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 00:22 All right, we'll come back to the rogue startups podcast. This is episode two Oh four. Dave, how are you doing this week?
Speaker 2 00:28 I'm doing great. How about yourself? Yeah, doing good. I'm very excited about big snow, tiny comp coming up here in preparation for it now and it's coming up in a very short period of time.
Speaker 1 00:40 Nice. And you have a full house again.
Speaker 2 00:43 We have full house. Um, it's super easy to get a full house at this point because there's just so many people that are repeats and you know, it's turned into a mastermind retreat instead of a general conference. So the folks that are committed to it are all, you know, they come there specifically to give their history, to talk about the history, to hear what everybody else is up to and get some, you know, solid, reasonable feedback. So, um, yeah, it's a nice safe place to talk about how fucked up your business and, and how shitty your plans are for the next year and how, how you might improve them and not fuck up really badly. Um, yeah, so that's, that's great. I love that about it.
Speaker 1 01:30 How hard is it to compress like that amount of feedback into a couple of days. And the reason I ask is like, you know, like we've had uh, two retreats and the tiny seed folks just got done with the third one, um, in key West. And I wasn't able to go just cause it's a long way to go and we had some other kind of personal stuff going on here. Um, but I know that like from the first two that I was a part of, like in Minneapolis and then in Croatia that like two days of nonstop talking about your business is totally exhausting and totally energizing at the same time. Uh, is it the same way for, for y'all?
Speaker 2 02:06 Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And in fact, I don't know that I would want to make the conference any longer than it already is because that you go really deep and it's super intense. So it really starts in earnest on Monday night. In fact, this year, the one thing that's really different and we're changing is that previously on Monday night, it was kind of like a, you know, wait for everybody to show up and get to know each other and just hang out and talk. But after, you know, so I think, I forget whether I'm on five or six years, which is kind of embarrassing. You'd think I would know that. Right. Um, so after, you know, a few years of us getting together, it became clear that the Monday night part was not as valuable as it was the first two years. And because we are, you know, we have 12 people.
Speaker 2 02:51 So that means in the two full days that we are together, that's six talks a day and we start at three in the afternoon. So if you do the math and there's an hour for dinner, you're done about 10 at night, which is late. A lot of people come in from the East coast. They're just cooked completely fried by the time that comes rolling around and they're like, yeah, I would really like it if we could maybe move a couple of these sessions to Monday. And I was like, okay, yeah, sure, we'll do that. So this year we're moving two of them to Monday night. So we'll start those at seven, which is usually a more casual day anyway, we'll just get some pizza so we don't even have the catered dinner that night. Um, we'll start with the pizza. People start bullshitting and then at seven o'clock I'll kick it off with my session and then we've got one more session after that.
Speaker 2 03:37 And then that means we have five sessions the next two days. So we can be done at like nine. So for those that are, you know, that want to stay up, which, you know, generally I think we stay up, it kind of varies but I don't remember going to bed much before 11 most times and I'm there cause just, you know, the conversation keeps going. And one year I gave a bonus presentation on some stuff that uh, I was working on on the side and we talked about that for an hour. So you just never know what's gonna come up. Sometimes it's like a follow on because everybody only gets 45 minutes to do their thing, which usually, you know, there's an hour slot that we have a little bit of transition time and then we say you've got 45 minutes for your thing. And that also allows for, you know, if there's 10 more minutes of questions, you've got room to do that.
Speaker 2 04:24 But we try to keep it pretty strict on the timing so that everybody gets their chance and everybody, you know, the 45 minutes is a lot of times. So you know, it's not like you don't have time to talk about your stuff. And most people at this point kind of opt for the mastermind format. Yeah. So they come in, they say, here's what I've been doing, here's what I'm thinking of doing. What do you all think? You know? And that that format seems to work pretty well and people get really deep good feedback about it and it, you know, oftentimes one person's discussion will then slide into another person's mastermind so that, you know, one person might present something and the next person be like, well, like this other guy was saying, here's what I ran into over here, blah blah blah. And then we might continue that discussion.
Speaker 2 05:13 We might add to that discussion, you know, who knows there might be a new answer that the previous guy gets because we've now continued it in the second one. So you know, you just never know what's going to happen. But it really is intense and it is both energizing and exhausting. So you're doing this for five hours a day. We go skiing for five hours a day. So you're physically tired, you're mentally tired, but at the same time, you're hanging out with people that really, like you're talking about something that really makes you excited. And you know, we're all, we found our tribe, right? Because we're all kind of weird in the sense we love talking about this stuff and not many people love to hear about this talking about this. Right. So the fact that you're in a room with 11 other people that all love to talk about this stuff and they want to talk about it too is really cool.
Speaker 2 06:05 So that's not something you get very often and yeah, I don't know that I would want more than a couple of days, but I have determined that I probably want more than once a year. Like once a year isn't enough. So I think I'm trying to do big summer tiny comp and I just trademark that, so don't try to get the domain. Um, so yeah, big summer, tiny comp, and we'll do something here in the Colorado mountains. I don't know what, you know, we could do river rafting, we could do hiking. There's a Lake that's pretty accessible from Denver and just, uh, go out on a boat or, you know, I dunno. There's, there's lots of options there. Definitely options.
Speaker 1 06:52 Yeah. I, you know, I, I know that I will miss this aspect of like the tiny seed cohort and like this year long thing a lot. Um, then if I've already been kind of chatting with advisors and people about like, it's really going great and I've really gotten a lot out of, you know, we've gotten a lot out of using the money and we've gotten a lot out of the mentorship and the community and stuff like that. And you know, the, the community in the mentorship will, will still be there to some extent, but not as organized as, as it will be here going forward. And so I'm already thinking about like maybe getting big snow tiny cup Europe started again. Um, we were going to do something, um, that we were calling European founders retreats, which is, you know, basically the same thing, but maybe not skiing. Um, and you know, really thinking about organizing something about that for next year. Um, because, uh, yeah, it's massive to to have the people that know you and your business really well, um, that you're comfortable and can be open and honest and transparent around easily. Um, is super important. And I, I, I, I am envious that you guys have been doing this with basically the same crew for so long. That's, that's really cool cause that just makes the conversations that much more fruitful, you know?
Speaker 2 08:09 Right. There's a richness to being able to go and say, all right, well what happened from last year? So you know that and you already have a history. You kind of extend on what you already know and then you kind of find out, all right, look, you had these big plans. What, what came of that? Did you stay with the big plans? Did you totally go off to the side? Was it something different? Like you just never know what you're going to end up getting as a result of that, which is really cool.
Speaker 1 08:35 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Are you, uh, are you able to share what you're going to be talking about, uh, in the, in the conference or is it too, uh, too close to the vest?
Speaker 2 08:45 I know some people are that attend the conference are going to, are also listeners in the podcast here, so, but they're going to get it after the, you know, they're going to make snow tiny starts on Monday, so this isn't going out before Monday, February 3rd. So I'm not too worried about them hearing that beforehand, but basically I'm talking about recaptures growth and the fact that I was kinda surprised by what happened last year and it didn't really see that coming in that particular way. Uh, and I have a list of growth initiatives for 2020 and I'm kinda bouncing those off the group there, but the rest of it I'd say is kind of under lockdown.
Speaker 1 09:24 Gotcha, gotcha. I would imagine that that general theme is what most people are talking about, right? I mean, if it's anything like the, the tiny seat group, it's mostly about product market fit marketing, sales team. Uh, I mean that's, that's most of what a business businesses. So it's not surprising that that's, that's what everybody wants to talk about.
Speaker 2 09:43 Well, I'm going to surprise you and say no, it's not always what it's about, right? Yeah. I mean, there are ancillary topics that come up, you know, sometimes it's about hiring, sometimes it's about managing remote teams. Uh, for one business it was about experiencing a massive lack of growth despite all kinds of efforts that were being put into the contrary. And them having some very successful years prior and they weren't really able to pin down why their market was contracting. So, yeah, I mean there's, there's a lot of stuff that goes on in there. Um, that isn't necessarily about, all right, I want to try tactic X. How does that work for you guys? Yeah, there's some of that, you know, I don't want to say there's none of that, but yeah. I mean, the topics are as varied as the businesses. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 2 10:37 Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of glad that we've gotten away from the presentation format because I feel like the mastermind format is much more intimate and you know, when people are willing to share very personal details about the business and then you in turn share personal details about your business, it definitely creates a bond amongst the attendees. Like, Hey, you know, I trust you enough to talk about my revenue numbers and be completely transparent about everything that's going on in my business. Whereas I don't share that with anybody else or I only share that with my partner or you know, my significant other or whoever, you know, like it definitely is a level of trust that is very welcome and appreciated.
Speaker 1 11:22 Nice. Nice. Well that's cool man. I'll, uh, I'll be anxious to hear how it goes. Um, yeah, all around just, you know, how it goes logistically and fun and skiing and all that kind of stuff. Um, I am, uh, I'm taking a little mini founder retreat myself to our, I'm going skiing on Friday.
Speaker 2 11:40 I see.
Speaker 1 11:41 And, yeah, I mean I've just been busting my ass lately and things are going really well and I kind of am, it's going to be a slow day work-wise and work a little bit, do some email and get ahead and then, you know, I'll be back by three or four o'clock tomorrow. I can, you know, work another couple hours tomorrow afternoon late. But uh, it has been raining here where we are for the last like three days. So I know it's been snowing up in the mountains, so it's uh, it's the day and it's going to be perfectly sunny. So it's like the perfect day to go.
Speaker 2 12:12 Nice. Nice. That makes, that makes a huge difference. Yeah. Yeah. I've looked at the snow conditions up in Beaver Creek right now. They've got like a 46 inch base. They've had five inches in the last 72 hours. That's awesome. And uh, we have forecast for snow on Tuesday and Wednesday, both. So those, those are the days that we're skiing are, sorry, Monday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all three. I think. Uh, it's, it's slated to snow and the snow pack is like at 109% of normal for what they normally, what they usually get up there. So I know that our conditions are going to be pretty good.
Speaker 1 12:48 Nice. Nice. Cool. How are things with you? Yeah, man. Things, things are good. You know, uh, like I've been, I've been thinking about this thing a lot, which is like, um, moving into basically only doing really high leverage, high value things, uh, of like my time in the business. And um, it's an easy trap to, to like fall out of because you can just like, you know, quote, just do some support or just do some marketing or just do some like a development planning or whatever. Um, but I've been doing a really good job lately and I think that's why like business is going well and I'm happy and less stressed and everything is, I've been really diligent about not just getting in the weeds and fixing a problem directly, but like working with the team to set a process and document we're doing and all this stuff to where like, like my goal is to basically only ever do anything once.
Speaker 1 13:55 And I know like it's, it's an unachievable goal, but like the closer I can get to it, the know, I know that like I'll be happier, they'll be happier, they'll be, um, you know, more, um, capable of being successful in their roles, you know, by, by themselves without me, like being there to, to kind of push the chain. And um, and it's really cool. It's really cool. It's a really good feeling. Um, it's taking like a fair amount of patients and it's definitely like a learned skill. But I think like what I realized is like, at the level we're at would just like the number of customers and the number of things that everybody's doing. I don't, I don't have the time to, to, to all this stuff, you know, and like when I get really super stressed is when I'm in the weeds in like three different parts of each business every day.
Speaker 1 14:49 And I'm just like, this is crazy. I'm doing a bunch of work and really nothing is getting done. We're just like treading water. Um, and so like, yeah, I've, I've been kind of proud of myself of, of doing that to the extent that I've done it in the last, you know, whatever a couple months. Um, and yeah, we're, we're having really, really, really good months, uh, for both businesses and that's awesome. Yeah. That's excellent. That's excellent. Yeah. Yeah. I want to talk at some point and I don't feel like I've gotten my head around it exactly about like our success with sales at podcast motor. Um, we're definitely like, we've definitely figured some stuff out there. Um, and I know this is like a big question that people like, people that are doing sales as opposed to marketing to acquire customers have is like, how do you, you know, how do you do sales? How do you structure sales agreements, stuff like that. Um, we probably should do an episode about what we're doing, what has worked and what hasn't worked at some point because, um, it's amazing like when you get somebody who can sell and really drive the revenue side of the business, it makes just everything easier. So we should, we should slate that as a future episode.
Speaker 2 16:05 Yeah. I would love to hear what you are finding works for sales associates because that is a conversation that's also being had in the big snow chat about hiring salespeople. What kind of a commission structures should you have? How do you deal with recurring revenue? What does that look like if a customer churns at what point, you know, is there a churn point at which you say it's okay or not okay to, you know, to do a commission for the sale. How much should the commission be? You know, it should it be all commission. Lots and lots of open ended questions that don't have a single answer that are very interesting to ponder for that process. They're a, you know, we don't have that process in recapture. And I don't see that process happening in the immediate future in 2020, but if we eventually start moving up market and we go to enterprisey kind of sales, then we're going to need somebody who's like calling people up and knocking on their doors and saying, yo, you want to sign up for this big enterprise plan here because that's what the process looks like. So, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 17:11 yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, it's, it's just been interesting all around, you know, like alignment of priorities, super important. Um, uh, and how that aligns with compensation. You know, though all those, you know, those three legs of the stool have to be kind of, uh, going in the same direction. And, um, yeah, I mean, we, we've, we've got a lot of it right at the beginning and we learned some things and adjusted, uh, as we've gone. But, um, I think the, the thing I would want to say is there's not an answer. You know, there's things that have worked for us because of the business we're in and the place we need sales help, you know, like the kind of sales help we need. Because I mean it's especially you get into like B to B SAS, there's, you know, um, God, what do they call them?
Speaker 1 17:55 Uh, BDRs, I'd have enough, I'm going to screw up the names but, but there's basically people that cold email and cold called to just get, uh, uh, a demo booked with the actual sales rep. and then there's no, they even had a title. Yeah, I just thought that was sales. Yeah. No, I mean, not me too. Like when I was in sales, I was both, I was the, I was the Hunter and the closer and the part of the fulfillment. And that's, that's kinda one of the big no-nos of sales is like the person who goes and gets the sales shouldn't be the person that onboards the customer. And I think this and this model I'm talking about, they even break the, the front part of that out a little more to say like, the, the person that gets the lead is not the person that closes the lead and that neither of those people are the person that is like success and onboards the customer.
Speaker 1 18:46 So anyways, this is, this is a prelude to another episode maybe, but, um, yeah, I mean I think if, if you're in the type of business and like for us Casios is absolutely not that kind of business. Um, right now where we would need sales. Um, you have to have a pretty high price point for, for it a sales process to work. Um, but, but if you wanted to say, what is that magic point, do you think? Yeah, I, I mean, I think it's, um, it's probably like a potential revenue number. It's not like a average customer value number, but you know, because like if you, if you could close a bunch of hundred dollars a month customers then then, and you just needed a sales person to get those people over the hump, then maybe that would be a good, a good roll. But I mean, we're selling, you know, $500 to several thousand dollar launch packages now.
Speaker 1 19:39 And that, you know, justifying a sales rep for that is, is really easy. But, but also just cause like our customers want to talk to a human being, um, almost across the board unless they know me. Basically. We, we S very, very, very rarely sign on a new customer without them talking to somebody. And so we have to have a salesperson and now that we have a sales person, basically we're able to kind of go up market a little bit is what we're finding of like selling higher price point things, creating some new packages, um, because we have somebody that can kind of fulfill that responsibility, you know? Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I know at $20 a month Costos will never have a salesperson, which is fine. That's just not the model. No, not, yeah.
Speaker 2 20:30 So, uh, speaking of sales, uh, we have been doing a lot of work and by we, I mean me, um, I've been doing a lot of work with paid acquisition on Shopify, so we started testing that, um, just Thanksgiving this year and then just after Christmas I shut it off so I could have a comparison window of something that was kind of similar. Although there's really no two months of the year that are truly similar except maybe like the couple of months coming up. Cause every month the traffic is like building, building, building, and then by the time you hit November, it's kind of a crescendo and it dives a little bit in December and it kinda craters in January is everybody catches their breath, but then it starts to build again in February. So I was trying to find a way that I could get some stats to find out, you know, as paid acquisition, working, what are my, you know, what's my CAC if I'm using Shopify ads and stuff like that. And you know, what kind of a boost is it giving me? And so based on, you know, my two whole months of data that I have here, which is really Jack shit, statistically speaking, uh, I did find that it's that paid acquisition is doubling my, uh, trial to paid rate or install a paid rate. Well that's great. Yeah. And my CAC is pretty low, like a one 500th of our sea of our LTV. Oh wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2 22:05 So I got, I've got a lot of
Speaker 1 22:07 about that first metric. Uh, can you explain how the ad works in the kind of trial adoption buying cycle of the customer?
Speaker 2 22:17 So this is in the Shopify app store and they just started this program actually back in the beginning of November. And just by pure luck, I was browsing this store one day and I jumped in and I contacted Shopify support and I said, Hey, how can I get in on this? And they're like, Oh, well, we're just doing a beta right now and we already have all the people we want to work with. Three days later they emailed me back, said, do you want to get in? And I'm like, hell yeah. So I jumped, I jumped on board and I set it up immediately and I just started hammering it just so I could get statistics and find out what the hell is out there. And I started adding stuff. As I saw more things, more keywords, I could search for more targeted stuff and even more general stuff just to see what, you know, you have no data on this platform, so it's cheapest. Hell, just try everything and see what the fuck's going on. Yeah. So I did that and I got some statistics on all of that. Uh, and then I, you know, shut it off and let it go for another month so I could have something to compare with. Um, but I don't know what the fuck was your question. Where, where does
Speaker 1 23:20 the ad like come in and end to the customer side? Cause I like me not knowing how it works. I would think that it would increase your total install rate if it's like somebody searches for abandoned cart plugin, whatever, and you have an ad they would install it and then they'd go through your cycle. But you're saying that it's affecting your install to trial rate, is that right?
Speaker 2 23:43 Uh, no. So installs are the same as trials basically. Uh, when somebody goes to <inaudible>, so the, the, the, the right now the, the cycle goes like this. You search on the Shopify app store, you find the app or thing, keyword, whatever it is you're looking for. You look through the listings that are in there. You pick something that looks good to you and you either decide to install it or you move on to something else. And I can tell some of those stats in there based on searches and installs. So I can see when I have people searching for my keyword, they hit my listing, but they don't necessarily install it. I can tell that. So that's a visitor to trial. But then the ones that install those ones, I can say, all right, I have N number of those in a month and I have Y that convert to paid.
Speaker 2 24:31 So I can tell you what my trial to paid or install the pay. That's the same really what that looks like. So that's the thing. So what they'd done with the ads is that the top three results on any search page are now ads in the Shopify app store. Gotcha. So for me, it was actually a major boost in the rankings because I was hovering anywhere between seven and 10 or lower, depending on the page, depending on the keyword for, you know, just being visible in the Shopify app store. So now all of a sudden, boom, I'm in the top three, which you know, that's a massive uptake there. If you are targeting relevant keywords, if you target irrelevant keywords, then they're just walking over your ad, then you're, you're not getting those extra installs from. But I am seeing extra installs as a result of this.
Speaker 2 25:21 That's all. And it looks like, yeah, just getting more installs and because I've got a high LTV and it's a low CAC, like I could pump more money into this and make not make them a, well, I'll tell you why I don't at the moment. So what, first of all, they're still in beta and they're kind of shaking some stuff out. So what I can't tell right now and the number one thing that they're looking to fix is attribution. So I'm getting more installs and I'm getting slightly higher paid rates. But are those installs that I'm getting from paid, are they more likely to turn or more likely to convert? I can't tell you the answer to that question right now. And if they're more likely to churn, then I'm wasting my money if I'm just getting, you know, a higher rate. I mean it doesn't make total sense because I'm doubling the rate that that's exactly what's going on.
Speaker 2 26:15 But I would like to know, you know, how effective is the paid cause if my paid is like three times as effective as my, um, organic, then I want to dump as much money as possible into this and just get shit tons of customers. Um, and also if for me to dump in tons of money into paid right now doesn't make a ton of sense because this is the lull time of the year. This is not when the serious stores are really looking to make their moves. And I want the serious stores that starts to happen late February, early March, all the way through the summer. So if I'm going to target anything that's going to be the time that I just go hog wild on the budget. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's definitely not a, not a question of does this make sense? Yell. Yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 2 27:02 Uh, it's a question of timing and making sure that I hit the traffic and get them as early as possible and get the ones that are serious. Cause I do see, you know, I still see a significant number of tire kicker stores. If you're making zero, I can't help you. So I don't want those stores. I want the ones that are, you know, at least making a couple grand a month. Those are the ones that I can, I can benefit. Yup. And otherwise my turn rate just goes up and I don't like that. Mm Hmm. Yeah. Well it sounds really <inaudible> promise
Speaker 1 27:30 I made note without knowing much more or, or seeing like the full effect of turning him on and turning him off with respect to, to conversions and churn and stuff like that. It'll be really interesting to see how that goes and when you're able to turn that back on.
Speaker 2 27:43 Yeah. And what's also going to be interesting to see is, so we're still in the beta phase of this. They haven't really opened it up to all merchants. That's going to happen in the next few weeks. Yeah. What is that going to do to the CAC and the click costs, the CPM 10 times they're going to go away. So my dirt cheap acquisition right now is totally, I mean this is a Cinderella's period to say the least when it goes up, it's still going to be worth it to me. But the question is how much does it go up and for which keywords does it go up? You know, some keywords that I'm targeting, maybe super sweetheart keywords for me, they may not work from a lot of other people and I can still get them for the dirt cheap prices that I'm getting them now. But you know, I'm not gonna know that until I see what the whole flood looks like. So there's definitely going to be a shakeout in a shift here in the next month. I just don't know what it looks like.
Speaker 1 28:38 Would, Hmm. I would challenge a little bit to say like if they're in beta and you know the price is going to go up, even if you don't have all the data, I might continue to pour money into it now while it's cheap because it's only going to get worse. Right. Like even if it's not great right now and you're just breaking even or something, which I can't believe you are at one 500th of your lifetime value. Um, I, yeah, I dunno. I mean cause if it like 10 times in the price to acquire a customer when this goes out of beta is not unreasonable. Um, I, I dunno, I might really think about at least turning them back on and putting some money back into it while it's cheap. Even if it's just to get more data on usage and feature requests and stuff like that. Like a lot of that stuff is, is helpful even if it's not like a super direct impact on the top line, you know, just to, to, to get exposure and links and people talking about you and stuff like that. There might be some ancillary, you know, like I've heard the term umbrella effect to paid acquisition. Um, there might be some of that that might be worth looking at that you can't quantify.
Speaker 2 29:47 Yeah, to be clear, I'm not, so I haven't shut it off during this period. It's on right now. Okay. And, but you know, I still have a limit on the budget, but based on your conver, you know, based on your comments right here, I just went and doubled my budget. So there you go. Nice. Did it right on the show lie right here. That's action. I like it. So we'll see. We'll see how that goes. I know before I had it to a certain point, I wasn't quite hitting the limit of the budget. Now I'm hitting the limit of the budget. But one thing that's still very unclear to me is the effectiveness of certain keywords here. So, you know, I really have two categories of keywords and while I'm getting installs on one of them, the question to me is still very open. Are they really stain or do they find that this is lacking and they're leaving?
Speaker 2 30:37 So what I really love to be able to do is I'd like to be able to attribute an install to a specific keyword and then I can look at they, they upgraded, they churned, they didn't even finish their trial and convert so that I could say I need to double down on certain keywords and I need to abandon other keywords completely because I don't know which keywords I'm really wasting money on right now. But like you said, it's not going to get any cheaper. This is probably the cheapest it will ever be ever. So I might as well just double down while I got while the getting's good. So
Speaker 1 31:10 we've done a fair amount of paid acquisition work and um, the, the, the few things that we've learned I think are kind of universally applicable is um, spending more money than you're comfortable with or spending it in, in really focused areas and higher volumes than you would like across the whole paid ad campaign is helpful to get data quicker because otherwise if you spend $5 a day, you're going to just be there for months and like wasting money. And so like, if you can go and instead of spending $5 a day to spend $50 a day for a week, uh, you're going to get that data and see the clicks and the conversions and all that kind of stuff more quickly to where you can put that budget into like more effective use more quickly. That's something we've noticed is like really focusing on trying one thing, putting a lot of our budget into it, see if it works. If it doesn't pivot to something else, if it does, then you know, that's great.
Speaker 2 32:09 Yeah. And then double down at that point. Yeah.
Speaker 1 32:11 Yeah. But as opposed to like, I mean, at one point we, we had like seven different campaigns going and like 10 or $20 a day in each campaign. And that's just silly because it's tough to get enough data about like impressions and clicks and conversions and trials and trial conversion, then all this kind of shit. So like that's one thing we've learned. And the other thing is, um, it doesn't sound like you're in this case, but since Castillo's is like a D as we have like a decent lifetime value, um, but I mean we don't have just, you know, shit, tons of money to burn on paid acquisition is, um, we have found like going after some kind of longer tail keywords has been really effective to lower that effective like customer acquisition costs. So instead of going after, um, abandoned cart recovery email, whatever, like your, your big headliner, um, term would be, uh, maybe to go after like some of those longer tail things that are typically cheaper. The volume is less, but you probably will get people, um, at a, at a cheaper cost. So
Speaker 2 33:16 yeah, I mean, no, I, I hear exactly what you're saying there. One thing that's great about Google and Facebook to a lesser extent is that you kind of have access to a set of tools that tell you about all those long tool keywords. You can get SEM rush, you can get MAs and stuff like that. This is all so new and Shopify, like the keywords are a fucking mystery. And you know, here's literally, here's how I got my keywords. I went to the, the dropdown in the app store for Shopify and I started typing every letter of the alphabet, a, B, C, D as the first letter to see what the auto complete told me. And then based on the autocomplete, I went and looked at those and I'm like, yeah, that doesn't matter. Oh there's one of my competitors. Oh wait, there's a good one.
Speaker 2 34:04 Oh that's a general keyword. Let's try that one. So a through Z 26 attempts, that's how I found all my keywords. Right. And it's, that's ridiculous because you should have better data than that. But that's all I have. So yeah, it's just crazy what you know you have and don't have, cause I'm sure that there are long tail keywords out there that Shopify knows about and I have zero inclination as to what they are. And there are, there is a Google analytics add on that you can use. And I've done this before to sort of say here's the searches that have run in the store. But I've looked through all those keywords and I know what they are. So I added those into my campaign as well. But I can't tell you like what are other related keywords to those keywords? That's not a question I can ask.
Speaker 2 34:51 Yeah. So there, there are definite limits to this platform right now and the attribution is a big is a big thing that they are aware of. I was just on a webinar actually this morning where they were talking about that that's very high in their backlog. So that's good because I think that's super important. And you know, this is just a great channel but it's new. So the channel is not going to have all the mature tools and all of the things that you expect to have from other paid acquisition sources that you've worked with in the past. Yeah. But you know, this is very focused. So the intent is much higher here. I would not have this kind of success if I went with Google ad words and it would not be anywhere near this cheap either. So yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1 35:32 Well I'll be a, I'll just see how it goes. We're, uh, we're, we're doing some really cool things paid acquisition, uh, now that I am not going to talk about on the podcast because it's too cool. Um, but uh, yeah, shout out to Taylor Hendrickson. Uh, we, he was in our episode 200, I think, and I, you know, talked about his stuff at my micro coffee or up talk. Um, he's an amazing guy. If you guys ever get a chance to, to meet him or to hear one of his talks or anything like that. He's just genius when it comes to paid acquisition and we've been kind of working with them on a pretty regular basis. He's one of the tiny seed mentors. Um, so we're doing some pretty cool stuff there that, uh, is, is working when some other things didn't. So it's pretty cool to see when you get paid acquisition working and you know, on a, on a product market fit scale or something of paid acquisition run like a, a two out of 10 or a three out of 10 maybe like some of it's working but it's not really dialed in like where you put a dollar in here and get $3 out.
Speaker 1 36:28 But um, it's starting to, and like we still are seeing the, the promise of it. So it's, it's that elusive thing we keep chasing, but I think we're getting closer. So I bought my tickets for micron F a U S in Minneapolis, so will 100% be there. Nice. Um, there will be lots of podcasting going on, um, more. Yeah, we'll, we'll have to figure out exactly what we're doing in terms of podcasting for this show and getting the other, uh, friends and stuff. But, um, I'm sure that will be happening, which is really cool.
Speaker 2 37:05 Yeah, I think we should try to find, you know, the hard thing about the, you know, you've, you've seen some shitty, shitty results of things that I've tried to do in Vegas with that little recorder on those noisy rooms and just in the middle of the casinos and conversations that are too easily overheard next to you. So it just makes for a nightmare for you and whoever else, uh, are the poor people trying to edit that audio file. So hopefully we can find some better places here in Minneapolis at the Hyatt new, you know, totally new venue, totally new place. So I've heard from a number of people that they're more excited about Minneapolis than they were in Vegas. So might even be a totally new crowd. I have no idea. I don't think it's going to be totally, totally new, but it will be, it'll be a little different, I think, and it'll be great for us to finally get together there after how many years? I mean, there are a lot of years, Dave, it's been a lot of years. It's 20 years.
Speaker 1 38:00 Yeah, I mean, four years since I've been, yeah,
Speaker 2 38:05 2015 I think was the date sticking in my mind, so that would be five, so, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 38:13 It's terrible, Sarah. Well, no, I'm excited about it. Uh, coming in, we have a tiny seed retreat a few days before. Um, and yeah, really looking forward to it. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 38:27 All right, well, if you have any comments about paid acquisition, things that are working for you, comments about what we're doing and we should do differently or suggestions we'd love to hear about them, send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com and as always, our one ask is if you found this to be beneficial to you, please share it with somebody you think would also benefit as well. Until next week,
Speaker 0 38:51 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>.
