Podcast appearances and mentions of david mihm

Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2022 36:06

Mike's Links:Amazon's sprawling grocery business has become an 'expensive hobby' with a cloudy future - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/19/amazons-sprawling-grocery-business-has-become-an-expensive-hobby.htmlBredin Report: What Content Works Best for SMB Consideration? - https://bredin.com/blog/2022/02/bredin-report-what-content-works-best-for-smb-consideration/10 Ways to Beat Google Title Rewrites, Backed by Data - https://zyppy.com/seo/title-tags/beat-google-title-rewritesDr. Marie Haynes - Google Workspace Docs now provides document summary automatically -Marie Haynes- https://twitter.com/marie_haynes/status/1493970225456369669?s=21Ep 52 Near Memo: David Mihm discusses whether the Doc summary feature provides an SEO tool -David Mihm- https://www.nearmedia.co/will-google-make-seo-superfluous-is-android-sandbox-real-or-pr-wixs-q4-s-how-big-is-the-smb-market/Favi-gone: 5 Reasons Why Your Favicon Disappeared From The Google Search Results [Case Studies] -Glenn Gabe- https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/favicon-problems-google-search/GBP Appointment Link is Gone?! - https://localsearchforum.com/threads/gbp-appointment-link-is-gone.58705/How to beat the GBP Q&A bug and answer a question as the business -Greg Gifford- https://searchlabdigital.com/blog/how-to-beat-the-gbp-qa-bug-and-answer-a-question-as-the-business/Yelp Elites and Others Paid for Fake Reviews in Plain Sight -Jason Brown- https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/consumer/yelp-elites-and-others-paid-for-fake-reviews-in-plain-sight/2816914/ Carrie's Links1-Star Reviews Have Increased on Yelp for 4 Years in a Row -Joy Hawkins- https://localu.org/yelp-rating-distribution-trends/Offer on Google Maps -Joy Hawkins- https://localu.org/google-just-deprecated-the-follow-button-and-welcome-offer-on-google-maps/Thinking about setting up a second Google Business Profile for your service area business? Read this before you do to make sure you don't fall into Google's naughty list. -Colan Nielsen- https://twitter.com/ColanNielsen/status/1494770066935750659LocalU Advanced April 5, 2022 - Great speakers, unique content -OnDemand Included- just $99 -https://localu.org/apr5

google thinking data offer seo doc backed yelp google business profile greg gifford favi marie haynes david mihm last week in local

Last Week in Local 2/22/2022

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2022 36:06

google thinking data offer seo doc backed yelp google business profile greg gifford favi marie haynes david mihm last week in local

29: Prioritize or Die

Suds & Search | Interviews With Today's Search Marketing Experts

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2021 47:34

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

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 19, 2020 30:50

David Mihm, founder of Tidings https://tidings.com/ @davidmihm My guest on this episode of Suds & Search is David Mihm. David is the founder of Tidings, a software product that automatically generates perfectly-branded email newsletters for small businesses. For over a decade, David has been one of the leading voices on Local SEO. He founded GetListed in 2009 during the early days of Local SEO. GetListed was acquired by Moz, and David took a role at Moz as their Director of Local Search Strategy. Over the years, David has been featured in blogs on pretty much every major SEO publication including GatherUp, BrighLocal, Moz, and Street Fight Mag. He currently serves on the faculty at LocalU. He appears pretty every local SEO conference and on tons of podcasts and webinars. I heard David present at Whitespark's Local Search Summit a few weeks before he came on the show. I started our conversation by asking him about his presentation titled, “Email: Your Marketing Lifeline During COVID-19 (and Beyond).” It's interesting to hear him talk about the ways that COVID has disrupted digital marketing and how email marketing has gained greater exposure. We also talked about Local SEO. David published the original Local Search Ranking factors study way back in 2008, and a few years ago when he left Moz, he handed the study over to Darren Shaw of Whitespark. I asked him about the importance of reviews, how to set up a good Local SEO foundation and the ways the industry has changed, but also remained the same over the years. Grab a beer and join me for a conversation with David Mihm. We talk about email marketing for small businesses, Local SEO best practices, and his efforts to remain a scratch golfer during the global pandemic. Listen to Suds & Search Podcasts: Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9teXNvdW5kd2lzZS5jb20vcnNzLzE1OTUzNTQ3MjgwNTZz Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suds-search-interviews-todays-search-marketing-experts/id1526688363 Spotify Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ALxRpeDgIvg63bK6eoUTe SearchLab 1801 W Belle Plaine Suite 107 Chicago, IL 60613 (312) 256-1574 Catch SearchLab on these platforms: https://www.linkedin.com/company/searchlabdigital/ https://www.facebook.com/SearchLabDigital https://twitter.com/SearchLabAgency https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3kf-yP3bwhI6YvFFeKfegA Suds and Search Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8Jit8A6IwPpFw7IPKuuyGF0Ii Local Search Tuesdays Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8JiuxY0eDWZr7Us_WgNNP-GDnSubscribe to Suds & Search | Interviews With Today's Search Marketing Experts on Soundwise

covid-19 director seo moz local seo tidings soundwise get listed whitespark david mihm localu

23: Course Correcting

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 29, 2020 41:34

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

20: Big Launches & Big Challenges

Local Marketing Institute Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2020 45:29

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

Google My Business Ranking Factors for 2020

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2020 68:09

What are the specific factors that impact Google My Business rank? Which of these can you influence and how much can you really expect to impact your search rank?Every business wants to rank as high as possible, but Google’s algorithm is based on three primary factors to determine where businesses ranks in a local search: relevance, proximity and prominence.In this episode, we’ve asked three of the most respected local SEO experts in the world — Joy Hawkins, Dan Leibson and David Mihm — to share their thoughts on Google My Business Ranking factors for 2020.You’ll learn …How Google’s recent algorithm changes affected local searchIf proximity is still the biggest ranking factorIf citation management and NAP consistency are still importantWhether local business websites still matterThe impact does link building really hasIf ranking factors are different for service area businessesHow reviews impact Google My Business rank in 2020Whether GMB spam actually works and what to do about itIf Google looks at products / services / menu for ranking factorsHow user and business behavioral signals impact rankingWhat to do about GMB posts in 2020To watch the video and get all links for this session, go to https://localmarketinginstitute.com/google-my-business-ranking-factors/

google seo nap google my business gmb businesseshow ranking factors matterthe joy hawkins david mihm

You Should Google Yourself: Local SEO and Google My Business

The Walkthrough | HomeLight's Real Estate Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 9, 2020 35:37

What do buyers and sellers see on page one when they Google your name? That can be the difference between whether or not they pick up the phone to call or text you. On today's show, we talk to local SEO veteran David Mihm about how agents can impact what shows up when someone Google's an agent by name. We'll walk you through how to claim and optimize your Google My Business profile, and discuss the specific factors that influence how agents are ranked in Google's "map pack." Grab your marketing person/team if you have one, or just listen in yourself and get ready to take some notes.

google real estate seo google my business local seo david mihm

11: Marketing Your Bootrapped SaaS

Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2019 57:08

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

#4/7 ThriveHive Grader with David Mihm

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2019 22:01

Join Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling and David Mihm as they take a Deep Dive into the Thrive Hive Grader.

deep dive seo grader local seo local search mike blumenthal thrive hive david mihm local university localu mary bowling last week in local

#4/7 ThriveHive Grader with David Mihm

Massage Business Blueprint

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2019 22:01

Join Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling and David Mihm as they take a Deep Dive into the Thrive Hive Grader.

deep dive seo grader local seo local search mike blumenthal thrive hive david mihm local university localu mary bowling last week in local

E219: Rocking Your Google My Business Listing (with David Mihm)

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2019 40:24

Getting your massage business found on Google has gotten easier than ever, thanks to Google My Business. With the right attention, this platform can help you connect with the right clients who are searching online. David Mihm from ThriveHive joins us for this expert interview episode and we walk through an overview of how to [...]

google listing rocking google my business thrive hive david mihm

01: The Hard Things

Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2019 36:21

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

ceo president australia google man change zoom speaker smart startups portugal software engineering seo customers saas factors helpful san jose edmonton facetime santa monica drip hard things ppc sql google my business vue moz local seo bootstrapped replicate briefcase five stars ahrefs facetiming laravel search console local search saastr frankensteined aw yeah mike blumenthal whiteboard friday whitespark david mihm local search ranking factors saastr annual

The David Mihm Interview

Coywolf

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 2, 2018 10:14

Google has been investing a significant amount of resources into Google My Business (GMB) but not a lot of businesses are fully taking advantage of it yet. David discusses why he thinks that’s about to change and why GMB is becoming more important than ever for Local SEO.

google local seo gmb google my business gmb david mihm

#3/24 Is it hard to run an Agency in 2018?

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 12, 2018 21:07

Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and David Mihm from Local University as they take a Deep Dive into this question: Is it harder to run an Agency in 2018?

deep dive seo agency local seo local search mike blumenthal carrie hill david mihm local university localu mary bowling last week in local

#3/24 Is it hard to run an Agency in 2018?

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2018 21:07

Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and David Mihm from Local University as they take a Deep Dive into this question: Is it harder to run an Agency in 2018?

deep dive seo agency local seo local search mike blumenthal carrie hill david mihm local university localu mary bowling last week in local

Last Week in Local 9/10/18

Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2018 20:53

Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and David Mihm from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.

seo last week local seo local search mike blumenthal carrie hill david mihm local university localu mary bowling last week in local

Last Week in Local 9/10/18

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2018 20:53

Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and David Mihm from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.

seo last week local seo local search mike blumenthal carrie hill david mihm local university localu mary bowling last week in local

#3-06 The Ins and Out of Reviews and Reputation in 2018

Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2018 56:11

Video Webinar : The Ins and Out of Reviews and Reputation in 2018 Special Event w/ David Mihm, Joy Hawkins, Sterling Sky, Aaron Weiche, Localu Panel moderated by Mike Blumenthal

reputation special event joy hawkins mike blumenthal sterling sky david mihm

#3-06 The Ins and Out of Reviews and Reputation in 2018

Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2018 56:11

Video Webinar : The Ins and Out of Reviews and Reputation in 2018 Special Event w/ David Mihm, Joy Hawkins, Sterling Sky, Aaron Weiche, Localu Panel moderated by Mike Blumenthal

reputation special event joy hawkins mike blumenthal sterling sky david mihm

#39 What happening last year (2017) in Local Search

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 20, 2017 29:52

Join Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling & David Mihm as they review 2017 & take a Deep Dive into the most important events of the year. DD 12.11.17

deep dive d d local seo local search david mihm local search ranking factors mary bowling local search engine marketing

EP 241: How to Build the Marketing Agency of 2020 w/David Mihm

Edge of the Web - An SEO Podcast for Today's Digital Marketer

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 20, 2017 67:22

Imagine the year is 2020 and Google and Amazon have taken over the world and Skynet has become a reality. What can you do to prepare your marketing agency for this ultimate reality? We're talking to David Mihm is the founder of Tidings this week on Edge of the Web. David Mihm has been involved in Local SEO for several years now and even founded the company GetListed.org which he sold to Moz in 2012. David's newest company is only a few months old and is looking to turn the email marketing industry on its head! This tool combines all of your social media postings and turns it into a weekly or monthly newsletter. Email marketing has proved to be one of the more effective marketing tools out there that people seem to ignore or push aside. This new tool will help to change that! A few of the topics we cover in this episode include: Home Service Ads Local SEO Artificial Intelligence Voice Search The Value of AdWords in the Future The Future of SEO

amazon google web seo skynet marketing agency adwords moz local seo tidings get listed future the future david mihm

How to Win at Local Search - David Mihm

The Agents of Change: SEO, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing for Small Business

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2017 34:43

Staying ahead of the Google algorithm curve can be frustrating. Just when you think you’ve made some headway, they change it again. You need to remember that what works on Google today may not work tomorrow, so be prepared. A couple strategies to strongly consider that certainly don’t look like they will change as far as Google search is concerned, are making sure your website is both fast loading and mobile optimized. And don’t underestimate the power of the customer review. Google puts a lot of stock in how others perceive your business as a means to determine if you rank high in their eyes, so acquiring and maintaining a robust selection of customer reviews is also a great way to impress Google. http://www.theagentsofchange.com/212

google staying seo ranking local search david mihm

#21 The Local Marketing Stack: A Roadmap for Small Business Marketing Decisions with David Mihm

Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2017 23:53

Mike Blumenthal, David Mihm & Mary Bowling discuss The Local Marketing Stack: A Roadmap for Small Business Marketing Decisions. Check out the charts & other links on our Localu.org blog

decisions roadmap local seo small business marketing local marketing local search marketing stack mike blumenthal local search ranking factors david mihm localu local search engine marketing mary bowling

#21 The Local Marketing Stack: A Roadmap for Small Business Marketing Decisions with David Mihm

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2017 23:53

Mike Blumenthal, David Mihm & Mary Bowling discuss The Local Marketing Stack: A Roadmap for Small Business Marketing Decisions. Check out the charts & other links on our Localu.org blog

decisions roadmap local seo small business marketing local marketing local search marketing stack mike blumenthal david mihm local search ranking factors localu local search engine marketing

John Interviews David Mihm

Duct Tape Marketing

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2017 25:13

john david david mihm

How to Market Your Local Business | Ep. #82

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2016 10:45

In Episode #82, Neil and Eric highlight the tips, tools, and tactics to use when marketing your local businesses. Listen to learn why you're not capturing your local market and what you can do about it. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 – Today's topic: How to market your local business 00:40 – Do local SEO 00:46 – Check out and read Moz and David Mihm 01:49 – Make sure you understand variables 02:06 – Use tools like Moz Local, Yelp, and City Search 02:22 – If you're not in them, you'll end up losing tons of revenue 02:45 – Make people happy to encourage them leave a review 03:16 – Use Facebook for geo targeting to market your local business 04:16 – Use Pretty Link in Wordpress to track local ads 04:41 – Use localized websites to network with 05:50 – Make sure you're getting reviews 06:18 – Don't forget Google Adwords for call tracking 06:34 – Another tool is Callrail 07:18 – Your website is important 07:41 – Make your phone numbers clickable 07:59 – Make your form fields simple 08:16 – Keep images and copy short and on point 08:28 – Make sure your server is close to that localized region 09:21 – Don't forget about phone calls! 09:41 – Waze local is worth a try too 09:56 – Be aware on all the new stuff that's going on 10:10 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Make the most of your marketing efforts by trying all the tools applicable to your biz. Business owners often neglect local details that can cost them revenue. Large-scale growth starts locally and expands outward. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

google business marketing growth market search local single startups seo large wordpress targeting patel grain ads yelp egg geo waze local business google adwords adwords sprout moz neil patel siu callrail citysearch mihm david mihm key points make moz local

How to Market Your Local Business | Ep. #82

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2016 10:45

In Episode #82, Neil and Eric highlight the tips, tools, and tactics to use when marketing your local businesses. Listen to learn why you’re not capturing your local market and what you can do about it. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28 – Today’s topic: How to market your local business 00:40 – Do local SEO 00:46 – Check out and read Moz and David Mihm 01:49 – Make sure you understand variables 02:06 – Use tools like Moz Local, Yelp, and City Search 02:22 – If you’re not in them, you’ll end up losing tons of revenue 02:45 – Make people happy to encourage them leave a review 03:16 – Use Facebook for geo targeting to market your local business 04:16 – Use Pretty Link in Wordpress to track local ads 04:41 – Use localized websites to network with 05:50 – Make sure you’re getting reviews 06:18 – Don’t forget Google Adwords for call tracking 06:34 – Another tool is Callrail 07:18 – Your website is important 07:41 – Make your phone numbers clickable 07:59 – Make your form fields simple 08:16 – Keep images and copy short and on point 08:28 – Make sure your server is close to that localized region 09:21 – Don’t forget about phone calls! 09:41 – Waze local is worth a try too 09:56 – Be aware on all the new stuff that’s going on 10:10 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Make the most of your marketing efforts by trying all the tools applicable to your biz. Business owners often neglect local details that can cost them revenue. Large-scale growth starts locally and expands outward. Leave some feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with us: NeilPatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

Useful Applications of Facebook Search for Marketers

Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2015 35:58

David Mihm, the ‎Director of Local Search Strategy at Moz, offers Useful Applications of Facebook Search for Marketers following up on his MozCon 2015 presentation where he showcased Graph-powered insights for small-business marketers—with utility well beyond Facebook.

director search applications marketers moz mozcon david mihm

November 18, 2014 Social Media w Emily Bell & Local SEO w David Mihm

social media local seo emily bell david mihm

SEO FOR BUSINESS USING GOOGLE LOCAL: INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MIHM – PODCAST EPISODE #173

Internet Marketing: Insider Tips and Advice for Online Marketing

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 9, 2012 20:40

We've done a lot of talking recently about how important the new Google+ Local layout is for your business, and in this episode of the Internet Marketing Podcast, Kelvin is interviewing an expert in Local SEO, David Mihm. You might know David from his blog or the annual project, Local Search Ranking Factors, which identifies the most important factors in ranking for your regional or local keywords. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

local seo using google google local david mihm local search ranking factors internet marketing podcasts

Best SEO Practices Google Local Places - Internet Marketing Podcast - Number 93

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2011 40:30

This is part 2 of a discussion of an article originally published by David Mihm regarding Google Local Search Ranking Factors. We discuss the percentage of users who use Facebook. We discuss best practices and how to optimize Google Local Places. Visit our Facebook SEO Houston page. Come visit the most popular Internet Marketing Podcast on iTunes. Video of our podcast is broadcast live from Houston on Fridays at 9:15CST. View our archive of Search Engine Optimization Videos. E-Webstyle is a service provider of Houston SEO.

google video local places practices optimization podcast number google local david mihm internet marketing podcasts e webstyle

Best SEO Practices Google Local Places - Internet Marketing Podcast - Number 93

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 18, 2011 40:30

google video local places practices optimization podcast number google local david mihm internet marketing podcasts e webstyle

Google Local Factors Part 1 - Internet Marketing Podcast - Number 92

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2011 39:47

In this podcast we discuss an article originally published by David Mihm regarding Local Search Ranking Factors. We look at the factors that matter most and least when getting good Google Local Places Ranking.Visit our Facebook SEO Podcast page. Come visit the most popular SEO Podcast on iTunes. Video of our podcast is broadcast live from Houston on Fridays at 9:15CST. View our archive of SEO Videos. E-Webstyle is a service provider of Houston SEO.

google video local places factors podcast number google local seo podcast david mihm local search ranking factors internet marketing podcasts e webstyle

Google Local Factors Part 1 - Internet Marketing Podcast - Number 92