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 82 of Roque startups. Craig, it's been awhile.
Speaker 2 00:27 It has been a while, man. I mean, I feel like we have been off and on for six weeks now. Dave, like a, I, we both just have a lot going on I think.
Speaker 1 00:36 Yeah. I, you know, last week I was on vacation in Costa Rica. Fantastic time by the way. Uh, we'll have a little story to share in a little bit, but yeah, summer is here. We're in and out and we're just recording random episodes to cover the other person's vacation and uh, yeah, it's a good time, man. It's good time.
Speaker 2 00:56 Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. Yeah, it's a, so I've been, I went to Costa Rica, golly, now it's been forever ago, but absolutely wonderful place. So I, I'm sure you ate a lot of great food, drank a lot of good coffee at a lot of great sun.
Speaker 1 01:10 The coffee was outstanding. I have to say it was so good. Like, you know, it's funny. So if you've never been to Costa Rica or any Latin American country, um, coffee is very much part of the culture, almost anywhere. The very first time I ever saw this was when I was in El Salvador and they have what they call cafe salvo, the daughter Ania, which is Salvadoran coffee and it's basically like espresso with like ton of sugar in it. And it's amazing. And I was like, you know, in college when I had this and I'm like, oh my God, this is the nectar of the gods. But anyway, the culture is just coffee, coffee, coffee, anytime, anywhere, whenever you want it. And DECAF is a, is a bad word in their culture. Um, and for kids, it's not a big deal to drink coffee, which my kids were all on board totally with, they were like, oh my God. Yes. Really?
Speaker 2 02:02 Wow.
Speaker 1 02:03 And so my wife and I, we've let them have coffee here at the house. We just don't do it very often. And so we kind of took the cap off on that and we're like, yeah, you want coffee for breakfast, you can have coffee for breakfast. We didn't let them, you know, free base it, they didn't have like a picture, but you know, it was just something that they could enjoy. It was really good coffee. You could drink it black. It wasn't bitter at all. Um, and everybody had a good time with that. We went and visited some of the major areas in Costa Rica. We did zip lining, which was a totally exhilarating and terrifying for a guy like me who doesn't like heights, but it was awesome. It was awesome. It was the longest zip line I've ever been on 15 lines. So that was super cool.
Speaker 1 02:45 Everybody on the family did it. Everybody enjoyed the hell out of it. We saw lots and lots of animals. We went to an animal sanctuary. We volunteered when we were there and we did like clean up and help forge for the animals and feed the animals and yeah, all kinds of stuff. So that was really, you know, it was that service oriented vacation a little bit in that regard and it was a cultural, uh, vacation where the kids went to visit like an elementary school and they played with the other kids and the kids did a dance presentation for them and they, you know, talk to each other and got to learn a little bit and played games. So that was super fun. Uh, we got a little bit of beach time. Went hiking in a national park. Yeah, it was great. And you know what the best part is?
Speaker 1 03:28 You don't have the absolute best part of the vacation was you didn't work. I didn't work. I didn't have to work. It's the first time I've had a true vacation vacation in a long time. Like everything was covered. The plugin support was 100%. Absolutely no problems escalated to me during that time. Recapture. Totally. 100% support handled by my developer Mike. And you know, questions came up while we were gone. He just handled every single one of them. Not a single thing was escalated to me. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately I know this because I still checked email every night to make sure that nothing was going sideways, but it was like 10 minutes tops in a day and it was, it was just meme hitting the delete button. Mostly. I wasn't doing anything else. It was awesome. It was great. It was really enjoyable. It's so totally unplugged. You know, we even forced our kids to unplug as well because you know, they were watching their iPads and listening to their iPods or iPhones on the way down and that was fine on the plane because being on planes boring.
Speaker 1 04:37 But when we got there, they were like, we're driving in the countryside and there's still like, you know, my oldest daughter's got her nose buried in a kindle and we're like, nope, not happening anymore. Hang them all over. So we just, in this beautiful country reading a book. Yeah, I'm, I used to now spend all this money to come to a foreign country to give you a cultural experience so you can read your fucking kindle. Not going to happen. So not going to happen. So, yeah, we, we took those devices away and basically said, all right, here you go. Enjoy the experience. And you know, my oldest was learning Spanish, so she was like spending, you know, trying to order meals when we're sitting down at restaurants and everybody in Costa Rica speaks, you know, excellent English and Spanish because they're all trained in school in both languages.
Speaker 1 05:28 So you could switch back and forth. I tried to exclusively talk as much as I could in Spanish just to get more practice on my Spanish, which was awesome. You know, I had a fantastic time with that. Great. Great Pina coladas. Um, the most amazing pineapples. Not the extent of your Spanish, is it a no, no. My Spanish is much better than that. I was actually having some good conversations. Our driver is that we were on a group trip, it was a 15 of us, so there were like four families that were there and the driver spoke okay, English not great. Um, but he obviously spoke great Spanish and so I would talk with him in Spanish and you know, we had fun conversations sitting there at dinners or whatever. So yeah, it's interesting, they kind of live a little bit of a nomadic lifestyle when they're a tour guide or a driver and they work for like different companies because one company doesn't keep you employed 52 weeks out of the year. You gotta you gotta jump from company to company and you know, they were talking about which tourists were the most obnoxious and you know, the answer was not Americans. And that shocked the hell out of me thinking it blew me away. It was not Americans. Um, it actually turned out that it was a, the Costa Rican.
Speaker 2 06:42 Uh, yeah, I was gonna say like, is it some kind of like Latin American that just think they should have everything? I would imagine there's a fair amount of like prejudice or hostility amongst the different countries and cultures. Like, I don't know. I don't, I don't know it well enough, but I can imagine that.
Speaker 1 06:56 Well, I think so. It's something that I think I've observed here in the United States as well. And that is if you go to American tourist sites, I'm not always seeing the people that are from outside the country being as wildly disrespectful, loud or obnoxious as I do the Americans. So there's definitely a, I'll call it a sense of entitlement. So you're in your own country, you vacation in your country, and I think that there's a sense of entitlement that goes with that and this is yours kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's, I know I was talking with the driver, his name was Sammy about this, and he said, yeah, that's, that's what it is. It basically, they're the loudest, they're the drunkest. They're the most obnoxious, you know, I said, when somebody is coming from outside countries, it's generally that they're pretty respectful and things are a little bit less obnoxious. I'm not 100%, you know, they still had some things to say about other, uh, other groups. They said the, the Spanish were actually the most obnoxious, uh, for the foreigners outside of the country, which I was still surprised that Americans didn't reach that.
Speaker 2 07:57 Yeah. They're not on the top couple of least.
Speaker 1 07:59 No. For some reason they like Americans. So, yeah. There you go. There's, there's one country in the world that actually likes Americans. There it is Costa Rica. Yeah, that's classic. But it was a great time and it was really nice to just, you know, 10 days to chill.
Speaker 2 08:18 Oh, I can't even imagine. That's amazing.
Speaker 1 08:20 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, how about you man? What a, what's been happening in Hewitt land?
Speaker 2 08:29 Yeah, man. Not 10 days of vacation, but, uh, it's cool. We've been, we've been really busy on the work front, uh, on, on both businesses, both for podcast motor and for Castillo's. It was funny, I was talking to some of the folks from delicious brains at WordCamp Europe and they listened to the podcast and they're like, why don't you ever talk about podcast motor? Like is it still a business and all this kind of stuff. And so I'll talk about it a little bit today because we, some interesting stuff going on. The business has been getting a lot of inbound interests lately. Um, for a couple of reasons. We've been doing some marketing stuff that is paying off evidently and to the point where we have a good problem that we have more leads than I can handle because we have sales calls with almost every customer before they sign up.
Speaker 2 09:17 And understandably, I mean, it's, you know, 500 to a thousand dollars a month kind of service. People want to talk to a person. Um, and they've, they very rarely do that without, you know, uh, you know, some kind of meeting. And so I, I don't give up all of my time. And so I only have in Calendly like three days a week with a couple hours at a time, and you can only schedule two. There's only two appointments available a day. So there's like six appointments a week that people can book. And so people were having to book like two or three weeks out on my calendar. And so I'm like, well, this is a problem. Uh, we need to do something about it. And I am busy enough with Castillo's and everything we have going on there, uh, that I don't want to give up more of my time, especially my evenings.
Speaker 2 10:02 Like where the time zone difference. It's legit. Like I'm in the evenings working a lot if I was going to start doing more sales calls. So we are hiring a salesperson for podcast motor a, it'll be the first time we've really invested in the business in a long time. But I think it just makes a lot of sense. Like the leads are coming in, this person should pay for themselves pretty quickly if we get this all to work right. And I'm excited because it takes a lot of time and efforts and evenings off my plate and hopefully it makes the business grow without me. So, um, yeah, I'm really interested to see how it goes and excited, interested because I've never hired a salesperson before. Wait, wait, hold on, hold on. Full Stop. You're a sales guy and you've never hired a salesperson, ever? Never.
Speaker 2 10:50 Nope. I mean I was never like in sales management. Um, sound is my jaw hitting the floor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no, I mean I was in sales and um, you know, like whatever frontline sales, I was never in sales management before. So yeah, hiring a salesperson is a weird thing. Um, because especially for this type of business, like we call them inside sales. Uh, so they are, you know, mostly dealing with inbound leads. Sure. As opposed to, you know, cold calling or whatever and that person, you don't want to be, you know, a total shark, you know, you don't want them to be just this like total animal that goes in and sells everybody, everything. Cause like the nature of the businesses. We're a longterm partner with our customers at podcast motor. I think everybody should be, but I mean with this one, like we're religious like in their podcast world all the time. And so if you have a salesperson that's, that's pushing the envelope in terms of the limits of what we can and should do as a, as a company and as a, we're going to get like bad fit a lot. And I think that's what, you know, talking to folks that, that run productized services, that if they get the wrong sales person in there, it's usually because they're selling stuff that the business can't perform ultimately. So
Speaker 1 12:07 no gray hat, black hat sales techniques. Exactly.
Speaker 2 12:11 Yeah. So, so it's interesting to think like, okay, we're gonna hire a salesperson. I want to go hire just, you know, some animal it's going to goes just sell a ton of shit. But then you have to say like, no, it should be like more like a marketing person maybe or like a community coordinator type person. So, um, it's been an interesting thing to think about and like it goes all the way to like compensation. Like how should you compensate this person? They shouldn't be compensated as much on like revenue and commission, but maybe more on salary and maybe some bonuses or something. So I don't have enough figured out yet. What about retention? Yep. So that will definitely be part of it. Uh, so our business really starts working well when people are around for six months or more just because as a service, you know, we're able to know them and what they need.
Speaker 2 12:58 So there'll be the compensation will be, uh, the majority maybe even will be salary. They'll definitely be a uh, commission on dollars sold and there will be a kicker on that, on that dollar sold after like six months and that, that, that will be like a, a pretty, it'll probably be about the same commission as the original sale. So I don't have it all exactly worked out, but I'm doing like kind of final run interviews now and when we get, you know, to make an an offer somebody, I'll have to have all that shit figured out but that will be another couple of weeks. So stay tuned on that end. I guess
Speaker 1 13:31 that's super exciting. And again, I'm just still shocked. Even when I was not a development manager, I was still participating in developer interviews a lot of the time because anytime you had a developer interviewing they were going to be on your team and you would want to get to know them through the interview just and you are usually the ones that the manager was like, here do the technical questions for this person, make sure that they know what the hell they're doing. Yup. And so I'm kind of, I'm kind of wigged out that you didn't have to do that as a sales guy.
Speaker 2 13:58 No. Yeah. I mean my role before I was definitely involved in hiring some of our, we had like technical or like field support people and it was very involved in that cause they, they worked, not for me but you know, kind of for me. And so I heard a lot of those people but that was really different. That would be more like hiring a developer as a project manager, a product manager or something in our kind of Sass world. But yeah, as a salesperson to hire a salesperson, it's weird. And this is like a different type of salesperson than, than I was before. So
Speaker 1 14:28 yeah, that's definitely, um, it's definitely very different and I think you have the right perspective on that to not, you got to have that longterm customer perspective instead of the aggressive, grab anybody with a heartbeat and a wallet credit card number and just throw them into the, to the funnel. That's dangerous. So yeah, I don't remember who was I talking to that said that they ended up hiring an overly aggressive salesperson. And that's exactly what happened. I think it was Brian Castle, uh, I think it was talking with him about, maybe it was audience ops where he hired a sales guy and he'd just started dumping in all these leads and then the leads churned out after two or three months or something like that because they, it was just overly aggressive and they weren't aligned in terms of the vision. So that's really smart. Yeah, definitely don't do that. Don't, no, don't go that way,
Speaker 2 15:17 Brian. Yeah, I mean, I talked to Brian a lot and I, I remember him saying that from before and yeah. So, yeah, so that's hiring on the podcast motor side. On the Casto side. I talked about hiring a full time marketer in our last episode that we did together and I'm super happy that we have hired somebody. We've made an offer, it's been accepted. All the ink is dry on the papers and uh, Denise, we'll be getting started with us, uh, the middle of August. She's going to wrapping up her current engagement and we'll be getting started on the cast marketing front in about a month. So watch out world. Very
Speaker 1 15:55 cool. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2 15:56 yeah, yeah. She's, I will probably have on the podcast at some point. She is a really, really, really sharp kind of marketing mind and has a lot of really interesting experience, not in SAS but in related kind of worlds that I think lends itself really well to kind of translating into what we're trying to do and particularly like with Castillo's what we need from a marketing person. And, uh, so yeah, I'm, I'm beside myself excited about what this means for my time and involvement in the business and the focus that we have on growth. You know, whatever going through the end of the year and beyond. So yeah. Cool. So a lot of, a lot of new people, which is, it is cool. It's super cool. Like I think I was telling Amanda, my wife that like one of the things I like most is giving people jobs and that's like a silly thing to say, but like, ah, you know, the business is successful and it's growing and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 16:52 But like when we can bring someone else on and give them a job and give them purpose and a thing to go wake up every day and go do and provide for their family and all that kind of stuff, it is like really fulfilling. And I don't want to like make that the, the, the milestone of, of what a business is, but it's pretty high up there. Like if we grow and we're profitable and we can keep bringing people onto the team too, to just have more people behind what I think is a good cause that we're doing, I get a lot out of that. So I, I'm really happy with that. Both of my businesses are growing and we're able to to bring awesome people on and kind of expand kind of what the business is cause like both of these people are, I mean Denise is definitely like personally very different than everyone else on our team, which is awesome because it kind of shapes and continues to expand who we are as a business and the sales person for podcast motor will be too because we haven't had anybody in that space ever, you know, and not even, not even meet with like when I was, you know, starting the business and it was my primary thing a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2 17:56 Like we were successful in a by chance and I never really pushed sales at all. I've been kind of dealing with inbound leads for the last two years and now I'd have somebody to be able to focus on that and like embrace that growth will be really interesting. Like for the rest of the business, say like, Oh wow, what if we doubled the number of customers in a couple of months? Like wow, what are we, what do we do then? And though those new challenges for the business will be interesting to see. Foldout yeah,
Speaker 1 18:22 yeah. I hear you. On the, the fulfillment that you get from giving other people employment. When I was a development manager or when I worked for other development companies, if I knew that there was a position available and there was somebody out there that was available and it didn't even have to be with like my company, I kind of like being the connector guy to hook people up just to, you know, if somebody over here is really good and a job over here that really would be a good fit. Try to connect the two. And if it worked out, I always, I was always pretty excited about that. You know, I had a lot of good networked opportunities that I got from just the people that I met at the very first company I worked at. And so I wanted to pay that forward as much as I possibly could. And I still do it now. I just, I don't see as many opportunities as I used to cause the industry that I'm now in and financial services. And the Java Development Enterprise freelancing thing here is a very different space than it was 20 years ago. So
Speaker 2 19:19 yeah. Um, how are things going with recapture?
Speaker 1 19:23 I'm glad you asked that question Craig. So things are actually going really well. And I have looked at the, the growth on ProfitWell here and now for the past four months we've been consistently growing at decent rates, somewhere between seven and 12% a month. Wow. That's stellar. Yeah. And Wow, here's, here's my quandary with it. I don't totally understand why we're growing and you know, I'm not running paid campaigns, we're not doing content marketing. And my organic search position hasn't really changed. We didn't really, you know, we did the thing with card hook, that's the only thing I can really point to. But <inaudible> hook is done. Like we kind of stopped taking on card hook customers in mid June, you know, there was a couple of stragglers in there, but it wasn't like they're not seriously continuing to contribute to the growth. But I'm still seeing it go every month and I'm like, what the Hell is going on?
Speaker 1 20:30 I can tell you it's coming from Shopify. It's coming from the Shopify app store. But beyond that I'm kind of at a loss as to what is driving it. Like I've looked, you know, did I get featured because usually that's like a onetime blip. You might get featured for a day or a week or something like that. And I've looked at the traffic on the website. There was a blip back in June, but that's it. Hmm. Like for one day. And then like if you look at my traffic on the website, it's pretty flat. A little spike on June 3rd still pretty flat, not changing, not going up, not going down, just flat. And if you look at, uh, the Shopify app store page, I definitely see that things have been slowly growing since May, ish. So, you know, it's kind of about the same time that cart hook, but he, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't promoting the Shopify app store page with Curt Hook that like, it was just through cart hook.
Speaker 1 21:24 We were talking to Carto Hook customers. They had a page on their site. It wasn't like we were pointing them to the Shopify app store. So I'm kind of scratching my head on this one here. And you know I've asked some people and I've gotten some ideas cause the Shopify app store allows you to throw on a Google analytics tracker on there if you want. There are a couple of different trackers you can use. Google analytics is the best of the bunch unfortunately. So you get a little bit of insight in there but I'm telling you it's not much. And so the latest recommendation I got was to go and do the ecommerce tracking on there to see about specifically conversions and events and things like that. So I'm trying to figure that out right now. And the other thing is that, you know, I'm getting a decent number of trials at this point and I'm probably getting about five to 10 people a day signing up for it, somewhere in that range, which is a good clip at much better than it used to be.
Speaker 1 22:17 And you know, some of them drop off right away, some of them make it all the way through the trial. Some of them like convert to paid almost immediately and some of them are perfect candidates and they don't do anything. And I have an onboarding, you know I went and prove the onboarding sequence may ish, which you know, you might say, oh well that's when you started growing. Maybe you're just better at onboarding. No, cause I actually got a bump in traffic too so it's good that I did that because you know I'm probably retaining more than I would have before but I still think I need to like make it even more fine grain than it already is. So I was having a Twitter conversation with Ruben Gamez from bidsketch and he was showing something that he was doing like with typeform and surveys and like you put in four links that are basically the answers to a quick survey question and they click on the answer right there.
Speaker 1 23:08 So you don't, you're making them think or do something even less than you would normally ask them to do. Like I do get some answers about people that are, you know, saying, oh well the app is too expensive. And then I go look at their revenue for the last 30 days and it shows zero. So it's like, well, yeah, if you're not making any money, 29 bucks a month is expensive. I get that. But then, you know, some of them were saying, uh, I had problems with the app. Like I, there was a woman from Brazil who was saying that, you know, when everything wasn't in Portuguese, so she had trouble using it. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I understand that. I don't know that, you know, I have enough Portuguese customers really justify translating the whole thing to Portuguese. But yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, I'm getting a little bits of things here and there, but I feel like I need more, like I need to understand those that are signing up and staying.
Speaker 1 23:56 I need to understand like where they saw it, why they picked me over everybody else and why they converted to paid. I mean, I've heard a little bit about, hey, it's a great UI. Hey, it's easy to use. Hey, does x, Y, Z that I really liked. Um, you know, but if there's not a consistent single answer or theme of answers that I can really point to to help me understand this growth, because if you don't understand it, you can't double down on it. Right? Yeah. That's where I'm at right now. I'm just, I'm scratching my head that I've now stumbled into some dumb luck fire hose here, which is great. But now I need to figure out how to really capitalize on it and make sure that I'm doing all I possibly can to grow the sucker. But that's, that's where I'm at.
Speaker 2 24:44 No, well, I mean, I feel, I feel you on not knowing exactly why it's happening, but it's a better, it's a better thing than not getting a lot of growth and not knowing why it's happening or not being able to decide what happened to your growth before. Do A, so you're talking about like ecommerce conversion. Um, so you have like a, a conversion event set up when someone to be k it becomes a paying customer. Is that it? Or do you have other like goals and Google analytics alone?
Speaker 1 25:12 Oh, well, I'm not actually doing goals in Google analytics. I do. I've done this through drip. So we have tags in drip. So as they go through certain things, we'll tag them. And now that I've read Brennan Dunn's thing on right message about how tags suck, you know, I regret having done tags but it is what it is now. Um, but anyway, so they get tagged when certain things happen and then when they do something else they get untagged from all the previous things and they get a new tag. But that sort of runs them through various onboarding sequences that I have. So there is something that checks if they got tagged by this sending the set of emails, if they got taken out of that tag, then don't send them any more of those emails. And if they get a new tag, send them a different set of emails.
Speaker 1 25:56 So I have a series of things that like tells me where they are, what they've done, what they haven't done and you know, things to kind of nudge them along to the next step. But then when they get all the way through, you know, that's usually the sweet spot. And at that point, I don't really need to bug them a whole lot other than maybe hey, you know, maybe try more things on here so that you can bump to a higher plan. Um, stuff like that. But yeah, I mean that, that, that's what I've got at the moment.
Speaker 2 26:24 Uh, interesting. I would look at maybe two things. One is like, so in Google analytics, ecommerce goals is what they call it, and it's not specific to ecommerce, but basically like on our page, we have a goal set up for arriving at like the welcome screen after they start a trial. Ah, they come to a page, it's always the same page. And so our goal, um, and if you, uh, you guys have like a center for a free trial or whatever and then like if they sign up, maybe you could, you could kick an event back to Google analytics. And the benefit potentially of that is you can then like associate that event with a person in all of their like browsing history and stuff. So you can see like this person that came in, where did they come from, what did they do on the, on the site before they sign up for a trial and stuff. And the other thing that we have that I don't look at it enough but is helpful when I do is I would look at either like full story or hotjar both on your marketing site and in your app. And so they both do like a screen recordings and we use hotjar because it does like funnel visualization too.
Speaker 1 27:28 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I did used to do this on um, kissmetrics and crazy age. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 2 27:35 Yup. Uh Huh. So it's cool. It's cool to see like, okay, this may come to the homepage, this maybe will come into pricing and this people will come to like start a trial and then this many people would come through to like the welcome page to start, you know, that that signed up. And of course all of those have huge amounts of drop-off along the way. But it's nice to be able to see that and hot jar. And then you can say like, okay, just show me the screen recordings of the people that signed up or just show me the people that abandoned sign up halfway through or something like that. So it's pretty cool. And they have a decent free tier. So we use them just as a free tool right now.
Speaker 1 28:04 Yeah, yeah, no, I definitely didn't do that. And you know, of course, but anytime that I've ever come into this situation, it always sucks because then you suddenly realize, why didn't I set all this crap up earlier so that now when I got to this situation, I would have at least had some data about it because now when I set it up, I got to wait like 30 days to figure out whatever the hell it is. And even then, that's a small window of data to really, I guess, you know, you're assuming that that 30 days is like the previous 30 days is like the previous 30 days. Yeah, it's representative. And if it's not representative, you're not really gonna know that until you have Labatt six months a data or something like that. So you're, you're running on faith a little bit there, but it is what it is.
Speaker 2 28:46 Yup. Yeah, yeah. I mean all of this shit is a guests and all these things are making it a more educated guests I feel like. But yeah, I mean, yeah, we're, look, we're trying to look at, you know, with Denise coming in from marketing of course her first question is, okay, where are you getting customers now? And I'm like, that's a great question. I have no fucking, I mean I have some ideas, but you know to, to say I have a really good amount of data around this is silly. So we're trying to get some data around this ahead of her coming onboard so that she can say, okay, great. What are we doing already that we can just do a whole bunch more of, cause that's obviously the way to go. But yeah, this marketing attribution stuff is a, a, a giant, a hole in the marketing SAS world. I feel like if anybody has this figured out, I would love to, uh, steal what you're doing, so please let us know.
Speaker 1 29:35 Yeah. Yeah. I feel the same way, man.
Speaker 2 29:38 So, uh, so Dave, I'm coming to America,
Speaker 1 29:40 coming to
Speaker 2 29:42 America. Yeah. So what brings you stateside? Where you just stateside a little while ago. So we were there in April for visiting family. Uh, and I'm coming next week by myself. First time ever. First time they'll ever like, uh, make a transatlantic flight by myself. A tiny seed founder retreat is next week in Minnesota. Yeah. So me and uh, whatever, 12 of my newest best friends, they're going to spend two days in the middle of the Minnesota forest together. Uh, I'm really excited about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 30:16 Hope it's not like a survivor where you guys end up voting each other off the island or there's bloodletting or you know, you get a tiny seed Tattoo. Who knows, who knows?
Speaker 2 30:28 Uh, I'm sure. I, I'm sure there is. Uh, there is a lot of fun stuff planned. I mean, I think, you know, the retreat is going to be a fair amount of like work and mentorship and talking through, you know, talking shop, kind of like the big snow tiny comp thing, but a fair amount of like, you know, fun and team building and all that kind of stuff too. So I'm excited to see, uh, see what they have planned. Tracy. Uh, it's like the program manager for tiny seed and his slash she's amazing and organizing all the stuff we get to do and um, so she'll of course be there and running the whole show. That'll be, it'd be a lot of fun. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. Like a little mini vacation. I get to have five days without the kids and it able to work as much as I want.
Speaker 1 31:08 Yes. Yes. And uh, you know, I'm sure that there will be copious amounts of alcohol involved as well.
Speaker 2 31:15 I can imagine. Yup. Yes, I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 31:18 Well, in a, on other news, I finally got a WPC p four dot o shoved out the door.
Speaker 2 31:25 Nice. Nice. How did a, a major breaking change?
Speaker 1 31:29 Uh, well you probably had a check in with me next week cause we just shoved it out the door yesterday and it's a little early. You know, there's been a few people that have said, hey, I'm having a problem with this, but it hasn't been like, oh my God, the world's on fire. We haven't gotten a lot of those yet. And I've been kind of keeping an eye on the form today. I sent out a big announcement and uh, aside from one guy telling me I was discriminating against Nigerians because paypal doesn't support the Niara, you know, it's actually been going pretty smooth. Yeah. Awesome. But that wasn't, it was a hell of a lot of work to get that damn thing done. So yes, it's a little bit of a sad event. So one of my senior developers will be leaving shortly now. Um, so I have three developers right now on the plugin side.
Speaker 1 32:14 I'll pretty soon be down to two. Uh, this was an agreement we had that he had to get this thing out the door and he's been very patient. And we talked about this back in January. I thought it was going to be a couple of months, but here we are, it's middle of July and we just finally got it. So you know, Kudos to everybody on the team. It was a hell of a lot of work to push it out the door, get a new developer trained up, get everything ready. The conversion over in EDD for a recurring payments and the revamp of the site and the Redo of the documentation and oh God. Yeah. I'm glad to be. I'm glad to have it behind us.
Speaker 2 32:50 That's awesome man. That's great. I can imagine those big major changes or major, major releases are really nerve wracking. Cause I mean I'm sure you guys changed a lot of shit that can break sights, right?
Speaker 1 33:01 Oh yeah. Which is part of the reason we started doing a Beta back in December and you know, that held it up quite a long time and I'm glad it did because there were plenty of things that were just plain scary that we shook out with the help of some really great Beta testing folks. So who were willing to, you know, take the risk, move forward and say, I really want that feature and I'm totally willing to, you know, give you feedback and you know, deal with all your three quarter baked software. It definitely wasn't half-baked. Yeah. It was more basic than that, but it wasn't as baked as it should be. You know, it's like, it's like a loaf of bread that you take out of the evidence. Still shake a little bit there. It's not quite there.
Speaker 2 33:39 Yeah. How did you, uh, how did you manage the, the Beta program and you'd have like a separate getup repo that people pulled the plugin out over or how did you guys manage that? As far as like releasing it to customers?
Speaker 1 33:49 So we have an entirely private repo and I wasn't willing to open it up for the customers at that point because it would expose our premium modules. And that's the only reason we have a private repo is that I don't want anybody to have that code except our developers. And so what we ended up doing was announcing a Beta program. We had like 60 some odd people on the mailing list and we probably had about eight active people going through it. Um, and a bunch of people that said that they wanted to access to it but we never really heard much from them. But eight was great, like eight was a good number to get active feedback from. And so what we ended up doing is we would basically periodically mail the list and say, hey, we have an update. You know, maybe we fixed a bunch of stuff and we'd send out a new version, we'd send them a link to the main plugin, let them install it.
Speaker 1 34:33 A lot of them would come back with feedback to us. We would fix it privately and then like maybe we'd be in communication directly with them, send them development versions and then periodically re update the list. Because anybody who needed like premium module upgrades, they had to come contact us to get the four o versions of them. They weren't compatible with the old ones. Um, cause cause everything, everything upgraded in terms of the API APIs and stuff like that. So, yeah, we, we managed it that way and that's the second time I've done that. I did the same thing with, um, business directory and I felt like it was pretty successful on both counts. I mean, there's definitely some manual shenanigans that go on there, but you know, when you're talking about eight people going through a Beta program, I felt like I didn't need more than that to handle it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean the hard part was really just sending out the emails, drumming up the interest and then finding out who was willing to respond after that. So, yeah, I think it was,
Speaker 2 35:26 ah, interesting. I know Pippin does like a whole separate getup repo. Like they run a separate version of the plugin, I think, uh, for, for maybe EDD or, I don't know what at, we're looking at this cause I mean, we make pretty small changes to seriously somewhat podcasting at this point, but we've made some pretty big ones and most of all they've gone well. But, but it's scary sometimes. Like we would make a release, it affects something kind of mission critical and you're like, well, I hope that it doesn't break anybody's stuff. All the testing we've done says that it's okay and it's safe to do, you know, put into production. But you don't know. I would love to have 20 or a hundred people that were, you know, willing to run the newest version, uh, at any time. And an easy way to do that. Cause I mean, SVN and all this, I don't, I don't know all the details admittedly, but it's just not easy to send someone up a release version of a plugin. We do it manually right now with Dropbox. We just put the plug in and Dropbox and send them a link and say, delete the plugin from your site, install this new one. And that's just Janky. Like, that's nice.
Speaker 1 36:27 It's totally Janky. But you know, you can definitely do that. You can even do it through EDD if you want. Like they, they allow you to set up Beta versions. It just was more hassle to me than it was worth. Um, and also we just weren't entirely comfortable with, uh, the versions at any given time. So we wanted to get, be more directly in contact with the customers instead of having just quietly send out updates and then maybe hear something and maybe not hear something. Yeah. So I felt like the email gave me an engagement platform to really find out what the hell was going on. So, yeah.
Speaker 2 36:59 Yup. That's the whole point. Yeah. Do you want to, you want to hear what they like and don't like and what breaks and all that stuff before everyone else gets it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 37:05 Yeah. So, you know, in the end, I think it was pretty successful. It took longer than I wanted, but you know, it was all right.
Speaker 2 37:10 Good. Nice. Nice. Well, I think that about wraps up for this week, uh, if, yeah, so we've talked on a few things that folks have, you know, experienced with or input, uh, for us or for everyone else. We'd love to hear it. Uh, I think, you know, marketing attribution, definitely one of them, uh, plug in releases for wordpress. If you're doing this in a Beta form, ah, better than Dave and I are, we'd love to hear about it. Uh, and really anything else that we talked about. If you guys have any questions or comments or feedback, send us a message podcast@roguestartups.com and as always, the ask is if you're enjoying the show, please share it with someone else who you think would enjoy it too. And we'll see you next week.
Speaker 0 37:47 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. <inaudible>.
