Bootstrapped Web

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web. Mr. Brian Castle, How are you?

Doing good. How's it going, Jordan?

It's going pretty well.

Another day, another week.

Another day. It's Friday. Feels good though. This week felt good. I've always looked for, okay, it's a little weird.

Basically when I walk around my house, like flexing, like, yes, like that's when

I know I'm in it.

Know what I mean? Not like moping around, oh, this next thing, but when I'm like, yes, I just like get this energy And I, I do a lot of calls and I'm an extrovert and that's what gives me the energy when I have this great call and the response and everyone's into, you know, like that really just gets me going. It's been like that all week.

I get the energy from sales, from conversions. It's been a really good week on that front. Had product hunt earlier in the week and also, I've got some news to share today too, which is, which was kind of fun and unexpected. I guess I'll just get right into it.

Why not? Let's do it. Let's do it. No one wants to hear my my my furnace story.

Or or the flooding in my basement. But I I see, that's how you know this has been a good week for both of us. Our houses are falling apart, both of us, but our businesses are doing just fine.

My my 1st Floor will be heated with space heaters for roughly six weeks. My sheer ignorance as a homeowner. But but Anyway You know me. I don't complain. Oh, what's up?

Tell give us some good news, though.

I'll give some takeaways from the Product Hunt launch in in just a bit. But as of today, I'm happy to announce that I have sold my process kit business.

Ryan's on a tear, baby.

It was a good outcome for me. I can't get too much into the details of of of the deal. I can't share who the buyer is. They they asked to to remain anonymous, but it was a really good experience. I'll just say that this one really came very quickly.

You know, I mean, it did go through micro acquire. I had been sort of seeking a buyer for it for a couple of months. It went through a few potential deals that ended up falling apart. This one, it was kind of unbelievable. It happened over the course of like five days.

Wow.

You know, Monday offer, Tuesday LOI, Wednesday into Thursday, a little bit of due diligence. We hammered out an APA and by Friday it was wire transfer and it's done.

How did you have your act together enough to transfer domains over and like databases like

A lot of it is it's the buyer too. It's not just the seller. I mean, I think both of us were very professional about this whole thing. Both of us, it's not our first rodeo with buying and selling. Again, can't really share who it is but it's a private investor group and I've only gotten to know them you know through this past week really but had multiple calls and I've been really impressed with them.

They've got a really strong like technical background and SaaS experience and I'm actually really excited for the future of ProcessKit. They're gonna really run with it.

Awesome. Product finds a good home and the money finds a good home in your bank account.

And as I said, I was talking to several potential buyers over the last few months and this group was far and away the best possible buyer. And I'm just super excited that it went to them. Incredibly fast. It was just no BS and I loved it.

Awesome. No haggling back and forth over minute details. What's this charge on the credit card? And yes, like, come on, let's be serious.

There was due diligence. It wasn't like we're flying blind here. It was completely reasonable and expected like one Google doc, one one page of questions and I answered them. And then we had a call where we dove into the code base a little bit. We walked through the product a bunch.

They had already signed up for the product. So they knew it a little little bit. And then I went into a little bit more, but I answered a bunch of questions and they're really competent and experienced and technical so they got it. There was no confusion about how things are structured or how the code base works, how the features work, what the business is all about. Like they totally get it.

So it just made the whole process super easy. And and then like I said, they're they're experienced in doing deals. I've I've done a few now. So you know, it was just no BS. It it like I used a template APA for asset purchase agreement from a previous deal.

We adapted it for this one. It was pretty straightforward terms and then the the transfers all happened this morning in in an hour. We were on a call together and just did them. Yeah.

Fantastic. Great way to start the year. Congratulations. Fantastic. Cool.

Well, look, I'll start things off this episode with an anecdote, a fun one. I need to give a shout out to Bootstrap Web listener, David Chung. What's happening, Dave? So here's, here's what happened. I spoke last episode about deciding to move out of Portland.

I do regret my negative tone on that. If I could dial it all the way back, I would. I just, I just don't.

I thought that it was fine.

I know. I just I don't want to be negative because I love this town and the people here and I just having my version of the experience. So in our search on where to move, where we've zeroed in is on the North Shore Suburbs of Chicago. And so we're starting to focus there. We have friends there.

We stay there every summer when we go up to Michigan.

I love Chicago. It's up there in my favorite cities.

Went to school.

I went to school at Columbia College in Downtown Chicago.

Yeah. Very cool. So it's Look, everyone knows the winters are brutal. Turns out when you're like 41 years old with three kids, weather, not actually anywhere near the top of the priority list. It's like schools, community, culture, safety, location.

You know, it's like the weather's further down, even though I could live in, like, tropical weather for the rest

my life. It's pretty awesome in the summer, though.

Oh, it's spectacular in the summer. So we're very familiar with it. We have friends from college that live there, and we stay with them every summer for at least, a weekend. So our kids know each other anyway. So we make this decision and I'm on the couch one night, like doing research.

And I ping my good friend here in Portland, Johnny Walt, who runs Roaster Tools. And I say, Hey, I think we're kind of finalizing this whole like Chicago thing. And he said, Well, you got to talk to my my man in a mastermind group that I'm in who's like the man in Wilmette, which is the the city, the the little town that we want to live in. And he says, Dave Chung. I'm like, Okay, cool.

Like, I'll check his stuff out. He's a real estate agent, along with a bunch of other stuff that he does. So I tell this to my wife and it turns out it's our friend, the ones that we stay with, it's her agent also. So he's worked with our very good friends from college to help them sell their house and buy their new house that they just moved into the same area that we want to move into. So I, of course, I email them immediately.

I'm like, hey, Dave. Yeah. All these stars have aligned and my wife and I will be in Wilmette tomorrow morning. Do you want to meet? So last weekend, we just we just did like this twenty four hour trip.

We flew from Portland, went to Chicago, saw Dave, gave us the full tour, two hours conversation, coffee shop, then go drive around town, all the highlights and schools and all that stuff. Hung out with our friends that night, flew back the next morning. Was basically just, yeah, just to confirm like, yes, like this is what we want to Yes.

And that

was just about like kind of scoping out the scene, but you haven't really done the house shopping yet.

The house shopping has now begun, and that's going to be a challenge because, you know, we where we want to be is a very small little area inside of Wilmette. So we got to be on the lookout. I'm probably going to have to do that whole thing of like, you know, Dave's gonna walk around with a FaceTime and show us the house when we make an offer type of a situation is is kind of what I'm expecting.

Well, that's good that they have him like on the ground there.

That's that's right. That's

right. Longtime listeners of this podcast might remember back in 2015, I was my family, we did the round the country road trip kind of thing and we were in between homes. We'd put our stuff into storage and we lived in Airbnb's for like almost a year. We were coming back about to have our second kid and we were house shopping like from the car, from the hotels on the way home.

It's a challenge.

And just remember like we were making lists of like these are, this is like the top three, oh that house that's the one like it looks amazing right and then we show up in person and be like this place is terrible.

Like Yeah, it's tough.

You know, afar, like you just don't see like, oh, it's actually right next to a gas station or like smells like smoke or all the

Right, there's only so much you can, you know, take a walk on Google Maps, but you, it's really, really tough without being there. So fortunately, have our good friends who live there and now Dave. So we're all set.

Yeah, man. That's great. Anyone in

the Chicago area, hit me up. I I need a new community of peers to jump into and kind of learn learn about. So it's it's exciting, and I'm sure I'll be talking about it. Hopefully not ad nauseam because it will be obviously a big part of my life over the next six months. I gotta figure out how to tell the kids and all all that stuff, but I'm excited about it and I'm very sad to leave Portland.

So would the goal there be like to do the move like by the summer or before the summer so that then the kids start in like September, the next school year?

Yeah. Priorities make sure that we're there so the kids can start school there. And ideally, like you said before, the summer in Chicago is amazing. And so as much of the summer as we can spend there as possible. So we're going to aim to get there, you know, in June as soon as school's over.

But whether or not that aligns with everything else, it's tough to tell. Love it. But we'll see. Cool man. Cool.

Bootstrap web, wherever. We'll have to do like

a bootstrap web road tour at some point.

That sounds kinda nice. Any travel sounds kinda nice right now.

Yeah. I mean, Hunt, Zip Message has been up on on Product Hunt since, Tuesday. Hey, I just wanna thank everyone, you know, listeners of this podcast, people who've been following along on Twitter. I can't thank you all enough for all the support and kind of showing up for Zip Message on Product Hunt. It's been really awesome to get messages from folks and the comments have been amazing.

I never feel great about being so so promotional all condensed into one day like that but I'm glad it's, I'm glad all that all that's done and it did pretty well. I mean, I'm pretty happy with it. I mean, know, we didn't like quote unquote win the day on product hunt. We ended up, man, it got competitive near the end.

Did it really?

It ended up in fourth place. It was like neck and neck with Zip Message and the one that was in third place. So we broke into third place for like six hours late in the day on the day. And then like I go to bed and like sometime around midnight, they got a few more votes and pushed us into fourth to finish the day.

Wow. Well, I think a marketer would say that you were in third position on Product Hunt for the day. But look, I think everyone loved supporting you and it was cool to see people tweet about it. The comments on Product Hunt is pretty awesome. So that's great.

Some takeaways. I mean, know, this week MRR bumped up significantly for sure.

You think it's directly attributable? It's so quick that people just jump in and turn into paid customers?

We definitely get several paid customers a day. We sort of normally do, but we got more this week for sure. There are always users who start a free account and they sort of instantly upgrade because they hit some limits pretty quickly. The other thing is we we did get a lot of new free users in in this past week. So that's a that's a new expanded pool of of users and it'll be interesting to see how how those metrics play out over the next, I'd say one to two months to see how that how that group converts and and and refers out and Right.

Right. Right.

Yeah. It's it's kind of interesting to start to be able to measure the impact of free usage and the impact of that virality and to really understand what a free user does.

Yeah. I guess a couple of sort of surprising things. Like I would have expected more, like maybe this would have happened if we were like number one or something, but like I would have expected more questions or like objections and comments from the Product Hunt community that hasn't seen Zip Message before. There was only a few of those and I and I got some sort of like private messages from from people who clearly just discovered Zip Message through Product Hunt which was cool. You know, they're like excited to see this type of solution but I was expecting more questions.

Like I had drafted answers to questions I was expecting to have to answer and there wasn't a lot of that. Know, all the comments were basically supporters or our current users coming in and sharing their review of it. That went over a lot easier than I expected. I was expecting to like answer like, well how is it different from Loom? And I had all answer ready for that all this different stuff, know.

I was looking at the traffic and the traffic to the site like went up but it wasn't a massive spike in traffic. And I wonder how much of a difference it would have made if we were in the number one spot versus like number three and four. But we hung out on the homepage. We might even still be on the homepage right now. I'm not sure.

It brought like three or four x the the amount of traffic that I that we would normally get this past week, but it wasn't a massive flood. I think having the free plan helps a lot. It gets a lot of free usage, know, a lot of free users registered. So that was really good. Oh, the other thing is, you know, there are some other benefits to having put in the work doing this Product Hunt launch.

Yeah, I'm curious about the work you put in and what feels like it was worth it, both for the Product Hunt itself and for what you're alluding to now.

Yeah, like there's a bunch of new assets that I got out of this. So like, number one, I did the work of like creating a new video, a new demo video. And when I did it, I knew this would be a good nice up to date demo video for zip message showing off all the new designs and everything and the and the best benefits and I and I can explain it a lot better now than I could a few months ago. So I put all that in a video and I created one version that said like, Hey product hunt, check out zip message. And I created a second version that just doesn't say product hunt, it's just more generic.

So so now I it's like the same work but now I have a much better explainer video for this for the site. The other thing is I have tons of new testimonial quotes and really useful ones like some of these comments on both Product Hunt and on Twitter are really well worded, testimonial quotes that I could use. And a lot of them from some really great people and all of our best customers kind of showed up and offered their words of like, what I mean is quotes where they talk about a specific use case.

I was gonna say what makes

it Or talk about specific benefits and different, like some people talk about how they use it with clients and we have a whole page about client usage. So we could put those there. Are there other use cases about how they integrate it with their website and we can put those quotes there. So like I still need to sift through all those and get them up on the website, but there's a lot of really good material that that'll be able to kind of get from this.

It's kind of like the, you know, we all think of software and the magic of compounding recurring revenue building on itself. But there's also an element to any business, including software business where over time, this stuff just gets better. The reputation gets better, the assets get better, the marketing, the testimonial, it really builds on top of itself and starts making it easier.

Everything leading up to Product Hunt, like just for the past year. And then especially once we got up to now, then it'll continue to improve. I just feel like everything gets tighter. Like we're it up, especially for me in in terms of how I explain it and and how I'll I'll write little pieces of copy about about the key benefits and and the positioning of Zip Message and like everything just sort of like tightens up. So, and then I start to see that in the testimonials because the testimonials are sort of like referencing the way that we position the product.

Like all that stuff is starting to starting to like click into place. And I think it'll continue to get even tighter over the next year.

It's exciting. We are not there yet, but what helps me is knowing what the journey looks like because we offered something similar. It went through a similar path at Cardhook. I caught myself this week. What I tried to do is convey to the team basically why we should walk around feeling really confident, even though this is really early, because we know we have something unique.

And whenever we show it to people, you know, with what we think of as an at bat, basically here's a demo and focus on it. Whenever someone gets focused on it, they come away really excited. And the desire, the demand is really high. So it's really just a game of, well, let's just show it to a lot more people, but everything is so immature. When someone asks us for a case study, we don't have a case study yet.

When someone wants testimonies, you just don't see that. So this is the stuff that you're building up over time that just makes everything easier. So I'm like pumping up the team on like, don't forget what we have is genuinely exciting and unique. So we just, we're just going to stick with it. That's, that's literally the only thing is to stick with it.

I always think of Colin, another friend here in Portland who runs customer IO. He's just been at it for a long time and has continued to do work and execute at a high level over a really long period of time. And the businesses is incredible. It's a beautiful business. You know, he shares a lot of stuff on Twitter.

One of the things that I love seeing from him is he shares the cohorts. Yeah, see this graph that shows cohort and retention. And it is amazing that first cohort from whatever it is eight or nine years ago, it's It's still still like a line underneath. It's amazing. And then you can also see the growth and the retention of newer cohorts be even stronger and they stay also.

And that just takes a long period of time to be consistent over. But once it clicks, Oh my goodness. It's beautiful. It's unstoppable.

Yeah, man. You mentioned that you're doing some sales and marketing and really diving into that. Want to?

Yes. So right. The goal of all of this was always to be ready in the new year to finally go to market. So in Q4, the product got to a point where it could take people on. We started to onboard a few accounts.

We started to go through the process with them of getting fully integrated and onboarded and so on and started processing our first revenue, which was such a relief for me in our all hands, which we just did last week. We had this slide of like basically how things are going. And I had this one bullet point on financial performance. And what I had there was like that icon or whatever it's called that emoji, that's just a desert, like a cactus with a sun behind it. It was just like, and I called it no man's land because we were in between.

We had this amazing product, but we didn't have revenue going through it yet. So for a few months in a row, I would say we're still in no man's land and we need we need to get to the other side. And then to finally just not share that anymore and show that yes, we've processed the first record.

There's some activity.

Yes, hallelujah. What we did in Q4 is we hired, we did two things. We hired a salesperson, experienced salesperson, more senior. The previous biz dev hire was not like a seasoned sales pro, but had great e commerce experience and I had a lot of trust in in Sam. And so and he knew ecommerce really well.

He came over from DRIP, and I just felt like, okay, this is definitely a hire that's going make sense. And he's he's been doing great. And now now we have someone to lead that team with a lot more experience. So Matt started on the team in January, you know, whatever it was, January 3, that first day. We hired Matt in December.

He started in January as like lead salesperson. And then we also hired powered by search, the agency that we worked with at Cardhook. And that feels great. Great.

Yeah. Dev and the team there are awesome.

They're really impressive. You know, we worked with them at Cardhook and we thought that the right thing to do is go through a full process. Don't just reach back and hire who you know, talk to a bunch of agencies.

So now you have these people in place, right? You've got your new lead sales person, you've got your customer success, you got powered by search.

Yep.

What mechanically is happening now? Right? Like here in January, like what's a, yeah, what new processes, what new workflows, what activities are hacked?

I'll talk about the marketing front first. The reason we ended up back with Powered by Search after going through a search and talking to a bunch of agencies is because we wanted help in marketing overall. We wanted a holistic approach to the agency that we worked with. We didn't just want people who ran ads. And we met with some great people, Aaron, I think the Lizazy Mysakowski, we met with a bunch of people who were great at what they did, but they were pretty focused on.

We will run your paid ads and your paid traffic, which maybe we'll get to in the future or something, but that's not what we needed right now. What we needed is to look at our marketing overall and our positioning and our customer and their needs and their desires and their pain points and think through it and how that impacts our positioning and how that impacts our copy. And that's what powered by search really does like from the ground up. And so right now we are pretty deep into the onboarding process with them. We've done a bunch of calls around who's the customer, what's the solution, what does the market look like?

What makes you unique? So really pulling out all that stuff. And then that then gets translated into, okay, here are the keywords we're going to start with. And here's the funnel that we're going to run at first. And so what's happening on the marketing side is we have our keywords, we have our ad copy, we have our ad creative.

Importantly, we also have our negative terms. What, what do we not want? Right? We don't want people searching for payment processor. No, we want people searching for, you know, one click checkout or something like that.

Yeah. And so you're doing like paid search and like content development too, or?

Yes. So paid search is Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook. And that traffic, which starts to run next week, that traffic will go right now. It's going to go to the homepage and we're developing a landing page and the CTA there is scheduled a demo. So it's traffic leading to a page that sells a demo.

The landing pages that we're building out with that we're experimenting with is basically what are the benefits of the product and what are you going to get in the demo? Basically, why should you fill this out to learn more about our solution? And then that flows into Pipedrive and then the sales team takes over with a demo. So that is the marketing funnel.

Yeah. Just like drive leads to the sales.

That's right.

In person sales.

And then at the same time we have the sales funnel. So Sylvia is leading marketing along with powered by search. And the key thing there is what do we need to get accomplished? What tasks are currently in the way before we can run traffic? But that's like basically my assignment to her was give me a list of things that stand in your way between where we are right now and the traffic that we can run.

And then let's just knock those down and everything else on your table, on your list. We're going to move over until until this is done. And so we're just kind of going through that. We're almost done with it. And then next week traffic will start to run.

Once traffic is running, we can take a deep breath and then think, okay, how do we optimize which landing page software to use? What things do we need to change and so on? And at the same time, brought the sales team in and I said, give me a list of things that prevent you from sending out ten, twenty good emails or LinkedIn messages every single day. So same thing. We're going through the list and the sales.

That's an area that I never really quite understood. So are they doing like cold outreach, like relationship building? Like how does that, aside from the marketing leads that the marketing team is sending, they got to also kind of develop their own leads.

That's right. And if you think about it, it's kind of like a, like the letter Y, but tipped on its side or just the letter Y, right? It's two individual funnels, a marketing funnel and a sales funnel that then join when it's time to do a demo. And then all a sudden you're, it's one funnel. So you're doing a demo and then you're onboarding and you're selling and you're following up and then you're integrating.

Then right then that's kind of like the onboarding part of the funnel. So both marketing and sales need to feed into that. Let's do a demo funnel. So sales is going to be a bunch of experiments. Matt that came in has had a lot of success in previous roles with LinkedIn outreach.

And there's a whole science and I can get into that when I learn more from him exactly on what his process is going to be and what, what tends to work, but generally speaking, connecting with someone and then sending a message in the appropriate way is effective, much more effective than cold email. We are still going to send some email. Yeah. Yeah. So we went to BuiltWith, we identified lists of merchants that are on the platforms that we work with.

This is like, is like Cardhook six years ago. Right. This is how I got Cardhook off the So

run the playbook.

Yep. That's, hey, you know, it's worth a try running a similar playbook. LinkedIn is now a new part of that playbook, but it's effectively the same playbook. It's get a list, qualify, and then do outreach. So we're going through that process.

We also downloaded some lists of our competitors, which is kind of an interesting thing. Some of our competitors, I don't want to blatantly talk bad, but one of our competitors, I would say the merchants are very unsatisfied with. So when you go to BuiltWith and you download a list of people that have ever used this software.

And yeah, and that's the nice thing about your, the space you're in, you could literally scrape the internet and see who's using what.

That's right. And you can qualify, right? You can go to someone's site and see if they have a firm and no, we don't integrate with the firm. Let me not reach out just yet. Let me put it on the list for later.

Things like that. So this competitor has a very large list of merchants that have had it historically and a relatively small list of people who are actively using it, meaning a lot of people churned out. When they churned out, that's kind of an interesting thesis, at least that we're that we're pursuing because our solution has their product as a feature. Rally pays effectively their entire product. And it's just one feature for us.

So maybe that feature that thereafter, that one click upsell part of it, maybe they wanted it, but weren't satisfied with their solution. It's worth it for us to approach them and say, you weren't happy with that one. This is much better. Do you want to check it out? So we're doing things like that.

We're kind of thinking through who the right people are.

Are you able to share like what the pricing structure is for Rally?

Sure. The pricing is an initial step, right? That's kind of how I'm thinking about it. The the initial pricing is 50 basis points. And at Cardhook, we ended up at $500 a month plus 50 basis points, right?

Half a percent. And this time when I run the model, given our runway, we are better off not charging the monthly subscription at this time.

Just doing the transaction.

Yep. That's right. Because, you know, in a similar way, the Shopify's financials, because they're public, you can see them. They started off with their subscription portion of their business, greatly outweighing their transaction side. And when they hit escape velocity within two years, it equaled one another.

And now the transaction side of their business is far higher than their subscriptions, which tells you why they didn't like Cardhook very much because we were jabbing them at this at the point of transaction. So when I run the model with a much larger bank balance basically that we can dip into and use now with VC, as of right now, it appears that we're better off not charging a subscription plan. And we might do that later on, especially as we add on a bunch of additional features. But for now, no monthly, just 50 basis points. And then, you know, part of our business model is that we have a rev share with the payment processors on the back end.

So we're getting money in two ways on the front end from the merchant, on the back end from the payment processor. And in early access that we're in right now, we're just not charging 50 basis points at all. So it's basically free during early access and that'll probably go for another few months.

Yeah. I mean, I guess with the deciding on the pricing structure and like whether, whether you do a monthly fee or not, it aside from the running the mop, like the financial model, it's also sort of figuring out who, who are the best type of customers, right? Like without the fee, you have the benefit. You could sell the benefit of like, you know, we make money when you make money, right? So you can get like more aspirational stores whereas, you know, the bigger players, they would be paying a fee and maybe that helps attract them by having a fee.

Yeah. It's tricky. And I acknowledge that there's also some danger in going about this the way we are, but it's, and we know all of us, you can change your pricing. It's not set in stone At Cardhook,

we- And

that's how I felt about ZipMessage pricing too. Like for the first year plus, which we're still in, it's like, intend for this to be lower than what it ultimately will be.

That's right. And that's fine. At Cardhook, it was important to us not only to have a monthly fee, but to have a relatively high monthly fee because we had this very strange situation of more demand than we can handle. And so we had to filter and that pricing was the most effective filtering mechanism. At Rally, we want to go much wider.

Cardoc was always going to be a niche play to have 500 merchants and make, you know, dollars 6,000,000 a year type of a thing. We want thousands and tens of thousands of merchants on over time. And so removing that initial hurdle in the early stages might make sense. If we get to a place where we have a lot of professional services and a lot of additional premium features and AB testing, and if the market tells us that we're better off filtering, then we'll do it. For now, doesn't make sense.

Nice man.

The important thing of the whole conversation, the wheels turning. That's right. By next week, we will have sales fully operational and marketing fully operational. And it's just really exciting. What's starting to happen now is people are starting to find us as people start to look for solutions in January.

And some people that we've worked with in the past at Cardhook are finding rally. I just had a call with one this morning and it's like a reunion. It's like, oh my God, the relationship and like the battle we all went through together there on both sides, the software side and our customer side, like really formed strong bonds. And people are like super excited for us and wanna try it out and feels great. Love

it, man. That's awesome. I guess we'll probably wrap up soon, right now I'm really playing catch up with the message with our features and roadmap. Like we have right now three, like really nice new features that are 80% or 90% built. They're each on a branch in git just waiting for the finishing touches to be put in place and prepared and announced and shipped.

And I've been so sidetracked between Product Hunt and I've been going on a bunch of podcasts lately and doing all this other marketing stuff and yeah, it's just been pretty chaotic and I feel like the our our GitHub board where we manage the features is like kind of a mess right now. Like we like again, we have all these issues that are like 80 or 90% done and usually we just sort of do one thing at a time, ship it and then move on to the next thing but like, I don't know for whatever reason between the holidays and then here in January it's just been like, all right, let's just start this and all right, well that's on hold. Let's go start this and then let's do, and then I'm starting a thing and my developer is doing a thing. So we've got like the API is coming. Like that's just about to launch a public API and that that'll be cool because we've had some developer types ask for it but it's gonna unlock my ability to go out to tons of other products and do integration partnerships with them.

And I've been, talking to to a few about that already.

Okay. I wanna hear more about that next week because that's Yeah. That's a new area for you.

Probably probably next week is when we'll be looking to actually release the API feature.

Would you say that that marketing is currently ahead of product? Is that what you mean by like behind gotta catch up?

Yeah. Probably a little bit. You know, they they it's like two racehorses going back and forth throughout the year. Right? Right now, yeah, I I would say the product is all the core things are really solid and optimized at this point, but there are all these little improvements and feature requests that we have not shipped yet.

And that's the other thing that sort of bogs us down a little bit is like, I I constantly keep coming back to like just make the core thing better and better and better. You know, the the recording experience, the playback experience, the reliability of recording and playing back a message. Like that stuff has to be good at all times. So if there's ever a little bug or or quirk with that or or a way to improve the experience, I I prioritize that over shipping a brand new feature, you know. That's been actually slowing down our feature roadmap is because we just keep making the core of the product better.

And I think that's really important. And also like, well, another feature that's coming it's related to now that we've gone freemium, I'm really prioritizing things that help with the first user experience record and share. Like the smoother I can make that slide from I just signed up, I created my first message, now I'm prompted to go share my message with someone else and then they can get it and reply and sign up. And like that whole cycle has to be extremely smooth.

That is interesting.

And, and I've made, I've already made some improvements over the past month there and shipped them and I've been able to actually see improvements in metrics. Like activation is up and referrals are up because I tweaked a few things in the UI, This you

reminds me of Ruben's challenges because he's right, it's this coordination between how do you maximize traffic and then how do you give an incredible first experience. For him it's it's, you know, it's electronic signatures. Yeah. So when you come in with

a doc I believe.

Yes, that's right. So that, that slide, like you described it from here's traffic of someone interested in the solution. And then from that point all the way into the product and then sharing it and then getting value out of it and then someone else touches it also. It's like that whole thing over and over again.

Actually just to solidify that a little bit. Well, thing that I did was, you know, for the first, most of the last year, I was really mostly concerned with customer research in in the onboarding, right? So I did this with process kit too and I did it with ZipMessage for a while, but then I ripped it out. So basically when you it used to be when you sign up for ZipMessage, you sign up, you confirm your profile and then you answer like four research questions. What are you trying to do?

Who are you? What how'd you hear about Zip Message? And like three or four of those, right? And and then and then we you proceed into the product and then we ask you to click a button to create your first message and then you can record your first message. So now I I cut out a bunch of those steps.

Now it's like you sign up, you you finish your profile, you're landed into a pre created message for you. Now you could just hit record, you know? And then, and then the next piece is, share it. So redesigned the, the, like the model that pops up to help you share it off with someone else and then it prompts you. And so like I I'm missing out on some of that initial customer research that that I get from from them answering a survey on the on their way in, but they're coming right in and they're recording at a much higher rate than they were before.

So This is so interesting because it is

I still wanna find a place to like sneak back in that question of like, how'd hear about Zip Message? You know, just that I have that data point, but like

But you'll find another way. The reason I was saying it like it's so interesting is because it's driven by business model, right? It is driven by strategy, it's driven by pricing. And then you start to, you know, move into place. You start to move your product over a few degrees.

It's not a different product, but you move the onboarding and that initial experience to start to match with the strategy and the pricing. It is, it's really exciting because if it, if it clicks, right, and starts to align, then you can basically tell yourself, okay, now I just need as much traffic as possible to push through Another this

kind of cool thing, I tweeted this a couple of weeks ago. So another thing that started happening after I went with freemium is people would convert from free to paid. And we have multiple limits, multiple feature gates, multiple things that would push someone to convert and it was unclear to me why are people converting? Like which thing caused them to finally say, okay, the free plan is not enough for me. I need the paid, right?

Right. Is it more clear now?

Well what I implemented was kind of a URL parameter. Like one of the things is like they want to personalize their their zip message link. They want zipmessage.com/jordan, right? Well if if they're trying to edit that and then they realize they can't without upgrading then they click through to upgrade to get it, I can track that that they were trying to customize their slug and that param goes through the whole conversion even into the notification. After they pay they they become a customer.

I get a notification and it says what was the thing that they're trying to do? Customize the slug. Or or they they bumped into our recording limit. That's that's what caused them to to convert or, they they wanted to invite team members. They they were trying to invite a team member and then they converted, you know.

So I I could see that data now coming coming into the, into the conversion emails so that's been pretty helpful too. Cool.

Yeah. More information means more instrumentation, right? Means better data. Means better experiments.

And man, it's, I love being able to code and build that stuff without having to ask my developer to do it.

Pretty cool. Good stuff. Brian.

Right.

This was like a good podcast episode. You know, wasn't just a rambling conversation.

I think the key was I did not drink coffee before this. I'm in a calmer state, so we're good. And interesting. I don't know what that's Things are good on your end so yeah. No, takes a good,

good stuff man. Thanks everyone for listening. Brian congrats on the sale, congrats on product time. Keep rolling.

You too, buddy.

See you.

Alright. Later.