Launching a Podcasting Service / Learning to Code / Partner Webinars
Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Another episode of Bootstrap Web. I'm Jordan.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian. Yeah, good to be back on the air.
Nathan Barry:Nice to see you. Today was one of those episodes where Brian and I jump on. We usually have a few minutes where we talk among ourselves before we start recording. It's And one of those we started getting all pumped up. We just said, okay, we should, we should just be recording this.
Nathan Barry:So what are we doing? Why are we getting to
Brian Casel:start starting to just talk about everything is like, know what? This better get on the recording. So yes,
Nathan Barry:Cool. So where are we, man? It's the March. So we've got April coming up. We've got microconf around the corner for end of the first quarter.
Nathan Barry:I don't know if you think in those terms. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.
Brian Casel:You know what? For me, I actually think of microconf as like a big marker in the year. There's usually something that I'm trying to get done or launched or get through some project up until the trip to microcomp, and then usually at microcomp everything changes and I've got all sorts of new ideas that will like take me through the summer. So yeah, that's usually like the
Brennan Dunn:turning point in the year. Yeah.
Nathan Barry:I like having micro comp as a, as a marker. I know last year I gave a talk and showed like our MRR growth throughout the year. And then right before MicroConf, our revenue like jumped up. So I had that like spike upward at the end of the graph. And I was like, thank you, MicroConf.
Nathan Barry:Let me see if I can do the same thing next year. Yep.
Brian Casel:I feel like a lot of things on my end have been just changing and things are up in the air and going in different directions. I would like to talk about two things. One is kind of an announcement of a whole new launch, something we're launching. It's a, it's a whole new service line from audience ops. Got a couple of customers on it already and it's been kind of in, this, like a private beta.
Brian Casel:Haven't really talked about it much yet. I'll start to talk about that. The other thing is I decided I'm going to start to learn to code or at least code more than what I've been able to code myself. And I can dive into some of the reasons for that and some of my, like where I'm headed with that and the questions in my mind about that.
Nathan Barry:And that's the topic we started getting all heated about before, that we, we said, hold on, hold up. Let's catch this. All right, cool. I want to hear about, about what the service is that you're adding on and how you went through a beta and found people and kind of even came up with the idea that what made you confident in the fact that people were actually interested.
Brian Casel:You know, before we dive into all that, I put out on Twitter about a week ago or so. Sometimes we we get on these shows and we're just like, you know what, we don't really have much to talk about today, but what like, why don't we just talk about somebody else's business? Right?
Nathan Barry:Yes. Yes. Look. I I I like this idea.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. Right? Like, I think we should do it.
Brian Casel:And we got a bunch of people replying to that tweet like, yeah. Like, talk about my business, please. You know?
Nathan Barry:So maybe what we should do is put out another call on Twitter. And I guess what we're doing is kind of asking for permission. We can I think people that we know of that are like in the same stratospheric level, we can ask them and get permission? If you're talking someone like, let's just say, Intercom, for example, let's raise $50,000,000. I don't really think they mind our criticisms.
Nathan Barry:We can feel free to talk about companies like that. But I wouldn't want to talk about someone who is, like, in the same sphere as we are in the same peer group and just kind of talk without their permission. So maybe we could ask people for, like, submissions.
Brian Casel:Yeah, exactly. We've had a few and like I'm putting it out here now. So by next episode, maybe we'll have a few people reach out and and, you know, show us your your website URL, we'll take a look at it and and we'll armchair quarterback your business. I'm sure most of these things like we don't even really know what's going on. We would it would be total speculation just throwing that out there.
Brian Casel:Something something for us to ramble about for an hour.
Nathan Barry:Part of the fun is the fact that you don't have complete information. Right? Even the founder or founders don't have complete information. So from the outside, you are guessing, but it's interesting.
Brian Casel:Yep. Maybe next episode on that one.
Nathan Barry:You have some competition for next episode because Ben, my co founder, is here in Portland for the month. We decided we really just want to get our process down. We kind of have like some quiet time after that big release and it was re released and everything's like cool and we've had a nice quiet two weeks. Feels great. So he's here for the month to just work on our process and Rock, our lead engineer is going to be here next week from Slovenia for a week.
Nathan Barry:So the two of them are conspiring to try to get you to let them be on the podcast with you so that they could talk about me and I'm not allowed to say Something, try to come up with something like that.
Brian Casel:I love it. Let's do it.
Nathan Barry:I think it sounds terrible.
Brian Casel:I think it's a great idea. We should do it. Awesome. And how about on your end?
Nathan Barry:Yeah. My topics for today, let's see what I have written down here. So we had a great March. Sign ups were up 100%. So we doubled our regular sign up volume.
Nathan Barry:MRR growth was strong. We're set up to have a really good April. And most of it was driven by a webinar. And so I want to talk about how we did that webinar, what we did ahead of it, what we did after it and why I think it worked and how we're using that as a model to set more of the same up. This interesting pressure of, oh, now sign ups are like getting to where we want them to be.
Nathan Barry:Now we have to keep doing work to make sure they stay there. But we like don't want it to dip back down. Yep. That's one topic. And the other
Brian Casel:one definitely want to dig into the webinar thing. Like what worked and how repeatable
Nathan Barry:will that be? Yes. It was actually a very interesting experience. Webinar itself was like we can talk about when we get into it. And the other topic is I just sent out a tweet.
Nathan Barry:I'm struggling between two topics to talk about at MicroConf. And one of them is how we have used paid ads along with content over the past few months to drive up revenue. And the other topic is if somebody asks me, like, what's the most valuable thing that you've learned over the past few months? It would definitely be related to our process. We just did not have a good enough process.
Nathan Barry:And as we went from four people to 14, it just started, it just stretched beyond comfort. And there was miscommunication, things being missed. So we kind of had to overhaul the entire company's process, how we come up with ideas, how things go to tech, how things get specked out, how people contribute and we get buy in, which tools we use. So those are the two topics that I want to talk about at microconf, either how we do content plus paid ads for a campaign or like basically after banging our head up against the wall for six months. What is the process that we came up with for a remote team that works for the tech side and the product side?
Brian Casel:This is not going to help you at all but like I'm actually interested in both of those topics. I think both would be good. I'm personally more interested in the second one, the process.
Nathan Barry:Yes, I know you I'm just trying to think of the audience. It's microconf growth.
Brian Casel:Right. So I think that microconf growth, I think most of the people frankly would maybe even benefit more from the process talk. I like that kind of stuff, but I know it kind of bores a lot of people when they see a headline, but like they can get the most out of it I think. But the the content plus paid ads, that's interesting too. Definitely more tactical, definitely more like here's something actionable you could use.
Brian Casel:So that might be more attractive as like a, as like a sales headline.
Nathan Barry:Yeah. Well, it's not a voting thing. Right? It's just, I haven't talked. So it's a, it's one of those funny, like imposter things.
Nathan Barry:Like part of me is scared to talk about number two because it reveals like what you didn't know what you were doing. You didn't have you haven't had this process for two years and nobody knows. And that's the thing. I feel like if I were in the audience, I would want number two more because it's the stuff that people everyone just kind of assumes everyone knows and everyone's embarrassed to ask about and what most people do is what are you guys using for project management? Right.
Nathan Barry:Which is fraction of that equation. It is it is one piece.
Brian Casel:I think if you tie it to that pain, whether it's like not knowing what to do or like we wasted so many man hours without this process or like whatever that pain is, you know.
Nathan Barry:So those are my topics, mic, comp talk and and the webinar, campaign. But alright. So let's let's hear. What what is this new service? How'd you come up with it?
Nathan Barry:What happened?
Brian Casel:I guess let me just, set the the stage for both of the things I wanna talk about today with with this basically. That right now, audience ops, the writing service that we've had for now three years, right now it feels like the most stable that it's ever been. Meaning churn is very low, maybe the lowest it's been. The team is really solid. Most of the team has been on the team for over two years.
Brian Casel:There's not a lot of turnover there and we've got a batch of really great clients. I must say that new sales have slowed down. So new sales and leads have just slowed in general. We're still getting new customers in the door, but it's just a slower rate than it used to be. Probably a bunch of different reasons for that.
Brian Casel:Some I don't know, some I have a sense for, but So MRR has started to really plateau. It kind of inches up, but it plateaus. It's not the growth rate that it used to have. There's that. And then I talked previously in other episodes about OpsCalendar and kind of the challenges that I've had with the tech side and how that's been like one step forward, two steps back.
Brian Casel:We have a handful of customers on OpsCalendar. We do get trials coming in, but that product is far from breaking even. It's still very much a loss. That is if I'm spending on developers every month, which I have been for the last year and a half. Off and on, but for most of the last year and a half.
Brian Casel:So that puts me in this space now where I have more time than cash on hand. Right? Audience ops, it pays my salary to support what what I need to live, but it doesn't require a lot of my time anymore. I do a couple sales calls, but beyond that it's totally handled by the team. There are very few, if any, fires to put out these days with Audience Ops.
Brian Casel:It leaves me with a lot of free time. But like, like I said, like I don't have the extra profit, extra cash to burn on several thousand dollars a month of paying outsourced developers or even like investing into, into major ad campaigns and and things like that. Like it I just don't have that extra cash on hand. So
Nathan Barry:The the initial dip of of going into the red with the software product.
Brian Casel:Right. So priority number one is increase revenue, increase profits so that I have more cash, limit costs, limit expenses, and so I can't really invest in things. That's so so how do I the the one asset that I have now is my time. How can I use my time in the in the smartest and invest my time in the smartest way possible so that I can get that sort of return? So one thing that I've, that I'm now just kind of like wrapping up is I'm, as I've been working on the funnel for productize, trying to sell more of the productize course.
Brian Casel:And that, that just has started to work. A lot of that work is now done. So now I'm kind of moving on to step two, which is launch this new service from Audience Ops. It'll be a done for you podcasting service. PodcastingYouTube content.
Brian Casel:Basically, we're going to be doing what we've been doing for blog writing but for podcasts. It's not just an audio editing service, it's actually a fully done for you, or you might call it a done with you podcasting service where somebody from our team would actually be the on air host of your podcast. We will get it all together, launch it for you, artwork, music, set up the feed, set up the podcast, and then our host or our producer would actually be on air and like interview you as the founder or a CEO of your company or somebody from your team or your clients or your guests or your partners. We'll get on a call, one or two calls a month. Our producer would like put up questions, like ask questions, and then you as the CEO would just kind of speak your mind.
Brian Casel:We tee you up to be the subject matter expert on your own podcast or, you know, again, clients or case studies or anything like that. We handle all the legwork from start to finish in planning the recordings, planning the topics. Then it goes to our audio editor. We write up show notes. We set up the blog post.
Brian Casel:We set up the email newsletter. We set up the social media posts. So everything that we've done for blog articles, we'll now be doing for podcasts. And there will be a couple of optional add ons to these plans where we could cross post these interviews to your YouTube channel, so you have video content with it. We could do full transcripts.
Brian Casel:We could do actually finding guests to interview on your podcast if you don't want to be interviewed. So we're putting that, that service together. And so I'm, I'm announcing it today, but it's, but I've actually been working on this kind of in under the hood for the last three weeks or so.
Nathan Barry:Can I ask if it was your idea or customers coming to you and asking?
Brian Casel:A few different things led to it. It was my idea to begin. It was an idea that I had actually been kicking around for like a year or two now, but I had always just tabled it. Someday we'll get into something like that. It came up more recently because, like I said about, you know, it's a good time for me to invest into something new, but I have noticed that some of our existing customers have started podcasts in addition to the blog content.
Brian Casel:Some past customers who previously had canceled, one of the reasons was they actually ended up starting a podcast instead of their blog content. And I'm just seeing that podcasting in general is starting to really heat up now more than more than ever. Also that I know that a lot, if not most of our customers on Audience Ops have found Audience Ops from listening to my podcasts or or listening to some other podcasts where that I was a guest on. They're fans of podcasts. They're in this world.
Brian Casel:They're b to b software SaaS services, so they're podcast people. So that was just an idea, right? Someday maybe I'll do it, so three weeks ago I was like, you know what, maybe I should explore doing this now. And by the way, you're not gonna see anything on our website today about this. Like it's not up, it's not published anywhere.
Brian Casel:At some point soon I will put up a page, but it's My first step was to just create a Google Doc. I created a single Google Doc which basically served as like the sales page or the pitch for this service. It kind of went through all the details of like what the pain point is, how it would work, what we would put into the packages, the pricing packages, and then I wrote, you know, we're doing a pilot program where we want five customers. You'll get a discount, but we're looking to secure five customers, before the March to join this pilot program. Email me if you're interested.
Brian Casel:And so what I did was I created this Google Doc. My first step was to email it out to, I guess, most of the customers of Audience Ops who who had previously canceled. Like, they they were a client for a while and then eventually they just ended or paused service. I went to that list first because first of all, they they know me. Second of all, they've they've bought Audience Ops service in the past.
Brian Casel:For whatever reason they canceled, so this could be a good fit.
Nathan Barry:So you went to them before going to existing paying customers?
Brian Casel:Yes.
Nathan Barry:Okay. Just why? Just to not disturb?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Partly partly that. Also because like at this point I wasn't even sure if this was gonna fly or not. Know, it it was just a Google Doc and an idea. I'm just throwing it out there.
Brian Casel:Like if I got no response from that email, I would have stopped there.
Nathan Barry:Right. You spent a little time on a Google Doc, that's all.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so I, that's why I didn't really want to send it to existing customers yet. So from that, from that email, I forgot how many it was, like, I don't know, maybe like 90 or a 100 people over the past three years have fell into that group. Out of that I got a bunch of replies who were like, oh, this looks great. It makes total sense, but I'm just not interested right now.
Brian Casel:But I did get a bunch of a couple of replies were like, yeah. Like some of them were like, yes, sign me up right now. Some of them were like, yeah, I definitely want to talk to you about it. One person referred a total stranger over and that person signed up. So out of that first batch, it ended up being four people signed on for the pilot program, meaning they paid.
Brian Casel:Like I got on calls with them, they paid for their first month of service at a discount. And what I told them was, so this pilot program, I spoke to them in mid March, I said, okay, I'm asking you to prepay, then I'm going to take about three weeks or so to get the service together and start hiring people and get a team and a process together. And then I told them that we would begin the service in mid April, start to launch their podcast. Then their first episodes would air in early May and that's when we would continue the billing for the ongoing service. Initially four people bought into that and then my next because I wanted to fill up five spots, my next step was to send the same email to all of the leads from 2017 for audience op service who didn't end up closing, who didn't end up signing up for so that was my next batch.
Nathan Barry:Oh, that's that's interesting. It's from from cancellations to people who were warm, but but didn't take it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So people who who requested sales calls, but just didn't end up signing up for whatever reason. About a 100 people on that list out of that group, again, more pretty good feedback. A lot of just people ignored it. And then, one person bought.
Brian Casel:So as of now, we have five people in this pilot program.
Nathan Barry:Hold on. Five people in the pilot program said yes and bought outside of your existing paying customers? Yes. Oh, so I was looking at this as an upsell to existing customers.
Brian Casel:Well, eventually it will be.
Nathan Barry:Yeah, but it sounds even stronger if it's able to pull people back in that were outside of the system either through cancellation or or just a decline.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So these are like five like this is like adding MRR, adding adding new people to the customer
Nathan Barry:list. Okay.
Brian Casel:So like once I got the first three of those people, was like, shit. Now I gotta start putting So this I started putting out job ads and I ended up hiring two people who will be our podcast hosts. So far I have two. Might bring over one person from our writing team, a couple other candidates, and then I have another add out to find audio editors. I'm going to hire one or two of those, and then I'll either put one of our VAs on this or hire another one.
Brian Casel:So I just talked to these people so far as of today, and two people have agreed to come on, and we talked about rates and terms and what to expect from the role and they're excited about it. Right now I'm in that space between we have five customers ready to go and so now I'm in this two or three week period where I said, Okay, we're going to get our shit together on our end And in mid April, you'll hear from me and that's when we'll get started. So my next step here is is to work on those processes, get get prepared there, but I also wanna put up like a legit page on the audience ops site about it. It'll be like audience ops on an audience app slash podcasting, something like that.
Nathan Barry:Right. So it's, it can be an add on to existing customers.
Brian Casel:Yeah. An add on, but like in the next week or two, I want to start to get that page out there more publicized and we'll still we'll we'll have a waiting list. Like right now we're just gonna start with these five and and not take on more for another month or two, but that's that's the plan on that. Know, the idea is just to kind of I I think that it's good timing in terms of what people are interested in when it comes to content these days, at least in our circles. At least that's what it seems like in terms of the feedback that I've heard so far.
Brian Casel:It makes sense for audience ops. It's like we've been doing blog content. It's a good next step in terms of podcasting. And a lot of like a lot of the production process and tools and people, like we have all that infrastructure in place already. We'll have to build some new stuff in terms of process, but yeah, I mean, I'm going to kind of work on getting this service up in the next month, two months, three months.
Brian Casel:And eventually it'll again, you know, I'm going to kind of remove myself like I did from the writing service and that'll be the plan.
Brennan Dunn:I love it. Love it.
Nathan Barry:It's a use of your existing assets, existing lists, existing customers, right? Hopefully as much of it as existing labor, as possible. I'm sure you might need to hire, what would you say, two more people you think?
Brian Casel:I I did tell two people that two new people because these are these are people who have podcasting experience. Like they've been podcasting and they've been producing a bunch of shows. So I wanted to get like people who are really good on air. So, so we've got two people like that to come on soon. But, but beyond that, I'm not really taking on new costs because these new costs are tied to new revenue.
Brian Casel:So,
Nathan Barry:Right. So all variable. Nothing new that's fixed. Maybe a software service or two.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, think we're gonna use, Craig's Castos as hosting. Like, we'll refer all all of our customers to that.
Nathan Barry:That's cool.
Brian Casel:And, yeah.
Nathan Barry:Be cool. I like it. I am into alternative content, basically things other than blog posts. I think blog posts are good, but the alternative pieces, the e book case study podcast, video, recorded webinar, all these things are like, at least in my head, they're they can make a bigger impact because they're they're different. They're they're harder to produce.
Brian Casel:Yeah. They they are. And and I think there's a lot of unique benefits that, like, unlike blog articles that that a podcast or or YouTube content, a, like being being found in like iTunes or being found on YouTube, so you've got extra visibility. But you can also use it as material to feed your writers so that they can repurpose that content into articles. It's a thing that you can go out to partners and be like, Hey, do want to come on as a guest to my podcast?
Brian Casel:It's a good way to like strike up a relationship. You know, you can use it for customer case studies. There's a lot of
Nathan Barry:different uses. Yeah. We reuse content like that all the time. We put it into our onboarding emails. We put it into, yeah, any anywhere that we think it's relevant and would help.
Nathan Barry:We jam it in. We're actually looking at this tool called Viper. I think it's called Viper. And it's like content upgrade system but encourages sharing. We have maybe 10 sign ups a day for our exit intent pop up.
Nathan Barry:That's great. We've got our email list growing every day for it. So what we're doing is taking the page that comes after the content upgrade opt in. And then it basically says that's on the way to your email. We have this other piece of content.
Nathan Barry:If you share this page on Twitter, you'll get that piece of content too. So that can be interesting just because if it's, you know, it's ten, fifteen people a day, let's see what happens if five of those people share something also. I don't know who's going to be. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Something that I've seen Brennan Dunn doing, I wanna incorporate this into my my sites is like so we do content upgrades on everything, but if like personalization. Right? It would detect if you're not a subscriber, then ask for your email address to get the content upgrade. If you are a subscriber, exchange the content upgrade for a tweet.
Nathan Barry:Okay. Okay. Yeah. I like that. I like what brands doing with the the free tool.
Brian Casel:Saw that
Nathan Barry:right bar. It's very analogous to what their service does overall, but in a limited way, which is kind of the right approach to a free tool. Yeah, we've talked a lot about doing free Shopify apps for reporting or for you know, funnel analytics, things like that, but we've gotten to it.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. I like that free tool as marketing. Like everybody wants to do something like that, but it's it does take a lot of resources and time.
Nathan Barry:Yep. Ideally. Alright. So
Brian Casel:how about over you? Let's let's hear about the webinar thing.
Nathan Barry:Yeah. Okay. So here's here's where we were. We were dealing with the V2 release and that gave us trouble. So we dialed it back.
Nathan Barry:We communicated with everyone. That was kind of a good experience in many ways because the team really came together and had to just figure out, okay, how do we do this? We're not going to release this again for ten days. How do we manage expectations? How do we communicate?
Nathan Barry:How do we set expectations for the future? Give people proper warning? How do we make sure we don't have another issue on the re release? So along with that, Ed, who's our marketer, he and I were off to the side in a marketing capacity saying, okay, this is all going to happen on the tech side. It's going to be released.
Nathan Barry:What we want to do is the V2 version of our checkout is just a lot better. So it gives us a lot more confidence on the performance of the app overall. And so we said, okay, with that, what we want to do is we want to push. Let's spend effort and money and get signups up so that we can see what this V2 really can do. Like what impact does it have on conversion and on performance, on revenue process, all these key metrics.
Nathan Barry:So we timed this webinar to happen about a week after the re release. So what we did was we reached out to one of our partners, which happened to be one of our oldest customers. So one of our oldest, oldest customers, literally like first five people that signed up, that's been with us through everything, always given us great feedback. We have this nice relationship with. He launched a Shopify app that does print on demand.
Nathan Barry:You familiar with that concept?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like like if you want to like drop shipping t shirts almost like you could like print them off. Yeah.
Nathan Barry:Exactly right. So you can sell unique designs, but not actually have to carry the inventory. He launched Shopify app for print on demand for like watches and wallets and like interesting things beyond just T shirts.
Brian Casel:And his company does the printing or they partner with someone?
Nathan Barry:Yeah, he's he's in Asia and he's been working in Asia for a long time on his own Shopify store using our product either because he had all these manufacturer relationships. He came out with this app and this thing like took off like crazy.
Brian Casel:I don't want to know about that because I've been thinking about doing T shirts for people. Like, yeah,
Nathan Barry:I hear you. This is so it was as soon as we saw that a few months ago, I was like, you know, I told Nate, my buddy, the customer said, look, you now have something that our customers might want and your customers might want. What will we have? I was like, this is our opportunity. Let's get together.
Nathan Barry:It was a great experience to bring one of our oldest customers, like on a webinar with all of our customers. So here's what happened. We set a date, we coordinated on slides and we made it super casual. This was not a sales webinar. This was a conversation.
Nathan Barry:This was alternative content. Right? Two people that you can learn from on how to sell things on Shopify with funnels.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And you like you both promoted to both of your lists.
Nathan Barry:Exactly right. And he sent it out to his Facebook group. We sent it out to our email list. We put it as the exit intent pop up for the website for a while. We kind of did everything.
Nathan Barry:We tried to make sure we put it in intercom notices for existing customers. We just promoted it on our side and then he did the same. I think 300 people registered and about maybe 60 or 70 actually showed up and then we sent out the recording and this thing drove sign ups man. It bumped everything up by like, I mean, I guess maybe 50%.
Brian Casel:And you like actively like driving a promotion or anything like that. It was just
Nathan Barry:Absolutely not. It was Just the visibility. Just visibility. We made an offer, but not like a here's what you get when you act now and you must do this and you must do this. We just did like a here's 50% off for the first month.
Nathan Barry:Thanks for coming sort of thing. So it's very, very non salesy and non pushy, right? So the whole conversation was just about Nate, let's see how you use CardHook to do this and how do you do that? How does it work with this thing? And so he kind of gave his like tips and tricks and people loved it.
Nathan Barry:So and then what it gave us is it gave us all this material. It gave us the webinar recording. It gave us material for a case study. It got us people onto the email list from his side. It gave exposure, especially inside these Facebook groups for our app because we're not in the App Store.
Nathan Barry:So we need this other form of attention, this distribution outside of the App Store. And this thing rocked, man. It fun. It wasn't that hard to do. Right?
Nathan Barry:We didn't spend a crazy amount of time on the slides. What we say inside the company, because I end up being like a chicken with no head. I end up running around and on the phone all day and people are like, Jordan, his life sucks, basically. So when I come in, we call it like, how do we set up a pinch hitter scenario that I'm just bumbling around on the phone with million people and meeting this person and that person and then I just walk up to the better spot, take a few swings and walk away. Right?
Nathan Barry:So how do we do that for the CEO basically? And what this showed is like a model of like, okay, Ed is now fully up to speed and now he's reaching out to other people with Facebook groups and with Shopify apps. And we're going back into our existing integrations, the 15 apps that we already have integrations with. And we're now coming to them and saying, hey, we just did this really successful webinar. We can get attention.
Nathan Barry:You know, our email list is now getting close to 10,000.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And you could literally point to the thing that you just did.
Nathan Barry:Like point to the thing we just did. And it's like, it's easy, man. Like all it is, we're not going we're to be pushy. There's no negative aspect for the brand. It's just an opportunity to talk about what you're doing, how it works with the card hook, how people can use it to be more successful.
Nathan Barry:And the beauty of it is it's a pinch hitter situation. All this work can happen. I send an email or two, but then I just show up, go on the mic, have a good time talking to someone that I already kind of know and then just walk away and then it just keeps running. Yeah, it feels like it took a while to kind of be able to get here. But if we can do one of those a month So for us what works is case studies.
Nathan Barry:So this is related to the microconf topic that content plus paid ads. So we do everything with paid ads. We don't rely on SEO. We don't rely on word-of-mouth. Mean we should do more of it, more non paid promotion.
Nathan Barry:But we just see every piece of content that we generate, we promote with paid ads. So what's worked really well for us is case studies and then this webinar really worked. So if we look at it and we say if we could do one case study per month and one webinar per month, then we basically have something every two weeks. And then that's how we can kind of sustain the sign up level that we're at now and slowly go up from there.
Brian Casel:So you're going to do more of these partner webinars. Are you going to run cold ads to get people on those or just promote the webinars to existing subscribers?
Nathan Barry:We run cold ads too. We drove maybe a third of the sign ups. So out of the 300, we probably drove a 100 sign ups. I think we only spent like $215 or something. It was like it worked nicely because we advertise into Facebook groups and people who are interested in Shopify and interested in e commerce and that sort of thing.
Nathan Barry:They ask again, it's not salesy. So it's just learn how WC fulfillment is Nate's company. Learn how WC fulfillment builds million dollar Shopify funnels with Cardhook. That's it. Right?
Nathan Barry:It's attractive, but it's not like bombastic and like, I'll show you all the tricks and all this other stuff. And the truth is once people click on it, then they're in our retargeting audience. And then we then they get all the other, all the other types of ads.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Just to follow-up on last episodes, I was talking about the webinar thing for for product ties that I that I did on a limited basis, just cold ads too. That one promotional week, it ended up not being profitable. It did not break even. Was, it came close to breaking even.
Brian Casel:I sold a couple, but it wasn't quite there. But you know, what I found was it just costs too much to get cold people to sign up and register and watch the webinar. And so since then, what I've been working on is is, more free assets, like a couple of pillar articles and a new video crash course free that I'll be promoting with with ads and with retargeting. And, and that's like the top of the funnel thing that I'll be putting out there with ads. Then the next step through, through drip automation and through some retargeting ads would get them to the webinar.
Nathan Barry:Okay. And that, that should hopefully bring the cost down from, you know, $5.06, $8 per registration to a dollar per email signup type thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I just find in general, like people are more interested in actually attending a webinar when they know me or they know the brand. And now I've set it up to be like a totally automated thing. Like everything is evergreen at this point. So it's
Nathan Barry:Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. For us, the recurring part of the math is just different. Right. We start at $300 a month.
Nathan Barry:If we get five signups and webinars, that's great. So if we get 10, that's a home run. Yeah. So that was the webinar. And yeah, we're just going to try to do that regularly.
Nathan Barry:Keep it in the mix. My fantasy content calendar scenario is case study once a month, webinar once a month. And then in that's effectively a piece of content every two weeks or an event every two weeks. And then the other two weeks of the month, it's like a product email on what's new in the product, new integration, new feature, highlight of something. Yep.
Nathan Barry:So if we can kind of keep those up, we have something.
Brian Casel:Are you doing other stuff like just straight blog articles or you had a Cart Hook podcast, didn't you?
Nathan Barry:We had a Cart Hook podcast a while ago, but we stopped. The past few months, the focus was on what we looked at as our pillar content. We wanted to get our point of view on what we think is happening in e commerce and where e commerce is going. And what we did, this is actually what I would talk about in number one in the microconf like that campaign. What we did is we broke it down into five pieces, four pieces.
Nathan Barry:I think it's four pieces. So the first two pieces were not about us. The first two pieces were here's what we think is happening in e commerce. Right? So it was like thought pieces or like blog post content that you think of that's not talking about you.
Nathan Barry:And then the last two posts were about how we fit in and how what we're building is built to match what we think is happening in e commerce. And then at the end of that, we wrapped all four of those blog posts into an e book. So we promoted each blog post along the way. And now we have this e book to promote as well. So we haven't really done like more straightforward blog posts.
Nathan Barry:We've done that and then the webinars and the case studies and that sort
Brian Casel:of thing. Okay. Very cool. What
Nathan Barry:was that second topic you had?
Brian Casel:Well, I think I'm going to really dive in and finally learn how to code like legit and just my thing is I wanna be able to build a software app like at will. Know? As I've talked about before, like I am a designer and a front end HTML CSS coder. That was my background, my trade, if you will. I'm pretty good with that stuff.
Brian Casel:I could design pretty well in the browser. But when it comes to building a functional web application, like anything, you know, with a database or or even more advanced JavaScript stuff, I can't do that. I don't that's not in my skill set. I've stretched my front end design skill set to the max, like to the for various projects over the years where I would just try to figure out enough to get by to put something up on my marketing website. But but once I get to that line where it's like, okay, I need custom software built, I always stepped back from that line and be like, know what?
Brian Casel:I am not a coder. I will outsource outsource this. I'll I'll hire someone to do it.
Nathan Barry:What what is changing that that
Brian Casel:So the thing that has changed now is this I mean, like I said before, I don't have the the spare profit cash on hand every single month for the foreseeable future. I do still outsource small things like my plug in developer will will work on things and will fix bugs in in in the SaaS and stuff like that, but I don't have the ongoing budget to continuously burn on a on a SaaS runway. Like, the that's just not there. And when that runway gets really tight or cash flow gets really tight, I have no choice but to just pause all progress. And again, I'm I'm I'm in this space now where I have more time than cash.
Brian Casel:I do have the time. Like, I I talked about the podcasting thing, but even that is not taking up a a forty hour work week. Like, it's it's really not. I think that it could be a a valuable investment of my time for the for the rest of this year and probably beyond to take some courses, to do some practice projects, some apps, and actually learn how to build a functional app from start to finish. I've had this thought in my mind of a full stack product person.
Brian Casel:You've heard like full stack developer that can do front end, back end, everything, but there are a few people out there that we know who very much are like full stack product people.
Nathan Barry:I hate them.
Brian Casel:And I hate them. So jealous. Jealous. I mean, you look at somebody like like like a Brennan Dunn or like, Josh Pickford, know, these guys like I Yeah. Marketing.
Brian Casel:I don't know for
Nathan Barry:design product Yeah. Development is ridiculous.
Brian Casel:They have the software chops to build something functional, and they can design a bit, and they can and they their market, and they can reach an audience, and they can connect with customers. They could sell. Like, that is a full stack bootstrapped product person.
Nathan Barry:Yeah. Dangerous.
Brian Casel:Right? Dangerous.
Nathan Barry:Dangerous.
Brian Casel:And so and it's just so frustrating to be able to design software and to be able to identify pain points that need solutions in a market and then hit up this wall of like, I have to outsource that. And so my thought is if I could invest this time into and I fully don't expect to become an expert level or like really even like professional level, not near, not nearly somebody who's been doing it their whole career, but
Nathan Barry:So it's almost like, like a MVP?
Brian Casel:Yeah. If I could build an MVP or if I can build very simple apps, that would be great. And then if I could, on the more complex applications, I could still bring in a consultant to to help with the more complex parts. But the low level stuff, especially the front end UI design stuff, like I I spent so many hours and so many dollars outsourcing all of all these low level parts of ops calendar over the past year. Like, if I could have just outsourced, like, 30 of of the high level stuff and and I handled the front end because I did design the front end, I should be the one coding that, frankly.
Brian Casel:There are probably a lot of people thinking like, I should be outsourcing and hiring everything. I'm a founder. But like really for me, I'm in this space where I I am a a maker and I'm on a bootstrapped budget and I enjoy this stuff. So like I should be able to get a product from zero to MVP or a version one mostly on my own and then start bringing it. And I mean, I think it would help when it comes to hiring and collaborating with other developers.
Brian Casel:If I could actually know what I'm doing with the code rather than just guessing.
Nathan Barry:It's an, it's an unfair advantage toward getting to the point with software, which is the hardest, the hardest part is getting to the point where you can afford a full time engineer and then to continue paying them, you know, for the foreseeable future is requires a lot of money. The ability to kinda jump start that on your own is is such an advantage.
Brian Casel:Also, it comes to designing web applications today in 2018, we're at this point now where like if you're a designer of of web applications, like you should have a full stack skill set, I think. It's difficult, but it's if you come at this as a from a designer, from a from a product designer standpoint, and and I've I feel like I've been in this world for for the past couple of years. There's no reason why we as designers shouldn't extend into having that ability to to code. Because I remember, like, five, six, seven years ago where it was like, alright. If you're a designer, you have to learn HTML and CSS.
Brian Casel:And I became pretty good with that. But I feel like now in 2018 there's this next level of if you're a front end designer, you should be able to confidently use a JavaScript framework and know how to hook up a back end database. Like, you don't have to be a DevOps expert, but you can, you know, you should be able to build something from start to finish.
Nathan Barry:I mean, I have looked at that repeatedly over the past, call it ten years. I think I downloaded a whole bunch of Ruby stuff on my computer at some point. I gave up on it. It sounds to me like you would be closer to being able to achieve some competency there because of the comfort with code to begin with. I don't know what to tell you.
Nathan Barry:It sounds great. It also sounds a little scary in terms of time commitment, but I know it can definitely make a difference. I know one of my really good friends here in Portland, John Ewalt, who runs Roaster Tools, he's had the same experience. At some point, when you're paying engineers and they're doing certain things, you still just want to be able to say, I just want to add this feature. I just want to go in there and add this column to this table so people can do this new thing.
Nathan Barry:And he just got sick of of of waiting on that and just has done.
Brian Casel:Or like like quick bug fixes, quick tweaks in the UI. Like, I I shouldn't have to wait a few days.
Nathan Barry:Yeah. The interesting thing that's happened to him is not only does it give him more confidence and more power in the whole equation of the business, it also gives you momentum because you're not going a few weeks without changing anything. It also gives you customers like this jolt of satisfaction. Like I just talked to the founder and then three days later what we talked about is in the app and now I'm, you you get this back and forth relationship and it's much more faster. I know for us it's a painful thing that we've just kind of accepted.
Nathan Barry:We just don't move fast anymore. We're 14 people and we already don't move fast. So I can I can just imagine like when you get to a 100 people, it's not that you move faster, it's the opposite? So while you're still small, the ability to move fast and and the biggest bottleneck is the dependency on on developers.
Brian Casel:And I think part of the reason why I've been so so hesitant to take this step to to learn how to code is a because of the time commitment and like my time is more valuable selling and marketing and talking to customers, which it is. I I don't disagree with that. But again, I have this space and time, more time than than cash, and I think it'll be a valuable thing. But also part of it has been like, you know, in in past years, it was like, alright, the the the hurdle to get over to to get to that point where you can build a production level application, even a simple one, was so high. The bar was so high because there were so many components that you need to custom build.
Brian Casel:Whereas today, there are so many tools and so many frameworks that speed up the I'm not saying it's simple by any means, but it's
Nathan Barry:There's a lot of tools.
Brian Casel:There's a lot of tools. There are a lot of frameworks and libraries and and open source components and things that you can just put together. It's not easy, but you need to have some basic coding skills to be able to put these together in a functional way, but you can do it much faster. And if you have those basic skills, and then project after project, you're just going to learn more. So the last couple of days I've been talking to a few friends about this and I was trying to think about like, all right, well, do I dive in?
Brian Casel:Right? Like I know HTML, CSS, that's
Nathan Barry:going to be my next question. Where do you start?
Brian Casel:My first thought was to go into dive into PHP Laravel because I've, I know some light PHP. I've worked with WordPress quite a bit over the years and, and not that that's PHP, I know blah, blah, blah, but I've seen PHP, I've hacked it apart a few times myself and that seems like I had the most hands on experience with that. And ops calendar was built with PHP and Laravel. And I liked that. I liked things like Laravel spark and other things,
Nathan Barry:but we're Laravel
Brian Casel:And I haven't really started doing any sort of learning yet, but I'm thinking Ruby and Rails. I have much less experience with that, but I, from what I understand, seems like it's, it might be a little bit simpler, especially from a, from a designer's point of view to pick up and might get me there faster than, than learning all the ins and outs of writing PHP.
Nathan Barry:Yeah. I have very limited knowledge on it, but that's my impression of it too. And it seems like the community, I mean both communities, Latterfield's got a really strong community and Ruby obviously does as well. Have you seen Andrew Culver's product?
Brian Casel:Oh, he's building like a spark like thing for Ruby, Yeah,
Nathan Barry:it's called bullet train.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I definitely wanna look at that.
Nathan Barry:It's like a Ruby on Rails app, like in a box, basically. It just gets all the pricing, the connection to Stripe, the account management, like all that stuff that you were saying you have to kind of learn how to do one by one that just gets removed and that's where these things are going overall.
Brian Casel:Exactly. So yeah, so I'm definitely gonna take a look at that. I do definitely want to dive into a front end JavaScript framework that would be between like Vue, Angular, or React, I guess. I've seen and worked a little bit with Vue through ops calendar. I might kind of run with that, but yeah.
Brian Casel:So I'll spend some time diving into that as well. So it's not going be overnight, but I've been trying to figure out like what, where's a good place to learn this stuff. I'm looking at like Codecademy and looking at Treehouse. I'm looking at, what else is there? There's like Udacity.
Brian Casel:There's there's one month rails.
Nathan Barry:Check out egghead also.
Brian Casel:Egghead. Okay.
Nathan Barry:Egghead.io is actually run by a guy here in Portland or Vancouver across the river or something. Yeah. Actually great indie hackers interview with him recently. It's like high level professional videos and lessons for for code.
Brian Casel:Nice. Yeah. That's that's what I'm looking for. So I'm kind of looking through these things and and trying to figure out like, what's the most efficient learning platform. I'll pay for it, like learning platform to get me there the fastest.
Brian Casel:And the other thing that I'll throw out there, just last week I was working on a piece of code on my Productize site, hooking up the Evergreen product launch system, which is basically custom coded, very simple by, by me. But I ran into a hitch with, it was JavaScript. I was like, I don't know how to write this thing that I need. I know exactly what I need. I just don't know how to write it.
Brian Casel:So I went on codementor.io. This was like one of the most amazing eye opening experiences that I've had. And like, it's freaking unreal, dude. Like I love the internet. I just love the, I love the Internet, period.
Brian Casel:Amen. Because because I was I was driving myself crazy. I was like, I know there's, like, three lines of JavaScript that I I know what I want them to do. I just don't know how to write it. I was searching through Stack Overflow and Google and all these places.
Brian Casel:I can't find exactly the right solution. Nothing's working. I'm like, there should be, like, an on demand live code help.
Nathan Barry:And if you could think of it, it exists on the Internet.
Brian Casel:And so I Googled it. I was like, I forgot what I Googled, like on demand code support or something like that or JavaScript support. CodeMentor comes up, within two minutes I create an account, I write a really brief synopsis of what I need and like thirty seconds later it's like pop, pop, pop. I get IMs from five different developers in like India. I clicked on one, I paid $15 per fifteen minutes.
Nathan Barry:Video chat?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Just like yeah. They have a system. He remote hooks into my desktop and he's coding on my computer live and we're chatting. Took like half an hour, like thirty minutes.
Nathan Barry:Okay.
Brian Casel:Solve the problem, thing is thing is launched, done.
Brennan Dunn:I love it.
Brian Casel:And he's and he's showing me line by line like what he's doing.
Nathan Barry:What he's doing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like it was unreal dude. Like sick.
Nathan Barry:I love it. Alright. So we're gonna hear about Brian's journey into becoming a developer and slowly becoming less social and weird habits and not wanting to talk to customers over the next year.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's the that's the thing that I fear is like the more code that you learn, like it takes away marketing skills, know, so it's like
Nathan Barry:Alright. Just don't build a checkout product with processing of payments and you're good, bro. My recommendation. Duly noted. Yeah.
Nathan Barry:Cool. So we should wrap up pretty soon. My side, I think the only thing I was really going to talk about was that the breakdown of our process, but it's kind of too much to get into in like a five minute thing.
Brian Casel:I think either we should hear about that at MicroComp and if we don't, then we'll hear about it on Bootstrap Lab.
Nathan Barry:Yeah, I think we can dig into it. It's been a very difficult experience. Everything started to get blamed on the process. It was just, oh, this thing got released and support is now getting questions on a feature that they didn't even know was released. Why?
Nathan Barry:Because we don't have the right process place. Then this thing got why is this in staging in this form when we gave feedback here? Because we don't have one central place that we're all responsible for. And everything kept coming back to because we're not going according to a strict process that would have caught that or would have solved it or showed it or something. So we just kind of got sick of it to the point of, okay, let's get this version two out.
Nathan Barry:And then the priority is just, yes, we've signed up for like 100 project management tools until we found one we liked and we left Jira alone and we have all this. So it's not the tools. It is what do the people do with the tools? Who is responsible for it? How do we make sure it gets done?
Nathan Barry:One of the more interesting parts of the whole experience was finding out that we don't actually have the process wrong. We had the process right. We weren't implementing it properly. It was even more frustrating than having it wrong. Right?
Nathan Barry:So Ben, our head of product and co founder, he's kind of had the right process for months, for a year. The issue was that it wasn't being executed. And so I started to be like, Ben, what the hell is wrong with our process? And he kept being like, well, I don't think anything's wrong with our actual process. We started talking to people.
Nathan Barry:We started talking to whoever I knew that I respected from a development point of view. We talked to Rob Walling, we talked to some of our investors and we talked to Adam Watham speaking of Laravel. We talked to anyone that we can kind of get our hands on that we could just be really vulnerable and be like, what the hell are we doing wrong? And the feedback was, you kind of have it right. What you're missing is the people being responsible for certain things and the baton being handed off properly.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Really really sticking to the process.
Nathan Barry:Yes. Yes.
Brian Casel:I we were chatting about that in the productize Slack, the the members there, and and, like because I talk a lot about the about building processes and systems for for your productized service, and a challenge that a few of them have have had was, alright, I got these processes, it all makes sense, but how do I get my team to buy into it? And I've had that challenge too with audience ops. Don't know if you ran into this, but we're getting into a whole other episode here. But with newer people who are joining the team, they don't understand the importance of why these processes and like protocols exist. The longer term members of the team like Kat, our team manager and a few other people, like we, we spend a lot of time trying to explain to people like, we do it this way for this reason.
Brian Casel:We've seen it break down. Here are some examples of ways it has broken down in the past. That's why we do it this way and just trying to explain that.
Nathan Barry:You know, we've had the opposite experience in some ways because the company started off as four buddies. You don't really need that much process and you're never really harsh with one another. There isn't even the threat of being harsh with one another with four, right? You don't tell people what to do with four people. You don't get angry at something that didn't get done yesterday that was supposed to do.
Nathan Barry:It's like this more free flowing social interaction type process. But now with new people, they're looking at us and being like, well, what happens next to new people? It's not optional. Like this is work and you tell me what to do and I'm going do it. It's not like if I feel like it, but when it was for people, it's a little bit like if I feel like it.
Brian Casel:They've had to change.
Nathan Barry:Yes. We have kind of to drag the original people into like, okay, this is work. This isn't like fun time with friends. This is how we do things and they get done this way for a reason. The analogy that was very helpful that our CTO coach gave us was you're running a business.
Nathan Barry:Sometimes it feels like a family, but it's a lot closer to a professional sports team than it is a family. Professional sports team, like, you you're getting paid, you're going to perform and you're going to perform according to what the coach tells you and the coach is going to perform according to what the owner tells them. So it's more of a it's not like this is the military. You do everything we tell you, but it's not family either. It's just in between and like professional sports team was the analogy that kind of hit home for me.
Brian Casel:That's that's a good one. Like that.
Nathan Barry:Credit to Ron Pellet. Brian, we got to stop. You turning into a coder. I'm getting excited. I'm hungry.
Nathan Barry:It's lunchtime. It's Friday.
Brian Casel:Alright. Well, yeah, I'm looking forward to the next episode. I'll be back with, Ben and Rock. You you take a break, Jordan, and we'll, we'll see. Maybe maybe we'll invite you back on the show.
Brian Casel:We'll see.
Nathan Barry:I mean, I'm scared. I want veto right over the recording before it gets published.
Brian Casel:We'll see about that.
Nathan Barry:All right. Right.
Brian Casel:All right. See you.
