[108] Growing Families And Growing Businesses
Hello, everybody. This is Bootstrap Web episode number one zero eight. It's been a while. It's nice to be back. Ryan, what's, what's going on, man?
Jordan Gal:I feel like I don't know. We gotta we got pressure. Well, I feel like we just gotta get our shit back together.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So it is good to be back. I I think well, I think we've got a couple legitimate excuses for taking a couple weeks off there and between adding family members and businesses and moving homes and and all this stuff, I mean, it's been absolutely hectic.
Brian Casel:But, yeah, it is good to be back and hopefully we'll get we'll get back on a good weekly schedule here going forward and we'll keep, keep Bootstrapped Web alive for at least another another 100 episodes or so at least.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's too good. So we're not we're not going anywhere. We're not quitting. We're back in in the saddle.
Jordan Gal:We'll have regular, episodes coming out now like, like they should. We've got a lot to catch up on. So why don't we, you know, let let's jump into it. I know you've you've been busy. I've been busy.
Jordan Gal:We'll talk a little bit personal. We'll talk some biz, what we've learned. It's kind of been and every week there's there's so many lessons. At some point, I really just was thinking to myself, man, I see the value in keeping a blog, but I I I'm not gonna do it. Maybe I just like record like quick three minute, like, YouTube things of, like, here's what I learned today that I have been screwing up for the past six months and now You know what?
Brian Casel:I I mean, I'm like, my personal blog and my newsletter and everything have been, like, the one thing that that I've been pretty consistent with for the last few years until this year. And definitely in the last couple of months, that has taken by far a backseat in what I'm doing. And and I've got a lot of automated content on my newsletter going out, but I'm I haven't been writing new articles. I mean, this podcast is basically it. This is where I get my my update out, I'm I'm sure as as you do.
Brian Casel:So
Jordan Gal:Even now you've been slacking off.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So tell us about why. Well, so let's see. April 24, couple weeks ago now, we welcomed our second daughter, Juliet Castle, to the world. And so that's been that's been exciting.
Brian Casel:And it's been it's been awesome and a lot of work and stress and craziness going on at the same time because we also have a two year old. It's not like two x everything. It's definitely like 10 x everything. I'm sure my wife would agree with that one. Yep.
Brian Casel:So so that's been happening. Oh, and by the way, we we moved into the new house and we or I I was you know, we were managing some renovations on the new house. I was working on this new office that I'm in now. We, did a bathroom and did all these tweaks before we moved in. Now we're in and so we've been here about a little bit more than a week and that which means the whole house is basically in boxes and for like the half our furniture hasn't been delivered yet and you know, we're putting stuff together and you know, figuring out everything and and it's it's been a mess.
Brian Casel:But and and having a newborn and and a two year old running around here, it's been
Jordan Gal:absolutely stressful things
Brian Casel:you you can
Jordan Gal:do in life. Moving moving and having a baby.
Brian Casel:Exactly. So, I mean, I I was planning on the month of May not being very active for me personally in terms of the business. You know, I'm still obviously working, but way far far less hours every week than I normally do. But it's it's good. I think I think this week, finally, I'm I'm I'm just beginning to get back into a kind of a normal work schedule because a lot of the moving stuff is is behind us.
Brian Casel:We're still putting things together inside the house, but it's and and I've got my office all set up here now. We've got Internet now, so it's I'm I'm starting to get back into the daily routine, settling down in one place, not traveling around the country. That's what's happening on the personal update. You wanna flip over to you?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. You know, I I raised my level of difficulty in in the game of life along along with you. I had we had our third daughter a few weeks about a month before you on March March 23. So we've got number three running around, which is insane. But it's been it's been fun and she's been really cool.
Jordan Gal:And also by the third one, I don't know, definitely wasn't as stressful. Clearly wasn't as stressful as the first, and it wasn't as stressful as the second either. It's kinda like, you don't really have a choice, so you just get sucked into the mayhem along with everyone else. Yeah. You just happen to not be able to walk.
Brian Casel:And you guys are like trained professionals at this point with the whole parenting thing, so.
Jordan Gal:I guess. Although what I have found the parenting thing creeping into my business life where I would often get very stressed about time. And now with a new baby, you can't be mad at a baby. Nothing is their fault. So I have found myself a lot more patient in the parenting world and in the business world where I'm like, I don't know, I could be stressed or I could not be stressed.
Jordan Gal:It's not really going to change that much about what I do and can't do.
Brian Casel:Yep. Always stress over the things that you can actually control.
Jordan Gal:Right. I hit peak freak out at some point a few weeks ago and was like, I don't want to just go through this experience, you know, the next few years and the startup thing and the parent thing and just be just constantly stressed out about what time is it? What do I want to get done today? What needs to happen before I go to sleep? So that kinda that kinda eased up and I think that the baby helped with that.
Jordan Gal:It was like, you know, with a two year old, you're like, dude, just get your freaking shoes on. Get off the freaking door. Like, go downstairs, you know, so so that's
Brian Casel:I know. It's like these temper tantrums, you know, that are are the just like the ridiculous demands that that they have on us just kind of like harden us with with the with the business. Like, you you learn how to just deal with right?
Jordan Gal:Wait. I'm gonna work in the house right now. Right. So yeah. So it was that and then that goes away with the baby.
Jordan Gal:You know, something nothing's her fault. So it's like, alright. I'll just hang out here and change her and do this and that. So it's been good. So the the business and the personal have definitely mixed.
Jordan Gal:And next episode, we'll kinda dive into what happened Cardhook, the new product and all that stuff. It's this giant tale of woe and tragedy, which we are trying to make sure ends up as a big victory. Man, that affected the personal. It was like the most emotionally traumatic experience of my business career, and you can't help but have that affect your personal life. But thankfully, my wife has been amazing, and very importantly, Ben as co founder and Rock as our lead engineer.
Jordan Gal:I took the waves a lot harder, maybe because I felt like it was my responsibility or I chose the direction and it didn't go as planned. So I was more messed up than they were and they helped to bring me back into reality. So we'll get into, like, the fuller story.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I've got a lot of I mean, I know a little bit of it from talking to you, but I've got a lot of questions that we'll definitely dig into, you know, the the ins and outs of what happened, but also, you know, how how you made it through, like you and the team.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And the lessons we learned, think a lot of lessons for other people to learn from not even necessarily our mistakes, it's just kind of our experience because we try to minimize the mistakes and the risk, but sometimes that doesn't matter. Mean, you go to carthook.com right now, you'll see we have two products now instead of one. That's the tip of the iceberg. That's what you see publicly.
Jordan Gal:Part of the what's cool about a podcast like this is like you you could explain what went into that and why and and what's going on behind the scenes on it. Yeah. But speaking of biz, how about you? What what has been going on? What have you been What lessons have you been learning over the past month or so?
Brian Casel:Well, like I said, this month of May, right now we're right in the May. I've taken this opportunity to, in a way, step back a little bit and and do a little bit more strategic thinking while at the same time bringing a few new team members onto the team and and also developing some new roles on the team. But basically, what's happening right now is like, the main thing that's on my mind is that Audience Ops is growing. It continues to grow every month. We have turned the corner, like we're no longer just a startup.
Brian Casel:Now now it has to be a company, you know, and and that's like a new mindset that I need to take on for myself. And and I I think I'm probably the one I think that the team is growing and and the team is rock and rolling and and the client base is growing, but I'm I'm probably the last one to come around to this realization that like I have to stop being a scrappy bootstrapped startup person and just start to embrace the the like the bigness of this. If that means more structure, that means new team members hiring faster, but not just hiring more people, but actually developing new roles, putting people in new roles that didn't exist before. So I'm just trying to wrap my head around all this stuff and trying to figure out like how how do I spend my time and and how do I the other thing that I'm noticing right now is that when you're a bootstrap startup and you're scrappy and you're getting your very first customers and everything, it seems like you have a lot going on and a lot of balls to juggle at the same time.
Brian Casel:But I think the reality is in some ways that's a little bit easier because you really only need to focus on the most essential things like get customer number one, get customer number three, deliver the main value proposition and then you can perfect everything a little bit later. But now I am a little bit later and so now there's a lot of things, a lot of holes that need to be plugged, a lot of things that need to be improved. And so now it just seems like there are way more projects that have to happen concurrently and more people involved in all these different projects. And a lot of them are, it's not like me trying to do too much. A lot of it is like, okay, I've got people in place.
Brian Casel:I need to give them what they need to go run with these projects. But but these projects still require my input and my direction. Some of them still require hiring more people and that takes a lot of time. So that's probably the biggest thing that I'm challenged with right now.
Jordan Gal:So what are those indicators? What are the events or numbers or people or what happens that tells you, oh shit, I gotta think about this differently, I gotta act differently.
Brian Casel:Well, just from a process standpoint, things start to fall apart a little bit. Like you start to literally feel the wheels falling off the wagon. Like things that we've that worked perfectly fine for us for when between clients zero up to like 15 to 20 clients, things work perfectly fine. Now we're over 30 clients, So New systems needed. Deliverables come in a day or two late, which we're very strict about here.
Brian Casel:Like we're you know, we we've got a weekly production line that like if it falls behind, big problems. And we deal with those. And I had to let a a really talented writer go last week, which was tough because she was a really great writer. The problem was she didn't meet delivery deadlines and it cut and that kind of thing caused problems for the assistants and for the managers and, you know, and, you know, I I gave her a chance to to fix the problem and then it happened repeatedly after that and it was like, okay, we've got to kind of nip this in the bud. So things like that started to happen or QA checks kind of fall through the cracks when they should have been caught, managers complaining about they've just got too much to manage.
Brian Casel:And and so so now now I'm at at a point where we as of today, we have two managers. I'm I'm going through applications to hire an additional two managers so that we we can have more managers each managing fewer clients. And so I'm I'm working through like like a pod structure there where like it's, you know, smaller mini teams within the team. Meanwhile, we so I I mentioned a few episodes ago that that I was hiring a marketing tech person. So we we did hire that person.
Brian Casel:He's been taking on the role of running PPC ads for us, for audience ops, and we've been running those for almost a month now and, learning a lot and and getting some really good data, getting some pretty good results. So now our next step over the next month is to continue running our our own campaigns and then develop this into an add on service. So we'll be running PPC and retargeting campaigns for clients. So that's his his job is to do do that, is to like develop this into a process and I'm meeting with him tomorrow to to, you know, talk about progress there. I've got another person on the team who is a project manager now but she's also working on our content strategy with Audience Ops and again, like whatever we do for ourselves, we try to apply to our clients as well.
Brian Casel:So so first we're making some improvements to how we do content strategy for our own blog and then we're gonna kinda update our strategies that we implement for clients. And the other thing that I'm getting a little bit used to or trying to learn how to become a better manager is is weekly team meetings. I talked about how I I I haven't really done too too much, like, you know, full team meetings, like, stand ups or whatever. Like, that that's for whatever reason, that that just never caught on with me personally or with the team, they just never seem very productive. So so what I'm doing now is, starting to do weekly or sometimes biweekly one on one meetings or one on one one in three meetings with like a couple of managers or with my PPC person or with our salesperson.
Brian Casel:So that's the other other update is we have a salesperson doing all sales and I'm kind of coaching him on on how to do sales. So that's actually a big weight off my shoulders and that's what allowed me to spend a lot of this month with the family and go to the hospital for a week and do the move without having to completely pause new sales because it was only a couple months ago that my
Jordan Gal:Right. You did every meeting.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like, my calendar was jam packed with with sales calls and if if I'm traveling for a week or whatever, like that means like we're just not making sales because I can't do the calls. So now that's kind of fixed with our salesperson running all the consultations.
Jordan Gal:How did how did you find them?
Brian Casel:He's been on the team since the very beginning.
Jordan Gal:Oh,
Brian Casel:okay. So he kinda got shifted and like shifted from within into that role.
Jordan Gal:Cool. So you're very familiar with it? Super familiar with education?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Super familiar with with our process, but I'm definitely spending a lot of time coaching him on sales, which is very different from like, started as a writer and then he he was a project manager and then and then he's a sales. So it's a different different thing.
Jordan Gal:Nice. So yeah. So you so you get these indicators, right, that you gotta treat things differently, but what does it make you want to do? Like what does it tell you? Oh, I have to kind of brush up on my management skills.
Jordan Gal:It makes me want to start hiring more people, start raising prices because this is gonna get more complicated? Like what what is it? Where's it leading you once you get all these signals? What what does it tell you?
Brian Casel:Well, for me personally, I I wanna keep pushing or keep building really. And what that means is adding new new revenue streams for audience ops.
Jordan Gal:Right. Like the PPC thing.
Brian Casel:The PPC thing. The next big thing that I wanna do is to start to develop major training product from AudienceOps. Oh, yes. And that's really on my list for for next month to get to get cracking on. And and so, like, if if I'm tied up in sales calls or if I'm tied up in managing clients myself or, you know, kinda just doing the same things that I've always done, then I'm I'm never gonna be able to actually build and and grow.
Brian Casel:When when I feel like I can't build because I'm too tied up with other crap, then I think there's a problem. That means I need more people and better systems in place to free me up.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, I still deal with the guilt of that, but I'm getting over it. I look at it, I'm like, I am too busy to be effective and strategic, so I should stop doing that. I should stop doing these tasks. Then I feel like guilty almost that I'm like, am I being lazy because I just don't want to do this anymore? Or is it really better off?
Jordan Gal:And I've started to shed the guilt and be like, I don't fucking care. I don't care. I'm just going to be selfish in that role because I think that'll kind of work out better anyway. Because a lot of the really important strategic stuff is what ends up being ignored because it's not in front of your face as a task, as an email, as a to do. Right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Which is it's it's not smart overall.
Brian Casel:It's not just building new products. Right? And that's definitely something that I wanna be doing is building additional products from audience ops. But it's also going back and updating things that we're already doing and improving like like sales for instance. We we still get a lot of organic leads coming into our system and not even I don't I think most of them are not people from this audience or from my personal audience anymore, they're they're really just just companies who who've come through word-of-mouth or through organic through our own content stuff.
Brian Casel:Like one thing that I'm thinking about right now is making sure that we get the best or like most ideal types of clients into our pipeline because I think we've getting we've been getting a lot of random industries and verticals and some like our bread and butter is like b to b SaaS. The further we get away from that, the the more complicate like, what happens is it it makes it a a strain on the team if if they do become a client and chances of them staying on over the long term are are less.
Jordan Gal:Right. Now now you're feeling it a few months after accepting an ideal an ideal, whatever
Brian Casel:that word would be. I had
Jordan Gal:a very interesting I had a cool experience. It was it was a little humbling, but it was it was a very cool experience. We're about to implement a webinar strategy. So in trying to be strategic, I said to myself, I'm not gonna do this myself. I'm going to hire the best Facebook ads person for webinar registrations.
Jordan Gal:I'm gonna hire someone to build out the funnel and the emails. I'm gonna hire someone to build the sales page and the copy, and I'm gonna hire someone to help me put together the webinar. Like, I'm not gonna try to do this on my own. It's too important. And so I'm speaking to as many Facebook experts, ad experts that kinda specialize or at least have experience with webinar registrations as the as the conversion goal.
Jordan Gal:And a few days ago, I spoke to to one and he just kind of flat out told me like, you're not a good fit. And I I have someone that I can recommend, but here's why. And he specializes in people who have an existing webinar funnel and optimizing and scaling it. He's like, If you don't have any raw data, what's going to happen is what's happened in the past. We're going to talk and then it might not work out because that's not my specialty.
Jordan Gal:That's not what I'm made for. That's not my talent. And so what happens is you're going to walk away unhappy. If you walk away unhappy, my reputation, my word-of-mouth gets all tarnished and I don't feel good. I don't like that and you're not going to like it either.
Jordan Gal:And I've learned that over the past few months and that's why I only work with people who have an existing webinar funnel with Facebook ads. And he basically just told me you are not there yet
Brian Casel:He for must have learned that like those are clients that just don't work out.
Jordan Gal:Exactly right. And I was like, I appreciate that. That's cool. We talk about this in theory and I had someone so confidently kind of go with the theory and really put into practice. I was so impressed.
Jordan Gal:Was like, and you know what it does? It makes you want to work with them more. I was on the opposite side. I'd prefer to be on his side of the conversation, but I appreciated it so much to kind of go through that. Was like, hell yeah.
Jordan Gal:Good for you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, that's another thing that that's been happening with Audience Ops is, you know, with productized service and everything, what what I I what I preach and what I teach in in in the strategies and everything is to be as focused as possible to figure out your most ideal customer and only deliver that. But I have but but with AudienceOpse, with my own company, we've been straying from that a little bit.
Jordan Gal:It's real hard.
Brian Casel:And and recently in the last month, started to get back to being more strict about that. So for example, we've had a few clients who just don't use WordPress for their blog. Believe it or not, that that seems like a simple thing, like, oh, they use Squarespace for their blog or they have a Shopify blog or something like that.
Jordan Gal:I'm sure it changes your process big
Brian Casel:And to the client, they're like, can't you just post it to Squarespace instead of WordPress? It's basically the same thing, same process.
Jordan Gal:Right.
Brian Casel:But, you know, for us, that's actually a huge problem because we've got we've got teammates who are trained on on using WordPress, you know, if if the buttons are in different places, it's it's a problem. But then the the other issue is so then what what we did for a little while was, okay, if you're set on not using WordPress, you're not willing to migrate to WordPress or whatever, then what we'll do is we'll do the content for you, but we'll give you the Google Doc and you and your team have to publish it in your blog.
Jordan Gal:Right. And then they they they probably failed to do that.
Brian Casel:And and so we had a couple of of and this is like 5% of our client base, right, but which which is even more of a problem because these are like special cases. So then it's on them to publish it and then what happens is either they miss the deadline, like the scheduled publish date, which means we because we also do like social media promotion, but we need the URL for the blog post in order to publish to do the social media. And so all these things just don't fall into place and then three months down the road it's like, hey, you're not doing any promotion for us, we're not seeing an ROI. Well, that's because we can't deliver the full extent of our service and it all routes back to you not using WordPress. So so that's like one thing that that we've kinda turned around on and said like, from going forward, only WordPress clients and or or only clients who are willing to move to WordPress at least for their blog.
Brian Casel:And then same thing with email tools. I mean, we almost exclusively work with Drip at this point. That's what allows us to implement our recommended email automation workflows and tagging strategy and all this stuff. Mailchimp is the other one that we also work with and we can do almost all the same things that we do with Drip, in Mailchimp. It's it's a little clunkier in Mailchimp and we recommend Drip, but, you know, but we've had a handful of Infusionsoft customers and a couple of other tools out there that just what happens is even if we have a special case process to send your newsletter with Infusionsoft or whatever, we can do it and we can do it pretty consistently but it's so edge case for us that there's a higher likelihood of a mistake, either sending to the wrong group of people or or sending an email twice or or not sending it on time, you know.
Brian Casel:The goal here is to be as consistent and and, you know, be error as error proof as possible and so we're trying to get back to that that route.
Jordan Gal:Cool. I like it. That's the the point of the product I service.
Brian Casel:Yep. But, yeah, the next thing that I really wanna get rolling on right now is is this training product. That's gonna be the next step for AuditOps is to have a more scalable product that and also we we can we can serve a much broader audience. Like I said, b to b software is is perfect for a done for you service, but clients like the construction industry or technical healthcare clients and stuff like it doesn't make sense for us to write that content, but for you to hire your own writer using our systems and processes and our training that and like our training that you can then give to a writer or we can even help you source a writer like that. I'm I'm thinking through different, trainingservices that might work here.
Brian Casel:So I think my next step for this is to run some surveys and do some interviews with potential customers. I've already done a few interviews, kind of customer development, customer research interviews, which have been going pretty well. So I mean, if anybody's listening and that what I just described there sounds like something you might be interested in, like as as an alternative to hiring an an audience ops, but, you know, building this kind of thing in house, you know, we're looking to develop a training for that. So, if it makes sense to, to talk to you about that, you know, definitely reach out.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I like that a lot. A book that I've been digging for the past few weeks, Ben and I have kinda geeked out on it, is.comsecrets from Russell Brunson. He's the guy that runs ClickFunnels. He's just a really clever Internet marketer and like doesn't come from our our world, but
Brian Casel:.com secrets you said?
Jordan Gal:.Comsecrets. Yep. Russell Brunson, he runs a company called funnels, which kind of blew up. I think that they do like a million in MRR after like twenty months. Think is is Mixergy interview actually posted today, so you can learn directly from him.
Jordan Gal:And he's very good at what he does. And the book espouses basically a theory technique philosophy of a value ladder. And, you know, basically what he's saying is different customers want a different version of the value you can provide to them at different points in time. And some can afford the whole way, but if you if you only offer the top of the line, expensive high end version of your value, you're not capturing all the value that's possible. If you're only selling at the low end, you know, you've kinda have to have all of these in place in order to capture as much value as possible.
Jordan Gal:If you look at the audience ops case study in this context, you see WordPress plugins. You see free content, you see WordPress plugins to help you achieve specific things, Then there's a gap in the middle and then there's the done for you service. You can see that that training product that's probably the largest percentage of the audience that wants to work with you and wants to get value from you, that that is probably significantly larger than the number of people who want the done for you service.
Brian Casel:Yes. And and I think there's room to to increase the price of the done for you service and make it even more exclusive.
Jordan Gal:That's exactly what I think.
Brian Casel:And that's kind of the the game plan there. But, you know, and I think an important part of the whole strategy and something that I've written about before is, I didn't start with plugins info and or trying to do all levels all at the same time, I started with the high level first, the the done for you service and that's what established the the company and established the cash flow to then be able to invest in things like plug ins and and now doing the next thing. And and so, you know, one step at a time and it and it takes a long time to to roll out each piece of the ladder, but or each step in the ladder if you will. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. But I I definitely rec would recommend the book. I mean, part of what we're reading it for is we are we are heading into competition of sorts with them on on the new product. So I just kinda wanted to absorb everything possible. But in in absorbing everything possible from like a potential competitor, I I learned I learned a ton from him.
Jordan Gal:Really impressive stuff and
Brian Casel:Very cool. Yeah. Just put this on the on the wish list.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. It's it's good. Like one of the reasons that I kinda got into that side of things is because I've gone on a mystical peyote journey for the past month. So we have this new product. I was convinced.
Jordan Gal:I am convinced. Cardhook with card abandonment, there's only so much excitement you can generate because there is a somewhat mature market for this type of solution. It's not unique and it's not new. You're limited in how much of a splash you can really make unless you're doing something unbelievably innovative, which we are not. With this new product, it is a genuine innovation.
Jordan Gal:It's something unique in the market. There are no other options. If you want to get this done, if you want to replace your Shopify stores checkout page with a customizable one page checkout, you don't have any other choice right now except us. That will change in the future, but I became obsessed with taking advantage of that fact to make a lot more money a lot faster. So I just looked at the situation and I was like, there's gotta be a way to not go $50,100 dollars a month at a time because that is it's inevitably, you know, it's slow, man.
Jordan Gal:Even even if you're awesome at at our budget levels, if you gain, I don't know, $3.04, $5,000 in MRR, you're doing better than basically everyone everyone that I talked to that's in in the bootstrap world. And I was convinced, how do I there's gotta be a way. There's there has to be I just convinced myself that there's a way to go a lot faster. And I kinda looked and looked and looked. It's not that I found it.
Jordan Gal:It's it's that somebody came knocking on my door and just hit me in the face with it because it's been there the whole time.
Brian Casel:Charge more.
Jordan Gal:No. Charge different. Basically what happened was we had someone see our product and get in touch with us and was like, Guys, holy shit, this is awesome and I know the right people to blow this up, so let's work together. You can take it with a grain of salt, you have an interest in it, so let's calm down. In the conversation with him, he was an experienced guy and I got a ton of value just from the few conversations that we had.
Jordan Gal:I don't know if it's going end up working out, but basically what he told me that a lot of other people are doing, and after he says it, you look around and you're like, Oh shit, everyone is doing it. Basically what people do is they run webinars where they make a great offer for upfront payment. You see Leadpages doing this, you see Samcart, that's like a competitor ish of ours, you see ClickFunnels, if you start looking around, you start to look at some of your favorite software companies that you know who they are, what they do, what their pricing is, and you look at their site and it's called a $100 a month. You just happen to not be in their marketing funnel maybe because you've already come out of it. But new people going to that funnel get pointed toward a webinar when on that webinar, the offer is not buy my software for a $100 a month.
Jordan Gal:The offer is if you bought my software on the site, it would be a $100 a month times 12, that's $1,200. And I'm also gonna give you this piece of value and this piece of value and this piece of value if you pay me now, call it $697. What they're doing is they're taking their funnel and they're leaving the option open of going to the site and signing up for a $100 a month. But they want to expose as many people as possible to the one time annual payment.
Brian Casel:I see. So they're still selling the software but the annual option on the
Jordan Gal:Exactly right. But because you can make more money upfront on the sale, you can spend a lot more money on the ads, and you can pay affiliates, and you can do all this other stuff that is essentially a way to not grow 50 or $100 a month at a time, but to grow $508,100 dollars a pop at a time. So it changes the math so significantly that you could spend a lot more money on advertising. So so that's kind of it's been in plain sight the whole time. You just kind of don't feel it or realize it or it comes off as strange because you're like, why are you making me this offer?
Jordan Gal:Or maybe you just don't hear the offer because you already know about
Brennan Dunn:this offer.
Brian Casel:And and you don't hear so much just looking at it like analyzing the competition because it's happening on the back end.
Jordan Gal:Exactly right.
Brian Casel:It's really interesting because this idea of offering an annual plan for a monthly SaaS, I think a lot of people or at least a lot of newcomers to SaaS look at it like, well, you might as well just offer the option monthly or annual. But in this case, it's a real strategic offer point through through through the webinar. And the other thing that that happens there, not only are they getting not only is the company capturing an a year of revenue and it's a deal for the customer as well, It gives them a year, a full year. It's not like a thirty day trial, which is very easy to just try it out for a day or two and say, maybe later or or just abandon it. A year is like, okay, I'm committed to this thing for the next year.
Brian Casel:I've just paid $607,100 bucks for this. We're gonna implement it. We're gonna see if it actually works for a few months. And then once you're maybe maybe it's not a 100% perfect. Maybe it's 90% perfect.
Brian Casel:But that's enough to keep you stuck in there enough for you not to want to switch again.
Jordan Gal:Right. It changes the nature of the relationship and the commitment. Yep. How much more likely are you to finish the onboarding quickly if you just paid $800? Right.
Jordan Gal:A lot more. Yep. As I was speaking and kind of coming to this conclusion, I remembered clickfunnels.com. If you go there now, you see a, you know, a big long sales page kind of website. The first like three or four months that clickfunnels.com existed, their homepage was nothing but a webinar registration page.
Jordan Gal:That's all of us. You couldn't see the pricing, you couldn't see the features, you couldn't see the product unless you went through their webinar funnel. I started all piecing it all together. So needless to say, you know, it's not like we are stopping everything we're doing and immediately implementing that strategy. But I thought it sufficiently, it warranted an attempt to sell things that way.
Jordan Gal:That's kind of what triggered the, I'm to build the capacity in house to run weekly webinars and I'm not going to do it myself. I'm to get some pros. I'm going to pay money for it, commit to it and then run weekly webinars for this new product.
Brian Casel:Very cool. Yep. Good stuff, man. Well, I think it was a good update. Why don't we wrap it up here and then we'll get into next week's episode.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. Good to get back in the groove. Sorry for the absence, everyone, but we're back.
Brian Casel:Yep.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Alright. Cool, man. Thanks. Bye.
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