Podcasts about rank tracker

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2022 4:53

In today's Daily SEO Tips video, I'm going to show you how to find and track keywords using the Rank Tracker from SEO Powersuite. If you have any SEO questions, make sure to watch one of my other videos for more SEO tips. If you thought this video was helpful, click that subscribe for more SEO tips. https://www.youtube.com/c/CaseysSEO #seo #seotips #searchengineoptimization

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Episodio 43. Así estamos montando un rank tracker, uno muy bueno.

SEO local, el podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2022 55:24

Estamos a punto de lanzar un rank tracker, se llama Collac, y aquí contamos cómo lo estamos haciendo. Los gurús lo llamarían build in public, nosotros de otra forma.Más info en https://collac.io y, obviamente, en este episodio.

google estamos seo montando rank tracker

Search Results Check Up

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 12, 2021 6:09

After two weeks, my results for Auto Hail Repair News has not changed too much. I am ranking for almost all my keywords that I am tracking. I track my keywords using Rank Tracker. This is a list of new websites that I just created and will be discussing tips on it very soon. PDRshops.com Autohailrepairshops.com Paintlessdentrepairshops.com Paintlessdentremovalshops.com Dentremovalshops.com Haildamagerepairshops.com Doordingrepairshops.com Hailremovalshops.com Autohailremovalshops.com Caseysseo.com Flashseo.co

search results rank tracker

Rank Tracker Search Results

ALEPH - GLOBAL SCRUM TEAM - Agile Coaching. Agile Training and Digital Marketing Certifications

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 28, 2021 5:13

Here are the keyword results from this paintless dent repair directory website. The search results came from using Rank Tracker.

search results rank tracker

7 Free Keyword Research Tools

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2021 4:32

As Google gets better at interpreting language and search intent, can we finally take it easy on #keywords? Not really. #Keywords remain important indicators of how people use search. Even though we no longer need to go after the exact keywords, an analysis of keywords offers ideas for content that's relevant to searchers and shows gaps that your content could fill. 1. #Keyword Surfer If you want a fully immersive keyword research experience, then consider adding the #Keyword Surfer Chrome extension. It hijacks each of your Google searches by displaying #keyword statistics in the search bar. It also adds a side panel to the search result page, providing the top 10 keywords similar to the current query. 2. Google Keyword Planner #Keyword Planner is a perfect balance of sophistication and simplicity. On the one hand, it's a Google #SEO tool so it accesses one of the biggest and the most reliable keyword databases. On the other hand, it doesn't allow for much research customization and discloses only the most basic of keyword quality metrics. Enter a few seed keywords and get a list of semantically similar #keyword suggestions, complete with metrics like monthly search volume, competition, and bid ranges. There are likely to be thousands of results. You can use the sorting and filtering options to narrow them down. Most notably, you can exclude negative #keywords – you won't see the results for searches that include those words. 3. QuestionDB Another question-oriented #keyword finder, QuestionDB pulls a #keyword list from a database of over 48 million questions asked on Reddit. When people post to Reddit, they ask questions that are not readily answered by Google. That's your opening to create a unique piece of expert content. You can even add it to the topic's Reddit thread once it's ready.Sometimes this tool returns nothing useful, but other times it can be fascinating. 4. Rank Tracker Unlike most other #SEO tools on this list, Rank Tracker is a collection of nine research methods. Those approaches can be broadly sorted into two distinct categories – spying on your competitors and playing with keyword semantics. Rank Tracker finds the highest-ranking keywords for a competitor and exposes the #keyword gaps on your site. As for semantic research, enter a keyword and get a list of related searches, related questions, and autocomplete suggestions. #Keywords collected this way are a gold mine for content makers because many of them already sound like article titles. In addition, Rank Tracker integrates with Google's #SEO tools, including analytics, #keyword planner, and search console, so you can see detailed quality metrics, like organic search volume and keyword difficulty. 5. Google Trends Using Google Trends is not as much about discovering the best keywords as it is about prioritizing your content ideas. It shows keyword popularity over time and across geographic locations. You can plot and compare several keywords on the same graph. 6. Google Search Console Google Search Console lets you discover opportunities for those #keywords already used on your website. Google Search Сonsole provides a list of #keywords that your site ranks for, including SERP positions and click-through rates. The trick is that each SERP position has a widely accepted CTR benchmark. For example, a keyword in the first position should expect to have a CTR of about 30%. Each consecutive position drops an average of 5%, and the last four positions on the first page of SERP get a CTR of about 3%. 7. Answer The Public Searchers are increasingly confident in using natural language when forming queries because search engines are getting smarter and delivering the results searchers seek. More highly specific, question-like searches are being asked and Google is delivering more featured Q&A snippets at the top of results. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aleph-global-scrum-team/message

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Rank Tracker: Track all your Keywords for FREE!

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 11, 2021 3:01

Check out Rank Tracker to track all your website's keywords.

rank tracker

27: Plan the work, work the plan

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 30, 2021 46:50

FULL SHOW NOTES[INTRO music]0:00:12.0 Aaron: Episode 27: Plan the work, work the plan.0:00:16.2 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrap SaaS company. Here are the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]0:00:42.3 Aaron: Welcome to the SaaS venture podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:45.7 Darren: And I'm Darren.0:00:47.7 Aaron: Darren, I wanted to start today with a little bit of an inspirational quote for us in our planning topic. Are you ready? 0:00:55.7 Darren: I'm ready. Let's hear it.0:00:57.0 Aaron: So Eleanor Roosevelt said, "It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan."0:01:05.1 Darren: It's a solid quote.0:01:07.4 Aaron: I like the positivity of wishing and day-dreaming without the work involved, [chuckle] but I get where she's going.0:01:15.2 Darren: Just take your wishes. They're all running around in your brain. Just write them on paper and you're starting to plan.0:01:21.0 Aaron: There you go. One other note. We are also using video recording for this episode. We're gonna test this out and see. When we watch it back we'll [0:01:33.2] ____ if we're cringy or it's just not something that we want or if it's a good second medium for us to distribute our talks.0:01:44.1 Darren: I think our subscribers are gonna go through the roof. You're so handsome. You're gonna have [chuckle] so many people being like, "Well, I wanna see more of that Aaron Weiche."0:01:54.1 Aaron: I'm pretty sure there's not enough of a filter to combat that to make that come true, but it sounds good. All right, well, hey, it's been almost two months since we recorded an episode. I'm definitely to blame on that. I've been super heads down with some things, which we'll talk about my side of planning work and working the plan, but how have things been? Are there any changes in your life in the last two months during the pandemic? 0:02:22.8 Darren: No. Pandemic-wise, it's all the same over here. Nothing really has changed. No one's gotten vaccinated in my immediate family yet, so it's all same stuff here. Busy with work. You're definitely not all to blame. I have been heads down on a bunch of stuff as well, and so I haven't sparked a podcast conversation, but yeah, what's new at Whitespark? Let's see. We launched actually a really big update to our Local Rank Tracker. It's not the kind of thing that has much impact customer-facing, but we've rebuilt the whole thing in our standard tech stack. It used to be on Angular, and now we've switched our front-end JavaScript framework to View, which has many positive impacts for us. We're able to iterate on it much faster. The software is more organized, and so it really opens us up to quicker feature releases on our Rank Tracker, so I'm excited about that.0:03:25.8 Aaron: Nice.0:03:26.8 Darren: We are finally about to pull the trigger on our new account system that I've talked about on the podcast many times, but it's actually happening. And I'm not even gonna say two weeks. It's actually happening in five days on Tuesday. Tuesday is the day that we're gonna pull the trigger, and actually on that day, we've decided we're going to raise the prices of our premier SaaS software, the Local Citation Finder. We're doing a big price increase on that, that I've been talking you a lot about, Aaron. I'm excited about that. I think there's great potential there. I feel like it's long overdue. We've had the same price of that software since we launched it 10 years ago. I've never increased prices, so it's long overdue. I feel like we're just gonna flip the switch and be just all of a sudden, we're making a lot more money, which we should've done a long time ago. So I'm excited about that. And we've got a big new feature to launch. I've talked about this before, I think, on the podcast, which is our citation auditing component that's gonna be integrated into our Local Citation Finder. So that's next on our agenda. That we're gonna be diving deep into that. It's mostly done, but pushing towards launch on that as well, so that's what's new in my world. How is Leadferno going? .0:04:42.9 Aaron: Yeah, well, one, it's great to be public with Leadferno. I think that's the biggest thing in announcing this. Just Monday of this week, I mentioned to you when we were talking before, hitting record earlier today is having this time between leaving GatherUp and just helping wrap up some things there and whatever else and diving head deep into Leadferno, but not really having it in a place where I wanted to promote or talk about it. That was definitely hard. So it was like... In my planning, it's like I had this plan on how I wanted to announce. I wanted to have the marketing website ready, and I wanted to have it to a pretty like, I don't know, full-blown or at a pretty solid part, to be able to build content around and screenshots and specific features. And early in the product and planning, there's a lot of that that you still don't even know how it's gonna end up or come true. You don't have visuals for it, things like that. So that was definitely one part of figuring out how do I make the most out of announcing what it is and driving people to something that actually does a good job of explaining it and all those pieces. So yeah, that was just a huge shift this week in being able to say like, "Here it is. Here's what it's called. Here's the link to it." And be able to socially do that in my professional profiles and my personal profiles. That was awesome.0:06:26.3 Darren: Yeah, I was excited to see the tweet from you and see that you've gone public with it. It's like, "This is the thing. You can check it out now. This is what's coming." So that must be a huge relief and just feel good to get it out there.0:06:41.5 Aaron: Yeah, I was kind of laughing. It checks the boxes on that social high or that dopamine hit you get when your LinkedIn posts and all the congratulations and the comments and the likes and retweets on Twitter and everything else. It's like this fever pitch. I kind of laughed at myself 'cause it's like, "I want that. I need that. I need word to spread on Leadferno and what it is and what it does." But I also felt like one of my teenagers where I'm worried about how many likes are on my TikTok video and things like that. It's like, I was like, "Oh, geez. Don't get caught up in this." But yeah, Monday was definitely just a rush all day long of people reaching out, people I forgot I had in my LinkedIn network where it's like you build these networks of, I don't even know, thousands of people, and then you get something and then you're like, "Oh, who's that? Where did I meet them at?" You go back and recall all of that so.0:07:40.7 Darren: Well, I think you coined the phrase, "LinkedIn is slow Twitter."[chuckle]0:07:46.9 Aaron: Yes. I'm glad you remember that. It totally is.0:07:50.7 Darren: Yeah, it makes some sense. You post something on LinkedIn, it continues to gather likes and comments for weeks, whereas something on Twitter, it disappears within half an hour.0:08:00.9 Aaron: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. The Twitter steam settled down within 24 hours, and you're exactly like, "I'm still getting messages three days later on everything related to LinkedIn and whatever else." So people can check LinkedIn once a week and feel like they really haven't missed out on too much, where if you're really into Twitter, you're on it every few hours at least, so...0:08:27.2 Darren: Yeah, well, congratulations on going public with your new software, and you got some pilots running too. I'm excited about that. How are those running? 0:08:38.1 Aaron: Yeah, so far so good. I have five pilots up and running. It was definitely hard on me. You have this incomplete product. You know all the things that you want it to do. The vision's there, but you're also rolling out this like, "Hey, it does one-fifth of what it's going to do it in three or four months. Is that good enough for you?" [chuckle]0:09:01.5 Darren: Yeah, you probably get a lot of feedback too where people are like, "Oh, this is great. Can it do this? Can it do that?" And you're like, "Soon, coming. Yeah, we're working on it." [chuckle]0:09:11.3 Aaron: Yeah, so it's great when you get the requests that are in your product road map because that just affirms that the things you thought or what you know to be like feature parity, things like that, are true, but the other part, though, some of the feedback, there's been a handful of things. There's definitely one thing or all the early ones, so it's like, we built it and it's a desktop app only right now and it will be when we launch and then we'll be building our mobile apps right after launch. So with that, really the biggest thing, every time I was doing a demo for a potential pilot user and as they got on it, all had to do with notifications. And it was kind of interesting where it's like, "Yeah, we kinda knew that we built in... We had notifications on our road map, so we fast tracked doing your operating system notifications." You get the little alert that says, "Allow or Block." You allow it. That way, if you just have the window open, you're in a different tab, different browser, whatever else, you're gonna get that notification. But I've learned it's not enough. People have become so dependent on their phone telling them things, so what we're actually looking at doing now is building an SMS notification to fill the gap before we get to apps, so...0:10:35.9 Darren: That's good.0:10:36.5 Aaron: Yeah, yeah. So you'd just be able to drop your own mobile number and your user profile, and it'll just say, "Hey, you have a new lead from Leadferno." That will hopefully be that stop gap until we get an app that has push notifications, and you get your annoying red bubble that you don't want the numbers to go up on.0:10:56.7 Darren: That's perfect. And then at the very least the business owner gets a heads up that there's a new lead, and they can just jump in there and respond to it right away.0:11:03.3 Aaron: Yeah. Absolutely. Other than that, I've been doing Mechanical Turk notifications. I log in to all the pilot accounts, and I see if they have leads in there. And then I send them an email, "You have leads. Do you wanna go in there?" Like, "Oh, we forgot to log in." Working a new piece of software into somebody's routine can be hard and difficult, but yeah, that was one really interesting thing, it was like, "Okay, I just didn't realize how important the notifications were." And that sounds almost silly, but it's like...0:11:37.0 Darren: Makes sense.0:11:38.4 Aaron: My head is around 50 features into V1, but if you don't have this one, then we really... It's just not gonna work for us. We're worried about not meeting customer expectations. We wanna be able to move freely away from our desktop computer. We wanna know these things. So that was definitely a really big win, and then we've just had some other just small things as they're using it like, "Hey, if this expanded when I was typing in, it would be helpful," things like that. So.0:12:10.0 Darren: Can you access the application through a mobile browser? Is it responsive enough that it's functional? 0:12:17.2 Aaron: So we've chosen not to build it responsive, just because we're gonna go straight to mobile apps. The thing that we just didn't feel like a responsive was gonna give us a big enough win for the effort, just for what we talked about, the push notification, just some of the snappiness that you get out of a native app over a responsive site. So we just kinda chose instead of duplicating efforts for something that would maybe get used very little when you have the app as an option, like we're just gonna skip it. And right now, I would love there to be a responsive web design version of it. But six months from now I'll be like, "We have mobile apps. Don't worry about it." So then I won't care, so...0:13:05.4 Darren: Totally. I was only thinking of it as like a temporary stop gap until you actually have mobile versions.0:13:10.7 Aaron: Yeah. And we just looked at it, "Why spend time on that right now when we could just build more features into the core product itself," so...0:13:17.5 Darren: Absolutely. Makes sense. Yeah. Wow, good. It's going well, it sounds like. I know somebody who's running a pilot and they're like, "Man, this thing works too well. I can't keep up with all the leads," So that was great feedback to hear.0:13:31.9 Aaron: Yeah, no, the theory of exposing and marketing that you will text with customers definitely seems to be doing what we thought in opening more conversations. The barrier to starting a conversation for people is so low on text. You're just completely fine texting randomly a new business where having to take the time to make a call and will I get a voicemail or will I get a person or will I get a call tree? Am I gonna ask the right... All of those things is just so much lower, so... Yeah, from what we've seen in our pilots across a very diverse group of business types, and they're all seeing just an increase in conversation starting. It's also just been really interesting, which gets me excited. It's like, "All right, we have these five testers, and we have dozens of conversations happening in a week, but already seeing the differences in how people communicate." And the businesses is what I'm talking about, how the length and their process. Some are using it and immediately jumping into different communication medium. Others are solving it all right in the text conversation. It really gets me excited for the future of like, "Wow, the things that we'll learn as we compile all these conversations for a business to expose what do people care about? What are they asking the most?" Things like that really get me jazzed.0:15:03.8 Darren: Yeah, you think about the sentiment analysis you can do on all that incoming content, that's really interesting.0:15:09.9 Aaron: Yeah, no, totally, for sure. So when I look at that, that gets me excited for planning past the V1. It's like everything right now, I can script for you the next three months to six months, pretty much like almost every move we know we have to make. There's gonna be more things like the notifications that come into play that will be like, "All right, we need to do this, or people are gonna be not happy or frustrated." So we need to solve that, but the fact that there's just so much that has to be in the coming time frame, is just like, holy cow.0:15:53.5 Darren: Yeah, totally. That's almost the way it is with every product. There's just a non-stop stream of things that you can do to make it better. It's a good industry to be in. Speaking of all that stuff and planning that stuff, you wanna get into the topic of the day, planning.0:16:13.8 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. As it relates to me, this is the first time I had to do planning around a launch of a product. Done plenty of feature launches and things like that, and I already kind of touched a little bit on just planning how to announce it and what was there and what was needed and things like that. But in this too, it was just thinking through like, "Okay, you get the site. You have those elements there. What do you need of those elements? Created some motion graphics for the site, what are all the things that we can round out?" And then after that, it's like, "Okay, putting the site out there, what's kind of our plan? What do we want to have happen? What's the conversion that we want out of it?" So it was mapping out like, "All right, we want people to say, Yeah, send me notifications. We're launching in June, but we'd like to every two or three weeks, send out an email and say, Hey, here's something new that we've just added to it. Here's how things are shaping up. Here's a couple ideas." Like just kind of build that fever pitch so that hopefully there's some people feeling like, "The minute that you will take my money, I will give you my money." That's the hope for sure.0:17:30.9 Darren: You want people to land up at your door with bags of cash.0:17:34.0 Aaron: Yeah, exactly. The next part is we introduced some calls to action for early access. So people who are early adopters who wanna put it to use, we wanna find out who they are and tell us a little bit about you so we can see like, "All right, based on where the product is, would you be a good fit to be a tester? Is it in a business type or a process we haven't served yet where we could learn from it? Will you be a heavy user of features that we already have instead of, Oh, the feature that would really benefit you is one of the last we're gonna build. So I'm not gonna bring you in now and get you frustrated." So that as kind of a pre-launch goal. And then the other one is we're gonna do a partner program with this product. This will probably be one of the most fundamental decisions that I find really interesting, so I decided with Leadferno not to do a white label product, which we had at GatherUp. And a couple of the reasons behind that, the beauty of a white label product is we had a large customer base that are digital marketing agencies and marketers and SEOs, and they resell it. They put their logo on it. They can claim it as their own, and then they can mark it up however they want.0:18:57.0 Aaron: We charge them $50 a month, and they can sell for $100, $200, $300, whatever they want. So those are the pros on it. The cons that I always found that won't be surprising is, one, you're not maintaining double the product, but 25-50%, you're double maintaining a product because how settings work, and how things are accessed, how you name features, you have to keep your brand out of everything, then you have to build materials for your white label people that they can grab and convert to theirs. There's just a whole lot of pieces to it that definitely make it a challenge. And for a lot, it can be worth it. Like for GatherUp, it was definitely worth it for us. We had 400-500 agencies when I left that were reselling our product, and some doing extremely well with it. But I just chose with this one, I wanted to take the route of building a partner program where what our partners, what they have to do is just refer their customers to sign up. They get the benefit of, "Hey, here's a great tool." If we're a web designer, we built you a beautiful site, but let's convert customers to contacting you. That's the ultimate goal.0:20:17.6 Aaron: If we do local search or SEO, we're a digital marketer, we wanna convert that traffic. So this is a great conversion tool. It will allow them... They'll have access so they can see into all of those accounts and see what's happening and grab data and reporting and site conversations so that they can add that to what they're doing on a retainer basis and reporting for that customer. And then also we'll kick them back a percentage of reoccurring revenue. So the downfall is I can't take a $50 product and mark it up to $300, which some have done, but the win is all I have to do is tell them to go look at this. We'll sell them. We'll support them. We'll do all those things. 'Cause the one thing that was probably the most frustrating with a white label product is you build new features, you do all these things, and your resellers just don't know or don't care or don't really have an idea. They don't support the customers as well. It's like you win on the sales side, but you can really lose on the customer experience side.0:21:26.0 Darren: Sure, yeah, actually, I've got two questions about this partner program 'cause it's something that we've been looking at a Whitespark because we currently have some referral partners that send us leads and we don't have a good system. We're currently tracking it manually. Stuff gets lost. It's like someone sends us an email and then we gotta go in and be like, "Oh, make sure that we're giving credit for this person for this referral." And so we've been looking at software solutions, and the more I look at them the more I think, "Wow, they're expensive, and we could easily build our own." So the first question is, are you gonna build your own or are you gonna use some third-party system for managing the referral program? And the second question is, I'm wondering what kind of kick back you're planning to give? 0:22:08.8 Aaron: Yep. So the first one, I'm having a hard enough time building one product. I am not building another product. So [chuckle] I'm gonna use... There's a couple out there. I've watched more than a few Facebook group conversations on things like this. The one that I probably see mentioned the most that I'm probably gonna do the deepest dive in is FirstPromoter. I think based on our needs and what I've read, that's one that I definitely want to investigate. I need to investigate further. I know another founder, Josh Ho. He has a product called Referral Rock. I need to see if that's kind of built the same way as FirstPromoter. I just... I know Josh through online conversations, but I haven't dove into his product as deeply. So I'm gonna find a product that fits the need for us to be able to do that so we can just focus on our core product.0:23:08.5 Darren: Yeah, so I was thinking about this, and it's like, I looked at one called PartnerStack, which Unbounce uses, and it looks really slick, it looks great. But it's $15,000 at the lowest end to $40,000 per year for the high end, and I'm like, "What? That's really expensive." and I don't get the value proposition there because when I think about what my needs are, I need to go into my account system, press a button that says Add New Referral, put in their name, their PayPal email, and it's gonna generate a referral link for them. I give them that link, and then all I have to do is on our website is track the URL parameter, set a cookie, and then on checkout, look for the cookie and record a transaction in our account system if anyone comes through on that cookie. It's actually pretty straight forward, and our team could build it, they're telling me in like... It's a week-ish to build this functionality into our account system.0:24:08.8 Darren: So when I think of it from that perspective, then it's like, "Why wouldn't we just build our own and just have it internally." And then you have to have a page for the referral partner and be able to look how many people came, clicked through on my link, how many people converted, and what is the timeline, what are my kickbacks, what is my next check gonna be. You just need a system like that, so it seems pretty straight forward. And I don't know if it justifies the expense of a third-party tool.0:24:35.3 Aaron: Yeah, my inclination would be I'd do more searching. The pricing on that sounds really steep. Like FirstPromoter, I think is in the $100-a-month range. I think they have some plan variants, but also everything you're describing there and just in building software, like your first blush is like, "Oh yeah, it's just these five things," but then it's like, "Oh, yeah, but these five and these five and these five," and then pretty much then it's a runaway train and I don't know. I'm just hesitant on those. I'm like, "Let's find someone who all they care about is this and let's plug into them, right? They're already plugged into Stripe. They already create the landing pages. They already have all these elements." So like I said, I have enough to do [chuckle] where I'm like, "I'll outsource." If we look at it and like, "Oh, we're only using these three things," then I at least have the experience of using something else and saying, "We could build this better, easier, simpler, that just meets our needs and eliminate that cost," then I'd at least know I'd rather start using something that's there.0:25:45.4 Darren: Sure.0:25:46.5 Aaron: And then head the other route.0:25:47.9 Darren: Yeah, I'll do a little bit more investigating of those two that you mentioned.0:25:51.4 Aaron: Yeah, and then after that, your second question on percentage, I think we'll probably be falling between a 10-15%. This was part of the other thing. Our product most likely, and we're still working completely finalizing, but I would say we're gonna fall between $150 to a $250-a-month product. And in my experience with a lot of agencies, especially the ones that really like the uptake on this product, selling price points is really hard for them. So I looked at it. If we did a white label and say we even discounted the product to, let's say, $100 a month, we could afford to do that for them. They would, because it's already at three figures, I feel like they would price it at $125 anyway. They'd get the same $20 back than if we just did everything else, because they'd be afraid to push those margins higher. Now, some of the really good sales agencies and successful ones like, no, they would probably... They could push it a lot higher and not have a problem with it, but that's just some of the things that I noticed that GatherUp is overwhelmingly a ton of them, just their own price sensitivity and sales.0:27:06.5 Aaron: They're good at their work. They like to do the strategical and tactical things, but selling for a lot of those agencies was really hard. So that's why, I just wanna do it like you make the introduction. We'll make it all happen. You get access. You get data, and you get revenue from it. So I'm hoping that like I said this could be a fatal flaw in my plan. I might be building a white label version of our product six months from now. So...0:27:33.0 Darren: Sure. Yeah, no. I think it sounds like a really good plan to me. I feel the same. Like I'm thinking about our future developments and where we're going, and I don't think we'll ever have a fully white labeled version for many of the challenges that you've already described. It's just so much more to maintain when you do that. I remember white labeling GatherUp and then noticing that the source code references your product. Even some of the class names of your CSS had to be updated, so just so many hassles.0:28:03.4 Aaron: Yeah. No, there is. There is a lot of it that you really have to have in mind when you do it. And it's like when I would talk with our team when we're launching features or things like that. Especially as the brand grew, you worked more like branding things into what you named it and how you created it. And there's just so much where I always looked at... One of our top-three threats all the time was exposing our white label resellers. Like hands down, that was the one thing where I was just always like, "Oh, nothing would be worse than me having 20 emails or 50 emails or 200 emails saying like, You just exposed me as a GatherUp reseller, and I charge four times more than you charge because I'm layering it with a service where like, Oh, what... I'm glad a few times we'd have something small, whatever, and quickly stomp it out or it was only a handful accounts, but that's scary stuff.0:29:03.8 Darren: Yeah. Totally. Well, I like that you're just avoiding that all together, go referral system instead of white label.0:29:09.5 Aaron: Yeah, well, we'll find out. Like I said, that plan might be a bad one. The jury's out on that. We'll see where that one goes. That's one of those, right, where it's like, "I definitely... I feel this way, but I understand this. And it was super successful before, but I don't know, we'll see where I land on that."0:29:31.2 Darren: Yeah, we'll see. I think as a person that has a re-sold product, it's also a lot of work on my end. I would almost prefer the referral system.0:29:41.6 Aaron: Yeah. Yeah, that's my hope. My big question is, is the revenue enough for someone to care because they might not look at your product as like a revenue generator for them. It's like, it's money back in. It adds up. It's worth something, but it's not gonna become a line item on the balance sheet that you really care about unless you have hundreds of customers. I mean, oh man, I hope I have a reseller that's like, "Yeah, sweet. We have 100 accounts that we've brought you." That would be fantastic, so...0:30:15.3 Darren: Yep, and do you pay your resellers... Is your plan, if it's like a percentage, do they get that recurring forever or is it just like for the first six months, the first...0:30:24.0 Aaron: Yeah, we're gonna do recurring for forever, so...0:30:26.4 Darren: Okay.0:30:27.2 Aaron: Yeah, I want it to be a win-win. I actually want it to be a win, win, win. I want the agency to win.0:30:35.4 Darren: Win - win - win.0:30:36.8 Aaron: Yeah, I want the business to win, and I want the consumer to win by loving using our product. When they can text with the business, they win on it. I like this where I was talking to... I was doing a demo with another potential pilot prospect, and he used to be a GatherUp customer and saw what I was doing, and the great thing is he's like, "The beauty of you and Mike... " He's like, "You guys, I never felt like you're out to make money. You were just out to give us a great solution. So I fully trust whatever you're doing on this, and I fully trust whatever price point you set." And I was like, "Oh well, I hope the whole world feels like that, so that sounds good."0:31:14.6 Darren: Yeah, you have implicit trust, everyone that comes over to you.0:31:17.9 Aaron: Yeah. I'm leaving money on the table, but I sleep well at night and I like what the product does, so...0:31:22.6 Darren: Yeah, yeah. Good. What else related to planning? 0:31:27.3 Aaron: Yeah, now that it's like out, now, it's a lot of both planning on the marketing side, how do I keep mentions going and stay in front of people and things like that. Lucky over the years to build contacts. We just had Localogy reached out and did an interview with me. I have a couple of others that lined up, pinging some people and just saying, "Here's an angle. Is it worth mentioning?" To try to keep that going to launch and then use launch as another propulsion. And there's a lot of things that I even joke with our marketing or our product team when they're talking about building something. I'm like, "No, we can wait on that. We can wait. That can come a month after launch." Well, I'm like, "He gives me something newsworthy to talk about and to put out there." So just planning all that out. And then now I'm just starting to focus on the launch plan, and we still have a ton of things to build into the product and just mapping out.0:32:32.2 Aaron: We basically have five sprints to where we wanna hit for our launch date, so it's like we have each of those sprints ratcheted with like, "Here's what we need to do and accomplish in whatever else, and we're really at this point, you're kinda out of room on, "Oh, that can get bumped or at this point, if it falls out of a sprint, it's not gonna be in the product for the V1, which is gonna be a bummer. I look at my list of 20 things right now, and it's like, "I don't wanna live out without any of them at launch, but I'm also... There might be five of them that just aren't gonna make it at launch." So a lot of that planning going on and that plan will probably be re-factored pretty heavily as we move through each sprint, but we'll see what happens.0:33:16.7 Darren: And how do you do the planning? What software systems do you use? How do you communicate this with your team? How do you set up your meetings? How do you lay out this plan and manage to stick to the plan? 0:33:28.9 Aaron: Yeah, so we do all of our sprint planning and development in Clubhouse. My product manager just hates Jira. I think he spent too much of his life in it. So even though Jira is probably the staple that's out there, it's what we used at GatherUp as well, he wanted to use Clubhouse. So that's what we use for that. That's where everything goes into play as far as organizing the sprints and what epics and stories and tasks and everything go into that. For the team, for me, I try to... The less I'm writing things in Clubhouse for me, the better. I try to... That's the weeds for me. I try to stay out of those weeds. I review the stories to keep track of progress. I answer questions when they're needed, but I like to frame things up in just any visual and have done both like Google Slides and also spreadsheets, just to say like, "Here's a high-level view. Here's all of these things." And a lot of times I like to use those and then also match them up for them to understand the business goal side.0:34:39.4 Aaron: I think it's really easy for engineers to be building in a vacuum and not understand the business needs and what goes on publicly and things like that. So helping them understand, "Hey, we need these things done and need to be this far, so we can have pilot testers. And once we have that, we wanna be able to launch and show people the product and have short demo videos and things like that." So it's good to not only have them see the sprints, but like what are the business goals that might be attached to these sprints as far as public launch, how many pilot customers are on the platform, soft launch with some paying customers, all those kind of things with it. So there, I'm pretty, whatever I can pull together fast that is well organized, that shows them and gives them a longer view, helps them see three months out. And how does all this work together? 0:35:39.4 Darren: Yeah, how often do you... Has it been from the genesis of the concept of Leadferno to today. You make these plans, you try to put a structure in place and create the timelines. How often are you sticking to things, or has it been going pretty well? 0:36:00.8 Aaron: No.0:36:00.9 Darren: No.[laughter]0:36:03.5 Aaron: You get all the other challenges in building a team, right, like finding the right people with the right expertise, the right ways to communicate. We can definitely get into this another time, but we hit kind of a road block end of January, February that had to do with our team's expertise with Flutter, and that's what we're using for the front-end SDK format of thing. I don't even know if you can call Flutter a framework or what you call it, but we realized we needed to level up. And so we had to do some changing of our team in relation to Flutter experience, and so that was a big shift that probably just kinda gutted two sprints off us. So we were not only... We weren't moving fast enough to that time because we didn't have the right components, and you're back and forth between, "I'm hopeful this will change," and, "Let's try some of these things and whatever else." And your gut might be telling you something, and then finally, I was just like, "We have to do something, right?"0:37:14.7 Aaron: So yeah, between all that, we just kind of... It's not accurate to say we lost a month. That's how I feel about it, but we had to change guard. We had to hand off information. We had to bring some new people in. Any time you bring new people in, they are also gonna have some ideas, which a lot of times, they're good ones on restructure. "Here's the efficiencies you're missing. Here are some of the things that if I was here from day one, I would have decided different that you're gonna wanna redo this." So it was really hard, and I was super bummed at that point. It would be like, you combine what you're working on isn't public. You can't talk about it at all. You're just in this hole working with development teams and testing and everything else. We weren't at the point of being able to have pilot customers yet. We were trying to do this work to have pilot customers. That was part of it, where it was like, "Man, everything feels like it's just kind of not going right right now, but you just keep working at it and things are getting better."0:38:18.2 Darren: With that big speed bump behind you, are things flowing to plan fairly well since you've kinda caught up from that, that bump? 0:38:28.2 Aaron: Yeah, I feel like it's getting better. We've had to make adjustments. There were things on how we were planning, designing features where we weren't doing a good enough job on it, and so we had to step up our game with how prepared we were ahead of the sprint, how we are creating some of the epics and stories. We're making adjustments there. So yeah, all the stuff is always an evolution, and so you're working hard to how can we constantly be getting better? And you're taking what you feel and what you see and feedback from the team and you're bringing in new expertise. There's just a lot. There's a lot happening at once. And it's like, that's easily the one thing it's like, you come from... I came from a team at GatherUp that our core development team had been together for three years when I left, and there's so much that was in lock step. Things were still hard and difficult and you'd still have misses or holes, whatever else, but so far less just because there's so much trust in the team. They had worked together. They understand the overall direction, a bunch of things like that. And then you jump into something else and you realize you have to rebuild that, and for the first three years at GatherUp, we didn't have it. It took us three years to hit our utopia or our best efficiency within that, and now I'm trying to smash and shrink it into months. [chuckle]0:39:55.2 Darren: Right.0:39:55.8 Aaron: Which is really not possible.0:39:58.8 Darren: No, but I think you are shrinking it, though. It seems like you're moving really fast at Leadferno actually. If you think about how much you've accomplished since you started this, you're progressing pretty zippy, it seems to me.0:40:12.7 Aaron: Yeah, I can tell you personally, the weeks have never flown by faster for me like ever. They are like... I'm like, "What? How is it a weekend?" Then on the weekends, there's no stand-up. I can't see what else got done, [chuckle] anything. It's like, I actually don't want the weekends. I want weekdays. I want stand-ups. I want progress. I wanna test. Man, it's crazy. So anyway, but I threw into our notes. I read a great tweet, and this guy was just sharing something that he had heard. And I reached out to get the pronunciation of his name, and his name is Tobenna Arodiogbu. And he put out this Tweet, and he just said, "Someone once told me it takes about three years to build really great software." And he said, "I kind of agree. The trick is in providing value when your product is merely good and executing every day the right to make it great." And I was just like, "Oh, that's so it." Right? And I'm like, "I'm trying to make great software in six months, and it's not gonna happen. But I need to do well enough where people are like, Yeah, I see where you're going. This is good enough and keep going and we're gonna stay with you."0:41:28.9 Darren: Totally. It's a really good quote. It's like people... You don't wanna take three years to launch your product. Launch it when it's pretty good and it continue to iterate. And actually, this is one of the things that we've actually had a roadblock at Whitespark about is we continue to refine and iterate before, and then we do this massive launch. It took us a year-and-a-half to get this thing out the door, and we're really trying to solve that problem and be like, "No, this is our existing product. We're getting that out of the door." We did it again with our new account system. It's like, "We could have launched this a long time ago if we weren't constantly refining it." And actually the nice thing is that once you get it out the door, all those refinements can come week after week after week, and then you're doing regular updates. You're showing your customers that you're alive and continuing to make the product better, and you have a new marketing push every week. And so that's the cadence that we're trying to get towards where every week we've got some new updates, some new thing that we're pushing live.0:42:35.1 Aaron: Yeah. No, I think you're spot on with that is how can you build and iterate rapidly? I think it's the same thing I was kinda talking about with our team. Like momentum, that's the killer thing. When you have great momentum, it doesn't even matter if it's just constant small steps, but you have momentum. And when we hit our rut, January, February, the momentum was gone. If anything, the momentum was backwards, and that is emotionally tough. It's tactically tough, all of those things. And the same when you get your customers to start feeling that your product has momentum, like, "Hey, every month or every other month or every quarter there's something new," like they feel that momentum. I think that's the key thing to find.0:43:27.9 Darren: Yeah, I see it with ClickUp. So we use ClickUp for some of our project management on our GMB Management Service, and every Friday I get an email from ClickUp. They call it the ClickUpdates 2.75, every time it increments. And they've done, I think, 275 updates. And so every Friday, there is an email that usually covers about three new features in the software, three new things. It's incredible, and that's... I dream of getting to that point, and it doesn't seem impossible. It seems totally within our grasp very soon. As soon as we have new accounts out, we're gonna start iterating on all... 'Cause at Whitespark, we have like five products. So we have so many different things that we're always working on.0:44:14.0 Aaron: Yeah. Well, it gives you a story to tell, and then you can take that story to your customers. That's marketing, and, yeah, ClickUp does a great job. I definitely went on a binge of signing up for any tool with a free trial for researching onboarding processes and things like that. And so I'm still getting a ton of emails, which is great because it helps me understand their messaging, and yeah, ClickUp does... They do a really great job with it.0:44:40.3 Darren: Really good, yeah.0:44:41.0 Aaron: Some of their little animations in their emails and things like that, so yeah, that's definitely a good example.0:44:49.3 Darren: They've got the resources too. I think they got $100 million in funding. [chuckle]0:44:55.2 Aaron: I don't know. It sounds great to have... I would have such a hard... This like Leadferno, we raised a small angel round, so we can scale up a team. And even that still feels hard for me, getting a team of five, six engineers right off the bat. It felt like, "Oh my gosh. That's so much for no income coming in and whatever else." It's like, "Oh, I'm learning, man. I'm baby steps on how to do something that isn't bootstrapped from the start." So...0:45:24.9 Darren: Yeah. [chuckle] Yeah, totally.0:45:28.8 Aaron: Well, cool. I think we've probably worn people out by now. You've worn me out. You just made me answer all the questions today, so...[chuckle]0:45:37.8 Darren: You know what? That's because I'm like the worst planner, so I just basically have to defer to you and be like, "Hey, Aaron, what can you teach me about planning?" So I'm learning as much here as the audience.0:45:48.0 Aaron: Yeah, you're evolving though with it, Shaw, but sooner or later you will be the plan guru, and I'll just take notes from you, so it's all good.0:45:57.9 Darren: Great, well, we'll slate that for March 2022, new episode on planning where I'll lead. I'll give some advice on planning.0:46:06.7 Aaron: You'll hit it before then. I know you will.0:46:08.8 Darren: Okay, great. Great, I appreciate the confidence.0:46:11.3 Aaron: Awesome. Yeah, you bet. All right, well, thanks everyone for joining us. Good to get another episode out. Hopefully we won't let so much time go by until Episode 28, and we'll get back to you. Anything you wanna make note of coming up Darren? 0:46:27.2 Darren: Nah.0:46:28.2 Aaron: Nah? 0:46:28.8 Darren: No. [chuckle] Let's talk about it next time.0:46:30.9 Aaron: Keep doing the things on repeat.0:46:33.1 Darren: Yeah totally.0:46:34.2 Aaron: All right. Well great catching up as always with you Daren, and we'll talk soon. And we'll talk and record soon as well.0:46:41.2 Darren: Yeah within a month. All right thanks, Aaron.0:46:43.7 Aaron: All right thanks take care everybody.0:46:45.7 Darren: Thanks everybody.[OUTRO music]

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26: A Big Change

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 8, 2021 49:09

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

24: Raising Prices

Website Investing from Investing.io

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2020 43:59

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

E8 Part 1: Steve Brown on Managing a 15 Site Portfolio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 3, 2020 42:30

In this episode of the Website Investing podcast I speak with top website investor Steve Brown on how he is able to generate consistent success by building out on aged domains. In this part 1, free subscribers get the first 40 minutes of the conversation; paying subscribers also get part 2 in their RSS feed which runs at an additional hour. As is typical, part 2 elicits more insights as we get further into the conversation.In this week’s Monday newsletter I asked for help with the publication, in particular, a Podcast Producer. I’d like to thank Brady Cargle for reaching out offering to help edit and produce this week’s episode until I find someone (which I now have). Brady is the voice you hear introducing and summarizing in this week’s episode. Steve’s audio is a little buzzy at the beginning but Brady got it to settle down. He also did the excellent show notes below.EPISODE SPONSORS🔥 Premium Domain Names - SEO domains to kickstart a UK-focussed site (i.e. targeting Amazon in the UK) so you don’t have to wait years to rank and bank.🔥 Ezoic - an AI-driven platform built for publishers to optimize ad revenue and maximize site speed. You can start a free trial of Ezoic today.Part 1 Show NotesSteve’s AssetsSteve’s own sites have weathered the update storms (one was listed in a Deals email back in May). His May income was just down 3% from April, but his April income was 2x of his March income. Most of Steve’s traffic comes from Google and most of his income comes from Amazon Associates, but he does have some affiliate diversification and is interested in diversifying more.One problem with affiliate program diversification is the increased time management required. One potential tool to manage your affiliate programs could be Affluent.io shown below:Traffic Diversification In AcquisitionsIt’s easy to know how much traffic a website is getting. But why is the website getting it? How can we track the movements of individual keywords in mass to know how the website is moving in the SERPs?There’s no good way to do this. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush allow us to see historic traffic, but these tools can be inaccurate. Future sellers should look at tracking all of their rankings in something like Ahrefs’s Rank Tracker (or Steve’s favorite: Keyword.com, previously called SerpBook).Rankings history will be helpful to verify that a website’s traffic is diversified and isn’t wrapped up in just a handful of pages.Premium Subscription Models As Income GeneratorsThe premium subscription model is exciting right now. Content seems to be getting to a place where people are willing to pay for it...As long as it provides them value or saves them time.There are a couple of ways to go about a content business: You can be an expert in your niche and deliver high-value, time-saving content or you can curate news within a certain niche. Both models work and seem to be on the uptrend.It’s an attractive model for any business, including an authority site because you have control. No one can take your subscriptions away. Amazon can’t change your rate, Google can’t remove you from the featured snippet.The downside to the model is that it does require a bit of legwork. A premium publication (such as Growthlist by Chris Osborne) will take time to build.Episode 8 Part 2In part 2 of this conversation we discuss:The strengths and weaknesses of having a larger portfolioSteve’s approach and thoughts on 301 redirects / combining sitesHow content needs to be relevant to the link profile it’s published onSteve’s most important factor for conversionsWhether Steve would roll up and sell his entire portfolioPart 2 is for paying subscribers, you can access by hitting the button below.Enjoyed this episode or have any questions? You can leave a comment at the bottom of the web version of this post. Get on the email list at website.investing.io

amazon google uk ai future managing tools seo deals rankings keyword podcast producers semrush steve brown serps amazon associates affluent ahrefs chris osborne rank tracker ezoic

Getting Ahead With Jungle Scout | Greg Mercer

The Smartest Amazon Seller

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2020 38:00

In today’s episode, we talk with the founder of Junglescout.com, Greg Mercer. Jungle Scout is the #1 Amazon product finder and research tool. Greg gives us his perspective about the challenges of starting a SAS business and he talks about how he planned and built the particular facets of his product. We also discuss the various features of Jungle Scout within the context of Amazon's inner mechanics; such as keyword optimization, promotions/launching, rank tracking, alerts, and inventory management. Today, we also go into Jungle Scout and Buyboxer’s efforts to help educate and enable E-Commerce professionals. Finally, a SPECIAL DEAL FOR LISTENERS OF THIS PODCAST is offered, just follow the link https://junglescout.grsm.io/SmartestSeller-Greg’s Advice for Getting Your SAS Business Going 2:16-Mechanics of Jungle Scout’s Features: Keywords, Promotions/Launching, Rank Tracker, Alerts, and -Inventory Managers 8:23-How Jungle Scout approaches Inventory Management 23:38-Jungle Scout’s Academy 28:50-Jungle Scout and Amazon in 2020 35:01Greg on Jungle Scout’s Inventory Management Feature: “What I’m really excited about with it is our data science team has built some really, really accurate seasonality algorithms that are going to be incorporated in the tool, so it’s seasonality with forecasting.” 24:47Socialhttps://www.instagram.com/smartestseller/https://www.buyboxer.com/

amazon marketing advice selling academy ecommerce mechanics marketing strategies sas alerts fba getting ahead inventory management jungle scout greg mercer rank tracker

15: A Recap of 2019 and Looking Forward to 2020

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 2, 2020 44:50

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

14: Working On & Working In The Business

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 15, 2019 37:05

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

12: Building Process in the Process

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 13, 2019 51:59

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

11: Marketing Your Bootrapped SaaS

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2019 57:08

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

08: Churn - Figuring it out and fighting it

Late Night Internet Marketing with Mark Mason -- Affiliate Marketing Tips, Online Business Advice, Email Marketing and SEO

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2019 49:19

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

Peek inside a Live RankDaddy Zoom Training – Episode 17 – RankDaddy TV

RankDaddy's Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2019 70:23

Hey guys, Brandon Olson here. We got another episode of Rank Daddy TV. There’s a cool guy. Today, we’re going to do something a little different. I’ve never let this go to the public. This is something that we do for our Rank Daddy members. We have regular Zoom trainings. We set up a live conference, a live Zoom. Let you get on if you’re a member, ask questions in real time. We can cover topics, maybe you’re having issues. Cover an issue in your SEO agency or maybe in your prospecting. Whatever it is, it’s wide open. It’s question and answer and there’s also some things that we see maybe regularly. Topics being discussed in the Facebook group, so we’ll address those so everybody’s on the same page. Everybody’s successful. Everybody’s able to scale and continue to grow their SEO agency. I’m going to let you guys in. We just recorded one and it is live now in the Facebook group but I’m going to go ahead and put it on YouTube and stream it into this podcast video so you can actually see a little bit more about what you get when you join Rank Daddy Pro. There’s so much value, it’s insane. When you join Rank Daddy, you can come in for a dollar, you get more value for that dollar than you’d ever get on any other training platform you’ve ever bought, in your life, guaranteed. 30 days later, your $1.99 membership fee starts. If you haven’t landed a client 45 days following the process of at least $500 or 1,000 bucks a month, I will refund the first $1.99 thing. We literally give and give and give and we’ll give you complete access to everything, for a dollar, so you can test it and see if it’s even going to work for you, before you decide to even start paying or continue with the course. It’s not like you’re dropping four, five grand, on a high ticket course. Which is what this is, without seeing inside first. Flipping the script on the digital marketing space. You’re in for a dollar. We want you to land deals. We’re going to teach you and take you step-by-step, by the hand, how to land clients. Use the client money to pay your $1.99 for Rank Daddy. To cap ongoing education support and stop whenever you want. Go into your dashboard, hit “cancel” whenever you want to bounce out and you’re done. Let’s get started. Let’s take a look at what we covered on today’s Zoom training. Let’s go. Here’s the question; how can marketers like us, working only part time, and running our entire business from our laptop or smartphone, how are we able to guarantee insane results to our clients when the mainstream internet marketing gurus say that guarantees are impossible? That’s the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Brandon Olson and welcome to Rank Daddy. We’ll have some more join but we’ll go ahead and get started. Been a lot of new members coming in. A lot of common questions that we’re seeing so we’ll address some of those tonight. What’s one of the first things you can do … and, everybody’s muted right now but, when you comment, you can just unmute yourself so that way, we don’t have a lot of background noise. Say, you come across an issue. It can be prospecting, it can be whatever, part of the SEO process, what’s one of the first things you can do within the Facebook group to find the answer before you’ve even asked it and typed in as a post? Anybody? Somebody’s on the chat. Use the search function. Very good. Use that search bar. Whether you’re on mobile, whether you’re on desktop, if you want to find out all the different posts that people have mentioned or we’ve talked about about client landing and prospecting, put prospecting in there. You’ll get a wealth of information. This groups’ been open for well over a year now so there has been a lot of deep discussions on practically every topic that’s covered in the training. Sometimes, the search feature doesn’t work all that great. I’m trying to find posts that I made months back, trying to remember different words that were in there. Sometimes it doesn’t work so it’s not to solve all problems but if you’ve posted a question maybe, and you haven’t gotten the answer yet, start digging. Don’t wait for the answer to come to you. Use Google or use the search bar in the group to see what others have put about it. Second thing, contest. The contest for March is going really good. There’s actually a pretty close tie for the number of spots. It’s not performance based so literally, the newest guy coming in can win. It’s not based on, okay, Ed’s going to take everything because he’s landing six deals a week. We’re going to give away 100 bucks to 10 different people and a thousand dollars to one person. Every time you place an order on SEO Outsource or Localize, we’re tallying it. It can be press release, it can be citations, whatever. If you are a 10 pack or five pack of PBNs, you get a 10 entries or five entries. We’re mentally putting them all on a spreadsheet and at the end, we’re actually going to print them out, put them on paper, cut them up and use a fish bowl or something. We’ll probably do it live here on a Zoom or Facebook live in the group and announce it ahead of time so we can randomly draw the winners out of that. We’ve never done anything like that before. It’s always been performance based but it’s almost unfair to some of the new people coming in, to do it like that all the time because you got all these leaders who’ve been in here since the beginning, that just dominate everything. This is kind of a fair way to do it all. What else? What else? An other topic that has come up quite a bit, you’re coming into the training, seems like there’s so much to learn. You’ve got WordPress. You’ve got content. You’ve got how to build Web 2.0 sites. You’ve got on-page SEO, which is daunting all by itself. I’m going to open this up to you guys, what do you want to master? What do you learn? What is necessary to learn on all these things that are covered in the training? Anybody got any ideas? Hey Brandon, I’ll step in real quick. Yeah. A couple things for me. I was in the last Zoom call but to just get more clarity. I’ll just start with some of the basic, simple steps like; just setting up your payment plan to receive a payment. Following that step right there. That’s a good one. Maybe also like, for me in my situation, my challenges, follow along, because I work so much. I really only have two days, like Monday and Tuesday, that I can actually do this business but during the week, I get up at 5:00 but I don’t get home until about 7:00 at night so as far as follow-up, teaching maybe an email. I’m not good at writing but maybe some basic way to do follow-up through email. Something like that, simple like that. Here’s the subject line and then here’s a basic, two or three sentences that you can send this day and then two days out, then three days after that, as a follow-up. I think that would be really helpful, at least for me I think. That’s good. As far as the process goes; you land a client, you immediately, obviously, have to do on-page SEO first. Do you have to be a master at SEO and on-page, before you can get past that step? The answer is no. A lot of people are coming in … The things that you touched on are critical. You obviously have to know how to setup the credit card process or whether it’s your Square or however you’re going to take payment and you should do that before you even start prospecting. Somebody out there is like; “I got a guy, he says yes. What do I do now?” “Well, send him an invoice.” “How?” Oh, yeah, rewind. You should already have done that. You got to have processor if you’re going to actually want to take money from people. That’s something you have to do. It can’t be outsourced. That’s what I’m hinting at. All these steps in the training, you do not have to be a master at. You don’t even have to know it. You have to know the steps in order to educate a person on the SEO process and what’s going to happen so that they know what to expect but you do not need to know how to do the on-page SEO yourself. You do not need to know how to build WordPress sites. A little bit of editing and things like that, that’s great knowledge to know and that’s about my limit. I don’t know anything other than the basic stuff that the tools show, for on-page SEO. Like; finding their title and their H1. Yeah, I can go into WordPress and edit those things but I’ve never opened a screaming frog, ever. All these tools, I’ve never touched. Here I am, with a massive SEO agency and teaching hundreds of people how to do the same thing, successfully. How is that possible if I don’t even know how to do it? Because I’ve got steps in place that I know work, that we have quality control over, that you don’t have to rely on learning everything and become a master at everything to move forward. Many are coming in and they’re saying, “Okay, this is overwhelming. I got to learn WordPress. I got to do all this.” You don’t. You’ve missed probably one of the very first videos on it and maybe we need to mention it more clearly through the course. I know Kevin did it in the on-page. Look, if this is overwhelming, you do not have to know it. Just know that step one is on-page. Just know that step two is, when the on-page comes back, it’s press release and so forth. As long as you know what order of what has to happen when you land a client, you’re golden. We know that when we land a client, on day one, like when we get their money. Okay, their money hits our processor, hits our bank, we can now order on-page. We can order citations. We can order web 2.0 to start. We can’t order press release until the on-page comes back. We can’t order social signals until the press release comes back because it has to create a natural flow. The on-page is there so that it communicates with Google, they know what the page is for, what it’s about, what it wants to rank for. The press release, once that’s done, starts that foundation for trust. 500 or so media links all with massive trust, coming to the site. Once that’s done, you run the social signals, which creates the viral activity of all that news that was just put out. Google sees all these steps and they see how they happening in the natural order. That’s why the course is there and laid out in this order, because it creates a natural scenario of what would actually happen in real world, to a business who actually ran a press release, who actually did these things, that naturally builds trust. The web 2.0 are there and they’re just consistent until you get the guide glued to the top for multiple editions, then you can back up on your web 2.0 because that’s your link diversity, your link consistency because they’re coming in five days a week, or however often you have your VA build up. They’re coming from trust, they’re coming from … do follow links are coming from no follow links are coming from … some of the platforms have little trust, some have no trust. Some have a lot of trust but that’s the diversity. Google doesn’t want to see all home run links. People come into this and they’re like, reads through the course and then they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to start building PDNs and then I’m going to shoot 10 to this client and that’s a massive amount of trust.” Yes it is but what else is it? It’s a massive flag. It wouldn’t be natural for a landscaper in, whatever city, Plano, Texas, to suddenly have 10 massive PBN powered links that looks like they’re worth a thousand regular links all at once. Figure out what you want to learn and what you want to do. Some people like their on-page SEO. They like the technical stuff. Some people like the content writing. I just got to the point where I like to land clients so that’s why all the outsourcing stuff is there on all the other steps. People are also asking, “Can we outsource the prospecting part?” Guys, I’ve tried and tried and tried, spent thousands of dollars on all these other job type of platforms, trying to bring in recruiters, 50% commission, 100% commission on month one. I mean, sales people are sales people. They want to be paid good and be able to then take a break for a few months and the money keeps coming in, residual. I’ve tried everything, so have a lot of the heavy players here in the group. We haven’t found anything that works. This is something you got to learn how to do because it almost is like, you need the dialogue. When you set out prospecting videos, not everybody replies the same. I’m sure you’ve noticed that. You’re going to get a lot of the same, common questions but you need the dialogue to bounce off so you know what to reply with. Pretty soon, it’s going to come natural. You’re going to know what to say, when to say it. Then follow through with another leading question, just to get to that point. Yes, it’s your destination. You’ve got to go through nos to get there. Don’t take no as personal or no as the end. Go to somebody else. No means, I don’t know all the information. I don’t know, how does it really work? How can I really trust you? There’s so many things that no could mean. Keep digging. Keep digging. Stick to the system. Micro steps. Another topic I wanted to cover. We’ve kind of touched on it in the group. When you’re sending a screen cast, and you shot your video, you’ve gone through Google or maybe you saw the signs on somebody’s truck, you got to prospect. You build a screen cast based on module nine, copy that model, extend it out. I would recommend using your personal email address, and I’ve tested both ways. I’m getting 90% or more open rate, sending from a personal email, using a simple subject line, roof repair. A lot of these new guys are coming in and they think they know. They’re like, all this crazy, guaranteed SEO stuff, tactics, white hat. No, they don’t care about that. That’s instant delete for business owners. I’ve done retail businesses for many, many years and we’re inundated. We’re inundated by SEO people claiming they know everything and they’re going to rocket our business to the top. None of them know. None of them know. Micro steps. The first goal is to get them to open the email. You want to be sending from personal email and you want a short subject line. Once that’s opened, second goal is to get them to watch the video. You don’t want to put a book there. “Hey,” and explain everything that’s in your video. Two short lines of text. “I saw your truck at Home Depot. I do computer stuff so I looked up your website and I found these two things that you can tweak real quick to improve your rankings, check this out.” It’s simple. Laid back. Nothing sales-y. No money mention. Nothing else. Don’t even talk about yourself for more than five seconds. Goal three now, is to get a reply. Goal one; get them to open the email. Once they open the email, second goal is to get them to watch the video. Short text that convinces them, “Hey, open the video. It’s just two short things. Tweak these things and your rankings are … It’s what I do for a living. Just helping you out.” Goal three is to get a reply. The video should be short, to the point. Do not talk about yourself for more than five seconds. I know people come in, they immediately want to start that video with, “I am Brandon Olson. I run SEO web consulting. I’ve done it for the last 10 years. I’ve helped 276 clients get to the top of Google,” and they’ve already left. They shut it off. They don’t care. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Immediately, go in and have that thing queued up to their homepage or their website. When they click play, they go, “Hey, my webpage’s here. What’s he saying?” Then they’re gonna start listening. Micro steps. Yes, we want to get that prospect and we want to see them to the end where the first thousand bucks are hitting our credit card processor, but we cannot do it on visit one. We cannot do it on email one, video one. It’ll take 10, 12 back and forths, sometimes before you even get a conversation started. At that point, they’re going to realize you’re so persistent, maybe this guy does know what he’s talking about. Maybe this girl does know what they’re talking about and then they’ll start asking questions. Now you can get to those questions one by one, answer them. Don’t bring up the money until they do. Don’t even mention the price. Price is another thing I want to cover. My pricing has always been population based. Some of you are probably in the accountability groups and have heard Ed with his pricing models. His pricing models are insanely powerful. He doesn’t leave a penny on the table because he introduced that prospect, he finds out how much the average client is over a year, whatever. He’s got a little formula that works perfect for him. If you want to do that, great, because it works, but it doesn’t work for me. That’s the point. There’s so many different ways to do things, to determine price. Mine is fast; land a client, get them started, plug them in, let my team start and I move to the next. I don’t care if I’ve left a little money on the table because three, four months in, if I only started a guy in a quarter million population, at a thousand bucks, and he’s a roofer, I know that once he starts seeing results and his phone’s ringing off the hook and he’s seeing his rankings shoot from page whatever, to page one in a couple of months then yeah, now he’s starting to see money come in from my efforts. Now I can always go back and say, “Okay, this is costing a bit. I know you’re getting an ROI because I see you got three or four different keywords on page one. Quality, competitive keywords. Let’s bump this up. I don’t mind adding other keywords for you.” That’s kind of the good thing about having Google Webmaster tools or search console installed right in the beginning. Because, once that thing runs for a while, and this is in, I think, module six about content, putting massive content on, running a Google Keyword Report after a few months in, especially once you’ve started the campaign, you might have started with five or six keywords but you can literally add dozens and dozens or even a hundred more keywords to your search tracker or whatever rank tracking program you’re using. You’re instantly going to see that they’re not just ranked for these five, six keywords you’re working on. They are ranked for dozens. 10, 20, 30, 50. All pages one through three or four but now you can take them, sort them by impressions and there’s a video in there that teaches you how to do this. I’m not going to go into that. Generate the report, get the list of keywords. Search them by impressions. That means; which ones are being displayed the most? Weed out the crap because there’s going to be stuff like popper sites that are helping you with restaurants and stuff that I don’t know why exists. These words aren’t even on my site. Delete that junk out. Put those keywords in your Rank Tracker. Now show your client, “Look, here’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve started with just a handful of keywords but now, suddenly, you’ve got two dozen ranked in the first two pages. Now we can take some of these and maybe run through our web 2.0.” Make sure they’re in the content, for the biggest part. You can use them for anchors but that’s not really the preferred method anymore, to rank keywords. If they’re in your content, especially if you’ve created new pages and you’ve done the meta and the H1 with those new keywords, they’ll start ranking automatically because you’ve already got trust going to the homepage. That’s kind of some things I wanted to cover. We’ll open it up. I’ve got some more things but I want to hear what you guys got to say. What kind of questions are you guys running? What do you want to do? Hi, I have a question. Yeah Maya. Hello, hello Brandon. How’s it going? Good. I have a question about on-page SEO. The new training is great but then, I’ve sent my order to SEO outsource but there are a few things that I will have to do myself because they don’t cover it unless it was already done on a website. That’s to install Google Analytics and submit a site map and what else? Google, let me see, register the website with Google My Business. I don’t know if that’s the same thing as … No, it’s not. No, that … Okay. All these all important for SEO or not so much or … Do you see what I mean? Yeah. For sure. Google My Business, 90% of my prospects already have a Google My Business place. If yours don’t, have them do it. A lot of guys in the group like to do that and take control of somebody’s Google My Business account. I’m not into that. It doesn’t matter either way. You can. It’s kind of based on their email address. Their company email address so they got to log in or whatever. It’s so easy for them to just do it. Okay. Yeah. Get the postcard and verify it. As far as analytics and site map, those are just simple plugins, normally, on a WordPress site. I don’t know how to walk you through it but if just post and tag Kevin, he’ll help you out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. There are ways to do it. Yeah. That’s fine. Okay. They are really through SEO. Yeah. Analytics got some great data in there so you can see visits real time. Keywords they’re pulling to come into the site. It’s a lot of good data that you may be able to share with the customer at some time. I don’t really ever get technical with my clients unless they want to. I’ll have it installed. My team installs Google … I keep saying Google Webmaster Tools. It’s now Search Console and it probably has been for years. Okay. Search Console and Analytics, right up front in the beginning so that any data that we need, we can get to at any point rather than customer ask a question, and then … Exactly. You can install Analytics and then we will have the information like, one months from now, when the thing crawls. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Sure. I have a question. Yeah, who’s this? This is Miriam. Oh, hey Miriam. Hi. I just joined today. Yay. Quick question about on-page SEO. You’re talking about WordPress. I have a friend who’s just starting a moving business and his website is not on WordPress. That’s okay. That’s okay. All right. Good. Yeah. Depending on what platform it is, some of the platforms will allow to do quite a bit of on-page SEO. The most important things, obviously, are your meta tag. Your meta title and your H1 because those are the ones that are going to match your anchor for your press release. Okay. If you figure to how, just post in the group and tag Kevin. He knows practically, how to do every platform. He is fricking insane. I’m so glad we brought him on the team. He has helped us through stuff that I didn’t even know existed. Tag him and he’ll help you with that. For sure. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah. Hi Brandon. How’s it going? Good. Mason. Yeah. I just wanted to ask about, more in depth, when you go on Search Console and you find a bunch of additional keywords that your client site has. If you see many keywords, how do you determine what to put on the homepage or what to build separate pages for or should you just build separate pages for each individual keyword that the client … For example, my client right now, I’m noticing, has 300 keywords and then, I was only targeting like five or 10 of them. Then there’s like 300 of them that’s showing up on Search Console and they’re all around position like, 30 or something like that. How do you determine what to … I notice that you talked about building separate pages for some of them and blog pages for some of them but some of them, I feel like, would need landing pages and, would you put them on the homepage. Yeah. How do you determine those kinds of things? Homepage is always dedicated to the, either the brand, if you’ve got a multi-site client. Or, the primary one or two keywords. Okay. Never go back and tweak your homepage based on keywords you’re finding in Google Webmaster Tools. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. Because then you’ll start losing ranking for the main keywords because you’re telling Google, “This page is no longer about this. It’s actually about this.” It’s kind of a subtopic, which usually, is what the keywords are that you’re pulling out of there. I use them as extra landing pages but I first sort them. You’re sorting them by impressions. You’re getting rid of the stuff that’s way down past page nine and finding the ones like you’re seeing, around position 30 or whatever. Page three, that’s great. Delete out the junk and then maybe, copy those out and stick them in a spreadsheet and ask are client, “Are there any of these things you want to go for?” At that point, sounds like you’re kind of in the campaign, at least a few months, to be able to get that kind of report. Unless the site’s been up for a while and it’s got some trust on it, some age. It’s only been the second month in the campaign. The site’s been up for a couple months but for some reason, it’s popping up really well so I’m really good about that. That’s good. Yeah. As you’re building landing pages too, you have to take that list of keywords and group them together because you can use two, three keywords, or even more if they’re related. You want to max it out at probably two, kind of different keywords but everything that is in that list is kind of encompassed or maybe is a subtopic of that keyword. You can start using H2s and stagger your page out like that. I wouldn’t have multiple keywords that are different from each other. If they’re similar, group them together on a landing page and then make another set of landing page for the other group. You’ve got your title H1 as your main keyword, out of that 30 and then, if there’s five or so that are kind of related, plug them in there also. Have the content written and have H2s with those keywords. Google will find them and figure out what you’re doing, for sure. Okay. The keywords to use also, I’ve noticed, are local relevant and some of them don’t have the locality region in there so we should definitely use the local relevance as the … No, at that point, you won’t need it. Google already now knows, what your local relevance is. Now for these other pages, you don’t necessarily need cities in every one of your meta titles. Oh. Okay. You can have them sprinkled. It’s not going to hurt. It doesn’t hurt even if you’ve already done it but it’s not required. Okay. Once your homepage starts to get trust and Google knows what city you’re in and now you’ve got other H1s that are just keywords … If they know you’re sitting in Plano and you’ve got roofing and you’ve got another one for roof repair and insurance claims, they don’t have to be tied to Plano anymore because that is now under the hierarchy of what Google already knows your sites about. If they are. That’s okay. I see. Okay. Then, in terms of anchor text, from those inner pages to the homepage, is it important to have those specific keywords on that page, being interjected in the homepage? That’s debatable. I like to take and not anchor them all to the homepage but anchor them to one of the pages on the navigation bar or, in your list of service pages. You might have some linking to home because it logically links to home with whatever word you’re using or if it’s keyword or whatever, but some of the other words in your article may make more sense to anchor to one of your service pages or one of your pages about roof repair or whatever. They don’t all have to go to the homepage. The link just flows a lot better and Google can crawl it a lot faster and get the results to you faster if they are linking to one of the core pages. Also, linking to another page. You want to interlink those too so it’s kind of like, the spiders can crawl all over because you’re leaving them paths all over the place. That’s super helpful. Thank you. Yeah. You bet. Good question. Louis, are you raising your hand? Hey. How’s it going? It’s finally nice to hear you guys. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Perfect. Perfect. Just wondering, I’ve gone to the course for about a week now and I’ve done a lot of heavy weight here and just wondering if there’s a plan in place because I’m doing the screen casts and I’m trying to figure out how to handle a phone call. For instance, I could email back and forth. I’m pretty good with the screen cast. I’ve been trying to push those out. I’m just worried about objections and maybe, how to handle clients when they call in, maybe start asking me a bunch of questions that I might get unfamiliar with. Yeah. Man, if they’re calling you and you answer it and you don’t let it go to voicemail, you’re going to stumble through it until you figure it out. I used to let them always go to voicemail. Maybe they’ll leave me a question and I’ve got some information I can research before I call them back but soon enough, you get fluent with our language and really, the biggest thing is the SEO process. Man, if you can watch that video or get the script or whatever, and if you can answer and avoid so many questions that you don’t know they’re going to ask by just going over that. When they hear what you tell them, is going to happen, no matter what niche, “This is your process. This is how we rank sites on Google, on demand.” “We literally, will start and we’ll interview and we’ll look at your site and see. Have a professional writer write about you’re business. We’ll distribute that as a press release, to 500 TV and radio and newspaper type websites.” Just tell them that and that’s massive. I mean, you’re literally just walking them through what’s going to happen and then, by the time you get to the end, they have no more questions. Usually, they’re just ready to start. If they’re asking other questions, it’ll trigger stuff that you’ve gone over in the training and soon enough, you’ll get better and better and you’ll know even, what they’re going to ask before they ask it. There’s no way to know what they’re going to ask and if you’re going to be surprised at what there asking or even know the answer. If you don’t, say, “Hey, I’m involved in a network of hundreds of other SEO guys. Top, elite guys across the country. Let me run it by them and I’ll find out, what the best way to go is.” Great, great, great point. Would it be helpful to ask them a few questions? To get them … I always do. Maybe to find out where they’re at in their company. That’s exactly right. That changes the subject. That kind of shifts everything too. When they see that you’re more interested in them and what they want for their business than you are to talk about the money end of it, that’s massive to a business. When a guy’s sitting there trying to figure out how to help me grow my business and they’re asking me, “Would you rather have more residential clients or more commercial or whatever,” and you go through and figure out what they want to rank for, what they want to … more customers. What type they want. When you start getting into that, that really gets them to let their guard down too. Okay. You’ve been very helpful. I’ll DM you or … ask you for a few other questions later on. Thank you. Louis, you got one? You got your hand up there. Nothing? Okay. He’s good. Soaking it in. Who else? Hello? This is Dwight Norris. Hey Dwight. Hey, I have a question. I’ve been getting a lot of video watches from my recent screen cast, from local and non-local people. I’m wondering how I can go about following up about them because I can walk to the local one and the others, I can’t so I’m not sure what kind of strategy I should use. Okay. Maybe I misunderstood the question. You made a video and put it on your YouTube channel, you’re getting watches? On YouTube. Yes. Okay. The people watching are not in your local area? There’s one company that’s just a couple blocks from me and there’s two others that aren’t close to me that I can’t actually get to and speak to them face-to-face. You have an internet business so you’re not confined by … and a lot of people have to get past this in their head sometimes. You’re not confined by taking customers only where you live. I have had probably five customers from my city, for SEO. Everything else I’ve got, all over the states, Australia, Canada, everywhere. Followup by email, is what I recommend. I don’t normally call businesses, unless they’re really want to phone call, and then I will. I like everything back and forth in emails so I can remember when they reply. I can look at the strand and see what we talked about and keep going because some prospects will carry on for a couple of months before you really get anything going with them. You’re kind of building are pipeline that way. Yeah, if you’re getting views from other places, that’s great. That’s kind of a technique that we want to add to the training to show you guys how to build a YouTube channel and promote it like that to get people coming to you. You certainly don’t have to be limited to have customers only where you’re at. That’s why I started this. I wanted a business that I wasn’t tied to any geo, local area, I wasn’t tied to an office, I wasn’t tied to a time clock and I could literally do, and outsource every step of my SEO from my iPhone, from the Caribbean or Florida or Bahamas or wherever I was and they don’t know the difference. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. You bet. Hey Brandon, can I just … not going to ask a question but just kind of address what Dwight just said and maybe even Louis. Yeah. For sure. Because I’ve started using this more. I’ve been for about a month, been, I don’t know, and a half now, month and a half now, but I’m starting to realize; we have so much resources at our fingertips like what Dwight, you getting a bunch of views, which is great. A lot of people are sending out a screen cast, and getting your emails to be open but a lot are not necessarily getting their videos to be clicked on. They would love the fact to have like, even myself included, I’ve sent out probably, about 35 or 40 and I a lot of them have been opened but I think there’s only been three that have actually been clicked on to actually watch the video and I’m thinking, “Man, if they could only see the screen cast, they would open them up.” I’m really wanting to get better at those first two or three lines to be my body of the email, to get them open. Like Brandon says, just little steps. You got to just tweak a couple things. Keep it simple to get them to open it. For you, Dwight, I was thinking, why couldn’t you, as you’re already getting a bunch of views coming onto your site, why couldn’t you just send out followup, just like what you’re doing now, putting yourself on camera and just addressing the next stage in SEO process. Like Brandon says in the videos, we get addressed just the H1 and the meta title. The meta tag. Maybe number two, you address the situations. Number three, you address the not secure. Number four, you just keep going down the line. Addressing these certain things in the process and then that’s going to first of all, give them value. They’re going to see, they’re going to get familiar with who you are. That’s more and more contact with them so you’re getting that much more closer to closing them because you’re having four or five or six or seven different touches with them to where now, they’re going to ask you, “What’s the price for your service?” So on. You could just do it right there, in front of your camera, right there where you’re sitting right now, without ever having to leaving or ever having to pick up a phone. Oh thanks Andrea. I didn’t think about that. Getting value is definitely one of the best things that I could do. I think I’ll try to implement that with people that are actually viewing my videos. Well, along with that too, on the search, like Brandon said earlier, when we first started the Zoom, in search, if you could just type it in there, type in the search and asking followup methods. That’s what I’m going to do. Followup methods. I’m sure a bunch of stuff will come up because people have addressed this in the past. I have. That’s my challenge, is basically, a lot of the followup methods. I know I can do it. I’m not good at writing but I’m just going to go in there and get a bunch of different ideas and print it out in front of the main group because you’ll have many different people come at you with their different angles and you’ll be able to pick and choose what works best for you. Good stuff. Good point. For those of you who are doing this, saving your screen cast to your YouTube, it’s a great idea. Make sure you build your banner. Have a professional banner. Have it done on Fiverr or something or tag somebody in the group or post in the group. If you make a YouTube channel that’s professional looking and it’s got a link to your website in it and it’s got ways that you’re … I mean, you’re using that as another platform. Kind of like your web agency website, for people to contact you. Set it up as a business, your business YouTube channel. Now, all these videos that you’re showing local business owners. I mean look, after you do the 30/30, you’ve got 30 videos that you can plug in there. You can make playlists out of them. People are going to start finding these. Especially if you’re using keywords that local business owners maybe are searching for, in your title. Use it in your title and then the first line of your description and it’s going to help it come up the YouTube rankings. Another tip on tags for videos, and this works on anything. I use Rank Daddy Branded. One word; as a tag in every single video. When you see one of my videos, off to the side, you’re also going to see suggested videos. Some of them are going to be mine because Google relates videos. If a video plays, Google wants to immediately feed that watcher with something else that’s related. It doesn’t know what’s happening on the video. It only can go by text right? Maybe at some point, or maybe they’re working on it, I don’t know. Tags are heavy. Tags and hashtags. If you use one keyword that nobody else in the world who’s using so it’s unique to your video. Now suddenly, all 30 of your videos are related. If one’s playing and you’ve got a business owner that happens to find one, that thing ends and Google is now suggesting another one of yours so they’re going to watch that. Now they’re consuming all your content and they’re going, “Wow, this guy actually knows something that can probably help my business.” They click the little arrow down thing and they read the description. Make sure you got a clickable link in that description. Https://yourwebsite so that it’s clickable. When you do it, go through and make sure it works and it redirects to your business. Can’t tell you how many people have found my ways back to content me from YouTube videos. We’re still getting five or six joins a day, to Rank Daddy, from people finding the videos and it’s the same concept. They’re finding it, I make it easier for them to click and they are able to find brandonolson.com where they can PM me and ask questions and then get in the group or just join. Works the same way on SEO. Once the maps is all done out and finished, that’s, I think, another one of the trainings we’re going to put up. I’m working with another person in the group who is really knowledgeable about YouTube and YouTube ranking. We’ll probably make an add-on training for you guys, to help you with that because it’s just one more way to get in front of people. Google owns YouTube. You get a good YouTube video, it’s going to show organically in page one. I remember when I was really focused on trying to rank my agency website, I took up eight spots of page one. I took up two maps because I had two different addresses. One went to a post office and one was an actual business address. I had two websites, brandonolson.net and seo3.com. That was when Google plus was still up. I had two Google Pluses and I had two YouTube videos and like, it was plastering. Sadly, it’s rare for a business to start searching for local SEO and find people that way. I kind of gave up. I had some web 2.0’s ranked even, on page one. You can build web 2.0 websites and point other web 2.0 links at it and those will start ranking. There’s a lot of little techniques that you can use to get yourself out there, in front of people, so that you just got better odds at landing clients. That’s all it amounts to. Brandon, I just realized that you said I should have those public. I had it unlisted. I didn’t even think about that. Well, I’d put them on public. Now, if you get a business owner that says, “I don’t want that there,” then yeah, put it unlisted. Until then, you created that video, you’re just using their site as an example. I’ve never had anybody tell me, “Take my video down.” Kind of have to play that, however you feel about that. Do it. If I’m creating instructional videos and I’m using stuff that’s public information on the internet, I don’t see anything wrong with putting them on public. It’s already public, I’m just giving you tips. Something to think about. Why does a website rank at the top of Google? What has to happen for a website to rank? Needs trust. Yeah. Trust. Trust. Ultimately, actual web traffic is the strongest trigger. It would have taken trust to get it ranked to number one and now it’s got the most amount of traffic. This is why, as you go through your SEO campaign and you see that it’s so easy to take people from nonexistent or page four, five, six, seven, even three, to page one, super fast. 30 to 60 days. Now, when you’re on page one, the results got to trickle because now you got to beat the people who have actual web traffic. Web traffic, traffic coming to an actual website, people actually clicking on that and visiting the site trumps all the other search criteria. The more you put trust at it, trust will slowly overtake because now you’ve got trust, you’re on page one. Maybe you’re at six or eight or seven and you’re continuing to build trust with the process but you’re also starting to gain traffic. Now you’ve got multiple things so Google and their algorithm has to determine at some point, okay, these guys are almost break even with traffic. Your site’s a little bit more but you got a lot more trust signals so pretty soon, you’re going to bump a guy off. Yeah. Website ranks when it’s trusted. The end game is to get the traffic but you have to go through the steps. How do we get to the trust? The trust comes from the process. The trust comes, it has to be built in a logical, methodical, natural way. It can’t be gained or anything like that with Google. They have so many people questioning whether to spend a dollar to come into this program to learn because they’re afraid that what we’re teaching is shady techniques. I don’t know of any member past or present, who’s ever had a site slapped for a Google penalty or something, for doing something shady. The process brings trust. The site ranks for the words on the site. You’re building trust, Google knows what it’s about. Google is going to rank it because of the trust, for the words that are on the site and most importantly, for the meta title and the H1. Those are the two major things that tell Google what you want to rank for. What the site’s about. Many SEO guys are still under the misconception that a site ranks for the back link anchors that are pointed to that sit. They’re going out and they just massively build all these anchors that are Dallas plumber and Dallas roofer and whatever niche they’re in. It doesn’t work like that anymore. Those were off page signals but if you have too many of those, it’s obvious to Google, what’s going on. It’s obvious to us. We can look at a back linked profile and see that a site has been SEO’d because it’s not natural for 50% of all the links coming in to be the main keyword. It’s obvious what’s going on. Extensive research has been done by my team, by other SEO guys in the business, 70 to 80% of all the links coming in need to be either your brand, so your company name or a naked link, just the website. Rankdaddy.com. Whatever. Out of every 10 links, seven or eight of them have to be naked or branded. Google is so heavy on branding right now, try to squeeze the brand in the title. If you have room for your one main keyword and your company name, separated by the bar, do that because Google wants to start seeing brand mentions. Especially as the map training comes out and you’re going to see how important it is. It’s going to lend massively, to the trust factors coming into your site. Your site does not rank for the back links or the anchor text. It’s a massive flag if you just overdo that. What else? What else questions? Brandon. Yeah, Maya. In the training, Kevin mentions that if we don’t do URL of our website, we can find out if it comes up first in the searches. With the website I’m working on right now, it’s actually the website bookings.com that is first because well, it’s so big. That tells me that they’ve got more what? Pages or links? No, it’s a massively trusted site. Yeah. Yeah. But, you can beat it. I can? It’s there because nobody else has proven trust. We do this all the time. I’ve done resort things. We had a huge campaign for some resorts out by Disney and we were beating bookings.com, hotels.com and all these other things because, guess what? Bookings.com is a search engine. Okay. Google doesn’t want to give results to a search engine if they don’t have too. Cool. You have to prove you need to be there. Yeah. The other thing is, bookings.com homepage has a massive amount of trust. That’s right. That result that’s coming up is not the homepage, it’s one of the landing pages to whatever property’s on it. For sure. Yeah. It’s not as much trust. The top level domain has the trust but that page doesn’t so you only have to beat the trust that’s found on that page. Very easy to do. Okay. Brilliant. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Yep. I’ll work on that. Cool. What else? Stop me. Hey, there’s a post in the group and you’ve probably seen it. Just use the search bar. Bring on the objections. I just, I don’t know. It’s been months. I put it up there and I just said, “Hey, what are you guys running into as your prospecting?” I don’t know. There are probably 20 objections up there that me and some other guys have responded with what we actually say when that objection comes up. Look for that. Prospecting is the main thing. I mean, the process works. That’s not a question. It’s a matter of, “Now we got to get clients so we can just plug them in and make money and scale.” If we get good at prospecting and landing clients, the rest is game over because it’s literally, just plug it into the system and if you’re new, you do it by yourself. In 30 minutes, the whole month’s work for one client, and then you move on o the next one. Once you’ve got 10, 12, 15 clients now you can start looking at hiring VAs and sculpting and forming your team. Posting in UpWork for maybe SEO assistants and things like that and give them tasks and test them out. This is how I got my VA. Sakid, in the group, that you guys have seen post or reply every once in a while. I used to tag him. He’s been with me for over seven years. He started at $2 an hour. He’s in Pakistan. He now runs a team and we have offices in Pakistan. We have offices in Pakistan on the ground floor of the … I forget what building. He bought a house, a car. He’s got to be one of the highest paid guys in Pakistan. He runs a whole team there and he just started at two bucks an hour with me on UpWork and I gave him more and more responsibility. It’s real easy to take the steps in the beginning because it doesn’t take much time. Just focus on mastering and just, as much as you can immerse yourself on prospecting. Even if it’s taking other little courses or get on youtome.com for prospecting or other YouTube videos. There’s a lot of training on sales and closing and the more stuff that goes in your brain, the more that you’ll be able to use when it comes time to land a client. Even though, not that you’re using high pressured sales tactics but if you know how to deal with a client or a prospect, and how to walk them through the steps of a close so that they don’t feel like you’re trying to get them to sign their life away. It just gets easier and easier. I really, really like the video and I might need to redo it because I think it could be a little more clear. Think it’s either four or five. The five closes that are my go to closes. They guarantee … Man, I can’t even remember. I might have to pull it up. You know what I’m talking about, it’s on the blog. Episode four or five. What else? Any other questions? Yeah. I have another question about the objections post. I read it and I thought it was so good that I created a Word document with all the answers and I uploaded it. It’s in the … Oh, cool. Yeah. It’s in the group. It’s only the resources. Everybody can have a look at it. Files, in the Facebook- In files. That’s it. Yeah. Cool. There you go. That’s good. Yeah, because they were really good. You know how we sort of try to get them in and explain that we need two months for the site to reach page one? At first, I’m trying to, yeah, get them to try my services and once we get you to two months, I know they’re going to ask, “Tell me again. Why do I need to keep paying for SEO now?” I’m thinking one of the ways would be, once we’ve had a look at the competition and we’ve seen how many pages they have, how much more content and back links, I would say, we build up and we beat your competition. First, when you say … You’re probably not using this but it’s just maybe, how I heard it, it’s going to take us two months to get to page one. Right. I wouldn’t quote that because sometimes it’s slower. Okay. We got some clients that you have to just dig because they get stuck and their site doesn’t move past page two or three for some reason, for months. There could be little things on their site that Kevin will find. Anyway, but yeah. That can happen and when it does, you got to know what to say. I always, plant a seed in their mind in the beginning, not necessarily what I’m landing it but maybe after I send them the first report, after it’s been a month, I want to make sure they know how I’m doing this. I’m not going to use the PBN but I want them to know that it’s not necessarily hard work that’s doing this. They need to know that their site is being trusted, that we’re building and everything we do is to bring trust to their site. We own and maintain a network of sites that have a massive amount of trust with Google. I explain this to them so that they know because, if this ever comes up, I’m coming back to that. When they say, “Okay, I’ve been on page one for six months, why do I have to keep paying you?” Right. Yeah. That’s it. Remember when we first started the campaign, I kind of explained how we rank and hold your site there? We’re using that network of sites of ours. They’re very expensive to maintain. We add content to them. Run different hosting that not your average GoDaddy hosting, things like that. They cost a lot of money to build and maintain. We only use those sites for you. We don’t use one site and link to multiple people. That’s dedicated to you. For all of the links that come up to those sites, that’s hard cost for us, monthly. Your SEO fee is offsetting that. If you stop paying … Also, I’ve already told them that one link is like, we’d give you a thousand links all at once. If we’re six months in we they got 10 links coming out from these trusted, powerful sites that we’ve got, I ask them, “What is it going to look like if you stop paying and we delete your anchors or your links because we have to use them for another client that is paying to offset that? What happens? What’s Google going to see?” They’re going to see thousands of links leaving your site. Which is going to do what?” You get them to thinking. They’re like, “Oh yeah. No. Don’t. Let’s not even go there.” Plus, I say, “I mean, you’re paying a thousand bucks a month, you’re getting an extra 10 grand in revenue,” or what ever it is, “When do you stop that?” There’s ways to do it without threatening them. I like the reminder thing but in order to do the reminder, you have to have already explained to them how you’re doing it. I never use the word PBN because they may start looking it up and there’s so much bad press on PBNs. Oh, I see. Okay. PBNs are dangerous if you don’t know how to do it properly. Screw somebody’s site up. Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Some of these questions, and I’m glad we’re doing these Zooms because it’s so much more effective to hear an explained answer than to read it in a post comment. It’s hard for me to get all those words in that comment and make them make sense. Glad you guys are here. Anything else? We’re going to wrap it up. Quick question, if it’s all right. Yeah. It’s Miriam. Okay. It’s sort of a sales question, sort of. I recently spoke to somebody who right off the bat, told me he was window shopping. Just talking to a few different people, and that’s fine with me. He and I are in another group together and I thought, “Okay, let’s just spend some time getting to know this business.” Ask them a lot of questions. Give them a lot of general pointers. Then they’ll send me a proposal. After I went through in detail like steps and blah, blah, blah and at that point yeah, okay. I could send them a proposal but my gut reaction’s like, nah, I don’t want to send proposals. I’m just wondering, in the training, do you cover that? To me, I don’t want to work with somebody’s who’s like, “Ah, I got to think about it again.” We already went through your entire financials. You know that this is the only way you can do this. I don’t know. Do you cover that? Yeah. I never, ever, ever sent a proposal. I’ve never sent a contract in writing. I am as simple as, okay, it’s all back and forth. I’m answering your questions. You’re asking. At some point you’re going to ask a price. I’m going to tell you how much it is, I’m going to tell you what we do. I’m going to tell you what the SEO process is and that’s it. As soon as you say, “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do it.” I’m going to say okay. I’m going to send you an invoice. Fill out this form, which is my intake form and then I’ll send you an invoice and we’ll get started. That’s it. It’s all by email anyway. It’s it’s in the email. I don’t do formal proposals. I just tell them. There’s no point because I’m not making you sign a contract. You can literally stop whenever you want. I want them to feel like they always have a way out. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That’s a little been another question. That’s great. No contracts. Yeah. Just month-to-month. The only time I ever did a contract, we had a state wide insurance deal. I was partnering with a guy in Florida and they required it so I made him do it and we did it. All these thousand dollar a month deals are all no contract, stop whenever you want, because I want them to feel like they have no pressure and they’re not locked into something. They just need that. Even though we’re giving them that, we still remain in control because our network of incredibly powerful sites are holding their rank to the top and once they’re in month two, three, they’ve already seen their rankings launch to the top. Now they’re starting to see customers from our efforts and that’s why we’ve got a 90% retention rate, because it works. It sticks. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Good question. I was talking to my brother the other day. He’s in the group. We were talking about business and, this is going to apply to a lot of people in the group because we have such a diverse group here. It’s about branding yourself and not compromising or bending or folding or getting forced into a mold that you think some business needs you to be or act or dress or live in a certain place. He’s from Arkansas and he has this “Good Ole Boy” accent and he’s like, “I just want the type of client that I can go and we can have a beer after work.” That’s the type of clients he’s attracting. There are millions of businesses across America that want to deal with that kind of a person. If you’re that kind of a person, great. Don’t think you have to change to fit in the SEO mold. The SEO agency mold. Maybe you live in another country. Maybe you have a thick accent. Maybe your hair’s long or maybe you’re like me and 90% of the year, you wear shorts and flip flops. If a business owner’s not okay with that, that’s okay. There’s more businesses to catch. I guarantee you, there’s millions of businesses that are okay because I still know enough to 10x their business while I’m wearing my shorts and flip flops and doing all this from my iPhone. Don’t think you have to fit into a mold. Brand yourself. You look at the Rank Daddy logo, that’s me. Shorts and flip flops. I’ve gone to meetings like this and gone to clients in this and landed them. It doesn’t matter. If they have a problem with it, they’re not going to sign up and that’s great. You move on to somebody else. Just knowing that you can be whoever you are and do this business is a great feeling to me. Last thing I wanted to cover, Lebron James recently broke Michael Jordan’s record, right? I don’t know a lot of the whole stats and everything but this is about modeling someone or something that is successful if you’re trying to reach that level of success. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. There’s no reason to try to figure it out on your own. If you want to be successful at something, the fastest way, and Tony Robin says this, is to find somebody who’s already done it and model exactly what they did. Lebron, as a child, would buy packs and packs of basketball cards, hoping for a Jordan. He would study every aspect of Jordan’s game. Down to the way he wore his calf sleeve and turned it inside out so that the red lining showed. He studied and imitated. Drew profound inspiration from his … I’m reading this from an article that I read because it was so cool, his tongue wagging dunks. His fade away jumper. His competitive fire. The little details of the way Jordan wear his sneakers and shorts. Lebron, he admits he didn’t think he could be like Mike but yet, he modeled him. Does that mean you don’t have to put in the work? No, because he worked his butt off. Same with your SEO agency. You have to put in the work, even though you’ve got a system that you can plug into and model exactly, to get the results that so many in the group that are finding success, have done. Don’t veer. There’s no reason to make a step 3.5 and plug it in because you think it should go there. Doesn’t need it. We’ve done this on thousands and thousands of site already. It works. Follow the model. That’s it for today guys. We’re a little over an hour so we’re going to cut it there. I appreciate you guys. You find value in any of this, go to one of my YouTube videos and leave a comment like Andrea and a lot of these other guys. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here. I’m humbled at all of this. Love the group. I love the interaction, the engagement. Let’s keep building. Keep leaning on each other. We’ll get there. Ya’ll have a good night. Thanks Brandon. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you, thank you. Thank you Brandon. Have a good one guys.

How to Land SEO Clients - $28k Case Study - Episode 11

RankDaddy's Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2018 50:56

Hey guys, Brandon Olson here. Welcome back. Rank Daddy TV. Today’s episode is gonna be a little different, a little longer. Let me give you kind of a back story. So, in Rank Daddy, in the training, in the group, we had a contest over the Summer. It was a Summer business building contest. The objective was to add as much monthly revenue to your agency as you possibly could. So the grand prize was $1,000, just a drop in the bucket really compared to what growth you guys see, or have seen over the Summer that you’ve put into your agency. So, a lot of growth, there was a lot of competition, it was awesome. So, what we have in today’s episode, the winner, his name is Caleb. Just a regular dude. He’s doing SEO part time. Started an agency literally six months ago he joined us. So at the beginning of this contest, he was only three months in. Total newbie. And what that shows is, that Rank Daddy literally works for anyone, okay? It doesn’t matter if you know SEO, or you think you know SEO, or you don’t know anything about SEO. Caleb won this $1,000, but really compared to what he brought into his agency, what he grew his business, it was insane, he literally added $17,000 in new monthly recurring revenue. So we didn’t count anything that students already had going. This is all newly added revenue to your business. But because of the way he scales his pricing, he starts everybody out a little low, maybe gives them half price to get them in, but by the end of next month, or within a month from now, he’ll be at over $28,000 just from what he brought in during this contest. $28,000 a month in added revenue from the contest. So, just over the Summer. So here’s what happened. You’re gonna notice as you watch, Caleb, like I said is just a regular guy. He hasn’t been doing this very long. Six months total. He’s got another business that he runs full time, and takes his entire … Or the majority of his focus and his time. He’s in real estate. SEO for him is completely part time. So as you watch this, I want you to do this. Keep telling yourself throughout the video, self, if this guy, a complete newbie, just a regular dude can build and scale an SEO business to $30,000 a month in just a few short months, part time, I can do it too. So keep telling yourself, let’s get into my computer, I’ve got this thing downloaded. What happened is, when we announced him as the winner, he was getting message after message after message, how did you do it? What was your prospecting like? What is your pricing? So he hit me up. He said, Brandon, can I just go in and do a Facebook Live? Do a Facebook Live and explain to people exactly what I did so I don’t have to answer? I mean, it’ll be a lot faster. So, literally he was bombarded. So that’s what we got for today’s episode. He literally shares in this Facebook Live, and you’ll see as if he’s doing a question and answer, it’s because people are posting questions as he goes along. We downloaded it, put it on YouTube, so you won’t be able to see the questions. But just kinda be in tune with what he’s doing. But he literally shares exactly how he did it. How he landed the clients, how he used leverage to land more clients, how he priced his deals, and more. He goes into great detail. I’m really, really glad he shared his story. Now this thing is 47 minutes long. If you have to pause it, come back to it. But don’t skip any of it. This thing is insanely, insanely valuable. And remember, as yourself, if this regular dude can do this, why can’t I? And you can. So let’s go. So that’s what we got for today’s episode. He literally shares in this Facebook Live, and you’ll see as if he’s doing a question and answer, it’s because people are posting questions as he goes along. We downloaded it, put it on YouTube, so you won’t be able to see the questions. But just kinda be in tune with what he’s doing. But he literally shares exactly how he did it. How he landed the clients, how he used leverage to land more clients, how he priced his deals, and more. He goes into great detail. I’m really, really glad he shared his story. Now this thing is 47 minutes long. If you have to pause it, come back to it. But don’t skip any of it. This thing is insanely, insanely valuable. And remember, as yourself, if this regular dude can do this, why can’t I? And you can. So let’s go. Rank Daddy. What’s up? It is Tuesday, and I think, yeah, Tuesday here right at noon Central Time. It’s actually 11:59. I’m a minute early, but want to let you guys hop on here. I will give you guys a second, but we’re going to be talking about how I was able to win the 2018 summer contest. I’ve gotten messages after messages, and so I just sent a message over to Brandon, and just really was like, “Hey, man. Can I just come live because it’s going to be so much easier to just come live, rather than texting everyone back individually?” Whatever, you guys jump on, say hey, say hello. I want to see you guys in here, whether that’s a hand wave. Jerry, what’s up, man? How are you? Thanks for joining in. Like I said, guys, whatever, you hop in here, wave. Give me a little wave. Give me a thumbs up. Give me something. I don’t know. As well, want you guys to know this, any questions that you guys have, feel free to let me know. In the middle of this, I’ll definitely be able to answer those, and so wanted to just go through with you guys what my process is honestly, and what I did do to achieve everything I have, and so I’m not done yet. It’s not like I’m just going to kind of go, “Oh well, I’m here”, whatever. Aaron, what’s up? What’s up? Nathaniel, Randy, how are you, guys? Alec, how are you? [Amit 00:01:36]? [Ahmet 00:01:37]? Dude, I don’t know. I’m sorry. The worst pronouncer of names ever here. Jimmy, what’s up, man? All right, guys, so we’re just going to go ahead and kick things off. If you guys are watching this on the replay, say replay. Want to see who all watches this live, and obviously back. Like I said, for those of you who just jumped on, if you guys have questions, feel free to reach out and say them right in the middle of this, all right? I want to help you guys, because like I said, I’ve been getting tons of messages, “Hey, what did you do?”, “How did you do this?”, all this, and so I messaged a couple of people back, and then I was like, “All right. No. I’m done. I’ve got to go live because texting people back so much is just not going to really work out as well.” “It just took forever.” This is honestly what I did, all right? If you guys aren’t in Rank Daddy Pro yet, please, please, please go sign up for it, because that’s why I was able to do what I did. You guys need to really … For those of you who are in Academy, you guys need to figure out a way to upgrade. I don’t know. Get a credit card with 0% APR interest, something like that to make this investment because this is a huge, huge investment, and for those of you who are in Pro, you guys know the value of one, all the trainings, but secondly, our Facebook group. That’s just incredible of a small community that we hope to get even bigger, but just how helpful that it is, right? Whenever you ask a question, it’s all there, and that’s honestly why I was able to do what I did. Now, let’s talk about prospecting, all right? What I did is I literally just came up with a list. I sat down one night and just started thinking, “Okay. What kind of businesses are there? What are the categories?” All right? I’ve got a list pinned up of roofers, landscapers, tree service, a dentist, pest control, towing, restaurants, water damage, painting, contractor, lawyer, a plumber, carpet cleaning, a limo service, car detailing, a mover. I just came up with a big list of … Oh, man. My water is out. That’s a sad day. All right. I guess I’m back. Cool. If you guys can hear me, just give me a thumbs up. It said I had low internet connection for a second, so just want to make sure that you guys can hear me before I start to ramble on. Like I said, create that list there. I’m seeing thumbs up. All right. Perfect. Thanks, guys. Creating that list helped me, and this is what I did. I straight up just did this because a lot of you guys might not know this, but I’ve got a background in the real estate industry, and that’s really what I do kind of more so than SEO, is I buy and flip and sell investment properties, and so that’s really what I do full-time. It’s kind of what I focus on, because there’s big money in that. You can pop off a big chunk of 20, 30,000 bucks at once, and so that’s what I focus on, and I do this stuff on the side, so I haven’t really gotten full into prospecting like I really want to, just because again, I don’t have the time running two businesses, so I just have to pick and choose what I have. What I did is I straight up went on to Google. Again, this is a prospecting method in Rank Daddy Pro, then I’m going to give you guys tips about what they teach you in Pro of what I actually use. What I did is I just created a list like that, and I just straight up cold called. I went on to Google, began at the top of page two, and just started calling people. “Am I the only one? The video stopped playing.” Yeah. It kicked off, so if you guys need to rejoin, go ahead and get back on there. What I did is I cold called them straight up. I also had a virtual assistant help me, and what I would do is, is I made a training video, and if you guys have a Mac, it’s key. Hey, if you guys are on here, I see some new faces hopping on. If you guys have questions about what I’m talking about, anything else, feel free to ask me. If you guys are catching this on the replay, say, “Replay”. You can even do #Replay if you’re really feeling it. So happy to have you guys on. What I did is I had a virtual assistant help me with this as well, is that they would go through, and they would actually go and create lists for me. What they would do is, is they would call, or … They would call. I did that at first. Matt, yeah. Absolutely, man. Happy to help. What I did is, is I had a virtual assistant go through … I gave them a big list, and I told them to go through page 10. Honestly, I probably should have had them go through page like 15 or whatever, but of each industry and each city that I wanted to, so I’m here at the Nashville area, so I gave him like Nashville and a few surrounding areas as well that I thought might be a good idea, and I had him create an Excel sheet of the business name, company phone number, email address if it was there, and I think what page of Google they were on. What I did is, is with all those emails, what I did is I created a MailChimp, and I sent out a MailChimp to that same list about three times. I sent the same thing, and then I mixed it up, but I just sent it over and over and over again, until I got people saying, “Take me off your list”, or whatever just to know that people got it, but that worked. I got a couple of clients by doing that, and then I called people. Just straight up cold called them. One of them is … Actually, I’ve got a follow-up with them tomorrow. Funny enough, this was back in June, all right? He was ready for SEO. He’s a t-shirt printer. They do that, and they do embroider as well, which is something that I didn’t really think of, but they were ready to do SEO, man, and it was t-shirt company population of about 200,000 people. They were ready, and their AC blew out in their workspace, and so he was like, “Hey, I’m not going to be able to. I want to. Call me back in September.” Here we are, so I’m going to get back with him and follow up, and that’s another big thing, is follow up. Make sure that you guys create some sort of … For me, it worked the best creating a Google sheet, and just kind of keeping up with who I called, when I called them, when I was going to need to call them back, things like that, and that was really a great way for me to know who I needed to call when, and it just helped me keep organized, because I feel like I need to be … I’m a very organized individual, so I like to have things laid out to a tee. You know what I mean? That’s what I would suggest for you guys, is to do that. Again, if you guys have questions throughout all of this, feel free and shoot. I did that, and then, this is a really important thing that I did as well, and this has worked for me the very best, the very best, asking for referrals. Now, you can’t just straight up ask for a referral until you do some work for them, right? One client, my very first one, I landed back in I think April or May, and what I did is, she was paying me about two grand a month, and so I literally socked all 2,000 into her. Boom. I was just throwing it in there, PBNs, press releases, Web 2.0, doing tons of stuff to get her up there, right? Population, about a million. I mean, I was throwing stuff. I was just literally like I said all of it to her, and so what ended up happening is, is in July, she had a record-breaking month, like three times what she’d ever made, and so she was just crazy. She’s like, “This works. This is amazing. Oh, gosh”, so I asked her, “Hey, do you know anyone else that could use the same thing?” She referred six people to me. Six that are all clients right now, all right? They range from a CBD oil shop thing. He’s just sells CBD oil and a few Gummies, and things like that to a plumber. I mean, the list goes on and on of just random friends that she has that are attorneys, and a plumber, a CBD oil shop owner, like just random things, but she was like, “Look at what happened. This guy is legit.” That’s really what happened, and I got her from cold calling, right? That’s what I did, but then … My best advice for you guys is your first one, two, three, four clients really, so everything they give you into them to get them up there to generate the most money. Yeah, you probably won’t make a lot or anything at all, but it’s going to be worth it, guys, so make sure that you guys are sowing into people, and giving and putting everything you can into them. Don’t be super greedy. “Oh well, I’m going to just wait until they pay me.” No, no, no, no. Push that in. Sow into them, because guess what’s going to happen, is when you do that, people know, “Wow, they’ve given me everything”, and now look at it. She gave me six new clients. Why? Because I helped her get a record-breaking month because I wasn’t pinching pennies. I was putting every cent into her website and ranking her. Every penny, all right? I mean, yeah, I think I ended up making like, I don’t know, 2,000 bucks for two months of it. I ended up making about $400, so 200 bucks each month. That kind of like made up for my time, just as far as putting into it. You know what I mean? It didn’t really make up for all of my time, but it made up for a little bit, and so like I said, I just sowed into it, right? That’s what I did, guys. I mean, it’s really not that hard, and another big thing is Facebook marketing. That’s another big one, is literally doing this, joining the yard sale groups, buy, sell, trade groups, literally any of that, and just post something like this, “Hey, local business owners, share your website. Let’s see what we come up with”, and make something creative. Make it sound like you’re trying to talk to people, and then say, “Mine’s in the comments”, and you start it off, and you share your SEO agency site, right? You say, “All right. Hey, here’s my company site. I run an online marketing agency.” I just say online marketing agency is a lot easier. People don’t know what SEO is most of the time, so say something like … Literally just do that and don’t spam a group, right? Add some value to it. If somebody is asking for a referral for a chiropractor, give them yours, whoever you go to, a dentist, same thing. Add value so that way, people see you as real, not just as a spammer. You know what I mean? Literally, like I said, just it’s when you get that one client, when you get your first, what you need to do is you need to literally sow every penny that you have to getting them to be number one, all right? Here’s why. Here’s why. Even if you’re like, “Yeah, it’s 500 bucks a month they’re going to pay me. What the heck?”, it’s nothing. Put all 500. Put 700 into it, right? Here’s why. When you can show somebody rankings and say, “Look at this guy. I ranked him. He’s ranking number one”, mobile, on a computer, and in the Map Pack … It’s important for you guys who aren’t using SerpTrack.io, go use that to track your rankings. Literally, Brandon and whoever helped him create that is literally the best-ranking tool out there, so go sign up for that. Plus, it’s cheap. It’s the same price … I was using Rank Tracker before to pay 19 bucks a month, went over to Brandon’s and paid 20 bucks … Oh, a dollar more, and got double the keywords, and I think double or 10 times the sites I get, but like something insane that I was like, “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I, right?”, and he shows you a computer, ranking mobile and Map Pack, especially the Mac Pack. I think the Map Pack is probably one of the most important ranking tools because that shows up the majority of times when somebody searches on an iPhone, and over 60% of mobile of any search on to Google is done from a mobile phone, so yeah, makes sense that the Map Pack’s going to show up, and that’s why it’s important to get you guys up there. Again, I would really highly suggest for you guys to just hustle and cold call people. Call people off of one of the billboards, a van, and here’s a big one that you guys probably aren’t going to like this, show up in their office. Just show up, right? Show up. Dress professionally with a little handout, some sort of a letter, a flyer, I don’t know, something that you can hand them and say, “Hey, this is what I do.” “No.” “Are you guys interested, and if not, you just leave it there”, because who knows? In six months, they might call you back, right? They might, because they might be going through a hard time, one, or two, if they are already doing SEO, their SEO, dude might just suck, okay? Straight up, might just suck. I had a client, and they were with another SEO company for like six months, best-ranking like page four, I think. All I did was on-page SEO on to … They ranked number one in all their cities they were trying to go after, right? Again, my man Jerry here, who is on … I don’t know. He was on. I don’t know if he is. He helped me out big time, and guess what? In Rank Daddy Pro. That’s why it’s so important, guys for you guys to get into Rank Daddy Pro here. Now, I’ll be honest, Brandon didn’t ask me to come on here and sell you guys Rank Daddy Pro and blah, blah, blah. That’s not why I’m doing this. I’m just being honest, giving you guys my opinion about what’s best, because you guys saw what I was able to accomplish, and why was that? Rank Daddy Pro. That’s why I was able to do that. Why do you think that Ed over here is popping off these big clients? One, he actually hustles and actually does the work, and two, Rank Daddy, right? That’s why. A community, right? We ask each other questions, even if we feel like it’s a silly thing to ask like, “Hey, guys. I should probably know this, but I’m just kind of drawing … I’m just kind of having a hard time remembering what that is. What is that?”, and people answer, and boom. There it is, so people … We help each other there, and it’s fantastic. As far as what my favorite niche and population size is, honestly, I don’t really have a favorite niche necessarily because I’ve got a bunch of different clients and a bunch of different fields, and they all work pretty well, from car detailing to a plumber, to CBD oil, to tons of different things. Honestly, I think my favorite clients to go after are probably the ones in the like 1,000 to $1,800 a month range, and I’ll talk about how I also price things here in a minute, but I’m going to wrap this up fairly quick, probably 10 more minutes because I’ve got a tea time this afternoon. Why? Because I don’t really have to work that much, because I’ve gotten this stuff. Yeah. I’m going to continue to push, but guess what? I can work half a day in the morning and go play 18 holes in the afternoon because of this, so it’s fantastic. My favorite population sizes honestly are probably anything under about 300,000. That’s me. Why is that? Because that’s the easiest to rank. Really, all you would need to do is drop a press release, do social signals, Web 2.0s, and of course, this is kind of … You should just know this, but do an on-page SEO correctly, right? That’s kind of a given, but doing that right. Let’s just back it up. On-page SEO, number one. Very, very important. Then, press release, social signals, few Web 2.0s and a couple PBNs, and they’re pretty much top three, and really, once you do the local citations, they’re going to be up there in the Map Pack. Matt, yes. One second. I will go over that. Yes. One of the things that you guys need to look at is what’s going to be easier to rank, 10 clients and a thousand bucks a month in a population of 150,000, or one client going national from very competitive keyword for 10,000 bucks a month? In fact, they’re going to be on you constantly every day. “Hey, how are the rankings? Hey, how are the rankings?” “Hey, how are the rankings? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.” They’re going to be on you constantly, but somebody paying you a thousand bucks a month in a population of 150,000 people, yeah, they might message you once a week, but guess what? The upkeep’s going to be a lot less because they know you, they trust you. It’s not going to be a big corporation. It’s going to be a mom and a pop type thing. It’s going to be one dude running it, or a father and son, husband and a wife. You get the idea, so it’s a little bit easier, so I would pick easily a 10, a thousand buck a month clients in a hundred thousand, 200,000 city because you get a rank faster, and when you get those, it just gives you more ammo, more marketing ammo, saying, “Look. Look at me. Look at me. I rank this guy number one.” “I can do that for you”, and that’s a big thing of other clients that I got, is that yes, the one client that had that record-smashing, not even [breaking 00:23:28], so record-smashing month in July. They just saw her, and they saw those rankings and said, “Yeah. She said you’re good. I don’t even need to see other people”, so that’s why it’s important for you to focus on one individual client, or two or three to get them up there to begin asking for a referral. That’s very, very key. Now, Matt asked, “Can you go over a bit of how your cold calls went, stuff that you found worked and didn’t, et cetera?” Yes. This sounds kind of silly, I guess, but get yourself a pair of headphones, all right? I’ve got the Powerbeats3, so you just hook in to your ear. It just looks like this, right? It’s super easy. Super comfortable. The microphones here, you put this one on the other ear, and you just go at it, and you call, and you can’t tell. These things are, I think they’re 150 bucks. I would make an investment in these or something like it, plus, I like these for when I go on a run or anything like that because they’re just super nice. That’s my tip number one, get some sort of a headset, but this isn’t what I would say, is as soon as I would call them, is whoever would answer is I would say, “Hey, just out of curiosity, I found you guys online back on page four or five. Was just curious if you guys have anybody doing SEO or online marketing work for you guys at all.” They would just base on what they would answer, I would kind of lean with that, see how they would answer, and then just say, “Okay. Great. Is there something I could maybe chat to, maybe a manager or somebody who’s in charge of all of your guys’, all of the marketing?” They would usually be like, “Yeah. Sure.” “That’s Jim. He does all of that, or that’s John”, or whoever, and you would get to them, and then you just ask them and just say, “Hey, found you guys back online back to page four or five. Was just curious if you guys have anybody helping you guys rank your website, increase your traffic, get more leads, et cetera.” If they’re like, “No thank you.” Be like, “Would you like to increase your revenue by two times or five times?” Kind of like, “Wait. What? Yeah, of course.” SEO can help you with that, right? One thing is cold calls get a lot easier the more you do them and the more ammo you have. Ammo is clients, and rankings, and things like that. You can say … This is one of the things I love to do, and when I first began, I would use this, because I had already ranked, and this was before I even found Rank Daddy and all, but I had already ranked my real estate investment company up there, and so I would just have them on the phone, say, “Hey, why don’t you go in to Google right now and just type in, ‘Where can I sell my house?’, in whatever their area was, because I knew that I was already up there, and just say, ‘Hey’. Just tell me who shows up number one.” They would read, “Oh, this website.” “Yup. That’s me.” “If you click on that, go to the About Page, you’ll see my name, my picture, all of that”, to give them a validity saying, “Oh, snap. I Googled this, and you just showed right up.” It’s good when you talk to somebody over the phone, is have them actually look up one of your clients, right? Actually, look that up while you’re on the phone with them. Say, “Hey, yeah. Are you in front of a computer?” They’re like, “Yeah, I am.” “Wonderful. Go ahead and hop on there to Google, and just type in there whatever the keyword that your client’s up there for”, and they’re going to say, “Yeah. I see that.” You say, “Yup. I ranked them.” It gives them a validity, so it just gives them validity to see, “Okay. This dude is real. This client here, he’s ranking them, and okay. All right. All right. I’m beginning to see this, beginning to trust this”, so really guys, with cold calling, you’re going to face rejection. It’s just going to happen, and this is a weird trick, I know. This is going to sound so weird to all of you, but it works for me, so you’ll have to find your thing that works for you, is that give yourself some sort of a reward for cold calling people. What I would do, kid you not, I’m a two-year old, it’s so funny, I would literally … I went to Sam’s Club, and I bought a big thing of some fruit snacks, so I literally would, after every couple of calls, I would say, “All right. I can eat a couple of these. For every two, three calls I make, I can get one gummy or two”, however I set it in my own head. What that would do is, is that would motivate me a little bit to call them to say, “Okay. I can’t eat these until I make that call.” I know it sounds silly, but it worked for me, right? Maybe for you, it’s, “All right. I can’t play another round of 18 holes until I make 25 calls, 30 calls. I’m not allowed to do something I enjoy until I make this many calls.” What that’s going to do for you is it’s going to kind of give you motivation to do it, right? Hey, guys. If you guys have any questions, feel free to shoot. Alexis, I’m trying to expand your question there. It says, “See more”, but when I hit “See more”, just brings me to like it or something. I don’t know. Yeah, “Share one of your real estate sites.” We can talk about it. Yeah. Send me a private message and we can chat. Oh, before I forget, yes, this is the last thing I’m going to go over, but if you guys have any other questions, feel free and shoot. Again, got to go play 18. What I did as far as pricing, this has been huge for me, and this has worked so stinking well, is what I’ve done is … All right. Let’s just say that you’ve got a client for 2,000 bucks a month. Aaron, yeah. Literally, it’s exactly what I’m going to go into. This is how I set this up, guys, and this works so well. So well. Let’s just say that we have a $2,000 a month client. Again, guys, in Rank Daddy Pro, it teaches you how to price clients correctly, and how to do it all, and again, a good Rank Daddy Pro community that’s, has other clients and might have them in your own, in that particular area or clientele that you’re shooting for. They might be able to help you, and give you tips. “Oh, hey, I only gave them a thousand dollar a month, $1,500 a month”, whatever. It’s a great way to help, but this is what I did. Let’s just say we have a $2,000 a month client, right? What I would do is, is I would give them a bit of a pricing cut month one and month two, so I would tell them this, “All right. It’s going to take about 2,000 a month”, and this is a good thing for you guys to do. I always send this in an email always. I never tell them a pricing over the phone. I always say, “Hey, I’m going to have to look into it. Let me send you an email.” Here’s why, is you have that in writing proof of what you’re going to offer them, how much, how everything is. It’s just wise to have everything in writing, all right? Now, what I did … Again, I keep on shooting off here. Let’s go back. 2,000 buck a month client. How I present this to them is say, “All right, so the typical price is going to be 2,000 a month, but you know what? What I’m going to do for you is I like to help out other companies because I know what it’s like.” “I get it. I know what it’s like to pay for a marketing channel that’s new and might not generate leads right off the top, and it’s going to take time, and I get that. I know what it’s like. I run a company too”, blah, blah, blah. “I know what it is. What I’m going to do is I’m going to actually help eat some of your costs.” “It’s not that you’re getting any less of a package, but I’m going to actually help you eat costs. Yeah, it’s going to be 2,000 bucks a month, but, you know what? For month one and two, I’m only going to charge you a thousand, or 800”, or you make the determination for what you feel is comfortable for you, and say, “All right. You know what? I’m going to chop that 2,000 in half, so month one is going to be a thousand, month two, same thing, another thousand, and then month three and beyond, it’s going to jump up to the agreed upon $2,000.” What that does is it lets people see, “Oh, wow. It’s kind of like I’m paying for one month, but getting two months out of it.” “Oh, okay. All right.” It’s a lot easier for them to try things out for lesser, for less money than what you talked to them about originally, because it makes them feel like they’re getting a deal, a sweet deal. “Hey, I’m giving you half off”, and that’s how you get to give it to them. I did that. Worked like a charm. Perfect, like you would not believe. Worked incredible, all right? That’s how I do it for everyone of my clients is I give them a bit of a price cut, and honestly, I don’t give them any less. If I lose money, I lose a little bit of money. No big deal, because I know that it’s going to succeed and they’re going to come back month three, four, five, six, seven, and they’re going to keep paying me money, right? It’s a way for me to set myself up for the future to know, “Okay. They’re going to keep paying me. They’re not going to stop paying me.” Any other questions, guys? That’s kind of how I did what I did. I know you’re kind of like, “Did I miss something? Yeah.” Like, “What’s going on?” No, guys. That’s literally it. There’s no secret magic sauce, you know what I mean? It’s just doing it. Hey, Ken. Yeah. How many calls a day was I doing? Like I said, I also run a real estate investment company, and so I did this SEO thing on the side. I wasn’t really focusing on it, so I would only make five to 10 calls a day, if that, and I did for probably a couple weeks, until I landed a couple clients, then I kind of got overwhelmed with a couple of houses. I went to buy and fixing them up, and doing things, so I got overwhelmed and didn’t really focus on it much, other than the clients I had, and so what I did is like I said, is I said, “Okay. Probably, the easiest way for me to get more clients is to have one do really, really well and have a couple do really, really well, and have them just refer people to me so I don’t have to make all the calls and do that.” I was right, and it worked, and yes. Ken, what I did is I … I would definitely encourage you to go watch the first half. What I did is I have a virtual assistant. I picked a bunch of categories, roofers, landscapers, tree service, all of that, and what I did is had a VA go and pull the company name, the website, the phone number, any email address that was on there, and what page they were on to Google on, and when I call them, I always added a couple extra pages, so if they’re on page two, you go, “Hey, we found you on page four or five”, kind of make it sound kind of worse than it is, and so that’s how I set that up. Yeah. Aaron said, “Are you basing price off city?” Yeah. What I tell them, I tell everyone this, is I base what the pricing is on these two things, the city population size and your competition, how much competition do you have in your area online, right? Really, all I do is I base it off a city, and so … I forgot that was empty, man. Did that earlier. Definitely going to have to get some water here soon. How I set things up is right now, I’ve got a plumber in a city of 50,000 for about 600 bucks a month because I know that that’s a lot for him, but it’s going to work well for him, so yeah, I base it all off city population size, and so what I would say is kind of a good rule of thumb, is anything below 150,000 people, consider being in the range. I don’t want to charge people less than 500 bucks, and that’s like rock-bottom. I really don’t take people under a thousand, but I took on a plumber just to again build my ammo, build my rankings to show people, “Hey, I ranked him”, so I’m not making money off of him. I’m going to make money off of him eventually though because I’m going to use his rankings to show other high-profile clients, right? That’s how I set things up, so don’t say no to the little guys because it’s going to help you land a much larger fish. Like I said, anything under 150,000 people, I would probably look at between 500 and a thousand bucks, somewhere in that range, and then population of 150 to 300,000. I would say no more than 2,000 a month, just kind of look in that kind of range. I feel like a good, solid base no matter what is about 1,500 bucks because if you look at it, you run local citations, press release, social signals, PBNs, kind of gives you enough to put into the client, but you also make a little bit, so if they’re not feeling 3,000 bucks a month, chop it in half and see what 1,500 bucks is. You know what I mean? It’s better to get something than nothing at all, and again, clients … Excuse me, the smaller fish are going to help you land bigger clients because new, potential clients want to see rankings of current clients, so if you don’t have any because you’re too expensive and you’re not willing to kind of take a little bit of a hit upfront to get those rankings, then guess what? You’re probably not going to do so well. Okay? Just saying, so that’s what I would do, all right? All right, guys. That is really … Honestly, guys, that’s everything. If nobody has any other questions, I’m going to sign off. I’ve got like I said my tea time here pretty soon, so I got to go get changed and go get ready for that. Going to grab a bite to eat and go play 18 holes. Guess what, guys? You guys can live the luxury life I am … No. I’m just kidding. I’m not really … Listen, guys, I’m not living some extravagant life or anything like that. Just working hard, guys. It’s what I tell all of my employees, is I tell them this is, “Listen, guys. We just have to work hard. We can’t settle. Don’t settle, guys. Don’t settle.” When you have 10 clients, awesome. That’s great. You got 10. Go get 30. When you get 30, you did it. You got 30 clients. Go get 50. You’ve got 50. Oh, it can’t get better than this. Oh, it can, because when you hit 55, it gets better. When you hit 75, it gets better. When you hit 100, it gets better, all right? I’ve made a mistake, especially in all of the real estate side of things for me, is when I close a house, I’m saying, “Oh, man. Feels good. Let me kick back and relax. Oh, this feels great.” Right? Don’t do that. Don’t relax. Don’t settle. I’m not saying don’t go and enjoy yourself, right? Have fun. Live life with your family, your friends. Do fun things. Let this be a freeing experience to say, “I’ve got the money now. We can go play 18 holes. We can go on a little vacation, a weekend in somewhere, to the mountains, to a local beach, a lake house”, something to … Let this be an enjoyable process for you guys, and again, Rank Daddy Pro is where it is at, guys. It’s where it’s at. Go sign up. If you guys haven’t … I’m just telling you this now. That’s why I am where I am, is because of that, Rank Daddy Pro. Go and sign up for it, guys. I’m telling you, go do it. Go do it. It’s worth its weight in gold. “Yeah. So what? It’s a few thousand bucks.” Go open up a credit card and put it on that. Do something. Make an investment in yourself. Yeah, I had to pay too. Guess what? Pulling in almost 20,000 bucks a month. Going to up that to 30 or 40,000 a month coming up soon. Guess what? Got a few thousand bucks. It’s just a tiny, little drop, okay? You have to pay that. You have to pay to play. It’s just the way that it is, guys. It’s worth it. I’m telling you, it’s worth it. Listen, guys, if you guys have questions, feel free to drop a comment on here, and so feel free. Drop a comment, and I would love to answer it here, because it would be awesome if you guys can just leave any questions. Those of you guys catching this on replay, watch it here. Leave a comment here, so that way, I can answer it here, so that’s just like everybody can see it rather than you just sending me a message. Let’s try to keep it all in here, so that way, this helps everyone, and not just you. Guys, that is everything. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope this has been a big help, just kind of give you guys some encouragement on what to do and things like that, so guys, go make calls. Go get it. Go kill it. Go lock up clients. Go get the job done. Guys, biggest encouragement here, do the work. Make the calls. Don’t hire somebody to do the calls. Make the calls yourself. It’s always the sweetest victory when you can do something yourself and say, “I did this. I made that call. I worked that deal.” “I got that person. I landed it. Boom. I did it. Yes, this is great.” Then, when you begin to land clients, then you can tell somebody, “Hey, this is actually how I did this”, rather than trying to hire somebody saying, “Hey, I don’t know how to make cold calls.” “I don’t know how to land a client. Just go figure it out.” You can’t do that. You got to do it yourself, right? That’s my biggest piece of advice. All right, guys. I will see you guys later. I got to go play 18 holes. I’ll talk with you guys later. All right. I’ll see you.

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Track Your Website Rankings In Google (without going broke) [LNIM085]

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2014 41:22

Tracking the ranking position of the keywords for your websites is a critical part of any affiliate marketing business. In this episode, I talk about my personal solution for tracking web site rankings — Rank Tracker from Link-Assistant.com. I use the tool to track website rankings in conjunction with a captcha solver, a dedicated “always on” […] The post Track Your Website Rankings In Google (without going broke) [LNIM085] appeared first on Late Night Internet Marketing with Mark Mason.

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Episode 45 - How to Change your Plan

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2012 7:22

In this video you'll learn how to update your Rank Tracker plan so that you can track the rankings of your websites in the major search engines quickly and easily.

rank tracker

Episode 44 - How to Upload your Ranking Data to the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2012 8:17

This video reveals how you can quickly and easily upload your existing Rank Tracker data to the cloud, so you can start tracking your rankings on autopilot with Market Samurai's new Rank Tracker.

data cloud ranking upload rank tracker market samurai

Episode 44 - How to Upload your Ranking Data to the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2012 8:17

This video reveals how you can quickly and easily upload your existing Rank Tracker data to the cloud, so you can start tracking your rankings on autopilot with Market Samurai's new Rank Tracker.

data cloud ranking upload rank tracker market samurai

Episode 45 - How to Change your Plan

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2012

In this episode you'll learn how to update your Rank Tracker plan so that you can track the rankings of your websites in the major search engines quickly and easily.

rank tracker

Episode 44 - How to Upload your Ranking Data to the Cloud

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2012

This episode reveals how you can quickly and easily upload your existing Rank Tracker data to the cloud, so you can start tracking your rankings on autopilot with Market Samurai's new Rank Tracker.

data cloud ranking upload rank tracker market samurai

Episode 45 - How to Change your Plan

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2012 7:22

In this video you'll learn how to update your Rank Tracker plan so that you can track the rankings of your websites in the major search engines quickly and easily.

rank tracker

Episode 30 - How to Analyze Your Rankings

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2010 13:39

How to interpret Rank Tracker data so you can watch your website increase in Google's search engine ranking.

google analyze rank tracker

Episode 29 - Introduction to Rank Tracker

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2010 9:53

How to track your website's ranking in the search engines using Market Samurai's Rank Tracker.

rank tracker

Episode 30 - How to Analyze Your Rankings

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2010

How to interpret Rank Tracker data so you can watch your website increase in Google's search engine ranking.

google analyze rank tracker

Episode 29 - Introduction to Rank Tracker

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2010

How to track your website's ranking in the search engines using Market Samurai's Rank Tracker.

rank tracker

Episode 30 - How to Analyze Your Rankings

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2010 13:39

How to interpret Rank Tracker data so you can watch your website increase in Google's search engine ranking.

google analyze rank tracker

Episode 29 - Introduction to Rank Tracker