start and that that that that earns you yeah. It earns you loyalty. You end up that's that's you actually end up winning.

Like you're doing something good for them, but really it's it's it's better for you.

And and it's also this idea of culture, right? Like, especially culture for freelancers who are used to being totally alone in a room in their house. Like I am right now. All of us are in our in our team are. But this is that opportunity to be part of a Slack group with 20 plus people.

And we're talking about our travel stuff or and we're and you have teammates that you can rely on that support you and help you just do your work better. So I don't know, try to make a good situation for everyone. Yeah, I

like it. And then so one last thing and then and then we'll flip it over to you. We have started running a marketing process more formally. We hired this great consultant, this guy Sid, and he helped us put this in place. And it's been this is one of the things like I wanna write a blog post about.

Yeah. So tell me, like, does this work? What what's running right now? What's or what can

we So so what we've done is we've set up a situation where where the end result is is different marketing experiments. And so what we do is we've we started off by getting our new marketer, Ed, who joined the team. So first full time marketer, which has been like, you know, as expected. Well, the truth is he's actually really, really good and just knocks out to dos at a very, very fast rate. It's kind of been inspiring for everyone on the team looking over at him like, Jesus, man, you're just mowing them down and it makes everyone better.

It's it's great. He used to work at an agency, and I think in that environment, you got pressure on you to perform. So now he's almost like working for just one client that he actually likes. So it's kind of the best of both worlds for both sides. So we started off with him talking to customers.

So we identified some of our most important customers, most ideal customers, had conversations, wrote out a bunch of stuff in terms of demographics, what they where they read, what they go online, how they get the information, and so on. Then we moved that over into mapping out the customer journey from like awareness to decision and so on and what happens and what individual actions are required to take them from one phase to the next in the journey. And then what we did is we we just have a list of ideas and each idea we categorize, okay, which part of the customer journey does this address? And then we have almost like a technical approach to it where we say how much effort is required and how much impact is expected. And then that gives us like a score and then we can prioritize.

And then we move that over from the list of ideas to experiments for that week. And then the experiment is, okay, what's the thing we're trying to do? Who's responsible for it? What do we estimate on the impact? And then what are the actual results?

And so it's kind of clarified all that we have a million ideas, but instead of just pursuing whatever idea comes into our mind that week, we it's part of a larger list of ideas so we can look at it and say, what is the right mix of effort and impact? And then we move that over and we say, alright. Cool. Let's, you know, what are we gonna do this week? We're gonna do these four or five different experiments.

And so we've we've knocked them down at these. Some of them are little, and you can knock out four or five experiments in a week. You feel good, man. You're like, we we are now officially trying multiple things every week.

Yeah. These one week experiments. How can you draw conclusions after one week when it comes to marketing experiments? For most marketing, I feel like most things that I've tried, have to let it run for several weeks or months before I know whether or not that's going to pay off.

Yeah. Some of them you can tell immediately, some of them take a few weeks. But at least from my point of view, the activity in launching the new experiments is so important that in a week, you might be launching four or five. You're not coming to a conclusion on all the ones that you launched the previous week. It might take some time, but they're now in play.

They're out there. So here's an example of one of the my favorite marketing experiment that we've run so far. We looked at our Google Analytics, which I didn't do for months. Okay? Because I was focused on other things.

Ed comes in, obviously, first you know, one of first things he does. I need I need to understand what's happening. What we saw is that we had 17,000 uniques per month going to our homepage. Pretty good considering how little we actually do in terms of content and so on. Then we noticed that our checkout product page, the actual page that we want people to see was only getting like 4,000.

So something was happening between 17,000 uniques to the homepage and then clicking on the page we want them to actually see that our company does, the checkout product. So what we did is we looked at that as a marketing experiment and we thought about the effort and the impact, we said, we can get more people that could have huge impact. We have the same conversion rate, but double the traffic to the page, that doubles signups. So we we that bubbled up to the top of the priority, and then we looked at the effort, and we said, how do we do this? How do we make sure that more people get there?

So what we did is we went into Cloudflare, and we redirected all traffic from cardhawk.com to cardhawk.com/checkout. And in one ten minute marketing experiment, we went from getting 17,000 uniques down to four four thousand. Right? So now we went from 4,000 up to 17,000. We quadrupled our traffic to the page we wanted to by taking ten minutes and I just identifying it and minimizing the effort.

Did it impact signups?

Yes. That's awesome. Yes.

That's great.

Right. Love it. It's like, yeah, and have identified it unless it was part of a larger list where we said what will have the most impact and what has the least effort. Now it happens all the time. We look at our marketing site and redoing a marketing site is ridiculous effort.

It's like a month. But what instead, what we're looking at is say, why don't we redo the pricing section? Why don't we add trust symbols? Why don't we add testimonials? And now and now it's like these little tiny experiments instead of a massive one.

Awesome. So you have them doing like little experiments. Are you building out a larger funnel?

Yeah. We have one funnel in place that's like from marketing excuse me, from a Facebook ad to a landing page that is a blog post case study. And that has an opt in to an automated like ten minute webinar. I guess you can call it a webber. It's a ten minute video about the product.

And then that leads to a modified pricing landing page that just shows the key benefits, the key features, pricing, and sign up. And then that leads to a trial. And and now all of sudden we have an actual funnel to optimize. We see, okay, 40% of the people that watch the video end up as signups. So it's like, okay, that page is doing great, but only, you know, X percent of the people that go on the landing page opt in.

So now we need, we need to do a better job of that. So then we look at that and say, okay, that part of the funnel needs help. Let's look at the case study page and we realize, oh man, we're not making that call to action until the very bottom. Let's insert one in the middle. Let's add an exit intent pop up.

The exit intent pop up blew our minds because we took the same case study. We put it into a PDF, and then we use that as an exit intent pop up on the main site itself, not the you know, not having to do with the funnel at all.

Because it's kind of like walled like, the funnel has its, like, own wall and then the the general traffic.

Exactly right. It's not even on our blog. You can't find it. It's like a hidden page just for this marketing campaign. So we took that and repurposed the content, put into an PDF, and we're adding, like, 15 people a day to our email list because of it.

You know? All these, like, little micro experiments. It's not a lot of time.

There's all this little just little stuff like that that I I I need to do, but I'm so my time is on products. My time is on the bigger like, I'm doing a lot of that customer journey stuff and working with the content team, and, you know, all these little optimizations. It's like, I know that I need to do them, but when am I gonna get around to it? You know? And same thing on and for product ties too on my personal site, there's a lot of changes I wanna do there, but

Yep. Yep. Yeah. The the low hanging fruit and just staring at it for months was very frustrating, and then hiring someone to do it was was very, very satisfying. So when you're ready for it, you know, it'll be good.

Yeah. Awesome. I guess I'll just kind of finish up. I know we gotta wrap here in a minute, but this question that's been on my mind. I don't think I'm gonna do it at least not yet, but it's I really wanna ask this as more of a broader question for startups, especially self funded bootstrap startups, like, should you go freemium or not?

And I hate these questions where it's like, oh, you should always do something or yes, always do, know, always the answer is no. I hate stuff like that. And I feel like freemium is one of these things where Yeah,

people are emotional about this.

Yeah, and like a lot of bootstrappers in this community has maybe not given it the a fair shake as a strategy. Okay. And That's that's legit. And it makes me question that too for for myself and for for the ops calendar product. Heat and Sean and Stelly had a really good episode about this a couple of weeks back that kind of started me thinking about it.

I mean, what's the big thing? What's the trade off? Right?

Like what's when you approach it,

it's- Because I think that the general mentality and my mentality, frankly, the last couple of years has been like, don't do freemium. Like when in doubt, just always charge for your products. Don't offer a free one. Maybe have a free trial, but you gotta have paid plans and you can't price too low because you have to build revenue. You're bootstrapped.

You have to do whatever you can to make this a viable business.

Support costs money. It's not it's freemium for them. It's not a 100% free for you.

Yes.

Now the flip side is lower friction to get people in.

Yeah. So but like the thinking was don't ever do freemium because you need to get to revenue and break even faster. And my thinking now is like, it's gonna take no matter whether you're freemium or not, it's when it's a software product, it's gonna take forever to get to break even anyway. It's a long slow ramp, right? Like if you're, I mean, if you're not a developer like I am, like I'm paying for developers, I'm paying for marketing, and that's multiple months up to a year or more of investing before you're gonna make enough revenue to just break even.

And

it's a potentially great distribution model. So

it's like, I'm using my service, the profits from the service to fund all this anyway, so throughout the That's interesting. So so don't use the the excuse of like, you have to get to break even faster and that's why you shouldn't do freemium. So I feel like that's out the door.

Yeah. It depends on the situation. Then the

question is like, alright, for this product in this market, would a freemium offer be more compelling than just a paid offer? And my thinking there is, at least for my product, is that first of all, most of our paying customers right now are on our middle or upper tiers. Like, I'd say

So even they came in free, they wouldn't have been able to stay in the free tier.

Yeah, and people are coming in like on day one, they're like, I want to do the middle or the upper tier. They're just not even interested in the lower tier.

Okay.

And so that just makes me think like maybe the lower tier should be the free tier, or we should have some sort of very limited low free option. And then the headline, big offer, the big splash is Use it for free, and that's the top of the funnel

It could Attract a lot of people.

Yeah, but and I'm not saying that necessarily making it free will magically bring traffic to the site and magically, you know, get more trial or, you know, get more users or you get more paying customers or anything.

But Right. But the only question is will it get more people into the top of your funnel?

Yeah. And and the question that I'm thinking about it, and and I brought this to my mastermind. This is one of those examples where it's like, you know, the mastermind helped helped clarify it. Is it ready for for freemium? And then like the question is like, well, like, why don't you just start without like just just paid plans and then move to freemium later.

And then my my thinking is like, well, if you're gonna do freemium, maybe you should start with freemium as you as you make your big splash and you and you do a your big initial first push, you know, in order to capitalize on the freemium strategy, start there. And then if you have to, you can make it paid later. So that's one argument for it. But then the argument against is like, well, maybe the product is not ready to handle that many users. Maybe support will be too much of a headache for free users.

It could bog down your developers. Could

accelerate your learning, but it could also accelerate the learning for the wrong crowd. It is its own thing. It's a different strategy and has different pieces to it. Right now, I don't know off the top of my head, I'm like, what's the right approach to freemium? Is it providing just enough value to get something accomplished but not everything, or is it supposed to self select by type of customer, or do you ideally want to get them in and and as they grow almost like an email plan, like as you get more email subscribers, then you have to start to pay?

Yeah. Like, think It's hard to know how

to approach. Think that question is where you get into, like, this does this product and this market actually fit a freemium model?

Lend lend itself

Not everyone does. Like, if it's purely a large team product, then don't don't do freemium.

Yes. But

but what I'm kind of seeing with OpsCalendar and some of the feedback that I've had is that we have business customers who have teams and a marketer on the team, maybe a marketing team who works under the CEO. They're going straight for the business plan, which is our middle plan, which is a paid plan. Then we have customers who are agencies and they're kind of like audience ops, serving clients. They're going straight to the pro plan, right? But then we have some people who are just bloggers or solopreneurs just kind of doing their thing.

They want a bit more organization, but they can't justify $39 a month or even like 30 like between $29 $39 a month when they when they're kind of doing the same thing using free tools like Trello and spreadsheets and and using nothing at all or using a regular calendar. And and it's not based on a ton of data right now, but I'm just thinking like as like a strategic play, give it to those people for free, but get but once you need to invite teammates, once you need all the power features, you're getting into a paid tier anyway. And then the thinking is, you can capitalize more on PR. More people can write about it, you can do more product hunts, you can do that. That stuff is pointing to a free product.

Right, so what's the downside? If you get, let's say 500 people sign up, that's a lot of people to service for our types of businesses. So you can't like take it away from them, can you? It is, how much of a commitment is it? How easily reversible, right?

That's one way to approach a decision like this. Like if it's not, if it's easily reversed, then why not? But is it difficult to reverse? Because that's the only downside of trying it.

That's a good point and that could backfire from a publicity standpoint too. It's like if-

I don't worry about publicity. I feel like no one cares what we do.

Well, yeah. And, but I mean, the solo plan would be so limited that it's, it is useful for a solo person. You wouldn't be using it if you have a team. So it's not like you'd be screwing over a team.

Yeah. Do do you require credit card upfront? I mean, now, you're you're actually you're actually forcing the demo for now.

Yeah. But then but then they get into a free trial, which is no credit card upfront until they do certain actions. Like, when they invite when they need to invite a teammate, we require the credit card first.

Yeah. Why why not just why not just allow for a self serve free trial that doesn't require a credit card? And isn't that like freemium? Well,

the way that I have it right now is that it's a thirty day trial. You could like pretty soon I'm gonna get rid of the demo form and then anybody can just sign up for the free trial. But it's gonna expire after thirty days.

Okay. So it's the timeframe that actually ends up. It sounds like the only change between what you have and freemium would be the time restraint. Like if you just let someone come And certain features wouldn't be available for freemium. Right.

I see that all the time. Sometimes I see it overly cynical where it's like, get started for free,

And it's like a bullshit product. Yes. Right. Yeah. That's where it's like, is it the right product where there's a certain segment who can get use out of it for free?

But the real users, the real customers, you know, and but the other point that my mastermind brought up is like, you have to make sure that your onboarding is is nailed down, which I don't have, like, you know, onboarding is kind of nonexistent right now except for my calls that I do. And and then what I'm also a little bit wary of is the is the product. I think it's functioning pretty good right now. But if we were to, like, 10 x the user base, you know, and we have all these new features to build in the roadmap and I could see the developers just getting bogged down and scaling issues rather than feature issues. So, you know, might still be good too.

So that's why I'm I'm not that's why I'm still deciding not to go freemium yet, but it's but I wanted to bring this up here as a question for It's like taboo. Yeah. Like, I just think that like

to consider it.

I just think that more startups, SaaS startups should be thinking about freemium as a strategy and don't just completely dismiss it. And don't say like, oh, I have to go freemium. Like, it's there's just all these, you know, pros and cons, There's different

a lot of different shades of gray in between. And I think when people say freemium, as long as they don't approach it as it'll be free for now and I'll figure out how to charge later.

Right. That's the other thing that I see that I

don't That

sounds scary.

Yeah. But is it get started for free and do limited stuff, get limited value, but you can see the app, set up your account, do certain things, interact with it, make a decision on whether or not you want to upgrade, that's almost like an unlimited trial, which is freemium ish, but might make more sense for Bootstrap startup. We might come out with another Shopify app that makes sense with ours, but can be separate. I'm looking at that and seeing maybe that's a revenue source, but maybe that's just a lead generator. Other angle on this for sure.

But I have they're think about that other

apps that people charge for and that's their business. And I could do some damage if I came in with a good product that was either much cheaper or free. It would, because you have a different business model. Same with you with the agency. You're like, I don't need to make, I don't need to break even right now.

I know it's gonna take time anyway.

Yeah, yeah. And like, that's another thought is like, maybe not have a freemium tier on the main product, but just take out one feature, make that a standalone little tool that's free. Yeah.

Ben and I have talked about that from the very first time we met that technology as marketing can be ridiculously powerful. Yep. Yep. Cool man. Well, look, it's great to catch up.

We got a lot going on. Yeah. We're starting to use video in our marketing. We're starting to get some results from our Facebook ads and all this retargeting stuff we're doing, I could talk about that in in the next few weeks. We could dig in maybe we could dig into the tech process, maybe bring Ben on and talk about why we needed to do all this process and how we came up with it and what tools.

Because Ben's a tool machine. He's like a product hunt maniac. And our team like kind of like like kids them about it. Like, oh, another thing from that. But every once in a while, they come across.

Like, he he recommended something called Station to me. I dismissed it for like two weeks, and then it has blown my mind. It's kinda like Slack in that you adopt it immediately and then don't know how life how how you did it earlier. You know what it is? It's a browser for your apps.

So Gmail is an app. Calendar is an app. Slack, Asana, LinkedIn, DocuSign, and it all put gets put together, and it does a lot of memory management. So I don't use Gmail inside of Chrome anymore, so my computer is just faster and happier.

I've seen one. Like, there was there was another thing that kinda did that. Like it turns those web apps into Mac apps, basically.

Yes. So I have Stripe, I have my Zoom, I have BearMetrix, and Jira and Intercom. It's just all inside here instead of in a million tabs in Chrome. Big things like that.

That's interesting.

So when Ben came out with all these, he found all these tools that we now use in our process, we were like, whatever, whatever, whatever. Then as we started using them, we're like, okay. So you're right.

Makes sense. Good stuff, man.

Alright, brother. You have a great weekend over there.

You too.

Good to catch up. Thanks everybody. Talk soon.