Podcasts about aw yeah

Batman is a loner. Except for Alfred, the Robins, the Batgirls, Signal, Batwoman and the Justice League. But before many of those characters, there was Ace the Bathound, the first of numerous Bat pets, mostly brought into the cave by Damian, another noted loner , and that club now includes Titus, Alfred the tuxedo cat and Batcow. Another noted dog lover is this week's Patreon backer, Dan Grote, who asked us for stories about Bat pets. So we're going into all ages territory for some Scooby Doo and Tiny Titans, and then reading what might be the most heart warming story Mark Russell ever wrote. A Dog-gone Crisis (Scooby-Doo Team-Up # 18 [Digital 35-36]) Aw Yeah, Pet Club! (Tiny Titans # 13,17,21,23,28,33) Hounded (Batman: Urban Legends # 11-16) Check out our current ranking list at www.comicsxf.com/batchat-rankings/ Thanks to Geri Nonnewitz for our podcast logo Follow the show on Twitter @BatChatComics and support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/batchatwithmattandwill

You're gonna love this episode! Carmela teams up with Will Krasnoff and CHRIS HOLLISTER against Jonathan and Sara Callori with Zahkia in the host's chair. Too much fun! Enjoy! Sponsored By: www.sporclecon.com - Use the code TWA to get 10% off your ticket!

Predictions for 2024. and other stuff

The Penultimate episode of Aw Yeah April focuses on Aw Yeah NY with the disembodied voice of Ben Houx (and sometimes his bird Sinestro) joining host Nick Jones for a great chat?For all of your Aw Yeah needs click the link!AwYeahComics.comLike the pagefacebook.com/AwYeahComicsNY

Aw Yeah April rolls on with (Three Time!) returning guest Dr. Christy Blanch talking with host Nick Jones about her Aw Yeah Muncie shop!Remember to check out all things Aw Yeah!awyeahcomics.com

This episode kicks off Aw Yeah April with Nick Jones being joined by the manager of Aw Yeah Skokie Joe Crohn!All the Aw Yeah you need:awyeahcomics.com

Franco! Franco! Franco! A co-founder of the beloved Aw Yeah! chain of shops and a creator himself, Franco knows what's going on in the world of comic books. From Tiny Titans and Deadman Tales to his new Fae and the Moon (dropping February 21), his projects capture the imagination of all ages. _____________________________________________If you liked this podcast, please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And tell your friends!Looking for more ways to express your undying DBB love and devotion? Email us at dollarbinbandits@gmail.com. Follow us @dollarbinbandits on Facebook and Instagram, and @DBBandits on Twitter.

Aw Yeah, welcome to WE LOVE COMICS! A comics podcast where we love comics, AND YOU SHOULD TOO! I am Vactor and I'm joined by Black Nerd Power's own Markus Seaberry! And Twitch.TV's own Hunter Camp! On today's episode we are joined by William Goodman! He's a comedically tall comic book fan and sometimes writer @complex and @gq Be sure to check out Goodman's review of Love and Thunder at Complex Giant-Sized Topic: Thor: Love and Thunder Review! If you like this video watch some of our past episodes! We Love Comics is a part of the Geek So To Speak Podcast Network: The Sandbox Gamers is our Video Game podcast TREKnological is our Star Trek podcast GeekSoToSpeak is our Geek News podcast Check out Seaberry reviewing movies on CineSundry and podcasting on Black Nerd Power, Hunter Camp streaming on Twitch and William Goodman at https://twitter.com/Goodmanw Thank you to Bre for our ad! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/comicbookkaiju/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/comicbookkaiju/support

Hey Fellas, If you find music from popular shows or movies, you are fake. HAHA. Just kidding. Do what you want. Listen to what you like. If Stranger Things says hey Kate Bush and you say hey yeah Kate Bush, that is fine. That is cool even. AW YEAH. Be cool. Just gotta be cool. If you are not being cool to others and their musical tastes you are either me during childhood or making an error. We all make mistakes. I made that one for years. Don't follow in my footsteps. I have let you all down this time around. But, I made it. I no longer rag on people for what they like. Except for Nickelback sometimes. You know it is a hard one. Setting aside biases and just letting people do their thing. It is my lifelong goal and something I work on every single day. HEY : notatalkshowpodcast@gmail.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/notatalkshow/support

Check out this week's episode, all about how to align your content, prepare, and perform in the moment on the "free stages" (like a podcast!)- all while establishing and deepening those powerful networking relationships. Aw YEAH!

On this preview special of Small Market Insecurities, StatGuy Nate gives a preview of the 122nd US Open Championship at The Country Club. Let StatGuy give you the brief 411 on what to listen and watch for as you tune in this weekend, and keep your ears peeled for who Degenerate Nate has his money on this weekend! Follow our socials! @smallmarketins - Twitter, @smallmarketinsecurities - Instagram, @smallmktinsecurities - Tik Tok --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Aw Yeah, welcome to We Love Comics! A comics podcast where we love comics, AND YOU SHOULD TOO! Seaberry's Opening Rants: New figga alert! Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is the fifth studio album by American rapper Kendrick Lamar Pull-List: Seaberry read - Devil's Reign: Omega (2022) #1, and Sci-Fu Vol. 1 and Sci-Fu Vol. 2 (It Takes 2) Vactor read - Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2018) #16 and The Amazing Spider-Man #2 We Love Comics is a part of the Geek So To Speak Podcast Network: The Sandbox Gamers is our Video Game podcast TREKnological is our Star Trek podcast Check out Seaberry reviewing movies on CineSundry and podcasting on Black Nerd Power and Hunter Camp streaming on Twitch! Thank you to Bre for our ad! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/comicbookkaiju/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/comicbookkaiju/support

Episode 405 This is another video episode attempt with some unpacking of Zombie Tramp Kickstarter stuff and Art Baltazar Aw Yeah! comics items along with some more Free Comic Book Day reviews and whatever else. Send comments, questions and tips to kevintheduckpool@gmail.com please help us out by rating and reviewing us and telling a friend. Also check out audio and video versions of Crimson Cowl Comic Club & Under the Cowl podcasts. A fun variety of great people talk comic books, entertainment or whatever and you can see or hear me on many episodes of those podcasts as well with many more great episodes to come out in the future. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/support

Episode 397 The first episode where you can veiw the podcast on Spotify for the first time or still get it on audio wherever else you listen to Under the Cowl of MS, watch me setting up my new podcasting area and opening stuff and some entertainment talk and whatever. Send comments, questions and tips to kevintheduckpool@gmail.com please help us out by rating and reviewing us and telling a friend. Also check out audio and video versions of Crimson Cowl Comic Club & Under the Cowl podcasts. A fun variety of great people talk comic books, entertainment or whatever and you can see or hear me on many episodes of those podcasts as well with many more great episodes to come out in the future. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/support

Episode 381 To fill in for no episode of Crimson Cowl Comic Club this week I decided to put out a comic book style (spoiler cast) episode for people missing out. Comic talk about Life With Archie #283, Hellblazer Special Bad Blood (A Restoration Comedy) #1-4, Solid State Tank Girl #2, Solo Avengers starring Hawkeye and Mockingbird #1. There is some Aw Yeah! Comics talk and some Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie revue with minor spoiler. Send comments, questions and tips to kevintheduckpool@gmail.com please help us out by rating and reviewing us and telling a friend. Also check out audio and video versions of Crimson Cowl Comic Club & Under the Cowl podcasts. A fun variety of great people talk comic books, entertainment or whatever and you can see or hear me on many episodes of those podcasts as well with many more great episodes to come out in the future. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/support

Episode 380 Comic Book talk about Aw Yeah Comics ! # 7-9, Dr. Strange #16, Quantum and Woody #4, Quantum Leap #6, The Savage Dragon #1, 13, Cartoon Network Scooby-Doo! #36, Speed Racer crossover featuring Ninja High School #1, WCW World Championship Wrestling #3. Multiple Sclerosis Health Talk about Assisted Devices, Dementia, SAD Seasonal Affected Disorder and other stuff with health and MS. Send comments, questions and tips to kevintheduckpool@gmail.com please help us out by rating and reviewing us and telling a friend. Also check out audio and video versions of Crimson Cowl Comic Club & Under the Cowl podcasts. A fun variety of great people talk comic books, entertainment or whatever and you can see or hear me on many episodes of those podcasts as well with many more great episodes to come out in the future. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/support

Episode 376 To fill in for no episode of Crimson Cowl Comic Club this week I decided to put out a comic book style (spoiler cast) episode for people missing out. Comic talk about Dark Ages #6, Hellblazer and the Books of Magic #1 & 2 of 2, Quad #3, Saga #28-31, 37, 41, 43, 50, 57, Tiny Titans #22. There is some Aw Yeah! Comics talk and some Morbius movie revue with minor spoiler. Send comments, questions and tips to kevintheduckpool@gmail.com please help us out by rating and reviewing us and telling a friend. Also check out audio and video versions of Crimson Cowl Comic Club & Under the Cowl podcasts. A fun variety of great people talk comic books, entertainment or whatever and you can see or hear me on many episodes of those podcasts as well with many more great episodes to come out in the future. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kevin-kleinhans/support

with appearances by michael caine donald trump paul mccartney john lennon and bruce willis

The one and only Shinyribs joins us. Aw Yeah!!!

Aw Yeah baybee!  It's time for another episode of America's only podcast, Late To The Table.  Does the 2007 David Cronenberg film Eastern Promises hold up in 2022?  Who brings a dong to a knife fight?  What animal would you feel comfortable having sex in front of? FIND OUT NOW.

FULL SHOW NOTES[INTRO music]0:00:11.4 Aaron Weiche: Episode 31, SaaS is a marathon, not a sprint.0:00:16.2 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno, and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.0:00:42.2 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:45.4 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:47.0 AW: And if SaaS was a sprint, I would just already be collapsed at the finish line. And I probably wouldn't have finished first in my heat anyway Darren just...0:00:58.4 DS: Yeah, me too.[laughter]0:01:00.6 AW: COVID has taken its toll on my physical well-being. I need to keep working on getting that back under control, so... How have you been? 0:01:10.9 DS: Oh, I've been so busy. I've been...0:01:14.6 AW: Yes you have.0:01:15.4 DS: It's... The last few days have been nice 'cause I'm like, "Oh, just got so much free time now." But the summit, yeah, so we put on another local search summit, 30 speakers, three days, Holly, that is an endeavor. It's a lot of work to put on a virtual conference like that. And so it was all-consuming for the last couple of months, for sure. And all consuming for Jessie Low our marketing manager for the past six to eight months, for sure. And it was very successful. So I thought it was great. We had 3000 registered attendees. Lots of fantastic feedback. I think we did an even better job this year than we did last year, incredible speakers, an incredible talk. So I thought it was great. We came out profitable in the end. So, we're happy to break even because it's more of a marketing play than a money-making thing.0:02:13.2 DS: And a brand exercise, and we're really just trying to build our brand with the summit. And so we definitely got that and we didn't lose money on it. So there was some profit in the end so that was good. We're all a success. I have a post-mortem call scheduled with Jessie this afternoon and Sydney to discuss what went well, what didn't go well, and what changes we'd make for next year. That's what's going on with me. That's it.0:02:40.8 AW: Yeah, no, and I totally get... And you and I were texting a little bit last week during it, and even inside of those three days you had highs and lows, right? 0:02:51.6 DS: Oh man, it's the roller coaster of emotion. It's just like, yeah, I felt kind of low on the second day. I was like, "Oh, why are we doing this? My life is a failure."[laughter]0:03:05.7 DS: And then like day three, at the end of it, I just felt like just so elated with how well it went. That's just the life of a founder.0:03:15.0 AW: Yep, no. Same roller coaster as being a founder, right. I probably should have just taken a screenshot where one of your text was like the low, like, "Oh I'm second guessing everything." And then a couple of texts later was the next day and you're like, "Everything is awesome."[laughter]0:03:34.1 DS: Totally. Yeah, that's how I felt about the summit. Now I've kinda settled somewhere in the middle. Just trying to evaluate it logically and think about like, alright, is this a valuable thing for us to do and do we wanna invest so much effort into it next year? 0:03:48.6 AW: Well, one thing that I definitely noticed from the sales side of me is you put in a lot more calls to action for your products and services and things like that, and the breaks and slides and different things like that. Do you have zero visibility... Right, we're on the couple of work days outside of the event ending, do you have any visibility to... If that's made an impact or will it be something that you'll let run a little bit and then evaluate? 0:04:23.0 DS: Yeah, we've had a couple of really big days since the summit. And so I do think like I could tell just straight up finances being like, "Well, that was a good day." And then a couple days later, "Well, that's another good day." And so seeing that and noticing how close that was to the close of the summit feels definitely like there is a direct business boost. More sign-ups that kind of stuff. And so I wanna give it a bit more time because a lot of people don't take immediate action. They're like, "Oh, I saw the summit, I learned about this thing at Whitespark summit." And a week or two, or three or four later, they finally get around to signing up for the thing or trying our software. And so I'm gonna give it a month and then I wanna do a comparison of our accounts, like new accounts and new sign-ups from that period... From the last period and cross-reference it with attendees at the summit and then we'll see. Yeah.0:05:21.1 AW: Awesome. Well, I can only think or feel that it will be stronger than other things you've done just because I have either been a part or have watched other things that you've done all the way from your weekly videos to things like that. And this by far in a way was your most sophisticated or visual call to actions with what Whitespark offers and does. So I think that's a really good step forward, as you and I have discussed in some of our conversations like, "Man, you crush at education, you crush it, putting stuff out there." You have a lot of opportunity in the trade. I'll give you all these great things. Please just listen to how our tools and services can support you in some of these things that you're doing. And just being a little more firm in asking them to do a free trial or to look into your services and tools. I felt like you really... I was looking at that and part of me was like, "Oh, this is good. This is good, do those things Darren." So good job.0:06:30.5 DS: Yeah, calls to action. You gotta call them to action, if you want them to take action, you should give them a call.0:06:36.3 AW: Yes, it's great, it's great to be top of mind because of all the goodwill and how you've positioned yourself as an expert... Yeah, those things are totally great. And so in six months, if they have a customer that needs something specific that folds into that. Yes, you will likely be top of mind because of how you've established yourself. But there's a lot of people that you can get to take a next step, while they're also feeling that euphoria and feeling like, "Oh, I'm learning new things, it's time to do new things, it's time to change a tool I'm using or to start using something like this, and now I have trust and I have excitement and I wanna do it right now." So just make that road really... Or that bridge really easy for them to cross.0:07:19.4 DS: Totally. Well, you're a master at all of that, so I always appreciate your advice and yeah, I agree that that's a key thing that I'm really trying to get better at, and I appreciate you pushing me on some of that.0:07:32.3 AW: Yeah, well, like I said, if you look at the world of like, you can only get what you give, you give. So I totally think you asking for a little get, that's no problem at all. And speaking of that, you had to compile and put out the local search ranking factors report as well, which is a massive undertaking.0:07:56.1 DS: That... Yeah, so that was a big part of what consumed me leading up to the conference, 'cause not only did I have to deal with some organization. Jessie, of course, took care of most of it. But it was really just compiling the data and analyzing the data and putting my own presentation together. That was a ton of work for sure, and so now that that's off my back, I just feel very light right now, but I do have to get around to writing up my findings into a blog post and get it published.0:08:26.3 AW: Yeah. When do you exhale harder? When you log off the summit on the last day? Or when you wake up the next day and you just don't have all of that hanging on you? 0:08:38.7 DS: Yeah. I felt pretty relaxed after the moment the summit ended, I was like, "Yeah cool, I don't have it, I don't have to do a anything." And then the next day, actually, I had a bunch of wrap-ups stuff I had to deal with, so... Yeah.0:08:55.1 AW: So you clicked close and then you're just like, "Joe, get me a beer." [chuckle]0:09:01.3 DS: Well, I would have gotten my own beer. I would never... I would never do that, that would not go over very well. So I'm very capable of fetching my own beer.0:09:11.1 AW: I just meant in a celebratory way, right? 0:09:14.4 DS: Yes, I definitely did go down to the beer fridge, yes, immediately.0:09:18.8 AW: And just possibly being passed out in your chair. Like nonstop, three days, all of the emotions, everything else, you might have just been tapped out, so.0:09:29.2 DS: I was very tapped out. Absolutely.0:09:31.3 AW: Oh, awesome.0:09:31.3 DS: How about you? What's up with you these days? 0:09:34.7 AW: Since we talked just the week before we were launching, so Leadferno has launched, and it's gone okay, there hasn't been any part of it where I'm like, "Oh my gosh." We talked before, I wanted to hit 50 trials, and you said 10. And yeah, we were closer to 10 than 50, so you were spot on there ...0:10:04.3 DS: Wait, didn't I say the opposite? You said 10, and I was like, "No way, you can get like 700."0:10:09.8 AW: No, no, no [laughter] you were more of the voice of reason with it, but it was... It definitely went well. And I look at... Right, it's not like the world was waiting for this, and the fact that news broke, that Leadferno has launched, didn't send people running into the streets and...0:10:31.4 DS: Yeah. I did see it on CNN actually, that was huge. That was huge.0:10:35.6 AW: That would be bad. I can't imagine a scenario where I get that kind of press of something great, it would be like, Leadferno took down the internet, everyone is mad. I don't know what else.0:10:47.5 DS: That's right. Weren't you responsible for that Facebook outage? That was you guys, right? Just so much traffic, you just ruined the servers.0:10:56.2 AW: I was... That was interesting, between the... When the whistle blower interview happened, and then the next day they have that outage, it's hard to believe like, "Oh, maybe someone inside was also like, yeah, I'm not gonna go that far, but I'll sabotage something on the inside to make an outage."0:11:09.4 DS: I know. That would get me wondering.0:11:11.9 AW: Yeah, very interesting situation. So things have been progressing well as we get more into our topic, I can talk about some of my early learnings and then just the actions you have to take off of those learnings and conversations and things like that. But mostly working really hard on just any amount of publicity, trying to do as many podcast interviews, webinars, presentations like mine at the local search summit. So just trying to get as many mentions, shares, links, all of those things. Because it takes a lot to get that ball rolling. I'm just starting to see some of it now, where we're getting this past week, where I'm getting some inbound leads, that it's like, "Okay, great." And without... It isn't any one of those things, it's just knowing like, "Okay, I now have 10 of those things out in the universe, and a month ago I had only two or three."0:12:19.9 AW: So continuing to work on those and then lastly, I spent all last week in San Francisco and was at the SaaStr Annual, which is probably the largest SaaS conference. Normally, it's like a 10,000 plus person event, they limited it to 5000, it was all outdoors, it was at a fair grounds in San Mateo, just south of San Francisco. And yeah, it was really, really well done, you had to be vaxxed to attend, you had to have a negative test within 72 hours, and they provided test there, so like the day before the event, we went there to pick up our badges and got a COVID test there, and that all worked out well, and yeah, you were just... You were always outdoors.0:13:17.5 AW: And yeah, just felt... I felt really easy. It was great, it was great to be around people and energy, it was nice to have in-person learning, and then also be able to network and talk with people. It was just so great to talk shop with vendors that were there, or talk shop with other people running other SaaS businesses in between. So it was definitely like an uplifting week for sure. It was one of those like, "Oh man, I've missed a bunch of these things and I don't have another one on my calendar again," but it felt really good for three, four days to do all that.0:14:00.5 DS: That's amazing. I can't imagine the state of our particular province in Canada is really bad, our COVID situation is worse it's ever been. And so I dream of one day getting back to this, like being able to go to an in-person conference over here, I just... I miss everybody, I miss seeing people, I don't see anybody, to my immediate family.0:14:23.3 AW: Yeah, no, definitely. It's definitely tricky, but like I said, this one I looked at, alright, from all the measures that are there and everything else, I'm like for the state that things are right now, I couldn't ask them to go through too many other precautions and...0:14:43.8 DS: Sounds like they did a great job with all the... Being careful with things and trying to be as safe as possible at it. Do people wear masks outside or not really? 0:14:55.4 AW: I would say maybe 5%.0:14:58.0 DS: Sure.0:14:58.7 AW: I mean it was really very little. People... They could if you wanted to, when we went to check-in, we were masked the first day until we tested, and were tested negative. But yeah, once we were then at the event, and it does feel where you're like, "Okay, all of these people," yes, we all have different interactions and who we've been around, and how we conduct our personal choices on our own time. But when you... It definitely felt a little bit of like, "Alright, everybody here is vaccinated, everybody here has been tested within a few days of being here." So... I don't know, it felt as secure as it could, I guess.0:15:41.1 DS: Any mind-blowing take-aways? Where you're like, "Oh my God, that's the greatest idea. I'm definitely gonna do that at Leadferno," you just went to a three day SaaS conference.0:15:49.3 AW: I know, I mean, the short answer to that is no. And I think there's some interesting things in... And this is kind of the segue, this came up like, this is what I wanted to talk about in the phrase of marathon not a sprint. One, I look at in prior years, this is the fourth or fifth SaaStr that I've been to, and I usually have had one of those like... Just something more probably tactical to help bring back to the business or put into it. I think two things, my current state, one, I've spent a good amount of time and have done a lot of things in SaaS where... And heard a lot of, read a lot of... So you have all of those aspects. So you're coming at it from a different position, and in Leadferno being so new, there's also what we have in front of us for next steps and biggest needs are really known, and really the only things we should be focusing on.0:16:57.1 DS: Sure.0:16:57.6 AW: So there's a little bit of... There are plenty of things that I looked at, especially when you're looking at software solutions and things like that. And I found myself just saying, "I can't wait until I need a solution for that."0:17:09.5 DS: Yeah, totally.0:17:11.2 AW: I don't have the volume or the complexity or any of these things to even worry about that or need that, I have my own fish to fry right now. So yeah, it was kind of a combo of those two things. But really the big thing for me... And that's again, what led to the title of this is I walked away just really realizing that, no matter if you're where I'm at like me, where it's like, "Hey, we have a $1000 in MRR right now, and we got a long way to go to get us where we need to be." And then you're talking to someone else at the conference that's at $250,000 ARR, and they wanna be... They wanna get to half a million by the end of the year, or someone who's at half a million and they can't wait till they're a million or someone at a million, and they wanna be five or 10. Everyone is at a stage in their company, and that stage has its challenges and things to figure out, and some of them might be specific to the company and the founders and what they're good at and what they lack experience in or have as a challenge, and others are just systematic of the stage that you're at.0:18:24.8 AW: Maybe it sounds weird, but I like... The biggest thing I got was some calm out of it. Because at the stage I'm at right now, it's like you feel like every day matters so much to get something done and accomplish and to talk to a handful of prospects and do whatever else. And the conference just really made me zoom out and realize everything I do in these days is important, it is all contributing. What this really is, it's a long-term game of survival, it's running the long race, even though every day is like a sprint, you're pealing 100 yards off the marathon that you're trying to... To try run with it. So that was probably my biggest take away, and that's what led me... That's why I texted you, I'm like, "Yeah, we need to record. This is what I'd like to talk about." And it was really helping me with that frame of mind, and so that's where I just thought us talking about, what is... What is your... What is what. "What's keeping you up at night right now? That feels like a super short-term thing, but solving, doing that short-term thing is what allows you to stay in the game, to run the marathon to be long-term."0:19:39.0 DS: Yeah. If I was to answer that question for myself, it's really like every day we're sprinting on our existing applications, which is frustrating because it slows progress on the bigger vision of building a new product. So if I think about our long-term or two years, five years, then I know exactly what we're gonna have at that point, but it just feels painful to get there, it's just like... I have to find some calm because it feels like it's just taking forever. And so something that I thought was gonna be launched by the end of September is now looking more like the end of October, and then it just everything gets longer and longer. I understand the reasons for it when I talk to the Dev team and then I'm like, "Oh hey, how come were so behind?" It's like, "Well, because we just spent three weeks fixing that problem on our other product." So what do you do? It's really tough to get there, and I think you just gotta recognize that it's the way it's gonna be. It's always gonna take longer than you think.0:20:49.8 AW: Yeah. Unfortunately. Some of the decisions to not make it take longer end up being just really hard decisions where... We've had these conversations before where you have to say no to something else because it's getting in the way of being able to accomplish those other things. And when you're weighing out what's the priority, what's the impact, and sometimes just really... Who's this decision for? Is this so I sleep easier at night? Or will this actually cost us something? Do we gain something in doing this? Does it cost us something in not doing it? There's just so many strands to it, and as founders and leaders, we can just be so emotional about those decisions where maybe they're not an emotional decision sometimes, but because we're so invested, we can't separate ourselves from those at the same time.0:21:48.8 DS: Yeah, totally. What's keeping you up at night? What are the things that you're struggling with? 0:21:57.5 AW: Yeah. I have two just big items right now, one was a known is like, I knew this was gonna be what people were saying, I need this, you're missing this, whatever else, and that was our mobile apps. So one, we made the decision in being a communication service and around text messaging, that we weren't gonna build... When we built our web app first for power users more than anything else, that we weren't going to build it responsive. Because if they were able to use a responsive version of it in web, from snappiness of it, access of it, push notifications, there's a bunch of different things and when we outline our technical scope and where users were interact, it was like, yes, it would allow them to use it on mobile. But then if we had users that didn't download the app and just kept using it on mobile, like that experience was gonna fall short, it was gonna degrade over time because we were... Once we have native apps, we weren't gonna put anything into that.0:23:11.8 AW: So, we always clearly knew we were gonna build a web app first because that was gonna be more difficult based on our approach and our build, and it would allow us the easier way to do some of the settings and account-based things and whatever else. So that then when we did a fast follow and we built the mobile apps, they would be streamlined only focused on the communication back and forth with the customer and contacts and things like that, and be lightweight and be around, centered on productivity with it.0:23:44.7 AW: And we even made the choices right in using Flutter for development, so it's like right now, we're a couple of weeks into work on the mobile apps, and that work is just going 6X faster than if we have built in one language and then we say, "Alright, now we're gonna go and build in these others," and if anything, we're just removing things only related to mobile or only related to the web. So that one was the known and we knew it and it's on the road map and we knew that there would just be... We're gonna launch and then there's gonna be four to six, eight weeks max, where people are like, "Oh, I love this, but I want it on my phone." And then we just have to say, alright, we have to wait for this time.0:24:29.7 DS: Do you feel particularly happy with the 10 sign-ups that you have right now, considering you don't have some of these things? Like, you know like, "Hey, this is our entry level experience and we're already meeting your needs, and so we're doing pretty good, we don't have the mobile app, we don't have integrations, we don't have some of these things that you feel like you need." And so does that make you feel pretty good about where you're at already? 0:25:00.2 AW: A little bit. I would definitely be worried if I had no one, then I'd be like, "Oh boy, we got a problem here." But yeah, I would probably... I would feel better if I was at two to three times where we're at with paying customers right now. That would just... A little bit more statistical but I'm happy we're slowly working our way out of counting customers on two hands. That's great that we're moving on to toes now.0:25:31.1 DS: That's right.0:25:32.7 AW: So I would love to exceed fingers and toes, I'd feel a little bit better on that side. It does affect... Especially the way I am like, I am a little bit apprehensive on sales calls and demos, just 'cause I'm like, "I know this is gonna get asked." I've done enough of these now, I've done somewhere between 50-75 demos, and it's almost every time. So it's easy to understand and yeah, the entire time I've always had an answer that like, "That mobile would be a fast follow," all of those kind of things.0:26:07.9 AW: And then we discussed, and I played out the scenario in my head, if we did things the opposite, if we would have done just mobile only, the load of what we would have had to build for some of the settings things and things like all the saved replies and stuff like that, would have been a lot trickier. So we wouldn't have gotten to market as fast with our initial product, then developing the web would be a little bit... So it's like doing things the other way, so to say like, "Oh, well to get rid of your mobile objection, you should have just built mobile first." That would have caused some other problems and issues and elongated the process a little bit, so... I feel good with the way that we approached it and what we bit off first with what's there. And it's just living through the frustration of the next handful of weeks where it's like, "I'm gonna get the question, I don't have an immediate yes. It's coming. Here's what we're predicting right now, as far as the date."0:27:10.1 DS: I often think of like building a SaaS company and a SaaS product, sort of like building a high-rise tower in the middle of the city, and it's like you build the first floor and you're like, "Move on in!" "Yeah, we're already leasing the first floor." "I know we're still building like the next 100 floors on top of it, but, hey, we're ready for you to move in. Don't mind the construction."0:27:37.5 AW: It's only gonna get better.0:27:39.2 DS: Exactly. Yeah. Believe we're putting a pool in on the third floor, we're putting in a fitness center on the fifth floor. It's gonna be great.0:27:49.8 AW: No, I mean you're totally... I hear that. And that fits in with the marathon, not a sprint analogy as well.0:27:57.2 DS: Totally, yeah.0:27:57.4 AW: Where it's like, yeah, you're not just building a single story building, and you're done and whatever else. It's like, "No, you're trying to get this thing to exponentially add floors continually to what's there. And even on that side, I think I can comment on some of that like, messaging and the evolution of those things too, but, the second item that's of main focus is just integrations, and this is the one where I knew this would come up, I didn't know it would come up so strongly and repeatedly.0:28:34.3 DS: Right.0:28:34.9 AW: And I think that being a blind spot is kind of a couple of things. One is just maturity in time, where, you know the last time I had this immature of a product was five years ago, and the world of software is a lot different, and the expectation has become that your software can talk to others. And then I hadn't built something that was so ingrained in the sales and communication process as you know, what GatherUp was and sending surveys afterwards and things like that, like the integration needs there were very light and some very straightforward things. We get asked instead of, I thought, "Oh, I bet about 25%, 30% of the time we're gonna get asked about integrations, we know what we need to do, they're more on our medium plan timeframe instead of short-term." But yeah, it became super clear to me in the first two weeks after launch, like this needs to be on our short-term plan. We have to get something accomplished here, because this is also being brought up 80%, 90% of the time.0:29:47.5 DS: Are you able to identify based off of your initial calls, like, "What is the number one we have to integrate with this as soon as possible because it's so common, and it's like you're getting a lot of people saying, "This is the thing."0:29:58.4 AW: Yeah, absolutely.0:30:01.1 DS: What is the thing? 0:30:02.0 AW: Yeah, top is CRMs. It's all updating the conversation into the contacts or having the contact created because the conversation is created, so that by far. The action that we've taken from that is we immediately started to look and talk to a couple of freelancers and then a vendor that's all they do is build apps, Zapier apps and integration, so we talked to a couple of those and we selected a vendor, and then we just started work this week on our Zapier app.0:30:40.7 DS: That's interesting. So you're outsourcing. You're like, we gotta get this to market quick, this is necessary, and so you don't have the dev resources, so you're like, "We're going to hire this outside team to start building our integrations right now."0:30:53.6 AW: Yeah, so one, having built a Zapier app before, I know that it's right, its own kind of nomenclature for how they want things done, and any developer can read up on it, study it, do whatever else, but I'd be asking... I looked at it, I'd be taking one of our small team and saying, "Okay, none of you have ever done this before, but within a few days, you'll get it." "You'll have some blind spots and some pitfalls and whatever else, but I'm also pulling you off of something you know how to do really well and asking you to learn that new thing." And this is kind of a shorter term like a get it done type thing. So, when I weigh those things out, it's like, "Alright, I can take it to these guys, have delivery of this within 20 working days, and I'm not sacrificing someone else from the team, taking them from a strength and putting them into having to learn something new." So yeah, it was just really pretty easy to say like, "Okay, I would love if we weren't paying on top of till I get this accomplished," but this is gonna be... It's gonna be faster, quicker.0:32:03.6 AW: We're also getting their expertise because my last Zapier app we weren't integrating with CRMs, so I was able to say like, "Okay, here's similar products. What do you guys think we should be creating for triggers and actions and the integrations in the Zapier ecosystem?" And you know they have experience in doing this, so they're able to outline it and you know make it pretty clear on us what we needed to do, and also outline a couple of things like... Our product is built API-driven, the back-end is node, so we have all the APIs and everything else, but there's a few things for how a customer might wanna set up an integration and handle something that they're like, "You might wanna create variances of this or you might wanna make this more real-time and build a web hook off it," so they were able to outline some of those things that we can pick apart over to... We won't do all of them right away, but they have recommendations where we can say like, "Okay, we wanna try to get these one to two done while you're building, but then these other ones we know that they'll probably come up based on your experience and they're at least on our radar to start creating them."0:33:13.6 DS: Yeah, it makes me think about like it's like another aspect of that marathon is limited development resources. It's like you can only build so much. And so it's that constant prioritizing and pushing things to next month and pushing things to next quarter and this will be something that we're gonna tackle next year, and if I had double my dev team, triple, quadruple. I see some companies, they have like 100 developers and they have 100 developers, and I'm like, "How are you not pumping out incredible stuff every week?" It's like you have 100 developers, but your product looks like it hasn't done anything exciting for months. So, it blows my mind. I don't know how companies... I can't imagine. How does that happen when you get to that scale of a huge company and you're still not innovating? That's really bizarre.0:34:07.3 AW: Well, you end up with technical debt.0:34:10.9 DS: Yeah.0:34:11.2 AW: You end up with a lot of dependencies, you've likely built so much that there's no... And we got to this point six years in at GatherUp. There wasn't anything that was like a yes, no. It was all if or maybe or also was it attached to everything, 'cause it's not like, "Yeah, it just can't be this because and how we did this or how we built this other feature and this also interacts with that, it's now competing, or it just has to be... Or now we have to build something that controls this, so these two things can be handled separately." You definitely get a lot of that every time, right? The same analogy of building the building up, once you get to the 60th floor, there are things like, "Okay well, we put a pool in on the 20th floor, and because of the weight of that, we can't do that how we want to... How much higher we wanna build, so we gotta go back and rip the pool out or fortify that more like... " All those things build up for sure, so.0:35:16.4 DS: Yeah, I guess that's how it happens as you just keep building it gets more complicated. Everything has to talk to each other and I'm facing that right now. And it's like I like your outsourcing idea. I have this one thing as a founder, every week I got some new thing I wanna build, but we don't have dev resources to do it, and so I'm like, I just pinged my lead developer this morning being like, "Hey, I wanna build this thing. How about I get it done over in Upwork?" I made the mistake last time of building something in Upwork and then it being completely useless. We'd love to integrate it with our software eventually, and so it's that tricky balance of building something in a way with the right technology so that we can still use it and integrate it into our larger software vision for later.0:36:02.4 AW: That's where the Zapier app makes sense because it is kind of on an island, right? 0:36:08.4 DS: Totally, it's perfect.0:36:09.4 AW: Yes, they have to use their API, but it has to follow the rules and the structure of how you build the Zapier app. So in that case, it isn't something like, "Oh well, yeah, we had this person build it, but now it's in a different language. We can't just mold it into ours at any time. And we need them forever in the Upkeep," like our team can learn and pick apart how it works, and we can do our own Upkeep as we get on the road if we need to, or we can make the decision again that, "No, we'll have them update it 'cause it'll be faster and we're focused on other things."0:36:49.2 DS: Yeah.0:36:49.4 AW: But yeah, so much of it comes out at the end of the day is like, when you're small and you need efficiency, the most efficient thing is people doing what they do best. I even know it for myself, the things that I'm good at, I can get more done than anyone I know with the things I'm good at. The things that I suck at, those take 10 times longer, right? It's just like, oh my God, this is never gonna end because I stink at it. I'm teaching it to myself at the same time. I don't enjoy it, so I'm like putting it off or...0:37:21.1 DS: Yes.0:37:21.5 AW: Procrastinating.0:37:22.6 DS: Procrastinating. Oh, totally. I know that feeling, like big projects where you're like, "Oh I hate doing this work," and then it just takes 10 times longer because you just pick away at it here and there, you'll work for a little bit and not enjoy it, but yeah 100% I agree.0:37:36.9 AW: Yeah. And I can see that even with one of our developers, he was stuck on our Stripe and billing and that wasn't his favorite thing, and it was hard at points and had to re-factor some stuff really quickly and whatever else. And now that he's working on the mobile app, in his work patterns and what he's sharing, in just the time and effort being put into it, I can tell totally this excites him.0:38:06.0 DS: Yeah.0:38:06.9 AW: He's excited to work on it, and the output is so much different than, "Oh, course, another dead-end on this and having to figure out this, like, 'Oh, I got a challenge, but hey, I'm gonna get it solved 'cause I wanna see this work at its next stage.'" So.0:38:20.0 DS: Sure. Yeah. Just thinking about that floors analogy is just you're just slowly putting on one floor at a time, just stepping through it and it takes a long time to build a company and going back to what you said about companies at those different stages. Everyone's looking to grow, even when you get to $10million, $50 million ARR, you just have more stuff to sort out and you've got the next mile to complete of your marathon, the next floor to put on your building.0:39:00.1 AW: Yeah. No, absolutely correct and even the last thing that it sparked in my mind and then it led me to just doing some of it last night is like going back and aligning web copy to the types of conversations that I'm having with customers, right? So it's like some of the web copy I wrote in February and March when we launched the marketing site and got that up there. Well, I've had hundreds of conversations with prospects and friends and people in the space. Everything else since then and my story has evolved like I've... It's allowed me to craft it better and realize what are people interested in? 0:39:40.9 DS: Right.0:39:41.6 AW: Where do we better align with those things, and so it's like going down that and it brought me to like, "Oh, I need to go back and look at those things, right?" I put in a sprint before, I'm getting content up and getting out there like what we are, but I've run further now, so I need to re-analyze it and go back on it and know, yeah this... There's a better version of it and one that's more succinct to what I'm seeing resonate with customers and the types of things they're asking about, my content should be answering. So from that standpoint, it just really made me realize like, "Oh, don't just leave that stale content out there," because you've evolved a bunch since you wrote that, you need to go back and bring that back up and do something new with it one way or the other.0:40:35.0 DS: Yeah. It's constant evolution, constant revision, tweaking, changing, progressing, growing, it's like... I don't know if you wanna call it a marathon that never ends? Or is it just one marathon after another? 0:40:48.5 AW: An ultra marathon. [laughter]0:40:50.6 DS: Yeah. Ironman.  You just keep doing all these different marathons, and so I don't know if it's like each product launch, each phase of your product launch, is that a marathon? And then you start another one? I don't know what the best analogy is.0:41:05.7 AW: Sounds like it, but I think it points out, Darren the reason... Then I also think like the emotional and the personal aspect sides of it as founders. And I think... You and I do in this podcast, it has multiple benefits, it's important for us to be able to talk about things out loud, it makes us reflect on things, it allows us to hear what the other person is going through, so you don't feel like you're alone with it. So I just think those things are really important inside of it too, is like, as you're going through this because it is so grueling, because it's long-term, because... Sometimes at certain points, you're just trying to survive, you're not even trying... You're not even trying to run your best time in mile 13, you're just trying to freaking get through it, so you can get to the next part of it is like, you have to think about those kind of things for yourselves too. Do you have the right outlets, taking care of yourself, especially the mental side. I don't know, as we opened with this, like the physical side, I need to get better at lately, like I spend way too much time just on my computer. I need to do a little bit more on the health side of things, but all of those things are so important so that you can make the long-term. You just can't crush yourself in some of these cycles of, this is do or die, this has to happen now, I need to get this done. Those can take their toll.0:42:31.7 DS: Yeah. That constant as a founder there's just stuff, that never-ending to-do list, that weight of all of the things that need to get done, that you wanna get done in order to progress and grow the company is just... It's pretty heavy, it's a lot to carry.0:42:47.3 AW: Yep. So make sure you have an outlet, make sure you're talking about it, or just even... Listen, listen to others, to know you're not alone in it, right? 0:42:58.0 DS: Yeah. And I hope that some of our listeners are feeling the benefits of that too, you're not alone, we're all in this together.0:43:04.4 AW: No. Darren and I... I struggle every day with certain aspects and just gotta keep pushing ahead so you can make it tomorrow to figure out the things tomorrow.0:43:15.0 DS: Yep, every day... The struggle.0:43:18.6 AW: Alright. Well, hey, let's call it a wrap, great to catch up with you. Happy that your load is hopefully lightened and hopefully you guys can finish the year strong and heads down on getting platform to its next steps. I know that's just such a big evolution for you guys. I really hope that can be your singular focus as you close out the end of the year.0:43:44.5 DS: Thank you, it is coming together and good luck with your mobile app and your integrations and the next phase of Leadferno. I'm excited to watch you grow through the rest of this year too.0:43:54.8 AW: No. I would love for our next episode... Or maybe we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. One of our episodes, the end of the year will be like, "We did it," and we've accomplished these bigger things and then we'll still have a bunch of other problems. But sometimes I'd rather have a bunch of small problems than a couple of the big ones, 'cause it's a lot to push that boulder up hill.0:44:18.1 DS: Yeah. One marathon after another one, so once we get... Once we finish the marathon that we're currently on, then we can announce that we did it and discuss what our next one is.0:44:29.3 AW: There you go, you nailed it.0:44:31.0 DS: Alright, thank you, Aaron. Great to talk to you as always.0:44:34.4 AW: Great to catch up, Darren. Thanks everyone for listening, we always appreciate comments or questions via Twitter or email. And hopefully we'll see you again soon. Hopefully we hit record in a tighter cycle than six weeks this time again.0:44:52.3 DS: Yeah. I would really appreciate any reviews on the iTunes store, those are really helpful.0:45:00.9 AW: There you go, then others can find us. We appreciate new listeners, alright. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon, Darren.0:45:05.6 DS: Talk to you soon. Bye.[OUTRO music]

We are approaching the 40th anniversary of The Color Purple, a novel that garnered critical acclaim, won Alice Walker the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and brought her sudden literary scrutiny. Both the book and its subsequent feature film adaptation elicited a flurry of criticism, frequently from within the Black community.Accused of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as inherently violent, Walker was viewed by some as a race traitor. And for reasons that include depictions of rape, incest, homosexuality, violence and explicit language, The Color Purple has consistently remained on the American Library Association’s list of frequently challenged and banned books over the years.Host Amna Khalid speaks with Ms. Walker about what it’s been like to experience a kind of “cancellation” repeatedly throughout her career.* FULL TRANSCRIPT *AMNA KHALID: We’re approaching the 40th anniversary of The Color Purple, the novel that earned Alice Walker the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, making her the first Black woman to receive the award. Shortly after, it was adapted into a feature film by Steven Spielberg, which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and 4 Golden Globes. The success of the book and then the film arguably made Alice Walker a household name.And yet it also opened her up to some of the harshest criticism of her career. For her use of a Black dialect, her portrayal of Black men and her depiction of same-sex love between women, Walker was excoriated from within the Black community. Many said she was trading in racist stereotypes of Black men as violent rapists. Ishmael Reed, an African American and another giant in the literary world, was incensed, almost personally offended, by Walker’s rendering of Black men in the novel: REED: You look at The Color Purple, you would think that the incest and all the people committing incest and committing rape are Black men. This is not true. Alice Walker said Black men are evil. She said they’re more evil than White men because White men are aware of their evil.AK: When the film was released in 1985, the Coalition Against Black Exploitation protested outside the premier in Los Angeles. Vernon Jarrett, an African American columnist for the Chicago Sun Times, was one of many who were critical of the movie’s portrayal of Black men:JARRETT: If it had been a story of Israel, would the Jews have permitted a movie to be made where every single male character was either a rapist, an incest perpetrator, a beast, or even dumb?AK: The fact that Walker had allowed Spielberg — a White, Jewish man — to adapt the novel for the big screen led many to view her as a race traitor. Here, speaking at the time, is Louis Farrakhan, Leader of the Nation of Islam:FARRAKHAN: He uses her, Whoopi Goldberg. She plays her part so well — I’m telling you — she may win an Oscar for that role. But not just because of her acting ability; but she wins an Oscar in the eyes of White folk because she aids in proving the point that the Black man is a dog. And as long as the Black man remains a dog, you cannot rise, therefore he cannot fall: The Color Purple. AK: Joining us now to discuss censorship, cancelation and the relationship between society and the artist is the author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker. Ms. Walker, thank you so much for your time. ALICE WALKER: Absolutely. AK: The Color Purple and the response that you received to both the book and then the movie and the musical in many ways presaged for us the current moment that we're in and the kind of politics around cultural representation, around art and the role of art, and also around who gets to speak and who gets to tell the story, who does it belong to. And I cannot think of a better person to reflect on our moment today, when everyone is being canceled left, right and center, because there is this objection to how they're presenting things, I can't think of a better person than you to reflect on our moment in light of the experience that you had when The Color Purple came out. AW: Well, you know, it’s not a pleasant feeling to be attacked for expressing the truth of your life, basically. This is how I, at the time, wanted to share what I understood of reality. And it was actually surprising and in some ways shocking that people were so afraid of it, and I understood that that was part of it, that they were really afraid. They were afraid of their own feelings where women loving women are concerned. They were really afraid when I said the God of the Bible was not the one that was interesting to me. So, I just basically bore it and lived my life outside of a lot of the controversy which went on for years.AK: Can I ask you a little bit about some of the responses that you've received to your work and what were you not anticipating and that you were shocked to see?AW: I was surprised that people didn't understand the compassion I feel for Black men. It was so interesting, but then I realized that they didn't read the books and that helped. I said, “Oh, they didn't read them.” And I think that's true and that's unfortunate. AK: There seems to be the capacity in your characters to hold complexity, to simultaneously have done things which people might find morally reprehensible, but then also to be so much more than that.AW: I see them as very human, and I don't see them as different from any of the other men on the planet. I mean, the men who do bad things in my novels are the same men who do bad things in China. That's why when my book was published, I went to China, and it was a bestseller already. It was an underground bestseller. And I said to the people who invited me, “Well, why? How did this happen?” – Of course, they hadn’t told me they were selling it – And they said, “Well, it’s a very Chinese story.” And that has been true on every continent. It's been true everywhere we've sold this book, and that's why it's so long lasting. It's just people and how they behave given the structures that they've had to live under. AK: Ms. Walker, I'm originally from Pakistan and I first encountered your book while I was still there. And indeed, it has this way of speaking across boundaries, across barriers of race, because it's telling a story that is around us all and we see it. But there is a way in which I find that today's atmosphere, especially around judging who gets to speak and who gets to represent, is very focused, especially in the U.S., on race, almost exclusively on race to the detriment of class, gender and other ways in which oppression may be—through which they may be refracted. AW: I think that's deliberate. We have always been used as a scapegoat. We've always been used as the focus so that you don't notice all the other horrible things that are happening to you. You can always just say, “Oh, those poor Black people,” or, “Oh, those terrible Black people,” something about the Black people, and very often about the Black men, which is why the criticism that I was somehow hostile to Black men was just absurd. It's useful to the people who want to divide us, very useful. It was a way to actually divide Black men and Black women and it was a way to distract all the rest of the people on the planet from their disasters. So, they could all look at the Black people and say, “Oh my God, they're fighting again,” or, “She's saying this and they're saying that.” It’s a tactic. And I think most of us are used to it by now. AK: But what's interesting is that a lot of this response actually came from within the Black community. AW: Yeah. But what I'm saying is that that is what gets focused on by the mainstream. So, they would focus on that rather than on the fact that The Color Purpleis a theological work. It’s about God. I mean, it's about God, it's about do we believe this, that we've been force fed, or do we not? And if we don't, what is our sense of what God is? But if you spend all your time worrying about Black men and Black women fighting over whatever, you will never get to that subject, which is central. AK: It's also interesting to me that I see this huge contrast between how you tell your stories — right? – and what we're seeing today, which, like I said, not only focuses on race, but is extremely unforgiving. There is no room for people to be human. The expectation is that somehow we should all be superhuman, 100 percent pure.AW: It’s ridiculous. That makes me think of how they came down hard on Flannery O'Connor. Now, Flannery O'Connor was a racist most of her life, but she evolved. And if you take the position that people who are locked into racism or whatever and that they never evolve, then you just get rid of them and whatever they created, which means that you stunt yourself. You never grow yourself. That's the real issue here: that if you in your indignation, in your inability to allow other people to grow and to evolve, you will never grow and evolve yourself, there you’re stuck. So, you know, I recognize Flannery O'Connor was a racist. We lived across the highway from each other when I was a child. But I also grew up to read her work and to watch her evolve in her work. And that's all anybody can do. If you are brought up in a racist society or sexist society, all you can do basically is try to free yourself by any means necessary, by reading, by traveling, by listening, by thinking. That's what you do. And I think people who insist on—they took her name off of the building at some Catholic university in their rage that she wasn't perfect. But nobody is. And people are evolving. People can evolve. And if you don't give them that opportunity, all you're setting yourself up for is that nobody will give you the opportunity in the future. And I dread thinking about what will happen to these same people further along the line. AK: Where do you think it comes from: this unwillingness to allow change and evolution?AW: Fear. Many people on the planet now think of these as the last days. And most of the people who have been taught from the Bible that—that's what the Bible says: that there will be an end of times. And so many people see this time now as that end of time, and they are trying to, in a way, purify themselves by getting rid of what they see as the impure. Too bad, because the impure, quote, are often the people you need to teach you how to get through some of the roughest periods. And this is a rough one. AK: Earlier this year, Ms. Walker was invited to deliver a commencement address to the graduating class of Hudson Valley Community College in New York, but just days before the event the college suddenly withdrew the invitation. I asked her what happened.AW: Well, I was invited to this college in upstate New York, and I was ready to go. And I made a tape, like we’re doing. And then they decided that they didn't want me speaking to their graduating class. I mean, just a really frivolous charge: some book that I had on my nightstand was written by someone who was an anti-Semite, says, I guess, some anonymous person. And they canceled my talk to the students, which is terrible for the students. I mean, it hardly impacted me. I was, you know, sorry they missed my talk. But think of what that does to the students not to be able to hear from someone that they had wanted to hear from. I'm sure those students were the ones who decided they wanted to invite me to come and talk to them at their graduation. AK: Did they expressly say that it was this anonymous person who objected to a book?AW: Yeah, objected to a book that I had mentioned in The New York Times over a year ago. I mean, there was a flap then, too, because I was accused of being anti-Semitic myself, which is such an old trope. I mean, it's just ridiculous. I don't really spend a whole lot of time agonizing over any of this because people do have a right to their perceptions, but they twist things so that the world that we would like to have where people are feeling free and equal, that's not likely to happen with all of the canceling, all the cancelations. I just posted on my blog this morning, one of the most cancelled people on earth: Norman Finkelstein. And, you know, he's been called everything—as we say down South—but the child of God. And I think he's brilliant. What can we do about all of these things? We can continue to forward the thought and the action and the outrageousness and wonderfulness that we see. Like you're doing. I mean, this is what you do, this is how you move forward in the world what it is you would like to see. You know, more honesty, clarity, vision, not so much fragility and fear and backwardness, which is how I see a lot of this. It’s just backward. You can't really expect people or want people or hope for people not to know a reality that shaped them. AK: And where do you see things going if we keep going down this route?AW: Life has its own meaning, its own reason and its own reality. And so, this will play for a while, but it will not stand. I mean, even if it takes us all the way to, like, I don't know, Nazi Germany or some of the other horrible places that come to mind, we may well go through them, but there's something in the human spirit that just wants to know what happened. That's human. And we will always have that unless we're drugged into oblivion, which we might be, but, you know, until then, we will want to know. And that's one of the great things about being human beings: our curiosity. AK: What can we do at this moment to nurture that curiosity in the face of this onslaught of cancelation? I love what you're saying about curiosity and how that is so deeply hardwired into us. AW: Yeah, I mean, it's my guiding light. I mean, I'm curious. I want to know. And if my effort to know offends you, then just go somewhere else. Because, you know, I do have this right, it's innate. It's a human right to be curious. And I exercise that right as much as I can. And I love it and I don't intend to forsake it. AK: But I also sense hope in how you've presented it. You're convinced that this cannot last that long, that there is a way in which human curiosity will override these attempts to silence and to shut people down. AW: Human intelligence and curiosity. People really want to know. My books have been banned, they have been critiqued, a few of them have been burned, but I just trust that because I'm a human being that other human beings are more or less like me and they want to know. It’s just a natural thing that we have. And so, I never see this kind of activity as conclusive. Look at Germany, for instance. When you go to Germany now, people are still pretty much the way people are. They're reading, they're writing, they're going to school, they're riding bikes, they're living. In my opinion, it's possible that we need to go through this period to study it. I love study. And I think it would be really wonderful if more of us would just look at this as something to, if we have to, endure, something we will probably have to struggle to survive, but it's a lesson and we can get somewhere from there. AK: I love this angle that you're presenting, which is if we see this as a moment that is passing, much like those that have happened before, we can study it, and this is not that special. We as humans like to think we are in the most exceptional moment in history, which is so not the case. AW: I thought about this a long time, about what it actually means to be cancelled. What is the ultimate goal of cancelation? It’s interesting and it’ll help you understand economics in this world and in this country much better. You know, why people are poor and why people cancel people. A lot of it has to do with money, which is an angle that people often don't think about. They just think about something you said that people didn't like, something you wrote that they didn't want their children to see, blah blah blah, but actually it has a financial meaning. And that is something to be studied. AK: Could you say a little more about the financial meaning?AW: Well, cancellation, one of the underlying, or maybe the overlying — I mean, it’s very prominent actually — is that they hope to impoverish you. If they impoverish you, you are automatically canceled in your own agency, because what can you do? You have no money in a country where everything is money. And the example I give is of Billie Holiday, this recent movie where you can see what I'm talking about just really, really clearly. Why do they hound this woman to death, chain her to her hospital bed as she was dying? Why were they intent on not letting her have a cabaret card so she could make a living singing? She was a singer. OK? They wanted her to stop singing a particular song about lynching. She refused. And so, their response was basically to just kill her by making her poor or trying to make her poor, sick and all of that so that she couldn't function in society. And that is a real goal, and we should acknowledge it: that people who deal in cancelations of other people are deliberately trying to make them so poor, so impoverished, so weak that they have no agency in the culture. AK: It's ironic because it's all being done in the name of trying to give people agency, but what you're saying is that it's completely being undermined.AW: Give what people agency? They're not trying to give the cancelled people agency. They're trying to destroy their agency. I like very much when people remember that in this culture especially, but more and more in the world, it really is about who has the means to speak. I mean, if you're making four thousand dollars a semester or whatever as a subcontracted biology teacher or something, it's unlikely that you actually have the agency to speak, especially if you have children. So, the financial angle is really crucial for us to understand. And that is why some people, artists, especially in artists, for women and of color, but men who are of color and some poor White men artists, how you have to both do your work and also always consider how you're going to live. These are the parts of the structure of living in a racist, sexist, monetary society that you have to really analyze because otherwise it's always up here, it’s as if there's no foot, there's no foundation to the problem that you're discussing. AK: No, and indeed, the thrust of all these cancelations is precisely that: people are losing their jobs, people are losing their livelihoods, which then prevents them from—AW: —from speaking. It’s very cruel. And it says a lot about the culture that it would support this cruelty without acknowledging this part. You notice they will never really acknowledge that this is what they're doing.AK: Alice Walker, thank you so much. I appreciate how much time you have given. And before I go, may I just ask you one final thing, which is what do you see as the role of art in society? AW: A mirror. I read somewhere that art is the only mirror in which we can see our collective face. That's why we need it.AK: I’d like to conclude today’s episode by invoking the words of another great American writer, James Baldwin, on the role of the artist: “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is tell that, I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are. I want to be stretched, shook up, to overreach myself, and to make you feel that way too.”Banished is produced by Matthew Schwartz and Mike Vuolo. N'Dinga Gaba and Chris Mandra mixed the audio. A special thanks to Anika Jones for her help with this episode.This is Banished. I’m Amna Khalid.Further reading: Gifts of Spirit — Thoughts on Being Canceled by Alice Walker This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Olivia Fuller: Hi, and welcome to Book Club, a Sales Enablement PRO podcast, I’m Olivia Fuller. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so they can be more effective in their jobs. The world of sales is becoming increasingly complex with more stakeholders involved in buying decisions, intensifying competition, and rapidly changing expectations of the skills and knowledge that sellers need to be successful. In navigating this complexity, the MEDDICC methodology can help provide a common language for everyone in the sales organization to more efficiently and effectively qualify deals and generate a clear path to success. Andy Whyte's book, “MEDDICC,” lays out strategies and best practices to successfully implement the MEDDICC methodology, and I’m so excited to have him on the podcast today to share some of the key insights from his book. With that, Andy, could you please introduce yourself to our audience and then tell us a little bit more about your book. Andy Whyte: Yeah. Hey Olivia, very good morning to you. Hello to the audience. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I’ve been listening to the back catalog, and I’ve been really enjoying the episodes so it’s great to be on the show, thank you for having me. As you said, my name is Andy Whyte. At heart, I’m a sales guy. That’s pretty much what I’ve always done since leaving school. Went into sales and started doing door to door sales selling home improvements, then worked in a cell phone store selling cell phones, and then got into SaaS and started climbing the ladder up of doing more senior roles and taking on larger propositions from selling to SMB's to selling to enterprises and all different kinds of SaaS solutions. More recently, I went into sales leadership within the last five or six years with a couple of different startups. The book came about really for a couple of reasons. One was I stumbled across MEDDICC myself as an individual contributor back in 2014 or 2015, and I just felt like it was something that as soon as I learned about it, I was like where’s this been all of my career? I don’t know anyone else who’s ever stumbled across some methodology or something, but it just made me feel, not happy because I’d found it, but sad because of all the time I’d wasted on deals before and deals that I’d lost and all this stuff. I could have saved myself the heartache if I had MEDDICC, so I embraced MEDDICC, loved it. It really helped me as an individual contributor, and then as a sales leader it helped me a lot as well in enterprising up the teams I was leading. One of the strange things around MEDDICC is it's 25 years old this year, but no one really had ever stopped to document it or put any kind of book together for it. I definitely saw that as an opportunity to put some of my ideas and thoughts around MEDDICC down on paper. What started as a first blog post iterated into where we are today with a book and a lot of great experiences that have come from that. That's the background story of myself and MEDDICC. OF: Fantastic. Well, again, I’m so excited to have you on the podcast today to dive a little deeper into your book, which I know I personally learned so much from. In the book, you note that MEDDICC is a qualification methodology, so I’m curious, how does that differ from a traditional sales methodology and what makes MEDDICC different and unique compared to some of the other qualification methodologies that are out there? AW: Yeah, that’s a great and actually really important question because it’s funny, it is a methodology of course, MEDDICC you can call a framework as well. I tend to swap between both of them. It’s in sales, so by definition you’d say, well, isn’t it a sales methodology? I guess you could call it that. The only reason why I like to point out and not refer to it as a sales methodology is because generally, the definition of a sales methodology is how you talk to your customers, how you engage with your customers. MEDDICC is much more around qualifying where you are with those customers, should you be engaged with those customers. It doesn’t necessarily dictate how you should engage and what messaging to use and how to talk to the customers. Likewise, the same with the sales process. Some people refer to it as a sales process, and it’s not. It’s a framework that sits underneath the methodology and the process, and the reason why it’s important just to differentiate the two is that you can really only have one sales process and one sales methodology. If you were to think of MEDDICC as being a sales methodology, you would assume that you can’t overlay it over the top of the framework methodology you already have. That's why it’s important to differentiate the two. Then when you think about MEDDICC as a qualification framework or methodology, it’s funny how when you get into the qualification framework world, it seems to be a world of acronyms. I can’t even remember most of them. The most famous ones are obviously MEDDICC and BANT. There’s a whole load of other ones. There’s one called CHAMP. There’s some with G's and C's and all this sort of stuff in there. I think where MEDDICC really comes into its own is that it sees you all the way through the sales process and beyond into post-sales and actually pre-sales process. MEDDICC looks so broadly, not just at the qualifying actual moment in time, but it talks about who you’re going to be working with, the proposition that you’re taking to those people, and what would those people be interested in. It can really go pre-sale as well and start to help influence how you market your products and how you message the value of those products as well. And how, of course, all the people internally talk about the different stages of revenue. That's where I think MEDDICC really comes into its own. It’s not to say that the other qualification frameworks aren’t good, but it goes very broadly across the entire sales process. OF: Definitely. As you mentioned, MEDDICC is an acronym and in the book, you walk through each of the different stages of the MEDDICC methodology and also some additions that companies are beginning to use. At a high level, I’d love if you could just dive into what those stages are, and also when it might be appropriate to supplement them with some of those additional steps. AW: Yeah, no great question. As I said a moment ago, MEDDICC is 25 years old this year and it was born inside of a company called PTC. Really where it came from was a guy called Dick Dunkel who invented it. He worked in sales enablement, probably one of the firsts, PTC was probably the very first people to do sales enablement, and he’d come out from the field with the task of helping PTC to level up all the new salespeople they were hiring. One of the exercises they did was to look at why PTC were winning deals, why they were losing deals, and why deals were slipping. What he found wherever he went, whatever sales team inside of PTC he went to, was that there was a continuity in the answers to those questions. These actually rolled up to being the elements of MEDDICC, which was at the time six elements, which is MEDDIC with just one C on the end and two D's. That obviously served us very well. It’s proliferated almost like no other methodology since that time, but what’s actually happened as technology landscapes have evolved, there’s been two particular elements that have come into be popularized inside of MEDDICC. That’s why a lot of people will know MEDDICC as MEDDPICC because it has an extra P in there. As I said, one of those letters is the “P,” which generally stands for paper process. What this is, it goes without saying, but it’s the process that occurs when you start to talk about contracts. SLSA's, DPA’s, there’s all of these three-letter acronyms that exist now that weren't around when MEDDICC was created because generally it was on premise software, you owned the licenses and data privacy wasn’t such a big thing. The paper process has become much more complicated. It’s also the big reason why deals slip, because of the paper process. What a lot of organizations will do is they’ll call the extra P out and that's why the extra P stands for paper process. The extra C is for competition, which again is a similar situation as time has evolved. Now, I think there’s something like a hundred new SAS companies a day. Competition is not just your rival solutions, there are other initiatives that exist that could be taking the same budget or resources that you're going for. It’s not just about money, it could be that the teams are helping to implement whatever solution you’re talking about. Inertia is a competitor as well, the customer just staying with what they’ve done or what they’ve already got. Then of course they can build it and sell so easily now with cloud structure and that sort of thing. Competition becomes much more of a thing today than it used to be all those years ago. That’s why you had the two letters in. For anyone that’s listening that doesn’t know anything about MEDDICC or know what the other letters are, very super high level, you’ve got the “M,” which is for the metrics. These are the quantifiable measures of value, so this is the KPIs if you like. The economic buyer, this is the overall authority, the best way of finding this person is the person to say no and others say yes, and they say yes while others say no. Then you have the two “D's,” which stand for decision criteria, decision process. It’s the what and the how the customer is going to make a decision-type process I talked about. The “I” stands for identify the pain or implicate the pain, which speaks for itself. Then you’ve got the champion, which is for me, the most important part of MEDDICC. It’s the one person who’s going to be your person inside of the customer who’s giving you information, helping you to navigate towards a successful outcome. Then as I said the next one after that is the second “C” for competition, which I talked about. OF: That’s great. One of the key points that stood out to me is you also highlight the importance of discovery, but specifically how it should be thought of as a mindset rather than a stage. I’d love if you could explain that a little bit further. Why is that mindset of discovery impactful in enterprise sales? AW: Yeah, great question. I might be a bit controversial here, but I’m going to go as far as saying, if you’re a salesperson and you’re not doing discovery, then you’re not being a salesperson. You’re being an order taker because if you can’t learn from the customer and adapt to suit the challenges and goals that they’re trying to aspire to or solve then you really are just going to be talking about your own product. Hopefully, if it works out for you, if you’ve got a good product and it’s well suited, then you’ll be taking the order. That’s the first thing I'll say is proper selling cannot be done without discovery. Why I say it's a mindset is because it’s not really about going in with a bank of questions that you need to try and find the answers to. Quite often when people have that mindset of, I just need to do this stage of discovery, it’s not a great experience for the customer. On the other end, it feels a bit like an interrogation. The mindset of discovery is to be genuinely curious because inside of you, you know that to really have the best chance of finding a good fit for your solution, you need to really genuinely understand the customer’s business. You need to understand their goals, you need to understand their challenges, you need to understand where they want to get to and what could be hurdles in the way for them there. Then see, and this is a really important thing, see whether your solution is a good one. Not always will it be a good fit. It may be that the customer does not have enough interest. It may be that your solution is not the right solution for them. I think that we really need to popularize qualifying out in sales. As much as you should be curious to try and find opportunity and strengths for your solution, you should also be thinking, well, do I really want to have to invest the amount of time the deal needs if it’s not going to work out for me, if it’s not going to be a right opportunity for me. Having that very open-minded genuine curiosity is going to lean you into finding real value that you can uncover. Then where MEDDICC comes into that, I always look at it like this. Generally, in discovery you’re trying to understand a few things. You understand the lay of the land you’re trying to qualify, but you’re really trying to find some pain. I quite liken it to a bit like mining for gems is the discovery, and finding the pain is like finding a gemstone, maybe they call it a diamond. Where MEDDICC comes in is it’s going to help you turn what is still a valuable gemstone, it’s going to help you turn that into a diamond ring by putting metrics against what the value of solving that pain would be. That’s where the pain, the metrics, buddy up to. The other point on this actually, which is important, why discovery is a process is because it's something you do throughout the deal. In enterprise sales by nature, they’re generally complex, they're generally long, there’s generally multiple stakeholders involved. Every single stakeholder, every different part of the deal, have new things to learn and will adapt and shift. If you’re up against a good competitor, they’ll be trying to adapt and shift it towards their strengths and towards your weaknesses. You have to be in your toes to make sure you bring it back towards yourself. Discovery is something you should be doing right up until the ink on the signature for the contract is drying That’s in my mind how I see it. OF: Great. You touched on some of the skills that make salespeople successful just now but explore that a little bit more in the context of today. As the world of work has evolved really rapidly in the past year, the skills that are required to be successful in sales have also now evolved as well. In the book, you talk about some of the characteristics of great sellers. I’m curious from your perspective, what are some of the key attributes of really elite salespeople in today’s environment? AW: Yeah, I have one favorite for this and it’s definitely not something that I came up with, but it’s something I heard and it’s outside of sales and it really resonates with me. This is the idea of taking action over having the intention to take action and actually being able to take action. I think that’s something that in sales is critically important. That’s really the difference for me between the elite salespeople and those that could be elite who have all the skills, have all the knowledge, have all the experience, but just never quite make that step up to being what we know as elite. The best example that I think will resonate with the audience on this is we’ve all been in those team deal reviews, where somebody is presenting a deal and as a team, it’s a great thing. One of the things I love about sales is how we can come together as different professionals who have different roles in sales and hear someone talk about their deal and brainstorm how we can help them make progress. Wherever I worked, there’s always been a salesperson who is not elite, but they know all the answers. They’ve got the answer for everybody’s problem in their deal, and they’ll tell you it as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. That is having intention for me, they know what the right things to do are, but when it’s really, really important, they don’t do it. In a MEDDICC sense, they’ll know how important it is to access the economic buyer. They’ll talk about it to everybody, but they won’t do it themselves. They’ll say, well, it’s hard to get there and all this stuff, which it is of course, but that’s kind of the beauty of it. For me to answer your question, it’s really about taking that next step to taking action. In reference to this world we’re in right now where most of our meetings are remote, we’re missing out on that beautiful time that we never really valued before, which is the time where you’d meet the customer in their reception area, and they’d walk you to the office room and then you get to the meeting room and then you’d get the walk back. That might only be 10 minutes, but in that 10 minutes you would build rapport, you would build relations, you could ask for debriefs, you can ask for an insight ahead of the meeting, all that kind of stuff. We don’t get that anymore, but we can. That’s the difference between action and intent. You can most definitely put some time in with that potential champion let’s say before the meeting. You can put some time in after the meeting. In fact, you could top and tail any meeting you have with anyone else by doing that. That’s what the elite sellers will do. Those that are a little bit below elite will know that that’s a good thing to do, they know that’s within their grasp, but they won’t take that step. That’s probably an example of the difference between elite in today's world. OF: I love that. Another thing that it really stood out to me in your book is you write that the most significant factor to the success of your MEDDICC implementation lies in your frontline sales managers’ hands and enablement often works very closely with frontline sales managers. I’m curious if you have any advice for how enablement can give frontline managers the support that they need to properly execute the implementation and really engage them as champions of the process? AW: Yeah, that is a fantastic question. I think being a frontline sales manager is one of the loneliest jobs in sales because you’re in this accountability sandwich where above you, self-leadership, we’re always asking you for numbers, for the reports, all this stuff. Below, your sales team is looking to you to protect them from the noise above, but also help empower them. You don’t really have, except for your peers themselves, but they’re also in a funny way because it’s a competitive industry they're almost your competitors and you have sales managers on the same level as you, you don’t really have anyone who's your buddy, except for sales enablement. Sales enablement are the people, especially in a MEDDICC implementation, who are like your secret weapon for success because what you need for successful implementation of MEDDICC above anything else is momentum. You need to have some forward momentum and wins with it. What I mean by that is, you’ll know this much better than I and your audience will know this a million times better than I do, there’s this thing that happens in all good sales organizations that are trying to evolve and develop and move themselves forward where one minute or one month it will be a new sales tool that comes in. It’s a new analytics tool. It’s going to help you figure out something that you didn’t know about your deals. The next minute it’s a new sales methodology. What tends to happen is you get this flavor of the month scenario happen and underneath it, the sales team, the individual contributors are like okay, what is it this month. MEDDICC, okay, we’ll be hearing about MEDDICC for the next month I guess and then it’ll be something else. What you need to really turn the tide with that kind of mentality is you need to be able to show the value to the salespeople. The great thing about MEDDICC is aside from managers, as an individual contributor, it can really help you to figure out what you need to do with your deals regardless of anyone else around you. To get the salespeople to have that mentality, they need to see some wins. Sales enablement is like the best friend for sales managers there because they can help keep the managers on their toes, help share best practice with them, remind them because as you know, sales managers have a lot of things on their mind. Reminding them of certain elements of MEDDICC that could help in certain scenarios and share successes. I think just that as a partnership really, really helps. Then there’ll be a lot of things in the sales enablement locker, a lot of documentation, a lot of collateral that relates very closely to MEDDICC. I think that bringing those into decision criteria is a great example. Decision criteria are really around, especially technical decision criteria, it’ll be around what are the criteria for which the customers base that decision? Well, most good sales organizers I know have a document that suits that. It’s about sales enablement empowering people to get that document across. The last thing I’ll say on this point is that where MEDDICC really comes into its own is as a common language for the revenue teams to use. It means everyone is talking about the same thing the same way. An example of this, champion is probably the most used phrase in sales. Outside of MEDDICC, if you meet two different salespeople, they’ll have completely different definitions of what a champion is. What MEDDICC does helps you define what is a champion? What is this part of it? What are the metrics? It’s really going to help sales enablement and sales managers to increase the efficiency of their conversations and really make sure they’re talking about the right things. When they are talking about the same thing, they’re defining it the same way as well. OF: Absolutely. I just have one final question for you. We’ve talked a little bit about the complexity of sales today and I’m curious to learn, how can MEDDICC really help foster deep engagement with customers given this increasing complexity? AW: Yeah, that is a good question. I think one of the things that’s adding complexity to sales today is the massive choice that customers have. As I mentioned earlier, when we think about competition, it’s not just solutions that are rivals of yours, you’ve got other initiatives and other things that the customer could be looking to do. It could be looking just to stay the same. Risk is dangerous, change is risky. Build it themselves is another thing. Then there’s this whole other scenario, which is that whilst there are of course people listening to this that will have Germany working for an organization who has a solution and you may have two, three, maybe five other vendors that do a similar solution. There’s this whole Venn diagram now of solution providers that do the same thing and then something else, and then something else. As a customer, you can have 10 options to solve that one thing you want to do and some will do it very well, but some will do it not quite as well, but they’ll do all these other things as well. That creates a lot of complexity for customers. The thing I think salespeople always forget is that our customers are not professional buyers. 99% of their day job is spent doing their job. They only spend 1% thinking about buying that bit of software to help them do their job. They're not out there spending all day reading G2 Crowd and all this stuff. They’re not necessarily experts in buying, so what you really need to be able to do is to approach the customer with, again, that curious mindset to really understand what it is they’re trying to solve and genuinely talking about how your solution can help solve that problem, if it can. Sometimes, like I said earlier, sometimes you may not be the best person to help them. One thing is for sure, if you went into an engagement with a customer and you were to genuinely take an interest in what they were trying to solve, what their problems were, and you turned around and said, hey look, thank you for your time today, but actually, I don’t think we’re the right fit for you, let me help you put you in the right direction of who is, I guarantee you a year, two years, five years down the line, when that person is an ideal prospect for you, that person will take your call and meet you 100%. You would have bought so much credibility and that person is probably likely to introduce you to other people that you can help. I think this is a long game. I think if you have a long game mindset in sales, it will help you out a lot. The short answer to that question, other than that long version, would to be that trusted advisor to your customers and have that genuine curiosity to help them solve their problems. You’ll be surprised at just how much more information the customer provides you if that helps you do your job better. OF: That’s great. Well, Andy, thank you so much again for making the time to join our podcast today. I certainly learned so much from you and I know our audience did too. Thanks again. AW: Well, thank you for having me on and thanks everyone for listening. OF: To our audience, thanks for listening for more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there’s something you’d like to share or a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

FULL SHOW NOTES[INTRO music]0:00:10.5 Aaron Weiche: Episode 29, Prioritize or Die.0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]0:00:42.5 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:46.0 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:48.0 AW: Did you see what I did with that clickbait title of our episode today, Darren? 0:00:52.9 DS: I did actually. I wrote something different, but yours is way better, yeah, that's good. [chuckle]0:00:56.8 AW: I think I was mostly trying to avoid, right? You had wrote prioritization and I was like, that just sounds like a word that I will somehow mangle when we go to hit record, and then yeah, I just went all-out sensationalism and clickbait and...0:01:12.2 DS: And I actually think, not only is it clickbait-y, which is great, but it also was accurate. I think that it's really the theme of this episode.0:01:20.9 AW: Yeah, and it's not... As we get into it, it's not an instant death, it's just probably a slow death if...0:01:28.8 DS: Absolutely.0:01:29.8 AW: You don't adhere to it. And yeah, I'm super excited to get into that. But it's been five weeks since we've last recorded, and we caught up a little bit before hitting record. Sometimes I think we should just hit record the second we get on and let people hear all of our small talk, and then maybe wrap that into the after show. We usually have really big... We just had some really big ideas. We'll see if we can put those into play someday. But...0:01:57.2 DS: Yeah.0:02:01.7 AW: What has been consuming your time this last handful of weeks? 0:02:07.0 DS: I've been busy with the summit. Just, I've been on lots of calls with the team, planning our software, and lots of summit stuff. So just trying to get all work...0:02:19.3 AW: So you're talking about, for those that don't always listen to us, you put on a local search summit, virtual last year, it was your very first one.0:02:29.2 DS: Yeah.0:02:29.3 AW: Remind me again, how many speakers... I know the attendee number was super high. Like frame up how the very first one went.0:02:36.8 DS: So our Whitespark Local Search Summit, the first one we did last year, a virtual summit, it's free to attend, pay if you want the recordings, and we had 6,000 registered... People registered for the event. We...0:02:56.7 AW: That's so awesome.0:02:56.8 DS: It was huge, yeah. So I was a little bit shocked with how well we did. We had 32 speakers, I think, a three-day event. And so it's a lot of work to put it together. So this year, I'm really excited about how things are shaping up. Our line-up is phenomenal. We've got incredible speakers like Aaron Weiche speaking. [laughter] So it's gonna be fantastic. I can't wait for it. We really put a lot of polish on it this year. I gotta give a shoutout to Jesse Lowe on our marketing team, she is our marketing team, and she...0:03:29.8 AW: Go Jesse.0:03:33.2 DS: She's done such an incredible job with the design, and we're building our website now and our sponsor deck, and just everything is just getting really nicely tweaked and polished, and it's gonna be an incredible event, and I think that we're shooting for 8,000 registrations this year, but it really feels like that level of conference quality that you might see at a Moss Con, I feel like we're hitting our stride with it this year and really kinda taken it to that next level. So been really busy with that, trying to get that stuff working out.0:04:03.5 AW: That's just so incredible, like when you say those numbers. I remember that attendees were in the thousands, but again, first-time event, you pull it off during a pandemic.0:04:15.1 DS: Yeah. [chuckle]0:04:16.1 AW: Some of it probably helpful 'cause people were just so hungry for good information, good interaction. I remember, I super enjoyed... So many of the speakers are like friends and people that we see on the conference circuit that you get to see in person and have a beer with or grab dinner with, and it was just like... It was just great to hear David Mihm present. It was just great to hear people that you're used to that are smart and have something different in your day than Zoom calls with your internal team. [chuckle] So...0:04:50.1 DS: Yeah.0:04:51.3 AW: Those are some lofty goals, man. 8,000, that's awesome. I can't wait.0:04:54.3 DS: I'm a little bit worried that instead of increasing our registration count, we might drop, and one of the concerns I have is just virtual conference burnout. It's like we kinda hit it and at a sweet spot last time around, whereas it's been a full year, and I don't know, my inbox is blowing up with virtual conference invites all the time, and so I just wonder if people are a little bit burnt out from it, but we'll see.0:05:20.4 AW: Yeah, could be, but I would say in the local space, other than local you, nothing else comes close to the level of content that you put into that event. So I think no matter what, even if you stay the same, even if you're a little bit lower, like you've put something great in motion that I can't wait for it to be like an in-person, just imagine like... Imagine if you're able to pull off a 1000-person in-person conference event in local, that would be nuts.0:05:54.7 DS: While we plan to do it, I actually have already looked into doing the conference at the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, and so one day we're gonna go to... It's like castle in the mountains, in the rocky mountains, it's so beautiful. I wanna do it there. I've looked into pricing. I would have done it if I felt confident that by 2022, we wouldn't have weird COVID variants locking us down again, but their cancellation policy is like, "You gotta sign that contract, and if you back out, you lose 75 grand." So it was like, "Okay, I can't commit." But 2023, I feel like we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it in the mountains, it's gonna be great.0:06:35.1 AW: Oh my gosh, that sounds epic to say the least.0:06:39.1 DS: Yeah. I want that to happen.0:06:45.3 AW: On my side of things, you and I talked during this as friends, and then professionally on a couple of things, but I had a hard two, three weeks of being able to focus on work, which is really strange for me because I'm definitely a workaholic, work is a hobby, I just love being immersed, but the short of it is, my mom has Lewy body dementia, and it's gotten to the point where she can't live on her own, and so we had to transition her into assisted living, and the combination of visiting facilities and finding the right one for her and organizing everything that goes into a transfer like that and to some of the medical things and records and application and process, and then she was living in a town home that we owned, so cleaning that out, and then my wife and I decided to sell the town home as well, with my mom moving out of it, we just felt like the timing was right, and real estate market's great.0:07:46.3 AW: So it was really hard. I'm normally like a lot of hours, 50, 60 hours easily of high-output work, I was probably more in the 30-hour range and having a hard time focusing 'cause of these bigger things, and it was really hard on me for a little bit because I'm just so not used to it. It was just jarring off of my normal schedule and what I usually put myself into and everything else. So it's nice to be on the other side of that now and feel Mom has moved and settling in and that's a really... That's a good situation for her and everything else, and the town home was sold and closed and that's wrapped up, and so we're not spending nights and weekends over there getting it ready to sell and that whole process. So it's definitely threw me for a loop that when I was in it, I definitely felt like I was just like kind of treading water, if not drowning and looking around, like, "What direction do I go here? This feels awful weird."0:08:49.4 DS: Oh man, I'm so sorry. It's gotta be... It must have been really tough, must continue to be really tough for you with your mom, so I'm really sorry to hear that.0:09:00.0 AW: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. You and I, we had some personal conversations that were helpful, easy outlet for me to talk through some of those things. But yeah, it's just... The reverse parenting and the things that go along with that is you enter the next stage of life. It's definitely interesting, and yeah, it can be overwhelming and... I don't know. I guess I just wanted to share that for those of you running a company, starting something, all those things are hard enough, and that's not even throwing in what real life throws at you [chuckle] sometimes, and when you're an entrepreneur, you just live so much of your life in the business, and it can get hectic. So know if it's getting hectic for you, you're not alone, and hopefully you find the right people to talk to and the right ways to sort through it, and you get to the other side of that moment.0:09:51.9 DS: Yeah, for sure. We all have the things that come up that we... We try to run a business, but life interrupts often. Yeah.0:10:00.9 AW: On the plus side of life, I'm fully vaxxed, that says of like three and a half, four weeks ago, so I've had weeks now to live as a vaccinated person. I booked a flight just two days ago. I felt like such a noob going into my Delta app and like, "Oh, how do you book a flight?" I had completely forgotten. And booking a hotel, all of it just felt... I felt like I was making these huge purchases on something literally... I used to probably do 30 to 40 flights a year, something that I used to do a lot. I probably illegally was booking flights while driving somewhere. It was just that common of a repeated process. And then I actually bought tickets to SaaStr. They're doing in-person in September. They said you have to be vaccinated. I think almost the entire conference is outdoors. They're using a big outdoor facility out in California  ____.0:11:00.6 DS: Oh wow.0:11:01.0 AW: So I'm really interested to check that out and see that and looking forward to it. I think my wife Marcy is... I saw the glee in her eyes when I said I was booking travel. She was like, "Yes, I could use some alone time in the house. This sounds great." [chuckle] Yeah, she's very encouraging. She's like, "That sounds wonderful. Is it tomorrow?" "No, babe. You gotta wait a couple of weeks."0:11:28.7 DS: Wow, that's a huge move. Booking travel. We're a couple of months behind you in Canada with our vaccination rollout, and so this is beyond my comprehension at this point. But yeah, I look forward to one day booking travel [chuckle] hopefully in the not too distant future.0:11:46.5 AW: You will get there soon. When it happens, if you just need a field trip, come on down to Minneapolis and let's hang out for a couple of days.0:11:53.3 DS: Oh my... I should just make that... I should book it right now, yeah.0:11:57.6 AW: Done. Sounds like a plan.0:12:00.1 DS: Yeah, I would love to, would love to.0:12:00.8 AW: Yeah.0:12:02.1 DS: What's happening with... I remember last time we talked, you had your Flutter main developer leaving. How's that sorting out? 0:12:09.9 AW: Oh man, that has been a struggle. So we engaged both our initial recruiter that's helped us build our team, and then we went through Toptal.0:12:23.4 DS: Oh yeah.0:12:24.7 AW: And I would just say that really the biggest challenge is Flutter is really two to three-year-old as far as being still not mainstream, but just on the map. So the pool of candidates is just super small. So my experience with Toptal, to cut to the chase, we did hire someone, it wasn't through Toptal, we probably had four or five interviews through Toptal, one we interviewed and felt like they weren't the right fit for our project, the next candidate, we interviewed literally an hour after we interview them, we found out they took another job, another project to work on, then they sent us one that was like twice the hourly rate that was in our budget, so that was a non-starter, then we interviewed another one, liked him. Toptal does... They basically put them with you on the project for five days as like a free trial, and then after day one, he backed off the project. He didn't like the... He basically said, "I should've asked a few more questions." He didn't like the state management that we were using with it and felt like he wasn't gonna be a good fit for that, which was great that he didn't waste any more time, but it totally felt like a back-to-the-drawing-board.0:13:50.2 AW: And so we also had a couple of interviews with our original company that was recruiting for us, and we ended up, one of the two candidates they sourced for us, got to move forward with him, and he just started part-time this week. So that process took us five to six weeks to completely reset, which where we're at in timing right now and trying to get to launch, that feels like we lost an eternity, losing two to three sprints.0:14:20.8 DS: Sure.0:14:21.2 AW: But all you can do is be happy now. The one little plus is he does have some Node JS, which is our backend, so he might be a little bit full stack for us, which is interesting. So far we kinda have two frontend, two backend.0:14:35.8 DS: Yeah.0:14:38.3 AW: So that wild card might be nice with it. So it's taken a while. It wasn't ideal. Some of it's no fault of anyone, it's just kind of a... I think Flutter is starting to grow, so those that have talent and experience there are in high demand, especially when we are looking for someone that had at least a year experience within Flutter, not looking to learn it with us.0:15:05.6 DS: Do you... Okay, now that you've been through this process, do you have any regrets about choosing Flutter as a less mature language that maybe doesn't have the same pool of candidates that other languages have? 0:15:19.2 AW: No, because the whole reason we selected it is because we knew we were gonna do mobile apps as well. And so really my only regret will be, is if that process isn't as smooth for us to kick out our mobile apps. We're gonna launch with just our web app, and then fast follow with the mobile apps. So I just look at it... We knew that there would be some pieces of immaturity in libraries with Flutter and things like that, and we've kind of crossed a few of those bridges, but I'm still really hopeful that the main reason we decided why was to only work on one code base, per se, to deliver the frontend in web and native app experiences. So from that side, I still feel good. If that falls flat, then I'll be super frustrated that we should have used React and React Native, something more tried and true.0:16:13.8 DS: Yeah, yeah. Well we'll see. I guess we'll talk about in a future podcast, how your mobile app development is proceeding.[chuckle]0:16:22.7 AW: There you go. Hopefully, it'll probably be a couple of episodes from now, but yeah, I can't wait. I'm excited to get to that part of things.0:16:30.2 DS: Yeah for sure. Yeah. Alright. What else is going on? How are things at Leadferno, I guess, now that you've got your development back on track? 0:16:40.7 AW: Yeah, progressing well, it's just with anything, never fast enough.0:16:47.6 DS: Yeah.0:16:50.5 AW: But... And I think this probably serves as a good crossover with us to start talking because, prioritization, because that's really where we're at right now, is like we kinda internally set four months ago, like end of June, we're recording this right now on June 11th, it'll come out next week, but we said end of June is when we wanted to go live, and I can see from where we're at right now, it's gonna take us another sprint or two, just testing, clean up some of those things. But even when we launch then, it's still not gonna be perfect. So there's definitely like, launch is our priority right now, but then there's a couple of priorities that I have to answer to inside of that launch, that, which one's most important? Is it time? Or is it features? And I have some conundrum within that, on which one to place first, and I think I've arrived somewhere, which is good, 'cause you do need to make some decisions on these things [chuckle] and not waffle on them. But that's been hard.0:18:00.5 DS: It's exactly what I'm dealing with too, with our stuff that we're working on at Whitespark. I could build my grand vision over the course of the next year or build it into phases, so we have multiple launches. And so our goal is definitely to get to these multiple launches. So we have our phase one, phase two, phase three, and then once we get phase six wrapped up, then that's the grand vision of what I wanna build. So that prioritization, what goes into phase one, what... Do you move to phase two? Is what we had planned for phase three more important to put for phase two? That's all the stuff that I'm debating right now.0:18:46.0 AW: Yeah well and, as you and I have discussed off-recording, I think you were wrangling for a long time with how do you fit this in or how do you prioritize this next thing with what you're doing, right? And you have tools and services that you sell right now, and how do you balance not only supporting those, but do you continue to improve and mature those. At the same time, what I heard from you is just like the next thing that you're building being so important to you, right? Like no matter what we were talking about, your answer would turn to platform really being the answer to other things that we were trying to solve or discuss or whatever else, and it became apparent to me, and then I think apparent to you, platform needs to be the prioritization, right? 0:19:43.4 DS: It really does, and one of the things it's like, your title Prioritize or Die, and you mentioned it's a slow process, and it is. It's really like death of a company by 1,000 cuts. It's one little thing after another, and we've been up against that for, I don't know, five, 10 years. We're just constantly... Before we can progress on this, we gotta finish that one last thing, or we gotta do this little thing, or we have to update our crawling architecture, or we gotta change our mailing application.0:20:17.7 DS: It's just like... Because we're already a mature company with a customer base to support and software to keep running, it's really hard to build that next generation of our product, and it's something that, it's really become clear that if I don't turn everything off, we won't ever get there. Or it'll just take us another three years to get there, and so this prioritization has really hit home with me, and it's like we're putting everything on ice. If it's not mission critical, we don't do it.0:21:00.0 DS: So if it... We're putting all resources towards building platform, which is the next generation of Whitespark products, and so I have to do it, otherwise, it won't happen, and so... And if it doesn't happen, we will continue to be a profitable successful company, but we won't have that growth. That thing that... That catapult into the two times, three times, five times growth that I wanna see happen for Whitespark. The potential is there, and it's like, I'm always looking at it. It's this sort of future thing. It needs to stop being a future thing, and it needs to be a now thing and that we're building it right now.0:21:40.3 AW: Yeah. No... One, I fully support that, and I totally agree with your statement. You won't reach your potential, right? You have these ideas, you know these things, you have so much experience in the space. You know what needs to be delivered, and if you keep hopping around with the other things that you have right now and trying to forward those at the same time of creating this ultimate idea, like you just can't... You can't split pairs that many ways and still have something yet left to do something with.0:22:19.1 AW: I think you put it... You put it perfectly in our pre-show notes when you just wrote, "It's okay to put other things on hold."0:22:28.9 DS: Right, yeah.0:22:29.0 AW: But we had some conversations, but I'd love to hear or maybe you sharing a little bit, like what happened in between some of our conversations where you're thinking about this internally and going through the... How uncomfortable at first, and how did you get yourself more comfortable with, it's okay to put things on hold and pursue this big idea that feels... This feels like what I need to do, but then it's much different to say you're going to do it and then put that in action to just do it.0:23:02.8 DS: Yeah. So I would say there was two things that happened. One, you and I talked about this platform stuff and you had pushed for... You'd be like, "Man, Darren you should really... You really... You need to start putting other things on hold and focus on platform." and so that seed was planted, and then... So I've always been faced with well, we'll get to that when we finish this thing. We'll get to platform when we finished this next thing, and the thing that was lined up was something that I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, but we have a new feature that we're integrating into our local citation finder that does a deep audit and a stand-alone tool, which we're calling Scanarator.0:23:46.4 DS: So this thing was built by one of our developers who we brought in-house, but he was a freelancer working on the side, and I wanted to do the side project, but I didn't wanna distract my team from... So he built this thing. And it's great, it works really well, but now that we're at this phase where we're actually integrating it into our stack, it became clear that we couldn't do it because he built it in his own weird framework-y thing, and so it's like, "Well, we're getting close to launching this thing, it's all functional, but when it comes to integrating it, we're gonna have to re-write it in our stack." and I was like, "What?" This is gonna take us like another month, maybe two, and then it was Click! 0:24:30.4 DS: This light bulb went off. I'd be like, what is that gonna give us? Is it gonna increase our MRR by a $1,000 a month? Maybe. Maybe it's not gonna give us that much more. It's like I keep pushing on all of these things that will definitely improve our software, but that's not gonna two times our company. It's just gonna keep us floating along. It's going to keep us staying the course. If I put that on ice, it doesn't hurt us. We've already raised our prices for the local citation finder.0:25:04.0 AW: So great, we're putting it on ice. We're not integrating that functionality until we can integrate it into platform, and so that was like... You planted the seed. I saw that exact situation occurring again, where I'm like, "My God, I'm not gonna delay platform by another two months." Forget it. We're putting everything on ice, we're focusing on platform, and that absolutely... I feel so good about that decision, and I know that that's gonna get us to where we need to go. And it's like... I don't know why it took me so long to have that shift of perception, 'cause it's really easy to just keep building on what you already have rather than going after the big prize.0:25:44.5 AW: Yeah. Well, it's probably a couple things. One, we all have different levels of risk aversion, and especially the larger you grow your company, you're responsible for more people, you're responsible for more customers. I think part of your success, Darren, is what I see in you is, you are so wired to not only please but exceed what people get from you. It's in all of the content you share, the presentations you give. You just give so much, and so I think when you look at this, I think it's been hard for you to wrangle with something, be like, "I'm just gonna let it be good enough for a while, instead of constantly pushing on it to be great, even though its ceiling just isn't the ultimate ceiling, right? 0:26:30.5 AW: And that's where getting this transfer of energy put into something that has a very high ceiling, but it's also gonna be hard. There's risk involved in it, and it's risky when you take yourself away from the same track that you've been on on trying to deliver greatness with what you do have out there and just being okay with it being the same for a while, while you put all your focus into one thing.0:26:58.1 DS: Yeah. The to-do list don't stop. Like all of our existing software products, they each have a list of 100 things that I wanna do for them, and then what ends up happening is I end up on all these client calls. So I'm on a sales call, or a customer support thing comes up, and so there's all these polls happening, like a customer... A lead wants this thing, and then your brain goes to like, "Well, if we built that thing, it would serve all of our customers and we could sell more and it would be great." But those are actually distractions, in my personal case, from the bigger prize, and I realize that I have to focus our attention on a bigger price and say, "Well, that's a cool feature, let's do it when we have the main thing that we wanna build it into done."0:27:49.3 AW: One of the things that I've done at multiple past companies, just because the same things you're talking about, like that happens everywhere in business for all of us, and I think the truly great leaders are the ones that find the time and find the ways to separate themselves from the business of doing in the constant motion, and boil it down to what is my one most important thing right now, and am I doing enough for that? Because if that doesn't happen, all of the other things usually pale in comparison, right? 0:28:22.0 AW: And I would try to do this from time to time, whether it was monthly or bi-monthly or even quarterly with my management team and just have a meeting in one of our normal exec team cycles or whatever, but say like, what's the one thing you need to get done right now and does it have a blocker, do you need support, do you need resources? And really make them think on that. 'Cause it was real easy for every run to report on, here's my laundry list of things that I need to do, that all need attention, meetings, calls, whatever. We all have that, but the truly great ones find a way to like... That's fine. That's still all gonna be there if I step away from it or put it on ice or delegate or whatever else. But if I don't do this thing... At some point, the business will pay a price in one way or another. If it truly is important enough to be prioritized, it's something that will cost you if you don't take action on it.0:29:21.2 DS: Right. Basically, it's the exact same concept of that book, Eat That Frog. I think it's called Eat that Frog, and so it's like, you start your day, what is the absolute... You just... I know you've got a list of 100 things, but what's the one thing? Eat that thing in the morning. Do that thing first thing before you do anything else, and It'll set you up for success for the whole day. That same concept can be applied with a greater scale at your company level. What is the frog? What is the one thing that you must focus on to move your company forward? 0:29:54.8 AW: I don't think I'm gonna remember right now 'cause I consume way too many SaaS and leader type podcasts, but one of the ones this past week I was listening to, the guy was talking... He literally puts his most important thing on a post-it note and it's on his bathroom mirror. So he sees it like every morning. So even if it's the most important thing for weeks at a time, he comes face-to-face with it every morning. There's no way he sees it in writing, and I just... So basic, but yet, just this gentle reminder in your mindset that, "Hey, it's great whatever I do today, but if I don't contribute to this one thing, I'm not putting my valuable time into the most valuable thing on my docket at the moment." That was really, really interesting.0:30:41.3 DS: Although it's hard because if you ask me right now, what is my personal one thing, whoa! I got three of them. I don't know. I got three of them. I got the summit, I got my videos I gotta make, and I got platform, right? So I have to move all of those things forward.0:31:01.6 AW: Yeah. And that's not to say that doesn't happen, but at the end of the day, if someone made you strip down to one, it wouldn't be the summit and it wouldn't be your videos.0:31:08.9 DS: No. But I... That... You know what happens though, I would let down a lot of people by having prioritized, and I think that's where the struggle is. It's like I got all these different pulls for my attention and my input, and my input has... Everyone wants it, and so it's really tough when, as your company grows. 'Cause if I didn't do my videos and I didn't do the summit stuff then that would just fall apart.0:31:37.9 AW: Yeah. Saying no is hard.0:31:39.4 DS: Saying no is hard.0:31:39.5 AW: Saying no is really, really hard. It took me a long time to... Especially... I've spent so much of my career on the sales and marketing side of running companies, and it used to be like saying no to bad deals when you're young and hungry and trying to grow, and you just take anything on, even though there's something in your gut that's like, "Oh! This... The communication doesn't feel right, the expectations don't feel right, but I just wanna get this deal. The money is good." whatever else, and then you get into it and you're like, "Oh, I would pay money not to have this deal right now." It is so the wrong the deal.0:32:15.9 DS: Yeah. I got a few of those in my closet, for sure.0:32:18.6 AW: Yeah. I actually... I think more than ever at GatherUp, I got really good at being able to say no to those. Where I was just like, that's not who we need to help us grow. Like that... One way or another, and it was really agency life is where I learned how hard... Having a bad client in SaaS Life isn't great, but it's not... Agency life, that bad client could just put your entire company on fire for no good reason and...0:32:51.1 DS: Sure yeah.0:32:51.5 AW: I don't miss that at all...0:32:51.9 DS: So much time. Yeah.0:32:54.5 AW: 'Cause it's just all service delivery, and when service delivery things go wrong, your only option is to throw more people at it, and that just... There isn't always bandwidth to throw more people at it, and then that upsets the other things you're working on. Like, "Oh, man... "0:33:07.5 DS: Yeah. Yeah. It's tough.0:33:09.8 AW: It totally is. Well, I applaud the moves you're making, and I just flat out think prioritization is the hardest thing in running a business. I think it is the most challenging thing that's there, and something that... I just always have so much work to do, sometimes I feel like I see things really clearly, and other times I fight all of those same battles with what's exciting and what's new and getting distracted, and I don't know. I've just... I've tried over time to just figure out as many things as I can to... How do I boil it down to answer to one thing instead of so many the buts and the what ifs and all of that.0:33:55.8 AW: That's always there in every conversation that you can have with yourself, but a lot of times when I analyze, I just have to look at... And that's where I'm at right now. My priority is launch.0:34:09.6 DS: That is obvious.0:34:10.5 AW: Yeah, I have 30 to 45 days at most, and I'm putting this on recording, I cannot go a day outside of July without launching. It's not gonna happen. The hard part, my what-ifs and buts are... There's one bigger differentiating feature that might get cut off and not delivered at launch, and that super pains me as someone who's a product... I don't wanna use the word perfectionist, but I demand and expect a lot out of our tool, and I know things I wanna build for years, and if I'm launching without something that has always been in my V1 and something that I feel like is a differentiator and I'm gonna have to wait another sprint or two sprints after launching, that just feels like such a like... I've almost said to others on the team, I don't know if this is a great way to do, but I'm just like... It's almost like parenting. I'm just like, don't make me have to decide this. Somehow pull this off, save the day. Let's get this feature included in what we're doing up until this time frame, but I don't wanna launch without the... And if it's super apparent to me that we're not even gonna be able to get it, then I'm gonna launch even earlier because I'd rather launch in early July, knowing I'm gonna be without this no matter what, then holding it even further.0:35:43.2 DS: I think one thing you should try to keep in mind is that you're gonna have a significant potential customer base that doesn't care about that feature. They want the core functionality, they're gonna get that out of the gate, and then by putting all of these things into additional sprints, every time you launch a nice new feature, that's another marketing push, it's another chance to reach out to your existing customers, provide more value to them and do a broader marketing push saying, "Hey, we now do this thing, we now do this thing" and so I actually came that realization with our rank tracker product. We were building the whole thing from the ground up, and then my dev team lead pulled me back and says like, "No, those features... Yes, we want them for launch, it'd be great if they were there for launch, but it actually can be a benefit to launch them after 'cause you get that additional marketing engine running for every new cool thing that you're putting up.0:36:40.1 AW: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I struggle with is just first impressions, and especially when you launch, you do get the love when you launch, right? It's like... At least for me at this point, I have a good network of colleagues and friends and professional contacts, like I'll be able to get social posts that get some good sharing to them and figure out some other distribution things and I just fear. It was the same in running GatherUp for six years, there's so many times where I'd talk to somebody, it's like, "Oh well, I looked at you guys early on, and it was just immature and missing so many things and whatever else," and then they don't pay attention to all the incremental steps you're making all the time and then you're just waiting, you need something to grab them to bring them back to get them to say, "Oh, I should take another look because they probably have a lot more understanding." They have a lot more or whatever else, but whatever turned me off to begin with, they almost hold that to you forever, their first impression was, say... And this won't be the case with Leadferno, I've gotten enough feedback that the interface is beautiful and easy to use and everything, so I'm not worried about that.0:37:54.5 AW: But say that was the case and he was like, "Oh," it just looks Junkie. It felt wrong. I couldn't figure out where to go. It wasn't intuitive at all. That person might never, ever consider you again because they just look at like, that company is not gonna fix that, or why would they fix that, right? 0:38:11.3 DS: Sure. Yeah.0:38:12.5 AW: And those are the things that I stress about, and this feature that I have to decide against is like... It is a differentiator, and it's just one of those things too, you might be like, Aaron, why do you have a differentiator that's on the line at the end, but it's like there's just so many things to build in the product, like something... For one reason, another... And in some of the steps we had to build, it just had to be in that place, and so it's like I'm just worried where... It's not gonna make or break us. But if I could get 20 or 30 people or 40 people to sign up those first few weeks as paying customers, and that's the reason why, or that's what keeps them as opposed to it doesn't, the guarantee on getting them to come take a look again when I message them two weeks or four weeks or six weeks later and be like, "Don't worry, it's here." I might not even know who they were. You know what I mean? It just won't...0:39:08.3 DS: I hear what you're saying with a brand new product launch, you're coming out of gates, no one really knows you, that first impression is kind of important, there is an MVP, that's just two minimum. You shouldn't be so minimum, that attention you get with the launch is wasted, right? I hear your perspective there, and now it does raise the question, what is... Let's say you decide, okay, we can't do it, we can't launch without this feature, is it worth pushing back the launch by another three weeks like this is what you're grappling with, right? 0:39:44.2 AW: Yeah, and I already feel like I'm right. Our internal goal was end of June, and so I've already come to grips with, it's gonna take another sprint and possibly two sprints, but that's where I say... Then I start hitting the point of like, "What's not to keep allowing yourself to keep saying like, Oh, just another sprint and another," right? And next thing it's October and I still don't have a damn product out and it's like... So I've drawn in the line of sand, no matter what, if we hit mid-June and we were hopeful we could get it in whatever, then I'll just say "No, all we're doing is prep in the next five days to launch." That's just what we're doing because I don't wanna work...0:40:24.1 AW: We have enough of the product there. I don't wanna work any further in the dark without people's opinion with money on the line, it's like pilot customers and doing demos and people wanting to learn it, all of that's great. But it's not the same as when they're saying yes or no with $150 or $200 a month behind their name. That's a much different piece of feedback, and I wanna get to that 'cause I want people to either be like, "Yes, and here's what I'd like to see next" or "Here's what I'm already learning in my usage", or "This is a no for me, and here's why. Here's what you're missing. Here's why I'm not willing to plug into this or wait for you to bring this along or anything else." We need to hit that at this point because we've been coding long enough... I don't wanna go further. Yeah.0:41:18.1 DS: It does make me wonder a little bit, and I'm sure you've thought of, This is your communication to that first batch of customers and being really... Lots of reminders about what's coming. You're getting in early, and we're gonna grandfather you in, and this is all the stuff that we're building, and it's gonna just keep getting better and trying to keep that excitement brewing for them.0:41:39.9 AW: Yep. Yeah. I know how important that is. I feel like that's something that we settled into and did really well at GatherUp, like we would be teasing features two or three months out. The minute we had a visual on what the future was gonna look like, we were telling people like, "Hey, this is coming and here's why we're building it." right? And helping them understand strategically how we're looking at things, and it was helpful in so many ways.0:42:10.9 AW: The hard part for me with this is like, I know two things that are really big fast follow. The minute we launch, literally, we will celebrate for an hour and then be like, and now we gotta get to these two things. Our mobile apps being one of them, and so I'll be able to promote those two things like, "Hey, we're heads down working on these." As they take shape, I wanna get it to a point where I can give a good firm date that we'll be able to hit for people so that they're not disappointed, but I also know who knows what the priorities will have to be reset when I have...0:42:50.7 AW: The hopeful is we have 20, 50, 100 users within weeks, and then they're telling us what's missing or what would make their life really easy, and then we have to figure how much do we work on those things versus on these big pieces that will open up more so, Oh, it's about to get interesting.0:43:06.7 DS: It's gonna be good. We have lots to talk about on the podcast.0:43:10.8 AW: But that's just all the reason more why... You just can't go any further, and I think every founder Pride has this. I definitely have this struggle. A minimal viable product is just so hard for me. So hard for me.0:43:30.2 DS: Yeah, me too. And that's actually, it's one of the things I realize has held us back because you could keep perfecting something for a really long time before you ever launch it. That's... Back to our topic, that's prioritizing. What is the priority? What needs to get done that's gonna create revenue growth in your company. That's really what it all comes down to you.0:43:52.8 AW: Yep, absolutely. So I'm gonna keep focusing on my priority of launching, and hopefully the dev team can prioritize my feature and get it in there. If not, we're gonna... The priority is gonna be time and we're just... We're not gonna stretch any further without getting... I don't know what term to use, credible feedback, just real feedback instead of... Like I said, pilot customers and testers and friends are nice, but they're just... They don't look at as critical as those paying for it and using it within their business process. That's who you need to be listening to.0:44:30.3 DS: That makes sense. I liked your comment about drawing a line in the sand. It's like, "We would love to have this feature, but here's the line, if we're not gonna have it, then we're not gonna have it."0:44:43.1 AW: And in a perfect world, your team gets that and understands it, right? If you communicate that far enough up front, what you would hope for out of your team is they're planning and preparing, and knowing that there's a deadline that's far enough out where they can make decisions, do their own prioritizing and figure out those things. Also, even having pride of the work like, "Hey, we don't wanna launch without this." So I think there's some smart things that can be done when you're transparent with your team with that and helping them understand prioritization and why you're prioritizing things that way. Again, that's an area where I really grew at GatherUp in just being very intentional in communicating with the team and letting them know, "Here's the order we're gonna build the features in, and here's why. Here's why it matters to our business or fits in with our vision." and allow them to support it and then make their prioritization and their decisions against it, and I think that's a really freeing thing for your team.0:45:41.7 DS: Yeah. I think it's an area of personal growth for me. That's something I can get a bit better at 'cause I don't really have deadlines defined, and I have been notorious for not defining them, but that also comes back to scoping out our projects really well, so having them really well-scoped, defining these sprints, defining these timelines, that's something that I gotta get better at.0:46:03.9 AW: No. Always something to get better at.0:46:04.0 DS: Yeah, definitely. Whatever.0:46:06.5 AW: Alright. Should we wrap it up? 0:46:09.1 DS: We should wrap it up. We did it in 45 minutes.0:46:12.6 AW: Hey, that's a win. We always discuss if we can go shorter, we try not to get longer, but as I told you, no one's ever complained, no one's ever written us and said, "Hey, this is too long, I just... I can't handle it." 0:46:26.7 DS: Sure. Alright, well, any listeners, if you have any complaints, let us know.0:46:30.1 AW: Yes, or if you have praise, let us know too. It's just always nice to know, it's just not Darren talking or topic ideas we get every now and then, questions you want answered, we'd love to hear from listeners so...0:46:42.9 AW: Alright, Darren. Well, I hope you have a fabulous time enjoying some summer and...0:46:52.4 DS: Yeah. Thanks. Same to you.0:46:54.4 AW: Hopefully. I know you have your second vaccination shot up and coming, and that helps return a few more spices of life and socialization and those things that have been hard to come by.0:47:06.9 DS: For sure. Yeah, I look forward to that. That lifestyle that you're getting into now. Go for a trip.0:47:11.6 AW: It feels kind of good.0:47:15.0 DS: I know. It sounds good.0:47:17.0 AW: Oh, to be normal.0:47:18.4 DS: Yeah. Totally.0:47:19.0 AW: Alright. Well, have a good one, Darren, and thanks everybody. And we'll see you on the next episode.0:47:23.8 DS: Thank you, everybody.[OUTRO music]

FULL EPISODE NOTES:0:00:12.1 Aaron Weiche: Episode 28: Vision and Mission.0:00:16.0 [INTRO]: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.0:00:44.2 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:48.2 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:49.5 AW: And, Darren, I think from our conversations that we have weekly, you and I, we've both gotten one shot in the arm now, which is nice to report.0:01:03.6 DS: That is really good to report, yes. I'm just waiting for the second shot and hoping things come back to normal, but a bit apprehensive about things going back to normal, because of variants and whatnot. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, feels good to have some protection that I likely won't die from COVID now.0:01:26.6 AW: There you go. Yeah, that's pretty much... Once you're fully vaccinated, that's proven to be 100%, your protection, depending upon what you're getting, 50% to 90%, mid 90%, depending upon which shot, what application types. But the fact knowing that it won't take you out is definitely reassuring and that's awesome. And, yeah, I can... I've fully accepted the way things were 16 months ago might never be the case, but...0:02:06.8 DS: Same.0:02:07.3 AW: I just... I've come to, like, "Okay, here's how to hedge your bets and to be smart, get vaccinated, all those other things, and... " Yeah, I'm excited to just dip my toe a little bit more into the social world. I'm definitely gonna get on a plane in June, so I'm excited about that. That'll feel awkward.0:02:32.0 DS: Amazing, wow. What an experience.0:02:34.0 AW: Both my co-founder and I will be fully vaccinated, so it's like we're long overdue to have a two, three-day jam session in person, melt some white boards and do something more than Slack, Google Meet, Zoom, everything else we've done.0:02:53.3 DS: I like that, it's a SaaS jam session. Rather than melting faces with guitars, you're gonna melt brains with white boards.0:03:03.6 AW: Yeah. We're just gonna be so high off of expo markers, it's gonna be wonderful. [chuckle] Other than that, what's new with you? 0:03:17.0 DS: What is new? Let's see. In the world of Whitespark, we did launch our new account system, I think I talked about that in the last podcast, that we were about to launch that. We launched it, and it was generally a pretty great launch. Nice and smooth, team did a great job on that. We have obviously lots of kinks to work out post-launch, as there would be with a whole new billing and account system. With that, we launched our new services packages, which have been very successful, so businesses thriving on a listing service side of things, so that's great. Busy planning the next Whitespark Local Search Summit for 2021, that's coming up right away. We're gonna be having that near the end of September, so we gotta get our speakers lined up, everything pre-recorded, get our sponsors in place, we're working on all that.0:04:09.0 DS: I've been really busy with these Whitespark weekly videos. I put in a good five to 10 hours every week, making these videos and then getting them published. It's going really well. I think that they're driving business for sure, we definitely feel the uptick. And we're growing our YouTube channel. We're at 1200 subscribers on YouTube or something, so that's been good.0:04:30.5 AW: That is such a massive undertaking. I would feel that that is so daunting, and you do such a great... I mean, when you tackle these topics, it's not just, "Hey, here's a few things in this direction." You are pretty exhaustive in what you're putting together on these, and great long-form content, blog posts, the videos, I see it all on my social channels. These things are legit and take a whole day out of your week, too.0:05:03.3 DS: Yeah. They might take me five to 10 hours to build and to actually prepare the deck, prepare my notes, figure out what I wanna do, all the research, record the video, then... I don't know how much time my video editing team spends on it, then I got Jesse working on getting it all up on the blog and doing all the promotional stuff. This is just a ton of work, but I believe in the rewards, particularly believe in the long-term rewards. If you can stay with it consistently week after week, month after month, year after year, you end up hitting this point of... It's like the TSN Turning Point, where all of a sudden now we have 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. And the thing is just a snowball that continues to drive value. So, I'm just gonna keep at it a good two years in. If two years we still don't have more than 1200 subscribers, then I'll totally give up, but I believe in the power of this, particularly long term.0:06:04.5 AW: We talked outside of our podcast recordings on this, and I think... And it's something you agreed and you're gonna implement, finding more calls to actions within this content. Because it is so great, it's attracting eyeballs, and it's taking it that last mile and giving people a clear next step on how to get a little bit deeper, start using one of your tools, investigate one of your services, but really working not just a traffic tool but a conversion tool as well.0:06:40.1 DS: I have already started implementing that, yeah. So, that's already... We're going through our content and finding good spots to drop, like little subtle banners. It's not like in-your-face blinking, but it's like, if you're looking for help on this particular aspect, hey, we have this software, we have this service, whatever it is. And so we're definitely integrating that into the content. And again, speaking about long-term value, that content will continue to drive views and people checking it out, and so that's getting our products in front of more people all the time.0:07:14.7 AW: Now, I feel that's especially important with the amount of time you and even the team is sinking into this, for you to have clear metrics that even go past traffic acquisition. I think you need to see... You can definitely tell, right? You feel there's a relation between putting these out and seeing just spikes in sign-ups and things like that. But you definitely wanna get probably pretty confident in the data that's there when you're gonna peel a quarter of your week off on to one thing, right? 0:07:52.7 DS: For sure. And we have... All the little ad placements we'll put within the content will have GTM tags, and they will track conversions in Google Analytics, so Analytics will be able to see if you can go to the campaign and see actually how much money they generate. We're getting all of that technology connected, making sure that we're tracking it well and pulling it into a dashboard. That is another thing we're working on actually. Within the launch of new accounts, we had everything, all of our subscriptions, in Payflow, which is a PayPal product, and we have since launched on Stripe, which offers a ton of benefits to us. And I didn't realize this, but you can send an email to PayPal and say, "Hey, we've moved to Stripe, can you please send us a dump of all our subscription data?" And then you can... Stripe will import it. We're gonna get everybody off of our legacy payment provider and put them on Stripe, which is phenomenal, so that gives us... Within the next week, we're gonna have everybody on Stripe, which means I can set up their metrics, gonna have excellent reporting. Can't wait.0:09:01.5 AW: That's awesome. That's a big win, and not having to cycle through users and have them re-add credit card information over time everything else, that's huge.0:09:14.0 DS: It's super huge, 'cause that was actually our game plan, was every time someone logs into an account, it'd be like, "Oh, we've got a new billing, can you please reenter your credit card data?" That was what we were planning to do, but this is way better.0:09:25.9 AW: Yeah. Yeah, that would have been scary.0:09:28.1 DS: Yeah. What's new with you? How are things going at Leadferno? 0:09:32.1 AW: They're going well. The general consensus is good momentum, especially April has just felt like it's gone really well. I'm spending a lot more of my days on demos and sales type opportunities, lining up pilot customers. And what's been really nice, especially our last couple of pushes and with the amount of features releasing in those pushes, my early demos were, "Here's what's there right now, if you were to test this, but here's 75% of the things that will be coming."0:10:13.2 AW: And now we've hit the point where 75% of it is there, and it's just kind of 25%. And the 25% are bigger things not necessarily features, per se, as infrastructure items, like how our profiles work, which segments locations or departments, where sales team would have one shared inbox and the service department would have a shared inbox, our internal admin tools for managing accounts and customers and things like that. We're using Stripe as well, so just starting to get some of the billing stuff tied in. And those are the really big pieces. We probably only have two or three features left to build for wanting to launch in June.0:11:01.1 DS: Great.0:11:02.0 AW: Yeah. But we have those big pieces. I go back and forth. Some days I'm like, "Man, I feel 90% confident we're gonna nail this and be out there in June," and then the next day the stand-up feels a little wishy-washy and there's a few new blockers, and then I'm like, "Okay, maybe I'm about 50% we're gonna make it to launch in June."0:11:21.7 DS: Sure. I'm always overly confident, to my own detriment. I'm always like, "Oh, this is gonna be great, we're gonna totally launch next week."0:11:29.7 AW: I'm probably more... I don't know if I'm pessimistic, but I definitely fall into reality, and doing just so many releases and doing small features and big features, and just so many different things, I feel like there's some key indicators that you kind of see where you can truly have comfort and confidence that you're gonna deliver. And until I see those, then I'm usually like, "Yeah, I'm not going all in on this or being too aggressive because of those things." And then sometimes on the opposite side I've definitely had times where I'd say to our team, "Hey, no matter what, we have to hit this date. It's not just your part, here's all the other things lined up, and why and why we can't move those. And so we're gonna have to do everything that we can to hit that." It's always a dance, that's for sure.0:12:25.1 DS: Yeah, we're just dancing around.0:12:29.1 AW: Yeah. The one challenging thing right now is we're basically losing our best Flutter developer, our front-end SDK. And we knew it was never a permanent role, he is part-time with us, and we sought him out because we needed some leadership on that side. We had a couple of developers, but we just weren't strong enough for the uniqueness and the newness of Flutter. And so I basically stalked Twitter community on the developers talking about Flutter, loving Flutter, being part of conversations with other developers, and found him and he had time to take on our project, he was looking for his next gig and was willing to take us on part-time for what we could fit.0:13:18.3 AW: It's bittersweet. One, I'm super grateful. He made a huge impact in the two months he was with us, and that was awesome, opened our eyes to some things, and so I'm super, super grateful. Selfishly, I would have loved to have him up till launch or even right after launch, we have some fast follow things that are important. But, yeah, he landed a really great full-time gig with a huge company out on the West Coast, and it's one of those things for him. We would never be able to pay him what he's getting, some options, a great company, everything else. Happy for him, super thankful for everything he did, but now it's like, "Okay, so now we gotta fill this hole." We're actually... It's the first time I ever used it, we're using Toptal, and so far so good. Their process is really easy. I think we're finding the same challenge that we've had in building our team. Again, there's not droves of Flutter developers out there. So far we've talked to one candidate, and that was okay.0:14:32.9 AW: The other hard part is I feel like we're gonna compare him to Luke, who we're losing, who I just feel was really unique and really great in a bunch of ways that we're just... We're not gonna get a one-to-one replacement for him. But hopefully we get a couple more candidates sourced so that we can find someone to plug in and keep our momentum going.0:14:54.1 DS: Yeah. Well, good luck with that, I'm really curious to hear how things work out with Toptal. I've looked at them a number of times, when I'm trying to source developers. I've looked at other ones, like Lemon.io is one that I've checked out before, they look interesting. There's a number of Toptal competitors out there now. But, yeah, I'd love to hear how that experience goes. We'll have to have a podcast episode on that one of these days.0:15:15.4 AW: There you go, I'll keep you updated. With that, to transfer over to our main topic today, Darren. You had brought up in a text conversation that we were having that you wanted to talk about vision, mission, core values, just how do you create or edit or surmise those things from within the company. Tell me a little bit why did you bring that up. What's the...0:15:45.8 DS: Yeah, for sure. Man, Whitespark has been in operation since 2005. So, what does that mean? Sixteen years? And I've never defined this, and so I'm really starting to think about my role as leader in this company and how it's like... We all have a very good general sense about what our why is, how we do it, what we do, but it just hasn't been formally defined. And I feel like that's a big gap in the company, and there's a lot of value to having the vision-mission statement, and so it's definitely time for me to define those. Long overdue, and so I've been exploring it and I thought it would be a great topic for the podcast since this is something you've been through a couple of times, and it's something I'm learning. I'll ask you questions, and you can provide your wisdom.0:16:40.3 AW: Well, I don't know if it's wisdom. It's definitely experience, and I would say passion. I love this part of it. It's translating what the core of what the business is about and where you're trying to get to, and somewhat of how you're gonna get there, and doing it in this way that's both internally and externally translatable, where your team can rally around it, someone from the outside can rally around it, it can help guide your decisions, and it makes it really easy when you're even... I found, with GatherUp, I would use it as I pair it against what features that we were gonna create and why we would prioritize one over the other, because it's like this falls in line with our vision, this is exactly what we wanna be about.0:17:34.6 DS: Yeah. And I think that's really important. In fact, if I think back on the last 15 years of Whitespark, the lack of that very clear vision and mission perhaps led us astray, because I would make decisions, like, "Oh, this is a really cool tool idea." And we would build this thing, but if I had been making decisions based off of our vision I would have recognized, "This is a cool thing, but it doesn't necessarily align with what we're trying to accomplish," and so I wouldn't have done it. And that would have been big time savings in terms of development, resources, my time, marketing time. All of that stuff that we've invested on multiple side projects over the year, the vision can really help focus you in on what's actually important to your company, and that's the big gap I'm recognizing and need to fix.0:18:29.0 AW: I think that's a great take, and not as long of a timeframe, but we definitely have that at GatherUp, was the same kind of "There isn't anything existing, we're doing this work, we're making these decisions. We're loosely talking about our direction and what we're trying to do and giving explanations to how we decide and what our take is on it, but it was really just kind of messy. And there wasn't anything that everybody could anchor into. When you would listen to other people... I always found it interesting, say we're at a conference and there's three or four of us at the conference, and if somebody comes up and just does the normal, "So tell me what GatherUp does." And at the time, we were... This is GetFiveStars, we hadn't re-branded yet, and I'll talk how we used that, but I would listen and it was always a different answer. Right? 0:19:24.7 DS: Right.0:19:25.2 AW: And so when you hear that and you'd hear how short one would be, how loose another would be, the different things mentioned, you just saw like, "Okay, that inconsistency isn't doing us any favors." And you can also see the person sometimes, and even myself would be guilty of it, you're just sometimes fumbling through because you don't have the words right then and there, or you're trying to piece it together in a new way, you're trying to find it yourself on the fly while you're in this discussion. So, I took it on that when we decided we were gonna re-brand GetFiveStars to GatherUp, that I wanted to institute these things. I wanted to create a vision, I wanted to create a mission statement, and I wanted to create core values for the company. And it really was... That was the funnest and most exciting part of the rebrand to me. Even more so than the visual of the logo and whatever else, I just loved working on defining what our DNA was and how we operated within that DNA.0:20:32.9 DS: Yeah, so valuable to have that. And so I'm really... And I know that when GatherUp rebranded, it really did feel... For me, as a GetFiveStars customer, it really felt big, it was like a big next step. GetFiveStars was great, but GatherUp was like, "This is a brand. This is for real. This is a legit big brand, this is what we stand for, this is what we do." And it just really elevated the company to a whole another level. So, you did a great job on that.0:21:05.5 AW: Thanks. It felt grown up. And I think it made our team feel grown up, too. I can easily point to a few things that really gave the team confidence in where we were at or what we had grown to, and that was one of them. When we made it into the Inc. 5000, that was another one where, okay, telling someone we're one of the 5000 fastest growing companies in the US, that's the kind of thing that you could tell your mom or your uncle or your brother, and they'd be like, "Oh, that's impressive, I get that." And there's so many times in our world where, yeah, people have no idea. I could go to someone in town and be like, "Hey, here's my software, and do you wanna use it?" And they just think I made it in my basement on my computer and I'm about to hand them like a floppy disk or a CD-ROM to make that. [laughter] 'Cause there's nothing tangible with it.0:22:05.5 DS: Yeah. "It's shareware. I got a shareware version. I have GetFiveStars here."[chuckle]0:22:12.0 AW: Oh, man. Yeah, it was just really interesting and fun. And the way I see this, especially the vision statement, I really do feel that's on the CEO, the leader, the founder, whoever has that visionary role, this is one that I see should be that person's vision. If you have co-founders and whatever else, definitely having those discussions, but I usually find there's someone in the group that should take the lead that is more of the visionary or has that. And that was kind of... We operated on there's four main partners, and we had our different roles and everything else, but I knew I was best equipped to handle that and create that. And when we created it for GatherUp it was thinking through a bunch of things like, one, I just started and just started to research anything I could find on other companies and reading about all these how-tos and everything else.0:23:16.6 AW: And I wasn't looking for one to, like, "Here's the 12-step process to having a vision statement." I just wanted to... I like to consume a lot and then weed out what I think is really important or what matters to me. So, I took all that on. And then in reading that, I was really just trying to get a feel for what is it about theirs that makes you feel something, and makes them unique and helps position them. And so that's when you read through and you get these great ideas from the Nikes and the Zappos and the Amazons of the world and everything else, but you really have to focus on what makes us us, and be super comfortable and be okay with that.0:24:00.6 AW: And in the case of GatherUp, it was already behind even our name change. We changed from GetFiveStars to GatherUp because we didn't wanna just be viewed as this review tool. We wanted to be about something bigger. We wanted to be about customer experience because that's how we all really viewed what we were doing, is listening to your customers, getting feedback, getting feedback in measurable ways, getting feedback in structured ways like reviews. Reviews is part of it, but our original name just really made it feel like it was all about reviews. And the last thing we wanted to be was like, "Oh, yeah, that's a review factory, you put this in one side and a review shoots out the other side." That's not what we were looking to be.0:24:49.7 AW: So when we created the vision statement, having that in mind and knowing that was our direction, we arrived at the vision statement of "Make customer experience the backbone of your business." And we really looked at that... That elevates that customer experience is our guide, that's what we're working towards, and we view it in a way that it is the most important thing. A human cannot stand up without their spine, it is the most key item to the structure of your body functioning. And we looked at a business the same way, like if you don't have great customer experience you will topple over on yourself, you won't be able to grow and get to where you need to go to.0:25:34.4 AW: That was one of those that was fun to create that, but we could already see it was just really taking apart the conversations and the way we are already loosely positioning ourselves to build that. And then working down from there, then into a mission statement, in front of a presentation, it was basically a pitch to a client one time, had broken down for him, like, "Our tool's here to do this. It's here to gather, manage, and market your customer experience." And that kind of gave us the pieces that we then worked into our mission statement in saying how are we going to execute on this vision, and allowed us to build that out.0:26:17.2 AW: And then really the part I loved the most was building out our core values. And people differ on core values. For some it's just a gimmick, or a marketing ploy, or a way to label some of the elements of culture, but I really care about them and think they serve just, again, a really great purpose to personal decisions and management decisions and things like that. And that one's the opposite, that's one where I went and I asked everyone in our team, "Give me four to five terms that you feel are important about our company, and how we operate, and how you wanna be viewed, and the standards you hold yourself to, and things like that." And so compiled that list and started working, and then pulled out five or six of those that felt really good that represented us, and then I hired a copywriter and we just basically versioned back and forth honing these and finding out how to talk to them so that each core value was this short statement, but then we built a two-sentence definition on how it applies to our business or how you see this in action, "What does that look like when we say... "0:27:35.4 DS: "What does it mean to you as a customer?"0:27:36.7 AW: Yes, exactly. And what does it mean to us internally, too, right? That was a super fun process and that was like... When we re-branded the site, that's the page I just loved, is our About page having vision, mission, and those core values, and then just seeing the pride in our team where they were like, "Yeah, that is us." And I felt like that one was really easy because all I had to do is just really plug into everything that was already going on there and define it, and shorten it, and dropping it down and making it concise and everything else. And that's probably the... That's the position you're in, where it's like there's a ton of things already there, you just need to figure out how to weed through it and find what really connects and what's most important that you wanna anchor to.0:28:31.9 DS: Yeah, it does make me wonder when I listen to the journey that you went through for the GatherUp statements, whether my approach might be smartest to start with the core values. If I start with the core values and I put that out to the team, collect the feedback, start to define and build those out, whether or not those directly inform the vision statement, the ultimate vision statement that we go with as a company. I don't know if that's the best approach. I'm also interested to hear... Well, let me hear your response to that potential approach. What do you think about taking that route? 0:29:12.6 AW: Yeah. I don't know if I could comment on if there's a chicken or an egg with it, and which comes first. Myself, I tend towards defining vision because it's so directional. That's the pull in where you wanna go. That one, to me, is the more important one, to get that direction stated. And then the core values are what are we holding ourselves to and how will we operate to move in that direction. For me, personally, I feel like the direction is more important in defining first.0:29:55.4 DS: Sure. All right.0:29:56.4 AW: But also I don't think you could go wrong if you did it the other way.0:30:02.0 DS: Right. You'd probably end up at the same place actually because...0:30:05.4 AW: Yeah.0:30:06.1 DS: And then I was wondering, so we've got three sections. You've got vision, mission, and core values. What's the difference between the vision statement and a mission statement? 0:30:17.1 AW: Yeah. Your vision statement is your "why." You're putting out there and you're basically stating, "Here's the big thing that we want to accomplish." For GatherUp, it was making customer experience the backbone of every business. And then the mission is to help every business gather, manage, and market their customer experience to improve their business. We believe listening is a business super power, so we're gonna transform conversations into data that drives improvements, bolsters reputation, fuels growth. That's more of the like, "Here's how we're gonna do our why.0:30:57.4 AW: And for Leadferno, the vision is that we want to make connections, make delightful connections at speed. And then how we're gonna do that is we're gonna power business messaging to create conversations, close leads, close more leads faster, and getting into some of the tactical pieces. And to me that's a big thing I pulled out of immersing myself in vision statements, is like it becomes a void of what your features are or how you're gonna do it, any of those things, it's like, "We just want to arrive at accomplishing this. This is what's driving us." Right? 0:31:37.7 DS: Right.0:31:38.8 AW: For Leadferno, right now, business messaging is an incredible way to create delightful connections at speed, but will that be the same in five or 10 years? Will we solve that problem? Will we move in that direction using the same tactical things of SMS and Facebook Messenger and things like that? 0:32:01.0 DS: Yeah. Your "how" may change, but your "why" is pretty set in stone. "This is why we're doing it, this is what we wanna put out into the world, this is what we wanna give to the world." I think there's great value in defining that. "This is what we want people to get out of what we're creating here."0:32:19.3 AW: Yep, absolutely.0:32:20.9 DS: Yeah. All right, great. See, I'm excited, I'm excited to get this all written up for Whitespark and figure that out, my wheels are already turning with ideas.0:32:31.7 AW: Yeah. It's a super fun exercise. And the cool thing is, what I found really helpful is, when we would talk about how... Especially at GatherUp, where you have thousands of customers, you have all these things you're doing, you're able to go back when you're trying to prioritize features and you're using these different elements to help prioritize, how many times is it requested, size of customers requesting it, what's a revenue opportunity by doing it. So you have all these other things that can fluctuate, they might be data points, it just might be the market, might be a gap you have from another product. But at the end of the day, when you can really couple it and say, "Does this support our vision? Does this tie in to how we see this and where we want it to go?" That's what you want, because then you end up... You're building a tool. And every time you're introducing something, it's right in line with the direction you're going, so it's supporting it and it's just making even clearer why that is your vision and how passionate you are about it.0:33:47.6 AW: So, as we moved along, there was just so many things where it's like, "Okay, yes, this exactly folds right into this and completely aligns with our vision why we're gonna do this over this other choice," because it has better alignment with where we wanna end up with what we're driving to.0:34:08.0 DS: And that's exactly... That line of thinking is what brought me to this, because we've launched our new platform, we know what we're building next, but then what's after that and what's after that? So I started planning on my roadmap. This is the way... We've got 100 ideas floating around, and so I now need to take those and put them into a phase launch plan, like, "This is our Q3 launch, our Q4 launch plan, these are the things that we're gonna build." But as I started doing that, it really led back to this, like, "How do you prioritize those things?" And that leads you to your vision statement and your mission, and all of this, it's so important. It's funny to imagine how long we've been developing stuff without that guiding principle, and so building that guiding principle will really help me do that prioritization work on a roadmap. And so I kinda got stalled out on the roadmap, and I'm like, "Dang, I better build this vision statement first."0:35:08.1 AW: Yeah. And I think this is such a great time for you because what you wanna do with the product next, with taking it from a handful of tools that operate independently into a cohesive platform, that's a great time. You're somewhat in a pretty big directional change, so you really should define that direction in words as well as what the product is gonna be.0:35:33.1 DS: Yeah, I agree 100%. That's why I'm talking about it right now. That's why I'm writing that Google Docs and brainstorming exactly what this is gonna be. I think it's a super valuable exercise, yeah. I'm just curious, I look at it and I think, "All right, I can probably get a pretty good crack at it in an hour of just hammering at a Google Doc and doing a little bit of research," and then over time, over the next week, I feel like I should have a vision statement ready to go within a week. It should be there. What do you think the timeline is to develop a good vision statement? 0:36:04.6 AW: Yeah. I would say I would be more interested in getting it to where you really feel great about it than a time frame. For me, both times, they were probably two to three-month processes, just from research, putting it down, whittling it down. So much is like remove, remove, remove, get more focused, things like that. And then that's when I got to the point where then I hired a copywriter and just said, "Hey, I basically wanna volley versions back and forth. Here's everything I have and where we're at right now, what stands out to you? Write a little bit about that, and it's just like back and forth." I can say each time it was somewhere between six to eight iterations back and forth.0:36:52.9 DS: Wow.0:36:54.0 AW: Yeah. And sometimes it was like we'd just be whittling on one sentence in one way, and we'd be doing it in email back and forth, and then be like, "Yes, that's it, nailed it. Boom. Yes, move on to the next one."0:37:04.5 DS: Yeah, this is how Jesse and I write titles for our blog posts and headlines and whatnot. It's just like, "Here are seven variations," let's just keep riffing on them until we come up with the one we like the best.0:37:18.0 AW: Absolutely, completely correct on that. And I really valued, too, the... I wanted someone completely outside to bounce this off of, and someone who is a bit of a wordsmith and a little more polished and craftier. Those were also the benefits for me, is they were gonna introduce some style and some other things to it that I know I couldn't bring. I get the representation and the passion and what it's about, but I wanted them to be able to tell these great little simple stories around it that I might not arrive at or come to.0:38:00.6 DS: Yeah. A good copywriter can really take what you've written and then think about it from that outside perspective and make it resonate with a broader audience. I think there's super good value in hiring a copywriter for this. I'll definitely do the same. I think it's great advice.0:38:17.3 AW: Yep. And so with core values, three of my... What did we have at GatherUp, if I pull up real quick. Four, five... We had six at GatherUp, and a couple of the ones that I love the most, and I also got to see with core values, this is something that your employees can apply to their decision making and what they put themselves behind. Right? 0:38:38.0 DS: Yeah.0:38:38.6 AW: Our number one core value was "Customers rule," and the definition of that was "Never underestimate the importance of the customer, they are your business. What customers share, say, and think is the pulse of any business. It's that simple." So, you can see both the external and how this reads to someone looking to work with you and buy your product, but internally it gave our entire team the knowledge, like, "Hey, making things right for the customer, taking care of them, they are our everything. We're gonna respect, we're gonna be responsive to them, and you need to make decisions based on that." So at the end of the day, you're able to say like, "Well, the customer rules, that's why I made this decision and this is what we did."0:39:25.1 DS: Right, right. Yeah, it's definitely a two-way street. Your product is all about customer experience, so the person reading that is like, "Oh, this is speaking to what I'm trying to accomplish." But then internally your team is also operating by the same principle.0:39:40.5 AW: Yep. Then the second one was, "Service sets us apart." We're obsessed with serving our customers. Every time we hear "Your customer service is the best I've ever experienced," we know that we've done our job. And this became something that I really treasured in a number of different ways, because we actually had this repeated back to us by clients. A couple of our clients, one basically said, "Well, we actually call it 'the GatherUp standard' now when we bring on a new vendor, and are they gonna be as organized, as easy to work with, as responsive, all of these things. And that's how we evaluate them. And until we worked with you guys, we didn't have a bar set." So, it was really awesome to understand, we made such an impact with how we interacted with them that we created a new tool of measurement. Like we were the tool of measurement, "Can they be as good as these guys? That's the kind of partners and vendors that we wanna work with." So, yeah, that was really cool.0:40:45.5 AW: And multiple times I heard from other clients that are larger, that work with tons of vendors, where they're just like, "We wish every vendor was working with you guys. You are the easiest and the best to work with, we look forward to the meetings, we never wanna skip them." And so that's the kind of thing, like when you see that and then when someone would share, "Oh, here's what they just said in this email," we would just comment, we're like, "That's right, service sets us apart." And just realizing, especially as a smaller bootstrapped company, we needed that personal touch, we needed to do those things right, not automate every last thing, not drop the ball, not be loose about it but try to set a whole new category with it.0:41:34.5 DS: It's so important, and that's why people would switch to you, right? They're not getting a great service from another vendor, or as they evaluate the vendors, they don't feel that they're gonna get the same kind of service, and stepping it up is just so important. That's a whole another episode. We've already talked about customer service before, but we can definitely do it again.0:41:55.9 AW: Yeah. No, by far and away it can be like your ace up the sleeve, for sure, and I'm a huge believer in that. I'm just wired that way. I wanna do everything possible I can to help that customer. I'll do it to help a partner, I'll do it to help a friend. It's just in me, I just... I wanna squeeze the most out of every opportunity.0:42:19.3 DS: Right, that's a good way to be. Leadferno's gonna be so successful, thanks to your helping nature.0:42:27.0 AW: Well, I hope so. And some of it, too, is just finding a bunch of people that also feel and care that same way, that selection. And that's why you have these core values, then it's so easy when you go to hire, because then you can measure people against those. Like "Read our core values, is this something that excites you? Are you passionate about these things? 'Cause if not, this might not be the place for you, 'cause... "0:42:50.1 DS: Has anyone ever said no in an interview? They're like, "No. No, I think those values kind of suck, they don't resonate with me at all."[chuckle]0:42:55.6 AW: I've never asked anyone to go and read them, but the ones that mention it bring it up, that shows me... One, simply put, we're doing the research and whatever else. But when they bring them and be like, "Hey, here's a couple of things I read on the website that I really identified with, or got me excited, or said this is a place for me," those are some great tells and definitely factor in.0:43:22.9 DS: Definitely, definitely. So many benefits: Aligns your team, aligns your customers, aligns your hires. Just so many benefits to having this stuff done. And it's actually surprising how many companies don't have it, and it's even more surprising that Whitespark still doesn't have it, so working on it.0:43:40.0 AW: Well, you're there. Hey, you know that it's time to put that flag in the ground and...0:43:43.5 DS: Yeah, definitely.0:43:44.6 AW: And you'll get there. And on the opposite side, completely different experience to do this with Leadferno and not be surmising something that you're watching happening. And it's more a little bit with Leadferno is more building it to be aspirational, where I can draw on all my past experiences and other companies and what we want this to embody, but I didn't have, "Hey, here's years of how I've seen this happen, and all I'm doing is putting a good title on it and writing a good summary for it." That one's a little bit different, and I think it's good to revisit these things from time to time. It doesn't say, "Hey, this is going to be this forever." If it is, that's great. But as we grow, the different core values we have, there might be an addition, there might be something else that gets swapped out, you just don't know.0:44:40.0 DS: Yeah, totally. But I think it's definitely the right approach to, when you start your brand new company, Leadferno, you started with the vision and the mission of core values. It's really great that you've started the company already with a guiding principle, it's so valuable right out of the gates.0:44:58.4 AW: Well, I've already been a part of seeing all the wins you get out of it, so that was one of those, Darren, someday when you sell Whitespark and then you go to start the next thing, you just have this list of all these things that, like, okay, doing all of these things in half the time I did them before, or doing them right from the start, that's just where you get to learn from those things and you get a chance on a blank slate to do it all over again. I saw how big a wins these were and I'm like, "There's no reason not to do these from the start. They're gonna benefit us over and over again." And even if they morph or change... The foundational elements are there, even if the details change.0:45:41.9 DS: Yeah, totally. It would be interesting to see if they do change. One would expect that they would as your company evolves.0:45:48.8 AW: Yeah. No, I totally get it. Your culture can evolve, your people change, the environment changes, so many different things. You definitely can't look at it and say, "Oh, it'll be this forever, this is set in stone." And, yeah, you just gotta read and react to what matters to the people in your company and the direction you're going.0:46:13.0 DS: Yep, yep.0:46:16.7 AW: All right. Well, I think we burned that topic to the ground, I hope.0:46:21.3 DS: I think so, yeah. I think we've talked about all the elements of it, definitely filled a podcast with it.0:46:29.3 AW: Yeah. That went super fast. Like I said, I'm so passionate about this and I just... I love doing this stuff. It almost like... Getting it done for Leadferno felt really awesome, but then I was also kind of sad because I wasn't doing it anymore. It's like, when you're a kid, you get this awesome 1000-piece Lego kit, and you're so excited to get to the end and whatever else, and then you build it and it's beautiful, and you feel accomplishment, and the next day you're like, "Oh, what am I gonna do with the two hour... I miss building for two hours and getting it to the next stage and whatever." Yeah, a little bit, so I felt a little bit like, "Oh, this is so great." And then I was also like, "Oh, I can't... I don't need to work on this anymore for a while, and I really like this work."0:47:17.7 DS: Yeah, I get it. Well, maybe you can help me with mine, that'd be great, if you really wanna get back into it.0:47:24.9 AW: Absolutely, I would love to. When you do, as you're doing right now, right, the first step is this giant barf of throwing everything out onto paper, and then after that, the hard work is whittling it down and trying to get concise. That's when it's good to have other eyes and opinions and things like that on it, to help weed through all of what's there. 'Cause especially as business owners and marketers, I just say all the time, "We just use way too many words."0:47:53.9 DS: Oh, definitely. Well, I'm glad to have a friend like you to walk me through some of this stuff.0:48:00.0 AW: All right. Well be careful what you wish for. You might be like, "Hey, stop it."[chuckle]0:48:04.9 DS: That's right. You're like, "Hey, Darren, can I come over?"0:48:07.9 AW: "Can I come over? I just wanna look at these. I'm gonna be on the first flight to Edmonton."0:48:11.9 DS: That's right.0:48:14.9 AW: All right. Well, great catching up, Darren. Great topic, I'm glad you suggested this, and, yeah, I'm excited to see, in one of the next episodes we'll have to talk a little bit on what you came up with and see how it's been received by the team and your process for putting it together. I think that would be interesting to recap after you come out the other side on it.0:48:36.1 DS: Totally, yeah, we can definitely talk about that on another episode. Looking forward to it.0:48:40.8 AW: All right. Well, take care, my friend, and hopefully we'll hit record again in two or three weeks and find something new to wax philosophical about.0:48:53.4 DS: I'm sure we will. All right. Thanks, Aaron.0:48:53.9 AW: All right. Thanks, Darren. Thanks, everybody, for listening. As always, feel free to drop us a review in iTunes. If you love anything we've had to say today, please share socially, put that link to thesaasventure.com and this episode out on Facebook or Snapchat. I don't know if you can place links on Snapchat so...[chuckle]0:49:15.1 DS: Snapchat.0:49:16.1 AW: LinkedIn.0:49:17.8 AW: Make a TikTok about the SaaS Venture, but just tell a friend, share the news about us, and we love to build our audience and talk to more people. All right. Take care, everybody, and we'll talk again soon.0:49:30.9 DS: Bye, everybody.

FULL SHOW NOTES[INTRO music]0:00:12.2 Aaron Weiche: Episode 26, A Big Change.0:00:16.0 S?: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]0:00:44.6 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, and welcome to 2021. I'm Aaron.0:00:50.3 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:51.6 AW: And Darren did you know that 99% of the time for lunch, I eat a turkey, pepper jack cheese, mayo and avocado sandwich? 0:01:05.9 DS: For how long, is this for the past seven years, you've been eating this for lunch every day? [chuckle]0:01:11.4 AW: I would definitely say the percentage has kicked up highly during COVID, so the last year now, but yeah, just because I'm home just about every single day that's kinda... If I'm home, that's the sandwich I'm making. And my kids just laugh at me, they ridicule me about just how basic, boring and the same I am.0:01:39.1 DS: Oh, that's funny 'cause I'm exactly the same. This is a life hack, Aaron, it's like you're reducing your decision fatigue, you don't have to think about what you're gonna eat for lunch, you just know what you're gonna eat and you just go and make it, and it's one less decision to weigh on your brain. It's like the Steve Jobs thing, he just wears the same thing every day, he gets up, puts on his outfit. [chuckle] So yeah, it's a smart... The smart move.0:02:02.6 AW: Right. I'm gonna choose to look at it as an optimization then. I just got done eating lunch before this, that's why it was on my mind now is just like, I make the sandwich, I have a basically... What do they call it? I think they call it a sandwich cut or a deli cut pickle. So it's not a dill pickle spear, it's like the flat slice but ridged, so it's got some texture to it so...0:02:28.9 DS: Okay, good.0:02:29.7 AW: Every day.0:02:30.0 DS: So that's what we're talking about today, just we're talking about sandwiches [laughter] on the podcast.0:02:34.2 AW: Totally, I love sandwiches. Someone tweeted this week talking about that they forgot to exclude mayo on a sandwich that they ordered from Jimmy John's, the sandwich franchise. And I was like, "No, it's not a sandwich without mayo, that is the ingredient, that's like sandwich glue. You need that, without it, it's just bread with stuff like." [chuckle]0:03:00.6 DS: I used to love when I was a kid... This is really weird. [chuckle] When I was like, I don't know, between the ages of 10 and 13, I used to love to eat... This is the weirdest sandwich, it was just two pieces of bread, mayonnaise and jam. [chuckle] It was just this disgusting sandwich that I ate all the time when I was a kid, really weird.0:03:21.9 AW: Wow, yeah, the mayo and jam combination that definitely... I was waiting for peanut butter, bananas, there's definitely some variations. I don't think I've ever heard jam and mayo. [chuckle]0:03:34.1 DS: And mayonnaise, I don't... I was just on a jam and mayo sandwich kick for a while.0:03:39.6 AW: Oh my gosh, for me at that age, it was like peanut butter and jelly and nacho Doritos. I think that was my lunch, especially during the summer at home as a kid, I made that every day.0:03:52.5 DS: Well hey, you and I, our next SaaS product is gonna be sandwich related.0:03:56.5 AW: Oh, this is brilliant. I would love a company that was named after a sandwich or something like that, I'm all in, so.0:04:03.8 DS: Alright.0:04:07.1 AW: Right, well hey, let's catch up on some other things besides our sandwich habits and our sandwich secrets. I hope our listeners feel really good about what we bring to the table...0:04:18.4 DS: They've all stopped listening at this point, I think.0:04:22.9 AW: This is what you got for 2021, sandwiches? [laughter] Anyway, catch us up on how the year started for you, Darren.0:04:31.6 DS: Alright, it's been a good start. We kinda went out with a bang at the end of 2020. We had a big launch of our Rank Tracker, and it was, I guess, probably in June, we launched our updated local citation finder and man, we've just been on a roll, it continues to grow. We were going through some declines on our subscriptions for a while, and that trend has been completely reversed and yeah, every week numbers keep going up, so it's been great on the software side of things. Great on the service side of things too, I've just been so busy doing marketing and lots of presentations because of the local search ranking factors, which I officially released at the end of the year, so just been doing tons of webinars and podcasts and presentations around that. So that's been... It's been good and it's been driving business for sure.0:05:24.5 AW: That's awesome.0:05:25.8 DS: Yeah, so yeah, it's been good. Got lots of stuff coming up in 2021 as well. It was a good end to 2020, a good start to 2021. And man, we have so much in the pipeline about to launch for in the next month or two, and I think it's just gonna be a great year. Yeah, it's looking good. Lots of optimism.0:05:50.3 AW: Yeah, that's a really great feeling. One thing, you and I, we did a non-recorded call, just catching up and seeing how things were, and one thing that obviously really stood out to me just 'cause we'd had many other conversations about it, but you were commenting on your engineering team has really found its sweet spot in efficiency and what they're kicking out. And that was great to hear just because prior months we had had talks, it felt like things were... Something was missing structurally or process, or even possibly people, and you were working hard to get your finger on it and change some things up, and it sounds like that's worked.0:06:32.3 DS: It worked really well. So step one for me was getting myself personally tuned into it, because the software team is busy doing stuff all the time, but I wasn't really hooked in, and I didn't know what they were doing, and so as the founder I just always had these lingering doubts. I'm like, "Are they doing anything?" I'm like, "Why is this taking so long?" But I wasn't really involved enough to know how things were progressing. So I started a daily stand-up. So we now do a daily stand-up. It takes about 10-15 minutes and everyone just kinda outlines what they do. We're recording all of this in Confluence, which is Atlassian, same company that makes Jira. So record that every day, and it's just so... That immediately dissipated any doubts I had. It was just like, okay, cool, I'm now in this. I'm involved. I know what's happening. It was really helpful for me, personally, to be able to see what was happening, and I think it was helpful for the team too, because it just sets the day every day. Every morning, we set up, like, "This is what we're doing. This is what I did yesterday, these are things we're doing today."0:07:38.6 DS: And then at the end of the year we did annual reviews for all of our staff, and I promoted one of our developers to a team lead position. So that's been really helpful too, because I'm not the best person to be the team lead, and I was kind of the go-to person for all software team-related decisions, and I was a bit of a blocker in a lot of stuff. And so putting Troy into our team lead position has been really helpful too, and so now we've got processes in place and we got the daily stand-ups, and then we ended up hiring two more people too. So we've got one more full-time guy, and we have a part-time student developer, and it's just like, "Wow, it's all... " All systems are firing, and the dev team is building stuff faster than I can review it. It's like I got a backlog of like I have to review this app and I have to review that app, and it's like, "Dude, they're waiting for my feedback on stuff, 'cause I've just been busy with other things." And so things are really going awesome on the dev team. Love it.0:08:45.2 AW: Yeah, that's fantastic to hear. Do you see the team themselves feeling it and having a new burst, or a new outlook, like has it crept in there? 0:09:00.2 DS: Yeah, it feels just really positive all around, and I think everyone just... It's that sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, right? You're just getting stuff done and it's like, wow, this app has come to life. It looks good. It's like, "Wow." We're really putting a polish on it and everyone just feels good about it. So generally, I'm seeing a lot of momentum. The daily stand-ups are really good to keep everyone connected too. When... 'Cause we have a lot of different things happening and different people are working on different projects, and so I always felt like one developer is just working in a silo, on his own, doing his own thing, and he's not really communicating with the rest of the team, whereas now, everyone is a little bit more connected, and it's really helpful.0:09:39.7 AW: Yeah, that's awesome. I definitely think we can dedicate a future upcoming episode to... Related to efficiencies and sprints, and builds, and shipping code. That's just one thing I've always been such a proponent of, is it's great to be doing work, but what's so important is tying it off, like, at what point are you shipping? And when you can get a team to have those better visibility into each other and that produces better accountability and gets everyone to that same level, and then you get everyone just more committed and performing to a level where they're shipping, not just doing... It's so easy in work to be busy. Being busy is not hard, but getting something done, that's hard, and that's where you need to get a team too, so that's great.0:10:37.7 DS: Yeah, and actually it's really important to define that cut-off point. We're already... The main thing that a lot of the dev team is working on is our new account system, all of our billing, our authorization, our transactions, all of that, signing up for all of our different things and all... The flow of all that has been in the works for a while, and it's already much better than our existing system. So it's like we can keep polishing it for the next three months, but gosh, we might as well just push it out the door, because it's already better than what we currently have. So it's about defining that, like, "Okay, let's launch. It's ready."0:11:18.0 AW: Yeah. Well, I think you just provided us some good segue in mentioning cut-off point. And for me, but this is the first time I'm kinda saying this out loud past my own internal team, but I've made the decision that I'm leaving GatherUp. I'm cutting off my time at GatherUp and have started on a new product and a new venture.0:11:49.7 DS: Big news Aaron Weiche. Big, big news.0:11:53.3 AW: We have to redo the intro of the SaaS Venture podcast. [chuckle]0:11:57.1 DS: That's right. Yeah, we totally do. That is a huge news. I'm really excited for you, Aaron. This is gonna be good stuff. Yeah. And so that's... We're gonna talk about some of that today, right? 0:12:09.3 AW: Exactly. Certain things I'm not ready to reveal and put out there, like the name of the product, company, and things like that, but all kinds of other things, totally. Totally fair game. I'll just sit back and let you pick away at me, and I'll try to give you some answers.0:12:31.7 DS: All right. So I wanna start with, what made you decide to take the leap? How did you do this? You had a very comfortable position, you had a very important role, how do you leave that behind and say, "I'm gonna do it. I'm diving into the deep end, and I'm gonna start something new?"0:12:49.1 AW: Yeah, well, as you personally know, Darren, 'cause you're somebody that's obviously in my sounding board, inner circle, this conversation started for me last summer. And it was a combination of a few different things. But one, after the acquisition, even though I was completely treated well and respectfully, so many things, I think it's more of the situation that is, is I went from being in charge of something that was a whole and an entity by itself, and then when you're plugged in with a whole bunch of other companies and I retained being in charge of that entity, but now I was part of a larger entity that I had very little influence on. And as a leader, that just ends up starting... I just started feeling unfulfilled, and it just wasn't gelling. I didn't feel like... I wasn't doing what I really love, and I didn't feel like I was being utilized for the things that I do best, just based on the structure of those things.0:14:06.6 DS: That's really weird how that happens. It's like you're in this position, you help build a company to what it is, and then after acquisition, it's just... Things change. It's something all founders should be aware of that after an acquisition, the structure of the organization will change and you don't really know how that's gonna impact you.0:14:26.9 AW: Yeah. And you really transition from entrepreneur to employee.0:14:31.2 DS: Right, right. Oh my God.0:14:32.3 AW: And an employee isn't something I've been for a very long time, and for right or wrong, those barriers or fences or the lane you're in, no matter how much freedom you're given, you start to bump up against those, and it starts to feel uncomfortable. And yeah, it just ends up, one way or another, it just ends up not being the ideal situation.0:15:00.7 DS: Yeah. And I think the opportunity presented itself too. You had a great new idea and it's just... The two things coming together. You're like, "Okay. Now's the time."0:15:16.3 AW: Yeah, yeah. There's so many components. As you know, a lot of hemming and hawing about it, where I was being recruited for a couple of other CEO positions, which was flattering and great, and that also led to me answering some of my own internal questions on what I really wanted to do and what would really make me happy. The incredible hard parts are, you've given every ounce of yourself to something, and then you're gonna walk away from it. And the two big pieces of that is, one, the team, is you have all these people that you've hired and recruited and worked alongside and everything else, and leaving that is extremely hard. I just... I dearly love our team. And the good news, they're friends for life now. But just such a great working relationship and just such a great culture that they all... They all self-built and contributed too to make it so special.0:16:22.7 AW: And then it's no secret, I love what GatherUp is about. I just was hanging out with a friend last night who's in a somewhat related world, and he had a bunch of questions 'cause I was letting him know about moving on. And it was kind of a... We hadn't caught up in quite a while, and just even my passion in talking about what GatherUp can do and what it's rooted in and what it provides, and showing him all the different ways it manifests and talking about how different companies use it and the benefits they get out of it, it was just like, man, I love this solution. I've wrapped my mind around it for the last five and a half years, trying to make it better every day and build the features and all those things, and it's definitely hard to walk away from something that you've put so much into building.0:17:17.1 DS: For sure. Yeah, it's got... I can't imagine. I can't imagine, one, being an employee and how that would feel and how I would respond to not being the person that has the final say on things. That's just the way... That's my position and it has been my position for 15 years. For 15 years, I've been the person that gets to make the final call on everything, and so that would be a weird transition for me. And then, I also can't imagine how difficult it is to leave behind something that you are so passionate about and spend so much time building up and leaving the team that you've built. And yeah, that's gotta be tough. But it's good that you're still friendly and still in touch with all those people and...0:18:00.0 AW: Oh, they're the best. Truly. All of us basically... And having something like that too, just what some of them shared with me, just super humbling, and just to know you're able to have a great impact and help them along in what their journey is and their careers, just super satisfying. And I'm just very grateful for it. They're all wonderful people, and they're all super supportive and just like, "Go get it." As one of 'em said, "Leaders gotta lead," right? And just...0:18:36.0 DS: Right, exactly.0:18:38.0 AW: It made it a lot easier getting that kind of support for them.0:18:43.4 DS: Sure.0:18:44.3 AW: And then just the last thing, as we can transition in and talk to some of the new things, is the idea that I had that was years in the making of when the initial idea happened and how I wanted to go about it really became an accelerated thing during COVID. And more solutions, we're working these elements in, and this was becoming more and more important with it, and I was just like... One, I had the feeling like, "Oh, I wish I already had this product to sell," and two, was just like, "Alright. Timing matters here. Stop sitting on the sideline," and as I again talked to the handful of friends and kind of professional mentors, they were all like, "Build the... Let's map out the plan you need here and the path you need to make this successful."0:19:41.8 DS: Yeah. You gotta strike while the iron is hot. I saw an interesting... No, it was probably just like a graphic or a stat, but it was like, if you map all the successful companies, they weren't usually the first to have the idea, but they launched their product at the right time. Timing is so important. It's like when the market is ready to get the product that you're selling, if you did it five years before, then the market wasn't ready, then that's a huge Achilles' heel. If you did it five years later, then you're a little bit too late. The timing is so important.0:20:17.2 AW: Yup. Absolutely. So with that, it was like, "Alright, I'm not sitting on the sideline. Let's pull all this together and framework out how to make this work, and what year one's gonna look like, and get started on it."0:20:31.8 DS: Yeah. So what can you tell us about the new venture without giving too much away? I don't know. I wanna hear what you've got to say about it.0:20:39.4 AW: Yeah. The problem that I wanna solve is just really helping businesses and customers communicate better with each other. And in short, the evolution that has already been taking place, but I really feel like is hitting more of a stride, and where COVID has definitely forwarded this is, all of the different messaging channels that are out there, are really becoming the dominant players in the acceptable ways and time periods to interact with each other. So SMS, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Google My Business now has their message product, chat. You have all these other ways where it's like email is really regressing to this static, slow play of what's out there. And I look back, this summer, I had a perfect example of, this is the problem I wanna solve. I was looking at... I was entertaining/daydreaming on getting a new boat. We have a family cabin, we have a boat, it's adequate, but the kids love... We have friends that have a boat where you can wake-surf behind it, the kids love that. You have to get a really high-end boat that has some pretty cool equipment to throw these big waves off of the back of the wake, so you can surf on them.0:22:03.2 AW: And so I started the process. I went to a boat dealership that was literally two miles from the cabin, I filled out a contact form 'cause it was the classic, "Here's a couple of models, call for price." And, one, I'm not gonna call. And, two, I fill out the form, I filled it out on a Sunday afternoon. Monday, they got back to me and had a bunch of questions. Monday afternoon is when I saw it, I replied back. Tuesday, they replied back, and was like, "Okay, great. Do you have a boat you'd trade in? What is its condition? Can you send us a few photos of it?" And so finally, by Wednesday night or Thursday morning, I got my quote for the boat. So it took four days, it was tens of thousands of dollars for the boat, and any momentum that I had on that Sunday afternoon while at the cabin daydreaming, whatever else, now I was back at my house, it's four days later. And it made me realize if I was able to text with someone, even if they didn't respond till that Monday morning, 5-10 minutes of a text exchange, and they would have had all the info and I would have had what I needed to know, right? 0:23:11.5 DS: Yeah.0:23:11.8 AW: And I was like, a ticket item of close to $100,000, and it took four days just to tell me the price, so you could acquire the info you want and structure your communication, all those things. That was just... I was just like, "That is just so wrong." I didn't like it. I can't imagine the sales person actually likes it, if it's a lead worth following up on.0:23:34.9 DS: Yeah. That's a solid lead. Every one of those leads coming in are great leads 'cause it's such a big ticket. By the time Wednesday rolls around, you're busy thinking about sandwiches. You're not worried about boats anymore.0:23:46.4 AW: [chuckle] Exactly. And then the other side that really incorporates my 20 years of building websites before I got into SaaS, was really the lack for businesses of putting good calls to action in place that are always in front of the user. When you think about how much emphasis we've put on content and content marketing and SEO and all of these other things, you still can come into a website and you have to go through this specific channel a certain way to reach out to the business. You have to go to the contact page, you have to find the form, you have to fill out this static form. And to me, it's just like it's so far away from a natural interaction with a customer.0:24:32.0 AW: So the other thing that is a big part of what we're looking at building now is, how do you have these call to actions right in front of the customer, and can you provide the customer with options, so it's not, "This is the way to do it," it's, "Hey, you can interact with us really instantaneously, and here's some choices on how you wanna do it." So you pick the channel or the way that you wanna interact with us, but you don't have to go clicking around and hunting to find it. We're gonna put it easily accessible, no matter where you are on our page, no matter where you're scrolling, what you're doing. I just saw a lack of that, especially in building websites where it's like, "okay, we build your site. Here's where your phone number is gonna be, and now we need to install this plug-in, if it's in WordPress or use this forms module and create this form, and then on a different page, we might have a scheduling item. So it's like you have all these things just kind of everywhere. And so I really wanted to centralize and say, "Hey, if you need CTA in a box, here's a solution, so you can deploy your three, four, five best contact methods or ways to start interacting with that client, and they're all in one place. It's easy to find and easy to make those choices."0:25:49.0 DS: Yeah. Well, it sounds like a good problem to solve, and it sounds like you're building a really good solution. Are you boot-strapping this? How do you just decide to drop what you're doing and start a new company? 0:26:05.9 AW: Yeah, so one of my big hang-ups with this was just kind of runway and funding and coming back to timing, and through a lot of different conversations, I ended up deciding through nudging of a few people, to raise an angel round with it. And that was hard, and coming from always being around and only doing bootstrapping, and the agencies that I've been a part of, GatherUp was bootstrapped, but I really looked at it like I wanted to do something where time to market could be months for the first version of the product, instead of a year of nights, weekends, one engineer, things like that. So I did... My goal is to raise this angel round and then run bootstrapped after that.0:27:00.2 DS: Sure.0:27:00.3 AW: So what that's allowed us to do is have a full-time engineering team, on day one, we roughly have a team of six, between front-end, back-end, QA and product management, that's already heads down on the product and building on it, and that's something, without raising that, I would have been able to have one and a half people if I was self-funding it.0:27:26.4 DS: Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. And so, I guess the debate is always, how much do you give up to your investors? How much equity do you give up to your investors, to get out of the gates faster? And it sounds like you have a pretty good balance. It was a reasonable angel round, right? 0:27:44.5 AW: Yes, yeah. I probably still haven't talked away through how much I'm going to share on that, but in that sense, we basically traded off 13% of the company for what we raised, and at the end of the day, especially when you're starting, it's so easy to look at that and be like, "Well, I have whatever percent of something worth zero," [chuckle] so when you put together and say, "Hey, here's where we're gonna evaluate this on, based on the team we have, the idea we have, track record, those types of things." That's where it... It obviously worked really well in my favor, one, we basically raised the money from five investors that were definitely qualified as friends that had either been part of past entities that I've worked on, or have known me a long time, and it really wasn't that hard, it was like, "I'm just coming off a win of GatherUp doing really well and selling for a great multiple," and so it really kinda rolled that over. And so it wasn't too painful to go through that. There are certain parts of it where it was a little bit... Whatever people have their own ideas on the evaluation and things like that, there's always challenges, but ultimately, only took about 60 days to kind of pull that together.0:29:12.7 DS: Right, that's kind of amazing too, when you can do it that way, just reach out to your network, find the right people, and there you go, you got a company, you got the funding to hit the ground running with an engineering team and a good group of people to build this thing.0:29:27.5 AW: And one thing I reflected on too, without what has taken place at GatherUp and the outcome and the acquisition, if I tried to do this 10 years ago, I think I wouldn't have been even able to raise 10% of what I raised. And it's kind of a couple-fold too, a lot of the people that invested in this, weren't in that position 10 years ago either. So it's this fluid thing where it's like, as you go on and you achieve success, your friends have also achieved success and they've had outcomes, and they are now in position to be an angel investor or to write a check of significant size, and that's... To me, that's just kind of really interesting. Again, back to timing, it is so interesting that you need that, where 10 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to do this at all.0:30:18.1 DS: Yeah, it is interesting how the network you built over the course of your career, becomes so important and valuable, and also just what you personally built, all of... Everything that you built, over the course of 20, 30 years, has such an impact.0:30:34.3 AW: Yeah, no, and that was even some of the things... And this just gets into when you're entrepreneurial-minded, that was one of the hard things for me too is, personally, after the acquisition, and in so many ways, things could be incredibly comfortable if I wanted them to be, and instead, I've taken all that, I've let go of a very well-paying job and security, and gone down to, "Alright, I am going to make zero likely, for 2021," and the great thing is, is I've achieved enough and put enough away where I can pay myself for that year. My wife, Marci, is incredibly supportive, at every turn where I thought, "Alright, here's where I'll probably get the, 'Hey, that's pretty risky.'" Ultimately, she was just like, "If we're gonna invest our money, I'd rather invest in you, than the stock market or anything else."0:31:29.2 DS: Yeah, I think Aaron Weiche is a safe bet, every day, any day.0:31:33.3 AW: But then, I was like, "Do you know what GameStop is gonna do? You might wanna rethink that?" [chuckle] Oh man. So all of that, just kind of a whirlwind over many months of talking it out, putting it all in action, coming to the GatherUp team, putting all of that together, is definitely interesting, and now transitioning it to a different day, cutting off and being like, "Okay, now my days are not gonna be Zoom meetings all day long, it's gonna be working and building on something extremely new and small and basic, and which is so... It's such a different mind shift when you're leaving something that is six years matured and has just grown by leaps and bounds.0:32:28.4 DS: Yeah, how do you determine, "Okay, this is launch-ready"? Do you have a cut-off point, where you're like, "Okay, this is the feature set we need to have, and that's when we're gonna launch"? Is that what you have in mind? 0:32:38.9 AW: I do, but I can easily say, this is something that I struggle with the most, just even as we're getting and moving fast and trying to get a super... A basic pilot where we could get a handful of people using it and giving feedback and trying to get some learnings, I already feel myself struggling looking at that and saying, "Oh yeah, it's good enough at this point," I'm definitely... I'm not a great MVP person. Just because I want it to have that polish, I want it to... I don't wanna get a bunch of crappy feedback, I wanna try to remove as many objections as possible, 'cause I feel like I know them, but I also know, that that just goes against so many things of get it into people's hands and either validate your opinion a little bit, but get them to also let you know or be able to start to pull out where you really need to focus or prioritize on the things that are on your roadmap.0:33:52.9 DS: Yeah, I struggle with that too. I find that it's like I wanna get feedback from people, but I wanna preface the feedback with, "Hey, here's the list of seven things I already know, you don't have to tell me that it needs this or it need that, 'cause before you give me... You spend all your time writing up this feedback, here's my list. Yeah, I know we've got these things on the roadmap and we're gonna do them." So I think I struggle with that too, just getting feedback early, when it's painfully obvious what already needs to be done.0:34:28.5 AW: Yes, yeah. And maybe it's... That's just part of it. I'm trying to save myself from what I already know, but it's like you will also get other things than what you already know.0:34:40.1 DS: Exactly. New perspective is so valuable.0:34:43.5 AW: Yeah, I need to get better at that, I really just need to force myself as it gets to that point and just be like, "No, put... Even if who you have piloting, comes back two days later and is like, "It's a piece of shit and I'm not using it," [chuckle] you just... You need to take that step, you need to break that level, and I know it, I'm just having a really hard time being able to be exact with it.0:35:10.1 DS: Yeah, that's one thing I mentioned earlier about getting an engineering team lead in place, he's really good at pulling back the reins, he's like... 'cause I have a non-stop stream of things I wanna do and how I wanna make the tool better, but he'll say, "That's post-launch. Nope, that's post-launch," so we just make two lists, it's like, "This is the feature set we need to get to launch and everything else, yeah, these are all great ideas, but we're going into another list and we'll hit them after we pull the trigger."0:35:42.2 AW: Yeah, and see, I just look at that and be like, "Oh okay, here's where it's at, but I see that these two more things are coming in the next sprint, those would really... That would be great to have those. So yeah, let's just wait another two weeks."0:35:54.9 DS: I know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's tough, but I think for you, you're like, you're gonna start with a closed beta, so you might as well launch it to some people, even though you know there's a lot of great functionality coming, you can start getting some feedback from early adopters.0:36:12.0 AW: Yeah, no, I need... By the next time we talk, I need to be able to tell you what's been going on in the pilot, otherwise, I've just screwed up and something needs to be... Something basic needs to be out there.0:36:26.5 DS: Alright, well, there you go, you set yourself a goal.0:36:28.7 AW: Yeah, hold me accountable.0:36:30.8 DS: Okay, will do.0:36:32.4 AW: Some of the other things that are interesting is, one, getting a new team to bond, we've assembled a team out of South America, on the engineering side. What's been nice with that, my previous engineering team was mostly in Poland, and so, the window to communicate and interact was kind of a three, four-hour window, depending upon how early you wanted to get up in the day, 'cause they're roughly eight hours ahead of me, and now, the team is two to three hours ahead of me for the most part. So we kinda gain... There's more of a four to six hour window every day, to communicate and collaborate, and that's been really nice. But again, with starting all over in a new team, your experienced team, they have this built-in accountability and responsibility to each other, not just the product and everything else, and that's one of the things, it's like, "Okay, that took years to build at GatherUp, how do I shrink that? What are the things that I can do, to get that to happen in a matter of months, with a new team?" And that's definitely been hard and interesting and already battling things of somebody being out with COVID and things like that, there's definitely... No matter what you know some things somewhat remain the same, you just hope you can solve them, even when they take time, just a little bit faster.0:38:06.0 DS: Yeah, that makes sense. It's gotta be hard, just bringing a whole new team together when you're coming from a place of such a mature, established team, right? 0:38:16.5 AW: Yeah, yeah, just 'cause it's... And maybe I'd even forgotten some of the things that I did do along the way, that helped build that in my previous team, and at some point, they took it over, they self-policed and had all those pieces, and it was just more finessing and prioritizing and things like that, and then you go all the way back over to starting from scratch, and you have to re-build and establish trust and communication, and how to, "Read the room" and understand where you're pushing too hard and where you shouldn't ask, and all of those kind of things. It's just really interesting and definitely challenging.0:39:03.2 DS: How are you communicating? Is it like you have Slack and you're mostly chatting on Slack and then firing up calls with the team, kind of stuff? 0:39:09.5 AW: Yeah, yeah. We do a daily stand-up, that's usually about 15 to 20 minutes, just kinda as you were talking about. What am I on? What's a blocker? So just normal stand-up methodology with that, and then we'll do planning meetings ahead of a sprint, just to map out what that looks like and then depending upon what they're working on, and what they have going on, then just spending time one-on-one, with either testing something or giving feedback or rounding out a story that they're working from and things like that.0:39:47.8 AW: It's pretty good, but it's just like with anything, just... Even the difference in specific people, it's like there's already a few people on the team that are great communicators, very proactive, put things in front of you. And there's others, you're pulling teeth like, "I need an answer. Let me see what this looks like. Let's collaborate or let's work a little bit more iteratively on this." So, yeah, it's just interesting, no matter what you set up and how, you really just have to be ready to adjust and adapt and find what works best for everyone individually and as a whole as the organization.0:40:27.6 DS: Yeah. And so a new app, you get to choose your new software stack, what you're building this in. What are you building your new application in? 0:40:38.1 AW: Yeah. So we definitely went through the selection process there, and chose to go a little bit of a route less traveled with something newer. We're using Flutter, which is one of Google's kind of SDK and UI toolkits, and it's really... What it's built around is kind of a one code base that you can deploy natively and to the web. And so that's even been a little bit of challenge where it's like, those are very well-known pros and we look at it like, "Okay, not having to build separate." And we also looked at... There's just a couple of nuances that made it feel like it might be more advantageous for us than React Native on the front side of things, which gets you close to accomplishing that as well. So we're kind of betting on how it matures. It's been out for a couple of years, but that's just not a long time in the world of code.0:41:40.2 AW: And what we're really finding is the first thing we're building in our product is the web app version. Well, that's the piece of Flutter that they started with the Native builds and web is kinda their trailer. So we're leading with what their trailer is, so we've definitely had a few things where we have to find some workarounds and our devs have to figure out some tutorials and dig into stuff and whatever else, but we're really hoping that just with anything, six months, a year down the road, both will have hit a better stride, and then we'll be like, "Okay, it was the right choice, not day one, but it was definitely the right choice day 100 or day 1,000."0:42:22.4 DS: Sure, yeah.0:42:23.5 AW: So a little bit risky. I don't know if everybody would like... A lot of people just say like, "Hey, the last thing you need to do is be worrying about those things. You should bet on what's tried and true." But we felt okay enough with what's there that we'd be able to make it work.0:42:40.9 DS: I think it's a bit less risky 'cause it's a Google product, and so it's gonna get wide adoption. People are probably going... It certainly has the marketing to get a lot of pick-up. And it's very compelling value proposition that you can write your application and, boom, you've got a iOS app, you've got an Android app and you have a web app. That's kind of amazing. When I think about our product, I've always wanted to... I have, in the back of my mind, one day building mobile apps for our products, but it's like, that's such a huge undertaking and it's one that you don't even have to think about. So that's kind of amazing, so I like your choice.0:43:19.0 AW: Yeah. Well, we'll see. If it comes to fruition, it's amazing. If at some point we have to break off and go back to React Native, then it'll be like, "Oh, okay. Hard lesson to learn." But I don't know, Darren, I look at the same time... I look at all of the things, obviously in you and I coming from the world of working so much with Google on its search products and local search products, Google also kills stuff off really fast too, and so... [chuckle]0:43:43.2 DS: Yeah. Well, I hope that doesn't happen. It is true, though. They love to launch fast and kill fast too.0:43:51.3 AW: Yeah. So hopefully, we don't end up in those things of it, but we'll just have to see what happens there, so...0:43:58.0 DS: Yeah, interesting.0:43:58.9 AW: Yeah, so that's kind of where things are at. In the next probably three, four weeks until we talk again, I think a lot will take place as the initial pieces really kinda come together and we have a little more time under our belt and all those kinda things. But I'm excited to get to do this and openly talk about so many of these things and what it looks like starting all the way back at zero again, so...0:44:30.3 DS: Yeah. It's really great content for our podcast. Brand new company starting from the ground up. I love it.0:44:37.3 AW: That's the whole reason I did it. I was like, "Let's get some new fresh content in here. [chuckle] I'll start a company."0:44:47.3 DS: Good idea, yeah. Well, thanks, I really appreciate your commitment to our podcast.0:44:50.7 AW: Hey, at the end of the day, let's be real, this is the best thing going, so...0:44:55.0 DS: That's right. [chuckle]0:44:57.9 AW: Our podcast that... As long as we get something recorded every five to six weeks, we're getting by, so...0:45:04.8 DS: Yeah, totally.0:45:06.2 AW: Oh, man. Good stuff. Well, I appreciate, I just wanna openly say, all of the phone conversations and things like that you and I had, you're a fantastic sounding board in a number of different ways, something that really took me many, many months to arrive at. So I appreciate your friendship and your advice and definitely made me look at some and face some hard things, which was good for me.0:45:35.2 DS: Oh, thanks. Well, I hope I was encouraging, because I have unbelievable faith in your success with this. I can't wait to see how this pans out in the next year, two, three, five years. I'm really excited to watch this journey. I think it's gonna be a huge success.0:45:56.0 AW: Alright. Well, I'm gonna try to live up to your expectations. [chuckle]0:46:00.3 DS: Alright. Good. Yeah. I'll be watching.0:46:03.3 AW: Alright, anything in closing today that you wanted to mention or have coming up? 0:46:09.1 DS: We got a bunch of launches coming up, not really much to say. We can talk about it on another podcast, but yeah, no, I'm excited about 2021 with everything that's happening at Whitespark. We've got some big stuff coming up. I don't know.0:46:21.2 AW: Yeah, no.0:46:21.7 DS: We'll talk about it next time.0:46:23.2 AW: Yeah, I can't wait to just continue to see what you guys can do with this new found efficiency and some of the ideas you have. That's definitely exciting.0:46:32.9 DS: Yeah, I'll say another huge thing that's gonna really help us out is that one of the big things we're working on is our new account system, and that is our final piece of legacy code that's been holding us back. We have to do a lot of maintenance on the old system, and so now everything within the company is on a modern tech stack. Everything's on the same tech stack, and so we'll be able to move a lot faster. I'm really excited.0:47:00.0 AW: Yeah that's really... Removing those blockers is awesome and it'll be fun to hear how that changes things for you guys.0:47:08.0 DS: Yeah, technical debt out the window. Ready to fly.0:47:10.6 AW: Paid off.0:47:10.9 DS: Paid off. We paid the debt off. Exactly.0:47:15.7 AW: That's awesome. Alright, well, thanks as always Darren. Pleasure catching up, and thanks everyone for listening. And as always, if we can remind you, if you would love, it's been quite a while since we've had a review. We get hundreds of downloads each episode, which we greatly appreciate, but if you could take a few minutes, leave a review. If it helps someone else discover the podcast or give it a listen, we're super grateful for that. At the end of the day, selfishly, I know I do this for myself, the ability to talk out loud and to get your introspect and review. There's oftentimes I just go back and review my state of thinking on this. It really is self-beneficial, but over time to the messages that we get on LinkedIn or email on people enjoying it or a specific piece that stood out or helped them make a decision, It's super, super rewarding. So if you can share a few notes in a review and help someone else discover us, or man, if you share what we're talking about socially on Twitter or wherever else, we greatly appreciate it. That would be fantastic.0:48:30.7 DS: Yeah, greatly appreciate it. Those reviews, they're really important and really valuable for the podcast, so yeah. Any words you could say would be greatly appreciated.0:48:39.9 AW: Yeah. Alright, well with that, have yourself a fabulous, let's see, whenever we'll release this, maybe it'll be in time for next weekend. So I hope everybody has a good weekend. I'll shoot to get this all wrapped up by Friday to launch, and then everybody can have a good weekend and my wishes are timely. Alright, take care Darren.0:49:02.8 DS: Thanks, you too. And see you all next time.0:49:04.9 AW: Alright see you everybody.[music]

[INTRO music]0:00:11.4 Aaron Weiche: Episode 25. Okay 2020.0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.0:00:44.1 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:47.4 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:49.7 AW: And we are here to look back at quite the year that we've had. Wouldn't you say? 0:00:57.6 DS: Let's say, yeah, it was a year for the history books, this one. It was... It was a bad year. 2020 really sucks for most of the world's population. It was a crummy year. But I guess... I don't know, I took some notes before the podcast and I have some positive things to look back on, but yeah, definitely it was a tough year.0:01:18.8 AW: Yeah. As we break it down, I think for me, at the end of it is like, "Okay, we survived this year," right? 0:01:30.3 DS: Yeah.0:01:31.3 AW: Being able to just make it through and not be as dinged up in some way or another as others, when you look around and there are certain industries that are completely shut down, have your doors closed. It's amazing when you think what it must be like to be in those types of industries.0:01:54.3 DS: That weighs heavy on me, I really feel privileged to be in the digital marketing industry, building SaaS software that people still need and are actively looking to sign up for. We're just in such a fortunate position, whereas so many other industries have been devastated. And so I think about that all the time, about like, "Wow, we gotta recognize our privilege here."0:02:24.7 AW: Absolutely. For better, for worse, however it happened, accidentally, on purpose, it isn't hard to look and be like, "Man, thank goodness, my industry has survived this well." Obviously, some aspects of our industry have absolutely taken off because of what COVID has forced.0:02:45.9 DS: Yeah, totally.0:02:47.9 AW: If you are at Zoom, a Zoom shareholder, any of those things, like you know how true that is. Or just probably any product in the video conferencing or live communications world has just sky-rocketed based on immediate demand across the board.0:03:06.6 DS: Totally. I really wish I had thrown some money into Zoom when, back in like March, early March, be like, "Oh quick, put all of our investments into Zoom, it's gonna be huge."0:03:21.0 AW: Back the dump trucks up to every tech stock in the last 10 months and you're not doing too bad anyway, right? 0:03:26.8 DS: Yeah, it's true.0:03:28.5 AW: Oh man. What is your overall... It's like you have the feeling of survival and whatever else, but maybe let's start to dig a little deeper into that. Like when you look back, is there ways... Do you feel like there's any ways you could break down, you know, the year into thirds or quarters, or things like that? And how you feel about, like are there transitions where you guys felt differently about it or adjusted, like what are your thoughts on that? 0:03:57.2 DS: Yeah, that's a good way to look at it actually, because I come to the end of the year and I can think, "Alright, great, we have some... We survived. We even thrived in some places." And I can look back at that and feel overall the sense of, "We did it." But then... Gosh, if I think back to March, April, May, it was a dark period. We had to... We saw massive decline in revenue, we had to do some layoffs, we had to put... We had to get all the government programs in place. And it was stressful and it was like, it was this period of uncertainty for myself and for all of our team members.0:04:40.4 DS: And so people were stressed and worried about the pandemic, and we came out of that after about three months, things just started to recover. It was almost like people instantly had this fear of the world falling apart, and so everyone really tightened up expenses and weren't spending any money. But then it was like, "Oh, well, I guess this is our new reality and life will go on and we still need to buy things," and so business picked up again. How did those first three months feel for you? 0:05:14.0 AW: Definitely when you're dealing with the unknown, that's one of the hardest things where there's no game plan for it. You can't research your way out of it, you're just taking sometimes hour by hour as it comes. And that same thing, I was just kind of wondering to myself while you were talking, I just wonder how much have people changed or where are they at in that progression.0:05:44.9 AW: Those first few months were so uncertain and just as you outlined, like you can imagine this Doomsday scenario where what you've built, what you're working on, whatever else, where it almost collapses on itself. You kind of envisioned, "Oh, everybody holds up." Business is just kind of killed off in every way. It felt like, "What's gonna go on and continue on?" You entertain those kind of thoughts, and then as time goes on, some of that regresses in certain areas. In the world of software at least.0:06:24.9 AW: And then you find, "Alright, well, here's the next thing we can do." And I think we started doing a lot of short-term focus things like, "Here's the 30-day plan, here's the next 30-day plan." And it was kind of focused on just taking small chunks, 'cause you can't predict or look at anything further than that.0:06:40.1 AW: I think we saw... That was one thing that I took from some of the larger companies at some point when they were like, "Hey... " And I can't remember if it was Apple or Twitter or Google, or whoever did it first, but a couple of them definitely said like, "Hey, we're remote until June 2021." They just said, "Let's stop trying to look at this as like in two weeks, in two months, in two quarters."0:07:05.9 AW: And they just said, "Yeah, well over a year from now, we're gonna revisit this. But that's not something we need to deal with right now, because it's just gonna be vacillating all over the board." And I almost kinda took that as like, and applied that to other areas and said, "Stop. Stop just vacillating on all the what ifs, you'll drive yourself crazy, and focus on the things that you can control and that you probably should control," and things like that.0:07:35.2 DS: Yeah. It was funny to look back at some of the emails we got from that time, like in early March, it'd like, "We're closing our shop, but we expect to be reopened in three weeks." [chuckle] People were like, they really thought this was gonna be a short-term thing, in so many ways.0:07:55.2 AW: Well, we've never experienced anything like it. So you just... No one knew, right? Everything was like... It depends on how much optimism you carried at the time. Or in some circumstances, and you can get this, a business would also look and be like, "Hey, anything longer than this and we are in trouble." That's where I feel with so many of these restaurants is like, they're not built to just shut down for a month, much less... Here in Minnesota, where I live, they're on their second six week to eight-week shutdown of no indoor dining at all, in any capacity, in any way.0:08:34.8 AW: And then to top it off, there's this time around, there's absolutely nothing that's lined up for support of what they need or helping them out. It's just this really wonky scenario of the government saying, "You can't operate and we also can't help you." And my hope is they should have already had help lined up before they ask them to do this again, or mandated they did it again.0:09:00.1 AW: But we're really starting to see some rumblings here between restaurants just all saying, "We're not gonna do what you're asking us to do because you give us no other choice to... You're basically saying, your business is dead. That's the only choice you have."0:09:16.2 DS: It's gotta be so tough. Be it in the restaurant industry or in the travel industry right now, just like, "Oh man. How are we gonna get through this, right?"0:09:26.3 AW: Yeah. When you look back, Darren, what's one thing that you feel like, okay, based on what took place this year, what's one decision you really feel good about that you're like, "Alright, I nailed that one. Pats on the back."? 0:09:43.5 DS: Well, it's tough to decide which one. I got two big wins over the past year. I think it was really a good move to launch, we came up with this concept of the Yext Replacement Service. And the timing was really good, right around the pandemic, right around when the pandemic first came out, because a lot of people were looking at their expenses or going through the credit card statement, and Yext stood out as a really expensive recurring fee. And people were like, "Is this something we still need?"0:10:16.3 DS: And then I think so we launched our service at the right time where we could offer a better price, a better quality service, right when people were looking for it. And so that was a huge success, it actually managed to keep the whole citation side of our business, not just surviving, but we actually did better than usual. So, I think that was it, that was a smart pivot, a smart launch. I think we did that one just right. How about you? What's your biggest win? 0:10:48.0 AW: Before we get to that, I'm interested, did you guys look at keyword volume as well, of people typing like "Yext replacement or Yext option or Yext alternative," or what does that look like? Or did you look at that at all? 0:11:02.6 DS: We were not analytical about it at all, it was just a complete gut feel, just like, "Quick, let's launch this thing." We were honestly in panic mode after seeing the decline of our revenue and being like, "We need to get something to replace that revenue as soon as possible." And we just built it, pulled the trigger and launched it as soon as possible. But yeah, we were not... We didn't really dig into it at all.0:11:29.0 AW: See, here I am doing a search on quick Yext, and I just look at the related suggestions and Yext cancellation policy, what happens when you cancel Yext. And one of the suggested terms is "Whitespark Yext and Whitespark versus Yext."0:11:44.5 DS: Sweet. Whatever, Google picked up on it. And we didn't even have to tell Google. [chuckle]0:11:49.4 AW: The number one organic result. "The best Yext alternative, stop paying... " I don't know, it cuts off after that, but it probably says, "Your life away," right? 0:12:03.2 DS: Is that our result? 0:12:05.8 AW: Yeah, yeah, it's a landing page, Yext Replacement Service.0:12:09.5 DS: Sweet. Yeah. That actually is intentional. [chuckle] "Stop paying... " People are gonna be like, "What? Stop paying what?" And then they will click through.0:12:17.5 AW: I love it. But that's awesome, I'm glad for that, that win for you.0:12:21.5 DS: Thanks.0:12:22.3 AW: I don't know if I have anything as specific as that. I think the biggest thing for us is just focusing on what we do best, and that's building product. So we launched social sharing, we did a lot around Google review attributes. We went to work on our biggest feature yet to date, which isn't gonna roll out until January, but inbox that's around like a ticketing system and auto-forwarding based on what the review is about. And you can create rules around who gets a review to be able to reply to it and why, and things like that.0:13:04.5 AW: So, we really just looked at it like, "Okay. Sales aren't... Sales aren't hot depending upon the industry and the size, extremely cold." We saw enterprise, large scale, like that market just went dead. Those guys definitely circled the wagons. As much as anything, I had a couple where they're just like, "Hey, we've got the budget, we wanna do this, but we can't switch gears or introduce a new service right now, like it would crush our team because the number of things that we are already doing."0:13:40.3 AW: And so the change management is what became tough on that. So, I think that's our biggest thing. And it brought our team happiness. Every person in our org gets excited about a new feature and how it can help. Sales is excited to talk about it. Marketing is excited to write about it and create strategies around it. Customer Success is happy because it gives them likely a solution to something that customers have been asking for or wishing they could do easier. Engineering is proud of what they've created.0:14:15.3 AW: So, that really helped us create a lot of internal wins by like, "Let's just keep building great things and let's put all of our focus there because that's the most controllable thing for us right now."0:14:26.6 DS: Yeah. There's lots to look back and I think you should feel proud about what you've built and what you continue to iterate on at GatherUp. All those things are fantastic launches. You gotta think about, some companies, like I watch them, I'm like, "They haven't done anything in a year." I'm not gonna name names, but I keep wondering, I'm like, "What's going on over there?"0:14:49.8 AW: Yeah, and who know, and it could just be... Again, if the name of the game is survival and depending upon how hard their revenue took a hit and you're going through staffing changes and things like that, that can definitely derail those. We saw some of that too. I mean, to transition into the toughest or decisions you didn't love or whatever else, like that, obviously, and I'm guessing probably you're in the same boat with that, is when we had to furlough a couple of people and eliminate a position, that was terrible.0:15:29.6 AW: I talked about that openly on this episode. I sat and shed tears to eliminate a position of someone that was a great contributor to our org, but because of what the go-forward in the moment had to be, that position was a definite non-essential within that. And that was really excruciating.0:15:51.1 DS: Oh man, yeah. I think that might be the hardest part of being a founder, being the person that runs the businesses, it's the layoffs. Gosh, I just hate that. It's the worst thing.0:16:03.8 AW: Yeah, no, 'cause every time you hire, you feel like, "Okay, now I have responsibility for this person putting food on their table and taking care of their family and progressing their career." And you have all those things, and when you just bring a complete stop to it, especially in this case, where it's not from a like, "Hey, you never hit expectations, you were a poor performer, we gave you chances, we worked on an improvement plan and none of those things happened." That wasn't around this.0:16:35.9 AW: It was just a, "Hey, we have to tighten the belt, and so we have to look at what is most non-essential as this belt is tightened and how things move forward." And when in your inside of an org, with us being acquired, it wasn't 100% all my say. And that... I wasn't... I can see where the company decided that. I personally wasn't personally aligned with it, and that made it even more conflicting. Just made it even harder.0:17:07.4 DS: That's an awkward thing, like you've been used to calling all the shots and you're like, "Oh, wait a minute, someone else is calling some of these shots now."0:17:15.3 AW: Yep, no, that is a massively difficult thing to adjust to if you're acquired and you stay on. Going from being able to lead in those ways, good or bad, to being someone that you might have some say or some influence, but ultimately you're probably doing more to carry out someone else's final decision, is a much different position.0:17:38.5 DS: Yeah, totally.0:17:41.4 AW: It's kind of like, Darren, I'm sure this happens to you. Your wife tells you, "Hey, we're not gonna hang out with those people. And you need to let them know, you have to be the bearer of bad news."[chuckle]0:17:53.5 DS: Totally.0:17:53.6 AW: "I'm not telling them, you are." Outside of that, so there are so many other things, let's maybe zoom out and take a look at some things outside of... We could obviously talk and who wants to really talk about COVID at length? I don't. I think we spent enough time on that and looking to transition out of that. But outside of that, what's another thing that was just an awesome challenge that went really well or really bad for you guys this year? 0:18:24.0 DS: Huge win was, and it had been in the works, pre-pandemic, we were really busy trying to launch our new local citation finder. And so if I look at our trajectory of subscription count, like it had been dropping week after week after week for about a year, just losing subscriptions, bleeding them. It had been horrible and we were like, "Oh my God, we gotta fix the system."0:18:52.5 DS: And so we launched our new system, I think in April, and from that point on, it was a complete reversal in our subscriptions. We then shifted gears to a growth mode, and it has been growing week over week over week ever since we did that launch. And so it's the kind of thing that's like, "Oh, this is how a SaaS company is supposed to work, you should see week over week growth in your subscriptions." And so a big part of that, of course, is retention.0:19:23.3 DS: So I think our new software really helps to keep people engaged and retain those people and continue to deliver value, which has been massive for us, so huge win. I'm so thrilled with it. I can't wait 'til we launch the next iteration on that software, which should come in early 2021, and that's when we're gonna raise prices, we've talked about that on the previous podcast. But for me, that was just, that's the most stand out win, business-wise, in 2020.0:19:57.4 AW: And I would guess with that, it wasn't like... There were wins in how the product, the local citation finder performed, what you said, reducing churn and turning it into growth and things like that. But there's probably also bigger learnings that you took away from this and when to make a move, how to think about it, what's really important to a customer, what's important for your product to survive. That probably is invaluable, right? 0:20:31.9 DS: Yeah. And I think there's two big things. If I had to look at the success of the local citation finder, the two big things for me are continuing... The software has to continue to provide value, and it didn't before. And I think that that's probably pretty to anyone in SaaS. And then design.0:20:51.8 DS: I really think that the updated design, the general like, "How does this thing feel to use? Do I enjoy using it? Does it feel modern? Is it... " 'Cause the old design was just such, it was just old and trash. It was outdated. I think that the design has a huge impact.0:21:09.5 AW: Yeah, no, I'm a massive believer in that. I always get excited when I see user feedback that's raving about our user experience and interfaces. Especially when they've come from a competitor and they're just like, "Oh, it's so much more intuitive and organized and clean," and I'm just like, "Yes, feed my ego. Thank you." [chuckle]0:21:31.9 DS: Especially as the world of SaaS evolves and you've got 10 competitors for every application, and they all basically have the same feature set, then what sets you apart? And it's, how does this system feel to use? Is it easy? Is it enjoyable? Is there any kind of fun in the application? All of those things, I think are so critical as things get more and more competitive to set yourself apart.0:21:58.8 AW: Customer experience, baby.0:22:03.3 DS: Yep, yeah. So, actually I'm right on the horizon, we may even, I don't know, we're talking today with the dev team about launching it on Monday, is our brand new Local Rank Tracker, which has exactly that. It doesn't really have much functionality improvement, a couple of things, but the design has been completely redone, which gives that great user feel, which I think will have a positive impact on both new sign-ups and retention. I can't wait to pull trigger on that one too.0:22:29.5 AW: There you go. You can tell your users Merry Christmas with that one.0:22:33.1 DS: That's a good idea, actually. Thank you.0:22:34.4 AW: "There's a new local rank tracker in your stocking. Boom." [chuckle]0:22:41.9 DS: Oh man, these are some good ideas. Wait until you see the email we send out, you'll be like, "I wrote that email."0:22:46.6 AW: "There you go. Software stocking stuffers from Whitespark."[chuckle]0:22:53.6 AW: I would also think, Darren, that you would have to agree, and I'm interested in even getting further out from it. And I think it was September, but your guys' Local Search Summit was definitely, I felt like it was a highlight because it allowed me to connect with a community I'm super close to that I didn't get those opportunities in 2020 to do that in person.0:23:13.7 AW: But your guys' event, because of the speakers and the quality of speakers and the number of attendees, that was a big energy, a creative boost to me for sure. How do you feel about that? And especially getting months passed that, have you seen any residual benefits from it? 0:23:32.9 DS: Yeah. I think that the summit was huge in terms of brand positioning, brand establishing. We introduced our brand to a lot of new people, and I think... It's really hard to measure. We've been doing fine since the summit, haven't seen any massive explosive growth, but you never know if we would have seen declines if it wasn't for the summit.0:24:00.2 DS: And so did the summit help keep us steady and with some small growth over the last little while? You know, it's hard to know. I think the summit for sure was a huge success, the amount of work that went into it was kind of unbelievable. It was a lot of work. But it's now firmly rooted as a thing in our industry. And we will continue to run it every year, and I think it's just gonna pay dividends every time we do it.0:24:30.1 DS: I think there's huge value in it, it was wonderful. And it was also really great to just be able to connect with everybody. I personally did every one of those talks. I had the opening intro, watched the presentation, had the Q&A at the end. So it was just really nice to connect with everybody during a relatively unstable time.0:24:53.0 AW: Yeah, no, it was really well done.0:24:54.1 DS: Thank you.0:24:56.0 AW: Another friend of mine just got done in the last week or two, carrying out, they're an association, and they have a giant annual conference that's usually held in Florida, and a ton of attendees from all over the country, they're all boat and marine dealers. And they had to switch to a virtual this year, and there was a lot of apprehension in their industry when you're dealing with a product that their expo floor are these giant boats and outboard engines. So different from a software conference where everybody's booth is just TV screens and demoing product.0:25:35.2 AW: It was really interesting, and he and I walked through and he talked about, they went back and forth from a free to charging for it and everything else. And they ended up charging for and saying, "Nope, our content's great, and we get that relationships and connections are super valuable, but our content is amazing."0:25:55.4 AW: And the long story short is like... They said it was... The feedback they got from their attendees was they were floored. They had more people attend because people didn't have to travel to go to it. They still... They basically doubled the amount of per-person attendees because the access was easier. And then they used a platform, I wanna say it's called Swapcard.0:26:25.6 DS: Interesting.0:26:26.9 AW: A virtual event platform, and he just said it was unreal it, had a lot of really great built-in features. They had a sponsor provide like a DJ and a band in between sessions and things like that, and he's like... They had... And they literally had some of their boat dealers, they had set up viewing parties of the conference, they're sitting in like a pontoon boat they're selling with a 50-inch screen all watching the conference together.0:26:56.4 AW: And so he just said all the things that went on with it were just unbelievable. And to me, it's really cool to see things like that that have adapted over the year, and having to do something completely different for the first time ever, and completely crushing at it. Because just as he said, there's plenty of people that were telling them like, "You'll never make it, it won't happen. The conference will flop, people won't like it. And then it's gonna hurt when you do it in person next year."0:27:23.3 AW: There was a lot of people that were just like, "You shouldn't even do one." And so it was so great to see him persevere from charging for it, finding a great way to present it, getting more people involved. And now they're considering, "Even if we can do our event in person next year, we should do a virtual at the mid way to get more people involved."0:27:42.6 DS: That's an interesting thing. I think about that too. It's like, we'll probably be virtual again in 2021, but then I would love to do an in-person event in 2022. But when I do that, I have to keep the virtual version too. You're gonna have to do both now, it's like you wanna come in person, awesome, let's meet, let's do this in-person thing, but we have to broadcast it, it has to... We have to leave it open because that is the future of events, I think. And the pandemic has created that for almost every conference.0:28:16.3 AW: Yeah. We'll definitely see a lot more of it. What would you say is one thing that you learned as a leader in this last year with all of its challenges? 0:28:27.2 DS: Yeah. I think one thing I learned as a leader was just the importance of regular communication, regular check-ins. Just really me trying to connect with my team better than I had been in the past. It was certainly really important during those difficult times to have very clear, regular communication with the team.0:28:50.7 DS: And then I really ramped it up. We built... I personally built a whole new system for doing annual reviews and quarterly check-ins. I feel like that whole process has been really valuable. So just, for me, just dialing in our HR stuff, it's been super important. And it was definitely something I learned in 2020, and will serve me well going forward, I think.0:29:16.5 AW: Yeah, no, I think that's awesome because it will pay dividends over and over again with your existing team. And as you grow, the new people you build on now you have so much better of a structure to do that and people understand their role and performance and their piece in the ecosystem, and all of that. So yeah, I think that'll pay dividends over and over again. That's awesome.0:29:38.7 DS: Yeah, it feels like it was kind of an area that I wasn't good at before, it was like, "You know, I'm just some guy who started a company, and oh, now I've got a team of 30 people." It's like, "Oh, I guess I should learn how to be a better manager." And so I needed to dial into that stuff, how about you? What are some of the... What did you learn as a leader in 2020? 0:30:00.7 AW: Yeah, it really showed me the importance in an area where I constantly have to work on, and I'll explain why it's so tough for me. But I think just empathy and self-care for the team really being a big thing. And how much connection and communication is important to them, some of the things that you talked about as well.0:30:27.4 AW: But I'm so wired to be excited about the work. I am a workaholic, I fight that balance of not being in front of a screen or researching or reading or testing or doing whatever else. And I also have this, for right or for wrong, like my own maybe personal struggles or challenges, I don't bring those into work with me. And work a lot of times is almost an escape to that. I'm sure a psychologist would break me down and be like, "Well, you're just modeling that," and whatever.0:31:05.2 AW: But it's like, yeah, I love that part. Work is like a hobby, it's a passion, all those kind of things. And so... But I have a hard time realizing that that's not true for a lot of people. That line is much thinner and they cross over it back and forth. And it really had me looking a lot at like, how do I make sure that people feel taken care of and protected? How do they have space to talk about how they feel? Whether it's uncertainty or confidence or whatever that might be.0:31:41.4 AW: And some of it too, it wasn't just COVID that presented that, it was coming out of selling the company, where you're like pushing, pushing, pushing, and then you cross this line that really is a finish line to some extent, right? 0:31:55.8 DS: Yeah. You feel really good.0:31:57.7 AW: Yeah. And then you get on the other side and then you realize like, "Oh well, I still want all these people to have the career that they want. And their finish line might not have been the company being acquired." And so you have to retrain your focus on those things. So for me, it's been just trying to balance those out and having more empathy as a leader for people's personal lives and how those things work.0:32:21.7 AW: And realizing too sometimes, it's great that I can be so laser-focused, so heads down, so obsessive sometimes, but then I also need to realize for myself, I'm probably locking myself out of something else in my life I should be present in or deal with, or take care of, but I run to my go-to of, "Great, here's work," that allows me to be productive and focus on whatever else and run away from something else.0:32:52.8 DS: Oh man.[chuckle]0:32:55.4 DS: Do we have a therapist listening that could have a chat with us? 'Cause damn, all that stuff really resonates with me. It's just like, for me, I'm just like, "Oh, if some thing is difficult in my personal life then well, I've always got the work life." That it's just a continual source of positive reinforcement. It's like I know that I can push hard, do this thing, get recognition for it, see the success. And it's just this thing that I can always turn to. It's like a pick me up, I'm feeling bad, down about something. It's probably not healthy, but maybe it's healthier than other escapes, I would say.0:33:42.4 AW: The other thing is, I know I do the opposite. If work is really hard and I'm getting kicked in the teeth there, I'll bring it into my personal life and ask Marcy, my wife, or family time, I'll use that to heal me or medicate me or do whatever else, but I don't... The opposite should probably be done to some extent too, where it's like, "Hey work, take a back seat to deal with these other things," or be more, just be more present.0:34:08.9 DS: Yeah. I'm working on it too. I think we're both aware of it and working on it.0:34:15.8 AW: I don't know, I probably need to work a lot harder on it. I'm maybe barely at the tip of awareness, but I can do... I definitely can do better with it. So, lastly, let's take a peak, what are you looking forward to in 2021? Let's say we get the pandemic under control. Now, I don't think, eradicated isn't the thing, but we get back to a 70-80% level of where we were normal, we're still making smarter decisions on contact and things like that. But what are you looking forward to next year? 0:35:01.2 DS: I think I have low optimism about our ability to get back to normal, get back to seeing people in person. I don't think we're gonna see much of that until maybe by the end of the year, but I just, I think by summer we might be getting closer to it, depending on the state of vaccines. But then I worry about the fall again, the fall, the second surge type thing. Concerns me. So I just don't have a lot of optimism that we will be back to seeing people in person.0:35:35.1 DS: But I can definitely look back and think about what I'm grateful for with the lockdown. And it was just this opportunity to get closer with my family during this time. It's like we spend every waking moment together, we are connected all the time. It's like we're learning how to care for each other better, we're learning how to argue better, we're just getting better at being together. And this closeness is growing, I feel closer to both my wife and my daughter than I ever have been.0:36:10.0 DS: And so I can look back and be grateful for that, and I can look forward to strengthening that really, those relationships going forward. And then I feel unbelievably optimistic about where we're headed as a company. All of our legacy code is basically complete now. We don't have any more legacy stuff that we've been dealing with in our software, which opens us up to have much quicker sprints, release dates.0:36:39.5 DS: I've recently promoted one of our developers into a team lead position. I just really feel like we've dialed that in and we're about to hit our stride with weekly releases of awesome new features, tons of stuff happening, really expanding our software and finally breaking free of some of the chains that have been holding us back for many years. So, I don't know, I feel extreme optimism about 2021, despite the pandemic.0:37:06.6 AW: Yeah, no, that's awesome. Gratitude is definitely a healthy thing. I'm probably concerned with you if your wife and daughter are gonna get better at debating and arguments with you, like you are gonna be in a lot of trouble, my friend.0:37:20.8 DS: No, no. They've always been way superior to me, I'm just stepping up a tiny bit. [chuckle]0:37:26.3 AW: Oh, nice. You're gaining ground. Good, good.0:37:29.3 DS: I'm learning how to argue a bit better, yeah.[chuckle]0:37:32.0 AW: That's awesome. And yeah, man, that is so freeing when you hit points and things where you reduce technical debt and you just feel like, okay, now we have an opportunity for an efficiency sweet spot because we don't have these hidden "oh-ohs" or these things that just kinda hold us back that you kinda look at and you're just like, "Why is it that that's holding us back? Something that almost feels irrelevant to some point, but it's like this invisible hurdle that is very, very real to get over.0:38:08.9 DS: Yeah, and we deal with it on a weekly basis. Like our legacy summer, our legacy software, particularly, it's our account system, which is like it distracts our developers non-stop from progressing on new initiatives. And that is... Early 2021, we'll be launching our new account system, and then building a whole system on top of it, which, man, can't wait. How about you? What are you looking forward to most in 2021? 0:38:35.9 AW: Yeah, well. I can't share everything yet, but let's just say probably the next time you and I record in January, we're a week out of Christmas right now and this will probably post just before Christmas. But I will probably have some news to share that's some pretty big changes.0:38:55.7 DS: Oh, exciting.0:38:56.3 AW: Let's just say I'm excited about change and maybe getting back to some roots of some things, but that a lot of excitement, a lot of big ideas, and I think I'm gonna make some of those happen in 2021.0:39:12.1 DS: Yeah, yep. I have a little bit of inside knowledge on some of that, and I'm excited for your 2021. I think it's gonna be amazing.0:39:19.8 AW: Me too. I'll either... I'll either go down in a ball of burning flames or I'll just be constantly on fire, I don't know.0:39:30.1 DS: It's the opposite, you're gonna be rising up like a phoenix from the flames.[chuckle]0:39:32.9 AW: Alright, I'll take that, I'll take that all day long. Anyway, I think as far as this podcast, which I'm also super grateful for the time that you and I get to sit down and talk every month and...0:39:49.5 DS: Same.0:39:50.3 AW: Catch up before we hit "record" and get to do the episodes together and banter and share. I'm looking forward to the content that we'll be talking about next year, just based on some of that stuff, I think it'll be fun. It'll be fun to be talking about the stages of something new, I think will be pretty exciting.0:40:11.8 DS: Yeah. Also looking forward to that. So much to talk about in 2021. We got big plans, you and I.0:40:17.2 AW: There we go, we're gonna... 2021, we're gonna take over the world.0:40:21.8 DS: At least part of it. A small, a small tiny piece of the world.0:40:26.6 AW: 10 miles north of the Canadian border and 10 miles south of the Canadian border, we're gonna take that part over.0:40:32.0 DS: Wow, that'd be huge. If we can get that much. That's good.[chuckle]0:40:34.1 AW: Awesome. Well, cool, let's wrap it up, Darren. I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, all of that stuff. And maybe we'll sneak in some time to chat in between the holidays. But if not, I can't wait to talk to you to start off, 2021.0:40:56.5 DS: Yeah, I would love to sneak in some time to chat, and you know, wishing you and your family a great holiday break. And yeah, to all our listeners too, I hope you all have a wonderful holiday break. I know it's weird times, enjoy Zooming with your family as much as you can, and yeah, look forward to continuing this podcast journey with you all in 2021.0:41:21.1 AW: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks everyone for listening throughout 2020, you've probably had more podcast minutes logged than ever before. And happy if we're one of the ones you've chosen to be in your rotation.0:41:32.7 DS: Yep. Thanks.0:41:34.1 AW: Alright, take care, Darren.0:41:36.1 DS: Thanks, you too.0:41:36.2 AW: Alright.0:41:36.5 DS: Bye everybody.[music]

FULL SHOW NOTES[INTRO music]00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode 24: Raising prices.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Here are the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.00:45 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast, I'm Aaron.00:48 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.00:50 AW: And the best way to sum me up right now is I am malaised in Minnesota, if that's even a correct way to say that.01:00 DS: I have no idea, I have to look it up.[laughter]01:03 AW: I don't know if I should be inventing words, but as we were just talking before hitting record, Darren and one thing, we haven't recorded in almost two months, which is just silly of us.01:18 DS: It's been a while.01:20 AW: Yeah. Too long, we need to do better. If we wanna keep listeners going up into the right, people have probably forgotten about us, so we'll try to win your hearts and minds back, but yeah, we were just discussing... I've just been in a little bit of a funk for various reasons, some of the obvious things, COVID and restricted or compressed life of not as many freedoms or...01:47 DS: For sure.01:50 AW: Especially, I don't know, I consider myself to be a creative person, and so I feed off of other environments and travel and observation and things like that, and my world just so much consists of home, work, home, work, and work is just pretty much zoom, home, zoom, home. So...02:09 DS: Yeah. We would just call it Groundhog Day around here, it's like every day, it's like that movie Groundhog Day, where it just feels like you're going through the motions day after day, and there's no variety in life right now.02:21 AW: And... I don't know, I was trying to talk about it with Marci, my wife, and there's just this little piece of, when you don't... I don't know, and I just might be messed up in how I see this, but when you don't have certain things to look forward to like time with friends or an outing or a trip, or being at a sporting event, things like that. Those are things that definitely provide a little bit of spark and optimism and all those different things and yeah, it's just so severely lacking, and with the season change in Minnesota, we've flipped back to life being a lot more indoors, at least until we get some snow on the ground and then hopefully I can get... I'm gonna... I'll probably do more snowboarding this year than the last five years combined, so...03:09 DS: Yeah. What are you gonna do about the hill, like when you go to the hill, are you gonna bring your own lunch? Are you gonna go into the lodge? Are you gonna eat lunch in the lodge? Are you gonna use the washrooms in the lodge? Just... I'm all super COVID sensitive, so I'm just wondering how you handle that.03:22 AW: Yeah. I haven't thought that far yet. The hill that's closest to me literally only takes 25 minutes to get there, and it's super small, it's like eight runs, so going there for two to three hours of runs, and then you can call it a day, but there's definitely... There's a couple of others around here that take an hour, a couple of hours to get to that are worth it, and yeah, then I'll probably... I probably just bring something along and bust it back out to the car and refuel, so...03:56 DS: Yeah. Yeah, sounds good. [04:00] ____.04:01 AW: Yeah, that's easily one of the consistent things I just not have been... I have at any point had a meal inside of a restaurant, cafe, anything like that since all this started, I did use... We have some very nice and well-spaced outside patios and things like that, but we've done a few times within the local community, especially to support some of the local business owners in addition to doing take out, but that's been above it.04:28 DS: Yeah. We've been like all meals all the time, making them at home. No take out either. So it's been... It's a lot of work. This is a, that Groundhog Day thing where we're just going through the motions all day along, it'd be nice to just get a break from dinner where just shows up at the door, right, but we're... We're just extra careful.04:50 AW: Yeah. No. Totally get it. So anyway, I feel like I'm working my way out of it, I'd probably hit the bottom of it a couple of weeks ago, and just been trying to pay more attention to exercise and alcohol intake and screen time, and just all those different things, it's not... There's not one thing to cure when you do feel that way, you gotta take all the pieces and say, "How do I bump all of these things up a level to contribute to finding a better place to be."05:25 DS: I think it's just a natural ebb and flow. You're gonna go through really solid awesome months and you're gonna have some time where you feeling a little lower, like, gosh, it's just a constant up and down for me over the months.05:39 AW: What have you been doing to fight that off? 05:42 DS: So exercise has been a thing for sure, I'm trying to get more sleep lately, I've been really diligent about my exercise routine, actually COVID's been great for exercise because it's just part of my routine and I have it all kinda locked in and my schedule has gotten really good. I've got a new morning routine, I'm feeling productive and focused and it's going pretty well actually. I'm going through a good period right now.06:09 AW: Awesome. Good for you.06:11 DS: I don't feel like I really need too much. I think I might be a little bit introverted in some ways, where I'm like, if I didn't see my friends in person for two years I'd be like, "Oh. That's okay." And then I'll see them in two years, and be like, "Hey. Great to see you." It doesn't wear me down. Really, I've always been... As a teenager, I just spent every weekend locked in my bedroom, playing video games, so I'm used to this. I come from a long history of COVID times.06:40 AW: See, I'm definitely more social, I would say I was probably in the social extreme in my youth where I was always with friends, always playing sports, always doing things. And then as time has gone on and especially just being more dedicated or turning into the workaholic or whatever, else, that isolation has crept in much more, but I still like if I had to put a time frame on it, every once a month or once every couple of months, I would like to have a day or an evening of adult socialization, something to do conversations to be had to... I don't wanna go for years without seeing some of my friends and things like that, so I need a little tighter cycle.07:30 DS: Yeah. And I used to get that all the time. Every week there would be multiple things happening because my wife does such a good job of sort of organizing our social calendar, but now it doesn't exist anymore. I guess one thing I'm just noticing is that I guess it doesn't bother me too much, which is, I guess maybe a little surprising.07:47 AW: Yeah. Well, good for you. You got it under control. I'm working on it and I'll figure my way out the other side, I can see if you raise the light, I'll get there.08:00 DS: I feel like I'm unusual. I think most people certainly want more social engagement, I want it too, but I'm able to progress without it. What's going on with the business? What's happening with your SaaS company? 08:16 AW: Yeah. A lot of... End of the year, I always kinda look at like this, you have to face the reality of what you actually can accomplish for the remaining couple of months of the year, and it's usually not what you had planned, so that's the facing the reality part of like, Alright, we still have these five things, and we actually can do two of them now, so that really kind of shapes up how the year is gonna end, and then you start Q1 planning with what's there, so that's been... I'm used to how that works. So that feels pretty normal. We had an opportunity pop-up, we're using an integration partner? So we're using a solution called Tray.io, and the easiest way to explain this is they help make integrations direct integrations possible with their software, and more of like being able to create like a Zapier-type connection inside of your product, so we'll be able to have an integrations tab, the first one that we're working on right now for us is Salesforce...09:26 DS: Nice.09:27 AW: So within a handful of clicks, you'll be able to sink to your Salesforce account and start going through those, and... So Salesforce is our first one, and then we will have four others in the subsequent sprints, I think we're just gonna try to tackle one integration every sprint, so probably like QuickBooks Online, Mailchimp, just some of the ones that when we pull customers or what people have asked about for integration, so excited about that, but that kind of popped up into the radar within the last few months and rapidly shot to the top, so that's also been part of throwing off some of the product plan and roadmap, so...10:08 DS: That's interesting. So basically right now, integrations are kind of... The onus is on a customer to create this Zap, they've gotta go and create that Zap and on their own, whereas now you can just press a button in the software. That would be the difference? 10:22 AW: Really what exists now is we will do an integration for a customer and use that product's API, or a customer could use our API and do the integration if they have a home-built CRM or a different piece of software that they wanna integrate with, and then obviously, Zapier is like a third-party marketplace where you build... We've built the GatherUp Zapier app years ago, and there's 2000 apps in the Zapier marketplace, so you can use Zapier and pay them, and then you get to build as many connections as you want between different tools and things like that, and then... Yeah. This basically, I use Zapier the same kind of way because you don't have to do any coding with it, it's a series of selections to set up the integration, and what's the trigger and what's the action and things like that, Tray is the one that handles those... So they basically have done the work from the API of all those other solutions into their interface, and then they take our API and do that into the interface, and then we're able to... iframe in that integration builder that here's your API credentials, your key, what account, what are you looking to do and build up that process without... You don't have to touch any code, it's just kind of click away and builds your integration how you want it to work.11:51 DS: Nice I'm gonna look into that. That sounds pretty handy.11:53 AW: Yeah, absolutely, it's a little spendy it's not cheap, but when you just start looking, right, when you have thousands of customers and you just kinda need a few hundred that can utilize it, and integrations make your product so sticky and the efficiency that's there, and just getting things to automatically talk to each other without human interaction is a big benefit.12:15 DS: Yeah. Definitely huge value. Makes sense.12:17 AW: What about you? 12:20 DS: We've got a lot of things coming up that I'm very excited about, and I'm looking forward to a number of launches, one, which is like getting the very final tweaks on it today is a whole new design for our Local Rank Tracking products, so we rebuilt and redesigned our Local Citation Finder back in the spring, and then it really made our Local Rank Tracker look like garbage, so it's like, "Oh. I got this nice new design on the Local Citation Finder, I wish we had a nice look in Local Rank Tracker, which the Local Rank Tracker actually looked pretty decent before, but we're now trying to have a common design, feel, UI elements, everything should be the same across all products, and so we're implementing that design of the Rank Tracker, which I'm thrilled about. It looks fantastic. Once you get into doing this kind of work, you end up having a bunch of features too, so it's got some improvements and so... Yeah. Can't wait to launch that, that's basically done. It needs... It just needs marketing, which we're working on now is...13:22 DS: What's our launch plan? Right, so we're putting that together. Our brand new accounts system, which has been in development for ages, is pretty much done as well, so we'll be launching that, it's just a new ordering system, your authentication, logging in, your billing, receipts, all that stuff will be in accounts, and so our first version was built back in 2011, and its ancient and frankensteiny, it's just been bolted on, everything has been put together, and it's just unmanageable now. So this new one has been built in a modern tech stack and can't wait to launch that, and then we also have on the horizon our local listing scan tool, so just a tool, you can type in your business info, it'll show you all your listings and audit them and show you inconsistencies? We're integrating that into our Local Citation Finder, which kind of brings us to the topic of this podcast. Because when we launch this huge new feature, I plan to finally raise prices, we've had the same prices for the Local Citation Finder for the past 10 years, we've never increased our pricing plans, and so this... So one, it's overdue because we've improved the tool significantly, we didn't even increase prices when we completely redesigned it, and to this feature that we're launching brings significant additional value, so I'm really thinking about raising prices, how to structure the prices whether I grandfather in and so I'd love to chat about all that on the podcast today...14:50 AW: Yeah. Wow. There are some interesting components to that, especially with probably the amount of time that you've had a product out there and have improved it and made it better and added more things, and yet the prices remained untouched in the entire period of time.15:09 DS: Way under-priced right now.15:11 AW: So I think... Let's start with one place I would love to hear you comment on, and I know it's an area that I've gone through like prior to COVID GatherUp was planning our second price raise in our six-year history, and more of one than we had done our first time, and the first thing I thought that I just watched both in myself and then watched across our team as we discussed it and everything else is just the emotional grappling with this uncomfortable of, "I'm gonna ask people for more money and they're going to have a reaction to that," and what has that been like for you especially? 15:53 DS: Yeah. I guess I don't feel too emotional...16:00 AW: Is that is what has kept you from doing it for the last 10 years? Why haven't you raised prices? Maybe we should start there, and that might be that answer...16:07 DS: I actually think that our product for the last 10 years has been relatively priced correctly because we did not enhance it too much over those 10 years, it just kinda sat there, it still had its old design, we could have looked at raising prices when we launched the new version in the spring. That would have been a time. But prior to that, honestly, I wouldn't have felt just justified raising prices, 'cause while prices didn't change for 10 years, the functionality didn't really change for 10 years either, it did not get that much better, we were not iterating on it, we were working on other products and so that's probably the main reason that I'd never raised prices, and this time around, I don't really feel too emotional about it, I feel like... Yeah. Sure. I feel like everyone's been getting an awesome free ride for the last 10 years, so when I raise prices, I feel completely justified to do it, but maybe I should be a bit more careful, I don't really wanna piss people off, but I feel like they'll understand the reasoning and they'll also see the value in the new features...17:13 AW: Yeah. And I think along the topic of grandfathering, the first time we did a price raise, we grandfathered and said, "Hey, if you're currently with us, we're not changing your pricing on this plan." Ours had a few different elements to it, we had one plan at the time, and then we rolled out three additional plans and we said, "Hey, if you're on the basic plan, pricing for that is not changing, you'll stay there," and then here's the new plans and their pricing, which was our new pricing model, so it was basically all new customers were going to be paying more, and there were now more plans out there, so In one essence for us, it wasn't where we were going to anyone and saying, "Okay, you were paying $200 a month this month, and in two months from now, you're gonna pay $300 a month," there's a 50% increase, and that becomes a lot different, but I feel like in your case, with the amount of time that's gone by and everything else, I would probably take grandfathering off the table because you've kind of grandfathered people for 10 years with the same price.18:18 DS: I'm definitely taking grandfathering off the table. I think it creates a bit of a problem down the road with our account structure too, it's like I just want everybody to be on the same plans, we don't have these legacy accounts, right, I just want everybody to be on the same pricing model, and I'm not we will lose them. So I was originally thinking to go hard core with it and double prices across all of our plans, but I scaled it back a bit. And now I'm gonna go 50% increase across all of our plans, and I expect to lose maybe 20% of the clients or of our customers, but since I've raised prices by 50%, it'll be a net positive and then it'll certainly help going forward, that's important. Really, it's like building a better base for going forward, and with these new features we're launching, there's a whole new marketing push, we will drive more customers coming in and we will retain more customers, so I feel like it's gonna be probably the biggest lever we've ever pulled at this company to improve the business overall.19:26 AW: Yeah, so what went into you arriving at the thinking of a 100% price increase, then coming down to a 50%, what are the things... What is the research decision making? What went into that? 19:38 DS: It's mostly a gut feel, it's like I put it into a spreadsheet, the old price and the new price, and I tried to put myself in the shoes of a customer and thinking about what is palatable, so it is a bit of a guess, it's like, is it... If you double prices on me, even if this new functionality you're offering is pretty awesome, I'd be like, "Damn, screw you. That's too much."20:02 DS: It just feels like a double price is just a little too hefty, I could go double price and grandfather everyone in. And I think that would be fine, and I think the product may have that value, but I also think it's a bit too harsh to double prices, and so that's why I scaled it back to 50% because the value is certainly still there from the company perspective, the value we get from it, and I think it'll help us retain a much larger percentage of customers, I think we might see a mass exodus with a doubling of prices, that's a little bit unheard of. That's the rationale anyway.20:42 AW: What if you doubled the prices for new customers and 50% for your existing? 20:48 DS: I could, but then I end up with those mixed plans, grandfathering, which I don't love.20:56 AW: It's obviously a lot to think through, but when you looked at... I guess there's a couple of things that it just leads me to ask in my head ... One, it's just it is that emotional change, the what's the value that people feel? What's the market look like? You have all these pieces. And so you have one set group that is price-anchored because they've been paying X amount of dollars for X how long, and so that's the number in their head, so they're gonna feel that one way or another, but then you have an entirely different group that they have none of that, they come into your product and they have a problem, they need a solution for it, you're the solution, and the price you put out there again, it has some weight based on the competitive market and what other choices they have, but they don't have that historical emotional price anchoring, and I just wonder... It's hard for me not to wonder if you're going to leave money on the table for those new customers coming in at a pretty significant amount.22:05 DS: Yeah, it's a pretty good thought. It's a great line of thinking that I need to maybe sit with a bit and think about that as an option, because the one thing that takes me back is our primary competitor, I know that it's less expensive over there, but I also know that we're X percent better than them on many things, particularly with the launch of this new feature. And so that's where it's like, I think I could easily sell against it even at our more expensive price, It'd be like, "Yeah, we are more expensive. But look at what we do versus what the competition does." Right? 22:42 AW: Yeah, well, it's all value-based, right? I've played all sides. Number one, you don't ever wanna be the cheapest solution in the market like, that's ever... I don't ever wanna be that. We worked to move, GatherUp from close to the bottom to get us into the middle, and even that was hard for fields like I never wanna be winning customers just based on price, I wanna be value winning customers across all of these other things. And then when I look at the high end of our category, there are people at 2 to 5 X our price, and they're creating enough value to create that amount of distance, and so there's no reason I can't create enough value to be in the middle ground of what's there or to be higher in some areas, so I get... Believe me, I'm a fan of simplicity, consistency, all of those things, but for the things that you have in your situation, I would be really tempted... 'Cause you can always... If you roll it out for a month and it goes bad, then you just change your pricing on the website, then you bring it back down, but if you're bringing in two-thirds of the same amount of customers you used to land at twice the price, right, that's all the reasons you do these things, even the things you laid out, if you raise the price 50% and you only lose 20% of your customers, the added MRR to your bottom line is significant.24:17 DS: It's huge. Yeah, that's why it's like such a standard saying in SaaS, which is to raise your prices, "Charge more, charge more." That's what you hear all the time, right? 24:29 AW: Yeah, and the longer you're around the harder it is to do it often. So that's why I also look at... I think people should always consider, "Am I raising prices for right now here and today, or am I raising them for also what I'm gonna grow into in the next six months or even the next year?" Because going back and then, again, cashing that emotional check, asking people to pay more again in six months or a year, that might be the more difficult part, rather than reaping a little bit higher to start and saying like, "Yeah, it might be a little questionable in the moment, but with what we have planned and the trajectory we're on and what we're adding like, we're gonna fulfill this next level of what we're asking sooner than later."25:18 DS: Sure, yeah, we did just raise our prices on one of our services, and I've certainly seen a drop off in sign-ups for it. So pricing does feel like it is this thing that you've gotta get right and so... And it always... I just hate pricing it's just such a gut feel all the time. It's hard to decide what your value is and just to pick a position against your competition, I just... Pricing is a tough one.25:52 AW: Yeah. No, it definitely is, but it's so important because the biggest thing that you have to look out of it is like margin, because of a margin of what you get to invest in the business to help it grow, to build more features, like all of those things. And if you don't have...26:08 DS: Hire more people, yeah, absolutely.26:10 AW: Yeah. If you don't have the right amount of margin, then you're never going to continue to ratchet things up, it's always like, we have enough to get by or maintain this level or do whatever else, but we're not creating enough of a gap and enough margin to take some bigger steps forward with what we wanna do with the product or the amount of marketing that we wanna do, or T hires, things like that.26:39 DS: There's so much more you can do when you just have more money. Especially as a bootstrap company, we've always been restricted by our revenue and it's just been tough, that new developer you wanna hire is always like, oh, 50 more subscriptions away, and that's just this frustrating way to operate, whereas if I could pull that lever now and be like, "Boom, now we've got the margin to hire two more developers, get another person on the marketing side, just hire a salesperson." All these things that I have in mind that I wanna do to help the company grow. We're cash-strapped, and so if you get your pricing right, then your growth is also increased, so yeah, I don't know. It's important to get it right.27:28 AW: Yeah, I would say in order to get it, you maybe have to push the ceiling, right? 27:34 DS: Yeah, sure.27:35 AW: You maybe have to look at because you can... Granted it creates work and other pieces and whatever else, but you can go too high and then say, "We went too high," and bring it back down, it is more difficult to only take half a step up and realize we could have gone a whole another step and then you have to figure out how to take that next step and let enough time go by, or now you have to tie it into more value features, whatever that might be, and that's why I just say, I really think it's important when people look at this to take a calculated step and like, "How do I take the step that's right where I'm not feeling like I need to do this again in six months or a year?"28:19 DS: Sure.28:21 AW: Because I just fell short. I could have gone further.28:23 DS: Right, yeah. Okay, so we are definitely going to raise prices, the amount that we're raising by is still in question, we're figuring that out. What's the process? So we've gotta communicate it to our users, do I just launch the feature and be like, "As of tomorrow, everyone the price is doubling." Do I launch the feature? And then give a month's runway or three months for them to know it's like, "Hey, we've just given you this awesome new functionality, and please know that in three months your price is going up." What do you think? 29:00 AW: Yeah, so number one, early and often, communication is definitely key to the ease. I've watched a number of companies, I've listened to other people and read articles, and what you see over and over again is like, people need time to adjust to what it is gonna be. So to me, with any pricing change, I would at least be 60 to 90 days ahead of it. Now, depending upon how your customers are constructed, like if you have bigger VIP, stronger customers, I would book a call with them and say, "Hey, here's what we're planning for February 1st or March 1st. The first time in our history, we're gonna raise prices, it's also coinciding with this and everything else, and let me give you a sneak peek of what these other things are. What questions do you have? Do you have any feedback?" And give some of those trials where you have personal conversations with your best customers on it, it'll help you in how you think about communicating with it before you send out any emails or anything, I would have... I would have those test conversations and those VIP conversations with them.30:20 DS: Yeah, okay, I think that's great advice. What do you do when you speak to one of these VIP customers and they're like, "Well, those features sound cool and everything Darren, but honestly, if you double my prices, I'm out of here." So what do you do then? Do you then be like, "Okay, well, for you we'll keep the old prices." It feels like a tight rope to walk.30:45 AW: Yeah, and that's where I think some of the nuances to it are, one, you have to understand where you sit in the marketplace. You'll have to have a few different talking points, "Here is the factual things, here is where we sit in the marketplace, this is what the other options look like and how we compare to that, here's the things that we've done. As being a long-time customer, you understand how well we support you, you understand our uptime, our delivery of quality, like all those things, you're already aware of these aspects." And then you're also like, "This is also a calculated move to allow us to grow more and to accomplish the things that we wanna do, and in that time, likely our cost to make these things happen have also gone up." So you're never gonna win in a tit for tat conversation, and... But you also can't let one customer determine your pricing either, you're gonna have some of those things. You're gonna have a few people that you know by name that have been with you a long time, that this might cause them to leave because the only reason they're staying with you is because of price.32:03 DS: Yeah, and this feature actually does come with a significant additional resource cost for us, so there's that too. That has to be factored in.32:11 AW: Yeah.32:12 DS: So I might say, "Okay, we'll lose 20% of our customers, but because we're raising the price by 50%, we're making 30% more money," that's not actually true. So it's important to actually think about these features and how they impact your expenses, and so this new feature will cost us a decent amount of additional in expenses, and so I have to factor that in as well.32:35 AW: Yeah, and I would definitely like... I would stay out of numbers, I would also stay out of anchoring it too hard to just the one feature because then people will say like, "Well, just don't give me that feature."32:47 DS: Exactly, yeah. There's so much more.32:51 AW: Yeah, for so many... Especially in the early years, I fought off so many people that were like, "I'd like to pay this because I only wanna use this feature in your platform," and it's like, "Nope, it's the plan, you choose what you wanna use, and that's on you, but I'm not taking and giving you only monitoring for $5 a month." To me, it's not the best play that's out there, so I'd really look at it like you will develop probably three to five main talking points on like, "Here's why we're doing this. It's to allow us to invest in our future development and take the product path that we want. It's to allow us to roll out the current features and to be able to serve you at a high level."33:36 AW: So you'll develop those and to the ones that... If you do have those conversations, I would just turn them into product calls and then ask questions, "Why is it that you feel that way? What is it that's anchoring you to that number?" And see what they have to say to you, and see if it's like, are these worth considering or not, are they valid, or is it just their position, their emotion or just the basic fact of, "I don't wanna pay more money." They would respond to their most favorite tool in the world, even raising the price five bucks, and they would have that response.34:11 DS: Sure, yeah. Yeah, no one wants to pay more money, so...34:14 AW: Yeah, yeah, but the products that we love and depend on, there's plenty of times you're like, "Okay, I get it."34:22 DS: Exactly, yeah. That's the thing, if someone came to me and said... Like, if Mailchimp, we're so dependent on Mailchimp at this point. If they raise their price, I'd be like, "Well, what are we gonna do?" Am I gonna spend the next month researching the alternative, transferring everything over setting up our funnels in something else? Like all that stuff is such a pain, and so that's actually a really important thing to think about building into your product, how do you make your product... It's like your customers are dependent on your product and it would be really hard for them to switch to something else, there's huge value there, and I actually see that with GatherUp quite a bit. I think GatherUp has pretty solid retention rate for that reason, because once you hit your trailer to that horse or whatever the phrase is, you're kinda... You're invested.35:12 AW: Yeah. Yeah, no, the more things... Just as we were talking about the integrations being very sticky, the more you get the hooks deeper into their processes, their marketing, things like that, we definitely know if you're gonna install our review widget on the website, you're gonna connect us to your point of sales or your CRM, like doing all those things, it's harder to rip you out, like you have efficiency, you have things that took some time to build or connect or to configure, and that's why the whole challenge is getting them to unlock those things and get just a little bit deeper with you, that's for sure.35:54 DS: Yeah. For sure. Well, I'm feeling, I'm feeling good about it. This has been a really helpful conversation to kinda wrap my head around some the things I wanna think of, you're always great to talk to about this stuff Aaron.[chuckle]36:03 AW: It's definitely an area like I've only experienced mildly once, planned to go through it a second time, and I was really interested to go through it was after we sold, and so I had a little more emotional detachment, and our parent company had already raised prices in a couple of products before, so they had some data modeling and some historical expertise and things like that. The other thing is, once you have those conversations, then planning like a three email series where it's like, "Hey, in two months we're gonna raise the price," and then in another month you're saying, "Hey, just a reminder again, on February 1st, we're gonna raise the price. Here is how much, here's how you're affected." Those are some of the things that I've seen... When people fail and it turns into either a Twitter storm or hate on some social channel or grumblings is like companies communicate and the change is too fast, where it's like, "Hey, starting next week... " And then if it's unclear, where they're not saying, "This is how it's changing, and here's how you're affected," and they just give it, "We're gonna raise prices, you'll find out whatever that might be," and I've experienced this as a customer too, I've seen people do it correctly, and it's like, okay, I get it, makes sense.37:26 AW: You're giving me a heads up, you allow me to wrap my mind around it, you allow me to like... You need to give somebody time to budget or maybe they need to pass along that cost to their end-user, but on the other side of things, when you do it too fast and you're not clear and you can't explain even some of the core things behind it, then you're really asking for your customer to be frustrated about it because they're gonna create their own answers, and usually their own answer is just gonna be, "These guys are greedy," or they just want more money instead of understanding that it's what they need to do to be successful.38:06 DS: Yeah, and then when we're successful, then we're providing a better product for you, so you're successful.38:11 AW: Yeah, and then after you do the increase, then you also need to think through your support team and responses, how do you respond when people reply to the email with what about this what about that? Having Talking Points and having pre-built answers that they can work off of, instead of trying to invent things to reply or one-offs or being inconsistent in your messaging, you definitely wanna do it. All the more reason, for me, have a handful of those conversations, see how people react, what they say, how you respond or what's important to them and does that calm the waters, and then you can build out that script for your support team when they get dozens of these on the very first email that you send out to your customers.38:58 DS: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Those initial conversations, I'll probably pick our top five clients, they've been with us the longest, they're at the higher-level plan, they're active, they're using the tool all the time. Those are people I wanna talk to, and I just wanted to let them know that this is coming, this is what the new feature is, These are the reasons why we're increasing pricing, and then get their thoughts and some of those things that they'll raise will be... Can be scripted out for our support team, how to respond to these things.39:26 AW:  Absolutely.39:27 DS: Makes sense. Makes sense. I think it's gonna be worth it, for sure. I think it's gonna drive significant value for the company, but of course, I feel a bit nervous about it. I feel nervous. Can you imagine if we lost more than half of our user base, that would suck.39:46 AW: It definitely would, yeah. That would definitely not be fun, but it would also create... Here's the other way to look at some of those things is like, depending upon your price range, it's like, okay, I still have the same amount of money, but I don't have to support as many people. And I get that's... It's not you want out of it, but there's definitely... You're gonna learn, you're gonna learn about how people value your product, how they view you, their sensitivity to these things, all those other things you are gonna learn. You're right to be wary. It's just like an anxious apprehensive, but I think if you communicate early, you're prepared, you have all those pieces, I think it'll work out.40:41 DS: I think so too. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I'm a little nervous, but I think it's gonna be a net positive for the company overall. It could be the thing that totally sky-rockets us to the next level, it... If we don't lose too many customers, we increase our growth, then I could see myself making a lot more money and hiring, increasing our development resources, increasing our support, increasing sales, increasing marketing, and then all of those additional investments allow us to grow even further. So I think it's this lever that we must pull now and it'll pay dividends in the long term.41:24 AW: Yeah, and then you probably need to condition yourself to hopefully be able to pull that lever in two to three years again instead of another decade. [laughter]41:30 DS: Sure. Well, I'll have some experience. So I would've been through it once.41:34 AW: There you go, you'll know alright you'll survive.41:37 DS: Exactly, yeah.41:41 AW: Awesome, well, good. What's roughly your planned timing on this? 41:46 DS: Well, the feature is, I would say it's about three weeks of development out, so still some tweaking of the software, getting it ready, and then I'd give it another couple, three weeks to sort of get our... All of our marketing in place to do the launch, so I'd say, I don't know, roughly a month and a half from now, but then of course, we don't wanna launch on December 25th or anything like that, so it's an early Q1 of 2021. We're gonna pull the trigger on this. It would come up, and then I do think we'll stagger the price increase, so we'll launch the new plans at this rate, and then we'll communicate to our existing customers that their rate will be going up, I wanna give them a chance to see the new feature, experience it, see the value that we're bringing with it, and that they have a little bit of a runway before their price will go up, that's my general feeling on how I'm gonna roll it out.42:46 AW: Okay, cool. No, sounds good. I'll be watching and holler at me if you wanna talk anymore on figuring out some of the little things in it.42:57 DS: I will, thank you. Yeah.43:00 AW: Yeah. Alright, well, and it'll be good for us to check in on this, I have a feeling, let's just say call it a hunch, we're gonna have a lot to talk about in our upcoming episodes, I just feel it.43:09 DS: I feel it too. Yeah, we got... As soon as we get off this recording, we gotta just book the next one, so we don't go another two months.43:16 AW: There you go, consider that my... I don't know, I'm probably foreshadowing. So be on the look out. Big things are coming.43:23 DS: Big things coming from both of us. Sounds good.43:26 AW: Alright, awesome, Darren. Great to catch up with you. We are gonna book our next one and at least get another episode out before the year ends here, and not spend another two months in between you and I have an elongated conversation. That's just silly.43:42 DS: Sounds good.43:44 AW: Alright, take care of my friend.43:46 DS: Take care.43:46 AW: Alright, see you everybody.43:47 DS: Bye everyone.

FULL SHOW NOTES:[INTRO music]00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode 23, Course Correcting.00:16 INTRO SPEAKER: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:47 AW: And I just finished eating a chocolate chip cookie. What do you think about that? 00:52 DS: It sounds pretty good. I just finished eating a salad. It's the exact opposite. [chuckle]00:58 AW: If my wife listens to this episode, I'm gonna get yelled at, but when I got gas at the gas station, they have these big chocolate chip cookies, and, yeah, this just looked like a great afternoon snack.[chuckle]01:09 DS: Totally, yeah. And now you made me wanna go get one.[laughter]01:13 AW: I'll mail you one.01:14 DS: Wow, I don't know if it'll be good by the time it gets here.[laughter]01:18 AW: So what's been going on other than salads and cookies? I know what's been going on. You spent all week last week hosting a massive virtual summit with 4000-5000 attendees. Let's talk about that a little bit before we get into our main topic today.01:34 DS: Yeah, so it's been huge. This summit was a massive success. We had actually 5500 people register for the summit.01:41 AW: Wow.01:42 DS: And pretty great attendance to all the different talks, and so it was big and we've been getting nothing but a steady stream of positive feedback about it. Just people comparing it to other conferences and saying how awesome it was and, yeah, so it was a great success. People love the content, and of course, I had some of the best speakers in the world such as Aaron Weiche, Mike Blumenthal, Joey Hawkins, so we had fantastic speakers. Basically, all the most known speakers in local search were there. Some heavy hitters outside of the local specific space like Rand Fishkin spoke. Michael King spoke. Brodie Clark, who was really building a name for himself down under in Australia, he spoke as well. And so, yeah, it was a great conference. We had huge visibility and, yeah, it was good. It was all good.02:31 DS: It was so much work though. Oh, my God, I can't... I'm glad it's over because not only was it so much work to put it together, I had my own presentation to do, the Local Search Ranking Factor survey had to get done out there, recreated, re-pull all the data, re-analyze all the data, build a slide deck, build a presentation around it and present it. And I handed that in like Monday night. The night before we were going live with the conference, I handed in my recording, and it was just a very stressful time. Glad it's over.03:01 AW: Yeah. Now, I wanna touch on a few benefits that we noticed in having myself and Mike both from GatherUp speaking at it. Our parent company Traject was a sponsor as well. They used their sponsor slot to tease our social product, which has been rebranded, called Fanbooster. But I wanna get back to seeing if you can quantify the work you put into it all, but on our side, the benefits with two speaking topics, we had great exposure, I can only guess you basically led off the conference with Mike, which I'm thinking was another hit. For a decade, he has been probably one of or the biggest thought leader in the space.03:50 DS: Totally.03:51 AW: And, yeah, a great draw and just the reason I love working with Mike is just the levels he can think on, and he gave a great talk around review attributes, which plays heavily into our platform and things like that. And then two days later, 'cause it was a three-day conference, and I talked on some things strategically related to reviews and reputation management. But for us specifically, we saw double the leads last week of what we had been averaging like the four to six weeks prior, which really great.04:30 AW: Any time you can 2X something is fabulous, and it returned our leads to pre-COVID for a week, which is awesome. I'm probably gonna be a little maybe frowny face next week when they jump down most likely again a little bit, but maybe some of those that paid for the videos and things like that are watching in this week, and then they'll still be interested to sign up. So we had a really great experience. A lot of Twitter conversation, which is always awesome, great, in the moment mentions, new Twitter followers, things like that. So from our standpoint, it was fabulous. From yours, what was the amount of work that it took you to put this together? I guess I just wanna frame up for any of our listeners that might be considering hosting a virtual conference as a marketing vehicle.05:24 DS: Yeah, I would love to be able to quantify the hours. It's tough to say. We've been working on it for about six months. Heavily working on it certainly through July and August, lots of recording. So there were 34 presentations, one of them mine, and then all the other ones I had to book an hour to record with that speaker. There was a ton of setting up all the speakers, doing speaker agreements, lots of chasing with regards to sponsorships too. So getting sponsors, going back and forth with them on a lot of stuff, writing up sponsorship agreements, getting the platform launched. We used the system called HeySummit, which turned out really well. But getting that whole website set up, my own team, if I think about what Jessie and Sydney put into it, it was almost a full-time job for them. And so hours, probably hundreds, a couple of hundred of hours have gone into launching this thing, and so it was a lot of work. And not only that, we worked with a company called HeySummit, and they were great 'cause they keep everything organized, and they also did all of our video editing, all the videos launched onto the site, and so...06:40 DS: Between all of us, maybe 300 hours is what it takes to put on a conference like this. If I had to guesstimate at it, maybe 400, 300-400. So that's a big investment. That's a big expense. The expenses broke even, so it's not really a money-making venture. We took any money that we got from sponsorship and we put it back into Facebook ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, to market the conference. So our whole goal was to get that attendance list up as high as possible, and we managed to get 5500 through all of our marketing efforts. And then ticket sales are covering all the expenses, expenses of that company that we worked with and speaker gifts, and so there's really nothing left in the end. It's not a money-making venture on its own. It was completely a marketing exercise for us to just get our brand in front of more people.07:28 AW: Yeah, and so you did that at a very large scale. You also, too, because of... The local search community is very niche and they're really... There's been a couple of attempts. MozCon created their own local event, and now they've just folded local into MozCon itself, which is a very large event in the SEO community. But I really saw it as you took the opportunity of a premier event in local search has been vacated, and you just claimed it heavily with what you did, and I think that's pretty cool.08:03 DS: Yeah, I think it's cool that way. And it's like, this one was so successful that we can't not do it again, so it's gonna be an annual thing. There's also some talk about doing spin-off conferences. Because we have all the talks pre-recorded, we could pull in a few new speakers that are specific to, let's say, dentistry. Like we'd get some top dental marketing guys to come in, and we'd do a few presentations with them, and then we'd pull out eight good... Our favorite talks from the summit, and we've got a new conference and it's really easy to spin it up now. And so we're actually thinking about doing a bunch of industry-specific conferences. A whole new set of sponsors, a whole new marketing push. So it's an interesting angle that we can keep running with for additional exposure into different markets in terms of marketing Whitespark. So the marketing potential of this is pretty huge.08:52 AW: Yeah, that's awesome. Now, you guys did a really great job. Internally, I was saying it made me miss 2019 because conferences and public speaking have been so important to GatherUp's growth and something that Mike and I are just wired to do, to share and network and connect through those events. And having that completely shut off in 2020, has been... It's removed a major marketing arrow out of our quiver, so it was nice to see that bump. We've seen it with a couple of the local universities in small chunks as well, but it was really nice to have that happen. And yeah, I'm looking forward to what else you guys can do with it with what you learned year one and what went right and what went wrong. You brought a lot of great speakers and you got some new faces in there, and I think you worked really hard on that, so well done.09:44 DS: Thank you.09:46 AW: I was definitely proud, excited, jealous, all of those things, which are all good.09:51 DS: Yeah, I'm excited about it too. I'm excited about the future of it. One thing that stood out for me is that you talked about the surge in leads that you saw from your presentations. It was fascinating to me that we did not see that. As the premier sponsor, the premier, we had four presentations from Whitespark. At the end of so many things there was all these like, "Hey, Whitespark deals," but we didn't really see a big lift in leads or sales from it, and it speaks to me about we just don't have the greatest products and services that are of interest to people.10:27 DS: We are very heavily citation-based, and that's part of it. Citations are losing interest in the industry right now but it's a big part of what we do, and so it just wasn't like, "Oh, awesome, citations." If I had done this conference six years ago, then I'm sure it would have been a massive business booster on the citation side of things. But our GMB service is amazing, and I think that there's a great potential there, and we saw some growth from a conference there. But our products, they're a little bit scattered. We got one for citations, we have one for reputation, we have one for rank tracking, but people, they're like, "Oh, I don't know what I should sign up for." So it's really like we have this grander vision of an integrated product that we're building, and we're working on that. So getting that launched as soon as possible is certainly a takeaway from the conference.11:14 AW: Yeah, no, that's really interesting and probably a super valuable takeaway, Daren. That could end up being... Depending upon how that sits with you and what you do with that, that might be as valuable as the conference and the marketing and the exposure itself. Is like what... It helped you learn something about yourself in a very fast cycle 'cause you saw it as, "We had 5000 people here with our name splashed all over it, leading the conversation, signed up through our website, all of these things, and it didn't move our sales in any direction." Right? 11:52 DS: Right. Yeah.11:53 AW: Yeah, no, that's really... That's, I don't know, telling/interesting/gave you some elongated, you don't notice it. If it's 5000 users over a year, you don't notice it, but when it's over a couple of weeks, it's something that really caught your eye.12:12 DS: Yeah, totally. And I think we are dialed in for next year, so when we do this conference again next year, we will have our software in the place, and so it'll be that perfect combination of like we know how to do this conference now, and so we do the conference, we have the right product to sell people, we can market it better and be in a much stronger position. So yeah, it's all good. All heading in the right direction.12:30 AW: On the flip side of that, and maybe around the leads and the bump we saw, I've really been both enjoying and realizing lately we finally have what I feel is like a very mature solution. And it's taken six years to get to that, and we still have things we wanna do and a couple of big piece items, but really gone are the days where 50% of the questions a prospect might ask you, you didn't have a great answer for or didn't have multiple options for. Where now it's like 10% of the questions might fall into that or even less to what's there.13:08 DS: That's amazing.13:09 AW: Yeah, and that just makes it great that when we get exposure, and we get in front of people, when we have the right marketing, it drives interest, leads, demos, sales for us. So it's really interesting to have that positioning now with it and understand that. And along those lines like...13:28 AW: I wish we could do a ton more marketing right now, it's really... The pandemic and the way, there's a lot of wait and see in the economy, especially with our larger enterprise prospects and customers. And it's such a hard thing to figure out in so many areas right now, and sales are really quiet for us on the upper end. Our resellers are creating movement and single locations are still coming on, so like the... If you frame it up as like onesie, twosies, we're making it there, our retention is great. We actually, in August, returned up above our pre-COVID revenue number, so it made... We didn't dip too far down and it didn't take too much for us to climb back up and be back to growing again and have gotten above what we lost in the first month or two, and things like that. Which is super encouraging, and I'm proud of our team for how hard, across the spectrum, everyone worked to make that happen. But it does get really... It's almost frustrating now to like, Oh, we have so many of these pieces in place, and the one thing that we could really get after is marketing and sales, and it is such a challenging marketing and sales environment right now.14:40 DS: Right, yeah, exactly. So it's so hard with the COVID situation, every... Budgets are tight, people are not really exploring new products right now, so... Yeah, I get that. And it's nice for you to be in that position, it's like we're almost in opposite positions: You've got a very mature product that you are struggling to do the marketing for, we've got a really great marketing engine and not the mature product. So it's like we've got to dial in our product, you've gotta ramp up your marketing somehow.15:09 AW: Well, and I think that serves as a great segue into the main topic that we wanna talk about today. I will say, I think there's no better time to be building than right now. If people aren't buying, great... Build. So that when that releases, when that changes, when that gets better, you have more to offer. Anyone, if you're in position in your product and you know you have some product market fit or things going your way, I would just double down on that so hard right now, so that when budgets loosen up, things pick up, whether that's a couple of months, six months, 12 months, 24 months, whatever it is, be in position to command those dollars. Take what you would invest into marketing and put it into the product. That would be my advice with this.15:57 DS: Agreed, 100%. That's what we're trying to do for sure. We're really focused on product right now. I'm trying to stay focused, I gotta stop distracting my team with all these side level, "Hey, here's a cool tool we could build, that doesn't actually drive any revenue for Whitespark, but hey, I wanna build it 'cause I love SEO." I need to stop doing that.16:16 AW: Alright, well, I'll try to hold you to that. I should probably stop eating gas station cookies, but we know how these battles go.16:24 DS: Yeah. Well, speaking of staying focused, one of the things that's come up for us recently, and I... This is the main thing, course correcting, it's like we had this feature that I got distracted with it, and I wanted to talk about that on the podcast today. It was like this idea that we were gonna build this feature called screenshots in our rank tracker. So we wanted to add this feature to our local rank tracking product that would allow people to see an actual visual of the rankings. So, like, actually we take a screen shot of every page. So it seemed like such a good idea, so we built this... The thing, we spent probably a good month and a half, two months building this feature. We launched the feature, it has had zero impact on our sales for the most part, so it's been useless from that perspective. And adoption rate of the feature was fairly low too.17:23 DS: Some people liked it, but the thing that it ended up doing was, while it was two months of development time, but then it was also... It's hugely expensive to... We had to spin up more servers to process everything, we had to implement new structures, and our actual crawling budget is way more expensive, it's like a separate crawl for each thing. We have to store all of those screenshots for 90 days. So we're spending a ton of money on S3 storage now, and so it was like, we launched this feature, did not help our business whatsoever, cost us a ton, continues to cost us a ton in operating costs, and so it's like we just made the decision to ditch the feature. And it's disappointed a few customers, but we set the email, we dropped the feature, we had three people cancel, that's it, just three. And so we've now saved ourselves massive maintenance costs, massive ongoing operating costs. And it really had no impact. And so it's like, that's the topic that's been on my mind and the main thing I really wanted to talk about.18:31 AW: Yeah, so let's go back to the beginning. Where did this feature originate from? Was this an internal idea, your idea, feedback from a customer, What does that look like? 18:41 DS: It was feedback from a potentially important customer, and it was really... It was Joy Hopkins that drove this feature. I blame you, Joy, if you're listening [chuckle] Basically, we launched the feature because Joy was like, "Listen, I'm using a competitor's tool. I really like your tool, but I can't use it 'cause it doesn't have screenshots, I use screenshots all the time." And I'm like, "Yeah, I know I've always wanted screenshots too." And so it's interesting to see how a decision like that can come from a single conversation with a single customer, and I think there's a big lesson there, it's like, do not drive your features by what one customer asked for. We've gotten caught by that a couple of times where it's like, we hear one or two people ask for something, but it's like, does it actually appeal to the entire user base? Is it that important to invest the time into? And so it's an important lesson to prioritize your feature development based off of one, how broad is the appeal for this feature and two, what will it to cost to build this feature? And I think we failed miserably on both of those.19:47 AW: Yeah. Has it spurned in you more ideas now, how to validate? It still doesn't mean one person can't give you a great suggestion.19:56 DS: Totally.19:57 AW: But then how might you bring that to your audience or what exists in your communication flows you're with right now where you'd be able to say, "You know what, we've actually had six other people request this" or "I know some people that'd be interested" or "Let me schedule a couple of calls with some of my power users and see what they think about it". And especially if it's a feature where... When you roll this out, were there any... Were you asking people to pay more for it or you were just including it and eating up margin in your current plan? 20:29 DS: Well sure, that's another good question and another good lesson is that one, we should've had it as an add-on at the very least. So it's like if you want this, you've gotta pay extra for it. Because it actually has significant additional operating costs, we should've charged for it. So that was another mistake made in the roll out of this feature. And then only the people that would've really wanted it would've paid for it. But even then, if by having the... Looking back at it, I'd probably still wouldn't have done it because there wouldn't have been enough people interested that would have justified the cost to build it. But to your question, it has made me think about implementing something like Kenney IO. Have you seen that? It's like this little feature request thing. It's like a software that you can have set up and customers can submit, "Hey, these are the features I want" and then they can upvote existing features that exist in there. And so it's like that way, you can kinda make sure that your development is driven by what your customers are asking for and then you have a little widget inside the tools like, "Do you have any feature requests? Let us know." and then that goes over to Kenney. I think that's a really smart idea and it's got me thinking about what... About adding that to our software? 21:40 AW: One thing I would almost suggest, even if it is something that you're not planning on feature gating in a plan or raising a price for, have a handful of phone calls, show them basic visual mocks or explain it, and then when they... If you ask a... Would you leverage this? Would this be something that would be really interesting or valuable to you? And they say "Yes," and then just pose the question,"How much more a month would you spend with us?".22:08 DS: Sure.22:09 AW: Right? 22:09 DS: What is it worth? 22:10 AW: Yeah. Would they actually put money on it? 22:13 DS: Yeah.22:13 AW: Even if everyone likes the idea, but everybody's like, "No, I wouldn't spend any more for it", then you also get like, "I'm saying yes to you to be nice because you've taken the time and it looks nice, but if you're asking me right now how much more I'd pay for it, I'm not gonna pay for it. I don't need it that bad".22:31 DS: Absolutely. Like, "Yeah sure. Give me this new feature. I might check it out. Sure, cool, but not giving you any more money for it". And honestly, I swear, if I had asked that question, I would've got a lot of people saying, "No, I'm not gonna pay more for it. I don't care about it that much" and then that would've told me and saved me all the hassle of building this. And so there's actually two things that we're... The topic of this podcast is course correcting, but there's also that preventative thing that we need to look at. It's like, how do you prevent yourself from building a feature that is actually not valuable.23:01 AW: Yeah. Well, it's that question, how did we end up on this course to have to correct it in the first place? 23:07 DS: Yeah.23:07 AW: It's definitely a piece to it. And it's like... It's something I still struggle with because I do build heavily off of intuition. But a lot of times that intuition isn't uninformed. It is from looking at, What are other people doing? What exists? What are competitors allowing people to do? It is taking in a lot of education across other things. It's even... I listen to probably six, seven talks from the Local Search Summit and it was just to get a feel for what's hot in certain areas, what are these leading experts pointing people in a direction, things like that, and then how does that play into what we're doing or what we should focus on or how can we even change our messaging to capitalize on it.23:56 AW: Like in the case, both David Mihm and Rand Fishkin's talk, talked about email and its value and just how much it outperforms social, and social is not just shiny, we gotta have it and it's sexy and fun and everything else and we have a social feature we put a lot into and it's very popular and gets used. But I've also written a couple of things like, "Hey, don't just use this for social. You can use this for images on your website or images in your email newsletters," and it just reaffirmed to me like, I'd put out a couple of tweets, piggy-backing on your hashtag and I'm like, "Hey, if you watched Rand and David's talk and you saw... So a email opens or 256 acts of engagement rate of social posts.24:42 DS: It's amazing.24:43 AW: Yeah, you're ready to double down on email, we've got you covered with the same solution that does social. So it is. You do have to do a lot of that intake. Obviously, having a way to capture the customer's voice, we still sometimes struggle at that. We keep loose track. We don't have an exact scoreboard but we do understand what people want in certain things and kind of loosely keep track of it. But I can't go and get like, "Oh well, 19 people have requested this, so you're the 20th. We really should build this".25:16 DS: Right.25:16 AW: But it would be helpful to make that more quantified.25:20 DS: Yeah. I was kind of feeling the same way. It's like one, we're not really asking for future requests and two, we're not scoring them. So I think those two things are super valuable and rather than me spending so much time trying to build based off of intuition, which of course, I think I have decent intuition, except in the rank track or screenshots example [chuckle] Generally, I think I have a decent sense about what would be appealing to the market, because I'm actively in the market. I'm always engaged in this stuff. But I think it'd be awesome to pull our customers and make sure that we're building based off of what people want. It's an important lesson I'm taking from this.26:01 AW: Yeah, well, one, I think you obviously saw where things were trending, you saw how you were leaking on this and there wasn't benefit, and the people weren't championing it, so you made the call to stop. And I think that's a progression because a year ago, you might not have done that. Correct? 26:19 DS: Yeah, we might have just continued to believe, in fact, I might not even looked at the numbers, I've been like... I didn't even notice that it was like, oh yeah, I forgot we launched that thing, it was costing us this much, and it didn't really impact subscriptions, but I'm trying to keep a closer eye on such things now.26:33 AW: Yeah, and did any part of you wanna talk to the three people that loved it so much that were there... 'Cause one thing I always struggle with, it can either be if you build something that doesn't take off, it either just didn't quite get over the hump where you built some, but not enough for it to really take hold. And someone else that does value it, could they offer you the last legs where then you can make the determination like, "Okay, it's gonna take me another two weeks or another month to build it this much better or to add this other benefit to it, and I'll do that. And if that doesn't change it, then I will shelf it, but I'm already 80% of the way, so just going a little further doesn't hurt, or did you just say "No, I know enough is enough, no one exposed anything great to me. It's just time to sunset it."27:23 DS: Yeah, I think those are some really good ideas and I would recommend anyone do something like you just proposed. In our case, we were limited and not really able to do that for this feature because one, we were exploring into whole new crawling architecture that we wanted to use instead of what we were currently using, but we couldn't because of screenshots, it was preventing us from switching to a much better solution that would allow us to maintain our crawl much better, and so we couldn't do it 'cause of the screenshots, and so that was like, "Gosh, these screenshots aren't paying us anything, let's just get rid of them," because that was the big driver of why we needed to do it.27:58 DS: And then the other factor is our rank tracker product is something we're going to maintain, but it's not generally going to be the thing that we're gonna put a lot of love into, because we have a broader vision, we're gonna build rank tracking into the broader vision, and then we'll eventually transition people over to our new software, and so when that happens, it's like I don't want to pull customers and find out that I can make it better by doing this when I don't want to invest any more Dev time into our existing rank tracking product.28:29 AW: Yeah, not easy, but sounds like you made the right call. You're doing a post-mortem on how we got here. How can I understand what people want more? How should I do more vetting of the value where they actually pay money for it? Things like that. I think those are all good lessons to learn and you have some actions to take next time.28:52 DS: Yeah, 100%. 'Cause I feel good about it, I'm taking the lessons and continuing to learn and grow and get better.29:00 AW: Interesting enough, I'm probably in the middle of your situation, so the timing of when you sent an email on this last week and you're like, "Oh, and I wanna talk about this." That was interesting. I have this internal conversation going, but we have a new reporting feature that we wanna put out, I'm not gonna get too specific and name it, but I wanna put this out, and so we've gone through the concept, we had to do a bunch of work in organizing the data on the back-end. So a very long time of doing a lot of just difficult data mapping. So one of those where you do all that work and you really don't have anything to show for it, because there's nothing to show for it, until you create a visual display where it's gonna show. So you do all this work on the plumbing, data mapping, everything else, it's non-sexy, none of the world knows that you actually had to put in all this time to make that happen. Now, once it's done. There's a bunch of different things that we can do with it. It just needed to be done regardless of this report or not.30:04 AW: But then I took... Alright, I created the wire frame, the purpose, the feature spec, all that, took it to our design in front-end and got it put together. And so it's at that stage right now and close to probably going into a sprint for development, and I stumbled upon someone else doing something similar, and they're doing it like 10 times better. [chuckle] And I just... For a week now, I've been putting off telling my product manager... I've just been like, okay, we're already this far down, this at least gets us something here. The lift isn't too crazy with what it is. It's getting something out the door. But then when I see how these other ones done, I'm like, oh, this is so much better because of this and this, and it's more visual and tells a better story, I missed on how I put this together, and now someone else has shown me like, "Hey, here's what you should have done 10 times better. And so I'm trying to figure out do I just move it forward and take the win in a month that it's out there, or do I course correct, shut it down, re-wire frame, re-front-end Dev, and probably doesn't see the light of day for three months. What would you do? 31:26 DS: Yeah, right. And so is this a feature that you have pulled your customers, you know that they're all waiting for this, you have a lot of interest in it, and it will provide a significant additional benefit to your users, and in that case, it might be worth revisiting. If you think it is like a small percentage will even care, then maybe you just roll out the basic version of it. Right? 31:50 AW: Yeah, so we've definitely been asked for it. It's definitely something in the space is... It's not a table stake kind of thing, but it's not a like, "Oh, this is the only tool that has... " There's plenty of tools that have this, but it is something that's definitely beneficial in a number of ways, and I think the hardest part is getting to... You know how you have certain features that are expected must haves, no matter if people really leverage it or really love it. You know what I mean? And I feel like this falls into that category where a third will really love it and use it beneficially and it helps them. A third notice it, see it every now and then and they're happy that it's there. And then another third, it was like, "Yeah, it's a checkmark when we were choosing tools, but we don't leverage it or use it. It's not a main driver for us." So that makes it even a little bit more difficult. Like just saying, "We have it," and the basic one I put together, that's gonna meet two-thirds of that audience.33:02 DS: Well, there, I think you just answered it, right, 'cause you're not gonna go back to the drawing board on it, are you? Do you think it's gonna be worth it if it meets the need, and it'll also get to put the checklist on your feature list? 33:13 AW: I still struggle though, 'cause I... One of my personal mantras, right, is good is the enemy of great. And this is a perfect example of like yeah, the, what we have in the pipeline right now is good. It's not great. And especially, sometimes you get that feeling and it gnaws at you and you're like, "Alright, we'll work in some new features. We'll get to this as soon as I get this up, these other priorities done." But for some reason, because I got to physically see great from how someone else is doing it, I'm like, "Well, that's just going against my own ethos. That's pretty dumb." [chuckle]33:54 DS: Yeah, it's like you just can't get past your personal need to develop something that's great. You can't launch a, what you would now consider half-assed version of it.34:04 AW: Yeah. And when I look at it like, "Alright, if I'm costing two months or three months, well, what's gonna happen in that meantime that's so... Part of it is just this feeling to ship new code and ship new features, which I think anyone in SaaS, you feel it. Whenever I describe SaaS in two words, it's... Or in two main themes, it's ship code and sell. That's the two main jobs you have in SaaS, and so part of it, like bringing new features, new eye candy, things you get to blog about, tweet about, showing a demo, all those other things, you need that. It is part of your lifeblood. So part of me is like, "Oh, I gotta put that off. And it was slated to be in this spot for something we can talk about," so I think some of it's just getting past that pressure that you constantly put on yourself to whatever it is, 30 days, 60 days, you need something new to keep people talking about you and to keep improving the product.35:06 DS: Yeah. It's so hard, Eventually you end up like in our case, our dev team is just so... They're pulled in so many different directions, and it's hard to continue a fast cycle of shipping. Have you ever seen ClickUp? Do you use ClickUp? 35:22 AW: We do not use ClickUp.  Is ClickUp a...35:26 DS: It's like Asana and Monday. It's like a project app.35:29 AW: Okay, yeah. No, we use some Asana. We're more into using a lot of the other tools in like Atlassian now, so like...35:37 DS: JIRA and stuff, yeah.35:39 AW: Yeah. Confluence and stuff like that.35:42 DS: Yeah, well, ClickUp just blows my mind, because every week, every Friday, I get an email from ClickUp saying like, "These are the five new features we shipped," and I cannot believe how quickly they are launching features and they're good features. It's like they're serious things. They're launching new shit all the time. It's amazing.36:01 AW: Yeah, but that's where you have to ask what's that size of their engineering team, where you have these... They might have, I don't know, the... I have no idea what they have. But they could have five different teams of five that each one has a rotation. So you're building in your team of five and you release and then you have five weeks till you have to release again in your rotation, because the next team has week two, the next team week three, like...36:27 DS: Sure.36:28 AW: Yeah, if you have that cadence and you can do it, that's pretty awesome.36:32 DS: I want that. I want that, Aaron.[chuckle]36:34 DS: How do we get that? [chuckle]36:36 AW: You want that with not even five developers, though. That's the hard part.36:40 DS: I want that with my two full-time developers.36:43 AW: Yep. Shiny, wonderful things.36:47 DS: No. I know.36:48 AW: So wrapping this up, course correcting. To summarize, I guess I would say it's something you absolutely have to consider. Yeah, sometimes you just gotta cut bait, or as we talked about, you have to investigate enough to know like, "Do I need to put more into this as one last effort?" Because you just, if you have the feeling or you have the data that tells you, "This isn't going the right way. It's just not that used. It's not making me more margin, or more top line revenue." Those are all the wrong signals you want out of adding to your solution.37:24 DS: Yeah, so knowing that trying to predict it in advance, of course, is the best course of action. If you can definitely identify whether or not this feature is gonna provide value. And I think it's, the lesson for me is to invest more time investigating these features before I give them the go ahead and then, but I do feel like, "Hey, I caught this one and it's time to course correct and cut our losses on it and move forward so the team can focus on other things and we can save those costs, because it's not actually doing anything beneficial to the business."37:53 AW: Yep. You gotta have the backbone to do it when you realize it's not there, and sometimes some things just have to be cut and shut down and you move on, and then just as you're outlining, post mortem you learn. And I'm a big fan. I use this statement all the time like, "Being proactive is an investment in your business, so more research, more listening, more vetting, asking people what they pay for that feature, taking the right steps to validate, that's an investment and everything you do reactively is an expense." So when you're still trying to deliver it, when you're trying to make it work for people, when you're ignoring the fact that no one likes it or is using it, and it's causing roadblocks to other things, like you're getting the bill on that in more than just dollars. It's time, it's everything else.38:42 DS: Yep, 100%.38:44 AW: Alright. Well, maybe on the next episode I'll let you know if I decided to redo this report or if I just stayed with it, but boy, I sure feel like, especially talking out loud with this, I need to course correct and go do it the right way and go from there.38:58 DS: I'm curious, yeah. I'd love to hear it next time we talk, what you decide to do.39:03 AW: Okay. My goal is to have that solved, not eat any more gas station cookies, eat more salads like you, and then I should be in good shape in two or three weeks when we talk again.39:14 DS: Yeah, looking good, feeling good. [chuckle] Sounds good.39:19 AW: Alright. Anything in closing, Darren, you wanna share? Anything you're looking forward to, or anything coming up in the next few weeks? 39:24 DS: Oh, sure, yeah, there's one big thing. I presented it at the Summit, is our local search ranking factors survey results. So I basically hacked together a presentation last minute so I can present. But the full publication's coming out. So I'm looking forward to launching that, and then also measuring the marketing impact of that as well. It's a pretty big resource in our industry, and so it'll be interesting to see what kind of business that drives.39:50 AW: Yeah, as a sub-point, maybe something we talk about as a focus in an episode like I think sharing and using data as inbound marketing and as content people want is massive, and you do such a great job with that and having the local search ranking factors is massive. Those are the kind of things that attract dozens or hundreds of links and mentions.40:15 DS: Yep. It's massive.40:17 AW: Yeah, over and over and over again and that's something we should probably talk about sometime. I think a lot of people miss the boat on that, just how much data, surveys, expert surveys, things like that, can just really fuel what you're doing for your inbound marketing, so let's mark that down for another topic.40:35 DS: Yeah, and I don't do it directly to make money. I think that there is a money-making benefit, but I just wanna clarify. I do it 'cause I love it. It's like the local search ranking factors is a labor of love and publishing it, I'm sure it definitely impacts business, but I would do it anyways.40:51 AW: There you go.40:52 DS: It's just what I love to do.40:54 AW: Even better when you love doing it.40:55 DS: That's right. Alright, thanks, Aaron.40:58 AW: Yeah, great to catch up. Everyone, thanks as always for listening. We always appreciate if you reach out with any topic ideas via Twitter or via thesaasventure.com, and if you get the opportunity and we're living up to our end of the deal of giving you valuable content, please leave us a review in iTunes to help others find the SaaS Venture podcast as well. So with that until we talk again hopefully in the next two to three weeks, sound good? 41:25 DS: Sounds good.41:25 AW: Alright, thanks Darren and thanks everyone. We'll talk to you soon.41:29 DS: Thanks Aaron. Thanks everyone.[music]

Links from this episode: Whitespark Local Search Summit Summit Beast Pricing expert Patrick Campbell on Twitter and his company ProfitWell  FULL SHOW NOTES:[music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 22, SaaS pricing. Is the price right? 00:16 [INTRO]: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.00:41 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:44 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:45 AW: And I think summer has just about set for me as we are in the last week of August here, and soon enough, hopefully, we'll be enjoying long weeks of Minnesota falls and then the inevitable winter abyss, but...01:04 DS: Yeah.01:05 AW: So so far, I've been doing a pretty good job this summer on spending my weekends up at the family cabin, and out in the boat with the kids, and on the water and things like that, which has made my July and August feel really great, much different than how like March, April and May felt. And how has that been for you, Darren, since... We haven't really talked in well over a month on the podcast anyway.01:30 DS: Yeah, it's been a while. The summer's been nice, we've been trying hard to get our backyard all nicely set up, so we got things like a new swing, and we got a hammock. We just recently invested in a nice projector and a screen, so we can do backyard movie night, and so...01:46 AW: I saw that.01:47 DS: Yeah, we're trying to take advantage of the summer, and because this particular summer is the summer of COVID, we're mostly staying home. We're not going anywhere and so we're trying to make the most of our backyard, and enjoy being outside because we have such a short period here in Edmonton. It's getting cold, I'm wearing a sweatshirt right now. It gets cold the end of August. September is our only month of fall, we start seeing snow in October, so yeah. We've tried to cram it in, as much as we could.02:19 AW: No, we're not there yet. I do... Fall's my favorite season, but we've still been doing 85-90 degree days last couple or so.02:27 DS: Yeah, yeah it's getting cold here already.02:30 AW: No, no good. Well, I know you have been extremely busy, Whitespark is putting on a local search Summit with 30 speakers? 02:41 DS: Thirty-three or 34 in total. So yeah, basically, if you are a somewhat known local search speaker or writer, like you kind of write about local search, you're mostly speaking at our... You're pretty much gonna be speaking at our conference. So I'm so excited about that, we have a huge lineup and yeah, it's been busier than ever trying to get all of these talks recorded, so the whole thing's gonna be pre-recorded, so I've been really busy with that. I'm also super busy trying to set up the local search ranking factor survey for 2020. That's getting put together right now. Aaron, you should get an email in your inbox this afternoon with an invite to take the survey, that's what my talk is gonna be on so I've been busy trying to put that together. And also another thing is, we have three different, sort of mini product launches that we're trying to time with the Summit, so...03:37 AW: Oh. Wow.03:38 DS: Dev is busy and yeah, it's been busy as hell.03:41 AW: Yeah, what would you say, what's your weekly time commitment to the Summit so far? 03:47 DS: Yeah, over the last couple of months, it's probably been 20 hours, 20 hours a week for the last eight weeks-ish.03:54 AW: Wow. Yeah, a considerable...03:56 DS: But I would say the return on investment is going to be huge 'cause it's already big, we are already feeling it and it's because we're doing the marketing for the Summit, and so that ends up generating a ton of buzz. All the speakers are talking about it, everyone's sharing it, everyone is seeing the Whitespark brand everywhere, and so our business is better than ever right now, and we're seeing really good growth right now. And I think it's just gonna continue to grow up until this sort of pinnacle of the conference, and then we'll have a really good drop off from that, but then it's evergreen content, we're gonna keep using it. We'll do it again next year, and then we have like a year's worth of content we'll be pulling out for more marketing, so I think it's gonna be kind of nuts. I really think this is gonna be a great Whitespark.04:43 AW: That's awesome. And I think that's a great little marketing tidbit in there, even... You can look and see right, the event itself, the day it's carried out and you play all the presentation over those days, that's the marketing and that's the buzz, but just as you alluded to, it's like it's all of the pre-marketing with it right, where you guys are... It gives you a ton to post about socially on Twitter, I know you guys have been using LinkedIn and seeing great traction at LinkedIn, and then you have 30 plus speakers that they're all putting it out on their channels, there's some really great ripple and carry effect on this, and you're still a couple of weeks away from the event itself.05:27 DS: It's just kind of amazing, and I'm gonna have to give a shout-out to Summit Beast. We've been working with this company called Summit Beast, run by Matthew Hunt and Edyta McKindsey. And they've been really instrumental in helping us put this together in terms of getting organized, what we need to do, helping us develop our ads, our sponsorship packages, our outreach, everything, it's... They've been really great to work with. So if this is something you're thinking about, I couldn't recommend them more. They're awesome.06:00 AW: Yeah, well, I think I heard through the grapevine that Traject, who is our kind of group of products for GatherUp is likely gonna be a sponsor.06:12 DS: It's gonna be great. Yeah, I had a talk with Katelyn about that, and we're looking at a sponsorship program with them. That's actually another marketing vehicle too, because these sponsorship packages, they end up getting the Whitespark brand in front of their audience too, right. And so... And then what we're doing is any sponsorship dollars we get, we funnel right back into advertising for the Summit 'cause our goal is to get as many attendees as possible, so it's not a money-making venture in its own right, we don't care to make cash from the event, but it's the brand building and authority we'll build through doing it.06:51 AW: Well, make sure you take detailed notes on some of this stuff 'cause I think this would make a great topic of conversation after everything wraps up when you're able to do a post-mortem on it. Kind of break down all of those things and to see like, "All right, what did the 30 or 60 days after the event look like as well as pre, for how it impacted our marketing and sales and things like that. I think there's a lot there.07:17 DS: Totally will do. What's going on with you these days? 07:20 AW: Probably, if anything, right now, just kind of sitting in this holding pattern 'cause the kids start school the second week of September, and my two oldest ones are in the high school, so they're on what's called a hybrid, so they'll be in school two days a week, and then they alternate an additional Friday every other week, and then the other days they distance learn. And then my third daughter, she's in middle school. She'll be alternating as well, and then my little guy, he's not in school yet, he's just four. So I don't have to worry about that with him. But yeah, so it's just gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. To some extent, like how long will this last? Will it be able to be carried out the way that they're thinking, will we see a spike in cases? You watch what's happened with some of these universities and reversing course from in-person classes to distance and... Yeah, it's just kinda like all right it's... I don't know, you definitely know you're getting on a roller coaster and it's like, "All right, well, you're getting on the ride and be prepared for the ups and downs, and fear and fun and [chuckle] whatever else is combined in it."08:30 DS: Sure. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Violet, our daughter is staying home, so they haven't... Our school board has put out an online option, and so we're gonna take advantage of that 'cause honestly, for us, we just... There are too many unknowns. It's like we don't know enough about the virus. But it looks like the majority of her school's going back so she'll be one of a few that are just sticking with the online option, but we're just gonna play it safe. We'll see how it goes.08:57 AW: Yeah, totally. Other than that, on the professional side, I have been missing lately, like conferences and travel and that just free time to get inspiration and things like that. And I really didn't, for the first three, four months of everything that's gone on since March, and it's like... I don't know, it was obviously so focused, there were so many things going on and you were focused on customer retention, and it's completely overwhelmed personally with figuring things out and keeping your family safe and all of those kind of things. And as those things have matured like just lately, it's like, "Man." And I'm just not built the way to like, "Wow, yeah, I just wanna get up and have five Zoom meetings every single day. Day after day."09:42 DS: With everyone.09:45 AW: Yeah, I like these breaks where it's like, "Hey, for a few days I'm at a conference and I'm talking to smart people, and I'm immersing in that experience," and it just allows me to get my head around other things, and network, and learn, and all of that. And I've definitely been missing that lately, so I'm looking for... I'm looking forward to your Summit. A few months back, we had the LocalU Advanced and that was a really fun day. It was great to see so many other familiar faces and just learn and see what people are talking about and things like that. It's not as good as in person, but it's still just access to so much great information, which obviously is great to spur in the brain but it just...10:26 AW: It feels really weird, right. I was thinking about this 'cause there's another virtual conference next week in our space. SaaStr's Annual is doing it, and it's like, I'm like, "Oh, should I put in a couple of not days off to attend talks that I want to attend to on this?" or, can you not take the time off because you're at home. So just you have two or three open hours, so you can only go to talks then. I don't know, it just feels really weird to me as opposed to, "Hey, I'm gonna be out of office for these three days at a conference and just so be it," right. It's not vacation, but it's not normal, like grind of the day, it's still work, but I don't know, it just feels different to me and I guess I'm just kind of struggling. Like, "How do I structure this? There's a bunch of things I'd like to go to, and do I just tell people I'm not gonna make these normal meetings that are important and keep things flowing and whatever else because I need some education and interaction and inspiration?" I don't know.11:26 DS: Yeah, it's so much more clear cut when you're getting on a plane and going to another city to go to a conference that you're like, "Hey, I'm gone for the next three days." [laughter] But when you're just sitting at home, and you're like, "Well, I guess I could answer those emails and jump on this call. This important meeting," or whatever. And so even though you're supposed to be attending a conference, it's hard to dedicate that time when you're not actually physically out of your office.11:48 AW: Yeah, yeah, totally. So I don't know... I need to figure something out, but a little bit of a loss with it, right. It wasn't like a... I didn't have a clear feeling right away like, "Oh, this is how I wanna handle that," or present it or manage my schedule, which, I don't know, kind of interesting, usually I'm pretty clear cut on those things, but not this time.12:07 DS: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I look forward to getting back to meeting in person.12:09 AW: Yes, absolutely.12:13 DS: I think we're a while away from that, but it'll be good when we get there.12:15 AW: Somehow, someway, we're gonna get there. You know, Darren, I couldn't help but notice since I'm connected to you on more than a few different social channels that our topic today was kind of born out of the fact that you had, you had a not-so-great experience around kind of pricing and customer engagement in a contract that you were in, and that led me to say like, "Oh well. Pricing is always on my mind. There's a lot of things to talk about, so let's talk about pricing," but let's start with what you recently have gone through, and I think there's some things we can pull out of that that are like what I would consider to maybe be no nos or a great way to alienate or piss off a customer just as it did.13:07 DS: Sure. Yeah, so we were using this CRM... Actually, not we... It was just me. I had signed up for this CRM called Copper, and I quite liked it, it seemed pretty good, but I found that I wasn't really using it because as the leader of the company, and I'm just too busy with many things, and I'm not really doing much for sales anymore. When I tried it out, I was trying to be a bit more organized with my enterprise sales stuff, but I've just backed away from that and I'm like, "Okay, other people in the company, you handle that. I'm not doing it right now. I'm too busy with other things." So since I wasn't using the software, I actually even put it in my calendar, I put a little reminder in my calendar, "Cancel Copper before it renews," and so that was like five days before the renewal. So I went into the Copper settings, I'm looking. How do I cancel it? And so I canceled it and I get an email from support and it says, they go "Sorry that it didn't work out for you. If you have any feedback, we'd really like to hear it, just wanted to let you know that your subscription will continue running until the end of August 2021."14:11 DS: And I saw that and I was like, "Huh." So I replied and I was like, "Oh, I think you meant end of 2020? My renewal is up in about a week," and he said, "Oh yeah, no, sorry, we have a 30-day cancellation policy, you have to cancel within 30 days, otherwise it renews for another year," and I replied and I was like, "Well, this is actually why I canceled, 'cause I haven't been using it. And if you check my account, I haven't actually logged in or even touched it in about seven months. It was a bit of a mistake to sign up for an annual plan anyways." I was like, "Is there anything you can do? I am not using the software, I really don't wanna pay for it for another year," and he was like, "Well, no, sorry, that's our policy." And then I even gave him one last chance. I was like, "Okay, I know it's your policy, but it's not really great customer service, and I gotta tell you that if you're not willing to help me out here, I'm probably gonna complain all over social media, and I don't know if that's in your best interest." And he's like, "Sorry, there's nothing we can do."15:19 DS: So I did, I complained all over social media 'cause I hate that shit. Why would you do that? In our company, if someone forgot to cancel and then they come back to us a week later and they said, "Hey, I'm really sorry, I haven't been using the software. Could I get a refund?" Our answer is, "Absolutely, no problem." We look, you haven't used it in two months, you know what, we're gonna give you a refund, we're gonna refund that last month too. So you gotta take care of your customers. Why do they want that $228 more than the goodwill that they will foster? It's like that $228 is gonna cost them way more because I posted on LinkedIn, I posted on Twitter. My LinkedIn post has 142 reactions, 79 comments, and 24,000 views, 24,000 people saw my post where I was saying, "Don't use Copper, I'm really not happy with their business practices, this is what they did." The damage to their business is astronomical. They got $228 from me, but man, did they create a reputation problem. And a lot of people that were thinking about using Copper probably won't now because it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth, it's just really poor customer service. That's what I'm annoyed with right now. [laughter]16:47 AW: Yeah, no, I get it, right. And you see this more and more like we just... There's a deal we recently signed, and I didn't have a great time in the process, but it was buying some data and access to contact information, and in doing so, one, I felt like they were making it hard for me to buy, which I thought really stunk and then the same thing is like when you read their contract right. It's like it's almost like this poison pill thrown into it that you know, "Hey, this is going to auto-renew unless you cancel X amount ahead of time," right? And it's like the same way where you had to go put something on your calendar, you knew you needed to cancel before the renewal, you didn't know you missed the 30 days ahead of the anniversary date on it. That's just crazy, right? Our financial person has to go and put a reminder on their calendar to then reach out to me and make sure that we don't wanna renew at that time, just as a checks and balance, and that's...17:49 DS: Sure.17:51 AW: It's just so much extra work and it just feels like, "Hey, we feel better," like, "We hope you forget. We hope you forget, and then you just keep paying us." It's not even the attitude, it doesn't feel like this attitude of, "We wanna make a great product that's really valuable that you're gonna pay to use over and over."18:08 DS: Yeah, totally. I will give them credit. After this exploded on social media, I did get an email from their customer support team lead, and she said, "Oh, we've actually canceled it. You won't have to pay the renewal fee." But in my opinion, it was too late, it was like, "I already gave you the out," and so it's not like I went back and deleted my social posts because I feel like, it's like you're only gonna do right by your customers when you get called out. That's not cool. Right? 18:41 AW: Yep. No. And I agree with you. Many times within ours, when somebody's said, "Hey. I forgot about this." And whatever else, the same thing you described. We'll go look at the account, we'll see what that looks like, and we're gonna propose something reasonable. It might not... To some extent, it is fair to say like, "Hey, it's not on us to remind you to use it to anything else like that, but it is easy to look at a number of these and say, 'Okay. Here's meeting in the middle,' which is very reasonable for both sides, because we do wanna treat you with a great amount of respect. We'd rather that you're like, 'Yeah. It wasn't for me, but they were fine and they were easy to work with.'" As opposed to how you ended up feeling and what you've now put out there, and even if someone who's come across that can't remember directly what went down with Darren Shaw Scorn, they definitely might have this feeling of, "You know what? I feel like I haven't heard the greatest things about them."19:42 DS: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I look at it that way too. If anyone comes back to us, it happens infrequently enough that the goodwill you foster by helping out someone who needs a refund, who knows what their reasons are for the refund, right? Maybe that money is really important to their business and they're like, "Dang it, this thing renewed, I wasn't using it." It's like, "I don't want that money, I wanna help you out." And I would much rather not have a situation where someone feels crappy about my company because when they feel bad about the company, they tell other people, and that's about the worst thing you can have.20:22 AW: Yep. Yeah. You definitely wanna stay with that, I think there's obviously some great takeaways here. Some of these seem like no-brainers, but one is, don't create an environment where you hold your customer hostage 'cause that's really what they ended up doing, is saying like, "Well, no matter what, we're gonna get this 200 and some bucks out of you. We really don't care because the fine print says we can." And that, at the end of the day, is holding your customer hostage. Then after that, you had communication, you introduced this in a number of ways, and they obviously haven't trained or created a system inside of their company for that support rep to raise their hand and be like, "Hey. I think we have a situation that could go sideways here, or the customer being upset, and as another human, I feel like there might be some validity." It sounds like their only playbook is just to say, "Nope. That's what it said. Nope. That's what it said." That's just not how you solve problems or build any goodwill or relationship, whether they're gonna be a short or long-term customer, there's still someone out there talking about it.21:28 DS: And I think that's so important. It's like, "What are we building here? What is our company... We're supposed to help people solve some problem, we're gonna do that with technology through our SaaS companies." And so if you're not solving that problem, they're not even taking advantage of it, then don't take their money.21:43 AW: Yep.21:44 DS: And provide good customer service. Be a good company. Be good people. Be a fellow human.21:49 AW: Yep. Yeah. We actually, for any of our written agreements, our, like SOWs, there are for that term, a one-year or a two-year term, and then if we have to renew it, have a signed agreement, there's out clauses in there and things like that. It's very straightforward, and yeah. At the end of the day, it's about people can still respect you even if they're not gonna work and use your product. And I think too many take it like, "Well, if you're not gonna work with us, then we couldn't give a crap how you feel or what you're gonna say or do." That's just silly.22:19 DS: Yep. Yeah.22:21 AW: With that, I wanted to talk about, there's some not things to do within pricing and how you structure working with you and stuff like that, and I wanted to spend just a little bit of time talking a little bit about pricing. I wanted to hear how you've approached some of those things. I can share some of our struggles and thoughts and challenges, but pricing is such a complex thing. And...22:44 DS: It's so hard.22:44 AW: Yeah. As I've learned over time, it's such both a science and math problem and an emotions, psychological problem, and that that just makes for this constant combustion of what's there and how you look at things. Maybe share, as any time you've done something and you've recently added services like your Google My Business as a service product, like how do you approach setting a price? Have you ever raised prices? I'm curious to know some of those things for Whitespark.23:21 DS: Yeah. It's so hard. I find pricing to just be a crapshoot most of the time, and it's like, on one hand, pricing is based off of what I think the market value is, but then there is some math to it. It's like, what are our actual costs for this thing? And you try to calculate the cost of your support team managing it, your dev team developing it, your design team, putting all of these things together, and that's your operating costs, and then you should have a markup on that for your profitability. And when we launch something new I try to factor in that math a little bit, but then sometimes it's hard not to be like, "What is everyone else charging and can we undercut them a little bit so that we're a bit cheaper?"24:07 DS: And that's a mistake I've made a few times, where it's like, "Yes. That might be the case, but a race to the bottom is probably not what you want." And so I feel like I've mostly made mistakes with every price I've ever put out. [chuckle] I look at our software, and I'm like, "No. It was too cheap." I look at our services and I'm like, "Dang it, we under-charged again." And we're looking at raising prices for our GMB service because, well, there's a lot of hidden costs that you don't even think about, and they start to eat into your profitability and your ability to grow a great company, and you need that revenue to grow a great company.24:45 DS: And you can just keep breaking even for the rest of the life of your company, but do you want growth, and do you wanna turn your company something big? And they talk about pricing. It's like the biggest lever you can pull. I saw a quote the other day that said, "The number one thing you can do to grow your company is raise your price." And it's the easiest and quickest, it's like, boom, you just add X amount to your price and you just added X amount to your revenue, and it's true, if you can do it and not destroy your customer base, then do it.25:18 AW: Yeah. An important mindset, and depending upon where you're at with your product stage of your company, the biggest erosion I see is in confidence because especially when you're just starting out with the product, you're kind of feeling like, "All right. This isn't the best version of my product." We've got the staples out there, the base needs and things like that, and I think it feels really hard for people to then say... To put a price out there that's anything, but feeling like, "This needs to be cheap and I just don't want... I don't want price to be an arguing point." That's where I don't want them to get ahead on.26:00 AW: If we pick a price that feels good, to me, usually for that business that, "That feels good" price is usually too cheap, and I've heard a lot about people doing experiments, especially when they're like... If they try to sell their product pre-revenue or pre-being put out there and they're talking to someone saying like, "Hey. Would you... We wanna sell this, would you buy it ahead of time? The release date is next month," or whatever else, "would you pay this for it? Would you pay that?" And keep increasing in those calls and seeing if you can land people at that higher price to try to get yourself there.26:40 AW: And to me, some of that... Yeah. It's really interesting because I don't even know the right way to frame this up, but it's like I can tell you, I think what our product is worth right now and what our pricing is are not... They're not aligned. Price rarely becomes a sticking point, it does at certain times and certain customers, but that's like... That's business  ____. I think a lot of times people will get, "I wanna offer it at a price where everyone can say yes, but that usually isn't living up to anywhere near what your value. And one thing that I know first-hand from our life cycle is we started off way too low. Just way, way too low. And the climb out of when you're low, that's hard because it's emotionally hard when you need to go raise prices because you start looking at each individual customer and then you're like, "How are they gonna react?" You know if you have dozens or hundreds or even more of customers, you start looking at each individual one and how are they gonna react to when you put that out there and what that looks like.27:54 DS: Wouldn't you grandfather though, I know what you're thinking with this stuff, but, what about grandfathering? You've got an existing customer base, you've already got them in at the product at this price, you wouldn't raise prices for them, but you would increase your prices for everyone going forward, they get grandfathered in at the rate that they signed up for.28:13 AW: Yeah. The one time we did a straight price raise, we actually did that, it's like you're basically saying, "Moving forward, we're now charging." We moved from... Our lowest level plan was like $29 a month, and we moved it to $39. That was three years ago now, and we said to our old customers like, "You are all staying there, here's the new price on that." But what we did at the same time too, that was when we only had one plan for our product, then we rolled out a couple of plans up above that and we used... We more fall into, our pricing setup is feature-gated. It's like, "Here's the five features you get at this price, then you get another three features that are super valuable at this price, and then you get all of these at this price." You're using different features to move people up in their plan price, that's there.29:10 AW: And I do believe that grandfathering is good. The one thing I would caution people to do is like forever grandfathering, I do think is not a great idea, especially in SaaS because you level up your product so far. I think it's just far smarter to be able to say like, "Hey, we're gonna do this. For the next year, your price is gonna stay the same." Or, "The next two years, your price is gonna stay the same." And I think it would have been even better if when we had done it, we had set a time frame, like we just said, "We're gonna grandfather you, your price isn't changing right now." We never said, "You're at this price forever." We didn't close that door or tie ourselves down to that. But I do wish, in hindsight, even though it would have felt difficult, I wish we would have said, "Your price is locked in for the next year," or through... If we did the raise in the middle of the year, 18 months, but, "Starting on Jan 1 of this date, you will move up to this price." And it's like if you've kept that customer that long, you're delivering the value, you have every right to do that.30:11 DS: And at that point, if they'd been with you that long, they're committed to the product and that extra $10 a month, if that was what it was, that's not gonna really be a deal-breaker for them, and they probably will see the value. And in fact, if you communicate it really well and you send that email that says, "Listen. Since you signed up, look at all that we've added to our features that you're benefiting from now that this is why we're innovating, this is why this is... " And I also tell them what this money is going to because I guarantee all of us have a number of those price-increasing emails in our inbox that we could look back at, and there's so much precedence for this, and it's okay to raise your prices like that. How are you planning to do it? Do you have any thoughts on that that you can share? 30:58 AW: Yeah. We had some things in motion and COVID crushed that, that would not be the right time to... We weren't essentially doing a, I guess you could call it a pricing raise, but if you consider us having three plans, we were basically gonna sunset our lowest level plan and move people up to that and say, "We're no longer offering this plan as of this time, everyone will move up and have this plan, this is where all of our features are... " Everything else. That's how we... For us, instead of just saying... The hardest price raise is when you say, "Hey. The exact same product that you have and you've always had, but now it's gonna be $20 more a month." That's a harder... Still can and likely should be done in many markets, because you also have to take a look around you... When I look around at some of our competitors, especially in smaller location  ____, their price can be anywhere from... The ones who I think are even close to us in a feature set and value, they are three to 5X more expensive, and that's just...32:13 DS: Sure thing, yeah.32:15 AW: Yeah. It's like, "Why do we have to be the bargain basement price?" Well, it's because we started there and we haven't found the right way to cycle up, move, whatever, and a lot of these guys came to market at a much higher price and then have escalated from there and they're larger, so they have even less care. The bigger you are, the less care you have with some of these things because you can play the numbers game, you'd realize, well, if we raise this much and we get 80% retention, here is the... Here's how far in the plus we are on this.32:48 DS: Yeah. Totally. You can run the numbers, they can tell you exactly what it's worth to take the risk to upgrade. I wonder if there's any data out there, like other companies that have... There must be... We could find the blog posts where they raised prices, they tell you how much they raised their price by and how many customers they lost, and I bet you it's a relatively small amount, they probably didn't lose too many.33:11 AW: Yeah. I would definitely think that the one Patrick Campbell at ProfitWell, puts out a ton of content on pricing, that's so much of their content marketing strategy. They offer a billing system to help you run reports on all of your revenue and things like that. But I've definitely, from being around and knowing a few other SaaS companies and what they've done, there've been really massive gains when they've done it, and the hard part as a founder or the person running the company, you look at it like, "I don't wanna lose anybody. I want everybody to still be happy. I wanna get the dollars from everyone, I feel like that's there." Everything else... And so it emotionally becomes really hard for you because it's hard for you to say, "Well, we're gonna lose 20% of our customers, but we're gonna make 60% more." Mathematically, you're like, "That's a no-brainer." Why are we not... Why are we not doing this? And it allows us to hire better people, keep progressing our team, invest in other technologies or processes. There's all these wins with what you can do with the financial gain, but you just end up emotionally focused on, "Somebody's gonna be mad and they're gonna leave us, and I'm gonna feel bad that that customer left us over a $20 a month."34:38 DS: Yeah, nobody wants to feel bad. [34:39] ____.34:39 AW: No. Not at all. But you have to free yourself of doing that, and that's the one that I think anyone going through a price raise, one of the biggest things you have to do is learn to keep your emotional side in-check, especially if you are rooted to, "I want everybody to be happy. I want everybody to like this. I want everyone to think we're fair," and those kind of things because that can feel really difficult.35:04 DS: It's blowing my mind right now, the massive opportunity we missed, we've talked about it on the podcast before, but we launched a massive complete overhaul of our local citation finder software, which is our most subscribed system, and holy cow did we miss the chance to raise our prices when we launched that. Jeez! We should have done that.35:24 AW: Yeah.35:24 DS: That would be the perfect time to raise prices and be like, "Hey. We've got a new local citation finder, it's a hundred times better than the old one, and we're raising the price." Most people would have stayed with us. And all the new people signing up would be giving us more money today. So, that move, should have done it.35:40 AW: I think there's a lot of things inside of pricing where it's like, "Should have done this, should have thought about it." And then we're not gonna spend the time to go into it today, but then there's just a lot to think about how you do it, the timing, how do you present it. Communication is everything. There's right and wrong ways to do this, getting the number, getting the price increase is one thing, and you have a lot of research and a competitive landscape and what else you've delivered in the product and things like that... That's the easy part. The hardest part to execute on... I shouldn't say it's easy, the hard part is how do we get this right so that we give our customers time to adapt, we give them answers, it's easy for them to understand how their pricing is changing, all of that stuff, that's where I've seen companies completely blow it or do a good job and end up on the right side.36:40 DS: Yeah. I think you already suggested this, but if I'm thinking about our case, let's say I'm gonna raise prices for our local citation finder. I think I would almost double our prices across all of our plans, and I would grandfather any existing users for a one-year time period. I think that would be a pretty decent approach, and so that way, any new people signing up for it, we're already making... I think what I would call the proper value for the tool, and then everyone else is on this sort of timeline where once that year is up, it'll switch over, everyone's price will increase, and I think the majority would stay with us still too.37:17 AW: I think you could even go lower than that, I think you could lay it out in like six months, you could... I think you could ratchet it down, I don't know, maybe this is something we should talk about offline 'cause I think if you have another next big feature, and improvement plan...37:37 DS: Totally.37:38 AW: That might just be the time. And you can always... Even if you're not gonna do anything grandfathering... And we did this with our basic plan that we're gonna sunset, we removed it off our website last summer. We're not bringing on any new customers on it and we're still seeing the same account growth with our entry-level plan that was now $35 a month high. It was like the difference between $40-$75. There's a lot of little things you can do, but I do think, like I said, from what we've done in the past, I would have done a timeline on grandfathering and just said, "You're still gonna keep your price through this amount of time, and then it is gonna switch to this because of everything that we've added and done, here's the latest addition." And then there's gonna be more additions by the time that your pricing increases, we know we're delivering that value.38:34 DS: I think that's also another smart takeaway, a nice strategy, drop your lowest level plan, just drop it. And then going forward, anyone that's on that plan, you can eventually upgrade them to the better plan 'cause then it's a much easier sell because it's not just like, "Hey, you've got the existing product and we're gonna charge you more for it." It's like, "We're moving you to the higher plan." So there's some justification with the price raise.38:58 AW: Yeah. If you're doing feature-gated, feature-based plans like that, I totally think that's an opportunity. Obviously, that's a lot trickier if you end up in seats or number of users is what moves you through the plan, or it can be a little trickier if you're metric-based where it's like your plan is based on the number of email subscribers you have with us, or the number of contacts in your CRM or the credits in this SMS marketing system, that can be a little bit tricky, but with all these things, there are ways... But my biggest cautionary tale is like, push yourself to the top of what you're comfortable with on pricing 'cause once you put yourself out there, moving away from that low price anchor, it's really hard and you will spend a lot of time cycles, emotional value, doing it. There's even times where you end up believing, "No. We are maybe only worth that." And if you're doing the right things, you're not, you're worth so much more.39:50 DS: Yep. Yep. Smart, especially for anyone who hasn't set their prices. Let's say if they're in the early stages of developing, really put in the effort to do your research and come out of the gates a little bit higher than you think that you should have. I think everyone should be doing that.40:08 AW: If you can avoid leaving money on the table and starting from a place too low, you're gonna be all that much better off as you... Down the line of success.40:14 DS: Yeah. Totally.40:15 AW: All right. Well, let's wrap. We're trying to make it a goal of not talking as long, I don't think we... We didn't hit our goal, Darren, but we definitely didn't blow out a whole hour today, which we've done in the past. [chuckle]40:27 DS: Yep. Yeah. 40 minutes. That's all right. Yeah.40:31 AW: All right, cool. Well, hey, if people get a chance, this will be out still well ahead of Whitespark Summit, if you're interested in local SEO at all, definitely go to whitespark.ca and click on the Summit tab. There's your shameless plug for that, I'm one of the speakers. The other 33 are fabulous. I might be questionable, but I'm gonna be there anyway, so hopefully, you'll take in my talk as well, and...40:57 DS: You're gonna be amazing. Yeah.41:00 AW: All right, well, you're gonna have to doctor it up quite a bit to get me to amazing.41:03 DS: Okay. [chuckle] I don't think so, but all right.41:06 AW: All right. Cool. Well, great catching up, Darren. Hopefully, your blood pressure's back down now and you're fully vented on Copper and you can move on with things and get back to normal. [chuckle]41:19 DS: Yeah. I can get on with my life now. Yeah. [chuckle]41:20 AW: Awesome.41:22 DS: Should be all right. Okay.41:25 AW: All right, all the best, man. Great talking with you. Thanks, everyone for listening. As always, we'd love it if you drop us a question, drop us reviews on whatever platform you're listening to us, or drop us any suggestions for our future podcast episodes. We'd love to hear from you and appreciate you listening.[OUTRO music]41:42 DS: Yep. Thanks, everybody.41:43 AW: Take care.41:44 DS: Okay. Bye.[music]

Full episode show notes:[INTRO music]00:13 Aaron Weiche: Episode 21, Frameworks.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:46 AW: And I am currently living summer to its fullest the last few weeks. How about you? 00:55 DS: I wouldn't call it to the fullest. [chuckle] I'm living summer to the "halfest". I'm doing some summary things, but I feel like I need to get out more. We're a little apprehensive about going out, spending enough time outside. We should get out more. More walks, more bike rides.01:10 AW: There you go, I think it's a good idea. In regards to COVID, I would say that the easiest way I surmise our family and definitely having kids with high school activities and sports and those things are like on their own trajectory, but we've moved from isolation to limitation. And a lot of it's just limiting like what are bad ideas? Going to a bar, for me, I'd rather not go get a haircut, I'm lucky Marcy's been cutting my hair. I'm in no hurry to jump on a plane. I'm not going to the health club. I'm doing long walks just about every day, but no weights or strength training or any of that but yeah, just trying to get back to as much as normal. If I'm in a store, I'm in a mask, just that kind of stuff, just trying to be as smart as possible and distancing and preventative things without... Yeah, the bunker life in a family of six and when you have a 16-year-old and a 14-year-old, it just won't work.02:10 DS: I can imagine, yeah. Yeah, it's not that dissimilar from what we're doing, so pretty much every night after dinner, I get outside with Violet, and we'll go for a walk or bike ride and Jill comes for most of those, too, so we're doing that, we're getting out and just sort of going outside when the weather is decent. Yeah, and definitely, mostly not going into any stores. If I did have to I would bring a mask. But for the most part, I haven't been to a store in over a month 'cause we get everything delivered. Our groceries are all delivered or curbside pickup and so it's been really easy that way.02:42 AW: It's an interesting thing when you're out, and when you're wearing a mask, and just the human energy between those wearing masks, those not wearing masks, just all... You see the collision in people's eyes of political views and personal views and their rights and oh, so many things, I don't know.02:58 DS: My freedom? 03:00 AW: Yes, it's quite an interesting thing.03:02 DS: Yeah, totally. I follow this group on Nextdoor for our neighborhood and wow, some of the posts over there are really blowing up with the two sides clashing, people talking about their freedoms to not wear masks, and people trying to educate them on the benefits of masks. But man, there's that one group that can't get their head around the mask only being for them, and they don't see the benefit of it from the other perspective, which is you wear the mask to protect others. And it's faced with all of the information being presented to them, they still can't wrap their head around that. It seems to me. There's probably lots of people like that.03:36 AW: Yeah, it's tricky folks. Definitely, I don't know, I don't know if it's pride. If it's vanity, I don't know if it truly is freedom or just being told what to do, or the fact that there's just so many people not willing to believe anything from any source at any time, right. The... I don't know, I can't handle all the conspiracy theories, what a hole to go down these days right.03:57 DS: Oh my God, yeah, I know, I haven't really gone down the holes, but I've seen glimpses of them and I'm like, Wow.[laughter]04:04 AW: Who knows? 04:05 DS: Some things they're thinking, yeah.04:06 AW: Yes, you'll never get out if you go in. So I think what you're doing is why it's just kind of walk around the edge and find a new path.04:13 DS: Yeah, totally, totally. How are things going at Gather Up these days, what's going on? 04:18 AW: Good. I think the easiest way to state it is just stability, things have become more stable from what's gone on as we've talked. We've had over a month since our last episode and things have really stabilized. The things that you see more than anything is, one, for me personally, like new sales are just slow and I'm mostly dealing with larger multi-location all the way up to enterprise-type deals, and really more than anything, it's like taking on something new, implementing a new tool and building process, or some companies would call change management. That's the obstacle right now. More so than spending budgets. And when you look, it's really easy to understand, it was the same for our business, especially the first eight to 10 weeks of COVID and what was taking place, it was like every minute was filled with a special meeting or a task force, or talking about how things were trending, what numbers churn, paused billing. So you can understand that inside of these other businesses that not only have that, but then have entered a reopening phase and changing protocols and health measures and communication and all these other things. So it's easy to see why they've probably just said like, "Hey, just keep on keeping on right now and let's not introduce anything new, look we have enough to deal with."05:45 DS: I think that's exactly it. Everyone's busy and they're getting back to business for the most part, but some things are lower priority and that concept of stability makes perfect sense. Let's just keep things going as they are, so we can focus on all this other stuff.06:01 AW: And as I pointed out with our stand-up team meeting today is what has really spoken well for us is just retention. Our April was down, but our May, we were not down, we were on the plus side, very little, but still on the plus side, which was really encouraging. June, as we record this headed into the last few days of June, is trending nicely for a percentage point or two of gain, which sounds fantastic, right now.06:29 DS: Any gains, sounds pretty good.06:30 AW: Exactly, and all of that's being done with basically almost no new sales, we have some of our resellers and agencies are expanding, our partners that resell us are expanding, but as far as things direct with us, that really isn't happening. So it's having just a high level of retention and you've already peeled away some of the people that were very fringe customers, not heavy users, don't find value, things like that, but overwhelmingly, the massive core hasn't needed or wanted to make any of those changes, so that's really sound. And I just shared with our team, that's a compliment all the way around, 'cause I really do believe that we have an outstanding product, but we have a phenomenal service layered over the top of it, and those two things combined absolutely lead to retention.07:19 DS: Yeah, totally, I think there's also some nature of the business too with yours, I notice certainly, 'cause we're a GatherUp reseller white label version of it is like that always stayed relatively stable. We certainly saw some drops at the end of March, early April, but then it stabilized and we didn't see much because it's the kind of service that you just will always need, it's one of the ones where you're like, Yeah, okay, I can't cut that. It's a bit of an essential service, and I think that that's really helpful for GatherUp, and we're seeing it on our side too. Yeah.07:52 AW: Other than that a lot of small little releases like a number of things it's interesting, I think we kinda have these cycles where we push and we'll have a really big feature or two, and we're really pushing and grinding on that, and then the minute that happens, I think especially our engineering team kind of needs... They need a little break and then we've also kind of built up a lot of small things that need to be tended to, and a lot of those tend to be behind the scenes, like migrating to a new version of something, shoring something up, test code, whatever it might be. And so we made it through a couple of weeks of that after some big, really big pushes to start the year, but then now we're getting into this middle ground where they're smaller things, but they're very visible things. We're pushing things out, but it's things that we can blog about or market or talk to our customers about things that they notice or they can engage with, or not so much a feature release, but an enhancement to an existing feature that's there. That's been nice to hit these patterns of that happening, like every couple of weeks out of a sprint.09:00 DS: I'm a little jealous of that position because I've got most of my dev team focused on building our brand new accounts system, which is like all of our payment processing, user management, receipts, all the order forms, if you're gonna go and sign up for something, all of that accounts stuff. Right, and it's one of those big huge beasts of a project and also migrating it all from the old system, and so we're not gonna have any feature releases for a while, until we get this thing wrapped up and out the door, so it's gonna be a quiet period for us, I think.09:32 AW: But what a new level you will hit when you get that done.09:35 DS: Yeah, it would be nice because we've been really held back that this system, we built it in 2011, I think, and it's just this Frankenstein system I think I mentioned it before on the podcast, but it's just terrible, so it's time to definitely centralize all of that, and it'll also really help us with our reporting and understanding our metrics better, so looking forward to it.09:54 AW: Now, I think it'll be a... It'll just elevate the level that you're playing from, and then I think a lot of the things that you wanna do moving forward from that will just be so much more impactful and in sync and consistent and all those other things.10:11 DS: Yeah, it also is the foundation of what we're trying to build overall as a company, kind of in our two, three year plan, and so that... It's the foundation of that, so we have so much to build upon it, so I'm excited as once we get that piece out the door, then we'll launch into a launching features quicker phase.10:33 AW: Awesome, yeah, we're about... I'm happy with these little quick releases, but we're about to embark where we've gone through all the design process on a new feature for us called Inbox, which is really centered around ticketing reviews or customer feedback that needs to be looked at so you can prioritize it and then assign it to people in the organization, and then efficiency in replies, so you can save replies and signatures and obviously, be able to look at a status and see if things have been replied or closed off, so that's gonna be a very heads-down two to three-month build, so I'm about to be back in the same boat as you, where it's like, Alright, nothing new for quite a while, none of these fun little quick hitters that the frequency makes you feel really good about them. Where it's about to be like, Okay, we're going for something big, and it's gonna be a while until the smoke clears.11:25 DS: Going into dark mode.11:26 AW: Yeah, totally. In our notes we exchange, I see something here I wanted to touch on, I see... I wanna hear about... You're working on a referral program. I would love to hear... Is it because you're asked so much about it, you feel like this is a good growth channel, tell me about why you've looked into it and kind of like where you're at with it.11:46 DS: Yeah, for sure. So it was one of the growth levers for our GMB management service, we really thought about that 'cause we get so many people sending us referrals already for that service that I feel like it's this opportunity because it's such a well-priced service that meets a need for a lot of these digital agencies that are... Right now, you can white label it, but a lot of people don't want to do that. They just wanna send them to us and not have to worry about it, but make some cash anyways, and so I think that the referral program could actually drive that side of the business pretty significantly, and so we've been just talking about it, just defining it, what is the payout? How do we track everything? Do we use some sort of system that's off the shelf that we can just get up and running immediately, or do we build our own. And so, yeah, we've just been kind of debating that, do we pay recurring, do we pay one-time payouts.12:45 DS: If you look at different referral programs out there, like web hosting is kind of a great one to look at because every web host has some kind of referral program and we really like WP engine's method, which is... It's just like a one-time $200 payout for accounts you sign up beyond a certain level. And so we're looking at something similar for ours, where if the client stays with us for three months, you get a $100 payout. And so we also were trying to debate, build our own versus use a software system, and if we just really decide it it makes so much more sense to build our own because the system is pretty damn simple, you have an area in the admin where you can generate these referral codes. So I was like, Oh, make a new one. Okay, here it is, agency.13:29 DS: And then they send that link out. When someone hits the page through that link, it sets a cookie, cookie expires after 180 days, and with that, any time they go through the check out, we just look for the cookie. "You have the cookie?" "Yes." Okay, then we fire... We fire a conversion. Now, the funny thing is, is that if you implement it in someone else's system, you have to do the same work. You have to go into their system, generate the length, you still have to build the cookie setting and tracking on your end, and then you fire the conversion over to their system instead of ours. So, it's almost the same amount of work and instead of paying 200 bucks a month for some system, we have just our own. The only thing you need after that is just a dashboard to report on how many clicks each referrals getting, how many conversions you're getting, and when their payout is. It's in a couple of days of work for our team to build that into our account system, so we're just gonna build our own.14:16 AW: So, how are you doing the payouts with it? Are you doing credits or kind of a check? 14:21 DS: PayPal.14:22 AW: Okay, PayPal.14:22 DS: Yep, so when you sign up, we want your PayPal email, and then one of our managers will just go through once a month and send payout. So, they just pull a report from the dashboard and send payouts via PayPal.14:35 AW: What happens when 10 people say they want Venmo? 14:38 DS: Then we say, no. [laughter] Do you wanna be in our referral program, then you can give us your PayPal, if you don't, then you're not in our referral program. And we'll expand it later, right, but we've got an MVP in mind, we're gonna launch with that, and maybe later it's like, "So many people want Venmo, so I guess, we'll add Venmo." So, we'll expand it as the needs arise.15:00 AW: Yeah, I was just playing a little bit of devil's advocate there.15:02 DS: Absolutely, cool.15:03 AW: Those are some of the reasons why after GatherUp we built our own billing system, that until now we're kind of actually in-between. All of our new customers are going on to, we're using Chargebee now. All of our new customers are going on to the Chargebee system. Our existing customers are all in our Legacy billing system that we built six years ago and added on and band dated and kept afloat over the years. But some of those reasons are the reasons why we wanted to use someone else who is strictly focused on creating that because so many things within billing features and just different methods of things in reporting and whatever else, it was like, "Okay, let's focus on one product, we build customer experience and review management, we don't build billing systems."15:52 DS: Yeah, right.15:53 AW: But I'm definitely curious, I would... I think this is something that I'll be checking in with you because I've had a lot of requests for a referral program and based... I don't know if I've over-thought it. We've just never felt comfortable in coming up with the right format and how it works and things like that, and then we also have a lot of customers, it would be like, "Oh well, I wanna resell some, but some I just wanna refer," and it just... It feels like it just gets really messy on the record keeping side more than anything.16:21 DS: Yeah, so it's easy for us because we're doing a real basic phase launch, like the first version of this. It's not for anything Whitespark, it's only for our GMB management service. So, we've really trimmed it down to this one little thing and we're actually not even building that web-based interface right now. We're in a kind of pilot. We already have three people lined up that wanna be referral partners, and those three are probably enough to drive a decent amount of business to pilot it. And we're just gonna give them a spreadsheet. It's like whenever there is a conversion, we're just gonna record it in the spreadsheet and, "Here's your shared spreadsheet." It's totally Mickey Mouse, but it'll allow us to kinda get a feel for it, and then we'll have a developer build a little web interface where they can wanna check their own stuff, but actually, I kinda wanna wait until we launch this new account system I mentioned and to build that, 'cause I don't wanna build it twice, and so that's why we're gonna launch with basic spreadsheets to start. Just really simple, really, really straightforward. For sure.17:18 AW: When... Outside of two weeks, when are you looking to launch this? 17:25 DS: The actual tracking is already in place. We have a call this Thursday and I think we might be handing out links this Thursday. So, I'm gonna go with two weeks, Aaron. [laughter] Two weeks, man.17:37 AW: All right. As long as you have it thought out and you're still going on two weeks.17:41 DS: I know it's a risky call, but I'm going with two weeks.17:45 AW: Well, here's a piece of good news with us, we're usually somewhere from three to five weeks when we record an episode and get together in talks. So, you really have three weeks and depending upon...17:56 DS: Okay good, yeah.17:57 AW: How things go down, you might have four or five weeks to get this done, and as long as it happens in between our episodes, that's almost the same as two weeks to me, so you don't have to worry about me criticizing you if it doesn't hit this.18:08 DS: I tell you what, as soon as we get off of this podcast recording, I'm slacking the team and I'm saying, "Guys, we've got two weeks. I told Aaron on the podcast it's gonna be done in two weeks. We've gotta get it done."18:18 AW: There you go, I'm there to keep you honest, Darren.18:21 DS: Thanks man.18:22 AW: Well, I think that's a little bit of a good segue, 'cause realize it or not, when we were sharing some banter about what we wanted to talk about today, and I wanted to talk about a product framework that I've developed and just kind of wanted to talk out loud and share it. And something I wanna kinda write about and hone even further, but I think to some extent it's kind of... You've gone through a little bit of a framework. You're building a framework for how you're gonna look at your referral program and what are the staples. What's gonna guide it? What is the structure of that system? And I want to talk about frameworks as opposed into a concept for how I approach features and how I evaluate which one is there, because it's really helped me prioritize what features to build and when off of a number of different factors.19:12 DS: Yeah, I'm really interested in this because, I don't know, I don't think I've ever said, "Hey, this is our framework." I've never really formalized it, but I guess in everything we do, we kind of build things through some kind of basic framework. So, yeah. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this and what you've been working on.19:28 AW: I think a lot of it sometimes is just peeling back and just thinking about it more abstractly, or even just analyzing your own thought process and starting to dig a little bit deeper in, well, alright, in these past things, why have I decided that? Or why did it become important to me? What was it, right? And on the surface you start to look at things and it might be like, oh, well, it's because a competitor had that feature or enough people asked for it or I read about this and it gave me an idea, whatever that might be, but then there's still layers to go beyond that, is like, well, why are people asking for it? What's the emotion behind it? What's the fear behind it? What's the excitement behind it? Things like that. And that's what I ended up doing last year, early on when I was just looking at a number of... I was like, alright, I had a dozen ideas and features and trying to figure out what order and how and what's their importance to our customer and to kind of the, I don't know, the next level of bricks in the structure of what GatherUp is, is we try to get always building closer and closer to what our vision is.20:35 AW: And it just started to emerge, and I'm obviously one, I like concepts and I like stories and figuring out these elements, so I just started to look at it and like, okay, there is kind of a method to how I keep doing this over and over again. I just haven't focused on it, detailed it, and made it into something where then I can easily go back and rely on it to support my decision. Does that make sense? 21:01 DS: Yeah, totally. So the concept makes sense. Can you give me an example? 21:06 AW: Yeah. So the framework is basically for identifying a feature and then prioritizing it, and... Amazing, right? No surprise to anyone, right? Create an acronym for it. So I call it the SEA Framework, as in the body of water, S-E-A.21:25 DS: Okay.21:25 AW: And from analyzing a bunch of different features and the decisions I made and why I've made them and all those things, I really could end up boiling it down to three specific things, and that is that feature either provides security, that feature either provides efficiency, or that feature provides an advantage. And the really good features tend to hit on actually two or three of these at one time, and that's what I really noticed I was picking up on is those are the ones that I felt more compelled to build first, were the ones that hit upon multiples instead of just one out of the three.22:04 DS: Mm-hmm. It makes me think of, I don't know, how do you organize your feature requests? Are you using something like Canny? Feature requests are coming in from customers, and how do you keep track of them? You have a spreadsheet, what do you do? 22:16 AW: Yeah, so we don't keep a running tally or scoreboard. We do a weekly report from our customer success team on what are people asking about, what are they reaching out about, things like that, and that's not always ideas. When we do talk sales team and even in... At this point, there's just a couple of us doing sales, but we have pretty tight dialogue with what people are asking for. We've never hit a point where it's like, okay, we need to track that every time they've asked for this, we need to track this because the amounts are so great.22:52 DS: Sure.22:53 AW: But I definitely keep track of what some of that volume is in my head, and a lot of times we're trying to get clarity on customers asking for this, but is that what they really mean, or is what they're asking for just the way they see to accomplish X, right? And then it's digging in and like, okay, well, can they accomplish X a different way that actually is more robust or applicable to more situations or just hits upon a greater level of output than how they see it, right? And a lot of times your customers are gonna bring you things where they're like, "Hey, if you just did this... " They're gonna look at the quickest hack to get what they want, because that makes them think this is more likely to get done if this is just change this or quickly add this thing or whatever else, but then if you start having the conversation, like, okay, well, ultimately, what do you wanna know? And then tell me why do you wanna know it? What's the importance? And then you can start to peel back and be like, "Okay, I see your destination, but I actually know... I feel like I have a better way to get there that will benefit more than just you and your role."23:55 DS: Yeah, that's the big thing, right? You get so many of these little feature requests, and it's easy to jump on them, too. They're just like, oh, yeah, we could just have a developer tweak that in a half day of work and then put that in the system. But then that's how you end up with a really bloated, ugly, messy system.24:10 AW: Yeah.24:10 DS: So are you putting these... So, let's say... You must have a list of the top four or five things that are commonly being requested, and so do you put them and score them on SEA, security, efficiency, advantage, and then if they're hitting... One of them's hitting all three, you're like, okay, that's my prioritization, I'm gonna hit that one first because it's more valuable than the other ones, which is maybe only hitting efficiency or something.24:38 AW: Yeah. So I haven't developed a point system or rating to it or anything else yet. I would like to get to something that makes... I think there's some of it that's just easy for me to understand, and of course that probably comes with its biases, but I feel like I'm able to look at it and really understand what it's drawing out or what it's hitting upon, what it's triggering for that customer and also for what we're trying to do with it. So when you look at at each of those, and when I look at those top things, I do wanna gravitate towards one that hits at least two of them, if not all three of them. So an example, just as I was talking before this about our inbox feature that allows you... Say a bad review comes in for two stars and based on what it's about, there's someone specific in the organization, you want to address it, or you want the general manager of a specific location to address it.25:35 AW: So it would allow you to take that and then assign that to Sarah, who's the general manager at that location, send it off to her, and then when she gets it, she already has a list of replies she's put together, so now she can just say like, okay, send reply four to this customer that has an apology, identifies the issue, and then offers, please email me so we can have some more back and forth on this to try to take it offline or into tighter communication cycles and make the customer feel taken care of. So when we look at that, it's like, okay, I can easily look at that one, that hits upon efficiency in the SEA Framework, right? It's gonna save time, it's gonna create more outcomes and more power for the person that's doing it, it's very process-focused, there's just some different wins that are in there for that person. But then we also look and it's like, okay, one other thing we wanna build into it... Now instead of somebody having to look at it, now you can actually... We're building in what we're calling smart routing, so you could create rules and say any time a 2-star review comes in that talks about feeling sick after eating at our restaurant, it needs to go to Sarah. So now a human doesn't have to touch it based on the rating and the words used in the review. It's automatically gonna be routed to someone you have placed as the owner or the expert this falls in their domain.27:01 DS: And there's a security element there too, right, because it's like I can feel more secure that I know that these 2-star "sick" ratings are going to the right person. It's like the software is doing that for me, there's a security there.27:13 AW: Absolutely, and then you can see automation is obviously a huge part of efficiency, right? My top three efficiency things I ever wanna achieve is automation and integration, or can machine learning or AI help out with it? And then interesting enough, then looking at it for the next is like, does inbox... Are the benefits an advantage? Does this give an advantage to A, our product, and does it give an advantage to B, our customer usage? So, on the A level, then I start to look at like, okay, do any of my competitors have this smart routing feature, right? There are definitely other competitors with ticketing abilities and things like that, and being able to assign a review for someone else to look at, yes, that exists, but I'm not able to track down anyone else that has, hey, we'll do the thinking for you. We'll automatically assign it to people based on topic, rating, a combination. You're really able to build, if this, then this, do this type framework.28:09 AW: And so in looking at that, it's like, alright, that create a selling advantage for us, so that's a plus. And then when we look at it for our competitors, all right, if they're able to respond faster from the right people with more ease, that creates an advantage for them, right? They see like, alright, this... We look better in customer service than our competitors because we feel this gives us the ability to respond X amount faster than they're gonna get from other businesses that they're working with. So it's not hard for me to look at a feature like inbox and say, this is something, just as we talked about, that we will shut off most of what else we're doing for three months while we make this feature come to life for us.28:50 DS: And you feel confident in that because it's hitting all three of the primary metrics of your SEA Framework? 28:56 AW: Yeah, super confident in it, because it hits across all of those things. Where you get into other small things like, let's just take review monitoring, right? To me, that's a strictly security play because it's really about two things. It's about, one, feature parity. Every other solution out there on the market has it, and the second, it's something the customer expects. It gives them security, like yep, of course I need to know what new reviews are coming out there, but they'd be even less secure in us as a solution if we were like, that's such a staple we just skipped right past it, use someone else for that. We're actually gonna help you do these other things instead, but because that's a fundamental. That they would look at that and be like, I don't feel so strong about you guys. This is something I expect.29:42 DS: Yeah, and they wouldn't wanna get that out of two different systems. They're just like, I want one system for monitoring and managing my reputation.29:48 AW: Exactly.29:49 DS: It sounds pretty good. It makes me wonder, what are some other frameworks? Okay, actually, here's another thing. So this is your framework for evaluating features, right? And so evaluating and prioritizing features. It's the SEA Framework for evaluating and prioritizing features. So what's next after that? There must be a whole bunch of frameworks already out there presented by other SaaS companies, and it's just not something I've explored. Have you looked at anything else out there? 30:20 AW: Well, there's definitely a lot of... From the high level, you have your... Is it a painkiller or a vitamin of your solution, right? I think that's... I don't know if that's just an analogy, or a framework that's supposed to be out there. I know there's a few other... Oh, I know I'm gonna forget who it's from, I believe somebody has someone... I should do a quick Google search on this and see if I can attribute it. So there's one, the RICE scoring model.30:49 DS: Oh, I've heard of this.30:50 AW: Yeah, so that's the one of that I've heard of before. So that one has to do with... And maybe it's Intercom that made that possible, but it's reach, impact, confidence, and effort. It's taking a... It's definitely a little bit different approach to what's out there, but it does have a point value with it, right? You're looking at... You're assigning numerics to what the reach is, what the impact will be, the confidence, and then what does it take to complete it, and then letting you know how that works into your prioritization and execution, right? And mine, mine doesn't go as far as saying, alright, that's great because your biggest ideas will definitely square out on the SEA Framework really well, but that doesn't take into account, can we actually pull this off? 31:36 DS: Sure, yeah, of course. It could be like, this thing could be huge, whatever, it's like, oh, yeah, definitely hits all the buttons, but it's an entire two-year project to build it, so I don't know, should we do it? 31:46 AW: Yep. No, in my search, maybe we'll link to this in the show notes, but it looks like... I found a list of nine product prioritization frameworks for product managers. So I need to create mine, and then I can email them and let him know I have a 10th.32:00 DS: There you go. I got another one for you. It's the Aaron Weiche SEA Framework for feature planning.32:05 AW: Exactly. So nobody wants a list of nine when you can have a list of 10, that's for sure.32:09 DS: You know what, it looks so lame when you just see that "Nine Best Frameworks," it should definitely be 10. It makes you wonder, though, what are the other areas of our business we should be structuring into this framework? Frameworks seem to help you, guide you towards decisions, right? So what is the next best feature to launch, or how should I approach this situation, or... There must be HR frameworks, and I don't know, I think there's great value in exploring that and seeing that implement in your business. I think... I just listened to this one about your SEA Framework, and I'm like, damn, gonna do it, I'm gonna definitely create a spreadsheet, we'll track our feature requests in there, pulling stuff from both sales and support, identifying what people are asking for, and then actually have a column for each of these and put checkmarks in them, an SEA column, and then if they hit all three of them, then that helps me with the prioritization. Also gives you an immediate visual. It's like... You can see which one... You can sort by number of checkmarks, right? So, yeah, I think it's really powerful.33:06 AW: Well to your point, that's the biggest value is you're creating something that you can make... Guide you in your decisions that can maybe save you from your biases or heat of the moment or moving forward or placing something higher than it needs to be in the moment, and sometimes those things happen and you need to react and you need to do those things, but how can you use it to guide in how you look at it and what you end up putting it back against? I also think it's important when you're building these things too, and you talk to it about your team that you're able to explain, especially 'cause most orgs, your entire team is not gonna be part of deciding the roadmap and the prioritization and things like that. And I feel like to keep them onboard, have them confident, them seeing the vision clearly, you need to be able to explain some of the method to the madness to them, not just, "Well, this is what I decided, or these two people decided, or whatever."34:06 DS: I can tell you the people at Whitespark that will love the SEA Framework more than anyone will be my developers, because if they have this like, "Uh oh, Darren is pinging me on Slack, I see Darren typing... Darren is typing on Slack" and it's like, "Oh what's coming now? What do I... What is he gonna ask for?" 'cause it's like, I have a tendency to derail them off of like, "Hey, one customer once asked for this thing, what do you guys think?" It's just like, yeah, I gotta stop doing that, instead I'm gonna put them in the spreadsheet, sort them by the SEA Framework and I won't be bugging them on Slack.34:39 AW: We all fall victim to that Darren, I've often laughed... Same thing where, especially on Slack too, the minute someone's typing for two minutes, and you're just sitting there in that channel ready for it to come out, 'cause based on what your usual interaction is, you've already developed, you already have the brand reputation that you are about to throw something out there, so that apprehension is there. And the longer it goes, the more it's like, "Oh, this is a doozy... This, we got a lot here."35:09 DS: Which is, Slack should start doing that, it'd be like, Darren is still typing. And then it just keeps escalating, it's like, Uh oh Darren is typing even more. Uh oh, here comes the doozy.35:19 AW: They probably all jump into the private channel and just start, they're already three cycles into banter before you even get it out.35:29 DS: Yeah totally. Yeah, well okay, I'll stop doing it, I'm gonna start using the SEA Framework instead.35:32 AW: Alright. Well, we'll see what happens. I need to continue to work on it further, but I wanted to... I thought it was something I was interested in, I'm kinda... I've been using it for a while. It's helped make my decisions like cleaner and faster, and it does help when I take it to the team, and then a large part of when we release features when we're on our monthly webinars with our customers, that's where we always start. We always start with, why did we build this? And we explain to our customers exactly why we built this, and there can be a number of things, and I don't tell them like, "Oh, we have the SEA Framework and here's what it is", but I'm explaining those specific things that this Framework has actually made me think about and...36:15 DS: Yeah. You were already doing that, but you just hadn't formalized it into a framework.36:18 AW: Yeah, and I think it gives off the impression to your customers, like the amount of thought and intent and vision that you're putting into what you're creating, and I found for us that's been really helpful in building trust because it increases the visibility on how you arrive, not just like, "Hey, here's this new thing that we built for you", they start to understand whether we're mentioning a lot of you have asked for it, here's what we see this provides, here's where we see a shift in the market, here's why we think this is really efficient but that explanation at the highest level gives them the right context to then embrace the feature and understand how it fits into the set we're trying to put together.37:00 DS: Yeah, no, I can also see it helping on the marketing side too, because once you've already defined that feature in terms of security efficiency advantage, you've also already written up the way you're gonna communicate the value of that feature when you put out your newsletter and your social posts on it.37:16 AW: Yup. You've been thinking about it the whole time.37:18 DS: Yeah.37:19 AW: Alright.37:20 DS: I like it. I'm gonna use it.37:22 AW: Alright, well, we'll see what happens. Hopefully, it doesn't take Whitespark down the drain.37:25 DS: I'm sure it won't. It's gonna elevate it to the next level.37:28 AW: Alright. Well cool Darren, anything in closing, anything coming up you're looking forward to or have going on? 37:36 DS: Yeah, we got our Local Search summit coming up, I'm excited about that. I've been busy working on that, trying to get all the speakers organized, and so yeah we're gonna have 30 local Search speakers, and it's a lot of work and a big deal, and I'm excited about it. Basically, if you are a local search speaker, you're probably speaking at it, so it's gonna be maybe the greatest collection of local search speakers in one conference.38:00 AW: I love it. That reminds me I need to get my topic and description to you.38:03 DS: That's why I mentioned it actually. It was kind of...38:07 AW: Dang it! 38:09 DS: Just wanted to remind you, yeah.38:09 AW: That's right. Well, you know me, I'm fully committed and I'm in, I will show up, but I realized I probably need to get that in so you guys can do some marketing, but no, I'm looking forward to that too, and I'm excited that you included me.38:22 DS: How about you, anything big coming up? 38:22 AW: No, a little bit of time off over the fourth, excited to unplug and recharge and some family time up at the cabin and yeah, I'm excited for... Just I was talking about with Inbox, it's probably, it might be the biggest feature we've ever put out, and so to be through our design phase and into starting cycles and things like that, knowing we'll be getting all that much closer to being able to see it come alive, I'm super pumped about that. I'll probably be dragging in a month when we're in the abyss of all the work that needs to be done and little details that pop up and everything else, and then as you get closer to the end, then that excitement rekindles again, so...39:06 DS: Yeah, totally. Well, that sounds awesome. I look forward to seeing it. Testing it.39:09 AW: Alright, well, great to catch up with you as always, glad to hear things are going pretty well for you guys, I'll be watching every day to see the referral program come out.39:20 DS: Sure yeah. We're not gonna market it, we're launching it quietly, but I will let you know when we've launched it just so that you know that... In my two-week deadline.39:28 AW: Tip me off. And mostly so I can just keep on the praise after you launch it, 'cause I think it's awesome and I will be, I think that's something worth checking in on... In our upcoming episodes too, I wanna hear what the uptake is like on it.39:41 DS: And I definitely planning to roll it out to the whole company, and to all of our services, so we're just dipping our toe in right now and getting a feel for it, and then we'll expand upon it, so yeah, definitely topic worthy for a future podcast episode.39:52 AW: Alright, well, until next time, take care, hopefully, we'll exchange a few text messages or a few calls in between episodes, but I hope you get your summer ramped up to full-time instead of half-time.40:03 DS: Yeah, okay, I'll work on it.40:04 AW: Alright. Take care Darren and everyone else, thanks for listening. And hopefully, we'll see you soon.40:09 DS: Thanks, everybody.[OUTRO music]

FULL SHOW NOTES:[INTRO music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 20, Big Launches and Big Challenges.00:16 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses, shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:42 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:45 AW: And we are back in front of the mic and ready to catch up on... It's been about a month since we've connected, and we definitely have plenty to talk about and catch people up on. But I thought a great place to start... Just from some of the things that we've been talking about regarding Whitespark and some of the things on your plate. I definitely wanna hear about your big launch that you've recently had with the Local Citation Finder and get the nitty-gritty details on that.01:21 DS: I know, it's exciting times. It's been really weird, actually. We haven't talked for a month, I think, 'cause we're both really busy. Kind of in a reactionary mode. With all this COVID business there is so much going on and everyone's trying to do their best to launch some stuff and put stuff out there. So yeah, feels like its been a while since we talked. Oh, yeah. Can't wait to talk about the launch of the LCF? But I guess before we get in there, I just... How are things going, what's going on with you at GatherUp? 01:47 AW: Yeah, well, we can get to some of that. I'm more of the big challenge part. We had a challenging week last week with a little bit of a reduction in staff. A few off of my team and that was incredibly difficult. And talk about, I guess, some of the more difficult parts of that, but within this, it's no different than a lot of businesses. There's hard decisions that have had to be made just based on so many aspects of what's going on in the economy and how it affects when you primarily serve small and medium-sized businesses and, in some industries, they've been so susceptible and have their doors shut and not had a way to even adjust, or if they have adjust, it's been a much, much different look to their business so that was definitely really difficult. We've seen some things leveled out from what April looked like as far as that first wave of panic churn.02:50 DS: Yeah, totally.02:50 AW: Yeah that kinda kicked in. And now we're just seeing stragglers in some of those situations from what's there. So just kinda adapting with that. But everything on the homefront is good. Everybody's healthy and the weather's been nicer. So we're getting outside more and just grateful for all of those aspects, and we've done a pretty good job of just shifting the... What we're happy with instead of what is different or what we're missing out on and things like that.03:20 DS: Yeah, right.03:21 AW: What about you? 03:23 DS: Yeah, so everything is going alright here. I've always worked from home. So it's not a huge shift for me in terms of my work and family life. It's not that much different. Just not seeing, not socializing as much really. And we had a bit of a health scare at the beginning of this, we were all worried that we had it. So we had to do some distancing in the house, but we've come out of that and everyone's healthy again. And so, we still don't know actually if we did have it. Even though we got tested. Apparently, we hear all the... All the tests are somewhat unreliable, especially if you're only carrying a small viral load. So we don't know if we have it. We're interested to get the antiviral test, but because of that, we're extra sensitized. And so, we're not seeing anybody. We get everything delivered. We sanitize everything that comes in the house. We're just really playing it safe now for two reasons. One, we had a bit of a scare and was like, "Well, we don't wanna mess with it." And two, we don't know if we're carriers now and so we're extra careful around other people too, right? So we had that, but gosh, now that that's over, it's so nice to just be back to living our quarantine lifestyle.04:35 DS: I spend a lot of extra time together, really connecting with my daughter these days. We all have really fun play time every night after dinner. So, family life has been good and the business has been surprisingly good too. We had a real big scare in at the end of... End of March, it was getting kinda bad. Lots of cancellations. And so it was like, wow, not looking good, and so we had to make a bunch of hard decisions. Similar to you. We did a few lay offs and we reduced hours across the team. And some of that was defensive planning for what was to come, but in the end, April actually turned out okay for us. So our revenue started to climb back up. We launched a new Yext service, which is Yext replacement service which was well received, and then we launched the new Local Citation Finder. So yeah, it's all been going back in the other direction. So we've brought our team, many of our team members back up to full-time hours and we're forging ahead with a lot of stuff. The business is starting to come out of it looking healthy, too.05:38 AW: Nice, that's good to hear. I feel like, on a sales and new business side, that has been... Was really, really quiet and I feel like in the last week or two, we've started to see more of a pulse there, which I'm...05:51 DS: Same, yeah.05:52 AW: Excited about so.05:53 DS: Yeah, like the last two weeks. It really starts to feel like the sense that people are... There was this panic mode at the beginning, everyone's getting defensive, cutting expenses 'cause they don't know what's gonna come, but now they're like, "Okay, well, it's been like this. I think we're kinda getting used to this, and we still have to build a business. So what are the ways we're gonna do that," and then... We both run marketing technology companies, so they start looking to us, and so leads are starting to come back in again.06:20 AW: Yeah. Awesome, let's...06:21 DS: Yeah.06:22 AW: Hope that continues. Ride that wave back up.06:25 DS: Yeah, definitely. What are some of the things you've been doing at GatherUp? What are some of your offensive strategies that you've been working on? 06:34 AW: The one thing that we've really gotten into is we just double down really heavy on content. I finally got it kind of pulled into a thought process the other day, but we were on a call and talking about shipping product, and the importance of that, and things like that. And I was like, "Well, I think what we're doing, we're just shipping strategy right now," because we have a really robust feature set. And sometimes with that, there's just a lot of elements to it where people don't understand all of the pieces, or how to string 'em together, or how to best utilize the features.07:15 AW: And I've found it almost cathartic to be writing and pouring myself into teaching. So, a lot of strategy type blog posts, and execution, and webinars. We had you on a local AMA we did. You, and I, and Joy Hawkins, and Mike Blumenthal. Yeah, really great. And we have our monthly customer webinars, and we had our agency webinar. So, we've just really gone all out with sharing things that, with not doing as much outbound, without as many demos things, like that where it's like let's just give people as much education as we can and try to help them through it to do the best that they can and for their business. So...08:00 DS: Yeah, I've seen really great content coming out from you guys lately. It makes me be a bit jealous, we're a bit quiet on the content front. You're like, "Okay, we've got all these great features, let's focus on content." [chuckle] We're like, "Oh, we got a good content list, let's get some new features launched." Yeah.08:15 AW: Yeah. Yeah, it's that's really it. That's not to say, I still have one heck of a wishlist.08:22 DS: Yeah. No, I agree.08:22 AW: And keeping those things moving forward, but it just definitely felt like for, especially for our customers, we wanna help you, we wanna make it through this together, 'cause if they don't make it, we're not gonna make it kind of deal. So, how do we help them understand how to best use our tool, even come up with different ways. Like one of the things that I like the most that I'm trying to get myself on some other podcasts and find some other ways to talk about is a post about just reopening during COVID, and just how important it is to have these tight cycles of you're making changes, you have new guidelines, and safety guidelines, and new ways that you're selling. You need really tight feedback loops to understand if what you're doing is actually building trust and confidence in the consumer and they will continue to come back, because...09:19 DS: Your content strategy there, it's so smart to really get into that, because people, as they start seeing this, and then it's sometimes they may not even be on your mailing list, but they're a customer, and they happen to see something on Twitter or something, 'cause it gets shared, all that stuff. So, it's really great to be bringing them back and thinking about the product.09:38 AW: Yeah. And like I said, it's been a good, just a great way to focus. And it's one of those things, it's nice when you get into it and you're able to write these things and string so many ways that you can use the platform and go deep and whatever else. And if anything it's just really renewed my love of what we've built, and how it works, and the potential it has, and everything else. So, that part of it has been a good grounding, gratitude, exciting, all of those things. Even though I love it much more if I'm talking to people about it on sales calls, that is a greater level of excitement than just riding out into the great wide open, but it has been great to help customers and then hear from them after our webinars or have them mail and say, "Thanks, this is something very tangible that I could use. I am using it. This opened my eyes." It's great to see things like that.10:33 DS: Yeah, totally. Yeah, awesome. Good job. Yeah, I actually saw a thing today, I don't know if we're both members of that, Aaron Kralls' SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook Group. [chuckle]10:45 AW: Yup.10:45 DS: And he posted this thing today, which I immediately talked to my marketing manager about, which was he's got this indefinite email follow-up sequence for anyone that has tried the software or used it and cancelled, anyone that has a free trial but they never converted. And it's exactly what you're talking about, it's like this sort of discussing all of the features. And it's just like you lay out this sequence that runs for indefinitely where it's like every month, there's a new email about this feature of the tool where you're really communicating that. And so, that's the kind of stuff like, man, we are not doing that and I would love to get into some of that. I could see the value there.11:25 AW: Very cool. If we get to the end of this and we haven't crushed all of our time, I wanna share something that just, it's been going on for a little bit, but I finally paid attention to it today, and it blew my mind. So...11:38 DS: Oh. Okay, well, I'll talk really fast then.11:41 AW: Yeah. [chuckle]11:41 DS: 'Cause I wanna hear that. [chuckle]11:44 AW: Alright, cool. Well, hey, let's dive in. I was really excited to see and also support, retweeting, and Facebook liking, and everything else the launch of the Local Citation Finder. And I also really enjoyed too, one of our listeners to the podcast, Chris McCarney from Sydney, Australia chimed in and basically said, "It only took two weeks."[chuckle]12:13 DS: That is awesome, yeah.12:16 AW: Yeah. I thought that was great. Shows Chris is a long time and a dedicated listener. And obviously the joke Darren has talked about a lot of times is he always, your comments always, "Just two more weeks, two more weeks, and we'll get that done." So, that was really fun to have one of our podcast listeners weigh in on the launch of Local Citation Finder...12:38 DS: That was awesome. Yeah, thanks, Greg.12:40 AW: Yeah.12:40 DS: The two weeks thing is so bizarre really, when I think about it because this project, launching the new LCF has been on our radar for at least two years. And the actual development spend was at least two years long. It took many different twists and turns along the way to get to where the final product was that we've launched. But, honest to God, I swear to you, in our initial conversation with the dev team when we were looking at the original scope. I was like, "How long do you guys think this is gonna take?" I swear to God they told me two weeks.[laughter]13:12 DS: It was because the original version was just supposed to be really basic feature parity. It was because the Local Citation Finder was running on an old development stack. It was on an other server. We had to keep it on a different server because it had an old version of MySQL, but our new software was using the new version and it wasn't compatible. So the first version was supposed to be like, "Okay, well, let's make these changes to the code so that we can put everything on our more powerful server and keep all of our development stack up-to-date, right?" 'Cause we're actually running into problems 'cause we're maintaining two development stacks, which was totally annoying. And so honestly, it was like, "Okay, great. We'll do that in two weeks. No problem." Once you get into that, you really start to think about it and like, I'm the worst... The two weeks thing is absolutely my fault because I get greedy. I'm like, "Ooh well, if you guys are working on it, maybe we can just make these few little tweaks, too, while we're at it."14:15 DS: And the few little tweaks evolve into a massively new feature set, and a whole new design, and overhaul it. And by the time we even get that stuff done, we got a new development stack we gotta put it on to. So it's like... That's how it just tends to evolve. It's just really hard for me to hold back on the improvements. Once I just start looking at them, I'm like, " Oh, you know, this tool really needs this or it needs that." And so that's basically what happens.14:43 AW: Well, that balance of quality and speed is always a tough thing. I fight it as well. I love though... You just have coined a phrase for it now, right? I feel like, in your company meetings, the minute someone says two weeks, alarms should go off, and...14:58 DS: Absolutely. There should be an actual siren and bell. Yeah.15:03 AW: Yeah.[laughter]15:04 DS: Yeah, totally.15:05 AW: But... So here's one thing I really loved here, and just to give people... And we'll link to this in our show notes. But your post on the release, this was, to me, just so interesting. This was actually the first piece of SaaS software that you built 10 years ago because you really were just a super small, couple person web development SEO firm, and then you got the idea to build the Local Citation Finder, and here you are majorly relaunching it. I'm sure you've probably added, Band-Aided, done whatever else, but this was probably its first overhaul in almost a decade.15:41 DS: Yeah. As a complete overhaul, this is it. It's been a decade. And I look back at that post, it was kind of sentimental. I'm like, "Oh man, this is the software that built the company." There was a major turning point for Whitespark because we were just an agency building websites and doing SEO for clients, and we only had three developers at the time. We only had three employees. It was me, Ethan, and Jeff, I think, at that time. And so, I read a post from Garrett French, and I was like, "Ah, that's a cool idea." And Jeff turned out the first version of this in three days. I should go actually use three days as our new timeline. [chuckle] I'll just keep referencing and be like, "How long is that gonna take, guys?" And they'll be like, "Oh, two weeks." I'll be like, "Well, you know, Jeff built the first version of the Local Citation Finder in three days," [chuckle] see if I can push them on that.16:33 DS: But yeah, we launched it in three days and it was really simple. It was just like, you put in keyword, the tool runs, and then it sends you an email with some data. And so that first version... But people really loved it, and then we thought, "Well, we could turn that into some real software and put a subscription model on it," and we did. And that was our sort of first foray into SaaS, which it's been 10 years now. So today, we have a whole new version of it, and gosh, I just love it now. It's the local citation finder I always dreamt of having. And I'm sure I'll hate it again in a year 'cause there'll be new stuff I wanna do. That's always the way it is.17:15 AW: Yeah. Well, you just always raise your standards, know a little more, and things continue to evolve. I also love that you're able to go back just in when this was released, right? And McGee a friend of both of ours, had... Long-time SEO and used to be editor at Search Engine Land. He had wrote that this was a must-have tool, right, back in 2010. So it was like, you had your own personal Wayback Machine in this blog post that existed 10 years ago.17:45 DS: Yeah, his post is still up. It's amazing. I can't believe that it's still live on the Internet. So that was great. [laughter] And actually... And then, I guess, Matt talking about it, and I remember having a phone call with David Mihm, and it was like... Garrett French set it up 'cause I think he talked to Garrett... David talked to Garrett first. I think they knew each other. And then Garrett said, "Oh, David Mihm would like to have a call with you." And I was like, "Oh my God, David Mihm wants to talk to me?" And I was so excited about it. And so, yeah, then I guess really it drove all these relationships and getting to know all the Local U guys. And yeah, it really just grew from there.18:25 AW: Yeah. Isn't it funny how all those things come together in one way or another? 18:29 DS: Yeah, totally.18:30 AW: I would say Mihm was definitely the main connector. He was my... I wouldn't have my relationship with Mike Blumenthal without David, Mike Ramsey without it. David was just a connector in our industry.18:44 DS: Yeah. I remember meeting you and Ed Reese at a Local U. And that was the first time I met you, and we hung out and had some drinks, and got to know each other, and yeah. It's all kinda grown from there.18:56 AW: So you can blame Local U you for bringing me into your life.19:00 DS: Oh, blame. Thank you. [laughter] Oh, I'll thank Local U. Much gratitude to Local U.19:06 AW: So with the launch... We're getting off track here, which is normal, but I'm interested... With the launch of Local Citation Finder, what was your... I wanna know what was both your customer base reaction, what stood out the most to them, and then what did you see in new opportunity, the excitement around the launch of it? 19:29 DS: Yeah, so it was really well received, for sure. So... There's a few really big improvements that we made, number one, the new design, the old tool looked like it was built in 2010, and the new tool looks like it was built in 2020, so it really does look awesome, it's got great visuals, it's fast, it's easy to use, it feels good to use, and that's a huge thing. And I have to shout out to Nick [19:55] ____ for really helping with that. He's got a great eye for design, he's really good about thinking about how the user will interact with this stuff. And so, he's our UI UX design guy and he did such a phenomenal job on the Local Citation Finder, just really thrilled with it. So that was one massive thing. People love that.20:13 DS: It's now also campaign focused. In the old version of the software, you just run these searches and they felt so like, "Okay, I ran a search, I got my data. Why do I keep paying for this tool? I don't need it any more, right?" So the new version of the tool is really... It provides ongoing value on a weekly basis, so it really drives you to create a campaign for each of your locations and then every week you're gonna get an update of like, "Hey we found these new citations for you", so it helps you to sort of monitor your citation growth over time and it also helps you define new opportunities because we're gonna search all of your competitors and find what they have and then report that back to you. And so you're getting this ongoing value from the tool, it keeps feeding you value every week. So that was designed to prevent churn because, man, this tool had terrible churn. We were on a long path of dropping subscriptions, more subscriptions dropping than coming in, and so it was really designed to reverse that.21:15 DS: Another big thing that we did was submitability. So people that use this software are really just looking for good citation directories to submit to. And so now we automatically identify whether or not you can submit to the site if it's just an easy one to submit to and we sort by that and so, you're immediately presented with actionable opportunities rather than just a bunch of weird sites like a directory of dishwasher parts, which uses a list of Part IDs and that ended up getting into your results or competitor's websites or blogs or newspapers, you can't just go and easily add your business to. It's still good to see that 'cause you can see your... "Oh wow, my competitor got a mention on this newspaper. Maybe I could too." But it's not actionable, immediately. So sorting by submit ability has been a really great feature, good filtering, new charts, new designs. So people were pretty damn happy about it.22:11 DS: I think that lots of people were excited to promote our number one fan Susan [22:16] ____, she was all over the place, all over Twitter, talking about how great it is, so thanks Susan, she's really been awesome. Also got great feedback on LinkedIn. I don't know, you do much on LinkedIn, but I've been trying to get more engaged over there and...22:33 AW: Yeah, I do, I've always... I call LinkedIn slow Twitter and I realized Twitter isn't for everyone because of the amount of info and how fast-paced but I, interesting enough see people use LinkedIn almost as their Twitter but it's more like somebody that wants to once a week put something out there or be connected, but that's really interesting that you got good play from there.23:03 DS: I got really good play from LinkedIn and my own post on LinkedIn drove quite a lot of interest but the real big kicker was Rand [23:13] ____ shared it from my post over to his feed on LinkedIn which was massively kind of him. So thank you so much to Rand for doing that because it drove a ton of interest, lots of comments, and so I was like, "Man, I'm really starting to think about LinkedIn and so I've been working over the past two to three months, I'm building up my following there and being more engaged and posting more often, and I just think it's a really great platform especially for us as B2B SaaS companies. It's just that's where everybody is, right? 23:44 DS: And so the nice thing about it is that it's so unsaturated like you post something on Twitter, it's gone forever, in three hours, no one's gonna see it again, right? You post something on LinkedIn and it's like that person that only logs into LinkedIn once every two weeks, it's the first thing they see on their feed 'cause there's not a fire hose of other stuff getting posed it over there, right? So it really has longevity. This whole concept of slow Twitter is for real because your posts stay up there and they really get massive visibility. Lots of people see it. So yeah I think LinkedIn is an untapped market for a lot of people, and I'm trying to drive more of that.24:23 AW: Yeah, and it is. So that's been one of the other things inside of our shipping strategy is we're creating more content, more things for people to talk about and just really look at like mentions are your best marketing. It's a great way to be relevant and same kind of things? Mike Blumenthal did a great post for us on review ratings from a bunch of data inside of GatherUp from our monitoring, and it was in Moz's Top 10 email of [24:52] ____ and it shared a bunch of places. To me, it's like when you get the amplification of other people grabbing it and then writing about it in their own words, not just retweeting it, that's where you see a really nice take-off and working into their spheres and stuff.25:11 DS: Yeah, it's amazing actually the difference between a basic retweet and a retweet where you add a comment and you talk about what is your take on this thing, that really seems to have a much better impact in terms of traction that you'll get off of your content.25:29 AW: Totally agree. So I'm interested, your switch from search to campaigns as part of it. Was that something that... Did you realize that a long time ago? Did you realize that while you were building it? Was that the reason you built it? Was it a customer who suggested it? Where did that come from? Because it seems like a pretty huge opportunity and swing.25:55 DS: Yeah, I was aware of it when we started doing the... When the development need came up because the stack was holding us back. That's when I was like, "Listen, if we're gonna do this, can we make some of these changes?" And then they're like, "Okay well, it's not gonna be two weeks anymore, it's gonna be two months." Which, of course was also a way underestimate. But we... I definitely came up with that, at that point because it was like... I've always known that, I've always been thinking about our local citation finder churn and realized that that was the problem and realized that that was the solution too, providing that ongoing value. And so it was when we started getting into it and that was sort of the main thing that I added as a feature request in addition to just a stack update, right? And then it grew from there, then of course, more features came out of it, right? 26:46 AW: Yeah, awesome.26:47 DS: Yeah, that's where it came from. Yeah. But honestly, it's like the way we approach this stuff has been a bit of a lesson and we did this... We made the same mistake with our rank tracker update. We took two, three years to get that thing out the door and it's because we don't let it progress in phases. We could have actually launched an improved LCF on a better tech stack, so it would have been faster, the customer would not have noticed the difference. And then we could have launched a campaign-based focus by just tweaking it a little bit and that would have been another marketing opportunity. Then we could have been like, "Look at this, folks, new design." We just like, splashy new design, everyone will be happy." Then we could have added submitability. So all the stuff that we added to the Local Citation Finder and the reason it took two years to get out the door... We could have done that in stages and every single one of those stages would have been another marketing opportunity.27:41 DS: So I really feel like it's a bit of a failure in our process, and it's something that I'm trying to become keenly aware of, and we're looking at it with our next stuff that we're working on here and we're like, "What is the absolute bare minimum? Let's get that out the door." Then we just keep adding to it. So it's like, "Well, I would love to give you this point." We use a project management software system called 'ClickUp' and every week they are pushing out updates. That's the way to do it. It's like, "Don't throw in 10,000 feature updates, and then launch one massive thing in a year. Every week, have more new stuff to promote and just keep iterating on a regular basis." And so, we're really... I'm really cognitive of that and really shifting to that mindset with stuff that we do going forward.28:26 AW: Yeah. Now that... Yeah, my reaction is, "Yep, that is way too long of a cycle." I probably... I don't know, I look at it, "What can we have out the door in 90-120 days?" And there's definitely been some things that we've done that have taken longer. A lot of times it's not actually... You have to look at it, it's not like engineering, it's more in the planning, design, gathering requirements, all of that decision-making where things can kinda stall out, fall flat, you hit a roadblock and you gotta figure your way out around it. But the exact thing you're pointing out, we definitely did that, and it was a bit of an eye-opener for me on our last bigger feature social sharing, where it turns reviews into a visual image where we basically said, like, "Alright, we're gonna get this out the door and this is where we're limiting V1 of it."29:25 AW: And then, 45, 60 days later, then we launched... So we launched it with integrations with Facebook and Google posts, and it was also creating LinkedIn and Twitter images that you could download and then post. And then we knew we were gonna do a Twitter integration, and then we got initial user feedback, and people wanted a cropping tool and we added some font size modification. So, then we had like this second update to it where we'd say, "And now it connects to Twitter and now you can manipulate the image more." And yeah, you get those marketing bursts out of it, and you also get it in the hands of your users, so they can be like, "Oh, I wish it had this," or...30:05 DS: Exactly, yeah.30:05 AW: This would be helpful or nice, so...30:06 DS: Yeah, totally, so, absolutely. It's the way that we're really trying to make sure that we progress in that format. In fact, last week, we had a call about the new big thing that we're working on and we stripped it back. We're like, "Actually, you know what, this is two things, this is not one thing. What is the MVP that we need for this thing that we're building?" And we actually... We're now stripping stuff out of the product that we've been building and so we're gonna just leave that in a separate branch. We're creating a new branch, and then we'll pull it back in later, because that stuff's almost done, but I know that that other piece of it is gonna slow us down by weeks if we decide to include it into this phase one launch. So the actual workload is cleaner because we can get everyone focused on the main core thing that we're trying to build, and then we get everyone focused on that next thing. And then everyone focus on that next thing rather than splitting the team and slowing things down. So it's gonna be way better.31:05 AW: Yeah, heck yeah, that's awesome. And that's what's great when you go through these and you have those learnings and it's just all about, "How can we get better the next time? What stood out to us?" All of those kind of... And that's a fun in it too. It can be frustrating in the moment, or when you're like, "Oh, this should have been obvious." But it is so great to learn on the fly like that and then you get to try it all over again, and be better the next time.31:36 DS: Yeah, it's amazing actually. It's just like this constant growth of both what we know and how we approach the development of things that we're learning, and growth of the company, growth of the software, growth of the user base. It's all pretty good. Man, I'm glad to be in SaaS.31:52 AW: Nice. Good work. Well, congrats on the big launch.31:57 DS: Yeah, thanks. It's been really successful too. It's like our goal to reduce the churn has definitely happened. So, since the whole COVID thing started, we dropped about 12% of our subscriptions. In just over two weeks of the launch, we're almost back to parity now and we're not really seeing the churn anymore. And so, I think we've reversed that and it's not just reversing the COVID losses, we've kind of reversed the losses from the last couple of years. And I expect to continue on a growth path now too, where we can kind of get back to the peak of our subscriptions and then go beyond that. I'm excited about it.32:38 AW: That's awesome, I'm excited for you...32:40 DS: Thanks.32:40 AW: Way to go.32:41 DS: Yeah, thanks.32:42 AW: Also, the other part of this, for me, no big launch since we last talked. Some nice, little ones, but obviously facing a big challenge with what we had to do regarding the reduction of staff. And the hard part with this is right in running, owning, operating, being in leadership in businesses for 20 years, I've never had to do something like this. It's always... If you had to let someone go, it's been performance-based. And you've already... It's a clear decision. And you've already tried to help that person. You've tried to create a framework to turn it around and succeed, and it just didn't work out. But this was just like it was so much different because it was purely a role-based activity, where as like what roles are critical to the business, what ones do we have a room for as we navigate through this, what will help add to the bottomline, retain customers, things like that, and that part being really difficult to go through. And, obviously, the hardest part of all of it... I don't wanna minimize, right? The hardest part of all of it was for the people who were furloughed and let go, right? 34:04 AW: And that sits with you hard because you realize, "I'm about to be part of putting stress on to people who... Let's face it. A lot of us are already stressed through this." So that part, not fun to think about. All of those elements to it. I will say, one, I feel like Traject took good care of those between furloughs and those who were laid off as far as taking care of them moving forward and super reasonable timeline on benefits and things like that. I felt like a really stand-up job was done there to take care of them. And really good communication with the team as far as why and the difficulty and everything else. But you can see the difficulty and how people feel. Like just today, I put in a note because Monday is Memorial Day, so US employees will be off at... That's when we normally have our team standoff or stand-up. And I put out a note just saying like, "Hey, let's just do a quick connect on Tuesday for stand-up and whatever else."35:15 AW: And I had a couple of people message me, and they're like, "Is this a good meeting?" They're apprehensive of a meeting also, right, because of what had took place last week. And I was like... I immediately just went and added onto my thing, it's like, "Hey, this is our normal stand-up. It's all good vibes," and whatever happy emojis that I could quickly find to put on there. But it was just such a... Emotionally, it was very difficult 'cause, one, when you build a company from scratch, we, GatherUp definitely built a family culture. So it feels like we had to put a couple of people, who are our family, off to the side and that was really hard. And then... Personally, the worst part was we eliminated the role of my head designer. And he has been with me at three different companies. We've worked together nearly 12 years like he...36:13 DS: Oh, man.36:14 AW: Yeah. My kids know him. And it was hard. And it's that... You definitely hear stories over time that there are people, right? You work with friends or you develop close friendships, and something goes wrong, or the friend leaves, right? I've seen all of those sides, but I've definitely never had to lay off a friend. And it was...36:35 DS: That's so tough.36:36 AW: Yeah. It was gut-wrenching. And it was one of the first times where I'm usually... I'm able to find the mode that's needed in those moments, where I'm both able to communicate, but still have the emotional side and not be robotic and understand the gravity of the situation. But this one, right, it was myself and our CEO that did the call with him. And I just pretty much was on the call to cry. I mean, I just cried. And it was just this feeling of helplessness and partially feeling like... I felt like I was letting him down as a leader and a friend, and just sad for the circumstance, right? I can't control COVID. I can't control the economy. All these things, I can't control. But it just... It felt horrible.37:32 DS: Yeah. That's gut-wrenching. That's really tough when those decisions have to be made about positions like that, especially when you have such a close relationship with one of these colleagues you've worked with for 12 years, you know? 37:45 AW: Yeah.37:47 DS: Really sorry, man.37:47 AW: Yeah. Thanks. But I will say, all of the people I dealt with that were impacted, all it did is prove why they were on our team. They were professional. They had their heads up. They understand the situation. They're either furloughed and cheering us on so that we can get them back or they're grateful for what took place and excited for the next thing, right? And to me, that just instantly was like, "This is exactly why I've worked with you for so long because of how you handled this and everything else." It's been hard. It leaves... Again, it leaves holes in the family. Our meetings haven't been the same just because of how those people connect, who brings the jokes, who has the music, all of those different things, so.38:35 DS: Yeah. We've had similar feelings with some of the layoffs we've had in here, too. It's always tough, right? They leave those holes on the team, right? 38:43 AW: Yeah.38:44 DS: We're hoping to rebuild and get some of those team members back in the next month or two, too. That's what we're working towards.38:52 AW: And it's just when you're used to, for so long, creating opportunities and when you're on the other end of where you feel like you're taking away an opportunity, that's just really heavy stuff. And then, lastly, at the same time, right, it just made me realize how much I care about our team and how I wanna work tirelessly so that no one else is affected like this, right? I had thoughts like, "What if I leave and so other people can stay," and things like that. And you ultimately, I arrived at I trust myself more than anyone else to get us through this and I will do whatever it takes to do that, and so I need to do that.39:38 DS: Yeah, I feel the same. Some of my team, they did reduce hours and I feel like I took on a lot of those extra hours. I've been working way more than usual trying to... I guess, initially it was save the company mode, and now it's just driving all these initiatives forward. Some of the team members are still on reduced hours and so it creates a lot of extra load like to get all the things done that we're trying to do, right? I'm just really pushing extra hard right now.40:08 AW: Yeah, I'm right with you.40:09 DS: What was the cool thing? 40:10 AW: Alright. Yeah. Are you a follower or have you ever paid attention to Gary Vaynerchuk at all? 40:19 DS: Not a follower. I know who he is. I've seen some of his stuff. Yeah, he's a little too intense for me. I think that Gary.[laughter]40:29 AW: Well, I mean, that's easy to see. So obviously, if you don't know who Gary Vaynerchuk or Gary V is, long-time entrepreneur and super early adopter of social media. That's how I came across him was I don't know eight, nine, 10 years ago when he was doing Wine Library TV. He actually spoken in a really cool event that used to take place in Omaha called Big Omaha. It was almost like a mini-South by South West and he did a show live there. I got to speak at another event, where he spoke at, so I got to meet him for 30 seconds. Talk to him real quick. But anyway, just a high-level engager in whatever else. Well, he's rolled out a new service, as part of his wine business, he also owns a massive agency, too, called Veiner Media. But it's winetext.com and all you basically do, it's a one-page site and since Gary is so well-known, has an audience, has been selling wine forever.41:30 DS: He can sell anything, that guy.41:32 AW: Yeah. There's a 45-60 second YouTube video, and all you do on that page is enter in your email, your cellphone, where you would ship wine to and your credit card information. And then what they do is they text you every day with the deal of the day, and then if you wanna buy it, you just reply with like, "Four bottles," and they ship it.41:54 DS: Oh. Wow. Wow, that's so easy.41:57 AW: It's so easy...41:57 DS: All the impulse buying, you've just tapped into that impulse buy. Wow.42:03 AW: Yeah, it's so basic, but it takes having that audience. You have to have something to go with it to have an instant boost. But I was like, "Alright, let's talk about removing purchase barriers." Where here it's like, alright, if I spend two minutes and enter all of my shipping payment and contact info, now any time I wanna buy... I'm giving you permission to send me a daily deal and all I have to do is reply with a number, and the bottles are gonna show up. I don't have to enter payment, I don't have to click on anything.42:40 DS: [42:40] ____ and you type that shit again just reply to a text. I love it, it's amazing.42:46 AW: Yeah. Yeah. No, it totally... It blew my mind, and it got me thinking of things like, especially thinking the restaurant industry right now and how different it is, and whatever else. What if a restaurant just created, here's our meal for the day, and you just responded with, "Yeah, I want three of those. It's enchilada's tonight? Yeah, I want three of them." And that was your ordering without all the other stuff, right? Yeah, I get there's a lot of complexities, but it just...43:16 DS: Yeah, totally the menu. You just basically use... You register on the site, and then we'll send you the Friday Special. And be like, "Do you want the Friday special?" The person's like, "Yes, I do." And then it just shows up.43:29 AW: Yeah, so it was just one of those I had seen tweets where he was talking about it and whatever else, and I never clicked in it. For some reason this morning, I was up working super early and clicked on it at some point this morning, and within taking it in, I was just like, "This is brilliant."43:49 DS: It really is.43:49 AW: This is a whole different way to do business, and it got my wheels turning big time.43:56 DS: No, I'm gonna do it actually as soon as we get off this call. I'm gonna go through our accounts database, and I'm gonna text every one of our customers and be like, "Do you wanna upgrade? Yes or no?"[laughter]44:09 DS: And then if they say yes, boom. More money in the company. Look at that.44:12 AW: Way to go, see, you're quick to adapt. That will not take two weeks; that will take two days.44:18 DS: Yeah. Exactly, two days. I'm gonna get that done, I'm gonna talk to my dev team right now, I'm gonna just sign up for one of those text services, import all the numbers, just press the button.44:27 AW: Awesome. Alright, cool, Darren, well, great to catch up. Hopefully, we'll be able to record again in sub 30 days. Congrats about 20 episode... I mean, any time we cross a round number, just things feel a lot more real. So 20 episodes, under our belt.44:45 DS: 20 episodes. Yeah, that feels like it just gets more and more real this podcast.44:51 AW: We're not a teen anymore.44:53 DS: No. Yeah, thanks a lot to all of our listeners. Keep listening, keep subscribing, keep sharing our awesome content.45:00 AW: Yeah and keep plugging in random jokes into Twitter on us.45:06 DS: It makes our day, for sure.45:09 AW: Awesome, Alright, man, well, you take care and we'll catch up, hopefully, in two, three weeks again.45:14 DS: Sounds good. Alright, thanks, Aaron.45:16 AW: See you everybody.45:18 DS: Bye everybody.[music]

FULL SHOW NOTES00:00 Aaron Weiche: Hey everyone, this next episode was recorded on March 5th, 2020, so ahead of COVID-19 and everything we are all experiencing right now. I just wanted to pop in ahead of that as we haven't published it until now in mid-April (April 15th, 2020), and didn't want the conversation, our tone, or our excitement for certain things to be taken out of context. So, thanks for listening. We hope everyone is well, and we hope to get on the other side of this soon. With that, we'll bring you the third part of "Selling GatherUp" and Darren and I will be back in a couple of weeks to give a further update on how our businesses are doing now, during COVID-19 and the pandemic.[INTRO music]00:56 AW: Episode 18, Selling GatherUp. Part three, the Transition.01:02 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]01:30 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.01:33 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.01:35 AW: And welcome to the month of March. Things are taking off quickly in 2020 for me. I don't know... What's that look like for you, Darren? Has the first two months of the year been a blur, or a little slow progression into the year? 01:50 DS: It's been pretty blurry. We have a lot of stuff going on right now, so yeah, it's been busy. I'm just really excited about everything that we're building right now. So it's gone by like nothing. Where'd those two months go? 02:03 AW: Yeah. Do you ever feel like you're already looking, especially at the end of this month, when you're like, "Okay, Q1 of the year is done, and now I only have nine more months to accomplish all my hopes and dreams for the year." Do you ever look at that that early and just feel like, "Oh my gosh, I'm behind the eight ball"? 02:21 DS: No, I have a really terrible sense of time, and so I always think everything is gonna... Everything, all my hopes and dreams are gonna launch in the next three weeks. That's what I always think.[laughter]02:34 DS: But then it ends up like nine months later, right? But yeah so that's kinda... I don't understand how time works and so it always takes a lot longer than I think. So I feel like we're on the cusp of launching everything and it's all just about to happen. But then there's a testing phase, and tweaking phase, and beta testing phase. So it just ends up taking a lot longer. But I just really feel like this is the year, man, all my hopes and dreams, they're just about to burst out of our email newsletter. "Oh my God, look what we launched." It's gonna happen. We've got a few things lined up. They're all really close.03:10 AW: That's awesome. I love the internal optimism too. That means all the way up until December 31st you're still like, "Yeah, we're gonna get it out there. Just wait."03:18 DS: Well, even if that rolled around on December 31st, I'd be like, "Guys, two more weeks! We're almost there."[laughter]03:24 DS: So close. You just feel perpetually like, "Ah, two more weeks." I'm always so damn excited.03:30 AW: You've definitely dropped that before in past episodes that you feel like you're always saying, "Just a couple more weeks."[laughter]03:37 DS: It's always two more weeks. It's a running joke at Whitespark, actually. Two weeks. 'Cause people ask me, "How long is that gonna take?" and by default I just say "Two weeks" now.03:46 AW: That's awesome.03:47 DS: How about you? How has it been the first couple of months of the year in the new company structure? 03:53 AW: Yeah, and that's definitely a lot of what we wanna talk about today is post-sale and what that transition's been like. In the day-to-day business realm though, it's been really good because we had so many things that almost kind of started to log jam and be on the same path at the same time towards the end of the year, and that really caused us to pause and then look at, "How do we release these in the best cadence to start the year?" So it became very much like... Alright, this is gonna happen on January 15th, this is gonna happen on January 31st, this is gonna happen on February this date. And so we're able to take three to four larger things and really map them out ahead of time, and then just a normal plan the work and then work the plan. And that went really well for us.04:48 DS: Nice.04:49 AW: Yeah, kinda all wrapped up last week with our new user management system, which is... It's really cool. This is one of those things not to... I don't wanna get too far off on a tangent with this, but when you release certain features, it's a lot of fun because they have a lot of sex appeal to them and it might be innovative or no one's doing it in a certain way and that can be really fun. And when you get into user management, this is one of those plumbing things and underlying fabrics that no one gets all that excited about it. It comes up in conversations and things like that, but it never escalates to the point where it's like, "This has to be dealt with," or "This is a must," or anything else. But last year we really started looking at things related to our user management, just because we get a lot of different set-ups and how people wanna handle it, and things like that. And for the life of our product, we basically have always had just two user types. One was the account owner, which could only be one person being the account owner, and then everyone else on the system was just a user. And then that user had, I think we had five different special permissions that would either enable or limit that user in what they could do.06:00 AW: And it was unbelievably basic, but for thousands and tens of thousands of users, it worked and it was never a big enough... There's never a big enough pain where people were like, "I just can't do this anymore." But last year we really started thinking, "How do we improve this?" One of the things that we've been asked. And we started modeling it out... It really started happening at our summit. I kind of put together a really loose structure and brought it to the team as a whole when we were face-to-face and said, "This is how I see this, this is how I think this could work and let's just start poking holes in it, and see what buy is there." And after an hour discussion, everybody was kind of like half-nodding their head like, "Yeah, yeah, I think this can work." The outcome of it, about six months of work. And it turned into a system where we created really six distinct user roles, and then inside of each role, it's an upgrade basis.06:55 AW: At the lowest end, you have a read-only, then you have a contributor, then you have a team member, so each user level steps up into what you can do. And then, to take it one step further, that type of structure isn't anything earth-shattering, but what we did inside of each role is give you a specific set of on and off toggles that allowed you to really customize the role and change it for how you wanted it to work. So, not only did you have these five, six designated roles that you can just switch someone between being an admin and a team, and that will limit or enable what you need them to do, but now I can go into the team member role and I might have 10 options that I can turn off or turn on depending upon what the default is for that role.07:42 AW: So, it literally made it limitless and it ended up being one of those things that was really cool, 'cause one, everyone on our team touched being part of building that feature, right? We wanted to know... Yeah, we wanted to know how everyone in customer success felt about it, and product, and sales, all these different angles. So, everyone had a say in it. Number two, I really felt like we built something, and I get there'd be all kinds of roadblocks based on how you've built your product and the tech stack. But I really look and I'm like, "Alright, we've built this user management, the thought process and the strategy we took with it, and this could be a product all by itself." Just in theory, if you said, "Here's a great way to solve user management between the roles you have and the amount of customizable permissions and things like that, and how easy it is to use and what the interface is." I totally think it could be its own product, it would be... It's just a utility, it's a non-sexy, marketing, none of that kind of stuff.08:41 AW: And then the last part is it touches all of our customers. When we flipped the switch on this, it changed for everyone on the same day, right? So, thousands of accounts changing over at once. And we had... I'm knocking on wood at the same time, this is over a week ago, we had a handful of small things that needed a small tweak or correction. And that was just really gratifying.09:06 DS: Well, the people in the old system, whatever the user management was, those would have just migrated over to the new system and nothing would have changed for them, right? So, yeah.09:14 AW: Yeah. We just mapped them from where they were. We just basically created a map that if you're this type of user with these two permissions, then you would become a contributor in the new user roles. But it was a very large... All of the things that had to be thought of and how things were tied in and the mapping of roles and the communication around it and how we gave early access to some of our bigger customers and did calls with them. It was just, it was a really big thing to do. And it was also a hard decision to use all the resources to do that, but I pretty much feel like now, if someone asks us to do anything with user roles and user management for the next 10 years, we can just be like, "No, it's already... Our system's well beyond anything else you're using, so we're not gonna... "09:56 DS: Yeah, yeah, you've got full control, really.09:57 AW: So, anyway, that's a very long...10:00 DS: Interesting.10:00 AW: Long-winded on that, but it was really cool to me. I was super proud of our team. I shared that with them just this week and realized this is just something non... This isn't a head turner for people, but our team actually did a really head-turning job with how they approached it, how we executed it, and how we brought it to market within the product, which is really cool.10:21 DS: Nice. Yeah, I could learn something there, I think. I often, on the software side of things, I mostly just talk to Deb about it, and sometimes we flip the switch and we're like, "To us, we don't think it's a big deal, we don't have to promote it." Just be like, "Yeah, we just launched a new feature," and we just move on with our lives. It makes the software better, right? But I think it was a great opportunity for us to get support involved, get marketing involved, really take the time to communicate it well, and get the best mileage out of it too. It's another marketing opportunity. And so, some of these little things that we... Obviously the thing you just launched wasn't a big... Wasn't a little thing, it was a huge thing, but it just makes me think about what I need to do with some of our upcoming launches, for sure.11:00 AW: Yeah. I can say, one of the most important things that we do is talking with our support and customer success team, and when we put something out there saying like, "Alright, how many different problems does this solve for you in tickets you answer, in chats you have, whatever else. And are we missing something that would really take it over the top that we should consider?" So, that's a very valuable group 'cause they're always talking to your customers.11:25 DS: Yeah, we look at that, too. I have a call every two weeks with the support team and they raise issues that are constantly recurring, people that have a complaint about this or that, and so that's how we try to prioritize a lot of the features that we launch, based off of that.11:39 AW: No, very smart move. Alright.11:41 DS: Yeah, alright. So, do you wanna talk about what it's like in the new version of GatherUp ever since you've been acquired? 11:48 AW: Yeah. I mean, mostly I wanna tie off our three-part series here, and then we can return to our normal format where you're talking as much as I'm talking, and I don't have to be put on the spot anymore, so I'm...[laughter]12:02 DS: Oh, I don't think I'll ever talk as much as you are.12:04 AW: Now you sound like my wife. [laughter] But yeah. So, just taking a look at everything after the sale, it's like we covered the why in part one, the entire process in part two. It's been really fun too. I've gotten a number of emails and tweets and LinkedIn messages of people just saying that they've enjoyed it, and looking forward to the next part in it. And that was the whole goal, that's why you and I decided to do this, is how can we bring this to light, 'cause I really felt like I was... I didn't have enough resources that I felt like applied to our situation when we were entering it and going through it, and I thought, "Well, if we can put some stuff that's out there, and I can share what was specific to ours, and some of the thinking and the emotional pieces, and that's helpful so that someone else has one more little thing to go off of in their process, then it's totally worth it.13:00 DS: Yeah, totally. These are great episodes.13:01 AW: Hopefully, they will be good for all time. So, yeah, I think a quick high-level summary and then let you pick away at some questions and see where things morph from there. But at this point, we're roughly 120 days out, so four full months out from the close of the sale. And really much of it, we're still in the transition period. Like some things have definitely started to show their path and the direction they're going and what it's gonna be like, but there's still plenty of others that are up in the air where you just haven't worked across that scenario or that situation in it yet.13:44 AW: By no means is it like, "Oh, yeah, well the transition was the first 30 days or the first 90 days." I can easily say at 120 days. Yeah, no, there's still transition that's happening in different ways, in different elements.13:58 DS: Yeah, this particular episode of the three-part series is the one that... I guess they're all super-interesting to me, but I'm really keen on this one. I'm imagining this day that if Whitespark ever sold, what would it be like? I would assume they would want me to be still in the company. And then what's it like answering to somebody else? How do they change the structure? How does the company culture change? How do you integrate with that new leadership? I'm really keen to hear about all of those things, so I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about it.14:32 AW: Cool. Well hopefully we cover all of that and then some.14:35 DS: Yeah.14:37 AW: One thing I guess... One area where I just wanna start with, it's usually the first question that people ask me after the acquisition and things like that were, did you have to stay? Right? 14:47 DS: Yeah.14:47 AW: Was it part of the purchase agreement, as it's usually referred to, golden handcuffs where you might have an earn-out. And that's very popular in deals, especially with things in service businesses, because they wanna maintain consistency.15:03 DS: Yeah.15:03 AW: So you might get X amount of the deal upfront, and then another percentage after a year, and another after two, and then maybe at three years, then you've fully have earned out what the purchase was.15:15 DS: Yeah.15:15 AW: And in our case it wasn't that at all. The deal was 100% cash at close. And two of our founders, Don and Thomas chose to roll off, and move in different directions. Don had already embedded himself in a new position working with Ford in their mobility program, so he was kind of already on a different path, with me running the company. But Mike Blumenthal and I just looked at it, and I think the biggest things is one, we just really love what we're doing, and love the product that we've created, and what it does. And the both of us to one degree or another were like, "Yeah, I wanna keep going and I wanna see what things look like on the other side of this."Specifically for me, it was, I had been given all the votes of confidence, like your plans for the product, we're not gonna mess with those. We want you to keep doing what you're doing. We would love to have you and keep running GatherUp and those kind of pieces. So all of those things were for me specific to GatherUp, felt like, "Yeah. This is what I wanna keep doing. I'm not done in what I wanted to create here, and put out into the world."16:27 DS: Yeah, I find that really surprising that a company would buy GatherUp and not wanna keep... That they didn't put that right into the contract. Like how did they feel that they have the confidence to come in here and just be like, "Okay, well cool, see you guys later. We got it here." [chuckle] How are they gonna keep everything running. I can't imagine buying the company and not locking in the primary decision-makers for a good year at least, before you can transition. It's just amazing to me. It feels like GatherUp wouldn't be as successful if all four of you had left.17:02 AW: Yeah, well, I think it would be as successful, just maybe different. Right? 17:07 DS: Yeah, it would be different for sure.17:08 AW: Yeah. And I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges through all of this stuff is like emotions. I've already talked about the emotions during the process and all of those kind of things. And there's a lot of that to this too, because you've created this, you look at it, and you have some amount of thinking to yourself like no one could do it as well as me. I have historical knowledge, and I have this feel for it, and I have all these other things. But the truth is that's not 100% true. It's true in the version of the story that you're telling, but there's also other versions of that story that could be equally successful.17:44 DS: Sure.17:44 AW: And I think in the case of Alpine Software Group, they had already purchased seven, eight other companies, consolidated a couple that were under kind of the same path of things. But they had already operated that way, where none of those founders stayed on board with it, and short transition, and then they took it over.18:04 DS: Yeah.18:05 AW: And I'm sure they look in the process and they look at what is the product, what market does it serve, what are the metrics, what are the numbers. And they look at those, and without emotion, they're able to say, "Yes, the businesses metrics are healthy. Here's what's going on." And there isn't any one person inside that company that's like making or breaking it. Are there individuals that add to it and make it more special or better, or serve it really well in a certain time frame? Absolutely. But will this product or this company die from one person being absent? No.18:39 DS: Yeah, sure. I guess I would be the same. Yeah. And then I think that probably maybe there are things that I do as the founder, that aren't as efficient as someone coming in with fresh eyes, seeing it and having a different perspective on it. So yeah, I think it's interesting. So if I was in that position to sell, would I wanna stay on, would I be required to stay on? I don't know. It's an interesting thing to think about.19:00 AW: Yeah, and at the highest levels, I would share when we were having discussions on the offer between the four of us main shareholders, between Don, Thomas, Mike and I is, at the end of the day you have to understand, no matter what, you are selling control. Right? 19:16 DS: Yeah. Totally.19:16 AW: So you're trading money for control. So if there's any part of that that doesn't sit right with you, or you want a little bit of each, it's probably not the right deal for you. Right? 19:25 DS: Sure. Yeah.19:25 AW: Or you just need to heavily structure the purchase agreement and how it's gonna move forward and everything else, so that you maintain some of that control, where maybe you don't sell all of the company that's there. You only are gonna sell them 60% of the company, or 70% or different things like that. There's a lot of different ways to make a deal. But, the way ours was presented, it was definitely gonna be either all in or all out, as far as your ownership shares. And then deciding, "Yes, I wanna stay on. And here's the role that I would see myself serving and bringing to the table and why I wanna do it."19:57 DS: Right. So okay, after you sell what... How do you start setting all this up? How do you figure out how things are gonna change? What was it like in the beginning of the first little while? 20:07 AW: Yeah, so interesting enough, at some point in time, my head started to think through the sales process, right? 'Cause at some point during the sales process, I realized when we were like 30 days out from closing, and when you would have those moments of not being emotional about it, you'd realize, "Alright, this deal is going to close."20:29 DS: Yeah.20:29 AW: So now as a leader, as someone who likes to have a plan and a strategy, I started wanting to know factually how will things be different and what will this look like and start to map some of that out. And I can easily say my mind probably moved there faster than our acquirer's mind 'cause I felt like I was asking a bunch of questions at first, that just kinda got like, "Yep, we'll get to that, we'll get to that." They were still all focused on the acquisition itself.20:57 DS: Sure.20:57 AW: And some of it... Maybe it's not normal. And they probably hadn't been around that before, especially if no one else had ever stayed on, right? 21:05 DS: Yeah, they don't have to worry about any of that.21:06 AW: Yeah. So I think there are some things with us that were a lot different that were first time that maybe they would do differently if they went back again, but there was definitely an area where things had a lot of more grey to them than what I wanted. But slowly but surely, it kind of fell into place, ended up working with the Chief Operating Officer for ASG MarTech, Alice Song. And Alice just did... She eventually kind of stepped in as my go to, to get answers from and to talk about things or at least put it in some kind of light that I could understand with it. So that was helpful in starting to map out some of the bigger things and have a good line of communication into the new owners even before it had actually take place.21:51 DS: Right.21:52 AW: Because I didn't wanna write it... It's just like, yeah, we closed the deal, and then the next day you're like, "So what do we do? How does this change?"21:58 DS: Yeah, exactly.21:58 AW: It's like... I wanted to be a little more prepared than that.22:01 DS: You had some prep work done.22:02 AW: Yeah, exactly. But one of the things that I think that ASG did really, really well is they basically set up what they called an integration day. So it was roughly about two weeks after our close, they flew our entire North American team out to Seattle, and we had a full day and a half that was structured around integrating our team with the new ASG team.22:27 DS: Right.22:27 AW: So there was a number of things in it that were really, really solid pieces that were helpful to our team across the board. One was being able to see faces, and get to meet the humans instead of just like, "Oh this entity, this company bought us, and I know none of them and everything else." So put a face on people. Which I think was really important... And especially for a remote company as well.22:53 DS: For sure.22:54 AW: And I would say our team also enjoyed. We had just had our team summit in the end of September, and here we are like six weeks later and everybody's back together again, which is...23:03 DS: Yeah, that's nice.23:04 AW: Yeah, really cool. Our team really liked that. But the format of the day they put together, it really started off with naming your fears and being able to say, "Here's what scares me about this acquisition. Here's what's stressful about it. Here's how it could affect me." And it was a very open format that I think it really opened everyone's eyes to like, "Okay, everybody here probably has some amount of fear to it or unanswered questions, or some anxieties." And making everyone feel like they're not alone in it. And these are common questions. And they're questions that we can work to answer over time.23:41 DS: Did they structure that? So when you came to this meeting, this is something that they... Do they do this with all their acquisitions? They kind of have this integration day and they have this structure for it where that's the... It's the first thing... Name your fears is the kind of thing that they kind of work through? 23:55 AW: Yeah, I can't speak for if they've done it for their all but they hire... They brought in a facilitator to lead this.24:01 DS: Oh interesting.24:02 AW: Yeah. So she came in and was the one driving the content and the exercises we were going through and some things you'd break down into a one on one, other were group things where you'd move around the room and in the center of the room was a label on the floor that said the acquisition. And she would ask a question and say like, "Hey if the acquisition heavily affects or gives you emotions around what I just stated or asked, go to the center. If it matters less to you or doesn't impact you as much, stay to the outside." So you could see where other people stood in position and then they would say, "Okay, because of where you're standing, how do you feel?"24:39 DS: Oh interesting.24:40 AW: Yeah, it was really, really interesting. And to me it was really well done. It was one of those things that instantly from the first exercise, and the way they... It was actually Alice and the facilitator when they first did it. One of the first things was just... Alice answered with very truthful, raw motion about it. And it was like it instantly set the stage, at least for me, I guess I can't speak for everyone, but I was like, "Oh this is not just gonna be corporate mumbo jumbo on this and going through the motions. This will actually be real."25:13 AW: And so, yeah, it was really well done. And then another section was just kind of creating vision for success. Helping everyone see that success in this was massively probable and that the failure while somewhat possible was very minimal in it. And so that was just really cool to get everybody seeing that, this is where this is trending so maybe by naming your fear and putting it out there and hearing others, you can put it away and move on with it.25:41 DS: Right. Now you'd assume that a company in this position that's buying other companies, they're not going to buy a company that they don't see a pretty clear vision for success and so they're able to name that and help everyone in the company see it. And from their perspective, which I think would be really valuable... It's like, "Here's where we're at now. Well, now that you're part of ASG this is where we're gonna be in the next five years." And so that could even be exciting for everyone, right? 26:07 AW: Yeah. No, absolutely. And in the case with our company, too, is like getting to meet a lot of people who might be peers to you when... So it's like gaining a whole bunch of new hires all in one day. And so you get to meet them and talk to them and find out what they deal with in their line of business and things like that. So just all around, after that day and a half, I really felt like a lot of nerves were calmed, a lot of anxiety was reduced and I think people were really excited. And the cool thing to me is it hit for people because of talking about how you personally felt and emotions, things like that. It was both well done on a personal level, but also on a professional level in seeing the success of the company and where things could go and how some of the things might work and those type of elements.26:54 AW: So it was... Like I said, it was really, really well done. I was like, "Okay, if I'm ever part of this on either side in any position ever, this concept of the integration day and what it's really about, I'm all in. I would push for that all day long.27:08 DS: Yeah. Did you all take turns like dancing around a fire and screaming at the top of your lung? Did you do any of that kind of stuff? 27:14 AW: I think at some point I might have been doing that in my mind. But I definitely didn't do it. I will say when we did the one exercise where I talked about where acquisitions in the middle and then people are walking around. And I think one of the questions was, how has this impacted or how has this impacted your life recently, or whatever else. And that was a really easy for one for me to like... I stood just right on top of it. And they're like... So alright, let's talk to some extremes and person outside the circle and then person inside, somebody right on top of it. And for me, it was like my voice cracks, I was tearing up right, 'cause in the...27:57 DS: Yeah. Truly.27:58 AW: I was present in the moment, and I was thinking about all the things that I had, I felt like I cheated my family out because of how much I've been working.28:06 DS: For sure.28:07 AW: Time lost and being present and all of those kind of things, where it was just like, it was a really emotional moment for me, so I had probably my own walk on the hot coals moment at that time, and then it subsided. That was probably a little bit of a pressure valve going off for myself.28:24 DS: Yeah, I bet, yeah. Makes sense.28:26 AW: And I think that side... The other thing to share personally, structurally company business-wise, the integration day was just really, really well done and it also made me respect ASG as a company where I was like... That's really smart, right? And it shows that you're investing in the people, and you want the transition to be great and everyone to feel respected and welcome. So that was all great, but just to that same release of emotion and things like that, like the first... And luckily with the timing being the end of the year, I really looked at it and I was at least able to realize, alright, I have to get myself back to feeling normal by the start of the year.29:09 DS: Right.29:09 AW: So after 80 hour weeks, the stress of it leading separate lives between what you know and how the company is operating day-to-day, 'cause you're not sharing it with the entire team. All those things. I was really burnt out, I was really emotionally dried. Yeah and so, and they were really supportive of that, right? Alice was like...29:29 DS: Right. I was gonna ask.29:31 AW: Yeah, she was like, take what you need to figure it out, and part of me is I wasn't just gonna walk away for 45-60 days and be like, "Oh, I'll pick it back up", but I definitely scaled back down to 30-40 hour weeks, which as you know as an entrepreneur, running a company like that's... I can work 30 hours a week while I'm on vacation, just checking email and doing different things to keep things moving. But it was much more normal instead of the 60 plus hours. We took two family vacations. I tried to just really be present with my kids and my wife, and just keep myself off of Slack at night and email and not be as responsive and as immersed and all those things.30:19 DS: I flow like that all the time. I'll have busy periods where I have to work most evenings, and then I'll have periods where I'm like, "Yeah, no." Months will go by and I'm like, after 5:00 PM, I'm done. Just leave it like that.30:30 AW: Good for you. I think that's something as an overall, I need to get better at doing from time to time.30:37 DS: Yeah, I feel like the company's growing into a good position where I'm able to do that, right? I don't have to put in the 60 plus hours a week. Everything still runs fine. What I wanna do, I wanna get to 20 hours a week, that's my goal, 20 hours a week of my mornings to myself, I work in the afternoon just checking in. And that really comes down to getting a good leadership team in place and so that's where I'd like to get to in the next little while.31:00 AW: Awesome.31:00 DS: In a little while, like few years, right.31:02 AW: I see that as a good future episode, talking about how to get yourself in that position.31:07 DS: Yeah, totally.31:08 AW: So I think some of the other things to share is like... We can probably dive into some of the challenges, right? 31:15 DS: Yeah, yeah, now that you've done this transition, your company is different, it's like, the way you ran things before you had full control. I'm really interested in that aspect of, what kind of control did you have to give up? Who do you answer to now? Like now you have to answer to somebody, you didn't have to before.31:34 AW: Yeah, yeah, so I basically report to Alice Song, who's the COO. And so, yeah, she's my boss for the first time in a very long time. And what is really great is I, very early on, had a really great rapport with her. I think it's one of those where I can easily say Alice is a good human being first and that makes it really easy to interact. Of course, she's very intelligent and all these other things, but she's somebody that you can see just has natural empathy and things like that, is a great listener. That part definitely made that easier. But it is weird. There's a number of things where it's like I have to check myself and be like, "Alright, I should probably either ask for permission or make this known or put that out there". And it definitely changes your mind frame. And I might even be over asking for permission in some things or have some things where I don't actually have to share it, but your mind just goes there now, because it isn't just you to answer to.32:43 DS: Sure. Now you have a boss, you're like, hmmm. So normally, let's say somebody on the customer service team comes up, they're asking you to make a decision on something, do you... Are there some things that seem relatively minor that you would have just made the call, but now you're like, "Well, I guess I better run it by Alice"? 33:00 AW: No, I'm allowed to operate within those ways pretty easily. I would say the biggest thing it comes down to is money, right? If it's anything having to do with financials, money, spending money, a hire, any of those things where in the past I would either do it and then if it was over a certain amount, I would definitely share it with the partners and be like, "Hey, just so you know, I'm deciding to do this", or whatever else, or if it was big enough that I would say, "I'd like to do this. Are you guys in agreement?" But they had already said, "Hey you're here to do what you want and how you wanna do it".33:33 AW: So yeah, so it mostly comes down to those things. Some of them are... There might be a few things strategically where it's just like, "Okay, based on what this is or what it reaches across," And I just look at like, "Alright, if I was in her position, would I want a heads-up on this?" And that's probably the biggest way I try to operate, is just putting myself in her shoes and in her position and, "Is this something I should be aware of?" And if so, then I need to put it in front of her.34:00 DS: Sure, that makes a lot of sense. So that's good to know though, that you don't have to run by her the little, tiny nuances, every little thing; you still have control of running the company, for the most part.34:10 AW: Oh yeah, yeah, but... And by no means... If I was being micro-managed, I'd probably... I wouldn't be around. That just wouldn't work. [chuckle] That wouldn't work. And I don't sense any of that happening at all, so...34:22 DS: Yeah. And obviously, I'm sure she doesn't wanna get bothered by all the little things either.34:26 AW: No, no, she's got bigger fish to fry as well. She's running seven companies or overseeing seven companies, so she has plenty to do.34:34 DS: Yeah. And so do they... Something that must change is you have this vision for the company, and they maybe have a slightly different vision, and they have new metrics to meet and new goals to meet. How has that changed? 34:49 AW: Yeah, the first one that absolutely hits you in the face is probably more of the financial and those type of metrics and goals, just because... I think it all relates... We are very much of always the mindset, "We definitely cared about the numbers, we looked at our numbers, we're reviewing them monthly," and everything else, but we were also the ones setting and making our own goals, and it just gives you a different feeling than when someone else comes in and says, "Okay, here's your numbers, here's what you're gonna hit for revenue or margin, or these things."35:24 DS: Right. And were those numbers way bigger than yours, and you're like, "Oh, wow."35:27 AW: Yeah, parts of them were. Definitely, if we had to make them just ourselves, it wouldn't have been those numbers. But I also think that's the beauty of some of this too, is because... Just we were talking about before with emotions, you're able to set goals and say like, "Oh, alright, that won't... That isn't emotionally uncomfortable for me to set the goal here or to make this decision or to do this thing." Where when someone else comes in from the outside, they're not gonna have any of that emotion, and they're just gonna play it straight by the business decisions and the financial decisions. And so I look at that, it's like, "Yeah, there are some cons in there, but there's also some pros in there that I can easily appreciate." And you're like, "Okay, this is probably good, I'm pushed out of my zone on this, and let's get after it and see what happens."36:11 DS: Yeah, it makes sense. Did they change anything in terms of the way you operate, that kinda stuff? 36:18 AW: A little bit, just because of the... And I don't know if I'll be able to... I would say the easy way to look at this is the kind of how the existing companies are operated is director level and up at ASG MarTech are all centralized. So the director of product sits over the top of all six products. And then once you get down, then there is a product manager for an individual product. So some of that has been a little tricky in just to where those things intercede. Especially for me, because just as we talked about, there isn't a single other founder from these other companies, at least that I'm aware of, I haven't met every single person across all the teams yet, but I'm the only CEO of just a company within it. So I'm kinda on this island that's I'm not in the org chart, to some sense, of ASG MarTech, but I also am interacting and operating with that director level as well. And I think that's both different for them and me, so I think there's still kind of a lot to be figured out there, and how things flow, and where they go, and pieces like that.37:32 DS: Yeah. Are you operating as the product manager now? So the other six have a product manager because the founders left. But in your case, the CEO didn't leave, so do you just fill that role for them, they don't need a product manager? 37:45 AW: No, we still have our product manager. So if anything, I fit more of the role of the VP of product or the chief product officer, I'm still deciding those things. So if anything, I almost like... Their director of product that would normally be sitting there and working through those things, he's not doing that with us, it's... And they've given me the full rights to continue to work on a roadmap for what I have set out there and what I've put in place now. We've sat down, and I've laid it out, and we've talked about it, and they're like, "Yeah, totally makes sense, good," and everything else. And it's one of those where I look at them like, "Hey, if we're making our numbers and making the things happen, I will continue to probably have that." If something falls out of wax somewhere else, then maybe they end up more involved, I don't know. But so far, they've been very true to their word on that side of things, and they haven't really put anything in front of me that says like, "Oh no, you... Don't build that feature or we need you to put this feature," or do that, they've completely stayed out of that part of it.38:45 DS: What are some of the things that you used to have to do, so this is part of your role that you no longer have as part of your role, anything? Or is it business as usual? And then, I'd ask the same question for different teams, like your marketing team or your support team, I'm just curious about how things have changed for them and things that they don't have to do anymore.39:04 AW: Yeah. So I think one of the things that's reducing for me is direct reports into me. I probably had seven or eight people, just based on our structure and what that looked like out of our 21 people, that were reporting to me. But now, we're kinda peeling those off, and it's like, "Okay, this person that's in marketing is gonna report to their director of sales and marketing and this person in this position is gonna report to this." So it's helped from that side of it with me, and very much so when Alice and I are discussing. It's probably one of the biggest things that she's talked to me about is like, "Delegate. Get stuff off your plate. Get others doing more," things like that which is a little bit hard for me just because I'm... I'm just like, grab whatever I can and try to do it. So we're working on that.39:53 DS: Sure.39:53 AW: That part has definitely been a good thing and a lot of it is just still very much the same. It's just the process to get there, or having to circulate it or communicate it a little bit that now is just a little bit different, or you have to be a little bit more thoughtful with.40:11 DS: Yeah, I wanna quickly go back to something you said about how the goals have changed and the metrics, the numbers that they're giving you, do they give you those new numbers but then also provide insight and strategy on how you're gonna meet those numbers, like that you might not have thought of on your own. Are they bringing in direction and leadership in that area in a way that is really helpful for the business, you're like, "Oh wow, this is a great idea. And now I can see how we could get... How we could two times our numbers that we originally were planning for."? 40:40 AW: Boy, I would say a little yes, and a little no. It's definitely not an overwhelming tidal wave because quite frankly, to some aspect, it's like they bought you because they see the trend you're going on, right? 40:54 DS: Right, yeah.40:54 AW: You know, on one side, some of our goals, like our revenue goals, I didn't feel like, "Oh, that's crazy. We can't hit those, we can't grow that fast," or whatever. A lot of those were very much in line with what I would expect for ourselves. Hey, you know, the area where...41:10 DS: Sure.41:10 AW: Things tightened up probably a little bit more was just on budgeting and what our bottom line is, and from that aspect, it's easy to... It's not hard to see why they created the budget that way, or think about it that way, or, you know, and there's definitely some efficiencies outlined and things like that, but that's something that I would just say we never ever did. We just always look like, "Okay, almost the vast majority of dollars that we're gonna make, we're gonna pour back in to grow, because we wanna continue to grow in this direction," and there's...41:41 DS: Yeah, that's how I operate.41:42 AW: Yeah, and they're just... They're very much more disciplined about it. But again, I look at it as another good learning experience where I can see like, "Okay, I think we would have hit these same sales numbers, even without this happening to some extent, or been in the ballpark of them," but we wouldn't have been as profitable or created some of that margin, and this is a little bit more disciplined and a little bit more formatted in looking at it that way. So...42:09 DS: So, yeah, they would slow hires and expenses and those kinds of things, did they cut any expenses? 42:15 AW: Yup, no, didn't really cut expenses, but we definitely dove into areas where like, where are there efficiencies, and those kind of things came from certain vendors or suppliers where it's like, "Great, we already have two other companies that also use Twilio, so let's negotiate a group contract based on the usage we have between the three companies, instead of just you on your own." Yeah, so there's definitely some efficiencies in that structure.42:39 DS: Oh smart, yeah.42:40 AW: And I think, at the same time, to be fair...42:43 DS: Yeah.42:44 AW: They're learning about us and the nuances and the things that go on with that as well. So it's not like they're gonna have every answer, day one or day 30 or even day 90 with what that's gonna look like. I do think so much of year one with this for both sides is just like, "Here's what we've... Here's what we feel really good that we can make happen, here's some ways that we can work to make that happen." But a lot of it's just being like, "Alright, let's just be really open to learning," and both sides will pick things up and that will make years two, three, four even better from what we learned in the start.43:18 DS: For sure. I'm really interested to see how the company evolves over the next year, see how things start to change a little bit from what I'm familiar with and just waiting for that big thing, where I'm like, "Oh man, look at that, look what they did," and it's like these kinds of things that you can do when you're under a larger umbrella that you might not have been able to do on your own. I'm really interested to see some of those come on.43:39 AW: Yeah, and same for me, right? I mean, there's already... There's definitely already small and medium things I can look at and say, like, "I would have not arrived here, if it was just me making this decision or getting the information or doing the research on this." I've already had some of... And that's, it's...43:55 DS: Yeah.43:56 AW: It's really cool, right? And it's, even realizing the ones where you even feel a little uncomfortable about it, you have to say, "Here's the silver lining in it." Or, "Here's what I'm also gaining," and that piece is really important. But it is, it's just this balance though, especially for someone when you've owned something, just the emotional stock that you have in it and when you don't own it anymore, even though to... It's really weird, you could almost say that that is like not... It's not real, right? It's like you have control, you have stock, you have a percentage of the company, and you sell that, and you get something tangible in exchange in money, but it's really the emotional piece that changes as much as your bank account or something else does, and that...44:40 DS: Oh, I can imagine, yeah.44:40 AW: That's yeah, and that's the really hard thing to articulate, and it's really interesting to watch how it hits everyone differently too, right? Like how it has hit me is very different in how I process through it than how Mike Blumenthal has. And I can only imagine...44:55 DS: Right.44:56 AW: For like Don and Thomas, where they just had this cut off, and then they were out and now they're on the outside and watching things happen...45:03 DS: Yeah.45:04 AW: And curious and wondering what it's like and probably still having background conversations with some of the team and whatever. But when you go to something that you were part of, and then you're completely on the outside.45:14 DS: Man, that'd be weird.45:15 AW: You know, looking at it. Yeah, yeah, totally weird, so...45:17 DS: Yeah, yeah, the whole thing is weird in many ways. So in both positions, staying on has its own weirdness, but completely leaving, I... For me, I think that'd be even weirder, I'd just be like, "Oh okay, well, good luck with the company, the thing that I've been doing for the last 15 years."45:32 AW: Yeah, oh my gosh, yeah.45:33 DS: Yeah.45:33 AW: No, I definitely would have felt that way and the one thing I would share, you know, and... I think it's important, especially as you're trying to get as much of anything like your emotional conditions in shape through all of this. For me, it was really about finding what can I tie myself to do, too, that is more of the normalcy that I'm into and that I'm engaged with and that makes me happy. And then for me, it was like, it was these feature releases to start the year, like I...46:05 AW: And this is the core of SaaS anyway, as ship code and sell. We talk a lot about it. I'd make fun of that being my mindset anyway. But, we shipped a lot of code in January and February, and so it really allowed me to tie into all those small pieces of getting excited as it gets into a dev server and being able to test it, and getting into a production server and start to work through some of the marketing and the communications of it, and beta testers using it and things like that. So it was like we had all those cycles that easily allowed me, as some other things needed more time to even out, or sometimes you just need time for your emotions to settle down or you need need to figure out how to articulate them. That gave me the work to tie into that I really love. I just said like, "Alright focus all your energy on this part that you really love and that will help guide you through as some of the other things even out.47:01 DS: That makes sense. At least you get to maintain some normalcy in your everyday operation.47:06 AW: Yeah, absolutely.47:08 DS: So what are some big gains, some awesome things that have come out of this? Some of the things that you're recognizing are valuable from this acquisition? 47:17 AW: Personally, getting to operate with other smart people. It's like, instantly you gain a group of people with different backgrounds, different experiences, different approaches, and that's been really great. I've enjoyed the directors at ASG and the people that I'm talking with; Francis who heads up their product and Kaitlyn in sales and marketing and Lauren. These are people that I really enjoy the conversations with and tackling problem-solving and ideas and things like that with, so that part has been a lot of fun. I've also just really enjoyed... I get to watch Alice in a position that my team would view me in, so I get to watch her operate in situations and how she engages and how she asked questions. And to me it's really interesting, too, because I'm someone... My educational background is massively minimal and she's someone who undergrad was at Yale and her Master's from Stanford Business School, so she's been to handling school training. All these things super heavily.48:26 DS: Yeah, she's a real pro.48:28 AW: Yeah, exactly, so it's been fun for me to watch those things and pick up on like, "Oh you can just tell where some of those things derive from," and also where some of the things just derive from who she is. So that's been a really cool thing for me, personally. It's always great when you're around smart, driven, caring people. It's fun.48:49 DS: Great. Well that's a huge win right there. You never really know... I guess you had a sense of it, through the sales process about who you were selling to, but until you start working with them day-to-day, you never really know. So it's nice to hear that it worked out pretty well and that you're happy with the leadership that's now making the call, the major shots at GatherUp. Sounds good.49:12 AW: And then just as I touched on... The other thing that's just really stood out to me is working also with the leadership and people making decisions that aren't as emotionally invested. It's been such an interesting exercise for me to watch how much emotion plays into how you make decisions and the effect it has on you and others and the degree of the decision and all those other things. So that's just been one. It's not something where it's like, "Oh, I have these answers" or whatever on it. But it's really made me aware of how much emotion factors in decisions.49:49 DS: Can you give me an example of a decision that you might have made that the company is less emotional about? So they have a better perspective on it. What are the kinds of things... I wonder what I do as an emotional founder who decides what features we build and what stuff we're gonna do mostly on whim. And how we're gonna price things. Gosh, a lot of that stuff is just based off of my gut feeling.50:13 AW: Yeah, no, for sure, the biggest one. And I'm sure some time after all the dust settles on this, we can definitely do an episode on it, but we basically have a change to our plans coming. It's something that I had mentioned before. We had started discussing this last summer, before we ever got this offer or anything else, we knew we needed to do something differently. So in the process of deciding this, because plans are tied to money and things like that, and the core essence of it is, you're shifting and we're removing a plan from our offering.50:48 AW: And within that, I looked at how I would have approached it even to arrive at that we are gonna sunset a plan versus other options and how you do things. I wouldn't have arrived as quickly or easily on the path that we're on. When you look at it just numerically and you look at it strategically and all these other things, it is such a 100%. When you look at it without emotion, you're like, "That's absolutely the right decision." But the minute you start clouding it with emotion, then you get into the, "Yeah, buts. And what if we did this?" and whatever else. I easily can see that the emotion in it would have just added a little more confusion. It would've added a lot more work. It would've distracted our focus. It would have done all these other things that are counter-intuitive in the long run, because in the short term it would have been just harder emotionally to handle what's there.51:39 DS: Right, right, right. That's a great example. That makes a lot of sense. Would you even have thought of doing that, or were you already thinking of doing it? Or they just came in and said, "I think we should do this"? 51:47 AW: It was like one of the things we were considering, but I think we wouldn't have done it. I think we would have... We would have emotionally argued why not to do it and gone somewhere like, "Alright, this is super safe." Right? And in business, you can't always do the super safe. You have to stretch a little bit further for the right reasons. I just... It wouldn't have ended up the same, and I'm really... I'm glad... I appreciate being pushed out of my emotional safety zone.52:16 DS: Do they have some financial smarts that they were able to look at your plans and pricing structure and stuff and say...52:22 AW: Yes.52:23 DS: "We might lose a little bit on this, but we're gonna make a back up on this." So they were able to kinda project and calculate that? 52:30 AW: They totally do. ASG as a whole has gone through this process and a few different flavors with multiple others of their products, not even just the MarTech products that we're about. So there's definitely like guidance and background and that kind of stuff that's there that really helps on the confidence side of it.52:50 DS: Yeah. It's interesting. That's where I feel so lacking in that. I just don't have that CFO ability to do projections and figure out what the market value is for something and how to price things. It's really hard to do that unless you've studied it. I'm too busy building product.53:06 AW: Yeah, and I think it's easy. I mean just look at anything though that if you just took something to get a friend or a colleague you respect their opinion on something and you just gave them facts on it or gave them spreadsheets on it or whatever else and said, "All right, tell me what'd you do and what you think." Probably, when they gave you that answer, you would then rebuttal it with emotional reasons why not to, because they can look at it and they're not worried about disappointing anyone or upsetting anyone or dealing with a hard conversation or any of that stuff. But like you know those inherently, you know your customers by name, like all those kind of things. So your first reaction is like, "No. No, no. That's... You can't. You can't do that. And here's why." Even though like the math might be telling you, the facts are telling you everything else. It's really interesting.53:54 DS: Right. Right. That is really interesting. And I would definitely be in that emotional stage too knowing how deep I am into like all of the aspects of the business. Yep.54:03 AW: Yeah. And other than that, the one final thing that was really cool that just has happened the last few weeks is our VP of customer success who actually works in my office with me is my lone recruit from the town of... City of Buffalo that I live in. But Taylor was actually just promoted. He now leads both the GatherUp team and Grade.us who's our sister company but competitor in reviews.54:25 DS: Oh, cool.54:26 AW: He's leading both of those customers success teams now.54:29 DS: Oh, interesting.54:31 AW: So yeah, so really cool for our team to already see that there's career opportunities and bigger things and ways it can be pushed. So there's...54:39 DS: That's a really interesting thing like the ability that okay now with a larger corporate structure, all your employees just got a bigger ceiling, like the ceiling just got expanded for them.54:50 AW: Yep. Absolutely. So that's been really cool. Taylor is super deserving. I know he's gonna do a great job running both and so but that was... That's just a really cool thing that already within the first four months that someone on our team has been elevated into a bigger structure within the company.55:07 DS: Yeah. That's great. Wow! Interesting. It's such a really great topic. I'm so grateful to have you sharing it with me and I guess with all our podcast listeners as well. I get to hear it first, I suppose, since we're recording it. But yeah, I just... I love this topic and it's so great to have a close friend go through it and lead the way for us. These are great episodes.55:30 AW: Well, happy to do it. I hope it's been helpful in some lights. Again, I always wanna point out like this is just our story in it and my story in it.55:38 DS: Yeah. Sure. Yeah.55:40 AW: Results may vary as the weight loss commercials always tell you but there are... I really think the things that if you're gonna gleam out of this three-part series is like just a lot on the emotional side of things, how to approach things, what they really mean, how to decipher, how to make decisions and all of this like... But, also finding as you've heard me call out, like find the trusted people that can help you at the different points with it. Trust your gut, do your due diligence. There's like all these characteristics no matter the structure of the deal and how it looks and whatever else, but you have to rely on those things for sure.56:16 DS: Yeah. For sure. Wow, it's been very educational. I look forward to seeing how it goes over the next six months to a year too. It'll be exciting to watch GatherUp evolve under this new direction, slightly new direction. You know things... Your road map is mostly the same, but as you talked about with the plans and pricing changes and those kinds of things, how it's like there will be some changes and it'd be really exciting for me to see how they impact the business.56:40 AW: Well, we'll see them, we'll talk about them, and we'll go from there. All right. Well, thanks Darren. I appreciate you being my Davenport I can lay on and this probably psychologically has been good for me too to rehash it and lay it out there and even turn some of the hard things into something that's hopefully helpful for the next person.57:00 DS: Yeah. Wow, thank you. Yeah, it's been great.57:02 AW: Cool. All right. Well with that everybody, we will wrap. We're at an hour, of course. Our longest episode to date. And we could probably keep going but if you're someone that maybe you're out running and you listen to us, you just probably ran an extra mile so you can thank us for that.57:19 DS: Totally.57:21 AW: As always, please feel free to share any of our episodes on the social media channels. Please feel free to drop us a review. Please feel free to connect with us on social media or drop us any feedback you have for us. Always want to incorporate that or try to answer things you wanna know about.57:39 DS: Yeah, do those things, do that.57:42 AW: Yes. Yes, we wanna hear from you. So with that we'll wrap it up. And Darren, hopefully, we'll talk to you again in a couple of weeks and...57:49 DS: Couple of weeks. Sounds good.57:50 AW: See how things are going. Because I know from your world something is gonna launch in the next two weeks.57:56 DS: Every two weeks. I launch something new every two weeks. That's what I keep telling the team. Yeah. How long is that gonna be? It's two weeks.58:02 AW: Awesome. So great. All right, take care, Darren. We'll talk to you soon.58:05 DS: Okay. See yeah.58:06 AW: Alright see you everybody.[music]

Helpful links from the episode: Alpine Software Group Steve Kozachok, Attorney and Partner at Taft Lost and Founder, book from Rand Fishkin FULL SHOW NOTES:[INTRO music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 17, Selling GatherUp - part two, the process.00:16 [INTRO]: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go! [music]00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:47 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:48 AW: And we are diving into part two of our three-part series on the acquisition of GatherUp from the end of 2019. If you haven't had the chance, part one of the series is the why, laying out things within the decision process, how to, things to consider and think about prepping your company to sell, just a number of aspects with this and today we're kind of hoping to transition into some more of the process items and small things, and being able to share just even how some of those things felt at the time. So looking forward to that but before we dive into that, Darren, it's been a few weeks since we've talked. What's new with Whitespark? 01:30 DS: What's new? Let's see, it's not really too much new. We just keep forging ahead with a lot of our product developments. Man, we have so many things that are so close right now, I'm just really excited about these launches that are upcoming, brand new local citation finder, a whole new account system. These are just on the cusp of being launched and it's funny because we have this local citation finder and it's been quite neglected for years as we build other things in the company. And it's truly... We get 300 free users signing up for that every week.02:04 AW: Nice.02:04 DS: And a lot of those are converting, but it's amazing to me that they're converting to the existing product because it's old, it's outdated, the data's not great, but and so, I look at that and I think I can't wait to launch the new one. And I think when we launch the new one, our churn rate will plummet. Our sign-up rate will drastically increase. I think it's gonna be huge for the company. So yeah, got lots of things on the go right now, busy with that, I don't have any trips planned until June. So yeah, I'm gonna see you in Minneapolis in June, that'll be good.02:37 AW: Yeah. Minnesota search will have a great time as always, have a few beers.02:41 DS: Yep, looking forward to it.02:42 AW: Maybe come up with another crazy idea to start a podcast or something.02:46 DS: Yeah, we'll start a different podcast.[laughter]02:50 AW: That's awesome. And I know the feeling with where you're at when your right on the cusp of launching things that was me towards the end of December and then January whereas we had three, four features that were kinda log jam together and then they were starting to shake loose. And then really we just had to start mapping out like, okay, what's our cadence of releasing one of them kind of every two weeks so that we have the right marketing message. And the team could focus on launching it the right way and landing the right way, and then calm the waters and then cycle back to the next one. We've been in that sequence here from mid-January and it'll keep going through the end of this month, so it's so fun when you have features coming out that you know will make an impact in getting to put them out there.03:37 DS: It's a funny thing that I'm trying to get better at but I have this tendency like once we start building something, I just wanna keep adding stuff to it. I'm like, "Oh, we could do this, and we could do this, and we could do that," and then the project scope just keeps creeping and we never launch the damn thing. [chuckle] So I'm trying to get to this part where like, "Shut up," it's like, "Okay, Darren, you got ideas, you put them on the phase two list and we're gonna get this core functionality released." And then the beauty is you've got multiple releases and you got multiple opportunities to push more marketing and more just promoting of the product every time. So if I just kept working on it, then we'd have one big massive release or we do the basic release and then five other releases after that as we keep adding all these extra functions that I wanna build.04:24 AW: I've actually gotten a lot better at that in the last year. I used to be very similar to what you're describing where it's like, "And one more thing, and one more thing, and one more thing." And now, I've done a much better job of saying like, "No, this is gonna be the V1 of this. Here's the dates we need to hit and then we will look at fast follow items or V2 items," things like that. And if anything I've found myself saying no to some of the things that the team is like, we should do this or consider this or whatever else. And it's been a strange reversal 'cause I used to be the one where they are just... I could see their eye, I could feel their eyes rolling when I was like, "Hey, I got one more thing we need to squeeze in here in the next few days."05:10 DS: Yep, totally. Yeah, we implemented a new process in our development on our dev team. So it's like a Monday planning call and a Friday retrospective call and we try to keep them short and it's just like on Monday, it's like, "Okay, you guys, what are you doing?" We have our ClickUp boards where we look at all the potential tasks we could do, and they just, they pick the ones that are doable within that week. Then on the end of the week, we look at it and we're like, "Did you get it done? If you didn't, what went wrong? Where were some of the challenges?" And sometimes they get more things done, and they squeeze it in. But this weekly really focused, "This is the goal for the week." I'm trying to block out everything else. It's like if something else comes up, it's like, "Put it on the list. We'll look at it next week." And so we're really trying to keep the team focused on the core goals and the core milestones and it's been helpful.06:03 AW: Yeah, awesome, good for you, keep it up. The discipline and prioritization and saying no is so powerful.06:11 DS: Yep, anything you just go on the list and we'll get to it one day, but right now, this is what we're focused on.06:16 AW: The ever-expanding list. That's something we can talk about some time.06:20 DS: Yep, totally. How's everything going with you? How's everything at GatherUp post-sale? It's all going great and continue to grow the business. You just had a huge feature released. The social sharing stuff looks awesome.06:33 AW: Yeah, super excited about that. We started that feature late last September. It was one of those where made a call. We had it slated later but with the drop of schema stars in search results from the review widget, we really felt like we wanted to get a marketing feature back out there that was a visible and tangible, got people excited. So social sharing was probably more slated to start work right about now but instead, we push that ahead of some other things. It's a great feature, basically gives you one more way to use your reviews and that we created a feature so it would turn your review into a visual image that you can then share on social media channels. And it's fun to have... I'm kind of putting together a post where what we're really saying is a review just isn't a review and with GatherUp, we can amplify it five different ways. And so you really wanna maximize that review instead of like, "Alright, we got it. Here it sits on the shelf in our Google My Business reviews," but it's really helping people understand like, "Here's how you use it on your website, here's how you can use it socially, here's how you can use it on this specific page and in this way," to really get people to maximize those hard-earned reviews.07:54 DS: Super smart. I remember I used to always think about how people would get testimonials and they just put them on their website and they would always ask for testimonials. And so my thinking was, "Don't ask for a testimonial, ask for a review." You get the review, now it's already on a public profile like on your Google listing or Facebook or whatever, and now you can use that on your website too.08:15 AW: Yep, absolutely, multi... You can make a review the Swiss Army knife. That's for sure, if you have your head around it the right way and we're just trying to point as many of those ways out and yeah, that social sharing feature. I think that's something we can do an episode on 'cause there's really some... I really challenge myself to think about that feature differently even when we created it 'cause people had asked for social sharing from us for a long time, but I really wanted to do it in a way that was attention-grabbing, excited people. Social media is a visual medium and I feel like we did a great job of finding the right way to embrace that and give people a really great marketing feature.08:55 DS: Yeah, I'd be interested in following up on that one too. I'm curious to find out what percentage of your user base adopts the feature and actually uses it. It's the kind of thing where you've got to engage and actually take the time to generate, press the buttons, and make it happen. So I'm curious if you have any logging set up to see how many people are using the feature and then maybe some what are some action plans to try encourage them to use the future down the road.09:22 AW: Yeah, absolutely. We can get into that down the road.09:24 DS: Future episode.09:25 AW: Yep, making note.09:25 DS: Yeah, making note.09:27 AW: Alright, so with that, let's dive into the main course of today and that's talking about the process as mentioned and hopefully as you listen in Episode 16, we talked about the why of Selling GatherUp. And today, I just kinda wanted to talk about and allow you, Darren to ask some questions as well about the process, more of the bullet-pointed items that you can expect in a transaction, at least sharing what we encountered with GatherUp. And so to kinda rewind what really kicked it off is we're at MozCon in July. I had our sponsor booth out there. During the conference, had a call set up with our contact at Alpine Software Group and we usually every six to eight months, we're having a call with them. We have had three or four, and it was just a normal check-in, building relationship, them asking how we're doing, how do things look for you guys moving forward, all of those different pieces, and just walking around in between the break at MozCon doing the call and at the end of the 15, 20 minute call, just wrapped up with them saying, "Hey, we're serious. We would like to put a number in front of you guys and make a real offer."10:45 DS: Nice.10:46 AW: Yeah, okay, and they were like...10:48 DS: You were the only one on that call so they just mentioned that to you? 10:51 AW: No, it's myself and Don. We were the two that were usually doing them with him. So Don Campbell and I on the call, one of our original co-founders. And yeah, they basically just needed three or four pieces and said, "Hey, we'll have a verbal offer to you in three to four days if you can hand these things across."11:11 DS: So at this point, you must have been sharing financials and stuff in order for them to consider an offer.11:16 AW: Yep, yeah. We shared a 2018 and 2019 P&L with them so gave them at that time about 18 months of history for how we are doing, and yeah, between that and then just kind of a scrubbed client list so they could see the accounts and sizes without the name to it just to understand the spread of what was there. And those are really the two main items that were there.11:45 DS: Were they interested in your organizational structure? Who are all your employees and what are the roles and all that kind of stuff? Did you have to share that stuff too? 11:56 AW: Yeah, not right off the bat, but that definitely came into play. So it's like that happened within the four days, they made the verbal offer. We discussed again, as we talked about last episode, we kinda already had... We had a line drawn in the sand of what we'd be interested in this was above that line, so we're like, "Alright, yeah, we're definitely interested," and we set up a face-to-face meeting for about two weeks down the road after getting the verbal offer.12:25 DS: I was gonna ask one thing. When you... So I'm just like, okay, what is it that makes one of these companies decide, "Oh yeah, this is a company we wanna make an offer for." And I'm curious about your growth rate over the two years of financials you gave them. And so, did you have 100%, 300% growth over that period or something like that? 12:44 AW: So what a lot of them... Well, everybody kinda has their own but I think Alpine Software group definitely was anchored to the Rule of 40. And if you understand the Rule of 40, it's your growth rate and profit margin exceeding 40%. And for us, we were well above that. Our growth rate was usually around that 40% year over year and a healthy profit margin as well. So we definitely fit into that piece, and this again where it was helpful and came in that they had already purchased a competitor of ours so they understood the space and the opportunity, and not just the metrics of a SaaS business but they really understood the metrics of a reputation management business in the SaaS space.13:32 DS: Yep, yep. Alright, cool.13:34 AW: Yeah, so then next the four of us, Don, Thomas, Mike and myself, we flew out to San Francisco and here we had three quarters of a day planned out. So it was talking a little bit more in-depth about the business as a whole, answering high level questions on customers and tech stack, taking a look at the... That's where we shared an org chart and a breakdown of the company and calling out certain performers and things like that with it so a much deeper level with it. It wasn't too difficult for us just because we'd always been very transparent and we had a lot of our stuff in order, so it was really easy for us to talk about a lot of those things and lay them out. And it was a nice kind of introduction too and understanding how they were thinking what they thought about us. Started to give some insight to what was important to them and why they looked at us and the positioning of their offer and things like that.14:38 DS: Were there any surprising things in that meeting where you were like, "Oh, we didn't think about this from a sales perspective," that came up, you're like, "Oh, we're gonna have to go and get that stuff organized"? 14:47 AW: Yeah, not so much. I mean the one thing that... A couple of things that were really interesting to me is one, in between the two weeks and in compiling this stuff together, it really made... And I would say myself and Mike, we really started to think a lot about their offer and what do we feel like we're actually worth. 'Cause now you have this number and there's so much, it's not like you get this handbook that says like, "Hey, your company should be worth this," or "this multiple," or whatever. You get some industry benchmarks and different things like that but it really allowed us to dig a little bit deeper on it. We actually went to that meeting with already getting everyone on the same page. Mike and I were very gung-ho and Thomas and Don ended up kind of agreeing and say, "Hey, you guys feel that way. We'll let you lead the way," and it really put a lot of confidence in our corner when I looked at it. I felt like we were pretty unique in where we are sitting as far as like who else in our space could be acquired and understanding that was definitely huge on your confidence side.16:00 AW: And so we went in and we had a counter to our offer that was roughly about a 20% increase from where we started, so it was a sizeable gain to the offer and put that out there at the end of our meeting with our contact and he's like, "Alright, today was great. Liked everything we heard. Let me bring that back to our team." And then, yeah, they called the next day and said that they agreed to our counter and the structure. The deal all stayed the same and everything else, and they were interested to put together the letter of intent.16:36 DS: It's gotta be so hard to like, okay, so they give you an offer, you think, "Okay, well, I think we're worth a bit more than that." You're gonna counter with the 20% increase, and then they accept it right away. You're like, "Dang, we should have done 30." [laughter] Did that ever cross your mind? Did we get the numbers right? Did you get as much as you feel like it was worth? 16:56 AW: Yeah, I didn't feel that way but you definitely felt scary thinking like, okay, they gave you this number that... Was it a good number, right? It obviously grabbed our attention. It met the minimum needs we had already outlined but it is scary then going in at the end and saying like, "Okay, we feel the number is this." And you really don't know even though you can have a good feeling, you can like the conversations, but what if that number took you to the point where they said, "You know what, at that number, we're just not interested, and we actually... We were wavering a little bit, so we'll actually just pull the offer off the table."17:36 DS: Yeah, for sure.17:37 AW: That is a possibility. Now, when you can emotionally step out of it, you realize that that probably is a little bit silly. But at the time...17:47 DS: Yeah, they would counter if they didn't like it.17:49 AW: Yeah, at the time, you feel so much emotion about it. You have excitement, you have fear, you have unknown, you have all these different things that thinking logically is really hard in this entire process.18:01 DS: Right, right.18:02 AW: And a couple of things that I really kept in mind is one, I had read Rand Fishkin's book on Lost and Founder and his history of the HubSpot offer and that offer being I think, if I remember the numbers right, they offered him 18 or 20 million, and he countered with 25 or maybe more. And they ended up not coming to terms and Rand massively regretted it because after taking on funding and everything else, they would have never personally made that much money again.18:36 DS: Yeah, that was the golden opportunity, missed it.18:38 AW: Yeah. And that was really helpful to... That was in the back of my mind, where I was like, "Be strong in what you feel like you're worth, but if you have a bird in the hand, don't squeeze that bird and crush it either."18:49 DS: Yeah, right.18:52 AW: It definitely is helpful. I even, I sent Rand an email. He didn't reply, but I just said, "Hey, because of you sharing that just know that it was helpful in our process to have this perspective of somebody who... " Good for him, that he felt that confident, but he obviously regretted it later that he probably should have moved forward with it. He just... It's hard. Your judgment can get clouded between emotion and maybe some greed, the fear of the unknown, all of those different things with it.19:22 DS: Yep, yep. I'm surprised he didn't reply.19:24 AW: Yeah. [laughter] He's usually would with it. I don't know, maybe I hit a spam folder, who knows? But anyway, I wanted to give him props for sharing his story and let him know that it actually mattered in a significant transaction of the same nature.19:39 DS: Totally. Yeah. Yeah, I've got that book. I've read the first chapter but you know how books are, they just sit on your side table and you... I got a lot of first chapters read.19:47 AW: Yup, so do I. But that one I read all the way through. I'm glad I did. So once that happened, the next thing that we did internally that I would stress to people, especially if you have partners, multiple shareholders is, we had our CFO put a mockup of flow of funds. 'Cause you have this number and it's really easy to look at it and say, "Oh, here's my percent, and it's of this number." But there's a lot of other things inside of that number in what gets taken off the top in legal fees, escrow, different things like that and then...20:20 DS: Taxes.20:21 AW: Yeah, taxes based on people's partner shares, where those things come from. So you really need to run through that if you have any waterfall in your tap table and things like that, so that you're able to understand like, alright, what does that number actually look like to me and am I still okay with that number? 20:39 DS: Right. So what's gonna go in my bank account? Yeah, totally.20:41 AW: Yup, yup. So just considering that within all of the different pieces that's there because it definitely ends up usually being a different number if you have multiple people at the table than just straight looking at, "Oh, it's this number and I get 30% of it," or whatever that might be.20:57 DS: Can you talk about what the legal fees are in terms of, I don't know, percentage or that kind of stuff? Are there brokerage fees? Are there other fees that you don't even know about until you kinda go through the process? 21:10 AW: Yeah. So we didn't have a broker. At this point once we had the verbal, then we went and said, "Okay, let's get an attorney to do this." We talked with Don, being in California, he had a couple of people that we'd either worked with before in drafting some agreements and he kinda went and talked to them. We had an attorney here in Minneapolis that used to be our attorney at my last agency, Spyder Trap I was at. And Spyder Trap had actually been acquired prior, and then Barb's CFO had worked with that attorney on that, so we brought him to the table on it. And yeah, we just kinda had to make a decision. A little bit of it was based on ballparks that they gave us. When you're looking at... Here, it's kinda hard to describe with the numbers, but in our case it was a six-figure expenditure based on sale price but there's a lot of difference in what the six-figure expenditure was from one to the other.22:06 AW: And so it just kinda came down to us, like trust and comfort level and ultimately we went with Steve Kozachok, our attorney and... With the firm in Minnesota because Barb had worked with him before. We knew Barb would be doing a lion share of the work. I knew Steve as well from when he was our attorney at Spyder Trap so we set a high level of comfort there. He had done a number of transactions. We felt good about it and the short there is, he was awesome throughout the process and really did a great job for us and was really a pleasure to work with, and made himself very available to us throughout the process 'cause there's definitely some Sunday night at 9:00 PM calls when we could get everybody together on something while it was in motion.22:46 DS: Yeah, you're lucky you had that 'cause I can imagine if I was trying to sell right now, I'd be like, "Oh, I guess I'm gonna have to find a good lawyer that knows how to do this," and it'd be a bit of a crap shoot. I would ask around and see if I can get some advice but, particularly being Canadian, I couldn't ask any of my US SaaS friends for advice. So yeah, it's good that you had that in place.23:04 AW: Yes. It was definitely, definitely helpful but it great if we already had it in place but we made quick work of it, made a decision and it worked out very well. So once we had that wrapped up, then they jumped into giving us the letter of intent. I wanna say it was probably from the time the first verbal, then had our meetings, whatever else. It was probably around mid-August when the letter of intent was actually put together. Now, the LOI is like, this is your first official doc. It's a shorter, four or five pages and it's really the high level of... It kinda guides what the purchase agreement, which is gonna be much larger and much more detailed, looks like. So it's in that the letter of intent, this is where, yes, having a great attorney is helpful. Steve did a great job in explaining things to us 'cause there's a lot of right? "Alright, help us understand the legalese of this. If we decide this way or we ask for this... Just a normal, what are common give and takes? What do others ask for? What should we be thinking about?" And he did a really good job of helping frame that up and helping us understand the role it played in the process, what to ask for, what should be important to us, getting our input on it and then being able to make some revisions to that.24:16 DS: Can you give me an example of what are some of these things that you should ask for that he was advising you on? And you're like, "Oh, yeah. I didn't think of that." I'm just curious what are some things that people might overlook if they didn't have a good lawyer? 24:28 AW: Yeah, some of it comes into the cycle of reps and warranties. So how are they gonna go through your numbers and pick certain things out and what are you gonna be held accountable for, post-purchase? And things like that. Looking at things, we had a number of things regarding our team. So it's like, just to make sure, they said, "Hey, we're gonna keep your team intact and everything else." But we're also like, "Okay, once you have control, you can do whatever you want." So if you don't honor that, we wanna have written in, like, "Here's the severance package. If someone is terminated within X days of the sale, if it's non-performance based." So how do we create a safeguard for our employees there that if they decide, well, we don't want that person on payroll or we wanna cut what your payroll is or people in certain roles, that they were gonna walk away well taken care of and have good runway to find their next opportunity.25:24 DS: Smart, yes. That's the kind of stuff that a lawyer will catch and help you think about and make sure you have that in place. Was there anything in the agreement that was like, warranties like, "Oh, if we end up buying the company and this, this or this happens we can reverse the deal," were there any clauses like that in any of your... Either in your purchase agreement or your LOI? 25:44 AW: S1: Yeah, you're gonna have certain things with that. It's not so much reverse the deal but it just gets into who's gonna pay if that happens? Because really, you're trying to slice and dice. We're either buying and we're assuming this responsibility or we're buying, but we're not gonna assume this responsibility. If this is... We already see this could be a possible issue, a tax issue or something like that and you are gonna be responsible for that. We're not gonna take that on. So there are definitely pieces like that to it.26:17 DS: Yeah, makes sense.26:18 AW: Non-compete timing, things like that. Those are all pieces that you get a little bit more detailed on and take a look at. Like I said, again, it's like the high level, most important things and elements of that are in that letter of intent. Now in comparison, it's like, alright. A couple of back and forths, we agree on the letter of intent and then kinda starts like the full process. And then once you get going on that, then the attorneys from their side start putting together the purchase agreement. Now, the purchase agreement ends up being, I don't know if I can remember in our case, but it's probably somewhere between 60 to 80 pages. So over a 10x factor and then it is, it's every little detail and every little element to all the things that are there.27:05 DS: That sounds painful. Man, I find a 10-page legal document painful enough, but geez, that sounds... So much reading and so much, the legalese, and it's just... I do not enjoy slogging through legal documents of that size.27:19 AW: Yep, and that's where it comes in, again, having a great attorney, having great advice, someone that you can trust to read every word, so maybe you don't have to read every word. You can get the summary where Steve would come to us, our attorney, and say, "Alright, out of these things, here's the 11 things that I think you guys should care about based on everything we've discussed and what I know you want out of this and what's important to you. And so let's talk about these 11. Let me explain them. Let's talk about your position, and let's figure out if there's ones we wanna go back to them on and ask for something different or frame it up or a different time, or amount, whatever that might be."27:54 DS: Yeah, it's Steve's job to read it carefully and think about all the potential things that could impact you as your... You're his client. So he wants to make sure that it all works out in the best way for you.28:05 AW: Yep, absolutely.28:06 DS: Yeah, makes sense.28:07 AW: And within this process, too, I definitely can say this is a part, emotionally, where you move from a lot of excitement to a lot of pressure. Because one, you create this data room... We touched about a little bit this on the last one but you end up with 100 plus items that they want all uploaded in there. And in our case, we had 80-90% of these, well put together and organized but then there's definitely a bunch that Barber, our CFO, was wrangling and tracking down and where are they, and things that maybe from deeper in the history had a number of versions and what are the right versions and how do we get those together? Cap tables have changed, new partners came on, things like that.28:51 AW: And between the culmination of all these things and getting everything hardened and getting it delivered and uploaded and creating a spreadsheet and saying like, "Okay. Thomas, you're in charge of these 12 technical items getting them together. Aaron, you're gonna take these 14 items, customer contracts," all of these kind of things. And so it really becomes a team effort to help put those together and everybody to do their pieces and shares and you have... We are probably doing every two to three days, doing a call, looking at that list, what's needed, what's still out there, how do we get it, those kind of things. And you feel the pressure of that. That's when you start to feel like if we don't bring all of this to the table, will the price change? Will they start to think differently? What are those pieces to it? 29:38 DS: Yeah, 'cause at this point the purchase agreement is not signed, right? You're just kinda putting all the pieces together and refining the agreement. Yeah, that would be a stressful time. That sounds like a lot of different things, like 100 point list of things you have to gather and get together for them? Man.29:51 AW: It is. It's a very long list. It's just like your incorporation and legal documents, tax returns and anything related to that, your contracts with customers, your agreements with every service you use, NDAs, your employment agreements, other vendors. It's just like anything you've ever signed, agreed to and rightfully so, anything that they would have to honor or know existed or know it took place, they wanna see all of that to be able to assess all of it, make sure it's in line. What's their risk, what are they looking at? How long does it last? Any of those kind of things.30:26 DS: They're just looking any red flags, I can imagine it's like, "Oh, they've got this weird service agreement with this company." And that could be a problem or a conflict or whatever.30:33 AW: Yeah, absolutely.30:34 DS: Yeah, makes sense.30:36 AW: And then within this time frame, too... So Barb our CFO and I, we had made a trip or two on top of calls doing this out in person to do some of this as well. Going through your financials, answering questions out of the P&L, going through client lists, sitting down with other members of their team and you start to see... I didn't fully realize it, at the time. It took a couple of days after it but then I started to realize what they were mostly looking to do then is, model out. Okay, we buy these guys, what does the next year look like? And so you could see they were even starting their transition of, and rightfully so, they have to go back to their investors and say, "Alright, here is why we're making this investment. Here's how we think this investment is gonna pay off and pay out over the next year, two years."31:23 DS: Yeah, they're trying to project all of that and figure out what their return's gonna be, yeah.31:27 AW: Yep. And it's hard... In your mind, you view some of it as an interrogation where it's like they're doing it to maybe not do the deal or lower the price or all these other things. But in our case, you just started to realize like, no, it's just so they have all the facts so they can properly project what this is and they make sure that they have their hands and arms around it the right way more than anything else. And that definitely took me a little bit and then I had to kinda try to preach that to the rest of our partners just because everybody comes in with their own angle on trust and are they gonna try to do this and depending upon what horror stories you've read about... And it happens. Transactions fall apart and all those other things. So it's hard not to be influenced by some of that fear. But as you... As I start to see some of these pieces come together, it was trying to get everybody else on board like, "Here's the why in why they're doing this. It's not to blow the deal up. It's not to try to claw back money out of it. It's not to try to lower the price. It's to really get their arms around, once we get this, what are we gonna do to maximize it even more?" And they have due diligence to go back to their investors and do their own reporting, and proposals and all those kind of things to make everyone on their side providing the money comfortable with the deal.32:49 DS: Yeah, totally. They absolutely have to justify it and they have to have a plan in place for how they're going to turn their investment into three, four, 10 times, that. That's their goal, so yeah.33:01 AW: Absolutely.33:01 DS: We got to think about it from that perspective. And they're gonna, of course, need all of that information. And then I could feel that myself, if I was in that position being like, "Ugh. All of this work," and "Why do they want all this?" And starting to stress about it, but yeah. I think that's a pretty solid point that you have to think about it from their perspective and what their goal is with this acquisition.33:21 AW: Yep. And then it just gets more important to like what does your gut tell you about the group that you're talking to and who you're doing business with. And right from the start, our contact at Alpine Software group, Jake Brodsky was always on the up and up, always straightforward, anytime if communication got off on email, he and I would get on a call and we'd each explain our why and we would easily be back on the same page. My hope is that anyone doing this, you end up with a stand-up person like Jake was on our side because it made it really easy for me not to focus on all the what-ifs and to be able to focus on the why we're doing this. They're being true to their word. I understand where they're coming from. They understand where we're coming from when we make an ask, and that just makes it so much easier. And I know, but there's probably plenty of deals that just don't have those elements and I feel for that 'cause it's already stressful without hide and seek, and some dishonesty, and hand tricks to try to throw people off or get their attention somewhere else.34:22 DS: Yeah. How much time passed between the letter of intent and the signing of the full purchase agreement? 34:27 AW: Yeah, so first letter of intent, like I said, was mid-August, and then our final signing was basically October 31st. It was Halloween Day.34:37 DS: Right, like three and a half months.34:40 AW: Yep, yep. Pretty fast track. We were on track to close a little bit earlier but we hit a hurdle in the middle and, without going into details, it was one that everybody worked together and was multi-faceted to work through. But the thing I just tell people, expect there to be some hurdles. I feel like we had our stuff in really good order for the size company we were, how long we'd been around, things like that. I feel like we always operated from a very high quality, well-organized, well-process standpoint. And we still hit some stuff where it's just like... And you just have to have your mind around like, "This is not going to be a straight point A to point B. There's gonna be some curves in it. And just as you do in business, come at it solution-focused. Be ready to do the work, to communicate, keep everybody on track, keep communicating and you can likely find a resolution as long as it's like coming from the right place, with the right things in mind."35:40 DS: Yeah, makes sense. Okay, you're working on getting all these documents together, what are some of the other stuff that they're asking for you? 35:46 AW: Yeah, the technical audit. So this is where they go and kinda embed themselves in your environment. They're looking for, what open source software your using, what other software that contains licenses, do you have everything in place? How much of it is your own created code, to some extent? How solid does it look? They're asking a lot of questions around your methodologies, and development, what outages have you had, things like that. They're assessing the reliability and things like that. That side we felt pretty good. I've been in the world of development and websites and apps and things like that for long enough where I felt very confident that our stuff was good. And I shared this last time, after that part of it, they definitely complimented us and said, of their 20+ acquisitions, we were right there as if not the best of what they had gone through before. So, huge kudos to our team and just everybody's dedication to quality on that side. But that became one of the big positives for us.36:51 DS: Do they assess your documentation? 36:54 AW: Oh, Yeah.36:54 DS: Like your code documentation? 36:56 AW: Yep, yeah. They really look at every aspect of it. And I don't even know all of the aspects that they would look at it internally, but configuration, documentation, process, security, performance, all of those things, they wanna understand as much of that as possible, because... And I know, to some extent they've probably have had a few purchases where if you don't do enough digging, you get in and once you open up the hood, then it's like, "Oh, okay. We gotta rebuild here on some of these aspects."37:26 DS: I've heard that, yeah, I actually heard that with some acquisitions where they bought the company and they're like, "Oh great. Now we're gonna spend the next two years rebuilding this from scratch 'cause he's got so much technical debt in."37:35 AW: Yeah, yep. And time is money. Another thing that we started to do is they wanted the, they came and said, "Hey we wanna talk to customers in this area." And so roughly somewhere around 10 to 15 of our customers. And I know you ended up being one of those.37:56 DS: Yeah, I had one of those calls.37:56 AW: Yep, and how we just positioned it, we did a reach out and just said like, Hey, We're bringing on this form to assess how our clients feel about us. They're gonna do an interview with you, it's a 20-30 minute conversation. So just making it look natural to our customers and asking them would they be willing to help and give their feedback and opinion on it.38:15 DS: I was so positive on that call. It's probably the reason you guys closed the deal. I had so many good things to say.[laughter]38:20 AW: Dinner and beers coming your way this summer.38:23 DS: Great. [laughter]38:25 AW: Yeah, and that obviously, it was actually kind of fun. Got to read the transcripts of those after everything closed.38:32 DS: Oh, that's good.38:32 AW: Yeah, and overwhelmingly positive and it's... In that form and being a little bit longer, even though I feel like we have great relationships, we hear from a lot of our customers, we use our product to ask our customers how they feel about us. So it's in that. It was cool to read all that and to be able to share it across our team as well, just to see how customers felt.38:56 AW: Then by now we're in mid-October, we're coming close to the end of it. At this point, you kinda transition and you realize that major hurdles have been dealt with, were on track, you're trying to find an outline of closed date, and you start to look forward, right? And for me, I had to really start putting a lot of thought around like, "Okay, what does the end of this purchase look like 'cause I've never done it before? So what are the elements within the purchase agreement in itself?" And then you start thinking about the transition items that are there.39:26 DS: For sure.39:27 AW: And there's all kinds of small details that you realize are gonna change, gonna be different, and then you start thinking about the communication of this. And to me, this was something that was really important to us so you have to start aligning and kind of putting together a framework like "Okay, if we're gonna sign papers on this day, then the next day, we're gonna do one-on-ones with all of our employees and lay everything out for them," because you're not talking... We chose not to tell any of them through this process because of it can be a large distraction. You can cause people to panic and be worried like "Oh, if we sell then my job will be eliminated so I'd rather just go find another job."40:07 AW: So there's definitely a lot of reasons why you wouldn't wanna go to your entire team and say, "Hey, we're working on selling and it's gonna be a great thing. And for the next 90 days or more, it's gonna be drawn out but don't worry, we'll take care of it", right. You're better off to, in my opinion, just do the work, handle that side. That's part of your job as an owner and an executive is to shield them from that. Put the company on the right track. Negotiate things that are in their favor and all of those pieces.40:35 DS: Yeah, yeah totally.40:37 AW: And then after that, then communication with the clients, and then the public information as well. At this point, it was really coming up with, and to me, this was like a whole new level of stress because now it's like, alright, you're telling our team of 20 and you feel some stress from that, you feel some excitement with it too because you're giving them good news in a couple of different ways, but then knowing you're gonna send out an email to your thousands of customers, that's scary. And what's gonna come back from that, how are they gonna feel about it? All of those different things. And the last piece, once you go public, that's totally the easy part, and man, did that feel a lot better? But from the time we sign to it being public was 15 days.41:21 DS: Yeah, it's just like two-week sort of period of just limbo. It's like "it's done, but we can't tell anybody", sort of awkward situation.41:29 AW: And so when we signed that day, and had everything signed and then Mike Blumenthal and Paul and I since we were both staying on, we just started jumping on Slack, and grabbing our people. We had put everyone in list together, we had put together kind of a script that said like "Alright, we're selling, here to, here's why we're doing it. Your job isn't going anywhere. Our great team is part of the reason that they wanted us." We'd also set aside a percentage of the sale as a bonus to employees.41:58 DS: Nice, I was wondering about that.42:00 AW: Yeah.42:00 AW: And we basically had two different things: One was length of time with the company, we gave a dollar amount for every year they'd been with us and then we also had an impact bonus when we looked at how did they contribute, how did that contribute to growth, did they help bring other people on, what have they done for us? Things like that, and so it was cool. Some of our people got more than their year of salary out of this bonus.42:28 DS: Amazing, but yeah, everyone was probably pretty happy about it, right? Did anyone have any notable concerns where you're like "Oh yeah, I didn't think about that." Either they're an employee or a customer that was maybe not so happy about the deal, or was everybody happy the deal? 42:44 AW: I mean, there's a few from each bucket. You definitely have people who are more anxious about things like that. Overwhelmingly, from our team and this made me feel really good as a person and as a leader, overwhelmingly, most of them said when we asked about questions, fears, we're doing this thing like, "Hey, we know you just got this news and let's be honest, we're still working our way through it 90 days later, but is there anything top of mind?" And overwhelmingly, a majority of them replied to that with, "I trust you guys and I trust you to make the right decisions and so I trust you on this, and we'll find out on some of the other things, but I don't think for a second, you'd make a decision that would put us in harm or in a bad spot.43:31 AW: And that to me was like, that was really gratifying even more so than... Yes, it was great to give financial rewards to people who had been with the company a long time and hopefully help propel them further in life, retirement, day-to-day living whatever that is. We had one team member that was like, "Man, I've been saving to buy a house, this puts me over the top so helping someone by a house out of that was awesome." We had more than a couple of people cry, very common, where they would just say, "Can you repeat that amount again?" They wanted to make sure that they heard it correctly.44:04 AW: Yeah, so that part was really cool, and that took a lot of weight off my shoulders for about 24 hours and then six days later was the announcement to our customers, which that one just based on mass was much harder. And I can say there again, I probably got, the email came directly from me, and I probably had about 30 to 40 replies were "Congrats, couldn't happen to a nicer group. We're excited for you guys, we're excited you're staying on board." Things like that, just very supportive, right? They're working for the same things in their own business, and they totally took a stance of instead of "Oh, how might this impact me?" They're just like, "I celebrate you as an entrepreneur and as a business person. That was really cool.44:47 DS: Nice, yeah, there wasn't a single customer that was concerned about it, or...44:52 AW: No, we totally did. So funny enough, after I send it, the first email I get, 10 seconds later, I get a reply that's just a one-line "Cancel my account right now... "45:02 DS: Are you kidding me? As a joke, right? [chuckle]45:05 AW: No, not a joke and the thing was, the company Alpine Software Group had already purchased our competitor GradeUs. This cust...45:14 DS: Oh, and then they switched? 45:16 AW: S2: Yes, this customer was with grade us didn't like them switched to us, so they immediately had the opinion that we were gonna merge all those things, even though all of our messaging said, we're staying separate companies, there will be efficiencies that we will have together, but we're staying different brands, our solutions have variances, teams like all that kind of stuff. But, yeah, and so, in getting that the first 10 seconds I was like, "Am I might about to get 1000 more of these", right? I was like, "Oh my gosh." yeah.45:43 DS: And so did you talk him out of it or did he cancel? 45:46 AW: I asked her, tell me why you feel this way. I tried to... I don't wanna lose you. Let me help reinforce this, what else can I do. And there really wasn't any... At the end after three or four emails I was like, alright, I don't need to take up more of your time. I understand you're very firm in where you are. If you change your mind, please do. I would love the opportunity to show you. We're being honest in our word. But that one was a lost cause and there was, I probably had three or four other emails with some concern, and things like that. But again, the overwhelming and with thousands, you're going to have that, you're absolutely going to have that.46:22 DS: Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I'm surprised that any of that happened, I don't know, it's just a weird response, in my opinion.46:30 AW: Yeah. Well, I mean be prepared for anything when you email thousands of people. [chuckle]46:35 DS: Yeah, totally.46:35 AW: Yeah. So interesting enough, on the one thing I do wanna share. So when everything comes to a close, there's basically a closing call, right, and it's a handful of minutes call with everyone from each side, legal on each side, those of owning the process on each side, and it's each side saying like, yep, we have all of our paperwork, we have everything we're in agreement. Same for this side, yep, we have everything, we're in agreement. And it's basically just to get a verbal from everyone, the okay to release the wire transfers and to release the funds to the shareholders. So, I had long planned, even some of this I had do plan around, I had a five-day family vacation that had been planned forever. And let's just say before this, I had been working crazy hours, like 80 hour weeks, super stressed, traveling a ton. I had like eight weeks straight on the road and I had let Alpine Software Group, know hey, when it comes to this date on November first, I'm on a plane with my family and this has to wrap before then, 'cause I'm gonna be on a time-out. Like I've been absent for so many reasons, and so based on the way things fall I'm like, "Okay I can do the call that morning before we get on the plane or whatever. I was hoping in a perfect world, my wife and I and our four kids will be through security. I'll go to the Delta sky Club, I'll take the call, all will be great, I'll come back and hug the family and we'll get on our flight and head off to sunny San Diego.48:06 AW: Well, We were behind, of course right, four kids, everyone packed, getting out the door. So, literally when the time comes for this call at 10:00 or 10:30, I can't remember which one it was, but I'm in line at TSA, and we are three away from getting our IDs scanned and boarding pass scan to go through X-ray and the scanner so I just tell my wife, you go with the kids. I have to make the call right now. I step back a few people in line and I like... I take the call for this to close the deal in the line of TSA. So I will never ever forget that was the... Again I was like super stressed about it and then it ended up being all of a two-minute call and just hung up and went and rejoined the family in the x-ray line, and we were off.48:56 DS: That's it.48:56 AW: Yeah.48:57 DS: Yeah, you know, you're not even supposed to be on your phone when you're at the TSA I think. Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't get tased. You're like in the middle of the call and someone comes in and tases you.49:05 AW: I'm like, yes, no and the deal is off, right? 49:09 DS: Deal is off, yeah. You didn't finish the call.49:13 AW: Interesting enough, right. A lot of founders, shareholders, would talk about right, it's that, it's real when the wire transfer hits your account. Well, funny story, for me there. Mine was going to my investment bank, so it had to hop a couple of banks and basically my wire got stuck at one of the banks and so my money didn't hit for another like four to five days, I had to make calls on it, I had to help them track it down through routing numbers. It was very non-climactic and all right, where it's like some of the other guys are within an hour or two were like, I got it, yeah, and whatever else.49:50 DS: Popping champagne and you're trying to find your money.49:53 AW: And I didn't even tell them any of that. This is probably the first time I'm sharing this out loud where it's just like after a day or two, I was like, what's going on, and then my investment bank helped track that down and everything else, but it was very anti-climactic where as finally where I could open the app and see the money was there and it was just like, I think we were sitting out on the patio already having a drink at the hotel in San Diego right on the beach and I just go, "Hey my money did show up." and we're just like cheers, so. [chuckle]50:21 DS: Yeah, yeah, awesome, that's funny. I feel like, you're stressing about when is my money gonna show up, but.50:29 AW: Yeah, so anyway all's well that ends well.50:32 DS: It all worked out, all worked out.50:34 AW: It did.50:35 DS: So yeah, now what's next, what do we gonna talk about next podcast? 50:37 AW: Yeah, part three, I wanna dive into some of the transition things right and share. There's some interesting aspects emotionally going from, you run this race, you run the race to the finish line and then you're kinda like what's my new motivation? It's like you always had this carrot of your equity and selling the business and getting this exit, and outcome. And for me in staying with the company I definitely think there are some things where it took me the last couple of months at the end of the year to kind of refocus, get my personal life back in order. I've been working so crazy and you're almost manic to a certain sense and it's like finding time to get yourself back to normal...51:23 AW: I'm helping the team map out things. There's some things that Alpine Software Group did that were really helpful in bringing our team together and I wanna talk about some of those, and then just helping the business not get too distracted. Because that caused a lot of distraction and a lot of...51:41 DS: Slowdown.51:41 AW: Uneasiness. Yeah, and it's like how do you get things calibrated back to the cadence where you were before or even better? And so I definitely wanna share what that's looked like for us 90 days after closing. And there's definitely...51:57 DS: Great.51:58 AW: Yeah, some interesting things to talk about there.52:00 DS: Man, such a great, interesting process, the whole thing. I really love all three of these episodes and I'm really looking forward to the next one. I have a lot of questions. And that whole feeling like when you sell your company, how does it change? There's so many things to think about, so many new details to incorporate into your company culture and your processes. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to that.52:19 AW: I wish truthfully, and this has been great to talk about this and it forces me to think about some of it and put it on paper in our notes to talk about these angles, but I really wish we could have done a reality show out of it.52:33 DS: Yeah, that'd be amazing.52:34 AW: Yeah, I would have loved to see a more accurate view of even how I was during this. It's because I truly don't even know. My wife, Marcy, has definitely provided me some insight and man, she was amazing. She got that I needed so much room to operate and I was so stressed and she did everything she could to keep me grounded and centered. And this isn't the world. It's not everything and everything else, but then also give me the room to go work crazy and not be there at kids' events and things like that because I'm working on all of these things nonstop. So it would definitely, it would be interesting to be able to look at it from the outside and see how you were and be like, "Do I recognize myself in that moment? What I see, what I see now, does that match up with what I thought I felt at that moment?" That would be really interesting.53:28 DS: Yeah, you just need the cameras following you through the whole process and then you could go back and review it, a little self-reflection.53:34 AW: Yeah, I don't think I'd be as dramatic as The Real Housewives of whatever city you choose to watch but I probably had a moment or two [chuckle] where it's like, "Alright, Aaron's off the rails a little bit" and then either Marcy or talking to one of our partners would definitely help bring me back to where things were, so.53:51 DS: Yeah, the real entrepreneurs of Minneapolis.[laughter]53:57 AW: Awesome, missed opportunity. If I ever get to do this again, I am calling the networks and being like, "Alright, let's do this." Yeah, here's a totally different reality show you need to make happen, so.54:08 DS: Sounds like it would be great. That would be an amazing show actually, but there'd be all these things you can and can't say. But you can all cut, edit it all out. Put it on the cutting room floor.54:17 AW: Yeah, no, absolutely.54:19 DS: I'm surprised that show doesn't exist. Shark Tank people should do that.54:23 AW: Let's get to a different part of things. Alright, well with that we should probably wrap, man. We are pushing in the hour but hopefully everyone listening found this to be extremely beneficial. Thank you for letting me share a pretty amazing chapter out of my business story. That's for sure.54:41 DS: Thanks so much for sharing it. I feel like, man, these episodes are so valuable. I think that for me personally hearing all of these information, it's so useful. It's great to be able to wrap my head around all of these different things and think about all the different things you have to think about when you're selling your company. So I love these episodes and that I hope that the audience is liking them too.55:03 AW: I can easily say I wish I would have had even more resources while going into it, during it, all of those things. So that's definitely my goal is to help others as they go into this, just have some framework. And obviously every acquisition can be so different. I'm just sharing what it looked like for us but I think some of the things are staples and are true and maybe they're just some of the things on what to look out for, what to pay attention to, how to make good choices, can be beneficial.55:33 DS: Yep, yeah, really good, alright, Aaron.55:35 AW: Well, with that episode 17 is a wrap. We will have part three of the Gather Up Acquisition coming up a few weeks down the line. Do you wanna remind people? I do wanna say thanks, man. I had a couple people reach out to me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and send me messages and just say, "Hey, thanks for sharing your story, really enjoying part one of it. Looking forward to part two," so thanks to those of you that took that time. If any of you feel compelled, we would love if you took the time to give us a review on iTunes. Help make our podcast as visible as possible or any sharing of it socially via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, wherever you're hanging out, passing it along inside of some of the groups you might be, Slack groups, or Mastermind groups, or SAS groups you're a part of if you think there's anyone that might benefit from this. Definitely appreciate you circulating it and bringing more listeners to what Darren and I share on a monthly basis.56:32 DS: Yes, please.56:33 AW: Alright, with that, take care, everybody and we'll talk to you soon.56:37 DS: Alright, thanks, Aaron. See you.56:37 AW: See you, Darren.56:38 DS: See you next time. Bye.[OUTRO music]

Helpful links from the episode: Official Press Release from Alpine Software Group (ASG) Acquisition announcement and interview on Search Engine Land  Alpine Software Group   FULL SHOW NOTES[ INTRO music]00:09 Aaron Weiche: Episode 16: Selling GatherUp - Part 1, The Why.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.00:41 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture, I'm Aaron.00:44 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:45 AW: And we are back in the year of 2020 after finishing off 2019 and catching a little bit of downtime. I know I probably got even more than I normally would with Christmas on a Wednesday, New Year's Day on a Wednesday. It was a nice slow two weeks for me. How about you, Darren? 01:06 DS: Super slow. I touched in a little bit here and there, but I mostly took like a full solid two weeks off over Christmas up until January 2nd, so that was nice. Good little break, spent some time with family, get my mind off work for a while.01:19 AW: It's one of those great... Like you can count on being able to recharge at the end of the year, because everyone wants to do the same thing.01:27 DS: Yeah.[chuckle]01:28 AW: So, email is quiet, phone is quiet, text is quiet.01:32 DS: Wonderful.01:33 AW: I still look forward to it in the last couple of days where it's just like you gotta start getting your mind back in the game and ready to roll, and launch the new year off to a fast start.01:42 DS: Yeah, it took me about a week to ramp up, too. I felt like my first week back, I was a bit sluggish, not firing on all cylinders, but I don't know, back in it now, got lots to do, I'm trying to time block and plan my week, and plan my day, and really get as much done as possible. So, I'm feeling productive now.02:00 AW: You're ready to be the most efficient you for 2020.02:02 DS: Exactly.02:02 AW: Alright, so as we had teased at in our last episode to close out the year, the big news on my side of things is we announced, I think the public announcement was November 14th from our press release, but as of November 1st, 2019 GatherUp was acquired.02:22 DS: It's huge.02:23 AW: Yeah, big news. The finish line you're gunning for, and, yeah, a million different thoughts. And as you and I talked about how best to talk about this, and share things, and just try to put as much out there, I really felt like at least two, and I think we've arrived at now, we're probably gonna do three episodes on this, because there is so much ground to cover.02:49 DS: For sure.02:50 AW: So, and looking at this today, we wanna focus on kind of the why, and almost some of this is pre-sale, and then early once you get an offer, and things like that. And the second episode, we will look at what are all those pieces of that 90-day or 120-day window, whatever the deal timeline looks like, and how all that works out and what to expect, at least what I saw in our scenario and things like that. And then doing the third part on post-transaction, 'cause when everything closes, and especially in our case where I stayed on as CEO, one of our other founders, Mike Blumenthal stayed on, and then basically our entire staff stayed on. You just have a ton of logistics work around press releases and customer communication, and internal things, and employees, and so many other things that that post-sale transition, if you are staying on with whose ever purchased you, boys, it's its own episode. There is a laundry list of things. So...03:57 DS: Yeah, I'm really interested in that process, like all the different moving parts, and how you have to answer to different people now, and how do your meetings go, and how often do you talk to them, and what kind of say do they have. So I'm looking forward to discussing that in part three.04:09 AW: So before we get all the way to that, we have to get a part one done first. And maybe one of the first things that I can probably offer up that a lot of people have asked me is just like, "Were you guys always looking to sell?" And the answer from that is, yes, that was always part of starting a SaaS company, we were both doing something that we loved, but we also wanted to get it to a certain point and really looked at a sale, at a successful acquisition as being what we wanted to achieve. A time where we could take money off the table and also look at the company having its next phase with some different parameters on it. So, that's one thing I've been asked in general a lot and the answer is absolutely. It wasn't like, "Oh, yeah, we didn't know this was possible," or, "never thought about it." Like we definitely had talks over the years on: Are we tracking the right way? Are we valuable? Who might buy us? All of those kind of things with it.05:15 DS: Yeah, that's interesting, 'cause like, I mean, my company was never sort of... That wasn't a thought when I started my company, it's kind of just evolved into a company that is a potential acquisition target for some of these companies. And so, I'm looking at it now more thinking about that as a potential exit and thinking about all the things I would need to have in place for that if I did decide to sell, but it's not necessarily the end goal for me. Like I will continue to grow the company, but let's say the company is doing $50 million a year in revenue, and I'm happy, and things are going well, and I have good leadership that's running things, it's like, "Well, maybe I don't sell," right? So, it's one of the things that I kind of bat back and forth, I keep looking at it from multiple perspectives, and I guess we'll see as we grow.06:00 AW: We had a plan B, like that that we brought to the table that we're like, "Listen, if we reach this level of revenue and this level of profit margin, then maybe our best move at that stage is profit-sharing and spreading that success around, and using that to build a very sustainable long term." So it wasn't always, it wasn't sell or bust, but that definitely was the leading one, especially from the early days, that was the big motivator, the carrot that was out there for us.06:00 DS: Yeah. Like how often were people approaching you and saying, "Hey, would you like... We're interested in your company, can we have some talks about potential acquisition?" Was this happening on like a monthly basis for you, once a quarter kind of thing, every week? I don't know.06:00 AW: Somewhere probably between weekly and monthly. And it's one of those where it just kinda maybe about two years ago now is where it first started to pop up. I think we had reached some amount of maturity. We were there for a couple of years. Some of the work we're doing was a little bit more visible. And keep in mind, it was... You start getting this interaction from a few different things. Some might be potential acquirers. Some are investors with different capital type programs from venture capital and things like that, but the way I look at it is, it's outside parties being interested in taking part in your growth, whether they end up owning all of your growth or they wanna give you some money and get a percentage to help fuel it or provide some services, whatever that might be. But it definitely, a couple of years ago, it definitely escalated.07:45 DS: Sure, and did you have a process in place where... How to handle these leads coming in, did you have a spec sheet that you would just give them and be like, "Alright, here's some details." 'Cause I've found... I gotten into the conversation a couple of times, they could be a real time suck. And so, did you make... Did you have a specific point around how you would handle these so that they didn't end up taking so much time? 'Cause you can go down a rabbit hole with them and then it doesn't turn into anything.08:10 AW: Yeah, we really didn't have a hard and fast rule on it. And for a while, it was Don Campbell and Mike Blumenthal, two of the three original founders. They handled the majority of those calls. I can't speak to how that looked for them or what that was like. As I transitioned in and started being more at the forefront of some of those, and then somewhat all through me. A lot of times I was really looking at, who is it that's making the reach out? It's usually not too hard to figure out, "Is this their business development rep? Is this someone low-ranking a very form-templated email, look into their company, what else is in their portfolio? How much can you learn about them online?" things like that, because you definitely can't take every call or meeting that's out there. I think you'd be so distracted that it just wouldn't be healthy. But I do think it's really important to build some framework, make some determinations, and take some of them. Because there's so many aspects to those conversations and you learn a lot by what do they ask you? What are they looking for? If it's somebody that's done these acquisitions, what's important to them? Why are they interested in you? Just kind of all of those pieces. So I just really consider it to be good practice. And to your question, you need to be smart about it, but just like anything, if you're gonna be decent at it, you definitely should take as many practice shots.09:38 DS: Did you consider taking funding at all? Any leads that came in, you'd be like, they are trying to offer you some kind of funding. Did you ever consider that or you mostly just shot those conversations down? 09:47 AW: Yeah, as a team, as a cohesive unit, the four of us that were the main shareholders, the answer to that was no. I think at different times there definitely was a person who... Or two, within the four of us that would say, "We should consider this" and things like that, and then we would just end up in conversations of like, "Okay, if we did, what would we do with that?" Right? Like, what's our plan, that money is the obstacle right now, that's holding us back. And I never felt, just because at the stage of the company, we were still really honing in on our fit and our value and our messaging and so many other things, I never once felt confident that like, "Oh, money is the problem right now. And if we just had more of that, we could take this... We could take a million-dollar investment and turn it into $5 million of run rate in two years." So, from that side, yes, the conversation popped up, but it really didn't go anywhere fast.10:44 DS: Yeah, I always feel the same way. It's like, extra money would allow me to hire a few more developers and maybe develop a bit faster, but it's not worth trading any equity for, that's generally how I end up, every time I think about it and consider it, I'm like, "Yeah no, I don't need to."11:00 AW: Yeah, it's important to understand the math on all that for you, too. It's like "Okay, for where we are and we're this, and if we got an offer and it's this multiple and it looks like this, here's what we would get out of it, and if we took funding and here's how the cap table changed and our ownership, well now to get that same number, we would need this. What's the likelihood and what's the time to get us there, and what actually does that give us?" So, there's a lot of different things but I can say even for myself, it was just operating from a position of debt where you were gonna take money and have a burn rate, that your sales weren't gonna match. And yeah, I get that's the way of the software world, and everything else, but it just wasn't a scenario I was most comfortable in, I'm more interested in bootstrapping and self-funding.11:48 DS: I was wondering like... Okay, so you had all these different suitors coming in, different people and so, how did you arrive at deciding that the company that ended up acquiring GatherUp, that this is the one you wanted to work with? 12:02 AW: Yeah, so early on, it was probably about two years ago, when we got our first bonafide offer, where actually written down, "Here's an offer, here's what we're thinking" and that first offer had three different components to it. Part of the offer was cash, part of the offer was seller financing. So we'd be paid once we went into that company and then that company was acquired and then another portion was stock within that company. So as it grew and then as it achieved an exit, then we'd be paid off. And while that offer wasn't the best obviously, we didn't go with that offer. What it did make us do is kinda put some exercises in place to start talking about what does an offer look like, that we would say yes to? 12:52 AW: So, when we received that offer, we took it very seriously, we had conversations and then what I did is just built a spreadsheet kinda pertaining to these three columns, but really more important, I looked at it like, "Alright, what do each of our four main shareholders, what do we want right now in cash and what do we wanna basically get chips to bet on the future of the next company? And so within that, each person got to kind of fill out what that looked like for them, and it really... It allowed us to have a very good numerical conversation and in that case, the easy takeaway was from what that offer was, we needed...13:34 AW: And an offer twice as high, like, otherwise how it factored out, we weren't gonna be able to say yes to it. And then, it also started outlining what was worth more to people based on their engagement, their career arc, things like that. Did they want more right now, or did they wanna be able to have chips to bet on something else on a future endeavor with the company that would acquire us? 13:58 DS: I think that's really smart. Did you find a framework or read some blog posts on people, other founders that had kind of done a similar process? Or did you just kind of come up with that on your own? Or were you like, "We're gonna sell. These are the factors that we need to think about," and you just sort of put it together? 14:14 AW:  I don't think it was a truly unique idea. I think, I had probably came across it because once that happens, yeah, you go into Google search overdrive on acquisitions, and you're trying to... Even though I was already listening to podcasts about it and things like that, I tried to find like every last piece. And so, I don't... I can't state directly, like, "Here's where I found it or whatever else," but it definitely wasn't an original idea. But however I took it in, it easily made me realize like, "We each need to understand each other's expectations. And then we need to see cumulatively, how do those add up to something that we would all say yes to or have a no-brainer." And it really was, it was a great exercise just to be able to see everybody's exact thoughts numerically, which is so important in an offer like that.15:06 DS: It is kind of amazing. I don't know how many times I've heard about companies totally falling apart because founders, partners, they have a falling out. They stopped stop getting along, they have different visions, but GatherUp has always felt from the outside looking in, so solid. The four of you guys have always been so... You just worked so well together, it always seemed to me. And these kinds of exercises, when I hear about them, you're like, "Okay, let's get everyone's thoughts on this. And let's collaborate on it." It just feels like you have a really great thing there.15:38 AW: I think we were always have been pretty solid at communication. I mean, in all honesty, we definitely had things like any family would, you have things to get sorted out and squabbles or irritants, and things like that. And we even had some transitions, right? Because we did have... Don as a main founder kind of rolled off when I took over as CEO. And I think, his desire to be in the day-to-day and exactly what his role looked like had kind of changed in his mind and needed something different. And so, we definitely had those ebbs and flows. But yeah, absolutely we all valued communication, and all very respectful of each other with how they viewed it or where they were looking at it. And at the end of the day, even if you didn't agree, you would be like, "All right, well, I know how they feel or I know how they look at it. So we're gonna keep that in mind or respect that it's just different than ourselves, but keep plugging ahead on what our mission is."16:34 DS: Yeah, well, so, what's the name of the company that bought you again? 16:40 AW: Alpine Software Group. So it's kind of a... Yeah, so it's kind of a few levels down. It's a private equity firm. At the top is Alpine investors. Then they have an arm that's called Alpine Software Group that has purchased over 20 software companies in the last handful of years. And then, inside of that, we're now nested in a group called ASG MarTech, so they own seven other marketing technologies. They've acquired a number within the reputation space, they own one of our competitors, as well, Grade.us, and that really, that gave us a lot of comfort when we got into that. And I guess, one thing before we get too far forward, I wanna point out, obviously two years ago, those offers that we got that offer, we drummed up another one at the time, which was even like less and a total waste of time from what it was, the way they structured it.17:37 AW: And it made it really easy for us to say no to those offers, even though the one, the one definitely was intriguing even though the numbers didn't work, there were future possibilities with it, they were very intriguing. So it was a very polite, like, "Let's stay in touch. Do whatever else. That's just not the right fit. We're gonna keep going on on where we're at." But in saying no to that, and putting our heads back down, it definitely made us think past even where we figured out some of the numerical things. It really allowed us to have a lot of conversations too on what we were looking for in an acquirer. So when we got, when these conversations started happening with Alpine Software Group, we really kind of already had defined what are the important core factors to us that these are the high level checkmarks that have to be checked off for us to wanna do a deal.18:31 DS: Right. Yeah, that's smart. I know I'll have to think about that when it, if it ever gets that way to me, or for me and my company. Like, "What are the things that I'm really looking for in whoever is gonna acquire Whitespark?"18:42 AW: Yeah, 'cause it's far more like it... Yes, obviously to get an exit and to take money off the table, that is absolutely something that you want. But that's the money's not all of it. It's not everything.18:54 DS: Totally, yeah. I'm very interested in, what will my life look like in one, two, five years after selling? Because I'm really happy with my life now, right? So will that make my life better? Or will it make my life worse? And what about the lives of my employees? Right? So those are the things that I'm really focused on when it comes to thinking about what it would take for me to sell.19:16 AW: Yeah. And when we arrived at kind of three main pillars. One is someone that would help us grow faster than what we've been growing on our own. And we've had great steady growth year over year. It's what made us attractive for an acquisition and everything else. But we would have to look at them and feel like, "Yeah, that here's why we feel they would based on process, knowledge, experience, the combination of those things and everything else. So that was one. The second was just as you alluded to, is like, "Who is gonna give our team a future?" Right? Both individually and as a whole. Because we are all, we're very lockstep in, right? 20:00 AW: When you build a bootstrap business, and especially your early employees, there's so much hustle that goes into things and you're just scrapping away all the time and you get a very tight unit, you're very dependent on each other, you've shared a lot of ups and downs, all of those things, like you care about them deeply and to be able to be like, "Oh sweet, we'll get this win. And there's four of us, or six of us that are celebrating...20:20 DS: Yeah, it's all right.20:21 AW: While there's another 10, 15 or 20 that are now in a really tough spot, that wouldn't have been a win, that wouldn't have sat well with us personally.20:31 DS: Everybody needs to celebrate.20:33 AW: Yup. And then, the last piece is finding a partner that was still going to champion and go along with what our vision is. We felt really strong about that and both Mike Blumenthal and I knew we were likely gonna stay on board and continue on, so we wanted to be able to... Because we love the product, we love what we're doing, we love working together, and so we wanted the opportunity to be able to continue that and not have that come to a halt, that this transitions and now they're like, "Nope, we're gonna do something different," whether it's branding name, focus, folding it into something else, or all of those pieces, we wanted to protect that and make sure that the product had a future and the vision had a future as well, so those were like our main three things. And obviously to do this, our acquire, all of these boxes were checked off course.21:23 DS: Did you have... Did you have like a three times, eight times the valuation evaluation number, or you just you had to know that the number was worth it? 21:31 AW: Yeah, it wasn't... It wasn't so much the multiplier, but from going back through that exercise, we definitely had... We definitely knew a number that then it was it's just like, "Okay, if it's structured this way and it hits this number, it'll definitely be in play." And even with Alpine software group, we had had a number, I think we had had three or four conversations over maybe a year's time, where they would just check in with us see how we're doing and we would talk and see how they were are seeing the market and things like that. And it was after the third or fourth call as that came to an end, where they just said, "Okay, We're serious, we would like to make a move with you and here's the things we would need to be able to turn around and make a pretty quick verbal offer to see if this is a conversation worth taking somewhere."22:22 DS: Yeah, and was it... Did it feel low-balled or was there a bit of back and forth negotiation? 22:25 AW: Yeah, it definitely wasn't low-balled. They made an offer that absolutely grabbed our attention. Our final ended up a little bit higher than where that initial conversation was just from when we went, looked and felt about the value and our future and where we are were positioned in our market and things like that, but it was... They were extremely, extremely fair negotiators. You hear... You definitely prepare yourself for a lot of things in this because you hear negotiation nightmares and clawbacks and how things are treated and what the deal deals is anchored on. And I really felt like these they represented themselves as caring about the founders and really just being focused on the deal and the outcome being successful. And I can say, hands-down, Alpine ASG did just a great job of that. I never felt like, "Oh, they're sticking it to us, or they're digging their heels in or whatever else." It was very solid from that standpoint.23:26 DS: You have had mentioned something that's interesting to me. You said it was a series of conversations over a period of a year, and I'm curious to hear your tips. How do you manage those from the initial conversation? If you are a company that wants to sell, how do you handle each one of those conversations? What are some things like, to not do, you don't wanna turn them off? How do you keep them interested enough, even if it's not the time to sell? 23:52 AW: Yeah, for me it was, it was just being genuine to what we were doing. I was insanely confident in what we were doing and where we are were going and pumped about it. It was like, "I'm living and breathing the brand and evangelizing it, and I feel like we have all these things going for us," so when we'd have these conversations, those are the things that I'm pointing out. And I think in a roundabout way, I really wasn't trying to position it, but I would think that the confidence, the things we were harping having, some of the areas that we were telling them the ballparks were in numerically and things like that, that's what they... That's what made them more Interested. It's like dating someone, developing a relationship, anything else, the more you hear the kind of things that you're attracted to or intrigue you and you have that, the better off it can be. So, yeah, to me, it was like just being genuine, and I wasn't trying to have the conversation to sell the business either. I was having the conversation like, "Oh, you're interested in how we run and what our future looks like, and what we're excited about? Sweet, yeah, let's spend 20-30 minutes and talk about that. I'm totally happy to share that," without, "I need there to be an outcome of this conversation." Like, "You're gonna make me an offer or you're gonna buy us or any of those kind of things."25:09 DS: Did you ever feel guarded with information sharing, knowing specifically that they already own a competitor? Wasn't that like numbers and processes and all the that stuff? 25:19 AW: Yes, yes.25:20 DS: 'Cause this is what they wanna know. "We're not gonna be interested in buying your businesses unless we know what your growth rate is, your numbers are," so did you not feel nervous about sharing that? 25:27 AW: Yes. So I guess, it kind of went... I don't believe in the Colonel Sanders recipe that you need it guarded and in the vault, and only one person knows how to make it that way. I believe in like, "You do you. Be confident in the path that you're going." GatherUp has a ton of competitors. Some of those competitors have taken funding that was nearly 10X our revenue and that was their funding for them to start off with.25:55 DS: Yeah exactly.25:56 AW: So when you have those things, I felt more like be proud of what we've built. Embrace it. Don't try to be something you're not, because eventually, when you get, when you get to an offer anyway, you're gonna need to hand over P&Ls, and whatever else. They're gonna see your numbers really exactly and they're gonna see what's beautiful about you, and they're gonna see your warts or scars or any of those other things in your financial trends. But the one thing that was a little tricky trickier about it was the fact that they already owned a competitor of ours, so that did make me a little bit more guarded in some ways.26:32 AW: But it also, what the other... It made it easier because we were able to dig in and see like, "All right, well, let's talk to a how that since you own them. What has growth been like? How has this gone? Those kind of things. And what they were able to do with our competitor gave us a lot of confidence. Like, "Wow, they know our business really well, they understand what our value is, they've had great success with how they've grown that. So, that feels like a really good fit." That checked off our first pillar of, will we grow faster with these guys than on our own? 27:01 DS: I was just wondering what the typical advice is. Do you share your numbers on the first call or do you wait for date number three? 27:11 AW: Yeah, and I don't know if I have an... I mean, I don't know if I would right away, but man, it just... I was going off gut with so many of these, but I definitely... I'm not one of those that is worried that, "Boy, if they know this about us," Like, "Now we're just gonna be in a horrible spot if they know our revenue or our churn or any of these things." Like, "Now our success is gonna go away," because I've never felt like any of our success has anything to do with who our competitors are, anyway. We're trying to do what we do best.27:42 DS: Yep. That's a good way of looking at it.27:44 AW: So, I... Yeah. I can definitely see why you can feel that way. But at some point, if somebody's serious you gotta have some substance to the conversation and it has to involve numbers, so I would be prepared for that. And if anything, you should know those numbers, right? If they ask you things like that, you should... There's a set of numbers you should absolutely know and be able to put in front of them or ballpark or say, "Yep, we're above this." So, you don't have to give the exacts exact to the dollar amount but you can easily say, like, "Hey, here's where we are right now. We're in this range."28:16 DS: Sure. "This is our revenue, this is our rough profitability, this is our churn." Yeah.28:20 AW: Yeah.28:21 DS: Yeah, all right, cool. What else? 28:25 AW: Boy, there's so much...28:27 DS: I know.28:27 AW: That you have to take in. On the prep side, some of the things that make your life a lot easier is just, and you kind of weigh this out, 'cause you don't wanna do too many things only for the purpose of possibly selling, but you do have to look at and say, "Do we have the right processes? Do we have the right accounting practices? Is our tech squared away, legal documents, right?" All of these different things that when you are, if you get an offer, if you get a letter of intent, and then you kinda go into this discovery, negotiation phase to get to a purchase agreement, you wanna have your house in order. And the good news is we were kind of already on that path. I would say the timing of our offer, we were committed to being heads down for at least another year or two. We still had another financial goal line that we wanted to cross and then we said, "All right, when we get to this number, then we'll be a little bit more periscope up and we might even be seeking or trying to drum up offers or interest instead of them coming inbound."29:34 AW: So, when they kinda jumped into this, it did throw us off guard a little bit, but it was like, "All right, this is a real conversation, we've had a bunch of talks, and if we hand over these things, they're gonna give us a verbal offer that's a real number within days." So, it jump-started some of the things where we would have had to have even more things buttoned up, but to cut, and this is something that we can talk about in the next one, I feel like our company ended up being very polished, very buttoned up, the evaluation... There is was no surprises, really, within our process. We had a little bit of a document on the legal company formation side, a little blip, but our tech scans were they... We were told that was some of the cleanest that they've run across in their 20 acquisitions. We have a lot of very mature processes. We were a very well-oiled machine that had done a lot of things right early, because we are were wired to care about quality and process and we are were building for a longer haul. So, we had instituted those things more for the success of the company, less for being acquired. But man, did those come in handy when you really get into the fire of the middle ground of sorting out the position the company is in financially.30:52 DS: Yeah, did you have to hand all those things over in advance of the offer? Like, "Here's our full tech stack, here's our processes, here's all our accounting, here's our legal documents." Did you have to hand that over before you got the offer? 'Cause that feels, particularly, if you're giving that information to someone that owns your competitor.31:12 AW: Yep. Yeah, not in full, but I mean, we did have three or four things we needed to hand over, and one was our last year-and-a-half of our P&L. So, that's definitely very telling to see what your top line and the margin you're pulling down and everything else, but you get it, especially when you're talking about the kind of dollars that you're talking about. No one is going to make an offer without seeing something, right? It can't be totally based on vapor. Now, that said, not a lot as far as a few just real broad questions on tech stack, but nothing really digging into things like that. So, it really was just like three or four documents, items, and two or three of them really had to just deal with our P&L, our numbers a couple of different ways, things that we were are able to easily pull together in like a day, a day-and-a-half, and lob over to get the process started.32:10 DS: And then after that, was it, "Okay, cool, here's an offer pending an evaluation of your tech stack?" Was there anything pending in the offer? 32:17 AW: What basically takes place after you have a verbal... Then we went and met in person, shared a little bit more, they had questions, and they were very much like, "Share as much or as little as you want, but the more you share, the more concrete this is going to be." And we were very, very open within all of it that. I mean, transparency is kind of key to how we operate. So, that meeting wasn't very hard for us and after that, it is was then getting to the first formal piece and that's a letter of intent. So, the LOI is more of a smaller, kind of a precedes the purchase agreement and gives a high-level framework on dollar mount, or how it's arrived at, or what the multiple is, what are the inclusions, the process it's gonna go through, the timing, all of those pieces. And once you kinda get that squared away, that's kind of like the high-level rules of engagement that any big pieces you kinda want highlighted there. Then, once you sign that, then that's when you go into like, "Okay, now we're gonna embed this so we can do tech scans on your software, we wanna interview some of your customers...33:24 AW: We wanna see the financials 12 different ways. We want every piece of legal documentation. So you basically create this data room and you are sending, dozens if not hundreds of documents, anything legal you've ever done, NDAs, employee agreements, all those things, are all going into specific folders located in there for their team, and their lawyers and attorneys to be going through and doing checklists and see, "Are there any flags? Does this check-out? What's the impact? All of that."33:53 DS: Wow. What is the a tech scan? What do they do on your software? I'm curious about this, like, I wonder if my software would hold up to this tech scan.34:00 AW: Yeah, so a lot of it has to do with just looking at like, "Is this originally created code? Is this a lot of, piecemeal of other like open source solutions? Are you operating a number of things that you do or don't have licenses for or that you need licenses for?" So just yeah, a number of things with that where they are really trying to assess like, "Are there... What vulnerabilities do we have?" Not so much like a stress testing, or things like that, but just like, "What are the surprises? Has the team actually created this? Or is it a version of something that... Maybe they don't own certain pieces of it? And there is...34:42 DS: Yep. That make sense.34:43 AW: Yep, there's gonna be a cost to that and those kind of things. So it definitely...34:45 DS: Yeah, I get that.34:47 AW: Yeah, it definitely felt intimidating, but then, when you kind of hear how well you did after it, then you're both prideful and like, "Okay, yeah, that that wasn't as bad as we thought it was gonna be," but you definitely see the reasons why for it.35:00 DS: Yep. So they just had sent developers into your repository, and then did they dig through the code inside? 35:04 AW: No, so very much automated, so it's embedding things right into your production environment that start going through and doing scans. They've built proprietary software, they hire an outside vendor to do this audit.35:18 DS: Interesting.35:19 AW: So you put all that stuff in yep, and it goes through everything and then they come back and, just like a security scan. It's like, "All right, here's... We had no high-level items that were offended any of the things. There here was is a couple of mediums. Here there is was a couple smalls, really and... " With some of them, it's just like, "Okay, we found these things. Do you actually have licenses for these?"35:39 DS: Right, like libraries or something, right? Yeah.35:42 AW: Yup. Exactly. And then, this it is just showing like, "Yep, we have those licenses. We're good to go." Most of the small things just don't even matter. Any piece of software is gonna have these low level items that are out there.35:52 DS: Right, interesting. How long did it take from the LOI to closing everything up? 35:56 AW: Yeah, I wanna say it was right around four months for us. I think, the... Yeah, the original... Oh boy, I should rephrase... Maybe it wasn't even that long. I wanna say we were shooting for closer to 45 to 60 days, and maybe it stretched as far as 90. But I should have really looked that up before we talked to have the exact, but it was... We were aiming for a pretty tight turn. And yeah, once we got into it, you could kind of see a few things where were maybe it would maybe it wouldn't. But yeah, when we get into some of the process stuff, that's where I can kind of unlock how to view some of those things. I guess as a teaser, the easiest way I explain it is, it's like sprinting through a dark all black tunnel. And at the same time, you're thinking in your head like, "Boy, I hope a shovel doesn't hit me in the face right now." Because you just, I had never been through an acquisition. I had no idea, "What is a big deal? What's a showstopper? What's not?" You feel this intense pressure that everything matters.36:58 AW: And that's probably one of the hardest things is just the emotional drain that it puts on you during that time because you you want it to succeed, right? You're in that process to win out, and you become very invested and it's very emotional and very stressful and it's interesting.37:16 DS: How many hours did you personally put in, and how many hours did other members of your team have to put in? I'm just... What is the time investment to go from a letter of intent, to close? It sounded like you had to do a lot of stuff to make this happen.37:28 AW: Yeah, I wouldn't have it articulated for hours but I would definitely frame it up as it became somewhere between a second part-time to full-time job. Part-time in hours for the things you need to do, tracking down documentation, having meetings, having calls with your legal representation, partner call calls. So much communication, so many things to decide on, paperwork to review, all of those kind of things. And that was definitely like a part-time job on top of running the company. But then, just even like, I just had no mental space. It was like this was, it consumed my mind. I was checked-out at home, and thankfully, like, my wife was great about it. She got it. She was super supportive. She didn't make it any harder on me for me to be so mentally unavailable, but it does consume you. So I would will just say, yeah, I would plan on it being another full-time job on top of your full-time job of you're trying to run the company, be successful, hit numbers and hit goals because you feel like if we don't keep that progress up in this small window we're trying to close, then they're gonna say like, "All right, we don't wanna do the deal."38:40 DS: Yeah, exactly.38:42 AW: Yeah, it's like, do this amazing thing and also do this other amazing thing of getting the company sold, it's very intense.38:47 DS: Yeah, it's that's kind of expected you're gonna be putting in a lot of hours over those three, four months it takes to close the deal. It makes sense.38:54 AW: Yes. And just being as... Especially if your significant other, anything else, communicate to him or her like, "This is what to expect, this will take a lot out of me." But at the same time, try to find where you can carve out some time to still be human and a decent parent and a good spouse or friend or partner. I just think that's really important. I definitely could have done a better job of on it. And when I look back, I was like, argh, I would probably didn't need to be so consumed.39:23 DS: Sure. It's pretty hard not to be when you're in that position though, 'cause it... There's a lot on the line. This is high stakes at this point.39:23 AW: Yeah, that it definitely. And it's high stakes for yourself and your family and it's also high stakes for your partners and your employees. It's like you feel the weight of not wanting to disappoint or have something fall apart with everyone. And then you're like, you've got our CFO, like, man, I feel like, task wise, her list was five times heavier than mine.39:23 DS: Right. She has gotta gather all the docs and yeah.39:23 AW: Yep. All the docs, answering endless questions as they review financials. I mean, numbers of calls. We had one to two meetings in person where we were flying out there. And yeah, she, Barb, was amazing. Our CFO, she just did such, such a great job and... Yeah. I would... I would have... Wouldn't know what to do without everything that she did. I can't imagine if I didn't have that position in the company or I had to do all of that, it would have been crippling. I couldn't have run the company.40:23 DS: I don't have a CFO. I'm gonna have... So I basically I cannot sell until I get a CFO.[laughter]40:28 AW: Well, either that or you're gonna need someone to run the company while you're doing all of these things.40:33 DS: Yeah, totally. Yeah.40:33 AW: But yeah, the preparation of having everything, just having so many things in place and documented... Documentation galore, and having easy access and having it well organized is just so important.40:45 DS: Sure, what do you mean by that? What are the things that need to be documented? 40:49 AW: Yeah, so it can be everything from the original corporate structure, any of your tax filings, if you've brought on shareholders, any adjustments in the cap tables and pieces like that, 'cause I talk about every last agreement. What do your contracts look like? Are they iron-clad, what NDAs, what partner agreements, employee contracts, reimbursements, expenses... It's just this endless, anything you basically do, if you have a paper trail and you have good documentation and clarity and the order it that took place in and everything else, it's gonna make your life a lot easier than when you're trying to give verbal explanations to numbers or what something is or why it exists, especially if it's anything of value to them because they wanna retain that value. So if you had have an agreement with someone and it's just a handshake agreement, that could affect your value because you don't actually have it in writing, in a legal agreement with them that thing.41:44 DS: Yeah, they're looking for liabilities too. If we you don't have certain things in place, then that of a concern, right? 41:49 AW: Yep, absolutely.41:50 DS: Yeah. It makes sense.41:52 AW: All right, so here we are. We're already 45 minutes in, we could can probably do another 45 on this but...41:58 DS: Easy.42:00 AW: Yeah, I think to wrap it up, the high level things I hit on: One, have thoughts around this not just day dreams of things selling but think about the structure, what it would look like, take some of these calls and practice especially when you get your first couple, like pay attention to, what are they asking, what's important to them? And it's okay to even ask them early too, like, "What do you care about? What do you wanna see? What type of growth are you looking for? What's most important to you?" Interview them on the other side. Don't feel like it's all on you, and that's really helpful. The second, if you have partners, get yourselves on the same page so that... You're gonna need to spend your energy focus on communications with someone who's interested instead of internally squabbling or figuring it out or going in a 100 different directions.42:46 AW: And then, the last one, just as we were talking about, have your stuff in order. Until this process, I definitely looked at a lot of things of... All kinds of pieces of paperwork, legal documents, whatever else is nice to have. And after this, I'm like, "Now, I get it." If you're never gonna sell your company or you don't need to prove any of those things, yeah, maybe then you're back to and nice to have, not a big deal. But if you're gonna change hands and of possession, having documentation and paper on all of those things is so important and especially if you don't want something like that to ding the value that you're looking for out of your...43:20 DS: Yeah, it that makes great sense. I think, a lot of start-up founders, they get, we they were are up and running but they're not buttoning up all of the legal stuff, I know that we've been in that position for sure at Whitespark 15 years in, I'm much better at it now, but it's interesting to think about that if you're like, you wanna sell your company you've gotta have all of that stuff in place. You better do it right.43:40 AW: Yeah, 'cause they're buying all 15 years of it.43:42 DS: That's right. Exactly.[chuckle]43:45 AW: So all right man, well, awesome. I'll start getting some notes together on the next episode. We'll get this one posted hopefully we can find a quick turn to get into part two and start getting to some of the... More of the blocking and tackling and what took place inner in our process and things like that.44:03 DS: Yeah. It sounds awesome and hey, huge congratulations again to you and everyone else at GatherUp. Man, this is great, great news for everyone there, and I'm glad to hear that it went so well and I'm excited to hear more about it.44:14 AW: Thanks, totally appreciate your support, and you've done it in more ways than one. You've verbally supported us, you have socially supported us, you have financially supported us in being a customer so when we have thanked our customers, you're right in there with that and yeah, you can't do without them it's a team effort, that's for sure.44:32 DS: Yep, all right, well, until next time then.44:34 AW: All right, we will talk soon. Thanks everyone for listening and we'll see you on the next episode of the SaaS Venture. Take care.44:42 DS: Bye, everyone.[music]

FULL SHOW NOTES[music]00:08 Aaron Weiche: Episode 15, a big recap of 2019 and looking forward to 2020.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, I'm Aaron.00:45 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:47 AW: And we have made it to the end of another year. Just a couple of weeks away from turning over the calendar and Darren and I thought it would be fun to take a look back at 2019 as a whole. A year in which we started podcasting together. We got in... This is our 15th episode and a number of other things, and take a look at what's gone on in the calendar year for us and what we're looking forward to the next year.01:15 DS: Yeah, it sounds great. I think it's really good to look back, understand what we've learned over the past year, look at some of the challenges and our accomplishments, and look forward to 2020. It sounds like the future. Hey? 2020.01:30 AW: It is... It is an exciting year to talk about, right? 01:32 DS: Yeah.01:33 AW: Plenty of plays on words with having 2020 vision for the future whatever that might be.01:39 DS: Yeah, it's been a full year. Our first episode was recorded on January 15th. So it's been just exactly a year, we've been doing this thing.01:48 AW: Yeah.01:48 DS: Yep.01:48 AW: Wait was it like last December when we decided something that we had talked about months earlier, when we were like, "Alright, let's do this, let's get it going." And then we got all of the ducks in a row, and then just started hitting record on. I think we were hoping... I think I was hoping we'd maybe get past 20 episodes. But I'm also... Considering what we've both had going on this year, I also look at like, "Alright, 15 episodes. We at least got one in every month." We didn't do too shabby.02:19 DS: Yeah, more than one per month I think is alright. And, I don't know, 2020 is shaping up to be pretty busy too. But so... Maybe we can try to get a few more in next year.02:27 AW: Yeah... And looking at that, what are you takeaways from 15 episodes, a calendar year of a podcast, maybe you've listened back to a few of them. What's your feeling on what we've done with the SaaS Venture? 02:43 DS: Yeah, I think personally, for me, it's been really incredible to have... To carve out those moments where, "Okay, we know we're doing an episode on"... Let's say, support, or sales and to really like... Okay, before the podcast, I take some time to think about what are our challenges in sales, what are our accomplishments, what are the things that we're trying to do and just having that time to think about it the podcast has been really helpful for me to take that step back and think about it. And think about how do I wanna communicate what we're doing. And so, that's been really amazing as a driver of new learning and growth for my company. So the podcast has been really helpful for that. And then, of course, it's amazing just having the opportunity to chat with you once a month, plus. Because I think that that collaboration I have learnt do much from you through doing this podcast. It's just been... It's been wonderful. I'm really glad that we decided to do it. And it's been a super fun time.03:46 AW: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I've enjoyed getting your perspective on all of these different things. I also... Just the ability to talk out loud about some of these things is like... I don't know if it's therapeutic or just helpful to hear yourself say some of these things. But I've learned from stating them out loud and every now and then listening... I'll go and listen back, partly because I wanna... Alright, how can I be better? How often am I saying "umm" or "yeah"? 04:16 DS: Right, yeah.04:17 AW: Or repetitious words. But also just hearing my perspective, especially when I dive back into an episode from mid-summer or early on, and then just thinking, "Alright, is that the same way I still feel about it? Did my perspective change? Have I done something different with it after talking about it as a challenge, or looking how well we're doing with it?" Yeah, it's been so...04:42 DS: I've actually taken a number of things that we discuss on the podcast, and started implementing at the company. And it's been great. It's been... Everything is just... Feels like we're tightening up a lot of the areas that we were a little loose in and just constantly growing and improving. It's been really good.05:00 AW: Nice. Maybe... Just maybe some of our listeners have been able to do a little bit of that too. And I would say, if any of you have, if there's anything that we have sparked an idea or you took a piece of process or whatever else, man, I would love to hear from you on Twitter, email, through our website, thesaasventure.com, anything else. That would be really cool to talk about that or speak to anything that anyone's willing to share on a few SaaS Venture episodes.05:25 DS: Same. Yes please, feedback requested.05:28 AW: Yeah, alright. And just as my last thought with it is, it just... It gets into just how much, time is a commodity. There are so many times where we've wanted to record something, do whatever else... One of us has to slide because of whatever... I feel like we've done a really great job of being flexible with each other. We both had our moments we're like, "Yep, it's not gonna work for me today." We gotta push a couple of days or push next week. But yeah, making the time for it really is the hardest part. Once we're on, talking is easy, but just carving out an hour and saying, "Yep, I can make it work, I'll have some prep done." Any of that that that's the hard part.06:03 DS: Yeah, talking is definitely easy. Keeping it short and succinct is hard.06:08 AW: Yeah.[laughter]06:10 AW: Absolutely on that. Alright, outside of the podcast, and just since we last talked, spoke in November, what's new with you? What's going on in the day-to-day of Whitespark? 06:23 DS: What's going on? Let's see. Well, we've hired a lot of people recently. We transitioned our citation team through an in-house team, so we've been kind of busy with a lot of stuff around that over the last quarter.06:39 AW: What was behind the move to go from the outside team to internal? 06:44 DS: Well, control was a big part of it, so there were a lot of things that we wanted to do with our citation processes and our work that were not... It was harder to work with the third party on that. If we owned it completely, then we could do whatever we want, and we didn't have to try and convince the third party that this is the way things should be done, and so control over quality and control over specific things that we wanted to be tracking in the process was a big part of it. Also, heating up competition, I guess, in the space. So trying to be a bit more profitable and competitive that way has been a big driving factor for it as well.07:28 DS: And all of those things have been accomplished by taking it in-house. And so, I think that can happen with a lot of businesses where your partner with the third party, and then eventually, you're like, "It would just be so much better if we did this ourselves." And so, we eventually got to that point where we had to pull the trigger and do it, and it was tough. And we had a great relationship with our previous partner for citations for ages, but it was just time to have complete control over that.07:57 AW: Yeah, and then how has that transition been? 08:00 DS: It's been great. Yeah, so everything is going good. We're a little bit behind on orders, our capacity is a little bit low, and that's what's been driving the hiring, but it takes time to get people up to speed, right? We're having a little bit of a growing pain with orders being late, but mostly getting there. I'm pleased with the hiring process, and who we've been able to bring on. Upwork has been awesome, too. We just recently put a job out to Upwork, and so we're gonna use it as a training ground. So you do a project, and you get five people do that project, and the two that did the best job are the ones that are gonna get a full-time contract. I think Upwork has been a really helpful... Discovering that this year has been a big one.08:45 AW: Nice. Anything else? 08:47 DS: Anything else right now? Well, we're just plugging away at trying to finish up our platform, our new account system, so that's coming together so beautifully. I'm thrilled with it. I cannot wait to launch that in Q1. I'd like to push for January, but you know how software development goes, so it might be February, but it's really coming together. It's all of my dreams coming true, Aaron. I cannot wait to have this thing, it's gonna be amazing. And I'm also really thrilled about our rank tracker development. How that has... We basically rewrote the whole thing. And so now that we have this thing, we can iterate faster on, and we have a new guy working on it, too. So I'm excited about that.09:30 AW: Yeah, I know.09:31 DS: We got some great new processes in our support team like a new onboarding process that we just rolled out, which is, I think really helpful. And this actually... A lot of these ideas were somewhat driven from stuff we talked about on the podcast. And so, when we have someone sign up, we actually have a customer support person look at how they set up their campaign and look for any key things that they might have missed or made a mistake on, and then we proactively reach out to them. So we're doing that with every campaign. Anyone that signs up for a rank tracker campaign, we check it out. We watch how they're doing, because this is a huge thing for reducing churn.10:08 DS: If people are setting up their campaigns wrong, then they don't get the data, and then they cancel, and lots of times, they don't tell us. So by proactively looking at every single campaign that gets set up, we're catching that in advance and fixing it for them. They really appreciate us reaching out to them, and they're like, "Oh, thanks a lot. You fix up my campaign, now I get it." And so, that's really helpful to reduce churn. And so, I think that that's a really good initiative that we've started doing.10:37 AW: Yeah, that's awesome. I'll be excited to maybe hear the data or the results behind what that looks like 60-90 days from now. So it sounds really awesome.10:46 DS: That's all that's new for me. What's going on with you, I know you had some big news.10:51 AW: Yeah, well, since the last time we talked, it became public that GatherUp has been acquired.10:58 DS: Huge! 10:58 AW: Yeah, very huge. Roughly about four months in the background of the deal fully coming together from the signal that, between offer and all of those pieces and everything else. So definitely a very intense, daunting, unknown process. I haven't led a company being acquired before, so I kind of equate it to running a sprint through a pitch black tunnel, and part of you is kind of waiting to get hit in the head with a low beam or something else, and then when the other end shows up, it's just like daylight, and you shoot out the other side.11:41 DS: That's a great analogy.11:43 AW: Yeah, very, very interesting. I'm happy to be through it. Very grateful, thankful, excited about what's next. And not to go too far, you and I have already discussed with this that we're gonna do at least a couple of episodes about this in January, 'cause there is so much to break down with it. But I can say just the high level is one, we are interested in someone acquiring us that was gonna help us grow faster. We felt like the company buying us was gonna help us achieve that. We wanted our team to be able to stay intact, and we're able to accomplish that. And then the third is that we felt like we'd still have the right leeway and dedication to what our vision is for the product, and that was accomplished well. We got a very healthy, multiple and... Yeah, all those things are really good so...12:40 AW: A lot has gone in to that, and then once everything is kind of finalized there's so much of internal communication with your team, then with your clients, then the last step is kind of the public PR and that announcement stuff and that really kinda helps close that off and then I'm staying on the CEO, so then I have to dig right into a whole lot of transition work and that's really been my last 60 days and it'll be my next 60 days.13:06 DS: Unbelievable. It's kind of cool that in our first year of podcasting this has happened for you. It is such a goal I know for most SaaS company owners, is like that dream that one day you'll be acquired. And so it's gonna be amazing fodder for our next couple episodes so listeners stay tuned. We're gonna have some exciting episodes coming up.13:31 AW: Yes. That will be fun to re-cap and I don't even know I'm already at the point, so much was happening at the time. Man, am I even gonna be able to speak to all these aspects of whatever, but I think a lot of what I wanna just share is just some of the emotional journey through it and when you have... We had four main shareholders in the decision-making process and what that looks like and then just the hard part of understanding something that you haven't done before, but has just such high stakes attached to it. It's one thing when you're trying something new. You've never ice skated before and you're gonna go out there. It's another thing when there's some serious money involved and you're trying not to screw it up or have something go wrong or get the most out of it 'cause you can't go in resell the business again after selling it. It's a one-time deal so you really need to make sure you're getting things right.14:27 DS: I like that analogy too. You just walking out of the ice with the shaky legs, trying to get it figured out, and then eventually, you're skating.14:35 AW: Yeah, and there's no helmet for an acquisition and you kind of need it but, anyway. Well, we'll dive into a number of those things but yeah, just super grateful for what we've been able to accomplish, our team, our customers, all those things and looking forward to what 2020 is gonna look like.14:56 DS: Yeah, so besides the big accomplishment, the acquisition what else you looking back at 2019? What do you think were some of GatherUp's biggest accomplishment that you're most proud of? 15:05 AW: When I spend a few minutes thinking about this, one is first and foremost our team we really... I think we added 6 members in 2019 bringing our total to just a little over 20 and a lot of just really solid. We got some great hires, like our VP of Customer Success. One of our founders kind of rolled back and being a product manager and we brought on a new product manager, so that's a very key and an important role. I finally got my sales team hired, two sales people, and starting to catch a little bit with that, so definitely some really big hires and for the most part all these people just gelled really really well together as a team and being able to... We had our all company retreat in October, where everybody got together from our North American team. And then, a month and a half later, we were all together again because of the acquisition where our acquire flew everybody to Seattle where they're based so we all got to see each other again so yeah, that was a lot of fun to have that face time and we normally get it once a year. Team is a really big accomplishment. I'm proud of a lot of the features we're able to roll out. Text back or inbound SMS feature, our insights report that's powered by IBM Watson.16:36 DS: Yeah, those are huge.16:37 AW: Fundamentally, we put almost two years worth of work into really kind of rebuilding that the platform, with the theory of things that kind of started from a bottom up and we needed... We kind of finished finally getting to a top-down build with everything.16:55 DS: What do you mean by that? 16:57 AW: So, when GatherUp started, originally as GetFiveStars, the original build that the guys put together was really focused on single location small business and a lot of that was born out of... They hadn't worked with 200 or 500 or 5000 location company so they weren't able to see it through that lens, it was just something that they weren't aware of, and that was one area where that's where I had worked a lot and then when I got in and started selling to some of these larger ones, I could see how that was limited, so we really had to look at alright, how do we keep inching towards this and flip this upside down that instead of everything being built off the location, it's really built off the brand but filters all the way down to the location.17:47 DS: Right, right, right.17:49 AW: Yeah, so a lot of work into that and most of that is really all tied up so we had to do that in increments.17:55 DS: Yeah, we're in a similar position right now with the design and development of our platform and so I'm trying to think about it from both angles. I want it to be easy for a single location business to come in, but it also needs to accommodate the enterprise businesses and so I think we've been thinking about it from both angles as we developed this so should be good for us I'm excited.18:16 AW: Yeah.18:17 DS: Yeah.18:17 AW: Yeah, yep. Now, it's just really important 'cause in some parts, it's great victory and really exciting but I also know we had to burn a lot of dev cycles kind of redoing things. We were still finding wins and how we redid it and making it better, but at the same time there's certain pieces that if you do them right the first time their shelf life is much longer before you have to re-touch them or reconfigure, and then you can build more new things.18:46 DS: Yeah, that's an interesting topic for another episode. It's just that concept of burning dev cycles and how do you reduce that, reduce the burn so that you're actually developing cleaner, without so much waste. I feel like we often waste a lot of dev cycles at Whitespark. It'd be good to fix that.19:05 AW: Yeah, I often feel the same way. You're not alone.19:07 DS: Everyone that runs a software company, I think yeah.19:11 AW: And I'd say lastly, the one other big thing, making the Fortune 5000 list, it was really great. I know we touched on this in one of our other podcasts but if anything, it was just such a big accomplishment internally that really made our team feel like hey, we're much more than a startup. 'cause now you get to see yourself alongside, numerically with other companies and you realize alright, we're doing something quite exceptional here. We're making a list of very high growth, fast-growing companies and we're right in the middle of this list. We weren't 4999, we're in the low 2000s and I think that was really an eye-opener from our team that...19:55 AW: In a startup, new company, small software company, you're so heads-down and you don't get a lot of these legitimacy things that make you feel like oh no, we are for real and especially with employees, if they haven't been around that type of thing before, there's just this giant gap in how they view what we're doing compared to a giant software company like Salesforce or something like that.20:24 AW: So it was really great to get that and just see the pride of our team in that accomplishment and what they got out of it as far as self-value and reflecting on what they've helped achieve and it's something they could take to their friends and family and be like no, what I do is legit. Here's the very credible list that we're on. That was really cool.20:44 DS: Yeah, it's a really great badge to put on your company, put on your website. It's really probably helpful for trust and sales with new companies looking at you as an option and I really do get that piece where, that company morale, where it's just like "Yeah, we're legit. We're a for real company. Look at it, we made the Fortune 5000." I really get that. In Canada there isn't one so I couldn't apply for this Fortune 5000 but there's a Canadian list that I guess I could get on but you know, it's Canada.[laughter]21:18 DS: I'll do eventually.21:19 AW: Yeah. There's a list somewhere you can get on out there.21:22 DS: Yeah, sure, I'll try to get on one of those lists.21:24 AW: There you go. What about you? What's been the big accomplishments for yourself and for Whitespark? 21:29 DS: Yeah, I think I've touched on a couple of them before. The transition of the citation team I think has been a lot of work and a big accomplishment that's been good for the company so I'm really pleased with that. Our GMB management service has really, in my mind, been a massive success. I had this vision to build a really straightforward well-defined service, recurring service that would scale nicely and so far, that has proven to be very true and huge props to Ally who directs and runs that team. She's doing an amazing job of getting everything in place and getting the people trained and it's growing really nicely under her leadership and so I'm really pleased with that, really grateful for having Ally in that position. She's doing a great job.22:19 DS: But that team is growing. Like we're up to 60 clients now. We just put out another job posting so we'll have four people on that team now and it's growing at a rate of 10 to 15 clients per month and then, it just has this potential to explode and with that rate, I expect to be at around 200 plus clients by the end of 2020.22:43 DS: So it's growing beautifully. I think it's a wonderful service. It's gonna be an amazing complement to the software we're developing so all of that is coming together so nicely. We grew our team a lot last year too. We added 10 new people in 2019 so a lot of those are on the citation team.23:00 AW: Awesome! 23:00 DS: A few of them on our GMB team so that's been some great growth for the company. We're up to 29 people now. We have two job postings out right now too. The Rank Tracker rebuild, that had been a long time coming so I'm really pleased to have that finally out the door, being able to iterate on that. We launched a cool little tool called, The Review Checker, which is a great little tool that allows you to see all of your review ratings across the web and it's just a free little simple tool. We talked about that in some earlier episodes but I'm pleased to have that out the door.23:38 DS: Rewriting our templates and support, our new onboarding process and support. I don't know, it's just been a great year. I'm really happy with how 2019 has gone and gosh, I'm thrilled about what we've got coming for 2020. It's been a good year, yeah.23:52 AW: Well, I think if I look at combining ours, the two themes are great people and great features, right? 24:01 DS: Yeah.24:02 AW: That's probably a couple of main ingredients to a successful...24:06 DS: That's the formula right there everybody. Great people, great features. Your PR motto for the podcast.24:11 AW: There you go, that...24:11 DS: Yeah.24:13 AW: So what about Darren on the challenging side? What are a couple of big challenges you faced this year? And are you winning currently against those challenges? Did you lose those challenges? What does that look like? 24:27 DS: I feel like we failed pretty bad on the software dev side, it's just so slow. You think you're gonna have this thing out the door in July and here we are in December and it's still a couple months away and then that couple of months turns into more months and it's just that frustration of dev cycles, this concept of burning dev cycles because you worked on something but you gotta go back to the drawing board or you just didn't properly scope it. You couldn't see how big it was until you started diving in and that's one of the biggest challenges for sure that we face at Whitespark. It's been really tough to try and develop things faster.25:09 DS: I think, the biggest problem we have is that we've got a fairly small development team. We've got new initiatives that we're working on but we have to continually be maintaining and supporting and fixing problems with the existing systems and so our capacity to develop something new is reduced to 30% of my total Dev teams capacity because they're always getting distracted by these little things that come up. My dream would be to have two teams. I got the Maintenance Team and I got the New Dev Team and the New Dev Team is pushing hard on the new stuff and not getting distracted. They're staying focused, they're staying on task and working on new software. While the Maintenance Team is fixing all the little things that come up or adding the little things that need to be added. That's the dream, I wanna get there.25:58 AW: Yeah, I can tell you, from listening to you, almost all the same words could come out of my mouth and I think every SaaS business might feel the same way. I can't remember who I read it from, if it was in a tweet or whatever else but they basically broke down SaaS as this. It's ship, code, sell. Ship, code, sell. Ship, code, sell and yeah, when you're not shipping code, it does. It just starts to wear on you and we had some of the same. We had like...26:29 AW: The first seven months of the year were so fast and so furious and really big features and getting things aligned and whatever else and then after that, it was like... I know the team felt a little bit burned out. We had some mis-steps within a few things. Details were missed. Some of those kind of pieces with it and that all kinda added up and then it kind of put us on pause for a month or two for everybody to get their feet back under them and now we're kinda in the same cycle where we have a lot of things starting to slope for like a January release and I feel like we're hitting this build up of things again that's not gonna be healthy for our team and it's a little harder to market because they all come at once.27:14 AW: We actually just had some meetings yesterday and we're trying to figure out how do we get our sprint cycles to be a little bit cleaner and better and our product manager Mark, had some really good ideas on that because at the end of the day, that's the biggest thing I care about; is shipping features and it's this balance of some of the things you ship are things you have to build into the product, they're not sexy, they're not gonna help you in marketing but the product needs them.27:44 AW: But ultimately, as a CEO and as a CEO that is helping a lot in sales and marketing, I need things, give me the marketing, give me the sexy features, the things that I can talk about. So it's finding that balance. I try to talk to our team about that. You have to understand this from the perspective of, we have to make news, we have to make a splash, we have to get people excited and certain things that we do or if they're about more of the plumbing of the system and things like that, that's not gonna turn heads, we have to balance those things.28:16 DS: Yeah, that's a really good thing to think about. Like what... Maybe, I think you touched on the idea that your product manager and you're looking at these sprints. I mean, how do we spread these out so that we're injecting some of these splashy things in between all the must-do-not-so-exciting things? And that's a pretty good model to follow, really. If you lay out the next three months of development and say okay, we're gonna push for this exciting launch in January, push for this exciting launch in February and we're also gonna do these other little things just to get them done." It's a good... Keep the wheel turning. Continually marketing and pushing out new exciting things.28:57 AW: Yup and I totally agree with you on the maintenance side. I just referred to this yesterday in a meeting, is like this is the undercurrent, right? No one can see it but there's so much to do and the more customers you have, the more small requests and we get a lot of integration requests and all these things and yeah, it just becomes really, really difficult with that and so I get back to the hardest thing of running a SaaS company is prioritization.29:27 DS: Yeah. Huge.29:28 AW: Right? Yeah. What to build over what, who to say no to? It's so hard to say no. We definitely have a yes-can-do culture in our company.29:36 DS: Yeah. Same.29:38 AW: And it's really hard because whatever I'm saying no to, matters a lot to someone in our company. It's a CS rep who has a customer or customers that are pinging them about it or a sales rep or an engineer that would feel a lot better if that was re-factored. So it's like you have all those things that when you give that no, there's multiple people taking a loss on it and then there's others on the team that are then getting a win because what they're rooting for, what they want to have happen can actually get some love, make it into the product...30:10 DS: Yeah. I think I've gotten better at that in 2019. Someone comes through support and they're like, "Does the tool do this thing? I need it to do this thing, otherwise I can't do it." A big one that comes up occasionally is integrating a rank tracker with Google Data Studio. I'm always faced with this option. Do I drop the other things that we're working on so we can build this? Is that a splashy thing? And so the thing I'm always trying to balance when I see these feature options, potential things that we could build, is how many customers will this effect and how much money could this thing make us if we actually built it.30:48 DS: And then based off of my assessment, I throw it on the list. It always makes it on to our task list but if it's something that's only gonna affect a handful of people and it's only gonna benefit a handful of people, it goes lower on the list and so I've been getting better at prioritizing that, I think. I feel better about it. Saying no more for sure has been a theme in 2019.31:14 AW: Yeah. I don't know if I'm getting better at it. It's happening more often. I think just because the request and the things that are there happening more often. I did comment I think, I don't know if it was in one of our management team meetings or an all-team meeting but I kinda made a comment that was funny to me where for so long, there's definitely plenty of people that almost beg you to say no to things, especially your engineering team.31:36 DS: Yeah, definitely.31:38 AW: But then once you start saying no to things, then some of them are bummed out that now you're actually saying no, right? So it's this flip like alright, what way makes you happy? And it's like the answer is neither. It just depends on their position on that feature, on that issue, whatever it might be but yeah, there's always work to be done there. I feel like prioritization is probably a good topic for us in the future to talk about a lot deeper in just as you outlined, what do you use to help make those decisions, data, financials, all those 10 pieces and...32:05 DS: It's mostly my gut. [chuckle] That's what it mostly is.32:19 AW: Yeah and where do you draw the line with those things? Within your business, what is it? Is it if two customers ask, 10 customers, 30 customers. What is the dollar amount that makes it seem worth it to you to do a one-off? So...32:36 DS: And sometimes it depends on the customer. It's like oh, well massive brand wants this thing so I guess we're gonna do it.32:43 DS: Yeah, yeah. Such difficult decisions that just have ramifications all the time. Everything comes...[overlapping conversation]32:50 DS: I think another challenge that we had in 2019 was custom projects. Well, I'd say I'm pretty good at saying no to feature requests that maybe don't affect a lot of people. I have taken on a couple of really big things that have slowed us down. It slowed me down personally, where lots of stuff that I personally wanted to accomplish, maybe more research, writing, speaking had to take a back seat because I've been so busy with custom projects, things that I personally am taking on and so that's a bit of a learning thing that...33:27 DS: The payout for those projects was good and the money is good but what was the cost? What is the cost in productivity in other areas of the business? That's the thing I'm trying to understand and learn from and in 2020, I'm gonna make a commitment to really stick to our core competencies and not take things that are outside of our typical realm of expertise.33:51 AW: Yeah. No, definitely a valid item. I think for me the last thing... And this will be a 2020 challenge for me as well. We started the conversation in the summer this year but just around pricing. The last time we raised our prices for gather-up was three years ago. We grandfathered others in and we've seen our market continue to elevate up above us. We are one of the cheapest solution and based on the features that we have and what we offer, we're definitely in that area and it's such an interesting thing because it just brings in so many emotional things for people on how do they individually value the product, how do they think through, okay when you go and talk to a customer about a pricing increase, are they gonna be mad at you and then how does that make you feel? Do you disappoint them?"34:44 AW: It's really hard to get your management team wrapped around this, right? And get them understanding and when we did a team survey on a number of things on just kinda do like, "How do you feel leadership was for the year or management or some of these different things?" I did ask everyone to name a price. If you're a one-location business, what's the price of our product? 35:10 AW: It was really interesting to see that variation from just a little bit more than what we charge right now, to three or four times more than what we charge right now. It's so interesting and it's such a psychological exercise internally and ultimately, externally as well.35:28 DS: Yeah, are you saying that if you... You grandfather people in but you also mentioned communicating a price increase to existing customers. If you have an existing customer that has, let's say, 20 locations in the system, do they only grandfather for those 20 but any new locations they add would be at the new price, is that how you do it? 35:49 AW: No, the account itself when we did it before just ends up grandfathered. So that customer can continue to make the amounts for that through that entire time. It becomes really tough right? And you're building a SaaS product that... Alright, if someone who's been with us four or five years, they have realized hundreds of updates, right? And you're not reconciling for those updates at all and when you look at the market, alright, if you were to go buy a similar tool, you would pay 2X or 3X of what our price is.36:24 AW: It's all these pieces and all of those things and so, we started talks early on this. It helps people get their arms around it, helps with the psychological part but it's something that is gonna happen for us in 2020 and that'll bring its own set of challenges on finalizing it, communicating it, just a... Our company is built to make everyone happy. We have great customer service. The minute anyone's remotely wrong, multiple people are on that problem but this is gonna be a hard one because it will... Price increases, no matter what, always ruffle some feathers when you have thousands of customers and this is something that's hard for every SaaS, right? 37:07 AW: And you hear, it's like... Man I've listened to so many podcasts and read so many articles on pricing strategies and structures and communication alone and there's so many that they just say like, "You have to do this or you will not be successful. You will not survive unless you're doing this on a frequent basis." And even sometimes some say, "You have to condition your customer that this is a constant. Tool gets better and the price gets better."37:33 DS: That's right. You mentioned that people that started with you five years ago, they were paying for a much more reduced feature set than what the system offers now and so, price increase makes sense. So would you then, are you saying that a person that did sign up five years ago, they might not get grandfathered in with a new price increase? 37:50 AW: Don't know any of those details yet.37:52 DS: Sure.37:53 AW: It's really looking into it. A lot of it is... Step one is getting the psychology around it and then the second step is figuring out alright, what do we need to do that's healthy for our business? That gives us the margins we need to continue to make the investments, continue to do those things as you get bigger and support your customers? That's the hard thing for... Some of your really good customers, they totally get it. They're like "Hey, I get it. If you're not making money, you're not a tool that's gonna keep growing and I can't use you so I want you." But it's that right balance, right? So yeah. I don't know any of those details yet other than... Those discussions started last year, they will likely... Hopefully, some time this spring we will arrive and figure out where we're going with it but it's just, it's a very big undertaking.38:44 DS: For sure, I got a pricing meeting today. We're gonna be talking about pricing for our new stuff that's coming out. I'm trying to figure that out.38:51 AW: There you go. Yup.[overlapping conversation]38:51 AW: [38:51] ____ your challenge as well.38:53 DS: So what are you excited about for 2020? 38:55 AW: Yeah, the new working environment we have, right? With having a parent company. The grouping were in, right? We were acquired by a group that owns seven other marketing SaaS technology companies and they even own one of our competitors and that was one of the things we liked. Yeah.39:15 DS: Weird.39:15 AW: But we saw how they could grow our competitor so that was really hands-on like alright, they know our space well. They understand the pulls and the levers in there and now we get to understand how those companies are operated. To me, that's what I'm really excited about to be able to not just know what my company is doing and how things are going and decisions being made but I'll see this for seven other companies. Yeah.39:40 DS: Amazing, yeah. Great learning opportunity.39:41 AW: Absolutely.39:41 DS: Talk to all those other founders.39:44 AW: Yup and then our team is now part of a larger team so now everybody in every position has a new set of peers doing the same type of customer success work or engineering work or sales work but on a different product so they have someone to learn from and collaborate with and pick someone's brain and everything else so I think that's really awesome. We've laid down, we have some really hefty goals so we're looking at some much bigger growth in 2020 so I'm excited for that and then yeah, just some of the challenges we're talking about like... And you put it best, right? 40:21 AW: Challenges are the uncomfortable things that stretch you further and push you further so I am excited about some of the challenges even though I know they're going to be hard and they're gonna push on me and all of those things but it's like alright, how much better will I be? What will I learn? How will it stretch what I've gone through? I'm excited for what those challenges are gonna be.40:43 DS: Yeah, totally. It sounds awesome.40:46 AW: What about you? What's on the 2020 docket? What are you excited about? 40:49 DS: Yeah well, we're just on the cusp of launching a few things. I'm really excited about those. I feel like these launches will really take our company to another level with the way we've got our software development coming up. That's our new accounts platform, our new integrated stuff that we're building. I think that's gonna be really huge for us. Our rank tracker will continue to evolve, our GMB Service will continue to grow. I don't know, it just feels like a huge growth year for us and I cannot wait to get some of these things out the door.41:21 DS: They're really close right now so, I've mentioned that meeting today. We're gonna be looking at a lot of the stuff and figuring out how we're gonna price it and what are the features... The different plans actually is a big part of what we're meeting today; is to figure out what's included at the different levels and so that stuff is so close and man, we're gonna launch that. It's gonna be amazing. I can't wait. It's gonna be good.41:46 DS: I don't know. In general, 2019 felt like a little bit of a flat growth year. There was a bit of growth but 2020, I'm expecting some hockey stick so I'm excited about that.42:00 AW: Nice. Well, I Can't wait to be talking on maybe even more regular basis and hearing how all of those things are going for you and especially your integration of everything together. I think there's gonna be so much for us to talk about on how that's progressing for you and the wins and the challenges and all of those things. Like that...42:20 DS: Oh yeah.42:20 AW: That to me is gonna be really exciting to dig in and hear how that's going for you.42:24 DS: Yup, yeah. I'm pumped. It's gonna be great, 2020 bring it on.42:29 AW: Bring it on. But before that relax, enjoy the holidays, enjoy the family. We were discussing in our chatter before hitting record like this is the best time of year to just kinda recalibrate, get a little down time, get some family time so that you're ready to charge ahead once things kick over.42:50 DS: Totally, yes. Same to you. I hope you have a good holiday break. This is a nice downtime. I'm definitely taking the full two weeks off over Christmas there and I'll be back on January 2nd to get back to it.43:04 AW: Pretty much the same. I'm on a plane tomorrow. We're doing a quick snowboarding and ski trip into the Rockies before Christmas.43:12 DS: Nice.43:12 AW: Yeah and then enjoying Christmas and family and some quiet time and then yeah, I'll be amped and ready to go come Jan.43:21 DS: Yup! 43:23 AW: Alright. Well hey man, I wanna thank you for everything this past year, the podcast, so many of our talks both recorded and unrecorded. I have benefited so much. I'm really glad we took the plunge on this and I also... I hope our listeners are glad we took the plunge on this too.43:40 DS: Yeah, well same to you. It's been amazing to chat with you and learn from you and to discuss all of these things about running a SaaS business together. This podcast has been a real blessing to me and my business and your friendship has been a real blessing too. It's been great Aaron, thank you.44:00 AW: You bet, virtual fist bump my friend.44:02 DS: Virtual fist bump.[laughter]44:02 AW: Alright, with that we'll wrap it up. I hope everyone listening, hope you've had a fabulous 2019. Hope you have a great Christmas and holiday season with your loved ones to take some time to relax and reflect. If you're working in this industry, you're likely working your tail off on a daily basis. Don't burn yourself out and looking forward to talking to you in a Happy New Year in 2020.44:31 DS: Yup, I echo all of Aaron's sentiments to our great listeners. Thanks for listening.44:36 AW: Thanks everybody. Have a good one Darren.44:37 DS: Okay, you too. Bye bye.44:46 AW: Bye bye.[OUTRO music]

Helpful links from the episode: Local Rank Tracker FULL SHOW NOTES[intro music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 14, working on and working in the business.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges wins and losses, shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron and I'm back from vacation.00:50 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren and I don't know when I'm gonna have a vacation.00:56 AW: There's a clear separator between us. I feel your pain. So, how have you been man.01:01 DS: I've been great, thanks how have you been? .01:03 AW: I am newly relaxed after my first real vacation since earlier in the year, in March, my wife and I went to London for a week and that was definitely a vacation. We left all the kiddos, all four kids at home for that though. So this was a family vacation out to San Diego, so left behind 30 degrees in Minneapolis and enjoyed 75 sun and a perfect breeze every day in San Diego right on the beach.01:37 DS: Wow.01:38 AW: And yeah, had a great time. And finally, this is sad to admit, plays into our topic today. But I had my first two days straight of not opening my laptop in probably six months which is kind of scary right when you look back at it.01:54 DS: It's pretty good to do that though. I find if I go away for two weeks, then I do always have to bring a laptop so it's like when you have it, it's easy to open it and get caught up on a few things. Maybe if it's just like for a half hour before bed or whatever. And it's just nice to not do that at all for a couple of days and really take a break.02:14 AW: Yeah, no, my backpack was there and I set it in the corner, I basically put it in a time out in our room.02:23 DS: That's right.02:24 AW: I would walk by it and I would just look at it and I'd be like, "Not today, my friend, not today".02:28 DS: That's good, that's the way to be, nice. So it was pretty short though it was how many days.02:35 AW: Yeah Friday to Wednesday so, five days, travel time in there, but it is so fun... One thing that I love is I travel alone so much and when I'm traveling alone, I often look at other families in the airports, and kids are usually... They're going somewhere fun, they're excited and I can't help but wish my kids were with me, and when we get to all travel together to go on like a vacation, it's often somewhere warm to break up the monotony of Minnesota late fall, winter pre-spring kind of deal, and yeah, my kids just love it, they're happy, it's so fun to be with them. My little guy right now, my youngest is three, and everything... He met the pilot, and he got a sticker and...03:30 DS: Awesome.03:30 AW: And he's telling everybody, he's a pilot, and riding the bus to the rental car center, he was then their bus driver, and just watching everything through his eyes and the beach and the ocean, and everything else. So rewarding it's so fulfilling that. I just love it.03:48 DS: Three is so cute. Oh man, I look back at videos of Violet when she was three. Just adorable, love it. That's a great age.03:55 AW: Yeah, no, it's a fantastic age. I wish I could freeze them and I have all the others, my kids are 15, 13, 10 and 3. So I've gone through this many multiple times, but I am enjoying his threes more than any of the others because you just, it's known, you understand so many things and you realize just how fast it goes. I can't believe my oldest has her driver's permit and...04:21 DS: That's crazy.04:22 AW: Yeah, 10th grade and all of the... She's only gonna be at home a couple more years, which is mind-blowing. So.04:29 DS: Man four kids and CEO of a really popular SaaS company. How do you do it? 04:35 AW: Because I have an awesome CEO at home that runs the ship there. So that's exactly how I do it. She makes my life easy. So that's how.04:44 DS: Yeah, I've got a similar set-up here, so yeah, it works out pretty well.04:47 AW: Yeah, you gotta have that support crew.04:49 DS: Yup...04:49 AW: What have you been up to? 04:52 DS: Well, I've just been busy with work stuff lately. Our next vacation won't be until March, we've got a four-day trip, planned to Jasper, we go skiing in the mountains every year, and so that will be awesome. We do that. I love to ski, yeah, but so at work, we finally launched a huge update to our Local Rank Tracker." It's a crazy update, because it's... The big thing we're announcing is, "Oh, you now have screenshots in our Rank Tracker, so you can actually look at the results on each day, right? But behind the scenes, we rebuilt that whole thing from scratch, it was a complete rebuild. So internally, it was a huge job, and we've got it out the door now and I'm really excited about it, because we can iterate so much faster on feature updates, now, so it's gonna be fast and furious pulling out new features over definitely one or two feature updates per month are gonna be hit in that Rank Tracker. So I'm excited about that.05:51 AW: That's awesome.05:52 DS: Really good growth potential for that software. And I know a number of people who are in the industry are excited about it. So I'm excited about it too. Sounds good, our GMP service continues to grow, it's we'll keep adding clients at a pretty decent pace and we're gonna have to hire again pretty soon. The next couple of months, so that's great. That service is doing very well, it just feels like I'm on the hamster wheel right now with all of this end of year work, and it's like all of my team is totally tied up, and so, I just find... Getting to our topic of the day, I just really feel like I'm working in the business so much right now. I've got so many projects that I have to allocate time to and actually sit down and work on them, and it's just so hard because all day long, I'm just dealing with the business, and then so in the evenings, I have to sit down and actually work on the projects. It's just... It's been tough. Just lots of work right now, and... Which is great, 'cause work is great, but it's just been really busy.06:53 AW: Yeah, and it's one of those things that... Oh man, it ebb and flows so much, right? 'Cause when we were talking before this and we didn't even have... Nailed down what we wanna talk about today. And you kind of alluded to like, "Oh, I feel like I'm on a hamster wheel." I'm like, "Perfect. That's it."07:08 DS: It might be a good topic.07:09 AW: Let's just talk about what's going on right here and right now with it. So tell me a little bit. Do... Other than having this conversation with me, creating some space for you to reflect and be like, "Man, I am just spending a ton of time working in the business right now." Do you usually realize that yourself and pull yourself out to work on the business, or does that only happen when you get a break from working in it? Like what does that look like for you? 07:42 DS: Yeah, it happens naturally. So it's not like I make some concerted effort to pull myself out, but it's just right now, a number of projects piling up that have to get done and I'm the person that is best suited to get those done, and so I'm just working a lot in the business. But when those wrap up, I think, I've generally got a pretty good set up in terms of company organization and structure, and I have people that can do all of... Most of the things, and so that allows me to just have a little bit of breathing room to spend more time with more strategic planning. So it's like, if I'm thinking about where we're heading and all that stuff, and that just feels more like working on the business. But if I'm doing projects, then that's working in the business, and just right now I'm just busy with that. But I think that it'll ease up over the next couple of months. So January, for sure, I'll be back to spending more time on the business.08:40 AW: If you had to break that down into numbers and give a percentage of time in versus time on, where would you say you're at right now? What does this last year look like for you? 08:52 DS: Well, that's a good question because I think we have to define what is working on versus what is working in it, right? So if I'm planning out HR policies, is that working on the business or is that working in the business? It kind of feels like on the business. So I have to do a lot of that stuff too. If I'm strategizing new processes and scripts for our support team, is that on or in? It feels to me like maybe that's on. So I guess, if I break it down, I probably spend 50-50 right now. Yeah, it depends on what you consider on versus in. So what do you consider on versus in? 09:32 AW: Yeah, I guess, in is more things directly related to clients, getting tasks accomplished, things like that, where on is definitely more planning, strategizing, right? It's not just so much task-driven but more ideation, mapping it out, a future state, goal-setting... Where do we want get to with those things? And in is...10:00 DS: Sure. If we defined it as that, it's like goal-setting, ideation, mapping things out, then I'm like 90 in the business and 10 percent on the business.10:10 AW: Yeah. And where do you think you'd like to get to? What do you think would feel right or you'd be happier with? 10:16 DS: Probably 30. 30 percent more of that strategic planning stuff. Honestly, I think I would run out of ideas. Because it's not like it requires that much time to be putting in goal-setting and all that stuff into your documents, right? So there's still all the other day-to-day, like issues come up with customers, and working with the development team on testing software, giving feedback, working with designers, working on hiring, all that stuff is day-to-day work that is gonna require most of my time. So I don't know. I think, if I got the strategic planning to about 30 percent, I feel like that would be a better balance. How do you feel about it? 11:00 AW: Yeah. Yeah, I would probably say I'm closer to 80-20 as far as 80 percent in and 20 percent on. I'd love to probably get closer to 50-50. It would be more ideal. One of the things I've found in between the growth that I've been able to be a part of at the last two companies, one being an agency and then, now GatherUp in the SaaS space, a lot of that comes from team growth. Right? 'Cause eventually, you get... You're trying to plug in... I've found that the best thing to do is recruit or hire owners that can own the task-driven elements of it. When you don't have that, then you have to own it. Right? I think you already made the comment. Like, "I'm the best person to get these things done," and eventually you have to realize, "I need to hire someone who is better at getting these things done than I am, so I can bring myself up."12:01 DS: That's a really important point that you've made there. And I think that's big and is... I think, it's also... As a founder or CEO, for me, maybe it's a bit of a failing is to assume that I'm the best person to get it done. But yeah, I shouldn't be. For me, it's like resources are thin and I know that the team members that would be best to do this thing are just completely strapped right now, so I'm like, "I can't put another thing on their plate." So it's like it falls to me. I gotta get it done. Someone's gotta get it done. No one else has room on their plate, so it falls to mine. That's kind of the situation I'm in right now.12:37 AW: Yeah. And with it, I mean, do you think about that when you're going through and you're looking to hire? I mean, are you always hiring for task positions? Or are you ever hiring for somebody it's like, "Alright," who can also be a thinker, not just a doer, who can own this, build more process, scale it, do those things where I don't have to be responsible for that part? I need to be responsible for helping them with the vision of it, aligning it, making those things happen."13:05 DS: Yeah, I think it's an opportunity of growth for me to look at it from that perspective, 'cause I think I do mostly hire task-based. It's like, "Here's the job. We need someone to do this job." But everyone kinda reports to me, which is probably not the best. They should mostly report to themselves and just give me regular updates. And then they'll have team members that report to them. And I do have that across the organization in a few key positions for sure. And I think I actually, I maybe sell myself too short. I actually have a lot of really solid people in key positions that run with a lot of stuff that doesn't have to go by me, which is great. So trying to delegate more of that and empowering those team members to like, "Hey, I trust you. You're doing a great job. Just go ahead. Do that thing, and I don't need to see it. You can just tell me about how I went." I think I'm getting better at a lot of that and having these key trustworthy people being able to just run with things.14:01 AW: Yeah, no, for sure. Trust is a big piece of it, but some of my most rewarding things are often times where all I did is mentioned or provided initial direction. And then all of the magic happened by others making it happen.14:14 DS: Totally, yeah.14:16 AW: Right? It's a super rewarding thing, and time is the biggest commodity. And at some point, Darren is completely tapped out of time.14:25 DS: Yeah, that point was like five years ago.14:27 AW: To do these things.[laughter]14:31 AW: It's hard. It's super hard, but that's one way I found of doing that. The other is just finding planning some of that discipline time where knowing and understanding... What do I need to think creatively, right? Is it time away from a computer? Is it traveling? Is it setting or planning meeting with certain people? Is it going to a conference and being inspired? So it's figuring out what things help create space for me to get in the mindset of working on the business and higher-level thinking and make sure that you're putting those into your schedule on a somewhat regular basis instead of filling your entire schedule with task after task after task after task.15:14 DS: Calls and... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we both need to get flotation tanks in our office, and it could just be like, "I'm gonna schedule an hour, I'm just gonna float in the tank for an hour and think about the business." [laughter]15:27 AW: Yeah. Is there anything that you do on a daily basis? So we don't have a flotation tank, but do you try to work it in as far as that tightly or weekly or monthly? What are some of those things for you? 15:42 DS: I currently do not schedule strategic planning time. So I should. I love that idea. What I try to do, this concept of being so distract-able and so accessible is a problem in my business. In the way I operate, I feel this problem. It's like I get in front of my computer in the morning and I've got 16 Slack messages, and 25 emails and I just start banging through them. It's probably the worst way to start your day because then you're off on somebody else's schedule all day long. And so what I'm trying to do and I haven't been very successful at it so far, is the first two, three hours of every day is just my time. It's like, I've got this project I wanna work on, or I could squeeze in some strategic planning into there. And then, I'm not available until afternoon or something like that. I won't answer your Slack messages. I won't respond to any emails until afternoon. And then at least I have that feeling that I have accomplished what I needed to accomplish from my own list. And now, "Okay, everyone else, what do you need from me?" That's where I'm trying to get to.16:50 AW: Yeah, no, makes sense and totally is the right direction. Sometimes I try to stretch myself, and I try to push all the way to like, "What if I was 100% on that side?" Right? Setting vision, strategy. What if that's where I spent all of my time? How would I go about that? How would I accomplish it? And then what would I need underneath me to actually implement it and to make it happen?" And I find that that stretches me a great deal, and it definitely causes me and especially at certain times within our growth that makes me think a lot more strategically about, "Yeah, I could hire somebody who does this, but why don't I find someone who has an experience and has those capabilities?" And I get, it's much harder, because it's gonna require more budget, recruiting the right person. You don't wanna miss on those types of hires. But I've almost always found that no matter how scary those are or you're investing more time, money, resources or whatever it might be, they pay off like three to five X over and over again, where a lot of just the tactical ones pay off on a one to one.18:00 DS: Sure. Yeah, getting the job done versus creating broader vision and moving the company forward.18:08 AW: Yeah, so let's talk about what's a little bit like, "Why are you in the hamster wheel right now? What are some of these things that are going on that you're so heads-down on? Why do you feel that they matter so much?"18:21 DS: So they're big enterprise projects that are custom projects that require a lot of man hours, and they're important for the revenue of the company. So it's like I couldn't really turn them down. And so they just had to get done. And so, they're wrapping up over the next couple of months. But these are the things that I'm putting in like a few hours every day on. And so they're really pulling me into the business, just getting the task done, actually doing the work. It's just timing and end-of-year project. I always often find this. A lot of our enterprise clients are like, they've got end-of-year budget, and so a lot of this stuff happens in Q4 for us. So I'm just in the middle of that right now.19:04 AW: Yeah, well, I'm no different. I mean, end-of-year, it's so conflicting, right? 'Cause on one part of you is trying to get as many things done with this timeline that's there, right? It's like, okay, this is the end of the year. There's all these things that we talked about at the beginning of the year that when you looked at them at that time, it's like, "Yeah we can get those done and it's gonna be awesome and great." And then you get towards the end of the year and it's like, "I basically have like four big features that I thought would be done by the end of the year. And now, the reality is like two of those are gonna be done." And then I've had to get resourceful. We're actually trying to knock out a third by using, we have a couple of contractors that are full-stack devs, but they primarily do front end development work for us. But we're basically outsourcing them, building a feature to get this third one done. And so it's breaking our protocol a little bit more, but it's looked at like I'm basically buying a feature from outside of our workflow because timing-wise, it's like, okay, I look at that and it's like, "I need to get those done 'cause otherwise, if those spill into 2020, now there's my first quarter of 2020."20:15 DS: Yeah.20:16 AW: It's this perpetual putting you further behind. So at the same time you're trying to wrap all that up then really, you should already be strategically thinking about 2020 and planning out how 2020 is gonna look. But you don't have time because you're so busy wrapping up 2019.20:30 DS: Exactly. Actually, that's another thing that's really taking up a lot of my time. So I was quite busy with the launch of the Rank Tracker update, so preparing videos, talking with marketing, bug fixing, testing, really spending a lot of time in that talking with clients and customers and really getting a feel for it. And just our support team is bringing up issues. So a lot of stuff on there. I'm working on a redesign of the software, so a lot of back and forth in revision requests with the designer on that. I'm working on new software features across a ton of our different platforms. So this is a problem actually. GatherUp has one software system. It's a reputation and review management and feedback management. Whitespark has four different software systems and three different services. And so I really feel like quite spread thin because I have to be touching all of these different things. So I have stuff happening in our citation services that are ongoing revisions, lots of stuff like managing and overseeing all of that. Each individual software I have different teams on each of those software things. So this is really driving a hamster wheel. So it's just all of the management of the different moving parts of the different services and software in our business.21:53 DS: And so, yeah. And then plus, on top of that, managing these projects that I actually have to do the work on. So that's where I'm at right now. So I feel like I'm gonna be like that until the end of 2019. And then when 2020 rolls around, hopefully, I can... What I need our product managers, project managers, they can oversee all of that. But it's not like I have all the money in the bank to just hire six new people, right, so that's the trouble.22:21 AW: Yeah, yeah, well, and here's the breaking news. You're gonna have a whole new set of really important, really big things as soon as you put these to bed. [laughter]22:30 DS: Yeah, breaking news.22:32 AW: It's like it's not gonna change. Yeah, but some of those things, Darren, those are the things that cause me to work backwards on things. And what do I need to create to get to more of those resources? 22:42 DS: Yeah, exactly. And I'm definitely doing that.22:45 AW: Yeah, that's where you have to think about pricing and profitability. All those things tie into how do I create this then. If my only constraint if I have endless ideas and things that need to get done and high importance and all those, how am I not creating room for those to happen. And it comes down to then a pricing conversation or margins or what are we paying for other certain things and are they valuable enough? 23:12 DS: Yeah, and I think we're definitely seeing growth across everything right now, which is great. I think we've made a number of strategic moves that have been very helpful for the company, and so growth is happening. And I'm also... I see so much future growth as we continue this launch train. So we've got a number of things that are coming out. And that will increase revenue, then we can make more of a strategic hires. And then I just basically sit in my isolation chamber all day long and think about the business. [laughter]23:45 AW: Alright. So here's a working-on-the-business question. Have you ever thought of removing one of your offerings and then doubling down on one of the others that you feel has more potential or more profitability or things like that? How scary is that or how much time have you spent looking at that? 24:04 DS: Yeah, I have thought about that. It's once something's out the door, it's making enough revenue that you're like, "Wow." You're not gonna ditch that, and lose those tens of thousands of dollars a month in revenue." So what you do is you just table it for a while. It still continues to operate. We just continue to support it, but feature progression stops on it. And so we put all of our attention on something else for the next little while. And then we'll come back to it. But what I'm starting to look at more and more now, and I've actually had quite a bit of success with, is hiring, like you mentioned this too, hiring a contractor to keep that thing moving forward while our company resources are allocated somewhere else. So I'm actually doing this, but that falls to me. I'm the guy that has to manage all the contractors right, so yeah.24:51 AW: But you could be buying a contractor to double down or triple down on something else that has more right? There's still a cost of keeping it running, supporting it, kinda all those other small pieces, right? 25:04 DS: Yeah, all of the individual parts that we have are successful enough in their own right, that... And they also form the broader picture of where the company is heading that I don't see myself ditching any of them. They all provide value and will provide greater value in what we're building. That's my vision anyways. That's my strategic vision.25:24 AW: Yeah, and as you mentioned, right, you're working on a plan to unify these. I think if you'd go back, you would say, "My misstep is creating these in silos as separate items when I should have been building them all together. [laughter]25:38 DS: Yes. Many, many times have I declared that misstep, yes. [laughter]25:44 AW: We all have them, that's for sure. So there's one other question that I had for working on, what are some of the things you do for inspiration, motivation, where are you gonna get ideas from? What does that look like for you for working on the business? 26:02 DS: Where does that come from? It's not like I sit down and say, "I'm gonna bang out some ideas." It's like the ideas, they just come so fast and furious, they're all over the place. It's like just being engaged in the community is probably a big part of it, so talking with other local search people, reading all the articles that are coming out, so just being involved in my industry is an endless source of ideas of how we need to improve the business and then of course talking with customers and clients, all the emails that come in, and all the support requests and talking to our support team. It's just like how we need to improve the business is right in front of me all the time. I don't need to spend some time, but sometimes, I would say the best source of idea generation is the shower. So just I'll be... [chuckle] I'm in the shower, sometimes I'll take a half-hour shower 'cause I've gotten an idea brewing and then I get out of the shower and I write it down. It happens to me, on at least a monthly basis. I don't know about you. How about you? Where do you find the time and what do you do with that time for business planning, strategic planning? 27:04 AW: Yes, so you're right about the shower sometimes, which then usually causes me to say...27:09 DS: Exactly! 27:09 AW: Did I shampoo my hair or not? And then I'm like, alright, I'm just doing it twice, I'm either extra clean or that is the only time I've done it, so that also makes me feel like I'm getting old and things are starting to fall apart already. I have learned about myself that I find this the best, when I can immerse in something different than my usual so I get it a lot out of traveling, and when I do that I really try to immerse myself since a lot of what our product does ends up touching like a consumer is the end customer, right? And so getting into places where I can interact with another business and look at like what's their customer experience like, how do they talk to their customers, what technology are they using, at what points in that interaction could have they have asked me for a review or done anything like that. How can I just sit and pay attention to other things? So it's when I can take my role and I can actually remove myself from being somebody running a company and running projects and tasks and are all of these things getting done and when I can get myself closer to an end user of my product and put myself in the client's shoes of the business I'm in, and then also the end consumer.28:28 AW: And a lot of times when I see those are... I get a lot there or when I push myself to just experience other people's technology and solutions. It's one thing, I was just thinking about from a different vein today, where it's one thing I need to do to push our team more is just this constant awareness of trying other pieces of software on free trials, just to extrapolate what's the UI like, what's the user experience, what's the on-boarding process. And I think you get so busy on the hamster wheel of like, "Here's how we do it and here's what we need to build" and everything else that you're not doing this reconnaissance and research and immersing yourself in these other experiences to be like, "What's great about these? And I see your team, you end up so laser-focused and you're running that hamster wheel so hard that you're not taking any time to step outside of that, that even people on our team they do it.29:20 DS: Would you call that working on the business? So if you're doing some kind of strategic research where... This happened to us recently, we're looking at improving our on-boarding process for our Rank Tracker software and so we did exactly that, we signed up for a bunch of things, watched other emails come in, and we've been taking notes and putting that down and preparing our own process for that. And so would you call that working on the business or is that working in the business? 29:45 AW: I would say the first part of it, thinking and outlining like, "Hey what's gonna make us better while researching other products, getting new ideas, seeing their communication patterns, on-boarding process all that, I'd say that's working on the business. Then once you get into, "Alright, somebody needs to sign up and I'll take a look at these things and log the research and get the emails then that's... " Now you're working in the business, right? And that's a little bit...30:10 DS: I was gonna say, then it's like five minutes on the business, and 17 hours in the business right, 'cause it's like, it couldn't take long to come up with that concept that, "Okay, I'm gonna check out some competitors."30:23 AW: But it's even, I would say it's stretching further, like don't just stop at your competitors right, and that's probably where you need to set the tone of what could be similar to this? What are real life experiences that... To me it's like I look at, if you go... If you're on vacation and you go on a tour somewhere, right, there's an on-boarding process from ticket sales to pre-tour to what they set out for you when the tour starts, like all these things, right? And then you can break those down, it doesn't have to be a software interface. You can say like, "Oh how does this company do a great job of setting my expectations, capturing more dollars for me, ensuring I'm gonna have a great time, letting me know when and where I can ask questions and how to get the most out of this experience, right? 31:10 DS: Sure yeah, totally.31:11 AW: So all that stuff I find really, really fascinating and because I'm able to look at it and get my mind right around it, I can take a lot more out of it and there's probably time right? My family probably wishes I wasn't looking at certain things that way, 'cause I'm over-analyzing instead of just being present, maybe sometimes.31:30 DS: Yeah, totally.31:31 AW: But it's like even when we were in San Diego, we rented kayaks, and then brought them into some of the Ocean Bay waters to go kayaking, but I was looking at, "Alright, we signed up on an iPad and filled out waiver forms and everything else and how they got equipment together for us, life jackets and paddles and the kayaks, and then we had to drag them a couple of blocks on these little carts to get them to the waters. Could they have made that easier by having one of their staff leading us all down there, right," there's a bunch of little things that I was parsing and it probably took me until I was actually in the water where I was done, thinking about a physical on-boarding experience.32:14 DS: Did you send them in an email after with all your business suggestions, how to improve? 32:18 AW: I didn't, I took eight photos of their business, so they would have better photos in their GMB listing, so...32:25 DS: Nice.32:27 AW: I'm still guilty there from that side of things. And then I thought about writing a review, so other people would realize what to expect, what's part of the process. So all those kinds of things. So...32:39 DS: Just can't stop your brain from thinking that way, what are you gonna do? 32:42 AW: Yeah, no, you just end up programmed that way for sure.32:45 DS: Yeah.32:46 AW: So alright, well, I think in the spirit, one thing you and I have talked about is being a little bit more timely with our podcast length. So.32:57 DS: Yeah.32:57 AW: I think we should we should look to wrap. I think we covered enough things. If I was gonna leave one take away or over-arching statement. Is that no matter what stage you're at, even if it's you. You're a solopreneur. You're the only person building your SaaS company. You need to set aside time to have these big ideas. And I get so much of initial traction is how much work can you bang out, tasks can you get done? There's so many things to do, and at every stage, there is. But you do hit a tipping point where you free yourself to do more of that thinking. And if you've made yourself void of it, your product has probably fallen behind because, what was your great idea? Now time has gone by, and you're not staying in step with what's next. So, it's like don't ever leave that out of your regimen. You need to include working on it at every step and every stage.33:53 DS: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think I could add a little titbit to that. It would be, carve out some time in the mornings because I really find that by the end of the day, I've got decision fatigue after running the business all day long. And so I get my least valuable brain power at the end of the day. And so really just saying, "The first hour of the day, I'm going to spend doing this stuff. No email, no text, no Slack, just turn everything off for that first hour." I think you'll get some really valuable results there. That's what I'm trying to do anyways.34:30 AW: Yeah, I know. Killer points. I say all the time. My biggest challenge across everything is prioritization. So prioritizing that time in the morning, prioritizing working on the business, those are likely really key things that if you break stuff down, they have to sit high on your priority list. Otherwise, if they fall off, you start to lose your sense of direction and the ability to course correct and keep that direction.34:58 DS: Yeah, totally.35:00 AW: Alright. Anything coming up for you in the next few weeks until we talk again that should be aware of? 35:06 DS: I don't think so. Just business as usual. Hopefully, I'll have these projects wrapped up, and I'll just be spending more time on the business.35:13 AW: [laughter] I'm with you. I'm gonna be working hard to try to get comfortable with where it's kind of like, "Alright, November is an indicator on will December the feast or famine to get us to the finish line of getting a few things out the door so hopefully we can roll them out in January, and then move on to the next set of challenges."35:37 DS: Alright, how about you? Anything big coming up? 35:40 AW: Not really too much. I just have a couple of small conferences, have a couple trips, a couple of really, really big pitches. That's been nice. We've seen in the last month some really nice sized, hundreds to thousands of locations, brands come in that at this timing, they're looking to get something kicked off for 2020.36:04 DS: For sure.36:05 AW: So they have urgency on their side at this point in the game. So, very serious talks right off the bat. Hoping to close a few of those up and make 2020 already look healthier from a growth standpoint.36:17 DS: Nice. You guys keep growing, doing great.36:20 AW: Alright. We'll keep after it. Darren, thanks as always. For those of you listening, if you have questions, if you have a suggestion, something you'd like us to cover, hit Darren or I up on Twitter. Our Twitter handles are on the website, posted in the show notes as well. If you like what we're doing we always appreciate reviews at whatever site you're listening to, especially within iTunes. That's always helpful. And Darren, pleasure, and we'll talk to you again, hopefully in two or three weeks.36:51 DS: Yeah, pleasure. Thanks.36:53 AW: Alright, thanks everybody.[outro music]

Helpful links from the episode: Zoom Pipedrive Copper Typeform FULL SHOW NOTES:[intro music]00:02 Aaron Weiche: Episode 13: Running a Great Sales Demo.00:06 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:32 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:36 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:37 AW: And this week, we are gonna dive into what goes in to running a great sales demo. How do you demo your SaaS product and break down a number of aspects regarding that. A very important piece really, I view it as kind of the absolute cornerstone and the biggest value prop within the sales process. And we'll break that down but first, Darren, let's play a little bit of catchup. What have you been up to lately? 01:08 DS: What have I been up to? Well, lately, I've done a couple auto dealer conferences, I had one in beautiful Banff, Alberta so right in the Rocky Mountains there. That was fantastic.01:19 AW: That place, I have not physically been there but every time I have a friend go there, and they post their photos to Facebook, I'm like, "That place cannot be real."01:27 DS: It's insane, it's so beautiful and it is like... The conference was held at the Banff Springs Hotel, which is basically this amazing castle in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. It's so beautiful. So yeah, it was wonderful, I brought the family, we drove down and spent a few days there, the conference was easy, I spoke to a bunch of auto dealers about getting the most out of Google My Business, and it's been nice 'cause I have this run. So I did the one in Banff and I just got back from Montreal, also a fantastic Canadian city. I did another auto dealer conference in Montreal for a brand called Kijiji. They have this thing, Kijiji Autos. And then I go tomorrow to fly to Vegas for DrivingSales Executive Summit, which is another auto dealer conference. I'm now officially the new Greg Gifford of local search.[laughter]02:25 AW: And Vegas, Vegas baby! 02:27 DS: Yeah, that's right. All I'm doing is auto dealer conferences, it's just been like this string of three in a row, but it's nice 'cause then you can use the same deck, right? So that's fantastic.02:36 AW: Yeah. Well, when we go to promote this podcast, I'm definitely gonna put out a tweet that says there's a new Greg Gifford of the auto industry, and that will quickly catch his attention. That's awesome.02:45 DS: Definitely. Yeah. So I've been dealing with that and that's over and I'll have a lot of free time not doing any more conference speaking probably until January, February, so that'll be nice to have this really good break where I can just be in the office focused on the business. We're building an API for our rank tracking software so a lot of people wanna just pull that data into their own systems or into Google Data Studio, so we're working on that. That should be done right away here, where we're putting the finishing touches. We are also working on a revision of our Local Citation Finder software, it hasn't been updated in a long time. We've had new designs, actually a whole new system built on staging. It's been sitting for months while the team has been distracted with other things. And so once this API is out the door, we're shifting to get that thing done. So I'm excited about launching that.03:41 DS: Another thing that we've been really working on is some customer service things. We've been reviewing our template reports. So if someone asks about this or that, we have these like, "Oh, well, here's some information on that," and then we often end it with like, "Well, please let us know if you have any more questions." And it's like, we really need to do a better job of being like, "When can I set up a demo?" That's a good question. "Can we jump on a call next week?" Being more proactive with encouraging that next step with a customer 'cause so many of our customer support requests that are coming in are actually sales leads, these are people that are like, "I'm interested in that service or product you have, I want some more information on pricing, or whatever." They give them the information, they're like, "High five. Good luck to you. Hopefully one day you become our customer." Rather than hoping for it, we're working on our language and especially how we're closing all those emails to move it to the next stage of the sales process. So I'm excited about that, too.04:46 AW: Yeah, that singular question is actually just a buying signal that you need to capitalize on that like, "Yeah, here's the answer for that, but let's jump on a demo and take a look at things as a whole, as well as dive into your specific question."05:00 DS: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. How about you? What's up? 05:02 AW: Oh, man, I have been wearing out runways around the country. I'm on the end of seven different conferences in six weeks. So yeah, between all those. I just got home yesterday from Philly. I was at a client's conference where I gave three talks in one day there, that was at least nice and concise, and I was only gone from home three days this week. Next week, I'm gone all week, Monday through Friday with three more talks. It's one of those, it's like when I said yes to these, it's like one asked me in January, so I said yes to it in September, and then one asked me in March and so I said yes to it, and then a couple other things, a client travel sprinkles in and then a new conference pops in, it's like, "Oh, that'd be really great exposure." I have over-committed massively and I'm not gonna do this again, I've survived it and there's been a number of great things that come out of it, but when you are spending so much time creating different decks and customizing them and all those things, just way too much at once, I really made it hard on myself.06:13 DS: Yeah, wow, that's a busy schedule. Packed it on. And then it's tough to manage all of the other stuff that's coming up in the business when you're traveling so much. I was like...06:22 AW: Yep.06:22 DS: I was feeling stressed for the last week just because like, "Ahh." You wanna be at the conference and talking to people, but your emails are piling up at the same time. You got all these employees that have questions for you and customers that have questions, so yeah, there's just a lot to deal with.06:37 AW: Well, and the life balance with it, too. It's like, I have four kids, and so, I'm gone Monday through Friday. My wife, that's the real CEO in my house. She's getting everyone to their sports, all kinds of other things, whatever else. And then, when I'm getting home on the weekend, I'm so behind that I'm going into the office for full days on Saturday and Sunday, if not more. And so, I'm not getting quality times with the kids, I'm not helping my wife out. Yeah, so it's just one of those... Luckily, we have a couple of family getaways that I've promised I will be offline, I will be trying to make up... Let my kids remember they have a dad, and get caught up in that side of life. But it's a lot to balance, and I really... I gotta learn to say no. It's great to have those opportunities and to take advantage of them, but I do need to balance it out.07:28 DS: So, are you working from home at all? Or are you mostly are in the office? 07:32 AW: I have an office that's all of 5 miles from my house. I need to have a focused space because with four kids, ... I have one in high school, one in junior high, one in elementary, and one not even in school yet, they're spread out everywhere. But my elementary aged daughter will come home... She gets home at 2:30 in the afternoon, and it's like, I still have three hours of work to put in. So yeah, I have to have a focused space, for sure.08:01 DS: I have that, too. I work from home 100% of the time, I love working from home. And when my daughter gets home from school, I always love to take that... I try to time my coffee break, when I go downstairs and make myself a cup of coffee around when she gets home so I can hang out and just see her. And then I go to back to work. And she does a really good job of respecting my office. When Daddy's working, you gotta leave him alone. It works pretty good.08:27 AW: Yeah, that's good. And good for you. One thing... I admire a ton of things about you professionally, and us being friends over the years, but you are such a good dad. I'm around you when we're on the road and I watch how you communicate with her and that you make time for calls with her. So, you could do a dad best practices podcast and completely...[overlapping conversation]08:48 DS: We should do that together 'cause honestly, I think the same thing about you. I'm always like, "You're my dad inspiration." I'm always ____ you're such a great dad, too.08:58 AW: I have quantity going for me. [chuckle]09:00 DS: Yeah. Well, maybe we'll just switch the SaaS Venture to be the Dad Venture. [chuckle] New podcast.09:06 AW: Yeah. There you go. Well, maybe let's just do an episode sometimes that has to do with being a dad when you're trying to lead and grow a company. Both are very demanding jobs. Right? 09:16 DS: Yeah, being a parent while trying to run a company. That's a great, great episode, yeah. Alright, well...09:22 AW: Alright, coming up.09:23 DS: What else is going on? [chuckle]09:26 AW: Yeah, well, one of the things in the middle of all this is, just two weeks ago, we had our company summit.09:31 DS: Oh, yeah.09:32 AW: All of our North American employees, which totals 13... Actually, would be... We just hired another customer success team member yesterday, we got our signed agreement, so excited about that. We had 14 of our team all together. This is the second year where we've brought them all into... They all fly into Minneapolis, and then we go about three hours north to a resort. Everybody is in two giant cabins. We eat every meal together, we do a lot of... 9:00 to 4:00, we do work stuff, but it's a lot more collaborative, exercises, ideas, things like that. And then, just getting to know each other when you fully work remote.10:19 DS: Wow.10:19 AW: It's one of my favorite weeks of the year. We have a great time, so many laughs, so many... The normal inside office jokes and banter that most people build on a daily basis, we jam all that into a week. We came out of it, we have a new currency in our office now, our product manager did an exercise where you had to buy features that are on our roadmap, and he made these... His name's Mark, and so he made these Mark bucks. Now, everything in our world... Our devs wanna turn Mark bucks into cryptocurrency. Yeah, we're trying to buy people off on things with Mark bucks. Somebody's going to Vegas with friends and we told them not to spend all their Mark bucks on the craps tables.11:04 DS: That's smart.11:05 AW: It's fun.11:06 DS: For example, sales and customer support, they're always pushing for features. And so now, they have to spend their Mark bucks in order to move features up the priority list? Is that the concept? 11:17 AW: Yeah, that exercise is just really looking at, like, "Here's everything we have on our roadmap," and it was tied into year-end, like, "What can we get done in the year-end?" And he basically assigned like, "Here's what this item would cost." And then, the currency was limited, so you actually had to pool together with other people to get enough money to "buy that feature" get it done.11:37 DS: That is so clever. I love that idea.11:39 AW: Yes. It was a really great exercise. And that's just one example. Product had one of those, customer success had one of those, sales... We just had all these different things and just more interactive and fun ways to look at things, get everyone on the same page. Yeah, it's so good. I love our team, and to have that week together and to do so much together both professionally and personally, I have a ton of gratitude for it. It was a great time.12:09 DS: Yeah, I wanna do that stuff. Alright, and what else? Anything else to report on the news when we talk about demos? 12:18 AW: Yeah, one last thing to put out there that I'm sure anyone building a SaaS product, especially when you're hooking into other platform services, things like that, we are waiting on such a small update with Facebook right now. We have the feature and we've had it in their hands to be able to reply to Facebook recommendations right out of GatherUp. We already have a Facebook authorization for monitoring recommendations when they switched and they put recommendations behind a wall, which they have now sub-sequentially pulled out behind the wall. But then, when they added to their API the ability to reply to Facebook review/recommendations, we've added that in. And you have to update your apps with them and we have both our direct app and then the white label app. And it literally has been horrible back and forth. And so, this feature is done waiting in their approval process, and it's just sat there for weeks. And that's super frustrating when you do the work, you get it done and then you're just dependent on this outside party to be able to push it across.13:28 DS: Totally, and it's such an important future for your business. All of your clients that wanna be able to reply to Facebook right within the customer activity feed, that, that's so valuable. Instead of that jumping off to Facebook every time, so yeah, I can see that that is frustrating.13:44 AW: Yeah, it reminds me of what used to be really frustrating to me when I ran agencies is when we would build iOS apps and when you'd submit them to Apple, and then it could be four or five days, which would be a dream world when they approved it and it could go into the App Store, but depending upon their backlog and whatever else, you could totally end up with an app that you were done with, but three weeks later, it would finally hit the App Store, and that was just so frustrating.14:10 DS: Yeah, totally. You're so excited, you're like, "Yeah, launch day. Oh, wait. Launch day in three weeks." Yeah.14:15 AW: Yeah. Hold your bet. And that's what it is right now. Everyday, I'm asking my product manager, "Has Mark Zuckerberg emailed us yet?"[chuckle]14:24 AW: And he's like, "No."14:24 DS: Maybe you should try...14:25 AW: And I'm like, "Can you... "14:26 DS: To spend your Mark bucks. Send them over to...14:27 AW: Exactly! I was gonna say, "Can you buy him off with Mark bucks? I wanna get this out."14:32 DS: Yeah, definitely.14:34 AW: Oh, anyway. Alright, well, let's talk about things that we have more control over, and that's our focus topic today in looking at demos and breaking down a number of things. For us, it's most prevalent in our sales process and as we do a demo with the customer, but let's dive in. Where do you wanna start with demos, Darren? 14:57 DS: Well, I've got a lot of questions for you, basically. It's something I've been thinking about a lot as we look at this customer service stuff and as we're trying to encourage more demos. Demos have really been on my mind lately, and I think about how we do them and how we can improve them. And so, I thought you might have some ideas. Where do I wanna start? I wanna start with software. What do you use, first of all, to record your demos? Have you tried other things? I know what we use. Let's hear it, what do you guys use? 15:25 AW: Yeah, we have migrated through a few different things. Started originally with just one or two users or just maybe a company account with GoTo, when the team could be counted on one hand. Then, when we had to expand to at least five licenses or so, we used Join.me. And I'm pretty sure Join.me now has been purchased by GoTo. But it was easy and straightforward, but we definitely... We had a few people that had a few performance issues with it here and there.15:57 DS: Really? 15:57 AW: Yeah. And then, just like cutting out, audio quality, things like that, weren't always awesome with it.16:03 DS: Right, interesting.16:05 AW: And then a year ago, then we switched to Zoom. We had just expanded into, I think we're around 15 licenses now: Sales, customer success, exec team, everything else. And for the most part, on the meeting side, it's great, it does everything it should. The one thing we've had trouble adapting is when we switched for our monthly customer webinars or agency webinars. Zoom's webinar product is not killer. It's got a lot of finicky, little nuances that we were learning on the fly 'cause we just thought, "Oh, it'll be similar. We're using GoTo webinar." And yeah, not as polished there, and you gotta ride that bike a few times, otherwise, you kinda crash on it a little bit. That part's been hard, but the regular, just conference calls and those pieces, Zoom has worked for us pretty well.16:56 DS: That's interesting. It's also very interesting to me that you have 15 licenses. At Whitespark, we have one, two people that really do demos, and we just share the one account, so it's like... We certainly aren't at that level. And so that makes me wonder, you must be banging out demos all over the place. You have a number of people doing it. We're currently using Join.me and it seems to work pretty good. One of the things that we like is, we will record the demo and then we send the client a link to it after. If they wanted to review something in the software, they have a recording of it. Do you do that with Zoom? Do you have a follow-up and a recording, right? 17:37 AW: Yep, absolutely. Yep, absolutely, we record it. And then, I've also found it, too, when we were training salespeople, I sent them a bunch of my sales recordings.17:45 DS: Yeah, totally.17:46 AW: It lets them hear the history of things that we've been doing. And then, vice versa, I'd have them record their early sales calls and then send them to me. So then, when I had time, I could listen back and offer some talking points and some feedback on those. So yeah, super valuable to be able to record those calls.18:05 DS: Yeah. How many demos are you doing per week, would you estimate? 18:11 AW: Yeah, so we have things bucketed into few different ways. It's like, if you look at... And it falls in line with our segment, our customer segments. On one side is our small businesses; single-location, small business comes to our website and we have call to actions all over our website on request a demo, so they sign up and yeah, we basically have... I don't... This is sad, I don't even know the exact 'cause it doesn't fall directly under my wing, but I'm gonna guess we have somewhere around two to four set demo times every week. We reply to them and say, "Hey, great, you're interested. Here's the upcoming demo times this week." And so, we're trying to do a one-to-many demo with those. We used to do personal one-on-ones, but it got to the point where we were doing so many that it's like, "Alright, we need to have five, 10, 15 of these businesses in this demo, and we're just gonna do them every... Two on Tuesday, one on Thursday, and let's get as many people to those within that time frame."19:16 DS: That's interesting, yeah. So, that's smart. You've mentioned that on a previous episode, where for the SMBs, you'll do them all at the same time. In that case, you're not really trying to address specific pain points by showing specific features, you're kinda just walking through the script of, "This is the tool, this is what you can do, and here are the features." Is that right? Yeah.19:40 AW: Yep, yep. A lot of just education on the product, acknowledging what the landscape looks like, and addressing these are probably some of the problems you're having, and it's why you're looking at us. Here's the benefits, and then here's the features that make those benefits happen. And then allowing some Q&A and follow-up at the end for 'em, but that was one of our hard things, 'cause when you're doing one-to-one, you could be like, "Alright, what type of business are you? Oh, you're a plumber. Well, great, let's talk about some things specifically that I know are helpful in your industry." You lose that a little bit, but once you start hitting certain things, you're like, "Okay, based on price point and scaling this, and what we need to be putting our time on... " Those are just some of the things that you figure out what are we prioritizing to make this happen.20:28 DS: Right, that's really interesting. I think that's a key takeaway from this podcast episode for listeners is that concept of pooling your individual clients. Obviously, like any large multi-location deal, you're gonna wanna do a customized demo, but pooling them is really smart.20:46 AW: Yeah, so after the small business one... And those are done by our customer success team. There's two members of our customer success team that rotate or help each other out with those, but they're the ones that are doing that, they're incredibly well-equipped to do it. And for how we run things, that process for us isn't a high sales process. We follow up with, "Here's what we reviewed, here's the link to go and sign up, let us know if there's anything else you need." But it's much more of a low-touch format with what's there with them. And we've even talked about the next step for us to automate more if we felt like we couldn't get to it, is just to go to an on-demand recorded webinar, where from our side, we'd still want them to say, "Hey, here's who I am, here's my name and email address and my business," so that we can follow up with them and understand who they are. But then that would give them access to like, "Alright, great, here's a 30-minute pre-recorded demo that you can watch."21:46 DS: Is the demo when you have it with let's say 10 to 15 SMBs participating in this Tuesday or Thursday demo, is it interactive in any way? Can they ask questions? Or...21:57 AW: Yep. Yeah, they can totally use the question or the chat feature to ask questions when they're on it. Yep, still able to answer those questions, and that's where a recording wouldn't even allow you to be able to do that, and we just... It was the right step for us not to go all the way to a recorded. I know there's plenty of SaaS tools that do it. Depending upon what type of product you're selling, that might work for you, but in our case, we just know they have questions, we need to dive deeper on certain things and it works best for us.22:28 DS: Sure. And so you will address the questions interactively on the demo as they pop up? 22:33 AW: Yep.22:34 DS: Okay. 'Cause you could still have the recording, but have a chat open where someone's just sitting there answering the questions. [chuckle]22:40 AW: Yeah, yeah, totally, that could be done but then they'd be not paying attention to what the next section is 'cause they're interacting with the chatroom. But who knows? Someday we might be busy enough where we get to that, where it's like, "Alright, that's really what we need to do." Then the next segment with agencies, here we do one-to-one demo, so our agency sales rep, Chris, between demo requests and pricing requests, he's trying to move them to get them into a demo. He does a one-on-one demo with them, he answers a lot of questions. If anything, as we continue to grow, we look at with him, that he probably goes too far in the demo, and it becomes more of a customer success session than a sales. Our customers love it, but when you start looking at certain volume things, that's where it gets really tricky. How much time is too much time? And how do you cut that off? 23:37 AW: And I would say on average what we like to see on Chris' plate is closer to 10 to 15 demos a week for him based on what our inbound is and numbers that we'd like to hit. Some could be slower, some could be even faster with that. I know he's had some good marathon days where he's doing five, six, seven, eight demos within a day. But that's where it's even more important to have discipline on, these need to be 45-minute demos, and you're not trying to boil the ocean with it, as compared to somebody... Somebody can easily drag you into a two or three-hour demo just by wanting every question answered. I think that's something important for people to think about when you're early and starting off, yeah, invest all the time you can, but as you grow and hit some maturity, you do have to be conscious with, we need to have this be concise, still incredibly valuable, but have it be concise and try to move them to the next step in the sales process.24:38 DS: For sure. Is that the number, 45? Is that what you try to keep your demos to? Or the half hour, what is it usually? 24:44 AW: Yeah, so me personally, the ones that I'm doing with multi-locations, we schedule an hour call. And I really wanna have... And this one, since I'm the one doing it, I can speak to it a lot more accurately, but what we do with our multi-location calls is, we have a deck of about 30 slides that takes you about 30 minutes to run through. Then I'll have a browser set up with a bunch of tabs all related to the back end of the product, "Here's review widgets on sites, you can see it, here's a number of other features." And I really let that second section based on what they ask questions in the slides, that's where I go to like, "Alright, here's where you have these questions, now let's look at how this works either in the product or how this surfaces on your website, or in the search results, or whatever that might be."25:33 DS: That's interesting, I did not realize you did that. When someone books a demo with Whitespark, it's like, we get on a call, I have some questions for them, and then I show them the software, and we talk about their pain points and hear how we can solve those. You have a deck? Like you actually present a slide deck? 25:50 AW: Yes, yep, so what we hit upon is kind of... And I should back up, 'cause you just touched upon something that we just evolved to, it's really important. When it was just me doing these sales, I had a set routine of questions I knew I wanted to ask. And when I went to formalize our sales process more and build more structure for our sales new hires, we actually created a pre-demo questionnaire. We send them a 10-question form that hits upon things like, "Why are you coming to us? How many locations do you have? Have you used a reputation management solution before? What CRMs do you have?" We're asking the 10 most important questions that really help us understand how we might customize our pitch and what we spend time on, what are their pain points, how familiar are they with what we do, that kind of stuff, and that really helps. Yeah, that really helps inform that, and make sure that we capture those things. 'Cause even in my demos, in winging it sometimes, I'll forget to ask that question and it's like, "Ah, now I have to follow up in an email to find that," and it's just getting even further to delivering our price or a proposal, or whatever that could be.27:03 DS: For sure. Interesting. Alright, cool, I wanna see that deck. Actually, I think I might sign up for your regular SMB demo. I wanna get on that...27:14 AW: There you go.27:14 DS: And watch your demo and see how you do it, 'cause it's something that we're trying to work on here at Whitespark, improve our demos, and so I think...27:21 AW: Well, I would say for any business, sign up and be sold to. And it gives you a lot of ideas on what you do and don't like. Funny enough, we have sat in on a couple of competitors' demos, only from the standpoint that they buy lists and they end up emailing us when they bought the list to say like, "Hey, you should... "27:42 DS: "Hey, want a demo?" [chuckle]27:43 AW: Yeah. Yeah, whatever, we're like, "Yeah, sure, you emailed us about it. It's not us sneakily creating our John Smith account."27:51 DS: Yeah, totally.27:53 AW: Yeah, but it shows, especially for bigger ones, just how blind they are to what they're putting out there. It's a total shotgun spray approach. Put as much out there as possible and see what bites.28:04 DS: Who the heck buys lists? It's actually the worst marketing strategy.28:09 AW: I get emails weekly on, "Here's your competitors, buy their list." And then when they're really bad at it, and they say like, "We have all these competitors." When they're really bad at it they have you on it as well.[laughter]28:21 DS: Yeah, totally.28:22 AW: It's like, yeah...28:22 DS: You know you can segment the list.28:25 AW: Yeah. That's us, so good job.28:26 DS: Yeah, totally. [chuckle]28:28 AW: Or we re-branded over a year ago now and they'll still... It'll be a GetFiveStars email address are sent to us instead of GatherUp and the opening is there, "I've been following your company closely... "[chuckle]28:43 AW: It's like, "Really? Well, you seem to be about a year behind."28:48 DS: That's right. Yeah.28:49 AW: Yeah. So, yeah, and then, like I said, the slide deck is pretty static, answer questions in it, but it allows us to get our main talking points across, how we see the space, what's unique about us, here's the features that are there. And it's pretty much the same deck that our SMB delivers, but we just talk about it differently. The talk track and the story to it is a lot different. And then after that, like I said, the browser stuff, then I wanna jump into the product where they hag questions or interest. And I really wanna drive home with them, like, "Hey, you're interested in how you request reviews? Great, let's go in and look at how the email is basically a drip campaign and there's automations, and you control the settings and things like that with it," reporting, things like that that just translate much better visually. I wanna show that living, breathing in them.29:37 DS: Yeah, and I think the review feed, I think that's a huge thing. Whenever I demo Reputation Builder, which is GatherUp, I've always really drill into that customer activity feed. So you can say, "Here's all your reviews for all your locations. It's so nice, you can manage this all in one place," and that is what I find, I [29:57] ____ up there, their eyes light up.29:58 AW: Totally. I use that... Yeah, I'm like, this is a working screen for you, right? You have 6000 customers in here, but let's look at your ones that gave you one or two stars and that you haven't replied to them.30:12 DS: Yeah. All that culture.30:12 AW: And then they're like, "Oh, wow. Yeah, this makes it a working scenario for me so that I can make sure we're doing the right things."30:18 DS: Yeah, totally.30:19 AW: Yeah, so once the demo's done, then our process for me at multi-locations is, I'm gonna follow up, I'm gonna give them a PDF of the deck we reviewed, I'm gonna send them the recording. If there's any specific questions that I needed to get back that we weren't able to answer, send those. I'll usually try to send a case study. So I really make that reach back email super valuable to them and just kind of pepper them with like, "Alright, wow, all my bases are covered, I have all this." And then try to deliver them pricing and say, "Great, can we put in a statement of work together for you based on everything that we've shown you?" And it seems like we're...30:56 DS: Do you have a system? So, okay, you send this great email at the end that has all of the... Everything they would need so all their questions are answered, that's smart, and then do you set something up where it's like, okay, in four days an automatic follow-up needs to get sent out? Or do you put something on a calendar, in your CRM, like, "Okay, make sure we follow up with them in four days"? 31:18 AW: Yeah, we don't, but we should. At least, I can't speak for myself, but, yeah, we absolutely have the availability to do that in Pipedrive. Sometimes, I will set those, but I'm definitely not consistent with it. I've always said, like, "Man, I am the biggest failure of a CRM ever, and I just try to train my employees...31:40 DS: To do it better. Yeah.31:41 AW: And our teams to be way better than what we do. So I'm like, "Don't be me." I definitely get the deal info in there, but as far as every last detail and the back and forth, I could totally do a better job, and I could use built-in features like the reminders and next item and tasks.32:00 DS: I feel the exact same. It's like, I go through these waves where I'm really good at being on top of sales. And in my CRM, we use a system called Copper. And I'm really on top of it for a good couple of weeks and then I just get busy. It's like, these conference things will come up, and then things just start falling off and I'm not doing as good a job as I was before. What can you do? Can't do it all.32:22 AW: Yeah, no, it becomes hard. And I think if anything there... And you'll see, as you grow and you expand past just you doing it, that's where you see the real big value. It's like, "Oh, this gives me so much visibility," I can look at the team and say, "Here's what's in each of their... " We have five sales stages, and so I can see what deals are in what stage, so I can forecast better, it allows me to help, like, "Alright, why don't we have enough within this segment, within this phase of the sales process?" That visibility is a really good thing, and it's accountability for each person too, right? 32:54 DS: Definitely. Yep.32:56 AW: They see what they have in there, and then I can say like, "Hey, here's someone else's pipeline, do you see the massive difference here? And let's talk about how do we get this... Where are we missing the mark with getting in or progressing people to the next stage?"33:10 DS: Yeah, definitely. Cool. Alright, I got more questions here. Let's say, questions are coming in on support, they didn't explicitly request a demo. How heavily are you pushing demos in those customer support questions? Like new leads that come in, they have questions. Do you then proactively try to suggest demos on a regular basis? Are you pushing demos as your primary thing? Or do you suggest you get on a call? Or is a call always a demo? 33:40 AW: Yeah. We offer a lot of leeway, especially to our CS team, if those are coming in through those general channels, but we usually see a pretty... For those that are pre-sales, we are gonna try to funnel them to a demo. We basically tell them like, "This is the best way to get to know the product and really understand the concepts," because even if somebody comes in and says they have this one or two very specific questions, it's great to answer those, but you also have to realize they might be asking this specific question with a complete misnomer on the high level strategy to it. Right? 34:18 DS: Right.34:19 AW: So we always wanna route them back into... If they're not a customer with us, we absolutely wanna get them to a demo, and if we understand they're a small business or a multi-location or agency, we wanna get them to the right person to get them into the right demo. So yeah, we definitely wanna route 'em that way. When it's an existing customer, then we wanna do exactly what we can to answer those questions for them, that gets more into customer success support stuff and things like that. But being helpful, giving them the help guide article that they might need, jumping on a call if that's what they need to resolve it, all of those different pieces, whatever it is to satisfy that direct ask.35:02 DS: Yeah. How many demos are you personally doing for larger enterprise-y type client? 35:09 AW: Yeah, on average, I would probably say two to four a week.35:16 DS: That's a lot.35:17 AW: It is a lot, it's a good thing. I'm starting to... Now with having the sales team, I'm probably closer to the two, so it's gonna be very large ones that I also know will be very sophisticated. As we continue to ramp our team, the more experience our sales team has between our two outbound reps in multi-locations, that's made it a lot easier on me, but I still... The ones that are in the hundreds or possibly even thousands of locations, I'm handling those directly. Sometimes, I will have them... They still will ride along with those based on what's here. It's been harder to do lately because man, working these in amongst how crazy my travel schedule is and whatever else, that has been a nightmare and been really hard. And even with some of those, it's allowed me to pass off. It just makes it easier for me to delegate and be like, "Alright, sweet, I'm CC-ing this person on our sales team." And the minute you reply, "Yeah, let's schedule this demo," they're jumping in to be like, "Great," and they handle it from there.36:23 DS: Nice. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, because what are you gonna do? Are you gonna go to a Starbucks and do a demo? 36:31 AW: Yeah, totally. Plenty from my hotel rooms as of recently.36:33 DS: Sure, yeah. That works. That works fine.36:36 AW: Yeah. But yeah, I wanna get to the point where I'm really only involved in extremely high level pitches or the sales team is asking me to come to a super key demo, because they know it will help bring the customer on. I wanna be a tool for them as success instead of part of the process to get that customer.36:54 DS: Yeah, I like your pre-demo questionnaire. That's a great idea, we're gonna hook that up. Definitely get that.37:00 AW: It's such an easy thing to do, right? 37:01 DS: Yeah, exactly.37:01 AW: We use Typeform for it and when we're scheduling the demo, we're like, "Great, we're all set, I'm gonna send you a Zoom invite for the meeting on your calendar, and here's a quick 10-question survey to fill up before the demo so we can best customize it to your needs." And yeah, it gets filled out and it's also great 'cause our entire sales team can see all the results that come in so you can see what other customers are citing as their background, their big goals, what CRMs they're using, things like that. It's actually building up a good repository of pre-sales data for us.37:34 DS: Cool. What kind of post-sale demos do you do? Any at all? A customer just came through, signed up, they've been using the tool for a few days and they have a bunch of questions. Do you ever say, "Hey, well, let's jump on a demo and I can show you that stuff"? Is that... Or you wouldn't even call that a demo, you would just call that...37:56 AW: Yeah, we wouldn't really call it a demo. Customer success will totally do that and, "Hey, let's just jump on a call real quick, share our screen and be able to walk you through so you can see exactly how this works." On the sales side, sometimes, we'll have some secondary demos so it might be the person who's required to go do the leg work and identify possible solutions. And then the next time will be like, "Okay, now my boss and my boss's boss, these are the people involved, and now we need to do a demo for them." That, on the sales side, that's more likely in multi-locations, where we get into that. And now, the decision makers are at the table, which it's much better when they're all there day one. I usually try an early email communication to be like, who's gonna be there and things like that, and try to get all those people to the table.38:52 AW: But sometimes in bigger orgs like that, that will have to happen and then I should throw out there, for certain ones, too, I just tell them after a demo sometimes if there's gonna be more, like, "Can I get on a plane?" and "Do you guys wanna have a meeting?" If it's the right kind of deal and I know it'll go a long way, let's do this demo in person. I'm more than willing to like, let's build a relationship, let's build trust, the size of the account warrants it. Yeah, we're selling software but let's get a relationship going." And I find that that's a great secret weapon, 'cause there's so many companies not willing to invest into that or do that. And when you do that, then they're just like, "Wow, you were really eager to work with us, and I trust you, and I feel good, and you answered all of our questions while we're sitting there face-to-face. We're gonna go with you."39:42 DS: That is nice. You're lucky to be in Minneapolis, it's a good hub for getting anywhere.39:47 AW: It does make going anywhere a little bit easier, for sure. I would have never thought... Once upon a time, I would have loved to be able to live anywhere I want, and now, running a remote company, I actually could, but yeah, I cannot live an hour away from a direct main airport because that would just drive me crazy.40:10 DS: Totally. And Minneapolis is so beautifully situated in the center of the country, kind of.40:16 AW: Yes.40:16 DS: You can easily... You can pretty much have a flight anywhere where you can fly in the morning, you're working on the plane the whole time anyways, you go and have a two-hour meeting and then you're home in the afternoon.40:28 AW: Yup, it does make it a lot easier.40:30 DS: Yeah, that's great.40:32 AW: Darren, what do you think... I wanna ask you a question. What do you feel like in your process that you haven't... What has it been that has kept you from getting more of a like, how do we get what our customers are asking about and get in front of a living, breathing environment like a demo for them? What's kept you from doing it? 40:49 DS: Well, it's not like we don't do it, we definitely do it. It's just opportunities to improve our process there, things like the pre-demo questionnaire is really clever. We gotta do that. And I think another big one is this slide deck idea, so the flow of your demo is very interesting to me, and so I think we can improve process there. We do a lot of demos, so we have a lot of customers that come in and they ask for a demo, we schedule them, we do them, but we just haven't put in the time to build a good process around it. And so I know that this episode is very valuable for me from that perspective so I hope that a lot of listeners are picking up some ideas here, too, 'cause there's lots of opportunities to optimize that process. And so that's what I wanna do, I wanna improve all of these things.41:45 DS: Maybe Zoom, it might be better. So we might even change our software, we'll build a deck, and then we'll have a post-demo follow-up process. You know what? It really speaks to our last podcast episode around process. We don't have a good demo process, we're just winging it, it's like, "Oh, someone wants a demo? Sure. Yeah, we get on a call with them and we show them the tool." It's like, everything that you're describing is a very structured process on how you can optimize and improve your demos. And so that's what we need to do, that's what you have to do to take to the next level. And it's funny to think about that, right? You just think about demos as this one thing you do but you can put a process on everything to make it so much better. And I think it sounds to me like you've done a really good job of doing that.42:33 AW: Yeah, well, as always noted, there's always room for improvement. Some of the things we're doing, we literally just put some of the... The pre-demo questionnaire, that just came about 60 days ago as we grew and needed more process on the sales side. It is never ending, but yeah, I look at that structure and I look at that, the deck has always allowed us to make sure the demo is about the customer. You wanna personalize it, you wanna have to be about them, but it is about how do you communicate your value proposition, how you're different, and how you wanna help them, what's important to you, how do you do that in a consistent and concise way. And I found out early on before we had that, we didn't have that, where it's just jumping into the product that, then you really allowed the customer to completely control all of it within some ways. And while that is great, a lot of times, you would miss out on a number of things because of time constraint and where they took the conversation that you never had a chance to set the table on, "Here's what this looks like, here is what is important, here's what we wanna deliver in business value, here's how you're gonna benefit, here's the features that make it happen." And so we weren't getting that flow in a consistent basis, that was really important to be able to nail.43:57 DS: Absolutely. I think that's a really good comment, is being able to set the table. It's like you wanna make sure that all of these really valuable features and benefits get conveyed on the demo and it can completely get derailed if you don't have a structure in place. They'll have a question and then you could spend the next like half hour talking about schema markup rather than actually demoing the product.44:22 AW: Yes, and those things can still happen.44:25 DS: Yeah, definitely. Definitely, yeah.44:28 AW: What do you find? What's one thing that you have found surprising or consistent that you didn't think would be in the demos you do? What's something that you're like, "I would have never bet on this, but this is something that I continually see or a takeaway from, when I interact with customers in pre-sales demos"? 44:49 DS: Oh, man, you ask me this question 'cause I think you probably have an answer for it, but I can't think of anything. Our demo process is, I try to really focus the demo on their specific pain points. Whenever they get on a call with me, I wanna ask them like, "What are the things you're having a problem with? Are you currently using a vendor for this? What are the struggles you're having? What are the challenges?" And then from there, I'll show them all of the features. As you just mentioned, I probably miss out on showing them other really great stuff because I'm too focused on that one thing, but that is why they came to us, so I think there was a benefit there. I don't have a good answer.45:31 AW: Yeah. Maybe I can ask the question better. How well do you feel that they understand what you deliver? 45:38 DS: Yeah, so I think I would rate it... It's a C. On a letter grade scale, I would grade us a C. And I think we could get to an A with a better process because I think they understand pieces of it but not the whole picture, and that's just a really great way to look at it. If someone comes in, they want a demo, that's an opportunity for you to show them how great your solution could be, and if you don't use that time properly, you could only be showing them 60% of what the potential is. And then if you only show them 60%, someone else shows them 100%, then they're gonna get the sale and not you. So yeah, it's a really interesting way to look at it.46:24 AW: Yeah, no. And that's I guess what it's [46:27] ____, it's like, alright, they know the terms to be able to ask the questions around a citation or around a review and things like that, but what we found is a lot of times, they're missing the strategical part, and we see that so key, as like, "Let us help you think about this because the tactical decisions are endless and you have a lot of options," but unless you're rooted into, "Here is why these things matter, here's how we approach them." To me, that's the biggest sale you're trying to get, is them to buy into how you view what takes place, not so much the tactical. "What mode? Are you gonna request reviews via SMS or email?" I look at... If that's the only things they're making their decision off of, then there's a million solutions that can help them. But if you're able to convey, "This is why we've built these tactical things 'cause they weave into this strategical outlook," those are the ones that will sign up, will stay with us, become loyal repeat customers, and refer us to other people, because in the easy way to put it, like they're drinking the Kool-Aid.47:34 DS: Yeah, totally. And it's not actually Kool-Aid, it's the real stuff. You are subject matter experts and it's helpful to educate the customers on that and you establish yourself as people that they can trust to help answer that. You're not just going through the motions of like, "We have this feature. Look, you can toggle that on or off." That's not that exciting to people. What's exciting to people is, "I have this bigger problem which is much bigger than sending feedback request via SMS or email, it's like, how do we improve our business?" And so you're really tackling it at the high level, which I think is valuable in the demo, and it could be a piece of our demos that we're currently missing.48:19 AW: Yeah. Well, I think you made a great point in there of an overall, no matter what you're doing in a demo or a sales call, keep your customer engaged. If you are boring them to death, [chuckle] if you're not delivering value, teaching them, giving them insight, yeah, you're likely going to lose them or they're gonna be typing emails while your demo's playing. So yeah, that's definitely an important piece. And in that same line, boy, we as always, we're getting close to a pretty long time on here. We should probably cut ourselves off once again so that our podcast listeners stay engaged. We might have to revisit this one. There's still plenty to talk about.49:00 DS: There is, yeah. For sure. Alright.49:02 AW: Alright. Well, awesome. Thanks everyone. We appreciate you joining us again on The SaaS Venture. Darren, anything of note coming up for you personally or professionally in the coming weeks that you wanted to touch on as we sign off? 49:16 DS: Nothing too much. I'm looking forward to launching the new Local Citation Finder. I think that's gonna be great for us, it's our biggest SaaS product, we have more subscribers to that and we have a lot of churn there. So the new Local Citation Finder should improve that churn, reduce the churn, and I'm really looking forward to that. It's sort of the biggest thing that I wanna focus on [49:40] ____ in a while. I also actually need to get back to doing the local search ranking factors, so I'll be putting that together in the next month as well.49:51 AW: Nice. Yeah, those are a couple of big things I'll be excited to hear about. Hopefully, you can keep us up to date on if retooling that does help your churn and some of the things you learn in that, that'll be awesome.50:03 DS: Definitely. I'll have to make sure that we set it up properly to track and really measure the difference, the impact that we see from doing that.50:10 AW: Coolio.50:11 DS: Coolio.50:12 AW: Alright. Well, thanks, everyone, for listening. We'll wrap things up, and thanks, Darren, always a pleasure.50:18 DS: In turn, always a pleasure. We'll talk to you all next time.50:20 AW: Alright. Yup. See you everybody next time.[outro music]

Helpful links from the episode: UpWork Conferences:  LocalU Advanced, Swivel, Content Jam Copper CRM Pipedrive sales CRM ClickUp Asana FULL SHOW NOTES [intro music]00:11 Aaron Weiche: Episode 12: Building Process in the Process.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses, shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.00:40 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.00:43 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:45 AW: And today, we are going to be tackling all kinds of things related to processes, building processes, why have processes, and how you do all those things while you're extremely over your head in the process of building the business as a whole. So that'll be a fun topic to dive into and one that's absolutely never ending in the business. But before we get to that, Darren, What is new with you since we last talked? 01:19 DS: What is new? What is new? Let's see. So our platform is really coming together now. I've probably mentioned this on previous episodes, where we're trying to integrate our software. We're building a new account system with Stripe and it's starting to really look great. We've had Nick, who's taken on a role as a product manager, putting together designs and thinking about user interface and user flow through the software. So now that the dev team has design-oriented development things are moving so much better. And it's a real wake up call for me actually to make sure we never... We have this problem actually at Whitespark where it's like, "Okay, I want you guys to build this thing." So I'll put together a scope document. I define it pretty well. And then they build it, and then it's a lot of back and forth with trying to fix up the user interface, and the look of it and the feel of it and all that stuff. So I want to never do that again now that I'm seeing the huge success with this design-driven development. And so, the platform has been a really valuable thing to build that way, and so we're pushing towards that. And it looks great, and it feels great to use. I'm just really happy with it.02:33 AW: Now if I remember this right, this is your process of you're taking your tools from being siloed and one-off and bringing them all together? 02:42 DS: Yeah, and it will happen over a series of phases. So, the first thing is we need a new account system. Account means our users, our authentication, like our sign-up, sign-in, all of this like ordering any of our services and software, so if you sign up for anything it happens through accounts. So we're building all of that, and then same with our citation services, we're changing it. Like right now if you order citations, either audit and clean up or building, you're gonna have to give us a spreadsheet with your location data. So it's totally 1998 janky process. And so speaking of processes, it's terrible. [chuckle] And so, we're building what we call the location manager, where you'll just add your locations to the location manager, it syncs with Google My Business. And so that's phase one, just brand new accounts and a better ordering process for our customers.03:37 DS: Phase two is pulling in all of the functionality so it just all happens in one platform. And so that's GMB management features, Google posts creation, GMB synching, GMB notifications, a lot of that stuff is happening in the platform, is being developed right now. And then things around listings, things around rankings, all that stuff will be pulled into here. So rather than our rank tracker being a separate tool, we will still maintain that for people, but we're going to have rank tracking in the platform too. And it'll be location-centric, right? So you'll just be like, "Enable rank tracking for this location? Yes." And so you can just... It's like a new paradigm and slowly everything will be built within the platform and other applications will slowly die. People will move over to our platform, and we'll have incentives for them to do that.04:32 AW: Nice.04:33 DS: So yeah, that's coming around great. I had this really great success with Upwork this week. So one of our large enterprise clients wanted to do a big audit across one of the sites. I don't know if I wanna say this publicly. So we built a scraper to scrape the site and pull in all the listings. And I've been working with this developer out of the Ukraine on Upwork and I can't believe how well it's gone. The guy is sharp as a whip. He's got seven years of experience doing web data mining projects. He's been so easy to work with, he's been working lots of hours, and it's just been kind of a dream, and I'm like, "Man, I should do more of this." And so I've always wanted to have a side projects guy. And so I think that I'm gonna start putting more time into scoping up projects and putting them on Upwork and having side project development happen. So I was pretty happy about that.05:33 DS: That happened this week and we're gonna start building some new stuff that way too. And then I'm just really busy getting ready for these upcoming conferences. I have one in two weeks. I have a series... Over the next four weeks, so starting in two weeks, I have three auto-dealer conferences that I'm speaking at. So fortunately I get to use the same deck and the same presentation, so that's good. But yeah, I'm busy with that. That's what's going on for me. How about you? What's up? 06:00 AW: Yeah. Yeah, I get to start there as well. The same conference season, fall and spring are always heavy there, and just speaking a lot, which is always both... It's fun, it's exciting, it's great to get out there, but as we were talking before we started recording, it's like when these come in one at a time, one request comes in in January, and then the next request is in March. But then, all of a sudden, they all line up 'cause the events are just all right on top of each other that following fall. So it's like the next six weeks, next week, Swivel and Bend, and straight to there to LocalU Advanced, speaking to a bunch of Kubota dealers. One of our customers, I speak at their franchise e-conference, speaking at Content Jam in Chicago in the end of October. So yeah, just a lot of that. And the majority of these based on the structure, a couple of them are workshops. So it's a lot of...07:01 DS: Oh boy.07:01 AW: Like new slide deck creation. That's always the hard part as you well know. Presentations don't magically create themselves, and it becomes a job within itself.07:15 DS: Well, you're a veteran. You've done how many events? I don't know, so many. But, yeah. You won't have a problem pulling it off.07:20 AW: But it's a catch-22, right? Sometimes that makes me so confident 'cause I've done 100+ where it's like, "Oh yeah, I can wait", like, "Yeah, I'll get that done", and whatever. And then you push it up and then all of a sudden you're like, "Okay, I cannot say that anymore", right? 07:36 DS: Totally. It's hard to make presentations when you're busy running a company. That's the problem. And so, you end up doing all of this presentation work after hours. It's like kids go to bed, and then you spend another two, three hours every night trying to get your decks together so that you can go on and present at these conferences.07:53 AW: Yeah. No, I pretty much... I'm a lot better, and maybe it's just 'cause I've gotten older, too. I definitely hit a point now where I just can't go any more at it just 'cause how long you've been looking at it. Now that happens closer to 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock at night at the least, where once upon a time, man, if you were in the zone, you kept going till 2:00 or 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and just went for it. But I can't do that. Lack of sleep kills me now more than anything else in life.08:21 DS: I know. How much you get? I get about between six and seven on average on a week night.08:26 AW: Yep, I would probably say I'm close to that. There's times where it sparks and it's higher. I've developed this new thing where if I wake up any time from like 3:30 on...08:39 DS: Oh, really? 08:40 AW: I'm probably gonna be up for the day.08:42 DS: That's tough.08:43 AW: And that's... Yeah, that's really the biggest headache is I can't fall back asleep. So, yeah. And that hasn't worked out well with... I have four kids, and our oldest ones are 15, 13, 10. They're in a pretty easy zone. You rarely will... Maybe sometime the 10-year-old will come up in the middle night for an issue or storm wakes her up or whatever else. But then also, we have our three-year-old and he's still in that phase of getting up. He's in potty training right now though, so I have more than... He does a good job multiple times of week of possibly waking me up before 5:00 AM.09:23 DS: Oh, great.09:24 AW: And causing me to be up for the day.09:27 DS: Yeah. Yep.09:28 AW: I'm keeping the list. He's gonna know about all those someday when we can...09:33 DS: Yeah, good, keep that list. You can present it to him.09:34 AW: Yeah.09:34 DS: When you want him to mow the lawn, you can just present the list.09:37 AW: Yes. Oh, I will air those grievances and he will realize he's in a hole he'll never get out of.[laughter]09:43 AW: But yeah, it's awesome. But yeah, probably the same... It's amazing when you get an eight plus hour night and, yeah, when you get short-handed it's a little bit of a grind, but you try to get back to a regular schedule.09:57 DS: Yeah, for sure.09:58 AW: Putting in a lot of planning for... In two weeks we have our team summit, so we fly all of our North American team into Minneapolis, and then we drive about three hours into Northern Minnesota. We stay at a resort, and just a fully planned out week where we eat every meal together, we have talks and strategy sessions, collaboration, and we do fun things, we play games. It's just really to help bring our remote company together, get FaceTime, focus on bigger company things, building collaboration and teamwork, and getting everybody to have buy-in on that. So, really looking forward to that. It's just a fabulous week. And I know our employees, even though everybody is leaving behind family, busy life, all those other things, I think everybody really loves it and gets great energy off of it. So I'm really looking forward to that.10:58 DS: What do you do... Okay, so if everyone in the company is doing this, who stays behind and manages support or incoming sales, and that kind of stuff? 11:05 AW: Yeah, we just carve out some times on that. I was just talking with our exec team today, we really ask everyone to plan around it. We say, "This is that one time that we have to do this, and we get business must go on, so if it isn't an emergent have to do thing, get it done the week before or push it the week after. And then we don't start our team stuff till 9:00 AM, so if you need to get stuff, do a little bit before we start in the morning." That always happens. We leave a full hour or so for lunch, and so people can pick up work and reply to stuff during that, and then we knock off earlier in the afternoons, usually around 3:00 PM or 4:00 PM, and then people can catch up, make sure that they keep things moving. So, it's worked well for us so far, but we do ask, "Plan well, be dedicated to it, and just understand the importance of it." And obviously, if something for you is on fire, we have to take care of that, but we try to do our best to be proactive into making it so that we can engage as much with each other as possible.12:19 DS: Yeah. Well, makes sense. That sounds like it's gonna be awesome. I'd like to do that kind of thing with my company when we get there. I'm not there yet.12:28 AW: And then the last thing, just more and more with our sales team. It's challenging, it's rewarding, it's fun, but between progressing the things that they're doing. Each of them has landed a couple of small sales which is awesome to ink their first deals and be able to get through a process end to end, which builds confidence and gives insight. Also un-earths to me... And we'll probably hit a great segue here to our topic. But it un-earths to me where I have to build more process for them, and some of those things. But it's going well. It's been a lot of work but it's very rewarding work, and I really have enjoyed it. And I've also managed to take some steps outside of it to look at it from the 10,000 foot view to understand what have we done right in this, what could be better, what else should we be thinking about that we need to shore up, what should we repeat, all those kind of things. So it's been a very interesting and fulfilling process, for sure.13:41 DS: Has it taken longer than you're expected? So in terms of, "Okay we're gonna hire this salesperson, give them some training, after a couple weeks they should be closing out sales like crazy." Are your expectations being met or not quite? Did you need to temper your expectations, is what I'm wondering.14:00 AW: Yeah, I think my expectations are pretty on point. I feel pretty good in that. What I've had to see with probably our sales hires is, it's like with anything, when you look at it from the outside you always form your own opinion on, "Alright, this part will be easy, this part will be hard." Things like that, and just kinda understanding it. And then when you get into it, then a lot of times you're getting a more accurate view 'cause you're actually in it and part of it. And so I think for them it's probably been some of their expectations, even though in the interview process I'm a very frontal, as far as expectations, this is what's gonna be really hard. We put a huge focus on how much you have to know and understand the product. We gave them a lot of homework on making that happen, and all those pieces. But I think we're getting... Now it's like we have a few inbound leads and that's been the majority of what they've been closing, which is great. There are smaller ones that would be really hard for me to have as much time on and to follow up and... They can be very on point in working through those, which has been great.15:12 AW: And I think this next stage is probably gonna be the hardest because they're working on getting their pipelines built up, they're developing their own talk track and story to what they're doing, and all of those elements. And I see that's that gray area where there's not gonna be as many deals closed in wins like that because it's more of building, getting things in motion, getting your confidence, getting more the details. I think that's the next... From now to the end of the year is gonna be the hardest part, I think, for them. And then I think they'll cross over to having those things in gear further down the line, more confidence, etcetera.15:51 DS: Yeah, I wanna get to talking about process, but just quickly since we're on sales, I have been using this CRM called Copper, and I don't know if I mentioned this on previous podcasts, but I am in love with that application. It is awesome. For a really simple, inexpensive CRM for sales process, gosh, it's amazing. It's really revolutionized my ability to stay on top of sales, and so I've been really happy with it. That's all.16:18 AW: Nice. Is it just Copper.com, or CopperCRM.com? 16:24 DS: Yeah. I think if you just go CopperCRM in Google, you'll find it.16:27 AW: Okay, nice. Yeah, on the sales side, we use PipeDrive. It mirrors to our sales process, we have five stages in our sales process, and that gives a really great visual mirror to what we're doing and what stage that that prospect is falling into. So...16:46 DS: That's exactly what Copper does too. And you can define those steps, and you can make more steps and all that kinda stuff.16:51 AW: Awesome. Totally Awesome. Cool. Yeah, alright. The topic of the day, let's talk process. And always an interesting thing, right? Because when you zoom out on this, building your company is a process all within itself. And then what we're probably gonna talk moreso about today is all these micro-processes that contribute to the macro-process of building the company. One area where I did wanna start at just a thought level of the why to build the process, and let's maybe talk a little bit about what stage or time in the company do you start thinking about that process. 'Cause especially in the early days, you're just scrambling, or the buzzword all the time, hustle. You're just working every angle you can, and process isn't easy to build, 'cause it's not just doing something, it's documenting what you're doing so you can repeat it. So how have you always... Do you have a philosophy around it? How do you look at it? What's part of some of your why with process? 18:05 DS: So yeah, I think for the longest time Whitespark operated with very little process in place. And so the question about when would you start implementing process, how big do you have to be, how many employees, when is it necessary. As we have started implementing some processes, I think immediately. Let's say you are a sole proprietor, single person company, I think defining your process is extremely valuable, whether that's a sales process, how you do your client work, processes around everything are super valuable. So I would say the sooner the better you get into defining your processes the more organized you'll be, the easier it will be to do your work. I find that... Well, a great example is our new GMB management service, where we designed that thing, fully processitized it before we even took on a customer. So, there's huge value in doing that. And now, the thing is just running really smoothly. I'm lucky to have good people working in that department, really great people. Ally and Sydney are doing a great job over there. And then, our team that has helped design the processes around that, Jesse and Nick and myself. I just feel like by doing it process first, we've had huge success with it. And I think that any other way, we just would have been scrambling.19:32 AW: Yeah, totally agree. And I feel like this is one that has taken me a long time to learn it, because I'm kinda wired as like a doer instead of a documenter, and some of those other pieces to realize that you should format it that way and be able to teach, and repetition, and all of those kind of things. In the past for me, especially when running digital marketing agencies, so much of our process almost always came out of some disaster of some sort happening. Not a true disaster, but something where a fire, a client issue, whatever else... And as soon as you're done calming it and bringing order back to it, then you'd usually be like, "How do we never have that happen again?" That was...20:24 DS: We need a process.20:25 AW: Yes. Yes. That was painful, it sucked, people weren't happy, customer wasn't happy, our team wasn't happy, whatever else. And it really gets you in the mind of thinking through things and being, to me, just a key to so many elements in businesses as spending the amount of time being proactive so you don't have to spend the amount of time being reactive. 'Cause I'm totally the ilk that reactive work is twice as costly, it's twice as damaging, 'cause it's usually... Yeah, under pressure, under timelines, your team gets burnt out, it crushes their confidence in things. It's just, it's hard all the way around.21:02 DS: Yeah. If I think about that, and we just decided we're gonna put up a landing page and start selling our GMB management service and we'll figure out as we go without any processes in place, then we'd probably have a lot of churn. People would sign up for it, they would be using it, they would be unhappy for some reason, and we would fix it as we go, and over time, we would eventually develop processes. But there's damage there, because some of the early customers might talk to other people and be like, "Yeah, I tried that. It really sucked." And then, we have people not staying on. So far, our retention rate has been 97%. It's been really fantastic since we launched the service. And so...21:44 AW: Nice.21:45 DS: Being proactive with that versus reactive, it makes a lot of sense.21:49 AW: Yeah. And then, as we were talking about the emotional cost that can go into when you do things without a process and wild west, just trying to get it done and everything else, that's one area that where I really realized is one of the biggest benefits is your internal team. Employees have frameworks that help guide them, so they don't have to make one-off decisions or be paralyzed or traumatized by them, or anything else. There's a path to follow that can take a lot of that hard work out of it.22:24 DS: Absolutely, yeah. We have that really well with our citation services and our new GMB management service. And so, there's very specific workflow that you have to go through. And so, that's really helpful for the employees. In other areas, it's harder to do. And so, I think you're probably working on this. We're working on this in terms of processes around sales, processes around maybe marketing, processes around support, even development processes, that's where it's Whitespark has weaknesses. And this whole thing that you're talking about where employees really benefit from the frameworks, we do a good job in some areas, but we have a lot of employees that aren't gonna have benefits. That's where I'm looking to develop new processes.23:06 AW: Yeah, totally. So, with that, that covered some of the why and probably a lot of our listeners are like, "The why does not need to be answered." But timing right from the start, as early as possible, just realizing all you're gonna do is cash in benefits at every step down the line. The next part in the how, what does that look like for you guys? Are you creating most of these processes? Is it tasked to certain people in certain areas? Is everyone free to create a process? What does that look like for you guys? 23:44 DS: So, at Whitespark, where we've been successful with process is when I'm not doing it. So, if I'm completely out of the picture, that's probably the best thing. So, on the citation side, Yagoslav is our guy there, and he does a great job of directing that whole service and the team and developing processes within that service. And on the GMB management side, it's quite collaborative, but Ally is certainly the frontrunner there, and she's really done a good job of setting up our tasks. And Nick has also really played a role there in getting us set up with a task management system. We use this ClickUp, which we also love that software. So, ClickUp has been very good for us in terms of defining our processes, making templates around the processes. And then... A new client comes on board, it's like, "Boom," you just go through the process in ClickUp, and we make a new client in ClickUp, copy over the template and work through it. It's been really nice that way. So, generally, the way we've been building them... It's nice to actually have a software system like ClickUp, that can help you define what are the steps, what is the process, it's kind of a series of steps you go through. And so, ClickUp has been great to provide a software that structures that for us.25:06 AW: Yeah, we do the same with Asana. Create those process flows and checklists.25:13 DS: Right. Yep.25:14 AW: I agree with you, the same way. Probably all of our great processes are not created by me. I usually... I'm gonna weigh in and really make sure that the right business case is presented for us, and just try to have as much peripheral vision in how it folds into other things going on. But the same words, like I look who's in charge of that specific area or that line of work, or whatever else, and that's the person I wanna empower, work with to do those things. And then, as a leader, it's such a... You feel like you get this gift when they're like, "Hey, I'm gonna share with you the process that we've built to do this." And then, you just get to be like...25:57 DS: That's a huge gift.25:58 AW: Yeah, awesome. This is a success map, and now you're showing me and what the journey is gonna look like, and what we get at the end of it, and it's definitely a very rewarding thing. But yeah, I think the team is really key inside of that, and even back to your earlier comment, even if you're just solo, it's thinking through, "Alright, what are the things I should be building on process myself?" So, when I do need to make that jump from one person to two, it's not just conversation. These are these documented things, and then hopefully, they build on top of that, so when you go from two to four, you have a head start on that. It continues to multiply and get better as you grow.26:40 DS: Absolutely. Imagine that you're just a solo freelancer, you've developed your own process, you grow to this point where you hire somebody and you're like, "Here you go, we got it all ready for you. You don't have to get it all out of your head". So, it's smart to just process at times everything [26:58] ____.[overlapping conversation]26:58 AW: What are some of the key things that you look at that are just key processes for you guys over the years, that you've developed, that you're like, "Oh, we couldn't live without this one now. This is really helps guide some of the things that we do"? 27:15 DS: I would say... Yeah, so I've touched on them before. The citation ones, we've been doing that for a long time, so we have a very clear process for how we do a citation audit, we have a very clear process for how we do citation clean up. Every single site that we do clean up, there's a process, you step through the steps. And so, we have documentation on all of that. And so, that's been really successful for us, for sure. And we've done the same thing around our GMB management service, where it's just a series of steps, and then you break it down into smaller tasks, and then you define the tasks, and this is what you have to do to do the task. I don't know, is that what a process is? Is that kind of what yours look like too? 28:00 AW: Yeah, yeah, really, for the most part, it's just defining and creating a playbook on what it is and putting the rules of the game together that everybody is gonna play by follow and go through in that same manner so that you can repeat it over and over again, the same method to achieve the same results.28:22 DS: Yeah, and it becomes your training guide, too. When you've got that process, training is much easier.28:27 AW: Yeah, for sure. For us, and this goes all the way back to one of our early episodes, when we were talking about sprints and things like that, that was something that I really saw evolve over my first couple of years with GatherUp and that was our development process, where it was something that was really, really loose, then we ended up figuring out all the right pieces of it, from where ideas collected, then how are they turned into a feature spec, how are they socialized to get buy-in and make people aware and contribute to it that way, then how do we create low-fidelity mockups that we can click through and see it in action, and then how do we socialize that so our team can poke some holes and see what's wrong, and then it gets to design. Then, once it's in design and we poke holes in it there, then it goes to front-end development. And then, finally, at the end is the engineering team to get their hands on it to make it living and breathing. And then, once that happens, it's dev servers and then internal testing.29:35 AW: Then we almost always know if it's a bigger feature it'll go into beta with us and we'll invite beta users and we're able to flag it and just turn that feature on or off per account or per location in our system. And then, once we feel like, "Alright, it's solid," we have some user feedback, we don't have any big holes or issues, then we're able to roll it out. And even then, content has already been riding alongside of it, and so they have blog posts ready to go and the user guide and an update to our changes log and all those areas. So, it's been really fun to watch something that once upon a time was just an idea, and then you just built it, and didn't think about any of the 20 other steps we have in our process, now, to this just well-oiled machine on how it goes down the track and what happens with it. And it's still not to say we don't have bumps with certain areas of the process. One thing we continue to have to get better on is that future spec should be living and breathing throughout the cycle, and sometimes people don't read enough into it, they don't continue to update it, they don't use it as the guide that it should be in the process.30:47 DS: And by the time you get to the end of it, what you've developed is completely different from the feature spec.30:51 AW: Yeah, it can be a little bit. Or you just end up missing something. Sometimes it was like, "This was a very core piece of the feature spec, so how did we miss this?" Sp yeah, both sides of that can happen a little bit. But it's using all those things. It's like anything, you still... You have to... A process is only as good if you're gonna adhere to it and you're gonna do check-ins and check-points on it to make sure it's staying in line with what you're doing.31:20 DS: So, all of that sounds so great. We've done a pretty good job with processes on the service side, but we are quite loose in terms of processes on the development side. Our software... I don't know, our teams are operating in silos on different projects, and it all comes together, but I do think we have problems there, and that's an opportunity for us to tighten up and when we tighten up there, I think we'll be able to develop faster. 'Cause right now, we end up with roadblocks or problems or reversions. So, you build something and then we will then come in with designs after, and you've gotta step back for a few days and rework it to match with the actual vision of the product. So, by not going through the proper steps of a process, we waste time. And so, this is an area that I really wanna work on and improve processes in. And so, actually I had a meeting with one of my developers yesterday and we started talking about some of this stuff and processes we could put in place. And so, it's coming, but it's certainly an area that we need to work on.32:30 AW: Yeah, and just to share from my experience with it, I would say if anything... What ended up happening for us and where we place more of our value is much less on speed and just more so in reliability of: It's built right, it has the right aspects to it, it performs right, it meets the needs of the user and it allows you to pull... To some extent, nothing is ever fast enough in software, From the minute you have the idea, you would love if it was already in play. Yesterday, I was just doing... I was writing a feature spec for something, and it's something that I could completely do manually, so I started doing it manually and making it happen, and it's something related to social, so I was putting it out on social, and it definitely got me excited, it allowed me to see pieces in the process and decisions I need to make, what kind of settings and things need to be part of it. But then, at the same time, I also realized, "Alright, all of this excitement, this is gonna probably be three months to build this. So now, I gotta put all that excitement on the shelf so that... "33:44 DS: I know. Painful.33:46 AW: Yeah, the speed part can be hard, but when it comes to getting enough sleep at night, not making customers mad, not rolling out something that affects other dependencies. That, to me, is really the biggest win in all the process is, it just can put your mind and your emotions and the product at ease and not have to worry about some of those other things.34:12 DS: Right. It's funny, I think about how small my company is. I have a friend, a fellow developer I went through Computing Science with, he works at Salesforce now, he's one of the team leads over at Salesforce. And the amount of process they have over there is mind-blowing. And so, for an organization of that size, every piece of code they write goes through a massive series of unit testing, then it goes through an integration process, which has its own series of testing, then it goes on to a code server thing that they run against it for a month, it goes through all this process. A feature never makes it into the actual public-facing system until... It takes months and months for that stuff to hit production. And it's because they have all of these processes in place with their development. In one sense, you have to do it that way when you're as big as Salesforce, because you can't release broken stuff, 'cause it's gonna affect millions of customers. It can really bog you down. Do you ever feel bogged down by this, the processes you've put in place? 35:21 DS: 'Cause sometimes it's nice for us at Whitespark to be like, "Wow, this is gonna be great, it's super valuable. Developers, stop what you're doing. [chuckle] We're gonna pound this out in the next few days and put it in the software." And we've done that many times, and it's been great, it's been successful. And then, they get back to the regular flow. But when you have a strict process, you're not allowed to do that. You're like, "Okay, well, you got an idea. Cool, we'll put it on the queue." So, do you ever feel bogged down by your current process? 35:52 AW: I don't think I feel bogged down. I guess I always realized the trade-off. We can re-shuffle priorities or bring something to the front. We definitely have something like that that we're doing right now that we wanna get done by our customer webinar in two weeks from now.36:13 DS: Right, exactly.36:14 AW: And that causes some shuffling. But even when we do that, it still follows a process. I have enough personal experiences of, when you go outside the process, it eventually, almost every time has bit me in the rear end. And it might not be immediate, it's just later on when it's like, "Oh yeah, well, we built that really quick and we didn't really do much with the interface or we didn't even put it here and now it's been drifting in this no-man's land even though we got a quick win for a handful of clients that know where it's hidden in the product. We didn't build it right. We didn't roll it out right. And now, we're gonna have to go back and do that work."36:52 DS: Yeah, my development team would ask me to re-listen to this podcast and hear you say that five times.[laughter]36:58 DS: So that I stopped doing exactly that. I love to derail them, and be like, "Oh my god, guys, great idea," 'cause one customer asked for it. So, one customer asks for something, and I'm like, "That's gonna be amazing." And so, then we roll it out and then it's like, "Yeah, that one customer thinks it's kinda cool," but it doesn't really improve the business. And so, that's the thing about taking the time to think about, what is the actual customer adoption of this feature and will it move forward or should we stay the course on what we're currently building? 37:31 AW: Yeah, no, totally. I mean, those are always... I think the hardest thing in running a software company is prioritization. I think it is the bottom line hardest thing 'cause it's like we are not short between myself and my Blumenthal and people on our team. We are not short of ideas, our customers have ideas.37:54 DS: Yeah. Totally.37:55 AW: But you only have so much time to execute and it really comes down to how do you prioritize them to get the maximum value out of how you prioritize it, right? So...38:06 DS: Yeah.38:06 AW: That's the tricky part. And I'm like, emotionally, I'm right with you. When I'm excited about something like the test I was doing, I want it built already because I know it'll unlock emotional value for our customers, and so that's gonna be a really big win. And it's like, "Oh, I want that win. I wanna play the game right now. I don't wanna have to go through the practices, training camp, whatever else." But then I'm reminded and when I'm writing that feature spec, I'm reminded like, wow, there's a lot to think about with this.38:39 DS: Every time. I know, you're always seems like, "Okay, cool, we could definitely build that." But then once you start speccing it out, you're like, "Oh, this is growing," as we've got a lot of things you got to consider, right? It's like, well, there's all the edge cases, If this then that. There's a lot of stuff to figure out in the spec process.38:56 AW: Yeah, no, there definitely is. But I would say, for the couple of drawbacks in process and whatever else, just as you point out, you have to understand your time and place with process and we couldn't run gather up like Salesforce, right? Like that would, it would be over overdoing it, but you can definitely take the core concepts and look at like, "Well, why do they do it?" Right? Well, it's for protection of this, right? 39:24 DS: Exactly.39:25 AW: It's protection of the product, or it's protection of the customer, or protection of your internal team and your employees. And so when you see that, that's where you can look like, "Okay, we can build a little bit of process around that, and then as we grow, then we can grow the process more."39:40 DS: And I think that's exactly how it happens. Like, obviously look at the size of Salesforce, right? So their process wasn't always like that. It's evolved and developed into that as their team has grown and the complication of their product has grown. So then your processes have to grow along with it, makes sense.39:57 AW: Yeah. Have you seen anything with your employees over time when you introduce a new process where either non-existed or you're revamping a process where they're a little resistant to that change? Or it's a little harder for it to catch gear? 40:12 DS: I don't think I can speak to that question very well because on the citation side, I don't get direct feedback from the citation team, really. I just interface mostly with Nyagoslav over there. And so he would get that feedback and he could probably answer that question better than me. On the GMB management service side of things, we've always developed from process. But I'll be able to answer that question in a few weeks because we'll be rolling out a development process pretty soon. So it'll be interesting to see how that gets picked up. How about you? Have you implemented new processes that didn't exist before? And how has that been received by your employees? 40:49 AW: Yeah, there are definitely can be ones where there is a little bit of tension, especially with things like when we started implementing more financial controls, so like expense reports, and things like that. There's more than a few people that were little up in arms about it. And in some cases, it's like, all right, do the process a few times and then let's talk about it. If you feel like it's too cumbersome or whatever else but it can be hard when people look at like, "Oh, well, that's a little bit of busy work," and they don't understand, "Okay, well, this is what it's for protection or structure with." They don't always see those part.41:26 DS: Yeah, definitely.41:28 AW: And yeah, with certain processes there can be things. If there's a process that exists and they're comfortable and used to doing it. And it's easy for someone to look at and be like, "Well, there's nothing wrong with what we're doing right now. It's not failing." But they don't understand, Well, here's why we're adding on to it, or making it further, or whatever outright the business reasons. And that's where I look at like, that should probably be my job then to help connect those dots and explain it, support the person who's putting the process into place to say like, "This was created out of a conversation we have with here's we're expanding the scope of what we need to address, protect, ensure, and that's why there's a change since. It's not that the current one is wrong, or you're doing the current one wrong, or we wanna... It's not because we wanna add more stuff to your plate, it's just we have to assure bigger things in a bigger way."42:22 DS: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, that's a good note there is that when you roll out a process, it's pretty valuable and important to make sure you communicate the whys and the hows, you ask the team when you do that. So if you're gonna roll out a process, make sure that everybody understands it's bigger than just you doing the process, this is the overall value to the company.42:48 AW: Yeah, I think explaining wise in anything is important. If you ever even look at like our monthly customer webinars, anytime we roll out a new feature, we start with a, "Why are we building this feature?" And it's not the tactical reasons, it's more the strategic. We created this because these are benefits that people have asked for or that we see is important to the strategy that we're trying to align our tool with. And I think that helps, really helps people understand more and wrap their mind around the feature and the things that are part of it when you lead with the why.43:26 DS: Sweet, I'm taking that one and will be using it this week 'cause we have a big update to our Rank Tracker about to launch. It's done. It's just waiting for me to communicate it properly to our customer base. So I'm gonna be doing some videos, and I'm gonna do a blog post on what we've changed and why. And so, I'll lead with why, I think that's a great tip.43:49 AW: There you go. Check out our... We post all of our webinars on our blog, just click on the webinar category and we post the recordings in the slides so you can see how we presented if you need a little guide for yourself there.44:01 DS: Gonna do it. Thanks for the tip.44:02 AW: Right, yeah, so let's wrap up. What's one area where, and talking about this are we looking at, what's one area where you feel like I really, I wanna develop more process. This is on my short to mid-term radar to build out the first process, or to edit and mature an existing process even further.44:27 DS: Yeah, so 100% for me is on the development side. So we need processes around how we develop, how we communicate. We have problems like sometimes staying on track where someone can start working on a feature and then they realize, "Oh, all this code is total crap." And so they start rewriting everything but then that rewrite affects other things and so we're building processes around that to try and keep focused on the task at hand and trying to make sure everyone's on the same page. Code review, I have some processes around that on my mind, and something that I want to build out there and really getting into a real flow of like, "These are the steps that we go through for software development and these are the checks and balances we have in there." So that's a process that we're really working on and need to get ironed out. And then we're also going into a great place with that... You know, a lot of our legacy code is being mostly phased out, we rebuilt everything, and so we're in a good spot now to really define those processes where we don't have to deal with old crap that can't even fit to our processes. That's a big one for me. Development. How about you? 45:37 AW: Yeah. Yeah. I think that'll make a big impact for you.45:41 DS: I think so too.45:43 AW: Yeah, for me, it's one where I probably need to be the most critical of myself and that's just to employ development within our team. In growing, our employee size has doubled in the last 18 months from sub-10 to... I think we're about at 22 now.46:02 DS: Wow.46:04 AW: So, yeah, just... And we've cleaned up some things like our interview process and offer job descriptions. Some of those things have definitely improved but it's at next step on really solidifying a clear review schedule and those check points and expectations within those, and then when you get further out, just laying out like, I wanna get to the point where we can lay out some career path expectations, right? It's not just...46:31 DS: For sure. Yeah.46:31 AW: Here's a six-month review and what you did well, here's challenges and areas to work on, here's looking forward but really being able to help people understand, here's where you are and here are some possible paths. And that's one where I look at mature companies really have that nailed really well now. Do they move people through those paths? Well, that can be debatable here and there but I think it's really important for people to have a clear line of sight because when we have a great team and everybody works so hard... I never really have to... I never have to coach anyone on our team to work harder, I have to help coach on priorities, efficiencies, and things like that so to me that's one thing that I need to champion a little bit harder and we need to get better at, like, we're implementing some of those things but probably not fast enough. And we need to get that long-term vision, we need that career path piece and phased to be in there, not just a review cycle to be there.47:40 DS: Yeah, totally. Do you find, as the company grows, that this sort of employee development stuff becomes hard for you to personally manage? Like, it finds quite a bit of time and it's the kind of thing that I don't do a good enough job of staying on top of and one day, I would hope to have an HR manager of some sort, like an HR person that work through all this stuff or managers of specific teams, they do the check points and stuff, right? 48:10 AW: Yeah. And your second comment there is what I think is really key. Even though we've had this growth and explosion, I still have way too many people that are direct reports with me.48:21 DS: Yeah.48:22 AW: So it's finding someone to lead each of those areas where I can only have two or three or four direct reports and then they have teams underneath them and...48:33 DS: That's the way to go, I think. For sure.48:35 AW: Yeah, we've got half that structure built in. I have a couple areas where that happens but then we still have a couple that don't. And then if you have... You know, right? Like, the sales team all falls under me. So there's basically three people on the sales team that all become direct reports. I think that's the challenging part in that growth is like you have the growth, you can't always afford to or you don't even... It's really important to find the right person to be that manager, director, VP, whatever you wanna look at. So you're very cautious about those or you're specific with a lot of intent to recruit them or whatever else that might be. So you have to eat up a lot of gap in that time and it becomes tricky. You're already taxed for time and it's more time and then it's also not fair to those that are underneath it. I mean, any time we've plugged someone into a leadership position in a department or on a team, that's the first thing I tell them, I'm like, "You are gonna benefit from having someone focused on you instead of 5% of my time." Right? 49:38 DS: Yeah.49:39 AW: That's the biggest win right upfront amongst all the other things that will come with it.49:43 DS: Yeah, totally. That's a great point.49:44 AW: Yeah. Alright. Well, hey, great topic. I think I picked up a few things, reminded me of a few more things I need to work on.49:55 DS: Same.49:56 AW: Process is never ending. That's for sure.50:00 DS: Yeah. And then the more you can... Everything could be process-itized. If you put in the time to do it, I think there's benefit there so I don't know, it's a note to self to start working on some of that. I'm definitely thinking about sales processes, I'm thinking about processes with the support team, how we handle incoming tickets, how you divide them up based on what the subject matter is, there's so many things that we could do better at adding process to and we're gonna work on it.50:26 AW: There you go. Let's make sure from time to time we sneak in some of our process wins or challenges into our periodic updates when we start our episodes. I think that's good and allows you and I to hear what's going on as we continue to evolve our processes.50:42 DS: Great idea. Let's do that.50:44 AW: Alright. Perfect. Thanks, Darren. Another productive show. Episode 12 is in the books.50:51 DS: Yep.50:51 AW: As always, it's been great getting feedback from some of you guys. I thank, shout out to Will Scott. He sent me an email that he had binged all of our episodes and the number of other people always touching base with us. Take the time, write us an iTunes review, or hit Darren and I up on Twitter and we'd love to hear if you have episode ideas or specific questions that you would like us to touch on, cover, or just say we have no idea and try to go from there on it. So with that we'll hopefully talk to you in a couple of weeks. Good luck with your upcoming speaking gigs and we'll talk soon, Darren.51:29 DS: Thanks. Yeah, same to you. You got a lot coming up there so good luck with all of that and good luck with the retreat and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks, maybe three, I don't know. We both have a busy upcoming schedule so talk to you soon.51:42 AW: Alright, sounds good. Thanks Darren and thanks everybody for listening.51:44 DS: Thanks everybody. Bye.

Helpful links from the episode: Whitespark's Google My Business Service Whitespark's Local Rank Tracker GatherUp's Insights Report 100+ Online Review Statistics resource  FreshChalk: 150k small business websites teardown Getting started in public speaking and presentations Whitespark Local Pulse email Whitespark weekly videos (YouTube) FULL SHOW NOTES:[Intro music]00:11 Aaron Weiche: Episode 11, Marketing your bootstrapped SaaS.00:16 Show intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:42 Aaron Weiche: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:47 AW: After a nearly month hiatus and a failed podcast attempt, Darren we are back hopefully in the groove of things and can return to a more normal schedule of recording.01:00 DS: Yes, that was quite disappointing at MozCon. We thought we were gonna get a nice podcast recorded while we were in person. That was gonna be really exciting, but so many technical difficulties, that was quite frustrating.01:14 AW: Yes. Mark us down as being complete newbies in live in-person podcast recordings. We made a lot of attempt and just ended up failing, and let's just put that behind us. There's bound to be a failure along any journey, right? 01:32 DS: I thought we did it though, and I thought it was a success, but then I guess we didn't get the file, I think it was all network problems and stuff. It was too bad.01:42 AW: Yep. No glory to be had at the end of it but... With that we've had literally about four to five weeks since we've talked at length and since we've recorded an episode. What's been going on with you in that time? How have you been living these last days of summer? 02:02 DS: Well, I did go on a family vacation which was amazing. We went to Nova Scotia, we'd never been out East before and it was magical, it was just such a nice, relaxing vacation. We typically vacation in big cities and then we pack our days with going to all the museums and sites, and we've got lunch, breakfast, and dinner planned every single day at all the different places we wanna eat at. Whereas this was just like a we went to a rural type cottages in Nova Scotia just by the ocean and just hung out and it was relaxing and it was awesome. And we loved it so much, we're probably gonna re-book again for next year.02:44 AW: Nice, sounds like a winner.02:45 DS: It was great, yeah. It was good. And so, I guess, on the business side, so much going on always at Whitespark. We launched a new landing page for our Google My Business Management Service. It's got better screenshots, and we've kinda tweaked the copy a little bit, talked a little bit about some of the benefits a bit more, and it definitely seems to be converting better. So we're seeing those orders trickle in and our team is getting a little bit stretched thin. So we're gonna do some hiring this week. I have an interview set up tomorrow, so we'll keep building that team and that service, I'm excited about that. We're also transitioning our citation building team, so we've been working with OptiLocal for, I don't know, seven years now, as our citation building partner, and so we're bringing that all in-house now, so it'll all be managed by our in-house team led by Nyagoslav Zhekov, citation expert extraordinaire. We are about to launch some major improvements for our Rank Tracker, those are finally finished. I had a call with Jessie, our marketing lead today about how we're gonna promote the launch of these new features, so I'm excited about that.04:00 AW: What are... Real quickly, what are some of the improvements to the rank tracking tool? 04:05 DS: Yes. The Rank Tracker new features are the, basically we wanted to add screenshots. So it's the stagnant that lots of people have been asking for. So we started this, "Okay, we're gonna add screenshots to the Rank Tracker." And once we started getting in there, we found all these other things that we wanted to fix and do and change and improve, and so it's been a fairly significant overhaul, but it's not a significant release. Like the big announcement is, "Oh, now you can do screen... You'll get a screenshot of every search result page." But there's a whole bunch of stuff behind the scenes that we rewrote, reworked, made it more efficient, made it actually accurate. And once you get in and you discover actually, our visibility score is totally wrong. [chuckle]04:48 DS: We started fixing a whole bunch of things and the release has a bunch of bug fixes, user interface improvements, and the screenshots. And so, I'm pumped about that, that is coming down the pipeline right away and I'm gonna do some videos. This is another thing we've never done on the landing page, I wanna have this overview video where I show people what's awesome in the tool and why it's great, and it's something that I've always meant to do and I've been holding off because I know there's a few problems with our production version of Rank Tracker, so once we flip switch on this one, I'm gonna make these videos and update all of our marketing too.05:24 AW: That's awesome, and you are great at those videos from the other video work I've seen you do. That's definitely a hole for us, so good for you, and yeah, that'll be great, that sounds awesome.05:38 DS: Yeah, I'm excited about that. And man, so we're building this one, like a whole new account system with Stripe and all the ordering pages will be done, all the subscriptions authentication, this whole thing's being built, and then it's meant to really facilitate our citation services. Right now when people order, they have to send a spreadsheet of their location info, and then we do the job and we send them the spreadsheet back. It is so 1998 janky, crappy unprofessional stuff, it's bugged me forever. So we're building what we call the location manager where you can add all of your locations, and that's pretty much built and done. And when you place an order now, it just... You select which location from our location manager you want us to do work on, and then everything is just nice, and in the platform. But in the process we decided we're gonna... Well, allow it to sync with GMB, and so we did that. And honestly, my part-time student developer was like, "Oh this GMB API is great." And the dude has already built Google post scheduling, Google Q&A monitoring, Google review management, he's built Google photo management, so we actually have a full GMB management platform that we're about to launch too. So all of that stuff is coming together so nicely, and I'm excited about that.06:53 AW: Isn't it amazing when you have a good API, good documentation? Although my team might argue how good most of Google's APIs are.07:02 DS: Right yeah.07:02 AW: But when you have those things, and then you have someone ambitious to do those, it is it can just be a free for all.07:09 DS: Yeah, and it's really the feature releases are coming fast and furious. And so I'm like, "Alright, sweet, this platform is looking so beautiful". And I've got Nick working on the user interface and the design of it. And this analogy I have that I'm really excited, I can't wait to launch this. It's like, you remember back in the day when everybody used Skype as their internal chat system? We did anyways.07:34 AW: Yeah.07:34 DS: We used Skype, and we had groups in Skype, and then Slack came around and it just felt so much better, it had a more modern interface, it had a great feel that you could do fun things in it. This is the analogy I feel about what we're about to launch. And I could not be more pumped about it, because it just... It's a dream to use and it makes me really happy. So I can't wait to put that out the door.08:00 AW: Nice. Yeah, you have a lot of good vibes going on, you got... I like that, I like that momentum. Maybe we should talk less frequently.08:07 DS: Yeah, good vibes all rounds. Good stuff. Yeah, the future is looking bright, just gotta get this stuff launched. How are you? What's going on? 08:16 AW: Oh man, it's all going on, which is a fabulous thing. I've obviously spent a lot of my time with our newly... Our two new outbound sales team hires. So, you do all this work to find the right people and interview and get them on board. And then comes especially when you're someone who sells and you've been doing a lot of it just by the seat of your pants. And now you realize how much more I need to structure things, right? I realized it even before they were hired and started working on a lot of those pieces but just so much into getting organized for training, and building out better processes and, down to the smallest details and how to have better organization. So just, a ton into that, and you mix in the... Lately, I've been on probably every other week travel schedule, so in the office for a week, then on the road for a week. So, not only all your meetings are compartmentalized into one week when you're actually back and in the office, for calls and demos, and your own sales calls, and then all your sales training and those things as well. So definitely really intense when I am back and able to be fully present on more day-to-day things and training with them. But it's all been great. The uptake for them has been really solid. One has already closed a deal. The other one has one out for electronic signature right now.09:51 DS: Nice.09:52 AW: Hopefully it shows up soon. Yeah, so both of them closing deals in their first month of being with us. But yeah, it's a lot of work and you start to realize a lot of holes and gaps when you're starting to try to systematize a lot of things and create processes and repeatable processes. And then I also, where one part of it is really awesome that two reps at once, and so you're training them both at once. And you can double up on so many of those things, not only with me but as they spend time with others in the company. But then you just start seeing just... It's no different than when you have two kids. And how different each of your kids are.10:31 DS: Right.10:32 AW: You start to see like, "Alright, here's how I'm gonna have to manage them differently. Here's their pros, here's what's great, and then here's where an area of challenge or area of opportunity and growth."10:42 DS: Yeah.10:42 AW: And I need to actually personally address that with them. So now it's starting to split out a little bit where it's like, "Alright I have some work to do in specific areas. It's not all just like, everything's doubled up at once. No worries, it's a two for one." So.10:55 DS: Sure. You didn't quite get the two-for-one.[laughter]10:58 AW: No, I didn't get the same exact person. Maybe you need to hire twins, when you hire. [chuckle]11:02 DS: Exactly. All your new sales hires will be twins going forward.11:07 AW: Yeah. But all really great things. But the hard part has just been tough, when you are somebody, right? I have 100 things going on at once. I still find a way to keep 99 of them usually going. But then when you have to slow down, stop, and turn it into process and documentation and those things, you really have to focus and it takes up a lot of time, but then you see what the benefits are too. So it's a really good reminder.11:29 DS: Yeah.11:31 AW: Based on our early success with that we're hiring another CS lead for our customer success team. We're starting to see our on-boardings ramp up with more and more deals being signed, and we've already identified how critical that is to success with our platform.11:48 DS: Yeah, we gotta get into that.11:50 AW: Yeah. So with that we're actually... As much as we have ever, we're hiring ahead on this which by the time they get on board, it won't be ahead then, but usually about the time this person is gonna end up starting that's when we would have usually said, "Oh man, we could really use someone else." So we are four to six weeks ahead which is... You'll take those small wins, right? 12:16 DS: Absolutely, yeah, we're trying to do that with our new GMB management service hire. So, I know what the capacity is of the team, but I'm also projecting based off of how many orders are coming in, and based off of the potential that an agency might say like, "Hey, we have 20 clients on board." So that's why it's like, "We better hire now, even though we don't need that person immediately we're gonna bring them on and get that person started. So that by the time we do get a little slammed we have the resources in place to manage it."12:46 AW: Yeah, for sure, and it's... We're trying to get better at predictable hiring and understanding numbers and capacities and things like that. We still have a long way to go but yeah, when you get kind of these nights, it's like I didn't have to have six people tell me this is breaking us. We were able to see like, "Oh pretty soon they will say that. So let's do something about it."13:11 DS: Great. Nice.13:12 AW: Yeah, really good. Product-wise, we launched a really big feature, we've been pretty launch heavy this summer but our last really big one within the last month is our Insights Report. It, in essence, is Natural Language Processing, so using some machine learning and AI, all the buzz words. It's powered by IBM Watson. And it's really designed to take... If someone writes three or four sentences around a review, we're now breaking it out into specific keywords in the context of those keywords, the sentiment of those keywords, and give people a broader view. 'Cause if you have a four-star review, that three things were awesome, but here's the one thing that held me back, businesses really need to understand when that happens as a whole or what does that look like and what are those, the food is great. The place was great. The pricing was great but the service really could have been better. The service wasn't exceptional, and helping them figure those out.14:17 DS: I got a little demo at MozCon and it looks really great. I love the visual where you can see the big green bubbles are like, "This is where we're good.", and the red bubbles are a "This is where we need to improve." So it's really smart. Quick glance at where you're doing well and what you're not, and it's amazing you can pull that out of the review content. I love it. It's a great feature.14:38 AW: Yep, it's been really exciting. And just as you noted, we also... We took some product approaches too where we wanted it to be a visual feature. And so we really looked at shapes, colors, layout, things like that, how do we make this something that is really visually pleasing and informative because so much of our content or data just its rows, tables, percentages, things like that. So we wanted to be able to bring some of that appeal to it as well. And when we outlined it, there's already a lot of tools doing natural language processing, doing sentiment analysis and we just kind of took a little bit deeper stab at it. The main thing we're trying to do with it is showcase what's the impact and understanding, when people are talking about this, this is what leads to your strong performances that raise your review average, and when they talk about this, this is what weighs you down and brings your review average down. So not just individually looking at terms, it does that as well, it outlines that, but we really wanted to show you what's having positive impact and what's having negative impact on your average experience for a customer.15:50 DS: Yeah. It's a really good feature. It's a great sales tool for you as well. So when you get in those conversations, you can show that feature and it's the kind of thing that will really click with prospects where they'd be like, "Oh we need that," That's awesome.16:03 AW: Yeah. Yeah. Especially with larger locations 'cause we can index hundreds or thousands of Google reviews, and already show them how people look at this without them even having to work with us, day one.16:15 DS: Amazing. Yeah, totally great. Pour it all in and then...16:18 AW: Great resource.16:19 DS: Yeah.16:20 AW: Yep. And then from, as I mentioned the buzzword marketing side, some of those things you do have to look at and there's all kinds of jokes around the software world that you'll get bought or people will pay you money if you have the buzzwords of AI or anything else but you do have to check those boxes. And as I always look at it, there's features you build around utility that you help do things, automate things, whatever else, and then you have this second layer of features that is more about what can we teach you, how can we help you think, how can we help you make a decision. And that's where this one falls into. And it was maybe our first or second, depending on how you look at some other things, foray into that starts to really... Let's simplify some thinking for you and point out some things you might not be aware of.17:10 DS: Yep, well it's a great feature. Congrats on that launch, yeah.17:13 AW: Yeah. Cool. And then planning hard, we have our North American Team Summit, so I think the North American team size is 14 now. We have that in the end of September. We bring everyone into Minneapolis and then we head about three hours north up to a resort. Fall is a beautiful time here and we spend four concentrated days together between company-sharing and having everybody on the same page since we're all remote, allowing everyone to interact and get to know each other better. Brainstorming exercises, future planning and then a lot of fun. When you get to eat every meal together. We've done things like escape rooms and boat rides and things like that. It really is... I don't know, I might re-brand it as "Camp GatherUp", but it's really a good time and everyone looks forward to it, so that's a lot of fun to plan that.18:09 DS: Yeah, it sounds wonderful. I wanna do stuff like that with my team, of course, but now it's not the time. We're in build mode. Once we're in the night sales mode that you're in, then we'll get there.18:20 AW: Yep. And it took us... To have that full out one last year was our very first one. We've had bits and pieces of ones, and when our team was really small, we had one that basically included everyone and that was all of five of us getting together. But yeah, to reach these bigger numbers and to bring everyone together from all across North America's... From our team there is definitely exciting.18:46 DS: Awesome.18:46 AW: And then lastly, where we tried to record our podcast live and failed, but MozCon was just a fantastic event for us. The number, the amount of exposure, the number of leads, the energy, all of those things were just incredibly fabulous for us, we'll still see. I just had one of my new sales team ping me and they just said another demo where you set well passed a dozen demos. We probably had about 80 very qualified leads. We've signed one or two deals. I have another couple that are in like legal or in approval process. So, just highly valuable, highly profitable for us. It was just a fantastic event that we still have a lot of energy and momentum going from that almost basically a month ago now.19:41 DS: Amazing. Huge congrats, that's awesome because, yeah, I totally feel that. When we did MozCon, it's just this great conference and it's so nice that there's only eight other vendors there, so you really get this great attention, and they put the snacks right down there where the vendors are, so all the vendors are, or all the attendees are having a snack and then checking out what kind of stuff you got going on. So yeah, it really drives a lot of people.20:09 AW: Absolutely. And with that, let's segment in, that's what we wanted to talk about being at a conference in any capacity whether it's a sponsor, a booth speaking whatever else is all part of the marketing and that's what we wanted to talk about today was marketing for your SaaS company. And this one too, I see a lot of when I'm on Facebook groups or Slack groups of SaaS companies, marketing is obviously a very large topic because so many of us feel like we understand how to build a product. We don't always know the right things to build and what whatever else but that the most challenging thing is how do you find users, how do you let them know that your product exists and that you're out there solving a problem and you have what they need with it, so marketing such an important piece. And interesting enough, we might not have too much variants in what you and I talk about today because I would say we are both from the school of a massive inbound marketing focus for both Whitespark and GatherUp.21:15 DS: Yeah, we really are, and I don't know if we're just a little bit lucky when I think about, let's say if I were to SaaS starting out right now, it would be really hard to get to where both of us are and I think you would probably be smart to explore paid rather than just inbound or you obviously wanna do both. But in order to kick-start, you might wanna start doing some paid stuff right off the bat like we have the advantage of being in early, early writers, speakers, about local search, and so we've sort of already built up an audience before we even had really good products.21:53 AW: Yeah, absolutely, I point to the fact all the time with having Mike Blumenthal, as one of our co-founders. Yeah, he already had and there's all kinds of marketing that will talk to you if you already have someone that has a community or you have representation or contact in that community, you need to leverage that big time. And our early success, we still have trailing success off that, we owe so much of that to Mike and his reputation and the thousands of articles he wrote before he ever even was part of launching our product.22:26 DS: Yeah, basically, your product launched with immediate trust. It was like, "Oh, Mike Blumenthal is behind this. This has gotta be a good product." Because he is such a well-respected luminary in local search. So it's like you have immediate credibility with the product. And so that was huge for you guys, for sure.22:46 AW: So what is it from you at a high level? We can break down into some of the specific pieces of what goes into inbound marketing but, why do you feel that inbound marketing is your A-game and how you built Whitespark? 23:01 DS: Yeah, I think we've been fortunate, we were early writers about citations, specifically. I think what had happened was we created a local citation finder, and then I really wanted to learn everything about citations and I just started writing about it, doing research projects on it, so I was lucky to contribute, to collaborate with David Mihm on some early research that go put up on Moz and then I got to do a community speaking spot at Moz about some of that research. And so it just, inbound became the natural channel because I was passionate about learning about it, researching it, and writing about it. And so I guess that kind of is inbound is content marketing, you're creating something that is a new that will attract a lot of attention particularly around all the SEO agencies, they're like, "Well how does this work?" And so when you're trying to answer those questions, if it's research-based questions, then it can drive a lot of eyeballs and those eyeballs will then eventually look at your products and services. So that's kind of how it evolved for me. How about you? 24:11 AW: I've just always been positioned towards sharing what I'm doing. This podcast is even no different. I've always looked to expose what I'm doing and early on I should go back and try to pinpoint a day but like pretty early adopter of blogging and sharing what the company was doing, and I always equated to it of more calling it like perception-based marketing. Are you creating your perception of what your company is doing and what your company can do, and the benefits your customers are getting out of it. And I found that really important back when I was running digital marketing agencies to share, here is not only the websites were creating, but here's the process. This might be a hand sketch or a wireframe and sharing that visually or sharing those processes. And to me it really led to then when buyers were looking to find someone to design or build their website that they're like, "Well, we understand your process really well. We saw things in some of your blog content that we hadn't had the last time we did our website and that looked really, really appealing."25:23 AW: So I think so many of those wins like led me towards like, you just need to find the right ways to amplify what you're doing, how you can help, how you're thinking. And I get paid is that, and in more of an instant format but I don't know, I just had personally kind of always gravitated towards more of content marketing and organic search and things like that. Because there's also part of paid that if you really have your stuff together, it can be an incredible flywheel. But I always felt like I was missing too many pieces on just the exacts of certain things to get it. Whether it's keywords and phrases that you're bidding on and bid management, landing pages, the funnel, like all of those things. It just felt almost daunting. Sometimes it's like, "Oh if I have any one of these six things wrong in the funnel, it's gonna bork what the outcome is and I'm wasting money then."26:23 DS: Yeah, I think one comparison I often have in my head between inbound and paid marketing, is that inbound comes with this baked in credibility and trust whereas paid doesn't. It's almost like, if you tell someone that you're really awesome and you should work with us, that's a lot different than someone else saying it. And so when you are putting out content, really good content that everyone is sharing and everyone's talking about, then you have a lot more credibility than just putting out an ad. If you just put out an ad that it says we're the best, but then if you have a whole bunch of other people saying, "Oh, this company is really good, they know what they're talking about. They've shown that they really understand this space." Then that's what inbound marketing can do. Inbound creates a lot more word of mouth too because there's just a ton of sharing. No one is gonna go and share your ad, but people will share a really great content. And so, it's just so much more valuable I think than focusing on an ad. And of course it costs less. It costs a lot less. People I know of, lawyers that are spending 100 grand a month on Google Ads. It can be so expensive.27:36 AW: Yeah. No, totally. So with what does content marketing look like for you guys? Do you have a formalized strategy that someone own it there? Is it just when people have things they then write them and share them? What does that look like at Whitespark? 27:53 DS: So, yeah, no, we do not have a formalized strategy. We are blessed to have a recurring massive content amplifier called the local search ranking factors. So, a huge thanks again to David Mihm for letting me take that over. It's a big one that tends to drive a lot of credibility for Whitespark. I do a lot of my, for example, one of the thing that actually drive this, I'll commit to going go speak at a conference, and then I'm like, "Oh crap, I better figure out what I'm gonna talk about." So I always try to do original research where I can. And so the conference obligations often drive something new for me, where I'll rack my brain and be like, "Well, what would be interesting to people?" And so, then I'll put together some new research. Like our recent success would have been my MozCon case study.28:43 DS: So, I think that drove a lot of interest and a lot of new eyes to Whitespark. And then when they're there then they start looking at, "Well what else does Whitespark do?" So, it's not formalized and then a lot of our content just comes out of everyday work. It came up a lot recently about Google suspensions. So Google listing is getting suspended and Allie has been researching it and putting some time on it. So Allie we're like, "Well, we should make a blogpost out of this." So Allie puts together a blog post. So a lot of it is just driven by what's going on in the company. It's not really formalized, it's not strategized. Jessie does a pretty good job of nagging us. She's like, "Hey, we need some more content. Who's got something? What can we put out next. It's been too quiet around here." So she does a good job of prodding us. But other than that, there's no strategy. Do you guys have any strategy or it's just like you have an idea and then you do it. How does it work at GatherUp? 29:42 AW: Yeah, so we've tried to evolve our strategy just a little bit more than having no strategy. One piece of that was last year, roughly about a year ago, we hired a content and product marketer specifically that we basically told her you own all the words now. So she's across a number of things, releasing or write, user guide posts and feature release post and a number of things like that. And we've really tried to go the route of like, "Alright, we have enough to say about the product. We obviously get thought-leadership articles from Mike and myself." A number of different types, and learn anything else. Now it's like, "Alright, we should be having something going to our blog every week, in one way, shape, form or another." So that type of repetition we've really gone after it. And we've had a lot more discussions on creating things that sometimes, "What can we do that it's a little more evergreen." Like month ago we compiled a post that we're continually adding to of 100 plus online review statistics.30:54 DS: Sure. Yeah, that's a great one.30:56 AW: Yeah, as a new one, I just sent a link today that had three new stats around healthcare and online reviews, and we'll add that. So that'll be a growing piece. We're starting to see some of the organic search pay back for that with people talking about it, being mentioned for it, being the source of research in their articles. So we're evolving a little bit more with that. Some of the areas I think we're still really challenged is, we write a lot of content that's for everyone. And I think if we could niche down a little bit more and say, just how we look at it. We've written maybe two articles all time on our blog that are strictly just for digital marketing agencies, and we really should be doing one a month in my mind because that's a good part of our customer base. And, or specifically writing something like, "Alright, this is just for restaurants," or, "This is just for home service companies," and we're starting to get a little bit better with that. But you have this feeling like, "Oh, if I write it, it needs to be applicable for everybody and you have to get comfortable with." No, I want this to be a really great piece for a specific audience. And then down the road, I will write something else equally great for another specific audience that we serve.32:10 DS: Or even the same kind of content, so the content could be like what restaurants need to think about around reviews and you've got all the statistics around restaurants, you could pull data that's a restaurant-specific and then you've got this sort of template you can now use for insurance agents, or for plumbers, whatever.32:30 AW: Yeah and that's one thing even just outside of blog content, we're trying to create some more static landing pages for each industry. We have five or six industries that we work really well, and we really understand everything else and so we need, we're in the process of creating content. So, it is specifically like, "Here's how GatherUp helps restaurants. Here's how GatherUp helps insurance and finance industry. Here's how GatherUp help self-storage." So more speaking their language, detailing the benefits to them and how the features roll up into making those benefits happen is something we're trying to get better at. We're trying to have a lot more micro-conversations and being very specific and having a lot of intent with what we're putting out there.33:17 DS: Yeah, I've always thought about doing that industry-specific stuff, too. And I don't think that our current software offerings lend themselves to that very well, but with what we're building, I really see how we can focus content around specific niches, to speak to how our software is good for those specific industries. I'm looking forward to having that with our new platform.33:41 AW: Yeah. It's hard for me, but when I boil down to, here's the thought I arrive at is, no matter what if I write something and it gets 1000 page views in the first month of it being up there. Like that's great, but then do they actually translate into working with us or becoming customers? And I think when you niche it down, there's more of an opportunity that it might only be 100 that read it, but based on how impactful it is for them and how detailed you can get and the examples you can give them, you take them so high up that trust curve where maybe five of them then become a customer. And to me it's writing more about those, it's always that battle where it's like the exposure feels great. The links feel great. The mentions, social media mentions and tweets and posts feel great, but the end of the day if it doesn't move that bottom of the funnel and add to more customers, then is it really as impactful as you feel it is? 34:42 DS: Yeah, that actually really lends to one marketing thing that I have planned for this fall, that I think is gonna be my new go-to. I'm speaking at three different auto-dealer conferences this fall, so I've got one in September, and two in October. And so, there's a huge benefit there. One of them is, if I go in a SEO conference, this is where I do most of my speaking. A lot of those people I'm speaking to are my competitors. Some of them are gonna use our software, 'cause we have agency-based software, but on some of the service side of things they look at me as a competitor not really a potential vendor, but when I go to an auto-dealer conference, then everyone in the audience is potentially my customer and so that's a great credibility there. The beautiful thing is, I can generate one slide deck, and use that for multiple industry-specific conferences. There isn't that high bar where you have to bring this mind blowing new research every time you go and speak.35:46 DS: Then I'm gonna take that same concept and spin it too like, "Okay, well I've got this really successful talk that I've given to auto-dealers, I wanna take the exact same thing and now rework it, my screenshots and everything for dentists or lawyers, and so I can go and do all these industry-specific conferences. So I'm thinking I'm going to say no to some of the big conferences, like some of the SEO specific ones, and a lot more yeses and even pitching for industry-specific ones, and that's also where I think these sort of industry-specific landing pages could come in. If I had these landing pages, that could be super valuable.36:23 AW: Yeah. Also I think you're on to something very smart there and I will be interested to hear how that goes but I think it will yield you very good results. It's a human format of what we're talking about. I'm being focused to that persona in content marketing. You're doing it through conferences and speaking. So totally awesome.36:46 DS: Yeah, I'm excited and I'll let you know how it goes. We'll have another podcast episode and chat about it.36:49 AW: Nice. One thing I think we both do really well, that I think a lot of people overlook from time to time is, surfacing research and data. So you have the local search ranking factors, that's a really big piece. We've done all kinds of different either using Google surveys and asking specific questions and finding out how people view online reviews and do they trust them and how often do they write them and things like that. When you spend the time and the money to create those to me, those just have endless payback. When others are writing articles about it, they cite your stats and your data so often so, you get mentions. We just had another mention in a Moz article last week and the research was maybe from at least a year or two years ago, but it continues to produce links, produce mentions in real time for something that has been out there quite a while, just because you can become the de facto research for it.37:48 DS: Stats and data, it's huge. It's a really great, it's like the snowball effect right. Now that Whitespark is built up. We can release something and it has this great effect where a huge spread happens from it. I think it might be hard if you're just starting out, but maybe not. Did you see the Fresh Chalk thing that came out? So that Adam guy did that thing, where he analyzed, I think it was...38:14 AW: 150,000 I think.38:16 DS: Small businesses. Yeah, he looked at their websites, and he compared their websites' metrics with their rankings, and then he did this great research around it. And that is like a case study of how you could do something, research-based, and absolutely blow it out of the water in terms of getting some... I had never heard of Fresh Chalk before. I didn't... I knew nothing about it. And so now he's on the map. And it's a... That actually is an opportunity for any SaaS that's... Even if they're brand new, if they do something, and they put in the work, then it... I think it could... It's gonna reap the rewards for Fresh Chalk forever. It's huge. That was a massive marketing move with that resource.39:00 AW: Yeah. No, I actually met up, when I was in Seattle, with Liz Pearce, who is one of the co-founders, and the CEO of Fresh Chalk. So it does help put those things on the map. That was part of me ending up connecting with her. So, yeah, I mean, don't ever look past what you're creating, and when you're the one that compiles it together, and you make it easy for someone else to absorb it, read it, and then use it the way that they need to, you're gonna get benefits out of it. Mentions, links, referrals, top-of-mind, brand awareness, right? 39:32 DS: Yep.39:32 AW: All of those.39:33 DS: Shares from big industry people. Yeah, we've gotten tons of shares. Like everyone was sharing that content around.39:39 AW: Yeah. One other thing that I've always liked, that you did, that you pulled together, and maybe you can tell me if you feel it actually has an impact, but you guys at Whitespark created a topical email called The Local Pulse, and every day you send out an aggregation of articles from many of the different resources in local SEO, and everything else, and there can be anywhere from three to 10 articles linked in there, on a daily basis. And it's a great way to bring that into my inbox. If you check it, I have a pretty good open rate. But it makes me aware of those articles, and then Whitespark is the one that's done the hard work in bringing this together.40:18 DS: Sure.40:19 AW: Have you seen benefits of this over time, in line with what you hoped for, or how do you view that strategically, in tech? 40:26 DS: Yeah, email market is a whole huge marketing thing that we didn't really get into yet, but yeah, so the Local Pulse is this funny thing, it's like I had this idea, and I wanted it just for me. Well, that any time these 12 blogs that I care about in local search post something, I wanna get notified about it, right? And so I figured out that I could build this thing with MailChimp that automatically aggregates the RSS feeds of all of the blogs, and then produces this email. And actually, for a first little while I just had it going to me, and I was like, "Oh, should I let other people subscribe to this?" And so I opened it up, and I let other people subscribe to it. We have about 1500 people on that email list. And so the outcome is... I have no idea, because, honestly, it's this thing... [chuckle] It's funny, because I saw you put that in our notes for today's call, and I immediately sent a message to Jessie, being like, "Hey, can you add a banner to this email?" [chuckle] 'cause we have never used it to be promotional in any way.41:32 DS: But there's a perfect little spot for it, where we could just use that to highlight the latest things that we're doing. I think it's mostly agencies that would be on that list. And so we're gonna now use it to show, put a little banner for our white label agency program for our new GMB management service. Why have we not done that before? So, maybe I'll have some numbers for you later, see if that converts at all. But it's a pretty good resource. We've never really used it to be promotional, we've just provided it as a friendly service, but I think it's the kind of thing that could potentially drive some extra business. And so we're gonna drop a little banner in there, and see if it drives any conversions.42:14 AW: Nice. And I think that's always a great way to start a relationship, because you've created something that is just giving to them.42:20 DS: Yeah.42:20 AW: I think it just paints you in the right light, so that, well, down the road, when you do get at least some type of a promotional, or a sales call-to-action in it, it won't even rub them the wrong way, because they're already appreciative of... You've simplified something, and you efficiently give them value. So that won't do anything, rather than... Right? If the only thing you were doing is emailing them everyday trying to ask them to buy from you, that obviously has a much different outcome.42:46 DS: Yeah, totally. And I think, actually, we might get some decent conversions through this. And we certainly wouldn't be salesy about it, we'd just be like, "Hey, we also have this service. Here are your latest Local Search posts... And oh, by the way, Whitespark has this service." And that's all there is to it.43:01 AW: Yeah. Totally. Another aspect, you and I both do a lot of... Or we try to maximize this at our companies, is being a featured guest on a podcast, or a webinar. Talk to me about your approach with some of those, and the advantages you feel that are with that, and how you... Are you doing anything to try to get more of them, or even though you've had other members of your team recently being part of them, that I think that's fabulous.43:30 DS: Yeah, I think they're really great opportunities when they come up. I don't seek them out. I guess, well, I'm fortunate to be in a position where they come to me, and they ask me to be a guest on these things, but they are in-the-bag wonderful opportunities to get in front of a new audience, because usually they're really easy. They're just... It's just a Q&A type of thing, right? They're asking you questions, you answer the questions, and as long as you don't look like a total idiot, then sometimes that can expose your company to new people that didn't know about you before. And if you come across as knowledgeable, then that might encourage them to come and look you up, and see... "Oh, well, what does this guy do?" "Oh, well, he's got this company Whitespark. What does Whitespark do?" And then that can lead to business, I suppose. But, yeah, the webinars are fantastic, when they come up, same with podcasts, being invited to be guests on these things, that really... It really does stem from being a speaker. So being a public speaker at a lot of these events is what will drive these invites, basically, that's always been the way for me. Is anyone on webinars that doesn't speak at events? It's pretty rare, I think.44:39 AW: Yeah, and then I think that comes from then the host, or the person putting together knows, "Alright, I'm gonna get great content. This person has stage/mic presence. They're known. So others will come to the podcast because one of the two or three or four guests on like a webinar roundtable, they'll all bring their own spheres of people that come to it". So, yeah, so it's like mutually beneficial, right, to both the host and the guest.45:10 DS: Yeah, and actually, that's interesting. And you think about your personal influence, and so building up your following on Twitter, on Instagram, or whatever it is... In the SEO space, it's mostly Twitter, probably the same in most SaaS spaces, but it's certainly beneficial to build that up and to... Like I don't do it consciously. I'm not out there, "Ooh, I'd better tweet so I get more followers." I'm just... I'm trying to share stuff that I think is interesting and valuable, and just because I think it's interesting and valuable. Like I'm not doing it as this thing, but certainly it creates some benefit. So when someone is looking for someone to join their webinar, it probably helps that I have 16,000 followers on Twitter because they know that I'll probably tweet about it and then those people will... It might drive more people to the webinar. So it's certainly valuable to build up your personal following.46:05 AW: Totally. And a last main topic regarding marketing that we have time for is kind of where we kicked off this conversation but... Around conferences, right? Both you and I have cut our teeth over the years and risen through the ranks to some extent, right? Like I've written articles in the past on public speaking, and one of my main pieces of advice for people is like just start. My first one was literally a room of 20 people at a local chamber of commerce, and... But it allowed me to start talking in public. It allowed me to see what do people care about, what questions did they ask afterwards. I recorded it. What could I break down that I could do better or be more engaged in or tell the story better. Yeah, so it's like that was, I don't know, 15 years ago now. So it's like what have you seen right through your own journey on that and what's the reason why you continue to do it even though you're evolving maybe who your audiences are? 47:08 DS: Yeah, do you remember what my first sort of big talk was, Aaron? 47:12 AW: I think you mentioned that it was when you helped bring Local U to Edmonton.47:16 DS: Yeah, but there's an even greater story behind that because Ed Reese forgot his passport and he couldn't come, and so I ended up... Like the very first talk I gave at that Edmonton Local U was your presentation. It was your like, "How does Google search work?" And all I had was the damn slides until I was trying to give this presentation. It's basically my first talk ever in front of an audience and I'm like, "And here's a picture of a spider. I don't know what Aaron was planning to say here, but maybe something about web crawlers and this is how web crawlers work." And so I basically just stumbled through it and it was a pretty scary first experience of getting up to speak when they weren't even your own slides. It was like this last minute thing. I was like, "Okay, I'll do it," and...48:08 AW: Yes. No, that would be horrible. I remember... So SMX Advanced was right after that and I was speaking at SMX Advanced, and I had on my SpyderTrap jacket out in Seattle and somebody's like, "Oh, hey. Aren't you the guy who just didn't have a passport and you couldn't speak in Edmonton," and I was like, "What?" And then I found out the whole thing and I was like, "No, man, that was Ed Reese," and then Darren used my presentation. I wasn't even supposed to be a part of it, like I somehow got wrangled in as the bad guy who couldn't enter the country legally even though I was never on the agenda. So oh, that's rough. That's a tough first speaking I did.48:47 DS: It was pretty tough, but you know maybe it was a good idea to just start out really hard, and then the rest of them became much easier after that.48:53 AW: There you go. Only up from there.48:56 DS: Exactly. So I did have my own talk and that was wonderful, and I honestly, in the local search space, Local U is a great opportunity because if you bring a Local U event to your city and you do all the legwork to get all of the people, you know to help bring in attendees and sell tickets, then you generally get a speaking spot. And so it's a pretty great place to start. I would say I got my start actually just teaching little courses back when I was in the university. I got the opportunity to teach courses on Adobe Dreamweaver, like how to make websites.49:34 DS: It was Fireworks as well. It was like this little graphic design thing and I did a Photoshop class. And so that was really helpful to speak to a really small audience. It would be like 10-15 people in a workshop and I would teach them how to use the software, and so that's kind of where I got my start with being in front of a small audience. But there's also like little meetups where you could go and meet up with other web developers or SCOs in your city, and you could give a little presentation to 10 people. That's an awesome way to get started with that. And then of course, then you pitch. So once you kind of get the opportunity to speak a bit more, then you'll pitch at smaller conferences and work your way up to bigger conferences. It's... I, honestly, I cannot imagine where Whitespark would be today if I didn't get the opportunity and put some effort into becoming a speaker that... It's been huge for us in terms of marketing, just massive.50:26 AW: Yep. Yep. No, I agree. And even personally, it's created so many new friends, networking opportunities, partnerships on down the line if you are, and I get everyone is different, introvert, extrovert, what their comfort levels are.50:43 DS: Sure, for sure.50:43 AW: Public speaking can be a massive fear for a lot of people.50:47 DS: Yep.50:48 AW: But if you can, it just does pay a lot of great dividends. And one thing too that I would share with everyone is if you get the opportunity to do it, think how can you build in a call to action or a next step for people, right, and not a like, "Hey, buy our software," but, "Hey, I presented the high level of this research, like the full research is now in a blog post on our site. Here's where you can... "51:12 DS: Totally. Yeah.51:13 AW: And I think... I feel like you do a good job of that or finding something that continues the conversation that... Or even if you're speaking at an event, and then... That's where we're more evolving to, is we wanna speak and we wanna find out, can we have a booth there, or let's bring a salesperson there anyway so that they can be the... Have an opportunity to close or find out who's interested in it, because sometimes just the talk alone, yes, it'll generate exposure and buzz and get you out there, but if you don't have some type of mechanism to push it down the sales funnel or to get more out of it, you're definitely wasting the momentum that you're building with it.51:52 DS: Yeah, that's actually a big part of my marketing plan for these auto dealer conferences, right? So I'm presenting this research where I'm gathering all of this data on auto dealers across Canada. These are all Canadian-based conferences. And so then I'm gonna present like, these are the statistics for auto dealers in Canada on using these different features, and this is why you wanna be using, this is how you wanna be using them, and... So I was only able to talk about this for 20, 30 minutes, and then we're gonna have a great resource on our website that I'll send people to at the end of it. So it's exactly what you just said, that's my plan for these auto dealer conferences.52:26 AW: Yep. Now, no different than the pages on your website, you gotta have some type of a call to action or next step very visible. Make sure you have it in your talks, right. Not a salesy frontal "buy now or I don't like you," but something that progresses them the next step into your reunion.52:46 DS: Absolutely.52:47 AW: So we've talked a lot here, and that's what happens when we have so much downtime in between...52:54 DS: It's been like, yeah, six weeks? 52:54 AW: Yeah, and closing with one question, what's a marketing strategy or tactic that you haven't gotten to yet that you really feel like, oh, this is something I need to accomplish before 2019 is over? 53:09 DS: The big one for me is, last year I did this series, I called it the Whitespark Weekly, where I would make a little video of me talking about one small aspect of local search. And they were meant to be under 10 minutes, it was just me with a webcam doing a screen share showing a thing. And those were huge for us. Honestly, I saw very significant uptick in our business at that time, and there was a lot of sharing of our content and it was on such a weekly basis. Those were really massive for us and it's a marketing thing I can't wait to get back to. But my to-do list is so damn big, and every week goes by I'm like, "Dang it, I really wanna get another one of those videos done," but it's really hard for me to find the time, so I'm trying to figure out how I can block off some time and get back to doing those regular videos. Because the thing about that is like, I can get on a stage and speak to 200, 300, 400 people, but these videos, they can reach a much larger audience. And so doing that stuff on a regular basis can really build our exposure, and so I wanna get back into doing those videos. That's the biggest thing for me. It's the biggest marketing thing on my mind, especially as we start launching our platform and all of that stuff. It's gonna be great for us.54:30 AW: Sounds like you gotta leverage some prioritization there, Shaw.54:33 DS: I really do. I'm working on new calendaring systems and trying to figure out how to block off my time, yeah. How about you, what's your big thing that you wanna make sure that you're taking care of on the marketing space before the end of 2019? 54:47 AW: Yeah, I'm almost embarrassed about this, but retargeting. In today's day and age, you need to be doing it, and it's just something... We've had small discussions and talked about it, but have not launched it, and it's ridiculous in the landscape of what's going on out there not to lay that trail as people move on past you to put reminders in front of them to come back and check you out and to re-affirm the value prop and all those other things. So yeah, by far and away...[overlapping conversation]55:19 AW: Yeah, we need to get retargeting going before the end of the year. That is an absolute low-hanging fruit in today's marketing mix that sadly is just rotten fruit on the ground for us right now.55:31 DS: Oh, that's a great analogy. Yeah, totally. Same here, there's rotten apples all over Whitespark from not doing retargeting. So can I pick two? I wanna add that one to my list too.55:42 AW: Yeah, go ahead.55:43 DS: Retargeting, gotta do it.55:44 AW: Yep, go ahead. You can have two, and let's hold each other accountable and let's get it done before the year ends.55:49 DS: End of 2019, okay, good deal. You are gonna see my Whitespark Weekly videos start up before the end of 2019. I'm gonna commit to that.55:57 AW: Alright, make it happen.55:57 DS: Yep.55:58 AW: Alright, well, I think that's a wrap as we push an hour of time here for this episode. Thanks everyone for listening. I also wanna send a shout-out... Bunch of people at MozCon came up... I also received texts lately from people asking questions, so thanks to people like Noah Lerner... Will Scott said he binged all 10 of our episodes and they had some questions for me...56:22 DS: Thanks, Will.56:22 AW: On sales team and sales comp, yeah. So thanks, you guys, for reaching out. Continue to do so, you can tweet us any questions or topics you'd like covered. Hopefully none of you got worried that we were abandoning this after 10 episodes with the recent month of darkness. We'll get back on track and keep coming at you.56:44 DS: Yep, looking forward to it.56:45 AW: Alright, well, thanks everyone, and have a fabulous rest of your weeks until we talk to you again.56:58 DS: See ya.[outro music]

Helpful links from the episode: Stripe MnSearch Summit MozCon a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO David Ulevitch on Twitter FULL SHOW NOTES[music]00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode nine, The CEO Journey.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to The SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Here the experiences challenges wins and losses, shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:45 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:47 AW: And we are back in front of a microphone, sharing our business secrets, our love secrets, everything in between, and making them public, so that we can share them with our listeners. And, if anything, sometimes it's probably cathartic and healing and everything else, wouldn't you say? 01:07 DS: Yeah, definitely, I have not yet shared any love secrets, so I'm not sure where you're going with that, but...[chuckle]01:15 DS: May be a future episode. I don't know.01:17 AW: I'm just trying to keep things broad, all the time, right? 01:20 DS: Broad, yeah. 'Cause you know we never know what we're gonna talk about.01:22 AW: Yeah, no, if this turns into a relationship podcast on how you and I get along, and our friendship and being there for each other and everything else, we could pivot right, like, software is all about pivoting at different times.01:35 DS: It really is, yeah, and I think we should definitely keep that in our back pocket.[chuckle]01:40 AW: Alright, so with that, we'll both get up off the davenport and the attempt to talk on a few different topics today, especially the deeper content we want to get into on kinda the CEO journey. We have a lot to cover there, we will probably, once again, have a hard time keeping ourself to 40 minutes but hopefully the content is appreciated. But what have you been up to since our last episode on churn a few weeks ago, Darren? 02:12 DS: What have I been up to? Well, we've talked about this Local Search service a number of times, and how we're re-pivoting that actually, speaking of pivoting, into a Google My Business Management Service. And so I hired someone new for that. Basically Allie is my primary person that is running that service and she's at capacity, so we need to hire, and so can't really launch it until we have new people hired and trained and ready to do the service. So, I hired Sydney, she worked with us in the past, she's pretty awesome. And so she started yesterday. And I put out a job posting too. And so we're just trying to get the people in place to be able to service the service because we have a waiting list of 30 people that are interested already. I don't even... Honestly, I worry that we might never even launch the landing page because we'll just keep picking people off the waiting list, 'cause the waiting less seems to be growing faster than we can hire and train people to build the service up.03:10 DS: So, it's very interesting to me that there's that much interest in the service, I think it's gonna be very successful for us, and I think we've dialed in our processes really well. So, the next thing to dial-in, is hiring and training and scaling it up so I'm excited about that. That's big for us, for sure.03:24 AW: That's awesome to have that type of demand. That part has to feel really good.03:29 DS: It feels great, and I think it's like... I had read a tweet or some one... Some luminary of the modern age, had tweeted that the biggest success factor for companies is not really product or anything, it's timing. And so having the right product at the right time, that people need, and I feel like that's precisely what we're doing with this service. So I'm excited about that. And I know there's competition out there, but it's early stages. We have a great reputation that we've built up in this space, and so I think we're really well positioned to do well with the service.04:01 AW: I'm interested, you seem to be comfortable in productized services and things like that, where the whole reason, not the whole reason but one of the reasons I got into SaaS after well over a decade in agency is I wanted to get away from services and I wanted to be strictly product-focused. But you have a good comfort level with that. But yet, man, I would be really, I would be frustrated right now. Like really, I gotta wait on services to get this awesome new thing launched? 04:32 DS: Totally. And you're like, you have a software, you just flip the switch. "Okay, sign up everybody." And so there is something beautiful with that. There are two types of services. There is a complex agency, SEO service where every case is different and everyone's got different needs, and some clients are more of a hassle than others. Same thing with something like web design where you're building out a website. There's just so many touch points with the client that it's really hard to scale that. And what I have found is with a very simple streamlined one thing type of service, so citation building, for example, it scales really well. It's like, this is what it is, you buy it, you basically get a product, really, it's a very specific thing. And there's not a lot of back and forth, there's not too much... Not to many questions about it, right? 05:22 DS: And so everyone gets the same thing. And that's where the pivot happened actually, 'cause I had turned the Local Search service into something more complicated than it needed to be, which opened the flood gates for all of that like different clients and how do we handle practitioner listings, and just lots of complication. So scaling it back to just this really helps us to build something that's scalable. And so I am comfortable with this as a productized service but I totally hear you on just services in general. They can be a real pain in the ass and very hard to scale.05:53 AW: Yeah, well, good for you. You are a braver man than I am and totally... Nothing wrong with it. Not in my wheelhouse of a fit right now but how is it right? You said you're posting, and I know this, I've talked a number of episodes on hiring, especially for sales positions, which I'll give an update on and we're continuing to do. But in talking before the podcast, you kinda have a few little tips for people in hiring and posting to job boards.06:27 DS: So yeah, this, this job posting I actually forgot to do it when I first launched the job posting. I put out... So I posted the job and I had done this last time, but we use Indeed.ca, I think, I'll see if there's any indeed.com, but we post our jobs to Indeed and so, we get a flood of applications and most people, they just press the button to apply through Indeed. I have a very specific note that says, "How to apply," and it says, "Include your resume and cover letter," and it says, "and email it to darren@whitespark.ca." It also says right in the, "How to apply," "If you just apply through Indeed, instead of emailing Daren directly then we'll know you didn't read this and it'll be really helpful for us for filtering our candidates." So this is awesome because I get... So far I've probably had about 40 applications for this job and only five of them read this instruction. Most of them are just like, it's like a volume game, they apply to every job that's on Indeed, and I don't wanna waste my time with those people, I want people that actually took the time to read this, decided this if is a job for them, and they emailed me directly. And so I have three really solid candidates already, and I just posted the job yesterday, and then the other ones, they just go straight to the bin. I don't even look at 'em. I just archive them.07:45 AW: Awesome.07:46 DS: Yeah.07:46 AW: Totally agree with you. We always ask, "Tell us about yourself, share links to wherever you're creating content or are a part of content on the web. And yeah, you get the ones that are just plain but the ones that actually take the time, you can see that they're just so much more of a qualified candidate. And it is amazing to like, if it's a job you really want or you're really interested in, put in the effort to differentiate yourself. It blows in my mind that people just fall short on that.08:13 DS: Yeah, they don't care, they're just playing a numbers game, they're like, "Well, if I apply for 100 jobs I might get two interviews, and then one of those could turn into a job." They're just lazy.08:23 AW: Finding a job should not be like a marketing funnel. I don't think.08:26 DS: Seriously. And it's like how are they not a little bit more discerning in what they apply for? It seems like they're... Like people that just do not have the right skill set that we're looking for are applying for everything it seems.08:37 AW: Yup. Well, that's a great tip. Include something that knows people care, they want it, they pay attention to detail and read things through before they take action. Those are all great pre-interview filters to help you know what you're dealing with.08:52 DS: Yeah, totally. Also, we signed up for Stripe. We did the deal yesterday. So I've been talking with a salesperson over there. So I'm so excited 'cause we're building our new account system, and Stripe just looks amazing. My developers are doing the happy dance all over the place. Just getting off of PayPal, moving over to Stripe, and Stripe billing looks so nice. Did you know they have this feature? This is a tip for all of our listeners. Stripe has a magical feature that will automatically update credit cards that are expiring. They have an agreement with Visa and MasterCard, and let's say your credit card is expiring, then, this system which only costs an extra 0.4% recurring revenue, will automatically update credit cards that are expiring. So you don't have to chase people with expired cards. Did you know that that was a thing? 09:44 AW: I didn't, I didn't at all. That is mind-blowing.09:47 DS: Right? Holy, I'm so excited about that. So this is... I think it's fairly new. But he told me that and I was like, scrambling to find a pen, so I could sign this contract 'cause oh my God, that's gonna be such a great feature.10:01 AW: Yeah, now there's a few. My CFO and some of our customer success team members would love to hear that. We run an internal report, and that will show us like, "Alright, here's who's failing, and we're communicating and making attempts." And then they usually get involved with a human reach out and it's only... It might be anywhere from three to 10 accounts in a month out of thousands that need that. But man, they would love to have that off their plate, and some of them turn into cancel billings, right? There's even more of what those are. So, wow, that sounds really interesting.10:36 DS: Yeah, look it up. They got a new feature. I think you're already on it. Yeah, 'cause I recalled getting Stripe invoices from your team. So I'm pretty sure that you already have the feature. You just need to flip the switch, maybe.10:48 AW: Yeah, no, we're not in Stripe, so.10:51 DS: Oh, you're not? 10:51 AW: No, we're not, we're on PayPal.10:54 DS: My condolences.10:57 AW: Yeah. [chuckle] But, yeah, we'll see as our process, we're just starting in on the billing system stuff decisions and... Month down the road I'll have updates on what that looks like, but that's in step. But yeah, the payment processing might change for us some day.11:15 DS: Sure. Well, what do you have updates on what's new in your world? 11:18 AW: Yeah, on the good side of things, really happy, I know I mentioned this in our last episode, but our customer success team with bringing in a new leader there, a couple of months ago is really going great. We've added on to our onboarding process where... We used to... We did a great job of getting people onboarded and set up, but we missed a number of opportunities to kind of be a little bit more consultative and outline things. And then once they got to, "Alright, go," then we just weren't as good as following up and making sure that things were progressing well. We were there if they had questions, but we weren't really leading them.12:00 DS: Totally.12:00 AW: And he already in a couple of months, Taylor has just done a great job of putting that together and getting that in motion and that was just a great example of things I know that needed to be done, but in being too many places and too many things, like it just was an area I can focus and I could lead, so I'm super happy with that. We're getting ready for... We have a couple events in the near future, Minnesota Search this week and their Summit which you've just spoken at and been at in the past.12:32 DS: Yup, that's a great one.12:33 AW: Yup. We're a sponsor at that, so excited to talk to all the local agencies and in-house marketers, at roughly around 300 to 400 attend that great one-day event. And then we're kind on a three-and-a-half weeks until MozCon. So really excited about that from every aspect. We're a sponsor from the biz dev side, seeing so many friends in the industry, yourself included, like it really is just a fun three or four days to everybody together. Yeah.13:04 DS: Yeah, I can't wait. It's going to be so fun. We'll be hanging out.13:07 AW: Yeah, on the sales side. So I'm trying to feel better about this. We did extend an offer to a new sales person on Friday. I'll know in the next couple of days, that they've accepted. I'm feeling confident that we're able to kinda meet the needs and we're a good fit for each other. But I was really, I was really trying hard to hire two or three at once and maximize training and get more output and things like that, and I just couldn't find out of the group I was talking to a good second or even a third candidate. So, a little frustrated. I'm still... I wanted our outbound sales to be up and running months ago and just hitting stride now, but yet I'm still at the beginning and really actually need another body or two for how we're planning to work this. So, that part's a little frustrating, and I go back and forth between beating myself up about it and then having to re-motivate to, it's okay, these bumps happen and work through them.14:09 DS: Hiring sales is so hard. So yeah...14:12 AW: It is.14:12 DS: And I think finding one good person is great and you might be able to get into this position where this new person is just fantastic. And that they're able to be the one that trains the next two people.14:24 AW: Yep. No, absolutely. And then from an overall perspective, it's just been a lot of fun. Google's had a number of updates, lately. It just seems like they've been on a tear, it's still around local and other things, but we're just seeing reputation and in having a product with GatherUp being related to capturing customer feedback and generating online reviews, reputation is just... The easiest way put it is, it is becoming the most visible piece of data about your business.14:53 DS: Yeah.14:53 AW: Yeah, Google just released some things today. If you're Googling phone numbers for a business or an address for a business, they're attaching reputation call-outs to all those simple type of informational services. Two weeks ago, it was a Google Q and A. That feature having automated answering that, it'll pull up reviews related to the question you're being asked. So, this shift to consumer, customer-generated data in the form of reviews and Google is doing more and more and more with it. That's fabulous for us. It just plays into what we've been talking about and we haven't seen maybe these exact things, but we are really... It feels good to know that it's right in line with what we knew was gonna happen, we didn't know how, but we've really figured it would.15:44 DS: Yeah, it's just like as I see more and more of these features come on, it's like, "Google's squeezing everybody else out, it's like they're just gonna become the only review site, it almost feels like. Other than a first party, it feels like Yelp is gonna get pushed out and some of the industry sites will get pushed out. It's just Google is doing such a good job of putting their content front center and really using their content. So, yeah, that's pretty amazing.16:09 AW: Yeah. No, and I don't wanna steal any thunder from our co-founder and my friend Mike Blumenthal but he's had his finger on the pulse of this. And you're exactly right with that. And I think at the LocalU Advanced in Denver in September, I already have seen some of this data and studies. But you're right it's gone from a dozen review site players to really one review site player. And he has some really interesting data on how it's impacted Yelp and some of the other things. And for us it even pushes more the reason why we say first-party reviews really should be treated with a lot of respect and a lot of value, because if you leave everything, all of those eggs only into Google's basket, we just think that that that's just such a huge mistake and you're missing the boat on so many other things that you can do to both improve your business and market it.17:01 DS: Yeah, is that new feature where they highlight the reviews, and then they show the different review sites on mobile, will it pull first-party into those? 17:09 AW: Yeah, reviews from the web? 17:10 DS: Yeah.17:11 AW: Yeah, yup, it absolutely will.17:13 DS: Okay.17:14 AW: Yeah, there's just a number of things... I don't know... I'm just off the... Look, first party reviews are like the utility knife that a marketer really needs to focus on because it's a tool that you can use where GMB reviews are absolutely visible and have a great amount of visibility and draw to them, but you are just missing out if you don't whip out that Swiss army knife that's in your pocket to be able to MacGyver a million things on the marketing side.17:45 DS: Yeah, totally. Totally.17:46 AW: Well cool, with that, we kinda wanted to talk about a podcast. I was lucky enough, I had a long time industry friend who passed along this podcast to me and said, "Hey I think this would be of interest to you." So thanks, Ed Kohler, for passing that along, but it's the a16z podcast, and the topic of this podcast was really understanding that the journey and the stages of being a SaaS CEO. And the title of it and we'll link it in our show notes, you can give it a listen but it was, "What time is it?" And it was from being a technical to a product to a sales CEO. And the guest on the podcast was David Ulevitch. He founded OpenDNS sold it to Cisco. He's kind of morphed into a few different things now, he's on the VC side. But the high level of it and where I wanted you and I to discuss it, I sent it your way after listening to it, but it outlined that he looked at it as like four stages that every CEO goes through or has the opportunity to go through. The first stage is more of a technical CEO.19:00 AW: You're trying to build it, get it built, is it feasible, do people want it? Then the next one you evolve into is being that product CEO, and now you're trying to figure out, do you have product market fit? You're doing discovery with customers that you think you have that with. You're listening to them so you can build the right features and evolve the right way, and ultimately are you solving those right problems? Then the next one is the sales CEO, and once you have that fit, now you're like, "Great, how do I generate more revenue so I can grow the company, acquire more customers?" And then lastly, if you are able to make it out of that is then you're that go-to-market CEO at the higher level. You have a VP of sales and a VP of Customer Success and all these other things and you're looking to, how do I scale and accelerate and have all the right pieces so that I can grow this as much as possible? 19:50 DS: Yeah.19:50 AW: And that simple look of it and just building it into four stages was something that really resonated with me that I looked at like, "Oh, I can identify with that," 'cause I've gone through... I wasn't a technical CEO 'cause I wasn't a founder day one, but I definitely came in and had to be the product CEO, and now I'm transitioning into that sales CEO.20:13 DS: For sure. You see that as you build your sales team and as you personally experiment with some of this outbound sales stuff, like yeah, you're really into that sales CEO position right now. Does it feel that way to you? Are you still... You must still though go back to product 'cause you're always on... It's a big touch point. Like, what are the new features? How are we solving problems? What are the new problems that are coming up that we want our product to solve? So you kinda jump back and forth, do you know? 20:37 AW: Yeah, no, I definitely do. I think if I had to pick one, I'm absolutely in the sales CEO. My initial thing a year-and-a-half ago when I kinda took the reins over, it was like, it gave me more control to get the right features that I felt were missing when I was out doing sales and interacting with customers. And I think we achieved...20:57 DS: Right. Right.21:00 AW: Better product market fit and we're able to do it in a good cycle. But I do. I wanna get to be that go-to-market CEO, the overseeing, and I have smart people better than me in all of these areas to do all of the right things. So I definitely wanna get there. But I do have a... I have a love for what we do and I'm very passionate about the high level of vision and problems we're trying to solve and things like that. So I think I'll always have a toe in the water over there on the product side. But, I don't know. I don't know if I'll always wanna be the stuck-in-the-sales-cycle, the one generating the majority of the bigger accounts.21:38 DS: Yeah, I feel like I'm pretty firmly seated right now in the product CEO stage. I spent a lot of my time thinking about product market fit, trying to thinking about features, a lot of the sort of research I do, like I'm kind of in the trenches as an SEO still, like I'm not...22:00 AW: Yeah.22:00 DS: I spend a lot of time researching SEO things 'cause that's what I'm really passionate about. And so, that permeates into the products that we build and then I'm the one that's sort of reviewing everything that the team is building and advising on it and working on design and layout and so... And features. So I really feel like I spent too much time in the product CEO role, and I should have the right people in place that can do that for me so I can move to that next stage. That's sales CEO. This four stages, this podcast, is a little bit illuminating for me in like helping to direct maybe where I should be because I love being a product CEO, but in order to grow the company, I think I need to focus more on becoming a sales CEO. So this has been super valuable for me to think about it in these terms.22:50 AW: Yeah, and that was a really big that... There's one comment that David made in here, right, where he said it's all about making the right decisions for the right time, and I feel like you just alluded to that, right, where you realized where you're at and then it's maybe... So what are your options to move out of that, right? Like, do you... I...23:09 DS: Yeah.23:09 AW: You need to find a product manager that can take over the product part and you...23:13 DS: Exactly. I got one, I know who he is.23:15 AW: Yeah.23:16 DS: Yeah.23:16 AW: Yeah, where you can still influence it and do whatever, but the lion share of it is off your plate so you can focus your time on the other, right? And that's... That's that same progression when I've looked at a number of these is like in order to get yourself out of it, you have to replace yourself there or find someone better than you specifically at that, and that can be hard too because to some extent, you might look at... Do you feel like you're better at product than sales and you'd only be doing sales because the company needs it, or what does that look like for you? 23:46 DS: I feel like I'm... Like, when it comes to doing sales, like if we think about any enterprise leads that come in, I have a much higher close rate and I think because I'm so familiar with the product and the industry, it helps me to come across as very trustworthy, right? People wanna hire me because I know what I'm talking about, and it really helps to close the sale. So, I think there's a great opportunity for me to transition into a sales CEO and then build our sales culture, so then start to hire, basically get to the position you're at right now.24:17 AW: Yup.24:17 DS: And so... And I have a really good guy, Nick. He is fantastic. He could definitely be the product manager. I have him doing client work right now and it's like, "Man, we gotta just ditch those clients, bite the bullet and have Nick become the product manager and I'll step out of it and spend my time on sales."24:34 DS: But you know what the trouble is? I'm the type of person that I only like to do what I like to do. [chuckle] And so, I don't love doing sales, and so that... I'm just like, "Argh, sales." Like sometimes it's like I'll have a great sales call and then it's like, "Yeah, sure, I'll send him a proposal eventually, I guess." Like, I'm just not good at staying on top of it and I'm not... I don't get pumped about sales and excited about closing the deal.25:00 AW: Yeah.25:01 DS: I just want money to come to me though I didn't have to do anything for it. I just wanna sit back and money just rains in.25:06 AW: Yeah.[chuckle]25:07 DS: That's what I want.25:08 AW: And it does sound nice, but maybe that's where you realized like, "Okay, I actually need sales people," but they utilize you as an asset, right? Where...25:17 DS: Yeah, maybe.25:18 AW: Bring Darren to the call to build trust and answer so many questions and salesperson Sarah or Sam, they're handling the communication. They're staying on top. They're doing all those things, right? Like, I think there's ways to architect that.25:32 DS: Oh, my, that's a genius idea, Aaron.[chuckle]25:34 DS: I will do that because I love the sales call. I love being on the call and chatting with the clients and learning from them and it really helps to inform the product side too, right? 25:42 AW: Yeah.25:43 DS: So, I do love that, but I don't wanna put the proposals and statements of work together and go back and forth with legal. No thanks.25:52 AW: Yeah. And I don't mind those things. I do, like I love to evangelize our product. I love to tell the story of what we do and show people, like just before we started recording today, I just got off a sales call, and we are taking someone from a competitor in the space and we are giving them exactly what they want at a massive cost reduction. Like it's just...26:14 DS: Great.26:14 AW: Yeah, wins across the board, and I love that. I get a high off of winning that deal and doing whatever, but I've realized over the years and in building agencies, like that self-awareness, here's what I'm good at, here's what I'm not very good at, and I need to find people who are good for those other areas. And then even if I like, even if it fills my tank to participate in those, then participate as long as you're not taking away from it and figure out what can you add to it without missing the gap on all of the other little pieces, right? I love being part of product, but if I had to be the product manager and all the detail and writing Jira tickets and all those other things, I would fail within weeks at that too, like I'm not a detail. I'm a big vision type person. So you gotta understand those things and then figure out how you can add to it and make it work.27:08 DS: Yeah. I think it's a bit of a lesson for me. I tend to get way too detaily. I get really deep and I'm like, "Make this donut chart slightly thicker." Like I'm really fine into the details where it's a lot of my time, right? 27:22 AW: Yeah.27:22 DS: And so this is where a product manager would fill that role for me.27:26 AW: Yep, absolutely. One thing that we talked about when we were kind of comparing notes on this was also understanding and you and I's world of running bootstrapped companies and limited resources, that some of this seems over-simplified and it's coming from someone with VC experience and revenue backed startups that's already there to play with it and everything else.27:46 DS: Yeah.27:50 AW: But what's really important is you can take from those. You can take from podcasts, from VC and big companies and whatever else, but it's finding the little pieces that you can work into your own framework, right? 28:03 DS: Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the awesome things from this podcast, I really liked where he talked about laying out your packages and plans. So I love that idea. What he suggests is taking your packages and plans and sort of designing them for your different customer profiles. For example, small businesses, agencies, enterprise in my case, right? And so they have different needs, and so I can push the different tiers based off of those needs. So something... So, small business is our base plan, and then if you want white labeling, well, you have to have the agency plan. If you want enterprisey-type reporting, you need to be on the enterprise plan. And so having those levers that will push people to the next tier is really smart, and I don't really do that right now. So I definitely took that.28:54 DS: But yeah, it felt frustrating to be on a podcast, to listen to some of those things and think, "Well, those are all great when you are a CEO that has a leadership team where you can sit back and be big picture, but personally as a bootstrapped company, I feel like I'm running around answering everyone's questions." Right? So all the questions kinda come to me 'cause I am for the most part the leadership team, and so I'm not there yet. I don't have the resources to hire a leadership team. And so it is a little frustrating to hear these big picture things, but that's not to say that you can't take so much from it, right? 29:32 AW: Yeah. Now, understandable when you look at it and there's certain parts of it, it's like, "Oh, they make it sound so easy and this is what you do and you have a lot of room to offer a salary and all these other things to implement that."29:48 DS: Yeah.29:49 AW: But for us, all I can say is that that's what's led me that I've already seen in scaling past businesses how important that was, and really in a couple of them, I was one of those pieces, right? I wasn't the CEO, but I was the one tapped to like, "Okay, Aaron will come in and handle sales," or, "Aaron will come in and handle the brand and marketing and putting this team in place."30:06 DS: Yep.30:10 AW: And what I saw in participating as part of those teams is like this is really where the company is run, right? Because if everything hits a bottleneck of one person, the CEO, or whatever that is, you just become infinitely limited in what you can do. But it's hard in those early days where that's all that you have room for is your one thinker and a lot of doers, but you need those additional thinkers and leaders within those areas to hit those bigger strides. But it's tricky on when who's the right one, especially your first one, right? How do I find the right person to trust, invest in and know that they have, they're in great alignment with what I wanna see done with the company? 30:57 DS: Yeah. No, you're already a few steps ahead of me for sure in terms of leadership team. So you've got... Describe your structure right now. So you're a CEO and then you have a product manager.31:07 AW: Yep.31:08 DS: You have... You now have a sales manager, right? Yeah? 31:10 AW: Not sales manager. That's really the last area I need to close. So I have one person that... I do kinda double as VP of product, but we have a product manager that handles all of the day-to-day and communication with their engineering team and all those pieces, so they are pretty much the owner of that area. We have a CFO to own finances, HR, hiring benefits, all of that kind of stuff. With the recent hire of a VP of Customer Success, I have someone that owns that team and is, like I said, in 60 days has already had a fabulous impact there. And then I have someone in head of design that he kinda works with the product manager for all interface design and feature design and all that kind of stuff. So it's a little bit of a tandem there, but that really gives me that.32:01 DS: Yeah.32:02 AW: And sales is that last place where it's like I completely own that right now. We only have one sales person on staff. We're trying to bring on a second, but I need to get enough bodies and I either need one to emerge as a leader that I can say, "Hey, this is yours to own and you need to build goals and you need to train and do whatever else," or I need to find that person. But right now I'm just at the stage where I just need more staff allocated to doing sales even more so than I need a leader or a builder of that area.32:30 DS: Interesting, and you talking about your structure and all these different people and me thinking about me being that CEO bottleneck, one sort of spark of an idea that I just had was all these questions that come at me, it's a good exercise for me as a leader to look at that and say, "Who else could own this question?" Rather than me answering this, who could be the person that can make a decision on these things and then building up those people within my team and saying, "This is something you can handle," or at least, or thinking about a role of someone that can handle that and then slowly trying to siphon off these decisions, 'cause what does a CEO do? They just make decisions all day long, deciding what this should be, that should be, and it's like trying to put other people in positions to make those decisions for the company, I think, is the key to getting into that stage where I would be able to focus on being a visionary rather than the person that has to answer every question.33:32 AW: Absolutely. And yeah, I don't ever wanna be that bottleneck and I don't wanna be the only resource too. Number one, I am incredibly opinionated. And sometimes that's a strength because I'm gonna have a strong opinion and I'm gonna do research and get experience to back it up and all those different things. It's not gonna be... It's not just gonna be thrown into the wind. There's a lot to support it, but on the other end of that, sometimes that causes me to just be too stuck in my ways or only viewing it one way. And that's one thing that I found by empowering other people and giving them decisions.34:06 DS: Yeah.34:09 AW: And then just creating... I think it's really important then to create a communication cycle where you're in the loop but the loop still goes without you, right? So you don't have to be in it all.34:20 DS: Yeah.34:21 AW: And sometimes I hear the decisions and sometimes I'm like, "Huh, yeah, I wouldn't have done it that way or thought about it, but that totally works," and sometimes has more success than what I would have dreamed up. And there's still are times where I'm like, "Wait a minute, how do that get decided? I think we missed some things," and whatever else, but those are just teaching moments that everyone to talk through it.34:38 DS: Sure. Yep.34:40 AW: So the next time that we have that we can approach it differently.34:43 DS: Yep. Yeah, and the one thing I've learned more and more is that when I am not rigid on my opinion, then I often come around to the opinion of others and realize, "You know what? I think he makes some really good points and that is probably the best direction to go." And so I really try to be open and think about it from the different perspectives. I feel like that's one of the primary features of a leader, like you really have to be able to listen hard and listen well and think about what other people are suggesting 'cause that oftentimes, we'll have better ideas than you do.35:23 AW: Yep. What would it look like for Whitespark if Darren said, "I'm taking the rest of 2019 off," who would own the different areas and make the decisions and whatever else? I think that would be an interesting scenario for you to play through in your head. And then how do you maybe implement some of those or start working through some of those things so that you can peel it away? Because I find and maybe you'd find the same, like I need space to think. I can't come up with big ideas or vision or the next partnership or whatever else if I'm just so far down in the weeds on little mundane decisions on how many pixels something is, not to say I still don't stick my head down in there, but I really shouldn't do that.36:08 DS: Yeah, exactly. Well, you know what? I'm just gonna do it. I'm taking the rest of 2019 off. Good idea, Aaron.[laughter]36:14 DS: Thank you. That's it. I'm out. Good luck, Whitespark.36:18 AW: Yeah, the Whitespark team is gonna send me some hate mail for sure.[laughter]36:23 DS: Yeah. No, it's a really great thought exercise and to think about who takes over because honestly, I go on vacations and I do work hard to disconnect and the company never falls apart. It runs just fine without me. When I get back, there's some decisions that are waiting for me, but I think it does come back to really trying to assign those decisions and empowering people on my team to make those decisions without me and rather than holding the reins on some of these things. So I'm gonna really use this as a starting point to look for those decisions and say, "Who else could make this decision instead of me?"37:01 AW: Yeah. Ultimately, Darren, through those four stages, and you talk about how you're primed that second stage in the product right now, do you ultimately even wanna get to the fourth stage? Like is that where you wanna be? Because I think it's okay too to look and say like, "These things I am, this I'm not. I don't ever wanna get there. And if anything, someday I might hire a CEO and I just stay, I'm VP of Product," right? What does that look like for you? 37:25 DS: I can tell you exactly. When I look at these four stages, this is what I wanna happen. I've already passed technical CEO, the feasibility, the building, but we have a pretty good product and obviously it needs a lot more work and that's why I'm spending so much time in product, in the product CEO stage because of churn, actually. David Ulevitch mentioned this on the podcast that if you've identified... We're talking about what time it is. Well, right now, what time it is right now, it is fix the product, and that's what we're doing right now. And so when the product is fixed, I think I would love to skip sales for the most part. I would like the model that you described where I am still on sales calls and I'm thinking about sales and I'm thinking about how to grow sales, but I'm not the person closing for the most part. And then once the product is humming and we can scale, then I would love to jump to that, go-to-market CEO stage and scale the business like to $5, $10, $100 million.38:26 DS: That is my dream and that is where I want to get in the next five years. I wanna get there, and I think I can get there and I do think it really comes down to getting the right people in place at those stages, because once you get a really good product manager, you don't have to be a product CEO anymore. Once you get an awesome sales director, you don't have to be the sales CEO and then you can really focus on being that go-to-market CEO. And so these four stages are really... It's a really great framework to think about as the leader of a company and trying to say, "How are we," and then make your plans, right? Plan out how are we gonna get to those stages and what do we need to do to reach that stage? And for me, I know exactly what it is for the most part. It'll evolve over time, but I know how to get there. And so I think our road map looks pretty good for that, but I'll be a product CEO for at least another year I think.39:20 AW: That's a brilliant take, and I think the most important thing when I look at that is just that self-awareness, where even he broke down, it's really about asking where are you right now, "what time is it? ". You just answered that, and where do you wanna go. And sometimes, especially when you're so busy in the business, you don't step out and look at a framework like this or see, what type of leader do I need to be and where do I need to be focusing that gets us to the right place? 39:49 DS: Yeah.39:50 AW: And just as you're there right now, that... It's still, as you alluded to, I still have my hand in that a little bit, but we fixed a lot of the things that we needed to have that product market fit where I didn't get my rear end kicked on the sales calls I was on, and even to some extent, there's a couple more things we're releasing this year which really takes my confidence to an all-time record high, and it shows in your sales call. That's, if anything, I probably only did the product CEO so heavily just because I knew what I needed to sell to be the sales CEO, and I knew if I was gonna go into the ring and just get my butt kicked every time, it was gonna crash and burn.40:28 DS: Yeah.40:33 AW: The product had to be better. We had to shore up some of the gaps and we were able to do that. But you have to realize that, and if you're only doing... If you're not pulling up and looking at it from this level, you're gonna miss seeing that. If you only look at it in the four or five clear stages, you're not really understanding where you're at. You might not get yourself out of that stage to ever get to the next one.41:00 DS: Yeah, exactly. This framework really helps you to see where you need to focus. Yeah, it's so defeating when I, as a sales, when I'm wearing the sales hat, when the leads come in, it'll be like... We have 10,000 locations. This is a major company that wants to work with us.41:14 AW: Yep.41:15 DS: And we don't have the product for them. This is what I face on a weekly basis, really great leads that I can't service. And so this is where... This is why I'm a product CEO right now. I'm a product CEO because I have to fix our product so that we have... These people are coming at us thinking we have it when we don't actually have it, and so we're building it right now, and I can't wait to have it so I can sell it to them.41:38 AW: Then you just say, "Yep, here is your contract to sign."41:43 DS: Yeah, exactly.41:44 AW: That's awesome. Well, hey we, as I mentioned, we will link to this episode of that podcast in our show notes. Give it a listen, again, if you're a bootstrap company. Most likely you are. That's why you're listening to us as we put out episodes. It isn't about mirroring the VC. They're different. All those things are different, but there's just so many great little details and frameworks to pull out and hopefully us talking about where we're at within this four stage of the CEO's journey is helpful to you and hopefully you can take a look at it and figure out how you're, where you're at in it. Anything you wanna communicate on what's coming up or next for you, Darren before we talk again in a couple of weeks? 42:30 DS: No, nothing big to announce. I'm gonna go to LocalU this week in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. So I'm looking forward to seeing some of the LocalU friends, Mike Blumenthal, Joey Hawkins, Joel Headley. So I'll be, great to see.42:41 AW: That's a great group.42:43 DS: Yeah, really great, and I can't wait to hang out with you and the rest of the get list or the gather-up crew at MozCon. Man, I can't wait for that. It's gonna be fun.42:51 AW: It'll be a great week in Seattle, and yeah, we'll have to, no matter where we're at in our cycle, we will have to record the MozCon in person episode.43:00 DS: Yes. We should actually get that on the calendar so that we know exactly what time we're doing it and we make it happen.43:06 AW: Yeah. And something tells me it's gonna be somewhere where we can have a beverage in front of us to help with all the conversation and ideas.43:12 DS: Yeah, with laptops far away from those beverages.[laughter]43:16 AW: My wife actually told me I can't do any more jokes on you for spilling the beer. She said I wore that out, so I'm glad you did the joke instead of me.43:23 DS: Yeah, I brought it up.43:24 AW: Yep.43:24 DS: Yeah. So you're off the hook on that one.43:26 AW: She's the most critical listener of the SaaS Venture. So...43:30 DS: Great. It's good to have a critical feedback person. Yeah, for sure.43:33 AW: Yeah. You passed with flying colors. You know you're an arm's length away. You can do no wrong. But I gotta work. I gotta work on my game, so...[laughter]43:42 DS: Alright.43:43 AW: Awesome. Well, thanks, Darren. Thanks everybody for listening. We're always trying to grow our audience. So writing a review on Apple iTunes would be helpful. Sharing a link to one of our episodes on social media or letting people in your Mastermind group, your LinkedIn group, out on LinkedIn, any of that, we would so appreciate it. We're excited for the hundreds that we reach, but we would love to have more. And as always, if you have an episode suggestion or an idea, hit Darren or I up on Twitter and we would be happy to try to work that into our topics and into the upcoming shows. So with that, Darren, have a fabulous time at the LocalU event coming up, and I'm excited to see you in Seattle in July.44:26 DS: Alright. Yep, you too. Have a great week. Talk to you later.44:29 AW: Alright. Take care everybody.[music]

Helpful links from the episode: Hotjar Heap Analytics Mixpanel Appcues Google Analytics Net Revenue Churn Net retention ProfitWell Baremetrics FULL SHOW NOTES[intro music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode eight, Churn, Figuring It Out and Fighting It.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:45 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:48 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.00:50 AW: And we are back at you with Episode Ocho, which I feel like is, every week I like seeing that or every time we talk, Darren, I like seeing a bigger number. It makes me feel like we're really accomplished and we're almost hitting double digits.01:05 DS: I know, that double digit's gonna be a huge milestone.[laughter]01:07 DS: We should have a champagne party of some kind, big celebration.01:12 AW: Nice, nice. We'll do a virtual toast.01:14 DS: Yeah, sure, definitely that.01:16 AW: So we're at least in a better cycle. We're back to talking every two weeks, the last three recordings that we've done, anyway and anything pop in with you in the last couple of weeks? 01:27 DS: It's been much of the same. It's only been two weeks so we're still working on the same things here. We're working some of our services and I'm excited we'll get in this Google My Business syncing working with our platform so that's gonna allow us to build out a ton of amazing stuff. So that's all up and running and we're working on that, launch of our, update to our Rank Tracker is coming. So our rank tracking platform will now support screenshots, so taking screenshots of your listings so that you can be like, "Did I really rank there?" and checking that out, so I'm excited about that. It's coming down the pipeline pretty soon.02:05 DS: Designs are all finalized on our Local Citation Finder, so the team that's working on the rank tracking stuff, once that gets launched, which is pretty quick, they're gonna shift over to implementing all of these designs to our new Local Citation Finder. I don't know, lots of stuff in the works, lots of things going on, tons of sales calls lately.02:29 AW: Nice.02:30 DS: Yeah. So it's been good.02:31 AW: Gotta love that, especially since we talked all about sales in our last episode.02:35 DS: It must have been that, actually. People were like, "Oh, Darren Shaw, Whitespark, we better call them, give 'em a sales call." Yeah.02:43 AW: Yeah, well, I mean, the things we talked about last time, that's... Now that I've literally finished seven weeks of travel every single week but my number one and I already, from putting a couple things out on LinkedIn today, have a few new intros but I have to find at least one, if not as many as three salespeople to help get us to the next level. We have enough going on and we have the right things and we just need to be talking to more people and I need to get them up and running to have an impact yet this year, which is crazy to think but...03:27 DS: Sales is so time-consuming. So it's, for you as the CEO, trying to manage so much of that, it's really valuable to bring on some people to help out.03:36 AW: It totally is and I'm a little bit scared about... Not scared but I just realize how much work it's gonna be to train one, two or three, hopefully all together. But knowing, all right, if I sink my teeth into that hard for 30, 60, 90 days, then it will pay off, right? It's a necessary evil, so.03:55 DS: Yeah, I would... One thing we're trying to do with training is to group it as much as possible. So when we hire, we try to hire three people at the same time and train 'em all at the same time so that they'll get that. And then we've also started screencasting and recording all of our training sessions. So later we could have someone else do the training and they can refer back to that as a reference or eventually dial it in to the point where it's all recorded, be like, "Oh, welcome aboard, here's your training package. Let us know when you've worked through all that and then we'll have a call, right?"04:29 AW: That's awesome, that's great efficiency. I need to do a better job of that. I hope I'm able to hire two salespeople at once so I can duplicate the output of that training. I've been trying to, even after this call, to record this today, I have a sales call and I've been recording those as of late just so when we do hire, I can say, "Here's a dozen sales calls in the last month. Now you can listen to all these and pick things out, start to think about your pitch and your story and what kinda questions are asked and things like that. So."05:04 DS: Do you give your prospects a heads-up that you'll be recording the call for training and quality assurance purposes? 05:13 AW: I usually don't say that. Sometimes I'll just tell them it's for their purpose, right and then I'll send the link to the recording along with the materials I shared.05:20 DS: That's good to do, yeah.05:21 AW:  I've found in doing that, why not give them every piece of that? That way if they have to share up or down, they have that available. Sometimes people even ask for it but yeah, I don't always let 'em know the wire is tapped either, so I probably should do that. [laughter]05:38 DS: Oh, yeah, you should. You're breaking some FTC laws, I think, if you don't.05:43 AW: Totally. They're coming for me. I'm sure I'm already on their list.05:48 DS: Yeah, ding-dong. [laughter] Right in the middle of the podcast, all right.05:53 AW: Other than that, we just wrapped up... Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we had our exec team summit. So for us, that it basically ends up being six, seven of us that kind of lead different areas in the company. We try to have at least three or four face-to-face that we just call our exec summit. We pretty much map out the three days solid to get face time, both where things are at hiring financials, what's next, planning, ideation, try to fit all that in, spend some time together, have dinners together.We actually did it here in Minneapolis this time with having five of our exec team are now in Minneapolis out of the seven. So that made it a lot easier and then those of us that are here in the Twin Cities, we stayed at a hotel Monday night and Tuesday night just so we could spend more time together and not be commuting back and forth and everything else.06:53 DS: Right, yeah. Sounds great, that's really helpful. I feel a little bit on my own from an exec perspective. It's mostly me as the primary exec. I certainly have some key team members that I lean on for a lot of those decisions and collaboration and discussing things but in the end, I'm the only, I'm the sole director of things really. So it's nice to have that team around you that you can work with in that capacity.07:25 AW: Yeah, I adopted the philosophy at my last agency when we grew that and I was basically in the COO role but I really saw that our company was run best at that level and I kinda wanna as we grow, I wanna duplicate that at GatherUp where I can be spending most of my time working on the business instead of in the business so being able to be visionary and recruit and evangelize and do those kind of things and all of those things are things I'm self-aware that that's what I'm really good at and then have the right people handling finances and UI, UX and customer success and sales and things like that. Where I really look at that group runs the company, it's me to navigate vision, motivate all of those kind of things so.08:21 DS: Yeah, right, totally.08:24 AW: That's the ultimate plan. We're still just a couple of positions short. Sales really, really being the big one. That's still almost 100% in my wheel house for our multi-location and larger deals so hopefully I'll have some good news on that when we talk in the future.08:42 DS: So okay, you're currently managing all of that and you're doing it on a part-time basis. What makes you think you need three salespeople? That seems like a lot. Do you actually have that much volume and you're just dropping the ball on that many of them? 08:57 AW: So a couple of different things, one is definitely bringing someone in on the agency side, we already have one agency account exec that is selling the white label version of our product to resellers and we have more than enough leads there. We're manufacturing about 100 warm leads a month there. So that can definitely use a second person to give more touch, a deeper dive. I also believe competition, especially in sales is a great thing. It's the tide raises all boats kind of deal so that's helpful.And then on the multi-location side, I see the same thing. I'd rather try to bring two people in at once there and at the stage right now, we don't generate as many leads there but to get them going out and looking, I'm gonna look for a sales person that is very comfortable looking for where those next opportunities are and working their networks and possibly their backgrounds and being an outbound sales person more so than just inside sales.10:03 DS: So who's handling those hundred leads right now. Is it customer support? 10:06 AW:  No, our agency sales rep handles the majority of those right now and we have a good 15 to 20% close rate every month with those 100 which is nothing to laugh at but I think we could get another five to 10% out of it just by splitting them up and spending a lot more time and yeah. And I even think that then we'd be in a position where we could do a little more outbound as well because we know the types of agencies that are really successful with our product.10:39 DS: Yup. Well, hey, with so many people coming on every month, how many you got going off the back door? I think that's what we wanna talk about today, right? [laughter]10:46 AW: There you go. We wanna talk about churn and the front end of the problem is getting new customers on and yeah, the back end is do you have a leaky bucket and how leaky is it, right? 11:00 DS: Yeah. Totally. That's a good way to put it.11:01 AW: Yeah, so for us, we've really ratcheted down pretty tight on churn and really care a lot about customers leaving us, what our churn looks like and in a few different ways. And I think for me at the highest level, churn is a constant thing. It's not something you can look at and be like, "Oh, here's just what we need to do and if we get it there and then it's fixed." It's an ongoing thing that needs to be baked into how you do business and then the next piece is tracking it and being aware and this is something that we've gotten better at over time.11:45 AW: Once upon a time an account was an account and we just tracked overall logo churn on a monthly basis based on our accounts and then we started realizing a couple of years ago, we realized like, "Hey, each of our market is different." We have single location businesses, that they sign up from the website no touch. They're paying $40, $75, $100 a month. We may or may not ever interact with them in support or anything else. It's just a come in and use as you wish and that's one segment.12:22 AW: Then the next one is our agency resellers, so these are digital marketing agencies or one or two person SEO shops and they come in and now with us 75% of them are coming in through our sales process. They're getting a demo. They're seeing our pricing. We're sharing a few case studies on how it works and then trying to help them get up and running and getting their clients on it and sell new clients on it.12:53 AW: And then the third one is multi-location businesses, just kinda five locations up to tens of thousands of locations and these are much more high-touch, sales and demo process, a statement of work, locking them into a year or two years worth of service. So we see both in how they come on, how they're treated, the sales process, all of those different things, we track churn individually inside of each of those categories.13:24 DS: So that's fascinating. We don't do that. We're the way you were before where an account is an account and we can see how many are leaving and we have a number of things to follow up and try to understand the reasons why people leave but... So do you have that in the account set up type? How do you know what they are basically? Do you flag them internally? Do you go through and mark them all? How do you know if they're SMB or agency? 13:51 AW: Yeah, so in the sign-up process, they're able to state what that is and then when we re-branded, we moved our agency pricing in our multi-location pricing behind basically a form, you just have to say who you are. This is great lead generation for us and then it also allows us to know who those accounts are and then the sales person for agencies and working with them and then you need your account to be an agency account for it to work the right way with the agency dashboard we have. And then the majority of them want to white label so that's already gonna be a key and then other determination, we see how many locations they have in there. So if they did self-select wrong when they signed up, we can easily correct that. We can set three-second switch at any time.14:43 DS: Sure and so tell me which is the segment that has the highest churn? 14:48 AW: Yeah, SMB as you would probably expect has the highest churn so that's the one that... The good news just as we are going over, we have a half percent improvement in overall logo churn from our 2018 to where we're at in 2019 so far, which is great and we kind of see that mostly across the board but both agency and multi-location churn is almost half of what SMB churn is and we have... I don't wanna get into exact specifics but I would say our SMB churn is definitely in an average slot for how SMBs churn. You're in a five to seven and a half, 8% range per month, that's pretty common for SMBs and SaaS.15:42 DS: What percentage... I don't know if you have this data or not but I'm interested to know what percentage of those SMBs that churn never really got set up? They signed up, they got busy two months later, they realize I'm not even using this thing and they cancelled. Do you have that data? 16:03 AW: I do, so that is so frequent. We actually internally, how our product is built if any of those that don't understand it, you set up your business location, you can figure what you're outbound templates look like to request a review via SMS or by email, other configurations in setting, which sites you're gonna ask for reviews on and once that's all set up, then it's all about you need to add your customers in and those can be added in manually or uploading a list or you can use an app or a Zap on a Zapier and create a Zap so that they auto-populate. You can even use our API, so it automates out of a CRM or POS but we basically do refer this, we call this the problem of zero and if they don't add a customer, they will... It is so unlikely they will lock any emotional or statistical value out of our product.17:03 DS: Yeah, totally.17:04 AW: Because our product is an engine, the customer is the gasoline so it just doesn't run because most people won't be that excited, like, "Yeah well, I'm paying 40 bucks a month then I get to monitor these five websites and whatever else that's not gonna give them value that requesting reviews, requesting feedback, all of those other things will unlock for them so...17:28 DS: For sure.17:29 AW: We actually see about 50% of our SMB cancels never even send one request out.17:37 DS: Yeah and that makes perfect sense and now I'm wondering, okay great, you've identified a pretty significant churn problem. How are you now going to prevent that? Are you monitoring? It's been a week, this person hasn't sent any review requests out. We better get someone to contact them. Do you have anything in place to alert you to these situations and then a system so that someone gets in touch and tries to help them get properly up and running with the software.18:07 AW: Yeah, so we've tried some different things. Early on we basically created a report called the red flag report and I can't remember the initial things but it basically said, if you haven't added 10 customers in the first 60 days or the first 30 days, then they would appear on that report and we would try to start doing some outreach to invite them to our webinar or what can we answer anything else but we basically were raising the flag like this account is likely in trouble because they're not adding customers into the system.18:45 AW: As you can imagine with SMBs, we didn't see a lot of response with that so it ended up being something that as we continue to get bigger and other things happened, we weren't fighting it in a service or a human element. So the next thing is we started looking at in the product and we realized like hey, we weren't being as frontal as possible with how to add customers. It was one button from one screen and it became glaringly apparent, we need to bring this to the forefront so a month or two goes when we finally got this all in order but request actually became a main item on the navigation and then you see like, do you wanna add a customer, do you wanna upload a list. Then you see the ways to add customers there.19:35 AW: So then we looked at, all right, how can we attack it from UI, UX and I really think with all of these, they're almost always that there's never a silver bullet with it. It is about what three, four things can I do from in-product, from customer success, from all those different things and then we just started a trial right now that anybody who's at least on our second plan up, our pro plan or higher, when they sign up, in addition to... And I should mention we have a drip series, so there's five emails that go out in the first four weeks of being with us that outline all the basics. We have a quick start guide that goes out on the first one.20:14 AW: We put a lot into that and then yeah, we're doing a test right now with pro plans and higher. We're actually reaching out and we're trying to offer them a half hour call and just say, "Hey, we're gonna go through four things to get you completely ready." And the goal of that call, by the end of it is saying like, "All right, now send me your list and we'll help you upload it so we can get you to start sending requests."20:35 DS: I think that could be so huge because most of these businesses already have a list somewhere. It's just like, "Give us your list. We're gonna start sending out those customer requests." Then you really get to feel the benefit of the software and I think that would have a massive impact on reducing churn.20:51 AW: Yeah. No, well, I'm hopeful that shows some of it, 'cause it just continuing to figure out how do you get that lever pulled and what is it and part of me is hoping to some extent that if we have to do that consistently by human, that's a little bit frustrating because that doesn't scale well. So you do start looking at, what do we need to make easier in the product or more rewarding or happen faster or whatever that might be but you'd like to find some way where it's not all human touch.21:27 DS: You can somewhat fake the human touch and that is something we've implemented to help reduce with churn and at least understand why customers cancel. When we get a cancellation, there's this email that goes out from darren@whitespark.ca, it looks like I sent it even though I didn't. It is just like, "Oh, hey Bob, I noticed that you cancelled and I would love to hear any feedback you have. What is the one feature we were missing? What was lacking? What could we have done to have kept you as a customer?"22:01 AW: So I send that email and it looks like it comes from me and when they reply, it goes to me and then I always get back to them right away 'cause that's such valuable interaction when they do take the time to provide that feedback. So it makes me wonder if you could do something similar where an email goes out and looks like it came from let's say Josh and it says, "Hey, we notice you haven't added any customers. If you send us the list, we'll do it." And that email's completely automated but then Josh gets the reply and it comes to him and he pumps the list in.22:31 AW:  Exactly and we're in the first steps of doing that, so the one big thing we have to get better at is internal app analytics.22:42 DS: Yeah, same.22:43 AW: We don't have deep enough data sometimes on what people are or are not using. We can see surface level how many customers have been added but we can't even tell, are they even clicking to that page or feature or some other systematic thing. So that's one thing we have in motion. It's probably a quarter or two out from the number of moving pieces but exactly what you outlined, yeah, is what we wanna get to is how do you personalize that help experience so that the system itself is seeing something that's missing and either giving them a suggestion to learn about it or here's who you can talk to, to get that corrected.23:27 DS: Yeah, that in-app stuff is so valuable. How are you planning to implement that? 'Cause I know there's software, like Hotjar or whatever that you can do to track all of your engagement. What buttons are being clicked on and what not? But then I always think well, we can kinda build our own tracking system for measuring what gets clicked. You can even do an analytics, just like any click tracking could be put on every link in the navigation, every button.23:52 AW: Yup, I think that's where we've arrived is using Google Analytics, at least for the tracking side. We looked at Heap Analytics and in the end, based on a couple of different things, one didn't just have a great service experience with them and talked to a few other people that had used Mixpanel and had used Heap.24:15 DS: Yeah, Mixpanel.24:16 AW: And we had a few different people that said, "You know what, you can do everything you need to with Google Analytics and Tag Manager so that is where we're headed. We use Appcues and we've used that in our product for a while when we add something to a navigation or roll out a new feature or we change something up, we use that at a macro level to make any user aware when they log in and it's been a great product for us just to point things out to people that are new in the platform, things they need to be aware of. You can take multi-steps with them. That's been very successful.24:54 AW: So the goal with that is then to integrate those two together so that then analytics is showing like hey, they haven't even clicked on this page that then just for that user in their account, it can service the alert that says, "Hey, we noticed you haven't add anybody. Here's the request tab, click on this." And there's five different ways to add customers. So that's what we're hoping to use a combination of Google Analytics and Heap to give those personalized Appcues or Google Analytics and Appcues and be able to give those personalized cues to get them to take the next step that's specific to that user and that account.25:34 DS: That's interesting. I looked at Appcues and it's just like a wizardy kind of thing. So it's like as soon as you load the app, it has these little overlays that will point at specific things, like go here to do this specific activity, go here to do this and it's like it steps you through and kinda shows you the features of the app. Is that what Appcues is, right? 25:54 AW: Yep, it ends up being an overlay and so you can anchor it to navigation items or things on specific pages or drive them to specific pages. You can do steps with it and then it lets you know how many times it's been activated, how many times somebody's gone through it and completed it. So we've found it to be really helpful instead of those things happening silently or in the dark and the user having to discover them themselves.26:19 DS: Right, yeah, I get that when I looked at it, I thought the pricing caused it was based off of a number of sessions kind of thing and the pricing looked really expensive to me and I thought well, we could just kinda build our own. It wouldn't be that hard to build our own little overlay that directs a person through the software, right? 26:35 AW: Yeah, yeah we used to have an in-app notification. We just called it an in-app alert that we could control what page it would appear on and the header and I can tell you this has been wildly more successful. It is in the... I can't remember off the top of my head but it is in the hundreds of dollars a month but we absolutely... We almost always have one macro Appcue going on at a time and we find it just to be... It's been really helpful for us and when we look at that, when we look at the cost, we totally see like, yes, it pays off and now it gives us that extra step that as we get to better tracking and we get to personalization that we can then take it that step that now that's cheap for what you're able to do.27:20 DS: And you can set it up with your support and marketing people, rather than developers having to get in there, right? 27:26 AW: Yeah, once a code's set whatever else, yeah, it's actually our Chief Experience Officer who's all of our UI and UX and everything else, he owns Appcues for us and does all the set up with it.27:39 DS: Sure, yeah, that makes good sense. Yeah, I get it.27:41 AW: Yeah, it's been good. The one other thing I wanna point out on tracking that we've just recently evolved to is tracking net revenue churn and the premise behind this is not every logo is equal and when you're only tracking logo churn, losing a $40 a month, single location dog walker pales in comparison to losing a 200 location hotel.28:07 DS: Totally, yeah.28:08 AW: Yeah. So net revenue churn measures your revenue churn versus what are you expanding in a month so in our case where we have resellers that are adding locations or say we have a multi-location that we renew and now they moved from basic to the pro-plan or pro-plan to pro plus and they're expanding their revenue, net revenue churn looks it like how much are you expanding and that doesn't include new sales, so your brand new deals are included, so it kind of looks at it as a self-sustaining environment. Will you continue to grow without landing new deals because your expansion revenue is greater than your revenue churn.28:49 DS: Right.28:50 AW: And that's a much more finite number and we just finally started tracking that for Q1 of this year and it was definitely an eye-opener where we ended up close to right around a 100% for that month, meaning that was good but we had some months that were lower, some months that were higher. But really, I think just from some numbers we shared at our executive meeting around 120% or 130% net revenue retention is like best in class and the closest you get to 100, that's definitely a good number. If you're above 100 and constantly taking in more than what you're churning out without new deals, that's a self-sustaining system. So we're really... We're right on the edge of that so far, with tracking that.29:38 DS: Wow, that's exciting. So what do you use for tracking? I'm really jealous of your tracking because we have a legacy account system that we built in 2010, that has just been Frankenstein built upon and bolted on stuff to it and it's just the worst, it's the worst code base and every one of the developers hates it and avoid getting into it because it's such a mess and so, we've been in the process of rebuilding our account system and it's very close to launching.30:10 DS: But because of that, I'm in this limbo state where I can't say, hey I wanna track this metric because our guys are like well, what's the point of building that into the existing account system, when we have a new one coming soon, right? So, I'm really in a stuck spot here where I can't get these metrics until we launch our new account system, so I'm just curious what do you use for accounts or for these dashboard metrics? 30:33 AW: Yeah. So we built our own dashboard in our, our world's run by what we call our admin panel so inside of that we have an account churn report that lays all that out and breaks it down like, here's our overall account churn, here's single, here's multi-agency. Now the net revenue churn, we have to calculate that by hand so we have to use a couple of different of our billing numbers and reports and do that by hand which is a little bit tedious. I would love... Eventually, I think we can build a report that that doesn't... To start with, we're just kinda like, alright, let's do it by hand, it's incredibly valuable.We've learned a lot about the formula and all those other pieces in the process but we will eventually need to build our own report to do that. That said, if you look back, we've talked about this over episodes like we are eventually this year, switching over to a new billing system, where that is a report provided in that billing system so that's another advantage to going with one of the existing SaaS billing products that's out there.31:41 DS: They've built all that already.31:43 AW: Yeah, most of them have those reporting suites or the ones that integrate with a ProfitWell or Baremetrics that allows you to put your data into visible formats in the right types of reports.31:55 DS: Yeah, are you using Strike for your payment processor? 31:58 AW: We're not, we use PayPal. That was where things started with far before me and... Yeah, it integrates with some things and but yeah, most of the really forward, new age reporting things are Stripe and Braintree and things like that, and not so much PayPal Pro.32:23 DS: Is it Payflow? Is that what your processor is? Payflow. Not PayPal.32:27 AW: PayPal Pro is what ours is.32:29 DS: PayPal Pro. Yeah, I should look into that. It would be nice if I could just spin up a dashboard quickly based off of our Payflow account, just connect them. I think that that might be something that I could explore in the short term.32:41 AW: Yeah, yeah, no definitely. Unlocking that data and being able to see what's there and the different types of reporting. It was like when I came across a couple of articles on the net revenue churn on a monthly basis, it just got me thinking about it differently where it's like yeah, I already knew logo, per logo wasn't the same and while we're working hard on that, there's so much more below the surface of that, that it's really about, are you leaking? What does the dollar leakage look like each month? Not just the logos. As we said, all accounts are not equal and as we've sold more and more into multi-location and some bigger deals like we have those massive discrepancies between a $30 account and a $5,000 a month account.33:28 DS: Yeah. That's okay. So speaking of, let's say you are tracking this net revenue churn, how do you react differently to an SMB that has churned versus a $5,000 a month account that has churned? And so you now have the data. Are you doing anything different based off of that data? 33:47 AW: Yeah, for SMBs, we try to cycle what we see in that back all the way to the front. So we look at why did they leave? So again, this continues to expose our problem of zero customers added and we continue to look at how are we messaging them. They need the upload customers. How do we make it easy to upload customers? How can we support them uploading customers? Eventually, do we need to reward them for uploading customers? What are all those things that we need to look at it from that angle? 34:18 AW: The multi-location clients are definitely different because they're... And it's an area where we're strong and we're getting even stronger and that's looking at how our customer success team engages and we've had a really fabulous reactive customer success team. We do support extremely well. If you read our reviews, you see it in our reviews, people rave about how fast we are, how thorough the materials that we give them to put it on to but where we're trying to get now and especially as some of our early deals from last year when we started to have multi-location success, now we're trying to be like " Alright, hey, your deals up in 30 days. Let's jump on a call and talk about your renewal. Are we hitting goals? Here's some of the data we see. Here's ideas on how you can do better? And let's do that and get this next deal. Let's sign on again for another year or two. Great."35:11 AW: So we're just starting that within the last month. We hired a VP of Customer Success that has that kind of background and has really started orchestrating what that looks like. Our onboarding process which, there's another part of churn is how easy do you make onboarding and to get set up and we've always had a really great onboarding process for some time now that's well documented out and makes it really easy for the customer to understand what's going on. It's ratcheted into four phases.35:43 AW: But once they got up and running then we stopped being a guide and then we're like "Alright, if you need something, let us know." And now we're trying to build out that first 90 days where it's like, we're still driving it and like "Great, here's what we see happening. Alright, let's set this up now. Let's do this additional thing." And getting it so it's truly customer success where we're like "Alright, we know how to get you to being successful within your first 90 days."So then after that, the next nine months, our lather rinse repeat of what's going on or smaller adjustments but we already have you on your way and then we know, yes you're gonna renew. We're gonna keep you long-term because you're happy with what's going on. It's not a secret. It's not a wondering when renewal comes up like, "Oh, will they re-sign. We have no idea." So...36:30 DS: Yeah. Well, with that onboarding you solve that problem of zero, right? You get them into the system using it and seeing with benefits of the software.36:39 AW: Yeah. Multi-location suffers far, far less from that 'cause we're usually in multi-locations. We're trying to find out two things. One, what other pieces of software you're using, so that we could do an integration? That's the number one thing is we wanna make it happen auto-magically that the customer is coming into our system after a purchase or after their experience. If that can happen, then we're making them, "Hey, here's how our list upload works. And all you have to do is pull down one customer list that has first name, last name, email address and a location identifier and show us a sample of data you'd pull from that. Okay, it has the right things. Here's where you upload that in our system and if you do this on a daily, every other day, weekly basis, part of you, it takes you five minutes to do, your system is gonna run smoothly."But what we haven't done in the past is checked to make sure that those manual ones are still doing it, where now we're trying to set at more things, so we know "Alright, this person's actually falling off. They haven't uploaded someone in two months. They get great results when they do it but they just haven't been doing it. So now we're actually putting a little more in place so we can recognize those things."37:49 DS: I'm picturing a sort of dashboard that a customer success person would log into and it would automatically sort near the top. All of the least engaged customers. So a lot of these SMBs that are basically haven't uploaded anything and you could have different engagement points. What pieces have they done and they could go from green to red depending on how deep they've got into the software and the customer success person gets to pick off the top 10 of those every day. Just log in, spend an hour touching base with those 10 least engaged people and trying to bring them in and help them out.38:29 AW: Are you spying on our company? 38:31 DS: Did you... [laughter] I'm just thinking about it man. Is that what you were doing, is that the idea? 38:36 AW: Yeah, yeah. So, Taylor, our new VP of Customer Success, that's one of his things is basically creating a score card for each customer and there's components based on the features they're using, the results they're seeing, customers being added, what's their tone when they talk to us in support or whatever else and using all of that to develop a score, so that we understand where they sit and the system will provide some of that data so we can see if somebody isn't adding customers or they don't install review widgets on their site, we'd see that contribute to that score being lower so that we get that alert so that we're like, "Okay hey, these guys are at this level, let's engage with them and get them back up to a healthy level." So no, you're spot on, you're right, you're right on track with us, Darren, I like that.39:26 DS: Well, I wish I was ahead of you sometimes but you're always like, six months ahead of me with all of these ideas. [chuckle]39:34 AW: It just works out that way sometimes but what do you guys see, I mean what's the biggest reason when people are giving you their cancel reasons, what are you seeing for... Why do they churn out of Whitespark? 39:44 DS: It's most... So it depends on the software, we have this unfortunate problem that we have multiple software systems and multiple services and so we don't really have a sense of churn out of our services, like let's say an agency was using us for citation building on a regular basis and then they stopped. That's a churn, right? They went to some other provider with citation building services. We have no line on that right now, I'm not tracking that at all.On the software side, we have cancellation. So whenever they cancel, we try to collect feedback from them and then we will use that to help understand why people are churning but a lot of this awesome stuff like integrating tracking within the software, they're all fantastic ideas that we just have not implemented yet.The biggest reason people churn out of, let's say the local citation finder is; I'm just not using the software and it actually... It is unfortunately part of the nature of the software. Let's say you're a small business, you sign up for the local citation finder, it suggests a number of places you could get citations, you get those citations and you're like, "Why am I paying monthly for this software?" I don't need it anymore, I did it, I accomplished my goal and so to solve that problem which we are fully aware of, the new version will provide ongoing recommendations so you don't have to think so much about it.The system will feed you every month or every week, actually, we want it to be like, "Here are your top citation opportunities for the week," and then also doing a better job of keeping track of when you do get them and then sending out rewards and just lots of engagement type features is what we're focusing on with the new version of the LCF, so that's in production. We will be launching that in the short term and continuing to improve that. So there's a lot of opportunities just within the software to improve engagement and so we have a big one there.41:46 DS: Same thing on the rank tracker...41:47 AW: That definitely is making it stickier and more valuable on an ongoing basis, that's a big thing, right? 41:54 DS: I think for me it's the hugest thing and it's the one that I want to focus our attention on solving first and I think that that will have a pretty significant impact on churn of the local citation finder for that particular piece of software.42:06 AW: Do you guys look at or track... Are people more likely to stay with you longer if they're using multiple products versus just one service and one product or two products that... Do you have any idea on that? 42:20 DS: That's a great question. I don't have any idea on that. If only we had our new account system and tracking system, I'd be able to put some of those... Get an idea of some of those things, I would think that it does have a small impact. The software systems are all for very different purposes and a number of companies, most companies would bundle things together. So if you look at, let's say, a SEMrush or a Moz or HHreps, you just sign up for Moz and you get all of the different products and services in your Moz Pro account. That is a direction that we're heading as well. Bundle, but then allowing people to also self-select tiny things.If they only want the LCF, then we're still gonna allow that to happen but bundling, I think we'll have a big impact and maybe give people broader value and especially when they've signed up for a bundle, they might be using our reporting stuff on a regular basis or our citation analysis stuff but they might not need some other things and so bundling will help a lot, I think, to reduce churn. Just to provide a one place to get everything that they need.43:31 AW: Nice, what do you guys do in terms of support channels when people... It's like on one side you have the silent sufferers and that's what we were kinda talking about with having a score card or an alert, something that helps you know, they're drowning and they always say, "Drowning is the silent killer because it isn't the screaming and kicking that you normally think it is when someone's drowning."43:57 DS: Yeah, right.43:58 AW: And they're in the water and drowning, they're not swimming, they're drowning but what about the ones that raise their hand and say, "I have an issue," what does... How do you guys handle your support? What does that look like and how successful do you feel like that is? 44:12 DS: I feel like we do a pretty good job. Like you had said earlier, with your support, we're quite responsive and our reviews reflect that people always talk about how support at Whitespark is good. We almost never go 24 hours without responding to a ticket. Our team works hard to try and solve problems, we're very friendly too. If someone says, "Oh hey, I haven't used the LCF in the last three months, can I get a refund for the last three months I didn't use it?" We're generally like, "Yup, no problem."We don't really want to... We wanna be understanding and empathetic with our customers in many cases and we wanna try and help them out as quickly as possible and the support is fantastic for driving feature direction as well. So when someone complains that it's missing this or missing that, then it ends up on our road map and we do a good job of trying to implement that which of course in the long-term will reduce churn as well.45:14 AW: Yeah, for sure. Well and I think support is probably a whole another topic for us some day so we probably shouldn't get down that vein too far 'cause we probably should wrap up here for the week but...45:25 DS: Yeah, how are we doing full time? Let's see.45:27 AW: Yeah. Ticking up there again. Yeah, we can just go on and on and on, right? 45:33 DS: I know.45:34 AW: I'll just add support to our cue of topics to talk about but I think in closing, I'd like to hear a couple of things from you that you think is really important in churn. But mine are ... number one, as we alluded to with a lot of these things like figuring out who's in trouble, even before they realize it because they don't always realize it, they just obviously hit a switch where they don't find value in your product and they might not re-enter a new credit card, they might just go and click Cancel but at some point in time, the value versus the dollars spent isn't there.So, you need ways to figure that out once they do that and that's where we talked about a number of things that are there because you really need a way, when you can be proactive so you can ask them how they are doing and you also give them a chance for them to tell you how you're doing. Those are great ways to suss out problems, issues, misunderstandings and a lot of time we just find people don't even know that's available in our product, right? That has so many customizations and so many settings.46:43 DS: Totally.46:43 AW: And then lastly, just realizing you have to attack churn from all angles, it's user interface, it's user experience, it's help guides, it's tool tips, it's using something like Appcues, it's internal app tracking, it's a customer success team, right? It is a complete team effort to continue to move that ball forward and drive churn down and what would yours be Darren? 47:06 DS: I really think the biggest one is that internal app tracking. So really identifying engagement, I think that you start to churn when you have people that are not engaged with the product and so getting a line on that and understanding what features people are engaging with and when people will stop engaging, getting stuff in front of them so that they do start engaging and trying to automate that as much as possible. I think there's a great opportunity there for SaaS companies to say, to have something in place that tracks, identifies when engagement drops off and then pings them with suggestions about how they could get it back engaged. I think that has a huge impact on churn.47:47 AW: For sure. I totally, totally agree with you and something tells me we will probably address this topic again, in the future, not so far away and hopefully, we have some updates on some of the things we're trying to do with it. So...48:00 DS: Yeah. We gotta get beyond our hopes and dreams and then we'll have a whole episode on our successes like, Wow! We reduced our churn by 12% by implementing this awesome thing.48:11 AW: You just gave me new episode idea called "the hopes and dreams" right where we lay out our biggest hopes and dreams that our product could do or accomplish or handle.48:19 DS: Yeah Totally.48:21 AW: Alright, well, awesome. I think it's a great topic. Again, there's so much more we could cover but hopefully our listeners got some good tidbits and ideas off of both the things that we're doing to track and address and try to combat customer churn. So with that, we will bid you ado, hopefully you continue to enjoy our episodes, please leave us a review on iTunes, otherwise tweet at Darren or I, we'd love to hear feedback or any topic ideas that you guys have, that's always helpful. And other than that, we'll talk to everyone in a couple of weeks when we record episode nine.49:02 DS: Looking forward to it, we'll talk to you all in a couple of weeks.49:05 AW: Alright, take care Darren and talk to you later everybody.49:08 DS: See you.

FULL SHOW NOTES00:05 Aaron Weiche: Episode 7. Sales, inbound, outbound, and all around.[intro music]00:11 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:40 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:43 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:44 AW: And this week we are talking sales, but beforehand, let's kinda catch up on the last couple of weeks. We went from a month in between almost our last episodes to now, just a matter of less than two weeks, so that's good that we're getting back to our tighter cycle. But what's new from your side of the Canada border this week?01:10 DS: Yeah, it feels like I just talked to you. I saw this on my calendar today, and I was like, wow, [chuckle] look at us, talking again so soon. Let's see, what's new in the world of Whitespark and Darren Shaw. Well, we launched a new service, I think I mentioned it in the last podcast, called our Local Search service, which I was so pumped about. And now we're gonna trash that service [chuckle] and make a completely different service. The whole point of this service was, I was excited to build something around Google My Business Management. So the whole local search ranking factor survey really pumped a lot of these new features in Google My Business and how these are great ways to drive conversion, this whole concept of Google as your new home page. And so I was really excited, we need a good service for this, and so we built it, and then I, like I always do, kept bolting things onto it, "Well, what if it did this? And it could also do this." And so it just really expanded into a full SEO service, which is Google My Business Management plus your citations, your reviews, your website, even some link recommendations, and now we're not differentiated at all. We're just like another SEO service.02:22 DS: And so I've decided to strip it back to what its core message was supposed to be. I wanna reposition it as specifically around Google My Business, and that's all we do. So we will find duplicates, fix duplicates, make sure your GMB listing is perfected, and regularly keep it up to date, adding new photos, adding posts, managing your Q&A, helping you with reviews, just that whole concept of Google as your new home page, we're completely focused on that. And we're focused more on conversions from GMB, improving your views and conversions rather than rankings by the whole local search picture. So I think it's a much better pivot, and it will be better for the service and better for scaling it, too. It's just much simpler offering, right?03:09 AW: Yeah.03:09 DS: You launch an SEO service and you get a million questions about, "What should I do with schema on my website?" The service becomes so much more complicated, whereas when we scale it back to strictly these things, we can become subject matter experts on that, and it really makes it easier to scale and manage. So I'm excited about it; I think it's gonna be a good move.03:31 AW: There's so many variables when you get into the full-blown service side of things.03:36 DS: Yeah, definitely.03:38 AW: What from how your customers were interacting with it or lack of interaction gave you a signal, this isn't perfect, what do we need to do?03:45 DS: Yeah, so a lot of questions about rankings like, "How soon will I be ranking?" all that stuff. And every time those questions come in, we're just like... We shake our heads, and we're like, "Oh boy, I don't know, [chuckle] is this the right direction?" And then pricing as well, we didn't get a huge pick-up from it, we definitely got a decent amount of clients that... After we promoted it. But I think it's a bit expensive, people are like, "$399, and it's not a full agency service, why would I choose this over the million other things?" Whereas when I scale it back, it's gonna be at a much nicer price point, plus the "Why would I choose this?" we can answer that so obviously, and so I think it'll be much better that way. So it's simpler, it's a better price, and we don't have to worry about rankings, which I really like.04:35 AW: I also extract from what you shared with this the local search ranking factors report helped influence a product idea for you, and then you put that... You saw that, hey, this is growing in importance and carrying a lot of weight, and so you put something out for it, and then you realized you went too heavy into it in one side, and now you're scaling back. It's just kind of an interesting cycle for me on where ideas come from, and then how you meet them, and then how do you quickly adjust and pivot if you know it's not the right fit is really interesting.05:14 DS: Yeah, and so I think we're adjusting and pivoting quick enough. And if you talk to my software development team, they will say that I do this all the time, [chuckle] I get excited about something, and I just keep adding, it's like, "It could do this, and it can also do this, and it's gonna be the ultimate magical, amazing thing," and I make it too big, [chuckle] and I make it too complicated. And so I'm really working on scaling things back to the core offering, what is the core offering, what is the core differentiator, and why would someone pick this specific thing? So really trying to dial in on that.05:50 AW: I don't think you're alone in that, Darren, we struggle with that, too, with features, a lot of times. I have gotten better at it. I actually will push our product team a lot of times and just say, "What is... In the world of good, better, best, how do we have a better version instead of this immaculate conception of the feature that has everything you'd ever need, and every way to customize it, and all of those pieces that then takes you forever to roll it out, and so many other things that complicate it.06:23 DS: For sure, and there's a place for that in the industry. If you look at software like Salesforce or HubSpot, these things are massive, and they do try to do everything, and they're very successful, but I think for a smaller industry, you're not gonna go and compete with them, you're better off to try and build something that has a very clear differentiating factor, this is the one thing we do better for this specific use case, and that's what you can sell.06:48 AW: Yeah. So important.06:49 DS: Yep, so yeah, well, how about you? What's up with you? You've been traveling for a long time.06:54 AW: Yeah. I've been living out of a suitcase. I am about ready to at least get a little bit of a reprieve next week. I have a speaking engagement that's just a two-day, two-night away. But I have basically been on planes for six straight weeks, sometimes just for a day trip. Last week it was three different cities over seven days, so it is a lot, it's been really hard to find desk time to get other things accomplished and keep things moving. But on the plus side, a couple were speaking events, but then others were face-to-face meetings with customers. One of the things that was really important to me when I took over as CEO was getting out from behind the desk and going to meet some of our great customers in person that we don't have a deep relationship with and trying to make that deeper, and...07:51 DS: Yep. That's interesting, yeah, that really rolls into sales too, right?07:56 AW: Yeah, yeah. And it's been really fun to do that, to see how they operate, to give them a peek at our road map and what we have coming up, and just to build rapport and be more of a partner instead of just a business relationship with it. So I've done a majority of those, Mike Blumenthal has knocked out a couple as well, but it's allowed us to go from seeing a few of our customers at conferences to getting in front of some that we never, ever would unless we went to Salt Lake City to see them, or Charlotte to see them, or Montreal to see them, whatever that might be. I'm really proud that we've done that, and it's been great, and even to post pictures in Slack of who we work with and bring faces to the people that our support team deals with, and dev team builds stuff for, and whatever else has been really kind of rewarding all across the board.08:54 DS: Okay, cool, I got some questions about this. What is the threshold for this client is spending enough to warrant me getting on a plane and going to see them? How do you determine which of your customers get this royal treatment and which don't? What's the cut-off, I'm curious? Number of locations being managed or something?09:16 AW: I guess that's really interesting. Dollar volume is definitely part of it to a certain extent. For agencies and resellers for our white-label product, we're basically looking at who's our top 10, and we see how important they are to us. Most of them are very long-term and have notched up a number of locations.09:40 DS: Yeah. When are you coming to Edmonton? Are you flying out here? Are you coming to Edmonton to take me to dinner?09:45 AW: I will come to see you. [chuckle] I feel like we already have a good relationship, but if you need that, I'm all in.09:51 DS: No man, we're gonna hang out so much at MozCon, you don't have to fly to Edmonton.09:54 AW: Alright, cool. We'll make that happen. Dinner on me in Seattle, for sure, in July.10:00 DS: Sure.10:00 AW: So on that side, yeah, that's pretty straightforward. Multi-locations, it can be a little bit different. Sometimes it's just demanded as part of the sales process, it might be part of an RFP to meet them in person, it might be part of onboarding as you get close to a renewal, or just based on the relationship and strategically how you see it evolving. So on that side, it's definitely a little more common and probably less of a... You're a top tier or whatever else, there it's just more of like, we wanna get that face time with you. If your business is succeeding, you're likely adding or opening more locations to what you're doing, that's more business for us. We wanna make sure we're in lockstep with you and that you have good vision into where we continue to go. So there it's a little bit murkier, but even... I think it's even more important in that area of our business to be making face-to-face time.11:00 DS: Really interesting. And then what does this visit look like? Do you go for lunch? Do you sit down at their desk and look through the software and give them a little training, address some of the problems they've been having? What do you do it at one of these in-person meetings?11:13 AW:  I just call it show-and-tell from both sides. So usually going in and trying to spend anywhere from 2-6 hours together dividing that up between, hey, one, we're super appreciative. Here are some of the things we've seen with the growth of your business and what you're doing. Talk to me about what you love, tell me what's frustrating, or what's an idea, or what's something that would make your life easier. Then we might jump into the platform and they might outline some of those things and take a look at it. Then, yeah, grabbing lunch or a dinner together and just talking philosophy on it. Also getting to know them as a person.11:57 DS: Yeah, definitely.11:58 AW: Yeah, really important there. And then as I shared, giving them a visual, too, like, "Hey, here's what's next for us in 2019, this is what we have mapped out, this is what I think would be of interest to you. Here's a couple of things I've seen in your account that would be helpful to pay attention to, or a feature to leverage further, or something you might wanna test."12:18 DS: Yep, nice. That's a great idea. I would love to get into doing some of that as well in the not-too-distant future. I feel like we're so scattered with many different products and services that once we get everything organized and more platformatized, then that kind of stuff will make more sense for me. Right now, it's just so all over the place.12:39 AW: Yep, totally get it.12:40 DS: Alright, well, that sounds awesome. So sales, you wanna talk about some sales stuff?12:45 AW: Let's talk sales.12:46 DS: I would like to talk sales. It's something we've been thinking about a lot here, thinking about our customer service, all the leads that come in, they come in through our support channel right?12:58 AW: Yep.13:00 DS: And so we are working on trying to figure out how do we segment these requests, and how do we identify their need from the request and then direct them to the right solution that we have? I think it might be a bit simpler for you because you've got this one platform, and you can direct them to the different plan. But man, we have so many different things, some people need this and some people need that, and so I feel like we miss it sometimes. A customer comes in, they have a request, and we could have suggested our local search service, or a better fit for them might actually be our local search audit service, or maybe they just need citations. And I feel like we miss it sometimes, and I also think we complicate it sometimes because we do have so many things. So we're really trying to work on processes there and identifying what is the best fit for this customer and then working on our emails and our response rates, and also trying to decide who do we get on the phone with? Sometimes we just respond via email, sometimes we'll respond and say, "Hey, well, let's have a call and talk about it." And so obviously that call would be much more likely to close, but then you don't wanna have a call with everybody, so we're working on those processes right now.14:13 AW: Yeah. You guys are probably like us at this stage, and we are in a little bit of a transition, but 99% of things or greater, it's all inbound for you, right?14:23 DS: Yeah.14:24 AW: And then once that comes in, you guys don't have a formalized, "Okay, we wanna do a demo," or "We wanna forward them to a recording of this." It's just, "Here's my initial questions why I'm reaching out," and you guys try to answer that and then push them in a direction or prescribe a product that meets their pain? What does that look like?14:43 DS: The first thing we wanna do is understand their needs. And so we will start asking them questions. So sometimes it makes more sense to just get on the call with them and ask them questions, but we'll generally... If it's not clear what they're looking for, then we'll start asking them, what is the current solution you're using, what are the troubles you're having with it? And then we'll try to set up a demo. But we also... We're a little conservative with suggesting demos, too, because we only have a limited support team. They can't be... We don't have someone dedicated to be doing demos all the time. And so most of the demos we do are people that say, "Hey, we wanna check out your platform. Can we schedule a demo?" So it's usually they will ask for the demo, but occasionally we'll suggest it where the client looks big enough, too, right?15:33 AW: Yep.15:33 DS: So if it's a small business that wants to sign up for our $20 a month local citation finder, we don't usually come out of the gate suggesting that we get on a one-hour call with them.15:44 AW: Yeah, what we do with those is we kinda... We invite them into... We have two or three set times each week where we do a high-level 101 demo, so then we can get 5 SMBs, 10 SMBs, 15 SMBs, all into the same demo, so it's not personalized but it shows them... Yeah, it shows them very high-level what the product's about, whatever else, and then it'll cause them to then reach out afterwards because we had... Early on, we would do one-to-one demos all the time, and then we finally grew to the point where, yeah, we have too many leads and not enough team to be doing one-to-ones for a $40 a month customer. So then we just went to, let's set these... And I can't even remember what it is anymore, but it's at least twice a week. And so we say, like, "Great. Here's our two demos this week. Go ahead and sign up for one of these two time slots to learn more about the product."16:37 DS: Yep. That's awesome. I love that idea.16:40 AW: Yeah. And then with multi-locations, those are totally one-to-one demos, and right now the majority of those sit with me, especially if they're 25-50 locations and up, those all reside within me, and we're... As I mentioned, we are definitely in this transition, and we tried to already start it, and our initial start to it didn't go great, mostly because of a bad hire, bad fit to start the year, but we are definitely ready to do outbound. I already do outbound. I'm looking for companies where I'm like, alright, I know we align with their vision, they're in the right industry as us, I can see from their website they're not using certain features that we have to offer of a review widget to show off their reviews, or there's not an easy path to leave feedback through their website. So I can make some high-level determinations that they maybe don't have a full-blown solution like what we offer, and those I do do outbound and try to get in front of them and set up a time to do a demo. But I really, by the end of this year, want to have a fully functioning sales team that is completely outbound.17:55 DS: Crazy. Are you... How do you identify the targets? So you're... Did you buy a database, or are you just browsing around the web thinking about specific business types that are a great fit for your product, and so you're just looking through the search results and then clicking through and checking out the websites? How are you identifying who you would approach in an outbound sales call?18:20 AW: Yeah, totally a lot of grassroots research, so knowing the industries we fit well and then finding out what are some of the publications in that industry? So one we're a really great fit for is fast casual restaurants, so subscribing to some of the daily and weekly emails of that industry, and then they're talking about here's up-and-coming brands, here's all these things. All of these franchise brands within fast casual that I never knew existed, and learning who they are, and then going to take a look at their website, take a look at their makeup and a four- or five-point really quick check, like, okay, I don't see them anywhere saying, 'Hey, leave us feedback here, and here's an easy way to do it,' or 'Here's our location pages for each restaurant.'" Are they displaying any reviews or customer-generated content on them? So it was a pretty easy checklist, where I can see, okay, they might be monitoring reviews, they might be doing these other things, but they're missing these other pieces that we bring to the table, that we could replace what they're doing or be one solution instead of between three or four solutions.19:32 DS: Right. Well, that sounds like a really smart approach for you to identify. "Okay, well, this would be a great client. I want that client." Okay, so now you've done that, how do you find the right person at that company to reach out to? How do you do that?19:48 AW: Yeah, I use LinkedIn heavily to figure out like, okay, who is... Marketing is almost always the first inroad for us. Every now and then it will be operations, but I'll try to hit it from a couple of different spots. I at least wanna get to a director or VP of marketing or digital depending upon how their org is set up. If I can get to a CMO or a C-level, that's great, but I usually try to find out who that is. Then just do a little searching, try to dig up their email, try to connect with them on LinkedIn, but also try to source their email so I can directly reach out a little bit further, put some information in front of them, maybe a case study, or pointing out certain things that I think we could be of help in and trying to get them interested in doing just a quick initial call to learn more about each side and give them a glimpse into the benefits of our product.20:44 DS: And how many of these cold emails just get completely ignored?20:49 AW: Yeah. Well, completely ignored is at least like half to 75%.20:54 DS: Right. Yeah. That's what I would expect. Actually, if you're getting 25% response rate, that sounds actually kind of awesome.21:01 AW: Yeah, and some of it is even like, "Hey, we're good at this time, we're not interested or this isn't a goal for us right now but it's least I know who the contact is. I got us in front of it," and for me, it's a weekly thing of probably somewhere between five and 10 that I'm doing every single week. I consider it, it's like farming, you plant a bunch of seeds and you get a few of them to pop and keep them maturing along to get them to the point where you're having a conversation.21:32 DS: Yup. And have you yet closed a pretty great deal by your outbound sales work, so far?21:41 AW: Yes, yup.21:42 DS: Nice.21:42 AW: And that is, yeah, and it's a very rewarding thing when those... Any of those, right? It's like we talked about in our last episode, doing our first conference, and then we closed the deal from that conference. Those are such huge wins when it's like, "Okay, I thought this would work this way, I put in the effort, stuck with it and then something happened from it." That's such a huge win and it makes you hungrier for the next. I definitely feel that enthusiasm, and then where I'm like, "Now, I'm not doing just five this week, I'm doing 20 this week. I wanna find more people." So it's a great motivator.22:18 DS: Right. And then you know what the conversion rate is and so you're like, "Well, if I could scale this to 200 emails a week, we could be closing five awesome new clients every week." And so speaking of that, obviously you can't do it all forever, you've got a whole company to run. So hiring for sales, this is something I've always wondered about and I'm trying to figure out, one thing that really bothers me with sales jobs is this concept that you hire someone for sales and they, through the ability to make commission, you can have a salesperson making three, four times as much as anyone else in the company, just totally raking it in. And it bugs me because the amount of effort they're putting in isn't four times the amount of your developers, for example.23:08 DS: It's almost like when I was a server, the front of the house, the waiters would walk out of the restaurant with 300 bucks in their pocket after a busy Saturday night, but the guys in the back were making minimum wage. And then so it kind of feels like that concept to me. And when I think about hiring for sales and I think about the sales positions, the people that are good at sales really are expecting this massive commission-type job. And if I was gonna hire, I would be like, "No, we don't do that. This is your salary, that you get a salary for this job." How do you feel about that? How do you plan to hire for sales?23:46 AW: I feel the opposite of it.23:47 DS: Really?23:48 AW: I look at for... Yeah, for what they're gonna create, I'm fully on board with rewarding them for what that is because they're only gonna make those fantastic numbers if they are selling fantastic numbers, right? So, just to throw random numbers based on salary and commission, if you're gonna make $250,000 annually that means you are possibly bringing in $2 million of new business into our business. And to me, that's a complete win-win because doing that cycle and especially if you're creating your own leads and finding those right and having high-level conversations with some of the things that I talked about at VP or C-levels and locking them into two-year deals, those are so extremely important to your business. And I totally get the difference between front of the house and back of the house. But at the end of the day, I know everyone has this dream of something so great that everybody just tells everybody to use it. The product is the sell. But I really think for the vast majority, that's not the case.25:05 AW: You can have the greatest thing, and if you don't sell it right to the right person, at the right time, with the right message you can have the greatest product that just goes unused, dies, whatever. I see it all the time. So I see sales especially in today's market, it is so competitive. For every one slack that you have that people love to use and it spreads like wild fire, and everybody talks about it and everybody using whatever else, you have millions of other software products that are good, if not great, but to get in front of somebody in such a competitive landscape with so many options and so many choices, if you're not selling it and marketing it, you're never gonna get there.25:49 DS: I hear you, and I get that. A really good salesperson can generate massive revenue for a business, and you would think, "Yeah, great, we should compensate them and the commission structure should allow them and motivate and encourage them to do that awesome job at sales." I totally get that, but I also think you can have a UX designer that fixes something in your software proactively, not prompt to do this, notices something in the software, reconceptualizes how this feature should work, then the developers build it, and they make it even better, they tweak it a bit more, and these changes that they make to your software system totally fix your retention problem. You are churning out almost as many as were coming in. You fixed this, now your retention is amazing. And over the course of two years, this one change generated millions of dollars for your company. And then those people that were responsible that were behind those innovations don't get the massive payout that a salesperson does. And that's where I find it... I just find it frustrating how sales is the one position in a company where that person gets the opportunity to make so much money.27:13 AW: Yeah, but I would say there then why don't you solve that if that happens in your company, why wouldn't you go to that UX designer and be like, "You know what, here's the bonus you're getting this year because this is how you impacted the bottom line." So either in a raise, now you're worth this much more to us 'cause these are the kind of things that happen. I totally think that can be addressed and can be dealt with. It might not be as easy because it's directly... Sales is directly generating dollars, right? Right in front of you where some of those other things now, in today's day and age, yes, you can track some of the impact, you can track how something has impacted, churn it, and done whatever else. But you can find ways to pass that compensation along to them. It's just in sales, it's always just been out there so long. And to me, the whole structure of things with commission was just created to separate those because there is such a massive difference between an okay salesperson and an amazing salesperson. The difference is incredible like nothing else.28:15 DS: Yeah, okay, so do you have a job posting out there? Are you trying to build up a sales team or not quite yet?28:23 AW: So the easiest way, we hired somebody at the end of 2018 and... The easiest way to put it. Here was my big takeaway from it, within about 90 days, it was like your local search service, it was a fail, we needed to move on from it. And the biggest thing that I saw missing is, I really realized that to sell our product, you have to be very more of an education-based seller than anything else because there's so many nooks and crannies to dig into and you really have to understand... You're teaching them about best practices in customer feedback and in customer experience and in online reviews and in SEO that if you don't care to dig into those or understand those, your pitch and your conversation with that customer will fall very, very flat.29:15 DS: Yeah.29:17 AW: And that's really what we saw with this person is, they couldn't take the uptake, they didn't have the passion and desire to really learn that to turn into an education-based seller where... That's my natural position, I will teach you everything I know and I have a good feeling that that's gonna build value, and you then wanting to use our product to reach those benefits and to unlock them. And I'd say that's true across multiple people in our organization. So we did that, ended up not working, nothing was really being generated, parted ways. I went down, had interviewed someone else and basically last minute, she took a job with another company and that really stunk 'cause I felt like she was a great fit, like I was meeting with her in person.30:12 AW: I'd worked into my travel schedule to meet her in person while I was out on the road and the last minute, 23rd hour, rug got pulled out and that stunk. Yeah, I need to get after that. I've continued to do some interviewing but I've been less about posting because we already did that, went through all that. That's very time-consuming. I've really been trying to almost recruit what I'm looking for. I know what the right fit, here's what I wanna see in experience and background, I wanna have some conversations and I wanna see what they're about and would they be the right next fit for us?30:49 DS: I really find the hiring process tedious. It's so hard to put a job posting out there. Look through 100 applications, narrow it down to 10, filter those out with your team, then meet with four people and try to make a decision. That stuff I find very frustrating and I do think a more proactive approach where you identify the person you want, and then you try to find that person and you just reach out to them whether they're currently employed or not, it's generally a way to find much more talented people.31:21 AW: Yep. And especially when you get into... I would like for this first hire in this to be someone who could also... Then I could turn it over to them after a few months to them to build the team, right? And...31:32 DS: Exactly, that's exactly who you want.31:34 AW: And that's what I'm really hoping for this. A lot of my first year and a half as being CEO has been getting the right person. I hired a CFO that I had worked with before, she's incredible.  It completely takes that part of the business off my plate and makes me better, and allows me to put my time into where I need to. I hired my former Creative Director to oversee all of our visual design and all of the elements, takes that off my plate and raises the quality of our product. I just recruited another person I had known for a long time who's now come in as our VP of Customer Success and he's helping us take our offering there to a whole new level.32:14 AW: So, totally, totally agree, agree with those. I've run into some brick walls where some of the salespeople I've worked with in the past, they forwarded their career and now they're sitting high up at Twilio, or another sales org where I can't afford them anymore. And that's a total bummer, it's like, "Oh, that person would be great but they have vesting with some other start-up that they're locked in there, they're doing well, they're crushing it there and I can't compete."32:44 DS: Sure, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so what's your approach? You don't have anyone in mind, you're just... Are you gonna just filter through LinkedIn profiles and try to find somebody?32:55 AW: I've pretty much on a weekly basis, either been reaching out to people, reaching out to some of my contacts asking, "Do you know anyone? Is there anyone you can put in front of me?" And all those kind of, they kicked up, starts up conversations and email exchanges, and things like that. I will have to... My head has been, like I said, literally in the clouds with all of the travel and everything else. But this will be the burning thing I have coming up here as we wrap up May. We have a big feature launching that is gonna be really important and awesome for us. And then finding this so I can get something going by Q3 with this is an absolute must, I'm gonna have to put more effort into it.33:45 DS: Well, I think it is an amazing thing when you can dial in sales, how it can totally put your business on a rocket ship. And so, I understand the desire and the need to get that up and running as soon as possible.34:00 AW: Yeah, 'cause we're seeing... When I first came on and I was... Spent at least 50% of my time in sales easily, if not more, we still had some gaps in our product for multi-locations and not the perfect fit. And we lost a few really big... That would have been great opportunities, because we were just too far apart. And then we closed that gap, then we landed a few customers that helped us close the gap even more. And now, we win... I feel like we're close to winning about 50% of the deals that we get to the point where we're exchanging paper with them and a statement of work. And so with that, I'm totally at the point we're like, "We just need to have more of these conversations."34:49 AW: And we're using marketing to help that with some by doing conferences and trying to be more visible with our brand and getting out there. But the other side is by doing outbound sales and by reaching out and sticking our nose into some things and making new connections and all those other pieces. So, it's definitely time because I have the utmost confidence that if we get those conversations going, we are gonna get them to the finish line based on what we see happening and just even the better things that we have coming up in the very short term with our product.35:23 DS: Sounds awesome, man. You guys are really in a good position right now. I'm excited to watch you grow over the next two, three, five years. It's gonna be amazing. Even one year really, it's gonna be awesome.35:34 AW: Well, I hope you're correct. As you know how it goes, Darren, one minute, I feel on top of the world, and the next minute I feel like the world is standing on top of me.35:42 DS: That's true.[chuckle]35:43 DS: I know. That's the reality of running a business.35:47 AW: It totally is. What are some next steps you feel like you need to take in yours? It sounds like you need to get into more of a consultative selling process and just getting more of a process down that you know you can work people through instead of just field responses that comes in?36:03 DS: Yeah, for me, I find it hard to... Like you mentioned earlier, 50% of sales or 50% of your time is put toward sales. And sales is a really time-consuming task. So right now, I am also in that position. So anything that's sort of multi-location enterprise-y, I talk to them, I put proposals together, I'm writing statements of work, I'm following up, and I just feel like I'm not the best person for that. So, I would like to, by the end of the year, have someone dedicated to managing sales. My wife is actually a very fantastic salesperson, award-winning sales rep in her previous job. And so I'd like to get her more involved in sales with the company and streamlining our inbound.36:49 DS: I don't think we're ready for outbound yet. Once we have our full platform launched, I think then we'll maybe get into some outbound and we'll be in a similar position to you where we have a very competitive product and we can be winning all of them. And then at that point, outbound makes more sense. But right now, we're still just trying to dial in our inbound. And I personally dropped the ball a few times here and there where I didn't get back to that person soon enough or whatever, and it's just hard for me to manage it all. So I would like to get a person in place to handle all the inbound within 2019.37:24 AW: Yup. No, I think you'll see some big gains when you do that just by building a little bit of process and some redundancies and just looking at how can we message and communicate with these interested parties as much as possible, as quickly as possible, when their interest is very high and then get into the weeds and the details after that. But let's build some momentum with them understanding big picture, how we can really help and what we have to offer, what are our benefits, and then we can pair down. 'Cause then those last questions are just kind of like, "Okay, I'm excited, whatever else. Here's the I to dot and the T to cross, and then we're gonna start up with you." Instead of everything hinging upon how you answer those questions.38:11 DS: Right, right. Yeah, so anyways, we're still working on that. And I think really understanding the customer that comes in is a big part of it and asking the right questions to let them know that we've taken the time to understand their needs and then we're offering the solution that is the best fit to their needs, that's when I find I really close the best. So, working on that process and making sure that that's communicated down to our support team is probably top of our sales priority right now.38:40 AW: Yup. No, that's such a good thing to point out. It really is all about asking the right questions in the sales process more than any great thing you're gonna say, if you're not connecting with what they really feel their need is or what they're looking for or anything else, you often miss the mark with that. I think that's just a fantastic point for people to understand is know the three to five questions that you really need to get answered to be able to tailor your sales pitch and your messaging to that customer, to that prospect.39:15 DS: Totally. And I do have a bit of a template now that I use. One of the metrics I always look at after I have a sales call is, we use Uber conference for all of our sales calls, and at the end I get this email that shows you how much time you spent talking versus the other person spent talking. And I always want that weighted much further to them. The worst thing that can ever happen is that... From a person trying to buy something, when I get on a sales call with somebody, and they're like, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" to the point where I tune out and they're talking about all about how awesome they are, and all their awesome products, and what this can do for them. That, I think, is a really terrible, wrong approach for an initial sales call. I want 70% of the talking to be done by the prospect, where they're explaining it to me, I'm listening, I'm taking it in. And then I have the opportunity to reflect back to them what their struggles are, what their frustrations are, and how our solution will meet those specific needs. But you've got to spend the time to really listen to them before you can present that.40:22 AW: Right. You're pointing out some things I need to work on. I don't think I would wanna see my timing as far as how much I talked and how we do our demos. I need to give the prospect more of a voice, so I'm taking that down as a to do.40:39 DS: It's not always it's supposed to be you showing the product so it's understandable that you would have more talking time on that one.40:45 AW: Yeah, I don't know, I feel like I need to leave more openings for them to ask questions and go further.40:50 DS: Possibly, yeah. There's probably an opportunity there to really... Probing questions, so you could look at your demo process and say, "What are some opportunities for probing questions that would help direct the demo?" That could be an opportunity there.41:04 AW: You're absolutely correct. One thing that I found really helpful, and I created this when we were going through... Sometimes you get benefits out of struggles, and when I was struggling with this outbound sales hire, I kinda put together like, here's our five phases of selling our product. And in each phase, here's what you need to ask and find out, here's a deliverable that you need to give them after that step, and here's what the expectation should be for the next step with it. That has really served as a great piece, where now I'm like, "Alright, this is awesome. We have a great playbook for interacting that obviously when somebody comes in, they'll kinda make it their own." But we really have the groundwork set with what that sales conversation should look like. In any failure, there's great things that come out of it. That was definitely a very beneficial thing because it really allowed me to granularly focus on the sales process and what we needed to do to achieve success, because we weren't getting it.42:05 DS: Cool. That's exactly what we're trying to do right now. I would love to see your playbook, if you don't mind sharing it.42:10 AW: Yeah. No, I'll send it. It's a one-sheeter. I'll send it over to you.42:13 DS: Nice, thanks.42:15 AW: Alright. Well, I think that puts a wrap on for this session, talking sales. We could probably go down about two or three other paths. I'm guessing this will probably re-emerge as a topic for us as we continue to go on and also provide some updates with where things are. Hopefully later in the year we can do a session where I talk about how to build a great outbound sales team, because I have one then. [chuckle]42:40 DS: Right. You can tell everybody how to do it.42:42 AW: Yeah, and you can do how to build a great inside sales process, 'cause you'll have done it by then.42:48 DS: I'll basically just read... I'll start from the top of your playbook and read it and that will be my contribution of the podcast.42:55 AW: Perfect. One last question before we wrap up. Have you dumped any beverages on your computer in the last couple of weeks?43:03 DS: No, not yet. [chuckle] I basically keep my laptop in a Ziploc bag at all times now.[chuckle]43:11 AW: It's like in an incubator you'd see in a NICU, where you have to reach through with gloves to type on the computer.[chuckle]43:18 DS: Exactly. It's the only way I can have any kind of peace while I work on my laptop. I don't allow drinks anywhere near it, so I have to get away.43:28 AW: I can only imagine you're a little bit scarred from that.43:30 DS: Totally.43:32 AW: Awesome. Alright, well, thanks Darren, another fantastic episode. Thanks everyone for listening. Hopefully you are subscribing to us on whatever your favorite podcast player of choice is. Feel free to leave us a review out in iTunes. Thanks for those that have left us a rating, but we'd love to see that. And as always, hit up Darren or I on Twitter if you have a question or a topic you'd like us to cover on a future episode. We'd be happy to do so.44:00 DS: Yep, thanks Aaron. It was a great chat as always. And thanks to all the listeners and I guess we'll talk to you next time.44:08 AW: Alright, talk to you next time. See ya everybody.44:17 DS: Okay, bye.[music]

Aaron and Darren dive into the design process for new features and product updates.  Whitespark and GatherUp take different approaches to this process and we look at each process to see what works best and why for each team. Helpful links from the episode: MozCon - GatherUp is a sponsor! Brighton SEO conference Invision GatherUp March webinar FULL SHOW NOTES[intro music]00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode Five, The Design Process.00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:43 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.00:47 AW: And we are super excited to talk this week 'cause it's been a few weeks since we've connected, but we have a common theme. I just got back from a week in London, and you're headed over to England in a handful of days, so we like...01:05 DS: Yep.01:05 AW: We almost could have met and recorded a podcast live from London.01:09 DS: We're gonna do that eventually. For sure we're gonna be at the same place. Maybe when we're at MozCon we should definitely plan a podcast when we're there together, that'd be awesome.01:17 AW: Genius. And should we have a live crowd and a T-shirt cannon, and that kinda stuff?01:22 DS: Yes, definitely. And an applause sign, so when we say something funny, someone flashes the applause button.01:29 AW: There you go. It's you and I, and then hopefully three people and then our T-shirt cannons.01:35 DS: Exactly. [chuckle] And some guys showed up to get free scones or something.[laughter]01:41 AW: Totally. Yeah. If we give enough good free stuff, they'll show up.01:44 DS: Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I'm going to London in a couple of weeks here. I gotta go to London to do a presentation at BrightonSEO, and I'm also doing a training session. It sounds like you've got some training stuff coming up, too. Tell me about your trip though. How was London, what was the best thing?02:00 AW: Oh, the best thing, regardless of location, it was the first trip, my wife and I, where we've had seven days together since our first child, which she turns 15 next week.02:11 DS: Wow.02:12 AW: Yeah. Plenty of three, maybe even a four-day getaway, but having a full week... At some point midway, it was just like, "Wow, we've gotten so much time together." We maybe ran out of things to even talk about, and then we're like, "Okay, cool, silence is even cool," and then we just found other things to talk about. It was so great.02:36 S2: Oh, that's nice.02:36 AW: Yeah. We divided our trip halfway between the countryside of England, so we went out to an area called the Cotswolds, about an hour, hour-and-a-half outside of the London area, and super small little villages, one lane roads to get in between, driving out there was nuts. Man, there were so many times where I thought for sure that one side of the car was gonna be sheared off by the other car.03:03 DS: Right. Do you ever have to stop and one car has to reverse until the road gets wide enough for someone to pass?03:09 AW: Yeah, we totally had some of that going on. And just so many times where the locals they're still doing 40, 50 miles an hour on a one-lane road and I'm like over to the side, and then there's stone walls next to every road. There's no shoulder. It was just crazy. I definitely, out loud, shared how I felt a few different times, and I couldn't believe we never even touched mirrors out of all of it. It was crazy.03:37 DS: It's funny, I had that same experience in Italy for sure. Driving down these tiny little roads between buildings, and I'm like, "How are we both gonna fit through there?" But then you manage to do it. And the locals are like, "What's wrong with you? Just drive your car, man."03:52 AW: The locals stuck behind me hated me, because I was nowhere... When they would post the speed limit, I'm like, "How can somebody go that fast? I can't go 40 here, that's not happening."04:05 DS: Totally. Yeah.04:05 AW: Yeah, it was great. And then just the beauty and the calmness and the serenity of out there was awesome. I really, really loved that part. Then we went into London for four days, and that just such mixture of... We went to the theater, just so much sightseeing, so much history. It's like everywhere you turn is something that you would never see in the States. And that's the cool part about it to me, is just photographic visuals of little alleys and buildings, and little cafes and pubs, and things like that, where it's just like, "Oh, my... " You're in this huge area, but every 10 feet is something to look at.04:45 DS: Yeah. I saw that on Facebook, your photos were beautiful.04:48 AW: Yeah. Not even close to all the ones captured, those are just some of them. Yeah, it was really, really great. And, yeah, I'll give you a few tips. There's just so much to explore there, I would love to go back. It was my first time, and I'd be very excited to go back.05:07 DS: Yeah. Jill and I are in a similar situation. We've never taken a long trip like that away from our daughter. She usually comes with us if we're going somewhere for a while. But just like two nights most... I think two nights is the most we've ever done actually, we've never done more than that. She's eight now, we've got another seven years, I guess, before we can have the seven-day vacation.[laughter]05:29 AW: Well, hopefully you get it in sooner than I did, 'cause... Oh, man, it was really great, it was awesome for both of us. You're headed over to London to do a conference, right?05:42 DS: Yeah. I'm speaking at Brighton and also doing a training thing, so I've been very busy trying to... I'm doing a really interesting case study, where I take a business from nowhere, like the brand new, zero online presence business, and I've been trying to see how wide I can get them to rank in the local results, so tracking their location across multiple zip codes, and doing everything I can, like all the regular local search stuff, and being able to measure the impact at every step, which has been really great. So, it's like, "Okay, they got three new reviews. Wow, look at what happened to the rankings." Just those three reviews gave them a massive ranking boost. And so, because it's so dialed in and they had nothing going on before, it's this clean, clear case study of what happens at each phase and how that impacts local search. It's been really great, I'm excited about that. But it's been taking me too long and I've been putting too much time into it and not enough time into preparing for the local search training I'm doing on one of the days, so I have to spend about seven hours giving a full day training course, so I'm gonna be really slammed all next week trying to get all that stuff done.06:47 AW: Yeah, so much work all the time to get ready for that stuff. Your study sounds awesome. I'm gonna be excited. Hopefully, you'll share that deck with me when you're done with it.07:00 DS: Yeah. Basically, I've got four months into it for Brighton, and so I'll have that much data, but I'm also going to show it at MozCon, so I'll have another two, three months of data to present and more things, as we get more links and as we do more things, how that impacts local search. Ideally we'll have them ranking round the whole country and local search by the end of it.07:25 AW: Nice. I like that. I'll be able to see it in person then at MozCon. And speaking of MozCon, I'm excited, GatherUp is gonna be one of the sponsors for MozCon.07:36 DS: That's awesome, yeah. We've done it a few years and it's been really great. You've done it before though. You were just the local?07:43 AW: Yeah, just only the local SEO event, haven't sponsored the regular one. But it's such a fit for our audience, 'cause our two biggest audiences are multi-location and brands, and then agencies. And that's the entire thousand plus people is, for the most part, either an agency person or someone in-house at a larger brand.08:05 DS: I think it's gonna be huge for you guys, it's gonna be really, really good. You're gonna have a ton of great conversations and, yeah, it's definitely your audience. I thought Moz had some kind of review product in Moz local. No?08:18 AW: They have a review monitoring for a couple of sites, and that's really about it. Comes from your GMB integration, stuff like that, but nothing for acquisition or review widgets or all of the other wonderful things we do.08:33 DS: Cool, cool. I'll try to see if I can squeeze a mention of GatherUp into my slide deck for you.08:39 AW: There you go. Every time you do it, it buys you one beer.08:42 DS: One beer? Wow. [laughter] It's great. I'm gonna get a six-pack eventually.08:47 AW: Yeah. I gotta keep my budget low after spending on conferences.[chuckle]08:53 DS: Totally. Having a booth at MozCon is about a billion times better than a booth at any other conference, because they only let eight businesses in, and they're right... It's like, everyone that's coming into the main conference center to watch the talks, they walk right through the booths every time. And then after the conference gets out and they open the doors for a snack time, the snacks are right there where you're hanging out. And so it's like everyone comes right to you. It's not like you have this expo hall, which is often separate from the conference, so you get massive exposure. It's the best place I've ever seen for a conference booth. I think it's gonna be great for you.09:35 AW: That's exactly what I shared with our team, because none of... I don't think anyone else from our team has ever been to just the regular MozCon. I told them that, the placement and the numbers. You're not one of 100 or 500 booths. You're not tucked in a corner, you're not hoping people find their way to you. You're right in the flow and there's just a handful, and you're so visible and so accessible. I'm really hoping it's gonna be a great thing for us, I'm definitely excited about it.10:06 DS: It's gonna be good. How much time do we have here? I did wanna ask you, what is your conference process? But we're into 10 minutes, let's get into the meat of this podcast.10:15 AW: There you go. Another time, we'll go into it. Maybe after MozCon, then we can talk about how I did IFA a couple of weeks ago and I've had a couple of really good leads. I'm hopefully closing a deal or two from that coming up, which totally takes care of what that investment was, and then we'll see how Moscone goes and then, yeah, let's do that for a subject down the line. We might even be... We'll be in double digits by then. It'll be...10:40 DS: What do you mean?10:41 AW: Episode 10 or 12. Right?[chuckle]10:43 DS: Oh, yeah. Totally. Exactly. We could actually talk about that at MozCon. That might be a good topic for when we're at MozCon.10:50 AW: Boom. Talk about conferences, right?10:51 DS: Yeah, totally.10:53 AW: All right. With that, just as you alluded to, and this week you brought up the main topic of looking at the design process. You have a number of things from when we started chatting before we hit record and notes put together, but, yeah, I'd love to see you break this apart and talk about some of your challenges and share some of the things that we're doing and see where we end up with all this design stuff, because it sure does matter.11:26 DS: It does matter. This has come up for us recently because we just finished our revisions on the brand new local citation finer that we're building. We tore it down, started from scratch, rebuilt the whole thing, and as a result, we have a whole new interface. The way that our process works is... The first phase of this local citation was what we called feature parity. We're building in a brand new development stack and bringing it up to modern standards, and as we're doing that, we're re-envisioning some of the UI, some of the layout, some of the design, and just improving things as we go. We got it as far as we could, so now we have a feature parity version of a local citation finder. It looks a million times better, it has a lot of new functionality, we took it quite a bit beyond feature parity. And it looks great.12:25 DS: It looks a lot better than the existing one, but I don't wanna stop there. And so what we've done now is, I've given it to our designer at this freelance company we use out of Croatia, Creativa Studios. These guys are awesome. And so they're gonna take a pass through it where they just go through each screen and Photoshop it up, so they put their spin on it. And then they'll come back to us and we put a fresh face on it, and then we launch the thing. And so that's been our process for this software, and it really got me thinking about design because I feel like that's pretty ass backwards.12:56 DS: I think a lot of businesses, SaaS businesses, go the other direction. They start with the designs, they start with the wireframes, and they conceptualize everything. And they do a lot of painstaking planning, then based off of the plans and the wireframes, the designs, they start building the software. And I can see the merit to that, but I have to tell you, every time we've tried to do it that way, what ends up happening is, by the end of it, we have a completely different product than the designs. And it works, but a lot of that initial time spent upfront is wasted because, once you start building the software and using it and trying it and tweaking it, you realize a lot of those original concepts don't work or you want it to be slightly different. And so that's why I feel like our organic approach... It works for us anyway. So, we just build first and design after. We put a better face on it after. 'Cause it's the functionality and the user interface, and my developers are decent enough at design to make it look fine. And then we can make it look really good after the fact.13:58 DS: What do you guys do over at GatherUp? How do you build a new feature, for example? Do you completely design it first, and then build it out, or do you kinda build it and then say, "How do we make it look better?"14:10 AW: There's definitely been an area of evolution for us in the last three-and-a-half, nearly four years since I came on, just 'cause I'm a much more process-driven person, plus, as the company has grown and things like that, where we start now is any new feature basically starts in a feature spec just in a Google Doc.14:39 DS: Yeah, that's how we do it, too.14:39 AW: So, you're writing down, "Here's the business case, here's why we wanna do it," and then you just start writing down the little things, the dependencies, "In this situation, it was, do this, here's what to keep in mind." And we try to get that through a first pass as far as possible. After that, what it used to be, and I don't know if I should talk about where we came from or where we've arrived at first, but where we came from is... Once upon a time, we would freelance it out. We wouldn't even really create a design spec, we'd create a wireframe. We'd be conversationally all be talking about it, and we'd either create something where we could all mark it up or create examples off of existing screens, or whatever that might look like, and then we would take it to a designer and ask them to design it. Or we would even say, "All right, let's just re-use some of the elements we have from this screen and that screen," and we'd have our devs build it without a designer. And let's just say all of those failed miserably in many different ways.15:46 DS: So, what's your process now?15:48 AW: Now, it goes to a feature spec. One big change that we did is, we said, "All right, we're gonna hire a designer." 'Cause, for us, it was hitting upon a couple of different things. One, we badly needed a V2 of our interface. Our interface felt dated, there is some not-so-great decisions. Our style sheets were starting to blow apart because there was just no consistency. We had a number of things. And so I just looked and I was just like, "All right, I'm a very visual person, and visual interface and all that really matters to me." I basically went and tapped someone who was my creative director at my previous agencies and recruited him, and just said, "Here is an opportunity for you. Everything needs to be redone, we have a re-brand coming up as well." And we basically brought him on as our chief experience officer. He's the one responsible for how people touch the product and interact with it, all of these different kinds of aspects to it.16:47 AW: So, we go from feature spec to now he's usually creating what we would call a low-fidelity wireframe, and we're using that and InVision to make it clickable, so you can click and move around and start to get, like, "All right, here's how we move through three or four things," to get rid of just static design, where it's like, "Yeah, it looks great." And then, just as you're alluding to, once you click or do something, it starts to fall apart. So, we drive home that idea in InVision first. Once he gets to that, then he's like, "All right, we've solved most of those things, we understand it," and then we bring it into design.17:22 AW: The other thing we have going for us is we've also created a library now of this is what this is and how it's used. So, getting a lot more down with what the size things are, how tables are presented, buttons, spacing, whatever that might be. It's not very Wild West at all, 99% of anything we do, that element has already been created somewhere. He takes it through design, and once we hit a point for the back and forth and that's good, then we take it to our front-end devs. Front-end devs build it and stand it up, and we're able to... They're gonna wire in as much as they can, just without data into the back end of the product. And once we approve that, then it's ready to... Basically that's when we insert it into a sprint with our engineering team. Engineering team then takes it through our feature of internal testing, beta, public beta, and then release.18:17 DS: Does it feel like there's any waste in that process? In terms of... I don't know, for me, it sounds like it takes a long time to go from that Word Document, where you describe the feature, to actually having this in production, 'cause you've got many different steps you have to follow.18:37 AW: Yeah. You can look at it that way. For me, I view it as this all serves as different points for people to touch it, feel it, interact with it, socialize it, get people used to it. It's amazing all the things that happen, and just as you alluded to, there is nothing like when you actually really use it. We probably learn the most about our product when we do our stage of what's called a private beta, when we flag it in our product, you could turn it on, and we can start using it at test production accounts we have. That's where we really learn the most. But the good thing is, by having the same person doing it, who's using the product, going through all these design processes, he sees some of those things before it happens. And even us as a team, we bring up a lot more things. Our customer success team is fabulous at... They right away look at it and they think of something that they get asked all the time, and they're like, "All right, well, what about this? 'Cause this is what's gonna be asked about there."19:39 DS: Right, yeah.19:39 AW: We do get those iterations within there, and there is stuff that you could look at, like, "Wow, that seems excessive." But for us, it's really helped tied off a lot of details 'cause for a long time, we were pretty much like build, build as fast as you can, and throw it out there. And then you'd be like, "Oh, here's all the stuff that we need to go back and fix," or, "It could be better," or, "We didn't even think about that," and things like that. So, we feel like we've arrived at a place that allows us to hit the quality that we want.20:06 DS: Yeah. Our approach is, we build it first and then we tweak it. I'll look at it and I'm like, "Okay, we wanna change this, change that." And then the dev team could turn around those changes in... Sometimes while I'm on the call with them, they're like, "Okay, they'll change it in the code," deploy, I'd be like, "Okay, refresh." So, I'm on the call, we're changing, we're updating it regularly. And then once I feel satisfied with it, I throw it over to Jessie and Nick, have them take a look, throw it over to Brianna or our customer service team, have her take a look at it. And then we get it pretty much, like, "Yeah, the functionality of this is great." Then we just put some lipstick on it. We get a designer to make it just feel and look a little bit more polished, and then I feel like it goes out the door. And to me, it feels like some pretty rapid development, it's a great way of getting to a launch-ready product pretty quickly. It works pretty well for us.21:05 AW: Yeah. And I think that's an important part. At the end of the day, lots of ways to achieve something. It does come down to whatever works best for you in getting those things out and once... I feel like we're pretty agile. We talked about, in an earlier episode, where we've gone to a feature a month that is gonna get delivered, and then we have multiple others that fall underneath it. We kick out a lot of updates, and we push a lot of really, really, in our world, what are big features, and a lot to tackle on a consistent basis. And to me, there's even more we can explore. Our chief experience officer has been with us for a year now, but I still think he's halfway there to where we really need him and want him to be, because he just needs to continue to use the product more and understand it more.21:57 AW: And really it's unlocking things. There's always a straight line way to do something, and that's the one thing I worry about with your process, is you come into it with this bias of, "Well, here's how you do it." But you didn't take any time to explore, what are the other ways to do it, or how would this work in other environments, are there steps I can cut out, or what's intuitive for the user, things like that, that what we've found in our process in doing it and creating some of these motions in just like a clickable wireframe, is you get people using it and talking about it really early that sometimes, "Oh, well, we can reduce clicks and do it this way, or if we add clicks, it takes all this other stuff off the table and makes it easier." I think there's some really interesting dialogue when you do that, so I really look at it as, as fast as we can get it to something that can be socialized. And you're, in essence, doing it that same way, too, you're just doing it in a full build, to some extent.22:55 DS: Yeah, one of the failures of our process... Well, I'm gonna even call it my process. My developers might say that the way I do it sucks. It's frustrating for them, because one of the things that happens is I get this idea, I want this feature, and so I scope it out, and then they start building it. And then we have to ditch it because we realize, "You know what, that's not gonna work the way we originally planned." And so they've already spent the time to program it, but we ditch it, and we come up with a new angle. Whereas with your approach, you avoid that, because you think about it in the design and wireframing phase before all the time has been put into actually programming. I can see the benefit there, for sure.23:39 AW: Yeah. In any process, fail early and fast, if you're gonna fail with those things, so that you can re-calibrate or restart from what you learned or where you went wrong, and then try to go from there as fast as possible.23:55 DS: Yeah. There's gotta be some good guides out there, blog posts on processes for software development, that I just don't feel like I spend enough time reading and investing in. Looking at all those different things and thinking about what do we wanna incorporate in our process and how do we wanna do our next project or feature release. Right?24:13 AW: Yep. And sometimes you play around with it. We're definitely constantly adding things or just tweaking some little things. We have our main steps and framework down, but inside of that, we're trying a lot more things. We realize in a lot of things, "Okay, we need to socialize this, or we need to have more conversations or even a presentation of it with our engineering team," because we give it to them all wrapped up, but they might not always understand the business case or the use case or some of the things like that. And for a while, we'd do a great job of creating the feature spec, but then all the changes that we would make while we were designing and building, we would never update the feature spec. So, it was like, it got it started, but we really realized, "Oh, well, this thing, it should be the narrative of the feature. And as we make these new options or choices, we need to go back and update that." So, the final thing you do, that still serves even when you're at step 28 to finish it up, that feature spec is still informing you or something you can cross-check against to make sure you did it right.25:22 DS: That makes sense, yeah.25:23 AW: Especially when you pass it off to so many hands, because ours is going through half a dozen hands in the process.25:31 DS: Yep. Our process is currently... It works, but I think one of the big ones that really stands out in my mind is the rebuild of our rank tracker. That took us two, three years, and it's because we kept going back to the drawing board on it. We'd build something and then we'd be like, "Yeah, that doesn't work." And then we would build something else and then we'd build something else, whereas I think a lot of that anguish could have been saved if we had more of a formal design process. And sometimes it works great. If we think about our new tool that we just launched, that review checker, that was mostly just one guy, Dimitri, thinking about it, putting it together, getting feedback, we tweak the system based on the feedback and eventually we've got something out the door. And it worked pretty well there. And I think a formal process for that small tool would have really slowed everything down.26:27 DS: So, we were able to get something out the door quickly with a part-time developer by just letting him roll with it. And then he would show us what he's got and we'd be like, "Okay, well let's make this look a little bit better. Let's change the icons here, let's change the colors, let's move this and put it somewhere else." But the functionality never really changed. All that changed was the placement and layout and design, and that kind of stuff.26:51 AW: Yeah. For the rank tracker, most of the things you kept coming back to, were they visual displays? Was it how you were displaying things more so than functionality?27:01 DS: I think it was a combination of both. It wasn't really the design that was the problem, it was the overall architectural planning, I think, was the problem. And it's just a really big project, and there's two main components to it. There's the crawling architecture, that's a big complicated system that runs on the back end that does all the crawling, and then we have the front end interface that pulls in all the data. I think it was actually... Most of the problem wasn't visual, it was architectural. And so we went back to the drawing board a couple of times on that, based off of... Even technologies that we were using were problematic. So, we started with our database structure being in this one thing called Couchbase, and it worked great until we reached a certain capacity, and then it all started falling apart.27:48 DS: Having to shift gears and rebuild something else, and then once you rebuild that, you've got to change something else, with the way that we're doing other things, that was part of the big problem. The system works quite beautifully now. One of our developers, Troy, has done a really good job with the crawling platform and the servers that we use for it, and the whole architecture of that is running really well now. So, glad to have that behind us, which allows us to rapidly develop all these other things right now.28:19 AW: Yeah. Just because at the time now, I know a majority of your products are siloed from each other, do you have a consistent design theme and library across all of those? Is that constantly evolving? Do you introduce... When you introduced the review tool, did you introduce a new library for that? What does that look like for you guys?28:39 DS: Yeah. No, we don't, which is bad. This is part of our problem. We do have this concept that we're building, it's called the platform. And we're building our new account system, which does all of our processing, and where customers can log in and see what subscriptions they have, their billing information. That's the base of it, and that's going to evolve into what will be an integrated platform. And so that was designed in advance. We have all the Photoshop files, all the InVision stuff for that platform concept. We wire-framed it all out. And now this software... I told you we just rebuilt the local citation finder. The design of that is being built by the same guys that designed the platform, using the same concepts. And so it will have a uniform design to our new platform. And then the rank tracker, I'm gonna ask the designers to take a pass through that as well to make it also uniform. And then the Holy Grail will happen some point in 2019, where everything is integrated into one platform.29:40 AW: Yeah. That'll be big, but I think you'll find, just as we did when we started through the redesign of our application interface, that just working from a set library, developing consistency and predictable elements, that is such... I think that's such an important pillar in good design. Your team is not guessing, but also the user isn't seeing all those inconsistencies. Right?30:07 DS: Absolutely. It's gonna be great. They know that our buttons are always on this spot and they always look like this. It's like that is what a select dropdown looks like in this application.30:17 AW: Yeah. Those visual cues, that visual way finding just makes it so much easier. And we still have things... I think we still have four to five different pop-up designs in our product where it's trying to find, "All right, when can we sweep through and get those all on one?" That kind of stuff.30:37 DS: That one little modal that's still that old design.30:40 AW: Yeah. That kind of stuff just drives me nuts right now. I just had that happen today where I hit something and got into something where it literally, I feel like it was one of the first things ever designed in our product and it's still in there somehow. It's like, "Oh, remind me to never click on that in a demo again." It's terrible. [laughter] It's easier for me to avoid it than to figure out how are we gonna get that one thing changed to base on other pieces that are there?31:11 DS: Yeah. I have a tendency to just derail my development team when that stuff comes up. As anything that bugs me, I'm just like, I'll just ping them on Slack and be like, "Would you be able to fix this this afternoon?" They're just like, "Drop what you're doing, just take a break. I'm sure you're getting tired of it, just fix this." 'Cause anything that bugs me too much, I just wanna get it done immediately.31:31 AW: See, I have that power in our feature build process, beta process, whatever else, but our product managers now have got to the point where they're like, "Yeah, we'll get that in the next sprint, but... "31:45 DS: Yeah. That's what we need at Whitespark, but right now I'm just like the ultimate dictator. It would be good to have somebody to be like, "No, not doing that. You can't derail our team 'cause we're working towards a sprint and we need to get it finished."32:01 AW: Yeah. I both love and hate it. It's like, "No, I want this done ASAP." But on the other side, I'm like, "Man, I love that we have enough process and communication and things that don't get someone upset at me just because here's Aaron banging his fist that he wants this done." It's a good thing even though in the moment sometimes I wanna throw a tantrum about it.32:23 DS: Yep, for sure.32:25 AW: So, what do you think, based on this, do you feel like there's something that you know you wanna try different, or where are you at?32:33 DS: If I think about what's on our software development roadmap, it's tough to say because... Actually, a little bit, yes, and so I think what we'll do... 'Cause we're finishing phase one of this local citation finder rebuild, which was done development first. I think phase two, we're gonna have a nice fresh design, we're gonna have all the functionality that we need for future parity, so a brand new system. Before we start development of the new features that I want, we'll actually wire frame them and then turn the wireframes into proper full designs, 'cause we'll have all of the materials to be able to do that. And so I think we're gonna get to that point that you're at now, where you can go through those phases for a feature, 'cause everything that we're building now, they're just new features on the existing well designed system. So, we're going to definitely approach it as from a design first perspective for phase two of that local citation finder. And I think that will work better, because then we can have all those discussions in advance before anyone starts writing code, and I think that's where the time savings will be.33:38 AW: Well, and it's figuring out what's most important to you. There's pillars inside this of... For me, it was quality and consistency were the two biggest pillars. You're pointing another one out in being efficiency. I think when anybody looks to design their plan around design, however you're gonna map that out, is you have to figure out... I would start with, what are our pillars, what is most important to us. Obviously another one is user experience and usability to it. So, what are the three, four or five things you're gonna answer to? And as you build a process or figure out, who do we need internally on the team as compared to externally, or the talent pool or skill set, how do you answer to those and does it meet those core pillars that you know you need it to meet when you design it? And that's where I think that can be different for everyone else, based on how they view things or what's important to them.34:37 DS: Right. Do you guys ever run your designs across your customers, you run it by the customers and say, "Hey, this is this new feature, does this look like what you have in mind?"34:48 AW: Yeah, we definitely socialize... Especially with bigger things, we'll take it to people and see how they feel about it. Even in the case with you guys, when we do stuff for agency resellers, we're gonna say, "All right, how does Whitespark feel about it? And let's socialize this, part of the pieces, or let's explain it and see if they get it." And then if they do get it, then there's a lot of questions, like, "Oh, well, can it also do this? Can it do this?" That can be helpful as well. We've even gotten into that with our monthly webinars. Our monthly webinar almost always consists of, "Hey, here's the latest thing that we just rolled out, we wanna make sure you fully understand it. Here's what's right around the corner, possibly going into beta, if you wanna join, here's how to," and get them excited about that.35:34 AW: And then the last is we almost always try to have something that is a sneak peek. So, we did that today with a... I just did our March webinar today, and we gave a sneak peek to a report that you can start to get people excited, and you give them something to look forward to, you get them something to get used to, that when you roll it out into the product, they're ready and waiting to utilize 'cause you've already talked about it and explained it, and they have the visual cue on it. And they're wanting it and looking for it, instead of it just being a surprise, which surprises can be good, too, but I find when we can seed it as we go along, it works out much better.36:11 DS: I really wanna get into that. I feel like one of the things that we fail at at Whitespark is, we'll launch a brand new feature and we don't even tell anybody. It's like, yeah, we've got this awesome new feature and we didn't promote it, we did not do a webinar on it, we did not even tweet about it. Just like, yeah, it's this nice little new feature, whereas it's an opportunity to promote the value of this new feature and we often don't do that. We're just so focused on continuously building and adding new features and improving the software that we don't do a great job of promoting it. And I think what you just described, or that process where you get people involved at the early stages, you get their feedback, you socialize them, and you even get them into the beta already, all that stuff is so valuable and it's definitely something I'd like to incorporate at Whitespark.37:03 AW: Now, it gets the hype going, it gets them excited about it. For some people, it's a feature or something they've been asking for, so it makes them feel like they're being heard and listened to. And, yeah, there's definitely a lot of wins on it that go a long way. And we're trying to find more and more ways how do we do that? Like our last feature, text back, we used a little explainer video just about the feature itself, and put that out there. So, it's like how different mediums can we use, so we're really trying to expand, even... I think we do quite a bit, but we wanna take it even further. 'Cause at the end of the day it is about marketing and storytelling and communication and getting those things across, and we wanna do as much as we can in them.37:47 DS: Do you have a specific person at GatherUp that's responsible for prepping the webinars and marketing and writing up the emails, or do you do all that yourself?37:58 AW: Yeah. I do way too much of it myself. One step we did take, we hired what we just call a product and content marketer last fall. And she's been great, she's taken a lot off my plate, from writing user guides and beta instructions and blog posts, and things like that. She still hasn't taken it all off, I still do all the emails, I still do all the webinars, and I don't know if that will ever... I wouldn't see the webinars being in there, but it's reduced 50% of my content output. Where I was, other than Mike Blumenthal helping out on our blog a lot, it was all me, and it was way too much. That has been a really big help, especially with all kinds of littler things, and I think we still have a long way to go. She's only six months in, still learning product, still learning all these things, and it's getting better and we're figuring out some of our processes and ways to excel there. But in my opinion, too much of it still relies on me to execute. I can be a great... If you wanna ask me about stuff, if you want me to spout off about it or anything else, I would love to be the motivation or the soapbox source, but to have someone else write and execute on it, that would be a dream come true for me.39:17 DS: Yeah. I feel pretty lucky to have Jessie. Jessie's been with the company for nine years, she knows everything, she's also an awesome SEO, she knows the local search space really well. She does all of our newsletter, when we launch new features, she writes them up, she promotes them, she manages our social media. We're really lucky to have her to be able to handle all that. She can talk about all of our products, all of our services, and she can talk about local search as well as anybody. She's really great to have in that role, it takes a lot off of me. I don't have to worry about any of that stuff.39:51 AW: Yeah. I like your Jessie. And if we weren't such good friends, I would steal your Jessie.39:57 DS: Yeah.[laughter]40:00 AW: Everybody needs a Jessie.40:01 DS: Yeah, she's pretty great. And when we go to conferences, too, she's the one that's there and she'll organize all the stuff and she'll talk to the customers. Yeah, she's great that way.40:10 AW: Nice.40:10 DS: Yeah.40:11 AW: All right. Well, I think that puts a wrap on this episode. And in talking design, my advice to people today, and maybe, Darren, you have a couple of things you wanna share, but mine is define what your core pillars are that you want to anchor to and build a processor on that. I'm of the ilk that design individuals are so important, do not undersell what that takes, and if that means... In our case, where we hired someone with great expertise and allowed them to own it, that was a big change for us and it allowed us to work that process even better, so I think the design process is definitely an important one and not something to just cobble together, for sure, for someone building or enhancing a product in today's SaaS market.41:00 DS: Yeah, I'd agree with all that advice. I would say that it is possible to build things with a more agile design second approach, and I think that our review tracker was a good example. If you have a developer that can design stuff well, then you don't necessarily need to put all of that effort in upfront, depending on what you're building, if it's a small little thing. If it's a big complicated thing, I do think there's a lot of value in putting more effort into the planning and design in advance, and I've learnt lessons there. And so take Aaron's advice on that one, and that's advice that we're gonna start taking a little bit more here, too, where we do the planning in advance, 'cause I think that there's generally good value in that and you avoid pitfalls in the future.41:43 AW: Yeah. Well said.41:45 DS: All right.41:45 AW: Well, Darren, when we talk next, we'll be able to get your download of some time in England, in London, and good luck at the Brighton conference. Knock 'em dead, and find some time to enjoy yourself, and have a few pints, and eat some good food as well.42:02 DS: Thank you. I'm gonna try to do all those things, it's gonna be good.42:06 AW: You will excel, I have no doubt.42:08 DS: The pint drinking anyways.[chuckle]42:09 AW: Totally. All right. Thanks, everybody, for joining us on another episode of the SaaS Venture. Happy to have you with us, and we will see you next time.42:20 DS: See you next time.[music]

Helpful links from the episode: Whitespark Review Checker Tool Jira ClickUp IFA 2019 Conference LSA Conference GatherUp TextBack feature FULL SHOW NOTES00:11 Aaron Weiche: Episode Four - Building and Running Remote Teams.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SAAS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SAAS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:42 AW: Glad to be back on the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: I'm Darren.00:47 AW: We are back to recording action, probably three weeks between our last episode, as we've both been a little bit busy taking on other things.00:56 DS: Yeah.00:56 AW: And with that, for me, some of the highlights or things that have gone on, one, we did our first large show as an exhibitor. We were at the International Franchise Association convention in Las Vegas, and that was really great. Probably somewhere between 35 and 50 what I would consider solid conversations where we have the contact info of who the buyer would likely be and understand a lot about where they're at in their scenario and things like that. So that was really exciting, and good to get past, too, 'cause there were a lot of unknowns in not having done a show of that size with thousands of attendees. I wanna say there was 4,000 at the show, so that was really helpful to get through.01:42 DS: You talk to Andrew Beckman there? He's from Location3. He goes on to me about how awesome that show is, it's great...01:47 AW: Yeah, those guys... Yeah, Location3 had two or three booths there. I didn't make it over to talk to them. I know a couple others from that organization as well, but I saw their booths, didn't talk to them. I was busy talking to prospects, man.02:01 DS: That's great. So okay, you said you talked to about 35 solid leads when you were there, and then how many of those leads have converted to follow-up conversations, and have you actually closed any of them since you were at the show? 02:17 AW: Right, so that's the big next phase. The show was just last week, got home Thursday night, and then yeah, this week has been sending out emails, a few responses, and trying to get demos in place. So that's kind of the next piece, and the next of figuring out, "All right, what do those numbers look like?" Because you're totally correct, it's one thing to be excited about... And you need those conversations to start top-of-funnel there, but it is how fast and who are the ones that you can actually get to the table and turn into customers? So I'll definitely have more data on that the next time you and I talk.02:53 DS: And know what I'd love to know? I would love to know, okay, this is what you spent to go to the show in terms of getting the booth, cost of travel, cost of expenses with hotel and everything while you were there. Then looking at it six months later, and then calculating the lifetime value of the customers that you were able to close from it, and determining what's the ROI on that? Because I always wonder that about exhibiting at conferences. And IFA sounds pretty good, 35 solid leads sounds really good to me, and so I'm curious to know if you actually have a positive ROI in the end.03:29 AW: Yep, next episode I'll share those numbers and anything of what we're looking at. The really good news, no, it's not cheap to do it, but it only takes a couple of decent deals to easily make that back. And the other thing that I look at, too, is five of our competitors were there, and if we're not there in that conversation and in that room, then we're already losing. So there is some brand awareness and being seen. And this is our first time there, too, we had a lot of people say, "Oh, I've never seen you guys before." So repetition's important. We already signed up for their 2020 event in Orlando. But yeah, next episode, I'll report on where I'm at with those 'cause it definitely is of interest to me as well.04:08 DS: Yeah, for sure. And there's another side benefit, I think, of these things. So you might have talked to 35 people, but GatherUp was looked at by hundreds, thousands of people. They saw you, they looked at your banner, they got the sense that you do review stuff and that two months later when they're thinking about it, they're like, "Yeah, we should consider GatherUp, we know they're one of the players in this space."04:34 AW: Absolutely.04:35 DS: And so there's other stuff, you can't measure that, you don't know who those people were, and you don't know if it's because they saw you at the IFA show.04:42 AW: Yep, totally correct. And some of the conversations were a little longer term where people are like, "All right, we're in with somebody until this date, but let's stay in touch because I definitely wanna talk to you. It seems like you have more to offer or would be better to work with." So completely.04:58 DS: Well, that sounds exciting, good.05:00 AW: Yeah, totally exciting. We were supposed to have a big feature release today on our new inbound text feature called TextBack. We ran into some snags through a carrier, through Verizon this week and kinda had to self-diagnose between Verizon and Twilio, and trying to work with either one of those is almost no help, so a lot of self-investigation. We have a handle on it now, but we had to push back a couple of days till a Monday launch, which pains me, but totally the right thing to do because we couldn't push it out without it working for one of the major carriers consistently.05:37 DS: Can you describe that feature? How does it work, TextBack? 05:40 AW: Yeah, so TextBack, each location would have a number, so a local restaurant or a local store would have a mobile number that any customer in the store would see signage or on their receipt that says, "Text the word feedback to this number," And then it auto-replies with the link and says, "Great, now leave us feedback on how your experience was. So it's a easy way for a consumer to self-opt-in, and especially in industries like restaurant or retail, where giving up your email address or your phone number might not be part of the purchase process, but it gives real-time access.06:14 DS: Oh my god, I love it. That's so good! I really think about that for some of these retail type clients that... They're not collecting emails or phone numbers at the checkout. They don't have time for that, they're not messing around, they're just ringing people's orders, though, right? 06:31 AW: Yes.06:32 DS: And so that kind of a thing. And you could also put it on a card that you drop in a bag, right? 06:36 AW: Absolutely. Any print way or signage way you can get it in front of them can absolutely be used, and yeah, just as you alluded to, you get real-time feedback, you get them through your review process, those are all wins for the customer and the business. And then, yeah, then you can capture their mobile number or their email for future communication as well. So I'm really excited about it, and so that was really hard to know that it was gonna come out today and then be like, "Oh yeah, just kidding, guys. It's gonna be a couple more days," but better to get it right.07:08 DS: I'm super familiar with that. We're always gonna launch it, and then we're like, "Oh, we found more things. We've gotta figure this out before we can launch."07:15 AW: Yeah, totally. And other that, we talked last time about rebuilding or buying billing systems. I had a really good demo today with one of the two that I'm looking at, and I think I have a favorite in it, and has all of the things that we needed in the billing system, all of the features. A couple others that were on our wish list but are there, so we kind of turned over a ton of information to them, and they're gonna build out a really detailed personal demo for us in a couple of weeks. And we'll have our larger team on with that, somebody from product and our CFO and myself, and hopefully we can make a decision on that, so that's exciting. And then we've had two new hires in the last couple weeks since we talked, too. We hired another developer for our team, so our development team's up to five. And then we've hired a new PM, so one of our co-founders has served in our PM role the last couple years, and he was looking to kind of... He was there because we needed that role filled more so than it being a passion of his. So we've actually brought on an experienced PM, and it's already going awesome, it's been a great hire only two weeks in, and our current PM is super ecstatic, and we're already seeing some benefits of some of his experience. So a lot packed into the last three weeks since we talked.08:37 DS: That's fascinating, the PM thing. I've always thought about that, having a project manager, a dedicated project manager to oversee stuff. Because right now, that's kind of me, but I do 10 other things at the company, so I'm not the best person to be managing the development projects. And sometimes I'm the road block. It's like, "Okay, we wanna add these features. Hey, Darren, can you describe your vision for this?" I'm like, "Yeah, maybe next week," and they're just sitting around trying to find things to do and picking off bugs from our task system.09:09 AW:  We've always had a product manager role who oversees that and helps set... For the dev team, helps set priorities for them, and orchestrate the sprints and tickets, be the leader of Jira, all of those types of things. And to me, what it allows me to be is I serve more as that VP of product then, where I can help with vision and direction, and getting feature specs started, and wireframes, and that kind of stuff, but leave that product manager to handle all of the air traffic control-type stuff for what's flying around, 'cause as you know, there's just so much of it.09:48 DS: That's funny that you mention Jira. I have a developer on my team that said that he would quit immediately on the spot if I ever introduced Jira to the company. [laughter]10:00 AW: It's one of our core systems, it's great for tracking, ticketing, moving things around everything else. So our team would probably quit without Jira.10:08 DS: Yeah, it is industry standard. The guy had worked with it at his previous position and he just hated it. And we now use a system called ClickUp that we use to manage all of our tasks, and everybody at the company is madly in love with it. It's amazing, we love ClickUp.10:22 AW: Nice. Yep. Well, any time you have something that aids in process organization, efficiency, things not falling through the gap, it's such a win, right? 10:33 DS: Yep, totally. So building system, who's the winner? Are you willing to say, or are you gonna hold that answer...10:41 AW: Yeah, I'll hold that until we have a final... 'Cause what if they listen to my podcast and then they know how badly I love them and I can't negotiate price even harder? 10:49 DS: Good point, good point. All right, yeah. [chuckle10:53 AW: Yeah, I'll definitely share that with you too, especially after we get through... By the time we talk next time, I'll have had this personalized demo and I'll have a very accurate view. And I'll also have the opinions. I've done all this leg work, and now I'm gonna bring in our team and get their reaction to them, so hopefully theirs... I would think theirs will align with mine, but they'll definitely have some different perspectives from their areas of how they interact with it and what they'll have to integrate with it and things like that.11:21 DS: Yep. All right, well, from my side, have launched our new review tool. We finally did it. We did it, Aaron, can you believe it? 11:29 AW: Yeah, I feel like we should just shut down the podcast now 'cause that was...11:34 DS: I know.11:34 AW: The cliffhanger of every episode, and now what do we have to live for anymore? The review tool has been launched.11:40 DS: I know, well it's just first version, so we can keep cliffhanging off of the the next version that we're gonna launch of it, which will be a paid version of it. So it was just this free tool now, but we have a broader vision for a paid version, and so we can keep a cliffhanging on that for the next few episodes, for sure.11:57 AW: Nice. It's the continuous thread through our podcast throughout its life.12:02 DS: That's right, the life.12:03 AW: I obviously... I saw lots of tweets, I tweeted about it, I used it, I sent you some feedback on it. How did everything go with it? 12:12 DS: It went amazing, and Dmitri, our developer of that tool, he's so great. Basically, we have an internal feedback mechanism where it's like, "See something wrong with the results? Click here to leave your feedback." And so we got quite a bit of that, we got about 12 pretty valid reports that we looked at. And so he then just started picking them off, he'd be like, "Okay, I see what's going on here, and we fix it, fix it," and now it's like we tried our best. That's why it took so long to test it very well and get it working to what we thought was 100%, which turns out to be it was about 90%. And then customer stress testing after launch was amazing, because it gave us all this additional feedback, and we found a few extra bugs, and we've stamped them out. Now the thing is just working so nicely, I just love it. It's such a great tool. I'm so happy with how it launched.13:06 DS: I don't know if I mentioned this last time, but... So it was experimental. We had been looking at... And we'll get into... This is actually quite related to our conversation that we wanna talk about related to remote teams, but we'd been talking about hiring a developer out of Bulgaria, 'cause I have a company established in Bulgaria as well, and so we did some interviewing here and there, and it just... None of the candidates ever really stood out that, "Oh, we have to hire this person." But we had this idea that we would put a job posting out to the local university here and have them send it up to the computing science department, and we probably got about 20 good applications for this part-time job. It's a good job for a comp sci student to get some skills while they're still in school. And this one guy that applied seemed really great, so we hired him. He works part-time, he submits his hours, and he's the guy that built the entire tool; no other developers were involved. He built that complete system in about three months, and I'm just so thrilled with it. And so this concept of hiring part-time students is like... I'm like, wow, we had such huge success with Dmitri, I wanna try and find some more developers. And because we're a remote company, I can hire across the whole country, I could hire out of any university in the country. And so I would like to hire a couple more these part-time developers.14:29 AW: Yeah, that's a... No, as we talk about remote teams, I think that, what you just stated, kinda threads in line with something we can talk about, and it's finding what works for your company and your culture, and knowing that, "Hey, this is something we can repeat based on these things."14:43 DS: All right, should we talk about remote teams? 14:45 AW: Yeah, well yeah, before that I wanted to hear about... You went to the LSA, the Local Search Association event in San Diego, and I know you talked there, but how was that event?14:55 DS: Yeah, so that was great. It was early last week. It's the first time I've been to an LSA event, and it's more businessy than agencies, so lots of the events, like the Local U events, or you go to MozCon or some of the... MnSearch Summit, you get a lot of agencies and SEO people at these events. LSA was great because there's a lot of big business, there's a lot of vendors there, so you have... A lot of the SaaS players in our local search space were there. So the conversations were very interesting, it was great to look at other products, I had some great talks with Neil Crist from Moz. And my presentation went really well, too. I was bringing local search ranking factors, which I was a bit worried would be... People are getting tired of hearing it, but it seems to me like the audience, it was fresh info for them, so that was also good.15:47 DS: But some of the topics were really good, and one that I got a lot of value out of was this topic on churn. So the session title was Customer Retention, Reducing Churn, and Moz looked at this, and so Neil Crist from Moz gave an interesting presentation with a few takeaways about... They did this report, it was sort of this state of the local search industry. They surveyed a bunch of people, and so he went through that report. And Brendan King did a presentation on... They analyzed over 2000 SMBs for this retention study, and they've been studying this for over three years, and they were asked a number of questions, and so they were able to pull from their data, which was... A number of them were things like does the quantity of products that a single SMB is purchasing affect retention? And the resounding answer was yes.16:48 DS: So if you have multiple products, and you can get the person to sign up for more than one, then their retention rate will go through the roof. And it makes a lot of sense because they would become dependent on you for many different things. It's not just this one thing that they could easily find a competitor for, it's like, "We like to have all of our stuff with Whitespark. We've got our review management there, we've got our rank tracking, we have our citation analysis, we're using them for our citation building." So if you look at... In my business's case, if I looked at all of our clients and I found the ones that have lots of different products and services, those are the clients that'd be the most likely to stick with us. And so the takeaway there is cross-sell. If you can cross-sell, you can get all of your clients... If someone's on one thing but not the other, getting them to be interested in using some of these other products will definitely have a positive impact on retention. I thought that was a pretty interesting insight. And of course, you wanna do that anyways, that cross-selling.17:53 DS: One thing I thought was interesting was user engagement. So this is something that I don't do a good job of measuring, but I would like to measure more. They found 151% lift in retention if you can get a person engaged in your product every day. So GatherUp is really well-positioned for this, if you have people logging in every day and adding new customers, then that's a great way to get them actively engaged on a regular basis, if you think about our product. So the takeaway there is what is the value you can provide that makes your tool indispensable? What is the metric you can give them that will help them on a daily basis? And so I've been thinking about that and trying to figure out what we can do in our products for each of... How can I get someone coming back to the tool every day? It's on their start button, it's part of their daily morning routine where they check something. If you help them get that, then you'll definitely get a higher retention rate.18:52 DS: Adding more services makes you indispensable. I think that's what we talked about, so sort of expanding your services. I don't know, would that apply to you? We could do it because we are this all-in-one... We wanna provide a whole bunch of stuff around local search, whereas you just focus on reviews. And Vendasta is... Their data is gonna be skewed towards this because they do offer a massive marketplace of all these different products and services, right? 19:17 AW: Yep.19:18 DS: They did say that that would have an impact, the more different things that people sign up for. I don't know how... How could that apply to GatherUp, do you think? 19:25 AW: Yeah, for us it kind of applies into all the different things that you can do. Reviews is the easiest thing people understand about us, but when you get into, you... Just as you alluded to, you wanna be adding customers. Some do that manually, some do it through an automation tying into their CRM or their POS, so that's good. But the feedback coming in daily, and reading each piece of feedback that comes in, then using... We have a feature called auto-tagging that helps you build themes of what they're talking about. In April, we're launching a report that'll help you see the sediment of all the different mentions that they have, and which ones are impacting your five-star reviews, which ones are impacting your one-star reviews, replying to customers, replying to reviews, replying to direct first-party reviews.20:14 AW: So yeah, there's definitely a lot of opportunity for that, what they're getting after, what we internally just call that stickiness, like how do you become something... We actually had a great comment from a new customer we brought on of decent size, a well-known brand, and the first day they launched they basically said to our customer success team, they were like, "We're addicted to watching the screen and watching new feedback come in," and that's one of those you're like, bam, hooked. So trying to find ways to achieve those. And yeah, churn is such a... It's an important thing we talk about a lot, we measure it by customer segments, we look at it a lot, and we're constantly talking on ways to reduce it. And it's kind of different for each of our different segments between a small business, a multi-location business, and an agency reseller as what leads to account churn.21:07 DS: Yep, that makes sense. Another thing that I though was pretty cool from the presentation was this concept of verticalization. So if you service a specific industry, let's say it's healthcare, or it's storage, or it's legal. So if you focus on that, apparently, according to their data, you have a 34% lift in retention, you're gonna retain your customers better. And I think that makes sense, too. People think, "Well, I'm working with a specialist in that particular area."21:39 AW: Yep. Even when it comes down to your messaging, right? You're speaking their language.21:43 DS: Yes.21:43 AW: You understand what they're trying to achieve, the nuances and context of their relationships. We definitely see the same thing, and that's been a slow-moving change for us is getting from trying to be everything to everyone to really focusing and saying, "Yeah, we'll take you if you're these other things, but we've really found out that there's five or six industries that we work really well with, and we should try to maximize that."22:08 DS: That's interesting, yeah. I've also thought of this as one of the future things, 'cause we're building a larger all-in-one local marketing platform and service, and so once we have that it's... The Whitespark version is the general public one, so it's like, "Yes, we offer this to any industry, and it's gonna work just fine for any industry." But one of the things that's funny is that the service is actually exactly the same. For the most part, it doesn't really have much of a difference if you're in storage versus healthcare; there's very few differences. But we could identify those differences and then speak to them and adjust the software just a tiny bit to meet those different needs and launch a new version of it. It'd be like... Let's say it was storage, it'd be like the storagelocalmarketingsystem.com, and it's basically exactly our system and exactly our services and our processes, but tweaked slightly and a whole new marketing platform for it, and it's sort of this verticalization that we would... It would all be run from the one company, and so it's like storage marketing provided by Whitespark, but it looks like it's... So in some sense, it's really just the perception, the perception that you're getting a storage-specific system. You know what I mean? 23:30 AW: Yeah, no, there's a lot of opportunities for personalization in your marketing, that's a big win.23:35 DS: And maybe they would be on a different domain and everything would log in different, and it would be branded slightly different, but generally it's the same product. It's an idea I've had, particularly around automotive, actually. I think there's an opportunity in automotive.23:47 AW: Nice, I like it. You might have to further that one down the line.23:50 DS: Yes, we'll talk about that later.23:52 AW: All right.23:53 DS: That's much later.23:54 AW: Cool. Well, hey, that's... We have been busy, that's a lot of updates, and so let's get to our main topic for the day. And this is kind of fun, it actually comes from... We actually had a listener question, so some validation for us, we at least have one person listening on a regular basis, which is awesome. Kane Jamison reached out to us on Twitter, he is the founder of Content Harmony, and he shared in a tweet, "I know a part of Darren's team is distributed internationally. I'd love to hear more about making that work for SaaS development and building a team of devs in a manner that would be pretty interesting. What are policies and safeguards to make that successful?" So I thought we both actually run remote teams, my dev team's overseas as well, so I saw this as a great talking point on the things that we see being important to building and having a remote team. So maybe real quick, Darren, do you just wanna touch on your team size and what your distribution looks like? 24:54 DS: Yeah, totally. We have a team size right now of five, and so that's... There's three in Edmonton... Two in Edmonton, one in Calgary, one in Nanaimo, BC, and Dmitri, our part-timer, is in Edmonton as well. So we haven't gone international for our dev team.25:15 AW: Yep. The five is just your dev team?25:18 DS: Yep, that's just the dev team. The company's bigger than that. I have a whole company established in Bulgaria that is our service side, so they do all of our citation, audit, and clean-up service.25:27 AW: And how many do you have over there?25:29 DS: I think it's around 12.25:31 AW: Okay.25:31 DS: Yeah. And then that team is led by Nyagoslav Zhekov, and he is actually located in Malaysia, so we're all over the place. We definitely have a lot of employees. And I've got one in the US, and then most of the other team, like support and SEO and marketing, that is in Edmonton, except for Allie, and Allie's SEO, and she's over in Toronto. So yeah, we're all over the place for sure.26:00 AW: Yeah, and same with us, we're a team size of 18 total. Our dev team of five is all overseas, four in Poland, and one is in the island of Cypress, he used to live in Poland, but moved to the island of Cypress maybe two years ago now, so same type. And then the rest of our company distributed between the US and Canada as well. We do have a little bit of a nucleus here in the Minneapolis area now, just from people in my network that I've recruited or hired on, so we do have five people here in the Twin Cities now, just from how connections and past work experiences work. But other than that, all across coast to coast.26:41 DS: So that's interesting, how come Poland? How did you end up building a team there? 26:45 AW: Yeah, our lead engineer, Lucas, who is located in Cypress. I believe Don, one of our co-founders, originally found him on WorkUp or one of those types of sites, and ended up just on a contract, and dove into it, and did really well. And yeah, he's been with us ever since, four plus years now. So it's one of those, just an internet job board and that's how it happened and where we chose to go. The thing that's allowed it to grow, at first what we tried to do is, in the early days we ran our company very flat, there wasn't somebody who owned a department or was a manager, or a lead, or anything else like that. And we tried to, "All right, let's hire a dev here." We hired a dev from India, we hired a dev from Mongolia, we hired a dev from Texas. And what ended up happening on almost all of those is they failed for one reason or another, either culture fit or communication, or quality of work.27:47 AW: And we finally just went back to Lucas and said, "All right, you're fantastic. You're basically writing everything in the app right now. Who do you wanna hire?" And that led him to being the one to building the team. So he's the one now that, if we know we have room to expand, like with this recent hire, I go and be like, "Hey, we have the ability, we either need a developer or a senior developer. You know what you kinda need as far as a skill set to be complementary and what you need," and he goes through the process of posting, and interviewing, and giving out the tests, and following up, and then coming back to me and being like, "All right, here's the one or two, and which one do you think or why, or here's the one I suggest, and here's salary requirements," and it goes from there. So for us, we ended up learning, letting him own that and build a team that responds to him well, that he can own, that he can train, absolutely the right way to go. And we have a great team of rockstars now, and I'm happy that we're adding one more.28:40 DS: Awesome, and then I had a question: How do you pay your remote dev team? 28:45 AW: Yeah, we pay them as contractors, so it's an hourly rate, but we do... Once they've been with us for a while, we do do some benefits of paid holidays and things like that that we allow them to include on their invoice. So it is a contractor relationship, but we treat them as a direct member of our team. They're not a contractor at arm's length, they're all on all-team calls and things like that, so it is... Minus the way you have to handle paperwork and out-of-country employees and things like that, we handle them as a contractor.29:18 DS: Yeah, and do they invoice you and you pay them through PayPal? Is that the method?29:23 AW: Oh boy, I'd have to ask on how we pay them, but yes, they invoice and we pay them, and they get paid... It's one of the benefit... Many of them have commented, "I submit and you guys pay me right away, always on time, not used to getting that on all our deals," and I think that's where we've seen our retention. Everyone minus this new hire, we hired... All of our devs have just been with us for years now. Our second most recent hire came on maybe eight or nine months ago, and then now that is the next one that we're just hiring right now. So we've had... Everything that Lucas has done, we've had great retention, we've had a couple that haven't worked out along the lines, but he's just done a great job.30:03 DS: How do they report their hours? Do they give you a sort of sheet that explains, "Okay, for this day I worked three hours, and this is what I was working on on those days"? 30:11 AW: Yeah, we really haven't had to, just based on... With this group, we haven't had to be that detailed. They put together their hours, but everything that they're doing is there in Jira, and we work very outcome-based. It's all about hitting the goals in our sprints, and getting the things accomplished, and closing tickets out. And we have a much tighter pulse on it than having to measure up, like, "Worked on this feature for three hours, this feature for two hours." We don't have to get that specific. Now, as we grow we might have to, or if we hit some under to average performers, we might have to, but with the group we have right now, I don't have to coach people up on, "I need you to work harder." More than anything in our company right now, sometimes I have to tell people, "Hey, step back, take a few days off, [chuckle] don't be so dedicated," which is both a blessing and a curse.31:03 DS: Sounds good, yeah. And now let's talk a little bit about communication with this remote team. So do you talk to them or does your lead developer do all of the organization of this dev team? 31:18 AW: Yeah, it kind of splits into a few different ways. Lucas, our lead, is the most fluent in English. He speaks English very well. He and I almost daily on Slack or in conversations, every now and then we'll do a phone call. We have a weekly meeting that Lucas is always part of as the head of engineering, and then once a month the entire dev team will join us as well. So we keep a lot of open lines of communication. We're actually looking at right now one of the... We lay out budgets for education and materials and things like that. And I think actually some of our dev team actually wants to take English classes just because that is...31:58 DS: Cool.32:00 AW: Yeah, yeah, really cool, right? And it helps unify the team even more.32:03 DS: That is one the big benefits for our Bulgarian team, so I'll cover up to $1200 in Bulgarian dollars, Bulgarian leva per year for English language training, because it helps them with their job, so I'm happy to give them that. They have to go on their own time, off-hours or whatever, but I will pay the expense.32:26 AW: Yep, no, that's great, that's an awesome, awesome perk. Yeah, it's things like that. And then separate to our all-team meeting, then the product team, so five engineers in Poland... We do have two part-time front-end devs in the US that are local here in the Twin Cities that handle front-end, then our product manager, our lead designer, and our product marketer, they're all on a call once a week as well where they all participate, going through the sprints, the features, all the things that are there. So our team, we've established a lot of both fixed and loose communication that really helped bridge all that stuff together.33:04 AW: And then lastly, we just have to be delicate. It's an eight-hour time difference for me in the Central Time Zone, so you know... I know if I get up early at 5:00 or 6:00 AM, that's a great time to be talking, interacting with those guys, as their window closes around 10:00 or 11:00 AM for us.33:24 DS: Right. You ever get up at 5:00 or 6:00 AM?33:26 AW: I do all the time.33:27 DS: Oh my god.[laughter]33:29 AW: Once upon a time, Darren, I would work until 5:00 AM and then go to bed, but having four kids, that definitely changes how those things go. So I often will wake up around 5:00 AM, and I'm on email by 5:30 and Slack by 5:30 or 6:00 AM. And I find it to be really productive. I'll do a couple hours and then a lot of times I'll go to the gym for an hour, and then I'm in the office by 9:00, but I've already cranked out a couple hours of work before that.33:56 DS: And you're in bed by 10:00, roughly? 33:58 AW: Absolutely. I'm an old man that way, and if you stretch me... When we were at that show in Vegas, and the last night we stayed out till 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, I was wrecked the next day. [chuckle]34:09 DS: Sure. [chuckle] Yeah, yeah. For us, by the time we get Violet to bed, it might be 8:30, 9:00 o'clock, and that's the only time Jill and I have to hang out, so we'll watch a show while we fold laundry, and it's always 11:30, midnight, 12:30 by the time we're in bed sleeping, so I don't know, I can't do ten o'clock.34:33 AW: I know. I know you run a little later than me just from the emails I get from you sometimes are when I'm sleeping, so...34:39 DS: Yeah, right.34:40 AW: So one thing I wanted to circle back to with hiring your student and that working out so well, do you feel that's because of... You have a really good training process in place or a really good peer system? That to me, any time you hire someone with less experience or no experience, you're really dependent on do you have the right onboarding and training and guardrails to make them successful? What does that look like for you guys, or what did you learn in this process? 35:10 DS: Sure, great question. We do not have an excellent... We have a terrible onboarding process, it's like, "Hey, here's a project. Can you work on it?" And so I think we mostly just lucked out with Dmitri. So you hire somebody... One of the big things, I think, if you're gonna hire somebody is you have to hire... Especially if it's a student, you're not hiring somebody that just is talking... Only has school experience. They must have built applications in their own free time, that's the kind of person you wanna hire. When you know that they can take a concept to application to delivery and launch something into the world, once they've done that once or twice, that's the kind of person that I would wanna hire. So I would never hire a student that did not have that under their belt. And so Dmitri had that. He had built a couple of things in the past, and so we knew he had the ability, and we also knew that he worked with our exact development stack. So Laravel and Vue, that's what we build everything in, and that's where he built his applications in, so we knew he could just hit the ground running. He did not need any training, he knew how to build applications.36:18 DS: And so we have a good support system through Slack where it's like, "Okay, any questions come up?" 'Cause he did have to interface with some of our crawling technology in order to build this thing. And so our dev team would support him. So if he has a question, he would pose it to the dev team in the dev channel and Slack, and he would get answers. And I would direct him there for a few things too. I'd be like, "Oh, you might not know, but we have this thing, and here's a link to it, it's one of our admin tools," and he's like, "Oh perfect. I could definitely use this."36:49 DS: And so he had the ability to program out of the gate, and those would be the requirements for hiring students going forward. First, number one, they are already really familiar with our particular development stack, we don't have to train them. And number two, they have launched applications to the world that we can actually play with, use, try out, and even look at their code for those applications. So that's the way we'll hire students in the future. And if I put a job posting out to five universities and none of the applicants have that, then it's no big deal. In fact, I'm gonna put those as requirements in the application, and I will actively discourage people from applying if they don't have that, because we don't wanna get overwhelmed with resumes from people that we know we're not gonna talk to.37:34 AW: Yeah, those are great ideas for sure. One other thing that I would add to that that I've always adhered to and I think our team here has learned and adapted to is just short cycles when you show your work and share it, instead of taking it...37:50 DS: Oh, yeah.37:50 AW: Yeah, being head down for two weeks, and then when you emerge it's the wrong direction with the wrong thing and everything. It's like, no, every day let's surface some work so that we can see we're on the right path.38:01 DS: Yeah, and I was pretty blessed to have Jessie actually. Jessie was a very strong project manager for this, because she was constantly looking at the tool and thinking about it from the user perspective, and being like, "Oh, well, what about this, what about that?" And so her and Dmitri worked really hand-in-hand to push this thing into production, and I would pop in every few days and offer my suggestions. And so there was a lot of collaboration with this project. It wasn't just like Dmitri is in his dorm room working on this for three weeks, and then comes out, and we'd be like, "Oh, that's all wrong." Yeah, no, it was active collaboration every time he was working, which was great.38:44 AW: Yep, totally. How do you guys... Another key thing to me is how do you replicate the happy hour culture or the grab a friend and go to lunch culture that you get in a physical office when things are remote? Do you guys look at that at all, or how do you help them develop these personal relationships when everybody's kind of walled off to each other, to a certain extent? 39:06 DS: Yeah, it's a really great question. We've struggled with it for our entire existence. There are a few things: One, we have our daily scrum channel, people can put in what they've got there. We try to encourage calls, so different teams will get on calls and talk about stuff rather than just doing it all typing through Slack. We find that to be productive. We have a channel in Slack which is our really weak version of some kind of culture. We call it Fun Times, where people can just post, "Hey, look at this hilarious video on the internet."39:42 AW: We have that, it's called... Ours is just called the Random Channel. [chuckle]39:46 DS: The Random Channel, right. Someone comes across something funny on the internet and they share it, and then people talk about it. And other things that get shared in Fun Times are just like someone's working on a renovation project in their house, and so they'll post photos of like, "Hey, look, I installed my sink last night, check it out." And so the Fun Times channel is exactly that, it's this sort of water cooler where people can just chat about stuff with their colleagues.40:13 DS: And it's helpful, but it doesn't get us as close to a culture of face-to-face as we would like, and so we also, with our local Edmonton team, we get together once a month, every third Friday of the month we have... We call it a Team Day, and it's generally a pretty unproductive day. It's slightly productive because we get that face time where we can talk about projects, but there's not a ton of work getting done on those days because we haven't seen each other for a month, and so we chat, and we talk about life, and we drink coffee, and then we all go for a nice meal together, and the company picks up the bill all day, and we all just hang out. And we always go home early on those days, too. I leave at 3:30 and I go to the gym, and everyone else basically leaves at 3:30 so they can miss traffic. So it's just one of these days where we... It's productive in it being a break, and it's productive in us getting some face time and hanging out a little bit, and collaborating on projects in person.41:13 AW: Yeah, no, that's good, those are definitely some good ideas. And that's just an area for people, I think, to really think about. We try to get past those in the Random Channel in Slack, and encouraging communication, and sharing what people are doing personally. Last year we did our first all-North American summit, so we brought everybody in from California, Washington, New York, Toronto, all into Minnesota, and we rented out this 12-bedroom cabin in Northern Minnesota, and that week was amazing. We had 13 people all together, and did small groups, and did breakouts, and it was nine to five work. And then we did an escape room mystery room, we did dinners together, we went out on the boat, just did as many of those things as possible. And this year we're gonna try to do one in Toronto so that all of our guys from Poland can come over and do an all-company. But that one week of face time and being around each other and having personal conversations and beers or burgers or whatever it is, that just catapults you so much further forward than a Slack call.42:23 DS: And I think that... On one hand, I believe that the regular office chit-chat is overrated. People don't actually want that. They love the fact that they... Most of my employees enjoy that they can be at home and not having someone show up at their cubicle asking them questions. They get to focus on their work, get stuff done, and I think they're more productive. But eventually it gets a little quiet and lonely, and so it's nice to get out once in a while, and it's nice to check in on our Random Channels. When we had our Christmas party, we flew in employees from the rest of Canada, and so we had a nice team day that day where it was easy, and then in the afternoon we all went bowling together, which was fun, and then we had a really nice Christmas dinner. So that was the one time that I've flown people in. I generally don't have the budget to do these kinds of summit that you describe, but we'll get it there.43:19 AW: Yep. We've just... We didn't the first few years, and now we've just made it part of it. And we have a lot of other small team get-togethers and executive retreats and things like that where we might pull in other people if they're located close by just to try to further that face time as well. But to your comments on getting rid of some of the noise and the daily chit-chat and things like that, the way I just frame this up is I wanna build a company where it's really about working at your best. And everyone is different from that, some people crave people. So with that, if somebody needs a co-working space, or we just got an office in a co-working space here in the Twin Cities 'cause we have five people here, so we got an office that has three desks, but any of the five can rotate in and use it, and there's public spaces there too, and then we can rent the conference room there for when we need to have a bigger meeting.44:10 AW: So to me it's where do you work at your best? And for some people it is in complete silence, never leaving their house and whatever else, and for others, they need some stimulation, or they want collaboration, or they want human interaction. And I think I'm trying to work towards that, how do we provide as many of our employees with as many of those opportunities to work at their best? 44:30 DS: Yep, no, that's really good. Co-working has come up in my company too, and I keep going back and forth on it. I'm still trying to decide if it makes sense. Now, do you find the co-working space sits empty much? 44:42 AW: We've only been into it three or four weeks and so I haven't... I've made it in there three or four times myself. Now, next week we have two people flying into town, they're coming in to meet the rest of the Minnesota team 'cause a couple of them haven't met face-to-face, so we will have seven or eight people in there. We're doing a happy hour with our part-time dev, so we'll be making crazy use of it next week, and then after that, I don't know. I would like to think that there's one out of our four or five in there every day or every other day, but I'll have to set up a Nest cam to know that. [chuckle]45:18 DS: You spy on them.45:20 AW: [chuckle] They'd love that.45:23 DS: [chuckle] Exactly. Aaron's checking out the co-working office all the time. You get nothing done 'cause you're just staring at the camera.45:29 AW: Totally. All right, well, I think those are... I think we alluded to communication is very key within remote teams, understanding, and as you pointed out, hiring people that have already done the right things, that are self-starters, that can work autonomously. That's really important. And then finding a way to build and instill culture and make people feel connected and that they belong, not only to the mission and vision of the company, but to their peers and to each other are definitely key aspects in building a remote team, development team or not.46:04 DS: Yeah. And it's hard. It is harder with remote to build that connection between the employees, but, I don't know, maybe it's not that necessary. It's been working very well for us for almost over 10 years now. So yeah, it's been good for us.46:18 AW: Yeah. Awesome.46:20 DS: Yep.46:21 AW: So we've gone pretty extended today, but maybe... What's a couple of things that you have going on or you'll be up to in the next few weeks before we talk again? 46:30 DS: Yeah. I'm a little bit slammed trying to get ready for Brighton. I have to do a full day of training, and I have to do a presentation as well. So I've been dong this interesting case study. This is all local search stuff, not really SaaS stuff. And so I'm busy with that. In terms of team development and SaaS launches, we're plowing through on our review checker tool, so trying to build the paid version of that. We're also getting pretty close to launching our updated version of the local citation finder. So I can definitely talk about some of the development stuff that's going on in those. And I got a bunch of tweaks to make to our rank tracker. I don't know, just keep plugging away at all of this stuff. I don't have anything really big on their horizon over the next few weeks.47:16 AW: That's the name of the game is keep plugging away, isn't it? 47:18 DS: Yep, one foot in front of the other.47:20 AW: I'm hoping... Hopefully we'll talk about our launch of a few different features, a couple of UI enhancements that are somewhat related, I'll tie it back to when we talk next time. Some of it is to help address some churn and things we see as needing to happen and trying to make that easier for the customer and our product. And that TextBack feature, that inbound SMS feature, I'm really excited to get that. Our beta tests have gone really well, so I'm excited to get that out. And then next week I'm going to London for a week. But yeah, just vacation, just my wife and I, and yeah, I tried to book a meeting with a client and a prospect meeting and she said, "No way, I rarely get time with you." So it is seven days of vacation, so I had to give in.48:07 DS: And so wait, what are the dates of those?48:09 AW: March 14th through the 21st.48:11 DS: Fantastic. When you get back you can tell me all the things that I should do when I'm in London for a couple days.48:16 AW: All right, I will scout it out for you and set you up with Aaron's TripAdvisor.48:22 DS: Wonderful, yeah, sounds good.48:24 AW: All right. Well, fantastic work, my friend. We covered a heck of a lot today, our longest episode ever. We'll have to work on being less wordy or tackling less topics next time, but hopefully everyone found it...48:35 DS: Less topics.48:35 AW: Yeah, [chuckle] less topics, there you go, because the conversation on it is great.48:39 DS: Yeah, it's been good. Thank you, Aaron. Good time.48:42 AW: Yep. Thanks, Darren. Thanks everyone for joining us on The SaaS Venture, and we'll talk to you next time. And don't forget, if you love what you're hearing, please drop us a review in iTunes. And just as we did this week, we would love to answer if there are listener questions. You can ping either Darren and I on Twitter. We are both very active and easy to track down there. So we'll talk to you next time.49:04 DS: Talk to you next time.[outro music]

Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about SaaStr annual and billing system rebuilds.Helpful links from the episode: SaaStr Annual conference 5 Questions CEO's Struggle With and How To Answer Them - Dave Kellogg presentation at SaaStr A Step-By-Step Guide To Revenue Growth (PDF) - Mark Roberge at SaaStr Billing systems mentioned:  Recurly, Chargify, Chargebee FULL SHOW NOTES00:09 Aaron Weiche: We're bringing you episode 3 - SaaStr Annual Recap and Rebuilds.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. Darren, both of us have... We've been on the road and doing some travel, are you back and settled into the daily desk, in the daily grind? 00:54 Darren Shaw: I am still trying to catch up on email. Oh man, it's tough to take a week off of email, just piles up. And then every time I look at it, it's this weird thing where when I've got like 300 emails that are real messages, it almost becomes a lottery, where it's like, I go through my inbox and just something stands out to me, and I just jump on it and reply right there. But then there's other stuff that's also important and it's just like, "No, you never get replied to, sorry." It's just this weird thing when you're away for a week. But yes, I'm back, it was a good trip. Local U was amazing. Probably the best Local U ever. It was awesome, you missed it.01:32 AW: Yeah, well fitting that it was the best ever when a first advance that I've never not been a part of, so that's too bad. I was trolling you guys from just up the road in San Jose, but I definitely missed out. Mostly, I just miss out seeing all the great people that are part of kind of that Local U family and community.01:53 DS: I definitely missed hanging out with you.01:55 AW: Yep, there's nothing like beers in real life over talking on podcasts and emails and all of the other ways we end up communicating.02:03 DS: Sure, yeah, this podcast is a good second best, though.02:06 AW: It totally is, it's given us a lot more regiment in our interactions, which is a great thing.02:12 DS: And now we have a schedule of chatting so that's good.02:16 AW: So, I've been refreshing my Twitter feed every like 10 seconds waiting for you or Whitespark to announce that your review tool, or your new tool that we've been talking about has launched. But did I miss the tweet, or where are we at? 02:32 DS: Yeah, no, you're probably a little over-zealous with your refreshing there. We're not quite ready to launch. It's amazing, honestly, it's been day after day, where I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm waking up in the morning and we're gonna launch this thing, there's just that one last little thing to do." And so we start looking at that one last little thing, and then we find five other things. It's like, "Oh well, it doesn't work if you try a business in this particular way, or if you search in this way," or it's like, "Oh, it's this weird bug on the PDF export." Just all these little tiny things that keep cropping up, and it feels so close, day after day after day. We could have launched it, but then you get a bunch of people emailing saying, "Oh hey, it didn't work. Or my business... It didn't return the right results." So we keep finding things, and I figure it's a free tool, so there's not like anything pressing to launch it, so we might as well just hold it until it's really polished, to make sure that we found all the bugs.03:29 AW: Yeah. Do you start to lose your mind at all with that stuff? Where it's... You feel like it's Groundhog Day, and it's always just a couple more things, just a couple more things a couple more things, 'cause I don't deal with that very well if that ever happens to our team.03:44 DS: Yeah, it doesn't really feel... It doesn't make me lose my mind, but it does feel like Groundhog Day, it's just like, "Oh, man, every day there's something else." Which is quite irritating. I don't really... I just kinda like, "Oh, it's not today." I look at it in the morning for about an hour, or I run a few tests, we try for a few things. I write up the next, the list of tweaks to make, and then I move on with my day. It's no big deal. But it is annoying, a little annoying.04:13 AW: You have better patience than I do 'cause I really start... I just start focusing... Like I don't wanna wake up another day and be testing this again, or see the same bugs, or new bugs, or anything else. I get to a point where we have this, "Enough is enough," talk and we map out an hour by hour plan on how this is going to change. And most of it's the result of my frustration because I end up feeling like, "Well, we can't get to the next thing, that we need to get to, without getting this out there or whatever." And I get what you're saying that putting out a free tool is probably a lot more excitement over it than a necessity. Like a big feature is...04:54 DS: Yeah, so I think that's exactly it. There's two things. One it's this free tool, it's almost... It was a side product that gave our new part-time developer employee. He's a computer science student at the U of A. And so, one, he's a busy student, so he's not available to work eight hours a day on this. So I just put in the to-dos and he gets them done when he can. And two, a free tool, it's not that stressful, it's not a big deal. And we don't have any clients relying on this, waiting for it, it's just gonna be another marketing vehicle for us when we launch it.05:29 AW: Yeah, I would still have trouble with my own excitement, keeping that at bay, 'cause I'd wanna share it with the world.05:35 DS: No, I do wanna share, like I showed it to people at Local U, and they're like, "It's so awesome." And I'm like, "I know, I really wanna launch it." I'm excited about how it's gonna be received. I think everyone is gonna quite like it. And so I think it's gonna be great from that perspective.05:48 AW: Well, good, I'm continuing to keep my anticipation level high.05:53 DS: Great, thank you. I know. It won't let you down, you just gotta pretend I didn't say anything. Pretend I just announced it to you today that we're building this new tool. [chuckle] So you had no prior thing, so you can keep that anticipation high.06:07 AW: I can fake being surprised really well, so I'm in on that.06:11 DS: Okay, perfect. I wanna hear about SaaStr. You went to this awesome conference, all about building SaaS apps and all the things that go into that... So I'm just curious to hear, what are some of the takeaways, how was the conference? 06:26 AW: Yeah, the conference was awesome, it was my best SaaStr Annual experience I've had. This was the third one that I've gone to. All three have been at different venues. This one actually moved, the first two were in San Francisco, this one was in San Jose. And for me, this was the best venue... Each time the venue had its own little quirks on how much room there was to get around, or room sizes, and how many rooms. And it really felt like... Cause I think this is the 5th or 6th year of SaaStr Annual total, but it really felt like they had nailed a number of those past problems, and alleviated those in the space they were in and everything else. One, that was a really nice relief that we had that taken care of that time. And then it just started off, the very first talk I went to was a topic of five questions that CEOs struggle with. That one was just a fabulous talk that really gave a lot of insight to what things that I definitely deal with on a daily basis. So it was great to see someone else's view of that.07:38 DS: Yeah, what are these five questions CEOs struggle with? 07:42 AW: Yeah, and the interesting thing with it is so many of the speakers of this... This conference is definitely built around a lot of VC-funded companies, so we're a little bit of an outlier there as a bootstrap company. But you come in with it through the frame of mind that there's a lot I can learn by just kind of switching from, "Hey, we have a whole bunch of money and can hire who we need to, and it's just about putting the process in place and scaling and everything else." And so you adapt to reading between the lines on some of the talks that were there, which makes it a lot... A lot easier. Yeah, but the, that very first talk there was really one piece of it that I really liked as the speaker got into, and that more or less had to do with the frame of mind and what you focus on, or what you speak about, and how you look at it.08:39 AW: And the cool thing was the way that he put it was looking at how you align things where you speak about your business like you're vision-driven, you create a culture that's customer-driven, and then you build strategy and goals like you're competitor-driven. But yeah, make sure you don't obsess too much about who your competitors are. And that to me was a really great framework for a CEO to approach your business where you have to keep that vision at the center of what you're working towards, and decisions you make, and how you progress. But then also having a culture, and this is something, you know I liked it probably because it is how I view us at GatherUp is one of our main core values is that it's customer first. And we think of it a couple of ways down is one, we've built our tool to help businesses interact so they can put the customer first. And it's the same with our team, where we bend over backwards to provide as much service as we can for that customer.09:48 DS: And I can speak to that as a customer, really, because you guys are always really helpful when we need something. And you're responsive, and that's the way we try to be at Whitespark as well. And I've heard about some competitors that are not as easy to work with, and so I think it's super key. We see people leaving competitors and coming to us because of that. When the customer service isn't good over there, then they start looking around.10:18 AW: Yeah, we're starting to see that in our sales cycle, where we're seeing people who have chosen another review or reputation management platform, and they've gone through their one or their two-year contract with them, and they're going back into the market, and they're talking to some of the other ones that's there. And when you read between the lines on when you're asking them what they liked, and what they didn't like, and things like that, you really see a lot of being shared there has to do with how they interacted with that company. And it's really important piece, as I point out all the time, in being a bootstrapped company, we are just never ever going to out-feature someone. We're not gonna win the feature war because we don't have 50 or 100 developers that are there. But where we can win is by being able to out-service them by caring more, more consistent, and things like that. So it's really, I think it's extra important in a bootstrapped environment.11:22 DS: That makes a lot of sense. At SaaStr, you mentioned that it's kind of driven and geared towards VC-funded companies. In our... I'm just curious, how much of a minority are we bootstrapped SaaS companies versus VC-funded companies? 11:40 AW: I don't even know if I would have a sense in the overall space. But definitely at this conference, there's over 10,000 attendees. I felt like one out of every 10 that I talked to, was bootstrapped. And again, it's attracting people, there's VCs there you can go pitch VCs there, there's a lot of things like that. But it definitely seems like, in the overall scheme, lower and much less given the climate of what's there right now. And I'm just amazed at the amount of money constantly being thrown around in that space. It's mind-blowing to me, and a little bit different from the way I'm wired, that's for sure.12:18 DS: Yeah, it's very different from the way I'm wired. I'm curious, would you... Let's say someone said, "Hey, here's $5 million, you can use it to hire some more developers, and accelerate your development, and improve all your marketing, your sales whatever." Would you take it, would you want it? 12:35 AW: Yeah, right now I wouldn't want it. I would just... Obviously, it comes with some type of attachment, right? If it's a free $5 million, yes, please. [chuckle] But between equity and being driven by a board, things like that, that's where it starts to get a lot trickier.12:56 DS: Same, yeah. I would never take it. I would not take one, five or $10 million to do it because the main thing for me is being able to set the vision for the company and develop what I wanna develop without anyone else having any input on that. I feel like I have a good vision, and I don't wanna have to justify it to a board or anything like that.13:20 AW: Yep, no, totally, totally agree with you. And one of the other things I liked about the initial talk on the five things for CEOS, a lot of it had to do with hiring and finding the right people too. And one of his comments was about make sure that you're bringing people on that give energy instead of take energy. And that was one that just really hit in a very simplified way, and really made me think about... Cause we've just hired someone new again this week, and these are all like adding positions to our team. We continue to grow and add positions, and it's not replacing something that was already there.14:00 AW: As we're adding these new folks to the table, those are very important things. And we recently did have a... We had a failed sales hire that lasted all of about 90 days, and some of the things that he touched upon in the hiring process that they look at, and what's important, and one other talk that I'll give you a little download on really kind of solidified when you're ranking and looking at what's important in your position. I really thought that I needed someone who was a good closer, and just had a lot of just sales moxie to them. And I think what I found out is just the way we're built, and already in the culture of our company, we really need someone who's knowledgeable in our space and in our product, because all of us are, and me, especially, I'm an education-based sales person is the way I refer to it. I wanna teach you everything, and if I teach you well enough, you will see how we solve the problem.15:00 DS: But you're also adding value and integrity through that approach, I find. When someone talks to a vendor that is mostly just all about, they discuss the features and whatever, and then they talk to someone like you who's educating them on what's best for them, it's like they can tell that you have their interest in mind. You're trying to help them find the best solution. And that, I think, is an excellent sales approach.15:24 AW: Yeah, and it definitely it made me think about... Alright, so when we go back to the table, 'cause we're gonna need to hire some more salespeople. I need to keep that in mind. I saw what happened when I placed more value somewhere else. And so this next time through, I definitely need to place more value on someone who's passionate about our industry, knowledgeable, experienced. That doesn't mean knowing everything, but they're much further down the line of our last hire we really had to teach a lot, and just the uptake didn't happen, so they weren't really empowered by it, and it didn't lead them to then have confidence to be having those conversations at the level you need to have them to bring on the right type of customers.16:07 DS: One thing you said that I thought was interesting was hiring people that give energy, rather than take energy, and I was wondering how can you assess that in the interview stage when you are just trying to find employees, how can you determine that, at that point? 16:23 AW: Yeah, and I don't have a good answer for you on that. I would think you probably need to devise some scenarios where you're trying to understand how they approach things like problem solving, and pick through that to figure out what they are. Or to some extent, too, is realizing that if you have somebody that's taking energy on your team, that's something you need to do something about, or remove from the team. And I think that was probably more along the lines of what they're saying of, "Be aware when you have that going on. It's already hard enough. Don't continue with someone making it that much harder."17:03 DS: Yeah, it's like that classic saying in HR, "Hire slow and fire fast." Once you get a feel for it, if it's not working out, then you cut your losses.17:12 AW: Yep, absolutely. And I would say after our recent failure on one of our hires, I totally feel that way. The good news when I look... Last year, I think we hired seven people total, and there was one that didn't work out. So if I can hit on six out of seven again this year, I will be extremely happy with it. I'll take that winning percentage all day long.17:34 DS: Yeah, yeah, for sure. The hiring has been pretty good for us too. We've generally not had too many duds in the history of the company. So, yeah, it's been pretty good. It's hard to fire, too. I hate that. It's the worst thing. That's why hiring slow is so important to really take your time and make sure you have the right person. There's nothing worse than having to let someone go.17:53 AW: Absolutely. So the next talk that I really loved was kicking off the second day and it was a presentation called The Step-by-Step Guide to Revenue Growth. And this was from Mark Roberge who was the Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot, and now he's a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. And it was hands down probably one of the best presentations I've ever taken in. And, yeah, it was all focused on sales, marketing, churn, and a little bit of hiring as well. And he just laid out in such a concise way how to look at, how to accelerate growth, and where to focus on, and really understanding just a lot of self-awareness on what your product fit is, and what your go-to-market fit is, and then how do you grow and build a mote around what you're doing once you're ready to scale.18:53 AW: So it was one of those where I was like, "Man, I didn't know at first if his slides we're gonna be available." So I was literally... And as well as the rest of the crowd taking photos of every slide. It was just really well laid out and told you exactly what you needed to be looking at with it.19:10 DS: Are these the actual slides he presented with? 19:12 AW: That we're taking photo or that I gave you in the link for our show? Yes.19:16 DS: They are so packed with text content. Were you not struggling to follow him and read the slides? 19:23 AW: No. Great presenter and just went through 'em. And, yeah, as you can see from the slides, they're not like this visual like, "Oh they're so beautiful," right? 19:33 DS: Right.19:33 AW: Just really content-driven and it really embodied everything that he was talking about. And one of the first points that he really hit upon was really understanding what product market fit is and finding out what is that metric that helps you understand that a customer is successful with you. How do you define that leading indicator that they're successful? And then what you wanna do in your company is make sure how can you optimize, how fast you're delivering on that leading indicator. So how do you take it from happening at month six or nine or 10? And making sure a majority are hitting it in month one because if you don't, more of those are gonna drop out. They're not gonna meet their level of value in the product. And it was just a really clear way and a little bit different. There's so much all the time in the SaaS world on product market fit and how do you know you have it and the gut feeling of it and what the numbers tell you and churn numbers. But churn is this trailing thing where... How he laid it out puts it into something where you can start looking at it like month one. Do I have 70% of my customers achieving this leading metric that we know leads to success right away in month one? Yeah.20:55 DS: And these slides... I don't know if you can share these with podcast listeners but these slides are packed with info. This is, it's the whole presentation, completely consumable in the slides.21:06 AW: Yeah, yeah, that's a great part about it is that... And that's why it was such a bonus when he's like, "I'll tweet out the link for these slides." I was like, "Thank you 'cause I am saving these straight to my desktop and reviewing them constantly." So it was just a really great walkthrough on how to analyze those things and what to look at. Another area of it that I really liked was understanding how to market and sell to the right fit for you. In his slides, it's like slide 25, he's able to show, "All right, you have different channels to reach customers inbound, outbound and partners. And then you might have different categories of SMB, mid-market and enterprise." And he lays out a grid so you're able to analyze and say, "Okay. Who are we reaching and what's our best channel that we are reaching them?" And instead of always trying to make one work, find the one that really is your go-to and that's where you really really want to invest. And just maybe you experiment or even ignore the other segments but I could definitely look at this with our team and there's a few things...22:17 AW: We do inbound very, very well. 99% of our business comes from inbound marketing of writing blog posts, social, speaking at conferences, all those kind of things. But we really badly... There's parts of us that, "Oh, we'd love to have a great partner channel. We'd like to figure it out in this way," or "We'd like to do more outbound." And so some of it was just realizing. Like find out what does work for you, and then just completely max that out because you know it works.22:46 DS: Yeah, it makes sense. I always think about outbound sales and I'm like, "Oh, should I be doing that like everyone else seems to be doing that?" And I get these emails and I'm like, "Oh, that's a pretty decent email." And I can see all these companies doing it and I think, "Man, maybe we should get into that." But honestly, we have a hard enough time managing the leads that are coming in right now anyways, that's why I should probably hire a sales person because we don't respond fast enough where I'm just like, "Yeah, I could set up a call with you, like, in two weeks." It's like, "Those leads are going cold by the time I ever talk to them," and so I just need to hire a sales person, I think, 'cause we have enough inbound coming in that I don't need to worry about outbound.23:25 AW: Yep. Now and we're kind of the same way. I definitely have some areas where there's a lot of interest with, like, our agency partners and resellers, but for our mid-market, for businesses that are 50 locations on up, like, we do need to do more outbound to start those conversations and to at least be on their radar as much as anything because that's... Our competitors are doing that. And so to expect when there's, you know, 10 different products all reaching out and cold emails and ad conferences on expo floors, and calling them and connecting with them and we're not doing that, like, we are gonna miss the boat on a bunch unless they decide, "Well, the only way I'm picking a vendor is by who I'm gonna search for and what of their content I like to read." So, yep, to some extent, we have to because everyone else is in that arena.24:23 DS: Sure, and are you experimenting with that? 24:25 AW: Yeah, we definitely are. I mean, I do some of it myself. I see businesses and I know really fit our mold well and I'm able to do, kind of, a quick glance at what they have available online, and are they displaying reviews on location pages and things like that, and make a good determination that it's somebody that I wanna go after. So I definitely do that. The sales person that we hired and then didn't work out, that was their role, and they really didn't even get to doing the outbound part because they just couldn't get enough knowledge and confidence in the product, so...25:00 DS: Yeah. I often think, like, your customer support people, if someone on that customer support team that really knows the product, that has been supporting the product for a while also has the sales acumen, then they would be a good person to put into a dedicated sales role.25:18 AW: Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. What I've found with our current customer success team is those guys love to help and they don't love to talk money. So I don't have anyone that's a fit for that right now, because the minute it comes to bringing up even the smallest dollar amount, they're uncomfortable, it's just not in who they are. So I don't have any of those candidates right now, but yeah, it'd be great to be able to bring some people from that role into more of a biz-dev role, more of a sales role with having that great underlying base of nothing but product and customer knowledge.25:56 DS: Yeah, totally. Yep.25:57 AW: Outside of the talks, the other stuff is just networking. I mean, there's just so many great network opportunities because every time you sit down in something and introduce yourself or you're standing in line to go into a session, it's someone else who is a VP of sales or a founder or CEO, or runs marketing for a SaaS company you've either heard of or it's somebody you never even knew existed. So you have all these great mini conversations in between sessions, and at the happy hours, and at the events at night, where it's just one big group of your people. And so, I mean, imagine Local U of the 100 that are there, and then you multiply that into 10,000 and the conversations and the exposure and the insight you get into other people's companies and what they do is just unbelievably fantastic.26:51 DS: Sounds so great. Next year, next year I wanna go with you.26:53 AW: Totally.26:54 DS: Hopefully it doesn't conflict with the Local U Event.26:57 AW: Yeah, no, totally. You would love it. It was fun for I brought another member of our team and it was his first SaaS type... He used to work for me at agencies that I was part of before and so this was his first immersion deep into the SaaS world, and he was just like, he was blown away by it. And it was also great because some of the things he heard in some of the talks, he realized we're already using that framework or thinking about it that way, or doing those things. So there was a lot of... And I had some of these things too where you're in your own bubble so much an in your own head. It was so great to get outside affirmation like, "Okay, I am thinking about this right." Brand is really important and that's why we re-branded and it put so much into that. And here's somebody really talking about how big of a differentiator that is.27:46 DS: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Your new brand makes a lot more sense, I really like it. It's more all-encompassing. So, yeah. We talked about that last time.27:54 AW: Yeah. But yeah, so good from all those different pieces and then one other thing where I wanted to transition and touch on this a little bit is, I was also there seeking out a new vendor for our billing system because our billing system we built it ourselves, an in-house built, we have a lot of little wrinkles and just unique things about the way we bill on a per location and how many get added in a month and our re-sellers can sell and add or remove and at the time we built it there just wasn't a billing solution that fit all of the different combinations and possibilities that we have and so it's gotten us by and it's gotten us through but now we have a lot of other needs, we have four different plans, we have all these pricing levels, we wanna do promo codes and discounts, there's a lot of other things we wanna look into and so we're basically at the point of we either need to completely rebuild it and do its version 2.0, new life and have it be so much more robust or find a provider.29:00 AW: And the common thing that I keep looking at, it's like it's already all of our work to build and run one product and to me that billing system just ends up looking like a second product. And do we even want to try to maintain that and pay as a much attention to that as we have to pay to our main product of helping with customer feedback and online reviews? 29:23 DS: Yeah, we're in a very similar situation because we have an account system that we built in 2010, and it's been meeting our needs but it is like it's this terrible system to work with and whenever we have anything to add it's a real pain and so, yeah we've been working on updating it. We actually, we have another problem is that we use three different payment providers, we've got a pay flow accounts, we have a bean stream account, we have legacy clients on these old payment processing accounts and so we have multiple payment providers all hooked up into this account system and we have promo codes, we have all this stuff but it's just all hacked together in such a terrible way so we've re-conceptualize our account and about six months ago we started working on a rebuild and I'm gonna have two of my team members dedicated to building this thing right now, so we're building our brand new accounts. But the thing about the account system is that it's also the underpinning of our whole new platform.30:24 DS: Right now, we have all of our applications as separate things you can sign up for but we're building a single platform that everything will be tied into that you'll just sign up for white spark rather than these people that come to our website and they're like, "Well, what should we sign up for? You've got this, you got that, what do I want? I kind of want a demo of your platform." And we're like, "Euu, we don't really have a platform to show you." So we're trying to build a platform and the accounts becomes the basis of that. But then I think about what you said earlier as you were looking at some of those Chargify and Recurly and maybe it would be smarter for us to just use one of those but they get really expensive. So it's either pay once now and then we have our own system that we can manage and have complete flexibility over or pay forever, you're gonna lock into one of these systems and just always pay for it.31:13 AW: Yeah, but I see some of that as like a cost of success. It's no different back in the day when hosting could be something a little bit more expensive and you'd have to lay out to someone you're building a website for in the early 2000s, like if you do this much traffic, you might need a shared server and if you did this much traffic you might need dedicated and where they look at it like, "Oh wow, If I needed a dedicated server for $1000 a month, that would be terrible and be like, "No, there will be a reason you needed that dedicated server because you had so many visitors and so much traffic to your website", you actually want that happen, right. So.31:51 DS: Yeah, it's really interesting. I still think we'd have to build all the payment pages and all that. It almost feels like it's just the billing system and so our account system that we're building we still need it anyways and I don't know if we're gonna get that much benefit out of using something like Chargify or Recurly.32:08 AW: Yeah, yeah, well I'd be happy to give you a little in a test account with one and I have calls coming up with a couple of the others, 'cause I'm definitely gonna put them through their paces and vet them but I've already been impressed when what ours is in... That's not to say our system won't still have to do some billing-related things but there's so much more that that can handle where we just need to inform them, here's the account, here's the locations and plans and whatever else. Now, it assembles the bill, does the billing, contacts the processor and then there's a lot of reporting mechanisms that can come out of that too that can be a lot more helpful.32:48 DS: That is one thing we tried to build reporting dashboards out of our current account system, it's just we never quite get what I want I have this... I still cannot calculate churn which is crazy. I don't even know how to calculate my MRR and ARR and all that stuff. I just don't have those numbers which is quite pathetic really.[laughter]33:11 AW: We have those incorporated into our home-built tool and everything else and we've also done some good things like predictive billing. I can see where we're likely to land already for February here in the middle of the month, based on what's there. That yeah, some things could change a little bit but also able to see a pretty clear path to where we will likely end up with it.33:36 DS: Right.33:37 AW: Every time I would need a new report or I need that addition, it's pulling one of my team off of something that's a feature in our product that will allow us to get a new customer, a new whatever else to bring them over to build that on this other side, right? And that's where I've just kind of arrived at for our growth and where we're at, and we're passed a couple million dollars of... We're in the multiple millions of ARR. So, it's definitely at the point for me where it's like I see it as an investment and a cost of doing good business as opposed to taking money from us where it's just not worth the value, and I think that can vary for everybody at what point that time is.34:14 DS: Yeah, I think I'll look into it a little bit and reassess. We're not too deep into it. I still think a lot of what we're building will still be needed, so there might be an opportunity for us to offset and accelerate the development. 'Cause the ideal thing is I'll get these guys off of accounts and working on the software, right, so that's my goal, I wanna get there, get them there, as soon as possible. So if I could do something like Chargify then I think it's worth looking into.34:40 AW: Yeah, and I'm happy to pass along my notes. Like I said, after I've talked to all of them. Happy to share. It was nice. That was really nice about the conference to have that. And to have five different ones all on the same sales floor and to be able to go spend 20 minutes with each one and explain a little bit about our system, get some early answers and just anything that was gonna be a no-go or needs to be dug into... And then set up a next step in a call was definitely helpful, where that would have been harder to do one by one over the web to some extent.35:15 DS: Yeah, definitely, yeah.35:16 AW: Well, cool, man. What's your next couple of weeks? What's on your radar that's big in your world, or that you're looking after until we talk again, in a few weeks...35:26 DS: Well, we're gonna maybe launch a new free tool if we're gonna...35:30 AW: [laughter] Well, what if we just for the entire life of this podcast, you're always launching this free tool.35:37 DS: That would be awesome. [chuckle] one day we finally launch it. It becomes like the most ultimate free tool. Does everything you can ever imagine.35:45 AW: That's the cliff hanger, people are gonna download every episode just to find out when is the episode that the free tool launches? So this might be a little hard on the business, but it might be really great for our podcast.36:00 DS: [chuckle] Exactly So there's that. I'm also a little stressed because I'm speaking at Brighton SEO in April, and so I have my presentation there, so I'm doing a case study for that presentation. But I also have to do a good seven hours of training, and in that training, I gotta make all the slide decks for all the different aspects of local search so... I'm gonna be very busy with mostly that over the next six weeks or so.36:29 AW: Woo, Yeah.36:29 DS: But I'm going to Local Search Association in California at the end of February, and then I got a little ski trip to Jasper with the family, so. I got some nice stuff coming up too.36:38 AW: Nice, yeah, no, that sounds daunting to put... Any time you have to put together... I think the biggest thing I've ever done is like a three-hour session. And that was very daunting where it slides and I put together a workbook and a lot of interaction and things like that and that that was a lot of work... I was like, "I don't know if I ever wanna do that again."37:00 DS: Yeah, it is gonna be a lot and I'm just kinda, I haven't fully started on it yet, so it's not as scary yet until I actually write that outline and realize, "Oh damn, this is way bigger than I imagined." I'm always overly optimistic about things until I start on them and Then I realize, "Wow." But yeah, if I think about my slides, I usually do about, for 20 minute talk, I'll have about 90 slides, so for seven hours, I'm gona have a lot of slides to make.37:27 AW: [chuckle] Your slide totals are going to be, you're gonna approach like four digits. That's impressive.37:33 DS: I think so. Yeah I'll have like 1700 slides.37:36 AW: Nice Well, I'm gonna be interested to see... We just added another team member this week, a product manager. So I'm gonna be excited, just... Any time in a young company, when you're onboarding and especially in a remote company, there's so much we learn and we get better at our onboarding and our training process, and this is the first time where we've hired another product manager so to see what that first hire goes like there and the training there, it's definitely gonna be interesting to me. We just signed off this morning actually on some co-working space, so we have five, six people around the Minneapolis area now, and they were kind of seeking somewhere where they could get some face time and interaction and so we pulled the trigger on that. So it'll be fun to see how that adds and hopefully gives people around here more options. And then for me it's just tough too then kinda balancing out for those where we only have one in a place or two in a city. How do we afford them some of the same opportunities or try to bring them in from time to time so that they can see more of the team face-to-face is gonna be some interesting challenges.38:47 DS: Yeah, I was thinking about that with co-working spaces as well because I would do it maybe in Edmonton but then I have employees in four other cities. Right? And so do I sign up for co-working spaces in all those cities. It gets a little tough and it's hard to be fair to every... All employees, right? 39:03 AW: Yap, yeah, well, maybe that would be a great topic for us to talk about next time is just some of the things that are challenges in remote work and those types of pieces and for everything from finding the right people who thrive in remote work to training them in to getting collaboration and communication. There's definitely a lot of different finer points to it.39:25 DS: Yeah, definitely. All right, well I'll definitely put that on the agenda for our future podcast.39:30 AW: Sounds good. Well, thanks my man. Another good episode in the books and I hope you have a great couple of weeks until we sit down and talk together again.39:41 DS: Yeah, thanks Aaron. Always a pleasure. Talk to you next time.39:44 AW: All right. Thanks everybody for listening to episode three of the SaaS venture podcast. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks.39:53 DS: See ya.[outro music]

Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about how they run their sprints and release features in their products.Helpful links from the episode: Whitepark's free Google review link generator tool SaaStr Annual conference GatherUp GMB integration launch FULL SHOW NOTES[music]00:11 Aaron Weiche: We are back with episode two, Sprints and Features.00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp, and Darren Shaw of White Spark. Lets go.[music]00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, episode two. I'm Aaron.00:50 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:51 AW: And we are excited to absolutely 100% what we're doing because we're going from one to two episodes, and that's pretty exciting. I felt good about getting one episode in the books. I don't know how you felt about it.01:05 DS: Yeah. I think that, okay, one in the books and now we're recording two, that tells me this is a thing. It's happening, we're doing it.01:12 AW: Everything from here is hockey sticking up, and to the right.01:17 DS: Yeah, it's amazing. Our growth, from zero to where we've come, has been pretty impressive.01:22 AW: I've actually had some fun figuring out all these little wrinkles of podcast recording, and getting your feed submitted everywhere, and finding an editor and a voice-over talent, and all that kind of stuff, that was an interesting process to get to learn so much about a new medium. It's been a while since I've had to... It was like learning WordPress all over.01:44 DS: And you've really done it. I've basically been sitting back and you just tell me when to show up. So, thank you, Aaron, for managing all that stuff.01:51 AW: Yeah. Well, like I mentioned, that's a personal issue. I need to delegate more and do less, but I love to learn, so it's definitely exciting. But I probably need to hand some of it off to you to get you to feel involved.02:03 DS: Sometimes you're gonna be busy, and I'll take the reins of organizing everything.02:08 AW: There you go. So, what have you been up to the last couple of weeks since we talked last? 02:11 DS: Well, we're trying to get this one tool out the door. We've been building this new tool, which we call Review Checker, and we were so confident. After last Friday, we're like, "We're definitely gonna launch this thing." And then on Monday, we start stress testing it and it's like, "Oh, yeah, oh right, there's this problem." That's the trouble, you always think you're done and then you just have a bunch of people poke at it, and you're like, "Wow, there's still so much more that we need to do before this thing is ready for prime time." That's been taking up all of our time, and I'm really excited about it. I think it's gonna be a great project. I think it's going to be a nice little tool that will bring lead gen into White Spark stuff. We have built that review link generator. Do you know that, on our website? 02:54 AW: Yep.02:54 DS: That thing gets so many mentions and tweets and links to it. It's a really great tool that drives a lot of attention to Whitespark, and so this will be something kind of similar.03:05 AW: Now, do you guys have a formalized process as you're getting ready to release a feature or a new little tool like this that you follow very closely, or is it just like every day, see where you're at, see if it's done, next step kind of deal? 03:20 DS: It's the latter. It's like we're always just picking away at it. So, it's Dmitri will finish the last round of edits, a request that I made of how I want it to look, and then I'll take a look at it or Jesse will take a look at it. It's basically been Jesse and I testing the tool out and writing up a list of things that we want different. And then he'll finish that round, and then we do it again and take another pass at it and think about it some more. So, it's been growing like that over the last little while. And then we had a bunch of our team members take a look at it and we found some problems. The biggest problem... First, I'll explain how the tool works. Basically, it just scans your business name. It'll search Google, it'll find any sites that have review schema with little stars that show up in Google search results, and then it will track that and give you a report, saying, "Hey, you have this many reviews on Google, and this is your rating. You have this many on Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, etcetera." So, it just gives you this nice little report of how many reviews you have.04:23 DS: And so if you were an agency on a budget, or a small business, and you just wanna keep track of this, you could just come back to the tool once a month or once a week, and run it and get a little report back, and you can say, "Okay, this is how our reviews are going." It's this free little once-off, check your reviews tool. In terms of the development, yeah, it's basically just been that we keep plugging away at it. And one of the problems that we're finding is, let's say you put in a really generic name, well, Google returns a whole bunch of stuff that's actually not your business. It's someone else's business, it's some weird business. So, if your name is really generic, you can get a whole bunch of what we are calling false positives in the tool, so we're trying to figure out a way to fix that before we launch it.05:02 AW: Nice. How far into the results does it go? Is it mostly looking at page directories that would rank page one, or does it go further than that? What does that look like? 05:10 DS: Yeah, we do the first two pages.05:13 AW: All right. So, you're looking at, what, page one, and then page two, where the SEO joke is. That's the best place to hide a dead body, is page two of Google search results.05:21 DS: Exactly. And we run about 10 different searches, and then we combine all the results, so we do a whole bunch of variations to try and find everything we could.05:29 AW: Yeah, awesome. You're looking at this as more of a marketing and lead gen tool, at the same time you're building it out? Are other people on the team taking care of the marketing pieces, and how you're gonna promote it? 05:41 DS: Well, promoting is pretty simple. We don't have a huge promotion plan. Basically it's a free tool, so it's this new little free tool. We're going to tweet about it, obviously, put it on our social stuff, we'll put it in our newsletter, and that will mostly be the extent of it. And we think, generally, my experience is, if you launch a free tool that is cool and useful, the marketing does itself. People will just share it because it's free, it's like, "Oh, this is a great new free tool." And we might do a little poking around people that talk about free tools and have free SEO tools. We'll make sure we get listed on those, so just a little prospecting and outreach for that. And then that's about the extent of it.06:18 DS: The thing is interesting though because we have a number of clients... We have this one client in particular who is using Reputation Builder, which is our white labeled version of GatherUp, and they've got 70 of their locations in there, but across the US, they have 120 or something like that. There's some reason there's this other faction of the business that reputation builders overkill for them, they don't want to put them in our reputation builder, and it's like the whole process doesn't make sense for them, but they still wanna be able to track reviews. And so they were just asking me, "Do you recommend any inexpensive rank review tracking tool?" And I was like, "Well we have this little thing." And she's like, "Oh, well, if you could give me that in a monthly report, then we'd pay for it." So, I might actually put a subscription model on this thing. I might say, "In expense of $5 a location, we'll give you this report every month, and then we'll track it over time and give you a nice interface where you can see pretty charts and all that kind of stuff, and multi-location view." I am actually thinking about launching it as a paid tool, but we definitely can't do that until we fix some of these false positives and other problems with it.07:23 AW: Maybe you look at something like you're allowed one scan per email address or something, right? 07:29 DS: Yeah.07:30 AW: You can limit their use if they wanna run it more, then they would need to switch to the paid version.07:34 DS: Yeah. And we already have that actually, we limit it to three searches per day.07:38 AW: Okay.07:39 DS: It also does this cool thing, it calculates a review score for you. It's specifically a Google review score, we look at your primary category, and we compare it with all the other businesses and how many reviews they have and what their ratings are, and we combine that to generate a score based on what the average is and where you fit on that average, and so we report that back to you as well. It's pretty handy to get the sense of, "How am I doing compared to my competition?"08:06 AW: How are you pulling competitors? Is that from others in the same category, regardless of location, others that have ran it in the tool, or are you actually finding a way to pull out others that might be in the Map Pack, against them? What does that look like? 08:20 DS: Yeah. What it looks like is we pull their primary category from Google My Business, so basically... They'll select their business, we grab what we can find for them, and then we look at their GMB business profile, which used to be called the Knowledge Panel, and figure out what the primary category is. And then we take that primary category, and we search it in the local finder results and grab the top 60 businesses ranking for that term. And we parse all their data out, and then that's how we determine the average in your city. So, your average in your city... There might be 60 other hair salons, here's the top 60, these are their reviews and ratings, and this is where you fall in that.08:58 AW: Got it. That sounds really awesome and really helpful. Can I send you a few people to run a test on? 09:05 DS: Yeah, totally. I'll just give you access to the tool.09:07 AW: Hey, I like that even better. Do you guys often do that with features? Do you do an open beta with any of your customers? Is that part of a feature release for you? 09:16 DS: It is, and we will do that for our Local Citation Finder. For a free little tool like this, we probably wouldn't do it. But we are launching a new version of the Local Citation Finder. It's currently getting put through its paces by our internal team, and there's lots of stuff we still have to do before we would open it up to some of our customers. But, yeah, I would imagine we'll have a couple of weeks where we collect feedback from customers, and once we get it to the stage that we're happy with, and then that will probably come up with another few weeks or month of feature updates, and then we'll launch it officially.09:47 AW: Nice.09:48 DS: How about you? What do you guys do? Do you invite your top clients to stress test some your new features? 09:53 AW: A majority... We look at certain things that it is a must, so we go through internal dev servers, then what we actually do is turn every feature into a flag where it can be turned on and off in our admin panel internally. And then we'll do what we refer to... We just call it private beta, and it's usually us just turning it on inside of our own accounts where we maintain some data or businesses. So many things make so much more sense when you're looking at real data, instead of just stuff you're inputting or trying to use without a business case.10:26 DS: Yeah, definitely.10:27 AW: Yeah. And then a normal process that we've moved to is we just do an open invite on our monthly webinars. We just did our January webinar last Tuesday, and we actually have two different features going into beta in the next few weeks. And so we just put out there to send an email to our support team with beta invite in the subject line, and then we invite those people into the beta when it's ready, send them instructions on how it works and things to be aware of. And then if it's a larger feature, we keep track of all the feedback and comments that come in, and then some of the times, we'll even do a survey at the end of it anywhere from eight to 10 questions on is it intuitive, is there something you'd add, just trying to find out more about their experience with it. And that process... We really solidified our process around releasing a feature last year, and it's still a work in progress. We're trying to always optimize it, but it has really served us well, and we've just come leaps and bounds, especially in the last 18 months of that being a more formalized process.11:29 DS: Man, that's nice. That's smart. We are very not organized like that, so I think that I will take some notes on that. And when we do do our proper release for the Local Citation Finder update, we'll follow that process exactly. It's a huge release, it's like we rebuilt the whole software. That release is massive, and that'll certainly be the topic of... It'll come up many times in this podcast as we continue to push forward on it.11:56 AW: Yeah. Those big ones are the hardest. We have the same thing last year when we rebuilt... When we added our client level and introduced an agency dashboard for all of our agency resellers. There were just all kinds of reasons behind it. It was one of those things, and if we didn't get it structurally in, we were gonna wind up with just some issues in how we delivered features to our agency resellers, which is a very important segment to us. We have three buckets of customers. One is a single location small business. The next bucket is multi-location business, might be anywhere from five locations, physical locations, in their business, to 10,000-15,000 locations of their business. And then the third is that white label version of that agencies and resellers, we have hundreds upon hundreds of agencies and resellers that resell our software.12:45 DS: In terms of number of locations, that middle tier is the biggest? Right? Like multi-location brands that are working directly with you? 12:52 AW: Yeah. As far as location-wise, definitely that brings the biggest girth of locations, because you can have one client that has tens of thousands or one client that has a thousand. Location-wise, which is what our pricing model is built off of, that's definitely the one, the biggest. But our agency reseller is so important because it has so much expansion in it. You land an agency and they start selling it, in their first month they get four or five customers on, and then they can just continue to organically do that. They're out selling it and pitching it to their customer base. And so we have resellers who have north of a thousand locations, all by themselves, that are all their customer locations.13:33 AW: As we found, some of the thing behind the the client level and the Agency Dashboard we put into play was really helping a lot of our resellers sell to more multi-locations. Just there were some challenges in how structured the system was. That was one of those, for us, where it was like a three, four-month feature, and held a bunch of other things up that we couldn't release because it wouldn't work for agency resellers and only our direct customers and we never want to do that. And a lot of learning things in the process. So, even though we have a pretty refined process now and things detailed out, and we're still working on it, that's only because we've learned the hard way through operating loosey-goosey, and as you go, and just one foot in front of the other. And it usually leads to frustration and some missed things and things like that, where we just started looking at, "How do we use process to shore more of these things up?"14:26 DS: Yeah. I need to learn from that, because we basically do that one foot in front of the other until it's like, "Hey, we have something, here it is, try it." And I think that refining our processes would be very helpful.14:36 AW: We're always willing to try things, too. Last week, we had our exec team summit, and this was one of our big topics is how our sprints work. And in 2018 ...14:48 DS: I wanna hear this.14:49 AW: Yeah. In 2018, for the most part, we put a sprint together with X amount of features and say, "All right, this is what we think we can bite off," mostly looking at it in about a six-week cycle, four to six-week cycle. And, of course, some a little quicker, most a little longer, depending upon if you weighted them out the right way. And then we have that one really big one that took a big chunk out of the time. So, in our rear view in 2018, we completed eight sprints in total, with one being literally a three to four-month sprint all by itself.15:24 AW: This year, one of the things that we met on that we were looking at is, "How do we have some more predictability, and are we open to trying something a little bit different?"  Because we could definitely continue on the way we are going, but we wanted to see, based on predictability and time management and the marketing aspects, and things that help that way in your business, should we do something else. What we're trying for this year is a combination of a couple different things. One, we pretty much looked at the calendar for the entire year and weighed it out, and said like, "Okay, let's have a feature of the month. This feature is something that we are absolutely going to deliver in this month." So, we need to backdate stuff in our process so that we know we can launch this feature in March, and we know we can launch this feature in April.16:16 DS: Do you ever put some features in the bag, where you're like, "Okay, we finished both our March and April features, and so we're just gonna not release those until March and April?"16:25 AW: Yeah, we'll be willing to do that, if that happens. Because the other thing after that high level is we basically have this huge cascading list of customer requests, and other ideas, and medium and smaller things, and we basically treat that as a running list, that if we're sitting good with when we need to deliver this bigger or the "feature of the month," then we'll just start grabbing from the prioritized thing in that list, which literally there's hundreds, so there's no shortage there.16:56 DS: And some of them they can be banged out in a couple of days, so you're like, "Okay, well, we'll have no problem meeting that for our March feature of the month."17:02 AW: Yeah, right. That's what we're going to try for this year and see how it goes, instead of just really defined sprints that are in a four-week, a six-week... This is something I definitely pay a lot of attention to and listen, read about how other companies do their sprints, and you hear the opinions on what's too short and what's too long. For us, we have a really productive engineering team, and so I don't want to ruin that, 'cause I know some of that is by not having just a ton of rigid guidelines to how and when it's going to happen. And so it's like, "How do we get some of the predictability to hit some of our other goals and some of our other planning?" The nice thing for me is it allowed me to lay out every month of 2019, and say, "All right, this is when we're going to deliver these things," and I know, if I needed to swap something based on a really big need or some type of vision or whatever else, I'm going to have to pull something else out of that feature of the month category and then hope it can maybe find its way into the top of the other list to get handled. It helped me, vision-wise, for the entire year as a planning exercise.18:11 DS: Yeah. If I think about our process, if I say, "Okay, here's our six-month sprint or six-week sprint, these are the features we're going to have done in that six-week sprint." Let's say there's 14 features in there, I know by the time we get to the end of it we only got nine of them done. How do you deal with that, where you're like, "Oh, well, we were overly optimistic... " 'Cause everything always tends to take longer than you expect and there are always things that come up that you couldn't expect. I couldn't predict that this was gonna slow me down for three days while I was trying to build that feature, so how do you... Is there a disappointment at the end of it, or do you just take those extra six features and throw them into the next sprint? What do you do when you're laying out these sprints? 18:53 AW: Yes. Sometimes they do get talked into the next one, we have to shift it over. And sometimes some of them... We had a couple that just would float and float and float, and for different reasons. It's like we just released this week, our Google My Business Authorization, that allows customers to reply to Google reviews right out of GatherUp and that also basically enables the monitoring straight...19:17 DS: Yeah, love that.19:18 AW: And their API. And that's something that we've had in beta and working for customers that asked for it for probably a year. But it was one of those that just never got tied off because of a lot of just quirky things with it. And then Google updated their API in the middle of when we were working on it. So, it's one of those that stretched on and on forever, and it just finally ended up being something where I was tired of seeing it on our to-do list. It was like, "All right, this is it... We're almost to the goal line, we have to get this across," and so we had to buckle down. And it's a much harder thing to test, too, because you need people with access to the Google My Business accounts to be able to authorize it, and then see all the different errors it could throw off, if it doesn't go through. There's just a lot of edge cases with that kind of stuff, so it was a much harder one to deal with than when you build a feature that the data is in your control, and the functionality is in your control, and everything sits on your side. It was one that lingered on for a long time. Yeah, I don't have an exact... This is what we do when those things fall off, because we've had ones that kinda trickle along forever and we have other ones that just get buttoned into the next one, and then get tied up.20:27 DS: Sure. Well, I'm only asking because I don't really structure these six-week sprints, I don't really do anything called a sprint. It's just like these are the projects, we have a massive to-do list, we drag things around and prioritize them, and just things are getting picked off here and there. Features are getting completed, and eventually the project makes its way up to launch. We're like, "Okay, we're good, we're gonna launch this thing." But I don't plan it out in advance into these sprints. And I feel like if I did, I would be disappointed. I'd be at the end of every one, I'd be like, "Oh, well, I guess, we were overly optimistic." And so I'm just wondering how you handle that.21:01 AW: Yeah. Well, don't be afraid there. Don't let fear control you.21:04 DS: I'm not afraid, I'm all right.[chuckle]21:07 AW: Yeah. And that's where... Who knows what the process, we're doing. We could, after this year or even mid-year, if it ends up being something that really isn't working for us, go back to how we were doing it before in more of a traditional, "Here's a sprint, here's the six things included, and here's the six-week timeframe, that we're gonna try to get that done."21:26 DS: Yeah. One thing that would be nice with our loose way is that there's never a deadline, and so no one's got a fire under their ass to get it done by X, right? 21:36 AW: Yeah.21:36 DS: And so that's what the sprints would give you. In one sense, we do have deadlines, because I have a weekly call with the different dev teams that are working on different projects. And in that call we always say, "Okay, what's realistic that we could have done for our next call, for us to review on our next call?" And so these weekly calls is what keeps us pushing forward. And sometimes we're also too optimistic on that. We might pick four things and say, "Okay, we'll have these four things working for demo." But when it comes to it, it's like, "Wow, we were only able to get these two or three done because we got road blocked on whatever." And so that's kinda... We set these weekly deadlines. And that's interesting, it's something I started doing based off of a conversation I had with Dudley Carr, who used to be with Moz, he used to be on the Moz local team, and he's building a new product now and directing a team, and he said that that's the way he organizes his sprints, he has weekly sprints, and every week they check in and, "Did you get these things done? If not, why not, what happened?"22:35 DS: And he's also really... This is something I have to get better at because it keeps coming up. He's got this laser focus. Everything that comes in that could potentially distract the team, he's like, "Can it wait till next week?" 'Cause then he just puts it on the next week's sprint. Or, "Can it wait till next month?" And so he's really like he does not want to take people off the track of the four things that were supposed to get done on that sprint. And so that's one of the problems we have here. It's like, "Okay, well, the team is working on the Local Citation Finder, but we have these clients that keep chirping." They're like, "Oh, hey, we'd like to have this on a Rank Track or we'd like to have this somewhere else." And so someone's asking for things all the time, and every once in a while, we're just like, "Okay, let's just get that done." And so it takes us off track.23:20 DS: And sometimes it works out well. Just last week, or just this week actually, we launched a white labeling feature for our rank tracking platform, so a business can now get their... Our rank tracking on their own sub-domain. I'm pretty excited about that. We now have that feature. We didn't have that before, but it's the kind of thing like, Troy is like, "Okay, I guess I'll do it." And it takes him an afternoon or two to get it done, but it's also a little "ugh" for me, too, because now I know I've pulled him off of the Local Citation Finder, which when we have our call next week, it'll be like, "Well, I could have done more, but you asked me to do that rank tracker thing."24:00 AW: Yeah. So, what you're getting at, that's probably the biggest thing I know I struggle with and I know is on me to always really drive, and that's prioritization. What is a priority, and then how do you set it up for the things that are behind it? 'Cause everything you're talking about, we face it no different. Compared to what you're sharing... A one week sprint for us would never ever work, our product's too complex now. We have too many dependencies, we have multiple user types of our segments, and agencies use things a little different than multi-locations do, and we need to build it so it works for everybody. So, that shorter timeframe is definitely out for us. But we have the same things in that time when we're working on something where, yeah, there's customer needs, the sales team has needs based on something they're trying to close, and if we had this feature, then we would win that deal, and where do you put that into place? And it's hard. You have a product manager that is trying to protect the team and make sure that those things stay within reasonable planning and are reasonable to do.25:06 AW: I think that's hard for every SaaS company. I think evolution is important. To me, it's just being real with what can be done, what is that list. That's the one thing that I really liked about... And again all of it seems like a great idea now until we put into practice. But the feature of the month thing made it so you could only get one big feature each month, and you had to lay them out. So, it gave me some prioritization and some discipline, 'cause there are certain things I'm looking at, like, "Man, I'm not going to get that feature until August." The other things in front of it, that absolutely makes sense to what's there. The one thing to your comment earlier, I think it's absolutely important for people to have a finish line. When you don't have a date that the team is working towards together, and there's the peer accountability that goes into play and a well-communicated deadline, and you're able to cheer people on for it and hold their feet to the fire even and everything else, to me that's a really slippery slope not to get where you want to. I just think that's really important.26:08 DS: For sure. It just becomes too easy to just be floating around doing all kinds of little things that maybe aren't the top priority. Prioritization is really the key. And I think part of the thing that I always look at is, when I get these feature requests, I'm always trying to assess is this a feature that's only going to benefit this one customer, or is it a feature that will benefit all of our customers, make our product better, help us sell more? And then that's kind of how I... I sort of put them on the scale of where they fall in there. So, if they're really valuable, they'll get prioritized higher. If they're really obscure, then they get to put to the bottom of the barrel, and we don't really tell the client that requested it, we don't tell them a deadline. We're just like, "Yeah, we'll put that on the roadmap," but in the back of our minds, I'm like, "I don't know if we'll ever get to that."26:57 AW: Totally. I think the important thing with customer requests is actually peeling back the layers to what they're actually getting at, right? Because a lot of times their request is just the hack or the easiest way to get there that they can see in the product, instead of actually really pinning down to what are they trying to learn, what are they trying to execute, and then I look at it like if we built a feature that could do that, that would solve this for them. But then are there other things that this would also solve or value or benefits it would deliver to the rest of our customers? 27:28 DS: Yeah. And you can help them see a different way of getting at the same results, but with more benefit and also with a broader feature set benefits your whole platform.27:38 AW: No, that's how I mean. Especially the client side is really, really hard, because you'll have all these different voices, different use cases and there's a... Based on if they're the loudest or they're paying the most, co many different things can factor into who and what you have to listen to. And even your own internal team, look at, "Who's bringing this to me? Is it our customer success team? Is it our sales team? Is it our management team? All those things factor in, and that's where you really have to weigh through them, and like, "All right, which one of these am I actually gonna grab a hold of and take and do something with?" 'Cause when you look at all of it... We have the same... Probably as you, we have a stand-up all-team meeting every Monday, and in each department section, there's feature requests in all of them. And so it's kind of picking out where I see it, I don't know if the team always sees it that like, "Hey, guess what?" There was actually 13 feature requests in our meeting today. They saw the three out of their section and maybe not so much the cumulative of all of them from every aspect.28:41 DS: Right. Yeah, I noticed that actually Ahrefs uses a really interesting product called canny.IO, and they're using this to keep track of all of those customer requests that are coming in. And then there's a voting system. So, if you have a feature request, first you can go and see if it already exists, and if it does, you upload it as a customer. And so they really use this to help guide their features and understand what's important. And it pops up within the tool, and it prompts you to request stuff. And I think it's really smart. I've been looking at it, and I have our customer success team testing it out and getting a sense for it, and we might actually roll that out into our product. It just seems like a really good way to get all of that, 'cause there's so many customers that aren't gonna tell you. They're just like, "Oh, I wish it had this feature," but they don't say anything about it. Prompting them, I think, could be a great way to drive that customer feedback.29:36 AW: We have definitely... We've talked about that in the past. A couple of things that we do do. One, we use a product on the product management side called "product board," and we use that to collect other requests and everything else, so we can see when some of these requests are doubling up. We use it for a capture side. It has a lot of other features as well. I don't think we're maximizing it, by any means, but it definitely helps us in certain areas. The other thing we've done for the last two years is we usually send out in the summer a customer survey that's probably only 10 or 12 questions, and we ask, "What feature in our product could you not live without?" We want to understand what's really important to them, we want to understand additional ideas, understand where their head is at.30:21 AW: Really, at the end of the day, for me, it's a combination of those things, because, one, your customers aren't always gonna get what your long-term vision is or where you're trying to evolve to. I have that in my head and my gut, as well as other members of our team that come up and throw ideas into the hopper that we elaborate on. Then you have what customers are asking for. Then you also have what competitors are building and what they're doing, because sometimes you have to build things just to keep up with the Joneses in certain areas, and you have to decide, "Am I fine with this being a differentiator between our two products based on what our vision is and maybe what they're trying to be? Or do I need to have this because this has become the expected feature in this product category?"31:01 DS: Yeah. And your sales team can help you vet that, too. So, they're like, "Oh, we lost this deal to X competitor because they have this future and we don't," and so that's where you really have to prioritize those things.31:11 AW: Yes. And sometimes it makes really nice. I deal a lot with our multi-location sales and I've been really fortunate lately that there's the same one or two features that they're all talking about and mentioning, and that makes it very easy for me when I go to build our use case why we should do it, prioritize it, have it be one of the features of the month, that this is something that customers of this size, that would mean this dollar volume to us, actually want and wanna see. And then we go and marry it against what our vision is and what we're trying to accomplish. If it checks out there, then you can move on those things. But it's a moving target. It's very challenging. As I mentioned, prioritization is really hard and, yeah, we've developed a lot more processes and feature... Our own internal feature set and how we do those things, and I feel like we get better and better every time we optimize it, and tweak it, and try something whether it works or not.32:05 DS: Right. We were inspired actually by your customer survey. We got that customer survey, and we thought we definitely need to do something like this for our Local Citation Finder. And we started putting it together, but I realized... Some of the questions, like, "What is the one feature you would really want," or, "What is the one thing that really annoys you about the product that you wish it could do, but it doesn't do?" All these questions. I already know all the answers to those, because they're the same things I want in the tool, the same things that bug me about our current tool. And so we actually scrapped the idea of sending it out because we're in the middle of rebuilding it to my dreams. We're building my dream version of this software right now, and so there's no point asking everybody, because they're all going to answer the things that I already know. And I also know it because of our cancellation form. When someone cancels, we ask them why they're canceling. And so we've been collecting that data for a long time, and it's all right there. It's like I know exactly why people are cancelling, what they want that we don't provide, and so now our vision is to build all of that and we will... Once we get the new version up and running, and everyone's using it, then we're gonna survey them and see, "Okay, well what's next? What are the things that we didn't catch?"33:12 AW: Yeah. Well, the only thing I would caution you... There's a couple of other second level benefits. One, you're reaching out and getting a touch point with your customers...33:20 DS: Right. That's helpful.33:21 AW: In one that's structured that says, "We care what you have to say." And to me, that's a really important thing, even though if you have a great idea on what they already might say, now you're giving them a chance to be heard. And then when you go to create it, even if it's all the things you already heard, now that customer feels like you listened.33:37 DS: That's such a smart point. We're creating that connection. What you just said makes so much sense, I'm gonna do it. We're going to launch that thing, because then even though everything might be what they asked for, we're going to deliver it. "You asked for it, we deliver it. We're listening to you, we care about you." Oh, my God, yes, we definitely have to send it.33:55 AW: And it helps them realize, too, that you've queried the crowd. So, it's not just like what “Darren decided” or the team decided or whatever else. They understand, "Hey, they did to some extent, they put this out for a vote. They let everybody have a voice, whether we took the time to fill it out or what we said. And even if it's not exactly in alignment with what I put out there, I know they were at least listening to us. We were one of the data points they considered when they made those choices." I think there's a ton of wins, even though you might be exactly right, you might 100% know what's all on there, but there's a lot of validation and just good karma, I think, by engaging with your customers that way.34:32 AW: Cool. Well, hey, speaking of that, as we wrap up, next week, when this airs, you're going to be probably engaging with some of your customers face-to-face, because you're going to be at Local U Advanced in Santa Monica.34:44 DS: Yeah, looking forward to that. There's not very many local search people, other than you, that won't be there. It's pretty much everyone's gonna be there. So many of the local search people will be there, so I'm looking forward to seeing everybody. I can't wait see Susan Staupe. Susan is gonna be there.35:00 AW: Nice.35:00 DS: Yeah. She won one of our tickets to the event. I'm looking forward to hanging out with everyone there.35:05 AW: She's going be super pumped.35:07 DS: And you're going go to SaaStr. Right? 35:08 AW: Yeah. I'm very bummed to miss LocalU. I'll be just north of you in San Jose at SaaStr, which obviously, biggest conference in the SaaS industry. I'm really excited for that. I'm bringing one of the guys on our team that's only been with us a year. He heads up all of our customer experience and interface design stuff, and just excited for him to just see how big our industry is and just absorb a lot of the industry talks.35:35 DS: Nice.35:35 AW: Things that we get after all the time to what we're talking about now. There's tracks on product, there's tracks on churn and sales, just so many of those aspects. That's really exciting. And hopefully, by the next time we talk as well, your new little free tool will be out. We can talk about how to launch that and what the uptake looks like.35:56 DS: Definitely, yeah. It'll definitely be out within the next couple of weeks. [laughter] But you know what, two weeks is this magic number. I always say it's going to be out in two weeks, but...36:06 AW: Well, maybe you'll take some of what we talked about, and you will set a deadline and you will make sure you hit it, just to have some content for the next time we talk. Right? 36:14 DS: I'll definitely have content. We'll be two weeks further ahead anyways.36:18 AW: Nice. That's awesome. Well, it's been another great episode. We now have two under the belt. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed our talk about how we approach some of our sprints and releasing features, and then the things that all go along with that. I don't know about you, Darren. I was really excited to see the amount of people that shared what we're doing socially, some of the comments, starting to see a few reviews trickle in. We would love more reviews on iTunes, especially, and thanks people for sharing what we're doing socially. And don't hesitate to reach out to either one of us if there's a topic you'd like to see us tackle or share about what we're doing inside of our company. That's the whole point of this, is sharing things that people might want to know that don't... It's not always easy to get a look inside other companies and what they're doing. With that, episode two of the SaaS Venture is a wrap. And thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you next time.37:11 DS: We did it. Thanks, Aaron. Thanks everybody for listening.[music]

Aaron and Darren jump into things as we officially launch The SaaS Venture. Our topic for the episode is "The Hard Things" and we each share one of the difficult things we accomplished in 2018.The full show notes are below the helpful links.Helpful links from the episode: GatherUp Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors 2018 LocalU Advanced conference FULL SHOW NOTES00:08 Aaron Weiche: Alright. Well I guess there's no going back. We are officially launching episode one, The Hard Things.00:15 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture. I'm Aaron.00:47 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:49 AW: And we have finally decided to abandon or move away from all other ways of communication and get into this podcast thing and super excited to be bringing you guys through our world of trying to lead and manage and grow our SaaS companies, which both GatherUp and Whitespark are bootstrapped, and share just some of our day-to-day and month-to-month activities and what keeps us up at night, or everything else that goes in with it. And Darren I was trying to go through my head and figure out when was it... I know we were at a conference, but we were talking about doing a podcast together. It was some time ago, but I can't remember where it started.01:34 DS: Yeah, you proposed the idea at MNSearch Summit. It was in the after-event at some pub that was right across the street from where the conference center was. And I was actually FaceTiming with my Violet, so having a little FaceTime with my daughter, and you actually came in and had some FaceTime with her, and then after that little call you're like, "We should do a podcast." And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds fun." And so we talked a little bit about it.01:57 AW: That makes sense, where it was like some learning, some mental stimulation, being around smart people at a conference and then mix in a few beers. And that's when the big ideas happen.02:09 DS: I think that's how every podcast starts really. [chuckle] A few beers are required.02:14 AW: I don't know if I've heard anyone else document that so we might be the first to admit to it.02:18 DS: Maybe, yeah. Yeah, I'm excited. This is gonna be good. There's so much to talk about and it's a new, I often talk about local search things, but this is talking about running the business, it's a new topic for me to share with the world, so I'm excited about it.02:33 AW: Yeah, me too. Same thing, both of us speak at a ton of digital marketing and other types of conferences where we're asked to come in and give... For me, it's how to get more reviews and customer feedback and customer experience and it's so tactically driven a lot of the times. And I think both of us were really intrigued by this to share more of running a business, things unique to a bootstrap SaaS company, and all of those other aspects that we really don't get to talk and share a lot about, and it's also content that we're constantly seeking out ourselves through podcasts and articles and things like that.03:07 DS: Yeah, and I think it's gonna be highly educational for me as well. Just getting a chance to chat with you on a regular basis, and then even thinking about these things like, "Okay, I wanna talk about this process that we're dealing with with our pricing page," or whatever and spending the time... Knowing that I'm gonna talk about it in the podcast, I'll put a little bit more effort into it. So [chuckle] I think it's gonna be great for helping drive my own personal development as well.03:30 AW: Yep, I totally agree. So even if we only get two downloads out of the gate, we will chalk this up as a success, because you and I are talking on a pretty regular basis in order to make this happen.03:42 DS: Yeah, definitely. [chuckle]03:43 AW: There you go. There's a byproduct always of wins in everything you do.03:46 DS: Absolutely.03:47 AW: So just as we touched upon this first episode of The SaaS Venture, we wanted to look at the hard things, and this got me thinking. Just this last week, I put out a tweet because I was frustrated to myself. There's a couple internal projects that are just on my plate here at GatherUp and I started looking at all of the external things I do between speaking and selling and traveling and recruiting and hiring, as we're growing our team and all these other aspects. And probably one of the hardest things for me to do are internal projects, for me personally. Where it's working on a better intranet type system is one of the things on my plate. And I was feeling really frustrated because I was having a hard time carving out the time and being able to focus on it and that led me to thinking for our first episode topic and we're starting the year here recording this in January. We'll see when we get it edited and aired. But just reflecting back of like, "Well, what was my hardest thing in 2018?" And when I looked back at that, it was another internal project, it wasn't mine, just personally, but it was an internal project for our company and that was re-branding. We used to be called GetFiveStars for the first four and a half years of our company's life, and we re-branded to GatherUp on September 17th; it sticks out in my head very, very well.05:13 DS: Why did you re-brand? What was the motivation to get a new brand name? 05:17 AW: Yeah, it's one of those multi-facets, like many fingers on the hand pointing in that direction. One, I can tell you from day one, I've been with the company for over three and a half years, is one of those things that just as like a gut check never aligned with me. I'd like to say that I'm kind of a brand marketing guy at heart, is just kinda in my core. And so, in my gut, it didn't sit right. Then we had just kind of other pieces where we had... Sometimes we would get someone who would tell us your name feels kind of spammy because it feels like I'm gonna buy five star reviews. If I purchase services from GetFiveStars, I will get five star reviews.06:00 DS: Yep.06:00 AW: As we went up channel in our customers and started having bigger customers, we had a couple that were using the company Five Stars, which is a loyalty. And they were like, "Man it's really hard to talk about you guys and talk about Five Stars in the same meeting. And he's just like, [chuckle] "Why don't you change your name?" That was kind of comical but I was kinda like, "Yeah, I kind of agree with you." And then just looking at longevity of things like we have GatherUp now, we just finally got word that we're officially registered, trade marked. That was never gonna happen with the word GetFiveStars and it was just kind of like GetFiveStars felt tactical where GatherUp feels like a brand. So it was kind of a collection of all of those things that really signaled to us that we need to start looking for a new name.06:47 DS: That makes sense.06:48 AW: Now the process of that, that's a pretty interesting process, right? There is kind of like all these little steps and hurdles. The first part is trying to figure out a name, that might be the hardest part, because so many other things after that, are steps and processes and things you document and checklist and whatever else, where the initially figuring it out is extremely difficult. At first we tried to do it by committee with the four or five of us that we kind of call our executive team, within our company. And it really kind of fizzled out after that. And then to be honest, there's just a lot of... And I know not many people want to admit this, but a lot of late night texting with Mike Blumenthal, where he and I just, sending text, "What about this? What do you think about this?" And you'd kinda judge if it had any legs, based on how long it took the other person to reply. [chuckle]07:42 DS: Right? Yeah, it's like, "if there's a long silence then it's maybe not a hit."07:47 AW: Yes, yeah, you kinda knew it wasn't there. And I don't remember what it was or how or whatever else, but I was doing a lot of working and researching thesaurus.com, and looking into all kinds of other things that were related to what we were doing, but yet unrelated, and things like that and GatherUp just kinda came into place and was one of those like, where sent it across to Mike and got kind of a... Nothing gives you a yes. Most of the things that you sent across, a couple will get you like a maybe, right? 08:16 DS: Right. Did you start at the domain registry searching. You've gotta be able to get the domain, so how did you... You've gotta start there, right? 08:25 AW: Yeah, totally. When you're an online SaaS company, anything but the dot com to us was just non-negotiable, so...08:34 DS: Yeah, same here. Whitespark.ca. [chuckle]08:37 AW: Yeah, so going through that, and that was its own deal, it was like, "Yeah, okay, gatherup.com was not being used by anything, which is a great sign and we were able to figure out it was for sale but then luckily we had a contact who had recently secured a domain name for a friend of ours and his SaaS business, so we went through him. Definitely one thing I learned from my wife, being a very successful realtor over the years is negotiating with emotions is a really bad idea. So to have someone represent you in that domain name was definitely helpful because I definitely got emotions, where we're looking like, "Oh this could be the future of our company," and the other side's looking at like, "Well, how do I maximize and make the most out of something that somebody wants in this moment right now?" That can really cause some of that back and forth to be skewed a little bit.09:28 DS: Yeah, are you happy with the price you paid in the end? 09:31 AW: Yes totally, we were willing to go probably at least two to three times as high as what we paid for it, we paid in the thousands of dollars and we had kinda capped and said like, "Alright, if it comes in and it needs to be this much here's what we're willing to go." Because we looked at it like, "This is an investment in our future, we feel good about it, and we're willing to go that high." So the amount wasn't so much, it was one of those... It was an interesting process. Let's just say the domain owner was somebody who lives off the grid, wants to stay off the grid, so his kind of payment request and process were not a normal process for purchasing a domain. [chuckle] But anyway, basically between briefcases of cash, we ended up securing...10:15 DS: Is it drop them in by drone or something? Briefcase... [chuckle]10:18 AW: It was darn [10:19] ____. If I laid it all out...10:20 DS: It's [10:21] ____ up a mountain.10:22 AW: Yeah, if I laid it all out you'd get a good laugh. And it was kinda one of those things too where it's talking about the emotions. A couple of people in our company where just probably ready to quit at that point 'cause this person didn't make it any easier. Mike and I were at the point where we're like, "Hey, well, if this is something super sketchy or fraudulent, we'll put up the funds for it, the company won't be out." We're betting that this is a little strange, but the world of domain-ing is strange. So it just was what it was.10:47 DS: It was worth it. I struggle with it myself, because I once had the opportunity to get whitespark.com. When I registered my company, which is a local Edmonton web developer and so I didn't really care. I was happy to get the dot CA and whitespark.com was owned by a company in Portugal who was an engineering firm and I was like, "Okay, whatever. They're far away, it's not gonna really impact me." But then they went out of business, the name went up for auction, and I joined the auction, but I screwed up something. I never got the domain. So now it's floating out there and every once in a while they hit me up and they're like, "Hey do you wanna buy this domain?" And I'm like, "Sure I'll offer you this much." And they're like, "My client thinks the domain is worth six figures." And then I just laugh it off and I never bother doing it. So it's really annoying. I would like to have the dot com, but don't six figures want the dot com.11:35 AW: No. Well, keep after it. I feel like sooner or later, I believe in you, I think you can win that battle.11:41 DS: Thanks man, I appreciate that.11:43 AW: And then it got easier. Our Twitter handle, we ended up... There's another great one. It was registered 10 years ago by a gentleman in Australia and Mike Blumenthal went all the way down to... 'Cause the guy wasn't active on social media at all, but Mike ended up finding out that he coached his kid's rugby team, and he went through the President of the rugby club to reach this guy.12:08 DS: Wow, that's a story right there. That's a whole podcast.12:10 AW: Yeah, totally.12:11 DS: We've gotta get Mike on.12:12 AW: And I think we had a part with either $500 or $750 for the Twitter handle, but completely worth it and the experience of tracking him down was a story within itself.12:23 DS: Nice.12:24 AW: Yeah. And then once you kinda get past those pieces and you have the right thing and everything else, a lot of it on our side was just looking at a lot of processes and documents.12:34 DS: So many things to update, yeah.12:35 AW: Oh my gosh. And our biggest goal was don't mess this up. We have thousands of customers with a daily experience and the master plan was rolling everybody into this new brand. We had given our customers a heads up as we got towards the tail end, but we didn't wanna disrupt service and transfer everybody from one domain to another, and there was some architectural things that were different. We went from... Our app was running just at getfivestars.com and we moved everything to a sub-domain for GatherUp on app.gatherup.com for a number of different reasons. So just not messing up was the biggest thing. But, yeah, we created a spreadsheet basically by department in the company and here's everything that engineering needs to do, here's everything sales and marketing needs to do. From changing Zoom accounts, email addresses to what's on an invoice, here's what billing has to do. There's this giant spreadsheet that for months we just looked at and kept picking things off and just made sure like, "Okay... "13:38 DS: Adding things too. 'Cause like, "Oh, I forgot about this." There must be so many little things that you kept remembering. "Oh we have to change this, we have to have to update that."13:44 AW: We still had a few stragglers here and there afterwards, but you just stay focused and work hard on the details and you have everybody on the same page, and it went really well. I couldn't have been more proud of our team and the effort and the work that they put in. Engineering especially, they replicated environments, we had no issues related to the transfer at all. Replicate environments, then transferred all the data. Everything went perfectly smooth. I was counting on being on some 48-hour bender, never sleeping, fixing things, talking to customers, apologizing. You plan for the worst, right? [chuckle]14:23 DS: I would expect that too. And as a reseller, we resell GatherUp at Whitespark. I was really impressed that your communication as well was fantastic. So all of your client communication in your email newsletter and your blog and your social feed did a really good job of making sure that the communication was clear and the transfer was really seamless for everybody. So I think it was really impressive.14:49 AW: Thanks. I appreciate that. We definitely learned a lot of things out of it. I think what you hit upon, communication is so key. You see it so many different ways. I think it was just last week on Twitter, there was a big flare up because Drip raised prices and the way they communicated it and the stipulations they gave, people were all up in arms and it was just one of those reminders to me as a leader in our company, how important it is to communicate early and often. And honestly, those are really big things in ways to engage your customer base that keep them as a strong community and believing in you and trusting you and spending their money with you.15:28 DS: Yeah, definitely. And it's one of the things that I think we need to work on and improve and I think it comes from me as the leader of the company, sometimes I'm not the best communicator and I need to make sure that when we launch something we have a bit of a communication plan around that. So planning communication is part of the piece that we often don't put enough time into. And after this podcast though, I'm gonna much better.15:53 AW: There you go. Sometimes it's just being self-aware of what it is. There's a whole another podcast for us, self-awareness. I'm big into that. We can go and do a lot of things there. I have my own things to work on.16:06 DS: So what are the biggest wins? How did it benefit the company? 16:10 AW: So to me, there's two things that really stand out is one, being able to take this from scratch approach and truly create a brand and have so much cohesiveness and touch all the small things and really create it the way you want, was really, really important. Because our site and our messaging and so many other things over four and a half years kind of got Frankensteined together, and that's understandable with a startup. You're just happy sometimes to live for the next day, and you're not really thinking far out into the future. And I really took that approach with this and was like, "Alright, how do we best tell our story and how do we get to those pieces?" I really have seen that take hold with how we wanted that to work out for us in our brand positioning and messaging and things like that.17:03 AW: And then the second thing I looked at is it was such an internal win for us because it allowed us to tighten up the things we talk about internally, and define our why so much better. We built out core values for the first time in our company, which might sound crazy to some but we always... We're just doing the work and we kinda sorta knew why and what we made decisions off of. But we're really able to nail these down. In some regards I felt like I was cheating because I had... It wasn't just putting them out there into the air, we had years of doing this. So it was just like how do we tighten that up. And it really turned into something that when it all came together, I really saw our team all come together.17:45 DS: Nice. And then how about the reception? How the clients, customers, everyone received the new name change. Any complaints? Everyone's generally happy with it.17:55 AW: Yeah. I would say 90-95% was all... Customers are great. When you do the right things, they support you, they cheer you on, they share it for you. Some people... Change is always hard for some. Some will be like, "Great. I have to retrain myself this, and where to log in and what to call you guys." There was definitely some small pieces of that but the good far outweighed it and people were really like... I felt like they saw what our vision is. That we're not just about reviews, we're about creating a connection between the customer and the business, and they already saw it in our features and now we're putting this wrapper on it that best represents it.18:33 DS: Yep, nice.18:34 AW: Yeah, and really the only big scary thing was just... We are 99% inbound marketing, and so switching domains and ending up in that Google sandbox, and for us it was a five to six-week sandbox, that was scary stuff.18:50 DS: So, yeah, that 301 redirect, so you're gonna redirect all your relevant pages to the equivalent page on gatherup.com, but that doesn't flow immediately, it takes, what, five to six weeks for you? 19:00 AW: Yeah, yeah, it took us five to six weeks, so it was just daily of doing searches, and monitoring things in Ahrefs, and consulting others that are out there, "Have you seen it happen this long?" There was just so many things, and finally when we started seeing a branded result and site links and things like that, and you start to see things tick up in Search Console, you're like, "Yes, yes, we're coming out of it." [chuckle]19:25 DS: Well, that's interesting. I thought Google would be a little quicker with that. Five or six week seems like a really long time for them to get the pictures, considering that you've gone into Google My Business and changed the entity name, you 301 redirected the whole site, it's shocking it takes Google five to six weeks to get it all resorted out.19:44 AW: It was shocking. I wanted it to sandbox for five or six minutes. [chuckle] Not five or six weeks.19:50 DS: Yeah. That's what you'd expect, you think Google's so smart these days, right? 19:53 AW: Yep, totally. So I would say if anyone else, if you're facing this, if you're gonna do it, that's one thing you have to consider, especially if you're heavily dependent on inbound, it's gonna be more than a blip on the map, and you've gotta be willing to wait it out. And in our case, too, we also had great... I went back to people who had written articles in the past 30 days that were still fresh and asked them to change and update link... We tried to do everything we could to send the strongest signals possible, anything to wriggle us out of that sooner than later, but yeah, it ended up a month and change until we were out.20:26 DS: Yeah, a brand might actually consider planning for that and allocating additional budget for PPC and other marketing, paid marketing, in order to cover the loss you're gonna get from organic marketing in that period.20:40 AW: Yep ... Nope. Smart. I should have done that. That was definitely one thing we didn't consider, we were...20:44 DS: You didn't know. You didn't expect five to six weeks, did you? 20:46 AW: No, no. We were so consumed. I definitely expected a couple of weeks; I expected two to three weeks, but it really doubled. So that was definitely a hard thing about the hard thing.20:57 DS: Great. There's our first big teaching moment in the podcast. [chuckle] Anybody listening, if you ever do a re-brand, prepare for a five to six-week downtime in your organic traffic.21:08 AW: Totally. Well, enough of putting me on the spot, I wanted to get to... As we were talking before this and before hitting record, I find your hard thing really interesting because what yours is is a hard thing is putting together a giant study, and you definitely do that. You have taken over the Local Search ranking Factors report on a yearly basis. And I would just love to hear more about and ask you a couple of questions around what is it like putting together something that has so many opinions, is that massive, and then ends up on such a visible stage to people? 21:49 DS: Yeah, it's a pretty hard thing. But it's funny, because I have this very positive outlook on things. Before I do something, it seems so easy. It's like, "Oh yeah, no problem. I'll be able to get that done in two weeks." [chuckle] And then after I do something and it's in the past, I'm like, "That was no problem." But when I'm actually working on it, when I really think about it, it was a ton of work, and there were a lot of challenges that I had to face through it. So I think it's very applicable for our hard things topic.22:16 DS: So let me just describe what it is, because not everyone that listens might be familiar. So it's called the Local Search Ranking Factors, and it was originally conceived and executed by David Mihm; he prepared this study for, I think, eight years before he handed the reins over to me. And what he started with was he would send out a spreadsheet and ask the 30, 40, 50 top notable local search experts to rank the factors that are driving local search. And so each year he would add new factors and remove factors that aren't applicable anymore, and it was a spreadsheet thing, and you would just drag the factors that you think have the most importance versus the least importance. And so when I took over, I would basically execute it the exact same way.23:03 DS: And so some of the really hard things are chasing people down. So first it's like, "Are you gonna participate? Hey, can you get this back to me. I'm still... " So you're trying to chase people. And then another thing that I did this year, which was maybe a bit too ambitious, was I wanted to take it out of the spreadsheet format. Instead of dragging factors in a spreadsheet and copying and pasting, which was kind of clunky and difficult and challenging, I wanted to use a drag and drop survey tool. I looked at maybe, I don't know, five or six of the top survey tools, and none of them really offered the features that I needed, so we decided to build our own. So we put it together and we now have a little tool that we created that allows participants to just drag the factors in and really do it easier and simpler.23:53 DS: And another benefit to that is that now everything gets saved to the database, and so I now can run queries to run the analysis. And so it was really nice, actually, one of the first times... I haven't touched code in a long time, but I wrote all of these SQL procedures in order to extract the data, and I felt really proud of myself for actually writing some code, 'cause I don't do that anymore, my developers do not let me touch code anymore. [chuckle] Yeah.24:20 AW: This sounds like you might have built a whole new product. We might need to start talking about how you're gonna go to market with this. [chuckle]24:26 DS: That is a challenge. We're always building things, and I think, "I could sell this." I was like... [chuckle] We already have way too many little things at Whitespark, that's part of the problem.24:35 AW: Yeah. So between all these things, Darren, you're getting it all put together, you're building software to make it easier for people to do it, you're chasing down participants. What's your time investment into this report each year? 24:49 DS: It's really hard to estimate, but if I had to give a number, I would say maybe 300 hours roughly; 300 hours went into it. It's a lot of time, a lot, a lot of hours, and that's over months and months and months. So it's first reworking the form. What are the things that need to be changed this year, what are factors that need to be taken out, building the software, it's refining the software, it's chasing people, getting answers, going back and forth 'cause some people actually had problems with the software where it wouldn't save their answers, and so dealing with those kinds of things. And then after that, okay, let's say everyone took the survey, great, I have all the data. Then I spent a ton of time extracting all the analysis, so I'm analyzing the results and trying to get the numbers. I'm reading through all the commentary, trying to pull out information in there.25:35 DS: And then I'm preparing slide decks 'cause I took it to SearchLove London, and that was the first place I presented the results. And then I had another conference a week after that, so I had to prepare two slide decks. And then it's getting it ready to publish, so it's extracting all of the content and putting it into a resource format. It's writing up my take on it, preparing a blog post that pulls out what are the high-level take-aways. Oh, and then I also flew to Moz to film a Whiteboard Friday on it. And it even still comes up. So let's just be clear, I am not complaining. [chuckle] The beauty of it is that it's this non-stop marketing engine for me because... And I just got invited to go and speak at the Local Search Association, so he wants me to present on the Local Search Ranking Factors. Great, I already got that stuff and I know [26:25] ____ so it's really nice to be able to continue to reuse this as marketing over and over. And I got to present on a bunch of different webinars. And so it's a lot of work, but with a lot of reward. And so I love it quite a bit; it's a really fun thing to do.26:41 AW: Yeah, no, I mean, it absolutely gives such an authoritative stance by being the one to pull it together. And I think... I look at... I did it for four or five years when I was more hands-on and still running a digital agency before David even made it drag-and-drop, David Mihm who originally started it. And I remember feeling like this is a lot of work to fill out this spreadsheet when I got it, much less have to wrangle it all together and everything else, but...27:13 DS: Yeah. Yeah, I remember actually spending a good five, six hours just doing the survey as a participant.27:18 AW: Yeah. Well, and it was kinda nerve-racking, too, because I always looked at it like, "Oh, when David reads this, is he gonna think I'm dumb compared to someone else's opinion? Is he comparing these really hard against each... Is he doing his own ranking on who's actually intelligent or not?" It was nerve-wracking.27:34 DS: Right. It's an intelligence score, he scores everybody based on how close your answers are to his.[laughter]27:43 AW: I can see that happening.27:44 DS: Yeah, I totally felt that way taking it, and it's something you don't take lightly when you do that survey, you wanna make sure that what you're putting out there is your best effort, because it is evaluated by David himself, and then a lot of commentary gets read by everybody that does local search, so yeah.28:02 AW: So you touched on a number of the things from obviously the positioning as an authority, and an industry influencer, and all the different conferences and talks and things like that. What are some of the SEO benefits? Can you turn that into anything tangible for us to understand what it gives off in that, and backlinks and mentions and all that kind of stuff? 28:25 DS: Yeah, it's hard to measure. I bet you I could do a little bit of research and figure out how many times Local Search Ranking Factors and Whitespark are mentioned together, and then find all the ones that are actually linking, but it's a ton. Every time you publish this, there are so many links that go out. And I publish it on Moz, I don't publish it on the Whitespark website, so a lot of those links are going to Moz, which is fine. But another big benefit is Moz has a huge audience, so it puts me in front of Moz's audience, which a lot of enterprises follow, and so it has this really great marketing reach, and it really establishes me as one of the top influencers in local search as the person who executes this study. And so, yeah, it gives us a lot of clout, we get a lot of leads and calls because of that position, and so its dollar value is impossible to measure, and marketing value is impossible to measure, but it is... You can feel it.29:23 DS: After we publish this thing, you can feel the number of contacts really increase at Whitespark. The number of emails that I personally get that then end up turning into various forms of work, people either signing up for our software or contacting us for enterprise work. You really notice it after doing something like this. And then, of course, more invitations to go and speak at conferences, which then leads to more of that. So there is a huge benefit, and I really have to thank David for passing those reins to me, it's been a massive gift. And he's done such a great job of preparing this; he really just handed it to me on a silver platter, and I couldn't be more grateful. That guy's amazing.30:04 AW: Well, I would agree with that. I like David as well. I think you're doing an outstanding job with it. I like the fact that even when you look at it, you consider the process and how you could improve it, and your software and product side of you led to figuring out efficiencies with that and how you can make it easier to extract data and run queries against it and everything else. I think those are kinda cool things happening within your process that you probably, at some point in time, will look back and be like, all right, that was kind of wild that we just continued to evolve it even further from what it was.30:38 DS: Yeah, definitely. And it's also exciting to think about the evolution of it, because one of the things we're gonna talk about at the Local U event that's happening in Santa Monica in early February is we're gonna talk about the Local Search Ranking factors: Does it still make sense to sort factors this way? And so it's a real thought exercise as well, this whole thing where we get to think about what is driving local search. And so from a personal development perspective, it really helps drive me forward as well in terms of is this... Is what we've been doing to rank businesses in local search still applicable? And the way that we decide what drives local search, does that still make sense? And so it's exciting from that development perspective to be able to push the industry that way.31:23 AW: Yeah, for sure. Well, you kind of touched on here, as we get ready to wrap up episode one, I was gonna ask what are you up to in the next couple of weeks before we talk again, and try to get another show recorded, and put that out there. I think first week of February is Local U Advanced in Santa Monica. I was bummed, I won't be there, I'll actually be just north of there, I'll be in San Jose at SaaStr Annual, which is the big...31:50 DS: Oh, yeah.31:50 AW: SaaS conference. It's almost too big, it's 10,000 people.31:56 DS: You told me about this one, yeah.31:57 AW: Yeah, it's really... The thing I love about it is, you go into a session, you sit down, you introduce yourself to the person next to you, and it's most likely the CEO or a VP of sales, or someone else at another SaaS company that you can just make really great connections with, and ask a few questions, and learn more about things that they do, and everything else. So for me, the networking, and connections, and war stories, and finding insight, all of that, to me, is usually on par or even greater value than some of the presentations that are there. I will say...32:31 DS: I often find that at conferences, where just the relationship building and the conversations you have outside of the talks, that's where a ton of the value of going to conferences.32:39 AW: Yep. No, and that's why I'll be missing it at Local U, all of the... It's such a great conference, and it's family style, where you get 50-75 attendees, and all the speakers, and it's just a ton of great knowledge share for 2-3 days on so many different levels, so I'll definitely be missing out on that, but... So is it where you also... That would be my fun place where I'd wanna spend my time at a conference, but I definitely get a lot out of the SaaStr Annual, and need to be there as well. And I haven't found a way to duplicate myself yet, so I can't be at two...33:12 DS: Yeah, well, maybe next year I'll come to that SaaStr with you, that sounds awesome.33:16 AW: There you go, you should totally do it. I'll show you... This'll be my third year now, so would love to have you there so I had someone else that I know to hang out with and everything when networking falls apart.33:28 DS: Yeah, that'd be fun. So yeah, next couple weeks, we've got a number of developments happening within the company. We've been rebuilding our Local Citation Finder in modern technology; it was built on some pretty old stuff and had some really terrible code in it. And so we basically started from scratch with it, rebuilding the whole thing in Laravel and Vue, the most modern versions of those, and so that's been wonderful. Oh my god, I'm so happy [chuckle] to see the new Local Citation Finder coming together. So our staging environment, I was playing around with it, I have a weekly call with the team on that, and was playing with it today, and it's just such a delight to use compared to the old piece of crap. And the Local Citation Finder is probably our most popular product, it is our most popular product. We have so many new sign-ups coming in all the time, and that user experience they're having is just... To me, it feels like it's been letting them down. So I can't wait to launch this new version, and we might be able to get it out in the next two weeks before our next call.34:26 DS: I'm also launching... You're gonna find this interesting, Aaron, we're launching a software system called... It's just this free little thing, we call it Review Checker. So what it does is it Googles your brand name plus reviews and a whole bunch of different search terms, and then it aggregates anything in the search results that has stars. So if you've got schema markup and there's stars, it's gonna pull all that stuff in and give you a little report of all the places you're getting reviews. And so pretty much every review site is returning schema, and as long as they have enough authority they're gonna get pulled into our tool. So it's this great quick check, and we have a review score algorithm where we calculate what your review score is, and we show you all the sites you're getting reviews on. And so that little free tool, which will funnel into our GatherUp resell software called Reputation Builder, we should get that out the door in the next couple weeks as well, so I'm really pumped about that.35:19 AW: Awesome, yeah, you got some great, great things going on there that, yeah, we'll have to catch up in a couple of weeks and determine what topics to talk about on episode two. But as you and I have discussed, there is always so much going on on both sides for us that we really don't think content of sharing what we're up to, what we're planning, decision-making, all that kind of stuff is gonna be too difficult for us.35:42 DS: No, we're gonna have lots of content, so much to talk about.35:44 AW: All right, well, we got one recorded here; we'll see what the future holds for us. Thanks everyone for listening to episode one of the SaaS Venture, where myself and Darren Shaw take you through what it's like to lead and grow bootstrap SaaS companies through our own struggles, wins, losses, experiences, and challenges, and we hope we will see you again by subscribing to our podcast. Thanks, and have a great day everybody.36:11 DS: Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

The Total Tutor Neil Haley will interview Christopher Daniels of Ring of Honor.  "From the creative team that brought you CHRISTOPHER DANIELS & KAZARIAN WRESTLE AW YEAH COMICS comes the newest title from Aw Yeah Comics, AW YEAH COMICS TEAM-UP #1! Action Cat & Adventure Bug have protected Beautiful Downtown Skokie from all kinds of threats. But what happens when the newest bank-robbing threat is a familiar face: Christopher Daniels?!? How will the heroes deal with their former compatriot? And when Awesome Bear brings Frankie Kazarian into the fray, the battle lines are drawn! But WHO will team up with WHOM? AW YEAH COMICS TEAM-UP #1 features a story by ChristopherDaniels and art by Art Baltazar, and is available January 2017 at www.awyeahcomics.com, www.artbaltazar.com, and www.comixology.com. Copies autographed by Christopher Daniels & Frankie Kazarian will be available at www.rohwrestling.com and at Ring of Honor live events throughout the U.S. CHRISTOPHER DANIELS is a 24-year veteran of professional wrestling. Currently a member of the Ring of Honor roster, he is a former RoH World TV Champion and a 4-time RoH World Tag Team Champion, twice with his Addiction teammate, Frankie Kazarian. Christopherpreviously wrote the story for CHRISTOPHER DANIELS & KAZARIAN WRESTLE AW YEAH COMICS, released by Aw Yeah Comics in 2014.