/
RSS Feed
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.
If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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.
If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 413 | How Lucidchart Grew to 13 Million Users with Freemium
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about how Lucidchart grew to 13 million users with freemium. They point out effective ways to use freemium, viral loops, horizontal markets, and how you could incorporate some of these things in your bootstrapped startup.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and I talk about how Lucidchart grew to 13 million users using the freemium model. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us 413.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. To where this week, sir?
Mike: Did you happen to see the announcement that FogBugz/Manuscript was being acquired by DevFactory?
Rob: I got an email out of the blue and was completely shocked by that. I shouldn’t be, right? Fog Creek, for those who don’t know, was founded by Joel Spolsky and Mike Pryor back in, I believe, it was 2000 or 2001. Joel was probably the first blogger I ever read. He had so many insights about how to start software company and how to project-manage and all that stuff that I was really enthralled by him. And then he launched FogBugz but then they went into Stack Overflow and Trello and all this other stuff. I was always like, “This is crazy. They’ve had a lot of successes.”
Mike: They also had a CityDesk which was their blogging tool, I don’t think that it ever really went anywhere. I think they got it to version 2.
Rob: Content management. It was a website content management territory, but it was desktop, right as the switch to SaaS was happening.
Mike: I think it was before WordPress came out or just about the same time. But it was published through the website, so everything was all straight HTML. I think they had an internal beta version that Joel was still using for a while, it was like version 3-A or something like that that just never got out there publicly. I find it interesting that they decided to sell that business to an outside company just because the way that they’ve kind of run the business, it’s odd.
Rob: Yeah, it’s definitely unexpected. I don’t know what else I expected though. I mean, it’s freaking 17 years later–these things don’t last forever. I remember when Joel stepped down as CEO of Fog Creek, I was like, “Oh my gosh!” but it’s like, “Well, of course, he’s going to do Stack Overflow.” I believe Mike Pryor stepped up at that point and then Mike Pryor went up to be CEO of Trello once that took off. They really used it as an incubator–Fog Creek itself. It’s no surprise that they had the third CEO and it’s running Fog Creek. I don’t even know who’s running FogBugz.
I don’t even know if Fog Creek still owns anything else. Do they or is the company just going to shut down? Because they sold Trello, Stack Overflow is its own entity at this point, they haven’t used Fog Creek developers for years. Probably 10 years at this point. Manuscript is the only thing I know that they still had.
Mike: No, they still have Glitch.
Rob: What is that?
Mike: I don’t even know because they’ve been working on it for three, four years at this point, and I still don’t understand what it actually is, which it seems like it’s some sort of a programming framework without the programming. I don’t really understand it, to be perfectly honest. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I don’t know, I don’t know what to tell you about that.
Rob: I just googled Fog Creek Glitch and it says, “Fog Creek is renaming itself to Glitch. We’ve been thrilled to see the community embrace Glitch as the home for creating and discovering the coolest stuff on the web.” It sounds like Reddit. I’m confused at this point. I just haven’t followed this story. Fog Creek has been basically, a B2B software company–or at least Manuscript, Trello was, and then Stack Overflow was obviously VC-funded. Stack Overflow, I was going to say social network, but it’s more like a question and answer platform.
Yeah, it’s a trip man. I have mad respect for what Mike Pryor and Joel have built. You and I have both met them in person at BOS. I’ve had multiple conversations with them. These are smart, ethical-driven software developers who have done a lot I think for both the people that they’ve hired, but also in sharing their knowledge and building the tools. I have nothing but respect for these guys. The amount of success they’ve had, when you say, “Yeah, the same people that started Stack Overflow also started Trello and started this other seven or eight-figure company called FogBugz.” that’s a lot to do in a career.
Mike: I wonder if part of the reason they spun that off was because of the way that they want to run the business and the way that they want to treat the developers because I think early on, they had talked a lot about how they wanted to treat everybody—who’s working within the company—with respect and make sure that they participated in the successes of the business.
I remember some blog articles or some discussions on one of the podcasts that they had at one point talk about Stack Overflow, but because Stack Overflow and Trello were both born out of Fog Creek, at some point, they had to split the business. How do you compensate the people who were originally in Fog Creek and were excited and maybe helped out a little bit, but didn’t necessarily go with that team? There was also a question of like somebody had an idea for, I think it was co-pilot at the time, and it ended-up come in like a $1 million line of business for them, ARR. It’s just like, how do you compensate that person for the ideas and stuff that they’ve brought in?
At this point, FogBugz has been running for years, and there’s probably not a huge number of things that they’re going to add to it, I mean they could integrate it with other business processes and things like that, but there’s not a lot of other stuff they could do with it. It’s really just kind of the cash cow for them, but how do you translate that into a financial or monetary success for the people who are currently in the business and may have been there for anywhere up to 10 or 15 years at this point? It’s a private company, so I don’t think they hand out equity. I don’t know.
Rob: I think they did profit sharing, was my recollection. They did hand out dividends because like you just said, it was a pretty profitable company.
Mike: Got it.
Rob: On my end, I just got an email this morning that said, “Stripe is now valued at $20 billion.”
Mike: Oh, is that all?
Rob: Oh, man. Their last round was at $9 billion. I don’t normally follow these funding and valuation stories, but since we basically have had dinner with both the Collison brothers and been on stage with them at MicroConf, I kind of have a vested interest in keeping up with what they’re doing. Bravo to them. I have nothing but respect for those guys.
Mike: That’s an insane number but both of them are super, super smart guys. You stand near them and you just feel dumber.
Rob: Totally. When I’m around them, yeah, I feel dumber, but I feel my IQ points, I gain maybe 5 or 10 just in speaking to them. “Oh, you taught me a new word and a new concept today.”
Mike: “…that I thought I knew for 10 years, but you clearly know it better than me.”
Rob: Yeah, exactly.
Mike: Good for them. I think a lot of our audience probably still uses Stripe.
Rob: Still, what do you mean? Still uses. I wouldn’t go anywhere else, it’s insane to think of going back to the days of Authorize.net and PayPal web payments pro. I guess there’s Braintree now, right?
Mike: That’s what I was going to say. I hear that on a “higher-end” people are migrating to Braintree and, I don’t know if any other options actually other than Stripe and Braintree. But I don’t know anything about Braintree. It’s just interesting to see the ark that they’ve taken over the past, what, eight years or so? It’s just crazy how much they’ve grown and the things that they do are quite honestly, for the entrepreneurial community, they have enabled the vast majority of us to be able to do what we do. Without Stripe, most of the businesses that are out there just would not exist.
Rob: Or it’d be lot harder to get them off the ground. I remember trying to get an Authorize.net account and it just took weeks of literally sending stuff on paper and faxing it back and forth. This was only maybe six years ago, seven years–it wasn’t that long, and I’m not talking 2005. It was just insane to me that a) how are we not doing this online or at least e-signing things? But I literally was just printing out this 30-page document. It was such a nightmare. I’m glad Stripe came on the scene.
Mike: I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of weeks rebuilding and migrating some of my infrastructure in order to cut costs. I’ve doubled the number of servers. I’ve gone from two servers to four and I’ve reduced the costs of them by out 75% which is odd. I have everything hosted on Azure and they have these things called burstable virtual machines. Basically, if they are running below a certain threshold in terms of process or usage, then you pay basically, a discounted rate for it and you are gaining credits at that point. If you are using more than that percentage then you’re basically burning into your credits
I think they had maxed out the CPU with that but basically, I just paid less for this machine or these machines because I’m not using them all day every day. It’s like there are certain times a day where I need more processing power and rest of the time I just don’t need it. It’s nice to be able to have moved over to those types of servers and save a fair chunk of change. But I needed to split up my infrastructure anyway because I didn’t like having everything on just two servers.
Rob: That makes sense. It’s nice to put a few more bucks in your pocket.
Mike: Yeah. I pushed off on that division for probably about a year or so. It was kind of time to do it.
Rob: Anything else?
Mike: The last thing is, this is totally random but there’s a website that I stumbled across when I was trying to do calculations for my Dungeons and Dragons game, to kind of optimize my character. If you’re into figuring out probabilities on different dice rolls, you can head over to anydice.com. It will basically allow you to write functions that will essentially simulate what the dice rolls are, and then it will show you the percentages and distributions, and you can see crafts and stuff like that of exactly what those distributions look like.
You can say how many attacks or if you have advantage or disadvantage on different attacks or damage rolls or things like that then it will show you what those numbers look like and what’s your average rolls would be.
It’s pretty cool. You can probably spend a whole ton of time on it, but they do have some documentation there and some ready-built functions you just pull, and copy paste into the editor.
Rob: I see what you did there, Mike. Do you realize you started that segment off, you said, “This is totally random.” But any dice stuck. You can’t […] by me, man. Really bad puns. Alright. Cool.
Let’s dive into what we’re talking about today. It’s an article on a blog of freshworks.com. They have a sales CRM , it’s that section or that category of the blog, but the article is titled, “How Lucidchart Grew to 13 million Users on a land-and-expand Strategy.” I want to talk a little bit about the virality and the freemium part of it. It’s an interesting interview with, I believe, is the SVP of Sales and Customer Success of Lucidchart.
If you haven’t heard of Lucidchart, it is a Software as a Service with a freemium model, they have 13 million users and it is like Visio–it is how I think of it. It’s a diagram solution where you can create diagrams and share them and then collaborate on them. Is that an accurate description, Mike? You said you’ve used it.
Mike: Yeah. That’s probably pretty accurate. I think Visio seems like they started out much more for data modelling within a programming environment. But Vision also has a lot of different icons and stuff that you can put in there for like network map layouts and office maps layouts and stuff like that. You can use it for other things like org charts and stuff like that, but I think originally, it seemed like it started out as part of the MSDN suite, you get a few sign-ups for that, and it was primarily a programming tool.
Rob: Right. And it expanded into other things. Lucidchart, looks like it was started around 2010, 2011 and they raised $1 million in funding which you would need if you’re going to do freemium model, and then three years later they raised $5 million, and then two years after that—in 2016—they raised $36 million. I can imagine they probably hit a hockey stick moment where the user growth justified raising–because you raise that much money, you want to have really high valuation, so you don’t give away most of your company.
They said that 96% of Fortune 500 companies use it. They have customers at Google, Amazon, Cisco, and Intel, and they receive around 500,000 sign-ups every month. It’s a free tool, right? It’s free, no credit card, if I recall. That’s still a big number though. A nice horizontal market that these guys are in. They’ve obviously achieved success–13 million users is a ton of people; it’s a ton of people to support, it’s a ton of people just to have your software running.
I wish that they’d told us how many paying users or how many paying accounts because that’s really what I’m interested in. I’m interested to know if they are even profitable on revenue, above the amount of just sheer volume because they must have hundreds of employees, and I would like to know that. But all that said, what I want to talk about today is really the freemium and the viral one and they have some stuff about sales as well.
Mike: I’m sure their competitors would love to know how much money they’re making too.
Rob: Yeah, totally. I know. It’ll come out at some point. They’ll wind up talking about it.
Mike: Alright. Why don’t we dive right in then?
Rob: Sure. The first question for Dan Cook, which is the SVP of Sales, the interviewer asks him, “It runs on a freemium model, how do you pitch the product, and how do you scale it to an enterprise model?” His response is, “The freemium gives them an advantage because they have this—this is where the land-and-expand comes in within a company—they get employees within a company using the product and then they share it with other people in the company to collaborate and then they set-up accounts, so there’s a freemium plus virality there. The reason they sign-up for it is a) it’s free and b) because it’s a good tool.
In the early days it was good enough. It was not a great tool but as it developed, I bet these days, it is best in class or is becoming then. He said that, basically, they can have 15 or 20 paid or free users of Lucidchart within a company. Then they leverage that fact to say, “Alright, IT department, here’s a value proposition for you.” This is a similar model to other tools. Slack, I’ve heard them talk about this a lot. That one small development team within a huge org would start using it and of course, you have to invite other people for it to have any value. Once you have 10, 20, 30 users, IT Departments and frankly, CTOs and CIOs want to have control of that kind of stuff. It’s an interesting dual use of that freemium plus virality.
Mike: Yeah, I’ve seen that at a much, much smaller scale in Bluetick where somebody will sign-up for Bluetick and one of the earlier objections I’ve heard from somebody was like, “Oh, well. I wanted to sign-up for it but then I would have had to go to my boss and get his credit card.” That freemium model, even just the 14-day trial that I had or that I added in after talking to that customer, it allows them to sign-up for it without having to go to their boss and justify like, “Hey, I need the corporate credit card and it’s going to cost this much money.” Because in the enterprise environment, they’re probably going to not only have to go to their boss, but then their boss is going to have to justify it to somebody else.
Nobody really knows if it’s going to work. If they just start using it, in a freemium model, they can just use it and if it doesn’t work out for them, they just shut it down or just abandon it. If it does then as more people start using it then it becomes more visible. As a result of its success, then Lucidchart can go in and ask them for money for an enterprise license or a small group license within a department or something like that. But it is interesting to see that they seem to have intentionally done that or chosen that strategy.
Rob: Right. I want to point out some things that Lucidchart has or had that listeners to this podcast may not have, and if you don’t have all these things in place, it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible to pull off this strategy that they did–this freemium strategy.
Mike: Do you want to start with the $36 million or…?
Rob: That’s what I was going to say. Funding–that’s the first one. It wasn’t $36 million originally. For the first three years it was $1 million. That’s actually not that much money for three years. You can hire a few people but it’s not like you’re going to hire 20 employees and not bleed that out. But yes, funding was one advantage they had; $1 million in funding. Another $5 million three years later. The fact that they are a very horizontal market much like Trello and Dropbox and Slack, those are three other tools that have used the same approach–this freemium plus viral component.
If you’re in a horizontal market and you can raise enough funding or self-fund this thing to the point where you can provide the service to all the free users, it really can be this fascinating approach. The other thing is they have virality, not every tool has that. I think of a tool like Drip or even a proposal software, invoicing software, there’s a little bit of virality and that you can have a Powered By or a Sent From or a Sent With. But true, deep virality like Trello where–I mean, I use some Trello boards for that other people but there’s a lot of collaboration that goes on there. Slack is all about being viral. You have to invite other people to get any value.
Lucidchart does not need, need, need. You’d have another person to get value, but I would say, that’s probably a big reason that people would use it because it’s so easy to get you charts and collaborate. Of course, Dropbox has it’s all other things. Having virality plus that freemium I think is a big thing that people overlook. Because having freemium on its own without funding, being horizontal, and virality is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Mike: I think this is also a tool that because of what you’re using it for, you’re using it to help communicate, that helps it too. That kind of sets it apart from a lot of other tools. Trello, to some extent, just by inviting people, you get to have them take a look at what it is that you’re working on. But with Lucidchart, you can print those things out, you can embed them into Word document, or even just take screenshots, but by being able to invite people and say, “Hey, this is the process, or this is the workflow that I’m looking at. What do you think? Is this going to work for our team?” That right there—because it’s embedded in the communications—that just inherently makes it even more viral.
Because if people look at the tool and they like it and they want to use it because it’s a lot easier to use than something like Visio, it gives it those additional advantages. It gives people the “aha” moment that they need in order to say, “Yeah. I want to use this too.”
Rob: Another question that he asks this VP of Sales, which I thought was kind of cool, I don’t know, I hadn’t thought that much about it, but he says, “Let’s talk about your value proposition. How does it work when you’re convincing a company to buy the enterprise version? What to the teams and what does the enterprise get out of it? Why don’t they just keep using their individual accounts?” I like that because a) you’re asking why should they upgrade or why should they consolidate? He says, basically, the value to the end-user is that it’s all consolidated and it’s much easier to share among their co-workers. You don’t have to convert diagrams into other formats to be compatible. If everybody starts using it in your company then you don’t have to be like, “Oh, you’re using Visio? I’m using Lucidchart. Let’s convert to this format.” and blah blah blah.
Then to the IT department, the first one is consolidated billing, so there’s only one bill and you know you can negotiate that and manage it. It’s just easier to do it. Also, for training, a lot of big companies especially provide training for their tools. If you have just everybody using one tool, it’s easier. Then secure logins which is fine but the one that really gets them is document retention which is where someone leaves the company, as someone is running that company or running that IT department, you want to have access to everything they did while they were there because you might need to reference that later. If they take individual accounts away with them then you’ll never get that stuff back. It’s not even someone stealing it or taking it away, it kind of goes away. They forget about it or you just don’t have access to it.
That was a big one working at Leadpages and Drip is seeing people leave and being like, “Oh, yeah. There was that one thing that he shared with me and now I don’t have access to it.” It could be kind of a pain. It’s interesting to think—if you’re going to try to pull this off—about what the value prop is that you have to offer for people to upgrade.
Mike: The other interesting piece there that’s in that enterprise group subscription there is the idea that, it’s not just if somebody leaves the company, but what happens if you have to fire somebody. You want to be able to have like this master key that says, “Okay, we’re going to lock you out of everything before we follow through with letting this person go.” and then still have access to all that stuff. There’s that side of it to consider too. I think one and two-person businesses don’t tend to think about that because they just don’t experience it. But the larger companies that they are advertising to or agencies or other small businesses 50-100 people, those companies do think about that and it is important to them.
It’s good to understand that that is a value proposition that you can leverage as a marketing point to those larger companies and say, “Look, this is why you should upgrade or this is why you should buy higher-priced tier because we are including this for your account versus a freelancer account which doesn’t really have any of that stuff and oh, we have a 25 people have 25 different freelancer accounts.” Yeah, it’s not ideal because they get 25 different bills but at the same time, that master key is kind of what people are looking for.
Rob: And then he asked him a question about their outbound sales process. He says, “Yeah, we have 80 sales people and their core play is they basically target companies that already have some form of adoption.” You likely would, I’m guessing, you’re going to use some type of data augmentation tool, like a full contact, to augment you customer data to know who they work for or just look at the email address, look at the domain, the .com on the end of their email, and do a Group By and see how many people are using it. As simple as that.
If you get 20 people inside Disney or Target or BestBuy or something, it’s like they reach out and say, “Hey, you have 20 people that have signed-up for accounts. Do you want to aggregate that?” It’s an interesting thing. I’ve heard, I believe, it was either Slack or Trello also talk about this as an approach. It’s like warm outbound. It’s an interesting approach.
Mike: You just hope that their CEO or their CTO isn’t so totally paranoid that he says no outside tools that are based in the cloud and shuts them all down.
Rob: Yeah, it could happen, I supposed.
Mike: I think that’s a lot less common today than I think it was 5 or 10 years ago. But I have run into those people who say that kind of stuff and there’s usually exceptions for that. They can’t possibly have everything self-hosted. It is just not realistic.
Rob: Yup. There’s a couple more questions that I think are relevant. One is, he asks him, “Lucidchart is the popular alternative to Microsoft Visio, how do you differentiate yourself?” He basically gracefully says, “We’re grateful to Vision, but it’s outdated. It’s a classic Microsoft style product, and it has a lot of innovation on it since they acquired it in 2000.” That’s that whole thing where, yeah, you can have a better funded competitor but as a startup, your secret super power is you can move fast, and you can be closer to the customer. Because I’m guessing, a lot of the developers working on Visio—assuming there are some still—they’re not nearly in close contact as someone at Lucidchart is when they’re in their customer success department having one-on-one conversations with their clients.
Mike: I think that’s partly a difference in how the product was originally engineered. There is a cloud version of Visio, I believe, so it’s enabled for people to collaborate and stuff which has always been the biggest problem with Visio documents, is that it’s like a Word document that you have to basically send it back and forth. Even if you’re using something like Dropbox, you still have the problem of having multiple people trying to work on the same thing at the same time and it just doesn’t work very well.
That’s why Google docs has kind of come around and been such a massive upstart in the past, what was it, like 10, 15 years ago when that came out. But Word had been out in the mid-90s or the early 90s. Something like Lucidchart just has a fundamentally different delivery mechanism than Visio. Visio has to make that backward compatibility so they’re not able to do the same types of things versus Lucidchart, they’re like, “We don’t care about actually running locally on the desktop.” It just doesn’t matter to them which gives them some advantages right there.
Rob: Right. It’s interesting to think like if Microsoft really cared about the market—I just don’t think it’s big enough for them to care about probably—but they should have, would have built a web-based version back in 2008 because it was totally doable. But they didn’t and so, somebody decided at some point not to do that. I know they have collaboration features now built into the Office tools. I don’t use many of the Office tools anymore, only when absolutely need to. I’m just in Google docs all the time.
Mike: I bet they sunk all the resources into the Windows Vista.
Rob: Windows Vista, yeah. That must have been it.
Mike: It must have been it.
Rob: To round it out, he ask him, “What do you think are the top three reasons for Lucidchart’s success?” He says, “Well, people need visual communication tools and there wasn’t really anything that was that great. Second is, we made it enterprise ready, so selling into that enterprise, it was not hard. They have collaborations and integrations and all that stuff and freemium–those are the three things he says. I think he leaves out the virality. I actually believe the fact that a) the market is big, I think is a good thing. They chose a large market. I have a Lucidchart account. The reason I have it is because I got invited by two separate people on two separate diagrams. I would count as one of the 30 million users.
Now, I don’t go in, I never created a Lucidchart diagram myself, but I have collaborated with other people. I think that’s an element, a fourth thing that he didn’t mention that I do think is probably a decent driver of their trial sign-ups.
Mike: I do think the other thing that really helps them is the fact that it’s surprisingly easy to be able to get in and get started with Lucidchart, create some things that are generically applicable across the business without being locked into , “Oh, I have to use this for data modelling.” It sort of does these other things well but not really. That’s the way I would describe the difference between Visio and Lucidchart.
Whereas Lucidchart doesn’t necessarily have the data tie ins to be able to, let’s say for example, a database design, but there’s lots of other ways to do that these days. That makes Vision, I’ll say, that less powerful in that respect. But you don’t need that with Lucidchart. You can just create a generic process. Instead of sketching it out on paper and saying, “Oh well, I’ve got this customer support process that’s got to do this.” Or, “I’ve got this marketing process where I’ve got this email Drip campaign over here and the sales page over there.” You can wire them up in Lucidchart and use that to document your marketing sales funnel, for example. It works really, really well for that.
The downside is, you do have to keep it up-to-date because nothing is automatic but as long as you need to document it anyway, you may as well use something like Lucidchart where you can create good documentation that shows you how everything ties together.
Rob: 500,000 sign-ups every month, Mike. What would you do with that?
Mike: I don’t know. Take it to the bank, retire?
Rob: Yeah, that’s crazy. You can just imagine the processes they must have in place in order to even be able to support that many users.
Mike: You know, I’d be interested to see what they have for a backend infrastructure because I’m just like an engineering nerd like that. Like, “How the heck do you handle that much? How many is that per minute?”
Rob: I know. One point of data is I went to Crunchbase and it says, “According to owler.com that they have 7.1 million in annual revenue.” You don’t know how accurate that is but it’s an estimate by an outside company.
Mike: And at 500,000 sign-ups a month, that’s about one every five seconds which is insane.
Rob: Yup. I know, it’s crazy. They say, let’s see, employee count is between 101 and 250–it’s about what I expect. It says, “A team of 150 plus employees.” You don’t know when that was written but I would guess, if it was even a year ago, I bet they’re at probably over 200 by now. That gives you an idea of their size. That’s the thing, they’ve raised $42 million, if they are at $7 million or $10 million in recurring revenue, that’s not a home run. They need to get bigger than that in order to return that kind of funding because the valuation was definitely north of $100 million. I mean, $120 million, $180 million, somewhere in that range, if I were to guess. At that point, you need to sell for half a billion or a billion dollars to return venture returns. To get there, you need to have $100 million in ARR. They have a long way to go to get there.
I don’t want folks to take this entire episode the wrong way, I’m not saying that we should model ourselves after Lucidchart or anything like that, I was pointing out that the way to use freemium, viral loops, thinking about horizontal markets, thinking about other way to approach problems, how could you, in your little maybe B2B bootstrap niche try and corporate some of these things?
Mike: I think the other takeaway you could have for our audience of listeners is that, even with 500,000 sign-ups a month, as you said, financially, this is probably still not a home run.
Rob: Right. If they haven’t raised $40 million, it could be alright if they’d only raise up to $6 million and could have done it, then that’s a totally different story but that’s where I like raising a lot of funding and having this big valuation. It means you have much higher expectations at that point.
Mike: Right. All it does is dilute the founder and some of the investors, earlier investors maybe, but it makes it hard to have a spectacular exit if you’ve, I’ll say, weighed down by too much investment.
Well, on that note, I think that about wraps us up. If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. To where this week, sir?
Mike: Did you happen to see the announcement that FogBugz/Manuscript was being acquired by DevFactory?
Rob: I got an email out of the blue and was completely shocked by that. I shouldn’t be, right? Fog Creek, for those who don’t know, was founded by Joel Spolsky and Mike Pryor back in, I believe, it was 2000 or 2001. Joel was probably the first blogger I ever read. He had so many insights about how to start software company and how to project-manage and all that stuff that I was really enthralled by him. And then he launched FogBugz but then they went into Stack Overflow and Trello and all this other stuff. I was always like, “This is crazy. They’ve had a lot of successes.”
Mike: They also had a CityDesk which was their blogging tool, I don’t think that it ever really went anywhere. I think they got it to version 2.
Rob: Content management. It was a website content management territory, but it was desktop, right as the switch to SaaS was happening.
Mike: I think it was before WordPress came out or just about the same time. But it was published through the website, so everything was all straight HTML. I think they had an internal beta version that Joel was still using for a while, it was like version 3-A or something like that that just never got out there publicly. I find it interesting that they decided to sell that business to an outside company just because the way that they’ve kind of run the business, it’s odd.
Rob: Yeah, it’s definitely unexpected. I don’t know what else I expected though. I mean, it’s freaking 17 years later–these things don’t last forever. I remember when Joel stepped down as CEO of Fog Creek, I was like, “Oh my gosh!” but it’s like, “Well, of course, he’s going to do Stack Overflow.” I believe Mike Pryor stepped up at that point and then Mike Pryor went up to be CEO of Trello once that took off. They really used it as an incubator–Fog Creek itself. It’s no surprise that they had the third CEO and it’s running Fog Creek. I don’t even know who’s running FogBugz.
I don’t even know if Fog Creek still owns anything else. Do they or is the company just going to shut down? Because they sold Trello, Stack Overflow is its own entity at this point, they haven’t used Fog Creek developers for years. Probably 10 years at this point. Manuscript is the only thing I know that they still had.
Mike: No, they still have Glitch.
Rob: What is that?
Mike: I don’t even know because they’ve been working on it for three, four years at this point, and I still don’t understand what it actually is, which it seems like it’s some sort of a programming framework without the programming. I don’t really understand it, to be perfectly honest. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I don’t know, I don’t know what to tell you about that.
Rob: I just googled Fog Creek Glitch and it says, “Fog Creek is renaming itself to Glitch. We’ve been thrilled to see the community embrace Glitch as the home for creating and discovering the coolest stuff on the web.” It sounds like Reddit. I’m confused at this point. I just haven’t followed this story. Fog Creek has been basically, a B2B software company–or at least Manuscript, Trello was, and then Stack Overflow was obviously VC-funded. Stack Overflow, I was going to say social network, but it’s more like a question and answer platform.
Yeah, it’s a trip man. I have mad respect for what Mike Pryor and Joel have built. You and I have both met them in person at BOS. I’ve had multiple conversations with them. These are smart, ethical-driven software developers who have done a lot I think for both the people that they’ve hired, but also in sharing their knowledge and building the tools. I have nothing but respect for these guys. The amount of success they’ve had, when you say, “Yeah, the same people that started Stack Overflow also started Trello and started this other seven or eight-figure company called FogBugz.” that’s a lot to do in a career.
Mike: I wonder if part of the reason they spun that off was because of the way that they want to run the business and the way that they want to treat the developers because I think early on, they had talked a lot about how they wanted to treat everybody—who’s working within the company—with respect and make sure that they participated in the successes of the business.
I remember some blog articles or some discussions on one of the podcasts that they had at one point talk about Stack Overflow, but because Stack Overflow and Trello were both born out of Fog Creek, at some point, they had to split the business. How do you compensate the people who were originally in Fog Creek and were excited and maybe helped out a little bit, but didn’t necessarily go with that team? There was also a question of like somebody had an idea for, I think it was co-pilot at the time, and it ended-up come in like a $1 million line of business for them, ARR. It’s just like, how do you compensate that person for the ideas and stuff that they’ve brought in?
At this point, FogBugz has been running for years, and there’s probably not a huge number of things that they’re going to add to it, I mean they could integrate it with other business processes and things like that, but there’s not a lot of other stuff they could do with it. It’s really just kind of the cash cow for them, but how do you translate that into a financial or monetary success for the people who are currently in the business and may have been there for anywhere up to 10 or 15 years at this point? It’s a private company, so I don’t think they hand out equity. I don’t know.
Rob: I think they did profit sharing, was my recollection. They did hand out dividends because like you just said, it was a pretty profitable company.
Mike: Got it.
Rob: On my end, I just got an email this morning that said, “Stripe is now valued at $20 billion.”
Mike: Oh, is that all?
Rob: Oh, man. Their last round was at $9 billion. I don’t normally follow these funding and valuation stories, but since we basically have had dinner with both the Collison brothers and been on stage with them at MicroConf, I kind of have a vested interest in keeping up with what they’re doing. Bravo to them. I have nothing but respect for those guys.
Mike: That’s an insane number but both of them are super, super smart guys. You stand near them and you just feel dumber.
Rob: Totally. When I’m around them, yeah, I feel dumber, but I feel my IQ points, I gain maybe 5 or 10 just in speaking to them. “Oh, you taught me a new word and a new concept today.”
Mike: “…that I thought I knew for 10 years, but you clearly know it better than me.”
Rob: Yeah, exactly.
Mike: Good for them. I think a lot of our audience probably still uses Stripe.
Rob: Still, what do you mean? Still uses. I wouldn’t go anywhere else, it’s insane to think of going back to the days of Authorize.net and PayPal web payments pro. I guess there’s Braintree now, right?
Mike: That’s what I was going to say. I hear that on a “higher-end” people are migrating to Braintree and, I don’t know if any other options actually other than Stripe and Braintree. But I don’t know anything about Braintree. It’s just interesting to see the ark that they’ve taken over the past, what, eight years or so? It’s just crazy how much they’ve grown and the things that they do are quite honestly, for the entrepreneurial community, they have enabled the vast majority of us to be able to do what we do. Without Stripe, most of the businesses that are out there just would not exist.
Rob: Or it’d be lot harder to get them off the ground. I remember trying to get an Authorize.net account and it just took weeks of literally sending stuff on paper and faxing it back and forth. This was only maybe six years ago, seven years–it wasn’t that long, and I’m not talking 2005. It was just insane to me that a) how are we not doing this online or at least e-signing things? But I literally was just printing out this 30-page document. It was such a nightmare. I’m glad Stripe came on the scene.
Mike: I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of weeks rebuilding and migrating some of my infrastructure in order to cut costs. I’ve doubled the number of servers. I’ve gone from two servers to four and I’ve reduced the costs of them by out 75% which is odd. I have everything hosted on Azure and they have these things called burstable virtual machines. Basically, if they are running below a certain threshold in terms of process or usage, then you pay basically, a discounted rate for it and you are gaining credits at that point. If you are using more than that percentage then you’re basically burning into your credits
I think they had maxed out the CPU with that but basically, I just paid less for this machine or these machines because I’m not using them all day every day. It’s like there are certain times a day where I need more processing power and rest of the time I just don’t need it. It’s nice to be able to have moved over to those types of servers and save a fair chunk of change. But I needed to split up my infrastructure anyway because I didn’t like having everything on just two servers.
Rob: That makes sense. It’s nice to put a few more bucks in your pocket.
Mike: Yeah. I pushed off on that division for probably about a year or so. It was kind of time to do it.
Rob: Anything else?
Mike: The last thing is, this is totally random but there’s a website that I stumbled across when I was trying to do calculations for my Dungeons and Dragons game, to kind of optimize my character. If you’re into figuring out probabilities on different dice rolls, you can head over to anydice.com. It will basically allow you to write functions that will essentially simulate what the dice rolls are, and then it will show you the percentages and distributions, and you can see crafts and stuff like that of exactly what those distributions look like.
You can say how many attacks or if you have advantage or disadvantage on different attacks or damage rolls or things like that then it will show you what those numbers look like and what’s your average rolls would be.
It’s pretty cool. You can probably spend a whole ton of time on it, but they do have some documentation there and some ready-built functions you just pull, and copy paste into the editor.
Rob: I see what you did there, Mike. Do you realize you started that segment off, you said, “This is totally random.” But any dice stuck. You can’t […] by me, man. Really bad puns. Alright. Cool.
Let’s dive into what we’re talking about today. It’s an article on a blog of freshworks.com. They have a sales CRM , it’s that section or that category of the blog, but the article is titled, “How Lucidchart Grew to 13 million Users on a land-and-expand Strategy.” I want to talk a little bit about the virality and the freemium part of it. It’s an interesting interview with, I believe, is the SVP of Sales and Customer Success of Lucidchart.
If you haven’t heard of Lucidchart, it is a Software as a Service with a freemium model, they have 13 million users and it is like Visio–it is how I think of it. It’s a diagram solution where you can create diagrams and share them and then collaborate on them. Is that an accurate description, Mike? You said you’ve used it.
Mike: Yeah. That’s probably pretty accurate. I think Visio seems like they started out much more for data modelling within a programming environment. But Vision also has a lot of different icons and stuff that you can put in there for like network map layouts and office maps layouts and stuff like that. You can use it for other things like org charts and stuff like that, but I think originally, it seemed like it started out as part of the MSDN suite, you get a few sign-ups for that, and it was primarily a programming tool.
Rob: Right. And it expanded into other things. Lucidchart, looks like it was started around 2010, 2011 and they raised $1 million in funding which you would need if you’re going to do freemium model, and then three years later they raised $5 million, and then two years after that—in 2016—they raised $36 million. I can imagine they probably hit a hockey stick moment where the user growth justified raising–because you raise that much money, you want to have really high valuation, so you don’t give away most of your company.
They said that 96% of Fortune 500 companies use it. They have customers at Google, Amazon, Cisco, and Intel, and they receive around 500,000 sign-ups every month. It’s a free tool, right? It’s free, no credit card, if I recall. That’s still a big number though. A nice horizontal market that these guys are in. They’ve obviously achieved success–13 million users is a ton of people; it’s a ton of people to support, it’s a ton of people just to have your software running.
I wish that they’d told us how many paying users or how many paying accounts because that’s really what I’m interested in. I’m interested to know if they are even profitable on revenue, above the amount of just sheer volume because they must have hundreds of employees, and I would like to know that. But all that said, what I want to talk about today is really the freemium and the viral one and they have some stuff about sales as well.
Mike: I’m sure their competitors would love to know how much money they’re making too.
Rob: Yeah, totally. I know. It’ll come out at some point. They’ll wind up talking about it.
Mike: Alright. Why don’t we dive right in then?
Rob: Sure. The first question for Dan Cook, which is the SVP of Sales, the interviewer asks him, “It runs on a freemium model, how do you pitch the product, and how do you scale it to an enterprise model?” His response is, “The freemium gives them an advantage because they have this—this is where the land-and-expand comes in within a company—they get employees within a company using the product and then they share it with other people in the company to collaborate and then they set-up accounts, so there’s a freemium plus virality there. The reason they sign-up for it is a) it’s free and b) because it’s a good tool.
In the early days it was good enough. It was not a great tool but as it developed, I bet these days, it is best in class or is becoming then. He said that, basically, they can have 15 or 20 paid or free users of Lucidchart within a company. Then they leverage that fact to say, “Alright, IT department, here’s a value proposition for you.” This is a similar model to other tools. Slack, I’ve heard them talk about this a lot. That one small development team within a huge org would start using it and of course, you have to invite other people for it to have any value. Once you have 10, 20, 30 users, IT Departments and frankly, CTOs and CIOs want to have control of that kind of stuff. It’s an interesting dual use of that freemium plus virality.
Mike: Yeah, I’ve seen that at a much, much smaller scale in Bluetick where somebody will sign-up for Bluetick and one of the earlier objections I’ve heard from somebody was like, “Oh, well. I wanted to sign-up for it but then I would have had to go to my boss and get his credit card.” That freemium model, even just the 14-day trial that I had or that I added in after talking to that customer, it allows them to sign-up for it without having to go to their boss and justify like, “Hey, I need the corporate credit card and it’s going to cost this much money.” Because in the enterprise environment, they’re probably going to not only have to go to their boss, but then their boss is going to have to justify it to somebody else.
Nobody really knows if it’s going to work. If they just start using it, in a freemium model, they can just use it and if it doesn’t work out for them, they just shut it down or just abandon it. If it does then as more people start using it then it becomes more visible. As a result of its success, then Lucidchart can go in and ask them for money for an enterprise license or a small group license within a department or something like that. But it is interesting to see that they seem to have intentionally done that or chosen that strategy.
Rob: Right. I want to point out some things that Lucidchart has or had that listeners to this podcast may not have, and if you don’t have all these things in place, it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible to pull off this strategy that they did–this freemium strategy.
Mike: Do you want to start with the $36 million or…?
Rob: That’s what I was going to say. Funding–that’s the first one. It wasn’t $36 million originally. For the first three years it was $1 million. That’s actually not that much money for three years. You can hire a few people but it’s not like you’re going to hire 20 employees and not bleed that out. But yes, funding was one advantage they had; $1 million in funding. Another $5 million three years later. The fact that they are a very horizontal market much like Trello and Dropbox and Slack, those are three other tools that have used the same approach–this freemium plus viral component.
If you’re in a horizontal market and you can raise enough funding or self-fund this thing to the point where you can provide the service to all the free users, it really can be this fascinating approach. The other thing is they have virality, not every tool has that. I think of a tool like Drip or even a proposal software, invoicing software, there’s a little bit of virality and that you can have a Powered By or a Sent From or a Sent With. But true, deep virality like Trello where–I mean, I use some Trello boards for that other people but there’s a lot of collaboration that goes on there. Slack is all about being viral. You have to invite other people to get any value.
Lucidchart does not need, need, need. You’d have another person to get value, but I would say, that’s probably a big reason that people would use it because it’s so easy to get you charts and collaborate. Of course, Dropbox has it’s all other things. Having virality plus that freemium I think is a big thing that people overlook. Because having freemium on its own without funding, being horizontal, and virality is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Mike: I think this is also a tool that because of what you’re using it for, you’re using it to help communicate, that helps it too. That kind of sets it apart from a lot of other tools. Trello, to some extent, just by inviting people, you get to have them take a look at what it is that you’re working on. But with Lucidchart, you can print those things out, you can embed them into Word document, or even just take screenshots, but by being able to invite people and say, “Hey, this is the process, or this is the workflow that I’m looking at. What do you think? Is this going to work for our team?” That right there—because it’s embedded in the communications—that just inherently makes it even more viral.
Because if people look at the tool and they like it and they want to use it because it’s a lot easier to use than something like Visio, it gives it those additional advantages. It gives people the “aha” moment that they need in order to say, “Yeah. I want to use this too.”
Rob: Another question that he asks this VP of Sales, which I thought was kind of cool, I don’t know, I hadn’t thought that much about it, but he says, “Let’s talk about your value proposition. How does it work when you’re convincing a company to buy the enterprise version? What to the teams and what does the enterprise get out of it? Why don’t they just keep using their individual accounts?” I like that because a) you’re asking why should they upgrade or why should they consolidate? He says, basically, the value to the end-user is that it’s all consolidated and it’s much easier to share among their co-workers. You don’t have to convert diagrams into other formats to be compatible. If everybody starts using it in your company then you don’t have to be like, “Oh, you’re using Visio? I’m using Lucidchart. Let’s convert to this format.” and blah blah blah.
Then to the IT department, the first one is consolidated billing, so there’s only one bill and you know you can negotiate that and manage it. It’s just easier to do it. Also, for training, a lot of big companies especially provide training for their tools. If you have just everybody using one tool, it’s easier. Then secure logins which is fine but the one that really gets them is document retention which is where someone leaves the company, as someone is running that company or running that IT department, you want to have access to everything they did while they were there because you might need to reference that later. If they take individual accounts away with them then you’ll never get that stuff back. It’s not even someone stealing it or taking it away, it kind of goes away. They forget about it or you just don’t have access to it.
That was a big one working at Leadpages and Drip is seeing people leave and being like, “Oh, yeah. There was that one thing that he shared with me and now I don’t have access to it.” It could be kind of a pain. It’s interesting to think—if you’re going to try to pull this off—about what the value prop is that you have to offer for people to upgrade.
Mike: The other interesting piece there that’s in that enterprise group subscription there is the idea that, it’s not just if somebody leaves the company, but what happens if you have to fire somebody. You want to be able to have like this master key that says, “Okay, we’re going to lock you out of everything before we follow through with letting this person go.” and then still have access to all that stuff. There’s that side of it to consider too. I think one and two-person businesses don’t tend to think about that because they just don’t experience it. But the larger companies that they are advertising to or agencies or other small businesses 50-100 people, those companies do think about that and it is important to them.
It’s good to understand that that is a value proposition that you can leverage as a marketing point to those larger companies and say, “Look, this is why you should upgrade or this is why you should buy higher-priced tier because we are including this for your account versus a freelancer account which doesn’t really have any of that stuff and oh, we have a 25 people have 25 different freelancer accounts.” Yeah, it’s not ideal because they get 25 different bills but at the same time, that master key is kind of what people are looking for.
Rob: And then he asked him a question about their outbound sales process. He says, “Yeah, we have 80 sales people and their core play is they basically target companies that already have some form of adoption.” You likely would, I’m guessing, you’re going to use some type of data augmentation tool, like a full contact, to augment you customer data to know who they work for or just look at the email address, look at the domain, the .com on the end of their email, and do a Group By and see how many people are using it. As simple as that.
If you get 20 people inside Disney or Target or BestBuy or something, it’s like they reach out and say, “Hey, you have 20 people that have signed-up for accounts. Do you want to aggregate that?” It’s an interesting thing. I’ve heard, I believe, it was either Slack or Trello also talk about this as an approach. It’s like warm outbound. It’s an interesting approach.
Mike: You just hope that their CEO or their CTO isn’t so totally paranoid that he says no outside tools that are based in the cloud and shuts them all down.
Rob: Yeah, it could happen, I supposed.
Mike: I think that’s a lot less common today than I think it was 5 or 10 years ago. But I have run into those people who say that kind of stuff and there’s usually exceptions for that. They can’t possibly have everything self-hosted. It is just not realistic.
Rob: Yup. There’s a couple more questions that I think are relevant. One is, he asks him, “Lucidchart is the popular alternative to Microsoft Visio, how do you differentiate yourself?” He basically gracefully says, “We’re grateful to Vision, but it’s outdated. It’s a classic Microsoft style product, and it has a lot of innovation on it since they acquired it in 2000.” That’s that whole thing where, yeah, you can have a better funded competitor but as a startup, your secret super power is you can move fast, and you can be closer to the customer. Because I’m guessing, a lot of the developers working on Visio—assuming there are some still—they’re not nearly in close contact as someone at Lucidchart is when they’re in their customer success department having one-on-one conversations with their clients.
Mike: I think that’s partly a difference in how the product was originally engineered. There is a cloud version of Visio, I believe, so it’s enabled for people to collaborate and stuff which has always been the biggest problem with Visio documents, is that it’s like a Word document that you have to basically send it back and forth. Even if you’re using something like Dropbox, you still have the problem of having multiple people trying to work on the same thing at the same time and it just doesn’t work very well.
That’s why Google docs has kind of come around and been such a massive upstart in the past, what was it, like 10, 15 years ago when that came out. But Word had been out in the mid-90s or the early 90s. Something like Lucidchart just has a fundamentally different delivery mechanism than Visio. Visio has to make that backward compatibility so they’re not able to do the same types of things versus Lucidchart, they’re like, “We don’t care about actually running locally on the desktop.” It just doesn’t matter to them which gives them some advantages right there.
Rob: Right. It’s interesting to think like if Microsoft really cared about the market—I just don’t think it’s big enough for them to care about probably—but they should have, would have built a web-based version back in 2008 because it was totally doable. But they didn’t and so, somebody decided at some point not to do that. I know they have collaboration features now built into the Office tools. I don’t use many of the Office tools anymore, only when absolutely need to. I’m just in Google docs all the time.
Mike: I bet they sunk all the resources into the Windows Vista.
Rob: Windows Vista, yeah. That must have been it.
Mike: It must have been it.
Rob: To round it out, he ask him, “What do you think are the top three reasons for Lucidchart’s success?” He says, “Well, people need visual communication tools and there wasn’t really anything that was that great. Second is, we made it enterprise ready, so selling into that enterprise, it was not hard. They have collaborations and integrations and all that stuff and freemium–those are the three things he says. I think he leaves out the virality. I actually believe the fact that a) the market is big, I think is a good thing. They chose a large market. I have a Lucidchart account. The reason I have it is because I got invited by two separate people on two separate diagrams. I would count as one of the 30 million users.
Now, I don’t go in, I never created a Lucidchart diagram myself, but I have collaborated with other people. I think that’s an element, a fourth thing that he didn’t mention that I do think is probably a decent driver of their trial sign-ups.
Mike: I do think the other thing that really helps them is the fact that it’s surprisingly easy to be able to get in and get started with Lucidchart, create some things that are generically applicable across the business without being locked into , “Oh, I have to use this for data modelling.” It sort of does these other things well but not really. That’s the way I would describe the difference between Visio and Lucidchart.
Whereas Lucidchart doesn’t necessarily have the data tie ins to be able to, let’s say for example, a database design, but there’s lots of other ways to do that these days. That makes Vision, I’ll say, that less powerful in that respect. But you don’t need that with Lucidchart. You can just create a generic process. Instead of sketching it out on paper and saying, “Oh well, I’ve got this customer support process that’s got to do this.” Or, “I’ve got this marketing process where I’ve got this email Drip campaign over here and the sales page over there.” You can wire them up in Lucidchart and use that to document your marketing sales funnel, for example. It works really, really well for that.
The downside is, you do have to keep it up-to-date because nothing is automatic but as long as you need to document it anyway, you may as well use something like Lucidchart where you can create good documentation that shows you how everything ties together.
Rob: 500,000 sign-ups every month, Mike. What would you do with that?
Mike: I don’t know. Take it to the bank, retire?
Rob: Yeah, that’s crazy. You can just imagine the processes they must have in place in order to even be able to support that many users.
Mike: You know, I’d be interested to see what they have for a backend infrastructure because I’m just like an engineering nerd like that. Like, “How the heck do you handle that much? How many is that per minute?”
Rob: I know. One point of data is I went to Crunchbase and it says, “According to owler.com that they have 7.1 million in annual revenue.” You don’t know how accurate that is but it’s an estimate by an outside company.
Mike: And at 500,000 sign-ups a month, that’s about one every five seconds which is insane.
Rob: Yup. I know, it’s crazy. They say, let’s see, employee count is between 101 and 250–it’s about what I expect. It says, “A team of 150 plus employees.” You don’t know when that was written but I would guess, if it was even a year ago, I bet they’re at probably over 200 by now. That gives you an idea of their size. That’s the thing, they’ve raised $42 million, if they are at $7 million or $10 million in recurring revenue, that’s not a home run. They need to get bigger than that in order to return that kind of funding because the valuation was definitely north of $100 million. I mean, $120 million, $180 million, somewhere in that range, if I were to guess. At that point, you need to sell for half a billion or a billion dollars to return venture returns. To get there, you need to have $100 million in ARR. They have a long way to go to get there.
I don’t want folks to take this entire episode the wrong way, I’m not saying that we should model ourselves after Lucidchart or anything like that, I was pointing out that the way to use freemium, viral loops, thinking about horizontal markets, thinking about other way to approach problems, how could you, in your little maybe B2B bootstrap niche try and corporate some of these things?
Mike: I think the other takeaway you could have for our audience of listeners is that, even with 500,000 sign-ups a month, as you said, financially, this is probably still not a home run.
Rob: Right. If they haven’t raised $40 million, it could be alright if they’d only raise up to $6 million and could have done it, then that’s a totally different story but that’s where I like raising a lot of funding and having this big valuation. It means you have much higher expectations at that point.
Mike: Right. All it does is dilute the founder and some of the investors, earlier investors maybe, but it makes it hard to have a spectacular exit if you’ve, I’ll say, weighed down by too much investment.
Well, on that note, I think that about wraps us up. If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 412 | The Pitfalls of Several Commonly Recommended Marketing Tactics
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about the pitfalls of commonly recommended marketing tactics. This topic was inspired by a tweet from Scott Watermasysk from KickoffLabs. Some of the tactics discussed include split testing, affiliate programs, content marketing, and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about the pitfalls of several commonly recommended marketing tactics. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 412.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you with the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on, Mr. Rob?
Rob: We received a voicemail from someone, I believe he was in Brisbane, Australia, but it was definitely an Australian accent and I could barely make out the audio. The audio quality was so bad that we don’t even know his name or the question he asked. If that is you, please call us back or better yet, just record an MP3 on your local machine and just attach it or send us a Dropbox link to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Because it sounded like a good question but couldn’t really make out what he’s saying during that. How about you? What are you up to?
Mike: I’m in the middle of testing a new road map process with one of my customers using Teamwork. The basic idea is that I set up a project in Teamwork, mainly because this customer’s been with me for a while and it’s not a really complicated stuff that they’re asking for what they need, but they need assurances or like timeline and implementation and everything else.
I’ve got a road map that I’ve been using in the background using Trello for a while, but I just haven’t kept up with it. I’ve never really gotten into Trello like most people have. What I did was I created a project in Teamwork and then I invited them to look at it. I took their […], threw them in there. Basically, I’m working through them and it gives me the opportunity to comment on those things directly and allow them to comment back on them as well. It creates this really nice feedback loop between those things.
I haven’t added any other customers into it yet, but I think that that might be something that I’ll look into the future. But I’ve looked at other road mapping tools in the past and I’ve never really quite found one that suited me.
Rob: Is this for communicating your road map to customers?
Mike: If a customer asks for something, how do I communicate it to the rest of the customers, like, “This is what is going to be going on and this is what the priority is.” It’s a little bit different than like a bug tracker, obviously, if there’s a bug or somebody needs support or something like that, it’s different, but I’m the only one who can add stuff in so that it’s visible, but anybody can comment on it, at least so it seems like.
Rob: I’m trying to think there’s a tool that we use at Drip and of course, I can’t remember the name of it and we always used it to announce what we had built. It’s like, “This is what we released in September.” It’s like a change log tool but it was user-friendly. It was not super techie. I’m trying to think if you could use that pretty easily to suggest like, “Here’s what we’re working on in order.” I think there was actually a little feature where you could just add a bulleted list, but it was super stripped down. It was a very simple tool. It was $10 a month or something. It’s probably someone’s side project, although it’s pretty well-designed. Is that all you need is just a list of things? Why not just have, maybe a public Google doc or even just a static page on your website that’s like /roadmap? It’s just five things in bold list like, “Here are the next major five efforts we’re doing.”
Mike: There’s two things. One is we’ve been going back and forth through email and I said, “Look, I understand you got all these different things that you want to see, but I need a list of them. Just going back and forth one at a time is really not working. Send me the whole list.” They sent me the entire list and broke it out into three different sets like, “These are things we need very, very soon, these are things that can wait a little while, and these are things we’d like to eventually see down the road.” I looked at them and they all mapped pretty well like my internal road map anyway, which I have in my bug tracker, but I’m not going to pay for other people outside of business to have an account there just because it’s going to get expensive.
I was trying to figure out how do I work back and forth with them because I had a bunch of questions on some of them and there were comments on other things. It was a question of, “How do I work with them to flesh out what each of these things is?” because if I got an email that’s, let’s say, two pages or something like that, like bullets that they email to me, it’s hard to go back and forth about one line item and five line items in an email. I really needed something that was going to break them out so that I can comment on things individually and separate them a little bit more. Does that makes sense?
Rob: It does, yeah. It’s not just for outbound communication, it’s kind of like you’re almost collaborating with a client. It’s not that they’re paying you for this and not that you’re going to build it exactly as you’re expecting, but they really are. It’s much more customer development process than it is, “Hey, we’ve got suggestions in here is what’s we’re going to build.”
Mike: Yeah, I’d say customer development is probably a better way to phrase it than I did. It is a lot of back-and-forth to figure out like, “Is this going to work for you or what exactly did you mean by that? How are you going to use this?” for example. Because some of the questions are like, “I hear what you’re saying and it makes sense but where you going to use this for? I want to know, is there a better way to do this or is there something else that we could do either short-term or manually that would get them there faster?”
Rob: Right. Cool, it sounds interesting. I think of it as less of a road map process and more of, I guess, it is impacting your road map, but it’s more like a customer collaboration or a customer development process that you’re doing using Teamwork. That makes sense?
Mike: Yeah, it is.
Rob: Cool.
Mike: But I went on Google and searched for road map software a while back and I came across all these other things, like there’s ProductBoard, aha.io, ProductPlan, ProdPad, and things like that. It’s just none of them really seem to fit what I was looking for in terms of this back-and-forth communication with either individual customers or with small groups of them. I really think I just want to identify a couple of more customers to maybe work on this with, but it’s really a matter of, does it make sense in that particular context for that customer?
Rob: That makes sense. Have you seen MailChimp’s new branding?
Mike: I got an email about it, but I haven’t looked at it yet.
Rob: It’s a trip. I think I saw a news article. I think I was on SparkToro Trending. SparkToro is Rand Fishkin’s new startup and there’s a trending page and they talked–there was an article written about MailChimp’s new branding. Obviously, I think of MailChimp as the ESP. There are other email service providers but they are the biggest one. They are the ones that send a billion emails a day. Like the title tag on their homepage, which is what will appear on Google now, is marketing platform for small business.
I don’t know if it’s a pivot as much of just a rebrand. But like their homepage used to say, “We help you sell more stuff at MailChimp,” or something like that, it’s very much commerce-focused, but their headline is now, “Your business was born for this. Become the brand you want to be with smarter marketing built for big things.” It’s very, very interesting. It’s a gutsy move. The colors are different. I actually like the design of the site. It’s definitely jarring.
Remember when the Drip rebrand happened and there was the magenta and the other colors, I feel this is similar but different, but the headline and the value prop on it feels not nearly as focused as what I’ve always thought of as MailChimp. The fact that the sub-headline is “Become the brand you want to be with smarter marketing built for big things,” that doesn’t resonate with me as a customer and never would have at any point in my entrepreneurial career. I’m concerned. These guys are smart, let’s not fault MailChimp, but I feel like maybe they’ve made a misstep here.
Mike: I don’t know. I think it’s easy to think that if a company changes their brand name, that, “Oh, this company isn’t for me any more. This tool isn’t for me,” but at the same time, the tool itself hasn’t change. It’s really just a marketing message. I forget who said this, but the line is something along the lines of, “What got you here won’t get your there.” Like you said, they’re sending a billion emails a day but that doesn’t necessarily acquire them more customers faster, they need a marketing message that resonates with a larger group of people than they currently have or they’re currently after because they probably saturated the market. The ESP market is really highly saturated. There’s tons of players there so they need to differentiate themselves an go after people who are either just not using something or are using something else and want to find something that is going to fit them better.
Rob: Yeah. That makes sense and that’s thing. When you’re not inside an privy to the conversations that they’re having and who they’re competing against when they’re going for big deals, you don’t know. That’s where I’m like, “Who am I to say?” but this is my opinion on the outside. Again, with the Drip stuff when there was that rebrand, it was right before I was leaving the company. It was happening and rolling out. There were so many naysayers and haters on social media and all the stuff, but they were privy to the information that is actually going on inside the company.
I guess what I’m saying is, it could be so easy for me to sit here and just rail on this MailChimp rebrand because it’s “different,” but I trust that MailChimp is pretty damn smart and pretty good at what they do, and that they took the information. It’s either going to work or they’ll change. If that headline doesn’t resonate with people, they’ll change it. I think that’s the thing. When you make these big gutsy moves and you’re trying to land and expand or pivot into a larger space or whatever it is that they’re doing, apply to more people, as you said, you have to do risky stuff at some point.
What’s interesting is in the early days of a startup, you take a lot of risks but no one’s there to notice and no one cares. But when you have 1000, 10,000, 50,000 customers and you take these risks, a lot of people get up in arms over it, but really it’s the same risk that you’ve been taking all along.
Mike: I think for large companies like that, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we might sit here in armchair quarterback it, you know Monday morning quarterback. Just because their existing customers are still going to be paying them money, it’s about them acquiring new customers, not appealing to the ones that they already have. That’s the way I see it.
Rob: That’s the thing. As long as you don’t do such a pivot that you completely turn your existing customers off and have a bunch of churn and stuff, man, that would be really hard to do, especially with ESPs where there is some lock-in in the space.
Mike: Yeah, it is hard to move from one to another. I’ve done that before. It sucks.
Rob: Yup. So what are we talking about today?
Mike: Today, we’re going to be talking about a couple of pitfalls of some commonly recommended marketing tactics. This topic was inspired by a tweet from Scott over at KickoffLabs and we’ll link that into the show notes. But he said, “One of the worst startup diseases is AB testing. Such a colossal waste of time when you don’t have significant traffic,” and it got me to thinking, what other things are there that are commonly recommended marketing tactics that I see and hear about or you’ve see and hear about, that are either colossal waste of time or there’s pitfalls or things that you don’t necessarily know about until you get into it, and only to realize that you’re walking into a hornet’s nest and there’s more trouble than it’s worth or it’s just not going to work for you or it’s something that you can do short term, but it’s not going to be sustainable for you.
Rob: Cool. Let’s dig in. I was pretty excited when you talked about doing this topic today because I think there are a lot of, I won’t say misinformation but it’s more like myths or people making things look easier than it actually is in order to sell things, in order to sell their software or sell their infoproducts.
Mike: I think that’s the big piece of it is that they think it look easier or sound easier than it actually is. For split testing, we’ll start off there because of the tweet from Scott but you need substantial traffic and most early entrepreneurs don’t have it. It’s not just that you need substantial traffic, you need substantial traffic and a short enough time window where your test is going to be able to give you at least some sort of significant results.
The other thing that I think is a little bit misleading is about whether or not the split testing that you actually could do, if you were to get 1% results or an increase every month for 12 months, would you actually be that much better off? I have seen some odd anecdotes where people will say, “Hey, we did all these split test or we split tested something against itself and one was significantly different than the other.” It does make me wonder a little bit as to whether or not with the resources that we as small business owners have available, can we actually even effectively execute on that stuff in a way that is going to move the needle for our business?
Rob: If you’re thinking about the early days of your startup and you’re trying to build something people want, you’re in customer development, you have a website, a little bit of traffic, split testing is the furthest thing from your mind or should be the furthest thing from your mind. You need to be talking to customers in those early days, to figure out what is that I can build that people are willing to pay for, that’s different enough from the competition that I can communicate that and people will sign up.
Typically, you’re going to split test your home page or your pricing page or your sign-up funnel, and I would not even consider it before I had, let’s say 5000 or 10,000 uniques a month. Really, at that point, it depends on what revenue is and if I have the time to test the headline here or there. But if I were to do split testing at that point, let’s say I had 10,000 uniques a month coming to their home page, I would probably just set up one or two alternate headlines and just let it run and see what happens. But it wouldn’t be some massive effort where I would be redesigning the entire page to spending a bunch of time to try to get some major difference in conversions, because there are other levers you should be pulling at that point. When you have 5000 or 10,000 uniques, you should be worrying about more traffic, or you should be worrying about, frankly, converting more of the existing trials you have to pay the customer. It’s going to tend to move the needle more than spending a lot of time on split testing.
Mike: The next marketing tactic is using affiliate programs. I see a lot of startups from Product Hunt, BetaList, and a couple of other places that startup it up where they’re pitching this affiliate program and saying, “Hey you can manage your affiliate program through our SaaS and you’ll be able to get more customers for your business.” But the reality is that the attribution itself is fine within those pieces of software, but finding the affiliates who are able to bring in enough leads to make it worth your time is actually pretty hard.
I’ve done this a couple of times. It seems to me the software itself is reasonably straightforward in most cases to implement, but finding the people who are actually going to bring leads that are qualified to you is a lot more challenging. It’s just, you have to do a lot of education to those people, you have to make it worth their time, and you have to be finding affiliates who have a substantial traffic source already or existing list where you can point them back to your website, give them an affiliate code or something like that, and give them an offer that’s actually going to get them to convert. If you don’t have all of those things, then it’s just not going to work. It doesn’t matter how many people you sign up for your affiliate program. You need the qualified leads to be coming in.
Rob: Yeah. Finding affiliates is way harder than most people think unless this is a primary strategy for you and you have a network. The people who I’ve seen make it work—let’s talk about Clay Collins of LeadPages—it was built mostly on the affiliate model. He did that because he knew all the people in the internet marketing space. He had the clout to get them to do webinars with him. It wasn’t just, “Hey, send me some traffic.” It was, “Let’s do a webinar,” and then he pitch an annual deal and it was 50% off, there was time pressure and there were bonuses, I should say, that you got if you sold there. That’s how he grew it that fast.
ConvertKit did the same thing. It was the same playbook. If you’re going to do that, then do that and go all in on it. I recall, at one point, Clay was doing 20 webinars a month or something in the early days, 15 or 20. It was crazy. He’s just a machine. In that case, you’re an exception. You’re not going to start from a cold network where you don’t know other people who have big audiences and make affiliate programs work from the start. It’s going to be a ton of work. In addition, the process side I just talked about, I’ve only seen it work in one niche and it’s in this aspirational business niche. It’s in the people who want to be bloggers or be info marketers and they’re being sold info on how to start your own biz from home.
You look at LeadPages and ConvertKit and they both serve that same path Flynn-ish niche. You can’t just go to enterprise software and think you’re going to do this big affiliate model, sell to Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 1000 companies using that. Or even freelancers would be possible because there are people with those audiences, but it wouldn’t work to the same extent that it does because the audience is just aren’t as big and they aren’t as prone to buy. I’d say there is one or two other spaces that I know of that are similar to that, that aspirational thing where you can sell them the idea or the promise of, “Hey, you’re going to have a landing page provider or here’s an ESP and here’s how to start your blog and make money.” But beyond those, it is really hard to get an affiliate program profitable one off the ground.
I had affiliate program with HitTail and Drip, and they made money, they were profitable, but they were not major driving factors. Even when we did joint ventures and we did joint venture webinars, we’d do JV mailings, it made money and it was fine, but these were not the major drivers of growth that I’ve seen in most of my startups. Again, not saying it can’t work but it’s definitely different than it appears.
Mike: Yeah, it’s definitely a lot harder than it appears. You have mentioned enterprise software sales where affiliate models wouldn’t really work and I agree with that, but there’s a slightly different model for those enterprise deals where it’s basically a reseller arrangement. You don’t have direct contact with the enterprise companies, you resell to other companies, you sign them on as resellers which is a slightly different take on an affiliate program, but it’s not substantially that much different. It’s the same basic idea–somebody else is bring in the lead in. The difference with a reseller is that the reseller is basically managing the customer relationship versus with the affiliate, they’re bringing them in and then they’re hands-off at that point.
The next one is content marketing. I think that the content marketing has been all the rage for the past several years and I don’t see it necessarily ending anytime soon, but I think the bottom line for content marketing is that it is time and resource intensive to general content on a repeated basis. If you’re trying to blog once a week or put out a few articles each week or each month, that’s fine, but it’s not just the generation of those which is time and resource intensive, it’s also the marketing and distribution of those. If you’re trying to post it to Quora and various startup list and out your email newsletter and social media, that gets to be time and resource intensive, especially if you’re trying to cross-promote between different channels and schedule everything–it just gets complicated.
There’s also very long lead time to getting results and getting measurable results from them. It could be anywhere from three to six months, it could be as much as a year or 18 months. Regardless if that, it’s a lot of time and effort to get that engine running. But once it’s running, you’ll do really well with it but it just takes a long to get there and there’s probably better places for you to spend your time if you’re early on.
Rob: Yeah, this one is tough because content marketing can and does work. You just got to remember content marketing is more about SEO and it is a long-term play. That’s why when we get the questions from someone like, “Hey, I’m at $2000 MRR. Should I start my content marketing?” It depends. Probably not, but it really depends what niche are you in? Are there distribution networks? Not even networks but like growthhackers.com and YCombinator are distribution avenues for you to get the content out and are there people daily reading stuff like this? Are you going to be able to drive it? Are you going to build your list? And then long term, are you targeting SEO terms? Organic terms that are going to bring traffic? That’s how the play has really been successful for these larger companies.
Of the three we’ve talked about so far, I think content marketing is the best and most viable, but your critiques are absolutely correct in that it often takes a long time to get results and it is very resource intensive to generate content at the quality, and these days at the length that’s required to make it dent because there’s so much noise, man. I have not been on the social news sites like inbound.org used to be one but it shut down. growthhackers.com is still there, Hacker News, even SparkToro Trending, I had not been on any of those. I just don’t go on them regularly.
I’ve looked at a few of them this morning and the volume of content is crazy. It’s so much more and so much of it is highly targeted and you can tell it’s targeted to try to just get clicks to it. It’s a startup that is trying to get people to come through from Hacker News or from Product Time or from whatever to generate traffic to then funnel into the leads. We’ve all been there. I totally know that playbook. I was doing it back in 2012-2013 or even before that from my blog in 2010, but there is just a lot of noise out there. To rise above that, it’s a lot of time and money to create content that is good enough to warrant people’s attention.
Mike: The fourth item on our list is social media marketing and by this, I don’t mean paid ads like if you’re going on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, whatever you like. You can pay for advertising, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about building an audience and then trying to market content to them. I think the reason that this can be a substantial pitfall for people is that it seems like it should be easy but it’s time-intensive to gain followers. When you post things, a lot of times only a fraction of your followers are going to see a particular piece of content.
For example, I think on Twitter, the stuff that I’ve heard is about 5% of your followers are going to see any given tweet that you put out. So even if you have 100,000 followers, only about 5000 of them are going to see that. So the strategy to overcome that is you tweet multiple times a day and use something like Buffer to put those tweets out at different times a day to try and catch people on different time zones.
At that point, I feel like you’re also oversaturated in the people who are on Twitter a lot and it could very well be a turn-off to those people, but again, it’s a matter of, “What type of product are you promoting to people and is it going to be relevant to the people who are on Twitter?” I tried Twitter advertising for AuditShark, for example, and it just absolutely did not work because the people who are in the enterprise are just not the type of people who are looking for security software on Twitter.
Rob: Yeah and that’s not to say that Twitter advertising won’t work for anyone. I also think LinkedIn could be better for you, but I tried LinkedIn many times with multiple products and never got LinkedIn advertising to pay itself back. Again, not saying it won’t work, it’s just going to take trial and error if you can get it to work at all.
Mike: On that note, James Kennedy is going to be speaking at MicroConf Europe on a LinkedIn strategy for acquiring leads, so that might be interesting to you.
Rob: Awesome. That would be a cool one. I agree, man, social media marketing is great for B2C and it can be great for prosumer stuff, aspirational entrepreneurship, or even photographers–they tend to be aspirational. But when you’re talking about real sales tools, or real email marketing tools, or real tools that you want people to buy and use for years, and you need businesses that are making decisions, comparing you to competitors and all that, social media is a nice to have. It is not something in general that’s going to drive your bottom line if you are a B2B SaaS app. I’m sure there’s one exception to this, maybe two, I’m sure there are a couple, but overall as a bootstrapper or as someone who is really just trying to block and tackle, there are so many more things that you could be doing than to tooling around on Facebook and Twitter.
Mike: I think the real challenge here is just the fact that entrepreneurs tend to be on the internet a lot, we see Twitter a lot and we see Facebook a lot, so it’s natural to assume, “Hey, I should test that out or use that as a marketing strategy.” But again, it’s time-intensive to gain the followers. The reality is that what you want and most of those cases is actually just send them over to an email list anyway so you […] email address. Assuming you can get an engine up and running that can do that for you then that’s fine, but you still need a way to make it work and it can be very time-intensive to gain those followers and it’s not obvious always how you’re going to be able to do that.
The last one we have on our list today is offline advertising. By this, you can take it a bunch of different directions. It could be billboard advertising, […] response in a conference or podcast or anything where the direct attribution is a little bit more challenging. That also include things like sending postcards or physical mailers to people. I think, is it GRC marketing that does that? They advocate that a lot for sending out the bulky mail to people just to get their attention. That works great for those situations where you have a higher price point product or it’s a service, and there’s going to be a relationship that you’re trying to establish with them or the dollar amount is high enough that it’s worth it to send those.
The biggest downside of those is that it’s extremely hard to do the attribution in most cases and then there’s also a much longer iteration cycle. Instead of looking at couple of weeks for paid ads on Facebook or Twitter, you’re looking at a month, two months, maybe three months for an iteration cycle to send out a mailer and then figure out whether or not you got results from it, track those back, then make some adjustments or tweaks, and then move on to the next group. It can get very complicated to juggle all of those things at once because even if you’re just doing it repeatedly over the course of a month or two, it’s just going to suck up all of your time and attention. You’re not really going to be able to do very much else.
Rob: Yeah, it is expensive, too. It’s a long turn-around time and the iteration cycles are just, I would say, too long for a startup. Now, once you’re down the line, you have product market fit and it you’re in a space where offline is a really good option, obviously you could experiment with it. But it’s not something I would be messing with in the early days. And as you said, attribution is rough. I did some trade publication magazine advertising for one of my products once or twice and it didn’t work. Again, it’s not saying it wouldn’t work for you, but I quickly realized how expensive it was and just how you can’t tell if it’s working.
There’s a little adage, “50% of advertising doesn’t work.” You just can’t tell which 50% and that’s when people are talking about magazine and TV and radio and that kind of stuff. Obviously, you can tell which 50% works when you’re online and we are spoiled by that, in all honesty. I think that’s a real boon to the online marketer today. Offline is not something that I think you should get into lightly unless you really know what you’re doing.
Mike: I do know people who make offline advertising work. The problem is just that the iteration cycles are anywhere from 8-12 weeks just to find out whether or not a particular mailer got through to the right people and whether they got those people into their sales funnel. It does work especially in his particular business, but again, it’s just the lead time for you to go from one iteration cycle to the next and get the information back. It’s just hard if you’re still trying to make ends meet.
I think generally speaking, when you are trying to evaluate a marketing tactic is to whether or not it’s going to work for you or decide whether it’s going to be something that you want to try, there’s a couple of things to keep in mind. The first one is, is there a complicated setup that needs to be done first? Are you going to need to go create a bunch of accounts or are you going to need to integrate a bunch of different tools together? Is there ongoing effort that needs to be done? Are you going to have to constantly be creating or doing things? Any of those things where it takes your involvement on a very repeated basis is going to eat into the feasibility of using that strategy in the long term.
For blogging, for example, or content marketing, if you have to do that every single week, it can be difficult. It’s not saying you can’t outsource it. If you have money, you can obviously substitute that in for your time, but again, that’s a resource trade-off that you’re going to need to make down the road. You can start off doing it yourself or you can outsource it to somebody else. But those are the type of things you need to think about when you’re trying to figure out, “Is this something that I’m going to try and do long-term?” or are there better places that you could be spending your time?
Rob: Right because it’s one thing to intentionally try something and know that it’s not going to scale, but to do it as an experiment. It’s another thing to try a bunch of different tactics that really you don’t have much hope of sustaining without really doubling down on them. If you shotgun it and you try five different things but all of them need a tremendous amount of resources and effort, and you only go 10% of the way with each of them, you’re throwing an article here and you set up an affiliate plan here, and you do a Twitter and Facebook post a week, it’s like you’re not doing anything well.
But if you dive into one and experiment, figure out is there any way to make this possible, you dig in for a month or six weeks or whatever it takes, and you do these sprints where you dig in, learn everything you can about it and execute on it or you hire someone to do that if you have the budget. Determine, “Is this going to work right now given my business, yes or no?” Answer that question and then move on to the next thing–that is much more of the approach that I would recommend and the approach that I’ve taken in the past. You don’t need many of those to work in order to scale your business. If you find one or two pretty substantial marketing practices and you figure out the angle and you figure out how to get in there, that can grow your business to well under seven figures. It doesn’t take 10 different marketing tactics to get there.
With that, we’ll wrap up for today. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt, used under creative commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you with the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on, Mr. Rob?
Rob: We received a voicemail from someone, I believe he was in Brisbane, Australia, but it was definitely an Australian accent and I could barely make out the audio. The audio quality was so bad that we don’t even know his name or the question he asked. If that is you, please call us back or better yet, just record an MP3 on your local machine and just attach it or send us a Dropbox link to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Because it sounded like a good question but couldn’t really make out what he’s saying during that. How about you? What are you up to?
Mike: I’m in the middle of testing a new road map process with one of my customers using Teamwork. The basic idea is that I set up a project in Teamwork, mainly because this customer’s been with me for a while and it’s not a really complicated stuff that they’re asking for what they need, but they need assurances or like timeline and implementation and everything else.
I’ve got a road map that I’ve been using in the background using Trello for a while, but I just haven’t kept up with it. I’ve never really gotten into Trello like most people have. What I did was I created a project in Teamwork and then I invited them to look at it. I took their […], threw them in there. Basically, I’m working through them and it gives me the opportunity to comment on those things directly and allow them to comment back on them as well. It creates this really nice feedback loop between those things.
I haven’t added any other customers into it yet, but I think that that might be something that I’ll look into the future. But I’ve looked at other road mapping tools in the past and I’ve never really quite found one that suited me.
Rob: Is this for communicating your road map to customers?
Mike: If a customer asks for something, how do I communicate it to the rest of the customers, like, “This is what is going to be going on and this is what the priority is.” It’s a little bit different than like a bug tracker, obviously, if there’s a bug or somebody needs support or something like that, it’s different, but I’m the only one who can add stuff in so that it’s visible, but anybody can comment on it, at least so it seems like.
Rob: I’m trying to think there’s a tool that we use at Drip and of course, I can’t remember the name of it and we always used it to announce what we had built. It’s like, “This is what we released in September.” It’s like a change log tool but it was user-friendly. It was not super techie. I’m trying to think if you could use that pretty easily to suggest like, “Here’s what we’re working on in order.” I think there was actually a little feature where you could just add a bulleted list, but it was super stripped down. It was a very simple tool. It was $10 a month or something. It’s probably someone’s side project, although it’s pretty well-designed. Is that all you need is just a list of things? Why not just have, maybe a public Google doc or even just a static page on your website that’s like /roadmap? It’s just five things in bold list like, “Here are the next major five efforts we’re doing.”
Mike: There’s two things. One is we’ve been going back and forth through email and I said, “Look, I understand you got all these different things that you want to see, but I need a list of them. Just going back and forth one at a time is really not working. Send me the whole list.” They sent me the entire list and broke it out into three different sets like, “These are things we need very, very soon, these are things that can wait a little while, and these are things we’d like to eventually see down the road.” I looked at them and they all mapped pretty well like my internal road map anyway, which I have in my bug tracker, but I’m not going to pay for other people outside of business to have an account there just because it’s going to get expensive.
I was trying to figure out how do I work back and forth with them because I had a bunch of questions on some of them and there were comments on other things. It was a question of, “How do I work with them to flesh out what each of these things is?” because if I got an email that’s, let’s say, two pages or something like that, like bullets that they email to me, it’s hard to go back and forth about one line item and five line items in an email. I really needed something that was going to break them out so that I can comment on things individually and separate them a little bit more. Does that makes sense?
Rob: It does, yeah. It’s not just for outbound communication, it’s kind of like you’re almost collaborating with a client. It’s not that they’re paying you for this and not that you’re going to build it exactly as you’re expecting, but they really are. It’s much more customer development process than it is, “Hey, we’ve got suggestions in here is what’s we’re going to build.”
Mike: Yeah, I’d say customer development is probably a better way to phrase it than I did. It is a lot of back-and-forth to figure out like, “Is this going to work for you or what exactly did you mean by that? How are you going to use this?” for example. Because some of the questions are like, “I hear what you’re saying and it makes sense but where you going to use this for? I want to know, is there a better way to do this or is there something else that we could do either short-term or manually that would get them there faster?”
Rob: Right. Cool, it sounds interesting. I think of it as less of a road map process and more of, I guess, it is impacting your road map, but it’s more like a customer collaboration or a customer development process that you’re doing using Teamwork. That makes sense?
Mike: Yeah, it is.
Rob: Cool.
Mike: But I went on Google and searched for road map software a while back and I came across all these other things, like there’s ProductBoard, aha.io, ProductPlan, ProdPad, and things like that. It’s just none of them really seem to fit what I was looking for in terms of this back-and-forth communication with either individual customers or with small groups of them. I really think I just want to identify a couple of more customers to maybe work on this with, but it’s really a matter of, does it make sense in that particular context for that customer?
Rob: That makes sense. Have you seen MailChimp’s new branding?
Mike: I got an email about it, but I haven’t looked at it yet.
Rob: It’s a trip. I think I saw a news article. I think I was on SparkToro Trending. SparkToro is Rand Fishkin’s new startup and there’s a trending page and they talked–there was an article written about MailChimp’s new branding. Obviously, I think of MailChimp as the ESP. There are other email service providers but they are the biggest one. They are the ones that send a billion emails a day. Like the title tag on their homepage, which is what will appear on Google now, is marketing platform for small business.
I don’t know if it’s a pivot as much of just a rebrand. But like their homepage used to say, “We help you sell more stuff at MailChimp,” or something like that, it’s very much commerce-focused, but their headline is now, “Your business was born for this. Become the brand you want to be with smarter marketing built for big things.” It’s very, very interesting. It’s a gutsy move. The colors are different. I actually like the design of the site. It’s definitely jarring.
Remember when the Drip rebrand happened and there was the magenta and the other colors, I feel this is similar but different, but the headline and the value prop on it feels not nearly as focused as what I’ve always thought of as MailChimp. The fact that the sub-headline is “Become the brand you want to be with smarter marketing built for big things,” that doesn’t resonate with me as a customer and never would have at any point in my entrepreneurial career. I’m concerned. These guys are smart, let’s not fault MailChimp, but I feel like maybe they’ve made a misstep here.
Mike: I don’t know. I think it’s easy to think that if a company changes their brand name, that, “Oh, this company isn’t for me any more. This tool isn’t for me,” but at the same time, the tool itself hasn’t change. It’s really just a marketing message. I forget who said this, but the line is something along the lines of, “What got you here won’t get your there.” Like you said, they’re sending a billion emails a day but that doesn’t necessarily acquire them more customers faster, they need a marketing message that resonates with a larger group of people than they currently have or they’re currently after because they probably saturated the market. The ESP market is really highly saturated. There’s tons of players there so they need to differentiate themselves an go after people who are either just not using something or are using something else and want to find something that is going to fit them better.
Rob: Yeah. That makes sense and that’s thing. When you’re not inside an privy to the conversations that they’re having and who they’re competing against when they’re going for big deals, you don’t know. That’s where I’m like, “Who am I to say?” but this is my opinion on the outside. Again, with the Drip stuff when there was that rebrand, it was right before I was leaving the company. It was happening and rolling out. There were so many naysayers and haters on social media and all the stuff, but they were privy to the information that is actually going on inside the company.
I guess what I’m saying is, it could be so easy for me to sit here and just rail on this MailChimp rebrand because it’s “different,” but I trust that MailChimp is pretty damn smart and pretty good at what they do, and that they took the information. It’s either going to work or they’ll change. If that headline doesn’t resonate with people, they’ll change it. I think that’s the thing. When you make these big gutsy moves and you’re trying to land and expand or pivot into a larger space or whatever it is that they’re doing, apply to more people, as you said, you have to do risky stuff at some point.
What’s interesting is in the early days of a startup, you take a lot of risks but no one’s there to notice and no one cares. But when you have 1000, 10,000, 50,000 customers and you take these risks, a lot of people get up in arms over it, but really it’s the same risk that you’ve been taking all along.
Mike: I think for large companies like that, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we might sit here in armchair quarterback it, you know Monday morning quarterback. Just because their existing customers are still going to be paying them money, it’s about them acquiring new customers, not appealing to the ones that they already have. That’s the way I see it.
Rob: That’s the thing. As long as you don’t do such a pivot that you completely turn your existing customers off and have a bunch of churn and stuff, man, that would be really hard to do, especially with ESPs where there is some lock-in in the space.
Mike: Yeah, it is hard to move from one to another. I’ve done that before. It sucks.
Rob: Yup. So what are we talking about today?
Mike: Today, we’re going to be talking about a couple of pitfalls of some commonly recommended marketing tactics. This topic was inspired by a tweet from Scott over at KickoffLabs and we’ll link that into the show notes. But he said, “One of the worst startup diseases is AB testing. Such a colossal waste of time when you don’t have significant traffic,” and it got me to thinking, what other things are there that are commonly recommended marketing tactics that I see and hear about or you’ve see and hear about, that are either colossal waste of time or there’s pitfalls or things that you don’t necessarily know about until you get into it, and only to realize that you’re walking into a hornet’s nest and there’s more trouble than it’s worth or it’s just not going to work for you or it’s something that you can do short term, but it’s not going to be sustainable for you.
Rob: Cool. Let’s dig in. I was pretty excited when you talked about doing this topic today because I think there are a lot of, I won’t say misinformation but it’s more like myths or people making things look easier than it actually is in order to sell things, in order to sell their software or sell their infoproducts.
Mike: I think that’s the big piece of it is that they think it look easier or sound easier than it actually is. For split testing, we’ll start off there because of the tweet from Scott but you need substantial traffic and most early entrepreneurs don’t have it. It’s not just that you need substantial traffic, you need substantial traffic and a short enough time window where your test is going to be able to give you at least some sort of significant results.
The other thing that I think is a little bit misleading is about whether or not the split testing that you actually could do, if you were to get 1% results or an increase every month for 12 months, would you actually be that much better off? I have seen some odd anecdotes where people will say, “Hey, we did all these split test or we split tested something against itself and one was significantly different than the other.” It does make me wonder a little bit as to whether or not with the resources that we as small business owners have available, can we actually even effectively execute on that stuff in a way that is going to move the needle for our business?
Rob: If you’re thinking about the early days of your startup and you’re trying to build something people want, you’re in customer development, you have a website, a little bit of traffic, split testing is the furthest thing from your mind or should be the furthest thing from your mind. You need to be talking to customers in those early days, to figure out what is that I can build that people are willing to pay for, that’s different enough from the competition that I can communicate that and people will sign up.
Typically, you’re going to split test your home page or your pricing page or your sign-up funnel, and I would not even consider it before I had, let’s say 5000 or 10,000 uniques a month. Really, at that point, it depends on what revenue is and if I have the time to test the headline here or there. But if I were to do split testing at that point, let’s say I had 10,000 uniques a month coming to their home page, I would probably just set up one or two alternate headlines and just let it run and see what happens. But it wouldn’t be some massive effort where I would be redesigning the entire page to spending a bunch of time to try to get some major difference in conversions, because there are other levers you should be pulling at that point. When you have 5000 or 10,000 uniques, you should be worrying about more traffic, or you should be worrying about, frankly, converting more of the existing trials you have to pay the customer. It’s going to tend to move the needle more than spending a lot of time on split testing.
Mike: The next marketing tactic is using affiliate programs. I see a lot of startups from Product Hunt, BetaList, and a couple of other places that startup it up where they’re pitching this affiliate program and saying, “Hey you can manage your affiliate program through our SaaS and you’ll be able to get more customers for your business.” But the reality is that the attribution itself is fine within those pieces of software, but finding the affiliates who are able to bring in enough leads to make it worth your time is actually pretty hard.
I’ve done this a couple of times. It seems to me the software itself is reasonably straightforward in most cases to implement, but finding the people who are actually going to bring leads that are qualified to you is a lot more challenging. It’s just, you have to do a lot of education to those people, you have to make it worth their time, and you have to be finding affiliates who have a substantial traffic source already or existing list where you can point them back to your website, give them an affiliate code or something like that, and give them an offer that’s actually going to get them to convert. If you don’t have all of those things, then it’s just not going to work. It doesn’t matter how many people you sign up for your affiliate program. You need the qualified leads to be coming in.
Rob: Yeah. Finding affiliates is way harder than most people think unless this is a primary strategy for you and you have a network. The people who I’ve seen make it work—let’s talk about Clay Collins of LeadPages—it was built mostly on the affiliate model. He did that because he knew all the people in the internet marketing space. He had the clout to get them to do webinars with him. It wasn’t just, “Hey, send me some traffic.” It was, “Let’s do a webinar,” and then he pitch an annual deal and it was 50% off, there was time pressure and there were bonuses, I should say, that you got if you sold there. That’s how he grew it that fast.
ConvertKit did the same thing. It was the same playbook. If you’re going to do that, then do that and go all in on it. I recall, at one point, Clay was doing 20 webinars a month or something in the early days, 15 or 20. It was crazy. He’s just a machine. In that case, you’re an exception. You’re not going to start from a cold network where you don’t know other people who have big audiences and make affiliate programs work from the start. It’s going to be a ton of work. In addition, the process side I just talked about, I’ve only seen it work in one niche and it’s in this aspirational business niche. It’s in the people who want to be bloggers or be info marketers and they’re being sold info on how to start your own biz from home.
You look at LeadPages and ConvertKit and they both serve that same path Flynn-ish niche. You can’t just go to enterprise software and think you’re going to do this big affiliate model, sell to Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 1000 companies using that. Or even freelancers would be possible because there are people with those audiences, but it wouldn’t work to the same extent that it does because the audience is just aren’t as big and they aren’t as prone to buy. I’d say there is one or two other spaces that I know of that are similar to that, that aspirational thing where you can sell them the idea or the promise of, “Hey, you’re going to have a landing page provider or here’s an ESP and here’s how to start your blog and make money.” But beyond those, it is really hard to get an affiliate program profitable one off the ground.
I had affiliate program with HitTail and Drip, and they made money, they were profitable, but they were not major driving factors. Even when we did joint ventures and we did joint venture webinars, we’d do JV mailings, it made money and it was fine, but these were not the major drivers of growth that I’ve seen in most of my startups. Again, not saying it can’t work but it’s definitely different than it appears.
Mike: Yeah, it’s definitely a lot harder than it appears. You have mentioned enterprise software sales where affiliate models wouldn’t really work and I agree with that, but there’s a slightly different model for those enterprise deals where it’s basically a reseller arrangement. You don’t have direct contact with the enterprise companies, you resell to other companies, you sign them on as resellers which is a slightly different take on an affiliate program, but it’s not substantially that much different. It’s the same basic idea–somebody else is bring in the lead in. The difference with a reseller is that the reseller is basically managing the customer relationship versus with the affiliate, they’re bringing them in and then they’re hands-off at that point.
The next one is content marketing. I think that the content marketing has been all the rage for the past several years and I don’t see it necessarily ending anytime soon, but I think the bottom line for content marketing is that it is time and resource intensive to general content on a repeated basis. If you’re trying to blog once a week or put out a few articles each week or each month, that’s fine, but it’s not just the generation of those which is time and resource intensive, it’s also the marketing and distribution of those. If you’re trying to post it to Quora and various startup list and out your email newsletter and social media, that gets to be time and resource intensive, especially if you’re trying to cross-promote between different channels and schedule everything–it just gets complicated.
There’s also very long lead time to getting results and getting measurable results from them. It could be anywhere from three to six months, it could be as much as a year or 18 months. Regardless if that, it’s a lot of time and effort to get that engine running. But once it’s running, you’ll do really well with it but it just takes a long to get there and there’s probably better places for you to spend your time if you’re early on.
Rob: Yeah, this one is tough because content marketing can and does work. You just got to remember content marketing is more about SEO and it is a long-term play. That’s why when we get the questions from someone like, “Hey, I’m at $2000 MRR. Should I start my content marketing?” It depends. Probably not, but it really depends what niche are you in? Are there distribution networks? Not even networks but like growthhackers.com and YCombinator are distribution avenues for you to get the content out and are there people daily reading stuff like this? Are you going to be able to drive it? Are you going to build your list? And then long term, are you targeting SEO terms? Organic terms that are going to bring traffic? That’s how the play has really been successful for these larger companies.
Of the three we’ve talked about so far, I think content marketing is the best and most viable, but your critiques are absolutely correct in that it often takes a long time to get results and it is very resource intensive to generate content at the quality, and these days at the length that’s required to make it dent because there’s so much noise, man. I have not been on the social news sites like inbound.org used to be one but it shut down. growthhackers.com is still there, Hacker News, even SparkToro Trending, I had not been on any of those. I just don’t go on them regularly.
I’ve looked at a few of them this morning and the volume of content is crazy. It’s so much more and so much of it is highly targeted and you can tell it’s targeted to try to just get clicks to it. It’s a startup that is trying to get people to come through from Hacker News or from Product Time or from whatever to generate traffic to then funnel into the leads. We’ve all been there. I totally know that playbook. I was doing it back in 2012-2013 or even before that from my blog in 2010, but there is just a lot of noise out there. To rise above that, it’s a lot of time and money to create content that is good enough to warrant people’s attention.
Mike: The fourth item on our list is social media marketing and by this, I don’t mean paid ads like if you’re going on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, whatever you like. You can pay for advertising, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about building an audience and then trying to market content to them. I think the reason that this can be a substantial pitfall for people is that it seems like it should be easy but it’s time-intensive to gain followers. When you post things, a lot of times only a fraction of your followers are going to see a particular piece of content.
For example, I think on Twitter, the stuff that I’ve heard is about 5% of your followers are going to see any given tweet that you put out. So even if you have 100,000 followers, only about 5000 of them are going to see that. So the strategy to overcome that is you tweet multiple times a day and use something like Buffer to put those tweets out at different times a day to try and catch people on different time zones.
At that point, I feel like you’re also oversaturated in the people who are on Twitter a lot and it could very well be a turn-off to those people, but again, it’s a matter of, “What type of product are you promoting to people and is it going to be relevant to the people who are on Twitter?” I tried Twitter advertising for AuditShark, for example, and it just absolutely did not work because the people who are in the enterprise are just not the type of people who are looking for security software on Twitter.
Rob: Yeah and that’s not to say that Twitter advertising won’t work for anyone. I also think LinkedIn could be better for you, but I tried LinkedIn many times with multiple products and never got LinkedIn advertising to pay itself back. Again, not saying it won’t work, it’s just going to take trial and error if you can get it to work at all.
Mike: On that note, James Kennedy is going to be speaking at MicroConf Europe on a LinkedIn strategy for acquiring leads, so that might be interesting to you.
Rob: Awesome. That would be a cool one. I agree, man, social media marketing is great for B2C and it can be great for prosumer stuff, aspirational entrepreneurship, or even photographers–they tend to be aspirational. But when you’re talking about real sales tools, or real email marketing tools, or real tools that you want people to buy and use for years, and you need businesses that are making decisions, comparing you to competitors and all that, social media is a nice to have. It is not something in general that’s going to drive your bottom line if you are a B2B SaaS app. I’m sure there’s one exception to this, maybe two, I’m sure there are a couple, but overall as a bootstrapper or as someone who is really just trying to block and tackle, there are so many more things that you could be doing than to tooling around on Facebook and Twitter.
Mike: I think the real challenge here is just the fact that entrepreneurs tend to be on the internet a lot, we see Twitter a lot and we see Facebook a lot, so it’s natural to assume, “Hey, I should test that out or use that as a marketing strategy.” But again, it’s time-intensive to gain the followers. The reality is that what you want and most of those cases is actually just send them over to an email list anyway so you […] email address. Assuming you can get an engine up and running that can do that for you then that’s fine, but you still need a way to make it work and it can be very time-intensive to gain those followers and it’s not obvious always how you’re going to be able to do that.
The last one we have on our list today is offline advertising. By this, you can take it a bunch of different directions. It could be billboard advertising, […] response in a conference or podcast or anything where the direct attribution is a little bit more challenging. That also include things like sending postcards or physical mailers to people. I think, is it GRC marketing that does that? They advocate that a lot for sending out the bulky mail to people just to get their attention. That works great for those situations where you have a higher price point product or it’s a service, and there’s going to be a relationship that you’re trying to establish with them or the dollar amount is high enough that it’s worth it to send those.
The biggest downside of those is that it’s extremely hard to do the attribution in most cases and then there’s also a much longer iteration cycle. Instead of looking at couple of weeks for paid ads on Facebook or Twitter, you’re looking at a month, two months, maybe three months for an iteration cycle to send out a mailer and then figure out whether or not you got results from it, track those back, then make some adjustments or tweaks, and then move on to the next group. It can get very complicated to juggle all of those things at once because even if you’re just doing it repeatedly over the course of a month or two, it’s just going to suck up all of your time and attention. You’re not really going to be able to do very much else.
Rob: Yeah, it is expensive, too. It’s a long turn-around time and the iteration cycles are just, I would say, too long for a startup. Now, once you’re down the line, you have product market fit and it you’re in a space where offline is a really good option, obviously you could experiment with it. But it’s not something I would be messing with in the early days. And as you said, attribution is rough. I did some trade publication magazine advertising for one of my products once or twice and it didn’t work. Again, it’s not saying it wouldn’t work for you, but I quickly realized how expensive it was and just how you can’t tell if it’s working.
There’s a little adage, “50% of advertising doesn’t work.” You just can’t tell which 50% and that’s when people are talking about magazine and TV and radio and that kind of stuff. Obviously, you can tell which 50% works when you’re online and we are spoiled by that, in all honesty. I think that’s a real boon to the online marketer today. Offline is not something that I think you should get into lightly unless you really know what you’re doing.
Mike: I do know people who make offline advertising work. The problem is just that the iteration cycles are anywhere from 8-12 weeks just to find out whether or not a particular mailer got through to the right people and whether they got those people into their sales funnel. It does work especially in his particular business, but again, it’s just the lead time for you to go from one iteration cycle to the next and get the information back. It’s just hard if you’re still trying to make ends meet.
I think generally speaking, when you are trying to evaluate a marketing tactic is to whether or not it’s going to work for you or decide whether it’s going to be something that you want to try, there’s a couple of things to keep in mind. The first one is, is there a complicated setup that needs to be done first? Are you going to need to go create a bunch of accounts or are you going to need to integrate a bunch of different tools together? Is there ongoing effort that needs to be done? Are you going to have to constantly be creating or doing things? Any of those things where it takes your involvement on a very repeated basis is going to eat into the feasibility of using that strategy in the long term.
For blogging, for example, or content marketing, if you have to do that every single week, it can be difficult. It’s not saying you can’t outsource it. If you have money, you can obviously substitute that in for your time, but again, that’s a resource trade-off that you’re going to need to make down the road. You can start off doing it yourself or you can outsource it to somebody else. But those are the type of things you need to think about when you’re trying to figure out, “Is this something that I’m going to try and do long-term?” or are there better places that you could be spending your time?
Rob: Right because it’s one thing to intentionally try something and know that it’s not going to scale, but to do it as an experiment. It’s another thing to try a bunch of different tactics that really you don’t have much hope of sustaining without really doubling down on them. If you shotgun it and you try five different things but all of them need a tremendous amount of resources and effort, and you only go 10% of the way with each of them, you’re throwing an article here and you set up an affiliate plan here, and you do a Twitter and Facebook post a week, it’s like you’re not doing anything well.
But if you dive into one and experiment, figure out is there any way to make this possible, you dig in for a month or six weeks or whatever it takes, and you do these sprints where you dig in, learn everything you can about it and execute on it or you hire someone to do that if you have the budget. Determine, “Is this going to work right now given my business, yes or no?” Answer that question and then move on to the next thing–that is much more of the approach that I would recommend and the approach that I’ve taken in the past. You don’t need many of those to work in order to scale your business. If you find one or two pretty substantial marketing practices and you figure out the angle and you figure out how to get in there, that can grow your business to well under seven figures. It doesn’t take 10 different marketing tactics to get there.
With that, we’ll wrap up for today. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt, used under creative commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 411 | Bootstrapping vs. Funding: 19 Questions To Ask
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about bootstrapping versus funding. It is a common question new entrepreneurs ask themselves and based on an article on the subject, the guys comment and elaborate on some of these questions.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and I talk about 19 questions to ask when considering bootstrapping versus raising funding. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 411.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Where this week, sir?
Mike: Well, there is a book recommendation that you’ve given awhile ago called, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I’ve commented it, I’ve bought the book, but I haven’t read it yet. I’ve been kind of diving into that a little bit. I find it fascinating probably more so from a historical perspective because Ben Horowitz, who’s the author, he’s talking about his journey through the startup after he had left PayPal, and running this other company, and they basically only had one customer that was providing 90% of the revenue and basically spun that business off into its own separate entity and got rid of a bunch of assets with it, and talks about he built up the company from there.
What I find fascinating about it is that the new company is called Opsware. I remember back in those days when I was doing sales demos and presentations and stuff, I was actually in some cases, competing against Opsware.
Rob: That’s a trip. That book–it is brutal. Have you finished it?
Mike: I’ve not, no.
Rob: I was so stressed. It’s a good book but I don’t know if I could listen to it again because what he has to go through to grow and keep his company from basically going under and then he sells it for $1 billion or multiple billions of dollars and then he starts Andreessen Horowitz—that part is not in the book but he talks a little bit about it—but he is the Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. I remember listening to it and being like, “Yup, I could not have done this. I would have imploded.” It is, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a good title for it.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. I do not think that I would have wanted to go through all the stuff that he’s gone through especially just the financial challenge of trying to go public at the time that he did, right after the economy kind of cratered. What did he say? Like there was 200 plus IPOs the year before and then there was 6 or 12 or something like that the year that he did it. Wow!
Rob: It’s crazy. He went public, he didn’t get acquired, I forgot what…
Mike: No, he went public first and it was in a bad environment. The reason they went public was because they couldn’t get anymore investment capital from investors. Then it was a bunch of years later, like 2007 or something like that where they ended up selling to HP for, I think, it was $1 or $2 billion.
Rob: Got it. That was my memory, but I have forgotten they went public. It’s agonizing. It really is the shoot for the $1 billion exit. You don’t need to be a several hundred-million-dollar revenue journey raising venture capital and all that stuff. A lot of it just did not sound like something I ever want to experience in my life, even for payout like that. I don’t it’d be worth it.
Mike: How about you? What’s going on this week?
Rob: Well, you and I just had a conversation before this episode started recording. We are evaluating potentially having sponsorships on Startups For The Rest Of Us. If you are a company, whether you’re a startup or if you think that you would be interested in reaching the Startups For The Rest Of Us audience—it’s a lot of bootstrappers but it’s also a lot of people running six and seven figure businesses, drop us a line at questionsforstartupsfortherestofus.com and just put “Sponsor” or “Sponsorship” in the subject line, and we’ll talk about it.
Obviously, as a listener, we’re been doing this for eight years, and we appreciate the trust that you put in Mike and I to produce high-quality content and to deliver value to you. We have no intention of “screwing up” the podcast by adding a bunch of sponsorship roles in the thing and interrupting your flow, but we are at a point where it does cost us money and it does cost us time away from our businesses to do this, so we’re just evaluating it. It’s a preliminary thing, we definitely have not made up our mind about it, but we do want to explore this as an option.
Mike: Again, that email address is questionsforstartupsfortherestofus.com and just put “Sponsorship” or “Sponsor” in the subject line, and we’ll take a look at it. Again, we’ll just kind of evaluate how things go. To reiterate what Rob had said, we appreciate you guys listening and we don’t want to screw up the whole thing. I think like a lot of things that we’ve done at MicroConf every year I think is just kind of a play it safe approach, but at the same time, look for ways to change things to make things better.
Rob: Yeah, we’ve experimented a lot with things at MicroConf over the years. Some have worked, some haven’t. But one thing that I think we’ve done a good job is recognizing when they work and don’t and basically changing it up when things don’t. Even if we try it, if it suddenly becomes a […] or something like that, I could imagine pivoting.
Today, we’re going to be running through an article by a listener and commenter name Don Gooding. The title of his article is Bootstrapping versus Venture Capital: 19 Questions to Ask. But what I find interesting about the article is it’s not just about venture capital, it is about angel investment as well. But before we get there, we have a comment from Adam on episode 406, and 406 was five episodes ago when you and I discussed, “Should bootstrappers raise money?” was the title of the episode. Adam said, “I’m so glad you jumped in, Mike, and said something about Rob hitting 21k MRR saying that it wasn’t a fair comparison.” Because I believe I was saying, “Drip hit 21k MRR quickly and if it took me four years to get there then I would’ve […] it down.” And you said, “Well, that’s not a fair comparison because you’re in a different place and if you’re building something on the side, maybe it is four years.”–to that point.
Back to Adam. He says, “I’m still trying to hit 21k MRR after four year, but I don’t think I’m failing at what I’m doing. Maybe an episode on what you think that growth is, that people should be aiming for, this was a good episode. A follow-up question to Mike would be, why have you or have you not fun strapped Bluetick?”
Mike: Oh, that’s a good question that I don’t have a good answer for.
Rob: It’s something evaluated, no?
Mike: Oh, yeah. I’ve looked at it a couple of times. I had a few conversations privately with people I know who have raised money, and just asked them what their take on it was, what their experiences was after going through it, what were the drawbacks, what would they have done differently. I got a sense that it was going to be rather complicated and time-consuming, and I didn’t have the time to spend on it. I continue to kind of look at it and continue to think about but it’s not something where I’ve said, “Yeah, I definitely want to do that. I’m all in. I’m going to dedicate the next X weeks or months whatever going out and raising funding.”
I’ve probably spent a lot more time working on getting Bluetick to a better place. I think I have been open about the fact that early on, I had hired a bunch of contractors to build a lot of the core infrastructure of Bluetick. Quite frankly, it was not done very well so there’s a lot of things that are generally screwed up and it makes it difficult to make changes. I would prefer to move fast if I can help it, but the problem is a lot of the architecture and the choices that were made at the time make that difficult. I have a hard time pulling away from those things and doing some of the clean-up work to basically make myself be able to move faster.
Because I feel like if I had like a pile of money, I would feel obligated to expand things a lot quicker and maybe even more than I’m possibly comfortable with, and I just know that there are certain parts of the app that if I were to dump 50 or 100 users on it all at once, it’s not going to scale very well. There are certain processes that need to run and it’s just not going to take a large influx of people very well. It can do it, I’d probably have to tweak a couple of settings to make it happen, but I’m not real comfortable doing that. I think it’s partly out of obligation, partly out of complexity and the time that I would have to spend on it.
Rob: You have technical debt already.
Mike: Yes. I think you have technical debt as soon as you write a single line of code.
Rob: Well, not if it’s fully unit tested, though. I think of […] there’s that, I don’t if it’s a joke or it if it’s truly the definition but it’s like, “Legacy code is code that is not highly unit tested.” Yeah, you have a little bit of technical debt but to hear that it’s hard to make changes, that’s a real bummer to hear given how early stage you are, and that you’re a technical founder. That’s the whole point of us being technical founders, that’s our skill set, we shouldn’t have that.
Mike: Maybe I should caveat that a little bit more. It’s not that it’s hard to make changes, it’s that I feel uncomfortable making changes to certain places because they’re not as well unit tested as I would like them to be. The software does a lot. There’s some changes I’ll just push out. It’s just like, “Hey, this is a frontend UI changes, it’s not that big of a deal.” But then when you get into things like, how mailboxes are stored and how the data is synchronized, I’m real hesitant to make changes to those because there is, in one particular case I can think off the top of my head, there was literally no way for me to unit test it whatsoever.
It’s hard to justify going in there and just making whole scale changes that would make things easier because I know that it’s working and if it breaks, it does a lot of work every second, and things could go seriously sideways very, very quickly. The new build server I put in place a couple of weeks ago would actually make rolling back pretty easy, but then I’d have to go through and figure out what in the code broke. Again, it’s not easy to unit tested that piece.
Rob: Yeah, I feel like, “Next time, should we just build, I don’t know, simple project management that just pulls things out of databases. It’s that no connections to any external sources and no queues. I don’t want any queues, I want everything synchronize.
Mike: Honestly, that’s part of it is the queues and stuff that I have to deal with. Queues processing, storing data, being able to filter certain things out and, “Oh, somebody deleted this piece of data.” It kind of sucks to have things moving while you’re also writing the code on it. I’m sure you went through this with Drip. There’s so much…
Rob: That’s SaaS though.
Mike: I know. It’s like open heart surgery–it feels like sometimes.
Rob: Yeah, every time we did anything meaningful to scheduling or, I mean there’s all kinds of stuff that’s so easy to screw up. If you can figure out a way to smoke earn—not smoke test—but to get you in a test on that stuff because the fact that you don’t feel comfortable making changes to a part of your app, that’s going to be a hindrance forever. It’s not going to get better, it’s only going to get worst especially if it grows, if you start hiring people, that’s a big red zone there that I think you need to think about remedying early.
Mike: Yeah. […] is there’s a component that I’m using where to get into the technical details of it, there’s a C# Class and I have to serialize it. In order to do that, in order to store the data. The problem is they’ve marked it as sealed which means I can’t inherit from it, which means I can’t really do anything with it. I’ve been working with them to try and figure out like, “Is there a way I can get an interface for this or something like that so that I can create it?” Because they don’t have a public constructor for it because it’s a sealed class, it’s encapsulated in the assembly, I can’t narrow from it either. I really don’t have any other options other than faking it which is what I’ve done so far. I basically have my own object that very, very closely mimics theirs, but it’s not perfect, and that’s the problem. I’ve found a few edge cases here and there, it’s kind of scary. I’m hoping it will come up with a solution sooner rather than later, but I’ve been working with them for probably six months on it.
Rob: One minute while I update my spreadsheet. Let’s see, apps to not start as an unfunded single founder, email marketing for writer, cold email outreach–the list is getting longer and longer. It’s like, these things don’t seem that complicated when you look at it from the outside. “I want to build an ESP. This is going to be a piece of cake.” said Derek and I before we wrote code.
Mike: I think anything where you have an outside dependency that you don’t completely control or have complete access to, that’s where it gets hard. Or you’re relying on events coming in to the system and you have to do data processing on.
Rob: Alright. Well, let’s keep moving on with this episode. Our second comment on episode 406 was from Don Gooding. He linked over to a few articles he’s written and one of them which we’re going to discuss today. His comment was, “I write a lot about bootstrapping versus venture capital or angel funding. They’re definitely a bunch of issues to consider both early and later. I hope you’ll consider the following posts helpful and not spammy.” and I do consider them helpful. He links to three different articles. His blog is fourcolorsofmoney.com. Don, if you’re listening, register the 4colorsofmoney and also, redirect that over because I tried that as well and it just goes nowhere.
He linked to the first article which is, Bootstrapping Versus Venture Capital: 19 Questions to Ask–we’re going to talk about that today. He also linked to another article called, The Bootstrap to Funding Pivot Playbook which is about bootstrapping first and then raising funding later. He talks about revenue financing in that one. Then his last article is, Revenue-Based Financing: Five Different Options and he walks thru them which is pretty interesting.
His site is called Four Colors of Money because he looks at bootstrapping, he looks at grants, he looks at grant and equity–those are the four colors. He’s obviously—having read through it—pretty knowledgeable about this stuff. Again, we will include those three links in the show notes. You can always go back on those comments on episode 406 if you wanted to see his full comment.
But today, we are going to talk through his article Bootstrapping Versus Venture Capital: 19 Questions to Ask. We won’t have time to go through all 19 question, but the idea here is to think about whether you can and should bootstrap or whether you need to raise funding.
His first question is, “How much of your own capital do you have. Do you have a way to self-fund it?” Self-funding and bootstrapping sound like they’re the same thing, but they’re different. Bootstrapping is truly having almost no money. A few hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, a couple thousand dollars, and then growing a business based purely on its revenue and profits.
Self-funding is if I have $1000 in the bank or $200,000 in the bank, or I had another business that was throwing off money or another income stream that was throwing off money that I could then take and start my next business from.
Self-funding is a lot of what I did. In the early, early days, I bootstrapped everything right out of consulting revenue but spent very little money. Then the more business revenue I had, I stayed consulting during the day full-time, and I took that business revenue and used it to self-fund the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and each of them got bigger and bigger. It took me a long time to get from having .net invoice doing $300 a month, 10 years later, even longer, 11 years later, it’s Drip doing seven figures a year and having exit.
I didn’t have to raise during that time because I self-funded, but it took me a lot longer than if I had come up with an idea and just raised funding early on. That’s kind of how I think about the trade-offs is I believe it takes longer if you’re in a self-fund unless you do have a rich uncle or a trust fund. But his first question to think about is how much capital on your own do you have that you can invest in the business?
Mike: I feel like this is more of a runway question because the money itself, you either have to when the business itself is generating money, how much is left over for you to leave versus how much are you going to be able to put back into the business. If you’re running a business on the side or on nights and weekends and stuff like that, then you presumably have a full-time job, and that is keeping your self alive and your family fed while the business is getting the rest of the profits. But at some point, things are going to transition, and you have to make some choices about like what your future looks like, do you have enough money to be able to spend $1000 on ad words or something like that to test out a market? You may even need that money early on.
That comes down to the fundamental question that he’s got here is, how much of your own capital do you have? Can you afford to run experiments early on? Do you have more time on your hands or do you have more money? This is getting more at the money side of the equation. If you have plenty of time, if your timeline is five years, you can take as long as you want to do most things. Certain industries of course will move very quickly, and competitors will swoop in, not ideal if you’re trying to take five years to do it but certain ones you can do that.
I think Patrick McKenzie, with Bingo Card Creator, he slowly built that up. Nobody else wanted to get into market because there wasn’t a lot there. But he was still able to make a pretty good business out of it. He just took a really long time to do it.
Rob: His next few questions look at ways that if you don’t have the money to self-fund, ways to look around and see if you can essentially raise funds but not from venture capitalists or angels. His second question is, how likely it is you can raise funds from family or friends. Third question is, “Can your product support a Kickstarter style campaign?” which I believe a lot of people overlook. Info products and even some software, not B2B, but have to really be B2C in general can use Kickstarter as well as obviously physical products would be a great way to do it. His fourth one is, “Will customers pay you well in advance of you delivering your product or service?” Can you essentially pre-sell it? His fifth one actually is, “Does it qualify for a grant?” I don’t think that applies to most of our listeners nor any business I’ve ever started, but it is one of the colors of money that he talks about.
Mike: You know, I’ve thought about this kind of crowd funding. I’ve heard people gone down that path, not on Kickstarter, but someplace else, I can’t remember the name of it.
Rob: Like Indiegogo or something?
Mike: I think, yeah, it was Indiegogo. The general consensus was people are much more willing to fund individual ventures and things where there’s a physical product. But when it comes to software, people are not particularly interested. Maybe that’s just because it’s kind of self-selecting where the people who are building those generally are targeting them at businesses versus if you’re going to do something where it’s like, “Oh, this is a way to organize baseball cards,” or something like that, if it’s something that has a wider appeal and it’s a non-business use, you’ll find the hobbyist into that or the people who are prosumers, so to speak, they are going to be into it, and they would probably fund it. But if you’re going to try and create a CRM or something like that, who’s going to fund that? I can’t think of anyone who would want to willingly throw in money unless it was for their own business at which point, it’s not really for the greater good so to speak.
Rob: Totally. When I look back at the 173 Kickstarter projects that I’ve backed. Mike, did you hear what I just said?
Mike: Oh my god.
Rob: Oh, no. That’s the number of successful projects I’ve backed. I’ve 185 Kickstarter projects. Oh, the humanity, Mike. It’s so embarrassing. I just love Kickstarter. But I don’t think I’ve backed a single piece of software. My taste, it’s a lot of graphic novels, it’s a lot of table top games, it’s a lot of little tech gadgets. There was a Kano–the open source computer that I could teach my kids how to put computers together and do that stuff. A lot of it is some learning, some teaching, and some gadgetry and stuff. I think that my gist is that my taste are not uncommon. I do agree that in trying to launch a project in Kickstarter would be hard. But there are a lot of listeners who are not just trying to do B2B software as we’ve talked about.
I’m going to skip over a couple of these questions. But another couple of questions that I think are interesting to ask because they imply that you should probably raise some type of at least angel and potentially go after venture funding. One is, “Do you think it will take more than $100,000 and/or longer than one year to develop your product or service to the point that it is generating revenue?” Another question is, “Does your business have network effects where only one or two companies will end up with 80% or 90% of the market?” because that’s a super protectable. There’s a moat around that product or around that business. That is something that can very likely be fundable.
Another questions is, “Do you have large capital equipment or other fixed investment needs that aren’t debt financeable?” those three would obviously imply that you probably need to raise some kind of funding.
Mike: Well, I look at those things as potential disqualifiers as well because if it’s a network effects type of business where only a couple of companies are going to end up with a large percentage of the market, to me, that’s kind of a disqualifier unless you’re going to go raise money, and which I guess is kind of what he’s saying, but you have no idea if other people are going to answer in there who have a lot more clout than you. That’s why you should probably go raise funding if you’re going to go for something like that. But you’re also going to look at that particular thing and say, “This is a disqualifier for me. I’m not just going to go in that direction because I don’t want to raise money.”
Rob: Another good one I like that he asks is, “Do you have potential customers that will see your small sizes of risks? For example, a potential career–a limiting decision.” In other words, if you’re selling to banks, large institutions, they’re going to require that you have some kind of backing, right? I shouldn’t say require. They’re going to be unlikely to go with a single founder building software out of his/her garage.
I remember talking to someone at Gumroad actually, because Gumroad was kind of bootstrapped early on, and they raised a big round, I believe it was 7 million if my memory serves me right. I was saying, “Why did your raise the round?” He said, “Well, we wanted to become a credit card processor.” And to actually process credit cards, you need a bunch of money in the bank. They just won’t let a bootstrapper do that, or a self-funded company do it. I think that’s definitely a case if you’re trying to start a Stripe or even a Gumroad which seems it could be a bootstrappable company, there maybe a case where you need to pony up and raise a little bit of money.
Mike: That’s just a social proof of creditability factor. You’ve got people who have been willing to invest $7 million in you than it serves to the banks as like, “Oh, these people have convinced these other seemingly smart people to give them $7 million. Clearly, they’re onto something and they know what they’re doing.” Doesn’t mean that that’s true, it just means that that’s what their perception is. You’re really just playing off their perceptions.
I think there’s certainly situations where you can either skirt that or use it to your advantage for a relationship or something like that. If the […] that you’re getting after like you get an introduction into them. That way, you’re not going in completely cold. If you can get those introductions from somebody that they trust, then that’s going to help out a lot. That’s a place where if you go into different reseller channels, and there’s tens of thousands of resellers across the world, that their sole business is to go in and sell software to other businesses.
There’s a bunch of large value-added resellers like Dell and HP, in companies like that where they have entire channel programs set-up such that they’re going to and work with small businesses or they will escort small businesses into a deal in order to provide the credibility, and then everything goes down on their paperwork.
That’s how Dell and HP have, like massive services businesses, it’s because they have all the relationships already, they have sales fields reps, they walk in because they have a relationship or they can just make a phone call and say, “Hey, I’m your Dell rep and I’d like to come in and talk to you.” And then they talk to you and find out what your problems are, and they escort a small partner in the door.
If you can get some of those relationships, you can basically get escorted in. You don’t need to have that $7 million in the bank or you don’t have to hire 300 sales people or call center in order to do outbound cold calling in order to find your leads. You can leverage those partners to help walk you in.
Rob: His last few questions are really surrounding this topic of, “Are you a fit for angels and VCs?” One is, “Will your business support growing sales by 50-100% annually for 5-7 years? Will annual sales reach $15-$50 million with that timeframe?” high-growth, right?
Another question is, “Are you comfortable selling your business in order to provide your investors their return in five to seven years?” or maybe earlier for VCs. “Are you comfortable sharing control of and decision making for your company with investors? Is your team plan and pitched in the top 10 percent of companies seeking financing in your region?” All interesting things to think about.
Mike: I think that a lot of those are hard questions to answer too. I’ll say they’re very personal questions and depending on the time and day that somebody asked you, you might also change your mind. It could be hard to come up with a solid answer that you stick with.
Rob: Yup. I would agree. I think these are good things to think about. I think long time listeners of the podcast will have heard us discuss these types of thought processes before. Well, if you’re new to the podcast, you probably think, “Boy, these guys really talk about funding a lot for a bootstrapping podcast.” because in the past five episodes we’ve talked about it twice.
But I do think that it’s becoming more and more relevant. I don’t expect us to talk about it every five episodes by any stretch, but it does seem to be this emerging trend that is coming into the startups space. I think back to 2007 to 2009 or ’10, and I was using a lot of email marketing in my info products, and then I started bringing them into software products and kind of the startups space, it was definitely this emerging trend that I recognized. I talked about it at BOS.
Split testing was something I had seen in info and people in the startups were not doing that, that also became a trend that took off. There’s a bunch of things that have come from different angles. Even customer development and a lot of lean startups stuff was taken from the automotive. You see these trends coming in.
While startups and software have traditionally been VC funded and the trend that you can I have been a part of is this bootstrapping and self-funding kind of spearheading it, I would say, or I mean at least part of the folks who have really driven it over the past eight plus years. I think we look back and the first time I had said “fun strapping” on the podcast was in 2013 or 2014. It’s becoming just a little bit more common for folks to raise a round and not go institutional, which is another trend that I see, not infiltrating because that sounds like it’s a bad thing, it’s just another trend in the space. I think we’re just continuing the dialogue about it to keep abreast of what we see is happening.
Mike: Yeah. Things just change over time. As time goes on, the entire software space has become more and more competitive. I mean, eight years ago when we started podcasting, it was easier to launch products in terms of getting in front of customers. Now, there’s lots of competitions. You have to have a more polished product, it’s got to be further along, it’s got to solve more of the customer’s problems because they’ve got other things that they can pay attention to.
It just makes it, I’ll say a little bit more challenging to launch a product today than it is yesterday, than with the day before. As time goes on, I think that that trend is just going to continue. I say that the natural evolution is you have to have more resources in order to launch something. It’s kind of where the industry is headed. I’m not going to say that that’s where it will end up and that you’re always going to have to raise funding in the future because I don’t think that’s true. But I do think that there are certain types of businesses where it makes a lot more sense to raise some funds than it is to not, especially with certain life circumstances as well.
Rob: Yup. The good news is that it’s easier, I would say, than it has been in the past to get some type of small amount of funding with a lot fewer strings attached than say, 10 years ago. On the flipside, like you said, I believe there’s always going to be bootstrapping. That’s not going to go away. There’s always going to be folks who are hacking away, launching small software products, getting a lot of learning, getting some revenue. I think that’ll last forever and I think that’s a really great thing.
I’ve said this before, we live at an amazing time in history where even 30, 40 years ago, you couldn’t do any of this, and 100 years ago it’s even worst. But now, someone with some type of technical acumen can basically start a whole side business and really never leave their house and have this thing making money while you sleep. It’s always been the big draw I think for a lot of us. Part of it might eb the adventure and the active creating, I think that’s a big deal, but to be able to literally make money from nothing more than your skill and your computer is just mind-blowing. When I think back to being a kid, I was in junior high in high school and it was like, “Well, I don’t really want to work in a cubicle but were my options?” Right? In the mid to late ‘80s. This stuff was just coming about and I didn’t know much about it but the fact that we live at this age–consider ourselves lucky.
Mike: I think at the end of the day when you’re trying to evaluate whether or not to raise funds, it’s all about that trade-off of time versus money. Do you have money to burn? Burn is probably not the great way to put it, but do you have money to spend in order to learn quickly or are you okay taking a much longer time to do it, and doing things slow and steady based on what your financial situation is like, your personal life, and how much time you have available. That’s going to be different for everyone. That’s what generally governs these types of decisions for most people. I think that about wraps us up for today.
If you have question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Where this week, sir?
Mike: Well, there is a book recommendation that you’ve given awhile ago called, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I’ve commented it, I’ve bought the book, but I haven’t read it yet. I’ve been kind of diving into that a little bit. I find it fascinating probably more so from a historical perspective because Ben Horowitz, who’s the author, he’s talking about his journey through the startup after he had left PayPal, and running this other company, and they basically only had one customer that was providing 90% of the revenue and basically spun that business off into its own separate entity and got rid of a bunch of assets with it, and talks about he built up the company from there.
What I find fascinating about it is that the new company is called Opsware. I remember back in those days when I was doing sales demos and presentations and stuff, I was actually in some cases, competing against Opsware.
Rob: That’s a trip. That book–it is brutal. Have you finished it?
Mike: I’ve not, no.
Rob: I was so stressed. It’s a good book but I don’t know if I could listen to it again because what he has to go through to grow and keep his company from basically going under and then he sells it for $1 billion or multiple billions of dollars and then he starts Andreessen Horowitz—that part is not in the book but he talks a little bit about it—but he is the Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. I remember listening to it and being like, “Yup, I could not have done this. I would have imploded.” It is, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a good title for it.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. I do not think that I would have wanted to go through all the stuff that he’s gone through especially just the financial challenge of trying to go public at the time that he did, right after the economy kind of cratered. What did he say? Like there was 200 plus IPOs the year before and then there was 6 or 12 or something like that the year that he did it. Wow!
Rob: It’s crazy. He went public, he didn’t get acquired, I forgot what…
Mike: No, he went public first and it was in a bad environment. The reason they went public was because they couldn’t get anymore investment capital from investors. Then it was a bunch of years later, like 2007 or something like that where they ended up selling to HP for, I think, it was $1 or $2 billion.
Rob: Got it. That was my memory, but I have forgotten they went public. It’s agonizing. It really is the shoot for the $1 billion exit. You don’t need to be a several hundred-million-dollar revenue journey raising venture capital and all that stuff. A lot of it just did not sound like something I ever want to experience in my life, even for payout like that. I don’t it’d be worth it.
Mike: How about you? What’s going on this week?
Rob: Well, you and I just had a conversation before this episode started recording. We are evaluating potentially having sponsorships on Startups For The Rest Of Us. If you are a company, whether you’re a startup or if you think that you would be interested in reaching the Startups For The Rest Of Us audience—it’s a lot of bootstrappers but it’s also a lot of people running six and seven figure businesses, drop us a line at questionsforstartupsfortherestofus.com and just put “Sponsor” or “Sponsorship” in the subject line, and we’ll talk about it.
Obviously, as a listener, we’re been doing this for eight years, and we appreciate the trust that you put in Mike and I to produce high-quality content and to deliver value to you. We have no intention of “screwing up” the podcast by adding a bunch of sponsorship roles in the thing and interrupting your flow, but we are at a point where it does cost us money and it does cost us time away from our businesses to do this, so we’re just evaluating it. It’s a preliminary thing, we definitely have not made up our mind about it, but we do want to explore this as an option.
Mike: Again, that email address is questionsforstartupsfortherestofus.com and just put “Sponsorship” or “Sponsor” in the subject line, and we’ll take a look at it. Again, we’ll just kind of evaluate how things go. To reiterate what Rob had said, we appreciate you guys listening and we don’t want to screw up the whole thing. I think like a lot of things that we’ve done at MicroConf every year I think is just kind of a play it safe approach, but at the same time, look for ways to change things to make things better.
Rob: Yeah, we’ve experimented a lot with things at MicroConf over the years. Some have worked, some haven’t. But one thing that I think we’ve done a good job is recognizing when they work and don’t and basically changing it up when things don’t. Even if we try it, if it suddenly becomes a […] or something like that, I could imagine pivoting.
Today, we’re going to be running through an article by a listener and commenter name Don Gooding. The title of his article is Bootstrapping versus Venture Capital: 19 Questions to Ask. But what I find interesting about the article is it’s not just about venture capital, it is about angel investment as well. But before we get there, we have a comment from Adam on episode 406, and 406 was five episodes ago when you and I discussed, “Should bootstrappers raise money?” was the title of the episode. Adam said, “I’m so glad you jumped in, Mike, and said something about Rob hitting 21k MRR saying that it wasn’t a fair comparison.” Because I believe I was saying, “Drip hit 21k MRR quickly and if it took me four years to get there then I would’ve […] it down.” And you said, “Well, that’s not a fair comparison because you’re in a different place and if you’re building something on the side, maybe it is four years.”–to that point.
Back to Adam. He says, “I’m still trying to hit 21k MRR after four year, but I don’t think I’m failing at what I’m doing. Maybe an episode on what you think that growth is, that people should be aiming for, this was a good episode. A follow-up question to Mike would be, why have you or have you not fun strapped Bluetick?”
Mike: Oh, that’s a good question that I don’t have a good answer for.
Rob: It’s something evaluated, no?
Mike: Oh, yeah. I’ve looked at it a couple of times. I had a few conversations privately with people I know who have raised money, and just asked them what their take on it was, what their experiences was after going through it, what were the drawbacks, what would they have done differently. I got a sense that it was going to be rather complicated and time-consuming, and I didn’t have the time to spend on it. I continue to kind of look at it and continue to think about but it’s not something where I’ve said, “Yeah, I definitely want to do that. I’m all in. I’m going to dedicate the next X weeks or months whatever going out and raising funding.”
I’ve probably spent a lot more time working on getting Bluetick to a better place. I think I have been open about the fact that early on, I had hired a bunch of contractors to build a lot of the core infrastructure of Bluetick. Quite frankly, it was not done very well so there’s a lot of things that are generally screwed up and it makes it difficult to make changes. I would prefer to move fast if I can help it, but the problem is a lot of the architecture and the choices that were made at the time make that difficult. I have a hard time pulling away from those things and doing some of the clean-up work to basically make myself be able to move faster.
Because I feel like if I had like a pile of money, I would feel obligated to expand things a lot quicker and maybe even more than I’m possibly comfortable with, and I just know that there are certain parts of the app that if I were to dump 50 or 100 users on it all at once, it’s not going to scale very well. There are certain processes that need to run and it’s just not going to take a large influx of people very well. It can do it, I’d probably have to tweak a couple of settings to make it happen, but I’m not real comfortable doing that. I think it’s partly out of obligation, partly out of complexity and the time that I would have to spend on it.
Rob: You have technical debt already.
Mike: Yes. I think you have technical debt as soon as you write a single line of code.
Rob: Well, not if it’s fully unit tested, though. I think of […] there’s that, I don’t if it’s a joke or it if it’s truly the definition but it’s like, “Legacy code is code that is not highly unit tested.” Yeah, you have a little bit of technical debt but to hear that it’s hard to make changes, that’s a real bummer to hear given how early stage you are, and that you’re a technical founder. That’s the whole point of us being technical founders, that’s our skill set, we shouldn’t have that.
Mike: Maybe I should caveat that a little bit more. It’s not that it’s hard to make changes, it’s that I feel uncomfortable making changes to certain places because they’re not as well unit tested as I would like them to be. The software does a lot. There’s some changes I’ll just push out. It’s just like, “Hey, this is a frontend UI changes, it’s not that big of a deal.” But then when you get into things like, how mailboxes are stored and how the data is synchronized, I’m real hesitant to make changes to those because there is, in one particular case I can think off the top of my head, there was literally no way for me to unit test it whatsoever.
It’s hard to justify going in there and just making whole scale changes that would make things easier because I know that it’s working and if it breaks, it does a lot of work every second, and things could go seriously sideways very, very quickly. The new build server I put in place a couple of weeks ago would actually make rolling back pretty easy, but then I’d have to go through and figure out what in the code broke. Again, it’s not easy to unit tested that piece.
Rob: Yeah, I feel like, “Next time, should we just build, I don’t know, simple project management that just pulls things out of databases. It’s that no connections to any external sources and no queues. I don’t want any queues, I want everything synchronize.
Mike: Honestly, that’s part of it is the queues and stuff that I have to deal with. Queues processing, storing data, being able to filter certain things out and, “Oh, somebody deleted this piece of data.” It kind of sucks to have things moving while you’re also writing the code on it. I’m sure you went through this with Drip. There’s so much…
Rob: That’s SaaS though.
Mike: I know. It’s like open heart surgery–it feels like sometimes.
Rob: Yeah, every time we did anything meaningful to scheduling or, I mean there’s all kinds of stuff that’s so easy to screw up. If you can figure out a way to smoke earn—not smoke test—but to get you in a test on that stuff because the fact that you don’t feel comfortable making changes to a part of your app, that’s going to be a hindrance forever. It’s not going to get better, it’s only going to get worst especially if it grows, if you start hiring people, that’s a big red zone there that I think you need to think about remedying early.
Mike: Yeah. […] is there’s a component that I’m using where to get into the technical details of it, there’s a C# Class and I have to serialize it. In order to do that, in order to store the data. The problem is they’ve marked it as sealed which means I can’t inherit from it, which means I can’t really do anything with it. I’ve been working with them to try and figure out like, “Is there a way I can get an interface for this or something like that so that I can create it?” Because they don’t have a public constructor for it because it’s a sealed class, it’s encapsulated in the assembly, I can’t narrow from it either. I really don’t have any other options other than faking it which is what I’ve done so far. I basically have my own object that very, very closely mimics theirs, but it’s not perfect, and that’s the problem. I’ve found a few edge cases here and there, it’s kind of scary. I’m hoping it will come up with a solution sooner rather than later, but I’ve been working with them for probably six months on it.
Rob: One minute while I update my spreadsheet. Let’s see, apps to not start as an unfunded single founder, email marketing for writer, cold email outreach–the list is getting longer and longer. It’s like, these things don’t seem that complicated when you look at it from the outside. “I want to build an ESP. This is going to be a piece of cake.” said Derek and I before we wrote code.
Mike: I think anything where you have an outside dependency that you don’t completely control or have complete access to, that’s where it gets hard. Or you’re relying on events coming in to the system and you have to do data processing on.
Rob: Alright. Well, let’s keep moving on with this episode. Our second comment on episode 406 was from Don Gooding. He linked over to a few articles he’s written and one of them which we’re going to discuss today. His comment was, “I write a lot about bootstrapping versus venture capital or angel funding. They’re definitely a bunch of issues to consider both early and later. I hope you’ll consider the following posts helpful and not spammy.” and I do consider them helpful. He links to three different articles. His blog is fourcolorsofmoney.com. Don, if you’re listening, register the 4colorsofmoney and also, redirect that over because I tried that as well and it just goes nowhere.
He linked to the first article which is, Bootstrapping Versus Venture Capital: 19 Questions to Ask–we’re going to talk about that today. He also linked to another article called, The Bootstrap to Funding Pivot Playbook which is about bootstrapping first and then raising funding later. He talks about revenue financing in that one. Then his last article is, Revenue-Based Financing: Five Different Options and he walks thru them which is pretty interesting.
His site is called Four Colors of Money because he looks at bootstrapping, he looks at grants, he looks at grant and equity–those are the four colors. He’s obviously—having read through it—pretty knowledgeable about this stuff. Again, we will include those three links in the show notes. You can always go back on those comments on episode 406 if you wanted to see his full comment.
But today, we are going to talk through his article Bootstrapping Versus Venture Capital: 19 Questions to Ask. We won’t have time to go through all 19 question, but the idea here is to think about whether you can and should bootstrap or whether you need to raise funding.
His first question is, “How much of your own capital do you have. Do you have a way to self-fund it?” Self-funding and bootstrapping sound like they’re the same thing, but they’re different. Bootstrapping is truly having almost no money. A few hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, a couple thousand dollars, and then growing a business based purely on its revenue and profits.
Self-funding is if I have $1000 in the bank or $200,000 in the bank, or I had another business that was throwing off money or another income stream that was throwing off money that I could then take and start my next business from.
Self-funding is a lot of what I did. In the early, early days, I bootstrapped everything right out of consulting revenue but spent very little money. Then the more business revenue I had, I stayed consulting during the day full-time, and I took that business revenue and used it to self-fund the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and each of them got bigger and bigger. It took me a long time to get from having .net invoice doing $300 a month, 10 years later, even longer, 11 years later, it’s Drip doing seven figures a year and having exit.
I didn’t have to raise during that time because I self-funded, but it took me a lot longer than if I had come up with an idea and just raised funding early on. That’s kind of how I think about the trade-offs is I believe it takes longer if you’re in a self-fund unless you do have a rich uncle or a trust fund. But his first question to think about is how much capital on your own do you have that you can invest in the business?
Mike: I feel like this is more of a runway question because the money itself, you either have to when the business itself is generating money, how much is left over for you to leave versus how much are you going to be able to put back into the business. If you’re running a business on the side or on nights and weekends and stuff like that, then you presumably have a full-time job, and that is keeping your self alive and your family fed while the business is getting the rest of the profits. But at some point, things are going to transition, and you have to make some choices about like what your future looks like, do you have enough money to be able to spend $1000 on ad words or something like that to test out a market? You may even need that money early on.
That comes down to the fundamental question that he’s got here is, how much of your own capital do you have? Can you afford to run experiments early on? Do you have more time on your hands or do you have more money? This is getting more at the money side of the equation. If you have plenty of time, if your timeline is five years, you can take as long as you want to do most things. Certain industries of course will move very quickly, and competitors will swoop in, not ideal if you’re trying to take five years to do it but certain ones you can do that.
I think Patrick McKenzie, with Bingo Card Creator, he slowly built that up. Nobody else wanted to get into market because there wasn’t a lot there. But he was still able to make a pretty good business out of it. He just took a really long time to do it.
Rob: His next few questions look at ways that if you don’t have the money to self-fund, ways to look around and see if you can essentially raise funds but not from venture capitalists or angels. His second question is, how likely it is you can raise funds from family or friends. Third question is, “Can your product support a Kickstarter style campaign?” which I believe a lot of people overlook. Info products and even some software, not B2B, but have to really be B2C in general can use Kickstarter as well as obviously physical products would be a great way to do it. His fourth one is, “Will customers pay you well in advance of you delivering your product or service?” Can you essentially pre-sell it? His fifth one actually is, “Does it qualify for a grant?” I don’t think that applies to most of our listeners nor any business I’ve ever started, but it is one of the colors of money that he talks about.
Mike: You know, I’ve thought about this kind of crowd funding. I’ve heard people gone down that path, not on Kickstarter, but someplace else, I can’t remember the name of it.
Rob: Like Indiegogo or something?
Mike: I think, yeah, it was Indiegogo. The general consensus was people are much more willing to fund individual ventures and things where there’s a physical product. But when it comes to software, people are not particularly interested. Maybe that’s just because it’s kind of self-selecting where the people who are building those generally are targeting them at businesses versus if you’re going to do something where it’s like, “Oh, this is a way to organize baseball cards,” or something like that, if it’s something that has a wider appeal and it’s a non-business use, you’ll find the hobbyist into that or the people who are prosumers, so to speak, they are going to be into it, and they would probably fund it. But if you’re going to try and create a CRM or something like that, who’s going to fund that? I can’t think of anyone who would want to willingly throw in money unless it was for their own business at which point, it’s not really for the greater good so to speak.
Rob: Totally. When I look back at the 173 Kickstarter projects that I’ve backed. Mike, did you hear what I just said?
Mike: Oh my god.
Rob: Oh, no. That’s the number of successful projects I’ve backed. I’ve 185 Kickstarter projects. Oh, the humanity, Mike. It’s so embarrassing. I just love Kickstarter. But I don’t think I’ve backed a single piece of software. My taste, it’s a lot of graphic novels, it’s a lot of table top games, it’s a lot of little tech gadgets. There was a Kano–the open source computer that I could teach my kids how to put computers together and do that stuff. A lot of it is some learning, some teaching, and some gadgetry and stuff. I think that my gist is that my taste are not uncommon. I do agree that in trying to launch a project in Kickstarter would be hard. But there are a lot of listeners who are not just trying to do B2B software as we’ve talked about.
I’m going to skip over a couple of these questions. But another couple of questions that I think are interesting to ask because they imply that you should probably raise some type of at least angel and potentially go after venture funding. One is, “Do you think it will take more than $100,000 and/or longer than one year to develop your product or service to the point that it is generating revenue?” Another question is, “Does your business have network effects where only one or two companies will end up with 80% or 90% of the market?” because that’s a super protectable. There’s a moat around that product or around that business. That is something that can very likely be fundable.
Another questions is, “Do you have large capital equipment or other fixed investment needs that aren’t debt financeable?” those three would obviously imply that you probably need to raise some kind of funding.
Mike: Well, I look at those things as potential disqualifiers as well because if it’s a network effects type of business where only a couple of companies are going to end up with a large percentage of the market, to me, that’s kind of a disqualifier unless you’re going to go raise money, and which I guess is kind of what he’s saying, but you have no idea if other people are going to answer in there who have a lot more clout than you. That’s why you should probably go raise funding if you’re going to go for something like that. But you’re also going to look at that particular thing and say, “This is a disqualifier for me. I’m not just going to go in that direction because I don’t want to raise money.”
Rob: Another good one I like that he asks is, “Do you have potential customers that will see your small sizes of risks? For example, a potential career–a limiting decision.” In other words, if you’re selling to banks, large institutions, they’re going to require that you have some kind of backing, right? I shouldn’t say require. They’re going to be unlikely to go with a single founder building software out of his/her garage.
I remember talking to someone at Gumroad actually, because Gumroad was kind of bootstrapped early on, and they raised a big round, I believe it was 7 million if my memory serves me right. I was saying, “Why did your raise the round?” He said, “Well, we wanted to become a credit card processor.” And to actually process credit cards, you need a bunch of money in the bank. They just won’t let a bootstrapper do that, or a self-funded company do it. I think that’s definitely a case if you’re trying to start a Stripe or even a Gumroad which seems it could be a bootstrappable company, there maybe a case where you need to pony up and raise a little bit of money.
Mike: That’s just a social proof of creditability factor. You’ve got people who have been willing to invest $7 million in you than it serves to the banks as like, “Oh, these people have convinced these other seemingly smart people to give them $7 million. Clearly, they’re onto something and they know what they’re doing.” Doesn’t mean that that’s true, it just means that that’s what their perception is. You’re really just playing off their perceptions.
I think there’s certainly situations where you can either skirt that or use it to your advantage for a relationship or something like that. If the […] that you’re getting after like you get an introduction into them. That way, you’re not going in completely cold. If you can get those introductions from somebody that they trust, then that’s going to help out a lot. That’s a place where if you go into different reseller channels, and there’s tens of thousands of resellers across the world, that their sole business is to go in and sell software to other businesses.
There’s a bunch of large value-added resellers like Dell and HP, in companies like that where they have entire channel programs set-up such that they’re going to and work with small businesses or they will escort small businesses into a deal in order to provide the credibility, and then everything goes down on their paperwork.
That’s how Dell and HP have, like massive services businesses, it’s because they have all the relationships already, they have sales fields reps, they walk in because they have a relationship or they can just make a phone call and say, “Hey, I’m your Dell rep and I’d like to come in and talk to you.” And then they talk to you and find out what your problems are, and they escort a small partner in the door.
If you can get some of those relationships, you can basically get escorted in. You don’t need to have that $7 million in the bank or you don’t have to hire 300 sales people or call center in order to do outbound cold calling in order to find your leads. You can leverage those partners to help walk you in.
Rob: His last few questions are really surrounding this topic of, “Are you a fit for angels and VCs?” One is, “Will your business support growing sales by 50-100% annually for 5-7 years? Will annual sales reach $15-$50 million with that timeframe?” high-growth, right?
Another question is, “Are you comfortable selling your business in order to provide your investors their return in five to seven years?” or maybe earlier for VCs. “Are you comfortable sharing control of and decision making for your company with investors? Is your team plan and pitched in the top 10 percent of companies seeking financing in your region?” All interesting things to think about.
Mike: I think that a lot of those are hard questions to answer too. I’ll say they’re very personal questions and depending on the time and day that somebody asked you, you might also change your mind. It could be hard to come up with a solid answer that you stick with.
Rob: Yup. I would agree. I think these are good things to think about. I think long time listeners of the podcast will have heard us discuss these types of thought processes before. Well, if you’re new to the podcast, you probably think, “Boy, these guys really talk about funding a lot for a bootstrapping podcast.” because in the past five episodes we’ve talked about it twice.
But I do think that it’s becoming more and more relevant. I don’t expect us to talk about it every five episodes by any stretch, but it does seem to be this emerging trend that is coming into the startups space. I think back to 2007 to 2009 or ’10, and I was using a lot of email marketing in my info products, and then I started bringing them into software products and kind of the startups space, it was definitely this emerging trend that I recognized. I talked about it at BOS.
Split testing was something I had seen in info and people in the startups were not doing that, that also became a trend that took off. There’s a bunch of things that have come from different angles. Even customer development and a lot of lean startups stuff was taken from the automotive. You see these trends coming in.
While startups and software have traditionally been VC funded and the trend that you can I have been a part of is this bootstrapping and self-funding kind of spearheading it, I would say, or I mean at least part of the folks who have really driven it over the past eight plus years. I think we look back and the first time I had said “fun strapping” on the podcast was in 2013 or 2014. It’s becoming just a little bit more common for folks to raise a round and not go institutional, which is another trend that I see, not infiltrating because that sounds like it’s a bad thing, it’s just another trend in the space. I think we’re just continuing the dialogue about it to keep abreast of what we see is happening.
Mike: Yeah. Things just change over time. As time goes on, the entire software space has become more and more competitive. I mean, eight years ago when we started podcasting, it was easier to launch products in terms of getting in front of customers. Now, there’s lots of competitions. You have to have a more polished product, it’s got to be further along, it’s got to solve more of the customer’s problems because they’ve got other things that they can pay attention to.
It just makes it, I’ll say a little bit more challenging to launch a product today than it is yesterday, than with the day before. As time goes on, I think that that trend is just going to continue. I say that the natural evolution is you have to have more resources in order to launch something. It’s kind of where the industry is headed. I’m not going to say that that’s where it will end up and that you’re always going to have to raise funding in the future because I don’t think that’s true. But I do think that there are certain types of businesses where it makes a lot more sense to raise some funds than it is to not, especially with certain life circumstances as well.
Rob: Yup. The good news is that it’s easier, I would say, than it has been in the past to get some type of small amount of funding with a lot fewer strings attached than say, 10 years ago. On the flipside, like you said, I believe there’s always going to be bootstrapping. That’s not going to go away. There’s always going to be folks who are hacking away, launching small software products, getting a lot of learning, getting some revenue. I think that’ll last forever and I think that’s a really great thing.
I’ve said this before, we live at an amazing time in history where even 30, 40 years ago, you couldn’t do any of this, and 100 years ago it’s even worst. But now, someone with some type of technical acumen can basically start a whole side business and really never leave their house and have this thing making money while you sleep. It’s always been the big draw I think for a lot of us. Part of it might eb the adventure and the active creating, I think that’s a big deal, but to be able to literally make money from nothing more than your skill and your computer is just mind-blowing. When I think back to being a kid, I was in junior high in high school and it was like, “Well, I don’t really want to work in a cubicle but were my options?” Right? In the mid to late ‘80s. This stuff was just coming about and I didn’t know much about it but the fact that we live at this age–consider ourselves lucky.
Mike: I think at the end of the day when you’re trying to evaluate whether or not to raise funds, it’s all about that trade-off of time versus money. Do you have money to burn? Burn is probably not the great way to put it, but do you have money to spend in order to learn quickly or are you okay taking a much longer time to do it, and doing things slow and steady based on what your financial situation is like, your personal life, and how much time you have available. That’s going to be different for everyone. That’s what generally governs these types of decisions for most people. I think that about wraps us up for today.
If you have question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 410 | Customer Development for Dummies
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike talk about customer development. Based on a Sujan Patel article, the guys walk through 5 tips for doing customer development the right way.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about customer development. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 410.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’ve been drinking coffee.
Mike: It’s not whiskey?
Rob: It’s not whiskey. It’s 10:00 in the morning, so I was hoping it wouldn’t be whiskey. Mike, I don’t drink coffee very much anymore. I’m having coffee right now so this is going to be good.
Mike: I have a coffee cup that says, “This is probably whiskey,” on it.
Rob: Nice. I like that.
Mike: Anyway, we’re here to share experiences, help avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Rob?
Rob: Aside from drinking just a tiny bit of coffee this morning, which will hopefully come across as making me energized and sharp rather than wandering all over the place and to crazy tangents, I’ve been listening to a book called Valley Of Genius. It is the history of Silicon Valley, all the way back into the, I believe it’s 50s and 60s as Fairchild Semiconductor came up. It’s told in the words of the people who were involved. There’ll be a chapter telling the history and there’s a chapter or a bunch of quotes from Steve Jobs and Fairchild himself, and a bunch of people who worked in Atari, Nolan Bushnell and people who worked there.
Right now, I believe I’m in the early 80s. I don’t know when it’s going to end, if it’s going to keep going all the way to Facebook and Google or where it goes. I’ve really enjoyed books like this. I grew up there and I remember a lot of orchards and stuff that wasn’t developed and all these concrete tilt up started coming. My dad was in construction and he’s in charge of building a lot of fabs for Intel and they shipped that overseas. Then it was biotech. Then it’s was dot com stuff in the 90s. Then it became just more data centers.
It has a special place for me because I was there but even if you’re not, it’s not like you need to have lived there to get something out of this. It is purely history book. This is a fascinating telling of how these things all developed and really how Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley pretty much by accident. If you’re interested in that kind of history and hearing how things developed, Valley of Genius. It’s a decent book.
Mike: On my end, I’ve got a book recommendation that was sent to me from Keith Gillette and he runs tasktrain.app. He suggested Slicing Pie based on a previous episode where we talked about finding co-founders and how to split equity. I looked into it and it’s a very interesting book.
The Slicing Pie book talks about how to divide equity between co-founders based on a variety of different factors in it. Seems like it’s generally applicable to just about any situation. The general concept is that you divide the equity based on people’s contributions and if you believe in your startup, you’ll probably going to work more on it and you’re going to put more time, effort, and resources into it. But at the end of the day, it’s a gamble. You’re essentially placing bets with your time and money and those are essentially translated into equity points for lack of a better way to put it. Those equity points are divided among the co-founders and that’s how you come out with a final equity split.
I think it’s a fascinating way of looking at it. I didn’t dig into all the details. I’m sure there’s some interesting edge cases but definitely want to say thanks to Keith for sending that over to us.
Rob: Yeah. Definitely, appreciate it. I read that book or at least skimmed it when I first came out because I believe the author sent it to me or maybe he sent it to us. This was a few years ago. I thought it was interesting, although it was probably not an approach I would take.
I’m trying to remember even what it was but I think it was all the founders were starting off and it was a developer and a marketer and you’re just dividing. It’s three developers or whatever and I’ve always felt when I started businesses, we’ve always had brought different things to the table but might not just be task-based.
It’s like, “Oh, so-and-so has $1000 to bring to the table.” That really set things different. Or, “So-and-so has an audience they’re bringing and we’re going to build that on it,” and that has a lot more value than, say, building a certain feature or whatever. I think it’s a good model and frankly, it’s the only book I know that’s been written on this topic. It’s something to be thinking about. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Today’s we’re going to be talking about customer development. The title of this episode is actually Customer Development For Dummies but this is based on an article that was written by Sujan Patel on his blog and we’ll link that up in the show notes.
Sujan was a speaker at MicroConf Growth Edition in 2017 but he talks about customer development in a way that I think that most people can at least get a few takeaways from it and obviously, we’ll add our own perspectives on different pieces of this particular blog post.
Rob: And we’ll, of course, link that up in the show notes. It’s an article at sujanpatel.com and it’s called Five Tips For Doing Customer Development The Right Way.
Mike: His first tip is to talk to your customers, which I think is one of those intuitively obvious things that most of us try to do but I wouldn’t say that we’re all necessarily successful at it. But he’s got a lot of advice in here about how he went about approaching the market for when they were developing Mailshake and they going out to talk to customers.
The one thing that I think he pointed out here which is extremely interesting was that if you’re just trying to validate a product, you don’t have customers yet. So, instead you have to talk to new customers, you can go out and talk to the customers of your competitors, which I think is a really fascinating idea. It’s not just because it’s brutally obvious if you don’t think about it, but I hear a lot of people say like, “Oh, if I don’t have customers, who do I go talk to?” I think that’s just a perfect piece of advice for those people.
Rob: Yup and as a strategy, he says to find your competitor’s customers, going to a site like Capterra or GetApp where people are rating your competitors, and you’ll notice that most of the sites let people connect their LinkedIn or Twitter profiles, then you can reach out. He said, reach out to 30 or 40 people and in his experience, you’ll get 20%-30% success rate, and then ask what they like or don’t like about your competitor’s product. I think it’s a pretty clever hack.
Obviously, you could use something like BuiltWith or Datanyze but those are really expensive sales prospecting tools where you can get list of folks who were using things and this should be more of a freeway. Takes a little bit more time on your end, but more of a freeway to reach out to competitor’s customers.
There’s a lot of value in talking to competitor’s customers and even former employees of competitors, frankly, is an interesting avenue. I guess you wouldn’t get as much customer development. Maybe you can find out more about internal processes or at least approaches if that’s something that you need. It’s probably not something you need this early on but it’s something to keep in mind as you grow.
Mike: The other thing I like about talking to customers or prospective customers and ask them what they don’t like about the products is that it gives you a punch list of challenges that they’re probably having with those products and you can cater your own development to trying to solve those. That’s not to say that, that is going to lead directly to success but if you hear enough people saying the same things over and over that are bad about a particular competitor, then you can use that as a marketing point as well as an engineering point to say, “We are going to make sure that we solve this so that when people are looking for an alternative to this because they are so angry about this particular thing that happens, then we’re the obvious choice for them.”
Rob: Here’s a pro-tip. If you start doing customer development like this and you get the feeling or you get the sense that you’re going to have to build your entire competitor feature set, then make changes, adjustments, or additions in order to get the customers, that’s a red flag. Building out features that’s going to take forever. The best kind of market that you can get into is where a competitor or competitors are bloated and have huge feature sets but a lot of different niches or a lot of different verticals are using say, 20% or 30% of it and that 20% or 30% is broken but it’s the best option.
An example of that is QuickBooks. QuickBooks is a huge tool. It can do inventory management. It can do invoicing, AR, and AP. It can do all this accounting stuff. There’s probably a slice of small businesses that just need a pretty simple, kind of based like freelancers, where they just need some basic invoicing and keeping track of expenses. That’s where startups like Xero and LessAccounting came up, and they just built that part of it. They didn’t have to build inventory management because they were just pulling off of that part that didn’t work.
Another example is Infusionsoft. As we were growing Drip, we realized Infusionsoft has landing pages, shopping carts, affiliate management program, payment processing I believe is built-in, then they had email marketing, they had marketing automation, they had CRM, they had a lot of stuff. We did not build all of that. We just needed to be really good at the email marketing and marketing automation, and we were able to pull a lot of customers from Infusionsoft.
So, two examples of how I view markets. If you had to build all of the Infusionsoft or all of QuickBooks, you just can’t do it. It’s going to take you years to do it.
Mike: That leads to the natural question to ask while you’re talking to those customers is, what things do you not use at all? Or do you use very little? That will help give you an idea of some sort of relative ranking of the features of the competitor that you probably have to implement versus the ones that are probably complicated and going to take a long period of time to develop but most customers don’t use. If it’s not used by 80% of the customers, you probably get away without it.
Rob: Yup and one question that I ask during Drip customer development was, what’s your biggest pain point with tool X? Whether that was Infusionsoft or whether it was MailChimp or HubSpot or Marketo or Ontraport, what do you like the least about it or what do you wish they would fix or what do you wish they would add or how could they do better? AWeber is on that list as well.
The cool part is I started seeing patterns of, “Well, I like MailChimp and AWeber and they’re solid tools, but they don’t do this. You can’t tag people, you can do automations.” Someone said, “I like Infusionsoft but it’s really buggy. The Campaign Builder is too complicated. It’s way too expensive for what it is. Didn’t like the $2000 upfront.” There’s some real specific things that everyone referenced back to. If you’ll notice, that’s what we attack really early on with our marketing. We’re like these guys but better, we’re like this but different. It wound up being something that in 10, 20, 30 conversations that I had, could translate into our entire marketing message.
Mike: Yeah and you’ll find that there’s definite hot spots in those areas as well. As you said, you talked to 30, 40, 50 people, you start to hear the same things over and over again, and you just know where to focus your time and effort.
The next tip that Sujan has is to track your competitor’s pros and cons. I think that goes a little bit back to the previous one where there’s a difference between feature set versus what people like and what they don’t like, and what things they wished that the competitors had. The feature set is what they advertise versus how well they mash the customers’ expectations in terms of the pros and cons. There’s obviously some overlap in the feature set in that but there’s a definite difference between how the customer feels about the features versus what their marketing message is saying.
Rob: Yeah and Sujan says to google things like competitor’s name review, like QuickBooks review or QuickBooks testimonials, and visit as many results as you can trying to come up with a list of the top 10 things people like about each of the competitors as well as what they don’t like.
This is a way to do it without having conversations and I would view this as day zero research. You’re trying to put together a list or get a sense of the pros and cons of your competitors and you’re going to do this for multiple competitors. It’s not just one in general. Typically, more than one competitor has a decent market share.
The next step for me would be then to start having those conversations with either people who have signed up for your early bird list. Even if you don’t have customers, you can ask them, “What do you expect? What do you want? Do you use one of these competitors? Do you use QuickBooks? Do you use Infusionsoft and what do you think about them?” Or, if you don’t have that yet, start building it today and then go and do what we talked about in the previous step which was to go to Capterra, GetApp, and start having conversations with your competitor’s customers.
Mike: The other thing he recommends is that you track the changes to this list over time. I think that’s also an important piece that I’ve not really thought about in the past but tend to agree with them because the technology is going to change over time. The entire market itself is going to change over time. As time plods on, there’s going to be a set of features that is standard across all of your competitors and you need to make sure that you have those features. If you don’t, you’re going to end up being left behind.
That’s not say you should always copy every single feature that your competitors have but if you’re the only one who doesn’t have a particular feature, you might want to seriously consider adding it.
Rob: Tip number three from Sujan is to test before you build. He talks about how Hiten Shah does a really good job of going through a lot of testing. If you want to see someone who is really at the top of the game of pre-validating products and doing customer development, go to hitenism.com––it’s called Product Habits now. Sign up for his email list and just watch what he does because Hiten is, like I said, one of the best at this.
Mike: The reason why you want to test these things before you start building them is that you don’t want to waste a lot of time on building stuff that nobody’s going to use or that isn’t actually solving a problem that your customers have. If you’re just blindly copying a competitor, for example, they may have implemented a feature that they didn’t necessarily know that their customers wanted. They may have just said, “Oh, we think that they need this or somebody mentioned this and we’re going to build it,” and then you spend several weeks or a couple of months building something that, because you didn’t test the market, you didn’t know that nobody needed it either. You’re just copying somebody else. You want to find places where you can save time, not waste it.
Rob: You know why I realize is that we didn’t even really define customer development when we started. Some folks may have heard that and they may have an idea of what it is but there is a pretty solid definition because Steve Blank, who’s a serial entrepreneur and he’s now a professor or was a professor, was it Stanford or Berkeley, somewhere in California. He developed this concept called customer development.
It’s a four-step process. It’s customer discovery to start with. There’s a lot of conversations proposing an MVP, trying to figure things out. Then there’s customer validation once you start building it. And then it’s customer creation which is where you’re scaling and then you’re bringing in customers. And then it’s company building, which is where you scale operations and stuff.
If you google what is customer development, there is a pretty nice diagram of all that and we don’t need to go into those pieces for you to understand it, but just in case you are listening, thinking, “What is this customer development term?” it really just means we are focusing really on the first and second steps here, which are the conversations with your customers and then trying to find product-market fit. I think maybe Sujan is really focused on even just the first step in this article, because second, third, and fourth is more company building, scaling, and organization.
Mike: We talked a little bit about the types of ways that you can test things before you start building them. One that I used during the validation process for Bluetick was, I created a set of Balsamiq mockups and then showed those to people. Instead of building codes and instead of creating CSS mockups or Photoshop mockups of exactly what the app was going to look like, I just sketch it all out using Balsamiq and was able to link the pages together. You can see how the application was going to work without writing any of the code for it. It took me probably 20-30 hours or so to put that together, but that’s a lot less time than it took to build the application and put something that was completely functional together.
During the process of showing it to people, I got a lot of questions about, “Oh, what does this piece do?” or, “How would I go about doing this other action over here,” and it gives you a sense of where your design essentially is going to either fall short of what their expectations are or other areas where you should probably spend a little bit more time on it.
Rob: Sujan suggests getting a wireframe and going to sets like in five-second test or user insights, usertesting.com is another one, and that will give you UX stuff but it won’t tend to give you customer insights like you’re talking about, Mike, where you are actually talking to a group who you knew was interested in the solution that you’re going to be providing. I think yours is harder to do but it’s more valuable in my opinion.
Tip number four is to go to conferences or events where your customers are. This is an obvious one but one that a lot of people overlook. I think you can get a ton of value in a two- or three-day conference. You could talk to 50 or 100 people if you scheduled well. Maybe not 100, that actually sounds like a lot but maybe let’s say 30 or 40 people really quickly in person if you really made a point of having your stuff together, you’ve been having mock-ups.
I was at a startup pitch, was a competition. It was more like a demo day for local accelerator here in town the other day. Someone was talking about something and then pulled out an iPad Pro and was like, “Here, let me just walk you through.” He had, it was either mock-ups or maybe it was an actual app running on it. It was kind of funny to see him just pull it out during a conversation as we were having drinks and it got a better picture of what he was up to. Frankly, I was able to give him feedback of like, “Oh, I was confused by that,” or, “I don’t see my people would use that,” or, “That screen’s really nice.”
Mike: I have something that you can actually show to people. It leaps and bounds above just explaining it to them. When you’re explaining it to them, they’re going to have their own vision in mind of what the thing’s going to look like, how it works, and what it does even. You might say something like, for Bluetick it’s an email automation follow-up software or something like that. They’re going to have in their own head this impression of what something like that does based on their previous experiences and it doesn’t necessarily reflect what you are building. So keep in mind that if you can show them anything at all as opposed to leaving it up to their imagination, you’re going to be much further along.
The other thing Sujan points out is that in an informal setting such as a conference or an event, is much more conducive to getting feedback from people because if you’re getting people on to webinar and you’re doing a sales demo or something like that, people have a tendency to hold back a little bit. In an informal situation, you get, I’d say a little bit more honest feedback because they’ve realized they’re not really being sold to and they’d like to help you out. They want to give you feedback that is going to help you. In just any informal setting, that alone is going to help do that.
Rob: And his fifth tip for customer development is to live a day in the life of your customer. He talks about dogfooding your own product. It helps you smooth out the rough edges. This is one of the benefits of scratching your own itch. Scratching your own itch has been thrown around since 37signals said, “Hey, this is all you got to do because that’s what we did, and look, it worked.” It is cool. It is easier if you can do that but it’s not required. It’s not required to scratch your own itch to build a great product. I’ve seen it done for people entering a market that they’re not part of. However, either way, whether you’re scratching your own itch or not, you should dog food that product. You should try to use it as if your customer was using it.
If I recall, dogfooding was coined by—was it Bill Gates or someone at Microsoft because he learned that the CEO of a dog food company would eat the dog food to test it. Bill Gates was like, “We need to basically eat our own dog food which means we need to use our own software to make it better.” So if you’re curious about where that term comes from, that’s at least my anecdotal memory of where it comes from.
Mike: I experienced this first hand with Bluetick. It was a lot harder when I was working on AuditShark just because there’s only so many servers that I have, for example, so scaling things up is a little challenging in terms of using the app for a large number of servers. With Bluetick, I’ve used it to go out and do email follow-ups. It’s interesting to see the places where I’m running into challenges and whether it’s UI- or UX-related issue, things were just not as quick.
For example, there’s a bunch of shortcuts that have been added and it’s explicitly because I found that it was too many clicks to click between different things. Not one customer ever really said that to me but I also knew just from using it, that it was painful to do that if I had to use the main navigation without those shortcuts.
Those are the types of things that you’re going to find and by finding those things that are painful for your customers to use, you’re also going to be able to fix them and prevent them from moving off to other products because they get so fed up with those and they say, “Oh, this has got UI or UX issues and I can’t get around or it takes me too long to do my job.” You don’t ever want your customers to feel using your tool is a chore because you’re trying to solve problems for them and save them time and money. If you’re causing them more headaches, it’s just not worth it for them and they’ll move on to something else.
Rob: Right and using your own product shouldn’t just be done in the early days because once you have customers, you need to use it on an ongoing basis in a perfect world. That’s where, if it is something you use, you have that leg up because you will get in there and you’ll notice things that bother you about it that don’t bother your customers, and it keeps your product at that really high level of refinement, high usability.
You’ll notice a tiny, like a little misspelling or a like a four-pixel difference between this and that and it’s just something that, if you can catch that, because no customer is going to screenshot that and send it into you. Maybe a typo they will, but there’s just these little things that I used to see in Drip all the time when I was using it. It was like, “Man, that bothers me that that is not perfect.” I would send it over to our design team and say, “Hey, we got to fix this little thing.” It came across as a refinement rather than a complaint. It was like, “Let’s make this tool better.” All that’s safe if you’re able to use a product on a daily or weekly basis you think that there’s a lot of value there.
Mike: Just over time, just by doing that it will naturally get better and smoother over time. That’s really what you’re looking to do is just smooth out the rough edges there and make it a nice, clean experience. When people get that experience from one product and have used others where they didn’t get that experience, they talk about it.
Rob: That about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’ve been drinking coffee.
Mike: It’s not whiskey?
Rob: It’s not whiskey. It’s 10:00 in the morning, so I was hoping it wouldn’t be whiskey. Mike, I don’t drink coffee very much anymore. I’m having coffee right now so this is going to be good.
Mike: I have a coffee cup that says, “This is probably whiskey,” on it.
Rob: Nice. I like that.
Mike: Anyway, we’re here to share experiences, help avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Rob?
Rob: Aside from drinking just a tiny bit of coffee this morning, which will hopefully come across as making me energized and sharp rather than wandering all over the place and to crazy tangents, I’ve been listening to a book called Valley Of Genius. It is the history of Silicon Valley, all the way back into the, I believe it’s 50s and 60s as Fairchild Semiconductor came up. It’s told in the words of the people who were involved. There’ll be a chapter telling the history and there’s a chapter or a bunch of quotes from Steve Jobs and Fairchild himself, and a bunch of people who worked in Atari, Nolan Bushnell and people who worked there.
Right now, I believe I’m in the early 80s. I don’t know when it’s going to end, if it’s going to keep going all the way to Facebook and Google or where it goes. I’ve really enjoyed books like this. I grew up there and I remember a lot of orchards and stuff that wasn’t developed and all these concrete tilt up started coming. My dad was in construction and he’s in charge of building a lot of fabs for Intel and they shipped that overseas. Then it was biotech. Then it’s was dot com stuff in the 90s. Then it became just more data centers.
It has a special place for me because I was there but even if you’re not, it’s not like you need to have lived there to get something out of this. It is purely history book. This is a fascinating telling of how these things all developed and really how Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley pretty much by accident. If you’re interested in that kind of history and hearing how things developed, Valley of Genius. It’s a decent book.
Mike: On my end, I’ve got a book recommendation that was sent to me from Keith Gillette and he runs tasktrain.app. He suggested Slicing Pie based on a previous episode where we talked about finding co-founders and how to split equity. I looked into it and it’s a very interesting book.
The Slicing Pie book talks about how to divide equity between co-founders based on a variety of different factors in it. Seems like it’s generally applicable to just about any situation. The general concept is that you divide the equity based on people’s contributions and if you believe in your startup, you’ll probably going to work more on it and you’re going to put more time, effort, and resources into it. But at the end of the day, it’s a gamble. You’re essentially placing bets with your time and money and those are essentially translated into equity points for lack of a better way to put it. Those equity points are divided among the co-founders and that’s how you come out with a final equity split.
I think it’s a fascinating way of looking at it. I didn’t dig into all the details. I’m sure there’s some interesting edge cases but definitely want to say thanks to Keith for sending that over to us.
Rob: Yeah. Definitely, appreciate it. I read that book or at least skimmed it when I first came out because I believe the author sent it to me or maybe he sent it to us. This was a few years ago. I thought it was interesting, although it was probably not an approach I would take.
I’m trying to remember even what it was but I think it was all the founders were starting off and it was a developer and a marketer and you’re just dividing. It’s three developers or whatever and I’ve always felt when I started businesses, we’ve always had brought different things to the table but might not just be task-based.
It’s like, “Oh, so-and-so has $1000 to bring to the table.” That really set things different. Or, “So-and-so has an audience they’re bringing and we’re going to build that on it,” and that has a lot more value than, say, building a certain feature or whatever. I think it’s a good model and frankly, it’s the only book I know that’s been written on this topic. It’s something to be thinking about. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Today’s we’re going to be talking about customer development. The title of this episode is actually Customer Development For Dummies but this is based on an article that was written by Sujan Patel on his blog and we’ll link that up in the show notes.
Sujan was a speaker at MicroConf Growth Edition in 2017 but he talks about customer development in a way that I think that most people can at least get a few takeaways from it and obviously, we’ll add our own perspectives on different pieces of this particular blog post.
Rob: And we’ll, of course, link that up in the show notes. It’s an article at sujanpatel.com and it’s called Five Tips For Doing Customer Development The Right Way.
Mike: His first tip is to talk to your customers, which I think is one of those intuitively obvious things that most of us try to do but I wouldn’t say that we’re all necessarily successful at it. But he’s got a lot of advice in here about how he went about approaching the market for when they were developing Mailshake and they going out to talk to customers.
The one thing that I think he pointed out here which is extremely interesting was that if you’re just trying to validate a product, you don’t have customers yet. So, instead you have to talk to new customers, you can go out and talk to the customers of your competitors, which I think is a really fascinating idea. It’s not just because it’s brutally obvious if you don’t think about it, but I hear a lot of people say like, “Oh, if I don’t have customers, who do I go talk to?” I think that’s just a perfect piece of advice for those people.
Rob: Yup and as a strategy, he says to find your competitor’s customers, going to a site like Capterra or GetApp where people are rating your competitors, and you’ll notice that most of the sites let people connect their LinkedIn or Twitter profiles, then you can reach out. He said, reach out to 30 or 40 people and in his experience, you’ll get 20%-30% success rate, and then ask what they like or don’t like about your competitor’s product. I think it’s a pretty clever hack.
Obviously, you could use something like BuiltWith or Datanyze but those are really expensive sales prospecting tools where you can get list of folks who were using things and this should be more of a freeway. Takes a little bit more time on your end, but more of a freeway to reach out to competitor’s customers.
There’s a lot of value in talking to competitor’s customers and even former employees of competitors, frankly, is an interesting avenue. I guess you wouldn’t get as much customer development. Maybe you can find out more about internal processes or at least approaches if that’s something that you need. It’s probably not something you need this early on but it’s something to keep in mind as you grow.
Mike: The other thing I like about talking to customers or prospective customers and ask them what they don’t like about the products is that it gives you a punch list of challenges that they’re probably having with those products and you can cater your own development to trying to solve those. That’s not to say that, that is going to lead directly to success but if you hear enough people saying the same things over and over that are bad about a particular competitor, then you can use that as a marketing point as well as an engineering point to say, “We are going to make sure that we solve this so that when people are looking for an alternative to this because they are so angry about this particular thing that happens, then we’re the obvious choice for them.”
Rob: Here’s a pro-tip. If you start doing customer development like this and you get the feeling or you get the sense that you’re going to have to build your entire competitor feature set, then make changes, adjustments, or additions in order to get the customers, that’s a red flag. Building out features that’s going to take forever. The best kind of market that you can get into is where a competitor or competitors are bloated and have huge feature sets but a lot of different niches or a lot of different verticals are using say, 20% or 30% of it and that 20% or 30% is broken but it’s the best option.
An example of that is QuickBooks. QuickBooks is a huge tool. It can do inventory management. It can do invoicing, AR, and AP. It can do all this accounting stuff. There’s probably a slice of small businesses that just need a pretty simple, kind of based like freelancers, where they just need some basic invoicing and keeping track of expenses. That’s where startups like Xero and LessAccounting came up, and they just built that part of it. They didn’t have to build inventory management because they were just pulling off of that part that didn’t work.
Another example is Infusionsoft. As we were growing Drip, we realized Infusionsoft has landing pages, shopping carts, affiliate management program, payment processing I believe is built-in, then they had email marketing, they had marketing automation, they had CRM, they had a lot of stuff. We did not build all of that. We just needed to be really good at the email marketing and marketing automation, and we were able to pull a lot of customers from Infusionsoft.
So, two examples of how I view markets. If you had to build all of the Infusionsoft or all of QuickBooks, you just can’t do it. It’s going to take you years to do it.
Mike: That leads to the natural question to ask while you’re talking to those customers is, what things do you not use at all? Or do you use very little? That will help give you an idea of some sort of relative ranking of the features of the competitor that you probably have to implement versus the ones that are probably complicated and going to take a long period of time to develop but most customers don’t use. If it’s not used by 80% of the customers, you probably get away without it.
Rob: Yup and one question that I ask during Drip customer development was, what’s your biggest pain point with tool X? Whether that was Infusionsoft or whether it was MailChimp or HubSpot or Marketo or Ontraport, what do you like the least about it or what do you wish they would fix or what do you wish they would add or how could they do better? AWeber is on that list as well.
The cool part is I started seeing patterns of, “Well, I like MailChimp and AWeber and they’re solid tools, but they don’t do this. You can’t tag people, you can do automations.” Someone said, “I like Infusionsoft but it’s really buggy. The Campaign Builder is too complicated. It’s way too expensive for what it is. Didn’t like the $2000 upfront.” There’s some real specific things that everyone referenced back to. If you’ll notice, that’s what we attack really early on with our marketing. We’re like these guys but better, we’re like this but different. It wound up being something that in 10, 20, 30 conversations that I had, could translate into our entire marketing message.
Mike: Yeah and you’ll find that there’s definite hot spots in those areas as well. As you said, you talked to 30, 40, 50 people, you start to hear the same things over and over again, and you just know where to focus your time and effort.
The next tip that Sujan has is to track your competitor’s pros and cons. I think that goes a little bit back to the previous one where there’s a difference between feature set versus what people like and what they don’t like, and what things they wished that the competitors had. The feature set is what they advertise versus how well they mash the customers’ expectations in terms of the pros and cons. There’s obviously some overlap in the feature set in that but there’s a definite difference between how the customer feels about the features versus what their marketing message is saying.
Rob: Yeah and Sujan says to google things like competitor’s name review, like QuickBooks review or QuickBooks testimonials, and visit as many results as you can trying to come up with a list of the top 10 things people like about each of the competitors as well as what they don’t like.
This is a way to do it without having conversations and I would view this as day zero research. You’re trying to put together a list or get a sense of the pros and cons of your competitors and you’re going to do this for multiple competitors. It’s not just one in general. Typically, more than one competitor has a decent market share.
The next step for me would be then to start having those conversations with either people who have signed up for your early bird list. Even if you don’t have customers, you can ask them, “What do you expect? What do you want? Do you use one of these competitors? Do you use QuickBooks? Do you use Infusionsoft and what do you think about them?” Or, if you don’t have that yet, start building it today and then go and do what we talked about in the previous step which was to go to Capterra, GetApp, and start having conversations with your competitor’s customers.
Mike: The other thing he recommends is that you track the changes to this list over time. I think that’s also an important piece that I’ve not really thought about in the past but tend to agree with them because the technology is going to change over time. The entire market itself is going to change over time. As time plods on, there’s going to be a set of features that is standard across all of your competitors and you need to make sure that you have those features. If you don’t, you’re going to end up being left behind.
That’s not say you should always copy every single feature that your competitors have but if you’re the only one who doesn’t have a particular feature, you might want to seriously consider adding it.
Rob: Tip number three from Sujan is to test before you build. He talks about how Hiten Shah does a really good job of going through a lot of testing. If you want to see someone who is really at the top of the game of pre-validating products and doing customer development, go to hitenism.com––it’s called Product Habits now. Sign up for his email list and just watch what he does because Hiten is, like I said, one of the best at this.
Mike: The reason why you want to test these things before you start building them is that you don’t want to waste a lot of time on building stuff that nobody’s going to use or that isn’t actually solving a problem that your customers have. If you’re just blindly copying a competitor, for example, they may have implemented a feature that they didn’t necessarily know that their customers wanted. They may have just said, “Oh, we think that they need this or somebody mentioned this and we’re going to build it,” and then you spend several weeks or a couple of months building something that, because you didn’t test the market, you didn’t know that nobody needed it either. You’re just copying somebody else. You want to find places where you can save time, not waste it.
Rob: You know why I realize is that we didn’t even really define customer development when we started. Some folks may have heard that and they may have an idea of what it is but there is a pretty solid definition because Steve Blank, who’s a serial entrepreneur and he’s now a professor or was a professor, was it Stanford or Berkeley, somewhere in California. He developed this concept called customer development.
It’s a four-step process. It’s customer discovery to start with. There’s a lot of conversations proposing an MVP, trying to figure things out. Then there’s customer validation once you start building it. And then it’s customer creation which is where you’re scaling and then you’re bringing in customers. And then it’s company building, which is where you scale operations and stuff.
If you google what is customer development, there is a pretty nice diagram of all that and we don’t need to go into those pieces for you to understand it, but just in case you are listening, thinking, “What is this customer development term?” it really just means we are focusing really on the first and second steps here, which are the conversations with your customers and then trying to find product-market fit. I think maybe Sujan is really focused on even just the first step in this article, because second, third, and fourth is more company building, scaling, and organization.
Mike: We talked a little bit about the types of ways that you can test things before you start building them. One that I used during the validation process for Bluetick was, I created a set of Balsamiq mockups and then showed those to people. Instead of building codes and instead of creating CSS mockups or Photoshop mockups of exactly what the app was going to look like, I just sketch it all out using Balsamiq and was able to link the pages together. You can see how the application was going to work without writing any of the code for it. It took me probably 20-30 hours or so to put that together, but that’s a lot less time than it took to build the application and put something that was completely functional together.
During the process of showing it to people, I got a lot of questions about, “Oh, what does this piece do?” or, “How would I go about doing this other action over here,” and it gives you a sense of where your design essentially is going to either fall short of what their expectations are or other areas where you should probably spend a little bit more time on it.
Rob: Sujan suggests getting a wireframe and going to sets like in five-second test or user insights, usertesting.com is another one, and that will give you UX stuff but it won’t tend to give you customer insights like you’re talking about, Mike, where you are actually talking to a group who you knew was interested in the solution that you’re going to be providing. I think yours is harder to do but it’s more valuable in my opinion.
Tip number four is to go to conferences or events where your customers are. This is an obvious one but one that a lot of people overlook. I think you can get a ton of value in a two- or three-day conference. You could talk to 50 or 100 people if you scheduled well. Maybe not 100, that actually sounds like a lot but maybe let’s say 30 or 40 people really quickly in person if you really made a point of having your stuff together, you’ve been having mock-ups.
I was at a startup pitch, was a competition. It was more like a demo day for local accelerator here in town the other day. Someone was talking about something and then pulled out an iPad Pro and was like, “Here, let me just walk you through.” He had, it was either mock-ups or maybe it was an actual app running on it. It was kind of funny to see him just pull it out during a conversation as we were having drinks and it got a better picture of what he was up to. Frankly, I was able to give him feedback of like, “Oh, I was confused by that,” or, “I don’t see my people would use that,” or, “That screen’s really nice.”
Mike: I have something that you can actually show to people. It leaps and bounds above just explaining it to them. When you’re explaining it to them, they’re going to have their own vision in mind of what the thing’s going to look like, how it works, and what it does even. You might say something like, for Bluetick it’s an email automation follow-up software or something like that. They’re going to have in their own head this impression of what something like that does based on their previous experiences and it doesn’t necessarily reflect what you are building. So keep in mind that if you can show them anything at all as opposed to leaving it up to their imagination, you’re going to be much further along.
The other thing Sujan points out is that in an informal setting such as a conference or an event, is much more conducive to getting feedback from people because if you’re getting people on to webinar and you’re doing a sales demo or something like that, people have a tendency to hold back a little bit. In an informal situation, you get, I’d say a little bit more honest feedback because they’ve realized they’re not really being sold to and they’d like to help you out. They want to give you feedback that is going to help you. In just any informal setting, that alone is going to help do that.
Rob: And his fifth tip for customer development is to live a day in the life of your customer. He talks about dogfooding your own product. It helps you smooth out the rough edges. This is one of the benefits of scratching your own itch. Scratching your own itch has been thrown around since 37signals said, “Hey, this is all you got to do because that’s what we did, and look, it worked.” It is cool. It is easier if you can do that but it’s not required. It’s not required to scratch your own itch to build a great product. I’ve seen it done for people entering a market that they’re not part of. However, either way, whether you’re scratching your own itch or not, you should dog food that product. You should try to use it as if your customer was using it.
If I recall, dogfooding was coined by—was it Bill Gates or someone at Microsoft because he learned that the CEO of a dog food company would eat the dog food to test it. Bill Gates was like, “We need to basically eat our own dog food which means we need to use our own software to make it better.” So if you’re curious about where that term comes from, that’s at least my anecdotal memory of where it comes from.
Mike: I experienced this first hand with Bluetick. It was a lot harder when I was working on AuditShark just because there’s only so many servers that I have, for example, so scaling things up is a little challenging in terms of using the app for a large number of servers. With Bluetick, I’ve used it to go out and do email follow-ups. It’s interesting to see the places where I’m running into challenges and whether it’s UI- or UX-related issue, things were just not as quick.
For example, there’s a bunch of shortcuts that have been added and it’s explicitly because I found that it was too many clicks to click between different things. Not one customer ever really said that to me but I also knew just from using it, that it was painful to do that if I had to use the main navigation without those shortcuts.
Those are the types of things that you’re going to find and by finding those things that are painful for your customers to use, you’re also going to be able to fix them and prevent them from moving off to other products because they get so fed up with those and they say, “Oh, this has got UI or UX issues and I can’t get around or it takes me too long to do my job.” You don’t ever want your customers to feel using your tool is a chore because you’re trying to solve problems for them and save them time and money. If you’re causing them more headaches, it’s just not worth it for them and they’ll move on to something else.
Rob: Right and using your own product shouldn’t just be done in the early days because once you have customers, you need to use it on an ongoing basis in a perfect world. That’s where, if it is something you use, you have that leg up because you will get in there and you’ll notice things that bother you about it that don’t bother your customers, and it keeps your product at that really high level of refinement, high usability.
You’ll notice a tiny, like a little misspelling or a like a four-pixel difference between this and that and it’s just something that, if you can catch that, because no customer is going to screenshot that and send it into you. Maybe a typo they will, but there’s just these little things that I used to see in Drip all the time when I was using it. It was like, “Man, that bothers me that that is not perfect.” I would send it over to our design team and say, “Hey, we got to fix this little thing.” It came across as a refinement rather than a complaint. It was like, “Let’s make this tool better.” All that’s safe if you’re able to use a product on a daily or weekly basis you think that there’s a lot of value there.
Mike: Just over time, just by doing that it will naturally get better and smoother over time. That’s really what you’re looking to do is just smooth out the rough edges there and make it a nice, clean experience. When people get that experience from one product and have used others where they didn’t get that experience, they talk about it.
Rob: That about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, call our voicemail at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 409 | Defining Product/Market Fit, Using Inexpensive Developers, When to Quit, and More Listener Questions
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike answer a number of listener questions. The topics include defining product market fit, using cheap developers, when to quit, and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- The Quiet Light Podcast w/ Rob Walling
- FounderCafe
- Closer Sharing
- Sean Ellis: 40% “very disappointed”
Rob: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and I discuss the definition of product market fit using inexpensive developers, when to quit, and more listener questions. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 409.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Where this week, sir?
Mike: Do you hear that?
Rob: The silence behind you?
Mike: Yes. The kids went back to school. Oh my god, it’s so awesome.
Rob: You’re right. It’s nice that they’re not in the house except for […] of the day or eight hours of the day with buzz time.
Mike: Yes, yes. It is. There are certain cartoons that they watch that could not end soon enough because they’ve watched the same episodes over and over. I’m just like, “Oh, please. Let it stop.”
Rob: Totally. Our kids go back next week. Although by the time that this airs, they’ll have gone back, but as of the time we’re recording, they’re not back in school yet. I’m definitely looking forward to that.
Mike: Yup. What’s up with you?
Rob: Well, I’ve been listening to a few books. As always, I kind of have my audio queue full at all times for when I get through all the podcasts episodes for the week. One I listen to is called Brotopia. It’s about kind of the Silicon Valley boys club and I enjoyed it. It’s by Emily Chang. It really brings a lot of stuff to light. I’m very glad she wrote it. I wasn’t surprised by a lot of it, I was surprised by parts of it in a bad way, just about stuff women have had to deal with in Silicon Valley.
There was a small portion that I felt like, I mean, literary 5-10% of it where I was like, “Okay, I feel like you’re taking this a little too far.” Or, “This is a little over the top.” Or, “This particular argument or example just feels like a little bit sensationalist,” but all that to say, solid 80-90% of it, it was like, “Oh my gosh, yeah.” Things are beginning to change but it’s not nearly enough. I appreciated that book. I think it’s something interesting to read or listen to if that kind of stuff interests you–and it should. Diversity inclusion is something that everyone is thinking about these days or should be.
Another book that I listened to that I didn’t think I would like actually. But I’m a huge fan of Paul Simons—Simon and Garfunkel in particular. There’s a new biography called, Paul Simons: The Life. I figured that anything before Simon and Garfunkel, like his growing up and anything after Simon and Garfunkel would not be that interesting to me. But it turns out it was well-written, it was fascinating, the story, and just the way he reinvents himself every album. […] is painful process of being a maker in what he does. I loved just hearing about creators and how much—it’s the struggle. It’s the struggle of creating things and how hard that is. Anyway, it’s highly recommended if you’re at all into Paul Simon or want to meet and like the artist’s journey, kind of biographies.
The last one is just a fun diversion. I buy a lot of books thinking like, “I’m going to go out on a limb here. It’s not typically what I love.” But it’s by David Spade and it’s called, A Polaroid Guy in a Snapchat World. I’m not a David Spade fan, in particular. The only movies that I ever saw him in were like Tommy Boy. I think he was in two Chris Farley movies. David Spade was on Saturday Night Live in early ‘90s, I believe. I have not followed him, I have no connection to him, but man, this book was funny. He just turned 50 years old and he just talks about kind of being in 5 television shows, and 24 movies. He’s a famous person. He just talks about life in LA, and Instagram, growing up, and other things. It’s funny. I enjoyed that. I feel like at first, it kind of set off in a beaten path. It was something that I could listen to that would take my mind off of work, which is something you’ve talked about a lot, how you read fiction to give your mind a rest from it.
Mike: Yeah, very cool. I haven’t read any of those few books. But I’ve run across Brotopia before, at least I’ve seen mentions of it in a couple of places. It’s interesting but as you said, I wouldn’t expect a lot of the things that are talked about in that to be necessarily surprising because there’s a lot of stuff that’s come out of the Silicon Valley culture that is just unacceptable, to be perfectly honest about it.
Rob: Yeah, it’s pretty over the top.
Mike: What are we talking about this week?
Rob: This week we are answering some listener questions. We have one question that we’ll kick it off with. It’s about using inexpensive developers. An anonymous listener wrote in, he said, “I discovered some of your videos on YouTube and the principles that you teach specifically the idea of an MVP have turned my thinking upside-down and got me really stoked. I’m a lead developer for a government contractor and I have been for 12 years. I believe that good software cannot be pounded out by cheap labor. I’ve seen too many programmers not willing or able to separate concerns like DRY Code–Do Not Repeat Yourself Code, and otherwise make unmaintainable convoluted messes. On the other hand, I need help for my on-the-side startup and cannot pay anywhere near the $100,000 a year for good developer in the States. I’m considering trying cheap overseas labor and I will attempt to review a code and set a standard to keep the code base at an acceptable level of quality. I have a couple of questions.”
This is good stuff because we often, Mike, we often get the questions of, “I’m non-technical. How do I find somebody else? How do I validate?” But this person is technical and so this is a boat you and I have both been in. It’s interesting, right? Because back in, between 2005-2010, I was very much in this boat. I knew you have had folks working on both Audit Shark and Bluetick.
He has three questions. The first one is, “Have you tried this and do you have lessons learned?” Second question is, “I’ve heard you say don’t worry about scaling it until you prove your market. Would you take that as far as hiring cheap developers to write unmaintainable code for your first iteration of the product, assuming the code actually works, of course. Building, kind of a crappy, and repeat, and then rewriting it later.” The third question is, “How have you approached hiring developers?”
We may not be able to in-depth answer all of these. We have talked about hiring developers in the past. I actually talked about it on the Quiet Light podcast, in specific where I went to 5 or 10 minutes of just that topic. Maybe let’s send people over there or they can search the back catalog because we have transcripts of every episode. If you go to startupsfortherestofus.com, type in hiring, you can grab some old episodes from iTunes and you can listen to that. Maybe we just tackle the first two in this episode.
The first one, have we tried what he’s suggesting, kind of hiring cheaper than $100,000 a year labor, and what are our lessons learned from that.
Mike: Yes, I have. Lessons learned is that your expectations for them should be lower than if you were paying more. You can find developers as cheap as $5 or $10 an hour, but you’re going to get what you pay for. I found that when I went above $20 an hour, I stared to get better developers. You’re able to get a wider variety of in-depth experience as well. If you go to the lower levels, you’ll just find somebody who says, “Oh, I can do front code and I could do backend code,” but they can neither one of them very good or they’re really good at one and they’re just terrible at the other. They can do it, they just are not good. You’ll find that the code is completely unmaintainable, and it’s very difficult to work with even if you lay out like, “Here’s the entire process of exactly how to do everything.” It still is just probably not going to work out very well.
That said, leading into number two, not scaling until you prove the market which you take that as far as hiring cheap developers to write unmaintainable code for the first iteration of your product. That’s a harder question to answer because it depends on how long it takes them to get there. The mistakes that they make are going to bite you and there’s two different ways. One is, whatever rewrite you have to go through, and the second is the goodwill that you’re earning with your customers. Because if you’re going through and you’re continually breaking things that used to work, they’re going to get angry with you. It’s just going to make your life more difficult in terms of trying to build the business and build revenue because they’re going to leave, they’re going to churn out because like, “Oh, this product, it breaks every other minute or every other day whenever something new goes in. It’s just a complete mess.” It’s going to be hard to go that route.
I would definitely, if you can afford it, hire slightly better developers, pay more than you probably think that you can potentially afford, or at least you thought that you can afford because it is going to be worth it. You’re not going to find that you’re going to get a $15 or $20 an hour developer. You can get two of them and they will be just as effective as a single developer that’s at $40 or $50 an hour. You’re better off going to better developer route even though you’re probably going to get less code because of the fact that they’re going to do a better job at it.
Now, obviously, there’s wide range of skills between people. Some people may charge $40, some people may charge $80 and they could potentially be similar in skillset not likely, because people tend to know what their value is but definitely, at the lower levels, everything’s like a total crap shoot. Once you get into the middle of $40, $60, $80 an hour, it changes quite a bit. There’s a, I’ll say, an order of magnitude. Difference in capabilities in somebody who’s below $20 versus above $30 or $40.
Rob: Yeah. His statement of, “I really believe that good software cannot be pounded by cheap labor.” It’s like, yeah, don’t be too dogmatic about that because cheap is relative, right? I was charging $125 an hour as a contractor. People would go to hire me and then say, “Well, I can hire someone for $50 and they’re cheap.” Is $50 an hour cheap or is $5 an hour cheap? Keep in mind that this is not absolute. I like your point about—and I’ve found the same thing—$5, $10 an hour, it’s going to be a mess. Know that going in if you’re going to build something like that with $5 or $10 amount.
I have found that decent developers in the $15-$25 an hour range much like you were saying. The interesting part is they maybe good developers but they tend to have something else that leads them to only charge that much. They might have kind of a chaotic personal life, or they might not be able to work as many hours as you need them to, or they might be just a little more sporadic on the hours than you want them too, or they might not be detailed on other things. You can find a good developer who’s cheap. There’s probably something else they’re not super reliable or something like that. That’s a thing to keep in mind is, it’s all trade-offs.
I can think of 20 reasons why any startup that I’m going to start is going to fail. Even back in 2005-2010, when I was much more in the same boat as the original question that asker here, yeah, I was taking risks. I hired a bunch of people that were in the $15 range. Some of them were really good, and some of them were terrible, and I just had to vet them. I found PHP developers, I found ColdFusion developers, I found Classic ASP developer because I had a bunch of different code bases, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to do this. Can this work? Yes, it can, but it’s not going to work the first time. The best developer for $20 an hour is not going to magically drop into your lap. You’re gonna have to look, and you’re going to have to vet, and you’re going to have to put in the work.
I’d say, don’t be too dogmatic about, “Oh, someone need to be making about $100k a year in order to be a good developer.” That’s not true especially not true if you go around the world. But even in the US, you can find good side labor with people who are paying less than $100k a year especially if you hire a junior or mid-level and are able to train them up. That’s a whole other story but we did that with Drip. We took two developers right out of code school so they literally had, I don’t know, six weeks to two months of coding experience. They have done a little on the side. Could they write great code from the start? No. But we had a bunch of safeguards in place. Derek did a lot of code reviews and he kept a close eye on the code base and the code base grew—it’s very large now, and it’s still a very solid code base with a lot of tests covered. Yes, this is possible.
Second question is, “Would you take it so far as hiring to develop unmaintainable code for your first iteration of a product?” My answer is probably not. Personally, I wouldn’t do that. I care too much about not having to rewrite the product because once you start getting momentum, and you start getting a few K in MRR, the last thing I want to do is go back and spend six months rewriting the thing. I’ve seen companies do it. It is agonizing. It kills the founders, not literally, but it is so painful to do.
If I’m going to do it from the start, I would just tackle a smaller problem and I would try to tackle part of the MVP without software at all. You’ve heard us talk about this. Use excel spreadsheets, use emails, there’s a bunch of other interfaces, use cheap virtual assistants to do the grunt work. There are ways to do this without building software. As developers, we think software is the answer to everything. In most cases, it is not. There are some when you need it to be.
If you’re building the next Google, yes, you need software. But I’d say in 80% of the cases where someone says, “I’m going to build my MVP,” and they assume that means software. They’re actually incorrect. You can do a lot of things. You could sell a lot of people on idea, or on mockups, or on the excel, email version of something without ever having to write a line of code. That’s the thinking I’d be doing at this point.
Mike: Yeah, I was going to mention that as an add-on for his second question was that, the first iteration of product doesn’t necessarily need to be software. How far are you down the road of the validation process? I think that once your past validating it and you decided to pull the trigger on it, do it the right way. Hire the developers that you need as opposed to the developers that you can just afford. You need to get good developers in there doing it.
Rob: I’ll even say, I’ve hacked things together myself. I think of the, what is now Founder Café, which is our online community for bootstrap software founders, go to foundercafe.com to learn more about that. But the original version of that, it had a different name altogether, called Micropreneur Academy, I was a software developer. I could’ve built online learning platform. There weren’t very many that were any good at that point. Moodle was in its early days, 2008, 2009. I hacked it together. I hacked it together with WordPress, and plugins, and theme, and that was really it, and I hacked some PHP. It wasn’t great. In the end, we had some technical dab but it was years later, it had already been built up and do a pretty nice business at that point. I’m not saying build a SaaS app that way, but there are workarounds you can look at to make that happen. Thanks for the question, Anonymous. I hope that’s helpful.
Our next question comes from dan@closersharing.com. He recorded an audio question so he jumped to the front of the line. It’s a long question but he gives a lot of background, and I appreciate it because oftentimes, people will send short questions, and then we have a lot of questions in our mind about, “Well, they didn’t give this detail or that.” It’s a couple of minutes here, but hang out, and then Mike and I will weigh in.
“Hey guys. My name is Dan Webb from Closer Sharing. Before I get to my question, I just want to say thank you to both of you. Thank you for all you do. I’ve learned a bunch from you guys. I’ve been listening for a few years now. When I first started listening, I tore back through the archives and learned a bunch and have been listening ever since. Thank you, guys, for sticking with it and teaching a lot of people a lot of stuff. Thanks.
Before I get to my question, let me give you a little bit of background. I have a startup. It’s called Closer Sharing. It’s a sermon podcasting platform. It’s a podcasting platform specifically designed for churches, allows the volunteers to quickly and easily use our recorder to record, and tag, and post the sermon each week, and list it on their website, and just takes the pain out of it, of hosting, and getting on their website and all that. We officially launched the product in January of 2017—a little bit over a year and a half ago. I have tried to grow it.
Right now, I currently have seven customers. We have an MRR of $200 a month. We really bootstrapped the thing building it. We only have an outflow of $175 a month who we are in the black. Out of those seven customers, all are original, I have had no churn whatsoever, so everybody that’s using it really likes it. Some have been on it the full year and a half. The latest sign-up was a couple of months ago.
There is no churn. I think it is a good product for the people who get on it. The trick is getting people on it. I have tried cold emailing. I’ve tried Facebook Ads, I have tried conferences. I tend to walk away from each one with one customer. I went to three of them. It really became obvious to me, one of the mistakes I was making a couple of podcast ago when you were talking about SaaS marketing, and I have not been trying to really connect with people and teach them anything. I’ve been just—as I’ve heard some people say—ask him to marry me on the first date sort of thing. I have a series of blog posts in my head that I feel like I should write and get out on my blog, and start sending people to them, and getting people to know me, but I haven’t done that yet. Probably my next project.
We’re well in the year and a half in, I was listening to your last podcast about funding, and some of that made me think as I’ve been thinking maybe I should just say, “Hey, it’s been a year and a half. I’ve only got seven customers. Maybe I should kill it and shift to something else. But then again, I have seven customers and I like them and I like to continue to provide the service for them. But I don’t want to be that guy that’s just clinging to my startup just because I’ve built it. I would like to know if it’s a viable product. I do have a whole list of futures that could make this platform really great, but I don’t want to keep building on it if it’s not a viable product.
My question is, should I keep spending my nights and weekends on this thing—I have a full-time job—and continue to grow really slowly? Should I possibly look for some sort of funding, so I could spend more time on it and possibly grow it quicker? Should I just kill and walk away and work on another product and try to develop it into a business? I’d loved to hear you guys’ thoughts on these things. I appreciate all you do. Thanks, guys.”
Rob: Tough question, huh, Mike? What do you think?
Mike: I think that’s a really tough question. I do hear a couple of things in there in terms of working on the weekends and wanting to build features. I think that that’s very natural for any developer to want to do because that’s comfortable, but at the same time, I think I would go back and I would start looking at metrics in terms of how many people you’re getting in front of, and how many trials sign-ups you’re getting, how many actual sign-ups you’re getting, I don’t know if there’s a free trial or anything like that, but those are the types of things that I would probably look at first, and see if there are obvious places where—like your sales funnel is just simply not working.
If you’re not getting 1000 or 2000 uniques a month, then that’s probably the place to start and try and figure out, “How do I get more traffic?” Because there’s this whole funnel that has to be in place in order for you to be able to build a business. That’s longer-term stuff. I want to make sure that I emphasize that there’s a difference between that type of stuff and then shorter-term stuff that you can do which you’d mentioned that you’ve done some Facebook ads and some cold emails and things like that. But I don’t know if you really have much on the website in terms of what you’re offering to people. I think the blog post sounds like a good idea in terms of education but I’m not seeing email newsletter sign-up list or anything like that on the website.
It’s more of a, “Come buy this product.” And there’s really not much in terms of education about how the churches that would invest in this type of products will deliver better sermons or would engage more with their church members. I think that’s what you need to key in on this because that’s what’s going to be important to them. The professional sound, they’re not going to care nearly as much about that as you are. You have to ask yourself, “What is it that’s actually important to them? How can they connect better with their members? How could thy reach more of them? How can they be more convenient to them in a digital age where people don’t necessarily need to show up at a certain time to see a movie, they can just stream it On Demand.”
That’s what you’re trying to cater to. That’s one of the problems that they’re probably having. Offer advice and solutions and different techniques and things like that in the form of educational material, and then try and build up that early part of the sales funnel. I would absolutely try and contact them directly as opposed to just sending emails because those are very easy to ignore. Pick up the phone, I mean, it’s probably not that difficult to reach them. I would imagine that most of their phone numbers are available.
If you’ve got people that you’re cold emailing, you’d probably have a way to find out who they are, and get a phone number for them, and call them and ask them. Talk to them and say, “What are your problems around this and around building a community?” because it really seems to me that’s what your product is trying to do. How do you engage with them and getting the information directly out of their mouths is going to be very helpful? I wouldn’t just call 5 or 10. I would call 50 or 100.
Put a line in the sand at some point in the future like you’d ask about whether or not you’d kill it. “What is your line in the sand? How much more effort do you put into this?” and really put the pedal down to see what is going to work. “How much effort can you justify putting into it?” and then once you’ve hit that, “Have you hit whatever your goals are or do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?” in either of those cases, you can keep going. But if you get there and there’s nothing else you can try, or you can’t think of anything else, I would kill it at that point.
Rob: I feel like this is such a tough market because some churches don’t tend to adopt. Some churches adopt technology but a lot of them do not. The older churches with aging congregations are just unlikely to need podcasting. You’re dealing with such a small subset of the entire market. If you think about, in the world, the number of people who, period who listen to podcasts is very small. My mom and dad don’t know how to do that. If you just break that down into a subset, and do a subset of like, “Now it’s churches, and now it’s churches who have people maybe under age 40, or age 50 who also know how to use podcasts.” Those are the only ones that have any type of need for this service. It’s a very small market and it’s a market where obviously, in conversations, I’m sure that he’s learned that they are just not that interested in adopting it. That’s the first problem.
The second issue, Dan, is you have a top of funnel problem, it sounds like. If you had 1000 or 10,000 unique visitors to your website each month, you think you would convert them? I don’t know. But generating visitors is going to be really hard to do. If you’ve been doing for two years and only have seven customers, that’s a bad sign. That’s a sign that something’s not resonating here. I think a big question I would ask myself is, “Are you tired of working on this? Are you done yet? Are you still excited to invest time?” not even, “Do you still believe it can work but are you excited to get up and think about this problem and try do to it?” I would stop building features altogether. You shouldn’t be coding anything which doesn’t sound like you are.
Your biggest problem is, it sounds like might be driving traffic, or maybe driving traffic hasn’t worked at all and it’s only been in-person conversations, in which case ask yourself, “Is a $29 a month product worth doing high-tech sales for?” because for me, it’s not. It’s going to grow very slowly. You need $100-$200 a month minimum, to make that kind of approach work. I really don’t think funding will fix this.
This is not a problem of, “I need money to scale or I need to put in more time to get to a point where this product is worthwhile.” It seems that you have a worthwhile product already. You’ve a lot of cool features. More time to market? What would you do? It sounds like you have tried a bunch of stuff. I mean, you haven’t tried everything, maybe you didn’t try enough of it, didn’t have the budget, but I’m cautiously skeptical that if you have $100,000 in your bank account tomorrow, and you could go full-time on this for, let’s just say, nine months and had some budget for stuff, I don’t see this taking off like a rocket ship based on how you’ve described.
I think my biggest piece of advice, given what you’ve said and looking at the website, it seems like a pretty cool tool in all honesty. You have features like automatic intros and outros, professional sound without the work, automatic feeds, is there another vertical that could use this? Should it be horizontal? Should it go across all verticals, basically? Should you not limit it to churches, is what I’m saying.
Right now, you’re marketing to churches, is that too limiting, and is there either another vertical that would have so much more uptake on this or just open it to everyone, and then poof, you become the ‘how to start a podcast superfast’ service. Maybe you make it a little cheaper but sign-up for six months or a year at a time and you pay upfront. I don’t know if that’s the direction but that’s where I’d be looking. Are there already services that do that? Because at that point, if you could get into that space, now you have affiliate potential because you have people who teach other people how to podcast. Would they potentially refer you for an affiliate commission? That’s a bigger space is people trying to start their own podcast. Could you go after businesses or startups or whatever?
Again, this is something I would either try to research, do some customer development, put some digging into that because I feel like that’s a space where there are more likely going to be folks who will actually adopt this, and consider jumping on this train because it seems that you’ve built a decent piece of software–at least from the marketing side. It looks pretty interesting and has some features I haven’t seen elsewhere, but I don’t the competitive landscape. That’s probably where I would look at or shut it down. That’s the other option that I see.
I always hate to make a recommendation like that because I feel like the founder knows better than anyone else. They often need to see […] that’s where having a mastermind would help, right, of people who’ve been along in the journey. But to hear a formative voice and then make a recommendation that, you should check your product down, it’s tough. It’s tough for me to say that but, I think that’s a more viable option than trying to scale this up in the church space or raising the funding.
Last question of the day came from Twitter. It came from @chelso and he said, “Regarding episode 406. What is your definition of product market fit?” and then I started tying and then thought, there’s always so much nuance to a question like this, and Twitter is not the place to do this. This is either a blog post or it’s a conversation like this. I think product market fit is not a binary thing. I definitely think it’s a continuum and I think you kind of ease into it.
There is a nice measure that Sean Ellis created. It’s this survey you can send out that says, “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” insert product name here. The four options are; very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed–it isn’t really that useful, or NA–I don’t really use the product, or I no longer use the product. If you get more than 40% who say they would be very disappointed, that is how Sean Ellis has defined product market fit. I think that would be the most common definition. I have run this exact survey on some of my products.
I know Hiten Shah has run this exact survey on, not only his products, but on a bunch of other products. He’ll run it on Google Analytics. He’ll just ask a bunch of people, and I don’t know if he uses a mechanical trick or how he does that, but Google Analytics definitely has product market fit, at least according to his slide deck and some talking he’s done. We will link to SlideShare, this Hiten Shah presentation in the show notes so that you can take a look at the work that he did.
I’ll leave it there, Mike, so you can weigh in. I have additional thoughts and kind of my own personal thoughts of when I saw Drip–what it looked and felt like before product market fit as we were getting there, and then once we had it, from my perspective. I do want to weigh in, but I don’t want to sit here and monologue and not let you weigh in.
Mike: True. This is probably not going be much different from other people on what they would comment but you’ll know it when you see it. I know that’s kind of a hand-wavy type of thing but there are some people who will look at metrics–so Sean Ellis has that product market fit survey. If you’re more than, I think he said that 40% are, I forgot what the exact percentage was, but certain percentage say that they are either somewhat disappointed or very disappointed that they would go away.
Rob: 40% said they would be very disappointed if it went away. 40% or more then, by his definition, you have product market fit.
Mike: Right. Like you said, that’s a very, I’ll say, exact in definition. I won’t necessarily say that that’s the only definition. It’s kind of my view of it. I like the way Rob phrases like, “There’s a continuum of it.” That’s why I say you’ll know it when you see it because if you’re involved in the startup from beginning to end or wherever you’re trying to figure out like, have you gotten to product market fit, you’ll know it when you see it because things will start to tick up and it will be obvious that you’re on the right track. Because it’s a continuum, you’re never going to be like, “We have perfect product market fit.”
You think things can always improve, they can always get better, and the market’s always changing, your product’s always changing, your marketing messages are going to be always changing–these things that interact with one another that you’ll never have this perfect product market fit. Even if you did, it’s very likely something that something is going to change and throw it all out of whack in 18 seconds.
Really, what you have to do is, if you don’t have the data, if you haven’t run a survey like this, you kind of have to go off of a gut feeling. My general view on it is that if you take the product and you put it in front of people who are in what you believe to be the correct target market, and they actually are, do you win much more than you lose? Are those people going to sign-up and say, “Yes, I would like this,” Or, “No, we’re not just interested.” Because that will tell you one of two things, either one, you’re pointing at the wrong market or your product is not good enough and it’s just not doing what people need it to do.
The second piece, which I didn’t mention yet, is that those people will have to actually stick around. You can explain to them, “Hey, this product will do X, Y, and Z for you. It’ll make all these problems go away.” But if you don’t also deliver on it, they’re going to churn out. You have to figure out ways to make them stick around. Those are two different competing things and sometimes, your things should make them stick around or going to be more features–sometimes it’s educational, or onboarding, or something like that. That’s a slightly different problem than product market fit. Somebody may believe that they need a particular solution, and they’ll pay for it, but then they don’t use it.
Think of any weight loss program on the planet. People buy into that stuff and then they don’t use it. Why don’t they use it? Is it a product market fit problem or is it a customer retention problem? That’s a hard thing to figure out because if they churn out, if they stop paying for it, if they stop using it, then is it because other things got in the way or the product doesn’t actually do what they needed it to do? There’s an attribution problem of, “Why did they churn out?” If it’s because it wasn’t actually a good product market fit and they bought into the messaging, but it didn’t solve their problem, then you don’t have product market fit. If they churned out because they just don’t have the chops or time or anything like that to actually do it, then that’s a slightly different problem–that’s a retention problem not necessarily a product market fit problem.
Rob: This is why it’s a good conversation to have. I won’t talk about weight loss stuff because I don’t even know if product market fit applies to that in particular. I mean, it does, but I don’t think about it in terms on that one. I think of a SaaS app, a retention is a product market fit problem, in my opinion. That if someone’s not getting on-boarded, not using it, then the need isn’t deep enough, and you haven’t found that fit with the market. The question that I ask, the way I frame it in my head is, “Have you built something people or businesses need?” That’s the question that I’ve asked.
I think Paul Graham says, “Have you built something people want?” I think it’s a great way to phrase it but have you built something that people or businesses need? Let’s stick to businesses because we talk a lot about B2B SaaS here. If you built something people desperately need, and they start using it, can you still fail, or can you still grow slowly? Yes, I believe you can even with product market fit because if the market’s too small, and you tap out, that’s one way.
If your market’s only $10,000 a month then you can own the whole market and really just tap out very quickly. Or if your market is huge but you can’t reach them in a scalable fashion, that’s a totally different problem than product market fit. I think there’s different problem than product market fit. I think there’s being able to build something that people need, and businesses need, and then there’s the ability to reach them in a scalable way and get them onboarded in a way that doesn’t kind of break the bank.
The three questions I think about, in order. The first one you have to ask—this is before you’ve built anything— “Is a problem you’re choosing to solve worth solving? i.e., is it much of a pain point for people?” then you’re going to start building it or you’re going to start validating it. Customer development even before you build it. You need find out, “Are people willing to pay for a solution to this problem?” Then you propose a solution and that’s where you hit that very first milestone is problem solution fit. You’ve proposed a solution to a problem. Does anyone care? Is it worth building at all? Are people willing to pay for that? And then product market fit is almost this, it’s kind of a twisted question or it’s a weird way to think about it, but it’s like, “Have you solved that problem well? Have you solved better than the alternatives? Is the problem worth solving? Are people willing to pay for it?”
You can build a good product but if you can’t reach the people and get them to sign-up, you’re going to really have a problem. I almost feel like problem solution fit is one, product market fit is the next, and then there’s this one, market marketing fit. I just made that up today because I was thinking, “Can you reach your market?” is almost the question there.
I remember when Drip started to scale up, at first it was like, people were churning, churn was high, trial to conversion rates were low and then they just flipped. Trial to conversion went up, churn started plummeting, and we started growing very quickly even with fewer trials that we’ve had in previous months. That’s when I knew, we are a product market fit, or at least I thought, and sure enough I did that survey, the very disappointed thing. I remember thinking it was going be really high because everyone was like, “Well, Drip is so great. Everyone’s switching.” and blah blah blah. We got like 43%, 46%, somewhere in there. I remember being disappointed by that because I thought, “Oh, man. I thought more people would be very disappointed.” but as it turns out, it’s really hard to get above 40%. That’s why Sean Ellis sets the bar where it is.
Mike: I think one of the things that you explained probably better than I did because I didn’t actually put a label on it was that, when I said, if you put the product in front of people who are in your target market, basically, that’s bypassing the problem of the product market fit piece of it and trying to ascertain whether or not you have a problem solution fit. Because by doing that, you’re making an assumption that you already have product market fit and you’re able to get the right people there.
If you don’t have that, if you get what you think are the right people, and you put it front of them and they don’t buy, then you probably do not have that product market fit. It’s just kind of a little subtle thing that I, I guess I talked about there, but I didn’t really explain like that. Applied to the previous piece and you’re just trying to avoid the whole marketing side of things. You just say, “Are we actually solving the right problem for the people that you think need that?”
Anyway, I think that will about wrap us up. Chelso, I hope that was extremely helpful for you. If you have question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: We’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Where this week, sir?
Mike: Do you hear that?
Rob: The silence behind you?
Mike: Yes. The kids went back to school. Oh my god, it’s so awesome.
Rob: You’re right. It’s nice that they’re not in the house except for […] of the day or eight hours of the day with buzz time.
Mike: Yes, yes. It is. There are certain cartoons that they watch that could not end soon enough because they’ve watched the same episodes over and over. I’m just like, “Oh, please. Let it stop.”
Rob: Totally. Our kids go back next week. Although by the time that this airs, they’ll have gone back, but as of the time we’re recording, they’re not back in school yet. I’m definitely looking forward to that.
Mike: Yup. What’s up with you?
Rob: Well, I’ve been listening to a few books. As always, I kind of have my audio queue full at all times for when I get through all the podcasts episodes for the week. One I listen to is called Brotopia. It’s about kind of the Silicon Valley boys club and I enjoyed it. It’s by Emily Chang. It really brings a lot of stuff to light. I’m very glad she wrote it. I wasn’t surprised by a lot of it, I was surprised by parts of it in a bad way, just about stuff women have had to deal with in Silicon Valley.
There was a small portion that I felt like, I mean, literary 5-10% of it where I was like, “Okay, I feel like you’re taking this a little too far.” Or, “This is a little over the top.” Or, “This particular argument or example just feels like a little bit sensationalist,” but all that to say, solid 80-90% of it, it was like, “Oh my gosh, yeah.” Things are beginning to change but it’s not nearly enough. I appreciated that book. I think it’s something interesting to read or listen to if that kind of stuff interests you–and it should. Diversity inclusion is something that everyone is thinking about these days or should be.
Another book that I listened to that I didn’t think I would like actually. But I’m a huge fan of Paul Simons—Simon and Garfunkel in particular. There’s a new biography called, Paul Simons: The Life. I figured that anything before Simon and Garfunkel, like his growing up and anything after Simon and Garfunkel would not be that interesting to me. But it turns out it was well-written, it was fascinating, the story, and just the way he reinvents himself every album. […] is painful process of being a maker in what he does. I loved just hearing about creators and how much—it’s the struggle. It’s the struggle of creating things and how hard that is. Anyway, it’s highly recommended if you’re at all into Paul Simon or want to meet and like the artist’s journey, kind of biographies.
The last one is just a fun diversion. I buy a lot of books thinking like, “I’m going to go out on a limb here. It’s not typically what I love.” But it’s by David Spade and it’s called, A Polaroid Guy in a Snapchat World. I’m not a David Spade fan, in particular. The only movies that I ever saw him in were like Tommy Boy. I think he was in two Chris Farley movies. David Spade was on Saturday Night Live in early ‘90s, I believe. I have not followed him, I have no connection to him, but man, this book was funny. He just turned 50 years old and he just talks about kind of being in 5 television shows, and 24 movies. He’s a famous person. He just talks about life in LA, and Instagram, growing up, and other things. It’s funny. I enjoyed that. I feel like at first, it kind of set off in a beaten path. It was something that I could listen to that would take my mind off of work, which is something you’ve talked about a lot, how you read fiction to give your mind a rest from it.
Mike: Yeah, very cool. I haven’t read any of those few books. But I’ve run across Brotopia before, at least I’ve seen mentions of it in a couple of places. It’s interesting but as you said, I wouldn’t expect a lot of the things that are talked about in that to be necessarily surprising because there’s a lot of stuff that’s come out of the Silicon Valley culture that is just unacceptable, to be perfectly honest about it.
Rob: Yeah, it’s pretty over the top.
Mike: What are we talking about this week?
Rob: This week we are answering some listener questions. We have one question that we’ll kick it off with. It’s about using inexpensive developers. An anonymous listener wrote in, he said, “I discovered some of your videos on YouTube and the principles that you teach specifically the idea of an MVP have turned my thinking upside-down and got me really stoked. I’m a lead developer for a government contractor and I have been for 12 years. I believe that good software cannot be pounded out by cheap labor. I’ve seen too many programmers not willing or able to separate concerns like DRY Code–Do Not Repeat Yourself Code, and otherwise make unmaintainable convoluted messes. On the other hand, I need help for my on-the-side startup and cannot pay anywhere near the $100,000 a year for good developer in the States. I’m considering trying cheap overseas labor and I will attempt to review a code and set a standard to keep the code base at an acceptable level of quality. I have a couple of questions.”
This is good stuff because we often, Mike, we often get the questions of, “I’m non-technical. How do I find somebody else? How do I validate?” But this person is technical and so this is a boat you and I have both been in. It’s interesting, right? Because back in, between 2005-2010, I was very much in this boat. I knew you have had folks working on both Audit Shark and Bluetick.
He has three questions. The first one is, “Have you tried this and do you have lessons learned?” Second question is, “I’ve heard you say don’t worry about scaling it until you prove your market. Would you take that as far as hiring cheap developers to write unmaintainable code for your first iteration of the product, assuming the code actually works, of course. Building, kind of a crappy, and repeat, and then rewriting it later.” The third question is, “How have you approached hiring developers?”
We may not be able to in-depth answer all of these. We have talked about hiring developers in the past. I actually talked about it on the Quiet Light podcast, in specific where I went to 5 or 10 minutes of just that topic. Maybe let’s send people over there or they can search the back catalog because we have transcripts of every episode. If you go to startupsfortherestofus.com, type in hiring, you can grab some old episodes from iTunes and you can listen to that. Maybe we just tackle the first two in this episode.
The first one, have we tried what he’s suggesting, kind of hiring cheaper than $100,000 a year labor, and what are our lessons learned from that.
Mike: Yes, I have. Lessons learned is that your expectations for them should be lower than if you were paying more. You can find developers as cheap as $5 or $10 an hour, but you’re going to get what you pay for. I found that when I went above $20 an hour, I stared to get better developers. You’re able to get a wider variety of in-depth experience as well. If you go to the lower levels, you’ll just find somebody who says, “Oh, I can do front code and I could do backend code,” but they can neither one of them very good or they’re really good at one and they’re just terrible at the other. They can do it, they just are not good. You’ll find that the code is completely unmaintainable, and it’s very difficult to work with even if you lay out like, “Here’s the entire process of exactly how to do everything.” It still is just probably not going to work out very well.
That said, leading into number two, not scaling until you prove the market which you take that as far as hiring cheap developers to write unmaintainable code for the first iteration of your product. That’s a harder question to answer because it depends on how long it takes them to get there. The mistakes that they make are going to bite you and there’s two different ways. One is, whatever rewrite you have to go through, and the second is the goodwill that you’re earning with your customers. Because if you’re going through and you’re continually breaking things that used to work, they’re going to get angry with you. It’s just going to make your life more difficult in terms of trying to build the business and build revenue because they’re going to leave, they’re going to churn out because like, “Oh, this product, it breaks every other minute or every other day whenever something new goes in. It’s just a complete mess.” It’s going to be hard to go that route.
I would definitely, if you can afford it, hire slightly better developers, pay more than you probably think that you can potentially afford, or at least you thought that you can afford because it is going to be worth it. You’re not going to find that you’re going to get a $15 or $20 an hour developer. You can get two of them and they will be just as effective as a single developer that’s at $40 or $50 an hour. You’re better off going to better developer route even though you’re probably going to get less code because of the fact that they’re going to do a better job at it.
Now, obviously, there’s wide range of skills between people. Some people may charge $40, some people may charge $80 and they could potentially be similar in skillset not likely, because people tend to know what their value is but definitely, at the lower levels, everything’s like a total crap shoot. Once you get into the middle of $40, $60, $80 an hour, it changes quite a bit. There’s a, I’ll say, an order of magnitude. Difference in capabilities in somebody who’s below $20 versus above $30 or $40.
Rob: Yeah. His statement of, “I really believe that good software cannot be pounded by cheap labor.” It’s like, yeah, don’t be too dogmatic about that because cheap is relative, right? I was charging $125 an hour as a contractor. People would go to hire me and then say, “Well, I can hire someone for $50 and they’re cheap.” Is $50 an hour cheap or is $5 an hour cheap? Keep in mind that this is not absolute. I like your point about—and I’ve found the same thing—$5, $10 an hour, it’s going to be a mess. Know that going in if you’re going to build something like that with $5 or $10 amount.
I have found that decent developers in the $15-$25 an hour range much like you were saying. The interesting part is they maybe good developers but they tend to have something else that leads them to only charge that much. They might have kind of a chaotic personal life, or they might not be able to work as many hours as you need them to, or they might be just a little more sporadic on the hours than you want them too, or they might not be detailed on other things. You can find a good developer who’s cheap. There’s probably something else they’re not super reliable or something like that. That’s a thing to keep in mind is, it’s all trade-offs.
I can think of 20 reasons why any startup that I’m going to start is going to fail. Even back in 2005-2010, when I was much more in the same boat as the original question that asker here, yeah, I was taking risks. I hired a bunch of people that were in the $15 range. Some of them were really good, and some of them were terrible, and I just had to vet them. I found PHP developers, I found ColdFusion developers, I found Classic ASP developer because I had a bunch of different code bases, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to do this. Can this work? Yes, it can, but it’s not going to work the first time. The best developer for $20 an hour is not going to magically drop into your lap. You’re gonna have to look, and you’re going to have to vet, and you’re going to have to put in the work.
I’d say, don’t be too dogmatic about, “Oh, someone need to be making about $100k a year in order to be a good developer.” That’s not true especially not true if you go around the world. But even in the US, you can find good side labor with people who are paying less than $100k a year especially if you hire a junior or mid-level and are able to train them up. That’s a whole other story but we did that with Drip. We took two developers right out of code school so they literally had, I don’t know, six weeks to two months of coding experience. They have done a little on the side. Could they write great code from the start? No. But we had a bunch of safeguards in place. Derek did a lot of code reviews and he kept a close eye on the code base and the code base grew—it’s very large now, and it’s still a very solid code base with a lot of tests covered. Yes, this is possible.
Second question is, “Would you take it so far as hiring to develop unmaintainable code for your first iteration of a product?” My answer is probably not. Personally, I wouldn’t do that. I care too much about not having to rewrite the product because once you start getting momentum, and you start getting a few K in MRR, the last thing I want to do is go back and spend six months rewriting the thing. I’ve seen companies do it. It is agonizing. It kills the founders, not literally, but it is so painful to do.
If I’m going to do it from the start, I would just tackle a smaller problem and I would try to tackle part of the MVP without software at all. You’ve heard us talk about this. Use excel spreadsheets, use emails, there’s a bunch of other interfaces, use cheap virtual assistants to do the grunt work. There are ways to do this without building software. As developers, we think software is the answer to everything. In most cases, it is not. There are some when you need it to be.
If you’re building the next Google, yes, you need software. But I’d say in 80% of the cases where someone says, “I’m going to build my MVP,” and they assume that means software. They’re actually incorrect. You can do a lot of things. You could sell a lot of people on idea, or on mockups, or on the excel, email version of something without ever having to write a line of code. That’s the thinking I’d be doing at this point.
Mike: Yeah, I was going to mention that as an add-on for his second question was that, the first iteration of product doesn’t necessarily need to be software. How far are you down the road of the validation process? I think that once your past validating it and you decided to pull the trigger on it, do it the right way. Hire the developers that you need as opposed to the developers that you can just afford. You need to get good developers in there doing it.
Rob: I’ll even say, I’ve hacked things together myself. I think of the, what is now Founder Café, which is our online community for bootstrap software founders, go to foundercafe.com to learn more about that. But the original version of that, it had a different name altogether, called Micropreneur Academy, I was a software developer. I could’ve built online learning platform. There weren’t very many that were any good at that point. Moodle was in its early days, 2008, 2009. I hacked it together. I hacked it together with WordPress, and plugins, and theme, and that was really it, and I hacked some PHP. It wasn’t great. In the end, we had some technical dab but it was years later, it had already been built up and do a pretty nice business at that point. I’m not saying build a SaaS app that way, but there are workarounds you can look at to make that happen. Thanks for the question, Anonymous. I hope that’s helpful.
Our next question comes from dan@closersharing.com. He recorded an audio question so he jumped to the front of the line. It’s a long question but he gives a lot of background, and I appreciate it because oftentimes, people will send short questions, and then we have a lot of questions in our mind about, “Well, they didn’t give this detail or that.” It’s a couple of minutes here, but hang out, and then Mike and I will weigh in.
“Hey guys. My name is Dan Webb from Closer Sharing. Before I get to my question, I just want to say thank you to both of you. Thank you for all you do. I’ve learned a bunch from you guys. I’ve been listening for a few years now. When I first started listening, I tore back through the archives and learned a bunch and have been listening ever since. Thank you, guys, for sticking with it and teaching a lot of people a lot of stuff. Thanks.
Before I get to my question, let me give you a little bit of background. I have a startup. It’s called Closer Sharing. It’s a sermon podcasting platform. It’s a podcasting platform specifically designed for churches, allows the volunteers to quickly and easily use our recorder to record, and tag, and post the sermon each week, and list it on their website, and just takes the pain out of it, of hosting, and getting on their website and all that. We officially launched the product in January of 2017—a little bit over a year and a half ago. I have tried to grow it.
Right now, I currently have seven customers. We have an MRR of $200 a month. We really bootstrapped the thing building it. We only have an outflow of $175 a month who we are in the black. Out of those seven customers, all are original, I have had no churn whatsoever, so everybody that’s using it really likes it. Some have been on it the full year and a half. The latest sign-up was a couple of months ago.
There is no churn. I think it is a good product for the people who get on it. The trick is getting people on it. I have tried cold emailing. I’ve tried Facebook Ads, I have tried conferences. I tend to walk away from each one with one customer. I went to three of them. It really became obvious to me, one of the mistakes I was making a couple of podcast ago when you were talking about SaaS marketing, and I have not been trying to really connect with people and teach them anything. I’ve been just—as I’ve heard some people say—ask him to marry me on the first date sort of thing. I have a series of blog posts in my head that I feel like I should write and get out on my blog, and start sending people to them, and getting people to know me, but I haven’t done that yet. Probably my next project.
We’re well in the year and a half in, I was listening to your last podcast about funding, and some of that made me think as I’ve been thinking maybe I should just say, “Hey, it’s been a year and a half. I’ve only got seven customers. Maybe I should kill it and shift to something else. But then again, I have seven customers and I like them and I like to continue to provide the service for them. But I don’t want to be that guy that’s just clinging to my startup just because I’ve built it. I would like to know if it’s a viable product. I do have a whole list of futures that could make this platform really great, but I don’t want to keep building on it if it’s not a viable product.
My question is, should I keep spending my nights and weekends on this thing—I have a full-time job—and continue to grow really slowly? Should I possibly look for some sort of funding, so I could spend more time on it and possibly grow it quicker? Should I just kill and walk away and work on another product and try to develop it into a business? I’d loved to hear you guys’ thoughts on these things. I appreciate all you do. Thanks, guys.”
Rob: Tough question, huh, Mike? What do you think?
Mike: I think that’s a really tough question. I do hear a couple of things in there in terms of working on the weekends and wanting to build features. I think that that’s very natural for any developer to want to do because that’s comfortable, but at the same time, I think I would go back and I would start looking at metrics in terms of how many people you’re getting in front of, and how many trials sign-ups you’re getting, how many actual sign-ups you’re getting, I don’t know if there’s a free trial or anything like that, but those are the types of things that I would probably look at first, and see if there are obvious places where—like your sales funnel is just simply not working.
If you’re not getting 1000 or 2000 uniques a month, then that’s probably the place to start and try and figure out, “How do I get more traffic?” Because there’s this whole funnel that has to be in place in order for you to be able to build a business. That’s longer-term stuff. I want to make sure that I emphasize that there’s a difference between that type of stuff and then shorter-term stuff that you can do which you’d mentioned that you’ve done some Facebook ads and some cold emails and things like that. But I don’t know if you really have much on the website in terms of what you’re offering to people. I think the blog post sounds like a good idea in terms of education but I’m not seeing email newsletter sign-up list or anything like that on the website.
It’s more of a, “Come buy this product.” And there’s really not much in terms of education about how the churches that would invest in this type of products will deliver better sermons or would engage more with their church members. I think that’s what you need to key in on this because that’s what’s going to be important to them. The professional sound, they’re not going to care nearly as much about that as you are. You have to ask yourself, “What is it that’s actually important to them? How can they connect better with their members? How could thy reach more of them? How can they be more convenient to them in a digital age where people don’t necessarily need to show up at a certain time to see a movie, they can just stream it On Demand.”
That’s what you’re trying to cater to. That’s one of the problems that they’re probably having. Offer advice and solutions and different techniques and things like that in the form of educational material, and then try and build up that early part of the sales funnel. I would absolutely try and contact them directly as opposed to just sending emails because those are very easy to ignore. Pick up the phone, I mean, it’s probably not that difficult to reach them. I would imagine that most of their phone numbers are available.
If you’ve got people that you’re cold emailing, you’d probably have a way to find out who they are, and get a phone number for them, and call them and ask them. Talk to them and say, “What are your problems around this and around building a community?” because it really seems to me that’s what your product is trying to do. How do you engage with them and getting the information directly out of their mouths is going to be very helpful? I wouldn’t just call 5 or 10. I would call 50 or 100.
Put a line in the sand at some point in the future like you’d ask about whether or not you’d kill it. “What is your line in the sand? How much more effort do you put into this?” and really put the pedal down to see what is going to work. “How much effort can you justify putting into it?” and then once you’ve hit that, “Have you hit whatever your goals are or do you see a light at the end of the tunnel?” in either of those cases, you can keep going. But if you get there and there’s nothing else you can try, or you can’t think of anything else, I would kill it at that point.
Rob: I feel like this is such a tough market because some churches don’t tend to adopt. Some churches adopt technology but a lot of them do not. The older churches with aging congregations are just unlikely to need podcasting. You’re dealing with such a small subset of the entire market. If you think about, in the world, the number of people who, period who listen to podcasts is very small. My mom and dad don’t know how to do that. If you just break that down into a subset, and do a subset of like, “Now it’s churches, and now it’s churches who have people maybe under age 40, or age 50 who also know how to use podcasts.” Those are the only ones that have any type of need for this service. It’s a very small market and it’s a market where obviously, in conversations, I’m sure that he’s learned that they are just not that interested in adopting it. That’s the first problem.
The second issue, Dan, is you have a top of funnel problem, it sounds like. If you had 1000 or 10,000 unique visitors to your website each month, you think you would convert them? I don’t know. But generating visitors is going to be really hard to do. If you’ve been doing for two years and only have seven customers, that’s a bad sign. That’s a sign that something’s not resonating here. I think a big question I would ask myself is, “Are you tired of working on this? Are you done yet? Are you still excited to invest time?” not even, “Do you still believe it can work but are you excited to get up and think about this problem and try do to it?” I would stop building features altogether. You shouldn’t be coding anything which doesn’t sound like you are.
Your biggest problem is, it sounds like might be driving traffic, or maybe driving traffic hasn’t worked at all and it’s only been in-person conversations, in which case ask yourself, “Is a $29 a month product worth doing high-tech sales for?” because for me, it’s not. It’s going to grow very slowly. You need $100-$200 a month minimum, to make that kind of approach work. I really don’t think funding will fix this.
This is not a problem of, “I need money to scale or I need to put in more time to get to a point where this product is worthwhile.” It seems that you have a worthwhile product already. You’ve a lot of cool features. More time to market? What would you do? It sounds like you have tried a bunch of stuff. I mean, you haven’t tried everything, maybe you didn’t try enough of it, didn’t have the budget, but I’m cautiously skeptical that if you have $100,000 in your bank account tomorrow, and you could go full-time on this for, let’s just say, nine months and had some budget for stuff, I don’t see this taking off like a rocket ship based on how you’ve described.
I think my biggest piece of advice, given what you’ve said and looking at the website, it seems like a pretty cool tool in all honesty. You have features like automatic intros and outros, professional sound without the work, automatic feeds, is there another vertical that could use this? Should it be horizontal? Should it go across all verticals, basically? Should you not limit it to churches, is what I’m saying.
Right now, you’re marketing to churches, is that too limiting, and is there either another vertical that would have so much more uptake on this or just open it to everyone, and then poof, you become the ‘how to start a podcast superfast’ service. Maybe you make it a little cheaper but sign-up for six months or a year at a time and you pay upfront. I don’t know if that’s the direction but that’s where I’d be looking. Are there already services that do that? Because at that point, if you could get into that space, now you have affiliate potential because you have people who teach other people how to podcast. Would they potentially refer you for an affiliate commission? That’s a bigger space is people trying to start their own podcast. Could you go after businesses or startups or whatever?
Again, this is something I would either try to research, do some customer development, put some digging into that because I feel like that’s a space where there are more likely going to be folks who will actually adopt this, and consider jumping on this train because it seems that you’ve built a decent piece of software–at least from the marketing side. It looks pretty interesting and has some features I haven’t seen elsewhere, but I don’t the competitive landscape. That’s probably where I would look at or shut it down. That’s the other option that I see.
I always hate to make a recommendation like that because I feel like the founder knows better than anyone else. They often need to see […] that’s where having a mastermind would help, right, of people who’ve been along in the journey. But to hear a formative voice and then make a recommendation that, you should check your product down, it’s tough. It’s tough for me to say that but, I think that’s a more viable option than trying to scale this up in the church space or raising the funding.
Last question of the day came from Twitter. It came from @chelso and he said, “Regarding episode 406. What is your definition of product market fit?” and then I started tying and then thought, there’s always so much nuance to a question like this, and Twitter is not the place to do this. This is either a blog post or it’s a conversation like this. I think product market fit is not a binary thing. I definitely think it’s a continuum and I think you kind of ease into it.
There is a nice measure that Sean Ellis created. It’s this survey you can send out that says, “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” insert product name here. The four options are; very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed–it isn’t really that useful, or NA–I don’t really use the product, or I no longer use the product. If you get more than 40% who say they would be very disappointed, that is how Sean Ellis has defined product market fit. I think that would be the most common definition. I have run this exact survey on some of my products.
I know Hiten Shah has run this exact survey on, not only his products, but on a bunch of other products. He’ll run it on Google Analytics. He’ll just ask a bunch of people, and I don’t know if he uses a mechanical trick or how he does that, but Google Analytics definitely has product market fit, at least according to his slide deck and some talking he’s done. We will link to SlideShare, this Hiten Shah presentation in the show notes so that you can take a look at the work that he did.
I’ll leave it there, Mike, so you can weigh in. I have additional thoughts and kind of my own personal thoughts of when I saw Drip–what it looked and felt like before product market fit as we were getting there, and then once we had it, from my perspective. I do want to weigh in, but I don’t want to sit here and monologue and not let you weigh in.
Mike: True. This is probably not going be much different from other people on what they would comment but you’ll know it when you see it. I know that’s kind of a hand-wavy type of thing but there are some people who will look at metrics–so Sean Ellis has that product market fit survey. If you’re more than, I think he said that 40% are, I forgot what the exact percentage was, but certain percentage say that they are either somewhat disappointed or very disappointed that they would go away.
Rob: 40% said they would be very disappointed if it went away. 40% or more then, by his definition, you have product market fit.
Mike: Right. Like you said, that’s a very, I’ll say, exact in definition. I won’t necessarily say that that’s the only definition. It’s kind of my view of it. I like the way Rob phrases like, “There’s a continuum of it.” That’s why I say you’ll know it when you see it because if you’re involved in the startup from beginning to end or wherever you’re trying to figure out like, have you gotten to product market fit, you’ll know it when you see it because things will start to tick up and it will be obvious that you’re on the right track. Because it’s a continuum, you’re never going to be like, “We have perfect product market fit.”
You think things can always improve, they can always get better, and the market’s always changing, your product’s always changing, your marketing messages are going to be always changing–these things that interact with one another that you’ll never have this perfect product market fit. Even if you did, it’s very likely something that something is going to change and throw it all out of whack in 18 seconds.
Really, what you have to do is, if you don’t have the data, if you haven’t run a survey like this, you kind of have to go off of a gut feeling. My general view on it is that if you take the product and you put it in front of people who are in what you believe to be the correct target market, and they actually are, do you win much more than you lose? Are those people going to sign-up and say, “Yes, I would like this,” Or, “No, we’re not just interested.” Because that will tell you one of two things, either one, you’re pointing at the wrong market or your product is not good enough and it’s just not doing what people need it to do.
The second piece, which I didn’t mention yet, is that those people will have to actually stick around. You can explain to them, “Hey, this product will do X, Y, and Z for you. It’ll make all these problems go away.” But if you don’t also deliver on it, they’re going to churn out. You have to figure out ways to make them stick around. Those are two different competing things and sometimes, your things should make them stick around or going to be more features–sometimes it’s educational, or onboarding, or something like that. That’s a slightly different problem than product market fit. Somebody may believe that they need a particular solution, and they’ll pay for it, but then they don’t use it.
Think of any weight loss program on the planet. People buy into that stuff and then they don’t use it. Why don’t they use it? Is it a product market fit problem or is it a customer retention problem? That’s a hard thing to figure out because if they churn out, if they stop paying for it, if they stop using it, then is it because other things got in the way or the product doesn’t actually do what they needed it to do? There’s an attribution problem of, “Why did they churn out?” If it’s because it wasn’t actually a good product market fit and they bought into the messaging, but it didn’t solve their problem, then you don’t have product market fit. If they churned out because they just don’t have the chops or time or anything like that to actually do it, then that’s a slightly different problem–that’s a retention problem not necessarily a product market fit problem.
Rob: This is why it’s a good conversation to have. I won’t talk about weight loss stuff because I don’t even know if product market fit applies to that in particular. I mean, it does, but I don’t think about it in terms on that one. I think of a SaaS app, a retention is a product market fit problem, in my opinion. That if someone’s not getting on-boarded, not using it, then the need isn’t deep enough, and you haven’t found that fit with the market. The question that I ask, the way I frame it in my head is, “Have you built something people or businesses need?” That’s the question that I’ve asked.
I think Paul Graham says, “Have you built something people want?” I think it’s a great way to phrase it but have you built something that people or businesses need? Let’s stick to businesses because we talk a lot about B2B SaaS here. If you built something people desperately need, and they start using it, can you still fail, or can you still grow slowly? Yes, I believe you can even with product market fit because if the market’s too small, and you tap out, that’s one way.
If your market’s only $10,000 a month then you can own the whole market and really just tap out very quickly. Or if your market is huge but you can’t reach them in a scalable fashion, that’s a totally different problem than product market fit. I think there’s different problem than product market fit. I think there’s being able to build something that people need, and businesses need, and then there’s the ability to reach them in a scalable way and get them onboarded in a way that doesn’t kind of break the bank.
The three questions I think about, in order. The first one you have to ask—this is before you’ve built anything— “Is a problem you’re choosing to solve worth solving? i.e., is it much of a pain point for people?” then you’re going to start building it or you’re going to start validating it. Customer development even before you build it. You need find out, “Are people willing to pay for a solution to this problem?” Then you propose a solution and that’s where you hit that very first milestone is problem solution fit. You’ve proposed a solution to a problem. Does anyone care? Is it worth building at all? Are people willing to pay for that? And then product market fit is almost this, it’s kind of a twisted question or it’s a weird way to think about it, but it’s like, “Have you solved that problem well? Have you solved better than the alternatives? Is the problem worth solving? Are people willing to pay for it?”
You can build a good product but if you can’t reach the people and get them to sign-up, you’re going to really have a problem. I almost feel like problem solution fit is one, product market fit is the next, and then there’s this one, market marketing fit. I just made that up today because I was thinking, “Can you reach your market?” is almost the question there.
I remember when Drip started to scale up, at first it was like, people were churning, churn was high, trial to conversion rates were low and then they just flipped. Trial to conversion went up, churn started plummeting, and we started growing very quickly even with fewer trials that we’ve had in previous months. That’s when I knew, we are a product market fit, or at least I thought, and sure enough I did that survey, the very disappointed thing. I remember thinking it was going be really high because everyone was like, “Well, Drip is so great. Everyone’s switching.” and blah blah blah. We got like 43%, 46%, somewhere in there. I remember being disappointed by that because I thought, “Oh, man. I thought more people would be very disappointed.” but as it turns out, it’s really hard to get above 40%. That’s why Sean Ellis sets the bar where it is.
Mike: I think one of the things that you explained probably better than I did because I didn’t actually put a label on it was that, when I said, if you put the product in front of people who are in your target market, basically, that’s bypassing the problem of the product market fit piece of it and trying to ascertain whether or not you have a problem solution fit. Because by doing that, you’re making an assumption that you already have product market fit and you’re able to get the right people there.
If you don’t have that, if you get what you think are the right people, and you put it front of them and they don’t buy, then you probably do not have that product market fit. It’s just kind of a little subtle thing that I, I guess I talked about there, but I didn’t really explain like that. Applied to the previous piece and you’re just trying to avoid the whole marketing side of things. You just say, “Are we actually solving the right problem for the people that you think need that?”
Anyway, I think that will about wrap us up. Chelso, I hope that was extremely helpful for you. If you have question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 408 | Should You Take on a Co-founder?
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike answer the questions, should you take on a co-founder? The guys discuss the difference between hiring and being a partner, how to begin a partnership, and how to do if you’re a good fit.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about whether you should take on a co-founder or not. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 408.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Rob?
Rob: MicroConf Europe tickets are not available to the public. Head to microconfeurope.com and click on the ‘Gimme a ticket now’ link or we’ll link directly to our event right page in the show notes. I’m pretty stoked. It’s Croatia, man. It’s just a couple of months away.
Mike: Yeah, I know. The date is coming up quickly. It’s definitely something to look forward to though. The place where they are having it is right on the ocean. It should be a gorgeous view, if nothing else. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but parts of Game of Thrones were filmed there and over at Old Town in Dubrovnik.
I saw this article that showed a mashup of what the place actually looks like versus what the Game of Thrones scenes that’s associated with it was. Some of it is just breathtaking. It’s just fantastic architecture, the scenery, and everything else that goes with it. It will be pretty cool.
Rob: That’s super cool. I had heard that. I didn’t realize that they did it in Dubrovnik. Assuming we’re pronouncing that correctly, although we may not be. I’m excited both to get there for MicroConf Europe because I always enjoy the conference, seeing old friends, and hearing the speakers, but also excited to take a couple of weeks and see Croatia because we’ve never been. I’m going to be bringing the family, or I should say we’re––Sherry and I are going to be bringing the family.
Sherry and I are both speaking at MicroConf this year and we’ll probably take a couple of weeks before MicroConf Europe and head all the way down the coast. There’s some cool itineraries if you buy a guide book where they have a two-week driving itinerary. There’s also some online. You fly in to the capital and then you drive down different cities. The thing is, when we first talked about it, we’re like, “Yeah, we can probably take out the kids for two weeks because there’s school and all that kind of stuff,” but Sherry’s like, “I’m not sure there’s going to be enough to do in Croatia. Maybe we should head over to Greece,” and then as soon as we started researching it it was like, “No, there’s a lot to do and a lot to see.”
Reminds me a little bit of California. It’s not identical, obviously, but there’s, at least in that order of magnitude, that much rich kind of cultural things, natural beauty, beaches, mountains, all that stuff. So, pretty stoked to do it there this year.
Mike: Very cool. On my end, I have a Bluetick revenue milestone today. Just recently, Rachelle recently crossed the $30,000 in total revenue for it.
Rob: Good for you, man.
Mike: I’m pretty happy about that, but obviously I definitely have ways to go in terms of MRR but things are trending upwards in the correct direction. I’m pretty stoked about that and it’s just a matter of getting the things done.
Rob: Yeah, it always is. That long slow SaaS ramp of death is always just that. Long and slow. Hopefully, it’s not actually death, though.
Mike: Yes, hopefully not.
Rob: I was actually listening to CurrentGeek, which is a Tom Merritt podcast. He was talking about eBay and that he hadn’t sold something on eBay in 15 years and that he was moving and he’s getting rid of some old stuff. He started talking through the process of selling and how different it was. I realized that I just always done a lot of buy and selling online. Even before eBay and Amazon, I was in the Usenet groups in the 90s.
Mike: Oh, you’re old.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: You’re old.
Rob: No, I am one of those guys and I used to buy and sell all kinds of stuff like comic books. I used to do guitar pedals, play electric guitar a lot back then. It was mostly for profit. I was trying to cover at least my living expenses, not my rent or my tuition, but just other miscellaneous expenses.
Anyways, with that said, eBay was such a bear to sell on in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was like you had to take your photographs, then you had to get them scanned, then you make them digital. It’s such a mess. But with the eBay app now, you just take the pictures right in the app and then if you’re selling anything that’s moderately standardized, like if you’re selling a model of printer or a model of a laptop, or a set of headphones, they have all that data now. I don’t know why it took them so long to do it, but it’s not exactly the same, but it’s more similar to selling on Amazon.
I switched over to Amazon for almost all of my selling. I don’t do that much these days, but I will play some games and then we’ll get tired of them or will have some books that are worth something, and I’ll post them up because it takes 30 seconds to post. Then you can print the shipping labels both right directly from eBay and Amazon now.
I have my kids tape them on and they take typically some of their stuff that we’re selling, to be honest. I don’t have much physical stuff left like physical books and stuff, but my kids will take a portion of the profit and portion of the things. I’m trying to show them how to do it and motivate them as well. It’s just one of the comments that I typically have veered towards Amazon because it’s such an easy process to post.
eBay does still take longer but there are items sometimes that Amazon won’t let you resell. Like the manufacturer had said, there are certain types of games that don’t have replayability, there’s the escape room games, and Amazon just won’t let you sell them, so I’ve sold those on eBay. Then there’s some other like mighty wallets and stuff that I have that are in good shape that I was trying to sell. Really just public service announcement that if you’re going to sell something and Amazon won’t let you do it, head over to eBay. It’s not as catastrophic as it once was.
Mike: That’s some definitely good advice. I’ve tried to avoid eBay to some extent just because I don’t tend to just sell a bunch of my stuff. I guess, I just collect it, to be honest or just throw it away. I remember checking my eBay account. It was a couple of years ago and most of my radiance and stuff have completely gone away because I hadn’t used my account in so long. I’m just like, “Oh, all right.”
Rob: I don’t know if they do. They show lifetime ratings but them they’re like that. If you haven’t got ratings in eight, six months or a year, then they degrade, which I think is a good policy. Basically, people will buy an account with some ratings to swindle people, so they really have to be concerned about that.
Mike: Oh, I haven’t thought about that. Darn those people.
Rob: What else is going on with you?
Mike: The only other thing I have is that I spent far longer than I wanted to trying to rebuild my deployment process for Bluetick. I talked to about how I was in the process of deploying a public API, put that out there, and unfortunately as part of that, it creates another URL that I need to have software deployed to. Things just got more complicated and I’ve got multiple machines involved.
It’s no longer as easy as it’s just like, “Oh, just click this button here and then copy a folder from this machine to this machine and then run an executable or whatever.” Now that it’s much more complicated because I have four different websites that basically need to be deployed as part of the build process, I ended up re-engineering this whole thing.
It took me probably a week-and-a-half to two weeks to just rebuild that using different software, but it’s all working now. It’s really nice I can just click the button and then it just goes out and deploys everything on multiple machines and it deploys new copies of it. It’s no longer deploying over itself which is just fantastic because now if anything goes wrong, I can revert, whereas before, I didn’t really have that capability. I had to do a bunch of manual stuff in order to make sure that in certain cases, I have the ability to revert.
Obviously, there’s some changes that you’ll make that are like, “Oh, I’m changing some HTML here, an API call there, and it’s not a big deal,” but then there’s other ones where you know that it’s much more of a risky change and you want to have backups of stuff before you go deploy it because the build process can take a while for you to revert in any way.
Rob: That’s brutal to spend that much time on something like this at this juncture but I get it that these are the things that, at some point, you have to deal with and you can’t just keep kicking them down the line. You can, but then you get this crazy legacy stuff that really can hold you back down the line.
Mike: I kicked this down the line for a year at this point. I went back and looked at when I started trying to do what I just finished and it was a year ago. I was like, “Oh, I need to upgrade the software, put the latest version on, and all of these other stuff. I remember seeing the dates and it was about a year ago. It was complicated enough that I’m like, “Nope, I’m not going to do this now,” and I pushed it off for long enough that it’s like, “I have to do it now.”
Rob: It stinks to lose that much time when you’re trying to move fast on a startup and this is why, at a certain point, it’s either having money whether from revenue or from a small amount of funding like we talked a couple of episodes ago, to just hire someone who can come and help with that, or to hire someone who can come in and help with that, or to hire someone to build features while you’re doing that. It allows so much more parallelism, you can move a lot faster.
Mike: That’s a nice lead in to today’s topic which is should you take a co-founder? Obviously, if you have a co-founder, you don’t necessarily need funding. You can certainly go down that road as well if you’d like, but I think the problem most people are trying to solve by bringing on a co-founder is avoiding going down that road altogether or by adding somebody in in a way that feels much more cost-effective and helps to have somebody else who’s got some skin in the game and they’re going to help the business with a completely different skill set than you have and help drive the whole thing forward.
Rob: Yup, for sure and this is a topic I know we’ve discussed a little bit in the past, but I don’t think we’ve dedicated a whole episode to it and it’s something that a lot of people are faced with. It’s like, “Should you do this or should you go it alone?” I think it will be a big conversation today.
Mike: The opening question is should you actually go down the road and having a partnership or should you hire somebody? I think for most self-funded businesses, the big issue with hiring somebody is you simply don’t have the money. You either don’t have the revenue or you would have to cut significantly into your own amount of money that you basically put into your own pocket in order to hire somebody, and you may just not have enough coming in to be able to do that. Also, if your very early on, or you’re just working from the point of having an idea, there’s nothing there.
In many ways, it makes sense to go the partnership route versus hiring somebody because if you’re going to try and hire, let’s say, a developer or something like that, you’re probably going to blow at least $30,000 or $60,000 trying to get something to the point where you can just show it to customers and get it out the door.
Whether you validated that in idea in advance—obviously you should’ve—especially if you’re going to dump that kind of money into it because you want to be absolutely sure that this large quantity of money that your dumping in there for that work to be done is going to eventually pay off.
Rob: Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups has a saying. He says, “Hire your co-founders,” or at least that’s what he does. He has the luxury that he has the funding to do that. He can basically keep the line sure of equity because long-term he thinks that’s going to be worth a lot of money. He can hire someone at a totally reasonable salary because he can either do it out of pocket or he can raise a round of funding and pay them probably market rate or something close to that and maybe they get 5% of the company.
They have skin in the game and they all get the upside, too, but he doesn’t have to give up 50% of the company or whatever it is as maybe if you were starting from scratch that you would have to deal with.
The hiring is a luxury that you will have if you have either raise some kind of funding on your own or have the power to do that because of whatever, because of your background or your network, or you have the money that you were able to sell fund from other ventures. But if you don’t, then yeah, it becomes not possible. If you don’t even have enough money to quit your own job, how are you going to have enough money to pay someone else’s salary?
Mike: The other thing to take into consideration is the skill sets, like do you have the skill set that ranges both the marketing sales side of things or can you only do development? If you’re a non-technical founder, then you need somebody to step in and perform those duties as a developer from the eyes of the business owner.
I’ve talked to a few different people or non-technical founders and they were like, “Oh, okay I want to bring somebody in to help out with the development side,” but I find it a lot of contractors are very hesitant to take the reins and say, “Okay, I’ll be the architect for this,” or the people just don’t have the money to hire somebody who’s a skilled-enough person to be able to have that high-level view who’s done it before. It’s more of the chicken and the egg problem, I think, but even with the skill set, you have to figure out what is going to be complementary to you and what is the best type of person to bring in.
Rob: What’s interesting to me, you’re talking about having a technical co-founder. I don’t believe it have backed a single company in terms of my personal angel investments that did not have a technical co-founder. I have passed on several that did not and that was my biggest concern is how are you going to get the tech right? This is a software company.
Obviously, the marketing’s important, but the software has to work and someone has to own that. If you don’t have someone who is either has some skin in the game, whether it’s co-founder or whether if someone say, “Hey, I’m employee number one and I’m able to pay my full-time salary and I give them 5%,” I’d be like, “Okay, I can live with that.” But just saying, “Hey, I’m going to go hire an agency. I’m going to hire a contractor or something.” That wouldn’t work for me. That’s a personal bias or a personal belief of mine. It is obviously possible to do, build a software company without a technical co-founder. I’m sure we probably know people who’ve done it, but very, very difficult especially SaaS, which is, as we know, even more complicated than the traditional downloadable software model.
That’s not too much of a tangent but it is something that I think folks should think about. This is part of why that stair step approach works for even non-technical founders. You start super simple and you start with the one-time download like an info product or it could be a WordPress plugin because I can see you paying a contractor to build a plugin to solve a problem, making a few grand a month from that, then you build, build, build to the point where you either have the network, or the relationships, or you have the funding to then where you can self-fund and actually bring someone on who really is more of a technical co-founder.
Mike: The next question I think the answer is how do you know if you are a good fit for each other? I feel this is a hard question to answer just because it depends a lot on what your relationship already is with the person. If you’ve known them for 15 or 20 years, it’s a lot easier to make the determination is to whether or not you would want to work with them.
But if you just met them at some local meetup or something like that, or you met someone at a conference, or you followed them online, and you’re just starting a new relationship with them and you haven’t known them personally for very long, then it becomes a lot more difficult to make, I’ll say, an objective consideration about it.
I think that there’s a couple of things I would keep in mind and try out when I’m doing this. First one is, before you make a full-blown agreement, have a trial period of some kind on a project. It could either be that project or it could be something else. You might hire them to build something for you. That’s more of a contracting basis. I wouldn’t say that I would hide it from them that you’re interested in potentially pursuing something later, but probably wouldn’t bring that up as like the first thing as, “Hey, I want to think about having you brought on as a partner and I want to hire you for this project in order to figure out whether or not we’re going to be a good fit.” Because then, if it doesn’t work out, then you already set those expectations that, “Hey, this might turn into something.”
Rob: Yeah and on this topic there’s an episode of the Zen founder that is probably 100-150 episodes ago where Sherry interviewed Jordan Gal and Ben Fisher, who were the co-founders of CartHook and just about the “dating process” that Jordan and Ben went through. They had spent months trying to figure out how, “Are we a fit to each other? Are we going to work well together?”
I believe Jordan flew out and worked for a week or two from Ben’s co-working space. Ben went out to New York and did that with Jordan and they just went back and forth and it was definitely a long trial process, but they were really feeling each other out and figuring out, “Can we work well together? Are we a good fit? Because if we’re not, let’s not do this. Let’s not waste either person’s time and let’s not have the agony,” because the agony of a co-founder breakup is pretty bad. It’s pretty rough.
I think that pre-arranging a trial period—you had mentioned not mentioning it—to someone that you think of bring them on, I think that is definitely one way to do it. For some reason, I don’t remember the context of the story, but Jordan and Ben had already––there was more context to it to where they’re both equally willing to walk away. It wasn’t like one guy bringing the other guy on. It was really they were trying to find a fit. I think you can do it both ways.
Mike: I think that whether you bring it up upfront or later on is dependent a lot on how well you know them to begin with and whether or not you even broach the topic. If it’s someone you know online or you seen them and you are considering potentially asking them, then I probably wouldn’t bing that up first thing. But if you already have some relationship with them and you see them on occasion, or you’ve talked to them before and they know you personally already and you have the sense it might be something you want to pursue, then yeah, I would probably bring it up upfront at that point.
There are some red flags, I think, I would look for. One is if you’re trying to communicate with them and they are not very willing to communicate back with you especially if you hire them for a project, that’s obviously a red flag. If there’s any social power disparity between you in terms of what you guys would be bringing to the business relationship, not like Twitter followers, more along the lines of, “Oh this person has all the contacts in this particular industry and he’s going to try bring them in as customers and the other one basically has none.” It can be an issue. I’m not saying that that’s a disqualifier or anything, but it’s something to examine with a magnifying glass, say, “Is this going to be a problem?”
I think the obvious question is, “Could you see yourself hanging out with this person as a friend?” Because if there’s a business partner with you, you’re going to have to talk probably quite a bit and it’s going to be a relationship that you’re going to have to maintain for years.
If you can’t see yourself working with this person or hanging out with them, maybe you just don’t like the way that they treat other people or they’re racist or something like that, there’s certain things that you’re going to have to say, “No, this is a deal breaker and we’re just not be able to do it.”
Rob: Another thing to think about, obviously, is this is a little bit like hiring someone that you want to have references, you want to do references checks. So, talk to friends or colleagues that run in the same circles who can potentially know this person. Hiring someone who’s completely unknown is certainly a possibility that could work out, but it is less likely if you don’t have any overlapping circles and no one you know knows this person. Don’t know if you’re just starting out or have been going longer, you have to get contacts to it, but certainly if you know anyone who knows this person, it will be a lot better off if you can talk to them about it, how this person works and all that kind of stuff.
Mike: Of who has done business with them before, how do they treat their clients and other people that they interact with at business level because if they are in the habit of screwing over their customers, then is that the type of person you want to be in business with?
Rob: Yup.
Mike: The next question is, how to begin a partnership? There’s lots of different ways to go about that like you put together a vesting schedule, think that most startups tend to do that if they’re granting options, for example, but I do think that even in a partnership, a vesting schedule of some kind is probably a good idea.
In the early days, you can track hours. Just say, “Okay, well I put in 20 hours this week. How many did you put in?” I wouldn’t necessarily use that as a weapon, for example, in a relationship but use it as a barometer of how much effort are people putting into the business. What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to end up in a situation where you’re putting in 95% of the effort and the other person is putting in 5% or 100% and 0%. At that point, the whole thing is just going to fall apart at some point down the road. You can’t have a long-term business relationship if that’s going on.
Another tip is having regularly scheduled meetings to just discuss what’s going on, put together an outline of what those things are going to entail, and then make sure you have a set of common goals and expectations for one another. Know what your expectations of that other person are and make sure you communicate them because if you don’t tell them what you expect of them, then they’re going to be hard pressed to just come up with it on their own.
Rob: I think the thing is you’re trying to find common goals. It’s a ‘do you have’ common goals. That could be a big thing from the start is like, “Hey, I want to start a SaaS company and one person wants to go raise funding and go through YC and the other person just wants to build a lifestyle business and work as long as possible and pay the bills. That is overly simplistic way of looking at it, but these are the hard conversations that will save you so much pain and anguish down the line.
I think this is probably a good point to talk about. We’re talking about how to vet a co-founder right now but the title of the episode is Should You Take On A Co-Founder and I think I went off a tangent about if I were non-technical, I would look for a technical co-founder and that’s a very common thing. But what if you are a single technical founder? The question I’m posing here is, do you that that you should go look for a co-cofounder? And what are the pros and cons about it?
I know that when folks apply to Y Combinator, that they tend to fund a lot few single founders because from their perspective, the code is like the journey is hard and you tend to need someone else to lean on.” I don’t know if that’s programmed pattern-matching. I don’t know if this program had, I believe, two or three other co-founders when he launched and grew his startup. What are your thoughts on that question, specifically? If you’re going to build a SaaS and you are a technical person, what are the ideas? Obviously, if I say should you, you could say no because you’re a single founder. But what is the thought process there? What should someone think about as they’re thinking that thing through?
Mike: I think the interesting point to bring up here is actually the Startups For The Rest Of Us podcast actually came from a blog post that I’ve written a long time ago about when Y Combinator was first and announcing that they going to be funding a bunch of companies and they were going to be offering $6000 to move for three months to some certain location. I’m like, “That’s just not enough especially for somebody like me and what about the rest of us? Startups for the rest of us?” That’s where the original idea came from and plus, obviously, I had the domain singlefounder.com. It hit really well, but I do think it’s a really interesting question because one, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s really what is right for you? What is it that you are comfortable doing?
I have met people who are perfectly comfortable taking all the responsibilities for a business on their own shoulders, and I’ve also met entrepreneurs who are not. They want a co-founder to share the responsibility and they’re okay sharing everything because they don’t want everything on their shoulders. It really depends on the type of person that you are. I also believe that depending on the type of business that you’re trying to build, you may or may not need help. That’s a big question as well. How complicated is the thing that your building. Are you going to be able to do both the marketing side of things and are you also going to be able to do all the technical side of things?
If you’re building something that’s extremely complicated like the level of Drip or something like that, there’s a ton of stuff that goes in there. I think it would be extremely difficult to build that as a one-man band. There’s just so much technical stuff going on and so many things that need to go into it and a short amount of time, that you are not going to have the bandwidth to build the stuff and also do the marketing for it.
I think that’s probably one of the contributing factors to why you and Derrick worked out together so well because you have technical architecture level stuff and you can help with the design, but then you went off and did the marketing stuff while he did a lot of the implementation. You served as a barrier so he can get work done. I’m speculating to some extent here but you can confirm or deny that.
Rob: Yeah, Drip started off as a smaller idea. It was going to be a lifestyle business. Derrick was a contractor at that time, then became W2 at some point. When we made the decision to become more ambitious about it, I was bouncing ideas off Derrick. At this point, I was still the full owner of the company. It was truly my decision whether or not to go into this market. But he was like a confidante and he and I just had a lot of co-founder-like discussions, is what I realized. Between the two of us, he and I made better decisions than I would make alone. That’s what wound up happening. It was just a natural thing.
Honestly from the very start, I did not think there could be a co-founder. It was not a plan for me. He was literally a contractor working half of his time on HitTail and I said, “Hey I want to build another product. What do you want the other 20 hours of your week? Do you want to get paid for that?” And he was like, “Sure.” It was fun to build a product from scratch and his UX chops are good. It was just a funny little thing and we unintentionally traveled down this road that you’ve outlined here of how to vet but we didn’t have any of the presuppositions of, “Oh man, are we going to make the decision someday to be a co-founder …”
Eventually, Derrick started a couple of apps before that, before Drip that hadn’t panned out and he knew that he wanted to kind of own something. He didn’t just want to work for somebody forever and knew that about him. It came to the point where it’s like, “Look, I’m going to do my own thing,” and it was like, “Well, let’s talk about what I can do at Drip for you to not do that, to make it worth your while to stick around in that.” That’s where it went. It’s very natural and by that time, I trusted him, he trusted me, we both knew how we work.
It was a Cinderella story so to speak of just making it work. But you’re right. I don’t want to say it wouldn’t have been what it was without both of us. It just would have been different. You know what I mean? Drip, especially in the early days just built a lot on my network and my very early vision for the product that quickly became our vision, and it was built a lot on my public speaking and my audience and all that stuff, and that’s what got early traction. Even my network later on got us affiliates and got us people recommending it and people willing to try it and all that stuff.
I think Drip could have worked without Derrick but it wouldn’t have be able to grow as fast. It would have been way more stressful for me. Derrick took so much of the load of the technical side as well as just building good software. I wasn’t dealing with a revolving door of contractors, I wasn’t dealing with that headaches which would have severely hampered the growth of the business, I believe. I think either of us having not been involved, it still could have been successful but it could potentially have been calamity as well.
I think it comes back to that question, should you take on a co-founder? As you said, Drip is very complicated. It’s very large in terms of the app. I can’t imagine doing that alone. I can’t imagine doing that as a single founder. If we’re doing a simpler app, I had HitTail before that. I didn’t take on a business partner with it, nor I didn’t build it, but it wasn’t that many lines of code. I did grow it essentially from $1000 a month to $30,000 a month over a course of a couple of years really on my own. Then I had a couple of contractors helping me out. For that one, I didn’t need a co-founder. That was definitely a nice little lifestyle business.
Mike: But I think there’s an order of magnitude and complexity difference between those two different products and that’s my whole point is that, if there is an order of magnitude difference between what you currently have going on and what you intend for that product to be or what it is going to become, then having that co-founder is probably really a good way to go, regardless which of the two is writing the code or if only one of them has technical experience, that’s fine. But there needs to be help because you are not going to be able to switch back and forth between both of them very well.
I’m saying this as somebody who’s in the middle of that right now. It’s really, really hard to switch back and forth between them because Bluetick is complicated under the covers. It’s way more complicated than I thought it would be and that’s just the nature of it.
Rob: Yup. That’s the struggle. Do you regret or do you wish you had a co-founder? Have you thought about looking for one?
Mike: Oh yeah. It was probably a year-and-a-half ago I actually approached somebody about coming on as a co-founder. It’s not something I haven’t thought of but at the time, I was like, “Okay, yeah, I know and trust this person and I’ll asked him.” He thought about it and we discussed it a little bit, and he decided to go on a different direction, which is totally cool. We’re still great friends and everything and he’s off doing something else and that’s great. But at the same time, I also have it at the back of my mind like, “Hey, it would be nice to have a co-founder or it would be nice to have funding to be able to either attract a co-founder or help in areas where I just can’t dedicate nearly as much time as I would like to then.”
I could either go in either direction and I honestly weighed them both pretty heavily over the past 6-8 months. I know that down the road I probably can’t do both side of the business. The question is what do I do? Do I go for funding and try to hire people that just do marketing and report to me or do I go the co-founder route? I think that it’s a hard comparison to make because on one hand, you’re saying, “Okay, well, if I get funding, maybe I give away some percentage of the company,” and I don’t really want to do that. But at the same time if you bring in on a co-founder, what are the logistics of that look like?
I’ve already spent months, actually years at this point helping build the product and get it to where it is. I’ve done a lot about, I’ll say, the hard, heavy lifting to get the products to be functional and do what it needs to do, but how does a new business partner work into that? How do you value the business, how do you value all the work and effort that I put in, the money that I paid to the contractors that help me in different ways, the infrastructure that I put in place, how do you put a price on that? How do you work out, what the terms of that would be?
Rob: You’re right. That’s hard to do but that shouldn’t be a reason that you don’t do it. You need to figure that out if you really need a co-founder. There’ll be some awkward or hard conversations and you’ll both have ideas of, “You know I have an idea that you should get this much equity,” and then the other person have different and you figure out, “Hey, are we willing to meet in the middle or are we willing to compromise? Or is this just not a fit?”
You’re right. There’s a lot of complexity to that stuff, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. As developers, you and I see all the problems with everything, frankly, like Sherry can say, “Hey, we’re going to Croatia in two months,” and I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, the logistics of that is going to be a nightmare. Everything is going to go wrong.” It’s like we’re used to looking at code and trying to figure out how it’s going to break. In life I try to figure out how are things going to break so I can think, be ahead of them, or whatever and I think that’s what you’re doing here. If it’s the right decision, you just have to figure it out.
But if it’s not the right decision, if you can raise funding and essentially hire someone to handle that, or if you can grow revenue fast enough that you can hire someone, and I’m not saying you in particular but just in general, I mean these are other options instead of having a co-founder, but it sound like you’re right. There’s going to be complexity but I still think that it’s something if you think it’s right for the business, that you should consider.
The good news is raising funding at a later stage or bringing someone at a later stage means that it shouldn’t be a 50/50 proposition or your evaluation should be higher because you do have more traction. If you’ve proven in the business that you have all of these and you have traction, then it becomes a different conversation.
Mike: Yeah, that’s true. Like I said, the situation for me personally is like I’ve got three different, I guess, pass so to speak, and it’s not to say that any of them is necessarily exclusive of the others but there’s the finding the co-founder, there’s also the funding, and then there’s the potential that is like grow the business revenue higher than it is currently to the point where I can hire somebody to bring on which I’m almost positive that like that would be somebody to help out on the marketing side of things, and then figure out things from there.
If I did that, it doesn’t necessarily mean that bringing on a co-founder is out of the realm of possibility because if I hire somebody to do marketing, I may decide that, “Hey, this person is working out in this capacity but I would not want to have them as a co-founder.” And the question is like, “Well, who would I bring on as a co-founder?” I don’t have an answer for that, to be perfectly honest. I don’t want to say a hard situation, it’s just I don’t have easy answers.
Rob: It’s startups, man. There are never easy answers. That’s the thing. I do think that though our discussion today about whether to look for a co-founder, I feel that should be helpful to people. This is one of those issues where there’s a lot of ‘it depends.’ It depends on who you are, your goals, your goals personally and for the business, and like we said, the complexity of the business and all that kind of stuff.
Mike: Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, I really feel it comes down to the complexity, and as you said, you probably would not fund a company that doesn’t have a technical co-founder if they’re trying to be a software business. I would agree with you but at the same time, I also say the decision to take on a co-founder, I feel, is heavily influenced by how complex the software is that you’re going to be building or that you’re working on.
The more complicated it is, I feel the more you are likely to probably need a co-founder because you need somebody who has a large stake in the business, who owns that and knows that they’re responsible for it, and is going to do whatever the right decision is, regardless of the cost, but also keeping in mind all of the other business things that are going on.
If you hire somebody to do the technical stuff, they are probably not going to be aware of this marketing effort that’s going on. That thing is going over on sales. They maybe even involved in some of the support stuff because they’re going to have to fix those issues. But their concern is not marketing. Their concern is not sales side of things. Their concern is building the tech stack and because of the lack of, I’ll say, visibility that they would have or their perceived lack of importance of that stuff to their job, I just don’t think that they’re going to do as well if they’re not an equity/co-founder type of person.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree. Is someone a co-founder? Co-founder is just a title. You can give someone a co-founder title retroactively. If someone has 5% of the company, are they a co-founder? I don’t know. Some people might have that title. Other folks might say, “I don’t know. They’re the CTO, they’re technical employee number one or whatever. Software developer number one.” We are throwing around this term and haven’t really defined it. But I don’t know. We don’t necessarily need to dive into that.
I think the thing to think about is, you know the reason that I haven’t funded any companies without a technical co-founder, you talk about the complexities versus non-complexity of an app. I think these days, I want to fund companies that are going to be seven figure or eight figure businesses. They’re going to be in the millions or above $10 million in annual revenue. I think today to build a SaaS that does that, you are going to have complexity.
I don’t know of a space where you can go back to the Basecamp days and build a project management system that isn’t that complicated. Let’s say Basecamp’s not complicated today, but realistically, when they built it, it was just a lot of CRUD, Create, Read, Update, Delete. That’s what Rails is really good at and that’s what Rails is really good at and that’s why DHH built Rails right out of––pulled it out of Basecamp. Those days are mostly over. I don’t want to say entirely over but the complexity of getting something to seven or eight figures these days, I believe, almost without exception, will require software that’s more complicated than we want it to be. How about that?
It’s like Drip was more work and more complicated than I wanted it to be and same with Derrick. Bluetick is more complicated than you thought it would be and want to be. That’s just what becomes because people want features, you look at the features and like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to be hard to build,” but that is going to be my differentiator or that is going to get this client to sign up.
Mike: I think a close second behind that is the type of person that you are and whether or not you do well under pressure and how comfortable you are making decisions without additional input. I do agree with you in almost every case like two heads are better than one. It almost doesn’t matter what the situation is, but at the same time, somebody is going to have to ultimately make the decision and it’s more comfortable to have somebody to make a decision when you have somebody else there who’s on even footing with you, and they agree with the decision. Versus, “I think this is the right decision but I’m not sure, but I don’t have anyone to talk to about it or anyone who can say ‘Yes, we should go on in this direction,’ so I’m going to make it. But I’m going to be more stressed out because of that.”
Just by virtue of having somebody else to be able to act as that sounding board who is involved in the business, yes, mastermind group can help and other founders of other companies that you know they can certainly help out and give advice, but ultimately, if you’re the only person in the business making those decisions, everything falls on your shoulders enough a lot more stressful. Just having that co-founder to share the stress and the responsibility of those decisions, good or bad, is going to be helpful.
Rob: I feel that was a pretty good discussion. I hope you as a listener enjoyed our conversation. If you have question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Rob?
Rob: MicroConf Europe tickets are not available to the public. Head to microconfeurope.com and click on the ‘Gimme a ticket now’ link or we’ll link directly to our event right page in the show notes. I’m pretty stoked. It’s Croatia, man. It’s just a couple of months away.
Mike: Yeah, I know. The date is coming up quickly. It’s definitely something to look forward to though. The place where they are having it is right on the ocean. It should be a gorgeous view, if nothing else. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but parts of Game of Thrones were filmed there and over at Old Town in Dubrovnik.
I saw this article that showed a mashup of what the place actually looks like versus what the Game of Thrones scenes that’s associated with it was. Some of it is just breathtaking. It’s just fantastic architecture, the scenery, and everything else that goes with it. It will be pretty cool.
Rob: That’s super cool. I had heard that. I didn’t realize that they did it in Dubrovnik. Assuming we’re pronouncing that correctly, although we may not be. I’m excited both to get there for MicroConf Europe because I always enjoy the conference, seeing old friends, and hearing the speakers, but also excited to take a couple of weeks and see Croatia because we’ve never been. I’m going to be bringing the family, or I should say we’re––Sherry and I are going to be bringing the family.
Sherry and I are both speaking at MicroConf this year and we’ll probably take a couple of weeks before MicroConf Europe and head all the way down the coast. There’s some cool itineraries if you buy a guide book where they have a two-week driving itinerary. There’s also some online. You fly in to the capital and then you drive down different cities. The thing is, when we first talked about it, we’re like, “Yeah, we can probably take out the kids for two weeks because there’s school and all that kind of stuff,” but Sherry’s like, “I’m not sure there’s going to be enough to do in Croatia. Maybe we should head over to Greece,” and then as soon as we started researching it it was like, “No, there’s a lot to do and a lot to see.”
Reminds me a little bit of California. It’s not identical, obviously, but there’s, at least in that order of magnitude, that much rich kind of cultural things, natural beauty, beaches, mountains, all that stuff. So, pretty stoked to do it there this year.
Mike: Very cool. On my end, I have a Bluetick revenue milestone today. Just recently, Rachelle recently crossed the $30,000 in total revenue for it.
Rob: Good for you, man.
Mike: I’m pretty happy about that, but obviously I definitely have ways to go in terms of MRR but things are trending upwards in the correct direction. I’m pretty stoked about that and it’s just a matter of getting the things done.
Rob: Yeah, it always is. That long slow SaaS ramp of death is always just that. Long and slow. Hopefully, it’s not actually death, though.
Mike: Yes, hopefully not.
Rob: I was actually listening to CurrentGeek, which is a Tom Merritt podcast. He was talking about eBay and that he hadn’t sold something on eBay in 15 years and that he was moving and he’s getting rid of some old stuff. He started talking through the process of selling and how different it was. I realized that I just always done a lot of buy and selling online. Even before eBay and Amazon, I was in the Usenet groups in the 90s.
Mike: Oh, you’re old.
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: You’re old.
Rob: No, I am one of those guys and I used to buy and sell all kinds of stuff like comic books. I used to do guitar pedals, play electric guitar a lot back then. It was mostly for profit. I was trying to cover at least my living expenses, not my rent or my tuition, but just other miscellaneous expenses.
Anyways, with that said, eBay was such a bear to sell on in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was like you had to take your photographs, then you had to get them scanned, then you make them digital. It’s such a mess. But with the eBay app now, you just take the pictures right in the app and then if you’re selling anything that’s moderately standardized, like if you’re selling a model of printer or a model of a laptop, or a set of headphones, they have all that data now. I don’t know why it took them so long to do it, but it’s not exactly the same, but it’s more similar to selling on Amazon.
I switched over to Amazon for almost all of my selling. I don’t do that much these days, but I will play some games and then we’ll get tired of them or will have some books that are worth something, and I’ll post them up because it takes 30 seconds to post. Then you can print the shipping labels both right directly from eBay and Amazon now.
I have my kids tape them on and they take typically some of their stuff that we’re selling, to be honest. I don’t have much physical stuff left like physical books and stuff, but my kids will take a portion of the profit and portion of the things. I’m trying to show them how to do it and motivate them as well. It’s just one of the comments that I typically have veered towards Amazon because it’s such an easy process to post.
eBay does still take longer but there are items sometimes that Amazon won’t let you resell. Like the manufacturer had said, there are certain types of games that don’t have replayability, there’s the escape room games, and Amazon just won’t let you sell them, so I’ve sold those on eBay. Then there’s some other like mighty wallets and stuff that I have that are in good shape that I was trying to sell. Really just public service announcement that if you’re going to sell something and Amazon won’t let you do it, head over to eBay. It’s not as catastrophic as it once was.
Mike: That’s some definitely good advice. I’ve tried to avoid eBay to some extent just because I don’t tend to just sell a bunch of my stuff. I guess, I just collect it, to be honest or just throw it away. I remember checking my eBay account. It was a couple of years ago and most of my radiance and stuff have completely gone away because I hadn’t used my account in so long. I’m just like, “Oh, all right.”
Rob: I don’t know if they do. They show lifetime ratings but them they’re like that. If you haven’t got ratings in eight, six months or a year, then they degrade, which I think is a good policy. Basically, people will buy an account with some ratings to swindle people, so they really have to be concerned about that.
Mike: Oh, I haven’t thought about that. Darn those people.
Rob: What else is going on with you?
Mike: The only other thing I have is that I spent far longer than I wanted to trying to rebuild my deployment process for Bluetick. I talked to about how I was in the process of deploying a public API, put that out there, and unfortunately as part of that, it creates another URL that I need to have software deployed to. Things just got more complicated and I’ve got multiple machines involved.
It’s no longer as easy as it’s just like, “Oh, just click this button here and then copy a folder from this machine to this machine and then run an executable or whatever.” Now that it’s much more complicated because I have four different websites that basically need to be deployed as part of the build process, I ended up re-engineering this whole thing.
It took me probably a week-and-a-half to two weeks to just rebuild that using different software, but it’s all working now. It’s really nice I can just click the button and then it just goes out and deploys everything on multiple machines and it deploys new copies of it. It’s no longer deploying over itself which is just fantastic because now if anything goes wrong, I can revert, whereas before, I didn’t really have that capability. I had to do a bunch of manual stuff in order to make sure that in certain cases, I have the ability to revert.
Obviously, there’s some changes that you’ll make that are like, “Oh, I’m changing some HTML here, an API call there, and it’s not a big deal,” but then there’s other ones where you know that it’s much more of a risky change and you want to have backups of stuff before you go deploy it because the build process can take a while for you to revert in any way.
Rob: That’s brutal to spend that much time on something like this at this juncture but I get it that these are the things that, at some point, you have to deal with and you can’t just keep kicking them down the line. You can, but then you get this crazy legacy stuff that really can hold you back down the line.
Mike: I kicked this down the line for a year at this point. I went back and looked at when I started trying to do what I just finished and it was a year ago. I was like, “Oh, I need to upgrade the software, put the latest version on, and all of these other stuff. I remember seeing the dates and it was about a year ago. It was complicated enough that I’m like, “Nope, I’m not going to do this now,” and I pushed it off for long enough that it’s like, “I have to do it now.”
Rob: It stinks to lose that much time when you’re trying to move fast on a startup and this is why, at a certain point, it’s either having money whether from revenue or from a small amount of funding like we talked a couple of episodes ago, to just hire someone who can come and help with that, or to hire someone who can come in and help with that, or to hire someone to build features while you’re doing that. It allows so much more parallelism, you can move a lot faster.
Mike: That’s a nice lead in to today’s topic which is should you take a co-founder? Obviously, if you have a co-founder, you don’t necessarily need funding. You can certainly go down that road as well if you’d like, but I think the problem most people are trying to solve by bringing on a co-founder is avoiding going down that road altogether or by adding somebody in in a way that feels much more cost-effective and helps to have somebody else who’s got some skin in the game and they’re going to help the business with a completely different skill set than you have and help drive the whole thing forward.
Rob: Yup, for sure and this is a topic I know we’ve discussed a little bit in the past, but I don’t think we’ve dedicated a whole episode to it and it’s something that a lot of people are faced with. It’s like, “Should you do this or should you go it alone?” I think it will be a big conversation today.
Mike: The opening question is should you actually go down the road and having a partnership or should you hire somebody? I think for most self-funded businesses, the big issue with hiring somebody is you simply don’t have the money. You either don’t have the revenue or you would have to cut significantly into your own amount of money that you basically put into your own pocket in order to hire somebody, and you may just not have enough coming in to be able to do that. Also, if your very early on, or you’re just working from the point of having an idea, there’s nothing there.
In many ways, it makes sense to go the partnership route versus hiring somebody because if you’re going to try and hire, let’s say, a developer or something like that, you’re probably going to blow at least $30,000 or $60,000 trying to get something to the point where you can just show it to customers and get it out the door.
Whether you validated that in idea in advance—obviously you should’ve—especially if you’re going to dump that kind of money into it because you want to be absolutely sure that this large quantity of money that your dumping in there for that work to be done is going to eventually pay off.
Rob: Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups has a saying. He says, “Hire your co-founders,” or at least that’s what he does. He has the luxury that he has the funding to do that. He can basically keep the line sure of equity because long-term he thinks that’s going to be worth a lot of money. He can hire someone at a totally reasonable salary because he can either do it out of pocket or he can raise a round of funding and pay them probably market rate or something close to that and maybe they get 5% of the company.
They have skin in the game and they all get the upside, too, but he doesn’t have to give up 50% of the company or whatever it is as maybe if you were starting from scratch that you would have to deal with.
The hiring is a luxury that you will have if you have either raise some kind of funding on your own or have the power to do that because of whatever, because of your background or your network, or you have the money that you were able to sell fund from other ventures. But if you don’t, then yeah, it becomes not possible. If you don’t even have enough money to quit your own job, how are you going to have enough money to pay someone else’s salary?
Mike: The other thing to take into consideration is the skill sets, like do you have the skill set that ranges both the marketing sales side of things or can you only do development? If you’re a non-technical founder, then you need somebody to step in and perform those duties as a developer from the eyes of the business owner.
I’ve talked to a few different people or non-technical founders and they were like, “Oh, okay I want to bring somebody in to help out with the development side,” but I find it a lot of contractors are very hesitant to take the reins and say, “Okay, I’ll be the architect for this,” or the people just don’t have the money to hire somebody who’s a skilled-enough person to be able to have that high-level view who’s done it before. It’s more of the chicken and the egg problem, I think, but even with the skill set, you have to figure out what is going to be complementary to you and what is the best type of person to bring in.
Rob: What’s interesting to me, you’re talking about having a technical co-founder. I don’t believe it have backed a single company in terms of my personal angel investments that did not have a technical co-founder. I have passed on several that did not and that was my biggest concern is how are you going to get the tech right? This is a software company.
Obviously, the marketing’s important, but the software has to work and someone has to own that. If you don’t have someone who is either has some skin in the game, whether it’s co-founder or whether if someone say, “Hey, I’m employee number one and I’m able to pay my full-time salary and I give them 5%,” I’d be like, “Okay, I can live with that.” But just saying, “Hey, I’m going to go hire an agency. I’m going to hire a contractor or something.” That wouldn’t work for me. That’s a personal bias or a personal belief of mine. It is obviously possible to do, build a software company without a technical co-founder. I’m sure we probably know people who’ve done it, but very, very difficult especially SaaS, which is, as we know, even more complicated than the traditional downloadable software model.
That’s not too much of a tangent but it is something that I think folks should think about. This is part of why that stair step approach works for even non-technical founders. You start super simple and you start with the one-time download like an info product or it could be a WordPress plugin because I can see you paying a contractor to build a plugin to solve a problem, making a few grand a month from that, then you build, build, build to the point where you either have the network, or the relationships, or you have the funding to then where you can self-fund and actually bring someone on who really is more of a technical co-founder.
Mike: The next question I think the answer is how do you know if you are a good fit for each other? I feel this is a hard question to answer just because it depends a lot on what your relationship already is with the person. If you’ve known them for 15 or 20 years, it’s a lot easier to make the determination is to whether or not you would want to work with them.
But if you just met them at some local meetup or something like that, or you met someone at a conference, or you followed them online, and you’re just starting a new relationship with them and you haven’t known them personally for very long, then it becomes a lot more difficult to make, I’ll say, an objective consideration about it.
I think that there’s a couple of things I would keep in mind and try out when I’m doing this. First one is, before you make a full-blown agreement, have a trial period of some kind on a project. It could either be that project or it could be something else. You might hire them to build something for you. That’s more of a contracting basis. I wouldn’t say that I would hide it from them that you’re interested in potentially pursuing something later, but probably wouldn’t bring that up as like the first thing as, “Hey, I want to think about having you brought on as a partner and I want to hire you for this project in order to figure out whether or not we’re going to be a good fit.” Because then, if it doesn’t work out, then you already set those expectations that, “Hey, this might turn into something.”
Rob: Yeah and on this topic there’s an episode of the Zen founder that is probably 100-150 episodes ago where Sherry interviewed Jordan Gal and Ben Fisher, who were the co-founders of CartHook and just about the “dating process” that Jordan and Ben went through. They had spent months trying to figure out how, “Are we a fit to each other? Are we going to work well together?”
I believe Jordan flew out and worked for a week or two from Ben’s co-working space. Ben went out to New York and did that with Jordan and they just went back and forth and it was definitely a long trial process, but they were really feeling each other out and figuring out, “Can we work well together? Are we a good fit? Because if we’re not, let’s not do this. Let’s not waste either person’s time and let’s not have the agony,” because the agony of a co-founder breakup is pretty bad. It’s pretty rough.
I think that pre-arranging a trial period—you had mentioned not mentioning it—to someone that you think of bring them on, I think that is definitely one way to do it. For some reason, I don’t remember the context of the story, but Jordan and Ben had already––there was more context to it to where they’re both equally willing to walk away. It wasn’t like one guy bringing the other guy on. It was really they were trying to find a fit. I think you can do it both ways.
Mike: I think that whether you bring it up upfront or later on is dependent a lot on how well you know them to begin with and whether or not you even broach the topic. If it’s someone you know online or you seen them and you are considering potentially asking them, then I probably wouldn’t bing that up first thing. But if you already have some relationship with them and you see them on occasion, or you’ve talked to them before and they know you personally already and you have the sense it might be something you want to pursue, then yeah, I would probably bring it up upfront at that point.
There are some red flags, I think, I would look for. One is if you’re trying to communicate with them and they are not very willing to communicate back with you especially if you hire them for a project, that’s obviously a red flag. If there’s any social power disparity between you in terms of what you guys would be bringing to the business relationship, not like Twitter followers, more along the lines of, “Oh this person has all the contacts in this particular industry and he’s going to try bring them in as customers and the other one basically has none.” It can be an issue. I’m not saying that that’s a disqualifier or anything, but it’s something to examine with a magnifying glass, say, “Is this going to be a problem?”
I think the obvious question is, “Could you see yourself hanging out with this person as a friend?” Because if there’s a business partner with you, you’re going to have to talk probably quite a bit and it’s going to be a relationship that you’re going to have to maintain for years.
If you can’t see yourself working with this person or hanging out with them, maybe you just don’t like the way that they treat other people or they’re racist or something like that, there’s certain things that you’re going to have to say, “No, this is a deal breaker and we’re just not be able to do it.”
Rob: Another thing to think about, obviously, is this is a little bit like hiring someone that you want to have references, you want to do references checks. So, talk to friends or colleagues that run in the same circles who can potentially know this person. Hiring someone who’s completely unknown is certainly a possibility that could work out, but it is less likely if you don’t have any overlapping circles and no one you know knows this person. Don’t know if you’re just starting out or have been going longer, you have to get contacts to it, but certainly if you know anyone who knows this person, it will be a lot better off if you can talk to them about it, how this person works and all that kind of stuff.
Mike: Of who has done business with them before, how do they treat their clients and other people that they interact with at business level because if they are in the habit of screwing over their customers, then is that the type of person you want to be in business with?
Rob: Yup.
Mike: The next question is, how to begin a partnership? There’s lots of different ways to go about that like you put together a vesting schedule, think that most startups tend to do that if they’re granting options, for example, but I do think that even in a partnership, a vesting schedule of some kind is probably a good idea.
In the early days, you can track hours. Just say, “Okay, well I put in 20 hours this week. How many did you put in?” I wouldn’t necessarily use that as a weapon, for example, in a relationship but use it as a barometer of how much effort are people putting into the business. What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to end up in a situation where you’re putting in 95% of the effort and the other person is putting in 5% or 100% and 0%. At that point, the whole thing is just going to fall apart at some point down the road. You can’t have a long-term business relationship if that’s going on.
Another tip is having regularly scheduled meetings to just discuss what’s going on, put together an outline of what those things are going to entail, and then make sure you have a set of common goals and expectations for one another. Know what your expectations of that other person are and make sure you communicate them because if you don’t tell them what you expect of them, then they’re going to be hard pressed to just come up with it on their own.
Rob: I think the thing is you’re trying to find common goals. It’s a ‘do you have’ common goals. That could be a big thing from the start is like, “Hey, I want to start a SaaS company and one person wants to go raise funding and go through YC and the other person just wants to build a lifestyle business and work as long as possible and pay the bills. That is overly simplistic way of looking at it, but these are the hard conversations that will save you so much pain and anguish down the line.
I think this is probably a good point to talk about. We’re talking about how to vet a co-founder right now but the title of the episode is Should You Take On A Co-Founder and I think I went off a tangent about if I were non-technical, I would look for a technical co-founder and that’s a very common thing. But what if you are a single technical founder? The question I’m posing here is, do you that that you should go look for a co-cofounder? And what are the pros and cons about it?
I know that when folks apply to Y Combinator, that they tend to fund a lot few single founders because from their perspective, the code is like the journey is hard and you tend to need someone else to lean on.” I don’t know if that’s programmed pattern-matching. I don’t know if this program had, I believe, two or three other co-founders when he launched and grew his startup. What are your thoughts on that question, specifically? If you’re going to build a SaaS and you are a technical person, what are the ideas? Obviously, if I say should you, you could say no because you’re a single founder. But what is the thought process there? What should someone think about as they’re thinking that thing through?
Mike: I think the interesting point to bring up here is actually the Startups For The Rest Of Us podcast actually came from a blog post that I’ve written a long time ago about when Y Combinator was first and announcing that they going to be funding a bunch of companies and they were going to be offering $6000 to move for three months to some certain location. I’m like, “That’s just not enough especially for somebody like me and what about the rest of us? Startups for the rest of us?” That’s where the original idea came from and plus, obviously, I had the domain singlefounder.com. It hit really well, but I do think it’s a really interesting question because one, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s really what is right for you? What is it that you are comfortable doing?
I have met people who are perfectly comfortable taking all the responsibilities for a business on their own shoulders, and I’ve also met entrepreneurs who are not. They want a co-founder to share the responsibility and they’re okay sharing everything because they don’t want everything on their shoulders. It really depends on the type of person that you are. I also believe that depending on the type of business that you’re trying to build, you may or may not need help. That’s a big question as well. How complicated is the thing that your building. Are you going to be able to do both the marketing side of things and are you also going to be able to do all the technical side of things?
If you’re building something that’s extremely complicated like the level of Drip or something like that, there’s a ton of stuff that goes in there. I think it would be extremely difficult to build that as a one-man band. There’s just so much technical stuff going on and so many things that need to go into it and a short amount of time, that you are not going to have the bandwidth to build the stuff and also do the marketing for it.
I think that’s probably one of the contributing factors to why you and Derrick worked out together so well because you have technical architecture level stuff and you can help with the design, but then you went off and did the marketing stuff while he did a lot of the implementation. You served as a barrier so he can get work done. I’m speculating to some extent here but you can confirm or deny that.
Rob: Yeah, Drip started off as a smaller idea. It was going to be a lifestyle business. Derrick was a contractor at that time, then became W2 at some point. When we made the decision to become more ambitious about it, I was bouncing ideas off Derrick. At this point, I was still the full owner of the company. It was truly my decision whether or not to go into this market. But he was like a confidante and he and I just had a lot of co-founder-like discussions, is what I realized. Between the two of us, he and I made better decisions than I would make alone. That’s what wound up happening. It was just a natural thing.
Honestly from the very start, I did not think there could be a co-founder. It was not a plan for me. He was literally a contractor working half of his time on HitTail and I said, “Hey I want to build another product. What do you want the other 20 hours of your week? Do you want to get paid for that?” And he was like, “Sure.” It was fun to build a product from scratch and his UX chops are good. It was just a funny little thing and we unintentionally traveled down this road that you’ve outlined here of how to vet but we didn’t have any of the presuppositions of, “Oh man, are we going to make the decision someday to be a co-founder …”
Eventually, Derrick started a couple of apps before that, before Drip that hadn’t panned out and he knew that he wanted to kind of own something. He didn’t just want to work for somebody forever and knew that about him. It came to the point where it’s like, “Look, I’m going to do my own thing,” and it was like, “Well, let’s talk about what I can do at Drip for you to not do that, to make it worth your while to stick around in that.” That’s where it went. It’s very natural and by that time, I trusted him, he trusted me, we both knew how we work.
It was a Cinderella story so to speak of just making it work. But you’re right. I don’t want to say it wouldn’t have been what it was without both of us. It just would have been different. You know what I mean? Drip, especially in the early days just built a lot on my network and my very early vision for the product that quickly became our vision, and it was built a lot on my public speaking and my audience and all that stuff, and that’s what got early traction. Even my network later on got us affiliates and got us people recommending it and people willing to try it and all that stuff.
I think Drip could have worked without Derrick but it wouldn’t have be able to grow as fast. It would have been way more stressful for me. Derrick took so much of the load of the technical side as well as just building good software. I wasn’t dealing with a revolving door of contractors, I wasn’t dealing with that headaches which would have severely hampered the growth of the business, I believe. I think either of us having not been involved, it still could have been successful but it could potentially have been calamity as well.
I think it comes back to that question, should you take on a co-founder? As you said, Drip is very complicated. It’s very large in terms of the app. I can’t imagine doing that alone. I can’t imagine doing that as a single founder. If we’re doing a simpler app, I had HitTail before that. I didn’t take on a business partner with it, nor I didn’t build it, but it wasn’t that many lines of code. I did grow it essentially from $1000 a month to $30,000 a month over a course of a couple of years really on my own. Then I had a couple of contractors helping me out. For that one, I didn’t need a co-founder. That was definitely a nice little lifestyle business.
Mike: But I think there’s an order of magnitude and complexity difference between those two different products and that’s my whole point is that, if there is an order of magnitude difference between what you currently have going on and what you intend for that product to be or what it is going to become, then having that co-founder is probably really a good way to go, regardless which of the two is writing the code or if only one of them has technical experience, that’s fine. But there needs to be help because you are not going to be able to switch back and forth between both of them very well.
I’m saying this as somebody who’s in the middle of that right now. It’s really, really hard to switch back and forth between them because Bluetick is complicated under the covers. It’s way more complicated than I thought it would be and that’s just the nature of it.
Rob: Yup. That’s the struggle. Do you regret or do you wish you had a co-founder? Have you thought about looking for one?
Mike: Oh yeah. It was probably a year-and-a-half ago I actually approached somebody about coming on as a co-founder. It’s not something I haven’t thought of but at the time, I was like, “Okay, yeah, I know and trust this person and I’ll asked him.” He thought about it and we discussed it a little bit, and he decided to go on a different direction, which is totally cool. We’re still great friends and everything and he’s off doing something else and that’s great. But at the same time, I also have it at the back of my mind like, “Hey, it would be nice to have a co-founder or it would be nice to have funding to be able to either attract a co-founder or help in areas where I just can’t dedicate nearly as much time as I would like to then.”
I could either go in either direction and I honestly weighed them both pretty heavily over the past 6-8 months. I know that down the road I probably can’t do both side of the business. The question is what do I do? Do I go for funding and try to hire people that just do marketing and report to me or do I go the co-founder route? I think that it’s a hard comparison to make because on one hand, you’re saying, “Okay, well, if I get funding, maybe I give away some percentage of the company,” and I don’t really want to do that. But at the same time if you bring in on a co-founder, what are the logistics of that look like?
I’ve already spent months, actually years at this point helping build the product and get it to where it is. I’ve done a lot about, I’ll say, the hard, heavy lifting to get the products to be functional and do what it needs to do, but how does a new business partner work into that? How do you value the business, how do you value all the work and effort that I put in, the money that I paid to the contractors that help me in different ways, the infrastructure that I put in place, how do you put a price on that? How do you work out, what the terms of that would be?
Rob: You’re right. That’s hard to do but that shouldn’t be a reason that you don’t do it. You need to figure that out if you really need a co-founder. There’ll be some awkward or hard conversations and you’ll both have ideas of, “You know I have an idea that you should get this much equity,” and then the other person have different and you figure out, “Hey, are we willing to meet in the middle or are we willing to compromise? Or is this just not a fit?”
You’re right. There’s a lot of complexity to that stuff, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. As developers, you and I see all the problems with everything, frankly, like Sherry can say, “Hey, we’re going to Croatia in two months,” and I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, the logistics of that is going to be a nightmare. Everything is going to go wrong.” It’s like we’re used to looking at code and trying to figure out how it’s going to break. In life I try to figure out how are things going to break so I can think, be ahead of them, or whatever and I think that’s what you’re doing here. If it’s the right decision, you just have to figure it out.
But if it’s not the right decision, if you can raise funding and essentially hire someone to handle that, or if you can grow revenue fast enough that you can hire someone, and I’m not saying you in particular but just in general, I mean these are other options instead of having a co-founder, but it sound like you’re right. There’s going to be complexity but I still think that it’s something if you think it’s right for the business, that you should consider.
The good news is raising funding at a later stage or bringing someone at a later stage means that it shouldn’t be a 50/50 proposition or your evaluation should be higher because you do have more traction. If you’ve proven in the business that you have all of these and you have traction, then it becomes a different conversation.
Mike: Yeah, that’s true. Like I said, the situation for me personally is like I’ve got three different, I guess, pass so to speak, and it’s not to say that any of them is necessarily exclusive of the others but there’s the finding the co-founder, there’s also the funding, and then there’s the potential that is like grow the business revenue higher than it is currently to the point where I can hire somebody to bring on which I’m almost positive that like that would be somebody to help out on the marketing side of things, and then figure out things from there.
If I did that, it doesn’t necessarily mean that bringing on a co-founder is out of the realm of possibility because if I hire somebody to do marketing, I may decide that, “Hey, this person is working out in this capacity but I would not want to have them as a co-founder.” And the question is like, “Well, who would I bring on as a co-founder?” I don’t have an answer for that, to be perfectly honest. I don’t want to say a hard situation, it’s just I don’t have easy answers.
Rob: It’s startups, man. There are never easy answers. That’s the thing. I do think that though our discussion today about whether to look for a co-founder, I feel that should be helpful to people. This is one of those issues where there’s a lot of ‘it depends.’ It depends on who you are, your goals, your goals personally and for the business, and like we said, the complexity of the business and all that kind of stuff.
Mike: Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, I really feel it comes down to the complexity, and as you said, you probably would not fund a company that doesn’t have a technical co-founder if they’re trying to be a software business. I would agree with you but at the same time, I also say the decision to take on a co-founder, I feel, is heavily influenced by how complex the software is that you’re going to be building or that you’re working on.
The more complicated it is, I feel the more you are likely to probably need a co-founder because you need somebody who has a large stake in the business, who owns that and knows that they’re responsible for it, and is going to do whatever the right decision is, regardless of the cost, but also keeping in mind all of the other business things that are going on.
If you hire somebody to do the technical stuff, they are probably not going to be aware of this marketing effort that’s going on. That thing is going over on sales. They maybe even involved in some of the support stuff because they’re going to have to fix those issues. But their concern is not marketing. Their concern is not sales side of things. Their concern is building the tech stack and because of the lack of, I’ll say, visibility that they would have or their perceived lack of importance of that stuff to their job, I just don’t think that they’re going to do as well if they’re not an equity/co-founder type of person.
Rob: Yeah, I would agree. Is someone a co-founder? Co-founder is just a title. You can give someone a co-founder title retroactively. If someone has 5% of the company, are they a co-founder? I don’t know. Some people might have that title. Other folks might say, “I don’t know. They’re the CTO, they’re technical employee number one or whatever. Software developer number one.” We are throwing around this term and haven’t really defined it. But I don’t know. We don’t necessarily need to dive into that.
I think the thing to think about is, you know the reason that I haven’t funded any companies without a technical co-founder, you talk about the complexities versus non-complexity of an app. I think these days, I want to fund companies that are going to be seven figure or eight figure businesses. They’re going to be in the millions or above $10 million in annual revenue. I think today to build a SaaS that does that, you are going to have complexity.
I don’t know of a space where you can go back to the Basecamp days and build a project management system that isn’t that complicated. Let’s say Basecamp’s not complicated today, but realistically, when they built it, it was just a lot of CRUD, Create, Read, Update, Delete. That’s what Rails is really good at and that’s what Rails is really good at and that’s why DHH built Rails right out of––pulled it out of Basecamp. Those days are mostly over. I don’t want to say entirely over but the complexity of getting something to seven or eight figures these days, I believe, almost without exception, will require software that’s more complicated than we want it to be. How about that?
It’s like Drip was more work and more complicated than I wanted it to be and same with Derrick. Bluetick is more complicated than you thought it would be and want to be. That’s just what becomes because people want features, you look at the features and like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to be hard to build,” but that is going to be my differentiator or that is going to get this client to sign up.
Mike: I think a close second behind that is the type of person that you are and whether or not you do well under pressure and how comfortable you are making decisions without additional input. I do agree with you in almost every case like two heads are better than one. It almost doesn’t matter what the situation is, but at the same time, somebody is going to have to ultimately make the decision and it’s more comfortable to have somebody to make a decision when you have somebody else there who’s on even footing with you, and they agree with the decision. Versus, “I think this is the right decision but I’m not sure, but I don’t have anyone to talk to about it or anyone who can say ‘Yes, we should go on in this direction,’ so I’m going to make it. But I’m going to be more stressed out because of that.”
Just by virtue of having somebody else to be able to act as that sounding board who is involved in the business, yes, mastermind group can help and other founders of other companies that you know they can certainly help out and give advice, but ultimately, if you’re the only person in the business making those decisions, everything falls on your shoulders enough a lot more stressful. Just having that co-founder to share the stress and the responsibility of those decisions, good or bad, is going to be helpful.
Rob: I feel that was a pretty good discussion. I hope you as a listener enjoyed our conversation. If you have question for us, call our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
Episode 407 | A SaaS Pricing Conundrum, Subdomains, Building an Affordable MVP, and More Listener Questions
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us , Rob and Mike answer a number of listener questions on topics including SaaS pricing, subdomains, and building affordable MVP’s.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Rob: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and I discuss SaaS pricing conundrum, subdomains, building an affordable MVP and more listener questions. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 407.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us. The podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to 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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share out experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Where this week, sir?
Mike: You remember a few weeks ago when I said I had gone unto meetup.com, and had started a Dungeons & Dragons group, and gotten a couple of people together, and started playing a campaign?
Rob: Indeed.
Mike: Because I’m signed up for and have a paid account now, they started emailing me about various groups, like, “Hey, you might be interested in this,” and I was told that I should join the Massachusetts cannabis marketing and sales group.
Rob: You totally should. That’s a growth market, man.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Is it legal in Massachusetts?
Mike: It is. Although I don’t think anybody’s licensed to actually sell it yet, that happened two years ago, they said, “Yes, this is now legal in Massachusetts for recreational use.” but they still had to go through all these regulatory hurdles, and people had to get certified, and all these other stuff. They’re like, “Yes, you can use it recreationally, but nobody can sell it to you.” that was the situation for a couple of years, I think that they’re supposedly sometime this summer, starting to do that but I don’t know. Maybe the deadline has already passed. I don’t know.
Rob: Because I was back in California, I think it was when I was at SaaStr, so it was probably, February or March of this year, and it’s legal there. It’s been medically legal for years, so they already have the dispensaries, and they legalized it. I think it was maybe, less than a year later, they were allowed to sell it for recreational use.
I was walking around at night with some friends from the conference, co-workers, there was a lot of pot smoke that you could smell, and it was like, “Oh, yeah.” Of course, I was looking around like, “Oh man, they can’t be doing that, right?” it’s just this sense you get when you smell that. But it’s like, “No, no. It’s just legal, and you can do it on the corner.” It’s such a trip, such a trip. It’s going to be weird to get used to. The way it’s going, it’s going to be legal in all 50 States, eventually. It’ll be an interesting thing to adjust to.
Mike: Yeah. Definitely can be interesting. I just found it funny that they’re like, “Oh, you should join this group.”
Rob: Totally. They know who you are, Mike, deep down.
Mike: I guess, maybe. I don’t know. How about you?
Rob: I’ve been doing some smart home stuff which is something I’ve been interested in for years. But since we had a rental for the past couple of years, obviously, I wasn’t going to put a bunch of stuff in a rental. I now have several Alexas—oops, I just activated.
Mike: We should leave this in. This is good radio.
Rob: Yeah, I have several Echos in the house. I need to, not say A-L-E-X-A. I’m enjoying them. I’m enjoying that you can use them as intercoms because our house has a lot of stairs. There’s three or four stories—depending on how you count.
Mike: I found out about that the other day that you could use it as an intercom. I didn’t know that you could do that. You can just drop into some other room in the house. Although I was told there’s a—not a security loophole or something like that—but something associated with it where you have to disable it by default. Otherwise, if somebody in your contact list, they know you have one, they can drop into your living room and just talk to you through the intercom, I think over the internet, and I didn’t know that.
Rob: Oh, interesting.
Mike: Yeah. It doesn’t sound good.
Rob: Yeah. I enjoyed doing it most from the Echo app on my phone. You can just click a couple of times, and then boom, you’re just speaking out of one of the Amazon Echos. Our kids’ playroom is way downstairs, and it’s easier than running down and telling them dinner is ready. It’s pretty nice.
I’ve definitely bought into the Echo ecosystem, and I like their direction that’s going. I got a Nest for the first time. I tried installing Nest at our old house, but it wasn’t compatible. I have a Nest here, and I can now control that of course with the app, and it’s smart thermostat, and that’s fun. You can even tell the Echo to adjust the temperature, I believe. I haven’t activated that yet.
We moved into this house, it’s in the Midwest, it was built right around 2000, and they wired the whole thing for in-home speakers. There’s speakers in almost every room. There’s this big central places where he had a receiver, a tuner, CD player, and all this stuff. I’m thinking, in the 90s, that’s what I would have done. When in college, I would love big speakers from dorm room to dorm room, as I moved around or apartment to apartment, and you had your receiver, you had your amp and all that stuff.
Now I went online, and I was like, “There’s got to be an easier way here. I want to be able to stream everything.” I researched it, and of course, Sonos is the leader in that space. While I don’t love how proprietary Sonos is, even down to the fact that I can’t just stream from Spotify through my Sonos but I believe that you have to use the Sonos app, and you […] it into your Spotify account like, “I don’t want to use the Sonos app.”
Mike: Oh, geez.
Rob: I know. I know. I need to double-check that because they may have opened it up, but last time I looked, you weren’t able to kind of just airplay it–the equivalent of that through the Sonos thing. But anyway, they have this thing called, Sonos Connect: Amp. The Amp part means it has an amp in it that you can connect to speakers. I just got one, just as an experiment. I put in on the first floor, and sure enough, it takes the place of all of this equipment he had, the speaker wires go in the back, and there’s volume knobs on every wall in the house.
I was going to bail on it altogether and just not do it. But Sherri’s like, “No, no, no. If we have people over, there’d be multiple…” because you can do multiple floors, and there’s all this stuff. All that to say, I reluctantly implemented Sonos in this smart home thing, but man, it’s cool. You can tell your Echo to start this on Spotify on the Sonos, and it will do it, and you go to the wall and turn it up. It’s magical, man. It’s pretty interesting. It feels like we’re living in the future.
Mike: That’s pretty cool. I bought a new amplifier maybe two or three years ago because my old one was 12, 15 years old. Actually, it was more than that. It’s probably close to 20. It still works great. It’s just that it didn’t have any of the connections. It didn’t have an HDMI connection. It still had all the component outputs or inputs and everything else. I couldn’t hook it up to any new equipment that I had, like a Blu-ray player and stuff like that. I was like, “Alright, fine.” I brought it down, and I bought a new amp.
I was looking at all the different options, and it seemed to me like a lot of that type of equipment, is very much like car technology where they’ll build something into it like Spotify or something like that, and it’s obsolete almost the second you buy it. They’re terribly useful. It sucks that it feels like that type of technology is still on that trend, where everything is proprietary, and it’s so hard to connect stuff, and it’s expensive too, but at the same time, it doesn’t really wear out. I still got speakers that were almost 20 years old, and they’re still in great working condition. I don’t really have any need to buy new ones, except for the fact that if something breaks. That’s it.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I agree. I was concerned when I bought this Sonos. I had to research it because I was, “Do they even support speaker outputs anymore? There’s exterior speakers in the patios, is it going to drive those? Is it going to connect to all the stuff?” Sure enough on the back, it looked like it had the right ports and it wound up doing it. They’re called banana clips.
I agree. Trying to interface this newfangled technology with stuff that has existed for 30, 40 years, maybe even longer. I remember twisting speaker wires together. I had four speakers in my dorm room. Certainly, it was quadraphonic, it was a stereo, but I would twist them together, ran them into the amp, and do all the stuff, and that technology is now having to interface with, like you said, this Spotify stuff.
I did evaluate not doing Sonos. There are, obviously, other brands that have streaming music devices that have amps built-in, but they just all seem, like you said, bolted on, and antiquated. I don’t know. It’s interesting to see how this is going to shake out. I’m interested to see how it’s going to shake out over the next few years.
Obviously, I’m investing in ecosystems now. I’ve been on the Alexa ecosystem now. I’m in obviously now, on the Sonos a little bit. I think I’m probably going to have to get at least one more […] perhaps too because there’s different zones and stuff. But I’m trying to pick market leaders because I don’t want to buy the Betamax, and suddenly have to bail on it because they just killed the line or whatever.
Mike: Well, that just means you’ll have to find the one that is selling porn with it, that will be the winner.
Rob: I do think, I might need to stand corrected because I opened Spotify while we were talking, and it does look like I can just connect to the Sonos downstairs, and just stream it through there instead of using their app. I’ll test that later to prove it out. I know for a while they didn’t do that. But if it does it now, they must have added it in the past whatever, six months or something.
Mike: It seems to me, for that type of technology, anything that comes to streaming, you just want something where you can connect to it with Bluetooth or something like that, or with even just a cable, and then from there, it just acts as a dummy piece of equipment that just does its thing, and that’s its sole purpose is, and then you plug other stuff into it. It seems most people would really just want to do that.
My wife used to work at an electronic house, and they had all these high-end stereo systems going up to $100,000-$150,000. Don’t get wrong, they were beautiful, but the reality is you’re going to spend that much money on a stereo system for some downstairs place. Their target market was people who had nothing better to do with their money. Sure, that makes sense, but I think for the average user, it doesn’t matter that much.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing. Like you sad, I wouldn’t want to use a cable because the Sonos is in a cabinet set away but Bluetooth or I believe it’s just via wifi because it connects to wifi obviously, and it had its own identity. Once I […] it connects over that. I’m not Bluetooth-connected to Sonos at all. The phone just know where it is.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: With that, should we do a whole episode?
Mike: We could talk about all the different problems of those too. There was some kid’s device that was out there that connected into the WiFi, but it also would record pretty much anything, and it would send it back to the servers to the company that made it, it wasn’t encrypted, and it was using it to do voice recognition. They were basically collecting voice data from kids. It was like, “Oh boy. That’s not good,” and it’s all not encrypted either. That’s a big problem.
Rob: Yeah. That’s the thing too. The IoT is the term for this—Internet of Things. Everything is going to be on the internet at some point, is what they’re saying. The IoT devices are much like the Nest and the Sonos and even smart toasters, smart microwaves, smart fridges, and all the stuff that’s supposed to be coming.
That stuff is said to be a hacker’s dream. Most of it, it’s super insecure. Some of it, if it doesn’t get patched, then it’s easy to hack. Even a lot of it that is patched is easy to hack into. They’re saying that’s the coming wave of hacks. That’s going to be the zombie nets of the future. Because that’s how folks do DDoSes—they go out, and they take control of a bunch of old PCs that are unpatched, and then they do attacks, distributed denial-of-service, from all those things. They’re saying that the Internet of Things is going to be tenfold or a hundredfold the number of devices. It’s going to have that much power.
Mike: Yeah. I shudder for people who have to deal with those types of problems.
Rob: Seriously, yup. Cool. Let’s dive in. We have some listener questions. We have some comments on some prior episodes. Our first comment is on episode 403 which was titled, Should You Love What You’re Working On? and it’s from Martin. He just came to startupsfortherestofus.com and entered a comment at the bottom of episode 403’s blog post.
He said, “Hi, Rob and Mike. Thanks for another great episode. When you guys talked about love versus opportunity, I was reminded of the idea that it can take hard work to cultivate a passion. If I remember correctly, Cal Newport talks about this idea in one of his books. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve noticed that there are a lot of things where you need to put in the work first before you start to enjoy them. I’m currently working as a software consultant, and I remembered that the reason I picked up programming in the first place was because as a kid, I was into video games. Now many years later, I really enjoyed developing software, often more than playing games. I think that’s true of many things. For example, when you’re just starting with any kind of sport, and you suck at it, it’s often not that great, but once you put some effort into it and you start to improve, you suddenly get why people enjoyed doing it.”
I think Martin has a good point. Thanks for posting, Martin. This is how I felt about playing music–playing the guitar. When I first started it, it was really hard, and then definitely the better I got, the more I wanted to play my guitar. What do you think about this?
Mike: I remember reading about this. I think that Josh Kaufman wrote a book about learning different things. I’m pretty sure he had a graph in there that showed that. There’s a skill level versus enjoyment. When you first start doing something new, you suck at it which is to be expected, but you don’t enjoy it at all. Then once you get a little skilled at it, then you really start to enjoy it because you feel you know what you’re doing, so you’re on the cusp of always learning this new stuff, but you’re also enjoying the journey. Once you get much more advanced, then it’s about putting the time and effort to practice, and get the muscle memory or the mental connections made so you don’t have to really think about it when you’re doing it. Pretty sure it was Josh’s book that—I can’t remember the name of the book off the top of my head—but I think that that was in there.
Rob: It’s called The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast.
Mike: Yes, that was it. Yup. It’s a fascinating read, too. If you are interested in learning new things and the process of learning new things, I’d definitely recommend picking up that book and checking it out. He goes through several different things that he learned, like the ukulele, sailboarding, and a couple of other things. It’s just fascinating how he learned about how to learn stuff.
I always had a problem with that when I was in college. When I got to college, I just authorized, “Go ahead,” relied on my natural ability to just remember things, pay attention in class, and then do well on tests. When I get to college, you have to do the homework. That was always a problem for me in college, but it worked itself out eventually, but it took years for that to happen.
Rob: Yup. For sure, I felt the same thing. The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman. It’s also on audible which is I believe how I read that book. Thanks for the comment, Martin. Our first question of the day is from Michael Needle. He’s from alltheguides.com. He says, “Mike and Rob, first, thanks for all you do. I previously called in about building a marketplace, alltheguides.com, to connect adventure travelers and guides. I’m close to finishing the platform, and I took your advice on building one segment first. I went with guides to have providers ready when clients come,” which is the way I believe we should have recommended that you do. It’s a two-sided marketplace, and we said when you start with two-side marketplace you have to get that one side done first.
Now back to his email. “Now ahead of the platform launch, I want to make sure I can bring the clients to the site, the customers, the consumers. I thought I’d follow your advice by starting an informative blog in order to get emails.” Adventure Travel Ideas, I think is the idea of the blog. Here’s the question. “I already have a landing page up from my platform. I assume it would be better to have the lead gen on a different domain as opposed to a subdomain. I just assume that subdomains will be less likely to draw initial visitors. Am I wrong on this? Or if I’m right, and I should go with a different domain, what is the best way to nudge my list towards the platform once it’s launched? Thanks again, guys. You provide invaluable advice and inspiration.” What do you think, Mike?
Mike: I think there’s a natural inclination to believe that you should put your landing page and stuff like that on some sort of a subdomain and that’s how you’re driving traffic to them. But the reality is, I think is that if you’re doing tour guides in a marketplace like this, I don’t think people necessarily really care about the subdomain. I think what really comes into it with the subdomain is that you’re trying to establish new website according to Google, and do all the SEO, and the site ranking, and get that up based on how Google looks at it.
You could instead focus that energy on a subdirectory in your main domain and use that to essentially focus your efforts and increase the authority of that domain versus trying to do it with one subdomain and then another— that’s probably the approach that I would go with. I guess there’s a few different examples I would point to like Craigslist, Angie’s List, and Reddit. Reddit’s got all those different subReddits and stuff in it, but they’re all under, most of them in different subdirectories.
Rob: The reddits? Yup. It’s reddit.com/r/whatever, /startups or whatever.
Mike: Right and that’s not necessarily a two-sided market, but Craiglist is. Based on the location, they will have subdirectories, which are a geographic location, but I wouldn’t worry too much about the subdirectories, at the moment. I guess I’m curious to know whether or not you’re trying to use those subdomains as like the location, like city name, or something like that. Maybe it would make more sense in that case, but at the same time, you could also just use it like it as a different subdirectory as well, and you’ll benefit, for the site authority, through that.
Rob: That’s the thing, and now Google has come out and said, “Oh, subdomain, subdirectory, there’s no difference.” I still think there’s some difference. I still believe, deep down, that subdirectory is better for SEO. I do like your point there. I think if you are going to start a blog, I would try to do it in subdomain, if possible. It’s not always possible to do that. You might need to do reverse-proxy and do some things if you’re running WordPress because you don’t tend to want to run WordPress on a production app server. When I say don’t tend to want to, I mean don’t do it. There’s just too many security holes.
If you want to host it somewhere, I’d go with somebody like the VPNGINE or Pagely or whatever. I think I may have misspoken earlier and said subdomain, but what I mean was subdirectory, if you can do a subdirectory, that’s what I would do.
I don’t think this matters actually, that much. When using a different domain for the lead gen, I would probably lean towards subdirectory, and if you need to use a subdomain, I don’t know—its just apples and oranges, this is small stuff. If you’re going to drive ads to it, it doesn’t matter, nobody cares, they’ll just click on the ad, and they’d go see it. If you’re going to try for SEO then like Mike and I were saying, I would lean towards subdirectory, if possible, I think it’s pretty clean, but in all cases, I don’t know that it matters that much.
Mike: Yeah. The one really nice thing about having everything underneath the same domains—and you’re not dealing with subdomains—is redirecting people back and forth, and then also dealing with the fact that, like any tracking analytics where you’re trying to track like, “Did somebody hit this subdomain and then this other subdomain?” and then you got cookies back and forth between them. With marketing tools, it becomes an absolute nightmare.
You’re much better off just having it all on one domain and then you don’t have to worry about that because the cookies are going to be able to work all on that domain between different directories, versus, like a Google Analytics tracking code. Something as simple as that is going to be an absolute nightmare to work across multiple domains.
Rob: Yeah, and it’s possible, you just got to know how to do it. It’s not out-of-the-box trivial. Sharing cookies is a pain, and then you’ll get the, “Hey, this person came from one of your domains to the other, and they show up as a new visitor.” It’s not ideal. Anyway, I hope that helps.
Our next question is from long-time listeners and friends of ours. Folks that we’ve known that have come to MicroConfs–Dan Taylor and Simon Payne. Dan Taylor runs appsevents.com, which is an events company that runs more than 300 annuals events. Simon Payne was the co-founder of Lead Pages. They both live in Prague, actually, in Czech Republic. Simon was working on an app with Dan Taylor, and Simon has also launched a WordPress button called Convert Player. That’s pretty cool.
Anyway, they wrote in. They said, “Hi, Rob and Mike. Two long-time listeners here, Dan and Simon. We’ve developed and released a SaaS app called EventsFrame. It’s eventsframe.com. It’s ticketing and attendee management system, with fixed low monthly pricing for unlimited events and unlimited attendees. We’ve moved all of my company, AppsEvents more than 300 annual events to this, and done a full public launch last month. We already have paid sign-ups from our listings on sites like Capterra, some content marketing, and some basic Facebook ads, which have converted this in paying customers, which is a good sign. We’re doing an AppSumo launch in a couple of weeks to get a bunch of users on this system, which is taking a lot of our focus, but we’re planning for how we grow this long-term, as Simon and I are focusing all our time on this project.”
“Our question is on pricing. As you know, systems like Eventbrite take a percentage of ticket price, and most systems follow a similar model. With AppsEvents, I was spending thousands of dollars a year on Eventbrite fees. We want to go for a fixed price for unlimited events and attendees. Our initial idea is $97 a month. Now the issue with this is that people running one several small events might prefer a percentage of ticket price, as there is no upfront cost. And on the other end, large event producers would pay a lot more than $97 a month,” or I think he’s saying they should pay a lot more than that cost they’re getting more value. “We guess some pricing tiers could be good. But any ideas to help with our process would be greatly appreciated. All the best, Dan and Simon.” What do you think?
Mike: This is something that I actually looked into pretty heavily and struggled with several years ago. Back when I was running AuditShark, one of the ideas that I had come up with was, ironically, Bluetick, because I was doing a lot of outreach to people and I just needed to follow-up with them and keep on them. But also, as a side note, I was also helping out on the sponsorships side for MicroConf. For that particular problem, I found that I had to do the same thing.
I said, “Oh if I had this product or tool in place that would allow me to do that outreach as an event organizer that would help me out a lot.” I looked around. A bunch of different things didn’t really work very well for what my use case was. I said, “Well, could I build this? Is this something that I could basically move away from AuditShark?” because at the time, it wasn’t really on the best path, and I recognized that at the time.
Anyway, I looked into specifics of whether or not I could target event organizers with that. What I realized was that there’s a wide range of types of event organizers. Some of them, that’s all they do, they organize events like the AppsEvents company. They will organize hundreds of events every single year, and then there’s ones like MicroConf where we do it a couple of times a year, and that’s it.
For ones like that, a monthly pricing model really doesn’t work well because of the fact that you’re only running a couple of events. If you’re doing it on a regular basis, sure, it makes a lot more sense. But as you pointed out, it makes a lot more sense to just do with a percentage of the ticket price for those types of customers.
The other thing I would look at is, Eventbrite, yes, they do charge a percentage of the ticket, but they also give the event organizers the ability to pass that cost onto the attendees. That’s actually what we do with MicroConf. It’s only a couple of percent, but at the same time, it raises the ticket price by that amount. The question you have to ask is, “Well, as the event organizer, is that something that’s going to turn away people? Are they going to, not buy a ticket because they have to pay that extra fee?” That’s again, for the event coordinator to decide. But your problem is, how are you charging?
For us, Eventbrite is I’ll say, “free” and that we’re passing those cost on, and then on the other side, we’re paying the cost of the payment processing, which we would have to pay, regardless. Whether Eventbrite handles it or we do it through PayPal or Stripe or whoever, that fee has to be paid. But our payment to Eventbrite is basically, covered by the attendees buying those tickets, which make it free for us, which makes it a lot more attractive than a $97 a month plan or even a $50 a month plan. Coupled with the fact that, we also don’t run more than a couple of events a year. Why should we be paying for that over the course of the entire year if we’re only running events in a certain time window, I’ll say?
That’s exactly the problem that I ran into when I was trying to identify, “Well, how can I build this email follow-up product aimed at event organizers?” Event organizers, if they run a lot of events, awesome. They’re a good target. But if they don’t, then having them pay a monthly fee is not going to work.
Rob: Yeah. Basically, what Dan and Simon are talking about doing is doing pricing innovation in the events space. While I think it certainly saved Dan money from a customer perspective—he was paying Eventbrite thousands a year—I’m not sure it makes sense to do this from a business perspective.
There’s a reason that most of these events software companies charge the way they do. The reason, as you’ve laid it out, if your event is free, you don’t pay EventBrite anything. If you only sell 20 tickets, and they’re $5 each, then I believe you pay Eventbrite 2.5% of that. If they do the processing, they charge you 3% fee, payment processing fee or we use PayPal, and obviously, it’s whatever it is, 2.9% or 3% there.
Or, if you sell $100,000 worth of tickets in a year, then yeah, you do pay $2500, so I get the […] Eventbrite. It makes sense from a customer perspective of being like, “Man, I’m paying EventBrite so much money,” but now that you’re on the other side of it, and you’re running a business, my thought is like, “Yes, that’s how you want it. You want it so that the people who are getting a little bit of value out of this system aren’t paying that much for it and it scales up perfectly linearly with how they do it.”
If you sell $100,000 for the tickets, you’re probably making a chunk of money. We can argue about whether $2500 is too much money, but you definitely are getting quite a bit of value out of the system if you’re selling $100,000 worth.
Trying to do pricing innovation is a challenge. Is it business model canvas? That something that if you read that book, do you remember the book?
Mike: Yeah, I remember it. There was a whole worksheet that went with it.
Rob: Yup and that talks a lot about trying to do pricing innovation. I don’t know if it has practical enough tips to help you sort this out. But I will say that I tried to innovate on pricing in the early days of Drip, and instead of doing per subscriber just like MailChimp and everybody else is doing, I tried to do new subscribers per month, and it was a bad idea. Not only did they confuse people, but as we started to scale up, we were not growing nearly as fast as we should have.
That’s the thing that you’re going to run into is you’re going to have people who come and are selling half a million dollars’ worth of tickets on your system and they’re going to be paying $97 or even if you do tiers, it’s not going to be that much. They’re not going to be paying you 2.5% of $500,000.
I think since people are used to this, and it is a lucrative model. If anything, you could try to be the low-cost provider which I don’t think is a terrible idea in this space. I don’t know enough about the whole space. I know that EventBrite, yes, it does feel expensive to a lot of people, and it’s clunky, so you have those two things. They have a ton of features, but they’re a little more expensive than everybody wants them to be, and they’re arguably quite a bit harder to use, although they have a lot of features.
This is like going after a QuickBooks or InfusionSoft or Marketo—kind of going after that. If you make your software infinitely usable and slightly less expensive, but you still keep the same model, maybe only try 2.5%, I don’t know. I know you have other bootstrap competitors around you, look at what they’re doing. That’s probably where I would start is doing just a big survey of all the pricing structures of all the events SaaS apps, and mapping that out on a big sheet of paper or mind map or something, and trying to think that through.
I think in the end, you are going to want to be a percentage of revenue is my guess, because otherwise, you’re going to constantly have this problem. Try to think if there’s any way around it with tiers, try to think creatively. It’s like you could have a free tier or you can’t charge for events, and then you could have your $50 a month tier where you go to a certain amount of ticket sales. In essence, you’re taking a percentage, but you’re not, you’re just having tiers of it. That would maybe be the only other thing that I would consider. But man, just taking 1.5%, 2.5%, it’s so clean. It makes your pricing look so clean. It’s simple, and everybody understands that.
Mike: I think the problem that you just alluded to is that, depending on the size of the event that you’re dealing with, if it’s 5 or 10 people, you might have one price tier, and then if it’s 50, you could have another. Whether or not you deal with those, like what’s the price point of those? If it’s $25,000, but they only allow five people in it, is it a free account? Depending on the value that you’re providing to them, that’s really what you’re pricing should be based on.
I think you almost get into this territory of, you have an unlimited number of pricing tiers because how high could those ticket prices go or what is it that you actually basing it on? Is it the number of attendees or is it ticket price? Or is it a combination of the two? Once you get into that territory, it gets overly complicated, and people don’t want to deal with it because they’re like, “This pricing model is too confusing for me. I feel like I’m going to get screwed, so I’m going with the competitor because I understand it.”
Rob: Thanks for the question, Dan and Simon. I hope that was helpful and I definitely wish you guys the best of luck with EventsFrame.
Our next question is from Alex, and he says, “Hi again. Thanks for all the great content. I feel like I’m in a bit of a dilemma. I have an idea that I would like to turn into a business. It’s for a job site. I have the requirements, more or less hammered out to the point I can have a developer build it. I’ve recently been in the process of getting quotes from various companies, and freelancers to build it but I’m hesitant to make this jump. Aside from the inherent risk of it just failing, I’m concerned I will spend all my money on the MVP then quickly run out of money to fund any iterations on the site. I don’t know anyone willing to help me build this for free, and I also don’t know the first thing about raising money or how to prepare for that. I guess my question is, how would you approach building an MVP in the most affordable way?”
One thing I’ll throw out before you dive in Mike is, you’ll not be able to raise money, maybe from family and friends, but you’re not going to be able to raise money without a working app these days. It’s just kind of table stakes. Although he asked us, “How would you approach building an MVP is the most affordable way?” I don’t know that’s a question we should answer. I think the question we should answer is, how do you validate this more before building an MVP. Would you agree?
Mike: Yeah, I would agree. That’s the next step is like, what is the MVP? What question are you trying to answer? The question I think you’re trying to answer is, “How do I know if I should dump this money into this type of product?” I think the answer to that is the same thing that I did with Bluetick. Go to balsamiq.com, and buy a copy of Balsamiq for $80, and mock everything up. Then go try, and sell that to people, and see if people are actually interested in buying what it is that you have.
That will do a couple of different things for you. One is, it will help you find the types of people that you need to talk to, and the second thing it will do is, it’ll give you enough information to say like, “Is this something that people would actually pay for?” and that’s the answer to your question is, if you can get enough people and find the market for it and tap into a channel of people to talk to, to get them excited about it, and find out if they’re going to pay for it, then sure, go for it.
But if you can’t get past that part, if you can’t find the people to talk to, it’s never going to work. You’re just not going to be able to turn it into a working product, regardless whether you have code written or not. That’s not the problem. The problem is trying to find those customers and make sure they are willing to pay for it. There’s obvious concerns here about, Alex’s voice about, “I’m concerned about making the jump because of the risk of it failing,” and that’s how you make sure that it’s not going to fail.
Rob: Yup, I would agree with that. I think the question you need to ask yourself is, “How can you validate this before dumping a bunch of money into it and doing as much of that as possible?” Sometimes, an MVP is not even software. We’ve talked about this in the past. An MVP might be you with an Excel spreadsheet or a Google spreadsheet. It might be you manually writing things, taking in a list of keyword someone gives you, manually running an algorithm on them in Excel, and then giving back the keywords they’re most likely to rank for. That is basically what I would have done if I had built an MVP for HitTail, as an example, or any keyword tool.
There are ways to do it without needing to hire anyone to write a line of code. My second book, which is a collection of essays, is called Start Marketing The Day You Start Coding, but now, I think it’s Start Marketing Or At Least Validating Well Before You Start Coding. With Drip, I had 11 people who said that they would pay $99 a month for what we were going to build before we broke ground on code. I wanted 10, happened to get 11, then Derrick started writing code.
I know for Bluetick you got pre-orders. There is a lot of hustle that can happen up front. It’s hard work. This is the stuff that, “Well, is anyone going to trust me? Who am I? Is anyone going to trust me if I don’t have the software after the software ?” No, that’s an excuse. Yes, it would be better if you had all the software, and could just start marketing it. But that’s not the case.
I think your concern is valid, that going out and building an MVP, it’s very, very unlikely that’s going to have product fit, so you’re going to have to iterate. If you don’t have the money or the time or the skills to iterate on that, then you need to figure out how to get to the point where you feel more confident.
Here’s the thing. If you try to recruit a developer to build it for free—we’ve talked about this in the past—nope, no developer is going to want to do that. If you go to a developer and you say, “Hey, I built all these mockups, I have 25 phone calls, and I got 10 pre-orders, they paid for a quarter, three months of service, and they’ve all committed to—assuming it works and does what I say—it’s going to be $50 or $100 a month after that, boom, we’re going to be at $1000 MRR,” yes, that’s a lot of hustle, and it’s a lot of work, but that’s how you recruit a co-founder or at least a developer who is willing to build it maybe for an equity share or something like that.
I like the way you’re thinking about it. I’m glad you’re hesitant to just dive into the MVP, but I don’t think you should look at building an MVP as software in the most affordable way. I think you should look at, not automating them, doing stuff manually, and think of, “How can I possibly validate this?” The first step is going to be customer conversations, then it’s going to be trying to get pre-orders, then it’s going to be doing it manually until the software’s built, then it’s building a crappy software MVP, and then it’s doing a better job. I bet there’s a lot of steps between where you are today and basically, paying someone to build a complete SaaS app.
Mike: I think part of it just stems from the classic misunderstanding of what an MVP is because MVP has the word Product in it, and that’s not really what it means. I talked about this in my book, Single Founder Handbook, and I quote Wikipedia from […]. It says, “An MVP is not a minimal product. It is a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers.” What you have to understand there is that it explicitly calls out an MVP as a process, not as a product. Building a product is not your MVP; answering a question is what your MVP is. The first thing that you have to start with is, “What is my question?” and here it’s, “How do I know that I need to pay people to develop software?” It’s all the stuff before that that Rob just talked about, like talk to customers, find out what they really want, and whether they’re going to pay for it, that’s all the stuff that you need to do..
Thanks for the question, Alex. I hope that was really helpful. I think that about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, you can email it to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, or you can send us a voicemail by calling 1-888-801-9690. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups, and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us. The podcast that helps developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to 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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m Mike.
Rob: And we’re here to share out experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Where this week, sir?
Mike: You remember a few weeks ago when I said I had gone unto meetup.com, and had started a Dungeons & Dragons group, and gotten a couple of people together, and started playing a campaign?
Rob: Indeed.
Mike: Because I’m signed up for and have a paid account now, they started emailing me about various groups, like, “Hey, you might be interested in this,” and I was told that I should join the Massachusetts cannabis marketing and sales group.
Rob: You totally should. That’s a growth market, man.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: Is it legal in Massachusetts?
Mike: It is. Although I don’t think anybody’s licensed to actually sell it yet, that happened two years ago, they said, “Yes, this is now legal in Massachusetts for recreational use.” but they still had to go through all these regulatory hurdles, and people had to get certified, and all these other stuff. They’re like, “Yes, you can use it recreationally, but nobody can sell it to you.” that was the situation for a couple of years, I think that they’re supposedly sometime this summer, starting to do that but I don’t know. Maybe the deadline has already passed. I don’t know.
Rob: Because I was back in California, I think it was when I was at SaaStr, so it was probably, February or March of this year, and it’s legal there. It’s been medically legal for years, so they already have the dispensaries, and they legalized it. I think it was maybe, less than a year later, they were allowed to sell it for recreational use.
I was walking around at night with some friends from the conference, co-workers, there was a lot of pot smoke that you could smell, and it was like, “Oh, yeah.” Of course, I was looking around like, “Oh man, they can’t be doing that, right?” it’s just this sense you get when you smell that. But it’s like, “No, no. It’s just legal, and you can do it on the corner.” It’s such a trip, such a trip. It’s going to be weird to get used to. The way it’s going, it’s going to be legal in all 50 States, eventually. It’ll be an interesting thing to adjust to.
Mike: Yeah. Definitely can be interesting. I just found it funny that they’re like, “Oh, you should join this group.”
Rob: Totally. They know who you are, Mike, deep down.
Mike: I guess, maybe. I don’t know. How about you?
Rob: I’ve been doing some smart home stuff which is something I’ve been interested in for years. But since we had a rental for the past couple of years, obviously, I wasn’t going to put a bunch of stuff in a rental. I now have several Alexas—oops, I just activated.
Mike: We should leave this in. This is good radio.
Rob: Yeah, I have several Echos in the house. I need to, not say A-L-E-X-A. I’m enjoying them. I’m enjoying that you can use them as intercoms because our house has a lot of stairs. There’s three or four stories—depending on how you count.
Mike: I found out about that the other day that you could use it as an intercom. I didn’t know that you could do that. You can just drop into some other room in the house. Although I was told there’s a—not a security loophole or something like that—but something associated with it where you have to disable it by default. Otherwise, if somebody in your contact list, they know you have one, they can drop into your living room and just talk to you through the intercom, I think over the internet, and I didn’t know that.
Rob: Oh, interesting.
Mike: Yeah. It doesn’t sound good.
Rob: Yeah. I enjoyed doing it most from the Echo app on my phone. You can just click a couple of times, and then boom, you’re just speaking out of one of the Amazon Echos. Our kids’ playroom is way downstairs, and it’s easier than running down and telling them dinner is ready. It’s pretty nice.
I’ve definitely bought into the Echo ecosystem, and I like their direction that’s going. I got a Nest for the first time. I tried installing Nest at our old house, but it wasn’t compatible. I have a Nest here, and I can now control that of course with the app, and it’s smart thermostat, and that’s fun. You can even tell the Echo to adjust the temperature, I believe. I haven’t activated that yet.
We moved into this house, it’s in the Midwest, it was built right around 2000, and they wired the whole thing for in-home speakers. There’s speakers in almost every room. There’s this big central places where he had a receiver, a tuner, CD player, and all this stuff. I’m thinking, in the 90s, that’s what I would have done. When in college, I would love big speakers from dorm room to dorm room, as I moved around or apartment to apartment, and you had your receiver, you had your amp and all that stuff.
Now I went online, and I was like, “There’s got to be an easier way here. I want to be able to stream everything.” I researched it, and of course, Sonos is the leader in that space. While I don’t love how proprietary Sonos is, even down to the fact that I can’t just stream from Spotify through my Sonos but I believe that you have to use the Sonos app, and you […] it into your Spotify account like, “I don’t want to use the Sonos app.”
Mike: Oh, geez.
Rob: I know. I know. I need to double-check that because they may have opened it up, but last time I looked, you weren’t able to kind of just airplay it–the equivalent of that through the Sonos thing. But anyway, they have this thing called, Sonos Connect: Amp. The Amp part means it has an amp in it that you can connect to speakers. I just got one, just as an experiment. I put in on the first floor, and sure enough, it takes the place of all of this equipment he had, the speaker wires go in the back, and there’s volume knobs on every wall in the house.
I was going to bail on it altogether and just not do it. But Sherri’s like, “No, no, no. If we have people over, there’d be multiple…” because you can do multiple floors, and there’s all this stuff. All that to say, I reluctantly implemented Sonos in this smart home thing, but man, it’s cool. You can tell your Echo to start this on Spotify on the Sonos, and it will do it, and you go to the wall and turn it up. It’s magical, man. It’s pretty interesting. It feels like we’re living in the future.
Mike: That’s pretty cool. I bought a new amplifier maybe two or three years ago because my old one was 12, 15 years old. Actually, it was more than that. It’s probably close to 20. It still works great. It’s just that it didn’t have any of the connections. It didn’t have an HDMI connection. It still had all the component outputs or inputs and everything else. I couldn’t hook it up to any new equipment that I had, like a Blu-ray player and stuff like that. I was like, “Alright, fine.” I brought it down, and I bought a new amp.
I was looking at all the different options, and it seemed to me like a lot of that type of equipment, is very much like car technology where they’ll build something into it like Spotify or something like that, and it’s obsolete almost the second you buy it. They’re terribly useful. It sucks that it feels like that type of technology is still on that trend, where everything is proprietary, and it’s so hard to connect stuff, and it’s expensive too, but at the same time, it doesn’t really wear out. I still got speakers that were almost 20 years old, and they’re still in great working condition. I don’t really have any need to buy new ones, except for the fact that if something breaks. That’s it.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. I agree. I was concerned when I bought this Sonos. I had to research it because I was, “Do they even support speaker outputs anymore? There’s exterior speakers in the patios, is it going to drive those? Is it going to connect to all the stuff?” Sure enough on the back, it looked like it had the right ports and it wound up doing it. They’re called banana clips.
I agree. Trying to interface this newfangled technology with stuff that has existed for 30, 40 years, maybe even longer. I remember twisting speaker wires together. I had four speakers in my dorm room. Certainly, it was quadraphonic, it was a stereo, but I would twist them together, ran them into the amp, and do all the stuff, and that technology is now having to interface with, like you said, this Spotify stuff.
I did evaluate not doing Sonos. There are, obviously, other brands that have streaming music devices that have amps built-in, but they just all seem, like you said, bolted on, and antiquated. I don’t know. It’s interesting to see how this is going to shake out. I’m interested to see how it’s going to shake out over the next few years.
Obviously, I’m investing in ecosystems now. I’ve been on the Alexa ecosystem now. I’m in obviously now, on the Sonos a little bit. I think I’m probably going to have to get at least one more […] perhaps too because there’s different zones and stuff. But I’m trying to pick market leaders because I don’t want to buy the Betamax, and suddenly have to bail on it because they just killed the line or whatever.
Mike: Well, that just means you’ll have to find the one that is selling porn with it, that will be the winner.
Rob: I do think, I might need to stand corrected because I opened Spotify while we were talking, and it does look like I can just connect to the Sonos downstairs, and just stream it through there instead of using their app. I’ll test that later to prove it out. I know for a while they didn’t do that. But if it does it now, they must have added it in the past whatever, six months or something.
Mike: It seems to me, for that type of technology, anything that comes to streaming, you just want something where you can connect to it with Bluetooth or something like that, or with even just a cable, and then from there, it just acts as a dummy piece of equipment that just does its thing, and that’s its sole purpose is, and then you plug other stuff into it. It seems most people would really just want to do that.
My wife used to work at an electronic house, and they had all these high-end stereo systems going up to $100,000-$150,000. Don’t get wrong, they were beautiful, but the reality is you’re going to spend that much money on a stereo system for some downstairs place. Their target market was people who had nothing better to do with their money. Sure, that makes sense, but I think for the average user, it doesn’t matter that much.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing. Like you sad, I wouldn’t want to use a cable because the Sonos is in a cabinet set away but Bluetooth or I believe it’s just via wifi because it connects to wifi obviously, and it had its own identity. Once I […] it connects over that. I’m not Bluetooth-connected to Sonos at all. The phone just know where it is.
Mike: Yeah.
Rob: With that, should we do a whole episode?
Mike: We could talk about all the different problems of those too. There was some kid’s device that was out there that connected into the WiFi, but it also would record pretty much anything, and it would send it back to the servers to the company that made it, it wasn’t encrypted, and it was using it to do voice recognition. They were basically collecting voice data from kids. It was like, “Oh boy. That’s not good,” and it’s all not encrypted either. That’s a big problem.
Rob: Yeah. That’s the thing too. The IoT is the term for this—Internet of Things. Everything is going to be on the internet at some point, is what they’re saying. The IoT devices are much like the Nest and the Sonos and even smart toasters, smart microwaves, smart fridges, and all the stuff that’s supposed to be coming.
That stuff is said to be a hacker’s dream. Most of it, it’s super insecure. Some of it, if it doesn’t get patched, then it’s easy to hack. Even a lot of it that is patched is easy to hack into. They’re saying that’s the coming wave of hacks. That’s going to be the zombie nets of the future. Because that’s how folks do DDoSes—they go out, and they take control of a bunch of old PCs that are unpatched, and then they do attacks, distributed denial-of-service, from all those things. They’re saying that the Internet of Things is going to be tenfold or a hundredfold the number of devices. It’s going to have that much power.
Mike: Yeah. I shudder for people who have to deal with those types of problems.
Rob: Seriously, yup. Cool. Let’s dive in. We have some listener questions. We have some comments on some prior episodes. Our first comment is on episode 403 which was titled, Should You Love What You’re Working On? and it’s from Martin. He just came to startupsfortherestofus.com and entered a comment at the bottom of episode 403’s blog post.
He said, “Hi, Rob and Mike. Thanks for another great episode. When you guys talked about love versus opportunity, I was reminded of the idea that it can take hard work to cultivate a passion. If I remember correctly, Cal Newport talks about this idea in one of his books. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve noticed that there are a lot of things where you need to put in the work first before you start to enjoy them. I’m currently working as a software consultant, and I remembered that the reason I picked up programming in the first place was because as a kid, I was into video games. Now many years later, I really enjoyed developing software, often more than playing games. I think that’s true of many things. For example, when you’re just starting with any kind of sport, and you suck at it, it’s often not that great, but once you put some effort into it and you start to improve, you suddenly get why people enjoyed doing it.”
I think Martin has a good point. Thanks for posting, Martin. This is how I felt about playing music–playing the guitar. When I first started it, it was really hard, and then definitely the better I got, the more I wanted to play my guitar. What do you think about this?
Mike: I remember reading about this. I think that Josh Kaufman wrote a book about learning different things. I’m pretty sure he had a graph in there that showed that. There’s a skill level versus enjoyment. When you first start doing something new, you suck at it which is to be expected, but you don’t enjoy it at all. Then once you get a little skilled at it, then you really start to enjoy it because you feel you know what you’re doing, so you’re on the cusp of always learning this new stuff, but you’re also enjoying the journey. Once you get much more advanced, then it’s about putting the time and effort to practice, and get the muscle memory or the mental connections made so you don’t have to really think about it when you’re doing it. Pretty sure it was Josh’s book that—I can’t remember the name of the book off the top of my head—but I think that that was in there.
Rob: It’s called The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast.
Mike: Yes, that was it. Yup. It’s a fascinating read, too. If you are interested in learning new things and the process of learning new things, I’d definitely recommend picking up that book and checking it out. He goes through several different things that he learned, like the ukulele, sailboarding, and a couple of other things. It’s just fascinating how he learned about how to learn stuff.
I always had a problem with that when I was in college. When I got to college, I just authorized, “Go ahead,” relied on my natural ability to just remember things, pay attention in class, and then do well on tests. When I get to college, you have to do the homework. That was always a problem for me in college, but it worked itself out eventually, but it took years for that to happen.
Rob: Yup. For sure, I felt the same thing. The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman. It’s also on audible which is I believe how I read that book. Thanks for the comment, Martin. Our first question of the day is from Michael Needle. He’s from alltheguides.com. He says, “Mike and Rob, first, thanks for all you do. I previously called in about building a marketplace, alltheguides.com, to connect adventure travelers and guides. I’m close to finishing the platform, and I took your advice on building one segment first. I went with guides to have providers ready when clients come,” which is the way I believe we should have recommended that you do. It’s a two-sided marketplace, and we said when you start with two-side marketplace you have to get that one side done first.
Now back to his email. “Now ahead of the platform launch, I want to make sure I can bring the clients to the site, the customers, the consumers. I thought I’d follow your advice by starting an informative blog in order to get emails.” Adventure Travel Ideas, I think is the idea of the blog. Here’s the question. “I already have a landing page up from my platform. I assume it would be better to have the lead gen on a different domain as opposed to a subdomain. I just assume that subdomains will be less likely to draw initial visitors. Am I wrong on this? Or if I’m right, and I should go with a different domain, what is the best way to nudge my list towards the platform once it’s launched? Thanks again, guys. You provide invaluable advice and inspiration.” What do you think, Mike?
Mike: I think there’s a natural inclination to believe that you should put your landing page and stuff like that on some sort of a subdomain and that’s how you’re driving traffic to them. But the reality is, I think is that if you’re doing tour guides in a marketplace like this, I don’t think people necessarily really care about the subdomain. I think what really comes into it with the subdomain is that you’re trying to establish new website according to Google, and do all the SEO, and the site ranking, and get that up based on how Google looks at it.
You could instead focus that energy on a subdirectory in your main domain and use that to essentially focus your efforts and increase the authority of that domain versus trying to do it with one subdomain and then another— that’s probably the approach that I would go with. I guess there’s a few different examples I would point to like Craigslist, Angie’s List, and Reddit. Reddit’s got all those different subReddits and stuff in it, but they’re all under, most of them in different subdirectories.
Rob: The reddits? Yup. It’s reddit.com/r/whatever, /startups or whatever.
Mike: Right and that’s not necessarily a two-sided market, but Craiglist is. Based on the location, they will have subdirectories, which are a geographic location, but I wouldn’t worry too much about the subdirectories, at the moment. I guess I’m curious to know whether or not you’re trying to use those subdomains as like the location, like city name, or something like that. Maybe it would make more sense in that case, but at the same time, you could also just use it like it as a different subdirectory as well, and you’ll benefit, for the site authority, through that.
Rob: That’s the thing, and now Google has come out and said, “Oh, subdomain, subdirectory, there’s no difference.” I still think there’s some difference. I still believe, deep down, that subdirectory is better for SEO. I do like your point there. I think if you are going to start a blog, I would try to do it in subdomain, if possible. It’s not always possible to do that. You might need to do reverse-proxy and do some things if you’re running WordPress because you don’t tend to want to run WordPress on a production app server. When I say don’t tend to want to, I mean don’t do it. There’s just too many security holes.
If you want to host it somewhere, I’d go with somebody like the VPNGINE or Pagely or whatever. I think I may have misspoken earlier and said subdomain, but what I mean was subdirectory, if you can do a subdirectory, that’s what I would do.
I don’t think this matters actually, that much. When using a different domain for the lead gen, I would probably lean towards subdirectory, and if you need to use a subdomain, I don’t know—its just apples and oranges, this is small stuff. If you’re going to drive ads to it, it doesn’t matter, nobody cares, they’ll just click on the ad, and they’d go see it. If you’re going to try for SEO then like Mike and I were saying, I would lean towards subdirectory, if possible, I think it’s pretty clean, but in all cases, I don’t know that it matters that much.
Mike: Yeah. The one really nice thing about having everything underneath the same domains—and you’re not dealing with subdomains—is redirecting people back and forth, and then also dealing with the fact that, like any tracking analytics where you’re trying to track like, “Did somebody hit this subdomain and then this other subdomain?” and then you got cookies back and forth between them. With marketing tools, it becomes an absolute nightmare.
You’re much better off just having it all on one domain and then you don’t have to worry about that because the cookies are going to be able to work all on that domain between different directories, versus, like a Google Analytics tracking code. Something as simple as that is going to be an absolute nightmare to work across multiple domains.
Rob: Yeah, and it’s possible, you just got to know how to do it. It’s not out-of-the-box trivial. Sharing cookies is a pain, and then you’ll get the, “Hey, this person came from one of your domains to the other, and they show up as a new visitor.” It’s not ideal. Anyway, I hope that helps.
Our next question is from long-time listeners and friends of ours. Folks that we’ve known that have come to MicroConfs–Dan Taylor and Simon Payne. Dan Taylor runs appsevents.com, which is an events company that runs more than 300 annuals events. Simon Payne was the co-founder of Lead Pages. They both live in Prague, actually, in Czech Republic. Simon was working on an app with Dan Taylor, and Simon has also launched a WordPress button called Convert Player. That’s pretty cool.
Anyway, they wrote in. They said, “Hi, Rob and Mike. Two long-time listeners here, Dan and Simon. We’ve developed and released a SaaS app called EventsFrame. It’s eventsframe.com. It’s ticketing and attendee management system, with fixed low monthly pricing for unlimited events and unlimited attendees. We’ve moved all of my company, AppsEvents more than 300 annual events to this, and done a full public launch last month. We already have paid sign-ups from our listings on sites like Capterra, some content marketing, and some basic Facebook ads, which have converted this in paying customers, which is a good sign. We’re doing an AppSumo launch in a couple of weeks to get a bunch of users on this system, which is taking a lot of our focus, but we’re planning for how we grow this long-term, as Simon and I are focusing all our time on this project.”
“Our question is on pricing. As you know, systems like Eventbrite take a percentage of ticket price, and most systems follow a similar model. With AppsEvents, I was spending thousands of dollars a year on Eventbrite fees. We want to go for a fixed price for unlimited events and attendees. Our initial idea is $97 a month. Now the issue with this is that people running one several small events might prefer a percentage of ticket price, as there is no upfront cost. And on the other end, large event producers would pay a lot more than $97 a month,” or I think he’s saying they should pay a lot more than that cost they’re getting more value. “We guess some pricing tiers could be good. But any ideas to help with our process would be greatly appreciated. All the best, Dan and Simon.” What do you think?
Mike: This is something that I actually looked into pretty heavily and struggled with several years ago. Back when I was running AuditShark, one of the ideas that I had come up with was, ironically, Bluetick, because I was doing a lot of outreach to people and I just needed to follow-up with them and keep on them. But also, as a side note, I was also helping out on the sponsorships side for MicroConf. For that particular problem, I found that I had to do the same thing.
I said, “Oh if I had this product or tool in place that would allow me to do that outreach as an event organizer that would help me out a lot.” I looked around. A bunch of different things didn’t really work very well for what my use case was. I said, “Well, could I build this? Is this something that I could basically move away from AuditShark?” because at the time, it wasn’t really on the best path, and I recognized that at the time.
Anyway, I looked into specifics of whether or not I could target event organizers with that. What I realized was that there’s a wide range of types of event organizers. Some of them, that’s all they do, they organize events like the AppsEvents company. They will organize hundreds of events every single year, and then there’s ones like MicroConf where we do it a couple of times a year, and that’s it.
For ones like that, a monthly pricing model really doesn’t work well because of the fact that you’re only running a couple of events. If you’re doing it on a regular basis, sure, it makes a lot more sense. But as you pointed out, it makes a lot more sense to just do with a percentage of the ticket price for those types of customers.
The other thing I would look at is, Eventbrite, yes, they do charge a percentage of the ticket, but they also give the event organizers the ability to pass that cost onto the attendees. That’s actually what we do with MicroConf. It’s only a couple of percent, but at the same time, it raises the ticket price by that amount. The question you have to ask is, “Well, as the event organizer, is that something that’s going to turn away people? Are they going to, not buy a ticket because they have to pay that extra fee?” That’s again, for the event coordinator to decide. But your problem is, how are you charging?
For us, Eventbrite is I’ll say, “free” and that we’re passing those cost on, and then on the other side, we’re paying the cost of the payment processing, which we would have to pay, regardless. Whether Eventbrite handles it or we do it through PayPal or Stripe or whoever, that fee has to be paid. But our payment to Eventbrite is basically, covered by the attendees buying those tickets, which make it free for us, which makes it a lot more attractive than a $97 a month plan or even a $50 a month plan. Coupled with the fact that, we also don’t run more than a couple of events a year. Why should we be paying for that over the course of the entire year if we’re only running events in a certain time window, I’ll say?
That’s exactly the problem that I ran into when I was trying to identify, “Well, how can I build this email follow-up product aimed at event organizers?” Event organizers, if they run a lot of events, awesome. They’re a good target. But if they don’t, then having them pay a monthly fee is not going to work.
Rob: Yeah. Basically, what Dan and Simon are talking about doing is doing pricing innovation in the events space. While I think it certainly saved Dan money from a customer perspective—he was paying Eventbrite thousands a year—I’m not sure it makes sense to do this from a business perspective.
There’s a reason that most of these events software companies charge the way they do. The reason, as you’ve laid it out, if your event is free, you don’t pay EventBrite anything. If you only sell 20 tickets, and they’re $5 each, then I believe you pay Eventbrite 2.5% of that. If they do the processing, they charge you 3% fee, payment processing fee or we use PayPal, and obviously, it’s whatever it is, 2.9% or 3% there.
Or, if you sell $100,000 worth of tickets in a year, then yeah, you do pay $2500, so I get the […] Eventbrite. It makes sense from a customer perspective of being like, “Man, I’m paying EventBrite so much money,” but now that you’re on the other side of it, and you’re running a business, my thought is like, “Yes, that’s how you want it. You want it so that the people who are getting a little bit of value out of this system aren’t paying that much for it and it scales up perfectly linearly with how they do it.”
If you sell $100,000 for the tickets, you’re probably making a chunk of money. We can argue about whether $2500 is too much money, but you definitely are getting quite a bit of value out of the system if you’re selling $100,000 worth.
Trying to do pricing innovation is a challenge. Is it business model canvas? That something that if you read that book, do you remember the book?
Mike: Yeah, I remember it. There was a whole worksheet that went with it.
Rob: Yup and that talks a lot about trying to do pricing innovation. I don’t know if it has practical enough tips to help you sort this out. But I will say that I tried to innovate on pricing in the early days of Drip, and instead of doing per subscriber just like MailChimp and everybody else is doing, I tried to do new subscribers per month, and it was a bad idea. Not only did they confuse people, but as we started to scale up, we were not growing nearly as fast as we should have.
That’s the thing that you’re going to run into is you’re going to have people who come and are selling half a million dollars’ worth of tickets on your system and they’re going to be paying $97 or even if you do tiers, it’s not going to be that much. They’re not going to be paying you 2.5% of $500,000.
I think since people are used to this, and it is a lucrative model. If anything, you could try to be the low-cost provider which I don’t think is a terrible idea in this space. I don’t know enough about the whole space. I know that EventBrite, yes, it does feel expensive to a lot of people, and it’s clunky, so you have those two things. They have a ton of features, but they’re a little more expensive than everybody wants them to be, and they’re arguably quite a bit harder to use, although they have a lot of features.
This is like going after a QuickBooks or InfusionSoft or Marketo—kind of going after that. If you make your software infinitely usable and slightly less expensive, but you still keep the same model, maybe only try 2.5%, I don’t know. I know you have other bootstrap competitors around you, look at what they’re doing. That’s probably where I would start is doing just a big survey of all the pricing structures of all the events SaaS apps, and mapping that out on a big sheet of paper or mind map or something, and trying to think that through.
I think in the end, you are going to want to be a percentage of revenue is my guess, because otherwise, you’re going to constantly have this problem. Try to think if there’s any way around it with tiers, try to think creatively. It’s like you could have a free tier or you can’t charge for events, and then you could have your $50 a month tier where you go to a certain amount of ticket sales. In essence, you’re taking a percentage, but you’re not, you’re just having tiers of it. That would maybe be the only other thing that I would consider. But man, just taking 1.5%, 2.5%, it’s so clean. It makes your pricing look so clean. It’s simple, and everybody understands that.
Mike: I think the problem that you just alluded to is that, depending on the size of the event that you’re dealing with, if it’s 5 or 10 people, you might have one price tier, and then if it’s 50, you could have another. Whether or not you deal with those, like what’s the price point of those? If it’s $25,000, but they only allow five people in it, is it a free account? Depending on the value that you’re providing to them, that’s really what you’re pricing should be based on.
I think you almost get into this territory of, you have an unlimited number of pricing tiers because how high could those ticket prices go or what is it that you actually basing it on? Is it the number of attendees or is it ticket price? Or is it a combination of the two? Once you get into that territory, it gets overly complicated, and people don’t want to deal with it because they’re like, “This pricing model is too confusing for me. I feel like I’m going to get screwed, so I’m going with the competitor because I understand it.”
Rob: Thanks for the question, Dan and Simon. I hope that was helpful and I definitely wish you guys the best of luck with EventsFrame.
Our next question is from Alex, and he says, “Hi again. Thanks for all the great content. I feel like I’m in a bit of a dilemma. I have an idea that I would like to turn into a business. It’s for a job site. I have the requirements, more or less hammered out to the point I can have a developer build it. I’ve recently been in the process of getting quotes from various companies, and freelancers to build it but I’m hesitant to make this jump. Aside from the inherent risk of it just failing, I’m concerned I will spend all my money on the MVP then quickly run out of money to fund any iterations on the site. I don’t know anyone willing to help me build this for free, and I also don’t know the first thing about raising money or how to prepare for that. I guess my question is, how would you approach building an MVP in the most affordable way?”
One thing I’ll throw out before you dive in Mike is, you’ll not be able to raise money, maybe from family and friends, but you’re not going to be able to raise money without a working app these days. It’s just kind of table stakes. Although he asked us, “How would you approach building an MVP is the most affordable way?” I don’t know that’s a question we should answer. I think the question we should answer is, how do you validate this more before building an MVP. Would you agree?
Mike: Yeah, I would agree. That’s the next step is like, what is the MVP? What question are you trying to answer? The question I think you’re trying to answer is, “How do I know if I should dump this money into this type of product?” I think the answer to that is the same thing that I did with Bluetick. Go to balsamiq.com, and buy a copy of Balsamiq for $80, and mock everything up. Then go try, and sell that to people, and see if people are actually interested in buying what it is that you have.
That will do a couple of different things for you. One is, it will help you find the types of people that you need to talk to, and the second thing it will do is, it’ll give you enough information to say like, “Is this something that people would actually pay for?” and that’s the answer to your question is, if you can get enough people and find the market for it and tap into a channel of people to talk to, to get them excited about it, and find out if they’re going to pay for it, then sure, go for it.
But if you can’t get past that part, if you can’t find the people to talk to, it’s never going to work. You’re just not going to be able to turn it into a working product, regardless whether you have code written or not. That’s not the problem. The problem is trying to find those customers and make sure they are willing to pay for it. There’s obvious concerns here about, Alex’s voice about, “I’m concerned about making the jump because of the risk of it failing,” and that’s how you make sure that it’s not going to fail.
Rob: Yup, I would agree with that. I think the question you need to ask yourself is, “How can you validate this before dumping a bunch of money into it and doing as much of that as possible?” Sometimes, an MVP is not even software. We’ve talked about this in the past. An MVP might be you with an Excel spreadsheet or a Google spreadsheet. It might be you manually writing things, taking in a list of keyword someone gives you, manually running an algorithm on them in Excel, and then giving back the keywords they’re most likely to rank for. That is basically what I would have done if I had built an MVP for HitTail, as an example, or any keyword tool.
There are ways to do it without needing to hire anyone to write a line of code. My second book, which is a collection of essays, is called Start Marketing The Day You Start Coding, but now, I think it’s Start Marketing Or At Least Validating Well Before You Start Coding. With Drip, I had 11 people who said that they would pay $99 a month for what we were going to build before we broke ground on code. I wanted 10, happened to get 11, then Derrick started writing code.
I know for Bluetick you got pre-orders. There is a lot of hustle that can happen up front. It’s hard work. This is the stuff that, “Well, is anyone going to trust me? Who am I? Is anyone going to trust me if I don’t have the software after the software ?” No, that’s an excuse. Yes, it would be better if you had all the software, and could just start marketing it. But that’s not the case.
I think your concern is valid, that going out and building an MVP, it’s very, very unlikely that’s going to have product fit, so you’re going to have to iterate. If you don’t have the money or the time or the skills to iterate on that, then you need to figure out how to get to the point where you feel more confident.
Here’s the thing. If you try to recruit a developer to build it for free—we’ve talked about this in the past—nope, no developer is going to want to do that. If you go to a developer and you say, “Hey, I built all these mockups, I have 25 phone calls, and I got 10 pre-orders, they paid for a quarter, three months of service, and they’ve all committed to—assuming it works and does what I say—it’s going to be $50 or $100 a month after that, boom, we’re going to be at $1000 MRR,” yes, that’s a lot of hustle, and it’s a lot of work, but that’s how you recruit a co-founder or at least a developer who is willing to build it maybe for an equity share or something like that.
I like the way you’re thinking about it. I’m glad you’re hesitant to just dive into the MVP, but I don’t think you should look at building an MVP as software in the most affordable way. I think you should look at, not automating them, doing stuff manually, and think of, “How can I possibly validate this?” The first step is going to be customer conversations, then it’s going to be trying to get pre-orders, then it’s going to be doing it manually until the software’s built, then it’s building a crappy software MVP, and then it’s doing a better job. I bet there’s a lot of steps between where you are today and basically, paying someone to build a complete SaaS app.
Mike: I think part of it just stems from the classic misunderstanding of what an MVP is because MVP has the word Product in it, and that’s not really what it means. I talked about this in my book, Single Founder Handbook, and I quote Wikipedia from […]. It says, “An MVP is not a minimal product. It is a strategy and process directed toward making and selling a product to customers.” What you have to understand there is that it explicitly calls out an MVP as a process, not as a product. Building a product is not your MVP; answering a question is what your MVP is. The first thing that you have to start with is, “What is my question?” and here it’s, “How do I know that I need to pay people to develop software?” It’s all the stuff before that that Rob just talked about, like talk to customers, find out what they really want, and whether they’re going to pay for it, that’s all the stuff that you need to do..
Thanks for the question, Alex. I hope that was really helpful. I think that about wraps us up for the day. If you have a question for us, you can email it to questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, or you can send us a voicemail by calling 1-888-801-9690. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups, and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 406 | Should Bootstrappers Raise Money?
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike answer the question of should bootstrappers raise money? The guys distinguish the difference between venture capital and angel investing and how raising an angel round may be a good fit for some types of entrepreneurs.
Items mentioned in this episode:
Mike: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and I are going to be talking about whether bootstrapper should raise money or not. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 406.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Rob?
Rob: We have new iTunes reviews.
Mike: Oh, cool. What do we got?
Rob: This one from Find Fitness Pros. It says, “This is my go-to podcast every Tuesday morning. Rob and Mike continue to give their insights, not just info on exactly what to do,” and from Nathan Bell, he says, “Great information. I listened to one episode and I’m hooked. It was full of great information I can easily implement. Some of the info was a little bit advanced for me currently, but I’m confident that by selectively listening to more, I will pick up more.”
Those are a couple of new iTunes reviews that we have. I used to keep a worldwide tally of it using CommentCast and when I moved to my new computer, I don’t have the .exe or what is it called, it’s a .app I guess in Mac. I don’t have the executable anymore and you can’t download it anywhere. So I moved over to mypodcastreviews.com but it only gives me reviews, not ratings. We’re up to almost 600 worldwide ratings, I believe. People don’t necessarily need to write sentences or whatever, but I don’t have that tally anymore. Certainly, we’re above 600 at this point.
Now, what I have is I have 347 worldwide reviews and that’s a lesser number. I want to get back to the world’s rating. I think the guy at My Podcast Reviews says that they are going to add ratings but neither here nor there, the more reviews or ratings we get, the more likely people find the show, the more motivation it gives us. If you feel like we’ve given you some value as a listener to the show, it would be awesome if you can open iTunes or Stitcher and just give us a five-star review. Really appreciate it.
Mike: The solution to not having that app that gives you the numbers is just make up a number. So we’re at 3000 reviews I think.
Rob: That’s right. 3422 reviews. That’s great. How about you, man? What’s going on this week?
Mike: Well, this morning, I published a public API for Bluetick. Of course, I say it’s a public API but there’s actually only one person who actually knows about it.
Rob: It’s in beta?
Mike: Yeah, basically.
Rob: Early access, good.
Mike: I had a prospect who wanted to sign on and they’re like, “Yeah, I really need to have a public API that is available for me and Zapier wasn’t going to work for them. Basically as I said, I spun it out because I heard from a bunch of customers that I currently have, and I started talking to them about, “What is it that you need?” and trying to figure out what’s the minimum that I could build that this particular prospect or customer would need to get started. They only needed four things. Build those, put them into it, and then there’s all the infrastructure changes that needed to go into it.
It took a week-and-a-half just to do the infrastructure changes but now the best stuff if all taken cared of. I got that published out there and waiting for them to start using it, and then figure out what needs to change. I already made it very clear upfront, like, “Hey, here are some things that I know we’re going to change, and then over here, based on what you tell me, other things could change, so treat this as an absolute beta. Eventually at some point it will become stable, I guess, and then I’ll start pushing it live to everybody.
Rob: That’s nice. It’s nice to do. You’re basically doing customer development on what is its own little product. You can say it’s a feature but really some entire products are just APIs. You want to get it right from the start, and by start, I mean by the time you publish and people start hooking into it, you can’t change it at that point. I think it’s really good to take this approach of roll it out slowly, roll out one endpoint at a time and really think through how you want to structure it.
I was just on your site trying to guess the URL. I was going to just type in a bunch of stuff so you’re going to see a bunch of 404s in your error logs. Not a hacker, it was me, but I didn’t find it alas.
Mike: No, that sucks. I would tell you if you asked for the right price. Other than that, I also got my first fraudulent charge from Bluetick. It took a lot longer than I expected it to but somebody signed up, then they logged in, and absolutely they didn’t pay any attention to the onboarding emails. Come time when their trial is up, they got charged, and then I forget how long it was later. I was maybe probably three or four days later, I got a notification from Stripe saying, “Hey this charge looks fraudulent,” and I looked at it. I think it’s a debit card too and I was like, “Oh great.” Three hours later though like, “Oh you’ve had a chargeback.” I was like, “Wait, I didn’t even get a chance to decide that to do with this potentially fraudulent charge,” and they already converted it into a chargeback, which cost me an extra $15. Well that sucks, but, oh well.
Rob: Was it a person not using or was it a stolen credit card? Is that what you think? Or do you think that they just went in with the intention that it was their own credit card and they just intended at the whole time?
Mike: I’m not sure. It looks legit. The email address, I couldn’t quite tell whether it was real. I think it was a Gmail email address. I couldn’t really trace it back to a company or anything like that but the name on it seem to match what the email address was. I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure but I think it was from a real estate company or something like that. All right, well, whatever.
Rob: Yeah, that sucks. It’s going to happen. It’s definitely a milestone you don’t want to hit but you’re going to hit it eventually.
Mike: Yup. Certainly not a milestone to celebrate but I definitely hit it.
Rob: Yeah, exactly. Cool. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Today, I thought we would have a discussion about whether or not bootstrapper should be raising money. I guess by definition if you’re raising money, are you no longer a bootstrapper at that point? I think there’s maybe a time during which you are bootstrapping a company and self-funding it. I almost called it self-funding, like should people who are self-funding raise money, but again that would go against it.
The idea came because I saw Justin Jackson had tweeted out a link to an article he wrote over on Indie Hackers called The Bootstrapper’s Paradox. In that article, he shows a graph or what they’re doing for transistor.fm, which is the new startup that he’s working on. Basically it shows a graph of over the course of 60 months was 10% exponential growth and 5% turn. The MRR will get to $21,000. But 60 months is five years of time.
I thought it would be interesting to just have a conversation about this because when I was reading through the tweet that he had put out, there were a bunch of people who chimed in on it, mostly people who were listening to the show would have heard of like Des Traynor, Jason Collin, and Natalie Nagel. They’re giving their thoughts on this stuff and I just thought it would be interesting to talk about it.
Rob: Yeah, that’s for sure. 10% growth every month sounds like an impressive number but when the number starts very small, like $1000 a month, that means you’re growing $100 MRR a month. You just can’t do that early days or if you do, it’s going to take five years. You either need to figure out a way to grow faster or you need to be really patient.
This is a struggle. It’s funny that, Justin called it The Bootstrapper’s Paradox. I don’t know that it’s that as much as this is the reason people raise funding. We know people who are just bootstrapper through and through, you should never raise funding and 37signals used to say that and even mentions it that DHH and Jason Fried took funding from Jeff Bezos two years after launching Basecamp. It wasn’t even funding that went into the company. They took money off the table. If I recall, I think that number is public. I think it’s $10 million that he invested, was my memory and maybe I don’t think I’m making that up. It’s either rumored at that or it was announced.
They had essentially at that point had FU money and it’s really easy to make different decisions or just say, “Hey, we’re going to grow as slow or as fast as we need,” when you have that kind of money in your personal bank account and you’re just running this business day-to-day.
Justin’s article is a bootstrapper’s realization of “Oh Sh*t.” This is why people do raise money. It’s coming to that realization at this point and I think it’s a good thing to call out for sure. I’ve been thinking about this so much so I’m looking forward to today’s episode because in my Microconf talk this year, I talked about things that I learned bootstrapping and then self-funding and then in a venture back company after Leadpages acquired us.
In the last five to seven minutes I did just a little snippet about fundstrapping, which is this term that Colin from customer.io coined, where you’re kind of in-between. You bootstrapped a little bit and you raised a small round. I say it’s between 200,000 and 500,000 and you raise it with the intention of getting to profitability. Without, you’re never going to raise institutional money, or raise it from friends or families or angels, so you don’t give up control, you don’t give up a board seat, you really have the benefits of funding without the institutional chaos of it, the headache.
It wasn’t a throwaway piece but I almost didn’t include it in the talk. That piece has gotten me more emails, more comments, more thoughts, more people came up to me, ask me what that’s like, asked if I would invest or find new people who were doing fundstrapping. It’s just fascinating response to this, this thing that’s been percolating. It’s a long rant on it to start but I just think this is becoming more and more of a viable option and potentially even a necessity as the SaaS market gets more and more crowded.
Mike: Yeah. That’s the part that I think has changed over time, where five or 10 years ago, you could come out with a SaaS and you’d launch it to the public and you would start to grow by virtually the fact that there was nobody else out there or there were very few competitors out there doing what you were doing. Now if you launch anything, you probably got a couple of competitors just right out of the gate. If you don’t, then you probably don’t have a product that’s going to go anywhere. But if you have any competition, it’s probably substantially more competition today than you would’ve had five years ago or 10 years ago. Just by virtue of having launched five or 10 years ago, you were going to be more successful quicker than you would if you did the exact same thing now. It’s going to take longer, which means that you’re going to burn through more runway and it’s just going to be harder.
Rob: Right. Now, five or 10 years ago, there was less competition but the expenses would have been higher, 10 years ago especially because you literally needed a rack server. There was no Amazon EC2. In addition, there was still like when Basecamp first launched on their homepage, they were like, “You don’t have to install any software. No downloads needed.” They were still educating on just the concept of being in the cloud and there were hurdles there.
Mike: That was almost 15 years ago.
Rob: Yeah, that’s true. No, you’re right. That was 2005 or 2006? You’re right, 12 or 13. You’re right. But even with that, say 10 years ago, even with that, it’s still I believe was easier back then. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start something today. It just means you got to house some more, you got to pick a better niche, you got to have more skills, or you need a little more money in the bank.
Whether that means you raise it yourself out of consulting efforts, which is what I did, or if there’s definitely more money being thrown around as funding these days that is, I’m not going to say no strings attached because it’s certainly they take equity, but 10 years ago if you took half-a-million bucks, boy that was typically institutional money, it was a pain in the butt to raise, you are giving up a lot of control, you are giving up a board seat, that is no longer the case. There really is this viable option, this in-between.
Mike: I think if you look at the businesses that, in the past have tried to figure out how to raise capital, one of the things that most people, 15-20 years ago, it was common to say, “Okay, let me go to a bank and get a loan from the bank.” But that is a non-starter for most new businesses. You got SBA loans and things like that where you can use the money to take over an existing business where they’re able to evaluate.
But if you have a business that you’re trying to get off the ground, a bank loan is basically a non-starter, especially when it comes to SaaS because they don’t understand how to calculate how much that business is worth. There isn’t any inventory and with software, it’s going to lag in terms of the revenue over something like a physical goods business, or a coffee shop, or a fitness studio where they know how many people are coming in and they can put a value on the equipment whether it’s the coffee machines or the spin cycles on a fitness studio. Banks are okay with that. They understand that.
But when you got a software business, the expectations today are much higher than they were five or 10 years ago. You have to do a lot more in order to make your product a lot more polished, which means it’s going to take time to do that which burns through your runway. It burns through that money a lot faster today. I guess you wouldn’t burn through it faster. It’s just you burn through more of it than you would have 10 years ago to get to the same point.
Rob: Even if you can get a loan, you have to send a personal guarantee. Now, all your personal assets are on the line. And if you decide to shut the company down, you owe them money. If you borrow $100,000 it’s a big deal. To me, that is more of a risk than I think an entrepreneur should take, unless you’re at the point where you already have, “All right, I’m at $10,000 MRR,” in which case you may or may not need the money, but if you’re at $10,000 MRR, you should raise equity funding anyway.
But if you know the business is going to succeed, that’s fine. When I hear that people charge $50,000 or $100,000 on credit cards to start a SaaS business, I’m like, “Oy vey.” That is going to be catastrophic. That is a really, really stressful way to live and it’s something I would not do, especially when we’re in a space where raising equity capital is relatively inexpensive. Raising a small angel round and selling 10% or even 20% of your company to reduce a lot of stress and to get there faster, I think it’s a pretty reasonable idea these days. It’s not impossible to do, I’ll say.
Mike: I want to talk about that specifically right there. What you just said was raising capital is relatively inexpensive. The reason I like the way that you put that is that when I think of the way I thought about raising funding years ago was that, “Oh, I’m going to have to give up a lot of control, I’m going to have to give up a lot of equity, and I don’t necessarily want to do either of those things.”
But if you’re thinking about putting together a business and you have anybody who’s helping you—a partner or a co-founder, something like that—your immediately giving up 50% of the company anyway, and then there’s a whole lot of difference between doing that and giving up 50% when there’s really nothing there, and yes, it could grow up to be something huge, but you’re giving up 50%.
So there’s like a mental block there of you saying, “Okay, well I’ll raise $250,000 in exchange for 10% of this,” and you don’t want to do that but you’re willing to give up 50% to somebody else when there’s really nothing there that’s being invested except for their time. Do you know what I mean?
Rob: Yeah. It’s cognitive dissonance I believe is the term where two things that don’t agree or paradox, I guess. It’s something in your head you’re rationalizing one way but then you turn around and give away 50% to a co-founder. That’s what you’re saying, It’s like you can give a small amount to get a big chunk of money, or even if it’s a small chunk of money.
Here’s the thing. Let’s say you live in the middle of Minnesota, or the middle of Nebraska, or something and you have an idea and you raised even $100,000 or $150,000 and you paid for your salary for a year or a year-and-a-half. That gives you a year or a year-and-a-half to get to some point of revenue that makes sense. Even if you gave away 15% of your company, you’re valuing it at $1 million right off the bat, or if you give away 20% or $750,000, it still makes your life a lot easier.
I think that’s the realization I’m coming to, is that at Microconf, or through this podcast, or whatever at different conferences, we meet smart people who are trying to launch businesses and something that stands in their way often is that, “I have a wife and kids. I have a house. I can’t do this nights and weekends. But I don’t want to raise funding because it’s really complicated. I don’t know how.”
What’s funny is you outlined this episode and you brought the topic up. But this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and there’s a gap here in the space. We do have folks like indie.vc which, if you haven’t heard my interview with Bryce from indie.vc, it’s episode 310 of this podcast, and it’s a more realistic approach to funding. It’s kind of a fundstrapping model. I’d recommend you go listen to that.
In addition, I feel we’re coming to an inflection point where there’s this gap and there’s a level of interest in something, and no one is filling it. No spoilers on what I’m up to next, but I’m starting to feel I might be the person to tackle this, to take it on. I’ve been spreading the word about it. I have been talking about it for years and I’ve been investing in startup like this.
We talk about Churn Buster, LeadFuze, CartHook. These are all small angel investments. I’ve done about 12 angel investments and I think three or four of them were essentially fundstrapped. it’s where they took money from a handful of folks and they never planned to raise a series A. I put my money where my mouth is, but now I’m thinking I only have so much money, how is it that I can take this to the next level in a realistic way. It’s something that’s definitely in the back of my mind and it’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot. Hopefully, we’ll dive into more in the future.
Speaking of that, if you listen to this and your thinking, “Oh, this is an interesting topic,” go to robwalling.com. Enter your email because it’s going to be something that I’m going to be thinking more about in the future as well as on this podcast for sure.
Mike: One of the comments that jumped out of me on the Twitter post that Justin had put out there was from Des Traynor and he said, “I think a second piece people don’t really internalize is that 60 months of the best years of your career is a substantial upfront investment too. Like a seed round but instead of money, it’s your life.”
That’s a fascinating way of looking at this because even back n the day, I would always say, “Oh, well. You know you’re basically trading money for time,” and I don’t think that I really equated time with years of my life. It sounds intuitively obvious. That’s exact same thing. But when you’re in the middle of working on stuff, you don’t think, “Oh, I’m trading five years of my life away of hard toil to get this thing to where it could be a lot sooner if I were just to take some money and trade some of that equity for it.”
Rob: Right. It could feasibly be a lot sooner. It may or may not. Money doesn’t solve all the problems but it certainly makes things, I’ll say less stressful and you having done it with true bootstrapping with basically nothing and doing nights and weekends, to then self-funding with revenue from HitTail going into Drip, and then venture funded. I’ve done all three of these. I will tell you that having that venture money, I didn’t have to raise it and I did attend the board meetings but I didn’t necessarily have to report to the board. My life was less stressful at that point than either of the prior two scenarios.
I think it’s a good point, man. I don’t want to come off. You can tell, I’m coming off kind of pro-raising a small round, and I don’t want to come off too one-sided. We’ve never been anti-funding ever. From the start, Microconf, I think in the original sales letter. It was, we’re not anti-funding. We’re anti everyone thinks the only way to start a software company or a startup is with funding. That maybe from the introduction of my book, actually—Start Small, Stay Small.
Even back then in 2010, I was saying, “Look, raising funding is not evil in and of itself. It’s the things that you have to give up by raising funding. Just know what you’re getting into.” Yes, we have seen founders that get kicked out of their own company. There was, I figure what that app it was. Was it Tinder? Something sold for $460 million. No. It’s FanDuel. It’s sold for $460 million and the founder who started it, and I believe was CEO when it started, he got no money because of liquidation preferences and he’s suing them.
That’s a huge exit. He got I believe it was zero dollars from the exit. There was an article or something that was like, he’s suing them now. If the contract say this is what the liquidation preference is, that’s one thing but he’s suing them because he thinks they screwed with the valuation intentionally and there was fraud or something. He’s not going to win if he just says, “No, that wasn’t the deal,” because he signed the papers. These VCs are not stupid but he’s trying to do that.
Yes, that does happen. But I believe there is a way to do this and I’m seeing it with these smaller SaaS apps. A way to do it without that much stress, without giving up that much equity. Brennan Dunn, RightMessage. That’s another one. I also wrote a check. And Rand Fishkin’s SparkToro. He’s doing the same thing. He’s not calling it fundstrapping, but he said, “Hey, we’re going to raise around, and we’re going to get to profitability, and we don’t want to do institutional money. If you listen to Lost and Founder which is his book, he talks about the perils of all that and you couldn’t read that and say, I can see really they didn’t like – once they raise funding, he really didn’t like it.
You can look and say, “Well, Rand’s anti-funding now.” But no, he’s more anti-institutional money, and there’s a difference. Venture capital is institutional money. These angel rounds tend not to be.
Mike: But I think even back, we’ve talked about it on the podcast before. As you said, we always had the position that, it’s not that we’re anti-funding, we’re anti-this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it. That’s always been my thought behind it. I’ll say the majority of my career and thought process has been like, “Yeah, I really just don’t want to take funding in this more because I don’t want to necessarily give up control.” Back then there weren’t really the options for that. Now, things have changed a lot. It’s not, say, front and center on my radar, but it’s something I’m definitely looking at niche and exploring a little bit more.
I definitely think that—like with Bluetick for example—there’s ways to go further faster, but I just don’t necessarily have the money to be able to do it, which sucks but at the same time, it’s always a trade-off. I think that’s what you always have to consider is, what is the trade-off and what am I going to have to give up in order for me to get X amount of influx and then what are you going to do with that?
You have to have a plan. You can’t just say, “I want to raise money.” You got to have a plan for not just raising money but also what are you going to do with that money when you get it? How are you going to deploy it? How are you going to build the company and how are you going to grow things? You can’t just drop $100,000 in your bank account or $500,000 and say, “Okay great. I’ve raised money. Now what?” They’re not going to give you the money if you don’t have a plan.
Rob: And if you don’t know what you’re doing, money’s not going to fix that. You’re just going to make bigger mistakes. This comes back to the stair-step approach. No chance I would have raised money in 2005-2009 with ,DotNetInvoice, and Wedding Toolbox and just beach towels and stuff. Even if I could have made the case that DotNetInvoice would grow to something, I would have made huge mistakes because I made small ones back then. But I learned and I gained experience and I gained confidence.
By the time I get to HitTail, I remember thinking, “Yeah,” because remember, I bought HitTail for $30,000 and then I grew it up to basically that much MRR per month but end and I value at it. Maybe I should raise a little bit of money in it. It would make this a little easier. But to me, it was the headache of it. I was like, “I do not want to slog around and spend months asking people and the paperwork.” It just felt like a pain in the butt to me. I don’t know if I could have. Did I have the name recognition? Could I have raised enough?
Arguably, yes. By the time I got to Drip, it was definitely like it. If I haven’t had that HitTail money, let’s just say I’d had none of it. I basically used a bunch or revenue from HitTail to fund Drip. If I hadn’t had that? I absolutely would have seriously considered doing what we’re talking about raising a small round. I knew Drip was ambitious, I knew it was going to get big at least by the time we are six or eight months in, and it had a need for that.
That’s what we’re saying here is the words always, never, and should, they’re not helpful words. Don’t say, “I should always raise funding.” “I should never raise funding.” “I should raise funding other people think I should or shouldn’t.” These are not helpful words. Just evaluate things and look at them, and like you said, look at the trade-offs. Pluses and the minuses, and the realities of them, not the FUD. Not the fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
I can tell you the story, “Oh, look. The founder of Fandle. He got screwed by his investors. Therefore, I’m never going to raise investing or I’m never going to raise funds.” That’s dumb. Actually look at the black-and-white of it. I think that’s what we’re talking about today. We;re not saying you should or should not, but it’s look at the reality of it.
Now, you and I talked about this in-depth in episode 211, When To Consider Outside Investment For Your Startup. We went in-depth on what are funds and family round, an angel round, or often called a seed round was. We talked about series A, B, C. Once you get to the serieses, that’s when you get to institutional money, which is when things get way more complicated. Once you raise a series A, it’s the point of no return. It’s implied you’re going to raise a B, a C, and go on to either have this huge exit or an IPO, and it’s growth at all cost for the most part.
But if you’re able to stop before that series A and stick to people who are on board with you, angel investors and such are on board with, “Hey, let’s build a $5 million, $10 million, $15 million company with it, it’ SaaS. Let’s do a 30%, 40%, 50% net margin on this thing.” That’s great. That’s the kind of company I want to build and that’s the kind of company I want to invest in.
But venture capitalists don’t want to invest in that. If that’s not your goal, to go to $100 million and do what it takes to do that, then you don’t want to go down that road. You want to have those expectations clear both in your head upfront, as well as anybody who’s writing you a check.
Mike: Right. The problem with that is that episode 211 when we talked about that, that was four years ago. That’s a long time in internet time.
Rob: I might need to go back and listen to that episode to hear what we said. How much you want to bet? Oh, I’m going to go search it and see if the word fundstrapping if I mentioned it in there.
Mike: I don’t think so. Oh, it is.
Rob: Is it?
Mike: Yup. About 20 minutes in, you said, “I heard the term fundstrapping and I really like it. It was from Colin at customer.io.”
Rob: There it is. In 20 minute then boom. This is 2014, November of 2014 even back then.
Mike: But you were in the middle of Drip at the time, were you?
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: Was that right?
Rob: Yup. In the middle of Drip and I was probably already thinking about because at this point, we were growing fast and I was dumping all the money I had into it, both from that revenue and from HitTail, and I was thinking, “Boy, if I had half a million bucks right now, given our growth rate could have raised it. If I had half a million bucks right now, we could grow faster. I can hire more and have more servers and not shut down EC2 instances on the weekend.”
We used to do that to save money that’s insane, that lengths. I remember valuating Wistia versus SproutVideo, and Wistia, for what we need, it was $150 a month and Sprout was $30. It’s a nice tool but now way it was Wistia. I went with SproutVideo because I needed that $120 bucks to pay something else. We had to migrate later and it was a bunch of time and all that stuff. I never would have made that choice if we’d had a little more money in the bank. It’s the luxury of having some investment capital.
Mike: Yeah and unfortunately, you have to make a lot of trade-offs like that. You spend a lot of mental cycles and overhead making those trade-offs and just making the decisions because you don’t have the money, which is a crappy situation to be in. All that said, part of the problem is, you don’t necessarily want to raise money if the idea itself or the business model just simply doesn’t have merit. Maybe that’s partly what those investors are there for is to make sure that they act as something of a filter.
That’s always the problem that I’ve seen with angel investors is that they’re the ones who are in control, not you. Maybe angel investors isn’t the right word, but outside investment where they basically end up getting control of enough of it that you don’t get to make the decisions anymore. They’re the ones who make the decisions whether or not your business is going to succeed based on whether or not you get the money. If you can’t set aside the time, like nights and weekends, to be able to do it, it’s just not going to work out. You need that money in order to make the business work, then it’s going to be a problem for you down the road.
Rob: And that’s the thing is the losing control of your business tends to be if you raised multiple rounds because each round you sell, let’s say, 15%-20% is typical. May 15%-25% and if you do one round, you still have control. You and your co-founder or you if you’re a solo founder still own that 80%. But if you do another round, another right you get two, three rounds in, it’s typically by series C or D where the founders are the minority shareholder and investors now own most of it. If you don’t been on the path, it’s unlikely, or if you just make bad decisions.
I saw someone on Shark Tank where they had no money upfront and they sold 80% of their company to an investor, to an angel investor. Shark Tank was like, “We can’t fund you because you’re working for nothing.” All the work is for the investor. If you make a bad choice, that’s another way to do it too. You do need to educate yourself about it and I think that’s something that some people don’t want to do because it is boring stuff.
I really like the books that Brad Feld does and this one is maybe like venture funding or like a guide to venture funding. I got four chapters in and I just couldn’t stand it because it was all terms. He didn’t write it. It was more of a series that he’s involved in. The terms were just so boring that I stopped. I understand if you don’t want to learn at all. You need to learn enough about it to do it.
I want to flip back to something that Natalie Nagele responded to Justin Jackson and then it was actually just what I was thinking when I saw his graph. It was five years to $21,000 MRR. In all honesty dude, I would shut that business down before I wait it that long. I forget how long it took Drip but it was maybe a year. I don’t think it was even a year from when we launched and it was probably 12-18 months from when we broke around on code, that we had $21,000 MRR.
Drip was admittedly a bit of a Cinderella story. It was fast at growth than most but if you’re growing $100 a month in the beginning and you continue that 10% growth like that, you can’t do that. You need to get it up—
Mike: But I don’t think that’s a fair comparison, though, because if you look at the way Drip was funded into, you said 21 months or so to get to that point? He’s talking about a completed self-funded company versus something where you put money in from HitTail. Those are two entirely different things. I don’t know all about the details of Transistor but my guess is that there’s a huge disparity in terms of the amount of code and the quality of code that needs to go into something like Drip because of the sheer complexity of it versus something like Transistor.
Rob: Yeah, that’s true. I was for the long entrepreneurial journey too, I would say. I had successes that I’ve parlaid into it. You’re right. It’s not a fair comparison. I shouldn’t say with the Drip but…
Mike: I was just arguing about the point of, if it was five years to get to the $20,000 in MRR, should you shut that down? I think it’s a very different answer based on what it is that you’re putting into it. If you’re dumping $200,000 into it, yeah, you probably should shut it down if it’s still going to take you five years to get to that. But if you put nothing into it, or $10,000 into it but it takes five years to get there, it’s like, “Uh, well, I don’t know.” It’s a judgment call.
Rob: It’s interesting and that’s the thing. When I think back in 2005, I started with DotNetInvoice, making a couple of grand a month. It took me until late 2008 to get to where I was making about $100,000 a year, between $100,000-$120,000 a year and that’s when I stopped consulting.
So it took me three and a half years. But again, I did it with no funding and I cobbled it all together myself. That’s the situation we’re talking. I wasn’t doing SaaS. I did it with these multiple products. I think if I was less risk-averse, I’ve could’ve done it faster. I think that’s probably what we’re talking about here. It’s getting a little bit more ambitious and trying to speed things up. How do you do that?
Mike: Part of being more ambitious these days, I think, is because you’re forced to, because of the level of competition that’s out there. You have to do something that’s quite a bit above and beyond what you would have done three or five years ago because the competition is there and people are going to be asking for features that they see in other products that you’re trying to compete against. If you don’t have those features, they’re going to say, “Well, I could pay the same amount of money to you versus this other product and they’ve already got those features so why would I go with you?”
You’re just not able to compete unless you have those features there that you can demonstrate. It’s not even just about the marking. It’s about having the things they need. If you don’t have them, they can’t go with you. It’s not even that they like you. They just won’t do it.
Rob: Yeah and that’s true. Again, funding even the way we’re talking about it, it’s not going to fix all ills. If you pick those markets that’s too small or you don’t build a good product, you’re not going to get to action. Or if it’s a market that people aren’t interested, or you don’t know how to market, you don’t have the experience, you don’t suddenly become an expert startup founder just because you raise funding but if you have the chops and funding is a big piece.
Time is a big piece because you’re only working nights and weekends. You can only put 10 hours a weekend or rather 15 hours. It’s a big difference if you can suddenly go to 40 or 50 hours with two co-founders. It doesn’t fix everything. In addition, does it come with complexity? Yes. You have to report to your investors once a month with an email. You can feel the stress of that.
That was actually something that I asked Justin McGill, Jordan Gal, and Matt Goldman, those are the co-founders of those three businesses that I mentioned earlier, CartHook, LeadFuze, and Churn Buster, and I said, “Hey, do you feel raising this money made things more stressful or less stressful?” They each have their own take on it. If I recall, Justin McGill was like, “It’s more stressful because I feel like if we don’t grow, we’re going to let you guys down.” A lot of the investors he has a lot of respect for. That’s one way it cut through. It can make it more stressful.
I don’t want to put words in people’s mouths but I think Jordan had said, “It’s more stressful but better because it motivates him to succeed.” you got to think about how your personality is and if you feel like it’s going to add more stress, if suddenly five or 10 people that you really respect, that are friends, colleagues, and fellow Microconf attendees write a check to you, how does that make you feel?
Mike: Yeah. I think the answer’s going to be different for every person, especially depending on what your product is like, what the expectations are, how you’ve position it, and how the investor views it. Some investors just say, “Yeah, I may lose all this and that’s totally okay,” and other ones may say, “I have these expectations and you’re not meeting them,” if you miss a deadline or something like that.
There’s a lot of dynamics and complexity there. Some people will thrive in it and some people won’t. I think at the end of the day, I also feel having money has the potential to make the downsides of your product or business model worse. It will just exacerbate some of those issues. If you don’t have a market that you can actually go to, if you think you do but you don’t, and you get a bunch of money in, I think it’s just going to make it worse because yes, you can try a bunch of things and you’ll be able to throw money on it, but then you’re burning more money than you would have otherwise.
Rob: That’s the thing. I know we’re going long on time but really important. I would not raise any type of funding before I have product market fit. That’s a personal thing because (a) your valuation is way last before then, and (b) no one is going to give you money if you don’t have a product, period. You have to have a product these days. You can’t raise money on an idea unless you’re Rand Fishkin, or Jason Cohen, or a founder who’s been there and done that.
You have to have a product, you have to probably be live or at least have beta users, your should have paying customers. That’s a bare minimum to even think about trying to raise funding. You have to get there. You have to write the code, you have to beg, steal and, borrow to get someone to write the code. But the valuation is going to be way less and you’re probably going to burn though a lot of that money just trying to get to product market fit. From the time you launch until you’re part of market fit, I’m going to say it’s 6-12 months if you know what you’re doing.
You see founders like Shawn Ellis, you saw Jason Cohen, you saw me do a Drip. You see people who are pretty good at it and know what they’re doing, and it still takes them six months, and ours still takes 9-12 months to do it. At that point, once you do it and you do kick it in a little bit of that growth mode where it’s like, “Okay people, are really starting to uptick it.” That’s when you pour gasoline on the fire.
But before that, I have seen at least one startup in the last year raise a small round before product market fit, and just burned through it really fast because they staffed up, do a lot of marketing and do a lot of sales, and it just that their churn was so high. That’s typically where you can tell his people aren’t converting to pay it or they aren’t sticking around. There are dangers there. Like a samurai sword, like a said in the past, it’s a weapon that you need to know what you’re doing with to wield well and I think you need to be smart about when you raise.
Mike: Yeah and it sounds like there’s obviously different takes on it. If you want to go down like the VC or angel route, series A funding down the road, I think it’s possible to probably raise money if you have any sort of history or relationship with them, like if you don’t have a product yet. But you’re still also going to get eaten alive in terms of the equity shares and everything.
I think that point that you raised about you have to have a product and you have to have paying customers before you start to go raise money, that’s how you maintain your equity, a fair amount of the equity, enough of the control to be able to what you want, need to with the business, and also be reasonable sure and confident that you’re not going to just waste the investor’s money and burn those relationships. You can use that money for good, and you know what that money will do for you versus you’re still trying to get to product market fit. You don’t know who’s going to but it or who uses it, or why.
Rob: Yeah and the once exception as I’m thinking about it is if you raise a big chunk, let’s say you raise $250,000 or $500,000 and you feel like you need to spend it, and so you staff up but your not part of market fit, you’re going to treat their money. But the exception I can think of, is like I said earlier. What if you just bought yourself 12 months of time and you didn’t staff up but you just worked on it, or 18 months. You didn’t raise this huge amount of money or raise a small amount to just focus on it and work, I could see doing that before product market fit. That would get you to the point where then you can raise that next round.
I’m not trying to be wish-wash but I’m realizing I never said never raise before product market fit but I did say I wouldn’t personally. But I have the resources to get me to product market fit and I could work on a full-time to do that. It’s an exception. If was I doing it nights and weekends, then I would take money before I see I have to think about where the advice is coming from or where the thoughts are coming from. I’m just thinking it through as if I were literally doing this nights and weekends, I would consider taking money as soon as I could. If I was going down this road because going full-time is a game-changer. Being able to focus full-time, being able to leave everything behind is a big deal. It really is and a night and day difference.
Mike: I know there’ll be a range of opinions on it, but I wonder what most investors would think about, somebody saying, “Hey, we got this product. I’ve been working on it and I’d like to get some funding and money in the bank, basically to extend the runway because I got a little bit of something going here, I got partial product in place, I got some customers, but it’s not a lot. I need runway in order to make it work but I don’t know specifically how much runway I necessarily need or how I’m going to get to having $10,000-$20,000 MRR, but I need time to get there. There’s something here but I don’t know what.” I think it’s hard to evaluate for anybody what that looks like.
Rob: Yeah. I don’t know of any investors today that would work with that. I think that’s a good thing to bring up. It’s like, is that a gap in the market then? Could that be a successful funding model of looking at people who essentially have the potential and have, like you said, pre-product market fit but have something to show for it and looking at backing them for a period of time.
Anyway, I love this topic and I think that we’ll probably talking about it again, just soon you’ll be hearing more on it from me, but I feel we might need to wrap this one up today.
Mike: Yeah. Great talk. I like it.
Rob: Me as well. So if you have a question for us about this or any other topic, call our voicemail number 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each and every episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
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 build your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike.
Rob: And I’m Rob.
Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. What’s going on this week, Rob?
Rob: We have new iTunes reviews.
Mike: Oh, cool. What do we got?
Rob: This one from Find Fitness Pros. It says, “This is my go-to podcast every Tuesday morning. Rob and Mike continue to give their insights, not just info on exactly what to do,” and from Nathan Bell, he says, “Great information. I listened to one episode and I’m hooked. It was full of great information I can easily implement. Some of the info was a little bit advanced for me currently, but I’m confident that by selectively listening to more, I will pick up more.”
Those are a couple of new iTunes reviews that we have. I used to keep a worldwide tally of it using CommentCast and when I moved to my new computer, I don’t have the .exe or what is it called, it’s a .app I guess in Mac. I don’t have the executable anymore and you can’t download it anywhere. So I moved over to mypodcastreviews.com but it only gives me reviews, not ratings. We’re up to almost 600 worldwide ratings, I believe. People don’t necessarily need to write sentences or whatever, but I don’t have that tally anymore. Certainly, we’re above 600 at this point.
Now, what I have is I have 347 worldwide reviews and that’s a lesser number. I want to get back to the world’s rating. I think the guy at My Podcast Reviews says that they are going to add ratings but neither here nor there, the more reviews or ratings we get, the more likely people find the show, the more motivation it gives us. If you feel like we’ve given you some value as a listener to the show, it would be awesome if you can open iTunes or Stitcher and just give us a five-star review. Really appreciate it.
Mike: The solution to not having that app that gives you the numbers is just make up a number. So we’re at 3000 reviews I think.
Rob: That’s right. 3422 reviews. That’s great. How about you, man? What’s going on this week?
Mike: Well, this morning, I published a public API for Bluetick. Of course, I say it’s a public API but there’s actually only one person who actually knows about it.
Rob: It’s in beta?
Mike: Yeah, basically.
Rob: Early access, good.
Mike: I had a prospect who wanted to sign on and they’re like, “Yeah, I really need to have a public API that is available for me and Zapier wasn’t going to work for them. Basically as I said, I spun it out because I heard from a bunch of customers that I currently have, and I started talking to them about, “What is it that you need?” and trying to figure out what’s the minimum that I could build that this particular prospect or customer would need to get started. They only needed four things. Build those, put them into it, and then there’s all the infrastructure changes that needed to go into it.
It took a week-and-a-half just to do the infrastructure changes but now the best stuff if all taken cared of. I got that published out there and waiting for them to start using it, and then figure out what needs to change. I already made it very clear upfront, like, “Hey, here are some things that I know we’re going to change, and then over here, based on what you tell me, other things could change, so treat this as an absolute beta. Eventually at some point it will become stable, I guess, and then I’ll start pushing it live to everybody.
Rob: That’s nice. It’s nice to do. You’re basically doing customer development on what is its own little product. You can say it’s a feature but really some entire products are just APIs. You want to get it right from the start, and by start, I mean by the time you publish and people start hooking into it, you can’t change it at that point. I think it’s really good to take this approach of roll it out slowly, roll out one endpoint at a time and really think through how you want to structure it.
I was just on your site trying to guess the URL. I was going to just type in a bunch of stuff so you’re going to see a bunch of 404s in your error logs. Not a hacker, it was me, but I didn’t find it alas.
Mike: No, that sucks. I would tell you if you asked for the right price. Other than that, I also got my first fraudulent charge from Bluetick. It took a lot longer than I expected it to but somebody signed up, then they logged in, and absolutely they didn’t pay any attention to the onboarding emails. Come time when their trial is up, they got charged, and then I forget how long it was later. I was maybe probably three or four days later, I got a notification from Stripe saying, “Hey this charge looks fraudulent,” and I looked at it. I think it’s a debit card too and I was like, “Oh great.” Three hours later though like, “Oh you’ve had a chargeback.” I was like, “Wait, I didn’t even get a chance to decide that to do with this potentially fraudulent charge,” and they already converted it into a chargeback, which cost me an extra $15. Well that sucks, but, oh well.
Rob: Was it a person not using or was it a stolen credit card? Is that what you think? Or do you think that they just went in with the intention that it was their own credit card and they just intended at the whole time?
Mike: I’m not sure. It looks legit. The email address, I couldn’t quite tell whether it was real. I think it was a Gmail email address. I couldn’t really trace it back to a company or anything like that but the name on it seem to match what the email address was. I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure but I think it was from a real estate company or something like that. All right, well, whatever.
Rob: Yeah, that sucks. It’s going to happen. It’s definitely a milestone you don’t want to hit but you’re going to hit it eventually.
Mike: Yup. Certainly not a milestone to celebrate but I definitely hit it.
Rob: Yeah, exactly. Cool. What are we talking about today?
Mike: Today, I thought we would have a discussion about whether or not bootstrapper should be raising money. I guess by definition if you’re raising money, are you no longer a bootstrapper at that point? I think there’s maybe a time during which you are bootstrapping a company and self-funding it. I almost called it self-funding, like should people who are self-funding raise money, but again that would go against it.
The idea came because I saw Justin Jackson had tweeted out a link to an article he wrote over on Indie Hackers called The Bootstrapper’s Paradox. In that article, he shows a graph or what they’re doing for transistor.fm, which is the new startup that he’s working on. Basically it shows a graph of over the course of 60 months was 10% exponential growth and 5% turn. The MRR will get to $21,000. But 60 months is five years of time.
I thought it would be interesting to just have a conversation about this because when I was reading through the tweet that he had put out, there were a bunch of people who chimed in on it, mostly people who were listening to the show would have heard of like Des Traynor, Jason Collin, and Natalie Nagel. They’re giving their thoughts on this stuff and I just thought it would be interesting to talk about it.
Rob: Yeah, that’s for sure. 10% growth every month sounds like an impressive number but when the number starts very small, like $1000 a month, that means you’re growing $100 MRR a month. You just can’t do that early days or if you do, it’s going to take five years. You either need to figure out a way to grow faster or you need to be really patient.
This is a struggle. It’s funny that, Justin called it The Bootstrapper’s Paradox. I don’t know that it’s that as much as this is the reason people raise funding. We know people who are just bootstrapper through and through, you should never raise funding and 37signals used to say that and even mentions it that DHH and Jason Fried took funding from Jeff Bezos two years after launching Basecamp. It wasn’t even funding that went into the company. They took money off the table. If I recall, I think that number is public. I think it’s $10 million that he invested, was my memory and maybe I don’t think I’m making that up. It’s either rumored at that or it was announced.
They had essentially at that point had FU money and it’s really easy to make different decisions or just say, “Hey, we’re going to grow as slow or as fast as we need,” when you have that kind of money in your personal bank account and you’re just running this business day-to-day.
Justin’s article is a bootstrapper’s realization of “Oh Sh*t.” This is why people do raise money. It’s coming to that realization at this point and I think it’s a good thing to call out for sure. I’ve been thinking about this so much so I’m looking forward to today’s episode because in my Microconf talk this year, I talked about things that I learned bootstrapping and then self-funding and then in a venture back company after Leadpages acquired us.
In the last five to seven minutes I did just a little snippet about fundstrapping, which is this term that Colin from customer.io coined, where you’re kind of in-between. You bootstrapped a little bit and you raised a small round. I say it’s between 200,000 and 500,000 and you raise it with the intention of getting to profitability. Without, you’re never going to raise institutional money, or raise it from friends or families or angels, so you don’t give up control, you don’t give up a board seat, you really have the benefits of funding without the institutional chaos of it, the headache.
It wasn’t a throwaway piece but I almost didn’t include it in the talk. That piece has gotten me more emails, more comments, more thoughts, more people came up to me, ask me what that’s like, asked if I would invest or find new people who were doing fundstrapping. It’s just fascinating response to this, this thing that’s been percolating. It’s a long rant on it to start but I just think this is becoming more and more of a viable option and potentially even a necessity as the SaaS market gets more and more crowded.
Mike: Yeah. That’s the part that I think has changed over time, where five or 10 years ago, you could come out with a SaaS and you’d launch it to the public and you would start to grow by virtually the fact that there was nobody else out there or there were very few competitors out there doing what you were doing. Now if you launch anything, you probably got a couple of competitors just right out of the gate. If you don’t, then you probably don’t have a product that’s going to go anywhere. But if you have any competition, it’s probably substantially more competition today than you would’ve had five years ago or 10 years ago. Just by virtue of having launched five or 10 years ago, you were going to be more successful quicker than you would if you did the exact same thing now. It’s going to take longer, which means that you’re going to burn through more runway and it’s just going to be harder.
Rob: Right. Now, five or 10 years ago, there was less competition but the expenses would have been higher, 10 years ago especially because you literally needed a rack server. There was no Amazon EC2. In addition, there was still like when Basecamp first launched on their homepage, they were like, “You don’t have to install any software. No downloads needed.” They were still educating on just the concept of being in the cloud and there were hurdles there.
Mike: That was almost 15 years ago.
Rob: Yeah, that’s true. No, you’re right. That was 2005 or 2006? You’re right, 12 or 13. You’re right. But even with that, say 10 years ago, even with that, it’s still I believe was easier back then. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start something today. It just means you got to house some more, you got to pick a better niche, you got to have more skills, or you need a little more money in the bank.
Whether that means you raise it yourself out of consulting efforts, which is what I did, or if there’s definitely more money being thrown around as funding these days that is, I’m not going to say no strings attached because it’s certainly they take equity, but 10 years ago if you took half-a-million bucks, boy that was typically institutional money, it was a pain in the butt to raise, you are giving up a lot of control, you are giving up a board seat, that is no longer the case. There really is this viable option, this in-between.
Mike: I think if you look at the businesses that, in the past have tried to figure out how to raise capital, one of the things that most people, 15-20 years ago, it was common to say, “Okay, let me go to a bank and get a loan from the bank.” But that is a non-starter for most new businesses. You got SBA loans and things like that where you can use the money to take over an existing business where they’re able to evaluate.
But if you have a business that you’re trying to get off the ground, a bank loan is basically a non-starter, especially when it comes to SaaS because they don’t understand how to calculate how much that business is worth. There isn’t any inventory and with software, it’s going to lag in terms of the revenue over something like a physical goods business, or a coffee shop, or a fitness studio where they know how many people are coming in and they can put a value on the equipment whether it’s the coffee machines or the spin cycles on a fitness studio. Banks are okay with that. They understand that.
But when you got a software business, the expectations today are much higher than they were five or 10 years ago. You have to do a lot more in order to make your product a lot more polished, which means it’s going to take time to do that which burns through your runway. It burns through that money a lot faster today. I guess you wouldn’t burn through it faster. It’s just you burn through more of it than you would have 10 years ago to get to the same point.
Rob: Even if you can get a loan, you have to send a personal guarantee. Now, all your personal assets are on the line. And if you decide to shut the company down, you owe them money. If you borrow $100,000 it’s a big deal. To me, that is more of a risk than I think an entrepreneur should take, unless you’re at the point where you already have, “All right, I’m at $10,000 MRR,” in which case you may or may not need the money, but if you’re at $10,000 MRR, you should raise equity funding anyway.
But if you know the business is going to succeed, that’s fine. When I hear that people charge $50,000 or $100,000 on credit cards to start a SaaS business, I’m like, “Oy vey.” That is going to be catastrophic. That is a really, really stressful way to live and it’s something I would not do, especially when we’re in a space where raising equity capital is relatively inexpensive. Raising a small angel round and selling 10% or even 20% of your company to reduce a lot of stress and to get there faster, I think it’s a pretty reasonable idea these days. It’s not impossible to do, I’ll say.
Mike: I want to talk about that specifically right there. What you just said was raising capital is relatively inexpensive. The reason I like the way that you put that is that when I think of the way I thought about raising funding years ago was that, “Oh, I’m going to have to give up a lot of control, I’m going to have to give up a lot of equity, and I don’t necessarily want to do either of those things.”
But if you’re thinking about putting together a business and you have anybody who’s helping you—a partner or a co-founder, something like that—your immediately giving up 50% of the company anyway, and then there’s a whole lot of difference between doing that and giving up 50% when there’s really nothing there, and yes, it could grow up to be something huge, but you’re giving up 50%.
So there’s like a mental block there of you saying, “Okay, well I’ll raise $250,000 in exchange for 10% of this,” and you don’t want to do that but you’re willing to give up 50% to somebody else when there’s really nothing there that’s being invested except for their time. Do you know what I mean?
Rob: Yeah. It’s cognitive dissonance I believe is the term where two things that don’t agree or paradox, I guess. It’s something in your head you’re rationalizing one way but then you turn around and give away 50% to a co-founder. That’s what you’re saying, It’s like you can give a small amount to get a big chunk of money, or even if it’s a small chunk of money.
Here’s the thing. Let’s say you live in the middle of Minnesota, or the middle of Nebraska, or something and you have an idea and you raised even $100,000 or $150,000 and you paid for your salary for a year or a year-and-a-half. That gives you a year or a year-and-a-half to get to some point of revenue that makes sense. Even if you gave away 15% of your company, you’re valuing it at $1 million right off the bat, or if you give away 20% or $750,000, it still makes your life a lot easier.
I think that’s the realization I’m coming to, is that at Microconf, or through this podcast, or whatever at different conferences, we meet smart people who are trying to launch businesses and something that stands in their way often is that, “I have a wife and kids. I have a house. I can’t do this nights and weekends. But I don’t want to raise funding because it’s really complicated. I don’t know how.”
What’s funny is you outlined this episode and you brought the topic up. But this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and there’s a gap here in the space. We do have folks like indie.vc which, if you haven’t heard my interview with Bryce from indie.vc, it’s episode 310 of this podcast, and it’s a more realistic approach to funding. It’s kind of a fundstrapping model. I’d recommend you go listen to that.
In addition, I feel we’re coming to an inflection point where there’s this gap and there’s a level of interest in something, and no one is filling it. No spoilers on what I’m up to next, but I’m starting to feel I might be the person to tackle this, to take it on. I’ve been spreading the word about it. I have been talking about it for years and I’ve been investing in startup like this.
We talk about Churn Buster, LeadFuze, CartHook. These are all small angel investments. I’ve done about 12 angel investments and I think three or four of them were essentially fundstrapped. it’s where they took money from a handful of folks and they never planned to raise a series A. I put my money where my mouth is, but now I’m thinking I only have so much money, how is it that I can take this to the next level in a realistic way. It’s something that’s definitely in the back of my mind and it’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot. Hopefully, we’ll dive into more in the future.
Speaking of that, if you listen to this and your thinking, “Oh, this is an interesting topic,” go to robwalling.com. Enter your email because it’s going to be something that I’m going to be thinking more about in the future as well as on this podcast for sure.
Mike: One of the comments that jumped out of me on the Twitter post that Justin had put out there was from Des Traynor and he said, “I think a second piece people don’t really internalize is that 60 months of the best years of your career is a substantial upfront investment too. Like a seed round but instead of money, it’s your life.”
That’s a fascinating way of looking at this because even back n the day, I would always say, “Oh, well. You know you’re basically trading money for time,” and I don’t think that I really equated time with years of my life. It sounds intuitively obvious. That’s exact same thing. But when you’re in the middle of working on stuff, you don’t think, “Oh, I’m trading five years of my life away of hard toil to get this thing to where it could be a lot sooner if I were just to take some money and trade some of that equity for it.”
Rob: Right. It could feasibly be a lot sooner. It may or may not. Money doesn’t solve all the problems but it certainly makes things, I’ll say less stressful and you having done it with true bootstrapping with basically nothing and doing nights and weekends, to then self-funding with revenue from HitTail going into Drip, and then venture funded. I’ve done all three of these. I will tell you that having that venture money, I didn’t have to raise it and I did attend the board meetings but I didn’t necessarily have to report to the board. My life was less stressful at that point than either of the prior two scenarios.
I think it’s a good point, man. I don’t want to come off. You can tell, I’m coming off kind of pro-raising a small round, and I don’t want to come off too one-sided. We’ve never been anti-funding ever. From the start, Microconf, I think in the original sales letter. It was, we’re not anti-funding. We’re anti everyone thinks the only way to start a software company or a startup is with funding. That maybe from the introduction of my book, actually—Start Small, Stay Small.
Even back then in 2010, I was saying, “Look, raising funding is not evil in and of itself. It’s the things that you have to give up by raising funding. Just know what you’re getting into.” Yes, we have seen founders that get kicked out of their own company. There was, I figure what that app it was. Was it Tinder? Something sold for $460 million. No. It’s FanDuel. It’s sold for $460 million and the founder who started it, and I believe was CEO when it started, he got no money because of liquidation preferences and he’s suing them.
That’s a huge exit. He got I believe it was zero dollars from the exit. There was an article or something that was like, he’s suing them now. If the contract say this is what the liquidation preference is, that’s one thing but he’s suing them because he thinks they screwed with the valuation intentionally and there was fraud or something. He’s not going to win if he just says, “No, that wasn’t the deal,” because he signed the papers. These VCs are not stupid but he’s trying to do that.
Yes, that does happen. But I believe there is a way to do this and I’m seeing it with these smaller SaaS apps. A way to do it without that much stress, without giving up that much equity. Brennan Dunn, RightMessage. That’s another one. I also wrote a check. And Rand Fishkin’s SparkToro. He’s doing the same thing. He’s not calling it fundstrapping, but he said, “Hey, we’re going to raise around, and we’re going to get to profitability, and we don’t want to do institutional money. If you listen to Lost and Founder which is his book, he talks about the perils of all that and you couldn’t read that and say, I can see really they didn’t like – once they raise funding, he really didn’t like it.
You can look and say, “Well, Rand’s anti-funding now.” But no, he’s more anti-institutional money, and there’s a difference. Venture capital is institutional money. These angel rounds tend not to be.
Mike: But I think even back, we’ve talked about it on the podcast before. As you said, we always had the position that, it’s not that we’re anti-funding, we’re anti-this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it. That’s always been my thought behind it. I’ll say the majority of my career and thought process has been like, “Yeah, I really just don’t want to take funding in this more because I don’t want to necessarily give up control.” Back then there weren’t really the options for that. Now, things have changed a lot. It’s not, say, front and center on my radar, but it’s something I’m definitely looking at niche and exploring a little bit more.
I definitely think that—like with Bluetick for example—there’s ways to go further faster, but I just don’t necessarily have the money to be able to do it, which sucks but at the same time, it’s always a trade-off. I think that’s what you always have to consider is, what is the trade-off and what am I going to have to give up in order for me to get X amount of influx and then what are you going to do with that?
You have to have a plan. You can’t just say, “I want to raise money.” You got to have a plan for not just raising money but also what are you going to do with that money when you get it? How are you going to deploy it? How are you going to build the company and how are you going to grow things? You can’t just drop $100,000 in your bank account or $500,000 and say, “Okay great. I’ve raised money. Now what?” They’re not going to give you the money if you don’t have a plan.
Rob: And if you don’t know what you’re doing, money’s not going to fix that. You’re just going to make bigger mistakes. This comes back to the stair-step approach. No chance I would have raised money in 2005-2009 with ,DotNetInvoice, and Wedding Toolbox and just beach towels and stuff. Even if I could have made the case that DotNetInvoice would grow to something, I would have made huge mistakes because I made small ones back then. But I learned and I gained experience and I gained confidence.
By the time I get to HitTail, I remember thinking, “Yeah,” because remember, I bought HitTail for $30,000 and then I grew it up to basically that much MRR per month but end and I value at it. Maybe I should raise a little bit of money in it. It would make this a little easier. But to me, it was the headache of it. I was like, “I do not want to slog around and spend months asking people and the paperwork.” It just felt like a pain in the butt to me. I don’t know if I could have. Did I have the name recognition? Could I have raised enough?
Arguably, yes. By the time I got to Drip, it was definitely like it. If I haven’t had that HitTail money, let’s just say I’d had none of it. I basically used a bunch or revenue from HitTail to fund Drip. If I hadn’t had that? I absolutely would have seriously considered doing what we’re talking about raising a small round. I knew Drip was ambitious, I knew it was going to get big at least by the time we are six or eight months in, and it had a need for that.
That’s what we’re saying here is the words always, never, and should, they’re not helpful words. Don’t say, “I should always raise funding.” “I should never raise funding.” “I should raise funding other people think I should or shouldn’t.” These are not helpful words. Just evaluate things and look at them, and like you said, look at the trade-offs. Pluses and the minuses, and the realities of them, not the FUD. Not the fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
I can tell you the story, “Oh, look. The founder of Fandle. He got screwed by his investors. Therefore, I’m never going to raise investing or I’m never going to raise funds.” That’s dumb. Actually look at the black-and-white of it. I think that’s what we’re talking about today. We;re not saying you should or should not, but it’s look at the reality of it.
Now, you and I talked about this in-depth in episode 211, When To Consider Outside Investment For Your Startup. We went in-depth on what are funds and family round, an angel round, or often called a seed round was. We talked about series A, B, C. Once you get to the serieses, that’s when you get to institutional money, which is when things get way more complicated. Once you raise a series A, it’s the point of no return. It’s implied you’re going to raise a B, a C, and go on to either have this huge exit or an IPO, and it’s growth at all cost for the most part.
But if you’re able to stop before that series A and stick to people who are on board with you, angel investors and such are on board with, “Hey, let’s build a $5 million, $10 million, $15 million company with it, it’ SaaS. Let’s do a 30%, 40%, 50% net margin on this thing.” That’s great. That’s the kind of company I want to build and that’s the kind of company I want to invest in.
But venture capitalists don’t want to invest in that. If that’s not your goal, to go to $100 million and do what it takes to do that, then you don’t want to go down that road. You want to have those expectations clear both in your head upfront, as well as anybody who’s writing you a check.
Mike: Right. The problem with that is that episode 211 when we talked about that, that was four years ago. That’s a long time in internet time.
Rob: I might need to go back and listen to that episode to hear what we said. How much you want to bet? Oh, I’m going to go search it and see if the word fundstrapping if I mentioned it in there.
Mike: I don’t think so. Oh, it is.
Rob: Is it?
Mike: Yup. About 20 minutes in, you said, “I heard the term fundstrapping and I really like it. It was from Colin at customer.io.”
Rob: There it is. In 20 minute then boom. This is 2014, November of 2014 even back then.
Mike: But you were in the middle of Drip at the time, were you?
Rob: Yeah.
Mike: Was that right?
Rob: Yup. In the middle of Drip and I was probably already thinking about because at this point, we were growing fast and I was dumping all the money I had into it, both from that revenue and from HitTail, and I was thinking, “Boy, if I had half a million bucks right now, given our growth rate could have raised it. If I had half a million bucks right now, we could grow faster. I can hire more and have more servers and not shut down EC2 instances on the weekend.”
We used to do that to save money that’s insane, that lengths. I remember valuating Wistia versus SproutVideo, and Wistia, for what we need, it was $150 a month and Sprout was $30. It’s a nice tool but now way it was Wistia. I went with SproutVideo because I needed that $120 bucks to pay something else. We had to migrate later and it was a bunch of time and all that stuff. I never would have made that choice if we’d had a little more money in the bank. It’s the luxury of having some investment capital.
Mike: Yeah and unfortunately, you have to make a lot of trade-offs like that. You spend a lot of mental cycles and overhead making those trade-offs and just making the decisions because you don’t have the money, which is a crappy situation to be in. All that said, part of the problem is, you don’t necessarily want to raise money if the idea itself or the business model just simply doesn’t have merit. Maybe that’s partly what those investors are there for is to make sure that they act as something of a filter.
That’s always the problem that I’ve seen with angel investors is that they’re the ones who are in control, not you. Maybe angel investors isn’t the right word, but outside investment where they basically end up getting control of enough of it that you don’t get to make the decisions anymore. They’re the ones who make the decisions whether or not your business is going to succeed based on whether or not you get the money. If you can’t set aside the time, like nights and weekends, to be able to do it, it’s just not going to work out. You need that money in order to make the business work, then it’s going to be a problem for you down the road.
Rob: And that’s the thing is the losing control of your business tends to be if you raised multiple rounds because each round you sell, let’s say, 15%-20% is typical. May 15%-25% and if you do one round, you still have control. You and your co-founder or you if you’re a solo founder still own that 80%. But if you do another round, another right you get two, three rounds in, it’s typically by series C or D where the founders are the minority shareholder and investors now own most of it. If you don’t been on the path, it’s unlikely, or if you just make bad decisions.
I saw someone on Shark Tank where they had no money upfront and they sold 80% of their company to an investor, to an angel investor. Shark Tank was like, “We can’t fund you because you’re working for nothing.” All the work is for the investor. If you make a bad choice, that’s another way to do it too. You do need to educate yourself about it and I think that’s something that some people don’t want to do because it is boring stuff.
I really like the books that Brad Feld does and this one is maybe like venture funding or like a guide to venture funding. I got four chapters in and I just couldn’t stand it because it was all terms. He didn’t write it. It was more of a series that he’s involved in. The terms were just so boring that I stopped. I understand if you don’t want to learn at all. You need to learn enough about it to do it.
I want to flip back to something that Natalie Nagele responded to Justin Jackson and then it was actually just what I was thinking when I saw his graph. It was five years to $21,000 MRR. In all honesty dude, I would shut that business down before I wait it that long. I forget how long it took Drip but it was maybe a year. I don’t think it was even a year from when we launched and it was probably 12-18 months from when we broke around on code, that we had $21,000 MRR.
Drip was admittedly a bit of a Cinderella story. It was fast at growth than most but if you’re growing $100 a month in the beginning and you continue that 10% growth like that, you can’t do that. You need to get it up—
Mike: But I don’t think that’s a fair comparison, though, because if you look at the way Drip was funded into, you said 21 months or so to get to that point? He’s talking about a completed self-funded company versus something where you put money in from HitTail. Those are two entirely different things. I don’t know all about the details of Transistor but my guess is that there’s a huge disparity in terms of the amount of code and the quality of code that needs to go into something like Drip because of the sheer complexity of it versus something like Transistor.
Rob: Yeah, that’s true. I was for the long entrepreneurial journey too, I would say. I had successes that I’ve parlaid into it. You’re right. It’s not a fair comparison. I shouldn’t say with the Drip but…
Mike: I was just arguing about the point of, if it was five years to get to the $20,000 in MRR, should you shut that down? I think it’s a very different answer based on what it is that you’re putting into it. If you’re dumping $200,000 into it, yeah, you probably should shut it down if it’s still going to take you five years to get to that. But if you put nothing into it, or $10,000 into it but it takes five years to get there, it’s like, “Uh, well, I don’t know.” It’s a judgment call.
Rob: It’s interesting and that’s the thing. When I think back in 2005, I started with DotNetInvoice, making a couple of grand a month. It took me until late 2008 to get to where I was making about $100,000 a year, between $100,000-$120,000 a year and that’s when I stopped consulting.
So it took me three and a half years. But again, I did it with no funding and I cobbled it all together myself. That’s the situation we’re talking. I wasn’t doing SaaS. I did it with these multiple products. I think if I was less risk-averse, I’ve could’ve done it faster. I think that’s probably what we’re talking about here. It’s getting a little bit more ambitious and trying to speed things up. How do you do that?
Mike: Part of being more ambitious these days, I think, is because you’re forced to, because of the level of competition that’s out there. You have to do something that’s quite a bit above and beyond what you would have done three or five years ago because the competition is there and people are going to be asking for features that they see in other products that you’re trying to compete against. If you don’t have those features, they’re going to say, “Well, I could pay the same amount of money to you versus this other product and they’ve already got those features so why would I go with you?”
You’re just not able to compete unless you have those features there that you can demonstrate. It’s not even just about the marking. It’s about having the things they need. If you don’t have them, they can’t go with you. It’s not even that they like you. They just won’t do it.
Rob: Yeah and that’s true. Again, funding even the way we’re talking about it, it’s not going to fix all ills. If you pick those markets that’s too small or you don’t build a good product, you’re not going to get to action. Or if it’s a market that people aren’t interested, or you don’t know how to market, you don’t have the experience, you don’t suddenly become an expert startup founder just because you raise funding but if you have the chops and funding is a big piece.
Time is a big piece because you’re only working nights and weekends. You can only put 10 hours a weekend or rather 15 hours. It’s a big difference if you can suddenly go to 40 or 50 hours with two co-founders. It doesn’t fix everything. In addition, does it come with complexity? Yes. You have to report to your investors once a month with an email. You can feel the stress of that.
That was actually something that I asked Justin McGill, Jordan Gal, and Matt Goldman, those are the co-founders of those three businesses that I mentioned earlier, CartHook, LeadFuze, and Churn Buster, and I said, “Hey, do you feel raising this money made things more stressful or less stressful?” They each have their own take on it. If I recall, Justin McGill was like, “It’s more stressful because I feel like if we don’t grow, we’re going to let you guys down.” A lot of the investors he has a lot of respect for. That’s one way it cut through. It can make it more stressful.
I don’t want to put words in people’s mouths but I think Jordan had said, “It’s more stressful but better because it motivates him to succeed.” you got to think about how your personality is and if you feel like it’s going to add more stress, if suddenly five or 10 people that you really respect, that are friends, colleagues, and fellow Microconf attendees write a check to you, how does that make you feel?
Mike: Yeah. I think the answer’s going to be different for every person, especially depending on what your product is like, what the expectations are, how you’ve position it, and how the investor views it. Some investors just say, “Yeah, I may lose all this and that’s totally okay,” and other ones may say, “I have these expectations and you’re not meeting them,” if you miss a deadline or something like that.
There’s a lot of dynamics and complexity there. Some people will thrive in it and some people won’t. I think at the end of the day, I also feel having money has the potential to make the downsides of your product or business model worse. It will just exacerbate some of those issues. If you don’t have a market that you can actually go to, if you think you do but you don’t, and you get a bunch of money in, I think it’s just going to make it worse because yes, you can try a bunch of things and you’ll be able to throw money on it, but then you’re burning more money than you would have otherwise.
Rob: That’s the thing. I know we’re going long on time but really important. I would not raise any type of funding before I have product market fit. That’s a personal thing because (a) your valuation is way last before then, and (b) no one is going to give you money if you don’t have a product, period. You have to have a product these days. You can’t raise money on an idea unless you’re Rand Fishkin, or Jason Cohen, or a founder who’s been there and done that.
You have to have a product, you have to probably be live or at least have beta users, your should have paying customers. That’s a bare minimum to even think about trying to raise funding. You have to get there. You have to write the code, you have to beg, steal and, borrow to get someone to write the code. But the valuation is going to be way less and you’re probably going to burn though a lot of that money just trying to get to product market fit. From the time you launch until you’re part of market fit, I’m going to say it’s 6-12 months if you know what you’re doing.
You see founders like Shawn Ellis, you saw Jason Cohen, you saw me do a Drip. You see people who are pretty good at it and know what they’re doing, and it still takes them six months, and ours still takes 9-12 months to do it. At that point, once you do it and you do kick it in a little bit of that growth mode where it’s like, “Okay people, are really starting to uptick it.” That’s when you pour gasoline on the fire.
But before that, I have seen at least one startup in the last year raise a small round before product market fit, and just burned through it really fast because they staffed up, do a lot of marketing and do a lot of sales, and it just that their churn was so high. That’s typically where you can tell his people aren’t converting to pay it or they aren’t sticking around. There are dangers there. Like a samurai sword, like a said in the past, it’s a weapon that you need to know what you’re doing with to wield well and I think you need to be smart about when you raise.
Mike: Yeah and it sounds like there’s obviously different takes on it. If you want to go down like the VC or angel route, series A funding down the road, I think it’s possible to probably raise money if you have any sort of history or relationship with them, like if you don’t have a product yet. But you’re still also going to get eaten alive in terms of the equity shares and everything.
I think that point that you raised about you have to have a product and you have to have paying customers before you start to go raise money, that’s how you maintain your equity, a fair amount of the equity, enough of the control to be able to what you want, need to with the business, and also be reasonable sure and confident that you’re not going to just waste the investor’s money and burn those relationships. You can use that money for good, and you know what that money will do for you versus you’re still trying to get to product market fit. You don’t know who’s going to but it or who uses it, or why.
Rob: Yeah and the once exception as I’m thinking about it is if you raise a big chunk, let’s say you raise $250,000 or $500,000 and you feel like you need to spend it, and so you staff up but your not part of market fit, you’re going to treat their money. But the exception I can think of, is like I said earlier. What if you just bought yourself 12 months of time and you didn’t staff up but you just worked on it, or 18 months. You didn’t raise this huge amount of money or raise a small amount to just focus on it and work, I could see doing that before product market fit. That would get you to the point where then you can raise that next round.
I’m not trying to be wish-wash but I’m realizing I never said never raise before product market fit but I did say I wouldn’t personally. But I have the resources to get me to product market fit and I could work on a full-time to do that. It’s an exception. If was I doing it nights and weekends, then I would take money before I see I have to think about where the advice is coming from or where the thoughts are coming from. I’m just thinking it through as if I were literally doing this nights and weekends, I would consider taking money as soon as I could. If I was going down this road because going full-time is a game-changer. Being able to focus full-time, being able to leave everything behind is a big deal. It really is and a night and day difference.
Mike: I know there’ll be a range of opinions on it, but I wonder what most investors would think about, somebody saying, “Hey, we got this product. I’ve been working on it and I’d like to get some funding and money in the bank, basically to extend the runway because I got a little bit of something going here, I got partial product in place, I got some customers, but it’s not a lot. I need runway in order to make it work but I don’t know specifically how much runway I necessarily need or how I’m going to get to having $10,000-$20,000 MRR, but I need time to get there. There’s something here but I don’t know what.” I think it’s hard to evaluate for anybody what that looks like.
Rob: Yeah. I don’t know of any investors today that would work with that. I think that’s a good thing to bring up. It’s like, is that a gap in the market then? Could that be a successful funding model of looking at people who essentially have the potential and have, like you said, pre-product market fit but have something to show for it and looking at backing them for a period of time.
Anyway, I love this topic and I think that we’ll probably talking about it again, just soon you’ll be hearing more on it from me, but I feel we might need to wrap this one up today.
Mike: Yeah. Great talk. I like it.
Rob: Me as well. So if you have a question for us about this or any other topic, call our voicemail number 888-801-9690 or email us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com. Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Outta Control by MoOt used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us in iTunes by searching for startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each and every episode. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time.
Episode 405 | Minimum Viable Security, Moving on from AuditShark, and More Listener Questions
/
RSS Feed
Show Notes
In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Rob and Mike answer a number of listener questions on topics including Mike’s thoughts on moving on from AuditShark, minimum viable security, and more.
Items mentioned in this episode:
- Indie Hackers Podcast with Mike Taber
- Release Notes Podcast with Mike Taber
- Segment
- Zapier
- Nomad List
- Comics ‘N’ Coffee
- Medium.com Post
- Medium.com Post #2
- Safestack.io Post (Security)
- SaaS Security Checklist
Rob: In this episode of Startups For The Rest Of Us, Mike and I talk about minimum viable security, moving on from AuditShark and answering more of our listener questions. This is Startups For The Rest Of Us episode 405.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m officially the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.
Rob: 42.
Mike: Yes.
Rob: Did you just turn 42?
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Congratulations man. Happy birthday!
Mike: Yeah, I finally made it. It’s like my kids. I keep telling them, “Oh if only you make it to 10, or 11, or 12.”
Rob: You finally made it to the end. I can’t believe I didn’t even think about that when I was 42. Ooh, people get to guess now how old I am. It’s fun.
Mike: I know. Oh you’re screwing up the intro.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes that we’ve made. Where are we this week sir aside from happy birthday wishes to you?
Mike: Well, I was in The Indie Hackers podcast, I think about a week and a half ago. That was with Courtland Allen. I was also on the Release Notes podcast with Charles Perry. There are actually two episodes to that. They split it up into part one and part two. I think that part two will be live by the time this episode goes out. Both were a lot of fun. I’ve got a lot of feedback from both The Indie Hackers podcast through The Indie Hackers forum and then over Twitter. It was nice to see the stuff I was talking about was resonating with people in terms of my journey, and path, and things with Bluetick and how that was validated, and how AuditShark went off the rails and everything else.
Rob: That’s cool. I heard the Release Notes episode. It actually came up in a Google alert. I have a Google alert on maybe Founder Cafe or maybe Startups For The Rest Of Us or something, and so it came up because it was in the show notes, and I so I picked up the episode. I actually enjoy hearing you on other podcasts because they ask you questions that we never cover on this show, and so I learn something, “Oh I didn’t know he did that.” You talked about your past and then even just hearing your retelling of the story of AuditShark, and Bluetick and stuff was kind of fun. I enjoyed it. We’re going to link up both of those episodes in this week’s show notes, episode 405.
Mike: Aside from that, I’ve started working on public API for Bluetick. I knew that I wanted to do it, at some point but the entire application itself is a single page application, so everything’s driven with an API. But in the process of building the app and creating that API, I found all these things that are just, I’ll say, are not probably done in the best of ways. It’s nice to have version 2–is the API that will be public versus 1, which is for internal use only.
Rob: Yeah, I was going to say that. But obviously, be sure to have a /V1 or /V2 when you publish it because you’re going to need to update it at some point and you don’t want to break retroactively. The other thing is, have rate limiting in from the start because, by the time you get to the point where you need it. It’s not good to have somebody take your API down.
I would also, this is all just from experience, if possible, put the API on a separate server or separate banks of servers because if someone takes your API down, you don’t want your main app to go down. What else? I bet there’s like four of these totally off the top of my head. I had not pre-planned these, but yeah, there’s really good ways to do APIs at this point.
I remember, again, dating my years back 10 or 12 years ago, all the APIs were different, REST was not a thing, it was all post-APIs. It was really jenky, and I guess, they were what, it was like web service, it was like XML. Remember, it was all XML?
Mike: Yeah, Microsoft came up with this thing as WSDL.
Rob: It was WSDL, SOAP, all that crap. It was terrible. You’ll still see some old APIs use that, but REST APIs now are so clean. A lot of them are stateless. There’s these best practices that people use. I would really try to implement because they definitely makes a cleaner experience for everyone.
Mike: I use Swagger to document the API, kind of hooked it, so if I make any changes to the API, I’ve got to document that basically says how it works. That’s an easy enough thing to incorporate into the public API but the other nice thing that I found is that there are utilities out there that you can use to query your Swagger documentation, and then it will build libraries for you in various languages so, Python, C#, and various other things. It’ll just create a library for you, and then you can make it available to people so that if they want to hook it directly into their application, they’ve got the code to do it, and they don’t have to write all of the wrapper stuff that goes with it which is awesome.
Rob: Assuming that it works well, that is awesome. Really, really cool. I know that with Drip early on, obviously, we released a Ruby wrapper because Drip was written in Ruby, and then someone built an open source. Python was one, I believe, and then someone built a .NET one. I think they kind of just open sourced it, and we linked out to it which was cool especially in the early days. It did kind of stink as we got further on because they weren’t actively maintaining it because they have built it for themselves and implemented it.
We added more to the API later on, a bunch of more methods, they didn’t implement them, so people would email us and be like, “Hey you need to add this.” It’s like, “We don’t even know anything on the code base.” and we didn’t have any .NET developers on staff. There’s different things. Everybody wants a wrapper in every language, and you just can’t do it, and it’s just not feasible. But if you are able to roll up the top two or three most common ones and then be able to maintain them, that would be a big deal.
Mike: I don’t know how many people are going to hooking into it, but I have talked to other people who run apps like SaaS apps, and they are interested in hooking into Bluetick. Question is, “How do I make it available for them? How do I make it available as a public API for customers? Do I have separate endpoints for each of them?” I’m not entirely sure on it yet but I suspect it’d probably be easier to maintain if I just have one public API, and that was it, regardless of whether you’re integrating directly or not.
Rob: I would tend to do that although—we had the public API and anyone could consume it. If we wanted like, when Leadpages wanted to integrate with us or if it was an official integration that we were both going to promote, and it was going to be on our integrations page, we typically fork off a separate endpoint so that we could handle that differently. Because sometimes, with that one, we wanted to give it a higher rate limit or we wanted to route the traffic slightly differently based on what it was, and if it was coming to the public API we didn’t know–that is one thing to think about. In the end, we had 35-40 integrations. We did not have a full, 40 different endpoints but I do think we had a handful for especially the most popular ones.
Mike: I could see having a third party integration API, like a dedicated endpoint for that, and then for certain ones, you say, “Okay, we’re going to fork this code and give it additional functionality or put it on a different server.” Because it justifies having higher rate limits just because of the data going back and you trust them to send you things in a normal fashion versus if you just have that public endpoint, who knows what they could be doing or sending. Most of those are going to be for regular customers versus somebody who is sending stuff over on behalf of a lot of customers.
Rob: Yeah, totally. Here is something to think about as well. For some reason, segment.com—at least last I heard when I still at Drip—they don’t honor rate limits, they just never implemented it. They said that they were working on it but they would DDoS us about every two months or three months. They would take the API pretty much down, and we would be frantically emailing them because we would return a 403 I believe which is, “You’re over your rate limit. Please stop sending.” and there’s a bunch of stuff in the response code. You say, “You have to wait 57 minutes before you can send another whatever.”
Zapier is an example, has a rate limit, and when we would go out and webhook into Zapier, we would read that response, and then we’d throw it into a queue for 57 minutes later. It would say, “You can have up to 1000 per hour.” You can just read the response, and it will allow us to rate limit stuff out. Segment never bothered to build that, and so someone would come in with half a million uniques a day, and they would be pumping everything into the segment, and they just click the check the box of like, “Yes, stuff everything into Drip.” All of a sudden it will be just, boom. Beware of that.
Again, we talked with Segment quite a bit about it, and they were like, “We’re working on this. It’s a problem for other folks too.” But at one point, we, for a couple of hours, we had to block all of Segment’s IPs. It was crazy. We’re at the firewall, and then they would get it turned off. Just beware. It’s not going to happen day one, but it will happen eventually.
Mike: I don’t know. It may happen day one.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing, right? You never know.
Mike: I’ve seen, just because of the volume of data that Bluetick handles on the backend because it’s a mailbox. When I split things off onto two servers. Part of the reason I ended up having to do two servers was because when I got a new sign-up, if they had a large mailbox, the first thing it does is it indexes everything. Right there, just adding a new customer will basically DDoS the entire application, it depends on how large they were, so I added a bunch of code to back things off a little bit and do internal rate limiting on how much calculations and stuff it does, and how quickly it does stuff.
I even added code that would monitor the process that was currently running, and then throttle it up and down in terms of the CPU usage which was kind of crazy because it works across the entire process, you can’t do that on a […] basis in Windows. I don’t know. I considered moving it off into its own separate process, but that one involved a different service. I was just like, “I’ll put it on a different server, and I then I won’t have to worry about it.” that was the solution I ended up with.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. Something else to consider, in the early days, reset the rate limit pretty low knowing you can always increase it but decreasing it later is not going to go well. We set it low and when people come in and say, “I need to import 100,000, and your rate limit is going to take me two days to do it.” So we’d said, “Okay, we’re going to build a bulk endpoint for you.” so then we build a public endpoint that was, instead of add subscriber, it was bulk add subscriber, and you could I think it was 1000 per payload, 1000 subscribers. It was still the same amount of submissions, it was still rate limited at that, but you could then send 1000 instead of just one. We built several bulk endpoints both in, and I believe out as the troubleshooting.
This is one of those things where customers say, “No. I need a higher rate limit.” It’s like, “What do you actually need?” “What I actually need to do is import 100,000 people.” “Oh well, there’s a better solution than increasing the rate limit across the board for all 30,000 people or whatever who use this app because that could be catastrophic for the thing.” so we did do that. It’s just something to think about. It’s product decisions. But there’s often more elegant ways to do things than just what the customer is asking for.
Mike: Yeah. I like to have early conversations with pretty much every customer that comes on to Bluetick just because I want to know what it is that you’re actually trying to do. Like yesterday, I had a call with somebody who had signed up, and I was trying to figure out what it was they were trying to do. They’re in the fashion industry, and they have all these samples and stuff of people, like manufacturers and vendors, that they have to follow up with, and they ask for samples, and if they don’t get them or they don’t hear back, they have to follow-up with them.
It was very interesting hearing the conversation about exactly the specifics of the problem that they were trying to solve. Ultimately, we concluded that the volume isn’t high enough right now to justify using Bluetick, but once it starts scaling up, which they expect that to happen, then Bluetick is going to be really helpful for them.
Rob: On my end, as you know, I recently moved. We were in California for two weeks, and then we flew in and landed at midnight on a Wednesday, and we closed on the house on Friday. When we were in California, I really wasn’t thinking much about the house closing. All of the stuff was in-flight, and there wasn’t much work to do on it. When we got back, I’m like, “I need to start changing our address.” Thursday and Friday, as we’re about to get the keys, I start changing the address, I start moving utilities, I start doing all that. I forget that for internet access, a: how critical it is—it is perhaps more important than a lot of other things.
Mike: […]?
Rob: Yeah, I was going to say electricity, but it’s really not because you need both. It is as important to me as having electricity. It was crazy to not have it. What I forget is that cable, internet, and DSL—they can turn it on same day or they overnight you the equipment, and you get it the next day. That’s what I was thinking. But of course, we have fiber here. We’re at the luxury of having fiber gigabit fiber.
There’s two companies that offer it in the neighborhood, really cool. I call up, and they’re like, “Yeah, we can get to you in 11 days.” Then the other one said, “We have to trench…” not trench but put pipe under the ground, so it’s going to take 30 days. I was like, “No, this is catastrophic,” because we’ve been spoiled by having this fiber at the other house, so I set up the appointment. The 30-day fiber is a local company called US Internet, and super fast, and it’s $70 per gig, up and down. They are at the street, but it’ll take them about a month to get in.
But I signed up for cable. I’m going to basically have it for a month. I had them overnight the equipment, so within 36-48 hours of moving in we had real internet but it is cable which is crazy. It used to be blazing fast, but now it feels–I think if Sherri and I if we’re both on video calls, and the kids are streaming, you start to have issues. It’s funny how quickly you get spoiled by having gigabit which you never, I will say, we never maxed it out.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: The moral of the story is a couple of things; if you’re moving, and you’d only need DSL or cable, you can probably just give them a few days’ notice assuming it’s already wired in but if you’re going to do something like fiber, this is a reminder to myself be like, “Yeah, you wanna give somebody a few weeks because it may not actually be wired to all the houses.”
Do we want to answer some listener questions today?
Mike: Let’s get to it.
Rob: Alright. Our first question comes from Nick Malcolm, and he recorded an audio question, and so he went straight to the top of the pile—as they always do—so voicemail to us or emailing us with an MP3 or M4A gets you to the top of the stacks. Let’s listen to that audio here.
“Hello, Mike and Rob. I’m a long time listener from New Zealand. I’ve been involved in startups in the past, in technical roles but now I’m working as a consultant helping companies to better at security. I work alongside development teams doing things like threat modeling and teaching about common risks like […] and also at an organizational level with processes and policy and risk management. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on what minimum viable security should look like for startups and how this might change as the company grows. Thank you for everything you both give to the startup community, that’s much appreciated. Thanks.”
Mike: I think the trouble with security or trying to address the problem of minimum viable security in a startup is it competes with the aims of the business especially when you’re first starting out. There’re pre-profitability and then post-profitability. If you’re talking about pre-profitability, you need to do at least the varied minimum basics such as making sure that the code that you’re writing is, if it’s proprietary code, you’re not going to be releasing it, just make sure that it’s in a secret repository someplace, it’s not like a public repo. But obviously, if it’s open source, that kind of stuff doesn’t matter.
In terms of the server and infrastructure, for a startup, it so depends on what the startup is doing, how their infrastructure is configured, and the, I’ll say, knowledge of security that the people who are building it have. If you’re the type of person who is like, “Oh let me handle all these edge cases and make sure that I’m doing the right things,” then that’s fine. But if you’re not, then you just have to be aware that those things are probably going to need to be dealt with at some point down the road. Maybe not today but you have to do a good job of being diligent about marking where your code could potentially be exploited or places where things could go sideways. Whether it’s cross-site scripting attacks or things going into the query string and the API being used for things that it really shouldn’t be. Beyond that, you can go so far into the weeds that it’s just not even funny.
Security companies make their living basically, sort of being ambulance chasers to start with. If somebody has a security breach, they suddenly come up with all these articles about, “Hey, you have to be careful of these two, and this just happened to this person.” because it’s scare tactics. That’s really what they’re trying to sell on. But in terms of the basics, if you’re using password, make sure they’re one-way encrypted, make sure that anything that is sensitive is being encrypted inside of the database.
Those are the types of things that you want to at least pay minimum attention to. If you’re running Windows, obviously, you’d probably want to be running antivirus software of some kind on each of the machines in the environment. But as I’ve said, you can go so far into the weeds like putting data loss prevention things on your phones or laptops or all these other stuff. You don’t need to go that far, in most cases, I don’t think. Unless you are a security company selling security software, in which case, being hacked would obviously, be the worst thing in the world for you.
Beyond that, just do what you need to do in order to protect the customer’s data. Making sure information does not bleed from one customer over to another. That’s a pretty basic thing, but sometimes it can go wrong if you’re not careful about how you’re doing database queries or packeting data between customers.
Rob: I agree with you. This is the kind of stuff that you have to worry about just enough, and not any more than that because it will slow your business down, it’ll slow building features down, but you have to pay attention to it as you go. These days, when I think of minimum viable security for startups, I think of starting with a language that has that built-in or a framework that does. I know that Rails has a bunch of stuff that validates the incoming request streams, and it’ll pull out cross-site scripting sequence injection, and all of the stuff. That‘s a good place to start.
If you use Azure or if you use EC2 or Google cloud, there’s a lot of security best practices built into there. Nick, who sent the question, included what looks like three blog posts that we will link up in the show notes as well as a SaaS CTO security checklist. Again, this is stuff that you do it just enough to where you feel comfortable. It’s like GDPR. Do you implement a full-blown thing and pay $10,000 to hire a lawyer or do you pay someone $500 and the be mostly compliant?
The TLDR that Nick sent over is like, “Use version control, have logging and monitoring, and continuous integration.” so that you’re constantly running unit tests. I think you should have some unit tests that are testing security, and making sure that things are not going to be easily hacked or whatever. Hopefully, those thoughts are helpful. I realized that it’s kind of an “it depends”, and it’s definitely always a “there’s a continuum” when you’re doing these things but it’s also similar to a question of, “How much should I worry about the legal stuff surrounding getting my LLC set-up and getting every trademarked.” and getting all that. It’s like, “Well, I should worry about it just enough.” It depends on your risk tolerance in all honesty. Thanks for the question, Nick. That was a good one.
Next, we have a comment about moving on from AuditShark. He says, “Hey, guys. I’ve been listening for a while now. Over two years ago, I started an app part-time. Finally, after all these time and all the money I’ve sunk into it, I’ve decided to let it go. There were a number of reasons it failed. Most important being that I’ve never launched my own product before and didn’t fully understand what it took. Listening to Mike’s decision to move from AuditShark…” we have an episode called Moving On from AuditShark. It’s probably 150, 200 episodes ago. He said, “It’s given me the confidence to know this is the right decision. I felt his pain in the episode because it’s the same pain I’m going through now. I’ve decided to do this stair-step approach and practice learning simpler products like an e-book or audio course. Hopefully, this will both give me the confidence and an audience when I’m ready to launch another product. It still hurts and I still think what if all the time but I know I’m making the right decision. Love the show and congrats on 400.”
Thanks for writing in, Greg. It’s always good to hear from folks who experienced things. We talked about trying to help people avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Sometimes you’re going to make the same mistakes we’ve made but maybe knowing that we made them, there’s some solidarity in knowing, “Oh, other people make them too,” and kind of we’ve all been there so. I think this thing will go away over time. Mike, from your perspective, you went through it, and now you’re in the middle of AuditShark building something that’s obviously starting to get some traction. What are your thoughts on this?
Mike: I’m not in the middle of audit shark anymore. What are you saying?
Rob: Freudian slip, that’s funny. What do you think?
Mike: Well, I definitely get how you can think what if all the time. I really don’t. AuditShark would not have been a good fit for me long-term. I didn’t realize that when I started out. I didn’t realize it ‘til I was probably very close to the end but it didn’t fit me as founder, and it wasn’t the type of business that I probably would have wanted to own long-term. I looked at it from more of a financial perspective of, “Oh I really want to be able to sell this and make a lot of money from it.” I enjoyed the problem space itself, but I did not enjoy trying to sell that type of a product versus Bluetick where I actually do it because I feel it’s legitimately helping people that need that help, and with AuditShark it was more about meeting the checkbox requirement for people, and nobody actually cared about it. It was just like, “Oh, our company says we have to do this so we’ll do it.”
Rob: Yup, that makes sense. I think early on you probably thought what if a bit, and then you moved past it. That’s the healing process of letting something like this go.
Mike: Yup, definitely.
Rob: Cool. Our next question/comment is a comment on episode 403, so go to startupsfortherestofus.com if you ever want to leave a comment, read all your comments. Doug said, “First of all where do you find the time to play D&D?” which I think is funny. From my perspective, I am trying to think, I got back into it, what is it, my kid is 12, and I think I taught him when he was maybe eight, and so it’s been about four years so yeah, Drip was going on. Frankly, we don’t play D&D very much. I mean, we do more now that I’m not working on Drop anymore, but when I was growing Drip, we would maybe play every few months. It really was not an on-going campaign thing, but it’s definitely gotten easier for me to carve out the time.
I think if we have a recurring campaign that was with other people, you just kind of find the time. If it’s every week or twice a month on a Thursday at seven, and you know that you’re going to let people down if you don’t show up, that would be something. The other thing for me is we keep our sessions short. They’re typically 60-90 minutes. They’re not these four-hour campaigns, and we enjoy it that way. How about you, Mike? How do you find the time?
Mike: I have two different ones. […] morning is with a friend of mine and our kids, kind of collectively, that we’ve run very sporadically. We might need once in a month or once every two or three months. That’s been going on for probably close to two years at this point. The other one that I just started up, I think we’ve had three sessions so far, but it’s every Tuesday night. We meet up at 7:30 PM. Two nights ago we’ve had a rather lengthy one. It went until 12:30 AM. It was almost 1:00 in the morning by the time I got home. It was 7:30 PM to 12:30 AM, that was kind of the ballpark thing.
We’re shooting for 2-3 hours, three hours is kind of the minimum that we want, and then after that, it’s kind of wherever is a decent stopping point. That session just happened to be longer. But I agree with you that having a set time of the day each week or every couple of weeks that you’re shooting for, that’s the best way to go just because you’re making a commitment to other people to be there and show up. I think that’s really helpful.
Rob: Here’s the thing, when I was doing startups on nights and weekends and had a day job, I didn’t play any of this. There were years where I didn’t go to happy hours with friends when they would go. I didn’t play any type of tabletop games because I work all day, and then I work all night. My kids were either not born yet, or they were really young, so they would go to sleep at seven, and then I would just work ‘till 1:00 in the morning, and I was tired, but that was the slog.
You and I both moved into the position. Once I’m working on it full-time during the day, and I’m putting the seven-nine hours a day of startup work, then in the evenings I actually like to not continue to do that, and so it depends on the phase you’re in. If you are still working nights and weekends, I would say don’t get involved, like don’t have a hobby. It’s crazy advice, but I really put all my hobbies on hold while I was getting that initial traction. It was definitely a couple of years, it was even more than that, actually. It was probably over the span of about five or six years, but it wasn’t constantly I would tackle a project, work on it for six months, and I wasn’t doing anything nights and weekends, and yeah, it sucked, but I had that goal. I wanted to get that financial freedom. I wanted to get out of my day job. It would crash and burn, and then I’d be all dejected and disappointed. I would go back to having a hobby for a while until I got motivated enough to do the next effort.
Mike: I find that setting aside the time is a nice distraction as well because it’s very easy to get stuck into the pattern of working on the same thing all day every day and let it bleed into other parts of your life which ultimately is probably not good for you. I think that they’re just making sure that there’s a set commitment that I have that is external to work in any way, shape or form. I find that that’s helpful.
Rob: I agree. I fully agree. I think of this podcast a little bit like that. Every week, no matter how bad things were, how hard they were, how stressed I was, you and I would have this one hour blocked off to sit and talk about this stuff, and that’s something that we’ve done for a long time. Even though it’s talking about work, in essence, it did help the days. I think you have to have some variety to them.
Doug has another question, he says, “Rob, you say wanting financial freedom was motivating. Is that another way of saying I hated my day job? How far can not liking the cubicle and office get you on a startup journey? Comfortable paycheck is the enemy of great startup ideas. I am proof of that.”
It’s an interesting question. In all honesty, I hear this from people time to time, and they’re like, “Well, my day job’s good enough. I’m kind of motivated to do. It sounds like it’s fun to do a startup.” In my opinion, if you’re not all in on it, you’re just not going to put in the time to do it. If it really is a major pain point, like for me, yes, I hated my day job. I hated all of the day jobs I did. Hate is a strong word, but I was never happy for very long. Maybe it was 12-18 months, and then it was like, “No, I have to move onto the next thing.”
The further I got along, not only would I burn out on a job within, let’s say, 12-24 months. But I also realized I wanted to make money more as a salaried or even as a contractor. I wanted mobility. I wanted to be able to travel, and not have to worry about being in one place or living in the same city or being concerned that I was going to get laid off, so I wanted the confidence that I was in control of my own destiny. Frankly, I did want more control of my time.
I hated having to be in an office at 8:30 AM or needing to be available at these hours, so I just wanted that. Especially as I got older, when I’ve gotten to my early 30s, I realized, “This was not going to work for me.” It was a real, true pain point in my life and I was willing to put it all on the table. I was willing to sacrifice nights and weekends for years to do this. If that’s not you and you don’t have the burning desire, that’s okay. I’ve some good friends who I envy because they’ve been happy.
Mien, a really good friend of mine in Sacramento, started the day job the same week back in 2000. He still works at that company. It’s 18 years later. He’s a developer, and he works at a consulting firm. I’ve had 20 jobs since then. I bounced to different jobs, different products if you count it all, maybe even more than that. We’re just cut from a different cloth. I would be so hopelessly unhappy and depressed if I had his life but I don’t judge him and say, “Oh you could do better if you’ve done startups.” because I don’t think he really had the desire. I don’t know if his personality is cut out for it. He really didn’t want the stress. He’s just more conventional than I am.
We each have different priorities, and we have different personalities. I think you really have to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Am I willing to do what it takes?” because this startups stuff is not easy. I hope that’s something we’ve communicated in the past 405 episodes both through just talking about stuff theoretically and also the agony of episodes like moving on from AuditShark and the agony of some of the stuff that I’ve talked about here. That was a good rant for me. What do you think, Mike? You have other thoughts?
Mike: The summary of what you just said is like, it’s a personal decision for each person. I can relate to your friend out of Seattle. I was up in Rochester within the past couple of years, and one of the reasons I had left Wagman’s was there was a guy who’d recently got promoted to a position that I had wanted, not that I was going to get promoted to it, it’s just that it was one that I aspired to. He got promoted to it after being at the company for 18 years. I was like, “I’m not waiting 18 years to get promoted to that level.”
I ran into him a couple of years ago, and he’s still there working at the same company that he’s been at for 30 years. That would not have worked for me. I don’t have the personality to have been working in that business for that long and not transition around. I’m sure that he works on different things, but it would not be a good fit for me.
Rob: Thanks for the questions, Doug. I enjoyed them so much. I didn’t answer them on the blog. I wanted to talk about them on the show. Our final listener question for the day is from Ricardo Feliciano, and he says, “Hey Mike and Rob. I love the podcast. I find it very valuable. My question is, what is the best way to charge for an online and real-life community? The two best examples I’ve seen are Founder Cafe from the two of you and Nomad List, nomadlist.com. I ask because I’m starting a community for Marvel and DC fans called Comics and Coffee, that’s comicsncoffer.com. I don’t know if I should pay wallet or try to monetize it through merchandise. Perhaps through a premium program such as what Reddit does with Reddit Gold or Discord with Nitro. Thanks for your time. PS for comics and coffee background: We started up with a podcast, and we’re adding a form, and in-person meetups for movie nights soon.” What do you think?
Mike: I think if you’re going to have a community, there has to be some compelling reason for people to join and stick with their membership is, really what it comes down to. When you look at something like Nomad List, that’s aimed at people who are traveling around the world—and they’re probably constantly traveling—they’re more likely to become and remain a member for longer periods of time. Because even though they may be in Thailand for three months or six months or even a year or two, then they go over to Belarus or Spain or Africa or wherever, and then they’re going to need to be able to connect to other people either locally or online or potentially both, that’s one of those communities where it’s an ongoing thing, that they don’t just need the service once versus something like, trying to meet up with other people locally and those people are not moving around.
Everybody lives in the same community. For example, I live here in Massachusetts. If I wanted to get together with people and wanted to form a group or an organization or something like that, I might use meetup.com for that. The benefit of that is finding other people but if you’ve already got an established location, and a group of people that are coming, chances are good that they associate with other people outside of that who are also involved in comics. They’re going to invite their friends.
Now, the advantage of your platform or your community is that you are going to be able to attract more people to it and that’s the value proposition you have which is, “Hey, find other people and stick with a local community.” The problem is that once they have found your community and are coming to whatever meeting’s there are on a regular basis or semi-regular basis, what additional value are you offering? I’m not clear on what that would be.
With Founder Cafe, it’s a little different because everybody’s remote. Because it’s all remote like, if you join the community and then you leave, you no longer have access to it versus if it’s a local, in-person meet up and there’s a regular meeting every Tuesday at 7:00 o’clock, everybody comes at 7:00 and once you’ve found it, you kind of no longer need the platform anymore, so what value is it that you offer?
I think that’s what you need to focus in on in terms of trying to figure out how to monetize it. You might be able to pay wallet and have some sort of merchandise behind it, I’m not sure how would that go though. I don’t know is charging on ongoing basis is for would be terribly lucrative, I’ll say.
Rob: Yeah. B2B is easier than B2C. In this case, Founder Cafe or the Dynamite Circle or Nomad List, they tend to surround people who run businesses, who are making money through something, who the network they know can help them make more money, help them to have a more successful business whereas going to gamers, I mean gamers are notoriously cheap. They’ll spend money on games but trying to ask consumer to do a subscription tends to be a harder thing to do. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it but know that when I think about the $99 every quarter that we charge for Founder Cafe, most business owners see that and think, “Yeah, that’s not very much money compared to what I’m paying for all the other services I’m using.” But if you were to try to charge that in your case, it will be very hard.
Basically, no one would sign-up. I bet people would be like, “Are you kidding me? $33 a month to have access to this list?” You’re going to be more down in the, I’ll say, the Netflix zone where you’re probably looking at $5-$10 a month, I would think. I would probably either charge it quarterly or charge it annually. It’s such a small dollar amount. You don’t want to have these $5 charges all over the place. Maybe it’s $50 a year, $80 a year, $100 a year, somewhere in that range is what I initially think about.
I don’t think it’s a bad experiment. I mean depending on how many people you already have on the list, merch is fun, but merch is going to take time, the margins are low, and you really need a lot of people on your list in order to sell enough merch to get any type of revenue, you’re only getting, what’s the net margin on merch? Is it 10%, 20%? It’s going to be very small. I think that could be an interesting revenue stream to explore, but I would do that later. Having a premium membership, I think could be very interesting.
You could also consider doing a Patreon but again, you need quite a few people to do that, then you can have that insider’s group pretty easily, and all the mechanics are handled for it. People already know, it’s becoming pretty popular to hear this word Patreon and to know what that means. It’s not like reinvent the wheel and introduce everybody to, “Yeah, this premium membership,” blah blah blah. It’s just like, “Go to your Patreon account. You already potentially support some other podcast creators, support it, and if you support it at the $5 a month level,” and then Patreon handles all that for you—all the billing and all that—then you get this extra perk of getting this log in, or getting this episode earlier, getting these episodes that are only published on the Patreon feeds.”
Those are my initial thoughts on it. I love the idea of Chris. I’d love to do something like this, but it is going to be hard to pull the viable business out of it. You’re going to need a lot of people listening to you. B2C is the volume play. You need a lot more people selling something for $5 a month versus $50 or $100 a month.
Mike: The other thing that occurs to me is something like this seems similar to there’s a website called Roll20 which is mainly aimed at roleplaying games but obviously, there’s a lot of Dungeons and Dragons players on there, but playing various editions, and Pathfinder, and various other roleplaying games and they have a mechanism where they’re charging, I think it’s either $5 or $10 a month and it’s an annual fee.
I agree with Rob but I think going the annual route is probably the best way to go to get some of that initial revenue and then down the road, you could look at that and say, “Okay, now that I’ve got 500, 1000, or 10,000 who have paid that much money.” Again, with 1000 people paying $50 for a year, that’s $50,000, it’s not enough to support one person for the most part full-time.
One thing you could do is start offering like an escrow service for people who want to buy or sell comic books. Yes, you can do it on eBay, but then you have to deal with PayPal, and all these other stuff, for higher-end, and Rob maybe you could speak into this because I know you’re in the comic books but would you pay for an escrow service for something like a high-value comic book? Because we’ve talked about, in episode 403, about analyzing another type of business but I think part of that is looking at the type of customer that you want. People who are buying and selling extremely valuable comic books, they want to make sure that what they’re getting is good quality, and that they’re actually going to get it and not going to get ripped off. By offering an escrow service as an add-on later, that might be an option.
Rob: Yeah, I think that could get traction. I don’t know if that exists today, to be honest. I wish there was a text box, we could type search terms into, and it could potentially tell us if that exists today.
Mike: I know. That’d be fantastic.
Rob: It’s crazy. Anyway, enough daydreaming. But yeah, I think that’s a good point. Again, then do you have to build a large enough community that the small percentage who use whatever service offshoot making enough money to be viable. But I do think that’s a cool thought experiment or an interesting way to think about it. It’s a creative way to think about, I’ll say. I think adding offshoot businesses rather than just charging directly is another way you could potentially monetize it.
Mike: Thanks for the question, Ricardo. I think that about wraps us up for the day.
If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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 Rob.
Mike: And I’m officially the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.
Rob: 42.
Mike: Yes.
Rob: Did you just turn 42?
Mike: Yup.
Rob: Congratulations man. Happy birthday!
Mike: Yeah, I finally made it. It’s like my kids. I keep telling them, “Oh if only you make it to 10, or 11, or 12.”
Rob: You finally made it to the end. I can’t believe I didn’t even think about that when I was 42. Ooh, people get to guess now how old I am. It’s fun.
Mike: I know. Oh you’re screwing up the intro.
Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes that we’ve made. Where are we this week sir aside from happy birthday wishes to you?
Mike: Well, I was in The Indie Hackers podcast, I think about a week and a half ago. That was with Courtland Allen. I was also on the Release Notes podcast with Charles Perry. There are actually two episodes to that. They split it up into part one and part two. I think that part two will be live by the time this episode goes out. Both were a lot of fun. I’ve got a lot of feedback from both The Indie Hackers podcast through The Indie Hackers forum and then over Twitter. It was nice to see the stuff I was talking about was resonating with people in terms of my journey, and path, and things with Bluetick and how that was validated, and how AuditShark went off the rails and everything else.
Rob: That’s cool. I heard the Release Notes episode. It actually came up in a Google alert. I have a Google alert on maybe Founder Cafe or maybe Startups For The Rest Of Us or something, and so it came up because it was in the show notes, and I so I picked up the episode. I actually enjoy hearing you on other podcasts because they ask you questions that we never cover on this show, and so I learn something, “Oh I didn’t know he did that.” You talked about your past and then even just hearing your retelling of the story of AuditShark, and Bluetick and stuff was kind of fun. I enjoyed it. We’re going to link up both of those episodes in this week’s show notes, episode 405.
Mike: Aside from that, I’ve started working on public API for Bluetick. I knew that I wanted to do it, at some point but the entire application itself is a single page application, so everything’s driven with an API. But in the process of building the app and creating that API, I found all these things that are just, I’ll say, are not probably done in the best of ways. It’s nice to have version 2–is the API that will be public versus 1, which is for internal use only.
Rob: Yeah, I was going to say that. But obviously, be sure to have a /V1 or /V2 when you publish it because you’re going to need to update it at some point and you don’t want to break retroactively. The other thing is, have rate limiting in from the start because, by the time you get to the point where you need it. It’s not good to have somebody take your API down.
I would also, this is all just from experience, if possible, put the API on a separate server or separate banks of servers because if someone takes your API down, you don’t want your main app to go down. What else? I bet there’s like four of these totally off the top of my head. I had not pre-planned these, but yeah, there’s really good ways to do APIs at this point.
I remember, again, dating my years back 10 or 12 years ago, all the APIs were different, REST was not a thing, it was all post-APIs. It was really jenky, and I guess, they were what, it was like web service, it was like XML. Remember, it was all XML?
Mike: Yeah, Microsoft came up with this thing as WSDL.
Rob: It was WSDL, SOAP, all that crap. It was terrible. You’ll still see some old APIs use that, but REST APIs now are so clean. A lot of them are stateless. There’s these best practices that people use. I would really try to implement because they definitely makes a cleaner experience for everyone.
Mike: I use Swagger to document the API, kind of hooked it, so if I make any changes to the API, I’ve got to document that basically says how it works. That’s an easy enough thing to incorporate into the public API but the other nice thing that I found is that there are utilities out there that you can use to query your Swagger documentation, and then it will build libraries for you in various languages so, Python, C#, and various other things. It’ll just create a library for you, and then you can make it available to people so that if they want to hook it directly into their application, they’ve got the code to do it, and they don’t have to write all of the wrapper stuff that goes with it which is awesome.
Rob: Assuming that it works well, that is awesome. Really, really cool. I know that with Drip early on, obviously, we released a Ruby wrapper because Drip was written in Ruby, and then someone built an open source. Python was one, I believe, and then someone built a .NET one. I think they kind of just open sourced it, and we linked out to it which was cool especially in the early days. It did kind of stink as we got further on because they weren’t actively maintaining it because they have built it for themselves and implemented it.
We added more to the API later on, a bunch of more methods, they didn’t implement them, so people would email us and be like, “Hey you need to add this.” It’s like, “We don’t even know anything on the code base.” and we didn’t have any .NET developers on staff. There’s different things. Everybody wants a wrapper in every language, and you just can’t do it, and it’s just not feasible. But if you are able to roll up the top two or three most common ones and then be able to maintain them, that would be a big deal.
Mike: I don’t know how many people are going to hooking into it, but I have talked to other people who run apps like SaaS apps, and they are interested in hooking into Bluetick. Question is, “How do I make it available for them? How do I make it available as a public API for customers? Do I have separate endpoints for each of them?” I’m not entirely sure on it yet but I suspect it’d probably be easier to maintain if I just have one public API, and that was it, regardless of whether you’re integrating directly or not.
Rob: I would tend to do that although—we had the public API and anyone could consume it. If we wanted like, when Leadpages wanted to integrate with us or if it was an official integration that we were both going to promote, and it was going to be on our integrations page, we typically fork off a separate endpoint so that we could handle that differently. Because sometimes, with that one, we wanted to give it a higher rate limit or we wanted to route the traffic slightly differently based on what it was, and if it was coming to the public API we didn’t know–that is one thing to think about. In the end, we had 35-40 integrations. We did not have a full, 40 different endpoints but I do think we had a handful for especially the most popular ones.
Mike: I could see having a third party integration API, like a dedicated endpoint for that, and then for certain ones, you say, “Okay, we’re going to fork this code and give it additional functionality or put it on a different server.” Because it justifies having higher rate limits just because of the data going back and you trust them to send you things in a normal fashion versus if you just have that public endpoint, who knows what they could be doing or sending. Most of those are going to be for regular customers versus somebody who is sending stuff over on behalf of a lot of customers.
Rob: Yeah, totally. Here is something to think about as well. For some reason, segment.com—at least last I heard when I still at Drip—they don’t honor rate limits, they just never implemented it. They said that they were working on it but they would DDoS us about every two months or three months. They would take the API pretty much down, and we would be frantically emailing them because we would return a 403 I believe which is, “You’re over your rate limit. Please stop sending.” and there’s a bunch of stuff in the response code. You say, “You have to wait 57 minutes before you can send another whatever.”
Zapier is an example, has a rate limit, and when we would go out and webhook into Zapier, we would read that response, and then we’d throw it into a queue for 57 minutes later. It would say, “You can have up to 1000 per hour.” You can just read the response, and it will allow us to rate limit stuff out. Segment never bothered to build that, and so someone would come in with half a million uniques a day, and they would be pumping everything into the segment, and they just click the check the box of like, “Yes, stuff everything into Drip.” All of a sudden it will be just, boom. Beware of that.
Again, we talked with Segment quite a bit about it, and they were like, “We’re working on this. It’s a problem for other folks too.” But at one point, we, for a couple of hours, we had to block all of Segment’s IPs. It was crazy. We’re at the firewall, and then they would get it turned off. Just beware. It’s not going to happen day one, but it will happen eventually.
Mike: I don’t know. It may happen day one.
Rob: Yeah, that’s the thing, right? You never know.
Mike: I’ve seen, just because of the volume of data that Bluetick handles on the backend because it’s a mailbox. When I split things off onto two servers. Part of the reason I ended up having to do two servers was because when I got a new sign-up, if they had a large mailbox, the first thing it does is it indexes everything. Right there, just adding a new customer will basically DDoS the entire application, it depends on how large they were, so I added a bunch of code to back things off a little bit and do internal rate limiting on how much calculations and stuff it does, and how quickly it does stuff.
I even added code that would monitor the process that was currently running, and then throttle it up and down in terms of the CPU usage which was kind of crazy because it works across the entire process, you can’t do that on a […] basis in Windows. I don’t know. I considered moving it off into its own separate process, but that one involved a different service. I was just like, “I’ll put it on a different server, and I then I won’t have to worry about it.” that was the solution I ended up with.
Rob: Yeah, that makes sense. Something else to consider, in the early days, reset the rate limit pretty low knowing you can always increase it but decreasing it later is not going to go well. We set it low and when people come in and say, “I need to import 100,000, and your rate limit is going to take me two days to do it.” So we’d said, “Okay, we’re going to build a bulk endpoint for you.” so then we build a public endpoint that was, instead of add subscriber, it was bulk add subscriber, and you could I think it was 1000 per payload, 1000 subscribers. It was still the same amount of submissions, it was still rate limited at that, but you could then send 1000 instead of just one. We built several bulk endpoints both in, and I believe out as the troubleshooting.
This is one of those things where customers say, “No. I need a higher rate limit.” It’s like, “What do you actually need?” “What I actually need to do is import 100,000 people.” “Oh well, there’s a better solution than increasing the rate limit across the board for all 30,000 people or whatever who use this app because that could be catastrophic for the thing.” so we did do that. It’s just something to think about. It’s product decisions. But there’s often more elegant ways to do things than just what the customer is asking for.
Mike: Yeah. I like to have early conversations with pretty much every customer that comes on to Bluetick just because I want to know what it is that you’re actually trying to do. Like yesterday, I had a call with somebody who had signed up, and I was trying to figure out what it was they were trying to do. They’re in the fashion industry, and they have all these samples and stuff of people, like manufacturers and vendors, that they have to follow up with, and they ask for samples, and if they don’t get them or they don’t hear back, they have to follow-up with them.
It was very interesting hearing the conversation about exactly the specifics of the problem that they were trying to solve. Ultimately, we concluded that the volume isn’t high enough right now to justify using Bluetick, but once it starts scaling up, which they expect that to happen, then Bluetick is going to be really helpful for them.
Rob: On my end, as you know, I recently moved. We were in California for two weeks, and then we flew in and landed at midnight on a Wednesday, and we closed on the house on Friday. When we were in California, I really wasn’t thinking much about the house closing. All of the stuff was in-flight, and there wasn’t much work to do on it. When we got back, I’m like, “I need to start changing our address.” Thursday and Friday, as we’re about to get the keys, I start changing the address, I start moving utilities, I start doing all that. I forget that for internet access, a: how critical it is—it is perhaps more important than a lot of other things.
Mike: […]?
Rob: Yeah, I was going to say electricity, but it’s really not because you need both. It is as important to me as having electricity. It was crazy to not have it. What I forget is that cable, internet, and DSL—they can turn it on same day or they overnight you the equipment, and you get it the next day. That’s what I was thinking. But of course, we have fiber here. We’re at the luxury of having fiber gigabit fiber.
There’s two companies that offer it in the neighborhood, really cool. I call up, and they’re like, “Yeah, we can get to you in 11 days.” Then the other one said, “We have to trench…” not trench but put pipe under the ground, so it’s going to take 30 days. I was like, “No, this is catastrophic,” because we’ve been spoiled by having this fiber at the other house, so I set up the appointment. The 30-day fiber is a local company called US Internet, and super fast, and it’s $70 per gig, up and down. They are at the street, but it’ll take them about a month to get in.
But I signed up for cable. I’m going to basically have it for a month. I had them overnight the equipment, so within 36-48 hours of moving in we had real internet but it is cable which is crazy. It used to be blazing fast, but now it feels–I think if Sherri and I if we’re both on video calls, and the kids are streaming, you start to have issues. It’s funny how quickly you get spoiled by having gigabit which you never, I will say, we never maxed it out.
Mike: Yup.
Rob: The moral of the story is a couple of things; if you’re moving, and you’d only need DSL or cable, you can probably just give them a few days’ notice assuming it’s already wired in but if you’re going to do something like fiber, this is a reminder to myself be like, “Yeah, you wanna give somebody a few weeks because it may not actually be wired to all the houses.”
Do we want to answer some listener questions today?
Mike: Let’s get to it.
Rob: Alright. Our first question comes from Nick Malcolm, and he recorded an audio question, and so he went straight to the top of the pile—as they always do—so voicemail to us or emailing us with an MP3 or M4A gets you to the top of the stacks. Let’s listen to that audio here.
“Hello, Mike and Rob. I’m a long time listener from New Zealand. I’ve been involved in startups in the past, in technical roles but now I’m working as a consultant helping companies to better at security. I work alongside development teams doing things like threat modeling and teaching about common risks like […] and also at an organizational level with processes and policy and risk management. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on what minimum viable security should look like for startups and how this might change as the company grows. Thank you for everything you both give to the startup community, that’s much appreciated. Thanks.”
Mike: I think the trouble with security or trying to address the problem of minimum viable security in a startup is it competes with the aims of the business especially when you’re first starting out. There’re pre-profitability and then post-profitability. If you’re talking about pre-profitability, you need to do at least the varied minimum basics such as making sure that the code that you’re writing is, if it’s proprietary code, you’re not going to be releasing it, just make sure that it’s in a secret repository someplace, it’s not like a public repo. But obviously, if it’s open source, that kind of stuff doesn’t matter.
In terms of the server and infrastructure, for a startup, it so depends on what the startup is doing, how their infrastructure is configured, and the, I’ll say, knowledge of security that the people who are building it have. If you’re the type of person who is like, “Oh let me handle all these edge cases and make sure that I’m doing the right things,” then that’s fine. But if you’re not, then you just have to be aware that those things are probably going to need to be dealt with at some point down the road. Maybe not today but you have to do a good job of being diligent about marking where your code could potentially be exploited or places where things could go sideways. Whether it’s cross-site scripting attacks or things going into the query string and the API being used for things that it really shouldn’t be. Beyond that, you can go so far into the weeds that it’s just not even funny.
Security companies make their living basically, sort of being ambulance chasers to start with. If somebody has a security breach, they suddenly come up with all these articles about, “Hey, you have to be careful of these two, and this just happened to this person.” because it’s scare tactics. That’s really what they’re trying to sell on. But in terms of the basics, if you’re using password, make sure they’re one-way encrypted, make sure that anything that is sensitive is being encrypted inside of the database.
Those are the types of things that you want to at least pay minimum attention to. If you’re running Windows, obviously, you’d probably want to be running antivirus software of some kind on each of the machines in the environment. But as I’ve said, you can go so far into the weeds like putting data loss prevention things on your phones or laptops or all these other stuff. You don’t need to go that far, in most cases, I don’t think. Unless you are a security company selling security software, in which case, being hacked would obviously, be the worst thing in the world for you.
Beyond that, just do what you need to do in order to protect the customer’s data. Making sure information does not bleed from one customer over to another. That’s a pretty basic thing, but sometimes it can go wrong if you’re not careful about how you’re doing database queries or packeting data between customers.
Rob: I agree with you. This is the kind of stuff that you have to worry about just enough, and not any more than that because it will slow your business down, it’ll slow building features down, but you have to pay attention to it as you go. These days, when I think of minimum viable security for startups, I think of starting with a language that has that built-in or a framework that does. I know that Rails has a bunch of stuff that validates the incoming request streams, and it’ll pull out cross-site scripting sequence injection, and all of the stuff. That‘s a good place to start.
If you use Azure or if you use EC2 or Google cloud, there’s a lot of security best practices built into there. Nick, who sent the question, included what looks like three blog posts that we will link up in the show notes as well as a SaaS CTO security checklist. Again, this is stuff that you do it just enough to where you feel comfortable. It’s like GDPR. Do you implement a full-blown thing and pay $10,000 to hire a lawyer or do you pay someone $500 and the be mostly compliant?
The TLDR that Nick sent over is like, “Use version control, have logging and monitoring, and continuous integration.” so that you’re constantly running unit tests. I think you should have some unit tests that are testing security, and making sure that things are not going to be easily hacked or whatever. Hopefully, those thoughts are helpful. I realized that it’s kind of an “it depends”, and it’s definitely always a “there’s a continuum” when you’re doing these things but it’s also similar to a question of, “How much should I worry about the legal stuff surrounding getting my LLC set-up and getting every trademarked.” and getting all that. It’s like, “Well, I should worry about it just enough.” It depends on your risk tolerance in all honesty. Thanks for the question, Nick. That was a good one.
Next, we have a comment about moving on from AuditShark. He says, “Hey, guys. I’ve been listening for a while now. Over two years ago, I started an app part-time. Finally, after all these time and all the money I’ve sunk into it, I’ve decided to let it go. There were a number of reasons it failed. Most important being that I’ve never launched my own product before and didn’t fully understand what it took. Listening to Mike’s decision to move from AuditShark…” we have an episode called Moving On from AuditShark. It’s probably 150, 200 episodes ago. He said, “It’s given me the confidence to know this is the right decision. I felt his pain in the episode because it’s the same pain I’m going through now. I’ve decided to do this stair-step approach and practice learning simpler products like an e-book or audio course. Hopefully, this will both give me the confidence and an audience when I’m ready to launch another product. It still hurts and I still think what if all the time but I know I’m making the right decision. Love the show and congrats on 400.”
Thanks for writing in, Greg. It’s always good to hear from folks who experienced things. We talked about trying to help people avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. Sometimes you’re going to make the same mistakes we’ve made but maybe knowing that we made them, there’s some solidarity in knowing, “Oh, other people make them too,” and kind of we’ve all been there so. I think this thing will go away over time. Mike, from your perspective, you went through it, and now you’re in the middle of AuditShark building something that’s obviously starting to get some traction. What are your thoughts on this?
Mike: I’m not in the middle of audit shark anymore. What are you saying?
Rob: Freudian slip, that’s funny. What do you think?
Mike: Well, I definitely get how you can think what if all the time. I really don’t. AuditShark would not have been a good fit for me long-term. I didn’t realize that when I started out. I didn’t realize it ‘til I was probably very close to the end but it didn’t fit me as founder, and it wasn’t the type of business that I probably would have wanted to own long-term. I looked at it from more of a financial perspective of, “Oh I really want to be able to sell this and make a lot of money from it.” I enjoyed the problem space itself, but I did not enjoy trying to sell that type of a product versus Bluetick where I actually do it because I feel it’s legitimately helping people that need that help, and with AuditShark it was more about meeting the checkbox requirement for people, and nobody actually cared about it. It was just like, “Oh, our company says we have to do this so we’ll do it.”
Rob: Yup, that makes sense. I think early on you probably thought what if a bit, and then you moved past it. That’s the healing process of letting something like this go.
Mike: Yup, definitely.
Rob: Cool. Our next question/comment is a comment on episode 403, so go to startupsfortherestofus.com if you ever want to leave a comment, read all your comments. Doug said, “First of all where do you find the time to play D&D?” which I think is funny. From my perspective, I am trying to think, I got back into it, what is it, my kid is 12, and I think I taught him when he was maybe eight, and so it’s been about four years so yeah, Drip was going on. Frankly, we don’t play D&D very much. I mean, we do more now that I’m not working on Drop anymore, but when I was growing Drip, we would maybe play every few months. It really was not an on-going campaign thing, but it’s definitely gotten easier for me to carve out the time.
I think if we have a recurring campaign that was with other people, you just kind of find the time. If it’s every week or twice a month on a Thursday at seven, and you know that you’re going to let people down if you don’t show up, that would be something. The other thing for me is we keep our sessions short. They’re typically 60-90 minutes. They’re not these four-hour campaigns, and we enjoy it that way. How about you, Mike? How do you find the time?
Mike: I have two different ones. […] morning is with a friend of mine and our kids, kind of collectively, that we’ve run very sporadically. We might need once in a month or once every two or three months. That’s been going on for probably close to two years at this point. The other one that I just started up, I think we’ve had three sessions so far, but it’s every Tuesday night. We meet up at 7:30 PM. Two nights ago we’ve had a rather lengthy one. It went until 12:30 AM. It was almost 1:00 in the morning by the time I got home. It was 7:30 PM to 12:30 AM, that was kind of the ballpark thing.
We’re shooting for 2-3 hours, three hours is kind of the minimum that we want, and then after that, it’s kind of wherever is a decent stopping point. That session just happened to be longer. But I agree with you that having a set time of the day each week or every couple of weeks that you’re shooting for, that’s the best way to go just because you’re making a commitment to other people to be there and show up. I think that’s really helpful.
Rob: Here’s the thing, when I was doing startups on nights and weekends and had a day job, I didn’t play any of this. There were years where I didn’t go to happy hours with friends when they would go. I didn’t play any type of tabletop games because I work all day, and then I work all night. My kids were either not born yet, or they were really young, so they would go to sleep at seven, and then I would just work ‘till 1:00 in the morning, and I was tired, but that was the slog.
You and I both moved into the position. Once I’m working on it full-time during the day, and I’m putting the seven-nine hours a day of startup work, then in the evenings I actually like to not continue to do that, and so it depends on the phase you’re in. If you are still working nights and weekends, I would say don’t get involved, like don’t have a hobby. It’s crazy advice, but I really put all my hobbies on hold while I was getting that initial traction. It was definitely a couple of years, it was even more than that, actually. It was probably over the span of about five or six years, but it wasn’t constantly I would tackle a project, work on it for six months, and I wasn’t doing anything nights and weekends, and yeah, it sucked, but I had that goal. I wanted to get that financial freedom. I wanted to get out of my day job. It would crash and burn, and then I’d be all dejected and disappointed. I would go back to having a hobby for a while until I got motivated enough to do the next effort.
Mike: I find that setting aside the time is a nice distraction as well because it’s very easy to get stuck into the pattern of working on the same thing all day every day and let it bleed into other parts of your life which ultimately is probably not good for you. I think that they’re just making sure that there’s a set commitment that I have that is external to work in any way, shape or form. I find that that’s helpful.
Rob: I agree. I fully agree. I think of this podcast a little bit like that. Every week, no matter how bad things were, how hard they were, how stressed I was, you and I would have this one hour blocked off to sit and talk about this stuff, and that’s something that we’ve done for a long time. Even though it’s talking about work, in essence, it did help the days. I think you have to have some variety to them.
Doug has another question, he says, “Rob, you say wanting financial freedom was motivating. Is that another way of saying I hated my day job? How far can not liking the cubicle and office get you on a startup journey? Comfortable paycheck is the enemy of great startup ideas. I am proof of that.”
It’s an interesting question. In all honesty, I hear this from people time to time, and they’re like, “Well, my day job’s good enough. I’m kind of motivated to do. It sounds like it’s fun to do a startup.” In my opinion, if you’re not all in on it, you’re just not going to put in the time to do it. If it really is a major pain point, like for me, yes, I hated my day job. I hated all of the day jobs I did. Hate is a strong word, but I was never happy for very long. Maybe it was 12-18 months, and then it was like, “No, I have to move onto the next thing.”
The further I got along, not only would I burn out on a job within, let’s say, 12-24 months. But I also realized I wanted to make money more as a salaried or even as a contractor. I wanted mobility. I wanted to be able to travel, and not have to worry about being in one place or living in the same city or being concerned that I was going to get laid off, so I wanted the confidence that I was in control of my own destiny. Frankly, I did want more control of my time.
I hated having to be in an office at 8:30 AM or needing to be available at these hours, so I just wanted that. Especially as I got older, when I’ve gotten to my early 30s, I realized, “This was not going to work for me.” It was a real, true pain point in my life and I was willing to put it all on the table. I was willing to sacrifice nights and weekends for years to do this. If that’s not you and you don’t have the burning desire, that’s okay. I’ve some good friends who I envy because they’ve been happy.
Mien, a really good friend of mine in Sacramento, started the day job the same week back in 2000. He still works at that company. It’s 18 years later. He’s a developer, and he works at a consulting firm. I’ve had 20 jobs since then. I bounced to different jobs, different products if you count it all, maybe even more than that. We’re just cut from a different cloth. I would be so hopelessly unhappy and depressed if I had his life but I don’t judge him and say, “Oh you could do better if you’ve done startups.” because I don’t think he really had the desire. I don’t know if his personality is cut out for it. He really didn’t want the stress. He’s just more conventional than I am.
We each have different priorities, and we have different personalities. I think you really have to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Am I willing to do what it takes?” because this startups stuff is not easy. I hope that’s something we’ve communicated in the past 405 episodes both through just talking about stuff theoretically and also the agony of episodes like moving on from AuditShark and the agony of some of the stuff that I’ve talked about here. That was a good rant for me. What do you think, Mike? You have other thoughts?
Mike: The summary of what you just said is like, it’s a personal decision for each person. I can relate to your friend out of Seattle. I was up in Rochester within the past couple of years, and one of the reasons I had left Wagman’s was there was a guy who’d recently got promoted to a position that I had wanted, not that I was going to get promoted to it, it’s just that it was one that I aspired to. He got promoted to it after being at the company for 18 years. I was like, “I’m not waiting 18 years to get promoted to that level.”
I ran into him a couple of years ago, and he’s still there working at the same company that he’s been at for 30 years. That would not have worked for me. I don’t have the personality to have been working in that business for that long and not transition around. I’m sure that he works on different things, but it would not be a good fit for me.
Rob: Thanks for the questions, Doug. I enjoyed them so much. I didn’t answer them on the blog. I wanted to talk about them on the show. Our final listener question for the day is from Ricardo Feliciano, and he says, “Hey Mike and Rob. I love the podcast. I find it very valuable. My question is, what is the best way to charge for an online and real-life community? The two best examples I’ve seen are Founder Cafe from the two of you and Nomad List, nomadlist.com. I ask because I’m starting a community for Marvel and DC fans called Comics and Coffee, that’s comicsncoffer.com. I don’t know if I should pay wallet or try to monetize it through merchandise. Perhaps through a premium program such as what Reddit does with Reddit Gold or Discord with Nitro. Thanks for your time. PS for comics and coffee background: We started up with a podcast, and we’re adding a form, and in-person meetups for movie nights soon.” What do you think?
Mike: I think if you’re going to have a community, there has to be some compelling reason for people to join and stick with their membership is, really what it comes down to. When you look at something like Nomad List, that’s aimed at people who are traveling around the world—and they’re probably constantly traveling—they’re more likely to become and remain a member for longer periods of time. Because even though they may be in Thailand for three months or six months or even a year or two, then they go over to Belarus or Spain or Africa or wherever, and then they’re going to need to be able to connect to other people either locally or online or potentially both, that’s one of those communities where it’s an ongoing thing, that they don’t just need the service once versus something like, trying to meet up with other people locally and those people are not moving around.
Everybody lives in the same community. For example, I live here in Massachusetts. If I wanted to get together with people and wanted to form a group or an organization or something like that, I might use meetup.com for that. The benefit of that is finding other people but if you’ve already got an established location, and a group of people that are coming, chances are good that they associate with other people outside of that who are also involved in comics. They’re going to invite their friends.
Now, the advantage of your platform or your community is that you are going to be able to attract more people to it and that’s the value proposition you have which is, “Hey, find other people and stick with a local community.” The problem is that once they have found your community and are coming to whatever meeting’s there are on a regular basis or semi-regular basis, what additional value are you offering? I’m not clear on what that would be.
With Founder Cafe, it’s a little different because everybody’s remote. Because it’s all remote like, if you join the community and then you leave, you no longer have access to it versus if it’s a local, in-person meet up and there’s a regular meeting every Tuesday at 7:00 o’clock, everybody comes at 7:00 and once you’ve found it, you kind of no longer need the platform anymore, so what value is it that you offer?
I think that’s what you need to focus in on in terms of trying to figure out how to monetize it. You might be able to pay wallet and have some sort of merchandise behind it, I’m not sure how would that go though. I don’t know is charging on ongoing basis is for would be terribly lucrative, I’ll say.
Rob: Yeah. B2B is easier than B2C. In this case, Founder Cafe or the Dynamite Circle or Nomad List, they tend to surround people who run businesses, who are making money through something, who the network they know can help them make more money, help them to have a more successful business whereas going to gamers, I mean gamers are notoriously cheap. They’ll spend money on games but trying to ask consumer to do a subscription tends to be a harder thing to do. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it but know that when I think about the $99 every quarter that we charge for Founder Cafe, most business owners see that and think, “Yeah, that’s not very much money compared to what I’m paying for all the other services I’m using.” But if you were to try to charge that in your case, it will be very hard.
Basically, no one would sign-up. I bet people would be like, “Are you kidding me? $33 a month to have access to this list?” You’re going to be more down in the, I’ll say, the Netflix zone where you’re probably looking at $5-$10 a month, I would think. I would probably either charge it quarterly or charge it annually. It’s such a small dollar amount. You don’t want to have these $5 charges all over the place. Maybe it’s $50 a year, $80 a year, $100 a year, somewhere in that range is what I initially think about.
I don’t think it’s a bad experiment. I mean depending on how many people you already have on the list, merch is fun, but merch is going to take time, the margins are low, and you really need a lot of people on your list in order to sell enough merch to get any type of revenue, you’re only getting, what’s the net margin on merch? Is it 10%, 20%? It’s going to be very small. I think that could be an interesting revenue stream to explore, but I would do that later. Having a premium membership, I think could be very interesting.
You could also consider doing a Patreon but again, you need quite a few people to do that, then you can have that insider’s group pretty easily, and all the mechanics are handled for it. People already know, it’s becoming pretty popular to hear this word Patreon and to know what that means. It’s not like reinvent the wheel and introduce everybody to, “Yeah, this premium membership,” blah blah blah. It’s just like, “Go to your Patreon account. You already potentially support some other podcast creators, support it, and if you support it at the $5 a month level,” and then Patreon handles all that for you—all the billing and all that—then you get this extra perk of getting this log in, or getting this episode earlier, getting these episodes that are only published on the Patreon feeds.”
Those are my initial thoughts on it. I love the idea of Chris. I’d love to do something like this, but it is going to be hard to pull the viable business out of it. You’re going to need a lot of people listening to you. B2C is the volume play. You need a lot more people selling something for $5 a month versus $50 or $100 a month.
Mike: The other thing that occurs to me is something like this seems similar to there’s a website called Roll20 which is mainly aimed at roleplaying games but obviously, there’s a lot of Dungeons and Dragons players on there, but playing various editions, and Pathfinder, and various other roleplaying games and they have a mechanism where they’re charging, I think it’s either $5 or $10 a month and it’s an annual fee.
I agree with Rob but I think going the annual route is probably the best way to go to get some of that initial revenue and then down the road, you could look at that and say, “Okay, now that I’ve got 500, 1000, or 10,000 who have paid that much money.” Again, with 1000 people paying $50 for a year, that’s $50,000, it’s not enough to support one person for the most part full-time.
One thing you could do is start offering like an escrow service for people who want to buy or sell comic books. Yes, you can do it on eBay, but then you have to deal with PayPal, and all these other stuff, for higher-end, and Rob maybe you could speak into this because I know you’re in the comic books but would you pay for an escrow service for something like a high-value comic book? Because we’ve talked about, in episode 403, about analyzing another type of business but I think part of that is looking at the type of customer that you want. People who are buying and selling extremely valuable comic books, they want to make sure that what they’re getting is good quality, and that they’re actually going to get it and not going to get ripped off. By offering an escrow service as an add-on later, that might be an option.
Rob: Yeah, I think that could get traction. I don’t know if that exists today, to be honest. I wish there was a text box, we could type search terms into, and it could potentially tell us if that exists today.
Mike: I know. That’d be fantastic.
Rob: It’s crazy. Anyway, enough daydreaming. But yeah, I think that’s a good point. Again, then do you have to build a large enough community that the small percentage who use whatever service offshoot making enough money to be viable. But I do think that’s a cool thought experiment or an interesting way to think about it. It’s a creative way to think about, I’ll say. I think adding offshoot businesses rather than just charging directly is another way you could potentially monetize it.
Mike: Thanks for the question, Ricardo. I think that about wraps us up for the day.
If you have a question for us, you can call it into our voicemail number at 1-888-801-9690 or you can email it to us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com.
Our theme music is an excerpt from We’re Out of Control by MoOt, used under Creative Commons. Subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for Startups and visit startupsfortherestofus.com for a full transcript of each episode. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
