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 00:19 All right, welcome back to another episode of rogue startups. This is episode one 94. Dave, how you doing?
Speaker 2 00:25 I am doing really well here in Chile, Colorado today. We have a snow storm moving in and it's just in time for Halloween just to make things exciting for the kids. Nice. Nice. Yeah, like six inches of snow today. We had five inches the other day. Yeah, it's great for ski season. Those of you that are a big snow, tiny comp listeners get excited. Uh, so far it's looking like a great ski season, you know, four months in advance. Right.
Speaker 1 00:57 Oh, that's cool man. That's cool. Yeah, that seems really early, but uh, that's, that's good. I guess, let me get that bass down. I should stay up on the mountains for a while. I guess.
Speaker 2 01:06 I would hope so. Yes. They're starting to call it October Prairie, which, you know, it's a little, it's a little early for this kind of crap here because, you know, you just, summer just hit and then we got this real hard cold snap and then it's like fall kinda just got truncated and that just sucks, you know, cause yeah. This is the time of the year for raking leaves and carving pumpkin's and cooking Turkey. It's not time for sledding yet. Nice. Nice. It's gonna make January that much harder I think.
Speaker 1 01:40 Yeah, yeah, yeah. We find that, yeah, we find that kind of thing to like fall where we live is really fall and spring seem to be very short. Like it's cold and then it's hot and then it's hot and it's cold. It's like, Oh my goodness. Yeah. We are down in the South of France right now. The kids are on like school holidays for two weeks. And so we're down here for a few days trying to eke out the last bit of fall down here. It's like, you know, five or 10 degrees warmer down here than it is in Annecy. So we're, uh, we're enjoying some like, or like nice sweater weather for another, you know, five days or so here before return. And then we get snow this next week probably at home. So yeah, it's a bit of a drag, but it's cool. Cool. Cool.
Speaker 2 02:19 Speaking of a warm temperatures, you just got back from Microcom for Europe recently, didn't you?
Speaker 1 02:25 I did, yeah. And uh, for anybody who hasn't been to Croatia, it is absolutely stunning. Um,
Speaker 2 02:33 I had this FOMO, I had such FOMO, seen all that stuff going on on Twitter. I was like, Aw man, I wish I was there. They're having the thing at the beach, the beach. I'm like, wait a minute. It's October the beach. Dammit. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 02:47 yeah. Like totally swimming in the ocean. No big deal. We went, um, so it was, it was a long trip. So it was, um, left last Thursday, Friday, Saturday where like a tiny seed founder retreat, um, which is really cool. So we did like the same as we did it before we went to Minneapolis. We did like a half a day of like hot seat sessions with each of the companies. There were seven companies there, um, today to hat, like hot seat sessions, 30 or 45 minutes for each company, um, in the morning, both days. And then the afternoon just did some fun stuff, which was really cool. Um, the first afternoon we did just like continued masterminding and, and you know, talking shop at the pool. Uh, and the second day we went kayaking. OU was really cool. We left, we left from Blackwater Bay for all the game of throne, hers.
Speaker 1 03:39 Um, did anybody, uh, throw in a, what was the, um, dragon fire? No, that's not it. Uh, what is that stuff? The liquid. Oh, right. Uh, Oh gracious. I don't remember. Yeah. Somebody's going gonna send us an email saying you idiots. This is the amateur and game of Thrones fans. Yeah. Thrones. Yeah. Greek fire. All I can think of, it's like Greek fire, but it's not Greek fire. Right, right, right. Yeah. So no, nobody threw that at you. You didn't get attacked by a, the iron fleet. No, no. Thank goodness. Uh, but it's amazing. Like, uh, so and then we went on game of Thrones story, like the next day we had like a day off in between the tiny seat thing and the micro cough. So we went on a game of Thrones tour. And have you ever been to a place where they, uh, like film a movie like outside or in a building or something?
Speaker 1 04:26 Not really. I mean I've kinda driven, so I spend a lot of time in LA for my freelance client and I've driven past some very famous places that are in movies but never like a specific city. That was the whole thing was the set, you know. Yeah, yeah it was. So it was cool. And the interesting thing I found is that like they would be like, okay, this is where the scene of, you know, this part with Searcy cause the stuff in Dubrovnik is all King's landing. Like that's all they filmed that, that pretty much. Right. Um, and like they will be like, this is where this big scene is. And it's like a corner of one room. Like it's just like this one little space. And they filmed this big, huge elaborate scene there. And then they're like, and then on this side of the room is where we filmed this scene.
Speaker 1 05:12 And you're like, no shit. Like a dozen people in all this really crazy stuff happened in the corner of this one room. It's just crazy. Like they have this big huge tower and like fortress that is like the red keep. But like, yeah, they seem, they film like individual scenes and really small pieces of it. That was like, my big takeaway from the whole thing was like, Holy cow. Like it's no wonder like these Hollywood sets are just like a wall sometimes, you know? And they could fill in this whole big huge thing without a lot of like kind of substance to the, to the scene. I don't know. Right. Yeah. It's a, it's amazing what's a filmmakers can do in such a short window of visual effect. Right? Yes, exactly. That's very eloquent way of putting it. Yeah. Well that would, that would be the first time I've said something to eloquent on the podcast, so thank you.
Speaker 1 06:05 Um, yeah. But no, it was a, yeah. So it was all all really good, but gone for like six days. Um, that was a long time to be gone, but it was good. Oh yeah, definitely. No doubt. Yeah. And then Microcom for Europe was really good. I spoke on the second day and was happy with my talk. I think it was like well received and you know, got good feedback from folks. I haven't gotten any bad feedback. So if you have, if you were there and you have bad feedback, I'd love to hear it so I can, you know, improve my craft for next time. Yeah. I heard nothing but good stuff about your talk, so congratulations on that. Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. It was, um, it was an interesting group of, of like presenters. There was a lot of different stuff that I hadn't really heard before, which was cool.
Speaker 1 06:50 So that was neat. Yeah, that was neat. And I felt like the crowd at microcuff Europe this year was a lot more advanced than in other years. This is my third MicroComp Europe. Uh, I felt like a lot of people were like, you know, been there, done that, you know, built a business, exited or whatever is, you know, still running a, you know, a really successful big business, which is maybe a little bit of a change from past years. So. So how many attendees that were there at Microcom for Europe would you say were also past attendees similar to you? Oh, it's tough for me to say just cause like I've skipped a year every year. Like, um, well don't, they don't they have the little badges where it shows, you know, previous attendee, how many times you've come, that kind of stuff. They have like buttons, like stick, like a pin on buttons to your lanyard.
Speaker 1 07:37 Um, I don't think it says that. I noticed as, I don't know that it says like directly on the badge itself. Yeah. Like I definitely knew a lot of people there from previous MicroComp Europe's or from femto cough. So, yeah, definitely like a lot of, you know, familiar faces and people I knew. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay, cool. That was cool. What were some of the other talks that you thought were really impactful or significant? Yeah, so my favorite talk of the whole thing was a, an attendee talk by the folks that built, uh, feedback Panda. So feedback Panda is a, uh, a feedback tool around the, um, like English as a second language for Chinese students, the really specific, right. Uh, and so their whole talk was in the attendee talks are 12 minutes, so it's really condensed content and their talk was all around how they like identify their target audience, built the tool, systematized it documented process sells kind of stuff and then sold it to share Swift capital.
Speaker 1 08:38 And they did all this in like two years and were at like 50 K MRR in two years. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa. And yeah, so it's really, it was really, really, really interesting just like I would love to hear like the long version of it. Um, and so I've stayed in touch with them a little bit since then. I think we'll have them on the podcast, uh, at some point down the road. Cause there's a really interesting story and just like a lot of their growth was around like, you know, the tool obviously was great and like solved a really good problem in their market, but it sounded like the way they grew was like really nailing down the value proposition to the exact right audience and then having them champion the tool to other people. Right. And so like, so what they kind of like talked about is a, so let me like podcasting are definitely e-commerce, right?
Speaker 1 09:27 Like you are competitive against your other people in your space, right? Like so I might not want to tell everyone in the podcasting space what my like secret is to audience growth eCommerce store to might not say, Hey man, I'm using this tool. I'm getting so much more like abandoned cart recovery. Because then like if people go spend dollars and another eCommerce store, it's less money they're spending in years to a certain extent. But they didn't see this in their market. So that's why like the social sharing and the viralocity from within their audience and user base was so strong and they attributed a lot of their success and growth to that. So yeah, that was like by far like the coolest talk just to hear like their story and they're just like super successful, like super successful. Seems like everything went right and I'm sure it didn't.
Speaker 1 10:12 Um, and maybe we could have them on to talk about that side of things. Uh, grass is always greener man. Always green. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But um, super interesting talk and I think most people found that to be like the most entertaining and inspirational talk and that for me. And it was crazy. So, um, we like the tiny seed folks had like about an hour with Steli the night before the event, uh, just to kind of talk to him and she was choosier about a few things, uh, which was super cool. Kinda like one of the perks of being in tiny seat is access to folks like Steli on a regular basis. But then he gave a talk as well. The first talk of the second day and something that he talked about in his talk was the virtual close. And so like I've heard Steli talk a lot, and I've not heard this kind of specific thing, but the virtual close is like when you're on a sales call with somebody and I think it would apply to like partnerships or you know, hooking up an affiliate or something like that is, is like you get to this point in the conversation and like everything has been said right.
Speaker 1 11:14 And you're just like, you're waiting now and then that the line is okay. So based on like everything we said, it's my, uh, like perception that this is a good fit. What would it look like to go from here to like us closing this deal? Um, and it's not necessarily like closing the deal, but kind of setting, they're like mind frame around the process that they would need to go through in order to close the deal. And so I think Steli talks a lot about like enterprise level deals. Like you got to go to procurement, you got to go to legal and we gotta do a beta and we got to do this and that and the other. But his like kind of what he's saying is like if you just leave, like you obviously get nothing and you're not going to close those deals. If you ask these questions, then you might qualify somebody out who's going to have like another six months of like evaluation and sales process, which you as like a bootstrapper just don't have. But also like it sets the framework for what the next step is for you and it, and like they're telling themselves what the next step in them purchasing your solution is. Um,
Speaker 2 12:17 yeah, I've heard when Steli did one of his MicroComp talks, and I don't remember which one it was, he, he mentioned that, but he didn't call it, I think he called it something a little bit different. I'm not sure if he used the words virtual close, but I think it was, you know, you, you gotta make the ask. And that was basically one way of doing the ask. And I think he phrased it a little bit differently. Something like, he said, this sounds kind of used car sales me, what's it going to take to get you into this car today? You know, that kind of a thing. But he put it in a very different way to basically say, look, you know, I think this is a fit. What do you think at this point? What does that look like to get you signed up for this at this point?
Speaker 2 12:56 And then sort of let them road map it out. And then that way you can tell are there objections that you missed? Because at that point that's when they come up, right. And if they don't come up then they can say, okay, well basically, you know, they talk themselves into it and then once they've outlined whatever that process is, you can write that down and then start following up with them saying, Hey, did you get that procurement thing? Did you get that PO? Did you talk to the beta users? Did you blah blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. Instead of just saying, Hey, you know, are we going to do this thing or not? Because you don't know where they're at. Right. Yeah. So it definitely, it provides way more information about how you're going to close somebody out on that. And I've used that a couple of times and that has been very helpful cause it either basically brought up objections that they didn't bring up before or it laid out what obstacles are in the way to getting this whole thing done. And sometimes it's like, Oh well I was talking to the wrong person. Like you know that I needed to go talk to somebody higher up the food chain and then you get to start the process all again. Yup. So yeah that, that's a great line. That's a great line.
Speaker 1 14:00 Yeah man. I think in back to my sales days before, like the process is always pretty similar at the hospitals and the doctors that we sold to before. But each one was a little different. So this was like a big question we asked, which is like, okay, who makes the decision here? You know, cause we like, it's really complicated. Like the doctors are into and ultimately the people that chose to use our thing. But the hospitals were the one buying it in the most cases and then Medicare was the one paying for it, which is totally bizarre. But right of like qualifying and really understanding the process was super important for us before, cause there's the committees we had to go to and all this kind of stuff. So it was kind of baked into like our sales training before and it's like I never even thought about it and like selling in this world.
Speaker 1 14:39 But yeah, if it's not the same every time and for a lot of people you don't have the luxury of like dictating the process. Then understanding like the process to somebody buying is super important. Not just for like how you're going to close the deal, but for qualifying people out or disqualifying people, you know, if the sales process is too long and there's too much shit going on and things that you can't logistically deal with, then like I'm a big fan of just saying, you know, I don't think this is a good fit for us. You know, I think you should go check out these other folks over here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah. And the last one that was really like really interesting and kind of gut wrenching was shy from right message, uh, talking about their like kinda how they decided to build the product and haven't Brennan raised some money and uh, they had like all this prelaunch buzz and they launched and it was great and they did like 20 K in the first like six months or something.
Speaker 1 15:35 And then like churn was 25% or something and per month I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. And just like, like they didn't have product market fit. I mean these are his words and like, cause they started like heavy on the like website personalization train and ultimately like what it came down to for him was for them was the same objections I think Dave, that you and I had or have to using right message across the board. I like as a website personalization tool, this like, you know, what does it do to Google and SEO, like how will this impact like different types of user experiences that I haven't considered all this kind of stuff. And it's like creating a whole new paradigm, right? Like there's not another tool that does website personalization based on like user characteristics or like visitor characteristics from what you know about them from their email habits are answers that are questions they've answered on your website or whatever.
Speaker 1 16:33 And so they've pivoted now into write messages, much more of a opt-in tool and we use it heavily at Castro's. And uh, it's amazing, like it's really amazing the stuff you can do with it. And so they found that like moving from like a, a market that they were defining into a market that already existed and competing against other people is actually easier because like people have mental space in their brain reserved for like opt-in tools, right? Like, okay, there's opt in tools. I can use Sumo or I can use optin monster or I can use right message or I can use the drip widget or whatever, and then you start weighing out like, okay, you know, have the $50 in the budget every month for this. And like, okay, which is the right tool for me and what I'm trying to do and stuff, but as like, okay, we're just going to do website personalization, go right and like that. You have all these hurdles to overcome and messaging and education and sales and all this kind of stuff that when you're defining a market that when you're just trying to get people to convert from tool a to yours, it's maybe a little more difficult, but at least it's kind of like better understood from a customer perspective. Yeah. Carving out an a market niche and Oh well not just the market niche, but the market is just
Speaker 2 17:50 brutal. I, I don't know that I'd ever want to do that. Yeah. And I can totally see why the, the opt in pivot there makes all the sense in the world because now you don't have to sell, what the hell are you doing with this thing? They're like, Oh, it's opt-ins, but we can personalize it. Oh, okay. Yeah, now I get it. And before it was like a website personalization. Well what the hell does that mean? You know what? What does that really, what can that do for me? What am I visitors see? You know, I didn't even consider the SEO implications of that. But yeah, those are, I'm sure that those are very serious implications indeed. Because now Google sees a very different version than your customers do. And if your customers are searching on a particular thing, but they don't see the personalized content, I'm sure Google is like, what the hell? How do I rank this thing? I don't understand this.
Speaker 1 18:38 Yeah. I mean when someone asks that like after shies talk and, and what he said is that Google will see like the anonymous visitors, what right message calls it. Like the person who's never been to your site.
Speaker 2 18:48 Right. So they see the version, Google will see, yeah, they see the most generic content though. The least interesting version of the content. So yeah. But what they do see is that when somebody comes in, then they click on the opt in widget, then they're getting the personalized version. So I'm sure that that drives their engagement rates up. They go through more pages, they see things that are more relevant to them and so they probably have longer page view times and stuff like that. But
Speaker 1 19:11 <inaudible> <inaudible> yeah, and something that like, uh, like something that we look at like with cast us a little bit that I think that Brennan and shy might be looking at is like you can, you can enter the market and a certain place and then expand from there, like the land and expand kind of thing. But, but in a vertical sense, you know, not in a horizontal, like they're not going to start selling to different types of customers, but they're going to sell the optin thing to customers. And then it would probably be easier to then sell the website personalization stuff later on versus like maybe the opposite that they, they were looking at to begin with. Yeah. Yeah. Entirely possible. Yeah. Yeah. That was most of like the big takeaways from Microcom for Europe. For me, it was really good. And, um, I'm super jazzed about micro con from Minneapolis to be able to, uh, catch up with you for like the second or third time ever. I think. Um, I think is it second four years and 200 episodes? I guess that'd be the third time.
Speaker 2 20:10 The third time. I think you're right. Um, yeah, it's amazing that in how many years, four years at this point that we've only seen each other that many times. That's all kind of just kind of hilarious actually.
Speaker 1 20:22 Yeah. Yep. It was really something or it is really something I should say. Um, Oh, you know, I, I should, I, I should take that back. One of the other really interesting things from my <inaudible> for Europe is every year they have like this kind of floating spot that they have, you know, and it's like Patrick Collison at the one that I was at Microsoft I was at in Vegas and I don't remember what the last one I was at, but this year was Mike Taber talking about kind of like, you know, where he is with blue tick and entrepreneurism and all this kind of stuff. And like my hat was off to him for sure, for getting up on stage and asking and answering people's questions and kind of, you know, chatting through what he's up to and how he's feeling and kind of where his head is at and what his plan is and all this kind of stuff. Because I mean Dave, I think you and I are like mildly public people about our businesses through the podcast, but a podcast as popular as startups for the rest of us or anything like where people live in public like that. If everything doesn't go great, then you have a whole shit ton of people who are Monday morning quarterbacking you.
Speaker 2 21:25 Oh my God. Yeah, it's terrible. I, you know, I've following startups for the rest of us for years. One thing that, and I know I should never do this, but I read the comments and you know, on the episodes where Mike was giving audit shark updates and things like that and stuff for blue tick, there was just this cadre of people that would keep hammering him all the damn time. Well, that episode, you know, I'm like, you should kick Mike off the podcast. I mean, just all kinds of terrible stuff and I'm like, dude, you have no idea what kind of struggle this is to go through this. I mean, it is way worse than armchair quarterbacking. Uh, but it's definitely in the same vein there. So, you know, my, my heart goes out to Mike for the struggle that he's had over the years for this and my hat goes off to him for being open and public about that. Uh, I certainly would, you know, I would not be standing up on stage doing that necessarily. I don't know that I've got the hutzpah to do that.
Speaker 1 22:22 Yeah, no, I, I definitely don't. I mean, I think, you know, something that I think we try to do is to be as honest as possible. But I mean, Dave, there's plenty of bad stuff that's happened in my business and I'm sure there's plenty of beds. Some of it's happening in your business that we don't talk about on this show thinking thing. Cause I don't want like, I don't want to talk about it. Yeah. And like Rob and I have dug into some of the bad stuff that's gone on with Casto and this tiny seed tales thing we're doing. And that's not comfortable or cool, but, but it is interesting and like it's, it's important for people to hear some of that stuff, but, but it's hard, you know, and like I think neither you or I choose to talk about that stuff and that's why he doesn't come out here.
Speaker 1 23:00 And Rob kinda made me talk about it. Yeah. But I mean for, yeah, for Mike to get up on stage and you know, everyone, the cool thing is everyone that comes to a conference, like MicroComp is not a hater and they all, you know, love and respect Mike and want him to do well. Uh, and I know, I think Mike listens to the podcast and so Mike, we, we love you and we hope everything goes as well as possible for you and we wish you like the best of success. Um, and I think for all of us, like in the community, if there's anything that any of us can do to help, uh, each other, you know, I placed everybody, um, that, that we definitely should hear here. And so it was a really, it was a really cool, um, example kind of of that and kind of this community that we're in.
Speaker 2 23:41 Yeah. Yeah. No, that was, that was super cool. I saw that a Rob, uh, tweeted out something about that. I don't remember if it's the first or second day, but yeah, I was like, Oh, wow. I bet that was an intense session for my ex, so, yeah. Yeah. He might've taken like a dozen Prozac right before then. I don't know cause he was pretty cool on stage a dozen whiskies afterwards. I dunno. Yeah actually, yeah, maybe both. I have no idea. All right. Jeez. How about a, a couple updates that we haven't talked, we haven't talked in a couple of weeks. How are things, we are like on the cusp of locking everything down for black Friday, cyber Monday. And we've been like hammering through a bunch of updates that needed to happen. So there's a few minor customer requests but there's been like some performance things and stability things and they have largely wrapped up as of this week and we've got things deployed out there including a new feature for unique coupon codes.
Speaker 2 24:39 That was a customer ask. And so now I've got a uh, push out an update saying, Hey, this stuff is available now. But yeah, I mean it's basically lock and load and, and hunker down now because you know, my, my thing is after the first week of November, we're not doing any major deployments or changes into the infrastructure unless there's like a critical, desperate bug. Because this thing's just got to run. And you know, we've done as much testing as we can, but there is definitely distinct nervousness on my part at this point because you know, people, I was doing some, uh, analysis of our stats and I think we're, we're running somewhere between a million to a million and a half a week through recapture or I'm sorry not running it. We are recovering. We are recovering a million to a million and a half a week for all our customers at this point. That's wow, that's pretty big. And you know, that's not a number that you, after a while, like you realize you're a critical piece of people's infrastructure. And so this stuff gets really serious. Like if I sit down and think about it too much, it kind of freaks me out a little bit.
Speaker 2 25:54 But that, I mean, that's, that's where we are and I'm, I'm pretty happy about that. So I'm trying to get some other stats so I can find out like how much total volume was processed through recapture and how much did we recover, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, that's all pretty exciting. And then I'm, I'm doing onboarding, mapping. I know I've talked about this before, but I just sat down and started doing the, the paper writeup of what do I need to do to sort of optimize the onboarding experience going all the way from like showing up on the site to getting them to do a trial to, you know, at the very end they're successful. We're doing reviews, followups for why did you not install, why did you shut off the trial, all that kind of stuff. And there are so many fucking edge on this.
Speaker 2 26:44 Um, and, and because I've been doing it manually, like I know which cases are important, but there's still so God damn many of them. And to do this with all triggered properties and stuff in drip is still a ton of work. But I'm very glad that I still have the ability to do that because following, I'm, I'm definitely at a point where following up manually is not working for me anymore and I know exactly what I need to say now. Like I've done it enough times that it's like, Oh, I follow up with this next email here. Okay, great. So a lot of the times it's me digging that up, pasting it in and sending it, which means it's no longer interesting and I'm not really learning anything anymore. I just need to automate it. But automating this beast is going to be a big deal.
Speaker 2 27:26 And honestly, it's so big. I don't think I'm going to get it done before January at this point. Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's very big, partly because of the time that I can put into it, but it's still just a sizeable automation. Like there's a, I'm looking at the paper right here in the, uh, you know, I have at least 13 different cases where I need to have automated sequences of emails that are going out, three emails each. <inaudible> um, and I don't have all those emails written. Like I know what goes into the content of some of them, but I'm trying to personalize it. And in some cases the email might be, Hey, you recovered something. That's great. Why didn't you sign up? And, Oh, I'm sorry you didn't recover anything. Would you like to continue the free trial? Do you want some help with the emails?
Speaker 2 28:11 Or Hey, you didn't recover anything but you didn't have your damn email campaigns on what the hell happened? Like I have to break it down like that because that's what, that's what I'm doing manually right now is deciding, Oh, what do they do in the account? Oh, then I need to tailor the email this way. So there's lots of ways that you can do that, but all of them involve some level of personalization in the email to say, Hey, you did this with your store X. And then figuring that out from there. So that's wrapping my brain around that. A is definitely my next task here. And then we've got some more integrations on deck. I've been talking to some folks over at big commerce and uh, then we have another exciting thing that I'm not going to talk about yet, but all right, uh, I'm looking to launch that one in January and I believe it is an untapped market for abandoned cart recovery.
Speaker 2 29:03 Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. So more coming ocean blue ocean. Yeah. And it wasn't something that I really thought about. It was a discussion I was having with somebody else and he suggested it and I'm like, huh, that's really interesting. And then the more we discussed it, it became very clear nobody else was doing this and there was a significant number of people that could benefit from it. And there is no competition in this space. I'm like, Holy shit. Wow. Why? You know, I mean, I don't know, maybe it could be a total bust, right? But I have an inside track on how to market to 12,000 customers and all paying customers on another platform. So I know that they are, you know, willing to do something and if they have sites that are making some money, this is an obvious and easy way to boost that. So yeah, it could be lucrative. It could be a total blast, I don't know. But it was exciting to find that. And so now I just have to bring that to fruition. Right on. Right on.
Speaker 1 30:05 For the sake of the onboarding emails. We just did a massive overhaul of kind of our nurture campaigns for casitas and, and that there's a lot of personalization using right message and there's a lot of different, uh, like customer personas that we're nurturing. Um, and so the, the advice that we got from Brennan Dunn on this is to use like if you're using drip or whatever kind of tool you're using, have like a container, a workflow or like tool to decide kind of where people go and then have like a spin off workflows or campaigns or whatever you have, uh, that then are kind of the ones to implement some more of the, of the logic. But like that way you can have like the really high level and its own container workflow. Uh, and then like the actual implementation of it is one level down. Just to abstract away some of the confusion of like all these decisions you have to make.
Speaker 2 31:04 I want to make sure I'm clear on what you mean by container. Are you talking about like where they are in the funnel? So are they a prospect, are they in a trial, are they a paying customers that sort of the container idea or is it something else?
Speaker 1 31:19 Uh, so for us it's more like customer personas. So like are they podcasting yet or are they like ready to start a podcast but need a little bit of help or like do they want to start a podcast someday? Ah, gotcha. Okay. All right. And then like once we decide that, then they go into their own workflow. Each of them have their own workflows and within there there's a whole shit ton of stuff that happens. But at least that way then we separate out a third of the confusion and do their own workflows. So for you it might be a, are they a lead? This is like the lead workflow. Are they a customer? This is the customer workflow, uh, or like they in a trial and this is the trial workflow. And then you can hop people between workflows based on events that happen and stuff and goals.
Speaker 1 31:59 But that we found helpful just to be able to get your head around one of them at a time. And the other thing is we have like a kind of alerts or like we have tags that fire when things happen that are kind of outside of what the workflows handle really well and we do reach out individually for some of those people. And I think it's just a situation of like if some crazy shit happens and we don't feel like the workflow or the campaign or whatever it is, handles this really well. If it doesn't happen that often, then it probably is worth you going in and saying like, Hey, this I value customer and they're doing this thing that like I can't really automate. Maybe if you can just get like the 80 20 of that into your inbox or to do list, uh, to, to do manually, but, but not everybody, you know.
Speaker 2 32:46 Right. But I mean, just, just identifying those high value customers right now would be hugely valuable because I am going through and having to send a whole sequence of emails to people that are sort of moderate value. And they can either be moderate value with no recovery of moderate value with low recovery or moderate value with, you know, they hit that top of the free tier meeting, meaning that they probably got high recovery potential. Yup. And for each of those it's very different. So you know, I would love to be able to say, look, if I've got somebody who's got a high recovery potential, I want to handle this by hand. So it sounds like, you know, just putting something in drip where it triggers a zap that says send me a personal email, Hey here's a high value customer, here's their data.
Speaker 1 33:33 <inaudible> that's exactly what we do. Yeah. We just send a one off email from the workflow if this thing happens. Send Craig an email.
Speaker 2 33:38 Yeah. Yup. Okay. Yeah that, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, yup. Okay. And then it's not like so much, but they're the best ones for you to get involved in. Right. That's the one that I want to spend the most time trying to prospect. Cause you know, if I get one of these high value customers in here within two months, I can hit their expansion revenue and take them straight to the top tier. If they're really good, which I've done multiple times. All my expansion is coming from my best customers, so. Yup. Yeah. It's not like huge numbers of new customers. It's when I get the right customer in there, they expand and it's like, wow, bam, that just happened. You know, obviously you want good new customers and you want regular new customers too. But when you get those really good customers and they hit that expansion, it's just like, that's fucking gold. That's awesome man. Yeah. Nice. Well, how about, how about you? What are you working on?
Speaker 1 34:27 Uh, yes. So this like re revamping this nurture stuff has been really interesting. Um, yeah. I mean not, not to get too into it. Uh, like we just, yeah, we kind of see the, like there's a bunch of different types of people that come into our world and the want to start a podcast or want to start, you know, working with us. And so trying to identify better as kind of who those people are and where they're coming from and what their goals are and talking to them in the right way. Uh, and it, we're doing a lot of this with the right message is really cool and like really effective. So that's cool. And so now some really kind of complicated involved stuff, uh, with like liquid templating in the emails and stuff is all live and so we're just starting to see this pay off.
Speaker 1 35:05 Um, but like Denise from our group has been working on this for like the last month pretty, pretty solidly. Like she's getting like carpal tunnel or RSI from writing so much I think. Um, or Denise. Yeah. But it's cool to see it like paying off. Um, and that's really cool. I think the updates so far is the jury is still out on our free trial stuff. So I know the jury is not out in terms of number of trials. It's definitely obviously like a huge win. And our number of new trials is, is up in about the same area that we wanted it to be, which is cool. Our trial to conversion ratio is not quite what we want it to be yet, but I think we knew that and we had been taking this whole month of October to do some like onboarding and UX stuff and the app.
Speaker 1 35:54 And so like it's taken a lot longer than than it could have otherwise because we're at this interesting point where up until like two months ago we had zero unit tests in our app. And so a changing things like how the RSS feed works and how, you know, episodes are created and stuff, uh, is really hairy if you don't have unit tests. And so this whole thing is process unit tests. Yeah. And so this whole process now is taking like twice as long as, as it would have otherwise because we have to go back and write the unit tests for how things work now and then change it and then make the unit test work for how it's changed to, you know, and so like there's just been a lot of really important engineering work that nobody will see right for the next like couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 36:43 But like, no, like the first week or so in November we'll roll some of this stuff out and I know that it will help our, our onboarding and our child to conversion ratio, trial to paid conversion ratio, which will make like our no credit card required stuff really start working. It's working okay now, but I think it will, it will make our growth, you know, better than it was before at that point. So growth has been, you know, pretty flat or you know, not growing as much as we were before, I should say, because our trial to paid conversion ratio has been sucking a little. But, um, I'm confident that these changes we're making will, we'll kind of make up for that. Nice. Nice, very exciting. Yeah. Yeah. And I also have some super exciting secret stuff that I can't talk about that came out of our tiny seed retreat, um, but should be able to talk about another couple of weeks. Cool. Cool. Yup. Yup. Cool. Well, I think that wraps us up for today. If you have any questions, shoot us a message@podcastatroguestartups.com or leave a comment and the post for this episode. And as always, if you've enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. And we'll see you next time.
Speaker 0 37:50 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>.
