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 00:23 All right, welcome to episode one 74 of rogue startups. Mr. Craig, how are you doing this week? A man, I'm good. It is a Friday night and I'm podcasting with you Dave. Uh, that's the, uh, that's the extent of my social life these days. I guess that, uh, this is what Friday night looks like for me. So, well, I'm, I'm both honored and a little scared that I am your best social option on a Friday night. Yup. Yup. Uh, yes, kid life Hashtag kid life. That's right. That's really all about this I know all about. Well, yeah, it's been, it's been a weird couple of weeks for me cause we haven't really talked about, uh, any updates for a little while here. But uh, for those of you that didn't know or, um, aren't in the u s there was a school shooting this about now, almost two, two weeks ago at this point at my daughter's school.
Speaker 1 01:20 That was a stem school in highlands ranch, Colorado, and that has really sort of colored everything that's happened in the last couple of weeks. I mean, how can it not? Right. Yeah, no, I mean it's just been super, super weird. You know, first of all, there is absolutely nothing as a father, let me just tell you that ever prepares you for the phrase dad, there's a lockdown at my school and I heard gunshots. You know, when your daughter texted that to you. That is so disconcerting. And for hours, I had no idea about the safety of both of my daughters. It turns out that, you know, both of them were fine, nobody was hurt physically. Um, but you know, I mean there's been lasting traumatic effects and we're go into all of these things with various parents and kids and vigils and things at the school and the whole schedule's been turned upside down and now they have like this really short and school day for both of them where there's like 20 minute long classes and yeah, they're like, okay, just to get the kids back into going to school kind of mode or is there another, yeah, so I mean as I understand it, you know, this is kind of sad, right?
Speaker 1 02:33 But because they've had experience in other previous school shootings that counselors and other people want to get the kids back in as soon as possible to kind of put some closure on things and to help start the healing process, which I can see that you put them together in the room and the kids are, you know, you see them brighten up. A lot of them are like happy to see their friends and be around that especially. So I, I've got it from different perspectives. I got it from my nine year old and I've got it from my 14 year old. My middle daughter was not at stem, thankfully, so we didn't have all three of them there. But you know, that's an entirely different situation. And so with my nine year old, it's like there are some things that she's kind of picked up on and some things that are disturbing to her, but for the most part she's been kind of happy go lucky.
Speaker 1 03:22 And some of her friends are like that and some of them aren't. Some of them were more effected in, some of them were less effected. And it's very interesting to see how individual kids react to this sort of thing. Uh, and with my older daughter, you know, she's, she's kind of been all over the place and how she processes this. Um, she's very much like me and that she's good in a crisis and Kinda can compartmentalize and deal with the things that are at hand and the crisis and not worry about the emotional baggage until later afterwards than it is like a freight train though. Right. But then it hits you like a freight train and you don't really know exactly when it's going to hit. And you know, we're still working through that. And with some of her friends, you know, we, we had to take them both to school on different days to go pick up their belongings because during this lockdown they basically were like, okay, you leave everything behind.
Speaker 1 04:13 It's all evidence. Get outta here. Wow. Really? They had to walk the kids out, you know, with their hands above their head on their head with the police. Yeah. I mean just some sad is, um, okay. I'm sorry. That's completely unnecessary, right? Like, well it is and it isn't because, you know, they don't really know who's involved at this point. You know, it's weird because they're doing this a long everything march amount, like military, like camp style, just in forces, the trauma that just happened, right? Like I don't mean that there are so many bad things about this, but yeah, I mean there's lots of bad things about this, but you know, it, this is, this is what happened. And so we're dealing with all the fallout and trauma and, and everything of this. So like our whole schedule has been turned upside down for a while after school activities were off the, you know, off the docket and now they're kind of coming back and like my daughter and I do martial arts together and now she's like, no, I don't really want to do that right now dad.
Speaker 1 05:15 And I'm like, okay, I get it. Yeah, this is, this is bad. So it's like, it's like our whole life just got turned upside down and dumped on the ground. We're kind of trying to pick it all up. So like business wise, this last two weeks, I have literally done fuck all I have done. I've done the absolute bare minimum to keep things running and I've done a piss poor job cause I'm getting things from like, you know, my customer support people and developers and they're like, hey Dave, we're kind of waiting on you on this. And I'm like, Oh, I'll pay you to wait then. That's privilege I have of being in business owners. That's my decision, right? Yeah, it is. Uh, but you know, it doesn't make me feel any less bad about the whole thing here. It's just, yeah. So I'm, I'm still processing and dealing with all of that. Oh God. I mean I get,
Speaker 2 06:07 I get a little bit of the, the notion of trying to get back to life as normal as soon as possible because it tries to like put your mind at ease that you are going to go back to school, you are going to start your extracurricular activities, you were as a parent are going to go back to work and your kids are going to be okay and all that kind of stuff and you got to have the time for processing and the structure around it, which it sounds like they've done a good job of like setting up.
Speaker 1 06:33 Thanks for everybody coming out. How many kids at the school, Dave? There were over 1800 kids at the school. Oh Gee. Elementary, middle school and high school. Elementary, yeah. We have k through 12 at this school and yeah, I mean my daughter was in elementary. She's in fourth grade and yeah, I mean, you can imagine that the scared the holy living crap out of the little kids and for a long time, you know, a lot of them, it's funny, some of them were saying to their parents, I didn't realize this. This was a drill, you know, and they were sitting around for two hours. They were just like, wow, this is really long, you know? Yeah. But the middle school and the high school kids figured out very quickly obviously. Right. That kind of adds to the fear. Whereas now the other ones have realized that wasn't a drill anymore. And so now they're, they're freaked out. I'm sure that they're going to be freaked out like the first time that they run a fire drill or any kind of a thing here. Um, yeah, just weird stuff triggers right now.
Speaker 2 07:31 I mean, I'm sorry man. I'm sorry that that happened to you, that, that your, your kids are having to go through this and process. I mean, it's something that no, no one in the world should ever have to go through it much less a kid. Um, and, and much less the young kids that don't know how to process anything emotionally, much less like a threat to their life. Uh, and like seeing of their friends react in this kind of visceral way that I'm sure some of them did and stuff. Like that's just,
Speaker 1 08:03 yeah, I mean I could go off on a whole political rant about this is all about, but just, yeah, I mean to have your kids go through this, you know, if you're, if you're out in the audience and you're a parent, hug your kids tonight and tell them that you love them because there's, you know, there's a chance if you send them to school that something like this could happen. I was honestly naive enough to believe that this particular school was probably the least likely one in the area and it turned out it was the one. So, you know, whatever, whatever assumptions that you have about school shootings and where your kids are going to school, it can happen. It can happen anywhere at anytime. And, you know, I'm so grateful and thankful that our kids came home safe and in one piece, because not everybody's kids did that, you know, one kid that had died in this thing and uh, eight others that got injured.
Speaker 2 08:58 Um, yeah it was, it was scary as hell. I have to say. Um, this is a big fear of, of minds, but even more so my wife's a, it's like guns just in general, not necessarily at school. I mean where we lived in New Orleans was a pretty safe place for New Orleans, but still like shootings at gas stations and stuff like that til like next to the school where kids went to preschool and stuff like totally bizarre. I have to say like as an American you are raised with this shit on the news all the time, but man, like it doesn't exist here. Like there are not guns and there are not shootings. And like, I mean if this kind of stuff really concerns you get the hell out of the country because there's a lot of places in the world where that is not normal and is not acceptable.
Speaker 2 09:51 And it doesn't happen. Uh, we have a whole lot of things that suck about France. There's a lot of really great things. There's a lot of things that suck, but this is not one of them. And so I would say like, well today maybe come on over here or to anybody else. Like you don't have to accept this as normal. Like, cause it is not normal. And you, for you Dave, to think that like, Oh, if I send my kids to this science technology, engineering and math school stem, like if they're going to be safe, totally get you. And I would have been the same way, like private schools or whatever. Probably safer than other places. But like you still don't have to take that as like acceptable, you know, cause it's not
Speaker 1 10:29 it. You're absolutely right. You are 100% right. This should never be acceptable in any place in the world. And, yeah, I mean that, like I said, I could go off on a whole political rant on this, on how the parents of these kids were blatantly irresponsible by not locking up the weapons that they had and why they let their kids have access to those in for any reason, for any length of time. It makes zero sense. But you know, most of these school shootings, I heard a stat the other day, 67% of them got them from their parents. So,
Speaker 2 11:00 you know, we, we have a big gum problem here in the United States and I'll go up on the rent for you Dave. The, what's the Second Amendment right? The right to bear arms, right from the revolutionary war, which is what Dave? 18 hundreds uh, yeah, 1776. Okay. Right when the gun was the biggest and best, baddest thing that you could have against someone else and it would defend your whole country, right? Like if you had a gun, you could, you know, whatever defeat the British right now in 2019 it is not, that does, did not have that purpose anymore. And so for people, so civilians to have guns is just fucking stupid. So, and I don't care if we lose podcast listeners over this. No one that's not in the military should have a gun. Because if you didn't have guns than shit, like what happened to you, Dave would not happen. Totally agree. 118000%
Speaker 1 11:55 agree. It's insane in France. You can have a good
Speaker 2 12:00 gun and it has to stay locked at a, uh, like hunting camp and you can only use it there.
Speaker 1 12:06 Well, there you go. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me at all. If you're a hunter and for it to go hunting up there, yeah, you're going to go on take it onto camp Wallah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, common sense gun laws had been completely hijacked here in the United States, thanks to the gun lobby. So it's insane. It's insane. Yeah. No, let's, let's talk about something more more applicable to the podcast audience then going off on her own political leanings. No, I actually, the, the thing I had to talk about today is also extremely political. Um, but let's just kill the rest of the podcast audience while we're at it here. That's good. But as a,
Speaker 2 12:44 uh, hopefully a very positive, uh, aspect to it or shine to it. So, um, we, I talked about this at Femto comp. Uh, benedict and Cristoph were kind enough to give me a few minutes to talk to the, you know, the audience of like 25 people or something like that about, um, something that I'm starting that has to do with climate change and the impact that we all have on the environment and creation of like, uh, you know, pollutants and things that are creating greenhouse gasses. Uh, so I am launching a site called sustainable startups, so it's sustainable startups.co uh, if you want to go check it out. And the idea here is for us to build a community of carbon neutral, uh, startups and the, uh, the inspiration for this came from a, a blog post by the hunter.io folks. Do you know hunter? Like the email look up tool?
Speaker 2 13:45 Yeah, yeah. In fact, I've used it. Yup. Yup. So hunter is a French company and they wrote a really cool blog post on medium about how they purchased carbon offsets for their entire business. So they had a calculator, like the really cool excel spreadsheet or a Google spreadsheet they talked about like servers and flights and people and offices and all this kind of stuff. And they calculated, you know, the tons of carbon that they created a year as a company and they're a pretty decent sized company. And then they went and bought carbon offsets for it actually like for the last three years or something. And for them, they're a team of like six or seven people. And for all three years they've been in business is about a thousand dollars for them to buy carbon offsets for like as long as they've been a business. Um, so I was like, this is really cool and we got to do something about this because like we're seeing here and France, like some really firsthand, uh, like evidence of climate change. And when I was in the u s w a month ago, they have this thing, I don't know if it made the news out where you are. David's called red tide did you
Speaker 1 14:49 is over here. But I know what red tide is
Speaker 2 14:52 but I didn't know that there was something recent going on. Yeah, so, so Annie, this is a huge, but the red tide is this algae bloom in the ocean, like in coastal areas that kills all of the fish and all of the marine life. Right. And so the whole like southern half of the state of Florida had this algae bloom for basically all of last summer. And it wasn't until a hurricane came in cold, the water down and blue, you know, just turbulator the water so much that that it, that it killed the does algae bloom out. But it is decimated the economy and a lot of these tourists areas and it only happens when the water is really warm. And so it was like the longest in history by a long shot. And they're fearful that it becomes back this year. Like some of these coastal areas will be just totally decimated in terms of their economy, not to mention the wildlife and stuff.
Speaker 2 15:41 So anyways, that's, that's kind of a tangent. So I read this blog post by the hunter io folks. Um, and I was like, we gotta like get something around this. And then the, the model of like the bare metrics open startups thing came into my head, like a community of people showing what they're doing around in bare metrics case like their business. But what sustainable startups is, is a community of businesses that have pledged to offset their carbon footprint by buying carbon offsets. And it's really easy and it's really cheap. And if you go to sustainable startups.co we have a carbon calculator and we have information about where you can buy carbon offsets at a bunch of different like marketplaces that have these, uh, ecological Li like additive aspects to them. Um, we bought our offsets for <inaudible> and it was like $250 for the past year because we're a small business.
Speaker 2 16:39 Um, and yeah, so our goal with this is really just increase awareness with respect to like how easy it is to, to become a carbon neutral business and how to calculate it because that's kind of a hard thing. But we have like a calculator that's specific to really software and online businesses. Like how many servers do you know, how many people do you have? Are they remote? How much do you travel? Basically? Like that's all that we do. You know, not many of us like make stuff. So I think that's where it gets harder to measure your, your carpet impact. But um, yeah, so this is, uh, this is something I'm really excited about and interested in and am hoping that folks that listen, we'll go check it out and share it with everyone they know because this shit is really real. I mean, it's as real as what you were talking about with the terrible stuff for your kids and your family went through. Um, and this affects everybody and to think that it doesn't, or it's not coming or it doesn't affect you or something is, is really silly. So I think that it's cool that we as online businesses and like smarts with it, people can like say, I can do something that's really not that hard or expensive to offset the impact we have and create some awareness around it. Um, hopefully kind of starts to make a dent and the stuff we're doing to the planet.
Speaker 1 18:01 Yeah, that's a, that's super cool. Um, at one point, I remember I did this because I was doing a lot of travel. I don't do quite as much as I used to, but it was still a fair amount and I went and did carbon offset calculations for one flight. And it's huge. It's unbelievably huge. So that, you know, Aaron lines are one of the greatest contributors just because of the sheer power of the engines that they're using and how much they're flying. And even, you know, if you're on a plane of a 300 people, your carbon offset for that one flight is still way higher than you think. So that's pretty scary. Yeah. To look at those numbers and see what kind of an impact you really have on the planet. So yes, we'll put that in the show notes, I assume.
Speaker 2 18:46 Uh, Yup, absolutely. Yup. Okay. Yeah. So check it out. Check it out in the show notes. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's cool. I mean, it's, um, you know, been talking to some of the people at Femto comp about it. Uh, and I think that it's something that will, I hope it's something that will really get some steam and get people talking and thinking about it. At least hopefully they go spend a few dollars to, to kind of offset the impact that they're having. Um, but at least, you know, talking and think about it because, yeah, I mean, I think it's the, if you look at any of the statistics that don't come from the Trump administration, the shit that we're in is, is serious and it's not getting better anytime soon. So.
Speaker 1 19:27 Well, that's for sure. Sticking our heads in the sand isn't gonna isn't going to improve it, that's for sure. Yup. Yup. So on, on non politic front, uh, how <inaudible>
Speaker 2 19:38 things going with Casto since podcast motor, things are good, man. Things are good. We're, um, really on both fronts. We're exploring some paid acquisition avenues. Um, I've been playing around with combinations of Cora Facebook ads and Google ads and kind of experimenting and getting to know the platforms a little bit for both businesses. Um, and I think the reason is you kind of realize that like we've been doing content marketing, especially on the Casitas Front for a long time. We did a lot for podcast motor at the beginning and that's cool. And you can write a lot of blog posts and they're impactful and stuff like that. But, but to, to scale growth, I think anyone would tell you that like, just doing content is not going to cut it. And so finding a way to acquire customers in a way that you have a lot of control over, like ads, um, is something that most companies will need to figure out at some point.
Speaker 2 20:38 And I think that's kind of the realization I came to is like content is the, is still going to be the cornerstone of our marketing plan and we're going to be using ads to enhance it and get the word out to more people faster. And in a better way, maybe, um, but, but content is still going to be the thing that like we drive people back to and it's going to be the top of funnel experience for a lot of people. But yeah, I mean we're trying to figure it out. You know, at what stage in the customer journey we use what ad platforms and for what purposes and what, uh, you know, how we can figure out based on like the growth trajectory. We'll wanna we want to go at, um, kind of doing the math backwards. It's like, okay, we want to add whatever a hundred customers this month.
Speaker 2 21:23 We need to get a thousand new trials or 5,000 or 10,000 new trial or visitors to the website and 2% or 2% of them are going to convert to trials and 50% of those are going to, you know, all this math. Um, so we have a pretty cool spreadsheet where keeping track of all this and now, um, to try and like keep track of what we're doing, but also to do the math backwards to say, if we want to grow at 10%, we need to be doing these, you know, that's the end result. But we needed to be doing all these things kind of upstream or I'll funnel, um, to, to drive those. And organic, you know, word of mouth or even referrals I feel like is not, um, you can't impact it quickly. Um, you can impact it I think. And you know, things like affiliates and referrals and blog posts and social media and pop, we're podcasting of course, all that stuff is like really good. And I think it should be like the base of what you do. But I think if you want to add to that, that obviously like paid acquisition and, and, you know, promoting your blog content, stuff like that has to come in. So we're, we're, we're working on that and that'll be the focus for awhile, really of like how we're adding to our marketing.
Speaker 1 22:36 Cool. So I have two comments about that. One. I don't think I shared this article with earlier this when I came across it or maybe it was last year. It's all kind of a blur. Um, it had to, with somebody talking about the thing that's going to move the needle for content marketing. I think I got it from growth hackers and they were talking about the dimension of originality. So everybody always talks about, okay, well you got to build skyscraper content or you've got to build 10 x content and everybody's been doing that. But the problem is everybody kind of just copies everybody else. So if you, if you find an article that already exists out there, and the example I think that was used was Neil Patel's SEO stuff. If you just take and replicate what Neil Patel has done and create another skyscraper article or a 10 x content that does exactly what Neil did, you're not really going to get any traction out of that because Neil's already done it and he's ranking for it.
Speaker 1 23:35 So why would Google pick him over, pick you over him? And the dimension that this thing was talking about is that you need to kind of object. You need to inject originality into this here, you got to take a new perspective on it. So sometimes that's a contrarian position and sometimes it's actually doing the other stuff where it doesn't exist with a skyscraper or a 10 x content doesn't exist and that's hard these days. That's really bloody hard and that's, that's the thing that I think is going to be the tough part to make it scale. So as long as you guys can figure out a way to, to set that, I think you've got some good traction there. Um, the other comment that I was going to make is the reverse engineering of your funnel. Isn't that really fucking scary? Yeah.
Speaker 2 24:24 I mean the, the volume of like the difference of where we are and where we need to be on the, like the top end of the funnel is
Speaker 1 24:31 immense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean what I did that with a recapture in the early days, trying to figure out what would it take to get me to growth. And then all of a sudden you take this general nebulous thing of saying, all right, I want to do 10% a month growth, and you reverse engineer that and say, all right, 10% growth means I need to close this many people and I need to have this many trials because of my conversion rate to get that many people. And then in order to go from visitor to trial, I need this many people and then all of a sudden you're like, Holy Shit, I got to have 10,000 people come through here. What the hell went wrong? And nothing went wrong. It's math. That's what makes the scary. Yeah. And that that, you know, I think that sort of tempers your, your outlook on growth there. It's like if you have to get 10,000 people in too close and get 10% growth in a month, maybe something's either wrong with your channel, your growth strategy or your pricing, or is something like you've got to figure out what's, what's wrong with your setup there? And that's why I like that approach. So I'm glad you guys are taking that. It's quite scary to do the math on that instead of just saying I'm going to grow 10%.
Speaker 2 25:40 Right. Right. No, I mean it is. Cause you know, I think you can hope, right, that you're going to grow at 10% and just quit work hard. Right. But I think if you don't know one where you stand today and the whole funnel, um, then you, you have no chance of figuring out what you need to do at any of those points along the way. And the top of the funnel is the easiest one. But like we have another metric we're looking at that like really sucks. You know, like a lot of our SAS metrics are really good, but we have one that really sucks. So what if we could double or triple it? Um, then you need a lot less at up at the top. So maybe the traffic we're getting now is good. If we can fix this other thing, um, you know, we would be doing, you know, 10 or 15% a month. So
Speaker 1 26:28 to quote a Mike Tabor from one of his microcomp talks, hope is not a strategy. No, no kid, you can't just do that. And I mean, I've done it. I said, Oh man, I really want to, I just hope we're going to get this growth this year and you know, try various things. But you don't, when you, when you think of it that way, it just never really works out. You've got to have some concrete strategies say, right, this is my goal, the goal is this, and then here's how I'm going to get there with the following things and here's some math that tells me here's what's got to happen for that to work out. Because if I can't get to that, then there are problems and I have to fix those problems. So that's a much more methodical approach. I don't want to say scientific because really there's nothing scientific about any of this. It's all, well I guess you could say it's scientific because you're doing experiments and then you're finding out did my experiment work or not? And if it did, then double down on that or find out what I can do better. And if it didn't, then try to fix what's broken. And yeah,
Speaker 2 27:26 I mean, as frustrated reminds me of is, uh, not long after we got married, my wife put us on a budget. She's a very budget type of person and I'm very much not like I'm a very, we'll just figure it out kind of person. Uh, and it's hard and it's uncomfortable and it's weird to know like where you stand in the financial world, but if you don't, then there's no chance of getting to, you know, the promise land or whatever, you know, and from a personal finance stand point to be saving money every month from a business standpoint to be growing and profitable and all this kind of stuff. So, yeah, I mean I think that even just knowing where you stand is a huge step. And like we've had this spreadsheet for a couple of months now and so I know like, yeah, a lot of our metrics are really, really great and we have one that just blows.
Speaker 2 28:14 And so we got to work on that one. And so that's cool. It makes it makes it all really easy. Instead of I want to grow at 10%. It's, we need to affect this one thing like that makes it really tangible. Uh, and sign, yeah, scientific is a good word because it's like, yeah, we're going to go do a bunch of things to this one piece of the business, um, and see if it works. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love it. I love it. Yeah. But you're right on about the content stuff, man. I mean, we are writing a lot of really good long content, um, and it's paying off for sure. Like our traffic is definitely going up. Um, but I don't, uh, I am hopefully not naive enough to think that it is the only way that we'll grow cause it's just hard, uh, and competitive even in the podcast space, which I don't think there's like a ton written about. Like if you're in like marketing automation or like the Neil Patel types of worlds or Seo, it would just be impossible, I think, to the overall ranking content. Yeah.
Speaker 1 29:15 Yeah. No, I would not want to, I would not want to be trying to do content marketing those worlds, that's for sure. Yeah. And the one I was first exposed to when content marketing was going big was the stuff that help scout and groover doing. And when I was trying to do support vine, I was sitting there thinking to myself, well, how am I gonna? How am I going to get my game up to theirs? Because they're getting all this attention based on the fact they had this great content and these great stories and I had nothing. And the truth is you, they, they just beat me to it. You know, if I had been at a different stage, I could have probably executed on that and had some, you know, funding and customers and I could have hired, you know, uh, Gregory Chianti or a landmark Gideon or any of those guys that were doing all, you know, we're just dedicated to writing this content on there and they would not, some pretty incredible stuff. So, yeah, I mean, some of that's timing. Some of it's luck and the rest of it is just you doing the hard work of research. So I hope that works out man.
Speaker 2 30:12 Yeah, thanks man. How are things with recapture?
Speaker 1 30:16 Slow and steady. Like I said, uh, you know, some of the, I was looking at the growth from last month and I'm seeing some churn this month from some of the people that just signed up and then activated without really thinking about it. And now I'm looking at their accounts after 14, 15 days and they didn't revenue to speak of. So you're not, you can't recover more than zero, um, when they only have zero to start with. So that kind of sucks. Um, so I've got to figure out what's going on with my onboarding that makes them want to do that. It was good that they kind of jumped into there, but you know, the, I feel like I kind of fell down and you know, I need to, I need to really segment my customers really into two buckets. Those that are ready and those that are quite aren't quite there and I need to have a different way to handle the ones that are not quite there, but I'm not really sure what that looks like at this point. Um,
Speaker 2 31:06 I know you get information from Shopify when someone installs, right? That's correct, yes. Can you send like a, even just like a bully and like they're ready or they're not like a zero one value to drip to say like send them this campaign or sending that campaign based on revenue or something?
Speaker 1 31:22 Well, yes I can. The question is the ready flags. So what happens, um, when we do the install after the install, there's this asynchronous process that's going in the background and it's pulling their past orders in Shopify and we go back a year so that we can actually show them customer lifetime value data. And in order for us to calculate even 30 days of good customer lifetime value data, we really need a pretty deep history to get to that. So it takes like 24 48 hours to kind of chunk through that. And so sometimes we see like their past 30 days of revenue, like right away if they have a very small history and sometimes we don't like sometimes it can take a day to catch up or longer. And so I don't necessarily know in the first few emails, you know, because by the time I get to day three they've probably already picked up three or four emails from me.
Speaker 1 32:21 And at that point I just am starting to get an inkling as to whether they might be a good fit or not. And sometimes it could throw it off a little bit. For an example, they might have a test store and that test store is really representative of a store that's making six, five, six figures a month. And I don't really know that. So I might miss classify them as something else. Cause sometimes I'll just do a development store cause they're migrating over from Genco and they're just working on it. Yeah. So you know, I mean that's a little bit pathological. I mean I could probably figure this out. The question is how do I try to handle them differently? So what I ended up doing right now is not ideal, but when they get to the end of the trial and they haven't converted the ones that are obviously below the revenue threshold, and I'm looking for, I just, I'm like, okay, yeah, this didn't work out.
Speaker 1 33:14 I should probably try to find a way to follow up with them. But sometimes they just uninstalling move on. Like, there are people that, you know, install the APP in six minutes later, they're like, yeah, we're done. And you know, I don't know what to do with people like that. I'm pretty sure that there isn't anything to do with people like that. I think they, they either know what they want or they're looking for something very specific and I don't have it yet. Or they just, you know, don't like the pricing. I've had a couple of people come back and say, yeah, you know, I found something that does it cheaper. Okay, great. That's fine. Um, you don't want those people. I don't want those people. Yeah. That's a different mindset that I'm looking for. I want somebody who's more concerned about, you know, how can we, how can you help me grow my store and do a good job at it.
Speaker 1 33:54 So that's, you know, that's hard to figure out with just magical boolean flags in there, in the onboarding process. But when I get to the end and there was somebody that was clearly a good fit and either they didn't convert or they an installed, I try to reach out to them, but you know, by then it's a little late because if they've been installed, they've probably mentally moved on, not just physically and there are probably somewhere else. Like they're looking at a different APP or they're just done with it. And so trying to pull him in at that point is tougher. So I, I've got a, I've got some work to do on that, but yeah, I mean I haven't had the head space to really know that into practice this week, that's for sure. But that's been bugging me the back of my mind, watching the growth from last month and the churn that's happened this month is, yeah, it sounds like really impactful stuff though.
Speaker 1 34:46 I mean, if you could figure that out, that that like segmenting those people in sending the right message at the right time kind of thing. Uh, if only there was software for that. Yeah. Could be, could be pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, part of it's like, well for me to really get, the thing that really kind of bugs me about recapture is that the guy that originally wrote it, he did all of the front end and the APP altogether in node node and a html five and CSS with a little bit of reacts reactor on the front end is mostly just raw html. So for me to do website stuff, I code the whole damn page from scratch, which is good and bad. I can use some page templates for a lot of stuff, but some stuff I can't and you know, in some ways I kind of wish I was just wordpress where I could drop in some stuff a lot faster. And I've been sitting here thinking to myself, man, I should just migrate this. And then when I start to migrate and I'm like, oh my God, this is a pain in the ass. Is this really the best use of my time right now? And because I just haven't gotten there, we're moving the business forward. Yeah. Yeah. I and I keep coming back to the notes, not so I do something else and you know, like more integrations or, yeah. So, or the onboarding sequence stuff. Yeah. Yup, Yup.
Speaker 2 36:08 No, no. I think it's, it's real. It's a struggle I think for all of us everyday is like, what's the, what's the most important thing, right. No matter where you are in the journey or do you think it's like, that's always a question.
Speaker 1 36:18 Yes. Yeah. No, you should be asking yourself that every day. And if you're not, then you're probably spending time on stuff that might not be as important as you think it is. That's for sure. Yep. Cat Videos, that's really those cat videos. No, actually I can't stand the cat videos.
Speaker 2 36:33 Cool. I think that wraps us up for today. Uh, if you have any questions, shoot us an email podcast@roguestartups.com, uh, and, uh, a shameless plug. If you're interested in, um, sustainable startups and want to be listed as a sustainable startup, but we're going to have like portfolio pages for every company that kind of, uh, has pledged to show their carbon neutrality. Uh, just go to sustainable startups.co uh, and you can either go ahead and join or just drop your email in and we'll get in touch with you to, uh, to guide you through the process. But, um, yeah, thanks everybody for listening and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 0 37:09 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.
