[44] How to Build a Productized Service Business w/ Nick Disabato (Draft Revise)
Alright. This is Bootstrap Web episode number 44. This is the podcast for you, the founder who learns by doing as you bootstrap your business online. And we've got a great show for you today. Today, we are talking about productized services, a hot topic.
Speaker 1:Seems to be cropping up everywhere you look and everywhere you talk to people. And a little later on, you'll also hear Brian's interview with Nick DiSabato, the founder of Draft Revise. I think one of the more well known productized services, at least that's been highlighted by a few people. But before we get into the the show, let's do a quick update. Brian, what has been going on over
Speaker 2:the past week or two? Yeah. Jordan, you know, good good to be back. We're we're kind of recording this one last minute. It was supposed to help publish today, but here we are, end of Thursday.
Speaker 1:Total total
Speaker 2:my fault. Well, I mean, mine too. I've I've been pretty behind just, again, in crunch time producing this course product ties. And today, you know, the the stuff that we'll be talking about are basically concepts pulled straight from the course, things that I've been researching and and writing and teaching as I'm producing this course. So so you kinda get a sneak peek of some of the ideas, kind of a high level overview.
Speaker 2:And then a little later, my my interview with Nick DeSabato, founder of Draft Revise, one of the more well known and really well run productized services, productized consulting businesses out there. So it was a great conversation talking to him, and that's actually one of the case studies that is included in the course. And by the way, those of you on my newsletter, you you already know this, but the course is launching October 21. That's Tuesday morning, couple days from now. And and, yeah, that'll, you know, be kind of a special going on through the month of October.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, if you guys have any questions, let us know. But, Jordan, what what have you been up to?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm really excited to be able to to share with people on the show, you know, right before you launch, during your launch, and then after your launch, looking back, I think it'll be really interesting, not only for us to look at and talk about, but also for other people to kinda listen in and and see how that how that goes and why things work and why things didn't work. So it'll be a great kinda case study in real time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I do have a lot to share about this this particular launch. I feel like it's it's been more hectic and more, I don't know, like, complex than than other launches. Like, I'm
Speaker 1:just doing so much more this time around. And it kinda at the
Speaker 2:same time, it it makes me a little nervous because I I always have that feeling, you know, a couple days before it opens that, you know, it's it's not gonna live up to expectations and putting in a lot of work for nothing. You know you know how the entrepreneurial
Speaker 1:Yep. Only human. You wouldn't be normal if it was 100% optimism throughout the entire time, but I think you're onto something good, and I think it's gonna be really interesting to look at the split between the work you're doing for the course and the work you're doing for the marketing and promotion of it, how at first they are closer to even fiftyfifty. And then as you create an online and digital product, you can start to focus more and more heavily on the marketing and promotion side of things, and how you know, that that's just a much better lever to push on than trying to to do both at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, the the other thing that factors into this and the same thing happened when I released, my book last year was, you know, trying to market it and trying to build up to the launch and build that anticipation and everything. And then, you know, when when people started to buy it, the the book last year, I I had this other feeling like, oh, crap. Now people are gonna actually read this thing.
Speaker 2:You know? And and I kinda had that same feeling with this course, you know. I I so I'm really just trying to make it as as useful and and really actionable as possible. And I I think it does that. I think, you know, it does cover a lot of ground.
Speaker 2:It, you know, probably way more beyond just productized services, but it actually gets into, like, automation and systemizing and then market. There's a whole slew of lessons around marketing. So, you know, I wanna make it really useful and, you know, so that's just on my mind as well.
Speaker 1:It's Yeah. Know. Look, if
Speaker 2:they're a lot out of me these last few days as we lead out to the launch.
Speaker 1:I'm sure. But if there's anyone that's the right person to teach this, it's someone who's, you know, gone through the trenches and come out the other side with a productized service business that's up and running and, you know, mostly automated and acquiring customers and growing. Okay. So let's let's get my little update out of the way. I'm not the focus of today's, today's episode, and I don't mind that because my brain is exhausted and and not at a 100% capacity.
Speaker 1:So for for me, the right. On the personal front, man, I'm tired. This is this is one of the real difficulties of bootstrapping a business as as, you know, a husband and father. Three weeks ago, I had my brother in law's wedding up in Seattle, not even Seattle, two and a half hours east of Seattle. So from Portland, Oregon, you know, that's that's a big trip.
Speaker 1:It's five days. It's driving. It's family.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You've been traveling everywhere.
Speaker 1:Right. The the week after that, my wife goes away, to visit friends, which is great. You know, take a little break from the six month old and go breathe a little bit, which is good. It also means I am I'm I'm dad. So for those five days, you know, you don't really get much work done.
Speaker 1:Then this past weekend, go into a a wedding in Martha's Vineyard. From Portland, Oregon to Martha's Vineyard, it you cannot get a more difficult, annoying, multifaceted airplane, you know, planes, trains, and automobiles type of, situation. I had a great time. But over the past three weeks, all that, you you really don't make progress. Right?
Speaker 1:I basically just tried to keep things running and keep things moving forward and not lose customers and make sure free trials are converting and people are launching their campaigns, but there's very little progress. And so it becomes stressful and physically and mentally just exhausting because you just want to move forward and you can't. So that has been a real struggle, but I'm back. I'm back home, back in the office, and very, very excited to to kinda go back to a to a normal schedule. Just a just just a few five day work weeks in a row is is really all I need.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's so funny that how, like, we crave that those, like, solid workdays. You know? Like, actually, just today, my wife is actually you know, she she's been so great. She she's actually taking off work today.
Speaker 2:She called in sick just so that I can get an extra day in the office and, you know, to get these videos edited and everything and ready for the course. You know?
Speaker 1:Yep. It's a full contact sport and and, with a spouse and kids, you are, you're you're the tip of the spear, but you have a support team. You're you're standing on on the shoulders of of people that that help you out. It's just part of the deal. On the business front, I'm just trying to move things forward with CardHook.
Speaker 1:I have more free trials going than I ever have right now, so super exciting. We'll have our biggest month. You know, next month, once people start to convert, we'll have the biggest revenue month. I'm still growing at a good, like, 25% every month.
Speaker 3:Very
Speaker 1:nice. So, you know, so really excited.
Speaker 2:So you've got systems running. So even even when you're you are going out with your family and traveling and everything, you know, it's it is a recurring revenue business. It's it's going.
Speaker 1:It is. And and I I've I've made a few switches in policy. I used to email people the their results for the month and then wait for their confirmation before I charged their card. And now I switched that policy and I basically said, I'm gonna send you the same email. If I don't hear back from you, I'm assuming it's all good, I'll charge your card, three business days after that email gets sent.
Speaker 1:So I finally had that very, very happy feeling that every online entrepreneur wants where I just went and took all of my customers and just charged all of them at once. So I finally got, like, bang, the whole revenue for the month all at one time, which was a great feeling. Nice. Now I'm not chasing, you know, that accounts payable piece of it starts to disappear and becomes more and more, closely resembling, you know, the standard SaaS at the beginning of the month you you charge your customers. So that's good.
Speaker 1:The the difficulty I'm having, I'm looking for development help for Cardhook, and I'm having trouble. It is hard. My cofounder is a developer, and he he's focusing on the really important features, but I need more integrations. I'm looking for JavaScript developers. I'm looking on oDesk, and I am having trouble.
Speaker 1:I I reached out to a service called ZipTask. Ziptask.com. I'm pretty sure I heard a commercial for it on Stitcher. And this service allows you to hire a project manager, and they go out and deal with, you know, oDesk or whoever they go out to find. And you're just dealing with that one person, and they have a layer of expertise, and they're a developer also.
Speaker 1:That has not gone perfectly, but I am still hopeful that that is something that can that can work for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I mean, I know that you're you're a non developer, but Mhmm. You know, I wonder how bringing in, like, a a firm or an outside project manager like that, that might kinda add a layer of complication when it comes to your your partner who is the developer having him kind of collaborate with the other developers. And and, you merging code and all that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's really tricky because we have some code that I just would not let anybody touch besides him. You know, like our worker script and all these things that run the actual service, it's just it's it would just be crazy to let somebody just start fiddling with it. But there's you know, so you have to figure out where that line is. Like, okay.
Speaker 1:I want my onboarding improved. So on the back end, in the admin panel, is that okay for people to touch? And so it's definitely something that needs to be figured out over the next few weeks, but there's no choice. It it has to be it has to be figured out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. I look forward to, you know, keeping you updated on that, and, yeah, and launching some new features, and
Speaker 2:Yeah. We should do a whole episode
Speaker 1:on, like,
Speaker 2:hiring developers and and working with developers, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's almost like it's not just for someone in my situation that's a non developer.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. I mean, I I struggle with it all the time as well. I mean, I'm not a super developer or anything like that, but, know, I
Speaker 1:Even even for a developer, you know. Always think of Ruben Ruben Gomez in BidSketch and how he forced himself to rely on other people for for development, which I think is a really smart way to go, and it's a real challenge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
Speaker 1:So enough about, about us. What I wanna hear about, Brian is working on a course on productizing a service. This is something that comes up all the time because anybody running a service based business knows it's really difficult, and having a productized service is extremely appealing for for a whole bunch of reasons. I I just joined a consulting mastermind that I spoke to this morning and productized services and and how to productize and how to position it and price something that's more productized as opposed to open ended is is really the goal. And so I'm really excited.
Speaker 1:We have we have the man himself, the real source of this, someone who built a productized service. So, Brian, why don't you take it away from here and, you know, talk to us about what what we're talking about today to orient people, and then let's get into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So as as we keep talking about, it's all about productized services. Right? So, I mean, what are kind of some of the the common scenarios where productizing might come into the picture, you know, depending on where you're at in your business or, you know, in your whole journey, you know, through bootstrapping or or doing in your your own thing. Right?
Speaker 2:So you you get a lot of freelancers and consultants who are moving out of working project to project or billing by the hour, you know, just taking on different clients and doing all sorts of different types of jobs and things like that. They wanna kind of you know, their their big challenge and this is through talking to everyone in my audience and then also just looking back on on my experience when I was a freelance web designer. Their their work and their income is tied way too closely to their time. It's that that feast and famine cycle. Right?
Speaker 2:So that's kind of the the big driver that that drives this group towards looking at a productized model, you know, to make that sort of change in their business. The other things that kind of, you know, really get start eating away is just writing those long proposals, doing the negotiation, the the discovery meetings, going back and forth with clients, you know, scoping out projects. It can it can just kinda become a grind after a while. And the other thing that I hear a lot is clients don't value your work, you know. So, like, you you attract clients and all they really care about is getting something done cheaply or they don't really understand the value of of of your expertise or or the the benefit of of your actual service.
Speaker 2:So, you know, those are things that kinda drive freelancers and consultants into productizing. You know, another another scenario here is launching a new product. So, you know, if you're if you're not ready to invest the time and money into building something like a big SaaS application or or an iPhone app or something like that, you know, you you need to launch to paying customers quickly. And I did a bunch of these case study interviews as as part of the research for this course. And one thing that just kept coming up again and again, and you'll hear it in this interview with Nick DeSabado today, you can launch a productized service like that, you know, within a week.
Speaker 2:I mean, I spoke to Jared Drysdale. He he launched landing page in a day in a day. Like, I think he had the idea on Friday, did put up his landing page on Saturday and started posting it online and had a few paying customers, by Monday or Tuesday.
Speaker 1:So why do you think that is? Why what's the difference? Obviously, building software is gonna take a long time, but what is it about a productized service that allows you to launch so quickly? Right? I have my ideas on it, but what what do find?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the whole concept is that you're doing the work. It's it's a done for you service. You're not necessarily relying on software that may not exist yet, You know, and also you're doing something that you've already been doing just in a different model. So you're drawing on some kind of expertise and some kind of experience.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean, there are just so many many examples of this. I mean, I've been speaking to a lot of, like, web designers who who who launch kind of these type of related services, but there's another site, a Broaders. Right? They they just handle your credit card points. So they'll they'll help you track your your credit card bonus miles and and help you get, like, free flights and free upgrades and everything for for a set price.
Speaker 2:And, like, they just manually track it for you and then send you, you know, reminders. And and so, you know, these types of services can be launched, you know, just throw up the landing page and and kinda get it out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think for me, one one of the big big things that makes it attractive is that, you know, we keep saying the term productized services, but if we listen to to the first word there, productized, you're really writing a product description, and it's defined. Yes. So if you're if you're a developer or designer, whatever it is, if you're a web professional and you say, these are the services I offer, SEO, PPC, web design, WordPress, CMS, ecommerce sites, it's it's undefined, and the person looking at it has to find, does this person work? Is this the type of thing that I need?
Speaker 1:Whereas, you know, I equate it to a product page on one of my ecommerce sites that I used to have. You get there, you read it. If it's right for you, you consider buying it. If it's if it's not right for you based on what's on the page, you understand, this isn't for me. So to come across a landing page that says, I will build your landing page.
Speaker 1:I'll give you two revisions, and it'll include X, Y, and Z. The person can kinda make a decision, and the person writing, right, the person who wants to offer the service, you know what you need to write on the page
Speaker 3:and
Speaker 1:just, you know, put out the points that they need to be there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, that that's exactly right. I mean, really, what a productized service is, like, it's a service, but you're positioning it as a product. You're selling it as a as a product with a set scope and a set price. And these are like non negotiable terms.
Speaker 2:Mean, yeah, you can build in some sort of flexibility and
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And and that sort of thing. But essentially, you're offering one value proposition and that's based on, you know, a number of factors. But, you know, mainly you're you're you're solving a problem. And it and you're solving a problem that based on your experience whether you're coming from a a freelancing background or maybe working at a job, you've seen firsthand that people are willing to pay for this problem to be solved. And and that's just a really important aspect.
Speaker 2:And then you just design your your scope of work to be the most optimal solution to that problem. Right.
Speaker 1:And you know from experience about how long it's gonna take you and about how much money you you need in order for it to make sense and to be a viable business. So, yeah, all these defined parameters just help focus the person making the offering as well as the person considering it as purchasing.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. I I mean and and that's like that's the perspective of the customer is, you know, it's a set scope and and price, and it offers this value proposition. But from your perspective as the founder, you know, it it has the potential to run systematically and it can be, you know, scaled up using systems and processes so that essentially, you know, you can get to the goal of of a productized service business that can produce and grow without you. You you can go on vacation and you and you're still getting customers in the door and those customers are still being served whether it's by your team or or automation, you know, or or a combination of the two and streamlining, you're removed from the process. So it it just you're basically building it into a into a saleable asset, essentially.
Speaker 1:Right. And I think that might be the single most attractive piece of this. Yes. It makes it more clearly defined, and it might make it easier to sell and and all that. But, you know, a business that you do everything in is not really a business.
Speaker 1:It's I don't know. It's you hiring yourself out by the hour one way or another, even if it's productized. Mhmm. But what makes this so attractive is that it's repeatable. And the more you do it, the better you get at it.
Speaker 1:And the more results you bring, the more results you can show, and the easier it becomes, the more systemized and documented you can make it. So I think that's really just the most attractive thing. Compared to I will build your website, that's really, really hard to make repeatable unless you focus on it exclusively and get really good at it. But these other types of services, I think you can build it in a repeatable way, and that's a real business that you can start to step away from as you build the systems and documentation and make sure you build in enough margin there to continue making a profit. You can hire more people and get more clients and start to step away, and that that's a business.
Speaker 1:Something that operates without you, that's the that's the goal. That's what we can call a real business.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, that so so let's go kinda go through a couple of different types Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what I
Speaker 2:wanna hear. Of of product type services because, you know, I I I've been doing a lot of these interviews, and and you see this stuff again and again, you start to see the same patterns. And what I found is that for the most part, most of these productized businesses fall into two main categories, and then there's kind of a a a third one that is actually kind of a new development in in more recent years. So the first two, the the big two are basically productized consulting. And the you know, this is basically a solo founder who wants to stay solo, but gain focus in their work.
Speaker 2:So, you know, productizing is not necessarily all about scaling up and growing a team and becoming a manager and, you know, it can certainly run as a solo operation. I mean, Nick Desabato, as you'll hear today, is a is a prime example of this with his service draft revised where he basically you know, he does conversion rate optimization, a b tests, one a b test per month. He'll run the test. He'll implement the successful result. He'll give you the report, and he'll, you know, recommend what's the next thing we should test.
Speaker 2:You know, he he kinda focuses on that because that's what he's really good at. That's what he enjoys doing. And, you know, he doesn't necessarily intend to to grow his team and, you know, grow beyond himself. He kinda has this comfortable recurring revenue business that works really well for him. So that's kind of the that's the productized consulting piece.
Speaker 2:The other version of this is productized service businesses, which are designed to scale and and grow. You know, Dan Norris, founder of WP cofounder of WP Curve, Great example of this, you know. And again, they're they're another example who just you know, he just launched this site really, really fast. He wrote a whole book called the seven day startup about how he launched w p curve to 10 paying customers in seven days. And today, they have many multiples beyond that.
Speaker 2:They're just growing like crazy and his team I think he's got, like, 20 or 30 employees at this point, all built on systems, all manual processes. They're doing live customer support for WordPress site owners, and it's just truly impressive. Like, they would not be able to scale without those kind of systems in place. And and so I talked to him all all about that. You know, my business restaurant engine is also very much designed to scale up and and kind of run on autopilot.
Speaker 2:And then there's this third trend that I'm starting to see, and this is this is really interesting. And it and it's kind of like a software productized service hybrid model. Right? So using software helps to streamline the productized service component. So maybe you started with a software product and you're kinda struggling to gain traction, and you add in a productized service component to that, to help attract customers and and add more value.
Speaker 2:You know, the it's a it's a really great way to to kind of, like, supercharge the growth of a of a of a young software product or to use an existing software product or maybe one that you've developed and and use that as, like, the basis for a new productized service. So so two examples
Speaker 1:come to mind. Right? I I love that one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, I mean, you know, again, my my story with Restaurant Engine, in the very beginning, it didn't I never intended it really to be a productized service. I wanted to build the SaaS. I wanted to build a a hosted web design service. And what I learned over the first year or two was that our clients really wanted us to do all the work for them, and and they really value that.
Speaker 2:And that's what actually attracted them and got them to sign up. So we just kept doing that more and more, and and it got to the point where we did it for every client. And now we actually require every client to to have us set up their site. And so then we've kind of embraced that and and really took the manual approach on everything and then just focused on the systems. So that was kind of my story over the last three years.
Speaker 2:But then I spoke to Jared Drysdale. So this is really interesting. He he launched a a software product called Cascade about a year ago. And, basically, it's like a frame it's like a design framework, CSS framework kind of thing. It helps helps you, like, really quickly design and and and build semi custom landing pages.
Speaker 2:And that's like a standalone product, and and it offers some value. But then he launched landing page in a day, and you ask, you know, how are you actually able to design and and write a whole landing page in a day? The way he does it is he uses his software product to do it. You know, he he built this framework that's designed to do that really really quickly so that so his software allows him to streamline the manual piece.
Speaker 1:I I love that. I mean, as as a non developer, I I've had a bunch of ideas that kinda use the same framework. Yeah. Landing pay I mean, Jared right. What Jared's doing is he's using his own framework, his own product.
Speaker 1:As as a nondeveloper, I don't even think you need to do anything like that. If you just wanna add a layer of value, which is most likely your expertise on top of a software product that exists, I the first thing that comes to mind is Leadpages. This thing has blown up in popularity. Right? So if you take yourself and use a Leadpages landing page and offer a productized service that says, I will build landing pages for you using Leadpages.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty sure there's a consultancy that exists that does only this. I think they'll they do, like, a manual design. But still, I will build and manage and optimize your Leadpages landing pages for a set price. Yeah. There are a ton of business people that want to use Leadpages, and it's it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I use it, but it's not that easy. Good luck setting up a webinar with a Weber and GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar with the LeadPages landing page as a non right? I live on the web. I have a freaking software company. It it was not easy for me to do.
Speaker 1:I guarantee you there are people that want to do it, and if you can do it for them, all you're doing is you're leveraging an existing popular platform
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you're adding on a layer, and that's the service component, but you can offer it as a standardized offering.
Speaker 2:That's exactly you go. That's that's a hybrid. Exactly. And and I'm I'm seeing a lot of this actually. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Beautiful. You know, see it again and again. Lot of people are are emailing me their ideas of about, like, how how they're productizing their services. You see it a lot with, like, analytics tools and and also conversion rate optimization.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Kind of like what what Nick does DeSabato does. I I think he uses Optimizely. Another guy showed me this, Chris Vannoy. I I hope I'm pronouncing his name right. He he just launched or he's kind of in the process of of launching his his new productized service called brass tax.
Speaker 2:Basically, he so the headline here, it says, what are your analytics actually trying to tell you? And we'll link this up in the show notes. It it you know, it's a really good value proposition here. Basically, he just monitors your Google Analytics for you. So or or not only monitors it, but sets it up to track your your key metrics and to kind of, like, you know, fit he'll actually, like, consult with you first and then figure out, like, what are those five or 10 key metrics that you need to track in your in your business.
Speaker 2:And then how can we actually, like, set up a a custom dashboard in your analytics to to get that data out. And then he documents everything so that you have it. And, you know, it's really great service.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's adding a layer of value and then standardizing it and being able to offer to more people. You know, people have been doing this forever with with PPC. Right? I'll manage your Google AdWords for 15% of your spend.
Speaker 1:Right? It's pretty similar. Right? It's a, you know, it's it's a service, but if you're gonna standardize it now there's something like that. Each customer is different.
Speaker 1:Each keyword's different. All that. Right? There's there's a certain amount of flexibility. But if you minimize that flexibility and have the the procedure from in gate from marketing to engagement to the process and then launch and after the sale, if you can standardize as much of that as possible, then you have something that's repeatable and you get good at it and you could bring more more results.
Speaker 1:Yes. That that's that's really interesting. So you spoke to a few different types. Right? Nick DeSabato, essentially, productized consulting.
Speaker 1:He's he's leaning on some software, but it's really his expertise that people are hiring. And then the WP curve is just ridiculous. The the the fact that that works, that everyone's just like it's all manual. It's all developers, all spread around, but you standardized it. It's that that is just an awesome case study to look at.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It really is. And it's simple. Right? It's not all it is is helping you with your WordPress site, like installing a plugin, installing a theme, you know, minor task or or even just answering questions.
Speaker 2:Like, just having someone on live chat, like, that pretty much didn't exist before unless you're you're paying your your freelance web designer by the hour, which costs way more.
Speaker 1:Right. And and there's there's a big market for it. So
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So what's what's what's next? Right? So you've got looked at a few different types. What's what's the next piece?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, you know, I'll I'll just kinda, you know, touch on this real real briefly because I know we we wanna get, you know, right into this interview with with Nick. But, basically, you know, what is the first step? You know, let's let's make this a little bit actionable. Right?
Speaker 2:How how can you actually get started with productizing? And I think it comes down to one one key thing, and that's really just you have to focus. You have to really become way more focused than you've been before as a freelancer doing everything, know, doing taking on any type of product project, any client. You need to focus on one service and focus on one customer. So by focusing on one service, what what I mean here, and I mentioned this earlier, is you ideally, you wanna you wanna find something that customers have paid you to do as a freelancer or at your job.
Speaker 2:And that indicates that there's a real pain or problem to be solved. In in in my email course, have like a whole process for how to kind of, you know, narrow down and and pick that service. You know, but and then the other thing that you wanna look for is something that can produce real results and compelling case studies. So, you know, conversion rate optimization, you know, is is a great one.
Speaker 1:Right. You know, you Quantifiable.
Speaker 2:Quantifiable. You're saying, like, every month, we help you increase conversions 20%, you know. And you can you can point to those kind of case studies. And then the other piece of this, and this is really important for almost anything, but especially with productized service businesses, you gotta focus on one customer. You know, number one, it it most of the services that I look at are b to b, you know, working with businesses.
Speaker 2:I haven't really seen much that that really work with consumers. But, you know, b to b but the niche verticals can be easier to reach. You know, I've I've been seeing that with Restaurant Engine, obviously. You know? But, you know, you you do wanna kinda choose the right audience for you.
Speaker 2:Who can you write content for? You know, will you attend their conferences and and that kind of stuff. But, yeah, like, just focusing in on one customer and really understanding and knowing everything about them makes it much easier to to tailor your marketing and your messaging and your value proposition and defining your the scope and your landing page. All of that becomes so much easier when you're just speaking to one customer and you know who that is compared to when you're a freelancer. You're just kind of working with everyone.
Speaker 2:So every time that you're talking to a new customer or or potential new client, you kinda have to, like, redefine your whole value proposition and and reinvent it every single time.
Speaker 1:This part's tricky. I mean, I I know right? I I used to offer a few different services in the consulting business, and then I narrowed it down, and then I productized it. And but even now, as I'm about to make another push for the consulting service for for building a sales funnel for people, I know I need to niche, but it's it's really hard to clearly define. Because in my mind, anybody that spends money, a decent amount of money, on getting people to their site, ideally with paid advertising, and then doesn't do lead generation.
Speaker 1:Right? They either send to the homepage or they're sending them to a contact form. That to me is is a potential prospect, but that's way too wide.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's I mean, I don't too big. I don't think that it necessarily has to be like a niche industry vertical.
Speaker 1:Right. It can be like a niche situation or Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:You you can look at just I mean, for CartHook, you work with ecommerce stores. You don't only work with pet food ecommerce stores. You know? You Right. Work with Right.
Speaker 2:Anyone who's doing ecommerce, basically, or on that platform. You you know? Right. Or you can look at local service businesses. And then, you know, other other qualifiers are, like, local service businesses who do, you know, a 100 k in revenue a month or something like that.
Speaker 1:Right. So The the more you can focus, the better. Right? If if I was building sales funnels only for coaches, you know, for business coaches, I would have an easier time. And if I'm don't have the confidence to do that because I don't wanna niche down because I don't quite know yet who gets the most value, then I guess you at least have to niche down to the type of person, the type of business, and maybe geography, number of employees, number of locations, any of these parameters that you can use to niche.
Speaker 1:My favorite one is to make sure that they're spending money on advertising because Yes. Those are the comp those are the companies that are trying actively to grow. And if you can improve their results in any way, so that's that's my favorite qualifier.
Speaker 2:I mean, just look at the yellow pages. If they're spending if they're wasting money on on advertising in the yellow pages, you know, that's a that's a great opportunity because number one, they're obviously spending money. Number two, that money is not being spent very wisely. So, you know, you can you can surely improve their their results. Yep.
Speaker 1:So you gotta pick a service and you've gotta pick a niche. Whatever that that means to you, the narrower you can get, the better for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you know, I I think we should kinda leave it here. There there is so much more that I actually wanted to cover, but I don't wanna take away, you know, we've we've waited long enough now to talk to to Nick. So let's kinda, you know, hop into that. You know, there there is so much more, you know, about systemizing and and scaling it up and then marketing it, but but that'll have to be, you know, on another day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and I totally agree. I'm really looking forward to, to your conversation with Nick. And we're talking about this, but I know if I were on the listening end of this, I would wanna know where I can, you know, get more of this information from you. So if somebody wants to dig deeper into this, where should they go, Brian?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I have a, there's a free crash course on on productizing your service. That's available on my homepage, castjam.com. And then, the course, it is opening on Tuesday. That's at castjan.com/productize.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So if you're, looking for information on prioritizing your service, this is this is the man to get it from. So at this point, let's let's jump into your conversation with Nick. Brian, great talking to you, my man. Alright, Jordan.
Speaker 1:Alright. Cheers, everyone.
Speaker 2:Alright. So I'm here with Nick DeSabato. Nick, thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 3:Thank you having so much for having me here today.
Speaker 2:Cool. So, you know, I again, I've just been really impressed with everything that you've been doing, especially with your productized service draft revise and you kinda have a a line of, you know, a number of different things that you do. So well, why don't we start there? I mean, how do you answer the question, you know, Nick, what do you do?
Speaker 3:Well, I tell people that I run a small interaction design consultancy, and the largest offering of which I make is DraftRevise, which I call a monthly AB testing service. Essentially, I tear down your site at the beginning of an engagement and on a monthly basis, make tests and write up reports for you. People have found it pretty valuable and helpful for them. So
Speaker 2:That's awesome. And, you know, you you do a great job of kind of laying out the entire service and what's involved in in the copy on your landing page. And, again, your site is it so that service, is that a draft.nu?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So if you go to draft.nu/revise, that's draftrevise. And then I run other stuff. Draft.nu/revise/express is revise express where I do just the teardown. And I write up a big report for you, and it's a one off engagement.
Speaker 3:And then I do like one off interaction design products. I sell a book called Cadence and Slang, which I wrote in 2010 and completely overhauled in 2013. And that's at cadence.cc. So I have a lot of different offerings and try and you know, they're they're varying price points too. So if you like if you just wanna get to know what I'm doing, you can buy my book, and it's not that expensive.
Speaker 3:If you have no money, if you're in college, you can subscribe to my newsletter for free and all that. So yeah.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. And and, you know, I I do kinda wanna get into how you've evolved even beyond just the Draft Revise and then offered Draft Express and then these other these other products. Yeah, what I'd like to really start with is just, you know, diving into Draft Revise itself. Like, how does the service work? How does the pricing?
Speaker 2:How does the delivery work? And then we'll kind of rewind a little bit and get your story of what you were doing before and how you came about this idea of doing a productized service.
Speaker 3:Sure, So
Speaker 2:you do analytical AB testing. I think a lot of us in this audience kind of understand what that is, but how do you explain it to clients and and specifically like what is included in the scope of delivery for for this package service?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So when you sign up for draft revise, you have to apply and you I put together a little form and then I give you something called a welcome packet. And that defines the scope for what I would imagine we'd be doing. And it fits a wide array of businesses that I think are at kind of mid to upper growth. They I I spec out between two or five tests a month depending on how high your traffic is.
Speaker 3:You want more than that, you can reserve a second slot for me. So can you can pay me double basically and I can do up to 10 tests a month or whatever have you and put together more comprehensive reports and a couple of clients have taken me up on that. So I'm trying, you know, right at the beginning to try and limit the scope of what I'm doing. And for other people looking to put together their own services, what I would suggest is like figure out how much you can do in a month for a given client and how you want to be spreading that among an array of different clients. With draft revise, I have seven clients right now and I'm very happy with that number.
Speaker 3:And that is by design. If you are running an individual consultancy, you don't want to provide too much you don't want to get too much of your income from one client because if they decide to part ways with you, you're screwed. So a lot of people see this kind of feast and famine scenario where they're depending on one check. For me, I'm depending on seven checks and they're of varying sizes. So with the pricing, I used that pricing on my site and I took it off.
Speaker 3:And part of that was to accommodate a given business. You've heard probably a lot about value based pricing where you think about how much the person would potentially get as ROI from engagement and then you price it out accordingly. So my tiny mom and pop businesses are paying me significantly less money than a sophisticated 30 consultancy. I'm making the same kinds of changes for them and I'm doing the same kind of work, but they're getting back different amounts of money from it. Right?
Speaker 3:If I make a 2% conversion for a tiny business, it's gonna be vastly different. Right. But I like the smaller businesses. They're good people and they have interesting problems to solve. I want to work with them.
Speaker 3:So, I don't wanna cut them out.
Speaker 2:Right. It's an interesting kind of give and take for the value on both sides. Right? I mean, you get a certain amount of value of working with the smaller mom and pop businesses. It's more enjoyable.
Speaker 2:You get a more hands on approach. You also said something really interesting there early on in that answer, where you said a certain type of business fits into this this defined scope. Right? I I think, typically, what a freelancer would do is they speak to a potential lead, a potential new client, and they try to fit their services around what they need. Whereas what you're offering is a very well well defined set of of services.
Speaker 2:It's really kind of one culture. It's the AB testing and in a certain type of client fits within what you do. Or or would a certain type of client would get that kind of value from what you do.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, if you're like a Fortune 100 company, like, I I would like to work with you if you're good people and you have interesting things to do, but I'm not gonna be able to just wing away a welcome packet to you and say, here, I'm gonna do five tests a month for you. If you're operating at a certain scale where you're getting 1,000,000 hits in, well, okay, I usually set up an account on my Visual Website Optimizer. I have a giant agency plan with Visual Website Optimizer and that supports 300,000 hits a month. Okay.
Speaker 3:Well, that handles all but one of my clients and that one client pays for their own plan. So I say if you're, you know, if you're, I don't know, Target, say, I they're not a client of mine, but they get hundreds of millions of hits a month. Buy your own Optimizely plan and give me the keys to the car and I will drive it and that will, you know, that'll work out well.
Speaker 2:Right. And it's interesting how, like, I I think so many people who are just getting into building a product or even a productized service, the assumption is like, oh, everything must be completely automated and turnkey, and, you know, you you can have these conversations one on one and just say, you know, Look, you're at the level where you need to have your own account, and just, you know, send me as a manager access, and that'll be that. Works perfectly fine. So, the other interesting thing that I heard there was, you have a set scope of services, like, you know, deliverables, to dos that you actually deliver for every client, but then you can kind of vary them. You said, like, you know, some clients do between two and five tests per month, or then you can kind of vary the pricing and increase it up to 10 tests per month.
Speaker 2:So there are there is a little bit of wiggle room within your your service.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, one thing to keep in mind with draft revise is the only thing that is automated in the entire situation actually, there are two things. There's the payment and the testing. And I built only one of those things. I use a automated AB testing utility to be doing this.
Speaker 3:So at the beginning, I mean, I wrote a marketing page, and it was toothpicks and twine, man. It was just very slapdash. And I am writing reports manually. I am deciding what to test manually. I am executing on those tests manually.
Speaker 3:Everything that I do is the long hard stupid way. And you can automate parts of this, like if you have an automatic like PDF creation utility, you can deal with the busy work that way. And there there are probably ways that you can do it, but if it's productized consulting, it's still consulting and you're doing things like a consultancy would by building deliverables and by executing on strategy and by creating that strategy and that is by definition a manual mentally demanding process.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:So yeah, it's it's definitely something that I would recommend like don't think that you can just build a SaaS business and make it look like it's a consultancy. It's the other way around. You build a consultancy and my marketing page looks like it's a SaaS business.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah. That that's kind of the beauty of a of a product type service. I'm just curious, like, personally for for you, was this a personal choice where you where you just wanted to just focus as a solo, you know, business owner running your operation solo without automating, you know, anything or or outsourcing any of the work? Or is that something that you plan to do down the line?
Speaker 2:Or or how does that work?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. I love running a one person business, and I'm I don't know if I'm bad at delegation because I'm so fearful of it that it never comes up. And so I just don't do it. And I try and do everything in house in a way that I have view of the entire operation. And for other people, yeah, you can outsource things, like totally do that.
Speaker 3:Hire a VA for intake if you need to. Hire other designers to execute on your work if you need to if it blows up a lot. But everybody asked me this question about like, well you can hire like four designers and then just delegate out AB tests. But really what they're paying for in the situation with productized consulting access to me. They want my ideas and my beliefs and my opinions and that is a finite resource.
Speaker 3:And it's why I take on only six or seven clients and develop these long term relationships with them. I also like doing that a lot. I really like being able to bring value to somebody's business every month for a year. And when I'm working at a typical interaction design project and we're signing a statement of work and doing all this, I work with you for six weeks And then I follow-up and then what? Like Right.
Speaker 3:It it doesn't it's not I love get I love solving those kinds of problems, but it's a very different type of situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, I I really like that answer because what I've been writing about when it comes to productized services is that it can be designed to run with or without you. And, you know, I mean, put in my business, I've been focusing on systems and automation and delegating and trying to build a business that does run without me. Largely does, not a 100%, but almost there. And a lot of others do.
Speaker 2:But then but then kind of on the other side of the coin is someone like yourself who chooses to focus on the craft that you love doing, you know, working with just a handful of clients because that's that's the kind of interaction that that you like working with on a monthly basis. And so you've designed your service around around those goals, and I and I think that's that's just awesome. Yeah. And cool. So, you know, another thing that I'm wondering here is, you know, the give and take between a productized service, which has this set scope of deliverables versus typically what a freelancer or an agency would do where they have things like scope creep and and different requests come up and chain and change orders and and whatnot.
Speaker 2:Is what you do kind of, like, set in stone? Like, what happens four or five months into a relationship with a client and they, for some reason, have a huge increase in demands of your services. Does that happen? Or like, how do you deal with that kind of thing?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. Totally happens. So it happens on kind of two different fronts. Right? There's more AB tests and more ideas.
Speaker 3:And usually that happens after I have like a couple of successful AB tests and a lot of big wins because they're just they just get greedy and, like, more, more, more, more, more, and they want a lot out of it, which is funny, and I've learned to anticipate it. But the so there's more AB tests, but there's also more just general interaction design work. Like, I was at a bar with one of my clients at one point when he flew into Chicago, and, we were sitting there. He's like, you know, our homepage doesn't look very good. And I'm like, you know what?
Speaker 3:I agree. Your homepage is kind of a mess, and it hasn't scaled elegantly. It used to look good, but now you have like 10,000 articles and you you used that only 200. They're like a a tech blog. And, like, do you know any interaction designers or information architects that would be able to, you know, tackle wireframing out the homepage?
Speaker 3:And I'm like, yeah, know a guy. I'll I'll email intro you. Like so I ended up scoping in another set of work and doing this in you know, it has nothing to do with AB testing. It has everything to do with me wireframing it. But then I wireframe it, build it out, and AB test it against the original.
Speaker 3:And then I have a a different, you know, lever that I can pull. And we end up scoping that into the engagement. It's amazing. So, you know
Speaker 2:So so you would still do these kind of like add on projects like on top of
Speaker 3:the Totally.
Speaker 2:Normal retainer.
Speaker 3:But I'll charge them for it. Sure. I mean, yeah. The the rule, the takeaway here is don't close yourself off to more work. My god, it's more work and with a proven client that likes you, like they're trying to take on more work, but write another contract and get everything locked in stone because you don't wanna do that on a handshake, and you don't wanna, like, sidle them with a charge at the end of the engagement, and then they get frustrated, and you get lawyers involved, and it's sad and rough.
Speaker 3:But like
Speaker 2:Yeah. And total and like what you just said, the the key benefit here is that this is someone in someone that you've been working with. You I mean, you met up with him in a bar, like, already knew him or or her and and you know you have a previous working relationship. So that right there tells you, okay, This is gonna be a good project. I I know it is.
Speaker 2:I've been working with them. Whereas, it's easy to take on a, you know, a highly lucrative client project with a with a stranger, and then all of a sudden gets sucked into months of a black hole being pulled into a a client from hell kind of relationship. Yeah. So very cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So let's talk a little bit about how you how you do pricing with draft revise. I I know you you discussed a little bit how you vary between, you know, mom and pop businesses and and larger companies. I I mean, would you be willing to share some of the the price points with us here or Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean, I've been public about a lot of price points. When I launched Draft3rvise, it was at $6.50 a month. And just to keep clear, this was with a three month initial outlay. So you would have to pay $19.50 at that point.
Speaker 3:And then $6.50 after that. I raised it to 800 and then a thousand and then 1,500. The highest client I have right now is at 2,000 and I still have two clients at $6.50. So I mean, people and I've wanted 800 and two at 1,500. So, like, there there are people all over the the map.
Speaker 3:Right now, the annual recur or not that. Monthly recurring revenue of draft revise is at something like 7,100. Right. I believe something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's just draft revise. That's not express. That's not cadence. That's nothing. No other activities in draft.
Speaker 3:Cool. That covers all of my business expenses and payroll. So everything beyond that is gravy. It's just all profit.
Speaker 2:Right? And I mean, when you say payroll, that's that's you. Right?
Speaker 3:That's me. I'm on pay I'm on I take a salaries for, like, booze and food Sure. And, like, personal stuff. But yeah. So yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's the
Speaker 2:so what are, like, the terms there? You you said that you you always require three months paid upfront, and then and then you kinda go from there. Is is it like, from there, is is it, like, month to month or
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's not. Month, a year contract or anything like that?
Speaker 3:I have a Stripe plan set up where I effectively charge you for three x the monthly rate upfront and then give you a ninety day trial. That's how they have it configured. And after those ninety days, it just starts charging you every month. About two weeks prior to that, we kinda have a go no go conversation. So speaking to your, you know, client black hole of insanity.
Speaker 3:If I don't like you, then we pause the engagement and we we you know, that's the nice way of saying we're never working together again. So yeah. Gotcha.
Speaker 2:And so that was kinda my next question. You are using Stripe to to charge all of your clients? So is it like automated? Way you do you ever have to deal with I guess, again, like comparing to my my days when I was freelancing, you know, chasing down checks that that arrive late or never arrive at all and and things like that. I mean, you're you're very much billing more like a product.
Speaker 2:Right? But it's it's still consulting.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everything goes through Stripe. I've never had to deal with chargebacks. You have to pay me before I do anything for you.
Speaker 3:So you pay me, I set up Basecamp and Visual Website Optimizer and enter you into my spreadsheet. You really don't exist in my system until I have your money. I've never had to deal with a card decline later. One nice thing of only having seven customers in my system is I actually set up Google Calendar reminders for dunning emails, and I can just do that myself, and I have it all automated. So there's that.
Speaker 3:And I don't really have to think about, like, oh, you changed your card. Okay. Well, this is the stupidest, most manual part of it. I don't have a way for you to edit your cards, so you just call me on Skype and I type in the number on Stripe. Right.
Speaker 3:And I've never had a problem with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, we have a form on my site, Restaurant Engine. We have a form to to log in and update your billing, but, like, more than half the time, yeah, we basically just have to get on the phone with our customers and update it over the phone.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, it's dumb, but it's something that happens, like, once every two years for most of these people, or they, like, get a new company car and they get fancier or something or whatever. Right.
Speaker 2:It's not
Speaker 3:a huge deal.
Speaker 2:The other thing that I like to kind of talk about when it comes to pricing of productized services is that it often takes the haggling out of the equation. Right? When when you're so up front with the price tag and also the terms and, look, this is what it is, take it or leave it. I mean, have you found that with draft revise or or is there a kind of a give and take in in the beginning when you bring on a new client, you know, oh, it's, you know, it's 1,500. Can we do it for 1,200?
Speaker 2:Do you deal with that kind of thing?
Speaker 3:So I'm gonna flip the script on this question a little bit because I think that by the time I present the price, essentially, I've already handled as many potential objections as you're going to have. And if you want it to do 1,200, then we're gonna have a broader conversation about whether you're serious about the engagement. Right. What happens prior to all of this is I get inside your business as much as I possibly can without you actually paying me. So I ask you for your monthly recurring revenue if you're a SaaS business.
Speaker 3:I ask for your, you know, your run rate if you're and and, you know, all of this is confidential and all that, but, like, I know how many hits you have. So I know roughly how long a test is going to take, give or take. So I know a lot of the metrics about your business and I can say, okay, well if I'm going to give you a 2% improvement in your conversion rate, it's gonna net out to this much increased revenue. If draft revise isn't a no brainer at the price that I've quoted at that point, it's probably my fault. If, you know, if I can say, I'm going to make you another $20,000 a month within three months of the engagement, and that's like a low estimate, like a conservative estimate, and I quote $2,000 a month for you and you flinch.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Then you're just penny pinching. Like, it's an investment and it's an obvious investment. Like, it's something that, oh, I get to, like, work with this this really cool guy who presumably has a lot of charisma and is articulate at what he does. And I do that for, like, three hours a month, and he makes me money hand over fist. And if that's not a no brainer for you at that point, I don't know what more it's it's either my fault and I need to retool the way that I'm selling it or we shouldn't be working together.
Speaker 3:Yes. Just full stop.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Well said. So so yeah. I mean, you know, let's kind of rewind a little bit and where so, you know, where do you come from? Like, what kind of background in in terms of, like, work and and services?
Speaker 2:What have you done before you came out with Draft or Advise? Were you always kind of doing UI design or were you doing it solo as a freelancer? You used to work at a company? Have you know, where does this come back?
Speaker 3:It all it it goes back to the womb now. It goes back to I started when I got out of college in or grad school in 2006, I started out as an HTML developer and I did front end just HTML CSS, trench warfare with Internet Explorer, etcetera. Dating myself fixing I e six.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh my god.
Speaker 3:I e six. That that was a brought back nightmare. Yeah. Riding the bomb down. No.
Speaker 3:I and I did that, but I always wanted to do interaction design and UX stuff, but it was at 2006 kind of difficult to break into that. I wrote cadence and slang before having my first UX gig, which is normally not the order that you go in, and it's moderately insane and I wouldn't recommend it. But I wrote cadence and slang, started getting UX gigs, and just did interaction design, did wire frames, and that is the thing I remain best at. I I'm good at AB testing to the point where I can make you a lot of money, and it's probably the most lucrative part of my business right now. But holy hell, I love making wire frames.
Speaker 3:I love making prototypes and doing layout and behavior and talking about it. And so I I did that starting in agencies. I went freelance at one point which was an unfettered disaster. I went back to agencies, agencies, ran a UX practice at a small ad agency for a year or two and then moved on to being an underling at a really amazing UX agency for another year or two and then started draft. Gosh.
Speaker 3:Now, it's been two and a half years.
Speaker 2:You kinda went from full time employment straight to doing draft revise?
Speaker 3:Or So I've been in draft for two and a half years, and that is the name of my company. And draft revise, I launched about a year ago. So I was doing one in draft, the thing I've done the most is one off UX engagements, putting together prototypes, IA content strategy Gotcha. Digital strategy for people. And draft revised came about.
Speaker 3:I take a one month intermission from client work every year. And you're in the smack middle of that right now when we're having this conversation. It's always in summer so that I can go to the lake and hang out and like not have to worry about stuff. But I spent my time doing biz dev and last year I edited the second edition of Cadence and Slang and wrapped up a quarterly journal I was working on and put together that ecommerce system that I talked about and did everything in Stripe. And, I ended up with a week to spare.
Speaker 3:And I was wondering, what do I do now? Well, okay. What can I do that I could potentially turn into, like, an actual product service that that could actually, like, fit my consulting offerings? I saw, like, Copy Hackers was doing, like, site teardowns and, like, video teardowns, and that was super cool. And I remembered Thirty Seven Signals did an express service at the end of the nineties that led into their making base camp, and they would just tear down a page for $2,000.
Speaker 3:I'm like, $2,000 is like, man, I can go to like Jongbu and like get like Korean food for a month. That's amazing. Like, probably more than a month. Like, handle my rent and, like, do everything off of one of these. And and I was thinking, okay.
Speaker 3:Well, what can I do that's like a monthly service that what are what are the Venn diagram of monthly services that people will pay me for and interaction design engagements?
Speaker 2:Right. Well, actually, let me let me ask you. I mean, at that point, were you doing any sort of monthly retainer type services or was it always kind of one off product projects up until that point?
Speaker 3:What kinds of projects did I do? I'm sorry?
Speaker 2:Up until that point when you're putting together the idea for draft revise, were you had you been doing any kind of monthly retainer services? Or or up till then, it was all kind of project to project?
Speaker 3:Flopping around, had no idea what I did. It was project to project. And I was I kept thinking about doing, like, monthly retainer stuff, but the thing I really love to do, which is wireframes, doesn't work well for a monthly retainer. The whole thing is a it's a holistic package. Like, I can't just do your homepage and be like, stay tuned through the landing page next month.
Speaker 3:And no, that's not how it works. It's preposterous to think that way. So, I decided on AB testing because I was also starting to get frustrated with, like, working as a UX designer. You if it goes right and a project is scoped correctly, you're in at the beginning of the project. You're doing the planning, the strategy.
Speaker 3:And I love doing that. But, you know, after that point, shake your hands, say goodbye, and there's nothing else to say about it. And I wanted to follow through with my clients. So when I was putting together a marketing page for Draft Revis about a week before it launched, I sent it off to all of my clients from the past year. I was like, you know, just tell me what you think about this.
Speaker 3:You know, you don't have to sign up for it. There's and this is not a sales call, but you know me really, really well. And I know you really, really well. And I just wanted, you know, would you buy it? Would you recommend it to others?
Speaker 3:Do you think it's compelling? Do you like anything about it? And it was an unfettered disaster. They hated it. Nobody wanted it.
Speaker 3:Nobody wanted it. Two days later, I launched and blew up on the Internet.
Speaker 2:So wow. So so I mean, you you so you kinda took a week, wrote up this landing page, described, you know, the ideal service, you know, what you'd like to offer. It had you know, in your eyes, it clearly has value and I I think Yeah. Of course, it has proven its value. So so your first step was to launch that.
Speaker 2:So yeah. I mean, let let let's right now, let's kinda get into how you market this thing, how you got your first clients, first customers on draft revised. So your first step was to send it out to your past clients and get their feedback. And I guess the thinking there is like, well, they've already done a project with you. They don't have the burning need for this type of AB service.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We have a professional relationship, but they don't need AB testing every month. The people I've come to realize that the people that want for interaction design work don't want me for AB testing. That's completely fine. And that was the reason
Speaker 2:different types of customers.
Speaker 3:Yeah. At the same time, I sent it out to a bunch of colleagues, like friends that were designers, and I was like, can you just pick this apart because I need critique? And holy hell, they loved it. They all really really liked it. And one of them was Brennan Dunn.
Speaker 3:He is a fellow bootstrapper who has an enormous audience. I sent it out like the Thursday before it launched. And he was like, wow, this is great. Let me know when it launches. And Monday rolls around, it launches.
Speaker 3:And I email him. He's like, okay. Great. Tuesday, he wrote on Freelancers Weekly, I want you to be more like Nick. Here is Nick's offering.
Speaker 3:Here's everything that he does. Holy crap. He positions everything so amazingly well and, you know, this is an amazing model for business.
Speaker 2:About that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So two days later that Thursday, Patrick McKenzie wrote about me and did a 4,000 word teardown on my marketing page. And then my server crashed.
Speaker 2:And the rest is history.
Speaker 3:Rest is history. No. I filled up every slot within a week.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's amazing.
Speaker 3:So I wrote about all of this. I have a huge blog post that summarizes the first year of draft revise, which kind listener, I strongly recommend you take a look at it, blog.nickd.org. And this covers everything that that happened in that first month. Essentially, the the short of it was I had a panic attack that lasted for two months and had no idea what I was doing.
Speaker 2:So, yeah. I mean, like, tell me about that first week after you after all this craziness happens on the Internet, your your stuff is kind of covered by Brennan Dunn and and Patio eleven and so Yeah. Where so, you you know, you book your slot solid. Is that like seven paying clients in in the first week?
Speaker 3:I booked eight, and I told everybody initially it was gonna be 10. And I I eventually got 10, but I realized that I've spread too thin at ten. I can't do it. Mhmm. I can't do it.
Speaker 3:I paired it back to seven and charged more so I can serve everybody as well as I can. Onboarding a client takes an enormous amount of energy out of me. I can't do more than like one or two in a month. I just
Speaker 2:I mean, at this point, you've been doing it for over a year. I'm sure you've got your processes kind of well honed and refined and everything. But what was that first month like? You you book yourself solid. You got, like, eight, ten of your first clients.
Speaker 2:All you've done up to this point is write a landing page about this new service. So was it was it just craziness in that in the first couple weeks of,
Speaker 3:like It was insanity. I slept maybe six hours in the first two weeks.
Speaker 2:I mean Combined. I can't I mean, what was well, let me ask you this. I mean, AB testing, you had been doing wireframes and interaction design and and and UX and and all that. I mean, had you done much of, like, AB testing, return on investment type of work before before launching DraftRevise?
Speaker 3:So I I had not done anything that quantitatively tied what I did to results. It was more Nick works magic and then sales quintuple. And so I get testimonials from people, and I can, like, justify the ROI, but I don't know the magnitude, and I don't know the the time frame. With AB testing, you know both of those things very immediately. So and you know the confidence interval, so you can actually predict things and use statistics to your advantage, which is amazing.
Speaker 3:But I had not done any of that prior. No.
Speaker 2:So how did you kind of I mean, did you do some sort of like guarantee of the value return on investment? Like, what if they don't see results after a month or after three months or, you know?
Speaker 3:If if I'm not generating value for you after three months, we're definitely parting ways on possibly refunding you. There's no question. I don't think that I should be wasting your time. I don't by that point, it should be a well oiled machine for us. I mean, I shouldn't be running into any bugs on the AB testing.
Speaker 3:And and I've done that a couple of times. Like, I'll say, like, you know, I'm not making money for you. We're done. Like, this is a bummer, but, know, we learned something out of all of this. And we learned something out of potentially running an AB testing practice.
Speaker 3:There will be sites that get a lot of traffic, but it's already like qualified converted traffic. So I don't have anybody to sell to and I don't find that out until I actually start testing and then I realized that 98% of people coming in are logging in.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 2:Interesting. So, know, past that first month, like, how did things change or improve, or how did you refine the service as as the the first year went on?
Speaker 3:Well, as mentioned, it was completely slapdash. I barely had terms and conditions together. I my fun story, my lawyers closed up shop two weeks before draft revise launched. And when I emailed them, they were like, we're out of business. I was like
Speaker 2:What? So I
Speaker 3:had to find lawyers, retain them, and then ask them to write terms and conditions for draft revise within the span of about two days, which thank god. Oh my god. They have a customer for life at this point. They're amazing. But that happened.
Speaker 3:And, I don't have anything together. I really didn't. I barely had a relationship with VWO at that point, and I had to, like, ping them about getting a a agency plan and getting everything together. So the things that changed where I actually got all of my stuff together. Over the first month, I refined the reporting on it a lot and I asked for a lot of feedback and figured out a lot of the like pitfalls that can happen.
Speaker 3:Basically, everything that could go wrong in the first month did.
Speaker 2:I mean, what was what's an example of one thing that you had assumed would be a a key part of the service and maybe didn't turn out to be as important to to customers as you thought? Or the flip side, like, maybe something that they were asking for that you didn't anticipate.
Speaker 3:Some clients have wanted different reports and different formats for the reports. They want varying things. Some of them really like the the very prim like one off PDF that they get every time. Some people just want me to write really long base camp posts and I have to ask them. There was one person who demanded markdown and I wrongly assumed everybody wanted markdown.
Speaker 3:Not everybody wants markdown. They're not neckbeards like me. It's the fastest for me to write, but yeah. So I mean it's the reporting has been the one big thing, but there's a like kind of a bimodal distribution in how hands on you are. Some people are just like, yep, great.
Speaker 3:Other people are like getting they're they're like getting on a Skype call and whiteboarding behind the camera and like talking with me through it and like Wow. That's I love both of those approaches, but it's very different personalities and very different cultures. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So okay. So so beyond Draft Revise, we also have Draft Revise Express, it's called.
Speaker 3:That's
Speaker 2:right. So how how did that come about? I mean, that came about later on. Right?
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah. The Revise Express only came out two months ago. So when I write when I start working with you for draft revise, one of the first things I do is I write an enormous teardown of your entire marketing site, and that allows me to impress the heck out of you within a week and provide you with my perspective on things. So it also kind of vets whether we would still be a good fit together. I've had if you rebel against the first report, we should not be working together.
Speaker 3:Thank God that has never happened, but you know Right. It's a it's another bromide and it's the first deliverable you get from me. And a lot of people will be like, oh, wow. This is great. I would pay like a thousand dollars for this report alone.
Speaker 3:And I'm like, you know, good. Yeah. So now I just sell one off reports for a discount, 10% discount, 900. And you can buy them from my site by hitting a button and giving me your credit card information, filling out a questionnaire in that order. And they've sell they've sold pretty well.
Speaker 3:It takes me about a week put one together. I print out your stuff, mark up screenshots, and write up typically about 5,000 words on what you need to be doing. And I also write like a a b testing how to guide that goes out to everybody and it teaches you how to put these into practice, what to be testing first, and how to be actually handling all of this stuff. So far, everybody that's gotten the reports has been very responsive and very helpful in providing feedback, and they I think it's provided a good ROI for them, although it's only been two months. So what I've put together, which you don't know about as a customer of Revisexpress is a one year accountability system where I email you constant I don't constantly, but like, I email you periodically and ask you how things are going.
Speaker 3:And if you aren't putting together AB tests or if you're not getting ROI from the AB tests, then we'll talk about potential refunds cause that's on the table. That's still on the table.
Speaker 2:Or that that kinda keeps you in constant contact with those customers. They can potentially become customers of draft revise.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's what happens. So I will email you three months out and be like, so how things going, man? How how have your test been going? And they'll be like, oh, Nick.
Speaker 3:They were so swamped. We don't have anything to do. We we haven't done any tests. We haven't even signed up for Optimizely yet. Please come in and help us.
Speaker 3:I'll be like, great.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:I will come in and help you right now. And I deduct that from your draft revised fees. I don't want you to pay twice. We already have a plan together, and we're gonna start testing, like now.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. And, I mean, that's that's really the key behind a product high service like this is that it's it's done for you. You know? Right. Part of the the the value is that you're saving them the time of doing it themselves, or for them to even like figure out how to do it themselves.
Speaker 2:You know, like thinking about like software versus, you know, building software versus building a productized service. Mhmm. Software is typically like, here's a tool, now you go do it yourself. And so that's really interesting. And I really like what you've done, again, with product with Revise Express.
Speaker 2:Again, you're kind of like defining the scope as something that you personally wanna be doing on a daily basis, weekly basis, whatever it is. And something that provides clear value, can be useful. And, you know, you're not in this conversation of haggling between, oh, you know, we wanna add a, c, let's let's tweak the scope to be that, or sure, I could do logo logo design or all these other random services, but you do one thing one thing really well. Or, you know, a couple different things, actually. But just really awesome what you're doing here.
Speaker 2:So back to kind of draft revise and marketing. In very beginning, you were booked solid, thanks to Brennan Dunn and Patrick McKenzie. And how are you going about marketing today? I mean, it it looks like draft revise is constantly booked up. Right?
Speaker 2:I I mean, like, how does that work today?
Speaker 3:I really just post that another slot is available and famous people on the Internet retweet it so much that it fills up within a week. I haven't I have the most terrible marketing advice for everyone, which is funny because I edit your marketing page. But for draft revise, like, I get famous people to post about it. I don't know. Like, it just
Speaker 2:Well, tell me about that for a second. I mean, since you've been doing draft revise, that has gotten a lot of attention. But do you personally have a pretty large audience? Or how how do you get this kind of recognition?
Speaker 3:So if you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that my Twitter has just turned into a link blog. Others called it garbage. I don't really do much on it. I have stopped really paying attention to social media. I have a mailing list, but I deliberately don't look at the metrics behind it because think I would get incredibly petrified at what happens.
Speaker 3:The only metric I do know is the reply rate, and that's in the hundreds every time I send out an email. So I suspect I've built a really large audience on that. I write a letter to people every Monday and it's the world's stupidest mailing list. I wrote 1,600 words about a sandwich last month that were well received. If you are looking for hard business advice or actionable value, I would like you to unsubscribe from my mailing list and subscribe to Paul Jarvis, Remin Don or Patrick McKenzie or people who are actually helping you.
Speaker 3:Very nice. So my marketing strategy what's the technical term for it? It's terrible. It's absolutely terrible. Have no idea what I'm doing.
Speaker 2:But I mean, like okay. So, like, new customers who who grab one of those open slots whenever they do open up, do those typically come as a result of a tweet a tweet from Brendan Dunn? Or or are they people who've been following you for a while or been on is there a there's a waiting list to get on when it's it's all closed up? Or
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, you can still apply, like, well, the all slots are full as of today when we're talking, but you can still apply. I'll just email you right when a slot opens up, and I'll do that before I send it out to the unwashed masses. And sometimes, like, maybe fifty fifty, people will be like, oh, yeah. We're ready.
Speaker 3:We've been ready for, three months for you, Ben.
Speaker 2:Very
Speaker 3:cool. But I have no idea. I don't look at the thing about Twitter, it's all like a numbers game, and it's all like trying to see how many people and cool people and famous people are at replying you. So I really just don't look at it. Maybe Brandon retweets me every time.
Speaker 3:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, you know, Nick, this this has been great. I I I certainly learned a lot more about kind of behind the scenes what what you've been up to.
Speaker 2:I think the folks here will will get a lot out of it. So, you know, really appreciate it. Where can people kind of reach out to you? What's the best way to connect?
Speaker 3:So my personal site is at nickd.org. Don't at reply me on Twitter. Just email me. I'm nickd@nickd.org on there. I am very responsive on email.
Speaker 3:Usually, turn everything around in a day. I'm at inbox four right now, so I'm really good at email.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm
Speaker 3:better than email me there. And draft.nu is my businesses site, and you can take a look at all my offerings there. And I think that cadence.cc is my book if you wanna read about interaction design, and I pack and ship every single book myself. If you turned this camera around right now, you would see 2,000 books in the printer. Awesome.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:Cool. Well, Nick, thanks again. And it's been great. Thanks.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate it.
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