Episode 163 | Our Goals for Next Year (And Why You Should Set Your Own)

Startups For the Rest of Us

Episode 163 | Our Goals for Next Year (And Why You Should Set Your Own)

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Show Notes

Rob

• 5x Drip
• Get HT back on track
• Throw 2 MicroConfs in a sustainable manner
• Re-launch Micropreneur.com

Mike

• Go full-time on AuditShark
• Finish my security book
• Get back to blogging/writing. 26 blog posts/email newsletters for the year
• Take an extended vacation (2+ weeks)
• Make a conscious effort to improve my health.

Transcript

[00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 163.

[00:03] Music

[00:10] Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.

[00:18] Rob: And I’m Rob.

[00:19] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s the word this week, Rob?

[00:24] Rob: December’s a good time to be post-launch I’ve decided. I feel it’s a little bit like a calm after the storm of launch and the calm before the storm of kind of restarting marketing in January. Obviously I’m referring to Drip. It’s just been kind of a time for me to come off of some pretty stressful and kind of high hour count weeks in November and I feel like things are starting to slow down, starting to ease into the holidays. We have a nice big back log of features that we’re cranking out. I keep saying this phrase of I’m cocking the crossbow. I feel like I’m pulling back that mechanism and loading up and having blog posts created and some content marketing stuff and banner ads and all types of ad campaigns.

[0:01:07] I’m getting suited up to do to just pummel the earth with, scorch the earth with in January. So that’s kind of what’s on my agenda. Nothing new in terms of actual marketing. I’m not executing anything right now but just building up that stock pile so I can start off 2014 with a bang. How about you?

[01:23] Mike: Well do you remember all the auto generated content project that I put together like a month or two ago and put out there and was waiting for Google to come in and index all that?

[01:33] Rob: Yeah. That was like Brecht Palombo and Patrick McKenzie had suggested that.

[01:36] Mike: Yeah. So I followed through with that and Google finally decided to come through and index everything. I’ve got something like 600 or 650 pages indexed in Google now. And my organic search traffic has increased roughly 50% to 100%

[01:50] Rob: Very nice. That’s awesome.

[01:52] Mike: The weird thing is that it seems like Google is slowly adding content to their industries over time so not everything – it’s kind of weird because I go into like the web master tools and they are showing that they have indexed 600 pages but it says that it’s not actually looking at more than I think 150 of them for some reason. It’s some weird number that they have in there. And you can see the graph of that number is increasing overtime and I’m not quite sure what it means.

[02:19] Rob: Yeah. I had this happen with HitTail when I first moved it over. I moved the blog to a sub domain and did some other tweaking and at first, Google wouldn’t index anything. The more links I built and the more people started talking about it in social media, the more of the site Google would index. It’s like if you have high authority, it would index everything, but you have to get there first. I think if you just released a brand new domain and you release a thousand pages of content, Google is not going to index that because they only have so many resources.

[02:48] And so that’s my guess of what’s happening is as your site is gaining authority in Google’s eyes and they’re able to slowly add pages into their index and eventually they’ll get after a while HitTail went from 200 and I think it’s up over a thousand pages indexed now so I’d imagine this same thing could happen to you.

[03:04] Mike: Yes so I’m hoping that will continue and I just kind of have to watch it for a little while.

[03:08] Rob: Very cool. Yeah, hopefully that traffic converts reasonably well. I know that long tail traffic in general doesn’t convert as well as more targeted traffic but if you get them on an email list, email mini course and funnel them into just kind of into your funnel I guess. This is a way to handle it and you can convert some of them and make it worth a while.

[03:25] Mike: Well I do have Drip installed so that’s certainly helping.

[03:29] Rob: So I wanted to mention a site, it’s called useronboard.com and it’s been getting some traction in recent weeks. It’s basically a critique of user on boarding for big sites that you’ve heard of like vimeo and Netflix that he did, Trello and less accounting and Basecamp and the site is getting a lot of buzz. It was funny. I followed it through and actually put out by my growth hacker intern and he didn’t tell me about it. I found it actually through social media.

[03:57] His internship ended with me about 10 days ago and he’s now back to doing consulting work and that kind of stuff so he launched the site. He and I had a couple conversations about it but I didn’t know what domain he was going to use and didn’t really know he was going to do these PDF’s critiquing it but apparently he said it’s really taken off and it’s doing well. So it’s a cool idea both from two sides. 1) Just to check out the on boarding, he knows on boarding like that’s what he’s done for a couple years. He’s very knowledgeable about it so it’s neat to see the feedback he gives.

[04:26] It’s also interesting to think about he went from zero audience to I’ll just say a sizeable little email list in a matter of weeks just by putting himself out there and leveraging his expertise. And he had already planned to write an eBook on this topic and release it but this just gives him even more of an excuse. He’s now validated there is a need for this type of content. So if you have a few minutes, checkout useronboard.com.

[04:49] Mike: The other thing I have going on is I went on my email list and invited a bunch of the Linux users into my early access program. So I sent out invitations directly to about half dozen of them. But one of the things that I’ve started to realize in talking to people – because some people would just email me back and say hey I don’t think I’m a good fit but really like what you’re doing and once my business gets to this point, that I’d really like to be able to see what Audit Shark could do and can help me lock down my servers because this is also a problem that I have.

[05:17] And I’ve had enough of these conversations that I’m leaning heavily towards creating a special bootstrapper tier specifically aimed at people who can’t necessarily afford the full pricing for Audit Shark and that’s primarily because I built Audit Shark to kind of raise the general bar of how secure the internet is and how secure people’s servers are out there. So for me it’s not necessarily all about the money. I mean obviously Iwant to make money from it and make a living and everything but at the same time I want to help other people secure their severs.

[05:47] And there are people out there who are building stuff which it may not necessarily be secure and they just don’t know what they’re doing who are freely willing to admit that but they still need help. So I’m looking at creating some sort of a bootstrapper tier specifically aimed at those people so they can get at least some sort of protection in a way that doesn’t break the bank for me. So it’s not necessarily a premium model. It’s kind of like a I’ll say some weird hybrid model I guess.

[06:13] Rob: Dharmesh called it a cheapium model where he said you basically price it kind of at cost to what it cost you for the resources and maybe to support it. But you don’t make any profit. I hear what you’re saying. I’m a little hesitant to endorse it. My big concern would be that if you get 50 or 100 people on this bootstrap startup plan and you really aren’t making any profit, it sucks a lot of resources away from your core profits basically. And given that you’re not venture funded and you do need to make money and that’s the goal, it’s a tough call. It’s not something that I would bite off early on in the products lifecycle.

[06:38] Mike: Yeah. I understand that. I mean the other side of it is it also gives me ability to talk to these people who would use it if it were priced for them and they’re more than happy to start using it and give me feedback because a lot of the I’ll say the solid leads and stuff that I’m getting from people are at much higher price points and they take much, much longer to make the decisions. So I’m getting a lot of bites in that area but its taking much longer to kind of push those people through the sales funnel and I’m basically looking for feedback now. I don’t want feedback in four months. I want feedback now.

[07:19] Rob: Yeah. That makes sense. My concern is you’re going to get feedback from people who aren’t willing to pay for it or aren’t willing to pay very much for it so I’m not sure, I don’t think that’s as good a feedback as if you can just find customers who are willing to pay the full price. I know what you’re saying you have enterprise people who are going to be in the four figures a month range. It’s going to take you six months plus to close them. It’s tough. You know the product better than anyone but I think the market itself is still unknown. And before I went to like a cheapium model I think you have other roads, avenues to explore.

[07:51] Mike: Well, like I said, I’m still looking at it.

[07:53] Rob: Yeah. Here’s the thing, you can do an unpublished version of that, you could let five people in and not make it something they can sign up through from the website. But as you’re having conversation just be like alright, I can give it to you for way less than the list price and basically break it even and then get their feedback. That can’t hurt.

[08:10] Mike: Yeah. I wasn’t thinking that I would put it out there as like click here and get cheapium price.

[08:15] Rob: Got it.

[08:16] Mike: I actually have my developer working on some stuff that will allow me to do some price testing. One of the things that the stuff is working on that would allow me to do is just create a code that I can send to somebody and it would create a very specific pricing tier from them to say okay, well you’ve entered such and such codes so you’ll get these many servers. This will be the price point etc. So that way it’s more based on one on one conversations. It’s not something that you go in and it’s like $5 a month per server or something like that because the business obviously can’t support them.

[08:46] Rob: Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Not a bad way to go. Remember when Richard White talked about launching UserVoice and we did an episode about that. He said that they discounted a lot of their tiers that they priced them high and then they offered pretty big discounts. I think the average discount was 40% or 50% not unheard of.

[09:05] I have one other topic of conversation before that. It was tweeted to me this week but I think both of our opinions probably valid – that was from Brecht Palombo. He’s @brechtify on Twitter. Brecht Palombo, he talked at MicroConf last year. He’s a longtime Micropreneur academy member, lifetime member and he has distressedpro.com it’s his business that he does full time and he also runs the bootstrap with kid’s podcast. He tweeted and he said I need a better business stats review regimen. Would love to hear about yours, maybe a podcast episode.

[09:42] So I don’t think we need to devote a whole episode to this because my regimen isn’t that involved. Here’s what I’d do. Basically I have businesses I’m actively working on. So today that’s Drip. And then I have businesses that are more in the background so that would be everything else that you see. If you go to thethenumagroup.com you’ll see the other apps I have. All of those other ones are basically – they’re not back burnered because that sounds like I’m ignoring them but they are basically moving along well. They are being supported but no major time investment is coming from me.

[10:10] And so with the first category, so Drip, the current thing I’m actively working on, I am pretty much checking stats daily. I have a bookmark. In chrome I have a little folder with a list of bookmarks and it says daily on it. That’s what the folder is called. I right click on the folder and I say open all bookmarks in new tabs and poof, it just opens them all. And this basically brings me into right in the exact page in Google analytics with a time, with a date range that I want to see.

[10:39] It has Google analytics. It has perfect audience which I use for retargeting. It has any ads. If I’m currently running ads on any networks, it has those pages in there. So this thing is in flux. When I stop ads, I will pull it out of this list and it also has my dashboard of Drip itself at other times as I’m doing they’ll make their way in here. So sometimes this will only 3 or 4 pages and other times it can open 6 or 7 different pages. And I will look at this at least once a day when I’m working with Drip and if I’m actively running ads and doing a high ads bend, I will sometimes look at it every hour or two, not all the pages but just the ads bend because things move quickly during the business day.

[11:18] In addition to that, when billing runs every night, I get an email and I almost always pop in typically from my phone because it’s in the evening and I checkout the dashboard to see what happened, see what the billing was, what the expected billing is for the month, see how things have changed, what the churn is, blah, blah. So yes, it all depends on risk tolerance. It’s like if you want to look at this only once every few days then something could go wrong and you could risk basically losing money or not making as much money. So when I’m actively doing stuff, that’s where I am.

[11:50] When I have a less active app like let’s say HitTail where I’m not out there actively hardcore marketing it and pushing it, I will typically check Google analytics once a week sometimes once a month. There are some of my apps that have been on autopilot even longer and those I really do about once a month right around the time that I’m doing end of month financials, I’ll go through all the Google analytics and just check through to make sure there was no big drop. Now again, this depends on your risk tolerance because you could feasibly lose 3 or 4 week’s worth of traffic or worth of sales if you haven’t been paying attention to that stuff.

[12:23] So you need some confidence that things are going to continue to go the way they have been if you are not looking at analytics or sales for 3 or 4 weeks at a time. Anyway, that’s how I break it down and that’s the process I’ve developed over the past couple of years. How about you Mike?

[12:35] Mike: Well, for Audit Shark I get a daily email that gives me all the important things that are going on. It will tell me for example off the top of my head I know that it tells me how many customers are currently in there, how many components which our component is either an agent or it’s an agent list audit that’s been setup for a Linux machine so I know how many servers that the system is designed to be auditing or to setup to be auditing. And then it also tells me the number of controlled points and check so as my developer adds in new ones, I can see that they’re being added in on a daily basis.

[13:09] And then beyond that, I’d say probably once a week or so, I’d go into post mark app and take a look to see the outgoing emails and just making sure there’s no problems. I also get a weekly report from them that tell me how many emails went out on the previous week. Beyond that, I also use dig my data to basically to keep track of the Twitter feed in terms of the number of followers that its gaining over time. I have more than doubled it, almost tripled it in about a month to a month and a half. So I went from around I think it was maybe 170 or so probably two months ago and right now it’s right around 950 or pretty close to a thousand.

[13:48] Rob: Very nice.

[13:50] Mike: Yeah, that’s going extremely well, just continues giving up. I mean there’s a huge jump kind of as I start figuring things out it just jumps dramatically. And then you know the standby Google analytics I take a look at that at least once a week if not 2 or 3 times a week just to kind of see what’s going on across some of the different sites because it’s nice to have that dashboard where it’s got everything in there. And then like I said, I do the same thing with dig my data where I use it as a dashboard where I keep track of multiple products and things that I’m working on.

[14:18] Rob: Very good. Thanks for the question Brecht. Hope that helps.

[14:21] Music

[14:24] Rob: So let’s dive into our goals. Let’s take a look back at 2013 look at the goals we’d setup for ourselves and then we’ll dive into what we’re looking to do in over the next 12 months.

[14:33] Mike: So my first goal from last year was to stop writing code and I think within a week or two of stating that as a goal, I said that I didn’t really want to do it because I actually enjoy writing code. I haven’t really stopped writing code. I still write code here and there usually for bug fixes or things that need to get done quickly, a lot of times I’ll take the stuff that needs to get done and outsource it. But if there’s stuff that is extremely time sensitive, maybe it needs to be done the next day or only a couple of days away and I don’t necessarily have the time to hand it off to somebody, I’ll just do it.

[15:04] I usually handle a lot of the smaller bug fixes as well like if a customer comes up with something and it’sjust not working quite the way that they want or if there’s errors that are getting thrown and I’ll handle those. But for the most part I don’t write I’d say a lot of the core code anymore. I’m basically handing that off doing much more high level design than most of the implementation.

[15:24] Rob: Very nice. Yeah, getting away from code is always hard I think for both of us. Even I’m still writing code at this point because I just enjoy it too much. So my first goal for 2013 was to grow HitTail by 2.5x and that was based on the October revenue which I think is when I had a personal retreat and made this goal. I didn’t make 2.5x. I did get to 2x HitTail from October revenue which was a five figure number already. So it’s not a small amount.

[15:53] The reason I didn’t hit 2.5 well there’s two reasons. One is I did start to back off of it to do MicroConf and then that lead right into Drip. So I didn’t have as much time as I’d like to devote to it. The other reason is that Google did their not provided thing and I saw it coming and started backing off of some of the marketing spend earlier even before Google announced it a couple months ago. And so that had definitely had an impact on the growth. Now I‘ve already talked about on the podcast some efforts that I’m going to be undertaking to kind of get around that but we’ll see how it goes in 2014.

[16:28] Mike: My next one was to launch Audit Shark publically and I would say that I’ve gone ahead and done that even though I’m still working through the early access list and slowly on boarding people and making sure the system can handle it as they come on. But I mean you can go to the site and sign up right now. There’s nothing stopping you. But like I said, I’m working through the early access list with people just to give them a little bit more hand holding and anyone who’s signing up through that is going to end up getting some sort of a discount I haven’t fully published any of that stuff. But there is different pricing for the early access people versus the public pricing.

[17:00] Rob: My second goal was to launch Drip in the spring and then I had a six month revenue mark that I wanted to hit and so I did not launch Drip in the spring. It really started having paying customers around June so it was more summer and then somewhere in there it’s hard to say really what launch was. You could say its November but it was already doing in the thousands a low four figures before then so I’d say it launched in late summer or early fall. I have not hit the six month revenue mark. I mean I really only worked through the list about 30 days ago so I do think I’m definitely on that track to meet or exceed that six month revenue mark but we’ll have to see.

[17:38] Mike: My third goal was to grow to a full time team of at least three people and nobody who’s working on Audit Shark is full time on it yet right now but I do have about five people that are working at least on a part time basis in some way, shape or form related to Audit Shark. So I would say that I definitely did not hit that goal but there was some partial progress on that.

[17:58] Rob: My third goal was to hold another MicroConf that changed the way people launched their companies and I wasn’t even thinking about MicroConfEurope. I don’t think it was an option at the time but I would say that we achieved that with MicroConf in Vegas because MicroConf 2013 in my opinion was the best one we’ve done. Looking forward to 2014 for another.

[18:17] Mike: My fourth goal was to help get my wife’s fitness business system stable and profitable. I’d say that it’s pretty profitable. It’s not necessarily stable. It kind of influx right now but I don’t know whether that’s just because of the different partnerships that she’s kind of looking at or whether it’s because of the time of year because anytime between thanksgiving and new years is not a great time to try and get people to work out.

[18:39] Rob: Yeah. It’s always hard. I’ve heard the fitness business is unstable by definition.

[18:44] Mike: My understanding is that things really pick up in January because people have put together all these new year’s resolutions and it’s kind of weird that I hear that a lot of fitness studios and gyms have these membership programs where it’s like you get subscribed to them on a monthly basis and then people will come for a month or two and then will stop coming for three or four months because they kind of fall off the wagon and then they go to cancel and then they find out that there’s like this $90 or $120 cancelation fee that goes along with it.

[19:15] So then sometimes they’ll delay a little bit more because they’re like I don’t want to have to pay that but at the end of the day they’re going to have to pay to cancel anyway which is kind of weird to me but you think that if you sign up for it then you’re good to go whenever you decide to cancel but that’s just not how it works.

[19:30] Rob: Right. Kind of like you mentioned when business hold their customers hostage.

[19:36] Mike: Yes.

[19:37] Rob: Sounds a little like that. So my fourth and final goal from last year from 2013 was to release three video training courses. The first was a video about hiring virtual assistants and that’s at startupvacourse.com I did get that one done. About three months into the year I figured I wasn’t going to make the other two. With MicroConf taking up as much time as it did and then with Drip being pushed basically back on the launch, it just didn’t seem like the best idea. I wanted to work on my software products instead of focusing on another video course.

[20:12] I would love to do another video course n 2014. I think three is just too ambitious. Recording it wasn’t the hard part. It was getting all the meta stuff together and getting it uploaded and I uploaded to you to me and getting the marketing done. The course was profitable but it’s not worth the number of hours that I spent time on it compared to what I can do with an app like Drip that has recurring revenue tied to it. So we’ll see what happens in 2014 if I do another one. It definitely was a lot of fun to put it together but I think like MicroConf, it’s a lot of effort for kind of a onetime pop or just a one time launch so I’ve kind of for now my site’s on the more recurring stuff.

[20:52] Mike: For my last goal, one was to write a security book who assists with the marketing behind Audit Shark and I’d say I pulled back from that pretty early on just because I knew that it was going to be a big undertaking so that’s still on the back burner at some point. I’ll revisit that. It will probably actually be pushed into this year. I just haven’t gotten back to it mainly because I’ve been involved with Audit Shark. And then the last one was to cut 75% of my travel consulting. And I haven’t cut 75% I probably cut maybe 20% so I’m still working on that. When customers are paying that much for an 8 or 10 or 20 week project, they kind of want to see your face.

[21:28] Rob: Very good. So let’s dive into what we have in mind for 2014. It’s early December so we kind of have 13 months to dig through these and it looks like we each have five goals. You want to kick us off with the first thing you’re looking to do?

[21:41] Mike: Sure. So the first one is obviously to go full time on Audit Shark and it seems like with the product actually launched at this point and on the path to having some real revenue I feel like that is something I should be able to achieve.

[21:54] Rob: Very nice. For me, my first goal is to 5xDrip. Since Drip is still in somewhat early stages, 5x is I think a doable goal. It’s definitely ambitious and it’s beyond what I had in the original marketing plan but things have been going well so far and so I want to set my stats high. So we’ll see if I can get there.

[22:13] Mike: My next one as I said before was to work on that security book so my goal for the end of this coming year is to finish the security book and have it out there as an additional marketing avenue for Audit Shark.

[22:24] Rob: My second goal is to do some work on HitTail. This is actually a short term goal. Really I expect to have HitTail back providing the full value that it was before the Google not provided fiasco. I hope to do that in the next 30 to 60 days. What that means is I’ll resume some of the marketing and kind of do another push. So the goal here is a little loose. It’s to get HitTail back on track. I don’t necessarily have a revenue growth goal because I won’t be hammering on it as much as I do Drip but I want to get it back to where it was pre not provided, get that marketing spend going again.

[22:57] Mike: My third goal is to get back to blogging and writing a little bit more. I’ve started doing this probably more over the last month than anything else. I’ve got a few different blog posts that I got cued up but one of the things that I did was I actually started putting together a real email list for my blog. So it’s not very large right now but if anyone is interested and wants to go sign up you can go to singlefounder.com. I will be posting probably about every other week. I do have several posts that are kind of already cued up. My goal is to publish 26 blog posts through that email newsletter by the end of the year.

[23:28] Rob: My third goal for 2014 is to throw two MicroConfs in a sustainable manner. And what I mean by that is in a way where you and I aren’t so tied to it in terms of all the labor being done. We were able – we were lucky to land Dan Taylor to help us run the MicroConf in Prague and that took quite a bit of the labor off of us. Now I’m thinking what are we going to do in Vegas because it just takes too much time and we want to keep doing it and we want to keep making it better every year but I want to figure out how to make that more sustainable so that it doesn’t detract from the other things that both you and I are trying to do.

[24:04] Rob: My fourth goal is to take a real extended vacation and by extended vacation I mean at least two weeks maybe more. I took a vacation earlier this summer which it was only about a week long. My family and I went out over to Niagara falls, took the kids out there, went on the maid of the midst and basically took an extended road trip through upstate New York and went up to Adirondacks and went camping. I guess I shouldn’t call it camping. I have a cottage up there so it’s not really roughing it or anything. But it was a lot of fun and it was very relaxing.

[24:35] I don’t think there was a time where I didn’t have internet access in some way shape or form through my phone but it was just nice to be able to relax in that way. So I think I’d like to extend that a little bit more and instead of just one week maybe do at least two, maybe more but we’ll see how things go.

[24:50] Rob: My fourth goal for 2014 is to relaunchmicropreneur.com, the Micropreneur Academy with you. We’ve been in some early talks to figure out what to do next because the Micropreneur Academy’s been around for four years now and it just needs some reworking. So we started putting some brain power into that looking at the changes that need to be made and no exact decisions made yet but I think that will be coming here in early 2014. I think our goal is to get it out before MicroConf Vegas. That’s definitely going to be time intensive to get that done as such I have it on the goals list here. And if you haven’t ever checked out the academy it’s atMicropreneur.com and if you have checked it out in the past, know that we will be expecting to release something new, kind of a revamp of it in the next several months.

[25:37] Mike: My last goal is to make a conscious effort to improve my health just in general but specifically one of my goals is to lose about 2.5% of my BMI by the time MicroConf. It’s about 10 pounds or so. There’s obviously differences between losing weight versus losing some fat off of your body and just becoming generally healthier. So I’ve actually been going to the gym quite a bit more than I probably have all year. Things are going reasonably well so far. So as long as I don’t blow up my ankle or anything like that then I should be okay.

[26:06] Rob: Nice. So my fifth goal is an honorable mention and what I mean by this is it was an unpublished goal in 2013 and I have it there in case I get everything else done and have extra time but it’s falling off the list the last two years and I frankly don’t think I will get to it in 2014 but it’s something that’s been on my mind and that’s to do a second addition of start small stay small. Like the academy it’s been out there for several years and it could use some updating and I just have so many new thoughts that aren’t in that book so we’ll see. It will either be late in 2014 or it may move up the list in 2015.

[26:43] Before we started mentioning these goals, we probably should’ve prefaced it but I guess we’ll just do a post script here. I think it’s important for people to understand why we set these goals. I know that as a goal oriented person, if I don’t have these on the list then I can tend to wander. It’s pretty easy when you’re bootstrapped especially if you don’t have a founder, you don’t really have a ton of accountability. And so these goals are part of what keeps me accountable to continuing to push hard over the next year.

[27:14] And I will show probably most of these goals to my mastermind groups. These are written down in my idea notebook that I always talk about and I will come back to them over and over this year. And although they’re not an exactly blueprint of what’s going to happen, I do have a general timeframe of how each of these play out. Probably the month or two, the 60 day period when I think they’ll each be completed and especially with growing Drip, I do have a month by month time table of where I think I can get and how hard it’s going to be to get there.

[27:46] I threw out I want a 5x Drip. I didn’t pull that number out of thin air because it’s a nice round number. I actually looked at how much traffic I think it can drive. I took a percentage of how many people I think will convert to trial. I looked at our trial to paid conversion. I looked at churn. I drew all these numbers into a machine and it gives you kind of a range and I picked the number that I think I can hit but that’s definitely ambitious. So these goals will absolutely drive me over the next 12-13 months and without them, I find that I tend to wander and I tend to hear about some new project or hear about a new idea. I get email pitches all the time to do stuff that sounds like fun.

[28:22] And the problem is if I don’t have these goals that keep me tethered to what I really want and to what I pick out by spending hours and hours of thinking what do I want in 2014, then I will tend to wander. I think most of us do too. It’s the entrepreneurial ADD. And we see a lot of folks who do just wander from one thing to the next and my guess is that having goals could be some type of tether to keep them centered around that. Is that similar to your reason for setting goals or do you have others?

[28:47] Mike: No, it is. And it’s funny you mentioned that you would show this to your mastermind group and let them know what your goals were because speaking of masterminds, one of the things that I do is I take a lot of notes for our mastermind group so usually what I’m doing is I’m taking notes and anytime somebody talks and says these are the things that I’ve done, these are the things that I plan on doing next week, I basically take all the things that everyone says that they were planning on doing next week and then putting them into an email and right after the mastermind group meeting is over, I send that email to everybody. So I sent it to all three of us.

[29:21] And then I also sent one using boomerang for one week later so that it goes out the following week and that way at the beginning of the week, everybody gets these. So it’s not like there’s two weeks in between and you’re rushing like oh its Monday. We’ve got our mastermind group meeting tomorrow. Let me try and squeeze all these things in that I was supposed to be working on for the past two weeks. And instead, they get that email and reminder right away these are the things you should be working on at least start on them sooner rather than later. And then you get that follow-up the kind of in between. And I think that helps people to stay on task because as you said, some of these things, there’s really long amount of time between them.

[29:58] You said that in order for you to 5x Drip, it’s not like that’s going to happen overnight. There’s different goals and milestones that you’re going to need to be able to meet. You got to get to 2x before you get to 5x. And there’s kind of a clear path of progression for being able to do that. And I think being able to refer back to these goals, helps keep you focused on the things that you should be working on. And if you’re getting pulled in directions that are not necessarily in line with those goals, then you really need to reconsider whether or not that’s something you should be doing.

[30:23] Rob: So if you’re looking for some perhaps public accountability, I’d encourage you to sit down, take a couple hours hopefully away from email and away from the distractions of family and try to think of what you hope to achieve in 2014 and we’d love to see a few of your goals since Mike and I have shared ours here, we’d love to see your goals in the comments section of this episode startupsfortherestofus.com and its episode 163.

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