Bootstrapped Web

Jordan, how's it going, buddy?

Going pretty well. Good to see you. It's been a while. Mostly my fault.

No. It's a it was a good little break. So I just typed into chat.openai. What should we talk about on today's episode of Bootstrap Web? And?

We are not famous enough for chat.ai.

Apparently, it doesn't know It doesn't know that.

What we are and and what I was talking about. But anyway.

So this this episode is not brought to you by OpenAI. This is still the the very slow and prone to mistake human intelligence.

Yes. Yeah. Our our voices here are real. We're not This is real. Generated.

Well, is I mean, if we could just jump right into it, my take is that what's next is audio.

Yeah. Well, there's already been some of that. Right? You heard the the Right. Like the Joe Rogan, Steve Jobs thing.

That's right. That's right. And that's kind of like, you know, manipulating voices and so on. But I mean, like, we're we're now real close to conversation with a computer. Like, the the chat is effectively conversation.

And if you bring that out from text into audio, it's not like, Alexa, set my timer for four minutes. It's not like that anymore.

Yeah. No. This is not like, you know, like Alexa or or I guess like Siri or something where it's just like, look up the definition on the Internet of some thing and give me a link to Wikipedia. It's it's not that. It's like it learns what you're saying and it responds intelligently.

And this is the thing, you know, this week on on Twitter with our with our circles. It always it always happens this way. It's like it's it's this exciting new tech, this new sort of big news item, and everyone is either shitting on it or they're super excited about it or they're talking about the possibilities and where it's going next. And you you can't ignore this thing. It's coming.

Yeah. It's it's fascinating. For people who work on the Internet and are interested in this stuff, I mean, it's fun. I think people keep getting caught up in which side of the argument am I on.

This is the thing. If you compare it to the to the crypto thing, you know, crypto may or may not be like a long term thing. We we can argue that forever. I I think I'm more optimistic that it that it would play some role in the world in the future, but it's still sort of like a gray area to me in terms of like the use cases. It's just it's just a little bit more murky in terms of like, how does this fit into day to day life?

But with AI, it's still super fresh. It's a lot newer than than crypto and everything. But like, the use cases are just so obvious. And the and the speed of advancement is so fast now that you can't make the argument that this is gonna be irrelevant in a in a couple of years. It's it's only gonna keep getting better faster.

And I was just tweeting about this the other day, especially us, especially folks like us, software makers, designers, marketers, writers, illustrators. Those are like the first, skill sets to be impacted Challenged. By AI, right? Yep. And, you know, maybe that's a good or bad thing, but I think it's generally a good thing.

It's a tool, right? It's a tool to make us better, more efficient, cut out steps in the workflows of making things on the Internet.

Right? Yeah. That that's how I describe

the first obvious use case. And then, of course, it's just gonna keep growing.

Yes. And and and I think a lot of people, myself included, they have a hard time making the connection to use cases just because they are relatively new. But if you put any amount of time into thinking on it, it it opens up to into into everything. And it's almost like because it's applicable to everything, it's hard to even think about these specific cases. We're seeing the very, very beginning, these glimpses of use cases like a Jasper AI, where it's like, help me write content.

Right? So I I went

into a few weeks ago, just a couple of weeks ago, the the action was around, like, oh, AI can write blog articles. And maybe it can, maybe it can't, maybe they're not good quality enough. Okay. But now, like, the UI of chat ChatGPT or whatever is like it it just puts it into perspective of like, this is so much more than just generate an article. This is conversational.

This is like, help me do a task. I really think that at some point in the pretty near future, it's going to become such an integral part of, especially folks like us, our workflows, where it'll get to the point where it's like, it's irresponsible not to incorporate AI in your workflow.

Yeah. I I almost see it as like, okay. So the way I describe it, sometimes my my brothers who are not in tech, they kind of ask me, oh, hey, what's going on? What should I think about this thing in tech that I keep hearing about? And so I have to translate into non tech talk.

And the way I explained it to them was the same way that technology of any type just helps you go faster, right, literally from walking to using a bike, more efficient movement. So the Internet was like a rocket boost because you didn't have to dig into your memory or go somewhere to find information. It was just there for you whenever you needed it. This just continues on accelerating individual person's ability or other people's ability to, like, do something faster. That, like, that's it at the most basic.

It just feels so much more natural to interact with it. Right? Google goes out and finds you links on the web. This gives a little additional thought to what you would want based on how you asked it in and who you are. So it's just more context and more natural.

Yeah. And and it's like, it's literally the difference, not that like I'm using it in my day to day workflow when I'm coding on on the app or anything, but it's not hard to see a very near future where it's like instead of handwriting lines of code, you're interacting with an AI to build out many more lines of code much faster than you would by hand. You know. And and, you know, you can make the arguments like, it's not the best code or it's inaccurate or this or that. But, like, the point is that you're gonna be using it as a tool.

I mean, look, we use Google every day as a tool. We use Stack Overflow every day as a tool, and those are far perfect, you know.

That's right. Yeah. Have you seen some of the examples around code building and like write me a program in C plus that accomplishes x y and z?

Yeah. I've been playing with it, dude. It's it's incredible. Like like, I just did a super basic example. Like like, write me a JavaScript calculator.

Like, my kids are learning, multiplication and division and subtraction right now. Right? So I was like, write me a and I showed it to my kids. I was like, write me a a calculator in JavaScript that can do multiplication, addition, subtraction, and create a simple HTML user interface. And it whipped it right up and we played around with it.

And it was like, I mean, that's a super simple example. But as an example, that in itself was something like 50 lines of code between the HTML and the JavaScript. Right? Now I could code that up myself by scratch, just based on my knowledge of JavaScript. If I did not know how to code it from scratch, I could have gone to Google and typed you know, maybe how to do addition in JavaScript, and then how to do division in JavaScript, and how to do this or that, and get examples from Stack Overflow, and copy and paste those into my code, and then piece them together.

And now we're talking about, like, 20 different steps. Whereas with chat.ai, I typed one sentence, and it gave me the the working prototype. Yeah. You know?

It's it's fun. I've been showing it to our team and trying to challenge some people in the team. I always have to caveat, this is a brainstorm. This is not an idea to pursue. Don't go off and change your roadmap.

But but I'm saying it is interesting for us to think through how this impacts ecommerce. How does this change the way people buy things? Because the way we talk about it is like we have a product, we have a roadmap, and we want to continue adding to our product so that it gets to a point where it's very compelling for people to use. Cool. That's like the normal roadmap.

But along the way, over the span of one, two, three years that we are building out that roadmap to get to the product that we really want to have out in the market, there will come events and technologies and things along the way. Nine out of 10 of them will be distractions, But every once in a while, something will come along that we actually should move off of our roadmap to go toward. The the challenge is in in getting it right and not wasting your time. That that's the challenge. But you also can't clam up and avoid all those.

So when something like this comes comes along, I I at least try to challenge people and say, is this one of those things that we should divert ourselves off the roadmap or not? And you can't figure that out unless you go through the exercise of being creative and saying, what can this do? How can this change our product? Does this change things significantly enough that we should come off of a roadmap for it? And I think everyone should go through that exercise.

Yeah.

And you know, I mean, I I've had some pretty obvious feature ideas for Zip Message that could leverage AI, like help you write a response in a Zip Message conversation, right? I'm obviously not building that right now, but I think that is also where for us software makers, AI based features are going to become pretty normal across many SaaS applications. And they already exist. And we were working on some SEO lately and we were using the tool Surfer SEO to analyze articles and how well they would rank and analyze competitors' articles and things like that. And that already uses AI to analyze and break down an article and give you the sub headlines and give you the know, things like that.

Like, there are gonna be so many features where the AI itself is not is not gonna become, like, the thing that will help you win in SaaS. But most SaaS are like, there are so many features in SaaS that are, like, table stakes today already. Like, whatever, like user logins, teammate invites, you know, stuff like that. There's gonna be like AI, you know, text generation. Like, that's just gonna be a a common thing that you see in a lot of apps.

Yeah. I I've been trying to figure out, like, you know, if I'm thinking about it the right way or if I'm getting it wrong where okay. So so the the way the way this is currently working is OpenAI, a private company, is developing a lot of this technology and then licensing it out so people can use it in their applications. Right? That's what Jasper AI and CopyA, things like that.

So

Yeah. My understanding is they, you know, they have this token system. So like if you're gonna build an app that leverages their API, like they are an API product. Right?

Yes. That's right. They're not building applications, they're the underlying API or infrastructure level, whatever you want to call it, and people are building applications on top of it.

Yeah. So if you're gonna bootstrap a SaaS or or some software that uses AI, like you can't just, you can't do a chat GPT is doing and give it away for free. You gotta charge for it because you gotta pay for all those API.

Right, right. Well, you're paying for license fee from there, the business model is up to you. You can do whatever you want as long as you pay them for the service. My guess is within a month, we'll see things like, you know, we'll write Arc your cold email for you. Yeah.

Right. I mean,

that's probably that that stuff probably already Right.

Right. That's a perfect example of if you're outreach.io and you help people send cold emails, like you better get on that or your competitors definitely will. What I'm trying to think through is how can that be extended into an individual product? Let's say like Rally. Right?

Someone comes in and has a set of actions that they wanna take. Can we use their APIs so that we can have a chat box and allow one of our users to say, create me a funnel with this product at this price, with this trigger, go. Like, can we

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't you know, I haven't had time to really play with the API myself, but from what I've I've been, you know, on Twitter and seeing a bunch of these examples, I don't think it's quite there yet, but there there are things that are I saw someone talking about, like, giving it instructions to go through an interface and fill out a bunch of options and create a thing. That's where it's going, where it's like, be my virtual assistant, a robot generated virtual assistant that goes and does the thing. We've had like done with you services, we've had done for you services.

I think that's another trend where it'll be like, this is a service that can be performed by an AI. You as the service provider or the app provider can program it in a way that makes it dumb simple for users get that done.

And did you see today that the integration with Zapier went live?

What, Chat AI? Yes.

I don't even know. I don't know if it's Chat AI or Open AI or what, but now that it's integrated into Zapier, all of a sudden it becomes low code or no code to be able to interact with the API interface. And now you can start to have people building applications, but they don't need, even need to interact with the API directly. They can just in it. Right?

So you can have an app and someone can say, you know, give me three iterations of this email and then it can go through Zapier and

I mean, it's just super exciting, man. Like you can be skeptical of it. You can call it inaccurate all you want. Sure. There are plenty of examples of it, but like, it's just exciting.

I mean, like, even in personal life, you know, my kids and I, like, we, you know, we read bedtime stories every night. Right? I've read the same 30 books every single night for the last eight years and it's driving us nuts. We're sick of them, right? Okay.

For this past week, we've been going to chat GPT and typing in totally random ideas for bedtime stories. You know, when Dog Man met Captain Underpants or whatever, and just all these random bedtime stories. And they are so much better and so much more entertaining for my girls than the Doctor. Seuss books we've been reading for years, You know, stuff like that. I mean, clearly you're gonna get to a point where the next hit Netflix show was written by an AI, not a Hollywood writer.

Mean, that's coming.

Right, The crazy thing is how new it is. And then the speed at which these things move, you just project out a year and there's infinitely more interesting useful things coming out. Yeah. Now it is definitely the new fad and it's got the attention and of course the VCs will fund it to oblivion and there are definitely some interesting things around where value accrues and if everyone's using the same APIs, does it, you know, a lot of it get commoditized? There's a bunch of questions around it, but there's no question that it is an interesting new thing that's that's popped up and you can ignore it all you want.

It's it's going to have an impact in a lot of different places.

Yep. Yep. For sure. Well, what's happening down here on our like human, driven businesses?

Well, holidays are coming up. It's December. It's that time of year when I don't know those those things happen that happen at the end of the year. You'd look back, you look forward. I'm doing some some budgeting on my end, some revenue projections, some it's amazing what what comes out of a spreadsheet.

Yeah. We were just talking about this. I think you and I were both looking at the same kind of spreadsheet. Yeah, I got one that projects out the next twelve months and I updated it yesterday to What it was, was it just a SaaS projection spreadsheet that can tell me if we increase conversion rate, if we improve churn, what will the numbers look like? And then I added in through my budgeting process and thinking about where my priorities are, I added in my expenses and bank balance and runway and how I can literally plug in now all these different changes.

Like if we increase conversion rate, how does that impact our financial runway? Or if I hire this person or that person or if I add them in month four of next year, then how does that impact the runway? So I've got a pretty clear picture now.

Yeah, the way I'm looking at it is like a year ago, founders were rewarded for being optimistic and in a rush. It's don't wait, just raise the round now. Push harder because why not? There's money behind you. Like, it just all arrows pointed toward be more aggressive, be more optimistic, push harder, push faster.

And and now it feels like patience and prudence and being careful and a bit pessimistic around where things are going and how quickly things are gonna get better, it feels like that's the right mindset. And so when looking at this, I'm like refusing anything optimistic. Like, what's on the projections isn't even like a base case. It's like the the negative case is the base case. Like I just refu if it gets better, great, but I refuse to plan optimistically.

That feels like That's usually how

I map it out to anyway.

Yep. And the assumption of more money, not a good assumption.

You know, this exercise, I think it sort of like relieved a little bit of stress, because like when you see it there on a spreadsheet, like it's really not nearly as bad as it might be if I'm just thinking theoretically about how much we're spending and how unprofitable we are in terms of the revenue and the expenses and stuff like that.

It does wash over the emotions. Right? It

does. Yeah.

Right. It's like, oh, I feel bad about spending x. No. It just tells you the truth.

Yeah. Because I because, you know, I am in a different situation than I've been in from the previous ten plus years where I was just fully bootstrapped, like, basically profitable at all times, and and I'm still in this, like, you know, startup runway sort of mode here. You know, this month, looking back at the at the last half a year or so and then looking ahead to '23, we've been sort of finishing this year, I'd say stronger than we were over the summer, in terms of growth, but it's we're not really out of the woods yet. And I've just started to prioritize just trying to be more focused on like how we're budgeting on the things that are actually making an impact and not just investing in things that are sort of spinning our wheels. So, you know, I had to make some like some hard decisions around like, let's let's cut investing here.

Let's add investment there and there. And and that and mainly focus right now on like top of funnel and developers. We're probably gonna hire a third developer. We're starting to spend more on marketing providers who can help us grow the top of funnel. That's the priority.

Yeah. So I I hear you and I'll tell you what that process and thinking where that resulted for us. It'd be great to hear what what you're doing also. On our side, we have cut ad spend almost to zero. And we are not renewing with the marketing agency that was running that.

Right? We've been with PBS for, I guess it's almost two years and we worked with them at Cart Hook and they were awesome. Thank you to to them. But it it simply doesn't work for us right now. At at our stage, we have to come to terms of the fact that ads and spending money on ads is not gonna do it.

It's just not gonna do it in b to b at our stage. Maybe later on, it makes more sense. It's to kind of almost support your other marketing efforts and your biz dev and so on. But right now where it's more of like a zero sum budget game, we have trimmed all advertising other than brand, competitor, and retargeting. That's it.

Brand people who are looking for Rally Checkout, right? Competitor where it's like Bolt checkout alternative and retargeting because you've already been to our site, so let's spend a few bucks to stay stay top of mind. And we're shifting we're shifting all that budget over.

We actually have not done any advertising for ZipMessage yet. I just talked to a a PPC manager this week to potentially hire him in the next couple of weeks. I'm talking to like two different people about that. Basically to start what you have downsized to. Like we have nothing and so we're probably gonna just start the basics of brand search and competitor search and stuff like that.

Which makes sense. But top of funnel prospecting with like Facebook ads, I would not recommend.

Yeah, no. And that's what we're, that's what I actually decided to hold off on. The thing that I have been investing a lot in and now have changed some team members around, but still investing heavily is SEO. So we have an SEO strategist who helps with the strategy and then multiple writers who help execute that. That's just gonna be like an ongoing, it's just such a long game that we, and we still have so much to build there.

And frankly, get most of our customers from Google anyway. So I feel like it's, we just need to keep, and we have a lot more to go. Would say, but we've been flat at the top of the funnel. Like that's become clear that it's like the, there are two big factors that are hampering growth. It's our top of funnel has been mostly flat and the product.

I know exactly what we need to build. I know exactly what these coaches are waiting for from us. We need to just ship it. And we have this like long roadmap and we've shipped a whole bunch in the last few weeks. So we're probably 20 to 30% of the way through this big roadmap.

And here in December and January, we're shipping like the biggest pieces of it, automation workflows and then programs like hosting and running automated courses and interactive courses and community spaces. That stuff is coming between now and January. You know, we have multiple coaches waiting to use that stuff and move their programs into that stuff once we launch it.

So let me ask you a question on, okay.

And I'll just add like one more thing real quick. Like the other major request we get all the time is having a dedicated mobile app. And see, like there's so many like ands here, like mobile app and payments. All this stuff is in the roadmap and it's a matter of prioritizing them. And we're building out workflows, programs, community spaces, and then payments for that whole string of user use cases.

But layered on top of that, everyone else wants a wants a mobile app. So that'll be coming after that. And that that definitely means hiring another developer to get that going. But even this roadmap is so jam packed that, like, me plus my two developers, we're not moving fast enough, so we're gonna need more more speed. And I'm sort of like anticipating this increased dev cost to

Yeah.

Get us going.

That's right. Well, it sounds

like a lot a

lot to build. Okay. I'm I'm gonna ask you about like three areas that seem to be overlapping here for for you and for us the same way. One, SEO content. Two, marketing content.

And three, like product led. Right? So so when you're talking about SEO and hiring someone there, my assumption is that that's on an ongoing basis over the long term to do the dance for Google that it wants. But that is not the same thing as we are gonna publish a case study and show people how to use our product successfully like one of our other users. Right?

That that's Right.

No. The case studies are we're doing that too, but that's different.

Right. So so we think of Yeah.

Those are two completely

different things. So that that's almost like that's content marketing. Like you're you're publishing stuff. Okay. And then the third part is like, well, we're gonna build the features to attract people so that more of the top of the funnel converts into interested people and we can do more with it and our content marketing will go tightly with where the product is going and who we want to attract.

Yeah. Alright. I I can speak to all three of those. You you broke it down exactly how I'm thinking

about it. Okay. So because we're thinking the same way where it's like, just because we're gonna do SEO does not mean that we're not gonna do the content marketing. And that does not mean that we're not gonna keep shifting the product along this feature roadmap to get into the right place.

Yeah. Yep. The SEO, I really think about it like it's you're essentially doing Google search ads except not paying for them. You're just paying for the content. It's it's almost like It's the

only investment.

It's almost like the if the top half of page one is ads on Google that you pay for, the bottom half is organic. Okay.

And you

wanna be on both. That's a

brutal way to look at it.

It's brutal. That's what it is. Know? Yep. And that's why you have these tools now like Surfer SEO and all these different like SEO analysis tools and consultants who who really know how to how to create briefs that can compete with the other six or seven articles that are ranking for this keyword.

Like, that's what that that game is now. And, you know, then there's link building and stuff like that. So there's a whole lot of action in terms of our budget spreadsheet happening in that realm. And look, that's not even like content that we actively promote other than get it up on the website so that Google can find it. Right.

People can find it through Google.

Right. Apologies to all the SEOs out there, but that is mind numbingly boring for me.

That's like, okay. That's why I hired someone. Right.

Do some analysis. Yes. You are magicians. We'll give you that much, but it's not that interesting to talk about.

Okay. Totally. And then the other stuff yeah. Content like case studies is exactly so again, I've been going through this roadmap. I'm trying to merge the case studies with the roadmap.

So as I talked about a lot, I I've done heavy research with coaches. I have a long list of coaches who who are already using our product. A smaller subset of them are are like my closer, like, beta group. And I've been showing them deep dives of of the mock ups and the features that we're building and what's coming and when this stuff is coming. And I've and I've had actual commitments from them to say, like, I wanna be one of the first people to use these new features.

And when when you do have these features, I will build and launch or move my whole coaching program to it and have it, like, basically hosted and run on Zip Message. That's awesome. We are going to interview them and turn them into case studies and and get them on board as, like, the very first users of of these new features. So, like, those two areas that you talked about, like content marketing and product led. Content marketing, I I see it as, interviews and publishing those interviews and then maybe write ups and turn it into social media content and content that we can run ads to, content that we can use in a sales process.

But the product stuff, we're changing. Like, Zip Message is is moving into like, yes, we've been for asynchronous messaging, and that will continue to be the core of what you do with Zip Message, But we're expanding into a into a much more of like a platform for for, especially for running a coaching business with obviously messaging your clients is the core of your coaching business. So like, we're moving into a space where it's like, basically the idea is to is to is to move us away from just being an alternative to like Loom. Because it's just too easy to like use us or not use us, you know, switch swap us out. And by the way, we just launched the ability to

we just lost the

ability to embed a Loom video in Zip Message. Like, that's how unimportant Loom is to us at Right. This

Right. So it's a commodity, almost like a Calendly, and who wants to compete with that?

Yeah. Yeah. So we're moving into a place where all these coaches see us as, like, it's the only tool that really combines the messaging piece with course content delivery, with some small group community, group cohorts, group coaching, all under the same hood because they are duct taping those tools together. Right.

So you have like a messaging engine, which is at the core of the value that a coach provides their customer. And now you have to build features around it to allow the coach to build their business on it, which includes taking payment, confirming.

Yeah. Includes Okay. Yeah. It it includes the messaging piece obviously, and then it includes automating the message the messaging piece. So we're we're shipping workflows which will enable like a a drip sequence of messages to your coaching clients on a schedule triggered when they reply to your message and stuff like that.

And then programs. Every coach most coaches have, like, a course or really what they call it is like a library of assets of, like, prerecorded videos, frameworks, templates, worksheets. They put all that stuff in their library, and they pull from it, and they insert into into their conversations. We have part of that ability now. We're gonna be building on that.

And then Spaces, which takes us into this, like, area where it's like you have a small group cohort and you want them to interact with each other and you as the coach, that's what Spaces is is gonna be aimed at. And then and then payments to get to to pay for access to all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So that's great. You can you can work with pricing around that and you can get a a piece of the payments revenue and

And and so to get back to the point of, like, how does how does this impact marketing? When people come on board because of this that whole platform, it it it adds that lock in. It adds that, like, this is essential to my business, you know? And it and it also unlocks our ability to we are gonna be changing prices, like, early twenty twenty three with all new plans that reflect these new features. And so as I'm prioritizing these features, I'm I'm balancing, like, what coaches really want to use to be active and which features do we need to have to unlock our ability to launch the new pricing.

And that's that's kind of how I'm prioritizing. So I have like a list of like probably nine different features, and I'm I'm trying to boil it down to like the three or four that get us to the new pricing and then we follow on with the other ones after that, you know.

Yeah. It's it's almost like the it's like product led content marketing. Like where the features are starting to come out, that's what you wanna write about and show and highlight with case studies. We are we are experiencing something new for ourselves, which is aiming at a developer audience in in '23. Not entirely, but we've gotten the product to the point where we can now start to open up our APIs and show people how to build in a headless way with our checkout, which is, you know, what we've been aiming toward.

It just made sense to go toward the traditional platforms like a BigCommerce, but now the opportunity feels like it's opening up around headless and integrating with front ends like Next. Js. So we're we're thinking about it the same way where as the API becomes externalized, right, it gets published, then what we should do is create technical content around how to build a template that works with Vercel, Next. Js, and then Rally and integrates on the back end with the platforms that we work with. Yeah.

So that's that's new for us. We we haven't really done technical content and that's that that's one of the big challenges in January.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like, what Adam has done with with Talend

That's my that's my North Star.

That is the North Star in terms of like documentation and usability of of of becoming a new developer on on getting up and running. And and over the years, like, he's come out with so many, like, YouTube tutorials and like show like, watch me build this thing from start to finish. And Twitter content for developers and UI designers, like awesome. Yeah. And I like that direction for Rally too, where a dev tool.

It makes perfect sense. Like the headless thing, like if I assume you're looking at like agencies who are building for ecommerce and like developers at agencies who are building for ecommerce and Yes. Yeah. I mean the go to tool in in their toolbox.

That that's right. Because everyone building headless has to deal with checkout at some point or another. So you can build a Next. Js or Vue storefront or Shogun or builder.io or whatever. At some point, you need to take that front end, which usually ends at the cart page, and then you need to do something for the checkout.

If you're trying to go on Shopify, use Shopify's checkout. That is no fun to do headless. So the it's

Hey, look at Stripe, right? Like they they started by going after developers first.

Yep. Yep. That that that's right. And and we have our so like you, when we add a new feature, so one of the one of the quote features that we are adding in January is the ability to build with our elements. So you don't need to use our checkout page.

You can build your own page, but you use our elements like Stripe elements and then you get all the checkout features that we have, the post purchase offers, all the integrations, all this other stuff. So just launching that feels useless without content around how to actually do it. Here are templates, here are code snippets, here are tutorials. So we're we're thinking through what what works in marketing these days. The conclusion that I keep coming back to is that short form video is is king.

Okay. So if you know that and you need short form video for exposure, basically the top of the funnel, then what do you do? Right, if you have a thirty minute YouTube tutorial on how to connect Next. Js with Rally, that's great, but you need to get people there.

I think, I think you can probably cut it into smaller, have the thirty minute tutorial, the official course, but then have smaller tweetable, just show the magic moment, right? The look what happens when I if I need a a headless checkout, you know, one click upsell, watch these three steps. Like, cut and paste here, deploy there, boom. Yes. Yes.

And So that's

Even if it takes them, like, some, you know, magic editing of the video, just just show the magic once they get in there. Cut it up.

Yeah. Absolutely. That's it's it's right. That's almost like some people that are doing well are are podcasters. They take these thirty, sixty second snippets and they put it on the Instagram Reels, TikTok, Facebook, all the platforms with short form video, and that is effectively a call out to the audience that you click with, and then that brings them into your actual product, whether it be a podcast or a blog or something else.

That's that's how I recently found a podcast called, oh my god, chat news.

I saw you tweet about that. I gotta check that out.

Yeah. They're they're awesome.

But I'm I'm thinking about the same thing too, about the marketing marketing of the new features and marketing the new like, you know, we've talked about this before where, like, I feel like now if you look at zipmessage.com and and even our KB docs and our YouTube videos for Zip Message, everything is like months behind what we actually what we actually have in the product today. Like, so the part of the plan, and it's almost like how is it humanly possible to do all this stuff simultaneously? But as we're shipping all these new features, I already talked about a ton of them. So that's where my focus needs to be. But I think I'm gonna be working with a designer pretty soon to redo the whole marketing site and get some new visual assets and communication assets.

Normally, would do that myself, but I just have so much work to do on the product itself that I wanna get an even better, not just visual design, but we need to rethink how we communicate everything about Zip Message in '23. So I'm gonna be collaborating with a designer. I've been talking to a few people about that.

Yeah, we thought about hiring someone full time to make technical content. It's quite hard to find that person.

Yeah, that's a tough We

found someone that kinda like matches up with us. He's got his own thing going, but like he's a true believer. Like, that's exactly the the process that we talked about. He heard me on a podcast and was like, oh my god, I see the world the same way. Reached out, we've become friends and now he's in our in our Slack and that's the person who makes sense to build things.

It's almost like we're we're gonna hire him to do the content and then we have to go through the steps internally to figure how to do that. Right? Because immediately, Rock and Jessica are like, hold on a second. I want approval over that code. Right?

So we're like not we're not like not built. We're not positioned to just publish regularly and not make it a big deal. Not a three week blog post, but like everyday videos and everyday content. So we to figure that out and get better at it.

And look, for me, as a developer, product designer, builder, the docs are everything. When you're marketing, if if I'm using a a Ruby gem or a framework or something, like, the ones that I've latched onto are the ones that have the the best, easiest to use, most thorough documentation. You know? Like like writing up docs in GitHub is an art form at this point. And that's what it really needs to go big, I think.

There are so many of these tiny libraries out there that are so incredibly powerful, but they don't come even close to their potential because their docs are either so mind numbingly technical that you can't even understand it, or they're completely missing. But you compare that to a Tailwind or Ruby on Rails or Devise or any of these popular Rspec, any of these really popular frameworks that have been around forever, like React, the newest trend Elixir, all the new trendy stuff, they have the best documentation. It just welcomes in loads and loads of all the new developers to get them up and running.

Yeah. My challenge is, and the challenge I put forward to our marketing director, is if we are gonna stop spending money on ads and the agency to run the ads, how do we properly use that budget to build up the ability to do this when we don't have it natively? It's not in our DNA right now. So how do you how do you inject it into the DNA? This is one of the things that we heard.

I think I talked about this, but when we went to Berlin for the for the off-site, we did this exercise where we had 15 stations and everyone there was a QR code

printed out. Don't think we've had an episode since you went to Berlin.

Is that right? Yeah. It's been a while. My my apologies. I've had a bunch of personal stuff that I needed to focus on.

Everything's okay. We went to Berlin, and we should talk about it more on another episode. One of the best things we did is that Jessica, our VP of Product, who, you know, we've I've been working with for a long time, she had an idea where we had these prompts, things ranging from what would you do if you took over as CEO tomorrow to where do you think the company should go that it's not currently going. Just 15 prompts, wide variety of of types of questions. And we printed up QR codes and there were like 15 stations around the room and you would just walk up to it with your phone and the QR code would bring up a type form and ask you the question and you'd fill it out, hit enter and move on to the next one.

So it was like a fun two hour thing, but what it did is it took fifteen

answers? Questions

So we compiled them. It's 15 questions times 25 people. We got all this data all of a sudden.

I'm curious, what were some of the other questions?

I wish I had like access to it right now. Don't know how find it in my Google spreadsheet.

On the next episode of Bootstrap.

Yeah, we can talk about it because we went from business y stuff to technical stuff. But one of the most interesting ones was around what are we not doing that you think we should do? And a lot of what came up from the development team, from the engineering team was go more toward headless. And so as we were already thinking about going more in that direction, and so we brought it back to them and said, okay, are you willing to participate? Are you willing to create content, to write snippets, to create templates, to do screenshots, to do in like, quick interviews together?

Like, will you allow our engineering team to become the source of our best content?

You know, this brings to mind my my friend Brad Tunar. He is the founder of SpinUpWP and he was the founder of Delicious Brains, which was just recently sold to WP Engine. Amazing outcome for Brad and the team. And that is exactly how their whole success in marketing was built off of that. They are developer tools.

Their team

was the content engine.

All their products are developer focused products. They're technical products for developers, and their developer team were all responsible for literally writing technical articles on the blog. And that's They had a rotation of if you work on the code and then you contribute an article or two every month.

Wow. Wow. I might need to talk to them about that because is the truth is the highest form of marketing is sitting inside of our team. Our ideal marketing content is how do you use this stuff beyond what you see on the surface. Very interesting.

I would say the other company that that comes to mind is Thoughtbot. Ben used to work there. They have become a a huge leader in the Ruby world by publishing content and by creating I mean, that's another thing for you guys. Like you could think about doing an open source tool. Yes.

Not Rally itself, like they have all these different byproducts, like all these different products created that are free Ruby gems that are extremely popular because they're extremely well supported and documented by the team.

Okay, interesting. Yeah, that's the plan. Like the ability to open source, you know, these connector pieces of code around like how to use Vercel with Rally, how do you and then, you know, that it starts off with for being being directly related to our product, but can expand beyond that. You know, this brings up something that I thought about a lot over the last like month. And it's something that I feel like I did very wrong at Rally and maybe sharing it might help some people.

What I did is I identified what I want to happen in the market and what I thought was gonna happen in the market, which is moving toward headless, where merchants are gonna start to favor the customization and flexibility of a headless stack over the monolithic traditional SaaS platform. So I identified that two years ago, and we have been a quote headless checkout since we raised money, but I played it safe. And I said to myself, there isn't enough money in headless yet. So let's go phase one to the traditional platforms. Let's go to big commerce, right?

Let's go a bit safer and we'll wait for the market to develop. Over the last few months, what I have kind of come to the conclusion or have to admit to myself is, what really happened is we went the safe route and didn't get the safety, and then avoided the risky route and didn't get the reward. So kind of shot myself in both feet and trying to course correct on that. The conclusion is no one's coming to save us. The market's not just gonna happen.

We have to participate in making the market happen. And if we don't, it has a much lower chance of probability that it will happen, and we will regret it so much. We didn't even shoot the shot that we meant to shoot. Like we just kind of waited

and the went original vision. Yes.

Yes. So there is a definite course correction. We were no bullshit here. We were fortunate to raise more money in this environment. And now I'm like, well, there's no way I'm about to play it safe again.

So we're going toward developers toward headless.

Yep. Okay. So how are you thinking about marketing and sales right now while you are building toward that vision. I've been talking about it on this episode. The most exciting thing is the most frustrating thing when it comes to product market fit.

I've done all this deep research and interviews with our coach customers for most of 2022. And I'm so dead clear on exactly what they want to do with Zip Message and what they want it to be. I know exactly what that vision looks like. Down to the T, they have reviewed mock ups, they have given me feedback on it. I see what other tools they're using instead.

It's so clear. So it's like from a product market fit standpoint, it's like I have that knowledge, but we don't have the product in hand fully yet. We're halfway there.

So it's like You have to start moving toward marketing it and distribution.

Well, like the the thing that the business still needs most is ship the product that our best customers want to pay a lot more for. Yeah. That just Yep. Takes

It's hard to be patient during that time.

But like, what do you do about marketing during this roadmap time? You know? Because for me, I am just uncomfortable with not marketing. Literally, it frustrates me on a day to day basis, like this week, when I'm like, I know we have to ship this feature before the holidays come, But what if what if I talk to this guy about some PPC stuff? What if I work with the SEO guys about, like, getting that stuff going?

Like because because, man, if we're if we're not working on those on those growth graphs, I don't feel comfortable. But at the same time, it's like, I need to be working on the product. And that is where I am the most effective, to be honest. So I've sort of come to the hire the right people to execute on marketing and focus my hours on product. But I've unfortunately hiring the right people is a lot easier said than done.

Yeah, that's right. That part, the hiring part is really hard. We just let go of someone else today, yesterday, that was on the go to market team. So that it just it just hurts because that's we are relatively thin on the go to market team. And losing someone means that function gets hurt for months.

I mean, do you mentally start to, because you were just talking about like, okay, we are committing to our vision headless.

Yep.

Like Does that involve committing to a level of comfort with inactivity on marketing and sales for a period of time until the product catches up to where you want it to be? Or are you still mentally like, we need to push on top of funnel?

We can still push because our product still fits into those two environments. So we have a lot of opportunity with BigCommerce. They are great to work with. We just did an event with them down in Nashville. We met more people.

There is a lot of biz dev to do. There's a whole bunch to do. So that needs to continue on. That needs to not be interrupted while something else starts to come to fruition, which realistically takes months. So our outbound still works.

It's still producing four to eight demos every week. So that's good, that should not stop. So that needs to continue on. And when it comes to the headless approach, there's multiple efforts there. So there's biz dev with the front end solutions, right?

So we should be partnered to integrate with all of the front end e commerce solutions. And now we're also building two more integrations on the back end, one with commerce tools and one with Salesforce. So we'll go from two back integrations to four and we'll partner with all the front end solutions that we already kind of work with, but we wanna formalize those partnerships. And then start publishing the content and templates and code snippets and everything else that ideally start to get us into conversations with a different type of prospect. I don't like that our pipeline is full of people that we reached out to and said, do you want to see what we have and jump on a demo with us?

And they said, yes. That is good. That is not ideal. A minority of our pipeline right now are people who said, I'm leaving Shopify. I'm going to swell.

I can't believe you created this product. This is exactly what we wanted. When we decided to leave Shopify, we needed something that does exactly this. And so that we need to expand that to overwhelm the other type of prospect, Right? That was our entire pipeline at Cardhook because people knew what they wanted and came to us to get it, and that is where I wanna be.

Yep. So one has to keep going while the other one builds up, but we definitely want it to switch. Right. My like ideal is sometime over the next six months, we are doing very little outbound. We are just handling inbound requests and inbound prospecting.

Mhmm. Yep. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we've just a base level of organic traffic and trials every and new customers coming in every month. That number has not grown in the last several months.

It's just been this flat level of growth. So I feel like we fit product market fit, we we're we're sort of, like, 50% fit. Like, we're, like, we're exciting to a bunch of customers, and a lot of customers, like like, upgrade and and buy because of that. But there's so much untapped potential in in the new features that we're that we're about to launch that it's like because then we, like, we occupy a much more significant part of their mental space and literally like functionally in their business that they think of us in a much larger category.

Right. You're in a similar position. Six months from today, you wanna be transitioned to that.

Yeah. And like the thing is we already we've already made pretty good progress on shifting the pie of those trials to be mostly coaches. I could literally see it in like the churn graph of this year. The first half of the year, we were in, like, eight different customer avatars. The second half, you know, we start to shift all of our messaging and marketing and stuff toward coaches, and and you see the churn reduce.

But the the value that we can provide and, you know, is so much more in in the next few months that it's like the thing is I want our marketing to meet us there when we get there. I don't want it to be starting the marketing later.

That's right. And how's your patience?

I'm always impatient. I don't think it'll ever improve.

Yeah. I feel better now on the patience than I did a few months ago. And and that's not necessarily because of raising money or not raising money. Like I I was actually my most impatient and most stressed and anxious right after raising money, which was weird because I figured I'd have a sense of relief and I did not have any sense of relief. And it took me about a month of just internalizing, hey bud, relax.

Do you have to think about this in years, not weeks? And that helped me just understand, okay, if it takes us six months to get to this next place, as long as we are growing along the way, then it's okay. And so I'm not and I don't feel as anxious and panicky around timing as as I did maybe two months ago.

I mean, you know, looking at the spreadsheet yesterday, it definitely relieved some of that impatient stress that I always have. Like, why is our MRR only here by now? And and, you know, the impatience around, like, okay, just running the numbers, like, if nothing changes, if everything were it continues on its current course, we're, we're just gonna be a little bit larger twelve months from now, and that's not gonna be enough. We have to really move the needle on multiple fronts. And that's product, that's ARPU, that's top of funnel volume and churn.

Like, all of those need to improve. If they just stay at where they're at, it's not just like waiting for time to go by because it it'll it would just be way too much time to to get to where we need to be.

You know. Look, and and I think we can agree, at worst, we just pivot toward AI and we're good.

I mean, that's it. Like, we we could just that it would be that's the easy path.

Yeah. There you go. Cool, man. Well, I feel like we can go on for another hour. Yeah.

That podcast by the way is called group chat and is and is dynamite.

I'm gonna check it out.

Yeah, check it out. It's it's a phone. They do daily. It's great.

Oh, If you guys if

you guys in LA, it's like drama from, not ridiculousness. Fun Factory, Factory something. Fantasy Factory with Rob Dyrdek and and a few other guys that are like in the ecommerce world.

Alright. Alright,

folks. Alright, dude. It's Friday. Let's let's go let's go get this weekend. Yeah,

man. Alright. Later. See you.