[107] Our Recap of MicroConf 2016
Hello, everybody. Welcome back. Bootstrap web number one zero seven. Brian, what's up, baby? Talking to MicroConf.
Brian Casel:Yep. That's right. What's what's up there, Jordan? It's been a couple weeks. I know we took a couple weeks off there.
Brian Casel:Sorry about that, folks. We've been traveling to the desert to meet up at MicroConf.
Jordan Gal:Yes. And then dealing with the aftermath and but we're back. And it's kind of interesting to not do a MicroConf recap episode immediately after, but actually a few, like, weeks after. So now it's what's still there? What what resonated to the point of still lingering and bouncing around our our heads?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. We're I think right now we're about two weeks out. So
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Two weeks?
Brian Casel:So something like that. I I can't even keep track anymore. It's too much going on. I think
Jordan Gal:that's right. I mean, overall, man, I I love it there. It's so much fun, and I I wasn't a 100% engaged the way, you know, that I feel like I normally would because my wife had just given birth a few days prior. Yeah. Man, it it's it's such a unique conference.
Jordan Gal:It's just the right size and everything feels so relevant. It's not like other conferences where you can just kinda ignore 50% of the stuff and it's because it just doesn't apply to you. Here, it's just everything. It's so easy to get into conversations with people. Everyone just shares everything.
Jordan Gal:It's a very unique thing. It's great.
Brian Casel:Absolutely. It's a great community. I feel like it gets better and better every year. And I think that's probably I mean, I'm sure that it does get better every year, but I think it's probably because the more you go back every year, the more people there are to catch up with. And that was certainly the case this year.
Brian Casel:So that's my biggest reason for going in the first place. It's I don't care who's speaking, to to be honest. The speakers were great, but I I go to see all all my people.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And it like so the prior year was my first. So this is the first time I've gone back and that's I found the same thing. Even if you hadn't talked to someone in a year, you saw them at the last microconf and you immediately reconnect. You know, it might have just been one conversation you had at the last one.
Jordan Gal:And then this is like, it like doubles your relationship. You're like, okay, now we can go even further in and be even more open and more honest with each other. And and and they they adjusted some formatting things starting a little later, gave time to kinda hang out and be more casual about breakfast and kinda bum around and talk to people. And then I feel like they gave more time for lunch also. I feel like that's where that's where I got the most value.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Lunch was felt like almost two hours, right?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Was it was a long time. And I think they did that on purpose. Yeah. That was What happened was you'd listen to a speaker and then you'd go to lunch and you'd be able to talk about that topic or whatever else came to mind with the people that you're at lunch with and you kind of have an extended rolling conversation and, you know, they do the and the food the food was good.
Jordan Gal:I remember that. It was good. Yeah. And then they had people just kind of take your dishes away and then you're left just sitting at a table with people and you just kind of you get into it.
Brian Casel:So yeah, I think that there were a few like conference related changes like you said, the schedule, the venue was different. It was at The Palms this year which I liked. You know, I thought it was probably better than the Tropicana. I liked the upstairs where they had the after parties, the one with the outdoor space. That was really cool.
Brian Casel:I liked some of the formatting things that were different, like the surprise speaker from Stripe. Right? Is that a Collison? Patrick. Patrick Collison.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I like that just that idea of having a surprise speaker. Especially for folks going back every year, start I felt like it was like an Apple event. Like what's the secret Right. What's gonna happen?
Brian Casel:Feature gonna be this year, you know?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That was unexpected. And also the fact that I don't know about you, I'm not a fanboy of that many entrepreneurs. You know, I don't see the point in it.
Brian Casel:No, didn't really know too much about him. I probably heard an interview with him or two, like one or two before, but obviously, you know, co founder of Stripe. I mean, that's that's a huge story to hear about.
Jordan Gal:Right. And he was so humble and and like smart and, you know, the guy the guy I don't know. God knows how much the guy's worth on paper, but he came off as an entrepreneur. Someone in the in the hustle like us. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Maybe his thing happened to blow up to global proportions, but he's still kinda doing it, and it it didn't feel that disconnected. It wasn't like, I'm a super successful billionaire and I will come down and give you my lessons. It wasn't that at all. It was like a conversation with someone else like us.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And, you know, I think things like that, speaker spots and things where that's like icing on the cake to me. But again, like I didn't go out there for that, but it was still, I still thoroughly enjoyed every talk. I actually jotted down a bunch of notes, which I'm sure we'll try to talk through here today. I think the other big takeaway that I'm kind of reminded of year after year is, for me, the experience of microconf, I'm sure everybody else can relate to this too, it all depends on what you're currently focused on in your business and and what whatever's happening in your personal business is gonna put all of micro comp in a certain light or or you're gonna see micro comp in a different perspective.
Brian Casel:I mean, example, last year, literally like a year ago, this time a year ago, I went into MicroConf a little bit freaking out, like not knowing what my next business was gonna be because I was kind of, I think, in the process of selling Restaurant Engine at that time. It wasn't sold yet. I think I was just starting that, like, due diligence process somewhere in there. And at that time, I knew that I was exiting and I had no idea what Audience Ops did not exist when I was on the flight going to MicroConf. And then the concept for Audience Ops came together while I was literally in the hotel at MicroConf.
Jordan Gal:Right. And that colors your whole experience.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it was a combination of all the conversations that I was having with folks at MicroComp that helped to spur on the idea of Audience Ops, and just getting inspired by hearing what what folks are doing and where things are at. So that definitely was a huge experience. But then this year, a year later, I mean, running Audience Ops, it's up and running, it's growing faster than anything I've worked on before. And that also changes my whole perspective at MicroConf in terms of the things that I'm taking away from every conversation, the things that I'm taking away from the talks, notes that I want to jot down.
Brian Casel:I mean, I'm using the information differently this year. There are probably some other questions on my mind right now related to growth and managing a team. I think I had a conversation with someone about this, at an after party and maybe MicroComp just isn't the conference for this type of thing, but I I thought that there wasn't a whole lot on managing a team or a growing team and being not even just being a manager, but being like I don't know. Like the term CEO comes to mind. Don't think of myself as that But growing a company to the next level and not just scrapping along and doing whatever quick tactic you can get to customer number one, I think now there are more folks who are a little bit further along running more sizable companies.
Brian Casel:And I would have liked to see or hear from folks who are a little bit more in that world. There are folks that I spoke to in the hallway track that would kind of fit that, and those tend to be the people that try to seek out and talk to. And I'm still looking for more people like that to to reach out to.
Jordan Gal:You know, when when I heard things, the guy from Teamwork, the CEO of Teamwork, which was a great talk, he talked about being a CEO and the challenges he had with it, and that stuff went in one ear and out the other for me because that's that's not my problem right now. My problem isn't hiring and managing. My problem is, you know, something else. And I was sitting next to Justin McGill, our buddy from LeadFuse, and he's listening to a talk and he and he's just hearing completely different things than I'm hearing. I remember one of his big takeaways that he was talking about was focusing on each step of the of the onboarding funnel.
Jordan Gal:And it's because he doesn't have a leads problem. He has a conversion problem.
Brian Casel:Right. He's focused on onboarding
Nathan Barry:right now.
Jordan Gal:Right. And and I don't have an onboarding problem. So that like, I ignore that and I I I figure out, like, no. How do I find bigger customers? It really just filters through and it gets applied to your situation.
Jordan Gal:Every time you go, it's gonna be different.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So like for you, like what was your what kind of mindset were you in going into MicroConf in terms of like what was your hope to get out of this year's microconf?
Jordan Gal:Well, the I'll tell you the most painful lesson was at dinner and when I walked head first into a gigantic pane of glass and shattered my face.
Brian Casel:I was there. That that was so funny because because we were at a group of there's like 12 of us at that dinner. So like all of us are basically watching that and everyone just kind of erupted in laughter at what what had happened.
Jordan Gal:I cannot tell you how much that hurt. It hurt up until a few days ago.
Brian Casel:You had a huge bump on your head.
Jordan Gal:Oh my God. I was FaceTiming with my kids. We're sitting at dinner. FaceTime comes in, my kids are in the bath. I'm like, oh my god.
Jordan Gal:I'm say hi to my girls. And so I just look up and I see what was by the pool. And I
Brian Casel:I'm gonna walk out to the pool now.
Jordan Gal:And start walking. Oh my god. I cannot believe how hard it hit my face. There was just like an oily smudge of my forehead and nose.
Brian Casel:The the funniest part is that your your family saw it happen too over face time.
Jordan Gal:Kids were like, dad? Dad, what's going on? I was like, oh. Like, my my jaw hurt for a week. The back of my neck it might have been a concussion.
Jordan Gal:It was unbelievably if it wasn't more so painful, it'd be embarrassing, but I was focused on how much it freaking hurt
Brian Casel:me. Like, we're you know, we're not joking around to make this sound more dramatic. Like, you literally had, like, a huge welt on on your forehead.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So that that was the that was the low point. That was a good, like, humbling experience.
Brian Casel:Right. So
Jordan Gal:going in, what what I wanted the first thing is to connect with a bunch of people and have fun, and have fun in a way that's like it's like beneficial for your business, but you don't need to be cynical about it because it's just fun. So that is just like a win win in that way. You just talk to people, hang out and learn and it's good for your business and it's fun to share and hang out. It's like an all around good experience in trying to better your business and have a good time at the same time. That's what I remember from the first time and I was like, it's such a pure experience.
Jordan Gal:You don't have to be cynical. You don't have to only try to benefit for yourself. At the same time, it's not like this frivolous trip to Las Vegas when I have, like, a four day old at home. So it was really that's what I was looking for. I was like, I'm not gonna feel guilty about leaving the house, and I'm not gonna feel bad about trying to get more benefit for the business.
Jordan Gal:They just go together, which is I think the nice part.
Brian Casel:On that note, think for me too every year is that it's a chance to break away from work and the day to day of grinding away at the business. I mean, have a break from that, but it still feels like It doesn't feel like work, but it's still productive. And it's energizing and adds fuel to the business. It's not just a vacation on a beach.
Jordan Gal:Right, and you get to step away and take a bit more strategic view and I can't help but like coming up against other people and just hearing what they're doing and comparing myself and that's just really motivating to kind of see what people are doing and what people have the success and what they're struggling with. The other thing was that Ben was gonna be there also, and we don't get to hang out in person very often.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's cool hanging out with Ben.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. We had a few like nights of like, you know, a few too many drinks and like laughing a lot at like 2AM and that's that's really healthy. It's good for you, it's good for the business, good for the relationship, just kind of reconnect. We had a few drunk moments of like, not confrontation, but like bringing something up that might have been contentious that we got to laugh about because we were in person and that helped.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I mean, went into this year, I had one thought on my mind and that was to learn more about growing a remote team. I kind of talked about that a minute ago, but this thought of like how to improve company culture, like going beyond just Slack. And I mean, to be honest, like I said, I don't think that I really got the info or the answers I was looking for. I don't even really know what the questions are. I just kinda something that I've been thinking about.
Brian Casel:And actually Claire Lou's talk really resonated with me quite a bit. And I I shot her an email while we were there at MicroConf to say I I wanted to, you know, try and catch her while we were there and and talk. But, you know, I guess we just kinda kept missing each other. I I do have an appointment to talk with her next week or actually tomorrow.
Jordan Gal:Give give a little more background on who Claire is. Is she the one that works at at Know Your Company?
Brian Casel:Yes. Yeah. Claire Lou is the founder of Know Your Company. So why don't we start going through the talks?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Why not?
Brian Casel:Let's let's do it. Yeah. But while we're talking about her, you know, the, I think she was like the second speaker on the first day. Really good talk. Talked about Know Your Company which is an app that was kind of born out of out of, from from 37 signals and kind of spun off and she's running it.
Brian Casel:It's about knowing your company and knowing your employees. And I'm actually still pretty unclear about how it works because they're they're pretty, not they don't really show you how their software works or how their service works really. They just talk about the problem and the pain point and if you have it, here's what it's gonna cost, know, dollars 100 per employee and it's not a recurring thing which was interesting. That was really most of what her talk was about was how how she's building this as really like a one or two person company without a recurring revenue model. The the the note that I put down while she was talking was she said something to the effect of filter for high commitment in person demos, meaning like they only take customers through the in person demo process.
Brian Casel:I think she was talking about that they're going to be launching a self-service sign up pretty soon. But I mean, it's been like over a year of of her running this company just doing in person demos and kind of limiting it that that way so that she has to talk to every lead that comes in. I think that's just really smart. I think there are so many new startups just trying to get a sign up form up and running and and they launch to crickets. But when you just get on the phone with people and you invite people in to to request phone calls and that's the only way that they can buy our product, it kind of forces them to go through this funnel where you can learn exactly what they need and really to perfect the product.
Brian Casel:I think that's what she's been focused on.
Jordan Gal:Right. And even in the demo, if it's not a good fit, they don't try to push the sell. I think overall, it was just an exercise in, right, it has that 37 signals slightly unconventional approach to things, that's what I took away from it. This is a software product. You can't see the software.
Jordan Gal:There are no screenshots. The pricing isn't like per month. It's just flat $100 per employee. That's just a completely different approach. It shows that if you get the problem and the solution right and match it with the right audience, you don't have to do it exactly how you see your competitors doing it or everyone else doing it.
Jordan Gal:There are other apps that do this and they're not really selling an app. They're selling something totally different. They're selling the ability for someone who runs the company to know whether or not their employees are happy or satisfied. For that, they had a specific size of company, 25 to 75, something like that, 10 to 50? Whatever they had, it was a defined segment.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually interested to hear how that works because I I don't know exactly what how their service works, but I think it is interesting and and I'll be talking to her tomorrow. I I guess I'll pull out a couple of like, we won't be able to go through everyone who spoke, but just some of the more, some of the interesting things that I wrote down. So Des Trainer, I think he was the first speaker, founder of, Intercom.
Brian Casel:Great talk there. So the things that I wrote down were one thing was why do you exist other than to make money which was interesting. I mean obviously we're all trying to grow revenue and be profitable and that's important to you know grow an actual sustainable business. But I think at a certain point, if you're gonna go along with a business as as they've done and as, you know, most of us are thinking about doing, you have to you have to think about well, how do you why do you exist other than to make money? And and I think that will also help you grow a bigger business if if you have this kind of mindset of what's what's the bigger picture here and and who does this impact?
Brian Casel:Why does it impact them? How does it impact me and my people? And and, I thought that was interesting. The other thing that I noted down on on that one was, he wrote, know your real or he he said something to the effect of know your real competitors. For example, when do flowers compete with chocolates?
Brian Casel:I really like this analogy. I've never heard it put this way before, but it's so true. Right? And the other analogy was when does Twitter compete with games? And so the thinking here is that, you you might look at Twitter as like, well, what's the competitor to Twitter?
Brian Casel:It's Facebook or it's Snapchat or or it's it's like another social network. But really, it's it's competing for your time and attention. So what is the other thing that might take your time and attention? Well, a game might do that, you know, or, like, I don't know, walking your dog might might do that. So, if you think about what the alternative to your services, I mean, for me, running audience ops, the the thought that I have is we're not necessarily up against another content marketing agency.
Brian Casel:You know, we're we're really up against a founder writing blog posts themselves, you know, as as like and, like, that's a lot a lot of what our our clients are thinking about is like, well, I could either write the articles myself and and do it all myself, or I can have this other service do it. You know, the other way to think about it, maybe I'll hire someone in full time. You know, we're up against, like, a full time employee hire.
Jordan Gal:So Right. Think that's part of why your marketing resonates nicely because you're you are talking to that person. If right? If you're talking to me, it's not about who you're competing against in terms of other agencies. It's founders shouldn't write blog posts.
Jordan Gal:It's like, oh, okay. Now I'm now listening to you. Yeah. The the biggest thing I got from Des was, he had this slide that showed the nine x effect that you need to be nine times better. I think that was the gist of it.
Jordan Gal:So what he said was, you tend to overestimate the value of what you're offering by about three x and your prospects overestimate what they're currently using by about three x. So three x and three x, you kind of have to be nine times better than what they're currently doing for them to say, oh, I I'm willing to give that a try. I'm willing to change my behavior, go out of my way, pull up my credit card, change my flow, can you convince myself, do all those things, you know, that that create friction.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The cost of switching is so high for everybody.
Jordan Gal:Right. I I read that and right. So this is an example of, like, it depends on your context. We just put up the marketing site for our new checkout products, which is a whole other episode to cover. And and as he said this, I went to the marketing site and was like, oh, wow.
Jordan Gal:I am assuming that they think their current solution is terrible. And in my mind, I realized like, Oh, I can't assume that. I have to assume that they are going to overestimate what they're currently using, So I need to spend more time rubbing, scratching the pain about this is why. I immediately created, I like sketched it up in a Google Doc and then put it up on the site immediately. Instead of just saying, here are the key features, one, two, three, four.
Jordan Gal:I said here are the key features compared to your regular Shopify checkout. So this is bad and this is or the good version. This is bad. So it's it was an immediate application of like, what am I thinking? I have to.
Jordan Gal:Why should I assume that they feel the pain that I know they should feel? It was like, it immediately pointed out a disconnect in my assumptions Yeah. To the
Brian Casel:Love it. Another great talk was Patrick Campbell, Super smart guy talking about, pricing and and, and all sorts of metrics and and studies related to optimizing, your pricing. Obviously, he he's from Price Intelligently, so they they know a thing or two about about pricing. I had dinner with Patrick and a couple people as well. We had some really good chats there.
Brian Casel:The thing that I noted down was this study that they ran. I forgot how many companies they studied here, but the the question that they were posing was, what can you improve to to grow revenue? Like, there there
Pippin Williamson:are
Brian Casel:three levels biggest impact. Yeah. What will make the biggest impact? Right? And and there are three three things that they're comparing, either acquisition, monetization, meaning your pricing, or retention.
Brian Casel:So improving monetization, meaning optimizing your price points and matching them up with the right markets, increases growth more than any other of those three. So, like, reducing churn and and obviously that's very important, but but retention and and keeping people around, that that only increases by something like 3%. Acquisition, you know, getting more more traffic and more leads in the top of the funnel that that only increases something like four or 5%. But optimizing the right price points, can increase something like 13%, you know, over over their study. I thought that was really interesting because honestly, if you were to give me those three things and I had to guess, I don't know that I would have guessed pricing at all.
Jordan Gal:I just say I agree. I say acquisition. I'm like, oh, you need more. You need more numbers, more trials.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I might have said churn. I would have said, Once you get rid of the churn problem, everything will be better. But I even look at my current business compared to the previous business, it's so true. Mean, the price points are completely different.
Brian Casel:And, I mean, you you just look at the the graphs, and and it's a completely different story.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's it's almost like a Patrick's talk, it was almost a little scary because it made you realize, like, oh, man, I need to I need to think about this a lot more. But then then it turns optimistic because part of his talk was at least this is something you have full control over. You can just change your pricing and that is good to hear because it's hard to wrap your mind around all what happens if we change pricing, we need to talk to our previous customers. You create all these mental hurdles And the truth is you can just change your pricing.
Jordan Gal:You you can do it. Everything is like imaginary that's stopping you from changing your pricing. There's always a way you can grandfather do this or do that.
Brian Casel:We we had this conversation at at at Big Snow Tiny Conf where almost like when you're in some kind of mastermind group or a conversation at a conference between entrepreneurs, the most common advice that one entrepreneur gives to another entrepreneur is, you know, you should really change your pricing or you should you should increase pricing. You should charge more.
Jordan Gal:It's so easy for
Brian Casel:me outside. And the most common and the most common reaction to that is like, yeah, I know. Yeah. Maybe. I I know.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Oh, yeah. Heard about that too. Yeah. I should raise a lot of prices. Cool.
Jordan Gal:Cool. I should double it until until conversions go down. Got it. Got
Brian Casel:it. Like like everybody is so resistant to that, but at the same time everybody recommends it and it's almost always correct.
Jordan Gal:It is painfully correct. I look at how much work I do in a given week and I identify the two hours a week maybe that I spend on like high value sales and those guys end up being like 80% of the MRR added that month. At some point I'm like, why am I doing all the other work? Why wouldn't I just, you know? And and the easiest way to do that is is to change your pricing.
Jordan Gal:Then you'll you'll you'll only only deal with the people. Yeah. It's this drives me nuts. It's almost like, you know, my my brain now is in new product mode. So we have a new product.
Jordan Gal:When you have a new product, it's like, oh my God, I get to It's daunting to start from scratch, but you also get to start from scratch. You get to decide how things are. After working in a SaaS that has a low price point, we have a decent ARPU, average revenue per user, but we still have a lot of people that come in at the lower plans. I look at that and I'm like, the next thing I do is not going to have that because it really ends up taking an enormous amount of your time and I don't think it's worth it revenue wise.
Brian Casel:Yeah, it's tough. I mean, obviously, the SaaS can grow and you can evolve the SaaS in different ways and start focusing on higher price points. That's another
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Different thing. Different thing. All right. Let's push on.
Jordan Gal:I know you have to buggy soon, so let's get moving.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Let's talk about day two a little bit. Just one of the attendee talks I wanted to call out, which I thought was really interesting, Anna from DRIP. Just one thing she said I thought was genius, what they're doing. I didn't realize they do this.
Brian Casel:She's kind of the person in charge doing demos with new customers, right? And they had this demo hack to convert those consultations into customers. I kind of forgot exactly how it worked. You probably remember, but I think it It was like
Jordan Gal:impacted me.
Brian Casel:Yeah, totally. Is it like, they set up the the Drip account and they set up all the automation workflows for the person live on the call, and then it's just a matter of, like, enter your credit card and it's ready to go?
Jordan Gal:Right. It's a it's a it's like a trial by default. So right. So if you have a demo coming up, I remember when we first started doing doing demos, we do the demo and we would say, okay. I'll keep an eye out for your account.
Jordan Gal:Let me know if I if you can you need any help. Then we got a clue and realized it was much better to say, okay. It's the end of the demo. Let's go over to cardhook.com slash sign up and get you started, and I'll help you right now. So it was like asking for the trial right then.
Jordan Gal:They go one step further, even smarter. They just set up the trial.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like before the Like you're you're already on a trial.
Jordan Gal:Well, well, the thing is the powerful part, that's that's one thing. Okay. Fine. You already have an account. The what they do is they do the demo using that person's trial account, And they put valuable things inside of the account, like a funnel, autoresponder
Brennan Dunn:series.
Brian Casel:And this ties right back to what Des Trainer was talking about with the high cost of switching for a customer. That's like, especially true in switching your email marketing tool because it's not just, importing your list. You've gotta set up all these automation rules and get the tagging right and all that stuff. And and when Anna's kinda walking you through that whole process for you, like, doing it for you on a call, that's really, really powerful.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yeah. I I love that.
Brian Casel:I thought Rob Walling's talk was was great. It it was a little shorter than usual. Talking about unfair advantages. I thought that was really interesting.
Jordan Gal:That was very interesting. He was kinda He was looking at his history of different products and trying to identify why do some work out so much better than the other, and he kind of came up with like four reasons that things take off where others don't.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I thought it I I think he's like the perfect person to do that talk. I I really like that he chose to do this this little study because he he's in contact with so many entrepreneurs between the podcast and between running MicroConf and going back over a couple years here. He's literally able to see all these case studies and he has a really good reference point to be able to see, okay, were certain ones more successful, disproportionately more successful than others? And and so the four unfair advantages that he pointed to were, you know, be early to a market.
Brian Casel:He kind of wrote this off as, really, you got to be a little bit lucky to be early and there's not much you can do to control this. Who you know, like, what kind of network do you have? Who knows you? So your your audience and growth expertise. How well
Jordan Gal:Knowing what to do.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Basically. Yeah. So I thought that was really good. Going back to Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, that was an interesting surprise speaker.
Brian Casel:The the note that I put down here was, it's not really actionable or anything. I just thought it was an interesting part of the story where he was talking about, like, how how can they how are they able to project growth? I mean, most SaaS, most software can say, like, okay. We're getting x number of trials. We're getting x number of users.
Brian Casel:Our growth trajectory over the next couple of months or the next year is looking something like this. But the challenge for Stripe is that they're a payment processor, so it's not only the number of customers that they have, the number of users using Stripe, but it's also what's the growth trajectory of their businesses. That's what made it difficult. So you could have a huge whale sign up, but back when they signed up, you don't know that they're going to become a whale. Yeah, hard to project.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. The other interesting question about why did Stripe take off and gain so much traction so quickly? Yes, it's a great product and it's so easy to use. He definitely pointed Patrick definitely pointed to the fact that, look, the alternatives were so bad. And yes, you look at like a PayPal and authorize.net and they're so massive, they're worldwide, like who would even think to take them on?
Brian Casel:And that's exactly what Stripe did. But it seems like almost insane to take on these huge players in the industry. But at the same time, those players suck. Like, they're terrible. The experience from every part of it is absolutely terrible.
Brian Casel:And, it doesn't mean that that just any player is gonna come in and and have the kind of traction that that Stripe did, but, that definitely played into, some of their early success.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. If you didn't mess around with the market they were going after. And I liked hearing how they began in the most hackiest hack way possible of just not building anything and just building beyond minimum, and then people would come to them and say, so when are you gonna transfer money to my bank account? And they were like, oh, I guess we got to build that now.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Because really, know, it's easy to look at a company worth $5,000,000,000 and say, oh, whatever. They must have had all these unfair advantages and that's just a freak or whatever. Then you hear like, no, they did things exactly the way we do it. Exactly cobble it together, make it work, MVP everything, and let the users push you on which features to make. Was cool.
Jordan Gal:Related to this, before I forget, I want to mention I did have a side conversation in the hallway track with Heaton, who's like the the darling of MicroConf.
Brian Casel:The thing the thing I love about Heaton and Steli is like you could just refer to them by first name. Everyone knows exactly who you're talking Yeah.
Jordan Gal:So I was talking to Heaton and Lars, who's now where is he now? He used to be at Kissmetrics.
Brian Casel:Is he still working with Remi at Sethi?
Jordan Gal:Yes, he is. So I had a conversation with them and Ben and I asked them about pricing and one thing that Lars said kind of stuck out in my mind and he was like, when you think about your pricing, what you want to make sure is that every cohort increases in value over time. And I was like, say that in English. So basically what he was saying was, if your pricing is so rigid that each time you gain 50 customers, those 50 customers will be worth the same thing every month on month one and on month 36, that's not healthy because then you have to continuously gain more customers in order to grow. But if those 50 customers become worth more every month as they move up in different tiers or whatever the pricing mechanism is that makes them worth more like Seats.
Jordan Gal:Right. Whether it's seats, whether it's price, whatever it is, if that cohort continues to increase in value, then each time you acquire a customer, you don't have to acquire more customers to grow. You're gonna grow even if you don't acquire customers. So that helped in our pricing decision making. I thought that was a really valuable tidbit.
Brian Casel:Yeah, totally. I thought Lars' talk was excellent. I'm not too familiar with him, to be honest. I kinda just learned about him through this year's MicroCon. I thought he was a great speaker.
Brian Casel:I like the way that Authoritative. Yeah, very authoritative. Yeah, knows his stuff. Yeah, he knows his stuff, and I'm usually pretty skeptical or just I'm not a huge fan of most advice that you hear out there when it's just like, you should always do X and it will work, you know, or don't ever do this. Like, things like that just kind of get to me because there are always cases or it doesn't take into account certain scenarios.
Brian Casel:But I think Lars' talk and the things that he was talking about is kind of an exception to that because he's basically just talking about core key metrics to your business. He was mostly talking about
Jordan Gal:churn. And
Brian Casel:churn, it relates to so many other factors. And like it's a truth. No matter what, if people are leaving your product, there is a huge problem that you need to address. Like, no matter what your business is. And that's that's one of those things, one of those exceptions to the rule where you can say, look.
Brian Casel:I I love how he put it. You know, if if you have a churn rate of of 10 more or or more, your business is on fire. You know.
Jordan Gal:Right and it will not be fixed by acquiring more customers faster and it's not I liked how practical he was at first I felt like you a bit skeptical of like, I get it churn's important but it's important when you have a thousand customers, not when you have 50. And then he kind of turned me around by the end because what churn represents isn't that you have a problem churning, it's that you have a product
Brian Casel:problem It's a and product that market problem.
Jordan Gal:Right. Much bigger issue. Then you can see, oh, then you really don't want to gain 100 customers every month because they're not going to stay, not because they don't like you or you have some weird problem with payments, it's because you haven't solved the problem for them. So it's almost like churn is the indicator, it's not the actual problem.
Brian Casel:Yeah, I think that a lot of times this comes down to just attracting the the right customer. And sometimes that means adjusting the product or or the service or the features of your service to to to meet a certain customer in a certain place. But I think so many of us, especially bootstrapping, you know, within the first year, it's all about just getting any customers you can possibly get. And and I see this a lot with productized services too, where it's like, you know, I'm kinda working with these clients that I've worked with for the past few years, and now I have this productized service, and I and I wanna form a productized service that that serves a couple of these clients and a couple of those clients and because those are the people I've I already have paying me. But just because you have two or three or five clients, you know, paying you today does not mean that that is the best market to go find a 100 of them.
Brian Casel:You know. I I think a lot of the product market fit stuff just comes down to to becoming more focused and maybe moving to a different different person to focus on.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man.
Brian Casel:So that's basically our recap. That wasn't everybody at the conference, but those are the things that kind of popped out to me.
Jordan Gal:Tracy Osborne had a good talk about I mean, it was sobering. Yeah. It wasn't like a feel good story. It was like, sometimes it sucks.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I like that. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And she was just she's just aggressive and she made things happen. And you kinda wanted the story to end like, and then everything took a turn and exploded. Now we're doing great. And wasn't that. It was like, no, this is kind of the journey I went through.
Jordan Gal:And I feel like people could identify with that. It wasn't putting someone from the top 5% up on the pedestal. It was putting someone who hasn't quite made it, is tenacious enough that you know they're going to make it, but it was like it it was it was good. It fit it fit in there properly.
Brian Casel:Totally. Yeah. I enjoyed that one. I I I like the mix of, like, tactical, actionable talks and some more, like, story related kinda talks. Was good good conference overall.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It was good to see you too, my man.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Good to see you, buddy.
Jordan Gal:Cool. So you're off you're off to mastermind. Yeah. I'm off to write.
Brian Casel:Oh, that sounds like fun.
Jordan Gal:Alright, man. Take it easy over
Brian Casel:there. Alright.
Jordan Gal:See you.
![[107] Our Recap of MicroConf 2016](https://img.transistorcdn.com/LDB_Cv9bHAA2vtoSPkZCpkdHPF6fAqfl7PL-PG7_c-M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:800/h:800/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jMjkw/MDYxZDQ0MWIxYTUw/NTMzMGI2NTExZWMx/MWQ1Yi5qcGc.webp)