Show Notes
- Principle 1: Social Currency
- Principle 2: Public
- Principle 3: Practical Value
- Principle 4: Stories
Transcript
[00:00]Rob: In this episode of Startups For the Rest of Us, Mike and I discuss how to make your SaaS app more contagious. This is Startups for the Rest of Us, episode 189.
[00:08] Music
[00:16] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you built you first product or your just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:25] Mike: And I’m Mike,
[00:26] Rob: We are here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week sir?
[00:30] Mike: I apparently have lost $7,000.
[00:32] Rob: Really?!
[00:33] Mike: I received a check for $7,000 in the mail. And I put it someplace because I had to go away for the weekend and then I got back and forgot about it. I’ve been looking around for it. Because I was trying to make sure all of my books and stuff were straightened out because it was the end of the month. I can’t find this check.
[00:48] Rob: So, you either… you going to have to reissue it or something?
[00:50] Mike: It’s frustrating because I have a system to take this into account. I usually put all that stuff into this little blue box for all my business stuff. But it’s just like, I got it. I was on my way out the door for like a long weekend. I think it was like a Thursday afternoon. I’m like “I’ll take care of this when I get back.” And I didn’t do it.
[01:09] Rob: Yeah, that’s a bummer. You know the the thing that’s saved me from losing checks recently is my bank finally started doing their deposits through their iPhone app. And so now almost everytime, unless I am in a rush out the door, when a check comes I open it right then. I endorse the back. I flip it. I take two pictures of it using the my banks app. And it is electronically deposited. And that keeps me from having to put it in my wallet or put it in some envelope and then bring it to the ATM next time I go. It saves me a lot of time.
[01:38] Mike: It’s just frustrating. It throws off your entire day. That’s the problem.
[01:40] Rob: Oh, totally. Yeah, because your thinking about it. And you keep thinking maybe it’s in my car. And so you go out and do that. It’s distracting, right?
[01:47] Mike: Yes, yes.
[01:48] Rob: By the way, How has it been not consulting for the past week or so?
[01:52] Mike: It has been very very nice. [Laughter]
[01:54] Rob: I bet it has. Yeah.
[01:55]Mike: My wife has opened up her own fitness studio. So it frees up a lot of time for her to do that and I find that I’m kind of splicing my work in between when she’s going out. So it’s like I’ll be watching the kids and she’ll come back . And I’ll go back and do a lot more work. And what I’ve found is that I’ve actually gotten a lot more time to concentrate on myself , in terms of like going to the gym and eating healthy and doing all those other things. It has helped me become more productive too. It’s a nice side benefit that I didn’t quite expect.
[02:23] I expected, oh well, I’ll get a lot more productivity out of working these extra hours. And the reality is that I am actually working less but I’m getting more done during the time I am working because I’m so much more productive. At certain times of the day I am concentrating on going to the gym and I’m listening to podcasts and things like that. And I come back and I plow through work for a couple of hours. But that couple of hours is way more productive than it would have ever been previously when I was just trying to, you know, just work 9-5 on my stuff.
[02:49] Rob: Right, right. I guess you’re just not wasting your good glucose on other things. You’re able to focus it on the things that really matter to you. That’s cool.
[02:57] So couple things for me. We’re moving HitTail to new servers. We’ve already rewritten it in Rails. Only took a couple of months. One developer and we’re just about beyond that now. But we… its code complete and we’ve already started kind of setting up the database migration. We have new servers and stuff. But I am excited about this to not be the technical guy. The reason I’m doing this, you know back in the day, people kept saying “Are you gonna rewrite it? Are you gonna rewrite it?” and I never wanted to there’s no reason to. But it’s gotten to the point now I have three Rails devs working for me.
[03:28] And HitTail is written in classic ASP and.net and so I’m the guy who always has to go in and make code changes. Which means they just don’t get done very quickly. They don’t get done very well because I’m in a hurry all the time because it’s not my primary focus. So, I’m just excited to be able to step away from this and just be able to, you know, when feature requests come through, it’s not a matter of me putting a day aside to try to code something up, but now I can delegate it to a developer.
[03:51] Mike: Yeah, whenever you’re the bottleneck like that it’s hard. Is there a wish or desire that you could read it or figure it out the architecture well enough to be able just go in and make changes yourself if you really had to. I mean, like I have some people who are working for me who are doing stuff. And I have no idea how any of it works so, like literally I’m hamstrung to the point that if I wanted to go make some of the changes I couldn’t. But the reality is like it would take me 5 or 10 times longer to do than it would to just say “Hey can you do this.” Even waiting for them two or three or four days to make those changes
[04:23] Rob: Yup, I have hit that point as well. That’s something I’m I’m okay with this point, Right? Because I’ve hired a couple of employees and I feel good working with them and they’re doing a job and so I know that the team has kind of enough cross-pollination that the architectures are now the same between Drip and HitTail or very very similar and there’s enough knowledge between everybody that even if …The danger is always if you have one developer and he or she leaves that what are you going to do? Right? But I have three guys now who have reasonable knowledge of both apps. So, it’s also nice that I can move people back and forth based on what we’re focusing on. So I basically had one guy dedicated to HitTail for the past couple of months and the other two on Drip. Kinda looking forward to getting standardized. And we’ve learned a bunch of best practices with Drip. Like, how to host on EC2, bunch of the infrastructure stuff and we’re basically just replicating that entire process, you know, and the structure of that with HitTail. So I’m looking forward to that.
[05:14] I think we’re going to do kind of a dry run early next week of the actual migration. We’re going to move the whole database and then do a bunch of testing, but not do a switch over and so it’ll probably be within about…I’d say about two weeks for me getting HitTail moved.
[05:27] Mike: Very cool.
[05:28] Rob: The other thing I had was I read a couple other books that I wanted to mention. One is called Hooked. And it’s about how to make your app or your game or you’re whatever you’r ebuilding more like addictive. Kind of how to keep people coming back and using it and if you hear about this book I liked it reasonably well. What I didn’t like is almost all the examples were were consumer stuff. It is all about viral videos. It was about iPhone app games. It was about stuff like that and I really had a tough time trying to apply it to our space.
[06:02] Instead of reading Hooked, I would recommend reading a book called Contagious. And that’s more about why things catch on and how to make your things more viral. And that’s actually what we’re…That’s what the whole outline is pulled from Contagious. Unless you are doing B2C stuff I would stay away from Hooked. The other book that I just read is called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s written by Ben Horowitz, who is, you know, a venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz. This was a gut wrenching tale of him basically growing a company, having it almost go bankrupt multiple times. Not having funding and then selling. It’s it’s a crazy crazy tale about his perseverance. I recommended if you just want to get into the dirt. It is a dark book because you feel his pain, like I actually got sad at several points. I got really tied into his story. So it’s gut wrenching. It’s not a feel good tale by any means but it definitely teaches you a lot about perhaps what it take to succeed at that level. And have a multi billion dollar exit.
[06:57] And frankly, I want no part of it. I’ve always thought that anyways. But in listening to this book…Yup. I wouldn’t of wanted to do that. I wouldn’t have wanted to put myself , my family, my friends just put your body mentally and physically through that ordeals, but it is definitely an interesting story about a big venture capital raise and exit.
[07:14] Yup, So today as I mentioned before we’re going to talk about how to make your SaaS app more contagious. And I pulled this from a book called Contagious: Why Things Catch On and it’s written by Jonah Berger. Mr. Berger is a marketing professor at Wharton. And he spent the last decade studying why things spread through word of mouth and social transmission.
[07:32] So, in his book he outlines six principles that he’s found in his studies, in his research that drive things to become contagious. He looks at consumer products, policy initiative , work place rumors, YouTube videos, there’s a couple B2B things. It’s really not a focus of it. But what I hope to do today is that in our examples of these principles of ways to apply it to more like B2B software, B2B SaaS and even some info products.
[07:58]The book is actionable if you make the effort to apply it to your product. We’re not going to discuss all six of his principles because two of them I was not able to apply to our space. I do recommend the book. But let’s dive into this first principle.
[08:10] The first principle he brings up is social currency. And what he says is that people share things because of social currency. They basically want to share things that make them look good. They’re three steps to increasing the social currency of something, so of a YouTube video or of your SaaS app and when you increase the social currency of something. That means when someone passes that along they get more benefit out of it for recommending it to someone else.
[08:36] And so these three steps which are kind of principles on their own but we will group them under here because he does, the first one is to find inner remark ability. The way I like to think about this is What is your purple cow? How can you find the purple cow for your app or your idea? And to throw out just one example of a B2B app that people are talking about one is BareMetrics. Right? BareMetrics.io. It’s Josh Pickford’s app that hooks into Stripe. And gives you a really nice kind of a SaaS dashboard. Something people talking about with BareMetrics, like it’s a B2B app. What could be remarkable about this? Well he has two things right off the bat that people are sharing.
[09:14] One is if you go to demo.baremetrics.io that is Josh’s live revenue data for his app. For BareMetrics. And so you can watch his app grow over time. You can see what his lifetime value is, his churn, his retention, his monthly revenue per user all that stuff. The other thing he did is he got Buffer, who many of you have heard of, to also to put their metrics live. So I am pretty sure that’s buffer.baremetrics.io. So, these two things, while not baked into his app, obviously when people see this. People sharing it on the Internet. And then you click through on a Tweet. It’s remarkable, right? This is a purple cow. This is a shocking thing. You say “Wow! These guys are totally sharing everything about their business.” And it has resulted in more traffic, more customers for BareMetrics.
[09:59] Mike: I think that part of that has to do with transparency, as well. And I don’t think that the inner remarkablility is a direct translation to, Oh that means you have to go out and be transparent. Just being transparent is one example of finding something that is remarkable about your application. Because you look at a lot of SaaS apps out there and it’s very difficult to get this kind of information from them. And that’s what makes this information that they’re displaying very remarkable. When you’ve got Buffer and Bare Metrics showing their own data, most people don’t show that. Most people don’t get a sense of that. They just see what they see on TechCrunch and all these other websites where they just send out a blast of “Oh this great company made tons of money!” And you don’t see all the stuff leading up to it. And this gives you that. This gives you that sense of, kind of, what’s going on today, what things looked like previously and how things are, kind of, shaping up to be in the future.
[10:53] And that is just not something you get a lot and I think that’s where the idea of the purple cow comes in and because you don’t see it. But I think that being remarkably transparent is one of those ways.
[11:02] Rob: Yeah, I would agree. I think another example I could bring up is with Drip. When we launched it, I thought there was marketability but it turns out people didn’t think it was that interesting. There was no sharing going on. How is it different from other apps? Well, it is similar to MailChimp but at that time it was similar to MailChimp but you could put kind of a widget on the front end of it. And then we tracked goals and we did all this stuff. But we did stuff that you could cobble together if you really wanted to using other tools. And so there was really nothing remarkable about it.
[11:30] What I found is that within the last month as we finished building the rules engine. Right, the email automation, behavioral email people have started talking about that. I’m seeing it on Twitter. I’m getting emails and saying “Hey! I saw what Brennan Dunn is doing.” or, you know, what another customer is doing with Drip now. I saw a screencast about what the rules do. And right away, that baked right into the product, we found something that people are remarking about. It is in a sense a purple cow. And I think that I can refine that a little more especially with improved marketing and encouragement for people to share. But at this point, that’s an example of an app that really didn’t have inter remarkability but by building some features and going towards a into a newer space. I’m pretty sure we’ve now achieved that. And that that’s going to be our push moving forward.
[12:12] The second step into improving your social currency is to leverage game mechanics. And this is essentially encouraging competition among your users or customers and encouraging people to reach goals. And this is often called gamification. And so a decent example of this of more of a B2C model is Stack Overflow. Right? One of the things that they did really well, that Jeff Attwood executed really well, was having people compete for these badges and answer more questions and get more points and that kind of stuff.
[12:41] I think another example is, that you could do, is to have your customers compare their results. Right? Maybe in an aggregated way or in an anonymous way. But have customers, have a leader board of like who has the highest conversion rate from their campaigns. And obviously people could opt in or opt out of this. But people take pride in, like, being on a leader board. And what would be interesting is if it was anonymous at first but then as people got into it and if you asked people, “Hey, do you want to not be anonymous and we’ll actually give you a link back, right.” So that people know what you’re doing. And the people with the highest conversion rate of their email campaign or the highest number of hits from their SEO campaign or whatever it is your app does. That getting people to kind of compete against each other with definitely will bring people together and hopefully get folks talking about it.
[13:27] Mike: Yeah. That’s definitely one way to do it. It’s something that I actually started out trying to do within AuditShark. And realized that I actually needed a lot more data and a lot more customers in order to be able to pull it off. And I think that’s one of those traps that you have to be at least a little bit cautious of because if you’re trying to do this and you’ve only got a handful of customers in there or one customer is very large in relation to the others. Then what you can have is that all of your statistics get completely get thrown out of whack when that one customer does something different. Or something fails in a dramatic fashion with regards to the stats. So you have to be a little bit careful when you’re doing that. But I think that there are definitely ways that it could work. I don’t think that it is a strategy that you can try pulling off on day one. It’s something you have to do down the road a little bit.
[14:13] Rob: I agree. Yup, you definitely need a little bit of critical mass if you’re going to aggregate stuff from your customers.
[14:18] So the third and final step to increasing the social currency of your app is to make people feel like insiders. And there’s a bunch of ways to do this with B2B apps. One way is to have a members only area and members only information. And training, whether it’s videos or blog posts or something that you’re giving them that you do not release to the public and that you value. And you let them know how valuable that is. The idea here is to actually perhaps an info product that you would essentially sell but you give it away to people on the inside. So, that’s one way that I am actually heading towards with Drip is to up the level of training, but not charge for it. Right. Just let Drip customers use it.
[15:00] Another way that I’ve seen work, and Mike, you and I have experienced this first hand is to only let in X number of people into your app per month. Now we do that with the Micropreneur Academy, Micropreneur.com. And the reason we started doing it was more because we wanted to bring in cohorts of people and we didn’t want 50 people or 100 people coming in all at once. Because we just couldn’t manage the onboarding. But what we found is by collecting emails upfront and not just having it open all the time that both the upfront conversion rate increased the people who did sign up. And people got more value out of the academy because they were more serious about it when they got in. They were able to focus the time. And people stuck around longer. They got more value out of it.
[15:39] Borrowed from that in a conversation I had with Nathan Berry about Convert Kit a couple of months ago. He took that and now he’s doing a similar thing with Convert Kit. So he…It’s a SaaS app. Right? It’s like a landing page and email marketing SaaS app. He’s doing the same thing. So you can’t just sign up for that anymore. You have to sign up for an email list. And then he does a launch. And he only lets a certain number of people in. And he provides a lot of education and makes you feel like an insider.
[16:01] Mike: Yeah, and I think the surprising that you and I found was that our conversion rate for that was something like four times what it was if we opened it up. We ended up fielding and still probably field a lot of support questions about, “Hey, why can I just sign up anytime? I want to sign up now.”And we’ve run the numbers. We ran it for several months and found that the sign up rate and the retention rate was roughly 4x what it was if we just left it open at all times. So there’s some significant advantages to being able to limit the number of people who are coming in. You know, part of it is helping them as well. It’s not just about the revenue. It’s about making sure that what you’re distributing is actually being used. Because if they can sign up for it at any time. They’re going to come back some other time. They’re going to say “Well, I can put this off.” And you want them to sign up for this now. You want them to get the value out of it as soon as possible. And that’s one of the ways that can do that.
[16:51] Rob:To recap that. That was all a single principle, which is increasing the social currency of your app. Increasing the likelihood that people will want to share it. And those three steps were: find inter remarkablility, just like finding your purple cow; leveraging game mechanics and making people feel like insiders.
[17:06] The second principle we’ll look at today is Public. And the idea here is, can people see when others are using your app? Is it observable? People want to follow a crowd, in general. There’s a lot to say for social proof. And so some of the examples he lists, which again B2C examples, he talks about the white earbuds that Apple released with their iPod. Now the Beats by Dre headphones. It’s obvious when someone’s wearing those because they have the flat sides and they have the big B on them. What about your app is observable by the public?
[17:38] Here’s some examples in the B2B space. Someone’s using Olark. You know they are because it says powered by Olark at the bottom. Someone’s using Drip. It says powered by Drip at the bottom. Now both of those apps allow you to upgrade to a certain plan and hide that but most people don’t. That right there is a nice viral loop. And a nice way to see if a lot of people are using it. So if you have any type of UI widget that people are installing on their site you’re in a good spot. Even if you don’t, I’ve seen apps that allow people to put badges on their sites. An example could be AuditShark. That someone could say protected by AuditShark in the footer of their site. If AuditShark had gone into the SaaS space and really going after SaaS users that could be something that much like a Verisign Certificate of security and that kind of thing. I think that AuditShark could be prime for that.
[18:24] Mike: I actually have that code written. [Laughter]
[18:25] Rob: Do you? That’s Awesome!
[18:27] Mike: It’s something that we basically put together in sort of like a little java script. It appears in the bottom right corner of the screen in the browser that you can enable on your website. And you could put that in there and it would pop up and say “This server is protected by AuditShark.” You’re absolutely right, there are a lot of other examples as well, if you have a customer facing website for support software for example, there’s companies like UserVoice. Where you can sign up and you get an account and you have a custom URL, for example, and customers can go there. And they see that that is that companies URL. So it’s not just widgets on your website, it’s also software that your customers might interact with as part of a support function or something like that.
[19:06] Rob: Sure. And even imagine if you’re sending emails on your customers behalf. So let’s say you’re a MailChimp, even like Rueben with BidSketch, where he sends out proposal emails. At a certain plan level and it wouldn’t be your top plans but maybe it would be your bottom plans that includes a tiny thing in the footer that says, powered by BidSketch. This proposal powered by BidSketch. And MailChimp does have that, right? And I think, in their free tier one of the things is that you have to have this powered by MailChimp thing in the footer. It’s the same way Hotmail grew virally in the late 90’s was having a powered by Hotmail thing and I think it was under your signature or something. So, there’s a lot of ways where, especially these days if you’re sending things or having any interaction with your customers.
[19:45] There’s ways to get in front of them and ways to do it elegantly. Yes, you can go too far with this. So you have to use your judgment. In my opinion you should have a plan or kind of a step up where people can definitely opt out of this. Right. To where it’s truly totally white label. But what I’ve found is that most people don’t mind. And that they’re frankly, if you do the job and you’re actually helping them out, people don’t mind helping you out a little bit. Right. They don’t mind allowing you to have that little tag line. And if that means that you’re going to be able to stick around. That you are going to be able to grow as an app and that they will be able to use you longer.
[20:17] Mike: I that, for example, FreshBooks whenever you send out invoices, that people can login and see their invoices using FreshBooks website. And it’s clear that you are using FreshBooks software. I think a lot of other accounting software does that as well. I think Zero does it. You’ll see their logo in there and like the invoice and things like that. But again, as you said, you can pay to have that stuff removed. I think Basecamp when they send out emails, they come from the Basecamp domain. They don’t come from your own domain. Basecamp has made the effort such that you can reply to those emails and things go right back into Basecamp. Which is great. But it also allows them to kind of expand the reach and let people know hey “This person is using Basecamp.”
[20:56] Rob: So that was principle number 2, and it was observablility, Can people see when others are using your app?
The 3rd principle of the 4 we’ll cover today is practical value. And what I love about this one is, since he talks so much about B2C a lot of the examples he gives are like viral videos they aren’t practically valuable. Right. They don’t have utility. They don’t provide useful information. For us, if we’re talking specifically about the B2B space it’s a piece of cake right. Because we typically do sell on value. We save someone money. We make them money or we save them time.
[21:27] And so, what he says here is if your product or whatever you want to go viral has useful information, basically do as much as you can to highlight how valuable it actually is. And I think the best example of this I can think of in the B2B marketing space is to include benefits on your homepage. Right. It is to have a powerful headline, that calls out exactly what you do. What your app does for people. And then talk about how much money it saves them. Or how much time it’ going to saves them. And really focus on the value that it’s going to provide.
[22:00] Mike: Yeah. I mean, this is just the basic value proposition for any given piece of software that’s going to take somebody an extra 15 or 20 minutes to put together a proposal or something like that and they have to do 10 of them. Then you’re saving them presumably, an extra 150 to 200 minutes a month. And how much is that worth of their time. And if you can put it in relation to the value of their time then you’ve got a solid mechanism for selling that piece of software. And again as you said, it’s a lot easier to sell to businesses than it is to consumers. Consumers are very much about I’ll spend my time to do it versus businesses where it’s worth it for them to spend the money to get things done faster.
[22:37] Rob: One other tidbit that I noted down, that someone has done a study, and he quotes it and he says, that if you’re giving someone a discount on something. Whether it’s signing up for annual or going moving up to higher plans so they get more for something. He said that if your product costs less the $100 and you’re giving them a discount, then use percentage. Meaning how large of a percentage discount they are getting. And if your product costs more than $100 then use the absolute dollar amount of the discount that you’re getting.
[23:06] Mike: That is interesting. I mean was there a specific amount of improvement over one versus the other. I assume there was some sort of A/B Test right?
[23:14] Rob: I think it was more of a research study with consumers. So it wasn’t like on a webpage. It had to do with getting real live people in an office and doing stuff. I don’t think there was a percentage improvement that he mentioned but my guess is if you went to look at the study we could figure it out.
[23:27] Alright, and our 4th principle we look at today are stories. The idea here is that people remember stories. And an example of this and how you can do it in B2B marketing is not to aggregate data, to give percentages, to give dollar amounts, while that does work in certain cases you also need to couch that with stories of customer successes. That’s why case studies often work better than aggregate stats. Aggregate stats can give people an idea, an order of magnitude, but to really impact them and get them to remember and to potentially share telling stories. It’s a winner. I would actually recommend it. He had a good chapter on this in this book, but it pales in comparison to the entire book called, Made To Stick by Dan and Chip Heath. And that for me, that’s the seminal work on a way to describe ideas using stories in a way that gets people to remember them and in effect share them.
[24:21] Mike: There’s a lot of examples of this kind of thing going on but I’ve also seen through various blogs and Twitter websites where they talk about doing conversion optimization and they point out that if you call out specific numbers so instead of saying save $700 say save $684.35 because that’s a very real number. Somebody can look at that number and you know that it is not made up. It wasn’t just pulled out of the air. And you can probably relate that back to a customer who saved exactly that amount of money using your software. Yeah you’re absolutely right using those testimonials but being able to point to those specific instances as opposed to kind of aggregate because people I think a tendency to look at those aggregate numbers and say well I don’t believe that. And the reason I don’t believe it is because you see in all kinds of marketing material especially on TV. You look at something like Weight Watchers.
[25:15] And they’ll pull out all of these statistics. Oh you know, so and so dropped X number of pounds. They almost never say on average people lose X pounds. They always pull out specific people and use testimonials to drive people to sign up for their service because it is more believable. It’s more relatable than this mass of people that you have no way to identify yourself with.
[17:13] Rob: Right and we see this in Presidential campaigns too right or any type of political campaign, where they will name some stats. It’s the epidemic of the “you know, Joe the plumber here. Here’s his story.” And whoever , who did this and that and they actually go into this whole story. That’s why they do that is to personalize it. You see it with charities trying to raise money. They can say a million people a month die in this country. But it’s when they actually start following a single story that you become engaged. Another way where I’ve seen this play out is in podcasts. There are podcasts that are mostly about the tips, trick and tactics. And then there are some that are mostly about the stories of the founders or of the people who are doing the podcast. And then there are some that are a mix. My favorites personally are the ones that are a mix. And here’s why. Because if it’s all stories and kind of just bouncing from one thing to the next it’s harder for me to justify spending a lot of time listening to it. And if it’s all tips, tricks and tactics then I don’t necessarily engage or feel empathy for the people or really get into their story. I don’t want to hear it every week and sometimes I’ll skip it if it’s not on a topic I want. But when it’s a mix and I feel both for the people and for the stuff they’re sharing that’s when I’m really into it. Like, Bootstrapped with Kids is actually a really good example of that because they do both. They share tips and tactics and even if I already know them I still want to hear what they’re up to that week. Frankly, this happened with us early on. I think the first 15 or 20 episodes of this show was much more about the tips and tactics. And we started engaging the audience and we started growing once we started sharing stuff that we were actually doing, sharing our experiences. And now people will certainly listen to it for the tactics but I bet there’s a lot of people who are listening to hear what’s next with us. To hear what we’re up to next. What we’re working on and how things are going in our stories.
[27:16] Mike: Yeah, I have definitely talked to people who have said that is why they listen. I mean they do get a lot of value out of the discussions of the different things that we’re talking about but a lot of them listen just for the weekly updates and stuff in the beginning. I’ve heard from some people that just say they listen just to see how long we’re going to run the podcast. Because it’s kind of amazing to them that we push out a podcast every single week like clockwork
[27:38] Rob: So to recap our 4 principles are: Social Currency, Observability, which is, Can people see when others are using your app? 3rd principle is Practical Value and the 4th principle is Stories. And again, the book title is Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
[27:52] Mike: If you have a question for us you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by MoOt, used under creative commands. You can subscribe to us in iTunes, by searching for startups or by RSS at startupsfortherestofus.com where you’ll also find a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Nice tip around “Can people see when others are using your app”.
Based on that, I’m testing adding a new section to the Bitesize Irish Gaelic Podcast, welcoming new members by first name and location. It shares with our audience that others are signing up for our paid service.
Very cool; let us know how it works out.