Funnels & Websites
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Bootstrap Web. Brian and I were just working out. Who does the intro? Yeah.
Brian Casel:Turns out Yeah. So here we go. We're gonna try to fit in a quick one. I'm gonna go shut the window before the landscapers Okay. Get on this podcast.
Jordan Gal:Perfect time. That's right. Well, it's Friday. I got my challah. I got my I got my pastries.
Jordan Gal:New pastry today.
Brian Casel:What are we talking?
Jordan Gal:At Hewn Bakery. I I don't know how to pronounce it. Koinammon? K O I G N A m m A n? Koinammon?
Jordan Gal:Koinammon? Oh my god. Like, coconut cream filling with, like, a like, a fruit tart thing going on at the same time. Great way to start the day. My stomach unhappy, my mouth very happy.
Brian Casel:I'm into a lot of that. I I don't know that I'm into the coconut. That that usually ruins a pastry for me.
Jordan Gal:I do not like coconut myself. This was just a coconut cream, but it was actually just pretty mild cream.
Brian Casel:Interesting.
Jordan Gal:It worked out. But that's I'm
Brian Casel:on coffee number two right now. So I'm gonna I'm gonna try to hold hold back the energy and and keep it. Pretty strong.
Jordan Gal:Have you have you tried Comet Coffee? The the way I'm addicted to Comet Your Coffee? I
Brian Casel:I make the espresso at home. Yeah. Like a Americano. Okay. A couple of those every day and Fair.
Jordan Gal:Fair. I do cometeer in the morning.
Brian Casel:I try to get it in, you know, before noon, 01:00 max. Otherwise, I'm not sleeping.
Jordan Gal:All of your coffee consumption before noon?
Brian Casel:I push it to like one.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Okay.
Brian Casel:I guess Yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's that sounded unreasonable to me, but the truth is I just have an espresso after lunch and that's usually my last coffee of the day. Mhmm. And that's at about, you know, 01:00. Yep. Yep.
Jordan Gal:There's a lawnmower. Oh, you hear
Brian Casel:it? Alright.
Jordan Gal:Just a touch. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Alright.
Jordan Gal:Brian. What do we got going on? What do we got going on? I'm like I'm like a new I'm like a SaaS indie hacker.
Brian Casel:I'm Okay.
Jordan Gal:I'm like 28 years old right now.
Brian Casel:I'm never done this before.
Jordan Gal:Yes. I'm I'm asking questions on Twitter. I'm going into communities, Ripple specifically. I'm posting things. I'm asking people for ideas.
Jordan Gal:I'm evaluating landing page software.
Brian Casel:I'm like the I'm I'm kinda
Brian Casel:like the opposite. I'm like the
Brian Casel:you're technically older than me but I'm like I feel like I'm like the old guy who's like burnt out and and disillusioned by SaaS and and trying to figure out alternatives to
Jordan Gal:I was you know,
Jordan Gal:just there with you like ninety days ago. Okay? Yeah. Dude, I it was really I was right there. I mean, I literally pivoted and gave up on a product that I worked on for like years.
Jordan Gal:So I feel you. And I have it's been actually been interesting to see where the motivation and energy comes from.
Brian Casel:And Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And and my wife like notices it. She's like, you got a little you got a little bounce going on. Little zing. Yes. With work.
Jordan Gal:Nice. And it's you know what it is for me? It's the self serve nature of the product.
Brian Casel:It's really interesting.
Jordan Gal:And and how much how much agency that gives me, like the impact that I can have on improving things.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Yep. I I can like I can feel the direct connection whereas in Rally, there were several steps removed from the things that I did and the decisions I made to the impact. Because it was like salespeople reaching out to people, trying to get them on calls, seeing what kind of inbound. And I could do my biz dev thing and I could do you know, talk to investors and get intros and that sort of thing. But it didn't feel very connected to any outcomes.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I I love today, like Friday and and this start has become sort of a pattern for me this year because especially when I when I start getting loaded up with consulting projects. Right now, I'm on one and it looks like I'm gonna have a second one coming up like next week or so. When I am working on products for for clients, I I really crunch all that into like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and sort of wrap it up by Thursday.
Brian Casel:So that by the end of Thursday into Friday, that's like my time.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:Now, like we do this podcast on Friday but I but this is also my day to hack on my own stuff. You know, I I squeeze in more of it like in other parts of the week too. But like, this is where it's like I I've already shipped some good stuff for for the client project yesterday. So Mhmm. Today I'm like I feel actually more relaxed obviously and like open.
Brian Casel:But I'm also at a point today where you know, I I've been talking about ripple.fm and that's been like the last personal project that I shipped and it's out there live. It's got a couple 100 users on it. We have a community for Bootstrap web listeners. It's it's linked up in the show notes if if you haven't found it yet. Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's really cool. You know, you you and I have been active in there and and just talking to our listeners. It's great.
Jordan Gal:I love Ripple. I find myself thinking about it several times during the day. Started to use it as a sounding board that feels more private than Twitter.
Brian Casel:The I've gotten there already.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Go ahead. Because
Brian Casel:I You've been hopping in there with with with questions about your work and stuff. Yes. I love to see that and what's really cool about it is, yeah, we could ask the same types of things on Twitter, but but we The the difference here is that you know that the people seeing this also listen to us. It's like they have so much extra context.
Jordan Gal:Yes. You have to explain And Twitter has that to a degree, but you kinda have to close your eyes and have faith that the people you want to see it are the ones that see it and respond because they have the context. This is just context is assumed. And but I gotta I gotta tell you. I got a list of feature requests.
Brian Casel:Oh, I know. I I
Jordan Gal:want a message board. That's what I want. I want a message board. I want more conversation. I want liking like all this stuff.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I'm hacking on some of those today. But you know, we could talk about we could talk about future requests for it but I but I also wanna What I'm thinking about personally is like winding down my time investment on this thing. Because it is a side project and it's not a business yet.
Jordan Gal:To to let it to let it run a bit.
Brian Casel:Let it do run. I I want it to grow. Right? And I put a little bit of growth hackery in there. There's some like email Yeah.
Brian Casel:Engagement stuff going on. I I'm I'm hoping that like podcasters can help spread it with their followings. I see it as an interesting way for people. Like I have a private podcast and I'm treating it like my newsletter. It's like a way to for me to be connected.
Brian Casel:I think it's better than like trying to grow a Twitter audience or you know. But I am I'm also thinking about like I gotta work on other products that Sure. That can make money sooner. Because this is this is like a thing that might be monetized in the future but it's just a thing that I just hacked on.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And the feature requests are not nearly as important as the fundamentals being there and people coming in and just using it for what it is and
Brian Casel:look feature requests are like things that I want as a as a user of Ripple. That's why I'm like deploying them today. I'm like, you know what? I kinda want this to be that way so I'm gonna deploy it.
Jordan Gal:But we just, you know, we're just kind of in your hands there and wherever you wanna take the features, you feel free to do so. It has opened up new new things in my mind. I I want to talk more about the business. I wanna talk in more detail. I want I wanna start a private podcast.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:I don't know what a private podcast is. I don't actually Okay. I I just wanna explore.
Brian Casel:Let just let me just kind of rant on on why I'm
Jordan Gal:excited about
Brian Casel:this. Okay. Again, I don't know if there's a business here or not and I'm hesitant to to put too much time and energy Sure. Into it. Okay.
Brian Casel:There's a few different angles on the value here. And there's already some like magic. Like you're you're talking about it a little bit. But like Mhmm. First of all, as let's talk about the public podcast side of things.
Brian Casel:Right? Like we have a public podcast. There's been a few other public podcasts who have come on, and it's like instantly, you come on and it's like, wait. There's 40 of my listeners? There's 60 of my listeners right here in this message board?
Brian Casel:Like I can go message them now. Yeah. Here are their faces. Like that's sort of a magical feeling. Like I felt it once I started seeing all these Bootstrap web listeners coming up.
Jordan Gal:Right? A communication channel.
Brian Casel:Tyler King from from from he runs Less Annoying CRM. He his podcast is Start Up To Last. You know, he hopped on and he was telling me and this starts to make sense is that like, Ripple can sort of serve like a better podcast website. Like if you if your podcast is hosted already somewhere else, you know, usually the podcast website itself, like our pop our podcast website for Bootstrap Web is like, it's there. It's just a list of episodes.
Brian Casel:There's no communication. There's no discussion. It's hard for us to manage. This could serve as like a better even replacement for the podcast website, if not a link to your official community. Alright.
Brian Casel:Let me talk about the private podcast thing for a second. I don't even Y'all don't even know if like the term private podcast is right for it, but here is how I see it. I think that it is a better it's like a new alternative for audience growth or network growth. The the whole concept here is like grow your network. Right?
Brian Casel:So like the traditional ways that we all know about are start an email newsletter. Try to get thousands of subscribers on your email newsletter. Or and or tweet. Try to get a lot of Twitter followers. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:A YouTube channel. Try to get thousands of subscribers on your YouTube channel. These are all of There's no Like when you have a huge audience, you're You have a ton of power to do stuff and it's great. I think that there is a middle ground between large audience with that's like on these big platforms with big algorithms and spam inbox filters and you know, and all that. And there's a I see having a private podcast as a more direct line between me and my most engaged people that I'm connected to.
Brian Casel:You know, for example, when I put out a tweet, chances are most of my actual followers, people who follow me are not even gonna see my tweet due to the algorithm. Yep. The algorithm is is gonna bury it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You you seed control to the algorithm. You you don't
Brian Casel:have control. Yeah. Same thing with email newsletters. If I send an email newsletter to my I have a hand A couple thousand people on my personal email newsletter list. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:There's a pretty good chance that most of those like Gmails and and you know, Outlooks and whatever are are going to suppress the email and put it into the spam inbox or put it into the promotions tab or whatever it might be for Yeah. Some stupid reason.
Jordan Gal:No. People love newsletters the day they subscribe and then they hate them every day after.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And even if they see my newsletter, they see so many that they're probably just gonna skim over it. Mhmm. But if you subscribe to my podcast, whether it's Bootstrap Web or my private one that I called what's next. If you subscribe to that, you're listening.
Brian Casel:Like you're listening out when you're walking, when you're washing the dishes, when you're driving. Like we have an actual relationship and you're literally spending time and giving attention in a way that you're not giving attention to people that you follow on Twitter. Like to me, that is a much more interesting Like I'm much more interested in having 50 to a 100 subscribers on my private podcast than having thousands on my newsletter or my Twitter followers. Like the the 50 are so much more valuable to me being connected in that way. That Mhmm.
Brian Casel:So if I can if if I can make Ripple be seen as like, I don't know, like a better way to grow your network without having to have a huge audience. You know, like it's it's it's just a different channel for for putting your ideas out there and having people listen to what you have to say. You know? I I don't know. Like And and like I don't know how how do we make this a product or a business that can actually grow.
Brian Casel:I I don't know that the answer to that. So, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think that's the part where you don't you don't need to know. Yeah. Whatever magic is happening, just keep harnessing it and then kinda see where it goes. And it's partly out of necessity that you need to just see where it goes because you're not gonna focus all your time on it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like I've And I think that would I've already moved on to other product ideas. I'm starting to hack on stuff that could be that could actually be an actual business a lot sooner. But
Jordan Gal:Cool. But this
Brian Casel:is something that that's there and Bootstrap Web has we're we're still And I I've set it up as a leaderboard too. So now when you when you go on, you you can not only search for your favorite podcast, you see the list of podcasts where for right now, we are still number one on the leaderboard, baby. Hey.
Jordan Gal:We we Whatever advantage we can take, you know, that's fine. Yeah.
Brian Casel:But I I would be more than happy for for the other podcast to overtake us by sharing Ripple with their audience.
Jordan Gal:Right? Just just my first million just needs to come in and just claims your podcast page and then there you go. Yep. Yep. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Well, look. This week this week we started advertising and it has been very interesting.
Brian Casel:Alright. What are we learning?
Jordan Gal:Okay. What we're learning is we have I think we we've talked about it as like we have multiple hurdles. We need to see if we know who to target. Then we need to see if we can get those people to the site. Then we need to see if we can convert them to trial.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Then we need to see if we can convert them into paid. And then we can see if we can retain them. Right? So right straightforward kind of funnel scenario.
Jordan Gal:But the self serve nature of the sign ups and the fact that we are able to just turn the faucet on by by spending money on ads has has created a lot of pressure right at the point of the of the landing page. So after someone clicks on the ad.
Brian Casel:Question though. Okay. Yeah. Okay. About the about this step in the funnel.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Okay. You're you're about to talk about the landing page but I'm curious about the ads. Like how easy have you found it to actually go buy traffic? Like targeted traffic.
Brian Casel:Right. Like, you know, because like, can can you spend money and get hundreds of visitors to the website?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So so Meta, I I have a friend on Twitter. His name's David Herman. And he he's an ad buyer, media buyer guy for like great brands. He complains about meta endlessly.
Jordan Gal:You can you can you can feel the torment through the tweets. Mhmm. And I've always just kinda felt bad for him, but you know what are you gonna do? We started messing with Meta and I immediately understood to a different degree what he was talking about. So dealing with Meta ads is is not easy.
Jordan Gal:I think if we did it without an agency, I don't know where we would have gotten. First of all, my my ad account is banned. I I have no idea.
Brian Casel:Dude, the the web of nonsense of just trying to like log in to your or meta account. You can't tell manager like, I've been in that web of a nightmare so many times that I've given up. I I just don't I I don't spend money there.
Jordan Gal:It's Okay. So I have to kind of acknowledge that, like, yes, you can buy traffic. Like, my answer to your question is yes, but I cannot leave out the amount of friction required to get through.
Brian Casel:Dude, the number of different Unbelievable. Admin interfaces for business owners on the Meta network is I don't know how any professional builder on the Internet This is like malpractice. This is like product malpractice. That that's what it is.
Jordan Gal:It's it's So it is as severe as Brian and I are making out to be. So I have no access to our meta ads because for some reason, my personal ad account is banned and anything having to do with business manager and advertising is connected to your personal Facebook. Ridiculous. Have no idea how to appeal it. I'm I'm just locked out.
Jordan Gal:I'm the founder of the company and I am locked out of anything to do with it. Thankfully, we hired
Brian Casel:At a point where I'm like, how does Meta actually have a business? How do people spend money? I tried to spend money with them and they
Jordan Gal:They make an enormous amount of money. Small
Brian Casel:thing. Like I think
Jordan Gal:you gotta be like David on Twitter who does this for a living every single day
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And just cries through it. That's it. So once we got through that friction, yes, we can buy traffic. Now, there are we are in the ramp up period so our ad account is currently throttled so we can only spend like $50 a day. Our our target spend per day is several times that.
Brian Casel:Okay? So we but even that Okay. So so can you get clicks though and and are those clicks
Jordan Gal:We're not clicks. We're getting sign ups.
Brian Casel:Sign ups. Nice.
Jordan Gal:So we're spending so here's what I did last night. I'm not gonna share. This is partly why I want a private podcast because I wanna be able to talk about this stuff. I don't wanna share the numbers here. But what the numbers do for me is I say when we spend $50 a day, we get this much traffic and we get this many trials.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. That means if you let's just round numbers here. Let's say if we 10 x the the the daily spend. If that then 10 x's the daily sign ups, and then I multiply that by 30 and then I multiply that by a conversion rate from trial to paid and then I multiply that by an average revenue per user and then I remove from that the amount of ad spend plus the ad management that we're paying the agency and oh my god, this is a real opportunity. Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:So, of course, it never works out according to that math quite the way you want The
Brian Casel:the math changes as the as you've grown numbers and
Jordan Gal:Yes. But it's still important to just go through the math and say, am I even playing the right the right game here?
Brian Casel:Yeah. So that I I guess what I was asking though was that like What I was asking was like, especially since you're in this AI space. Yeah. And it and it and you know, we talked about how you're sort of in this like new category. How easy or difficult is it to find targeted users who are like actually interested in in that, given that it's a new space?
Jordan Gal:Okay. So there's there's some very interesting things around this. I'm gonna I'm thinking back to yesterday when one of the founders of the agency that we work with sent me a talk that he just did at a conference. And it's a it's a twenty minute talk. I'll ask him if it's okay if I share it.
Jordan Gal:If so, you know, I'll I'll tweet it. And the talk was about targeting. Exactly what you're talking about. How do you find people who are interested in your thing? And his take on it was that over the last few years, there have been significant hurdles thrown in the way of good targeting, specifically around privacy
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And Apple's updates.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Okay. What we've talked about this in the context of e commerce and how much it impacted e commerce and Apple's plans to build their own ad network, all these other things.
Brian Casel:Yeah. For for the for those who might not be up to speed on it, it's basically like about a year ago, Apple like they they show you a pop up whenever you start using a new service like do you wanna share your information with Facebook or with Google or with whatever this is. Right. Most people opt out of that.
Jordan Gal:Right.
Brian Casel:But
Jordan Gal:the biggest thing is that they have made it very difficult to track conversion. Yep. And so you can advertise, but then you don't know who's converting and then it's very difficult to keep targeting based on that. Right? That's the machine that Facebook built through the interest graph.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. Okay. So Hamza, the the founder of the agency we work with, one of the founders, his talk was based on the fact that the new version of targeting is the algorithm. And so what platforms like Reels and TikTok do is they effectively do the targeting work for the advertiser, and they do that through their own activity graph. If I watch something on TikTok and I spend more than six seconds on it, they log that as a factor.
Jordan Gal:If I like something, they like it as a factor. If I follow someone that they their behavior impacts my interest graph also. So his Right. Argument is effectively what you need to do is create good content and then let the algorithm do its thing. It's that's basically your best option right now.
Jordan Gal:Let the algorithm go out and find the people, and the way to do that is to create good engaging content, and then the the the algorithm will put you on to the right graph and and show your content and your advertising to the right people which is why they make their ads feel like content.
Brian Casel:Right. We talked about the video ads and so so that that's sort of like seeding content and like stuff that can be engaged with which informs the ads platforms on how to serve your ads.
Jordan Gal:Right. You're yes. You're at their mercy but it also means that they have by far the best data available. They know views, likes, connections, DMs, they they see absolutely every bit of behavior and they have a lot of interest in your ads being successful.
Brian Casel:It seems less about like I feel like couple years ago it was more about like uploading your customer list and doing like look alike audiences Mhmm. And analyzing them and now it's more like, let's just trust the Facebooks and the Googles and the algorithms of the world to they're much smarter than than whatever retargeting we might be able to do.
Jordan Gal:Right. Given the constraints around privacy and tracking Mhmm. You're better off with the algorithm doing its thing. And I think we talked about this last week. What this agency is doing is is mixing content type with script.
Jordan Gal:So one content type will be like man on the street. So it's the guy walking on the sidewalk holding his phone. That's one content type. And another one will be directly head on to a computer talking and then this other one will be something else. So these different things and then we have multiple scripts and we run each of the scripts through each of the content types and all a sudden you have a bunch of varieties.
Jordan Gal:And we're only, you know, we're only a few $100 in but some of them are clear winners. And so we scrape all the other ones. We keep the clear winners and we start iterating from the winners and experimenting and so on.
Brian Casel:I love it. Alright. So so you're you're paying for traffic. You've you've got clicks and sign ups. Now what?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. So so now, it's like one hurdle in the funnel we have more confidence in our ability to tackle. Like we're not done. We don't know the best thing possible on the ad creative and everything else.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm. But we know that we can get traffic and then we can multiply the scale. Okay. Cool. So not surprisingly, the next piece of focus is well, once they click on the ad and then they land, right now they're landing on our homepage.
Brian Casel:Right. So we wanna like align the landing page, the headline with what the ad said.
Jordan Gal:Right. And so then you come to the next problem. What do you do with the with the funnel? What do you do with the first page after the click? You and I have talked about optimizing the homepage as effectively a sales page and I still agree with that.
Jordan Gal:Right? I don't wanna create multiple pages and product tours and different places. I just want all the information to make a decision on the homepage
Brian Casel:ads eventually go to multiple landing pages though. Right? Like like matching landing page to ad.
Jordan Gal:That's right. That's right. Because sometimes we will have let's say we specifically wanna target home service companies or lawyers or doctors or service professionals or whatever you do want the the landing page to match. And so the last few days, what I have been thinking about is what's the right way to do that? Is it landing pages?
Jordan Gal:Is it work with the designer? Is it Optimizely type of thing that works on top of your site that that alters content on the homepage directly? So that is now firmly on my plate. What to do? How to set us up to be able to iterate experiment, change our mind, have control without like waiting for our engineering team to, you know, to get to our marketing needs.
Jordan Gal:Like what what should we do with that? That's the
Brian Casel:next question. My thought would first of all, just on the homepage thing, I tend to think of like the homepage is really just like you're sort of like just like optimizing for the top number one thing that you wanna be searched and found for and known for. Like you're not really optimizing for ads or for targeted niche campaigns on your homepage, you know. What was I gonna say? So yeah.
Brian Casel:I and like the Optimizely or like I I guess there are tools that can like you know, personalize the content. I guess Optimizely does that. I think write Brendan's WriteMessage does does that sort of thing. Right. You know, those those seem like pretty cool tools but I find that like I I would think at this stage, at this early stage, it's like over optimizing or over technicality over technical thinking on that.
Brian Casel:Like I would just fire up multiple landing pages to see Like your your top five bets. Your top five targeted bets that you that you think are most promising, start running ads to these five pages and then then dial in.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I I was a little resentful of your smart ass tweet by the way. I said platform and of course, what does Brian say?
Brian Casel:What do think? HTML and Tal and CSS.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Very funny. Way to way to poke at my inadequacies.
Brian Casel:No. I I wasn't trying to do that. Fine. But I I generally do think that Yeah. I mean, I guess you could get by with a with a random page builder.
Brian Casel:Any any of them off the shelf. So I feel like every time I've tried to do that though, it I know. Gets harder than what they promise.
Jordan Gal:That's right. It gets in the way. So I actually went through this entire like decision process cycle and I I actually ended up where where you suggested, which is the irony. I I actually approached our designer and was like, can you just help me build landing pages so that we don't get because every page builder I looked into, I was like, this is just gonna get in my way.
Brian Casel:Like I'm just gonna have
Jordan Gal:to become an expert in Unbounce like
Brian Casel:I was even thinking about it. After that tweet, I was even thinking about it. What you could do, and I I think I think this is actually legit way to go. It's like Okay. Have your designer design a super high end HTML CSS one pager sales page.
Jordan Gal:Okay.
Brian Casel:Right? With all the styling and branding and look and feel. Nothing too fancy. Very clean but like super professional. Fast loading, really important.
Brian Casel:Mobile optimized, really important.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Those are a given these days. Just HTML and CSS. That's your template. And you can then literally take the source code of that, put it drop it into chat GPT and and say, here's here's my updated copy for the next version. Give give me the next version of this same landing page.
Brian Casel:I mean, I literally do that all the time myself. Just in my own work. I I design a page once or I design a component once. Okay. And then and then I feed into ChatGPT.
Brian Casel:I'm like here, I wanna iterate on this. So just give me the new version of this with these changes. And then it spits me back. And then what it'll do is like it'll it'll take the original designed HTML CSS that your designer did. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Then it'll swap in your new words. So
Jordan Gal:natural language say, change the headline to this, change this sub You
Brian Casel:could upload a document, you could just write and paste like a bunch of paragraphs of new copy and say I can ask it to come up with various new copy into this HTML page. Here's the code, here's the new copy. Done.
Jordan Gal:And then hand it over to our front end devs to just throw into the into the frame
Brian Casel:chat g p t sends you back a new a new dot HTML file. Mhmm. That's the new coded version with your copy in it. You could give it to your devs and have them deploy it. Dude, deploying an HTML page is so easy now.
Brian Casel:I literally go to Cloudflare. I think they call it Cloudflare pages. Okay. You do It's free. You you sign up for that.
Brian Casel:They put a box on the page. A drag and drop box.
Jordan Gal:You just toss it in there?
Brian Casel:You literally toss your HTML into this box. It is live on the internet. Done.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So then Rock just needs to set up like the domain or sub domain, whatever that I need to work with him?
Brian Casel:I map the domain to that to that HTML Cloudflare page. If you look at Let's see. Sunrisedashboard.com, my landing page for that. That's what that is. It's HTML on a Cloudflare page.
Brian Casel:Okay. You know, I have a new idea that I throw up on the internet, that's what I do. I do HTML. I design it in HTML. I throw it up on Cloudflare.
Brian Casel:That's it. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Very very
Brian Casel:Like it's a it's a step by step process that like definitely you can do and like anyone non technical. You're more than non technical by the way. Yes. You're not, you know. Yes.
Brian Casel:So it's it's incredibly easy. And and I think that that's more optimized than going to like a page builder or a WordPress or a web flow or whatever.
Jordan Gal:You're Yeah.
Brian Casel:You're adding in because you're adding in so so much tooling that's unnecessary, but you're also adding in bloat that actually literally slows down the the web page, which is not good, you know. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I didn't like anything I saw. They they look like they have a good bunch of features and the the sinking feeling I kept getting was I'm gonna end up spending all my time on this instead of coming coming up with ideas on what should be on the page. And I do I do have this sense that our game is going to be won or lost in the optimization of the funnel. Like we'd have the budget to buy traffic.
Jordan Gal:That is not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is making that spend somewhere near profitable. Somewhere so that the payback period is two or three months and not eight to twelve months.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:And then we can grow the way the way we want to. And so I'm I'm getting used to the fact. It really brings me back to my ecommerce days where I was the one responsible for optimizing the funnel, and we hired someone to run traffic and then we took our conversion rate from 1.5% to 2% to two point five to 3% and that's how the business succeeded. Yeah. And it was done in a way where I just would wake up and think what should I try today?
Jordan Gal:What if I move this button here and this button there and added a credit card symbol and put the guarantee bigger and and that that I had so much fun doing that. The prospect of doing that for this business sounds like so much fun that I just wanna set up a system where I can succeed in accomplishing it and not get discouraged and hung up on tack and waiting a week for this thing and
Brian Casel:Yeah. And that that's the thing. It's like all these all these extra tooling in the chain just slows down the momentum and it gets frustrating and then and then now now we're take This happens to me all the time. Like now, I'm taking my eye off the ball like, look, I just need to test these top three to five ideas for campaigns. You know?
Brian Casel:Because that's what's gonna actually move the business. You know, move move the needle for the business. Cool. Yeah. And I it's like story of my life.
Brian Casel:You
Jordan Gal:You are good though. You have the discipline to kind of just work your way through it until you understand it and can do it yourself. And I I feel like I get is
Brian Casel:unbelievable. It's It has changed the game. We're we're busting through those annoying technical roadblocks, you know. And also just replacing stuff that that even like like also like for me, where it's like it used to be just a year ago or or two or two, it would have been like, alright. I've got all these like HTML pages.
Brian Casel:I It's just such a grind for me to hack through and have to have to wrap every paragraph in a in an HTML paragraph tag. Like, I should just go hire a VA to go do Okay. So now I gotta go on Upwork and find a VA and then hire them and now I'm waiting a week for them to come back to me. I could have just done it myself in a couple of hours. Now, it's five minutes.
Brian Casel:Here's some text. Here's a design. Send it to chap at GPT. It sends me back all coded up. Just copy and paste done.
Jordan Gal:Okay. We're gonna we're gonna need to take this offline to get a little little tutorial session because Sure. Part of the excitement of the last few weeks, it has this real like determination to learn new things. And that feels like one of these things that will give me the superpowers I need to to enjoy this challenge. It's not
Brian Casel:I would love to do that. I I mean, this relates exact Like, I've been kind of freaking out over the speed that I'm able to build full Rails apps now with with AI in my tool chain. It's unbelievable. Because it used to be like I mean, Ripple came together in a month.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. A trip.
Brian Casel:And I mean, and I was on vacation for one of those weeks. And it's it's just because of what what I'm just describing to you about just an HTML page can be applied to any tech stack. Like when you need to just grind out a lot of code. AI does it for you. Just give it the directions and then you know you Like a developer knows how to finalize it and tweak it and fix it and and all that.
Brian Casel:But like it's so much faster than doing it ourselves.
Jordan Gal:Mhmm.
Brian Casel:It's unbelievable, you know.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Cool. Well, that's I'm I'm gonna be deep in funnel land for the next few I mean, foreseeable future.
Brian Casel:Yeah. How about you? I know we don't
Jordan Gal:have that much more time because I have a hard stop today.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, you know, my my I'm sort of up in the air in between what I should focus on next product wise. I have a couple of ideas. I mean, I talked about like Sunrise dashboard. That's sort of one of them.
Brian Casel:I'm I'm also tinkering with programmatic SEO which started as like a marketing play for the Sunrise dashboard idea. But as I'm getting more into it, I'm like, there might be some software here for doing programmatic SEO content. That's that's something that I'm thinking and and tinkering with. But the other thing that I'm that's on my mind is like even those ideas or any sass idea is like that's still a long game. It's gonna take a while to get something.
Brian Casel:I I could build stuff fast but making it a business is not is still not fast. Mhmm. So I'm thinking more about like what can I build and sell as a shorter term product revenue that's not consulting? I You know, I'm not interested really in like info products anymore. Like I used to do the Sure.
Brian Casel:Productize course. I'm I'm just not interested in creating courses or or writing books and stuff like that. I I build stuff and I I'm starting to think I'm starting to open my mind to the idea of some sort of like either releasing my app template, but I'm thinking more about like a components library. I All the components that I build, all the features that I build and and all the different products that I work on, I componentize them. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Mostly for my own use because I know I'm gonna build this thing again. So I make it a reasonable configurable component with like all my tail end UI. Like like tail end designing and and and the interface is how I want them. And I'm I'm thinking through ideas for like what a components library product or membership might look like. Where you And I'm I'm sort of like less interested in the traditional SaaS model.
Brian Casel:So I'm thinking a lot about like things that I can charge a little bit more for for like either a a lifetime access or like a or like a year license to to something. Which opens up the possibility for like, once a product like that exists, you know, we're talking about advertising here. Like that's something that I could actually buy traffic to. Like I can't buy traffic to a $19 a month SaaS product. No.
Brian Casel:You know?
Jordan Gal:No. No.
Brian Casel:But something that I charge like $500 for or like an option for like a thousand dollar package like I don't like I don't know. I'm just throwing numbers and ideas out here. I don't know what form this is all gonna take but This is something that I already have in my possession. Like I have my own UI components library and app template that I've been crafting and and improving with every project that I do. So it's something that's like that I am always improving anyway.
Brian Casel:And it's it's the idea of like selling your byproducts.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yep. Very direct.
Brian Casel:And I've always been sort of closed off to the idea of like doing that. Because there are so many components libraries out there. There's libraries. There's app templates. You know, why just do another one?
Brian Casel:Are are all these smarter than me developers gonna pick apart my code and make fun of me?
Speaker 3:Oh. All the classic.
Brian Casel:You know. You know. But as I start to think more about it, I started to think about like, well, there are some unique things that I can offer. Especially more of a focus on UI design and and making it more configurable especially for Rails, maybe having Laravel versions. And then I started to think even more about like, well, what does a modern components library product look like?
Brian Casel:Like? Yes. You get the components. But maybe there's an AI element where Here's my component for for a multi panel setup like settings menu for your app. You can get my code.
Brian Casel:You can see my video on how to implement it and how to customize it. Or you can just click this button and and send all that code over to AI and have it Mhmm. And have it custom tweak it to your needs. And and give you the new customized version off of my original component. Like, all all that built in.
Brian Casel:Because like right now, you'd have to like copy and paste into ChatGPT and and have it do its thing.
Jordan Gal:Or there's some value to add on top of the components themselves.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like I'm thinking sort of like, if you're familiar with like Larocast or or Tailwind UI, like those are great libraries and memberships for for having access to these components. But taking it a step further of like, okay, you're looking at this page inside inside a Lyricast, like now let's take the code and AI transform it to something more specific that I need. Know? Like that's what my service is too.
Brian Casel:Like when I work with clients, it's like I I take components that I design or or their existing app and I improve them. But So those are like the little like like directions that my mind is starting to go. Like these are things that I can build and ship in the not too distant future and and start to start to you know, I think of my income as a pie chart. Right now, a lot of it is consulting. A little bit of it is product revenue.
Brian Casel:A little bit of it is like income from from Clarity Flow. And if I can get that pie to be more product and and start to carve away the the consulting, that would be that would be good. And so anything I can do to So I you know, and it's and it's a little bit of like analysis paralysis and like too many ideas, too many products. I've got ripple over here. I've got Sunrise dashboard over there.
Brian Casel:I've got programmatic SEO. So I'm trying not to you know, it's it's a lot of scatter brain nonsense but I'm trying to figure out.
Jordan Gal:I will say from my point of view and I'm gonna guess from listener point of view, you are not too paralyzed. You you are thinking about a lot of things. There is a lot of analysis, but there's not too much paralysis. The things are moving. So I think, you know, I think it's good that you put pressure on yourself to, like, make decisions faster.
Jordan Gal:That's what all the productivity has come out of. You've just determined, hey, I gotta make decision faster and push things out more often.
Brian Casel:I I think you're right about that. Like, especially the second half of this year now, I'm much more in the mindset of like, okay, just go and build. Like because the first half of this year, I was I was literally only analyzing. Yeah. And and I just wasn't building anything.
Brian Casel:I was like, what if I do this direction? What if I do that? And I wasn't actually shipping. And and now now it's like, alright. Idea for Ripple, take a month and ship it.
Brian Casel:Idea for this, take a month and ship it. You know? That's Cool. In theory.
Jordan Gal:Well, we're gonna see we're gonna see what comes next.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep.
Jordan Gal:It's definitely I got a new mastermind going on.
Brian Casel:Nice, dude. Yep. That's always fun. A lot of new energy in there.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Absolutely. Same same set of problems. Very similar. Friend friend of ours.
Jordan Gal:I'll hold off on talking about it until I talk with him about it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Thank you for listening folks. And if you wanna keep the conversation going, hop into Ripple. There's a link in the show notes.
Jordan Gal:See you. Later, folks.
