Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible> welcome to the rogue startups podcast where to start a founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:20 All right, welcome to episode one 73 of rogue startups brought to you today by, I don't know what the hell are we bring today? I've got nothing here. This I was trying to
Speaker 2 00:31 brought by the power of zoom. We were talking about this before we started really quarter hour
Speaker 1 00:35 of zoom. The IPO has brought zoom to a new level of power. Yeah, we were just saying that all of the other video conferencing and audio conference services that we've ever tried are all mediocre. I won't say that they suck cause they'll, we'll get you there. But I mean, honestly they're just not as reliable and as consistent as zoom. So yeah, here's the zoom goes to. Yup.
Speaker 2 00:58 Yup. No, it's funny. We started using zoom. I don't know if people can tell a firm like the sound of our r audio or whatever, but we started using zoom what Dave like six or eight months ago. And it's, it's a plus and minus for podcasts. Anything for straight audio like conferencing audio or video conferencing. It's by far the best, the buffering and the like. Overall reliability of the signal is excellent. The downside for podcasting is it records and records and multiple tracks. So that's kind of the key with podcasting as you want to have like my part in Dave's part on its own file so we can edit them separately and it does that, which is cool, but it doesn't do is record like a really high quality audio file. Records are really shitty quality file actually. So I think we probably don't quite sound as good from like a depth of voice perspective, but there's no glitches and blips and drop out and stuff like that. So kinda take take where we can get. But yeah, I mean zoom is amazing and it's a testament to like, if you build the best product, they will come kind of, right?
Speaker 1 02:00 I, yeah, it sounds like it, but uh, yeah. Shout out to all the other audio file nerds out there that were nodding their heads in unison with Craig. I'm shaking my, uh, shrugging my shoulders go on. Okay. Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2 02:12 MMM.
Speaker 1 02:13 Yeah, it's fine. I haven't touched on Udacity in years and I feel really good about that.
Speaker 2 02:18 Yeah, same. Same. Yup. Yup. So what's new man?
Speaker 1 02:21 Well, things are kind of humming along with recapture. We're still seeing a fairly steady inflow of signing up customers and paying customers. So that's nice. I'm trying to push some, ah, more reviews in the APP store on Shopify here so that we can double down on our social proof. It's really easy to ask for reviews when people are making money from you, you know? Um, except for one customer, you know, I had one guy and I'm making this dude like six figures. You would think that's six figures would justify a review. Right? Well this guy was like, oh, I've, I've done better on other services. And I'm like, what? I mean, I'm getting, I'm, he has significant a recovery percentages. I mean, I think at one point we were as high as 36% it may have dipped down to 33%. That's unheard of. That's unbelievable. That's off the charts. Good. The average is 10%. So yeah, for this guy, apparently 33% in a six figure recovery a month was not worthy of a review, but everybody else was really happy. So we'll go with them. I think he's just really, he's really hard to please.
Speaker 2 03:32 So. So one out of three people that abandon their carts end up buying something for this guy.
Speaker 1 03:37 Yeah. Wow. That's massive. Has to be massive. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and uh, he, uh, well I, I, yeah, I can't really disclose anything about his business or anything like that, but obviously it's an online store and it's an Shopify and he deals in some live goods. So there is definitely a longevity and shelf life to things. So I don't know exactly how he's promoting stuff and what kind of secret sauce is going on in his store. It looks pretty nice. Uh, you know, it doesn't look like the average Shopify stores. I'm sure that has something to do with it as well. But he's obviously been doing this a long time and knows, you know, he's tripling down on what's working. So good for him. Yeah, there's definitely a lot to learn from his store. He just, isn't that all that impressed with recapture? I guess. So whatever,
Speaker 2 04:22 you know, this reminds me a, the episode that came out last week was with someone who's too as Pedro Cortez, the guy that we did the high value converting high value, uh, SAS customers article on. Well he reaches, it was really interesting. He reached out to us and said, Hey, I noticed you linked to my blog post and made a podcast episode out about it. I'd love to come on the show and talk about kind of what I do and help out your audience and stuff like that. So we talked about on page conversion stuff and booking demos and all this kind of stuff. So, so it made me think, Dave, we should get someone who is a landing page expert on the show to do landing page or the home page tear downs. Oh yeah. Cause Cause Pedro kind of hinted at it. Uh, but I was like yeah, but we should get like three or four and knock out, uh, a couple of tear downs as a, as a podcast episode. So if anybody has recommendations on who would be a good person to do this, uh, shoot us a message podcast or rogue startups.com and we'd love to, good to hear who you would want to tear down maybe some of our pages or years or whatever. So let us know. Let me be a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 05:23 All right. So I know that recently you were at femto comp and some new stuff is happening on your business here. So talk about it. What's going on man?
Speaker 2 05:34 Yeah. So femto comp was great. It was a, yeah, it was just a really nice chance to, to meet some of the people that had come to, to previous events and you know, good friends. Now that is my third year in row going. So really nice to be able to have the consistency with Christophe and benedict and you know, a lot of the, the the same people that come every year. It was really great. Guts meet a lot of new people as well, which is cool. Think they had about a third or half the people were new out of only like 25 people. So it's a super small conference.
Speaker 1 06:03 Um, 25 okay. Yeah, I was, I was going to ask you how many actually showed up because it wasn't clear from the pictures. It didn't look huge, but it was hard to get an idea of the account and I was thinking that it was somewhere around 50 but yeah, 25 wow. Okay.
Speaker 2 06:16 Yeah. Yeah. So it was really cool. It was really cool. One thing that was really neat that I would like to see more of is Charles and Joe Charles Perry and his cohost and release notes. Joe Joe has a really
Speaker 1 06:29 hard, complicated last names. I don't even want to try to pronounce Joe's last name. He was the one. And then I went onto the release notes podcast and I'm like, okay, that'll be the last time I ever hear your name pronounced correctly. Charles Duffy for me.
Speaker 2 06:42 But they, so they organized a, the, they call it like a tailgating event, uh, the day before, uh, in a little town called <inaudible> on the Rhine River. Uh, so this area of the Rhine river is like a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the highest concentration of castles anywhere in the world. And so we went to this little town Baccarat, which is like 30 minutes outside of Frankfurt and did a, like a little river boat tour and saw a bunch of castles and did some wine tasting and just really hung out and shot the shit there was about 10 of us there. That is really cool way like for them coming from the u s to like kill some jet lag with an extra day, but also for people like outside of the conference to be able to get to know each other. So like during the conference you really like get down to brass tacks and talk business.
Speaker 2 07:33 So it was a really cool thing. I would like to maybe try to organize something similar to it around microcomp Europe. And I know Dave, we've done the one microcom Vegas. I went to, we did like a morning of kind of thing where a bunch of people got together like for lunch and started hanging out before the conference. So I think it's a really cool idea of people like your own conference, you're going to travel like whatever distance, take a half a day or an extra day and like, yeah, really get settled, get to know people, have like a little mini focus group or mastermind or whatever. Uh, I think it's a fantastic thing as like an excuse to, uh, yeah, just get more out of the event, you know,
Speaker 1 08:13 I wholeheartedly recommend that and I would even go so far as to say, even if you don't know a bunch of people there, go anyway. Because like at Microcom for example, there's a very active slack group that everybody signs up for and there's stuff going on and there are people just saying, hey, we're running such and such down at the Paris. Hey, we're doing this and such over here in this other place in the Tropicana, blah, blah, blah. There's always things to attend. And after, while, you know, having been a microcosm for nine years, you know, for me now, it's like I made sure I have to go out two days before because there's just so much to pack in in that time. One of my hang out with these friends and do this thing, you want to go to this thing and watch, uh, attend this event
Speaker 2 08:56 and catch up with these folks in your masterminds, in person. Because this is literally the one time a year that you get to see everybody in your mastermind and, uh, in person, you know, in a mess. Well, certainly in my case, maybe in other people's cases too, we just don't have the bandwidth to travel all the time. So it's basically a big snow. Tiny comp and microcomp are the Times that I get to see people that are in my masterminds. So yeah. Take advantage. Yeah, and I mean, along these lines, we're organizing our first team retreat. Uh, so it's, uh, it's kind of a partial team retreat I guess. So we have a, so our two developers are kind of on this side of the world. And then Eileen, our support specialist is in the u s so she's not able to come, but the two developers and I are going to get together in Berlin for WordCamp Europe in the end of June.
Speaker 2 09:43 And so we're kind of doing the same thing, like they're coming to the event, but we're getting together a full day ahead of time, basically like a day and a half ahead of time to get together, hang out, do some work for sure to do some fun bonding stuff and, and get to know him because he made it like, especially like Jonathan, our lead developer, we had been working together for two and a half years now and we've not met in person. So it's kind of time and this like, you know, a little tailgating session that Charles and Joe organized really kind of like reinforce that with me. They're like, it's time to make the time and financial investment to, to do this and, and to go in and just get together. And that makes all the other like hard crap that you have during like during the regular work life easier if you've had that time to, you know, go for walks or have a beer or you know, do whatever together.
Speaker 2 10:31 So yeah. Yeah. That is true in person greater than online and in some cases, yeah, for sure. For sure. That's the case where you're like, well that's another meeting that could have been solved with an email. Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. I get that money. I think we, we, we certainly err on the side of like remote asynchronous is just fine. Every once in awhile we get together, I think we'll get together in person. We have sorted like a weekly calls, weekly live calls with the whole team. There are about 30 minutes each. We do a Monday afternoon here, morning in the u s and I am very, very, very much not a meeting person. Uh, I was telling someone today, actually I think I'm like, I've rebelled for the last like three years since I quit my job of not having meetings. But man, there is something about having a meeting where everybody can talk for just like 30 minutes.
Speaker 2 11:23 We solve a couple of problems. It is magic for everybody's like perspective and focus. Not that be we're unfocused before, but like there are no questions when we leave these meetings, you know, and you go work for the next seven days. We have another meeting the next time and we pick up right where we left off. I think if anybody a team of more than like two or three, uh, it's definitely worth considering. Like a quick 30 minute focused meeting once a week is really nice. It's been really good for us. Yeah. It's almost kind of like, uh,
Speaker 1 11:54 a remote agile where you're not doing the daily standup but it's more like a weekly Focus thing.
Speaker 2 11:58 Yeah,
Speaker 1 11:59 yeah,
Speaker 2 12:00 yeah. Those are cool.
Speaker 1 12:01 Those are cool.
Speaker 2 12:02 Yeah. We don't do any kind of like daily standup. We do like slack checkins twice a week, very roughly twice a week. And then these are the time to say like, okay, this is what I've done. I'm having a problem with this. We need help with that. You know, it's really just a problem solving session. So it's cool. It's really been nice. Cool. Cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1 12:19 Now what about uh, things going on with a cast us and podcast motor?
Speaker 2 12:25 Yeah, man. So things are, uh, things are going really good. We had, we had our biggest growth month ever last month in April, which was really nice. Uh, yeah, it was really cool to see. Um, and just, yeah, like all the numbers are pointing in the right direction, so it's really cool. Uh, so we released a feature in the plugin that allows people to import their podcasts content from like from external feeds. So if you're coming from someone like Libsyn or soundcloud or whatever, you can import this content right into your wordpress site through the plugin. Now it's available to everybody, not just cast those hosting customers. So it really felt good too. We did, it was actually quite a bit of work to do this and to release it. Two, everyone who uses the plug and not just our paying customers. It was really cool.
Speaker 2 13:10 I mean, I think we have a, an obligation to really take care of our, our plugin user base. And this was a cool way to, to be able to really kind of help, you know, prop those users up. It helps business too, for sure, because we just have more people using the plugin now I think, or we could. Um, but it was cool to be able to say like, yeah, we're going to develop, we're going to devote, you know, three weeks of work of work to this thing that's entirely free for everybody. So that was pretty cool.
Speaker 1 13:36 Yeah. That's nice.
Speaker 2 13:37 Yeah. And I think just in general with cast us, we're looking at can I doing a holistic view of where our marketing is right now. Um, like the product is solid and we're making improvements there. And I think we have a good roadmap of what product looks like. But you know, Dave, maybe we should, again talking, like we're planning our podcast episodes live kind of made, but we should, we should talk more about, and this is the topic of today's episode, but, but maybe to have somebody on to talk about like a holistic view of marketing and like how do you look at what you're doing now, evaluating what works and how do you plan for what the next three or 12 months look like? Because that's, that's where we are and it's a really hard thing to get your head around. It's like, okay, this is where we are. We're doing this well and were ruined by this much. If we want to improve that or at least keep it going, what do we have to do and, and how do we evaluate what we're doing already to continue to, you know, make positive progress. So that's kind of where we are and it's really hard like to get your head around. But
Speaker 1 14:40 yeah, and that is a nice actual segue into our topic for today. So, uh, let me throw out a little background before I dive in. Uh, Craig, an article about loops vs funnels, so growth loops versus growth funnels. And the thing that we found interesting was not specifically about the loops per se, but the fact that when we think about funnels, we tend to think of things like, well there's a marketing funnel and then there's a sales funnel and there might be a customer support funnel and not all of these apply at all stages of your company. If you're very early on, you likely probably have a marketing funnel in the sales funnel and that's it. But as you grow you would have a support funnel. And in each of these funnels has like a key metric on it. And the thing that this article brought up that was very interesting that is something that I think relates directly to what you just said, is that those metrics might be in direct competition. So if you've got a marketing group that's basically just trying to shove as many leads as they possibly can into the top of the funnel and their metric is total number of leads closed in a month or total number of leads acquired, that can be completely at odds because they could end up with some really shitty low quality leads and sales is sitting over here saying, well, we can't close any of those damn leads because they all suck.
Speaker 2 16:04 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 16:05 so you can definitely run into a conflict that way and customer support could end up with a headache on their hands because they've got all these low quality leads as well. So they might be closing a ton of tickets, but their customer happiness metrics go down. So you can definitely screw yourself by not having these things lined up and sinked up. So,
Speaker 2 16:23 yeah, I mean, I think this gets really important as the team gets bigger because one of the things they talk about in the article is, is how, uh, the, the idea for this from an internal perspective came out of the realization that we should all have larger cross functional groups. And when you do that, you create this, this loop kind of intrinsically you have, you know, product people and support people and pricing people and sales and marketing people all in the same group. And so you have all of the, the parts of this loop that a customer can go through, um, and that all should work synergistically together, right? As opposed to if you're in a big startup or in a big business and you have the marketing group over here and the sales group over there and the product group over there and the success group over there, and the finance people are ops maybe, and they're all trying to do their own thing in a silo and they're not thinking together or helping each other.
Speaker 2 17:23 Um, I can imagine. Well, I, you know, I worked in, you know, huge, like fortune 100 business before it is really easy to get siloed and for the, the goals and the work of one group to be actually totally counter to the, the goals and the metrics really, uh, of another group. And so I think as we're small, this is done automatically for us. You know, like we're a team of, you know, one of our four and up part time person. So this is kind of done for us automatically. I don't know if we think like this, but, but we're a small enough group to where everybody knows what's going on and we all kind of are marching towards the same goal. But as we get bigger, I can see where, yeah, you have a, a product group or an engineering group that's three or four people and they're going to go do their thing and you have a marketing sales group that's three or four people and they're gonna go do their own thing. And those are not the same thing. Right. That's where you, I think you get an in trouble.
Speaker 1 18:18 Yeah. And so at our size and maybe a little bit bigger, I think this is where something like a north star metric really comes into play where you basically say, all right, we're going to have one thing that really drives everything in the company. And let's just say, I mean for us, I can tell you what our north star metric is. It's top line revenue. So every month I'm looking at the Mrr and what is driving that? And so there's implicit style that goes with that. If we have a high churn rate on the following month that's affecting topline Mrr, and if we're not getting enough customers in, that's effective dean topline Mrr. And if we're not able to close the customers that we are getting in, that's affecting Mrr. If the support that I provide sucks, that's affecting Mrr because they're not
Speaker 2 19:04 converting into a paid account. So
Speaker 1 19:08 if you as a founder don't have some overarching thing that you can say, all right, the marketing has to support it from this side. The support has to support it from this side and the sales has to support it from this side. Cause instead of three departments, that could be three separate people or it could be you are one of those, uh, the people and the other two people all have to agree on what your vision is. So if you can't articulate that, then you're going to end up in a situation where you can't actually stay in sync, that you're marketing could start being at odds with your scales and then create
Speaker 2 19:43 issues in your support. So
Speaker 1 19:45 I think it's important to think about that holistically.
Speaker 2 19:48 Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. I mean, I think we're in a bit of an advantage as a small team, but, but even as a solo founder or you know, like two or three people, the different hats that you or the people on your, on your team were, are all changing with these different kinds of perspectives around the business. You know, one of the, one of the examples that they, they gave and the article was like Pinterest and is it like a talking about like the viral viralocity of it, but, but it makes sense for like, I think woo. Who was the other one? Uh, Woo forms, whatever the forms world too. Is that like survey monkey. Thank you. Um, survey monkey was other one, whereas like the more people you have creating Penn boards and sharing those with their friends and then those new friends are getting into the platform and they're creating Penn boards and sharing them with their friends.
Speaker 2 20:40 And like this is the cycle that they're talking about where like you get a customer in, you make them successful, uh, you retain them and then they share it with their world and then that world brings in another new customer. So the, the kind of analogy was like instead of some big splash launch where you get 500 or 5,000 new users, you get 20 new users in this loop and then the loop itself creates like 22 new users. And then that loop of 22 new users creates like 25 new users. And all this kind of runs automatically. And I think this is like the Flywheel, right? It's like the more people you have in your world, the bigger your world gets in the impression that you make. And that start marketing for itself and it makes, it's kind of like zoom, right Dave? Like all the way back.
Speaker 2 21:27 This is, this is the best fucking ah, ah, all around. Oh there we go. It did it again there. Yeah. Close that. Okay. No, but it is exactly like zoom, right? Like zooms are perfect example because like we wanted to use zoom for the podcast and you had already used it and you said, yeah, that's great, let's, let's use it. But if you hadn't, I would have said, Dave, I have this great new, you know, conference calling thing that there is no drop out and it's really easy to install and use. Let's just use it. And you'd be like, yeah, great, whatever. Craig, do you have an accounts? I'll use your account. But then next week you'll be like, I need a conference calling service. Oh, I'll sign up for zoom and I'll share it with my people from work. And then it's like spreads like wildfire when you get that.
Speaker 2 22:08 Yeah, I mean this is when they talk about these growth loops, I remember these being described a few years back. Has just by reality loops where basically had automatic distribution built into it. Another example would be like the powered by links that you might see in email marketing automation or in a little chat widgets, the pop up on your site, right, so we'll say powered by drip or powered by recapture. We have those links as well as a tactic. I think that specific kind on those specific tools has probably peaked out where people are not looking at that going, oh, I wonder what that is. That's really new. That's novel. I'd like to check that out. Now we see those things all over the place and I think they're, they're getting ignored, but in some other cases where they're talking about the growth loops in the Pinterest case, they're basically saying the start and end point is the search engine.
Speaker 2 23:01 So people look for content. They happen to find something that is on Pinterest. Then the user goes to Pinterest, they pick that board. Maybe they sign up for an account. Well actually they have to sign up for an account now because that's annoying. Fucking annoying. On Pinterest. I went to go find something the other day and it was like a photo that was on Pinterest. I don't have an account. My wife has an account, but they were like, oh, sign up for an account. You can look at this photo. I'm like, I'll move on to the next photo. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah, so that was annoying because I'm not really in Pinterest demographic and that's fine, but anyway, so they make you sign up for an account. Then you look at the content, you pin it to your board, that sends quality signals to Pinterest. Pinterest then adds additional things into the page so that that starts ranking higher in the search engine and Voila. Now they find
Speaker 1 23:46 that image in the search engine, but the next user, so that's the, it's it's, yeah, I mean I, whether that's a vitality looper a growth loop I think is probably open to some debate, but the question that I would like to ask today is how can we find these growth loops in smaller scale businesses? They gave the survey monkey and the the Pinterest example, but those are very large groups. At this point. So where could we find stuff like this in our business? Or how would you find something like this in any business?
Speaker 2 24:17 Uh, so no, I mean I think that, I think the way gently we were talking about like the vitality word implies that this is unachievable for all businesses, for every business I should say. And that's not true, right? Because I think we all have our should place importance on this in our businesses and build our products, our marketing and our messaging and our calls to action with our customers with this kind of thing in mind. Because like the, like an example I'm thinking of is like when should you ask one of your customers to refer your business to a friend? Right. That's like the easiest thing that it applies to everybody and everyone should do. And probably most of us don't do it or don't do it right.
Speaker 1 24:59 But I know the answer. I know the answer right after they start paying you. No, no, that's not correct. The for recapture, it's a very clear point. That point at which they've recovered, I would say where they've recovered the amount of revenue that we've promised them. So we promised 10 okay, and if we reach 10% that would be the point at which I would reach out and say, hey, we seem to be kicking ass and taking names for you. Would you be so kind as to refers to a friend? Like that is a clear point because that's part of our marketing. That's part of our homepage. You know, that's the promise of recapture. So if you get to 10% that would be at the time. And you know, people, I would know people that would get way more aggressive with Matt, they would probably just do it. The second thing you recovered any revenues like, hey look, we got you a dollar. Yeah, I would say that might be a little early there, but I mean at that point I would start hounding him about maybe a review
Speaker 2 25:54 <inaudible> I think it's, uh, I think that it's when you get value from the tool, so for recapture, it's when you recover revenue for Castillo's it's when you publish your first episode or did you get approved in iTunes or whatever. And I think it's a natural, that's a natural step is say, hey, okay, you were delivering on the promise that was on the homepage. If you're enjoying this, share it with somebody, share it with somebody and we'll give you, you know, $10 off next month or whatever. And I think that that's a totally natural thing. And this is just one small, really tangible example of it. I think that building your tool to where this is built 10 like the viralocity of a tool like zoom, uh, it, it's kind of baked in already. You don't have to ask anybody to do this stuff, you know, so think there's a lot of ways that people, that we all can and should look at how to do this.
Speaker 2 26:50 And how to kind of run our businesses, not just the product, but the messaging and the those sales and marketing and the success with this kind of thing in mind. Keep the customers happy. Yeah. Provide the value. We say we're going to uh, encourage them to share it with other people and use our tool to kind of spread the word makes. And I think the goal, the whole point of this is that like if you use a loop as opposed to a funnel, then you're not starting from scratch. It's like the one time sale versus Mrr thing, right? Like if like the Mrr is a loop and it spits off more Mrr and a onetime sale is like a funnel where you have to get new people in the top of your funnel all the time and some of those will end up being customers in the end.
Speaker 2 27:31 Uh, and that's just a lot of work that maybe isn't necessary. Yeah. And unless you have organic traffic, then your funnel efforts, whether it's a launch or a promotion or an email blast, it's going out these things or not totally sustainable in the long run. So yeah. Yep. That is the hard part in deed. Um, Yep. And before we wrap up, just wanted to kind of provide an update from the last two episodes ago. Wow. Three episodes ago that Dave and I recorded a talking about sales camp. So, uh, you have made the decision to, uh, sell sales camp. I have a couple of people that I'm talking to right now, uh, about acquiring the business, but if anyone is interested, uh, shoot us a message podcast rogue startups.com we'd love to, to chat and see if it's a good fit for anyone. Um, I think it's a, it's a fantastic business model and could be really good fit for someone, uh, and, and kind of the right situation. So if you're interested, let us know and thanks to everyone who's reached out so far. Uh, I really appreciate it. Uh, and yeah, if anyone has questions or comments about, uh, kind of loops vs funnels and how to think a little differently about building and kind of some viralocity into, to Your Business and acquisition and retention of your customers, let us know podcast@roguestartups.com and if you're enjoying the show, we'd love if you could share it with someone that you think would enjoy it as well. And we'll see you next week.
Speaker 0 28:56 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
