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In Part 2 of our conversation about Local SEO, Darren Shaw of Whitespark returns to The Simple and Smart SEO Show to break down advanced Google Business Profile (GBP) strategies that actually move the needle. From the controversial truth about citation consistency to actionable tactics for leveraging Google reviews and optimizing your GBP for maximum visibility, Darren shares insider tips you won't find in a typical SEO blog post. Whether you're a service provider, e-commerce seller, or local business, this episode is packed with high-impact, no-fluff advice to help you dominate local search results—ethically and effectively.
In this value-packed episode of the Simple and Smart SEO Show, host
Was this helpful? Leave a review!https://g.page/r/CVs16A3t1J44EAI/reviewThis episode delves into the critical issue of fake reviews in the digital shopping landscape, emphasizing the growing prevalence and impact on consumer decision-making. We uncover insights from a study analyzing 73 million reviews, share tips to spot AI-generated reviews, and address the phenomenon of review hijacking affecting local businesses.The significance of reviews in modern purchasing decisions The rise of AI-generated reviews and implications for consumersOverview of the study and its findings on review fraud Tips for identifying suspicious reviews Discussion on the practice of review hijacking and its impact on businesses ADDITIONAL RESOURCESOriginal study:https://askfortransparency.com/research/high-cost-of-review-fraud/Google Business Profile monitoring by Whitespark:https://whitespark.ca/local-platform/ ---Meredith's Husbandhttps://www.meredithshusband.com
Edge of the Web - An SEO Podcast for Today's Digital Marketer
This week, we've got a jam-packed session covering the latest and most pressing news in digital marketing and SEO. Top Stories: we discussed the recent merger of Getty and Shutterstock and its implications for image licensing, alongside the backlash Automattic is facing from the WordPress community. Adding to this, we explored how Google's search market share has hit its lowest since 2015! We have a special segment “In Local News” with friend of the show and Local SEO specialist, Darren Shaw, founder and president of WhiteSpark. He'll be sharing his insights on local search ranking factors, mapping exploits, and the evolving landscape of Google's local and LSA ads. Whether you manage a digital marketing agency or optimize your own business's online presence, this episode is loaded with invaluable tips and updates to help you navigate your digital marketing journey in 2025. So, buckle up and let's get to the EDGE—of the Web! News from the EDGE: [00:02:44] The Getty-Shutterstock merger: A new era for image SEO and licensable content [00:11:54] Automattic Turns Against WordPress Community Itself [00:17:19] EDGE of the Web Title Sponsor: Site Strategics [00:18:52] Google's search market share drops below 90% for the first time since 2015 In Local News w/ Darren Shaw:[00:24:05] EDGE of the Web Sponsor: InLinks[00:25:21] Google Map Pin Attack Exploit Fixed [00:28:14] Near Media - Google is replacing the UGC Google Q&A with "Ask Maps." [00:31:26] Mike Blumenthal - Details” on the “Review Badge of Shame” [00:35:52] Mike Blumenthal - LSA ads are becoming ever more visible [00:38:15] Anthony Higman - Google Is Getting Rid Of Crediting Back Leads, Message Leads, Booking And Call Recording For The Tax Specialist Vertical [00:41:47] Antoine Cameron - new AI tool under the Products section in Google Business Profiles [00:45:28] January 2025 Google Local Ranking Update (Unconfirmed Bug) Thanks to our sponsors! Site Strategics https://edgeofthewebradio.com/site Inlinks https://edgeofthewebradio.com/inlinks Follow Us: X: @ErinSparks BluSky: Darren Shaw (https://bsky.app/profile/whitespark.ca) X: @TheMann00 X: @EDGEWebRadio
In this episode, Meredith and her husband discuss issues surrounding Google Business Profile suspensions, offering strategies to prevent suspensions and steps to take for reinstatement. They explain common triggers, like address-related issues and frequent user-edit suggestions, and emphasize the importance of monitoring business listings closely. They recommend tools like WhiteSpark to manage citations effectively, which helps Google verify business information. These tips can help business owners maintain visibility and avoid common pitfalls in Google's local search system.Resources:https://whitespark.ca/local-platformhttps://support.google.com/business/answer/4569145Chapters[0:24] Introduction to Google Business Profile Suspensions[0:51] Profile Suspension Due to Business Name Issues[1:09] Importance of Maintaining a Verified Profile[2:06] Common Reasons for Profile Suspensions[3:17] Misunderstandings About Suspension Causes[4:29] Competitor Manipulation and Address Changes[6:07] Steps to Contact Google Support[6:57] Suspension Impact on SEO and Search Visibility[8:08] Monitoring and Managing Business Listings[10:47] Tips for Preventing Address-Based Suspensions ---Meredith's Husbandhttps://www.meredithshusband.com
Join host Jack Chambers-Ward and special guest Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark, as they dive into the latest in local SEO and Google Business Profile optimisation. Discover key updates expected in 2025, innovative methods to enhance rankings, the impact of custom service entries, strategic use of Google Posts, and the importance of robust Q&A sections. From optimising menu items for restaurants to leveraging photos and videos effectively, this episode is packed with expert insights and practical tips essential for SEO professionals and business owners. Links to follow Darren Darren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenshawwhitespark/ Whitespark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/whitespark/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@darrenshawseo Website: https://whitespark.ca/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WhitesparkCa Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@darrenshawseo Resources Local SEO ranking factors 2023 edition - https://whitespark.ca/local-search-ranking-factors Do Services in Google Business Profiles Impact Ranking? - Sterling Sky Inc Are Opening Hours a Local Ranking Factor? - BrightLocal Report: Menu items, busier businesses may be Google local ranking signals Google Vision AI: https://cloud.google.com/vision Website Title Tags and GMB Snippets Enter…the stuff zone: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/darrenshawwhitespark_perfect-title-tags-for-local-seo-activity-7065345429235781632-xGo1/ Chapters 00:00 Introduction 02:20 Sponsorship Shoutout: SE Ranking 03:54 Sponsorship Shoutout: Also Asked 05:19 Darren Shaw's Journey in SEO 06:31 Local Search Ranking Factors Update 09:43 Optimising Google Business Profile Services 18:23 Impact of Business Hours on Rankings 23:47 Menu Items and Local SEO 29:03 Multilingual Business Names for Local SEO 31:34 Mastering Google Posts: Common Mistakes and Best Practices 37:19 The Power of Videos and Photos in Google Business Profiles 44:53 Optimising Your Google Business Profile Q&A 50:18 The Controversy of Keyword Stuffing in Title Tags 57:07 Outro
The Bulletproof Dental Podcast Episode 362 HOSTS: Dr. Peter Boulden and Dr. Craig Spodak GUEST: Darren Shaw DESCRIPTION In this conversation, Peter and Darren discuss the importance of local SEO for dentists and how to optimize their Google Business Profile. They cover topics such as the impact of reviews on local rankings, the significance of keywords in the business name, the value of image and video optimization, and the benefits of using YouTube for video embedding. Darren emphasizes the importance of user engagement signals, such as time on site and pogo sticking, in influencing search rankings. He also discusses the significance of having a well-designed website with compelling copywriting and videos to keep visitors engaged. He highlights the value of optimizing GMB services and using Google Posts as a sales tool. Additionally, Darren recommends using Microsoft Clarity to track user behavior on websites and improve conversion rates. TAKEAWAYS Local SEO is crucial for dentists to improve their rankings in the local pack and attract more customers. Optimizing the Google Business Profile is essential, including selecting the right primary category and soliciting reviews. Image optimization, including adding captions and descriptions, can improve engagement and visibility. Mobile optimization is vital, as Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites and profiles. User engagement signals, such as time on site and pogo sticking, play a crucial role in search rankings. Having a well-designed website with compelling copywriting and videos can help keep visitors engaged. Optimizing GMB services and using Google Posts as a sales tool can have a positive impact on rankings and conversions. Tracking user behavior on websites using tools like Microsoft Clarity can help improve conversion rates. CHAPTERS 00:00 - Introduction and Background 02:29 - The Importance of Local SEO for Dentists 06:43 - Optimizing the Google Business Profile 09:26 - The Significance of Keywords in the Business Name 12:20 - Creating Separate Google Business Profiles for Practitioners 18:10 - The Impact of Image Optimization on Rankings 20:58 - The Benefits of Using YouTube for Video Embedding 25:23 - The Importance of Mobile Optimization 30:13 - Optimizing User Engagement Signals 33:12 - Prioritizing GMB Services and Mirror Image Web Pages 46:58 - Monitoring and Managing Google Business Profiles 51:38 - Tracking User Behavior with Microsoft Clarity REFERENCES Bulletproof Mastermind Darren Shaw
Send us a Text Message.New SAB Local Ranking Factor: Service area businesses have long been a problem on Google Maps. Spam, privacy, suspension AND ranking issues have plagued them since the beginning. Now it appears that there may be hope on the ranking issue. Historically they were ranked around the location from which they were claimed regardless of the service area. Darren Shaw of Whitespark has uncovered some indications that this is starting to change and the ranking signals are more around the service area chosen. Stay tuned. Interpreting Google AI Tea leaves & What it Says About Google's Product Development: Lots of questions swirled around Google's AI Overviews: Would their effect be apocalyptic on publishers? What did Pichai mean when he talked about an increase in web visits? Was Google going to surface the data in Search Console?The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Ep 158Subscribe to our 3x per week newsletter at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/
Whether you have a DIY approach to your law firm marketing or an in-house team at your beck and call, you really should be using the top tools of the trade, and Gyi and Conrad share just what you need! But first—many, many SEOs preach that you should keep ALL your old content… but we're pretty sure you really need to toss the majority of that bulk overboard. Is your website riding a bit low in the water? We keep hearing marketers say that your old content is some sort of treasure trove, but, more likely, it's just outdated junk that needs to be jettisoned—quickly. Clearing things out can make more valuable content perform better, and Gyi and Conrad lay out how to decide what should stay and what should go. Next, the list you've always needed to fill up your marketing toolbox! Depending on your approach and resources, the guys outline three different lists of essential tools to help you hone your marketing tactics. Total Beginner - The DIY Lawyer's Marketing Tools Google Searches Meta's Ad Library Google Maps CallRail Camera Microphone - SM58, MV7, or similar. Intermediate Tools - For the Those With Growing Expertise Local SEO Tools: Local Falcon, BrightLocal, Whitespark, or Places Scout. Intake Management Software: Clio Grow, Lawmatics, Litify, Lead Docket, etc. A Link Index Tool: Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz Advanced Tools - for the Seasoned Pro, Marketing Directors, SEO Leads, and the Like! Screaming Frog The News: Google I/O 2024 (their developer conference) just wrapped up, so what's gonna be happening with the latest in the search realm? Google is adding more AI to its search results | TechCrunch and Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you. ChapGPT 4.0 (Omni) is now available, and we're all just still hoping AI isn't going to eventually kill us all: Hello GPT-4o | OpenAI LSA now means Let's Screw Attorneys — So, should you play the game or just quit now? Thanks? We got a blog award: The 16 Best Legal Marketing Podcasts Of 2024 Gyi and Conrad will both be participating in the Law Firm Growth Summit from May 21-23. And, LocalU Detroit is coming up on June 24th! Mentioned in this Episode: The Bite - Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter! Leave Us an Apple Review Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on TikTok
Whether you have a DIY approach to your law firm marketing or an in-house team at your beck and call, you really should be using the top tools of the trade, and Gyi and Conrad share just what you need! But first—many, many SEOs preach that you should keep ALL your old content… but we're pretty sure you really need to toss the majority of that bulk overboard. Is your website riding a bit low in the water? We keep hearing marketers say that your old content is some sort of treasure trove, but, more likely, it's just outdated junk that needs to be jettisoned—quickly. Clearing things out can make more valuable content perform better, and Gyi and Conrad lay out how to decide what should stay and what should go. Next, the list you've always needed to fill up your marketing toolbox! Depending on your approach and resources, the guys outline three different lists of essential tools to help you hone your marketing tactics. Total Beginner - The DIY Lawyer's Marketing Tools Google Searches Meta's Ad Library Google Maps CallRail Camera Microphone - SM58, MV7, or similar. Intermediate Tools - For the Those With Growing Expertise Local SEO Tools: Local Falcon, BrightLocal, Whitespark, or Places Scout. Intake Management Software: Clio Grow, Lawmatics, Litify, Lead Docket, etc. A Link Index Tool: Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz Advanced Tools - for the Seasoned Pro, Marketing Directors, SEO Leads, and the Like! Screaming Frog The News: Google I/O 2024 (their developer conference) just wrapped up, so what's gonna be happening with the latest in the search realm? Google is adding more AI to its search results | TechCrunch and Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you. ChapGPT 4.0 (Omni) is now available, and we're all just still hoping AI isn't going to eventually kill us all: Hello GPT-4o | OpenAI LSA now means Let's Screw Attorneys — So, should you play the game or just quit now? Thanks? We got a blog award: The 16 Best Legal Marketing Podcasts Of 2024 Gyi and Conrad will both be participating in the Law Firm Growth Summit from May 21-23. And, LocalU Detroit is coming up on June 24th! Mentioned in this Episode: The Bite - Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Newsletter! Leave Us an Apple Review Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on YouTube Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on TikTok
In this episode, I've got to tell you about this amazing chat I had with Derral Eves. If you haven't heard of him, he's the genius who's been helping YouTube stars like Mr. Beast become household names, and he's the brains behind Vid Summit. We got together to talk about something I'm super passionate about: leveraging YouTube for local businesses, especially for my fellow vets out there. And before we jump in, a huge thanks to WhiteSpark and CallRail for supporting our show and helping businesses shine with local SEO and call tracking. Now, let me tell you about Derral's journey. This guy started his digital marketing agency way back in '99 and pivoted to YouTube when it was just a fledgling platform in 2005. He's not just a marketing whiz; he's also a dad to five kids down in southern Utah. His personal story is a testament to how YouTube can revolutionize the way we build audiences and make money. In our conversation, Derral dropped some serious knowledge about the unique advantages YouTube has over other platforms like TikTok. We're talking about real revenue and engagement potential here. He shared stories of success from all kinds of niches, proving that no matter how specialized your interest is, there's room for you on YouTube. For us in the veterinary field, this is golden. I even shared how Dr. Cody Gillman's YouTube channel skyrocketed to 60,000 subscribers, boosting his practice and making it a magnet for young talent in the industry. Derral's parting wisdom? Focus on your passion, not just the views. Whether you're starting a new channel or building on an existing one, clarity and consistency are your best friends. And don't worry about being too niche – it's all about finding your unique specialty and owning it. Remember to check your YouTube data now and then, but don't obsess over it. Keep an eye on metrics like click-through rates and viewer behavior post-video to keep improving your content. Wrapping up, I'm just blown away by the potential YouTube has for vets and local businesses. It's not just about growing your practice; it's about building a community and sharing your passion with the world. So, if you're a vet looking to make a mark, or you're just starting out, consider this your sign to dive into video marketing on YouTube. It could be the best move you make for your business. Thanks for tuning in, and I can't wait to see where your YouTube journey takes you!
In our latest chat, we're tackling the ins and outs of digital marketing and how it can totally transform your vet practice. We're talking about drawing in new clients, keeping them engaged, and making sure they stick around. I'm here to guide you through this journey, so let's jump right in! First off, I want to give a massive shoutout to our sponsors, WhiteSpark and CallRail. These folks are changing the game in digital marketing, and I'll be spilling the beans on how their services can seriously up your practice's game. Now, let's get to the good stuff. We're zeroing in on client-centered marketing because, let's face it, your clients are the heart of your practice. It's not just about listing what you can do; it's about understanding and addressing what your clients and their furry friends need. From the moment they call your practice to the messages they read on your website, it's all about making them feel heard and cared for. And it doesn't stop there. We're diving into how to create meaningful interactions, educate your clients right from the start, and even how to get them to sing your praises to others. Plus, we can't ignore the power of online reviews. I'll share some killer strategies on how to manage feedback to boost your online rep. This episode is jam-packed with actionable tips that can make your practice the go-to spot for pet care. So, if you're ready to make some waves in your digital marketing efforts and create a practice that truly resonates with pet owners, you won't want to miss this. Stick around for more episodes where we'll keep unraveling the world of veterinary digital marketing. Until next time, let's keep pushing the boundaries and making those meaningful connections with our clients. Catch you on the flip side!
In one of my latest episodes, I had an awesome chat with Darren Shaw, the big brain behind Whitespark, and let me tell you, it was a treasure trove of local SEO gold. We dove deep into the nitty-gritty of Google business listings and how they can make or break your visibility in your local community. If you're running a vet practice, you're going to want to hear this because Darren's insights could seriously put you on the map – literally. So, Darren's been in the local SEO game for over a decade, and Whitespark started out just like any other web development company in Edmonton. But now? They're the go-to for boosting your search rankings. And get this – your Google business profile is like your secret weapon. It's shocking how many businesses don't realize the power of keeping it fresh with updates, photos, and engaging content. It's not just about looking good; it's about drawing in those leads and calls that keep your practice thriving. But here's the kicker – local SEO isn't a one-and-done deal. It's a long game, and it's all about building a solid online presence that keeps you top of mind and top of search results. And with Google always shaking things up, Darren and I got into what's next for SEO and how to stay ahead. Plus, he dropped a killer pro tip: sprinkle some relevant keywords into your Google business profile name, and watch your local rankings climb. It's these kinds of strategies that can open up a world of growth for your business. Thanks for tuning in to this deep dive into local SEO with me. If you're ready to up your online game and get those leads rolling in, these strategies are your starting line. And remember, SEO is always on the move, so keep learning, keep tweaking, and keep climbing those rankings. Catch you next time!
Google's Newest Search Features: “Whipped cream on S.H. I. .T”.?While Google's new features aim to enhance user interaction and personalize the search experience, they may not address broader user concerns about search result quality and privacy. And in fact may, as David points out, might just be whipped cream on a not very tasty substrate. The success of these features will depend on their implementation, user acceptance, and compliance with global privacy standards.Whitespark Research: Exploring the Landscape of Local Business Reviews across 1 Million Listings. In the world of local businesses, customer reviews play a pivotal role in shaping public perception and influencing consumer decisions. Darren Shaw and Whitespark's comprehensive analysis of a million local businesses offers valuable insights into the distribution of reviews across various categories. There is a lot of work to be done on the fake review front:Google's new review algo didn't do a very good job spotting the many fake reviews on the physician's practice recently fined by the NYS AG. The fine, $100,000, was hardly enough to pay for the time they spent analyizing the situation and certainly was not enough to deter someone that is making millions as an orthopedic surgeon. While the FTC and state's AG are getting more aggressive bringing high profile cases, it is unlikely that is enough to stem the tide of fake reviews. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.near memo ep 135Subscribe to our 3x per week newsletter at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/
En nuestro capítulo de esta semana de la Pulidora, os hablo de un tema interesante: las reseñas, tanto las buenas como las malas. Os doy mi punto de vista sobre cómo se deberían valorar y analizamos varias reseñas reales que han dejado nuestros compañeros. Info Parquet es la plataforma donde os contamos todo lo relacionado con el parquet. En nuestro blog, vamos publicando noticias, novedades e información. Tenemos un canal de YouTube donde subimos videos de temática variada, y un podcast donde te contamos historias de parquet. Nuestro consejo es que vayas a infoparquet.com y te suscribas a nuestro boletín de noticias. Cada semana te mandaremos todo lo que publiquemos. Además, si eres profesional, puedes crearte una página en nuestro directorio de profesionales. Aquellas personas que visiten nuestra web pueden contactarte. También tenemos una selección de productos recomendados para el parquet y los parquetistas en nuestra tienda, y una sección de recursos y aplicaciones de utilidad en vuestro día a día. Todo son ventajas si estás registrado en Info Parquet. ¡Te esperamos! Si quieres saber todo sobre esta forma virtual de recomendarnos y mi sincera opinión de que en algunos casos se utilizan erróneamente, también os digo cómo implementarlas en vuestra web. Y cómo pedirle a un cliente que te haga la reseña y la valoración de forma sencilla utilizando este enlace que podéis enviar por email, o incluso WhatsApp. ¿Cómo generar un enlace directo a las reseñas de tu ficha? Existen varias plataformas para crear el link directo hacia las reseñas de tu ficha de Google My Business, cada una tiene sus ventajas y desventajas, pero, aquí tienes la más sencilla: Crear enlace a través de Google Review Link Generator –WhiteSpark Entra en la herramienta de WhiteSpark haciendo clic aquí. Escribe el nombre de tu empresa en el buscador. Se generará un link automáticamente hacia las reseñas de tu empresa. *Fuente: https://www.tmwebs.es/como-generar-un-link-para-escribir-resenas-directas-en-google-my-business/ Te llegará un email con el link y además un código QR que podrás enseñar a tus clientes para que te hagan las reseñas en el momento de terminar una obra.
In this episode, Near Media's Mike Blumenthal highlights the Google trends we should all be paying close attention to, discusses the evolution and importance of images in Google Business Profile, and introduces upcoming Near Media consumer research that could change how we look at searcher behavior.Listen to learn:What the future of Google Business Profile might look likeWhere to go to improve your Google and Google Business Profile knowledgeThe part ads and monetization play in the future of Google Business ProfilePLUS a surprising fact about what consumers do and don't care about in reviewsRESOURCESFollow Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mblumenthalMike's profile on the Google Business Profile Community Help Forum: https://support.google.com/profile/1779682?sjid=8164595187474410917-EUMike has an open email policy: mike@blumenthals.comMike's older local search blog, which he keeps alive as an archive: https://blumenthals.com/blog/The Near Memo - Near Media's Podcast: https://www.nearmedia.co/memo/Sterling Sky blog: https://www.sterlingsky.ca/blog/BrightLocal blog: https://www.brightlocal.com/insights/Whitespark blog: https://whitespark.ca/blog/Near Media: https://www.nearmedia.co/How to Upload and Manage Google Business Profile Photos: https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/google-business-profile/optimization/photos/Dispute a removed Google Business Profile photo or video with this form: https://support.google.com/business/gethelp
Tiktok IS about Local but not the way you thinkWhile the Wall Street Journal thinksTikTok holds companies hostage and a small business in Philadelphia thinks it is unfair to get so many fake reviews, there is no denying that Tiktok has scale. While it hasn't really provided any real local discovery options, any given video can get so much traction that it can be felt at the most local of levels. Google Perspectives: innovation for the SERPs or bandaid to prevent social media flight?Google has rolled out a new mobile CTA at the top of many serps called Perspectives which provides a dedicated area at the top of the search result for social media related commentary on the topic of your search. Depending on the query intent it might show first in the radio buttons or it might be last but it includes YouTube, Reddit, Quara and Twitter (amongst others) commentary on the topic. Many think that things have become less useful on Google; too many ads, too much spam, et cetera, and Google has to respond to it. The question is whether this is an adequate response.New Google GBP feature “By Owner” & new Whitespark tool reflect reality that GBP is rented not ownedGoogle is now highlighting “all” owner controlled GBP content in one tab; By owner in the mobile business profile. It includes the business description and their updates (aka Posts). It is not clear why a user would ever select or be curious about that tab. Whitespark has released a new dashboard that tracks the changes that users and Google regularly make to all of the other data in the business profile like phone number, address, categories, URLs etc. and reports these annoying changes back to the business owner. When viewed together, any rational business should be able to understand that they control very, very little of their own profile on Google and what they do control is unlikely to be seen. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.NearMemo Ep118Subscribe to our 3x per week newsletter at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/
Running a roofing business is a journey fueled by blood, sweat, and tears. No matter how much money you have, you want to optimize your marketing dollars to get the most bang for your buck. Today's show will be helpful for roofers at any and every stage of the business, whether you're a grizzled veteran in the business or a rookie who is just starting. Let's talk about how to best spend those marketing dollars! Tim Brown is the owner/CEO of the Hook Agency, where he teaches people how to optimize their websites, improve their SEO, and drive more Google traffic to their websites. His marketing strategies help contractors focus their marketing on their best customers. Tim has been featured on several episodes of The Roofer Coach, and we are glad he's here to share more marketing insights with us today. Before we jump into the conversation with today's guest, my co-host, John DeLaurier, and I are discussing how our contractor mastermind groups work. The benefits to these groups are numerous, and the camaraderie and collaboration go a long way in helping us solve problems that are common in our industry. If you'd like more information, visit The Roofer Mastermind. What you'll hear in this episode: Guidelines for spending marketing dollars in fiscally-responsible ways Where to focus and where to start to market to your ideal customer 5 steps to market your roofing business: Build your brand with a clear, memorable, and specific name, logo, message, story, and tagline. Pay attention to your Google Business Profile and Google Local Service Ads, making sure that your NAP (name, address, and phone #) listings are consistent. Get more reviews on a regular basis. Have a professional website design that speaks to your customer. Start small as you begin your SEO journey, but start with a plan. The difference in a good website and a bad website How the Hook Agency does website design, and how they created the website for DeLaurier Roofing Resources: Connect with Tim Brown and the Hook Agency: www.hookagency.com Whitespark listing service mentioned Previous Episodes with Tim Episode 208: Attract More Website Visitors That Turn Into Appointments That Turn Into Sales with Tim Brown Episode 255: Attract More Website Visitors That Turn Into Appointments That Turn Into Sales with Tim Brown Episode 267: How To Design A Website To Convert Visitors Into Sales, with Tim Brown Episode 294: When To Bring Your Marketing In House with Tim Brown Time is running out! Are you eligible for the Employee Retention Credit (ERC)? Visit www.rpcfinancial.com to find out! Do you need help with your books? We have a certified Quickbooks pro who is waiting to help you! Email John or Dave or contact us on Instagram for more information! Connect with John DeLaurier: www.calldrr.com, Instagram, and Facebook Connect with Dave via text message: 510-612-1450 Let me know if you'd like to join one of our new Mastermind groups for contractors. Email me: dave@theroofershow.com or visit The Roofer Mastermind to sign up. Download my FREE 1-Page Business Plan template at www.theroofershow.com. Contact me about one-on-one coaching at www.theroofercoach.com. We need reviews of the podcast! Please leave a five-star review. It matters! Vetted Sponsors of the Roofer Show Check out the programs that will help you gain confidence in your sales process, become a better leader, and build a winning sales team at Salestransformationgroup.com/roofershow Tee up the sale and make a great first impression by having a friendly, professional receptionist answer your phone with Ruby Receptionists. Use this link for up to $150 off your first month's service! get.ruby.com/theroofercoach Be the modern-day contractor! We help you leverage technology to generate, organize and maximize commercial roofing leads. Find out more about Peak Leads at Peakleads.io. Automate your systems and do follow-ups better! Check out ProLine and use promo code “Dave50” for 50% off your first month's service!
SEO for Photographers - Episode 60Creating Local Citations - the Free MethodToday we talk about how you can build local citations manually - if you don't want to pay a service (like Whitespark) to do it for you. This process does take some effort, but these tips will help save time and prioritize the steps for you. In this episode...[1:21] The Manual (free) Method to Build Local Citations [1:44] Why are Citations important? (they help your local rankings!) [5:45] The High School Analogy[11:21] THE STEPS[11:26] Gather information In One Place [12:59] Check for Existing Citations[13:37] The Master List of Citations[14:07] This is Really Important ... [15:09] THE DATA AGGREGATORS [15:39] Data-Axle.com[16:00] NeustarLocaleze.biz[16:50] Foursquare.com[17:41] The 2nd Tier of Directories[19:07] The 3rd Tier of Directories[19:39] Local and Industry Directories[21:31] Subscribe for New Tool AlertsRESOURCES mentioned in this Episode ... Local Citations Spreadsheethttps://www.meredithshusband.com/blog/citations?utm_source=shownotes&utm_medium=podcastThe Local Search Ecosystemhttps://whitespark.ca/local-search-ecosystem/?via=meredidthshusbandSUBSCRIBE ... for notifications whenever I create new toolshttps://www.meredithshusband.com/subscribe?utm_source=shownotes&utm_medium=podcast Connect… taplink.cc/meredithshusbandwww.MeredithsHusband.com
SEO for Photographers - Episode 58How to Get Higher Local Rankings (part 2)We talk about the most important steps you can take to improve your website rankings in Google's local search results. (ie. the websites that appear at the top of Google - next to the map!) In this episode...[0:54] Two Types of Links for Local Business SEO[3:41] The Important Element for Local Links [4:48] The Goal When Building Local Links[5:13] How to Send LOCAL SIGNALS to Google[5:35] Types of Link to Acquire[7:35] The 2nd Type of Link [8:50] Are Local Links Worth Buying?[9:54] Community Engagement for SEO[10:19] Example: Posting Internships [12:08] Charities and Volunteering for SEO[12:38] Tip: Get Agreements Before Donating Services[13:18] Example: Get Links From Other Local BusinessesEpisode 50: (Jan 20, 2023) Improve Local Rankings with Whitespark https://podcast.meredithshusband.com/1926553/12286115-improve-local-rankings-with-whitespark Connect… taplink.cc/meredithshusbandwww.MeredithsHusband.com
SEO for Photographers - Episode 50Using Whitespark to Improve Local RankingsHow do you get your local business listed in Google local results? Today we focus on one of the major factors that helps get websites into the Google Local Pack. In this Episode...[0:23] The LOCAL PACK and 3 Methods to Help You Get There[1:00] Reason #1: On-Site SEO[1:24] Reason #2: Google Business Profile[3:26] Reason #3: Local Citations (with Whitespark)[4:41] How Does Whitespark Help Local SEO[13:04] How to use the Whitspark Local Listing ServiceMeredith's husband said..."You either need to spend time or money on SEO."Listen to the December 19 episode for help with your Google Business Profile. WhiteSpark Local Link-Building Get 10% off with code: meredithshusbandDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Connect… meredithshusband.start.pagewww.MeredithsHusband.com
A look back on 2022 and what took place for Leadferno and Whitespark. Features, sales, wins, challenges, hires, mistakes, and more are shared. We also look ahead to what kicks off 2023 for each of us.
Google has been on a review tear of late and many reviews are being nuked that the new filter “thinks” violates the TOS. But not all review take downs by Google are legit. And a new bug seems to be affecting Google Business Profiles: when Google pushes a Suggested edit update, the profile changes CID numbers and loses their reviews. Businesses that lose reviews need to be prepared for this eventuality and put in place a plan to recover the reviews if lost. Darren Shaw of Whitespark discovered a new test by Google that shows how many in market reviews a reviewer left. On the surface this would appear helpful to shoppers looking to validate the reviewer and the reviews more easily. But like all reviews it is probably a false hope as location can be spoofed. Regardless, it surfaces the fact that Google is closely tracking and using the physical relationship between the reviewer and the business. In the forums, it is apparent that Google has consistently nuked more reviews from service type businesses which don't get reviewer visits and the further that reviewer is away, the more likely it is to be filtered. Most internet companies pay lip service to brand building but continue to favor short-term performance marketing. That typically means paid-search and paid social. AirBnB offers an interesting counterpoint and case study in decreasing reliance on paid search. The company just reported its "biggest and most profitable quarter" to date. On the company's Q3 earnings call, CFO Dave Stephenson said AirBnB's focus has been "on the overall brand ... and to be less reliant on search engine marketing." He explained that 90% of of the company's traffic is "direct or organic." Can other companies do the same? Yes but it requires a true commitment to puting the customer first and building a strong relationship based on trust and not just giving that idea lip service.The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 89
Mike's Linksthehustle.co - https://link.thehustle.co/view/5f3c2443c6344e7987022ea6h9fcv.f760/72bf8cbbZero-Clicks Study - https://www.semrush.com/blog/zero-clicks-study/Webinar: Rankings Are Great, Conversions Are Greater. - https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_69s-QR6bTG-VvrS6Wc7iDQGoogle Maps has removed its COVID-19 layer - https://9to5google.com/2022/10/26/google-maps-covid-19-layer-2/GBP Suspension and Reinstatement Chaos - https://www.brightlocal.com/blog/google-business-profile-suspension-reinstatement-bug-chaos/Hacks to get back to the Old GBP Dashboard Mike Blumenthal on Twitter - https://twitter.com/mblumenthal/status/1586754087080660992?s=12&t=NaNUY7w_DJFT7g65GfJdewCarrie's LinksMap Pack and Other Search features Disappeared - Dr. Pete - https://twitter.com/dr_pete/status/1585011516985978880Funny SEO Horror Stories | Local Search Forum - https://localsearchforum.com/threads/funny-seo-horror-stories.59548/Does the Text of a Google Review Affect Map Pack Rankings? - Joy Hawkins - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/does-the-text-of-a-google-review-affect-map-pack-rankings/Thanks to our LocalU SponsorsZipsprout- https://zipsprout.com/Places Scout - https://placesscout.com/Whitespark - https://whitespark.ca/Sterling Sky - https://sterlingsky.ca/
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Mike's Linksthehustle.co - https://link.thehustle.co/view/5f3c2443c6344e7987022ea6h9fcv.f760/72bf8cbbZero-Clicks Study - https://www.semrush.com/blog/zero-clicks-study/Webinar: Rankings Are Great, Conversions Are Greater. - https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_69s-QR6bTG-VvrS6Wc7iDQGoogle Maps has removed its COVID-19 layer - https://9to5google.com/2022/10/26/google-maps-covid-19-layer-2/GBP Suspension and Reinstatement Chaos - https://www.brightlocal.com/blog/google-business-profile-suspension-reinstatement-bug-chaos/Hacks to get back to the Old GBP Dashboard Mike Blumenthal on Twitter - https://twitter.com/mblumenthal/status/1586754087080660992?s=12&t=NaNUY7w_DJFT7g65GfJdewCarrie's LinksMap Pack and Other Search features Disappeared - Dr. Pete - https://twitter.com/dr_pete/status/1585011516985978880Funny SEO Horror Stories | Local Search Forum - https://localsearchforum.com/threads/funny-seo-horror-stories.59548/Does the Text of a Google Review Affect Map Pack Rankings? - Joy Hawkins - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/does-the-text-of-a-google-review-affect-map-pack-rankings/Thanks to our LocalU SponsorsZipsprout- https://zipsprout.com/Places Scout - https://placesscout.com/Whitespark - https://whitespark.ca/Sterling Sky - https://sterlingsky.ca/
Matt's LinksRecent Google review filtering and different ways to ask for reviews/different options when sending review requests via Joy Hawkins on Twitter - https://localsearchforum.com/threads/missing-reviews-reviews-disappearing.59057/GBP suspension bug should be resolved now - Via Joy Hawkins on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JoyanneHawkins/status/1583497806412910592LSAs in the local finder - via Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.com - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-local-pack-tests-refine-query-location-search-box-33170.htmlZocdoc showing on the SERPs via Colan Nielsen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ColanNielsen/status/1582739806206894080Carrie's LinksWhat are the Habits of Successful Local SEO Experts? - Colan Nielsen - SterlingSky - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/what-are-the-habits-of-successful-local-seo-experts/Suds & Search 135 | Brian Barwig, Local SEO Manager at Sterling Sky - SearchLab Digital - https://searchlabdigital.com/blog/suds-search-135-brian-barwig/Thanks to our LocalU SponsorsZipsprout - https://zipsprout.com/Places Scout - https://placesscout.com/Whitespark - https://whitespark.ca/Sterling Sky - https://sterlingsky.ca/
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Matt's LinksRecent Google review filtering and different ways to ask for reviews/different options when sending review requests via Joy Hawkins on Twitter - https://localsearchforum.com/threads/missing-reviews-reviews-disappearing.59057/GBP suspension bug should be resolved now - Via Joy Hawkins on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JoyanneHawkins/status/1583497806412910592LSAs in the local finder - via Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable.com - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-local-pack-tests-refine-query-location-search-box-33170.htmlZocdoc showing on the SERPs via Colan Nielsen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ColanNielsen/status/1582739806206894080Carrie's LinksWhat are the Habits of Successful Local SEO Experts? - Colan Nielsen - SterlingSky - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/what-are-the-habits-of-successful-local-seo-experts/Suds & Search 135 | Brian Barwig, Local SEO Manager at Sterling Sky - SearchLab Digital - https://searchlabdigital.com/blog/suds-search-135-brian-barwig/Thanks to our LocalU SponsorsZipsprout - https://zipsprout.com/Places Scout - https://placesscout.com/Whitespark - https://whitespark.ca/Sterling Sky - https://sterlingsky.ca/
Allie Margeson, Director of SEO Services for Whitespark, joins Greg and David for this episode of the Near Memo. She takes a deeper dive into the logic behind, and the mechanics of, Whitespark's new three-tiered service offering which involves not just Google Business Profile optimization but website updates and linkbuilding.Allie and Whitespark have a unique perspective on serving small businesses that most agencies and SaaS companies ignore, due to the difficulty of serving them profitably. She shares some behind-the-scenes information about Whitespark's delivery model and go-to-market strategies that make this service effective for its clients and profitable for its bottom line.The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 85
In this episode, we bring you Part 2 of Joe's interview with Whitespark founder Darren Shaw, in which he provides a wealth of information on the most effective ways to boost your local rankings. Darren is a recognized authority on local search. Whitespark provides software and services to help businesses improve their local search rankings and conversions.
In this interview, Joe is joined by Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark, to talk about the most ways to boost your local search rankings. Darren is a recognized authority on local search. His company, Whitespark, offers software and services to help businesses improve their rankings and conversions from Google's local results. He also conducts an acclaimed annual survey with the top SEO experts from around the world to determine what is truly effective in driving rankings and conversions in local search. In part one of this interview, Darren discusses what Whitespark is all about, and debunks the top myths in local SEO
Mike's Links:OpenAI expands access to DALL-E 2, its powerful image-generating AI system - https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/20/openai-expands-access-to-dall-e-2-its-powerful-image-generating-ai-system/Ep 74: Amazon & Google pander to the FTC, American Privacy Act: Opt-In/Out Battle, Instagram goes local - https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-74/Construction worker wearing a high-vis vest with an ad for a personal injury lawyer - https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1551582109852106755Outstanding Local SEO Takeaways from MozCon 2022 - https://moz.com/blog/mozcon-2022-local-seo-insightsLocal Landing Page Checklist - https://ricketyroo.com/blog/local-landing-page-checklist/The Rising Importance Of Images In Google Search - https://ducttapemarketing.com/images-in-google-search/Aircam.ai • AI Powered Photo Checker - https://aircam.ai/google-visionStefan Somborac Messaging FAQ on Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/StefanSomborac/status/1549721775981953024How to read & reply to messages from your Business Profile - iPhone & iPad - Google Business Profile Help - https://support.google.com/business/answer/9114771?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DiOSGoogle Tests "Reviews Aren't Verified" Label - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-reviews-arent-verified-label-33788.htmlCarrie's LinksSpam in LSAs is rampant - Google doesn't seem to care? - https://twitter.com/lenraleigh/status/1550557036269780993Tom Waddington shows a serp with 100 5.0 rated LSAs - mostly spam - multiple listings for same biz, etc. - https://twitter.com/tomwaddington8/status/1550855925623300098Google Local Service Ads Seeing A Lot Of Fake Reviews - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-local-service-ads-with-fake-reviews-33810.htmlPAA Back to normal levels - Google has never said why or admitted an issue - https://twitter.com/RangerShay/status/1550058170420166656Visitor update tab seen in the wild - https://twitter.com/CaseyABryan/status/1551265789445283846LocalU Tickets & Sponsors - https://localu.org/den22/#ticketsZipsprout - https://zipsprout.com/TheTransparency CO - https://askfortransparency.com/Whitespark
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Mike's Links:OpenAI expands access to DALL-E 2, its powerful image-generating AI system - https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/20/openai-expands-access-to-dall-e-2-its-powerful-image-generating-ai-system/Ep 74: Amazon & Google pander to the FTC, American Privacy Act: Opt-In/Out Battle, Instagram goes local - https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-74/Construction worker wearing a high-vis vest with an ad for a personal injury lawyer - https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1551582109852106755Outstanding Local SEO Takeaways from MozCon 2022 - https://moz.com/blog/mozcon-2022-local-seo-insightsLocal Landing Page Checklist - https://ricketyroo.com/blog/local-landing-page-checklist/The Rising Importance Of Images In Google Search - https://ducttapemarketing.com/images-in-google-search/Aircam.ai • AI Powered Photo Checker - https://aircam.ai/google-visionStefan Somborac Messaging FAQ on Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/StefanSomborac/status/1549721775981953024How to read & reply to messages from your Business Profile - iPhone & iPad - Google Business Profile Help - https://support.google.com/business/answer/9114771?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DiOSGoogle Tests "Reviews Aren't Verified" Label - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-reviews-arent-verified-label-33788.htmlCarrie's LinksSpam in LSAs is rampant - Google doesn't seem to care? - https://twitter.com/lenraleigh/status/1550557036269780993Tom Waddington shows a serp with 100 5.0 rated LSAs - mostly spam - multiple listings for same biz, etc. - https://twitter.com/tomwaddington8/status/1550855925623300098Google Local Service Ads Seeing A Lot Of Fake Reviews - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-local-service-ads-with-fake-reviews-33810.htmlPAA Back to normal levels - Google has never said why or admitted an issue - https://twitter.com/RangerShay/status/1550058170420166656Visitor update tab seen in the wild - https://twitter.com/CaseyABryan/status/1551265789445283846LocalU Tickets & Sponsors - https://localu.org/den22/#ticketsZipsprout - https://zipsprout.com/TheTransparency CO - https://askfortransparency.com/Whitespark
Erin Links:Google - GMB App Dead - https://support.google.com/business/answer/11402083Twitter Rolls Out Ability to “Unmention” - https://twitter.com/twittersafety/status/1546555047630159872Why Having A User-First Approach To SEO Is Important - Jesse McDonald - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/user-first-seo/456351/Google Indexing Problems - Barry Schwartz - https://searchengineland.com/google-confirmed-indexing-issue-affecting-a-large-number-of-sites-386526Content Consolidation Can Improve SEO - Dan Taylor - https://searchengineland.com/content-consolidation-seo-386518Carrie's LinksGoogle Discover Stories With TikTok, Facebook, YouTube For Destination Queries - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discover-destinations-stories-33754.htmlGoogle Taking Action On Recent One-Star Review Scams & Blackmail Threats - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-star-review-scams-blackmail-33764.htmlRestaurants Face an Extortion Threat: A Bad Rating on Google (paywall) - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/dining/google-one-star-review-scam-restaurants.htmlhttps://support.google.com/business/thread/171274322?hl=en - https://support.google.com/business/thread/171274322?hl=enLocalU Tickets & Sponsors - https://localu.org/den22/#sponsorsZipsprout - https://zipsprout.com/TheTransparency CO - https://askfortransparency.com/Whitespark - https://whitespark.ca/Leadferno - https://leadferno.com/SterlingSky - https://sterlingsky.ca/
Last Week in Local: Local Search, SEO & Marketing Update from LocalU
Erin Links:Google - GMB App Dead - https://support.google.com/business/answer/11402083Twitter Rolls Out Ability to “Unmention” - https://twitter.com/twittersafety/status/1546555047630159872Why Having A User-First Approach To SEO Is Important - Jesse McDonald - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/user-first-seo/456351/Google Indexing Problems - Barry Schwartz - https://searchengineland.com/google-confirmed-indexing-issue-affecting-a-large-number-of-sites-386526Content Consolidation Can Improve SEO - Dan Taylor - https://searchengineland.com/content-consolidation-seo-386518Carrie's LinksGoogle Discover Stories With TikTok, Facebook, YouTube For Destination Queries - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-discover-destinations-stories-33754.htmlGoogle Taking Action On Recent One-Star Review Scams & Blackmail Threats - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-one-star-review-scams-blackmail-33764.htmlRestaurants Face an Extortion Threat: A Bad Rating on Google (paywall) - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/dining/google-one-star-review-scam-restaurants.htmlhttps://support.google.com/business/thread/171274322?hl=en - https://support.google.com/business/thread/171274322?hl=enLocalU Tickets & Sponsors - https://localu.org/den22/#sponsorsZipsprout - https://zipsprout.com/TheTransparency CO - https://askfortransparency.com/Whitespark - https://whitespark.ca/Leadferno - https://leadferno.com/SterlingSky - https://sterlingsky.ca/
Part 2 on what Leadferno and Whitespark are doing for marketing in 2022. Aaron talks about exploring paid search, co-webinars and hiring a service for cold outreach to book demos. Darren has been launching a ton lately and talks about their video marketing, landing pages and referrals.
The funny thing is that many businesses are paying for Google ads but not taking advantage of the free advertising space in their Google Business profiles. In this Expert Insight Interview, we welcome Darren Shaw, the founder of Whitespark.
Darren and Aaron talk about the SaaS marketing strategies for Whitespark and Leadferno in 2022. We covered marketing your SaaS features, podcast interviews and events. In covering just some of what we are doing - we declared this part 1, with part 2 to come! No doubt marketing your SaaS is so important in 2022.
Each week, Greg and Ben answer your questions on digital marketing for local businesses … local search engine optimization (SEO), Google Business Profile, social media, email marketing, websites, online advertising and more.Updates and QuestionsMissing reviews survey. Product post bug. Justifications are showing up on Google Maps.WhiteSpark developes duplicate finder.What more can I do besides optimizing websites and getting good reviews to become more successful?Is it possible to get a listing to rank in multiple categories? Should I set up a new GBP for a new service I'm adding to my business? Has there been an increase in GBP suspensions recently? Is it possible to merge a business listing and a practitioner listing? Should I have a separate practitioner listing in addition to an office listing? Can you run a plumbing business out of your home and show the address or does not showing the address make a difference in ranking?Can I have multiple GBP listings at different locations with only one website? Is there a legitimate way to suspend my own GBP profile so it no longer displays anywhere? How do I rank in nearby cities in addition to the city in which the business is located? Is there any way to find out what the address is on a SAB when I control the GBP? Should I have my business name followed by my personal name on GBP when I go by my personal name on LinkedIn? If I have a template website do I need a different one for SEO? Would Google allow Real Estate Brokers to own the GBP of their agents?Should I use a tracking number for a location with two businesses and only one phone number? At an address with lots of businesses with the same category, should I switch to a home address and SAB?What should I do if I don't get confirmation emails of redressal forms when reporting a spam listing? How do I delete departments in GBP if I have no access?When updating my listings and key citations after moving locations from a local agency, should I use my home address? What are the effects if the business changed its name but everything else remains the same? If a practitioner has a GBP and the practice/business also has a GBP, where would you suggest users place their reviews? What should I do if GBP keeps directing me to claim a duplicate one?What should I do if my business doesn't show up when searching the business name, but does with a generic one? What should I focus on in my homepage when I have several categories I can rank for?Does a permanently closed business eventually disappear from the listings?Links mentioned in this session are available on our website at https://localmarketinginstitute.com
A website is an important part of any business, whether it's a brick-and-mortar store or an online company. It's the first impression that potential customers will see. There are several ways to build a site, but there are some specific issues to keep in mind when starting from scratch. IN THIS EPISODE...[00:24] Today topic: What do you do when you're starting from scratch [01:12] Google domain names [03:10] The bare minimum to launch a website [04:42] Getting a site listed in Google local listings [08:44] Yext v. Whitespark v. Semrush [15:15] How many words should be on a web page[18:06] Identify where you're getting leads topics discussed: domain names, launching your website, web directories, Squarespace. MEREDITH'S HUSBAND SAYS…"If you're launching a site from scratch, consider using Squarespace. It's quick, looks decent, and is relatively inexpensive compared to starting with WordPress. Launch a WordPress site later.”CONNECT WITH US…Website: https://www.thewebinaut.com/merediths-husband/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meredithshusband/LINKS MENTIONED… Google Domains Reliable $12 domains - without upsellingAdding Analytics to Wordpress [blog] To add Google Analytics to a WordPress site, try the simple plugin: Site Kit by Google. Adding Analytics to Squarespace [blog] To add Google Analytics to a Squarespace site: click SETTINGS in the home menu, click ADVANCED...Google Analytics Conversions See how to create "conversions" with Google AnalyticsWhiteSpark Local Link-Building Get 10% off with code: meredithshusbandDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Today is January 18th and I'll be talking about a potential algorithm update, Reviews in maps, Google My business hours, page experience going to desktop, Travel & Google Ads webinar, Competitive analysis and more!Full Blog Post and Show Notes @ https://opinionatedseo.com/s2e12January 14th and 15th seems to be a lot of movement in the algorithm trackers - was there an update?Some of my sites that are relatively newer content seems to have jumped up quite a bit in this time, but I think that might just be a coincidence. This podcast's main site had a jump to about 1400 impressions in Google Search Console compared to its average 50-100 per day. That ended up dropping back down a bit, so if Google was doing something, it might have been temporary if this site was an indicator.https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-ranking-update-january-14-32762.htmlAllie Margeson, the Director of SEO Services at Whitespark noticed review snippets getting visibility on maps. See her tweet.https://twitter.com/SeoAllie/status/1483166745980456966Colan Nielsen for Sterling Sky writes about Google My Business and when to list your hours as 24/7.https://www.sterlingsky.ca/when-should-i-list-my-google-business-profile-hours-as-open-24-7/We mentioned it a couple weeks ago, but Yoast officially launched their Shopify SEO app.https://yoast.com/release-yoast-seo-for-shopify/Google has been giving us a heads up on Page Experience rolling out to desktop. Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google's page experience criteria.https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/11/bringing-page-experience-to-desktopIn case you missed it, Google Ads put on the “Travel On Air” with Episode available for on demand viewing. If you are a marketer in the Travel industry (I'm talking to you Louderback and Dylan!) then this may be of interest!https://adsonair.withgoogle.com/events/travel-on-air-episode-4SEMRush published an article on their blog about not the ten, but the 12 Best Competitive Intelligence Tools for Market Research.https://www.semrush.com/blog/top-18-competitive-intelligence-tools-advanced-market-research/And, since we seem to always talk about internationalization, John Mueller answered a question on Reddit asking if Google used the same algorithm for each language.“Mostly. Search uses lots & lots of algorithms. Some of them apply to content in all languages, some of them are specific to individual languages (for example, some languages don't use spaces to separate words -- which would make things kinda hard to search for if Google assumed that all languages were like English).”https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/s64i0e/does_google_use_the_same_algorithm_for_every/
A look ahead at what 2022 holds for Whitespark and Leadferno. Aaron and Darren lay out their hopes and wished for what they can build, accomplish, market and sell in the next year. 2022 should be a year of big growth for both SaaS companies.
The SEO community has been abuzz over the news of the most recent Google update, dubbed the Vicinity Update by our own Joy Hawkins and the team at Sterling Sky. In addition to the Vicinity Update, Carrie and Mike discuss COVID-related changes for both Kroger and Google employees, updates to Whitespark's Local Rank Tracker, and more! Intro Discussion - The Vicinity UpdateThe Vicinity Update: What You Need to Know About Google's Largest Local Algorithm Update in 5 Years - Sterling Sky Inc - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/vicinity-algorithm-update/The ‘Vicinity Update': Winners and losers from the November 2021 local update - https://searchengineland.com/the-vicinity-update-winners-and-losers-from-the-november-2021-local-update-377624Mike's Links:Kroger ends COVID sick pay, adds insurance surcharge for unvaccinated employees — ABC News - https://apple.news/A5n2yoM24RPaAnHQTs_oacQGoogle tells employees they'll lose pay and will eventually be fired if they don't follow vaccination rules - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/google-employees-to-lose-pay-if-dont-comply-with-vaccination-policy.htmlRTW: County has done us no favors - https://www.oleantimesherald.com/opinion/rtw-county-has-done-us-no-favors/article_b992634d-21ad-5089-b621-269daff3817b.htmlLocal Rank Tracker Now Monitors Multiple Rankings - https://whitespark.ca/blog/local-rank-tracker-now-tracks-multiple-rankings/Why Are My Google Reviews Not Publishing? - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/google-reviews-not-publishing/The Vicinity Update: What You Need to Know About Google's Largest Local Algorithm Update in 5 Years - https://www.sterlingsky.ca/vicinity-algorithm-update/Carries links:Google Maps Dock To Bottom Feature - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-maps-dock-to-bottom-button-32586.htmlBusiness Profile posts content policy - https://support.google.com/business/answer/7213077?hl=en
Link building is the process of gaining links to your page from other relevant sites on the internet. We talk this week about building links with the goal of getting your website into the "local pack" of Google - the group of 3 websites displayed just beneath the map in local searches. This is one of the first steps to get your website into those listings. I explain the easiest and quickest way to do it in this episode.IN THIS EPISODE …[02:12] How to improve website structure for better SEO and conversions [08:28] Why you should build links as a local business owner[09:23] Link building explained[10:42] The importance of building links for your website[11:18] How Google determines website quality & relevancy[12:10] Types of links[13:28] What is Local Pack & how to get listed [18:29] Link building with WhiteSpark [22:16] SummaryMEREDITH'S HUSBAND SAYS … The more content you can put around your events, the better you'll rank.The more the number of links you have on your site, the better the visibilitySEO is basically answering two questions for Google, what your website is about, and how good it is.LINKS & RESOURCES ...WhiteSpark: https://www.thewebinaut.com/blog/whitespark CONNECT WITH US ...Web: https://www.thewebinaut.com/merediths-husband/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meredithshusband/topics: Link building, website link building, link building strategy, internal links, SEO best practices. WhiteSpark Local Link-Building Get 10% off with code: meredithshusbandDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
FULL SHOW NOTES[INTRO music]0:00:11.4 Aaron Weiche: Episode 31, SaaS is a marathon, not a sprint.0:00:16.2 INTRO: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno, and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.0:00:42.2 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:45.4 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:47.0 AW: And if SaaS was a sprint, I would just already be collapsed at the finish line. And I probably wouldn't have finished first in my heat anyway Darren just...0:00:58.4 DS: Yeah, me too.[laughter]0:01:00.6 AW: COVID has taken its toll on my physical well-being. I need to keep working on getting that back under control, so... How have you been? 0:01:10.9 DS: Oh, I've been so busy. I've been...0:01:14.6 AW: Yes you have.0:01:15.4 DS: It's... The last few days have been nice 'cause I'm like, "Oh, just got so much free time now." But the summit, yeah, so we put on another local search summit, 30 speakers, three days, Holly, that is an endeavor. It's a lot of work to put on a virtual conference like that. And so it was all-consuming for the last couple of months, for sure. And all consuming for Jessie Low our marketing manager for the past six to eight months, for sure. And it was very successful. So I thought it was great. We had 3000 registered attendees. Lots of fantastic feedback. I think we did an even better job this year than we did last year, incredible speakers, an incredible talk. So I thought it was great. We came out profitable in the end. So, we're happy to break even because it's more of a marketing play than a money-making thing.0:02:13.2 DS: And a brand exercise, and we're really just trying to build our brand with the summit. And so we definitely got that and we didn't lose money on it. So there was some profit in the end so that was good. We're all a success. I have a post-mortem call scheduled with Jessie this afternoon and Sydney to discuss what went well, what didn't go well, and what changes we'd make for next year. That's what's going on with me. That's it.0:02:40.8 AW: Yeah, no, and I totally get... And you and I were texting a little bit last week during it, and even inside of those three days you had highs and lows, right? 0:02:51.6 DS: Oh man, it's the roller coaster of emotion. It's just like, yeah, I felt kind of low on the second day. I was like, "Oh, why are we doing this? My life is a failure."[laughter]0:03:05.7 DS: And then like day three, at the end of it, I just felt like just so elated with how well it went. That's just the life of a founder.0:03:15.0 AW: Yep, no. Same roller coaster as being a founder, right. I probably should have just taken a screenshot where one of your text was like the low, like, "Oh I'm second guessing everything." And then a couple of texts later was the next day and you're like, "Everything is awesome."[laughter]0:03:34.1 DS: Totally. Yeah, that's how I felt about the summit. Now I've kinda settled somewhere in the middle. Just trying to evaluate it logically and think about like, alright, is this a valuable thing for us to do and do we wanna invest so much effort into it next year? 0:03:48.6 AW: Well, one thing that I definitely noticed from the sales side of me is you put in a lot more calls to action for your products and services and things like that, and the breaks and slides and different things like that. Do you have zero visibility... Right, we're on the couple of work days outside of the event ending, do you have any visibility to... If that's made an impact or will it be something that you'll let run a little bit and then evaluate? 0:04:23.0 DS: Yeah, we've had a couple of really big days since the summit. And so I do think like I could tell just straight up finances being like, "Well, that was a good day." And then a couple days later, "Well, that's another good day." And so seeing that and noticing how close that was to the close of the summit feels definitely like there is a direct business boost. More sign-ups that kind of stuff. And so I wanna give it a bit more time because a lot of people don't take immediate action. They're like, "Oh, I saw the summit, I learned about this thing at Whitespark summit." And a week or two, or three or four later, they finally get around to signing up for the thing or trying our software. And so I'm gonna give it a month and then I wanna do a comparison of our accounts, like new accounts and new sign-ups from that period... From the last period and cross-reference it with attendees at the summit and then we'll see. Yeah.0:05:21.1 AW: Awesome. Well, I can only think or feel that it will be stronger than other things you've done just because I have either been a part or have watched other things that you've done all the way from your weekly videos to things like that. And this by far in a way was your most sophisticated or visual call to actions with what Whitespark offers and does. So I think that's a really good step forward, as you and I have discussed in some of our conversations like, "Man, you crush at education, you crush it, putting stuff out there." You have a lot of opportunity in the trade. I'll give you all these great things. Please just listen to how our tools and services can support you in some of these things that you're doing. And just being a little more firm in asking them to do a free trial or to look into your services and tools. I felt like you really... I was looking at that and part of me was like, "Oh, this is good. This is good, do those things Darren." So good job.0:06:30.5 DS: Yeah, calls to action. You gotta call them to action, if you want them to take action, you should give them a call.0:06:36.3 AW: Yes, it's great, it's great to be top of mind because of all the goodwill and how you've positioned yourself as an expert... Yeah, those things are totally great. And so in six months, if they have a customer that needs something specific that folds into that. Yes, you will likely be top of mind because of how you've established yourself. But there's a lot of people that you can get to take a next step, while they're also feeling that euphoria and feeling like, "Oh, I'm learning new things, it's time to do new things, it's time to change a tool I'm using or to start using something like this, and now I have trust and I have excitement and I wanna do it right now." So just make that road really... Or that bridge really easy for them to cross.0:07:19.4 DS: Totally. Well, you're a master at all of that, so I always appreciate your advice and yeah, I agree that that's a key thing that I'm really trying to get better at, and I appreciate you pushing me on some of that.0:07:32.3 AW: Yeah, well, like I said, if you look at the world of like, you can only get what you give, you give. So I totally think you asking for a little get, that's no problem at all. And speaking of that, you had to compile and put out the local search ranking factors report as well, which is a massive undertaking.0:07:56.1 DS: That... Yeah, so that was a big part of what consumed me leading up to the conference, 'cause not only did I have to deal with some organization. Jessie, of course, took care of most of it. But it was really just compiling the data and analyzing the data and putting my own presentation together. That was a ton of work for sure, and so now that that's off my back, I just feel very light right now, but I do have to get around to writing up my findings into a blog post and get it published.0:08:26.3 AW: Yeah. When do you exhale harder? When you log off the summit on the last day? Or when you wake up the next day and you just don't have all of that hanging on you? 0:08:38.7 DS: Yeah. I felt pretty relaxed after the moment the summit ended, I was like, "Yeah cool, I don't have it, I don't have to do a anything." And then the next day, actually, I had a bunch of wrap-ups stuff I had to deal with, so... Yeah.0:08:55.1 AW: So you clicked close and then you're just like, "Joe, get me a beer." [chuckle]0:09:01.3 DS: Well, I would have gotten my own beer. I would never... I would never do that, that would not go over very well. So I'm very capable of fetching my own beer.0:09:11.1 AW: I just meant in a celebratory way, right? 0:09:14.4 DS: Yes, I definitely did go down to the beer fridge, yes, immediately.0:09:18.8 AW: And just possibly being passed out in your chair. Like nonstop, three days, all of the emotions, everything else, you might have just been tapped out, so.0:09:29.2 DS: I was very tapped out. Absolutely.0:09:31.3 AW: Oh, awesome.0:09:31.3 DS: How about you? What's up with you these days? 0:09:34.7 AW: Since we talked just the week before we were launching, so Leadferno has launched, and it's gone okay, there hasn't been any part of it where I'm like, "Oh my gosh." We talked before, I wanted to hit 50 trials, and you said 10. And yeah, we were closer to 10 than 50, so you were spot on there ...0:10:04.3 DS: Wait, didn't I say the opposite? You said 10, and I was like, "No way, you can get like 700."0:10:09.8 AW: No, no, no [laughter] you were more of the voice of reason with it, but it was... It definitely went well. And I look at... Right, it's not like the world was waiting for this, and the fact that news broke, that Leadferno has launched, didn't send people running into the streets and...0:10:31.4 DS: Yeah. I did see it on CNN actually, that was huge. That was huge.0:10:35.6 AW: That would be bad. I can't imagine a scenario where I get that kind of press of something great, it would be like, Leadferno took down the internet, everyone is mad. I don't know what else.0:10:47.5 DS: That's right. Weren't you responsible for that Facebook outage? That was you guys, right? Just so much traffic, you just ruined the servers.0:10:56.2 AW: I was... That was interesting, between the... When the whistle blower interview happened, and then the next day they have that outage, it's hard to believe like, "Oh, maybe someone inside was also like, yeah, I'm not gonna go that far, but I'll sabotage something on the inside to make an outage."0:11:09.4 DS: I know. That would get me wondering.0:11:11.9 AW: Yeah, very interesting situation. So things have been progressing well as we get more into our topic, I can talk about some of my early learnings and then just the actions you have to take off of those learnings and conversations and things like that. But mostly working really hard on just any amount of publicity, trying to do as many podcast interviews, webinars, presentations like mine at the local search summit. So just trying to get as many mentions, shares, links, all of those things. Because it takes a lot to get that ball rolling. I'm just starting to see some of it now, where we're getting this past week, where I'm getting some inbound leads, that it's like, "Okay, great." And without... It isn't any one of those things, it's just knowing like, "Okay, I now have 10 of those things out in the universe, and a month ago I had only two or three."0:12:19.9 AW: So continuing to work on those and then lastly, I spent all last week in San Francisco and was at the SaaStr Annual, which is probably the largest SaaS conference. Normally, it's like a 10,000 plus person event, they limited it to 5000, it was all outdoors, it was at a fair grounds in San Mateo, just south of San Francisco. And yeah, it was really, really well done, you had to be vaxxed to attend, you had to have a negative test within 72 hours, and they provided test there, so like the day before the event, we went there to pick up our badges and got a COVID test there, and that all worked out well, and yeah, you were just... You were always outdoors.0:13:17.5 AW: And yeah, just felt... I felt really easy. It was great, it was great to be around people and energy, it was nice to have in-person learning, and then also be able to network and talk with people. It was just so great to talk shop with vendors that were there, or talk shop with other people running other SaaS businesses in between. So it was definitely like an uplifting week for sure. It was one of those like, "Oh man, I've missed a bunch of these things and I don't have another one on my calendar again," but it felt really good for three, four days to do all that.0:14:00.5 DS: That's amazing. I can't imagine the state of our particular province in Canada is really bad, our COVID situation is worse it's ever been. And so I dream of one day getting back to this, like being able to go to an in-person conference over here, I just... I miss everybody, I miss seeing people, I don't see anybody, to my immediate family.0:14:23.3 AW: Yeah, no, definitely. It's definitely tricky, but like I said, this one I looked at, alright, from all the measures that are there and everything else, I'm like for the state that things are right now, I couldn't ask them to go through too many other precautions and...0:14:43.8 DS: Sounds like they did a great job with all the... Being careful with things and trying to be as safe as possible at it. Do people wear masks outside or not really? 0:14:55.4 AW: I would say maybe 5%.0:14:58.0 DS: Sure.0:14:58.7 AW: I mean it was really very little. People... They could if you wanted to, when we went to check-in, we were masked the first day until we tested, and were tested negative. But yeah, once we were then at the event, and it does feel where you're like, "Okay, all of these people," yes, we all have different interactions and who we've been around, and how we conduct our personal choices on our own time. But when you... It definitely felt a little bit of like, "Alright, everybody here is vaccinated, everybody here has been tested within a few days of being here." So... I don't know, it felt as secure as it could, I guess.0:15:41.1 DS: Any mind-blowing take-aways? Where you're like, "Oh my God, that's the greatest idea. I'm definitely gonna do that at Leadferno," you just went to a three day SaaS conference.0:15:49.3 AW: I know, I mean, the short answer to that is no. And I think there's some interesting things in... And this is kind of the segue, this came up like, this is what I wanted to talk about in the phrase of marathon not a sprint. One, I look at in prior years, this is the fourth or fifth SaaStr that I've been to, and I usually have had one of those like... Just something more probably tactical to help bring back to the business or put into it. I think two things, my current state, one, I've spent a good amount of time and have done a lot of things in SaaS where... And heard a lot of, read a lot of... So you have all of those aspects. So you're coming at it from a different position, and in Leadferno being so new, there's also what we have in front of us for next steps and biggest needs are really known, and really the only things we should be focusing on.0:16:57.1 DS: Sure.0:16:57.6 AW: So there's a little bit of... There are plenty of things that I looked at, especially when you're looking at software solutions and things like that. And I found myself just saying, "I can't wait until I need a solution for that."0:17:09.5 DS: Yeah, totally.0:17:11.2 AW: I don't have the volume or the complexity or any of these things to even worry about that or need that, I have my own fish to fry right now. So yeah, it was kind of a combo of those two things. But really the big thing for me... And that's again, what led to the title of this is I walked away just really realizing that, no matter if you're where I'm at like me, where it's like, "Hey, we have a $1000 in MRR right now, and we got a long way to go to get us where we need to be." And then you're talking to someone else at the conference that's at $250,000 ARR, and they wanna be... They wanna get to half a million by the end of the year, or someone who's at half a million and they can't wait till they're a million or someone at a million, and they wanna be five or 10. Everyone is at a stage in their company, and that stage has its challenges and things to figure out, and some of them might be specific to the company and the founders and what they're good at and what they lack experience in or have as a challenge, and others are just systematic of the stage that you're at.0:18:24.8 AW: Maybe it sounds weird, but I like... The biggest thing I got was some calm out of it. Because at the stage I'm at right now, it's like you feel like every day matters so much to get something done and accomplish and to talk to a handful of prospects and do whatever else. And the conference just really made me zoom out and realize everything I do in these days is important, it is all contributing. What this really is, it's a long-term game of survival, it's running the long race, even though every day is like a sprint, you're pealing 100 yards off the marathon that you're trying to... To try run with it. So that was probably my biggest take away, and that's what led me... That's why I texted you, I'm like, "Yeah, we need to record. This is what I'd like to talk about." And it was really helping me with that frame of mind, and so that's where I just thought us talking about, what is... What is your... What is what. "What's keeping you up at night right now? That feels like a super short-term thing, but solving, doing that short-term thing is what allows you to stay in the game, to run the marathon to be long-term."0:19:39.0 DS: Yeah. If I was to answer that question for myself, it's really like every day we're sprinting on our existing applications, which is frustrating because it slows progress on the bigger vision of building a new product. So if I think about our long-term or two years, five years, then I know exactly what we're gonna have at that point, but it just feels painful to get there, it's just like... I have to find some calm because it feels like it's just taking forever. And so something that I thought was gonna be launched by the end of September is now looking more like the end of October, and then it just everything gets longer and longer. I understand the reasons for it when I talk to the Dev team and then I'm like, "Oh hey, how come were so behind?" It's like, "Well, because we just spent three weeks fixing that problem on our other product." So what do you do? It's really tough to get there, and I think you just gotta recognize that it's the way it's gonna be. It's always gonna take longer than you think.0:20:49.8 AW: Yeah. Unfortunately. Some of the decisions to not make it take longer end up being just really hard decisions where... We've had these conversations before where you have to say no to something else because it's getting in the way of being able to accomplish those other things. And when you're weighing out what's the priority, what's the impact, and sometimes just really... Who's this decision for? Is this so I sleep easier at night? Or will this actually cost us something? Do we gain something in doing this? Does it cost us something in not doing it? There's just so many strands to it, and as founders and leaders, we can just be so emotional about those decisions where maybe they're not an emotional decision sometimes, but because we're so invested, we can't separate ourselves from those at the same time.0:21:48.8 DS: Yeah, totally. What's keeping you up at night? What are the things that you're struggling with? 0:21:57.5 AW: Yeah. I have two just big items right now, one was a known is like, I knew this was gonna be what people were saying, I need this, you're missing this, whatever else, and that was our mobile apps. So one, we made the decision in being a communication service and around text messaging, that we weren't gonna build... When we built our web app first for power users more than anything else, that we weren't going to build it responsive. Because if they were able to use a responsive version of it in web, from snappiness of it, access of it, push notifications, there's a bunch of different things and when we outline our technical scope and where users were interact, it was like, yes, it would allow them to use it on mobile. But then if we had users that didn't download the app and just kept using it on mobile, like that experience was gonna fall short, it was gonna degrade over time because we were... Once we have native apps, we weren't gonna put anything into that.0:23:11.8 AW: So, we always clearly knew we were gonna build a web app first because that was gonna be more difficult based on our approach and our build, and it would allow us the easier way to do some of the settings and account-based things and whatever else. So that then when we did a fast follow and we built the mobile apps, they would be streamlined only focused on the communication back and forth with the customer and contacts and things like that, and be lightweight and be around, centered on productivity with it.0:23:44.7 AW: And we even made the choices right in using Flutter for development, so it's like right now, we're a couple of weeks into work on the mobile apps, and that work is just going 6X faster than if we have built in one language and then we say, "Alright, now we're gonna go and build in these others," and if anything, we're just removing things only related to mobile or only related to the web. So that one was the known and we knew it and it's on the road map and we knew that there would just be... We're gonna launch and then there's gonna be four to six, eight weeks max, where people are like, "Oh, I love this, but I want it on my phone." And then we just have to say, alright, we have to wait for this time.0:24:29.7 DS: Do you feel particularly happy with the 10 sign-ups that you have right now, considering you don't have some of these things? Like, you know like, "Hey, this is our entry level experience and we're already meeting your needs, and so we're doing pretty good, we don't have the mobile app, we don't have integrations, we don't have some of these things that you feel like you need." And so does that make you feel pretty good about where you're at already? 0:25:00.2 AW: A little bit. I would definitely be worried if I had no one, then I'd be like, "Oh boy, we got a problem here." But yeah, I would probably... I would feel better if I was at two to three times where we're at with paying customers right now. That would just... A little bit more statistical but I'm happy we're slowly working our way out of counting customers on two hands. That's great that we're moving on to toes now.0:25:31.1 DS: That's right.0:25:32.7 AW: So I would love to exceed fingers and toes, I'd feel a little bit better on that side. It does affect... Especially the way I am like, I am a little bit apprehensive on sales calls and demos, just 'cause I'm like, "I know this is gonna get asked." I've done enough of these now, I've done somewhere between 50-75 demos, and it's almost every time. So it's easy to understand and yeah, the entire time I've always had an answer that like, "That mobile would be a fast follow," all of those kind of things.0:26:07.9 AW: And then we discussed, and I played out the scenario in my head, if we did things the opposite, if we would have done just mobile only, the load of what we would have had to build for some of the settings things and things like all the saved replies and stuff like that, would have been a lot trickier. So we wouldn't have gotten to market as fast with our initial product, then developing the web would be a little bit... So it's like doing things the other way, so to say like, "Oh, well to get rid of your mobile objection, you should have just built mobile first." That would have caused some other problems and issues and elongated the process a little bit, so... I feel good with the way that we approached it and what we bit off first with what's there. And it's just living through the frustration of the next handful of weeks where it's like, "I'm gonna get the question, I don't have an immediate yes. It's coming. Here's what we're predicting right now, as far as the date."0:27:10.1 DS: I often think of like building a SaaS company and a SaaS product, sort of like building a high-rise tower in the middle of the city, and it's like you build the first floor and you're like, "Move on in!" "Yeah, we're already leasing the first floor." "I know we're still building like the next 100 floors on top of it, but, hey, we're ready for you to move in. Don't mind the construction."0:27:37.5 AW: It's only gonna get better.0:27:39.2 DS: Exactly. Yeah. Believe we're putting a pool in on the third floor, we're putting in a fitness center on the fifth floor. It's gonna be great.0:27:49.8 AW: No, I mean you're totally... I hear that. And that fits in with the marathon, not a sprint analogy as well.0:27:57.2 DS: Totally, yeah.0:27:57.4 AW: Where it's like, yeah, you're not just building a single story building, and you're done and whatever else. It's like, "No, you're trying to get this thing to exponentially add floors continually to what's there. And even on that side, I think I can comment on some of that like, messaging and the evolution of those things too, but, the second item that's of main focus is just integrations, and this is the one where I knew this would come up, I didn't know it would come up so strongly and repeatedly.0:28:34.3 DS: Right.0:28:34.9 AW: And I think that being a blind spot is kind of a couple of things. One is just maturity in time, where, you know the last time I had this immature of a product was five years ago, and the world of software is a lot different, and the expectation has become that your software can talk to others. And then I hadn't built something that was so ingrained in the sales and communication process as you know, what GatherUp was and sending surveys afterwards and things like that, like the integration needs there were very light and some very straightforward things. We get asked instead of, I thought, "Oh, I bet about 25%, 30% of the time we're gonna get asked about integrations, we know what we need to do, they're more on our medium plan timeframe instead of short-term." But yeah, it became super clear to me in the first two weeks after launch, like this needs to be on our short-term plan. We have to get something accomplished here, because this is also being brought up 80%, 90% of the time.0:29:47.5 DS: Are you able to identify based off of your initial calls, like, "What is the number one we have to integrate with this as soon as possible because it's so common, and it's like you're getting a lot of people saying, "This is the thing."0:29:58.4 AW: Yeah, absolutely.0:30:01.1 DS: What is the thing? 0:30:02.0 AW: Yeah, top is CRMs. It's all updating the conversation into the contacts or having the contact created because the conversation is created, so that by far. The action that we've taken from that is we immediately started to look and talk to a couple of freelancers and then a vendor that's all they do is build apps, Zapier apps and integration, so we talked to a couple of those and we selected a vendor, and then we just started work this week on our Zapier app.0:30:40.7 DS: That's interesting. So you're outsourcing. You're like, we gotta get this to market quick, this is necessary, and so you don't have the dev resources, so you're like, "We're going to hire this outside team to start building our integrations right now."0:30:53.6 AW: Yeah, so one, having built a Zapier app before, I know that it's right, its own kind of nomenclature for how they want things done, and any developer can read up on it, study it, do whatever else, but I'd be asking... I looked at it, I'd be taking one of our small team and saying, "Okay, none of you have ever done this before, but within a few days, you'll get it." "You'll have some blind spots and some pitfalls and whatever else, but I'm also pulling you off of something you know how to do really well and asking you to learn that new thing." And this is kind of a shorter term like a get it done type thing. So, when I weigh those things out, it's like, "Alright, I can take it to these guys, have delivery of this within 20 working days, and I'm not sacrificing someone else from the team, taking them from a strength and putting them into having to learn something new." So yeah, it was just really pretty easy to say like, "Okay, I would love if we weren't paying on top of till I get this accomplished," but this is gonna be... It's gonna be faster, quicker.0:32:03.6 AW: We're also getting their expertise because my last Zapier app we weren't integrating with CRMs, so I was able to say like, "Okay, here's similar products. What do you guys think we should be creating for triggers and actions and the integrations in the Zapier ecosystem?" And you know they have experience in doing this, so they're able to outline it and you know make it pretty clear on us what we needed to do, and also outline a couple of things like... Our product is built API-driven, the back-end is node, so we have all the APIs and everything else, but there's a few things for how a customer might wanna set up an integration and handle something that they're like, "You might wanna create variances of this or you might wanna make this more real-time and build a web hook off it," so they were able to outline some of those things that we can pick apart over to... We won't do all of them right away, but they have recommendations where we can say like, "Okay, we wanna try to get these one to two done while you're building, but then these other ones we know that they'll probably come up based on your experience and they're at least on our radar to start creating them."0:33:13.6 DS: Yeah, it makes me think about like it's like another aspect of that marathon is limited development resources. It's like you can only build so much. And so it's that constant prioritizing and pushing things to next month and pushing things to next quarter and this will be something that we're gonna tackle next year, and if I had double my dev team, triple, quadruple. I see some companies, they have like 100 developers and they have 100 developers, and I'm like, "How are you not pumping out incredible stuff every week?" It's like you have 100 developers, but your product looks like it hasn't done anything exciting for months. So, it blows my mind. I don't know how companies... I can't imagine. How does that happen when you get to that scale of a huge company and you're still not innovating? That's really bizarre.0:34:07.3 AW: Well, you end up with technical debt.0:34:10.9 DS: Yeah.0:34:11.2 AW: You end up with a lot of dependencies, you've likely built so much that there's no... And we got to this point six years in at GatherUp. There wasn't anything that was like a yes, no. It was all if or maybe or also was it attached to everything, 'cause it's not like, "Yeah, it just can't be this because and how we did this or how we built this other feature and this also interacts with that, it's now competing, or it just has to be... Or now we have to build something that controls this, so these two things can be handled separately." You definitely get a lot of that every time, right? The same analogy of building the building up, once you get to the 60th floor, there are things like, "Okay well, we put a pool in on the 20th floor, and because of the weight of that, we can't do that how we want to... How much higher we wanna build, so we gotta go back and rip the pool out or fortify that more like... " All those things build up for sure, so.0:35:16.4 DS: Yeah, I guess that's how it happens as you just keep building it gets more complicated. Everything has to talk to each other and I'm facing that right now. And it's like I like your outsourcing idea. I have this one thing as a founder, every week I got some new thing I wanna build, but we don't have dev resources to do it, and so I'm like, I just pinged my lead developer this morning being like, "Hey, I wanna build this thing. How about I get it done over in Upwork?" I made the mistake last time of building something in Upwork and then it being completely useless. We'd love to integrate it with our software eventually, and so it's that tricky balance of building something in a way with the right technology so that we can still use it and integrate it into our larger software vision for later.0:36:02.4 AW: That's where the Zapier app makes sense because it is kind of on an island, right? 0:36:08.4 DS: Totally, it's perfect.0:36:09.4 AW: Yes, they have to use their API, but it has to follow the rules and the structure of how you build the Zapier app. So in that case, it isn't something like, "Oh well, yeah, we had this person build it, but now it's in a different language. We can't just mold it into ours at any time. And we need them forever in the Upkeep," like our team can learn and pick apart how it works, and we can do our own Upkeep as we get on the road if we need to, or we can make the decision again that, "No, we'll have them update it 'cause it'll be faster and we're focused on other things."0:36:49.2 DS: Yeah.0:36:49.4 AW: But yeah, so much of it comes out at the end of the day is like, when you're small and you need efficiency, the most efficient thing is people doing what they do best. I even know it for myself, the things that I'm good at, I can get more done than anyone I know with the things I'm good at. The things that I suck at, those take 10 times longer, right? It's just like, oh my God, this is never gonna end because I stink at it. I'm teaching it to myself at the same time. I don't enjoy it, so I'm like putting it off or...0:37:21.1 DS: Yes.0:37:21.5 AW: Procrastinating.0:37:22.6 DS: Procrastinating. Oh, totally. I know that feeling, like big projects where you're like, "Oh I hate doing this work," and then it just takes 10 times longer because you just pick away at it here and there, you'll work for a little bit and not enjoy it, but yeah 100% I agree.0:37:36.9 AW: Yeah. And I can see that even with one of our developers, he was stuck on our Stripe and billing and that wasn't his favorite thing, and it was hard at points and had to re-factor some stuff really quickly and whatever else. And now that he's working on the mobile app, in his work patterns and what he's sharing, in just the time and effort being put into it, I can tell totally this excites him.0:38:06.0 DS: Yeah.0:38:06.9 AW: He's excited to work on it, and the output is so much different than, "Oh, course, another dead-end on this and having to figure out this, like, 'Oh, I got a challenge, but hey, I'm gonna get it solved 'cause I wanna see this work at its next stage.'" So.0:38:20.0 DS: Sure. Yeah. Just thinking about that floors analogy is just you're just slowly putting on one floor at a time, just stepping through it and it takes a long time to build a company and going back to what you said about companies at those different stages. Everyone's looking to grow, even when you get to $10million, $50 million ARR, you just have more stuff to sort out and you've got the next mile to complete of your marathon, the next floor to put on your building.0:39:00.1 AW: Yeah. No, absolutely correct and even the last thing that it sparked in my mind and then it led me to just doing some of it last night is like going back and aligning web copy to the types of conversations that I'm having with customers, right? So it's like some of the web copy I wrote in February and March when we launched the marketing site and got that up there. Well, I've had hundreds of conversations with prospects and friends and people in the space. Everything else since then and my story has evolved like I've... It's allowed me to craft it better and realize what are people interested in? 0:39:40.9 DS: Right.0:39:41.6 AW: Where do we better align with those things, and so it's like going down that and it brought me to like, "Oh, I need to go back and look at those things, right?" I put in a sprint before, I'm getting content up and getting out there like what we are, but I've run further now, so I need to re-analyze it and go back on it and know, yeah this... There's a better version of it and one that's more succinct to what I'm seeing resonate with customers and the types of things they're asking about, my content should be answering. So from that standpoint, it just really made me realize like, "Oh, don't just leave that stale content out there," because you've evolved a bunch since you wrote that, you need to go back and bring that back up and do something new with it one way or the other.0:40:35.0 DS: Yeah. It's constant evolution, constant revision, tweaking, changing, progressing, growing, it's like... I don't know if you wanna call it a marathon that never ends? Or is it just one marathon after another? 0:40:48.5 AW: An ultra marathon. [laughter]0:40:50.6 DS: Yeah. Ironman. You just keep doing all these different marathons, and so I don't know if it's like each product launch, each phase of your product launch, is that a marathon? And then you start another one? I don't know what the best analogy is.0:41:05.7 AW: Sounds like it, but I think it points out, Darren the reason... Then I also think like the emotional and the personal aspect sides of it as founders. And I think... You and I do in this podcast, it has multiple benefits, it's important for us to be able to talk about things out loud, it makes us reflect on things, it allows us to hear what the other person is going through, so you don't feel like you're alone with it. So I just think those things are really important inside of it too, is like, as you're going through this because it is so grueling, because it's long-term, because... Sometimes at certain points, you're just trying to survive, you're not even trying... You're not even trying to run your best time in mile 13, you're just trying to freaking get through it, so you can get to the next part of it is like, you have to think about those kind of things for yourselves too. Do you have the right outlets, taking care of yourself, especially the mental side. I don't know, as we opened with this, like the physical side, I need to get better at lately, like I spend way too much time just on my computer. I need to do a little bit more on the health side of things, but all of those things are so important so that you can make the long-term. You just can't crush yourself in some of these cycles of, this is do or die, this has to happen now, I need to get this done. Those can take their toll.0:42:31.7 DS: Yeah. That constant as a founder there's just stuff, that never-ending to-do list, that weight of all of the things that need to get done, that you wanna get done in order to progress and grow the company is just... It's pretty heavy, it's a lot to carry.0:42:47.3 AW: Yep. So make sure you have an outlet, make sure you're talking about it, or just even... Listen, listen to others, to know you're not alone in it, right? 0:42:58.0 DS: Yeah. And I hope that some of our listeners are feeling the benefits of that too, you're not alone, we're all in this together.0:43:04.4 AW: No. Darren and I... I struggle every day with certain aspects and just gotta keep pushing ahead so you can make it tomorrow to figure out the things tomorrow.0:43:15.0 DS: Yep, every day... The struggle.0:43:18.6 AW: Alright. Well, hey, let's call it a wrap, great to catch up with you. Happy that your load is hopefully lightened and hopefully you guys can finish the year strong and heads down on getting platform to its next steps. I know that's just such a big evolution for you guys. I really hope that can be your singular focus as you close out the end of the year.0:43:44.5 DS: Thank you, it is coming together and good luck with your mobile app and your integrations and the next phase of Leadferno. I'm excited to watch you grow through the rest of this year too.0:43:54.8 AW: No. I would love for our next episode... Or maybe we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves. One of our episodes, the end of the year will be like, "We did it," and we've accomplished these bigger things and then we'll still have a bunch of other problems. But sometimes I'd rather have a bunch of small problems than a couple of the big ones, 'cause it's a lot to push that boulder up hill.0:44:18.1 DS: Yeah. One marathon after another one, so once we get... Once we finish the marathon that we're currently on, then we can announce that we did it and discuss what our next one is.0:44:29.3 AW: There you go, you nailed it.0:44:31.0 DS: Alright, thank you, Aaron. Great to talk to you as always.0:44:34.4 AW: Great to catch up, Darren. Thanks everyone for listening, we always appreciate comments or questions via Twitter or email. And hopefully we'll see you again soon. Hopefully we hit record in a tighter cycle than six weeks this time again.0:44:52.3 DS: Yeah. I would really appreciate any reviews on the iTunes store, those are really helpful.0:45:00.9 AW: There you go, then others can find us. We appreciate new listeners, alright. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon, Darren.0:45:05.6 DS: Talk to you soon. Bye.[OUTRO music]
FULL SHOW NOTES[INTRO music]0:00:10.5 Aaron Weiche: Episode 29, Prioritize or Die.0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast, sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins and losses shared in each episode from Aaron Weiche of Leadferno and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.[music]0:00:42.5 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture Podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:46.0 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:48.0 AW: Did you see what I did with that clickbait title of our episode today, Darren? 0:00:52.9 DS: I did actually. I wrote something different, but yours is way better, yeah, that's good. [chuckle]0:00:56.8 AW: I think I was mostly trying to avoid, right? You had wrote prioritization and I was like, that just sounds like a word that I will somehow mangle when we go to hit record, and then yeah, I just went all-out sensationalism and clickbait and...0:01:12.2 DS: And I actually think, not only is it clickbait-y, which is great, but it also was accurate. I think that it's really the theme of this episode.0:01:20.9 AW: Yeah, and it's not... As we get into it, it's not an instant death, it's just probably a slow death if...0:01:28.8 DS: Absolutely.0:01:29.8 AW: You don't adhere to it. And yeah, I'm super excited to get into that. But it's been five weeks since we've last recorded, and we caught up a little bit before hitting record. Sometimes I think we should just hit record the second we get on and let people hear all of our small talk, and then maybe wrap that into the after show. We usually have really big... We just had some really big ideas. We'll see if we can put those into play someday. But...0:01:57.2 DS: Yeah.0:02:01.7 AW: What has been consuming your time this last handful of weeks? 0:02:07.0 DS: I've been busy with the summit. Just, I've been on lots of calls with the team, planning our software, and lots of summit stuff. So just trying to get all work...0:02:19.3 AW: So you're talking about, for those that don't always listen to us, you put on a local search summit, virtual last year, it was your very first one.0:02:29.2 DS: Yeah.0:02:29.3 AW: Remind me again, how many speakers... I know the attendee number was super high. Like frame up how the very first one went.0:02:36.8 DS: So our Whitespark Local Search Summit, the first one we did last year, a virtual summit, it's free to attend, pay if you want the recordings, and we had 6,000 registered... People registered for the event. We...0:02:56.7 AW: That's so awesome.0:02:56.8 DS: It was huge, yeah. So I was a little bit shocked with how well we did. We had 32 speakers, I think, a three-day event. And so it's a lot of work to put it together. So this year, I'm really excited about how things are shaping up. Our line-up is phenomenal. We've got incredible speakers like Aaron Weiche speaking. [laughter] So it's gonna be fantastic. I can't wait for it. We really put a lot of polish on it this year. I gotta give a shoutout to Jesse Lowe on our marketing team, she is our marketing team, and she...0:03:29.8 AW: Go Jesse.0:03:33.2 DS: She's done such an incredible job with the design, and we're building our website now and our sponsor deck, and just everything is just getting really nicely tweaked and polished, and it's gonna be an incredible event, and I think that we're shooting for 8,000 registrations this year, but it really feels like that level of conference quality that you might see at a Moss Con, I feel like we're hitting our stride with it this year and really kinda taken it to that next level. So been really busy with that, trying to get that stuff working out.0:04:03.5 AW: That's just so incredible, like when you say those numbers. I remember that attendees were in the thousands, but again, first-time event, you pull it off during a pandemic.0:04:15.1 DS: Yeah. [chuckle]0:04:16.1 AW: Some of it probably helpful 'cause people were just so hungry for good information, good interaction. I remember, I super enjoyed... So many of the speakers are like friends and people that we see on the conference circuit that you get to see in person and have a beer with or grab dinner with, and it was just like... It was just great to hear David Mihm present. It was just great to hear people that you're used to that are smart and have something different in your day than Zoom calls with your internal team. [chuckle] So...0:04:50.1 DS: Yeah.0:04:51.3 AW: Those are some lofty goals, man. 8,000, that's awesome. I can't wait.0:04:54.3 DS: I'm a little bit worried that instead of increasing our registration count, we might drop, and one of the concerns I have is just virtual conference burnout. It's like we kinda hit it and at a sweet spot last time around, whereas it's been a full year, and I don't know, my inbox is blowing up with virtual conference invites all the time, and so I just wonder if people are a little bit burnt out from it, but we'll see.0:05:20.4 AW: Yeah, could be, but I would say in the local space, other than local you, nothing else comes close to the level of content that you put into that event. So I think no matter what, even if you stay the same, even if you're a little bit lower, like you've put something great in motion that I can't wait for it to be like an in-person, just imagine like... Imagine if you're able to pull off a 1000-person in-person conference event in local, that would be nuts.0:05:54.7 DS: While we plan to do it, I actually have already looked into doing the conference at the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, and so one day we're gonna go to... It's like castle in the mountains, in the rocky mountains, it's so beautiful. I wanna do it there. I've looked into pricing. I would have done it if I felt confident that by 2022, we wouldn't have weird COVID variants locking us down again, but their cancellation policy is like, "You gotta sign that contract, and if you back out, you lose 75 grand." So it was like, "Okay, I can't commit." But 2023, I feel like we're gonna do it. We're gonna do it in the mountains, it's gonna be great.0:06:35.1 AW: Oh my gosh, that sounds epic to say the least.0:06:39.1 DS: Yeah. I want that to happen.0:06:45.3 AW: On my side of things, you and I talked during this as friends, and then professionally on a couple of things, but I had a hard two, three weeks of being able to focus on work, which is really strange for me because I'm definitely a workaholic, work is a hobby, I just love being immersed, but the short of it is, my mom has Lewy body dementia, and it's gotten to the point where she can't live on her own, and so we had to transition her into assisted living, and the combination of visiting facilities and finding the right one for her and organizing everything that goes into a transfer like that and to some of the medical things and records and application and process, and then she was living in a town home that we owned, so cleaning that out, and then my wife and I decided to sell the town home as well, with my mom moving out of it, we just felt like the timing was right, and real estate market's great.0:07:46.3 AW: So it was really hard. I'm normally like a lot of hours, 50, 60 hours easily of high-output work, I was probably more in the 30-hour range and having a hard time focusing 'cause of these bigger things, and it was really hard on me for a little bit because I'm just so not used to it. It was just jarring off of my normal schedule and what I usually put myself into and everything else. So it's nice to be on the other side of that now and feel Mom has moved and settling in and that's a really... That's a good situation for her and everything else, and the town home was sold and closed and that's wrapped up, and so we're not spending nights and weekends over there getting it ready to sell and that whole process. So it's definitely threw me for a loop that when I was in it, I definitely felt like I was just like kind of treading water, if not drowning and looking around, like, "What direction do I go here? This feels awful weird."0:08:49.4 DS: Oh man, I'm so sorry. It's gotta be... It must have been really tough, must continue to be really tough for you with your mom, so I'm really sorry to hear that.0:09:00.0 AW: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. You and I, we had some personal conversations that were helpful, easy outlet for me to talk through some of those things. But yeah, it's just... The reverse parenting and the things that go along with that is you enter the next stage of life. It's definitely interesting, and yeah, it can be overwhelming and... I don't know. I guess I just wanted to share that for those of you running a company, starting something, all those things are hard enough, and that's not even throwing in what real life throws at you [chuckle] sometimes, and when you're an entrepreneur, you just live so much of your life in the business, and it can get hectic. So know if it's getting hectic for you, you're not alone, and hopefully you find the right people to talk to and the right ways to sort through it, and you get to the other side of that moment.0:09:51.9 DS: Yeah, for sure. We all have the things that come up that we... We try to run a business, but life interrupts often. Yeah.0:10:00.9 AW: On the plus side of life, I'm fully vaxxed, that says of like three and a half, four weeks ago, so I've had weeks now to live as a vaccinated person. I booked a flight just two days ago. I felt like such a noob going into my Delta app and like, "Oh, how do you book a flight?" I had completely forgotten. And booking a hotel, all of it just felt... I felt like I was making these huge purchases on something literally... I used to probably do 30 to 40 flights a year, something that I used to do a lot. I probably illegally was booking flights while driving somewhere. It was just that common of a repeated process. And then I actually bought tickets to SaaStr. They're doing in-person in September. They said you have to be vaccinated. I think almost the entire conference is outdoors. They're using a big outdoor facility out in California ____.0:11:00.6 DS: Oh wow.0:11:01.0 AW: So I'm really interested to check that out and see that and looking forward to it. I think my wife Marcy is... I saw the glee in her eyes when I said I was booking travel. She was like, "Yes, I could use some alone time in the house. This sounds great." [chuckle] Yeah, she's very encouraging. She's like, "That sounds wonderful. Is it tomorrow?" "No, babe. You gotta wait a couple of weeks."0:11:28.7 DS: Wow, that's a huge move. Booking travel. We're a couple of months behind you in Canada with our vaccination rollout, and so this is beyond my comprehension at this point. But yeah, I look forward to one day booking travel [chuckle] hopefully in the not too distant future.0:11:46.5 AW: You will get there soon. When it happens, if you just need a field trip, come on down to Minneapolis and let's hang out for a couple of days.0:11:53.3 DS: Oh my... I should just make that... I should book it right now, yeah.0:11:57.6 AW: Done. Sounds like a plan.0:12:00.1 DS: Yeah, I would love to, would love to.0:12:00.8 AW: Yeah.0:12:02.1 DS: What's happening with... I remember last time we talked, you had your Flutter main developer leaving. How's that sorting out? 0:12:09.9 AW: Oh man, that has been a struggle. So we engaged both our initial recruiter that's helped us build our team, and then we went through Toptal.0:12:23.4 DS: Oh yeah.0:12:24.7 AW: And I would just say that really the biggest challenge is Flutter is really two to three-year-old as far as being still not mainstream, but just on the map. So the pool of candidates is just super small. So my experience with Toptal, to cut to the chase, we did hire someone, it wasn't through Toptal, we probably had four or five interviews through Toptal, one we interviewed and felt like they weren't the right fit for our project, the next candidate, we interviewed literally an hour after we interview them, we found out they took another job, another project to work on, then they sent us one that was like twice the hourly rate that was in our budget, so that was a non-starter, then we interviewed another one, liked him. Toptal does... They basically put them with you on the project for five days as like a free trial, and then after day one, he backed off the project. He didn't like the... He basically said, "I should've asked a few more questions." He didn't like the state management that we were using with it and felt like he wasn't gonna be a good fit for that, which was great that he didn't waste any more time, but it totally felt like a back-to-the-drawing-board.0:13:50.2 AW: And so we also had a couple of interviews with our original company that was recruiting for us, and we ended up, one of the two candidates they sourced for us, got to move forward with him, and he just started part-time this week. So that process took us five to six weeks to completely reset, which where we're at in timing right now and trying to get to launch, that feels like we lost an eternity, losing two to three sprints.0:14:20.8 DS: Sure.0:14:21.2 AW: But all you can do is be happy now. The one little plus is he does have some Node JS, which is our backend, so he might be a little bit full stack for us, which is interesting. So far we kinda have two frontend, two backend.0:14:35.8 DS: Yeah.0:14:38.3 AW: So that wild card might be nice with it. So it's taken a while. It wasn't ideal. Some of it's no fault of anyone, it's just kind of a... I think Flutter is starting to grow, so those that have talent and experience there are in high demand, especially when we are looking for someone that had at least a year experience within Flutter, not looking to learn it with us.0:15:05.6 DS: Do you... Okay, now that you've been through this process, do you have any regrets about choosing Flutter as a less mature language that maybe doesn't have the same pool of candidates that other languages have? 0:15:19.2 AW: No, because the whole reason we selected it is because we knew we were gonna do mobile apps as well. And so really my only regret will be, is if that process isn't as smooth for us to kick out our mobile apps. We're gonna launch with just our web app, and then fast follow with the mobile apps. So I just look at it... We knew that there would be some pieces of immaturity in libraries with Flutter and things like that, and we've kind of crossed a few of those bridges, but I'm still really hopeful that the main reason we decided why was to only work on one code base, per se, to deliver the frontend in web and native app experiences. So from that side, I still feel good. If that falls flat, then I'll be super frustrated that we should have used React and React Native, something more tried and true.0:16:13.8 DS: Yeah, yeah. Well we'll see. I guess we'll talk about in a future podcast, how your mobile app development is proceeding.[chuckle]0:16:22.7 AW: There you go. Hopefully, it'll probably be a couple of episodes from now, but yeah, I can't wait. I'm excited to get to that part of things.0:16:30.2 DS: Yeah for sure. Yeah. Alright. What else is going on? How are things at Leadferno, I guess, now that you've got your development back on track? 0:16:40.7 AW: Yeah, progressing well, it's just with anything, never fast enough.0:16:47.6 DS: Yeah.0:16:50.5 AW: But... And I think this probably serves as a good crossover with us to start talking because, prioritization, because that's really where we're at right now, is like we kinda internally set four months ago, like end of June, we're recording this right now on June 11th, it'll come out next week, but we said end of June is when we wanted to go live, and I can see from where we're at right now, it's gonna take us another sprint or two, just testing, clean up some of those things. But even when we launch then, it's still not gonna be perfect. So there's definitely like, launch is our priority right now, but then there's a couple of priorities that I have to answer to inside of that launch, that, which one's most important? Is it time? Or is it features? And I have some conundrum within that, on which one to place first, and I think I've arrived somewhere, which is good, 'cause you do need to make some decisions on these things [chuckle] and not waffle on them. But that's been hard.0:18:00.5 DS: It's exactly what I'm dealing with too, with our stuff that we're working on at Whitespark. I could build my grand vision over the course of the next year or build it into phases, so we have multiple launches. And so our goal is definitely to get to these multiple launches. So we have our phase one, phase two, phase three, and then once we get phase six wrapped up, then that's the grand vision of what I wanna build. So that prioritization, what goes into phase one, what... Do you move to phase two? Is what we had planned for phase three more important to put for phase two? That's all the stuff that I'm debating right now.0:18:46.0 AW: Yeah well and, as you and I have discussed off-recording, I think you were wrangling for a long time with how do you fit this in or how do you prioritize this next thing with what you're doing, right? And you have tools and services that you sell right now, and how do you balance not only supporting those, but do you continue to improve and mature those. At the same time, what I heard from you is just like the next thing that you're building being so important to you, right? Like no matter what we were talking about, your answer would turn to platform really being the answer to other things that we were trying to solve or discuss or whatever else, and it became apparent to me, and then I think apparent to you, platform needs to be the prioritization, right? 0:19:43.4 DS: It really does, and one of the things it's like, your title Prioritize or Die, and you mentioned it's a slow process, and it is. It's really like death of a company by 1,000 cuts. It's one little thing after another, and we've been up against that for, I don't know, five, 10 years. We're just constantly... Before we can progress on this, we gotta finish that one last thing, or we gotta do this little thing, or we have to update our crawling architecture, or we gotta change our mailing application.0:20:17.7 DS: It's just like... Because we're already a mature company with a customer base to support and software to keep running, it's really hard to build that next generation of our product, and it's something that, it's really become clear that if I don't turn everything off, we won't ever get there. Or it'll just take us another three years to get there, and so this prioritization has really hit home with me, and it's like we're putting everything on ice. If it's not mission critical, we don't do it.0:21:00.0 DS: So if it... We're putting all resources towards building platform, which is the next generation of Whitespark products, and so I have to do it, otherwise, it won't happen, and so... And if it doesn't happen, we will continue to be a profitable successful company, but we won't have that growth. That thing that... That catapult into the two times, three times, five times growth that I wanna see happen for Whitespark. The potential is there, and it's like, I'm always looking at it. It's this sort of future thing. It needs to stop being a future thing, and it needs to be a now thing and that we're building it right now.0:21:40.3 AW: Yeah. No... One, I fully support that, and I totally agree with your statement. You won't reach your potential, right? You have these ideas, you know these things, you have so much experience in the space. You know what needs to be delivered, and if you keep hopping around with the other things that you have right now and trying to forward those at the same time of creating this ultimate idea, like you just can't... You can't split pairs that many ways and still have something yet left to do something with.0:22:19.1 AW: I think you put it... You put it perfectly in our pre-show notes when you just wrote, "It's okay to put other things on hold."0:22:28.9 DS: Right, yeah.0:22:29.0 AW: But we had some conversations, but I'd love to hear or maybe you sharing a little bit, like what happened in between some of our conversations where you're thinking about this internally and going through the... How uncomfortable at first, and how did you get yourself more comfortable with, it's okay to put things on hold and pursue this big idea that feels... This feels like what I need to do, but then it's much different to say you're going to do it and then put that in action to just do it.0:23:02.8 DS: Yeah. So I would say there was two things that happened. One, you and I talked about this platform stuff and you had pushed for... You'd be like, "Man, Darren you should really... You really... You need to start putting other things on hold and focus on platform." and so that seed was planted, and then... So I've always been faced with well, we'll get to that when we finish this thing. We'll get to platform when we finished this next thing, and the thing that was lined up was something that I think I've mentioned on the podcast before, but we have a new feature that we're integrating into our local citation finder that does a deep audit and a stand-alone tool, which we're calling Scanarator.0:23:46.4 DS: So this thing was built by one of our developers who we brought in-house, but he was a freelancer working on the side, and I wanted to do the side project, but I didn't wanna distract my team from... So he built this thing. And it's great, it works really well, but now that we're at this phase where we're actually integrating it into our stack, it became clear that we couldn't do it because he built it in his own weird framework-y thing, and so it's like, "Well, we're getting close to launching this thing, it's all functional, but when it comes to integrating it, we're gonna have to re-write it in our stack." and I was like, "What?" This is gonna take us like another month, maybe two, and then it was Click! 0:24:30.4 DS: This light bulb went off. I'd be like, what is that gonna give us? Is it gonna increase our MRR by a $1,000 a month? Maybe. Maybe it's not gonna give us that much more. It's like I keep pushing on all of these things that will definitely improve our software, but that's not gonna two times our company. It's just gonna keep us floating along. It's going to keep us staying the course. If I put that on ice, it doesn't hurt us. We've already raised our prices for the local citation finder.0:25:04.0 AW: So great, we're putting it on ice. We're not integrating that functionality until we can integrate it into platform, and so that was like... You planted the seed. I saw that exact situation occurring again, where I'm like, "My God, I'm not gonna delay platform by another two months." Forget it. We're putting everything on ice, we're focusing on platform, and that absolutely... I feel so good about that decision, and I know that that's gonna get us to where we need to go. And it's like... I don't know why it took me so long to have that shift of perception, 'cause it's really easy to just keep building on what you already have rather than going after the big prize.0:25:44.5 AW: Yeah. Well, it's probably a couple things. One, we all have different levels of risk aversion, and especially the larger you grow your company, you're responsible for more people, you're responsible for more customers. I think part of your success, Darren, is what I see in you is, you are so wired to not only please but exceed what people get from you. It's in all of the content you share, the presentations you give. You just give so much, and so I think when you look at this, I think it's been hard for you to wrangle with something, be like, "I'm just gonna let it be good enough for a while, instead of constantly pushing on it to be great, even though its ceiling just isn't the ultimate ceiling, right? 0:26:30.5 AW: And that's where getting this transfer of energy put into something that has a very high ceiling, but it's also gonna be hard. There's risk involved in it, and it's risky when you take yourself away from the same track that you've been on on trying to deliver greatness with what you do have out there and just being okay with it being the same for a while, while you put all your focus into one thing.0:26:58.1 DS: Yeah. The to-do list don't stop. Like all of our existing software products, they each have a list of 100 things that I wanna do for them, and then what ends up happening is I end up on all these client calls. So I'm on a sales call, or a customer support thing comes up, and so there's all these polls happening, like a customer... A lead wants this thing, and then your brain goes to like, "Well, if we built that thing, it would serve all of our customers and we could sell more and it would be great." But those are actually distractions, in my personal case, from the bigger prize, and I realize that I have to focus our attention on a bigger price and say, "Well, that's a cool feature, let's do it when we have the main thing that we wanna build it into done."0:27:49.3 AW: One of the things that I've done at multiple past companies, just because the same things you're talking about, like that happens everywhere in business for all of us, and I think the truly great leaders are the ones that find the time and find the ways to separate themselves from the business of doing in the constant motion, and boil it down to what is my one most important thing right now, and am I doing enough for that? Because if that doesn't happen, all of the other things usually pale in comparison, right? 0:28:22.0 AW: And I would try to do this from time to time, whether it was monthly or bi-monthly or even quarterly with my management team and just have a meeting in one of our normal exec team cycles or whatever, but say like, what's the one thing you need to get done right now and does it have a blocker, do you need support, do you need resources? And really make them think on that. 'Cause it was real easy for every run to report on, here's my laundry list of things that I need to do, that all need attention, meetings, calls, whatever. We all have that, but the truly great ones find a way to like... That's fine. That's still all gonna be there if I step away from it or put it on ice or delegate or whatever else. But if I don't do this thing... At some point, the business will pay a price in one way or another. If it truly is important enough to be prioritized, it's something that will cost you if you don't take action on it.0:29:21.2 DS: Right. Basically, it's the exact same concept of that book, Eat That Frog. I think it's called Eat that Frog, and so it's like, you start your day, what is the absolute... You just... I know you've got a list of 100 things, but what's the one thing? Eat that thing in the morning. Do that thing first thing before you do anything else, and It'll set you up for success for the whole day. That same concept can be applied with a greater scale at your company level. What is the frog? What is the one thing that you must focus on to move your company forward? 0:29:54.8 AW: I don't think I'm gonna remember right now 'cause I consume way too many SaaS and leader type podcasts, but one of the ones this past week I was listening to, the guy was talking... He literally puts his most important thing on a post-it note and it's on his bathroom mirror. So he sees it like every morning. So even if it's the most important thing for weeks at a time, he comes face-to-face with it every morning. There's no way he sees it in writing, and I just... So basic, but yet, just this gentle reminder in your mindset that, "Hey, it's great whatever I do today, but if I don't contribute to this one thing, I'm not putting my valuable time into the most valuable thing on my docket at the moment." That was really, really interesting.0:30:41.3 DS: Although it's hard because if you ask me right now, what is my personal one thing, whoa! I got three of them. I don't know. I got three of them. I got the summit, I got my videos I gotta make, and I got platform, right? So I have to move all of those things forward.0:31:01.6 AW: Yeah. And that's not to say that doesn't happen, but at the end of the day, if someone made you strip down to one, it wouldn't be the summit and it wouldn't be your videos.0:31:08.9 DS: No. But I... That... You know what happens though, I would let down a lot of people by having prioritized, and I think that's where the struggle is. It's like I got all these different pulls for my attention and my input, and my input has... Everyone wants it, and so it's really tough when, as your company grows. 'Cause if I didn't do my videos and I didn't do the summit stuff then that would just fall apart.0:31:37.9 AW: Yeah. Saying no is hard.0:31:39.4 DS: Saying no is hard.0:31:39.5 AW: Saying no is really, really hard. It took me a long time to... Especially... I've spent so much of my career on the sales and marketing side of running companies, and it used to be like saying no to bad deals when you're young and hungry and trying to grow, and you just take anything on, even though there's something in your gut that's like, "Oh! This... The communication doesn't feel right, the expectations don't feel right, but I just wanna get this deal. The money is good." whatever else, and then you get into it and you're like, "Oh, I would pay money not to have this deal right now." It is so the wrong the deal.0:32:15.9 DS: Yeah. I got a few of those in my closet, for sure.0:32:18.6 AW: Yeah. I actually... I think more than ever at GatherUp, I got really good at being able to say no to those. Where I was just like, that's not who we need to help us grow. Like that... One way or another, and it was really agency life is where I learned how hard... Having a bad client in SaaS Life isn't great, but it's not... Agency life, that bad client could just put your entire company on fire for no good reason and...0:32:51.1 DS: Sure yeah.0:32:51.5 AW: I don't miss that at all...0:32:51.9 DS: So much time. Yeah.0:32:54.5 AW: 'Cause it's just all service delivery, and when service delivery things go wrong, your only option is to throw more people at it, and that just... There isn't always bandwidth to throw more people at it, and then that upsets the other things you're working on. Like, "Oh, man... "0:33:07.5 DS: Yeah. Yeah. It's tough.0:33:09.8 AW: It totally is. Well, I applaud the moves you're making, and I just flat out think prioritization is the hardest thing in running a business. I think it is the most challenging thing that's there, and something that... I just always have so much work to do, sometimes I feel like I see things really clearly, and other times I fight all of those same battles with what's exciting and what's new and getting distracted, and I don't know. I've just... I've tried over time to just figure out as many things as I can to... How do I boil it down to answer to one thing instead of so many the buts and the what ifs and all of that.0:33:55.8 AW: That's always there in every conversation that you can have with yourself, but a lot of times when I analyze, I just have to look at... And that's where I'm at right now. My priority is launch.0:34:09.6 DS: That is obvious.0:34:10.5 AW: Yeah, I have 30 to 45 days at most, and I'm putting this on recording, I cannot go a day outside of July without launching. It's not gonna happen. The hard part, my what-ifs and buts are... There's one bigger differentiating feature that might get cut off and not delivered at launch, and that super pains me as someone who's a product... I don't wanna use the word perfectionist, but I demand and expect a lot out of our tool, and I know things I wanna build for years, and if I'm launching without something that has always been in my V1 and something that I feel like is a differentiator and I'm gonna have to wait another sprint or two sprints after launching, that just feels like such a like... I've almost said to others on the team, I don't know if this is a great way to do, but I'm just like... It's almost like parenting. I'm just like, don't make me have to decide this. Somehow pull this off, save the day. Let's get this feature included in what we're doing up until this time frame, but I don't wanna launch without the... And if it's super apparent to me that we're not even gonna be able to get it, then I'm gonna launch even earlier because I'd rather launch in early July, knowing I'm gonna be without this no matter what, then holding it even further.0:35:43.2 DS: I think one thing you should try to keep in mind is that you're gonna have a significant potential customer base that doesn't care about that feature. They want the core functionality, they're gonna get that out of the gate, and then by putting all of these things into additional sprints, every time you launch a nice new feature, that's another marketing push, it's another chance to reach out to your existing customers, provide more value to them and do a broader marketing push saying, "Hey, we now do this thing, we now do this thing" and so I actually came that realization with our rank tracker product. We were building the whole thing from the ground up, and then my dev team lead pulled me back and says like, "No, those features... Yes, we want them for launch, it'd be great if they were there for launch, but it actually can be a benefit to launch them after 'cause you get that additional marketing engine running for every new cool thing that you're putting up.0:36:40.1 AW: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I struggle with is just first impressions, and especially when you launch, you do get the love when you launch, right? It's like... At least for me at this point, I have a good network of colleagues and friends and professional contacts, like I'll be able to get social posts that get some good sharing to them and figure out some other distribution things and I just fear. It was the same in running GatherUp for six years, there's so many times where I'd talk to somebody, it's like, "Oh well, I looked at you guys early on, and it was just immature and missing so many things and whatever else," and then they don't pay attention to all the incremental steps you're making all the time and then you're just waiting, you need something to grab them to bring them back to get them to say, "Oh, I should take another look because they probably have a lot more understanding." They have a lot more or whatever else, but whatever turned me off to begin with, they almost hold that to you forever, their first impression was, say... And this won't be the case with Leadferno, I've gotten enough feedback that the interface is beautiful and easy to use and everything, so I'm not worried about that.0:37:54.5 AW: But say that was the case and he was like, "Oh," it just looks Junkie. It felt wrong. I couldn't figure out where to go. It wasn't intuitive at all. That person might never, ever consider you again because they just look at like, that company is not gonna fix that, or why would they fix that, right? 0:38:11.3 DS: Sure. Yeah.0:38:12.5 AW: And those are the things that I stress about, and this feature that I have to decide against is like... It is a differentiator, and it's just one of those things too, you might be like, Aaron, why do you have a differentiator that's on the line at the end, but it's like there's just so many things to build in the product, like something... For one reason, another... And in some of the steps we had to build, it just had to be in that place, and so it's like I'm just worried where... It's not gonna make or break us. But if I could get 20 or 30 people or 40 people to sign up those first few weeks as paying customers, and that's the reason why, or that's what keeps them as opposed to it doesn't, the guarantee on getting them to come take a look again when I message them two weeks or four weeks or six weeks later and be like, "Don't worry, it's here." I might not even know who they were. You know what I mean? It just won't...0:39:08.3 DS: I hear what you're saying with a brand new product launch, you're coming out of gates, no one really knows you, that first impression is kind of important, there is an MVP, that's just two minimum. You shouldn't be so minimum, that attention you get with the launch is wasted, right? I hear your perspective there, and now it does raise the question, what is... Let's say you decide, okay, we can't do it, we can't launch without this feature, is it worth pushing back the launch by another three weeks like this is what you're grappling with, right? 0:39:44.2 AW: Yeah, and I already feel like I'm right. Our internal goal was end of June, and so I've already come to grips with, it's gonna take another sprint and possibly two sprints, but that's where I say... Then I start hitting the point of like, "What's not to keep allowing yourself to keep saying like, Oh, just another sprint and another," right? And next thing it's October and I still don't have a damn product out and it's like... So I've drawn in the line of sand, no matter what, if we hit mid-June and we were hopeful we could get it in whatever, then I'll just say "No, all we're doing is prep in the next five days to launch." That's just what we're doing because I don't wanna work...0:40:24.1 AW: We have enough of the product there. I don't wanna work any further in the dark without people's opinion with money on the line, it's like pilot customers and doing demos and people wanting to learn it, all of that's great. But it's not the same as when they're saying yes or no with $150 or $200 a month behind their name. That's a much different piece of feedback, and I wanna get to that 'cause I want people to either be like, "Yes, and here's what I'd like to see next" or "Here's what I'm already learning in my usage", or "This is a no for me, and here's why. Here's what you're missing. Here's why I'm not willing to plug into this or wait for you to bring this along or anything else." We need to hit that at this point because we've been coding long enough... I don't wanna go further. Yeah.0:41:18.1 DS: It does make me wonder a little bit, and I'm sure you've thought of, This is your communication to that first batch of customers and being really... Lots of reminders about what's coming. You're getting in early, and we're gonna grandfather you in, and this is all the stuff that we're building, and it's gonna just keep getting better and trying to keep that excitement brewing for them.0:41:39.9 AW: Yep. Yeah. I know how important that is. I feel like that's something that we settled into and did really well at GatherUp, like we would be teasing features two or three months out. The minute we had a visual on what the future was gonna look like, we were telling people like, "Hey, this is coming and here's why we're building it." right? And helping them understand strategically how we're looking at things, and it was helpful in so many ways.0:42:10.9 AW: The hard part for me with this is like, I know two things that are really big fast follow. The minute we launch, literally, we will celebrate for an hour and then be like, and now we gotta get to these two things. Our mobile apps being one of them, and so I'll be able to promote those two things like, "Hey, we're heads down working on these." As they take shape, I wanna get it to a point where I can give a good firm date that we'll be able to hit for people so that they're not disappointed, but I also know who knows what the priorities will have to be reset when I have...0:42:50.7 AW: The hopeful is we have 20, 50, 100 users within weeks, and then they're telling us what's missing or what would make their life really easy, and then we have to figure how much do we work on those things versus on these big pieces that will open up more so, Oh, it's about to get interesting.0:43:06.7 DS: It's gonna be good. We have lots to talk about on the podcast.0:43:10.8 AW: But that's just all the reason more why... You just can't go any further, and I think every founder Pride has this. I definitely have this struggle. A minimal viable product is just so hard for me. So hard for me.0:43:30.2 DS: Yeah, me too. And that's actually, it's one of the things I realize has held us back because you could keep perfecting something for a really long time before you ever launch it. That's... Back to our topic, that's prioritizing. What is the priority? What needs to get done that's gonna create revenue growth in your company. That's really what it all comes down to you.0:43:52.8 AW: Yep, absolutely. So I'm gonna keep focusing on my priority of launching, and hopefully the dev team can prioritize my feature and get it in there. If not, we're gonna... The priority is gonna be time and we're just... We're not gonna stretch any further without getting... I don't know what term to use, credible feedback, just real feedback instead of... Like I said, pilot customers and testers and friends are nice, but they're just... They don't look at as critical as those paying for it and using it within their business process. That's who you need to be listening to.0:44:30.3 DS: That makes sense. I liked your comment about drawing a line in the sand. It's like, "We would love to have this feature, but here's the line, if we're not gonna have it, then we're not gonna have it."0:44:43.1 AW: And in a perfect world, your team gets that and understands it, right? If you communicate that far enough up front, what you would hope for out of your team is they're planning and preparing, and knowing that there's a deadline that's far enough out where they can make decisions, do their own prioritizing and figure out those things. Also, even having pride of the work like, "Hey, we don't wanna launch without this." So I think there's some smart things that can be done when you're transparent with your team with that and helping them understand prioritization and why you're prioritizing things that way. Again, that's an area where I really grew at GatherUp in just being very intentional in communicating with the team and letting them know, "Here's the order we're gonna build the features in, and here's why. Here's why it matters to our business or fits in with our vision." and allow them to support it and then make their prioritization and their decisions against it, and I think that's a really freeing thing for your team.0:45:41.7 DS: Yeah. I think it's an area of personal growth for me. That's something I can get a bit better at 'cause I don't really have deadlines defined, and I have been notorious for not defining them, but that also comes back to scoping out our projects really well, so having them really well-scoped, defining these sprints, defining these timelines, that's something that I gotta get better at.0:46:03.9 AW: No. Always something to get better at.0:46:04.0 DS: Yeah, definitely. Whatever.0:46:06.5 AW: Alright. Should we wrap it up? 0:46:09.1 DS: We should wrap it up. We did it in 45 minutes.0:46:12.6 AW: Hey, that's a win. We always discuss if we can go shorter, we try not to get longer, but as I told you, no one's ever complained, no one's ever written us and said, "Hey, this is too long, I just... I can't handle it." 0:46:26.7 DS: Sure. Alright, well, any listeners, if you have any complaints, let us know.0:46:30.1 AW: Yes, or if you have praise, let us know too. It's just always nice to know, it's just not Darren talking or topic ideas we get every now and then, questions you want answered, we'd love to hear from listeners so...0:46:42.9 AW: Alright, Darren. Well, I hope you have a fabulous time enjoying some summer and...0:46:52.4 DS: Yeah. Thanks. Same to you.0:46:54.4 AW: Hopefully. I know you have your second vaccination shot up and coming, and that helps return a few more spices of life and socialization and those things that have been hard to come by.0:47:06.9 DS: For sure. Yeah, I look forward to that. That lifestyle that you're getting into now. Go for a trip.0:47:11.6 AW: It feels kind of good.0:47:15.0 DS: I know. It sounds good.0:47:17.0 AW: Oh, to be normal.0:47:18.4 DS: Yeah. Totally.0:47:19.0 AW: Alright. Well, have a good one, Darren, and thanks everybody. And we'll see you on the next episode.0:47:23.8 DS: Thank you, everybody.[OUTRO music]
FULL EPISODE NOTES:0:00:12.1 Aaron Weiche: Episode 28: Vision and Mission.0:00:16.0 [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.0:00:44.2 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:48.2 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:49.5 AW: And, Darren, I think from our conversations that we have weekly, you and I, we've both gotten one shot in the arm now, which is nice to report.0:01:03.6 DS: That is really good to report, yes. I'm just waiting for the second shot and hoping things come back to normal, but a bit apprehensive about things going back to normal, because of variants and whatnot. But it's definitely a step in the right direction, feels good to have some protection that I likely won't die from COVID now.0:01:26.6 AW: There you go. Yeah, that's pretty much... Once you're fully vaccinated, that's proven to be 100%, your protection, depending upon what you're getting, 50% to 90%, mid 90%, depending upon which shot, what application types. But the fact knowing that it won't take you out is definitely reassuring and that's awesome. And, yeah, I can... I've fully accepted the way things were 16 months ago might never be the case, but...0:02:06.8 DS: Same.0:02:07.3 AW: I just... I've come to, like, "Okay, here's how to hedge your bets and to be smart, get vaccinated, all those other things, and... " Yeah, I'm excited to just dip my toe a little bit more into the social world. I'm definitely gonna get on a plane in June, so I'm excited about that. That'll feel awkward.0:02:32.0 DS: Amazing, wow. What an experience.0:02:34.0 AW: Both my co-founder and I will be fully vaccinated, so it's like we're long overdue to have a two, three-day jam session in person, melt some white boards and do something more than Slack, Google Meet, Zoom, everything else we've done.0:02:53.3 DS: I like that, it's a SaaS jam session. Rather than melting faces with guitars, you're gonna melt brains with white boards.0:03:03.6 AW: Yeah. We're just gonna be so high off of expo markers, it's gonna be wonderful. [chuckle] Other than that, what's new with you? 0:03:17.0 DS: What is new? Let's see. In the world of Whitespark, we did launch our new account system, I think I talked about that in the last podcast, that we were about to launch that. We launched it, and it was generally a pretty great launch. Nice and smooth, team did a great job on that. We have obviously lots of kinks to work out post-launch, as there would be with a whole new billing and account system. With that, we launched our new services packages, which have been very successful, so businesses thriving on a listing service side of things, so that's great. Busy planning the next Whitespark Local Search Summit for 2021, that's coming up right away. We're gonna be having that near the end of September, so we gotta get our speakers lined up, everything pre-recorded, get our sponsors in place, we're working on all that.0:04:09.0 DS: I've been really busy with these Whitespark weekly videos. I put in a good five to 10 hours every week, making these videos and then getting them published. It's going really well. I think that they're driving business for sure, we definitely feel the uptick. And we're growing our YouTube channel. We're at 1200 subscribers on YouTube or something, so that's been good.0:04:30.5 AW: That is such a massive undertaking. I would feel that that is so daunting, and you do such a great... I mean, when you tackle these topics, it's not just, "Hey, here's a few things in this direction." You are pretty exhaustive in what you're putting together on these, and great long-form content, blog posts, the videos, I see it all on my social channels. These things are legit and take a whole day out of your week, too.0:05:03.3 DS: Yeah. They might take me five to 10 hours to build and to actually prepare the deck, prepare my notes, figure out what I wanna do, all the research, record the video, then... I don't know how much time my video editing team spends on it, then I got Jesse working on getting it all up on the blog and doing all the promotional stuff. This is just a ton of work, but I believe in the rewards, particularly believe in the long-term rewards. If you can stay with it consistently week after week, month after month, year after year, you end up hitting this point of... It's like the TSN Turning Point, where all of a sudden now we have 50,000 subscribers on YouTube. And the thing is just a snowball that continues to drive value. So, I'm just gonna keep at it a good two years in. If two years we still don't have more than 1200 subscribers, then I'll totally give up, but I believe in the power of this, particularly long term.0:06:04.5 AW: We talked outside of our podcast recordings on this, and I think... And it's something you agreed and you're gonna implement, finding more calls to actions within this content. Because it is so great, it's attracting eyeballs, and it's taking it that last mile and giving people a clear next step on how to get a little bit deeper, start using one of your tools, investigate one of your services, but really working not just a traffic tool but a conversion tool as well.0:06:40.1 DS: I have already started implementing that, yeah. So, that's already... We're going through our content and finding good spots to drop, like little subtle banners. It's not like in-your-face blinking, but it's like, if you're looking for help on this particular aspect, hey, we have this software, we have this service, whatever it is. And so we're definitely integrating that into the content. And again, speaking about long-term value, that content will continue to drive views and people checking it out, and so that's getting our products in front of more people all the time.0:07:14.7 AW: Now, I feel that's especially important with the amount of time you and even the team is sinking into this, for you to have clear metrics that even go past traffic acquisition. I think you need to see... You can definitely tell, right? You feel there's a relation between putting these out and seeing just spikes in sign-ups and things like that. But you definitely wanna get probably pretty confident in the data that's there when you're gonna peel a quarter of your week off on to one thing, right? 0:07:52.7 DS: For sure. And we have... All the little ad placements we'll put within the content will have GTM tags, and they will track conversions in Google Analytics, so Analytics will be able to see if you can go to the campaign and see actually how much money they generate. We're getting all of that technology connected, making sure that we're tracking it well and pulling it into a dashboard. That is another thing we're working on actually. Within the launch of new accounts, we had everything, all of our subscriptions, in Payflow, which is a PayPal product, and we have since launched on Stripe, which offers a ton of benefits to us. And I didn't realize this, but you can send an email to PayPal and say, "Hey, we've moved to Stripe, can you please send us a dump of all our subscription data?" And then you can... Stripe will import it. We're gonna get everybody off of our legacy payment provider and put them on Stripe, which is phenomenal, so that gives us... Within the next week, we're gonna have everybody on Stripe, which means I can set up their metrics, gonna have excellent reporting. Can't wait.0:09:01.5 AW: That's awesome. That's a big win, and not having to cycle through users and have them re-add credit card information over time everything else, that's huge.0:09:14.0 DS: It's super huge, 'cause that was actually our game plan, was every time someone logs into an account, it'd be like, "Oh, we've got a new billing, can you please reenter your credit card data?" That was what we were planning to do, but this is way better.0:09:25.9 AW: Yeah. Yeah, that would have been scary.0:09:28.1 DS: Yeah. What's new with you? How are things going at Leadferno? 0:09:32.1 AW: They're going well. The general consensus is good momentum, especially April has just felt like it's gone really well. I'm spending a lot more of my days on demos and sales type opportunities, lining up pilot customers. And what's been really nice, especially our last couple of pushes and with the amount of features releasing in those pushes, my early demos were, "Here's what's there right now, if you were to test this, but here's 75% of the things that will be coming."0:10:13.2 AW: And now we've hit the point where 75% of it is there, and it's just kind of 25%. And the 25% are bigger things not necessarily features, per se, as infrastructure items, like how our profiles work, which segments locations or departments, where sales team would have one shared inbox and the service department would have a shared inbox, our internal admin tools for managing accounts and customers and things like that. We're using Stripe as well, so just starting to get some of the billing stuff tied in. And those are the really big pieces. We probably only have two or three features left to build for wanting to launch in June.0:11:01.1 DS: Great.0:11:02.0 AW: Yeah. But we have those big pieces. I go back and forth. Some days I'm like, "Man, I feel 90% confident we're gonna nail this and be out there in June," and then the next day the stand-up feels a little wishy-washy and there's a few new blockers, and then I'm like, "Okay, maybe I'm about 50% we're gonna make it to launch in June."0:11:21.7 DS: Sure. I'm always overly confident, to my own detriment. I'm always like, "Oh, this is gonna be great, we're gonna totally launch next week."0:11:29.7 AW: I'm probably more... I don't know if I'm pessimistic, but I definitely fall into reality, and doing just so many releases and doing small features and big features, and just so many different things, I feel like there's some key indicators that you kind of see where you can truly have comfort and confidence that you're gonna deliver. And until I see those, then I'm usually like, "Yeah, I'm not going all in on this or being too aggressive because of those things." And then sometimes on the opposite side I've definitely had times where I'd say to our team, "Hey, no matter what, we have to hit this date. It's not just your part, here's all the other things lined up, and why and why we can't move those. And so we're gonna have to do everything that we can to hit that." It's always a dance, that's for sure.0:12:25.1 DS: Yeah, we're just dancing around.0:12:29.1 AW: Yeah. The one challenging thing right now is we're basically losing our best Flutter developer, our front-end SDK. And we knew it was never a permanent role, he is part-time with us, and we sought him out because we needed some leadership on that side. We had a couple of developers, but we just weren't strong enough for the uniqueness and the newness of Flutter. And so I basically stalked Twitter community on the developers talking about Flutter, loving Flutter, being part of conversations with other developers, and found him and he had time to take on our project, he was looking for his next gig and was willing to take us on part-time for what we could fit.0:13:18.3 AW: It's bittersweet. One, I'm super grateful. He made a huge impact in the two months he was with us, and that was awesome, opened our eyes to some things, and so I'm super, super grateful. Selfishly, I would have loved to have him up till launch or even right after launch, we have some fast follow things that are important. But, yeah, he landed a really great full-time gig with a huge company out on the West Coast, and it's one of those things for him. We would never be able to pay him what he's getting, some options, a great company, everything else. Happy for him, super thankful for everything he did, but now it's like, "Okay, so now we gotta fill this hole." We're actually... It's the first time I ever used it, we're using Toptal, and so far so good. Their process is really easy. I think we're finding the same challenge that we've had in building our team. Again, there's not droves of Flutter developers out there. So far we've talked to one candidate, and that was okay.0:14:32.9 AW: The other hard part is I feel like we're gonna compare him to Luke, who we're losing, who I just feel was really unique and really great in a bunch of ways that we're just... We're not gonna get a one-to-one replacement for him. But hopefully we get a couple more candidates sourced so that we can find someone to plug in and keep our momentum going.0:14:54.1 DS: Yeah. Well, good luck with that, I'm really curious to hear how things work out with Toptal. I've looked at them a number of times, when I'm trying to source developers. I've looked at other ones, like Lemon.io is one that I've checked out before, they look interesting. There's a number of Toptal competitors out there now. But, yeah, I'd love to hear how that experience goes. We'll have to have a podcast episode on that one of these days.0:15:15.4 AW: There you go, I'll keep you updated. With that, to transfer over to our main topic today, Darren. You had brought up in a text conversation that we were having that you wanted to talk about vision, mission, core values, just how do you create or edit or surmise those things from within the company. Tell me a little bit why did you bring that up. What's the...0:15:45.8 DS: Yeah, for sure. Man, Whitespark has been in operation since 2005. So, what does that mean? Sixteen years? And I've never defined this, and so I'm really starting to think about my role as leader in this company and how it's like... We all have a very good general sense about what our why is, how we do it, what we do, but it just hasn't been formally defined. And I feel like that's a big gap in the company, and there's a lot of value to having the vision-mission statement, and so it's definitely time for me to define those. Long overdue, and so I've been exploring it and I thought it would be a great topic for the podcast since this is something you've been through a couple of times, and it's something I'm learning. I'll ask you questions, and you can provide your wisdom.0:16:40.3 AW: Well, I don't know if it's wisdom. It's definitely experience, and I would say passion. I love this part of it. It's translating what the core of what the business is about and where you're trying to get to, and somewhat of how you're gonna get there, and doing it in this way that's both internally and externally translatable, where your team can rally around it, someone from the outside can rally around it, it can help guide your decisions, and it makes it really easy when you're even... I found, with GatherUp, I would use it as I pair it against what features that we were gonna create and why we would prioritize one over the other, because it's like this falls in line with our vision, this is exactly what we wanna be about.0:17:34.6 DS: Yeah. And I think that's really important. In fact, if I think back on the last 15 years of Whitespark, the lack of that very clear vision and mission perhaps led us astray, because I would make decisions, like, "Oh, this is a really cool tool idea." And we would build this thing, but if I had been making decisions based off of our vision I would have recognized, "This is a cool thing, but it doesn't necessarily align with what we're trying to accomplish," and so I wouldn't have done it. And that would have been big time savings in terms of development, resources, my time, marketing time. All of that stuff that we've invested on multiple side projects over the year, the vision can really help focus you in on what's actually important to your company, and that's the big gap I'm recognizing and need to fix.0:18:29.0 AW: I think that's a great take, and not as long of a timeframe, but we definitely have that at GatherUp, was the same kind of "There isn't anything existing, we're doing this work, we're making these decisions. We're loosely talking about our direction and what we're trying to do and giving explanations to how we decide and what our take is on it, but it was really just kind of messy. And there wasn't anything that everybody could anchor into. When you would listen to other people... I always found it interesting, say we're at a conference and there's three or four of us at the conference, and if somebody comes up and just does the normal, "So tell me what GatherUp does." And at the time, we were... This is GetFiveStars, we hadn't re-branded yet, and I'll talk how we used that, but I would listen and it was always a different answer. Right? 0:19:24.7 DS: Right.0:19:25.2 AW: And so when you hear that and you'd hear how short one would be, how loose another would be, the different things mentioned, you just saw like, "Okay, that inconsistency isn't doing us any favors." And you can also see the person sometimes, and even myself would be guilty of it, you're just sometimes fumbling through because you don't have the words right then and there, or you're trying to piece it together in a new way, you're trying to find it yourself on the fly while you're in this discussion. So, I took it on that when we decided we were gonna re-brand GetFiveStars to GatherUp, that I wanted to institute these things. I wanted to create a vision, I wanted to create a mission statement, and I wanted to create core values for the company. And it really was... That was the funnest and most exciting part of the rebrand to me. Even more so than the visual of the logo and whatever else, I just loved working on defining what our DNA was and how we operated within that DNA.0:20:32.9 DS: Yeah, so valuable to have that. And so I'm really... And I know that when GatherUp rebranded, it really did feel... For me, as a GetFiveStars customer, it really felt big, it was like a big next step. GetFiveStars was great, but GatherUp was like, "This is a brand. This is for real. This is a legit big brand, this is what we stand for, this is what we do." And it just really elevated the company to a whole another level. So, you did a great job on that.0:21:05.5 AW: Thanks. It felt grown up. And I think it made our team feel grown up, too. I can easily point to a few things that really gave the team confidence in where we were at or what we had grown to, and that was one of them. When we made it into the Inc. 5000, that was another one where, okay, telling someone we're one of the 5000 fastest growing companies in the US, that's the kind of thing that you could tell your mom or your uncle or your brother, and they'd be like, "Oh, that's impressive, I get that." And there's so many times in our world where, yeah, people have no idea. I could go to someone in town and be like, "Hey, here's my software, and do you wanna use it?" And they just think I made it in my basement on my computer and I'm about to hand them like a floppy disk or a CD-ROM to make that. [laughter] 'Cause there's nothing tangible with it.0:22:05.5 DS: Yeah. "It's shareware. I got a shareware version. I have GetFiveStars here."[chuckle]0:22:12.0 AW: Oh, man. Yeah, it was just really interesting and fun. And the way I see this, especially the vision statement, I really do feel that's on the CEO, the leader, the founder, whoever has that visionary role, this is one that I see should be that person's vision. If you have co-founders and whatever else, definitely having those discussions, but I usually find there's someone in the group that should take the lead that is more of the visionary or has that. And that was kind of... We operated on there's four main partners, and we had our different roles and everything else, but I knew I was best equipped to handle that and create that. And when we created it for GatherUp it was thinking through a bunch of things like, one, I just started and just started to research anything I could find on other companies and reading about all these how-tos and everything else.0:23:16.6 AW: And I wasn't looking for one to, like, "Here's the 12-step process to having a vision statement." I just wanted to... I like to consume a lot and then weed out what I think is really important or what matters to me. So, I took all that on. And then in reading that, I was really just trying to get a feel for what is it about theirs that makes you feel something, and makes them unique and helps position them. And so that's when you read through and you get these great ideas from the Nikes and the Zappos and the Amazons of the world and everything else, but you really have to focus on what makes us us, and be super comfortable and be okay with that.0:24:00.6 AW: And in the case of GatherUp, it was already behind even our name change. We changed from GetFiveStars to GatherUp because we didn't wanna just be viewed as this review tool. We wanted to be about something bigger. We wanted to be about customer experience because that's how we all really viewed what we were doing, is listening to your customers, getting feedback, getting feedback in measurable ways, getting feedback in structured ways like reviews. Reviews is part of it, but our original name just really made it feel like it was all about reviews. And the last thing we wanted to be was like, "Oh, yeah, that's a review factory, you put this in one side and a review shoots out the other side." That's not what we were looking to be.0:24:49.7 AW: So when we created the vision statement, having that in mind and knowing that was our direction, we arrived at the vision statement of "Make customer experience the backbone of your business." And we really looked at that... That elevates that customer experience is our guide, that's what we're working towards, and we view it in a way that it is the most important thing. A human cannot stand up without their spine, it is the most key item to the structure of your body functioning. And we looked at a business the same way, like if you don't have great customer experience you will topple over on yourself, you won't be able to grow and get to where you need to go to.0:25:34.4 AW: That was one of those that was fun to create that, but we could already see it was just really taking apart the conversations and the way we are already loosely positioning ourselves to build that. And then working down from there, then into a mission statement, in front of a presentation, it was basically a pitch to a client one time, had broken down for him, like, "Our tool's here to do this. It's here to gather, manage, and market your customer experience." And that kind of gave us the pieces that we then worked into our mission statement in saying how are we going to execute on this vision, and allowed us to build that out.0:26:17.2 AW: And then really the part I loved the most was building out our core values. And people differ on core values. For some it's just a gimmick, or a marketing ploy, or a way to label some of the elements of culture, but I really care about them and think they serve just, again, a really great purpose to personal decisions and management decisions and things like that. And that one's the opposite, that's one where I went and I asked everyone in our team, "Give me four to five terms that you feel are important about our company, and how we operate, and how you wanna be viewed, and the standards you hold yourself to, and things like that." And so compiled that list and started working, and then pulled out five or six of those that felt really good that represented us, and then I hired a copywriter and we just basically versioned back and forth honing these and finding out how to talk to them so that each core value was this short statement, but then we built a two-sentence definition on how it applies to our business or how you see this in action, "What does that look like when we say... "0:27:35.4 DS: "What does it mean to you as a customer?"0:27:36.7 AW: Yes, exactly. And what does it mean to us internally, too, right? That was a super fun process and that was like... When we re-branded the site, that's the page I just loved, is our About page having vision, mission, and those core values, and then just seeing the pride in our team where they were like, "Yeah, that is us." And I felt like that one was really easy because all I had to do is just really plug into everything that was already going on there and define it, and shorten it, and dropping it down and making it concise and everything else. And that's probably the... That's the position you're in, where it's like there's a ton of things already there, you just need to figure out how to weed through it and find what really connects and what's most important that you wanna anchor to.0:28:31.9 DS: Yeah, it does make me wonder when I listen to the journey that you went through for the GatherUp statements, whether my approach might be smartest to start with the core values. If I start with the core values and I put that out to the team, collect the feedback, start to define and build those out, whether or not those directly inform the vision statement, the ultimate vision statement that we go with as a company. I don't know if that's the best approach. I'm also interested to hear... Well, let me hear your response to that potential approach. What do you think about taking that route? 0:29:12.6 AW: Yeah. I don't know if I could comment on if there's a chicken or an egg with it, and which comes first. Myself, I tend towards defining vision because it's so directional. That's the pull in where you wanna go. That one, to me, is the more important one, to get that direction stated. And then the core values are what are we holding ourselves to and how will we operate to move in that direction. For me, personally, I feel like the direction is more important in defining first.0:29:55.4 DS: Sure. All right.0:29:56.4 AW: But also I don't think you could go wrong if you did it the other way.0:30:02.0 DS: Right. You'd probably end up at the same place actually because...0:30:05.4 AW: Yeah.0:30:06.1 DS: And then I was wondering, so we've got three sections. You've got vision, mission, and core values. What's the difference between the vision statement and a mission statement? 0:30:17.1 AW: Yeah. Your vision statement is your "why." You're putting out there and you're basically stating, "Here's the big thing that we want to accomplish." For GatherUp, it was making customer experience the backbone of every business. And then the mission is to help every business gather, manage, and market their customer experience to improve their business. We believe listening is a business super power, so we're gonna transform conversations into data that drives improvements, bolsters reputation, fuels growth. That's more of the like, "Here's how we're gonna do our why.0:30:57.4 AW: And for Leadferno, the vision is that we want to make connections, make delightful connections at speed. And then how we're gonna do that is we're gonna power business messaging to create conversations, close leads, close more leads faster, and getting into some of the tactical pieces. And to me that's a big thing I pulled out of immersing myself in vision statements, is like it becomes a void of what your features are or how you're gonna do it, any of those things, it's like, "We just want to arrive at accomplishing this. This is what's driving us." Right? 0:31:37.7 DS: Right.0:31:38.8 AW: For Leadferno, right now, business messaging is an incredible way to create delightful connections at speed, but will that be the same in five or 10 years? Will we solve that problem? Will we move in that direction using the same tactical things of SMS and Facebook Messenger and things like that? 0:32:01.0 DS: Yeah. Your "how" may change, but your "why" is pretty set in stone. "This is why we're doing it, this is what we wanna put out into the world, this is what we wanna give to the world." I think there's great value in defining that. "This is what we want people to get out of what we're creating here."0:32:19.3 AW: Yep, absolutely.0:32:20.9 DS: Yeah. All right, great. See, I'm excited, I'm excited to get this all written up for Whitespark and figure that out, my wheels are already turning with ideas.0:32:31.7 AW: Yeah. It's a super fun exercise. And the cool thing is, what I found really helpful is, when we would talk about how... Especially at GatherUp, where you have thousands of customers, you have all these things you're doing, you're able to go back when you're trying to prioritize features and you're using these different elements to help prioritize, how many times is it requested, size of customers requesting it, what's a revenue opportunity by doing it. So you have all these other things that can fluctuate, they might be data points, it just might be the market, might be a gap you have from another product. But at the end of the day, when you can really couple it and say, "Does this support our vision? Does this tie in to how we see this and where we want it to go?" That's what you want, because then you end up... You're building a tool. And every time you're introducing something, it's right in line with the direction you're going, so it's supporting it and it's just making even clearer why that is your vision and how passionate you are about it.0:33:47.6 AW: So, as we moved along, there was just so many things where it's like, "Okay, yes, this exactly folds right into this and completely aligns with our vision why we're gonna do this over this other choice," because it has better alignment with where we wanna end up with what we're driving to.0:34:08.0 DS: And that's exactly... That line of thinking is what brought me to this, because we've launched our new platform, we know what we're building next, but then what's after that and what's after that? So I started planning on my roadmap. This is the way... We've got 100 ideas floating around, and so I now need to take those and put them into a phase launch plan, like, "This is our Q3 launch, our Q4 launch plan, these are the things that we're gonna build." But as I started doing that, it really led back to this, like, "How do you prioritize those things?" And that leads you to your vision statement and your mission, and all of this, it's so important. It's funny to imagine how long we've been developing stuff without that guiding principle, and so building that guiding principle will really help me do that prioritization work on a roadmap. And so I kinda got stalled out on the roadmap, and I'm like, "Dang, I better build this vision statement first."0:35:08.1 AW: Yeah. And I think this is such a great time for you because what you wanna do with the product next, with taking it from a handful of tools that operate independently into a cohesive platform, that's a great time. You're somewhat in a pretty big directional change, so you really should define that direction in words as well as what the product is gonna be.0:35:33.1 DS: Yeah, I agree 100%. That's why I'm talking about it right now. That's why I'm writing that Google Docs and brainstorming exactly what this is gonna be. I think it's a super valuable exercise, yeah. I'm just curious, I look at it and I think, "All right, I can probably get a pretty good crack at it in an hour of just hammering at a Google Doc and doing a little bit of research," and then over time, over the next week, I feel like I should have a vision statement ready to go within a week. It should be there. What do you think the timeline is to develop a good vision statement? 0:36:04.6 AW: Yeah. I would say I would be more interested in getting it to where you really feel great about it than a time frame. For me, both times, they were probably two to three-month processes, just from research, putting it down, whittling it down. So much is like remove, remove, remove, get more focused, things like that. And then that's when I got to the point where then I hired a copywriter and just said, "Hey, I basically wanna volley versions back and forth. Here's everything I have and where we're at right now, what stands out to you? Write a little bit about that, and it's just like back and forth." I can say each time it was somewhere between six to eight iterations back and forth.0:36:52.9 DS: Wow.0:36:54.0 AW: Yeah. And sometimes it was like we'd just be whittling on one sentence in one way, and we'd be doing it in email back and forth, and then be like, "Yes, that's it, nailed it. Boom. Yes, move on to the next one."0:37:04.5 DS: Yeah, this is how Jesse and I write titles for our blog posts and headlines and whatnot. It's just like, "Here are seven variations," let's just keep riffing on them until we come up with the one we like the best.0:37:18.0 AW: Absolutely, completely correct on that. And I really valued, too, the... I wanted someone completely outside to bounce this off of, and someone who is a bit of a wordsmith and a little more polished and craftier. Those were also the benefits for me, is they were gonna introduce some style and some other things to it that I know I couldn't bring. I get the representation and the passion and what it's about, but I wanted them to be able to tell these great little simple stories around it that I might not arrive at or come to.0:38:00.6 DS: Yeah. A good copywriter can really take what you've written and then think about it from that outside perspective and make it resonate with a broader audience. I think there's super good value in hiring a copywriter for this. I'll definitely do the same. I think it's great advice.0:38:17.3 AW: Yep. And so with core values, three of my... What did we have at GatherUp, if I pull up real quick. Four, five... We had six at GatherUp, and a couple of the ones that I love the most, and I also got to see with core values, this is something that your employees can apply to their decision making and what they put themselves behind. Right? 0:38:38.0 DS: Yeah.0:38:38.6 AW: Our number one core value was "Customers rule," and the definition of that was "Never underestimate the importance of the customer, they are your business. What customers share, say, and think is the pulse of any business. It's that simple." So, you can see both the external and how this reads to someone looking to work with you and buy your product, but internally it gave our entire team the knowledge, like, "Hey, making things right for the customer, taking care of them, they are our everything. We're gonna respect, we're gonna be responsive to them, and you need to make decisions based on that." So at the end of the day, you're able to say like, "Well, the customer rules, that's why I made this decision and this is what we did."0:39:25.1 DS: Right, right. Yeah, it's definitely a two-way street. Your product is all about customer experience, so the person reading that is like, "Oh, this is speaking to what I'm trying to accomplish." But then internally your team is also operating by the same principle.0:39:40.5 AW: Yep. Then the second one was, "Service sets us apart." We're obsessed with serving our customers. Every time we hear "Your customer service is the best I've ever experienced," we know that we've done our job. And this became something that I really treasured in a number of different ways, because we actually had this repeated back to us by clients. A couple of our clients, one basically said, "Well, we actually call it 'the GatherUp standard' now when we bring on a new vendor, and are they gonna be as organized, as easy to work with, as responsive, all of these things. And that's how we evaluate them. And until we worked with you guys, we didn't have a bar set." So, it was really awesome to understand, we made such an impact with how we interacted with them that we created a new tool of measurement. Like we were the tool of measurement, "Can they be as good as these guys? That's the kind of partners and vendors that we wanna work with." So, yeah, that was really cool.0:40:45.5 AW: And multiple times I heard from other clients that are larger, that work with tons of vendors, where they're just like, "We wish every vendor was working with you guys. You are the easiest and the best to work with, we look forward to the meetings, we never wanna skip them." And so that's the kind of thing, like when you see that and then when someone would share, "Oh, here's what they just said in this email," we would just comment, we're like, "That's right, service sets us apart." And just realizing, especially as a smaller bootstrapped company, we needed that personal touch, we needed to do those things right, not automate every last thing, not drop the ball, not be loose about it but try to set a whole new category with it.0:41:34.5 DS: It's so important, and that's why people would switch to you, right? They're not getting a great service from another vendor, or as they evaluate the vendors, they don't feel that they're gonna get the same kind of service, and stepping it up is just so important. That's a whole another episode. We've already talked about customer service before, but we can definitely do it again.0:41:55.9 AW: Yeah. No, by far and away it can be like your ace up the sleeve, for sure, and I'm a huge believer in that. I'm just wired that way. I wanna do everything possible I can to help that customer. I'll do it to help a partner, I'll do it to help a friend. It's just in me, I just... I wanna squeeze the most out of every opportunity.0:42:19.3 DS: Right, that's a good way to be. Leadferno's gonna be so successful, thanks to your helping nature.0:42:27.0 AW: Well, I hope so. And some of it, too, is just finding a bunch of people that also feel and care that same way, that selection. And that's why you have these core values, then it's so easy when you go to hire, because then you can measure people against those. Like "Read our core values, is this something that excites you? Are you passionate about these things? 'Cause if not, this might not be the place for you, 'cause... "0:42:50.1 DS: Has anyone ever said no in an interview? They're like, "No. No, I think those values kind of suck, they don't resonate with me at all."[chuckle]0:42:55.6 AW: I've never asked anyone to go and read them, but the ones that mention it bring it up, that shows me... One, simply put, we're doing the research and whatever else. But when they bring them and be like, "Hey, here's a couple of things I read on the website that I really identified with, or got me excited, or said this is a place for me," those are some great tells and definitely factor in.0:43:22.9 DS: Definitely, definitely. So many benefits: Aligns your team, aligns your customers, aligns your hires. Just so many benefits to having this stuff done. And it's actually surprising how many companies don't have it, and it's even more surprising that Whitespark still doesn't have it, so working on it.0:43:40.0 AW: Well, you're there. Hey, you know that it's time to put that flag in the ground and...0:43:43.5 DS: Yeah, definitely.0:43:44.6 AW: And you'll get there. And on the opposite side, completely different experience to do this with Leadferno and not be surmising something that you're watching happening. And it's more a little bit with Leadferno is more building it to be aspirational, where I can draw on all my past experiences and other companies and what we want this to embody, but I didn't have, "Hey, here's years of how I've seen this happen, and all I'm doing is putting a good title on it and writing a good summary for it." That one's a little bit different, and I think it's good to revisit these things from time to time. It doesn't say, "Hey, this is going to be this forever." If it is, that's great. But as we grow, the different core values we have, there might be an addition, there might be something else that gets swapped out, you just don't know.0:44:40.0 DS: Yeah, totally. But I think it's definitely the right approach to, when you start your brand new company, Leadferno, you started with the vision and the mission of core values. It's really great that you've started the company already with a guiding principle, it's so valuable right out of the gates.0:44:58.4 AW: Well, I've already been a part of seeing all the wins you get out of it, so that was one of those, Darren, someday when you sell Whitespark and then you go to start the next thing, you just have this list of all these things that, like, okay, doing all of these things in half the time I did them before, or doing them right from the start, that's just where you get to learn from those things and you get a chance on a blank slate to do it all over again. I saw how big a wins these were and I'm like, "There's no reason not to do these from the start. They're gonna benefit us over and over again." And even if they morph or change... The foundational elements are there, even if the details change.0:45:41.9 DS: Yeah, totally. It would be interesting to see if they do change. One would expect that they would as your company evolves.0:45:48.8 AW: Yeah. No, I totally get it. Your culture can evolve, your people change, the environment changes, so many different things. You definitely can't look at it and say, "Oh, it'll be this forever, this is set in stone." And, yeah, you just gotta read and react to what matters to the people in your company and the direction you're going.0:46:13.0 DS: Yep, yep.0:46:16.7 AW: All right. Well, I think we burned that topic to the ground, I hope.0:46:21.3 DS: I think so, yeah. I think we've talked about all the elements of it, definitely filled a podcast with it.0:46:29.3 AW: Yeah. That went super fast. Like I said, I'm so passionate about this and I just... I love doing this stuff. It almost like... Getting it done for Leadferno felt really awesome, but then I was also kind of sad because I wasn't doing it anymore. It's like, when you're a kid, you get this awesome 1000-piece Lego kit, and you're so excited to get to the end and whatever else, and then you build it and it's beautiful, and you feel accomplishment, and the next day you're like, "Oh, what am I gonna do with the two hour... I miss building for two hours and getting it to the next stage and whatever." Yeah, a little bit, so I felt a little bit like, "Oh, this is so great." And then I was also like, "Oh, I can't... I don't need to work on this anymore for a while, and I really like this work."0:47:17.7 DS: Yeah, I get it. Well, maybe you can help me with mine, that'd be great, if you really wanna get back into it.0:47:24.9 AW: Absolutely, I would love to. When you do, as you're doing right now, right, the first step is this giant barf of throwing everything out onto paper, and then after that, the hard work is whittling it down and trying to get concise. That's when it's good to have other eyes and opinions and things like that on it, to help weed through all of what's there. 'Cause especially as business owners and marketers, I just say all the time, "We just use way too many words."0:47:53.9 DS: Oh, definitely. Well, I'm glad to have a friend like you to walk me through some of this stuff.0:48:00.0 AW: All right. Well be careful what you wish for. You might be like, "Hey, stop it."[chuckle]0:48:04.9 DS: That's right. You're like, "Hey, Darren, can I come over?"0:48:07.9 AW: "Can I come over? I just wanna look at these. I'm gonna be on the first flight to Edmonton."0:48:11.9 DS: That's right.0:48:14.9 AW: All right. Well, great catching up, Darren. Great topic, I'm glad you suggested this, and, yeah, I'm excited to see, in one of the next episodes we'll have to talk a little bit on what you came up with and see how it's been received by the team and your process for putting it together. I think that would be interesting to recap after you come out the other side on it.0:48:36.1 DS: Totally, yeah, we can definitely talk about that on another episode. Looking forward to it.0:48:40.8 AW: All right. Well, take care, my friend, and hopefully we'll hit record again in two or three weeks and find something new to wax philosophical about.0:48:53.4 DS: I'm sure we will. All right. Thanks, Aaron.0:48:53.9 AW: All right. Thanks, Darren. Thanks, everybody, for listening. As always, feel free to drop us a review in iTunes. If you love anything we've had to say today, please share socially, put that link to thesaasventure.com and this episode out on Facebook or Snapchat. I don't know if you can place links on Snapchat so...[chuckle]0:49:15.1 DS: Snapchat.0:49:16.1 AW: LinkedIn.0:49:17.8 AW: Make a TikTok about the SaaS Venture, but just tell a friend, share the news about us, and we love to build our audience and talk to more people. All right. Take care, everybody, and we'll talk again soon.0:49:30.9 DS: Bye, everybody.
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]
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]
[INTRO music]0:00:11.4 Aaron Weiche: Episode 25. Okay 2020.0:00:16.2 Intro: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. Sharing the adventure of leading and growing a bootstrapped SaaS company. Hear the experiences, challenges, wins, and losses shared in each episode, from Aaron Weiche of GatherUp and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. Let's go.0:00:44.1 AW: Welcome to the SaaS Venture podcast. I'm Aaron.0:00:47.4 Darren Shaw: And I'm Darren.0:00:49.7 AW: And we are here to look back at quite the year that we've had. Wouldn't you say? 0:00:57.6 DS: Let's say, yeah, it was a year for the history books, this one. It was... It was a bad year. 2020 really sucks for most of the world's population. It was a crummy year. But I guess... I don't know, I took some notes before the podcast and I have some positive things to look back on, but yeah, definitely it was a tough year.0:01:18.8 AW: Yeah. As we break it down, I think for me, at the end of it is like, "Okay, we survived this year," right? 0:01:30.3 DS: Yeah.0:01:31.3 AW: Being able to just make it through and not be as dinged up in some way or another as others, when you look around and there are certain industries that are completely shut down, have your doors closed. It's amazing when you think what it must be like to be in those types of industries.0:01:54.3 DS: That weighs heavy on me, I really feel privileged to be in the digital marketing industry, building SaaS software that people still need and are actively looking to sign up for. We're just in such a fortunate position, whereas so many other industries have been devastated. And so I think about that all the time, about like, "Wow, we gotta recognize our privilege here."0:02:24.7 AW: Absolutely. For better, for worse, however it happened, accidentally, on purpose, it isn't hard to look and be like, "Man, thank goodness, my industry has survived this well." Obviously, some aspects of our industry have absolutely taken off because of what COVID has forced.0:02:45.9 DS: Yeah, totally.0:02:47.9 AW: If you are at Zoom, a Zoom shareholder, any of those things, like you know how true that is. Or just probably any product in the video conferencing or live communications world has just sky-rocketed based on immediate demand across the board.0:03:06.6 DS: Totally. I really wish I had thrown some money into Zoom when, back in like March, early March, be like, "Oh quick, put all of our investments into Zoom, it's gonna be huge."0:03:21.0 AW: Back the dump trucks up to every tech stock in the last 10 months and you're not doing too bad anyway, right? 0:03:26.8 DS: Yeah, it's true.0:03:28.5 AW: Oh man. What is your overall... It's like you have the feeling of survival and whatever else, but maybe let's start to dig a little deeper into that. Like when you look back, is there ways... Do you feel like there's any ways you could break down, you know, the year into thirds or quarters, or things like that? And how you feel about, like are there transitions where you guys felt differently about it or adjusted, like what are your thoughts on that? 0:03:57.2 DS: Yeah, that's a good way to look at it actually, because I come to the end of the year and I can think, "Alright, great, we have some... We survived. We even thrived in some places." And I can look back at that and feel overall the sense of, "We did it." But then... Gosh, if I think back to March, April, May, it was a dark period. We had to... We saw massive decline in revenue, we had to do some layoffs, we had to put... We had to get all the government programs in place. And it was stressful and it was like, it was this period of uncertainty for myself and for all of our team members.0:04:40.4 DS: And so people were stressed and worried about the pandemic, and we came out of that after about three months, things just started to recover. It was almost like people instantly had this fear of the world falling apart, and so everyone really tightened up expenses and weren't spending any money. But then it was like, "Oh, well, I guess this is our new reality and life will go on and we still need to buy things," and so business picked up again. How did those first three months feel for you? 0:05:14.0 AW: Definitely when you're dealing with the unknown, that's one of the hardest things where there's no game plan for it. You can't research your way out of it, you're just taking sometimes hour by hour as it comes. And that same thing, I was just kind of wondering to myself while you were talking, I just wonder how much have people changed or where are they at in that progression.0:05:44.9 AW: Those first few months were so uncertain and just as you outlined, like you can imagine this Doomsday scenario where what you've built, what you're working on, whatever else, where it almost collapses on itself. You kind of envisioned, "Oh, everybody holds up." Business is just kind of killed off in every way. It felt like, "What's gonna go on and continue on?" You entertain those kind of thoughts, and then as time goes on, some of that regresses in certain areas. In the world of software at least.0:06:24.9 AW: And then you find, "Alright, well, here's the next thing we can do." And I think we started doing a lot of short-term focus things like, "Here's the 30-day plan, here's the next 30-day plan." And it was kind of focused on just taking small chunks, 'cause you can't predict or look at anything further than that.0:06:40.1 AW: I think we saw... That was one thing that I took from some of the larger companies at some point when they were like, "Hey... " And I can't remember if it was Apple or Twitter or Google, or whoever did it first, but a couple of them definitely said like, "Hey, we're remote until June 2021." They just said, "Let's stop trying to look at this as like in two weeks, in two months, in two quarters."0:07:05.9 AW: And they just said, "Yeah, well over a year from now, we're gonna revisit this. But that's not something we need to deal with right now, because it's just gonna be vacillating all over the board." And I almost kinda took that as like, and applied that to other areas and said, "Stop. Stop just vacillating on all the what ifs, you'll drive yourself crazy, and focus on the things that you can control and that you probably should control," and things like that.0:07:35.2 DS: Yeah. It was funny to look back at some of the emails we got from that time, like in early March, it'd like, "We're closing our shop, but we expect to be reopened in three weeks." [chuckle] People were like, they really thought this was gonna be a short-term thing, in so many ways.0:07:55.2 AW: Well, we've never experienced anything like it. So you just... No one knew, right? Everything was like... It depends on how much optimism you carried at the time. Or in some circumstances, and you can get this, a business would also look and be like, "Hey, anything longer than this and we are in trouble." That's where I feel with so many of these restaurants is like, they're not built to just shut down for a month, much less... Here in Minnesota, where I live, they're on their second six week to eight-week shutdown of no indoor dining at all, in any capacity, in any way.0:08:34.8 AW: And then to top it off, there's this time around, there's absolutely nothing that's lined up for support of what they need or helping them out. It's just this really wonky scenario of the government saying, "You can't operate and we also can't help you." And my hope is they should have already had help lined up before they ask them to do this again, or mandated they did it again.0:09:00.1 AW: But we're really starting to see some rumblings here between restaurants just all saying, "We're not gonna do what you're asking us to do because you give us no other choice to... You're basically saying, your business is dead. That's the only choice you have."0:09:16.2 DS: It's gotta be so tough. Be it in the restaurant industry or in the travel industry right now, just like, "Oh man. How are we gonna get through this, right?"0:09:26.3 AW: Yeah. When you look back, Darren, what's one thing that you feel like, okay, based on what took place this year, what's one decision you really feel good about that you're like, "Alright, I nailed that one. Pats on the back."? 0:09:43.5 DS: Well, it's tough to decide which one. I got two big wins over the past year. I think it was really a good move to launch, we came up with this concept of the Yext Replacement Service. And the timing was really good, right around the pandemic, right around when the pandemic first came out, because a lot of people were looking at their expenses or going through the credit card statement, and Yext stood out as a really expensive recurring fee. And people were like, "Is this something we still need?"0:10:16.3 DS: And then I think so we launched our service at the right time where we could offer a better price, a better quality service, right when people were looking for it. And so that was a huge success, it actually managed to keep the whole citation side of our business, not just surviving, but we actually did better than usual. So, I think that was it, that was a smart pivot, a smart launch. I think we did that one just right. How about you? What's your biggest win? 0:10:48.0 AW: Before we get to that, I'm interested, did you guys look at keyword volume as well, of people typing like "Yext replacement or Yext option or Yext alternative," or what does that look like? Or did you look at that at all? 0:11:02.6 DS: We were not analytical about it at all, it was just a complete gut feel, just like, "Quick, let's launch this thing." We were honestly in panic mode after seeing the decline of our revenue and being like, "We need to get something to replace that revenue as soon as possible." And we just built it, pulled the trigger and launched it as soon as possible. But yeah, we were not... We didn't really dig into it at all.0:11:29.0 AW: See, here I am doing a search on quick Yext, and I just look at the related suggestions and Yext cancellation policy, what happens when you cancel Yext. And one of the suggested terms is "Whitespark Yext and Whitespark versus Yext."0:11:44.5 DS: Sweet. Whatever, Google picked up on it. And we didn't even have to tell Google. [chuckle]0:11:49.4 AW: The number one organic result. "The best Yext alternative, stop paying... " I don't know, it cuts off after that, but it probably says, "Your life away," right? 0:12:03.2 DS: Is that our result? 0:12:05.8 AW: Yeah, yeah, it's a landing page, Yext Replacement Service.0:12:09.5 DS: Sweet. Yeah. That actually is intentional. [chuckle] "Stop paying... " People are gonna be like, "What? Stop paying what?" And then they will click through.0:12:17.5 AW: I love it. But that's awesome, I'm glad for that, that win for you.0:12:21.5 DS: Thanks.0:12:22.3 AW: I don't know if I have anything as specific as that. I think the biggest thing for us is just focusing on what we do best, and that's building product. So we launched social sharing, we did a lot around Google review attributes. We went to work on our biggest feature yet to date, which isn't gonna roll out until January, but inbox that's around like a ticketing system and auto-forwarding based on what the review is about. And you can create rules around who gets a review to be able to reply to it and why, and things like that.0:13:04.5 AW: So, we really just looked at it like, "Okay. Sales aren't... Sales aren't hot depending upon the industry and the size, extremely cold." We saw enterprise, large scale, like that market just went dead. Those guys definitely circled the wagons. As much as anything, I had a couple where they're just like, "Hey, we've got the budget, we wanna do this, but we can't switch gears or introduce a new service right now, like it would crush our team because the number of things that we are already doing."0:13:40.3 AW: And so the change management is what became tough on that. So, I think that's our biggest thing. And it brought our team happiness. Every person in our org gets excited about a new feature and how it can help. Sales is excited to talk about it. Marketing is excited to write about it and create strategies around it. Customer Success is happy because it gives them likely a solution to something that customers have been asking for or wishing they could do easier. Engineering is proud of what they've created.0:14:15.3 AW: So, that really helped us create a lot of internal wins by like, "Let's just keep building great things and let's put all of our focus there because that's the most controllable thing for us right now."0:14:26.6 DS: Yeah. There's lots to look back and I think you should feel proud about what you've built and what you continue to iterate on at GatherUp. All those things are fantastic launches. You gotta think about, some companies, like I watch them, I'm like, "They haven't done anything in a year." I'm not gonna name names, but I keep wondering, I'm like, "What's going on over there?"0:14:49.8 AW: Yeah, and who know, and it could just be... Again, if the name of the game is survival and depending upon how hard their revenue took a hit and you're going through staffing changes and things like that, that can definitely derail those. We saw some of that too. I mean, to transition into the toughest or decisions you didn't love or whatever else, like that, obviously, and I'm guessing probably you're in the same boat with that, is when we had to furlough a couple of people and eliminate a position, that was terrible.0:15:29.6 AW: I talked about that openly on this episode. I sat and shed tears to eliminate a position of someone that was a great contributor to our org, but because of what the go-forward in the moment had to be, that position was a definite non-essential within that. And that was really excruciating.0:15:51.1 DS: Oh man, yeah. I think that might be the hardest part of being a founder, being the person that runs the businesses, it's the layoffs. Gosh, I just hate that. It's the worst thing.0:16:03.8 AW: Yeah, no, 'cause every time you hire, you feel like, "Okay, now I have responsibility for this person putting food on their table and taking care of their family and progressing their career." And you have all those things, and when you just bring a complete stop to it, especially in this case, where it's not from a like, "Hey, you never hit expectations, you were a poor performer, we gave you chances, we worked on an improvement plan and none of those things happened." That wasn't around this.0:16:35.9 AW: It was just a, "Hey, we have to tighten the belt, and so we have to look at what is most non-essential as this belt is tightened and how things move forward." And when in your inside of an org, with us being acquired, it wasn't 100% all my say. And that... I wasn't... I can see where the company decided that. I personally wasn't personally aligned with it, and that made it even more conflicting. Just made it even harder.0:17:07.4 DS: That's an awkward thing, like you've been used to calling all the shots and you're like, "Oh, wait a minute, someone else is calling some of these shots now."0:17:15.3 AW: Yep, no, that is a massively difficult thing to adjust to if you're acquired and you stay on. Going from being able to lead in those ways, good or bad, to being someone that you might have some say or some influence, but ultimately you're probably doing more to carry out someone else's final decision, is a much different position.0:17:38.5 DS: Yeah, totally.0:17:41.4 AW: It's kind of like, Darren, I'm sure this happens to you. Your wife tells you, "Hey, we're not gonna hang out with those people. And you need to let them know, you have to be the bearer of bad news."[chuckle]0:17:53.5 DS: Totally.0:17:53.6 AW: "I'm not telling them, you are." Outside of that, so there are so many other things, let's maybe zoom out and take a look at some things outside of... We could obviously talk and who wants to really talk about COVID at length? I don't. I think we spent enough time on that and looking to transition out of that. But outside of that, what's another thing that was just an awesome challenge that went really well or really bad for you guys this year? 0:18:24.0 DS: Huge win was, and it had been in the works, pre-pandemic, we were really busy trying to launch our new local citation finder. And so if I look at our trajectory of subscription count, like it had been dropping week after week after week for about a year, just losing subscriptions, bleeding them. It had been horrible and we were like, "Oh my God, we gotta fix the system."0:18:52.5 DS: And so we launched our new system, I think in April, and from that point on, it was a complete reversal in our subscriptions. We then shifted gears to a growth mode, and it has been growing week over week over week ever since we did that launch. And so it's the kind of thing that's like, "Oh, this is how a SaaS company is supposed to work, you should see week over week growth in your subscriptions." And so a big part of that, of course, is retention.0:19:23.3 DS: So I think our new software really helps to keep people engaged and retain those people and continue to deliver value, which has been massive for us, so huge win. I'm so thrilled with it. I can't wait 'til we launch the next iteration on that software, which should come in early 2021, and that's when we're gonna raise prices, we've talked about that on the previous podcast. But for me, that was just, that's the most stand out win, business-wise, in 2020.0:19:57.4 AW: And I would guess with that, it wasn't like... There were wins in how the product, the local citation finder performed, what you said, reducing churn and turning it into growth and things like that. But there's probably also bigger learnings that you took away from this and when to make a move, how to think about it, what's really important to a customer, what's important for your product to survive. That probably is invaluable, right? 0:20:31.9 DS: Yeah. And I think there's two big things. If I had to look at the success of the local citation finder, the two big things for me are continuing... The software has to continue to provide value, and it didn't before. And I think that that's probably pretty to anyone in SaaS. And then design.0:20:51.8 DS: I really think that the updated design, the general like, "How does this thing feel to use? Do I enjoy using it? Does it feel modern? Is it... " 'Cause the old design was just such, it was just old and trash. It was outdated. I think that the design has a huge impact.0:21:09.5 AW: Yeah, no, I'm a massive believer in that. I always get excited when I see user feedback that's raving about our user experience and interfaces. Especially when they've come from a competitor and they're just like, "Oh, it's so much more intuitive and organized and clean," and I'm just like, "Yes, feed my ego. Thank you." [chuckle]0:21:31.9 DS: Especially as the world of SaaS evolves and you've got 10 competitors for every application, and they all basically have the same feature set, then what sets you apart? And it's, how does this system feel to use? Is it easy? Is it enjoyable? Is there any kind of fun in the application? All of those things, I think are so critical as things get more and more competitive to set yourself apart.0:21:58.8 AW: Customer experience, baby.0:22:03.3 DS: Yep, yeah. So, actually I'm right on the horizon, we may even, I don't know, we're talking today with the dev team about launching it on Monday, is our brand new Local Rank Tracker, which has exactly that. It doesn't really have much functionality improvement, a couple of things, but the design has been completely redone, which gives that great user feel, which I think will have a positive impact on both new sign-ups and retention. I can't wait to pull trigger on that one too.0:22:29.5 AW: There you go. You can tell your users Merry Christmas with that one.0:22:33.1 DS: That's a good idea, actually. Thank you.0:22:34.4 AW: "There's a new local rank tracker in your stocking. Boom." [chuckle]0:22:41.9 DS: Oh man, these are some good ideas. Wait until you see the email we send out, you'll be like, "I wrote that email."0:22:46.6 AW: "There you go. Software stocking stuffers from Whitespark."[chuckle]0:22:53.6 AW: I would also think, Darren, that you would have to agree, and I'm interested in even getting further out from it. And I think it was September, but your guys' Local Search Summit was definitely, I felt like it was a highlight because it allowed me to connect with a community I'm super close to that I didn't get those opportunities in 2020 to do that in person.0:23:13.7 AW: But your guys' event, because of the speakers and the quality of speakers and the number of attendees, that was a big energy, a creative boost to me for sure. How do you feel about that? And especially getting months passed that, have you seen any residual benefits from it? 0:23:32.9 DS: Yeah. I think that the summit was huge in terms of brand positioning, brand establishing. We introduced our brand to a lot of new people, and I think... It's really hard to measure. We've been doing fine since the summit, haven't seen any massive explosive growth, but you never know if we would have seen declines if it wasn't for the summit.0:24:00.2 DS: And so did the summit help keep us steady and with some small growth over the last little while? You know, it's hard to know. I think the summit for sure was a huge success, the amount of work that went into it was kind of unbelievable. It was a lot of work. But it's now firmly rooted as a thing in our industry. And we will continue to run it every year, and I think it's just gonna pay dividends every time we do it.0:24:30.1 DS: I think there's huge value in it, it was wonderful. And it was also really great to just be able to connect with everybody. I personally did every one of those talks. I had the opening intro, watched the presentation, had the Q&A at the end. So it was just really nice to connect with everybody during a relatively unstable time.0:24:53.0 AW: Yeah, no, it was really well done.0:24:54.1 DS: Thank you.0:24:56.0 AW: Another friend of mine just got done in the last week or two, carrying out, they're an association, and they have a giant annual conference that's usually held in Florida, and a ton of attendees from all over the country, they're all boat and marine dealers. And they had to switch to a virtual this year, and there was a lot of apprehension in their industry when you're dealing with a product that their expo floor are these giant boats and outboard engines. So different from a software conference where everybody's booth is just TV screens and demoing product.0:25:35.2 AW: It was really interesting, and he and I walked through and he talked about, they went back and forth from a free to charging for it and everything else. And they ended up charging for and saying, "Nope, our content's great, and we get that relationships and connections are super valuable, but our content is amazing."0:25:55.4 AW: And the long story short is like... They said it was... The feedback they got from their attendees was they were floored. They had more people attend because people didn't have to travel to go to it. They still... They basically doubled the amount of per-person attendees because the access was easier. And then they used a platform, I wanna say it's called Swapcard.0:26:25.6 DS: Interesting.0:26:26.9 AW: A virtual event platform, and he just said it was unreal it, had a lot of really great built-in features. They had a sponsor provide like a DJ and a band in between sessions and things like that, and he's like... They had... And they literally had some of their boat dealers, they had set up viewing parties of the conference, they're sitting in like a pontoon boat they're selling with a 50-inch screen all watching the conference together.0:26:56.4 AW: And so he just said all the things that went on with it were just unbelievable. And to me, it's really cool to see things like that that have adapted over the year, and having to do something completely different for the first time ever, and completely crushing at it. Because just as he said, there's plenty of people that were telling them like, "You'll never make it, it won't happen. The conference will flop, people won't like it. And then it's gonna hurt when you do it in person next year."0:27:23.3 AW: There was a lot of people that were just like, "You shouldn't even do one." And so it was so great to see him persevere from charging for it, finding a great way to present it, getting more people involved. And now they're considering, "Even if we can do our event in person next year, we should do a virtual at the mid way to get more people involved."0:27:42.6 DS: That's an interesting thing. I think about that too. It's like, we'll probably be virtual again in 2021, but then I would love to do an in-person event in 2022. But when I do that, I have to keep the virtual version too. You're gonna have to do both now, it's like you wanna come in person, awesome, let's meet, let's do this in-person thing, but we have to broadcast it, it has to... We have to leave it open because that is the future of events, I think. And the pandemic has created that for almost every conference.0:28:16.3 AW: Yeah. We'll definitely see a lot more of it. What would you say is one thing that you learned as a leader in this last year with all of its challenges? 0:28:27.2 DS: Yeah. I think one thing I learned as a leader was just the importance of regular communication, regular check-ins. Just really me trying to connect with my team better than I had been in the past. It was certainly really important during those difficult times to have very clear, regular communication with the team.0:28:50.7 DS: And then I really ramped it up. We built... I personally built a whole new system for doing annual reviews and quarterly check-ins. I feel like that whole process has been really valuable. So just, for me, just dialing in our HR stuff, it's been super important. And it was definitely something I learned in 2020, and will serve me well going forward, I think.0:29:16.5 AW: Yeah, no, I think that's awesome because it will pay dividends over and over again with your existing team. And as you grow, the new people you build on now you have so much better of a structure to do that and people understand their role and performance and their piece in the ecosystem, and all of that. So yeah, I think that'll pay dividends over and over again. That's awesome.0:29:38.7 DS: Yeah, it feels like it was kind of an area that I wasn't good at before, it was like, "You know, I'm just some guy who started a company, and oh, now I've got a team of 30 people." It's like, "Oh, I guess I should learn how to be a better manager." And so I needed to dial into that stuff, how about you? What are some of the... What did you learn as a leader in 2020? 0:30:00.7 AW: Yeah, it really showed me the importance in an area where I constantly have to work on, and I'll explain why it's so tough for me. But I think just empathy and self-care for the team really being a big thing. And how much connection and communication is important to them, some of the things that you talked about as well.0:30:27.4 AW: But I'm so wired to be excited about the work. I am a workaholic, I fight that balance of not being in front of a screen or researching or reading or testing or doing whatever else. And I also have this, for right or for wrong, like my own maybe personal struggles or challenges, I don't bring those into work with me. And work a lot of times is almost an escape to that. I'm sure a psychologist would break me down and be like, "Well, you're just modeling that," and whatever.0:31:05.2 AW: But it's like, yeah, I love that part. Work is like a hobby, it's a passion, all those kind of things. And so... But I have a hard time realizing that that's not true for a lot of people. That line is much thinner and they cross over it back and forth. And it really had me looking a lot at like, how do I make sure that people feel taken care of and protected? How do they have space to talk about how they feel? Whether it's uncertainty or confidence or whatever that might be.0:31:41.4 AW: And some of it too, it wasn't just COVID that presented that, it was coming out of selling the company, where you're like pushing, pushing, pushing, and then you cross this line that really is a finish line to some extent, right? 0:31:55.8 DS: Yeah. You feel really good.0:31:57.7 AW: Yeah. And then you get on the other side and then you realize like, "Oh well, I still want all these people to have the career that they want. And their finish line might not have been the company being acquired." And so you have to retrain your focus on those things. So for me, it's been just trying to balance those out and having more empathy as a leader for people's personal lives and how those things work.0:32:21.7 AW: And realizing too sometimes, it's great that I can be so laser-focused, so heads down, so obsessive sometimes, but then I also need to realize for myself, I'm probably locking myself out of something else in my life I should be present in or deal with, or take care of, but I run to my go-to of, "Great, here's work," that allows me to be productive and focus on whatever else and run away from something else.0:32:52.8 DS: Oh man.[chuckle]0:32:55.4 DS: Do we have a therapist listening that could have a chat with us? 'Cause damn, all that stuff really resonates with me. It's just like, for me, I'm just like, "Oh, if some thing is difficult in my personal life then well, I've always got the work life." That it's just a continual source of positive reinforcement. It's like I know that I can push hard, do this thing, get recognition for it, see the success. And it's just this thing that I can always turn to. It's like a pick me up, I'm feeling bad, down about something. It's probably not healthy, but maybe it's healthier than other escapes, I would say.0:33:42.4 AW: The other thing is, I know I do the opposite. If work is really hard and I'm getting kicked in the teeth there, I'll bring it into my personal life and ask Marcy, my wife, or family time, I'll use that to heal me or medicate me or do whatever else, but I don't... The opposite should probably be done to some extent too, where it's like, "Hey work, take a back seat to deal with these other things," or be more, just be more present.0:34:08.9 DS: Yeah. I'm working on it too. I think we're both aware of it and working on it.0:34:15.8 AW: I don't know, I probably need to work a lot harder on it. I'm maybe barely at the tip of awareness, but I can do... I definitely can do better with it. So, lastly, let's take a peak, what are you looking forward to in 2021? Let's say we get the pandemic under control. Now, I don't think, eradicated isn't the thing, but we get back to a 70-80% level of where we were normal, we're still making smarter decisions on contact and things like that. But what are you looking forward to next year? 0:35:01.2 DS: I think I have low optimism about our ability to get back to normal, get back to seeing people in person. I don't think we're gonna see much of that until maybe by the end of the year, but I just, I think by summer we might be getting closer to it, depending on the state of vaccines. But then I worry about the fall again, the fall, the second surge type thing. Concerns me. So I just don't have a lot of optimism that we will be back to seeing people in person.0:35:35.1 DS: But I can definitely look back and think about what I'm grateful for with the lockdown. And it was just this opportunity to get closer with my family during this time. It's like we spend every waking moment together, we are connected all the time. It's like we're learning how to care for each other better, we're learning how to argue better, we're just getting better at being together. And this closeness is growing, I feel closer to both my wife and my daughter than I ever have been.0:36:10.0 DS: And so I can look back and be grateful for that, and I can look forward to strengthening that really, those relationships going forward. And then I feel unbelievably optimistic about where we're headed as a company. All of our legacy code is basically complete now. We don't have any more legacy stuff that we've been dealing with in our software, which opens us up to have much quicker sprints, release dates.0:36:39.5 DS: I've recently promoted one of our developers into a team lead position. I just really feel like we've dialed that in and we're about to hit our stride with weekly releases of awesome new features, tons of stuff happening, really expanding our software and finally breaking free of some of the chains that have been holding us back for many years. So, I don't know, I feel extreme optimism about 2021, despite the pandemic.0:37:06.6 AW: Yeah, no, that's awesome. Gratitude is definitely a healthy thing. I'm probably concerned with you if your wife and daughter are gonna get better at debating and arguments with you, like you are gonna be in a lot of trouble, my friend.0:37:20.8 DS: No, no. They've always been way superior to me, I'm just stepping up a tiny bit. [chuckle]0:37:26.3 AW: Oh, nice. You're gaining ground. Good, good.0:37:29.3 DS: I'm learning how to argue a bit better, yeah.[chuckle]0:37:32.0 AW: That's awesome. And yeah, man, that is so freeing when you hit points and things where you reduce technical debt and you just feel like, okay, now we have an opportunity for an efficiency sweet spot because we don't have these hidden "oh-ohs" or these things that just kinda hold us back that you kinda look at and you're just like, "Why is it that that's holding us back? Something that almost feels irrelevant to some point, but it's like this invisible hurdle that is very, very real to get over.0:38:08.9 DS: Yeah, and we deal with it on a weekly basis. Like our legacy summer, our legacy software, particularly, it's our account system, which is like it distracts our developers non-stop from progressing on new initiatives. And that is... Early 2021, we'll be launching our new account system, and then building a whole system on top of it, which, man, can't wait. How about you? What are you looking forward to most in 2021? 0:38:35.9 AW: Yeah, well. I can't share everything yet, but let's just say probably the next time you and I record in January, we're a week out of Christmas right now and this will probably post just before Christmas. But I will probably have some news to share that's some pretty big changes.0:38:55.7 DS: Oh, exciting.0:38:56.3 AW: Let's just say I'm excited about change and maybe getting back to some roots of some things, but that a lot of excitement, a lot of big ideas, and I think I'm gonna make some of those happen in 2021.0:39:12.1 DS: Yeah, yep. I have a little bit of inside knowledge on some of that, and I'm excited for your 2021. I think it's gonna be amazing.0:39:19.8 AW: Me too. I'll either... I'll either go down in a ball of burning flames or I'll just be constantly on fire, I don't know.0:39:30.1 DS: It's the opposite, you're gonna be rising up like a phoenix from the flames.[chuckle]0:39:32.9 AW: Alright, I'll take that, I'll take that all day long. Anyway, I think as far as this podcast, which I'm also super grateful for the time that you and I get to sit down and talk every month and...0:39:49.5 DS: Same.0:39:50.3 AW: Catch up before we hit "record" and get to do the episodes together and banter and share. I'm looking forward to the content that we'll be talking about next year, just based on some of that stuff, I think it'll be fun. It'll be fun to be talking about the stages of something new, I think will be pretty exciting.0:40:11.8 DS: Yeah. Also looking forward to that. So much to talk about in 2021. We got big plans, you and I.0:40:17.2 AW: There we go, we're gonna... 2021, we're gonna take over the world.0:40:21.8 DS: At least part of it. A small, a small tiny piece of the world.0:40:26.6 AW: 10 miles north of the Canadian border and 10 miles south of the Canadian border, we're gonna take that part over.0:40:32.0 DS: Wow, that'd be huge. If we can get that much. That's good.[chuckle]0:40:34.1 AW: Awesome. Well, cool, let's wrap it up, Darren. I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, all of that stuff. And maybe we'll sneak in some time to chat in between the holidays. But if not, I can't wait to talk to you to start off, 2021.0:40:56.5 DS: Yeah, I would love to sneak in some time to chat, and you know, wishing you and your family a great holiday break. And yeah, to all our listeners too, I hope you all have a wonderful holiday break. I know it's weird times, enjoy Zooming with your family as much as you can, and yeah, look forward to continuing this podcast journey with you all in 2021.0:41:21.1 AW: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks everyone for listening throughout 2020, you've probably had more podcast minutes logged than ever before. And happy if we're one of the ones you've chosen to be in your rotation.0:41:32.7 DS: Yep. Thanks.0:41:34.1 AW: Alright, take care, Darren.0:41:36.1 DS: Thanks, you too.0:41:36.2 AW: Alright.0:41:36.5 DS: Bye everybody.[music]
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.
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