Compensation, Content, & Speed
Bootstrapped Web. We're back. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?
Jordan Gal:It's going. It's Friday. I was in Austin this week. That was
Brian Casel:Oh, I love Austin. I miss Austin. I've been here in a while.
Jordan Gal:It's it's a beautiful city. It's pretty messy.
Brian Casel:Is it? It's been a couple of years since I was there, actually.
Jordan Gal:Look. I was on 6th Street, so the messiest part of of the city. We had a great time. The event was good. The the whole deal, the bar that we went to was cool.
Jordan Gal:We hit we sponsored a happy hour with Bear Group and Adobe and, you know, other partners. Did a panel. It was it was great and beautiful city and big. Right? It's like a college town, but it's a real city.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Beautiful buildings, but messy. Homeless people sleeping on the street. Yeah. You know?
Jordan Gal:Shady characters hanging out on the corner, the the whole the whole deal. Party town.
Brian Casel:Dude, it's like it's such a weird thing in America in the in these last few years. Mhmm. We're gonna we're gonna kick it off right into the societal It's
Jordan Gal:some doom
Brian Casel:and gloom.
Brennan Dunn:Let's do it.
Brian Casel:I mean, you know, what's weird, I was I was talking to a friend. I think I was talking to Charles about this. He's from Boston.
Jordan Gal:Oh, yeah.
Brian Casel:And, you know, I grew up around New York, and you'd I you don't see the homeless issue in Boston and New York currently and for the last there's some. There there's always been some.
Jordan Gal:Sure. But not nearly the same
Brian Casel:thing. You're seeing in in few other yeah. And we we we're
Nathan Barry:at a micro comp in Denver last
Brian Casel:last time. I mean, man,
Jordan Gal:so many mess.
Brian Casel:Yeah. DC. It's like it's it's it's kinda it it's incredible. The other thing that we were talking about was, like, when we were growing up, when we were kids, that was not a thing. Like, going to seeing the nation's capital, going to DC, or going to any any of these cities, like, you don't see these tent cities like you see now.
Brian Casel:It's Yeah. Yeah. It's Yeah. Yes. I hope
Jordan Gal:yeah. Hopefully, it's kind of hitting a a bottom, and we'll come back up with some sanity and policy and all that. But so I was at a bar that we did a happy hour. It was about 10:00 at night. I basically just didn't get a good meal the whole day because I was in the conference.
Jordan Gal:I'm not not really hungry, trying to focus, and then we went to, you know, one happy hour, then another. I'm eating little finger foods. I was like, I'm hungry, and I am not willing to take a walk by myself at 10:00 at night. And, you know, I'm a a man and, like, pretty fit, and I I was not interested in going take a walk by myself for a few blocks to look for food.
Nathan Barry:Right.
Jordan Gal:Yep.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yep. Gets a little gets a little dicey. Yeah. Well, we're in the we're in the comfort of our of our quiet suburban homes here.
Brian Casel:So
Jordan Gal:Yes. I mean, that's that's you know, it's not why we left, but that general, like, environment in Portland became very frustrating.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I mean, after we left, like, a few a few months ago, they they found a dead body in my the schoolyard of my kid's school in Portland.
Brian Casel:Yep. Oh my god.
Jordan Gal:Someone someone went to the back of the school and OD'd. You know? Like, so that like, yeah. That's, you know, that's as thank goodness a kid didn't find the person. It was it was an adult, but but jeez.
Jordan Gal:You know?
Brian Casel:Oh,
Jordan Gal:man. So, yeah, we we we when people here ask us, why'd you move to Chicago? And we're like, stability. Yeah. We came looking for the nice, boring Midwest so we can focus on our kids' education and work and and our our day to day lives.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And I think we talked about it at the time, but, like, you know, you work in an industry where you could just get up and walk if if the if the local situation is Mhmm. Less than ideal, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. That's right. Anyway. Anyway, it's Friday.
Jordan Gal:How was your week?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Pretty good. I think I feel like things are getting a little bit more hectic, more different projects, different things competing for my focus on a day to day than I than I typically like to have. Okay. Some of that is self imposed.
Brian Casel:Some of that is just a lot of stuff happening. But but, yeah, wrapping up the week feeling okay about things. I I feel like I I have gained a lot of clarity on on a bunch of big decisions and directions, for what I'm doing. I I talked some about this last week, about the the trajectory for Clarity Flow. You know, I I just wanted to, like, kinda clarify.
Brian Casel:I got some some messages, which I really appreciate from from some folks, after last week's episode. ClarityFlow is very much going going strong, like like, totally kicking, like and and a lot of the decisions and the things that I'm working through is, like, finding the right path to keep it going, long term. You know? There there's definitely no there's definitely no end in sight here on on Clarity Flow. It's it's going you know, we we're about to ship, Clarity Flow Commerce, which is our our big payments feature, the ability to connect your Stripe account and and sell subscriptions, sell sell one time purchases.
Brian Casel:All that stuff is is planned to ship in, here in November. And then, courses and community that, like, we shipped these features a few months ago, and customers have been really, pretty excited about these things, like moving their their coaching groups and their coaching cohorts into into Clarity Flow and off of these, like, generic course and community tools. So, that's been really cool to see. We shipped some some improvements to that this this month. But, yeah, we're just you know, we're we're continuing to to hammer away, and, and I think I've got a good a good plan in place to sort of adjust resources as I as I move forward, all optimized at, like, keeping the team in place, keeping our our road map intact on Clarity Flow long term and and really letting this thing grow.
Brian Casel:You know? Give and giving it, like, time and space to grow. I think that's the thing. What you know, kind of removing some urgency is is part of what I'm doing to to speak
Jordan Gal:It it sounds like your biggest challenge is is how to distribute your your attention and energy, right, more than anything else.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I think part of the reality as as I'll be a little bit more public about as I as I move forward is, you know, I'm gonna have to probably get back to splitting my time a little bit between, you know, something else that that sustains me and as but also, like, sustains my career as an entrepreneur, without putting all of the eggs and time and resources into the one SaaS business. And I know there's a lot of debate over, like, oh, you gotta focus on one thing versus the other or versus multiple things. Mhmm. So I think in this case, as I move ahead into 2024, it's it's less about, like, wanting to split my time and more about the the necessity to keep like, it's weird, but it's like, this is the way to to keep, like, sustaining Clarity Flow without going out and raising more investment or selling the business or or letting it completely, like, gut the business of of all of its resources.
Brian Casel:Right?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think it's really important what you're doing by, a, talking about it and, b, not letting, like, almost like a a set of built up expectations dictate what the right thing to do is.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That that's the that's like the the maturity required is you gotta make your decision on on what the best thing to do moving forward is.
Brian Casel:And I
Jordan Gal:clarity flow without raising more money, keep it moving forward, then sometimes you gotta go, okay. I'm gonna go I'm gonna go split attention and come back later, come back when it makes sense.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it's it's not impossible. I I did that for many years in my career. And it's just it part what it means to bootstrap, frankly, is to go slower. As as difficult and as frustrating as that is, especially for someone as impatient as myself Mhmm.
Brian Casel:That is the trade off. Like, you know, raising a lot of investment is a lot of times that buys you speed. And if the decision is to not go that route, then then at some point, it reaches a level where it's like, well, this thing can sustain, but it's just gonna go slowly. And and, like, we see, you know, we see growth, and we see improvement, and we see a lot of excitement about the product. But sometimes it's just not enough to, like, you know, hockey stick growth in time for for runway to sustain itself.
Brian Casel:And, you know, this this also comes up a lot with with our podcast here. I I'm sure you you hear messages like this. I know I do, or at least I I hear people follow along with our stories. That's what we do here. Right?
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And and I really do think that the that the pivot from ZipMessage to Clarity Flow was the right one and really going all in on on coaches. I I all of that is having the intended effect. And but I think the thing about having this podcast and being so public and sharing the story, which I love to do, it just the fact that we are on microphones talking about it gives gives the impression that it's bigger than it is, frankly. You know? And and I hope that I I think that you and I are transparent enough to to not try to mislead people about what's happening.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. You know, we're not we're not papering over the the hard work.
Jordan Gal:Never done that. We've we've always looked at that version of things with mistrust, disdain. That's we don't wanna do that.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. Of course, there are things that we can't talk about publicly, but we're but I think that we're we're both totally honest about things. But still, even despite that, I think just the fact of, there is this extra level of, like, don't I know, like, bigness that comes when you share publicly on on any sort of podcast, even a small one like ours. You know?
Brian Casel:So, you know, I just wanted to, like, kinda kinda talk about that, like you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I think it's I think it's important. And and somehow we have found ourselves on a podcast called Bootstrap Web
Brian Casel:where both of us, like well, we're we're we're kind
Jordan Gal:of pulling apart these different forms of experience Because as I hear you say, you're balancing on time and speed and the non binary version of if this doesn't work, then it's over. You know, I I juxtapose that with my experience and I'm like, oh, I'm accelerating toward the wall. But that is what I chose to do. Yeah. And and I don't I'm not splitting my attention, not because I don't think I should, but because I that that has been foregone
Brian Casel:as an option. That's the calculation that you've already made. Yes. Yes.
Jordan Gal:That's right. Had a lot of thought recently. Yeah. It it does make sense, but it it is difficult to get into that mindset from one version to the other. Right now, going into this season, this Q3, Q4 before the first half of the year where all the selling happens, my intention was to hire one salesperson.
Jordan Gal:And we decided to hire two. And that's not a small thing. It's a very expensive position, which I want to talk about a little later on the podcast. And really that calculation was, well, what what are we doing here? Like, they're holding back is pointless.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Looking to change the runway calculation by two weeks is What
Brian Casel:was the so the decision to go with two, is is that Yeah. What was the decision there? Was it did it come down to like, I've I've heard the classic advice, especially with salespeople that it it helps to have multiple people kind of
Jordan Gal:That was a factor. That that was a factor because for all the reasons that people make that argument. To be able to compare the two, to not assume that the one is gonna work out perfectly, to get different perspectives, all of the things went into that decision. But underneath it, the decision to take on the additional expense, really the north star of that decision is, well, well, what are we doing here? You know, we we gotta go.
Jordan Gal:This is binary. We either grow fast enough to attract more capital or I do something else. That that's really the calculation. And that's that's okay. That's what everyone signed up for.
Jordan Gal:That's what everyone put money in for, and then what everyone signed their employment agreements for. The the the everything's aligned.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah, man. Did you want did you wanna get into that?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Sure. Let let's get into that. I was gonna go back to toward attention or something, but but let's let's talk about that for a second. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:We have we have a a debate, I guess, a conversation happening internally in the leadership team around the topic of compensation of salespeople. Yep. Over the last year, I keep saying six months, but it's really let's call it a year now. We have moved from a product led distribution with platforms type of an approach to a firmly sales led approach. Even when I think about marketing, it's to support sales because we're just trying to get people into the pipeline so that the salespeople can bring them along into through that complex sales process.
Jordan Gal:The way we're doing the account based marketing, identifying visitors to the site and having SDRs reach out. The fact that we have two SDRs and two AEs and currently no marketer. Right? We just signed up with a marketing agency.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The whole funnel flows flows through everything.
Jordan Gal:The sales. That's right. Yeah. Demo, the pricing, the positioning, everything is toward that. So this the these two AE hires that they both signed, we have one starting on the thirteenth and one starting on the November 20.
Jordan Gal:So we checked the box. We went recruiting, we didn't get the right candidates. We hired a recruiter and paid up for the recruiting and we got great candidates. We interviewed, we made offers, both are signed. It's it's almost like, okay.
Jordan Gal:So they're signed, right? Like their employment agreement is done, meaning their compensation is set. We have like a quota plan. We have like the Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like, like, what can you share? I know it's hard to share a lot of this stuff
Jordan Gal:publicly, but, I can share.
Brian Casel:Know what I'm the the approach to to compensation. How does that work?
Jordan Gal:Yes. So the approach of compensation is effectively fifty fifty between base and OTE. OTE is on track earnings. Meaning, you hit on target earnings, excuse me. If you hit your targets, this is what you make.
Jordan Gal:So it's fifty fifty. Call it, you know, if it's a hundred and two hundred k, one fifty, one fifty, 200, 200, like that. And then the ratio is 25% of quota. So OTE equals about 25% of quota. If you wanna make 300 k OTE, meaning a 150 k base, a 150 k incentive, then you need to bring in four x that in ARR.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. 300 k OTE equals 1,200,000 ARR quota. Okay. So that is like, that's basically the most important math for both the salesperson and the company. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Additionally, if you don't hit your targets, you make less than 300. Right? The one fifty base, you get the one fifty We're just gonna go we're just gonna go with one fifty and and one fifty for a nice straightforward example. Mhmm. If you bring in 2,000,000 ARR, you're gonna make more than 300.
Jordan Gal:So what we have right now for the first time is we are hiring people who are gonna be the most highly compensated people in the company. And they'll make more than me and more than Rock and more than Jess and more than leadership and more than everyone. Yeah. So it does legitimately beg the question Mhmm. If that is a if that's the right approach.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's so hard. I I have no what the what the right approach is on this, and really what a solution is on this. But theoretically, it you know, they are adding just as much value, may maybe or maybe even in some ways less value than what the rest of the product team puts in.
Jordan Gal:A backend engineer that's been working with us for eighteen months has added a tremendous, tremendous amount of value that has leverage. Right? That person contributes and every customer moving forward benefits. And the team benefits from the code being good. And everything else, the same thing goes for front end, QA, DevOps.
Brian Casel:And they get, know, they they get compensated with with a healthy salary, but, like, the the question then is, like, if even if at their at their max salary, it it it wouldn't come close to what a a high performing AE would be making if if they're having, like or exceeding their their quotas. Right?
Jordan Gal:Yes. If we just take the 25%, like, doesn't work out exactly like this, but just look at it as 25. If a salesperson comes in and adds 2,000,000 in ARR next year, let's just say they make $500,000. Right? We have people who've been on the team for, like, two years working to make the product good enough so that it can command a price of a $100,000 a year.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:And then the the salesperson comes in and benefits from that great product that everyone contributed to and then makes a a lot more money.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So And like the one thought and again, I I I this doesn't seem like the solution to it, but the one thought that I had about like, okay. Well, how does the rest of the team get if if the if the if the sales team gets compensated or gets the the bonus on on the initial sale, the rest of the team that that's where something like profit sharing comes in. But profit sharing is so far in in the distance. Exactly.
Brian Casel:What what profit and, you know, and and it's like, why should the the rest of the team be, like, kinda close that gap so far down the line in the success of the company. Right?
Jordan Gal:Yes. The the best argument is a risk reward argument where really they're just getting their base. Yeah. The salesperson. Everything above the base is risk, and they are being compensated for taking on that risk of the ability to close business.
Brian Casel:Like like, for me, the the risk that if if you if you call it a risk reward, then the base would have to be lower.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So okay. Perfect. Perfect segue. Agree.
Jordan Gal:Like, mathematically speaking, if it's a risk of
Brian Casel:base is if the base is, like, more or less the same as, like, a high level product person. Right?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So I you know, so that that's, like, the perfect place to go in the argument. The issue is the base, who's the base decided by? The market. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So and that's the and that almost ends almost ends the conversation.
Brian Casel:The best candidates.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. That is kind of the issue right there that you can make you can put together the logical argument for both sides. You can write There's always part of me that watches the Wolf of Wall Street and wants a company full of insanely ambitious people that wanna get rich by working at your company without all fraud and jail. Right?
Jordan Gal:But in theory, some of us, you you watch that movie and you're like, oh, they set up an environment for lunatics to make a lot of money. And you know who makes the most money? The owner of the company. So I I like that concept in general.
Brian Casel:I I always find it difficult to, like, understand the mindset of all the different roles in a company because I only have the mindset of the founder.
Jordan Gal:Of the owner.
Brian Casel:Of the owner. You know? Like Yes. So may like, maybe maybe this is just something that that we think a lot about or we maybe stress over a a lot about. But somebody who is a professional at their craft in product management or UI design or UX or marketing.
Brian Casel:They just want a good career in what they do, or or or the or maybe this is a real question about compensation and and balance of things and fairness, if you will. I mean, I don't think
Jordan Gal:that there's I don't think
Brian Casel:there's there's necessarily anything unfair about the about what the market demands in terms of pay scales. You
Jordan Gal:know? That's right. The truth is that you can think it's unfair all you want, but to go against the market guarantees not attracting the best people.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Right? There there is an element that equity plays, like, you know, stock options, that they play a role. The people who joined Rally when it first started are in a far better position with their stock options.
Brian Casel:The strike price a more, like, under understood reality of things. If you're the owner, if you're the one of the earliest people in in the team, like, you
Jordan Gal:know Right.
Brian Casel:Yeah. No one touch financial benefits to to that. You know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. No. And and and there
Brian Casel:there's some real and I feel like that is more straightforward risk and reward. The Yes. You know, the founders starting a company from nothing or early employees, like, betting their career on joining us extremely early stage idea stage. When they were starting.
Jordan Gal:Nothing to make sense of it.
Brian Casel:Yes. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And that that's in stone. You know, the the the way the market works for stock options is you can't just make up the strike price. So you're getting a $4.00 9 a valuation from an external source, and that's what the strike break is strike price is from then on. So there's no going backwards.
Jordan Gal:Right? When you come in, it's like a penny. And and now it's no longer a penny, and you you you can't go back. They're only the people that came in early. So it does have a way of working itself out, but of course the equity only turns into cash in the event of some type of an event.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. Yeah. So it's tricky. When I talk to the absolute best salespeople, there's just no going around the existing market dynamics.
Jordan Gal:And if there's anything that I've come to terms with over the last year is that this is not like my own company that I control. And at Kartok, we never really had salespeople, and we were able to treat people very fairly. Almost in, like, a family business sense. I'm like, this is what's right to do, and everything was determined by this is just what feels like the right thing to do, and that's how our policy is gonna be because we're deciding the policies. Now it's not like we're being imposed on.
Jordan Gal:It's like our VC investors are forcing us to be unfair. Absolutely nothing in
Brian Casel:the store. About, like, the the direction of being so sales driven. Like That's right. The reality of this strategy.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You you wanna go and be very fair? You're not gonna attract the best candidates. You're not gonna trust the bet the best candidates. You're gonna give your your company a lower chance of success, and then you're you're being irresponsible.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yep. So a lot of it has just it's a bit of a, I don't know, ethical and moral sacrifice, but it's it's a it's a reality. It's like, okay. Fine. I'll I'll make certain compromises to go along with market realities.
Jordan Gal:And so, you know, if someone comes in and and brings in 5,000,000 ARR because they're really good at closing deals and they make a million dollars next year, I mean, God bless. What what else what are you supposed to do?
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and I mean, I think that those dynamics, the realities sort of reveal themselves at all stages of this. Right? Like, you like, that's the reality that you're pointing to right now. And, yeah, there it might theoretically feel like there's some some friction there.
Brian Casel:But is the is the friction actually real with or is it just something that you're questioning? But but if it if it is something that becomes real with, like, the rest of the team, that would reveal itself, and then that's a new problem to solve. And you can course correct if if and when that happens. But as far as I as far as I'm aware in in the industry, which maybe I'm blind to this, is, you know, that that dynamic between product team and sales team and fairness and and and compensation, that it's I don't know. Maybe it's there, but maybe I maybe I don't know that that you know, like, it's like that that's the issue that you deal with later if it if it pops up.
Brian Casel:But it but it's not like that's the strategy that that you're going.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. My my assumption is that it exists. I mean, any form of, like, public company, right, Salesforce, any, like, any sales driven software organization, it exists. In VC, b to b software, it exists. I mean, that that's who we're hiring from.
Jordan Gal:Yep. You know? We're we're hiring from our peers in the industry. They're leaving those companies and coming to us. And it's it's if you if you can't match what their expectations of their career are, you're just you're gonna be priced out.
Jordan Gal:How can you expect them to do that when when they have the ability? The best people have the ability to choose the right opportunity. So you have to match the reality of the market. Yeah. But but it's but it's what I called it is it's a worthwhile conversation to have.
Jordan Gal:It should not be dismissed because because it as a leadership team, we do need to get ourselves to a place where we are comfortable with certain things and then define where our limits are.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I agree. It's a worthwhile thing to to think about and to talk about, and I think it was a it's a good segment for this kind of podcast too. You know? Like Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Put put this kind of stuff out there for sure.
Jordan Gal:Well, what do you got going?
Brian Casel:Right now, like, my my project that I'm working on in Clarity Flow is self serve demos into self serve onboarding. So Okay. Earlier this week, I shipped basically, I changed on our on our ClarityFlow marketing site, up until this week, there was, like, a secondary call to action. It was the first one is, like, sign up for a free trial. The second one the secondary is it used to be request a demo.
Brian Casel:Now I just changed that to see a demo. So you click that, and instead of leading to my calendar and booking a live sales call, that now leads to, you know, like, after you put your email address in, so we capture that and you're you're now in our in our list and we can send you emails. The next page that you see is a recorded demo. It's actually several videos. I think it's, like, five or six videos in, like, a sort of a, you know, a a, like, a tabbed interface, and you can go through them.
Brian Casel:I I recommend going, like, in order, but the user can skip around to the to the features of Clarity Flow that they're most interested in learning about. I recorded all fresh demos last week, so this is, like, the newest look at the product. It's not any of these, like, outdated zip message videos that I
Jordan Gal:that I had. Okay. Recent.
Brian Casel:Yeah. All all the showing off all the new features, the the core stuff, the community stuff, the, you know, the programs, the, all of it. And, I think it does pretty well. And and then it, you know, we've we've still had the same, if not more, people requesting access to this. I mean, it doesn't look all that different on the front end except for the change in the in the word of request a demo to see a demo.
Brian Casel:The only difference there is they now go to this recording. And then while they're viewing the recordings, there's a button to start your trial, or there's a button to ask a question. And they can ask a question, and that leads them to a Clarity Flow intake page where they can submit a video or audio or text question. And now they're in a Clarity Flow asynchronous q and a conversation with me. Okay.
Brian Casel:And so, you know, a little bit of dog fooding the the product in, like, the presales conversations there. And that's you know, so that that I think that that not only eliminates all the sales calls that have been just plopping themselves onto my calendar every week. I think it did get to a point where I I'm actually not as effective at delivering a sales demo as as the recorded demo is. You know? Because, like, it got to a point where Clarity Flow is sort of the we we merge together three or four big pieces of the product, like async conversations, programs, like to run a course, community, like group spaces for your coaching programs.
Brian Casel:So we, like, merge these things together. And then the the fourth piece that's coming out is is commerce. So, like, sometimes a sales lead, I'd be on, like, a live call with them, and they would just be like, well, but but how do I do this or that? And then and then I'm, like, jumping between these different areas, and it doesn't quite make sense unless I weave them together in a in a sequence and sort of, like, step them through, like, how all these things actually. Even though they're four separate things, they they do integrate perfectly together, and I need to demonstrate that.
Brian Casel:Right? So I think that the videos do a better job of that, but then they still have the the option to sort of click around. And then my next step is to take basically the same videos, slightly modified to have the same sort of sequence that's on like, in the onboarding experience. So after you sign up for your trial I haven't shipped this yet. That's coming next week, which is, like then they'll be able to, like, really see, like, a a a much better guide, like, guided tour of the product.
Brian Casel:And I'm not going with, like, one of these, like, interactive, like
Jordan Gal:Like, tooltip stuff?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Not the tooltip tour thing. Because, again, it's some users might wanna start with with loading in their course. Some users might wanna start with setting up their coaching group cohorts. Others might just wanna fire up some async conversations.
Brian Casel:So I'm just showing you the video guides on how these things work, and you can click your way through the interface and and but, like, this, like, setup tour is is gonna be readily available, whereas currently, it's it's not yet. So that's been that's been sort of lacking. And I this is all aimed at improving the conversion rate of trial to to paid and you know? Because I think that we get too many pretty good fit customers coming through our funnel. Like, they should convert.
Brian Casel:They're they're good they're they're coaches. They have good coaching businesses. We're a perfect fit for what they do. But there's too many people who are coming in, they just feel a little bit lost or they they can't find the features that they're looking for. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:And and hopefully, this putting this video series right front and center should should help with that. So that's my project right now.
Jordan Gal:Right. So it's, like, more efficient, maybe a bit more risk on asking them to do it on their own. I feel like a lot of people like to do stuff on their own these days.
Brian Casel:They do. And and that's that's also part of the reason why I want to avoid the the heavy handed, like, tool tip. Hey. You click this button now, and and let me let's let's go through a tutorial together. Like, no.
Brian Casel:Like, just watch this four minute video, and there's a little button. If if this is not for you, just click skip. And then, you know, you can go to another one. Or if you wanna skip out of the whole thing, just skip out of the whole thing. And then it's all gone, and there's a little button in the menu if you wanna bring it back and refer back to it later, like, you can get back to the tour.
Brian Casel:Like, it's all like, that's that's what I would want out of these tooltip tours. You know?
Jordan Gal:Right. Self directed.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So that's that's just the current project. And then other than that, I'm just trying to weave together, like, you know, keep keeping to like, keeping on pushing on Clarity Flow, managing my developers, and thinking about the bigger picture and and some new directions that I'm putting together for for next year. You know? K.
Jordan Gal:Cool. Yeah.
Brian Casel:What do you what else you got?
Jordan Gal:So we are starting with this marketing agency this month, and the onboarding with them has started. And so we're what I'm trying to do is set the overall point of view and strategy, mostly around evangelizing the problem as our North Star, talking about the problem, identifying it, pointing out that that it exists, defining it, everything with the problem being first and foremost. And we have to come up with specific ways to do that because it is right. We talked about the category creation issue and the relative lack of awareness and the and and what's worked for our
Brian Casel:Awareness of the problem.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. Because because people don't think they can use a different checkout. Or maybe they're a little bit educated, but they've seen our competitor, and they they do things pretty differently than than we do. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And right now, it's kind of thought of as, like, one click checkout, and that's not really what we offer. So we we have to get the problem right. Along with that, what what's revealed itself as a problem for us is we don't have the muscle to publish content. And I'm not even talking about, like, content marketing that puts thought leadership out there and drives people toward us with our content. I'm talking like the nuts and bolts of a feature launches, and we write a blog post about it.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Or we we meet a great agency partner, and the first thing they say is, let's start out with some content. Let's just write something together. And we just don't have that muscle. It's it's a it's a result of individual decisions that I've made.
Jordan Gal:First, our marketer, the person who really led those efforts went on maternity leave. And then she came back and then soon after I decided to go with an agency instead of an in house marketer. So, you know, the this it's a problem of my own making, but I seem to have trouble figuring out what to do there.
Brian Casel:I feel like most companies have have trouble with this.
Jordan Gal:Really? Because it feels like everyone else has it figured out and I'm the only idiot. It's one of
Brian Casel:those No. I I don't think so. I think that most especially SaaS companies the the only ones to meet, the only ones that do okay. What just to be clear for folks, when we talk about content, I believe that we're talking about, like, true, like, human stupid term, but
Jordan Gal:thought leadership. SEO.
Brian Casel:Like, not SEO. Not just, like, you know,
Jordan Gal:not But communication from the company to the outside world.
Brian Casel:Yes. Yes. The ones that do that the best are personalities. Personal brands, essentially. True.
Brian Casel:You know? That's the most authentic content that there is. That that's what you wanna go for is authentic authenticity. Right? But when it when it needs to be a function of a product company that is not like a personal brand company Right.
Brian Casel:That's that's where I think most companies struggle. And Okay. That's what most companies are. They're not they're not usually personal brands. Like, if you look at 37 signals, I feel like they are very personality driven.
Brian Casel:That's why their content, love them or hate them, they have two founders who are extremely vocal, and it's it's, like, natural for them to be vocal. And that's why they've grown a large audience over the years. You know?
Jordan Gal:It it is a superpower. And at the same time, you know, you don't have to strive toward it, but you you do need to figure it out as as a company.
Brian Casel:So And I'm and I'm definitely not saying that, like, that's the way, especially for a SaaS company. I think that's not the way, to be honest. Like, to to be to be, like, purely personal brand audience focused, I think that's great if if that's your business. But if you're a SaaS business or, you know, like that, I I would not necessarily recommend, like, being a person you know, a personality driven thing. The way that I I'm approaching it with Clarity Flow, and we've certainly not totally figured it out, we we keep it we we've been experimenting with different approaches to this.
Brian Casel:We do the SEO stuff, which is a lot of AI driven kind of stuff. We're actually getting more going deeper down that direction with more programmatic SEO, but that's not what we're talking about. That is that is more like technical, programmatic, SEO driven stuff.
Jordan Gal:Right. Different thing. You're actively tracked. Yeah. Yes.
Jordan Gal:Yes.
Brian Casel:The the one the one thing that I did go into in terms of, like, what I think of as, like, brand content is you know, so so this is within the realm of ClarityFlow. Right? And and also keep in mind that, like, I consider ClarityFlow to be not my personal brand, and I don't intend to wrap my personal brand around Right. ClarityFlow. But I'm a solo founder with a very small team, so I am putting myself in some things.
Brian Casel:One one thing that I did was I recorded about 12 interviews with coaches. I did this over the summer. And a lot of them are Clarity Flow customers. Some of them are not, but they're all coaches. And they're, like, forty five minute interviews on podcast mics and on video.
Brian Casel:And we're releasing them as, like, a season of a podcast, and we're releasing them on YouTube. And we're we're cutting those YouTube videos up into, like, three or four videos per episode, which is, like, a ten minute segment of, like, us talking about a specific topic. You know? Like like, for example, this this episode of you like, every Bootstrap Web episode, we probably covered, like, three or four big topics. So we would cut we don't do this for Bootstrap Web, but, like, for this one, we we would, like, cut, like, ten minutes where we talked about the salesperson stuff.
Brian Casel:Like, that would be a a segment. And then, you know, so that's what we're doing with with Clarity Flow. Right now, we're we're starting to drip them out, and so I have so all I did on that was I did the recordings. I show up. Like, I I, invite the person.
Brian Casel:They book on my calendar. We do the hour long recording session. I pop it into, you know, whatever, Riverside and Notion, and then my assistant does the rest. She she did the video editing, the audio editing, the publishing, and then she cuts them up. She puts them she schedules them out on social media, and, and that's what we're doing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I I it's great. I I need to come up with
Brian Casel:And and, like, out of that approach.
Jordan Gal:I need to hire a writer, do it myself, something, but I I I need to get off of whatever situation we're in right now that it makes it like it's a big deal to publish, you know, a few paragraphs. It shouldn't be a big deal.
Brian Casel:There so so the the question and I still have this question of myself on on that little project of, like, the Clarity Flow podcast and and YouTube content. It's like, why why did we even invest the time on that? It it didn't take a lot of my time. I just did these these calls, which frankly were pretty enjoyable talking to our best customers. But out of that, we're able to generate video testimonials because there's always a segment where they talk about how they use Clarity Flow, and that becomes a video testimonial that we'll publish on our site.
Brian Casel:It's content that other coaches can relate to because they know, our customers wanna see content of or stories from their from people who look just like them. And a lot of these people have pretty large audiences, so they can share it out. So that that's my thinking.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's great.
Brian Casel:I love it. The the other type of content that I that I'm the solely responsible for right now is, when we release a new feature. And I I kinda wish I didn't have to do this. I just don't have a a good solution for another person to do it. But one of the goals when I redesign when when clarityflow.com was redesigned at the marketing site, we essentially set it up so that we have two blogs.
Brian Casel:One one is, like, SEO articles, but the other one is just what we consider like a company blog. And and on the company blog, I'm the one who who I write a short write up whenever we have a new release of a new feature. And I also usually record a video with it. So I record a video. I'll write a couple paragraphs about what the feature is, why it's important, and, and I publish that to the blog.
Brian Casel:I write a newsletter to the to the list with the same sort of content. I link from the newsletter to the blog, and I put out a social media post with the video. That's basically the the process. And I try to do that, like, about twice a month whenever you know, that's sort of the cadence that that we're releasing stuff this year. But that's a lot of work, man.
Brian Casel:Like like like, I put a lot of work in just shipping the feature and polishing it up and working with the dev team and getting that out the door. But then it's like, the day that it ships or the day after, I have to spend, like, at least half my day writing that stuff up, shooting the video, you know, just getting all the details right and the because I don't like, my my assistant little thing. My assistant can, like, edit and publish videos, and she can do SEO articles. But she doesn't have my knowledge of the product and why a feature is important to our customers. Like, that's only me.
Brian Casel:And yeah. I don't know how to I don't know how to outsource that, but it's
Jordan Gal:I don't I don't know either. I it's it but it's a problem, and I'm determined to figure it out.
Brian Casel:I would think that in a company with a larger team, I would think that that that sort of content, like feature release product release content, that should probably come from, like, the, what do you call it? Like like, product manager or lead product designer. Like, whoever's whoever's the one responsible for mapping the customer's needs to what we're gonna build in in this sprint or whatever. Right. When you when you put that game plan and the person managing the team on that, I feel like that person should also be writing up the the release blog post.
Jordan Gal:Maybe. Maybe I it's possible that I could go to them and and and ask if if they wanna take that on.
Brian Casel:Or at least, like, put having them interviewed by a content creator or write up a bullet point list of what's important about this and then an actual writer puts it into
Jordan Gal:a Yeah. That's that's that's my current thinking. My current thinking is a little bit of internal plus external help. Mhmm. Because I I feel guilty that I don't just do it.
Jordan Gal:But when you say it and, downplay how much work it is, you can commit yourself, oh, it's not a big deal. It's a few paragraphs, but it's not. It does take time.
Brian Casel:It's a lot of little things. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And I am I think you mentioned it earlier in the podcast. I am pretty overwhelmed with my task list at the moment.
Brian Casel:And
Jordan Gal:our super generalist on the team is out for a few weeks. And as soon as that happened, I'm like, oh my god. Because he did a lot of things around sales.
Brian Casel:It's a pain because it's like, we ship features and and it's deployed. It's on it's on production. And, like, the last thing that I want the the the thing that I wanna do most after it gets out to production is start working on the next feature. I don't wanna spend a whole day creating content about the thing that's already live. But that's the whole point of releasing features is to let our customers know that that we've released a feature.
Brian Casel:Right?
Jordan Gal:Yes. It's it's, you know, it's valuable for people who use the product, but it also has significant marketing value.
Brian Casel:Exactly.
Jordan Gal:Not to mention the general marketing value for the company in the sense of momentum and new features coming out on a regular basis. And just visibility, literally views. When someone sees your product over and over and over again in front of them on LinkedIn and on Twitter and other places, it's it's better for you.
Brian Casel:The other thing that I've started like, this this year, we've been releasing a lot of features, right, like, on on a pretty regular clip. I think we're coming to the end of a of a really big push on the product now. But the other thing that I noticed is that, like, just because you announced it once, most people are not gonna notice it. I still get you emails. Should be
Jordan Gal:posting it for months.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I started doing, got enough emails or messages saying like, Hey, I'm waiting for your programs feature. I'm like, Oh, we shipped that four months ago. How did you miss that one email newsletter that I sent about it? There's no Of course, probably most people delete most emails or they miss them.
Brian Casel:Right? So what I started doing is, I wanna do more of this. But one thing that I do is in every product newsletter that I send out to say, like, here's the new thing that we shipped, There's always a section near the bottom. Like, in case you missed it, here's the last four features that we shipped. And just link back to those product blog posts.
Brian Casel:And just keep like, every newsletter has a set of, like, three or four things. So, like, everything is getting repromoted. What I wanna do, I haven't done this yet, is set up, like, an automated email sequence that just goes out long term over many month over, like, the life cycle of a of a trial subscriber that,
Jordan Gal:like, every two reveals over time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like a like a like a feature highlight email. We don't have to say, like, this is brand new because it's not new anymore, but it's like, hey. Check out our payments feature. You know?
Brian Casel:Or the or or the did you know, like, we have a mobile app? I mean, we do have an email about the mobile app, but
Jordan Gal:you know? But the the repetition is is required. Yeah. I I love from, a, like, a business, like, respect point of view, this agency that we are working with, I think they're so smart to do things the way they are. Effectively, what it allowed us to do, it's almost like a land and expand approach where we sign with them, the monthly retainer is super low.
Jordan Gal:But as soon as we now have a marketing agency on board, everything I think of, I email them. Do you do LinkedIn posts for the founder? You know? Yes. We do.
Jordan Gal:Let me connect you with the social media person. So by the time plan for that. Yes. Within three months. We haven't even started with them, and I've emailed them twice already.
Jordan Gal:Like, do you have this other service also?
Brian Casel:I love it.
Jordan Gal:My guess is within three months, it'll be double or triple what we initially signed with them on. But it really let us make the decision. There's like there's a lesson in there
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah.
Jordan Gal:For software, for coaching, for consulting. It's just if you wanna work with the person and they wanna work with you to not make the initial hurdle, this big giant decision Yep. Is is it's smart. It's working.
Brian Casel:Yeah, man. I don't know how much more time we have left, but one of the things that I'm starting to do, I guess I'll be a little bit more open about this now, is as I as I'm talking about, I'm looking for the beginning the the beginnings of starting a new thing, a new a new big direction in my career here. And one of the things, maybe, no surprise, is I'm looking at starting to offering, like, a private coaching service to, like, a a very limited number of of clients.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:And I've I've done some coaching in the past, especially around, like, productized services.
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm not Yeah. How general are you being?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm not so focused on that. What I what I am focused now on is product strategy. And, you know, especially software teams. And one thing that I'm interested in, and I'm starting to have some conversations with with some folks.
Brian Casel:So so I would say where I'm at right now in this journey is exploration. I'm sort of like sniffing around and poking around and having some conversations with people who I think sort of fit the type of person who could could maybe benefit from someone like me, working with them or working with their team. And my thought right now, this is super rough. I'm just gonna kinda talk about it publicly.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:Is so product strategy is is the theme of of what I'm focused on. And what do I mean by that? I mean, like, making decisions on your product, making business decisions about your product road map, taking technical considerations into bringing a product to market, finding shortcuts to to get to market faster, given some technical realities of of what needs to be built. You could also weave in customer understand understanding of the customer, customer research, jobs to be done, taking that stuff and mapping it into actual development of a product or a feature road map. And the people and so I so when I start to explore anything new, I always try to start with the person.
Brian Casel:Like, who who would this be for? Mhmm. And I think that there are two kind of avatars that I'm thinking about, but one a little bit more so who I I just put them on on paper or on on a Notion document, and would call it, like, a nontechnical founder of a SaaS or or a cofounder of a SaaS. And this person does not intend to get their hands dirty in the code. They're not a developer, but they are at the head of a tech of a of a pro of a technical product company.
Brian Casel:So if if I come in as, a in a in, like, a coaching capacity or, an advising capacity to help make sense of some of the technical decisions that need to be made around the product, the road map, maybe sort of like translating between the tech nontechnical founder and their technical team or technical partners, helping to collaborate on on on, like, the shaping process for a product road map. You know, that's the stuff that I live and breathe every day, and I feel like I I could be valuable to, either a single founder or or their team, in some capacity. And that's the thing that I'm sort of poking around to see if if there's something there. And I'm having some conversations with folks, and it's interesting to see, like like, some of them are, like, in more established, like like, later stage SaaS, and they and they and I'm sort of surprised to see that they have some some pains or gaps, and then others are a little bit earlier on. And they they have some needs, but they have concerns over budget.
Brian Casel:And so I'm just sort of, like, trying to understand what's here. So that that's one that's one direction. The other one, I don't know about this one, but it's it would be someone who is also not, like, full stack, but they they they would like to take a similar path that I personally took. Like, if you go back to 2017, 2018, I spent that year transitioning myself from being just a designer to, to being a full stack product developer, you know, learning Rails, going from just front end to Rails, or someone who is, like, maybe heavily into, like, no code tools, but they want to be able to supplement that with some actual coding skills to be able to bootstrap and ship their own products, like, bringing their their own products to market. And even back then, that year, like, I did work with a coach, a a couple different coaches who sort of supplemented my learning.
Brian Casel:Like, I did some courses. I did some practice projects. But what helped me the most was having another more experienced product developer to answer my questions, help me bust through roadblocks, and tell me the ways that things are designed. So that's another area that I'm that I'm exploring and and trying to maybe help some earlier stage founders who wanna, like you know? And, like, the the angle on that would be, like, I'm not gonna teach you enough to go get hired by Google as an engineer,
Jordan Gal:but I Right. I'm gonna help you in I
Brian Casel:I can can help you, like, bootstrap and ship a product Yeah. Without kinda having to only rely on, like, no code stuff. You know? So that and, you know, it's gonna be super limited. I I only have, like, a limited availability for this sort of thing, but it's like a first step into what I think might be, like, a larger theme for me, going forward, you know, in terms of, like, product strategy.
Brian Casel:So Cool. Just wanted to throw that
Jordan Gal:out there. I'm interested to see, you know, where where you dial that in to kind of, you know, give, yeah, give people an option. But it does sound like you're you're looking to help people that were in a very similar position as you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah, man. And it's like it's interesting. Like, how do you even, like, start this sort of thing? You know?
Brian Casel:Like like, literally starting from nothing. And and and so I'm still kinda navigating that. Like, like, I did, like, post a blog post on my personal blog for the first time in a while about how I think about product strategy and sent that out to my list along with some survey questions. So that sort of got the conversation started with some folks. I have I also wrote up, like, a Notion page.
Brian Casel:That's sort of like a draft, like, sales page for this sort of service. That's how I start to make sense of, like you know, I I I start to, like, write out, like, what would a sales page how how would that need to to read from a copywriting standpoint? I haven't shared it out, but I guess my next step on that would be to sort of, like, make a list of all of my closest contacts in the industry to, number one, just get their feedback on this. Like, tell me if if this makes any sense. If like, just how does this read to you?
Brian Casel:And then, you maybe out of that would turn result in some, like, introductions to folks who might be a fit. So Yeah.
Brennan Dunn:I don't know.
Brian Casel:It'll be interesting to to see what's here.
Jordan Gal:You know? I agree. Well, I am off to elementary school fundraiser, gala thing. Oh, So I'm gonna that's put on a suit tonight,
Nathan Barry:try to
Jordan Gal:be a normal human, try to put all the worries of the world on pause for a little bit, go out with my wife and have a good time, raise a few bucks for the local local school.
Brian Casel:Very nice. I think we're gonna do a little, date night, go out to the movies this weekend. It should be nice. Grandma's gonna come over and watch the kids.
Jordan Gal:Nice. Sounds great. Hell yeah. Thanks for listening.
Brian Casel:Later, folks.
