Bootstrapped Web

This is Bootstrapped Web. Welcome. We're back at it. It is December getting towards the end of the year through the holidays. Jordan, how's going, buddy?

What's up, Brian? Good to talk with you. That's right. We're right in between the Thanksgiving and holidays. It's like a quick few weeks that just disappear on you, but one last chance to get a few things done before before the holidays and New Year's.

You know, we're getting close to the end of the year. In our circles, there's always, the 2017 recaps, and we're starting to make big things happen for 2018. I always try to make December I usually kinda step away from my main projects to focus on something like a side project. Typically, that that's the productized course. I'll talk more about that, but that's gonna be my focus in this coming month.

So I'm excited to kinda shift gears for just a couple weeks.

Yeah. I I hear you. And, all the stuff that happens around the end of the year, you know, it's making me just kinda think back on on the year. I I know, like, one one of the big things on my mind is is writing my investor update. So that that's always like a trip because it make makes you look back further.

It's not like what's happened since the last time I wrote an update, what happened in the past month. It makes you look back since what what happened, you know, over the past twelve months, and that's a very different perspective that has been helping me feel, like, calmer, more grateful. You know, a a year ago, it was four of us, and now

there's Oh, yeah. You guys grew the team a lot this year.

Yeah. We went from four. We're 12 now. Wow. So now we have we have, like, a, like, a holiday party here in Portland.

There's a holiday party happening in Slovenia with, like, five of them over there. You know, there are, like, just a bunch of people who, like, rely on the company for their salary for them and their families, and people are, like, moving closer to Portland. It's just kind of a it's a trip. It feels good. So it's helping me get some perspective on, like, alright, bud.

You're not completely where you wanna be yet, but you should be happy with the performance, you know, of of the team and the company overall for the past year, which is kinda giving me a calmer feeling overall.

Yeah. Maybe we'll do a more dedicated year end or new year episode in a couple weeks, but I'm thinking a lot about how this year has just been such a roller coaster on my end. It really started out in a in a pretty tough situation just overall in in in the business and then had to kinda dig out of a of a downturn, then it went back up and plateaued. And then now it's actually coming into a pretty strong end of the year, which is exciting. But, yeah, it's it's been a interesting year for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. The the saying, right, as as a parent that you hear is that the days are long and that years are short. And, yeah, business, it almost feels like the opposite. Like, the day, the weeks just freaking fly by.

But then the year, you're like, oh, wow. That's that's a lot of stuff we did and went through and dealt with and learned.

So, so what's on the agenda today? What do you got?

I've got a few things. Some of the new hires have been interesting. Just the the the growth in the number of people and the challenges that have come with that and making sure that people have, like, direct connections, that I have direct connections and doing one on ones. And so all those dynamics are are totally new to me, so I'm not good at it. So I've just been starting to read up on things, how to talk to employees, how to treat people, how to not make assumptions based on how you would want things.

You should really ask them how they want things instead of just assuming. So all all this stuff is new, so it feels a little scary because, yeah, I just haven't done it before. I'm not good at it. That's been on my mind. Some marketing stuff, a lot of our focus over the past month has been on tech, and the tech team went from two.

They're five now. They'll be six in a few weeks, so that has gotten more complicated. The need for structure, for scoping things out, for process has just increased dramatically, and it feels like the stakes are just they're just higher. So it it's it's a lot of pressure on everybody. And the coordination between the support team and the tech team now is, like, super critical because everyone needs to know what's happening.

But it's not cool to, like, do an update and support team isn't aware of it, and then all of sudden they get people asking questions. They don't have their info. So we're starting to write a lot of the documents down and, okay, what happens when we have planned downtime? Here are the steps. What happens when we have unplanned downtime?

These are the steps. You know, looking back at the year, one of the cooler, like, metrics, that I look at is in January, we were processing 5,000 a day. And this past weekend, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we processed a million dollars a day. Wow. So, like, 5 k to a

million like that. That's amazing.

You know? So, like, all the stuff that went with that, the AWS, it's just been an amazing learning curve, like, under fire.

Yeah. Yep. That's awesome. Today is the last day of of my week long Productize Black Friday sale, and this is also for the first time. I'm I'm actually closing down Productize today.

I'm gonna be shutting it down to new people until early twenty eighteen when I'll be launching a completely 100% rebuild of the entire course, the entire product, and everything that goes with it. I'll be spending the next month or so working on that full time, and I'm excited to to get that rolling. But then the other update is I'm also now finishing up a major just sprint. I've been talking about it in the last few episodes, but I'm really near the end of this whole process. I guess it's been about a two month process of just we are just cranking.

I I keep saying that, but we've been really, every single week, pushing new significant features into ops calendar. And this past week, like after Thanksgiving, right up until today, today's December 1, I know that I'm dedicating December to productize, so I wanted to kind of wrap up all these little loose ends in Ops Calendar this past week, like the little things, like, you know, onboarding videos and and, you know, just little bugs and just making the user experience pretty solid. My developers will continue on it in December, but I'm gonna kind of shift gears for a few weeks, but then really hit the ground running on ops calendar in 2018 pretty hard. So

I I wanted to ask a lot of questions. Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Getting to Yeah. We just started using app queues.

We're trying to figure a bunch of stuff out, and I want to ask you about your development process and QA and how that fits in. I've I've I've been educating myself for the past few weeks as we start to like, we look at our process for for next year. I'd like to hear how how you're doing it too.

Cool. The big difference is that you have a lot of active users, and we have very few. So, we can break things, and it's not as big a deal as as it is for you. But

Yeah. I guess, you know, to to to an extent, I think it's still a mindset and a process. And, like, if everything's a trade off, where are you putting the emphasis? Is it on speed? Is it on stability?

Right? Are you gonna go fast and break stuff, or are you gonna go slow and and be safer? Yeah. Yep. Making that a conscious choice sounds like it it should be a conscious choice, not just something that happens accidentally.

But let's kinda dive into that, I guess, the second half of the of this episode. Cool. I mean, real quick, the one update I have on on product ties is this Black Friday sale. There is something about Black Friday that's that is unique, I think. It is a frenzy.

It's a frenzy. You know? And I'm and I'm on these email list for all all these people we know who sell products.

I bought I bought some stuff.

Yeah. Did I buy? I actually didn't really buy much, to be honest.

I just waited for marine layer and bonobos. And as soon as I got through the I I actually preloaded my cart. I did shopping ahead of time and then just sat there and waited.

Yeah. I did buy an Amazon Fire Stick TV. Was getting sick of the, the Apple TV thing for a little while, so I'm gonna

try that. Switched from Roku to Apple TV, and now I'm really pissed because Apple TV doesn't have Amazon. I'm like, guys, can you

I know. That's that's why I switched to Amazon.

Now we have Roku and it, and and the at least the Apple TV works really well with your phone. So I can watch mind of a chef, which is just on Facebook now, which is so awkward, but at least it works on TV.

Just the the Apple TV remote that so we like the newer one that's like the touch screen

Yes. Yes.

Stupid thing. And like, that was just killing me. It was like, you know, Like, we'd constantly, like, accidentally pause the the show. Whatever. Alright.

So so let's can we dig

in a a second? So I got your emails, and and and they were good. And and they it's great when you have the benefit of marketing talk being honest instead of like this weird fluff. You're like, no. I'm I'm closing it down.

Yeah. I really am.

And actually, this is the very first time that I've closed it. It's it's been open, available for anyone to go to the website and buy since the day that I launched it back in 2014. And I was on the fence about that, I wasn't sure that I was going to do it this way. I was like, you know what, I don't even know how long it's going to take me to build a new course, like I don't want it to be closed for that long. Yeah.

So there are a few different benefits and this is all closed now that you're listening to this, but anybody who has ever bought Productize, including folks who buy it this past week, get grandfathered in to lifetime access to the to all the new stuff. So, like, nobody who's ever bought it before will have to buy the new course next year. Right? And because I've always made that promise, I'm gonna I'm certainly gonna honor that. There is gonna be some new stuff like the community.

I'm gonna add like a a private Slack group and have like guests come in all year long and and they're gonna get lifetime access to that. Whereas new folks next year, that's gonna be more of a, like, an annual subscription type of type of membership thing.

Okay.

And, I mean, prices will be raising next year as well. So the deal this week was like not only was it 30% off, but it's also much less than what the regular prices next week. Right. Right. Right.

So I think a combination of all those factors plus just people who've been on my list for a while, who've been kind of thinking about product highs and you know, haven't pulled the trigger, I think. I don't feel comfortable sharing real numbers here, but I will say that this has been I believe it's been the biggest spike in in revenue ever for product ties and, way beyond expectations. I mean Awesome. I think quadruple what I honestly expected. This past year 2017, you guys know I've been really focused on audience ops, really focused on ops calendar, and really not so focused on coming out with new content on my personal site and and actively growing my personal email list.

It it grew naturally a little bit, but really not much growth there in terms of new new subscribers. So I was kind of assuming that this would be a pretty quiet Black Friday year and I was mistaken, you know. Merry Christmas. So it also really reinforces for me that this problem and this concept, this business model for freelancers and consultants who are looking to you know, my my path that I took

Right.

To kinda graduate from billing by the hour to to really owning a business and and growing something that's that's not just your time and transitioning and bridging into other products. You know, productized services, that's that's the thing that that that I've kind of gone back to again and again, and that's what I this really confirms that it just really resonates with my audience, and it justifies me taking a month off all my other stuff to focus on productize for the next month.

That helps. And now that it's closed, you have more motivation to get it get it done faster also. Yeah. Now here's here's the question I have for you. I know Black Friday is like an aberration.

It's not it's not an everyday event. However, I I think that the dynamics behind Black Friday, the scarcity, the timing, the sale, I think those can be recreated, those dynamics, maybe not to the same

Yes.

Height. So where my brain goes is, well, I don't know if you should have this open all the time.

And that's my thinking for 2018.

Okay.

That that is the plan. I'm not gonna

open it. So you you go through a funnel, you get an offer, and then you don't you don't have that offer forever.

Yeah. Even that I've I've been on the fence about, but I've basically decided now that it's not gonna have a quote unquote public launch date. I'm just gonna start doing launches once or twice a month. Okay. So maybe even frequently than that depending on how busy I am with other stuff.

But I'm I'm not even gonna go straight to, like, an automated thing or or it maybe not ever. It's it's really just gonna be live real live webinars, like, couple times a quarter. And there's gonna be you come to the website at any time you get on the waiting list. Right. You can opt

in to the next time. You get on the list, and then you'll get notification next time there's a webinar.

That's that's the part.

I like it. I mean, I it sounds like you could it it's a good situation for an evergreen funnel with with the deadline, but not at first.

I think with the new course and I'm gonna create an all new webinar. I'm gonna do I'm I'm gonna re redesign all of my, back end drip automations to to support all the new models and everything. And so I really wanna optimize it and do it live probably for several months before I put anything on on autopilot. The whole idea of closing it and having a deadline where that's literally the last chance to buy it, which is today in in this deal. I've done deals that that do expire.

I've done urgency or scarcity in the past where it's like this this discount will go away after today. Mhmm. But it's still available. But I think this is really opening my eyes to, like, literally when you close the cart, it just drives so many more sales. You know?

Yep. Yep. We see it even even even in the physical product world. We see we see product launches, and we see these big spikes that for merchants who really know how to do it. It works everywhere.

One hesitation that I've had about going with this model in 2018 is that I I I know just looking at the data that people have gone straight to my website and purchased Productize. Some of them without even being on my email list, but others just join my email list today and buy by the end of the week. That that could speak to the fact that it's not a super expensive program, but it's like, I wonder about the the trade off there, but I I I think the the scarcity outweighs it.

My guess would be also I mean, you you could try it out for a few months, but that my guess is that the increase in in getting people to make that commitment based on, you know, seeing it and kinda, like, reaching a Crexendo Crexendo? Crexendo.

Crexendo. Yeah.

Crexendo. I don't know what that word. And, like, you know, make the time to make a decision for for your business type of thing.

Yeah. And I and I think it'll be much easier to run ads to webinars and really measure what's working and what's actually not in in the in, like, a one week span. You know? Yep.

I'm in. I've been hesitant to

go this route, but now I'm I'm going where I'm really gonna put most of my marketing energy into grow my list and sell product ties. And and that's the starting point. That's the top of of of the products that I'm running. And eventually people in my audience or people who who know this type of stuff eventually make their way to audience ops and ops calendar. I mean, those will have their own marketing engines as well, but I I shouldn't ignore the fact that, like, the majority of customers still come from my audience, and I have to kinda embrace that.

Whereas for the last couple of years, I haven't fully embraced that. I I wanted to make these stand alone engines that didn't depend on my personal stuff, and I'm just gonna kind of try to embrace that more in in 2018 and and just put more stuff, more more value, more more resources, more content into that side of the thing.

So You can you can fight the energy in the world, or you can go with it. I know I experienced that all the time. If I try to push things uphill, it might feel good and heroic, and then you look back like, well, I really just didn't need to do that at all. Right. Right.

Cool. So on on my side

Over to you.

That's a beautiful update, by the way. Hell yeah. Nice work. So not surprisingly, what we've experienced is when you hire people on the sales, marketing, support, success side, immediate impact. Right?

So we have a head of content now. So it's super exciting. She started last week. So all of a sudden, we we are finally gonna be investing in content. We have a lot of big plans for, like, thought leadership and how to espouse what we believe.

And and the point of that really being that we wanna sell a strategy as opposed to a tool. Content is, like, the key to that. You you you can't do that just with the product. You you have to put your ideas out into the world.

Yeah. Obviously, have a lot of clients on audience ops who who come to us to kinda, like, take care of that piece to outsource it and not hire in house. But there are plenty of folks who've been with us for a year or longer and then they decide to bring it in house or just other SaaS companies who go with the in house full time person on content. And the really, to, like, double down on that with a full time person who's just focused on all different types of of content. Like, you look at, just what a lot of different companies are doing with, like, these these monthly publications and, and really going deep into, like, networking and and bringing guests in in, and, like, it's it's pretty cool.

So you can do a lot of things with that.

Yeah. And and it's similar to other roles in the company, like like our marketer, Ed, that started a month ago who it's it's all about ownership and responsibility. It's not about doing everything yourself. So so she's responsible for the content. Doesn't mean she write every word.

She has, like, a budget for writers, and and then she needs to execute the strategy and then own it as opposed to, like, you write everything. So it's it's it's like a a mixture. So it'll still be augmented by by writers. And and, fortunately, she has a lot of experience, so she has a lot of writers that have worked for her before and and so on. So something like that is exciting, and it's it's a relatively quick impact.

Maybe content takes a long time, but all of sudden, start getting content out. We have a customer success manager coming on board in two weeks. That's, like, immediate. The other side

I'm curious about that. What what is the success? Where where does a a new customer success person start at the company? Like, what are they doing?

Yes. So so this has been interesting for us because we we have not had a lot of trouble getting people to sign up. But where we need more work is getting people to be successful in the product, use it, be successful with it, get good ROI from it, and keep paying for it. We know that that is one of one of, like, the key focal points of the company. But it makes sense for Assess.

So thus far, we've had a customer success person on it, but he hasn't had that much experience in customer success. He's kinda just game and awesome and creative and a good communicator and everything, but he doesn't have, like, the discipline of customer success. So we we were trying to figure out what to do. Should we bring in a consultant and help us create a customer success process? What we ended up doing was hiring someone here in Portland who has that discipline, that that that five, six years of experience of growing customer success team, segmenting VIP versus non VIP customers, identifying how to measure things so that we can improve things.

So that that's who we're we're bringing in. So her job is really to first take a look at what we have, learn the customers, learn the market, learn the product, and then start to understand, okay, what do people seek when they're signing up? What defines a successful trial? What defines a successful experience with the product overall? Which features do people want that matter the most?

So it's it's it's a it's a tough role because you're you're sitting between support, success, marketing, tech. It it requires a

of work. Would think there's a and there's a lot of like, with marketing, you know, the the customer success person figuring out, like, who is the most successful with this product Yes.

It is.

Talking to marketing, like, how do we get more of those people in?

Yes. And and so it's like it like, that that's why we did our best to get someone here in Portland. Yeah. Because I I want the person in charge of marketing, person in charge of success, person in of support sitting within 10 feet of each other. Because that that communication, those little insights, you know, that, like, Matt on the success team, like, does a demo.

So we we've built out a process. We should dig into it in one of these episodes actually because we just kinda banged our head up against the wall to learn. Maybe it'll make sense to bring Emily in and then see where our process evolves and and then talk about it.

Yeah. Cool.

So we have a a segment. Right? We have a a parameter that we say, okay. If you have done over x amount of revenue in your Shopify store in the past thirty days, we put you on a VIP track. And part of that VIP track is an automated email that goes at, hey.

You've qualified for our VIP program. We'd love to set you up with a a call, an appointment. We try to position you as valuable with someone on our success team. And a lot of those people like that, so they sign up for it. So those demos are really, really interesting.

It's people who have already signed up, and now all of a sudden, they tell us what they're really looking for. So it's almost like we're capturing them before they look at the product and say, oh, it's not it's not quite what I thought it was or what I wanted or it's missing this thing. So it gives us an opportunity to, like, show them how to accomplish what they're actually trying to do. Nice. So when Matt walks back into the room, he he's carrying with him, like, insight directly from the customer.

And he talks right to Ed on marketing, and Ed is like, oh, that's interesting that they wanted to do this. We've heard that multiple times. We should put that out front on the site. We should highlight that integration. We should write content about that.

Do you guys, record those calls?

We do record them. We don't really go back, very often, but they are recorded by, you know, just automatically in in Zoom.

Very cool.

Yeah. So so things like that. So what what I'm talking about is is the customer side of things, marketing, sales, support, success. The engineering side, totally different story. Yeah.

You you add someone there and it's like, it's not immediate. It's actually negative impact at first Yeah. Because of the onboarding. So we went from two to three and added a back end developer, which has been very helpful, and now we just added two more, another back end and a front end developer. It's forced on us a stronger focus on process, on some a little bit hierarchy on who's the boss.

When someone when the boss tells you that you need to write out a full spec before starting to code, like, you have to do that. It's not, like, optional anymore. You know, when it was when it was two of them, it was like this is more loose.

Yeah. This was like, that's a chore, but this is now it's like those specs actually matter because

Yes.

More people rely on them.

Exactly right. So it's it's helped, and I I do wish that we had been more strict on it. I see that as mostly my fault because I I pushed speed, and I knew some of the trade offs, and and I didn't appreciate how powerful the trade offs were. Yep. So now we are, you know, we're we're confronting it now, and it's a little difficult to confront when we're this far along, but there's there's no choice.

Cool. Well, I guess on that note, I guess we could talk about development.

Yeah. So I'll tell you, like, what our problem has been, like our our exploration, and then I wanna hear how you do it and how what you hear about other people. So so one of the things that we we kinda came to terms with was that it's been painful to have responsibility for the tech in New York and then the tech actually happening in Slovenia. And and we want Ben to be able to focus more on product than tech. We've taken that opportunity to say, okay.

If we're gonna make this type of responsibility transition, let's look at our process. Let's let's take the opportunity as we're, like, you know, shaking things up to reexamine what we're doing and think about if this is the right way to do it. So a lot of that has come with me. Like like, today, I have lunch with someone here in Portland, who's really experienced as a CTO and is now running a product that helps, like, CTOs and executives, understand what's happening in their tech team, velocity and speed and bugs per line of code and all that. So I've just been talking to a bunch of people about, given our situation, what's the best way to set this up?

We have had, outside QA, and then we've come across test driven development, something I'm really just learning about now in terms of, you know, putting the responsibility of writing automated tests on the development that's that's creating the feature right then. And the things won't get released until that that it passes those tests. And so it reduces the need for QA, but it makes things slower. So all these different things, like, I heard the other day kinda blew my mind. Someone's telling me that Shopify right?

That that's the platform we're on, so we we look up to them. Right? Shopify has no QA. In my mind, I'm like, I don't understand. That's a gigantic software company.

How do they not have QA? And that's that's when

They just rely on completely automated unit tests.

Yes. And and that's when I, like, kinda first heard. I I knew about automated testing, but the concept, but I didn't click it together. Like, I don't understand how they cannot have QA. And I finally saw it in that context, like, you can do QA almost ahead of time or alongside it as opposed to Yeah.

After.

We're we're in a much different phase than you are. I think we're we're still very much in the

But you're creating your habits now.

Yeah. Yeah. But, so, like, automated tests, like, we are way way behind the curve on that. And bugs pop up all the time. And I and I'm the one who does the QA.

I'm head of product. I'm doing design. I'm doing front end. And my two developers are doing the back three developers are doing the back end work. I do some raw design.

I write up the specs. I give it to them. They knock it out. They put it on staging for me to review. I test it.

I'm saying this works. This works. This doesn't work. And then I send it back to them, they fix it, and then we push it live. Or no, I test it again and then we push it live.

And and then, but and then it's like, oh, by the way, this thing that that was that was working fine for the last two months, yeah, that just broke. Why did that one so that happens all the time and that's definitely because we don't have the coverage in the automated test built out. And the reason for that is because I have absolutely 100% prioritized speed. Like I just yes. Yes.

I just like I hear you. Drone on that all the time. Every single week. I'm like, speed. What can we ship this week?

Yes. And by like Sunday night or Monday morning, I'm like, alright guys, these are the things that like, I gave you everything you need. They're good to go. I'm I'm I'll just tell them flat out. I'm like, look, I'm hoping to test these by Tuesday or Wednesday so that we can ship it live by Thursday and then really be done with it by Friday.

Right. Like and that happens every single week. Okay. So I I know for a fact that our tech is not as optimized and bulletproof as it could be. There's no possible way this this very early version one can be that.

But again, like, I I prioritized speed because I can't spend three years on this. I've already spent one full year on this, you know, and it's still not and this is, you know, partly the the marketing that hasn't really gone up to full speed ahead yet. But I I can't self fund perfecting every line of code. I like, right now the priority is speed. And as we move forward and as the revenue justifies the investment, then it's like, okay.

We go back and improve our process and improve our code. And that's that's how I kinda laid out the priorities.

So I'm currently in a conversation with myself twelve months ago. Yeah. That's really that's really what it is. It's I wouldn't do things differently, but this is what what's gonna happen as a bootstrap company, and and, right, all all the resources are precious.

I have to kinda clarify something though because I think this I see this a lot, like, people talk about MVPs and people talk about, like, move fast and break things. And, like, your first version doesn't have to be perfect, and you could ship without all your key features. Right.

See if people want it first. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. So all that is true. And I think I'm beyond, like, the total MVP rough stage, but I'm before, like, scale.

Yep. Yep.

I still have a very high standard for what I want to put in front of customers.

There's a difference in what they see and experience compared to the consistency and reliability of of of the product that they're using and the functionality.

Like, there are things in OpsCalendar right now that just are are slow to, like, load the page. Like, the page load is is very slow. And that's because I know that our underlying infrastructure is not as optimal as it can be.

Right. Right.

The user experience and the way that that I've designed the features and the interface, like, that is as pixel perfect as I can as I can make it. I actually wanna do a video at some point about some of the user experience decisions, like how I get the user from from zero to actively using the the product as fast as possible by, like, pre creating things for the user and and and all this stuff. But, like, you can kind of, like, leapfrog with user experience and design and and make the app really easy and productive for the user. Like, you you don't have to cut corners on that side. And you can still ship a perfectly usable functional product that will improve over time.

And and I think the other thing that I wanna get across is that, like, the developers that I'm working with are top notch, really solid developers.

They're they're

not hacks.

Right. So they they have their standards too.

Yeah. Like, just any code that they ship is is adhering to general best practices for Laravel and Vue and and, you know, infrastructure and and all that and and security. But but they do know that, like, at this phase, it's about speed. So if a certain requirement that I'm giving them is super complex, I told them, like, just stop. Let's talk about it.

Maybe we can find a better way to do it faster.

Don't don't spend three weeks on one thing.

Yeah. There are these trade offs, but I think it's still important that in a in a like, a version one phase, you can still have very high standards for what you put in front of the customer. And in terms of, like, what's actually usable and what's what's just like, this is not a usable product.

Yeah. I I had a lot of trouble, dealing with that in our in our version one. I was just perpetually not happy. So we it it didn't meet my standards for the for the first, like, six months. And I would just look at the app every day and be like, that makes no sense why it says that.

It shouldn't say that. It should be here, and it should say something else. I had to really just swallow that because the tech team was like, if you want us to do admin changes, it's we can do it forever. Like, we just need to redo the admin when we're ready. And then that that that took longer.

So it was it was tough to be okay with not meeting my own standards. That that that was rough. You know, a lot of it depends on the the nature of the product. For us, the only thing that mattered most first six months was reliability of the checkout. As long as the checkout worked, nobody cared at all what it said on the admin or how it looked or if the button was in the wrong place or the wrong color or anything.

The checkout had to work. We were doing trade offs all over the place. We're doing trade offs towards speed, but we had to do reliability. So, like, something was gonna pay the price, and that was, like, design and UX. We just couldn't do all three with a team of of two engineers.

I think in in my case, like, I'm doing all the design and the front end. And as the founder and the product owner, I'm driven to move as fast as I possibly can, especially because I'm I'm self funding and bootstrapping. And and so that adds an extra pressure of, like, every single day that I have developers working on this that's coming out of my pocket. The sooner we could ship more features, key. The front end side of things, that forces me to wake up 6AM, get to the computer, ship front end code so that my guys can get to it during during this overlapping time zone.

I give them everything they possibly need to run with for the for the week ahead. Right.

Like, you're you're not gonna be the bottleneck.

I will not be the bottleneck. Yes. You know, like and that's for the past two months. Like, that's my number one priority every single day for the last two months is, like, do the developers have things that they should be making progress on that they're so that they're not waiting on anything? And that's that's been it.

You know?

You know, when you when you hear entrepreneurs that that, let let's say, have exited, you know, they've sold their business, and then people ask, well, what are you gonna do next? And they come back with, I don't know if I can do that again. Right. Hearing you describe that, I look back affectionately at that time, but I do not wanna do that again.

Yeah. Those it's it's a it's a crazy, like, frenzied

frenzied state. It's very exciting.

But it's It's

high high stakes, man. It's high stress.

This is some of the the most enjoyable work that I've done in years, just the last two months because I'm I'm designing. I'm creating a product.

Creating something.

I'm creating a tool that I personally use every day and that my team uses, that customers are using. That's super exciting to like design and and and make a software product. That's awesome. But the the the stressful part about it is that just knowing that me getting to do this enjoyable work is costing me all this money. Making making a product that is not earning enough revenue to necessarily justify all that.

Like

If it didn't have that piece of the the creativity and the creation, right, it it wouldn't it wouldn't be as fulfilling. If you didn't have the the the pressure of reality, it would be masturbation, for a better word. Right? You're just creating stuff.

Right. Right. And we have some customers, so it's and and it's not like, you know, one of these all too common situations where you spend two, three years working on an app and you haven't even shown it to anyone. You can go to the website now and sign up for it and use it. What stresses me is that because I'm so involved in product development every day and because I've got other things going on in my business, I would love for it to be have product and marketing working together.

And it and they're just not. Like, marketing is on hold, kind of. Like, we're doing some content. I've started some SEO kind of work, but the but the active outbound sales and marketing funnels and and advertising, all of that, I have yet to press go on. Yeah.

That's And that's it's stressful. Like, what I would love in an in an ideal world is for those two to be working hand in hand. Like, I was listening to a really great episode of

Instead of one of one of the other.

Yeah. Drift, Seeking Wisdom podcast, their their podcast. Yeah. A couple weeks back, they had a really great episode. I think they brought in, if not the CTO, like somebody on the engineering team at Drift came onto their episode.

And they talked about this concept of they kinda talk about it like they're launching a new thing every month. Every month they are launching something new, like an entirely new product, but I think really what they meant was like a big new feature in Drift every single month.

Right.

But the way that they talked about it was that engineering and product is completely in sync with marketing. And so when they start developing the new feature that they're launching, marketing is already getting the wheels in motion on the blog post and the newsletter and the and the promotion and how they're gonna how they're gonna leverage this into into more exposure. And so the day that the feature goes live, marketing is boom, ready to go. You know? And, like, that's and and that's what's kind of been frustrating me right now about Ops Calendar.

We've launched so many awesome features in the last two months. We just came out with this Chrome extension. We got search. We've got user permissions now. We've got custom content types, custom checklist type, all this stuff that nobody really knows about.

A few users know about it, but because I haven't had the marketing material, the marketing assets, and the announcements lined up with with these product releases. So, like Yes. In the in the next few weeks, I feel like I'm gonna be playing catch up.

You don't get the benefit, man. That doesn't compound.

Right. Right. Yep. I like, I've in in the next few weeks and months, I'm gonna be playing catch up on, like, announcing all these features that we've actually shipped.

Yes. So the here's what the way we've tried to look at that because we did we did the exact same thing. We would launch these huge updates and huge features and integrations, and then we literally wouldn't even send an email out to be most. Yeah. What we've done is we just ignore the timing.

Like, we just identify, okay, we have a recharge integration. Let's just launch it whenever we want to. So it looks like, so what if it happened six months ago? Whatever. Let's just make a big deal

It's like

and show it how to use it, and then it's it's there. And some people will get it in real time, and then everyone else after that won't get it in real time, but it'll it'll be there.

It's still there. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I remember when Ed came in and when Catherine came in on the mark on the content, I basically said to them, if you don't have anything to do, there's there's a list of things that should already have been highlighted that haven't been. So we can just go that well anytime, and it's exactly what you talked about.

All the stuff that you do now, what I didn't do and I wish I did is I just kept like a a document of just the things that that as you're doing them seem like a big deal. Three months now, they won't seem like a big deal, but, really, they they are a big deal.

They're there. Yeah. Yep. That's so true. That's a good idea.

The other thing that I did this past week, you know, right at the November heading into December where I know I'm gonna shift my gears and focus on productize, I wanted to kind of wrap up a lot of loose ends with ops calendar. So so these loose ends are as we launched a bunch of new features, I want to create a bunch of onboarding videos. I want to get our our new user onboarding from absolutely nothing to let's at least have something to to help onboard new users.

Yeah. Okay.

This is not what what the perfect onboarding process will be, but this is a good, I think, version one of that. And and that's basically I picked out, like, five key things that you should accomplish when you're during your trial, like adding something to the calendar, creating a a checklist template or using the one we give you, inviting a team or or your clients and customizing their permissions, scheduling some social media posts. There was one more in there. Forgot what it was. I recorded like a five minute video, like just a how to, like how to do this, how to accomplish this task.

I put those videos into our Help Scout documentation and I just installed help scout's beacon feature. Okay. If you're familiar with that.

No. Tell me.

You know that help scout has their help desk section and then they have their docs section. So so we're using their doc system to to house all of our our KB docs, but then docs has this feature called Beacon, which basically puts a little circle in the bottom corner of your app. You click that, it pops up your docs right in app.

Oh, like the docs that are relevant for that specific page?

You can set you can get that fancy.

Okay.

Okay. If if you don't do that, it just pulls up like your top docs. And then I I talked to their support. Was like, how can I just specifically call out these five Mhmm? Getting started docs?

So I was able to do that. And so now users see see this little beacon, they can click on it, it'll give them the five top docs with videos of how to do it and there's also a link to to send us a support email right there without leaving the the app. So I mean, that's like a really simple, like, it's not a guided tour, but it's it's this is how you do the key things in the app and their videos and and and they're right there embedded in the app and it's ready to go. So this past week, I recorded those videos, put that beacon in place. And so at least at least now, in the next few days, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to open it up.

So we talked about previously on on previous episode that, currently, if you wanna sign up for ops calendar, have to go to the site, fill out the form, request a demo call with me, and I'll manually onboard you. I think in the next few days, I'm gonna actually open that up. Oh, that would be interesting. Anybody can go and sign up for a free trial.

And what we've done with that is we we make the offer of the demo after you sign up. So if because we we see a lot of value a lot of value in that demo, that conversation. It establishes that it's a real company, that you can reach out to people, and it just gets it out from the process of sign up. Literally in the email, hey. Welcome.

I'm Brian. You know, here's what welcome to ops calendar. I'd love to talk with you and help you get set up. Bang.

I'm glad you said that because I didn't think of that. Because what I was gonna do was those videos, I'm also gonna line up in like a typical drip onboarding email sequence for new trial users. We already have new trial users tagged in drip. So that's all set, ready to go. To pitch the demo call right there, right after they they sign up for the trial.

Right. That's pretty good. How much easier of a sell for the call? It's not like, let me try to sell you, it's let me try to help you. Yeah.

Just very very different. It's pretty much the same call, but from a different different point of view. It's okay. You're set up. So what what Matt does a lot with those VIP demos is he comes prepared to help them set up the account right then while they're on while they're on the call.

He just put puts them right through right through onboarding. Yep.

Yeah. That's awesome.

And one of the big things that we learned in our exploration on customer success, I don't recall if I talked about this on the last podcast because it was two weeks ago. I don't remember. But one of the biggest things we did was we separated out well, let me correct myself. We were doing it wrong. We were we were looking at the onboarding as one piece, and it's really two pieces.

We looked at it as account setup. Like, come in, connect your Shopify store, connect your payment processor, get your account details, and then, like, you know, get your account fully set up in order to be able to use the app. We looked at that as onboarding. What we were ignoring was that second phase of, okay, now that your account is set up and it's functional, from there to actually processing revenue, we kinda have to Activation. Yeah.

Activation. We have to treat it as an entirely new process. And so instead of redesigning the admin and adding a bunch of stuff, we started using AppCues. So that that goes live.

Is is that, like, it's a tool that you can subscribe to that basically, like, pops in an onboarding tour?

Yes. It's it's like a tool tip, like an advanced tool tip tour type thing. So you can have rules. You can say, the first time someone sees this page, highlight this thing. The second time when someone sees this page, highlight this other thing, or maybe do them in a row or let them just skip it.

So it gives you all those options. But the key part is that it allows you to do it without code. And so we would

It just, like, overlays on your own.

Exactly. We were able to do it on our own, and then all we have to do is ask the tech team to install the snippet, and then that goes live next week. So it'll be really interesting to see. At least from our point of view, ahead of time, it looks like it's gonna make a big difference because the difference between having those and just being dropped off into that and, like, okay. Go figure out the logic of a new software app.

Yeah. Yeah. I think at some point, I wanna look at that app queues. You know, I think right now, I'm more concerned with, just having the ability just to really easily send us a message or at least see some help videos. But I'm more interested in getting the messages to see like what are the most common questions.

Yeah. And and I've already had a lot of those questions just from doing a lot of calls with people, but I'm definitely more in this phase of, like, don't optimize. Just get enough data, you know, to figure out where to go next.

I think that's that's the right way to do it. The other tool that we have found very useful is Wistia came out with a a mini product called Soapbox.

Yeah. I saw that.

Yeah. And and when I first used it, I was like, this is awesome, but I can't even save the video to my Wistia account. I can't I, like, was confused on what the point was. But, really, they just launched it early, and now it's a full product. And what it allows you to do is very easily record your screen and your webcam at the same time.

Yep.

And then after the fact, in post production, very, very easily decide at which point in the video do you wanna show the screen, your face, or both. And and what that does is it gives your onboarding and support videos a little bit of personality, a little bit of, hi. I'm Aaron from the support team, And then your face disappears and it's just the screen. And I'm gonna show you how to build your product funnel today. And it it just helps make those connections.

Yep. So I am a huge huge fan of this other tool which kinda does the same thing. They just changed their name. It used to be called vueedit.com, but now they it's by this company vidyard.com called Go. And the and the product is called GoVideo.

It's a free tool. This came out before Wistia's thing, so I I've been using it a bit longer. Then I tried Wistia's soapbox thing and it was a little bit slow and clunky to use compared to this. What I love about this is that it's super, super fast. It's a Chrome extension.

You literally pop it open, press record, I'm talking and I'm showing my screen, and when I stop recording, I instantly have a URL to send to somebody to go watch that video right now. There's no uploading time, there's nothing. It's like, I use that with my developers every single day. I'm like, guys, watch me replicate this bug.

Yes. Yes. Yes. So so much better than documenting.

So I I do it all the time and I've been I've been obsessed with this tool. Use it every single day.

Very nice. That's good. That's great to know. Yeah. Alright, man.

Look. We gotta get one more in before the end of the year. We'll do a a year wrap up or

Yeah.

Something. Yeah. Karaoke or we'll come up. We just just sit here and drink drink together. That sounds like Yeah.

Exactly. Auditory experience. Yep.

Good stuff, buddy.

Alright. Great to hear from you. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Talk to y'all soon. See you.