Bootstrapped Web

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrapped Web. Brian, was so good to see you at MicroConf. Yeah. I got the

hang of person. Finally. Yeah. It's been a couple weeks now, but It has been a few weeks. Yeah.

Back back in the saddle over here.

Back in the saddle, stressing ups, downs, roller coaster. That's it. Our house. Like, we're we're in flux. There's there's a lot going

on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. For sure.

We had a funny week last week. We it was my kids spring break and, you know, we wanted to do something fun for them and give them like a break and stuff. And so we're like, hey, let's let's drive out to Hershey Park. It's like a four hour drive from where we live in Connecticut. It was like perfect.

It was like a total what's that what's that movie with Chevy Chevy

Chase movie? The Lampoons?

National Lampoons? Yeah. They get out to Wally World and it's closed. That was totally us. Like we showed up Just and wrecked the

whole way.

You know, we're we're just gonna do like a Tuesday to Thursday road trip. We get there, oh yeah, they're closed during the week during spring. They only open on Friday. So we ended up staying a couple extra days. We we went to the park on Friday.

We got tickets to the Mets Phillies on on on Wednesday, which is cool. I've never seen the Phillies ballpark. We drove over there. Yeah. It was a fun little trip.

That's cool. You know, we did the Hawaii thing for spring break. That was great. We got home and then there was a COVID outbreak in the kindergarten class that our youngest is in. Like eight kids got it.

So ours got it. My wife is a bit of a politician. She's the president of the PTA, so she's very visible. So you got you got to play it the right way. You got you got to keep everyone home.

So all three kids at home for a week, then my wife got it. So she was just kind of exhausted more than anything else. So it was just it was just a mess inside the house for like a week. And now we're coming out of it. And yeah, the house is sold.

So we're living in a house that we don't own. That's weird, but it's kind of nice not paying any rent or mortgage for a few months. I'll take that.

Yeah. So what's, what's the timeline on your move here?

We are trying to find a house that we can move in before August 1. That's the ideal, but it is rough out there.

Cause I'm, I'm looking at you. You're still in your, your same house. You sold it, but it's not.

Yeah. We're out of here probably like July 15. Then we go to Michigan for two weeks. And then ideally we go straight into a new house in, in Chicago.

Or you do like an Airbnb for a couple of weeks.

Yeah. So exactly. We just need to get into the right school district. Man, it's, it's stressful. At least, at least I found Silicon Valley Bank to do the mortgage.

Shout out to Colin from customer IO, my friend here in Portland. He recommended them, introduced me to the right person. And they at least are like, there's someone to talk to, right? These other banks,

they understand the software business.

They understand, they understand the situation. And because they're not selling the mortgage out after they underwrite it, they keep it on their own balance sheet. That means a, they're a little slower, but they really care about the quality of the credit. And they're not just like filling out the form and don't care because they're going to sell the mortgage off anyway. So there's actually a conversation to be had.

I'm like, what happened last year? What is this card hook thing? What is this rally thing? What does this mean in the future? It's an actual conversation.

So at least I feel like at least that's going to go better than than it did like two years ago when I bought this house.

Yeah. I mean, I'm definitely glad I got my mortgage in the house, like when I was right in the middle of audience ops in that business where when my finances looked steady and healthy and compared to what they looked like today, it's like, it would make no sense to a banker, you know?

Yes. It's a snapshot in time. Like I almost, I almost laughed it because, you know, you fill out all the forms and the personal financial, all this other stuff. And I looked at it and I kind of had a good chuckle of like, this is the best I've ever looked on paper. My stress level is not in line with the way it looks on paper because you know the truth of like, you know, you're not done.

You're trying to figure this stuff out and you got to make it work and you got to this and there's all this danger. But like to get everything ready for the mortgage company to like take this snapshot in time and make the judgment on you as if like, you're looking at, you know, this, I've had the same job for ten years and it goes up. Oh, it's a weird game. But it's nice to sell your house at the top of the market. It is no fun to buy at the top of the market.

What the hell is happening? Yeah.

And you're not, you're not even in state there. Right? Because I I have friends who who've been sort of looking to buy for some reason and they're, you know, it's like you gotta make an offer sight unseen, at least here in the Northeast. Absolutely

sight unseen. And it's all

Is that what you guys are doing? Are you literally

Well, you kind of have to go in the right order. Like we found the first house that we got emotionally attached to like a week ago, but because we don't have a full done pre approval, you can't make an offer because if you want to be competitive, then you kind of have to waive your financing contingency. And then it puts you in danger of losing like the deposit unless you get your mortgage. So it's kind of, you can't really do that. At least I can't.

So we're going through this preapproval process. So we're kind of just hoping nothing good comes up until we get preapproved. Otherwise we're just going to lose it also. Shout out to David Bootstrap Web listener, who's our real estate agent. And he's on the ground there in the town, in the same neighborhood that we want to move into.

So he's just got his eyes and ears out and like texting us, like helping us through the stress.

That's cool. Let's, let's talk about business. What what do we got going on?

Alright. I got a few things to talk about. Let's see what you got talking. Let's jump into it.

A bunch of ZipMessage, updates, some changes being made.

Yeah. Saw, I saw some marketing stuff from you, some positioning stuff on the marketing site specifically, some features. Cool. On our end, I wanna talk about, you know, things have clicked on the traction front. It looks completely different than it did thirty days ago.

And I talk about why and what happened and what that feels like and what it means for us. I'm having a lot of conversations with investors all at the same time. That's I think the most I could say about it. And that process of getting ready for those conversations, I guess a very honest feedback from one of our VCs. And I just want to talk about that relationship of like, you know, where honesty comes in and how how that works, you know, where it's harsh and where it's helpful, that sort of thing.

And then I want talk about Tuple. I want to talk about the marketing campaign that they're running. And I think that's very interesting. And I want to get into that.

Super interesting for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, why don't you start on like what's the top of mind? Is it the marketing and positioning changes or is it?

So I'm taking it in like a sequence of things and one of them is now done which is a big update of the website. And I've said this before where I I think especially in the first year of of a of a company like I've always found like it makes more sense to just keep updating the website like more frequently than most usually updated.

You are much better at that than most.

Yeah and I mean, I even felt like this this last, this most recent change was like, you know, overdue. And by that I mean, so basically what I launched was a very big update to the entire website from the homepage copy, added several new pages for like specific use cases, expanded out some product feature pages, added a bunch of testimonials that that have been that I've been collecting for several months but haven't gotten up on the website. And the main thing is like tightening up the positioning with the headline. It now, it's basically just a tweak on it, but it's now all about like zip message replaces meetings. That's the thing

that Yeah. When I, when I go to the headline on the homepage, that's video messaging tool that replaces meetings.

Yep. And that's how I explain it every time I talk about it now. And that is sort of carried through to every product page and the these use case pages. And we and and you know, I did a lot of work on writing up like we now have eight separate use case pages and I wrote like a bunch of copy on these and and you know, they're sort of like SEO optimized for like product intent searches type of thing. I did a bit of research around that and and highlighting a lot of the same features across the the pages but with like targeted copy at that speaking to that use case and that type of person.

And you know, now I have a lot more testimonials, especially from the Product Hunt launch and just other tweets and stuff that have come through. Like

Yeah. I see every page, pricing page has multiple testimonials.

Yeah. And and hopefully, you know, some of them are, are like targeted at what the page is about. You know, like the page about hiring has testimonials about using it for hiring and the page about, you know, podcasting, there's a few people using it in podcasts or coaches are using it for coaching, you know, so, and also the features like, you know, we've launched a bunch of features in the last several months that weren't even on the website. So you know, just a lot of like layout changes making the page a little bit more or the whole site a little bit more optimized SEO wise, product positioning, navigationally it's updated I think a little bit better. So, you know, the design is all the same.

It's basically just the content that's updated.

I'm almost scared to ask you, but how long how long does that take you? It feels like that would take me like two months.

Yeah. Well, to be clear, it wasn't a redesign. The design was the same. So if it was-

Right, but still.

If there was design work, it would have taken a lot more time.

Okay. But isn't there design work in everything? Every testimonial element like-

Well, the testimonials I already had the design I had the same style on those before, but just now there's more of them. There was a bit of design work. Like I I did change up the layouts, like on the homepage and stuff. I actually believe it or not, I did a lot of this work while we're on that road trip to Believe it or not.

You're actually lampoons marketing side

of I wasn't doing a lot of work but like there's like an hour or two of downtime during the day and then at night I can't sleep on the hotel bed so I'll take out the computer and work a little bit. And I mean it, you know, it started before the trip and it continued after the trip. So I would say all in all, it was like about two weeks of work with a vacation in there. Okay.

That's pretty good.

The most time consuming thing was actually writing the pages, especially the use case pages. If you go on there, there's like it's it's more copy heavy than you'll see on the home page. You know, it's it's a little bit targeted at like search engine observation, but also just the the use case and showing examples and stuff.

Yeah. It's like the, the search engines, read all the words and the humans read the headlines and images and Yep.

And so to go along and then just yesterday, I like following up on the website update, I launched an update to the onboarding flow. Basically the thing that I added was a survey, a one question survey immediately after they sign up for a new free account, they have to choose or you like check all the boxes and apply for, I think the question is, what do you plan to do with ZipMessage? How do you plan to use it? Something like that. And and those options match up with the use case pages.

I'm getting that, you know, piped over to me with an email notification. I can see every single sign up and, you know, the goal is to try to try to somehow narrow down like the most ideal I mean, I've already chosen the eight or really it's like six niched down use cases that I think are the most valuable that I see most people doing in the past year. I left out some use cases that I think are less

You don't wanna target?

Yeah. Just producing less lower quality customers and so so you know the idea is like to try to get this some some survey data on on the new people onboarding and of course like the first like you know there's been about 15 or 20 sign ups since since I launched that and yeah every single person like checks like at least four boxes. So it's like Okay. Whole goal of like niching down is not working out so well. But but the good news is that like having launched all this, all these website updates and the onboarding updates, it it seems like new free sign ups are up.

So there's been over a full week of the new website out there. Free sign ups are definitely up. It could have been a mix of other mentions elsewhere.

Yes, yes. A bit early to tell, but still.

And then, and then, you know, customer conversions are also up this week too. So it's like at least that kind of stuff has not broken.

You just don't want to see that go worse. It's either stay the same or better, and then you can kind of say, okay, now let's really see how it unfolds over the next thirty, sixty days.

So so that's that's good to see those numbers up but the the real intention behind these changes is to kinda go after, retention and and and targeting our best customers. And that that's that was the thinking behind like going to zip message replaces meetings.

That's who's finding the most value or most excitement.

That's who gets the most value and uses it the most long term is when they I like to think of it like both sides of the async conversation are invested. So if you're a company, you and your employees and coworkers are both invested in responding back and forth asynchronously.

So both sides are getting value and are happier to do things that way as opposed to like

They feel obligated or invested in taking the action to reply and interact using so like hiring is another really good use case for us, right? Like if you want

a job, you're gonna reply.

You're gonna reply and probably reply several times if it's like an async interview. Same thing with coaching, that's a high investment on both sides where the coach and the student are both invested and going back and forth. There's a couple more and customer success is the other one where so customer support is the one that I'm starting to move away from. You know, that was actually the initial idea for the whole

product

was a customer support context, but that's where I'm seeing less like people will sign up for it and then they'll send links out to their customers and customers may or may not reply.

It's almost like too far from the money. It's like the incentive isn't as strong.

Right, because it's like a lower, yeah, it's customers like lower stakes for them to reply, right? So I'm I'm moving away from that but I'm but I'm moving to like customer success. So like because I'm I'm using it for that. I I send ZMs to to people who are Yes. Starting up with with Zip Message and

I'm in on ZMs by the way. Let I

let you do it.

I that yeah. Why not? Go with it.

What's cool is like I that was a term I I started using like early on, but then like other random customers started like suggesting it. And I was like, yes.

Yeah. You can make it happen, but not really your customers make it happen. That's that's, that's much better. That's interesting. Yeah.

When I think about it, if I project our needs onto zip message and we are a customer, the ability to use that in the sales process and the onboarding process like it came up yesterday, Rock was onboarding a WooCommerce merchant that couldn't get on the phone and couldn't get on Zoom. And it's infinitely easier on video than it is over email. And I was like, dude, this is where you use that message. Just point and click and show where the code goes and why and how to test it and how to like inspect to make sure that things are running properly.

Yeah. Yeah. Sales is another one of the use cases like that. Especially once you're like in a deal conversation, right? Like you can use it for like video outreach to prospects but once you're in like a proposal to a new client and they need to go back and forth like that's

That's you

for several weeks there, I was not I got out of the routine of sending ZMs to customers so I felt like out of touch from customers. I was only hearing from like people on my customer support but not actively reaching out to new customers, right? So this week I got back to that routine of every single day I send at least five or six of these, zip message messages to like new onboarding customers or or new paying customers. And man, it's it's just a reminder of like, you know, we talk a lot about the emotional roller coaster of of this thing. The last several weeks I I was getting into more of a funk with, you know, see I'll I'll see churns here and there or I'll see a couple days where we don't have as high sign ups as we usually do and like and and again like my mind goes to, alright, this thing is all broken.

It's it's over. This sucks. Right? But then then you when you hear directly with your when when you're in touch directly with your customers, I mean, video, audio and and just hearing them verbalize, yeah, think I'm gonna use it for this and we like, okay, this morning I got a message from total stranger and you know, who found out about it through our viral loop like has never met me or listened to this podcast or anything. She says, you know, I tried that thing Marco Polo app, if you're familiar, you know, it's pretty similar to ZipMessage, just a little bit more consumer focus.

But the thing with that and things like, what's the other one, like Voxer and stuff like that, she literally said, she was like, you know, I'm in this group and I've got coworkers, but then we want to loop in some other mastermind buddies that I'm with but they're not on Marco Polo so you know asking them to install it was kind of a pain and then we found Zip Message and that was sort of perfect for sharing a link with someone else

And I was like, yes. Like Yeah. It was very

The customer like explaining exactly the whole value prop and I'm like It just gives me so much more energy.

It gives you life. It gives you life. It's so crazy. The good thing is after we've been doing this for a long time, when you do get into that negative place, like the mantra is just, just hold on a little longer because one of those, one of those drops of life is on the way. It's inevitable.

It might be a day, might be an hour, it might even be a week. And that's when it really sucks when it is an extended period of time. But then that next thing happens and you're kind of back. It's just keeping the mental state positive over time. It's really like that Churchill saying, you know, one defeat to the other without loss of enthusiasm.

It's just really hard to stay there. Like you need other people to to to help you stay there.

Yeah. And just the last thing on this, we'll we'll switch up. But like SaaS is is so much harder than than growing like a productized service, you know. And, you know, in the early days of audience ops, MRR grew so much faster. You know, we rocketed right You into five were adding $7,000

every time someone signed up.

Yeah. It just we we got into the comfort zone financially like so much faster than you do with a SaaS or at least what we're seeing with it. So like, and I'm already like definitely seeing a lot more traction much faster with ZipMessage than anything else, but it's still, we're still in that like fragile early phase where we're

like We're gonna make it. You just don't

Like we're not in that mode where it's like, okay, settle in. We're in this for the long, like that's the goal, but financially it's not there yet. Right?

So I think back to that feeling at Cardhook regularly. And I think to myself, like maybe I'm running the venture version of things, but the feeling of default alive and profitable, oh my God, it's, it's really healthier. It's really, it's really a lot less stressful and a lot healthier. Well, I'm looking forward to you getting there as I am myself.

Yeah, you too buddy. What's, what's up traction? Tell me about it.

Okay. We're gonna, we're gonna more platitudes, right? Luck equals opportunity and preparation, right? Is that is that the same?

I think it is. I think I just Googled it. Yeah. There you go.

We we we had some luck over the last few weeks. People have heard me talk about our competitive environment being a little kooky, right? Basically, like the loudest space on Twitter was check out for like a few weeks. Thankfully, it's cooling out now, but a lot of that noise was around fast, you know, falling apart and shutting down very precipitously, very publicly. And that had a tremendously positive impact on our traction and pipeline and sales and energy and attention.

Just, that's awesome. So you're literally seeing switchers come over.

We are seeing switchers and now there's an interesting thing. Our products are different, right? Their product was an express payment option, like adding PayPal to your site and like adding fast to your site is the same thing, right? You keep your existing checkout, but you add a new express payment option like enabling Apple Pay or something like that. Our product is the entire checkout.

So it replaces your BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Swell checkout. And then we integrate with the express payment options that you can enable, but you have a new checkout page. So they're different products, but in the merchant's mind, they're accomplishing the same thing. I just want to, I want better conversion rates. I want to make it easier for my shoppers to buy.

I want less friction to purchase. I want a checkout experience like shop pay that I can't have because I'm not on Shopify. Right? So they kind of fit into the same bucket in the merchant's mind, even though the product's different. So the demand just shifted over to us because there's clearly demand for a better checkout experience in e commerce outside of Shopify.

It's actually the more you're outside of Shopify and the better the Shopify checkout experience gets the more demand there is for a checkout experience like.

Yeah. How do you get that exposure so quickly to all these fast users? Like how, you know, cause Rally is so much newer.

Yeah. I got to give, I got to give a lot of credit to our team, both Matt and Sam who do sales and biz dev, but you know, we're early stage. So they're both just doing whatever the hell takes between sales and biz dev and opportunities and presentations and demos and whatever. So they are the ones with their ear to the ground and they're the ones talking to merchants every day. And they basically came back and were like, Yo, something's happening.

We got a bunch of people coming over. We got a bunch of people saying, I used to use fast. I heard about you. What do I do? So we huddled and we immediately said, Okay, this is a moment in time.

This is an opportunity. And let's let's go hard at it. And so what we did is we went to BUILTWITH, we downloaded a list of everyone that used that. The truth is we already had that list and BUILTWITH and had some plans for it, but we weren't using it quite so aggressively.

Yeah.

And so we went into and updated it. And then we started a cold email campaign basically saying, Hey, very sorry to hear about, you know, fast shutting down. We noticed that use it. Our our product does something similar. Do you want to take a look?

And that thing crushed. It was like 50 to 60% open rate for a cold email. And then we had multiple emails. We had a three email sequence. And then we also started to kind of spend more time on the merchants that we thought were like really valuable.

And so what we would do is inside of our demo store, we would take that merchant's logo and upload it to the demo. You really got to see what our checkout looks like with your logo. And then we would put that in a screenshot in the third email and it filled our pipeline like boom immediately. And so over the last thirty days, we've gone from the goal is to sign up anyone because we need more data to, okay, too many people. Now we need a threshold.

You need to have at least X amount of processing revenue or this, or now we'll suddenly are in a position to be a little pickier about who we work with. Just that span of thirty days. It's awesome. It was fun to be aggressive. It was like, look, there is a Are

you learning anything from those customers? Like as, so they're coming from fast, which means they're they're they're a different profile of customer, right? Because they are already like they already had a live checkout with Fast and they need to switch like switch it, migrate it.

So that's the thing. If they're using fast, that means they were using fast with their default platform checkout, most of which was BigCommerce. So they're in the same universe of merchants that we're already going after, right? They weren't using an alternative checkout. They were using the BigCommerce checkout.

So we come along and we basically say that fast functionality that you're after. That's a feature inside of our larger checkout solution. So rally pay is like fast, but your shopper doesn't need to sign up for an account when they go through the checkout once the next time they come back, as soon as they've typed their email address, we'll recognize them, send them

an

SMS OTP. And then when they authenticate, they go right to the last step, just like Shopify. And people were like, Oh, the truth is most people get it. Some people are like, so it's like fast. And that's one of those like sales conversation things.

That's kind of, you know, you, you get everything across, you make sure you're on the same page and then you move on to the next step in onboarding. And then the tech team on onboarding is like, you don't even know what this does, do you? So we'll get some challenges there, but it's all good, good challenges. The hope is that it's just accelerates the learning and the traction and, you know, that helps the fundraising stuff and it just, just helps. So there's some delicious irony in that.

Yeah. I mean, the sales front, it's been interesting. Like this week I'm talking to so like SEO focused agencies and consultants. I I'm probably about to hire one of these, probably just a consultant to really kick off like an SEO content strategy to fill out like the rest of the year and beyond and just get that engine up and running to sort of grow organic search traffic. And I'm in these conversations like I'm the the lead talking to the salesperson at agencies or talking to these consultants.

And it's just doing sales calls for audience apps for so many months. It's just so kind of like weird for me to be the, you know, sitting on the other side of the table there. It's interesting, you know. I mean not like I haven't done this before but it's like I have been on very, very similar sales calls before as the salesperson and yeah, it's been sort of interesting.

You do learn a lot on how a process makes the prospect feel because that matters as much as the product and the pricing and all that, that the process matters, especially if it's something that's like important to your business and isn't like, look, it's $20 a month. I don't want to talk to anyone. Just let me try it and see if I like it.

Yeah. No. But when you're talking about like thousands, like you do have to have a phone process. Not that I'm like the greatest salesperson in the world but I've done a lot of optimizations on the sales flow with audience ops and learned a lot about how to how to like qualify and how to lead the questions to to a certain destination and things like that and and I'm sort of like experiencing that in different flavors of of it from different people. Okay.

I guess like talking about marketing, like investing in marketing, right? I came to sort of a conclusion on how I'm going about it like I previously tried to hire a person here or there who could sort of become like a generalist and maybe grow into like a head of marketing type of thing and that didn't work out so well for me. What I should have done and now now I'm coming around to it is like just hire specialists and even like sub specialists. Right? So one of several channels that that I wanna develop is SEO and content for for, the Zip Message site.

And to execute on that what I'm doing is like I already have a couple of really good writers that I've worked with in the past. Like I know I'm gonna go to them to write articles. But before we even get to those articles, like I need to have a really good plan. And and actually remembering back to audience ops, the clients who were most successful with with audience ops were the ones who came to Audience Ops having already done their their own keyword research either themselves or hiring a firm or a consultant to give them a long list of like well researched keywords and topic ideas and then they they sometimes they would even have like outlines like like really planning planning out every piece of content strategically and then having the team write them. The audience ops team write them like that.

That's what worked really well. So I I sort of need to do that. So that's what I'm looking to do is is hire like the the strategist to help with the keyword research. I've I've done a bunch of that myself with like hrefs and you know learned I feel like I continuously like relearn the skill of of SEO research, but it's just not my strength and I know enough to know how much work it takes to really do it well. So that's why I want to bring in an expert on on that piece and then sort of develop a queue of topics and there's a lot of sub strategy there like these these articles are aimed at this intent and these are aimed at link building and these are aimed at this and that.

So like just trying to execute on on all that over the next several months and and put the right people like just basically I'm just trying to get this person hired, give my input, have the writers in place, give my give my input and have a process for churning out articles And now that, now that machine is running and that will grow our SEO content game over the next year while I then focus on integrations and other stuff. Yeah. You got

to build a machine and then just know, okay, got to put coins into this machine every month. I know how much I'm putting in and then the payoff will be down the road. And your, your product is wide enough in its appeal that I think SEO makes sense in that way, but people Googling around meetings and async and video and messaging and all that is to

Yeah. And you know, going back to I did this big website update with the positioning update and these new product pages and use case pages. Like I wanted to get that done. Like just me personally working on that myself Cause I know the product, know the customers, I know the direction of where we want to go with the positioning of this thing in the market. I needed to get that all really sorted out and launched.

And now that that's out, I can go to these agencies and consultants like, okay, now let's build it out from here. You know, that's, sort of like the sequence of how I'm, executing on on that stuff.

Well, speaking of marketing, I want to bring up something I saw on Twitter yesterday from Tuple, our friends at Tuple. And help me remember the name of the marketer that they hired.

Aaron Francis?

Yes. So I saw it was an interesting hire. I I follow Aaron and he he does cool stuff. Yeah. Then to to see him join Tuple, also interesting.

And to see, you know, Ben's been very deliberate about his hiring. He hasn't blown out the team size like they're, they're careful. It feels like they're careful and deliberate over there on that front. So it's great to see them hire someone. Aaron felt like this, like a good cultural match with them, right?

It's not like this like bombastic marketer that's just going to like do things different than the way they normally do things. So, so yesterday Aaron writes this tweet and it's basically, we're going to run experiment. We took out $200,000 from Stripe Capital, which is an interesting part of it. I would almost love to hear Ben, like, why'd you take money out in that way? I mean, it's right there.

It's available. It's cheap. It keeps the cash balance. I don't know what their cash balance is like, but my guess is that they could have used money from cash. So they're right.

They're financing this. I don't think it's in conjunction with Stripe or anything, but it's so, so it's cool. They're taking out $200,000 in loan from Stripe Capital.

I think it's an interesting, bigger picture experiment into like, if we have And I think this is how Ben is I think I've heard him talk about it before. You know, Ben, let us know. If we have 200 ks, how do we make that profitable? Right? Like

Right. If we have access to it,

yes. What's a profitable way to to spend 200 ks for, and we should know what we can spend that on.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is a smart way to do it because that it is, it is utilizing access to capital in the right way. Like I would love to criticize our really big competitor BOLT for throwing money around, but that's what you should do when you have access to capital.

Use it to your advantage. So this experiment is $200,000 and correct me if I'm wrong. They want to do it. They want to use three marketing campaigns. And the interesting thing is that they want to talk about it publicly, what they're going to do with the money and what the results are like.

And I think this is like, this is compelling content. You care even, it's not aimed specifically at you, only your audience. It's a bit wider than that. It almost like it's your company out there. It's interesting from like

multiple There's a story. The whole thing is a story. Campaigns themselves are stories. You're along for the ride.

And you get to learn. So it's a little bit selfish as you're watching also, it's like in your own interest because you want to learn from it. And it's got this little bit of FOMO, isn't that cool that they can do that? It's like, I think it's perfect. I think this is what content marketing looks like these days.

The traditional content I think drives SEO, but it doesn't drive attention. It's so hard to get attention.

I agree. I think that like SEO focused content marketing is just that. That's just that that is a totally different thing. Like that that's not I wouldn't even really call it like content marketing even though technically it's you know, text on a page, right? But yeah, this you're right.

It's this is how content marketing has evolved and and you know, like it it's also getting into podcasting and video and and Twitter. And the other thing about them is that they they are a tool for developers. So developers are not easy to quote unquote market to.

Yes. So you sort of

have to do the you have to be a lot more interesting to Yeah. Be interesting to your audience. And that's not just developers. I mean that's that would probably go for B2B SaaS more broadly, right? I mean,

it's hard to get attention. I don't read anything, I

don't pay attention, you know? It's like,

it's pretty tough to do. So it really, I love

being, you like, you get into like the offline like niche verticals, like selling, you know, to whatever, like real estate agents, you can get a little bit, I would say less creative. You can go with more traditional tactics, but like when you're selling a tool to people who live and work online and they're more savvy, you gotta, you gotta raise the game. That's what this is, you know?

Right. How do you, how do you have your audience, your potential customers and your future potential customers know what your company does and associate what you do, who your company is with like positive feelings, positive memories of what they've done. Do you like the people that are involved? It's, it's this weird, long, complicated game around positioning, brand recognition, product recognition. So I'm really interested to see what campaigns they actually run.

I hope they can find opportunities that match the opportunity, the moment of like this, this narrative that people want to want to see.

Yeah. I forgot what the three things exactly were, but what from what I remember, it was like the first two were like, like more specific things and then the third one was something around like something for the developer community.

I don't know if it might've been a sponsorship.

It was almost like their hypothesis is like, if we just support the developers, that's what's gonna win. Let's prove let's prove that by putting it

up Right. In

How do we

do it? Yes.

Yeah. Alright. Here we go. Okay. So so the the three bullet points of the three things.

He said he won't divulge the the details quite yet, but one is a physical product, which is super interesting.

Yes. That's right.

Two is a blitz of traditional media.

Like, so ads?

Yeah, and the three is giving back to the developer community.

Okay. So do they have a thesis that number three works best or they're like, okay, let's see what works.

No, no, but

The physical product, that's like one thing you do.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think like giving back to the developer, like of course that's going to work. It's a question of like, how well do the other two work?

Sure. Giving back developer community works, but like in what way does, does that reflect back on you? Does it bring you

the right people? Yeah.

Right. Is it making people happy? Like what, what is that? So I saw something similar in the crypto space recently, along with Sean Purry, you know, the, the guy on Twitter. This guy, Sean, I think he does my first million or something like that with the, the other guy.

Oh. My

memory, my memory doesn't work right now. So I saw this crypto focused company basically say that they're they're going to give away $25,000 to to people to like learn, right, to like be able to take time off and learn Web three development. And then Sean retweeted it and was like, I'm in for 25 ks also. And, and I was like, that's content marketing now. That version of, look, if you're going to spend money on it, on a campaign, you can go give it to Facebook and run ads, or you can give it to your audience and show that you genuinely are investing in your audience.

And it doesn't even need to be cynical. You can actually be straightforwardly like optimistic and idealistic about it.

You know the truth is this stuff is not new, right? Like Seth Godin's book, The Purple Cow which came came out what thirty years ago?

Yeah, long time.

Mean that's about like you gotta have something that's noteworthy, like that's worth talking about, that's worth sharing. I mean, that's what the the the this is just the evolution of that.

This I is like, that's what it looks like

in 2020 You gotta you know, you gotta do stuff that's and and, and like compelling to follow along, you know?

Yeah. When I saw the crypto company with the Sean Puri, like retweet, I sent that over to Dev and Mark from PBS. And it was like, guys, this, this is this sort of thing like this, Right? I'd rather spend money on that directly into the audience of like any Shopify app that has more than a thousand users that build an integration for rally, like we'll do X for, or we'll provide X or sponsor something or like, yeah. So it'll be cool to see what, what, what Tuple does and how it works.

I think, I think they're onto something.

You know, getting a little bit in the weeds on because I I went down the rabbit hole and like watching all these like SEO strategy videos. A lot lot from Ahrefs which is still just amazing content on that, especially their YouTube stuff and I had one little like one one little learning from that. It was sort of ties in like the way that you break up all the articles that you might develop over the course of a year. You know one would be like the buy intent pages where it's like mainly product pages or product focus pages. The thing is you can't expect to get a lot of links to those organically because they're mostly sales pages.

Then you got like low competition, know, think like long tail, like low difficulty opportunities. You can just sort of develop content. Some link building but like it's more of a quantity game there. But then the third piece is like just develop really high quality that is aimed at getting inbound links. Like you might not necessarily rank these pages but they are so interesting and so worth linking to that that link juice that you can attract with these pages can then flow like the domain authority would then flow to your product pages.

Like you're not gonna link building and inbound promotion is not super effective to do it directly at your buy intent pages. But if you have these super interesting pages on your site, so

That generate links like

So think like On their own. You know, traditionally people would think about like skyscraper articles even like like, survey data and stuff.

Right. So good. It's like undeniable type of stuff.

And like other writers link to it like crazy and reference it like crazy and people feature it in their conference talks and stuff like that. But like the next evolution of that is stuff like this. Like so interesting that everyone talks about it and links to it and then you'll still develop the buy intent pages on your site. You'll still do the low competition long tail pages, right? But you gotta mix in this high value, super unique, worth talking about story based stuff that people just wanna link to all day.

Mhmm.

Yeah. I mean, we we are starting to look for a marketer now and the creativity required on on this sort of thing will be interesting to kind of, like, look for and try to dig into.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah, man. Cool. Well, I figured it out.

That's that's the Internet.

Well, that's great to see you. Good episode. Thanks for listening,

Alright. Later, bro.