[104] Updates: A Stealth Launch, A Public Launch, & Hiring for a New Role
This is Bootstrap Web episode one zero four. We're back with another updates episode. Jordan, how's it going, man?
Jordan Gal:I'm doing pretty well. How are you, Brian?
Brian Casel:Doing doing well. As I said, a couple weeks ago, back in Connecticut now, we're, settling back down. We're fully settling back down. We're actually in the process of of buying a house around here and, looking like we're gonna be living in Orange, Connecticut, which is a kind of the same area that I've been in, but a little bit farther away from New York City. Now now we're closer to New Haven.
Brian Casel:Still still near the water in Connecticut, so, excited about that.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. It is it is a funny coincidence how the pets how yours and I
Brian Casel:Oh, and my my cat The the number coincidences.
Jordan Gal:And moved around and snaked back around. And Yeah. Right now, you're staying at a house very close to to where I used to live.
Brian Casel:I mean, the number of coincidences with you For maybe is those who don't know the backstory here, you and I met through Mixergy.
Jordan Gal:Through our friend Javier
Brian Casel:in Through
Jordan Gal:Mixergy.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And so there was a post on Mixergy to form a mastermind group. You and I both joined that. And then in like the first week of that, you were like, Hey, you're in Connecticut. And it turns out we're in like neighboring towns, like one town over five minutes away.
Brian Casel:Then we met up for coffee. So that was a couple of years ago.
Jordan Gal:We met up for coffee and then I started traveling like two weeks later.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You're like, we live right here, but we're leaving. I mean, going back, you and me both grew up in Long Island, New York, only like ten minutes away from each other. Obviously, we didn't know each other back then, but yeah, it's just crazy coincidences.
Jordan Gal:Now you're back and I am far, far away on the West Coast.
Brian Casel:Yep. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Cool. We're coming back there in a few months over the summer. We gotta we gotta take the baby on tour. You know? Yep.
Jordan Gal:You gotta hit up all the old friends and family and all that.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yep. Yeah. We'll have to hang.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. So what can I tell you? This month is stressful. This is stress month.
Brian Casel:Isn't that every month? It
Jordan Gal:ebbs and flows. Right? There's there's a natural cycle. You know? Sometimes it's intraday.
Jordan Gal:Sometimes it's intra week. Sometimes month.
Brian Casel:So the big thing is you guys are building up to a to a product launch.
Jordan Gal:We're we're building up to a product launch, a very strange product launch because we can't make it public, which is, you know, the opposite of what I would recommend anyone do for a product launch. Get a list as soon as possible, get screenshots up, build an email list so you have someone people to launch to, and we we can't do any of that stuff because we're we're working on something that the company who were building an integration for the product, they have not announced that the integration is possible. So we have to wait until the announcement. So this is very strange product launch where we can't really tell anyone anything. We don't want our competitors to know.
Jordan Gal:We don't want anyone to know. So it's just this very strange thing. It's like doing a product launch in the dark, which is it's stupid. It's just we don't have a choice.
Brian Casel:And I and I know the backstory here. I won't give anything away here, but it's I I think you are making the smart right decision there. And I agree. Like, almost all the time, I would just tell people, you know, launch in public, build an early access list, talk about it, talk to customers. In this case, you're in a kind of a unique situation where it real it's the smart play to to kinda keep it quiet.
Jordan Gal:Yep. So yeah. So we're we're dealing with that and the strains that that's putting on a three person company while we're you know, the the train is rolling down the track right now. Things are moving and we're growing. We had our biggest month ever in MRR growth in February, which was fantastic.
Jordan Gal:At the same time, we as we start focusing on this new product, our pipeline is not as strong for next month. And so, you know, once once you get the MRR growth in one month, you don't want it to slow down the next month, but I think it will. At the same time, I'm a little worried about some churn that's that's heading our way over the next month. And then, you know, the kicker is that we're having a baby any day. So not not knowing when that's gonna happen and when that will rightfully interrupt work because work will be demoted on the priority list for at least a few days makes for an interesting I think the source of the stress though is the unknown.
Jordan Gal:That's that's really it. Everything else is what we're used to. Juggling a lot of things at once and not knowing this or that, but it's the unknown of what will happen with this product. Did we make the right decision splitting our attention? You know, it's a dangerous thing.
Jordan Gal:We don't have that much runway and so it was a risky decision to split our attention and I just wanna see it pay off.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So as you as you gear up for the launch, you know, you're just a couple weeks away. So, you know, there must be a lot of issues and bugs and and features to build and plan and marketing and the launch of all this. So how much would you say this is like taking away your focus from the core CardHook product? Like, any momentum suffering due to the launch of this new product?
Jordan Gal:Well, we've tried to mitigate that by taking we took some advice from a few advisers and investors on kind of how to approach this. Right? This is before we decided to to pursue this, we want to tell our investors as soon as possible. Right? You don't wanna spring this on people like, oh, by the way, we're about to launch a new product and that's we've been, you know, working on stuff that we haven't it just didn't make sense.
Jordan Gal:So we we let everyone know and then everyone was very enthusiastic, which was very helpful. And then we got some good advice from some investors who are in the game. So not just passive investors, but people who actively run software companies. And the advice they gave us, we took was get things in order, but don't start spending a ton of time on it because it's unknown. So what we've set up is basically a sprint at the end.
Jordan Gal:So we did a bunch of work for a few weeks to make sure that all of our assumptions were in order. Is this really possible? Let's think all the way through so that we're not spending time on something that is pointless. And then as we got that, we built up the relationship with the with the larger platform, all that. Once we knew that, we basically put it aside.
Jordan Gal:And now that it's March and this thing launches, in the March, now is the sprint. That way we avoided the if you kinda let it, it will just take over as much time as we give it.
Brian Casel:But are there any, like, technical unknowns? When you say, like, sprint leading up to a a pretty hard launch date in the calendar, and I think I think you you mentioned, like, there's some sort of event that this is lining up with that you can't just delay the launch if you wanted to. It it has to happen.
Jordan Gal:We can, but that would defeat, like, the purpose of of our position. Right? The the whole advantage is that we are one of the first people to know that this is possible and so to take advantage of it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, did you guys did you guys, like, work on any early prototypes that basically gave you confirmation? Like, yes, we we know that we can build this technically, and we'll just hustle our asses off in the final week to do it.
Jordan Gal:Yes. That was the first thing we did. First thing we did was, okay, this would be great and valuable. Let's just throw something together. And that's how the whole thing started.
Jordan Gal:We built it for ourselves, like in our own demo store, and then we showed it to other people and people were like, take my money. And that's what kind of got us on the, okay, let's figure out a way to make this work.
Brian Casel:Cool. And so I guess in that sense, it's not even completely stealth mode. You did show it to potential customers.
Jordan Gal:We showed screenshots to a few people. The the difficulty is in, like, the back end and the admin and the settings, we don't have any feedback. That's the strange part. So our plan is to get the prototype out to people next week and then get some initial feedback. But it is one of these things where it's the most important, most valuable features will be there and we know that the first few weeks after launch are going to be a mess of filtering through feature requests and deciding on which ones to pursue or not.
Jordan Gal:But it's not going be like a, no, that's against our opinion, so we're not going to pursue that. Understand. There's no way we could have gotten it right being in stealth, so we'll be ready to adjust.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Cool. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:What's new on your end?
Brian Casel:Let's see. One thing, I think I mentioned this real briefly on the previous episode, but I'm looking to hire this is kind of a new role that I'm looking to bring on to the audience ops team. Maybe I'll just talk a bit more about it now. I'm calling it Marketing Tech. That's the name of this role that this person will do.
Brian Casel:If you're interested in learning about this or if you think it's you, you can apply at audienceops.com/jobs. You'll find the, the job listing there. I wanna find somebody to handle a bunch of technical tasks related to running marketing campaigns. So specifically running PPC campaigns, Facebook ads, retargeting ads, working a lot with with, drip and creating workflows, you know, email automation workflows, email campaigns, tagging strategies, landing pages, funnels, all this kind of technical work that that's like the glue in within a content marketing strategy. So obviously, Audience Ops, we're a content marketing company and we've we've been implementing a pretty specific content marketing plan for all of our clients.
Brian Casel:Know, weekly blogging strategy, sending email newsletters. We do an email course, with a pitch. And we've got a bit of automation that we do. I'm looking to add a, like a paid traffic component to this. And we're gonna start by doing this for ourselves, just for our service and also for our our plugins.
Brian Casel:But eventually we're gonna build a specific strategy around running promoted posts on Facebook and then retargeting, ads to bring people who've read an article, bring them back to opt in for the content upgrade, which we've been doing. So, you know, strategies like that, I want to put together an optional upsell to have us manage some paid ad campaigns. And that's what this role will be. This person is going to spearhead that. This is a new role for me to hire for develop as the position, but, I think it's interesting.
Brian Casel:I have an idea about how all these things work and obviously I've run these kind of campaigns before myself, but I'm looking for somebody to kind of take over and take it to the next step and I'll just kind of give some input and strategy and ideas. So look looking to do that.
Jordan Gal:I love that. I love that. I think that's the that's the next step in the value you provide. Right? It's like and and you guys do now now that we're working together, I'm seeing what you do and the the promotion, the free promotion is is one step.
Jordan Gal:And then that that exactly what you mentioned, the promoting to Facebook and then building up a retargeting list and then showing ads, it's it's just one more step and it makes sense for you guys to to control it. Right now, we we pay someone who runs our Facebook ads to to do exactly that. They literally take your posts and put it on Facebook and promote it and then do retargeting.
Brian Casel:Yeah, we have several clients who do the same exact thing. And we've already been providing the artwork for the Facebook posts and that kind of stuff, and our clients can use that. But yeah, I think that is a piece that really makes sense to boost traffic and conversions and that kind of stuff. We don't really advertise this too much, a main part of our service is actually setting up, the email account. Most of our clients use Drip, so we'll set up a whole Drip account.
Brian Casel:If you're migrating to Drip, we'll set you up and set up the the tagging strategy and the workflows and the automation, and bring subscribers through a sequence and and all this stuff. And up until now, that's that task has basically been falling to me to do. Our assistants do set up campaigns and they set up the newsletters in DRIP, but but I set up the more strategic automation rules and and the workflows. And I think this will also be part of this this person's job is to implement these, but also develop our standard process for doing it. Right.
Brian Casel:You know, what it
Jordan Gal:makes me think of, it makes me think of, you know, the predictable revenue split of functions between prospecting and and the closing. You know, because I have a really hard what you're mentioning right now, I try to do both sides, and it is very difficult to get done because there's another component to all that. It's the content. It's the writing, what goes into the email, and then there's an entirely other half of setting it up, the tagging strategy, connecting the landing page with Drip, all these different things. To do both, it's it's it's a little exhausting.
Jordan Gal:You can see how it could make sense to split those up and get good at one or the other. Like, sometimes I I can't decide which one I like or which one I hate more, but doing both is really hard.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, the more I learn about, or I guess maybe just the more experienced I am with building businesses, especially the second one now, it's like, I'm just trying to delegate more and more. Even things that I know pretty well, I want to start to remove myself from them and only give input from a strategic level. But I'm even starting to let people on the team develop some of the strategy and the direction as well. I'm kind of giving my input.
Jordan Gal:Right, once they get better at it, you are.
Brian Casel:Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I think PPC for me is definitely one of those areas where I've tinkered with it multiple times over the years and I've just never really felt strong enough that like I'm not a PPC expert by any means. And I'm not even necessarily looking to hire someone who's like, who has years of experience and knows PPC inside and out. But if it's if it's something that you're drawn to and you feel pretty good about it and you wanna learn a lot more about it. I think this is a really good opportunity to to get your hands dirty and not just play around with it, but actually use it in real campaigns and drive real results.
Brian Casel:So I think it'll be cool.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. I like it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So I mean, I've got a couple other updates. Do you wanna go back to you?
Jordan Gal:I was gonna bring up MicroConf.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We just submitted both of us submitted our talks. Last year, I think I beat you by one vote. And that bragging ends Yeah.
Brian Casel:Well, thanks to, Nathan Barry for throwing his hat in the in the in the ring. So
Jordan Gal:You know, I think rightfully so, Nathan will get the most votes because I I wanna hear that story just like everyone else going to MicroConf wants to hear that story and what happened. They're one of those companies that have their numbers on bare metrics and we go there regularly. So Ben and I will just send each other screenshots of bare metrics like over the past sixty days, added 42,000 in MRR over 60, things like that. So the numbers are just kind of eye popping and I think that story is going to be awesome. But enough about Nathan, you are in great position and I am in like ninth place, which I think goes right under the the voting.
Jordan Gal:No. Think it's 12. 12? I thought I thought it was 8%.
Brian Casel:You're in, buddy. You're you're not escaping now, so Alright.
Brennan Dunn:Let's do it.
Brian Casel:You were saying like, hope I I just don't make it this year something. But I think you should make it because you do have a really good topic talking about integrations, right?
Jordan Gal:I think, yeah, I think I went a little niche on the topic, which I think is good. I think that's the most valuable thing that I can talk about.
Brian Casel:Yeah, but we were talking about this before the call. I like your topic because you're the only one talking about integrations in the whole list. I'm pretty sure.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I wonder I well, Nathan, I think, is gonna talk about some other stuff. But I wonder how much he's gonna focus on integrations. Right? Because his his growth has come from integrations and influencers, from what I understand, from what he's written.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I think he's done some sales stuff too.
Jordan Gal:That's right. That's right. That's right.
Brian Casel:But yeah, you're doing integrations, but we were talking about, and I'm completely guilty of this, but, like at least half the topics in the list for MicroConf use the same exact formula. You know, how I went from zero to X dollars MRR in X number of months, you know, like everybody uses that headline formula and you know what? It works. So I think it works
Jordan Gal:for a reason. That's you know, we wanna find the standouts in in our crowd and the numbers are the underlying, you know, factor in in whether you're you've done something that is sufficiently interesting to to to hear about
Brian Casel:on stage. I mean, you know, and I think most people are kinda qualifying it with like, I I did mine, like, zero to, 30 ks MRR with a product type service, right? So everybody's got a different angle on how you got there and what you did. So I think
Jordan Gal:that'll What be are you going to talk about? It's twelve minutes. I really can't talk about everything.
Brian Casel:I've got nothing prepared yet. Okay.
Jordan Gal:See, I think this is what made it a little easier. I was going to talk about fund strapping, like basically going from a bootstrap company to raising some money. I And thought that was just going be me talking about myself for twelve minutes, which sucks. Maybe it's cool for me, it doesn't give anything. That's why I went with the integrations.
Jordan Gal:At least I can talk about like, here's a strategy we use and how we use it.
Brian Casel:I think attendee talks, maybe I talked about this before, but attendee talks are different than full length talks. Not just because of the length issue, like, yes, they're only twelve minutes, but I think attendee talks are cool because it's supposed to be like, hey, look what I built.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, tell me what worked. Show me how you did it.
Brian Casel:It's just show us a really quick and focused case study. It's not necessarily like a whole presentation. Yes, there's some teaching to it and you do have to create some sort of presentation for it, but
Jordan Gal:Right, it's limited narrative.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and I think for the most part, the attendee talks are folks who most of us have not met yet. So it's our opportunity to see like, Oh, what are these guys working on? You know? That's what I love about the format. So, I mean, for mine, I'll probably just boil it down to something like five lessons learned.
Brian Casel:The story about Audience Ops, as I'm sure most of you know from listening to this podcast, is just the speed of it. It all happened in about nine months and it's continuing on now. And so yeah, there are definitely some lessons learned. What I want to try to do is find some tidbits that I haven't really talked about anywhere, including this podcast, and try to share them, only in MicroConf. I think that'll be kinda cool.
Brian Casel:There there's definitely some stuff that I haven't totally been been completely open about yet. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:I'd also like to hear about why you think it worked. You know?
Brian Casel:It's I could talk all day about Right. Product and services and all that, but yeah. Cool. So but, yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to another year in Vegas, so it should be fun.
Jordan Gal:Different hotel this time too.
Brian Casel:That's right. That's right. Catching up with old old faces.
Jordan Gal:No. We're Tropicana, which which look. I'm happy about I think it's gonna be a better hotel experience, but I I love the Tropicana just because one of my buddies in college owned the Tropicana, which is weird.
Brian Casel:It's really out of the way. Actually, think the Palms is out of the way too. I mean, doesn't matter. We don't leave Yeah, the doesn't matter. So
Jordan Gal:cool. What else, man?
Brian Casel:So the other thing that's happening in audience ops, I'm I'm trying to make this happen. It's been a bit delayed just because so many other things have been going on, but, I'm looking to launch our second WordPress plugin, very soon. It's called our Landing Pages plugin, and that is a plugin that helps you build a landing page. The plugin is built. I've actually already been using it on my own site.
Brian Casel:You've seen actually, where is it? I'm promoting my Productize Crash Course using this plugin. And that's at productizecourse.com, if you wanna just take a look at what the landing page looks like.
Jordan Gal:Wanna take a look.
Brian Casel:Yeah, so
Jordan Gal:What is it? Productizecourse.com. So why why Landing Page plugin? There are a million ways.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's not for everyone. I mean, obviously a lot of people like to use Leadpages and or Unbounce and that kind of stuff. And those are good solutions. Of course, those are SaaS, this is a WordPress plugin.
Brian Casel:So there's cost savings there. But the real reason is because whenever I've ever wanted to create a landing page, I always end up hacking apart whatever WordPress theme I'm currently using for that site. You know, because most WordPress themes don't come built in with a stripped down landing page template. If you're a web designer, you have to like strip out the navigation, you've got to set up the headlines and the opt in form and all this stuff to really optimize a landing page template. What this plugin does is it allows you to create an optimized Landing Page no matter which WordPress theme you're currently using.
Brian Casel:You can just activate this and then just create Landing Pages. It's got, you know, some color customization options. You can customize, obviously, all the text and the headlines. It's got a couple of opt in forms. It it like our content upgrades plugin, currently, it integrates directly with Drip and Mailchimp.
Brian Casel:We're currently working on Infusionsoft integrations. We're working on ConvertKit integrations for both of those, probably a couple others down the road. And if you're not using those, you can export to a CSV. But yeah, that's the idea. So the reason that we're creating it from audience ops is what we're going be using it for is to help our clients promote their email courses.
Brian Casel:So email courses are something that we've been creating for our clients since the beginning, like an educational crash course. Just like my product has crash course. We basically do the same thing for our clients. It's like an educational course leads into a pitch for the product. And then after that, they just get dropped into the weekly newsletter.
Brian Casel:You can promote that using the drip pop up, which a lot of people do and it's great. But sometimes you want an additional dedicated landing page to point people to, whether it's traffic, retargeting ads to bring them back to the site, to opt in on the landing page. There are different features that we're building into it. So, like, you can even, like, launch the landing page inside a pop up in, like, a really big pop up. Kind of like a not we're not gonna be using an iframe, but the kind of like that, where where we're loading what is normally a full landing page in a big pop up.
Brian Casel:So you can launch that from like a widget or a link.
Jordan Gal:Like Leadpages has that that function where I guess for them, it's just the opt in form pops up.
Brian Casel:Yeah. This will be like a bigger thing. And that's just, like another way to view the same landing page. Or you can go to a dedicated landing page, which, you know, it also have a thank you page built into it. You can put conversion tracking scripts on it.
Brian Casel:In in a later version, we'll add, like, AB testing to it. So, yeah. It's just a kind of an easier way, and a faster way to get a a clean, optimized landing page up and running on your site without having to tinker around with your theme or even lead pages I've used many times before. You're still tinkering around with it and trying to design it. There's so many different designs and customization options.
Brian Casel:This is pretty light on the customization options. You can customize all the colors and you can customize all the text. And since it's a plug in that lives on your site, by default, it'll just use your existing styles, like your fonts. And so you can put your branding in there and everything. So I just think that it's an easier way to launch multiple landing pages across your site.
Brian Casel:So right now, I'm pushing to get the final finishing touches on this over the next two weeks. My goal by the March is to start using it on our client sites. As I said, I'm currently only using it on my own site, but in about two, three weeks we'll start implementing it on our client sites and then probably aiming for mid April, we'll be doing a public launch. I'll probably do a webinar to launch that for people to start using publicly. But yeah, big picture, you know, this is part of a bigger picture strategy for audience apps where, you know, we've been growing the service side of the business, But I also want to, this year, grow the software side where we're starting with a couple of plug ins and we're gonna try to grow that and and, you know, put some some marketing power behind those and, and see where those kind of evolve to.
Brian Casel:So content marketing service, content marketing tools, and then the other piece, which I haven't really started yet, building an educational product about doing content marketing. So that's that's the master plan.
Jordan Gal:I like it. You got a lot of work ahead of you, but all all kind of makes sense, all gels together into the the same audience, same customer base. Yep. Nice, man.
Brian Casel:So, so yeah, what's what else is on your end?
Jordan Gal:That's pretty much it, man. Besides going to the gym for the first time in like two years, maybe wanna puke and my hamstrings feel like they're not part of my body. But that's good.
Brian Casel:Yep. Fun stuff, man. Mean, the only other quick update I had is, you know, as I said, the service side of the business, the done for you product and service just keeps growing. I mean, we signed three new clients this week and it's only Wednesday. It's, I mean, it's So it's growing pretty fast.
Brian Casel:Leads are coming in and and sales calls just get easier and easier, I think. And, you know, I'm still working on well, what I've started doing is is bringing on our salesperson and I'm currently training him. So like every Friday we're having a call where we're talking through some stuff and he's listening to my recorded sales calls so he can learn that way. Again, by the March, my goal is to start having him take on some sales calls himself. But we're not quite there yet.
Brian Casel:You know, still kind of in a training phase.
Jordan Gal:Are you considering raising prices?
Brian Casel:That will be happening.
Jordan Gal:Right, if the sales are coming too easy, that might be an indicator of price insensitivity.
Brian Casel:That's a good question. It's gonna happen. I was thinking that I would wait until we launch our educational product, which will be later in the year. Because that product is gonna be the lower end option.
Jordan Gal:And Okay.
Brian Casel:And then have the higher end be the done for you service.
Jordan Gal:Okay. That way there's there's there's something for everyone that everyone that you talk to has an opportunity to buy. So budget
Brian Casel:That's won't be the idea. Yeah. I mean, mean, at the even at the current prices, you know, we're still we've been profitable the whole way through and it continues. Like the model, I've been really happy with this so far, even as we're growing so fast and scaling up the team, which obviously the costs keep going up. Remains at the same profitability level.
Brian Casel:That hasn't
Jordan Gal:really changed. That was one of the big unknowns. Awesome, that's great to hear.
Brian Casel:That's So cool, man. That's where we're at. That's the update. Solid. Alright.
Brian Casel:Talk again soon. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Alright, man. Take it easy over there. Alright. See you, bro.
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