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The last few episodes we've talked quite a bit about how as agency owners, we start to lose our subject matter expertise in the thing we built our agency on.We focus on growing the business and being good business owners rather than being the SEO or paid ads experts in the business. It's a weird feeling when your team starts to know more than you.Of course, you could always be like Joy Hawkins from Sterling Sky.For those of you in the SEO space, you probably recognize her name. She's the founder, owner, and local SEO expert at her agency, Sterling Sky and frequently contributes to major SEO pulbications like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, and is even frequently featured in Search Engine Roundtable.We're in awe at how Joy can maintain such an expert-level status on local SEO while maintaining and running her $6m local SEO agency.How do you maintain expertise while delegating and trusting people to be as good as you? Running the business is a fulltime job let alone being an expert in an area that's changing every day.----------------------------------Reach out to Joy on LinkedIn or check out her agency Sterling Sky. We also encourage you to check out their SEO digital conferences and webinars at LocalU. We've attended these ourselves and they are absolutely packed with local SEO information.Also, check out Joy's local SEO subreddit at r/localsearch!----------------------------------Our recommended agency tools:everbrospodcast.com/recommended-tools/----------------------------------⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐As always, if you enjoyed this episode or this podcast in general and want to leave us a review or rating, head over to Apple and let us know what you like! It helps us get found and motivates us to keep producing this free content.----------------------------------Want to connect with us? Reach out to us on the everbrospodcast.com website, subscribe to us on YouTube, or connect with us on socials:YouTube: @agencyuTwitter/X: @theagency_uLinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/agencyuFacebook: facebook.com/theagencyuInstagram: @theagencyuReddit: r/agency & u/JakeHundleyTikTok: @agency.u
Your CRM software isn't just some technical database that should be hidden away somewhere. If you've got it, flaunt it! And, congratulations, you've made it through the first quarter. So, what checkups should you be doing on your marketing campaign? ___ As you meet people, either online or out in the wide world, you should be considering each and every new connection as a way to grow your CRM database. It takes time and discipline to do it right, but it's totally worth it to grow your business. Gyi and Conrad discuss the possibilities that lie within a robust CRM system and how to meaningfully and effectively leverage those connections. We're 90 days in, everyone. How did Q1 go for you? Gyi and Conrad outline all the things lawyers and marketers should start measurably seeing after three months in the full swing of their marketing strategies. Is your target audience working? Are you hitting your priorities? What needs to change? The guys talk through all the questions you should be asking and the benchmarks you should be reaching at this point in the year. The News: So, what should we expect from Google in the next 12 months? Well, Conrad just did a session on it at Mass Torts Made Perfect, so he'll give you an overview! Universal Analytics is seriously done-zo on July 1, so if you're still using it, get out now. LocalU is coming to Detroit, and Gyi gets to help! LocalU taps into industry leading experts to teach about stellar SEO content. Check it: LocalU Detroit 2024 Mentioned in this Episode: The Bite - Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter! Diverse Marketing || 30 Days In - LHLM Episode Leave Us an Apple Review Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on TikTok
Your CRM software isn't just some technical database that should be hidden away somewhere. If you've got it, flaunt it! And, congratulations, you've made it through the first quarter. So, what checkups should you be doing on your marketing campaign? ___ As you meet people, either online or out in the wide world, you should be considering each and every new connection as a way to grow your CRM database. It takes time and discipline to do it right, but it's totally worth it to grow your business. Gyi and Conrad discuss the possibilities that lie within a robust CRM system and how to meaningfully and effectively leverage those connections. We're 90 days in, everyone. How did Q1 go for you? Gyi and Conrad outline all the things lawyers and marketers should start measurably seeing after three months in the full swing of their marketing strategies. Is your target audience working? Are you hitting your priorities? What needs to change? The guys talk through all the questions you should be asking and the benchmarks you should be reaching at this point in the year. The News: So, what should we expect from Google in the next 12 months? Well, Conrad just did a session on it at Mass Torts Made Perfect, so he'll give you an overview! Universal Analytics is seriously done-zo on July 1, so if you're still using it, get out now. LocalU is coming to Detroit, and Gyi gets to help! LocalU taps into industry leading experts to teach about stellar SEO content. Check it: LocalU Detroit 2024 Mentioned in this Episode: The Bite - Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter! Diverse Marketing || 30 Days In - LHLM Episode Leave Us an Apple Review Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on TikTok
How do you get and keep your SEO team up to speed? Where do you even start when training an SEO team? What tactics should you follow when building a strong SEO training program? Take your team to the next level as Sterling Sky's Colan Nielsen joins Wix's Crystal Carter and Mordy Oberstein to share proven strategies for training SEO teams. Formalize your training programs as Wix's own Henry Collie joins us to discuss his expertise in implementing successful courses to further strengthen your SEO team and beyond. “Go team!”, as this episode of the SERP's Up SEO Podcast helps you take your SEO team to new heights. Key Segments: [00:02:34] What's On This Episode of SERP's Up? [00:03:45] Focus Topic of the Week: Training an SEO Team [00:04:55] Focus Topic Guest: Colan Nielsen [00:27:21] Across the Wixverse [00:41:53] Snappy News [00:46:38] Follow of the Week Hosts, Guests, & Featured People: Mordy Oberstein Crystal Carter Colan Nielsen Henry Collie Mark Preston Resources: SERP's Up Podcast Wix SEO Learning Hub Wix Studio Wix Studio YouTube Searchlight SEO Newsletter Sterling Sky SEO Agency LocalU News: Google Completes Rollout of October 2023 Spam Update Google October 2023 Core Update rollout is now complete Google: Search Generative Experience May Link To Paywalled Content But Here Is How To Block SGE
My guest on this week's episode of Suds & Search is Jeremy Vest, Founder of Creator Unlock. Jeremy is a veteran digital marketer, serial entrepreneur, and frequent conference presenter. You might've heard Jeremy present at LocalU, VidSummit, Vidcon, and Social Media Marketing World. He also founded the popular conference Video Marketing World. What does Jeremy do exactly? He teaches business owners and thought leader how to dominate their niche using video. And the results are hard to believe. His clients have earned billions of views on tik tok, youtube, and other video platforms. Some of Jeremy's most successful clients are small businesses. Some are Fortune 100 companies. Jeremey's UNLOCK methodology works for all different business categories. What is the UNLOCK method? Who are some of Jeremy's best performing clients? What mistakes are video creators making? I'm going to ask Jeremy these questions and many more. Grab something cold to drink and join me for a conversation with Jeremy Vest. We'll talk about the monetization model in video, he'll share some tips about how to go viral, and we'll spend a little time talking about how vertical videos present a huge opportunity for video creators. Catch SearchLab on these platforms: https://www.linkedin.com/company/searchlabdigital/ https://www.facebook.com/SearchLabDigital/ https://twitter.com/SearchLabAgency https://www.youtube.com/c/SearchLabSubscribe to Suds & Search | Interviews With Today's Search Marketing Experts on Soundwise
My guest on this week's episode of Suds & Search is Krystal Taing, Director of Pre-sales Solutions at Uberall. Krystal is one of the leading experts in Local SEO. She's a platinum-level Google product expert. She hosts a training program on Wix. She's a frequent webinar host on platforms like BrightLocal, Duda, and many other places. She appears on virtually every list of the top local SEOs in the world. She is also on the faculty at LocalU. I'm sure I'm forgetting several other important contributions, but suffice it to say that when it comes to Local SEO, Krystal Taing is world-class. It's an interesting time for Local SEO. Darren Shaw of Whitespark recently released the Local Search Ranking Factors, thus beginning the annual tradition of Local SEO nerds scouring the findings, debating, discussing, and learning about how Google's local algorithm is evolving. Krystal was a contributor to that study. I'm going to ask her about what is changing and how small businesses can better position themselves for success. Grab something cold to drink and join me for a conversation with Krystal Taing. We'll talk about what you should do to appear more prominently in local results, what you shouldn't do if you hope to avoid a suspension, and we'll spend a little time talking about the Google product expert program. Catch SearchLab on these platforms: https://www.linkedin.com/company/searchlabdigital/ https://www.facebook.com/SearchLabDigital/ https://twitter.com/SearchLabAgency https://www.youtube.com/c/SearchLabSubscribe to Suds & Search | Interviews With Today's Search Marketing Experts on Soundwise
Today we'll talk about automated marketing data pipelines for reporting and even activation. If that last sentence didn't make total sense to you, don't worry, our guest is going to tell us why we need it and how we can set out implementing it. The place where Noah Learner got his start was on the island of Nantucket. It's around 20km (15 mi) long, which is small enough that most visitors leave their cars on the mainland, come across on the ferry and rent a bike. Noah's journey started with a job at one of the island's bike rental shops. Over the next decade as he rose to become the company's GM, he became convinced of the power of SEO for driving traffic. He relocated to Colorado, at various points he worked in corporate SEO roles and worked out on his own. He even mashed up skills from his past to serve businesses in the pedal-powered rental market, calling it 'bike shop SEO.' In the past 4-5 years he's built cutting edge SEO tools using cloud technology and has shared how to deploy them by speaking at MozCon, SearchLove and LocalU and in the agencyautomators.com community which he cofounded. he's just taken on a new role that has tool-building baked into his mandate, as Director of Innovation for Sterling Sky. When not at work, he loves doing typical Colorado things like fly fishing and skiing, along with family-friendly activities like hiking and camping where their two dogs can tag along.
Each week, Greg and Ben answer your questions on digital marketing for local businesses … local search engine optimization (SEO), Google Business Profile, social media, email marketing, websites, online advertising and more.Updates and QuestionsPubcon and LocalU in Dallas conventions in 2023.New BrightLocal consumer review survey is out.Bing beta AI chat is being slowly rolled out.How should a company with branches all over the country approach Local SEO?What are the best local SEO agencies to apply to in the US?If I switch from a location based business to Service Area Business, will switching back trigger a new verification?How do text notifications work on a GBP?Is there a bug with the “own this business?” link on GBP? Does video verification work for SABs that use a home address?How do I optimize my homepage for SEO?How do you update an appointment link within the new GBP interface?Is GBP going to become monetized?Should I show my address if I do B2B services?Links mentioned in this session are available on our website at https://localmarketinginstitute.com
Each week, Greg and Ben answer your questions on digital marketing for local businesses and local search engine optimization (SEO), Google Business Profile, social media, email marketing, websites, online advertising and more.Updates and QuestionsBusiness can be removed from Google Maps and deleted. Timeline for suspension is now 24 hours.LocalU events to come in 2023.Offer posts are available on Google Maps.Visual guides for In Search Experience available. (related link)Studies on local guides and reviews. (related link) Product post no longer allow price ranges.Are duplicate blog posts hurting traffic to my website? Is there something that explains how they aggregate data of photo views in GBP? Why has my ranking on Local Falcon gone down?Does having a slash and non-slash URL hurt SEO?How do I use SEO to recover from bad press? Do products show up in insights?Which URL should I use to track categories for a multi-location business?What else can I do to boost my GBP ranking when my website is fully optimized?Should I use a Spanish homepage for tracking?What should I do if I want to rebrand and there is a previous GBP listing that hasn't been claimed?Does using 360 photos help with visibility in Google Maps?Does using Local Service Ads help me rank quickly?Is there any benefit to reposting a Google Review as a Google Post on GBP?Why can't I list my website on my GBP?Links mentioned in this session are available on our website at https://localmarketinginstitute.com
Mike's Links:POPABLE AND WALMART JOIN FORCES TO HELP SMALL BUSINESS RETAILERS GET BACK ON THEIR FEET AFTER THE PANDEMIC - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/popable-and-walmart-join-forces-to-help-small-business-retailers-get-back-on-their-feet-after-the-pandemic-301662834.htmlGoogle is shutting down its dedicated Street View app next year - https://9to5google.com/2022/11/01/google-street-view-app-shutting-down/Semantic Photography: Low Hanging Fruit to Increase Google Local Conversions - https://www.nearmedia.co/semantic-photography-the-low-hanging-fruit-to-increase-google-local-conversions/Does the Number of Google Reviews Impact Ranking? [Case Study] - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/number-of-reviews-impact-ranking/Carrie's LinksReviews showing review location in Google – Darren Shaw – https://twitter.com/DarrenShaw_/status/1588964280665534464How to find reviews you haven't responded to yet in the NMX – Joy & Colan - https://twitter.com/JoyanneHawkins/status/1588518928002998272Tanking Local Rankings? How to Turn Them Around If They've Gone Down – Phils preso from LocalU - https://twitter.com/philrozek/status/1588274549057286145LocalU on demand coming this week - https://localu.org/buy-localu-event-videos/Level up your online presence with images that convert – Joy Hawkins & Mike Blumenthal - https://www.rioseo.com/events/local-photos-live-event/
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Mike's Links:POPABLE AND WALMART JOIN FORCES TO HELP SMALL BUSINESS RETAILERS GET BACK ON THEIR FEET AFTER THE PANDEMIC - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/popable-and-walmart-join-forces-to-help-small-business-retailers-get-back-on-their-feet-after-the-pandemic-301662834.htmlGoogle is shutting down its dedicated Street View app next year - https://9to5google.com/2022/11/01/google-street-view-app-shutting-down/Semantic Photography: Low Hanging Fruit to Increase Google Local Conversions - https://www.nearmedia.co/semantic-photography-the-low-hanging-fruit-to-increase-google-local-conversions/Does the Number of Google Reviews Impact Ranking? [Case Study] - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/number-of-reviews-impact-ranking/Carrie's LinksReviews showing review location in Google – Darren Shaw – https://twitter.com/DarrenShaw_/status/1588964280665534464How to find reviews you haven't responded to yet in the NMX – Joy & Colan - https://twitter.com/JoyanneHawkins/status/1588518928002998272Tanking Local Rankings? How to Turn Them Around If They've Gone Down – Phils preso from LocalU - https://twitter.com/philrozek/status/1588274549057286145LocalU on demand coming this week - https://localu.org/buy-localu-event-videos/Level up your online presence with images that convert – Joy Hawkins & Mike Blumenthal - https://www.rioseo.com/events/local-photos-live-event/
Elizabeth's Links:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-clarifies-product-review-best-practices/467398/#closeLatest product review upateFocusing on product review pages, not user generated reviews.Focus on who is writing the reviewshttps://www.seroundtable.com/google-date-timestamps-accurate-in-search-results-34211.htmlBeen "working on this" since 2018. Less impactful in the Local SEO space, but for those working on news websites this is a huge pain point.https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc/status/1578508310097334276?s=20&t=evPdIWqBsInMnrKALOtlTgLily Ray retweeted Google Search Liaison about G's partnership with the UN to "ensure accurate information about climate change is prominently displayed on Google". Google claims third party partnerships can NOT affect rankings - but CAN "create new SERP features in addition to regular results"Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/NRO/status/1578284682801717250?s=20&t=NxRMMM-74VtoN7_KZAQ98ACarrie's LinksGoogle Announces 7 Local Search Updates - at least 2 of the 7 are focused on restaurants - which are notoriously under-marketed (unless they're a chain w/ a marketing dept) - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-announces-7-local-search-updates/466500/#closeHow To Get Your Client Excited About Local Link-Building | Kick Point - https://kickpoint.ca/how-to-get-your-client-on-board-with-a-local-link-building-strategy/Localu.org/nov2 - get ticketsNew LocalU website - thank you so much Chris Ratchford!!
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Elizabeth's Links:https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-clarifies-product-review-best-practices/467398/#closeLatest product review upateFocusing on product review pages, not user generated reviews.Focus on who is writing the reviewshttps://www.seroundtable.com/google-date-timestamps-accurate-in-search-results-34211.htmlBeen "working on this" since 2018. Less impactful in the Local SEO space, but for those working on news websites this is a huge pain point.https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc/status/1578508310097334276?s=20&t=evPdIWqBsInMnrKALOtlTgLily Ray retweeted Google Search Liaison about G's partnership with the UN to "ensure accurate information about climate change is prominently displayed on Google". Google claims third party partnerships can NOT affect rankings - but CAN "create new SERP features in addition to regular results"Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/NRO/status/1578284682801717250?s=20&t=NxRMMM-74VtoN7_KZAQ98ACarrie's LinksGoogle Announces 7 Local Search Updates - at least 2 of the 7 are focused on restaurants - which are notoriously under-marketed (unless they're a chain w/ a marketing dept) - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-announces-7-local-search-updates/466500/#closeHow To Get Your Client Excited About Local Link-Building | Kick Point - https://kickpoint.ca/how-to-get-your-client-on-board-with-a-local-link-building-strategy/Localu.org/nov2 - get ticketsNew LocalU website - thank you so much Chris Ratchford!!
Mike's Links:76 Fake Charities Shared a Mailbox. The I.R.S. Approved Them All. - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/us/politics/irs-fake-charities.htmlA New York Starbucks abruptly closed – was it retaliation for a union drive? - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/04/new-york-starbucks-closed-union-driveGoogle Maps adds new store location feature, Locator Plus, Reserve with Google integration, new analytics and more - https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-adds-new-store-location-feature-locator-plus-reserve-with-google-integration-new-analytics-and-more-386085Google Adds Pros & Cons To Search Result Snippets - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-pros-and-cons-snippets-33661.htmlGoogle Auto-Selects Background Colors For Search Result Snippet Images - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-select-background-colors-images-33674.htmlGoogle Maps Tests New Local Panel With Images At Top & Tabs For Reviews - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-maps-new-local-panel-with-images-tabs-33673.htmlCeleste Gonzalez - Find business by review carousel test - https://twitter.com/celestexlili/status/1542604675521732609?s=12&t=upH6eS2eV1GsAELDvuIDZA21 Local SEO Moves & Situations I Have Never Seen a Business Penalized for - https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2022/06/29/21-local-seo-moves-situations-i-have-never-seen-a-business-penalized-for/Carrie's LinksFree SEO Keyword Tool - Term Suggest by Joe Hall - https://termsuggest.com/LocalU Permanent Early Bird Pricing - Localu.org/den22 LocalU Launched My Career and Changed My Life - Darren Shaw on LocalU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEQHrNpAl-U
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Mike's Links:76 Fake Charities Shared a Mailbox. The I.R.S. Approved Them All. - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/us/politics/irs-fake-charities.htmlA New York Starbucks abruptly closed – was it retaliation for a union drive? - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/04/new-york-starbucks-closed-union-driveGoogle Maps adds new store location feature, Locator Plus, Reserve with Google integration, new analytics and more - https://searchengineland.com/google-maps-adds-new-store-location-feature-locator-plus-reserve-with-google-integration-new-analytics-and-more-386085Google Adds Pros & Cons To Search Result Snippets - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-pros-and-cons-snippets-33661.htmlGoogle Auto-Selects Background Colors For Search Result Snippet Images - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-auto-select-background-colors-images-33674.htmlGoogle Maps Tests New Local Panel With Images At Top & Tabs For Reviews - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-maps-new-local-panel-with-images-tabs-33673.htmlCeleste Gonzalez - Find business by review carousel test - https://twitter.com/celestexlili/status/1542604675521732609?s=12&t=upH6eS2eV1GsAELDvuIDZA21 Local SEO Moves & Situations I Have Never Seen a Business Penalized for - https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2022/06/29/21-local-seo-moves-situations-i-have-never-seen-a-business-penalized-for/Carrie's LinksFree SEO Keyword Tool - Term Suggest by Joe Hall - https://termsuggest.com/LocalU Permanent Early Bird Pricing - Localu.org/den22 LocalU Launched My Career and Changed My Life - Darren Shaw on LocalU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEQHrNpAl-U
Mike's Links:Amazon's surprising new delivery partners: Rural mom-and-pop shops - https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/5/9/23063528/amazon-rural-small-business-delivery-program-hub-partners-uspsDC Restaurants Turn A Profit With No Tips & Higher Salaries - https://stories.zagat.com/posts/dc-restaurants-turn-a-profit-with-no-tips-higher-salariesFour Years Ago, This Chick-Fil-A Started Paying $17 An Hour. It Transformed the Business. — Entrepreneur - https://apple.news/Awuv7X_KWQ2q9POyB89deWwGoogle Throws More Reviews into the Filter Van - https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2022/05/10/google-throws-more-reviews-into-the-filter-van/ Hotel Place Topics now showing Thumbs Up/Down (Twitter) - https://twitter.com/mblumenthal/status/1525876039213367301?s=12&t=96uD9EC0VsBkqx-kxCb0RgCarrie's Links5 Things to Check When Your Google Business Profile Rankings Drop - Sterling Sky Inc - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/google-business-profile-ranking-drop/Google I/O 2022: Multisearch to Gain Local Information, Powerful Scene Exploration Feature Teased | Technology News - https://gadgets360.com/internet/news/google-io-2022-search-multisearch-local-results-lens-scene-exploration-feature-2965650Related: Multisearch & Lens + Near Me - https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-64/LocalU advanced tickets at https:/localu.org/den22Pre agenda pricing expires 5/24 at midnight
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Mike's Links:Amazon's surprising new delivery partners: Rural mom-and-pop shops - https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/5/9/23063528/amazon-rural-small-business-delivery-program-hub-partners-uspsDC Restaurants Turn A Profit With No Tips & Higher Salaries - https://stories.zagat.com/posts/dc-restaurants-turn-a-profit-with-no-tips-higher-salariesFour Years Ago, This Chick-Fil-A Started Paying $17 An Hour. It Transformed the Business. — Entrepreneur - https://apple.news/Awuv7X_KWQ2q9POyB89deWwGoogle Throws More Reviews into the Filter Van - https://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2022/05/10/google-throws-more-reviews-into-the-filter-van/ Hotel Place Topics now showing Thumbs Up/Down (Twitter) - https://twitter.com/mblumenthal/status/1525876039213367301?s=12&t=96uD9EC0VsBkqx-kxCb0RgCarrie's Links5 Things to Check When Your Google Business Profile Rankings Drop - Sterling Sky Inc - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/google-business-profile-ranking-drop/Google I/O 2022: Multisearch to Gain Local Information, Powerful Scene Exploration Feature Teased | Technology News - https://gadgets360.com/internet/news/google-io-2022-search-multisearch-local-results-lens-scene-exploration-feature-2965650Related: Multisearch & Lens + Near Me - https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-64/LocalU advanced tickets at https:/localu.org/den22Pre agenda pricing expires 5/24 at midnight
Google's Local help files have been updated to note that providing real time inventory via Merchant Center will result in increased rank. Anecdotally, we are seeing the 3- Pack populated with more real time inventory over the past several weeks. Google, often accused of self-preferencing, did so again by highlighting their own Point POS product as the only solution. At LocalU's last virtual event, Joy Hawkins shared insights spam prevalence by vertical and whether agencies should continue to fight it, as a service. Curtis Boyd described the results of a 1000 review case study of takedown and what worked and what didn't. And there was a discussion of a new update to the Vicinity update which allowed many businesses to gain more visibility. GApocalypse will soon be upon us and Google Universal Analytics will soon be sunset and replaced with GA4. Since GA4 is so bad and agencies seem to have developed reporting chops with Google Data Studio, is it time to look at other base analytics programs and build your own reporting dashboard?The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.EP 59 Near Memo
Happy Cyber Monday, everyone! Carrie and guest host Erin discuss notable news in local search from the past week. Last week, we saw quite a few changes at Google, including reviews and bolded text as ranking factors, GBP for the auto industry, the value of quality content over hype, new Google Maps features, and our amazing sponsors for tomorrow's LocalU Advanced event. (tickets still available at LocalU.org/Nov30)Carries links:99 Problems: Local SEO for Auto Dealers Ain't One - Colan Nielsen - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/local-seo-auto-dealers/I'd like to take this final chance to shout out to our LocalU Advanced Sponsors for the November 30th event. We're lucky enough to again have Places Scout sponsoring LocalU. Mark Kabana and the team at PS really go the extra mile to make tools that help local SEOs get on track and complete tasks - from map grid rankings, to historic screenshots of SERPs, to competitor tracking and reporting that can help with spam fighting - definitely a really great tool for any Local SEO to have in their arsenal. PlacesScout.comAgain returning to LocalU Advanced as a sponsor is the incredible team at Whitespark. Whitespark made its name in the citation game, but they offer Local SEO as well as the Local Search Ranking Factors study. Their ranking and reporting tool is unparalleled, their SEO knowledge & writing/newsletter is must-watch SEO, and they curate and share the Whitespark Local Search Summit every year - which is definitely worth the price of admission. Whitespark.caA first-time sponsor this event is The Transparency Company. Curtis Boyd and his team are building a world-class tool to help agencies determine where fake reviews are showing up for their clients (or if their prospects are faking reviews) - they also guide you through how to report and clean this up with a tool you can subscribe to and a Chrome extension. AskForTransparency.comAnother first-time sponsor, but long-time attendee is Dan Vance and the Advanced Local team. They have developed a specialty in automotive repair LocalSEO serving clients in the US and Canada. Their team covers the gambit from GBP optimization and ranking to traditional SEO, Social Media, and a variety of paid ads platforms. AdvancedLocal.comErin's LinksHow Marketers can adapt to Google's local SEO changes - https://searchengineland.com/how-marketers-can-adapt-to-googles-local-seo-changes-376371John Mueller of Google offers helpful tip with regards to text bolding as a ranking factor - https://twitter.com/johnmu/status/1462775511508262923?s=21Google confirms something we've known for a while - https://twitter.com/joyannehawkins/status/1463588414872297474?s=21Area busy-ness feature in Google maps - https://www.t3.com/news/google-maps-users-are-getting-a-cool-free-upgrade
Carrie and Mike discuss all the best news in local search from the past week, and this past week was a good one! This week they're discussing automation, a hotel calling the police on a granny over some hurt feelings, Apple maps, disappearing GMB categories, more local search news, and our awesome sponsors for next week's LocalU Advanced event!Mike's Links:The Automation Charade - https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/Starbucks, Amazon Go open cashierless store concept in NYC - https://www.retaildive.com/news/starbucks-amazon-go-open-cashierless-store-concept-in-nyc/610340/GMB to GBP: 3 Invitations for Google to Alter Their Indifference towards SMBs - https://moz.com/blog/gmb-to-gbpGoogle Maps Adds Pickup At Kroger, Restaurant Price Ranges, More Indoor Navigation & More - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-maps-pickup-krogers-restaurant-price-ranges-more-indoor-navigation-32430.htmlApple Maps - the Road to Discovery - Part 1 - https://www.nearmedia.co/apple-maps-road-to-discovery/99 Problems: Realtor Local SEO Ain't One - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/real-estate-agent-seo/99 Problems: Local SEO for Dentists Ain't One - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/dentist-local-seo/Hotel calls police on grandma after bad review - https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/the-reveal/hotel-calls-police-grandma-bad-review/85-377e243e-f05c-46e9-85f7-8a0748c7b71d Carries links:dozens of healthcare Categories disappeared from the Google Business profiles dashboard - https://twitter.com/ColanNielsen/status/1461709594770747395I'd like to take this chance to shout out to our LocalU Advanced Sponsors for the November 30th event. We're lucky enough to again have Places Scout sponsoring LocalU. Mark Kabana and the team at PS really go the extra mile to make tools that help local SEOs to track and complete tasks - from map grid rankings, to historic screenshots of SERPs, to competitor tracking and reporting that can help with spam fighting - definitely a really great tool for any Local SEO to have in their arsenal. PlacesScout.comAgain returning to LocalU Advanced as a sponsor is the incredible team at Whitespark. Whitespark made its name in the citation game, but they offer Local SEO as well as the Local Search Ranking Factors study. Their ranking and reporting tool is unparalleled, their SEO knowledge & writing/newsletter is must-watch SEO, and they curate and share the Whitespark Local Search Summit every year - which is definitely worth the price of admission. Whitespark.caA first-time sponsor of this event is The Transparency Company. Curtis Boyd and his team are building a world-class tool to help agencies determine where fake reviews are showing up for their clients (or if their prospects are faking reviews) - they also guide you through how to report and clean this up with a tool you can subscribe to and a Chrome extension. AskForTransparency.comAnother first-time sponsor,
This week, Mike and Carrie discuss our upcoming LocalU Advanced event on Nov 30, what's new at Google, the 2021 CTR Research Study, big web brands using political allies to battle antitrust probes, and more!Mike's Links:The Truth About Those Dollar Stores - https://www.consumerreports.org/dollar-stores/the-truth-about-those-dollar-stores/Yelp launches new home feed experience on iOS - https://blog.yelp.com/news/yelp-launches-new-home-feed-experience-on-ios/2021 CTR Research Study: The Largest Ever for SEO - https://www.seoclarity.net/mobile-desktop-ctr-study-11302/Google expands propaganda push to Adwords & Other business products - https://www.nearmedia.co/does-the-gmb-rebranding-mean-more-or-less-than-google-say/Amazon, Facebook and Google turn to deep network of political allies to battle back antitrust probes - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/10/amazon-facebook-google-political-allies-antitrust/How Location Page Providers Stack Up for Core Web Vitals - https://www.localseoguide.com/how-location-page-providers-stack-up-for-core-web-vitals/Adding alt text to product images: SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot - https://www.searchpilot.com/resources/case-studies/seo-split-test-lessons-adding-alt-text/Local SEO for 'Adult' Businesses is Beyond Crazy - https://onlineownership.com/local-seo-for-adult-businesses-is-beyond-crazy/Thibault Adda: Google showing image carousel on desktop brand searches - https://twitter.com/thibaultadda/status/1458923202302943236?s=12 Carries links:I'd like to take this chance to shout out to our LocalU Advanced Sponsors for the November 30th event. We're lucky enough to again have Places Scout sponsoring LocalU. Mark Kabana and the team at PS really go the extra mile to make tools that help local SEOs get track and complete tasks - from map grid rankings, to historic screen shots of SERPs, to competitor tracking and reporting that can help with spam fighting - definitely a really great tool for any Local SEO to have in their arsenal. PlacesScout.comAgain returning to LocalU Advanced as a sponsor is the incredible team at Whitespark. Whitespark made its name in the citation game, but they offer Local SEO as well as the Local Search Ranking Factors study. Their ranking and reporting tool is unparalleled, their SEO knowledge & writing/newsletter is must-watch SEO, and they curate and share the Whitespark Local Search Summit every year - which is definitely worth the price of admission. Whitespark.caA first-time sponsor this event is The Transparency Company. Curtis Boyd and his team are building a world-class tool to help agencies determine where fake reviews are showing up for their clients (or if their prospects are faking reviews) - they also guide you through how to report and clean this up with a tool you can subscribe to and a Chrome extension. AskForTr
Joy Hawkins talks with Jason Barnard about dissecting the GMB panel. Joy Hawkins is the owner of the Local Search Forum, LocalU, and Sterling Sky, a Local SEO agency in Canada & the USA. She writes for Search Engine Land and is a widely known Local Search speaker and has spoken at dozens of Local SEO conferences over the years. Google My Business panels are ever-increasingly important to the success of local businesses since Google local search is the dominant trusted source customers look at before visiting bricks-and-mortar businesses. Keeping it up-to-date is the minimum investment for local SEO, and managing the ever-expanding range of information it shows is the next step up if you want to increase foot traffic to your store :) But how much control and influence do we have on our own GMB panels? Jason Barnard quizzes the delightful Joy Hawkins as she walks us through the local knowledge panels of several different business types to know which information and features we can control, which we can influence and which are off-limits! They cover dozens of GMB items, from the most common (reviews, primary category, opening hours…) to the less obvious (descriptions, popular times, events, new features added recently because of health restrictions, Q&A…) and even delve into GMB as part of Google's role as an assistive engine. Joy also gives Jason a free consultation on the images he'd like to rectify on his GMB panel ;) This is a super groovy chat. And if you're a local SEO or a local business owner, you'll be glad you listened. What you'll learn from Joy Hawkins 00:00 Joy Hawkins and Jason Barnard01:01 International Brand SERP for Joy Hawkins03:33 Dissecting Oxford Cheese Co's GMB Panel04:40 Selecting a specific primary category and generic categories in GMB08:09 Evolving GMB attributes caused by Covid restrictions13:41 Popular times - where does the data come from?14:44 3 visible reviews in GMB rarely change17:13 How much GMB control does Google give restaurants?23:33 Why are doctors' GMB panels so sparse?24:42 Can a local business owner post a question and answer it themselves?25:28 Google as an assistive engine26:08 Setting the reservation button and business hours29:05 Adventure Land have a hybrid GMB / Knowledge panel 31:21 Why Google shows Jason's photo instead of Kalicube's logo on its GMB?35:07 GMB posts and events: Does it show up anywhere? Helpful Resources About Dissecting the GMB Panel How to Succeed With Google Posts: What We Learned From Analyzing Over 1,000 Google PostsHow to Get a Place Label on Google MapsGoogle My Business Category Changes by Month This episode was recorded live on video September 7th 2021 Recorded live at Kalicube Tuesdays (Digital Marketing Livestream Event Series). Watch the video now>>
Joy Hawkins talks with Jason Barnard about dissecting the GMB panel. Joy Hawkins is the owner of the Local Search Forum, LocalU, and Sterling Sky, a Local SEO agency in Canada & the USA. She writes for Search Engine Land and is a widely known Local Search speaker and has spoken at dozens of Local SEO conferences over the years. Google My Business panels are ever-increasingly important to the success of local businesses since Google local search is the dominant trusted source customers look at before visiting bricks-and-mortar businesses. Keeping it up-to-date is the minimum investment for local SEO, and managing the ever-expanding range of information it shows is the next step up if you want to increase foot traffic to your store :) But how much control and influence do we have on our own GMB panels? Jason Barnard quizzes the delightful Joy Hawkins as she walks us through the local knowledge panels of several different business types to know which information and features we can control, which we can influence and which are off-limits! They cover dozens of GMB items, from the most common (reviews, primary category, opening hours…) to the less obvious (descriptions, popular times, events, new features added recently because of health restrictions, Q&A…) and even delve into GMB as part of Google's role as an assistive engine. Joy also gives Jason a free consultation on the images he'd like to rectify on his GMB panel ;) This is a super groovy chat. And if you're a local SEO or a local business owner, you'll be glad you listened. What you'll learn from Joy Hawkins 00:00 Joy Hawkins and Jason Barnard01:01 International Brand SERP for Joy Hawkins03:33 Dissecting Oxford Cheese Co's GMB Panel04:40 Selecting a specific primary category and generic categories in GMB08:09 Evolving GMB attributes caused by Covid restrictions13:41 Popular times - where does the data come from?14:44 3 visible reviews in GMB rarely change17:13 How much GMB control does Google give restaurants?23:33 Why are doctors' GMB panels so sparse?24:42 Can a local business owner post a question and answer it themselves?25:28 Google as an assistive engine26:08 Setting the reservation button and business hours29:05 Adventure Land have a hybrid GMB / Knowledge panel 31:21 Why Google shows Jason's photo instead of Kalicube's logo on its GMB?35:07 GMB posts and events: Does it show up anywhere? Helpful Resources About Dissecting the GMB Panel How to Succeed With Google Posts: What We Learned From Analyzing Over 1,000 Google PostsHow to Get a Place Label on Google MapsGoogle My Business Category Changes by Month This episode was recorded live on video September 7th 2021 Recorded live at Kalicube Tuesdays (Digital Marketing Livestream Event Series). Watch the video now>>
We recorded early so Mike and Carrie could enjoy the 3-day weekend. Happy Labor Day!Join Mike and Carrie as they discuss how to combat Google title tag re-writes, keyword research for local search, how writing bad reviews can backfire, another fantastic LocalU Advanced (don't worry if you missed it, you can still get the sessions on-demand!), and much more!Mike's Links:Chrome Beta Can Display Competitors When Customers Are On Your Site - SERoundtable.com - https://www.seroundtable.com/chrome-beta-continuous-search-32023.htmlGoogle Title Rewrite Checker - Via Alyeda Solis - https://www.seowl.co/title-rewrite-checker/What Happened to Google My Business Site Managers? - Stephan Somborac - SteadyDemand.com - https://www.steadydemand.com/what-happened-to-google-my-business-site-managers/New Academy Course: How to Master Local Keyword Research - Claire Carlile - Bright Local - https://www.brightlocal.com/blog/new-academy-course-how-to-master-local-keyword-research/Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered - Miriam Ellis - Moz.com - https://moz.com/blog/7-beginner-local-seo-faqsCarries links:LocalU Advanced was Tuesday - great turnout, great content - if you didn't have a ticket you can buy on demand for $125 - LocalU.org - https://localu.org/store/localu-advanced-aug-31-on-demand/Sherwin Williams creates a 4% surcharge through Dec 31 - but have raised priced 6-7% 3x in 2021 AND performed over 1.6bil in stock buybacks in Q1 and Q2. - https://localu.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Gmail-Supply-Chain-Surcharge-1.png https://ycharts.com/companies/SHW/stock_buybackWalmart giving more than 565,000 workers a raise - CNN.com - https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/03/economy/walmart-wage-increase/index.htmlSomething weird going on with GMB suspensions, Posts and Adding photos. Unhappy with her breast implant surgery, she wrote negative reviews. Now she owes the surgeon $30K CBC.ca - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/woman-ordered-to-pay-30k-in-damages-for-negative-breast-implant-review-1.6156240
Join Mike and Carrie as they discuss what's new at Google My Business, businesses booming during the pandemic, our phenomenal LocalU Advanced sponsors, and the bittersweet signing off of the inestimable Mary Bowling as she retires. We're going to miss you, Mary, but look forward to your upcoming adventures!Mike's Links:The Pandemic Business Boom - The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/pandemic-business-boom/619674/Yelp Reports Second Quarter 2021 Financial Results - Yelp.com - https://www.yelp-ir.com/news-releases/news-release-details/2021/Yelp-Reports-Second-Quarter-2021-Financial-Results/Yelp will let businesses list their vaccination policies - TheVerge.com - https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/5/22610865/yelp-vaccination-policies-businesses-staff-customersThe Search Singularity: How to Win in the Era of Infinite Content - Animalz.co - https://www.animalz.co/blog/the-search-singularity/Google My Business Disables Select Categories for Service Area Businesses - Local University - https://localu.org/google-my-business-disables-select-categories-for-service-area-businesses/Carries links:Claire Carlile Whiteboard Friday - UTM Tagging for GMB - Moz.com - https://moz.com/blog/utm-tagging-google-my-businessA Guide to Google My Business Services and Google My Business Products - Claire Carlile - BrightLocal - https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/google-my-business-products-and-services-guide/Google Showing "Updated Today" on destkop "in stock" justifications - Brodie Clark on Twitter - https://twitter.com/brodieseo/status/1424265437190103044?s=21GMB Insights are case sensitive? Via LocalSearchForum - https://localsearchforum.com/threads/same-keyword-phrase-in-gmb-insights-but-separate-results.58058/Thanks to our Primary and Gold LocalU Sponsors - Zipsprout and Places Scout, respectively. Get your tickets to LocalU Advanced today!And finally, We want to let everyone know that the inestimable Mary Bowling has officially retired from Last Week in Local! Please join us in thanking her for all she's done for LocalU by sending her a Tweet to @marybowling with the hashtag #ThanksMary
Mike's Links:Operators of MoviePass Subscription Service Agree to Settle FTC Allegations that They Limited Usage, Failed to Secure User Data - FTC.gov - https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/06/operators-moviepass-subscription-service-agree-settle-ftcHow Local Delivery Stops App Giants From Eating Restaurants' Lunch - NearMedia.co - https://www.nearmedia.co/local-delivery-for-local-restaurants/Video: Obtaining a Personal Brand Panel - A Discussion with Jason Barnard - Local University - https://localu.org/video-obtaining-persponal-brand-panel/Google Local Spam Hall of Fame: Just How Long Can a Google My Business Name Be? - Blumenthals.com - https://blumenthals.com/blog/2021/06/10/google-local-spam-hall-of-fame-just-how-long-can-a-google-my-business-name-be/Google Local Spam Hall of Fame: We Have Some (real?) Winners - Blumenthals.com - https://blumenthals.com/blog/2021/06/10/google-local-spam-hall-of-fame-we-have-some-real-winners/Mary's Links:79 Best SEO Chrome Extensions (With Tips & Screenshots) - Olga Zarzeczna - SEOSly.com - https://seosly.com/seo-chrome-extensions/Google Launches Small Business Advisors Beta - LocalU.org - https://localu.org/google-launches-small-business-advisors-beta/Become a Street Fight Thought Leader | Street Fight - https://streetfightmag.com/become-a-street-fight-thought-leader/#.YMdcqrdKiUmCarrie's Links:Average rating pins showing on Map - Tim Capper via Twitter - https://twitter.com/GuideTwit/status/1403444803770228739?s=19Chrome showing desktop notifications - Claire Carlile via Twitter - https://twitter.com/clairecarlile/status/1402937253056364545What are “Relations” in Google My Business - Joy Hawkins - SterlingSky.ca - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/what-are-relations-in-google-my-business/Delivery Button Showing in Local Pack - Sarah Blocksidge - via Twitter - https://twitter.com/SarahBlocksidge/status/1403374238703271936ICYMI: Whitesparks List of Hidden Address Citation Sites - Whitespark.com - https://whitespark.ca/hidden-address-sites/LocalU Tickets on Sale - just $99 - Scholarships available! - LocalU.org - https://localu.org/aug31
Mike's Links:Speaking Pitches for LocalU August 3 - LocalU.org -https://localu.org/speaking-pitches/The Englishman trying to save American bookstores from Amazon via Benedict Evans on Twitter - https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1400376779676790787?s=12Resisting Amazon: An Interview with Author and Bookstore Owner, Danny Caine - Miriam Ellis va NearMedia.co - https://www.nearmedia.co/resisting-amazon-raven-bookstore/New York State to Revolutionize Antitrust - Matt Stoller via Substack - https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/new-york-state-to-revolutionize-antitrustMoz acquired by iContact, a subsidiary of J2 Global - SearchEngineLand.com - https://searchengineland.com/moz-acquired-by-icontact-subsidiary-of-j2-global-349273Google Won't Remove Negative Reviews That are Constantly Updated - Joy Hawkins - Local University - https://localu.org/updated-reviews-google/Google My Business (GMB) Deprecates ShortNames - Ben Fisher - Local University - https://localu.org/google-my-business-gmb-deprecates-shortnames/Google Adds Label - New On Google - Joy Hawkins - Local University - https://localu.org/google-my-business-adds-labels-for-new-listings/Mary's LinksAmazon, Google and Facebook will be hit hard by the G-7 tax deal. Here's how they responded - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/07/g-7-tax-deal-amazon-google-and-facebook-respond-.html - CNBC.com8 Ways to Champion Animals in Your Local Business Marketing Strategy - Miriam Ellis - Moz.com - https://moz.com/blog/champion-animals-in-local-seoIf You're Not Using the Products Feature in GMB, You're Missing Out!- Darren Shaw - Whitespark.ca - https://whitespark.ca/blog/gmb-products-feature/
Last Week in Local is a look back at the interesting and important articles from the previous week. It is 20-30 minutes long and covers critical industry trends, interesting local news, and tactical insights for anyone interested in Local Search.
Join Mike & Carrie as they discuss the latest news in local - with a bit of an in-depth discussion about messaging vs chat vs SMS and what it means in the fight against Google giving "too much" info in the search results. Also, Mike updates his masking research, Court denies discovery in fake review case, & much more.Data: As States Reopen, Local Businesses Grapple with Mask Dilemma - Mike Blumenthal - NearMedia.co - https://www.nearmedia.co/data-as-states-reopen-business-grapple-with-masking-dilemma/‘They don't care': US supermarket chain shutters stores after hazard pay rules - The Guardian - https://apple.news/AsDqBY3L9SUeIdbMcSKZ8iQGursten v Doe: Court Allows Fake Online Google My Business Reviews to Harm Competition - MichiganAutoLaw.com - https://www.michiganautolaw.com/blog/2021/03/29/gursten-v-doe-court-allows-fake-online-google-my-business-reviews-to-harm-competition/What Are Google Local Services Ads and Why Should You Care? - Tom Waddington - BrightLocal.com - https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/google-local-services-ads/The Local Finder vs. Google Maps: How Different Are They? - Miriam Ellis - Moz.com - https://moz.com/blog/local-finder-vs-google-mapsWhy Chat Matters to Google - Adam Dorfman - NearMedia.com - https://www.nearmedia.co/why-chat-matters-to-google/Google Placing Competitors on Knowledge Panel - Darren Shaw via Twitter - https://twitter.com/DarrenShaw_/status/1375519086684237824 Carrie's Links:Why You Should Think Twice About Activating GMB Messaging - Joy Hawkins, LocalU - https://localu.org/why-you-should-think-twice-about-activating-gmb-messaging/Text vs. Chat – Why We Think SMS Is Best -Aaron Weiche - Leadferno - https://leadferno.com/blog/text-vs-chat-why-we-think-sms-is-bestLocalU is next week - 4/7 - We closed scholarships on Friday and awarded 59 spots! More than any past event. - https://localu.org/apr7Google My Business Sent Out User Survey - Barry Schwartz - SERoundtable.com -https://www.seroundtable.com/google-my-business-sent-out-user-survey-31159.html4 local review trends to watch in 2021 - Joy Hawkins - SEngineLand.com - https://searchengineland.com/4-local-review-trends-to-watch-in-2021-346645
Join the staff of LocalU as they discuss the latest in Local Search news! Mike Blumenthal's Links:People With Disabilities Say This AI Tool Is Making the Web Worse for Them - Vice.com - https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7az74/people-with-disabilities-say-this-ai-tool-is-making-the-web-worse-for-themH-E-B reverses mask decision for customers after backlash - Austin.CultureMap.com - https://austin.culturemap.com/news/restaurants-bars/03-08-21-h-e-b-keeping-mask-mandate-for-customers-after-backlash-required-stores/A New Story is Starting for Sendible - Sendible.com - https://www.sendible.com/insights/new-story-starting-for-sendibleLocal Pack-O-Meter - Local SEO Guide - https://www.localseoguide.com/local-pack-o-meter/The Near Memo, Episode 7 - NearMedia.co - https://www.nearmedia.co/episode-7/New GMB Style with an LSA Connection - TomWaddington.com - https://tomwaddington.com/new-gmb-style-with-lsa-connection/Google My Business Launches Tool to Manage Review Removal Requests - Local University - https://localu.org/google-my-business-launches-tool-to-manage-review-removal-requests/Local Content Silo Videos - Greg Gifford - SearchLabDigital.com - https://searchlabdigital.com/local-search-tuesdays/?wchannelid=8kg9e7nlzn&wmediaid=94qb7krwweGoogle Maps Showing Street View Images For Service Area Home Businesses - Barry Schwartz - SERoundtable.com - https://www.seroundtable.com/amp/google-maps-street-view-images-service-area-business-31088.htmlCarrie Hill's Links:Can now mark a review as “Not Helpful” on maps. Via Tom Waddington on Twitter - https://twitter.com/tomwaddington8/status/1373284620662358017Business Texting & Messaging by LeadFerno - Aaron Weiche - https://leadferno.comLocalU Advanced Sponsor Info – April 7, 2021 – TicketsdbaPlatform is our primary sponsor for LocalU. dbaPlatform is “Mission Control: for Local Search,” a powerful suite of tools for digital marketing agencies and multi-location brands which includes local rank tracking, automated content scheduling, and enterprise reporting in a single robust dashboard. As a certified Google Partner, dbaPlatform has private API access to sync live inventory to Google business profiles thereby surfacing and promoting store products directly to consumers online. Use any or all of dba's 10 core influence and automation tools to empower your local marketing and convert online buyers into local purchases. Learn more about their tools at dbaPlatform.com.Gold Sponsor, The Respondery helps businesses respond to their customer reviews by providing custom, on-brand review response services designed to engage and please the viewer, impress future customers, diffuse negative feedback, and expand brand loyalty on the big 3 – Google, Facebook, and Yelp. Get ahold of the team if you're interested in this service at TheRespondery.comGold Sponsor, Zipsprout connects businesses with grassroots local event, nonprofit & association sponsorships for marketing & SEO campaigns. Helmed by Linkbuilding pioneer Garrett French, their tool connects grassroots, non-profit and other organizations with businesses looking to sponsor good works in their local communities. Check them out at Zipsprout.comGold Sponsor, Places Scout, offers a suite of tools that are invaluable for local rank tracking, spam fighting, and competitor monitoring. They also offer GMB Tools such as the GMB Scorecard Report & Widget – a great lead generation or sales tool that is customizable to the metrics your agency is most concerned with. They also offer the GMB Radar Change report – designed to help you monitor changes to your GMB listing(s) without looking at it multiple times a day.
Join the staff from Local University as they discuss some of the most significant and interesting developments Last Week in Local Search. This week Carrie Hil & Mary Bowling discuss Google Local Guides/Maps push, Claire Carlile's amazing new resource for landing your first Local SEO client, the continued importance of pricing your SEO services & the future of SEO, plus much more!Mary's Links:Top Most Popular Local Search Blogs - Nyagoslav Zhekov - Whitespark.ca - https://whitespark.ca/blog/top-local-seo-blogs/How to create topic clusters? (I got 1000% more traffic) - Samuel Schmitt - https://samuelschmitt.com/topic-cluster/India's draft e-commerce policy calls for equal treatment of sellers - Reuters.com - https://www.reuters.com/article/india-ecommerce-policy-idUSKBN2B50DJeCommerce: Coming To a Tweet Near You - Localogy - Mike Boland - https://www.localogy.com/ecommerce-coming-to-a-tweet-near-you/Local SEO During COVID-19 with Phil Rozek - by Traject - https://bytraject.com/blog/local-seo-during-covid-19/Social Media Specialist at Steady Demand • Austin • Remote (Work from Home) - SteadyDemand.com - https://angel.co/company/steady-demand/jobs/1246437-social-media-specialist Carrie's Links:Deconstructing Google's Local Guides and Photo Updates Post - Mike Blumenthal - NearMedia.co - https://www.nearmedia.co/deconstructing-google-local-guides/LocalU.org/apr7 - tickets still on sale! Agenda Published! - https://localu.org/apr7How to Land Your First Local SEO Client - Claire Carlile - BrightLocal Academy -https://www.brightlocal.com/blog/new-academy-course-how-to-land-your-first-local-seo-client/Bing Local Pulling in Q&A from Websites - Colan Nielsen via Twitter - https://twitter.com/ColanNielsen/status/1370067209712721923Suds & Search: Joy Hawkins - https://searchlabdigital.com/blog/suds-and-search-53-joy-hawkins-owner-of-sterling-sky-localu-and-the-local-search-forum/Should I Pay Annually for the Local Data Aggregators? 3 Things We Learned. - Joy Hawkins - Sterling Sky - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/local-data-aggregators/
Join the staff from Local University as they discuss some of the most significant and interesting developments Last Week in Local Search.Mike's Links:New playbook for COVID-19 protection emerges after year of study, missteps — The Wall Street Journal - https://apple.news/A0VeVF0uIT76c4nf9m72aJQApple illustrates privacy issues on Data Privacy Day - AppleInsider.com - https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/28/apple-illustrates-privacy-issues-on-data-privacy-dayhttps://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_Your_Data.pdfMaking Twitter a better home for writers - https://blog.twitter.com - https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/making-twitter-a-better-home-for-writers.htmlHD Media Files First of Its Kind Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google and Facebook - Editor & Publisher.com - https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/hd-media-files-first-of-its-kind-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google-and-facebook,185360Mary's Links:Local SEO Checklist Tool - The Team at Whitespark.ca - https://whitespark.ca/local-seo-checklist/ 9 SEO Experts on 2020's Impact and SEO Priorities for 2021, Part One - Wellspring Digital - https://wellspringdigital.com/9-seo-experts-on-2020s-impact-and-seo-priorities-for-2021/ Learning to Speak the Language of Your Clients with Kim Doughty - - ByTraject with Garrett Sussman - https://bytraject.com/blog/speak-the-language-of-your-clients-kim-doughty/Local Quizness - Quiz of the Year 2020! - BrightLocal - https://www.brightlocal.com/blog/local-quizness-quiz-of-the-year-2020/ Carrie's Links:Update to GMB Insights - by Colan Nielsen of Sterling Sky - https://localu.org/google-my-business-insights-update/First GMBChat hosted by Sterling Sky & LocalU - join us on twitter on Feb 9 at 11am EST! DM us your questions ahead of time! - https://twitter.com/SterlingSkyInc/status/1356264200306262020 Webinar Alert:Local SEO: Which Google My Business Tactics and Tools Drive Customers? Mike, Joy, Jason Barnard & Greg Sterling at SEMRush
FULL SHOW NOTES[ INTRO music]00:10 Aaron Weiche: Episode 19. Navigating the Unknown.00:16 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a Bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.00:43 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:46 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:47 Aaron: And the way we usually start our episodes is just by catching up. What's going on? What's happened lately? 00:56 Darren: Yeah, what's going on, Aaron? What's going on? 01:00 Aaron: Well, it seems like we're all... Have been doing the same thing for quite a number of weeks now. And it's interesting, until COVID-19 and everything else, anytime someone would post the Bill Murray Groundhog's Day meme on Facebook, or Twitter, or something else, I just never gave it much thought. And, literally, the last... I would say for me the last 10 days, I absolutely feel that way. Like it is such a lather, rinse, repeat of the same day with such little variance, it's wild.01:34 Darren: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. My days are a little bit all over the place actually. I just keep working on different things and I'm getting pulled in many different directions right now. Things are changing quite a bit actually for me, I feel. Yeah. Things have been really up in the air and I feel a little scattered.01:51 Aaron: Well, I will take some of your variance. I don't know if it's my attitude, or my outlook, or whatever else, but it definitely doesn't feel like enough variance for me. And I think some of it is just other things that I enjoy, like conferences, and things like that, all shut off. Sports, right? It's baseball season and every night I love sitting down with my Minnesota Twins on in the background, and happily writing a blog post, working on a contract, whatever that might be, just getting some small things done while I'm watching baseball, and that diversion of sports for me, isn't there, and that leaves a big hole.02:38 Darren: Apparently, there is a huge surge in Marble Runs sports. [chuckle] Have you seen this? They've got a big table and you're watching the marbles race through a track. Massive surge in viewership there.02:52 Aaron: Can you bet on it? 02:54 Darren: Probably, yeah. Bet on the white marble.02:58 Aaron: I need those small sources of joy.03:00 Darren: You can start watching that while you're doing contracts and stuff.03:03 Aaron: Yeah? 03:04 Darren: Yeah.03:05 Aaron: Interesting, just as we were talking before and prepped some notes, we definitely have some things to walk through, but I think a great place to start is both of us being remote and to some extent work-from-home. Me not so much really work-from-home, but with having a separate office, but has it felt that much different for you? Family life, at home life, what's that been like for you Darren? 03:31 Darren: Oh, yeah. It's kind of weird really. Because there is the sense that we're not going out anymore, and so a bit of isolation. But it doesn't feel that different to me. I've run a remote company since 2005, I've worked from home since 2005, and so our entire way of working... The way that I work is completely the same. No changes here. The only thing is, I see the Sun a little bit less right now. I'm just in the house and not going outside really. We're not even going for walks really, because Jill and Violet, my wife and daughter, have had mild symptoms, so we're supposed to be really isolated. I've been getting out into the backyard lately, but basically, from a work perspective, it didn't change much for us because we're 100% remote. We've always been that way. How about you? 04:27 Aaron: Yeah, same for myself personally and the GatherUp team. I've only been remote the last five and a half... Almost six years now, but long enough to forget the days of commuting, and in-office, and everything else. So that shift wasn't that hard, where for the rest of our company, which I should drop in I guess really quick just because I'm trying to get good at my references. Our group of products that Alpine Software Group had purchased that are Aramark tech that we used to call ASG MarTech, we actually rolled out a full brand for. So now it's called Traject. Traject includes the seven companies, SocialTools, Cyfe, Authority Labs, ourselves, Grade.us, we're all under this Traject umbrella. So we launched that just prior to everything with COVID-19 taking off. And I need to make that note before I start saying things, 'cause I'm trying to get good in being part of re-brands myself. Re-training yourself on how you refer to things.05:28 Darren: For sure.05:29 Aaron: So, for the Traject team, there's about 60-70% of the team as an overall that's all in-office and located outside of Seattle in Bellevue. And so it was interesting to watch. That first week, especially, was a struggle for them in moving from a centralized office to remote work and many of them have not been doing it right, they're working from the kitchen table and things like that, and especially with having others at home, if your spouse works, they might be just 10 feet away, and they're working remote, right? And it's like... I don't have any of those problems, my wife stopped working last year, it's a little different at my house, I have four kids that are home all the time now, ages 4 to 16.06:15 Darren: Yeah. She's working. Oh, she's working hard. [chuckle]06:19 Aaron: Oh my gosh. And they've done fabulous with leaving me alone, and they know if the office doors are shut, to cool it with dad. And luckily, in the last two weeks, their distance learning e-school has fired up, and so that occupies anywhere from two to six hours of their day depending upon what's going on and everything else. So, yeah, same as you, I feel really lucky that things haven't changed that much. But, yeah, the same... My 10-year-old daughter just said to me last night like, "Dad, every like hour or so, I'm gonna come get you and just make you go outside for five minutes." She's like, "You're in that hole all day." And I was like, "Yeah, you're right. That would probably be a healthy thing."06:56 Darren: Once an hour though, that'd be tough. I don't know, how about every two hours? 07:00 Aaron: [chuckle] I'm gonna try to appease the troops. If they have a suggestion for me at this point I'm just gonna take it because, yeah, I feel for them and all the small things that they're missing out. My kids all love school, but man, they are just missing friends, and socialization, everything else.07:19 Darren: Oh, man. So much, yeah. I used to have a pretty closed-door policy with my office when Violet comes home from school and stuff the office is closed, you don't come in. But now it's like, she wants to come and say hi to me, I'm gonna stop whatever I'm doing, just take some time to chat with her, "Oh, what are you working on? What are you playing with these days?" And you just hear her stories and just spend that time, because she doesn't have any other social interaction. Gosh, neither do I, so it's like, "Yeah, go ahead, interrupt me anytime, come on in and we'll have a little chat for a few minutes and then I'll get back to work." I think it's the way it has to be right now.07:56 Aaron: For sure. My kids have siblings to play with. They're very blessed, they have a lot to do. We're not in a traditional neighborhood, it's a little more spread out, so there's a couple of acres for them to be outside and play on without getting into some of those things and whatever else, so I'm more fortunate than not on a lot of things. I think the biggest emotional toll on me is just, for however long now? 12 years, 15 years, everything for me professionally has been growth, success, constantly going up, right? You still have your small struggles and dark weeks, or months, and whatever else, but really, the overall momentum is always forward. And I've never been a part of something like this where that momentum has been pulled back and you go from this growth mindset to a survival and circle the wagons to some extent. And I think that's been the hardest part on my mood.08:52 Darren: Yeah, it's a real shift from, "Okay, we've gotta build all this stuff and do all these things and keep growing forward," to like, "Oh wow. What do we have to do to protect at this point?" So, yeah, that survival mode instinct has kicked in and, yeah, it's tough to have that shift, and it doesn't feel good. All that growth always feels good and that push for success, but, yeah, it feels bad to be like, "I'm gonna make these tough decisions now."09:21 Aaron: Yeah. And still trying to find the success within it. I was listening to the last weekend local podcast on LocalU and I think Blumenthal coined a term of "sur-thrival". So it's like, how do you find ways to thrive in surviving? 09:37 Darren: Yeah. Totally.09:38 Aaron: I instantly grabbed on to that and I was like, "Yeah, that's a great way to refer to it. I totally agree."09:43 Darren: Yeah, and I'm seeing it actually, I'm seeing lots of opportunities in my business to thrive a little bit. And so we're trying to put in some defensive moves just to make sure that we can ride it out and some offensive moves. And so, I don't know, I'm feeling okay about it. The dust is starting to settle from the first few weeks of it really getting crazy and just starting to settle into this new way of how we're gonna operate, this new economy, and identifying the markets that are opportunities.10:14 Aaron: Yeah, for sure. And I agree with you, it's like there's a first big tidal wave where there was a lot more panic, less information, nothing had really been settled into, and I feel like this week, I feel like that wave has come, crashed, and it's now pulled back out. I think there's gonna be more waves, maybe not as big or aggressive, but it is starting to get a little different and a little more than norm.10:42 Darren: Yeah, and it's kinda like... That's happening for me, I have that feeling that, okay, well, those first few weeks I was just scrambling trying to figure out, "Okay, what the hell are we gonna do?" And I couldn't really focus on all of the regular operations. I was busy filling out government relief applications and sorting out all this kind of stuff. And so, I feel like, while that's happening for me, it's also happening for every other business in the world, where we're starting to kinda, "Okay, the dust is settling, now let's get back to business." It's like, what does the new business look like? What does the new way of operating look like? And all those businesses are gonna start coming out of the woodwork again and the economy will pick up. Sales have been super quiet, but we're starting to see more leads come in now as people are looking at alternatives to whatever else they're using.11:33 Aaron: Yeah. You just stated about five different things I wanna break down. One thing that you kind of mentioned, I know from you and I, we've both been talking professionally, we've also talked as friends during this, just 'cause you need that support in those outlets, but I know you've had to make some hard decisions around your business, and Whitespark, and some employee moves. What has that been and what does that look like? 12:01 Darren: Yeah. So once this all came out and we started realizing what a massive impact it's gonna have on the economy, we had to look at our expenses. Where are our expenses, what can we cut? So the first thing of course was to just take an axe to my credit card statement and be like, "What can I cross off here? What due is absolutely not essential? So we did some major cuts there. It's kind of crazy, I cut like $5,000 in monthly expenses off my credit card. And after I did it, I was like, "Well, dang, why didn't I do that a year ago?" It's just like so much.12:30 Aaron: You weren't forced to.12:32 Darren: Yeah, I wasn't forced to. It's like you kinda get into this. "Okay, well, finances are good, and yeah, those services are pretty good, but are they that essential?" And so I was able to do some pretty good cuts there. And then of course the next most major expense for our company... We don't have an office, we don't have a lot of overhead, it's really labor. So there were a couple of layoffs. One was on the development side, another one was on our GMB management team. We were actually in a pretty good growth mode with the GMB management team, where we were bringing on about 10 to 15 new clients every single month. And so we had just crossed that threshold where we're like, "Okay, well, we need to get someone hired and trained in order to meet that growing demand." And so we had just hired somebody and she had taken on a handful of clients right when this hit. And so we knew that that one was gonna start backing off, we were actually gonna start losing clients, so we had to make a lay-off there.13:38 Darren: It's really sad. She was amazing. We'd love to hire her back as soon as we can. So, once we can, we would love to hire her back. So a couple of layoffs and then another thing is that the government of Canada introduced what's called a work-sharing program. I think they always had it, but they loosened up some of their guidelines around it and made it easier to get into it. So we reduced hours with the team across the whole Canadian team and just to the point where they could still maintain all of their health benefits. So they still get all their health benefits, they reduce their hours by about 37%, and then the government work-sharing program tops that up for them. So it actually doesn't have a huge impact on them, it shouldn't be too bad, but it results in pretty significant payroll savings for the company. So all of those things are the defensive moves to make sure that we're shoring up some resources in the bank, because honestly, Whitespark has been in this growth mode where we've been running the line, where certainly we've been profitable, but it's not like we had millions in the bank or even hundreds of thousands in the bank.14:50 Darren: We were always like, "Okay, once we have enough more revenue, we hire somebody else," we'd have more expenses, we'd expand our servers. As a Bootstrap company, I think that's just what you do, you continue to grow your resources and your ability to build faster as you get more revenue. And so that's certainly what we're doing. So we didn't have this huge cushion. So my defensive measures were to try and create a little bit of that cushion, so it was tough. What was it like for you? 15:23 Aaron: Yeah. Well, one, I commend you, because those are hard decisions and just so many decisions in this are all about the balance between short-term and long-term effects. You make difficult short-term decisions to survive long term. And it's so important, I and we, the company, have definitely benefited from being part of a larger org within this. So, let's just say, as I commented to you, if GatherUp hadn't sold and we were still all by ourselves, I will say we had cash reserves for three months of zero income and 100% of our burn rate to be able to pay bills. We had done a good job of always investing our growth, but we always looked at... We definitely put money away when we were doing well within our growth and created a little bit more margin to have... Whether it was something like this, a crisis, economic downturn, or an opportunity where we were like, "Oh, if there is a small product, or a small team, we can purchase... " Or whatever else we wanted, to have at least a little bit of cash on hand.16:36 Aaron: But even within that, if it was just me and running the company, we would have made similar moves to what you did. There probably would have been... Obviously, the first thing is analyze every cost, cut everything out that isn't necessary, but then, just with about any company, bodies are your most significant expense. And, yeah, we probably would've at least had to make one, two, possibly even three moves, depending upon how we saw it, just to ensure that everything else was in the best position possible to survive at least a three-month if not a six-month economic winter of what we're just starting to get into.17:18 Darren: That timing, it's so unknown. That's the big thing, is this uncertainty, right? It's like, okay, we're seeing some drops, it's not that significant, but who knows, maybe in three months the US economy is gonna be so shut down because of this virus that we're in huge trouble. So if there's no spending happening anywhere, then some of the services and software that we provide will certainly get cut, and so it's trying to make sure that you can weather the storm. And that's what I think we've been trying to do. And it's nice that you're in that position. The timing actually of the acquisition really worked out in your benefit, certainly for the founders, and also, I think, just having that huge strong umbrella above you that can help protect from some of this, is really a nice place to be.18:10 Aaron: Yeah, no, who would have known? No way to tell, but yes, this scenario, it just shows you how much timing is a part of everything in life. So many different angles with it. But, overall, I really feel like Traject has done an awesome job. One is very early communicated the position of the company, the financial health of the company, and that they were already in talks with... We've talked before... There was a couple of layers between the very top level of the company down into the group we belong to. So immediately, there was strong communication, hit upon things that people would be most concerned about, and delivered a lot of good messaging there. And really, overall, the company just kept reinforcing, people first. This is tricky. Take care of yourself first. We want you to be emotionally and physically healthy, that comes first. If you're taking care of that, then we'll get at working and keeping the company healthy and all that kind of stuff.19:12 Darren: Right. For sure.19:14 Aaron: We basically have weekly AMAs with the exec team with Traject. So people are able to ask, "What's changing? Do you see anything different? What other decisions have you made?" So, just a really quick and easy way for whatever is a concern for people to hear that, and also for others, instead of those happening one-to-one in an email to the CEO or whatever else, everybody's able to hear it asked out loud and hear the answer to it, which I think...19:28 Darren: I love that. Oh, man, I'm gonna do that. I've been doing a weekly call with my team, but I always have a weekly call anyways, where I try to communicate the current health of the company, what's been happening in the company, what we're seeing in terms of our revenue and our different lines of business. So try to communicate that and be clear about that, but the AMA thing is a really good thing. I often get questions after the call, like people will just ping me on Slack, and I think it'd be really helpful for everyone to have that, and just, "Okay, that's the end of my spiel, now let's get into the AMA portion of the call." So I really like that idea and I think I'm gonna open that up for Monday's call.20:18 Aaron: Yeah, no, I think it makes people feel more comfortable. Everybody hears the same questions and the same answers, which is also great. And then lastly, they just put together a really good prioritization on, "This is what we're doing first. This is what we're doing second. This is what we're doing third," so the same things that we've just discussed on reducing expenses, different allocations, looking at this. And at the bottom of their list is, if these things don't work based on where things are at, then we potentially look at a percentage of salary cut across the board. And then, if that didn't work, then yeah, we'd have to look at the elimination of some positions. But the great thing, I think, it lays out is, one, it helps people understand the playbook that they're operating off of, which allows everyone to buy into the strategy. Two, it really helps them understand, there's a whole bunch of things before that comes on the table, and the thing I keep preaching to our team is, the thing to be grateful for right now is you have some control over this. We have our jobs, we have our personal income, and doing productive work is such a healthy thing right now.21:27 Darren: For sure.21:28 Aaron: Yeah. And a great distraction, and do what you can to not be paralyzed, or inundated, or overwhelmed, by all of this that's there, and focus on your work, because being successful with what you are doing is gonna contribute to the survival and some success inside of this, and making it to the other side. So when you get into that high level of like, what can you control and what can't you control, well, we can't control the economy and what happens to our customers businesses in full, and all of those kind of things, but we can control how well are we doing at our job, are we doing the right things that are needed to survive right now? Are we doing everything we can to help our customers so we're contributing to their survival? Those are all positives that I've personally worked hard to remind our team. Like, "Be grateful for that and let that gratefulness, and what you have, be the passion into what you're doing right now, in a difficult time for some to find that motivation."22:26 Darren: Yeah, totally. There's so much value in that. When I have a a really productive day in the office, you feel good about it, right? So it's a nice thing that people can lean on when things seem so bad. Being able to take your mind off of the struggles of the world and the stress of the uncertainty of what's gonna happen with this virus, and all the health concerns, and being able to just put your head into some work for a while and get that sense of accomplishment. I find a lot of value in that and I think it's a great thing to communicate to the team.22:58 Aaron: Yeah, you're exactly right. I've said multiple times in communication with stuff where we've elevated something very small and then pushed it out to everyone on our weekly stand-up or Slack, or both, whatever, is like, "No win is too small right now. Celebrate the smallest thing like it is a Super Bowl championship right now, because it's so important for the psyche and for your emotional well-being professionally," right? 23:26 Darren: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, it's great stuff. I'm gonna work on implementing some of that with my weekly calls too.23:33 Aaron: Nice.23:34 Darren: Yeah.23:35 Aaron: The next thing, I think, for us, the big shift almost immediately was just really realizing and I think all companies, especially SaaS, is in this boat right now, it's like, retention is absolutely the name of the game right now. Just as you said. And the same for us, leads, sales opportunities, whatever else, are like, I don't think they're even 10% of what they were in January, February, and early March.24:01 Darren: Right. That's amazing. I would say, if I had to guess in terms of leads for us, it's probably down only maybe 50%. Yeah. So our leads are actually still pretty solid. We're actually seeing quite a few people looking at cutting ongoing recurring citation services. So, let's say we're using Yext or Moz Local, or some of these other services, they are looking at our one-time offering and saying, "This is a much better way to go for citation management." So we're actually seeing pretty decent leads there, and then our software leads are... I'd say they're down about 50%.24:43 Aaron: Yeah. Do you feel like some of those people are looking like, "Okay, I want something around this service, but I want a more cost-effective solution?" And is Whitespark that compared to those. So you're gonna see some trickle down from those.24:54 Darren: I think it's exactly what I'm seeing, and I think also, on the software side, we're quite reasonably priced, and so I feel like a lot of people that are with more expensive solutions are looking to us. Or let's say they had to cut a $3000 a month SEO engagement with a good firm, and so they're like, "Okay, we're gonna take this in-house and now our marketing director has to manage some of this," and they're like, "Okay, local search software," and then we come up. And so I think that's where we're starting to see some of this. It's like people cutting expenses elsewhere and then finding us 'cause we are generally more cost-effective.25:33 Aaron: Yeah, that's awesome. I think that can be a big win. A forced changeover. Just the same as you analyze your credit card and like, "Why am I paying for this," or "What can I do," right? When people are doing that, and then you are positioned that way, that can definitely be a great migration from competitors to you at this time, which is awesome for you.25:57 Darren: Yeah. So we're actually... As part of our offensive moves, is we're putting up some landing pages that are specifically around that and we'll start marketing those.26:05 Aaron: Excellent. Yeah. With that stuff I always think of... I used to... Back in the day when... Building and running, maintaining websites, has worked with a lot of banks, and they would do a lot of campaigns on switching. Just like, "Here's what it's like to switch your checking account from Wells Fargo to us as a community bank."26:22 Darren: Oh, man, that's a great idea.26:26 Aaron: Yeah, just really laying it all out. So they're able to see like, "Hey, here's what's different, here's how we handle it, here's what we need." And just making it so that the consumer felt really comfortable with like, "Oh, this switch happens a lot. It happened so much. It's all laid out. And here's the majority of my questions. I feel really good about contacting them to do this."26:28 Darren: Yeah, I see the same thing in the cellphone companies. Telecom stuff. And so, yeah, I'll definitely look to that for inspiration for how to position those landing pages and those marketing messages.26:45 Aaron: Yeah. What was really interesting to me when you see... And just the way SaaS and recurring revenue works, March was still our best month in the history of the company. Every...26:58 Darren: That's amazing.27:06 Aaron: Yeah, minus one, two, three months over the last six years, it's like up into the right every single month. You know that predictable revenue, it compounds everything else, that's why so many people love software as a service. And so, with everything that's gone on, new clients early in the month, we signed a big deal midway through the month, there's still all these positive things going on, and most of the customers, some canceled, and others, we've been working with ways to help them with their accounts, but that stuff won't kick in until April. And just as you and I were talking before, it's like, I can already see from our predictive revenue tools that our April billing will be about 6% to 7% down from our March billing. And getting back into the psyche and whatever, I was like, "I've watched that number go up." The months where it didn't grow, it was maybe a quarter percent that it went backward, or almost even, but never even a full percentage point, and all things considered, a 6%-7% drop and considering a lot of that, is just paused billing. I think that's somewhat of a positive signal at this point after this first wave of crashing.28:29 Darren: Totally, yeah. Absolutely. I feel the same way, it's like, "Man, the losses are not that bad." And so my confidence grows every week, where I look at the numbers and I'm like, "Okay, I think this is gonna be okay." My confidence is growing but then I'm also a little... I don't wanna be overly confident because there's still so much uncertainty. It could get really bad in the next couple of months. So I don't wanna be overly confident, but I'm starting to feel like, "Okay, well, if we all settle in and this is the way it is, then there's still certainly some thrive opportunities." How can we thrive in this situation? And if we tap into those, certainly we're gonna see some losses, but how much of that can we recover with new initiatives? 29:14 Aaron: Exactly. I kinda look at it, as I mentioned earlier, baseball is a favorite sport of mine, right? It's like a baseball game and we're pretty much in the second inning right now. There's a lot of game left to be played, but it's underway, we're out there, a couple of things have already happened, and for us in these first couple of innings, the biggest thing around that retention is, we changed our cancel process. So instead of just being able to go... Hit "Cancel", drop a quick... We ask, "Alright, tell us why you're cancelling," and getting a little bit of info. We changed that to, you hit "Cancel", now you get a pop-up that says, "Hey, just so you're aware, with COVID-19 and everything going on, we get it, let's have a conversation and let's figure out how to keep you on board with us. Whether it's a reduction in billing, we need to pause your billing for a month." But we put a bunch of things in place and then we built that framework for our customer success team so that they could manage it, where they weren't coming to me and saying, "Alright, here's what this customer wants. They want 10% off this month," or whatever else.30:16 Aaron: We gave them a framework so that they could make those offers, handle those decisions, and take care of it right in the moment with the customers. So it really felt a win for them, win for our customer, win for the business, especially if we kept them from cancelling just to say like, "Oh, great, yeah, I'm a restaurant, or I'm an agency that serves restaurants and hotels. I just went to zero income, but I still wanna retain this data, 'cause they're gonna need this when they come back, what can we do with it?"30:45 Darren: Yeah, that's really smart. Yeah, actually, we put some measures like that in place too, and then we talked to your team about it, and got some more ideas, and it's so valuable. I think that is one of the big lessons for any of our listeners that are also doing SaaS, if you haven't put something like that in place, get that up immediately. Some kind of retention recovery program, right? 31:09 Aaron: Yea. 'Cause, yeah, the cancels are just likely gone. It's so much harder to get them... Say things recover in three months, getting them to physically come back, sign up, even if you market to them, send them messages, they've already... They've mentally divorced the situation. But if you're able to reduce billing or even pause a month or two of billing, then when it comes back, then it's like, "Okay, great, things are back, close to normal, are you good? Let's turn billing back on." Just so much easier of a process, and you need to do that when you're dropping or pausing revenue like that, you need more of an instant on when things return, instead of having to work a marketing program around it.31:49 Darren: Yeah. We actually had some reductions on our support team too, and our support is still as... It's certainly seen a drop in tickets, but it's still fairly active. And so I didn't wanna overwhelm my support team by having them talk to everybody that wants to cancel, 'cause there's a lot of them, obviously, they're coming in. And so we did the same kind of thing, but it's completely automated. So when you hit to cancel now, it gives you an option to be like, "Well, here are a couple of options for you. One, if you wanna keep everything still active, and still be able to use the software, we know things are tough," it's like, boom, "Here's a discount for you, you can get that discount." And so people could choose that option and continue to operate, or they can just choose the pause option, which means we'll stop actively doing anything in your account, we turn off all of the functionality, but we'll preserve your historical data, so that when you're ready to come back in, you can just press one button and turn it back on. So people get to choose themselves on the checkout and that's been helpful for sure. We're seeing a few people take us up on that option.33:02 Aaron: And I don't know if any of my CS team ever listens to this podcast, but I do wanna give them a shoutout. They have been doing an amazing job of taking care of GatherUp customers, and helping, and that's not easy right now for them either, right? Instead of solving technical issues, or usability issues, and things like that, you're talking to people who, they're fearful, they're losing their business, they're in a panic situation. And you're trying to calm them, do your job, and keep the business that you're running maintainable. So, really, a commendable job, a very tricky spot for them in their role right now for sure, and I super appreciate it. They have handled the lion share. I've handled 2% of the conversations that they've handled and they're killing it.33:05 Darren: I can attest to that. As a customer, we had... One of our large customers and reputation builder looked to cancel, and so that conversation happened with us and your GatherUp customer support team, and, man, they're awesome. They did an awesome job, really helpful, many ideas. And the real thing that comes across is that, what can we do to help? You can just really feel it. They're just... It's not about trying to save the money from the account, it's about, "Okay, well, what can we do to help here," and just really being helpful. And you feel it and it feels good. Yeah, I think they're doing an awesome job.34:29 Aaron: That's good. I think we have a lot of genuine care in our culture. I've always appreciated that about our team. So that's awesome to hear come through. Alright, lastly, let's end on something, I guess, a little more positive, some of the things that we're doing right now. What are you doing, Darren, as far as within marketing, within sales? I know you mentioned a couple of things right now, but how are you working this to find some success and get some new business inside of everything? 34:58 Darren: Yeah, for sure. We have a few initiatives that are about to launch. One is what we're calling... One of our big competitors that people look to us as an alternative is Yext. People have a subscription with Yext, they're paying for a monthly fee, or an annual fee, to just have their citation sitting in a database doing nothing, right? And so we have... We're about to launch what we call a Yext replacement service. And so, "If you're currently with Yext, here's how you could switch to us." And so it's exactly what you were talking about with the banks. We have a landing page specific for it, we have a custom package for it, and so that we're planning to launch next week actually. And so that's one of the big offensive moves that will keep our revenue on the citation team rolling. We actually haven't seen huge drops over there. A little bit, but not too bad. And so I think that this service... We actually are predicting some growth and we already have two potential new hires lined up in case we see some growth there from the launch of this service. Which would be great, it'll offset other areas of the business, right? So that's one of the big ones.36:08 Aaron: That's awesome.36:09 Darren: Yeah. Yext replacement service I think it's overdue. We've been thinking about it for a long time, and so we're pulling the trigger on that one and trying to get that up as soon as possible. Another huge one is, our biggest recurring software is our local citation finder. It's basically what we've built our business on. And that software honestly hasn't had a line of code added to it since probably 2015. We have not touched the thing, it's ridiculous. We've partly not touched it because it's been in this sort of complete overhaul redesign, re-development phase forever. We're actually shooting for a launch in 10 days. The 27th. April 27th, Monday April 27th, we're trying to finalize the final pieces of marketing, and polish, and we're pushing that out the door. And, oh my God, it's unbelievably better. And it's actually one of these weird pieces of software that over the period since this COVID thing happened, we haven't seen... I look at it on a daily basis and it's like, six new sign-ups, five cancellations. The next day will be like, seven new sign-ups, eight cancellations.37:27 Darren: And so it's holding fairly steady, and I feel like once we launch the new version of this, massive retention, because the software is just so much better. People are canceling not necessarily because of COVID, but they cancel because the software is like... It did the job for them, but it's pretty weak and it doesn't have a lot of reason to stay subscribed. The new version provides ongoing value in a way that's so much better than what the old version did, and it's a delight to use, it's fast, it feels great, it looks great, and just delivers so much more value. So I think we have the retention, but massive marketing push. There are so many people that are familiar with that software and have been using it for years, we have a huge opportunity to get our name out there and push the marketing for that. There's probably a hundred blog posts out there that reference the local citation finder. All the outreach to them, we can mention to them, "Hey, we got this new version. I've set you up with a free trial account, check it out." So I think we're gonna have a massive blast of additional marketing value, which of course will bring people to citation finder, but once they're there, they see all the other stuff we do too. So I think those two offensive moves are huge.38:43 Darren: And then on the Google My Business Management service, that's a great service that we're seeing fantastic growth, and I was really excited about where it was going. We've certainly seen it cut back, probably lost about 20 to 30 percent of our clients over there, but I did some talks in the fall for auto dealers where I crawled every Google My Business listing in all of Canada for auto dealers, and I broke it down. How many are using Google posts, how many are using... Have filled out the services fields, how many are using products? All these different features. And then I presented those stats, and then I talk about, "Well, wow, no one is doing this, it's a massive opportunity, here's how auto dealers can take advantage of that." And then, of course, I think that data which we're about to publish, for auto dealers, it's not a great time to be targeting auto dealers, but we're re-running that crawl for accountants, and lawyers, home services, all these businesses that are still continuing to operate, we're gonna re-run that with those marketing initiatives, so that we can get in front of those audiences and present our Google My Business Management service. 'Cause that management service is actually really reasonably priced.39:53 Darren: It's 349 a month. And so, for a lot of businesses that are cutting bigger expenses, it's one of those ones where they can come to us for a much lower cost. They're offsetting their cost, taking off that huge bill off their credit card, replacing it with this and still seeing great value in their marketing. So those are the things that we're looking at and cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to even potentially thrive over the coming months.40:19 Aaron: Yeah. No, that's great. And to some extent the same backbone of what we're trying to do. One, I've seen, you put out some tweets and sharing some visuals on the updated local citation finder. What a great way, build some excitement before it even happens.40:37 Darren: Yeah, a little bit of... Yeah.40:38 Aaron: Yeah. Love doing that stuff. Big believer in just doing your work out in the open or looking at your product as an aquarium and everybody can see in. I think those are great things. But I think the core of where you're getting is having things to talk about. If the only thing you have to talk about is, "We need sales," that's a boring conversation that nobody wants to listen to. Kinda like how you and I joked before this started. You made the statement that you have COVID blindness because every email that comes in says COVID on it. [chuckle]41:10 Darren: Oh my God. "A new message from our CEO." It's like, "Oh my God, I don't wanna hear what your CEO has to say about how, yes, you're still operational. I'm sure you are, 'cause everyone is, and thanks for the info."41:22 Aaron: Yeah. Yeah, no, totally. I'm with you on that. But, yeah, what we've looked at is the overall... Again, back to retention, is like, how do we help customers? One initiative that I launched is, I wrote out in a couple of hours, I created a spreadsheet and wrote down 120 blog topics. And then I took it to our team in our stand up and said, "Everybody pick at least two of these to write on in the next few minutes."41:47 Darren: That's impressive brainstorming, man.41:51 Aaron: [chuckle] I'm never short on ideas, only time to execute. So it brought it to everyone where usually it's like Mike and I blog and then we have a product and content marketer. She blogs a little bit, a lot more on feature releases. So we've gone from a once a week, once every two weeks post, to three posts a week for the last three weeks now. And it's been great.42:14 Darren: Yeah, smart.42:15 Aaron: And more social chatter, more things to come in, more things to talk about. And also, internally, I find... People already, it's great gratification for them to put work into it, put it together, and then have it published. And instead of sharing on their LinkedIn or their Facebook like, "Hey, here's what Aaron wrote, or here is our company blog," now it's like, "Here's what I wrote," right? And there's pride and accomplishment behind that. And so, I really feel like it's been a great movement. It's interesting, it's created a lot more work for me, 'cause I'm basically editing and finding really good visuals, and all that kind of stuff, but I love it. The post is at least half-written, if not more, by the time I'm able to get into it, so that's been a really big plus. And I'm always kind of a slogan or a catch-phrase guy. And so, internally, we've just really rallied around like, "Mentions are your best marketing and inbound is the best outbound right now." So, yeah. And going with those, content, then we have the... We're doing the local search Ask Me Anything webinar with you and Joy Hawkins on April 23rd. We already have a hundred and some registered for that. So I'm pumped about that. Traject has been great.43:30 Aaron: If you're a paid GatherUp customer, you can use our social product, Cyfe which is Reporting, or Authority Labs for free for 90 days. So we're offering access to other tools as well. So it's given us a lot to talk about, write about, be out there with, and, yeah, it's helped. It's like, our agency leads are down probably about 25-30% of volume of what they were, and then our multi-locations are really far down, that's the one that's below 10%. And they were just trying to, "Alright, what are the industries that are doing okay right now?" Certain areas of logistics, that's doing well. Grocery, pharmacy, things like that, they're doing well. So we're doing some light outbound with those, but much more we re-calibrated around... I just kinda put together a strategy of the the three Rs. And it's like, research and know the prospect super well. Reach out as a friend, a colleague, ask questions, how it's going for them, what are they seeing, things like that. And your goal is to build a relationship. So instead of trying to slam them into a demo, all you're trying to do is get a conversation going.44:43 Darren: Yeah, and try to solve their problem. What is the thing that they're struggling with, why are they even considering you, and then understanding what their challenges are and seeing if you can help them with that. That's all people want.44:56 Aaron: Yep, for sure. So we've just been hitting on that and we're starting to see progress. It's like, we're seeing the uptick in traffic to the blog, we're seeing more social chatter, we're seeing some of these other things. And these things are there a little slower. It's not gonna be next day success, but I really feel like if things cycle down another level, that's when this stuff is gonna kick in for us, and it's gonna keep us where we're at, and then at even kill, and we're also... We're not pissing people off by trying to shove sales and demo requests, and everything else, in their inbox, doing cold outreach at a time where nobody has mental bandwidth for that.45:36 Darren: And, man, I cannot believe the uptick in terrible cold outreach emails I've been getting in my inbox. And so, it's like, "Gosh, people are extra sensitive to it right now. Do not be taking that strategy, it will not pay off for you."45:51 Aaron: Yep. I don't even read my sales pitches right now. It's just...45:56 Darren: Forget it.45:57 Aaron: Yeah. Not even to see what they're saying. It's just such a hard delete, right? 46:01 Darren: Of course, yeah. It's the worst time to be pitching. If your company was built off of outbound, man, that was not a good move. Right now you need to be an inbound-based company.46:14 Aaron: Yeah, for sure. I agree. Alright. Well, I think we've ran a gamut of things, and I'm hopeful the next time we record it's not Groundhog's Day and we're talking the same things. [chuckle]46:25 Darren: Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to talk again in a few weeks and see where we've landed. There may be some of these proactive moves. We'll see how they're paying off, and see where things are at.46:37 Aaron: For sure.46:38 Darren: Yeah.46:39 Aaron: Great to catch up, Darren. Glad things are going as well as they can for you guys. I'm excited to see the launch of the local citation finder, and I think you set it up perfectly, it sounds like it's gonna launch in about two weeks. [chuckle]46:54 Darren: You know what? It's even less. 10 days now.46:58 Aaron: Oh, I like this.46:58 Darren: Yeah. I've shortened my two weeks to 10 days.47:03 Aaron: See, we're always evolving and improving, that's what I like about talking to you.47:07 Darren: Yeah. Alright, cool, great talking to you Aaron.47:11 Aaron: Yeah, you too. Hey, everyone, wishing you guys are well in personal lives, emotionally, fighting for your business, all those other things. Many of you are so gracious. You reached out on Twitter, have sent encouraging emails on our episodes, and they're helpful and everything else. If you have anything going on in this time that this is sparked that you have a question on, or you wanna know how we're operating, or even wanna share some of yours, please feel free to reach out to Darren and I, we're really easy to get a hold of, either from our website or on Twitter. So go ahead and reach out to us, we'd love to cover any of that on our upcoming episodes.47:47 Darren: Yeah, even if you just wanna chat via DMs on Twitter, or something, and you've got some questions, happy to talk and see if there's anything I can do to help.47:57 Aaron: For sure. You're a good guy.47:58 Darren: Alright.48:00 Aaron: Alright. Take care, Darren, and we'll talk to you soon, and thanks everyone for listening.48:04 Darren: Thanks, everyone. Bye.[music]
Join the staff from Local University as they discuss some of the most significant and interesting developments Last Week in Local Search.
Join the staff from Local University as they discuss some of the most significant and interesting developments Last Week in Local Search.
Join the staff from Local University as they discuss some of the most significant and interesting developments Last Week in Local Search.
Join the staff from Local University as they discuss some of the most significant and interesting developments Last Week in Local Search.
Join the staff from Local University as they discuss some of the most significant and interesting developments Last Week in Local Search.
Join Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Carrie Hill, Colan Nielsen and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Carrie Hill and Colan Nielsen from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting developments from Last Week in Local Search
Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Join Mike Blumenthal, Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling from Local University as they discuss the most important and interesting happenings Last Week in Local Search.
Helpful links from the episode: Stripe MnSearch Summit MozCon a16z Podcast: What Time Is It? From Technical to Product to Sales CEO David Ulevitch on Twitter FULL SHOW NOTES[music]00:12 Aaron Weiche: Episode nine, The CEO Journey.00:16 INTRO: Welcome to The SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Here the experiences challenges wins and losses, shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]00:42 AW: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. I'm Aaron.00:45 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:47 AW: And we are back in front of a microphone, sharing our business secrets, our love secrets, everything in between, and making them public, so that we can share them with our listeners. And, if anything, sometimes it's probably cathartic and healing and everything else, wouldn't you say? 01:07 DS: Yeah, definitely, I have not yet shared any love secrets, so I'm not sure where you're going with that, but...[chuckle]01:15 DS: May be a future episode. I don't know.01:17 AW: I'm just trying to keep things broad, all the time, right? 01:20 DS: Broad, yeah. 'Cause you know we never know what we're gonna talk about.01:22 AW: Yeah, no, if this turns into a relationship podcast on how you and I get along, and our friendship and being there for each other and everything else, we could pivot right, like, software is all about pivoting at different times.01:35 DS: It really is, yeah, and I think we should definitely keep that in our back pocket.[chuckle]01:40 AW: Alright, so with that, we'll both get up off the davenport and the attempt to talk on a few different topics today, especially the deeper content we want to get into on kinda the CEO journey. We have a lot to cover there, we will probably, once again, have a hard time keeping ourself to 40 minutes but hopefully the content is appreciated. But what have you been up to since our last episode on churn a few weeks ago, Darren? 02:12 DS: What have I been up to? Well, we've talked about this Local Search service a number of times, and how we're re-pivoting that actually, speaking of pivoting, into a Google My Business Management Service. And so I hired someone new for that. Basically Allie is my primary person that is running that service and she's at capacity, so we need to hire, and so can't really launch it until we have new people hired and trained and ready to do the service. So, I hired Sydney, she worked with us in the past, she's pretty awesome. And so she started yesterday. And I put out a job posting too. And so we're just trying to get the people in place to be able to service the service because we have a waiting list of 30 people that are interested already. I don't even... Honestly, I worry that we might never even launch the landing page because we'll just keep picking people off the waiting list, 'cause the waiting less seems to be growing faster than we can hire and train people to build the service up.03:10 DS: So, it's very interesting to me that there's that much interest in the service, I think it's gonna be very successful for us, and I think we've dialed in our processes really well. So, the next thing to dial-in, is hiring and training and scaling it up so I'm excited about that. That's big for us, for sure.03:24 AW: That's awesome to have that type of demand. That part has to feel really good.03:29 DS: It feels great, and I think it's like... I had read a tweet or some one... Some luminary of the modern age, had tweeted that the biggest success factor for companies is not really product or anything, it's timing. And so having the right product at the right time, that people need, and I feel like that's precisely what we're doing with this service. So I'm excited about that. And I know there's competition out there, but it's early stages. We have a great reputation that we've built up in this space, and so I think we're really well positioned to do well with the service.04:01 AW: I'm interested, you seem to be comfortable in productized services and things like that, where the whole reason, not the whole reason but one of the reasons I got into SaaS after well over a decade in agency is I wanted to get away from services and I wanted to be strictly product-focused. But you have a good comfort level with that. But yet, man, I would be really, I would be frustrated right now. Like really, I gotta wait on services to get this awesome new thing launched? 04:32 DS: Totally. And you're like, you have a software, you just flip the switch. "Okay, sign up everybody." And so there is something beautiful with that. There are two types of services. There is a complex agency, SEO service where every case is different and everyone's got different needs, and some clients are more of a hassle than others. Same thing with something like web design where you're building out a website. There's just so many touch points with the client that it's really hard to scale that. And what I have found is with a very simple streamlined one thing type of service, so citation building, for example, it scales really well. It's like, this is what it is, you buy it, you basically get a product, really, it's a very specific thing. And there's not a lot of back and forth, there's not too much... Not to many questions about it, right? 05:22 DS: And so everyone gets the same thing. And that's where the pivot happened actually, 'cause I had turned the Local Search service into something more complicated than it needed to be, which opened the flood gates for all of that like different clients and how do we handle practitioner listings, and just lots of complication. So scaling it back to just this really helps us to build something that's scalable. And so I am comfortable with this as a productized service but I totally hear you on just services in general. They can be a real pain in the ass and very hard to scale.05:53 AW: Yeah, well, good for you. You are a braver man than I am and totally... Nothing wrong with it. Not in my wheelhouse of a fit right now but how is it right? You said you're posting, and I know this, I've talked a number of episodes on hiring, especially for sales positions, which I'll give an update on and we're continuing to do. But in talking before the podcast, you kinda have a few little tips for people in hiring and posting to job boards.06:27 DS: So yeah, this, this job posting I actually forgot to do it when I first launched the job posting. I put out... So I posted the job and I had done this last time, but we use Indeed.ca, I think, I'll see if there's any indeed.com, but we post our jobs to Indeed and so, we get a flood of applications and most people, they just press the button to apply through Indeed. I have a very specific note that says, "How to apply," and it says, "Include your resume and cover letter," and it says, "and email it to darren@whitespark.ca." It also says right in the, "How to apply," "If you just apply through Indeed, instead of emailing Daren directly then we'll know you didn't read this and it'll be really helpful for us for filtering our candidates." So this is awesome because I get... So far I've probably had about 40 applications for this job and only five of them read this instruction. Most of them are just like, it's like a volume game, they apply to every job that's on Indeed, and I don't wanna waste my time with those people, I want people that actually took the time to read this, decided this if is a job for them, and they emailed me directly. And so I have three really solid candidates already, and I just posted the job yesterday, and then the other ones, they just go straight to the bin. I don't even look at 'em. I just archive them.07:45 AW: Awesome.07:46 DS: Yeah.07:46 AW: Totally agree with you. We always ask, "Tell us about yourself, share links to wherever you're creating content or are a part of content on the web. And yeah, you get the ones that are just plain but the ones that actually take the time, you can see that they're just so much more of a qualified candidate. And it is amazing to like, if it's a job you really want or you're really interested in, put in the effort to differentiate yourself. It blows in my mind that people just fall short on that.08:13 DS: Yeah, they don't care, they're just playing a numbers game, they're like, "Well, if I apply for 100 jobs I might get two interviews, and then one of those could turn into a job." They're just lazy.08:23 AW: Finding a job should not be like a marketing funnel. I don't think.08:26 DS: Seriously. And it's like how are they not a little bit more discerning in what they apply for? It seems like they're... Like people that just do not have the right skill set that we're looking for are applying for everything it seems.08:37 AW: Yup. Well, that's a great tip. Include something that knows people care, they want it, they pay attention to detail and read things through before they take action. Those are all great pre-interview filters to help you know what you're dealing with.08:52 DS: Yeah, totally. Also, we signed up for Stripe. We did the deal yesterday. So I've been talking with a salesperson over there. So I'm so excited 'cause we're building our new account system, and Stripe just looks amazing. My developers are doing the happy dance all over the place. Just getting off of PayPal, moving over to Stripe, and Stripe billing looks so nice. Did you know they have this feature? This is a tip for all of our listeners. Stripe has a magical feature that will automatically update credit cards that are expiring. They have an agreement with Visa and MasterCard, and let's say your credit card is expiring, then, this system which only costs an extra 0.4% recurring revenue, will automatically update credit cards that are expiring. So you don't have to chase people with expired cards. Did you know that that was a thing? 09:44 AW: I didn't, I didn't at all. That is mind-blowing.09:47 DS: Right? Holy, I'm so excited about that. So this is... I think it's fairly new. But he told me that and I was like, scrambling to find a pen, so I could sign this contract 'cause oh my God, that's gonna be such a great feature.10:01 AW: Yeah, now there's a few. My CFO and some of our customer success team members would love to hear that. We run an internal report, and that will show us like, "Alright, here's who's failing, and we're communicating and making attempts." And then they usually get involved with a human reach out and it's only... It might be anywhere from three to 10 accounts in a month out of thousands that need that. But man, they would love to have that off their plate, and some of them turn into cancel billings, right? There's even more of what those are. So, wow, that sounds really interesting.10:36 DS: Yeah, look it up. They got a new feature. I think you're already on it. Yeah, 'cause I recalled getting Stripe invoices from your team. So I'm pretty sure that you already have the feature. You just need to flip the switch, maybe.10:48 AW: Yeah, no, we're not in Stripe, so.10:51 DS: Oh, you're not? 10:51 AW: No, we're not, we're on PayPal.10:54 DS: My condolences.10:57 AW: Yeah. [chuckle] But, yeah, we'll see as our process, we're just starting in on the billing system stuff decisions and... Month down the road I'll have updates on what that looks like, but that's in step. But yeah, the payment processing might change for us some day.11:15 DS: Sure. Well, what do you have updates on what's new in your world? 11:18 AW: Yeah, on the good side of things, really happy, I know I mentioned this in our last episode, but our customer success team with bringing in a new leader there, a couple of months ago is really going great. We've added on to our onboarding process where... We used to... We did a great job of getting people onboarded and set up, but we missed a number of opportunities to kind of be a little bit more consultative and outline things. And then once they got to, "Alright, go," then we just weren't as good as following up and making sure that things were progressing well. We were there if they had questions, but we weren't really leading them.12:00 DS: Totally.12:00 AW: And he already in a couple of months, Taylor has just done a great job of putting that together and getting that in motion and that was just a great example of things I know that needed to be done, but in being too many places and too many things, like it just was an area I can focus and I could lead, so I'm super happy with that. We're getting ready for... We have a couple events in the near future, Minnesota Search this week and their Summit which you've just spoken at and been at in the past.12:32 DS: Yup, that's a great one.12:33 AW: Yup. We're a sponsor at that, so excited to talk to all the local agencies and in-house marketers, at roughly around 300 to 400 attend that great one-day event. And then we're kind on a three-and-a-half weeks until MozCon. So really excited about that from every aspect. We're a sponsor from the biz dev side, seeing so many friends in the industry, yourself included, like it really is just a fun three or four days to everybody together. Yeah.13:04 DS: Yeah, I can't wait. It's going to be so fun. We'll be hanging out.13:07 AW: Yeah, on the sales side. So I'm trying to feel better about this. We did extend an offer to a new sales person on Friday. I'll know in the next couple of days, that they've accepted. I'm feeling confident that we're able to kinda meet the needs and we're a good fit for each other. But I was really, I was really trying hard to hire two or three at once and maximize training and get more output and things like that, and I just couldn't find out of the group I was talking to a good second or even a third candidate. So, a little frustrated. I'm still... I wanted our outbound sales to be up and running months ago and just hitting stride now, but yet I'm still at the beginning and really actually need another body or two for how we're planning to work this. So, that part's a little frustrating, and I go back and forth between beating myself up about it and then having to re-motivate to, it's okay, these bumps happen and work through them.14:09 DS: Hiring sales is so hard. So yeah...14:12 AW: It is.14:12 DS: And I think finding one good person is great and you might be able to get into this position where this new person is just fantastic. And that they're able to be the one that trains the next two people.14:24 AW: Yep. No, absolutely. And then from an overall perspective, it's just been a lot of fun. Google's had a number of updates, lately. It just seems like they've been on a tear, it's still around local and other things, but we're just seeing reputation and in having a product with GatherUp being related to capturing customer feedback and generating online reviews, reputation is just... The easiest way put it is, it is becoming the most visible piece of data about your business.14:53 DS: Yeah.14:53 AW: Yeah, Google just released some things today. If you're Googling phone numbers for a business or an address for a business, they're attaching reputation call-outs to all those simple type of informational services. Two weeks ago, it was a Google Q and A. That feature having automated answering that, it'll pull up reviews related to the question you're being asked. So, this shift to consumer, customer-generated data in the form of reviews and Google is doing more and more and more with it. That's fabulous for us. It just plays into what we've been talking about and we haven't seen maybe these exact things, but we are really... It feels good to know that it's right in line with what we knew was gonna happen, we didn't know how, but we've really figured it would.15:44 DS: Yeah, it's just like as I see more and more of these features come on, it's like, "Google's squeezing everybody else out, it's like they're just gonna become the only review site, it almost feels like. Other than a first party, it feels like Yelp is gonna get pushed out and some of the industry sites will get pushed out. It's just Google is doing such a good job of putting their content front center and really using their content. So, yeah, that's pretty amazing.16:09 AW: Yeah. No, and I don't wanna steal any thunder from our co-founder and my friend Mike Blumenthal but he's had his finger on the pulse of this. And you're exactly right with that. And I think at the LocalU Advanced in Denver in September, I already have seen some of this data and studies. But you're right it's gone from a dozen review site players to really one review site player. And he has some really interesting data on how it's impacted Yelp and some of the other things. And for us it even pushes more the reason why we say first-party reviews really should be treated with a lot of respect and a lot of value, because if you leave everything, all of those eggs only into Google's basket, we just think that that that's just such a huge mistake and you're missing the boat on so many other things that you can do to both improve your business and market it.17:01 DS: Yeah, is that new feature where they highlight the reviews, and then they show the different review sites on mobile, will it pull first-party into those? 17:09 AW: Yeah, reviews from the web? 17:10 DS: Yeah.17:11 AW: Yeah, yup, it absolutely will.17:13 DS: Okay.17:14 AW: Yeah, there's just a number of things... I don't know... I'm just off the... Look, first party reviews are like the utility knife that a marketer really needs to focus on because it's a tool that you can use where GMB reviews are absolutely visible and have a great amount of visibility and draw to them, but you are just missing out if you don't whip out that Swiss army knife that's in your pocket to be able to MacGyver a million things on the marketing side.17:45 DS: Yeah, totally. Totally.17:46 AW: Well cool, with that, we kinda wanted to talk about a podcast. I was lucky enough, I had a long time industry friend who passed along this podcast to me and said, "Hey I think this would be of interest to you." So thanks, Ed Kohler, for passing that along, but it's the a16z podcast, and the topic of this podcast was really understanding that the journey and the stages of being a SaaS CEO. And the title of it and we'll link it in our show notes, you can give it a listen but it was, "What time is it?" And it was from being a technical to a product to a sales CEO. And the guest on the podcast was David Ulevitch. He founded OpenDNS sold it to Cisco. He's kind of morphed into a few different things now, he's on the VC side. But the high level of it and where I wanted you and I to discuss it, I sent it your way after listening to it, but it outlined that he looked at it as like four stages that every CEO goes through or has the opportunity to go through. The first stage is more of a technical CEO.19:00 AW: You're trying to build it, get it built, is it feasible, do people want it? Then the next one you evolve into is being that product CEO, and now you're trying to figure out, do you have product market fit? You're doing discovery with customers that you think you have that with. You're listening to them so you can build the right features and evolve the right way, and ultimately are you solving those right problems? Then the next one is the sales CEO, and once you have that fit, now you're like, "Great, how do I generate more revenue so I can grow the company, acquire more customers?" And then lastly, if you are able to make it out of that is then you're that go-to-market CEO at the higher level. You have a VP of sales and a VP of Customer Success and all these other things and you're looking to, how do I scale and accelerate and have all the right pieces so that I can grow this as much as possible? 19:50 DS: Yeah.19:50 AW: And that simple look of it and just building it into four stages was something that really resonated with me that I looked at like, "Oh, I can identify with that," 'cause I've gone through... I wasn't a technical CEO 'cause I wasn't a founder day one, but I definitely came in and had to be the product CEO, and now I'm transitioning into that sales CEO.20:13 DS: For sure. You see that as you build your sales team and as you personally experiment with some of this outbound sales stuff, like yeah, you're really into that sales CEO position right now. Does it feel that way to you? Are you still... You must still though go back to product 'cause you're always on... It's a big touch point. Like, what are the new features? How are we solving problems? What are the new problems that are coming up that we want our product to solve? So you kinda jump back and forth, do you know? 20:37 AW: Yeah, no, I definitely do. I think if I had to pick one, I'm absolutely in the sales CEO. My initial thing a year-and-a-half ago when I kinda took the reins over, it was like, it gave me more control to get the right features that I felt were missing when I was out doing sales and interacting with customers. And I think we achieved...20:57 DS: Right. Right.21:00 AW: Better product market fit and we're able to do it in a good cycle. But I do. I wanna get to be that go-to-market CEO, the overseeing, and I have smart people better than me in all of these areas to do all of the right things. So I definitely wanna get there. But I do have a... I have a love for what we do and I'm very passionate about the high level of vision and problems we're trying to solve and things like that. So I think I'll always have a toe in the water over there on the product side. But, I don't know. I don't know if I'll always wanna be the stuck-in-the-sales-cycle, the one generating the majority of the bigger accounts.21:38 DS: Yeah, I feel like I'm pretty firmly seated right now in the product CEO stage. I spent a lot of my time thinking about product market fit, trying to thinking about features, a lot of the sort of research I do, like I'm kind of in the trenches as an SEO still, like I'm not...22:00 AW: Yeah.22:00 DS: I spend a lot of time researching SEO things 'cause that's what I'm really passionate about. And so, that permeates into the products that we build and then I'm the one that's sort of reviewing everything that the team is building and advising on it and working on design and layout and so... And features. So I really feel like I spent too much time in the product CEO role, and I should have the right people in place that can do that for me so I can move to that next stage. That's sales CEO. This four stages, this podcast, is a little bit illuminating for me in like helping to direct maybe where I should be because I love being a product CEO, but in order to grow the company, I think I need to focus more on becoming a sales CEO. So this has been super valuable for me to think about it in these terms.22:50 AW: Yeah, and that was a really big that... There's one comment that David made in here, right, where he said it's all about making the right decisions for the right time, and I feel like you just alluded to that, right, where you realized where you're at and then it's maybe... So what are your options to move out of that, right? Like, do you... I...23:09 DS: Yeah.23:09 AW: You need to find a product manager that can take over the product part and you...23:13 DS: Exactly. I got one, I know who he is.23:15 AW: Yeah.23:16 DS: Yeah.23:16 AW: Yeah, where you can still influence it and do whatever, but the lion share of it is off your plate so you can focus your time on the other, right? And that's... That's that same progression when I've looked at a number of these is like in order to get yourself out of it, you have to replace yourself there or find someone better than you specifically at that, and that can be hard too because to some extent, you might look at... Do you feel like you're better at product than sales and you'd only be doing sales because the company needs it, or what does that look like for you? 23:46 DS: I feel like I'm... Like, when it comes to doing sales, like if we think about any enterprise leads that come in, I have a much higher close rate and I think because I'm so familiar with the product and the industry, it helps me to come across as very trustworthy, right? People wanna hire me because I know what I'm talking about, and it really helps to close the sale. So, I think there's a great opportunity for me to transition into a sales CEO and then build our sales culture, so then start to hire, basically get to the position you're at right now.24:17 AW: Yup.24:17 DS: And so... And I have a really good guy, Nick. He is fantastic. He could definitely be the product manager. I have him doing client work right now and it's like, "Man, we gotta just ditch those clients, bite the bullet and have Nick become the product manager and I'll step out of it and spend my time on sales."24:34 DS: But you know what the trouble is? I'm the type of person that I only like to do what I like to do. [chuckle] And so, I don't love doing sales, and so that... I'm just like, "Argh, sales." Like sometimes it's like I'll have a great sales call and then it's like, "Yeah, sure, I'll send him a proposal eventually, I guess." Like, I'm just not good at staying on top of it and I'm not... I don't get pumped about sales and excited about closing the deal.25:00 AW: Yeah.25:01 DS: I just want money to come to me though I didn't have to do anything for it. I just wanna sit back and money just rains in.25:06 AW: Yeah.[chuckle]25:07 DS: That's what I want.25:08 AW: And it does sound nice, but maybe that's where you realized like, "Okay, I actually need sales people," but they utilize you as an asset, right? Where...25:17 DS: Yeah, maybe.25:18 AW: Bring Darren to the call to build trust and answer so many questions and salesperson Sarah or Sam, they're handling the communication. They're staying on top. They're doing all those things, right? Like, I think there's ways to architect that.25:32 DS: Oh, my, that's a genius idea, Aaron.[chuckle]25:34 DS: I will do that because I love the sales call. I love being on the call and chatting with the clients and learning from them and it really helps to inform the product side too, right? 25:42 AW: Yeah.25:43 DS: So, I do love that, but I don't wanna put the proposals and statements of work together and go back and forth with legal. No thanks.25:52 AW: Yeah. And I don't mind those things. I do, like I love to evangelize our product. I love to tell the story of what we do and show people, like just before we started recording today, I just got off a sales call, and we are taking someone from a competitor in the space and we are giving them exactly what they want at a massive cost reduction. Like it's just...26:14 DS: Great.26:14 AW: Yeah, wins across the board, and I love that. I get a high off of winning that deal and doing whatever, but I've realized over the years and in building agencies, like that self-awareness, here's what I'm good at, here's what I'm not very good at, and I need to find people who are good for those other areas. And then even if I like, even if it fills my tank to participate in those, then participate as long as you're not taking away from it and figure out what can you add to it without missing the gap on all of the other little pieces, right? I love being part of product, but if I had to be the product manager and all the detail and writing Jira tickets and all those other things, I would fail within weeks at that too, like I'm not a detail. I'm a big vision type person. So you gotta understand those things and then figure out how you can add to it and make it work.27:08 DS: Yeah. I think it's a bit of a lesson for me. I tend to get way too detaily. I get really deep and I'm like, "Make this donut chart slightly thicker." Like I'm really fine into the details where it's a lot of my time, right? 27:22 AW: Yeah.27:22 DS: And so this is where a product manager would fill that role for me.27:26 AW: Yep, absolutely. One thing that we talked about when we were kind of comparing notes on this was also understanding and you and I's world of running bootstrapped companies and limited resources, that some of this seems over-simplified and it's coming from someone with VC experience and revenue backed startups that's already there to play with it and everything else.27:46 DS: Yeah.27:50 AW: But what's really important is you can take from those. You can take from podcasts, from VC and big companies and whatever else, but it's finding the little pieces that you can work into your own framework, right? 28:03 DS: Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the awesome things from this podcast, I really liked where he talked about laying out your packages and plans. So I love that idea. What he suggests is taking your packages and plans and sort of designing them for your different customer profiles. For example, small businesses, agencies, enterprise in my case, right? And so they have different needs, and so I can push the different tiers based off of those needs. So something... So, small business is our base plan, and then if you want white labeling, well, you have to have the agency plan. If you want enterprisey-type reporting, you need to be on the enterprise plan. And so having those levers that will push people to the next tier is really smart, and I don't really do that right now. So I definitely took that.28:54 DS: But yeah, it felt frustrating to be on a podcast, to listen to some of those things and think, "Well, those are all great when you are a CEO that has a leadership team where you can sit back and be big picture, but personally as a bootstrapped company, I feel like I'm running around answering everyone's questions." Right? So all the questions kinda come to me 'cause I am for the most part the leadership team, and so I'm not there yet. I don't have the resources to hire a leadership team. And so it is a little frustrating to hear these big picture things, but that's not to say that you can't take so much from it, right? 29:32 AW: Yeah. Now, understandable when you look at it and there's certain parts of it, it's like, "Oh, they make it sound so easy and this is what you do and you have a lot of room to offer a salary and all these other things to implement that."29:48 DS: Yeah.29:49 AW: But for us, all I can say is that that's what's led me that I've already seen in scaling past businesses how important that was, and really in a couple of them, I was one of those pieces, right? I wasn't the CEO, but I was the one tapped to like, "Okay, Aaron will come in and handle sales," or, "Aaron will come in and handle the brand and marketing and putting this team in place."30:06 DS: Yep.30:10 AW: And what I saw in participating as part of those teams is like this is really where the company is run, right? Because if everything hits a bottleneck of one person, the CEO, or whatever that is, you just become infinitely limited in what you can do. But it's hard in those early days where that's all that you have room for is your one thinker and a lot of doers, but you need those additional thinkers and leaders within those areas to hit those bigger strides. But it's tricky on when who's the right one, especially your first one, right? How do I find the right person to trust, invest in and know that they have, they're in great alignment with what I wanna see done with the company? 30:57 DS: Yeah. No, you're already a few steps ahead of me for sure in terms of leadership team. So you've got... Describe your structure right now. So you're a CEO and then you have a product manager.31:07 AW: Yep.31:08 DS: You have... You now have a sales manager, right? Yeah? 31:10 AW: Not sales manager. That's really the last area I need to close. So I have one person that... I do kinda double as VP of product, but we have a product manager that handles all of the day-to-day and communication with their engineering team and all those pieces, so they are pretty much the owner of that area. We have a CFO to own finances, HR, hiring benefits, all of that kind of stuff. With the recent hire of a VP of Customer Success, I have someone that owns that team and is, like I said, in 60 days has already had a fabulous impact there. And then I have someone in head of design that he kinda works with the product manager for all interface design and feature design and all that kind of stuff. So it's a little bit of a tandem there, but that really gives me that.32:01 DS: Yeah.32:02 AW: And sales is that last place where it's like I completely own that right now. We only have one sales person on staff. We're trying to bring on a second, but I need to get enough bodies and I either need one to emerge as a leader that I can say, "Hey, this is yours to own and you need to build goals and you need to train and do whatever else," or I need to find that person. But right now I'm just at the stage where I just need more staff allocated to doing sales even more so than I need a leader or a builder of that area.32:30 DS: Interesting, and you talking about your structure and all these different people and me thinking about me being that CEO bottleneck, one sort of spark of an idea that I just had was all these questions that come at me, it's a good exercise for me as a leader to look at that and say, "Who else could own this question?" Rather than me answering this, who could be the person that can make a decision on these things and then building up those people within my team and saying, "This is something you can handle," or at least, or thinking about a role of someone that can handle that and then slowly trying to siphon off these decisions, 'cause what does a CEO do? They just make decisions all day long, deciding what this should be, that should be, and it's like trying to put other people in positions to make those decisions for the company, I think, is the key to getting into that stage where I would be able to focus on being a visionary rather than the person that has to answer every question.33:32 AW: Absolutely. And yeah, I don't ever wanna be that bottleneck and I don't wanna be the only resource too. Number one, I am incredibly opinionated. And sometimes that's a strength because I'm gonna have a strong opinion and I'm gonna do research and get experience to back it up and all those different things. It's not gonna be... It's not just gonna be thrown into the wind. There's a lot to support it, but on the other end of that, sometimes that causes me to just be too stuck in my ways or only viewing it one way. And that's one thing that I found by empowering other people and giving them decisions.34:06 DS: Yeah.34:09 AW: And then just creating... I think it's really important then to create a communication cycle where you're in the loop but the loop still goes without you, right? So you don't have to be in it all.34:20 DS: Yeah.34:21 AW: And sometimes I hear the decisions and sometimes I'm like, "Huh, yeah, I wouldn't have done it that way or thought about it, but that totally works," and sometimes has more success than what I would have dreamed up. And there's still are times where I'm like, "Wait a minute, how do that get decided? I think we missed some things," and whatever else, but those are just teaching moments that everyone to talk through it.34:38 DS: Sure. Yep.34:40 AW: So the next time that we have that we can approach it differently.34:43 DS: Yep. Yeah, and the one thing I've learned more and more is that when I am not rigid on my opinion, then I often come around to the opinion of others and realize, "You know what? I think he makes some really good points and that is probably the best direction to go." And so I really try to be open and think about it from the different perspectives. I feel like that's one of the primary features of a leader, like you really have to be able to listen hard and listen well and think about what other people are suggesting 'cause that oftentimes, we'll have better ideas than you do.35:23 AW: Yep. What would it look like for Whitespark if Darren said, "I'm taking the rest of 2019 off," who would own the different areas and make the decisions and whatever else? I think that would be an interesting scenario for you to play through in your head. And then how do you maybe implement some of those or start working through some of those things so that you can peel it away? Because I find and maybe you'd find the same, like I need space to think. I can't come up with big ideas or vision or the next partnership or whatever else if I'm just so far down in the weeds on little mundane decisions on how many pixels something is, not to say I still don't stick my head down in there, but I really shouldn't do that.36:08 DS: Yeah, exactly. Well, you know what? I'm just gonna do it. I'm taking the rest of 2019 off. Good idea, Aaron.[laughter]36:14 DS: Thank you. That's it. I'm out. Good luck, Whitespark.36:18 AW: Yeah, the Whitespark team is gonna send me some hate mail for sure.[laughter]36:23 DS: Yeah. No, it's a really great thought exercise and to think about who takes over because honestly, I go on vacations and I do work hard to disconnect and the company never falls apart. It runs just fine without me. When I get back, there's some decisions that are waiting for me, but I think it does come back to really trying to assign those decisions and empowering people on my team to make those decisions without me and rather than holding the reins on some of these things. So I'm gonna really use this as a starting point to look for those decisions and say, "Who else could make this decision instead of me?"37:01 AW: Yeah. Ultimately, Darren, through those four stages, and you talk about how you're primed that second stage in the product right now, do you ultimately even wanna get to the fourth stage? Like is that where you wanna be? Because I think it's okay too to look and say like, "These things I am, this I'm not. I don't ever wanna get there. And if anything, someday I might hire a CEO and I just stay, I'm VP of Product," right? What does that look like for you? 37:25 DS: I can tell you exactly. When I look at these four stages, this is what I wanna happen. I've already passed technical CEO, the feasibility, the building, but we have a pretty good product and obviously it needs a lot more work and that's why I'm spending so much time in product, in the product CEO stage because of churn, actually. David Ulevitch mentioned this on the podcast that if you've identified... We're talking about what time it is. Well, right now, what time it is right now, it is fix the product, and that's what we're doing right now. And so when the product is fixed, I think I would love to skip sales for the most part. I would like the model that you described where I am still on sales calls and I'm thinking about sales and I'm thinking about how to grow sales, but I'm not the person closing for the most part. And then once the product is humming and we can scale, then I would love to jump to that, go-to-market CEO stage and scale the business like to $5, $10, $100 million.38:26 DS: That is my dream and that is where I want to get in the next five years. I wanna get there, and I think I can get there and I do think it really comes down to getting the right people in place at those stages, because once you get a really good product manager, you don't have to be a product CEO anymore. Once you get an awesome sales director, you don't have to be the sales CEO and then you can really focus on being that go-to-market CEO. And so these four stages are really... It's a really great framework to think about as the leader of a company and trying to say, "How are we," and then make your plans, right? Plan out how are we gonna get to those stages and what do we need to do to reach that stage? And for me, I know exactly what it is for the most part. It'll evolve over time, but I know how to get there. And so I think our road map looks pretty good for that, but I'll be a product CEO for at least another year I think.39:20 AW: That's a brilliant take, and I think the most important thing when I look at that is just that self-awareness, where even he broke down, it's really about asking where are you right now, "what time is it? ". You just answered that, and where do you wanna go. And sometimes, especially when you're so busy in the business, you don't step out and look at a framework like this or see, what type of leader do I need to be and where do I need to be focusing that gets us to the right place? 39:49 DS: Yeah.39:50 AW: And just as you're there right now, that... It's still, as you alluded to, I still have my hand in that a little bit, but we fixed a lot of the things that we needed to have that product market fit where I didn't get my rear end kicked on the sales calls I was on, and even to some extent, there's a couple more things we're releasing this year which really takes my confidence to an all-time record high, and it shows in your sales call. That's, if anything, I probably only did the product CEO so heavily just because I knew what I needed to sell to be the sales CEO, and I knew if I was gonna go into the ring and just get my butt kicked every time, it was gonna crash and burn.40:28 DS: Yeah.40:33 AW: The product had to be better. We had to shore up some of the gaps and we were able to do that. But you have to realize that, and if you're only doing... If you're not pulling up and looking at it from this level, you're gonna miss seeing that. If you only look at it in the four or five clear stages, you're not really understanding where you're at. You might not get yourself out of that stage to ever get to the next one.41:00 DS: Yeah, exactly. This framework really helps you to see where you need to focus. Yeah, it's so defeating when I, as a sales, when I'm wearing the sales hat, when the leads come in, it'll be like... We have 10,000 locations. This is a major company that wants to work with us.41:14 AW: Yep.41:15 DS: And we don't have the product for them. This is what I face on a weekly basis, really great leads that I can't service. And so this is where... This is why I'm a product CEO right now. I'm a product CEO because I have to fix our product so that we have... These people are coming at us thinking we have it when we don't actually have it, and so we're building it right now, and I can't wait to have it so I can sell it to them.41:38 AW: Then you just say, "Yep, here is your contract to sign."41:43 DS: Yeah, exactly.41:44 AW: That's awesome. Well, hey we, as I mentioned, we will link to this episode of that podcast in our show notes. Give it a listen, again, if you're a bootstrap company. Most likely you are. That's why you're listening to us as we put out episodes. It isn't about mirroring the VC. They're different. All those things are different, but there's just so many great little details and frameworks to pull out and hopefully us talking about where we're at within this four stage of the CEO's journey is helpful to you and hopefully you can take a look at it and figure out how you're, where you're at in it. Anything you wanna communicate on what's coming up or next for you, Darren before we talk again in a couple of weeks? 42:30 DS: No, nothing big to announce. I'm gonna go to LocalU this week in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. So I'm looking forward to seeing some of the LocalU friends, Mike Blumenthal, Joey Hawkins, Joel Headley. So I'll be, great to see.42:41 AW: That's a great group.42:43 DS: Yeah, really great, and I can't wait to hang out with you and the rest of the get list or the gather-up crew at MozCon. Man, I can't wait for that. It's gonna be fun.42:51 AW: It'll be a great week in Seattle, and yeah, we'll have to, no matter where we're at in our cycle, we will have to record the MozCon in person episode.43:00 DS: Yes. We should actually get that on the calendar so that we know exactly what time we're doing it and we make it happen.43:06 AW: Yeah. And something tells me it's gonna be somewhere where we can have a beverage in front of us to help with all the conversation and ideas.43:12 DS: Yeah, with laptops far away from those beverages.[laughter]43:16 AW: My wife actually told me I can't do any more jokes on you for spilling the beer. She said I wore that out, so I'm glad you did the joke instead of me.43:23 DS: Yeah, I brought it up.43:24 AW: Yep.43:24 DS: Yeah. So you're off the hook on that one.43:26 AW: She's the most critical listener of the SaaS Venture. So...43:30 DS: Great. It's good to have a critical feedback person. Yeah, for sure.43:33 AW: Yeah. You passed with flying colors. You know you're an arm's length away. You can do no wrong. But I gotta work. I gotta work on my game, so...[laughter]43:42 DS: Alright.43:43 AW: Awesome. Well, thanks, Darren. Thanks everybody for listening. We're always trying to grow our audience. So writing a review on Apple iTunes would be helpful. Sharing a link to one of our episodes on social media or letting people in your Mastermind group, your LinkedIn group, out on LinkedIn, any of that, we would so appreciate it. We're excited for the hundreds that we reach, but we would love to have more. And as always, if you have an episode suggestion or an idea, hit Darren or I up on Twitter and we would be happy to try to work that into our topics and into the upcoming shows. So with that, Darren, have a fabulous time at the LocalU event coming up, and I'm excited to see you in Seattle in July.44:26 DS: Alright. Yep, you too. Have a great week. Talk to you later.44:29 AW: Alright. Take care everybody.[music]
Read the full show transcript below as Aaron and Darren talk about how they run their sprints and release features in their products.Helpful links from the episode: Whitepark's free Google review link generator tool SaaStr Annual conference GatherUp GMB integration launch FULL SHOW NOTES[music]00:11 Aaron Weiche: We are back with episode two, Sprints and Features.00:16 Speaker 2: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode. From Aaron Weiche of GatherUp, and Darren Shaw of White Spark. Lets go.[music]00:44 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, episode two. I'm Aaron.00:50 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.00:51 AW: And we are excited to absolutely 100% what we're doing because we're going from one to two episodes, and that's pretty exciting. I felt good about getting one episode in the books. I don't know how you felt about it.01:05 DS: Yeah. I think that, okay, one in the books and now we're recording two, that tells me this is a thing. It's happening, we're doing it.01:12 AW: Everything from here is hockey sticking up, and to the right.01:17 DS: Yeah, it's amazing. Our growth, from zero to where we've come, has been pretty impressive.01:22 AW: I've actually had some fun figuring out all these little wrinkles of podcast recording, and getting your feed submitted everywhere, and finding an editor and a voice-over talent, and all that kind of stuff, that was an interesting process to get to learn so much about a new medium. It's been a while since I've had to... It was like learning WordPress all over.01:44 DS: And you've really done it. I've basically been sitting back and you just tell me when to show up. So, thank you, Aaron, for managing all that stuff.01:51 AW: Yeah. Well, like I mentioned, that's a personal issue. I need to delegate more and do less, but I love to learn, so it's definitely exciting. But I probably need to hand some of it off to you to get you to feel involved.02:03 DS: Sometimes you're gonna be busy, and I'll take the reins of organizing everything.02:08 AW: There you go. So, what have you been up to the last couple of weeks since we talked last? 02:11 DS: Well, we're trying to get this one tool out the door. We've been building this new tool, which we call Review Checker, and we were so confident. After last Friday, we're like, "We're definitely gonna launch this thing." And then on Monday, we start stress testing it and it's like, "Oh, yeah, oh right, there's this problem." That's the trouble, you always think you're done and then you just have a bunch of people poke at it, and you're like, "Wow, there's still so much more that we need to do before this thing is ready for prime time." That's been taking up all of our time, and I'm really excited about it. I think it's gonna be a great project. I think it's going to be a nice little tool that will bring lead gen into White Spark stuff. We have built that review link generator. Do you know that, on our website? 02:54 AW: Yep.02:54 DS: That thing gets so many mentions and tweets and links to it. It's a really great tool that drives a lot of attention to Whitespark, and so this will be something kind of similar.03:05 AW: Now, do you guys have a formalized process as you're getting ready to release a feature or a new little tool like this that you follow very closely, or is it just like every day, see where you're at, see if it's done, next step kind of deal? 03:20 DS: It's the latter. It's like we're always just picking away at it. So, it's Dmitri will finish the last round of edits, a request that I made of how I want it to look, and then I'll take a look at it or Jesse will take a look at it. It's basically been Jesse and I testing the tool out and writing up a list of things that we want different. And then he'll finish that round, and then we do it again and take another pass at it and think about it some more. So, it's been growing like that over the last little while. And then we had a bunch of our team members take a look at it and we found some problems. The biggest problem... First, I'll explain how the tool works. Basically, it just scans your business name. It'll search Google, it'll find any sites that have review schema with little stars that show up in Google search results, and then it will track that and give you a report, saying, "Hey, you have this many reviews on Google, and this is your rating. You have this many on Yelp, Facebook, Trip Advisor, etcetera." So, it just gives you this nice little report of how many reviews you have.04:23 DS: And so if you were an agency on a budget, or a small business, and you just wanna keep track of this, you could just come back to the tool once a month or once a week, and run it and get a little report back, and you can say, "Okay, this is how our reviews are going." It's this free little once-off, check your reviews tool. In terms of the development, yeah, it's basically just been that we keep plugging away at it. And one of the problems that we're finding is, let's say you put in a really generic name, well, Google returns a whole bunch of stuff that's actually not your business. It's someone else's business, it's some weird business. So, if your name is really generic, you can get a whole bunch of what we are calling false positives in the tool, so we're trying to figure out a way to fix that before we launch it.05:02 AW: Nice. How far into the results does it go? Is it mostly looking at page directories that would rank page one, or does it go further than that? What does that look like? 05:10 DS: Yeah, we do the first two pages.05:13 AW: All right. So, you're looking at, what, page one, and then page two, where the SEO joke is. That's the best place to hide a dead body, is page two of Google search results.05:21 DS: Exactly. And we run about 10 different searches, and then we combine all the results, so we do a whole bunch of variations to try and find everything we could.05:29 AW: Yeah, awesome. You're looking at this as more of a marketing and lead gen tool, at the same time you're building it out? Are other people on the team taking care of the marketing pieces, and how you're gonna promote it? 05:41 DS: Well, promoting is pretty simple. We don't have a huge promotion plan. Basically it's a free tool, so it's this new little free tool. We're going to tweet about it, obviously, put it on our social stuff, we'll put it in our newsletter, and that will mostly be the extent of it. And we think, generally, my experience is, if you launch a free tool that is cool and useful, the marketing does itself. People will just share it because it's free, it's like, "Oh, this is a great new free tool." And we might do a little poking around people that talk about free tools and have free SEO tools. We'll make sure we get listed on those, so just a little prospecting and outreach for that. And then that's about the extent of it.06:18 DS: The thing is interesting though because we have a number of clients... We have this one client in particular who is using Reputation Builder, which is our white labeled version of GatherUp, and they've got 70 of their locations in there, but across the US, they have 120 or something like that. There's some reason there's this other faction of the business that reputation builders overkill for them, they don't want to put them in our reputation builder, and it's like the whole process doesn't make sense for them, but they still wanna be able to track reviews. And so they were just asking me, "Do you recommend any inexpensive rank review tracking tool?" And I was like, "Well we have this little thing." And she's like, "Oh, well, if you could give me that in a monthly report, then we'd pay for it." So, I might actually put a subscription model on this thing. I might say, "In expense of $5 a location, we'll give you this report every month, and then we'll track it over time and give you a nice interface where you can see pretty charts and all that kind of stuff, and multi-location view." I am actually thinking about launching it as a paid tool, but we definitely can't do that until we fix some of these false positives and other problems with it.07:23 AW: Maybe you look at something like you're allowed one scan per email address or something, right? 07:29 DS: Yeah.07:30 AW: You can limit their use if they wanna run it more, then they would need to switch to the paid version.07:34 DS: Yeah. And we already have that actually, we limit it to three searches per day.07:38 AW: Okay.07:39 DS: It also does this cool thing, it calculates a review score for you. It's specifically a Google review score, we look at your primary category, and we compare it with all the other businesses and how many reviews they have and what their ratings are, and we combine that to generate a score based on what the average is and where you fit on that average, and so we report that back to you as well. It's pretty handy to get the sense of, "How am I doing compared to my competition?"08:06 AW: How are you pulling competitors? Is that from others in the same category, regardless of location, others that have ran it in the tool, or are you actually finding a way to pull out others that might be in the Map Pack, against them? What does that look like? 08:20 DS: Yeah. What it looks like is we pull their primary category from Google My Business, so basically... They'll select their business, we grab what we can find for them, and then we look at their GMB business profile, which used to be called the Knowledge Panel, and figure out what the primary category is. And then we take that primary category, and we search it in the local finder results and grab the top 60 businesses ranking for that term. And we parse all their data out, and then that's how we determine the average in your city. So, your average in your city... There might be 60 other hair salons, here's the top 60, these are their reviews and ratings, and this is where you fall in that.08:58 AW: Got it. That sounds really awesome and really helpful. Can I send you a few people to run a test on? 09:05 DS: Yeah, totally. I'll just give you access to the tool.09:07 AW: Hey, I like that even better. Do you guys often do that with features? Do you do an open beta with any of your customers? Is that part of a feature release for you? 09:16 DS: It is, and we will do that for our Local Citation Finder. For a free little tool like this, we probably wouldn't do it. But we are launching a new version of the Local Citation Finder. It's currently getting put through its paces by our internal team, and there's lots of stuff we still have to do before we would open it up to some of our customers. But, yeah, I would imagine we'll have a couple of weeks where we collect feedback from customers, and once we get it to the stage that we're happy with, and then that will probably come up with another few weeks or month of feature updates, and then we'll launch it officially.09:47 AW: Nice.09:48 DS: How about you? What do you guys do? Do you invite your top clients to stress test some your new features? 09:53 AW: A majority... We look at certain things that it is a must, so we go through internal dev servers, then what we actually do is turn every feature into a flag where it can be turned on and off in our admin panel internally. And then we'll do what we refer to... We just call it private beta, and it's usually us just turning it on inside of our own accounts where we maintain some data or businesses. So many things make so much more sense when you're looking at real data, instead of just stuff you're inputting or trying to use without a business case.10:26 DS: Yeah, definitely.10:27 AW: Yeah. And then a normal process that we've moved to is we just do an open invite on our monthly webinars. We just did our January webinar last Tuesday, and we actually have two different features going into beta in the next few weeks. And so we just put out there to send an email to our support team with beta invite in the subject line, and then we invite those people into the beta when it's ready, send them instructions on how it works and things to be aware of. And then if it's a larger feature, we keep track of all the feedback and comments that come in, and then some of the times, we'll even do a survey at the end of it anywhere from eight to 10 questions on is it intuitive, is there something you'd add, just trying to find out more about their experience with it. And that process... We really solidified our process around releasing a feature last year, and it's still a work in progress. We're trying to always optimize it, but it has really served us well, and we've just come leaps and bounds, especially in the last 18 months of that being a more formalized process.11:29 DS: Man, that's nice. That's smart. We are very not organized like that, so I think that I will take some notes on that. And when we do do our proper release for the Local Citation Finder update, we'll follow that process exactly. It's a huge release, it's like we rebuilt the whole software. That release is massive, and that'll certainly be the topic of... It'll come up many times in this podcast as we continue to push forward on it.11:56 AW: Yeah. Those big ones are the hardest. We have the same thing last year when we rebuilt... When we added our client level and introduced an agency dashboard for all of our agency resellers. There were just all kinds of reasons behind it. It was one of those things, and if we didn't get it structurally in, we were gonna wind up with just some issues in how we delivered features to our agency resellers, which is a very important segment to us. We have three buckets of customers. One is a single location small business. The next bucket is multi-location business, might be anywhere from five locations, physical locations, in their business, to 10,000-15,000 locations of their business. And then the third is that white label version of that agencies and resellers, we have hundreds upon hundreds of agencies and resellers that resell our software.12:45 DS: In terms of number of locations, that middle tier is the biggest? Right? Like multi-location brands that are working directly with you? 12:52 AW: Yeah. As far as location-wise, definitely that brings the biggest girth of locations, because you can have one client that has tens of thousands or one client that has a thousand. Location-wise, which is what our pricing model is built off of, that's definitely the one, the biggest. But our agency reseller is so important because it has so much expansion in it. You land an agency and they start selling it, in their first month they get four or five customers on, and then they can just continue to organically do that. They're out selling it and pitching it to their customer base. And so we have resellers who have north of a thousand locations, all by themselves, that are all their customer locations.13:33 AW: As we found, some of the thing behind the the client level and the Agency Dashboard we put into play was really helping a lot of our resellers sell to more multi-locations. Just there were some challenges in how structured the system was. That was one of those, for us, where it was like a three, four-month feature, and held a bunch of other things up that we couldn't release because it wouldn't work for agency resellers and only our direct customers and we never want to do that. And a lot of learning things in the process. So, even though we have a pretty refined process now and things detailed out, and we're still working on it, that's only because we've learned the hard way through operating loosey-goosey, and as you go, and just one foot in front of the other. And it usually leads to frustration and some missed things and things like that, where we just started looking at, "How do we use process to shore more of these things up?"14:26 DS: Yeah. I need to learn from that, because we basically do that one foot in front of the other until it's like, "Hey, we have something, here it is, try it." And I think that refining our processes would be very helpful.14:36 AW: We're always willing to try things, too. Last week, we had our exec team summit, and this was one of our big topics is how our sprints work. And in 2018 ...14:48 DS: I wanna hear this.14:49 AW: Yeah. In 2018, for the most part, we put a sprint together with X amount of features and say, "All right, this is what we think we can bite off," mostly looking at it in about a six-week cycle, four to six-week cycle. And, of course, some a little quicker, most a little longer, depending upon if you weighted them out the right way. And then we have that one really big one that took a big chunk out of the time. So, in our rear view in 2018, we completed eight sprints in total, with one being literally a three to four-month sprint all by itself.15:24 AW: This year, one of the things that we met on that we were looking at is, "How do we have some more predictability, and are we open to trying something a little bit different?" Because we could definitely continue on the way we are going, but we wanted to see, based on predictability and time management and the marketing aspects, and things that help that way in your business, should we do something else. What we're trying for this year is a combination of a couple different things. One, we pretty much looked at the calendar for the entire year and weighed it out, and said like, "Okay, let's have a feature of the month. This feature is something that we are absolutely going to deliver in this month." So, we need to backdate stuff in our process so that we know we can launch this feature in March, and we know we can launch this feature in April.16:16 DS: Do you ever put some features in the bag, where you're like, "Okay, we finished both our March and April features, and so we're just gonna not release those until March and April?"16:25 AW: Yeah, we'll be willing to do that, if that happens. Because the other thing after that high level is we basically have this huge cascading list of customer requests, and other ideas, and medium and smaller things, and we basically treat that as a running list, that if we're sitting good with when we need to deliver this bigger or the "feature of the month," then we'll just start grabbing from the prioritized thing in that list, which literally there's hundreds, so there's no shortage there.16:56 DS: And some of them they can be banged out in a couple of days, so you're like, "Okay, well, we'll have no problem meeting that for our March feature of the month."17:02 AW: Yeah, right. That's what we're going to try for this year and see how it goes, instead of just really defined sprints that are in a four-week, a six-week... This is something I definitely pay a lot of attention to and listen, read about how other companies do their sprints, and you hear the opinions on what's too short and what's too long. For us, we have a really productive engineering team, and so I don't want to ruin that, 'cause I know some of that is by not having just a ton of rigid guidelines to how and when it's going to happen. And so it's like, "How do we get some of the predictability to hit some of our other goals and some of our other planning?" The nice thing for me is it allowed me to lay out every month of 2019, and say, "All right, this is when we're going to deliver these things," and I know, if I needed to swap something based on a really big need or some type of vision or whatever else, I'm going to have to pull something else out of that feature of the month category and then hope it can maybe find its way into the top of the other list to get handled. It helped me, vision-wise, for the entire year as a planning exercise.18:11 DS: Yeah. If I think about our process, if I say, "Okay, here's our six-month sprint or six-week sprint, these are the features we're going to have done in that six-week sprint." Let's say there's 14 features in there, I know by the time we get to the end of it we only got nine of them done. How do you deal with that, where you're like, "Oh, well, we were overly optimistic... " 'Cause everything always tends to take longer than you expect and there are always things that come up that you couldn't expect. I couldn't predict that this was gonna slow me down for three days while I was trying to build that feature, so how do you... Is there a disappointment at the end of it, or do you just take those extra six features and throw them into the next sprint? What do you do when you're laying out these sprints? 18:53 AW: Yes. Sometimes they do get talked into the next one, we have to shift it over. And sometimes some of them... We had a couple that just would float and float and float, and for different reasons. It's like we just released this week, our Google My Business Authorization, that allows customers to reply to Google reviews right out of GatherUp and that also basically enables the monitoring straight...19:17 DS: Yeah, love that.19:18 AW: And their API. And that's something that we've had in beta and working for customers that asked for it for probably a year. But it was one of those that just never got tied off because of a lot of just quirky things with it. And then Google updated their API in the middle of when we were working on it. So, it's one of those that stretched on and on forever, and it just finally ended up being something where I was tired of seeing it on our to-do list. It was like, "All right, this is it... We're almost to the goal line, we have to get this across," and so we had to buckle down. And it's a much harder thing to test, too, because you need people with access to the Google My Business accounts to be able to authorize it, and then see all the different errors it could throw off, if it doesn't go through. There's just a lot of edge cases with that kind of stuff, so it was a much harder one to deal with than when you build a feature that the data is in your control, and the functionality is in your control, and everything sits on your side. It was one that lingered on for a long time. Yeah, I don't have an exact... This is what we do when those things fall off, because we've had ones that kinda trickle along forever and we have other ones that just get buttoned into the next one, and then get tied up.20:27 DS: Sure. Well, I'm only asking because I don't really structure these six-week sprints, I don't really do anything called a sprint. It's just like these are the projects, we have a massive to-do list, we drag things around and prioritize them, and just things are getting picked off here and there. Features are getting completed, and eventually the project makes its way up to launch. We're like, "Okay, we're good, we're gonna launch this thing." But I don't plan it out in advance into these sprints. And I feel like if I did, I would be disappointed. I'd be at the end of every one, I'd be like, "Oh, well, I guess, we were overly optimistic." And so I'm just wondering how you handle that.21:01 AW: Yeah. Well, don't be afraid there. Don't let fear control you.21:04 DS: I'm not afraid, I'm all right.[chuckle]21:07 AW: Yeah. And that's where... Who knows what the process, we're doing. We could, after this year or even mid-year, if it ends up being something that really isn't working for us, go back to how we were doing it before in more of a traditional, "Here's a sprint, here's the six things included, and here's the six-week timeframe, that we're gonna try to get that done."21:26 DS: Yeah. One thing that would be nice with our loose way is that there's never a deadline, and so no one's got a fire under their ass to get it done by X, right? 21:36 AW: Yeah.21:36 DS: And so that's what the sprints would give you. In one sense, we do have deadlines, because I have a weekly call with the different dev teams that are working on different projects. And in that call we always say, "Okay, what's realistic that we could have done for our next call, for us to review on our next call?" And so these weekly calls is what keeps us pushing forward. And sometimes we're also too optimistic on that. We might pick four things and say, "Okay, we'll have these four things working for demo." But when it comes to it, it's like, "Wow, we were only able to get these two or three done because we got road blocked on whatever." And so that's kinda... We set these weekly deadlines. And that's interesting, it's something I started doing based off of a conversation I had with Dudley Carr, who used to be with Moz, he used to be on the Moz local team, and he's building a new product now and directing a team, and he said that that's the way he organizes his sprints, he has weekly sprints, and every week they check in and, "Did you get these things done? If not, why not, what happened?"22:35 DS: And he's also really... This is something I have to get better at because it keeps coming up. He's got this laser focus. Everything that comes in that could potentially distract the team, he's like, "Can it wait till next week?" 'Cause then he just puts it on the next week's sprint. Or, "Can it wait till next month?" And so he's really like he does not want to take people off the track of the four things that were supposed to get done on that sprint. And so that's one of the problems we have here. It's like, "Okay, well, the team is working on the Local Citation Finder, but we have these clients that keep chirping." They're like, "Oh, hey, we'd like to have this on a Rank Track or we'd like to have this somewhere else." And so someone's asking for things all the time, and every once in a while, we're just like, "Okay, let's just get that done." And so it takes us off track.23:20 DS: And sometimes it works out well. Just last week, or just this week actually, we launched a white labeling feature for our rank tracking platform, so a business can now get their... Our rank tracking on their own sub-domain. I'm pretty excited about that. We now have that feature. We didn't have that before, but it's the kind of thing like, Troy is like, "Okay, I guess I'll do it." And it takes him an afternoon or two to get it done, but it's also a little "ugh" for me, too, because now I know I've pulled him off of the Local Citation Finder, which when we have our call next week, it'll be like, "Well, I could have done more, but you asked me to do that rank tracker thing."24:00 AW: Yeah. So, what you're getting at, that's probably the biggest thing I know I struggle with and I know is on me to always really drive, and that's prioritization. What is a priority, and then how do you set it up for the things that are behind it? 'Cause everything you're talking about, we face it no different. Compared to what you're sharing... A one week sprint for us would never ever work, our product's too complex now. We have too many dependencies, we have multiple user types of our segments, and agencies use things a little different than multi-locations do, and we need to build it so it works for everybody. So, that shorter timeframe is definitely out for us. But we have the same things in that time when we're working on something where, yeah, there's customer needs, the sales team has needs based on something they're trying to close, and if we had this feature, then we would win that deal, and where do you put that into place? And it's hard. You have a product manager that is trying to protect the team and make sure that those things stay within reasonable planning and are reasonable to do.25:06 AW: I think that's hard for every SaaS company. I think evolution is important. To me, it's just being real with what can be done, what is that list. That's the one thing that I really liked about... And again all of it seems like a great idea now until we put into practice. But the feature of the month thing made it so you could only get one big feature each month, and you had to lay them out. So, it gave me some prioritization and some discipline, 'cause there are certain things I'm looking at, like, "Man, I'm not going to get that feature until August." The other things in front of it, that absolutely makes sense to what's there. The one thing to your comment earlier, I think it's absolutely important for people to have a finish line. When you don't have a date that the team is working towards together, and there's the peer accountability that goes into play and a well-communicated deadline, and you're able to cheer people on for it and hold their feet to the fire even and everything else, to me that's a really slippery slope not to get where you want to. I just think that's really important.26:08 DS: For sure. It just becomes too easy to just be floating around doing all kinds of little things that maybe aren't the top priority. Prioritization is really the key. And I think part of the thing that I always look at is, when I get these feature requests, I'm always trying to assess is this a feature that's only going to benefit this one customer, or is it a feature that will benefit all of our customers, make our product better, help us sell more? And then that's kind of how I... I sort of put them on the scale of where they fall in there. So, if they're really valuable, they'll get prioritized higher. If they're really obscure, then they get to put to the bottom of the barrel, and we don't really tell the client that requested it, we don't tell them a deadline. We're just like, "Yeah, we'll put that on the roadmap," but in the back of our minds, I'm like, "I don't know if we'll ever get to that."26:57 AW: Totally. I think the important thing with customer requests is actually peeling back the layers to what they're actually getting at, right? Because a lot of times their request is just the hack or the easiest way to get there that they can see in the product, instead of actually really pinning down to what are they trying to learn, what are they trying to execute, and then I look at it like if we built a feature that could do that, that would solve this for them. But then are there other things that this would also solve or value or benefits it would deliver to the rest of our customers? 27:28 DS: Yeah. And you can help them see a different way of getting at the same results, but with more benefit and also with a broader feature set benefits your whole platform.27:38 AW: No, that's how I mean. Especially the client side is really, really hard, because you'll have all these different voices, different use cases and there's a... Based on if they're the loudest or they're paying the most, co many different things can factor into who and what you have to listen to. And even your own internal team, look at, "Who's bringing this to me? Is it our customer success team? Is it our sales team? Is it our management team? All those things factor in, and that's where you really have to weigh through them, and like, "All right, which one of these am I actually gonna grab a hold of and take and do something with?" 'Cause when you look at all of it... We have the same... Probably as you, we have a stand-up all-team meeting every Monday, and in each department section, there's feature requests in all of them. And so it's kind of picking out where I see it, I don't know if the team always sees it that like, "Hey, guess what?" There was actually 13 feature requests in our meeting today. They saw the three out of their section and maybe not so much the cumulative of all of them from every aspect.28:41 DS: Right. Yeah, I noticed that actually Ahrefs uses a really interesting product called canny.IO, and they're using this to keep track of all of those customer requests that are coming in. And then there's a voting system. So, if you have a feature request, first you can go and see if it already exists, and if it does, you upload it as a customer. And so they really use this to help guide their features and understand what's important. And it pops up within the tool, and it prompts you to request stuff. And I think it's really smart. I've been looking at it, and I have our customer success team testing it out and getting a sense for it, and we might actually roll that out into our product. It just seems like a really good way to get all of that, 'cause there's so many customers that aren't gonna tell you. They're just like, "Oh, I wish it had this feature," but they don't say anything about it. Prompting them, I think, could be a great way to drive that customer feedback.29:36 AW: We have definitely... We've talked about that in the past. A couple of things that we do do. One, we use a product on the product management side called "product board," and we use that to collect other requests and everything else, so we can see when some of these requests are doubling up. We use it for a capture side. It has a lot of other features as well. I don't think we're maximizing it, by any means, but it definitely helps us in certain areas. The other thing we've done for the last two years is we usually send out in the summer a customer survey that's probably only 10 or 12 questions, and we ask, "What feature in our product could you not live without?" We want to understand what's really important to them, we want to understand additional ideas, understand where their head is at.30:21 AW: Really, at the end of the day, for me, it's a combination of those things, because, one, your customers aren't always gonna get what your long-term vision is or where you're trying to evolve to. I have that in my head and my gut, as well as other members of our team that come up and throw ideas into the hopper that we elaborate on. Then you have what customers are asking for. Then you also have what competitors are building and what they're doing, because sometimes you have to build things just to keep up with the Joneses in certain areas, and you have to decide, "Am I fine with this being a differentiator between our two products based on what our vision is and maybe what they're trying to be? Or do I need to have this because this has become the expected feature in this product category?"31:01 DS: Yeah. And your sales team can help you vet that, too. So, they're like, "Oh, we lost this deal to X competitor because they have this future and we don't," and so that's where you really have to prioritize those things.31:11 AW: Yes. And sometimes it makes really nice. I deal a lot with our multi-location sales and I've been really fortunate lately that there's the same one or two features that they're all talking about and mentioning, and that makes it very easy for me when I go to build our use case why we should do it, prioritize it, have it be one of the features of the month, that this is something that customers of this size, that would mean this dollar volume to us, actually want and wanna see. And then we go and marry it against what our vision is and what we're trying to accomplish. If it checks out there, then you can move on those things. But it's a moving target. It's very challenging. As I mentioned, prioritization is really hard and, yeah, we've developed a lot more processes and feature... Our own internal feature set and how we do those things, and I feel like we get better and better every time we optimize it, and tweak it, and try something whether it works or not.32:05 DS: Right. We were inspired actually by your customer survey. We got that customer survey, and we thought we definitely need to do something like this for our Local Citation Finder. And we started putting it together, but I realized... Some of the questions, like, "What is the one feature you would really want," or, "What is the one thing that really annoys you about the product that you wish it could do, but it doesn't do?" All these questions. I already know all the answers to those, because they're the same things I want in the tool, the same things that bug me about our current tool. And so we actually scrapped the idea of sending it out because we're in the middle of rebuilding it to my dreams. We're building my dream version of this software right now, and so there's no point asking everybody, because they're all going to answer the things that I already know. And I also know it because of our cancellation form. When someone cancels, we ask them why they're canceling. And so we've been collecting that data for a long time, and it's all right there. It's like I know exactly why people are cancelling, what they want that we don't provide, and so now our vision is to build all of that and we will... Once we get the new version up and running, and everyone's using it, then we're gonna survey them and see, "Okay, well what's next? What are the things that we didn't catch?"33:12 AW: Yeah. Well, the only thing I would caution you... There's a couple of other second level benefits. One, you're reaching out and getting a touch point with your customers...33:20 DS: Right. That's helpful.33:21 AW: In one that's structured that says, "We care what you have to say." And to me, that's a really important thing, even though if you have a great idea on what they already might say, now you're giving them a chance to be heard. And then when you go to create it, even if it's all the things you already heard, now that customer feels like you listened.33:37 DS: That's such a smart point. We're creating that connection. What you just said makes so much sense, I'm gonna do it. We're going to launch that thing, because then even though everything might be what they asked for, we're going to deliver it. "You asked for it, we deliver it. We're listening to you, we care about you." Oh, my God, yes, we definitely have to send it.33:55 AW: And it helps them realize, too, that you've queried the crowd. So, it's not just like what “Darren decided” or the team decided or whatever else. They understand, "Hey, they did to some extent, they put this out for a vote. They let everybody have a voice, whether we took the time to fill it out or what we said. And even if it's not exactly in alignment with what I put out there, I know they were at least listening to us. We were one of the data points they considered when they made those choices." I think there's a ton of wins, even though you might be exactly right, you might 100% know what's all on there, but there's a lot of validation and just good karma, I think, by engaging with your customers that way.34:32 AW: Cool. Well, hey, speaking of that, as we wrap up, next week, when this airs, you're going to be probably engaging with some of your customers face-to-face, because you're going to be at Local U Advanced in Santa Monica.34:44 DS: Yeah, looking forward to that. There's not very many local search people, other than you, that won't be there. It's pretty much everyone's gonna be there. So many of the local search people will be there, so I'm looking forward to seeing everybody. I can't wait see Susan Staupe. Susan is gonna be there.35:00 AW: Nice.35:00 DS: Yeah. She won one of our tickets to the event. I'm looking forward to hanging out with everyone there.35:05 AW: She's going be super pumped.35:07 DS: And you're going go to SaaStr. Right? 35:08 AW: Yeah. I'm very bummed to miss LocalU. I'll be just north of you in San Jose at SaaStr, which obviously, biggest conference in the SaaS industry. I'm really excited for that. I'm bringing one of the guys on our team that's only been with us a year. He heads up all of our customer experience and interface design stuff, and just excited for him to just see how big our industry is and just absorb a lot of the industry talks.35:35 DS: Nice.35:35 AW: Things that we get after all the time to what we're talking about now. There's tracks on product, there's tracks on churn and sales, just so many of those aspects. That's really exciting. And hopefully, by the next time we talk as well, your new little free tool will be out. We can talk about how to launch that and what the uptake looks like.35:56 DS: Definitely, yeah. It'll definitely be out within the next couple of weeks. [laughter] But you know what, two weeks is this magic number. I always say it's going to be out in two weeks, but...36:06 AW: Well, maybe you'll take some of what we talked about, and you will set a deadline and you will make sure you hit it, just to have some content for the next time we talk. Right? 36:14 DS: I'll definitely have content. We'll be two weeks further ahead anyways.36:18 AW: Nice. That's awesome. Well, it's been another great episode. We now have two under the belt. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed our talk about how we approach some of our sprints and releasing features, and then the things that all go along with that. I don't know about you, Darren. I was really excited to see the amount of people that shared what we're doing socially, some of the comments, starting to see a few reviews trickle in. We would love more reviews on iTunes, especially, and thanks people for sharing what we're doing socially. And don't hesitate to reach out to either one of us if there's a topic you'd like to see us tackle or share about what we're doing inside of our company. That's the whole point of this, is sharing things that people might want to know that don't... It's not always easy to get a look inside other companies and what they're doing. With that, episode two of the SaaS Venture is a wrap. And thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you next time.37:11 DS: We did it. Thanks, Aaron. Thanks everybody for listening.[music]
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