Podcasts about heap analytics

Every B2B brand voice sounds the same. Let's mix in some drama, a bit of comedy, maybe even suspense. We're here to convince you to blend genres and create something new, unique and attention grabbing.We're taking notes from author Dan Simmons and his book The Terror with the help of our guest, JumpCloud CMO Micha Hershman.Together, we talk about mixing genres, using persuasion, and basing your narrative on a true story.About our guest, Micha HershmanMicha Hershman is CMO at JumpCloud, where he scales JumpCloud's go to market (GTM) strategy and creates programs to deeply engage JumpCloud prospects, partners, and customers. He is a marketing leader with over 20 years of experience in steering marketing initiatives for category leaders such as Eventbrite, Envoy, and Heap Analytics. He has played a pivotal role in scaling organizations, notably contributing to the global demand engine that facilitated Eventbrite's successful IPO in 2018. His strategic prowess extends to category creation efforts, resulting in Envoy's unicorn valuation, and platform positioning strategies that culminated in Heap's acquisition by Contentsquare. What B2B Companies Can Learn From The Terror:Mix genres. Borrow from action and sci fi and fantasy and romance and bring it all together to create unique content. Don't feel like your content has to fit into a box or a category. And your content doesn't have to be fact-based (as long as you tell your audience it's fiction.) Give yourself room to play. Micha says, “[Dan Simmons has] a reputation of writing on the margins in general. Like, yes, he's written science fiction and horror books, but they all bleed into each other. This book, Ilium and the Companion, Olympus, is Greek mythology and Shakespeare and Star Trek all smashed up together into this bizarre duology.  And I really love the way that he writes on the fringes and smashes all the stuff up together that he's interested in.”Persuasion is key. It's a top must-have skill for any marketer. Otherwise no one is gonna click on your content, read your blog, or subscribe to your newsletter. Micha says it best: “You can have great ideas, you can make big pitches, but if you're terrible at presenting it, your great idea for how you're going to save 126 people and get your ship out of the ice and get back to civilization is going to get washed away by some loudmouth who's a really brilliant orator.” Practice writing authoritatively, quote clients, speak to your audience's deepest cares, concerns and values. And get them hooked.“Based on a true story.” These are magic words that give you a foundation to build a Remarkable story from. Meredith says, “It gives you the bones of the story, but then it gives you freedom to imagine the rest and make it what you want.”Quotes*”You can have great ideas, you can make big pitches, but if you're terrible at presenting it, your great idea for how you're going to save 126 people and get your ship out of the ice and get back to civilization is going to get washed away by some loudmouth who's a really  brilliant orator.” - Micha Hershman*”I can't tell you how much effort I spend trying to talk my team down from doing more work. Like we don't have to go this big. We don't have to spend this much time, money, effort… It's not going to require it. And actually like, well, how little do we have to invest in this feature launch or this acquisition or whatever? Because marketers will add 10 billion bells and whistles. Nobody cares. Nobody wants them. My aim would be to work 35 hours a week because we're so good at the 80 20 rule. We know what 20 percent drives the business.” - Micha Hershman*I think on the procurement technology side, buying is relatively straightforward. You've got a couple suppliers, you've got cash in your hand, they've got a cost, you're negotiating. It's a pretty straightforward process that it comes down to math in many cases. On the creative side, a totally different animal. There's no procurement team in the world that can help you. Your CFO is going to shrug their shoulder and say, ‘I don't know, you're the marketer.' So much like Dan Simmons, you're going to have to have some kind of vision. You have to trust your gut. You're going to have to get bold and go places that maybe other people aren't really ready for you to try.” - Micha Hershman*”On the classic B2B SaaS side, the parallel I often draw is about the vision. The founder has this idea for what [the product] can be and how it will disrupt and change the world, even though there's no appetite for it at all. There's no comparable products out there. And then there's the super prosaic, ‘Our customers ask for this feature. We have to build this feature,' right? Which is a hundred percent data driven and to find that right balance between like vision and satisfying your customer data driven needs is that pressure that's always on. Finding that right balance, there's some kind of art in it.” - Micha Hershman*”As B2B marketers, we're dry, just so dry. It's just like, ‘This is the facts, and this is the information. And there's not a lot of packaging or storytelling or creativity or visual design. But we're not companies who buy, we're people who buy. And so, you know, storytelling is intrinsic to our nature. We all like beautiful things and we're all interested in creative expressions. So I do think that there is more room to explore there.” - Micha HershmanTime Stamps[0:55] Meet Micha Hershman, CMO at JumpCloud[12:10] Exploring JumpCloud: A Glimpse into the CMO's Role and Company Vision[13:54] The Creative Journey of The Terror: From Rejection to Success[25:41] Breaking Down the Story of The Terror: A Blend of History and Fiction[28:27] Exploring Dan Simmons' Unique Literary Style[29:38] Leadership and Creative Problem Solving Insights[31:28] Balancing Fiction with Reality: A Deep Dive[36:03] The Power of Storytelling in B2B Marketing[49:58] Leadership, Hubris, and Survival: Key Themes Explored[53:08] Advice for CMOsLinksRead The TerrorConnect with Micha on LinkedInLearn more about JumpCloudAbout Remarkable!Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. In today's episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.

In this podcast Shane Hastie spoke to Rachel Obstler of Heap Analytics about product-led growth, designing for customer self-service and how high growth products are constantly experimenting. Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/3buz0Hz Subscribe to our newsletters: - The InfoQ weekly newsletter: https://bit.ly/24x3IVq - The Software Architects' Newsletter [monthly]: https://www.infoq.com/software-architects-newsletter/ Upcoming Events: QCon San Francisco: https://qconsf.com/ - Oct 24-28, 2022 - Oct 2-6, 2023 InfoQ Live: https://live.infoq.com/ - July 19, 2022 - August 23, 2022 QCon Plus online: https://plus.qconferences.com/ - Nov 29 - Dec 9, 2022 QCon London https://qconlondon.com/ - March 26-31, 2023 Follow InfoQ: - Twitter: https://twitter.com/InfoQ - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infoq - Facebook: https://bit.ly/2jmlyG8 - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/infoqdotcom/ - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/infoq

Beyang talks with Ravi Parikh, founder and CEO of Airplane. Airplane is a developer tool for turning one-off scripts into internal mini-apps that can be used by technical and non-technical users across the company.Ravi shares his journey as a programmer, how he got into computers at a young age, took a brief detour to become a professional musician, and then started his first software company, Heap Analytics, with his friend Matin Movassate. Beyang and Ravi discuss what took Heap from idea to billion dollar company. Ravi discusses founder-led support and the ways he and Matin managed Heap's growth from an analytics tool geared towards developers to a full-fledged analytics platform with users across product, sales, and marketing.Ravi explains the seed concepts that led to the founding of Airplane and then demos how to use Airplane to turn a one-off support script into an internal mini-app that you can reuse again and again. The conversation concludes with a discussion of what's next for Ravi and Airplane. Show notes & transcript: https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/ravi-parikhSourcegraph: https://about.sourcegraph.com 

This episode features Matt Murphy, Partner at Menlo Ventures. Learn what investors and board members look for in a CFO, hear how Matt built companies and his career,Matt is a partner at Menlo Ventures and invests multi-stage across AI-first SaaS (apps, DevOps, API platforms) and robotics. Since joining Menlo in 2015, Matt has led investments in Alloy.AI, Benchling, 6 River Systems (acquired by Shopify), Canvas, Clarifai, Carta, Envoy, Firehydrant, Harness, Heap Analytics, Hover, Netlify, Scout RFP (acquired by Workday), Upstart, Usermind (acquired by Qualtrics), Veriflow (acquired by VMware), Vivun, and Zylo. He also serves as a board member at Egnyte and a board observer at Datastax.

Melanie Oberman is the EVP of People at Heap Analytics. In this episode, we talk about defining in-person etiquette for a virtual first company; designing an office space that aligns with why people are in the office, and a snapshot of the overall talent marketplace.

In this episode, Flavilla is joined by Taylor Udell and Ryan Goldman. They discuss the untapped opportunities of Opensource.Taylor Udell is a Product Manager at FOSSA. She leads the product initiatives around FOSSA's Licensing Compliance product. Prior to FOSSA, Taylor was an early member of the Heap Analytics team. When she's not building products, you can find her curled up with a good book.  Ryan Goldman is VP of Marketing at FOSSA, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He previously built and led marketing teams at Pendo ($1B valuation), Sentry (Series C by NEA and Accel), SignalFx (acquired by Splunk for $1.05B), Cloudera (IPO in 2017), and Cisco. Prior to tech, Ryan worked in international development for NGOs in Washington, D.C., focusing on education policy, social entrepreneurship, and microfinance. He moonlights as a music journalist and founded a social network for music lovers with members in 30 countries. To connect with Taylor, CLICK HERE To connect with Ryan, CLICK HERE To visit FOSSA's website, CLICK HERE Join Tech Brains Talk mailing list for more perks, CLICK HERE To find out more about 3 Colours Rule Agency, CLICK HERE

Product Analytics + Product Led Growth are critical partners for success.Ken Fine, CEO of Heap Analytics recently joined me on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast to discuss the inextricable linkage between these two concepts.PLG currently exists in a continuum of maturity, with some companies managing the entire customer lifecycle using a product-led motion, while the majority still using a traditional sales led motionKen believes the dominant Go-To-Market model in the future will be an artful combination of  both a product-led and sales-led motion with a key focus on reducing friction across customer acquisition, expansion, and retention.Some products are better suited for PLG, and others that require more configuration, integration, and implementation assistance will be better served with a combination of product and human assistance.Ken highlighted that PLG is applicable across every stage of the customer lifecycle.PLG requires developing a hypothesis, testing the concept, then using data to determine the efficacy of the experiment, and then continuously iterating to optimize the performance metrics.Activation is the point in a journey where a user finds value from using a product in a PLG  motion.  Often, activation is referred to as the “aha moment” for a user.Identifying the “activation point” is a blend of art and science, with a strong focus on data that directly impacts company value impacting metrics such as new customers, revenue, share of wallet, etc.Ken’s experience includes being the CEO of a company that deploys Product Led Growth in combination with a Sales Led motion.  When asked about the “predictive” data they found to predict conversion to paid, Ken highlighted that when users progressed to using their query tool "x" number of times, conversion rates are higher.   In addition, when users leverage their integration feature, that provides a “step level function” in conversion rates.The number of times a PLG company reaches out to a free trial or freemium during free product utilization is an evolving process. Based upon a user reaching an “activation” point, they have a product specialist resource reach out, and are still developing a global heuristic using a “test and learn” approach to determine the number of outreaches that optimize the conversion rate.When asked about the best “resource” to reach out to free or freemium users, Ken highlighted that “it depends”.  In their model, a solution consultant with deep product knowledge is the initial resource to reach out to provide product-centric assistance but also are trained to identify sales opportunities.Product Qualified Led’s (PQL) is a new metric that highlights when a free trial or freemium user has reached an activation point and is in a position to convert to a new or expanding customer.  PQL’s are scored on different levels of qualification, similar to an MQL, though much more qualified based upon actual product usage and engagement. PQL’s go beyond hypothesis and use proven product usage analytics that are predictive of conversion.In summary, Ken shared that if you have traditionally had a sales-led model, that change management is a critical, yet often overlooked element of deploying a PLG model.  In short Ken shared -  “NAIL IT BEFORE YOU SCALE IT”!If you are considering or recently started your PLG journey, Ken and Heap Analytics are a great follow.

Demystifying Conversion Rate Optimization and Data Analysis to Maximize Your Store's Profit and Potential All the way from Kenya, we're proud to welcome Ann Njuguna, a data analyst, web developer, and conversion rate optimization specialist with a keen eye for detail.We're even more proud to say that Ann is one of our team members at Budai Media, making this episode of The Ecom Show a special in-house episode! You'd be shocked to know just how many businesses are entirely neglecting CRO these days, even though it's more important than ever to get on board with this ever-growing field. Sit down and listen in as Budai Media's founder Daniel Budai, and our very own CRO expert weigh in on a variety of topics like: ✔️ How data collection and CRO have evolved in the last several years ✔️ Which businesses should start thinking about CRO ✔️ Optimizing for mobile or desktop ✔️ The best tools for data analysis ✔️ Are there quick hacks for better CRO? Then and Now Before Ann got her start in CRO, she specialized as a web developer. In the six years since she chose to focus on CRO, lots have changed!We see more ecommerce businesses and companies in general focusing on data collection. Before, it was also quite tricky to find an ideal customer for CRO because not many people understood its value, but Ann has noticed this is rapidly changing. People are starting to wake up and understand its importance. Right for Your Business? Should my business be focusing on CRO just yet? That's an important question to ask with an easy answer to give: Yes! Regardless of what product you sell, Ann says that any webpage with a goal in mind, whether it's a video to be watched or a button to click, you should be thinking about CRO.To dive deep and figure out what issues plague your website's conversion rate, it's essential to have enough reliable data to make an informed hypothesis and decision. If you haven't received enough traffic to your website, you can still make note of trends you see and try to figure out why certain things are or aren't working. Desktop vs. Mobile Which one should you optimize for? The easy answer is both, but that isn't always feasible for companies depending on money, human resources, and time. The more complicated answer is that you should truly consider the nature of your product and your audience before you make this decision.Ann gives the example of a logo or graphic design company that creates graphics and says that their clients are most likely using desktops due to the nature of their work and the software they will use when they receive their order. On the flipside, fashion brands usually receive more casual shoppers on mobile devices, so it pays to think this through! Right Tools for the Job Google Analytics does a great job delivering a well-rounded arsenal for data analysts and CRO-focused individuals, but it's hardly the only thing you should be using. For optimization and data collection, Ann recommends Google Optimize for more basic stuff, while Optimizely and Visual Web Optimize are more high-tier tools.Segment, Heap Analytics, and Mixpanel are also excellent tools to have in your arsenal, while for testing and heat maps, Hotjar, Crazy Egg, and Usertesting.com are incredibly useful. Easy Hacks and Quick Fixes? It might not be what you wanted to hear, but there are no quick hacks in CRO!The best bet is to follow the process because what works for one store might not work for another. Instead, collecting data and identifying leaks in your customer journey is vital, along with testing your theory multiple times.The thing with CRO is that it is a never-ending process, so don't get too comfortable if you've seen a boost in your numbers. Competition is always nipping at your heels, so if you don't think it's crucial to improve your user's experience constantly, other companies will swoop in and take your customers! If you would like to work with Ann and see how she can help you fine-tune your website to produce better results, feel free to contact us! Follow Daniel Budai: Daniel's LinkedIn Daniel's Facebook

This week's episode of MarketPlay features Ash Alhashim of BFG Consulting. With more than a dozen years of experience helping technology companies define and  execute their go-to-market strategies, he is a firm believer that sales should be as  much science as art — and that data should inform decisions wherever possible. He  founded BFG Consulting with the goal of helping B2B SaaS businesses generate  predictable, repeatable revenue by investing in state-of-the-art sales programs. Prior to  BFGC, Ash led sales teams at companies like Sift Science, Heap Analytics, and  Optimizely. When he's not working, Ash spends his time running, cycling, playing chess  and roasting coffee for Simsim Coffee in San Francisco, CA.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=44196766)

#GrowthTalks featuring Mick Griffin. In this episode we discuss:+ Hey.com a new email service from the founders of Basecamp.+ Conversion rate benchmarks goldmine from Heap Analytics https://heap.io/blog/data-stories/goo...

Milène is witty, curious, and quick at understanding and analyzing user needs in order to define a product vision. Her technical background and attention to detail makes her very capable of working with both engineers and designers. Today, she will be talking about collecting the right data and using data as a tool to better your product. Get the FREE Product Book here

3.Bölümde Dijital Pazarlamaya dair şu konuları konuşuyoruz. *Google Görüntülü reklam ağında bir reklam kampanyası oluştururken, dikkat edilmesi gereken konular nelerdir? Smart display ads faydalı mıdır? *Google Arama ağı reklamlarında bütçe sabit kalırken daha fazla tıklama ve daha az TBM ödemek için ne yapmalıyız? *Google Analytics ve Google Adsi nasıl etkin kullanabiliriz ? Analytics'in Google Ads'e faydası var mıdır? *Türkiye'de YouTube ve Netflix'e Yasaklar Geliyor mu? *Google Tag Manager dışında kullanabileceğimiz başka araçlar var mı ? *Adobe Tag Management servisini ve araçlarını, *Heap Analytics ile yeni marketing raporlama araçlarını, Konuk: Ahmet Balat YouTube ve Netflix’e Neler Oluyor ve Google Ads Arama Ağı ve Görüntülü Reklamlar Hakkında Önemli İpuçları *Türkiye’de YouTube ve Netflix’e Yasaklar Geliyor mu? *Google Tag Manager dışında kullanabileceğimiz başka araçlar var mı ? *Adobe Tag Management servisini ve araçlarını, *Heap Analytics ile yeni marketing raporlama araçlarını, bulabilirsiniz. Ayrıca bu hafta ki bölümde Dijital Pazarlama Uzmanı Ahmet Balat ile aşağıda ki konuları konuştuk. *Google Görüntülü reklam ağında bir reklam kampanyası oluştururken, dikkat edilmesi gereken konular nelerdir? Smart display ads faydalı mıdır? *Google Arama ağı reklamlarında bütçe sabit kalırken daha fazla tıklama ve daha az TBM ödemek için ne yapmalıyız? *Google Analytics ve Google Ads’i nasıl etkin kullanabiliriz ? Analytics’in Google Ads’e faydası var mıdır? Bu podcasti websitem üzerinden içeriği ile birlikte de dinleyebilirsiniz : faruktoprak.com/google_ads_youtube_netflix_e3 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dijital-pazarlama/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dijital-pazarlama/support

 In this special episode of the Growth Machine Podcast, Nat interviews Julian Shapiro and Asher King Abramson to talk about learning growth. Julian and Asher are partners of the Bell Curve growth agency, and also Demand Curve, a growth school where they teach everything they’ve learned about growing businesses. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show Julian Shapiro Asher King Abramson Bell Curve Demand Curve Streak [1:04] Clearbit [1:04] Imperfect Produce [1:04] Tovala [1:06] Envoy [1:07] Facebook Ads [11:07] Instagram Ads [11:07] Webflow [12:57] Heap Analytics [12:57] Cup & Leaf [14:16] UpWork [15:09] Google Shopping [16:35] Pinterest Ads [16:57] Shopify [22:00] Recharge Payments [27:55] Google Analytics [29:24] Mixpanel [31:34] Whois [36:52] Articles mentioned First part of the training [16:57] Julian Shapiro Growth Marketing Guide [18:10] Show Topics 1:04 – How Julian faked till he make it to learn growth to the point that companies hired him. “Once you get growth results for yourself and people start seeing them, they start asking if you can help them”. What is one of the most important labor shortages in Silicon Valley. 3:33 – How Julian and Asher met at a dinner because of their unique skills: guide writing and freestyle rap. How software engineers neglect the importance of growth. What is growth. Asher first experiences cold outreaching recruiters. 5:42 – How Asher started learning about growth and moving away from engineering. Working for a Private Equity firm that flipped websites. Experimenting and specializing in conversion. Joining Bell Curve. The principles Julian used to partner with Asher and how he thought him growth. 8:45 – Why it is hard to find good growth people, if one can learn in 90 days. Structure and data as the keys to accelerate your growth. Learning alone vs learning from an expert. Instilling confidence with data. A specific example of a subscription ecommerce business: giving the specs, which ad channel one should use, what messaging and which segmentation? 11:36 – The amount of money and time needed to test growth. The need to spend money to learn ads, compared to other skills that don’t. How they get advantage of previous clients’ experience. 14:15 – Starting ads for Cup & Leaf case example. How to approach spending on ads without expertise and with a limited amount of cash. Why going with a freelancer or a new agency is cheaper than going alone. Prioritizing ads channels based on the type of product and business model. Mastering Google Shopping in an afternoon. 18:02 – Julian’s original approach to get insights directly from the source. How to get first hand information from other marketing agency owners. Places to level up growth without saturating the technique. 21:02 – Conversion Rate Optimization. The symbiosis about ads and CRO. Qualitative approaches looking for low hanging fruits. Free Shipping under the Buy Now button. Removing the Buy button from above-the-fold portion of website. Quantitative process and stripping it down looking where people get stuck in the funnel. When to skip A/B testing. When to apply and what to expect from qualitative and quantitative improvements. 26:00 –  The bugged health insurance app story. Debugging a funnel to find why people don’t buy even after selecting a plan. Recharge vs the shopping cart on Cup & Leaf. Auditing websites to find what’s broken and setting up tools to track anomalies. 29:20 – The principle to get the best from Google Analytics. “I use Google Analytics as a fundamental source of truth”. 32:14 – How the growth training works at Demand Curve. 4 stages: strategy, acquisition, conversion, job placement. The 2 arms: startups training and income share. 35:20 – Which areas someone should focus to be more useful for their employer as a growth marketer. 3 core skills that people should know: Facebook and Instagram Ads, Google Ads, intelligent cold outreach. A different type of outreach. The channels that work most for Bell Curve clients. 38:20 – Find Julian at his blog julian.com or on twitter at @julian and Asher on @akingabramson Go to growthmachinepodcast.com/freecourse to get the 7 part, in-depth series about building a blog to success. Go to growthmachinepodcast.com and subscribe for future episodes. Lookf for growthmachinepodcast.com on iTunes and Stitcher. If you are enjoying the show, leave a review!

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

Helpful links from the episode: MozCon ticket giveaway Whitespark's new Local Search Service FULL SHOW NOTES:[music]00:10 Aaron: Episode six. Competitors, obsessed or don't care?00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:45 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:48 Darren: I'm Darren.00:49 Aaron: And today, we are going to dive into the topic of competitors. But before we get into the main course of this episode, Darren, I'm excited to hear about all the prep you had to go into the Brighton conference and your travels over to England. I'd love to hear how both the conference went for you and did you get a chance to do some touristy and fun things? How did all that go? 01:16 S2: Yeah. Totally, yeah. So, it a was pretty great trip. It was grueling trying to get ready for it, actually, because prior to giving my presentation, the day before, I was giving a full day of local search training which I had never done before, just everything up to... You could imagine with local search, so covering the full gamut and...01:39 Aaron: Did they get a certificate that says "Darren Certified," when they were done? 01:44 Darren: No, no.[laughter]01:46 Darren: I should have that though. I should have a nice stamp to give everybody. Yeah. But it was seven hours of training, so my slide deck ended up been 530 slides of just trying to get everything I could think of. It's basically, "Darren does local search brain in one massive presentation." It was crazy. Also, my flights got messed up. So, I was supposed to fly in the morning on Tuesday and then, I basically fly all day and arrive on Wednesday at 10:00 AM. But then, they bumped my flight from Edmonton to Toronto to leave at midnight. So, I left at midnight, Edmonton time, arrived in Toronto at 6:00 AM, and then, I ended up getting a hotel, so I stayed in Toronto in the hotel so I could get some sleep from 6:00 AM until about 1:00 PM. And then, I was just working in the airport waiting for my flight to leave at around 10:00 PM. While I'm working at this local pub, this pub in the airport, I dumped a beer on my laptop.02:44 Aaron: No.02:45 Darren: I totally fried my laptop and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm getting on my flight in two hours and I still have so many slides to make." So, I raced to the little electronic store, I buy a new laptop, I'm trying to get everything loaded on to the laptop before my flight takes off. They're calling my name and I'm watching the ton download of PowerPoint probably has to get a load on my laptop. They're like, "Last call for Darren Shaw to board flight to London." And it's like, I got 1% left and I'm holding the laptop, ready to close it, and ready to run into the gate. It was insane. So I finally got on my plane, worked a little bit on the plane, slept a little bit on the plane. It all worked out in the end, but man, it was stressful.03:28 Aaron: Oh my gosh, that sounds one of my worst nightmares like, "Holy cow."03:33 Darren: Yeah, it was really bad. But yeah, the presentation was great. I thought it was fun, and it's a cool case study I'm doing. I'm just taking a business that had zero local search presence and then, slowly stepping through each sort of thing that you would do in a local search, and measuring the impact of that like, "Okay, they got five new reviews. What impact did that have on local search?" We did other citation building, then we did a whole bunch of citation indexing. So, each step, I was like, "What impact did that have on the rankings?" And so, it was cool to do the study and I'm gonna continue that study as I go to MozCon in July.04:09 Aaron: Yeah, I'm super excited to hear about that. That sounds like such a great piece of research and everything you put into it. And also, if you and I, when we hang out next, if we're gonna have beers, I'm keeping my computer away from you.04:23 Darren: Seriously, keep it in your backpack. Do not get that anywhere near the table.04:28 Aaron: Oh, man.04:29 Darren: Yeah. I did a little touristy stuff, too. In Brighton, they have this i360 thing which goes... It looks like a UFO that goes up on a big stick, "Bzzzzz". Goes like way up high so you can see all the way out to the ocean, all of Brighton, which is kind of touristy and interesting. It was alright. And then, I went to visit a friend. I went up to London, ate some great meals. Yeah, Brighton's a beautiful spot, and London, of course, is awesome. I did a couple of days there. After that grueling work, I just wished I had gone home instead of taking a couple of days in London, actually. I felt like I'd rather be with my family than trudging around London by myself.05:11 Aaron: Yeah, I can see that but I almost always get like this. I don't know if it's like a high or just relief after when you have something that big and then, it's off your plate. It is such a... There's a lot of decompressing that you have to do. That was something for a long time that I think even my wife struggled with when I would come home from certain conferences or events where you had big talks and things like that, where I was like, I just need to check out for a few days and I feel really great about it but I have no... I don't have any purpose to accomplish big things right now, professionally or personally, so I'm just gonna be happy, have a beer, and walk around without a care in the world for a couple of days because I just had way too many.05:58 Darren: I totally get that. I feel the exact same. I love it when I go to a conference, say, something like MozCon, and I speak on the first day, because then, I got the next two days to just like, "Yey, I'm having the best time hanging out with all my industry friends and having some drinks and learning some new topics." And I'm just like, "I'm not checking my email for two days." Yeah.06:16 Aaron: That's awesome. Well, good. I'm glad it went well even though you threw the biggest curve ball at yourself ever, but way to overcome.06:25 Darren: Yeah, sucked. What's up with you? 06:28 Aaron: Well, on company-wise, I'm really excited. We just hired a new VP of Customer Success.06:35 Darren: Awesome.06:36 Aaron: Yeah. It's someone that I've known for a long time, has a great background and really, we already have a great customer success team. We have three direct reps, and we have had one that served as a lead. But I was directly managing or overseeing our lead customer success rep, and in the 100 ways I'm at, like I'm not giving him enough support. I'm not giving enough guidance to the team. And it just really became aware to me that, even though this wasn't like our number one need, that I knew the right person for this job, and that would be a great fit culturally for us and within our mission and a bunch of other things, and it would really help this team have more experience to draw from and more time with somebody to help both what we do and them individually grow.07:27 Aaron: I'm really excited about that. One of the things... We already have for, especially our multi-location clients, five locations to into the thousands, we have a really great onboarding process that we've developed and put together and communicate and everything else, but we almost like, Launch is like the finish line. And once they're up and running, then we kinda turn reactive again, and then we're like, "Okay, if you need something, let us know," where we should be...07:54 Darren: Not checking in on them. Yeah.07:55 Aaron: Yeah, we should be hands-on. What's their week one look like, what's month one, what's the first 90 days? How are we ensuring they're getting off to the right start, to really be successful? That's kind of one of our main high-level goals to get going, and I'm excited with how this hire is gonna plug in and help make that happen for us.08:13 Darren: How big is your customer support team? 08:16 Aaron: So total of four now with this hire. So we have three direct reps that those guys are handling everything from email tickets, phone calls. We do a live chat during normal business hours, on-boarding, all of those different things. We have four in total dedicated to that now.08:36 Darren: Right. And so, this made me think about one thing you could do is measuring engagement and then if you see a client fall off of engagement, they're not logging in, they're not sending out requests, then you could algorithmically send an alert to your customer service team and say, "Hey, you should check in with this customer."08:55 Aaron: Totally... Maybe that's another podcast. We talk about that, but we're definitely looking at a combination. We're just starting to do a deeper install with the product called Heap Analytics. We're gonna do a lot more event tracking in the app and things like that. So yeah, definitely a combination of we wanna be proactive and digging into accounts and looking for things. We wanna develop some systems that are kinda giving us those warning signs or being able to really high level kind of spot check where they're at.09:25 Darren: Yeah, totally. And I say that as just suggestion for you, but it's like, "Damn, we should do that too."09:30 Aaron: No, totally. And it's a great thing to talk about. And as we get further down, I'd love to talk about where we're getting with it, but it really is like, How do you have this prescriptive path that you know that they need to achieve and we know certain things based on how often they're logging in, often they're engaging with the feature, and then some of the metrics that are coming out. Those are key performance indicators that we really need to ratchet down on.09:58 Darren: For sure. What else is going on? Anything new? 10:01 Aaron: Excited that we landed our first customer from... If you remember back a couple of months ago, we did that IFA conference.10:07 Darren: Yeah, we talked all about ROI on that. So you got a good customer? 10:11 Aaron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got a good customer that basically, zeroed out our investment, right? We'll make money back on this customer in under a year from our investment on that. We signed them to a two-year deal. And then I still have a number of other conversations in addition to the exposure we got and everything else. I feel really, really good about that. Yeah, that's all I wanted out of our... Again, our first time. You have to understand these things that you're not gonna go in and shock and awe people first time in a giant conference like that, so it's like, "Can you just get a little traction? A lot of visibility, a lot of conversations." We're already signed up for the next one, next year, so excited about that.10:50 Darren: Yeah, and I think it's a good point. You definitely zeroed out. So you know you've got that exact measurable impact from the conference, but you did better than zeroing out because there was all that exposure of people that are coming to you because they saw you at the conference and you have no idea that you have a new customer, you didn't know that it was because of IFA.11:09 Aaron: Yeah.11:10 Darren: So you're definitely getting more than just this one big client, for sure.11:13 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely, but it's great to be able to go to the team just because some of my partners weren't always on board with doing these types of events and conferences and be able to say like, "Hey yeah, dollar-to-dollar. We got our money back and now here's all these other intangibles that continue to pay off, right? It's like anything in marketing. You have to look at it as an investment and some investments, they are short-term payoffs and some are more mid and long-term and you need to keep going back on it to get where you need to go.11:42 Darren: Yeah, and then you also get the lifetime value of that customer so it's more than just whatever the contract is that you sign, it's into the future. And then, a new customer and all the referrals that can potentially come from that customer.11:54 Aaron: Yeah, you just hope it's... You planted a seed with it and then it starts to grow and branch out and everything else, and you reap all those rewards.12:03 Darren: Totally, great. And I saw you guys were sponsoring MozCon.12:04 Aaron: Yeah.12:05 Darren: And I got to see all the tweets. Everyone's excited about giving away tickets.12:08 Aaron: Yeah, yeah, giving away a ticket, which is awesome, 'cause a MozCon ticket is expensive, like face value.12:15 Darren: And it's a great conference.12:17 Aaron: Yeah. Of like 1700 bucks and great speakers like yourself and Will Reynolds and Cindy Krum and things like that, where it really is awesome. And interesting enough, I saw in one of those side benefits, right? I was just on site a couple of days ago with a new customer that we're onboarding and kicking off with, that has hundreds of locations. And our main contact there was like... She's like, "Hey, can I ask you a question? I'm like, Yeah, totally she's like... Well, I was just looking into 'cause I need to get out to some conferences, and whatever. And lo and behold, I came across MozCon kinda looks great. And then I saw you guys are sponsor. So I thought you'd be able to give me really good insight on the... Is this a good conference and should I go to it? 12:58 Aaron: And to me, it was like one of those, it reinforced in other reasons why to sponsor conferences and things like that, 'cause even your customer see like, "Oh these guys are active in the space and they're part of these things and whatever else. So, that was kind of a cool full-circle moment there.13:10 Darren: There is no conference I've ever been to, I've never seen a better opportunity for vendors than the MozCon setup because at MozCon, they only take on eight to 10 exhibitors really, and they have these nice little, they call them partner hubs, and they're right as you walk into the conference. It's not like in a separate room like an exhibit hall that you have to go to. They're right there so your visibility is amazing and when people come out from the conference sessions to go and get a coffee or a snack, or they go off for lunch, they have to walk right past you. And so, all these people are mingling about and the snacks are right next to where all the vendors are. It's amazing. It's the best visibility I've ever seen at a conference. It's a good one.13:52 Aaron: Nice. I hope we can capitalize on that. Maybe we can even book like, Darren Shaw's in our booth for an hour and you can get photos and autographs.14:01 Darren: [chuckle] It's not just me, there's some great local people coming so Joy is gonna be there too, and Greg Gifford got a community spot. Oh, maybe I'm supposed to keep that on the down low. Well, it's out there now. [chuckle] It's definitely out there now.14:14 Aaron: Well, we'll have a handful of our team. Mike Blumenthal will be there as well, so we'll have a good crew.14:21 Darren: Yeah, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be fun. Can't wait.14:23 Aaron: I think maybe we do a thing where, for an hour, you will dump beers on people's laptops.[chuckle]14:29 Darren: You would get so many people lined up for that. Yeah. [laughter]14:33 Aaron: Oh, see I love these ideas. And other than that, man, I just... I know you know what this is like, too, but I've been on a plane every week the last five weeks. Monday, I leave for a local U in Austin. I go directly from there to North Carolina to one of our new clients and their internal conference for franchisees, so it's just been really hard to get time at my desk and to keep the other things moving forward when you don't have that focus time gap.15:02 Darren: And that's where this new hire comes in, right. Someone that can just... "Okay, you manage the customer support initiatives that we wanna run with? Like all this stuff that I don't have time to stay on top of."15:12 Aaron: Yeah, totally. Anyway, that's a normal struggle. You know what that's like, but man, it's crazy sometimes when it is. I'm going on week five of a trip, of multiple days every single week, and it's like I need a week just no calls, no emails, get caught up, get directions set on some things.15:32 Darren: I do not envy that. I know that feeling of just feeling like you're getting further and further behind with all the traveling and speaking, and all that kind of stuff. It takes a lot of time and I am really looking forward to this next stretch I have where I don't have anything until Moz... Oh, have a little one, a local U, in June and then MozCon so... But yeah, I'm basically free and clear for a while and I love it and I'm not gonna book anything. I've got so many initiatives that we have on the go here, I'm really excited about, and I'm so happy to be involved with.16:03 Aaron: No, that feels so good.16:05 Darren: One other new item for me, actually, is we launched a new service so I'm excited about that. It's called the local search service and we basically... You can kind of think of it like a Google My Business management service. We really tried to build a great productized service that we can scale, and I'm really excited about it and getting a lot of interest from it and I think there's great potential. We have so many customers that come to us that are like, "Okay, I don't even know what a citation is. What am I supposed to do? Can you help me?" And we're like, "Yes." Now, we can say, "Yes, we can help you. Sign up for this. We will basically manage all of the local pieces of search for you and so we can now meet the needs of all those clients, so I'm excited about that.16:47 Aaron: Yeah, you should be. That's really cool. And once again, it's usually when we talk, that totally sounds like an episode I'd love to do a deep dive on because I have some ideas around some productized services that we can bolt on top of what we're doing, especially with some of the features we have coming out in the next three to six months. So, that's really interesting. And yeah, let's put that on or our dock of notes on something 'cause I'd love to hear how all that unfolds for you more and what you understand as this rolls out and the success...17:17 Darren: For sure, yeah. There will be lots to talk about. Yeah, I'll be interested to hear more about your productized services. But now, let's get into the meat of it. We're gonna talk about competitors, right? 17:24 Aaron: Good old competitors.[chuckle]17:26 Darren: Yeah.17:27 Aaron: It's like an opinion, everybody has one, right? 17:30 Darren: Yeah, totally. Totally. You have lots, actually. Your space is pretty saturated and I suppose I have even more because we do everything so, yeah. How do you deal with your competitors? Are you like... Do you have alerts set up? Do you have a team member that's, it's their job to watch what the competitor is doing all the time? How do you deal with it? 17:51 Aaron: Yeah. I definitely fall into the camp where I pay attention and I think about them. I'm not as far... I know people who obsess about it and things like that. I think that's really unhealthy 'cause it derails the direction you're going.18:07 Darren: Yep.18:07 Aaron: But, especially when you're young, when you're a start-up and... Alright, I've been with GatherUp for just a couple of months shy of four years now, but in the earlier stages when I was there, especially when you haven't carved out where you are and you're not as secure in where you are, or confident, then you pay a lot of attention to it, right? And I think that can be a really hard evolution in just figuring out what the right balance is for you because it's smart to pay attention to them and understand what they're doing but when you obsess, then you start going backwards and the other way with it and that becomes really, really dangerous.18:47 Darren: How do you deal with feature parity? So one of your customers will be like, "Hey we used to be with this... We're currently with this competitor. We're thinking about switching to you. Do you also do this thing that my competitor does? Like is that something that you're like, "Ooh, we should really get that on a roadmap," or you're like, "No, we have our roadmap. We're staying the course. We don't care if this other competitor has this feature that this one customer wants."19:13 Aaron: It depends so much. I think if you go back to my first statement, I'm like knowing who you are and where you're going. A lot of times we're really easily able to say, "Does that feature even fit in with our vision and our direction or doesn't it?" And there are certain features, though, that you consider these are standard things that are needed in what we're doing, and that becomes the really tricky part in kind of parsing that out sometimes.19:41 Darren: Yeah.19:41 Aaron: We have certain competitors that I call  "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" competitor where no matter who builds what in the space, they have enough of an engineering team where they will basically copycat everyone's feature. And they really don't ever innovate anything or bring out something that's really strategic. They're just gonna say, "Hey, we have 250 features. We're never gonna lose a deal on a feature," and as a bootstrap company, we can't afford to do that. We have to align very tightly with our strategy and our vision with it. So that's the big thing that we always use is like, "Does this align with what those are?" And then we have to give the consideration like, "Is this an expected across the board?" So an easy example in our space would be like if we didn't have review monitoring, right, people would be like, "That's great that you helped me get more reviews and all these other things, but you're not letting me know when new reviews happen when I get them and giving me a notification about it."20:40 Aaron: That would be an issue no matter how our focus of like, "Well, we wanna help you connect with your customer and that's a reactive thing, and we only wanna do proactive things." So, definitely pieces like that. How do you look at it just as you talked about... You have this feature set that's so broad that you then hit all kinds of people that just focus on one of your features, but that's all they do is that one? What does that look like for you and your competitive landscape? 21:09 Darren: Yeah. So for us, I feel frustrated about competitors often because it's like I have this broad vision about what we wanna do. But we're kinda small, actually. Our company is not huge, and then competitors seem to always be a step ahead of us. We're like, "Damn it, we were gonna launch that." And then they put it out like a month before us. Things like that often come up that are frustrating. So there is, obviously, in my space, one major competitor which is BrightLocal, and it was funny because at Brighton SEO, that training I did, there were ten attendees for my full training session, and five of them were employees with BrightLocal 'cause apparently they're based out of Brighton. And so, I basically was training Myles and [21:56] ____ how to do local search, which was good times. [chuckle] And...22:00 Aaron: That's so crazy... Like did part of you just kind of feel like... Asking them to walk out of the room like, "This is not for you." [chuckle]22:07 Darren: Well no, 'cause it wasn't really like... We weren't really talking about our software and our services. We were just talking about local search in general, so it was totally fine. And I did my best to try and train them up as well as I could. And then the next day I actually went for lunch with my top competitor, Miles Anderson, from BrightLocal. And yeah, we had a great, great lunch, we chatted about things. I feel like we were both pretty open and it was interesting to hear about their business and what they're working on and tell him a little bit about what we're up to. And it's funny because you have some competitors that totally seem like assholes and you're like, "I would never go for lunch with that guy, [chuckle] but then I have BrightLocal and Whitespark, we're friendly competitors.22:51 Darren: I feel the same way about Moz, Moz has their Moz local product, but I love them all over there. It's a great group and so I don't really... I don't worry about the competitors, and I don't, I don't hate my competitors, but sometimes I'm frustrated about their ability to release faster than us. But other times, I just don't obsess about it either because, like you said, we have our road map, we have our style, people choose us because of who we are and what we do and how we do things because they just... It feels like more of a fit for them than this other product. And so, we just have to be clear on who we are and what we're doing, and I think that there's room in the industry for lots of competitors. If you think about how many email marketing systems are there? You got Mail Chimp, you got... I'm drawing a blank [chuckle], what are some of the other ones? Campaign Monitor.23:47 Aaron: Campaign Monitor, AWeber, Constant Contact. [chuckle]23:48 Darren: There's probably 30 of them and they are all making money. So it's like, to some degree, spaces will eventually merge to like a top winner but... And I would love for that to be Whitespark in my space. And you would love for that to be GatherUp in your space. But I don't worry too much about the competition. I'm not worried about my business... My business continues to grow, your business continues to grow and so.24:16 Aaron: And you have to look at it that way. If you're in a space you can see there's enough business for all kinds of people. And there's just so many different... It becomes interesting to me, based on who we're selling into, we might have a different set of two or three competitors. And that always becomes really interesting as you get into those. And I can kind of, like, for the three main segments we work in, there's kinda two competitors in each of those segments, that that's who we bump into in a comparison process, more often than not with it.24:51 Darren: I was just gonna say, speaking of comparison like, how do you handle all those questions where people are like, "Well what makes you better than competitor X?"25:01 Aaron: Yeah. I think, going back to the other things I hit upon, the thing that we always look at is, strategically, right, we really rely on like, "Hey, you have some of the people who have cared a long time about local search, people who care about business and reputation and communication. We understand all those angles, and we're not giving you... We're not the Walmart of SaaS products, where every feature's on the shelf and you grab what you want. We are this honed experience, that if you come in, we have the right things that you need, and we also can help you with the right ways to use them.25:34 Aaron: And I think that's really important coming from that angle, we point that out all the time as a difference, and we also use the fact that like, "Hey, we are hard-core focused on helping connect you to your customers." So at the end of the day, we're not gonna be creating a bunch of other things around local listings or some of these other things. And I get customers want... When they find like, "Alright, I can get one bill and one provider and there's some overlap." I get all of those are wins, but we really look at it as like we wanna be the best option with what we're trying to do, more so than, we have more things to sell you and, all across the board, we can make it so you don't have to need three people, you just need one. But we have our own ways that we make that happen.26:22 Darren: Yeah, that's interesting, our approach is a little bit different. We are kitchen sink for sure, and we continue to expand, and add new things like, "Oh, customers need this, we're gonna build it." So, I don't know, I feel like we're kinda stuck there now because we already offer so many different products and services around the whole range of local search that we can never get out of that, but I do think your approach is really smart, from a competitor perspective. And I think there's a service behind it too. It's like, "Hey, we are subject matter experts on customer experience, customer feedback, reviews, you come to us and we're not just like a software you're gonna sign up for, we're gonna actually help you get the best results that you can from that review process, and feedback process." So, I think it's smart to... The way you have honed in on that.27:10 Aaron: Well, hopefully, 'cause... But it's also you have to make the most of what you have to offer too. I don't have 100 engineers building every last feature, so I can't be in that arms race, I'm not gonna win that. So, we have to build really great, well-thought-out strategical features that align with things we understand. SEO, and local SEO, and communications between business and customer, and really dial those in so that we can show them like, "Hey, here's a really great repeatable process that your business can prosper with." Rather than, "Hey, spread yourself super thin trying to do all these things." And more and more, I'm hearing customers come back to that just because I think there is such an explosion in the ebbs and flows of software, and SaaS and that explosion where there is that feeling of adding more features, adding more features, adding more features. And I've actually had some clients say, "What I like about you is you are laser focused on this, and that other stuff is just kind of fluff to me, or thrown in or whatever else. And we don't need it, we're likely not gonna use it, we need to put our focus here."28:19 Darren: Yeah, and you also end up with feature bloat, where someone logs in to the system and they're like, "Wow, this is insane. I don't know how to do anything. Do you have a two-day training course for me to figure out how your software works?" And so staying focused and not building every damn feature can really help to make your customer experience of using the software better too.28:40 Aaron: Yeah, you always wanna find it. And this is something we are constantly battling 'cause sometimes I think we're getting that, as we offer so many customizations and configurations, or whatever else where, to me, it's always figuring out this top-down approach of how can I do the easiest things up front and right away, and then I have easy pass to go into second, third, fourth level advanced type settings, and I can dig deeper if I want to, but I don't have all that depth thrown in my face right away, and that's something I'm...29:08 Darren: Yep.29:09 Aaron: Really trying to philosophically work into our user experience. Let's not expose everything right up front, I get that makes sense when we're creating it 'cause we understand everything. But when the first time user comes in, that's the last thing you want them to be, it's like, "Where do I even start?" You don't want that.29:25 Darren: Yeah, totally. You got a dropdown with 30 different options and it's too much.29:30 Aaron: I'm interested, Darren in yours, how often do you see customers switching from one provider or another, and how hard is that switch for someone to pick up and leave BrightLocal, and come to Whitespark or something like that? 29:43 Darren: Yeah, interestingly it depends on what they want. So, BrightLocal has a couple of things that we don't have and so, but there are a lot of people that have a Brightlocal account, and they're paying for all this extra stuff that they don't actually use. And so we did recently make it pretty easy to switch to us. We've added some features that make it easy to switch, and we will support people that wanna switch too. So, if they wanna switch, we're gonna do all the work to try and make it as easy as possible for them. And that's been pretty successful for us, and we find that our customers that do switch are like, "Wow, this is a whole new world, we really love it." And that gives us some confidence in what we're doing. But we also see people go the other way too. When people cancel, one of the options they can choose is moving to a competitor. And then, of course, we ask for more details. Yeah, we do see people switch over to BrightLocal, and they list their reasons, and we think about those reasons, and we figure out whether or not we need to make any changes based off of what the feedback we're getting. And then there's so many people that are switching one way or the other, you never hear from. You don't know if they're switching.30:51 Aaron: Would you ever consider... Do you market that switching process? I think about, I've seen this for a long time with banks, they will actively put out content on their website saying like, "Hey, here's how you switch to our bank and we make it easy. And here's what's involved." Do you do any of that or would you consider doing that? So people know like, "Hey, it's not super painful, and we actually will guide you through it, and make it easy."31:14 Darren: Yeah, we've recently built these features to make it easy to switch. And we are going to definitely market them. We're just putting it on the landing page and saying, "Hey listen, if you're currently with this competitor, it's so dead simple for you to switch. We move everything over for you, contact us today." So we definitely wanna market it, we're not gonna do a blog post and tweet about it, and be like, "Hey, anyone that's with BrightLocal definitely come to us." [chuckle] We're not gonna do that, it just feels kind of douchey. But we will let... We wanna let people know that it's easy to switch. And we're putting it into our welcome email. So, someone signs up for that, we're like, "Oh hey, are you with BrightLocal? If you are... " Just a line that says, "Hey, it's easy to switch."31:56 Aaron: Nice, very, very smart.31:58 Darren: And it's not just BrightLocal, we've made it easy to switch from other providers too.32:01 Aaron: Yeah, so in your space, and I can't remember if BrightLocal has taken any funding at any point or not, but do you have...32:10 Darren: They have not.32:10 Aaron: Okay, so are most of your competitors in your space bootstrapped or do you have... Are there certain ones that are big VC-funded, and on a different trajectory? 32:21 Darren: It depends on what you're looking at. For someone that is pretty close to almost exactly what we do, it's BrightLocal. But then we have competitors in different areas like business listing management. You've got Moz Local, and then you have Yext. So Yext, of course, massive funding, Moz Local, massive funding, and so they are different. And then we have some that are a little bit more agency, but also a little focused on business listings, and that would be, Advice Local is one that comes up here and there. And I think they might be funded too. It's an interesting thing like that, bootstrapped versus funding.32:57 Aaron: Yep.32:58 Darren: I feel like I don't know why, but we have a market advantage and maybe it's just because of the speaking and stuff that I do, but I feel like people look to us as experts and that helps drive business for sure, for us.33:10 Aaron: Yeah. As you know, we're in that same boat where we wanna be thought leaders in the space, especially when it comes to search. We're the only one of our competitors that are at a MozCon or talking at search conferences where our competitors especially like BirdEye or Podium, that these guys have taken $30 million rounds of funding those guys are talking at SaaS conferences and VC conferences and things like that, and we definitely use that to our advantage on how well we understand the space and what Google is doing and what they're up to, and that we even have relationships there that are productive strategic ones. But there's such a gap in our space, 'cause we really have a competitor that's just, "Hey, they got a couple of million dollars in funding and it's allowed them to accelerate." We have these behemoths that have taken on tens of millions of dollars or you have us, that have not taken on any money. And so, that discrepancy that divide is so large and you see it in size of engineering teams and size of sales teams. It's like...34:18 Darren: Yeah. For sure. Yeah.34:19 Aaron:  I'm the only one that does outbound sales. I'm hoping that changes in the coming months, It's been top of my priority list for a while. We still haven't found the right fit. But I wanna grow an outbound sales team because our product is good enough for it now, and we're doing very well just through inbound marketing and all the things we do there, but it's really time for us to scale up those efforts. And those guys already have sales teams of 50, 100, and every last...34:45 Darren: That's insane, I know.34:47 Aaron: Yeah.34:47 Darren: Yeah, it's totally insane. So what kind of outbound sales do you do? Who are you talking to you? 34:51 Aaron: Yeah, I focus all on multi-locations. So I wanna talk if your... For me, I'm probably targeting anyone like 50 locations, and up. So yesterday, I saw one of my contacts is friends with the COO of a 200 location coffee shop. So I asked for an introduction.35:08 Darren: Right. That's smart.35:09 Aaron: I'm looking at brands that have size, continue to grow. And I can usually pretty easily see from even their own website. Are they using something to streamline feedback and reviews, are they displaying reviews on their site or location pages. So it's like this, three to four item checklist where I can see like, okay, they're either doing one of the five things we offer or two of the five, or none or I see they're using two different services, where I know we could help them consolidate.  I'm reaching out and try to start a conversation. I'm gonna put some of our case studies in front of them or some thought leadership articles from our blog or, "Hey, are you gonna be at this event that we're speaking at or we're sponsoring." And try to spark that up that way. And I would love to have one, two, three, four, five people duplicating my efforts there, just because those relationships are so much demand... It's one thing to get the conversation started, but then it's the calls, the demos, the meetings staying on top of it, keeping it moving, all of those things that you gotta have a team for.36:10 Darren: Absolutely, I find like... Sales are great, I can do the sales, but it's all the work that comes after that. Great, I've started a conversation I have a client that's interested, and then it's like managing that relationship is really time-consuming. You definitely need to build a team or it'll end up taking up all your time.36:27 Aaron: Yup, absolutely, I'm with you. Anything in closing, Darren I think we've ran our course, but do you have any final takeaways or a statement that you'd offer advice to anyone when... How they're thinking about or watching their competitors, researching them, what would you put out there to our listeners? 36:45 Darren: Yeah, I think it is important to keep an eye on them. You wanna have... I do have [36:51] ____ what they do and I keep tabs on it and I keep looking at what they're doing, but also, having that mentality that you touched on which is making sure that you understand what you're about and what your mission is, and not getting pulled off course for this feature, or that feature, 'cause competitors are always gonna be doing things slightly different from you but understanding what value you're bringing, and if that feature contributes to that value, then it's something that you might wanna include or if whatever marketing thing they're doing makes sense that it might be something you wanna do. But knowing who you are and what you're providing, and what your value differentiator is against that competitor is really important to get nailed down, so that you're not always just chasing every little thing that the competitors are doing.37:36 Aaron: Totally agree with you, self-awareness of your product and your company, is so important for people to be as soon as you can find that way, to be secure with that. You can't be over confident where you bury your head in the sand, you still need to be aware, but you need that self-confidence so that you can build your own path. And the cautionary tale, I tell people all the time, is if you build yourself to be so alike a competitor. Now there isn't just as you hit about there isn't this unique distinction on why someone would choose you or the other one.38:08 Darren: Yeah totally.38:09 Aaron: And it's like, Oh, you're both the same. Alright, well, which one's cheaper, now? Which is the last comparison that you want.38:16 Darren: Exactly.38:16 Aaron: I never wanna win, because I'm the cheap option, I wanna win because I'm the best value that's there. So I'd tell people to really be thinking about that. When you are paying attention to your competitors, you're not obsessing but how do you carve out the value that you have in comparison? 38:31 Darren: Yeah, and I would add one little thing. It's very valuable to hear, as customers are coming in when they do switch over, to touch base with them and find out what was happening over with your competitor that you had problems with? And then being able to speak to some of those things and trying to amplify your benefits against those perceived problems over there. That's one thing that we try to do over here.38:54 Aaron: Yes, yep. Now we have that going on in our reseller space right now, and we have a number of resellers, coming to us from our biggest competitor there that are like your feature set is better, your interface is better, your customer service is way better, and those are all things that we need to just be a little bit more touting and put out there so the people understand that there is that difference and that makes up for, "We are a little bit more expensive than they are." But as everyone that switches said, "You're 10X the value because of those things." And we need to do a better job of bringing that...39:29 Darren: Yeah laying that out for them. When you're onboarding new clients or when you're prospecting in the sales process, that's where that stuff should come out, where you can speak to those things. So yeah, that's where I really think the greatest value of keeping your eyes on your competitors is in that, in the sales process.39:44 Aaron: Yep. Nope, you're completely correct, I agree. Alright, well...39:47 Darren: Alright.39:47 Aaron: Thanks everybody. That concludes another episode. Hopefully, we've had about three, four weeks between our last one, just because of, as we touched upon travels and conferences and everything else, hopefully Darren and I, in the next couple of weeks will be sinking again to get you out another episode of the SaaS venture. Please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter. We've had some questions in the past we love to answer listener questions, or topic ideas and if you have the time, leaving us a review in iTunes is super helpful, helps with the visibility of our podcast, as we continue to reach more 100 people and have more listeners interact with us. Love doing that.40:26 Darren: Alright, yeah, what Aaron said.40:29 Aaron: Have a good one, until we talk again, Darren.40:30 Darren: Yeah, we'll schedule another one and we'll talk again soon, thanks Aaron.40:34 Aaron: Alright. You bet. Keep your beer away from your laptop and we'll talk soon.40:38 Darren: I will. Okay bye.40:39 Aaron: Alright. See you everybody.

Demand thinking in user experience is beyond a function. It's emotional and social. Show highlights: 02:40 - Sundaresh shares a story about app development designed in "engineering brain" versus "user centric brain" 05:30 - Joshua Mitchell talking about his background in User Experience versus just making "a prettier internet" (in the words of Joel Smith) 07:30 - Joel Smith origin story, got his start by creating a small web hosting company, and moved to marketing side 11:00 - The state of apps and websites in late 1990s and 2000s. "Pretty internet" talking about Flash, adding images and graphics early on. Just adding elements because we could, not because it added value. The question of we have new tool, just applying it because it's cool (examples: blockchain, 3D printing, or virtual reality). 15:00 - Bad UX example, talking about introducing Lime and Bird scooters because they are cool but need legislation and rules, so how do we balance. 17:30 - Minimum viable product, bargain with user that the product may not be perfect, but also create vulnerability for companies 20:00 - Why was starting Design on Tap hard? Josh and Joel describe the evolution from waterfall to agile. Defining waterfall versus agile. 27:00 - Marketers, if you don't know what you want, don't pretend you do. But rather work with a partner that will help you discover what you need. 33:30 - Are marketers in tough spots in relinquishing control to agency? Marketers and agencies should work with the client to understand the problem, versus just fixing the problem. 35:30 - How can we be using data in product development and understanding a buyer's journey. Two considerations: market demand data, and usage data and how the product is experienced. Book by Alan Klement "When Coffee and Kale Compete" http://www.whencoffeeandkalecompete.com/ 38:00 - Seeds of a movement called Demand Thinking - progress is the process of making change in a positive direction, and we hire and fire products to do that job. Clayton Christensen "The Innovators Dilemma" (https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/12/understanding-the-innovators-dilemma/). Design on Tap uses Heap Analytics, looks retroactively at the "digital exhaust" on existing state of product. Ryan Singer, Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp (https://www.feltpresence.com/) 43:00 - Buyer Insights, new service and research framework at Design on Tap to let design help companies create deeper meaning for customers along buyer journey. Why? Providing customers what they want before they even know they need it. 49:00 - 2 products, seeking to solve the exact same need with two very different solutions. Functional, emotional, and social components to the product manifestations. Modern customers are thinking, "I'll know a good product when I see it." 54:00 - Success story with Indy Chamber of Commerce, example of how to define outcomes but not sure how to get there, but a process to figure it out. Transforming website from something to just keep up-to-date to something that adds value. Shaping customer goals with the agency: SMART goals, learn or earn goals, and customer behavior focused current behavior and influence different. Came up with the goals AFTER the contract was signed 1:02:00- Closing remarks

Jon Bishop is the Director of Growth at Heap Analytics, a self-serve analytics SaaS product that has changed the ability for non-technical professionals to access deep insights driven by data without the assistance of an engineer. Previously, Jon worked at Periscope Data, another data analytics growth company, in which he multiplied revenue by 48x. At both Heap and Periscope, Jon was the first marketing hire. He has also worked as a growth consultant for venture backed startups. The topics discussed in this episode include exponentially increasing value for your customers, attracting an educated user base, and the power of small marketing teams.

Today our goal is to get into the minds of our users, and predict when they're likely to churn. Our guest expert is Richard Felix — the founder of Stunning, Retained, and multiple other products — who knows everything (and then some) about customer retention. You'll learn about different types of churn, how to measure user happiness, and what you should do if your customer decided to cancel. Podcast feed: subscribe to http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/1441/rss in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. Show Notes Stunning, Retained, Are My Sites Up — Richard's products Drip, Intercom — tools for communicating with users Mixpanel, Heap Analytics — tools for in-app analytics Richard's website Follow Richard on Twitter: @rfelix Today's Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Tiny Reminder. Are your projects on hold and you invoices unpaid? This tool will play bad cop with your clients — so you don't have to. Sign up today for our Forever Free plan at tinyreminder.com. Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a Review Reviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

In Episode #244, Eric and Neil discuss whether Omniture or Google 360 premium are worth the extra cost. Tune in to find out if you’re making the right decision in purchasing the paid versions of these products and Eric and Neil’s firsthand experience using both of them.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today’s topic: Is Omniture or Google 360 Premium Worth the Cost? 00:34 – Omniture and Google 360 are analytics tools 00:44 – Omniture is from Adobe and 360 is from Google 00:53 – Eric has used Omniture in the past and his friend used the premium service 01:30 – Eric’s friend’s feedback from using Omniture was that it was not worth it 01:52 – You can do a lot with Google Analytics without the paid version 02:43 – Neil has used the paid version and there’s really no difference 03:00 – You can use Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, and Heap Analytics instead 03:15 – Omniture is almost the same as Google Analytics 03:55 – Don’t use either of them and you’ll save money! 04:01 – That’s it for today’s episode! 3 Key Points: Try the tool, first, before purchasing its premium version. Opt for the more efficient, but less pricey tools if you can. Beware—not all paid versions are better versions. 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

In Episode #244, Eric and Neil discuss whether Omniture or Google 360 premium are worth the extra cost. Tune in to find out if you're making the right decision in purchasing the paid versions of these products and Eric and Neil's firsthand experience using both of them.  Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:27 – Today's topic: Is Omniture or Google 360 Premium Worth the Cost? 00:34 – Omniture and Google 360 are analytics tools 00:44 – Omniture is from Adobe and 360 is from Google 00:53 – Eric has used Omniture in the past and his friend used the premium service 01:30 – Eric's friend's feedback from using Omniture was that it was not worth it 01:52 – You can do a lot with Google Analytics without the paid version 02:43 – Neil has used the paid version and there's really no difference 03:00 – You can use Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, and Heap Analytics instead 03:15 – Omniture is almost the same as Google Analytics 03:55 – Don't use either of them and you'll save money! 04:01 – That's it for today's episode! 3 Key Points: Try the tool, first, before purchasing its premium version. Opt for the more efficient, but less pricey tools if you can. Beware—not all paid versions are better versions. 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

O Umblercast chamou quatro especialistas em Martech e mergulhou no universo das ferramentas de tecnologia para marketing. Ferramentas indicadas no podcast Pipz Automation: https://pipz.com/ Evernote: https://www.evernote.com/ Asana: https://asana.com/ Slack: https://slack.com/ Zapier: https://zapier.com/ Buffer: https://buffer.com/ SemRush: https://www.semrush.com/ Ahrefs: http://ahrefs.com/ Google Analytics: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/ Litmus: https://litmus.com Canva Design: https://www.canva.com/ Segment: https://segment.com/ Drift: https://www.drift.com/ Heap Analytics: https://heapanalytics.com/ Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/ Help Scout: https://www.helpscout.net/ Kissmetrics: https://www.kissmetrics.com/ Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/ Woopra: https://www.woopra.com/ SemRush: https://www.semrush.com/ Moz: https://moz.com/ Unbounce: http://unbounce.com/ GenMyModel: https://www.genmymodel.com/ JIRA: https://br.atlassian.com/software/jira Pipedrive: http://pipedrive.com/

Kyle Racki, co-founder and CEO of Proposify. He’s passionate about design, SaaS, and marketing. He loves jamming out to 90s covers/tunes at open mic nights, and also has the unique ability to work in perfectly, cromulent Simpsons’ references to any conversation. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Lean Analytics What CEO do you follow? –  Alex Turnbull Favorite online tool? — Heap Analytics Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— Sometimes If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “That it’s all going to be okay and…I’m going to give myself a hug”   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:40 – Nathan introduces Kyle to the show 02:24 – Proposify is a SaaS business and it helps people streamline their sales and close more deals 02:40 – Average customer pay per month is $40-$50 02:53 – Current number of customers 03:10 – Average MRR 03:25 – Proposify was launched in 2013 03:35 – Proposify had less than $1000 MRR for 17 months 04:03 – Kyle and his co-founder had an agency 04:22 – Kyle raised $250K in seed capital from a local investor 04:39 – Kyle and his team’s pay is around $60K a month during that time 05:40 – Team size is 15 and are located in Halifax, Canada 06:20 – Kyle shares how the startup market is in Halifax 06:50 – Known startup companies from Halifax 07:24 – Kyle does weekly phone calls with customers to check in on them 07:50 – Kyle shares how one of their customers beat VaynerMedia in a proposal 09:15 – How Proposify creates proposals in a flash 09:40 – Proposify’s competition 10:04 – Proposify is more focused on the digital agency space 11:25 – Average number of new customers per month 11:50 – Proposify has a free and no-credit card sign-up 12:00 – Proposify does inbound sales, but organic search is the biggest source of traffic 12:43 – Best podcast that drives Proposify’s traffic 13:05 – Proposify has a general marketing budget 13:28 - $10K for paid marketing 13:45 – CAC is quite low 14:18 – LTV 14:40 – Gross monthly customer churn 15:00 – Proposify currently has 2 sales people 15:35 – Other system Kyle uses for business intelligence is Heap Analytics 16:16 – Total 2015 revenue is $551K 17:11 – Proposify is profitable and continually growing 18:30 – “We’ll always entertain acquisition offers if it makes sense” 19:00 – The process Kyle will go through if there’s a possible acquisition 19:47 – Number of Proposify’s developers 20:00 – Connect with Kyle through their website and help Kyle look for Proposify.com’s owner and he’ll pay you 22:00 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: There’s a temptation to spend VC money; be decisive when you want to raise capital and stick to your goals. Organic traffic is good, but getting paid marketing can still drive more traffic and customers. There are a lot of things to consider in an acquisition – it should match your personal goals, be a cultural fit, and the numbers need to make sense.   Resources Mentioned: Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. The Top Inbox  – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens and follow-up with email sequences Proposify.biz – Kyle’s business website Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Matt Murphy is a Managing Director @ Menlo Ventures where he focuses on multi-stage investments across cloud infrastructure and AI-first SaaS applications. Since joining Menlo, Matt has led investments in Heap Analytics, Usermind, and Veriflow. Previously, Matt was a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins for over 15 years.  Matt was also an observer at Google (from initial investment to IPO), launched the iFund in ’08 (a collaborative initiative with Apple to build the defining applications on the iOS platform), and led KPCB’s investments in AutoNavi (Nasdaq: AMAP, 2010) and Aerohive Networks (Nasdaq: HIVE, 2014). Before joining KPCB, Matt worked at semiconductor startup Netboost (acquired by Intel) and prior to that at Sun Microsystems. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Matt made his way into the world of VC and enterprise investing? What were his biggest takeaways from working alongside John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins? How is the enterprise investing landscape changing? What fundamental shifts have we seen and what have been the dominant repercussions of this? Nakul Mandan stated that ‘we would see the 2nd wave of consumerisation of enterprise through business model’. Does Matt agree with this and what key trends is Matt most excited about in SaaS? How does Matt look to evaluate early stage SaaS valuations? What are people fundamentally misvaluing and how should the topic be approached? Is it harder now for SaaS companies to raise than ever before? What metrics does Matt look for in a Series A investment opportunity?   60 Second SaaStr Matt's Fave SaaS reading material? What are the greenfield opportunities in SaaS today? What was Matt's biggest takeaway from working with John Doerr @ Kleiner Perkins? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Matt Murphy

01:44 - Handling Initial Client Meetings 17:17 - Proprietary/Intellectual Property Lead Generation Trust Velocity Trade Secret 22:56 - Content Upgrades Philip Morgan: A Minimum Viable Funnel (MVF) 29:53 - Pitches 32:28 - If/When Property Becomes Public This American Life #427: Original Recipe 36:10 - Year-end Reports Picks KingSumo (Reuven) Google Keep (Jonathan) Jonathan Stark: How To Write Proposals That Close Without Lowering Your Prices (Jonathan) Lead Generation Trust Velocity (Philip) SendOwl (Philip) Heap Analytics (Philip) The Primal Blueprint (Chuck)  

01:44 - Handling Initial Client Meetings 17:17 - Proprietary/Intellectual Property Lead Generation Trust Velocity Trade Secret 22:56 - Content Upgrades Philip Morgan: A Minimum Viable Funnel (MVF) 29:53 - Pitches 32:28 - If/When Property Becomes Public This American Life #427: Original Recipe 36:10 - Year-end Reports Picks KingSumo (Reuven) Google Keep (Jonathan) Jonathan Stark: How To Write Proposals That Close Without Lowering Your Prices (Jonathan) Lead Generation Trust Velocity (Philip) SendOwl (Philip) Heap Analytics (Philip) The Primal Blueprint (Chuck)