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Bootstrapped Web. We're back. Jordan, how you doing, buddy?
Jordan Gal:I'm back. This is it. No more travel for the summer. My my last trip. I'm very excited to be home.
Brian Casel:Nice. Nice. Yeah. We're wrapping up the summer. Actually, yesterday, I took a day off, and the kids and and Amy, we hopped on the train, went to New York City, and we were tourists for a day.
Brian Casel:That's fun. Couple times a year over there. That's that's good for you.
Jordan Gal:Well, I just got back from Hawaii,
Brian Casel:and that that was
Jordan Gal:a big trip.
Brian Casel:Incredible.
Jordan Gal:And we got caught up a little bit in the LA, like, tropical storm flight situation. So we were, quote, stuck there for another few days, which was not a bad thing. But it did mean that we left Hawaii, arrived Wednesday at 6AM, landed at O'Hare at 6AM, and got the kids to their first day of school at 08:30AM that morning.
Brennan Dunn:So Wow. That's nice.
Jordan Gal:It's it's been, yeah, it's been a messy two days, but it's Friday afternoon. Back at work. Really excited to not be traveling anymore over the summer. And it feels like this this that same thing is happening between myself and Rock and Jess. You know, the three of us, we're a little older.
Jordan Gal:We all have kids. We have, like, these, you know, mid stage adult responsibilities, and that usually goes with some obligatory travel over the summer that we're just not gonna say no to. So the three of us have been moving around a lot over the last month, and now we're all coming back together. And everyone's, like, pumped up and just focused to go between now and Black Friday, Cyber Monday, like, that's our it's our time to just make this huge push before things start to chill out for the holidays.
Brian Casel:That same exact thing here. My kids start on this coming Monday. So so this week is, like, their final week of the summer, and
Jordan Gal:Oh, wow.
Brian Casel:They had they had already finished camp, so we brought them into the city yesterday. Was, like, something to get them off their iPads for at least a day.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And by this time, I'm sure you and your wife will, like, get these kids out of the freaking house already. Yeah. I got everyone to real.
Brian Casel:Yep. But the but, you know, like, something about, like, the kids summer mentality definitely bleeds over to me because I feel like like my summer of activities and travel and stuff is is just wrapping up, and now now we get serious for the rest of the year. And
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm home for the rest of the year except for Cabo Press in October, but that's the only And then I'll do big snows in, like, January and February. So but, like, between now and the rest of this year, other than that one week off, like, I'm I'm pushing, you know, a lot of lot of stuff I wanna get going here.
Jordan Gal:We have a trip to an e commerce expo in London, and that's in late September. So a few of us are gonna go over there and make, you know, like a leadership meeting at the same time while we're all there. So that's one big travel, and I think there's something else. So we go to DC this year for the holidays. But, yeah, I'm I'm with you.
Jordan Gal:I got something on the books with my brothers and my dad for Europe in January, but like it it feels really nice to just not have a ton of travel.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Now I don't know about you. For us, the the time of year is having a really big impact on our business because when we're in conversations right now with merchants, it is the timing and can we get it done before their code freeze going into the holiday shopping? That is very relevant in the conversation. So it's either we're just taking a look as we think through things over the next few months, make decisions in Q4 and Q1, or we're taking a look.
Jordan Gal:We want it this year, can you get it done before the code freeze? Mhmm. These are our requirements. So that that is animating our our world right now.
Brian Casel:You know, I historically have never cared at all about, like, seasonality in my business. And and I feel the same way about, economic turns, you know, like
Jordan Gal:Right. Right.
Brian Casel:The economy might be good or bad. It might be summer. It might be Christmas. Like, I don't care. Like, yes, that stuff might make some impact on my business, but I feel like it's
Pippin Williamson:not out
Brian Casel:of my control, and I don't care to even do anything about it because there's really nothing to do about it, really. That being said, I could I am starting to notice what I think will turn out to be, like, a natural summer seasonality with Clarity Flow. Like, it's not not major, not not significant, but I think we'll probably be, like we'll probably see some of the typical summer downturn that most SaaS see. Because I I definitely see it with customers like I mean, we were literally a little bit slower in the summer, and now I see it starting to kick up a little bit as as we look into fall. I I'm hearing from a lot of coaches saying like, yeah.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm planning to start my program up in September, or I have a new cohort starting in the fall. You know, I'm hearing things like that that I'm also seeing
Jordan Gal:Okay. So it is more cyclical or seasonal for them now.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I I also see, like, some customers who churned several months ago. Like, now now is the time they come back. Like, oh, like like, turns out we do need it for this thing, or it turns out we tried these other options. And right now, in this time of year, like, I think Clarity Flow makes sense again.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm seeing some of that happen. I mean, it it Okay. It also coincides with, like, we're shipping a ton of features. So they're getting they're they're hearing about, like, all these changes in the product. So yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Okay. Right. So it's it's not impacting, like, how you're working, but it is it is having some impact on business and interest and timing and urgency.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. Cool. It's interesting. I mean, I know we're always talking about sales, but I I feel like that's still that's that's much more relevant for me and you right now.
Brian Casel:Literally, the call right before this one was a sales demo. The one right after this is a sales demo. This week, one of the things that I finally shipped, I feel like everything is shipping later than I would like, but I spent I I did a a couple of, sales and marketing projects. One of them was to fire up, some some, like, cold outreach stuff, kinda getting the infrastructure set up to be doing that. The other thing was to finally put, like, a legit request a demo flow in place on the website.
Brian Casel:So the change there is like before, it was kinda hidden in the footer, request a demo, just links to our normal contact page. Now Okay. Okay. Now you'll see all throughout the website from the hero section to the top nav, the calls to action. There is still like you can sign up for a free trial and then right next to it is you can request a demo.
Brian Casel:You click that. Okay. You
Jordan Gal:get to I'm on your site now.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. So
Jordan Gal:request a demo is now a secondary CTA in a lot more places.
Brian Casel:Yes. And that now leads to a multi step form. And, you know, I I shared the the full details of this in my in my build in public update on on Twitter. Okay. Did a whole video on, like, how I wired all this up.
Brian Casel:And because I've done this now in, like, almost all my previous businesses, and I just set up a similar flow now. And what I'll try to give a a quick rundown, but it's
Jordan Gal:It's like annoyingly complicated. No.
Brian Casel:It shouldn't be. It really is. I'm not gonna get into all of it here if you want the code and and everything. Shared it on that video. But the in concept, the idea that I like to do is the front end of that form needs to be super minimal.
Brian Casel:Like, capture the email address is the goal. Mhmm. Right? So step one, all I ask for is name and email address. The fields.
Brian Casel:Yep. That gets them onto my list in in customer IO. So now I can follow-up if I need to, if they if they if they abandon, like okay. And then that brings them to step two. And that's where I really wanna capture more information.
Brian Casel:It's like a small survey. I'm asking questions. Not not I mean, survey is the wrong word. It's really like four or five questions. Just like I think I I ask, like, what do you do?
Brian Casel:What are your questions about Clarity Flow? How did you hear about Clarity Flow? What's your team size? That kind of stuff. In the background, invisible to the user, we we do track, like, where did where did they come from?
Brian Casel:Like, what who which sites referred them? Did they come from a Google ad? Did they come from, you know, which source, which medium? All that stuff gets captured and stored in all of our systems from Stripe to Chartmogul to Mixpanel to the notifications that I get. I I see where every customer came from, which was a whole technical thing to wire up.
Brian Casel:And then and then the third step is schedule the actual demo. We're using SavvyCal for that. I embedded that on the site. We we fire we we all all these steps, like step one, two, three, all these fire into customer IO. So I'm getting all that data in customer IO so that I can segment emails.
Brian Casel:Like, did they did they request, but they didn't book the demo? Did they book the demo, but they didn't become a customer? You know, I can track all that.
Jordan Gal:Right. So if they want, they can go all the way through to actually scheduling on your calendar directly on the site.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. So I put that whole flow live, I think, three days ago, two or three days ago, and already had, like, six demo requests just in that in that day, which is, definitely a lot more than usual. Like, you you know, I would get, like, maybe one or two in a week just hitting our contact form, asking for a demo. Now I've had like six in like three days.
Brian Casel:So the the flow is like now that I'm just making it more prominent, it's it's there. You know?
Jordan Gal:Okay. I I think that's interesting and you should pay attention to the volume there. Six in just a few days, multiply that by a few times in month, all of a sudden that starts to get more And what I'm curious about is, does that self segment into people who are more interested? Are they more likely to stick around? Are they more likely to ask you questions instead of giving up before buying?
Jordan Gal:Like, all those things on basically, does it make it more likely that they sign up, and does it make it more likely that they sign up for higher tiers?
Brian Casel:It all remains to be seen. Yeah. Mhmm. Good questions that I'm trying to figure out. I've I've done a couple of those demo like, because I've been doing demos, but these these are the first few that have, like, come through this new flow.
Brian Casel:We're also running some ads right now, and and we're get and and these are coming from different sources. So that's a question of, like, comparing leads from different sources, what what they're all about. In general, like, all the demos that I ever do, they all seem really, really impressed and excited about using the product. Especially more so now that we we've shipped a lot of stuff re recently, including programs, which is like, you can run your courses now on Clarity Flow. We've shipped spaces, so now you can run your community or your group coaching groups on Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:We did custom branding, custom domains. So these are all, like, key features to to running your whole coaching program. The the only remaining big piece that's coming probably in a month is is payments. Yep. But putting payments aside, we still have almost fully complete product now, that when I talk about it on the demo, which really I'm not even showing much of it.
Brian Casel:It's mostly me asking about their business and their use cases. And then so in most of these cases, they're really excited. The it's still an open question, and I think a gap in our funnel is the is the from going from the a successful demo to, okay, they they will sign up, but, like, will they get activated? Will they fully adopt it? Our onboarding and guidance there is very much lacking and a little bit confusing.
Brian Casel:So there's a lot that we should do on, like, the, like, the self serve onboarding. But I also wanna do more eventually with, like, done with you. Like, maybe get into some flow where, like, alright, we do the demo. Now let's schedule, like, a follow-up call to
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Make sure that you're all set up, like, a week from now. I I'm not really doing that second step right now.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's like the customer success element, the transition between sales and onboarding. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Mean, the other thing that I wanna start doing that I haven't done yet is, like because we get a lot of just regular sign ups who don't go through a demo, and some portion of them convert. But I I feel like I should be promoting a demo to to them too. Like, okay, you just signed up. And just so you know, like, if you wanna walk through, book a book a call with you know?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Just make sure you're you're set.
Jordan Gal:That might separate out the people who came in through a trial or some type of a lower level hurdle, but would go up to the demo if offered directly.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, almost like like as like instead of just, like, getting confused and turned off and you just walk away, maybe before you do that, at at least book a call. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So what you just said made me think of two things. One, I like to pay attention. I'm proud that our product like yours, it demos well. It shows well and it impresses.
Jordan Gal:I used to rely on that and think that that was almost enough because it used to be enough. It used to be when we talked to SMBs, Cardhook, these other types of contexts, that demo being impressive was enough to say, all right, I'll try it. Right now we've moved toward, okay, that's one small part of a more complex sales process.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So what we've done lately as we get better at the sales process, we've rearranged our CRM steps to more accurately mimic the actual steps of the sales process from the customer's point of view, like how are they thinking and experiencing the sales process instead of the stages that we want them to go through. Now we have more volume in the pipeline and we have a nice consistent, thank you, my Drake, the RSDR that does such a great job that keeps filling the pipeline every week. And so now that we have more, we can now look at the CRM and see where people are getting stuck. Nice. And it is not the demo.
Jordan Gal:The demo shows well, great. Then it moves on and technical discovery. That's good. And right now where we're starting to like really identify the snag is in the final bit of like scoping. Like, do do they fully know what they're getting into?
Jordan Gal:Do they have the resources ready for it? How long it's going to take? What details? What we need to build still if they come on board? Like that, like, back and forth is where we're starting to get caught up.
Jordan Gal:So it's not just like, hey, we lobbed over a proposal with a price. Like, that's one stage. But really, it's like right before that, like, do we okay. We have the price, we have the proposal, but do do both sides fully understand what's about to happen if they say
Brian Casel:yes? Mhmm. And that yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Brian Casel:And I mean, I feel like your in terms of, like, your product, like, get a customer getting activated. So they make it through all the sales, all the sales calls, all the decisions. They're ready to actually get going. Do you see a clear sequence of steps that need to be taken in order? Okay, first, we're gonna connect to the shopping cart.
Brian Casel:Second, we're going to set up these the checkout page. Third, we're gonna do these offers. And then fourth, like, put it live. Like, it always follows that road map, or is there any variance in one customer might do it this way, another customer might need it that way?
Jordan Gal:There's a lot of variance. There are a few steps that are required and so have to happen, like creating an account, that type of thing. But there's a lot of variance and we're getting some mixed feedback that we're trying to figure out if we need to change or not. Right now, when we so our typical deal, our typical process is a lot of information sharing and then it's signed the dotted line. So it's signed for an annual contract and then they create an account.
Jordan Gal:So a lot of the technical onboarding and activation is on the other side of the contract agreements, which is new for me. Right? That's like, I didn't think people So
Brian Casel:then it's like, yeah, I see in that situation, it's like they've already agreed and, like, paid Yes. And have, like, a contract. So there whatever steps are required, they'll eventually make it work between their team and your team, get it getting up and launched.
Jordan Gal:Yes. But just because they sign does not mean they're immediately gonna take all the action that you want them to take because very often it's one set of people doing the signing and then another set of people doing the implementation. Yeah. And we have a very high interest. Like, our first contracts did not have in place a time limit within which they need to get launched or they start paying either way.
Jordan Gal:So we were like, uh-oh, we got a contract, but they're not actually gonna pay until they go live. And they're not being as responsive as we want them to be. And so we haven't actually been able to book it until they launch. So we did end up launching that customer that I have in mind, but it was a more stressful experience than it should have been. And now contracts that we've signed, we paid attention to.
Jordan Gal:And now contracts that we're sending out is like, look, if you're not responsive and you don't you don't launch within sixty days of the effective date of the contract, you're gonna start to pay.
Brennan Dunn:Yeah. Right. And I dealt with a bunch
Brian Casel:of that with with Audience Ops because we had, like, a whole onboarding process. It took a good month before that we're even able to start publishing content. And and then we pushed out the first payment to, like, five weeks in instead of four weeks so that we have a little bit of buffer. But yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yes. So those are like these little, like, nicks, these little cuts that we're reacting to. Oh, that hurt. Let's not make that mistake again.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:But I like, in my onboarding for Clarity Flow, I still need to fully learn and figure out you know, because the the new product, all the new features that we have, you can use Clarity Flow. Because, like okay. Coaches use it for multiple aspects of their coaching offerings. And their coaching offerings usually include a combination of one to one communication with clients, a self serve or a, like, a a client community or coaching groups, you know, inviting them to what we call spaces, and then courses, and what we call programs in Clarity Flow. So you can build and deploy a course and and enroll clients in it.
Brian Casel:Those are, like, the three big aspects of what you can do with Clarity Flow. And I still have an open question of, like, well, which of those do they build and implement first? Right? Because currently, it we're still basically using the flow that we have we've had since Zip Message, which is you sign up, you get dropped into your first conversation, and we give you a little pointer on how to record your first message and then send it off to someone.
Jordan Gal:You're building the feature set that the coach wants to offer to their customers based on which tier their customer is Yeah, jumping like
Brian Casel:today it's still like we just drop them into like, just record a message and then send it to someone. Well, like, now that we're Clarity Flow, that doesn't fully make a lot of sense. They need it needs to be much slower. It needs to be more planned out. They need to in many cases, one of their first actions, I think, is to start to build what we call your library in Clarity Flow.
Brian Casel:So like a whole collection of prerecorded content, you know, or they're migrating content in from somewhere. And and then they they usually need to, like, test that a whole lot. Usually, like, inviting, like, a test client and seeing what that whole flow looks like before they're comfortable enough to actually invite clients. So, like, it used to be, like, when we were a Zip Message and trying to be sort of, like, a Loom competitor, like, let's get them as fast as possible to recording and and sharing it
Jordan Gal:with someone. Right. Lighter weight, faster.
Brian Casel:So now I and I think this is really where more of like a done with you consultation will will make sense because, like, a lot of clients have a course to deploy. Some some of them don't. You know? Some of them just wanna use it for for coaching or just for group cohorts. You know?
Brian Casel:Others others wanna start there and then maybe build their their course in later. So it's like, I I gotta figure out, like, what the right sequence to get them to not only seeing the value, because I think that they see the value just from the demo call and and from seeing and, like, signing up and and planning to use it. And, you know, they they're comparing us against other tools, and they usually decide, like, this checks all the boxes of what they ultimately wanna do. But I I think the open questions for me right now are, like, how do we get them from there to, like, fully deployed to their client base? You know?
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The normally, when I would hear something like that, I would be worried about the amount of effort and money spent on that sales and onboarding process and how you have to charge a lot to make that work. But the hack of bootstrapping and keeping your expenses in check is that you can make that work. Yeah. And I the upside do people and investors look at that and say, oh, that can't work because you have to do it so many times.
Jordan Gal:And you have to put so much effort, you have to charge so much and the market can't bear it. There is a needle to thread there. There is a spot where actually, no, I can do that for a 100 people. And then get my business to, you know, fifteen, twenty, thirty k a month, and now I'm sustainable.
Brian Casel:The way I see it playing out, I I don't know exactly if it will go this way, but I'm thinking about it in two tracks, like built like, continuing to build out two onboarding tracks for customers. One is fully self serve. Maybe they do a quick demo call, or maybe not. Maybe they just, like, watch videos on the site and then they sign up. The self serve track is like, we have really good guidance and flows within the app, maybe even making it dynamic.
Brian Casel:So step one is like, what do you wanna do first? Courses, community, or clients? And then they click one, and then we guide them down that path. Right? That's that's one self serve approach.
Brian Casel:The other is like a done with you. Okay. Let's book a second call. Maybe even a third call where me or someone on my team is consulting with you to strategize and plan out your coaching business, and let's implement your and launch this for you and with you. I I would expect that, like, eventually, that'll be like a paid onboarding service.
Brian Casel:Like, pay an extra, I don't know, 500, a thousand bucks, something like that to get this month long consulting. And you're invested, we're invested in you. Let's so I think that we should do both of those tracks. And that yeah. A lot of pieces need to be put in place for both of them.
Brian Casel:But that's Yeah.
Jordan Gal:But you're heading the right direction. The just just having conversations. We we have been we strive to have some type of an implementation fee, and mostly just for the focus and the motivation of their team getting on board and going through the activation that I talked about. It's been interesting to work with this go to market consultant around pricing and packaging. So that's improving.
Jordan Gal:We basically have new pricing. And one of the advantages of not having your pricing be public is that you could just change it and you can just experiment. And the next What demo
Brian Casel:what's the new how does the new pricing work, or what can
Jordan Gal:you share? So so okay. This is this is pretty interesting actually because it it challenged a lot of my assumptions and made me, like, admit that I had to change my mentality. So going into Rally, coming out of Cardhook, my mindset has always linked GMV process, the amount of revenue that our checkout processes in total. It has linked that to revenue because we take we have a take rate, right?
Jordan Gal:We we have a percentage and then it turns into an average percentage, Right? The really big merchants pay less and the smaller merchants pay higher percentage. And then there's an average. And so when we were at Cardhook, when we got to a billion in GMV run rate, like processing $80,000,000 a month, we were at 6,000,000 ARR. So Cardhook monetized GMV at a average rate of 60 basis points.
Jordan Gal:Okay? And that I took that mentality that at scale, it's really a GMV business. It's how much money can you push through the checkout.
Brian Casel:Yep. It's not about the the, like, the fee. It's just the
Jordan Gal:That that's right. It's like the fees kind of even out or or that that averages out. And then you really just focused on GMV and let's just get more GMV in the door and bigger merge, all this other stuff. That has changed. Those two are disconnecting.
Jordan Gal:GMV and our revenue are no longer linked in that same way because we're working with fewer larger merchants. And those merchants want to pay a SaaS fee on an annual basis. And it is still They
Brian Casel:don't want it to be like tied to revenue.
Jordan Gal:So so it is tied to revenue. That's the thing. It but it's less But the fee
Brian Casel:is different. It's like different tiers. Like you're in the 50 to a million tier and you're
Jordan Gal:in the Yes. So once we understood that that was happening, we then had to relook at it from the customer's point of view on are we pricing right for them and for us? And what we realized is that we were looking at it, we looked at our feature set and we thought of our feature set as all of these features contribute to processing more GMV. Therefore, we shouldn't separate those features out into tiers. We should just give all the features to everyone because that promotes more GMV and we're a GMV based business.
Jordan Gal:All of a sudden when you realize, oh, you're not that directly connected to GMV. Now what we were doing, we were hurting ourselves and the customer by lumping everything in and charging one price. What we really doing is we were charging for everything and not everyone wants everything. So we started to separate out into a rally core, like here's just the checkout if that's what you care about. And then at the same time then then you start to tier it out between here's Rally core and here's Rally with the marketing features, with the post purchase offers and checkout links and order bumps.
Jordan Gal:And really what that created was a scenario where everybody won because the merchant was able to identify, you know what? I'm interested in the post purchase offers, but that's not where I want to start. Don't make me pay for that right now. Let me start off at your core offering and pay less and feel like it's my choice and I'm getting what I'm paying for. I'm not overpaying for things that I don't want.
Jordan Gal:So they were happy. Yeah. And at the same time, it allowed us to start the relationship at a lower price point and then work with our success function over the first twelve months to get them upsold when they were ready. Once we had a chance to show them the feature set and when they were ready to take it on, that's when they would sign up and that's when we go up a tier and the revenue and the net revenue retention would be great. So all these Yeah, so
Brian Casel:you're describing sounds like a pretty complicated and complex pricing structure, right? If you think about, like, the the SaaS that show all that on the front end, but you have the advantage of it's not shown on the front end. So for each individual prospect and client, you can present the pricings, probably still in a pretty simple way because you only need to show them the things that you've discovered are important to that client. Right? Like and you can you can sell them on the other stuff later priced differently.
Brian Casel:Right? So it's like and and this is a challenge that I have right now with, like, figuring out the different tiers. But, like, what you're talking about, sounds to me like something like Intercom or Salesforce. If you look at these pricing pages, it's like, oh my god, it's so insanely complex. How do you calculate which tiers for me?
Brian Casel:It's just insane. But
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You need more info.
Brian Casel:But I feel like once you put it all behind the sales process and not visible on the on the public pricing page, that's that's like where you gain all the freedom to have a little bit more complexity because you can custom tailor it for each client, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Now now we we don't have a pricing page.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:But but now now but now we can, which is such a funny thing. It's like removing the pricing page, doing everything behind closed doors in demos, in individualized sales process allowed us to learn the right way to package. And now we can publish a pricing page that shows the tiers Rally core, all the checkout features, Rally design that allows all the checkout features, but your team gets full flexibility and can build with our elements, all this other stuff. Then Rally marketing with the marketing features. And so you don't know what the exact price is, but you understand how we package it up.
Brian Casel:I was going ask, are you showing numbers and then it's like, contact us
Jordan Gal:You don't not showing show numbers, but you show the logic of the pricing point of view. Here are the types of packages. You have a lot of choice on how and what parts of the product you want. And then in the individualized sales process, you start to learn, okay, based on which tier you fall into in revenue, let's say you do $10,000,000 a year or $60,000,000 a year, the GMV multiplier, like the basis points will be different, for but you can still then decide what's right for you. You want to start with core, you want to upgrade anytime, you want to just jump right to marketing because you know you want everything.
Jordan Gal:But the funny thing is that we're discounting. Everyone's discounting. You have to discount these days. You have a list price and you have a discount and you have to show the discount. It's like, it's almost why wouldn't you?
Jordan Gal:You kind of have no choice. That's what everyone's doing. Now, if you take the full price of Rally everything with all the features, with all the marketing, with absolutely everything, and then you discount that and you make an offer, it's actually lower than if you gave a much lower price with Rally core and then upsold them over the first year. So it it actually optimizes for revenue by creating a lower priced tier and allowing people to choose that because that's right for them because they don't want all of your features. They're not ready for all your features.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So it's really interesting exercise overall. And then the the fun part was being able to say, well, alright. Well, next week's proposals, like, let's show this and and see what the reaction is. And all of sudden, it just gets adopted in.
Brian Casel:I like that because it's not just about lowering the price to get them to a budget that fits their budget. It's also about simplifying the product to help them make the buying decision that you know, Rally does offer us a it's not more than what we actually need. They actually offer us a product that is made for us at this level. And and then once they raise their hand for, oh, we need the marketing stuff, like, that's that's another sales conversation for down the road. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's been you know, we have some trepidation around sales and enterprise sales and that version of the of of selling overall from our experience. And a lot of our DNA is like, we're a little weary of salespeople and traditional sales. And so we've always struggled. How do we inject our authentic culture and how we want to treat customers and be known for that into it.
Jordan Gal:It's been great to be able to do that while keeping the business goals in mind. This pricing version is one thing and then how we present the timeline is another. So when we get to a proposal and we have the call, we're revealing the pricing, these three tiers and the numbers. For you, this is how much it would cost. The very next slide is our proposed timeframe.
Jordan Gal:And what we show is the amount of things that we will do before they have to actually sign. So what we're projecting is we're not gonna charge you for things that you're not using. It's your choice in your control, which version of the product you wanna use and how much you wanna pay. And our goal is that by the time you need to sign the contract, you know the team, know the product, and have confidence enough to feel great about your decision. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And we've gotten multiple comments on like, that's how people should sell software.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So I don't know if that's exactly how it's gonna look six months from today, but it feels like we've gone into a place that feels authentic for our personality and our culture and also is smarter in packaging our product and the eventual pricing. And keeping in mind the reality right now of our situation is that ARR and revenue are not the same thing. At Cardhook, didn't care because revenue was cash flow and cash flow is profitability and profitability was what we were after. Here, we need to show ARR and you do not get credit for certain things. The amount of revenue you get from the payment processor kickback doesn't count as ARR.
Jordan Gal:The amount of money you can charge for implementation and services doesn't count for ARR. Right? So all these things to optimize toward ARR are, you know, part of our new version of reality.
Brian Casel:Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I I don't think that we're on the final destination of what our pricing yet is gonna be. I think we're at a good point compared to what we were.
Brian Casel:Like, we we raised the prices a few months ago to better match what the new product features offer. Mhmm. But I'm I'm still figuring out. I think it's still like, I haven't found I don't know if we need to find, but I haven't found the single value metric yet. Okay.
Brian Casel:You you know, because, again, like, there there's courses, what we call programs, so you can so each tier has up to a number of programs, and then there's also up to a number of enrollments in your programs in each tier. And then we have spaces, so number of spaces, but also limit on how many members you can have in spaces depending on which tier you're in. And then we have access to features. Payments is gonna be on the standard plan and up. So I'm still trying to figure that out because it's like there we do have people who use all of oh, and, like, the number of templates that you can store in your library, that's different on each tier.
Brian Casel:So what's difficult about it for me right now is is understanding it's not as simple as just saying, like, okay. Well, let's just base it off of number of members in a space because all coaches are doing groups and but, like, some of them have, like, really small high value spaces with, like, just, like, 10 members. Others have, like, hundreds, but they're paying a lot less. Or same thing with, like, the number of templates in their library. Like, maybe they're not even using spaces, but they do have 200 different templates that they wanna store in their library.
Brian Casel:All of a sudden, that bumps them up into into our top most tier. Mhmm. And it's like but but they're more on the lower end of the revenue and client base scale, but they still have a lot of content to to store. So it's like, I'm still trying to figure out, like Ricky. How to handle all that stuff.
Brian Casel:And and so far,
Jordan Gal:like It's not seats. It's not It's not like No.
Brian Casel:It's not seats. And we do a bit of per user pricing, but that's not significant for us because we have a lot of solo coaches. We have a lot of, like, a coach plus an assistant and an administrator, or maybe a small coaching team with, like, three to five coaches on the team. Like, yeah, they do pay for those team members. But in the in this space, it's much more about, like, number of clients, number of content, number of members in the spaces, number of course enrollments that you're doing.
Brian Casel:But and even though, like, the the way they might opt like, the those products and courses, communities, coaching is pretty similar across the customers, they charge very, very different amounts. They're in very different industries. So, like, you know, what is considered a, quote, unquote, big customer versus a little customer doesn't necessarily reflect in, like, the number of objects in the database that they occupy. You know? Mhmm.
Brian Casel:So I'm trying to figure out, like, how to how to handle all that. So far, it's like it's it's like most people on on your average usage, you're gonna start in our middle tier if if you want most all of the features with with, like, a healthy amount of of limit available to you. If you really just want unlimited everything, you're going to the top tier. And then even that is there's a few things that have limits. And for those, I'm offering, like, some, like, invisible add on subscriptions that you can upgrade to.
Brian Casel:But, that's that's version I guess it's, like, version two of the pricing. We'll we'll see what version three looks like at some point.
Jordan Gal:True. On on my side, the thing I'm currently focused on on a day to day basis is we have had difficulty finding a great account executive. So a salesperson to basically fill the gap in the process that I'm currently in and Sam is, he and I are kind of going half half on it. We've been looking for about four weeks. We found great people, fantastic people, but not quite right for the first hire and now.
Jordan Gal:Right. So the person needs to be super fluent in e commerce and be an individual contributor in terms of like just jumping in and selling. And it's just been it's been difficult to find. You know, we there's an issue in the e commerce space when you're looking for people to hire. Anyone who's been in the Shopify ecosystem for too long is going to be shocked by how different it is outside of Shopify.
Jordan Gal:One of the key elements is it's a much simpler sales process with Shopify merchants. And one of the reasons it's less complex is because there's basically no tech team involved in in the decision making. It's just really the marketing team and the tech team is always or almost always subservient to the marketing team on for a Shopify branch. Right? That's why they're on Shopify because they don't want to do tech.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And outside of it, have to you have to convince the tech team just as much as the marketing team. And so we've we've talked to people who have been great, but they're used to doing, you know, 30 deals a month for the app for an app that is being sold to Shopify merchants. And you can do that with Shopify merchants because they kinda say yes or no pretty quickly, and it's not that complex. In our universe, if you sign one good deal a month, you're you're a hero. And so there's there's a mismatch.
Jordan Gal:So let me ask you this. Some some some live advice giving here.
Brian Casel:What? I don't know if I'm the best on enterprise sales.
Jordan Gal:I mean, what what it's not it's conceptual. Right? So the my battle is do we look for a pure individual contributor? Someone who is just a salesperson and has done well at other companies and has been early stage enough to not lose their mind without all this infrastructure that they might be used to. And all the person does is create opportunities and close deals.
Jordan Gal:Or the other version of it is someone who will eventually be a leader and hire other salespeople underneath them once they figure out the process. And they're jumping into the individual contributor role for six months, nine months. But then the goal is definitely to, okay. I got it. I know how to sell this thing.
Jordan Gal:Now let's go hire two more AEs, and I'll show them how it's done.
Brian Casel:Alright. I have a couple of gut reactions to that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Okay.
Brian Casel:I want you and all the listeners to take this with a massive grain of salt. Yeah. Whatever. A lot of it, I don't have direct I have some direct experience with it, but I don't know if it applies to the enterprise level. All that being said, number one, knowing what I know about your process, I think that there's a clear separation between what what you just said, creating deals and closing deals to me are two completely different people and roles.
Brian Casel:Right? Like, you have Drake, I think you said is is his name. Right? Yep. He's the SDR.
Brian Casel:He's he's creating deals. He's Yeah. He's putting new opportunities into the new opportunities into the pipeline. So that's that to me is more of what you might what people might think of as a traditional, salesperson. Like, he's out there activity in establishing new relationships, knocking on doors.
Brian Casel:Right? Like Yep. The closer is in in my experience, looks a lot less like what you might think of as a salesperson, but just more like a really strong communicator, really strong project manager, point
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Consulting Yeah.
Brian Casel:Consultant makes things happen. I mean, in audience ops and even going back to restaurant engine, all of our sales were always inbound. So so we didn't even really have, like, the SDR aggressive salesperson thing happening on the front end. It was all inbound, like, high intent. They requested sales consultation.
Brian Casel:And but and this is how my approach to sales too, but also the people that I hired when I took myself out of sales was like, I basically just promoted, like, great account managers into a sale who who just happened to be, like, awesome communicators. They were great at sales because they could take a new lead and explain to them how things work and help them get comfortable with working with us. Like, that's that's what I think of as an account executive. Again, it might be very different in in an enterprise sales cadence, but, like, I think it's just more much more about, like, a a great listener, a great, like, understanding their needs and connecting the dots for them and speaking their language and that that sort of stuff. There was something else I wanted to touch on that you that you asked about.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The maybe, like, the that person and a and a manager again, different.
Brian Casel:To me, the idea of hiring someone now to fill that role with the hope of that same person eventually becoming a manager, that's to me, that's like cart before the horse. Like, just get the just get the great account executive in because that solves the immediate problem. Right? Like, if if it's like the immediate problem is, like, take Jordan out of the sales role and just put a great person in, the the manager part is sort of the next problem for a little
Jordan Gal:bit later. And you Yeah. Like, I can play
Brian Casel:a And separate that's a separate solution. Right? That that's probably a different type of person, different type of role.
Jordan Gal:You know? Yeah. It's someone who has moved up. I just really worry about someone who has been managing then jumping into the individual contributor role to the degree that we need them to. If we hire an AE, pure AE, then I can basically play a bad version of a sales leader, sales manager for them.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And show them what works and what we've been doing. And then at the same time, be like, if you see problems, feel free to fix. Don't just follow my lead.
Brian Casel:You know why I think it's important to go in sequence on that is because it's a super important role to this this AE role. Like Yeah. They're they're extremely client facing. It's gotta be someone that you really trust and really like for that role. If if the idea is to just hire the manager first, then it's like the this brand new manager at Rally's job to hire the AE, you can't put that much trust right away with a with a totally new manager to hire this super important AE role.
Brian Casel:Like, I think it's you're much better off, like, getting the perfect person, in your opinion, for the AE job. And then if they if down the road a year or more, they are like management material, then then they go up to that or not. Like but but at least you've you've really solved that problem well, and you can find a good manager later on. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I feel a lot of pressure around getting it right. And I've been much more hesitant to make an offer because of that. Because You know, because you're
Brian Casel:not you're not hiring the person Risky. You're you're not hiring this person to to hire the right to to have that person hire the right AE. Nope. Nope. They gotta gotta come in
Jordan Gal:and close a million dollars in ARR in the next twelve months period.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. I think there's it might be a little bit different in sales, but I think that it's sort of similar where it's like a great developer is not necessarily gonna be a great dev manager. And and many of them don't even wanna be. You know?
Brian Casel:A great salesperson is probably great with relationships. They may or may not be good at managing other sales reps. You know? Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:We've gotten to the point
Jordan Gal:where I expect us to engage with a traditional recruiter that specializes in the AE roles for ecommerce outside of Shopify. So, like, you know, there are people that do that. We've we've met with one or two, and we're going to pay whatever 25 percent of their salary and and just bite the bullet on that expense because it feels so risky to get it wrong.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Yep. The only thing I have left here is the same question that I bring up a lot on this podcast and deal with on a day to day basis in my whole business life here, and that is I am a solar fa solo founder and striking a healthy balance between working on product and working on marketing and sales, which those two are two separate things too, but put them in one bucket for now compared to product.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right.
Brian Casel:That's the two sides product. Yep. Yeah. Marketing versus product. As a solo founder, I think is especially uniquely difficult And and also in the early stage, like I am.
Brian Casel:Like Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Have have you come up with anything that works for you in terms of, like, one week this, one week that? Certain date Yeah.
Brian Casel:I've I've sort of been keeping my ears open on this question of, like, how other solos do it. And I've you hear a lot of stuff, like, there's the the maker manager schedule as it as it's known as I don't know if even maker manager is the right term for it because I guess I don't know. I just think of it as, like, product and and marketing. Mhmm. I it it hasn't really clicked for me in terms of, like, exactly one week on product and then exactly one week on marketing and then exactly one week on product.
Brian Casel:It's never that clean in my experience because it's usually because the product stuff takes way more than one week to make meaningful progress on. In one one version of that for myself that I think has started to work a little bit is to just think of it think about it in very clearly defined shippable projects on both marketing and product. Right? So so for example, like, this past month, I I defined two very, like, two sales projects. One was startup called Outreach, and that involved and and, like, what does done look like?
Brian Casel:Right? It it means, like like, research and decide on the on the tools and the stack that gonna use. I spent a day on that and then, research and decide on how we're going to be sourcing prospect lists. I figured out a game plan for that. And then, like, set up the infrastructure, like, the get the email sending domains, like like, set up set it all up so that it's ready to go, start warming them up, all that.
Jordan Gal:Like And that's all and that's all to avoid doing one task here, then one task there
Brian Casel:Yes.
Jordan Gal:And going Like, the product
Brian Casel:and then the mark. Avoiding unfinished projects just sitting around. I'm always that drives me nuts is having too many open loops. So that was one project. Another one was, like I talked about earlier, setting up the sales demo flow on the website.
Brian Casel:And and just clearly defining, like, what is done look like? You know? The form that has these steps and then it connects to the email and then it's done. Right? You know, those two taken together was probably a week of work, like two or three days on each of those.
Brian Casel:And I and I couldn't work on product during those days. I I was shipping those marketing projects or sales projects. I mean, I have developers that I work with. So so I have prefilled their queues. So they're making progress on their work while I'm working on marketing.
Brian Casel:But, but, you know, now I've shipped those. So now I'm back to product, and and I have a lot of important work to do there, both in, like, scoping and delegating some projects for my developers to work on, and, like, the payments feature is the big one. There's another important one which gets back to activation. And that's like improving the how our coaches invite their clients. We have a flow for that.
Brian Casel:It's not great. We need to improve that so that our client our coaches can easily get their clients on board. That's that is definitely a key factor in getting them activated and adopting the product. So gotta get that kind of fixed up. So I'm working on those things, which is good.
Brian Casel:But, like, I another thing that I struggle with, and I have not figured out any solution to this, is just the context switching. Other than just, like, taking a natural break in between, like, shifting from marketing projects to because, like okay. Like, the other day, I I finished that sales demo project. Right? Like, shipped it.
Brian Casel:It's live. Done. Right? Like, even finished it sort of, like, in the morning hours. So, theoretically, I should be able to, like, have lunch and then just start working on the product.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right. Product. Right. Along with the environment shifting.
Brian Casel:It's yeah. There there's definitely a mental I I just find myself that I'm mentally sluggish. Even though I have, like, a whole afternoon open, like, ready to start that next
Jordan Gal:Yeah.
Brian Casel:Product project, like, I kinda need a whole night sleep or or, like, a day off before I can get back into, like, technical product mode, you know, coming off, like, sales mode.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I sympathize, but don't understand that that context switching in terms of, like, getting getting into development. For me, the the the the most successful version of this I have is when I need to write an investor update, I I get out of the house and I go to a coffee shop.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I do that one. I'm sorry about this morning.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yes. Okay. That's so next week. So I, you know, I do this, like, legal pad system of of to dos, one is tasks and the other one is projects.
Jordan Gal:So, like, I have a prod. These are the things that I want to make sure I get right. Right? Like, start a new banking relationship to set up a line of credit is like a project. Right?
Jordan Gal:And then I have tasks. So, like, what do I wanna knock out today? And then I have little asterisk next to the ones that I'm like, do this by the end of today. Right? Some of these other ones can spill over.
Jordan Gal:And what I find is the projects, which is the more important list. I have trouble getting to because I'm focused on the tasks. And so next week, I'm running this little experiment on like setting some coffee shop time so that I have time set aside to focus on projects instead of tasks. Yeah. And we'll we'll see how that goes.
Jordan Gal:But there's a great coffee shop near the house. So I'm on a every time I go there, it makes me happy. So I'm like, okay. Well, why not just go
Brian Casel:there more? There you go. I love it. I mean, you getting back to being solo is like it's really diff what is actually really difficult about it is that it's never as clean as like, this is marketing week, or this is product week, so we can only work on that. What the reality of what happens is, at any given day, I'll I'll I'll get an email from a customer that says, like, when are you shipping the payments feature?
Brian Casel:You know? And that and and, of course, that email happens to come in during the week. I'm working on sales projects. Yes. Yes.
Brian Casel:So I I'm like, well, it's coming soon, but nobody's working on it right now because I'm working on sales.
Jordan Gal:You know?
Brian Casel:Like, that's constantly happening, and it's really, really frustrating. And plus, I'm I'm also the only person doing these sales demos, so there goes my my afternoon today because I'm doing a bunch of those.
Jordan Gal:Right. If that if something gets set up, then that takes priority. And yeah.
Brian Casel:Of course. Yep. I
Jordan Gal:I chuckle at the irony of how often my great plans and a two hour time block, and I set that aside. And right when I get started, then, like, one of the kids comes home and my wife is like, I'm stuck. Can you help me give a ride to someone? I'm like, yep. It it it just happens, and maybe maybe the truth is I let it happen.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But it's so really it's really hard to manage time.
Brian Casel:It's just no way around. You know, just to, like, not give the wrong impression, like, I I do have people that I delegate to. So, like, for example, like, ads is just an area that I'm just not set up not not suited to be running those myself. I I've got a great consultant who's working on that. I've got a marketing assistant.
Brian Casel:She handles a lot of, like, blog content and and podcast editing and stuff like that. So so there there are definitely things that happen that I can hand off. But but then I'm still, like, tracking their results and giving feedback on stuff and and, you know, giving them instructions or new tasks to work on, which all adds to my inbox.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Well, the good news is that we get another week next week to try it again, try to get a little bit better.
Brian Casel:And kids are at school.
Jordan Gal:Ah,
Brian Casel:yes. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Thanks for listening, everyone. Good to
Brian Casel:see you. Later, folks. See you.
