Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrapped Web. Mr. Castle.

Yes. What's happening? Mr. Jordan, what's up buddy?

Oh, should we just dive right in? I mean, let's dive right in.

Yeah, let's dive right in. I I I went on a quick, week vacation last week down to, Asheville, North Carolina with the family. That was a good good break. And you know, did a little bit of work but it was mostly hanging out and doing, doing hiking with the kids in this Airbnb. But yeah, it was definitely a good, good mental break too.

Especially because it was a long, long, pretty long drive.

Yeah, true. That sounds great. Yeah. We are we are starting to think about vacations and it's so exciting. I got my first vaccine shot.

Did not did not feel very good from it. Felt like I just felt like I was in outer space. It was a bit weird but

I have mine next week, a week from now.

Nice. Yeah. Can book some flights. I'll be in New York soon. So on.

So yeah, it's exciting. Finally.

Alright. So what do we got today?

I've got a bunch of things on the zip message front. Things are moving quite a bit right now and you got some stuff.

I do. I really have one main thing to talk about that makes other things feel a bit smaller in comparison. So might be a little personal. It's all business related but maybe it's a bit vulnerable.

Nobody really was personal.

It's just us.

Don't worry, we're not recording.

I had kind of a strange and tough experience this week where maybe I was overly critical of myself or analyzing a little too deeply but I just did not feel great about my contributions and my productivity. When analyzed it, started to really think about the differences between my role and my experience in running Cardhook and now running the new company. And at Cardhook, I got to a really good place where

I

was at my happiest a few years into the business and I had effectively hired away the critical functions that I just wasn't nearly as good at whether it was customer success, support, marketing, product, these things that I really shouldn't be doing. I was not that happy in the early years doing all those jobs but they had to be done. And as the company grew and there was more revenue and then profit we were able to start hiring for those. I got into a place where I didn't really do that much in terms of tasks. I wasn't responsible for day to day tasks, very few of them anyway.

So what I got to is this place where I think I'm best, which is a bit floating. It's no specific tasks that have to get done that day and it's more about having conversations with people, talking to a friend that runs a different software company, talking to an integration partner, texting with an agency that has a new client coming on board. All these conversations add up to these data points and then gathering those and interpreting them in my way can lead to an idea. And an idea like that can be the most important thing that I can do for the business. Best version of a contribution is having these conversations, having an idea, formulating into something actionable in a direction we should go.

And that's like a successful week. And that was me at my happiest, basically just floating around with ideas, which is what makes me happy.

You had a team executing, carrying out the ideas into launch of these Yes.

There weren't like, I have an idea, let's do it today. It was like this general direction of where things are going and why and how that impacts the feature set and the positioning and the copy and whether we should go toward webinars or toward email or toward this. It was just these ideas that impacted the general direction of the business. You know, after a few years I was okay with myself to the point where, you know what, maybe my ideas are leading in a good direction. So it's okay if I don't do that much during the day and I have these conversations and I help out a manager and I talk to someone here and I do something fun for the company and I have another conversation and I have an idea at night and like that's, that's work for me.

I became okay with that and I stopped feeling guilty about it because the number just kept going up. So it was, it had this external element that said, Hey buddy, don't be that hard on yourself because this number keeps going up. Clearly what you're doing is kind of working. So I was able to kind of live with myself and get to a place where I worked in that way, but didn't feel guilty about it. Now is very different.

It is pre revenue and what you're told, what we're all told and believe, at least I'm speaking for myself now, is in that situation, you've got to hustle. You've to work. You've to grind. You've to make it happen. And I got into a strange place where, is that what I should do?

Or should I have almost the confidence to stay where I'm good and where I'm happy and where I think I'm most effective in a little bit of idea land. And now that we have a lot more money starting off than with Cardhook, I have the ability to paper over those weaknesses of mine sooner as opposed to waiting until the revenue grows and then papering over them. So I got myself into this, into this place where I think this week it went negative on me.

Let me, let me ask you real quick, just to clarify what you're saying. So, cause it sounds to me like the activities that you're doing today in the new company are your strength activities, right? Talking to people, networking, comparing ideas from over here to over there, look, looking at potential directions. Isn't that what you're doing today? And that's Yes.

Your

And hiring Claire as chief of staff really, really helped because this early stage, there are a lot of tasks to do. Like there's everything from four zero nine evaluation for options to legal, to making sure the terms of services on point for what we're doing. There's a lot of tasks. She has helped tremendously in making sure that those tasks are getting done because they need to get done. I am very much doing what I like to be doing.

I'm just having more difficulty not feeling guilty about it.

That pressure that you were saying about like hustling, I think for most bootstrappers who are starting out early on, usually that hustle is like you're gonna run out of time or run out of money So you need to do whatever you need to do to get to, to replace income or to raise revenue to make this a viable thing. That's the pressure in the early days. I think now for, for both of us, we have the space to take it slow and be strategic. Right? But the pressure and I feel it every single day is, am I doing the right thing?

Am I going in the wrong direction? And am I making the same mistakes that I've made before again? Yes.

Am I doing everything that I should be doing? Right? People entrusted like millions of dollars.

I'm completely impatient all the time and I want to move as fast as possible but the speed to me isn't a financial thing, it's I wanna stop feeling nervous about this. The faster, the sooner I can get out of this second guessing myself phase, the more comfortable I will be and to get there, we need to ship, we need to get customers and we need to make this thing work. You know, that's, that's the pressure that I'm feeling every day.

And you, you want the silver bullet. You want it now. You want, okay, let me just accomplish this part of it so I can feel less stressed and then the stress will change and whatever else. So this week we really wanted to launch our landing page and it's not going to happen and I'm okay with it. I think what happened was this week it was supposed to go out so I was mentally prepared to turn the corner on this thing is quiet and private to, hey, now it's public and now we're kind of underway.

And because that expected energy didn't happen and I have to wait another week or two, I was susceptible to being down on myself. And then this beginning of the week, that's kind of where I was. And then on Thursday something really interesting happened. Tuesday afternoon I get the vaccine. Wednesday I really did not feel well.

So it was basically I just wrote the day off. I slept. I'm in my bedroom right now at the office. I literally just slept there for like three hours. So it created even more negative spiral.

So I was just not happy. Then on Thursday what happened was I had a conversation with Claire and I was honest with her and she's like, how's it go? You know, we do a quick stand up in the morning. So how are you? I said, not really that good.

I'm just in a negative place. And she was like, oh, well I was just telling someone about how great I think you are. And I was like, Oh, that's why? Well, she said, Well, I think you're very thoughtful and you are great at leading and by forming relationships with people. Then people really like working for you.

Everyone in the company is happy working on this. And I was like, Oh, okay. That felt good. It was like this external thing. And then I went to lunch with my lawyer who is really like a friend now and an ally.

We've been working together for, I think four years and he's seen me through a lot of challenges and really helped me. And, you know, you get into a very close relationship with a lawyer when when you're really trying to figure out what the right things are and how to talk about it and what do we do with this thing. And so we've been through the fire together. And then I had lunch with him and then he gave me a compliment also. He was like, I have to say over the past year you've grown.

And the fact that this new company is now underway and you already have someone handling a lot of the legal, I just see the same growth in you that I see in other managers that are able to scale, that are able to go from a small company to a big company. It was like another external compliment and what it allowed me to do is it allowed me to accept the positive version of the story in my head as opposed to the negative version. Not you're slacking, you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing. You should be doing more. You're kind of failing your investors that just gave you millions of dollars and you're kind of slacking, you're not going fast enough, that negative version.

And instead looking at the positive version of that's the fizz in your strength, the ideas are your strength and the leadership and the relationships. And that's what you're good at. You are doing that and you're doing the right thing. Like it was this, it was two stories in my head and I was buying into the negative version These external sources just came along and we're like, actually from the outside, we think the positive version of the story is right. It gave me this permission to be okay with myself as dramatic as that sounds.

And then I, it was like lifted man. I went and I hung out with my kids yesterday and took one of them to lacrosse practice and the other one a t ball and I was back to happy.

Yeah man. Dude, I'm in the same mental runaround every single day. Yeah, I mean you know it's always a mix of like impostor syndrome and impatience and second guessing.

And comparison. That's my enemy's comparison.

Comparison too. Yeah, for me too. We're both friends with a lot of fellow founders and the weird thing about being friends with so many different people, I I that's part of why I love this industry and and but it can be mentally really difficult at times because

because you keep seeing highlight reels.

You just keep seeing highlight reels and you know the behind scenes story too, you know? And it's Yeah.

Which always helps, really helps. I think everyone holds onto each other and appreciates so much knowing the full story from people. Like if you just give me your highlights, we're not actually friends. We just happen to be in the same industry. The second you put your guard down and you show me the weakness and the struggle, now we're actually friends because we are looking to each other as like a peer and you're honest with a real peer.

And the reality is every everybody has issues and problems and challenges and it's always a a big next challenge no what MRR level you're at or whatever.

Right. If you are holding up just the positive stuff and hiding that stuff from me, then you're putting on a show for me and that's not how real peers I

wanna highlight what you said this week about how it snapped you out of it just a compliment or two just randomly. That stuff really matters. For for founders, literally all we do is solve problems. That's all we ever do. That's literally what we do for a living.

What's the next problem to solve? What what what's the next thing that is not working? Like every single day. And when we're friends and advisors and mastermind buddies with other people or in public on Twitter, wherever it might be, founders like to help other founders. We know what we're going through.

We know that we're all trying to solve problems, so let's help let's help someone else solve their problem. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to give you advice on how how I think you should be solving your your problem that you're facing right now. Or I'm gonna point out some problems that maybe you're you're not, seeing. And that is incredibly valuable advice. Know, I ask for it, I seek it out all the time.

But sometimes like there there needs to be a balance to that. And not just like fuzzy, you know, feel good things, but, like, just any small supportive note is is helpful. Or or or like confirmation, like, that that detail that you did there, that seems like you're on the right track.

Yeah. Like, I like that.

Focusing on like these four churn issues are, are you gotta be focused on those obviously because that's all we think about. Yeah.

Well, if, if there's anything positive that I think can come out of people hearing what I'm talking about, what you're talking about here, first people can identify with it. But second, we need to compliment each other more because everyone asks for feedback, nobody asks for compliments. So you have to be more proactive about complimenting. Sometimes I'm good about it. Sometimes I'm not.

What I like to do is when I see something on Twitter, I like to DM the founder and give them the compliment there because the compliment in public feels performative. It's like I'm complimenting, doesn't everyone see how cool and how nice I am that I compliment him?

I'm a big listener of podcasts and then DM ing the podcasters.

Oh, nice. That's That is a nice compliment because you listened, which means you spent time with

what Of I

course, my feedback is coming like two weeks after they talked about the thing but you know. I guess the last point on this because it relates to something I have on my list today is everybody's coming at it differently and everyone has a different set of facts in front of them. So like you're saying, there needs to be more compliments, I think there needs to be more empathy. Put yourself in the other person's shoes. What is what is their set of of realities that they're trying to navigate?

It's even if you might have a very very similar business or business model, they're dealing with completely a different set of of assets and liabilities if you will that you know.

Right. The details, the truths of their situation and where it gets into more complicated territory is that we're also human beings. We are carrying around a lot. I talked to my lawyer about, after he gave me the compliment, I said, Thank you and here's why, because this is the experience I'm having this week. What we got into is everyone handles this stuff differently based on how they grew up and what their experiences since growing up have been.

The way I put it is I sometimes feel like one of the advantages that founders have that came from well off backgrounds is that they are more predisposed to being okay with not doing all the work. I don't know how if that sounds shitty on my part to say, but if I flip that around and I'm self critical on it, I grew up without money and I have a hard time rising above the work. I feel like, well, if I want to get out and get up, then I need to do the work. It's a real challenge for me to not feel guilty in an environment where kind of hiring people to do the work and I'm going to sit here and use my brain. It's not really a very comfortable natural place to sit if you grew up with like, well, you currently have nothing.

What are you going do with that? You're to hang out and use your ideas? No. You're going to just do whatever it takes to get to something. And then all of a sudden flipping that around and all of a sudden coming to the conclusion that no, you should just hire people to do the work and you should go take your ideas and move them forward and then go raise more money so you can hire more people to do more work.

You can go raise more money to use more ideas and have more people do the work. That is not a natural change.

I still struggle with that one too, especially with hiring people to take ownership of the things. To me, it's always been easier to hire people to just carry out tasks that I, that I more or less know just need to be done. I just don't want to do them or I don't, but I, in more recently I've been more willing to hire people because they're a lot better at me at, at these things. We're going down all sorts of tangents here. I see.

You know, like, it's related to a limit, you know, like a limited mind limited thinking mindset, where it's like, well, I I haven't justified that this thing is worth investing dollars into because it's not working yet. Like I, you know, when when really it would in in many cases it could move a lot faster toward becoming viable if if I have a team around me, you know. Anyway, I I've got a couple things on the list here all about zip message. Has its first customers in, in, on the box Yeah.

Let's get back over to the practical world. So,

so I, I got that going. I'm, I'm starting to work my way through the early access list. Wanted to mention that. Other thing I wanted to mention real quick before we get too deep in, I tweeted this yesterday and this idea didn't even occur to me earlier, but a few people have reached out to me saying, because I'm getting a lot of feedback about ways you might use Zip Message. I'm asking people like what are the key use cases?

And I've got more to talk about that later in this episode, about niching down to a use case. But this isn't super widespread, but a few people have have reached out and said, hey, I have a podcast. Can I use Zip Message to get listener questions or listener feedback from my podcast listeners? And Zip Message is perfect for that. You have a public mailbox you can send people to and they can record just audio, they can record their video, whatever it is.

So yesterday, was a spur of the moment. I was like, alright, let me post it zipmessage.com/bootstrappedweb And that's where anybody can come on and record a message for for Jordan and me to talk about here on the on the on the podcast.

So that use case came from the outside? That wasn't Yeah. Okay. Cool.

Yeah. A few other people are starting to use ZipMessage for that. And I was like, wait. I have a podcast. And and we need things to talk about, so I should I should use ZipMessage for this.

So if you have a question or if you have just a topic or whatever it might be, go to zipmessage.com/bootstrappedweb and that is our Zip Message account. This is like the public mailbox feature, so anybody can record a message and then it essentially starts a new asynchronous conversation between that person and us. Currently we're just using it to take in questions but we could reply if we wanted to. That's not a widespread use case but it's perfect for that.

What are you gonna do with this? It's so wide.

I know that's I'm gonna get into that too. And then the other thing I'll talk about here is I changed up the pricing pretty like a big time change this week after some feedback.

Did you change the metric? Yes. Of minutes?

Okay. Killed that.

Okay. Okay.

So I'll just say like, I think as of last episode, I had invited just a couple of friends who were interested in in Zip Message. And then over the course of last week, my dev and I were still kind of working through the feedback with those people and fixing a lot of bugs. We're still fixing bugs now. One of my goals as soon as I got back on Monday this week was, you know, send about 20, I ended up sending like twenty, twenty five invites to people from the early access list. Probably the most engaged people, you know, they're starting up trials and now we have a handful of people who put in their credit card, a couple have actually paid already and it's moving, you know?

You broke the barrier.

Yeah. I mean, you

know, first Congratulations. It's you know, back

to Don't the mental come

on. Don't do

that. Immediately. You talk shit about It's like it's back to

the mental shit and it's like, I know how big of a milestone that should be, but

You had an idea and now people are paying for it online in was it four months?

Yeah. I started working on it like around January. So and it's kinda cool because like, you know, the first couple of those are friends who are actually using it and they pay for it. A couple of those are not people I actually know, you know, they, they came from random places and ended up converting. So I'm very specific with goals and milestones for zip message.

So I figured April would be when I start sending invites in late April. I didn't expect to even have any customers in April. I had a number of customers in mind for May as my goal. It's like the first batch of customers should reach this level in May. There's a chance by the April, I'll get kind of close to that number.

It might be ahead of

That was designed for the May?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I don't know if it'll cross that number but it'll get close I think because there's still like, you know, eight more days in April.

As much as I love revenue, like anyone else, I would make sure that I looked at usage.

Yeah.

Right? Like how do you, you got to factor that in because signups are cool, but usage is the thing. If someone adopts it and gets into their flow, then you're, then you're good.

So that's the big thing I wanted to talk about today about usage. Cause actually like when I send them the invite, I'm asking them like, how are you using it? And that's like the fifth time I've asked each person that I'm constantly asking, how are you using it? And I could see,

can you look?

Yeah, I could, I could see like through the database, like who who's, who's creating conversations and messages. Also, several people are creating what we call team accounts and inviting team members, which is something I'm working on and all that. But I wanted to talk about the pricing real quick. So I'll credit you Jordan. You were the very first person to say, you know, you're going to change the pricing eventually because it's not right out of the gate.

Before you were talking, whispered into the microphone and I told you so.

Yeah, exactly. Well, after

Oh, but you adjusted quick?

I adjusted because I heard this, I heard the same thing from like six or seven other Okay.

Because they're you don't want them to even think about the number of minutes.

Exactly. What you

want them to use, the hundreds of minutes every month.

Yeah. So to clarify what I the original thing that I had was two tiers, a basic and a premium and the basic gave you up to a 100 minutes of recording, premium was up to two hundred and then on top of that you could add on minutes going up to like a thousand minutes or so, you know, bringing And you

now?

And now I killed the minutes thing altogether. It's no longer metered pricing. Everybody, all tiers get unlimited minutes.

And so what's the separating metric there?

It's features. So the basic plan is for solo. See, this is I'm still actually having trouble thinking through this because the types of users so there's a metric around users, but the main difference between the basic and premium is the feature set. So all the premium features are being pushed into premium.

And that's geared toward teams? Teams.

So the way that I have it now is premium, you can have up to five team members. And then if you need more than five team members, we'll have add on plans for that. And there are going to be like features in the premium, like, automatic transcripts and, custom branding and

stuff like that. Okay. So if I have a personal zip message account just myself, then I can interact with a lot of other people, but it all flows into my account in my pages and my conversations. Right?

Yeah. Your, your personal account owns all of those conversations.

Right. And then if I use it for my team, this morning, Jess and I were having a conversation and she just created a Loom video and sent it over to me. And then I'm replying to that in Slack. It's not ideal.

Right. Is that Loom account her personal account or is it the Cart Hook account or?

It is hers. It's hers. Have multiple team members.

And this is where it gets, I'm literally working on this today. Every person starts with a personal account on Zip Message. If you need to start inviting team members, you need to add a second account which we call a team account. Now you have your Jordan and Goll account and your say a Carthook account And you can easily switch between them inside the app. Then so so you flip over to your CartHook account and that's where you can start to invite team members.

But but the the tricky thing is that there are other users, we call them respondent users. Mhmm. Right? If you wanna send messages out to your customers, if you wanna, you know, have random freelancers respond to you, they don't need they're They

don't need accounts.

They they respondents. So so respondents in Zip Message are totally free. They can only respond to conversations that they've been invited to.

As opposed to start a call.

Okay. All

makes sense so far. The team management aspect, I know the new product we're building now, we spent a considerable amount of time thinking through that logic because we got it wrong with Cardhook. Once you get it wrong, it's real tough to fix in the database.

I'm literally trying to fix that because now that I have real users and real people trying to convert, that's immediately the first UX problem that we have.

Yeah. I I was frustrated how much time we were spending on it and I kept being told by the development team, we do not have a choice. If you want this to be used by enterprises that have 30 team members with different permissions, we have to get it right now or it will never ever end up right.

And you know, I tweeted about this today. Technically, it's hard to figure this out technically but it can be worked out and we actually have the structure of the database. Is already all set up for users and teams and inviting and multi account switching. We have that technically set up. The really, really hard part is the UX, user experience of am I in my personal account right now and if I put in my credit card details, am I associating that with my personal account or with my team account?

We had to build the ability to transfer a subscription from a personal to a team and then which account is actually owning which conversation. It's a beast.

Yeah, gets pretty gnarly. Our version of things. Have our x factor is agencies, because agencies can have access to multiple accounts. And so you have like your own account, your own team, then you have your permissions. And then an agency can kind of dip into multiple.

And then you don't want them having to create a new username and password every time. So it definitely can get pretty gnarly. And you can tell, it's one of these issues that kind of separates the pros from the noobs because when you are working with a product that has it done right, it's smooth. When it's not, it is so tough to deal with. I'm a notion super fan.

I love that product. But the user and team management drives me out of my mind. It drives me completely out of my mind. My desktop is different from the web, different from this. I don't have permissions to my own company things because I'm logged in a certain way.

So you don't want that to happen. Have to think it through. All right. So look, you're learning a bunch of stuff over the past

few weeks. Quick side note, I've I've tried to use Notion like five different times including again last week and every single time I'm like, nope, not clicking for me. Anyway.

I like it as a as a word processor. Like as as just a blank page that I can create a page that's linked to something and then write notes and then share it. That's how I use it. But we have actually gone toward confluence. That's where all of our stuff is organized in the company.

And it's like a, it's like a comical battle between myself and, and rock and Jess who love it.

Like for my personal organization to do lists and, and notes and, and like some kind of Kanban, I keep bouncing around, but now I'm trying not to do list again. I've, I've used bear for speakers. I've, I've used a bunch of stuff. Anyway, I wanted to get your, your thoughts on this thing. I spent a lot of time.

This was sort of a click in my mind. Okay. So we're going to get a little bit theoretical here. And for my own approach to this, I came upon a bit of a framework that is helping me think through the direction for ZipMessage. And I'm not saying this here like it's a framework that others should follow, but it's a pattern that I've seen with a couple of SaaS and it has helped me think through this question of how, how or when, or the pathway to niche down the product and the positioning.

Everyone knows the feedback of like it's easier to launch a very specific solution to a problem for a very specific customer in a niche that you can define and you can, you can, you can scale into that. You can market to them much easier. I completely get it, but I still have had trouble wrapping my head around the pathway to getting there with whatever product I'm, I'm working on. And, and, and that's zip message. The way that I got my mind to wrap around like a pathway to getting there is this framework that I'm sort of calling like enter and then lean in and then all in.

So it's like a three phase process. Enter is entering a software category that is existing, well known, it's in growing demand. I actually wrote all this out of my So in my case, I'm entering this video messaging space. You know, there's Loom, there's a bunch of other things in here. So it's a it's sort of like a known category where people are already using it, it's clearly growing in demand.

The reason I'm entering this space is because I believe there's a there's a key differentiator in in the technology or in the way that the product functions that makes it better for certain use cases. So I have some hypotheses around key use cases. Some of them might be my own use cases, some of them might be others that I observe in different markets, but I haven't necessarily nailed down anything. I'm specifically just going into a high volume, highly active space, if you will. And when I say space, I'm thinking more about the technology here.

I'm focusing on video recording in the browser, asynchronous communication, that sort of stuff, not yet niched down. And so like, you you look at like, like a SavvyCal or your calendar tools or email marketing tools or help desk tools. Like these are huge spaces that are not,

but

they're in high demand. In this stage, in this enter stage, it's, it's around coming into it with this hypothesis for potential new use cases, like three to five of them and a key differentiator in the technology. Like in my case, it's easy to respond, have the whole conversation back and forth. Then it's like sort of like soft launch or beta launch to whatever networks that you have access to. So Twitter, product hunt, your email list, your podcast, your people, whatever it is.

Then, you know, immediately from from the beginning, and I'm starting to do this now, is is is what I call like the lean in phase. So immediately start to zero in on one or maybe two niche markets or use cases that that I believe have the most potential for this. Not going all in yet. That's the next phase, right? So the homepage is still relatively broad, kind of mentioning a couple of different potential use cases.

You're talking to many different people. Like I'm getting feedback from currently four or five very common use cases. You know, ten, twenty plus people from each of these different use cases are excited about zip messaging in completely different reasons and ways. Right? So, I have to look at those and say, one of those do I believe has the most potential?

And, and I'm looking for this in a number of ways, but basically it's like an if then equation, right? Like if my belief is validated, the people who are in this use case, they respond, there's way more resonance and they respond more often with more words, they wanna get on calls with you, they buy and they buy repeatedly, there are multiple of them and I see an easy path for me to reaching many more of those types of customers, you know, that's a good signal. Then the response to that is launch a subpage, not the homepage, you know, so like a subpage on the site, like a landing page that then speaks directly to that niche and link to it from the homepage, maybe run ads to it, run campaigns to it and then just, and maybe continue to explore these other niches, but you can keep the homepage still fairly broad because I'm only leaning in now. I'm only sort of testing the waters of whether it makes sense to double down.

And then in

the thinking is the third phase is really changing the positioning of brand.

Yeah. The third phase is like all in and I think that the all in phase is sort of optional. Like you would only go all in if these trends develop. First of all, you've already grown the business to like over 50 customers, which basically means like, okay, this business is not a dud. There's something here.

Right. And it's becoming obvious that one use case is dominating the others.

Well, there's just 50 customers in general, but then you notice like among those customers, one niche performs way better than the other types of customers. So those customers are easier to acquire, they have longer lifetimes, lower churn and they fit with your overall company vision, right? The other customers who are not in that niche, they're churning more, they're more demanding on support.

Right. So you're hoping it's clear.

Yeah. Hopefully you're starting to see those trends. And then if that's the case, then the move is to, is to go all in, you know, reposition the homepage. Yeah. Maybe even rename the product if that makes sense.

Right. Go all the way, whatever, whatever it takes to directly address.

Just completely go all in. And so, so it's this like enter and then lean in and then all in. Cause I I've been getting a lot of feedback about, I'm trying to understand like, am I making some of the same mistakes with zip message that I've made in the past? And I hear a lot of the feedback about like, it's not niche down enough, it's way too horizontal and I feel that and that's what was getting me into these like mental loops for the last few weeks is like

Right, that you're not taking the risk, you're almost like not being brave enough and just choosing one.

Yeah, exactly. I'm not brave enough to go all in on the home page. And the reason is because I'm getting all this feedback from different use cases and they're resonating in different ways. So the one thing that I am starting to lean in to now is this idea of coaches and teachers communicating with students or their coaching clients. And sort of under that same umbrella would be like memberships, communicating with your members, your community members, course sellers communicating with students.

That's a group of people who've resonated with Zip Message, who I believe, and this is just a hypothesis still, I believe that's a high value use case for it because it could be an essential tool. It's literally the way that they communicate with their paying students, right?

Yeah. As you were talking, I wrote down three things that could be factors in the decision. You touched on some of them, but I wrote who experiences the most pain? Who needs it the most? Who will use it the most?

Then I wrote down which is closest to revenue. This is the vitamin versus whatever that saying is. Are you just solving a problem? Are you making things better? Are you improving things?

Are you So that's one way.

The thing that's clouding this a little bit for me is that I'm getting a lot of people who are interested in doing customer support. And that was really where the idea originated for me was doing customer support. I get a lot of people who want to communicate with their team, with their teammates asynchronously. Also those random like podcasters want to hear from their audience. But then there's these people who have students and Customers.

And those students are customers. Yep. And some of them are programs. Some of them are like online schools, know? Mhmm.

And and then you can even go to like literally all schools, like real schools, teachers and students. Right? And so I'm hearing from some of them and yeah, like that's where it's like closer to the revenue. Right?

Right. The actual customer as opposed to more cost center.

And I think it's a good use case to talk internally with your team, but with the customer support use case, I've been successful already using it for customer support, but I have noticed that the customers are sometimes a little bit shaky on whether they want to actually record themselves. So they're not super incentivized to record their video back. Customer support teams may not necessarily be like searching for solutions for this.

Yeah. The ease of the sale is it, is it, is it the ease of the sale?

You got to start to adopt it within your company. Whereas with the teacher student dynamic, the students are way incentivized to respond because they're talking to their coach, they're talking to their teacher or they're submitting their assignment or whatever it might be. Right.

This is a better way for them to ask their questions and communicate around figuring things out. The last thing I wrote down was what makes you happy. And you touched on that by ensuring that you think about the company vision so you don't go off track just because it seems like it might be a good idea.

Just because it seems like, I don't know, dog walkers resonate with this thing. I'm not going to build a whole company around that, right? Like why dog walkers would use zip message, don't know.

But something, well look, there is the potential that the broadness itself is an advantage, right? Skype wasn't video messaging for families. It was for whatever, for everything. Same way Zendesk isn't help desk software for software companies. It's for everybody.

That's why I think a viable path here is to do the first two phases. Enter this market, high growth, lot of activity, focus in on the one key use case but there's still other customers in there. That all in phase.

You called it optional.

I call it optional because you might not see the downsides of having these other customers in there.

Yeah, or one overwhelming segment may not present itself as the clear winner.

Yeah. Like I would say if you are seeing a bunch of customers who are churning a lot more or they're a lot more demanding on support or things like that, then those are problems that you need to solve and maybe the solution is to go all in on the segment that is not churning as much. Right. But you, but as a horizontal product, you know, maybe we're investing in marketing to coaches, but you still get other teams using it and they use it just fine. So, so it's like, sort of like we'll see when we get up to that point.

Right?

Yeah. And you can, you can see some broad software applications. You go to their footer and it says for enterprise, for e commerce, for software, for, you know, and, and then in that, on that landing page, they get into analytics for your e commerce company or a different page for analytics for your software company. So you can address it. It's not as powerful as going all in, but if it doesn't make sense to go all in, then don't go in.

And I mean, there's definitely an opportunity in going all in or really heavily leaning into a, to a niche because you can start to build features, expand the product for them. Like one direction could be for coaches like start to get into selling their time through Zip Message, right? Like, you know, transactions for buying coaching sessions, asynchronous coaching or teaching and stuff like that. So that could be a potential direction. But the thing that I had a hard time and I finally came to this framework this week that helped me was that like, just, it, it, to me, just felt like way too early to put all my chips in on one direction from the product standpoint, from the marketing.

Starting from zero customers, say you're talking about like, which product should I start? Yeah, it would be great if I already had access or knowledge of a very specific niche market with a problem that's ready to be solved. But in this approach, I feel like it applies when, when you, when you're noticing an opportunity in a, in a broad market like this category of software. And, and I've seen that work in specific examples. Like not all SAS go this route.

There, there've been very successful SAS that start from the niche and, and grow from there. But I think today we're seeing a few more of these SaaS pop up where they just go into a competitive space and then make their way toward a niche, you know?

Yeah. And there are no rules. You can do whatever you think is right. And I'm thinking of Appointlet, which is a Calendly competitor run by a friend of mine here in Portland. And I know that broadness has been an advantage.

And then as things change in the market, new segments pop up, right? COVID created new demand that did not exist and broad applications benefited from

that. Yep. Yeah man. Cool. I think

that's Well about all we we did it. We went touchy feely then we got into real tactics. I think we ended up a little touchy feely again which feels great.

It's a typical Bootstrap web episode.

Oh yes. Good man. Well it's Friday. It's beautiful out.

That's right. I've got my daughter's first tee ball game tonight.

Yeah. We went from zero to

a 100 miles an hour

on that whole sports thing. Now yesterday, all three of our kids had three different things all at the same time and we didn't, we didn't have enough adults for it. So one, the oldest one went with her friends.

Yeah. We've got a tee ball tonight and then soccer tykes tomorrow morning. Nice.

And I'm, I'm investing in my setup. I got a nice chair. I think I might get like, I don't even know. Like there's gotta be stuff to bring a little cooler, stuff like that for snacks. I'm looking around these parents like we've been doing this for like fifteen years.

So let's, let's settle in.

Let's settle in here. Lot of time.

An umbrella.

Oh yeah.

Good stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for listening, everyone.

Later, folks. See you.