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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob does a discussion show format with guest Derrick Reimer. They discuss multiple topics including the pros/cons of remote work, value vs. stress of Twitter, and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- The Art of Product Podcast
- Derrickreimer.com
- StaticKit
- Baremetrics Blog Post: “I almost sold Baremetrics for $5M”
- Baremetrics Blog Post: “5 things I learned failing to sell Baremetrics for $5M”
Rob: Welcome to this week’s episode of Startups for the Rest of Us, I’m your host, Rob Walling. This week, I’m trying out a new episode format. It is a discussion show, so it’s a conversation between myself, my old friend Derrick Reimer, and we talk about a number of topics. We talk about the value versus the stress of Twitter and social media in general, the pros and cons of remote work. We talk about Cal Newport’s new book Digital Minimalism, and then we wind up talking about Josh Pigford’s blog post in the Baremetrics blog that’s titled, I Almost Sold Baremetrics for $5 Million.
What I like about this episode format is it’s pretty casual and we’re covering topics that I think are relevant to many of us and a lot of us are thinking about. I originally thought of structuring this in some type of news, round-table, or show where we’re talking about topics of today. We do that with a couple things, I think the ability to introduce topics that aren’t necessarily news articles or news headlines also works, and the fact that Derrick and I know each other as well as we do really helps with just the rapport in the conversation, it’s not stiff or stilted. I hope you feel the same way about that.
If you don’t recall who Derrick Reimer is, he and I have known each other for years. We met back when I lived in Fresno. He was a young kid who was participating in a startup competition that I was the judge of. He won a couple years in a row. Then, he was thinking about starting to do some consulting work and I said, “Look, why don’t you come, write some code for HitTail?”
He wrote all the early code for Drip and later on, became retroactive co-founder of Drip. So, he and I have known each other. We’ve worked together. He’s been on the show several times talking about starting an app on the side called Codetree that he sold for $128,000 a few years back. Then, he moved to Minneapolis when we sold Drip. So, he and I now live six or seven minutes apart.
We see each other once a month or so and it’s always a good time to hang out and chat. So, I wanted to mix up the format just a little bit and do something that’s not an interview, not keeping up with Mike Taber, not just question and answer, but actually just bringing topics to the table that (I think) might be of interest to you. So let me know what you think.
You can tweet me @robwalling, you can email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, or you can post a comment on this episode, episode 482 and just say, “Yeah, I enjoyed the mix-up of the show format and the fresh ideas in a conversation.” Or you can say, “Got five minutes in, didn’t hold my attention, and I was out.”
That helps me think about and consider maybe we had one of these to the line up every couple months. It doesn’t always have to be Derrick. I could bring on different co-hosts and folks to weigh in, so we have different perspectives.
And with that, let’s dive into the show. Derrick Reimer, thank you for joining me on the show.
Derrick: Hey, thanks for having me again.
Rob: Yeah, I think this is going to be a fun one today, just talking through some interesting topics. I had a few in mind over the past couple weeks, some things have come up where I’m like, “You know, I really want to discuss these with someone,” and I don’t know who to bring on the show to do it. Then, you and I were having dinner last night and we got on some really good conversation topics, so I figured we could jump on the mic and record a few of these.
Derrick: Yeah, we both are a couple of old-fashioned, but we probably should have brought our mics, to be honest.
Rob: I know, I agree. One thing you kicked off with was just talking about something on a lot of our minds, social media in general but Twitter specifically, because that’s big in our circles and the value versus the stress of it.
Derrick: Yeah, for me, my personal journey with it has been the last remaining piece of social media that I really use these days. I’ve given up Facebook, technically, I have an Instagram account but I don’t really use it, and I’m not really hooked on checking those things. But Twitter is a tricky one and I think it is for a lot of people in the text space because it’s where a lot of our industry news is coming from, where a lot of the camaraderie among software developers and start up people is happening. There’s not really (to my knowledge) another platform like it.
There are niche communities in Slack and things like that, but Twitter is the public square for that. It’s been a struggle (I think) for the last few years. I’ve been saying things like, “Yeah, I’ve given up all social media,” but I can’t on Twitter because that’s where work stuff happens. I just become so aware that, for me (and I think it varies from person to person how they deal with it) it’s like Twitter is always the default. I hit a rough spot on something I’m working on and what’s my first inclination is to go check Twitter, go get a dopamine hit, and I’m over it at this point.
Rob: Do you still have it on your phone?
Derrick: I took it off my phone (which has been good) and I actually did another trick where I put all my apps in one folder, so now I just have like a blank desktop screen essentially on my phone. I keep email on there, for example, because I just want to be able to do email mobily, but I don’t want it to be something I compulsively check if I have a break during my day. That’s been a good way to deter that.
Rob: When you put them all in one folder, was it just to make them hard to find?
Derrick: Yeah. It’s like I had muscle memory built where I knew where to tap my thumb subconsciously to open email and now it adds friction to that.
Rob: Yeah, I do that. I’m compulsive with email and Slack, specifically the TinySeed Slack. I don’t do it with Twitter or Facebook and I’ve never really had that problem, but I definitely can see getting into that habit and I try to avoid it. I think the thing with Twitter is I check Twitter a couple times a week and (for me) that’s a pretty healthy balance.
I might post to it more often. A few months ago, I was posting every day and I fell off that wagon. I’d like to do that again, but checking it all the time is not healthy. That’s what you were saying last night. It doesn’t feel good because you’re going for the dopamine hit of someone replying to you, a conversation, likes, or retweets?
Derrick: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m feeling particularly just unsure about something I’m working on or just my business in general, all these existential mini crises we have all the time into building startups. That’s an easy place to turn where I’m going to share some piece of work that I’m doing and it’s going to have some marketing benefit. It’s going to increase awareness about what I’m doing and hope people will spread it around. Maybe someone new will discover my app.
I can justify that there’s some benefit to it, so then I’ll share something and it feels good to get people liking, engaging, and commenting, but it’s pretty hollow and it’s a veneer that’s providing a short-term benefit, but I don’t think it’s the healthiest way to engage with that. Then, when you don’t get the response that you were hoping for, then you feel bad. It’s like, “Why am I doing this in the first place?” This is not a solid way to go.
Rob: Yeah and the struggle is that it’s not just the social aspect. I know you got off Facebook years ago and I think it was easier to justify because there was no work component. There was no way Facebook was going to help you build or grow a company, whereas Twitter might (and I want to put it in italics and bold). We know folks who have personal brands on Twitter, social media empires. I don’t know of anyone who has built a SaaS app and the marketing was all Twitter.
I view Twitter as you can get a small audience and you can get those first few customers or you can get the first people who are going to give you good feedback. It’s part of just building that relationship with people, but realistically, once you have any type of product market fit and you’re actually trying to build a scalable marketing approach, Twitter is not it. If you’re looking at it purely as a utilitarian thing, there’s definitely times and places to do it and be on it, but with all the negatives, it does feel hard to justify to me.
Derrick: Yeah. You can definitely come into it with the strategy of like, “I know the best times a day to post where I’m going to maximize engagement,” I figured out some of those things for myself. Some of it, you can apply methodically. Other parts of it are a lot of the benefits that have come to me has been serendipitous and that’s where I have a little bit of fear that if I were to give this thing up, I don’t know what I’m giving up entirely. I don’t know what random encounters or interactions I might be missing out on and I think that’s for the fear that comes. This could be the thing that catapults my nascent start up into a different realm, if I were just there engaging in the community on Twitter. In reality, I’ve become pretty convinced that’s probably not a very good reason to accept all the negatives.
Rob: I keep doing it, yeah. You make a good point because it isn’t just finding customers, but what about that one relationship you build with the business development where someone says, “Let’s integrate. We’re a web host so let’s integrate.” You’re like a kid and you’re like. “Yeah, that could move the needle.” That’s what you’re saying, it’s like, “Do I want to miss out on those? What’s the potential?” and that’s where they get you. That’s where […], is it has all these negatives, and yet we still want to consider doing it.
Derrick: Yeah. If I think back, I’m frustrated by how many Twitter DMs have actually led to productive business meetings or chats and it’s like, “Why does that have to come to a Twitter DM?” because that’s just reinforcing that I struggle to actually get off of there, because people would have to find my email address or something.
Rob: Yeah, and it does seem like Twitter has declined pretty substantially in popularity. That’s been my sense and just the number of people on it. Obviously, the tech community, the Silicon Valley, plus MicroConf and just startups in general are on there. And the press. It does seem like there’s a lot of journalists, not just like TechCrunch but like Wall Street Journal, big-named journalists are on there and there’s certainly still some value. Remember Arab Spring, there is communication there, there is value to the world that that stuff is able to get out.
It really does seem like people have moved on to Instagram and what are the others? Snapchat, although I guess they’re on […] now. You mentioned TikTok last night and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of that. No idea what it does.” I’m so old dude.
Derrick: Yeah, we’re getting old.
Rob: What are you going to do? If you listen like I was asked on stage, “Are you bullish or bearish on Twitter?” and I was like, “Bearish.” This was last year. I was on my 2016 or 2017 prediction. This is when Twitter was still going strong. There are going to be too many trolls. People are just going to move on, and the nature of social media is that it’s pretty rare for a platform to actually stick around for that long. People just move from one to the next.
I don’t love Twitter and struggle with a lot of stuff on it, although I am still on it. I think there are benefits, especially now with the MicroConf stuff, the podcast and all that. I’m not going to quit Twitter anytime soon, even though I do have some struggles with it. But I’m curious, you’re seriously thinking about getting off of it or quitting it basically. Is that right?
Derrick: Yeah. I’m getting dangerously close to that. For me, my big fear is how am I going to keep a similar type of connection to people in the industry who I’m not so close with? I’m texting or private messaging all the time. How am I going to maintain that? How am I going to still get up-to-the-minute news about stuff? I see a lot of things in the React community, for example. New things emerging or new releases of things and a lot of that I’m getting through Twitter right now.
It’s important for me to know about that because I’m building tooling in that ecosystem. I don’t always want to be the guy who’s a month behind late to the party knowing about stuff, but a lot of these you can think of it as, is that really so bad if you’re a few more days delayed in finding stuff out? Probably not. In that case, for me, I’m trying to look for what are some digests newsletters for example that are in the industry? I’m already a part of some of these.
The Changelog is one of them. They send a weekly summary of what’s happening in the open source world. There’s one for the Jamstack community, too, and I’m on that one. I get a lot of good info from that. These are probably good enough for the news part. For me it’s like, how am I going to keep connection to my “audience?”
The podcast is a good one side of a way to do that. Again, returning back to the fundamentals. My email list, my newsletter list, how can I invest there? The time I maybe would have spent on Twitter carve out some of that time to try to invest that in the email list. Those are some of the ways I’m thinking about it.
Rob: Those are good alternatives. I was going to propose that mailing list and a couple of those other things. The bottom line is, yes, you may miss out on some things, but take the time and invest in stuff. I would say, investment in stuff that is less ephemeral.
That’s what bothers me about social media. It’s just here today and gone tomorrow. It’s not a blog post. It’s not even a podcast episode people go back and listen to. It’s not a book that people will read for years.
With your email list, if you can invest in an email list and repost that on the blog, because email is a bit ephemeral even though it’s a pretty deep connection. That’s when I’ve been off because the entire time we were doing Drip, I was not on Twitter at all. It was the right choice. I didn’t quit it for life though, I came back. Obviously, I’m a little more active on it now, but I do hear what you’re saying. If you tried it for two weeks or 30 days, or something, my guess is you’re not going to want to go back.
Derrick: That’s a good segue, because I’ve been reading a book, Cal Newport’s latest book called Digital Minimalism, which is like Deep Work. A lot of people know about that one. It’s Deep Work principles applied to more of your personal life and how you interface with things like social media.
One of the things you he talks about in there and recommends doing is like a digital declutter. That’s a term he coined for. Basically, taking 30 days and eliminating the things that are causing you problems like social media, that are pulling at your brain and causing it to be distracted, and all the negative side effects that come with it.
Think of this as you’re eliminating all this stuff and then at the end of it, be really deliberate about what you add back in. Don’t think of this as just a temporary detox where you remove all and then at the end, I’ve reset and now I can go back to the way I was doing things.
I’m in the midst of one of those right now. I’m not deleting my Twitter account, but I’m not checking it. I started this off going on a trip where I had very little internet access. That forced me to step away from it and even coming back from that after five days, I already had much less desire to go check it. I do feel a certain amount of Zen just from that. That’s becoming a reinforcing thing already for me. The more time I spend off of it, the less drive I have to go and check it all the time. That’s been healthy, I think.
Rob: That’s cool. How long have you been doing that?
Derrick: Since really the turn of the New Year, so we’re about two weeks in. It’s been good.
Rob: It’s a trip when you change habits like that. How scary, you don’t know if it’s going to work, and then you get in a few days and suddenly you feel this clarity, and then trying to come back to it. I’ve done this with drinking alcohol, social media, or just anything. I enjoy it. There are pros and cons to each of those things. It’s like if I have an old fashion, I feel better. In the short-term, it’s a good thing. Much like checking Twitter. Then in the long-term, I question the value of doing that and going off of those things. Coming back, you just realize how much it impacts your day-to-day or just how it actually affects your life.
Derrick: Yeah.
Rob: And you were saying last night because I haven’t read Digital Minimalism, but you piggy-backed on it and it got you thinking about remote work.
Derrick: Yeah. A thing that he spends a fair amount of time talking about in the book is what does it mean to have relationships and have real connection with other human beings. This is heavily tied in with the era of social media there of text messaging. The fact that we rarely call each other anymore. We are always texting. There’s all these norms that were established in society and a lot of them were around lower fidelity means of communication.
He makes a good point. This is based on some research he pulls into his thesis. We’re wired after millennia of communicating with each other, talking to each other, being able to read non-verbals and verbals, the whole picture, and now we’re reducing our communication down to very binary things. If you think about what’s a reaction in Slack or a like on Twitter? It’s literally a binary piece of information. You compare that to all the richness that comes with someone reacting to something in person. You get to see their face, you get to see them smile, or see them look inquisitive. There’s just so much more you can get from it.
In the one sense, you can think of it as more efficient using these productivity tools like Slack, but on the other hand, how much communication are you missing out on and what does that do to our mental state? You make some pretty interesting points that there’s high rates of depression and mental health among college students in the generation that grew up with smartphones. That’s starting to become really evident. There’s been some research at universities about this and just a really sharp increase in a lot of these issues that weren’t a problem before.
You take all that, bundle that all up, and I start thinking about how are we architecting companies? How are we building teams? I feel like a struggle that you build a 100% remote company. How often do you really have that high fidelity communication with each other? That’s what got me thinking about that.
Rob: It’s tough. My personality is I want to go against the majority opinion. It’s like, “Hey, everyone’s raising venture capital.” “Cool. I’m going to go start one without venture capital,” and that’s going to be a bad thing that I talk about. Or, “Hey, all these Fortune 1000 companies or even venture capitalists want you to be located in one place.” “Cool. I’m going to go start a remote company.” That was what you do and it’s a natural thing that I want to do.
In addition, we have the Remote book by DHH and Jason Fried. It’s definitely a thing and we know tons of startups, especially more in the non-venture track space that we write in, that are remote. And there are advantages to it. You can hire people in cheaper locations. You can hire the best people around the world. Everyone doesn’t have to be local, all that stuff.
I see the value of that for sure, but I’ve always said that the situation we had with Drip where half of us were in one city, and I would have loved for all of us to be in one city. We just couldn’t find the talent in Fresno. Half of us were in one city and we were in the office 2-3 days a week. That was my dream setup and I wish every job that I worked and every company I run, because now with TinySeed, there’s three of us and then with MicroConf, there’s two of us, and we’re all remote.
While I don’t think we should all need to live in the same city—it wouldn’t be practical, because (again) we wanted to hire the best people, and Einar and I are co-founders, he’s in California and I’m in Minneapolis—I would love to see them once or twice a week in person, which is what we did back when we’re doing Drip. And that’s so healthy.
Derrick: Yeah it felt pretty ideal. The nice thing was we can write the rules for how this works. There was inherent flexibility, we weren’t always on the same days every week. If something in life happens and you need to be out of the office an extra day a week, no big deal. But to have that as the default, it felt really good, like hopping in front of a white board with […] getting to work through some tough problems. I was never able to reproduce the same benefits over digital means and maybe someone still needs to solve that. Maybe we’ll get there.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the question that’s like will VR solve that at some point? Can you imagine if VR was super, super high fidelity, you and I can look around, literally feel like we are in front of a whiteboard together, and to get social cues, to where it’s uncanny “Valley” type stuff, like you see these amazing video games or even a Pixar movie. Humans look human enough that you can pick up all the stuff. If you and I can be in a room and literally look like that, maybe that would do it.
It’s a bummer. Some of the things I enjoy the most are lunches and hanging out, but I don’t know if you need that. Maybe that’s the point where it’s solved because video chat isn’t enough. Zoom is not enough because you are not going to sit on a Zoom call for 2–4 hours and shoot the breeze and get those moments that you need.
Derrick: That’s the thing. A lot of the way we are thinking about building companies and the tools that we are building for them, it’s introverted Silicon Valley-type engineers who are helping architects how we socially interact with each other. There’s an inherent bias in that. The fact that we are all about using tools for productivity, an important part of building a healthy team is actually having a relationship that has nothing to do with direct productivity. That’s more of a long-ball type of thing. If we are going to build cohesion, we’re going to be able to go to lunch together.
A friend of mine shared this anecdote, coming back after a long break and catching up on work over the holidays. His wife was relaying this to him and she said, “How was work today?” He’s like, “It wasn’t a great day, but I got to see my friends.” It was powerful. That’s something that you don’t necessarily have if you just stay, show up, and be productive. If your day is not productive, then you feel like you had a good day. If you get to see your friends, you get to see the people you built relationships with, then perhaps you’ll feel a lot more well-balanced.
Rob: Yeah. In Slack, you get the emojis and you get some fun stuff shared on a random channel. That’s fun, but it’s definitely different and it’s hard. Think about with TinySeed, we are a remote accelerator, so this is an issue. We get together three or four times a year and those times are really cool when we’re together. There’s a lot of bonding that happens being in person. That’s something that we are going to be facing and trying to overcome for sure.
In a perfect world, again, I just like seeing people more often. I’m pretty introverted, too. To your point about Silicon Valley people building tools, introverted Silicon Valley people thinking that remote work is, I won’t say infallible but it is the ideal. I don’t think it is for most of the world. I don’t think it is especially for extroverts for people who want to be around other folks. The loneliness and isolation is absolutely being shown. They are doing research on it, there’s going to be a real swing here depending on personality type. There’s a lot here that is not as clear cut as just saying, “Here are the pros of remote work and therefore we should all do it,” because it’s nowhere near that clear-cut.
Derrick: I feel like I’m starting to look at a lot of these things that I previously saw as absolutes and I’m starting to see a lot more gray in them. There are benefits, but there’s also drawbacks and you have to weigh them against each other. One cool anecdote that was from Cal Newport’s book, he talks about the Amish and he talks about how a lot of people just assume that it’s this community of people that decided arbitrarily like, “This is the peak of technology and we shall not accept anymore technology.”
That’s what I thought for many years. It just feels very arbitrary, why are horse-drawn carriages better than cars? I don’t know. It’s just a form of technology. But he talks about if you actually learn about their culture, they always evaluate technology. They are very open to it, but they also evaluate the pros and cons against their value system.
Look at cars back in the early 1900s. They try to mount for a while and then they determine that people who are driving cars tended to leave the community, go to neighboring cities, and engage with people outside the community that led to a breakdown in relationships. They just decided like, “This is not coherent with our values, so we are not going to do it.” I think there’s something really powerful to being open to looking at pros and cons and weighing them against value systems and what you are trying to do.
Rob: Yeah and that’s the thing. There are so many fewer absolutes than we would like. They talk about how it’s a sign of intelligence being able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at once. That’s what both of the things we just talked about are, Twitter and social media conflicting there has a lot of pros and cons.
The same thing with remote work where you can get a little too gung ho in either direction. I think it’s situational and having the willingness to really think it through on a case-by-case basis, to see the realities of it, and know no matter which choice I make, neither is ideal. That’s the hard part is that neither one is ideal. They are going to come with pretty major cons and figuring out how to work around them as best as you can.
As our last topic before we wrap up today, did you read that article, Josh Pigford almost sold Biometrics for $5 million. That was the title, I almost sold Biometrics for $5 million. He published it about six weeks ago.
Derrick: Yeah, I did check it out. It’s a pretty interesting read just because you don’t generally see this level of transparency about something like almost selling your company. It was pretty fascinating to see someone outline their thought process and what was going on through that.
Rob: I know. Super gutsy to do it. I think that’s why because there can be backlash. If you sell it, obviously it goes public that you sold it, but if you don’t sell it and you talk about doing it, there’s danger there. You could have customers leave. You can have employees be upset. Kudos to him for sharing that and sharing his thought process because it sounded tough. A really tough process.
To start with, he kicked it off and he said there’s always a price. Some people get too hung up. A lot of people are, “I’m never selling my business. Why would I sell my business?” I just don’t know. I don’t think that’s the right choice for most people. If you could become independent wealthy, why would you not do this? I don’t hold it against people certainly if you are going to keep your company but don’t just say something out of principle or out of some belief that this is the right thing to do to never sell your company. Think this through.
Now it’s easy. Let’s say I was running a company. It’s doing $50 million a year and I’m pulling $5 million or $10 million a year right off the top, which is totally easy to do with SaaS because it’s so profitable. If you really enjoy what you are doing, then yeah selling your company for $250 million. How much is it actually going to change your lifestyle?
You can afford a jet or whatever, but if you don’t want that and you are doing what you’re doing, why would you do that? But most of us are not in that situation. If you’re running an app doing a million or $5 million a year, somewhere in there, you are not pulling that much money off typically. Typically at that stage, you are in danger of riding it over the top, the growth can die, we can have a recession, you can get killed by a competitor. There’s all these things that could happen and selling a company for a 3X, 4X, or 5X revenue multiple, which Josh was offered 3.75 revenue.
You are doing $2 million a year and you are going to sell your company for $7.5 million, that is absolutely life changing. If you are making $150,000 or $200,000 a year and suddenly you can sell it for that, life-changing in the real sense of the word. It will change your life. You will have options that you never knew you had at that point.
Derrick: A lot of this talk of like why I would want to sell the thing. I’m working on my best idea. I can’t help but think of the Basecamp guys and that was their narrative for a long time. I feel like nowadays there’s a lot more nuance coming from them, which is really refreshing. Jason Fried was at MicroConf, was it last year or the year before?
Rob: Yeah, last year in 2019.
Derrick: Yeah, talking from the stage and he has been one, much more quick to plan the fact that they early on took some money off the table enough, to where him and JJ were millionaires after a couple of years and felt like, “Okay, we’ve made a healthy amount of return of this business. Now we can write it for longer.” A lot of founders go in blind and say, “Why would I want everyone to sell my company,” and yet, what usually ends up happening is that you are not as financially rewarded upfront as you would be if you were taking your raw skill set and having a salary job.
You’re foregoing a lot of money you could be making. A lot of opportunity cost and you are messing that into your equity that you have in your company. If you do end up five years down the line, things are competitive, whatever market conditions, and now suddenly you can’t achieve profitability, you are unable to sell it when you really want to, and you find yourself not able to extract a return from all of the investment that you’ve put into it.
For Basecamp to say, “Why would we want to sell?” because you were able to take some money off the table early on. Then, he also compared now Basecamp to like, “As if I’ve won the lottery and I’m taking the payout over time as opposed to a lump sum.” That totally makes sense.
Rob: Yup. The odds of them going to a business or something is infinitesimal and they get to work. They love their jobs, they have built a great team, and they get to build whatever they want. They’re building Basecamp version three, already built that. Jason Fried was talking a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, like they’re launching two more things this year. They really are a kid in a candy store.
If I were them, I wouldn’t sell, either, but I wouldn’t tell other people. I know they don’t tell other people not to, that’s not something. But I do think that people hear that and then take it upon themselves to think, “Well, I respect Jason Fried and […], I want to be like them, so I’m not going to sell my company either.” I don’t think that’s smart. I think you should evaluate.
Again, if I were Jason Fried, I would not sell Basecamp either because that sounds amazingly fun, but if you’re not in that situation, where you’re tens of millions a year in net profit is what he said, up from the market […], if you’re not in that situation and maybe you don’t enjoy your job, maybe you’re in a really competitive space, and you think that you could flat line.” Once your growth flat lines, your sales multiple plummets. There’s a really good time to sell and if you ride it over the top, suddenly you’re selling for 1X revenue or less. If you’re doubling every year, you’re selling for 4X or 5X revenue, again, it can be a life-changing amount of money or not.
I’m not encouraging people to sell. I think you should do what you want to do, but just really think things through. Back to that whole article we were talking about where Josh basically says, “Hey, there’s always a price. I wasn’t really that open to it,” but he got an offer for $4.95 million and it was like, “Wow, that would change my life.” Then he talks about just how it was a dead end and the buyers had claimed they had the money, but in actual hell, they got him under LOI (letter of intent), they went out and tried to raise money from investors, it was pretty dang shady. It was not cool. That must have been very, very hard.
Derrick: I can only imagine if that had been the case with our Drip story, because I just know how much stress we were under, you especially because you are really bearing the brunt of it, how long the process was, the due diligence stuff, just even getting to LOI. I’m glad that it moves a bit faster, like things didn’t drag out a year, and then Josh discovered this.
I guess on that sense it’s good that it didn’t go on too long, but even for as long as it did, I can only imagine how much you build up all this anticipation. You start to think, “Well, this is looking like it’s going to happen, they seemed very serious about it. Everything I’m hearing from them seems good.” It’s really hard to shift your mind into the gear of like, “I’m about to have a life-changing exit,” and then for that to be torn away is really a mental struggle.
Rob: Yeah. He said, “We’d spent nearly $20,000 on legal fees, months of time gathering all the docs, and they just disappeared. It was crushing. I was and still am furious with them. They wasted an epic amount of our time and money and then crawled into a new hole when they realized they couldn’t do the deal.” Crushing is an understatement, I would have probably crawled into a hole for weeks because your momentum is gone.
It’s one of those really hard decisions to make, but once you make it, you get a sense of peace about it and then that’s all you want. I remember almost hanging on to it too much because you don’t know if the deal is going to go through until it’s all signed. A month before we were selling Drip, it was like, “I’m so ready to sell this company. But I can’t say that out loud, because then if it doesn’t happen, I’ll be crushed.” I definitely feel his pain.
Derrick: Yeah, it’s tough. I don’t know how you could combat that. You have to enter the process, you have to trust what people are telling you initially. You had counsel, you had advisors and stuff, so I wonder how can you avoid that from happening or can you?
Rob: Yeah. I have no idea. I certainly did not and do not believe that I personally could. You would have to be someone of real fortitude to do it. I do like he links over to another article, where he says, “Five things I learned failing to sell my company,” and one of the things he says is avoid needing to sell. This is something a lot of people forget. If you need to sell, if you’re a desperate seller, you will have terms that are not as good.
Always having the abilities to, “Hey, we are growing, we are profitable. I don’t need to sell.” Those three sentiments will get you the best price, that plus getting a lot of different offers. That puts you in the driver’s seat. It’s the same thing with raising funding. Unfortunately, so many people go out to raise funding when they really, really need funding to do anything and nobody wants to fund those companies. They want to fund the companies that don’t need the funding as paradoxical as that sounds.
Derrick: Even on a small scale. When I sold Codetree, this is happening about around the same time that the Drip sale is going through. I was so focused on the Drip stuff that was going on and this was a side app that wasn’t really growing much, but was still just a nice side income for me. I decided it was time to not have to worry about that anymore, but even just having that, going into that with the mindset of like, “I want to sell this thing because it seems like the right time to do that, but I don’t have to,” it could just keep running on the side for a while and no big deal.
Even just going into the negotiation with that attitude. The seller then later on wrote a blog post about how they felt, like they were at a disadvantaged position because they could come in and say, “No, we really want $20,000 off.” My broker was like, “No, we don’t need to do that.” I’m like, “Cool, then tell them no.” Of course, I’m not going to do that, and then ultimately, I think, trying to keep that mindset of like, “If this doesn’t go through, no big deal. I don’t have to do this.” It helps.
Rob: Yeah, having your backs to the walls. Never good, whether you’re selling a car, selling a house. If you’re in a big hurry, you just get the worst deal. Kudos to Josh for that and for sharing. These are helpful things because (again) so many people don’t talk about it when deals fall through like this because it could have negative repercussions, but that’s something that I do love about our community, is that people are often willing to share experiences to help others avoid the mistakes they’ve made.
As we say in the intro, whether it’s to avoid the mistakes or just to understand, if I get into that situation, what will I do? What is this really like? That’s the other thing. If you have not heard of these stories, if you haven’t heard Josh, you haven’t heard you and I talk about selling Drip or any (I’ll say) real startup acquisition, then all you’ve heard is that on TechCrunch, that Instagram sold for $1 billion to Facebook over a weekend, when they had seven people and not much revenue. It’s like, “Well, that’s how startup acquisitions work.” It’s like, “No, they never do. Never.” This is like one in ten years does that.
The real startup acquisitions take a long time, they’re a grind, they’re typically for a revenue multiple or a net profit multiple if you’re running a different type of business or at a smaller revenue scale. There’s just a bunch of pretty common things that are realistic. If you don’t know that and you’ve only read the popular articles about the outliers, your sale is probably not going to be an outlier. So level-setting expectations with this post that Josh wrote is (I think) good.
Derrick: A helpful piece for the community archive for sure.
Rob: Yup, indeed. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming on the show.
Derrick: Yeah. It was a blast, thanks for having me.
Rob: If folks want to keep up with you, you release an episode every week, podcast episode at the Art of Product, you and your co-host Ben Orenstein. That’s a good bootstrap for podcasts over there. Then you are at @derrickreimer on Twitter. We’ll just send people there, but that is what it is.
Derrick: Yeah. Twitter and derrickreimer.com newsletter. Sign-up there.
Rob: That’s probably the one. That’s almost what we should recommend more, derrickreimer.com. I know you’ve blogged a bit over the years. I think all of us probably wish you blogged more.
Derrick: Yeah, it’s always the thing. It’s interesting to think about trying to do more, like higher frequency, less trying to spend 10 hours writing a piece, and think of it a little bit more like Twitter. That could be an interesting thing, too.
Rob: Sounds good, man.
Derrick: Cool. Thanks.
Rob: Thanks again to Derrick for coming on the show. He is working on his new startup. It’s called StaticKit, statickit.com. If you’re working on static sites stuff or interested in that whole ecosystem, he’s building some pretty interesting tools for static site builders.
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What I like about this episode format is it’s pretty casual and we’re covering topics that I think are relevant to many of us and a lot of us are thinking about. I originally thought of structuring this in some type of news, round-table, or show where we’re talking about topics of today. We do that with a couple things, I think the ability to introduce topics that aren’t necessarily news articles or news headlines also works, and the fact that Derrick and I know each other as well as we do really helps with just the rapport in the conversation, it’s not stiff or stilted. I hope you feel the same way about that.
If you don’t recall who Derrick Reimer is, he and I have known each other for years. We met back when I lived in Fresno. He was a young kid who was participating in a startup competition that I was the judge of. He won a couple years in a row. Then, he was thinking about starting to do some consulting work and I said, “Look, why don’t you come, write some code for HitTail?”
He wrote all the early code for Drip and later on, became retroactive co-founder of Drip. So, he and I have known each other. We’ve worked together. He’s been on the show several times talking about starting an app on the side called Codetree that he sold for $128,000 a few years back. Then, he moved to Minneapolis when we sold Drip. So, he and I now live six or seven minutes apart.
We see each other once a month or so and it’s always a good time to hang out and chat. So, I wanted to mix up the format just a little bit and do something that’s not an interview, not keeping up with Mike Taber, not just question and answer, but actually just bringing topics to the table that (I think) might be of interest to you. So let me know what you think.
You can tweet me @robwalling, you can email questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, or you can post a comment on this episode, episode 482 and just say, “Yeah, I enjoyed the mix-up of the show format and the fresh ideas in a conversation.” Or you can say, “Got five minutes in, didn’t hold my attention, and I was out.”
That helps me think about and consider maybe we had one of these to the line up every couple months. It doesn’t always have to be Derrick. I could bring on different co-hosts and folks to weigh in, so we have different perspectives.
And with that, let’s dive into the show. Derrick Reimer, thank you for joining me on the show.
Derrick: Hey, thanks for having me again.
Rob: Yeah, I think this is going to be a fun one today, just talking through some interesting topics. I had a few in mind over the past couple weeks, some things have come up where I’m like, “You know, I really want to discuss these with someone,” and I don’t know who to bring on the show to do it. Then, you and I were having dinner last night and we got on some really good conversation topics, so I figured we could jump on the mic and record a few of these.
Derrick: Yeah, we both are a couple of old-fashioned, but we probably should have brought our mics, to be honest.
Rob: I know, I agree. One thing you kicked off with was just talking about something on a lot of our minds, social media in general but Twitter specifically, because that’s big in our circles and the value versus the stress of it.
Derrick: Yeah, for me, my personal journey with it has been the last remaining piece of social media that I really use these days. I’ve given up Facebook, technically, I have an Instagram account but I don’t really use it, and I’m not really hooked on checking those things. But Twitter is a tricky one and I think it is for a lot of people in the text space because it’s where a lot of our industry news is coming from, where a lot of the camaraderie among software developers and start up people is happening. There’s not really (to my knowledge) another platform like it.
There are niche communities in Slack and things like that, but Twitter is the public square for that. It’s been a struggle (I think) for the last few years. I’ve been saying things like, “Yeah, I’ve given up all social media,” but I can’t on Twitter because that’s where work stuff happens. I just become so aware that, for me (and I think it varies from person to person how they deal with it) it’s like Twitter is always the default. I hit a rough spot on something I’m working on and what’s my first inclination is to go check Twitter, go get a dopamine hit, and I’m over it at this point.
Rob: Do you still have it on your phone?
Derrick: I took it off my phone (which has been good) and I actually did another trick where I put all my apps in one folder, so now I just have like a blank desktop screen essentially on my phone. I keep email on there, for example, because I just want to be able to do email mobily, but I don’t want it to be something I compulsively check if I have a break during my day. That’s been a good way to deter that.
Rob: When you put them all in one folder, was it just to make them hard to find?
Derrick: Yeah. It’s like I had muscle memory built where I knew where to tap my thumb subconsciously to open email and now it adds friction to that.
Rob: Yeah, I do that. I’m compulsive with email and Slack, specifically the TinySeed Slack. I don’t do it with Twitter or Facebook and I’ve never really had that problem, but I definitely can see getting into that habit and I try to avoid it. I think the thing with Twitter is I check Twitter a couple times a week and (for me) that’s a pretty healthy balance.
I might post to it more often. A few months ago, I was posting every day and I fell off that wagon. I’d like to do that again, but checking it all the time is not healthy. That’s what you were saying last night. It doesn’t feel good because you’re going for the dopamine hit of someone replying to you, a conversation, likes, or retweets?
Derrick: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m feeling particularly just unsure about something I’m working on or just my business in general, all these existential mini crises we have all the time into building startups. That’s an easy place to turn where I’m going to share some piece of work that I’m doing and it’s going to have some marketing benefit. It’s going to increase awareness about what I’m doing and hope people will spread it around. Maybe someone new will discover my app.
I can justify that there’s some benefit to it, so then I’ll share something and it feels good to get people liking, engaging, and commenting, but it’s pretty hollow and it’s a veneer that’s providing a short-term benefit, but I don’t think it’s the healthiest way to engage with that. Then, when you don’t get the response that you were hoping for, then you feel bad. It’s like, “Why am I doing this in the first place?” This is not a solid way to go.
Rob: Yeah and the struggle is that it’s not just the social aspect. I know you got off Facebook years ago and I think it was easier to justify because there was no work component. There was no way Facebook was going to help you build or grow a company, whereas Twitter might (and I want to put it in italics and bold). We know folks who have personal brands on Twitter, social media empires. I don’t know of anyone who has built a SaaS app and the marketing was all Twitter.
I view Twitter as you can get a small audience and you can get those first few customers or you can get the first people who are going to give you good feedback. It’s part of just building that relationship with people, but realistically, once you have any type of product market fit and you’re actually trying to build a scalable marketing approach, Twitter is not it. If you’re looking at it purely as a utilitarian thing, there’s definitely times and places to do it and be on it, but with all the negatives, it does feel hard to justify to me.
Derrick: Yeah. You can definitely come into it with the strategy of like, “I know the best times a day to post where I’m going to maximize engagement,” I figured out some of those things for myself. Some of it, you can apply methodically. Other parts of it are a lot of the benefits that have come to me has been serendipitous and that’s where I have a little bit of fear that if I were to give this thing up, I don’t know what I’m giving up entirely. I don’t know what random encounters or interactions I might be missing out on and I think that’s for the fear that comes. This could be the thing that catapults my nascent start up into a different realm, if I were just there engaging in the community on Twitter. In reality, I’ve become pretty convinced that’s probably not a very good reason to accept all the negatives.
Rob: I keep doing it, yeah. You make a good point because it isn’t just finding customers, but what about that one relationship you build with the business development where someone says, “Let’s integrate. We’re a web host so let’s integrate.” You’re like a kid and you’re like. “Yeah, that could move the needle.” That’s what you’re saying, it’s like, “Do I want to miss out on those? What’s the potential?” and that’s where they get you. That’s where […], is it has all these negatives, and yet we still want to consider doing it.
Derrick: Yeah. If I think back, I’m frustrated by how many Twitter DMs have actually led to productive business meetings or chats and it’s like, “Why does that have to come to a Twitter DM?” because that’s just reinforcing that I struggle to actually get off of there, because people would have to find my email address or something.
Rob: Yeah, and it does seem like Twitter has declined pretty substantially in popularity. That’s been my sense and just the number of people on it. Obviously, the tech community, the Silicon Valley, plus MicroConf and just startups in general are on there. And the press. It does seem like there’s a lot of journalists, not just like TechCrunch but like Wall Street Journal, big-named journalists are on there and there’s certainly still some value. Remember Arab Spring, there is communication there, there is value to the world that that stuff is able to get out.
It really does seem like people have moved on to Instagram and what are the others? Snapchat, although I guess they’re on […] now. You mentioned TikTok last night and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve heard of that. No idea what it does.” I’m so old dude.
Derrick: Yeah, we’re getting old.
Rob: What are you going to do? If you listen like I was asked on stage, “Are you bullish or bearish on Twitter?” and I was like, “Bearish.” This was last year. I was on my 2016 or 2017 prediction. This is when Twitter was still going strong. There are going to be too many trolls. People are just going to move on, and the nature of social media is that it’s pretty rare for a platform to actually stick around for that long. People just move from one to the next.
I don’t love Twitter and struggle with a lot of stuff on it, although I am still on it. I think there are benefits, especially now with the MicroConf stuff, the podcast and all that. I’m not going to quit Twitter anytime soon, even though I do have some struggles with it. But I’m curious, you’re seriously thinking about getting off of it or quitting it basically. Is that right?
Derrick: Yeah. I’m getting dangerously close to that. For me, my big fear is how am I going to keep a similar type of connection to people in the industry who I’m not so close with? I’m texting or private messaging all the time. How am I going to maintain that? How am I going to still get up-to-the-minute news about stuff? I see a lot of things in the React community, for example. New things emerging or new releases of things and a lot of that I’m getting through Twitter right now.
It’s important for me to know about that because I’m building tooling in that ecosystem. I don’t always want to be the guy who’s a month behind late to the party knowing about stuff, but a lot of these you can think of it as, is that really so bad if you’re a few more days delayed in finding stuff out? Probably not. In that case, for me, I’m trying to look for what are some digests newsletters for example that are in the industry? I’m already a part of some of these.
The Changelog is one of them. They send a weekly summary of what’s happening in the open source world. There’s one for the Jamstack community, too, and I’m on that one. I get a lot of good info from that. These are probably good enough for the news part. For me it’s like, how am I going to keep connection to my “audience?”
The podcast is a good one side of a way to do that. Again, returning back to the fundamentals. My email list, my newsletter list, how can I invest there? The time I maybe would have spent on Twitter carve out some of that time to try to invest that in the email list. Those are some of the ways I’m thinking about it.
Rob: Those are good alternatives. I was going to propose that mailing list and a couple of those other things. The bottom line is, yes, you may miss out on some things, but take the time and invest in stuff. I would say, investment in stuff that is less ephemeral.
That’s what bothers me about social media. It’s just here today and gone tomorrow. It’s not a blog post. It’s not even a podcast episode people go back and listen to. It’s not a book that people will read for years.
With your email list, if you can invest in an email list and repost that on the blog, because email is a bit ephemeral even though it’s a pretty deep connection. That’s when I’ve been off because the entire time we were doing Drip, I was not on Twitter at all. It was the right choice. I didn’t quit it for life though, I came back. Obviously, I’m a little more active on it now, but I do hear what you’re saying. If you tried it for two weeks or 30 days, or something, my guess is you’re not going to want to go back.
Derrick: That’s a good segue, because I’ve been reading a book, Cal Newport’s latest book called Digital Minimalism, which is like Deep Work. A lot of people know about that one. It’s Deep Work principles applied to more of your personal life and how you interface with things like social media.
One of the things you he talks about in there and recommends doing is like a digital declutter. That’s a term he coined for. Basically, taking 30 days and eliminating the things that are causing you problems like social media, that are pulling at your brain and causing it to be distracted, and all the negative side effects that come with it.
Think of this as you’re eliminating all this stuff and then at the end of it, be really deliberate about what you add back in. Don’t think of this as just a temporary detox where you remove all and then at the end, I’ve reset and now I can go back to the way I was doing things.
I’m in the midst of one of those right now. I’m not deleting my Twitter account, but I’m not checking it. I started this off going on a trip where I had very little internet access. That forced me to step away from it and even coming back from that after five days, I already had much less desire to go check it. I do feel a certain amount of Zen just from that. That’s becoming a reinforcing thing already for me. The more time I spend off of it, the less drive I have to go and check it all the time. That’s been healthy, I think.
Rob: That’s cool. How long have you been doing that?
Derrick: Since really the turn of the New Year, so we’re about two weeks in. It’s been good.
Rob: It’s a trip when you change habits like that. How scary, you don’t know if it’s going to work, and then you get in a few days and suddenly you feel this clarity, and then trying to come back to it. I’ve done this with drinking alcohol, social media, or just anything. I enjoy it. There are pros and cons to each of those things. It’s like if I have an old fashion, I feel better. In the short-term, it’s a good thing. Much like checking Twitter. Then in the long-term, I question the value of doing that and going off of those things. Coming back, you just realize how much it impacts your day-to-day or just how it actually affects your life.
Derrick: Yeah.
Rob: And you were saying last night because I haven’t read Digital Minimalism, but you piggy-backed on it and it got you thinking about remote work.
Derrick: Yeah. A thing that he spends a fair amount of time talking about in the book is what does it mean to have relationships and have real connection with other human beings. This is heavily tied in with the era of social media there of text messaging. The fact that we rarely call each other anymore. We are always texting. There’s all these norms that were established in society and a lot of them were around lower fidelity means of communication.
He makes a good point. This is based on some research he pulls into his thesis. We’re wired after millennia of communicating with each other, talking to each other, being able to read non-verbals and verbals, the whole picture, and now we’re reducing our communication down to very binary things. If you think about what’s a reaction in Slack or a like on Twitter? It’s literally a binary piece of information. You compare that to all the richness that comes with someone reacting to something in person. You get to see their face, you get to see them smile, or see them look inquisitive. There’s just so much more you can get from it.
In the one sense, you can think of it as more efficient using these productivity tools like Slack, but on the other hand, how much communication are you missing out on and what does that do to our mental state? You make some pretty interesting points that there’s high rates of depression and mental health among college students in the generation that grew up with smartphones. That’s starting to become really evident. There’s been some research at universities about this and just a really sharp increase in a lot of these issues that weren’t a problem before.
You take all that, bundle that all up, and I start thinking about how are we architecting companies? How are we building teams? I feel like a struggle that you build a 100% remote company. How often do you really have that high fidelity communication with each other? That’s what got me thinking about that.
Rob: It’s tough. My personality is I want to go against the majority opinion. It’s like, “Hey, everyone’s raising venture capital.” “Cool. I’m going to go start one without venture capital,” and that’s going to be a bad thing that I talk about. Or, “Hey, all these Fortune 1000 companies or even venture capitalists want you to be located in one place.” “Cool. I’m going to go start a remote company.” That was what you do and it’s a natural thing that I want to do.
In addition, we have the Remote book by DHH and Jason Fried. It’s definitely a thing and we know tons of startups, especially more in the non-venture track space that we write in, that are remote. And there are advantages to it. You can hire people in cheaper locations. You can hire the best people around the world. Everyone doesn’t have to be local, all that stuff.
I see the value of that for sure, but I’ve always said that the situation we had with Drip where half of us were in one city, and I would have loved for all of us to be in one city. We just couldn’t find the talent in Fresno. Half of us were in one city and we were in the office 2-3 days a week. That was my dream setup and I wish every job that I worked and every company I run, because now with TinySeed, there’s three of us and then with MicroConf, there’s two of us, and we’re all remote.
While I don’t think we should all need to live in the same city—it wouldn’t be practical, because (again) we wanted to hire the best people, and Einar and I are co-founders, he’s in California and I’m in Minneapolis—I would love to see them once or twice a week in person, which is what we did back when we’re doing Drip. And that’s so healthy.
Derrick: Yeah it felt pretty ideal. The nice thing was we can write the rules for how this works. There was inherent flexibility, we weren’t always on the same days every week. If something in life happens and you need to be out of the office an extra day a week, no big deal. But to have that as the default, it felt really good, like hopping in front of a white board with […] getting to work through some tough problems. I was never able to reproduce the same benefits over digital means and maybe someone still needs to solve that. Maybe we’ll get there.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the question that’s like will VR solve that at some point? Can you imagine if VR was super, super high fidelity, you and I can look around, literally feel like we are in front of a whiteboard together, and to get social cues, to where it’s uncanny “Valley” type stuff, like you see these amazing video games or even a Pixar movie. Humans look human enough that you can pick up all the stuff. If you and I can be in a room and literally look like that, maybe that would do it.
It’s a bummer. Some of the things I enjoy the most are lunches and hanging out, but I don’t know if you need that. Maybe that’s the point where it’s solved because video chat isn’t enough. Zoom is not enough because you are not going to sit on a Zoom call for 2–4 hours and shoot the breeze and get those moments that you need.
Derrick: That’s the thing. A lot of the way we are thinking about building companies and the tools that we are building for them, it’s introverted Silicon Valley-type engineers who are helping architects how we socially interact with each other. There’s an inherent bias in that. The fact that we are all about using tools for productivity, an important part of building a healthy team is actually having a relationship that has nothing to do with direct productivity. That’s more of a long-ball type of thing. If we are going to build cohesion, we’re going to be able to go to lunch together.
A friend of mine shared this anecdote, coming back after a long break and catching up on work over the holidays. His wife was relaying this to him and she said, “How was work today?” He’s like, “It wasn’t a great day, but I got to see my friends.” It was powerful. That’s something that you don’t necessarily have if you just stay, show up, and be productive. If your day is not productive, then you feel like you had a good day. If you get to see your friends, you get to see the people you built relationships with, then perhaps you’ll feel a lot more well-balanced.
Rob: Yeah. In Slack, you get the emojis and you get some fun stuff shared on a random channel. That’s fun, but it’s definitely different and it’s hard. Think about with TinySeed, we are a remote accelerator, so this is an issue. We get together three or four times a year and those times are really cool when we’re together. There’s a lot of bonding that happens being in person. That’s something that we are going to be facing and trying to overcome for sure.
In a perfect world, again, I just like seeing people more often. I’m pretty introverted, too. To your point about Silicon Valley people building tools, introverted Silicon Valley people thinking that remote work is, I won’t say infallible but it is the ideal. I don’t think it is for most of the world. I don’t think it is especially for extroverts for people who want to be around other folks. The loneliness and isolation is absolutely being shown. They are doing research on it, there’s going to be a real swing here depending on personality type. There’s a lot here that is not as clear cut as just saying, “Here are the pros of remote work and therefore we should all do it,” because it’s nowhere near that clear-cut.
Derrick: I feel like I’m starting to look at a lot of these things that I previously saw as absolutes and I’m starting to see a lot more gray in them. There are benefits, but there’s also drawbacks and you have to weigh them against each other. One cool anecdote that was from Cal Newport’s book, he talks about the Amish and he talks about how a lot of people just assume that it’s this community of people that decided arbitrarily like, “This is the peak of technology and we shall not accept anymore technology.”
That’s what I thought for many years. It just feels very arbitrary, why are horse-drawn carriages better than cars? I don’t know. It’s just a form of technology. But he talks about if you actually learn about their culture, they always evaluate technology. They are very open to it, but they also evaluate the pros and cons against their value system.
Look at cars back in the early 1900s. They try to mount for a while and then they determine that people who are driving cars tended to leave the community, go to neighboring cities, and engage with people outside the community that led to a breakdown in relationships. They just decided like, “This is not coherent with our values, so we are not going to do it.” I think there’s something really powerful to being open to looking at pros and cons and weighing them against value systems and what you are trying to do.
Rob: Yeah and that’s the thing. There are so many fewer absolutes than we would like. They talk about how it’s a sign of intelligence being able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at once. That’s what both of the things we just talked about are, Twitter and social media conflicting there has a lot of pros and cons.
The same thing with remote work where you can get a little too gung ho in either direction. I think it’s situational and having the willingness to really think it through on a case-by-case basis, to see the realities of it, and know no matter which choice I make, neither is ideal. That’s the hard part is that neither one is ideal. They are going to come with pretty major cons and figuring out how to work around them as best as you can.
As our last topic before we wrap up today, did you read that article, Josh Pigford almost sold Biometrics for $5 million. That was the title, I almost sold Biometrics for $5 million. He published it about six weeks ago.
Derrick: Yeah, I did check it out. It’s a pretty interesting read just because you don’t generally see this level of transparency about something like almost selling your company. It was pretty fascinating to see someone outline their thought process and what was going on through that.
Rob: I know. Super gutsy to do it. I think that’s why because there can be backlash. If you sell it, obviously it goes public that you sold it, but if you don’t sell it and you talk about doing it, there’s danger there. You could have customers leave. You can have employees be upset. Kudos to him for sharing that and sharing his thought process because it sounded tough. A really tough process.
To start with, he kicked it off and he said there’s always a price. Some people get too hung up. A lot of people are, “I’m never selling my business. Why would I sell my business?” I just don’t know. I don’t think that’s the right choice for most people. If you could become independent wealthy, why would you not do this? I don’t hold it against people certainly if you are going to keep your company but don’t just say something out of principle or out of some belief that this is the right thing to do to never sell your company. Think this through.
Now it’s easy. Let’s say I was running a company. It’s doing $50 million a year and I’m pulling $5 million or $10 million a year right off the top, which is totally easy to do with SaaS because it’s so profitable. If you really enjoy what you are doing, then yeah selling your company for $250 million. How much is it actually going to change your lifestyle?
You can afford a jet or whatever, but if you don’t want that and you are doing what you’re doing, why would you do that? But most of us are not in that situation. If you’re running an app doing a million or $5 million a year, somewhere in there, you are not pulling that much money off typically. Typically at that stage, you are in danger of riding it over the top, the growth can die, we can have a recession, you can get killed by a competitor. There’s all these things that could happen and selling a company for a 3X, 4X, or 5X revenue multiple, which Josh was offered 3.75 revenue.
You are doing $2 million a year and you are going to sell your company for $7.5 million, that is absolutely life changing. If you are making $150,000 or $200,000 a year and suddenly you can sell it for that, life-changing in the real sense of the word. It will change your life. You will have options that you never knew you had at that point.
Derrick: A lot of this talk of like why I would want to sell the thing. I’m working on my best idea. I can’t help but think of the Basecamp guys and that was their narrative for a long time. I feel like nowadays there’s a lot more nuance coming from them, which is really refreshing. Jason Fried was at MicroConf, was it last year or the year before?
Rob: Yeah, last year in 2019.
Derrick: Yeah, talking from the stage and he has been one, much more quick to plan the fact that they early on took some money off the table enough, to where him and JJ were millionaires after a couple of years and felt like, “Okay, we’ve made a healthy amount of return of this business. Now we can write it for longer.” A lot of founders go in blind and say, “Why would I want everyone to sell my company,” and yet, what usually ends up happening is that you are not as financially rewarded upfront as you would be if you were taking your raw skill set and having a salary job.
You’re foregoing a lot of money you could be making. A lot of opportunity cost and you are messing that into your equity that you have in your company. If you do end up five years down the line, things are competitive, whatever market conditions, and now suddenly you can’t achieve profitability, you are unable to sell it when you really want to, and you find yourself not able to extract a return from all of the investment that you’ve put into it.
For Basecamp to say, “Why would we want to sell?” because you were able to take some money off the table early on. Then, he also compared now Basecamp to like, “As if I’ve won the lottery and I’m taking the payout over time as opposed to a lump sum.” That totally makes sense.
Rob: Yup. The odds of them going to a business or something is infinitesimal and they get to work. They love their jobs, they have built a great team, and they get to build whatever they want. They’re building Basecamp version three, already built that. Jason Fried was talking a couple of weeks ago on Twitter, like they’re launching two more things this year. They really are a kid in a candy store.
If I were them, I wouldn’t sell, either, but I wouldn’t tell other people. I know they don’t tell other people not to, that’s not something. But I do think that people hear that and then take it upon themselves to think, “Well, I respect Jason Fried and […], I want to be like them, so I’m not going to sell my company either.” I don’t think that’s smart. I think you should evaluate.
Again, if I were Jason Fried, I would not sell Basecamp either because that sounds amazingly fun, but if you’re not in that situation, where you’re tens of millions a year in net profit is what he said, up from the market […], if you’re not in that situation and maybe you don’t enjoy your job, maybe you’re in a really competitive space, and you think that you could flat line.” Once your growth flat lines, your sales multiple plummets. There’s a really good time to sell and if you ride it over the top, suddenly you’re selling for 1X revenue or less. If you’re doubling every year, you’re selling for 4X or 5X revenue, again, it can be a life-changing amount of money or not.
I’m not encouraging people to sell. I think you should do what you want to do, but just really think things through. Back to that whole article we were talking about where Josh basically says, “Hey, there’s always a price. I wasn’t really that open to it,” but he got an offer for $4.95 million and it was like, “Wow, that would change my life.” Then he talks about just how it was a dead end and the buyers had claimed they had the money, but in actual hell, they got him under LOI (letter of intent), they went out and tried to raise money from investors, it was pretty dang shady. It was not cool. That must have been very, very hard.
Derrick: I can only imagine if that had been the case with our Drip story, because I just know how much stress we were under, you especially because you are really bearing the brunt of it, how long the process was, the due diligence stuff, just even getting to LOI. I’m glad that it moves a bit faster, like things didn’t drag out a year, and then Josh discovered this.
I guess on that sense it’s good that it didn’t go on too long, but even for as long as it did, I can only imagine how much you build up all this anticipation. You start to think, “Well, this is looking like it’s going to happen, they seemed very serious about it. Everything I’m hearing from them seems good.” It’s really hard to shift your mind into the gear of like, “I’m about to have a life-changing exit,” and then for that to be torn away is really a mental struggle.
Rob: Yeah. He said, “We’d spent nearly $20,000 on legal fees, months of time gathering all the docs, and they just disappeared. It was crushing. I was and still am furious with them. They wasted an epic amount of our time and money and then crawled into a new hole when they realized they couldn’t do the deal.” Crushing is an understatement, I would have probably crawled into a hole for weeks because your momentum is gone.
It’s one of those really hard decisions to make, but once you make it, you get a sense of peace about it and then that’s all you want. I remember almost hanging on to it too much because you don’t know if the deal is going to go through until it’s all signed. A month before we were selling Drip, it was like, “I’m so ready to sell this company. But I can’t say that out loud, because then if it doesn’t happen, I’ll be crushed.” I definitely feel his pain.
Derrick: Yeah, it’s tough. I don’t know how you could combat that. You have to enter the process, you have to trust what people are telling you initially. You had counsel, you had advisors and stuff, so I wonder how can you avoid that from happening or can you?
Rob: Yeah. I have no idea. I certainly did not and do not believe that I personally could. You would have to be someone of real fortitude to do it. I do like he links over to another article, where he says, “Five things I learned failing to sell my company,” and one of the things he says is avoid needing to sell. This is something a lot of people forget. If you need to sell, if you’re a desperate seller, you will have terms that are not as good.
Always having the abilities to, “Hey, we are growing, we are profitable. I don’t need to sell.” Those three sentiments will get you the best price, that plus getting a lot of different offers. That puts you in the driver’s seat. It’s the same thing with raising funding. Unfortunately, so many people go out to raise funding when they really, really need funding to do anything and nobody wants to fund those companies. They want to fund the companies that don’t need the funding as paradoxical as that sounds.
Derrick: Even on a small scale. When I sold Codetree, this is happening about around the same time that the Drip sale is going through. I was so focused on the Drip stuff that was going on and this was a side app that wasn’t really growing much, but was still just a nice side income for me. I decided it was time to not have to worry about that anymore, but even just having that, going into that with the mindset of like, “I want to sell this thing because it seems like the right time to do that, but I don’t have to,” it could just keep running on the side for a while and no big deal.
Even just going into the negotiation with that attitude. The seller then later on wrote a blog post about how they felt, like they were at a disadvantaged position because they could come in and say, “No, we really want $20,000 off.” My broker was like, “No, we don’t need to do that.” I’m like, “Cool, then tell them no.” Of course, I’m not going to do that, and then ultimately, I think, trying to keep that mindset of like, “If this doesn’t go through, no big deal. I don’t have to do this.” It helps.
Rob: Yeah, having your backs to the walls. Never good, whether you’re selling a car, selling a house. If you’re in a big hurry, you just get the worst deal. Kudos to Josh for that and for sharing. These are helpful things because (again) so many people don’t talk about it when deals fall through like this because it could have negative repercussions, but that’s something that I do love about our community, is that people are often willing to share experiences to help others avoid the mistakes they’ve made.
As we say in the intro, whether it’s to avoid the mistakes or just to understand, if I get into that situation, what will I do? What is this really like? That’s the other thing. If you have not heard of these stories, if you haven’t heard Josh, you haven’t heard you and I talk about selling Drip or any (I’ll say) real startup acquisition, then all you’ve heard is that on TechCrunch, that Instagram sold for $1 billion to Facebook over a weekend, when they had seven people and not much revenue. It’s like, “Well, that’s how startup acquisitions work.” It’s like, “No, they never do. Never.” This is like one in ten years does that.
The real startup acquisitions take a long time, they’re a grind, they’re typically for a revenue multiple or a net profit multiple if you’re running a different type of business or at a smaller revenue scale. There’s just a bunch of pretty common things that are realistic. If you don’t know that and you’ve only read the popular articles about the outliers, your sale is probably not going to be an outlier. So level-setting expectations with this post that Josh wrote is (I think) good.
Derrick: A helpful piece for the community archive for sure.
Rob: Yup, indeed. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming on the show.
Derrick: Yeah. It was a blast, thanks for having me.
Rob: If folks want to keep up with you, you release an episode every week, podcast episode at the Art of Product, you and your co-host Ben Orenstein. That’s a good bootstrap for podcasts over there. Then you are at @derrickreimer on Twitter. We’ll just send people there, but that is what it is.
Derrick: Yeah. Twitter and derrickreimer.com newsletter. Sign-up there.
Rob: That’s probably the one. That’s almost what we should recommend more, derrickreimer.com. I know you’ve blogged a bit over the years. I think all of us probably wish you blogged more.
Derrick: Yeah, it’s always the thing. It’s interesting to think about trying to do more, like higher frequency, less trying to spend 10 hours writing a piece, and think of it a little bit more like Twitter. That could be an interesting thing, too.
Rob: Sounds good, man.
Derrick: Cool. Thanks.
Rob: Thanks again to Derrick for coming on the show. He is working on his new startup. It’s called StaticKit, statickit.com. If you’re working on static sites stuff or interested in that whole ecosystem, he’s building some pretty interesting tools for static site builders.
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Episode 414 | Content Promotion Tactics
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Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about content promotion tactics. Breaking the tactics down in three categories (Social Media, SEO, and E-mail Marketing), the guys share thoughts and expand based on some previously written articles on the topic.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Episode Resources
Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I talk are going to be talking about content promotion tactics. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us 414.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us. The podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: I’m Rob. You know, I’ve been thinking about my next act for a while.
Mike: Have you now?
Rob: I have.
Mike: Is this where people start cashing in on the pool?
Rob: Totally, yeah. What is Rob’s next startup going to be, right? This has been a question for a while.
Mike: I think it was my timing, actually. Not just what it was going to be.
Rob: Oh, was it?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Because Rob said I’m never going to do this again. Who put money on never? I think…
Mike: Probably nobody.
Rob: …no one. My wife definitely did not put money on never. Well, my next act is not a startup. It is an accelerator for bootstrappers. It’s actually a small fund and an accelerator for bootstrappers. It’s called TinySeed. You can check more info at tinyseedfund.com. But it’s really the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers, so startup accelerators is something like Y Combinator, TechStars, and as you and I have talked many times, those are geared around people who have these unicorn ideas, who are going to move to a location for three months, work the 80 hours for little pay and little sleep, and that doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest of us. I mean, the name of our podcast is Startups For The Rest of Us, right? You did this after Y Combinator came out.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: That’s what this accelerator is. It’s designed for folks like you, me, listeners of the podcast, attendees of MicroConf–kind of the people in our ecosystem and our community where building $1 million SaaS app, $5 million, $10 million annual SaaS app, is actually quite lucrative and there are so few funding sources for folks like us. The idea is, to put more money where my mouth has been for the past several years.
I’ve made a dozen angel investments, half of those have been in these businesses that only want to raise a single round of funding. Often $100,000, $250,000, maybe $400,000, whatever some small-ish amount, and then they want to get to profitability and never do that institutional money. The idea is, we know a lot of founders, I know a lot of founders, who are somewhere between idea and $10k a month MRR–is the sweet spot. Because most of these folks are unable to work full-time on their business and that’s kind of the value prop of TinySeed is it gives you runway for a year.
It basically provides you with a small amount of capital but it’s going to be enough capital to basically live on for a year and keep you from having the nights and weekends stuff, to be able to focus full-time, and you don’t have to relocate so it’s remote. It’s going to be in a cohort model […] maybe it’s 10 in the first cohort, and weekly Zoom calls, and I’m assuming like a Slack or chat group, and then weekly office hours. Basically, all the things you hear about in an accelerator except that it’s designed for us, by us; it is remote and it’s just another option.
I think the other thing is, it’s longer term. You and I both know, I don’t think we could’ve built and launched Drip or Bluetick in three months. It’s just not long enough. The idea is to get longer runway to get more traction and since people are remote, it winds up being easier. Because Y Combinator couldn’t be a one-year thing because you’re not going to relocate to a place for a year. There’re different elements to it but that’s the basic gist.
Mike: We’ll have to talk about it. I almost think that we might want to talk about it for either longer period of time and it’s part of a direct episode on funding. I think there’s different ways that it could work. Obviously, you guys have to talk internally about what you are going to publicly disclose now versus things that you’re just talking about or ruminated on for ideas. But I do think we should definitely revisit it as a part of a longer discussion topic as part of Startups For The Rest Of Us.
Rob: Yeah, that sounds like fun. I would say, at this point, we’re about probably 80% locked down on terms and ideas, and curriculum and thoughts, and all that. But definitely more than happy to talk about it. The wee of it is, myself and Einar Volsett, who has been at MicroConf many times, he’s a YC Y Combinator alum, he’s had a couple of exits, and right now, he’s a Micro-Cap M&A advisor, which I think, he’s like a scout for private equities; he works with private equity companies. But you know him. I think you’ve talked a bunch of times.
Mike: Yeah. I’ve had dinner with him a couple of times at MicroConf. He’s a super sharp guy. He used to teach at Cornell, I think.
Rob: Yeah, he was a CS Professor at Cornell for a couple of years.
Mike: Right. He’s got a Ph.D. in computer science but he also knows a lot about the business side of things. What was the startup that he ran? It was inbox spelled backwards, it’s xobni, something like that?
Rob: It wasn’t xobni, it was something else. There was one called AppAftercare which he exited in 2016.
Mike: Oh, ReMail
Rob: Yep, ReMail, that was it. Y Combinator and it was acquired by Google in 2010. He has some experience and that’s where he has more of the fundraising and the private equity venture capital, more knowledge of that and the terms, so he’s good at figuring out models and running IRR calculations. If you don’t know what those are, you don’t need to unless you’re going to run a fund but that’s one of the reasons that I’ve never wanted to get into this is I didn’t want to do all that side of things.
Mike: Well, like I said, it will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out. I think that you guys are the first ones that are doing this in this particular space. We used to talk about why Y Combinator was aimed at people who are just going straight for funding versus like, “Hey, let me build a product. Let me get a little bit of traction for it and then go out for some funding, but I still want to not have to grow it into his giant thing.”
Rob: That’s right. I, of course, did a bunch of market research on accelerators and incubators and remote accelerators, they’re really–you can find a list of remote accelerators, but almost of them, they’re rather defunct now or it’s like a remote accelerator tied to like a city government launch or a university and it just kind of feels like a ghost town. No one has nailed this model. That of course could be a risk if you have no competition. Are you first or is it not going to work? Are you going down a wrong path? That’s always the question but I personally believe I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think that it was going to work.
Mike: I think every single entrepreneur […] of doing business. If I’m first, it’s like I’m seeing things that other people aren’t seeing. But it’s one of those things that you have to let it play out to find out whether history will remember you for being right or wrong.
Rob: Absolutely. That’s the game of being a founder, I think. If you’re listening to this and you’re just interested in hearing more whether it’s from the founder side, whether you are experienced, interested in being a mentor, somehow being involved, or just wanting to hear more about it, tinyseedfund.com. There, of course, is an email opt-in form in there. We’ll be communicating with that list as more details come out.
Mike: Awesome. On my end, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to schedule a personal retreat in the very near future just to straighten out where my marketing efforts are going to go for Bluetick. Because I’ve had things all over the place for several months now and I haven’t really had a solid thought on what the direction should be and where, strategically, I should be going with the marketing efforts.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to take that time right now just because my wife teaches on Saturdays, and my son has soccer games on Saturdays. For the next three or four weeks, he’s got those games. It’s just like she can’t be in both places at the same time, so I kind of have to wait, push off on that a little bit, but that is on my short-term road map, I’ll say.
Rob: That’s always a good idea. Frankly, since I started doing retreats, there always comes this time where you just don’t know what to do next, you don’t know what to try next, and you need some distance in order to do that. Because if you sit around at your laptop, at your home office, you’re just going to write code, you’re going to respond to fires and support requests and all that stuff and getting away for a couple of days–super valuable.
Do you have Sherry’s retreat guide, The Zen Founder Guide to Founder Retreats?
Mike: I’m not sure. I think I might. I’m not sure if I have it or not.
Rob: It’s just a very good guide to revisit. Every time I go on a retreat, I’d pull it up. If you’re listening to this, haven’t heard of it, go to zenfounder.com. I think there’s a products link in there. It’s $19 or something and it’s 30, 40-page e-book, in essence, but it’s kind of everything. Because Sherry introduced me to Founder Retreats and I talked about it on this podcast and it’s kind of spread from there which I think is a great thing. I’ve always found them so valuable. Sherry put together the guide and had me add as much as fill-in-the-gaps basically on it, and so it’s really, in my opinion, kind of the definitive guide for things you should think about as you go into your retreat.
I hope you’re able to do that soon. It’s a bummer to have schedule be the issue. Is there a way—just to throw out ideas—like he has soccer game on Saturday, could you leave Saturday evening and come back, basically 48 hours, come back Monday evening or Monday afternoon before the kids get home from school?
Mike: Probably. Last week was a holiday so I could not have done it that week. Then this coming week, I can’t leave on Saturday night because we’re basically going out to dinner for our wedding anniversary to celebrate that. Then the following week I leave for MicroConf.
Rob: You just cancel.
Mike: Oh, yeah. Sure. I’ll just cancel that.
Rob: Oh, for Pete’s sake.
Mike: I’ll cancel either our anniversary dinner or MicroConf. One or the other. It’s going to be several weeks no matter what at this point. There’s no way around it, I think.
Rob: I have a great idea. Do your retreat in Croatia. Just extend your trip a couple of extra days. Be like, “Hey, Ally, I’ll be back. Peace out. Have fun with the kids. I’ll be back.”
Mike: If I were leaving early, I can’t though. Just because she teaches during the week […] like Sundays.
Rob: I’m joking.
Mike: I know.
Rob: Yeah, man. It’s hard. I totally get it.
Mike: Oh, well, moving on. I guess we’re going to move on to our actual topic for today. We’re going to talk about content promotion tactics.
Rob: I am digging it. We’re revisiting a topic that we covered in 2010.
Mike: Yes. This is a little bit from episode six. In episode six, it was all about how to get traffic to your website. I went back, and I took a look at that, some of the links that we had in there like seobuilding.com just totally defunct at this point. You can buy that domain if you’re really interested for like $3500. If anyone’s interested…
Rob: You’ll at least be getting graphic from us at this point. No, not some of the links, Mike. I think, 40% of the links that we listed, and the approaches are just completely, they either don’t work anymore, they’re just gone, but this was eight years ago. It’s an eternity.
Mike: Yes. But I went back, and I looked at it. I was kind of inspired by, I was reading the SaaS mag article that’s put out by FE International. They launched it at MicroConf. You can go to saasmag.com, we’ll link that up in the show notes, and sign-up, and start getting issues of that. It’s aimed at SaaS founders. It talks about various things that are related to the industry and they interview experts from different fields on what they’re doing and kind of what the future looks like, and how they got to where they are, etc.
Most recent one I saw has interviews from Patrick Campbell from Price Intelligently, Brennan Dunn from Double Your Freelancing and RightMessage, also David Cancel from Drip. There’s a bunch of different people they’ve interviewed. But on one of the pages they had, it was kind of a poll that they have taken inside of a Facebook group called SaaS Growth Hacks. They asked the question, “What are the best marketing channels for SaaS companies?” and people voted on different things. Content, by far, was the highest voted thing. Below that you have forums, and Quora posts–answering questions there, and then cold email, and paid ads ranks about the same. Then below that was partnerships, word-of-mouth. Below that, free tools, and then the last couple of ones on the list were Twitter, conferences, and LinkedIn messaging.
The way that that shook out does not necessarily surprise me, but the fact the content was still so far up above, I felt like that was a little surprising.
Rob: I find that really interesting too, actually. I think, as you mentioned, it’s from basically marketers, so whether it’s founders or growth marketers or whatever, it’s what they are doing these days. I wonder if they’re doing these because they’re measuring, and it works or they’re doing it because this is kind of the current wave. The current mindset is, content is king, and it’s the thing that you should start with.
I don’t know that that’s worth even diving into, going down that rabbit trail. But it is something that comes to mind is, is there a group thing going on and zigging when everyone else is zagging, is the best way to go or is this really right now with social and the fact email marketing is so powerful in with the SEO benefits of content that content really is where it’s at and that’s why everyone’s there.
Mike: I think it’s partially because of the fact that with content, you can create an article through your website and it’s going to continue drawing traffic in versus if you do cold calling or a joint venture with somebody, I call them one-off activities even though you can do them repeatedly, but you don’t continue to reap rewards if you’re not picking-up the phone and cold calling, for example. You have to keep doing it versus if you go through the effort to creating an article, put it on your site, and you do well enough with the SEO, you will continue to get traffic much further down the road. You can also promote that piece of content multiple times.
It’s not about that content is king so much as this that content is reusable and it allows you to put it in front of people, not just multiple times, but put it in front of new people because you’re creating this asset of some kind that other people could find useful. You can’t really point somebody to an empty page on your website and expect that it’s going to continue to drive clicks.
Rob: Right. That’s the thing. We’ve talked in the past about how if you’re in super early stage, you’ve pre-product market fit or pre-product then content’s probably not the right play for you because content is a long game. But once you’ve found your audience, your product is something people want, and you’re scaling, that’s when I think, in general, content is going to be a really good play for you to get you that 5K or 10K MRR that you’ve just scratched and clawed and manually done maybe cold email, whatever it is to get your first 100 customers. But once you want to go from there, I think you need more scalable things and content is one of those avenues, and that’s why we’re talking about it today.
Mike: I think what we’re going to focus on is, we have a couple of resources that we’ll link to in the show notes. One if from orbitmedia.com and the other one is from neilpattel.com. one of the things that this really points to is the fact that when you are promoting content there are three essential pieces or channels you can look at. There’s SEO, then there’s sending out emails to drive people on your mailing list back to your site, and there’s social sharing. Where those intersect is you can promote your content into each of those places but depending on what your needs are, you’re going to put more effort into one versus the other.
The whole idea of this is, if you do it through social media, you’re going to try and get additional shares or followers. If you’re trying to get additional subscriptions to your mailing list, it’s going to help you grow your list for email marketing. If a visitor comes in and they link to your content from someplace else, you’re going to rank higher in search engines. The idea is to create this feedback loop, of you doing all of those three things in order to amplify your traffic and from that, you essentially end up with leads on the other side of it. It’s really just an engine that you’re creating.
If you have a ton of people on your mailing list, you can start asking them in trying to help promote on other things. You can say, “Hey, can you promote this on social media?” You can leverage them back and forth between each other to amplify the entire system.
Rob: Content does have this unique advantage which is one of the reasons that marketers like it so much is, it really has this trifecta of value that it brings, these three uses. I’ll step to another example; let’s say I’m running Facebook ads and I’m getting that to work. Facebook ads send typically cold traffic to a page, you might get trial sign-ups, you might have to retarget them, you might have to get them on an email list, but those ads you’re paying for—and they really have one purpose—and it’s to drive some traffic one time.
Content on the other hand has three uses, maybe it has more, but the three main ones that I’ve seen, and I’ve used, and it worked really well. The first one is social media. It’s getting that buzz because you put out a new article or essay or e-book or video or whatever, but you get people to talk about you on Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook or wherever else your folks reside, and you can get that quick social media bump of, “Hey, everyone’s talking about this cool new thing that came out.” Then it dies down and that would be one use.
But another use for this exact same content is you email your whole list. That can help with the social media aspect. It helps if more people know about it then more people talk about. But it gives you an excuse to contact your email list. Every time you contact your email list, you’re probably going to get more trials, more interests in your product.
The third use is this long play of SEO. If you put out good content and it hits the right keywords, and you do have links back or you have social shares that are pointing back, it rises in the ranks. Long-term, people searching for these terms in Google, come back to it.
I haven’t given it a ton of thought, but I don’t know, off hand, of another marketing approach that has that many solid benefits, this super short-term bump, the email list bump, and then the long-term paly of SEO. I believe it’s pretty unique in that respect.
Mike: Let’s dive into the first section which is social media. What we’re going to do is we’re going to throw in, just very briefly, highlight some of the different tactics that are listed on a couple of these reference articles that we pointed to earlier.
The first one is to mention people who are going to like your article, they liked the content of it or directly reference people who are quoted in the article. One example of how well this would work is if you’ve interviewed somebody and they are relatively high-profile in the industry that you serve, for example. If you’ve mentioned them in the social media posts, they are more likely to share it than if you were to email them directly and then say, “Hey, can you tweet this out for me?” Because then you’re asking them, “Hey, can you create a tweet and then post this?” versus they see it in their social media feed and they can just literally hit retweet and they don’t have to do any work. It’s just a matter of what your ask is of them.
If I see something where it has referenced me for example and I’ve commented on an article or was on a podcast, I’m almost certain to retweet that and like it just to give it more of a visibility.
Rob: That’s a nice tactic. I’ve definitely seen that. At a minimum, I’m going to like something if I click through and it’s like, “Oh, yeah. That was that quote I gave you two months ago.” Then like you said, if it’s a legit post, because sometimes you’ll get asked for a quote or a comment on, what’s the hardest thing about validating product or what are the market approaches that are working today or whatever, and they’re doing an expert roundup and I’m just cool to participate in those. Some of them are really, really good and really well put together and others are kind of someone doing a halfway job or maybe they’re new or whatever. But the best ones, when I get a mention like that, it’s pretty certain I’m going to click through and then based on the quality of it, decent likelihood that I will retweet that.
Mike: Another one is to tweet quotes from the content. The nice things about this is you can create multiple tweets and schedule them using Buffer, a variety of other tools, and get them out there in such a way that you’re not repeating yourself. Different quotes are going to attract different types of people. There’s a quote about, I don’t know, a search engine marketing for example, you could put that in there, and then there could be something else which is optimizing search engine marketing. One is very broad and then the other one is a little bit more specific, depending on the person who sees it, if they’re more interested in one or the other, they’re going to click on it.
Rob: Another approach is you’re not just going to tweet this once especially if it’s a big piece of content because the longer form, frankly, more expensive, whether it’s time-expense or actual cost in paying someone to build it. The longer form more expensive pieces of content are the ones that are winning today and the ones that are getting the tweets. You’re not just going to tweet this once and be done. A good strategy is to tweet it once and then schedule some near future and distant future tweets because, if you think about it, in three months, the buzz from this e-book or audio piece or whatever, blog post, will have died off but it’s probably still relevant and valuable. It’s something not to bother people with but to bring back up and remind them, “Hey, this is still is valuable and legitimate.” Obviously, even within the first week, I forgot what the number is, but isn’t it like 5% of your followers see any of your individual tweets?
Mike: That’s not a per day basis, I think.
Rob: Yeah. One approach is to, as we’ve said in the past, kind of have a once a day tweet this out for the first three, four, five days, so that people more people see it especially if it’s a really big piece of content. It can be worth it. You can also irritate people and they’ll unfollow you if you’re just spamming them with the same links over and over. You have to use your head here, like any other strategy, but this is definitely something I’ve seen marketers are doing.
Mike: It’s offshoot is that is to share a short video on Twitter, Facebook, whether it’s Facebook groups or one of your Facebook page or inside of LinkedIn. The idea of the short video is to more or less give a very quick overview or summary of what the piece of content you have is not to talk about the entire content. It’s not that you’re trying to drive people to watch the video. What you’re really just trying to do is help get those people who prefer a different medium. Some people like to skim things and read it, and then there’s people out there who like to watch a video. But you also don’t want to overwhelm them with, “Oh, I just popped on to Twitter and I’m expecting to be here for a couple of minutes.” They’re not going to have time for a 30-minute video. But they may sit down and watch a 30-second video or a 15-second video that just talks about like, “Hey, if you’re interested in this, come over and check it out.” You just want to be sensitive to the fact that some people like to consume that information in different formats. The other nice benefit of sharing it like that is that you tend to get the videos will be shared on Twitter, on Facebook, and LinkedIn as your face and there’s a very different type of algorithms that those companies use in order to highlight those types of posts.
Rob: Another approach is to syndicate your content on LinkedIn, Medium, and other avenues. Syndication is just a fancy word for either reposted there or taking excerpt from it and repost there. You can imagine if you’ve written this 100-page e-book, the definitive guide to social media marketing or email marketing or whatever, you don’t post that whole thing on LinkedIn. But maybe you take, because you can put LinkedIn kind of blog post-ish, you take a really great 1000-words from that, and you post it on LinkedIn and then you link out the book.
You can do same with Medium although you can go longer form there. You can post an entire chapter from that book, so maybe you do 5000, 3000, 5000-words on Medium. Again, say, “This is an excerpt from this book.” Or if it’s a video, maybe you’d do a transcript part of.
These are ways that if you have built a following, or if you think that those networks with be intrigued by the title and the content and stuff, then reusing this content is a nice way to reuse that effort because if you spent a month or two writing this e-book or making this amazing tutorial video or whatever, you want to get it out in as many forms as possible. That’s what syndication is.
Mike: The next section we’re going to talk about is email marketing. Many of these, I think, are probably going to be pretty familiar to most people listening to this, but we’re going to go through them anyway because this is kind of a major section of the, as Rob talked about the trifecta here of content marketing.
The first one is sending out the links to it through your email list. One thing you definitely want to make sure that you’re doing here is you’re putting calls to action in there. I have mixed feeling on whether or not you should post the entire piece of content in the email versus having it on your website. Because there’s advantages and disadvantages to both. I think you just need to make a judgement call about whether you want it on your website where people can go to it versus, you’re just trying to make sure that you get it in front of people on your email list. If it’s something that you want exclusively for people on your mailing list, obviously, you’d put it in there. But people also have a somewhat limited attention span if it comes to something in their email. I do think it’s worth being cautious and making some measurements around, “Are people actually reading that and then taking action on it?” But again, that’s a judgement call.
Rob: Yeah. My default rule of thumb for this is if you’re doing personal brand stuff, if it’s Patrick Mackenzie or Brennan Dunn or Rob Walling blogging, and then sending it to their list, it’s probably fine if you post the entire article in the email. Because people are engaged with you and the content is really gripping and they tend to want to—or hopefully, it’s really gripping—and they tend to want to read the whole thing and they could read it on their phone or whatever. That’s my general rule.
If you’re doing it as a business, when Dripping was sending it out or if Bluetick were sending out a post, I would probably do a teaser and a really snazzy excerpt with an image, and then say, “Click through to read the full thing.” Some people will click, and some people won’t, but it will get you traffic. The end goal there is to get traffic to your site. Hopefully, get people to share it from there, and sign-up for a trial or whatever.
Again, that’s my general rule, how I link. But I think you can certainly break those rules if you know your audience better or as you said, if you look at the numbers, it’s telling you that that’s not the best way to do it.
Mike: If you had an email course for example, a lot of times you’re going to put the course directly in the email, and you may not want that course directly on your website. You may want to reserve it just for people on your mailing list, and maybe that’s because they don’t get to the mailing list until there’s certain amount of trust gained, or maybe the purpose of that email sequence is to establish trust, and then you send them shorter emails later on with the links back to the articles. But again, as you said, there’s lots of different ways to do it.
Rob: Right. This particular point, of whether to include all the content in an email, is really only relevant for probably blog posts because if you’re putting out an e-book it’s going to be too long. If you’re putting out a video course or one video, you can’t embed that in email, you can certainly embed an image that links out somewhere. If you create any kind of downloadable content, you’re not going to be able to put that in email anyways. It’s only if you’re doing kind of the blog content engine or short essays.
Mike: As kind of an addendum to this, you can send out, “In case you missed it,” follow-up emails. Obviously, you can put those directly into the email campaigns and it works really well because I’ve seen Drip actually put this in their directive and specifically for that reason. But you get anywhere from 20%-40% lift in opens just by resending an email with a different subject line for the exact same emails. If somebody didn’t open it, you basically resend them that email.
Rob: We did that. It’s quite successful. Another tactic you can do is, let’s say you’ve put out three blog posts a week, you can recap either at the end of the week or at the end of the month, and just have a separate email that you pull up, “Hey, in case you missed it, here are all the posts from the past week or the month,” or, “Here are our top picks or the most popular five from the past month.” and it’s just one more way to reach out to the audience, provide them with additional content, and you didn’t have to produce that content. It’s just linking back to stuff that they’ve probably missed because they probably didn’t read every article.
Mike: Next on the list is you can also send those notifications directly to some of your high-value contacts. You can either do this as personal emails instead of broadcast emails or you can find people that are on your list, who may not necessarily be subscribed to a particular campaign or they’re tagged in a certain way or segmented somehow and you say, “Hey, I think that these people would be really great candidate to receive this particular piece of content.” Maybe it they opted-in to a particular lead magnet, then you would send the content to them. But it’s really about being a lot more targeted about who you’re sending it to.
Again, this is where personal emails to people can really shine just because if they do see an email coming in and it’s from your company versus from you personally, they’re probably a little less likely to treat it as, “Hey, this person took the time to really reach out to me, so I’m going to pay a little bit more attention to it.” But sometimes the emails that are coming in from a general newsletter email address, sometimes people have rules or filters set-up so that they go into a certain place. By sending it directly, a lot of times, it will bypass those defaults because they just didn’t think to set them up.
Rob: There are 50 content promotion ideas in the Orbit Media post alone, but another one that you pulled out is to notify your source of a new post. I think this is similar to doing it on social media but emailing people directly, “Hey, do you remember the article where I interviewed you for? That’s live. If you’d like to share it, it’d be great. Here’s a link.” Or, if there’s 10 people because it’s a roundup, you do the same thing. You notify them all and certainly a few people will likely help promote that for you.
Mike: If you give them a short snippet or a summary, you can also ask them to promote it to their own email list, and then you’re essentially amplifying the efforts there.
Rob: Let’s dive into SEO.
Mike: When you’re looking at SEO, obviously, what you want to do is you want to align the content of those posts with key phrases that you have pulled out after doing some keyword research. There’s a lot of different tools that you can use for that. We’ve talked about them in the past. But the other thing that you can do is when you take that phrase and you plug it into Google, scroll all the way to the bottom, and there’s a place where it says, “Related phrases.” Those are things that Google also recognizes that people are searching for. It doesn’t tell you numbers or how many people are searching for them but there’s a good chance that if you were to take those and put them into the article and sprinkle them around, you’re also going to pick up additional SEO benefit and additional traffic by using those phrases and it’s going to end up in front of more people.
Rob: SEO is such a–it’s a large and ever more complex subject than eight years ago, we could probably give you the five things you have to do to rank. These days, the list is just longer and longer and it’s more complicated. I don’t think we can do a full treatment of, “How to SEO your blog post or your e-books.” It’s probably, not only an entire podcast, but at this point, probably an entire e-book or book. You need a way to get it down.
But another tactic is to crosslink from other posts you have or other resources or other websites you have because obviously, while links are slightly less valuable than they used to be, you could just build links in the old days and rank for everything, links are still very valuable especially from authority sites. If you have control of an authority site or authority sites, you can crosslink from relevant posts or relevant sites and help that new content rank higher in Google.
Mike: Previously, you had mentioned that you can create a short video and post it on various social media sites, you can also use the video there to embed into the website itself just to give people the top of a brief intro to what they’re going to be reading about. The nice benefit is that when people are doing searches inside of Google, they have a tendency to show videos very, very high up in the list because most people aren’t creating videos that they’re using directly for content. They’re really trying to push people in that direction. I do see a lot of videos get posted or show up in the search results even though I’m not personally looking specifically for videos, but there is a significant benefit that I’ve seen for posts that included video in them.
Rob: Of course, they’re submitting to the–there are social platforms, there is Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, even Digg, although I’m not sure that’s worth doing at this point. You and I were just looking at it before this episode, but those are the things and that whole list shifts based on what your content is and who your content is. You can also do paid promotion on StumbleUpon, Outbrain, LinkWithin, Tabula, they’re often lower quality and they’re more consumer-oriented and its people just kind of skipping from one thing to the next, so if you’re a true B2B enterprise SaaS, it’s probably not worth doing any of these. I would look more at LinkedIn paid promotion or something like that. But there’s this whole world of both these social new platform, social discovery platforms, and these kinds of paid ways to get in front of them. Getting on those, if you can get a backlink, if you can get voted up, it will help in the short-term with the social media bump because more people know about it, but then in the longer term, it’s going to link back to you.
With that, I think we’re wrapped up for the day.
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Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us. The podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs be awesome at building, launching, and growing software products whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: I’m Rob. You know, I’ve been thinking about my next act for a while.
Mike: Have you now?
Rob: I have.
Mike: Is this where people start cashing in on the pool?
Rob: Totally, yeah. What is Rob’s next startup going to be, right? This has been a question for a while.
Mike: I think it was my timing, actually. Not just what it was going to be.
Rob: Oh, was it?
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Because Rob said I’m never going to do this again. Who put money on never? I think…
Mike: Probably nobody.
Rob: …no one. My wife definitely did not put money on never. Well, my next act is not a startup. It is an accelerator for bootstrappers. It’s actually a small fund and an accelerator for bootstrappers. It’s called TinySeed. You can check more info at tinyseedfund.com. But it’s really the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers, so startup accelerators is something like Y Combinator, TechStars, and as you and I have talked many times, those are geared around people who have these unicorn ideas, who are going to move to a location for three months, work the 80 hours for little pay and little sleep, and that doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest of us. I mean, the name of our podcast is Startups For The Rest of Us, right? You did this after Y Combinator came out.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: That’s what this accelerator is. It’s designed for folks like you, me, listeners of the podcast, attendees of MicroConf–kind of the people in our ecosystem and our community where building $1 million SaaS app, $5 million, $10 million annual SaaS app, is actually quite lucrative and there are so few funding sources for folks like us. The idea is, to put more money where my mouth has been for the past several years.
I’ve made a dozen angel investments, half of those have been in these businesses that only want to raise a single round of funding. Often $100,000, $250,000, maybe $400,000, whatever some small-ish amount, and then they want to get to profitability and never do that institutional money. The idea is, we know a lot of founders, I know a lot of founders, who are somewhere between idea and $10k a month MRR–is the sweet spot. Because most of these folks are unable to work full-time on their business and that’s kind of the value prop of TinySeed is it gives you runway for a year.
It basically provides you with a small amount of capital but it’s going to be enough capital to basically live on for a year and keep you from having the nights and weekends stuff, to be able to focus full-time, and you don’t have to relocate so it’s remote. It’s going to be in a cohort model […] maybe it’s 10 in the first cohort, and weekly Zoom calls, and I’m assuming like a Slack or chat group, and then weekly office hours. Basically, all the things you hear about in an accelerator except that it’s designed for us, by us; it is remote and it’s just another option.
I think the other thing is, it’s longer term. You and I both know, I don’t think we could’ve built and launched Drip or Bluetick in three months. It’s just not long enough. The idea is to get longer runway to get more traction and since people are remote, it winds up being easier. Because Y Combinator couldn’t be a one-year thing because you’re not going to relocate to a place for a year. There’re different elements to it but that’s the basic gist.
Mike: We’ll have to talk about it. I almost think that we might want to talk about it for either longer period of time and it’s part of a direct episode on funding. I think there’s different ways that it could work. Obviously, you guys have to talk internally about what you are going to publicly disclose now versus things that you’re just talking about or ruminated on for ideas. But I do think we should definitely revisit it as a part of a longer discussion topic as part of Startups For The Rest Of Us.
Rob: Yeah, that sounds like fun. I would say, at this point, we’re about probably 80% locked down on terms and ideas, and curriculum and thoughts, and all that. But definitely more than happy to talk about it. The wee of it is, myself and Einar Volsett, who has been at MicroConf many times, he’s a YC Y Combinator alum, he’s had a couple of exits, and right now, he’s a Micro-Cap M&A advisor, which I think, he’s like a scout for private equities; he works with private equity companies. But you know him. I think you’ve talked a bunch of times.
Mike: Yeah. I’ve had dinner with him a couple of times at MicroConf. He’s a super sharp guy. He used to teach at Cornell, I think.
Rob: Yeah, he was a CS Professor at Cornell for a couple of years.
Mike: Right. He’s got a Ph.D. in computer science but he also knows a lot about the business side of things. What was the startup that he ran? It was inbox spelled backwards, it’s xobni, something like that?
Rob: It wasn’t xobni, it was something else. There was one called AppAftercare which he exited in 2016.
Mike: Oh, ReMail
Rob: Yep, ReMail, that was it. Y Combinator and it was acquired by Google in 2010. He has some experience and that’s where he has more of the fundraising and the private equity venture capital, more knowledge of that and the terms, so he’s good at figuring out models and running IRR calculations. If you don’t know what those are, you don’t need to unless you’re going to run a fund but that’s one of the reasons that I’ve never wanted to get into this is I didn’t want to do all that side of things.
Mike: Well, like I said, it will definitely be interesting to see how this plays out. I think that you guys are the first ones that are doing this in this particular space. We used to talk about why Y Combinator was aimed at people who are just going straight for funding versus like, “Hey, let me build a product. Let me get a little bit of traction for it and then go out for some funding, but I still want to not have to grow it into his giant thing.”
Rob: That’s right. I, of course, did a bunch of market research on accelerators and incubators and remote accelerators, they’re really–you can find a list of remote accelerators, but almost of them, they’re rather defunct now or it’s like a remote accelerator tied to like a city government launch or a university and it just kind of feels like a ghost town. No one has nailed this model. That of course could be a risk if you have no competition. Are you first or is it not going to work? Are you going down a wrong path? That’s always the question but I personally believe I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think that it was going to work.
Mike: I think every single entrepreneur […] of doing business. If I’m first, it’s like I’m seeing things that other people aren’t seeing. But it’s one of those things that you have to let it play out to find out whether history will remember you for being right or wrong.
Rob: Absolutely. That’s the game of being a founder, I think. If you’re listening to this and you’re just interested in hearing more whether it’s from the founder side, whether you are experienced, interested in being a mentor, somehow being involved, or just wanting to hear more about it, tinyseedfund.com. There, of course, is an email opt-in form in there. We’ll be communicating with that list as more details come out.
Mike: Awesome. On my end, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to schedule a personal retreat in the very near future just to straighten out where my marketing efforts are going to go for Bluetick. Because I’ve had things all over the place for several months now and I haven’t really had a solid thought on what the direction should be and where, strategically, I should be going with the marketing efforts.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to take that time right now just because my wife teaches on Saturdays, and my son has soccer games on Saturdays. For the next three or four weeks, he’s got those games. It’s just like she can’t be in both places at the same time, so I kind of have to wait, push off on that a little bit, but that is on my short-term road map, I’ll say.
Rob: That’s always a good idea. Frankly, since I started doing retreats, there always comes this time where you just don’t know what to do next, you don’t know what to try next, and you need some distance in order to do that. Because if you sit around at your laptop, at your home office, you’re just going to write code, you’re going to respond to fires and support requests and all that stuff and getting away for a couple of days–super valuable.
Do you have Sherry’s retreat guide, The Zen Founder Guide to Founder Retreats?
Mike: I’m not sure. I think I might. I’m not sure if I have it or not.
Rob: It’s just a very good guide to revisit. Every time I go on a retreat, I’d pull it up. If you’re listening to this, haven’t heard of it, go to zenfounder.com. I think there’s a products link in there. It’s $19 or something and it’s 30, 40-page e-book, in essence, but it’s kind of everything. Because Sherry introduced me to Founder Retreats and I talked about it on this podcast and it’s kind of spread from there which I think is a great thing. I’ve always found them so valuable. Sherry put together the guide and had me add as much as fill-in-the-gaps basically on it, and so it’s really, in my opinion, kind of the definitive guide for things you should think about as you go into your retreat.
I hope you’re able to do that soon. It’s a bummer to have schedule be the issue. Is there a way—just to throw out ideas—like he has soccer game on Saturday, could you leave Saturday evening and come back, basically 48 hours, come back Monday evening or Monday afternoon before the kids get home from school?
Mike: Probably. Last week was a holiday so I could not have done it that week. Then this coming week, I can’t leave on Saturday night because we’re basically going out to dinner for our wedding anniversary to celebrate that. Then the following week I leave for MicroConf.
Rob: You just cancel.
Mike: Oh, yeah. Sure. I’ll just cancel that.
Rob: Oh, for Pete’s sake.
Mike: I’ll cancel either our anniversary dinner or MicroConf. One or the other. It’s going to be several weeks no matter what at this point. There’s no way around it, I think.
Rob: I have a great idea. Do your retreat in Croatia. Just extend your trip a couple of extra days. Be like, “Hey, Ally, I’ll be back. Peace out. Have fun with the kids. I’ll be back.”
Mike: If I were leaving early, I can’t though. Just because she teaches during the week […] like Sundays.
Rob: I’m joking.
Mike: I know.
Rob: Yeah, man. It’s hard. I totally get it.
Mike: Oh, well, moving on. I guess we’re going to move on to our actual topic for today. We’re going to talk about content promotion tactics.
Rob: I am digging it. We’re revisiting a topic that we covered in 2010.
Mike: Yes. This is a little bit from episode six. In episode six, it was all about how to get traffic to your website. I went back, and I took a look at that, some of the links that we had in there like seobuilding.com just totally defunct at this point. You can buy that domain if you’re really interested for like $3500. If anyone’s interested…
Rob: You’ll at least be getting graphic from us at this point. No, not some of the links, Mike. I think, 40% of the links that we listed, and the approaches are just completely, they either don’t work anymore, they’re just gone, but this was eight years ago. It’s an eternity.
Mike: Yes. But I went back, and I looked at it. I was kind of inspired by, I was reading the SaaS mag article that’s put out by FE International. They launched it at MicroConf. You can go to saasmag.com, we’ll link that up in the show notes, and sign-up, and start getting issues of that. It’s aimed at SaaS founders. It talks about various things that are related to the industry and they interview experts from different fields on what they’re doing and kind of what the future looks like, and how they got to where they are, etc.
Most recent one I saw has interviews from Patrick Campbell from Price Intelligently, Brennan Dunn from Double Your Freelancing and RightMessage, also David Cancel from Drip. There’s a bunch of different people they’ve interviewed. But on one of the pages they had, it was kind of a poll that they have taken inside of a Facebook group called SaaS Growth Hacks. They asked the question, “What are the best marketing channels for SaaS companies?” and people voted on different things. Content, by far, was the highest voted thing. Below that you have forums, and Quora posts–answering questions there, and then cold email, and paid ads ranks about the same. Then below that was partnerships, word-of-mouth. Below that, free tools, and then the last couple of ones on the list were Twitter, conferences, and LinkedIn messaging.
The way that that shook out does not necessarily surprise me, but the fact the content was still so far up above, I felt like that was a little surprising.
Rob: I find that really interesting too, actually. I think, as you mentioned, it’s from basically marketers, so whether it’s founders or growth marketers or whatever, it’s what they are doing these days. I wonder if they’re doing these because they’re measuring, and it works or they’re doing it because this is kind of the current wave. The current mindset is, content is king, and it’s the thing that you should start with.
I don’t know that that’s worth even diving into, going down that rabbit trail. But it is something that comes to mind is, is there a group thing going on and zigging when everyone else is zagging, is the best way to go or is this really right now with social and the fact email marketing is so powerful in with the SEO benefits of content that content really is where it’s at and that’s why everyone’s there.
Mike: I think it’s partially because of the fact that with content, you can create an article through your website and it’s going to continue drawing traffic in versus if you do cold calling or a joint venture with somebody, I call them one-off activities even though you can do them repeatedly, but you don’t continue to reap rewards if you’re not picking-up the phone and cold calling, for example. You have to keep doing it versus if you go through the effort to creating an article, put it on your site, and you do well enough with the SEO, you will continue to get traffic much further down the road. You can also promote that piece of content multiple times.
It’s not about that content is king so much as this that content is reusable and it allows you to put it in front of people, not just multiple times, but put it in front of new people because you’re creating this asset of some kind that other people could find useful. You can’t really point somebody to an empty page on your website and expect that it’s going to continue to drive clicks.
Rob: Right. That’s the thing. We’ve talked in the past about how if you’re in super early stage, you’ve pre-product market fit or pre-product then content’s probably not the right play for you because content is a long game. But once you’ve found your audience, your product is something people want, and you’re scaling, that’s when I think, in general, content is going to be a really good play for you to get you that 5K or 10K MRR that you’ve just scratched and clawed and manually done maybe cold email, whatever it is to get your first 100 customers. But once you want to go from there, I think you need more scalable things and content is one of those avenues, and that’s why we’re talking about it today.
Mike: I think what we’re going to focus on is, we have a couple of resources that we’ll link to in the show notes. One if from orbitmedia.com and the other one is from neilpattel.com. one of the things that this really points to is the fact that when you are promoting content there are three essential pieces or channels you can look at. There’s SEO, then there’s sending out emails to drive people on your mailing list back to your site, and there’s social sharing. Where those intersect is you can promote your content into each of those places but depending on what your needs are, you’re going to put more effort into one versus the other.
The whole idea of this is, if you do it through social media, you’re going to try and get additional shares or followers. If you’re trying to get additional subscriptions to your mailing list, it’s going to help you grow your list for email marketing. If a visitor comes in and they link to your content from someplace else, you’re going to rank higher in search engines. The idea is to create this feedback loop, of you doing all of those three things in order to amplify your traffic and from that, you essentially end up with leads on the other side of it. It’s really just an engine that you’re creating.
If you have a ton of people on your mailing list, you can start asking them in trying to help promote on other things. You can say, “Hey, can you promote this on social media?” You can leverage them back and forth between each other to amplify the entire system.
Rob: Content does have this unique advantage which is one of the reasons that marketers like it so much is, it really has this trifecta of value that it brings, these three uses. I’ll step to another example; let’s say I’m running Facebook ads and I’m getting that to work. Facebook ads send typically cold traffic to a page, you might get trial sign-ups, you might have to retarget them, you might have to get them on an email list, but those ads you’re paying for—and they really have one purpose—and it’s to drive some traffic one time.
Content on the other hand has three uses, maybe it has more, but the three main ones that I’ve seen, and I’ve used, and it worked really well. The first one is social media. It’s getting that buzz because you put out a new article or essay or e-book or video or whatever, but you get people to talk about you on Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook or wherever else your folks reside, and you can get that quick social media bump of, “Hey, everyone’s talking about this cool new thing that came out.” Then it dies down and that would be one use.
But another use for this exact same content is you email your whole list. That can help with the social media aspect. It helps if more people know about it then more people talk about. But it gives you an excuse to contact your email list. Every time you contact your email list, you’re probably going to get more trials, more interests in your product.
The third use is this long play of SEO. If you put out good content and it hits the right keywords, and you do have links back or you have social shares that are pointing back, it rises in the ranks. Long-term, people searching for these terms in Google, come back to it.
I haven’t given it a ton of thought, but I don’t know, off hand, of another marketing approach that has that many solid benefits, this super short-term bump, the email list bump, and then the long-term paly of SEO. I believe it’s pretty unique in that respect.
Mike: Let’s dive into the first section which is social media. What we’re going to do is we’re going to throw in, just very briefly, highlight some of the different tactics that are listed on a couple of these reference articles that we pointed to earlier.
The first one is to mention people who are going to like your article, they liked the content of it or directly reference people who are quoted in the article. One example of how well this would work is if you’ve interviewed somebody and they are relatively high-profile in the industry that you serve, for example. If you’ve mentioned them in the social media posts, they are more likely to share it than if you were to email them directly and then say, “Hey, can you tweet this out for me?” Because then you’re asking them, “Hey, can you create a tweet and then post this?” versus they see it in their social media feed and they can just literally hit retweet and they don’t have to do any work. It’s just a matter of what your ask is of them.
If I see something where it has referenced me for example and I’ve commented on an article or was on a podcast, I’m almost certain to retweet that and like it just to give it more of a visibility.
Rob: That’s a nice tactic. I’ve definitely seen that. At a minimum, I’m going to like something if I click through and it’s like, “Oh, yeah. That was that quote I gave you two months ago.” Then like you said, if it’s a legit post, because sometimes you’ll get asked for a quote or a comment on, what’s the hardest thing about validating product or what are the market approaches that are working today or whatever, and they’re doing an expert roundup and I’m just cool to participate in those. Some of them are really, really good and really well put together and others are kind of someone doing a halfway job or maybe they’re new or whatever. But the best ones, when I get a mention like that, it’s pretty certain I’m going to click through and then based on the quality of it, decent likelihood that I will retweet that.
Mike: Another one is to tweet quotes from the content. The nice things about this is you can create multiple tweets and schedule them using Buffer, a variety of other tools, and get them out there in such a way that you’re not repeating yourself. Different quotes are going to attract different types of people. There’s a quote about, I don’t know, a search engine marketing for example, you could put that in there, and then there could be something else which is optimizing search engine marketing. One is very broad and then the other one is a little bit more specific, depending on the person who sees it, if they’re more interested in one or the other, they’re going to click on it.
Rob: Another approach is you’re not just going to tweet this once especially if it’s a big piece of content because the longer form, frankly, more expensive, whether it’s time-expense or actual cost in paying someone to build it. The longer form more expensive pieces of content are the ones that are winning today and the ones that are getting the tweets. You’re not just going to tweet this once and be done. A good strategy is to tweet it once and then schedule some near future and distant future tweets because, if you think about it, in three months, the buzz from this e-book or audio piece or whatever, blog post, will have died off but it’s probably still relevant and valuable. It’s something not to bother people with but to bring back up and remind them, “Hey, this is still is valuable and legitimate.” Obviously, even within the first week, I forgot what the number is, but isn’t it like 5% of your followers see any of your individual tweets?
Mike: That’s not a per day basis, I think.
Rob: Yeah. One approach is to, as we’ve said in the past, kind of have a once a day tweet this out for the first three, four, five days, so that people more people see it especially if it’s a really big piece of content. It can be worth it. You can also irritate people and they’ll unfollow you if you’re just spamming them with the same links over and over. You have to use your head here, like any other strategy, but this is definitely something I’ve seen marketers are doing.
Mike: It’s offshoot is that is to share a short video on Twitter, Facebook, whether it’s Facebook groups or one of your Facebook page or inside of LinkedIn. The idea of the short video is to more or less give a very quick overview or summary of what the piece of content you have is not to talk about the entire content. It’s not that you’re trying to drive people to watch the video. What you’re really just trying to do is help get those people who prefer a different medium. Some people like to skim things and read it, and then there’s people out there who like to watch a video. But you also don’t want to overwhelm them with, “Oh, I just popped on to Twitter and I’m expecting to be here for a couple of minutes.” They’re not going to have time for a 30-minute video. But they may sit down and watch a 30-second video or a 15-second video that just talks about like, “Hey, if you’re interested in this, come over and check it out.” You just want to be sensitive to the fact that some people like to consume that information in different formats. The other nice benefit of sharing it like that is that you tend to get the videos will be shared on Twitter, on Facebook, and LinkedIn as your face and there’s a very different type of algorithms that those companies use in order to highlight those types of posts.
Rob: Another approach is to syndicate your content on LinkedIn, Medium, and other avenues. Syndication is just a fancy word for either reposted there or taking excerpt from it and repost there. You can imagine if you’ve written this 100-page e-book, the definitive guide to social media marketing or email marketing or whatever, you don’t post that whole thing on LinkedIn. But maybe you take, because you can put LinkedIn kind of blog post-ish, you take a really great 1000-words from that, and you post it on LinkedIn and then you link out the book.
You can do same with Medium although you can go longer form there. You can post an entire chapter from that book, so maybe you do 5000, 3000, 5000-words on Medium. Again, say, “This is an excerpt from this book.” Or if it’s a video, maybe you’d do a transcript part of.
These are ways that if you have built a following, or if you think that those networks with be intrigued by the title and the content and stuff, then reusing this content is a nice way to reuse that effort because if you spent a month or two writing this e-book or making this amazing tutorial video or whatever, you want to get it out in as many forms as possible. That’s what syndication is.
Mike: The next section we’re going to talk about is email marketing. Many of these, I think, are probably going to be pretty familiar to most people listening to this, but we’re going to go through them anyway because this is kind of a major section of the, as Rob talked about the trifecta here of content marketing.
The first one is sending out the links to it through your email list. One thing you definitely want to make sure that you’re doing here is you’re putting calls to action in there. I have mixed feeling on whether or not you should post the entire piece of content in the email versus having it on your website. Because there’s advantages and disadvantages to both. I think you just need to make a judgement call about whether you want it on your website where people can go to it versus, you’re just trying to make sure that you get it in front of people on your email list. If it’s something that you want exclusively for people on your mailing list, obviously, you’d put it in there. But people also have a somewhat limited attention span if it comes to something in their email. I do think it’s worth being cautious and making some measurements around, “Are people actually reading that and then taking action on it?” But again, that’s a judgement call.
Rob: Yeah. My default rule of thumb for this is if you’re doing personal brand stuff, if it’s Patrick Mackenzie or Brennan Dunn or Rob Walling blogging, and then sending it to their list, it’s probably fine if you post the entire article in the email. Because people are engaged with you and the content is really gripping and they tend to want to—or hopefully, it’s really gripping—and they tend to want to read the whole thing and they could read it on their phone or whatever. That’s my general rule.
If you’re doing it as a business, when Dripping was sending it out or if Bluetick were sending out a post, I would probably do a teaser and a really snazzy excerpt with an image, and then say, “Click through to read the full thing.” Some people will click, and some people won’t, but it will get you traffic. The end goal there is to get traffic to your site. Hopefully, get people to share it from there, and sign-up for a trial or whatever.
Again, that’s my general rule, how I link. But I think you can certainly break those rules if you know your audience better or as you said, if you look at the numbers, it’s telling you that that’s not the best way to do it.
Mike: If you had an email course for example, a lot of times you’re going to put the course directly in the email, and you may not want that course directly on your website. You may want to reserve it just for people on your mailing list, and maybe that’s because they don’t get to the mailing list until there’s certain amount of trust gained, or maybe the purpose of that email sequence is to establish trust, and then you send them shorter emails later on with the links back to the articles. But again, as you said, there’s lots of different ways to do it.
Rob: Right. This particular point, of whether to include all the content in an email, is really only relevant for probably blog posts because if you’re putting out an e-book it’s going to be too long. If you’re putting out a video course or one video, you can’t embed that in email, you can certainly embed an image that links out somewhere. If you create any kind of downloadable content, you’re not going to be able to put that in email anyways. It’s only if you’re doing kind of the blog content engine or short essays.
Mike: As kind of an addendum to this, you can send out, “In case you missed it,” follow-up emails. Obviously, you can put those directly into the email campaigns and it works really well because I’ve seen Drip actually put this in their directive and specifically for that reason. But you get anywhere from 20%-40% lift in opens just by resending an email with a different subject line for the exact same emails. If somebody didn’t open it, you basically resend them that email.
Rob: We did that. It’s quite successful. Another tactic you can do is, let’s say you’ve put out three blog posts a week, you can recap either at the end of the week or at the end of the month, and just have a separate email that you pull up, “Hey, in case you missed it, here are all the posts from the past week or the month,” or, “Here are our top picks or the most popular five from the past month.” and it’s just one more way to reach out to the audience, provide them with additional content, and you didn’t have to produce that content. It’s just linking back to stuff that they’ve probably missed because they probably didn’t read every article.
Mike: Next on the list is you can also send those notifications directly to some of your high-value contacts. You can either do this as personal emails instead of broadcast emails or you can find people that are on your list, who may not necessarily be subscribed to a particular campaign or they’re tagged in a certain way or segmented somehow and you say, “Hey, I think that these people would be really great candidate to receive this particular piece of content.” Maybe it they opted-in to a particular lead magnet, then you would send the content to them. But it’s really about being a lot more targeted about who you’re sending it to.
Again, this is where personal emails to people can really shine just because if they do see an email coming in and it’s from your company versus from you personally, they’re probably a little less likely to treat it as, “Hey, this person took the time to really reach out to me, so I’m going to pay a little bit more attention to it.” But sometimes the emails that are coming in from a general newsletter email address, sometimes people have rules or filters set-up so that they go into a certain place. By sending it directly, a lot of times, it will bypass those defaults because they just didn’t think to set them up.
Rob: There are 50 content promotion ideas in the Orbit Media post alone, but another one that you pulled out is to notify your source of a new post. I think this is similar to doing it on social media but emailing people directly, “Hey, do you remember the article where I interviewed you for? That’s live. If you’d like to share it, it’d be great. Here’s a link.” Or, if there’s 10 people because it’s a roundup, you do the same thing. You notify them all and certainly a few people will likely help promote that for you.
Mike: If you give them a short snippet or a summary, you can also ask them to promote it to their own email list, and then you’re essentially amplifying the efforts there.
Rob: Let’s dive into SEO.
Mike: When you’re looking at SEO, obviously, what you want to do is you want to align the content of those posts with key phrases that you have pulled out after doing some keyword research. There’s a lot of different tools that you can use for that. We’ve talked about them in the past. But the other thing that you can do is when you take that phrase and you plug it into Google, scroll all the way to the bottom, and there’s a place where it says, “Related phrases.” Those are things that Google also recognizes that people are searching for. It doesn’t tell you numbers or how many people are searching for them but there’s a good chance that if you were to take those and put them into the article and sprinkle them around, you’re also going to pick up additional SEO benefit and additional traffic by using those phrases and it’s going to end up in front of more people.
Rob: SEO is such a–it’s a large and ever more complex subject than eight years ago, we could probably give you the five things you have to do to rank. These days, the list is just longer and longer and it’s more complicated. I don’t think we can do a full treatment of, “How to SEO your blog post or your e-books.” It’s probably, not only an entire podcast, but at this point, probably an entire e-book or book. You need a way to get it down.
But another tactic is to crosslink from other posts you have or other resources or other websites you have because obviously, while links are slightly less valuable than they used to be, you could just build links in the old days and rank for everything, links are still very valuable especially from authority sites. If you have control of an authority site or authority sites, you can crosslink from relevant posts or relevant sites and help that new content rank higher in Google.
Mike: Previously, you had mentioned that you can create a short video and post it on various social media sites, you can also use the video there to embed into the website itself just to give people the top of a brief intro to what they’re going to be reading about. The nice benefit is that when people are doing searches inside of Google, they have a tendency to show videos very, very high up in the list because most people aren’t creating videos that they’re using directly for content. They’re really trying to push people in that direction. I do see a lot of videos get posted or show up in the search results even though I’m not personally looking specifically for videos, but there is a significant benefit that I’ve seen for posts that included video in them.
Rob: Of course, they’re submitting to the–there are social platforms, there is Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, even Digg, although I’m not sure that’s worth doing at this point. You and I were just looking at it before this episode, but those are the things and that whole list shifts based on what your content is and who your content is. You can also do paid promotion on StumbleUpon, Outbrain, LinkWithin, Tabula, they’re often lower quality and they’re more consumer-oriented and its people just kind of skipping from one thing to the next, so if you’re a true B2B enterprise SaaS, it’s probably not worth doing any of these. I would look more at LinkedIn paid promotion or something like that. But there’s this whole world of both these social new platform, social discovery platforms, and these kinds of paid ways to get in front of them. Getting on those, if you can get a backlink, if you can get voted up, it will help in the short-term with the social media bump because more people know about it, but then in the longer term, it’s going to link back to you.
With that, I think we’re wrapped up for the day.
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