Bootstrapped Web

Bootstrapped web. We came back. It's been a few weeks. Jordan, how you doing, buddy?

It's been a minute. I'm good, man. How are you? Good to see you. Good to talk.

It's a record.

Yeah. Yeah. Good to be back on the mics. Hey. I got a new toy here.

I got a new, new podcasting microphone.

I have to thank you for this whole microphone setup situation with the boom arm and all that that you helped convince me to get into. Oh yeah. It is the start of every Zoom conversation with a stranger. First thing they say, oh, you got a nice setup over there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, yes, it's just a distract from the dog crate, the pile of mail and the fact that I'm in a nook in my bedroom. But thank you very much.

Appreciate it. It's like, you're you're kind of a big deal. You got like a real podcasting setup.

Yeah. And that's fine. I have my spiel. Yes. Yes.

Good. Well, everybody listening, thanks for listening. It's good to be back. And where are we, Brian? It is December 4.

November's done. The Black Friday, Cyber Monday madness is done. Holidays coming up. So how about you? Where's your head at?

Yeah, doing doing alright. You know, obviously still always focused on on process kick. Got a couple of updates here. This isn't a cart hook Black Friday, but this is a I've had a pretty good little Black Friday for Productize this week. And today is like the final day of that promotion of having some emails sent out to the list about that.

And that's been kind of fun because I say this every single year with with the Productize Black Friday. And I'm like, this is the year where the sales are really just gonna tail off, and it's all over. It's been like five or six years now since I've been selling that course. Amazing. Especially this year because stopped offering the higher priced package, which is like a coaching session.

I just stopped doing that. So I figured like, with that out of the picture and you know, haven't been as active with the email list, like it's this is it. It's not gonna break like a couple of thousand and it's well above that at this point. It's been good. Cool.

That's the build once, sell twice, but build once, sell several 100 times.

Keeps going. Yep.

God bless the internet.

It's still an idea that people, especially consultants, freelancers, agencies, they, they still really resonate with that. There's all this content that I spent years doing articles about productized services and talks and podcasts about it, and it's like, man, if keep hammering on a topic that resonates with people, even if you take several years off, like I went into learning Ruby on Rails and doing SaaS and stuff, That stuff that sits out there on the internet still attracts people who are looking for those answers.

I think the difficulty that the overwhelming majority of people have is realizing that what they know is valuable. It's in the tank for them. They've already, they've known it, they banked it. They don't think about it as like, Oh, if I shared all this stuff that I think is just normal, it's not going be that valuable and reality is. I think that designer Jack Butcher is building an amazing business off of it.

Visualize Value, that's the name of the company. He's building an amazing little empire around this concept of build one sell twice. It's not a new concept, but he's just teaching it in a new way. It's great.

Yeah. The idea that I sort of finally clicked into many years ago now is just write about things, write to yourself from like two or three years ago. What were you trying to figure out two or three years ago? And just write to that person. Write write an article about or podcast to them or video to them.

And there's always people who are a two two or three years just right behind you. And and if you could just share that advice, it it works. Know?

Yeah. I like that.

I I I wish I could figure out a

way to do that the the way you do. Good, man. Well, it's Friday. And what that means is we we do this thing in Slack on Fridays that is so much fun. I'm sure I've talked about it before, but it is so much fun.

Every single Friday, we just share a snapshot from the camera roll with a brief explanation of what it is. That's it. But if you have 28 people doing that, it is, it is so much fun. And then there are these side conversations and threads off each one and then it's kids and funny, it's music. It's it is the easiest like team culture building thing that's just fun that we've ever landed on.

The ease compared to the fun is like the ratio is amazing.

Just pick a photo, share it.

Just pick a photo, write a few words. This is my kid doing this, you know, and then, right, this is a dish we made recently. Here's the recipe. All of sudden people start talking about their recipes for it and it's really fantastic. And we had something similar yesterday.

Have you done your Spotify wrapped?

Yes. And it Oh man, it pisses me off.

I've got a whole Oh, rant on

it's great. I love it. Did your kids ruin it? No, no, no. Not because of that.

I have two different lives on Spotify. I've got my work life when I'm sitting in here in the office where I exclusively listen to only instrumental music. A lot of soundtracks, lot of like electronica stuff like because I cannot focus when there's lyrics. Like, I'm big into soundtracks and stuff while I'm working. Literally.

It's crazy. But but then when I'm driving and stuff, you know, I'm listening to all my favorite bands and artists and and everything else, you know? But the majority of my listening happens at work. So all my

recommendations Spotify wrapped thinks you're super instrumental.

Yeah. Yeah. Thinks I'm like super into like the Game of Thrones soundtrack, you know.

It's So Brian, I I need to I need to break something to you though.

Yeah.

Brian, you are. That's true. That's how it is. The majority of your time is spent on that.

I wish I could discover some actual good new music. I I feel like I'm I'm stuck in listening to my favorite bands from the nineties forever. You know?

Yes. We shared first of all, the the rap thing was done so well. It had an Instagram story cadence with multiple sections at the top and it switched every tense. It was so well done.

Maybe I didn't see that. I just saw the top artists that

you've listened Oh, no. I don't think it's an app called Wrapped, but I think like, I don't even know. You go there and then you trigger it somehow, but you go through this wrapped experience that it feels like an Instagram's, like a set of Instagram stories. So it shows you your top song, your top artist, your top five, how many new songs you listen to, how many new bands you listen to, how much. So each one is like a little mini story and then you can share it at the end.

It's brilliant marketing for them. Well, we started sharing those. So I started a poll basically asking, are you proud and you actually have good taste or are you embarrassed and secretly listen to Post Malone all day like I do? So that triggered a lot of laughter in the Slack, but it was very cool, like consumer tech thing for for a company to do. Yes.

Very cool. Alright. You want get into some business?

Yeah. What are you working on?

So Black Friday, Cyber Monday, that was the theme for us for the past month. It was at the very November, which meant that we we really spent all of November focused on it. It's hard to like grasp, but we only launched the Shopify app in November. So it was all in the same month.

Yeah. Just about a month ago now, right?

About a month ago. So we had the Shopify app live in the app store. And then at the same time we had the cart of checkout, which is a lot of stress around Black Friday because of performance and reliability and uptime and all this other stuff. Overall, we did great. I would say the CartUp checkout overperformed and the Shopify app underperformed and then we can get into the nuance on why, but the CartUp checkout just smashed it.

It was the first month we've ever done over a $100,000,000 for the month. It was 101. So just awesome, which, which doubled from last year. And now of course this is a product that kind of doesn't have a future. You can't add any new merchants.

So I don't know what next Black Friday if it even is in existence. But we had, we had one last hurrah around Black Friday with the checkout and that was, that was fun. The most important thing there is it was smooth. Yeah. Because it is, it's scary and everyone wants to focus on their family and everyone wants to go through Thanksgiving.

You don't want anyone on your team spending all day stressed out with infrastructure and mad customers. So is a lot of stress around it, but it just went smooth. Our infra team has been at it for a few years. So like our servers barely, barely hicked up. We had AWS dialed in, we had all these different things dialed in with huge spikes.

We had one merchant that did tens of millions in the month and then it was like 25,000,000 for the weekend. So it split out over four days. That was awesome and it's a strange thing now because even if there's something that happens, we realize it's not just us anymore. It's AWS and it's Cloudflare and it's Shopify and it's all these pieces of the web that come together that get stressed that day. Could things could go wrong and it could be no fault of our own, then we still have to communicate with merchants.

And my stress is around just kind of ruining people's, you know, weekends. It's not going to be me that writes the emails but I don't want that for anyone on the team so I was very happy to kind of see it go smoothly.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, want to hear more about the Shopify side of of things. I mean, it's so new. How does the Black Friday event really impact things on your new position in the Shopify app store?

Is it still like you're figuring out what does it mean to sell this product at all in the Shopify app store or was there anticipation of like Black Friday's coming up?

It it really wasn't impacted that much by the Black Friday like weekend because a lot of the People merchants wouldn't

be shopping for that around Black They they would wanna have that either after or well Exactly.

The larger merchants, yes. The smaller merchants are more willing to experiment, and and we we saw sign ups stay pretty consistent throughout the whole thing. But large merchants don't sign up that close to it, they're just focused elsewhere. The real issue in the Shopify app, and it's something that we have to deal with for another few months, is it really feels like it's a bit of an extended beta. We launched it and Shopify want us to launch it and they worked hard.

We worked hard to get it out. It went out before Black Friday, is great news and messaging and all that stuff. But there are still severe restrictions specifically around customized checkouts. If you have customized your Shopify checkout at all, it will not work. It will just skip all the upsells.

If checkout.liquid has been changed at all, and I stress at all, it won't work. There is a very large number of merchants that have not optimized, that have impacted that checkout.liquid file in one way or another, and they don't even realize it. If you just add SMS to your checkout page to be able to capture people's phone numbers, that's an alteration. It won't work at all. So like 50% of the people signing up and more than 50% of the larger merchants signing up come in, sign up, talk to us.

Hey, how come it's not working? We tell them about the customized checkouts. They say, cool. I'll talk to you when it's ready. It'll be ready when Shopify does its next checkout upgrade that they do like once a year or so.

So that's scheduled for early Q1. So between now and then our support team is basically just on repeat of, Oh, it doesn't work because you have a customized checkout and blah, blah, blah. So we're just kind of, we're just kind of in a holding pattern on that front.

So like on every, maybe not everyone, but like these major feature launches that that Cardhook is preparing for the app in the App Store, these have to sync up with Shopify's release schedule of API updates?

Some yes and some no. So the ability to work with customized checkouts completely out of our hands waiting on Shopify to upgrade their new their checkout again and then it'll work. That that's entirely on them. On us, are things like AB testing, The fact that it's an extended beta period isn't necessarily the worst thing. We can also build up the product before these larger merchants come on board after the checkout upgrade.

AB testing, that's on us. There's no limitations there. Then there's things that are in between, like customization of the upsell page. We are very limited by what they're capable on the API side. Then we are also limited on the way our editor We're building up our editor alongside them building up the API functionality around design and access to HTML and CSS and so on.

It's a coordination, but overall we got a healthy amount of signups, but the conversion from signup to paid is lower than expected predominantly because so many people just can't use the app because of the checkout thing. So it's just one of these things where, all right, we'll live with that and let's use the time wisely. Let's build up the features and let's dial in our funnel and figure out how to convert people, build up the onboarding emails and just all the other stuff that you got to do anyway, may as well.

Yeah, very cool. Hey, by the way, before we move on to whatever we have next year, we should probably mention that, what is it, Startups for the Rest of Us, Tiny Seed, MicroConf, they're putting together this podcast awards. Honestly, I don't even have a link to talk about. Maybe we can add it in the show notes after the show, but apparently we've been nominated for one of the Bootstrapper podcasts or something like that, so thank you people. That's right.

We have been nominated. Thank you to whoever out there nominated us, one or several or many of you, but there will be voting at some point. And then that that's one of those things that we should share, Brian. Yes. You know, I I throw in the fact that I do a podcast from from time to time with friends, and they kinda roll their eyes.

But now if we are an award winning podcast, I'm going to shove in everyone's face.

It's the thing that the things that matter, you know? I just want to like tune in to see like what the other, what the other podcasts are.

Yeah, categories.

Yeah, all the categories is kind of fun. Very cool

idea. Love the podcasting. Alright, so talk to us. What's going on on your end? I just went on a rant on my end of Black Friday.

Yeah, let's see. You know, it's always the same old thing where you know, in theory everyone's like, oh, what's the next one thing that you can and should be doing to move the startup forward to get to that traction point, right? To get out of this roaming in the desert trying to get enough MRR, right? Everyone's like, oh, it's a marketing problem, so you gotta focus on marketing and don't worry about product. And oh, it's product market fit and and it needs these features, so that's the next thing.

The reality on the ground, as as everyone who has done this knows is that you you gotta do all the things at the same time. It's not ignore one thing and just do the one the other one thing. It it doesn't work. I've got a product thing and I've got marketing stuff that I'm, you know, focused on both. So the product thing is, I'm calling it onboarding.

Like I basically ripped out the existing onboarding flow in the app I'm talking about and, rebuilt the whole thing. But it's a little bit different than onboarding because it is onboarding. It is like the first thing that a new user sees, but it's also a feature that I'm calling the builder. It's the flow that someone goes through to build a process and set up a board to run your process.

Which is like at the heart of the product.

It's the core of the product. The whole idea is because without this, currently, up until now, the first two years of Process Kit, it's been you have to go create a process manually and a bunch of steps and write all this content. That's one piece of work. Then you've got to go to the board section, create a new board. Then you've got to go to the settings on that board and configure it to run your process automatically.

So it's a lot of like little setup work.

Yeah. Conceptually, you have to understand what what you're doing. Yeah.

First of all, it's like conceptually, and what I've had up until now is like a little video that kind of tells you about that whole concept and points you in the right direction. Now you go do it. Go go figure that out. Or I do it with you on demo calls. So now I built this builder that is it's like a one, two, three, call it like a wizard if you will, but it's actually a zero, one, two, three, four, right?

Step zero, like the first thing that you see is like, Hey, we've got all these templates. Just click one of these big buttons and instantly you're all set up with our new client onboarding template or our podcast production process template or our blog article.

Does that skip the other steps? Skip every Choose one of those?

Yeah. It's like one click, you are up and running. And and now you can go in and you'll see it up and running, but you can go edit it. The Modify. The whole goal with this is to get you from, just signed up and now I'm actually looking at something in my process kit account that is built, that I can tinker with rather than looking at the blank screen and having to build it from scratch.

And like to like to get you there much faster, Yeah.

So instead of having to build it and then look at it and understand what you built. Okay. So here's my question to you. Is the first experience when someone signs up and goes through this the same experience as if I wanted to create a new board?

Well, that's exactly why I think of this. It's actually like a reusable flow for users.

Okay. So you're teaching them while onboarding. This is how you use the product.

Yeah. It's teaching them, but it's also like this new builder wizard thing is like now in the product that the next time you go create your next process and board, it sort of defaults to that process or you can kind of secondarily go to like, let me create it the manual way. Because it's very, very common for a customer to first thing they do is set up their new client onboarding process. And then a few weeks later, they're going to do that again with their service delivery process and then again with their employee onboarding process. So you can go through the wizard multiple times and it's and it's just it's so much smoother because it's like, just what is this process for?

Type it in or click some of these suggested titles and boom, you're going. And then it's like, what are like the first three steps? Just type some stuff in and you're off and running. And then what are you producing in this board? Click a suggested title or type it in and now it's like all pre configured up and running.

Has it been deployed?

No. Well, maybe by the time this airs. It's, I think sometime next week, you know, because this is one of those things that I I've been talking about how I feel like onboarding is a challenge for for months now. And I, and frankly, all I've been doing is complaining about it and not really doing anything about it. I've just been sitting with the existing onboarding flow saying that it's a challenge and doing the demo calls and all of that.

Getting this feature shipped next week will finally be like, okay, I've done something about it. Now let that run for a few months and let's learn from that. Because there's plenty of other big features that need to get built in the product, all these requests and everything, but this is something that the trial to paid conversion rate has been nagging at me. There's probably several factors that impact that, one of them being it's just too much work and too much time to set up. This this attacks that that one problem.

Yeah. One problem.

Yeah. And,

yeah. You know, one of the things we're trying to figure out on the Shopify app side of things is like what what drives conversion to paid? Is it the number of funnels? Is it the amount of revenue? You know, we ideally want to identify, hey, the more funnels or the more x the the the shorter the amount of time from signing up to revenue, maybe that makes an impact.

How do we shorten that? Do you have any information around that? Like the more boards someone creates, the more likely they are to convert or the more time spent in the app or something like that.

Yeah. There's a few different things that I look at, like in terms of like activation or whatever, like are they actually actively using it?

Yeah, right. Is it when they log in every day during the trial, that is what tells you?

Yeah, that's definitely one. The most visible thing that I see is like, when they're logging in every single day and if they're asking me questions every day, like they're literally trying to make more progress every day because it's that much work to set up. I mean, I work on process kit and my company processes all the time. It actually takes a lot of time to work on it. It's a whole project.

When they're actively working on that, then I know that they're on their way to converting because they're already spending a lot of time on it. Usually also that means they've probably invited some team members already. They are definitely setting up several processes checking out and even setting up like automations and stuff. It does take them a little while longer to start using it on like real work. They'll want to set up a prototype, like a test run before they start running their real client projects through it.

But once they start doing that, then it's like, yeah, they're definitely going to. And the other, the other thing is like, connecting Zapier, you know?

Yeah. I like building up like a score, right? Like a lead lead score of some type. Used software for that a while ago. It worked okay, but it wasn't great.

But you ideally want to arm eventually the person who's really responsible for conversion there with just, Okay, there are 20 people in the funnel right now and these six are much more likely than the others. Focus there.

I hacked that sort of thing together in my own backend, metrics dashboard for process kit. That's basically the number that I'm looking at after I launched this thing. Like I have number of current trialers and then number of what I call active trialers. And that's like has created several processes, has invited team members, you know?

That's good. Do you have chat in the app or you do things over email?

I don't have chat. It mostly happens over email, but sometimes I have multiple demo calls with a customer and their team.

But those those questions that you're getting as one of the indicators that someone's engaged.

Well, chat is like honestly, this is one of those I feel like it's still a gap in in the SaaS market. Obviously, there's a lot of SaaS, a lot of live chat tools that that anyone can use. My docs are still on HelpScout and my support inbox is still on HelpScout, and HelpScout has this beacon feature, which is sort of like their version of live chat. But I don't like it because you have to leave it open on your screen and active I think in order for it to stay active for customers. Yeah.

Which is kind of annoying for me because I'm working on I'm a solo guy doing ton of different stuff. So I would what I would love is for it to just show as live as available for live chat on the app to customers. They could chat in and then when they do, just then ping me. Yeah. I'm I'm fine with it even pinging my my phone.

Like I will stop what I'm doing to talk to a customer. Of course I will.

That seems surprising that HelpScout does it that way unless they're kind of ideologically

Well, what it is. Like, Oh, you shouldn't leave your live chat unmanned.

Right. That's against the calm company type of approach.

Yeah, but for a bootstrapper who's working on a lot of different stuff, I can't sit there and look at it all day.

Yes, and each conversion matters, man. Exactly. Yeah, that's tricky. We switched to intercom for the Shopify app and we pay them $1,500 a month.

Yeah. Intercom isn't a good solution for someone like me.

Right. For us, it is awesome. It is phenomenal. When you have multiple support people with docs, all that stuff, we have the bot going and people just ask stuff there and, but I mean, there's, there's definitely chat solutions that might be look, the onboarding clearly is more important, but that chatting might be another experiment after that to just drive up that score.

Maybe what would do is leave Help Scout in place, leave my docs in place, but just stop using the Beacon and just swap it out with Yeah, something dead in the live chat.

Yeah. Right. Cool, man. Well, look forward to seeing your tweet about that going live because you are good at sharing those.

Hopefully sometime next week but you know my other stuff would be like marketing and niching down. We'll come back to that.

What do you got? Okay. Okay. I think I'll talk about marketing for just a touch. It has been a very strange experience around our marketing because when, when you're selling in an app store, but you have your own website there, there is a big disconnect on tracking.

So it is really hard for us right now to understand where people are coming from. We really don't know what's happening and it's pretty frustrating. We're trying to figure it out. I tried to ease some of the stress off the marketing team around like, look, basically just take the month of December and figure it out because we're flying a bit blind. We have a lot of traffic to the site and we see people clicking on the call to action, but that call to action sends you to the Shopify app store.

And when that happens, you lose your tracking. You lose your knowledge of who that person is.

Right. So you can't know that like someone who came from an ad or someone who came from a Google search went on to convert. You wouldn't know that.

That's right. And the Shopify app store has some tracking functionality. Like you can put your Google analytics, think, but it's not working. So we don't know which ad campaigns are working. All we can tell is that this ad campaign is driving traffic to the site and clicks to the call to action and that's it.

We don't know who is clicking on the App Store to install and we definitely don't know who's converting as paid. We are a bit blind right now and I don't want to talk trash about Shopify, but it is an amazing thing how successful a company can be with so many things that are basic that aren't done. The way the Shopify App Store works is you have to run through their billing API. What that really means is that you do not have a billing relationship with your customers because Shopify is billing them and they're adding the cost of your app to their Shopify bill. And the reason they do that, look, in some ways it's easier to collect your money because if they don't pay your bill, they're not paying the Shopify bill and they're not paying their entire businesses bill.

So therefore you're kind of more likely to get paid.

Dunning is less of an issue.

Right? Less of an issue. However, you don't really have that much insight. You have to trust Shopify a lot. Practically speaking, what they're really doing is they're inflating the revenue.

Right? So if our app costs, let's just say a $100 a month, they put it onto the Shopify bill. They're reporting that revenue to Wall Street as Shopify revenue. Then they're keeping 20% of it as their rev share, and then they send you the 80% that belongs to you, but it's already been counted toward their revenue and toward their stock price. This is pretty clever.

Yeah. Now I'm curious, do other app stores do it that way? Like does the Apple app No.

I don't know. I shouldn't say because I'm ignorant on the on the Apple apps. Right? I don't know how how that works. But the whole thing is strange, but that 80% they they send you, well, how would you guess they send that to you, Brian?

Not not immediately. Right?

PayPal.

No way. Seriously? Yep. Oh man, dude. That's that's rough.

Imagine thousands of app developers just being sent out through PayPal every month.

Oh, dude.

It's the whole thing is pretty is pretty wild. So like the track

And all these stories of of like massive amounts of cash being stuck in PayPal's freezing funds

and I stuff like have I have my my habit down. As soon as that money hits my PayPal account, it leaves my PayPal account immediately.

Yeah. So it was definitely one of that. I can't believe they they rely on pay like Shopify, this company that's like literally Hundreds

billion dollars.

Billions of of dollars around the Internet is relying on PayPal to pay out there.

Yes. Now look, I I again, I might be wrong on that. Maybe there's a way to set it up differently, but this this is what we're experiencing right now. We are at the early stages of the learning curve around the app store, but still.

I mean, the tracking issue, do Shopify The problem. Both Shopify also has their own ads platform. Like you could pay for Shopify ads. Right?

Well, not only that, but we we're already doing that and there is not much visibility because it's a it's a pretty early product for them, the the ad advertising. And now you're in the Google position.

I wonder if that's connected to their maybe a little cynical here, but like if you don't have all your tracking data, like if you do

more incentivized to add

to Yeah, exactly. My

guess is like other things with Shopify, it's not malice. It's just they haven't gotten there. Know, that's really all of our experience with Shopify is they're not bad. They're just kind of, it's imagine one of our companies just grew to 5,000 employees over the next four years. Would be just a mess all over the place.

So they're just trying to hang on for dear life also with their rocket ship and trying to manage it and it's not perfect. It's also software. That's one of the things that we learned that I loved learning. I loved having the people on the team. I kind of have like a bit of a arrogant chip on my shoulder.

I'm like, no one's better. Just like anyone else. I can do anything like anyone else. Sure. I'm not Elon Musk, but you got to have confidence around yourself.

But the experience working with the Shopify development team is like, Oh, they're just human. It's just software. They're not super powered. Like it's nothing. Was It's just

it was it Shopify or maybe Stripe? I I like they were they were announcing like for 2021, they're projecting they're gonna hire like a thousand more developers?

Yes. It might be both because I think Shopify announced that also and and Stripe also. It's it's crazy.

I mean, I I can't even wrap my head around that. Like Yeah. I don't know.

It's it's just thing. It's I hear that and I just hear, Oh, you're going to go even slower. So that's, that's what, that's what's going to happen there. You're just going to go even slower. Anyway, the experience with their dev team was great because it just humanized everything.

It's not some amazing superpower thing. They're just like us. It's just software. They have bugs. We have bugs.

We figure it out together. It's all good. I thought that was really important for the team to feel that so that they didn't keep Shopify like on this crazy pedestal and started to see them as like, Oh, these are peers. These are people we work with. They're in our Slack group.

It's just like when we work with postscript or Klaviyo or anyone else. Yeah. So we have a lot to figure out around our marketing funnel to get visibility, to understand what's working. And that'll be an interesting journey on how to figure that out. And my guess is some people listening to this are in the Shopee ecosystem also.

So I'm happy to share what we learn, on how to do it along the way. And if you know stuff that you clearly hear that I don't know, tell me the stuff.

Share the goods. Very cool.

Back to you.

Yeah. Let's talk about like, you know, because obviously the other side of of my world here is is figuring out marketing. Right? Like, process kit has been, let's say, like in the market, like to to paying customers for, I guess, going on eighteen months now, which is scary. Maybe a little bit frustrating.

It's been that long. I mean, I've been building it for two years now, but eighteen months of actually having users and customers. And for most of that time, it's just been basically just me solo building product, shipping features, and every time I ship and announce something, then a few more customers trickle in and there's still some organic channels, some audience stuff, some people stumbling into it, product hunt, Twitter, just little bits and pieces of marketing activity, but nothing, no systems, nothing repeatable, nothing that's like we're dialing in these funnels. There's none of that. Frankly, it's still none of that.

That's what I'm trying to figure out now. It has to go to the next level of because there's always gonna be that baseline organic activity. Now we need to figure out how to stack on top of that actual funnels, actual marketing channels that we can double and triple the investment into. It's really challenging, man. I you know, because and I'm trying to tackle this on multiple fronts.

Right? Because everyone's like, again, I'll just do do one thing and double down on that. You know? Yeah. You need to set up

the SEO for the long term. You need to think about retargeting. Need to

Doing the SEO, doing a lot of new content. We're doing a lot of link building and an outbound promotion on that stuff. On another track, I'm starting to get more podcast activity happening, my own podcast, and going out and being a guest on other podcasts. I've been dabbling in cold email outreach. The thing that's on my mind now is basically niching down, positioning.

And, you know, I talked about having those templates when you when you first come into process kit, and and I've known of these most common use cases for a while now, for most of the lifetime of ProcessKit, which is, number one, definitely First of all, umbrella, it's all for client services. It's all like, think agencies, some productized services. Doing work, delivering work for clients. That's the most common setup. There's variations on that and there's many different industries within that, but, most of them are like marketing agencies of some kind, but some of them are like accounting and bookkeeping.

Some of them are, you know, doing physical products, all these different things. New client onboarding is probably the most common use case. And, and it's actually probably one of the most valuable because you're, you're setting up customers for, for a really good lifetime. I'm I've, I've literally seen an audience ops when we overhauled our new client onboarding, it increased lifetime value more than double, you know,

you're giving people your client a good experience when they join after setting high expectations through the sales process.

Yeah. That, that end you're making it more predictable in how you onboard clients, which means now your team is set up with a system so you can go and push on sales and marketing and throw more customers into your machine things falling through the cracks. That's one. I mean another popular one is like podcast production, another one is sales. Blog

posts.

Blog posts. Another one is employee, like actually hiring, like going through the recruiting process, also training employees, delivering monthly retainer services. So there's all these common repeatable processes and we have templates for them already. It's built into ProcessKit, it's built into that new onboarding flow I was talking about. The question is now how to market these, right?

Or how to pick one or two to really focus in and make it more of a niche play. So for example, new client onboarding tends to be the one that we gravitate to. So everyone loves to talk about like, Oh, niche down. It's it's the product for client services who need to optimize their new client onboarding flow with their teams. Great.

We're we're positioned. We're we're niched down. That's great in theory. But now what do you actually do? Right?

So I guess, you know, it would start with like a landing page dedicated to that use case and base basically a whole sales page with that being the the h one and flowing into the the examples, the the testimonials, the case studies around that use case. Still that's that's just a landing page. I know I can create that. I will create that. What do you do from there?

Right? Like, so you know, we're we're creating we've already come out with a new big content guide about new client onboarding. We're doing some link building guest posting to get some SEO traffic to that. There's the quote unquote thought leadership. So it's like going around on podcasts with the, the key big, big idea that you're talking about is like how to optimize new client onboarding.

Yeah, that was pretty compelling, like mini pitch that you had there around, get your team set up in such a way that they can efficiently bring people on board so you can go push on sales. That's

mean, it's a it's a it's a big idea, like in the productized course that I've been teaching and talking about for years and and

like Right. Don't get into the feast famine version of go get the clients, then do all the services without getting new clients.

Yep. Yeah. So there's that. I could, kick off a new direct outreach campaign that focuses in on that use case. The end goal being right now there's a baseline organic number of people who come to the website, and actually a good chunk of them are convinced enough on the homepage, which is fairly generic at this point, kind of broad based, but they're convinced enough to start a trial.

And some of them end up converting, but many of them don't. But even the ones that convert, it takes a ton of time and work to get them converted. And and even a lot of them are like still trying to figure out what is their best use case. They know they want to use it, but they don't know where to start. Right?

And my goal with this more niche down marketing approach is when they come to the homepage for the very first time, come with a purpose. Like, we heard about this idea with new client onboarding. We want to do that. Let me go do that now. And today I can set up my new client onboarding and now I got my win today.

You know, of, instead of, know generally we need to be more process oriented, so let me dedicate all of December to setting up my process good account. Like, no, I want to move away from that and move to, I came here to do my new client onboarding, sign me up, set me up and I can build on that later, but at least I got this win today. That that's, that's the goal. It's a question of how to, how to get all that stuff into motion. Know,

you do need things to line up between the positioning and the products and the onboarding, but yeah, it is easy to just say niche down and so on, but you also need activity to go with it. It sounds like you're doing the right things. What I like to think about is the like, what are you good at? I think of Ruben Gomes, our mutual friend, because his skill set is so different from mine. I like to keep that in mind because it is very true that my way is not the only way.

It's just that my way goes with what I'm good at. So if I were in your situation, I would go out and make connections. I would network into agencies and organizations of agencies and podcasts and I would go out there because that lines up with what I'm good at. Ruben wouldn't do that at all. Ruben would go orchestrate traffic because that's what he's good at and then his plan would work alongside with his strength in terms of driving traffic and then dialing in a funnel of, okay, people at this step then convert to this step and convert to this step and then that leads into a trial.

So there's no one way to do it.

That's so true, you know?

But you you want you want activity, but maybe that activity should kind of line up with what you you're best at in generating that activity at the top of the funnel.

That's so true, man. For me, the weird thing has been podcasting has generally been sort of like the common denominator that like throughout the last many years now, like has been the thing that I won't say everyone has discovered my products over the years from podcasting, but if I had to pick just one channel, podcasting. Some people find it through the writing, some people from Twitter, some people from conferences, whatever, but podcasting is the thing that Actually, in most cases, they probably heard me on somebody else's podcast, but eventually discovered my podcast, either this one or productized podcast. And then the funny thing that this has happened several times for me with that productized podcast, which I go through seasons of basically. I I do a bunch and then I get burnt out and I stop for a couple couple of weeks or months.

And I'm looking at the trajectory of process kit this year in 2020. Dude, the the weeks where I was publishing episodes every week were our best months in process kit. And the recent weeks, I stopped publishing new episodes and, look at that. The the graph kind of flattened out. And and it's like, you know, I I I don't know that, like, every customer has been coming from that channel, but it's it's it's just like an activity that just seems to breed more word-of-mouth and and all that.

Any activity is better than none. And if podcasting is a particularly good activity because it filters anyone who wants to listen is already interested in the topic. And then hearing you talk about it, making that personal connection, being able to deliver and receive the pitch audibly that way, it's a good channel, and it's good activity.

And so here in December, I'm starting to think about goals for 2021, and one of them is to release an episode of Productize Podcast in all fifty two weeks. Just don't miss a Wow.

So just the consistency, because in the back of my head as you were talking about, the only thing that came up in my mind was, oh, you just need you need the consistency. If it works, then you just have to be brutal about it and just force it by by being consistent.

Obviously, I'm doing a lot of other things on the marketing front and and product front, but that that show should just be something that I'm always doing. Because no matter what I'm doing, even if that's not a key channel for ProcessKit, which I think it is, but even if it's not, it's still good to do. It's still good to just keep that activity coming. It grows the audience, it grows the community, it does bring traffic to ProcessKit. One

of my favorite things that people don't usually think about is it grows your personal network.

Yes.

Everyone you meet, you become friends with, you have a connection with, and they carry that with them, you carry it with you, and amazing things happen from that. It's deals that come through and introductions that come through and other podcasts and opportunities you never thought of, and to do it, you know, with guests every week, that that stuff works, man. You meet new people and you discover things.

I think that's going to be changing in 2021. I'm not nothing to announce here today, but except that the plan is to, not always do guests in 2021. It's it's,

know, drill into,

well, I think I'm going have a cohost and it's going to be a little bit more. It'll be different from Bootstrap web, but it will be easier to execute every single week because

Yeah. The coordination around a guest every week is,

is,

is It's a so much more work to do guests. And, and we, I actually do have some episodes coming up with guests, but, and those will still be in there to a certain extent, but like it's for anyone who's, who's not a podcaster, it's incredible how much more effort goes into it when you have to interview guests. And I love interviews. I love listening to them. Love doing them.

But it is a ton of extra work.

Yeah. There's a reason you and I don't do guests anymore. Yeah. We we don't have the time.

Yeah, exactly. It's so much extra effort that goes into preparing for the episode.

Yeah. Yeah. Especially when it's not as casual as this is. It's really like you want to get someone's story out, you want to get lessons in. You're like, I'm I'm setting up a Mixergy interview and I'm in my mind, I'm like, I need to prepare for that interview.

Yeah. It's not just like, Oh, just jump on five minutes before and say, Oh, well, you know, I'll be ready in a minute.

And Mixergy is a great example of, I mean, you've been on there before, right?

Yep.

I was on it a few years ago and it's a great example of like, look at how much effort Andrew invests into the process of preparing each individual show. I mean, it's it's an entirely separate call that you do just to prepare.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. And and multiple multiple people involved. Now here's the thing that that's also true, that the additional effort drives additional results.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Right. So you have to balance it unless you want to go completely whole hog into it. I don't know how much incremental value you get from all the enormous amount of effort that goes into all the other things like guests, but there's definitely additional value. The the way I look at all this stuff these days is the opportunity that we missed at CartHook and that I don't plan to miss in the future is that we don't have we don't have a media muscle. We don't have production output that goes out constantly.

And that is the name of the game these days. It's happening with direct to consumer companies, like the media, the audience is by far the most valuable thing. That's why you'll see things like like Morning Brew has that audience. Barstool Sports, like well, those are massive, right? But our stuff is more niche.

But if you think of something like Morning Brew, they could sell anything. They could sell absolutely anything immediately at a blink of an eye because they have the audience. And I think software companies are going to learn from that and start to produce a lot more media.

And I think it's audience and it's community. We've talked about that too. Like, I know we're getting a little bit long here, but just the one other thing that was on my mind this week on that note is I completely agree that that you just you do need to have all this activity happening, that that means, like, pushing out content. That means social media activity. That means fostering a community, running live events, like producing podcasts.

But I'm at a point where I cannot do that sort of hustle like I could before. Right? Like weekly newsletters. So now I'm working with a marketer and I've got my assistant, who from audience ops, he's stepping into process kit now. I just hired an illustrator to create some, some, illustrations for our content.

And so now I'm back in this mode of like, Oh, process kit is like a new company with other people other than me. And by the way, my developer too, like all of a sudden it's like starting from scratch all over again. Like it was, it's, it was the early days of restaurant engine and then the very early days of audience ops. And it's like now, right now I feel like I'm in the early days of process kit where, where we, where at least I feel like there's all these things that are starting to happen, but I don't have a good handle on where everything's at and who's doing what. And, and there's all these things that need to happen, but why are they not happening yet?

And it's like building that those processes. Like like just this week we set up starting next week, we're going have weekly newsletters going out because now we have a process for that, for how my team is producing those and getting them sent out so I don't need to do them, you know?

Yeah. It's exciting. It's a lot of work, but it's exciting. Yep. Yep.

Cool, man. Well, I think we should call it. Yeah. Whatever we're nominated for, just vote for it. All right.

Let's just be honest here. If still listening at this point in time,

just do a command f for bootstrapped web, vote for that, and then close the browser. That's all you need.

And we're good. We're good. Alright, Fry. Good to talk. Great episode.

Have a great weekend.

Alright. You too. Later,

folks. Thanks, everybody.