Bootstrapped Web

Hey. It's Bootstrapped Web. We are back on the mics. It's been a couple of weeks. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?

It has been a it's been long enough that I feel like a little nervous before we record.

Yeah. Which means it's been a while. Yeah. I think like we almost like forgot how to do this podcast.

There was some vacation involved. I think maybe you were away. I don't know what happened. I have no idea what happened, but it hasn't happened for a few weeks. And last week I was, I was about to say I was away.

I was not away. I was away from work, but I stayed home. One of those, vacation homes. I needed it. I got to a point where it was like, think I I talked about it.

Right? I woke up one morning like not in a good place. And the first thing in my mind was, the kids are going back to school. Like, this is your last chance. Take next week off.

So that's what I did. It was nice.

Yeah, we talked about going away this weekend for Labor Day, you know, this coming, but we're not, we're gonna hang around here and I'm gonna really try to just stay away from work for the next three days because I've been pushing lot on the product lately and I've been working that's been like bleeding into my weekends a little bit and and I think I just gotta like take it easy, get get like one more beach weekend in and and just relax for for three more days and then get back to it next week.

That sounds great. I completely forgot that it's a long weekend and then realizing that yesterday was such a nice relief because this week this week has felt like a month. It was intense.

So you put out some some announcements about Cardhook and Shopify. What's what's going on?

It did. So this is a bit complicated. This might take a little while to kind of explain, but I think people will find it interesting because everyone's going through their own journey in their business and you never really know which direction it's going to go. You have these ideas in mind and then you make certain decisions that put you on a path and you have an idea of the direction it's going, but you don't really know where it's going to end up. This is a really interesting, big, dramatic shift in the whole journey.

I'm happy to kind of get into it and a little bit of background maybe. How's that sound?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, there are going to be parts of this that you can't talk publicly about, but can you give us just like a very basic sense of the recent history, how you came to this point and what's changing?

Yeah, I think a little context is necessary. If we think about what Cardhook does, it offers a checkout optimization platform for Shopify merchants. What that really means is that a Shopify merchant is deciding to use the Cardhook checkout instead of the Shopify checkout. What that means is that our business and the product that we offer is in direct conflict with Shopify's business model. Shopify makes more than 60% of the revenue on some type of transaction related fee, whether it's payment processing or transaction fee that they add for merchants that don't use Shopify Payments, their own built in Stripe partnership processor.

In many ways, we've been on a collision course from day one. We originally built the product in such a way that it worked with Shopify's payments and processed the revenue through their checkout. That's the only reason we even went into the business because it wouldn't make sense to build something that takes money away from the platform because why would they allow that? So we actually built the product originally to work with their payment processor and then that didn't work out and we had to adjust the app. And so that put us on this trajectory where at some point, I'd liken it to a game of chicken.

So at some point they were going to kill us, acquire us or work with us. The announcement this week was that we found a way to work together. So what we've been doing over the past few years in replacing the Shopify checkout, the replacement of that checkout and doing the payment processing and owning the checkout page was the only way that we could accomplish the post purchase upsells, which is really what we wanted to offer. A few months ago, Shopify came to us and basically said, Okay, how do we work this out? Because at this stage after COVID hit, we are doing north of $80,000,000 a month in GMV.

So it is no longer insignificant. It is now, all right buddy, you're peeling a billion dollars away from our platform every year now and that can't go on forever and it can't go to 2,000,000,000 and then 3 and so on. So The negotiation was not easy. I'll say that honestly, but I have to give credit to Shopify for ending up in the right place because Shopify matters and we matter, but what Shopify did right is they put the merchants first and they said, Clearly, merchants want this. Instead of nuking this company out of existence, how do we figure out a way to provide this functionality that clearly there's demand for, but do it in a way that's acceptable and sustainable for the long term.

The announcement this week was the culmination of those negotiations and working it out with Shopify. What we're engaged in now is working directly with Shopify to expand their checkout endpoints in their API to allow us to build a post purchase upsell app that works directly with the native Shopify checkout and the native Shopify payment processing, especially Shopify payments. And so the big concession from us is that we're done taking on new customers to Cardhook. The product we've built over the past four years and that's processed $1,400,000,000 on and so on. It's not being sunset, it's not being killed.

The existing customers can continue on with it but no new customers. So the growth is now done.

So like as of this announcement, you've literally shut down the sign up form and and replace it with like a waiting list email thing on

the Exactly right. So we are shifting from acquiring customers for Cardhook to building up an interest list, a pre launch list for our new Shopify app that will work with Shopify's checkout and then finally, finally for the first time will be in the Shopify app store. And so we will finally get that distribution. There's a lot of factors here. There's a lot of emotion involved.

There's lot of money involved, all this stuff. But one of the things I really like and I'm really proud of what we were able to do, we dragged an innovation over from the digital marketing world that was seen as a bit spammy, right? A little salesy, a little aggressive, a little how do I extract as much money as possible from this buyer? We dragged it over to the physical product world and then we elevated it to the point where these direct to consumer companies like Native Deodorant and Goli and Magic Spoon and all these brands that we recognize are using them in a way that's not spammy. That's not taking advantage of the user, that they're doing it in a way that's making an offer, making a deal and making a good shopper experience.

And so we did that well enough that a platform like Shopify basically bowed to the demand. Okay. Clearly people want it. And so that's like this objective thing that's outside of our performance as a company or finances or anything like that, that we were able to do. And now we will benefit from that.

Other app developers will benefit from it because there's going be a lot more competition and merchants are going to benefit from it tremendously. Yeah. So it's

There's still always that balance when you think about like product and early customer research and product research for the bootstrappers, very, very early idea stage people listening to this. I mean, obviously you got to keep talking to customers and just be deeply ingrained in the market because what you're saying is like, you are deeply ingrained in all these different, like the marketing industry, but like, it's not like this fully existed in the physical product space. And it's not like somebody over there told you, please build me that, you know?

Yes. What we saw happening, right, it wasn't an invention

It's not connecting the dots.

Yes. It wasn't an invention of of my mind like all this brilliant flash of light thing. It wasn't that at all. What was happening was the digital marketers were going from selling courses and ebooks. They were going to ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels allowed them to sell physical products with these marketing tactics.

And then they realized that ClickFunnels couldn't sustain a physical product business because it wasn't built for it. It didn't have inventory shipping fulfillment built into the logic and so then they moved over to Shopify and then you had a demand arbitrage opportunity. You had people going to Shopify that wanted a feature from ClickFunnels That's what I mean by literally dragging it over from ClickFunnels into Shopify and then elevating. So we started off with the drop shippers and then over the arc of a few years, elevated it to the direct to consumer brands and now general acceptance from the market. I mean, the funny thing is we will benefit from it but our benefit will be a fraction, a small fraction of the overall benefit from merchants and other app developers and Shopify, which is kind of fun to think about.

We did this thing and it's cool that we processed $165,000,000 worth of upsells. That's awesome. But over the next few years, it's going to be billions of dollars and we will participate in a small chunk of it, but it will have this huge impact because a company at Shopify scale is now introducing it to the entire network.

Right. And so I don't know how much you can get into but like, so Cart Hook will have a Shopify app in the app store. Yes. Other Shopify apps would exist as well but you have sort of like a head start on that.

That's right. Think about this, the sensitive nature of this. This is inside Shopify's checkout so we're in sensitive territory here. Then you combine that with the fact that while Shopify, they're unbelievably successful in a public company, it's still software. It's just like you and I.

It's got its issues. You combine the sensitivity of it and the fact that this is still a brand new API, you need to test it out. They just practically cannot open it up to everybody right off the bat. So they will, there's going to be a lot of competition, but to start off, it'll just be us and a handful of others that have already been doing this a lot because we're helping them with the API and we have the expertise in it and so we will benefit from that to an extent because we'll have a head start. Now we're in this very interesting period where I mean, think about the dynamics.

There's a lot for us to handle. First of all, we have a new team internally that's working on the Shopify app separately because we have to leave the existing team in Cardhook to maintain and support the current customers right as we go into Q4. At the same time, we need to make sure that we're taking care of the Cardhook people that have been with us for years the right way because the product that they're working on has a very different future. And so, so there's like transition thinking and messaging and making sure people aren't freaked out and worried about their jobs. It's like this, it's a lot, a lot of stuff to handle.

I'm not as familiar with how it works on Shopify's app store. Like how do your subscription work on that? Do you get paid through Shopify's platform or how does that work?

It's pretty interesting what they've done. It's partly to their advantage and partly to the merchant experience advantage and also partly to the developer's advantage also. What they do is they have a billing API and your app uses the billing API and then your charges for your app get put on the merchant's Shopify bill. So when a merchant pays Shopify, they're paying for their Shopify subscription and all of the apps. Then Shopify takes that money, reports it to Wall Street as revenue, and then takes the money that is owed to them, the 20% cut, keeps it, and then disperses out the other 80% to each individual app.

Depending on how you look at it, you don't have a direct building relationship with your customer. On the other hand, if they don't pay their Shopify bill, their business is done, So the likelihood of collection is a lot better. So it's these pros and cons but it kind of just standardized everything whereas before it was a wild west of billing and all this craziness.

So what about the customer's information? How much of that you get?

You have a good amount of that. Relationship is relatively straightforward. It's a row in your database and whatever you want to put in that row between email You and

can send like email marketing to them and

Yep, exactly right. And you're adding them on, but the general approach is people sign up through the app store. There are other ways to do it. Some people have them sign up on their site and then they provide the app later and all this other stuff. But generally speaking, the preferred path is you have your own website and people click on it.

You send them to the App Store listing and then they download the app. And then they they accept and give privileges to the app to access certain parts of the store and then they're in. And the interesting part that we're working through now that we haven't done in the past is that your UI is inside an iframe inside the Shopify admin. That's good and bad. The other thing they do is they provide you with a design system called Polaris so that if you don't want to create all your own components, you can just use theirs and then it looks just like Shopify and it feels extremely native, which is great for onboarding and great for general acceptance and understanding of your UI, but also commoditizes you a bit.

So you're left in this, well, that would be a lot faster, but should we use our own? So there's a lot of product decisions happening now and obviously everything is very, very stressed on timing.

Yeah, man. Yeah. Wow. A lot of moving parts.

Yeah, lot of moving parts. So it's an end of an era in one way and a beginning of another but we do get to hold on to our customers which is great so our revenue doesn't drop precipitously, right? That was what I was worried about the whole time but the future's bright. It's not absolutely ideal and perfect but this is a great deal and we're gonna run with it.

Very cool man.

Be interesting to see how things change over the next few months and

Yeah and so you're looking at like October's one when it opens up?

Late October in time for Black Friday. So that's that's kind of everyone's goal and this is the first time that our interests and Shopify's interests have been so closely aligned. In the past because of that dynamic around what we do and how they make money, we've been opposed. They didn't let us in the app store. They didn't promote us rightfully.

Now all of a sudden post purchase upsells is something that they've been hinting at and promising the community for a long time. And so now all of a sudden promoting us is to their advantage. They can say, Hey, look, we fulfilled this promise. Now you can have Cardhook inside your Shopify store and it's super reliable. You don't have to worry about all this other stuff.

So it'll be interesting to see what we can make of that. Obviously, they have a gigantic megaphone. And so if we can align ourselves with that and have them promote us, then that's obviously gonna change things for us.

Yeah. Exciting. It'll be cool to see how how this goes.

Yes. Good stuff. Yes.

Yeah. Should we should we flip over to my stuff here?

Please do. Talk to us about what's what's new.

I guess I'll start with the marketing front and then just a lot of planning on the product side too. But it starts with marketing and that is I want to get moving and just get two things basically up and running. One is I hired a marketer. She's helping with some content development but also some content promotion and that's more of a long term play. So through the rest of this year, we're going to start to roll out some big content hubs targeting our target market, which is like agencies, especially marketing agencies.

You know, I wanted to get something up and running that that can move faster. Just something like

So that's like longer term investment?

That's longer term investment. Just start just start throwing some resources at this like, And it's great because she's really running with that and I'm just sort of giving my input on it like once a week. The other thing that I just wanted to at least test is cold email outreach. Because that's something that I felt like could go into the rabbit hole for a week, which I did three weeks ago, to figure out all the tools, the strategy, the the process of getting a a basic direct cold email outreach to my target audience. Like just get it up and running.

Just see see what it could do. Not optimized, just whatever.

It's worth a try because if it works then it's in your control.

Yeah. And and I and I fully was like, this is probably not gonna work. You know, I hate getting cold email and like we all ignore them, it's completely saturated now and who knows like but you know, I wanted to give it at least a solid try just to have something to get a response because the thing is I know who the best customers are. I know what their attributes are. I know which industries they're from and what their teams look like.

And I was like, if I could just go find them and say, hello, we we exist.

Yeah. Your your product and category is new enough that it's not constantly searched for and constantly looked for.

Yeah. I mean it's new but it's I don't know that it's like a totally new category because people think about it in the project management space. And just the idea of having a process and processes in your business, especially for service businesses That's been hundreds of years old and any, any service business knows that like, if you're going to scale, you need processes and all that. And that's usually why they're very frustrated with their generalist project management tools. And so, and so that's, that's why the pitch for a process kit is intriguing.

They're like, Oh, like a lot of our frustrations with the way that the Asanas and Trellos are not made for this sort of thing. So I fired it up. I wonder how much I want to get into on the podcast here. I have a system for finding ideal customers and basically finding their contact information and then automatically sending some cold email outreach to them. And it's very like super simple.

What I will go into is what I'm putting in the email because I feel like this is what so many cold emailers get wrong and that is, you know, they're all trying to get you on a call right away.

You read the first few words and it feels wrong.

You could read the first few words and know like, I'm I'm gonna delete this and any follow ups you you send me, I'm definitely gonna delete them.

Then I'm gonna get mad at you progressively until I, yes,

I'm gonna a spam. I only have two emails that go out. It's only a two email sequence. I could do more, maybe optimize it later. But the first email is, I don't have it in front of me here, but the general gist is like, your business running like a predictable machine?

The reason I ask is because I'm from process kit and it helps automate your processes. Is it okay if I send you, if I make you a two minute Loom video to give you a quick idea for how you might use it for your agency name.

Okay. So like letting them opt into it.

All I want is a, is a yes. And then I'm not asking them for a call. I'm just replying. So they reply to me like they say, yes, it sounds interesting. I reply to them and then I literally record a custom Loom video for them.

It takes me two minutes. I start with me looking at their website, commenting on like, hey, it looks like you've got a really solid service going. I like how you're standardizing and productizing it. Looks really cool. We work with agencies like yours all the time.

Let me show you this quick thing on like here, here's like a quick new client onboarding process and I'll fire it up for you one click and see how all these tasks automatically fall into place and automatically calculated and all this cool stuff.

Let them visualize what it would do to them.

So I, so I record that two minutes, pop it in the email reply. And then, and then from there it's like, let me know your thoughts. And then, and then, you know, if they reply back to that, then we get into a conversation and then book a demo call. I've been, sending, I don't know, something like 20 or 30 of these every day.

I was going to ask the quantity. Twenty, thirty? That's a decent amount. It's not crazy but it's definitely not like I'm going to send two long emails a day. It's somewhere in between.

It is cold email outreach. I'm not it's targeted in that I'm definitely targeting marketing and advertising agencies of a certain team size and only in United States and then I have another batch in Europe and their founders.

Emailing the owner directly to visualize this is how you could run your

I have two parallel campaigns going. One targets the founders and owners, the other targets, if you, if you're like a head of operations or an operations manager or something like that. And I'm using those words in the email like, Hey, like, like people in operations and agencies find this useful or like, so it's, it's a targeted list to begin with, but I'm not spending a ton of time upfront vetting each and every company before we send that first email. Cause it's cold email. It's a numbers game.

Yeah. It's not, it's nice that your target market is massive.

Yeah. Yeah. And they're, and they're findable.

Right. They want people to know how to contact them.

So So I'm not putting in a lot of effort upfront to vet each individual company. That just wouldn't make sense. What I am doing is after I send that first email to them and I'm sending about 20 or 30 per day, I've got it on a queue. If they reply and they're and they say, yes, I'm interested, then I reply back to them and I make a two minute video for them. I'm looking at my stats so far and I've been getting a 68% open rate on the first email and then 20% reply rate.

And of the replies, most of them are positive. There have been a few who reply and say, Take me off your list or whatever. But the majority are So far, just in the last three weeks, have been about 30 or so give or take like positive replies that I've replied back to with a Loom video.

Those numbers are pretty damn good for 2020. I would not assume that.

I was I'm super psyched about it. I literally expected this was gonna be a thing that like let me just try it, it's not gonna work, I'll try it for a week and then turn it off. And I mean like literally the first day of sending it turned into a demo call that I had with the guy like the next day.

So it's email, positive response, Loom video demo.

Yeah. Loom video and then they reply to that and then and then

we Then you're in it.

Then then we book a call. I mean, of them are are just seeing the the email, maybe not even replying, but they click over and then they start a trial. Know? Trials are up as well since I've been doing this.

So That's encouraging. That is very interesting. If you can

Yeah. Mean, completely cold.

Right.

Like to me like that's that's just another it's another like good sign. I'll get into the stressful things that I'm dealing with, after this update. But the good sign I feel like is still at this at the top of the funnel because this is the only like active marketing that I'm doing right now other than like tweeting about it. It it still shows that like agency owners resonate with this they have this pain with how they manage their projects and their tasks and their processes. And so they're coming to the website, they're resonating with that or they're receiving a cold email, they're resonating with that problem, they're starting the trial or in many cases they're getting on demo calls.

Many cases the founder get books to demo and then invites his manager to come on the demo with them. Happens

They're quite a bit feeling the pain enough to the point where they're interested in a solution.

Some of them like have the first demo and then they task their manager to book a second demo

with me.

So like these are all really good signs I feel like.

So what like what does your gut tell you on this thing? Is this something like, okay, we should just keep this running and keep pushing on it?

I'm definitely gonna keep it running. It costs me like almost nothing and I'm just paying for the tools basically. It's not like I'm hiring somebody to do this, you know.

And talk about what tools you're using?

Sure.

So I I wouldn't give away too much about how you're finding the the information.

On the on the side of of sending the emails, I'm using a tool called Lemlist. Cool. L e m l I s t, which I really like. You know, there's a lot of tools like it that do that do cold email. Think like Yeah.

But I feel

like you you're you're tough to satisfy on on tools like that. So if if it's if it's past your, your qualifications, then it must be decent.

I I like it. I I am tough to satisfy, but but this is the type of thing that it's like more of an automated tool, like set it and forget it. So, you know, I don't have to work in it every single day. It's just kind of setting up the campaigns and letting them run.

Hey, nothing wrong with software companies that do that. I'm jealous of those.

No, but it does what it needs to do.

Yeah, cool.

And I can pull in like dynamic variables into it and and it's got a good integration with the tools I'm using to to build the list.

Very interesting. I remember I remember it the first thing that worked for Cardhook with the recovery app was cold email. And as soon as I got some positive response, I was like, alright, this is finally a breakthrough in how to reach people and get them interested. And I mean, I I remember just being very excited about it and then very determined. I'm just going to add a zero to this.

I'm gonna send more emails. I'm gonna get more demos and I'm gonna grow faster. And I like put my head down. Was like, do I build a system that can do that?

Yeah. I mean, part of the thing with with this is that like it's it's cold email, you can't just like turn 20 emails a day into a thousand emails a day.

No. You don't want to.

But I do have a long and sustaining growing list that this can just keep running throughout whenever. Then, it just runs in the background and that's it. And it's still a little bit too early to tell on conversions, but like I have had several demo calls with these people from the cold channel and they're perfect fits just like the other demos that had. So it's just a question of like how many of them end up Yeah.

Eventually you'll need to look at segmentation.

Yeah. The difference is that I reached out to them and they were not seeking out the tool in the first place.

And they might churn more. You kind of don't know that. You just know that at this step of the funnel, it's it's working well.

Yeah. I'll I'll just move on to the other thing. Is that you got something else? Alright.

I can't even think of anything else right now. I mean, I haven't even responded to email in a week. I haven't everything just went out the window. So please please go ahead. I'll try to think of something else going on other than than that.

You know, I I've I've talked about this before that it's a big lift to get them from the top of the funnel to converted paying customer. And, you know, I'm always looking at that like trial to to paid conversion rate and and people are converting every month. And part of it is like, I don't even know what's supposed to be good or bad. What should I really expect at this? It's such an early stage.

I feel like for not doing much marketing, it's getting a healthy number of trials and I expect that the trials will increase the rest of the year. It just gets to me when just thinking about all these trials that don't end up converting who are really good fits. Like they resonate with the problem, we have a really positive demo call, they sign up for the trial, they start using it, sometimes they invite their team, but

It just doesn't get adopted. It just doesn't get used internally.

It's the activation, the adoption, whatever you want to call that and I've worked on this and worked on this. I'm literally doing one or two or three demo calls every day now so I'm talking to customers and users all the time. And so I tweeted about this the other day that what I'm starting to realize, it's weird how because I've hundreds of conversations and I'm continuing to have them. And like gathering all the feedback and processing it just mentally is so hard sometimes, you know, cause like sometimes it takes a really long time and a really high quantity of calls before you can start to connect the dots. Like they're all, like they've all been telling me the same things all this time, but it's like only now I'm starting

to It's So starting to

basically the thing is ProcessKit does a really good job of handling your internal processes and turning those processes into repeatable tasks for your team and running some automation around that. Everyone has been asking in different forms of this. Number one, they want to take intakes from their clients. So a very common scenario, we have it at audience ops, but most agencies when you're onboarding a new customer, you need to gather things from them. Gathering content, gathering logins, gathering information.

Usually they send them some big forms, sometimes they send them like a Google form, sometimes it's a spreadsheet, sometimes it's just manually over email. So you're gathering all these little bits and pieces or you need to get copy and images and files, whatever. That's one thing that they're asking for. The other thing is that they've been asking for how can I show my client progress? How can I give them like a portal to see our team's progress on their work but keep them at a distance so that they're not seeing everything that we're working on internally?

So if you think about it in three parts, it's client engagements begin, we need to take intakes from clients, gather things from clients. The middle piece is like our team processes that work, we do the service, we create the things, we're running our processes internally, and then the third piece is we're showing the client, we're delivering their stuff or we're just giving them progress updates. So if you think about it in those three parts, intakes, processing the work, and portals. I feel like process kit is is solid on the middle piece, but the intake and the portal, we do have forms and and things, but it's it's a full solution yet. It's not quite there.

Know?

Okay. Okay. I I'm just trying to like, how do you know where your product begins and ends in a given workflow? In it right? In the way they're actually doing the work?

That's what I'm seeing and that's what I've seen in all these conversations is that they are duct taping all these other tools together with ProcessKit, with their Asana or with their CRM or with their forms.

It's a bit scary though, right, to just assume, alright, our product needs to do the entire process because it's an expansion. Scope widens pretty dramatically and you'll find brand new nooks and crannies each direction.

Yeah, but we've been doing it. It's been like a half assed solution.

So so you're excited about about tackling it? Like like the the intake? Really, guess you what you would be doing is you would be you're gonna do a better job with the with the intake if it's connected directly to your, like data internally.

Yeah. Because you're you're working through a process for a client, like a new client onboarding process. And step five in the process is to is to gather their information for to access their website. And if they send that that information, then we need to do these steps. But if they don't send it or if they're late on sending it, then we need to follow these steps.

And that's where ProcessKit already does a really good job with that kind of stuff, but you need to use Zapier to connect to whatever you're doing to communicate with your client.

And and and that data that they bring in, does that then live inside process kit and and does it have value being there like their logins and URLs and images and and that's

I I don't wanna get too into the logins. No, like the I'm not doing like a password manager or anything like that. It's not like not like logins is sort of like a bad example, but it's it's like gathering information.

Name and who who's the direct point of contact for this project and all that stuff.

Copy for the website or images or and I know there are tools that like gather content and things like that that like but they're hacking those together and they're paying for that plus they're paying for their project management tool plus they're doing Zapier, plus they're doing spreadsheets and it's a mess and things fall through the cracks. And the use case though, I know this sounds like a very big product and it's covering a lot of ground and that is scary, you're right, but the thing is what I'm trying to do is focus in on the most common use case so that they can come to ProcessKit and get to that win, get to that like, oh, this is put together and working much faster than they are now. Do you know what I mean? Like, cause right now my main challenge is like, I'm really excited about what I could do with process kit, now I've got to like design all my processes and migrate everyone over and think about all these different integrations. Obviously there's still going to be integrations, but the most common use case is like we have a lot of new clients who are onboarding into our agency services.

We need to make that a really smooth process. If they could just nail down that process and that form and show them a portal, I feel like that's something that you can build and get up and running very quickly like in a day or two of setup and then feel like that win like, okay, I'm off to a good start with process kit.

I mean portal makes me think of one of our integration partners, Recharge, where they do subscription management. As soon as they did that for merchants, the ability to have a subscription for this bag of coffee that you get an order every month, When they flipped open the customer portal so that the person receiving the coffee could then go and see where's my shipment, do I want to add something, do I want to pause it, like it ballooned their value dramatically to the merchant, to their customer.

Right. So the portal side of it is the other really big piece and that's why this has come up in almost every conversation since the very beginning. It's just that I took that information and processed it differently than I am now. It's always difficult to get into the nuts and bolts of product and stuff on a podcast like this, but many months ago because I was hearing like, Oh, how can I share this with a client? Or How can I gather things from a client?

But do I have to pay for every client? I kept getting that question. So then we developed our guest users feature. So the deal with ProcessKit is you pay for your team members but you have unlimited guests. Guests can be assigned specific tasks.

So we basically bolted the guest feature into our existing task and process workflow. But what clients really want is just something more like a client portal that they could send them to where they could see progress from the outside but they're not in your projects and you don't have to invite them and give them a login that they forget their password and all this stuff.

Right. It's like it's like you're you're fully set up and we've started work on on on this on this month's piece of content.

Yeah. It's like you're you're running your process and doing your tasks with process kit, but there's like a it it also creates a public portal that you can show people from the outside and you get to decide what you show into that portal. And then there will be some intakes back from that portal that can integrate back into your processes. And it sounds very abstract here, but if you're an agency, a client service, these are things that happen every day in your normal workflows. You're setting them up to start a marketing campaign or a website build, you're working on that internally with your team, and then you're delivering and keeping your client in the loop and making it a really seamless experience for the client.

And this all ties into the positioning as well. So it's like instead of a process tool, like literally every business in the world has business processes, but I'm starting to focus on marketing agencies who are working with clients. What can I give this niche to satisfy their daily needs of working with clients to deliver marketing services in a predictable way? These are the things that most customers are trying to accomplish or job to be done if you will. It's like

To me this is like the blessing and curse that you've taken upon yourself to be the product architect and the person that talks to all the customers. Because doing both of those is really hard, but because you're doing both of them, these little iterations like what was that other feature you said? The guest feature. Like you're just not going to get that on your own. You're not going to come up with that unless you're running the process.

The guest feature, we'll, we'll still have it because they also use that for like, for sharing with like temporary freelancers. But when I heard all that feedback early on months ago about like, how do I share with clients? How do I get things from clients? How do I share with clients? And do I need to pay for all the clients?

I don't want to. Like I kept hearing that over and over again. And my solution in my mind at the time was like, what's the fastest way to satisfy that need? Oh, we can just make a level of user that is just a guest. And that was sort of like, I don't want to call it an MVP because it is a useful feature.

It doesn't fully satisfy that need in the best possible way. Know, because I also get like a related thing is like, well, can I custom brand it? Because I'm inviting my clients a lot. And so the answer has been no, like internally, your internal process kit account, you know, there's no custom branding in there, but when you create a public portal, yes, you will be able to slap your logo on it and

Yes. Which which is the same thing Recharge ran into. Maybe you should take a look at at their at their like feature set. They had the same thing. The interesting thing that happened to them, so they actually use it as part of their pricing where it's like very standard customer portal.

Or if you're higher end and you pay for the higher tier, you get to customize the customer portal because it's more important to you. And then what they found was that the customer portal turned into like revenue potential for the for the merchant. So their customers are going to that portal the same way that let's say the agency's clients were going to go there and then the merchant in this case, the agency can then use that interaction point to offer things, to present things, to allow them to communicate like all these other

things. Yeah. I see the portal as potentially like it could be like an element of like viral marketing because the client, their client could see the powered by a process kit. It's an open question of like whether we would give them an option to disable that or whatever it is, but like that's like an outward facing thing that could help in other ways too. But that's not the main reason I'm doing this.

The main reason is to kind of solve that need there. But I think it could be interesting. Anyway, that's something on my mind. Have certain things that sort of accomplish that, but it's not fully there. So I think in future months we'll get into building those things.

And I'm still thinking about onboarding. I made like a little onboarding widget a few months ago, but now I'm thinking more about like, how can I make the interface easier to just get up and running with on day one? So I'm spending a lot of my time now working on that user experience while I've got my developer implementing some other pretty big features and I've got a marketer who's starting on the content stuff. So I feel good in that sense that things are moving on all the different fronts. Me focusing on user experience and onboarding and thinking about these new features, I'm not losing time anymore.

That's where I feel like I need to be focused on because now I've got people pushing on the other fronts. Where it used to be maybe six, twelve months ago, it used to be like if I decided to do this now, then everything else gets put on hold. I feel a little bit less stressed about that because I've got people pushing now on other parts.

And you have some raw material to work with on just the number of trials and then if the cold email adds to those trials, then your work on basically trial to paid conversion, which is what product work really is doing. I would say that it might not feel like it, but you're making huge progress and the revenue, which is a lagging indicator, will show that progress two, three months from now. Right? And you'll look

back was hoping on two, three months ago. Always. Always. Always. And we were talking about this off air.

I'm not going get totally into it, but this is such a hard time, man, in in a SaaS for for me on my on my side here. It's like I'm constantly questioning, does it need to be this hard? Does it need to take this long? Am I making it unnecessarily harder on myself and and or making certain decisions or not making certain decisions? Revenue is increasing every month and we are converting customers every month, but for whatever reason I can't help but focus on all the leads who don't convert, you know?

And I know you're not going to convert all of them, but it's like Benedict from Userlist had a really great tweet that just like smacked me in the face the other day. Like, I totally relate to that. Yeah. So so Benedict said, one of the most challenging things in working on user list is to figure out what's a good idea to pursue and what's just a distraction. And are we missing out on opportunities by staying focused on the thing that we're currently working on?

And you know, I'm sure he's talking about all sorts of other opportunities than than I am, but like, that's the thing. It's like, am I working on the right things in the right order?

That's right. You're you're almost certainly not working optimally. Right? There's no way you're doing all the right things. Yeah.

So how bad are you screwing up? That's that's kind of the what ends up being the mindset. Yeah. But it's really hard because you have so much time in the day to think about it. That's really like the problem is when it's set and it's established and you're up and running and there's enough momentum, like even if you wanted to change something, you're not gonna change it for another few weeks because you've already committed to this, like

Yeah. Like the things that I'm talking about now are for the future. Like we're about to ship these features that I started working on weeks ago. Like there's always a pipeline of, so decisions that I make now, impacts like what we end up doing in the fall and winter, know?

Yes. And in the meantime, you're just left to sit at your desk and think, am I doing the right thing? Did I do the right thing? Is this smart? Why is this so hard?

I'm not on a, on a runway where I feel like I'm running out of time or funding that that's been luckily, pretty comfortable and sustaining, but I still have that sense of urgency. Like I don't want to look back on this whole year and think like, wow, I thought it was going to grow a lot faster than I did. You know? It's it's it's just always frustrating.

I don't know if that'll ever go away, my friend. It'll just change. Yeah. I'm I'm trying to like mentally, like enjoy. You know, this negotiation went on for a while and we knew it was coming for years and I should be able to be happy about it.

Right? I'm like forcing myself immediately. Immediately, I was on to the next hurdle and the next stress and the next, well, what about this? I'm just trying to take a few weeks of whenever that comes up to just say, But at least we got through this thing. That's kind of been on the horizon for so long.

Yeah. It is a natural result of knowledge work or whatever you want to call it that the winds, they just don't last very long. They just go right by and then it's just onto the next challenge and onto the next doubt and onto the next thing. Yep. So it goes.

Day to day. Well, I think we need a we need a good long weekend here.

We do need a nice long weekend. Hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend, enjoys themselves, gets out in the sun. That's it. September is here.

Alright.

Alright, man. Take it easy.

Later, y'all.