Holiday Hustle vs. Rest And Community Marketing
This is Bootstrapped Web '20 eighteen. We're back at it after a little good break there. Jordan, how's it going buddy?
Jordan Gal:What's up, man? Good to be back. Hope you had a nice break. We can get into what we did over the break and January is like a slingshot baby. You know?
Jordan Gal:You you take time off with the fam, you hang out, you read everyone's, like, weird moral dilemmas on Twitter about, like, you should work hard.
Brian Casel:You know? Did you did you catch that? I I did catch that. I I caught that little, controversy there a little bit.
Jordan Gal:More. So one poor soul wrote a comment of these ten days represent 3% of the year and while your competition is slacking off eating with their family, you should get to work and take advantage. And then of course, like DHH responds and like the whole universe explodes and then there's the backlash to the backlash.
Brian Casel:There's like the two sides of like, you know, you have to kinda hustle and and and work overtime and work work over holidays and this is this is how you win and this is the only way to win. That's one argument. The counterargument which kinda started the whole flame or the reaction to the whole flame war maybe is is just that like, you know, that's wrong. Like, you have to like, have your lifestyle in check and and, you know, hang hang with the family, take time off, stay healthy, get rest. I was listening to Steli and and Heaton this morning on their podcast, and I just I completely agree with their take on this whole controversy.
Brian Casel:And what's that? What Heaton said, you do you. There's no right or wrong way about any of this stuff that any anyone's talking about ever on podcasts. Like, I totally agree with that. I hate people shaming other people for for working hard and for not working and taking a break.
Brian Casel:It's like you do whatever the hell you want to do, whatever you Yeah.
Jordan Gal:The thing I'm against is people telling people what to do. That's what rubs me the wrong way. It's like if you frame it as, here's what I did and here's why and maybe you can learn something from it, that that's one thing. But the this is the right way to do it. I'm telling you this is what you should do doesn't doesn't feel right.
Brian Casel:Right. Like you're wrong for the way you live your life like Yes.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Like, come on. There's a there's a counter example to absolutely every single point. Exactly. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And I couldn't agree more. Yeah. And I caught it. What's her name? I am blank on her name.
Jordan Gal:The the founder and CEO of WildBits. They have
Brian Casel:like Yeah. Was the one that I caught. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And she was like, let's be honest for a second. A lot of us in a better position, let's call it, in the career phase started off working like crazy. So I hear you on the backlash to like, you got to go take a break. But if you were going to be honest, that first six months, years, sometimes two years, sometimes more, you were cranking like a maniac too.
Jordan Gal:So you didn't follow that advice. So yeah, it was it was an interesting thing, especially to watch in the holidays as, like, your family is around you and you're on Twitter and you're kind of thinking, like, should I be stressed right now or should I feel good right now? And I know I had a very dark first few days.
Brian Casel:You mean first few days of January or
Jordan Gal:No. The first few days of of break of like, you know, my family here, we got a house. Like, we got like a bigger house in Portland as an Airbnb and a bunch of family fluents. We could all fit together in the same house. So it was really supposed to be like an unplug, hang out with the fam, hang out with the kids.
Jordan Gal:And the first two, three days, I was in a depression and I was dark. I felt like I just didn't feel good at all. Felt guilty about everything and I felt
Brian Casel:Guilty because you weren't working during those days?
Jordan Gal:It just opened the spigot. It like cascaded into not just like, oh I should be doing more work now but like I should have gotten that investor update out before this. Now I'm not going to get out till January. And it just spiraled into like negativity land. And I had to like half the debate with myself and it took a few days to like get both sides evened out.
Jordan Gal:And then, and then I was able to relax and then I really enjoyed myself and got some rest and relaxation and was starting to get more creative and now I feel okay, but it was a weird like ten days there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. We took a long vacation up to Vermont. So so like the coldest cold front in in America is hitting the Northeast, and we decided to drive four hours into the deep the deeper cold area of The United States for some reason. It was actually like a a gift for my wife for the holidays to take this, what was supposed to be a snowboarding trip, I thought I was gonna take my daughter, you know, have her take ski lessons for the first time and all that. Yeah.
Brian Casel:My snowboard never left the car. It was negative 25. I'm that's not a joke. It was negative 25. Like, it's insane.
Brian Casel:We We had this little Airbnb in Stowe, Vermont, and we didn't leave the place. We were just hung out on the couch, watching Netflix for three days and it was pretty relaxing. It was fun. Stowe was a really cool little place, but we could only like step out of the Airbnb for like a few minutes at a time without freaking out. I definitely got some just flat out relaxation time, which was a nice change of pace, you know, just watching some Netflix documentaries and stuff like that and watching TV and hanging out.
Brian Casel:And there's plenty of time where I've just broke out the laptop and started working on on on stuff, like trying to get ahead on well, try to catch up on on what I wanted to finish in December, which didn't quite get finished. You know? There's always that that stress of, like, I wanted to ship this thing before I took this break, but it's dragging into the January. And so and now, you know, the stress is is still with me right now because I'm looking ahead to about two weeks from now. I've got a a string of three back to back trips.
Brian Casel:I've got two big snow tiny comps, and then we're we're taking a trip down to, we're we're gonna take a long weekend down in Belize, my wife and I, which I'm really excited about. That that's only gonna be like a four day trip, but that should definitely be a disconnect. Hang out on the beach for a few days. And big snow is is always disconnect as well because I'm hanging out and networking with people the whole time. So there's really no no time that you could work even if I wanted to.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:The value is in
Brian Casel:front of you. Yeah. Exactly. So the thing that I'm working on right now is is the big productized course relaunch. And I I wanted to get this course lesson well, all the all the lessons done in in December.
Brian Casel:Definitely dragging into this January, but today, I'm hoping to put the finishing touches on that beast of a project.
Jordan Gal:I think where where that whole debate, the the one we addressed on Twitter and also the one raging internally, where it becomes useful in January is it does force you to look at what you're doing. Look, we're not the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Like, yes, we're busy, but there's always an element to if you're that busy and that crazy, you're not prioritizing well and you're not focusing on the right things and you're not kind of you haven't set yourself up for success on that whole stress and what to focus on game. You know, it's not like you have to be, you know, David Hennemeyer Hansen who works twenty five hours a week and drives like crazy cars for fun. You know, you don't have to be a freak in that sense, but it is useful to to look at what you're doing and say, I I shouldn't be overwhelmed.
Jordan Gal:If I'm overwhelmed, that's my fault. It's not like that badge of honor, I'm I'm so busy at work, really is not not healthy. It's not it's not smart.
Brian Casel:I do think that a lot of the pressure that all of us feel is is internal. We put it on ourselves. I know that's definitely the case for me. No nobody else is is adding this stress other than myself. Like, in terms of, like, I want these things to ship.
Brian Casel:I want these realities in my business to come true, and I want them to be true yesterday. But the reality is they're not possible until one year from now because it takes that long to to do whatever we wanna do. Know? Like, things can never happen fast enough. You know?
Brian Casel:Whatever plans I I make, whatever plans I made last year in 2017, there weren't enough days, enough hours to get them all done. And and it's like that's the lesson that I keep learning year after year after year. It's like I I I haven't fully internalized, like, how long stuff takes. Like, I can't I can't predict how long it'll take to ship a project. You know?
Brian Casel:I think I've gotten better and more productive, and I can definitely execute faster. And I am able to tune out distractions better than I used to be able to do. But still, even when I outline and get specific about, Here's the game plan and these are all the strategic decisions, make those upfront and then just focus on execution, there's still stuff that just takes longer than expected. That really stresses me out because then it's like I want to start this new marketing funnel, want which to make a big impact in my business, but I can't do that until these other assets are put in place, and it's taking me extra hours to do that and then trips come up and it's tough.
Jordan Gal:It's tough. We've been working with this marketing coach on our marketing process and so on. One of the most helpful things that he does is he prods on what is the smaller bite to take from that experiment and how can we get data on whether or not that experiment's gonna work by doing less and less and less. Remember what we talked about like site redesign and we narrowed that down to actually, let let's just redirect all the traffic from the homepage directly to the checkout page and let's see what happens. So we've been trying to do that more and more because you don't know which experiments are gonna work.
Jordan Gal:And so and so if it takes you two months for an experiment, you you just killed off an opportunity to find out what works, which is like feels very dangerous. I mean, I know I've I've spoken about in the past where I always feel like there's an optimal path and then you're you're rarely on it. So I always think about whatever we have right now, whatever with the product, the tech, the limitations, everything that we have right now, if applied in a different way, different market, different context, could 10 x the business. So I always have to try to search for that. And so I've started looking at that and looking around at my team and all of a sudden, I'm thinking, oh, woah.
Jordan Gal:They're not doing that individually either. That that's scary because it was it was an amazing thing to hire employees. And and now that we have 14, it's like, woah. All this work is going on without me. Isn't that amazing?
Jordan Gal:But then it kinda dawned on me, like, oh, the success team might not be on that optimal path. And now, all of a sudden, that's my job, to help them identify what the optimal path is. It's not enough to just do work. If you do the wrong work for a month, it just doesn't have nearly as big of an impact if you spent three days on the right thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Especially when it comes to product development, that's something that I look back on the year of 2017 and a significant chunk, maybe 20% to 30% of the features that I paid for the developers to work on and that I waited weeks for them to finish are either so insignificant that they shouldn't have even built in terms of usage and focus or I ended up scrapping them entirely and replacing them with something simpler.
Jordan Gal:That stuff that stuff will kill you. That can break you.
Brian Casel:But, like, at the time, I for for whatever reason, I thought it was important, and then and then a simpler version emerged, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. And we've done that repeatedly. I think it's normal but if you can minimize it, I'm not into the concept of researching everything out ahead of time and knowing exactly why you're doing it and how many people are gonna use the feature. I don't think that's realistic in our situations.
Jordan Gal:I
Brian Casel:agree.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's like I took an academic approach which I appreciate and I can even acknowledge that it's the right approach. It just doesn't mean that it's the right approach for our situation every
Brian Casel:single time. There are all these rules or common best practices that we hear preached everywhere, but there has to be some pushback on all this stuff. Just like what we were talking about originally about the you have to hustle or you have to take time off and stay healthy. When it comes to validation and validating a product and validating every single feature in the product and being completely data driven about it, there has to be an element of just trust your gut. Everybody has intuition.
Brian Casel:You should know your customer well enough, and you should just have that good of a feel for where they're at by talking to them, by investing time in their world to know what's important and what's not. You're not gonna be right a 100% of the time, but a lot of times that that's what it takes to move fast is is not to stress over, okay, do we have evidence to justify every single decision? You know?
Jordan Gal:And that's one of the things that I don't like about the the hero worship of the a lot of the, you know, very successful entrepreneurs and product people that we look up to because a lot of the stuff that they write about how to do things is in hindsight. They're talking about their highlights in hindsight what they did that worked. I guarantee you almost none of them approach it in the way that they write about after the fact. Then if you look at that and you feel bad for not following that, that's unhealthy.
Brian Casel:You look at these highlights. You look at somebody who's telling their story on Mixergy or their blog post or their podcast or whatever, they're speaking at a conference, you're getting the end result. You're getting the story of the end result. Everybody wants to achieve that. Everybody wants to experience what that person has experienced.
Brian Casel:We want that reality for our own business. That's part of what I think adds the pressure of, I want that stuff now. Hearing that story makes us feel like, Oh, it's so easy or that it was achieved so quickly. It's not. Like, you're seeing the finish line.
Brian Casel:You're you're not seeing the years that that it took that person to get there. Just the timeline of of building anything is so much longer than it seems. It's way messier, it and it just, to me, that's like the core of the frustration. It's like it's, I wanna get there sooner, and it's and it's not moving fast enough, but you there there are no shortcuts too. There there's no matter how well you execute, no matter how productive you are every single day, there are things that just take that naturally need time to fall into place.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Ben and I talk about it. We talk about the the intimacy when you when you work that closely with someone, you get to see all the good and bad. And and most people, you don't show the bad. I mean, it's a bit meta, but everyone listening to this podcast knows.
Jordan Gal:We're we're trying to be as honest as possible, but you're not getting all the bad stuff that's normal. Even we're doing it in highlighting these things in hindsight. We're trying to be forthcoming, but it's not everything up to the minute. If everyone saw, this was the difficult part about a family business. Working with my brothers and my dad, you there's no idolatry that all the pretense is removed about how amazing and perfect of a person your dad is when you work with them every single day.
Jordan Gal:And the same with your kids and your brothers. So it's it's like that's the trade off. You get the time together, but you're seeing the human flaws.
Brian Casel:Well, alright. So what are you what are you working on next? What's what's coming down the pike in in your world?
Jordan Gal:I think the theme that I'm you know, coming across lately is that all of this is just really hard, man. First of all, I keep looking over at crypto land and I'm like, why am I not I I bought my first cryptocurrency investment if you want. It's like gambling. It's an adult casino.
Brian Casel:It is.
Jordan Gal:I I bought a thousand bucks worth of some things.
Brian Casel:So did I.
Jordan Gal:It's worth $2,000 two days two weeks later.
Brian Casel:I know.
Jordan Gal:I don't even know what
Brian Casel:they do.
Jordan Gal:Like, this is this is walking into a casino
Brian Casel:and being like, alright. Let's see what Sure.
Jordan Gal:You know? Yeah. Ripple? You said have you seen Ripple? Founder of Ripple is worth as much as Mark Zuckerberg is worth.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. This is not going to work out well.
Brian Casel:No. Insane. So anyways was listening to Tropical NBA today. The guy who does like, he somehow like accepts Bitcoin for all of his like, people buy his his ecommerce products with Bitcoin and and he has like over two thirds of his self worth in cryptocurrencies and it's like, that is just insane, you know. I
Jordan Gal:I love it. You you have to love it in some way, but you you do need to fear it and and not pretend like it's just gonna continue to go
Brian Casel:up. No. It's I I have it just for the the, like, the the game of it. I I like to check, you know, to see the value every day. It's play money.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm checking it like three times a day just to see. But, you know, I'm not not taking it, I'm definitely not trying to take it as like a serious
Jordan Gal:down to, I'm down to only 82% up. Yeah. It was, it was down 30% the day after I bought it.
Brian Casel:I know I, I bought it and it was up a 100%. It was up like 99%. And that was that was the the point where I was gonna take out what I invested and then just
Jordan Gal:And believe it. Yeah. We go.
Brian Casel:It it didn't cross the 100 and then it went down to like 660% and then it's been hovering ever since.
Jordan Gal:I'm hodling, baby. I'm I'm I told myself a year. A year or a 100 x, not not something before that. But and then I told myself I wasn't gonna check every day. I'm gonna check a few times a day.
Jordan Gal:So anyway, outside of of that, which I do think we're gonna talk more about over the next six months, I saw a software, a straight SaaS company do an ICO and raise $2,000,000 that way. That stuff, I can't help but be excited by that side of things. The intersection of bootstrapping, VC, angel money, and then like the whole ICO thing has real potential for the bootstrapping community to be
Brian Casel:That'll be really interesting.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Interesting. Okay. So
Brian Casel:first I'm trying to remember, like, terms of your products, like, where did we leave off near the end of last year? Like
Jordan Gal:So nice little Jewish boy from New York, from Israel, got a very nice Christmas present. On Christmas, we crossed $100,000,000 process revenue for 2017. That was awesome. That was just a boost for the whole team and energy and morale and just kind of like it was great.
Brian Casel:The product at this point, you guys aren't, like, building any big new features or you are?
Jordan Gal:We have worked out a lot of the tech process issues that we rubbed up against in the past few months. So we got a CTO coach. Just got off the phone with him before this podcast, actually. We meet once a week. He's been incredibly helpful in helping us establish the right process now that we've put the ownership and responsibility for technology onto the lead engineer and let Ben focus more on the product.
Jordan Gal:That shift was great for everybody. It relieved a lot of pressure on Ben that he wasn't really able to have as much of an effect on. They put the ownership and the onus right on the person that has the biggest effect on it, so that was really helpful. We didn't release a big feature for a long time. Then all of a sudden, at the December, we released one big one.
Jordan Gal:Next week, another big one goes out. Then two weeks later, our biggest update of the past, I guess, six months or so goes out. Yeah. So right now, we're really focused on getting that right and getting churn better because we have been adding what should be a very, very satisfying amount of MRR. But because the churn is too high, it's not making as much progress on the actual revenue.
Jordan Gal:That's really the focus. So we've got everyone aimed in that direction. Part of that depression of the first few days was a feeling of futility, a feeling of the most important thing in the company right now is the tech and the process and I can't have an effect on it and so I'm sad because I feel helpless. And really where I shook out in that internal debate is, okay, let's just put that aside and say, acknowledging I don't have control over that, what do I have control over and let's focus on that. So we've been focusing a lot on success.
Jordan Gal:I basically told the success team, you guys are the boss. Whatever you need, the company will do. If you need marketing to change things up in the way they position things so you get better people signing up or different people signing up, we'll do it. If you need tech to add a giant button that says click here to learn how this feature works, whatever you need that you think will make people more successful. Because once people start using our product, they stay.
Jordan Gal:So it's getting them to start using it. Everyone it's actually been a very interesting thing because I didn't know much about the success process. We have great onboarding. A very, very high percentage of people get onboarded and have their accounts set up. Where where we fall down is in the account activation.
Jordan Gal:And so now all of our energy is focused on, okay, they they create an account. They got set up. They connected their store. They connected payment processor, everything. But from that point to actually processing revenue, that's where we're weakest.
Brian Casel:Is it because their store is not very active?
Jordan Gal:Well, the truth is the first thing to find out is why. That's right. That's the first thing is, do you not understand how the product works? Do you not trust the product? Are you confused by something?
Jordan Gal:Are you looking for certain features that you can't find or are limitations that make you not want to continue on? You know, whatever those things are, we have to figure out what they are and address.
Brian Casel:But I mean, what if they're not selling enough product? Then I guess maybe the problem is the wrong people are coming through the funnel.
Jordan Gal:Right. And there's definitely definitely part of the problem is that. So what we've done is we started using a product called Sales Machine. It's a software company out of France, I think. And what they do it's a customer success software that allows you to identify triggers and parameters.
Jordan Gal:So if someone has been processing at a certain level but that dipped more than 10% over the past week, send an alert and mark a task for someone to reach out to them. So all this stuff and one of the biggest things is to identify who the best customers are. So we came out with a mantra. Here's our mantra and this is like an accidental finding because I was ranting like a lunatic. Okay.
Jordan Gal:I wrote: Stronger relationships with fewer customers who are more successful and stay longer. So that's our mantra. So now when we look at that and we talk about, Should we do this marketing campaign? And then we say to ourselves, that's not aimed at bigger customers. Why do we care to do more?
Jordan Gal:We don't want more. We want fewer customers who are more successful and stay longer. So it's helped orient a bunch of different things and and it gets thrown back in my face. I say, oh, that sounds great. They have this huge list and whatever.
Jordan Gal:And someone comes back and says, but does that do what we're trying to
Brian Casel:Does that achieve the mission? Yeah. I mean, speaking of the tech process stuff, that's something that's definitely on the horizon, probably looking to next month. So the past year, in my case with OpsCalendar, the SaaS, we're at a different stage than you guys. You guys are further along.
Brian Casel:You you definitely probably you you guys are doing things the right way. I've been doing things. Do it as fast as possible way. You know? Just get version one of the of the product built.
Brian Casel:And I think the product is actually really strong, like, from from the feature standpoint, but we've definitely to go faster, we cannot fully use test driven development the way that we should, you know? And any developer listening to this, you know you know, that's that's obviously the best practice. If and if you ever build a SaaS, you would always use test driven development. But when you're constrained by time and cash flow and runway, you want to get these features built as fast as possible, know, that's just not the the and priority is shipping the features because you don't have hundreds or thousands of users. You only have a few users who need these, and and you're validating whether this is actually gonna be a, you know, viable business.
Brian Casel:So that that's been the theme of the past year, but now we do have some paying customers, and we are getting organic trials coming to the site. People are interested in the product, and the product has come along, so it's pretty complex. All these different features interact with each other, and they worked fine for months, and now they're breaking down. Literally, I'd say at least half of the time I have to task my developers, where, again, I have limited resources. I have to take them off of building new features just to go fix bugs and refix bugs, like, refix the same features that were previously working.
Brian Casel:That's clearly just because we don't have tests built into the code that would prevent those bugs from even cropping up. So, you know, probably January, February, I'm going to need to just task my lead developer to just pause all work on new features and go back and retroactively build a bunch of tests for our for existing features and start and we'll start, you know, doing, like, test driven development for all new features going forward. It's gonna be a a big kind of setback in in terms of making progress on new features, and new features will take will be slower to to come out because we're we're building tests for everything. But the idea is that we shouldn't have to go back and refix bugs multiple times like like we are now. It's been kind of frustrating because there definitely still are some features that I that that are in the queue that need to be built, that customers are literally asking for stuff that I wanna be using every day myself, but we've got to get some of the, you know, it's not like we're we're doing like a rebuild of the of the app or anything, but we do need to get these these tests built in, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's it can be frustrating because you know exactly what people want and it's still you can't just do it. It still takes time and it's it's far off. So where are you now? It's it's January.
Jordan Gal:What's the balance between audience ops, ops calendar, productize? Like, how are you how are you prioritizing?
Brian Casel:This month, January is definitely all productize. Audience ops is, is, is like chugging along, doing actually really well. It had a really good December sales pipeline looks pretty good in January too. The team is really solid. The one thing that I just did in audience ops is I just set in motion hiring an additional Filipino VA, just adding to that group.
Brian Casel:The current guys are getting a little too much on their plate, but other than that, no changes there. Ops calendar, just talked about. Like, it's it's kinda in pause mode because my developers took some time off over the holidays. They're just getting back into the swing of things now. So that'll be ramping back up in the next couple of weeks.
Brian Casel:But my focus for all of December and now stretching into January is Productize and my personal site. I'm just finishing up the creation of the 100% new Productize course. I'm going to be releasing that to existing customers who get grandfathered into it probably in the next week or so. But now that I've basically done creating all the course material, all the lessons, all the videos, now I have to do all the little tying up loose ends. That's gonna take like a good two weeks.
Brian Casel:I've I've gotta set up a new course membership site, the purchase, the membership, the access to the course material.
Jordan Gal:What's your default on that tool? That's such an interesting space.
Brian Casel:Well, I up until now, what I've been using is Pippin's restrict content pro.
Jordan Gal:Love you Pippin. Shout out to Pippin.
Brian Casel:Yeah. He's the man. And that's been a really great product. Although I think I'm going to go to more of a dedicated, it's still going to be on WordPress, but a dedicated course membership system. Whereas hit that is kind of for a membership, but you kind of have to like custom built around whatever you need.
Jordan Gal:Part a larger system?
Brian Casel:Yeah. The one that I'm looking at now, I haven't really started getting my hands dirty with this yet, but I'm looking at lifter lms. I think it's lifterlms.com. It's a pretty popular WordPress plugin for creating LMSs for learning management system. So it's like for courses, memberships.
Brian Casel:And I'm going to put the course on a dedicated site, on at productizecourse.com. The other thing that I need to work on in the next week is I decided to really just double down on this whole productize brand thing. My personal site has been castjam.com. The word Castjam doesn't really mean anything other than, know, it's like like, Hass has been my nickname growing up and jam, I don't
Jordan Gal:know. It
Brian Casel:actually dates back to my that that was actually my AOL Instant Messenger screen name from when I was 13 years old. Yes. And and then I when I was 16 or 17, I got that domain name and it's still my personal blog when I'm 34 years old. So anyway, that
Jordan Gal:Hold on a sec. You're 34 years old?
Brian Casel:Wait. Am I?
Jordan Gal:Screw you, man. Whatever. So you're going to geek it. You're not going to go teachable or one of those hosted platforms?
Brian Casel:No. But for my site, I do plan to change the domain from cashjam.com to productizeandscale.com. You know, longer domain name, whatever, but it's, but I'm trying to just really focus on, on the product highs as, as the brand. I got a logo designed for that. That'll be coming out with the new, domain, not really redesigning the site, but just putting that branding on it.
Brian Casel:It's still me, not, not much is really going to change in terms of the content on the site, but it's just like, that's just become a big focus of, of, of everything that I do in terms of all of my products, my, my businesses, the stuff that I write about.
Jordan Gal:New blog posts that you write are going to go there?
Brian Casel:I'm sure I'll continue to write blog posts occasionally for audience ops, occasionally for ops calendar, but the stuff that's like personally from me, that's aimed at the product ties course and whatnot. That's, that's on my personal side. That's something that I want to do in the next week or two. One of my big goals for 2018 and I'm like hesitant to talk about this because I don't know whether or not I'll follow through on it.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Now I wanna hear.
Brian Casel:Community. I think that communities, both paid and free communities, are where almost all marketing is headed now. Especially content marketing, but audience driven marketing. So I just want to do a much better job of that. I've always, I think done a pretty poor job when it comes to keeping my members engaged with one another and with me.
Brian Casel:I have an email list and I do send newsletters to the list pretty often, but I want to do more to have my list members communing with each other and the paid members of Productize to get more like we have a forum through Productize and it's mildly active, it's not nearly as active as I would like it to be. And that's primarily because I don't get in there enough and I don't post. I don't I don't ask questions. I don't engage enough.
Jordan Gal:That's the thing. It it feels like it it takes a certain personality. I see it in the Facebook groups. Right? The Shopify Facebook groups are very important to us.
Jordan Gal:I see these people, like the leaders of these groups, they're they're amazing. Can't They do what they they they overshare. They get people excited. They they take you know, sometimes I have an interesting thought and I write it down to, like, talk about here, but they take that and just immediately go and make content out of it and write
Brian Casel:I I and I I see the same exact thing. I see those those type of personalities out there who run these really active Facebook groups and and other groups. Like maybe it's partly like my personality. Like I'm, I'm just not instantly going out and interacting with people. It's also time like I'm running businesses.
Brian Casel:So I, I, I've always struggled with like justifying, like I can't just sit around here for hours in Slack rooms and on Facebook groups, like interacting and stuff like that. But I do see the power of it as a, as a marketing channel. Like, and I'm talking about both having a free Facebook group, private Facebook group, but free as like a, you subscribe to my email list. The next step is like, okay, join us in the, in the private Facebook group. And then there's also the paid community through product ties that involves both the forum and the private slack group and the course material.
Brian Casel:What I'm getting at is that like, especially when it comes to content, like when I search for answers to stuff, when I'm trying to research a particular topic, I don't really go to Google anymore. I go to the private communities that I'm a part of. I go to the forums that I'm in a few paid forums and I'm in a few Facebook groups and I talk to friends who I know and I trust their opinion. I ask like, what's working? What have you done?
Brian Casel:What are the case studies that have worked? And then I try to learn from that rather than just seeing what shows up on like the first page of Google. Like SEO traffic and content, traffic to content will always be a factor when you're building traffic to your site and and building up content and follow-up sequences for your audience. But if you can supplement that with a private community, that could be a place to, to share content, have conversations about it for, for members to talk to each other, for members to.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, it's very, it's very powerful, but it's hard to do.
Brian Casel:It is. But I think that there's more of an ROI to be had if you actually do commit the time to it rather than look at it as like a, like a nice to have or like it's as fun to do only if you happen to have a few spare minutes. But if you actually dedicate some time to it every week, it could be a significant traffic source. I mean, are plenty of businesses who Their private Facebook group is their number one lead source for their products. You know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. This makes me think of of an article I came across. It's like one of those articles you get you you come across and you start sharing it like on Slack and I put it into the stand up channel and the marketing channel. I DM it to people.
Jordan Gal:I'm like, guys, this is like it. So it's an article on Medium by Andy Raskin who's like strategic guy. I don't know if he's an investor or what, but it's called The Greatest Sales Pitch I've Seen All Year. I saw that.
Brian Casel:I think I I think you tweeted out it.
Jordan Gal:It's probably probably that.
Brian Casel:So Yeah. So this was From Drift.
Jordan Gal:From Drift. It's you know, it goes along with what you're saying in terms of how people buy. And the the key paragraph from it, right, Product differentiation by itself has become indefensible because today's competitors can copy your better, faster, cheaper features virtually instantly. Now, the only thing they can't replicate is the trust that customers feel for you and your team. And it's like, shit, that feels true.
Jordan Gal:You might have a lead in features and you did something sooner or faster, but to really thrive, not just like make it has to be a connection between the company and the customer and the community piece, the communication, the transparency. It's all these things that we looked at as like, oh, content marketing, oh, blogging, they got to know you, they trust you. Now it's like synthesizing into like, that's marketing now.
Brian Casel:That's so true. I'd like to go along with that. We're connecting all these dots that I think are, this is definitely like a change. Like, Josh Pigford's article, which came out in December, titled Growth Hacking is Manipulation. I think this goes along with the same theme.
Brian Casel:Touching on, look, all these hacks when it comes to marketing, goal shouldn't be to kind of trick people to come through your mouse trap. It should be to just build trust and legitimately even if it works. It's not to say that there aren't things that can help you build traffic and bring more people into the top of the funnel, but once they get to the top of that funnel, then the work of actually building trust and making them feel like they're part of a group of like minded people who are all together working towards the same goals, solving the same problem, trying to reach the same milestones. Like we have the tools available between Facebook groups and social media and forums and, and all in slack and all this stuff. You can leverage that, those connections to actually just build a tribe.
Brian Casel:Like I hate all these stupid marketing terms that you hear, like, but tribes. But the the the idea is that, like, it actually makes your product more defensible too. Because, I think part of part of what he was saying in that Drift presentation was you you can't compete on product features anymore. It's it's it's impossible to compete on features. There's just way too much competition.
Brian Casel:Everybody's moving way too fast in terms of shipping or matching each other on features. The only thing that you truly can compete on is that relationship with your customer.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and I love that it comes from Drift because Drift should not exist. Drift is an intercom clone. It is a it is a chat. That that's that's all it is.
Jordan Gal:If you were looking at the world through the lens of, well, should we compete in this space? With Intercom, you would say no, especially those guys that drift, those are very experienced people with big ambitions. The only way you would even enter that market is if you approached it from the point of view of, well, how do people really feel about intercom? I have no warmth toward intercom. 37 signals, I haven't used their products in a decade.
Jordan Gal:Still have strong affinity toward them. There's a bunch of other companies I could say the same thing about. If you looked at it that way, all of a sudden, look at Intercom's market and you say, That's actually a giant opportunity because they're not talking to their customers. They don't have the trust of their customers in the same way. They're upstream and go toward the enterprise and then that connection is going to be lost.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And every company can potentially have their own community.
Jordan Gal:Right. No one's stopping you. Right. No competitors in your way.
Brian Casel:Right. Like but I mean, like, don't feel the affinity toward intercom, but some people do. Like, they have some people who are super loyal to it and and and some people are super loyal to, what? Like the the 10 other live chat apps out on the market. Right?
Brian Casel:Like like or or potentially so. Like, if you look at email marketing, email marketing automation tools, that's one of the most competitive spaces that you could possibly be.
Jordan Gal:And that really is tribal. People like defend their decision on who they want.
Brian Casel:Exactly. You know? And I mean when, when Nathan Barry did convert, starting up convert kit, was like you're entering a super competitive space and then he started to focus in on bloggers and build a whole tribe and build a conference around it and all that stuff. Then even like drip, you know, what Rob has done with drip, I mean a big reason why I continue to be a drip customer today is because I've been part of Rob's community, you know, between the podcast and the conferences and everything. I'm not saying that that is what if Drip didn't actually have the feature set that I needed, I wouldn't be a customer of it.
Brian Casel:But today, I could use ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, I could use any of these. They all do the same thing.
Jordan Gal:Features are part of it. It's almost like when people say you make the decision to buy emotionally and then you intellectually, what's called, justify Right? It's like you really want to find any excuse possible to use this product and then as long as the features justify your doing it and compromises you need to make to use this particular product, if that connection piece is strong enough, then they'll get you.
Brian Casel:I just think that like coming back to like, in terms of like getting tactical with this stuff, like building a private Facebook group, I happen to think is probably the best avenue for this. Maybe it won't always be, but like you look at what Brennan has been doing with RightMessage. He's completely building the early traction of this thing through his private RightMessage Facebook group. The guys at Lifter LMS, that WordPress plugin that's really popular, they have an extremely active private Facebook group. It's just hundreds and thousands of members just interacting, requesting features, talking about their pain points, talking about their problems, asking questions, like, inspiring each other, like, sharing their big wins, you know, giving each other high fives, and it's all swirling around this this product.
Brian Casel:And if you're a founder and you have access to and you you're running a Facebook group that has all these engaged people sharing with you their needs and their desires and their big wins and all this stuff. That's the ultimate market research that you can go to those people and ask them what they want you to build next. You can validate those features. You can go on gut feel. You can share your next blog post.
Brian Casel:You can do everything. And like when you have that kind of access, like rather than feeling like you have to like claw up this big mountain of just getting a 100 people to visit your website, I just think the community is going to, it already is but it needs to play more of a role in everyone's marketing I think.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, I like it. I think we're going to talk about that a lot in 2018. That's what I think. We're going look to that as a lever, something that changes the math, not just I spent a thousand bucks in ads and got x number of leads and x number of customers and so what if I improve the conversion rate? Not that.
Jordan Gal:Something that completely changes the math of this is getting traction in this space and that can grow at a very different pace than than regular campaign. Alright, homie. I got to boogie soon.
Brian Casel:I think we had a we had a good one here.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I like the ones where we have no agenda.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think they do get more interesting it seems.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Well, everyone thanks for listening. Let's put a link to that article, that marketing article. I think that's worth reading. We touched on one element of it in product differentiation but the best part of it is it really helps to shape a marketing narrative that goes along with that mindset of community, of being on the same side as positioning yourself against the big enemy, the inevitable thing.
Jordan Gal:It's it's it's very very good. Yeah. Yep. Alright, Bry. You have a great weekend over there.
Brian Casel:You too. Everyone stay warm out there and yeah, get back at it. Twenty eighteen. Here we go.
Jordan Gal:Alright, man. Be good.
