[112] Do Entrepreneurs Get to Have Hobbies? And Other Updates...
This is Bootstrapped Web episode one twelve. Jordan, how's it going, buddy?
Jordan Gal:What's up, man?
Brian Casel:How you doing? Doing good. And where where are you joining us from today?
Jordan Gal:I'm in Miami, hitting up the beach, going to the clubs, you know.
Brian Casel:There you go.
Jordan Gal:Just a regular. I bet you've been inside of a coworking space the entire time. But it's been sunny outside. Outside of the office, it's nice and warm.
Brian Casel:Yeah. How about you?
Jordan Gal:What's new?
Brian Casel:Good stuff. Well, we're both on the East Coast for once. So, yeah, I'm I'm at home in in the in the new house. We're all settled in here. It's been about a month or so since we've actually been been living.
Brian Casel:We've got our all our furniture in now. I've got my office all squared away. I I actually posted some some pictures of the office on Twitter the other day. I I feel good. It's it's back settled down in into the and and we have a, know, we have a newborn at home, our second daughter, I think she's like five or six weeks old now, and everything's going well, the family's doing good.
Brian Casel:Just trying to figure out the routine, new normal.
Jordan Gal:The the the new normal, basically.
Brian Casel:With with
Jordan Gal:with the new baby.
Brian Casel:Yep. So we've got, you know, the typical updates episode for you guys today. I think we'll just kinda go back and forth. You know, why don't we start with with the personal front? What's what's any personal updates?
Jordan Gal:So I I wanna start with a quick explanation. I'm gonna call an explanation on apology because I don't I don't think I did anything wrong. But we we did something we pulled an episode from existence. We made it disappear from the Internet. It's the first time we've ever done it.
Jordan Gal:Totally my fault. Basically, was catching a little too much heat for that episode explaining the whole journey of the new product and I did not see I saw a lot of downside and I didn't see much upside beside. I was really proud of the episode and I was happy to share it, but this company is not just me and I have to think about other people and so it made sense unfortunately to pull that episode down. Hopefully, one day in the future, I can talk about everything much more openly but right now, that was the right thing to do.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, it was a good episode listening back to it. I think it was one of the more interesting you know, stories that we've revealed here on on the show, but I I definitely agree with you. It makes sense to to take it down. I I told you right after we recorded it, I was like, know, if you don't want this out there, I'm fine with, you know I thought I
Jordan Gal:I thought I towed the line appropriately, but it depends on the listener. It depends on how you construe it. And so anyway, just to be safe. So that's that's the explanation. It made more sense for the business to not have that out in public.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And and there was like Sorry. There there were actually like, you know, forum posts and things that started to reference it and and it was clear that there you know, this should not really be out there.
Jordan Gal:Right. I thought it was going to be among us, me and you and the people listening to this and it started going beyond that and that's when I felt like, oh, that's a little more than I intended. It started going in Facebook groups and on Shopify groups in Facebook and then on Twitter and it was like, oh, okay. Okay. Okay.
Jordan Gal:Okay. I started having people reach out to me and say, hey, can I ask you about this because I'm having a similar and it was like, okay, let's just pour some water on that fire?
Brian Casel:Right. So so it's a little treat for those hardcore fans who may have caught it in the first few days before we took took it down. Exactly. Cool. So let's see what else.
Brian Casel:I mean, on on the personal front on on my end, you know, as I said, the house is all set, baby's doing well. You know, I'm I'm trying to get finally get back into a healthy routine a little bit, with the newborn and moving and all that it tends to be fast food, pizza, Chipotle every single day and it's not good for the waistline, but what I usually care about is like how focused I am and able to be productive at work and whenever I get into a funk there, it's always because I'm being unhealthy. And so I had a pretty long streak of that. So, you know, in the last week or so, my wife and I, were trying to commit to a a paleo diet, officially for the first time.
Jordan Gal:You're you're not going ketogenic? Because that's that's the new Joe Rogan hotness.
Brian Casel:I I don't
Brennan Dunn:know about
Brian Casel:all that. You know, we're we're I don't know. We're we're trying this out and seeing how it goes. I like it so far. I've been on it for about a week.
Brian Casel:And, with my wife here and the newborn and the two year old, it's been so hard for her to cook. I mean, loves to cook and we do a lot of home cooked meals usually, but it's so crazy that it's tough. So what we started doing is we found one of these like mail order meal sites, and there's a lot of them for for paleos.
Jordan Gal:Blue Apron and
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like like Blue Apron is, you know, they send you all the ingredients and the recipe and you cook it. But there are a lot of these sites where it's like, you know, a husband and wife chef team and they cook and then freeze these meals and ship them nationwide. Already precooked? Precooked.
Brian Casel:Wow. Like, you know, like, I don't know, like like gourmet paleo meals, like really good stuff and and A
Jordan Gal:fantasy, is it? How's it working out?
Brian Casel:So so we ordered a week's worth of these meals. They're all in the freezer and we just open them up and and eat them and it's really good, know, it's It's the future. Yeah, and it's, you know, I mean, it's little chunk of change to order them, but if you compare that to what we spend at like Whole Foods or whatever, it's, you know, it's comparable. So yeah, mean, that makes it easy.
Jordan Gal:Eating better, feeling better?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Also been using the standing desk for about two weeks now and I really really like that.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Can't believe I cannot get it through my thick skull that I am a happier, more productive person when I stand up. And and like, I do it for a few days, and then a few days I'll forget, and I won't do it. And then I do it, what what is wrong with me?
Brian Casel:Yeah. My routine is I I have it standing every morning when I'm doing my my hardcore work, and then afternoon, I'm typically sitting and I tend to sit on calls like I'm sitting right now. Just feel weird about standing on like a call for some reason. I like to stand and work but I don't like to stand and call.
Jordan Gal:I like that. I think that makes sense. I've been on calls with the other person standing and I just feel nervous the whole time.
Brian Casel:Right. I I find like I I tend to like sway when I'm Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Because I full I full on dance when I'm like singing music on and I just boogie. Yeah. That would be very strange.
Brian Casel:I've got these headphones here. I just like jam out to these when I'm I'm I'm working.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. Good.
Brian Casel:So, yeah, that's the personal front. What what else how about an update on in the cart hook world?
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm not ready for the cart hook world. I I wanna stay personal. I wanna get a little spiritual on you. Alright. Alright.
Jordan Gal:So today on the way to work, it's a it's a good twenty five minute walk from the apartment building we're staying at to this office here in Miami. And it's 8AM but it's hot. But for some reason today, was like, I don't want to take an Uber, I just want to like just walk. I get Stitcher out, I don't listen to the Art of Manliness podcast very often but I just saw a title that caught my eye so I hit play. So he's interviewing a philosophy professor who happened to get into trout fishing later on in life.
Jordan Gal:So it caught my eye because growing up, I was obsessed with fishing and I got into all types of fishing and fly fishing and all. I just love it.
Brian Casel:For some reason, you don't strike me as a fisherman.
Brennan Dunn:I don't know why that is. Look, I
Jordan Gal:don't think any of us are the same person. I mean, you as into music as you used to be? No. Okay. So this conversation with this guy is very, very interesting.
Jordan Gal:It got a little brainy but it's just talking about pursuits and how they make us feel, pursuits outside of work and why certain things appeal. Very interesting conversation but the thing I got away from it as I walked to work, I ended up focusing on one specific issue for people like ourselves, entrepreneurs. And that is the difference between the freedom that entrepreneurship gives you in terms of controlling your own destiny. And on the other hand, when you have a stable salary and a stable job, you have another type of freedom which is, I'll describe it as the freedom to pursue interests outside of work.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's oh, man. I've got it.
Jordan Gal:You know, and I couldn't help but focus on that because I was listening to a topic of fishing, let's say. I used to surf, I used to fish, I used to all these different things, play lacrosse on the weekends. A lot of those have kind of gone away and it's all the business' fault, it's my fault, But there is something to the fact that you gain one type of freedom and you give up another.
Brian Casel:That is so true man. I was literally thinking the same exact thing probably every day for the past week. Are you doing so what are you doing?
Nathan Barry:I don't I don't know what to do. I don't know.
Jordan Gal:It's
Brian Casel:So so I've got another personal update here. Okay. On that note
Jordan Gal:You guys playing again? No. I'm kidding.
Brennan Dunn:No.
Brian Casel:So for for me, I I just signed up for my first tennis lesson in, I don't know, a decade. You know, haven't haven't swung a racket in in, like, ten years. I used to play I I didn't so I used to play a bunch of sports when I was a teenager and tennis was one of them. I feel like now is a good time to try to just pick that up and and make it a make it a weekly routine and get back into the into the sport. I mean, the lesson is a few days from now, so I literally hasn't started yet.
Brian Casel:Maybe I'll just like one and done and get get this thing up. But I had the same exact thought. Was like, know, I don't have any other like interests or hobbies outside of just working on the business and and hanging out with the family and watching Netflix and and hanging out with the dog. I mean
Jordan Gal:You want more?
Brian Casel:Yeah, and about that entrepreneurial mindset, right? I've been trying on and off for how for my whole adult life now to try to stay in shape and to try to exercise. And when you're an adult, it's hard to find like a whole group of people to play basketball with and that kind of stuff. So I would like run, I would try going to the gym. But my challenge with that is that it's just fucking boring.
Brian Casel:Can't I can't get on a I can't
Jordan Gal:Hard to be motivated.
Brian Casel:It's just hard to get there and spend half an hour, spend an hour in a gym. It's like, what am I doing here? I I I would rather be working on something.
Jordan Gal:Right. If there's a game at 08:00, you're gonna be there.
Brian Casel:So that's my my thinking now is like, I can commit to a sport again with some competition and having appointments, I'm I'm meeting someone to play a tennis match or I'm taking part in a tennis tournament or, something like that, and I can continuously work on improving my game and getting better and kind of moving up in a sport, that's something that I can kind of put my mind to and actually work towards, it's weekly exercise too.
Jordan Gal:Yep. Yep. I like that. I think it's inevitable. You end up looking to yourself in the mirror and saying, I don't even remember what my hobbies are.
Jordan Gal:I don't remember what my interests are because it's been so long. I used to when you were like 24, I wouldn't even be able to remember all of my hobbies because I did so many different things and now it's kind of gone away. You can excuse it away and new kids and work is crazy and all this other stuff but you can't give up on it entirely. Yeah.
Brian Casel:It's so important.
Jordan Gal:I recommend that episode of The Art of Manliness. It's trout fishing and philosophy or something. I forget the title but you'll know when you see it.
Brian Casel:It is tough though and then the family life. You know, like so that tennis lesson was actually supposed to be last night. I had to cancel it because the girls were sick, and I had to be around for you know? So, you know Yeah. That's that's how it goes.
Jordan Gal:And priorities, but but I think the important thing is to acknowledge, like, there's more to us than our business pursuit. There has to be it sounds a lot more fulfilling and rewarding to have these things that exist outside of that and you can play and pursue and regardless if it's health, painting, building things with wood, whatever it is, it is important.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You and I both did the travel thing for a while and Travel's good. And you know, we're we're now settling down again, but I do both my wife and I were saying this, we we kinda miss being on the road a little bit sometimes now, and and I I do miss that. I was hustling, like like launching audience ops while we were traveling, but I I definitely made a point of, okay, we're only in this place for a week. I could I could work seven days this week or I could work two days and we can spend every afternoon, you know, checking out some stuff.
Brian Casel:And and we and we prioritize that and it was like something that we were doing. It was like, you know, exploring new places and now it's, know, you gotta find something to to do besides work.
Jordan Gal:Agree. So that's that's my that's my next part of the update. How about you? You got some work related?
Brian Casel:Yeah. So let's see. I feel like this is a running thing but the team is always growing. I recently just hired two additional project managers and now we have three project managers on board and I'm trying to wrap my head around probably one of my biggest challenges right now is just the growth of the team and managing that from my perspective and new roles within the team are developing. I feel like I've turned the corner where it used to be, okay, I work on something, I develop an SOP, a process for it, and then I hand it off to someone to just execute that and fill that role.
Brian Casel:Now I'm working with folks who are a little bit more higher level, they're managers and it's kind of their job to set up new processes, help define the strategy, make decisions on like, instead of me just deciding everything, they they need to be in a place where they can make certain decisions and and then, you know, delegate tasks to other team teammates and things like that and and work together. So so I'm thinking through all that I mean, we work like, we have these people on board, we're working through it. And then as this team is growing and and the management levels are growing, I there are all these new tools and systems that come into into play. And I'm I'm trying to figure out how to how to make sure that communication is happening efficiently. I feel like we've got several different tools, communication happens in all these different places.
Brian Casel:And I'm trying to avoid problems. Like, one thing I'm noticing is there are too many like private direct message conversations happening. And I'm constantly telling the team like, even if you're only talking to one person, try to put that in one of the public Slack channels so that everybody can be looped in. People learn from it or maybe somebody can just chime in like, oh, I know the answer to that. Yeah,
Jordan Gal:it's tricky. Slack is so good, but it becomes a little uncontrollable. Yeah. Because things move vertically and then if miss the conversation for a few hours, you have to claw back and reread and see what you missed.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and we use Trello quite a bit, we've got conversations in comments on Trello cards. We've got conversations happening in Google Docs, like as comments when we edit stuff. So there's just a lot of stuff. And and then the other new ish thing is these team teammate meetings. So I've started to structure my schedule so that every Thursday is my team meeting day.
Brian Casel:And I don't know how how much longer this is gonna last because yesterday yesterday was Thursday and it was absolutely crazy. So basically
Jordan Gal:All day.
Brian Casel:You know, 10AM meeting with the sales guy, 11AM meeting with my marketing PPC guy, then lunch, and then, you know, 2PM, my content strategist, 3PM is the project manager's meeting, and then 4PM is the team manager meeting. And it's like, you know, and and these meetings happen every two weeks so that I I wanna get what what I need to work on is is being better at leading these these calls and and not letting them drag on and and letting people ramble. Just set the agenda and just and just march right through it, you know, and and try to have other ways to socialize but make these team meetings just about execution, you know.
Jordan Gal:I I like that. We've we've it's it's mostly my fault in in the morning meetings that they've started to drag on a little bit because we end up talking not just about what are we doing today, what are we trying to get done, what happened yesterday, and what's gonna happen tomorrow, but it's turned into, we'll talk about that for ten minutes and then we start talking about the overall strategy of the company and that that can go on forever.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, that's that's the update. I've got one more after that but yeah, on to you.
Jordan Gal:Cool. We are hiring a
Brian Casel:new
Jordan Gal:developer. So Rock, our our lead engineer in Slovenia which I want to go visit so bad. So basically, we're like a Slovenian company right now. I don't if I said this in a previous episode but it's amazing, everyone's there. Designer or UX guy, UI guy.
Jordan Gal:So it made sense to us. We foresee over the next few months that we just are gonna need more development capacity. Rock is half machine but also half man. Like you you can't keep up the pace that we are at right now for that many weeks in a row before just say I need a freaking break. To do hardcore development twelve hours a day, five or six days a week for week after week after week, at some point you need more help.
Jordan Gal:So an amazing byproduct of of of Rock being in Slovenia is he knows the Slovenian market. So we are gonna get an office in Lublana. Lublana? Very difficult to say. And we're gonna get Rock and a new developer in the same room which I'm so excited for.
Jordan Gal:Marketing is one thing and even product but dev, we have a complicated product and a complicated code base. To think that we're going to be able to do the knowledge transfer required for a new developer in any short amount of time without being in person is just feels really really difficult. So the prospect of them being in the same room together and Rock also being very tapped into the local market. You know, he has friends and they have worked with developers and so when a recommendation comes his way that this person's good, it's because someone knows firsthand that that they're good. So we can minimize the risk of a bad hire which would be such a gigantic pain in the ass.
Jordan Gal:Nice. So that's Yeah, very and relatively affordable. It's not San Francisco, it's not New York, it's not even Portland. So that's very exciting because we launched this checkout product and a lot of energy came our way and when we can see that we've talked about it previously, Sometimes product is ahead of marketing and sometimes the other way around. Right now, is ahead of product.
Jordan Gal:And it's not so much that marketing is doing such an amazing job, it's that people want so much out of the product that immediately as soon as we launched, we got boom, we got this pressure on the on the product. I I wanna use it so bad but I can't unless it has PayPal. I I wanna do it but what about this and what about this processor, what about this currency or language issue? It's just immediate request and pressure for features and on the product. So I'm I'm excited about that prospect.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Cool. Like, we're starting to deal with a lot of that as well with our plugins, the the content upgrades plugin and the landing pages plugin. We're getting more just organic people buying those plugins than than we did before. Like, we we had to launch and then it was quiet for a while and then now, I I think just people are finding it a little bit more now.
Brian Casel:And we're getting, you know, more more bugs reported. I I hired a like, a month ago, I hired a second developer. Both of them are in The Uke Ukraine just to have more capacity to to deal with bugs, but also develop those new features because we get a lot of those questions as well. Like, does it integrate with this or doesn't it, you know. So Yeah.
Brian Casel:I've had several trying to push.
Jordan Gal:Several people ping us on intercom asking us what the plug in that we use on the blog is. Meaning your content upgrades. Oh, cool.
Brian Casel:Yep. Yeah. Nice. And there are things and we use those those plugins for our clients obviously, and with my marketing tech guy and our PPC plan, we're we're developing all these new enhancements to our service that we need features built into our plugins to be able to track certain things, to be able to do certain things. So, know, again That's cool.
Brian Casel:Again, this is like I'm trying to get the team to work together and communicate internally and get these things all worked out and, you know, but progress happens slowly.
Jordan Gal:Always always slower than you want it. But that's it's really nice that any work that you do on the plug in that you sell publicly also benefits you internally. Yes. That's nice that you get both of those together. Yep.
Jordan Gal:Cool. So that's that's the big thing on our on our side. We don't need to hire right now but we foresee in a month that we're gonna want it desperately so we're we're starting on that now.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it takes so long to like get the job ads out there and the and sift through applicants and filter them and
Jordan Gal:Yep. You know. Yep. Not not an overnight process. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Cool. So I guess the really my my big update, my because this is my goal for the summer now is to launch a training product from AudienceOps, like a major training product. I've taken the first steps of this. So currently, here in June, I'm I'm still in customer development mode. And I and I've been through this cycle before when I did the Productize course launch and and even when I started audience ops itself.
Brian Casel:I did a bit of this back when I started restaurant engineers ago, but not as much. But I did a lot with with product ties and now I'm kind of following the cycle again. And so basically what that is is I started with a survey. I created a survey on audience ops because this product will be from audience ops. It's pretty long survey.
Brian Casel:It's actually several pages long. I used Gravity Forms and and then I I actually recorded like a two minute video of me just talking about why we might build this this training product, what it's what it's about, who specifically is it for, and what are we trying to achieve with this. And and I described it in a certain way, and and then in the survey questions, I'm asking a lot of different questions about like who you are, what kind of company you are, what what revenue level, how many people do you work with, how do you what are your challenges with content marketing? Like, what what are the gaps in your understanding and and and things like that. And then and then I actually kind of pitch in a way through through the line of questioning.
Brian Casel:It's, know, I'm I'm just making it abundantly clear, like, are developing a training product and I'm trying to get your specific feedback about what we have in this concept at this point. And like one of the questions in the survey was, here's a here's a potential headline for our sales page. And I think it was something along the lines of, like, build a a content marketing department in your company. You know, that's and so that's how I described it. And so so I sent this this survey out to my entire list from from my personal newsletter list and and also all the subscribers on audience ops.
Brian Casel:And then I tweeted about it a bunch. Over the first week, got about 50 good responses in into this survey. So people who took like a a good five or ten minutes and filled out answers. And then I went through and I analyzed all those answers. I spent a good few hours on this where, you know, because most of them are like open ended, just write your thoughts on this, not not multiple choice, which is what I wanted.
Brian Casel:I I wanted them to just describe and and they did, but but in order to really analyze the trends, I needed to go through and kinda normalize them somehow into like data, you know. So for every question, I then kind of converted them into multiple choice in a way. So I can I can read 40 or so responses to a to a question and boil them down into like three or four themes? So I did that for for all the questions and then and then got a sense of of where things are at. Oh, and I also, like, presented a price point, like, you know, based on what you know so far, what I described in that video and what I'm describing in these questions, I think I phrased it like, how would you rate the value that if if this were priced somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000 to $2,000?
Brian Casel:And the choices were, no, I definitely wouldn't consider it, or yes, that sounds about right. Yes, I would consider it, but only if and then they write in a reason. I would consider it, but not at that price point. Think I think that's all I had. So so, know, I got some really good data there.
Brian Casel:And and then I so this is kind of what I the the conclusions that I that I drew from from analyzing the data. I think most people think that $2,000 on on the high end of this would be probably too much at at least, you know, from their judging by their responses to the survey. And then when they checked like, well, but not at that price point, you know, people are saying more on those are like 500 to 1,000. But other people are saying like, well, if you include one on one coaching or some sort of in person support, that that could be worth more.
Jordan Gal:Oh, that's so interesting that that one question and answer of yes, but only if is like that's like telling you what Right. Should what can differentiate the tiers.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And another another big one is I I was describing it in the video and then I put that headline as a question, like, do you think about like building your own in house content marketing department for your SaaS company? And a lot of people were just kind of turned off by that word department.
Brian Casel:And this was I saw like six or seven different people said, department sounds too big, too expensive, too complex. I'm not sure that I need that. And this is the kind of thing that you would uncover in customer development. In my mind, I'm thinking like, this is
Jordan Gal:Everybody wants that.
Brian Casel:Like, I built, really like a corporate department really, but it's just a way of describing it. But then, you know, I I heard people say I had a separate question where I was like, if I provide you with the specific procedures and our systems and our SOPs to train a writer and an assistant and a designer to to do content marketing for you, unanimous unanimously everyone's like, that is what I want. Right.
Jordan Gal:Just don't call it.
Brian Casel:People are like, I want the system, I want the road map, but I don't wanna build a department. And it's really just semantics here. It's words. You know, it's just words. It's just and so that right there I learned like, okay, well, that's not the headline I'm gonna go with, you know.
Brian Casel:That's basically what I learned. And my next step has been I've already done probably four or five of these calls where I I had a few replies to the email when I said like, hey, take this survey. Directly a few people just replied to that email and said, hey, yeah, I'm interested in this. And so those people I've already had calls with. Then I reached out to a few more people who filled out the survey to see if they would hop on another Skype call to just dig in further.
Brian Casel:Record those calls and we'll just talk for like fifteen minutes. And those have all been going really well. And those are clearly people who are verbally saying to me over the call, this is exactly what we need. I could definitely see myself paying for this sort of thing. Like, these are the responses.
Brian Casel:Now, we had the previous episode about validation. When do you consider something validated? I think we talked about how it's not a binary thing. It's not yes or no. And I don't think this is completely validated yet, but I think it's a few percentage points further down the line of, okay, we're going in the right direction.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, I mean the truth is because it's so closely related to the value that you're trying to provide with the service and that is validated.
Brian Casel:Yes.
Jordan Gal:Right, so it's even more it's more validated than coming out of the blue, right, and I just like how much it's going to how nicely it fits in where there I guarantee you there are people looking at audience ops and saying, wish I could do this, I just can't afford that right now, to give them another option is just perfect.
Brian Casel:Yeah, exactly. And as I described in the video to kind of present this concept to people to get their feedback, so the drivers behind making this product, it's it's really intended for for people who a couple scenarios. One, you just don't really have the budget to to outsource entirely to a service like Audience Ops and and pay for that on a monthly or quarterly ongoing basis. There are some folks who are kind of bootstrapping and starting up and they're just not that's a bit of a stretch for them. Another big group is we get a lot of leads who just have so specialized audiences or industries, or it's just highly technical or it's just really niche within a niche that like our our writing team, you know, we kinda specialize in writing for like b to b SaaS tools and ecommerce and some, you know, digital agencies will write for.
Brian Casel:But, you know, if if you're selling high end consulting to to the healthcare industry, you know, it's it it like our our writing team just doesn't have that experience to be able to write for that. So so we're gonna develop this training where you can hire a specialized writer and have systems to actually train them on the expertise that they would need.
Jordan Gal:Right. You have to go a little further on your own in getting a writer or maybe you might be the writer because you're the founder. Actually are technical for it and yeah, it's great. Didn't think about that version of the solution. I thought, you can't afford audience ops, you want this.
Jordan Gal:But the truth is even if you can afford audience ops, it it might not be a good fit.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And also we've had a few clients who have been with us for a long time and then event and eventually they just decide, you know, we're gonna take content marketing in house. And that's that's a common reason for for canceling or or downgrading their account. Right. In turn so I mean, another big driver is just to establish another product in our funnel.
Brian Casel:And the the plan, you know, you were talking about your your webinar funnel that you're that you're developing with with the new product and everything. The way that I'm thinking about this now is that once we we've established this product, so a few months down the line, once after it is launched and now we have this product in our line, the plan is really all of our marketing is gonna go towards selling the training product. So That'll be the driver. Ads, retargeting, all of our content marketing, growing our list, our email list automation basically funnels into bringing you to a webinar to teach you about this stuff and to give you an offer to buy the training. You know, selling the done for you service, that'll continue to to go on.
Brian Casel:I mean, those leads just come in organically, and I think they'll continue to just come in organically. But to really have something to to market directly and have like a buy now product, that's what this training product is intended to be. Right.
Jordan Gal:I think And it could also be a source of leads for the done
Brian Casel:for you. Yeah, exactly. I think some segment of of buyers on the training product would we'll also give you a credit towards your first month of audience app service. Yep. And can convert that way if you just decide we do wanna outsource this stuff after all.
Brian Casel:That's that's kind of the the long term game plan. Think this summer, you know, so now now that I'm doing this customer research stuff, this month, the month of June, I wanna start getting an an outline together for the material. By July, I'm I'm aiming to have like a a big webinar to kind of invite people into a pre sell beta period. And then the plan from there is to release sections of the course to those those pre sell beta people and maybe release it in like three three different sections. And after each section, we'll have a recorded q and a call to talk about that material to get their feedback on it and ask their questions.
Brian Casel:And that'll help inform how we develop the next batch of material. And then when it's all said and done, take those recordings of the q and a sessions and include them in the final package that that buyers will get. Like, you you get to go through the material, you get all of our SOPs and templates and everything, and you get to watch these these sessions from real business owners asking follow-up questions about this stuff.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I I love it. It's it's actually a lot of analogy, a big analogy to to how we wanna do the same thing, where the first few webinars are like, you are a founding member of this software, we're going to close it down for a month, work with you, get it right and then make the bigger push after that.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So it's like working with real people who are have the highest need, who are willing to say, yes, I know you're early on. I know it's the first version of this training. I know it's the first version of this offer, but I want it bad enough. Same people that will give you good feedback.
Brian Casel:Right.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Nice. We're both gonna be in the webinar game, Brian.
Brian Casel:I know. Yep. I'm I'm looking forward to it. We we were talking offline about that stuff and and, you know, getting the tactics right, and, I'm sure we'll we'll talk a lot more about it as as we go forward.
Jordan Gal:Cool, man. Alright. Great update. Brian, you take it easy over there. Good to be on East Coast time with you.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Good stuff, buddy.
Jordan Gal:Thanks for a few more days. Alright. Take it easy, everyone. See you. Bye.
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