Bootstrapped Web

Alright. Bootstrapped Web. We're here. So me and Jordan basically ran out of topics to talk about. And what's the only solution to that?

Well, it's invite Ian Lanceman on the show.

He'll

he'll figure this out for us.

I love being the third or fourth option. That's that's my this is my base spot for me. Yeah. This is

Well, last week we went to Twitter to see what people thought we should talk about. Right. And you come right after that.

Like we looked at a newspaper and there wasn't much in there. He's not like No. There's not

any news in the world.

Yeah. Yeah. So we'll get Lancer in here. He can ramble on. He hasn't been on a podcast in like a year or so.

He'll fill the time.

Ian, what is this, tweets that I'm seeing from you about, starting up a new podcast? What, what are you thinking there?

I know. Maybe this will be this will be it right here. Like I had to get my stuff set back up. I got the mic set up. I'm like, got my Scarlet set up and all that stuff.

So maybe this will be, I don't know, cause I love podcasting and like, So I'm kinda ready to get back into it. Like life is generally sort of a little less hectic in certain aspects of it where like I could do maybe kinda get back into podcasting a little bit, make that couple hours, but I don't know. We'll see. I feel like I wanna have a very specific, like a structure. I want more of a structure if I do a podcast again and I'm still kind

of thinking through that, so. I really love podcasting. I like getting on this show. And I had the other show, Productize Podcast which is like an interview show but that I got burned out on because of the structure and because of interviewing people and doing different guests. I would like more of open ended talk about anything because I was a guest on a few recent podcasts.

Like I was on, Caitlin Jordan's and then I was on, Matt Maderos this week just talking about like other stuff that I don't typically talk about here on, on Bootstrapped Web and I just, you know, it's just fun

to do that

kind of stuff.

That is definitely along the lines of what I'd want in that kind of like how I think like a template, but with more structure than this is like during fireball, like the talk show. I do not want any part of interviewing people. Like I don't wanna be prepared. Like I don't want questions that are related. Like I have to know your I don't Like I don't want anything to do with that.

But yeah, like there's a topic and we both just come in and we can talk about the topic. I'm not interviewing you and getting your life story. I'm just new Apple iPhone, right? It would just be like your traditional talk show one, right? Like let's talk about that or whatever.

Some bootstrap thing or whatever. But we're just discussing a topic. We're not like going into who you are and all that stuff and kind of a cast of characters like.

I like the idea of like a group of people who sort of like rotate back in and you're

gonna Yeah, come back exactly. Something like that, I think.

I think one of my issues with that is that the publishing cadence has a formality to it. Like there's a new episode and it's probably a week old when you launch it or when you publish it. And that feels disconnected from the casual, let's just have a conversation.

Because you got to come up with something, yeah.

Well, and then it goes by for a week. I don't know, it's just, there's something about the formality around like the weekly publishing cadence as opposed to just making it more disposable.

Well, that's kind of interesting too, yeah.

Right, here's a tweet that we recorded something for half an hour. It's just not treated like this big event. I like the concept around Clubhouse is the live version of that. And you could see how Clubhouse at some point you just kind of hit record and then you just publish the conversation. It feels more disposable.

I keep using the word disposable because I'm working with a product designer now and

he constantly picks it up.

He something like that where it's just like, I'm on right now. Come on. Or so like, even if it was like office hours, like I'm live right now, who wants to show up and chat like that kind of thing would be kind of cool too. And I have thought about that also. Yeah, we should maybe do that.

That could be interesting.

There's definitely a Clubhouse competitor. Is it Circle app or something like that? I think I'm misremembering. But I think there is a Clubhouse competitor. Clubhouse I tweeted about and said that it was, it like jumped the shark from like being exclusive to just being annoying that you can't get in and now you're resentful.

And then of course I got an invite on DM a minute later, but I haven't logged in yet.

I haven't even looked into what it is. Like I saw that tweet you sent and I looked at it for a second, but I honestly don't even remember what it is now. Like, is it like a Slack competitor or something?

I haven't heard anything about it since, what was it, a purchase? Like

The the the fundraise?

The

Yeah. The fundraise. The series a where the founders took money

Yeah. Like that clubhouse news when that happened a few weeks back and then Hey app, you know, the Basecamp email thing. Like these are things that were like literally all over Twitter at least and all over the internet for like a week when that news broke. And I haven't heard about anything about them since. And I haven't even, honestly, I don't know how many people are using Hey today, but I haven't seen like any Hey email addresses in my inbox, you know?

That thing will be abandoned. That'll be abandoned soon enough.

They're pushing on it. I just saw that they're hiring for it now and they're going to launch Hey for Business. I mean,

I'm sure they've got a solid, instantly solid SaaS right there. But it doesn't seem like it's a widespread thing.

You only need a certain number of geeks, If they get a decent percentage of the geek circle, then obviously that would be sufficient. But you know what, the thing with a company like that to me is just like, they're gonna get bored. Like it doesn't make a tremendous amount of money, then it's like either A, not worth doing and or it's just boring. Basecamp makes a freaking tremendous amount of money. So I just feel like it's gotta really make a lot of money.

They used to have another email thing that was like blast emails to your family kind of thing. And it was like $10 a year or something crazy like that. And I got abandoned. They've literally abandoned everything they've ever done except for Basecamp pretty much. So I don't know.

I mean, whatever it could, it could get right. I thought things

Yeah. Hiris was a cool product. I I do wonder though if they've gone all the way around where they're making enough money that they're actually not trying to build another big business. And it becomes slightly ideological because they are ideological. And so to just work on, hey, for the next ten years because it's enjoyable and it makes a dent in the internet the way they want it to go.

I could see that happen.

Possibly. I don't know if I buy it, but you know.

Yeah. I mean, and it's like how, how many, how many years, how many decades can you keep pushing into project management software when that space just gets so, it's just so, so big and so competitive.

Yeah, I feel like I could keep building like really custom homes and beautiful places around the world though and keep buying cars. I can do that for a

long time.

I actually think project management is way better than, just in terms of like, there's always new companies. There's always companies that are growing and need solutions to organizing things. And like, that's just ever growing. Whereas I don't know, like how the market for like people who wanna pay a $100 a year for their email when there's like really good solutions and that are free. I don't know.

I don't know if that's an ever growing market. The business one maybe like, maybe the business one will be where it's at and that'll be like obvious because it's like so much better than your outlook in some way or whatever. But, I don't know.

You know what's funny about like everybody loves to hate on the Googles and Facebooks and like, you know, you're the product. If the product is free, you are the product. You're getting all these ads. They're seeing all your data and stuff. I resonate with all that, but not so much that I'm gonna stop using Gmail.

Like,

you know, and like Make

me the product, baby. Make me the product.

I mean, I mean, at the end

of the day, I'm completely using Google's products and a lot

of them

are amazing,

you know?

If people are still using Facebook after all the things they've done, it's pretty sticky. The hidden cost of privacy just does not rise to the level of abandoning things that you used to use.

I just think also internet geeks doesn't really resonate with a lot of us that like nobody gives a shit. Like nobody cares about their privacy. You know what mean? Like not on the level, not on the level required to like pay a $100 a year for email or to stop using Facebook or all those things like they're there. They don't feel like they have a lot to hide and they're not that worried about it.

And you know, for the most part, they're generally probably right. Although obviously, that's sort of the bigger picture. If you're more geek oriented, like there's bigger possible abuses. I don't know. I just don't think people wanna pay for stuff when good stuff is free.

That's a powerful

Yeah, and it's also like the experience and how entrenched you, like you personally are in using a tool for, like, like literally I have fifteen years of search archives in my Gmail that I can't just leave that, you know. You mentioned something Ian just a few minutes ago about like, you know, a company like Basecamp, like at a certain point, like do they get bored hammering on the same product? And I mean, that made me think of you with like Helpspot. You've had Helpspot for what? Well over ten years now, right?

I mean Yeah, fifteen years. Fifteen years. It's gone through different iterations and stuff, but, but you know, then you've had a few, you know, like thermostat and stuff like, I'm, I'm curious, have you ever run into that? Like, like this many years in with, with HubSpot, like where do you get bored and what have you done about it?

Oh, yeah, super bored. Super bored. That's like, mean, longest job I ever had before Helpspot was three years and this is fifteen years. So, you know, I'm definitely bored at time. And then being a software developer, it's like constantly have all these ideas.

Every little annoyance is like, I could build a product to solve that annoyance, right? Like That happens to Right, exactly. It happens to me every if it only happens to me like once a week, that's like a total win. Usually it's like twice in a day, I'll be like, Oh man, like this thing stinks. I should build a better version of that.

Yeah, I don't know. We know that's where like it's kinda like goes back to what with Basecamp, right? Like, and this is my situation is actually really beautiful example because like I got bored and we built thermostat, which is, you know, an NPS tool. And that doesn't make that much money. And so it's like, okay, like we still run it, but it doesn't get much attention and it's fine and it works.

And it's not like in a broken state or anything. And when there's bugs, we fix them, But it mostly just sits there because I can work on the thing that makes a lot of money or I can work on the thing that doesn't. And I'm definitely not to the wealth level of like adjacent freed where maybe I could consider like, I don't care about the money at all. You know, I'm just doing this for the good of the world type things. So yeah, so it's like ends up being a fairly easy decision.

And then we try to do other projects and things to kind of get that sort of creativity out.

I'm curious then like with thermostat, because it's been a couple of years since you started and you have like launched that out and given where that is at as a product today, like was it still worth doing? Was it still worth like taking some time away from HelpSpot to do a side thing like that?

Yeah, I think so. Because it's not that much time. So didn't, so it was like three months then like another month or two with like some people out here and like, so we are in fifteen years scale, right, of the business, we took six months total and messed around with something else. And it still makes money. So like, it's just sitting there making money and not costing us really anything other than some server stuff.

So it's fine. And I don't regret it. It's not like that kind of thing.

Think I feel like being able to like flex that muscle like that's worth it in itself just to go.

It's a creative release valve.

Yeah. Yep. Like we had another product called Snappy, which that is more regret. That was like six years ago, we built that and that thing was a disaster. Because I had a lot of the team working on it.

So it's like, you know, we spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then, know, we ended up just like selling it for, you know, not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the time and effort and all that stuff. So that was definitely harder. And once I learned from that, because like with thermostat, I didn't make those mistakes. It's like, have this little interesting idea.

I'm just gonna build up the first version myself because I'm kind of bored anyway at this moment. And, you know, we spend a little time to polish it up with the team after I got it to a certain point and then whatever, we'll see what happens. But there's not like a lot riding on it necessarily. And it's still, it still grows very incrementally and who knows, like it could be a Mailchimp type thing where they let Mailchimp sit there for three or four years. And it was making $50 and then it was making $200 and they were like, Oh, maybe we should pay attention to this.

So I think with SaaS, it's kind of easy now. It's nice because you can build stuff quick. And once it's built, it can kind of sit and just exist, Not optimal, but if it's possible and if you do a little bit of work on like SEO, you could just let it sit there and it'll kind of grow doing nothing. So that's like a possibility with us.

I mean, I look at like Sunrise KPI that I worked on what, like a year and a half ago to to basically build and and launch that thing. And I more or less haven't touched it since at all. Like no no marketing, no new code, no new features. It it makes almost no money but it still gets sign ups every day and occasionally some some questions about it. But it but it was for me it was like a a the first real app that I built so I learned a ton Yeah.

That's even got a secondary benefit there. I I see

it as like a little product that like I don't I don't really have any plans to touch it anytime soon, but like it's there and it's not dead and it has some potential. Like I like who knows? Like it's just something that's just there,

you know? Yeah. And who knows? Like, whatever. At some point, if you like needed money, you could sell it for $5 or so, you know, it has value even just you could sell it tomorrow for some amount of money.

And so it's like, it's still an asset that you have that exists and is valuable.

For the record, I'm not looking to sell that so.

Send your offers, send

I've your had a few DMs about that. I don't wanna sell that. Like that.

Just killed an asset. It was a pretty interesting like thought exercise to the whole thing. So if we recall Cart Hook start off as a cart abandonment app and because of the nature of the product being pretty set it and forget it and then it made you money every month, people just did not cancel for years. And we still had somewhere in the area of, I think it was like six or seven ks in MRR, but it was just sitting there. Now we're sunsetting two products.

So it's like way down, right? Our current checkout product is, it's not going to be sunset anytime soon, but it's like, it's now like in Amber, right? We'll continue to work on the maintenance, but it's not going to keep moving forward that much because we're working on a new app. So we were like, okay, we can't do three apps. That's just ridiculous.

So we looked at selling it and it was literally not worth the effort to go through the sale and the handover because it would take a lot of attention away. You can't just sell something for a $100 and say, good luck. Like you're on your own. And then we looked at the server costs and everything and it was like $3.

We were

like, man, we're just gonna kill this thing. Like that is the best option. And if I think back at how long it took me to get to six or seven ks in MRR, Oh my God, I cannot believe that we're

killing it.

Was sweat in there. Yeah.

Oh my God. That was the basis for Cardhook the company. Mean, without that you wouldn't, you know.

Yes, that's a very strange feeling. It's just like two years of work, eighteen months of whatever how long it took to get there, just like, make the calculation does not make sense. Where in other contexts, why would you do that? You would leave it alone. But we leaving it running, and the security risk around that and the reputation risk of the domain, all that stuff was not worth it.

It's not worth it.

Yeah. Yeah, I think in your situation, especially is a little bit different than mine where it's like, I've had this thing forever. We grow a little bit every year. There's not a lot of pressure necessarily to do, you know, I can just do whatever I want. Like I so there's not that pressure there.

There's not all these other kind of stakeholders involved exactly as you have. So I think when you have that like a little more pressure to be growing a little more, you have the whole Shopify relationship, which is like a whole weird third party stakeholder relationship to manage and stuff. So yeah, like having just an a thing out there making a few bucks, but exactly like it gets hacked or something. And even though it's not your real product at this point, like that could be devastating for no reason at all to make $30 a year. So it's just not worth it.

Yes. Yes. You looked at it like, oh, we're still sending like 10,000 emails a day. Like where are those emails going?

Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, that sounds like a smart way to play it there for sure. Yeah, don't if we've ever we've shut down some other stuff too. The heck? Or we've had definitely things that like didn't didn't kind of go anywhere.

I don't know. There's been like so many things over the years here.

Can you tell

us what it's like fifteen years, you know, that's a very, very upper end of software companies. SaaS especially. You weren't always SaaS. Like how are things now? How many people are you?

How involved are you personally in the things that you used to be involved in? Like what's your role at this point? Fifteen years?

I'm still pretty involved because there's only five people who work at the company and my wife is one of them. She's not really that involved. And we have like some part time people, whatever. So there's like kind of four people full time in it every day. And so we were a little bigger at one point, but then the kind of attrition to us.

That's a beautiful thing to have have a software company like this many years just that small, you know, remote. It's beautiful.

I just haven't wanted to mean, there's like so much that it could have been bigger at different points. It's like, I don't know. I've never had that drive. It's like we made enough money and it's like the stress of getting to that next level is like, are we gonna really try to compete with Zendesk on like Zendesk's terms and like try to have social integration and voice over IP and all the stuff that that would require. I don't know, you know?

And so yeah, I've just been mostly bank attend. And then I have my other excursions, right? Like I'll build a thermostat or like we got super involved in Laravel and we run Laravel conferences. So we'll do these other things with that time rather than trying to make HubSpot a lot bigger or something like that. So there's definitely times where I wouldn't mind it being a little bit bigger because at times I'm probably maybe a little more involved than I might under optimal conditions be.

But yeah, I mean, I'm still in the code, from time to time anyway. I don't do a lot of heavy lifting there, but I am sometimes.

I like to talk to friends who have these like ten plus year SaaS businesses. I'm curious to know in in like the help spot product, what does feature development look like today when you're this well established as a product in in the market and everything like because I I think about it with process kit and I'm I'm constantly in a a day to day battle over do I work on feature a, feature b, feature c? Which one is going move the needle on conversions? Which one is going to, you know, make the product better, fit the, fit the roadmap? Like I've got a ton of features that I'm weighing and but like what does that sort of thing look like this many years in?

Like it does it does that calm down at a certain point?

It does calm down a fair amount. Well, yes and no. It's just different. Not really calmer. Because we've had these big chunks of years in here.

Like the first like eight years, six to eight years were kind of like you're describing where it's just like people want features, we're giving them features, people want features, give them features, features, features, And that's how you do the big new release and then you get more customers because you added the features that you didn't have and that people wanted and all that stuff. Then we kinda hit this, do we become Zendesk thing? And then it's like, well, I don't wanna build those features. So I'm not gonna build you voice over IP or whatever. So now we have a lot less we're pretty happy with like the product we have generally.

We're in the middle, we just launched a beta on HubSpot five the other day, and there's a bunch of big new features in there. So it's not like there's no room for improvement or features, but it is definitely different than early on where it's like huge gigantic features. You're just slinging around all the time. Like a lot of these are a little more subtle, like a new authentication mechanism or keeping up with industry standards in different ways and stuff like that. So yeah, we kinda hit that point where unless you're gonna move the product to like a different market or try to take on a bigger chunk of the market, then it changes a little bit.

And for us, Household was like my first big product. It was like built in the ancient days. So like we had like a couple years where we did nothing but convert it to UTF-eight because it didn't support UTF-eight. And that was like a multi year project, which now your app is UTF-eight just out of the box. Like you do nothing and it all works in Japanese just fine and whatever.

So that was like a huge project. It was on premise. So we spent a couple of years building out the cloud version so we could offer it as a SaaS in addition to still letting people run it on premise. So that was a big project. So we've had those kinds of like more infrastructure or underlying technology sort of projects that have just gone on for, you know, years at a time, basically.

Because when you're as small as us and you're also supporting a lot of customers and, know, our developers work with the customers too. So they'll get pulled off of coding to work on some weird thing with

a customer. Obviously it's gone through a ton of iteration, but like, has it always been basically the same code base with incremental improvements over the years or was it like, all right, we're doing version two now and then version three and then

So it's the same code base basically. It's radically different, but there's a lot of the code that's 15 old or close to it.

It's not like not like the Basecamp model where they spend two years working on the next version of Basecamp and then

I do like that model. So like, I that's an interesting thing. That's I'm not a huge Basecamp guy, but that I love. Like, that's one of their things that they've come up with that I really enjoy. Like, six years ago or something, we were gonna, like, just redo the whole rebuild it from the ground up.

Like, new stack, the whole thing, all the code new. And we started that, and I don't know. It just lost momentum. Like, it was just gonna take forever. And because there's just so much weird knowledge in the code of HubSpot.

It's like every little thing that we've worked on over the years, every little edge case and you just start to get in there digging around with that and you're like, that's gonna mean we can't ship a new version of helps. Like if it's gonna be years to build that and you get into this weird thing of like, but we're not improving the mainline products. Can that idea, but I do think we're kind of coming up on a point now. We've done a lot of the big infrastructure stuff. And that is something I'm gonna think about a little bit is that idea of like, could we do a new version that's like, cause like it has the same ideas and it's like, you have a compatibility later so you can move people over, but you can also get rid of a lot of old stuff that maybe doesn't apply anymore or we know it's bad and it's hard to rethink it given we have a bunch of customers using it and they don't want a whole new way of doing X, Y, Z.

But if we have a new version and we still run the old version, that's a little more possible. So yeah, I do like that idea a lot.

Is that what Basecamp does?

Yeah. Right now they're on Basecamp three, right?

And so you can run Basecamp two for a while and then before Well, they

don't let you buy Basecamp two, right? So all new customers are Basecamp three. But if you're on Basecamp one, like this customer still on Basecamp one and they just still maintain Basecamp one forever. Now they don't add features to it And they probably do security fixes, but like that would be it. So there's like just security fixes.

There's base camp two, just security fixes.

But if you look at them, like they are different. They're very different products, at least from the UI standpoint.

They take different approaches.

Different approaches each time. Especially three is like a pretty big UI change from Basecamp too.

Yeah, very big. Yeah, so it's kind of interesting.

Yeah. We just had a similar experience where we had to build a new app. So start from scratch but all of the concepts and learnings. So we were able to do it obviously in a much shorter amount of time. It was fun to tackle things that we didn't like the way we did them originally and they just had to stick with them.

That was cool to address. Like we don't want a tagging system. We want a criteria system. Don't build a tagging system.

And then you guys had that kind of cool thing where like, you know, you have a deadline, like, and if you meet that deadline, it's gonna be awesome for you. There's like some interesting is super interesting. I don't like the idea of the stress of that. But I do like the idea of like, it's not just like rebuilding your app in the abstract and then it's gonna launch one day on the same website you have now essentially. And the same number of trials will sign up as signed up yesterday.

And maybe you convert a few more, but it's like a very long term thing. This is like, no, if we hit this, this is gonna be huge for us if we can do this in this time frame.

Yes, which was necessary with the intensity came the motivation of the deadline and not just to finish it, but actually get benefit from hitting the deadline. That was cool. And I would say the team that did it, we could not keep up this intensity for very long. So I definitely had to telegraph to everyone, like because most of that team was totally new. And so we had to telegraph to them.

Like, yo, this is not normal. Like, we're

just gonna get through the

kinda like everyone come back down to to what a normal cadence can look like. And it's definitely been the most intense on Rock because as CTO and also he built the base of the new app because he was the right person to do it. And most of the people that we were hiring for the team were totally new. So they needed to work off of a base that made sense as opposed to like asking them to build a base that quickly.

Yeah. That would be way hard.

Right. It's asking too much but I think looking back on it, I can see it now that Rock's doing the best work he's ever done because it's like all that learning and then just super intense focused period of output. And I think for him, he's also moving apartments. He's kind of like, this is, I need a vacation. COVID and I'm looking at it like, this is the most amazing performance I've seen.

So I think looking back on it, he'll be very, very happy about it. But in the middle of it, it's pretty intense.

It's got to be such a payoff to go through years of like frustrations with different features and legacy code and different people have come in and out of the company and then to have a clean slate to just do everything to solve all those problems in one shot. That's gotta be pretty Yes. Pretty satisfying.

And to be official too, because I feel like every time I see your guys podcast, I'm always like, Oh man, Jordan. Oh man, this is like, I'm scared for you, buddy. I'm scared for you. This is just got the big beast out there just waiting to stomp on you at any moment. You could tell that your guys are doing better and it's growing.

I'm just like, Oh no. Like this is the part in the movie where like they just

come in

and say, now we offer this, goodbye. That's just it. So that you like navigated that and and avoided disaster. Was just like

Yes.

It was an intense game of chicken.

Exactly. And

then as you know, as it gets closer to the collision, you're really not sure how that's gonna work out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because We

are happy and relieved. I mean, it's not over. We still have to get in. We have to compete. There'll be more competition.

All the stuff. It'll be harder to differentiate.

When does it open up?

Oh, it's real soon. End of this month, October. It's geared to be in time for Black Friday. That's the goal. And so when it launches at the October, people can jump on it, get it in their stores.

Like the other app, you had to switch your payment processing. You had to redo your tracking. You had to redo all of your integrations. It was a big lift. You couldn't just do it in a day.

This is sign up for it by that same day you have post purchase offers running through your Shopify checkout. So it's just a very different nature of it. I did a podcast yesterday with Jane Portman about onboarding and I was like, this is like a conclusion to a story. Like everything I'm gonna talk about is no longer relevant at all and we're about to start the whole journey again on figuring out what the right onboarding is, right? Because onboarding is not this is the ideal onboarding.

It is this is the ideal onboarding for us, for your situation, your positioning, your pricing, your product market, all these other things. So we're about to figure all that stuff out again. Even just thinking

about your app though, like from a technology kind of CTO perspective, it seems really nice because like the old app much as be so huge compared to the new one. Just because it has to handle so much more that now you can just be on top of, you could depend on Shopify for a lot more than before. So that like just maintaining that how fast you can move. It's gonna have a lot of advantages there, even if yes, there's like way more competition and all those things too. But it's kind of nice in that regard.

Like what's it called the surface area, right? The surface area of the last product was like an infinite desk. It just went on

forever. Exactly.

From payments on this side to integrations and email and SMS and it was just wild all to accomplish something relatively narrow. And now finally we get to strip out everything except that narrow value and that's it. So that's exciting. It's not all perfect. There's additional issues to deal with but it is a relief to just stop being able to do that.

And it's not like that goes away. Like we learned a lot from that and we bring that in, but it's definitely a much easier, it's gonna be much easier product to run.

Yeah, who wants to build, I mean, anybody's built a billing system though, you don't wanna build a billing system. That's like the worst thing in the world to

build. A live billing system with shoppers doing like $3,000,000 a day and like

your customers are dependent on the billing system you built. That's like a whole another level of stress of billing system there for sure.

Yes. Yes. We did not we did not really know what we were getting into. Why do we?

Of course not. That's crazy.

I'm interested to hear that that conversation with Jane. Because I've I've just been like hammering my head against the desk with with the onboarding problem, trying to solve that for the last few months and still working on it the future couple months. Like, it's funny because like early on designing like process kit, I have all these opinions about what I think an app onboarding experience should or shouldn't be. Same thing with like designing certain screens in the app. Then after a while you run into these like issues with customers like, well, generally have been against like the idea of having like a wizard where you sort of like take over the screen and get brand new users, get the key information from them all set up so that they can get going quickly.

I've been against that whole idea cause I think you should just design your interface to be user friendly and they can figure it out on their own. And now I'm like, now I'm designing a wizard, know? Yes. You

So you guys ready for a landsman hot take here? A controversial take on this here?

Oh, no.

Okay. Here here's my controversial take. And listen, you're you're getting advice from somebody who's had like one big successful app. So, you know, take this all with a grain

of salt. But

I am not a big believer in anywhere resembling early on, like really even thinking about onboarding at all. Like I just don't believe in onboarding very much early on because I just think

You have to get the problem right first.

Yeah, I just think you have to get the problem right. I'm so much more worried about like the top of the funnel. Like I just wanna get more people in and get those good people. I think I'm the last, not your last, I don't know, you guys released a podcast yesterday. Haven't listened to it, but the week before, like how you're talking about how people who are good fits end up still not buying, even though they're perfect and they're a perfect agency and all that stuff.

I just think there's like, you just need a certain volume and you can't optimize. Getting a few more people through onboarding isn't as beneficial as doubling the top of the funnel, I feel like early on, as well as having the product get better. And onboarding is such a mess. You try the wizard and that doesn't work. Then you try the other thing and that doesn't work.

And you try the other thing and that doesn't work. And ultimately the people who really click with your product, they would download it and install it. They don't even give a shit about the onboarding. So that's the thing.

I definitely agree with you that like onboarding should not be the thing early on in SaaS product. Like it's really about that product market fit, the problem that you're solving. Are you solving a clear problem and all that? Well for ProcessKit, it has customers and those paying customers have made it on board without any bells and whistles in the onboarding process. But the problem that I see is just looking at how much work and how much time it took to get those people converted.

And some of them did all that work themselves. A lot of them I had to do multiple calls with them and lots, lots and lots of email support, know. And it's not like I'm against talking to customers. It's just there was a ton of friction to get a pretty small percentage converted. And I see that as like a problem, you know?

You're saying that's not onboarding?

No, he's saying the onboarding is the problem and that it takes a lot of work to onboard them.

Right. You're saying it's not about the onboarding, it's about the solution.

Me, yes. That's part of it too, for sure.

Well, I also think it's also, is it a solution that better onboarding just can't solve? A human walking them through it is just better than any wizard thing that could ever be built. I mean, because it's a complicated thing to move your Google Docs and your Asana list and all this crap you have everywhere, Jerry rigged together and put it into the solution that like a human in the middle is just a better way to do it. Not that you have to be that human, but a human involved is actually superior.

I mean, could be true. It's not true for every customer, but it's still just a lot of work even if you understand the product, how how it works. Know, it's still it's still just a lot of work to set up your processes write them and all that and then invite your team, get them on board. I also look at onboarding, it is about the product too and what it does, like so how fast can you get somebody to that moment of value, right? And that has to do with the small set of features that are most important and the market that you're solving, how clear the job to be done is that you're, that you're solving for.

And that's when I say I'm working on onboarding. Yeah. I'm thinking about like improvements on the first few screens that they see, but, but really I'm thinking about like the set of features that solves a very specific problem for customers so that I can get them to solve that problem on day one and see it much, much faster.

Yes. I mean, having the features that are really required to really solve the problem correctly is totally I don't call that onboarding exactly, but getting to a level of feature completeness where you're handling the 80% of cases is definitely super valuable.

That was the thing that like early on in ProcessKit when I was just thinking about it as a business idea. Not that I wouldn't have done ProcessKit and I still really believe in it, but I didn't expect this to be such a thorny thing to overcome.

Yeah. It

could always benefit from more top of the funnel, but even right now before a lot of our marketing stuff has kicked in and published, like we're getting a steady amount of organic trials and leads every, every month. The onboarding, I've talked about it in previous episodes. It's just like, like I feel like I should have seen it seen as coming, like how much work it really is to get your company on board with a whole new system like that.

Onboarding is one of the levers, but there are other levers. What Ian said certainly rings true in the Kartik experience. When we made our big change in June 2019, we had 100,000 in potential MRR signing up in trials every month. We thought we had an onboarding problem and once we got it, we would explode. We just couldn't fix it and at some point we admitted defeat.

And so we switched from trials to requiring an application process and a demo. We didn't change the product for the onboarding at all. None of the screens changed and we raised the price significantly. The positioning changed and we use those levers. We didn't touch the onboarding lever.

Literally nothing changed the product. So Brian, if you look at your situation right now, there are other levers. If you took your pricing and added pricing significantly or had like a minimum or something and then required a process, you could not change the product in any way, but change the dynamic.

I was talking to a friend yesterday about, about that. Like, like what if you just increase the price or add a significant setup fee or both? It's something that I'm open to. And I, and I have been selling, an implementation service with process kit. I sold it to a handful of customers so far.

What I, what I learned with that, and maybe it's, maybe it's because it's too low priced. I've been charging, as like a quote unquote, like introductory rate, 500, setup fee, totally optional. And a handful of customers have, have gone for that where I basically work with them directly on a couple of calls. We, we design your processes, get you set up. And I actually found that those customers have not been the best fits for process.

Some of them have been good, but a couple of them have turned out even after paying the setup fee and going through that. But again, like that could be a top of funnel thing. Like if, what if, what if I made it like a $3,000 setup fee and it's like a different sell and a different type of market that I would bring that to.

But also, I mean, I guess to me, I don't like, I'm not a big fan of the setup fee because to me software is all like volume. I would rather have a person which maybe not, you know, if you have enough revenue to like hire somebody, even if

it makes Well, would be the idea. I definitely would

it makes process or close to profitable because you have obviously other businesses and all that stuff. I don't know. I just think I'd rather have somebody working there, working on it, whether it's you or somebody else, bringing people on for free. And even though you're gonna lose some of those people and that will have been wasted effort, I think it doesn't matter. Because the people you get in there who stay, and if you make it easy for them to come in, they're gonna pay you.

I mean, we have people who paid us literally for fifteen years, hundreds of thousands of dollars, we don't ever hear from them. I think that there's that end of it. And then there's the other end on the top, which is like, yeah, you're only ever gonna convert a few percent in software. Like that's the thing. Was like, no matter how good you get that onboarding, like you're only gonna ever have so much, you're not gonna convert 50% or 60% to like paid who stay any length of time.

It just doesn't happen for anybody anywhere.

It's assuming a trial. Is that what you mean by volume as in software is like a flying business? Like you need more trials and you're gonna You need

more trials and then, you know, you're losing people all along the way. And then at the end you get the people who stay and that's it. And I think like

And after they've gone through the work of getting themselves set up, they're invested in it in terms of their

I want to disagree. I'm just trying to come up with the right argument.

One thing that Jordan said that I think is really applicable here too, which we don't have to deal with this, you have a little more opportunity here, think, Brian, although it's more work, of course. So one of the interesting things with HubSpot is that everybody essentially needs help desk software for their business or organization. Everybody essentially knows what it is. So I don't have to teach anybody anything about help desk software. And so they're already coming in with a ton of domain knowledge about what this type of software already is, which is sort of an interesting spot, I think, in the process stuff, because that's not true for process kit.

But if you kind of become the way people find out that this exists, I just feel like they're gonna default to you being the like, Oh, well these are the guys who introduced me to this type of software. I trust them. Even if your software doesn't do all the stuff that it could or it should or whatever, There's just gonna be that trust there, because you brought them in kind of at the top of the funnel, which is a lot more work.

I think the direction I'm going on that point is that there are competitors who have a very similar, feature set to process kit, But differentiator that I'm trying to double down on right now is like we are the thing made for a client services agency especially the type of agency which are mostly marketing agencies, the type of one that are very repeatable, that intend to scale up their growth. They're not the small boutique design shop who just does a few big projects a year, they're the SEO or marketing content, social media ads agencies who just have these retainers and they wanna onboard as many customers as possible and grow their teams and it's all they're just running their process over and over. And there's a lot of them like that. Like I don't just mean productized services. Like there's just a ton of marketing agencies in the world who work

that way. Both of the cold stuff's gonna be good for you too, I think once you get that really going. Like that seems like it could be effective for this particular case.

I don't know if this was like just an off week or something, but like it's still running to this day. It's been about a month ish, like four or five weeks of automated, you know, handful of cold emails going out every day, same target lists, same emails. It's a lower response rate in the last like two weeks. And I don't really know why, but it's, I want to, I want to see it run for a few more weeks and see if this continues, but like nothing really has changed. So I don't know.

Could check deliverability if like the something like that, maybe. Yeah. But you're not sending out that many emails. So I would doubt you're really caught up in like that much of a just deliverability issue. It's not like you sent out 300,000 or millions or whatever.

And so I wouldn't think that would be it, but could be I could just do it. It's such a small sample could totally just be random, you know, or time of year or people have other issues going on or whatever. Yeah.

But I'm working on a content which has started to roll out now, but the plan would be over the next few months to really try to promote this content and do more, you know, like link building to it and try to do a little bit more SEO traffic. We'll see how that plays out.

Yeah, get the SEO. The SEO is critical. Big SEO fan.

Can ignore it exists. It's terrible.

Seriously. For your stuff, it's a whole different world. Especially now that you're gonna, the new thing, it's totally irrelevant.

You're going into like the Shopify app store arena. Just battle it out in there.

Well, the funny thing is we are redesigning our website that most people aren't gonna see, it's still important.

You gotta have a website regardless you gotta have a website.

Yeah, it's interesting to try to optimize a site though, to send people to the App Store listing. That's a different thing than like your own signup process. That you'd like building up this trust and credibility because you can't do that the same way inside of an App Store listing. And then you look at the App Store listing and it's pretty narrow, your creative space. So like you got a video and you gotta make the screenshots look amazing.

And you gotta, you know, you use whatever formatting is available.

Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, I'm sure the website will still be important for you even though it won't be like the primary driver. It's definitely gonna be an important aspect

Yeah. Yeah.

And especially with that where people are spend a lot of money with you, they're a little more inclined to like probably go and search out the website and see if you are legitimate than, you know, some other thing that's like a little tiny, whatever. Does some little thing in your Shopify store, who cares? It's $10 a month, great. Like, when you're giving somebody a percentage, then you wanna know what's going on with them and if they seem legit.

Yes. Yeah, that's the hope. The hope is that even if there's a lot of competition that if branding is one of the only ways you can separate yourself, better invest in branding.

Yeah. You have, Brian, do you have like competitors who charge a lot or is everybody kind of at normal SaaS pricing?

Normal SaaS pricing and process kit, it's in the same ballpark as all of them. Some of them offer so it depends on who you consider a direct competitor or a semi direct competitor. Cause you could say it's in the same ballpark as like Asana and Basecamp and Trello and Google. But then there's like other ones that have like per seat pricing with no free option, which is in the same ballpark as, as process kit. You know, everyone's like slightly different structure.

Like, like with process kit, I just didn't want to have many one seater customers. So the base plan is 49 a month and that gives you three seats and then it's 19 per user for your fourth and up. And I think that has helped. Like that model to just, just basically stake out like this is for teams. If you're solo, it's just, it's not for you, you know?

Yeah. I definitely like that. Yeah. I was just curious, like, cause it's like, yeah, if you have people like a lot higher in price, it's kind of there's other interesting things there, but I don't think you really have that.

Like in my conversations with, with many people, they start to add up the two or three tools that they pay for, that they stitch together, that they would maybe replace with ProcessKit. And for a team of like five to 10 people, some are a little bit more than that. The solutions that they're paying for that ProcessKit solves, they're paying a couple 100 a month.

I don't know if we've ever thought if we talked about this, I don't know if we ever did, but like, it does feel kind of to me, like it could be sort of interesting if you had like a Basecamp pricing as like an experiment at some point, if you wanted to like, yeah, just flat. Like it's unlimited users because like we just want your whole team in here no matter what. We don't want you to like right now you have to think about when you add a person and you go to here and it adds money on a song and this with us, like you don't think about anything like $200 a month, get everything. That's it. Or maybe there's a couple of tiers or maybe that it goes up to a thousand because there's some like

Well, I've heard a lot of feedback. I asked for a lot of feedback on the per user pricing model and a few people were like, I don't love it. But in what people dislike even more actually is because a lot of these agencies, they sort of expect that most of these tools like this are per user.

Yeah. I mean, can't go wrong with per user just because everything's per user. So you're not like way out there on a limb.

What they really don't like is when it's buckets of users. So like, Oh, I want to add one more person, but it's going to bump me into this next very expensive tier. I don't like that. And then the other thing that I hear a lot is because it's, they're working with clients and they want to invite clients in. They don't want to pay for clients.

They want unlimited guests.

Sure. Yeah. Paying for clients makes sense that they wouldn't want to do that. Yeah.

Basecamp does the same thing, right? You can invite whoever you want.

Yeah, well Basecamp, as far as I know, they basically have no mechanism for like expansion revenue as far as I

can I mean, they might, at one point they had like a, if you wanted to get like invoiced or something, they had some like $3,000 a year plan that was just like, I don't know, gave you some random Yeah?

But but still, like the the 200 person company is paying the same as the as the five person company. Yeah. Base camp.

Yep. I I sell buck mean, health nuts buckets just as a counterpoint to that, which definitely occasionally do other people who are like, but now I gotta go, you know, I have 10 users and if I go to 11, then I have to buy like the 25.

Oh, dude. I I pay I pay for that and I and I think about that too. Like, it's actually a no it's actually a pain to be honest because like with audience ops, I'm sorry, Ian, like talk about it. With audience ops, we have a handful of client facing managers, but many more people on the team. And I only pay for those users, those managers in, in help scout all the time.

We need to show a client's email to the writer, you know, so, so they got to like copy and paste the email and throw it into our other place. Like, it would just be nice to have all 25 people on the team in there, but I

That's where I ended up making that sale. Like, mean, pretty much nobody ever doesn't buy because like, they had to go over the tier limit into the bigger tier. And he's gonna also always point out that like, yeah, we have these like five people, right? That could have access, but don't. And they're like, yeah, you know, it'd be nice if Bobby was in there and then like, okay, then all of sudden they've already used up half the next tier.

I mean, at the lowest levels, obviously, it's a little more of an issue. Like when you go from five to 10 or whatever at the smallest customers. But then once you get past like 10, like we almost never hear any complaints at all, like that you went from 25 to 50 or 50 to 100. Like, because if you have 50 people like you're, you're never adding just one. Your thing maybe doesn't have as many companies where like you have hundreds of people in it, but there could be a tiering that would work.

I like the per user pricing. I like the expansion revenue and that hasn't been as much of a pain point for me as a business. The next thing that I would probably experiment with on the pricing front would be putting credit card upfront. Cause right now there's no credit card upfront. I don't know how that would play out.

I would like to test it at some point because like I've defaulted to no credit card upfront because I feel like especially tools like these, almost all of them are no credit card upfront. I'm starting to think that it would get people to take their trial period more seriously and commit to the work of getting it set up.

I don't know. That's another thing I'm all dubious about that whole thing. I don't know. Especially a big like do it or not do it. I don't know.

I kind of just don't want to deal with the inevitably There's

gonna be customers. Yeah.

The refunds right after they accidentally converted after after fourteen

We did it. We tried it with a thermostat or something for a little bit and it was like, you know, can I just get in? I can't I can't use my manager's credit card. You know, like this, then you have this whole barrier to entry, Those are bigger organizations where, like, they just can't sign up with the credit card because they don't have permission to, like, do it. So I don't know.

And I also just feel like the big business process apps like Helpspot, like, Processkit, like where it's taking over a large chunk of this group. It's just not a decision that's made on that level. It's not like when I go into something and then I just randomly sign up for it and then I pick it. It's bigger than that. Like, I mean, maybe not the smallest process kit customer, right?

But the bigger ones, it's not just like a guy rolls in there and looks like, Oh, now we're using this. It's like a whole thing. They're the team and their demos and talking about it and like the whole thing.

That's why I've gone with no credit card upfront up till now because it's like, even when I do a deep demo call with them and I'm, some of them, I I'll stay on the call for like an hour screen sharing, showing them everything about prosecute. That's still not enough for them to decide. Like they still need to spend a week or two playing with it on their own before they could get

Every that information to get demo I do is an hour and nobody's in fifteen years decided on the demo that they're buying. It just literally

never It's just it's just too big of a Yeah.

It's too big.

The counter example would be like the other day I signed up for, what's it called? Re reward full? Rewardly?

Uh-huh. Yeah. Like affiliate. Affiliate.

I just wanted to very quickly slap on an affiliate program for process kit. Don't want to spend a lot of time on it. I know how it works. Like I think that they were credit card upfront. I was like fine.

I think so yeah.

Like let me put my credit card in. If I could solve this problem within an hour, that's great. I'm done. Like I wish I kind of wish my SAS was like that, but it's not. That's where it sort of really makes sense to do the credit card upfront when it's just like you solve such a quick, simple problem.

Yeah. Now I fill this link on my website and the whole thing's done essentially. And I don't have to think I don't I don't need a bunch of buy in from all the other people who work in the company and all that kind of stuff. Just I can make this decision by myself and that's it. Yeah.

I mean, hope the other thing too is to like, make sure you keep in touch with all those people. That's like we get a lot of people come back later too. So I don't know if you have like a good outgoing drip sequence, but like we get tons of people sign up later. Because it takes six months or a year to like they're like, I was working on this and then we couldn't work on it anymore and now I'm back. Six months later, like

Well, I I talked about how like like I'm in that early phase where we're just rapidly shipping features. So at least once or twice a month I send out a broadcast email. I'm only sending emails about, Hey, here's the latest new feature

that we, that we And

that, that is what brings people back. And it's really common for people to just keep tabs on process kit for like they trialed it five months ago and then, and then we released some feature and they trial it again and it still doesn't, they still don't convert. And then three months later they come back again and then they convert like that has happened several times.

Yeah. It's always hard when you have somebody has a solution to get them off of that solution is always fairly difficult because it's gonna be just a big project for them to move under any scenario, which is kinda like where again, like the more you can help them with like, maybe really helping them. I think it's sort of interesting in that regard. We don't like go into their well, I mean, we have we'll pretty much do anything to get anybody to move for the most part. The only line we have is if we have to code, then we charge them.

But if it's not code, like we'll go in and set up for them. We will help them organize how they should transition, like whatever, all that stuff is just part of what support does. So yeah, there's sort of, there's something interesting there probably with these big things. You know, obviously it's great when you can catch them when they don't have a process.

The hard thing about that is like, I like doing the close customer support about like the features of process kit and how you can use different automations. What is really super draining on the and really the barrier is consulting with them on how they should design their processes for their business operations, for their business goals. Like that's really the hang up is like, you know, even if they've documented stuff in Google Docs, it's not just a one to one migration. It's very similar to designing drip workflows or Zapier Zaps. You gotta figure out step by step how things should operate in your business.

That's Okay. So I got an idea for you there. Got an idea. I solved a similar problem pretty early on. We had two big problems that were sort of like this that I solved the same way for the first ten years of HubSpot, which is people would want to convert or be interested in HubSpot.

They would wanna convert, but they would have a big messy situation of some kind of data thing where they needed integration with their CRM or something like they didn't work and we didn't wanna do it. Or they needed hosting and we didn't wanna host. Because at the time, like hosting was being complicated. I don't want any part of hosting. Whatever.

I didn't wanna be responsible. I know how to run a hosting company, whatever. So for both these things, we just found outside parties. So like for we had consultants that were not us that we would send people to, and they would have a consulting engagement with them. And we didn't even get a kickback.

I was like, I don't wanna kickback. I don't want anything. I want you to make them happy and move them on the help spot. And the same thing with the hosting. Like, I don't want any money.

I mean, I probably could have worked out and gotten 10%, whatever. I don't give a shit. Just go host them and I don't wanna ever hear about hosting problems. And you can make I'm gonna send you these people and that's great recurring revenue for you. Just host them.

So I do wonder if you could like could you get somebody who's who is a consultant? And you could have like, I send everybody to you, you work out deals, you're obviously bringing them the process kit, you're making a consultant fee, like all that kind of stuff to be the consultant.

That worked for us.

All right, so I'm gonna be doing some like live brainstorming here on the podcast.

Here we go.

Thank you, Ian. Never gone wrong,

it's never gone wrong. No, of course.

The one of the things that I've been thinking a little bit about kicking around the idea of like hiring, I've hired like contract marketers to help with some content stuff here and there. I've been thinking about hiring for like a deeper role more on like the marketing side. In the last episode I was talking about like it would be great if there was if I had sort of like a collaborator who's just really pushing on the marketing stuff. Anyway, that's one thing that's on my mind, but this onboarding consultant is another need for sure that I would like to get off my plate but but still very much I want it done well. I want to give customers the that sort of deep expertise and knowledge.

Call it a customer success role, but I feel like it's that on steroids. And I'm thinking about like sort of combining that part marketing, part onboarding consultant. And some of it is like public facing where we're sharing tips and best practices and stuff publicly and internally they're working directly with customers. I think that like one expert level person like that who's like both technical and process oriented, loves systems and working with software and, but also sort of like marketing chops. Like they could, they could be on a podcast, they could do YouTube videos, they could do webinars on that same sort of stuff.

I like that idea. The question is like

Always hard to get the multitasker. That's always, always tricky. Possible, but hard.

It's multitask, but it's like really the best type of public facing marketing for process kit would be like a process expert sharing tips.

Yeah. Well, that's where it's too. It's almost like I see this as like almost the other spectrum of like doing like what Nathan did with convert Kit, and it's more onboard, what I would call onboarding specialist, who literally is just there moving. They still have to gonna be quite intelligent to figure out the weirdo Google. They're gonna have to understand these people process, but they're just moving the process.

That's a certain kind of person that I'd be inclined to do for free in this scenario. Now there's the other kind of person, which is an actual consultant. And they're gonna go in and be like, your process stinks, and we're gonna fix your process. And while we're fixing it, we work exclusively with Process Kit, blah, blah, We'll get you set up in there and it's all great. And then that's a thing where maybe I'm not even involved.

They're making money, they're doing engagement and then they're selling Process Kit as part of that or whatever. Or they could work for you too and you're charging consulting engagements, but

I don't have time to build this sort of thing, but I want to, have like a network of consultants because we already have templates in process kit and the ability for you to design your own templates and export them and import them into your clients process kits accounts, know? So yeah, like whether it's like consultants who make money off of like the affiliate program and then whatever consulting fees they want.

Yeah, partner network or something like that. Is that what you have Jordan? You have a partner network type thing?

We've done both. So we do both, right? We have success people in house who that's their job, figuring out what people need. The truth is that they only go so far, right? They will help like you, like your line in the sand is like, if we need to code, we need to charge you.

So we have our lines in the sand also where at some point if it turns into, need strategy, how does this work with our email marketing, all that? That's where we have our partners. There's one Will at Seller Flows has done really well for himself becoming a Klaviyo expert and a Cardhook expert. And for using both of those, we just point over to him and say that that's the right firm to get you set up the right way and really take advantage. And then the other way around, he has sent us some of our biggest clients.

So we always looked at that as a gauge of like product success, where if there were consultants that were making money from being CardHook experts, we have Google search, whatever that's called, like alerts. Whenever we see an Upwork or any type of a job posting that includes like cart hook expertise a plus like that we see that that's success, that's progress that people are seeing us not just as a tool to use for their business. But now if I get good at that tool, I can make a living. My living is improved by being an expert at that tool. That's like the ideal.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's always great to get to that level. That's starts to be self sustaining.

Right, we looked at click funnels was unbelievably successful at that. They grew so quickly. And they also attracted people who weren't that didn't have much expertise on the internet but wanted to. And then agencies popped up like ClickFunnels agencies specific. And then you had a ClickFunnels certification and that to me, that's like the ideal ecosystem.

Shopify did the same thing. They have their partner network and their agencies and that ecosystem is starting to see it now with Notion and Rome and tools that are built on top of it. Have you guys seen a company called Super? It like supercharges your notion. So you can have custom URLs.

You can have your blog on different designs affect the So I think those are all signs of

success.

It's almost like the product solves problems for customers, but really it's also like, it's a product for consultants to build their business around.

Well, that's what a really interesting thing about process, right? Is your primary customers are consultants. So like, well that might not be while, like if you're an SC, if you're like a brand agency, whatever,

that's fine. Of the customers are like marketing services. Right.

So they're not gonna necessarily be the right ones, but if as you get a little bigger and you come up with some who in house, maybe just, well, we're good at process kit. Like we love process kit and we could be doing more with, you know, could find the right people. Only need one or two of them to

like I've been in touch with a few like process consultants who expressed interest because they work with clients, but I haven't done enough of like targeting them and nurturing them as, as and all that.

More of a business relationship. Yeah.

I'm really thinking more about this idea because I've been thinking about hiring more of like a,

I don't know if it's a, if it's

a full time hire or a part time contractor or something to fill that role of like, like it's, it's to me, it's more than a, than your typical customer success onboarding rep. I've tried seeing like what, what a email marketing tool can offer in terms of their like done for you free, my concierge service. And it's almost like, to me it was like completely worthless. Like I, you're not designing my automations. Like I could figure out how the features work myself.

Want you to just like tell me like what to do. So I would want this to be a little bit more like working hands on with the customer as I've been doing with customers. But I, I would not like to do that forever.

That'd be it. Well, there's also just

the idea of like, like we make a lot of these decisions, which is just we're okay. Only working with certain types of people. If you want the super slick onboarding, like HubSpot doesn't have super slick onboarding. Like if you're not willing to get in there and like, we don't need a lot of setup. The app itself now, which is sort of different, it's like compared to other help desk apps, which are quite complicated in how you actually, once you're in there, what you have to do to like even be able to reply to an email is quite complicated in some of them.

Now with HubSpot, it's like nothing. It's just like you just do out of the box. You wouldn't even need to be trained, nothing like so. But there are other parts of this, like the earlier process of like signing up for a trial and things like that are just, they could probably be better, but I'm okay with like the people in some cases maybe need to jump through a hoop or two, or you wanna download and run it on windows. You're gonna have to have a windows person, you know, to help you with that.

And we, our support will help that person. But like, so, you know, it's like that, that's an aspect of it too. It's your thing and you don't have to work with everybody if they're not.

Yeah, I see that as an element of like profitable confidence. And it's healthy for the company to have these limits around like, HubSpot has a lot of this stuff. Look, you want it, you got to pay annual, you need to work on our timetable period. That's it. There is an element of that of it does increase the confidence also on the buyer side.

I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna basically throw $20,000 at the solution and my team's gonna be better off.

Right. Yeah.

Your chance, I got a call. Is like a regular Zoom call. Think I'm just gonna drop out. All right. Unless you guys have No, a

this is good.

Ian, thanks for thanks for hopping on. This is fun.

Went long. It. Perfect.

We did it.

The Bootstrap Web Talk Show wraps up. Everybody have

a great weekend.

Alright. Let's see.

Thanks, Ian. Later.