If we bootstrapped

[00:00:16] Speaker A: Hey, it is Bootscraft web today. We are recording on a Thursday. So how we doing, Jordan? [00:00:22] Speaker B: We're good. It does feel a little different than a normal Friday. I feel like I'm deeper into the work. Yeah. I'm excited to talk about a few topics. [00:00:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Tomorrow morning I'm gonna be out of the office. I'm heading down to Norwalk to meet up with the CEO and CTO of the indian agency that I work with. [00:00:41] Speaker B: No way. [00:00:42] Speaker A: They're just, they're like on a. They're on a us tour right now. [00:00:45] Speaker B: That's awesome. [00:00:46] Speaker A: Going around, I guess, meeting with a bunch of their clients in the US, and I'm one of them, so they're, I don't know what other cities they're currently in, but they're coming into New York today and then I'm meeting up in Connecticut tomorrow. [00:00:58] Speaker B: Very cool. Should be fun. I like that. I like online relationships that brew over years and then all of a sudden you meet in person. Like, it's crazy. [00:01:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Should be interesting. But yeah, today we've got our normal slate of random business stuff going on. So what are we talking about? [00:01:20] Speaker B: I have to give a very authentic plug. If you listen to this podcast, there's some conversation happening at Ripple FM. It is not happening anywhere else. [00:01:33] Speaker A: That is very true. Very true. [00:01:35] Speaker B: It has entered my mind as a place that I can go to that's in between a slack conversation with a friend that I've spoken to for years and public Twitter, it lives right in the middle there for me. And I feel like I can be very transparent and honest there. I hesitated tweeting yesterday about wanting a new headline. I kind of want to get your feedback in general because I have felt. [00:02:03] Speaker A: You get a lot of replies on these questions that you're throwing into ripple. It's great. [00:02:07] Speaker B: Yes, it's great. It's fun. I went in and I basically said, hey, I want a new headline. I'm not happy with our headline. The headline kind of made sense to me for the first few weeks of a product. It was literally meet Rosie, your new AI answering service. But nobody cares about Rosie, and nobody cares to meet Rosie. People want their problem solved, right? [00:02:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:02:29] Speaker B: So I wanted to, like, take the emphasis off of the brand and ourselves and start to get into a place where we're focusing on a headline for traffic that's coming in. It's amazing what spending $200 a day on ads will do. It focuses the mind. [00:02:46] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. [00:02:46] Speaker B: You know, it is really. So that's where I've been focused. But anyway, I genuinely feel that the conversations in Ripple can be better. People have a lot of context and. [00:02:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's how I feel with every comment that comes through on Ripple. I get a bunch on my private podcast on Ripple, which is called what's next? Where I. It's sort of like what I talk about here on bootstrap web, but I go more in depth and it's also more real time. Like, I just. Anyway, like, there's more explanation of what I'm working on and the projects and I get a lot of good feedback there as well. Yeah, the great thing is that, like, I'm talking to people who I know are actually tuned in and are very like minded. Whereas on Twitter, yeah, there's just a bunch of crap that's like this tweet that I'm gonna throw out here. Yeah, a lot of people are not even gonna be interested or really know the context of what this is all about. But yeah, in ripple, it's more of a. It's not like a closed community because basically anyone can join, but we all know that we're sort of tuned into the same things here. [00:03:52] Speaker B: It's semi private. It's like isolated to just the people who have opted in to be into the community as opposed to the general timeline. Right. Twitter used to have following as a signal of isolation into a group and a conversation, but that's not nearly as clearly defined as it used to be. So now it's all over the place. [00:04:17] Speaker A: Yeah. And actually on the last episode of what's next, my private pod that I put on Ripple the last episode was me talking through what a business model and like a pricing structure could look like for Ripple. And I have some ideas on that. I'm currently working through the system for podcast hosts to officially claim their show and be hosts on the network. And then that unlocks a whole bunch of benefits. The main ones being if you host any podcast, like a public podcast, not only can you bring your listeners into a community, but you could also kind of access the contact information for your listeners so you can add them to your email list. A lot of people have been asking about the ability to, like, offer paid communities. So even if you have a public podcast, like on Apple and stuff, you can offer like a vip community, you know, like an extra members only section for your listeners. You'll have the public listeners always, but then there's like an extra vip section that people can either pay for or they can just join for free. But, you know, you're also getting their email added to your list and you're getting them in a community. So that's sort of like the direction of where a pricing thing could potentially go. Like, I'm still in a place right now with ripple where it's like, I like it, I'll hack on it, I'll continue to hack on it and improve features and stuff and use it as a user. It remains to be seen for me if it's really viable, like big business opportunity. It might just be like a niche thing. I don't know. But it's a nice little project to keep hacking on. [00:06:08] Speaker B: I agree. And maybe that's a good transition to Thursday. We're more in the middle of the week than we normally are. What are you working on? I got a list of stuff. What do you got going on? [00:06:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So right now I'm working on a, a client project, a new SaaS MVP project, which is actually a pretty interesting product. I have a second client MVP project that I'll be starting working on next week. So now I'm starting to get like a little bit like loaded up with, with client work. [00:06:39] Speaker B: Okay. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Although today, Thursday, like I've, I've already kind of done my client work for the week. So now today and tomorrow, I'm starting to think about like, I'm working a bit on clarity flow right now. I'm thinking about ripple. I'm thinking about other product ideas that I'm exploring. Um, you know, I'm still in the mindset of, uh, right now. I'm still like consulting is starting to pick up, especially with this one month MVP service that I've been offering. [00:07:09] Speaker B: Are they both that form of consulting? Is that what they came in through or structured that way? [00:07:14] Speaker A: Definitely. That offer, that site onemonth app, I'm offering an MVP in a month, to be clear. And I'm starting to optimize how I sell that. In almost all cases, they come in with the idea with a long list of features that they want, which certainly would not fit in a one month project. It's my job. And they have this understanding that, that I'm going to tell you, like, okay, about 70% of what you want, we can actually ship in a month. And the other 30% means we can extend this into a six week project or an eight week project. [00:07:56] Speaker B: Yep. [00:07:56] Speaker A: And so, you know, I have like a notion template that I use for like proposals. And I'm turning and I keep honing in on this template and I keep kind of experimenting with the right approach for dealing with these leads. Right. And the best way to actually explain the service and close deals, set the. [00:08:18] Speaker B: Expectations properly, all that. [00:08:20] Speaker A: And so what I'm learning is like, okay, after the initial conversation, and then from there, it all becomes like async going forward. But I sort of give them proposal. Like, here's a solid MVP that we can do in four weeks, and then here's the six week version of that. And then here's the eight week version of that. And which one would you like to commit to? [00:08:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:08:41] Speaker A: Then there's also the option for ongoing retainers after that to either just keep the lights on or actually continue development. And so I'm getting kind of busy with all that work, not only working on the projects themselves, but even the proposal process. There's a lot of back and forth and negotiating over scope. So I'm trying to figure out how to make that more and more efficient. And I'm in this sort of decision point where it's like I could keep leaning into that and really grow it into an actual agency, or I could keep it at the current level of lead flow, which is sort of comfortable for me right now, taking on one or two projects at a time. And the rest I can schedule out into the future and not really plan on growing the team too much, but that keeps me still in it. And I'm spending time, and I would like to shift my time back to more product focused revenue and more make money in your sleep kind of stuff. [00:09:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I know, but pushing that up to, I mean, tens of thousands a month with a team. [00:09:55] Speaker A: And that could sort of accomplish the same thing. Right. If I were to scale it up, I would grow a team and then remove myself from the day to day. But the business, that's essentially what I did with audience ops, it became, even though it's a service, it's still a passive income business for me. [00:10:14] Speaker B: Does that. [00:10:15] Speaker A: That's like the wrong terminology, but you know what I mean. [00:10:17] Speaker B: I'm still removing my hours instead of operate. Right. Look, okay, so here's a question for you. Audience ops, the end product was content written word. Do you think you can do something similar in terms of the handoff and not doing all the work yourself when something. Design and development? [00:10:39] Speaker A: I definitely, it's a very different business to deliver, for sure, but I definitely think that I can, and I have done this a little bit where I hire a developer to work under my direction. Right. [00:10:53] Speaker B: You would do that first and hold onto the design. [00:10:55] Speaker A: Yeah. There's a couple phases of this to scale this up. The first immediate phase would be to more often bring on probably another developer from the indian agency to work under my direct direction, just like I do with clarity flow. So that here's a list of issues in the queue, and they just wire it up under my direction. That's the easiest, low hanging fruit, but I'm still in it because I'm managing it and I'm directing them and all that. The next level would be probably to hire someone who's more like myself, maybe like us based or Europe or somewhere that's a little bit more high level, where it's like they could completely own a whole project and I don't really have to be involved at all. Right. And they can do all the design direction development. Either do it themselves or they can manage the junior developer. That's the next level of scaling this up. And then there's another level which might be bringing on a salesperson or a project manager or someone like that to really remove myself from the whole chain of events that happen. But that's that all of that can be done. It's also a question of, can we drive enough lead flow to support that kind of operation? Right now it's enough lead flow to keep me busy. I don't know if it would be enough to support all those extra hires. [00:12:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you have pricing as a variable because right now you've made it very attractive. [00:12:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Right now I feel like it's underpriced. I expect it. I plan on raising my general rates by January and then even just raising prices, though. We still need to have enough leads so then we can start to turn on things like actual outreach and outbound sales and stuff like that. But I don't know. Honestly, I'm still more interested in doing products. That's why. [00:13:04] Speaker B: Just be honest with yourself on that. Not a thing wrong with that. [00:13:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Like right now, it's actually kind of comfortable to work on these consulting projects one or two at a time. And I make good money doing that, just myself. So that was the goal. And I enjoy it. Like, I actually like working on the projects, but I don't enjoy it as much as working on my own products. There's just no question about that. [00:13:31] Speaker B: You're just getting. You're just setting yourself up to eventually be on Lex Friedman's podcast so you can talk about your 45 different products that make you $200,000 a month. [00:13:39] Speaker A: Just like our boy levels, right? [00:13:41] Speaker B: I think level's a hero. I love him. [00:13:43] Speaker A: I have it queued up. I have not tuned in Lex Friedman. I usually tune in on YouTube just in the clips because I can't deal with a four hour long podcast, but I could take it in like ten minute chunks on YouTube. [00:13:55] Speaker B: True, true. I kind of just hope the world gives me the best clips in general. [00:14:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So actually one more thing on that front about product ideas, a little concept. This is like I'm just going to kind of think out loud here. And this is sort of what goes along with the levels thing and the idea of doing. I think it's sort of like the evolution of building and shipping software products in 2024. As I've talked about, it's becoming so much faster and easier with AI in the tool chain. [00:14:33] Speaker B: I would like to ask you about cursor after you bring this up. [00:14:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that too. But just in general, whether you're using cursor or anything else, having AI in the chain makes building new software so insanely fast. It's just incredible to me. And yes, this has the effect, this has multiple effects. Like one is almost literally anyone can spin up and ship a new SaaS startup like mvp, like so much faster. And honestly, it's a big reason why I'm able to even offer that service the way that I'm packaging it. Not saying like I build the whole app using just AI, but it just speeds up the whole process. But I started to think about like what are all the types of products that I could get into? Because SaaS itself, like traditional b, two B SaaS, as fantastic of a model as it is, it's probably like the holy grail of business power. [00:15:33] Speaker B: I'm very curious where you're going with this. Okay. [00:15:35] Speaker A: It's also like the hardest and longest road to having a viable business. So if I'm looking to have what is the fastest path to move away from services revenue and grow product revenue, there's the traditional, there's info products, there are downloadable products, maybe an app template. Like I talked about my hack in the past was productized services. So when I launched audience ops, the idea was like, look, services can be launched in a weekend, right? [00:16:11] Speaker B: Generally much faster business to build. [00:16:13] Speaker A: Yeah. And then it's hard work to like grow a team and the processes and deliver it reliably. But all that can be done and productized services enabled just a really compelling value proposition both for the customer and for the business owner. I think that was the whole concept with productized services, those are still great today. But I think that today adding tech and of course there's tech enabled services and that's nothing new either. Where if you think about bench or profit, well, these types of businesses have had basically they build a SaaS, but they also offer a done for you service. And because they have their own tech underlying it, it's like a double value and it gives them a lot more to play with. So there's still that option. But I'm also thinking about like, since we can rapidly build software so quickly, we could deliver done for you, sort of like productized services, but delivered using software. [00:17:23] Speaker B: Okay, first I thought you were going to say consumer, and I was like, we're going to have an intervention right now. So you're not talking about consumer. [00:17:31] Speaker A: What is, it's just an even more efficient way of offering, let's say like a productized service is by spinning up software to power it instead of hiring a team of 30 plus people. [00:17:44] Speaker B: Okay. So the end customer comes to you and says, we have this process inside of our company. That's a pain. We don't want to go buy software for $500 a month. [00:17:56] Speaker A: Yes. [00:17:57] Speaker B: Can you just build us a product that does this thing for us? [00:18:00] Speaker A: Right, exactly. Okay. But like, and do it for us. Like build the software to do it and then use that software to do it. [00:18:11] Speaker B: Right. So it's not like hiding, oh, this magical service. And then I actually can do it very efficiently. [00:18:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, I'm trying to think of examples. Like the one that I'm kicking around is like programmatic SEO. Right? So, like, companies all the time hire SEO agencies to do SEO and usually that looks like some on page optimization and writing a bunch of content. Sure. Right. [00:18:38] Speaker B: We pay just for link building alone. Just the link building, yeah. [00:18:42] Speaker A: And so, like, you, like, you could build software that is specifically designed to generate, programmatically generate content for your particular business, in your particular industry, but it would be built for your website. Then a tech firm like mine could build that for each individual client, maybe use the same software but replicate it and tweak it for each individual client. And then also have me or like a VA just run that software for each client. And so at the end of the day, the client is still paying a firm to do their SEO content and they're probably paying about the same as they would a high priced agency. But we as the tech enabled agency don't need to hire all those writers or do it or find people with the expertise because we could do it with AI or we can. That's one example. Or like, another one could be like, there's a few that I know of that I don't want to share publicly because they sort of, they're sort of ideas of other founders that I know they're working on them. [00:19:56] Speaker B: But, yeah, I've seen a few things like this. What we have come across at Rosie is there are, like, AI consultants and companies know that they want to use AI more, but they don't know how. And they basically hire this consultant to come into their business and look around and say, this process, this process, this part of your business, this part of your marketing, this part of your sales process, like, I can just make all of that better for you using these tools that I know about. You don't need to know anything. I'll just basically do it for you. [00:20:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And, like, also, like, I'm starting to open my eyes to this model because I'm doing the consulting work. Right. So, okay. I have currently about five different clients in various stages of my funnel. Right. Two of them are, like, active projects, and three of them are leads that I'm talking to right now. And these are all, these all came through my MVP software one month MVP service. Right. But, like, two of them are not actual product MVP's. They're just companies that need internal custom software. So. And these types of software firms have, have existed for years where businesses just hire technology firms to build them custom internal proprietary software. [00:21:17] Speaker B: That's right. I mean. Right. That's where SaaS kind of came out of, because doing that used to cost $250,000, and then all of a sudden, there was a business model to do that for a few hundred bucks a month. [00:21:27] Speaker A: Yeah, but as the builder, like, I look at some of these, and in a way, it's sort of, like, easier for me to architect a software solution for one business because I only need to make it fit that exact business's specific needs. We don't need to fit the needs of hundreds or thousands of customers. We only need to. They have a specific set of needs. We can build that in a rails application. [00:21:53] Speaker B: That's funny. It's like custom software. [00:21:55] Speaker A: Custom software, right. But there's another layer to that where I think you can build custom software for each individual client that comes through your door and you can run that software for them. And especially if you start to offer the same service again and again. But you could just tweak, it's so fast and easy to spin up an instance of a Rails app and tweak it for the next customer and just tweak it for the next customer. Just tweak it for the next one, and then it's like, and even if you have like a version of your software that you build and then you discard two months later, and then you build it again for the next batch of customers, like, we can do that. It's that fast. Now, you know, we don't have to spend a year building a crazy complicated SaaS solution to do a tech enabled service. We could spin up a SaaS solution in like a month and offer that to ten paying customers. [00:22:54] Speaker B: You know, I'm curious where you go with that because I get the concept. It's hard to visualize. [00:22:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:00] Speaker B: But I like situations where we are often ahead of the general market on understanding what the tech can do. And there's always an opportunity in that. [00:23:11] Speaker A: Gap, I think, to put a pin on all this. It's like we are in some, I don't, you could hear, I'm still trying to figure this out and navigate it myself, but I think that we're in some kind of iteration or evolution of because launching a B two B SaaS product is extremely difficult and it's not impossible. We all still want to do it. I'm still trying to do that. But that combined with the rapid, like, how fast it is to build and launch these things and combined with how extremely competitive it is in every single category and the buying patterns of customers, which makes marketing extremely, almost impossible, it feels like true. I mean, every marketing channel is, customers are immune to that stuff. I just think that all these factors are converging to like, we have to start to open our, open our, at least me, I have to start to open my mind to like, there are other ways to build businesses using software that don't exactly have to fit into like the traditional B two B SaaS box. There are other ways to benefit from these advancements that we have today, you know? [00:24:34] Speaker B: Cool. [00:24:34] Speaker A: That's all I have to say about that. [00:24:36] Speaker B: I like it. I'm curious. I forget what it was. I had a thought yesterday and it sounded crazy to me. So I was like talking myself out of it and I tried to remind myself like, hey, that's actually, that's the stuff, that's the breakthrough stuff. [00:24:54] Speaker A: That's the other thing is like, I'm trying to open my mind to ideas that I only even just recently, like felt pretty closed to. You know, I thought that like I was done doing like info products after productize. I still kind of feel that way. But just this morning I'm like, you know what, there could be an opportunity with this type of thing if it's done this way. Maybe I should reopen my mind to that. Or, like, the app template idea or components library idea. Like, I was always like, I don't want to just add another one to the, to the ocean of those things that are out there, but maybe there's like a twist and maybe I could offer something unique and just trying to take these ideas that, like, even though I've said no for a long time, like, what if I said yes? And, like, I think that's a really important exercise, you know? [00:25:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. I like it. What I will tell you on the Rosie front, when it comes to this, this part of the conversation, this doesn't feel anything like the rally B two B sass experience. This feels like a completely different business. Different business model, different everything. [00:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah. What are the biggest differences? [00:26:09] Speaker B: I think the biggest differences is the horizontal nature of the model, the openness the Internet can just find us and show up and sign up. So losing that part of the control of, like, who we talk to, who we give a demo to, who we push away, who we really want to talk to, who we target. So I think the drastic difference is definitely, like, my experience because of how different the two, but it does feel like it has almost a consumer feel to it because SMB in this context is very often like one person. So a one person financial advisor, a one person law firm, a one person, like chiropract. Like, that feels nothing like rally and a larger business. Yeah, yeah. And I'm energized by it. So I'll tell you what I'm working on this week. At the beginning of this week, I, like, went into a spiral. I was not happy. And the reason I wasn't happy is because I was looking at all the stuff that I want to do and I felt overwhelmed by it. And then I started getting mad at myself for not getting it done. And it was like I was trying to digest too much. So what I did to help myself there was I broke out these projects, initiatives, ideas, whatever. I broke them up into different parts of the funnel. And what I tried to give myself leeway with and, like, license is to only focus on the next part of the funnel. And anything that falls outside of it, I can write down, I can be interested in, but I'm not going to really spend any time working on. So. And what I mean by funnel, I mean literally our marketing funnel. So the first part of that funnel is just getting people to the site. Right. Just traffic that is starting to work itself out with a combination of the SEO that's slowly kicking in and the advertising and the cold email. So we have a few things going on that drive people to the site. So it's not that I have figured out that part of the funnel and no longer think about it, but it is more on autopilot than anything else. It's running. Money's being spent on it. I'm approving new scripts and new variations of the ads. We just identified our first two winners from the batch of 16. We kept those, we adjusted. We added a new script based on feedback over the last few weeks from users. And after this podcast, I'm going to approve the next batch and then they'll start to go out. So cool. So it's kind of running nice. Then converting from traffic to trial, and then after that from trial to paid, and then paid to retention. So anything that falls outside of converting from traffic to trial, I have just pushed out, I put a little bullet point, do this, maybe I link to a canvas or a Google Doc and I just ignore it. So that has helped me tremendously this week. And now I feel very energized, very, very focused on converting from traffic to trial. [00:29:34] Speaker A: Okay. [00:29:35] Speaker B: What I'm focused on right now is if you go to our site today, what you'll see is a homepage with a bunch of information. We added two new sections that show the product and the admin. Now that it's like looking good and ready, I wanted to do that. But the real issue is that really the only CTA you have is to get started. And I'm looking at a Google Analytics funnel right now. There's a decent percentage of people that go from the homepage to the registration page. So people that click on get started from there. There's a very big drop off from that registration page to an account actually being created. And I know there are a lot of different reasons for that. The registration page isn't great. The pricing, you can go from the homepage directly to the registration and not see any pricing, and then you hesitate because you don't know what the pricing is. You actually don't know what the trial is. So we're updating that part of it. But generally speaking, we are asking completely cold traffic to look at our solution. Look at a homepage, look at a website that it's not that full, right? There isn't that much on the website. There aren't any testimonials yet, there isn't that much information. And we're asking them to go from that level of trust to creating an account with a username and a password. And that, for me, is the issue that I want to attack. [00:31:15] Speaker A: And you're not asking for a credit card with the username and password. We are not see surprising, too. I feel like we would usually see a bunch of signups that are like that, just sign up and then ghost. It's like, because I've seen that happen with multiple businesses where you see a lot of email signups, and it's like, okay, after that, what did. You literally didn't click any other buttons after you signed up? Why did you even sign up? You know, which tells me, like, all right, maybe it's a bot or something like that, but. [00:31:43] Speaker B: Right. Or it's a, it's a bot. Or, look, if you. If you put registration and then the next page is credit card, you will get a lot of drop off. You know, you're getting a lot of drop off. But you're saying, right, I don't care, I want the credit card and at least I have the email now. We don't do that. I think we did a better job at that because we had a blank slate and we were just launching. And we said, well, where should we put the credit card? And we said, you know what we should do? We should let people create an account. We should let them come into the product, do everything they want, train, upload PDF's, add faqs, connect integrations. And then when you were ready to test it and you wanted your Rosie phone number, that's when we asked for the credit cardinal. So, generally speaking, I think that's a good way to do it. What we're doing now is we're working on a signup flow that it takes onboarding and brings it out into the marketing experience. So the way we are doing that is instead of having a button that says, get started, and then the next thing you see is account creation. Right. Registration. The first thing that we're doing is having the CTA be a field that you put your URL in and then you hit create my agent. [00:32:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:57] Speaker B: And then the next screen, you see your agent being created and your website being scraped, and then the next screen after that is you get a sample of rosy voice samples with your business information inside of the sample. [00:33:12] Speaker A: That's the way to go. And I'm seeing this as it's not just a trend, it's becoming more of the norm, I would say, because it's so competitive. It's so competitive. Literally, the MVP product that I'm working on with a client right now, we're doing exactly that. [00:33:31] Speaker B: Okay. Cool. [00:33:32] Speaker A: Literally, the homepage has a website URL and that starts the onboarding process. It's AI and it goes through multiple steps before we even ask them to register. And I just built that yesterday with them. [00:33:45] Speaker B: I love those. So we should compare notes on that side. [00:33:48] Speaker A: It's definitely a pattern that's there. It used to be a little bit more unique with just select apps doing it years ago, and now I feel like it's, we've gone from a lot of apps doing credit card up front and then sign up and a lot of apps doing no credit card up front, and then you go in and now I feel like it's more and more common to build your app on the homepage of your site. [00:34:17] Speaker B: Yes. I asked Twitter for examples of this and the majority of examples were SEO software. So SEO, perfect. Give us your URL, we'll give you a free analysis, and then if you want to go deeper, you create an account. So that made sense. And so that is the thing that I worked on this week that will likely be published by probably the end of next week. [00:34:43] Speaker A: Nice. So did you. Your app is not on the root domain yet, right? [00:34:53] Speaker B: No, it's not on the root. [00:34:54] Speaker A: Okay, so then how is that. So is it going to be like, they basically, like, the button takes them over to like, app. Hey, Rosie. And that's where they can start but not register? [00:35:05] Speaker B: Yes, that's right. [00:35:06] Speaker A: Yes. Okay. Yes. [00:35:07] Speaker B: And a lot of this came out because we started working on a landing page that was different from the homepage, so we could send paid traffic to a landing page that was more binary, either sign up or hit the back button type of a thing. And as we started doing that, we had two branches of work. We were like, let's do a landing page and let's also fix our onboarding. And we realized actually those should just be merged into the same project. And then you change the CTA on both the homepage and the landing page to both be. Give us a URL. [00:35:38] Speaker A: Right, right. Sort of on the same topic, some updates on clarity flow. An exper. So I think I talked about this, like, at the start of August. So about three weeks ago, we started a new experiment on clarity flow, which is we removed the free trial. So for the last three weeks, the only way to start using clarity flow is to come in and literally pay upfront for any of our plans, overhauled the whole buying experience and the pricing page and that whole flow, it's all improved now. It's been interesting. I'm three weeks into it. I'll say I'm sort of on the fence right now of what call to make on this experiment. When I started it out, it was like, I'm going to give this a good two months and then decide what to do. And I'm three weeks into it and I'm on the fence of whether I should only if I should cut off this experiment after one month or maybe give it a second month. But basically we've had a small handful of purchases in the first three weeks, which is probably a little bit less than we would have gotten before with our trial. And so it's roughly the same, if not a little bit less. We offer a money back guarantee with that. One of the handful has asked for the refund. It'll be interesting to see how we finish out the month. There's all sorts of maybe it's just August and it's summertime, and maybe things would naturally pick up in the fall if we kept the experiment going. So I don't know. It's at this sort of gray area where I sort of wish that we only had one or zero conversions and then it'd be clear, like, okay, that didn't work. Let's just go back. [00:37:38] Speaker B: We talked about this. This is the issue with these tests. [00:37:40] Speaker A: Is, yeah, it's definitely not like a clear winner. It's sort of just like the same because you have to figure like, okay, whatever number of purchases that we could reliably expect every month, there's always going to be some percent that, that there's like natural churn overall, and then there's going to be some percent that ask for the refund before the 60 days. So as of today, I'm sort of leaning toward next month we return to having a trial. But we have not yet experimented with requiring the credit card up front. Before we had a trial with no credit card up front, like a 14 day trial. But like you like, in order to unlock some features, you would put your credit card in during the trial next month. It would be like a five minute change for me to just switch back on the trial. We did architect it that way, but they would still require the credit card up front. I'm on the fence about that. I'm going to see how we finish out the month. But the other interesting twist is that also now in August, some of our traffic has increased, some of our marketing activity has started to drive some results. And so now we have, I would say, significantly more traffic than we were getting in the months prior. So if we were to go back to trials. The expectation is we should have a little bit more trials than we were getting before. So it's just another little iteration to see how can we unlock growth. And it's generally been mostly plateaued this year. Got to keep hacking on these experiments. We also have a big feature that's about to drop, which is appointments, essentially like a calendly alternative built into clarity flow. So that's interesting. Once we announce that that also should drive some activity. It's been a big feature request. [00:39:49] Speaker B: So here's what all my biggest concern around this experiment, and this is new for me, so take it with a grain of salt. The dynamic around people who don't know you at all, have never seen your product, are on your website for the first time. The fact that that is the competitive environment. Yes. You got work to do when retargeting and coming back, and then they find you somewhere else and they, you know, they experience your brand. Multiple touches. Cool. But the majority of people are on the site for the first time. [00:40:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's competitive. Like we have direct competitors that they are definitely comparing us to or switching from. [00:40:39] Speaker B: Okay. So in that environment, the idea of standing that strong at the entrance, at the gate, I don't know where I, you know, look, we did that with card hook, but there was no competition. Let me rephrase. There was huge demand and only one other competitor. [00:41:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:41:02] Speaker B: So we felt like we could do that. Not really because we're so awesome, but because the market was like, they don't have any other choice. They have one other choice. And people have proven that they're gonna refer people to you. The idea to do that now with Rosie. Oh, my. I don't have the balls. Not even close. [00:41:22] Speaker A: Yeah. I think part of my bet with it, I mean, I got some good advice from someone that pushed me toward, like, this is a worthwhile experiment, and I agree. But part of the thinking also was that if we get them to pay upfront, then compared to a free trial with no credit card and no payment, they are much more engaged in the work that's going to be required to get set up and get activated. And we have kat on customer success, and she's really, really effective at helping customers be successful, get all their questions answered. She does live calls with them, she does async with them. I do think that new users who are actually engaged and also actually have a successful coaching business, they tend to be successful on clarity flow, and they tend to go on to be great customers, but we do also attract, and I think that's sort of the nature of this type of market. There are unserious, there are both serious coaches with serious businesses and there are more unserious. [00:42:36] Speaker B: Right. It's not, they're full time or they're not full time. [00:42:39] Speaker A: They don't have enough business to support it. This and that. [00:42:43] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean you've been around long enough, you have enough data to make it a worthwhile experiment. [00:42:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:49] Speaker B: But you knew going in, you know, totally reasonable that it doesn't work because it is asking too much too soon and therefore, I mean it sounds like what your next step is. And in between you can create an account but put a credit card, we're not going to charge it. It's really just a slightly softer version of what you have now. Cool. [00:43:09] Speaker A: Yeah. So we'll see with that. Yeah. But meanwhile, like that is still a business that just, it's doing its thing. It's sort of plateaued. We've had some wins here and there, especially lately with like traffic and the product is in a great place and it's about to get even better with some new big features coming down the road. Developer is awesome on it and cat is awesome and I spend, I don't know, 20% of my week, even less sometimes just answering questions from them and approving stuff and trying stuff. But I'm spending the rest of my week figuring out how to fill out the rest of the pie. That is my business life here. [00:43:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you'll fill it just fine. [00:43:55] Speaker A: Speaking, I don't know what topic you wanted to get to. I thought we had a really good question come through ripple this morning. I don't know if you saw it. It's for you. I'm curious to hear it. How would you approach Rosie if this were not a vc backed business? [00:44:16] Speaker B: It is a good question. I thought about it when I read it earlier this morning. Let me think. [00:44:26] Speaker A: Or would you do Rosie? [00:44:31] Speaker B: Look, let me be very honest for a second. [00:44:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:35] Speaker B: If I'm being completely honest, I wish I was doing Rosie right now. Bootstrapped. That's the truth. That's true. There is something. [00:44:50] Speaker A: Well if you were doing it bootstrapped, right? [00:44:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:44:55] Speaker A: How would you think about funding your product team, the marketing funnels, all of that? [00:45:05] Speaker B: Yes. So I would not be doing advertising. By far the biggest difference in the biggest expense. Well the biggest expense is people. So I would be doing that very differently. I would not have a team of nine and I wouldn't be doing advertising anytime soon. The product itself and the process came together pretty quick. Yeah, not that different. I mean, we are, we are early stage in every way. [00:45:33] Speaker A: I mean, if you're bootstrapped, like, you and rock could just do this on the product side, I think maybe with like one more. [00:45:42] Speaker B: Yes, yes. I think a front end with myself and rock and it would be, you know, messier and it wouldn't be nearly as efficient from a product point of view and all these other things. We launched too early, which I think is right. Like, we didn't launch, we launched a beta until we had a signup flow. Once we launched a signup flow, we no longer called it beta, but it was, it was beta. And over the last few weeks, we did exactly what we wanted to, which is get feedback and basically tell people, no, don't cancel, we'll just extend your trial because we're going to build that exact feature that you just asked for. And now we have a far better understanding of what those features need to be. And if we were bootstrapped, the exact same process. Launch early, launch ugly, listen to people, adjust, make better. That's it. [00:46:35] Speaker A: Okay, now let's step back and start to take the same question. But like, okay, we just talked about Rosie itself, right? And what you just described makes total sense, right? There is a bootstrap approach to building what you're actually building. Sure. But it still requires several, at least several months of time. So if you were bootstrapped, if you had never raised, how would you be thinking about sustaining, like yourself, your salary and rocks and whoever else is giving their time to this business? So would you be thinking about it like, okay, you had an exit from rally, you would maybe just reinvest whatever you made from that into this? [00:47:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you do. You need to invest. You need to invest money. [00:47:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:27] Speaker B: You can do it another way and work on other stuff, but that's really hard. As everyone knows. Everyone doing it knows. It's really, really hard to figure out a way to make 1015 month for you, your family, all that, and also get a software product off the ground is very, very hard. So, you know, I honestly, I would have gone to tiny seed, I would have raised a few bucks, I would have put in some money myself, I would have gotten a little egg, you know, call it 150k, something like that, and give ourselves a few months without any revenue at all. Take as little salary as possible. Right? Like you cobble it together to see if you can focus on it or if you need to split your focus card hook. I had my focus split for a while, then I went full time after we raised money from friends and family, we raised 275k. So I don't even, I don't count that in the same category as VC. Yes, it is raising money, but it's closer to bootstrapping. [00:48:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:33] Speaker B: And the decision making would be very similar as if it was just my money and I was splitting my focus or something than if we raised 100. Biggest differences would be pricing. There's no way I would be doing a dollar 49 a month plan and looking at, like, how do I get 10,000 customers in the next two years? That would not cross my mind at all. I would be doing it for three to $500 a month and ask myself, how do I get 200 customers over the next six months? [00:49:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:02] Speaker B: So that, I think that is probably one of the biggest changes. And that starts to dictate your signup flow, your marketing, your ICP. It affects everything. So right now we are very purposely going very wide and very horizontal. And I am happy when a real estate company signs up and happy when a doctor signs up and happy when a vet signs up. [00:49:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:26] Speaker B: Whereas normally if I was bootstrapping, I would be like, I have a problem. Yeah. [00:49:31] Speaker A: The focus would be much more on getting, like, first revenue in the door. [00:49:34] Speaker B: Yes, yes. So now the beginning is a horror show, but the middle stage sounds a lot healthier if it's bootstrapped. [00:49:48] Speaker A: If it's bootstrapped, yeah, yeah. If you can get past the, like, the hardest part, which is the first year. [00:49:54] Speaker B: Right. [00:49:55] Speaker A: Something off the ground, something with traction and mrr. [00:49:58] Speaker B: Yes. Getting to a million in ARR over the span of a year in a bootstrapped environment. [00:50:06] Speaker A: Oh, you're golden. [00:50:07] Speaker B: Your goal is a dream. You are golden. [00:50:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:11] Speaker B: But doing that in VC means phase one, you know, and out of ten. Okay, cool. We've gotten here. Now, how do we do it? You know, get to 3 million? How do we go from three to ten and how do we do it within three years? [00:50:26] Speaker A: And I talked about this, but I made what you just described, that same calculation of you exited a previous business, you would have taken something like tiny seed or one of these or friends and family. I did that in 2021. At the start of zip message, I had sold audience ops. I took a big chunk, not all of it, like a chunk of that. I reinvested it and sort of funded the first eight months of, of zipmessage myself. And then I took some investment from company fund. I think looking back at it at the time, I feel like that calculation was right from my standpoint, at the time, because like you said, how can we just pad the Runway to give this enough time to. To give us a chance of getting that traction? But looking back on it now, a few years later, obviously it didn't pan out to the point where it's like we didn't reach escape velocity with it, and now it's just puttering along. I wish I could have stayed fully bootstrapped and not taken any outside investment. That would have been the move, but it would have meant investing a lot more personal cash for a much longer period of time. But I think also, for me personally, I think taking some investment of any form is what influenced me to truly be all in on this. One B two B SaaS bet, which was not at traction. It had some early signs of traction, but we were not profitable by any means. If I had remained bootstrapped, I would have maybe seen the same type of traction while also spinning up some consulting services or spinning up this and that and having a healthier bootstrapped portfolio than I ended up with. [00:52:30] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. Right now, I am comfortable with. With the path, not only because it's already. We're already on the path. There's no changing it. But I can see enough, the set of options is good enough and wide enough that I do not feel like this becoming the biggest voice agent business ever, doing a billion dollar revenue. I do not see that as the only outcome. We didn't raise that much money. Our valuation didn't go that crazy. I'm amazed we didn't talk about the bolt CEO in this entire podcast, by the way. I'm proud of myself. So I think there's still options. Yep, yep, yep. And the only thing that matters is just getting that initial lift. [00:53:21] Speaker A: That's it. [00:53:22] Speaker B: That's it. [00:53:22] Speaker A: That is it, man. I mean, it does have. It still makes me think right now, I still feel like I had a more clear direction on, like, what's the thing that I'm going to actually invest multiple months into growing? It could be any of these new SaaS product ideas. Like, sunrise dashboard is something that I'm still sort of looking at. But again, it's still the question of, like, how do you bootstrap this? Because for that same reason, knowing what I know now, I'm not interested in taking really any form of investment, at least where, from where I stand right now, I'm looking for the most efficient way to bootstrap. And for me, that's cobbling together consulting income and product income from a few different sources. [00:54:11] Speaker B: I think you're better off doing exactly what you're doing than looking for outside money or anything. And it takes a little longer and you have to stretch the attention to multiple things. But as soon as one thing, one thing proves itself able to grow, you are much better off that. You own it. You can decide what to do with it. You can sell it, keep it, grow it, focus on it. Keep it as a side thing like that is very, very valuable, that set of options. [00:54:41] Speaker A: Do that. All right. We got a good Thursday episode for you today. [00:54:46] Speaker B: Yes. Thanks for listening, everyone. [00:54:48] Speaker A: All right. Later, folks.