Charging For Attention / Elusive Product-Market-Fit
Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of bootstrap web. I'm Jordan.
Brian Casel:I am Brian.
Jordan Gal:What's up,
Brian Casel:Brian? You know, not much. Just digging out of some snow over here in the in the Northeast and
Jordan Gal:Oh yeah. I didn't realize it's 65 and sunny here in Portland so
Brennan Dunn:Oh yeah, of course.
Brian Casel:I did actually I did just book a trip. My family we're gonna be heading out out West to California and then up up through Oregon and stopping through Portland.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Very nice. Like over the summer?
Brian Casel:Yeah. In June. I think we're just gonna be in Portland for like one day, but or one night, but
Jordan Gal:Alright. Well, we'll get together. We didn't record last week. I think it was my fault. I think it was me basically saying I am not emotionally prepared to talk in public.
Brian Casel:Well, you know, it's funny because I think I'm that person today. Wait for you for doing
Jordan Gal:it anyway.
Brian Casel:But we're recording anyway.
Jordan Gal:I genuinely was was not comfortable with what was gonna come out of my mouth last time. That's the main thing I have to talk about today.
Brian Casel:I got two things. One is, this week I ran a very limited kind of experiment to run completely cold paid traffic to a webinar to sell the productized course. That webinar happened yesterday. Today is Friday. That webinar was yesterday, Thursday.
Brian Casel:Selling the course through this Sunday, and then it'll be closed again. My general audience didn't really see that. It was only to new people, so that's kind of interesting. The thing that's been kind of driving me in circles this past week is just doing a lot of customer research around OpsCalendar and what direction I want to go on that sort of product front. I don't really have a lot of answers to talk about today, but I can talk a bit about what I'm doing to get myself out of my own head and talking to customers.
Brian Casel:So, yeah, that's it. What about you?
Jordan Gal:Okay. Well, let's get into a little bit. So the past few months, we have been working on version two of our platform. We originally built it in Angular, which which helped get it off the ground a little sooner. It turns out that that was not the right tech to build it on because it was compromising speed, and it was also compromising tracking simplicity.
Jordan Gal:Our product used by ecommerce stores, not exclusively, but almost exclusively, our user base uses paid traffic to drive leads and to drive sales. Tracking is hugely, hugely important. So Angular affected both of those things, the speed of the checkout and the tracking. So those are, like, two of the most critical things of the entire product. So we made the decision back in September to do it, to basically rewrite the underlying infrastructure and move it over to Laravel so it's just loading straight HTML and CSS.
Jordan Gal:That project dragged on for a lot longer than we expected. It was a lot more complicated than we expected, which we should have expected. It always is. Always.
Brian Casel:And I learned that the hard way again and again and again.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And so we we got ourselves into into a rough spot because we were building version two. And because of that, a lot of the features that we had planned, we didn't release because it didn't make any sense to write them on version one and then have to rewrite them for version two. So that made sense to me. What what I didn't anticipate is that the project would would take longer than expected.
Jordan Gal:So we we went through a few months of really not releasing any real features that people wanted. And that affected churn and affected overall satisfaction. And so the whole company, we were getting pretty antsy. So we we worked everything to this release of version two, and that happened two weeks ago. We released it on a Thursday.
Jordan Gal:We immediately see the conversion rates jump up by 5%. Like immediately, like the next hour. And we're like, oh my god, here we go. It was all worth it and this is just going to bring better performance. And we see people are doing well with our product and paying us.
Jordan Gal:And now this is just literally overnight increasing their performance. We're just so excited. So we're starting to high five each other virtually. And then Saturday comes around and we start getting reports of, guys, what's going on with my tracking? And then an avalanche of woah, what happened to my tracking?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well you know the the internet turns off on weekends. Know that.
Jordan Gal:Well, mean e commerce does not. Right?
Brian Casel:You you don't stop
Jordan Gal:your Facebook ads on a Saturday. You you keep going but our our employees don't work on Saturday. And so what had happened was that, I won't get too geeky because I can't, but my layman's understanding of it is that Angular, keeps the pages persistent. So between the checkout, upsell, and thank you pages, it doesn't actually refresh to a new page. So we were doing some weird magic with tracking and scripts firing and API calls and so on.
Jordan Gal:And when we switched over to Laravel, the pages were fully refreshing. And so what was happening was that the API calls were getting terminated before reaching their destination because the page would load, the next page would load. So we literally went from too slow to too fast, which is ironic, but it blew up everybody's track. We tried, we tested it, everything, but we missed a few things. So we had to revert back to version one.
Jordan Gal:Super painful, pissed off everybody and especially our most important biggest customers who use a lot of advanced scripts and custom scripts and so on. But we had no choice. That was the right move. So we revert back and we have been reverted back to version one for the past week. And and now we're finally re releasing version two on Monday.
Jordan Gal:So it was at first it was unbelievably frustrating because you know, I felt like we should have caught things and it shouldn't have happened and we should have communicated better and everything. I was very, very unhappy. I was at my max frustration, you know. And of course, where am I when this happens? At a conference.
Jordan Gal:Of course. I'm in San Diego. Exactly. I'm in San Diego for a conference. This has happened like three times when I'm away at conferences for some weird reason.
Jordan Gal:So I'm at a conference and I'm I'm looking at an ocean of opportunity in front of me. Right? Potential partners, potential customers learning things. And I'm I'm on my laptop, man. I'm taking care of biz.
Jordan Gal:I'm making sure people have what they need and communicating, emailing customers and so on. I was very, very unhappy. But then something, amazing happened. The team reacted in such a way that I don't know how to describe it, it showed me where they were as a team and in their knowledge and so on. And everyone just got down to business, got serious and started communicating.
Jordan Gal:Right? I had like one stand up where I just kind of expressed my frustration and gave some marching orders, that type of thing. And then I just disappeared. I just did not insert myself into conversations at all. And they and they just flourished, man.
Jordan Gal:They just did their thing and they created documents and they communicated together and they set things up and they organized. And I was like, holy shit. I have a real company that doesn't that doesn't need me.
Brian Casel:And it's like you have to go through these fallouts once in a while for everybody to experience that pain, not just you experience that pain, but everyone on the team. Know that it's probably not an individual's fault, but it's like the team as a whole dropped some sort of ball, some probably several balls somewhere.
Jordan Gal:Exactly. It's it's everybody.
Brian Casel:So now it's like everybody's motivated to make sure this doesn't happen again. Yep. Right.
Jordan Gal:And I and I made sure that the team knew and felt that this is not a mistake by the engineers. This is everybody. Because if if success had communicated better, then people would have expected a a bigger thing with potential for danger. If support had done better to document it and if product had done better to coordinate things and if engineering had done more, it's everybody. Nobody walks away saying, well, somebody screwed up.
Jordan Gal:It was an amazing thing. It was brutal, but we kind of like went through a battle together and then all this week everyone's just like in this great mood because we like came together through this experience and now I just really want everyone to see the rewards of it and I just am really, really hoping for Monday to go smooth and the conversion rates to go up and then to see the MRR climb because of it. I'm just like the team deserves to feel the win from that experience. So it's it was it was rough but it was it's very exciting at the same time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Wow. Crazy.
Brennan Dunn:It was
Jordan Gal:it was a trip.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. I bet.
Jordan Gal:We have hundreds and hundreds of customers and you have several thousand orders every day and it's just pressure and and everyone feels it. So, you know, it's like the support tickets aren't, hey, this button doesn't work. Support tickets are like, you just cost me $10,000.
Brian Casel:Yeah. As I said this week, I've been going through a lot of these like questions around what to do with the product and where to focus. It's like thinking through the whole question of service businesses versus software businesses versus training product businesses. A lot of people look to the software, the SaaS model as like, Oh, you free yourself of all the headaches that come with client services. Everyone's got some version of that.
Brian Casel:Even customers who are paying just a couple $100 a month or less, there are still going to be fires to put out and complaints maybe coming in a different form and a different way to deal with it, but it's not always like the grass is greener on the other side for those looking to transition from one model to a different model. There's pros and cons of everything and and in terms of what the day to day enjoyment of running that business, you know?
Jordan Gal:Almost every business is going to have is going to have that. Like you just have to talk to people and we we always talk about, right, like Patrick McKenzie's mantra of charge more. The more you charge, the higher the expectations.
Brian Casel:Like when the price point is low and something goes wrong or multiple things go wrong for a customer, they're just going to cancel. They might send a question or two or a complaint get a refund or something, and that's not the end of the world. When the price point is high, they don't just cancel. They've got a fire that you need to put out. You've to make this work.
Brian Casel:You've to make it right. You know? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And they deserve that attention.
Brian Casel:And they deserve that attention. Yeah.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I mean, I get into sales conversations and the person I'm talking with just asks me very matter of factly, then they say, look, your competitor is $37 a month. You're telling me now that you want me to pay you $2,000 a month. I need to understand the reason. And that answer is almost exclusively focused on the team and the service.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The attention. The
Jordan Gal:attention. Right? And we say, look, you're doing a launch on a Saturday. You're going to make $500,000 in a launch on a Saturday. You let us know ahead of time.
Jordan Gal:You'll have an engineer support person on call on a Saturday. And and that that's what you pay for. Because if something goes wrong with that launch, it's gonna cost you a $100,000. Right? And if no one's there to answer you, you're out of luck.
Jordan Gal:If you pay someone $37 a month, they they can't. They can't service you. And it's like, oh, also the software is better because we have more people. But that's that's not that's not actually the answer.
Brian Casel:Yep. It's a funny game.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The thing I've gotten worried about lately and I I I've been thinking more and more about is the is the the fact that at some point we we kind of have to choose between enterprise and not because we have this huge range of $300 a month up to thousands of dollars a month and those customers currently are being treated the same. So if someone has a real issue, yeah, we have what we call VIPs, right? And we have them tagged in front. So whenever something comes in, everyone knows it's a VIP that's asking a question and so on.
Jordan Gal:But we pretty much treat everyone the same and that can't really last. We either have to treat everyone the same and charge in the hundreds or treat everyone the same and charge in the thousands. So it's kind of something on the horizon that that I see is, alright, at some point, gonna gonna have to choose one direction.
Brian Casel:We were just talking about this in my mastermind group this week about like, the closer you can get your product to the dollar, to to the business's ability to make money, the more essential your product becomes. Right? They can't or they don't wanna just cancel. It's not the first to go in their list of SaaS when they're when they're canceling SaaS, but more is on the line and more more fires to put out if things go wrong and and all that.
Jordan Gal:So Yeah. Was it Jason Cohen or or maybe Rob Walling that came out with like a here's the perfect SaaS business, like how to build the perfect SaaS business. I think it was Jason Cohen. And and one of the points was be really valuable but not middle of the night critical. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Otherwise, you're you're setting yourself up for those
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I and I was talking to my master, like, you're in the the ecommerce space and I'm not really. Like, my my customers and my audience are not exclusively ecommerce folks. And I feel like in the ecommerce world, they're almost everything is very close to the dollar. Right?
Brian Casel:Every kind of product or service around ecommerce is to help you sell more units.
Jordan Gal:It it does always lead up to that. But, like, our our mantra and the critical piece that we have to focus on is that we never want to get in the way of a customer giving our merchant money. So not many apps and not many services actually will prevent someone from being able to give you money. Whereas if we screw up, we do. So that's where we try to kind of focus on.
Jordan Gal:We have an oh shit button in our app that if anything goes wrong, you just click a button and it turns everything off and sends it to the Shopify checkout. Right? For that Saturday 2AM call and someone's freaking out, you can just say, hit that button and we will fix it, but hit that button so no one is prevented from buying.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. Yeah. Well
Jordan Gal:What's going on your So
Brian Casel:I guess kind of real quick is the, on the productize front, I ran this. I wanted to see if I can run cold traffic straight to a webinar and then and then sell the productize course. Like I do have funnels and automation for my audience. It's not an automated launch thing. I do actually do it live now every once in a while to my audience, and this webinar was live as well.
Brian Casel:But my goal for this one was to just run Facebook ads to cold audiences, not retargeting, not email subscribers. So I excluded email subscribers. And I ran ads for, I guess it was like three and a half days, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday ads. And then the webinar was this Thursday, which was yesterday. And then the the cart is open now up until this Sunday to buy Productize.
Brian Casel:As of now, it's it has not paid for itself. I got 60 people to register for the webinar. It's like a totally new funnel, so I don't know if I'm happy or not with that. I kind of think that for a first run of this, I'm not so disappointed with that number.
Jordan Gal:How much are you paying per registrant?
Brian Casel:Around $25 $30 Higher than I will want ultimately, but for a first run, I'm not so disappointed.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I mean, I'd say the goal is like 8 to $12.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And how much is the product itself?
Brian Casel:Two options. One is $4.97, one is $7.97.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I mean, that's the model that I see a lot these days is webinar to a questionnaire. And the questionnaire is a qualifier for a sales call and then people try to sell anywhere between like a thousand to $5,000.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I've seen that too. I've seen that too. I don't want to go much higher on these prices because I don't want to do that sort of sales process for productize. It's intended to be more of a passive product.
Brian Casel:It sold one yesterday, and we've got a couple more days of this promotion, a couple more emails that will go out over the next few days. If we sell a couple more, it'll more than break even. I'm happy with like the data that I was able to get from this, this first run so that like the next time I do it, I'll, I'll be able to optimize. I've already figured out, like, cause I ran like a lot of AB tests on these, on these ads. Like I had some more like video ads, some more just an image, some more lead ads, like Facebook lead form ads, some more went to a landing page.
Brian Casel:I targeted like four or five different targeting groups. I've got a lot of data to work with on, on the next time around. The next kind of thing that I that I've been working on is is just more of that, like, preliminary lead magnet that I can run ongoing ads to. So I'll I'll run cold ads to just a few blog articles, which go to the a free crash course, and then that will just run ongoing. Then periodically when I run the webinar launch, those prospects will be more ready to join live.
Brian Casel:And I got like about, it was like 15 or so people out of that 60 to attend live. Again, these are like completely new people who haven't been in my audience, not a huge number, but you know, to see how this could work for a cold audience, I was not so disappointed with that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's pretty interesting. 15 total strangers to show up live is, is really interesting.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:You can get that conversion rate up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Then, you know, there's the replay that's available for the next like two days and so we'll see.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. What's like what's the math on that little mini experiment, right? If you get 15 people there, if you can close 30%, I guess you can kinda work your way up to that. I know it's not it can't be that high up upfront, maybe 20%. I don't know.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, if I can, if I can basically sell three copies of of the productized course, this is profitable.
Jordan Gal:Right. Three copies at like average of $600. That's $1,800. They're gonna get the registration down. It's it's I love the math place where you're like, alright, I'm just gonna see if it works and see if I can get that down and this up and if it works, just keep keep doing it.
Jordan Gal:It's definitely not not easy to get it to work, but
Brian Casel:Yeah. I worked really hard on, on just setting up automation so that every time I run one of these webinars, I don't have to go through the whole process of like queuing up all the emails and stuff. Like it's, I've got the system down. I just need to kind of pick a date on the calendar and that and then everything else basically runs.
Jordan Gal:That that's nice. You have that all set up in drip?
Nathan Barry:Drip.
Brian Casel:Yep. Does does drip allow
Jordan Gal:export of of of funnels like that? I mean, that that's so valuable.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Well, so a lot of it I I built off of Brennan's teachings on that kind of stuff. I I tweak some things, but, I've emailed drip support about this multiple times. The the one thing that I really wish they would just add is having a date based event in a workflow. You know?
Brian Casel:As opposed to a trigger. Yeah. Like just like like somebody's going through the workflow, stop until you get to April 24 and then continue.
Jordan Gal:I see. Instead of it being relative to the previous step.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because then I could run a whole live webinar around April 24, you know, and and have emails that go out two days after April 24. You know, stuff like that. But I kinda do do that with drip, but it's a a lot of really technical hacky workarounds to to make that work.
Jordan Gal:We've we've been banging our heads around it the past few weeks too. We're doing a webinar on Wednesday with an integration partner and we moved the date once to be after the release because it was scheduled for last week and making all those changes. Yeah, it's different campaigns, different automations, different triggers, different broadcast emails. It's like that's it's that's a lot. It makes it hard to say, okay.
Jordan Gal:Well, let's just do it again in two weeks because it worked. It makes it hard to do that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So, know, I think that was a good, little experiment. It's still running this weekend. We'll see how it turns out. But, just real quick, you know, before before we got to hop off, I'm actually writing an article that I'll put out next week about this.
Brian Casel:I know that we a lot of listeners to this, like, we're all working on stuff. We're working on getting a product off the ground, get that traction, figure out the right direction, get to that product market fit, that elusive product market fit. With OpsCalendar, talked last week about some of the technical challenges that we've been having, and those are still there. Very much like you, we had to revert back to an earlier version because the new updates just caused way too many bugs. I was faced with this thing where it's like, We're probably going to need to rebuild most of it, if not all of it, so I don't want to invest in building new features on our existing app.
Brian Casel:Then I came to this conclusion of like, All right, well, if it's going to be rebuilt, might as well address some product market fit issues. We have some paying customers, but we've had some cancellations, and I'm really trying to get to the bottom of that. Also, trying to really dial in, where is the bulk of my audience and where is their need, and is that really aligned with the problem that OpsCalendar exactly solves? Don't know about that. There's a lot of questions up in the air.
Jordan Gal:You're asking the right questions though.
Brian Casel:What do people actually
Jordan Gal:want and need and are willing to pay for?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think I talked about how the Ops Calendar product kind of merges together a lot of different things. They do work together like the content planning, the social media scheduling, but also the checklists and processes, and automation and team delegation. Folks who know me, I'm a process freak in systems, and AudienceOps basically runs like a machine and all this stuff. I'm trying to figure out where the really useful parts are for my people and which people are interested in the other stuff.
Brian Casel:There's a lot of questions, and I don't have all the answers yet. See, when I get into one of these cycles, I've been through this before and it has paralyzed me. It just stops all progress for too long of a period. My goal is just to get some decision made on a plan so that I can keep moving forward.
Jordan Gal:Help me understand, define what you mean by get into one of these phases. Is it like a doubt phase or like a relook or like a
Brian Casel:Yeah. Doubt, product market fit. Why did a bunch of customers cancel in the last few weeks? If we're gonna rebuild it, what should we build exactly? What shouldn't we build?
Jordan Gal:You don't want that to take too long before you before you go to the next iteration, the next the next hypothesis or Yeah.
Brian Casel:Because I've there have been cycles where I had those same sorts of doubts in previous years where I spent a month, two, three months just going back and forth with, should I do this or should I do that? I've learned from those cycles that the key is to talk to customers.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, go faster. Faster circles. Talk
Brian Casel:to customers, get more feedback, look at certain data points, and talk to advisors. That's been my full time job for the past week and it will be for the next week. Specifically, I've done is, first, just looked at the data before I started talking. Just looked at metrics, looked at every customer message that I received, reasons for cancellations. I installed, what is it called, Lucky Orange, which records screen recordings of users in the app.
Brian Casel:I started watching some of those, which I installed it and was like, Oh, actually people are using it more than I thought. Then I did reach out to customers. So far, just in the past few days, I've had about three or four calls. Actually, right now I need to hop off because I've got a couple more customer calls this afternoon.
Jordan Gal:Nice. All right. You're doing You're pushing.
Brian Casel:Just picking the brain, trying to get out of my own head. I've been writing plenty of notes myself, but I'm just trying to have conversations, talk about what do your workflows look like, what tools are you using, which ones do you like, features are useful, which features do you wish you had not useful, stuff like that. Right now I'm crafting a really big survey to send to basically everyone. I'm going to send it to my list. I'm going to send it to Ops Calendar users.
Brian Casel:I'm going to send it to everyone. I've spent a lot of time just crafting those questions. I'll probably send that out on Monday. Then I've been going to my mastermind group and to a couple of different friends, advisors, and trying to get their takes on what I should do next. I have a couple of different options, a couple of ideas that I'm excited about.
Brian Casel:No firm answers yet, but I think the more that I talk to people, the clearer that'll get. And then I'm just hoping, you know, I won't spend more than another week or two before I just decide and then just go, you know?
Jordan Gal:I'm very interested to see where that goes. It's almost like you, we look at our history and we think there's no way we would have gotten to the product we're at now if we didn't start with the cart abandonment product. Right? But at some point we had to ask ourselves, do we really want to build a second product and take on that risk or do we want to keep pushing with what you're doing? It sounds very analogous to what you're doing.
Jordan Gal:Right? Push or pivot. If it's the same audience and they already know you and trust you and talk to you, then at least you have a much better chance of getting what they find most useful right. Coming at the market cold, your chances of nailing it are just reduced.
Brian Casel:I really feel the advantage that I have of being able to send off a few emails, just personal one to one emails, to just random people in my audience and have calls booked this week to talk to them, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I mean, that's the that that's the power of of people that that like you and trust you. You know, some people, we see them once they're successful. It feels like everything they do is successful and it's because it's it's a buildup from one thing to the next that you bring in all these advantages. Brendan's always a great example with Right Message because he did that for himself and it worked.
Jordan Gal:And then he showed other people how to do it and it works for them too. Then you're onto something that is a solution that drives ROI. It's not like a guess.
Brian Casel:A lot of the people in my audience, who come to my newsletter and the productized course and whatnot is they're trying to grow. They've been consultants or they've been agencies and they're trying to really scale up, double, triple their capacity, sell a product or a productized service, but they've had a challenge with being able to hire people and challenged with delegating and being able to hire managers. A lot of the feedback is like, Well, I just haven't found the right people that I could hire or we're not ready financially to hire people. But I believe, really, the underlying problem is you don't have the systems and processes in place to be able to be ready to hire people because I've been through that. It's a little bit of like give them what they need or give them what they want, I'm trying to figure out those questions.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's tricky. If you approach me, I look at that and then I say, the process is secondary. And then in in reality, it's not. But but what I want is the person to take care of it first.
Nathan Barry:Right.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. Tricky.
Brennan Dunn:Well, yeah. So that that's it, buddy.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Well, it'll be exciting to see what what you learned from these conversations. And I will have an update next week on whether I cried through next week or celebrated. Wish you luck.
Brian Casel:Awesome, buddy. Have a good weekend.
Jordan Gal:You too, man. Alright.
