Episode 750 | Making Your First Hire, Testing Prices, And More Listener Questions (with Laura Roeder)

Rob Walling:
You’re listening to Startups. For the Rest Of Us, I’m Rob Walling. In this episode, I have a Laura Rotor founder of Paper Bell. Join me on the show to answer listener questions. We talk about making your first hire, testing prices, and a bunch of other questions related to mid to later stage bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders. Before we dive in to today’s questions, wanted to let you know about something that my team and I at TinySeed have been working on for at least six months in the background. And it’s a premium private coaching community designed for B2B SaaS founders making at least 1 million in a RR or more. It’s called the SaaS Institute. And if you want to find out more, head to SaaS institute.com, enter your email address. We’ll be trickling out more information in the coming weeks and over the next few months, we are keeping the initial group very small. So if you’re interested in applying to potentially be part of the first cohort to get expert coaching, mentorship and community for high level SaaS founders, head to SaaS institute.com. If you’ve been watching what we’ve done with TinySeed over the past five or six years and thought to yourself, I could really use some community and mentorship and advice, but I don’t necessarily want to raise funding and or give up equity. That’s why we’re launching the SaaS Institute. And with that, let’s dive into listener questions with Laura Rotor. 

Laura Rotor, thanks for joining me on Startups For the Rest Of Us.  

Laura Roeder:
Yes, for the third time apparently fourth time.  

Rob Walling:
The  

Laura Roeder:
Fourth time,  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, so back in 2013, episode 1 43, how to hire like a Bootstrapper with special Guest Laura Rotor. And then two episodes in 2019 where I interviewed you about it must’ve been Edgar.  

Laura Roeder:
Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
It was about Edgar, it’s seller growth platform risk layoffs and powering through roadblocks. That sounds like the summary. That  

Laura Roeder:
Sounds like Edgar. All the  

Rob Walling:
Things. All the things. And then you sold Edgar in 22, I believe, right? A couple years ago.  

Laura Roeder:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
You have a good blog post about, that’ll link up in the show notes. And then December of 2019 you came on to answer listener questions. So today you are working on Paper Bell. Is that paper bell.com? Do you have the.com?  

Laura Roeder:
Yes.  

Rob Walling:
Very nice. You want to tell folks what it is, how long, the history of that, how long have you been working on it?  

Laura Roeder:
Yeah, so Paper Bell is a bootstrap sauce that’s been around for four years. We’re in the seven figure annual reoccurring revenue range and it’s a tool for coaches like life coaches to run their business. So it has their website, their scheduling, their payments, client comms, all that stuff.  

Rob Walling:
And how big is your team?  

Laura Roeder:
Very small. So we operate on all mostly freelancers and part-timers. So we basically have two developers, two customer service people. I have a project manager that works with me in marketing and freelancers.  

Rob Walling:
Very nice. So you have a lot of experience across the board, bootstrapping, hiring, all the things. We have some good questions for you and I to bat around today. First one is from Ryan King and Ryan says, Hey Rob, thanks for your advice on selling my company at the end of 2022. The sale didn’t happen in the end, but I found my feet and I’m working on trying to grow again. I have an intermediate startup question for you. I’m trying to transition from a one person company where I do everything to having a team. Your book, I think it means a SaaS playbook, explores the idea of who should be your first hire, but I’m interested in that in-between phase where you have some excess profit but not enough to make a full-time hire. My SaaS produces an excess of about $2,000 a month. At the moment, it’s not much, but I’ve been trying to use it to hire freelancers to work on the project, expecting it to buy me time to work more on marketing and sales. But it’s been a very frustrating experience and I’m not sure I can find someone reliable at that price point. I’m looking to try something new and I’m interested in hearing how you would utilize a small amount of funds to help grow the company if you were in a similar situation. Well, Laura, I think both you and I have been in this situation, so what’s your advice for Ryan?  

Laura Roeder:
Customer service is just the first thing that instantly comes to mind for most businesses. Customer service is either takes up a lot of time or even if it doesn’t take up a ton of time, it’s a constant distraction, which I don’t know Ryan’s business, but the fact that he’s not immediately running to customer service makes me wonder if he has one of those businesses that doesn’t have a huge support load. So maybe he’s thinking, ah, I don’t have to do that much customer service. It’s no big deal. But the problem with customer service is that it’s 24 7 and if you are a solo founder, you’re usually kind of having it on in the background all the time is kind of how I’ve seen most people operate. So you can get a customer service person or full-time depending on where in the world. For 2000 for sure. 

Obviously you can scale up the pay and scale down the time. You can get someone more experienced and have them in less hours. So that’s just kind of my immediate thing that for most businesses would save them a lot of time. The other one that I would think to look to is just kind of a general virtual assistant can be a really, really good hire at this stage. Lots of great people for around 10 to 15 an hour USD. You can find someone really good who knows what they’re doing from various parts of the world. And yeah, maybe they’re helping with stuff like customer service, maybe they’re helping with, it’s just kind of the admin grunt work stuff. It could be marketing stuff, customer service stuff. It could be techier stuff that’s more just grunt work instead of requiring deep knowledge. There’s usually a lot of that that can be taken off a founder’s plate.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I like that. The virtual assistant thing, if you want to read more about that, buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel I think was a really good book talking about how to think through that. Where do you hire? Are you an Upwork person? Where would you look for someone like this?  

Laura Roeder:
Yeah, good question. So I have a virtual assistant type of person. I have found before on platforms like Upwork or Fiverr. If you look for the more expensive people on those platforms, especially Fiverr, if you’re looking at the most expensive person on Fiverr, that can be a good way to do it. And especially if you have some kind of specialty that you’re starting with. Let’s say you do a lot of video editing. You’re like, okay, I’m going to look for someone who has that skill listed on those sites and then they can do other VA stuff. For me, for customer service, I would probably look more towards, a lot of it is regional. So if you’re looking in the Philippines online jobs.ph, like oldie, but a goodie still kicking  

Rob Walling:
Back in the day. Yep.  

Laura Roeder:
Yeah, it’s still around. There’s a site called Job Rack that’s really good for Eastern Europe. Obviously there’s tons of those now services that will hire for you and do the placement, but you’re usually paying a huge fee to them. So if you only have 2000 a month, you’ll probably be better off spending your time to source the person directly.  

Rob Walling:
If I’m doing a full-time W2 employee hire, we go through Dynamite Jobs, remote first recruiting just because finding full-time people is so time consuming, but if we’re hiring, we tend being TinySeed and even Drip. Back in the day we tended to go to Upwork and just we had a process, so we filter ruthlessly and we have a pretty good hit rate. It depends on the role, but we’ve had to hire a lot of part-timers, freelancers in the past few years and I think that’s the big, probably my advice for Ryan Echoes yours, customer support, customer success. Well, customer, if you have a low touch funnel where everyone’s just self sign up, I think it’s customer support, it’s email and live chat usually if you have a higher touch funnel, I think a VA or an EA or even customer success for onboarding, if that’s taken a lot of your time, obviously you have to hire part-time at two grand a month, but I’ve done this over and over and over. 

I’ve hired a lot of part-time people and eventually if they’re good I just move ’em to full-time. I hired a book project manager, which I think of the specialization of that role when I was launching the SaaS playbook of there’s so many specialized things you need to know. And I went on Upwork and I said, project manager bonus if you have experience in the publishing industry, and I happen to find someone in South America, she’s amazing. And she totally rocked the launch of SaaS Playbook and then Sherry hired her as her chief of staff, so she now works full-time for Sherry. You know what I mean? It’s just these things, if you find good people, you keep ’em around. The editor of this podcast, I believe has been editing it for 10 years. Andy who did email and live chat support for us at Drip worked the full, he probably worked there. 

He started as a part-timer doing five, 10 hours a week. He was through the whole and was with Drip for six, seven years. Then he worked for squad cast, a TinySeed company for five or six years and now he’s working for another TinySeed company. It’s like they stay in there because he’s so amazing. He’s so good. Anytime I’m like, if you look for a job, reach out to me. I want to place you with a company that I trust. So I think that’s part of it too, is your first freelance hire is always like, Ooh, you don’t have the experience and you don’t have any type of network. But once you start finding good freelancers, it’s almost like keep ’em in your orbit because you may need ’em over your career.  

Laura Roeder:
And I found when you’re looking on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, my tip would be to pay a bit more, do not look for the lowest hourly cost.  

Rob Walling:
Oh, for sure.  

Laura Roeder:
I have a guy I’m working with through Upwork right now that’s doing, we use Divvy on WordPress, so we kind of needed someone who’s familiar with that system and he’s in Pakistan and he charges 15 an hour. So there’s people in Pakistan who charge four an hour and I’m like, I want the 15 guy. So I think just doing that, if you have 2000, it’s like, yeah, you have some hours at 15 an hour, so don’t feel like you have to just absolutely scrounge and do just the absolutely cheapest person you can find. I found it’s well worth it to work with people that are still very affordable from A USD perspective, but not that bargain basement rate.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, totally. The other thing that I look for too when I’m hiring someone like this is usually it’s for a focused task or role, like we’ve said, customers service. But once I get to know if they’re good, I’ll say, Hey, what else do you do? What else do you dabble in? And you’ll often find it’s like, well, I do web design on the side, or I used to be a help desk person so I know what FTP is and basic computer troubleshoot. And you just kind of find out what else they know and you can start passing other things off to them that are hopefully within their comfort zone. I don’t look for a unicorn of like, I need a customer support slash marketer slash developer. It’s like, come on, that doesn’t exist except for Derek Rimer. But realistically, if you find someone good, they usually are good at other things too. 

And if you are a limited team, you don’t want to hire someone for each role if you can possibly have someone serve as two. So thanks for that question, Ryan. I hope it was helpful. My next question comes from Mark Krug. He’s the founder of Beta List and Startup jobs and wp.co. And this question comes to us from Twitter X, Twitter. I actually asked this question back in June. I said, what are some more advanced, intermediate and advanced questions? And he responded with, how can I do price discovery for a product where customers know what the others are paying? In my case, it’s a community product, but the same applies to certain markets. And I made a clarification. I said to clarify, do you mean how to raise lower test pricing when new customers know what your existing customers are paying? And he said, yes, specifically how to test different pricing models once you already have a customer base. Laura Rotor, have you tested pricing?  

Laura Roeder:
I have. And I will say people always say, oh, just test your price. And it’s definitely not that easy for lots of reasons, right? I’ve definitely been in that position where we have now 40 different things in Stripe because we followed the advice to test our, and now our tracking’s almost up and we have a million edge cases. It’s never as easy as people make it sound. And he’s bringing up a common concern in price testing, which is like, oh, my customers are going to see that someone else is paying a lower price. Now, I will say that’s usually less of a concern than you think it is. This person mentioned they have a community that their customers are active in. 

So even in that situation, let’s say you have a really active discord that all your customers are on, they’re not spending their time on your pricing page usually because already customers, but sometimes you get, it can happen where you get the one person and they’re like, Hey everybody, did you know that this company now is, we paid 50 and it’s just 40. But if you have that type of community, you’re usually very tightly involved with it as the founder and just be transparent. It’s like, yeah, we’re running a business. This is a test that we’re doing. If it rolls out, we’ll see if we might change pricing for existing customers as well. I think don’t announce it, don’t go into your community and be like, Hey everybody, we’re going to test out a lower price. But it’s very, very rare that you will get any kind of backlash from existing customers. And if it’s one-on-one, we’ll just offer it. So if we’re running some sort of promotion and one of our existing customers sees it, we’ll either offer them that promotion just in an email or we’ll be like, oh, we can give you this. That was just for new customers, but we’ll give you this other discount instead. Something like that. You can just handle it on a case by case one-on-one basis.  

Rob Walling:
I echo all of that. I have tested in quotes because the only company only SaaS company I ever have seen that actually split tested pricing was Zapier. And I’m sure someone else has done it, my HubSpot maybe. I mean there’s a few, but as a rule, you don’t test pricing. You take your best guess and you make the switch and then you roll it back if it doesn’t work. And I have had to do that and it’s not great, but you don’t even mess with existing customers at that point. You just change the pricing page and you say, fingers crossed that this is going to work, and you stare longingly at your numbers for the next seven to 14 days and you’re like, gritting your teeth. Did I just ruin my whole funnel? Terrifying. And if it works, you’re like, okay, now let’s talk about grandfathering versus not. 

Do we raise on existing? Let’s give it a couple months to iron out. Let’s look at our churn. That’s type of thing. And if it doesn’t work and early on, then yeah, you roll it back. That’s the only testing that I’ve ever done. So from the time we started Drip until we sold it, I think it was three and a half years and we three or four different versions of our pricing, I remember there was the V one billing engine and then the V two, V three V four, and one of them switched the pricing model, so it switched from new subscribers per month. We originally, that was our value metric, and then we switched to just subscribers in your account per month once we became an ESP. And then after that, the next two I think were just increasing prices basically. Or it was reducing the number of subscribers, keeping the price points the same, so effectively increasing pricing. And I do remember being nervous each time we did it. I viewed them as a test, but we just did it. And I think pricing, there’s so much to gut feel, and this is where hard decisions with incomplete information. I mean, I know that Patrick Campbell at ProfitWell talks about if you’ve ever seen him do a talk on pricing, it’s like, and we do this survey and you get these lines that  

Laura Roeder:
I’m very skeptical.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I’ve never done, I’ve never known anyone to do that except for ProfitWell. And they’re like pricing consultants, everyone else. I know it’s gut feel. It’s knowing your customer. It’s knowing the competitive landscape and it’s being like, well, am I losing some of my, if you’re doing enterprise sales or even just high touch sales, am I getting 10 to 20% that are complaining about my price good, then I’m probably priced accurately. If no one’s complaining about my price, I’m probably underpriced. And if people are saying, oh, you’re so cheap, or I’m way less than competitors, I’m probably underpriced. So  

Laura Roeder:
Yeah, I think he was asking about testing different pricing models. And it brings up one of just the hard things about being a bootstrap business is you don’t have enough volume to test something like pricing model. Your pricing model usually means a completely different backend, right? Testing something usage versus flat rate plans. There’s a huge amount of technical work involved. And for you to be able to maintain both those versions and then actually test ’em against each other, you’re just not going to have to have enough volume to do that. And you don’t have enough volume to test a lot of things. I mean, most things as a bootstrap company. So I think it is really important that you don’t approach this thinking, oh, I have no idea what’s going to work. So we’ll just test different things and we’ll see. You really have to go in with a strong hypothesis of this makes sense. This is what the industry is telling me, this is what customers are telling me. If you have strong evidence that something else makes more sense, sometimes we make the wrong choice. Sometimes we start one way and it becomes apparent like, oh shit, we really should be a usage based company. Then sometimes it makes sense to make that hard switch, but Rob’s saying it really can’t be a test. It needs to be more a pivot to that direction and then throw it all back if you absolutely have to.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And before I’ve changed pricing, usually it starts to just feel wrong in my gut of something’s off, what’s off, and then I start noodling in a notebook and then I talk to my co-founder, and then I’ve talked to folks in my mastermind. And these days I would probably go to Patrick Campbell, or he’s busy these days, but marco@pricing.io, pricing io.com. There’s certain folks that I would go to for some advice, and I do think it’s not like, what should I do? But it’s like, Hey, I have these two or three different ideas and I have a leaning, what do you think? And then the person would ask me questions of like, well, I don’t know your competitive landscape. How are your competitors priced? And that’s the kind of stuff with TinySeed companies that I do all the time. The majority of my calls with them are around some type of strategic decision, a pivot or something. And pricing is a big one, and there are rules of thumb.  

Laura Roeder:
So if you’re not in TinySeed, just chat with ai.  

Rob Walling:
Chat with ai. Yeah, say pretend you’re Rob Walling, you can do that now and chat GPT. There you go. And it’s like, okay,  

Laura Roeder:
Patrick Campbell. Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
What’s wrong with, yeah, what’s wrong with my pricing? This is my pricing page. Tell me what’s wrong. Yeah, changing the value metric is a big one. Simplifying. I mean, we do pricing tear downs at the kickoffs for TinySeed, and one of the biggest repeated things we see is too much. There’s too many value. You don’t need three value metrics usually is like, try, let’s try. Why do we have that one? Oh, that’s because a competitor. Nope. Get rid of it. Just make it either unlimited or within reason, within terms of service. Let’s get down to the one thing that really provides the value. So thanks for that question Mark. Hope it was helpful. Our next question is from Daniel Tanner and he asks content, what type of content should you be doing and how do you decide if it’s working? Laura, a tiny small question. What type of content  

Laura Roeder:
I have answer? I have an answer. The content you should be doing first is definitely the content that’s closest to your sale. So what they call bottom of the funnel content. The first thing you want to do with your content is have content for people who are actively looking to buy your thing. When people are typing in, I need a podcast hosting tool, you want content letting people know that you are a podcast hosting tool, let you do all the things. So this sounds kind of basic, but that is actually I think the best place to start with your content, making sure that you’re covering, of course, you said the word content. I don’t really know if you mean are these videos, are these blog posts? Are these LinkedIn updates? But whatever it is, you have to make sure it’s really clear that people know which problems that your tool solve. 

I mean, this could be support docs, right? It’s like you need stuff on the internet that answers people’s questions and tells them what your tool does. How do you know if it’s working? That’s a much harder question. How do you know if it’s working? I think something that’s really tricky about looking at content and broad strokes is we kind of like to do things, look at which content converts. This is something that we will look at on my team. We’re like, oh, which blog posts lead to a free trial signup or an opt-in signup? And I think it’s a little bit of a BSE kind of metric because it’s like, well, is it really that blog post that caused them to convert or is that the blog post they happen to be reading right before they convert. So I would actually advise that you not get too deep in the weeds of trying to pinpoint, oh, this specific piece of content caused this action, but it might be more if you are talking about video LinkedIn blog. Yeah, of course you’re looking at are those driving traffic for us? How are those performing? But to look at it in a more sort of broad strokes, holistic type of way.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. I’ll start with the attribution. How do you know if it’s working? You do your best. You do the best you can is what it is. And there’s different types of attribution. There’s like first touch, well, how did you first hear about us? There’s last touch. Well, that caused them to convert, which is what you were saying. And then there’s this blended attribution of we’ve had six touch points with them, so each of them gets 15% of the conversion. You’ve seen this in Google Analytics.  

Laura Roeder:
Oh yeah.  

Rob Walling:
And I never used, I would look at First Touch and Last Touch only are the only things I ever looked at. And you do the best you can. Attribution is not as good as it was five or 10 years ago, and it’s probably not going to be as good five or 10 years from now because of privacy and because of Google wanting to sell more ads. So we don’t get keywords provided to us anymore as we did back in the Halon days of SEO. But realistically, even if attribution is only 70% good, 60% accurate, at least it’s something, at least you have some data. The other thing I like to look at is having a, how did you hear about us when people get in the app? Is that foolproof? Of course, not every time we do this with TinySeed applications because I like to see what’s actually driving applicants. And then I can even look at, ooh, these were our 30 best applicants based on our ratings, what drove those the best applicants? And it’s super helpful for us, but inevitably we get people saying, oh, your email list. And it’s like, that’s not helpful to me. How did you get on the email list?  

Laura Roeder:
They’re like, I went to your website.  

Rob Walling:
It’s like, great, but how did you find the website? So it’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. That is how I know it’s working. And usually, I mean, I’ll tell you, if you truly are doing an SEO and creating a lot of content, whether that’s written content or videos or tools, I think of building a tool like Ruben does, the free tools, usually it is like 80 20 or even worse. It’s like 95, 5 or 5% of your content catches, and that drives a lot of traffic and well, a lot of conversions, at least in my experience. The other thing to think about is you said what is content? Because I think of it in two buckets, right? There’s onsite, which is like I’m going to create stuff on my website usually to try to draw search engine traffic or to point people to from social media. 

So I go out it’s hub and spoke. The hub is my website. I want people to get there. I want ’em to convert to the email list or convert to a trial. And the spokes are Twitter, Instagram, maybe even YouTube videos, a podcast and whatever, social media. So all of that is content, and that’s why this is a complicated question, is onsite. You totally answered that of look at the five stages of awareness. You can just Google that. I also did a, there’s a talk on YouTube. It’s something like, this is the best content marketing strategy I’ve ever seen. It’s on the Microcom channel. It’s a talk I gave, and I talk about creating content from unaware to problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. And you started this answer by saying, start with product aware and most aware, which is exactly what I say in that talk, and then work your way up. So onsite. I think that’s correct, offsite. Should I go on Pinterest? Should MicroConf and TinySeed be marketing on TikTok? No, because our people aren’t there and they’re not being, but our  

Laura Roeder:
People are on Pinterest. We direct traffic from Pinterest. Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
Exactly. So then the question is, should you be creating Pinterest? Well, of course, because where your customers are. So that’s the question I would throw back to Daniel, is figure out where your customer, are they on X Twitter? Are they on Instagram? Are they on YouTube? That’s how I think about it.  

Laura Roeder:
And I would say keep it obvious. I think people often overthink this and over this, our customers are on Instagram is the main place because Instagram has a massive user base. Don’t try to get cute and clever with these little niche. I mean, sometimes there’s a niche community that’s super relevant to you. If you’re only for Ruby on Rails developers, be on those forums and lists and whatever, but don’t mark it on Blue Sky. It just launched. Hang out there for fun. If you want to mark it on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Reddit, if that’s where people are, YouTube, lots of people on YouTube. Just don’t overthink it. Go for the most obvious ones where your customers obviously are.  

Rob Walling:
The biggest ones are usually the ones where there are the most people by definition. So I was skeptical two or three years ago. We were talking, what’s the next thing we’re going to attack for MicroConf audience building. We have the podcast, it grows, it grows really slow as podcast do. And I was like, YouTube, I think it’s going to be a bunch of 20 year olds. I see my 18-year-old just sipping through Minecraft videos and I was pretty skeptical. But then we did see other channels. Dan Martel had a channel and a few others that were talking about SaaS and had some reach. And so we were convinced of that. We were deciding between YouTube and TikTok at the time, and I went on TikTok and I was like, no, no, no. I don’t know that TikTok will ever, ever be for MicroConf TinySeed, but YouTube turned out to be really good. So thanks for that question, Daniel. I hope it was helpful. Next question is from Noel Gomez. He is a TinySeed founder. He asked on Twitter, given limited time and resources, Hey, that’s bootstrapping. How do you prioritize where to focus and invest to grow your pipeline? So specifically to generate new leads? How do you do it, Laura?  

Laura Roeder:
Yeah, this one is interesting. He uses the word pipeline. So this makes me think it’s a sales situation.  

Rob Walling:
Enterprise sales, he has a really big, big ticket.  

Laura Roeder:
So I mean the obvious one is just LinkedIn. I mean, that’s where the vast majority of people are doing it. I know LinkedIn are the big thing right now that are apparently getting a lot of eyeballs and a lot of awareness. So we talked about being on the biggest platforms, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, depending on where your people are. And then I think if you’re kind of breaking down those platforms, you want to do what the platform wants you to do. And so usually they will have these new things that they’ll give a lot of visibility to. Newsletters are a new product from LinkedIn, so they are giving a lot of visibility to newsletters. The reason so many people are succeeding on LinkedIn right now in general is because LinkedIn’s trying to get more active users hanging out on LinkedIn. So they’re actually showing people what you post in the feed. 

Like 15 years ago, you could post things on a Facebook page and that would show in people’s feed because they were promoting that, but that time is long gone. So it’s kind of a tricky balance. It’s like you want to be on the mainstream trends. You don’t want to be on something before. No one else is there yet, but if it’s a big platform, it is good to be on whatever that platform is pushing, which is why on Instagram and TikTok, people are often jumping around between stories and reels and whatever the latest thing is, but it actually kind of does make sense to be on whatever the latest thing is because you want to be buddies with, don’t go against Instagram, do whatever Instagram wants you to do.  

Rob Walling:
And I think the overarching thing that I think about is as a bootstrapper with limited time and resources, I would make a list of all of the marketing approaches that I wanted to try, and then I would pick the one I thought was going to work and I would work on it and focus the thing. I think if you try to do content, SEO, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, try to do all these things, you’re just not good at any of them and you don’t learn how to do them well. You’re just throwing stuff into the ether. Even with MicroConf TinySeed where we have budget and we have a team, we pick one new thing to attack, and we did YouTube for two and a half years and then until it plateaued around 90,000. And then we are looking at LinkedIn next and we’re going all in. 

We hired a LinkedIn consultant. We are spending thousands of dollars a month, many thousands to edit video and to create carousels and to do this stuff and to do, there is a LinkedIn playbook and kind of all the LinkedIn consultants say the same thing. This is what’s working right now. So that’s what we are going to do in the new year. For us. Audience building is a thing. What Microcom and 10 C Thrive on, it’s built around the audience. If you’re doing enterprise sales, I don’t think you should build an audience at all. It should be all about it’s selling. I think of the big, I call ’em the big five marketing approaches, which is the ones that B2B SaaS companies, especially Bootstrappers use the most, which is like content, SEO, cold outreach in-person events. Number six, actually pay-per-click and integrations and partnerships and then in-person events is in there as well. 

All of those depend on your annual contract value. Are you high touch or low touch, right? So with Paper Bell, you would never do, I shouldn’t say never do in-person events, but it would be a stretch. Your A CV is too low. It would have to be a really a big event with a lot of people for you to be like, I’m going to make this five grand back in signups. Versus Noel, since he’s a tint company, I know that they could literally get one customer from an in-person event and it would totally pay back whatever sponsorship they paid. So that’s how I do it is I take a guess and usually I want to do one that’s slow and one that’s fast, meaning s content and SEO is usually slow. It’s going to take months and months and months to pay off. And so what’s the fast thing I can do? 

What’s the thing I can do to get a new customer tomorrow? It’s like cold outreach. Either AdWords or Facebook are the two big ones, or Capterra, Capterra G two. So it’s like, can I run some ads and spend some money, a high A CV and also be doing content SEO, or am I gifted on the microphone and there’s a bunch of podcasts and YouTube channels in my space? Do I want to go on a podcast tour or a YouTube tour and try to get on all those things? Maybe in your space there is, and maybe it isn’t. If it’s enterprise sales, it might not be, but that’s always the question is how do people market and sell in your space? How can you do it well? Where are your customers and how do you find them is really the fundamental way I think about it.  

Laura Roeder:
The other thing that comes to mind is the book Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. I think it’s called the Dream 500  

Rob Walling:
Dream 100,  

Laura Roeder:
100. I  

Rob Walling:
Memorize that whole chapter,  

Laura Roeder:
And it’s just like, what would be your best a hundred customers? Write ’em down and call ’em. And it’s like, oh yeah, that is the most, and it’s like you’re saying, I do see a lot of founders that should be doing one-on-one sales trying to do more broader marketing stuff because it’s more comfortable. For a lot of people, they would rather be a guest on a podcast than they would go walk the floor of a sales convention and talk to a bunch of people, but the podcast is not going to get them customers. And the convention is, so the beautiful thing about the Dream 100 is it just cuts straight to the point. It’s like, who are your best customers? Have you call those people?  

Rob Walling:
And what I like about that book, if you’re listening to this and haven’t read the Ultimate Sales Machine, that chapter specifically talking about the Dream 100, it’s like make the list. And of course this is for selling. I think it’s selling stuff that’s like hundreds of thousands or millions a year. It’s really high ticket sales. So maybe for you it is Dream 500, but it’s make the list and then you call them and then you follow up, send them something in the mail. And these days, then you’d ping them on LinkedIn and then you’d send ’em an email and then you’d send them a physical thing. Do you remember this? It’s Lumpy Mail. It’s a lumpy mail where the physical object in an envelope, those don’t get thrown away. They open it up and they’re like, oh, it’s a tape measure that says, look how Data Coves helps you measure your result or whatever. 

It’s like a goofy cheesy thing. Data Coves is Noel’s startup. And so does this take time, attention, money, focus? It does. But if you’re selling big ticket items, this is how when you do run into that person at a conference, they’re like, I’ve heard of you guys. How have I heard of you? And it’s like, I’ve just been around. Retargeting is the other thing actually I want to throw in. If you are not doing retargeting, it is the cheapest advertising. And you can retarget what? You can do it on Facebook, you can do it on the Google network, and you can do it on YouTube. And a friend of mine had the YouTube tracking pixel, which I guess is just the Google tracking pixel and had this 32nd ad spot that was highly produced. And their customers or their prospects that they would talk to are, you guys are everywhere. You must be huge. You’re advertising all over YouTube. I see you all the time. And he was like, oh dude, we’re retargeting you. And so each of these takes time and money. Are you doing retargeting with Paper Bell?  

Laura Roeder:
Well, you know what I recently learned, this is kind of a new thing, is that on Meta, so if people listening haven’t used Meta Ads slightly, you don’t choose any targets anymore. You just do. The way that all the biggest spenders on Meta do It now is just to use Advantage, what they call Advantage Plus, which is just like Meta Do your thing. And what I recently learned is they also do retargeting automatically. So you actually, I mean you still can if you want to, but you no longer need to set up retargeting campaigns because obviously you have your website pixeled, and obviously those are smart people to show your ads to. So Meta just does it for you now. So we do.  

Rob Walling:
That’s interesting, man, how far this all has come. I remember spending so much time to figure out retargeting on the, and is it do on Google? And then is it working on Facebook? And then yeah, I feel like this question is like, how do you grow your pipeline? We could do an entire course on it. We could do an entire book on it. And a lot of the answer is, well, it depends on are your high touch or low touch? Where do your customers reside? I mean, I think these are the exercises that I would be going through. I would also, I like spying on competitors. Where are competitors running ads? What ads are they running? Go into HRES and say, what are they targeting with SEO? Can I do that better? Are they on Capterra? Are they doing integrations in partnerships? Who have they integrated with who’s promoted them? 

Each of these marketing approaches, I list 20 of them in the SaaS playbook. And you can go down and one by one Look, are competitors at events? Are they sponsoring events? It’s like asking that question. Now. I’m not saying just because they’re doing it, it’s working, but at least it should be on your radar that it’s a possibility in your space. So thank you for that question, Noelle. I hope that was helpful. Laura Rotor, thanks for joining me on the show. If folks want to keep up with you, laura rotor.com and of course Laura Rotor dot B Sky Social on the socials.  

Laura Roeder:
I’m making blue sky happen. Come, I want everybody to join me. Come join me. Indie SaaS people. We are hanging out on Blue Sky now.  

Rob Walling:
You’re a fan. Yeah. I don’t know if you listened to the episode of this podcast that went live today just a few hours ago, was Hot, take Tuesday, and it was Tracy a r. And really it was the two of them debating whether Blue Sky has legs, and so a R’s like, Nope, not doing another social media. And Tracy’s in your boat of Blue Sky all the way. I’m making it happen.  

Laura Roeder:
So is this, every Tracy’s positive, a ans grumpy, but every debate,  

Rob Walling:
That’s pretty much every conversation. Yep. So thanks again for joining me, Laura. It was great.  

Laura Roeder:
Thank you.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Laura for joining me on the show. Hope you enjoyed as she and I dug into some really good listener questions today. Thank you for coming back and listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off.