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. All right, welcome.
Speaker 1 00:21 So 200 rogue startups. Uh, thank you all for, for listening through the last four years that Dave and I have been blabbing on and on about business and SAS and life and remote work. David spent a pretty wild journey, huh?
Speaker 2 00:37 It has. And it just sort of struck me the other day that it's been, you know, four years and 200 episodes. I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't really feel like it, you know, the numbers of the episodes don't really sort of resonate with me as much as just taking a step back and then looking at like, Oh God, yeah, we've been doing this since 2015 and, Oh yeah, we're doing about 50 episodes a year and Oh God, yeah, that's totally 200 episodes at this point. And Oh wow. Yeah. Not a lot of podcasts actually make it this far. So, you know, it's, it's great that we have an audience that is, you know, really enjoying what we had to say. And I'd like to just personally thank all of you for taking the time to listen to what we had to say here. It's not always a insightful or profound, but occasionally we throw a nugget out there and we couldn't do this really without all of you, uh, listening to us. So thank you so very much for doing that.
Speaker 1 01:32 Yeah, and I think, uh, I'll give a compliment sandwich to our audience here, Dave, is that the thing that we enjoy most out of the podcast is when people send us an email or tweet at us about, uh, an episode whether they liked it or they didn't. So send us a message podcast@roguestartups.com or tweet at Dave and I, I think that's for me been the most fulfilling part of this is the fact that we might be helping people along and maybe, you know, maybe just entertaining them but then really like the, the other part of the compliment sandwiches, if you haven't, you know, get off your ass and send us a message and talk about what you like and don't like and want to hear more about it. It's really helpful. And I think if, if you're feeling this way, then a lot of other people are too. If a lot of people want to hear more about content marketing or remote work or travel or you know, work life balance or whatever, let us know so that we can do more of what folks want. Because otherwise we're just going to sit up here and you know, spouting off about what we think is best to podcast about. And that's not always right. So please let us know. Um, it really makes our day and I think it makes the podcasts a lot better.
Speaker 2 02:34 Absolutely agree. And if you don't send us something, then it's just going to be more dad jokes and bad puns. So,
Speaker 1 02:40 ah, nice. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2 02:41 yeah. So it's only gonna go downhill if you don't. Uh, but yes,
Speaker 1 02:44 200 episodes are gonna be
Speaker 2 02:48 yes, they all will be filled with profanity though, that's for sure. Because, you know, I, I still really, truly enjoy that he label that we get on iTunes. I feel a personal of honor and accomplishment from that myself. Badge of badge of pride. Yup. For sure. Totally, totally.
Speaker 1 03:04 So we're calling this episode, we have all learned a lot, uh, because we have in the last four years we've all learned a ton about life and business and the intersection of those two in managing it all. And today we have kind of a special format where, uh, we are going to be answering two questions that are fairly simple. And then we've asked a lot of our friends and colleagues, people we all know in the SAS and the bootstrapping space to, to answer these questions as well. And Dave, the two questions that we're answering are,
Speaker 2 03:32 the first one was what tactic are you finding to be uncommonly effective in the recent past? And the other question that we asked was, what tactic have you used before that you're finding isn't working so well today? Now? And those two questions I thought were like the most relevant because I've heard Rob discussed this before at MicroComp and on startups for the rest of us where basically all tactics have a half life. And as a result of that you sort of have to constantly be evaluating what's going on right now. What am I hearing about? What is working for other people? How can it work for me, is what I'm doing still effective? And if you put that in the context of, you know, our business and the people that we are aware of in the space here, we want to make sure that those tactics are constantly being refreshed and up to date. So that's why we felt that these two questions were going to be the most relevant and perhaps the most timely for this episode. And of course, if you're listening to this episode a year or two from now, keep in mind that because all tactics have a half-life, even the ones that we talk about today are not necessarily going to live on forever in infamy.
Speaker 1 04:53 Yup, absolutely. Absolutely. So I think we'll go ahead and dig in and then we have a, you know, cameos from about a dozen of our kind of friends and colleagues in the space that are giving their perspectives on it as well. They've all got and give my answers for the two questions. Uh, one is, uh, maybe a little bit of a cop out, but I think the thing that is working the best is, is not a tactic as a resource. Uh, and it is building a team both with podcast motor and with Castillo's. We have people that are excellent at what they do in the business, doing the things that add a lot of value. And that is the thing that's moving the business forward. And when we don't have that, it's really obvious and it's, it makes the business stagnate a lot. And so I think this is something that isn't easy for a lot of businesses.
Speaker 1 05:40 Like you have to have some scale to be able to hire out, you know, marketing people and sales people and support people. Um, but if, and when you get to that point, having really excellent people that are a lot better than you are at certain aspects of the business is a huge competitive advantage versus a guy or a girl running a business by themselves. And again, that might be a cop out, but that, that really is powerful. So I think if you can get there or if you can find a way to get there by taking a little bit of money or something, um, it's a huge edge up. And the other thing I would say, uh, is for the, what is not working as well as it used to be is what's kind of, we've experienced is like really bottom of the funnel. Paid acquisition is really hard for SAS.
Speaker 1 06:26 I think a lot of the content out there about paid acquisition is for eCommerce and like one time, uh, educational products and things like that where you get somebody, you drive them just because the math is really simple. If you can drive somebody to your sales page for $2 and they convert at a 10% rate, but you're selling a $300 thing, then you're in the money, right? And you have a positive return on ad spend. Uh, for us like you know, selling either podcast mode or Castillo's via paid ads is just complicated, right? Cause you have like this not return on ad spend but like payback period on your, your cost to acquire a customer from paid ads and it certainly is fuzzy at the bottom of the funnel. It's me even more fuzzy at the top where you say like, what if I'm just going to drive somebody on Facebook to a blog post and then hope they convert later that that's even more kind of fuzzy. But, but just generally I think paid acquisition for SAS continues to get harder. I talked a lot about attribution. Actually. I'll follow up on attribution in another episode cause we're, we're getting closer to figuring that out. But um, it's just a hard thing and maybe it's not working worse than it used to be, but I just find it really challenging.
Speaker 2 07:34 Yeah, I would totally agree with you on that one. The thing that has always been tough about SAS as we've gotten farther and further into the newness of SAS wearing off is the fact that there are more options out there. And so now it's not like, Oh well there's only one help desk, I'll go use Zendesk. Now it's, there's HelpScout, there's groove, there's happy Fox, there's fresh desk, there's all these other options. And so now it's about what one fits me. And so now I have to go with like on a, almost a personal journey for me to understand what's important and not important to me. And sometimes that might be, I'm trying a bunch of these things and some of them are good and some of them are not good for me. Maybe it's, I'm doing deep research on each of those and I'm just sitting here suffering with my current solution.
Speaker 2 08:22 But either way it's like it extends the sales cycle quite a bit because there's a greater level of sophistication there. So top of the funnel content stuff is really tough and that actually brings me to the thing that I think from my experience has been considerably less effective here in the last year. And that's content marketing. I, you know, just from a, from a consumer standpoint, I feel like I'm oversaturated. Like I've had to actually unsubscribe to a number of lists and blogs and newsletters and things like that that I'm reading because there's just too much shit. I can't read it all. I can't keep up with it. I can't consume it. And furthermore, what I'm seeing in recapture was last year we had been doing some content marketing towards the end of the year and this year I saw exactly 0% growth in organic traffic, organic marketing, like all of the keywords that I ranked for last year.
Speaker 2 09:23 I'm still ranking for them this year, but I haven't substantially changed that position. And while we did stop, there's usually like a delayed effect. So if you finished, say in September, you might see like a halo effect for like six to 12 months. I saw nothing, nothing on this. And it seems like if you're going to go the content marketing route, it only seems to work if you're in a space where your audience isn't already saturated with the stuff and there just isn't a lot out there to work with already. And both of those are not true for me in e-commerce. So I, you know, I'm not investing at all in content marketing anymore. It just is not the right answer. So that's, that's my tactic that I think has lost effectiveness over this year. And as you'll see from the other snippets in this episode, uh, I'm certainly not alone in that sentiment.
Speaker 2 10:15 Uh, but the one that I think has been continually effective and surprises me still to this day is that integrations are still working really great for recapture. So you know, obviously we've seen a lot of growth in Shopify this year, but I'm starting to see additional traffic that's coming in from other vendors that we've integrated with and those have contributed to various levels of growth. Not all integrations are equal and certainly the more your vendor is willing to put you into a place that you can get promoted, whether that's app store, whether that's doing some you know, webinars or joint content marketing or you know, something like that. And by joint content marketing, what I really mean to say is you write a article for their blog, they promote it to their audience and so you kind of get some traction from that. So you're really leveraging somebody else's audience instead of trying to build your own, which is different than the thing that I was talking about before that has been more effective I think continues to be effective, surprisingly so. So I'm going to continue that strategy into 2020. Uh, we've got a list of other integrations that we're working on and promotion opportunities and partnerships and things like that. Those are, those are still working quite well. In my opinion.
Speaker 1 11:31 I agree with both. I think content marketing is harder than ever. Uh, I still am not giving up on it. I think I feel like we have to do it. Like we have to have a blog and we have to get organic traffic that you don't pay for or that you're not continually building an integration for or doing a webinar for or something like that. But I almost look at it as an investment that I don't know what the payoff of it's going to be like in terms of time or more like hard dollars. Um, unlike unlike paid acquisition that is finite in terms of time and pretty absolute in terms of, or more absolute, I guess in terms of like the, the return that like the financial return you get. But I totally agree on integrations. I mean for Casto, sorry, integration with WordPress is massive, right?
Speaker 1 12:13 I mean, that's the reason we started the business really. Um, so yeah, I think that's huge. And I think that Dave, like the nuance of that is like I, I think both for like for recapture is, uh, a plugin or an app into Shopify and seriously simple podcasting is into <inaudible> or into WordPress as well. I think if you can integrate that deeply, it's a good deal. Having like a segment integration is not what we're talking about, right? Like, that's cool, but that's not going to get you the effect that I think you and I have seen. Um, I think you need to know to derive like the value of your app, of your business inside a platform, uh, for this kind of integration to be effective, not just, you know, Hey, yeah, we integrate with drip w Didi freaking do. I mean, it's not like that's table stakes, but that's not going to make the business.
Speaker 2 13:01 Right. Right. For example, we've had a, a Zapier integration for recapture for years. It was there before I even bought it. But you know, I recently went and did a check to find out how many people actually had our zaps installed. And of our several hundred customers, we only earned a couple thousand customers, gives me several hundred, uh, you know, out of a couple thousand people that we have, we only have 10 zaps, 10 people using this apps. It's like, yeah, yeah. That's just not, it's not moving the needle. It's not what people were like dying for it. Obviously there were a few people that have used it and it's kind of come and go over the years and it's one of those, Oh, if you have it, we'd like to use it. But yeah, that's, it's, it's a checkbox feature. It's not a core thing that's really making people go, man, I really want to switch to recapture.
Speaker 2 13:47 Yeah. Yeah. You gotta you gotta find that thing. So, by the way, I'm going to mention it here and I think we should link to it in the show notes, but one of the things that I have read recently, and maybe we talk about this in a future episode as well, is you've got to find the one important thing about your business. Like what is it about your business that people rally around? What's the thing that they come to you for that they don't get from anybody else? <inaudible> and Jason Cohen has really fantastic writing in general, but this particular article I thought was very timely because now we're in sort of the contemplative part of the year and people are thinking about, Oh well, you know, what should I be doing next year and what have I done this year? And I think this is a good article to kind of frame that if you're, if you're having that introspection time right now, I would strongly recommend going to a Jason's blog, which will link to the show notes and then read that article as well.
Speaker 1 14:45 Yeah. Cool. And with that we're going gonna we're gonna kick it over to yeah, some of our friends, uh, and colleagues in SAS and
Speaker 3 14:51 kind of marketing digital space and let them answer these questions as well. I hope you all enjoy. Hello everyone. My name is Asia Matos and I am the CEO and founder of demand Maven at demand Maven. I work with early stage startups and founders on reaching their very first growth milestones, first 100 customers, thousand customers and beyond. So in terms of these questions, the first question is, what have you learned recently, say in the last year that's making a big difference in your business? For me, because I am a consultant, uh, I run a consultancy. It's a very small consultancy. Uh, I'm the only full time person. This is a very interesting question because at the end of the day, it really comes down to me. In many ways the business exists outside of me, but for the most part it is just me for what I've learned recently, honestly, it's all about routine for me.
Speaker 3 15:45 I learned the biggest lesson that I learned, especially this year was that routine actually sets me free before I was running my business, uh, very much not really thinking about managing my energy or even managing, uh, the time that I have to be creative and strategic. And I was taking meetings whenever, uh, and just overall kind of scurrying through life usually like in panic mode. But I've learned that having a routine, whether that's morning, afternoon, evening, whatever it is, having a routine and also calendar blocking time, batching, those things actually allow me to be my most strategic and my most creative. And for so long I had been fighting against routine thinking that it restricted me, but I've actually learned that there's a freedom and discipline and routine truly does set me free in that way. And in terms of making a difference in my business, Oh my gosh, my energy overall running my business is super high and I'm also able to do my absolute best work for my clients.
Speaker 3 16:48 And that's at the end of the day, one of the most important things is making sure that I'm obviously taking care of myself, but my clients are also getting taken care of too. So that's really what it all comes down to. And the second question, what tactic used to work but isn't anymore? Okay. Uh, this one was a tough one because I'm so quick to, to uh, drop a tactic and forget about them entirely. I think from a tactic that used to work, but as anymore, I think the biggest thing was actually time tracking. I used to track my time religiously when I very first started running my business and now I realize that it actually, well one, it causes a lot more stress. And two, I don't really need to track time. And the way that I did before I, before I was tracking time to really understand how much time was I actually putting into my business and how much time was I actually spending on every account.
Speaker 3 17:48 But now I've that over time, the reality is that I've just gotten faster and everything. And so then what would end up happening is what used to take me hours now takes me about half the time or even a third of the time. And then I would end up feeling guilty because I would feel like I wasn't spending enough time overall in the business. And that is something that I've, I've had to learn that I've just gotten much faster. I've also seen and have, have had much more robust experiences now. So I arrive at conclusions much faster. I'm able to, to, to define strategy much faster. Really it's all about creating space for just making sure that, that, that can actually happen as effectively as possible. But a time-tracking I actually, for me it's just not a thing that I even think about anymore. And it used to be like this religious thing to like in the beginning, um, every single day I would pop up on my train, my time tracker log all my time and I would get all of my assistants and like all of my contractors to do it too. And now I'm like, you know what? It really doesn't matter as much anymore. Now that I at least know how my business runs and I know how I'm, I know what I can expect from any given task or activity that I'm actually doing, so that's my answer for that one. Thank you again. Again, this is Asia and have an awesome day.
Speaker 4 19:06 I'm Richard Felix from stunning, stunning help Stripe users to recover more failed payments and to prevent some of them from even happening at all. I used to rely heavily on content marketing but that isn't as effective now as it used to be. The attention of potential customers seems to be moving elsewhere. The tactic that I've recently found to be uncommonly effective is hiring someone to do customer research. Customer research gives you so much insight into where your potential customers hang out online and how they describe their problems and pains. Your marketing can be so much more effective when you talk to potential customers in their own words and when you know where your best customers actually come from.
Speaker 5 19:43 Hey everyone, this is Jean Boardman, cofounder of user list, a tool for sending lifecycle email to your SAS users and I'm really glad to be here on rogue startups. Congrats on your episode 200 that's a great milestone. Over the last few years I have been slowly transitioning from info products such as selling books to selling software as a service and I have learned that having a personal audience doesn't matter as much anymore. For example, books are definitely an impulse purchase and if you like someone you could probably buy a book, but selling software is definitely a different story and sometimes it can be even sort of deceptive to count on the people who know you online. You should always be looking for scalable, reliable ways channels to reach new people and you should be absolutely focusing on value delivered as opposed to anything personal, even though of personalities of the founders do matter.
Speaker 5 20:50 This year has been both exciting and challenging for user list. We went out of beta in August and have been growing ever since and what has helped me feel well along the way is the right mindset. I guess it took me a few years to realize that it's important to decouple yourself from your work and from your products. Because no matter how hard you try, there's still a chance that the growth is not going to be fast enough and that you're never going to be satisfied with outcome. So as some psychologists say, you are not your product, you are not your work, and it's really important for your everyday functioning to separate that and to come back to your desk with the great spirits every morning so that they can ship your best, uh, work for your company.
Speaker 6 21:42 This is Brian castle from the bootstrapped web podcast and I'm the founder of process kit and audience ops first. Uh, Craig and Dave, I've got to congratulate you guys on 200 episodes that, that's really amazing. Uh, I've been listening, you know, since near the beginning and most of that time my business has been growing. So if you're looking for tactics and strategies, keep listening to rogue startups podcast, if that's not a growth hack, then I don't know. It is. So the first question, so for me over the past year, year and a half working in public and being even more open and transparent and sharing a lot more than than I have in the past and I've been pretty public about things for for many years now, but I feel like in 2019 I really doubled down on that, especially as I've been designing and building process kit myself through that process.
Speaker 6 22:29 I've just had a lot to share, whether it's showing YouTube videos of the features that I'm designing and building and shipping to how I'm doing, marketing being open, and we're also really honest over on the podcast, just being even more open even about the failures and the struggles. I think when you, when you have that human aspect to it and just being honest and, and kind of vulnerable, people really connect with that and it actually helps them stay in tune with what you're up to, especially as you're trying to launch a new product. You know, it's, it's very easy to be working on a product for over a year as I have and going into the cave and not really talk about it. But just doing that work in public kind of gives you an excuse to, to keep reminding people that Hey, this thing is coming or this thing now exists.
Speaker 6 23:14 And uh, and that's actually, it helped a lot with the initial launch and early traction for process kit. So the second question, uh, what strategy are you finding to be less effective today? I'm going to have to say email marketing and it sort of pains me to say that because I still very much value using email. I put a lot of work into the newsletter that I write and send to my audience every week. But the truth is there've been a number of factors over the past, I'd say two years that just make this a more frustrating channel, to be honest. One is deliverability. I've seen those open rates and deliverability rates reducing over the last two years. I don't know if it's a matter of sending infrastructure from the email marketing tools or the way that email clients work these days with a lot of emails being thrown into the promotions tab or the spam inbox.
Speaker 6 24:01 You know, because I've had pretty high engagement on my emails historically, but I think that people in general, especially people in my audience and our circles are probably reading emails less as Twitter and podcasts and YouTube and private Slack communities and things like that become more prevalent. I think email starts to take a back seat in terms of where people are placing most of their attention these days. That's just my gut sense of it. And so with that in mind, I've been trying to increase my exposure, if you will, on those other channels. You know, doing more on YouTube this year I've been tweeting more. And then of course, you know, the podcast continues to get really great engagement. So yeah, that's sort of what I'm seeing here in 2019 as we head into 2020
Speaker 7 24:46 Hey, this is Rob walling from startups for the rest of us. MicroComp and tiny seed. Gentlemen, thank you so much for inviting me to participate in your 200 episode and a huge congratulations on making it to that incredible milestone. I was reading a stat the other day that was talking about how there are 750,000 podcasts in iTunes, I believe, and that may be a year or two old, but that only 22% of podcast listening is done in the car and there's so much room for expansion and just so much more of a market. Um, I believe we're just barely scratching the surface at this point. So translation, I think this whole podcasting thing may just work out and a super stoked that you guys have made it to episode 200. So you had a couple of questions for me. And the first one is what tactic or strategy have you recently learned about that you're finding to be uncommonly effective?
Speaker 7 25:37 And the one that I am seeing working with the founders that I work with through tiny seed MicroComp and, and you know, my advising and an angel investing is partnerships and integrations. And you know, there's several examples of that working in the current tiny seed batch. And um, this is something that has, has worked forever. You know, it's integration marketing and it provides, it's one of the only channels that provides value to both your existing customers and also drives top of funnel, uh, you know, visitors and such. And there, there really is only one or two channels that are like that. The interesting thing is if you're thinking about who to integrate with, look at what comes before or after you in, in the chain so to speak. So for example, if you were an email service provider, like you know, if you had built drip, uh, or if you were a MailChimp, what comes before an ESP will?
Speaker 7 26:28 Typically it's, it's landing pages or popups, you know, so you might look at, at a tool like lead pages or Insta page, click funnels, opt in, monster, Sumo, you know, any of those JavaScript forms or landing pages that would feed data into, so that'd be a great integration. And then what comes after someone has that email list in their marketing to them. And typically it is a commerce, you know, typically you're trying to sell something to folks on your email list. So that might be commerce platforms like a Stripe, a PayPal, Shopify, Gumroad, send owl, you know there's, there's a number of them, you know, there's a number of them to consider and obviously look at your own specific situation based on what comes before and what comes after and what is a complement of your product. Question number two, what tactic or strategy are you finding to be less effective today that you used to rely heavily on?
Speaker 7 27:17 And this comes back to something, you know, I've been saying for years, I had a blog post probably eight years ago. Marketing tactics have a half life. And so we've seen certain tactics come into Vogue, you know like the Google Chrome app store, the web app store. That was a big driver in the early days for Pipedrive and a couple other tools that got in early and got traction. But trying to get in there now and market your app is, it's not impossible. It's just much, much, much, much harder. Same thing with Google AdWords. We've heard entire companies get started and built on the five, 10 20 cent ad-words glicks and those days are gone. Again, it's not that ad, again, it's not that ad words doesn't work anymore. It's that it's so much more expensive that it's a whole different ball game. And I think even Facebook ads while still viable, you know, are more expensive by the day.
Speaker 7 28:03 So these things do tend to come into Vogue. Everyone starts talking about them and then over time they just kind of, they get too expensive or they burned themselves out and they don't necessarily work as well anymore. And the halflife piece implies, you know, it's not that it doesn't work at all, it's that it's half as effective after a couple of years and then another half is effective. So it's a quarter as effective. And then, you know, it's just an analogy or you know what, that's just a basic analogy to kind of get your head around the, you know, the decay of the effectiveness of a lot of these things. And it's the tactics. You know, you could say something like SEO, organic search is really a strategy, but the tactics to get there as what you know, stops working over time. So all that said, there's several that I'm seeing working less and less these days.
Speaker 7 28:42 But, uh, one I'll call out is cold email. I think that, you know, cold email had a real real bump when a predictable revenue came out in 2011, 2012 timeframe. We saw a lot of startups come out that were both doing cold email and providing data for cold email and over time, it's not that it doesn't work, but these certain verticals have just gotten inundated with it. So it's, it's just not working as well if you're aimed at, at these folks who are online and have already received thousands or tens of thousands of, of these cold emails. So the interesting thing is I am still seeing it working in verticals that are not inundated, so not start up founder designers and podcast hosts, but in these really tight verticals, these niches where cold email hasn't already had a tough life burnout. So thanks again, gentlemen for inviting me to participate. And again, huge congratulations on reaching your 200th episode milestone and that guy's lawyer, founder of fixed my turn. We are a team of specialists dedicated to helping you increase your conversions
Speaker 3 29:41 and reduce your customer turn for monthly recurring revenue based businesses. So what tactic or strategy have I learned recently that I'm finding to be uncommonly effective personalization without using the first name. So first name personalization has been around for a long time and it is still effective. I'm not saying don't do that, but gathered data and you probably already have the data on other pieces of information about your subscribers, where they came from, what emails they've already gotten from you, what products they're interested in, who they may have talked to, where they live. There are so many different data points depending on your type of business that you can use, that you can then plug into your emails using a little liquid taxed depending on what kind of ESP are using. Uh, you can plug in the specific information with using if else messaging, uh, to say, you know, if somebody has this particular, uh, status about them, this piece of data, then deliver this message and if they don't then deliver this message.
Speaker 3 31:02 This is really effective on product launches, on feature release announcements on in so many ways. Even just your regular ongoing newsletter and ongoing communications. You can use data other than the first name personalization to make emails feel super personalized, highly targeted and all customers want is to feel seen and heard. So you really help people feel seen and like they matter when you're able to tell them information that's relevant to them and them alone. And what tactic am I finding to be less and less effective today? That I used to rely on heavily? I would say the most change I've seen is in time-based email sequences. Again, with that customers wanting to feel seen and heard, it's really important that we create onboarding sequences that are behavior based, that are based on things that they're actually doing or not doing with your product and sending emails based on that. Mixing that in with some time based emails for consistency and especially if the behavior is sending is only on doing. Then if they aren't doing anything you want to send some time based emails as well, but time-based alone doesn't get the job done anymore. You have to meet your customers where they are and speak to what they are doing or not doing. Again, it's another form of personalization but I transferred into this idea of
Speaker 8 32:40 behavior based emails versus time-based emails only. Hey Craig, thanks for having me on. My name is Taylor Hendrickson and I own her opera about five or six different businesses across lead generation selling physical products, digital products and about everything in between. A focus on sales funnel architecture and we drive a lot of paid traffic and sell a lot of things online. So the tactics that have stopped working in 2019 as well as what we're shifting to coming into 2020 are actually very closely related. So in 2019 and most of the history of the internet paid advertising ran off a first click cold sale. So you attract people very cold. Coming on the internet with, it's coming in from search terms, um, through AdWords or Bing or target them demographically, um, through Facebook or YouTube or places like that. And it was for a long time. You were just trying to drive as many goes cold clicks and have them convert on that first visit as possible.
Speaker 8 33:33 Well that works as long as costs are very low and you can afford to buy a huge amount of traffic and only siphon off a top like one or 2% of the people who convert. But as traffic costs continue to rise and almost double to triple every single year, that is becoming less and less feasible to do so. A lot of people who are making very good money in that for a long time have now had to go back to the drawing board and either go seek out new channels who are still having low costs or shifted this new method of attracting, nurturing and growing the demand for your product, which we'll be doing through 2020. The main core of this strategy is influenced by two predominant ideas. First off, we could reports, did a study back a year or two ago and found that across $4 billion in ad spend, it took on average 42 days for somebody go from first impression or first click to actually purchase.
Speaker 8 34:20 And the other piece of it is a single individual need anywhere between seven to 11 touch points with a brand before they're ready to buy. So that kind of flips all of the first click cold conversion idea on its head. What we're going to be doing now going into 2020 is a lot more putting out information or in fewer content on the front end. That's kind of a level one cold targeting to start to engage people who we think will be interested in our stuff. This is the only time where we actually use cold targeting. So such as interests, keywords, or lookalike audiences can depends on what platform we're using. Um, and this is the time that we're, all we're really trying to do is figure out if they're interested or not in the thing that we're talking about. So there's basically it's shouting to a big room saying, Hey, who's interested in softball?
Speaker 8 35:05 Whoever raises their hand, so you guys come over here, we're going to talk to you, separate everybody else, go about your business, and then from there all of your future followups including the stuff you're actually trying to sell will only be directed towards those people. So you're just trying to be able to get more touch points with your brand, show more authority, and develop more of a relationship before you ever ask to withdraw that relational equity in the form of a purchase. What I recommend for most brands to do is figure out how are you going to reach out and introduce yourself, especially in low cost ways. Most of the time we do not actually want them to click to our website. We're just trying to get people in an engagement audience, whether it's they're engaging with their posts, watching the video ads or whatever to show us if they are interested in whatever we're talking about or selling. After that, we'll walk them through our normal sales messaging, introduce them to the product, showing the benefits of them. And then for those people who have engaged and haven't purchased yet, but we know we're really close, we'll walk them through a third stage of maximization, which is pretty much catching as much as we can that have fallen out of the funnel for whatever reason. So this is the kind of multi-step, multichannel approach that many companies will have to turn to as ad costs on the primary platforms will only continue to rise in the future.
Speaker 9 36:16 I am Ruben Gomez and I'm the founder of Bidsketch and doc sketch. So a Bidsketch is a sass app for proposals and doc sketches, a SAS app for electronically signing documents. I've been doing this for about, uh, this being, uh, growing and building SAS for about 10 years now. So one of the things that we've noticed, uh, lately that has been working really well for us, it's a lot better than you would think is this concept that I learned from a couple of people that work at HubSpot that they internally over there, they call it surround sound. And what it is is basically you want to be everywhere that someone who's just about to buy your product where they'll be looking. The twist is that it doesn't mean that if somebody is searching in Google for you know, the best uh, electronic signature app that we have to be number one, uh, in Google search results or anything like that.
Speaker 9 37:14 It just means that on any posts or articles that are to have lists of these apps, we want to be in all of those articles or as many of those articles as we can be. And because somebody is in this buying mode and we're being mentioned by other people, we're finding that this traffic tends to convert way higher than anything else that we've seen. We're looking at like 30 to 50% conversion rates from a visit to sign up. And then once they get into the app, the activation is much higher and everything's just, everything's just better. That's been working really well. One of the things that has not been working as well, um, not something that we used to do a lot and just isn't that good. Uh, lately, last couple of years actually, uh, but especially lately is um, running the blog. Uh, like if we were a publisher, meaning that we would just post two, three times a week and just keep posting content, just keep creating content that used to work really well.
Speaker 9 38:17 Just the more volume you'd put out there, the better it would do, more traffic you'd get. And um, as soon as this person, his name, his last name was Hough. Hufford uh, Brendan, sorry if I'm getting the name wrong, but uh, he had a good way. I've been struggling with the way to, to describe it the way, you know, instead of doing that instead of just publishing content, that way, way to treat it is to think of it more as a library. So you have your content and you keep updating it and you keep improving it, uh, and everything's there for a reason. So, uh, those are, those are my thoughts. Thanks.
Speaker 10 38:56 Hey Brecht Palombo here and I'm the founder of distressed pro.com. We have been in business online since August 31st of 2009, so over 10 years in starting a second brand now called Realty motor. And Dave asked me to talk about what tactic or strategy have you recently learned about that you're finding to be uncommonly effective. And I don't know that I've recently learned about this, but I will say that one thing that we've dug much deeper into over the last year or so is segmentation and really trying to deliver the correct message to the person at the right time. And so, um, one of the things we're using for that is called ConvertFlow convertflow.com and um, what we do there is we tune each of the calls to action on the website to match exactly where the person is on their journey according to, uh, what's happening within the marketing automation or CRM software.
Speaker 10 40:05 And so we've increasingly, uh, turned to, uh, more and more segmentation order to deliver a, uh, the, the right message at the right time, a tactic or strategy. The second question is, what tactic or strategy are you finding to be less and less effective today? That used to rely on heavily and, um, the, unquestionably, the answer there is the, the content hamster wheel. For a very long time. It was of the utmost importance that we would produce regular content once or even, uh, twice or up to three times weekly. We're just continually pumping out content. Uh, and in fact, over the last, uh, 12 months, what we've done is we've reduced the content on our site by more than, uh, it's by more than half. So, uh, by about 60%, we've reduced the content and consolidated, uh, those pages. And the result is that we're up, our organic traffic is up a little better than 20%, uh, for year over year for, uh, for the previous month for this justice path past month.
Speaker 10 41:17 And so I think the days of, uh, where the beating the drum of that you have to continually produce content, um, and share it on social media and all that. For us, that was absolutely not true. That was, uh, uh, it may have been for a time, uh, but the opposite is true today. And so, uh, one thing that we've done that's, that's maybe counterintuitive is we've done the less and less and less, um, and the, uh, the result is that we're, uh, w there's fewer, fewer deadlines, less stress and um, and more traffic and the quality of the content that we have. Rather than constantly producing new content. We're just readdressing the old content, uh, or the more mature content that we have to make sure that it is serving the, uh, the user, the reader in the best possible way for that particular search intent. So hope that's helpful. And Dave, thanks so much for asking me to do this and thanks for all your 200 shows.
Speaker 11 42:26 Hi, Craig and Dave. Uh, thanks for asking me to answer a couple of questions for the podcast. So my name's Robin Warren. I run a company where we build out ons for Trello. The main one is called Carrillo, which is dashboards for our general teams using Trello. None of that is relevant to what I'm about to tell you. Um, so you had a couple of questions. The first was what have I learned recently that's making a difference in my business? And this is really a takeaway from Microcom for Europe this year from a couple of people I had conversations with, which is that you don't get to decide the company that you build. The market is going to define that for you. So once you get to product market fit, yeah, you get to choose your product, your market, and if you work it out all right and you get lucky, then you get to product market fit.
Speaker 11 43:12 But after that point, the market really defines what you need. If the market says you need to do in person sales, you need to do emphasis idols. If the market says you need to build a team of 20 engineers and build all these capabilities out and blah, blah, blah, then then that's what you got to do. And if you don't do that, maybe you can exist for a while, but a competitor will come along and, and do that. Um, and that's been really beneficial for me because it's allowed me to sort of step outside the business a little bit and think about it in a slightly more abstract terms. What does this business need to be and then build that build up company building that business face at me. Um, and you also asked me what tactic used to work but isn't working anymore and it's sort of related to the previous question.
Speaker 11 43:54 The tactic which isn't working for me anymore is writing code. Myself. A year ago I built and launched a whole second product for the company and this year when I write code, I just ended up standing all over the toes of my developers. I may get back there at some point you'll find some way that I can do it usefully. But at the moment I don't have enough time to really dedicate to writing code and I need to accept the, I just need to remove myself from that and rely on better people basically to write the code for me. All right, cheers. Well all the best. Congratulations on 200 episodes and here's to the next 200
Speaker 2 44:32 Chez. All right so thanks to everybody who contributed to this episode here. We really appreciate all of the time and energy that you've put into your answers and giving the insights to those questions cause I think those are super important things here as we close out 2019 and as always, if you feel like this podcast has been helpful to you, please share it with somebody that you think would benefit from it. We would really like you to spread the word and you know, make other people's lives better with it as well. And once again, thank you so much for listening. Hope you had a great 2019 we're looking forward to being with you.
Speaker 0 45:15 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>.
