In episode 747, Rob Walling interviews Jane Portman, co-founder of Userlist, to discuss the evolution of their SaaS customer success strategy. Jane shares the four stages of Userlist’s customer success journey, from the early days of trial and error to implementing done-for-you services. They also discuss the challenges of customer onboarding for complex products.
Topics we cover:
- (2:20) – How customer success works at Userlist
- (5:27) – Dealing with upfront onboarding friction
- (9:51) – Stage 1, “young and naive”
- (12:16) – Stage 2, “hire someone”
- (19:06) – Stage 3, “done for you services”
- (25:47) – Leveraging the Userlist blog
- (29:26) – Stage 4, “developing your own frameworks”
Links from the Show:
- SaaS Institute
- TinySeed
- Jane Portman (@uibreakfast) | X
- Jane Portman (@uibreakfast.com) | Bluesky
- Userlist
- Episode 471 | Fighting to Gain Traction in a Crowded Space with Jane Portman of Userlist
- Episode 742 | Normalizing Hard Things, Facing Your Biggest Threat, and Making it Fast (A Rob Solo Adventure)
- Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
- Userlist Closes a Pre-Seed Round with 21 Angel Investors
- SaaS Email Marketing Strategy: Everything You Need to Know
- 20+ “Invite Your Team” Email Examples
- Atomic Emails: Our Proven Method for Writing Email Campaigns
If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you!
Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify
Welcome back to Startups. For the Rest Of Us, I’m Rob Walling, and in this episode I speak with Jane Portman, the co-founder of User List, about how they’ve evolved their SaaS customer success process over the past seven years of running their mostly bootstrap company. In this episode, we cover the four stages that their customer success process has traveled as it’s evolved over this time. Before we dive into the conversation, I wanted to let you know about an effort that the team at TinySeed and I have been working on here in late 2024. It’s premium coaching and community for SaaS founders doing 1 million a RR and up. Right now we have a teaser page up at SaaS institute.com. If you are a founder who is at or in the neighborhood of 1 million a RR, any your email there and we will be reaching out with more information.
This is going to be an elite and exclusive community application only hand chosen. It’s not intended to be an extremely large group of people, but it’s intended to get those that are at that point where YouTube videos and podcasts and even books are less and less helpful because you need more one-on-one focus and you want to be matched in a mastermind with other ambitious like-minded founders and you want to receive direct advice from handpick mentors and who better to do that than TinySeed. This is separate from our accelerator, right? Our accelerator is where we invest in early stage startups that are doing what between one and 2K MRR on the low end and maybe 40 k, 50 K on the high end. This is a high-end and highly curated premium coaching offering for those that are further along, basically doing seven or eight figures in a RR. So if you’re interested, SaaS institute.com. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Jane Portman. Jane Portman, welcome back to
Jane Portman:
Startup For the Rest Of Us. Super thrilled. Super thrilled. It’s been like five years, right?
Rob Walling:
It has in fact November 19th, 2019, episode 4 71, fighting to gain traction in a crowded space with Jane Portman of
Jane Portman:
Still fighting,
Rob Walling:
Still fighting in a crowded space. That fight never ends. Jane, let’s just be real. So for folks who aren’t aware, user list.com, you’re seven years into building that business with your co-founder Benedict, who many will know you and he from micro comps. The H one is email marketing automation for SaaS growth. User list is more than just an email marketing platform where your partner in successful implementation, you get proven SaaS frameworks, one-on-one onboarding and a dedicated support engineer so you can focus on hitting your growth goals. So tell us, Jane Portman, where does user list stand today? Give us an idea of how big the business is.
Jane Portman:
Long story short, we a team of six all over the world and roughly profitable,
Rob Walling:
Roughly profitable is just fine. You are a TinySeed company. You were in batch two, is that right? 2020,
Jane Portman:
Yeah.
Rob Walling:
Spring
Jane Portman:
2020. Covid specifically March, 2020, which was very bright experience.
Rob Walling:
Hey everybody, let’s meet up for an in-person. Well, we’ll do an in-person in six months. That was basically that year. That was tough for everyone too soon. I won’t drag everyone’s memories back to Covid. But today I wanted to have you on so we could talk about how you and your team have evolved your customer success practices over the last seven years. And before I hit record, you and I walked through and put together an outline of the four stages that you’ve traveled. And I really like this framework of thinking about getting something out that’s good enough. I actually talked about this in an episode just a couple of weeks ago. It’s first making it work, then you make it right and then you make it fast. And I feel like over the last seven years, your four stages have made it work, have made it right, and have made it fast.
So talk us through before we dive into stage one, which I love that you said, it’s young and naive, that’s what we’re going to call it. Just talk about how customer success works for you in the business. What’s involved in customer success for you? Trying to get people onboarded into a very powerful product because this is a conversation I have when obviously I ran Drip, which is a similar type of company, very complicated. I would say it’s powerful. Drip is powerful, very complicated. And folks who run reen, and I’ve had this conversation, it’s electronic signature Reuben’s like people come in, there’s a button to upload a doc, you drag a signature field there, you’re onboarded. And I was always writer like Derek was, I was like, you create a link, you send the link, people book the link. I know there’s more to it than that, but realistically there are different gradients of complexity with products and not all customer success approaches work for each of them. And so you can be naive if you’re going to build a really complicated slash powerful product and think that, ah, everyone’s just going to self-serve and get on board. So with that preamble, talk us through user list and how that journey has been for you from a high level,
Jane Portman:
If we knew what it takes for people to integrate and get started, if I knew as much as I know now, we probably just would not start, would not have started so many years ago because it’s insane. Somewhere in the middle we had a consult with a hidden shot and he said, I would not touch a product like this with a 10 foot pole because it’s incredible friction in the start. It’s just insane. I’m not sure it might be even easier for Drip because you can just import your list. User list provides SaaS email marketing automation, which is three times more complex than any other complex automation because you need to continuously update the information about your users in real time through the API integration. And there is no way around it because the users, they come, they go, they change plans, they do something inside their product and you send information about that into useless.
So we then can use that data to build segments and you can build segments, workflows and do all that jazz that you came there to do. And then you need to come in and think about what you’re going to be sending and write your campaigns and set them up. There is a whole second layer to this. And I think when we were just starting out, we thought that some templates are going to cut it for the creative part and the data part. I dunno, we just didn’t think about how much work it is, which now we know that in order to successfully integrate, people don’t just need to push some events and some properties inside useless, they need a tracking plan first so that the marketer doesn’t have to go back to their engineers every month asking for new things. It needs to be somewhat wholesome to move forward. In the ideal world again, yeah, there’s a lot of steps. The integration, segmentation, creative part, setting everything up and then running day to day is another thing that they probably need to less extent.
Rob Walling:
And that’s a ton of upfront friction as Heon said. And so you have to be, and then it’s like, well, so then you need to be able to charge a ton of money so that you can spend all this time to get people onboarded and your retention’s going to be high. But the problem is you are one of, if I were to guess 500 different email products one could use now not directly aimed at SaaS and has a functionality you do, but people start, they compare you to MailChimp or Drip or ConvertKit and they’re like, well, why are you four times the price of MailChimp? And it’s like, well, because we have all this stuff. And so it’s this constant push and pull of trying to convince people of how different and how powerful you actually are to justify any type of price discrepancy, but also not be having infinite pricing power because there are so many options that people can kind of hack and get. It’s 50, 70, 80% of the way there and they can justify it to themselves that like, well, I’m not going to pay $300 a month when I can pay 40 to MailChimp, but it’s like, ah, but it’s not going say, you know what I mean? So do you find that this, can you tell I’m speaking out of trauma because I had these conversations over and over?
Jane Portman:
Well that verbatim, I basically wake up with this. I’m like, how do we niche down? Where is that? Is that inflection point where we finally crack this miracle puzzle of where’s that key of niching down? Because niching down as far as I see the market at the moment is the only way to move forward. It’s insane how folks that are getting billion dollar funding moving forward and they’re just doing some insane things. And that’s slightly depressing for a team of six. There is another angle to this industries that when 20 years email automation came out, it was Infusionsoft, AWeber expensive. You would use a consultant for it for a reason and you would pay much for a reason. These days you can buy whole range of pricing, you can buy a very cheap stool, but you still need to know what to do with it. And the question is, do we just leave people alone or do we really teach them to do this? And this is a very, very interesting niche because there is no university degree for email automation. So it’s not precisely marketing and not precisely engineering. It’s in the mix needs a technical mindset but also needs marketing brains behind it.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, makes it a double whammy. So let’s dive into this. We have these four stages that you, yourself, your company has traveled on this customer success journey. You dubbed stage one, I hinted at it earlier, young and naive. Talk us through what that stage looked like.
Jane Portman:
So what we did, we wrote a bunch of email templates, we baked them into the product so it was easy to use. And then we also, because I’m a designer, can design well, I designed a bunch of printable worksheets that people could fill out, print out, fill out and enjoy themselves. So what we did, we distributed those around throughout the channels throughout the website and we were kind of said that, yeah, look how much we’re doing. We’re awesome. We really thought so
Rob Walling:
And you’re done. That was it. That’s the end. It’s just one stage. I was kidding. So everyone took those and filled them out and used them a hundred percent, right?
Jane Portman:
Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. That’s what happened. I guess we just didn’t bother that much because there were other fish to fry at the moment. We were onboarding folks mostly manually I guess at those stages. And we were just somehow stumbling forward, raising angel rounds, doing other things. Well, yeah, just moved forward.
Rob Walling:
And here’s the way I think about this. There’s an old book by Jeffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm, and I believe it came out in the early nineties maybe. And the book was more written for large scale adoption of think of palm pilots. Anyways, there’s five key segments that Jeffrey Moore broke this down into where you have, these are groups of customers, there’s the innovators who will use a product and they just love toying around with stuff and they’re willing to put up with a lot of pain and do a lot of work because curious and because it might provide value for them. So innovators then there’s early adopters, early majority, late majority, and the laggards, and I think what you’ve touched on because I’ve experienced this as well, is that your innovators and maybe some early adopters were fine with the young and naive face that they were cool with worksheets and templates. But those segments are very small and if you see this graph, obviously you can Google it if you’re listening to this episode, it’s like a bell curve and the innovators and early adopters are just a tiny, tiny, just not that many people. The masses are in that early majority and late majority. And so as you find that hey, a bunch of people aren’t converting, you entered stage two, which we’ve called Hire Someone. That’s a really good name. So it’s really descriptive. What do you mean hire someone? Who’d you hire? How did it work out?
Jane Portman:
Entered 2021, I think end of 2021. We just raised our second round a little bit of money from Angels. We hired developers, we were like, we can do more. And we identified that there is this area of proactive customer success that we can tackle. And so we sat on a journey to hire such a proactive person that could be Prince Charming, talk to people, do demos and just overall communicate a bunch. And I think we circled through three candidates that didn’t work out. I’m not going to go in detail, but particularly exciting things like one of them completely lacked empathy. Someone lacked tact about giving advice to people and we are not, I’m not going to go there anyways. It’s interesting. How
Rob Walling:
Did you hire them and hire them? They started and then you had to fire them.
Jane Portman:
It wasn’t like a trial training period, but yeah, they were being onboarded when we learned that. And it’s interesting, I think our hiring process has improved since then, but also it was not like we had a board and all that jazz. It’s not like we hired strangers and then Michael Christoph of P GMA started our friend, he was one of the early applicants for the job and we were like, no, Michael, you’re too qualified. No you, you’re not coming in. And then I had a consultation with him and together we figured out that what we first thought should be proactive support is actually about being helpful when they have that momentum to get started during the early days. So we actually needed just plain support, just support. And that was the beginning of 2022 when we put a smart person engineer Michael in the support inbox. And that just changed our lives first because everybody should delegate support even though there is not much, it’s really frees up the hands. And second, it just gave us a whole next level of customer investigations and all these things. There is a bunch of troubleshooting that happens in email automation. So he was taking this off Benedict’s shoulders and that was really tangible. So that was nice and that worked for a while.
Rob Walling:
So was you went to hire a customer, A CSM, we call him a customer support manager, which is an individual contributor who is going to be frankly mostly a little bit reactive but mostly proactive. And after these failed attempts, you just said, let’s just hire an engineer who can handle the support inbox. Is that the summary of it? And it worked?
Jane Portman:
It’s not like the first role means the second role, but while we were trying to fill out the first, we learned that we actually need just someone really smart on support. And probably there is still space for going through accounts and reaching out to customers and things like that, but it’s really secondary compared to being there for onboarding.
Rob Walling:
So that’s the difference is some people, when you say customer success, that is a lot of different things. There’s actually a lot of roles within that, right? There is onboard onboarding is only one part of that. Once people are a customer, there’s retention, there’s even instrumenting and reporting and doing analytics on onboarding. And there the amount of people who are getting onboarded, there’s a lot more to it than just onboarding. I think there’s a drinking game. I think we have six shots. I’ve said the word onboarding now six times. So it sounds like as you looked at customer success as a whole, you realize well maybe we don’t need to cover all of the bases and we should really more focus on getting people connected, getting the APIs connected and getting that early stage done such that they stick around. Am I understanding that right?
Jane Portman:
That’s correct. And my personal, well that’s because I was kind of supervising this, but my biggest discovery is a person was that I was wrong about the skillset of such person. It’s way less about being charming. Michael is super charming by the way, but it’s less about being charming and great in camera and whatever not, but way more about technical investigation skills and that is related to our product and our niche. So maybe different for your situation. I don’t think it’s the one size fits all answer.
Rob Walling:
So I want to touch on something you mentioned. You mentioned funding, you said raising rounds, raising angel rounds, and some folks listening to this might be thinking, oh well how much have you raised is probably the question on their mind. So first question is have you talked about it publicly? And if not, let’s give people an idea. I don’t think you’ve raised millions of dollars, right? You’re still mostly bootstrapped.
Jane Portman:
Our second round was a little bit short of 400 K, something like this. We don’t have this. Yeah, we don’t have this number in public, but we have a nice blog post outlining the list of investors. So it was not sacred.
Rob Walling:
Good. I just wanted to touch that so people have an idea,
Jane Portman:
Which is not a lot of money. It is not a lot of money if you’re building something like it
Rob Walling:
Sounds like a lot of money and it’s totally not. This is the thing, Jane, when we were building Drip, I was about 150 to 200,000 of my own money and that got us to product-market fit and then no other money raised. And this is a hard road. It was doing it on hard mode. I knew it. I was going to say in retrospect, it was doing it on hard mode. I knew it at the time, it was doing it on hard mode, but there was no avenue. This is what 20 13, 20 14, there was no TinySeed and there was no bootstrapper friendly funding. And this is before Iny vc, this is before no angels I knew would invest in a bootstrap company that didn’t want to go the venture route. So it’s nice that that is now an option for so many bootstrappers not only has the stigma, remember when Bootstrappers used to be like never raise funding. Funding is terrible, it’s so black and white. And now that stigma has been largely removed, at least in most of the circles that I run in.
Jane Portman:
We went through the cycle very properly step by step first being brave to apply to TinySeed then oh there is nothing scary there. And then friends talked me into talking Benedict into getting more and yeah, it was not VC money but maybe with VC money you get different dynamic still to explore this.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, for sure. Alright, so let’s enter stage three again. Stage two was hire someone stage three done for you, it’s offering done for you services. Talk through what that means and how that’s evolved.
Jane Portman:
So in stage two, customer success engineer at that time we were really starting to build our expertise because we were onboarding users, learning about automation. We built a fabulous expert blog and then we were getting advanced into we know how it should be done well and we see nobody’s doing it well. You just keep watching people struggle and you know how to do this, but you understand that no, it’s not a way forward to try and educate them from day one. And the way forward is probably to either recommend them to hire a consultant or do it for them. And we went as hard as writing the first email saying, no, you can’t do this yourself because there is five people in the world that are professional and you’re not one of them. So either get a consultant or here’s our done for you page, which was probably a little bit too aggressive. So we don’t have that email now. And that was early 2020. What was last year? 2023 that we started on this direction and these services were surprisingly easy to sell compared to selling software. We were like, we sent an announcement and I got the first customer immediately. I was like good old consulting days when you can actually sell something quickly and make a lot of money. Well
Rob Walling:
Yep, consulting, it’s a business code, selling dollars for hours. That’s why a lot of us start there.
Jane Portman:
So I was executing this myself as a consultant also learning a bunch. And honestly it’s more about that joke when it’s like $1 for hitting the hammer and $9 for knowing exactly where to hit the hammer. It’s kind of that kind of work a lot.
So it was not too bad. I served a few packages and burned out because the reason why we started SaaS was to get out of consulting people and now we are back in this. We have all the SaaS, we have the marketing machine going and services on top of that. That was really painful, but we kept offering this. It was not a huge stream. So it was a nice supplementary income, nice learning customers because when someone purchases a package, they’re pretty much guaranteed to get started and just overall good experience. So yeah, that was a netbook that allowed us to build the expertise even more because now we really did the drill for multiple companies and had feedback and implemented also actually helps to troubleshoot the tool itself quite a bit because you’re using it yourself. You’re dog fooding a bunch. It was good, it was definitely good things to do and it takes a bunch to set this up so you have to write your sales page. We also got a consultation from an email marketing consultant Summer os. She taught us her trade secrets on how to better approach the process with clients and we had these materials developed for intake questionnaires and steps and procedures and stuff. So when that was developed it was just great to have it live and going and available for customers when they need it. I guess that’s the description of this stage.
Rob Walling:
And is this something that you would recommend to other SaaS founders if they similarly have a complex product or a powerful product that takes a lot to get onboarded? It sounds like that’s why you’re here is that folks would come sign up and then just never, you just wouldn’t retain ’em, they wouldn’t get set up and so you’re just removing one more excuse. Well I don’t have any emails and it’s like go hire a consultant. You could have a page with agency partners who do this for them.
Jane Portman:
We haven’t
Rob Walling:
But those agents, but people maybe don’t want to go to ’em or they’re expensive, right? Because what’s the range, the price range that you’re offering the done for you?
Jane Portman:
Yeah, I can tell you the most popular package is the user onboarding kit includes the user onboarding campaign, like trial expire, expired trials, reactivation. So all the campaigns around activation, it’s $4,000 and consultants typically charge, I dunno, eight 12 K for the same thing up to 20 K sometimes. Depends on how much goes in this,
Rob Walling:
Right? So you are in essence offering a deeply discounted thing that is highly repeatable for you because you already have infinite client, infinite, it’s not true, but you have a steady flow of incoming new clients. So you’re not out there really marketing it already marketing user list and it’s repeatable for you and you can offer it cheaper because you want them as a customer. You want that a CV. So it’s interesting. Would you recommend that someone else do this?
Jane Portman:
You just sold it in five different benefits, didn’t you? So yes, of course, but also I guess it depends on what kind of lifestyle you want for yourself and the style of your business. I know some companies that were only made able to make the financials work with the services because otherwise it just didn’t take off. We know some peers who only have let’s say paid guided onboarding, which is a flavor of done for you. They have a thousand bucks set up fee, which is for bootstrap SaaS company who’s our customer, probably overkill to make it the mandatory fee, but that person I am talking about, they made it mandatory for everybody because it was pretty acceptable in the industry and they had a smashing success with it. So it depends. But at this point in my life, after seven years, I’ve really given up on trying to teach people as they get started. There is definitely a segment of bright folks who are willing to learn. It’s not impossible, but a typical busy person is not willing to absorb your information to make really qualified setup. It’s just either let them do their basic things or do it yourself really well. I guess that’s the barbell strategy of Nasim Tale. Either very simple or very complicated and expensive. The mid range is a danger zone.
Rob Walling:
So before we move on to stage four, I want to ask you about your blog as a marketing channel. And the reason this ties in is you told me offline that as you learned more and more about the thought process and the pieces that need to go into place for all the emails that a SaaS company needs, you started the done for you offering, doing it for all of them. You started realizing, oh there’s same patterns over and over and same ideas, same thoughts. And so you took that knowledge and now you’ve written a bunch of blog posts with that knowledge of here’s how to write this sequence, here’s how to do this and make it work. And so my question for you about that is, is that working? Because it’s a lot of work, right? The done for you, you’re getting paid for, but then to take that and to write up 2000, 3000 word blog post and put it out there on Google in the age of AI where people are getting more and more answers from ai, has that effort been worth it?
Jane Portman:
Definitely. So because just the niche of SaaS email marketing automation, thankfully with the word SaaS in it is narrow enough for us to be able to plant a footprint there. And then everybody who writes very shallow, very shallow bare bones stuff like lead the users to the aha moment. Nobody talks how to set up the triggers, how to orchestrate the journey, how to segment people really hard and a lot of others there is an endless amount of implementation details you can dive in and different ways to serve them. And going back to SEO, thankfully having the word SaaS is really helping for things like SaaS, email marketing strategy and things like that. And we also, in answering your second part, the effort, we also have two parts to this. One is big expert guides, which I write myself two, three times a year. And then we publish monthly roundups of email examples tailored to specific SaaS situations like I dunno, we just published a post today, invite your team kind of emails.
And we have a lineup of 20 emails that companies send during their own boarding flows. Very narrow, very niche, very specifically curated and described. If you go to popular platforms like really good emails, you’re going to find 80% emails from E-commerce purely curated. So you’re not going to be able to do that. So with email examples, we kind of really hit our tried. We have a community advocate who goes around collecting examples in the communities, also distributing pieces there. So it’s a content flywheel of sorts because we’re collecting examples in exchange for backlinks from people then using these examples for SEO. And this is great material and it seems obvious maybe for Reuben but not for me. It took a few years to figure out
Rob Walling:
Someday we all are on our own journeys Jane,
Jane Portman:
And maybe that’s why we are still so hot on the topic. Me and Benedict, for Benedict, it’s probably never ending technical challenge. We’re never relaxing and I’m never relaxing on the educational side. It’s always how can we better explain this? How can we better teach that? What’s the easier way? You don’t want to be like Big Bang theory complicated about it. Nobody’s going to read. You want to be human about very hard topics. So how do you do that?
Rob Walling:
And you don’t mean Big Bang theory, the sitcom, you mean the scientific principle as defined by physicists?
Jane Portman:
Correct. I mean the sitcom, like this type of language they
Rob Walling:
Use. I got it. The complexity. All right. Alright, so with that I do want to get into stage four, which is developing your own frameworks that you have developed out of the done for You work. Talk us through what it looks like today.
Jane Portman:
So this year with doing more than for you projects, it was obvious that some patterns are emerging and one of the patterns was the way we use existing materials that every SaaS has and that they’re different for every business. Some startups are heavy on videos, some startups have a great blog, some startups offer 20 types of onboarding calls and just different things people have. And the way we use these materials in the process to craft actual storyboards for the campaigns and the campaigns. And we wrote a guide about it and as I was writing the guide, I knew this was a very good piece of content. I wanted to make it into a framework. I tried to find an acronym and I spent an hour. The example for this is like Pirate metrics, A RR, the company may be dead, we all know the pirate metrics. So we wanted to craft something equally timeless, but I couldn’t find an acronym and I was always stumbling on that moment. When you break down what you have into, you atomize your resources into atomic small emails. And I was like, hmm, maybe there is something about the word atomic that deserves that James Clear really likes that we can also use.
So nothing revolutionary there and went for the name. And then now that that was done, it was a revelation that actually we also have another system for the first stage where we help our users to segment their journeys and use this as triggers and things like that. So lifecycle segmentation is something that we have been teaching for ages and now we have a framework for the creative side of things. So it’s obvious that we have system for this and system for that. So we thought, no, that’s probably called frameworks and we started using that to promote on the website. Our homepage has a section with fancy images where get started with our frameworks and basically highlights that we can help you at every step of the stage. And now this is another PR thing. We can go around customer success shows and talk about using frameworks. Hey, hey Rob, here’s how we got the placement with you. So it’s like in a rendering cycle of doing things, talking about them, meta talking about them, and then so on and so forth, which is pretty fascinating to be honest.
Rob Walling:
Yeah, folks want to check out atomic emails. You can go to Google and just type it in. It’s look for user list.com or obviously we’ll link it up in the show notes, but it’s a very thorough and obviously very knowledgeable article written from experience. There’s a difference, you said this earlier of people are publishing content about SaaS emails and what they do is they either go to Jet GPT or Baird or they go to a freelance writer who doesn’t know anything about SaaS emails and then they do some Googling and then they research and then they put something together That is a cursory thing to try to rank. And I mean that’s not what you’ve done here. All the posts on your blog, to be honest, feel like chapters of an ebook or even a short ebook, you know what I mean? They could be combined into a pretty interesting collection challenge of course is it changes so often.
So don’t do a book Jane, because by next year it’ll all be out of date. But that is an interesting competitive advantage that these days people are like, oh, content is dying. SEO is dying. And I don’t necessarily, everything’s sensational. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with that. But the idea that you can’t still put out really deep, thoughtful, long form content on the internet, on a topic someone cares about and have them discover it and use it, it’s still viable today if you put in the time. But it’s hard, right? It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of knowledge.
Jane Portman:
It’s a choice because we don’t publish anything but awesome these days. So when someone says, let’s co-market our integration, all you need is publish a blog post on your blog and we’re like, Nope, we’re not publishing a blog post on our blog for a new integration. We are only doing really cool stuff. And we also said, yeah, it’s a whole separate topic for the podcast because we went through the stage of hiring of trying to hire experts to write for us for 2000 bucks a pop. And we did a few, like 1500, $2,000. And it just, again, we stumbled into the same problem that folks are awesome in theory. And I can tell they’re not practitioners, they’re not working with real claims on this specific, well I don’t want to bring them down. They’re fantastic, but not what we’re looking for. There’s too much technical detail in this. So now we’ve settled on this combination of doing this ourselves and and using community examples for other types of posts.
Rob Walling:
Jane Portman folks want to find you on X Twitter, you are at UI breakfast and are you on Blue Sky?
Jane Portman:
Yep. Just joined lately.
Rob Walling:
Alright, are you UI breakfast as well?
Jane Portman:
Yeah, ui breakfast.com. That’s my old consulting domain.
Rob Walling:
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, talk about customer success.
Jane Portman:
Exciting. Thanks for having us. Rob.
Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Jane for joining me on the show. It’s great to have you here this weekend. Every week throughout 2024, it’s a wrap. This is a wrap on 2024. I wish you and every listener a happy new year, and I hope 2025 is shaping up to treat you really well. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 747.
Leave a Reply