Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where to start up, 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 89 of rogue startups. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 2 00:27 Oh, I am. Good man. I'm good. I have a, I've made like a, a slight, not a slight it pretty significant like a lifestyle change this week. We have a week, my wife and I have decided to do the whole 30, so I'm going to sure. If you do, you know of the whole 30 like diet,
Speaker 1 00:43 I have no idea what you're talking about. And that's crazy diets that come through this house because my wife having an auto immune disorder has tried a lot of different stuff to try to cope with that. From a dietary perspective,
Speaker 2 00:57 I really should. Should consider this. It basically is really strict paleo diet for a month. So lean meat, vegetables, no fruit, no booze, no dairy, um, meat and vegetables.
Speaker 1 01:15 You lost me a booze. I'm out. Yeah, I know it's, I mean honestly it's hard.
Speaker 2 01:20 Like, it's hard from a, a habit standpoint, much more than like a chemical standpoint. Like, I don't need to drink. Right. But after I'm done working cooking dinner, a glass of wine is really just like, you know, really nice. Uh, and now it's like a cup of tea and that's cool. So it's just like swapping habits and patterns, but uh, I feel amazing. It's like really amazing. Like if you get all the sugar and the starch out of your diet, it's really something, I'm only like five days into it right now. So, uh, I think the hard couple of days are coming here pretty soon, but uh, it's really amazing. Like you feel we've done it before when we were in Louisiana and you start feeling like sick around the one week part because your body is just like, fuck this. Like, give me some of that stuff that I used to have. Uh,
Speaker 1 02:04 well it goes into ketosis, right? You've got a combination of things going on. You've got the ketosis and the withdrawal from the sugar. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know the theoretical stuff behind it and yeah, it definitely sucks. Now my wife eats really, really clean because she has to, you know, she's on the, the AIP, the autoimmune protocol diet where, and she's also gluten free. So, you know, it basically eliminates gluten. It eliminates refined sugar. Um, she can have some kind of fruits, but not all kinds of fruits. And she has lots and lots of vegetables, meat, no processed foods of any kind. So no bread, no crackers. Doesn't matter whether it's gluten free or not, you're not supposed to eat any of it. Yeah. And then it limits even like certain kinds of vegetables. Like I didn't really understand this until she went on the AIP diet, but like night shades. So that's like eggplants, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, all of this stuff has like a kind of toxin in it. Like it's, it's very possible by somebody with a uncompromised immune system. But if your immune system is compromised, it weakens it further because it wastes energy trying to process this food. And so you're not supposed to incorporate those in your diet. Well, let me tell you, when you like Mexican food, that is a sucky one. That is a big tomato. Yeah,
Speaker 2 03:30 yeah.
Speaker 1 03:31 The Mexican food is nightshades like potatoes, peppers, tomatoes. Yeah. That describes most of it. So that kind of blows and yeah, we discovered this actually when you're, cause we do a fairly extensive garden in our backyard and I do a lot of tomatoes. That's like my big thing. And we had like 12 tomato plants and my wife was actively eating tomatoes like multiple times a day for an entire six week period. And it got to the point in September where she was like falling asleep at eight 15 and when she changed the diet, that improved radically. It's interesting.
Speaker 2 04:06 I feel really good. I feel really sharp but I am like kind of on edge like in a good way. So I could be entering like super asshole mode I guess at any moment. But uh, we'll see.
Speaker 1 04:17 So far so good. Uh, good. I I would, it would be interesting to see you in super asshole mode cause I always think of you as like this really gentle, nice guy. Like, I'm trying to figure out what does Craig, the asshole actually look like? Dave, the asshole doesn't take the whole lot of energy to really visualize cause I kind of sound like an asshole already. But if, but you sound nice. I don't always sound so
Speaker 2 04:41 my wife says I have a really long fuse, but when it blows like a watch out and that's, I mean I think it's pretty accurate. I don't get upset like outwardly at a lot of things, but when I do it's pretty bad. So yeah, it doesn't happen very often. A couple times a year.
Speaker 1 04:57 Yeah. Yeah. I mean I get, um, for me it's always about like being hangry most of the time. And my wife totally recognizes this now and she's like, are you hungry? Yeah. And then I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. What do you, what do you think of it? And then she hands me like a banana or a bar or something like that. Like it just eaten. Right.
Speaker 2 05:18 Great. Is it on the couch until you're human again?
Speaker 1 05:21 Yeah. Yeah. 95 times out of a hundred. That works great. And you know it's, it's very funny cause now I'm better at catching myself. Like I just know like most of the times that I'm like blowing up is usually like right around in the late afternoon before dinner time. Precisely because I'm low on sugar. So I mean I try to combat that with eating something in the late afternoon that is good. Doesn't always work because there's a, you know, desserts or something like that around the house and I'm like, Ooh, Hey peach Chris bar. Right. Well I know. Yeah. Yeah. So, but you know, in general that coupled with exercise late in the day, I feel like my moods have been a little less janky and a little more ridiculous. And so that's what a what's new with you?
Speaker 1 06:05 Well I am currently waking up every day to loving my profit. Well, emails that I get from Patrick software or the guy that likes those emails. Well, okay, let me be fair. Up until April of this year, I didn't really like those emails cause it was like there was one day of the month, it wasn't telling me that I suck. Yeah. The first like, yeah, like the first day of the month it's like, Hey, you're 0%, you know, of your goal. 0% of the month. I'm like, okay, cool. And then the next day it's like, Hey, you're behind this much in your, I'm like, Oh God damn. I tell her. Yeah. And the growth was just not catching up. And now I'm like, I'm at 200% of my goal right now. Yeah. And I haven't even hit the end of the month. I'm like, this is super exciting. So I'm loving those emails right now. Um, it's interesting.
Speaker 1 06:56 You've got to change your goal. That's right. That was exactly what it means. But don't, don't burst my bubble right now, man. I'm enjoying my vanity metric. Don't, uh, don't, don't take that away from me at the moment. I've had to suffer through that a alone too long prior to this. Uh, but anyway, you know, I, I enjoy waking up to that every day and then I'm always like, I'm going in there to find out like, who converted, who's not converting? And it's funny because my manual followup, I'm seeing that it actually is working because I'll go through, I'll do the, I'll look in the trial or who just ended a trial and if somebody should have converted like their, their stores in the ideal zone, like above 2,500 a month or they were recovering something, I'll just reach out and say, Hey, you know what, what was it that prevented you from recovering?
Speaker 1 07:40 And a lot of the time I'm not getting a direct email response, but then the next day when I go check out profit, well I'm like Holy shit, they signed up. So it's like there's something in there. There's something that in my onboarding I need to, to add like an added nag in there. And I don't quite know what that looks like yet, but it, whatever I'm doing manually right now, I need to figure out a way to add that into the onboarding sequence so that I don't have to keep doing that. Are you sending those like a on a time basis or are there like event driven things that send those emails? I, well, right now, yeah. So I'm, I'm doing this the way that Brennan Dunn says not to do it. Of course. Uh, I'm using tags so that when certain events hit, then we tag the user with that thing and then that triggers a campaign.
Speaker 1 08:29 So what I need to do is I need to change that to a property so that, you know, we can say here's the event and the name of the event is what triggers the campaign. So we're looking at the value of a property instead of like a specific kind of tag. Cause I've noticed that following my thing through the onboarding process and the tags gets really confusing and I've noticed that people end up in weird spots. I'm like how did that person get here? Because they tag should have dumped him over here. And trying to figure that out, eh, has proved to be somewhat fruitless. So I think what I need to do is just get some time to redo the, the onboarding process. Cause I think certain things are working certain things or not. But yeah, like that. And then automating the reviews piece of that.
Speaker 1 09:13 So I'm still going out and getting people to manually add their reviews and then bugging the crap out of them if they're not doing it. Just the ones that are like the ones that are clearly successful, like you're making 17% in addition every month. Like how about a five star review here? Like give me a little love here, come on. And that seems to be like keeping the, the ranking up in the Shopify app store. That's what's sustaining me and the rank right now, cause my little rinky dink app has 16 five star reviews and I'm beating people that have like 238 or 1,400 reviews in their app. So wow. Combination and right.
Speaker 2 09:53 So the rankings for whatever your key term is?
Speaker 1 09:56 Yeah, I mean there are several terms that I'm in the store for, but like the ones that I see the most search traffic from, I'm in the top seven or eight, which puts me just above the fold. So when the page loads I'm still, I'm visible right there without scrolling. Which I think that's part of the reason I'm getting a lot of traffic here is that it's not hard to find me. Yeah, sure. That's massive.
Speaker 2 10:18 Nice.
Speaker 1 10:19 So yeah, I'm spending a lot of time on that. Plus a just random customer support issues cause you know there's a new question every day and then it's updating the docs for this or something else for for that know we're definitely seeing way more Shopify installs than Magento install Scott. A few. But yeah, I mean it's nice cause I'm watching people come in and they're adding multiple stores and I know that when they do that, you know later on down the line in 60 days I'm going to see expansion revenue from that. The first 30 days we basically just start you at the bottom of the tier. The next 30 days is the previous 30 days. And usually for the first 30 days they're not fully ramped up yet. So they don't quite hit their stride. But by 60 days we see them fully at their math, their total capabilities. And that's when the expansion revenue is generally hitting is about somewhere between 30 and 60 days down the line.
Speaker 2 11:11 Man. That's awesome. That's awesome. I, you know, I would say like for, for this manual stuff you're doing, if you have the time, and I know it sounds like you're, you're, you're stretched pretty thin between this, you know, growing and support and the consulting stuff. But like if you have the time right now, that kind of stuff like manually going out and talking to customers and support or you know, after they've converted is massive for like them being lifelong customers and you really understanding like what they're digging about your tool and so you can go find more of those kinds of people. Like yeah, I wouldn't be so quick to automate all of that. Like some of it may be, but I think like I still stay in support every day and it keeps us in tune with like what the product is doing good, what people are struggling with and so we can make tweaks on that. So I, I wouldn't try, I wouldn't try to get too far away from that too quickly until you're really sure that, you know, like where things stand, you know?
Speaker 1 12:05 Yeah, no, no, I enjoy actually talking to the customers and in fact be, I've had a specific, a couple of conversations in the last week where the customer was like, Oh, that was, you know, funny and clever. The thing that you said there, I, I liked the fact that you have some personality, I'm gonna use your product and then they signed up. So the fact that you're, your support isn't robotic and that it isn't all automated and cold and automatic does seem to make a difference. And I've seen this in the plugins too, just having a real human being on the other side that they're like, Oh, Dave's there, Dave's willing to help me. Dave can get me through this. Like that. That is big. And you know, I have developed some relationships with the customers. I mean, I'm just sort of a natural customer support guy.
Speaker 1 12:49 That's just my background. So I still like doing that. I'm never going to totally automated all the way. I was just trying to take some of the monotony out of it. But even so like the one thing that still frustrates me is that, you know, I have all of this followup, I have all of these sequences that are going on in here and I still don't get tons and tons of customers like responding back to what I'm saying and I've tried, I've tried changing the wording. I've tried, you know, I'm making sure it's very youth focused. I keep it short. I've tried it long, I'm not getting them to engage me in all cases. And it seems like the, the, the unifying factor is that eCommerce store owners are just really busy and I'm just a checkbox. They want to say, okay, abandoned carts done, you know, and move on to something else because it seems like there's always something else they're struggling with, whether it's inventory or customer support or fulfillment or you know, shipping hassles or whatever. Like I'm always top five but I'm never number one.
Speaker 2 13:53 Does that like an opportunity for like some really highly curated, trusted content like a, you know, a really good version of like the 10 Shopify apps that every store needs, you know, and like really in depth stuff to talk about that and to guide people through like, Hey, this is, you know, we've seen a shit ton of successful Shopify stores and distilled the data down. This is what the best ones have. And you actually probably have that data, you know.
Speaker 1 14:21 Yeah, I do have a lot of data. And one thing I wanted to do this year was to, you know, post black Friday, sort of talk about what I'm seeing on recapture itself. Cause now I've got enough stores to really, you know, get some diversity in that data. When I had just Magento and I, you know, it was like, do the Shopify people really want to hear about the Magento folks cause they, in many cases they're very different. Um, I mean there's some similarities, but now I have an a Shopify folks that, you know, I could actually do platform based comparisons to say, here's what is doing, here's what Shopify is doing, here's the things that are on Magento, here's the things on Shopify, here's what the sales look like, et cetera, et cetera. So I kind of want to do that, but I don't have, I mean, Jesus, I just don't have the time to do as much as I want. And also query and stuff out. A Mongo is a real pain in the ass, you know, just writing queries and things like that. You can do it in code pretty easily. But like I'm very facile with sequel, but when I try to do things in mango, it's like, Oh, I'll just write this in node and then I'll, and I'll get some data. And sometimes it's the right stuff and sometimes it's not. And then you've got to tweak a bunch of stuff and it's just a little more painful, painful than it should be.
Speaker 2 15:31 Hmm. Hmm. You know, talking about black Friday, I would suspect that you'll be coming up on like a slower time here soon. Like in a good way too to let you kind of take a step back from being so involved with the customers and do some of these things that like that won't move the business forward right now just cause customers aren't shopping for this thing but like put them in place to where like after the first of the year they'll really make a difference. So that's, that's cool to look forward to.
Speaker 1 15:56 Actually that reminds me of the other thing that I did this past week, which was the dial in my five week black Friday course. So I had, you know, I ended up recycling a lot of the content that I had from last year cause it's pretty evergreen stuff. But then I had to preface it with a bunch of 2018 statistics and things like that. So I set that all up. It's now dialed in for five weeks and basically I have triple the number of stores that I had last year that are reading this content. So it's really going to be new to two thirds of the list anyway. Um, so that's fine. I think that'll work for this year. And you know, some of it is aimed at, you know it, the nice thing about that content is that it's really aimed at all kinds of merchants. If you've never seen this stuff before, you're going to be like, Oh my God, there's so much I could be doing here.
Speaker 1 16:40 And then you're going to implement a tiny fraction of it. But for those that have been doing it a while, they're like, Oh okay, wait a minute, I've done that, I've done that. Oh maybe I should do that one this year. Like that kind of stuff. So you know, there's definitely something for everybody in that and now I've got that locked in. So basically we're going to be running stuff through mid, mid, late October at this point is when the last one goes out. First one just went out this week. And then after that, you know, after November 1st I, I'm on hard lockdown with recapture. Like there's no feature releases unless there's an emergency where we absolutely have to push something out to fix a bug, not touching that code base until like first week of January. I mean we're going to be working on stuff but we're not going to be releasing anything to production after that cause there's just too much risk involved and I don't want to, I don't want to mess with the platform. Yep. We did the same thing last year. So
Speaker 2 17:32 nice. Nice. Sounds like a good,
Speaker 1 17:34 yeah, it makes for a great time to actually work on features and, and hardcore development, which we started working on the integrations about that time. So you know, we've got a list of things that I want to start accomplishing and working on that we've been had and having to kind of dial back because of customer support. But my guess is once things get locked down, most people are not going to end up contacting me for the bulk of the black Friday time. Other than, you know, Hey I, I, I'm having trouble finding this data or this one random cart isn't doing stuff. Cause last year was actually pretty quiet and I was like, is this thing even on, you know, I'm sitting here tapping the mic, Hey, is this thing on hello? And then I'm looking at the numbers and I'm like, Oh, $250,000 today and it's 10:00 AM okay. Great. Yeah, it's worse. Yeah, we're good. So yeah. Awesome. Awesome. How are things in the podcasting world?
Speaker 2 18:29 A good man. Good. I think, uh, like my, my only update on like kind of things that are new since we talked last is we have started doing a weekly webinar series, so we call it office hours where, uh, it's an hour long webinar every Wednesday. If anyone wants to check it out, just go to <inaudible> dot com slash office hours, all one word. And so we hold them every Wednesday at noon Eastern. And the idea is really to use this as a, um, a learning opportunity for customers or prospects or people that are in trial that have questions about how the platform works. But, but a lot more, it ends up being like, how to podcast or what to do about, you know, well, microphone should I use or how should I brand my podcast or all this kind of stuff. And so it's been, this is the second week we did it.
Speaker 2 19:15 We just did our second one yesterday. We're recording on a Thursday and it's really cool. It's really cool. I present for like 15 minutes on like a really small topic in the podcasting world and then we just have questions for the other 45 minutes. And there are a ton of questions that people have and at time, yeah, I mean, we're experimenting with this and you know, I don't know that we'll do it forever, every week, but, but I definitely liked the concept of it because, I mean, podcasting's hard. I mean, we've been doing this for a long time and I still like, I feel like we'd still suck at a lot of stuff, you know? Um, and people that are just starting that like have a blog and maybe they're not super technical, can't just go read an article and, and implement it. You know, have a lot of these questions and so we are able to answer them, you know, pretty much real time.
Speaker 2 20:01 So it's pretty cool. I feel like it's a pretty high leverage use of my time. You know, we're, we're repurposing the content a lot of different ways too, which is cool. So yeah, so the jury's out on the, the ROI of it, but I think it's a really good thing for us to be doing for the community. You know, it's not just for our customers, it's for everybody. So yeah, it's really cool. I'm really happy we're doing it and we totally ripped the idea off from help scout. So help scout does this as like an onboarding tool to say like, you know, Hey people that are in trial right now come check out, you know, our, I think they call it office hours too, whatever it is. And they have them every other week I think, but they have a 30 day trial, so it works. So
Speaker 1 20:39 cool. Cool.
Speaker 2 20:41 Yeah. Yeah. So webinars are really intense man. Like this. You know, if the dog hysterical right now, we can just edit it out later. But like webinars, like my face is on the screen and it's live, there's no editing. Like it's legit pressure to, uh, to get everything right the first time.
Speaker 1 20:59 Let's be honest. How many times is the dog gun crazy during the webinar?
Speaker 2 21:03 Oh, 50% of the time so far. Yeah, totally nuts. Yesterday
Speaker 1 21:07 dude. Now on your webinars to watch you perform under pressure,
Speaker 2 21:12 that's, that's pressure, right? And the dog is like, you're like, Oh my God, don't please stop shop. Eh, it's, it's something. But uh, yeah. Anyways, it's cool. Like I said, jury jury's out for awhile on the, the real ROI of it. But I really liked the concept so we're gonna stick with it for awhile cause I think it's, it's really cool and really helpful. So
Speaker 1 21:33 yeah. You know, webinars, I know that a Breck Palumbo really does a lot of webinars and caches in like nobody's business on these things. And you know, I mean based on what he was saying, it makes a lot of sense for his product cause it's an information based product and I've tried to, you know, webinars are one of those things that are kind of in the back of my mind as is this something I really want to try for recapture. Obviously with getting in the Shopify app store channel here, dialed in. You know, I'd be kinda dumb to switch focus right now and try to make webinars work too. Cause I haven't really tapped everything that I possibly can out of this channel yet. So, but it's definitely one of those things that I would love to experiment with someday.
Speaker 2 22:13 Yeah, I mean there's a lot to it man. I mean it's, it's as complicated or more as podcasting and especially if you're going to do it on a regular basis. You know, you've got gotta have your, all your automation and tagging and followup and all that kind of shit dialed in. And I know breakfast really, really good with that stuff. And so it's not surprising that it works for him, but I think it's the kind of thing that can work really poorly. If you just do a webinar and then don't follow up with those people or there's no offer, anything like that, then it's you know, a waste of your time. But yup. Yup. So, uh,
Speaker 1 22:42 speaking of waste of time, speaking of waste of time, we came across an excellent article and I hope everybody that's listening today also did, if you didn't, we were going to put it in the show notes but it is from a one of my favorite, he's not really a solo founder, he's just, he kind of works for small startup companies. So Lars has never been a single founder of anything. He's been the employee, you know, a very high impact one by any measure you want to, to give. But he's been at like Kissmetrics and he's been at, I will teach you to be rich and currently now he's actually the CEO of QuickSprout deal Patel's company and Lars. Lars is one of those intensely smart people. So having a conversation. I love having conversations with him cause every time I do I feel like I'm the dumbest person sitting in that conversation.
Speaker 1 23:38 So it is like this massive learning transfer usually like, and you know you can't be an idiot ask dumb questions. But you know, I feel like any question that I've asked, Lars has really good in depth answers to them when I've had one on one conversations to him and then with him I should say and he just put published something recently. And then I've seen other things that he's done in the past and I love all of his stuff that he writes cause he, you know, writes this really intense long form here. It's full of details and there's just lots and lots of stuff to take away from it. But this week's article was about building growth teams and he's done that at Kissmetrics. He's done it at, I will teach you to be rich and now he's like, I'll never do it again. And I was like, what?
Speaker 1 24:26 Yeah, you're not going to do the one thing you were like really super successful at. And these two other companies and the thing that you're literally known for at this point in the MicroComp community. So when I read this article, it was like, Oh wow, okay. And, and he's really talking about the struggles of how expensive it is to run a growth team, how counterintuitive the results are, how hard it is to really achieve a value of confidence over your actual measurements during AB testing. Like all of this stuff that, I mean, I, I don't know how much AB testing you guys are doing over in Castillo's. I've done some AB testing with recapture and my limited experience in it is a, I really suck at it. B, this is really hard and see, I'm like, I'm just not getting enough data to give me confidence in what I'm doing here.
Speaker 1 25:20 And so when Lars put out this article, I'm like, he's talking about me. Oh my God, this is great. This is great. Um, he's giving you the permission to say, I'm just not going to do this thing right. Well more than that. He's basically giving you like AB testing really is only for those companies that just have ungodly amounts of traffic. Like if you're going to do hardcore AB testing, that's one thing that this article says is you're not, unless you're, unless you're, you know, a quick sprout aren't, I will teach you to be rich or a Kissmetrics where you have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of visitors that are coming into your site. I think his metric was like 20,000, 15 to 20,000 unique visits a month or maybe even a week. I forget what the, the, uh, the thing was, I mean, both of those numbers were way out of what I have with recapture.
Speaker 1 26:11 So I was like, okay, well I'm not there, but those numbers are, they only thing that basically ever gives you some, a chance of having confidence that your AB tests. And I was like, I've always kind of felt like that, but everybody was like, Aw man, run AB test AB testing rocks. You got to do AB testing. And if you're not doing AB testing, you're an idiot. And I'm like, okay. Well, I guess I'm just going to be an idiot cause I've, the stuff that I've tried, I'm not getting enough traffic to make this work or if I do make it work, I don't feel like I'm any confidence in my results. Or the famous AB tests that I ran one time on a business directory was for the first week it looked like my change was working and then the following three weeks it dropped back down to basically the previous point before. So it was like a novelty effect and I'm like, Oh God. Yeah. So I mean that was, that was an interesting insight out of a Lars article here just talking about all of the things that he had and seen in his times as being this, this growth team leader.
Speaker 2 27:16 Yeah. I think you know, he has, he says these are the two rules of thumb for testing. Volume is 20,000 people per month to see an asset you want to optimize. So that's not website visitors, that's website visitors to your pricing page or something.
Speaker 1 27:31 Right. A very specific thing.
Speaker 2 27:32 Button. Yeah. And all thousand revenue conversions per month in the same funnel. Let's, I think very few people listening to this podcast have a thousand new paying customers a month. Or why me? I guess like in a, in a Shopify store or something like that, you could have a thousand purchases in a month and that wouldn't be like totally crazy.
Speaker 1 27:51 But digit spinners maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 2 27:54 Maybe. Maybe. You know, the one interesting thing I took around away from this, um, was a lot of the stuff that he talks about is like company culture stuff. So basically how like a growth team inside a business doesn't really fit with the, the, the goals and the model of the rest of the business. Right? So the goals like, you know, build a sustainable way to increase page view, you know, website views or something. It is like a really understandable, sustainable goal for, for a marketing group. But a growth team has like, okay, we're gonna run this test this month and it might work or it might not work and we're gonna get a bunch of data and from then we're gonna, you know, have the results to go do this other thing. And I think what he's saying is like all these tests and the uncertainty that they create is really countered to the culture that a lot of organizations want.
Speaker 2 28:50 And I totally get that. You know, like if somebody came to me and says, okay, we're going to need like two designer, you know, two developers, a designer and a data person to go do this thing that might steer the business in a direction that ends up not working for six months. I would be like, let's just spend that on ad-words or let's go know, let's go write a bunch more content or do some SEO. Stuff like that are more sure, longterm proven things. Um, and I think that's where like growth hacking falls down a little bit. And that's, I think that's what he's saying.
Speaker 1 29:23 Right. And another point that he was making along those lines is that when he was at, I don't remember which of the companies he said he was at. I don't know if they actually mentioned which one, but he basically was saying, you're this growth team and then there's the CEO and you do your growth hacks and you put them on the site and the then looks at the site and says, that doesn't match the messaging I want. I don't, you know, it doesn't matter that that's converting. I want this message. And then you become at odds with the CEO because even though you're converting this thing and optimizing the shit out of this page, the CEO then turns around and resents it because it's off brand. It's off message. And so in fact, he basically was saying that he can go to a website and can tell are they doing AB testing or are they doing branding?
Speaker 1 30:12 Because if everything feels a little janky and he goes from page to page and the messaging is different or it kinda tweaks itself depending on what, where he goes or it just feels a little bit off. He knows that they've optimized it for that reason, but if he goes and everything feels a hundred percent consistent, he knows that they're focused on the branding and they're not doing AB testing. And I thought that was really interesting as an observation there. So now I'm going to start looking for that as I go around on various sites as well.
Speaker 2 30:41 Yeah, yeah. You know, I think like the, the, what he talks about like a growth team is talking about conversion rate optimization a lot and he talks about having limited upside and, and that's true. Like I think you hear folks like Rob talk about, you know, when to start worrying about conversion rate optimization. And it's not until you have 100,000 page views a month or you know, a metric like Lars talks about like 20,000 visitors to the, this unique thing that you want to test. But, but like I think if you don't have that much traffic, then just focusing on getting more traffic is what you should do. And he kind of goes a step further to say, even if you have a shit ton of traffic and you're Expedia, you can split test all this stuff but it might only get you so far and then you got to go back to just getting more traffic to the site or whatever it is that that grows the business. And he has like four things that he talks about here that are like the, okay, if you're not gonna focus on conversion rate optimization and being a growth team like this and running all these experiments, then get back to like some of the basics.
Speaker 1 31:42 Oh I love this. I love these. By the way, I think these are awesome because this basically says, Hey, if you don't have a big growth team, here's what you should be doing anyway.
Speaker 2 31:51 Which is what all of us should be doing, right? Cause we're all small teams,
Speaker 1 31:54 right? This is everybody. But the Lars Lofgren is of the world who are optimizing these very large sites.
Speaker 2 32:01 Yup. Yup. And I think he says, you know, use the funnel. Use your funnel as a guide for healthy business. And this is like evaluating the degree of product market fit you have and what your positioning is. Any references, April Dunford, his book on positioning, which is called obviously awesome, which is wonderful. I've read it and he's kind of saying like, take a step back, look at your funnel where you're positioning the business and the product to your customers and make sure that styled in before. Then you go do all the other stuff to, to kind of grow the business to make sure you're like, it's set up for success.
Speaker 1 32:33 Yeah. And the next one that he's got on here, so one of the things that he talks about, and I should reference this first, is that first of all, the confidence level that you have in AB tests, uh, that I think you want a P value of depends on whose article you read. Sometimes you'll see that they want 90 or higher or you want 95 or higher. Lars is saying that probabilities aren't working the way that you think that they are, which anybody in the United States who watched the 2016 election can tell you that. Exactly. Um, but yeah, probabilities are very counterintuitive. And that's just one example of how they can be very counterintuitive. And in this case, Lars, the sane, unless you have a P value of 99, you don't really have confidence. So all of a sudden that's like 95%. It's still a 5% chance that you are losing a major win in there somewhere and that there's a 5% chance that there is something significantly better.
Speaker 1 33:31 And that's hard to really wrap your head around until you stop and think about it for a long time. And so the one of the suggestions that he's making to those of us that just don't have the data and are never going to get to P 99 you're barely gonna get to P 90 if you're lucky by the way, are to just eyeball things that go after some obviously big wins. So you look at your funnel, you find a step that's broken and then you just iterate on that step without doing AB testing. You know, you collect various kinds of data. Maybe it's heat maps, maybe it's direct user tests. Maybe you get five to 10 users doing the onboarding funnel and just figure out what glaring problems they run into and they're going to be pretty obvious if you've got a step that just sucks.
Speaker 1 34:14 And then when you get rid of those points of friction, you're gonna see a major change in your onboarding success rates and certainly your conversion rates at that step in the funnel. And that eyeballing can get you several wins that AB testing is going to take a lot longer. And because you're not getting that confidence, it's not going to be, you're not going to have as much success trying to go the the hardcore data route, I guess is what he's saying. When you're not at that level, just try to eyeball it. And I'm like, Oh well that feels a whole lot less AB testing me.
Speaker 1 34:52 But I think that's cool. And I think when you're the bootstrapper, I think, I think you do need to do that because you are going to have to get that direct feedback and figure it out and you're not going to, you're not going to get a hundred users and say 99 of them say, Oh, this step sucks because you just don't have the luxury of having 99 users that go through this process and are willing to suck at that. You gotta you gotta take some of that uncertainty and just eat it as a founder and try to make the big wind based on intuition, which is very an AB testing like
Speaker 2 35:23 <inaudible> <inaudible>. Yeah, like the one thing he talks about in here is like testing home page headlines as he says, like the, maybe the one big testing conversion rate optimization thing that he still likes doing just because it has such a big impact on trial signups and conversions and things like that. But he doesn't even AB test it. He just says pick a good one. Any references? A book in here called great leads that, um, is in my Amazon cart right now. But he says basically, you know, pick out a couple of headlines and just choose one and let it run for a month and see what's your, you know, whatever that metric is. You know, is that better or worse than what, what you had gone on the previous month. And that's kind of the simple poor man's version of, of split testing is like turn it on, turn it off, change the headline and just see what happens.
Speaker 2 36:08 I mean that's, that's kinda like what we're doing right now with <inaudible> is like we have some things we're trying, we're not like split testing it and all this crazy fancy data East off just like, okay, we're gonna change this thing and see what happens to trials or we're going to change this thing and see what happens to conversions. And like for me it's really nice cause like that's really all it matters, right? Like do we have more money than we had the month before? Yup. Okay. It worked like that. It takes all the other guests and worry about statistical significance and P values and all that shit out and all the things that you can't really attribute. Right, because that's another thing he doesn't talk about, but like you, you think you're testing this one thing but that there might be other like unintended consequences of a test you're running that you can't capture date on, you know?
Speaker 1 36:53 Right. And this is the thing that he says on here is routinely given him 30 plus percent conversion rate lifts on his funnels. So it's like the number one thing that he wants to do and he has also has this other suggestion that I like here. You pretty much have to understand your position. If you don't understand your positioning, then this, this headline experimentation becomes a different operation here. You've got to really sit down with the customers and understand what it is your customer wants from this product and what their real pain point is. But once you get past that and you've got a better idea of how you sit in the market and what problem you solved and why they want you over other things, then he says write three to five really strong but completely different headlines so you shouldn't like, you know, have one headline and then change two words and have that, that'd be the next headline. Like he wants them completely different and that's where you're going to get you're, you know, that's what you're going to know what really resonates with the audience.
Speaker 2 37:46 Yeah, yup. Yup. The last bit he talks about is like a list of conversion best practices. And I think this is kind of like, you know, what a lot of folks do or I do at least like with SEO is like, all right, is my SEO just like generally pretty good, right? I'm not going to go concentrate on this for, for months on end, but like is my SEO pretty good to where I feel like I have this base covered and he has like a list of a handful of things here that he always likes to do. Uh, without going overboard about like what a best practices and all this kind of stuff, but the things that he says like if you're doing these things then you're getting 80, 20 of like conversion rate optimization without spending a ton of time and money and you know, hiring a growth team and stuff like that. I don't they have, I don't think we have to run through each of these in detail but maybe just to mention them. And the first one is headlines like we talked about a, the second one is using a chat bot like Intercom or drift to if you can get conversations up in that leads to more customers.
Speaker 1 38:39 Yeah, I liked that one and I've had that on recapture. I've had people that are asking me about it on the business directory plugin, but I think that the email support that I've got is a better route for it cause they get more serious people instead of a tire kickers. But I'm not really seeing that with recapture. I get more serious people there but it's great. People want that direct access to you. You get a direct way to converse with them, it is awesome early on in the product to be able to have that direct communication. So I personally found it very valuable in recapture. Yep. Yep. For sure. Some others that he's got on here about popups, you know, you hate them, he says that they work beautifully. Uh, I think the jury, it depends very much on what you're trying to do. And I think you can overuse popups for sure, but put something in there, see how it goes, try it out, right?
Speaker 1 39:26 Yeah. Make sure you're, you know, don't avoid the obvious stupid stuff. Like make sure your site speed doesn't suck. Make sure you're on a good web host, optimize your images, take off unused marketing scripts. Anything that slows you down is going to penalize you in Google and that's not going to help you. So just make sure that you've at least gotten rid of the dumb stuff. Right? Uh, and then the, the one thing that he suggests is that if you have positioning, communicate it very clearly and redundantly on both your product and your pricing pages so that everybody is very clear, no matter where they go in your site, what it is you offer, what problem you solve and why they want to install it. And doing that makes a big difference. And then of course, you know, if you're doing any sort of PPC thing here, have a dedicated landing page for each separate campaigns so that you can test it. And those are the big things there.
Speaker 2 40:17 Yep. So yeah, we'll link up to this, uh, article in the show notes on conversion XL. Uh, I think it was a really great article and yeah, nice. Like nice to hear it. Like a little counterintuitive opinion from Lars, which is not like totally unexpected cause he's just like been there so many times that he's seen things than not a lot of other people I've seen. Uh, but also I think gives a lot of us confidence that our, you know, bootstrapping and, and kind of figuring this out. Not at a, you know, massive team or with the the budget of of a Kissmetrics or I will teach you to be rich or something that like Hey he doesn't think all that stuff is that worth it. Instead do these kinds of more basic fundamental things and do them really well and just keep doing them to, to kind of get the, the majority of the benefit out of this kind of uh, you know, marketing and growth is, is really is really nice and gives me like some solace that like we're doing the right stuff. Yup. Yup. Yup.
Speaker 1 41:10 And if you have some suggestions for things that are working that are non AB testing like that have a big win for you, we'd love to hear about them. Send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com or just drop us an email with a suggestion for another topic that you'd love for us to chat about on the show. And as always, our one ask is if you think that we were beneficial to you, share the podcast with someone you think would get something out of it too. Until next week.
Speaker 0 41:42 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>.
