Podcasts about baremetrics

About Jonni Lundy:Jonni Lundy is the Co-founder and COO of Resend, the developer-first email infrastructure platform that's revolutionizing how companies handle transactional emails. After helping scale Resend from inception to an $18M Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Jonni has become a thoughtful voice on sustainable growth, remote team management, and the psychological transitions founders face as they scale. Under his operational leadership, Resend has built a disciplined, metrics-driven culture that prioritizes long-term sustainability over hypergrowth.About Resend:Resend is a modern email API built for developers who care about deliverability, developer experience, and scalability. Founded to solve the frustrations developers face with legacy email providers, Resend offers a simple, powerful API with React email components, real-time analytics, and enterprise-grade reliability. The company has quickly become the go-to choice for engineering teams at fast-growing startups and enterprises alike.Show Notes:00:00 Introduction to Resend's mission to revolutionize developer email infrastructure02:41 How Resend is disrupting the legacy email provider space with developer-first thinking05:44 The unexpected psychological shift from IC to founder: "Success means other people winning"10:50 Inside their Series A: Why they stayed conservative even after raising $18M from a16z14:55 The retention graph hack that changed everything: inverting data to reveal product truth21:24 Building celebration culture in a remote team: why small wins matter27:40 Remote productivity insights: managing 24/7 flexibility without burning out30:29 Creating genuine connection in distributed teams: beyond Zoom happy hours33:45 Why making space for quieter team voices drives better decisions35:06 "Thoughtful discipline": Resend's approach to sustainable growth41:14 Finding balance as a new parent and founder: the parallel journeys43:48 The one metric that matters post-Series A: ARR per head over everything

Josh Pigford (@shpigford)​, who created Maybe and Baremetrics, talks about bringing his financial tool back to life by making it open-source!This has sparked surprisingly high levels of interest and even investment. Within two weeks.In our chat, we delve into the challenge of building a platform that simplifies financial data, similar to how Zapier simplifies automation, all under public scrutiny. The goal? A community-supported plugin system and a customizable personal finance operating system for every life stage. Josh also discusses considering changing the technology behind his project to Rails, weighing the pros and cons of different tech choices, and the reasons people contribute to open-source projects.Josh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shpigford00:00:00 Building Maybe00:10:44 Standardizing Financial Data Integration00:16:40 Choosing Tech for a Development Project00:24:37 Bootstrapping and Funding Open-Source Projects00:33:13 Motivation and Fulfillment in Helping Others00:38:04 Open Source Software and Long-Term GoalsThis episode is sponsored by Acquire.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/josh-pigford-the-open-source-transformation-of-maybe/The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/292-josh-pigford-the-open-source-transformation-of-maybeThe video: https://youtu.be/wq1qYUxUxagYou'll find my weekly article on my blog: https://thebootstrappedfounder.comPodcast: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/podcastNewsletter: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/newsletterMy book Zero to Sold: https://zerotosold.com/My book The Embedded Entrepreneur: https://embeddedentrepreneur.com/My course Find Your Following: https://findyourfollowing.comHere are a few tools I use. Using my affiliate links will support my work at no additional cost to you.- Notion (which I use to organize, write, coordinate, and archive my podcast + newsletter): https://affiliate.notion.so/465mv1536drx- Riverside.fm (that's what I recorded this episode with): https://riverside.fm/?via=arvid- TweetHunter (for speedy scheduling and writing Tweets): http://tweethunter.io/?via=arvid- HypeFury (for massive Twitter analytics and scheduling): https://hypefury.com/?via=arvid60- AudioPen (for taking voice notes and getting amazing summaries): https://audiopen.ai/?aff=PXErZ- Descript (for word-based video editing, subtitles, and clips): https://www.descript.com/?lmref=3cf39Q- ConvertKit (for email lists, newsletters, even finding sponsors): https://convertkit.com?lmref=bN9CZw

Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur and revenue leader responsible for increasing revenue across a small portfolio of companies where he leverages his 13 years experience of B2B Sales, Marketing and Recruitment. Mark currently splits his time as Co-founder of Speak On Podcasts, mentoring B2B Startups via GrowthMentor and ScaleWise, The Product Onboarders and coaching 100's of SDR's through his Outbound Prospecting course via The Sales Impact Academy. He's a Techstars 18′ Alumni and a regular speaker within the B2B SaaS industry, his work has been published by SaaStock, Mailshake, Pipedrive, LeadSift, Lemlist, SugarCRM and Baremetrics to name a few. Mark currently lives and works from Lisbon, is addicted to travelling and exploring new cultures and places. You'll often hear him saying “por que no?” (why not?) to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving and paramotoring. Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big!   Connect with Mark Colgan: Website: www.speakonpodcasts.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcolganmarketing

In this episode, we are joined by Corey Haines, the founder of Swipe Files and cofounder of SwipeWell. He shares their journey toward entrepreneurship, including the challenges they faced and how they found their passion in the world of tech and marketing. Corey Haines has been the head of marketing at companies like Baremetrics and SavvyCal as well as consulting with dozens of startups. He's currently writing a book on SaaS marketing called "Founding Marketing" that will be released in 2024.He also discussed the importance of having a media personality within a company's senior leadership team, treating content like a product, and building individual thought leaders. The conversation provides insights into the world of programmatic SEO and its potential challenges and opportunities for building a successful SaaS company. They discuss their approach to time management, content creation, and programmatic SEO, as well as the importance of treating content like a product and marketing like a media company.Topics:Programmatic SEO Marketing Enneagram Three Strengths and Weaknesses Managing Time and EnergyWorking on what's excitingThe Difficulty of Content Creation Building momentum for Swipe Well.Programmatic SEO StrategiesProgrammatic SEO and Generative AITechnical Foundations for Programmatic SEO Programmatic SEO VS Marketing Like a Media CompanyContent as the Cornerstone of MarketingBuilding Trust through Media PersonalitiesThe Risks of Building Social Thought LeadersRetention and Incentivization The Modern Environment of Media Companies Journey to self-discovery Show LinksVisit Swipe Files and SwipeWellConnect with Corey Haines on LinkedIn and TwitterConnect with Alex Birkett on LinkedIn and TwitterConnect with Omniscient Digital on LinkedIn or TwitterPast guests on The Long Game podcast include: Morgan Brown (Shopify), Ryan Law (Animalz), Dan Shure (Evolving SEO), Kaleigh Moore (freelancer), Eric Siu (Clickflow), Peep Laja (CXL), Chelsea Castle (Chili Piper), Tracey Wallace (Klaviyo), Tim Soulo (Ahrefs), Ryan McReady (Reforge), and many more.Some interviews you might enjoy and learn from:Actionable Tips and Secrets to SEO Strategy with Dan Shure (Evolving SEO)Building Competitive Marketing Content with Sam Chapman (Aprimo)How to Build the Right Data Workflow with Blake Burch (Shipyard)Data-Driven Thought Leadership with Alicia Johnston (Sprout Social)Purpose-Driven Leadership & Building a Content Team with Ty Magnin (UiPath)Also, check out our Kitchen Side series where we take you behind the scenes to see how the sausage is made at our agency:Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean SEOShould You Hire Writers or Subject Matter Experts?How Do Growth and Content Overlap?Connect with Omniscient Digital on social:Twitter: @beomniscientLinkedin: Be OmniscientListen to more episodes of The Long Game podcast here: https://beomniscient.com/podcast/

Welcome to another episode of "This Week in Niche Pursuits News!" This is a show where we talk about the most recent industry news, share success stories, discuss our shiny objects, and reveal a few weird niche sites we've run across. In today's episode, I'm joined by co-hosts Jared Bauman and Jake Cain. Watch Niche Pursuits News https://youtu.be/0dTNKm6LI2k “This Week in Niche Pursuits News” Google Bard opens up to beta users. Only US and UK Only in English Rarely cites sources “With Bard having Google's entire index at hand, it is interesting that it struggles to understand areas of content with multiple meanings.” OpenAI release paper theorizing which jobs will be eliminated by AI: “An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models” “Now That's Impressive!” Koala AI tool Baremetrics sold a year ago. The new owners increased price 2.5x and saw a huge spike in revenue. However, the MRR is now in a sharp decline. Ian Nuttal sells a 2 site package for mid-6 figures using programmatic SEO. https://visualfractions.com/ and https://worksheetgenius.com/ . Press release from FEI. Shiny Object Shenanigans Spencer's "Faceless" Youtube channel now has over 580 subscribers. Jared continues to grow his Weekend Growth newsletter Jake is using Hubble AI tools to create a trip planner, hashtag generator, and more “One Weird Niche” SaveTabSoda.com/. Tab Soda was discontinued by Coca Cola in 2020. Passionate fans are trying to bring it back PrisonInsight.com. Making $3,500/month - 100k pageviews. Ads only. Dog-Checks.com If you want to get more of this type of content, be sure to join the Niche Pursuits Newsletter here where I share similar topics 3 times a week.

We're joined today by Corey Haines, Co-founder at SwipeWell, Founder of Swipe Files, and former Head of Growth at Baremetrics. Corey is a marketer, entrepreneur, podcaster, and investor on a mission to help people with exceptional products, services, and content get the attention they deserve. Today's metric: Lead Velocity Rate.

If you're trying to solve a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, you can just try jamming pieces together. That could take you days or weeks. But, if you approach it with a framework or mental model (like starting off with the edges), you can increase your chances of success sooner rather than later.That's true for marketing too.Marketing mental models and frameworks give you the shortcut to success.That's where Corey Haines comes in. He's the Co-Founder of SwipeWell and has consulted and worked with dozens of startups, including SavvyCal, Riverside.fm, and Baremetrics.And he's a huge fan of mental models for marketers. He's even created a whole course about it!Today, we'll dig into one of his favorite mental models, Second Order Thinking, which will help you create more bulletproof Marketing plans… like New from the movie The Matrix.In this Marketing Powerups episode, you'll learn:What is the Second Order Thinking mental modelThree ways marketers can apply second-order thinking to their weekly and quarterly planningHow Corey applied the second order thinking to SwipeWell's embed featureWhy starting more side projects can help accelerate your marketing career

There are currently around 30,000 SaaS companies providing services to 14 billion SaaS customers around the world. With the growing number of software companies opening left and right, is it worth it to start building your own? In this episode, Raul welcomes Corey Haines, the cofounder of SwipeWell and the Founder of Swipe Files, to talk about the profitability of acquiring customers in the software and SaaS industry. He also talks about using their platform to help people save and organize marketing examples. Corey believes that copywriting is essential for marketers and entrepreneurs and that live events and communities are important for product growth. Who's The Guest? Corey Haines is the cofounder of SwipeWell (the only tool dedicated to helping you save, organize, and reference marketing examples) and the Founder of Swipe Files (a newsletter and community to help SaaS founders and marketers create predictable and consistent MRR). He was previously the Head of Growth at Baremetrics and the first marketing hire at Cordial. He's consulted and advised dozens of SaaS startups on marketing and growth. Episode Highlights Who's the Guest: Introducing Corey Haines Exploring the issues with CAC versus LTV Ratios Calculating the lifetime value for subscription-based products Impact of customer acquisition costs on business profitability Cash flow and product-led growth strategies in software and SaaS The challenges of measuring software sales performance B2C SaaS and the demand generation strategies for SaaS companies Exploring Relationship-Based vs. Community-Based B2B SaaS marketing strategies Understanding the power of copywriting and the benefits of persuasive writing How to use copy-pasting to create resonate copywriting Exploring the benefits of building a SaaS and a software company What it looks like finding a cofounder Benefits of a swipe file for creative inspiration The creative solutions of SwipeWell Tips for SaaS founders who are planning to build in public   Episode Resources Connect with Raul Hernandez Ochoa https://www.linkedin.com/in/dogoodwork/ https://twitter.com/rherochoa https://dogoodwork.io/ Connect with Corey Haines https://swipewell.app https://swipefiles.com https://coreyhaines.co https://twitter.com/coreyhainesco    Review, Subscribe and Share If you like what you hear please leave a review by clicking here

Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur and revenue leader responsible for increasing revenue across a small portfolio of companies where he leverages his 13 years experience of B2B Sales, Marketing and Recruitment. Mark currently splits his time as Co-founder of Speak On Podcasts, mentoring B2B Startups via GrowthMentor and ScaleWise, The Product Onboarders and coaching 100's of SDR's through his Outbound Prospecting course via The Sales Impact Academy. He's a Techstars 18′ Alumni and a regular speaker within the B2B SaaS industry, his work has been published by SaaStock, Mailshake, Pipedrive, LeadSift, Lemlist, SugarCRM and Baremetrics to name a few. Mark currently lives and works from Lisbon, is addicted to travelling and exploring new cultures and places. You'll often hear him saying “por que no?” (why not?) to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving and paramotoring. Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big!   Connect with Mark Colgan: Website: www.speakonpodcasts.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcolganmarketing

Corey Haines is a prolific entrepreneur and creator, he is the Cofounder of SwipeWell, a tool dedicated to organizing and referencing marketing examples. He hosts the Default Alive podcast, where he and his co-host discuss bootstrapping startups. He was previously the head of growth at Baremetrics, a business forecasting tool. Now, he shares his insights into marketing and growth for free to over 12,000 people each week in his newsletter. You can find him on Twitter @coreyhainesco.

François Nadeau talks with Jason Barnard about From SERP to M&A: The 8 figure ROI blog post. François Nadeau has more than 7 years of experience in digital marketing and SaaS. He has written for a number of websites including Indie Hackers, The Startup, freeCodeCamp, Baremetrics, Wishpond and Growth.org. He has given keynote speeches at more than 13 startup and web development conferences in Canada, the US, and Europe. He has long been a strong proponent of bootstrapping and Jamstack. How much effort does it take to stumble upon an amazing business opportunity? Marketers and business owners, if that is a question you ever asked yourself, then this is for you.  This week's awesome guest, François Nadeau, shares his incredible journey from blog post to 8 figure M&A. He also shares how he values creating content that best serves the audience in order to trigger business opportunities. Don't be put off by the rather geeky start to the episode (it spans with headless e-commerce and Knowledge Panels)… the rest is very business and marketer friendly - content marketing, community promotion, content creation, and an eight-figure ROI blog post that leads François Nadeau to Duda and the Snipcart acquisition. It's sure to inspire marketers and help them understand how to write TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) content. And to make this conversation even more interesting, Jason Barnard shares his brilliant tips in Snipcart's Knowledge panel. As always, the show ends with passing the baton… François incredibly turns over the virtual baton to next week's wonderful guest, Colin Shaw. What you'll learn from François Nadeau 00:00 François Nadeau and Jason Barnard00:35 Duda's Brand SERP01:25 Snipcart's About Page03:31 Knowledge Panel Tips from Jason Barnard05:56 François Nadeau's 8 Figure ROI Blog Post07:10 What is Headless E-commerce?08:03 What are the Benefits of Headless E-commerce?09:21 Two Main Advantages of Headless E-commerce14:00 Blog Posts: Opening Doors to Business Opportunities16:33 François Nadeau's Tips and Tricks to Writing Top of Funnel Content18:42 Golden Rule: UX Over SEO21:10 The Importance of Creating Content that Serves Your Audience25:07 More Top of Funnel Content and Blog Posts from François Nadeau30:40 Passing the Baton: François Nadeau to Colin Shaw This episode was recorded live on video August 30th 2022 Recorded live at Kalicube Tuesdays (Digital Marketing Livestream Event Series). Watch the video now >>

François Nadeau talks with Jason Barnard about From SERP to M&A: The 8 figure ROI blog post. François Nadeau has more than 7 years of experience in digital marketing and SaaS. He has written for a number of websites including Indie Hackers, The Startup, freeCodeCamp, Baremetrics, Wishpond and Growth.org. He has given keynote speeches at more than 13 startup and web development conferences in Canada, the US, and Europe. He has long been a strong proponent of bootstrapping and Jamstack. How much effort does it take to stumble upon an amazing business opportunity? Marketers and business owners, if that is a question you ever asked yourself, then this is for you.  This week's awesome guest, François Nadeau, shares his incredible journey from blog post to 8 figure M&A. He also shares how he values creating content that best serves the audience in order to trigger business opportunities. Don't be put off by the rather geeky start to the episode (it spans with headless e-commerce and Knowledge Panels)… the rest is very business and marketer friendly - content marketing, community promotion, content creation, and an eight-figure ROI blog post that leads François Nadeau to Duda and the Snipcart acquisition. It's sure to inspire marketers and help them understand how to write TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) content. And to make this conversation even more interesting, Jason Barnard shares his brilliant tips in Snipcart's Knowledge panel. As always, the show ends with passing the baton… François incredibly turns over the virtual baton to next week's wonderful guest, Colin Shaw. What you'll learn from François Nadeau 00:00 François Nadeau and Jason Barnard00:35 Duda's Brand SERP01:25 Snipcart's About Page03:31 Knowledge Panel Tips from Jason Barnard05:56 François Nadeau's 8 Figure ROI Blog Post07:10 What is Headless E-commerce?08:03 What are the Benefits of Headless E-commerce?09:21 Two Main Advantages of Headless E-commerce14:00 Blog Posts: Opening Doors to Business Opportunities16:33 François Nadeau's Tips and Tricks to Writing Top of Funnel Content18:42 Golden Rule: UX Over SEO21:10 The Importance of Creating Content that Serves Your Audience25:07 More Top of Funnel Content and Blog Posts from François Nadeau30:40 Passing the Baton: François Nadeau to Colin Shaw This episode was recorded live on video August 30th 2022 Recorded live at Kalicube Tuesdays (Digital Marketing Livestream Event Series). Watch the video now >>

François Nadeau talks with Jason Barnard about From SERP to M&A: The 8 figure ROI blog post. François Nadeau has more than 7 years of experience in digital marketing and SaaS. He has written for a number of websites including Indie Hackers, The Startup, freeCodeCamp, Baremetrics, Wishpond and Growth.org. He has given keynote speeches at more than 13 startup and web development conferences in Canada, the US, and Europe. He has long been a strong proponent of bootstrapping and Jamstack. How much effort does it take to stumble upon an amazing business opportunity? Marketers and business owners, if that is a question you ever asked yourself, then this is for you.  This week's awesome guest, François Nadeau, shares his incredible journey from blog post to 8 figure M&A. He also shares how he values creating content that best serves the audience in order to trigger business opportunities. Don't be put off by the rather geeky start to the episode (it spans with headless e-commerce and Knowledge Panels)… the rest is very business and marketer friendly - content marketing, community promotion, content creation, and an eight-figure ROI blog post that leads François Nadeau to Duda and the Snipcart acquisition. It's sure to inspire marketers and help them understand how to write TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) content. And to make this conversation even more interesting, Jason Barnard shares his brilliant tips in Snipcart's Knowledge panel. As always, the show ends with passing the baton… François incredibly turns over the virtual baton to next week's wonderful guest, Colin Shaw. What you'll learn from François Nadeau 00:00 François Nadeau and Jason Barnard00:35 Duda's Brand SERP01:25 Snipcart's About Page03:31 Knowledge Panel Tips from Jason Barnard05:56 François Nadeau's 8 Figure ROI Blog Post07:10 What is Headless E-commerce?08:03 What are the Benefits of Headless E-commerce?09:21 Two Main Advantages of Headless E-commerce14:00 Blog Posts: Opening Doors to Business Opportunities16:33 François Nadeau's Tips and Tricks to Writing Top of Funnel Content18:42 Golden Rule: UX Over SEO21:10 The Importance of Creating Content that Serves Your Audience25:07 More Top of Funnel Content and Blog Posts from François Nadeau30:40 Passing the Baton: François Nadeau to Colin Shaw This episode was recorded live on video August 30th 2022 Recorded live at Kalicube Tuesdays (Digital Marketing Livestream Event Series). Watch the video now >>

After taking on investment from Stripe, Josh Pigford realised he was running out of money in a matter of weeks and not months.What followed for Baremetrics was a period of salary cuts, general cost-cutting and a slow march towards break-even, stability and ultimately profitability.As a founder, Josh earned enough goodwill with his team that they didn't up and leave but instead stuck with him and helped move the company forward towards an exit.In this episode of It's Not Over, Josh and I discuss raising money when you aren't trying to, building a fully transparent software business, using content marketing to generate more income and how Josh convinced his investors to take a hit on their investment when they sold.----Apple: https://apple.co/37gY2I6Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3E4wUbmGoogle: https://bit.ly/3KBQgqGWebsite: https://nicharalambous.com/its-not-over----Josh's links:https://twitter.com/Shpigfordhttps://joshpigford.comhttps://maybe.co

In today's Shopify ecommerce podcast, my guest is Brian Sierakowski the General Manager of Baremetrics.Baremetrics is the leading provider of subscription analytics and insights for Shopify Partners and App Developers.When building a Shopify app, developers need to understand their performance: what's working, and where they need to improve. Baremetrics makes it easy by automatically calculating over 26 key metrics related to churn, retention, acquisition, and conversion. With Baremetrics, app founders can answer questions like “What plans have the longest life with my customers? When do you customers usually churn in subscriptions?” instantly and without the headache of spreadsheets.Baremetrics is a pioneer in the space of subscription analytics, and the only one with a Shopify Partners integration. Their team is obsessed with helping app developers get more from their data and grow faster.Profitably GROW and SCALE your Shopify store with the resources mentioned in todays ecommerce podcast episode.CLICK HERE > eCommerceFastlane.com or eCommerceFastlanePodcast.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this special .5 episode, we look into 3 startups: Baremetrics, Profitwell and Chart Mogul, they all were founded in the last ~5yrs, originally they did mostly the same thing, they were fierce competitors, and today 2 of them have been acquired. Today, an outsider's view of the 3 horse race.

Meet Corey Haines, creator of Swipe Files and cofounder of SwipeWell. Previously, he was the Head of Growth at Baremetrics and the first marketing hire at Cordial.In this episode, you'll hear why Corey created Swipe Files and how it differs from other marketing communities. You'll learn what it means to market like a media company in a B2B SaaS setting, how you can implement it within your budget and team size, and, finally, how to find a long-term balance between brand and performance marketing.Notes:- 02:15 A Unique Membership Community for Marketers- 08:15 The Specific Needs of Non-marketers vs. Hardcore Professional Marketers- 11:00 The Three Most Common Themes Marketers Need Help With- 13:20 What "marketing like a media company" Looks Like in a B2B SaaS Setting- 17:55 The Two Types of Relationships Marketers Have With Performance Marketing- 20:50 A "crawl - walk - run" Approach to Marketing Like a Media Company

“The rules change, the opportunities change. And so you don't want to build your castle on a big plot of sand, right? You want to have a strong foundation. And ideally, you want everything to funnel back to an owned means of distribution.” - Corey HainesIn today's episode, we are joined by Corey Haines, the founder and creator of Swipe Files. In this episode, he will talk about the idea of marketing like a media company. It's his mission to help people with exceptional products, services, and content get the attention they deserve. He's "stair-stepping" his way to entrepreneurship, building a portfolio of small bets to optimize for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Previously Head of Growth at Baremetrics and first marketing hire at Cordial. He consulted with dozens of startups on marketing and growth including SavvyCal, Evercast, and Riverside.fm, Holloway, Beamer, and Timetastic.Tune in now and learn more about how you can market like a media company!Watch this episode on YouTubeIn this conversation:Corey Haines:Corey's company, Swipe FilesCorey on Twitter: @coreyhainescoCorey's personal siteBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations.  Use it for free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes:“Too many people kind of harp on this idea of like, oh, you got to focus, focus, and only do one thing and just hammer at that. But early on, you got to explore, you know, and you got to put a lot of stuff out there that people will start to know you.” - Brian Casel“The best marketing looks like building a media company or just like doing things as if you were a media company.” - Corey Haines“The rules change, the opportunities change. And so you don't want to build your castle on a big plot of sand, right? You want to have a strong foundation. And ideally, you want everything to funnel back to an owned means of distribution.” - Corey Haines

Josh Pigford Josh Pigford is a serial entrepreneur. He is the creator of Maybe.co, Baremetrics.io, Temper.io, PopSurvey.com, PugSpot, Tiny Farmstead and other little bits of internet stuff. Josh's most recent business is Maybe. Their website reads "In 2021 I founded Maybe where we're helping folks take control of their financial future. I also run Laser Tweets because we all need something ridiculous to do." —— Links Maybe Finance: https://maybe.co/ Josh's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shpigford Josh's Personal Website: https://joshpigford.com/ Reddit SaaS: https://www.reddit.com/r/saas My Twitter: https://twitter.com/chddaniel My product: https://simple.ink/notion-forms

About Bryan Clayton:Bryan is CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. which had a $10 million annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013. In 2020 GreenPal generated $20 million in annual revenue.About GreenPal:GreenPal is an online marketplace connecting homeowners with lawn mowing professionals that want their business. Get 5 bids in minutes, pick the pro you want, and schedule and pay all online or with the mobile app. Founded by landscaping professionals to make the lawn care industry easier and more efficient for homeowners and vendors. Show Notes:01:15 Growing a high school job into a highly successful medium-size business5:45 Hiring the right number of employees6:30 Developing methods to minimize wasting time and other resources10:30 Calculating how much profit every employee adds, and what the diminishing margin of return for manpower is11:10 Working in the business vs. working on the business – making time for strategizing13:20 Applying blue-collar business learnings to tech entrepreneurship15:00 Triaging problems and focusing 100% of resources on the current major issues, one at a time16:30 Doubling down on what's already working, rather than fixing what's not working, especially when it comes to customer acquisition19:20 Inviting frictionless feedback and doing customer support yourself as a founder: closing the gap between customer logic and founder logic20:20 Thinking about what you can be the best in the world at, and focusing all business resources on that one thing25:20 Understanding your value to your customers: sometimes it's less about the actual service itself, and more about selling people back their time27:30 As a business that connects customers to contractors, catering to both sets of needs: customers want easy access to services, vendors want a sticky platform that enables fast payments, repeat business, marketing automation etc29:15 Creating incentives for vendors to perform well starts with accountability: providing performance metrics such as number of repeat bookings, reliability and quality ratings etc36:20 Identifying business problems and development goals, and implementing weekly strategies for success44:30 Creating one or two highly specific goals and getting your whole team to commit to them

Colin and Brent discuss the podcast's new name, baremetrics price increase, Twitter hostile takeover, & product improvements. Reach out if you want some tech and product diligence done.Enroll in Colin's Micro-PE Course & Community at IndiePE.com.Reach out to Colin Keeley and Brent Sanders on Twitter with any feedback. Sell your SaaS at VerneHQ.com 

My co-host Ed Freyfogle chats with Brian Sierakowski, general manager of Baremetrics. Brian stepped in to manage Baremetrics after it was acquired a year or so ago from the founder.Ed and Brian discuss the challenges of taking over a complicated business,  Brian's trajectory from SaaS founder himself to running someone else's business, and how changing prices inadvertently gave him the chance to get valuable customer feedback.

What's up everyone! Today we have a super special guest on the show, this interview is more than 12 months in the making – You probably already follow him on Twitter – I've personally learned a bunch from him and know you're going to get a lot of value from our conversation today. Today we're joined by Corey Haines. He's a full time creator and the former head of Growth at Baremetrics.  These days he keeps busy with many different things.  He runs a weekly newsletter,  And a growing marketing community,  He also manages multiple podcasts,  he wrote a few SaaS marketing courses,  he built-sold-and bought back a marketing jobboard  and he's a startup marketing consultant/advisor.  Most importantly, Corey's all-round great dude with a world class beard.Corey, we're grateful to have you on the show – thanks for taking the time.September 2020, you quit your job at Baremetrics to become a full time creator. You wrote about this and described it like you strapped on a spacesuit, launched into space and your plan is to figure out where you want to go from there.  How has the journey been 1.5 years later? Do you know where you're going yet?Yeah. Oh, man. The last year has been a whirlwind. I guess it's almost been like a year and a half now since I left. The North Star guiding goal has been to get into SaaS myself, start a SaaS company, maybe even a couple of products, and just have a small portfolio of bets and multiple things going on at once and see where they all kind of take me. I knew that doing that with a full time job is pretty hard, especially when I didn't want to step on your toes at Bearmetrics since we sold other SaaS startups. So I didn't want to build something that ended up competing with one of our customers. So I just kind of knew, like, that wasn't really an option for me. I didn't want to get another job and then start working on those side projects as well. But also, I wasn't really even close to building anything quite yet anyways. But I just wanted to kind of pull the trigger and jump and strap onto the rocketship, get into space. And then I could figure out where I was going from there. And on a personal level, very, very challenging. And like a lot of learning on hey, here's how to manage cash flow for all the different kinds of feasts and family cycles of freelancing and consulting. And just like knowing where to kind of find money and all the different revenue streams that you have when you're on your own, you don't have a paycheck really coming through the door. From a time management perspective, I've really learned how to be super ruthless with my time. I would say for the first four or five months I imagined once I left, I was like, I'm going to be free. I have so much time, I'm just going to get so much done. All these things are on my list. And then I didn't get anything done for like four months. I was like, what is happening? And because I had so many different meetings, so many admin things. I was busy doing emails, I was trying to chip away at small things here and there, but I was never really moving the ball forward in any one direction. And so I learned to be really ruthless. Now I do most of my meetings, like 95% of my meetings on Wednesdays. The rest of the week is completely wide open and I set what I want to get done, and I get those things done. And sometimes I work late, sometimes I work early. But you have to be really ruthless. It's been a great learning experience because really through the startups that I've worked for, consulting, advising, freelancing. Now I'm basically the marketing lead for Savvy Cal as well. So that's kind of helped bring back some stability in my life. And I see them all as just kind of practice rounds and getting in the reps and sets for learning how to build and grow a SaaS startup for when I want to do that for myself and for my own, especially the last year and a half, it's been like an invaluable learning lesson. Bootstrapping SaaS is really hard. You have to put yourself in the right position. Honestly, I wouldn't say that going the VC route is easier because I think raising money is really, really hard and it's a grind. And once you're on that track, there's a lot of expectations and it's a whole different game. But in the early days, it's easier because you have money, you pay yourself a paycheck. You hire the people to work with you. Bootstrapping is not easy. And so I would count this last year and a half as a part of my bootstrapping journey for building SaaS because it's all the work you have to do in order to be able to be financially stable, to put your time on something else completely without your whole world kind of exploding and going broke or, like, maxing out your credit cards. So I'm doing the best that I can, but I think I'm doing a pretty okay job so far. Multiple eggs in different basketsOne thing I want to ask about – you kind of mention the various different projects you're working on, like the idea of having multiple eggs in different baskets. What is the appeal of that for your personality? And how do you manage that as you're pushing these projects forward? I think that it's not necessarily, like, shiny object syndrome. I think that's what a lot of people conflate with having a lot of projects. You start one thing and then jump to the next one before you really kind of see the potential of it. I'm not really like that. It's more that I'm just mega impatient, and I just want to see all these things exist, and I want to do them and I'll do them all at once. My life is kind of, like, chaos sometimes. That's also why I leave four days out of the week completely wide open to get a lot of work-work done. I just want to see those things exist. I just want to work on them. I'm kind of a yes person and where I want to have my cake and eat it too. I just don't really like compromising and leaving something for later. So that's more the thought and the spirit behind multiple things. It's not really diversifying my income and multiple revenue streams and millionaires have seven sources of income. It's more just like, I want to work on all those things. I think they're fun. I want to see them exist, and I don't want to do them sequentially. I want to do them currently. What would it take to get you back in-houseSo, in-house, freelance, consultant, entrepreneur… Now you're getting a taste of all of them at the same time. Maybe someone in the audience right now is kind of thinking to themselves, I want to hire this Corey Haines guy that maybe this is not likely to happen… You possibly get a lot of offers to go back in-house. What would it take to get you back in-house? Or how would you design your ideal in-house role? Or scrap the question completely and tell me why the entrepreneur journey is the only way to go. Okay, well, I'll give you a Humans of Martech exclusive, because I haven't talked about this really anywhere else. So for last year, I've been working with someone who we were going to build SaaS together, and it's sort of like that was like the main thing. I'm putting most of my eggs in this basket. Long term, I want to work with this person. Then it turned out, his other businesses became too successful to really be able to step away from it even part time. So basically it came to a point where like, hey, we're good friends. We would love to do this, but it's just like not going to happen. It's just not realistic for this stage of our lives. That's a huge bummer because I was kind of just like, all right, well, do I go and find, like, a new technical co-founder or how do I even start to go about that? Is the last year just like a huge false start? Basically, do I go and get a job? Do I go try to do more freelancing or start an agency or something? I thought about this question fairly recently. I thought about it very seriously – going back in-house, to be honest. The first most appealing option would be to go full time with Savvy Cal with some sort of profit sharing or equity agreement on top of just a paycheck. Still, very early on, I had a feeling maybe I could make that work, but just not immediately. And so I was kind of like, well, I can't really think about that right now. And also I'm not going to freak out. I'm just going to let it sit there for a minute. If I really wanted to go work somewhere else, I think that it would be a very short list of companies. A company about to IPO or a unicorn, like a Stripe, or just a really impressive, interesting company that I knew was just going to be a moonshot and explode. And I'm still waiting for the day that Stripe IPOs so I can dump my whole life savings in there because it's just a massive success that they're holding out on all of us investors. Or I would want to jump in really early stage as basically a co-founder but first marketing hire at a really early startup that I think would be the next Stripe, essentially. I think that if I went back full time, it wouldn't be in a big corporate job. It wouldn't be like in a Series A or Series B, because you kind of, like, missed a lot of the work. And there's still the hardest part ahead of you. So I kind of want to jump in really early, get a good deal on equity and compensation, just be in it for the long haul, like the next ten years, and it's going to devote myself to this or like really late and have something that I knew was just like a Grand Slam. The work itself, honestly, doesn't matter a lot to me. I love product marketing, I love demand gen, I love copywriting, I love all the lifecycle stuff. Actually. I don't love Ops. Sorry, but I'm not an Ops person. So the role and responsibility and I don't need a team. Also, I could have a team. It's more just about what's the company, what's the stage or basically the opportunity of where the company's at. And would there be enough autonomy for me to do the things that would be enjoyable within my circle of competence? I didn't want to start an agency, and didn't really want to take on more clients. That would kind of feel like going backwards a little bit. So long story short, I found other sort of technical co-founders who are in this dating phase right now where it's kind of like we're building small things and we're going to see how we work together, not put a whole lot of stake into it or like, this is going to be the thing that we work on for the next five years. But I was like, hey, let's ship something and have some fun along the process. So that's where I'm at today and not for hire. Managing the stress of building your own thingThat's something that I've thought a lot about myself. I'm entrepreneurial too, one day I see myself starting something, but something I debate a lot is this idea of stress, the stress of being the person or one of the two people running things versus being a co-pilot, like being someone who is going along the rocket ship like you kind of mentioned with Stripe. How do you think about that? Is that something that sticks around? If I'm passionate enough about something that I'm building, the stress is going to be a positive stress. I don't know if you've heard this concept, but there's like good stress and bad stress. I think good stress is called eustress and then bad stress is distress. And for me, distress only comes when I feel like I'm doing a bad job of what I am doing. If I am doing a good job but isn't performing well, and I know that and that's sort of like not an acceptable outcome. So it's sort of like coming to something bad or if I just know that I'm letting myself down where my motivation is down, or like I'm not getting enough work done or don't have like, the energy levels that I have. In general, having high expectations, big goals, a lot of work in front of me, that's good stress and it's a lot of work, a lot to do. I look forward to it. I like it. I nerd out about SaaS marketing, and I'm generally not too worried about like, can I do this or will this work out? It seems to all make sense. As long as I do the best that I can. I'll just let the pieces fall where they may and generally they fall pretty well and it works out. That was true with SavvyCal. That was fairly true with Baremetrics. That was really true with Cordial. It's been true across all the other startups that I have worked with, and the advice that I give them, I can be a little bit more prescriptive now. I'm not too scared about being very particular and specific about the things I tell them to do. But yeah, stress isn't too bad for me personally. I think that the problems I might have that would be distressful later on is if a couple of these kinds of SaaS projects end up working out. And now I sort of have a good problem, which is that I have multiple things to work on at once. That won't necessarily be like a new thing for me because I've always been juggling a whole bunch of stuff. But I think I would have to figure out, how do I not let those things become a distress because I feel like I'm letting someone down or because I'm not giving the time and energy that is needed for this thing to really see the potential of it. So that's how I think about it. In-house skills to prepare you for full time creatorSomebody else sitting on the other side of this journey, thinking, I want to strap on a space suit. What skills do you think people should be focusing on in their in-house career? You're kind of earning your stripes, so to speak. What skills would you recommend people focus on to prepare themselves for a journey that you're taking? I think getting used to and knowing how to think through owning a project or even just a whole kind of area of responsibility. Like, all right, I'm tackling the blog, and I'm going to manage everything between writing or hiring writers or editing, publishing, promoting content. Just getting used to owning an area, whether that's content marketing or email marketing or demand gen, events, whatever, it's just having one lane area. I think what can happen early on is that you specialize and you're sort of like a contributor to an area of responsibility or some sort of channel. And that kind of leaves you off the hook because you're like, well, as long as I'm doing what's needed of me for this project, even if it doesn't work out, then, it's not in my hands, basically. And that's not really like a great thing to get used to. Getting ready for a creator journey, what you want to get used to is: all right, this is mine. I'm going to tackle this. I'm going to think through this end to end. I want to make sure that this is successful. To give you, like a little kind of snippet of this. Early on, I started as an intern at Cordial, and they started throwing stuff at me like, hey, we need to sponsor some events, do some research, figure out which events to sponsor, and then we have 500k to spend in the next couple of months. I was like, Holy, you're giving an intern this responsibility?! But they were just, like, kind of generous enough to be like, all right, here you go. Have at it. And I took it and ran with it. To be honest, I hate events, but I was like, this is my one chance to show some ownership and some responsibility at this, so I'm not going to squander it. So, yeah, I found the conferences. I had no idea what I was doing. I talked to people and got advice and got a lot of feedback along the way. But we scheduled them. We spent the money. We planned and coordinated all the travel schedules and cocktail parties and the booths and who's going to go where and how do we get salespeople to actually get meetings and make the most of these events? But I could have just been like, hey, I can't do that. Or, like, I need, you know, I'm going to basically, like, push this off to someone else, and, like, they're going to help me do it, but it's still not really going to be my responsibility. So just learning how to take on responsibility and really have that ownership be a part of what you do. It's a totally different experience, being a part of something that happens in marketing versus, I am the driver of this thing that is happening, and it forces you to be really objective and to really be like a truth seeker, to be like, Maybe this doesn't work out. Or maybe I was wrong about the way that this thing worked. I remember actually early on after conferences, we were like, all right, we need to fix our website. I came up with, like, the worst website copy of all time. Just, like, slapped a whole bunch of chatbots on there. That's when Drift was really hot. I had no idea what I was doing. Nothing worked. Nothing happened. I was like, oh, yeah… I was really wrong about that. It didn't really matter at the end of the day, because it was a couple of months that was kind of lost in progress but didn't hurt sales. It's just that nothing good happened out of that, right? But after that, too, I was kind of riding the high of all these events, and I was like, yeah, I need to really be honest with myself about this stuff. Maybe. I don't know everything. I need to really be objective about how this thing works, or is this right for us? And I just want to do things my way or what the ideas I have are. But what is the most promising idea to actually work and drive results for the company? Let's do that thing. And I'm willing to be wrong or adjust course or fix things along the way or change it completely, because I just, at the end of the day, want the best outcome for whatever it is that this thing is that I'm responsible for. On researching how to solve attributionThe beauty of startups getting to wear all those hats and drive big projects, sometimes with big budgets. I remember a couple of years ago, around the time that you left Baremetrics, you spent a lot of time chatting with a bunch of different folks, wearing a bunch of those different hats and different roles and stuff like that. You reached out to Close, you and I chatted about attribution. What were some of the things that stood out in the groups that you chatted with? Was that part of: I'm thinking of maybe one day building a SaaS and I'm doing some research here. Maybe talk about what's the hardest role to hire for in marketing and why it's operations.Well, actually, when I talked with you, I was really hot on this idea of marketing attribution and building software to solve that. I'm kind of convinced that at this point because of the direction with data and Privacy laws and a lot of deprecation of technology around cookies and tracking and browser technology, that it's sort of a lost cause. We might be able to have this conversation maybe like five years from now once the pendulum swings back in the other direction away from a lot of Privacy and data stuff. But right now it's basically impossible to build an underlying technology that would solve market attribution. It's just a total crapshoot. Sure, you can piece things together, but really, if you want to solve it, solve it. It's a little bit easier for ecommerce and for products and stuff. But for SaaS, if you want to solve it, it's impossible. So after about 50 conversations, one of which was with you, we realized that, yes, this is actually a pretty impossible task. But marketing attribution by far was the biggest and most painful problem across every marketing organization that I talked to and probably still is, because at the end of the day, that's literally what matters: what is working in marketing. If you can't prove that if you don't know it, you're misplacing dollars, you are optimizing for the wrong metrics, you are going after the wrong channels. You're not using your budget in a way that is profitable to build and grow the company. So that is the thing that's the crux of the whole thing working is how do we know that if we deploy this dollar, it will result in $2 in the error for the business? A lot of the other really painful problems were around, I would say, around operations and just like kind of meshing with sales, a lot of the kind of marketing automation stuff around personalization and how do we connect all the dots so that people get the right experience at the right time for the right lifecycle, et cetera, et cetera. I would say just like data in general is really difficult to do, like Segment and if you build your own data warehouse and whatnot kind of solve that. But it's still like a massive headache to manage, make any tweak or change. And similarly, those operations roles are really difficult to hire for because who knows how to do that. It's just you're looking for a unicorn, like you're looking for an engineer who likes marketing and they like getting the leads with data and automations and all this stuff. It's really hard. The hardest role to hire for in marketing is the head of marketingHonestly, though, I was thinking about it, and I think that the hardest role in marketing to hire for – just in general – and maybe I'm thinking about this wrong or interpreting the question wrong, but I think that the hardest person to get right to hire for is basically like a head of marketing. Because there are so many bad people out there who look qualified on paper but just aren't and just are really bad. To be honest, during my time at Cordial, I think that within about two years we went through five different marketing leaders and all of them were crap. Sorry, but they were all complete trash. Had no idea what they were doing. No managerial skills, no leadership skills, no budgeting skills. Couldn't even tell you what HubSpot did. I was like, how are you in this place? How did you get hired? There are a lot of roles that are really hard to find people for, like Ops. I think Demand Gen is a pretty specialized skill set in SaaS, especially when you want to find a SaaS marketer. For Demand Gen, content marketing is getting easier and easier. That's probably one of the easier roles to hire for. But to get a marketing leader right is such a critical position in the company. And normally there's a reason why it has the highest attrition and the highest turnover is because it's hard to find the right person. So that's my answer. What makes up the DNA of a great marketing leaderFinal answer for hardest position, great answer. I want to dive a little deeper on that. Like, what do you think makes up the DNA of a great marketing leader at a SaaS company? I just don't think that you can be a marketing leader and not be able to get your hands dirty and execute and do the work yourself. Maybe at a really late stage when you're more like CMO or VP of Marketing level, truly, and you have 20 to 50 people on your team, it's a lot more about leadership and managerial skills and actually more like budgeting kind of capital allocation. How do we get all people working in the right direction working on the right things. But I would say for a director of marketing, head of marketing, early stage VP of marketing, you just have to be able to do the work. You have to be really good at it. I think that's why Dave Gerhardt was such a massive success and like unicorn when he was at Drift. He was amazing at doing the work. He was an incredible marketer at doing the work. And early on you just need people who can get their hands dirty and get down to business and crank out some landing pages, crank out some email campaigns like really think through the ads and be strategic about do you know your market really well where you can sponsor the right podcasts and you can show up in the right communities and you can make the right connections for your sales team and your marketing team to the right events, et cetera. It's not really about the people skills and the leadership and just managing a team, making sure that everyone shows up to your daily stand up. No, it's about doing the work. I think also having the respect of other people under you, if you can do the work, makes them a lot more productive, a lot more motivated, and they will get a lot more done knowing that they have a leader who can actually help them with their work rather than someone who's just like, yeah, let me know how I can support you. And then in your next one on one next week, nothing's changed, right? You're still alone doing the work yourself, maybe mediocrely or just kind of stuck and blocked because they're not really doing anything. They're just sitting on their hands going through meeting to meeting to meeting, reporting to leadership. I think for earlier stage companies, maybe like seed through Series Bish, it's really about being able to do the work and managing the people. You can't be a crap leader, of course. I think it's kind of like we don't need to say that. Right. But you have to also be able to do the work well. From owning projects to leading teamsJust to tie this back to something you said earlier, like the advice around owning a project, there's a straight line from owning projects to being a team lead. You own projects. You can own all of marketing eventually, it's a transferable skill set. Yeah. You can't not know what you're doing in any one area. That's a huge blind spot. And that area will absolutely hurt because either that person won't know really what they're doing and they'll do a subpar job and that basically reflects badly on you or it's just not going to get done at all because you're like, I don't know, this whole event's thing, we're not going to touch that. I'm not that type of marketer. No, dude, you have to do everything. You have to do whatever the business needs. On writing a book on early stage marketingReally good advice for especially that early stage marketing role. Right. You actually tweeted about this a few times. One of my favorite tweets that you wrote was potentially one day writing a practical book on early stage marketing. For the folks that are listening to the podcast right now that are in an entry level role or mid level management that are one day hoping of leading an early stage marketing team or even mid stage marketing team. Did you ever get around to writing that book? And what would the rough chapters look like? Because there's so many things you can specialize in marketing, right? Like you say, you need to know how to do the work, but the T-shaped marketer is so vast and varied, how would you break it down? What are the most important parts of early stage marketing? My goal is to have it done by the end of 2022. This year, we'll see. Basically I'm working through a framework. I don't know if you guys know Rob Fitzpatrick. He's the author of The Mom Test, which is a great book, even for marketers, about how to talk to your customers because they're mostly lying to you very nicely. It's sort of white lies, but he has a whole framework around how to write useful books. And so I'm kind of going through his process, but I started with a table of contents, and the table contents is basically supposed to act as, like the skeleton of high level learning outcomes and topics to hit, and also what not to hit. So the frame of reference here is that it's for: how to grow a SaaS startup with limited time, budget and resources, basically, early stage companies. I'm not like a late stage scale up to a unicorn type of marketer, but if you're a founder, first time marketing hire, and you're kind of struggling to kickstart or accelerate growth, create some kind of scalable marketing channels, then this will help you basically create that plan and go and do the work and not have any sort of, like, area weakness or things that you can't do. I'm repackaging a lot of the course material, so it's not really a lot of writing for me. It's going to be a lot of transcribing and assembling stuff that I've already created from a lot of other courses and newsletters and podcasts and things I've done in the past. But the loose structure is kind of like we have table stakes: All marketing is derivative with the product Here's how you measure your product market fit, that way, you're not like throwing money into a leaky bucket and marketing something that isn't really ready for traction. How to pick a great market or expand to great markets. Common myths and mistakes that hold people back. Customer researchAnd then it really starts with customer research. I'm a big believer in this. You can let customers tell you how they want to be marketed to, and the customers basically set the strategy for the copywriting. Here's the thing that resonates. Here are all the areas where they hang out. Here are the most likely value propositions and offers to resonate with them. Here's how we go and find more people like this. So I first start with online sleuthing, where you do a lot of review mining and going through communities, being active there. Then you can kind of go through surveys. If you have an early access list or a small group of customers, we can ask them basically to find patterns and value propositions, what they care about and buying triggers, how they find and search for software like yours. And then you can go to video calls. We hop on a call like this and you really kind of dig deep and you're trying to really grab voice of the customer. Right. Like tangible words. These are the words that customers use. And you can copy paste them onto your landing page about how they describe their problems and what they're looking for, as well as influence mapping. So what are all the podcast you listen to and the Facebook groups that you show up in? Basically, who and what do you lean on to learn in your industry? Where do you go to learn about stuff related to your job, these digital watering holes of fuel. Right. Landing pages and positioningAnd then I think it really starts with once you have that kind of nailed down, you have to start with your landing page on your website. This is the same thing that I did with SavvyCal. That worked really well when I started with them. We were doing like $500 in MRR. Maybe. And of course we want to kind of get down to business and start scaling stuff up and do some marketing campaigns. But I just knew, like, there's still a lot of people who are signing up. They were like, how is this different from Calendly? And we would try to describe it still wouldn't really make sense. The conversion rate was really low. Like, Derek had sent out a bunch of blasts to his email list and it still wasn't really converting very well. So I just knew, if we do anything else, it's still not going to land very well. We need to nail the landing page. And really what that means is we need to nail our positioning. We need to nail the messaging. We need to have a clear, concise, compelling reason for someone to click that button and say, get started with SavvyCal and connect my calendar. So that's why I tell people now. It's like, okay, go to customer insurance. Then you start with your landing page and your positioning. You can use what I call the only test to basically create a compelling positioning statement where you are kind of the obvious choice. This is very derivative of April Dunford. It's obviously awesome if you can't tell. So we use a lot from there. But you need to be an obvious choice for someone, right? Not just marginally better or not just different, but you need to be an obvious choice for a subset of customers. Pricing and activation modelsOnce you have that down, I think the temptation is to just immediately jump straight to channels. But your pricing and activation models really matter because, again, you got someone to click the button and get started. And now what a lot of people do is they'll put them through a form where it's ‘contact us' or it's ‘start your trial', but it's ‘credit card required' or there's just some sort of exorbitant price that they just pull out of thin air. That doesn't make any sense. And people are like, whatever, screw it. I'll look at this later. Right. So you want to map pricing to value, not to cost or competitors. But you also want to make sure that you're picking pricing that you can learn from and that's oriented around the primary value metric that's linear with the value that people get and the outcomes that your software helps them achieve in their lives. And also that you're onboarding them in a very fluid, nice way so you're not turning them off immediately. Then the real marketing startsAnd then we can start getting to the marketing, the real marketing, the scalable stuff. Here I have everything on how to launch and announce and kind of use special offers to create momentum. A couple of examples, with SavvyCal, we did a landing page, we planned for a Product Hunt launch before Product Hunt. We ran a little campaign to reserve your username because there's some scarcity on the little slug. So SavvyCall.com/corey and whatever the meeting ID is. And so I want Corey. I don't want Coryhanes3691. I want it to be Corey. And we knew that a lot of other people would, too. So we sent that out to the list. We said, hey, this is our customers only sign up today. We're about to launch on product hunt and we know there's going to be a huge wave of people coming. So become a customer, save your own slug. That created a lot of momentum and early kind of scarcity. We did another thing around a Calendly buyout where we offered to buy the end of your subscription since it was around the end of the year. And we know that you just re upped for your annual subscription calendar, probably, but we'll buy it out. We'll basically credit the same amount to your SavvyCall account. You won't lose a dollar if you switch. Right now, we'll get this done for you. That created a whole bunch of ways. So things like that, you're building this momentum, and then the kind of crescendo is at the end with a product launch that's kind of like the last thing that you do in your launch event. Product Hunt was absolutely massive for SavvyCal, really. There's like a step change in inflection point in the launch or in the MRR trajectory after that, and then we get to channels. ChannelsSo I go through all the channels, everything from content, which I think is very much like the cornerstone of marketing strategy to advertising partnerships, platforms. Events, community, product, virality, and how that can be engineered as well, even if you're not inherently viral and then gorilla tactics. Rest of the bookThe rest of the book, I'm not really sure. I have some ideas for scaling. So how do you hire and create budgets and map a budget back to a goal and then, some type of stuff around your tech stack and minimal tools and things you need to implement. But the real meat of it is channels, obviously. But then, the work before that too, which is your landing page, customer research, pricing, and the launch events. What about the metrics?There are so many things you said there that I want to go off on tangents with, but I know we have a limit here on time, but one thing that you didn't really dive into, and maybe that's in the channel section. But metrics is something that's super close to Jon and I's heart, being at Klipfolio. We know that early stage founders love to obsess about all the metrics they can track. Once they get into the funnels and the channels they think they have product market fit, then it's like, all right, what are we tracking? And I know that you've recently been talking a lot about this idea that your SaaS metrics are oftentimes lying to you and specifically talking about LTV, churn and attribution. What do you mean exactly by that? And is that part of the channel section of the book? Yes, actually, I need to figure out a place to put that in there. Maybe they'll come in the tech stack section. But also given my time at Baremetrics, metrics are very near and dear to my heart, and something that I spent an insane amount of hours thinking about and looking at and consulting others about. Actually, one of the core things that I did was I would meet with about 10 to 20 founders and operators a week, either who were customers with questions and wanted help and advice, or with trialing potential customers. How do I use this? What is the value of Baremetrics? So I've seen everything. Like, any combination, Jon, I'm sure it's the same. I've seen it all. There's nothing surprising, and it really gives you a lot of perspective. And so I finally after all those brain dumpsI was like, here's some kind of quirks about your status metrics that you might not be aware of. It can actually be really misleading. Higher growth leads to higher churnThe first one, actually, is that higher growth usually equals higher turn. This drove me absolutely bonkers at Baremetrics because it felt like every time we started to grow faster the turn would pick up and then everyone else on the team would be freaking, oh, what's going on? We need to stop whatever we're doing, fix the churn and then we can start growing again. So it's the stop, start, stop. We'd like to turn on the channel, start doing these campaigns, churn would pick up, we'd stop, trying to go back down. After the third time, I was like, wait a second, this happened three times in a row. Now I started really digging in with other founders and other Baremetrics customers also looking at literal growth rates and curves on the graph and mapping that onto your turn rate as well. And it's pretty much always like a one to one linear correlation between higher growth equals higher churn. Why is that? It's because when you're growing more, you have a lot more top of the funnel, a lot more interest, a lot more hype and momentum. And also with that, a lot, a lot more cruft, the drifters, the people who are not the best fit for your product. So basically when you're fast growing, a lot of metrics are going to go down, your retention is going to go down because people are going to be churning out after the first month or two because they got really excited about it or they caught you when you're running an ad, turns out they're not a great customer. Also your conversion rate is going to go way down because again, more trials or more premium users, but less conversions because they might not be a great fit or just like you caught them early, you're sort of like front Loading a lot of your marketing. Also your landing page, you're getting a lot of traffic conversion rate way down. At one point I think the landing page was converting at around like 3% from visitor to trial. And then I started doing all this content marketing, all these events and all these launches, and then it went all the way down to like 05%. And I thought, I am the worst marketer of all time. No, actually it's par for the course. It just happens. So a lot of people don't realize that. But you can expect higher churn when you have higher growth. And if you'll see as well really plateaued startups, they have great churn. Their churn is like 0.5% or 1%. Why? Because no unqualified customers are coming through the door whatsoever. Because they're not doing a lot of marketing, right? They're not doing a lot of acquisition. Reactivation rates are underratedBut also you can actually have high churn if and you can sustain high churn if you have a high reactivation rate. No one talks about reactivation at all for some reason, I think because no one really understands it or has taken the time to really think about it. But reactivation is the rate of canceled customers coming back and signing up as a paid customer again and again. I realized after our churn would go down, our reactivation would go down too. And then growth would go up. Churn will go up, reactivation will go up. I'm like, what is going on here? And it turns out that some customers are just finicky, especially certain segments. I found this a lot when I started digging in into software that serves freelancers kind of creators and anyone who generally doesn't have a lot of money. Actually, a lot of gym owners are like very on edge with their finances for whatever reason. I couldn't tell you why. But just like anyone in the fitness industry, they're probably going to have failed payments or they're going to cancel, come back for next month, or like, they're always in between different things. But you can actually have high churn if you have high reactivation. Basically, think about it as a discount to your churn rate. So there was a startup that I talked to, looked at the churn. It was like 12%. I was like, this is absolutely insane. But about half of it, about 6% of that was coming back, like the next month or the month later, they had about 6% of their growth come from reactivation every month. So I was like, oh, it's actually fine. It's actually about 6% truly churn. So it's sustainable. It's fine. And they made it work with another one. And then I'll kind of digress. LTVHere is lifetime value. I could talk about this all day long, but lifetime value is not a thing in SaaS. It just isn't. It works for one time sales. Actually, if you guys have a different opinion, I'd love to hear because I'm always trying to test this and see how I'm wrong here or if there's any edge cases. But it works great for one time sales. Because basically the thought is how do we quantify the expected average value of a customer over time when you have a one time sale or like a very small product skew with very similar price points? It's very easy to calculate lifetime value. And that becomes useful because, you know, even if I'm like break even on the first purchase with this customer, over the lifetime, they'll be profitable. Right. And that's the whole idea. The problem with SaaS is that it's recurring revenue. So therefore, there's kind of multiple sales happening every month or every year, and there is no end date. There's also a wide range of price points. Could be anywhere between $9 a month and $900 a month. And so if you average that out, you're going to get to a number that might be skewed lower or higher than what's actually representative of the customer base. And also the way that you're supposed to calculate value in churn is by dividing your average revenue per customer by your user churn rate. And the thought there is that your user churn is basically the rate at like if you take 4% user churn, for example, over the course of twelve months, in theory you will churn through about 40% of your customer base. And so you can kind of reverse engineer the expected time for customers to be with you, which I think for I want to say for 4%, it's about an average lifespan of about two years. The problem here's, what we found at Baremetrics was that our highest paying customers stuck around the longest and their lifetime value was about like $40,000. For example, the lowest value customers stick around for about six months to a year on average and their lifetime value was about $1,000. Our lifetime value evened out to like three or $4,000. But that was not a useful metric whatsoever. It was like, what do you do with that? Right? How is that even useful at all? So anyways, I basically just say don't use lifetime value, it's not useful whatsoever. People try to use it for like CAC:LTV… just use payback period, just use ARPU compared to CAC to multiply that to your cost of acquisition. That gives you your payback period. At the end of the day, that's what is the most useful way of thinking about lifetime value anyway. So I digress. This is fascinating, I think there's definitely room for a full chapter just on metrics and including this rant here. I think your breakdown of LTV is fascinating, especially folks that don't buy into the annual plan model of SaaS and are all about the monthly recurring revenue and SaaS products change all the time and the pricing model changes as well. The reactivation bit too as well. I think that's a huge untapped area. I feel like we could chat about metrics all day. Happiness and balanceWe only have a few minutes left here, but JT, I'll let you kick it off with the last question for us. Thanks so much for being on the show. I know you've got like a ton of stuff going on, just evident through this podcast. One question we ask all of our guests I'm very curious on your take is… between all the things that you're doing and managing on a day to day basis, how do you manage being successful and happy? That's a good question. I'm glad you ask it. It's a fun one for a podcast like this. Every week is a little bit different. I think, though, for me, just knowing that I'm making progress, doing the best that I can. Like I mentioned before, it's kind of like eustress. It's only distressful when I feel like I'm not doing a good job or when I'm behind on things, or when I feel like I'm letting people down. I'm very much like a yes man and a people pleaser. So for me, being happy, like in my work, it's just knowing that I'm doing the best that I can and that things are moving forward and generally the way I've set things up between Swipefiles, consulting these new staff projects, advising, and random other investing stuff that we do on the side, I just want to make sure I'm not letting anyone down. I'm not doing that. Then I'm pretty happy. And I can kind of go at my own pace, which sometimes feels slow and sometimes feels fast. Personally, I find that having really strong friendships and also a really good relationship with my wife is very key to just being happy overall and in general. But I've also found, I don't know if you guys have a similar experience, but I'm not happy if I don't get outside and do something competitive once in a while. So more recently, I've taken up pickleball, which has been like a huge sort of competitive release for me. And it's like, active and it could be outside and it's fairly casual to do it with friends. It kind of checks all the boxes there. I love basketball. I also love playing poker. It's also very social and competitive as well. So if I do that, like one of those things at least once a week, I can look forward to that and kind of get my fix. And it makes me happier and it kind of releases me to do my work as well. But I find that if I don't do my work and I'm only doing those things, I'm unhappy. If I only do work and I don't do those things, I'm also not happy. So it's like having the blend of both those things to work with and kind of the back and forth that makes me happy. Where to find CoreyAwesome. Love it. Thank you so much for your time, Corey. I'll let you end it for us. Why don't you plug some stuff for our audience? Sweet. Thanks for having me. It's been a ton of fun. Love the conversation. Great questions. Kudos to you guys. You can find me on Twitter at Coreyhainsco for all the things that I'm working on, Swipefiles.com for the newsletter. Also just for podcast listeners: You can use the code “humans” at checkout at swipefiles.com/membership for 50% off the 50 membership, join us in the community. Get access to the courses, office hours, access to me, and I think that's pretty much it. Check out the Swipefiles community. I'm a member (Phil). See a lot of value from there. I'm actually friends with a couple of people that I met in the community, so, yeah, thanks for putting that together. And thanks for taking some time and chatting with us. It's been an awesome conversation. Feel like we can keep this going for two or three more hours. But. Yeah. Thank you, guys.--Corey's Twitter: https://twitter.com/coreyhainesco Corey's website: https://www.coreyhaines.co What Corey has going on Marketing weekly newsletter https://app.mailbrew.com/coreyhainesco/marketing-weekly-WV3pZMdwsL29   Swipefiles https://www.swipefiles.com/Phunt launch Podcasts everything is marketing https://pca.st/7myeg6u3  default alive https://pca.st/beidemfp  refactoring growth https://www.swipefiles.com/refactoring-growth  tiny marketing ideas https://www.swipefiles.com/tiny  Mental Models for Marketing: https://mentalmodelsformarketing.com  Marketing Like A Media Company Microconf video directory https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-unofficial-microconf-video-directory  Consulting side gig https://savvycal.com/icloud  hey marketers (sold) https://www.heymarketers.com  (Formerly) Baremetrics: https://baremetrics.com   Corey's offering 50% on his swipefiles membership if you use the code "humans" at checkout -- so check it out swipefiles.com/membership✌️--Intro music by Wowa via UnminusCover art created with help via Undraw 

"Be confident in the decisions that you're making with the information that you have at the time" - Mark Colgan.Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur and revenue leader responsible for increasing revenue across a small portfolio of companies where he leverages his 13 years experience of in B2B sales, marketing, and recruitment.Mark currently splits his time as co-founder of Speak On Podcasts, mentoring B2B startups via GrowthMentor and ScaleWise, the Product Onboarders, and coaching 100's of SDR's through his Outbound Prospecting course via The Sales Impact Academy.He's a Techstars 18' Alumni and a regular speaker within the B2B SaaS industry. His work has been published by SaaStock, Mailshake, Pipedrive, LeadSift, Lemlist, SugarCRM, and Baremetrics to name a few.Mark currently lives and works from Lisbon is addicted to traveling and exploring new cultures in places. You'll often hear him saying "por que no?" why not to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving, and paramotoring.Please enjoy! Click here to subscribe to The Sell My Business Podcast to save time and effort. SELECTED LINKS FOR THIS EPISODESpeak On Podcasts websiteThe Deep Wealth ExperienceFREE Deep Wealth eBook on Why You Suck At Selling Your Business And What You Can Do About It (Today)Book Your FREE Deep Wealth Strategy Call Did you enjoy this episode of The Sell My Business Podcast? Please leave a review. Reviews help me reach new listeners, grow the show, and continue to create content that you'll enjoy.Please click here to leave a review on The Sell My Business Podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Deep Wealth. Your liquidity event is the most important financial transaction of your life. You have one chance to get it right, and you better make it count. But unfortunately, up to 90% of liquidity events fail. Think about all that time, money and effort wasted. Of the "successful" liquidity events, most business owners leave 50% to over 100% of their deal value in the buyer's pocket and don't even know it.Our founders said "no" to a 7-figure offer and "yes" to a 9-figure offer less than two years later. Don't become a statistic and make the fatal mistake of believing that the skills that built your business are the same ones for your liquidity event. After all, how can you master something you've never done before? Are you leaving millions on the table? Learn how the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience and our 9-step roadmap helps you capture the maximum value for your liquidity event.  Click here to book your free exploratory strategy session.Enjoy the interview!

Inspirational stories plus practical takeaways from the entrepreneurship world.Today's guest is Nathan Barry, the founder of the email marketing platform ConvertKit. He started off as a freelance web designer and design book author. ConvertKit now powers the audience for over 20,000 creators including Tim Ferriss and Gretchin Rubin. The company is 100% bootstrapped and Nathan has revealed every bit of his companies finances publicly since it was founded in 2013. ConvertKit's MRR is currently exactly $2,464,976 dollars as I can see publicly on their Baremetrics page. Nathan is refreshingly open about his journey and there's so much you can learn from him.  We hope enjoy the episode and don't forget to share it with others. You can learn more at http//www.entrepreneurshandbook.co.Find more about Nathan:His website:  https://nathanbarry.com/ Follow him on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/nathanbarry Follow him on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/nathanpatrickbarryConvertKit: https://convertkit.com/

Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur and revenue leader responsible for increasing revenue across a small portfolio of companies where he leverages his 13 years experience of B2B Sales, Marketing and Recruitment. Mark currently splits his time as Co-founder of Speak On Podcasts, mentoring B2B Startups via GrowthMentor and ScaleWise, The Product Onboarders and coaching 100's of SDR's through his Outbound Prospecting and Cold Email Bootcamp course via The Sales Impact Academy. He's a Techstars 18′ Alumni and a regular speaker within the B2B SaaS industry, his work has been published by SaaStock, Mailshake, Pipedrive, LeadSift, Lemlist, SugarCRM and Baremetrics to name a few. Mark currently lives and works from Lisbon, is addicted to travelling and exploring new cultures and places. You'll often hear him saying “por que no?” (why not?) to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving and paramotoring.   Most passionate about We are building an agency, which is completely remote. And we're in the podcasting world. We help people secure interviews on relevant podcasts so they can get their brand message out there and build awareness about that. Mark's career and story I studied marketing at university, but as part of my degree, we had to work for one year in a company. I actually got a job in recruitment and I did so well in that year that I was invited back to the company once I graduated. I spent the first two to three years of my career in recruitment, working for some of the largest recruitment companies. I started to teach myself digital marketing because it was all very new back then. I managed to get a role in a separate company as the first digital marketing person. So, I got very good at implementing CRMs and marketing automation, as well as a lot of the technology and putting that all together. I realized, once I was traveling, that I didn't really want to go back to a nine-to-five job. I enjoyed the freedom. And I enjoyed the ability to be able to travel and work from wherever I wanted. So, I set up my own consultancy, focusing on HubSpot CRM and marketing automation, all of the things I love building together – building things and putting them together. I managed to be invited to work for a company as their chief revenue officer, which meant essentially that I was looking after marketing sales, customer success, and product. In this case, the product was the service. I did that for just over a year which brings us up to June 2020, when I left that company to start speaking on podcasts. This is the agency that I currently focus and spend most of my time on now. Best advice for entrepreneurs I'll split my answer into two parts, but it's pretty much the same answer: Focus on the customer. What I mean by that is to really understand who it is that you are going to be working with. What are their problems and their challenges, and can you build a solution to help them overcome some of those challenges and problems? The second part is to then think about distribution. What I mean by distribution is how you can get in front of as many of those ideal customers, whom you've defined, as possible. The biggest, most critical failure with customers My most critical failure would be not focusing on the client delivery part of the business. It's one thing to market and sell to people. It's another thing to actually deliver on the promise that was sold. I've been in situations where I wasn't focusing on that because it wasn't really supposed to be part of my job, but then I noticed that a lot of customers were becoming unhappy after they started working with the company I was working for. Biggest success with customers At the company that I was working for at the time, we provided data for customers to use in their own sales process, so their outbound sales process, but they had very poor messaging or...

Which SaaS Metrics really matter? What are good Startup Metrics or Startup KPIs? Corey Haines, Founder of Swipefiles and Marketing Lead at SavvyCal shares his hot takes on SaaS metrics that don't really matter and what to focus on instead.SaaS metrics and KPIs give you a pulse on what's working, not working, and what you should do next.But what if one of those KPIs gets off track, but your SaaS startup is growing really fast? Do you try to fix it?Corey shares his experiences and hot takes from working at Baremetrics and consulting other startups with their SaaS growth metrics. Get a deeper understanding of your SaaS growth in 2022.Show NotesContinue the conversation on Twitter -@ExploringPrdct@rdkhatch@candidrobert@coreyhainesco

About Mike Potter: Mike Potter is the co-founder and CEO of Rewind, the leading data backup and recovery provider for cloud and SaaS data. While studying Mechanical Engineering at McMaster University, Mike began his start-up career as the founder of InTheHack.com, one of the most popular sporting websites in Canada. Since founding Rewind in 2015, Mike has focused on building a company culture that values and respects employees. When Mike isn't running backups, he can usually be found assembling LEGOs with his kids or walking his dogs.About Rewind: Since 2015, Rewind has been on a mission to help businesses protect their SaaS and cloud data. Today, over 100,000 customers in more than 100 countries use Rewind's top-reviewed apps and support to ensure their software-as-a-service applications run uninterrupted. The Rewind platform enables companies to back up, restore, and copy the critical data that drives their business.About Baremetrics: Baremetrics provides real-time subscription metrics for teams built with Stripe, Shopify Partners, Braintree, Recurly, Chargebee, Google Play, and App Store Connect. In addition to providing metrics, Baremetrics is the industry leader in SaaS growth tools that prevent churn and help you make more. Start a free trial of Baremetrics today: https://app.baremetrics.com/users/sign_up

The best way to achieve success is by capitalizing on your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses. The question is, how do you identify what those strengths and weaknesses are? This is where your site metrics come into play. Metics reveal a wealth of information that can help you scale your business and maximize your ROI. In this episode, we're joined by Brian Sierakowski, the Director of Operations at Baremetrics, a software that translates metrics into analytics and insights that help business owners make profitable, data-driven decisions. Brian helps clear up the confusion around metrics by guiding us through which data points to focus on and which ones simply add to the noise. According to Brian: “If you get your metrics just right, you can craft the data to show you something that gets to a level of specificity. Then the answer to the question of, "What should we do next?" becomes obvious.” Brain explains how tracking your site metrics can help you make more informed decisions, and how the data that is revealed can help you create effective scaling strategies for your business.  Topics Discussed in this episode: How Brian got his start in the online business world (09:19) Brian explains what metrics are and why they're important (28:22) Which metrics give you the best picture of how your business is performing? (35:16) The biggest challenges people face when trying to optimize their metrics (40:55) Segmenting your metrics instead of drinking from the data fire hose (45:38) When your metrics reveal a trend, how long should you wait before acting on it? (51:55) The different metric optimization strategies for new vs established businesses (01:03:18) How metrics can help get your business out of a rut (01:11:22) Brian's predictions on the future of the SaaS industry (01:19:28) The best hidden growth opportunities within site metrics (01:24:28) What tools or resources can help online business owners optimize their metrics? (01:25:19) Brian recalls his funniest moment working in the online business space (01:26:39) Sit back, grab a coffee, and learn how to access a wealth of untapped growth opportunities through your site metrics!

In this edition of the UpTech report, we meet with Brian Sierakowski, CEO of Baremetrics, to pick his brain on everything he knows about growth. His entrepreneurship story began when he had a novel idea for a shared password manager a little over a decade ago, and shortly after, his first company Team Password was born. From startup to exit, he helped the company to expand at an incredible rate until they were ultimately acquired. His experience makes him an expert in growing a SaaS business and the startup acquisition process. These days, though, he is leading the charge in a new industry — SaaS subscription analytics. As CEO of Baremetrics for around a year now, Sierakowski is helping to change the way that Software as a Service companies analyze their data to increase profits. When you simply offer one subscription plan, tracking metrics is easy. However, what if you have dozens or even hundreds of different subscription products with various add-ons? Baremetrics will help you to track and analyze your subscription data and key performance indicators (KPI metrics), providing you with deeper insights into your business and what to do in order to increase sales.

Mark Colgan is an entrepreneur and revenue leader responsible for increasing revenue across a small portfolio of companies where he leverages his 13 years experience of B2B Sales, Marketing and Recruitment. Mark currently splits his time as Co-founder of Speak On Podcasts, mentoring B2B Startups via GrowthMentor and ScaleWise, The Product Onboarders and coaching 100s of SDRs through his Outbound Prospecting and Cold Email Bootcamp course via The Sales Impact Academy. He's a Techstars 18 Alumni and a regular speaker within the B2B SaaS industry, his work has been published by SaaStock, Mailshake, Pipedrive, LeadSift, Lemlist, SugarCRM and Baremetrics, to name a few. Mark currently lives and works from Lisbon, is addicted to travelling and exploring new cultures and places. You'll often hear him saying por que no? (why not?) to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving and paramotoring. What you'll learn about in this episode: Why Mark attributes his career success to his unique ability to match the right people with each other, and why he focused on the podcast thought leadership niche What opportunities Mark identified that pushed him to create his Speak On Podcasts business, and why it is a perfect fit for his talents How the outbreak of the global pandemic allowed the podcasting industry to explode in popularity and become an even more powerful marketing channel Mark describes the step-by-step process he and his agency take clients through to position them as ideal podcast guests and connect them with right fit hosts Why offering value for the audience and providing a unique perspective is the key to creating engaging podcast thought leadership content What research and screening process Mark and his team follow to identify podcasts that are the best fit for their clients Why it is crucial when appearing on a podcast to focus on being helpful to the audience and to avoid being too salesy Why it takes time, dedication and a lot of practice to become a great podcast guest, and why developing your storytelling skill is key How to reach out to podcast hosts through email to stand out and position yourself as a great guest that could bring value to their audiences Why a podcast episode is great cornerstone content that can be sliced and diced into smaller cobblestone content for other platforms Resources: Website: https://speakonpodcasts.com/ Book a call with Mark and his team: https://speakonpodcasts.com/strategy LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/markcolganmarketing/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/speak-on-podcasts/ Twitter: @MarkOnPodcasts

I've known Corey for about a year now. He's the founder and community manager of the SwipeFiles.com Community and many other things across the interwebs. Corey has worked with some amazing brands in the Software-as-a-Service sector, including Baremetrics and currently SavvyCal.com. In this episode Corey talks about his Entrepreneurial Journey from an in-house marketer to being out in the world on his own and building products and businesses. You can find more about Corey at his website: CoreyHaines.co If you're enjoying Entrepreneur's Enigma, please give us a review on the podcast directory of your choice. We're on all of them and these reviews really help others find the show. Also if you're getting value from the show and want to buy me a coffee, go to the show notes to get the link to get me a coffee to keep me awake, while I work on bringing you more great episodes to your ears. →  https://gmwd.us/buy-me-a-coffee Sponsor For Entrepreneur's Enigma Season 1 This episode is sponsored by SEMrush, the search engine optimization tool that we use here at Goldstein Media. If you go to https://socl.bz/semrush you can get a 7 day FREE trial of their software and take your site to the next level. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are so many marketers that dream of becoming entrepreneurs someday but fall into the "I don't have a tech co-founder" or "struggle with monetisation" trap. A year after leaving his job at Baremetrics, Corey's built a tech business that makes $3k MRR without writing a single line of code. In this episode, Corey shares his learnings from his 1 year old entrepreneurial journey.

In episode 63 of the Customers Who Click podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting to Corey Haines about swipe files. If you don't yet have a swipe file… You need to change it ASAP. If you see a decent landing page, you can save it for future reference. A great email campaign from your favourite brand? You guessed it - you can keep it for inspiration for later. Every marketer needs a swipe file, a base of knowledge you can refer to when working on a campaign. Marketing can only be mastered by doing it - courses, guides and marketing degrees teach you certain things, but they don't give you practical knowledge. Plus, there's no need to reinvent the wheel for every landing page or email; instead, if you see something is working, save the idea, find out why it's working and apply the principles to your business & customers. Corey is the founder of SwipeFiles, community, courses, and content to master marketing curated in one place. He's a marketer, maker, and proud pug owner. Previously the Head of Growth at Baremetrics and first marketing hire at Cordial, Corey has consulted with dozens of startups on marketing and growth including SavvyCal, Evercast, Riverside, Holloway, Beamer, and Timetastic. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter or head over to www.swipefiles.com. 

In this episode, Seth and Shannon talk with Corey Haines of SwipeFiles.com about building a community, doing the entrepreneurial jump during Covid and much more! Intro: Seth: Hey, Everyone, and welcome to season two, episode nineteen of the Digital Marketing Dive Podcast. I'm Seth with Goldstein Media, and with me as always is the amazing and talented Shannon of DIAM Business Consulting. Shannon, you ready to rock? Today we have Corey Haines of SwipeFiles on the show. Corey is a seasoned marketers and brand builder, who is going to talk to us today about building a community, a brand for your business, doing elearning courses to educate people, and all about his love for the no-code revolution online. Welcome Corey! Topics & Links Tell us your background? How did you find your way into marketing?Before becoming an entrepreneur, you worked in the tech/marketing world at Baremetrics, right? What was the journey like leaving that 9-5ish job to go out on your own?What is a Swipe File?What is Swipefiles.com?Tell us about the community behind SwipeFiles.com?How can small businesses use the swipe file technique? What are the benefits and how does one get a swipe file started?Tell us about your courses (Mental Models for Marketing and Refactoring Growth).You are also a podcaster. You have two shows. Tell us about them?Everything Is MarketingDefault AliveYou're a big proponent of the no-code movement? Why? How can no-code help the small business owner and entrepreneur?What are some of your no-code tools?You're an entrepreneur and small business owner. How do you make time for all your projects, your family, and have a life outside of work?We're all slowly getting out of the Covid-19 pandemic, finally. How has the past year-plus affected you? How have you coped? Special Offer: DIGITALMARKETINGDIVE - 50% off Swipe Files membership (swipefiles.com/membership) Outro: Seth: Well, that was so much fun Shan.  Shannon: It was great!! Reach out to us on DMD's social media channels and let us know what challenges you are having with digital marketing.  I want to shout out to Breesy Masks for keeping us covered in the craziness of 2021. These are by far the most comfortable masks I've worn. They are lightweight and moisture-wicking for a cool and comfortable experience. Check them out. The link is in the show notes! Seth: If you're enjoying the season, please feel free to give us a review in Apple Podcasts or the podcast directory of your choice. We appreciate all the support. If you feel so inclined check out PodChaser and give us a review there! That's it for this episode, but we want to hear from you. Drop us an email at hello@digitalmarketingdive.com. Also we have a community where you can interact with one another and with the guests. Check it out at Community.DMD.FM. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian and Jordan are back before Brian leaves to scratch his travel itch. Today, they are talking about the things they can control (launching ZipMessage and Jordan's new company), while also touching on a couple things they can't control (vaccines and concerts). They also spend a little time talking about Josh Pigford's amazing public journey, from exiting Baremetrics to starting his own company for modern financial planning & wealth management. How do you handle your professional persona? Are you an open book on your social media accounts? Are you strategic about what you post? Brian and Jordan discuss Josh's strategic and surprisingly open discussions on Twitter and how they differ in their social media personas. “I did want to step in and reiterate some of my larger goals and priorities to the team on Audience Ops, about what makes Audience Ops great. Kat really did that well, but I want to make sure that the team really knows, ‘This is why things work so well here. Let's keep this going.'” – Brian Powered By the Tweet This PluginTweet This Here are today's conversation points: The roller coaster of ZipMessage onboardingFinalizing copy and launching landing pagesAudience Ops team changes and transitionsThe vision at Audience OpsExpectations, emotions, and performative reactions during Monday morning callsThe importance of understanding the “Why”Josh Pigford's exit from Baremetrics and his professional trajectory…in publicAngel investing and asking for money “If you have an audience and you want to start a company, at this point, you can just ask for money. You can legally, publicly ask for money.” – Jordan Powered By the Tweet This Plugin

Corey Haines, former Growth Marketer at Baremetrics, joins us to talk about how he's building out Swipe Files. If you've dipped your toe into the #nocoded movement, undoubtedly you've come across the Makerpad community + tutorials staring back at you. Now, picture Makerpad but for marketing processes — that's what Corey's building. You'll love the multiple streams of income and micro products + services he's stitching together to make this all a reality. I hope you enjoy today's episode, and if you do, please say thanks to Corey and our sponsors! ⚡️ Say THANKS to our Sponsors! ⚡️ Do the Woo podcast — Looking for a podcast that is dedicated to the coverage of WooCommerce?! Check out BobWP's latest venture! MalCare — Looking for a great way to protect your client's WordPress website? Don't deal with the hassle of cleaning out malware or infected plugins, turn to MalCare! Blog posts mentioned https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ 1,000 True Fans? Try 100 ★ Support this podcast ★

Corey Haines tells this crazy story of how he got his first marketing job, within 3 days, to propose to his girlfriend. Last year, he left his job as the head of growth of Baremetrics, to go bootstrapping full-time. He's since worked on Hey Marketers ( a job for only for marketers), Swipe Files (a curated library of the best marketing examples with detailed teardowns of what makes them great), Mental Models for Marketing (Mental models and frameworks have literally been a game-changer in being able to think about marketing as a whole) and Refactoring growth (how profitable software businesses systematically acquire and retain customers the hack-free, spam-free way). He also hosts 2 podcasts, writes on his blog regularly, and shares very valuable marketing tips on Twitter. It was through Twitter that I started exploring his content and was flabbergasted by the sheer amount of good content he produces. He has so much to share, and we're here to listen :) SHOW NOTES 02:17 - Introduction 03:20 - A trip with friends that changed the trajectory of my life 05:30 - Podcasts that inspired me to explore marketing 07:10 - Took my first job to propose to my girlfriend 08:30 - How I started Hey Marketers 10:35 - Tips on creating your own job board 13:20 - The idea behind Mental Models for marketing 15:17 - How learning timeless frameworks and principles behind marketing was a game-changer for me 19:20 - We hire products just like we hire people 25:30 - Building an audience 28:10 - My stairstep approach to building an online business 33:00 - I had the idea of Swipe Files while trying to launch Baremetrics' affiliate program. 37:20 - My favorite Books and Podcasts 38:45 - Customer research is the ultimate competitive advantage 40:48 - Great resources on copywriting 43:03 - Why I'm documenting my entrepreneurial journey on my podcast 45:04 - Time management and juggling multiple projects together 46:14 - People I follow on Twitter for their awesome content 49:00 - Why I'd rather be Warren Buffett than Elon Musk 50:50 - The one thing I'm good at, that I'm not widely known for 52:42 - Leaving a legacy 54:25 - If you're already on some kind of trajectory, you don't need a mentor 55:40 - The best place to reach out to me I share all the articles/podcasts/books I consume during researching my guests on the newsletter as well as other stuff I find interesting (https://stealmymarketing.substack.com/) Corey's Website (https://www.coreyhaines.co/) Corey's Twitter (https://twitter.com/coreyhainesco) The guide to validating startup ideas -> https://guide.opryshok.com/ (use code "stealmm" for $5 off) --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/intellectual-software/message

In this episode, I spoke with Corey Haines. Corey is the Head of Growth at Baremetrics, a tool that helps SaaS companies to measure important revenue metrics and analytics. In addition, to his work at Baremetrics. Corey also has several marketing side...

Josh Pigford of Baremetrics talks to me about how he got 90% of the way to selling his business for 5 million dollars, and got ghosted at the last minute. He learned a lot through the process, and he tells all about it. You can read more details in his blog post here.

Corey Haines is Head of Growth at Baremetrics and this episode is about the five factors of growth for profitable SaaS businesses. Corey uses first principles thinking and mental models in marketing to break down a profitable SaaS business in to its most foundational elements and reconstruct those pieces to understand what we as marketers should be doing. The five factors Corey has identified are Market, Product, Model, Messaging & Positioning, and Channels. Corey also explains how he and the Baremetrics team applied this model and first principles thinking to the growth of their own business. This episode will make you rethink the way you think about marketing! Links Getting Product Strategy Right – Des Traynor >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-498BBUJJE The Mission Matrix >> https://www.advanceb2b.com/blog/the-mission-matrix-saas-go-to-market-strategy Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34460583-building-a-storybrand Obviously Awesome by April Dunford >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45166937-obviously-awesome?from_search=true How I increased conversion 2.4x with better copywriting by Amy Hoy >> https://stackingthebricks.com/how-i-increased-conversion-2-4x-with-better-copywriting/ Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann >> https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41181911-super-thinking Mental Models by Julian Shapiro >> https://www.julian.com/blog/mental-model-examples Mental Models: Learn How to Think Better and Gain a Mental Edge by James Clear >> https://jamesclear.com/mental-models Mental Models for Marketers by Corey Haines >> https://mentalmodelsformarketers.com/ Refactoring Growth by Corey Haines >> https://www.refactoringgrowth.com/ This Is Marketing by Seth Godin >> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40549476-this-is-marketing?from_search=true --- Advance B2B >> www.advanceb2b.com Follow The Growth Hub on Twitter >> twitter.com/SaaSGrowthHub Follow Edward on Twitter >> twitter.com/NordicEdward

Corey talks about how they are moving the needle with growth at Baremetrics, and he also breaks down a simple 2 step process for small teams and bootstrappers to think about marketing. 1. Talk to customers. Learn what they want and need to inform both product development and marketing materials. Use their language in your tweets, website copy, etc. 2. Build in public. Sell the dream, not just screenshots. Taylor Otwell is a good example. Corey also talks about how he uses mental models to inform his marketing efforts.

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.

Josh Pigford, founder of Baremetrics, discusses his many side projects, when to decide it's time to kill an idea, and the Open Startups movement. In chat with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Maker Mag. Sponsored by Blockstack.

Today the newest member of the Quiet Light team, David Newell, joins us to discuss the four pillars for buyers and sellers, particularly when they apply to SaaS businesses. David knows SaaS super well and covers all the metrics that buyers and sellers need to pay attention to on both sides of the acquisition process. We discuss everything he looks for when listing a SaaS business, the challenges in measuring some of those metrics, and some common SaaS buyer pitfalls. David started his career in investment banking and worked in that environment for four years. Looking for a taste of life on the outside, he started brokering online, eventually working his way through the ropes to a head broker role. David is now a successful entrepreneur in his own right, with a brand in self-discovery and personal development which has grown from a podcast to a full online brand. Inner Truth offers a wealth of courses, community, and content for anyone embarking on a journey of self-truth. We're very pleased to welcome David to the Quiet Light team. Episode Highlights: David takes us through his background and the SaaS business floodgate that opened for him as he learned about this niche and began brokering SaaS deals. The top three things David feels are important to hone in on to add value to a business. What churn is, how it's calculated, and why it's a cornerstone to a SaaS business. The difference between MRR and ARR and how each can affect the revenue profile of your business. David's software recommendations for measuring the metrics he looks at in a SaaS business. We get into what micro SaaS is and how it differs from the traditional SaaS model. Potential pitfalls of owning a SaaS business and the challenges to consider when getting into the SaaS acquisition arena. Tips and advice for folks preparing to sell their SaaS business. Compelling acquisition tips on how to do the good work before getting ready to sell. Transcription Mark: Joe we are quickly being outnumbered here at Quiet Light Brokerage. We just hired on somebody else who hails from the UK. Joe: Yes; David Newall, a fantastic guy, and another Brit. I guess Brian's not a Brit he's a— Mark: What is he? Joe: He's Estonian, that's what he is. Mark: Yeah but he's kind of an international mutt when we would think about it. He's Estonian but he lives in the UK sometimes but now he's looking at living who knows where. Joe: Well, he's a true entrepreneur. He's been living all over the world with his wife for the last 12 months. And we just got together at the Prosper Show last week with both David and Brian and Brian's wife; a first time we've met a Quiet Light spouse right? First time you've met … you've owned this company for almost 11 years and you've never met a spouse until last week. Mark: Over 12 years. I mean talk about the age of the modern company right? We are a distributed company. Everybody lives in different states and when we see each other it's at conferences. So it's pretty rare for me … very rare being that this is the first time ever that I met a Quiet Light spouse. And I think the only reason that I did is because Brian and his wife don't actually have a home that they go to. Joe: That's right. Mark: I mean obviously they have places where they live but they're constantly on the move which is fun but I'd like to meet more of the spouses. Joe: I'm with you. Yeah, they were in Vegas and then they were heading down to … I think it was Panama for two months and eventually they're going to make their way back to the UK and settle down I believe but we'll see. Time will tell. But yes we have a new member of the Quiet Light Brokerage team. His name is David Newall; a former investment banker, a former head of brokerage services for a competing firm, a fantastic guy. I gotten to him a lot on the podcast but even more last week and I knew we were going to hit it off well when I started calling him Harry Styles because of his British accent and his affinity towards Taylor Swift. Everybody call him Harry if you want and I think he called me grandpa at one point. So I think we're going to get along well. Mark: Didn't sort of from Australia though, is he? I mean— Joe: Not at all, that's what I kept saying just to bust his chops a little bit. Mark: Well, let's get to the meat of it though because David really knows SaaS super well. The guy is a genius when it comes to SaaS businesses and you guys talked about some of the metrics that both buyers and sellers need to pay attention to in a SaaS acquisition. Joe: Yeah, we did. We went through everything that he looks for when he's listing a SaaS business for sale and he's done dozens and dozens of them personally. So all of the different metrics and what some of the challenges are in measuring those metrics from a selling standpoint and then we focused and flipped it over to what buyers should look for and what some of the pitfalls are. Very, very knowledgeable; a very smart guy and it's going to be a great podcast for those SaaS business owners out there. Mark: Well, I love having these British guys on staff because they make us sound so much more intelligent. Joe: He does. Come on now there's nothing like a good southern drawl though. I don't have it but there's plenty of folks that have. Mark: Well, it helps that David is actually a really really smart guy so it's not just the way he says words, it's what he's saying. He's always extremely insightful. And he puts things in a very simple way as well that makes it pretty easy to understand and adjust. Joe: Yeah so let's get to the accent. Let's focus on SaaS and what David has done in his history and how he's going to help the Quiet Light team build a much, much bigger brand and a great, great addition to the team for all the buyers and sellers out there as well. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley with Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got one of our newest brokers with us. He has a ton of experience. It's David Newall. David welcome to the team and Quiet Light's podcast. David: Thank you, Joe, it's a pleasure to be here. Joe: That's a funny accent. Is that Australian? David: It's British and I saw you write it as Australian in an email the other day. I was absolutely savaged by that. I was going to reprimand you. Joe: I was only kidding. I was on the phone with Ben. We won't say his last name but he's like yeah tell him he's a great guy but I really don't like that Australian accent. He was kidding at the same time as well. Anyway, I'm going to kick this off just the way we do with every guest David and that is can you give us some background on yourself? Tell us about who you are, where you've been, that kind of stuff. David: Yeah well, I started life out in in investment banking actually. I've been a business degree undergraduate and then I launched myself into the windy world of investment banking. And I worked in merger and acquisitions for Citi Group in London for four years which as you can imagine is a very intense environment but also an incredible learning environment. And there I got to work on some of the biggest tech media and telecoms, M&A, Capital Races, for the first four years of my life. And you learn a lot, you earn a lot, you don't sleep very much and so at a certain level you start to think I wonder what life looks like on the outside of this office. And so I left that and took some time to travel and then shortly thereafter I decided it would be really good to get involved in something smaller where I could have more a managerial position and bring a lot of the experience that we had into a more exciting and a hotter area. And so that's when my online business brokerage life actually began. And I started life out at one of your competitors. Joe: Our competitors; you're on the team now. David: And yeah so I started like everyone does with this so that's the bottom realm with always the view to building up and becoming the [inaudible 00:07:48.7] which is just the head of brokerage and operations there. And so with the three attendant that I have, we obviously expanded very well out of London and moved overseas to Boston. Built a team up and so in that time yeah I must have done about 75 deals and sort of oversaw the rest of the team doing about 200. So a lot of deals across a lot of business models and a lot of niches. And yeah it was a very exciting endeavor. Joe: You know I was out for a walk this morning and yes folks I'm in North Carolina and it's sunny here and I was thinking about having this conversation with you this morning and the fact that you mentioned the last time we chatted that you've done 75 deals. And I'm thinking wow David might have more experience than I do. And I'm adding mine often. I think I've done more but I'm doing it longer, that's the key. David: Yeah for sure. Joe: But you have me by doing a larger deal than I've done as well which is it's great to have that experience that you bring to the team just because that's everybody here at Quiet Light, a very successful entrepreneur business person and a great deal of skill and talent in the internet space as well. You are also an entrepreneur as well can you touch on that just for a moment? David: Yeah, that's right I mean I think one of the things that was just becoming kind of a burning seed for me in 2016 which is the year that I sort of decided to leave was to strike out and become sort of my master and flex my entrepreneurial feathers a little bit. And so I spend the best part of sort of nine months, ten months as really resting and thinking in to what I wanted to get involved in. And my personal interest is massively in self-discovery and personal development. So I got really deep into yoga and meditation and shamanism and breathe work and all of these wonderful tributaries that are now becoming really big parts actually of modern culture. And so around this time last year, I actually launched my own online brand of self-discovery called Inner Truth and it started as a podcast and then we since added on audio courses with various famous speakers from around the world. And yeah the podcast is growing exponentially now and I'd had some really amazing people and I've got to interview some of my favorite authors, singers, writers, speakers, yeah it's mostly really famous people so it's kind of an interesting life now hopping on the podcast every week we have a celebrity and— Joe: It's pretty neat. David: Yeah yeah [inaudible 00:10:18.8] Joe: Yeah, it's … Mark and I did a podcast on the benefit of podcasting for your business and for us at Quiet Light it's just opened up doors to very successful authors, professors at Harvard, whatever it might be and then there are these celebrities inside the world we live in which is e-commerce and SaaS and so on and so forth. But it really is a great tool for anybody that's running their own business. Start with a podcast, it doesn't cost that much. You can always edit out stuff that you're not good. I think actually when we did that podcast I must have stuttered and stumbled in the first three minutes and we decided not to edit any of it because we said look if we can do it anybody can. David: Yeah, 100%. I mean on the first episode I recorded it was an hour long and I spent four hours editing it. Joe: Yeah. David: Well, I've got the last move and now and there's a lot less going on. You sort of have to force necessity when you're doing some of the bigger guns now. Joe: You certainly do. Speaking of big guns let's talk about some of your experience in the e-commerce brokering world or internet business brokering world. A lot of folks think that Quiet Light is really specialized in physical products or e-commerce as they label that whereas the largest deal I've ever done was a content business. The next largest after that was a SaaS business. Sure I do lots of Shopify stores with an Amazon component or more these days an Amazon business with a Shopify component but you have a tremendous amount of experience in the SaaS base right? David: Yeah exactly I think you know around 2014, 2015 we really started to spot this emerging trend of micro SaaS businesses coming up and sort of not really being thought about perhaps and valued in a very sophisticated way given the strength of these businesses, the IP mode that they've got and the recurring revenue. And so we really started to pour a lot of attention into what makes SaaS special. And yeah we're very happy to start working with some great names like Patrick McKenzie and Rob Walling and as they bought their businesses to us and we did successful exits for them; the floodgates opened really. And so for me yeah I think … you know I sold several dozen SaaS businesses over my time and culminating over course the successful sale of Rob's business direct in Leadpages in 2016 which was an incredible transaction an awful massively personally gratifying because Rob is such a good friend and great to get a life changing exit for him but also to sell into a company as big as that with Claire as a CEO; a super dynamic deal environment and yeah definitely a lot of learning. Joe: Yeah, Mark had Rob on the podcast talking about his story of building Drip and exiting from it and it was a great, great podcast. If anybody hasn't listened to that please do. But it's kind of funny I remember when you were doing that deal and we were getting wind of it and it's funny we just thought oh yeah no we don't want to do 10 million dollar deals or whatever the number was. You have to fly all over the country, you got to put a tie on then you … and I don't think you probably did any of that. And now we're doing deals that are that size and a little bit bigger so we all grow up in this business and have to evolve so to speak. So let's talk specifically about SaaS David. For the audience that's out there, if they're running a SaaS business, if you're working with them through Quiet Light, you get a referral and boom you've got a SaaS business that you're going to value what are the top three or four things that you're going to sort of hone in on that is going to bring more value? Maybe even speak to the buyers here what should they be looking at and what would you look at as the seller's broker? David: Well, I think that one of the most important probably least looked at and least understood metrics of any SaaS business is churn. Churn really is the cornerstone of successful SaaS business because it is completely cancerous to revenue growth if you don't get that right. Joe: Can you define that for folks that are just beginning to look at SaaS; what churn rate is and maybe how it's calculated? David: Yeah, churn rate I mean you can look at it from a revenue perspective or you can look at it from a customer account perspective. Revenue is probably more helpful and that's simply telling you how much revenue, how many customers you're losing per month through cancellations, expiries or sort of billings that aren't going through. Joe: That's measured against total revenue and what's a good churn rate in the SaaS world? David: Well, that's a great and a pretty seminal question that comes up a lot when you're evaluating SaaS businesses that specifically are targeting different end users. So if you're thinking like the B2B space the monthly customer churn rate actually varies quite a lot depending on which business segment you're looking at. So if you have a SaaS business facing an enterprise segment it's going to have a materially different monthly customer churn rate than one interacting or facing against an SMB segment because those end customers have different purchasing behaviors. So in enterprise, for example, you know very, very, very low monthly churns expected and we're talking like 1.5 to 1% a month which annualized is 6 to 10%. When you're looking at SMB something doing 3 to 7% is— Joe: What does SMB stand for David? David: Small to medium sized businesses. Joe: Thank you. David: And so annualize that's more like 30 to 60%. And so now you can start to see that the difference between a 6% percent monthly churn rate and a 4% monthly churn rate is going to have a mega, mega, mega difference to the revenue profile of the business 12 months out from now. Joe: Yeah, let's just … I want to talk about the other two aspects in terms of things that you look at in terms of the metrics but the churn rate measured against the revenue; obviously, the revenue has to continue to climb and new customers need to come in at a higher phase than the churn rate in order for the business to be growing. Or even actually just staying steady right? They can be losing 5% a month and be gaining 5% a month in revenue just that. And the beautiful thing that buyers love about this is that … or SaaS business is that it's the recurring revenue. And they generally trade at a higher multiple. If you've got a straight up e-commerce business selling physical products with its own brand even with a patent I think that a SaaS business that's growing and has lots of growth opportunities and a reasonable low churn and workload is going to trade at a higher multiple. Is that your experience as well? David: Yeah well, I think that the recurring revenue piece is one explanatory factor for that premium in multiples. I think the other is simply the moat that exists around the average SaaS business; having that intellectual property. We work in a space where if you can find product market fit for a very quick rate with an Amazon business and very quickly start to scale it but with the SaaS business you might have to pile in anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 into development and may not even make a penny. And so one of the things that actually make these micro SaaS businesses very valuable when they come to market is that actually, they've simply found product market fit after having put down a lot of Cap Ex. And so it's interesting that that's actually a large amount of the value proposition for people that are looking to acquire these and scale them because that in itself is finding a diamond in the rough. Joe: Right, so that risk is one of the four pillars for those that listen often. It's one of the four pillars and it's the lower the risk as David's talking about the defensibility of the business, that moat around it, it lowers the risk so therefore the value of the business goes up. All right throw in another couple of metrics that you generally look at and it's important for buyers to think about as well when they're looking at SaaS businesses. David: Yeah well, I think acquisition channel for the customers is really important and I think the really premium SaaS business at the higher end of the multiple range are just like every other type of business managing to acquire customers across a multitude of channels so the concentration risk is low. And that within those channels the competition is relatively low. You can look at say a SaaS business in the project management space which is absolutely saturated with VC vat competitors and that's a pretty frightening spot to be in. You'd much prefer to be somewhere in a quieter segment just like we'd look at in e-commerce. The same rules apply. I think it's quite nuanced in SaaS though because you have put down a lot of Cap Ex upfront to develop product and so you have to be pretty savvy when it comes to acquiring customers at a reasonable rate. Joe: Okay. So we've got the cost to acquire a new customer, the channel that you're getting them from, the churn rate, anything else that really jumps out that you're looking at? David: Yeah, I think the profile in terms of the revenue of the business is really important. So obviously we've been talking about MRR but there's ARR as well right? Joe: So that's Monthly Recurring Revenue and Annual Recurring Revenue. David: Yeah, exactly and it's very tempting when you're a business owner and this is kind of an important thing that I think a lot of business owners can trip up on to want to sell lifetime and annual plans at a gracefully discounted rate in order to book that revenue. But when it comes to sell it presents a pretty lumpy revenue profile at a major risk for the acquirer. And so actually the multiple that can be applied to MRR should be higher than ARR because it's more predictable. And this is, even more, the case when you know you're using debt financing to buy a business. And so something that I would always do when I'm evaluating a SaaS business is actually use something of a blended multiple where I value MRR higher than ARR. Joe: Right so to further detail that and explain a little bit that annual recurring revenue if you have one or two months a year where let's say the subscriptions are opened up and there's a flood of customers with a special promotion and a steeply discounted price for an annual subscription but you're selling the business a few years later and you are nine months away from or actually just say two months after that annual subscription, the person that's buying the business they're going to go 10 months without having that big bump in revenue. They're not doing any daily or weekly or monthly work for that revenue. It's going to occur so there's no discount necessarily but it can become a challenge like you say when they're getting debt financing. They've got a monthly payment to make every single month and if that big bump is not going to come for 10 months it can be a bit of a challenge. That's great. David: Yeah, and it's not entirely guaranteed that those annual subscribers will renew a great wish that came in there and I think people expect a certain level of annual around Black Friday but if the business is struggling to show MRR growth in off months then that's a bit of a red flag potential. Joe: Right, so from the buyer standpoint you think really the focusing on the monthly recurring revenue … you got to look at the annual recurring revenue but the more attractive business would be one that's got more monthly recurring revenue because it's spinning out that risk a little bit more. David: 100%. Joe: 100%. Okay, software that's out there to help SaaS owners measure these metrics. It's a challenge like I've looked at trying to calculate at lifetime value. It's very, very difficult. Everybody does it a different way. Is there a particular software that you've seen more SaaS owners use than not? David: Yeah I mean I really like the Profitwell analysis actually. I think whatever you use standardize. I think it's not helpful to swap between Chartmogul, Baremetrics, Profitwell, and just keep skipping around because then you're looking at very inconsistent numbers and methodology as in if trying to evaluate a number of SaaS business that's just not an additional complexity that you want to commit into your analysis. So I think stick with one and the one … the dashboard I've seen as the friendliest and the most well explained and the easiest to use is Profitwell. And in particular, looking at their cohort analysis the churn is this incredible way of seeing whether the business underlying is improving or getting worst as new customers are coming on board. Joe: Okay, Profitwell or wells? David: Well. Joe: Well, Profitwell. Yeah, I've seen Baremetrics used quite a bit on the SaaS businesses that I've sold. It's a great tool for buyers and sellers just to go look at it and study what these metrics are that people are analyzing these businesses on. David: Yeah, 100% and there's a bunch of open source businesses upon the Baremetrics platform where you can just go and look right now. I mean you can look at Baremetrics and their own metrics I believe on their own platform and I [inaudible 00:23:14.4] I think convert kit was on there for a while. They may still be. So it's fascinating to have a poke around and once you've looked at a handful of SaaS deals you can really start to get a feel for what makes sense for and what doesn't around from all of these metrics. Joe: I got you. David, you've mentioned the term micro SaaS more than once can you define that for us? Is there a certain size? Is that what you're referring to? David: Yeah I mean I think of micro SaaS as sub a million dollars in value but really when I think about it more deeply it's characterizing the business that has not gone down the sort of venture capital deep investment. You know fast growth, pushing for a revenue multiple exits and instead gone for the bootstrapped— Joe: I got you. David: Slower grave way of doing it. And that is absolutely not to say that you can't take a micro SaaS and push it into that revenue growth multiple VC back territory. It's just that I think a lot of the businesses that we look at in our world tend to fall into the micro SaaS class version. Joe: Yeah, I sold one last year that literally was started by someone that had a problem and he solved it himself. It was sort of a self-calendar tool and he had it for 14 years but he was an engineer by trade and you could tell by the interview that I did with him that he was not comfortable selling or talking; very, very much an engineer. The person that bought it very much the opposite of that and is already talking to private equity folks to invest or get it to a certain point and take it beyond this sort of micro SaaS market that you're talking about. David: Yeah this is a really important point actually that I want to extend because what I've observed in my experience is that a lot of the businesses that come off exit were designed by the engineer, by developer types that find a problem that solved that and pushed it out to friends and family and other developers, acquire a customer base. It starts to grow organically but they simply either don't have the appetite, the interest, or the skill set to market it. Nor do they want to. And so these businesses become right for marketers to take them over and actually work on building them out from a marketing standpoint because a lot of them are in very good shape on a technical side. They just need more sales effort poured into them. Joe: Yeah, the one I sold it was doing … I forgot exactly, let's call it a quarter million dollars in discretionary earnings. His advertising budget on a monthly basis was $325. David: Yeah. Joe: Yeah, I get emails every week now from them. I'm on their list; the guy that bought it and they're doing a much more aggressive email campaign, retention campaign, and adding new tools and features for the existing customers. Let's talk about the pitfalls of owning a SaaS business for those that are potentially buying one for instance. What do you see as major pitfalls and I had a gentleman named Ezra Firestone, you probably know Ezra. David: Yeah. Joe: I had Ezra on the podcast and we talked about a number of things. He's very much into yoga and meditation too by the way but we talked and he's got e-commerce businesses and he got SaaS businesses and he talked about the differences and what he likes about each and what he prefers. But I'd love to hear you talk about pitfalls and I'll tell you Ezra's feel. David: Yeah, I think that the IP roadmap for any SaaS business is always something that you have to be very clear on. I think you can easily fall into a trap where you start the design … excessively design the product either on specific customers and then it becomes this very odd sort of pool of mud. They like to use that phrase in SaaS world where you're designing around specific customers or you're just adding features to it that perhaps aren't really needed. And actually, I think a lot of SaaS business actually benefit more from dialoguing with customers about how to use their products more effectively. Because oftentimes they're only using about 20 to 30% of the functionality and then often churning away because they're not aware of the other 70% than just by adding feature sets for the point. And of course, this really does stack up because as you add more features that's going to add more complexity. You create more of a UX headache for your customer base. You create more of an operating manual to train your sales team with and everything starts to become … to slip out of control of. And I think that having a very clear crystal clear vision about the road map is actually like something that yeah probably keeps a number of SaaS owners up at night contemplating that. I think churn is a real challenge for micro SaaS businesses specifically because a lot of the time there ain't SNBs so they're naturally facing against a client base that's got higher churn. And the best way really to reduce churn is to really improve your onboarding experience and your customer success. And something we're all absolutely crushed during one of the best in class onboarding processes I've ever seen but it is expensive to do that unless you go down a very intelligent sort of IT lead onboarding route. And that's a challenge that I think a number of business owners struggle with because once you get up into massive scale on your VC back so you can have a whole sales team that come on and really help train every single house member when you're in this micro space you don't have the capital to do that. So you got to think very creatively about really educating customers, really onboarding them very well so that you can solve the churn issue and scale the business well. And the churn is also important because it really starts to impact your ability to run paid for example [inaudible 00:29:03.4] acquire customers that way and so there's a lot … you have to be just very, very thoughtful such I'd say churn is quite a headache as a SaaS business owner. Joe: Yeah, it sounds like any business with customers. Take care of the customers first. Make sure they're using the tools to the greatest extent possible and that will reduce the churn. Which will, in turn, give you more money to do paid advertising than more than $325 a month. Yeah, I was going to go to the same place not that there's a right business or a wrong business to buy, they're just physical products businesses are just different than content versus affiliate versus a SaaS business. So anyway I was talking with Ezra about it. He owns both. He owns Zipify and he owns BOOM by Cindy Joseph or a portion of that one. In the physical products world, you create an ad and it hits and you scale. You spend more money on the ad. With a SaaS business it may be the same but then you've also got more support, more customer onboarding, and focusing on that churn rate and the metrics and you've got the cost of those developers which are also a lot more expensive than the cost of really good customer service people or graphic designers in the physical products world. A big, big difference though and again it all balances out. With the physical products business you have to have working capital for inventory. Your business is growing like crazy … sometimes I've sold businesses that have been 24 or 36 months old and had in-depth conversations with the owners of those businesses David. They bootstrapped it. They don't ever take any money out of the business. It's just growing and all they do is take every ounce of profit just trying to keep up with the inventory demand; that working capital demand. And sometimes they still run out of inventory. So there are two different ways to look at it; two different worlds. Those people that exit on the e-commerce world they don't take a whole lot out the first couple of years if they hung on that accelerated growth always slows down a little bit and they can then start taking salary and pull some more money out of the business. But you don't have that physical product or working capital requirements inventory in SaaS but you've got more expensive staff and developers that gosh if you've got a key developer and they go away it's a key employee and you've got to replace them. It can be very challenging and very expensive. So I'm not sure which is right. I always … I think people that are new in the in the internet space that are coming from the corporate world and want to live … work at home and see their family more and travel less and I've talked to a lot of people like that they say what … where should I go? What space should I look at? And I kind of think that they understand more easily physical products and can easily say I sell a widget versus I sell software to that people subscribe to to help them manage their calendar better. It's very different; very challenging I think. What are your thoughts on that? David: Yeah, I agree entirely. I think there's a lot of things to think about with SaaS. It comes down to … as in life right? You always have to choose what problems you want to solve for and some people like solving for very intellectual problems. It's very interesting looking at the buyer base for SaaS companies that often people that enjoy the intellectual challenge of having a lot of the moving parts to think about. And there are people that enjoy the challenge of just scaling e-commerce. So it's … yeah, a totally personal preference. I don't think that one is better than the other. I think it's entirely a form or like disposition of character. Joe: Yeah. Well, listen, David, we've had you on talking about SaaS. You had more than SaaS experience right? You sold lots of content, lots of physical product sites in the past as well. David: Yeah, more than I can remember. I mean when I really started my brokerage career I spent almost exclusively doing content sites so we have all of the … it comes in affiliate stuff, Ad Sense sites and I love them because again you know we talk about these beautiful nuances between different business models. For me, it was just so interesting looking up the SBA strategies of these businesses, looking at the approaches that these owners are taking to rank specific pages. And I got super into ad optimization group and it just fascinates me with this psychology of ad revenues and clicks and so forth. So yeah I actually have a lot of reference for Ad Sense likes and I think I often look at them from my own personal acquisition perspective because I just love the pessimity of those business models. Joe: Yeah, yes, absolutely for those that don't understand it's good quality content developed over time that's driving organic traffic and you're getting paid for clicks either through Ad Sense or a lot of folks doing affiliate stuff as well when they're doing product reviews and things of that nature. But that was the larger one that I sold last year which is under 9 million and it was a content site; just crazy, crazy growth. A great story too and we've had Ramon on the podcast. And this goes to the relationships with the people that we work with. The first one that we sold for Ramon a few years ago, let's call it five years ago it was maybe $125,000 business and a few years later he comes back as a client again. He says okay I've got another one like this out. It's 425,000. And then he comes back in December of I guess it was '17 and you know he's got one where we think it's valued around 5 and then we get it under a Letter of Intent and it's just exploding growth. And so he says Joe I just don't think I can do this. It was a hard, hard call for him to make on a Saturday afternoon in April of 2018. And he had to walk away from a 5 million dollar deal because revenue was growing at 300% every month which really just drove the multiple down and the total value up. We pulled the listing and the same person it was under LOI for 5 million, he didn't go away. He wanted to stick in and he knew that the value was there so he bid it up and two others bid it up and it sold for just under 9 million; a great story for that guy. David: The high quality strategic exit there to come back at that level. Joe: It was a risky move to walk away from 5 million but it worked out for sure. And the buyer was fantastic too. You've got to have a good buyer and good seller on both sides of the table. Structurally business on the side I know but it was a combination of private equity money, a little bit of SBA money, some family fund money came into it, and then the owners… the buyer's personal money as well and as strange as it is that particular by David also bought the largest SaaS business that I ever sold. So relationships with buyers are critical as you know. Any quick tips or advice for people that are thinking about selling their SaaS business, what should they do? Should they just focus in on churn or maybe have a conversation with you with an eye to exit even in 12 to 24 months, what are your thoughts there? David: Yeah well, I think definitely I'd advice there as based on how far you are out. If you're quite far out I do think it's worth split testing price increases. Over the years we've seen a surprising number of wins from people making micro price improvements. I'm obviously not grandfathering existing customers by trying that out. I think if you are closer into the potential exit talking six months like the really important stuff is actually things that seem to become incredibly easy to miss. But I've seen over the years things like just securing IP properly and then that's much more than just getting trademarks sorted out. But actually, if you've had a lot of third party developers working on the code getting proper IP assignments. Because the number of transactions I've been involved where they've got to be done retroactively is a little bit uncomfortable. I think another piece is around security. Again if you're not patching passworkds properly or if you're storing credit card data or any of this kind of things, like if there's any aspect at leaking they really need to be on top of that. I think absolutely avoid any kind of large discounting, annual plan discounting. Don't sell any life time plan type things. I mean that attempt to sort of artificially increase revenue earnings three to six months out is really, really, really visible unless of course, it's around something obvious like Black Friday. And I think that don't be too heavy with sort of trying to cost cut because again that's really obvious when you come into a sale that if in the last six months you suddenly just gone extreme and leave in order to get an attempt at inflated SKU it becomes very obvious to any experienced buyer. Joe: Yeah very obvious. David: I think one of the things that really does have a pretty big impact in terms of leveraging the multiple up is as much as possible obviously document source code and annotate that well. But as you can try and bring in … if you're the owner/operator and you've done a lot of the IP yourself and built a codebase really start to consider six months out bringing on a developer in time to hand that off. Because if you can show you by the time you come to exit that the third party developer has been in the business for six months, understands the codebase intimately, and has made … pushed out various updates; that is going to be a very compelling acquisition proposition for a buyer versus … you know that all of the knowledge is inside the owner's head and then we've got to do like fulfill the email gates at transition and our third party developer is part of this. So do that work before and you will get paid multiples upwards on the backend. Joe: David, unknowingly you've talked about the four pillars; the risk, the transferability, the growth, and the documentation. It's not just financial documentation but it's SOP's and all the other stuff as well. All of the things that you're speaking to sellers about buyers can focus in on the same thing when they're analyzing a purchase of the SaaS business. Everybody, David is reachable david@quietlightbrokerage.com. Reach out to him there. He's up on the website now. A phone number extension is there as well. We'll put it on the show notes too. David welcome to the team. I'm thrilled that you're a member of the Quiet Light team now. Thank you for being here. David: Thank you, Joe catch you. Joe: Alright, talk to you soon. Links and Resources: David's Quiet Light Profile David's LinkedIn David's Podcast

In today's episode, we're talking to Josh Pigford, the founder of Baremetrics—the revenue analytics platform that helps companies better understand their customers, get more accurate forecasting and engage customers with more relevant messaging.

Today Brian and Jordan discuss growth. In Jordan's case he is dealing with sudden growth, and in Brian's case, he is planning for growth. Both share how they are handling this wonderful problem. Jordan has been focused on getting Carthook's marketing up and running again, but it has become clear that his team needs him to focus on improving the customer support. It has been a struggle to really pinpoint what the team needs. Jordan calls it “customer success,”  but Brian isn't so sure that's the best title for the position. Brian is working on his KPI (Key Performance Indicators.) While making the dashboard for these KPI, he learned that sometimes you need to just hire someone. Brian is also planning to do some hiring, he needs two project managers and a writer. He caps off today's topics with an article from the website Baremetrics. [tweetthis]I'm now in this mindset with this business, it is all about growth. - Brian[/tweetthis] Here are the conversation points: Brian's four major categories for his KPI. When to know you need to hire someone. Jordan's ever-growing stress. Jordan's undefinable job description. What does “customer success” mean? What Jordan needs for this new position. The importance of taking care of “home base.” Brian's hiring needs. Josh Pigford's blog post. [tweetthis]What we need to do is work harder and smarter on making sure existing customers are satisfied and happy. - Jordan[/tweetthis] Resources Mentioned Today: Being a Solo Founder: Pros, Cons, Tips, and Tricks, by Josh Pigford Audience Ops Carthook Ops Calendar As always, thanks for tuning in. Head here to leave a  review in iTunes.  

Josh Pigford is the founder of Baremetrics, an analytics tool for businesses on Stripe, which he took from $0 to $300,000 in the first year. Remember to download our 10- day Growth Hacking course for free at https://www.growthhackingpodcast.com/freecourseFor more information and resources, visit https://www.growthhackingpodcast.com

Josh Pigford is the founder of Baremetrics, a product that provides SaaS analytics for Stripe. Josh founded the company in Oct 2013 when he built and launched the first version of the product in just 8 days and within 8 weeks he was already doing about $2000 in monthly recurring revenue. In this episode, we get tactical and learn how Josh uses content marketing as the primary channel for acquiring new customers. Links, Resources & People Mentioned Baremetrics - @Baremetrics Stripe - @stripe Ulysses - @ulyssesapp Buffer - @buffer Josh Pigford - @Shpigford | josh [at] baremetrics [dot] com Omer Khan - @omerkhan Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.

Josh Pigford is the founder of Baremetrics, a product that provides SaaS analytics for Stripe. Josh founded the company in Oct 2013 when he built and launched the first version of the product in just 8 days and within 8 weeks he was already doing about $2000 in monthly recurring revenue. In this episode, we explore how Josh took his business from $0 to $30,000 per month in recurring revenue. Links, Resources & People Mentioned Baremetrics - @Baremetrics Stripe - @stripe Josh Pigford - @Shpigford | josh [at] baremetrics [dot] com Omer Khan - @omerkhan Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to the podcast Leave a rating and review Follow Omer on Twitter Need help with your SaaS? Join SaaS Club Plus: our membership and community for new and early-stage SaaS founders. Join and get training & support. Join SaaS Club Launch: a 12-week group coaching program to help you get your SaaS from zero to your first $10K revenue. Apply for SaaS Club Accelerate: If you'd like to work directly with Omer 1:1, then request a free strategy session.