Bootstrapped Web

Hey, it's Bootstrapped Web. We are back. Another, back to back week. So it's only been a week since the last one. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?

I was a little worried that we weren't gonna record this week. We started talking and then we did it.

Yes. Yeah, we did get on mics. I don't know how much we're gonna have to talk about today but let's let's see what happens here.

I'm sure we'll find it. From my side of things where my focus is some partnerships or partner conversations, let's say. My intention was to get our website launched and then talk directly to potential customers but the website's taking longer than we want, which happens. Not happy about it but it happened. And so what that's leaving me is talking with partners and agencies more so than actual potential customers.

I was gonna ask when you say partners, does that mean like agencies who would use it and connect it with end clients?

Yes, yeah, we have we have multiple types of partners like our platform partners, like e commerce platforms. Then we have payment processing partners, Stripe, Braintree, Square, so on. And then we have agencies that work directly with merchants and we want to make sure they know what we're doing and how it works and why so that they can kind of have us in mind. And then we also have integration partners. So other software companies that we integrate with and then we co market and partner and do content and that sort of thing.

And so that's right. It's four different types of partners I think I just laid out there and that's just my favorite. It's just, it's really just talking to peers and befriending them and what it's done is it has allowed me to really hone in the way I not just describe our product but what we want the future to look like. And every once in a while you get a partner that just shares that same vision of the future. My favorite thing, the thing that I'm good at is articulating that future vision clearly.

And when you get a partner that sees the world the same way you like bear hug, right over the internet, you're like, okay, like we are in an alliance. We see things the same way. We want things to happen the same way. And now in these back channels, right outside of the public view on the web and websites, what's happening in the back channels, have someone that is pushing in the same direction. And my favorite thing is to get like a ring of those people and the message is resonating.

And so I'm so optimistic, right? Because for a long time there was a lot of doubt around our vision of the future is different from the way things look right now. And so articulating it is a bit scary and you have that hesitation on is it stupid? Do I not have it right? Am I missing something?

Is it obviously wrong? All those fears And now that I'm just talking to a lot of people every week and a lot of them are kind of lighting up at that, at that vision, it just makes me feel optimistic. Like, okay, so it's not stupid. We're not on the wrong track. I didn't just take millions of dollars and hire people to build something in the wrong direction.

All those fears are starting to

Yeah, I hear that, you know, without getting into too much about what it is. The

How boring is that by now? Sorry everybody, we're almost there.

Let's see. Like, how much of it do you feel like is is truly ahead of its time or or or gonna align with with some movement in the market at just the right timing with the partners and customers that that you're talking to? How much of this requires like behavior change or, or, or a change in the way that they do things in order for this to be the solution?

It's, it's really, we can, maybe

we can wait on that one in the first couple

of weeks, but I don't know. Really not much longer, but it's really different. It is not the way things look right now. It is not the way things are understood right now. It's not the way things are assumed, all of it.

So it's related to what we proved is possible at Cardhook. And so it makes sense that we have more confidence on the vision than other people because what we did at Cardhook didn't make sense with the way things worked either. And so that gave us the confidence to what do you want to be contrarian and right. Right? It's easy to be contrarian and wrong.

Yeah. But I think, and I think that's what

And that really makes for a pretty strong marketing message, Right? It's like people are taking a position like we're we're on team x y z.

Yes. And and a little bit ahead of its time but ideally and and this is what I'm hoping and starting to get more indicators of, it's that it's different but people are already thinking it and it hasn't been articulated. It hasn't been put forward as like, here's our philosophy. And so that's the hope. The hope is we kind of nail that messaging and people are drawn to it because there are as a segment of people out there that already believe it and we're just going out there and articulate it.

I sort of feel the same way with with Zip Message right now. The thing with like asynchronous conversations, asynchronous messaging to customers and to colleagues. In some use cases, it's a it's a ahead of its time and in other use cases, it's like people have been communicating asynchronously for years now. And so I'm trying to align with existing behaviors with with other tools like like Loom, but we differentiate in key ways. But a lot of the feedback that I get from people, it's funny when people fill out the form on zip message that I have a survey on the backend.

They say things like, like they have an immediate, like, all right, well, I already use Loom for this and, and, and zip message seems better for that. And actually now that I'm typing this, I could see using zip message in in this way and that way and that way and for this. They're trying to think of like additional new ways to to communicate asynchronously that could replace live calls on their calendar and like you know, I'm still trying to navigate all that feedback you know.

Yeah, I've had that experience with zip message where once it burrows into your head and it's a new set of assumptions, then all of a sudden it starts to dawn on you these other uses. But the danger or the opportunity is in, do you need to articulate that for me to let me see it? It feels like the early adopters will just be drawn to it and get it because they already believe it before you even say too much. We do a call to make sure that every new employee and I sync up after they're hired, like three, four weeks into their time here. Because during the interview process we talk and then I kind of get relegated off to the leadership team and I don't have that much interaction with a front end developer.

I can't really help them. There isn't that much cause for us. And it's cool to be asynchronous in that way, but I want the connection. So we have a call set up and the call ends up a little forced. And it's 9AM for me, it's 7PM for them.

I'm feeling bad that I'm taking them away, but what are they supposed to do? Say no to the CEO's call? Of course you have to say yes. So it's like this awkward thing. I look at it, I'm like, that should just be a video conversation.

It should be more than a Slack message, but it doesn't have to be a synchronous call that makes both of us feel guilty, maybe adds a little awkwardness.

Yeah. It's funny actually. It's like, I'm just thinking of this right now live, right? So we've been making the transition in audience ops from Kat, actually today is actually her very last day at audience ops, right, to Sarah taking over as the team manager. I wasn't even fully aware of this, but we have about 25 people on the team spread out, we're all remote and most of them have not interacted with each other directly other than Slack messages here and there.

Like Sarah said, this thing where like the man we have a bunch of account managers and they interact with all of the writers across different accounts, but the managers don't necessarily interact with each other because why would two managers work on the same account? So now that Sarah is, is into this team manager role who was supposed to be in touch with everybody and, and you know, in constant contact with the whole team, she told me like, well there are people who I just haven't even talked to. And so we started talking about like ways to use zip message and in the, in the team, you know, without asking the team to get on all these extra calls or meet or weekly meetings, we never had like weekly standups or anything like that in, in, in audience ops, but it could be a way to get some form of FaceTime with the team or different team members you know, still asynchronously. We could still post those messages into Slack you know from Zip Message and stuff like that.

Yes and it's a new level of interaction. It's not this, not that. It's kind of its own.

Yeah. Then plus and I'm also seeing from people like communicating with with clients. So there's a lot of like designers who show UI designs and get client feedback and they go back and forth, 15 back and forth on asynchronous video message and zip message. Some people are already using it for that. We at Audience Hops would use it for that to get input from clients for, for articles.

Like we need to extract insights from you so that our writing team can write articles for your SAS company, something like that. So it's, it's kind of fun to, to think through all these niche use cases. And I guess a little bit of an update on what I talked about last week on bootstrap, how I was exploring different niches, leaning into certain ones. I was starting to talk to coaches and teachers and, and like community, you know, founders. There's still a lot of interest from those people.

And I've talked to several of them, but, but it's also becoming apparent that like that's one use case and sometimes it message fits, sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't necessarily make sense to like double down on that, at least not right now. So, so it's just one of several different use cases that, that just seemed to bubble up. So I'm starting to, I don't know, a little bit embrace the idea that like at the, at this outset phase, it's just going to be horizontal until I have many users and then I can really see the patterns of who's actually using it, you know?

Yep. And paying and adding.

Yep. Yep.

That's exciting.

Yeah. And so, you know, I have a handful of of first paying customers in in the door now. Today is a weird day for me, mentally because it's like literally this morning I just finished the for the past week we spent the week like refactoring a key part of the code base in the app, basically the way that accounts work. When, when you sign up and you own an account. I sort of talked about this last time.

It was a little bit too confusing and, and the framework that we used had like personal accounts versus team accounts and that made it confusing, like which one owns the billing and stuff like that. So we simplified that a lot and that was essentially what I was working on this week. I did the refactoring on that, had my developer review it and then we just pushed that live today. Just pushing updates live on a Friday afternoon. What else is But, but I worked on that this week while my developer was working on things related to our video recording and video playback stuff.

He and I are working simultaneously. We're essentially like two developers working on two tracks. It was a little bit frustrating to spend this entire week on that without inviting new users this week. Cause I invited a bunch last week and then I, and then it became immediately apparent that, that these, this accounts set up is too confusing. So I didn't,

Oh, so you stopped it.

Yeah. Well, I just didn't want to bring on additional. We, we we've been getting new trial signups like sort of organically, but I didn't send another big batch of invites to the early access list this week. And I wanted to wait on that to get this accounts thing sorted out because I didn't want more users on the on the old account system.

I hate those situations. It is the worst. It forces you to stop progress because it's it's it makes sense to stop the progress but it feels so wrong.

Couldn't agree more man. It's frustrating. I mean Monday, I'm gonna send another batch of invites, right? You know, it has me thinking right now, I think for the next couple of weeks here as, as I work through the early access list, it's probably going to be this give or take like a two week cycle that repeats, right? So one week I'll send a batch of invites.

I usually send 20 to 30 invites at a time off of the early access list. And then over the, over that following week, I will see who actually takes the invite and signs up for a trial. I'm talking to those customers. I think I should do more calls with them. I've done calls with some of them, but I need to do more of that.

And then the second week in that cycle is, is we just have so many fixes to make in the product, you know?

So you have to stop progress and fix.

I think I'm going to have to do this. I I I have to start to get used to this two week cycle. I I thought I would be sending invites every single week. I think it's gonna be like send invites and then make a bunch of fixes and improvements to the product and then send more invites.

Are you starting to get feature requests? When I've used the product, I wanna just type and hit enter. I I don't always wanna do video. I'm I'm sure you're starting to get all types of unexpected.

Yeah. So I mean you you can do text messages. That that's already in there.

In line. Right? Video, then you you reply with a text and

Right. We we don't have in line. We've had that request from a few people. You can record a video and add some text under it, but but we don't have like comments underneath each individual video that that is definitely coming like, like, like one big conversation and then sub sub threads within it. Right?

Yeah. We do get plenty of feature requests, but the ones that right now it's so new that like there are still a ton of bugs and things are too slow and you know, that also gives me hesitation to invite too many new users. Cause I'm like, I, I'm looking at our GitHub board and we have like five issues where I know that in the next week or two, we're going to make this one part of the app a lot faster or we're going to make it always work in Safari instead of sometimes work in Safari. Know, like I don't want too many new users to run into the really glaring bugs, you know? But I'm balancing that with like, man, I am anxious to get more users and customers.

Yeah. Yeah. The shame, like you can only give it so much credence at some point and like, it's okay to feel. Okay. So I have a question.

I feel like I'm going to be playing the avatar of the audience here. You started this a few months ago. It was the studio mindset. Let's bring some products to market. Let's see what hits.

Starting This to get little movement here, right? Clearly there's something here. What do you do now? How do you decide, you know what, this experiment is a success and it's worth going deeper and deeper and deeper investing more money and energy and time and putting away other ideas and like what are you looking for now?

Yeah. That's a good question. The way that I've framed it in my head over the past few months is it's just a series of milestones and at each milestone it's, is it working? Yes. Keep going.

Is it not working? Why is it not working? Maybe the answer is tweak something, maybe the answer is this is just a bad idea. And so far, with Zip Message, every time I came to one of those, it's like, yep, I'm seeing the good signs. I'm going keep going, you know?

And right now I still see a lot of really good signals. So in my mindset right now, full speed ahead on Zip Message. Process kit still hangs out there. We have customers, really happy customers. We still take on new customers that we do support.

We do sometimes feature enhancements, sometimes bug fixes, but that's not getting a lot of resources compared to the zip message right now. I would say my next milestone so I have the first credit cards in Stripe. Right? The next milestone really is to see, okay, can I can can I like double and triple this customer count in the next thirty days, right?

Right. Are people canceling? Are they asking for refunds? Are they staying? Are they adding people to their team?

It's definitely too early to see churn metrics. Some of those customers have paid and some of them have put in their credit cards, but they haven't even had the first charge yet. I definitely want to get into like exponential increase of customer counts over the next thirty, forty days. But, but like I said, I'm slowed down by the product and, and bug fixes and and that sort of stuff.

Yeah. You're live now. No no no more hypotheticals. Now you have real people and it slows down.

It it gets even without sending invites, it gets sign ups. The the sign up button isn't visible but you can sort of find the backdoor to it and it's

If I if I go to your site, I I can't sign up right now? Request an invite.

It's still request an invite because I I still wanna grow the early access list. That's the flow that I'm still sending the call to actions to is get on the early access list, fill out my survey and based on what you write, I'll I'll send a reply back to you and I'll invite you pretty soon. But it's it's viral too. So people start using it and they share it with someone and once you once somebody else responds to a conversation, they have a login now and then there's a call to action inside the app to

start your

trial. Mhmm.

Very interesting, Brian. Very interesting.

Yeah. So And you feel better about the pricing too? Honestly, that's still up in the air. Like I'm not gonna go back to the minutes thing, but it's still up in the air. I think this is only just a first stab at it.

I expect it will change again. Maybe go to a more traditional per user pricing. Stick with the basic and the premium but basic is lower dollar amount per user. The premium gives you the premium features but it's a higher dollar amount per user.

Makes sense.

You know, maybe we'll do something like that. But to to also answer your question there about like where is this going, My my goal is is to just keep pushing on this as as aggressively as I can and give it as much focus and resources as I can so that it gets to a point where it's just completely obvious. This is the thing. It it has traction. Now I'm ready to like, know, 10 x it, whatever.

Yeah, do the next steps. Yeah, hope

because there's also a fear. Let me get into the mental thing. Okay. Like there's a fear of like, I don't want to go back to the drawing board. I really don't.

Which is dangerous, Whenever you want something to be true, it's really hard to tell whether or not it's true.

Yeah. The whole idea at the beginning of this year of like a product studio launching lots of experiments. I don't want to do another experiment. I want this one to work, you know? And I see the signs that it's good, but I'm sort of measuring it against process kit.

If it can make progress a lot faster than process kit did, then that's a, that's a big time signal to me that like, this is getting traction a lot faster. You know?

I don't know what those signals are. Right. That's that's, you're the only one that's going to see those.

Yeah. Well it's, I mean, it's generally like, like MRR growth within a certain time period.

Right. If you get to a thousand bucks in MRR within like two weeks then you know, okay, so there's demand and they're willing to pay. So that that'll tell you something even if it's $500 in MRR. I mean you're purposely slowing things down. Reminds me a little bit of when we first launched the checkout where we just had too much demand, the product was ready.

We just had to just apologize to everybody and just ask them to wait. And then the people we would let in, they'd be like, Oh, now I see why you asked me to wait because it's not ready. And we had no choice, but okay, it was just going take some time. But you saw the demand where it was like a wall and behind it was just a whole bunch of demand that whenever you move the wall or open the door, it would just start coming in again.

Yeah. And I'm seeing that with the early access list. Like it's not like I have subscribers flooding in every single day, but I get a few every day and, but more importantly, I get people responding to the survey and sending me emails, writing a lot of, just writing a lot about like how they would use it, you know? And that's a sign that's like, you

know, people could give it to me. I want that.

Yeah. And I'm also excited about the whole, one of the big ideas, big reasons I got into said messages is the speed of getting value from it. You know, you start using it today within an hour, you can have a conversation with people and you just got some level of value from it. You know, like I'm, I'm really excited about that because it just makes onboarding so much easier. But in order for that to work, like the product has to work all the time.

And right now it works most of the time.

What I imagine will be the next like difficult thing to confront is that if you keep getting the traction and you'll start to get into a position where, okay, you're starting to get stretched in. You have a bunch of people, you have more work to do on the product than you can kind of handle or maybe you can handle it but then other work doesn't happen. Whether it's marketing or support or success. And then I think where a lot of people in our situations get into is right then it gets the most difficult. You have customers, you have revenue, everything's working but to go over your skis and start hiring and getting a support person that can help you so you're not doing support, maybe success and maybe marketing, the revenue isn't there to justify it but the revenue won't get there unless you do it.

So you get stuck right there.

Yeah and that you bring up the thing that's actually on my mind right now, I want to be at that point and I started actually talking to people about hiring someone, but I'm also like it's slightly too early to make a big hire right now.

Yeah, I think it's a bit early. Doesn't hurt yet.

I'm not like really financially constrained right now. I I could pull the trigger on hiring someone, but I don't but it's not at a point where it's like I we're growing, so now we just need more hands on deck. You know, it's it's it's still like proving that we can grow customers, know. Because right now it's it's me and the developer, we're essentially the two people on the product. And that's where I I I want to be, but I also realize obviously that I need to be market doing marketing and sales because we we don't have like if I if I were to look at my team right now, we're heavy on the on the product side and we don't necessarily have like a marketing person on the team.

And if I were to like form my dream team, which is like a very small core team of really like high quality, creative, awesome people to collaborate with on stuff from marketing to product, Like I have this vision in my mind of the type of team that I would like to build and I'm anxious to start building it. Like I want to start working with people on Zip Message but it's not quite there yet. It could be like just a matter of weeks away from like, there's some traction, we're growing, now it's time to find some awesome people to work with. We're still ahead of revenue to justify their salary but I could spend on that or you know make it work somehow.

That's so exciting to turn it into something that you could start to, you know, it's what we all want.

And one of the challenges actually with it and I've started to do this a little bit now is networking. You're great at this but it's not necessarily my strength which is like networking with and growing a network of talented people who could potentially be really great teammates in the near future. You know what I mean? Because hiring develop a developer doesn't seem as challenging. It could be challenging if if it were like a key tech hire, but I know many of them and I know many avenues to go find more of them.

It's the marketers that I have trouble networking with. I would like to just like know personally have had conversations with a whole bunch of marketers who could someday take a key marketing role with me if it became available.

I hear you on that desire obviously, right? Makes sense to be able to look to people. What I will say is that there's like an iceberg effect in these roles where we see the tip, we see the people on Twitter, the people with followings, the people who are great at teaching and getting attention and showing what they're doing and cultivating an audience for it. That is not the majority of the people available on the market to work with and sometimes, I hope no one takes offense, I'm not thinking about anyone individually. Sometimes the people who are good at getting attention are not actually necessarily good at doing the job.

So going for the anonymous, put up a job ad, talk to 30 people, find the one you click with, We have had more success with that than than with the well this person, I know them, I like them, I trust them, I know their public persona, let's hire them. That has not worked out well for us. Yeah.

The challenge that I have is specifically hiring somebody for a marketing role or or like call it a growth role, right? I could put up a job ad and get a bunch of developers, I could evaluate their their their code, their their chops, their their experience building, and we could have a conversation and and we could do test projects and and all that kind of stuff. In Audience Ops, we hire writers all the time. I'm not so involved in that anymore, but but we have a process for evaluating their writing samples and and and we do a test article with them and stuff like that. So so that's a straightforward like pathway to evaluating and that that somebody is good.

But how do you evaluate a potential head of growth person? Right. Other than like, do we have personal rapport? Do I trust their experience? Like even, even a test project that you do with them, like that still doesn't demonstrate that they're actually going to grow MRR in the next few months.

Know, you know, how much of that do you do? You literally just hire them and say, have at it, let's, let's hope for the best or like, okay, I've got some ideas on like, I think these channels could potentially work. I've got some, some ideas on, on how we can purse them creatively. Now, you do the execution and the experiments and let's, let's talk about it week to week.

It's really tough because it is a, it's a unique type of a role because nothing, well it's unlikely that they've done something very similar. Usually the the experience is varied and what we're presenting them at an early stage like this. There aren't that many people that have done it at that stage. Yeah. So it's it's some luck involved in.

And the stage is is is critical too. It's like how do how do you how do you attract a a really talented growth person to come work at a at a super small bootstrapped SaaS startup, you know?

Yeah. Ideally, that's what they're looking for. Right? Ideally it's a match.

Like how do you find the person who's, who's really fired up about that, fired up about the product and the, and the market and comes with all these creative ideas?

This is where I think the founder can make a difference because if you can attract, it's such a strange thing. It's like this combination of charming and vision and just the appropriate level of appeal toward money. It's just getting it just right for that particular week in the business' life and presenting it as a great opportunity to learn and earn and be part of something early like that conversation, I think that's what's going to make the difference. If you have someone interested in joining early stage and then they meet the founder and it's just not right for them or they're just not buying it, it's not going to work. I think that's where you turn on the charm and you convince this person that this is the right thing to bet on, which is hard.

Not only is it hard, it's also hard for you to do that because you're a little worried for the person. You don't want to lead them in the wrong way. You know, you care about people's careers. You don't want them to go derail what they're doing for six months. It's high stakes.

It's a Tricky thing.

You know, when we talk about marketing, that's such a general term, right? Because there's this super early stage marketing which I'm in right now, which to me is my job and my role and I should be doing it, which is sending early invites, talking to those people on calls, doing the very early customer support, customer success, checking in to make sure they're getting the value or understanding why they're getting value. That sort of customer development and learning, that's me, that's the founder, you know? And, and I, I more actually see that as a product function than a marketing function, right? Cause I'm, I'm designing the product, I'm talking to the customers who are using the product, I'm making the product better.

That,

that's You what have to get that right.

Yeah. And that's where I want to be every day. Okay. But then, and that's how I expect to get the first batch of customers. But at the same time, I do feel that urge to like step on the gas.

Like, you know, I talked about starting like an asynchronous AMA series using, using zip message or maybe, you know, turning that into a podcast or doing case studies or, you know, whatever it might be. It kind of be nice to have somebody who's just executing on that stuff while I'm doing the customer stuff. But

you need constant activity, ideally.

Constant activity. I don't know. So I'm, it's on my mind. I'm trying to have conversations with, with people who, who just enter my radar that, and then sometime in the next, sometime, hopefully, it the the traction comes and and and then it's like time to really start to grow the team. We'll see.

I think one leads into the other. You know, the traction is like this external validation and that leads to confidence in you. And then when you go out and talk to the outside world, they can like sense the confidence through the computer screen and they're attracted to it.

Yeah, and it's like literally a difference between saying like, here's my idea that I'm working on or here's the thing that has some customers and it's growing.

Right. Every time we send out a batch of invites, we get this many customers and it keeps happening and the list keeps growing and I really need your help. You know, that that's much more attractive than well I hope this works and I'm not sure yet.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Anything else on your end?

I mean, your end is just so much more exciting right now. So I'm glad we kinda got into it. It's a really really interesting spot. I I hope this is like one of those episodes we can look back on as like a you know, a pivotal moment on like where is this thing going? But I think all of us are just really hoping that it keeps going in the same direction for you.

I hope so too.

Yeah. Thanks for the listeners who like So we got some cool feedback on that last episode. I got some DMs and some texts. My brothers who listen also

Oh, cool.

You know, they obviously identify with it because we grew up in the same house.

They kinda know know you a little

bit. Yep. Yeah. And

by the way, we we still have zipmessage.com/bootstrappedweb if you you wanna send us a a message, something something for us to talk about. One one of these episodes, we'll start actually talking about those things.

Yeah. There yes. We will. And what I need to get back to a few of them.

And I've had a few more requests from people like they wanna use the message for that too for their podcast. So that's another

There is, like there are these growth hacks that are floating around Zip Message. Whether it's like, whether it's these podcast questions, I just love the visual nature of it that you can basically just drop it into Twitter. Here's a conversation I had with Justin Jackson about x. Boom, just drop it in there. And that like voyeuristic side of it where you can just listen to something, not just listen, you can watch someone else's conversation happening.

I I just find that very attractive.

Again, it's one of those things that I'm hesitant because of the bugs but I want to start these public AMAs. You can you can have a public AMA using zip message. Right? And we could tweet it out and I wanna do it with I I already made a list of like 40 people I wanna invite to do these AMAs. Right?

And I and I wanna throw it out there but if if it gets around and people wanna post something and then it breaks which does that.

What are

you gonna do? When you're routinely right now, it's like

I know. How long are gonna wait? I hear you. Hear you. Know.

I I Everyone sympathizes. It's and everyone has a much easier outside perspective Like I'm saying right now, do it. You know, it's just so much easier to say that.

The voices that that you're speaking into your earbuds right now, I I hear them in my head too. So

Yep. Yep. That's experience right there. Cool.

Alright. So I think we'll we'll call it.

Let's do it. Thanks for listening, everyone. Yep. Have a good weekend.