Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two 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 to episode one 99 of rogue startups 199 episodes. Craig, isn't that crazy?
Speaker 2 00:27 It is crazy, man. I, uh, and you know, the cool thing is, uh, I, it's, you know, nice that it's leading right up to the holidays. I feel like, you know, one 99 where like Christmas Eve, episode 200, which I guess Dave, we can go ahead and spill the beans and tell everybody about now is going to be really cool and we'll come out on Christmas day. So it's really cool.
Speaker 1 00:45 Dun, dun, duh. Here's our Christmas present to everybody out there. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, here's a little holiday something for you. So if you're wondering what to do after you've torn, open all the presents or you're sitting around on Christmas day and you've got nothing else, now you can listen to episode 200, uh, episode 200. We went out and we grabbed some of the best and brightest minds in bootstrapping, single founder entrepreneurship. And we asked them two questions.
Speaker 2 01:16 You want to tell him what the questions are? Yeah. So the two questions are, uh, what is something you've learned this year, uh, that you would like to share with people? And the other question is, what is something that had been working for you previously that isn't working anymore? Is that about right Dave?
Speaker 1 01:30 I think that's exactly it and nailed it. I think the first one was about being uncommonly effective or something like that. Like what's the new technique that you're finding to be surprisingly worthwhile? And the answers on a lot of this stuff were quite surprising and I'm really impressed about, you know, the quality of answers that we got on this kind of stuff. So I hope you all enjoy this as well. It was certainly a lot of fun to go out and interview people with those questions and get those answers. So,
Speaker 2 02:00 yeah, absolutely. And we're going to have a bunch of them from kind of all walks of bootstrapping, SAS location, independent business owner life. So I think you'll really enjoy it.
Speaker 1 02:09 Yeah. We tried to get a wide slice there. So if you're listening and a you want to contribute to something like that in the future, well watch for your emails and when we send it, don't hesitate.
Speaker 2 02:22 So, uh, yeah, so I know in, uh, in our world, it's always a very busy time of year in the podcasting world. People either have new year's resolutions that it's the middle of December and they're saying, Oh shit, I haven't started my podcast yet, so I better get on that. Uh, and a lot of people are also on the podcast motor side, more so coming in and saying, we want to launch a podcast in January. We're going to get started on it now. Uh, and so it's been classically, I mean, every year it's the same. It's just December and January are crazy months. So yeah, it's been a, it's been a busy time for us and we've been pushing out new stuff on Casta so we can talk through all that. But
Speaker 1 03:00 yeah, it's been, it's been a busy time. Wow, that's crazy. How about you? Well, you know, it's been kind of crazy as well and it's been crazy for a lot of things. So obviously we've had black Friday cyber Monday going on and our infrastructure has been humming along. We've had no glitches. So I'll knock on wood now in case I screw this up before the end of the year, but I think we're, we're past really the, the hump on that one. It kind of tapers off slowly towards the holidays. I, there's going to be a little bit of a bump here pretty soon. Like I'm December 15th when that's like the last day that you can order and still get free shipping and have it arrive on time. But after that it really kind of quiets down. So we've really gotten through all of that and we had no glitches, no outages, no downtime, no problems whatsoever.
Speaker 1 03:48 So shout out to Mike, you kicked ass and took names on that. Our infrastructure was rock fucking solid this year and I am very happy about that. And yet we took a lot of traffic. I mean, there was a, did we talk about a, the, we talked about the revenue that we pulled in on the last episode, I think, right? Yeah, we did. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean it's continuing to do that. I haven't run the numbers since then, but things are moving well and you know, there's just like, I observed the craziest behavior. Like there's all these people that are still stalling recapture, like during black Friday after black Friday, I'm like, shout out to you for putting in abandoned carts after the biggest shopping day of the year. Like, okay. That, that's crazy. And they're less than a little too late, but at least they learned it.
Speaker 1 04:36 Right. Yeah. I mean, I'm just like, wow. Okay. Um, that's interesting. I wouldn't have expected that. I mean, it just seems like it's one of those things when you're steeped in e-commerce, you just think everybody's aware of these things, but it's obvious that they're not right. Because if they weren't, then I would ha it would just completely drop off right before black Friday, cyber Monday, and it would go dark until like January 6th. But it doesn't, it's still going. Hmm. Yeah. And so there's also something else that we started here recently. So Shopify is now doing paid advertising on the Shopify app store for your apps, for any app. Not just me, but anybody can sign up for this. So they had, I noticed it one day, like it just, it flipped on, I usually check the store pretty regularly and one day it just flipped on and I'm like, what the hell is this?
Speaker 1 05:31 What the hell are they doing? And so then I contacted Shopify and I found out that there was like this page that was talking about this beta program and I that, you know, I contacted them and they said, yeah, we're in the middle of a beta. We have all the partners we need, so don't worry about it. We'll let you know when it goes public. And it was going to be Q1 like not three days later I get an email saying, Hey, do you want to be part of the beta program? I'm like, hell yes, I do. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. So they, you know, they gave me $100 free credit to try it out. And you know, it is, it's like getting in on the ground floor with Google ad words or Facebook ads. The clicks are dirt cheap, dirt cheap. So I'm getting in there and I'm looking at volumes and I'm looking at conversion rates and I have a bunch of keywords that we're checking out right now I'm getting installs and things like that.
Speaker 1 06:23 I haven't, you know, I haven't run it long enough yet to be able to compare my numbers to see is this really boosting installs by how much is it at boosting my installs over what I would get normally for free. And some of those I'm cannibalizing a little bit so I can like boost myself to basically the top three instead of being at like number nine on the page or something like that. Cause now with ads I just dropped down three more places, so I was nine, now I'm 12 and now I'm below the fold. In some cases it's like, Oh ouch. Oh interesting. Yeah. But since everything's so cheap, you know, it's not a problem to just throw this out there and say, all right, I'm going to pay this. And I'm, you know, I'm getting things that are like a buck an install.
Speaker 2 07:06 Oh, Dave, that's, that's amazing man. I mean, that's a, that's a dollar a trial then. Yeah,
Speaker 1 07:11 yeah, yeah. Well a dollar trial and then, you know, I have to go through the things and try to figure out what my conversion rates were and what they are now and have they gone up or they'd go down. I don't know any of those data points yet, but you know, at least I'm getting an opportunity to learn and it's not an expensive experiment to run. So I'm really excited about this. I think this is pretty cool and it could really move the needle. It basically allows me to double down on my own channel next year. The one channel that I know is really, really working well for me. So, yeah, that was, that was pretty cool to find out.
Speaker 2 07:42 That's awesome. That's awesome. We've been running paid acquisition for a while since the summer really? And, um, it's been nice to see that a lot of our kind of bottom of the funnel metrics have stayed similar. You know, we switched to no credit card in September so that screwed up everything. But really, you know, I guess since September we've seen really consistent like trial to paid conversion ratio, which is nice cause we've scaled our ad spend by like triple in that time, which is cool cause that's an, that's a difficult thing to do. It's one of the things people tell you is like when you start getting people that wouldn't find you naturally into your world, you should expect your conversion rates to go down. And I think we've been working on the product a lot to boost that up. So that's probably countering some of the, you the influx of, you know, new people that might not find us otherwise organically like through WordPress. But that's definitely something to keep an eye on. And it's good that you're kind of looking at your install rate versus new customer rate. I'm like trial to trial to paid conversion ratio before versus after. Um, at least on a cohort basis. You can say like, okay, I want to start running paid traffic, my conversion rate went down from 20% to 10% or whatever, and then if the math still works and that's fine, you know?
Speaker 1 08:48 Right, right, right. That's, and you know, I mean there's a lot of weirdness. So this is like just a weird time of year. I know historically speaking, looking back at my previous years, even when I was just on Magento, like the installs just top out December, January, late November. People just, you know, there aren't like the serious people that are really interested in moving their store and the ones that are going to have expansion revenue and the ones that have like serious volume, they're not moving right now. They locked and loaded at the beginning of October. They're sad and they're not touching anything until February. So that's when
Speaker 2 09:23 there's coming in now just to see what it's all about. Like on a test store maybe. And then we'll put it over live after the first of the year.
Speaker 1 09:29 Yeah, I mean I, I have a couple, like I was just talking with somebody yesterday. They want to bring over seven Magento stores in a Shopify store. So it sounds like whatever they've got, they've got something now, but they're in the process of thinking about the migration, so they're putting that stuff all in place so they can get their test stores set up and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that's fine. You know, but I just don't see a lot of those. Not compared with may, April, may through October, early October. That's when the big stuff really happens. So yeah, I mean I, it's, it's going to be tough to compare, but I, I know what I had from last year. I know what my general install rate is going to be, so I can see is this moving the needle? How much is it moving the needle?
Speaker 1 10:10 Am I getting a lot more paid trials? It also looks like there's some conversion issues that I'm having where between 60 and 90 days in the cohort, I see that I'm having, you know, a bigger drop-off in customers. But I also noticed that the customers that are dropping off, those are the ones that probably shouldn't have signed up in the first place. They're the ones that are making zero, they're making a hundred bucks or something like that. It's the ones that are making 2,500 or more a month that they should have stayed in need. Usually do stay. Those are the ones I'm, I'm working out fine with. So I'm trying to figure out like how can I get fewer of those customers in or keep them from signing up because I know that like for example, card hook had this exact same problem. They've got a really high pricing plan and they were encouraging people to sign up. But then like they would drop out within the first three months and you know, that was killing their churn rate. So that's when they went to the application only process and now they have a thing that basically they qualify the stores before they can sign up. It also adds to the mystique of CartHook lie. You can't just like install it and run it. You have to apply, you know, they're almost like the car TA of Shopify apps. Right, right, right.
Speaker 2 11:26 You know, I think an easy thing you could do is just raise your prices, right? Like that kind of naturally whatever, like qualify some people out.
Speaker 1 11:35 Yeah. Okay. So I've done that before. If you remember, I had my prices higher and I lowered him this past April and that's when I started seeing massive growth. Oh, interesting. Because there's no anything then. Yeah, no, I just, it didn't work for me. Like having my prices higher was actually a barrier because of the pricing of Shopify itself. So the lowest plan on Shopify. So here's an observation that I've made and others have made too. If you're on a platform like Shopify, like Magento, like WordPress, and there is a pricing plan for that platform itself that puts a, Oh, I don't want to call it a high water Mark, but it, it puts a bar in the customer's minds about how much they should be paying for other services on the platform. So if the lowest price on that platform is 29 bucks, if you're more than 29 bucks and you're not a brand that has some recognition, then you are going to be scrutinized and people are going to raise their eyebrows like, well I'm only paying 29 for Shopify, why the hell would I pay 49 for you?
Speaker 1 12:40 That that's a barrier. That's a very, it's an anchoring. Yeah, it's totally price anchoring. So if Shopify had started at 99 and I was at 49 it would have been fine, but they aren't. The bottom tier is 29 so when I lowered mine to match the bottom tier, that's when I started seeing installs. Interesting. Yeah. And so you know, and this is why I will never go to like Wix and Squarespace because their bottom tier is nine bucks. And I'm like, the economics make no sense for me at that level. Like I will never lower my prices so low as to be friendly to Wix and Weebly and Squarespace and you know, all of those guys. Yeah. As it is, you know, it's, it's even tough on WordPress because there is a lot of free alternatives that are out there. So that kind of anchors the space as well.
Speaker 1 13:27 Plus WooCommerce itself is free, but then there's a lot of people that like buy stuff for woo commerce. So that kind of moves the anchor a little bit. And those that like do managed WooCommerce hosting, that helps anchor your price a lot because you have to pay to get your store to perform well. And if you're paying 49 or 79 or 99 a month, whatever it is that you pay for managed WordPress hosting, depending on your host, you're going to look at something like this. If you're making money with your store, then you know, a $29 plan with me doesn't look so bad. Yeah. But it's all about the anchoring. It is completely about the anchoring, so yeah.
Speaker 2 14:04 Yep. Interesting. Interesting. You know, because it's a busy time of year and we know there's a lot of people kind of doing stuff in our world this time of year. We, we've been really prolific in the last couple of weeks with stuff. Actually this week we really, we pushed out a big update yesterday that's been coming. It's been a long time coming. Um, so like we, we call them our public podcast pages, so when you sign up for a castoffs account, you get like, you know, my show dot <inaudible> dot com as like a page and you can point a custom domain on it or whatever. And we just redesigned those. So if folks go to rogue startups dot <inaudible> dot com they can see what that looks like and they're beautiful. They're really beautiful. Uh, so Nathan Powell, a former kind of a cofounder of NuSI helped us redesign those and they look really great and they're customizable with images and color schemes and things like that.
Speaker 2 14:54 So that's cool. I think it really brings us up to at least kind of parody with some of our competitors in terms of like that front end design stuff. So that was really cool to put out there. You know, Dave, I think I enjoy as, I'm not a designer, right? But I enjoy putting out like design updates more than anything else. I think cause it just makes me feel like maybe it's cause I feel like I'm overcoming my, my own inadequacies cause I'm not a designer, you know? But like, Oh yeah, I can make pretty good, you know, pretty stuff or my, my tool is pretty now. Yeah. I really dig it and I was really happy to put this one out.
Speaker 1 15:27 Yeah. It might be the same feeling. So in my software development career, I always felt like user interface stuff was more satisfying to work on because you get this immediate feedback and this gratification, like when you show it to somebody with the backend stuff, you show it to somebody and it's like, great, it worked okay. Right. It's not that impressive. Like it really isn't till you show this to users and they're like, okay great. You say to the database, congratulations. But you show them like a cool interface and they're like, wow, look at that. All those buttons are really pretty. Oh I like the animations. And it's the same kind of thing when you release something that's just visually cool. So yeah, I feel, yeah, I feel you.
Speaker 2 16:06 Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. You know, and it's funny cause like a lot of our customers, if I ran the numbers, it's probably 80 plus percent of customers use cast us with WordPress now. And I think the goal, part of the goal with us is to go after the non WordPress space or at least remove that as an objection to say like, you don't need a WordPress site to use Castillo's or built in pages are beautiful and responsive and all this kind of customizable. You can point a custom domain, Adam. Uh, so like, you know, it's a tool for everybody now and so that's been really cool. Nice. Nice. Congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah. Uh, so how are things going with the replacement for Mike, your new JavaScript developer? How's it going?
Speaker 1 16:44 So this week we hired on the new guy. His name's Omar and Omar is doing really well so far. I have to say, I'm impressed. So the developer that we got from upstack is working out thus far. I mean, it's still very early of course, but he's doing all the right things. Like he, just to give you an example, the very first day that he installed the stuff from us, so I gave him a hundred page documentation that we had written up about all the background and recapture talks about the data structures, how to set up your dev environment, customer support issues. We run into how to do various weird things inside of recapture that we figured out over the years. So it's a pretty comprehensive document he plowed through that is three quarters of the way on the first day he also came back to me and said, Oh, I saw your development environment, uh, instructions over here.
Speaker 1 17:37 And keep in mind that these development environment instructions are probably four years, three and they're at least three years old, maybe four years old. When I originally bought the app from the other guys and I didn't really bother changing them and I just told Mike, here's how you do it. And I let him do what he was going to do. Well, Omar came in and said, Oh, well, you know what would really make this easier? Let me put this whole thing in a Docker image and I'll set this up so that basically it can be like a, you know, a three line install if you just run these commands. And I'm like, why didn't we think of that? That was, I mean, when I look at it now, it's like, yeah, duh. That was kind of obvious. Why didn't we think of that? But it's great that he went in, he just did it.
Speaker 1 18:19 I didn't ask him to do it. He went and said, Oh, this is gonna make things easier. This is going to make things better. So he checked things into the repository. He wrote up the, read me on it all on his own. So I was very, very impressed with that. And so far, you know, we've been giving him some tasks and he's digging into it. He's not being shy about it. The communication is good. So yeah, so far, all signs point to positive. Awesome. Again, it's very early. So, you know, we got a little bit of a road to go since Mike leaves at the end of January. So we've got six weeks. Okay. And I really want to see how he kind of digs into this stuff. Cause I, you know, ideally if everything's working out, I want to have Omar get more and more stuff on his plate and might get less and less.
Speaker 1 19:03 So by the end of January, Mike is pretty much in an advisory role only. And you know, he's not doing day to day stuff anymore. Although I think there's a couple of things that I may have Mike do because I think there's some big integrations that were coming up. So one thing that's come up in the last three weeks is I've had like three customers ask me about integration with OneClickUpsell, which is isn't a, it's a cart hook competitor. And I'm like, well, we don't have that yet. Uh, it's on the roadmap. I said that for the first one. And then the second one came up and I'm like, Hmm, maybe that needs to be a little higher on the <inaudible> actually put that on the roadmap. Well thought out. It was already on the roadmap but then I'm like maybe we should move it higher on the roadmap.
Speaker 1 19:45 And then by the time the third one came I'm like, Oh fucking hell we got to get this out like now because basically at one of the customers said as soon as you add this I will come back to your platform and I'm all okay. Cause I looked at what volume he was doing in his store and it was not small. So I mean it would be worthwhile for me to do it just on him alone. Okay. Yeah. And I don't, I mean it's some work and it's definitely not like an instant overnight kind of thing, but it's definitely something that would be another customer acquisition channel and you know, it, it makes it more attractive for somebody who is on Shopify. And I think OneClickUpsell actually supports more than just Shopify. I think they're on Magento and big commerce and some other stuff too. But yeah, it was like looking at the roadmap for 2020 and we've got a lot of initiatives that you know, need to happen. So I'm excited to get Omar on board and get him working on those things there because the sooner we can get that stuff early on, the sooner I can start promoting it and really growth in 2020
Speaker 2 20:48 yeah. How much is, is he planning to work? Is he going to be like half time or what?
Speaker 1 20:53 Well, right now we are working in halftime. He wants to work up to full time and you know, recapture is now at a point that I can actually afford that. So I have to decide, you know, I really got to prioritize my list really well because him at fulltime would start to eat through a lot of the backlog that we've got on the list and get to some pretty big items. So I got to make sure those are the right items to work on. Otherwise I'm wasting my money in his time. So, you know,
Speaker 2 21:19 that's the dance man every, almost every day. Certainly every week we go through that list of, okay, what are we working on now? What's next? Why isn't this next? You know, and it's crazy, man. Everyone, you know, developers, support, marketing all come in and say, we need this and I need this. And it's just, it's never ending, man. There's never enough time and there's never, there's never a right answer for sure. It's just like, yeah, this person's yelling louder than that person and you have a hunch about, you know, this'll bring more people in or make them stay longer or whatever it is. Um, yeah, it's, that's a really hard thing to figure out,
Speaker 1 21:54 especially a good process for figuring out. Yeah. Like, I mean, I have of all the growth initiatives that I've got, some take more engineering effort than others, but you know, it's hard to assess what that impact is going to be. Especially if you're doing something like a partnership where you don't really know until that partnership is in place. Is it going to be, is it very one sided? Is it going to be lucrative? Are they going to do everything that they said that they're going to do? Is it going to take longer than you expect? Like I was talking with the recharge guys back in a B-roll of last year and it wasn't until October that we finally got it in place because it just took that long for us to get the resources that we needed from them and to get the, get it placed in their documentation, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1 22:44 And now like the, the integration that we got was limited and you know, this is not a ding against the recharge guys. It's just a reality of their company and what they have to face as well. They didn't have the engineering resources to give us like a one click install because there has to be some O off work on their side to make that happen. And they had other priorities. They had, you know, they were doing some major retooling of their API for things that were happening with Shopify. And I'm like, okay, well I totally understand that and I'm sympathetic. So I'm obviously not the biggest priority in their list, but at the same time, you know, if they give me that, then I can't give that experience to our customers who, you know, had one yesterday who was trying to get it installed and he had a hard time and was like, yeah, this kind of sucked.
Speaker 1 23:31 And I'm like, I'm really sorry that, that kind of suck. I understand and I did not want that, but here's why it ended up being like that and we're going to try to fix that in January. And he said, okay, well thanks for letting me know. But you know, your priorities are often driven by other people's priorities, especially when you're doing integrations and partnerships. And that's, that's tough. That's tough. Cause you think that that's going to drive a lot of stuff, but if it takes six months longer than it normally would, then unfortunately that's not gonna work the way you expected it to. So
Speaker 2 24:01 <inaudible> <inaudible> yeah. You know from, from that Pratt, like from a product perspective, we, um, the update we shipped just before this, which is like a big onboarding update, basically making it a ton easier for bill to get started in the app. It took about six weeks for us to push out, which is about three times as long as we want it to be. And so now where we are wanting to ship at least one thing every week and that's, that's across now kind of like two and a half developers and ideally everybody shipped something every week, uh, is the goal. And then if it gets pushed out to two weeks, that's okay. But like even if you're building this big thing that's going to be six weeks long, you build, you know, you build the backend API and you push it and then you build, you know, the, the controller logic and you push it and then you push, you know, you build the, the F, you know, the front end UI and then you push it and it's all together and then the feature is done.
Speaker 2 24:55 But there's no more of this mega merge. You know, pull request that's like 30 you know, commits long or anything anymore. Like yeah. So we're trying, it just makes people feel better. I think as part of it, like our guys are both very happy now. They're pushing stuff same week a lot of times and everybody's happy and I'm happy cause I don't wonder like are we ever going to ship anything ever again? Which after six weeks you think like, Oh my God, we might never ship anything ever again. And our customers might be wondering like what the hell is going on to these guys? I haven't seen anything from them in a long time. Yeah, just even breaking it down for ourselves internally to say like, okay we shipped this thing. It works. Everything's good. There's no bugs we can move on, you know?
Speaker 1 25:38 Yeah. I I, there's an interesting break in engineering. So when you have one engineer, at least you know that when they push stuff that they've kind of worked on everything all at once, or that they're specifically breaking it down and that everything will end up being in sync because they're the only ones working on the code base, right? Yeah. Yeah. But when you get to engineers and then they split up the tasks, especially when it goes front end and back end, then it seems like that's a new level of complexity that always slows things down, where now you've got to do that coordination. And I've seen this in my own freelancing and working on teams and whatever. As soon as you have to depend on somebody else for something, everything slows down a little bit or a lot depending on who you're working with. And it's, it's frustrating.
Speaker 1 26:24 You've got to figure out what that cadence look like and getting things done. Or, you know, if you're doing backend work, you gotta get that stuff done so they can finish the front end work or you gotta, you know, have them mock stuff up so that they can get the data in a reasonable way. But then that means they're doing more work on their side in order to get the mocks. And I mean there's just, there's a lot of stuff in there that, that comes, you know, we talk about the zero to one, but I think there's the engineering one to two <inaudible>. Yeah, yeah. And then after that, the, the coordination is already there. So it's just a question of balancing it a little bit more. But yeah, it's still, it's still tough. It's still tough. Yeah.
Speaker 2 27:02 Yeah, for sure. For sure. It's a, it's a cool thing to, to kind of learn and go through. I feel like, I feel like we still are learning a lot about all of these kind of, you know, business processes. Not to be too jargony, but like just how the business is run. We do it better all the time, and we're still learning like, wow, okay, this still kind of sucks. Or this is still not a, you know, where it should be. So it's cool though. Yeah.
Speaker 1 27:26 Very good.
Speaker 2 27:26 Yeah, they are. The one thing that I wanted to share with folks if they want to follow along is we started a new podcast kind of project <inaudible> it's called audience. And the kind of idea or the goal of it is a really kind of transparent look at what growing a podcast audience is all about. So it's a podcast about podcasting, but not just, you know, Hey, this is how your podcast, and this is what audacity is and all this kind of stuff. But very specifically on like growing an audience, and we're going to look at it both from an organic perspective and from a paid acquisition perspective. So, yeah, we just launched a, a teaser episode of it today, and the rest of the kind of launch episodes will come out to the day after this episode is published, so on the 19th of December. So if you wanna check it out, go to audience dot <inaudible> dot com and uh, and check it out. And I think, uh, I'm really excited about it. I'll be learning a lot as we go through this, uh, about really growing an audience to the, we're talking like 50,000 listeners is what we're shooting for. Um, so that'll be, that's a, that's a legit podcast. Yeah. I'm really excited about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 28:30 Cool. Cool. That's very exciting. Yeah, yeah. Nice. End of the year. Stuff to be doing.
Speaker 2 28:35 Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. Yeah, we've been, um, you know, like I said, we've been doing a fair amount of paid acquisition stuff and are, are wanting to really kind of like support that with a lot of organic content now too. I think that the two is like a really good mix, you know, like Asia in our, our episode that, that just went live this week. Um, that had a really funny quote. She said, I never have talked to a founder who says, man, I wish I had started building my content engine two years later.
Speaker 1 29:05 Yeah, that's true. That's true.
Speaker 2 29:07 Yeah. I mean, and it's, it's a hard thing like when you're in the throws of just, you know, the, the hamster wheel of, of content, you're just like, why am I doing this? But the, I mean we see, you know, we see small gains all the time. You know, trials are up 10% trials are up, 12% trials are up, you know, whatever percent. And a lot of it is just from content, which is, and we can tell, you know that like these come from paid and these come from content or organic. A lot of them are just coming from content, which is cool. So it's, it's definitely the long and slow growth, uh, as opposed to paid can be really quick. Like you, you're sounds like in the paid Shopify app store. But I think a healthy mix is necessary. And you know, if talking to Asia, that mix is all down to how fast you want to grow. You know, it's kind of what she said is like, if you want to grow slow then just go all organic cause that's the safer, sure. Longterm bet. But if you want to grow fast, you have to supplement it with some kind of paid. Yup.
Speaker 1 30:03 Yup. I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with. Interesting. Well it will be interesting to see what the episode 200 answers are because I think there is some insight into that exact problem, uh, based on recent observations. So I won't, I won't spoil anything, but if you're, if you're into that problem and you think that, uh, you want to head that direction, definitely listened to episode 200.
Speaker 2 30:26 Yup, absolutely. And everyone out there, uh, happy holidays and hope everyone enjoys a bit of downtime, recuperation, a reflection ahead of the new year. And, uh, I think Dave and I'll probably be back with a, a new year's episode, uh, talking about some of our reflections on this year and kind of looking ahead to 2020, uh, here pretty shortly.
Speaker 1 30:46 And as usual, if you have any questions or comments on the episode today on our updates or things that you want to learn more about, stuff you want us to cover in a future episode, shoot us an email podcast@roguestartups.com and our one ask is if you felt that this was valuable, please share it with somebody you think would benefit from it. We'd really appreciate it. Until next week,
Speaker 0 31:13 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>.
