[100] Updates: Repeatable Marketing Ideas, Outsourcing Sales, & "Secret" SaaS Tiers
Welcome to Bootstrapped Web. This is episode number 100. Oh, man. I would like to say that we've got a very special episode in store for you today, but sorry, it's just a boring updates episode.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I think it's cool. You know, a 100. Maybe we'll do, like, a like, episode one zero two. We'll make we'll make it a big deal.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Actually, 100 should have been
Brennan Dunn:last week. So it was like the missing episode was was like the hundredth episode.
Jordan Gal:We kinda
Brennan Dunn:took a week off.
Brian Casel:But how's it going, It
Jordan Gal:is it is a good milestone. Come on. A 100. We've known her for a a long time and it's it's as fun as ever. I I hope people actually listen because I'm I'm having a good time.
Brian Casel:Absolutely, man. Yeah. This is this is great. I I I can't tell you how many, I mean, podcasting in general, not to go off on a whole tangent on this, but, like, more more and more people say they tune into the podcast even more than like the newsletter and the blog and and all this other stuff. And I've I've heard plenty of people come to like audience ops, you know, saying they they either listen to the podcast or they were referred to someone, you know, from a pod I I just think that more and more people are listening to podcasts.
Jordan Gal:Good. Let it let it keep growing. Yeah. We we get at least, you know, once or twice a week, someone saying, hey, I've been, you know, hearing about CartoCa on the podcast and figured it was worth a try, or I want to introduce you to a friend who has an ecommerce business or something. Cool, man.
Jordan Gal:So we're gonna do we're gonna do an updates episode.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, before we get into that, you you mentioned ecommerce. You know, one of these weeks coming up, you know, I I think we'd like to do it, an episode about ecommerce. I feel like, you know, we've got the ecommerce guru here on on Bootstrap Web with with you, Jordan. So, you know, if any of you are are thinking about doing ecommerce or you are in the ecommerce world and you have, like, questions or anything you wanna hear us, you know, talk about, I'm coming at it from, a layman's perspective.
Brian Casel:So any any ideas there, we'd love to do an episode talking about that kind of stuff.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Let us let us know about that. I'm it's too big of a topic and it's it's like a curse of knowledge thing. Like, how can you talk about ecommerce? That's that's too much.
Jordan Gal:But there are definitely some interesting topics, things like what I would do in starting an e commerce business right now. I mean, from Cart Hook's point of view, we get to see, we literally get to see every checkout session of every one of our customers. So obviously, wouldn't give anything away that that's private, but it's it's very eye opening to see what people are doing and and and how much they're making or not making and how much they're growing and their business model where their traffic comes from. Just really interesting to learn about all the different ways to sell, usually physical products these days. It's a challenging thing in in Amazon world.
Jordan Gal:So it's it's very different from from a few years ago.
Brian Casel:Very cool. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Alright, man.
Brian Casel:So got a couple updates here. You wanna go like back and forth like we usually do?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Sure. Go for it. Why don't you start?
Brian Casel:Sure. So right now, I'm so we're we're recording this in mid actually, no, the February, first week, and I'm in between big snow tiny comps. So so last week, I so actually, to to back up, I'm currently recording from, from Colorado. We're staying in a cabin in the woods, in the mountains of Colorado, somewhere near the Breckenridge area. And so last week, I flew out from Denver, out to Vermont to do the Big Snow Tiny Conf.
Brian Casel:That's kind of the original. This is the third year of us doing it at Sugarbush Vermont, and it was awesome. Brad Tunar and I have been organizing this, and this year was a great group. We we had 12 people there. It was awesome because all 12 of us made it.
Brian Casel:Despite the, the massive snowstorm that hit the East Coast, there were plenty of flight cancellations and rerouting and and rebooking, but everyone at the end, made it to the house, which was awesome. And it was a really good group too this year. It was, a couple of returning attendees, but for the most part, it was new people. And I feel like this year, we we had folks who are a little bit little bit farther along in in business and and doing some really exciting things. I learned a ton.
Brian Casel:I I I definitely had a few actionable takeaways. I could even talk about that in one of my upcoming updates on on this episode. But, yeah. You know, that's that that's the update on my end. So and then, I you know, to say I'm in between them, next week, I'm going to the Big Snow Tiny Conf in Colorado, which is being organized by our friend, Dave Rodenbach.
Brian Casel:That'll be over in Beaver Creek, Colorado, and, I'm looking I'm really looking forward to that one as well.
Jordan Gal:So So you just you just keeping it real cold over there. You're going from one snowy locale to the next and then Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And here in Colorado, we've had a ton of snow, and I'm trying to get as much snowboarding in and out as I can while while I'm here out west, but it's it's tough because I'm doing a bunch of work. But I know that next week, I'll I'll be, you know, with the group in Beaver Creek, so that'll that'll be really fun.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. Well, that sounds like a good time.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan Gal:Ski trips ski trips are the best.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, ski trips and snowboarding, that's super fun. But, man, these big snow tiny comps, it's it's such an awesome mastermind group. Just talking business. We we do, like, attendee talks where everybody kinda prepares something, either teach the group something or ask for advice or ask for feedback on something, and those are really cool.
Brian Casel:But then we get to kinda break off into smaller groups and conversations, like when we're out on the chairlift or having dinner or it's just a really fun time. So it's really cool.
Jordan Gal:Sounds good. Sounds like a miniature microconf.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It really is. Definitely, you know, more intimate. We're like sharing a house and going to the mountain. It it's fun.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. Alright. Well, I'll I'll I'll go off on my side. I guess I I need to start off by giving a full disclosure that Cardhook Inc is now a customer of audience ops. So you guys can can barely trust anything I say at this point.
Jordan Gal:It'll all be self serving and for Brian's benefit. No, but I think generally speaking when people listen to this podcast, if they had to bet on if I was going to sell you or you were going to sell me first, I think more money would be on me than you, but you you won out. So Right. Brian is now receiving a regular payment from Kart Hook.
Brian Casel:Well, actually, well, I I appreciate you saying that. I I hope that, you know, we're not gonna have an episode where you're gonna complain about how how shitty our service is. But
Jordan Gal:No. I I think the opposite. I can talk about what it looks like from the customer's point of view to go through a productized service and how, how you've done it, how you've set it up, how other people are executing it for you and how the whole thing feels. It's been a very interesting experience, just kind of letting it run through because what you and I agreed on was, let's not make this like special, like for a friend, let's just let this run the way it's supposed to run. And I'm learning a lot from it and, you know, I think that's the right way for us to do it also.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'll I'll just say about that. I mean, I I'll be honest. I I'm always a little bit nervous, and this goes back years. Whenever I'm working with a friend or a family member as as a client of mine, Back in my web design days, I tried to avoid it like the plague just because I I just didn't like that working dynamic.
Brian Casel:I think it's much different in audience ops now. Obviously, you're an online business owner and I and it makes sense. But I think one of the first things that that I said to you when we got started was, look, you know, if if you're ever unhappy with it or even just give us, like, critical feedback, we we seek that. Like, we we we really need that that feedback. Don't don't try to hold out don't try to hold back on on any of that.
Brian Casel:And even if it doesn't make sense for you guys anymore and you need to cancel, like, don't hesitate to cancel because we're we're friends. You know?
Jordan Gal:The business side. Exactly. Alright. So that was my my caveat that I thought was important to kinda mention. I'm sure we'll give updates on that regularly as we go along.
Jordan Gal:The first big thing on my side is we've just relaunched our marketing site. That's always such an interesting experience to go through because you take a closer look at what you wrote and have up on your site from maybe a few months ago, you see how your perception of your product and what's important and what should be used to sell it and how that changed over the past few months. So when we took a critical look at our website, it's always embarrassing. It's always like, Jesus, I can't believe this is what we've had up for six months. But the biggest thing that we saw was that we're simply not giving enough information.
Jordan Gal:We're asking people to take a leap of faith in what we're describing and then sign up so that you can see what it's really like. That's what I wanted to fix. And so what I took you know, I'm a I'm a copier at heart, which I I don't think people should be ashamed of at all. Those the Sammer brothers, those guys are my my heroes. That's the the clone factory out in Berlin.
Jordan Gal:So I took a page out of a few different people's websites. I ended up looking to a mixture. You look at Leadpages, you look at ConvertKit, you look at Stripe, you look at Drip, you look at all these different sites and the trend that I noticed that I liked was show, don't tell. Just giant screenshots and videos. So if you go to carthook.com now, what you'll see is we describe a feature, there's not only a screenshot, there's a video talking about that specific feature and how it works.
Jordan Gal:So it's like feature video, feature video, feature video. I think what it does is it allows people to see what the app looks like and understand how it works before making the decision to sign up or not.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and seeing those visuals can can also really communicate in in many ways, like, kind of like a headline or or a replacement for a headline, even though, of course, there are headlines. But, like, a lot of times people are just looking for for some familiar item on a page. Like in in your case, I'm sure they're looking for like a dollar amount recovered. Right?
Brian Casel:Like where where where is that image in the interface?
Jordan Gal:Right. Let me see what does the email template looks like. What yeah. What's the what are the results? And Yeah, so we did that and we redid our pricing at the same time, right?
Jordan Gal:Because if you're to redo your website, it's a good opportunity to kind of just look at everything and clean up your contact page and your About Us page and everything else. So that was like the big thing of the past few weeks to kind of get up and it always takes a few weeks longer than you want it to take. But I think it's performing better already in the first week, but I guess we'll let it run for at least thirty, sixty days to kind of really judge it's been an improvement or not.
Brian Casel:So two questions, maybe three questions. What's the new pricing?
Jordan Gal:So the new pricing, what we wanted to do was, right, you always want pricing to be as close to value as possible, right? To be connected between how much value are you providing and the price should be attached to that. So charging based on a percentage of recovered revenue is kind of the ideal because that's a direct correlation between value and price. The problem is that that creates weird issues. You have to build backwards.
Jordan Gal:You have to say, last month, we recovered this much. Therefore, you owe us this much money. So it creates a it creates a a very strange relationship where you are looking backwards, which means you're charging backwards instead of forward, which is not the ideal for a software company. And then you have billing issues because people now owe you money for the previous month instead of prepaying you. And it also creates a trust issue where how do I know that you recovered exactly how much?
Jordan Gal:I'm going to go look and check and ask questions. So we didn't want that. What we came up with is to do like a hybrid. So we have a tiered approach. It's not a percentage of revenue, but it's based on how much revenue recover and then between this bracket and this bracket, you fall into this tier.
Brian Casel:Oh, okay. Like that.
Jordan Gal:So you get the best of both worlds. You get the fact that it's based on how much you're recovering and not how many orders you get or how many all these different metrics that change between store and store. If you're selling $10 T shirts or $2,000 servers, that strains those numbers. So you get the benefit of that. And at the same time, you also get the benefit of stability and say, I know I'm gonna pay a $100 a month, or I'm gonna pay $50 a month.
Brian Casel:So you said that that it's performing better in the first week. What are you looking at, and how do you measure it?
Jordan Gal:It's so hard to to measure because there there's so many weird factors. Like, this past week, we got mentioned in forbes.com. So we have more sign ups this week. It's like, I don't know if the if the old website would have performed it exactly the same. So I you can't tell if it's more trials because of the Forbes mention or if it's more trials because of the the conversion rate going up because the site's improved.
Jordan Gal:So it's like it's kinda like I don't know. At at our numbers, our level, you don't really know, but you just kinda march toward improvement.
Brian Casel:You know, last week at in Vermont at Big Snow Tiny Comp, we kinda had like a running joke or like a running theme of of the whole trip, which is called like because attribution. And and we we were constantly like asking each other like, well, do you how do you know which marketing channels are are working best? How do you attribute certain customers and trials to a certain marketing channel? And nobody could nail down a solid way to clearly attribute, you know, one sale to one, you know, trigger or one cause or one marketing channels. It's
Jordan Gal:not like that. It's not AdWords to a a product page, to a cart, to a transaction. It's it's just not like that anymore.
Brian Casel:Exactly. It's it's multiple touches. It's return visits. It's it's a personal referral. It's it's organic.
Brian Casel:It's, know, who knows? And and, like, you know, as we're talking about our businesses, it's like, well, how's how's that working for you? He's like, well, I'm not really sure because attribution.
Jordan Gal:Yes. Yes. I like that. I like that. That's the truth.
Jordan Gal:It is. And not that it's not worth trying, but it is important to admit that you don't know exactly because that I think that'll lead you in most likely in the wrong direction. We try, we have UTM parameters where it's like if people sign up from our docs article on how to sign up, how to integrate with LemonStand. So we have first step one, create a Kartik account. So we have the Google UTM parameters there so we can tell if someone signed up to that, but who knows if that's the first thing they saw, like that's that's what convinced them just because it's attributed to that link doesn't really mean anything.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Who really knows? Yep. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Cool. That's it. Yeah. Website pricing and over to you.
Brian Casel:Awesome. Let's see. So my next update here is about my new upcoming Productize podcast. And, this has not launched quite yet. I'm I'm hoping to launch it by the March.
Brian Casel:But I've basically just finished up recording about 20 episodes, And I'm really excited about it. It it it's a little bit of a different I mean, it's a very different format than than this podcast, obviously. The focus is on productized services, and I'm talking to doing mostly case studies with with people who have launched or they're in the process of launching a productized service. And and I kinda dig into, you know, how how did you launch it? How did you come up with the idea?
Brian Casel:How do you do pricing? How did you get your first customers? How are you growing? How are you changing? So a number of the episodes so I've I've recorded about 20 episodes now.
Brian Casel:Haven't released any of them quite yet, but, most of them are case studies, and then I also do a couple of coaching calls because I do some coaching calls through the Productize course as one of the packages. But I've invited, you know, several students from from the Productize course on for, for recorded public coaching calls, which I think are are really fun. They're always fun for me to do, to kinda hear where people are at and hear what their questions are and and what they're challenged with. And together, we can kinda, you know, map out a way forward and and offer some ideas and and and try to get a better understanding of how to how to make progress with this thing and and launch a productized service. So I'm just really excited about that.
Brian Casel:That's over at productizedpodcast.com. There's an email list if you wanna get notified when when the first episodes are gonna go out, which should be in early March. And so my my thinking here was that I wanted to devote all of January, and I actually started this back in December. So, like, December into January to recording a bunch of these things and editing and and getting the website up. And sometime in the next week or two, I'm gonna basically schedule these 20 episodes to to publish throughout this year, 2016.
Brian Casel:So I'm basically done with the work on this thing, and it's and I'm just gonna kinda schedule it all out to publish, you know, going forward.
Jordan Gal:Does that make you so happy doing something like that?
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah. And it's I mean, it's very much like a season based approach. Like, these 20 episodes are gonna just be like the first season, and then I'll I'll stop for a while probably. But, yeah. You know, I'm just trying to add like one more touch point, one more entry point into my list and into the productized crash course, which is like a free version of of the productized course that kinda leads into the, you know, the the the premium course and, you know, I I think it'll be cool.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. I like it.
Brian Casel:So, so yeah. That's my next one. Over back over to you.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Let's see. What do we got here? I think the the biggest theme for me over the past, I guess, past few weeks, but it's kinda reaching a tipping point right around now is is the I'll call it the search for repeatability. So we have grown consistently and accelerated in the growth.
Jordan Gal:It's still not fast enough, but it's better and getting better. We measure things in thirty day increments. We're always improving to the point of the past thirty days are better than ever. So it's it's it's getting better and better slowly and slowly. The thing that's driving me nuts as the person who kind of responsible for customer acquisition is that we don't have a very repeatable channel.
Jordan Gal:So we do integrations, and integrations are awesome. They've been our biggest driver of growth. So tomorrow on the LemonStand blog, LemonStand is an e commerce platform like Shopify, Volusion, Magento, all those. And it's young bunch of guys and I have a great relationship with them. They're awesome.
Jordan Gal:They're kind of the same speed as we are. So really excited to do integration with them. So a blog post goes out, they let their email list know, they put an intercom message inside for their users. We tweet it out. It's great and it gives us a bump.
Jordan Gal:So we'll probably get a bunch of trials over the next week from that, which is awesome and it's like a high and it's like, alright, awesome. Our MRR for next month is, you know, assured. The growth in MRR because we got this many trials, we kind of know what that's going to turn into. But that's not it's not entirely in our hands. It's not we don't have full control over that.
Jordan Gal:Right? Mhmm. Whether
Brian Casel:And even the scheduling of it too. Like, they might Right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Well, lemon lemon stands cool. You know, we started working on this a while ago, but now we got this going and they asked me to write the guest post. I wrote that up in a few days. It's amazing what a deadline will do, and it will be published on Thursday.
Jordan Gal:And and, you know, at worst, it'll be published next week, but that's still it's not in our control that they're gonna publish it and promote it and all that. And so that's kind of what we've been doing the past few months and growing, but the company doesn't have this ongoing engine. It has integrations from the past, which just kind of kick free trials in our direction. But right now
Brian Casel:Because they have like a link on their website. Exactly.
Jordan Gal:They have a link or it's on the back end of their site or somewhere you know, whatever it is. It's just kind of relatively consistent. But I'm I'm looking for something much more repeatable, which isn't fully in our control where it's, okay, we spend a thousand dollars in Facebook ads. We get a 100 sign ups to a webinar. We get 30 people showing up, and it leads to eight trials on average.
Jordan Gal:Okay. Let's do that again next week. Let's do that again. Let's do that again. Let's automate it.
Jordan Gal:Let's improve it. It's in our control. We can repeat it over and over and over again. Or an AdWords campaign and keywords and being able to spend money and bring in okay. So this is just going to keep running forever because it's profitable and let it just repeat itself over and over and then the other things we're doing are gravy on top of it or outbound email campaign.
Jordan Gal:So right now, everything in my brain is let's we need to find that thing immediately. It's been too long that we haven't had something super consistent, and I want that back.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I mean, have you have you started to develop anything new that that could be repeatable?
Jordan Gal:So, I have a lot of experience with outbound, right? So, I figured that is not only in our control, that's in my control, and I I feel
Brian Casel:mean, you've done a bunch of that, like especially early on, right? Like cold email Yeah, to
Jordan Gal:we did a bunch, but that's what got us off the ground. And so that's kind of the first thing that comes to my mind. It's like, okay, I'm I'm going back to that. Because it may not be amazing and it may create a decent amount of work to do in terms of scheduling demos and doing demos and all that, but it but at least it's consistent. We know, hey, if we send out a 100 emails every single day, after a week or two, it starts to roll on top of itself and we're scheduling 10 demos a week.
Brian Casel:Right. Well, I mean, you I mean, the idea is to get more demos even if it eventually requires delegating that job to someone else, you know, to do the demo. Right? I mean, that's your basically your your onboarding process.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And it's it's always more work than you think. Right? Because you need to you need to set things up first. You need to write write off the campaign.
Jordan Gal:You need to all do all the stuff, and that's very hard to do when you're focused on five other things. Five. I'm I'm being nice by saying five. It's more like 25. So I have I've kind of swept all that stuff aside and said, no.
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm getting I'm getting this back up because it's repeatable and it's in it's in my control. It's that and then we we have someone that works on our Facebook ads. So I'm kind of bringing them in to right now, we have a lot of content promotion to bring people to the site and then tag them for retargeting. But now I wanna do more straightforward. I think I'm gonna try the the webinar scenario.
Jordan Gal:I did a joint webinar with Pure Chat last week, which is was awesome. And it was also great because it forced me to create a presentation.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That that you can now reuse.
Jordan Gal:Right. Now, can now reuse. So it makes sense. Now, all the assets are there.
Brian Casel:I think that sounds right. Especially, you know, once you get into retargeting and the organic inbound, you know, growing your audience, obviously, because have you looked at organic traffic and and organic search terms? Like, you ranking for things like heart abandonment and and things like that?
Jordan Gal:Not not well. There are a lot of really big competitors, like sales cycle, big enterprise companies that they just produce an enormous amount of content and have big budgets. So it's pretty hard to rank. So we're doing more on that front, but we don't focus on that nearly as much as we should. It's just one of these things where you have to pick your battles and SEO is not something that we are going to win.
Jordan Gal:And so it's hard it's really hard to justify focusing on it that much over these these other things.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The other thing that I that I wanna start doing with audience ops, I haven't done really any of this, is asking existing clients for for referrals. So just making it like a standard part of our process, like a month after they sign up or or a month or two, have kind of a check-in call and and say, know, hey, we're we're really looking for other companies just like yours. If you happen to know anyone who might make sense for us to talk to, I mean, maybe you can work that into, you know, like ecommerce folks who who network with other ecommerce folks. I mean
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I agree. Last night, I went to a startup event here in Portland and met up with with a buddy of mine here, Jared, who runs Appointlet. That's like a Calendly Calendly competitor. Right?
Jordan Gal:So he was telling me that one of their biggest growth channel is referrals, and they just they're just very straightforward about Hey. You know, we we would love, an introduction if you know some another business owner that would get benefit from our, product, and they just ask. Just, you know, as as a normal part of their process, which which makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I'm actually gonna get to something similar in my next update about life cycle emails.
Jordan Gal:But over to you, my friend.
Brian Casel:Very cool. So okay. So let me give you a little bit of an audience ops update because that's really what my full time focus is every day and every night, and it keeps me up at night and all just all the time. Just thinking about audience ops, how to how to grow it, how to, improve it. And so I think we've had a couple of interesting developments over the last month.
Brian Casel:Some good, some some a little bit frustrating. I guess I'll start with the frustrating thing with which is basically looking back on the on the month of January, it was actually pretty slow in terms of adding new clients. I think we only added two. And in all the previous months, we've been adding three or more. December, we actually had a huge month adding 10 clients, which was insane.
Brian Casel:But but then January was was slow, but it wasn't because it was like beginning of the year, people are doing other things. I think it was it was my own my fault, or just the issue was on my end. Because, if I look at the number of leads that we received in January, we had plenty of leads, you know, the same or more than we've had in previous months. The big problem was that I I was traveling most of the month and I was unable to get on the sales calls. I mean, I I would schedule them, but I'd have to tell people like, hey, thanks for reaching out.
Brian Casel:Thanks for requesting a consultation. My travel schedule is kinda hectic right now, but if you can grab a slot on Calendly, you know, we can talk like two weeks from now. When when I'm settled in in the next place, you know, because my family and I are driving, spending like five or six days at a time on the road. It's just really tough. And then and like, once I get a week like this week when I when we are staying put, then all those calls come crashing into each other.
Brian Casel:And literally yesterday, I had about six back to back calls. And my voice was just shot by the end of the day. I had a bunch of calls this morning, and I've got a bunch more tomorrow, and it's so, I mean, the the clear problem is I'm the bottleneck here. I'm I'm the reason why sales have slowed because I was not able to onboard all these, consultation requests. I mean, they're in the queue.
Brian Casel:They're they're booked, but it but they're delayed. So my main focus or my main goal over the next, you know, month, two, three months is to, is to bring on a salesperson. And I'm thinking I'm gonna kinda hire or, like, you know, promote from within here. Had a guy who's been a writer and a project manager inside Audience Ops, for since, like, the very beginning, and I think he's he's a good fit to, to become probably our our first sales rep. I'm thinking about bringing on the second one as well at some point.
Brian Casel:But, I I I think he'll be a good fit. So right now, I'm just thinking through the the best ways to, to to train him to do what I do on the sales calls and and to develop systems, and I'm trying to think through commission structures and and payments and and what his role should should like, what he should spend his time doing and how do we track everything. Like, I I kinda have a personal CRM right now. I'm currently using Streak inside of Gmail. I don't know if I need to switch to something more robust that, like, a team could share.
Brian Casel:So I'm I'm kinda thinking through all these things right now and I'm trying to take action on it so that I can actually so, like, basically, my goal is within the next thirty days, to to have him taking on at least half of the sales calls. And then maybe within two months, have him take on all of them. And and remove me from that from that role. And and because that's that's the one remaining thing in in all of audience ops that still requires myself to move forward. And and it's the thing that that keeps me tied to my calendar.
Brian Casel:And once I remove that, once I don't have to go on these scheduled sales calls, then I then I finally have, like, complete control over what I spend my time on every single day and and the timeline and and schedule of doing that. Because there are so many other things that I need to be working on, that I need to build out, or that I need to set up, that frankly are are being delayed because my calendar is full of these calls.
Jordan Gal:So I think that's that's the one thing, man. It's fucking ridiculous that you got you have one big thing remaining already. But, you know, once once that happens, you you move into strategic work much more so than than than day to day.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So like the other big thing that's that's been on my plate, I think I talked about this before, is scaling up the team, especially the writing team. And so last week, I just, for the first time, converted one of our freelance writers into a full time, salary position at Audience Ops. So so she's been doing an awesome job, and so now she's a full time writer for Audience Ops. I I think we have another freelancer who's been with us for a while who probably in the next two or three weeks, or so, will probably make the same offer and and and get her on board as as a full time.
Brian Casel:And so so this is another kind of problem that I'm starting to develop a solution for. Right? So, like I said, back in December, we we we brought on a a, you know, a bunch of new clients really fast all at the same time. And so it was really really crazy. And so that made me, you know, scramble to go hire more writers to to fulfill all all all this inbound clients.
Brian Casel:And so what it's been when when that happens is it's it's kind of like this sense of urgency, like, you know, signed up a client, awesome. And then it's like, oh shit, gotta find a writer. And I wanna get get away from that and and get into a more a much smoother operation and develop a funnel of bringing in, candidates and getting them into the system, and then kind of promoting them and giving them more and more work as as more work comes in. And so what I'm what I'm trying to move toward over the next couple of weeks is recruiting writers and continuing to to put up job post for for writers and ask for, you know, ask my network if you're a writer, if you're interested in writing about SaaS and WordPress and web design and and anything like that kind of stuff or ecommerce, definitely get in touch. So we're constantly looking for writers.
Brian Casel:But what I wanna do is is bring writers first in as copy editors. So that's like the first thing that that you that you do as kind of like a temporary starting role, probably like the lowest level role role at Audience Ops, where you're just editing and improving the articles that our other writers are writing. And then just at at all times, we'll have, like, three or four copy editors on board. And then as as the work comes in, we promote from that group in into becoming, like, part time writers. And after a few months of that, of ramping up and and giving you more more clients to write for, if it makes sense, you know, we can ramp you up into a full time writing position at at Audience Ops.
Brian Casel:And so I'm trying to, like, make this this sequence in this funnel to to keep this a continuous effort.
Jordan Gal:Right. Trying to address your capacity issues. Right? It's not like software where one additional client might be a little onboarding work, but it doesn't tax the system nearly as much as as a service will.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. And and this is actually also another area that that still requires my time. Like, I'm still the only one who who vets all the applicants that come in, and I do the interviews, and I decide who's gonna make it to the next step in the hiring process. And so I think eventually, once I get these steps really dialed in, you know, I'll have somebody else on the team maybe vet the first round of applicants just to just to give me a list of like a top five or a top 10 and then, and then kind of, you know, onboard them from there.
Brian Casel:So, yeah, that's that's my audience ops up to update. I think that's basically all all I have.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. The the last thing I have is just, we we took a look at our, lifecycle email, our whole setup, and basically what what can we do? What more can we do with it? So, at some point, I was sending out all these emails manually saying, hey, after one week of Kartok, here's how much you made. Here, after two weeks, after three weeks, after four weeks, do you wanna convert?
Jordan Gal:Then we automated those. Then we were leaving the conversion part like, hey, do you want to sign up? Here's what your pricing would be. You know, here's where you put your credit card that we left manual because I was working. Then we got too many trials, and then we automated that.
Jordan Gal:Now starting to optimize. We added in an offer to switch to annual billing, and that's obviously hugely important. We had our biggest revenue month by, I think, by three X in December in December from one email. And that email was, get two months of card hook free and stick it to the IRS. Right?
Jordan Gal:And and the pitch was basically pay upfront for next year, write it all off in 2015, get the benefit for for, you know, from both events. And
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, it's it's it's still it's interesting that so few companies do that. I I've I've seen WP Engine do it for for a long time. You're doing it. I don't really know of any other SaaS that I subscribed to that I that I get an email like that in December, but I I feel like more should be doing that.
Jordan Gal:Well, we made that mistake for a while and we will not make that mistake anymore because so December was so shocking. You convince yourself like, oh, how many people are really gonna take it? Not that many, whatever. And then you try it and you see, oh, wow, there's actually more than more than you expect. It's also a nice vote of confidence in people that have been around a while.
Jordan Gal:Also, people who have just signed up and they wanna sign up for the whole year.
Brian Casel:That could even be a a like, that doesn't even have to be in December. You can optimize that to get the those bumps all year long and, like, have an automated, like like three months in. Okay. You're committed to Cardhook.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We're doing it all over
Brennan Dunn:the You can get discount.
Jordan Gal:We're do doing it after the second time someone gets billed, and then right? So it's like you sign up and you get billed, and then you go for a month. And then if you get billed a second time, that means you're signing up for the second month and the right? That sounds like the right time. Like, hey, you're getting used to paying us every month.
Jordan Gal:Why not pay less overall? Then we're also including it in our monthly performance emails like, Hey, looking back at the month of January 2016, here are your overall numbers. Thanks so much for being a customer. By the way, if you want to get two months free, click here. So we're kind of like sprinkling it all over.
Jordan Gal:And we did that. We did a bunch of other life cycle email things. And there's just a lot of value to be had in there because you get trials and then you get activations and you can maximize right? If you can if you can make a big difference in the number of trials that activate, all of a sudden, your numbers change. If you can change the number of trials that convert to paid, obviously, that has a very straightforward effect on it.
Jordan Gal:So we're kind of just like adding emails and automation all over the place. And sometimes it's not even emails to the user, it's actually emails to us internally. So we do things like after someone creates an account, if they don't activate, meaning if they don't launch their campaign, we'll send them a few reminders, hey, what happened? Can we help? But then we also look at, hey, is this a high value customer?
Jordan Gal:Because we can see how much revenue is going through their sites. We say, if after a week we have tracked over a thousand dollars of revenue going through their site, we know they're making some money, and so it sends us an email saying, hey guys, this person got the reminder emails but still hasn't set up and they're a high value customer, so reach out manually or call them.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And that and so you kinda call them up and say like, hey, you know, can we set you up for for you?
Jordan Gal:Exactly. Because we know at that point in time that it's worth it for that person because they make they make money as an e commerce store. And if they make money, we can probably make them more money too.
Brian Casel:Very nice. I I mean, you know, like last like kinda quick point here, quick tip. I I think on that same note is, you know, I we've been talking about this, you know, for the past year doing doing things manually, calling up customers, you know, doing whatever you can to to get customers on board. I think most people who are looking at SaaS or any kind of software, you look at it like it's a do it yourself. Customers will come in magically.
Brian Casel:They'll activate mat you know, on their own and but that's not the case. And and even with email automation, that that helps, but still it requires a manual touch, you know. And I mean, an example from my end, just just yesterday, I was working with, so right now, I'm kind of evaluating this new tool. It's not a new tool. It's new to me, called RecruiterBox, which is like a a SaaS for it helps you manage applicants.
Brian Casel:I I was talking about how I'm trying to manage all these writer applicants and everything. So so I'm trying out. It looks pretty good. I I like it. And they had an interesting price price structure.
Brian Casel:Basically, two plans. It was called like the standard plan and the pro plan. And, you know, don't quote quote me on this people. I don't know when you're gonna listen to this episode. Maybe they're gonna change their their pricing.
Brian Casel:Who knows? But I think they had one plan for like $20 a month. And and that was like perfect for me. Like, have one job opening and it it gives me like the core features, but then their next plan up was like $500 a month. It's like literally like $20.20 bucks a month or $500 a month.
Brian Casel:And the idea with the 500 is that you have a lot it's a large organization. You have all these different job openings and everything, But they also have specific features enabled only in the top tier. And one of them was like follow-up questionnaires, which I wanted to use. And I and I and so I was I was using it on the first day, and then I just popped up that live chat. Right?
Brian Casel:So I'm talking to a guy who I I think was the founder. And I'm like, you know, hey, I wanna use this this questionnaires feature. How do I try that out? And he's like, well, you have to you have to upgrade and you have to get the pro plan, which means $500 a month. And I'm like, well, yeah.
Brian Casel:And I'm like, listen, like, I'm planning on on paying for the standard plan, the $20 a month, because that's my budget, that's my need. I just want this one questionnaires feature. And so immediately he replied back. He's like, you know what? I can I can just activate that feature for you and we'll just make that that standard plan 25 a month instead of 20 a month?
Brian Casel:And I was like, perfect. I'm in. And I put my credit card in that day and like so this whole idea of, you know, you can talk to customers, activate a secret tier if you need to, you know, and I think it's from both ends. If you're a SaaS owner, be be open to to these kind of conversations and and that kind of flexibility. And if you're a customer, just just ask.
Brian Casel:You know, it never hurts to ask.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. It it happens all the time. It happens constantly. It's it's yeah.
Jordan Gal:It's it's a natural evolution. I remember in the beginning, every single free trial was such a huge deal. It was, you know, you to stop everything and just make sure that they get onboarded because it's so valuable. And then as you start to grow, each individual free trial becomes less important, but then, you know, you're trying to weed out which are the important ones, where's the real opportunity, and focus there. And I could see how, you know, if we if we 10 x our volume right now in trials and customers and all that, you just don't you just do not have the luxury of treating each one the same.
Jordan Gal:The same way we couldn't do it from six months ago to now, I could see another six months now if we 10x, there's no way you can do it. So a lot of that allure of SaaS automation software, everything self-service, it's not for the beginning phase. It's for when you have so much volume that you can't possibly do everything manually, and then the focus becomes on automation and self-service and onboarding and knowledge bases and as much as possible to be without friction, but that's
Brian Casel:not stopping you. Even then, you're even then, you're gonna be scaling up your customer success team and people to call and and outreach and so Yep. Yep. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. Well, I like it. Episode episode 100.
Brian Casel:Yeah. A lot lot packed into this one. It's a good one, we'll we'll be back at it next week.
Jordan Gal:Alright, Brian. Take it easy over there. Get into the snow, I guess. I mean, it's, like, rainy and freezing here, so I guess snow would be better than that. But you're you're at the mountain, man.
Jordan Gal:Get get on the mountain.
Brian Casel:I know. It's literally like two degrees outside, so we're just staying put inside the cabin right now.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Cool, man. Alright. Thanks for listening, everyone. Alright.
Jordan Gal:See you, man. Bye.
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