Conference Strategy, Webinar Funnels, & Lead Developers
This is Bootstrapped Web. We're back. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?
Jordan Gal:Hello, Brian. Nice to speak with you.
Brian Casel:Alright. So, back at it after a couple of weeks. You know, know lately, you know, we haven't been as consistent, about the podcast as we as we usually have. I've getting, you know, some emails and tweets here and there, you know, expecting the the episode to drop every single Thursday. But, you know, look, it's it's just not gonna happen every Thursday.
Brian Casel:You and I are both, you know, very busy, obviously, running our businesses and families and travel and all that. But when we are both at home ready to do this on, we we record on Fridays, We can get one out there so excited to catch up.
Jordan Gal:Yes, I agree. Today's Friday. I'm heading out to San Diego on Sunday for traffic and conversion at the Digital Marketers' big conference and it's freezing here in Portland. This was the first real week of winter and San Diego sounds just about right, right now.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's awesome. Very cool. I've always heard a lot of good things about that one. I've never made it to traffic and conversion.
Jordan Gal:I haven't been to that one. I went to digital marketers, a one that's more focused on e commerce a few months ago and just got a ton of value out of it. The content, a little bit, but the networking was so good and just talking directly to people who use our product and talking to agencies who want to get their customers. After that experience in the smaller version, I thought, absolutely, we need to be there for the bigger one. We're actually in the middle of courting an enterprise customer and they're going to be there also, so it'll be cool to go have a beer and talk and just form that relationship.
Jordan Gal:I have found myself traveling more and I have found myself making that offer more often for larger customers. One of our customers is in Uruguay and I might go visit them. It's a big enough account that it's worth it and, you know, I'm down for Uruguay. I haven't been down there before.
Brian Casel:That's awesome. That's interesting. I was just talking to Nathan Barry over on other, the Product Hives podcast. By the way, that's a really great episode. For this audience, I think you would really enjoy it.
Brian Casel:The nice thing about talking to someone like Nathan is that everybody listening, most people listening already know him and know his story, so I don't really have to cover any of that. Could just dive right into the good stuff. Talked all about ConvertKit, and he said, you know, now, at ConvertKit's size, we were talking a lot about his outbound sales approach and, you know, how he did that pretty heavily early on to grow. But but even today, they're doing it, but it's more for those larger accounts and getting on planes and and going for those, big name accounts.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. And I'm a big Jason Lemkin fan. If you don't follow him on Twitter, he is among the best and he talks about that a lot, the enterprise sales and what getting onto an airplane and going to visit your customers can really do. I'm so excited that a large enterprise customer wants us to come to their office in Colorado to talk more specifics on tech, so I'm going to fly out our VP of engineering, Rock, from Slovenia.
Jordan Gal:I think that's going be such a cool experience for both of us to be able to go there and visit a customer at their office and then be able to do the business side for me and the tech side for him. Think it'll just a good experience for the company to just be able to do that for the first time and then be able to do better next time.
Brian Casel:That's great. Yeah, speaking of travel,
Nathan Barry:oh man,
Brian Casel:I am such an idiot. So last week alright. I I wasn't even gonna talk about this because it just sucked so bad. But Too bad. Last week on Friday, my wife and I were supposed to get away and go down to Belize for for a long kinda weekend trip.
Brian Casel:And of course, yeah, it's the night before, just a few hours away from an early morning flight, and I realize my passport has expired.
Jordan Gal:And Belize is a different country, my friend. You need a passport. Apparently,
Brian Casel:it is a different country. So it's one of those things where I booked the trip kind of like on a whim a few months earlier, and it was around November, December holiday time. Was like, I'm going to surprise my wife and do this trip, and had a bunch of cash come in. I was like, Let's do this trip. It'll be great.
Brian Casel:And I spent like a day or two booking the flight, booking the hotel, getting all the transfers together, getting it all done. And this is how I am with trips, and with anything that's non work related, I'm like, All right, Let me just do it, put it away, file it away, and then not touch it again until the day comes. And that's that's exactly what happened. Was, like, I, you know, I I didn't think twice about, oh, is my passport is like the ten year expiration date happened to come up the week before this freaking trip. So Damn.
Jordan Gal:What the lease for you?
Brian Casel:Well, we're we're gonna go like, you know, three weeks from now. So, you know, had to basically rebook a bunch of stuff, spend a bunch of extra money on it, yeah, that all sucked. But we are gonna go do it. So my mom came here to watch our kids while we went away, so we kind of booked my mom for the weekend to do that. So she, you know, she still did it, and so so so Amy and I booked a last minute trip up to Vermont instead.
Brian Casel:I went snowboarding. We we we just did that. So
Jordan Gal:It's gonna be worse, get worse. I too have done that once going to the Grand Cayman Islands with my wife and my best friend from high school and his wife and they were already there and we had to call them and say, So you guys are on your own this weekend. We actually went to the airport to the security line and then had them say, Oh, you can come in. Yes.
Brian Casel:I was so close to doing that too. Luckily, I did try to check-in online when I got the notification on the phone the night before. I like, was All right, let me just check-in online. And I don't always do that. Sometimes I just do it at the airport, but I did that and then that's when I realized the passport was expired.
Brian Casel:Luckily, otherwise we would have gone at five in the morning to the airport.
Jordan Gal:That would have hurt. Well, look, I'm going give you some credit for finding it, booking it ahead of time, thinking about your family and your wife. So good for you. It'll be a few weeks. No big deal.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it was actually really good, conditions for once up in Vermont, had a nice, snowboarding weekend. But then, yeah, since then, you know, back at it. Been doing a lot of, getting a lot of good good things up and running and launched and wheels turning on a bunch of bunch of good stuff. So so where should we dive in?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I guess we can do some quick updates and then some specific things that are coming up and things we're thinking about. I have some questions for you. I have some things like we're not rolling out a lot more features a lot more often and I don't really have a good system for how to keep people updated on it. If we add three features in a week, what do you, send three different emails?
Jordan Gal:You send
Brian Casel:You mean to customers? All right, like your audience.
Jordan Gal:To prospects and customers, right?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I'm terrible about that too with the SaaS.
Jordan Gal:We went for a long time without that many new features, so I'll talk about that in a sec. That's one of the issues. Just thinking about the conference next week is kind of an interesting topic of like, Okay, what would you do and what should I do ahead of this conference? I always laugh at myself that I don't have business cards. It's like three years in and everyone, whenever you go to a conference, I was like, Can I get a card?
Jordan Gal:And I just have to be like, No.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I know. I'm totally the same way. I'm like that guy, like, Yeah, just, I don't know, Google my name or something.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, just email or something. Yeah. But, you know, if you're actually going there to try to close business and form partnerships, I maybe mean, is that a thing? Do you actually need the card? You don't need
Brian Casel:the card. Honestly, you know, and I'll get a bunch of people's cards and I always just throw them out.
Jordan Gal:You just throw them out. Anyway, so it's little things like that, what to do with the conferences. And then the other thing is, Mr. Rob Walling, thank you, sir. He asked me to speak at MicroConf.
Jordan Gal:And so that's like the initial euphoria of, oh my god. I'm so special. He asked me. No. It's very exciting.
Jordan Gal:And then you say yes because you have to say it's such a great opportunity. And then all of a sudden, it's, well, shit. What am I going to talk about? Uh-oh. And then it gets into the it's like, I'm scared.
Jordan Gal:I'm not good enough. And then it goes back into the, wait, hold on. Maybe I could talk. So that whole
Brian Casel:And you're speaking at growth. Right?
Jordan Gal:Yes, which is even more pressure. And I'm like, so I want to talk about what I'm doing to try to prepare for it and one good resource that I found for it. And then maybe we can talk about the topic that I have in mind and just kind of just talk through it and see if it's kind of interesting enough or if it's just like a micro topic. That's Yeah, definitely. Some things on on my side.
Jordan Gal:How about you?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Mean, basically the two main things that are that are going on. So so productize that whole side of my business, my personal site and and the productize course, that's really been my focus for all of January and February so far. It's probably going to continue to be my focus for a while.
Brennan Dunn:I thought it would
Brian Casel:be a temporary one month spurt, but it's turning into a much longer term thing. I could talk a bit about that. Actually, right now, this weekend, there's a one time opening of Productize, which is going pretty well so far, but it'll be closed by the time that this publishes. Then the other big thing that's on my mind is a big renewed focus into ops calendar. I got some really good feedback on that during the two big Snow Tiny Comps that I went to, and I'm just thinking through some questions on the development side, the development team side of things, and some of the marketing and sales stuff for it.
Brian Casel:Really, those are just more like open questions that I've yet to really dive into and get your feedback on it.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Alright. So why don't I kick things off? Talk a quick update on things on the product and then we can talk about how that's related to keeping customers and prospects updated so you get the full value out of these new releases. So we have been working on the biggest update to the app in a long time.
Jordan Gal:It's a complete switch in infrastructure in our live pages, the pages that actually get published, the checkout pages, upsell pages, and thank you pages. Those were built in Angular. It made things difficult. First, it made the load time slow, which is not acceptable in a checkout product. That, had to address.
Jordan Gal:The other thing is that it was making tracking in JavaScript difficult, Right? I have a limited understanding of exactly why and the actual underlying reasons. Anyway, these were the issues. We decided to
Brian Casel:If people want to put a Facebook pixel on the success page kind
Jordan Gal:of thing, they can't Yes. Do And we allow for JavaScript on our pages. But because of Angular, the way it was loading and in the order which they were people had to do a lot of gymnastics to make it work instead of just copying and pasting, which is how it should be, especially for nontechnical marketers, which is who our product is aimed at. We did this project. It was effectively like a replatform, which is usually a disaster.
Jordan Gal:It was a semi disaster in just how long it took.
Brian Casel:I have a question about that because this is part of what I'm trying to think through with Ops Calendar. I definitely don't wanna do any sort of rebuild anytime soon, but it was built in Angular. Did you go to something else?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We flipped it over to Laravel, so it's just straight HTML and CSS. So it's a lot faster and and loads in an expected way for for the JavaScript.
Brian Casel:So, I mean, my question there then is, like, does that mean that you literally had to go through the list of all the features that you've already had up and running and just rebuild them? Redo all those features?
Jordan Gal:No ish. So some, yes, but not all. Now so that's directly related to the situation we're in. For a long time, that project, that was the most important project. The reason it was the most important project, not only is it because it was going to address the speed issue, which is what we needed.
Jordan Gal:The other thing is so many features are dependent on it that we were holding off because we didn't want to build and then, a month later, rebuild. It turned into the situation of two, three months of just really not many features coming out because we kept waiting on the larger update. That was really frustrating.
Speaker 5:I know that you and I
Brian Casel:are both nontechnical founders and OpsCalendar is built in Laravel and Vue. Js. I don't think that that was a wrong choice. I'm happy with it, but the Vue side of things has definitely been slowing down I mean, literally slowing down the app, but slowing down our progress, especially when the Vue library was outdated and it took like a month for my developer to get it updated and get the whole app. He's still in the progress of fixing all the features that broke when we updated Vue, basically.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's just really frustrating.
Jordan Gal:It's frustrating. The second you have any sort of momentum and people using it, it gets infinitely more complicated because now you're fixing a train that's left the station. This thing is in motion. A year ago, when we made updates, it was, Sorry, guys, to the 20 people using it. Now, with hundreds and all the money processed, it's just scary.
Jordan Gal:Everything is scary. We've reverted to a system where we don't make big updates for the entire group. We first have an early access, like a beta group, that we reach out to and we say, Do you want to be part of this beta for this specific feature? They say yes or no. It's up to them.
Jordan Gal:Then we've built in the mechanism on our end to have a flag to just say, yes, this feature is live for this person. Now the approach is, instead of going from staging to production, it goes from staging to production but nobody sees it, and then from production but nobody's seeing it to just making it available to the beta users that said yes, so now it went from staging to production with nobody to now production with four, five, six people. Then once it gets fleshed out, then it goes production to everybody. It's much more careful in the implementation and in the release just because we have to be more paranoid. Now that this thing got released, it went to early access three weeks ago and then it went live to everybody yesterday.
Jordan Gal:It went, all in all, really smoothly. The early access was not smooth but that's why it's early access. Then this one went smooth and maybe a few hours of debugging and fixing and getting some feedback. There's still a few lingering things, overall, for such a huge update, was really well done. Now we have this mountain.
Jordan Gal:We have fifteen, twenty features that are going to be released in the next two weeks that are kind of ready to go but have been waiting. I want to get the full value out of it, the full marketing value to make our customers happy, make our customers more successful, and also to let prospects know about these new features. We're just starting that process. We don't really have a good way to do it other than we have what we say are two different types of feature releases: a feature release that does warrant marketing and a feature release that doesn't. And so if a feature release warrants marketing, then it's it gets written up in a blog post, written up in a support doc, and then it gets put into an email that goes out to everybody.
Brian Casel:There was a great, I think we talked about this, a great episode of Seeking Wisdom, the podcast Seeking Wisdom, David Cancel, and, they were talking about that. It was a couple months back, but, the marketing and engineering is totally aligned. And when and they ship stuff every single month, It's like, okay, the ship date is both when the feature goes live and the blog post, newsletter, webinar, whatever is happening to market this new thing. It's in lockstep with pushing it live.
Jordan Gal:Everything we do on that side has marketing and promotion in mind. It's just, what's this feature? Is it market worthy? That's been working over the past few weeks as we release stuff, but now, all of a sudden, the speed at which we're releasing things is accelerating. That system feels antiquated.
Jordan Gal:That's like, what are we going to send out an email every two days? Or do we start to send out an email that is like what's new in Cardhook and has maybe two things or four things or six things depending on how many things have been released. Then do we write a blog post for every single one? Maybe we do and then we come back and write blog posts later for the ones that aren't as market worthy. Everything gets a support doc, so this is like the this weird problem over the next few weeks of how do
Brian Casel:we get the most value out of this Like, so you have a lot of stuff that's shipping rapidly. That's that's awesome. So I would just like, if every week or every two weeks there's, like, a a bunch of stuff that went live, just kind of batch the top three or four into into one email update and blog post and just make the coolest thing, the headline, the subject line.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And then Yeah.
Brian Casel:I've seen I've seen a few a few SaaS do that. Like, I get updates from, like, Help Scout and a couple other ones that I'm a customer of. Like, even Help Scout, I guess they're they're redoing their their beacon feature pretty soon, and they like, the founder did a a blog post ahead of the launch. I think the thing is not they're kind of, like, building it right now, but they laid out their vision for this new thing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's definitely one of the things we're weak at in terms of building anticipation. We kind of look internally and we get stressed internally about when is this coming out and when is it then we don't talk ahead of time. Then we're like, Okay. It's finally ready, and then we talk about it where, in reality, we should be building some anticipation.
Jordan Gal:I think, generally speaking, what we're experiencing is that we need ways to communicate more easily and quickly with our customer base. That's why I'm starting to look at it like, Maybe we need a Facebook group, man. Maybe it's time for a Facebook group. I always think of ClickFunnels because they did it so incredibly well. Russell, their founder, would just turn on his phone and just say, Hey, guys.
Jordan Gal:Got this new stuff for you. Check out this screenshot. Look what we're doing. Can't wait to release it. Just these informal ninety second videos goes up on the Facebook page, gets 500 likes and shares and excitement, and then the feature comes out.
Jordan Gal:It's much better.
Brian Casel:Brennan has been doing a really, really good job with that with RightMessage. He's got a RightMessage Facebook group. I don't know how he does it. He's literally every single day, he's posting something to the Facebook Like
Jordan Gal:screen share videos.
Brian Casel:Right? Screen share videos. Like I mean, him and his team are just cranking on on RightMessage. Like, they're shipping stuff every single day, but not just features. Like, here's an explainer video that we just did or, like, the team and I were just we're just whiteboarding something.
Brian Casel:Here's a screen here's a photo of the whiteboard. Like, just stuff like that. Just throwing it all out there. You know?
Jordan Gal:Right. It it is a a reorientation with your relationship and how how open you are, how transparent. We have not done that. I don't think I'm good at it, but it seems like a muscle we need to build if we want to generate a larger community with more heat. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I spoke with Brennan two days ago which we had a good laugh about our mastermind from what, five years ago? Don't know. Four years ago? We met, yeah. When we first met.
Jordan Gal:That's right. That's right. It was great to kind of reminisce on that. But, I feel like when you study what people like him and Russell Brunson and these guys do that are just better at it and then I need to come out of my comfort zone and start doing it.
Brian Casel:Totally. I've been completely eating up Russell Brunson stuff. I'll talk about that when I get to the product test. Really? Oh, yeah.
Brian Casel:Okay.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I'm I'm very interested in that because that's, it's it's different worlds colliding, at least in in in my head. There's, the SaaS world and then there's, like, the marketer world.
Brian Casel:Yeah. He he really kind of, you know, he he's his feet in both both of those worlds for sure. But
Jordan Gal:I mean, they're doing so well. It's crazy. It's yeah. I think they're at like a 125,000 paying customers or something like that. Insane.
Nathan Barry:Insane. Oh my god.
Jordan Gal:I would be surprised if they get scooped. Yeah. I would love that, baby. Yep.
Brian Casel:You know, I talked a couple of months ago about on my mind has been this idea of community marketing and having, whether it's a Facebook group, a Slack group, some private area maybe one for paying customers, one for audience, like inner circle audience people, free but private. And the productized community has started to really pick up. It's pretty active now. I've got a Slack group, I've got a forum, and that's for paid members. I am more active in it now than I was before, but I want to put more stuff out there, more raw, rough things out there.
Brian Casel:I don't publish things until it's done or you know?
Jordan Gal:Or polished or
Brian Casel:Or polished or
Jordan Gal:like It's almost like okay. So let let me just try something. Is it that the people who are better at the transparency, it's that they open up to the process? They show the process of what they're working on as opposed to, Okay, I have worked on this in private. It is finished and it's now ready for you.
Brian Casel:See, I don't know. Mean Is
Jordan Gal:that the right angle on?
Brian Casel:Well, like, different guys do it differently. Like, Justin Jackson is just super active on, like, a thousand different social networks, and I think his thing is just more about, like, he's super like, he engages his his people. Like, he's He's constantly asking questions and throwing a thought experiment out there and all that kind of stuff. Brennan is more about the process, I think, and just putting out, Here's something that's almost finished. Take a look before we actually really push it out there or get your feedback on that.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I tend to just kind of put finished ideas and concepts and articles and videos and podcasts out there after I've worked on them, but there's so much that I work on. The past couple of weeks, I've been deep in automation workflows and just setting up all these different marketing funnels and behind the scenes stuff that I'm like, Man, somebody should see what I'm working on.
Jordan Gal:It's like we're not getting the full value of what we're working on because we're keeping it to ourselves. That's really what it is.
Brian Casel:A lot of it is pretty complex, not not that people wouldn't understand it, just that I'm afraid if I if I hit record on a screencast to to share it out real quick, I'll end up I'll end up spending an hour on the freaking screen screencast, you know? But, yeah. I don't know. Don't know what the answer is to that, but I I do wanna just get more stuff out there.
Jordan Gal:Yep. The community marketing thing, it's already come up, what, twice in the past past two episodes, so we'll see where that goes. Alright. So that's my that's my product update along with that new problem of of how do we communicate better. Yep.
Brian Casel:Cool. Over to the Productize brand side of things, if you will. I did finish the rebrand of my site. It's no longer cashjam.com now. It's productizeandscale.com.
Brian Casel:Same site, same blog, everything. Same newsletter. It's just now it's called that. Got a new logo on it and all that fun stuff. Productizecourse.com is where the the course actually lives, and then there's the productize podcast.
Brian Casel:So so it's now it's all kind of connected under one banner. And so got all that out the door a couple weeks ago, and the plan this year for the productized product is to have it basically be closed all year long. I'm only opening it maybe like once a month, once every two months, something like that. I just finished creating an all new webinar presentation and I presented that live a couple of days ago. This weekend, right now as we record, it's actually the first opening of the new Productize course.
Brian Casel:I already released it to previous members, so they've had access. I've been getting some pretty good feedback on it.
Jordan Gal:This is the first run?
Brian Casel:First run of new customers buying the new Productize. Also, the price is slightly higher now than it was before. Experimenting with different things like before, you get lifetime access. Now you get a year access. Then after that, you have an option to continue with a membership model.
Brian Casel:This weekend, what I did was I promoted this new live webinar to my existing list. I had a few 100 people on the webinar yesterday, which went really well. I was literally finishing up these slides minutes before the live webinar. That's the best. I've said it before, it never ceases to amaze me.
Brian Casel:Live webinars, I spent several weeks putting all the pieces together and still made emails and it's still a scramble. I found out that it must have been fifteen minutes before start time that the buy button was not working.
Jordan Gal:Oh, perfect.
Brian Casel:I was freaking out. It took me a little while to figure it out. It's a new membership system, so I got it all squared away like a couple minutes before. But, yeah, got that squared away. And even, like, after the webinar, I was still writing the emails that are queued up for to go out over the weekend.
Brian Casel:So I was just really just down to the wire on it.
Jordan Gal:One of the best things about events is that they force you
Brian Casel:Totally.
Jordan Gal:To doing things.
Brian Casel:Totally. Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, I spent a lot
Brian Casel:of time building automations that when I run this thing again, it's literally just gonna be like press a button and the whole thing just just goes, you know? So speaking of of Russell Brunson, part of the plan, the marketing plan for the productized stuff is basically this year I I decided to really try to follow his recent book, the system that he lays out there.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Perfect Webinar?
Brian Casel:Yeah. The Perfect Webinar system, basically.
Jordan Gal:Value stack?
Brian Casel:Yep. I think this might be like the first time that I that I really followed somebody else's system, so step by step, like, let me just do everything that he's doing. Right, as the starting point.
Speaker 5:Yeah, like, you know, I've taken a lot
Brian Casel:of ideas from a lot of people and adapted them in different ways, a lot of things have worked pretty well, but it's always been like, Let me just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. The whole concept of I've done a lot of webinars in the past, I would always just come up with something, just teach a bunch of stuff that I think is valuable, and then lead into a pitch. But the way that Russell teaches it in his system in the book, what is it called? It'snot.comsecrets, expertsecrets
Jordan Gal:is the new
Brian Casel:That's right.
Jordan Gal:That's right. Yeah, let's get into this. It's a great opportunity while it's fresh in your mind.
Brian Casel:What I really love about the way that he put it together is that he gets much deeper into the psychology. It's not just like this is how you functionally set up a marketing funnel. We kind of know how that stuff works now. You can figure that out with any tool. What I really like about how he teaches it is he gets into the psychology of, These are the things that you need to square up and frame up in a very specific sequence so that you get the person to resonate with a story and meet you where you experienced this moment and then how that led into the solution.
Brian Casel:When he lays out the perfect, as he calls it, the perfect webinar presentation, he's literally going slide by slide and kind of laying out the psychology under why the pitch and the sales script and even the educational script is structured in the way that he does it. And it's also, like, not like, okay. Literally take my words and and use it, it will work in this way. It's teaching the concept, and so I was able to write, copy, and slide and design the slides in in my style, but still leveraging the same sequence of the story and all that.
Jordan Gal:Is it generally the same approach of having some open loops in the beginning, establishing your credibility, then providing value, then showing how they'll be able to do it also? Is it as expected in that way?
Brian Casel:What he lays out is basically you want to identify three secrets. You're going to learn in this webinar the three secrets to productizing your service, delegating to a team so that you don't do everything yourself, streamlining your sales. You figure out three key benefits of the product that you're selling and the key pain points of why those things are so painful to solve. You do teach a bit about the concept of of how they can be solved, but it's more about telling a story of of how you discovered the solution to to this long held frustration kind of thing. And and then Then those same three secrets then directly tie into the thing that you're pitching as the solution or the how.
Brian Casel:Yeah, it's a good book. I read through it and then I went back through it as I was creating the webinar and took a ton of notes, literally just writing out copy. As I went through the book, was the kind of thing where I read a chapter and then I write some marketing copy and then go back and write some more copies.
Jordan Gal:It was good. I have a webinar scheduled for March 7, so maybe I'll go refresh. I looked at the perfect webinar maybe six months ago, maybe a year ago even, and I did find a great YouTube video of Russell explaining the whole thing.
Brian Casel:His specific example is like, he uses him selling ClickFunnels, the the SaaS, as the as the prime example, so it even applies more to to what you're doing. Eventually, I'll probably try it on on ops calendar, but the I I was using it to sell the productize course and community, so I had to kind of adapt it for that.
Jordan Gal:That's this weekend?
Brian Casel:Yeah, that's going on right now. I promoted that to my existing subscribers. I wasn't sure how it would go over sales wise because I know that there are a lot of people who've just been on my list for a while, and even some people who've already bought Productize came to the webinar. I wasn't really sure. I'm actually still a little bit unsure.
Brian Casel:Sales yesterday and today actually were pretty good, and I'm expecting a few more through the weekend when it closes down on Sunday. Yeah. I mean, I know, I'm not unhappy with the results. It wasn't like the explosive launch that I've seen in in other with other launches that that I've done. And and I think that's mainly because it's mostly people who've it's not a lot of brand new people.
Brian Casel:They've they've kind of seen it. In a couple of weeks, I'm gonna be doing the same thing, but only to paid traffic. So I'm gonna be running ads, to get completely cold audiences into it and and kind of see how that goes. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Different tests.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. So I've I've actually already set up all the all the ads for that, and and that's scheduled out to to go, next week. That'll be kind of like the real test, and and we'll see where that goes. And then I'm, I'm still working out other things on that front, like new lead magnets, new kind of global content stuff, free content, free videos, a free private Facebook group, which I haven't launched yet, but I want to get this stuff going.
Brian Casel:And, you know, I'm just starting to spend a lot more time and effort and resources on on the product side of things because a, it's a it's a really good product that that continues to sell. It's a significant part of my income. B, the audience, that's what is sending all the activity into my other products, audience ops, ops calendar. Even getting feedback about tools like Opps Calendar and stuff like that, like coming from that audience, coming from the community. I mean, it's just so valuable.
Brian Casel:So I'm literally starting to see like the daily benefits of having like an active Slack group of members and stuff like that. So, you know, the more I'm able to invest time in it, the more it pays off clearly and the more that I'm able to give members and make it more of like a community rather than just a course kind of thing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And the fact that it drives leads into the other parts of the business too is just gravy, so it certainly sounds like it makes sense to keep focusing on it. All right, let's see what else we got going on here. Well, I guess we can kind of lump conferences into the same thing. Next week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I'm going to a conference.
Jordan Gal:What I've been trying to think about is, what's the right approach to this? The first thing I think about is just the social interactions. What I did was I got in touch with someone that I know is pretty well connected in that scene and I said, What are you doing Sunday night for dinner? He said, Actually, I'm hosting a VIP dinner and I'll hook you up with some discounted tickets. Here's three or four people that will be there.
Jordan Gal:I got invited to that. And then, Sid, who used to run marketing over at LemonStand, which is an e commerce platform, is now consulting for us on Cardhook. I know he's going to be there, so I invite him. Then this is the serendipity of going to live events. Sid e mails me back and says, Actually, I know someone from high up in Shopify that's going to be there.
Jordan Gal:Should I invite him to dinner? Then I say, Yes, obviously. Now, all a sudden, I'm going to dinner with someone from Shopify and making connections for Sid. It's like, Okay. The social piece of it is clearly the most powerful.
Jordan Gal:I feel comfortable not having this crazy agenda. I just want to just do as much hanging out and socializing as possible. The last time I went a few months ago, we were pretty surprised. I was pretty surprised. I was with Ben.
Jordan Gal:We were surprised that a lot of people knew about what we were doing. Now that I feel more comfortable in that fact, like, okay, so now if my assumption is when we went there, we were kind of like, No one is going know who we are except some people who are in our niche, and that's it. What we learned was, Oh, that's totally wrong. Most people in the space just are aware of all these different tools. Even though they're not using our product, they're aware of it.
Jordan Gal:Now, going into this, I'm trying to say to myself, Okay. Assuming that fact, I think I can be a little more aggressive in terms of, We're building up our agency program and here's what we do. We'd like to list you as an agency and here's what we do for you and here are the features and here's the right person on my team to get in touch with. Now I have a clearer version of our sales process, which is
Brian Casel:Is that a thing that you guys are actively doing?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. So one of our marketing experiments that we want to focus on over the next month is building out a partner program. We don't know if it's going to work, but it is definitely worth some effort to see as an experiment. What we're doing is we're trying to think, Okay, what can we offer people?
Jordan Gal:What is actually valuable? We basically wrote a bullet list of what are features for an agency. We just went through those and that's now our agency plan. Then the other thing we're going to do is launch a partner's page so we can list individual agencies and partners on a page on our site and then give badges based on how many customers they send our way and that we're working on together. You'll get a cart hook badge once you get three customers on the platform.
Jordan Gal:You'll get some platinum thing once you get five. We're just trying to think through all these incentives. Lot of the agencies would love a link from our site. They see us as the platform and, all a sudden, that helps them with credibility. Then what we've done is created two PDFs, one PDF for the agency that explains the agency plan and the benefits and what we can do for their customers and explanation of how to do things.
Jordan Gal:Then the other PDF we created was to give to the agency that they can very easily just forward on to their customer. When their customer says, Well, okay. I'm interested in hearing more about this card hook thing. What is it? Instead of putting that task on the agency, we just said, Just here's the PDF.
Jordan Gal:You can give it. It's oriented differently. It's oriented for the end customer. It talks about the benefits, the features, integrations, and what it can do for them. That way, we're just trying to make it as easy as possible on the agencies.
Jordan Gal:This is the type of stuff that I think I'll be able to report back next week on how it went and how it felt and what I would do.
Brian Casel:I definitely want to hear yeah. Even long term, want to hear how the agency stuff goes because I've seen some companies do really well with some sort of agency reseller kind of plan. And we have a small segment of clients on audience ops who are agencies. We don't have an official we do work with them. We have some programs, some incentives for them, but nothing really official or or that we promote.
Brian Casel:And then with with ops calendar, clearly one of the plans is is aimed at agencies. And I've I've seen, like, mixed results. Like, even back in restaurant engine, I I had very mixed results where where we would have agencies and I've heard this from other people too, like agencies really excited about it, they want to resell it to their customers but then they just can't get customers to sign up.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You never know if it's a waste of time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because of that experience with Restaurant Engine where I invested a lot of time and effort into that and then to get like almost no payoff, I've been so hesitant to spend any time on it in my current businesses. But sometimes I feel like I should be spending more.
Jordan Gal:Right. We have some evidence that there's opportunity there, but we don't know where it'll go. We're doing what we're effectively saying is a limited experiment. We have maybe 1010% to 15% of our entire customer base was brought on by an agency. We have four or five agencies that have three, four, or five clients each.
Jordan Gal:There's something there we just can't tell, so we're just going to sniff around it and see what we can do to encourage it, see if it works. My goal, speaking of ClickFunnels, ClickFunnels has agencies that have turned themselves into ClickFunnels agencies.
Brian Casel:That's they're like hardhook certified.
Jordan Gal:Exactly right. That's like the end goal. If we can create this ecosystem around our platform, that's the end goal. I think the evidence I'm looking for that we're heading in that direction is when I see agencies popping up that are cart hook agencies. We're not quite there yet.
Jordan Gal:We're at the point now where some of our agency partners include us as their normal. When they send out a proposal, what they'll do for you is, I'll set up your Shopify store, I'll create three landing pages, and I'll connect it to three funnels in Cardhook. It's part of their proposal. That's a step in the right direction. The next step is, we specialize in Cardhook.
Jordan Gal:And we're not there yet. Very cool. Love it. Yeah. You want to talk?
Jordan Gal:Otherwise, I was going to talk about giving presentations at conference which is a slightly different topic.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Go for it. So what's the topic?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So so the topic I'm thinking of is is about how we do content marketing, which is like the last topic that I would I would expect of myself because I haven't done content marketing before. I wasn't really a believer in it. You and I have talked about the whole audience building thing ad nauseam over the past few years. Where we have settled is on this very cynical ROI driven approach to content marketing.
Jordan Gal:We do content marketing predominantly, not exclusively, but predominantly as ammunition for paid advertising. I think it could be interesting to go through how we do that and how we marry our content writer with our marketer and they work together. One creates the content. One promotes it. Then that free content acts as the initial starting point for a visitor.
Jordan Gal:It's an ad that goes to free content and then the retargeting funnel of advertisements that happen over the next few weeks after you've hit our page. That's really why we're doing it so that you get into the retargeting and then those ads are actually action steps in terms of like a buy button,
Brian Casel:Start a free trial.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Get into a webinar, a video, so deeper in. We've kind of been able to do this over the past few weeks, it's working because I think it's something to teach. I don't want talk about myself. Want something useful.
Brian Casel:I I can't wait to hear it. I know that audience will eat it up.
Jordan Gal:Right. Every time I've heard about content marketing, I've heard it in this give value and create an audience. That always sounded, A, daunting and, B, hard to rise above all the great content out there.
Brian Casel:This is something that I need to probably communicate better with audience ops because our best clients tend to think of it that way.
Jordan Gal:They want ROI.
Brian Casel:Yeah. All clients want ROI, the ones who stick around the longest with us, and we've had a bunch onboard forever, for like three years now, a lot of them are doing paid traffic to the articles and the lead magnets that we do for them. A lot of them just do that. So that's one way of looking at it. Then the other way to look at it, I believe, and this also ties back to paid, is the back end.
Brian Casel:Everybody wants to say, Oh, I published this blog post and that blog post resulted in X new customers for my business. It really doesn't work like that. You might get some, but it really work. Content is a benefit for, A, to be a top of funnel, build up those retargeting lists, have something to run paid traffic to. But then on the back end, if you're running any sort of campaign, what, five five to 10% will convert right away, 90% don't.
Brian Casel:They're gonna be around later, hopefully, and you need that content to keep them around and keep them coming back and reactivate them. After the first campaign, they they just weren't like timing wise, they they they were off. But if they opted in for the thing early on and then three months later, they're ready having having something to send to their inbox every week, that's that's where the back end ROI comes from. Again, like, that's getting ROI from your paid campaigns and monetizing that 90% who don't convert on the first run of the paid campaign.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We've talked about this before in terms of email strategy where the content keeps people around and then the product and feature updates is what gets people to take action in terms of starting a free trial. I think that's what I want to talk about. We have direct experience with it right now. We're in the middle of this six week campaign that has been planned out so cynically, but it's content marketing.
Jordan Gal:It's like, okay, blog post one is going to be about the market. Blog post two is going to be about a smaller part of the market. Blog post three is going to be about our own feature. Blog post four is going to be about another big feature. Blog post five is going to be announcing a webinar to talk about it.
Jordan Gal:Then number six is going to be a case study. It's like, okay, each one gets published on Monday and gets promoted for the entire week and then another one drops on Monday. Then Monday, it's almost like a barrage of content to build up this retargeting audience all in anticipation of, And now we're doing a webinar. That audience is as big as possible that we have the pixel ready for retargeting and then, all at once, we can flip. Everybody will get promoted to the webinar.
Jordan Gal:Then everybody gets promoted to case study, the things that actually convert people. That's what I think I'm going to talk about. What I found was an article by Dan Andrews, Fifteen Minute How to Create a Conference Presentation. It's just a super useful blog post with a video, a fifteen minute video, and then just a slide format. I'm not going to follow it exactly to a T, but just what really helped me in that blog post was just how to make sure, how do you make what you're talking about useful?
Jordan Gal:That's what people like. They came to a conference not to hear about how awesome you are, to hear about what you're doing and to learn this stuff.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Dan knows a thing or two about running conferences.
Jordan Gal:Right. That's what he wrote from a very humble point of view. He was like, When I started, I was super nervous. After doing it a while, this is what I came up with to make sure that it's useful. Just going through his process and making sure that you're telling it as a story but also addressing problems and solutions, problem and solution, problem and solution.
Jordan Gal:Then here are common mistakes that we made that you can avoid, and here's what you can do right now to get started on it. That's what I want to hear.
Brian Casel:Another good point about making a presentation, I heard Patrick Campbell. So I just spoke to him recently on on the Productize podcast as well, but I heard him on a different podcast. I forgot which one. You kinda lay out the the main point, the thesis, like the argument in the first two minutes of of the speech, and the rest of the hour is convince people that that's true. Convince people why that like, everything else supports that that first argument.
Brian Casel:You know? Like, whatever that thing is. It's rather than just, like, lay out a whole lesson plan on something, think about it more like capture their attention with this bold argument of some kind, big new concept, and then you keep their attention because they're skeptical at first and then you need to convince them the of the time.
Jordan Gal:Right. And as you're going and showing yeah, the funny thing is that it's really hard to connect ROI with content, but doing it in this way, we actually have an easy way to measure. We know what people's first touchpoint was and then we can see when they signed up. I can run through the ROI and I can show, Here's how much we paid in salaries and here's how much we paid in promotion and this is the number of trials that it created and this is the amount of MRR that it created. It is a paid marketing campaign that content is necessary in order to make it effective.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yep. I like it. And then that Dan Andrews thing, was like, Okay. I went from Oh my god, what am I going to talk about?
Jordan Gal:To, Okay. I think I have not only a topic that's worthwhile and valuable to other people but now some confidence in the, okay, I can figure out how to make a presentation useful as opposed to just telling what we did. Cool. Yeah. Awesome.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I'll just talk about ops calendar real quick because you know, it's just continuously on on my mind, obviously, and and I'm thinking through a lot of the big next steps to where to go with it throughout the rest of this year. I got some really good feedback from folks, at at Big Snow Tiny Conf this year. So, we talked a few weeks back about how I initially, for a few months at the end of last year, I forced everybody on the on the marketing side to go to request a demo. Signing up for a free trial was just not available. You have to get on a call with me, and then I'll give you the trial sign up.
Brian Casel:Then I turned that off so that now people can sign up for a free trial. There's still an option to do a demo, but nobody does that. Everybody just goes straight to the trial. That's been the case for the last three or four months now, we're getting actually a lot of trials now. I'm actually pretty surprised that we're getting about one or two a day just organically.
Brian Casel:We did a bunch of content in the 2017, which I think is doing well with SEO, and the marketing side is doing pretty well. I did some tactics with Quora and a couple other things and directory sites and just some low hanging fruit stuff that's bringing more traffic. I'm happy with that, but I haven't been actively focused on it, I have been active on the trial to paid conversion. We get some people converting to paid, but not nearly enough. Not that I magically expected that to happen.
Brian Casel:I know that it takes a lot of work, there's still plenty of stuff that we have yet to put in place, like onboarding things. These last few months, getting all these signups, I have a drip email that does ask them to get on a call, and then occasionally I'll just manually email people, try to get on a call. I still feel out of touch. I've had a few calls with customers over the last couple of months, not nearly as many as I did before, Now I'm thinking about just switching that back, just going back to the force the demo. I used to get a lot of emails like, Oh, can I just skip the demo?
Brian Casel:I just want to sign up for it, but I just have to talk to more customers. That's the thing. So, yeah, like, I'm probably gonna make that change in the next week or so and just get back into the habit of of doing a bunch of demo calls every every week, a few a week. And, I think that'll just be good to get closer to the customer again. I I feel like there's a lot of activity in the app, but I'm not talking to enough people.
Jordan Gal:That's it. Just a a few weeks and and you already feel out of touch.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And I you know what it is?
Brian Casel:It's like I I I don't really know for sure, like, which features are the most I have an idea of which features are are most important. We have a couple of features that we built that nobody's using. It's mainly the checklists and automation of the assigning checklists and due dates and have it revolve around your calendar. It is focused on marketers and running content and syncing with your blog and social media, and it can do all that stuff. But from a positioning and market focus standpoint, it's also like a like a process tool and like an operations tool.
Brian Casel:Like
Jordan Gal:Yeah. What are you finding is is, like, the main reason people sign up?
Brian Casel:I'm seeing both. You know? I'm seeing I'm seeing marketers just come to it for, like, a content calendar social media scheduling tool, which it very much is. I'm seeing a lot of the same people, but also just other people who are running organizations and teams who a lot of the feedback is like, it's kind of like a Gantt chart without the crappy Gantt chart. It does the same stuff of having a checklist adapt to due dates on the calendar.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, and multiple things going on at the same time.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and like dependencies and that kind of like it does all that stuff and you can like automatically assign people on your team every time you add something to a calendar, all all that kind of stuff. So, and I'm I'm getting feedback from productized members who are looking for process tools because that's very much about systems and processes and and recurring tasks and all that kind of stuff. This is why I need to talk to more customers. I'm trying to think through who is the ideal customer for this, what's the ideal use case. Then there's the whole agency side of it too.
Brian Casel:It's like content agencies, marketing agencies using it as a tool to power their clients' campaigns. I feel like that side of it, is interest, but I need to do more active outreach to agencies, whereas the marketers just tend to find it, and I think that side tends to be just signing up organically. The few that I do talk to are really excited about it, they see it as alternative. They could drop some other tools that are that they don't like, but I need to do more outbound outreach to get like, they're not necessarily gonna search and find it the way that marketers are are just finding it. And then the, the other big thing on my mind right now is the developers.
Brian Casel:I don't really know where I'm going to go with this, to be honest.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay. This is a recurring problem in all founder circles that I'm involved in. It's everywhere. It's hard.
Jordan Gal:That's it.
Brian Casel:It's hard and it's this is self funded, I am limited by cash. I mean, ops calendar is is losing money every month. Like, they're you know, they're it's not breakeven at this point. So what I need is a lead developer. That's what I need.
Brian Casel:I have two developers, and I feel like neither of them is a lead developer. One of them has been on the on the project longer than the other. They're both good coders. They execute the features. They've built the bulk of the app.
Brian Casel:They ship features. They communicate fairly well, but I've been having issues with their availability. One guy's been tied up with personal issues, kind of like a chronic ongoing thing, which has been very, very frustrating, literally taking his hours from thirty down to five a week. I'm just like, Do thirty. I need you for thirty.
Brian Casel:Just stuff like that that's been super frustrating. Larger than that, the thing that I actually need is somebody to go in between me and the junior developer or developers. I'm very much the product manager and I want to continue doing that. I'm doing the design, the front end, planning the features, understanding what customers need and where we should prioritize features. I'm managing the product.
Brian Casel:I could talk about technical challenges when you explain to me the technical challenges, but I don't know. I can't code Laravel and Vue and PHP. I only really can code HTML and CSS.
Jordan Gal:The decision making that goes on before actually coding, the scoping and estimating and
Brian Casel:The architectural planning. There are things in the app that are functional today, but they are slow and buggy and intertwined with so many other things that I know just from using the app, I could tell that certain things were fundamentally, architecturally just not as good as they could be. If I had a lead developer who really owned it, who owned those decisions
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But it sounds like it's either a co founder or it's a full time employee, both of which are hard.
Nathan Barry:I know.
Jordan Gal:I went the co founder route and Ben ran that for a long time and that's what allowed us to do anything.
Brian Casel:I'm talking to different people about that and I'm trying to figure out what my priorities are and how much I want to invest into this person and into this position and into the product as a whole. I do intend to continue pushing and growing on the product, but I am a multi product kind of person. It's not my full time thing, so it's like how much of my overall business am I going to invest into this and how much should I expect of somebody else to be invested into this? And then of course the cash flow constraints and what I'm spending now versus what I would need to spend to get this level of person and where would they need to be based. I'm also thinking through, like, maybe it can be like somebody comes on full time for a month or two to do, like, a complete audit and a big strategy session, and then after that it's a part time basis.
Brian Casel:Like, I don't know. I'm trying to think through different options, and I don't really know where I'm going to land on that. But I do know that the pace of development and I think the overall, I'll say, quality, under the hood quality is not where I would like it to be. The customer base needs to get higher for me to really feel comfortable in in investing heavily into it as The well, but
Jordan Gal:the chicken and eggbees.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So it's a it's a question of, like, timing and and what exactly I wanna do about it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think that's one of the hardest puzzles to unlock as a nontechnical founder. If you are technical, you can decide how much do I want to invest in this of my own work. If you're not technical and that option doesn't exist, then you have to figure out the puzzle. How do you incentivize someone?
Jordan Gal:How do you pay someone? How do you find someone? Do you make it work?
Brian Casel:Like I said, we're getting organic trial signups every day, and I know that most of these are actually not coming from my audience. Some are, but a lot of them are not.
Jordan Gal:Right. And that tells you you're heading in the right direction. Right? It's like these little confidence building steps.
Brian Casel:Yeah. There's interest in it. There's people actively searching for a tool like this, but I still need to do more work around exactly which problem solution, product market fit kind of stuff do I need to really put all of our eggs into which basket? I'm trying to figure that out.
Jordan Gal:The way I did it is I got to the same point you are. The developer I worked with originally, Charlie, was really strong. The initial product was thin, but it was really well built. It did not have a lot of features, really limited features, but it worked well for what it did. Then just those first, what is it, 30 maybe customers, that's really what was used in order to attract someone of Ben's caliber.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Because then it was like, Look, there's something here and if you jumped on board and we both kind of went in our own lanes, then it would grow a lot faster. But what would we say to a young person with less experience that came and said, How do I attract a good developer? We'd say, Find a way to make it attractive.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Jordan Gal:It's similar.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and I do think about your your story of from, like, the first year of Cardhook, I I I I expect it would be something along those lines. Like and and I think I'm getting kinda close to that point where it's like, okay. I I know that at some point, everything kinda needs to be upgraded in some way. We'll see. So that's, you know, it's not something that I'm going to figure out in the next week or two, but it's, it's just on my mind and I got a priority.
Brian Casel:Number one is just to get more customers and talk to more customers and really let that fuel everything But
Jordan Gal:you never know. You never know who's listening, right? Sounds like an opportunity to me. That's what it sounds like. Yep.
Jordan Gal:All right, brother. We got to call it. I got to get some lunch. I got to go to my law firm today. I don't know what's going on.
Jordan Gal:It's Friday.
Brennan Dunn:Good luck with that.
Jordan Gal:Cool. It's great to catch up, my man. Have a great weekend. Yeah. You too.
Jordan Gal:See you. Alright. See you, everybody.
