Episode 758 | Do Free Trials Suck?, What Moves the Needle, and More Listener Questions (with Derrick Reimer)

Rob Walling:
This is Startup For the Rest Of Us. I’m your host, Rob Walling. This week I’m joined by fan favorite Derek Rimer, and we answer listener questions ranging from do free trials suck, how do you decide what moves the needle in your business? And two or three other listener questions before we dive into the questions. TinySeed, the accelerator I run for Bootstrap SaaS Companies is open for applications until February 23rd. Head to TinySeed dot com slash apply to find out more. And if you’re interested in the right amount of funding, amazing world-class mentorship advice and community, that’s c.com/apply. And with that, let’s dive into listener questions. Eric Rimer, welcome  

Derrick Reimer:
Back to the show. It’s good to be back. It’s been a couple of months, I  

Rob Walling:
Think it has indeed. I’m stoked to get into some listener questions with you today. I always hear after our episodes go live that people really enjoy our conversations and our rapport, so  

Derrick Reimer:
Awesome. Well, I enjoy having them.  

Rob Walling:
It’s good to have you back, man. So I’m going to dive into this first question from anonymous about entering a market with an established competitor and anonymous writes, Hey Rob, I wanted to first thank you for all you’ve done for the bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped community. You’re an inspiration to me and countless others. My wife and I love listening to your podcast Every chance we get, and you have inspired us to take this next step in starting a bootstrap SaaS business. So I need to pause there. There’s a couple things. Number one, I’ve been called Chief Instigator. Chief troublemaker. People will say, my spouse is mad at you. And I’m like, why? And they’re like, because you convinced me to start assessment. So I get the feeling that when Anonymous writes this, they’re both thanking me and also kind of punching me in the ribs, like, I will never forgive you for convincing me to go down this path.  

Derrick Reimer:
It cuts both ways.  

Rob Walling:
It really does, right? Yeah. Certain times. And then the fact that anonymous listens with his wife, I think is hilarious. This isn’t you, right? You didn’t write this question in.  

Derrick Reimer:
No, but my wife does listen to at least our episodes, and then I think she’s listening to Colleen’s episodes right now. We hung with Colleen  

Rob Walling:
Tiny tails. Oh yeah, yeah. It’s always fun when you know the person, right?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Cool. Oh, so we’ll continue. I hear this every once in a while that what he says is, my wife and I love listening to your podcasts, and I think they’re forcing their wife to listen. Do you love? And she’s humoring you. That’s kind of how I questioned it. But no, thanks for the comment there. So back to the email. My question is about how to launch a SaaS product in an established market. The market I’m entering is led by a company that has existed for five years in a relatively immature space. Although they have been successful, their business has not adequately invested in their software, which sounds familiar and often uses deceitful tactics to make the sale, which also sounds familiar. I believe I can catch the company flatfooted and lean on many of the strengths smaller startups have at their disposal, such as speed, design improvement, listening to my customers, et cetera. 

If I’m a new player entering the market, how do I properly address my competitor to prospective clients while being professional? Do you stay above the grain and focus on how my service and customer experience is superior? Or do I explicitly point out the limitations of the competitor, the outdated product design, deceitful tactics, high turnover? Are there legal risks I should be aware of? Thank you, Rob. I look forward to hearing your insightful insights. And before I toss it to you, Derek, to take the first crack, I want to read a brief poem, a brief disclaimer. I love to chat. I love to share. This is an original composition between me and chat, GPT. By the way, I love to chat. I love to share about startup’s growth and how to prepare. I’m not a lawyer, I don’t advise on contracts, filings, or legal ties for lawsuits, trademarks, taxes, to find a pro. That’s what they do. So take my thoughts, our thoughts, use them, right, but for the law, get legal insight.  

Derrick Reimer:
That’s the best legal disclaimer I’ve ever heard.  

Rob Walling:
There it is. Alright, so we’re not lawyers. We can’t give legal advice, but we are two guys on the internet who have opinions. So you want to weigh in on this one  

Derrick Reimer:
First? Yeah, yeah. So I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong here. I mean, you see a whole spectrum of approaches around this. My approach has generally been to try to craft the narrative around how you’re a better choice for your target market than the competition. So keeping it kind of framed positively on what you bring to the table and drawing helpful comparisons that speak to the customer’s underlying motivations. So with Savvy Cal for example, we tout ourselves as more thoughtful and more collaborative than most of the other players in the market, specifically our largest competitor. We have a comparison page where this narrative is sort of fleshed out a bit, and we claim that and we back that up with features that support that and things that are kind of unique to our product. So we’re really focusing on this is what we have to offer and we’re telling this narrative that hopefully resonates with you and it’s not necessarily a narrative that the other competitor could tell because they’re doing different things. 

So instead of saying, this competitor uses deceitful tactics, you could say, we will never lock you into X, Y, and Z, or we have a transparent cancellation policy. And if you’re talking to someone who has experienced those deceitful tactics with that other competitor, that’ll resonate in a particular way. But worst case, you’re just expressing something positive and noteworthy about yourself. So that’s how I think of it. I usually avoid those stupid checklists are skewed and biased where you get all the green check marks and everyone else gets all the red Xs. I think people see through those pretty easily. So I usually try to stick to more of a narrative around what’s the story of why your product’s better and keep it mostly focused on yourself, but obviously identifying those areas where clearly you’re casting yourself as separate from the others.  

Rob Walling:
I like that. I think there’s three. There’s a continuum of what you do here. Do I name ’em by name and put a bunch of negative press out about them? Or do I say nothing that maybe the two ends of the continuum? But let’s just take three points on that continuum. You’ve just named one, which is you’re not mentioning a competitor, you’re just calling out your pros. And I think that’s the most kind of chill, relaxed, non-confrontational way to do it. And if that’s, it’s totally viable and reasonable, I think it’s a good way. If that’s your personality, that’s how you do it. Let’s take a middle ground, which is, are you tired of deceitful sales tactic? You know what I mean? You are a little bit all up, but you’re not naming ’em by name. That might be in the middle. And that’s what we did. 

Well, no, the drip, remember when the drip homepage was just a long form sales letter and it did call out a few companies by name and it was like Marketo part, Infusionsoft. I think it was never MailChimp and HubSpot by the way, because I just always respected those founders. I respected the companies when I was write that marketing copy and get all angry, it wasn’t at them. We did name some folks by name on that homepage. And that of course is the third one is to come out and name people, not people I guess, but competitors, company names anonymous, asks, are there legal risks? There’s legal risks with anything. What’s going to happen? We’re not, lawyers can’t give advice, but what’s going to happen is if you put the company’s name on your website, they’ll either completely ignore it and not care, or they will come and write you a cease and desist or a huffy worded email. 

The odds of someone suing you without ever giving you any notice is really, really low. And we do see TinySeed companies from time to time get cease and desist of this manner. Or again, a huffy email from a CEO demanding, it’s a legal threat, but it’s just some CEO pound on the table. So we did it, we named companies by name, but the thing was they were so big we were nas just little gnats compared to them. And I think if we’d gotten big enough, they probably would’ve said something, but it was literally on our homepage. So it’s a risk tolerance thing, but I don’t think there’s a ton of risk. I agree with you. Having no, having a comparison page like us versus them to me is fair game. And that’s pretty common alternative to them. You’re trying to rank for stuff at that point in Google, and so people can compare. 

I agree with you about the check boxes. You can do the checkbox thing or not, but I think there’s a continuum here and a little bit of it comes down to your personality as a founder. You and I both know people who are just, they just give fewer s than you and I do is how I would phrase it. Or they’re just a little more aggressive or they like getting into arguments. They like sparring, they like to kind of have conflict. A friend of yours and mine, Matt Sing does not give a shit if someone’s mad at him. You know what I mean? And to his credit, that’s his personality. So him as a founder would probably go all the way to that third stage that I talked about, which is just name him and fight it and it brings him energy. For me personally, conflict and arguing or being called out. I can do it and I can handle it. I have the thick skin, but it is exhausting for me. And so I have to pick as I’m doing marketing or as I’m doing sales or thinking about this, I do have to think long-term, what problems do I want to create for myself? Starting a company, trying to get something off the ground, you’re building it, you’re creating a lot of problems for yourself just in doing that and which other ones do you potentially want to stir up is kind of the way I think about it.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, and I think that the other thing to consider is what is the brand you want to create, which is a little hand wave, but are you entering a space where you’re going to be the bulldog fighting everyone and you’re going to attract a certain type of customer who that resonates with? And other people will be totally turned off by that. If you’re just super negative and you’re just going after another company, then you’re sort of painting yourself. You risk painting yourself as a company who is just a response, a negative response to somebody else versus something that’s positive. And I think that that can paint you into a bit of a corner with your market as well. And certain people will just be grossed out by your marketing if it’s all kind of point finger pointing at someone else. So I think it’s like who do you want to attract? And it just comes down to strategy, I guess. Where do you think the opportunity is? Is it with and the industry too? I think there’s certain product spaces where it’s just inherently more combative and then others where it’s not. So it’s knowing your space, I think too,  

Rob Walling:
And knowing how your customers and potential customers view this competitor. There are some companies that are just despised, they’re just widely hated and it’s like they charge too much, they gouge us, their support sucks. I mean, let’s name a few names. Most people I know who interact with Salesforce in any way as a customer, do not like them. I’ve never actually been a customer. No, I have. Because we were paying six figures a year for Slack, for MicroComp Connect. It was outrageous. They were so hard to deal with and they were a pain in the ass. So if I was competing with Salesforce, would I throw shade at them? I would because I know that people don’t like them. I mean, Infusionsoft back in the day was the classic example. Anyone who used Infusionsoft, which is now called Keep, and they just sold the private equity for a one x less than one X error multiple, if I’m being honest. 

No one liked their software. It was just old and clunky. And so it was easy, it was an easy target and I never felt like I was being so aggressive in the copy. I keep saying it was you’re in my company. But I wrote the copy. I remember I writing those, the homepage in that and being almost angry for our customers. Customers would come over to Drip and they would just tell us horror stories. And I was like, that sucks. And that was kind of the motivation of like, ah, that how I justified it to myself. And I don’t know that it ever came off. I don’t know if it came off aggressive to people, but it felt justified. Now if let’s say I did that to Stripe, I think Stripe is pretty widely loved. I know some people have complaints on my Stripe account, whatever. There are some things on the edges, but compare Stripe versus PayPal. Most people don’t like PayPal. And I would say most people like Stripe. I like Stripe. Punching at Stripe in this way I don’t think would go over that well.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, it’s just bad strategy. I think that is a good point. If I were competing with Salesforce in some dimension, I mean whether you’re attacking them by name specifically or you’re attacking kind of the notion of the Salesforce type product where it’s like they’re going to try to aggressively gouge you and they’ve gone so far at market that they have highly optimized pricing, you will pay through the nose just sort of what they stand for. And they don’t have total control over that. It’s the reputation they’ve gained from the decisions they’ve made in the market. And so you’re putting yourself in the position of you’re an advocate for your customer and you’re telling the story that resonates most with your customer is the most important thing,  

Rob Walling:
Right? Anonymous asked several questions, but one of them is, do you stay above the grain and focus on how my service and customer experience is superior or do I explicitly point out the limitations of the competitor, outdated product, blah, blah, blah. And for me, we’re talking marketing website right now, but what if you get on a sales call? What would you do? So for me, I would want to find out if you’re currently a customer of that competitor, that’s what they’re comparing you against. You have to point out the differences. To me. Usually I would say something like, oh, you’re comparing us to X, Y, Z competitor, or you are currently a customer of X, Y, Z competitor. Would you like to hear how we’re different? That’s how I would phrase it. Would you like to hear how we’re different people tell us that we are much easier to use? 

Obviously our sales process is different. We’re month to month, not a year, whatever you point stuff out. I think if I was on a sales call and the prospect started leaning into, yeah, I feel like I really got hornswoggled in this hole. That’s a good one. Horn Sled 1887 called it once it phrased back, I dunno why you that I feel like I got really tricked on this thing that yeah, we hear that quite a bit. It’s a bummer. We definitely don’t do that. You know what I mean? Yeah. I would kind of almost go with the vibe of the person I’m talking to a little bit and that’s different. You can talk as much smack as you want on a sales call versus putting it in public on a marketing site. So I think those two things are different. So thanks for the question anonymous. 

I hope that was helpful. Our next question comes to us from X Twitter. This is Sander Fish at Sander Fish who asks often it feels like SaaS success is an accumulation of many small decisions and improvements over time. And me jumping in, I think any success, anything you build is you build a brand, you build a reputation, you build an audience, you write a book, you build. Yeah, I think you build any company. I think most things in life to get good at running or lifting, I think it’s all that small decisions and improvements over time. So I like this Sander fish’s question is how do you identify what really moves the needle? And I think we should limit this one to SaaS and not talk about all the other things I just mentioned because is really how do you identify Derek Rimer as founder of Sical? How do you identify what moves the needle in your business?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a very broad question, but I guess I’ll start by riffing on the high level of this, which I think it comes down to, comes down to having a strategy, which is just the most simply put, how do you win at the game you’re trying to play? So this implies that what game you’re playing, are you trying to build a rocket ship unicorn? Are you building a TinySeed type scale business? Are you building a true lifestyle business? So it’s like what game are you playing to orient yourself around the kind of success you’re trying to achieve? And then once you have that set, then you can start working with a strategy of how do we get to the goal that I want? Do you want to work four days a week and spend a bunch of time with family? Like okay, that’s going to mean different decisions on moving the needle towards the success you’re trying to achieve. 

And then once you have the strategy, then you can tactical decisions in support of what you’re trying to achieve. So if you’re trying to grow really, really fast, then making some endeavoring down a path towards a channel that’s only going to send you a trickle of prospects a month, probably not a great decision. You need to orient your sites higher. Maybe that means you need to raise a little investment to be able to take a bigger swing at something. So I think it’s orienting what constitutes moving the needle for what you’re trying to achieve. And that’s something you have to define first. So sort of a non-answer, I’m not really answering specifically, but that’s how I think about figuring out what even constitutes moving the needle.  

Rob Walling:
And it really depends on the stage of the business obviously. I mean we can say it depends, but I do think there are certain founders I know who are better at identifying what moves the needle. And there are certain folks who are not as good, and this is that thing that a R and I talk about a lot about the TinySeed founders we see succeeding, they do a lot of things, they ship a lot of things relatively quickly and they’re right the majority of the time. And by majority, I say it on this podcast over and over, it is not 90%, it’s some number, it’s 60%, 65 set. I don’t know, you’re right, just enough, but you’re doing a lot of stuff. You’re not flailing, but you’re shipping high quality things quickly, whether that’s features or marketing or whatever it is you need to ship. 

The biggest question that I ask myself as any business I’m doing, whether it’s SaaS or whether it’s MicroConf or TinySeed, there’s always one and only one bottleneck is how I see it. And now I’ll take that back. There are usually, there’s one that is the most critical at the time, and then there’s five that are below that. But oftentimes you don’t even know what those five are until you fix that first one. And you don’t know if fixing that bottleneck will get you another 50 KMRR before you see another bottleneck or if it’ll get you $500 of MRR before that next bottleneck. It’s really hard, at least for me, I can’t see the second one, but in almost every business, every tiny C call or even when we’re doing strategy and r and I talking about how to grow TinySeed itself, how to grow MicroComp, how to whatever, make more revenue, get more people in the audience, it’s like what’s the next step? 

What’s the one thing? And if I’m thinking about SaaS in early stage, it’s like I have no one interested in buying this thing that I’m thinking about building that is the actual bottleneck. It’s not the product, right? It’s interested people, it’s sales, it’s marketing, it’s interest. And if I’m doing 10 KA month and maybe I’m not growing, usually you can look and be like, oh, it’s because churn is high. That is my single biggest buy, 11% churn. This is business on fire. I have to fix that before anything. And if I’m at 10 KMR, that’s probably lack of product-market fit. If I’m at a hundred KMRR and it’s 11% churn, that’s a whole different conversation. That’s my short answer is what is the bottleneck? I mean, we are right now with TinySeed, we’re launching a premium coaching plus masterminds and stuff. So it’s similar to the tiny seat accelerator, but it’s paid and it’s for 1 million a RR founders between what’s 1 million end up. 

That itself is something that we’re working hard on. And how do we decide what moves the needle? Well, we look and we’re like, well, right now we have no one committed to paying for this, so how do we get that? And then it’s like, and we need a coach or two and we need the program itself, which we know a lot from TinySeed. So those are the only two things we should be working on is finding more people and finding coaches. Once we have those, we can do anything else. And I think the biggest problem that developers especially and makers and builders do is they either don’t know or they kid themselves. They convince themselves that the bottleneck is actually the product and features. So fun. It’s the fun part and it’s easy to just be like, well, I’m going to tell myself that’s the bottleneck. But it’s like that usually it’s usually not the product.  

Derrick Reimer:
And I think it’s a good point that there’s usually one thing, but that one thing may set off a cascade of different sub things that need to happen. And so I think to take the example of fixing churn, it’s like that one comes up all the time where it’s like, well easy, just fix your churn. It’s like, okay, well that is much easier said than done. So then it means maybe you’re attracting the wrong type of customer. You have problems in the product where you’re not meeting their needs and so they’re churning out maybe you’re, so it could be prequalification, could be product problems, could be on and on and on, positioning, marketing, all this kind of stuff. So then you start breaking the problem down and you start busting this up into small little things. But I think the hard part can be you get lost sometimes in the forest when you do this and then you find yourself five months later you’re working on something and you’re like, wait, is this in service of the thing that is still the biggest problem? 

Are we still trying to reduce churn? Do we feel like churn’s in a good place? So I feel like the game is having that step back to reflect on what’s really bottlenecking the business, and then oftentimes it means six months to a year of work that is in service of that, but you’re going to kind of lose sight of that. You have to get down into the weeds on actually working the process. So I think that probably takes regular check-ins and reflections on what’s the state of the business? Is this still the biggest problem? Are we still prioritizing our day-to-day tasks in service of that thing? And that’s the challenge I think  

Rob Walling:
I agree with you. Yeah, it’s easy to lose it when it’s over a long-term like that. This is where, as much as I don’t like process long-term planning, any of that, this is where it makes sense to be like, Hey, what’s our plan for this week, this month, and this quarter, maybe this year? It depends on the maturity of the business. If you’re early stage, it does not make sense to do that, but with my businesses Micrograph TinySeed, they’re six years and 15 years old and they’re multimillion dollars and there’s multiple employees, it actually does make sense for us to sit down and be like, loosely, what do we want to do in 2025? What is that? We don’t have a strict annual plan of every week this happens, but during the year, I think we’ll do this. And then we start looking at quarters and breaking it down, and we do look at what’s going to move the needle. 

And if you’re a SaaS company and you’re early stage or even middle stage, it’s like I could see this is where you do say, well, 2025 is the year I conquer churn, and Q1 is going to be these things and month one is going to be these things. And that I think having some type of plan that’s written down somewhere could be a Google Doc with a few bullets or a spreadsheet or something that you refer back to, can be helpful to keep, as you said, forest for the trees, right? So thanks for that question, sander. I hope it was helpful. 

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Derrick Reimer:
Pivoted five times and we’re not even doing that.  

Rob Walling:
Totally. It’s not relevant at all. I still like the sentiment question. Hey Rob, thanks for all the great advice you put out. I hear from advisors that you need to start working on the marketing already before or while building the product. Download my free ebook, start marketing the day You start coding Rob Walling dot com and your email address back to Austin’s email. I’m working on a SaaS product together with a co-founder. He does the programming and design while I do marketing, product development and sales. My question is how do I sell the SaaS that hasn’t even been built yet? How can I build an email list when I don’t even have a product? Should I do marketing already? Now before the product is launched, we work on a talent management SaaS where businesses can put milestones that need to be satisfied in order to get to the next level. Example to go from programmer to senior programmer. This SaaS is pretty general to general. Any ideas for marketing this before it’s built? That would be very much appreciated. Thanks and best wishes. Austin, what do you think Derek? Rimer?  

Derrick Reimer:
Well, I consider taking the opposite and saying arguing that you should not market before you start coding, but I didn’t. The conflict, I didn’t think I could steal that. That’d be  

Rob Walling:
Great. Radio. Yeah, the April Fools, I’ll bring it back for April  

Derrick Reimer:
One. Yeah, so yes, you should market, you launch your product. I guess to be more specific though, I was thinking about what does this look like at the earliest stages and trying to think about what do I see working right now in the year 2025? I mean, historically it was like build a landing page, drive traffic to the landing page, and I think a lot of that stuff fundamentally still kind of works. I mean, I think there’s more noise than ever out there with so many different startups trying to get attention all the time. So I think just strategically, I would be thinking focusing initially on your network. I mean, presumably you have people that kind of fit this target market in your circles where you can, they have some kind of warm connection to you, even if it’s just like a LinkedIn connection or something. 

So people you can have conversations with to get their buy-in directly and then try to amplify this messaging in places where other people who aren’t in your direct network will be able to see it. Your casting vision about the change you want to see in the world, maybe you have a manifesto or something, and it’s like this is enough to gain someone’s a couple seconds of engagement as they’re scrolling by in a feed to catch their attention. And so you’re just trying to build some anticipation around the product you’re building. And then while you’re doing that, you’re testing positioning, you’re writing a landing page with the headline and maybe you’re driving some traffic to it. I think a lot of those tried and true techniques for testing out positioning still work.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I think so. And you don’t have to sell it before built, but I do think you want to market it.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
Right. I mean, selling is be like, all right, so give me money. Well, I don’t mean some people talk about pre-sales. I’ve never ever pre-sold anything. I have pre-market everything. And yeah, it is more competitive every year. It always is. And frankly, the tactics that I outlined in start small, stay small are 15 years old now. And so a lot of people know them. I mean, they came from other places too. I think a four hour workweek outlined that the smoke test and all that. I still put up a landing page for anything that I launch, including a new book with SaaS institute.com. As of today, as you and I are recording, this is a headline, an H two a sentence and an email capture form. And I get it that at this point I have an audience. I can just say, talk on this podcast and talk on Twitter and such. 

If I did not, I would still do exactly that, and I would still be talking on Twitter. I would be in founder Slack groups and on, I was going to say Facebook, but founders, it’s like where do founders hang out? That’s the real question that you hang out there. You have conversations, you do what you said, which is you get a landing pitch up, and then if you’re selling something that’s quite expensive, well, you actually want to get conversations. You want to get into conversations with potential prospects. You’re not trying to sell it. You are trying to find out are we solving a problem that they have? That’s usually the big early thing. If you know that they already have this problem and they are already paying for other software to do it, then the next thing you’re trying to figure out is, well, how are we going to be different? 

I don’t want to be a commodity. So that’s what you’re trying to assess out. We did this with Drip as we were launching. It’s like, well, we know people need to send email. There’s 300 other competitors that do it, so how are we going to be different than MailChimp infusions stuff to all these, right? And you did it with Avial where it’s like, well, we know that there are other scheduling links that exists. So I know that it’s a pain, but if I launch an exact clone of a competitor, I’m not. I mean, my little, I’ll get to three KMRR we, but you’re not going to build a great business if you build a commodity. So it’s as much, it’s customer development, it’s customer conversations, and it is, I think there’s a lot of learning that can happen here, not just marketing and selling  

Derrick Reimer:
When it’s in the vaporware stage, the goal is different. You’re still trying to inform the building process very much with reading what the market needs. And maybe hopefully you’ve gotten to the point where you feel confident enough to start investing in product that there is something here, but that’s not a place to stop. You need to continue the refinement of what exactly we’re building and who’s it for and how are we going to get these people. So as you’re proving out the product hypothesis with building, you’re also proving out the marketing hypothesis and the sales hypothesis with trying to read the sentiment as you’re putting this messaging forward.  

Rob Walling:
Last thing I want to throw in is if you put up a landing page, but I don’t have a product, what do you put on it? You put a headline that addresses the problem or the pain point that you’re fixing, and you put a sentence of text. My first book Start Small Stay Small, was a headline that said A developer’s Guide to launching a startup. And then I think it had one or two sentences of copy that was it, email capture, and it said something like, finally a book written for someone who wants to launch a product or someone who wants to start a company without 5 million of venture capital in your bank account. It was something that was it, and it was an email capture. Now it’s a book, it’s not a SaaS, but if I was doing a SaaS, that’s what it would be. The same thing of I’m solving a problem, this is it. Opt in if you want to fix that problem. And again, if there’s already existing solutions, then you can’t just say, I’m going to help you send email to your marketing list because a solved problem. It’s like, how am I going to be different? Why are the other solutions failing? So thank you for that question. Hope it was helpful. Our next question is an audio question from Noah Tucker.  

Noah:
Hey, what’s up Rob? This is Noah. I’ve been listening to your podcast weekly for years now. I’m the founder of a company called Social Snowball, which is an affiliate marketing platform for Shopify brands. And we are mid seven figures of a RR. And my question for you today is about free trials. We have always been very generous with free trials. We offer a standard 30 day free trial, and we’ll sometimes extend that if a brand asks or if we’re working with a partner and they want an exclusive deal, we’ll do a 45 day free trial occasionally, for example, and obviously this is great for the sales team, it helps get deals over the finish line that maybe are dragging their feet a little bit because it’s just an incentivizing offer, but it comes with downsides. And what we’ve realized is that a lot of brands during their trial period aren’t really taking onboarding that seriously and are kind of slacking off and losing excitement to launch. 

And they don’t have as much urgency to launch their affiliate program with us because my theory is that since they’re not paying, they just don’t really have that sense of urgency and they’re just kind of like, oh, we’ll get to it later, and then their 30 day trial completes and they’ll ask for us to extend it. And then sometimes it just continues to drag out until the brand just forgets about it or loses interest. And this has been a little bit of a challenge for us to work through. So I’m curious to what your thoughts are on considering just chopping the free trial altogether for a few months and seeing what happens and just kind of adjusting accordingly. Another idea I had is basically offering a refund for the first month. If the merchant, our customer completes all of onboarding. So if they finish the steps and then they won’t ask for a refund for the first month, we’ll give it to them. So there’s an incentive for them to actually set everything up or they won’t be eligible to get a refund on that month. But that’s just one idea I have. I’m super open-minded to anything you could suggest. And yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate you.  

Rob Walling:
So I’ll start by saying I actually really like that idea of that Noah threw out of if they finish their onboarding, then their first month gets refunded. I think that’s pretty clever just to start. I hadn’t thought of it, and when he said it, I was like, that’s not the worst idea. But beyond what are your thoughts?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, so I think, I don’t know, free trials are tricky because it comes down to what is the goal of the free trial? So is it to give the customer time to set up, do they have resistance to pay for this until they make it through some kind of long setup process, or are you letting them kick the tires and learn about the product to themselves before they make a decision about going forward with your product? So they, in that preliminary buying phase, we’re still sussing out the options, or are you trying to actually give them a certain amount of tangible value before they pay? So you’re trying to say your customers refer a certain number of people before you’re obligated to pay us just to give away some value for free. Based on what you’re describing, it sounds like you have people coming in who are, you said not taking onboarding seriously or they’re losing excitement. 

So it sounds like they might be more of the aspirational type of customer where maybe they’re looking around at options, but they’re not ready yet to move forward with this. So I would be thinking like, well, is there value in letting them explore around or is that better that you control that process and just like, well, let’s watch a demo or have a live demo with us to explore this first before we get you into the product. I don’t know if it’s worthwhile to try to force them to have a stronger sense of urgency about the project. I mean, maybe it’s just not the top priority right now, but they’re doing a little preliminary research, so I dunno about arm twisting tactics to try to get them to do this right now. Although maybe they’re encountering something in the product where, oh, this is looking like it’s going to take longer to set up. So yep, this is maybe a for later type of thing. So that also could be something to look at. Are they getting tripped up at a certain point where like, oh man, I have these 10 different settings forms to fill out and there’s way too many decisions. Can you shortcut that? Can you make it easier to that minimum viable activation path? So there could be something in the product to look at too. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on with these trials, but these are some things I would think about.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I like that. I think you’re right on the money. I would give you a bullseye emoji. If we were on Blue sky, did you just invent an acronym? An MA minimum viable activation Path? Derek Remer, just coming up with the great thing. We might want to workshop that a little bit with chat GBT to get a better acronym.  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, probably. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
So yeah, you’re right. I mean social snowball is the H one is scale your affiliate revenue with creators and ambassadors. And so if you are trying to get an affiliate program set up, you can imagine you got to install some tracking snippet on a website. There’s stuff, and if you’re at a big bigger company, it’s like, well, I got to get engineering involved, I got to get it involved. When they say it, you’re like, this is only going to take six months. But having known the founder of ambassador get ambassador.com, Jeff, and seen him just deal with exactly this where it’s like, well, they’re not installing it. He was working with a big Fortune 500 company. He’s like, it takes them 90 days to install this line of JavaScript on a website of all the security and all the other stuff. So I’m not opposed to Noah’s idea of refund that first month. 

Some motivation if they get it installed or I’m sorry if they get onboarded. The real thing I would ask though is, is that motivating for them? If you’re dealing with a Fortune 500 company, let Target, they’re here in town and I was going to do affiliate tracking for Target. Do they care? Does the person buying care if they get the first month free? No, they don’t. But I don’t know what social snowballs customers are motivated by. So that’s the first question I’d ask. The other thing is, it is so common, especially if you’re selling to enterprise, and I’m not trying to make that assumption here, but let’s just dip into that real quick. Paid pilots, there’s a reason there are paid pilots and it’s like, you know what? Let’s do a 60 day paid pilot or a 90 day paid trial you could call it. 

And they do pay and then they have some type of motivation. It’s that time pressure. And this is always the thing where people say, well, I’m going to remove the trial or I’m going to remove, it’s not going to be a 14 day free trial. It’s going to be you log in and you can send X emails or you can book X amount of meetings. Well then there’s no time pressure and time pressure can be a good thing to get people motivated. And that’s kind of what Noah, I think what Noah is struggling with here.  

Derrick Reimer:
If it is a larger company and you’re like, okay, we need to get approval to pay for starting to do this thing, the question becomes, well, how far can we get without paying, without getting finance involved? So it could be a function of once you get the finance ball rolling, if you make that happen sooner, then that unblocks the project almost. So there could be some, when you’re selling to larger companies, these interesting dynamics start to emerge where I’ve heard Jordan Gaal talk about this too, how some have seen more success like asking for a large sum upfront from a larger organization because that means it’s taken more seriously or it’s viewed as a more legitimate. So  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, what’s funny is Jeff who started ambassador, which was affiliate management, I’m not going to say it’s similar to it, but it it’s the same category of this. After he sold Ambassador started his next company, and you know what it is, it’s onboard.io and the H one is onboard better and reduce customer churn. It was such a problem getting people onboarded. That was his number one thing. He could close these, he would close these big enterprise deals. And exactly the problem Noah’s running into is he was like, they’re just not getting onboarded and it’s a team. It’s like I got to get eight people at Target Best Buy, Verizon, whatever on the same page, and they’re all from different departments. And it’s like, how do you do that? His next SaaS was a tool just to do that because it was such a pain point for them. And it just shows you that this is probably not an easily solved problem, but it really does come down to what are the incentives and if you need to keep a time constraint and make ’em pay, I love coming back to the very first thing you said, which is what’s the purpose of a free trial? Because when you’re starting out in a new category or not a new category, but when you’re entering an existing category that’s competitive. People might want to poke around and see your product, and that’s what the trial’s for. 

But if you’re MailChimp, do you need a free trial? Everyone know how you send email, you don’t need a free trial. You just get in and you do your stuff. There’s just certain times where I just don’t think a trial is warranted at all, and I like that. Cool. So thanks for that question, Noah. I hope it was helpful. Our last question for today is from Xavier from France.  

Xavier:
Hi Rob. This is Xavier from France. I am working on this niche that I will qualify as a B2B C ish kind of niche, and I would love to have your feedback, your feelings about it and to know if it rings any bells to you. First of all, this niche has some good qualities that you mentioned. It’s small enough for big player to not care about it. It’s targeting to help people in their main job in the job with which they make a living. But my concern is it’s this kind of job fueled by patient in which the salary are very low. And for sure, my product won’t help them to make more money. It’ll just help them to execute better the job to make them win a bit of time, but at the end of the month, they won’t win more money because of my products in any kind of way. 

Because of this, I think the price that I can target for my project can be more than between the five or 15 USD per month as another B2C solution. And this is where my concern is because as you said over time is not that good price range for any people who wants to bootstrap a company. So yes. So this is a bit my wonder about this and I would love to have your feedback about it. Just keep up the good job. Your show is amazing and your content helps me a lot. So see you soon and thanks a lot.  

Rob Walling:
So to recap, he said this is for people to help them at their day job, but that the day job has a low salary and it won’t help them make more money. It will just help them execute a better job of what they’re doing to win a bit of time back to be more efficient. And then he says, I think I can charge between five and $15 per month. So he’s asking for feedback. What do you think?  

Derrick Reimer:
Sounds like a really hard road. 

I’m gathering that this is sort of, he’s describing this as B2C, but in a business context. So they’re using it for work. It’s not just for personal life stuff, it’s for work life stuff, but it’s sold. He’s imagining selling directly to the worker so that they can improve their productivity. I’m assuming it’s probably some kind of productivity thing, which I would say this sounds like almost zero willingness to pay. This sounds like a free, something you would install for free on your phone, free mobile app or something. I don’t know. I mean, one thought that just occurred to me is if this does benefit the business, is there a way to sell this to the companies that are employing these people? Because now you’re improving the productivity of their workforce and it’s not an expense that’s on their dime. But again, not knowing what it is, I’m not sure if that’s at all feasible for this, but I would be thinking how to make this more B2B, because trying to sell directly to the consumer sounds like a really, really tough road.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, me as well. I mean, this breaks pretty much every rule of anything I would launch ever again in my life. It’s just a low price point B2B two B2C ish. So I agree. Can you sell to the business? The other question that I had about this is, do these workers even care if they’re more efficient? Because a lot of people just don’t in their day job. 

Some people care and want to get better, especially if you are a sole proprietor, you run the business. But then that’s back to being a business owner. And that’s not what he’s saying here. If I’m an auto mechanic or I am a dental assistant or a nurse’s assistant or a construction worker, and do I care if I’m, I, of course always cared if we’re more efficient, but we are entrepreneurs. That’s why we we’re kind of built a little bit different. But most of those people in those roles really think, man, I wish I could get more done in this day. I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. And so are you solving a problem no one has or no one cares about?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yeah, I mean if he says it doesn’t lead to them making more money at all, and I’m like, well, that’s the problem. That sounds suspicious. I mean, even if there was some kind of vague tie of if they can prove to their employer that they are this much more efficient, then they have become more valuable and therefore should be ultimately compensated more in some fashion. But he made it very clear, this probably won’t have any link to their compensation, which is a good tell that the business won’t really value this. They won’t necessarily value  

Rob Walling:
This. Yeah, it’s hard to weigh in further without some specifics because it’s not detailed enough, I think, to really offer strong opinion. But that was it from Xavier. I hope that was helpful for you. Derek Rimer, people want to keep up with you. You are at Derek Rimer on X Twitter. And are you derek rimer.com on Blue Sky?  

Derrick Reimer:
Yes. Yep.  

Rob Walling:
Alright.  

Derrick Reimer:
Set up a profile there as well.  

Rob Walling:
Amazing. And of course, if people want to use the best scheduling link on the internet, they can head to savvy cal.com. Indeed. Thanks for joining me, man. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to Derek for joining me on the show. Once again, I’ve enjoyed having him on every month or two to answer your questions. If you have a question for the show, you can email it to Questions at startups For the Rest Of Us dot com or click ask a question in the top nav of our website, startups For the Rest Of Us dot com. You can send audio, video, later stage questions and audio video. Go to the top of the stack text questions I answer eventually, and all questions are welcome. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 758.