Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:21 All right, welcome to episode one 95. Craig, how are you this week?
Speaker 2 00:27 I am good man. Uh, it is solidly into fall here and we're, uh, yeah, digging, digging the change of season. It's, it's been like a bit of a, uh, I dunno, shock coming back from Croatia a couple weeks ago back into the grind. But you know, I think for the first time in a long time, I am completely caught up. Uh, we got to inbox zero on support just today, uh, which basically never happens for us. Um, so yeah, like for the first time I told my wife last night, like, I didn't feel guilty for not working into the evening yesterday for the first time maybe ever. Uh, so it's been really peaceful lately. Yeah.
Speaker 1 01:07 Wow, that's impressive. Now of course, inbox zero was gonna. You know, I kind of liked the idea of inbox zero, but for me it's sorta like, well fuck it just, it's gonna get ruined in three hours anyway. So, you know, busting your nut to try to get that all the time I think is like this Sisyphean task. For me it's about triaging and prioritizing and just trying to, you know, put out the major fires and then if shit has to get delayed a day, I let it get it delayed today. I mean, if you saw my inbox right now, it would be embarrassing. I have zero unread emails of importance, but like I have 163 that are marked unread at this point. And you know, a lot of it's just crazy stuff. So, um, you know, things that I haven't replied to yet or things that I need to get back to somebody on, but it's not super urgent and I, you know, I might have to wait a week or something like that. So, but yeah, with support, inbox zero is kind of important. So I see where you're at. Yeah.
Speaker 2 02:09 Yeah. We, we try, I mean we haven't been at zero in a very long time. We just, you know, we get 30 to 50 support requests a day, you know, between the plugin and the hosting. Um, and it's just impossible. We get it down to, you know, 10 a lot. Um, but, but getting it down to zero is tough, but uh, but it's also kind of like a vanity metric, right? Cause it's a zero, but that means that like some things have been assigned to people where they could have been taken care of directly and like we probably just did like, uh, some replies to people instead of really taking care of their stuff. So I agree. I think getting to inbox zero, um, with the wrong intentions or goals is worse than it just having things that are standing there and then you can take the time to actually solve in once fell swoop. So yeah, but it's still feels good.
Speaker 1 02:59 I'm not taking that away from you, man. I want you to feel good about your inbox. I feel good about myself. Thanks Dave. Anytime, anytime. How about you? Everything's well, you know, there, it's always a mixed bag, right? There's something, something going on that's trying to kick you in the balls. Uh, this last week I just found out that my recapture developer is going to be going off and doing his own project full time at the end of January, 2020. Wow. So this is very bittersweet news. On the one hand, I'm like, you go Mike, that is fucking awesome. And the fact that you are ready to get to that point and launch and go full time is just amazing. On the other hand, I'm like, ah, fuck. The best God damn developer I've had in a long time is now leaving me and I got to find somebody new, which always sucks because there's always that, you know, the uncertainty of, am I interviewing the right candidates?
Speaker 1 03:54 Once you've picked a candidate, are they going to, you know, are they gonna grow into the role? Are they ready to go into this role? You know, last time I was in kind of this place of desperation and I ended up connecting with Mike and founder cafe and he worked out great. Uh, you know, just absolutely everything about him was great, but he's also a founder himself. So, you know, he's very good at taking ownership and following up and communicating and just all of the awesome stuff that you want. So now I feel like my next developer has some big shoes to fill, but yes, this has turned into a major priority because, you know, I've got a three month window. I want to make sure that I don't squander that, you know, between now and then. Yeah. So, you know, it's just another fucking thing on my plate.
Speaker 1 04:40 What are you looking for someone part time, full time. What's the, what's the plan there? Well, so this is going to be somebody that would end up being part time. Uh, Mike's role in this has been, it's a mixture of support, like answering support, questions of technical things that I can't get into, like about the data and the configuration of certain user's accounts and why weird things happen. And then there's also like production support when shit goes down, which thankfully doesn't happen that often. And we have a very stable infrastructure, but it still happens occasionally. Like we've been having this random thing where various users on Shopify are getting attacked and we know it's coming from Shopify because we see like their abandoned carts for the last 24 hours or $27 billion. And I'm not exaggerating that number at all. It's a, you know, it's carts in the hundreds of millions to billions.
Speaker 1 05:38 It's so incredibly off scale of what these stores normally do, where they're making like, you know, anywhere from 2000 to 20,000 a month and suddenly they have 20 million in abandoned carts. You're like, wait a minute, that's not right. I mean it's not even like they're running a flash sale and it's happening across multiple merchants. So it's not even like one merchant got attacked and we were, I was certainly panicked for a while thinking, you know, there's some shit going on with her capture and we have a security leak. But no, it's none of that at all. We've eliminated all of those things and it's coming directly from Shopify. So, I don't know how these stores are getting attacked, but the fact that you know, all stores on Shopify, I have a my shopify.com extension. They have a, you know, it's just like WP engine where you have the name of your server dot WP engine.com yup.
Speaker 1 06:27 As the temporary domain and then you can redirect to your own domain. It's the same thing with Shopify. So my guess is that people are discovering these domains and then they attack them by trying to like throw tons of card at him. So it's sorta like a half ass denial of service attack on Shopify. But then all of this cart data comes through recapture. And you know, we've had three incidents I think in the last four months where it's been like one user, they'll attack and it be like 3,800 carts in an hours time for one user, which is just that like it's enough volume that, you know, it makes recapture like struggle because that's just not normal. And that's far beyond what any even high volume site does. So, you know, at first we were like, okay, do we want to try to handle this volume?
Speaker 1 07:18 And then we added things to make it more stable and we added more capacity to handle these glitches. But the reality is, you know, I just, I want to filter out this fucking traffic altogether. So, you know, we've got stuff like that. So the new developer that I would be hiring has to be able to diagnose that kind of stuff and come back and say, all right, this is what it is. Here's what I think the solution should be. That kind of stuff. So, um, and then on top of all that, we're doing feature development. So, you know, we're talking probably about like 60 hours a month or something like that. You know, for somebody who's like senior and skilled and is working on something else, this is going to be a great fit. I was, you know, talking with Mike about this and saying, Hey, what would a junior person work? And Mike was like, uh, Dave, what are you thinking here?
Speaker 1 08:08 I'm thinking with my checkbook, unfortunately. And, and he's like, yeah, you know, node has all of this asynchronous stuff in it and if they get it wrong, it's going to bring the platform down. They need to be able to do bug production stuff fast. And so like that's sort of reframed my thinking on this a little bit, but finding somebody that's kind of in that right spot, cause I don't have enough work to give them 160 hours worth of work in a month. I, you know, even if we did all of the things that I wanted to do and all of my wishlist, you know, we'd probably be done in two months and I, you know, I don't have enough money to pay them for full time work like that. So having somebody that's more around on a part time basis is definitely a better fit. So I have no, if I'm going to be able to find somebody like this, uh, Mike was a bit of a unicorn in that regard cause he was just trying to dovetail me with his own stuff, plus another client and it worked out great. So, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 09:11 Well, I, I mean that's, that's the hardest thing, right, I think is, is building a team, um, and finding good quality people that are affordable and like that, that they're kind of life situation fits in with what you need and you can offer, um, like all those things are, are the, the balance that we have to play. I think, you know, I think about this like a lot with looking at companies that are like really venture backed. Um, they definitely have an advantage here because they can just go hire $100 an hour developer, um, and like a hundred dollars an hour developers are better than $30 an hour developers, you know, like they make better shit. And so like, I think, you know, us as bootstrappers are like this, you know, all along from just starting out when you don't have any money to like, you're making 10 grand a month to your, you know, doing better than that up until, you know, whatever. Um, I think you're always like resource strapped and have to make some of these concessions, you know, have to take the developer that's not quite as good and maybe a little more junior or you can't give them full time hours or you know, they're in a part of the world where you can only be, you know, online the same time for three hours a day or something. Like all those concessions come into play with kind of the businesses that we're building. I think
Speaker 1 10:28 so many trade-offs. Yeah, I mean I think that's the, that's the best way to put it. You are just constantly constrained and so you as a, if you're a technical founder, that's what puts you at a massive advantage right there. Because you can actually do all of this expensive development, which is very, very hard to pay for if you're a non technical founder. Uh, it's certainly to pay for quality development. So that gets you a long way. But then if you're like in my situation where I am a technical founder but I don't have the time and the bandwidth to put it into this the way that I need somebody else to be doing, but I don't need like 100% of their bandwidth, I need a little bit of their bandwidth, then you know you have to trade off and say, you know, am I going to get a junior guy that's going to be working more?
Speaker 1 11:10 And I ended up paying him the same amount or her the same amount that I would a senior person where that person is doing it in less time. But it's costing me more and you have to decide, you know, am I going to be able to afford that longterm, short term. I mean, you know, Mike and I have been going back and forth and playing these games of, all right, well yeah I can, I can afford you for this much for this month. Are you okay with that? You know, and, and he was so that was great. You know, we could go back and forth cause in the earlier days of recapture when I was making, you know, a third of what I'm making now, it was very much a, you know, I don't know if I have enough money to pay you for that longterm. And I, you know, I don't want to screw you and I want you to, you know, if you have longer term, more stable work, I want you to rely on that.
Speaker 1 11:58 But if you're willing to, if you're okay with where we're at, you know, it was this constant back and forth of saying, all right, well this is what I can do. And you know, he's like, well this is what I can accept. And then we would go and do the trade offs and, and try to figure out what worked. And so we were able to make progress on the platform but never as much as I wanted. And I always knew that was because of me that, you know, and to a certain degree, like if I had been less resource constrained, I would have eventually hit a boundary with him. He would have said, Oh, well, I need a certain amount to do on my own projects and to work for this other client so I can only work this much for you. And when the times that I actually had more money, we ran into that. So it's like, there's always constraints. You get somebody who's really good, but they're in demand. You're not going to get 100% of their time unless you're extremely, extremely lucky.
Speaker 2 12:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yup. Yeah. You know, I, I think like, so we've hired a marketing person now too, right? Like Denise, um, and I, you know, I think, uh, being a nontechnical founder and of how having hired both sides, um, hiring a marketing person I find is harder. Um, because it's a lot of the soft, non tangible things that you have to evaluate. Like with a developer, you can give them a test project and say like, they did good or they didn't. That's, I think that's harder for, to test a marketing person like that. Um, but, but I think overall like apples to apples, a marketing person is cheaper than a really good developer. Um, so I think technical founder has an advantage there. Once they have a few grand, they can hire a marketing person. Um, whereas to replace them as like a senior developer would be a lot more money.
Speaker 1 13:40 Right. Well, I mean it depends. Again, it's all about trade-offs, right? So if you're willing to say, look, I'm going to look in the Ukraine, I'm going to look in Asia, I'm going to look in the Philippines and I'm going to or South America and I'm going to find a developer at a lower rate. But they're still pretty good. I think you can get that. But again, it's a trade off, right? Cause then, you know, there might be a language barrier in there. There might be a time difference, there might be an experience issue. You know, there's definitely not a visibility issue anymore where, or there is a, I should say there is a Villa visibility issue where you no longer are sitting there seeing everything live. You've got to see it as it comes in and then check it yourself if you're the technical founder. So that takes away from your bandwidth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, again, it's just trade-offs, man. It's trade offs. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2 14:25 yeah, yeah. I think the one, the one thing I would say like if anybody's considering all this like hiring stuff is a senior developer. If you're on a hire, one person, like a senior developer is a really good person to have on the team. Like a senior developer like Mike in your case and Jonathan and our team, they can make all these like architecture kind of longterm decisions that you'll have to live with for a long time. They make like a senior developer makes good decisions like that. And I think that's, to me what separates a senior and a junior developer, their code should be similar. Um, but the, the decisions that a senior developer makes about how they approach things is what sets them apart and is, is a huge asset
Speaker 1 15:07 for better longterm thinking. Absolutely. Yeah. And especially, you know, with, with the recaptured codebase, the one, one of the things that I really liked about when I bought it is that the guy who built it was also a very senior developer. He really architected it with a lot of longterm thinking in mind, scalability, separation of concerns, all the stuff that developers love to do. And he did a really good job at it and he documented the hell out of it. And there was a lot of comments in there. I mean this was like the ideal code for the ideal code people. And so given that that was the case, I was, you know, very, very concerned bringing on a new developer, are they going to maintain it at that level of standard? And Mike has done an better than outstanding job in continuing that. So now you know, I'm already at that level of standard and I want to continue making sure that this code base is clean as hell and that it is very concise and clear and it maintains these separations and it still can scale the same way.
Speaker 1 16:11 You know, there's definitely a lot of things where you know, you think about expensive processing. So like we were going back and forth about like what questions to ask a node JS developer. And Mike was like, one of the most important things you're going to want is to be able to say, does this person know how to process expensive operations? Because you have to figure out a way to do it without, you know, bringing the entire infrastructure down without locking one server up without locking the user interface up. And you know, if you're sitting there as a senior developer, you're like, dud Dave. This is also obvious, but the truth is most developers don't think about these things upfront unless they're a solid longterm thinking senior developer. Yeah. And that is, you know, that's been my experience as a freelancer, as a technical manager, uh, and as a, um, as a bootstrapper. So you, you, you find somebody who thinks like that, it's rare. It's rare than we would like it to be, but that's the kind of thinking that you need in order to really move your platform forward and keep your technical debt at the lowest and so on and so forth. So yeah, if you're listening to this mic, I'm going to miss you man.
Speaker 2 17:23 Well, and also, I mean if you're listening to this and you are a senior JavaScript developer, shoot us message right podcast or rogue startups.com. Let Dave know that you're a interested and available and it would be awesome if we could, uh, if we could find you somebody from the podcast man, that'd be cool.
Speaker 1 17:38 I would love that. If the, if there is somebody out there we're looking, you know, my two biggest things right now are you have to be an expert in no JS and you've got to have really strong JavaScript. There's a bunch of other stuff that we use like Mongo and Reddis and Stripe and AWS and you don't have to be an expert in all of that stuff. We can teach you that. We can bring you up to speed. We got a lot of documentation, there's a lot of comments. But like node and JS are nonnegotiable. Like you gotta be able to do that. And furthermore, you've got to communicate really well, like over communicate screenshots and frequent emails and being responsive. And all that sort of stuff. Yeah. If you can do those things like you are super successful and I would be very interested in talking to you. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 18:23 Awesome. So I had a interesting, uh, kind of like Twitter discussion. I don't need Dave, I don't do Twitter that much these days. Um, but I had an interesting Twitter discussion with James Kennedy, a former guest on the podcast, uh, that runs procurement express. Um, after like something from my Microsoft Europe talk, talking about like traffic and attribution and kind of like where to focus your energies based on kind of like what some of your metrics look like. I thought we could kind of pick that discussion up and talk about kind of what we're both seeing and, and kind of how we're thinking about that.
Speaker 1 18:56 Yeah, yeah, sure. So did James rebrand or something?
Speaker 2 18:59 I don't think so. No.
Speaker 1 19:02 Well, okay. So there's something else cause he's done rubber stamp and um, the procurement thing sounds new to me. Is that a new project?
Speaker 2 19:12 I know I did. This is the one that he was talking about when he was on the podcast. I dunno, a year ago,
Speaker 1 19:20 I can't remember what I had for breakfast. So,
Speaker 2 19:25 um, yeah. So, so, you know, part of my, like MicroComp talk was about, um, kind of like knowing your SAS metrics and how that tells you kind of where to focus your energy to, to help you grow kind of the most efficiently, right? Like if you already have a good trial to paid conversion ratio, focusing on improving that isn't going to really move the needle that much. But if you have a really, really shitty like visitor to trial ratio, um, and working on improving that will end up like resulting in the biggest improvement in your growth overall. Um, and I gave some like, uh, some numbers around like that, like some rules of thumb and we've talked about like some of these SAS metrics, rules of thumb on the podcast before. Um, but something that this really like brought up and that James is I think doing a really good job of is like segmenting and attributing a lot of your traffic.
Speaker 2 20:14 Um, and, and this is something that Denise has brought into our marketing efforts a lot. And like, we do this a lot better than we did when it was just me. Cause I don't, I didn't understand any of this stuff. And like I didn't like this is the detailed stuff that I just really suck at. Um, but the idea really is that like all of your metrics really don't mean anything in whole. Uh, you should look at them as granularly as possible. Um, and so like something like visitor to trial ratio, uh, from an organic visitor should be different than if you're running like paid ads and you're bringing in, like in James' case from Capterra, um, and we're running some paid acquisition now we definitely look at like, okay, what's our visitor to trial ratio overall, uh, and then what is our visitor child ratio and each of these different channels, uh, that, that people come in.
Speaker 2 21:06 And, and so we're using, uh, UTM parameters to track a lot of this. Uh, and so the links we have coming from paid acquisition or in our case like coming from the WordPress plugin, uh, into Costos, uh, lets us know like in Google analytics, okay, this person came from this place. Um, and then we can kind of follow that through and say of the people that started a trial, how many came from this source or from this paid acquisition channel or whatever. Um, and so that, that gives us more information. But the shit of it is that only gets you to like the, the first touch point, um, in your funnel. Like, so UTM parameters only go to like where somebody comes into the funnel, like in, in our case, like start the trial and we, we have a hard time attributing it all the way down to like who ends up being a paying customer.
Speaker 2 21:54 And then like even more like how long they stay and what their lifetime value in churn and all that stuff is. So I think we've figured out as much as we can, a bit of like a true attribution, um, in the really like top of funnel, like just visitors to the site and how they're starting to trial. We haven't figured out like bringing it through there to when they start an account and if they start paying and then how long they stay around. So it's something that we're kind of struggling with. Do you have decent like attribution Dave, like from Shopify and stuff? Are you able to use things like UTM parameters to, to get an idea of where people are coming from?
Speaker 1 22:30 Uh, well that's a whole different matter. But let me ask you a question on yours first and then I'll get back to that. So it sounds like what you're trying to do is you're trying to segment all the way through the funnel because right now you can add, you can attribute somebody where they come into the top of the funnel, but then after that they all get kind of mushed together and then by the time they get down to a paying customer, you don't know, was that paying customer organic? Was it from a paid acquisition? Was it something this or that? Is that, is that where I'm getting with this?
Speaker 2 22:55 Yeah. So I probably wasn't very clear that we know on a cohort basis, like this person, these people came from WordPress, these people came from Facebook. Um, but we don't know like on a particular customer basis. And that's where we really like, like, cause cause we're just working in cohorts, you know, to say like these people convert at this rate, uh, people from here convert to a trial or to a paying customer at this rate. But then like the, so what after that is like, do they stay? Um, and that's, that's where we're coming up short and I don't, I don't see any good solutions out there for it, so,
Speaker 1 23:31 right, right. Yeah, our attribution, um, the attribution that we get from Shopify kind of sucks. So this has a lot to do with the way that they've constructed the funnel. And I will say over WordPress, Shopify is like an order of magnitude better because with WordPress, I've got no fucking idea whatsoever. I, all I see are installs. So by the time, well, I don't even really technically see that, uh, only when they've activated a premium module, do I have any direct idea like who this customer directly is? And we give away a module in order to facilitate that. So everybody that goes to our email campaign and downloads this module and installs it, which we encourage a lot of people to do and we've got a very sizable list as a result of this. Uh, we get some ideas from that, but I still don't know like where they come from exactly.
Speaker 1 24:23 Because they, they can go and do everything on the wordpress.org site and never hit business directory, plugin.com and still be a customer. And in fact that is a heavy majority of them and an only when they go to the docs do I first see them. So it's, it's very weird. Attribution in WordPress just sucks. It's weird. Uh, but let's, let's talk about Shopify cause that's slightly better. So with Shopify, you, you are a page in an app store, just like WordPress, but Shopify allows you to drop in your Google analytics code, not the JavaScript but the actual number. So you put in your number there and it hooks you up to an account. And so then you can see stuff that comes through it. But I can't do custom venting. I can't do specific attribution based on when they click buttons. All I can see is traffic to that page.
Speaker 1 25:20 So I can see who comes in there. But it doesn't really talk about conversions, which is kind of weird. Like I can't set up events on that page because I can't put the event on the page. And Shopify doesn't set that up for you, which is kind of bizarre. You would think that this would be pretty obvious to do. Right? But they don't. Um, yeah. So anyway, but you, you can kind of fudge this so you get better data from this overall than you would from WordPress. So I know how many people can come to the page on a given time and then I can also find out how many people signed up for a trial during that same time from my own stats. And I can say, look, all the ones from Shopify are pretty much coming from that app store page. So my confidence in that data right there is pretty high.
Speaker 1 26:06 I don't see a lot of other Shopify signups from organic traffic or other sources so much. So I'm probably like hitting 95% of them that way. Okay. So I can actually find out total visitors total trials and I can get my visitor to trial ratio that way. And then from the trials I can see who ends up converting. So I can get a trial to paid conversion that way. But this is all manual at this point. Like I don't, I don't have a way to really figure that out without sitting down and crunching the numbers for a particular cohort. Yeah, yeah. I'll, uh, so there is, and again, I, you forget what
Speaker 2 26:43 you had for breakfast this morning. I forget if I talked about this on a previous episode. So there's this add on for Google sheets, which lets you pull a Google analytics data into Google sheets automatically. Um, and so we built like a bit of a, like a really top of funnel like reporting system with us. And so you say like, I want to pull, you know, total website visitors, web visitors to different beige, like the pricing, the features pages and stuff like that. And then like for us, how many people started a trial and then how many people became paying customers, um, over like on a daily. And then we aggregate into weeks and months. Um, and so you can pull all this stuff from Google analytics into a Google sheet and you can automate it to run every day or every week or whatever. Um,
Speaker 1 27:26 Oh, yeah. And that's nice. There's somebody that did that with like Shopify search statistics and I use that periodically, but I still have to, I have to manually go in and run it and say from this date to this date, but you can do it for any day. So I go in there about every three months and I update my sheets so I can see search patterns and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 27:43 Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, getting back to James, um, like the, the, the thing with all this I think is like, it gives you a general idea of like it, you know, for us like his visitor to trial ratio decent. Yup. It's decent. His trial to paid ratio decent. Yep. Okay. Is churn decent? Yep. Okay. Then you just need more people at the top of the funnel. Right. And then, and then you kind of like work backwards to say like if all that stuff down the funnel stays the same, you can figure out if I want to grow at a thousand or $5,000 a month or whatever it is, or $100 a month, if you know all those metrics kind of further down the funnel, you just need to figure out how many more people you need to get to, you know, in the top. Um, and then you can even, you can even separate it out, like Denise and I have done recently of like, okay, we can figure will increase organic traffic by 10% a month, so we need to go pay for more traffic from whatever paid resources for the rest of the stuff that we can really affect to get to those goals. So kind of working backwards, knowing some of the stuff further down, um, like what we need to do as an input to get the result we want later on, so,
Speaker 1 28:54 right, right. And that that also highlights things like, you know, I'm, I've always very conscious of our churn and knowing that, you know, churn is the thing that will ultimately limit your growth at some point. It might be soon, it might be later. It depends on how much traffic you're getting at the top of the funnel and your conversion rates and all of that other stuff. But if you get a high churn rate, you know, if you're talking 25% overall annual churn, you know, you're, you're basically turning over your entire customer base in what does that, uh, 12 months, right? 25% monthly chin, 25 no, 25% annual churn.
Speaker 2 29:29 Ah, uh, well that's, that's pretty good. So it'd be like every four years, right? Or I'm sure it's less than that, but
Speaker 1 29:35 yeah, four, I'm sorry, four years. So if it was like 25% monthly churn, then every four months turning over your customers, which is bad, that's like unbelievably bad. So 5% you know, 5% a month is still 60% a year. That's pretty bad. You know, in two years you're going to turn over your entire customer base. 60, you know, 60%, 18 to 24 months, somewhere in there. Right. That's bad. That's really bad. So you know, hitting that churn rate and, and dialing that back is going to improve your retention. It's going to improve your LTV and yeah, all, all of it. So if you, if you can't, if you can't control your turn, then you're already in trouble right there. And I think that's a, that's a major problem with any SAS is uh, looking at your churn rates and making sure that you can keep that under control.
Speaker 2 30:23 Yeah. You know, it's interesting, we had a, we had a discussion like, so one of the tiny seed companies, um, Matt wincing is he runs a SIM sassy and he just rebranded it as summit. Um, so you summit. Yup. So, um, so I was talking to Matt and he's like this super metrics data guy. I was talking to him about my talk, um, and I was like, you know, this is kind of the premise. He's like, yeah, but it just doesn't apply some times. And the, the one example he had was like ConvertKit, there turns like 8% and they're growing like crazy. But it's because like their top of funnel is just so huge that it can kind of overpower their churn. Um,
Speaker 1 31:03 yeah, no, exactly. It will catch up to Nathan at some point, at 8% a month that, you know, in two years he will turn over his customer base.
Speaker 2 31:12 Yeah. Well, in one year, right? 12 and 12 times eight. Like 96. Yeah.
Speaker 1 31:16 Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. In one year he'll turn out, he'll turn over his entire customer base. So as long as his, you know, growth top of the funnel growth is more than that, he's going to be doing fine. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of cutthroat competition there, so that's still pretty brutal churn.
Speaker 2 31:32 Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean that, that's an exception and I think that's why, um, it, there's rule of thumb rules of thumb and then there's exceptions to those. And that's like an exception because that's such a massive top of funnel. Like, you know, lead source that they have with their brand. And all the stuff they've done that most of us don't, don't have, you know, 10 million visits a month or something like that to their website.
Speaker 1 31:56 No. But ConvertKit's kind of an outlier in that regards. So that's what I'm saying. Yeah, definitely. Definitely not what I would use as the poster child there.
Speaker 2 32:05 Yup. Yup. So, um, yeah, I just, you know, kinda thought we'd run through some of that and how we think about it. Um, I think, you know, I think for most folks, if you can use UTM parameters for links going to your site, that's the one thing that nieces really taught me is like using UTM parameters everywhere outside of your site, um, in emails and guests posts and things like WordPress or Shopify if you're able to. Uh, so you know specifically where people are going, um, is really helpful in getting that information in Google analytics to, to then like attribute the, the, what happens afterwards. So
Speaker 1 32:38 yeah, in recapture we
Speaker 2 32:40 actually set this up for people automatically because it is, it is such a hassle and you know, it's, most of that stuff is pretty easy to populate. Like, if, you know, like we're the, we're the source of it so we know we can say medium is recapture and here's the name of the campaign and et cetera, et cetera. So, but having that and because trying to remember to do all of that for every single link in every single email, it's really tedious if you're having to manage that manually. So, you know, find a tool that helps you do that. Obviously recapture doesn't work for SAS, but uh, that's, that's definitely important. Yeah. Yup, yup. Cool. Well I think that about wraps up for this week. Uh, yeah, if you have any questions or want to chat more about a marketing attribution, I'd love to shoot us a message podcast@roguestartups.com if you are a JavaScript developer or you know, a JavaScript developer that is excellent and node and want to, uh, do some work with Dave on recapture a, shoot us a message there. Also podcast or Oh, startups.com and if you've enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. And we'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 0 33:47 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>.
