Bootstrapped Web

Brian Casel: 00:10

This is Bootstrap Web episode 89. And as always, I am Brian.

Jordan Gal: 00:15

And and I'm Jordan, and that's our new intro.

Brian Casel: 00:19

Pretty well thought out.

Jordan Gal: 00:20

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Brian Casel: 00:21

Yep. Yep.

Jordan Gal: 00:21

We're just you know, we're getting right to the point here.

Brian Casel: 00:23

Yeah. That's right.

Jordan Gal: 00:24

Becoming more efficient.

Brian Casel: 00:25

Not beating around the bush anymore.

Jordan Gal: 00:26

Cool, Brian. Good good to talk with you.

Brian Casel: 00:27

Yeah. Good to be back, sir. So this will be a good one. We're, I I guess today we'll just kinda talk about an update and then, yeah. Just kinda see what's what's going on.

Brian Casel: 00:36

What's new?

Jordan Gal: 00:37

Yeah. Update episodes. See what's, what's happening. I like where we always we start off on what we're thinking about day to day and then it end usually ends up somewhere like in in in the bigger picture of why we're trying to work on what we are and and and all that. Yeah.

Jordan Gal: 00:53

So you you you wanna go or otherwise I can I can I can rant away?

Brian Casel: 00:57

Yeah. I'll I'll start off today. Let's see. I just launched the content upgrades plugin. So, that's officially out the door now.

Brian Casel: 01:08

And as of this recording or when this when this episode publishes, it'll be officially open to the to the public for anyone to to get their hands on. So you can check that out. So this part of it hasn't totally been figured out yet. The like, which domain should we use for this plugin? And I'm still kinda working on that.

Brian Casel: 01:25

But basically, we have the domaincontentupgrades.io. And that's been the URL that we've been promoting for the the pre launch, the early access list. So probably, you can go to that URL, and and you'll you'll make your way over to where you can you can get the plug in. But I also just set up shop.audienceops.com. And that's where the plugin will actually be sold from.

Brian Casel: 01:50

So I'm thinking what I'll probably end up doing is have like contentupgrades.i o be be like the sales page or kind of a promotional mini site. And then the button or, like, you know, buy now or whatever will point over to, shop.audienceops.com. And what I'm what I'm thinking there is, you know, I've kinda talked about this before, how this plugin is really gonna be the first of of a whole line of plugins that will that will release probably over over the next year or so from Audience Ops. So I so I spent the last two weeks or so. I've been doing a number of things around the Content Upgrades plugin.

Brian Casel: 02:25

First of all, I had to set up that the shop on Audience Ops. So now we have a a fully functional, basically, an ecommerce store built onto Audience Ops. It's, using the, easy digital downloads system, which is really really great system built by, Pippin Pippin Williamson. And, just really dialed in, especially if you're selling WordPress plugins. And that's what what we'll be doing mostly.

Brian Casel: 02:48

So I got that all set up. And then and then yesterday, I held a live workshop, a live webinar, for for anybody who had had signed up for early access. And then I also promoted the the workshop to my list. So I've been promoting that over the last two weeks, then I've I've finally held that live workshop yesterday. And so all of last week, was the early access period.

Brian Casel: 03:11

As of today, as we're recording this, it actually launched yesterday. And for the rest of this week, as we as we're speaking now, this is like the early access period. And then Monday, yesterday, when when you're listening to this, it it's kind of open to the public. Know that's pretty confusing there, but

Jordan Gal: 03:27

Just the timing. So how how'd the how'd the webinar process go? Always always tricky.

Brian Casel: 03:32

I think it was okay. I think it was pretty good. The webinar itself was good. I think sales were okay. Probably sales of the of the plugin were, a little bit less than I had hoped initially.

Brian Casel: 03:43

But again, right now, we're only on the first day. So there was a a bunch of sales on the on the first day around the time of the webinar. And then I expect probably over the weekend when the early access coupon kind of expires, there's usually a spike of sales then too. The workshop went really well, though. We had about three fifty or so people registered for the workshop, and then about 75, maybe it was up to 80 at one point, attended live.

Brian Casel: 04:12

So that was really good to kinda get a good group on the call. And then and then anybody who didn't attend live can, of course, you know, go back and watch the recording. Every time I do one of these webinars, and I've done them, like, a couple times now, and I think I've gotten a lot better at it, in terms of getting all the pieces in in place and knowing, you know, how to set it up correctly and how to host the webinar correctly and and, like, the mechanics of doing all that. But there's there's so many little pieces that go into play, and there's always something that you forget, or there's always something that gets a little bit screwed out, you know?

Jordan Gal: 04:44

Yeah. Drives you nuts. You want it to be like a podcast motor, like let me just show up and do the podcast, and then and then everything else is done. Seriously.

Brian Casel: 04:51

And that was like a productized service idea that I almost launched before I before I did audience.

Jordan Gal: 04:56

Webinar motor. That's it, Craig. Let's do it.

Brian Casel: 05:01

Exactly. And I found, like, 10 things that I almost completely screwed up right at the last minute. And I like, know, phew, fixed that email before it went out, you know? But, like, the timing of the European time zone was an hour off, And those people kinda showed up, you know, an hour early and and whatnot. So it's it's just so much so many little details that go into these things.

Brian Casel: 05:23

But I think I think on all that the webinar went pretty well. And now my next step on working on that is to set up a more automated, sales funnel and and way to bring people from our Audience Ops audience, and my audience into the, the Content Upgrades plugin. So I'm kind of working on that today and tomorrow. I already have a few blog posts all about content upgrades and then kind of a PDF download and then a recorded version of of the workshop and kinda putting those pieces together into some sort of automation flow and drip. So that's what I'm working on this week.

Brian Casel: 06:00

And then the last piece that I wanna get in place before I you know, sometime in the next two, three weeks before I leave here, before I leave Asheville, North Carolina, would be like the primary lead magnet on Audience Ops itself. And that's gonna be an email course, which I've already started to outline. And, my designer is working on setting up a landing page for that. My developer has also started working on a plugin to create landing pages for email courses, because we do that pretty often for our clients too. So Of course, he has.

Brian Casel: 06:32

Yeah. So that'll probably be the next, first, we're gonna use it internally, and then we'll release it as as another plug in, you know, in in a few months.

Jordan Gal: 06:40

Can you explain that real quick?

Brian Casel: 06:42

What what what is it to? Yes. Okay. So so email courses are like a primary lead magnet. And we create them for almost all of our clients.

Brian Casel: 06:52

And and right now, I'm creating our email course for audience ops. And by primary lead magnet, mean, that's the thing that that you kinda drive all of your traffic to. Content upgrades are great for, like, individual blog posts. This is like that thing that it's the funnel that brings new subscribers into your product. Everybody gets funneled here.

Brian Casel: 07:11

If you already have an existing website, and you're already set up on WordPress or whatever, it's not so easy to just quickly whip up a landing page attached onto your website. There are tools you could use, like Leadpages or something. But there's the subscription for that. And I'm personally just not such a big fan of using, you know, template tools, especially when the Landing Pages have a different look and feel and a different branding than the rest of the website. I wanted to have a plugin that would allow us to easily put a landing page onto a WordPress site regardless of what theme the WordPress site is using.

Jordan Gal: 07:50

Oh, I see. So it it stays consistent. And this is this is essentially it's an opt in page.

Brian Casel: 07:56

Yes. It's an opt in to

Jordan Gal: 07:57

the course, but you want to explain the value of the course, what you're getting out of it before you ask for the fields to be submitted.

Brian Casel: 08:04

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, you could just create another page in WordPress for that. But then already using a theme, so it's gonna probably have the navigation and the footer and all that stuff. This is gonna be a totally stripped down landing page, just the headline, your logo, the description, an email opt in form, and that's basically it with a couple of really simple customization options. And I mean, like for my own sites in the past, what I would do is I'm a web designer, so I would just go in there and hack my theme and create a custom page template and put it into my theme.

Brian Casel: 08:39

That's how I used to create landing pages.

Jordan Gal: 08:41

Yeah, I was always jealous looking at your landing pages because they always looked great and you didn't use any of the other tools and I was like, what the hell man, I can't I can't do that. I have to use lead pages or something that's more templated.

Brian Casel: 08:51

Yeah, exactly. And and now that we're doing this on our client sites, audience ops, like, don't go in and really edit the client's website code or anything like that. We but we do install a couple of plug ins, like our content upgrades plug in, and then later we'll we'll install this landing pages plug in to allow us to put put up these landing pages. So I just started having my team work on building that tool out. And meanwhile, what I'm working on is actually writing our email course, so that these these pieces start to come together in the next couple of weeks.

Brian Casel: 09:23

And, hopefully, by the end of this month, we'll be able to launch our email course on audience ops. That's about, you know, how you can, grow your audience and, kinda convert that into customers and and all that.

Jordan Gal: 09:36

Is that gonna be similar content to your webinar? Because I I did listen to most of your webinar and a lot of the stuff that you just throw out there, like primary nurture campaign, right, these things and well, you explained really well on the webinar and how things like content upgrades help, but they are different entry points into your funnel and you do want people to go through one like, think that took me three or four conversations with you to, see that visually and say, oh, that's what it's the same thing with with I've had a few conversations with Rob Walling about Drip, and it took a few conversations for me to say, oh, okay. Now I get it. Everything should be automated except for the occasional newsletter that's manual. It like it took me a few times.

Jordan Gal: 10:22

I dunno if you plan on making that webinar, public on your site or automated it, but, but it's really good for, getting people to see and understand your vision of how to use content.

Brian Casel: 10:33

Yeah. Yeah. And mean, it's

Jordan Gal: 10:35

not easy to explain.

Brian Casel: 10:36

Yeah. Exactly. I mean, there definitely are different, like, different versions of of how to organize your content and all of your automation, and different people do it in different ways. But we kinda have a standard process that I've been using personally, and we and we implement this on all of our clients. But, yeah, that webinar from yesterday, I did mention the the primary lead magnet, but most of that webinar was kind of focused on content upgrades.

Brian Casel: 10:59

And so there is gonna be a a recorded version of that that comes in the sequence that'll be, like, ongoing, you know, like, readily available for anyone who wants to go through that sequence at any time, for the content upgrade sequence there. But, this next email course that I'm working on for Audience Ops is really for converting traffic into consultations to become clients of Audience Ops. So that's a it's slightly different. I mean, we're definitely covering a lot of, like, overlapping topics there. Mhmm.

Jordan Gal: 11:30

Right. But it should lead into an appropriate offer.

Brian Casel: 11:33

Yeah. It's more it's a little bit more high level. It's it's really speaking more to the business owner and how to how to think about content marketing for your business, not necessarily how to implement all the little pieces of it yourself. You know, because that segment of the audience is not so interested in the do it yourself stuff. They're more interested in, well, how do I just grow my customer base?

Brian Casel: 11:57

And how do I outsource this and systematize it and and, you know, get this machine running so that I actually get a a return on investment from content marketing. Like, that's the whole theme of of this email course that I'm that I'm putting together. And then after that, you know, I'm I'm gonna be traveling for most of December. So I don't plan to get a whole lot done then. So I think, I think I'll once I get that piece done and and this content upgrades funnel done, I'll feel pretty good about the last month or two, which was, you know, my whole goal right now has been get get our sales and marketing systems up and running, launch this plug in and get that out the door.

Brian Casel: 12:35

Things are moving well. I've you know, the the customer base on Audience Hops has been growing pretty well. We've got a good pipeline of leads now and, kinda really dialing in our sales and marketing process. And even the stuff that I do myself, like the sales calls and sending out, you know, basically template proposals to to leads I talk to them. Like, all of that has been really dialed in in the last two weeks, where it's like a couple of canned responses.

Brian Casel: 13:03

I do a call with someone, and then once they sign up, it's handed off right over to my team, and they're doing, like, a kick a kickoff call. They're coming up with topics. They're they're getting all the pieces going and and the the machine is running pretty well. Got the the team is is in place. They're all doing fantastic and it's it's exciting to see it all kind of come together right now.

Jordan Gal: 13:25

Nice, man. And where are you're still in North Carolina?

Brian Casel: 13:28

Yeah.

Jordan Gal: 13:29

Alright. And what what where you heading next?

Brian Casel: 13:32

So I'm in North Carolina right now. The next long stop is gonna be, Austin, Texas. I'll be there for about six weeks. So I know that there are probably more listeners who who live in that area. So I'm sure we'll do some, some meet ups around the Austin area.

Brian Casel: 13:48

Pretty excited about that. In in between North Carolina and Austin, there'll be about two weeks where we're doing, like, one or two night stops at different places. So from here, we'll we'll go to Nashville, and then Memphis, and then Little Rock. We're visiting some friends there. And then and then down to New Orleans for a couple nights, and then across the Southern coastline, as we get into Texas.

Jordan Gal: 14:17

Alright. Very nice, man. Well, good. It's it's good to hear. I think, you know, a lot of a lot of what you talked about is interesting, exciting, and the fact that content upgrades is is out the door.

Jordan Gal: 14:27

But I think what you said at the end about the fact that the team is gelling and working well together and you're not involved in every single step of the process, I think that's the that's the part that's the most most exciting.

Brian Casel: 14:40

Yeah. Definitely. I mean, feels good. Slack is, very active every day and, you know, I I kinda I definitely pop in there, but, you know, the the team is is off and running and and I'm still involved. Like, I'm we have team calls and and questions and emails and things, I'm I'm still working on this every day.

Brian Casel: 14:59

It's not it's not like it's completely hands off at this point, but I do feel good that I'm working on the things that I should be working on. Like, I'm not I'm not really working on the day to day repeatable service tasks. I'm working on building out new parts of our product. You know, I'm doing sales calls. That that's the kind of stuff that I enjoy doing.

Jordan Gal: 15:23

Nice, man. Well well, if it makes sense, to talk about my side of things, think that's a good gateway right there. Because while you might not be working on the day to day, I am. I'm not working on the right things and that's been the biggest challenge over the past week. What's happened over the past week is that things have gone well.

Jordan Gal: 15:48

What I mean by that is the number of trials we're getting is just increasing at a good rate. I had a few podcasts that I was a guest on published at the same time and a few other things just kind of all happened within a week and we just got a bunch of trials from it, higher quality trials, and just everything's heading in the right direction. I looked over at our records and we are now averaging more than one launched campaign per day. So it's that's not more than one free trial per day. That's a free trial that creates an account, gets set up, gets integrated, sets up their emails, and launches their email campaign.

Jordan Gal: 16:26

So we're averaging

Brian Casel: 16:27

And that's kinda like what you consider like activated.

Jordan Gal: 16:30

That's like a real a real lead, a real prospect, someone who's actually starting to get value from the product and therefore might turn into a paying customer. Everyone else, we try to, you know, we try to get them over that hurdle to get them launched, but that's that's the real that's the the magic number for us. So we're averaging more than one a day on that, and so everything's heading in the right direction. So what's happened over the past week is that with all of that activity, which is great, I have been buried in what what I still have on my plate. And so I'll go through a whole day and I'll work hard all day.

Jordan Gal: 17:06

And then I will look back and say, so I did a few things well. I spoke to three people on the phone that I've never spoken to before. And I always consider a day when I speak with a stranger on the phone, good day. I did a demo that was successful. I wrote, you know, and responded to 50 emails, and I got a few people launched and answered questions and helped someone on their template, all this great activity that's leading to more people launching and more people signing up.

Jordan Gal: 17:33

But I I didn't spend time on the strategic work of let's get a new Facebook ad funnel launched. Let me write out the email campaign for a cold email outreach campaign to this type of market. Let me reach out to someone like Pippin at easy digital downloads and say, should we potentially do an integration together? So all this strategic work that will will make the next month or two months from now look better. So it's been the first time I find myself taking my chair and swirling it around a little bit, looking at my bookcase.

Jordan Gal: 18:13

I look at things like Getting Things Done and these types of books, I'm like, I think I need to plan better. Need more of a system around making sure that I do strategic work.

Brian Casel: 18:27

Well, let me ask you something about that real quick. So, I mean, you said that when when people go through the trial and they and they get to that point where they're kind of considered activated, they've they've launched their campaign. I mean, you're you're doing like, are you calling them? You're you're reaching out to them? Is that what what's kinda taking up your time?

Jordan Gal: 18:46

It is it's death by a thousand cuts. It is, someone signs up and wants to do a demo, or or before they even do a demo, they respond to one of our either cold email campaign or an ad campaign, or they see us on a podcast and they say, hey, I'm interested. Here's my contact info. Let's set up a demo. Cool.

Jordan Gal: 19:08

So I will do that demo, which I think is is is great, and I end up closing most of the people that I do a demo with. You know, so it's definitely worth your time. And people who want a demo are generally higher quality prospects. So I'll spend time on that. And then I will go into support emails and respond to four or five emails.

Jordan Gal: 19:28

And then I will have owed someone something. And then I will also go and follow-up with someone who was supposed to convert and were waiting to get their credit card info but haven't, so I'll send them another email saying, hey, haven't got your credit card info. Please put it in. I'll confirm once we have it. So it's this combination of a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit and that, and then this, and then this other task.

Jordan Gal: 19:49

And it all look, it does add up to good things happening.

Brian Casel: 19:53

But What about support? I mean, is there not someone else who's working on support?

Jordan Gal: 19:59

So right now, sales and support are indistinguishable from one another. And it's actually interesting topic that we talked about internal internally, Ben and I, what we have found, because they're not really differentiated sales and support, when someone wants a demo, that's sales. Then when they create their account, now all a sudden it's kind of support. And they have a question and can you help me change something on my template? I want it to look like my other emails.

Jordan Gal: 20:31

Okay, now But that's kind of like sales

Brian Casel: 20:33

they're a free trial customer, right? There's, it's still kind of sales.

Jordan Gal: 20:36

Right, so it's still kind of sales, but then they get launched and they, oh, I saw this weird thing, did you miss this session, I wanna make sure. So now all of sudden it's more support, but it's still the same relationship of someone that I just had a demo with three days ago, and I want them to be super psyched about just the whole experience, because this is the most critical, that first week of the experience with the company. I So wonder

Brian Casel: 21:00

if I mean, I I know I know what you're saying. I know how like, the whole death by a thousand cuts thing. But I think there is real value in at least phasing in a tier one support person for for those things, even for the free trial people. And and I know how hard that is to kinda offload that, especially when it's, like, so critical and these are, like, high value accounts that are that could potentially sign up or drop off, you know. Mean, I've had this experience with with SaaS stuff that I've signed up for where it's like, I have a couple of presales questions, and I get into, like, the little live chat widget, and then I'm clearly talking to the founder of of the thing.

Brian Casel: 21:40

And then I sign up for it, and I'm setting up my account, and I've got a couple more questions. And it's still the founder who's answering my questions. And, you know, the the thought that I had in my mind was like, this looks like it's a one man operation. And and fine. Like, tool works, and it's solving my problem, and I'm probably gonna pay for it.

Brian Casel: 21:58

But if this guy, you know, gets sick or something, I'm probably not gonna get support. At least that's what I'm thinking. You know? Even if that's not necessarily the case or not. So, you know, even like, if you if you can train a support person to to be that tier one support, I think, believe it or not, like, it might even give your your new customers a little bit more peace of mind that, oh, Cardhook is like a real company.

Jordan Gal: 22:25

Yeah. So we we we actually do things to address that. When someone signs up, they get an email from Jonas first. That's our account manager, and they say, hi. I'm Jonas.

Jordan Gal: 22:36

I want to introduce myself. I'm your account manager at Cardhook. So they get an email from someone. They all so now all a sudden, they see an additional person on top of who they spoke with. Right?

Jordan Gal: 22:45

And they they might have spoken with Jonas first and gotten a demo scheduled with me. And then once they once they launch their campaign, we transition them on to someone else. We say congrats on getting launched and we have some important news. Here's the person that will take care of you moving forward. So we do have it in place, it's just that what I'm dealing with right now is scar tissue.

Jordan Gal: 23:06

You know that concept of scar tissue in in I think Rework, one of the 37 signals book.

Brian Casel: 23:11

I read that, it was a while while back.

Jordan Gal: 23:13

Yes, so they talk about this concept of scar tissue where a lot of the things you do are based on these negative experiences in the past that really shouldn't determine where your company goes but you can't help it because you know, you got hurt and now it's a scar And we had the same experience. I tried to back off almost entirely from support and we had a bad month. We had a bad two months. And so I basically said, alright, we can't afford another bad two months with our runway. I'm just gonna do what it takes and, you know, expectedly, things have improved.

Jordan Gal: 23:49

And so now I'm dealing with okay. I got scar tissue and then so I got like the I got like whacked and then I got the reward. So I'm like a nice trained monkey in the middle being like, okay.

Brian Casel: 23:58

You do this at that the end of the day though, or the like, the long term goal of all this has to be this product runs itself. Right? And the team and the support team runs the product. Like, you you know that at a certain point, it's not a viable product if it completely relies on you to do that tier one support during the free trial. You know, I think at some point, you're gonna have to trust that it's a quality product and that you have a quality team in place to support it.

Brian Casel: 24:26

And then and then you can focus on what you should be doing.

Jordan Gal: 24:29

You're not gonna get any argument from me on that. But I do I do see it in two phases. And I see phase one as just do whatever the hell it takes to get to to get either to profitability or very close to it. And then phase two is, okay. Now I can take on more risk, with with the smarter longer term approach.

Jordan Gal: 24:51

But right now we're we're in phase one.

Brian Casel: 24:53

Yeah. So Yeah, true. I hear that. I mean, even but like, even like a support person, you can just train them on like, alright, these are like the five most commonly asked questions. So at least those questions are handled.

Brian Casel: 25:04

And if it's anything else, just escalate to me, you know.

Jordan Gal: 25:07

Right. Right. Just to just to start, which yeah. Which I've I've done some in the past and I I need to do more of.

Brian Casel: 25:12

But that's still a good it's a good problem to have though.

Jordan Gal: 25:15

It's it's good. It's just a problem. That's like, okay. Now now I'm I essentially, I'm experimenting now with different ways to handle my schedule. My favorite time of day to do work is in the afternoon after lunch.

Jordan Gal: 25:29

So I basically have blocked off two to 5PM every day to do strategic work. And I'm using a bit of accountability along with that to so at the beginning at at 2PM, say, hey, Ben, here's what I'm working on during this strategic session. And at 05:00, I sent him whatever I have created in that time. So it's not like I'm gonna go explore this thing and and read a bunch of stuff about it. It's by 05:00 I want I'm gonna I need to send Ben whatever I have.

Jordan Gal: 25:58

Doesn't need to be finished, and there's no, like, oh, I'm not done with it yet. I'll send it tomorrow. Just whatever I have created in that time, I send to him. So it's, like, a time block plus some accountability.

Brian Casel: 26:07

That's that's a good point. I've been thinking about that recently. Have you looked at any of these tools that are specifically for that, like to report what you're working on or what you accomplished today? Have you seen those? I I think there's like, I I done this and Status Hero is is another good one.

Jordan Gal: 26:25

I just can't handle any more tools, man. I can't do it. When I get in the office, I'm like Gmail, Google Docs, Help Scout, Intercom, you know

Brian Casel: 26:34

I know. Slack. My team, like, goes crazy when I when I start thinking about, like, adding in more tools because we're we're all over, like, Slack and Trello and Google Docs and Yeah. We use

Jordan Gal: 26:45

sprint.ly. So it's it's really well, I'm kinda maxed out. Don't I don't wanna put my info. I'm just trying to make Trello trying to make Trello work, and then I I use my notebook for a a lot of stuff because I just like that.

Brian Casel: 26:59

This is, you know, but that is something like the accountability thing or even just like status. I mean, this is something that I've been thinking about for my team because in in two ways. Number one, we've we've had a little bit of an issue with knowing what everybody else is working on at any given time and and actually having an an understanding of, like, what everybody's workload is. So, like, when we give one of the one of the assistants, you know, hey, we need you to tweak this image in this blog post, we we might forget that that he actually has, like, eight other things on his queue. And and we don't we don't really have a way to to see that right now.

Brian Casel: 27:32

But then the other thing that I was thinking about for myself is my team is all working mostly on our production line of of blog content that goes out. And I'm doing all this other, like, sales and marketing stuff and building out systems and plans and strategic work. But sometimes I feel like and I don't know if this is, like, reality or not, but in my mind, I I feel like my team might think that I'm, you know, off on a beach somewhere not doing any work while they're while they're, you know, doing all the work. And that's, you know, it's obviously not the case. And I if if there could be some way for them to know what I'm working on when when what I'm working on isn't totally visible.

Jordan Gal: 28:13

Right. Because they don't they don't see. They don't see. Yeah. A lot of times, like what what Ben and Rock work on, I mean, I literally see it in Slack.

Jordan Gal: 28:21

I see committed to production. New new new feature launch, new thing committed. I see all that activity. They don't see when I have a phone call for thirty minutes with someone and I learn something, you know?

Nathan Barry: 28:33

Right.

Jordan Gal: 28:33

That's a different thing. Yeah. All they see is free trials. So when we have a great week of like 30 free trials, I'm like, I feel I feel great because I know they're seeing it, but but there's gotta be something something about it.

Brian Casel: 28:46

Yeah. Exactly. So what what is your your productivity stuff that you've been working on?

Jordan Gal: 28:51

No. It's it's this. It's moving around the calendar. You know, I think for Okay.

Brian Casel: 28:54

Like time blocking and and how how do you do the accountability thing? Like, are you just like sending Ben an email?

Jordan Gal: 29:00

Yeah. Like a a Slack message. Literally. Ben, I'm working on Facebook ad, which is, you know, image and creative and copy and all that, and audiences. And I'm also working on this PDF that is a download for the funnel.

Jordan Gal: 29:16

And that's it. And then I just will send him the latest version of that PDF, even if it's not done, even if has a bunch of weird red notes for me on what I should include here and what screenshot I need. As long as I just say, look, I've created something. I've moved forward and I I need that personally. I need the accountability.

Brian Casel: 29:34

Yeah. We we do a ton of accountability within our mastermind group which I have I have that call in about forty five minutes from now. That that's been great I think for all of us, definitely for me, like with tracking our goals and even like in between our goals, just like going into into our mastermind Slack room and just being like, got this done or assigned to this client and it's it's good.

Jordan Gal: 29:56

Yeah. I I think what it came down to for me was a few days ago I had this thought. I'm doing so much during the day with my time to make sure that other people are not disappointed. So people send an email, they get a response. People send a request, it gets addressed.

Jordan Gal: 30:10

You'll have a question, all these different things. And what I realized was, I am making sure that other people are not disappointed and it ensures that I am disappointed in myself because of the progress that I I know I should be making. I I needed to flip that. I need to say, no. I need to be more okay with other people being disappointed and, you know, what that means is them waiting an additional few hours for a response to ensure that I don't disappoint my own expectations and that's kind of what set me straight on this.

Jordan Gal: 30:41

Like, no, I I don't wanna keep doing the same thing I'm doing. Things are good. We got busy and then all of a sudden I stopped doing strategic work. It's like, no, that that can't happen. So I I have to create the space.

Brian Casel: 30:52

Yeah. Yeah. I've I've I've had to admit that to myself time and time again. You know, it's it's tough, especially when you see emails sitting there in your inbox. I mean, right now, I've got I've got questions from my teammates that are waiting on my re response.

Brian Casel: 31:08

But but, you know, I I think at the end of the day, I start to I start to admit to myself, like, you know what? It's okay if this waits one business day. And the same goes for clients. Of my teammates is asking me questions, and she needs to know the answers so that she can get back to one of our clients because our client is waiting for answers about something. And, you know, at the end of the day, like, it's okay if it if it takes a day or two to get back to someone.

Brian Casel: 31:36

I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, I would say three to five days to answer one question is getting unreasonable. But one one hour is also unreasonable too. Yes. Any other big big updates at this point?

Jordan Gal: 31:51

No. I think it's a good place to stop. I think the the the transition into that next topic that we wanna talk about and, you know, in terms of target market, I think it's kind of a clear dividing line between what we're talking about right now.

Brian Casel: 32:02

Cool. In the next episode we'll be talking all about how to find your target market. This is something that I've been asked a lot, it's something that I'm constantly thinking about and I know you've been thinking about it as well so we'll we'll do a deep dive into that one in, in next week's episode.

Jordan Gal: 32:17

Sounds good. Brian, I'll talk to on the other side.

Brian Casel: 32:20

All right, thank you man.