[92] Updates! Plugin Launch Results, High Value Customer Triggers, & Seasonality
Oh, hello, everybody. Welcome back to Bootstrap Web. This is number 92, and still Jordan over here.
Brian Casel:And I'm Brian.
Jordan Gal:Hey, Brian.
Brian Casel:How you doing, Jordan?
Jordan Gal:I'm doing alright. Should I give a warning that I had a beer at lunch and, like, a little funny, at least in my own in my own mind?
Brian Casel:That's that's the only way to do lunch, isn't it?
Jordan Gal:Well, in Miami, it is. Because I'm in Miami now.
Brian Casel:There you go.
Jordan Gal:Nice. For the next six weeks.
Brian Casel:Very nice. I'm still here in Asheville, right outside Asheville, North Carolina. But just a couple more days and then we we hit the road again.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. Where you heading next?
Brian Casel:So we go on like a two week span there where we're gonna be moving around from from city to city. And then we settle down in in Austin for about six weeks. So after Asheville, we're we're gonna be you know, we'll stop through, like, Nashville, Tennessee, Memphis, Little Rock. You know, we're traveling with a baby and a dog in the car. So we can't do the
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Too long stretch.
Brian Casel:Twelve hour stretches in a day. Like, we've gotta kinda cut it down to, three three, four hours max. But then we're gonna spend a couple of days down in New Orleans for about about three nights there, and then, make our way over to Texas. I think before we even settle in in Austin, we're gonna be in San Antonio for about three days. And then, December, we we get into our, Airbnb in Austin.
Brian Casel:And we'll be in in Austin December through the January. I know there are people down in Austin. Meetups people. Hit hit me up and we'll we'll we'll get a beer. We'll get, you know, get some people together.
Brian Casel:It'd be fun.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. Sounds like fun. I'm I'm in Miami through New Year's. Miami Miami is a crazy place. Generally speaking, I'm not the biggest fan in the world, but it's nice to be down here in December.
Jordan Gal:Where where it relates to business a little bit, there aren't many cities that will give you not give you, force, motivation down your throat the way Miami does. The number of, like, douchebags and Ferraris that I have seen, I've been here, like, forty eight hours. I've seen, like, 20 of them. And then you got you got the Bentley. It's just so in your face that it it's kind of you kinda, like, can't avoid it.
Jordan Gal:Like, Jesus. I I gotta step up my game. What am I doing here?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Crazy. But it's nice though. You know? Good good weather to be down there now.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's good. Family, Yeah. Enjoying So this this episode will be an update. See what's going on.
Jordan Gal:See what we're learning about what's going on. And then yeah. So I know you have more of a media update. Should I get mine first? I don't have that much of an update.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Let's hear it.
Jordan Gal:Cool. So the the biggest thing that's happened for us is, we talked previously about the balance between marketing and product, and sometimes one is ahead of the other. So at some point a few weeks ago, talked about how we scale, I I guess is the don't I'm not a big fan of the word, but we'd like 10x our volume over a span of like thirty days and all types of weird shit started happening to our tech because of it. So we had to rewrite a bunch of stuff and kind of get it in order. And inevitably what happened was we started focusing on the product and sales slowed down.
Jordan Gal:And then all of a sudden over the past two weeks, tech got solidified, no more weirdness, no more issues, we're fully in control, all this other stuff. And just two weeks to focus on marketing and sales as opposed to customer support and tech. And magically, all of a sudden things are rocking again. New prospects, new trials, new launches, all this stuff. And it's just a matter of focus.
Jordan Gal:Now what we're trying to do as a team, we're trying to learn from that and what I'm trying to do is say, how do we make it so that it's not one person out of three focused on marketing and sales? How do we combine our efforts? How do we take technology and product and combine it? So we're doing things like, now we have the good problem of having a lot of trials come in. So now what we're trying to do is figure out which trials we should focus on.
Jordan Gal:Which trials should we shower with love? Because I can no longer do everything manually. I can no longer call every single person. So now it's a matter of how do we figure out who the right people are? So now we're starting to build technology to assist that.
Brian Casel:And if I I remember correctly, you'd had mentioned that how you have some trigger where if someone recovers like $500, it triggers something and you can go reach out to them. But I guess what you're talking about here is how do you identify those high value prospects before they even trigger that? Like, you know yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Exactly right. So we're learning which metrics matter. And that is one metric that matters a lot. So that's the first trigger we put in place.
Jordan Gal:So now all of a sudden we're starting to add additional triggers, right? Things like some people do the integration, but then they haven't launched. But we're seeing all the activity through their site. So now we have a new trigger that just says, how much revenue does this company make? So now we know this person has made $10,000 in revenue over the past week.
Jordan Gal:This is an e commerce store that does $40,000 a month, but they haven't launched. So guess what? That's someone I should pay attention to and spend time on it, call them and say, how can we help you? Do you want custom work done on the email? So we're trying to combine our efforts.
Jordan Gal:Marketing, sales in conjunction with technology to try to assist all in the goal of customer acquisition revenue. That's been Beautiful.
Brian Casel:How do you guys manage? Are you guys using Trello what to work on every day, every week?
Jordan Gal:We have a combination of tools. We use sprint.ly as as the tech. I don't even know what to call it. Yeah. It's project management for tech.
Jordan Gal:So if I have a tech issue, I put it in sprint.ly and I sign it and it gets managed there. And then we have Trello for other things. Then Slack is like the brain. That's like the hub where everything happens. But because it goes by so fast in Slack, conversation happens in Slack and that gets put into its own system whether it's Trello or Sprinterly.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's the same with us.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, when you talk about it real quick and you say, cool, I'll add it to Trello or cool, I'll add it to sprint.ly or I'll sign this or I'll sign that. Yeah, so that's how we're doing that. That's it. And that's what we see as the focus over the next thirty, sixty days. It's okay.
Jordan Gal:What gets us more growth? Integrations. Cool. How do we combine efforts? So Rock will do the integration technology.
Jordan Gal:Ben will make sure it works properly with the product through our process. I will write a blog post and then reach out to the platform and say, Hey, we're doing an integration. Here's what we're writing. Will you help us co promote it? So that's like this marriage.
Jordan Gal:That's what we've been feeling. When we work in our silos, we make slow progress. When we work together, it starts to it starts to it just builds faster. It's more people, more brains focused on the same thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Have you noticed any seasonality to Cart Hook's business as you like head into the holiday season? Like, does it increase or decrease with ecommerce stores or anything like that?
Jordan Gal:I expected it to slow down now. But the truth is I think we're we're small enough that we just don't feel larger macro trends. So we just nothing's really changed. I mean, truth is over the past, we just are accelerating and accelerating over the past few weeks. We haven't felt anything.
Jordan Gal:I am assuming over the next week, people will be a little quieter and then the holidays, obviously. So what we're talking about internally is how do you take advantage of it? How do we work on things that we normally don't have time for? How do we improve the marketing site? How do we create a documentation section of the website to talk about tech stuff?
Jordan Gal:What should we work on that we're not bombarded with customers? And that that's kind of what we see as December. How do we plan and how do we work on things that we don't normally have time for?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I'm kinda noticing the seasonality a little bit with audience ops. And this is, you know, we're still within our first year.
Brian Casel:I'm So kinda learning as I go in terms of that. But I did notice this just recently as as we're heading into, you know, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. And a couple of the leads that I've been speaking to, I start to I I started to notice a a trend where where they say things like, very interested. It's you know, it's looking like we're gonna get started in January. Or, you know, everyone's thinking like after the holidays.
Brian Casel:And I actually did not notice that as much in back when I was working on Restaurant Engine. And the weird thing with Restaurant Engine was that I I actually noticed an uptick in sign ups and sales in November and December, which was which was weird. But I think it's because most restaurants are quieter in these months. And and their busy season is like the summer and stuff. So they're looking at like, alright, let's redo the website around this time of year.
Brian Casel:Whereas, I I feel like a lot of, like, Audience Ops now is a marketing service, working with online startups and they're thinking, like, let's get things kicked off early in the year. So now, you know, with with the leads who I think who are really the great fit for us, I'm I'm starting to offer, like, an incentive to get started before the 2015 to try to, you know, move things along in December. But we have had, we we have been growing in in the last month, the last couple months, bringing on new clients every month. So, you know, what what do you call that? Like, a thousand percent growth compared to last year because we didn't exist last year?
Brian Casel:You're like, I'm still, like, figuring this out, like, you know, what it looks like from year to year. But
Jordan Gal:Right. What what does what should growth look like? What's what's the high high end scenario? What's the low end scenario? Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I I do think December's a good time to make those relationships though because when people push it off, then then they're energized in January. And if they already know you and have communicated with you, it's like low hanging fruit. Like, I'm gonna go I'm not gonna go look for another provider. I've already talked to this guy, and I wanna do it now. So let's just let's just do it.
Brian Casel:We have about a four like a four week ramp up time. So, you know, if they really wanna get started with publishing content, you know, by early January, we really do need to get started in like early December. So, you know, not everyone kinda realizes that. Anything else going on on your end?
Jordan Gal:The only thing, it's not even an update. It's just like a a thought for people, especially in SaaS. Woke up somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, some random blog posts that I've read in the past. I woke up one morning and was like, Oh my God, I need to offer an annual plan prepayment option in December to give people the opportunity to, you know, to file it under this year's taxes. Because I know I have done that before.
Jordan Gal:And so that's something that's on my agenda. Like, I am not forgetting that. That that can bring in some good cash flow. So anyone else out there who runs a SaaS, don't forget your customers are often thinking about taxes this month. So if you're excuse me.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's December when this publishes. So make sure to make an offer of prepay for the year. Write it write it off on 2,015 taxes.
Brian Casel:So Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Don't don't forget.
Brian Casel:Yep. I've seen that offer, quite a bit. The first one that I saw came from WP Engine and they you know, the the way that they kind of title their their head the email subject line is something like, you know, save two months on WP Engine service and save on your taxes, you know, double bonus kind of thing. So it's it's pretty cool.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. How about you? What's been going on? Talk to us.
Brian Casel:Cool. So I mentioned, you know, the travel schedule. So, you know, we're heading out of of, Asheville, moving on. Again, if anyone is is in around the Austin or San Antonio area, definitely get in touch. We'll meet up.
Brian Casel:What else? So I think I had mentioned the last couple of episodes that we launched our content upgrades plugin. I think before, it was like, we're going to launch it. Well, now now we're a few weeks later, so we have launched it. That that happened about two weeks ago.
Brian Casel:You can check that out at contentupgrades.io. And basically, I I thought I would just kinda run through the the launch process and and share a few numbers, you know, on how that went. So again, the Content Upgrades is a WordPress plugin. It's priced at $49 up to $2.49, depending on how many sites you want to install it on. So it's kind of a typical WordPress plugin model.
Brian Casel:It's it's not a very high priced product. You know, it's kind of an an annual license, not like a month to month SaaS type of thing. So this is definitely more of like a side project. Not not a side project. It's part of the Audience Ops business, but it's, you know, it's kind of like a side revenue stream from from what we have.
Brian Casel:And this is the first of several WordPress plugins that we'll be releasing, over the next year or so. And so I I think it went well that what what I did was I started building up the early access list a few weeks before we launched. And I had about a 138 people sign up for the early access list. And then in addition to that, about two weeks before the sign up or before the opening of of early access, I promoted a webinar all about, you know, growing your email list. And then it was heavily focused on how to use content upgrades effectively.
Brian Casel:I had two hundred and and eighty one people registered for that webinar. So that's about a combined list of 419 people who were basically exposed to the early access, launch for the content upgrades plugin. The so it's these 419 people who get the link to to actually buy before the the general public can can access and buy it. And so I held that webinar. I didn't I didn't note down how many people attended.
Brian Casel:I think it was something like 80 or 90 people attended live. And then, you know, a bunch of a bunch more watched, the recording. So what happened was I I did the webinar, I think, on a Tuesday, and then the 20% early access discount lasted through Sunday. So, you know, a little bit less than a week. Overall, end of the end of that week, end of that launch process, there were 34 sales, just over 1,500, dollars in in revenue.
Brian Casel:Pretty happy with that, I think, you know, given the you know,
Jordan Gal:wasn't Almost 10%.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You know, kind of a, not a huge launch in terms of the the number of people on the overall list. But, yeah.
Brian Casel:I was pretty happy with with the sales. I mean, day one, you know, when I when I held the webinar, there was something like six sales that day. And and I was like, oh, six six sales for a $49 WordPress plugin. That's not what I was hoping for here. But then, you know, as as the week goes on and I had a couple of follow-up emails scheduled and, you know, a little bit of urgency as you lead up to Sunday night, you know, the rest of the sales kinda kinda rolled in there.
Brian Casel:So so that was pretty good. That I I just felt good to get that shipped and done. And that's a finished product. Now it's open to the public. I also leveraged a lot of the stuff that I had prepared in the live launch, like the webinar slides, I and and other emails and things.
Brian Casel:So then I recorded a version of that webinar and I and I wrote out a couple of email sequences. So now I have that all set up in kind of an evergreen funnel that I don't really have to have to do anything live going forward. So that's all set up as well. So I can kinda move on and that'll kinda generate ongoing sales.
Pippin Williamson:Yeah. I was
Jordan Gal:gonna ask, are you gonna market this thing on its own or just kind of on an ongoing basis, someone who who signs up into that funnel?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, it is go going to be marketed to people on the audience ops list, but not everybody on the on the audience ops list. So one of the things that I'm working on this week is the the back end automation that happens on the Audience Ops email list, which I'm managing all all through Drip. Basically, I'm I'm trying to figure out how to segment people between, are you a company founder and you're and you're interested in using content marketing, but you're probably going to outsource it and potentially hire audience ops to do that for you? Or are you more of a do it yourself person?
Brian Casel:You know, maybe you're a marketer and you're working with clients, you might be a better fit for some of our tools and our plugins. So I'm trying to, you know there might be some sort of welcome email where they kinda click, I'm I'm a do it yourself marketer, or I'm a, software company founder, or something like that. That'll tag you and kinda and kinda bring you through different sequences and that sort of thing. But, yeah. I mean, the other kinda just general update here is in the last couple of episodes, I've been talking about how, you know, during my two month stay here in Asheville, I've been kind of heads down focused on building out our sales and marketing systems in Audience Ops.
Brian Casel:And so now I'm about three days away from leaving Asheville. So I'm kind of looking back on on this time and seeing like, okay, well well, what got done? What what was I able to ship? You know, what are the systems that I that I was able to put in place that are going to live on as we move forward that I don't necessarily have to operate or spend as much time, and these are still gonna generate results going forward for for audience ops. So I think I'm pretty happy.
Brian Casel:I I think I I was able to get just about everything up and running and launched that I wanted to get done before I leave here. So the first thing was the Audience Ops blog. That's been up and running for close to two months now. You know, we're publishing two two pretty good articles a week. Most of my most of them are written by my team, so that's pretty hands off for me.
Brian Casel:I I have written a couple of the articles there, but, yeah. So that's that's up and running. The content upgrades plugin, as I mentioned, that's now shipped. I also put up an early access page for two more plugins that we have in the works. Those will be coming in 2016.
Brian Casel:I kind of launched a shop.audienceops.com site. That's where we'll be hosting our, our WordPress plugins and whatnot. The thing that I'm working on this week is finishing up an email course. This is kind of gonna be the primary email course for Audience Ops. And the goal of this would be to lead people into, to and to request a consultation to become a client of Audience Ops.
Brian Casel:Up until now, we we have been growing our email list, but only using content upgrades on our on our blog post. We haven't had, like, a primary lead nurturing sequence. So that's what this email course is gonna be about. I I think I'm about 80% done getting this up. And I'm I'm hoping to get it launched, you know, by Friday or or so or Saturday before I head out of here.
Brian Casel:And what else? So I mean, like, once I had that email course in place, and as I said, I are I also have the other funnel that points to the content upgrades plugin, then I'll start to be able to do things like run retargeting ads and set up more sophisticated automation flows in the back end. You know, because I once I have these content assets launched and shipped, which for the most part they are, I just need to kinda launch this this final email course for Audience Ops, Then I'll have all those assets in place and our ongoing blog post. And that's this kind of stuff that I can feed retargeting ads, Facebook ads, other other kind of stuff, you know, into
Jordan Gal:Right. You wanna have a minimum of this stuff ready. It's almost like, you know, channeling fish through a a stream, but you don't have your net set up yet. What kinda what's what's the point of spending money and effort in putting the fish through before you have anything set up to catch them?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, and I I mean, essentially, this is what we do for our clients. It's it's about time we, we set all this stuff up for ourselves.
Jordan Gal:So Yeah. True. It's funny how that is so much less important than you think before you start business. A lot of people before they start a business, they're like, oh, I have to have this in place perfectly because that's what I'm offering. It's actually Yeah.
Jordan Gal:You know, not not so much the case.
Brian Casel:Exactly. That's that's totally true. The other thing that I'm really happy with is our sales process. And and I've really dialed this in to the point where it's it's working pretty well. And what I mean by this is, okay.
Brian Casel:After somebody has has come in as a lead. So they filled out our form on our homepage. Now they've requested a consultation. What happens after that? So, well, first of all, leads are being generated through our content marketing as as I mentioned.
Brian Casel:So that's generating some leads. We've been doing some cold email outreach that I that I've talked about before. Almost all of that is handled by my VA. One of one of my VAs who, you know, builds up handpicked kind of targeted list of companies that we're reaching out to. That's all happening and I'm not even touching it.
Brian Casel:Once people, request a consultation with me, I've got a canned response that I just send back to them. It it includes a link to my Calendly, scheduler. They just pick a time, we talk. I so so that's kind of the one piece that I'm heavily involved in is I'm still the one who I you know, I do the sales calls with with new leads. And I I actually enjoy it.
Brian Casel:That's like my favorite part about this is because I'm talking to other other software online business founders and, you know, talking about content and how they're getting customers. So that's that's kind of fun for me. So, you It's know high
Pippin Williamson:value enough.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. So I I do a couple of those calls a week. And then after that call, everything else is basically handled. So what I do is I send my VA an email, and I say, here here is the client's name, here is the plan that we're recommending for them.
Brian Casel:Usually, it's like one of two two or three different plan options that we offer for everyone. So I'll say like, it's it's plan template one or plan template two, plan template three. He then goes into our proposal software. We we use Noocy for that. And we've got a couple of proposal templates all set up in there.
Brian Casel:So he he uses one of those based on whichever plan I told him that we're using. He'll set up that that proposal, puts puts the client's name in, a couple of other variables, like who their target audience is, know, which plan it is. And then and then we also set up a unique payment page on Audience Ops that we send to each unique client because it kinda has their name on it and a buy button with the plan that we're recommending for them. My VA sets up that page. He sends those back to me.
Brian Casel:Usually takes them like a day. And then I just take those two links, the proposal and the payment page, and I pop them right into a canned response that I send off to the lead. And they get that a that email. Here's the link to see the proposal. Here's the link to get started when you're ready.
Brian Casel:And that's it. And so, you know, I might send I'll set up, like, a follow-up reminder. I'll use follow-up. Cc for that. But other than that, it's it's all that's basically it.
Brian Casel:And then once they once they click the link and go through the purchase process and sign up, from there, it's completely handed off to my team. So so right then, I can just send another canned response email over to my project manager. She schedules a kickoff call. So she and the writer do a a pretty lengthy kickoff call research, get them all set up in in Trello, get get all the we we've got a a form, like an onboarding form, where they get all their WordPress login access information. Like, all that stuff, I'm not even touching.
Brian Casel:Like, it's just part of the process now. So literally, I'm only doing the the sales consultation calls and kind of, you know, firing off a couple of emails to my VA or my project manager and everything else in between is kinda just handled.
Jordan Gal:Sounds sounds beautiful. But I'm I'm glad you kinda shared it in that way in the sequential order from demo onward. I'm sure we could dig into each part of that, how to get a demo, how to do a demo, how to follow-up. But yeah, that's great. So what do you do after the demo?
Jordan Gal:I mean, right, the first step in this is getting enough demos. And then once you have enough demos, then you kind of have to close more of them. And I guess you can what you say in that demo, I'm calling it a demo because that's what I'm used to that consultation and then how you follow-up also hugely important.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, I have found that unlike Restaurant Engine, when I did consultations there, it usually required several consultation several calls. Like, call back week two, call back on week three, and have another call, and oh, gotta loop back in a few months. With Audience Hops, it's it's much faster.
Brian Casel:I think we're dealing with online business owners who who'd like to move fast, and they get all the information that they need in that first call. So so that's been that's been pretty good. I've I've done a lot of these calls by now. So I've so I have started to refine kind of the the talking points and the not so much objections. I mean, I haven't necessarily heard a lot of objections because I've these are mostly people who are interested and they kinda get it to begin with.
Brian Casel:They're they just have some questions about how things work. So I kinda go through that and and, I know how to focus on certain benefits tailored to certain types of companies. Like for example, I have noticed that some companies are are bigger and some are smaller. And and the bigger ones tend to have an in house marketing person on their team already. I can talk start to talk about like, well, we can we can actually collaborate pretty well with your marketing person and and help them, you know, work on a schedule and give you some resources to to work with.
Brian Casel:Whereas, the smaller companies, we you know, I I tend to focus on the fact that we're completely done for you. You can be totally hands off and, you know, that that sort of thing. So I'm starting to learn those those kind of nuances. And and, know, just to get back to all of that, like, automation and systems and processes that I put put in place with my VA and and the rest of the team. This stuff, like, I only finished refining, you know, like, last month.
Brian Casel:You know, within the last month. And and before that, was doing most of this stuff myself. It it would not work this way if I if I had built up all this stuff from day one. Because I I did it myself for about four or five months, and all these different things like the templates and the way that I word proposals and the way that I set up the payment page, it went through several iterations, you know. And even like the way that I write emails, I I needed to figure out the most effective way to do each of these individual individual pieces before I started to delegate it and and put it into like a rock solid system, you know.
Brian Casel:But, yeah. I I feel, pretty good with that one. And then, I mean, that that's about it. The the other thing is we're we're starting to head into December next week. My focus there I mean, I will be traveling a lot, but my my goal for December is to to kinda shift my focus a little bit to to get back onto product ties for for the month of December.
Brian Casel:And what I'm gonna be doing there is, adding a few new lessons. So I've got some new material that's a lot of it is based on things that I've been doing in audience ops. Whereas before, a a lot of the existing course material comes from my years working in Restaurant Engine. Now I kinda wanna update a few things from things that I've been learning in the past year. I already recorded a number of new case study interviews.
Brian Casel:Those will be added to the course as well. Thinking about doing a new free email course for ProductHise. And I'm kind of kicking around the idea of of launching a ProductHise podcast, which would be a kind of a short focused series of of episodes, more like like a season based type of deal, where I might take some of those case study interviews from from some existing students, and other people doing productized services and and get them on for kind of focused interviews. That that'll be something that I might launch in in 2016. But I'll see if I can kind of fit in all these things into the month of December while I'm, you know, in between travel, road trips, and and in between the holidays.
Brian Casel:Hopefully, I can get this stuff shipped and out the door. And then as we get into 2016, back back on to audience ops.
Jordan Gal:Nice. So kinda taking advantage of the potential lull in December.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I spent the the you know, hearing you talk through the process, it sounds to me like, right, a few really good things. First, that the only remaining piece that you are integral to is is the sales consultation. And there might come a time where you can get someone else, hopefully someone even better than you at it to do those consultations. And then it really it really becomes a a a very scalable business, a very hands off, potentially hands off business, and potentially a very sellable business.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Actually, I've already been talking to one of my my teammates. He he's a writer. He's also a project manager with us. And now he and I have been talking about him taking on more of a sales role for audience ops.
Brian Casel:So that's a shift that that we might make sometime next year. But but I I as I said, I I still do enjoy doing the sales calls, especially because a lot of them are with friends of mine and and and people that I talk to anyway. And it's still such a good learning experience. I mean, we're still within the first year of the of the business. I kinda wanna be doing it myself.
Brian Casel:I mean, the other thing that I'm I am still very hands on with is developing the the plug in products. And so I'm working directly with with my developer on the content upgrades plug in. He's already started work on on our next plug in, which is a landing pages plug in. So I I like to be get you know, dig into the wireframing and going through issues in GitHub and and and kind of things like that. So I kind of enjoy that process.
Brian Casel:I mean, at some point, I'll need to outsource some of the customer support for that stuff. But but for now, again, it's still very much learning and and very much, you know, getting these things off the ground.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. I love it.
Brian Casel:Love it. Cool. So That's what we like to hear. Yeah. I mean, you know, I I I should say though that I'm talking about a lot of positive developments in all this.
Brian Casel:But I don't wanna give the impression that things are running smoothly. I mean, they're they're they're going Is that
Jordan Gal:just all easy? You're not you're not sleep sleeping well counting counting your dollars?
Brian Casel:Oh, man. No. And and it's not like that at all. It's it's actually a I think you and I talk about this all the time. It's it's an emotional roller coaster, you know?
Brian Casel:You get a new sign up one day, someone cancels the next day, you get three awesome leads the next day, and and, and then a writer quits and you and you have to find a replacement. And it's it's it's frustrating. It's hectic. You have things that you wanna check off the list every week, but then other other shit comes up and you gotta you gotta deal with it. So it's,
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Trying to build momentum through setbacks. You you just need like you just need more in the positive calm than in the negative calm. The negative calm will never be empty for the week or for the month or for the day even. You just need more positive so it feels like things are going more forward than they are backwards.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But that's why I think doing these kind of updates is really important. I mean, you know, whether you have your own podcast or or not, you know, we we kinda do this in our in our mastermind accountability with talking about our goals and updates and whatnot.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Masterminds are great for it.
Brian Casel:But even if you're just doing this for yourself, just to send just to write down I I think it really is very important to look back on, say, the past thirty days. What are the things that got done? What what did I ship? And it can be sending an email to one lead. It can be, you know, launching one small feature in your product.
Brian Casel:Like, what are the steps that I took forward? Because, like, honestly, if I look back on the last thirty days and my mindset in each of those days, most of the time, I think I was pissed and frustrated and and worn out. But but then but then at the end of the month, when you look back, it's like, actually, I got a I got a lot of good shit done. So
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We've been talking about this internally. We we we've started we we built a dashboard. The the key metric that we want to focus on is the number of launched trials. So not just create a free trial, but you actually launched your abandoned cart campaign.
Jordan Gal:So now we have a dashboard that shows the number of launched trials today and the number of launched campaigns over the past thirty days. So and we all look at it and we post screenshots of it in Slack saying, hell yeah, or what's going on? So that's one of the things that helps you look back over the past thirty days. And and the the other thing we've been trying to figure out is how do we do that but for day to day? Like, if if I listed out the amount of shit I do in a given day, it's it's ridiculous.
Jordan Gal:But sometimes it doesn't produce things like a blog post or or things like that. And so it's not visible. And so your teammates don't really know or feel it or see it and you don't feel proud of it. It's just this mixture of like, do we how do we show our accomplishments on a day to day basis to ourselves and to teammates that that you can look back on and say, holy shit. This guy's really working his ass off.
Jordan Gal:Even if I'm not seeing what he's producing, he's he's just, you know, rocking in his corner over there.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I do think about that a lot in audience ops because my team is all working, like, on our production line with churning out blog posts and and meeting all those deadlines and whatnot. And and there are many days when I'm not necessarily talking directly to my team, but I'm working on stuff all day. It's just that I'm I'm I'm I'm the only one working on sales and marketing right now. You know?
Brian Casel:And and it's like that's it's almost like its own its own department. And it's completely disconnected from the service side of the business. And and it and it could very much seem like I'm just, you know, doing my own thing and not even working.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, it's one of the dangers of a remote business. You don't see and feel it. You kind of have to make these assumptions, but if you carry on an assumption for too long without getting validation for it, it starts to waver. And there are apps that do this. And we've looked at them.
Jordan Gal:We've looked at week done, weekday, workday, something. Week done, something like it's kinda like an I done this, but what have you done this week? And like report back, but we end up we end up not using it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I could see that. I looked at those two. But at this point, I think my team would absolutely If they if I introduced any new tool and because we're already using Trello and Slack and Google Docs and like, any new tool, they'd they'd probably be like, Brian, I quit. Like Yeah.
Brian Casel:Done.
Jordan Gal:Done. No more passwords. No more no more accounts. No more things to check it.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Cool, man. Solid update.
Brian Casel:Alright, dude. So we will we'll talk next week. What are we gonna be talking about? I think it's a couple of, like, eighty twenty tips and and hacks that we've been doing.
Jordan Gal:Cool. And it might be too late for everybody. But, Brian, I wanna wish you a happy thanksgiving.
Brian Casel:Thanks, man. Happy thanksgiving to you and your family. Exciting, exciting times.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Cool. Thanks. As always, everyone, check out bootstrapweb.com. Say hi on Twitter.
Jordan Gal:Send us your questions. Have a great Thanksgiving.
Brian Casel:See you, guys.
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