Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast, where two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig.
Speaker 1 00:00:20 All right. Welcome to another episode of rogue startups. This week, I'm joined by Ruben Gamez of both Bidsketch and doc sketch as episode ribbon. And I talk about it, a lot of marketing stuff, running to companies and brands and products at once and how he looks at marketing attribution. Ruben is a really kind of thoughtful and intentional founder, and I really enjoy talking to him. Uh, he was a tiny seed mentor and we chatted a couple of times during our stent and tiny seed. And it's great to catch up with them here on the episode today. Hope you enjoy this chat with Ruben Gomez from Bidsketch and doc sketch Rubin. Welcome to the show, man. Nice to have you. Hey, thanks for inviting me. Yeah, yeah. It's my pleasure. I know we've been, we've been chatting off and on with you as like a tiny seed advisor and in like a Slack group that we're in.
Speaker 1 00:01:07 Um, and it's nice to be able to catch up here on the podcast. I thought today we would. Yeah. I'd love to kind of catch up on what you're doing with your businesses. I know you have two of them and I'd love to kind of dig into that, that balance a little bit. And then, uh, I think probably talk a fair amount of marketing, um, if that works for you. Yep. That's good. Yeah. I'm working on both businesses, but uh, really mostly on one on doc sketch, which is the newer one. Yeah. Yeah. So I know Bidsketch is something you ran for quite some time. Now, how many years has it been around? It's been around, uh, a little over 10 years now, so it's super old and, you know, in the SAS SAS. Right, right. But then doc sketches, just a couple of years old and you're kind of just recently come out of like invite beta and stuff, right?
Speaker 1 00:01:58 Yeah. Well it launched a, about a year ago. I actually should have, uh, it would have launched later, but, uh, I was doing an AppSumo deal and they didn't want me to do it. Um, you know, and uh, in early access mode they wanted me to launch it, so I, okay, cool. Cool. How was your experience with AppSumo? It was good. It was, it was great for us. Um, we, wow. It's so I've done. I did two of those with Bidsketch and that was years ago, uh, with doc sketch. Um, you know, we just did one launch and we got a lot of traffic. We got, um, good sales, some good customers, actually. It's very different types of customers than we did with, uh, with Bidsketch, uh, which was super useful. A lot of people using, um, because doc sketches and electronic signature tool, a lot of people were using other electronic signature tools, super crowded market, right. Um, like DocuSign and Adobe sign and stuff.
Speaker 2 00:03:00 And, um, what was nice about that is that, um, it, the feedback that we got was from people that had been using really using tools, paying for those, uh, other tools and they were highly motivated to move off of them because they got a great deal on something. But, um, it was, it was much easier to segment the feedback and know that it was good. Right. Because these were actual customers, um, small teams and stuff like that, they were they're already using.
Speaker 1 00:03:33 Hmm. Hmm. How do you balance, or how did you balance getting a bunch of feedback at once from an acquisition source that you can't kind of replicate over time on a new product? Because I think that's like one of the most dangerous things when you get a bunch of feedback on what people like, and don't like on a new product from, I'll say sources, you don't trust, but that's not the right term. But like, but from sources that maybe aren't as genuine as you think you might get later on, if you know what I mean. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:04:08 Yeah. Well, um, I ignore anything, uh, that's not, that's coming from a source. That's not going to be target customer. So that's why I said that it was a, it was super useful because it was easy to segment a segment out the, the, the real customers, the real, uh, the people that work with closely match what we were going after. Um, and that was because these were people that were already paying for something and, uh, oftentimes had small teams on it. So they were paying, you know, they weren't paying like $10 a month or something like that though. We do have a $10 a month plan, um, yeah. With, um, so it was, I wasn't worried about that because it was so easy to identify, um, the, the real customer and a lot of these were like small business offices and stuff like that, you know?
Speaker 2 00:05:06 Um, so it's just different than like typical, you know, you'll get a good chunk and we still got this with AppSumo like freelancers and stuff like that. Uh, but the, uh, the amount of documents that they send the volume is low. Right. So that was another thing that we're, we're paying attention to, because if it's going to be feedback coming in from somebody that sends a couple of documents in a month, and then they might go a few months without sending a cup that feedback's not that useful. Right. They're not the target customer. Yeah. So they're not going to find a lot of value in the tool.
Speaker 1 00:05:43 Interesting, interesting. I've heard, AppSumo referred to as kind of a nice way to kind of get a mini funding round. Um, did you guys kind of get enough revenue to, to have it be impactful or was it, was it not a huge kind of chunk of change?
Speaker 2 00:06:00 It was, it was OK. Um, I, I, uh, I wasn't even thinking about the money. I didn't even do it for the money. So I did it for other reasons. Um, mainly, um, a few reasons for number one for the feedback, like I said, because, uh, I knew some of it was going to be good. I was surprised at how much of it was really good. Um, so that turned out to be nicer than I thought. The other, the other thing is that when I've done AppSumo deals in the past, there are, there are a lot of branded searches and a lot of activity. There's a lot of activity around your brand during that time. And we have always had stuff going on on the content marketing SEO side. And that just helps all of that. Um, especially launched a free tool around that time. And it was, it was really, really useful to have some of that going on. Uh, there's word of mouth that happens. That's really good in the past with, uh, Bidsketch, it didn't happen this time. Uh, maybe because with doc sketches, it's a free, you know, we do freemium, uh, with Bidsketch, uh, credit card upfront. Um, so it's, it's a sort of a different sort of model, but, uh, we, in the past for Bidsketch, we got, we also just got a lot of people who bought the product outside of the deal as well.
Speaker 1 00:07:23 Yeah. I've heard that too, that they get a bump in organic sales when you're on AppSumo so that's interesting.
Speaker 2 00:07:27 Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, there were, there were a lot of good things that came with it. Um, there was a lot of support, there was a lot of, uh, you know, I to hire an extra support person, just a temporary support person to help out and train them up really quick before that happened. And, um, you know, they're basically the way that I thought of them is, uh, like a freemium user, uh, any, any AppSumo user that came in. So that's why, um, I was okay with just having somebody pay a one time fee and, um, use the product because we have a viral component to the product, people sending out documents and they see that they're using doc sketch. So there, there are a few angles to it. The cost to serve a user is not that high, uh, some products that cost to serve, serve or support user is really high and it's not a good fit.
Speaker 1 00:08:21 Mm Hmm. Yeah. I we've been approached by AppSumo a couple of times for cast dos and I just don't think that we could do it because potentially the cost to serve a customer for us is, could be very high. And I don't, I don't think AppSumo would go for like a lifetime deal with some kind of fixed amount of bandwidth or downloads or something. Um, cause that's just not really what they do. I don't think so. Yeah, for us, I don't think it would be an option, but it's a fascinating model, uh, especially for early stage products I think yeah. For the re for the right
Speaker 2 00:08:56 Ones. And if you're okay with, with doing freemium and having freemium users, um, that's basically what they are just think of them in that way. And then, but you get a little bit of cash. We ended up with, uh, 40, $40,000 from, from it.
Speaker 1 00:09:11 Okay. Yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's not nothing, right. I mean that's a half a developer salary or something. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Nice. Um, so you know, most of your time is with doc sketch these days. Um, and I know you've talked about kind of the reason to, to start doc sketch, uh, and stuff on like a startups for the rest of us episode a while back, but kinda maybe just like the cliff notes version to, to get folks who haven't heard that kind of up to speed on, you know, why transfer some of your energy and focus over from an existing successful business in big Bidsketch over to a new app in a crowded space, like you're saying, um, you know, arguably, I guess it has more market cap or like higher, higher market cap, uh, or a total addressable market or something, but I'd love to hear kind of why, why make that switch and kinda like what that process was like, um, up to this point.
Speaker 2 00:10:05 Sure. So, uh, basically it was, it was the next thing we were getting people asking us to build a electronic signature, um, functionality into Bidsketch, which we did in it's kind of standard in the proposal, uh, category, but it's a very simple, it's a very simple version of it. Um, and we integrated with other e-signature tools for, um, for, you know, workflows that were a little bit more complex and for people that actually use those tools to upload and, you know, send other things that aren't proposals. Right. Um, and, uh, we were just getting more, more and more feedback asking us to, because seemingly there's a ton of overlap between the two types of products. They do a lot of the same things. Um, except that one in one pro uh, one category, you create the, the documents and then the other, you upload the documents. Uh, so people were asking us to just like add the upload stuff and, you know, enhanced the, the e-signature, uh, workflows and make it more of a e-signature tool as well. Um, so we just, we, you know, I started taking a look at the market and I liked what I saw there. Um, couple of them were using premium. Uh, it was very big, there was some overlap with our existing product and, uh, it just felt like it was, it would be a good next thing at that point.
Speaker 1 00:11:39 Did you look at like the, the kind of technical and user experience aspect of, of the competition and say like a lot of these tools suck. I think we could do this better or was that not part of the equation for you a little bit, ideally,
Speaker 2 00:11:54 Um, you you'd go in there and you'd see a lot of tools that a lot tools do suck and people aren't that happy with them and stuff. So there was a lot of research, uh, put into what do people like and what don't they like, uh, in that category, I did jobs to be done interviews, uh, with, uh, with people that were doing that had signed up and paid for DocuSign or, or hello, sign customers. Those were some of the two that I focused on check that review sites, uh, categorize like feed, you know, what people put up, um, had on there, on the reviews for positives and negatives. And, um, it like any category, there were things that people didn't like, things that some opportunities, uh, but it wasn't full of just, you know, uh, but these are, these apps are just a bunch of dinosaurs and they're doing everything poorly or anything like that.
Speaker 2 00:12:52 Right. So it was not that sort of a situ situation. Um, so I knew that, uh, I had, I, I would have to basically have some sort of adventures some way to get customers, especially in something that, that was really crowded. Uh, so the other part of the research was just, can we own a channel? Can we do really well in here? Um, because we, we just have a good source of traffic leads and signups that, uh, others don't. So did some research on that side. I felt like we could, and, you know, started it.
Speaker 1 00:13:31 I know, like without kind of giving away the secret sauce of like customer acquisition and stuff. Uh, I'd love to, I'd love to kind of talk more about marketing and, and kind of like what, what you guys thought about as you were getting started as far as like a marketing strategy and maybe like how that's playing out. Um, and I asked because our approach is very different than I thought it would be a year ago when Denise joined our team. Um, I thought it would be a lot of paid acquisition and a little bit of content and that we do a little bit of paid acquisition and a lot of content now. So I think it's kind of flipped on its head. Um, so I'd love to hear kind of like, as you formed that hypothesis for like owning a channel or what that channel might be, how you kind of went in and, and explored and started kind of, uh, building out that space as far as like customer acquisition and kind of how that process went in terms of kind of being successful.
Speaker 2 00:14:25 Sure. So, um, first of all, because we had a lot of apps in the category, it was just, uh, about taking a look at what are they doing right now, um, to get customers that that's working for them. And, uh, there was some content marketing and stuff focused on the SEO side, but they weren't, they weren't that good at it. Um,
Speaker 1 00:14:48 Interesting. Yeah. Those are big companies to not be good at it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:14:52 I mean, they, you know, they rank, well, they get traffic, but the content out there for, you know, uh, the keywords that they're targeting and stuff, but it's not that good. And, um, the, a lot of basically a lot of it was brand, uh, which is, which is really tough to compete with. Um, so, you know, depending on how you're trying to compete with, with, uh, the products. So a lot of it was just like a lot of people getting branded searches and, uh, enterprise deals and, you know, getting customers in that way. So, uh, looked at content marketing that it wasn't wide open because everybody was ranking for all the obvious stuff and, and easy stuff, but there was enough volume to, so that it was obvious that if we put in a good effort and outranked, uh, some of these companies and got some of this traffic that, uh, we could, we could build a nice business.
Speaker 2 00:15:53 Hmm Hmm. Uh, it started really with, with just doing the same thing, kind of analyzing the competition and looking at it that way, uh, figuring out what the opportunities were. And then from there getting a list of keywords, of things, you know, content tools and things that we could build out templates and then, uh, trying to figure out, okay, what's most likely going to work to get, um, signups and customers initially, because you have, you have a lot of, uh, content that you can write or create that we'll focus on, especially if you're doing, if you're doing something like SEO, right. And it's going to be intent-based that, that, um, can get you the, the right type of person as a visitor on your website or as a lead on an email list, but the alignment can be wrong with, um, you know, with your product.
Speaker 2 00:16:49 It can be just awful little bit because where they are in the buying journey, customer persona is a hundred percent totally. And that matters a ton that matters a ton. Um, so it, you know, it, it can be, um, can be a lot of work to, to finally rank for something. And then to only to find out that, all right, this isn't going to be all that, all that useful. So the, you know, like bottom, um, I think Christopher, uh, from snapper, uh, did a really good job of laying out the, you know, their content marketing strategy when he was on here. Um, very similar strategy for, for content marketing. We followed, we just, um, we added like a tool was part of it as well. Um, not just blog posts. So I like to look at all sorts of different content, um, and templates. Um, but the alignment on, on the templates is different. And we didn't find that out till later, so that one's going to take more work, uh, more work than some of the others that we're doing.
Speaker 1 00:17:54 Yeah. Yeah, no, it's super interesting. I think I learned this like the long and slow and hard way at podcast motor is we wrote a lot of content for, um, I'll say like amateur podcasters, which are very much not our, our persona, uh, at podcast motor, you know, we have services that are $200 to a thousand dollars a month. And you know, the guy in his basement talking about the green Bay Packers is not going to spend that on getting his podcast edited and produced. Um, and so at this point, I don't know how much more content we're going to write on that site. Like the site has good domain authority and ranks really well for a lot of these keywords that I don't think we ever got a customer from. Um, but I do, but the thing that it does, like indirectly is like having articles that rank well gives your domain as a whole really good authority. And then you can rank for like, whatever you want to rank for on your homepage. You know, for us, it's like a podcast editing service is like the thing that we want to rank for. And so we rank really well for it. I think just because we have a lot of high ranking blog posts,
Speaker 2 00:19:02 More of the bottom of the funnel stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:19:05 Even though like, I don't think those blog posts drive a lot of traffic, they just support the rest of the site, um, for like what are, um, higher intent, like higher buyer, intense, um, search terms and kind of traffic it. So, yeah, I think that, it's funny how to me like, and I, you know, of course I learned this over years, it's funny to see how like a lot of traffic doesn't really matter, I think is what you're saying. Like a lot of traffic to your site, people are never going to get on an email list and certainly never going to buy, but that's okay. Um, if it helps, like your main purpose,
Speaker 2 00:19:41 If it serves a purpose. Yeah. I took a look at, uh, the traffic that you guys are getting and you, you're doing pretty well with, um, on that side, on the content side. So it's interesting to hear you say that. I would have thought that some of the, some of the key terms that you have seemed to have good alignment, but oftentimes you find out later, it's like, Hmm, there's something a little bit off about this. And it's funny how, um, how often, uh, like if you really, really, really look at when, when you ask people, how do you get, uh, how do you get customers? And they say, Oh, content marketing. It's funny. It's funny how, like, when you dig in and I've done this a lot with a lot of different founders, um, and they're like, yeah, the blog, blah, blah, blah. And, uh, Oh, okay. So, uh, what do you use for analytics? And can you track that and is it showing, um, almost always it's no. Um, so like there's no proof, like there's such a huge percentage of the people that, uh, say that they're growing off of content marketing that have no proof that they're growing off of content marketing. There's nothing that really shows that they're, you know, the blog is basically bringing them customers not truly.
Speaker 1 00:21:00 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we look at, at Casto. So we look at, because it's funny, both Denise and I are like kind of left brain marketers, and we have this spreadsheet that auto updates and pulls in from Google analytics. And we look at it a lot and we look at some kind of site-wide metrics, traffic, new trials, new paying customers. But then we also have like a list of our top 10, maybe blog posts that start trials, um, you know, people that land on that blog post and then started trial. And we just want those numbers to be going up every month too. And like, it's, it's not super scientific, but, but for, for kind of a easy pass, I think that's a good indication that like, if traffic is up and the new trials from these kind of high buyer intent blog posts are up, then we're going in the right direction. And we can say, that's, that's as good as we want to measure for now. Um,
Speaker 2 00:21:57 Um, and I bet you most, if you put, uh, the traffic and sign ups that most people get from their blog on a spreadsheet like that, it's going to be very similar. It's just going to be like five, four, 10 that are producing the trials and then, you know, Oh yeah, it's a tiny a hundred or whatever and not,
Speaker 1 00:22:16 Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:22:18 Not doing anything for the business. And if, and if you, um, and I bet you, if you take it a step further and you have another column for like converted to customers, how many, um, that number gets a little bit smaller too.
Speaker 1 00:22:32 Yup. Yup. But I think, I mean, the way we look at it is like, this is a thing that we can affect, you know, kind of, kind of indirectly. Um, but then again, it kind of supports the, the overall ranking of the site for like what we want our homepage to rank for and what we run all the other like higher intent pages to rank for. So, right.
Speaker 2 00:22:52 No, yeah, there is there's value there. And, uh, so there's, uh, there's that balance because you can say, I want to focus on all or as much as possible bottom of the funnel content that I know converts. Right. And that would be ideal. You don't write, you write, you know, 10 posts. Um, and they all come from, they all bring in a little bit of traffic, bottom of the funnel. Usually doesn't bring in, uh, as much traffic as top of the funnel and, um, and you rank really well for them. And you're bringing in a bunch of customers that way, but, uh, it's kind of hard to do that when you have no like topic goal, a relevance for Google is nowadays more and more of a thing than, than it used to be. Um, it always, always was a thing, but, uh, they've just gotten a lot better for it. The more authority you can have for certain of content and for your site to be known for that thing, especially based off of like votes, which are basically links from other sites to say, yep, here's, here's a good article or something, you know, related to this topic, um, that Google can, can use and sort of help rank your site. Um, that's super helpful. So there is, there is a balance there.
Speaker 1 00:24:07 Yeah. Yeah. One thing that we are inspired by, in our trying to do more of is, um, types of content that show our product solving a problem. Um, because I think to this point, we've had a fair amount of, uh, you know, this is how to make a podcast, or this is how to do a thing in podcasting. And now we're trying to get more into, this is how you, um, you know, what our do a thing in podcasting with Castillo's. And I look at companies like H refs and they to this so good. And it is so seamless and natural or organic looking. Um, it's just amazing. Like, I don't know how much of this you guys do, but I think like it's super high buyer intent. It's super relevant. It's super helpful because people are searching for how to do this thing. They have this problem, your tool solves this problem. It seems like a really natural fit. I don't know if you guys do much of this,
Speaker 2 00:25:06 Uh, with Bidsketch yes. With a doc sketch, we don't even have a blog. Um, Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So, uh, one of the challenges that, that, because I wanted to approach it that way without having a blog and having a publishing schedule, it's really not necessary nowadays. You just follow, um, model called topic clusters, uh, HubSpot wrote a really good article just describing how it works. Um, and basically where we go off of what our, what our buyers are ideal customers, or, you know, somebody close to that searching for, uh, what's most likely going to work. We focus on just a few of them are the early days. Um, you know, one of them happened to be a tool and, um, the other, the, uh, so yeah, none of them really were like what you would think of as a blog post, um, and then work really, really hard spend most of the time, uh, promoting that and getting, trying to get that to rank and putting in the work there, because most people do the opposite.
Speaker 2 00:26:14 They, they put in all the work on, on, you know, the blog posts or whatever it is that they're creating and then do the minimal, uh, when it comes to promotion, put it like on Twitter. And I dunno, um, yeah, if it's like a tool type thing, maybe a product hunt and then that's it they're done with it. And if it's competitive, it's, it's, you're, you know, unless you get lucky, you're not going to get, uh, anywhere with it. So if it is competitive and especially like, um, things that are low bottom of the funnel and have buyer intent, they tend to be more competitive. Like what an easy way to tell those is just, um, in H refs, if you're targeting some keywords, uh, just order by the, um, cost per click and the more expensive stuff is usually the stuff that people that, that is going to be bottom of the funnel, typically, not always.
Speaker 2 00:27:09 And then, uh, people, people have also, you know, they'll do that. They'll, they'll find a topic and then automatically write content for it and try to just, which is really an older model, um, of to saying, well, let's create the biggest, best thing for this thing. Um, and I say, it's the older amount of, because maybe content isn't what Google thinks people want for that. So really the next step should be, um, a lot of people skip this step is what's looking at what's ranking there right now. Some people do this too, just to see like, Oh, I can create some resource that's really great and better than what I'm seeing at the, at the top results. But, uh, looking at what's ranking, uh, what Google is basically what Google is. Favoring will tell you what type of content they want. Maybe they want a free tool. Maybe they want some sort of downloadable, a guide. Maybe they want a product page. They want something really small. Um, because that's the, that's the intent that, uh, they figured out works. And that's sort of the type of content that you should be creating to create something different. It'll be harder to rank that. How, um,
Speaker 1 00:28:29 Oh Jesus, what was I gonna ask? Oh, um, without giving away too much of like the secret sauce, what kinds of things have you guys found successful in terms of promoting your content and getting links and traffic again, without giving away the secret sauce? Or what would you suggest people try, uh, to, to like, try to promote their content?
Speaker 2 00:28:52 I like to say that, uh, I think people should think of these things, like, uh, kind of like if they wrote a book, you know, when somebody writes a book, they go on podcast tours, they'll do guest posts. They'll, they'll basically promote it. But it's funny when, when it's content, they don't think of promoting it in that same way. Maybe it's because they put a ton of effort and time into a book and like, okay, well this deserves, you know, a ton of time and effort for me to go promote it. I'm doing a lot of those same types of things for if it's, if it's something that's worth it, right? Like it's, it's, it's content that's going or, you know, tour, whatever that's going to deliver a good amount of traffic that is relevant and probably going to convert for you as customers it's worth the time to do, to do all that.
Speaker 2 00:29:49 Now I don't, I don't have the, um, especially a lot of people do. I don't have the time to write a whole bunch of guest posts and, you know, so I've done a few, but, uh, what I tend to do on that side is I'll, I'll like pitch some stuff. And then if I get a yes, I'll, um, I'll have a writer write it. So I'll put together an outline and, um, cause I'm a slow writer. It takes me forever. So it would be, it would be miserable for me to actually write all these guest posts. I'll just outline it and make sure it's really good. Uh, and, you know, get it posted out. I've experimented with paying writers to basically handle and, and have done that as well, uh, handle the pitching themselves writers. Don't like to do that. It's hard to get them to do that. Uh, but uh, I have found a couple that have done that. Um, but basically that's the sort of approach to that, that, uh, that, that I like to take an idea that more people should take anything what works really well, um, is like what people think of traditionally as PR uh, basically doing that for stuff that you're trying to rank. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:31:18 We had a guest on our podcast a while back, uh, that, that talked about this with, with kind of relation to, to their podcast. They've a really, really famous podcast. Um, and he was saying like, if your content is that good, then the people you're reaching out to will be grateful that you have, let them know about this, you know, like kind of, you're doing them a favor by letting them know about this awesome thing that they can then go share with their audience and look super smart. And I think a lot of us don't like give ourselves that much credit, say like, Holy shit, like this article or this report, or this tool, or whatever is something that everybody that is interested in this thing genuinely will love. And I think like if it's not, you shouldn't be doing the PR or the outreach. And if it is, then you should like Pat yourself on the back beforehand and say like, I'm going to get a lot of nos because these people don't really get it maybe, but, but like a lot of people that I'm gonna reach out to honestly are gonna think that I'm great for giving them such an awesome resource for free, basically
Speaker 2 00:32:25 In some, some stuff. Um, you CA it won't, that won't work with because it just doesn't make sense. Let's say Google is ranking. Uh, you see that, Oh, okay. These are all product, you know, or feature pages.
Speaker 3 00:32:41 Hmm it's okay.
Speaker 2 00:32:44 Like a feature page, you know, something that kind of describes, uh, I don't know, let's say let's use a Bidsketch as an example, um, following up on, on proposals or something like that. Right.
Speaker 3 00:33:00 Mmm.
Speaker 2 00:33:03 And it couldn't be a page that really just describes how the product works and that's what Google is preferring. That's, what's going to rank, that's a really hard thing to get anybody to talk about, uh, in that sort of way. It just doesn't doesn't really doesn't work. Um, so for stuff like that, um, two strategies, one is just like create a content that is related that is promotable. Uh, they can basically earn the links and that then links to that page. So you're basically kind of letting all that flow through to that page. The other thing is just do guest posting and then work it into the content that they are writing in a way that makes sense. Right. And have, have a link there, make it just relevant. Like in that case, I'd try to write a guest post about following up in sales.
Speaker 2 00:33:59 So at this point, would you consider like your content efforts successful? Oh yeah. Uh, even though we don't have a block yet I call everything that we have, that's generating traffic content. Right. Even if it's a tool. Uh, yeah. So, um, but I'm most excited about, I'm most excited about, uh, some of the slivers of traffic that we're seeing instead of, so, uh, just for some context, uh, we're getting, uh, June, we almost ended with 400,000 uniques for the month. Then we're getting about, uh, almost 12,000 signups a month. Right. Um, I'm really excited about, uh, 500 visitors a month that we're getting, uh, from a specific source. Uh, I'm also really excited about a thousand that we're getting from this other source. So, um, I feel like being able to segment and track is a really big deal and not enough people do it. I had this con uh, conversation recently with somebody and we were talking about attribution and stuff, and they were just trying to get, they're trying to, they're trying to basically understand where their customers were coming from to try and get more of them and significantly grow the business. So, uh, I think they were looking at,
Speaker 3 00:35:23 Mmm.
Speaker 2 00:35:26 Basically looking at like first touch, um, last touch, and then trying to get a clear picture of like all the different touch points between, um, what they were. I feel like that's more, when you're in the optimization mode, they weren't there yet. They wanted to double their traffic. I feel like it's more important to pay attention to just the first touch, which is what most people track and get clarity around that and get, get the actual, real story of what's going on. Because just looking at the data you're going to be misled. You're not going to understand what's actually happening happening, like mapping out that buyer's journey is super important. So I, I, um, an example of this is like with Bidsketch we knew that when we send emails, we get, we get customers. Um, when we stop sending emails, we don't get as many customers.
Speaker 2 00:36:20 So sometimes we, we would be able to see, okay, this, um, Hey, that day when we send out this email, we, we got a little bit more customers. Maybe this topic is really good. Maybe we should write more about that. Right. So that's just looking at the, uh, quantitative data. Um, so when we did interviews with buyers and mapped out that whole journey, like 30 to 45 minute interviews, like, what did you do next? What, Oh, what triggered you to start looking at that day? Why that day? Not the day before or the day after. Okay. What happened next, right? Not, not, why did you sign up or, or directly asking what triggered it? So this is more like related to the book that's been going around a lot called the mom test, just, yeah. Just implement that style of, of interviewing, but, um, do it for the, the story of them, basically starting to look and finding, you know, evaluating different choices and then picking the right choice, you know, picking your product or whatever.
Speaker 2 00:37:28 And a really common story for us was somebody had a deadline because, you know, a client, um, needed a proposal. Somebody, they were pitching a new service or something like that. Right. And they needed to write a proposal. And, um, it was, there was something different about the proposal than what they, and these are the best, the best, one of, uh, one of the segments that were the best for us, if something was a little bit different than, uh, than their typical proposal. So they, um, they didn't have much time and they needed some help with the proposal. They didn't feel confident about it. Um, they were already on our email list. They remembered that we send them emails all the time. So they, um, sometimes they would just go into Google, uh, to search because they remembered our name. So that tracking wise, that would come in as a branded search, but that's not the, really the story there.
Speaker 2 00:38:28 Right. Right. And, uh, but other people, what they would do is they would search their email. They open their search, their, what was that company? I don't remember their name, search their email propulsive. Ah, there they go click through, maybe click through the link on the email and then sign up that way that email had nothing to do with, uh, um, getting them to sign up other than like, it was, it was something that helped them remember who we were. Right. Yeah. And, and zeroing on just using that data and saying, Whoa, we got more signups to stay pissed off of this. This is good content that we should write was the wrong thing to do. Right. Putting all this data together. So what we do is we take information from those interviews. Um, we have a spreadsheet, we have like their information as far as where did they come from? As best as we know. And then we add to it, what we learned from the interviews next to that, then we kind of pattern match. Oh, okay. When we see this in the data, it kind of means this. Right.
Speaker 1 00:39:38 And how many interviews are we talking about?
Speaker 2 00:39:42 Um, depends on how many segments. So typically for, for, uh, Bidsketch doc sketch, we're doing them right now. Um, I think for doc sketch, we're going to have to do some more, but anywhere from like 12 to 15 per segment, for the thing that we were trying to do 27 seconds,
Speaker 1 00:40:04 Meaning like people wanting to do this thing and like searching in this kind of way, coming from this place. Is that what you mean?
Speaker 2 00:40:12 Yeah. So for right now we're focusing on one, one of the segments that, like I mentioned, I'm really excited about for doc sketch. That's like 500 visits, so it's during on those. Okay. Who came in that way. All right. Let's talk to them. Okay.
Speaker 1 00:40:28 And so you, you know where these people came from and then like you, you have attribution all the way through to them signing up, so you can go get their email address and reach out and try and schedule this. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:40:38 So the numbers are smaller on that side. Right. We get, if we get 500 visits, then like how many of those become signups and then how many of those become customers? So it's not like the 12,000 that we're getting, you know, just in total. And if we just wanted to talk to, you know, to a batch of 15 customers out of those, it would be pretty easy. Um, it is harder when the numbers are smaller, so it's just like an ongoing thing. Okay. Um, you know, email, like the ones that came in last week and ask, and then maybe get one interview or two interviews out of that. It's just like an ongoing thing. It'll take time, but it's soup. It's so worth the time to, to, um, really get clarity on what's actually going on. And sometimes, um, sometimes they can't live with Bidsketch. We have this problem that can be really hard to even know where they're coming from, uh, in analytics. Um, and for that, like we just resorted to, and it worked really well. Um, just putting, I know it's not the previous thing, but putting on the signup form, where did you hear about Bidsketch or what did you hear about toxicology that works so well?
Speaker 1 00:41:49 Interesting. Interesting. We, um, we, we do that as a survey in the app afterwards. Um, and we're looking at moving to a different tool, um, called refiner. Maurice that was on the show earlier is able to then like kind of tie those survey results back to a user, uh, on our end. So we're able to kind of tell who gave us these answers. So we're looking at doing that to get some, like attribution of those survey results to a specific person's that we can go back and reach out to them and say like, you know, one, did they convert? Are they a customer or these kinds of things, but also like, we want to follow up to get more information about this. We know who those people are.
Speaker 2 00:42:26 Well, when you say afterwards, at what point, like right after they signed up or just, um, they're, they're a customer or whatever after, uh, for few weeks, and then you send something out through email or how does that work?
Speaker 1 00:42:38 So it depends all this is an app. Uh, so we have done, like, where did you hear about cast dos pretty much right after they sign up, but then we're going to be sending like NPS score on like a certain number of page views or visits or something like that, that we'll have to kind of trigger manually. Yeah. So that's, that's kind of in the works right now, but yeah, we, cause we want to send those after somebody converts or after they've been around for a while. Um, and then like the things you do with those results later is really interesting. Like if it's a good score, then you want to talk to them about that. If it's a bad score, then you want to try to do some different stuff. So that was interesting how he's talked about that in our episode. Yeah. You mentioned attribution. I'd love, I'd love to just hear like a, a quick version of, of kind of how you guys do attribution's I'm sure. Like it starts with Google analytics and then like, how do you guys follow the customer all the way through to like a actual pain conversion?
Speaker 2 00:43:33 Yeah. Um, I feel like it's really, really important to be able to, you know, buy these segments by like traffic source by ad campaign, by whatever it is that you're doing. Be able to know, um, how well are these people activating, you know, performing like the, the main thing, the main tasks that the app does. Um, and, uh, how well are they converting into a customer? Like this is at a minimum and then how what's, what does the churn look like for them? A lot of people have this lumped in, uh, and, uh, if you're, if you're going to spend some effort, money, whatever, getting more of a, of a, from a certain type of source or some ads are, seemed to be working really well. Uh, you really need to know whether they're churning, like not in general, not, not everybody all lumped in together, whether people that click through this ad are turning really high or low or what what's going on there, you know, whether people that are coming in from these types of blog posts are converting at the same level and turning at the same level or better worse.
Speaker 2 00:44:50 Um, so to do that, we, uh, we've done it differently for a bit sketch and doc sketch, but it's like high level. It's the same thing. Basically, Google analytics, right. Only tells you up to the, to the signup. And then you need something for event tracking for a Bidsketch we were using, Kissmetrics still use it, but that one hasn't gotten updated in a long time. Um, I think there may be updating it, but, uh, you know, Neil Patel bought the site and all that stuff. So I'm just hoping they don't shut back down and we'll lose all our data. Uh, soon we have a ton of years of data in there. Uh, but it tells, tells us everything as far as like all, all, you know, every step of the funnel we track. So we know where the drop-off is happening. Uh, and, um, we do the same for doc sketch with amplitude is what we're using there now, uh, for on the, on the churn side.
Speaker 2 00:45:48 And, uh, we're using more like chart mogul for that. And for all of these tools basically. And, and we do this even, even if you're not using any of that, the most basic basic form, if you're just going to have it in your database is on signup. You insert into your database where they came from and that first touch attribution data from amplitude. Yes. So years ago, this like 10 years ago or something like that, I saw a talk from the fresh books, founder, uh, Mike McDermott, I think is his name. He said, uh, he was talking about tracking and people just don't even back then. People don't do enough of it and they don't understand what's going on. He said, if you just do this one thing, you'll be so thankful later on, you'll be way ahead of everybody. Um, and, uh, base. And this is what we do.
Speaker 2 00:46:44 What he described was when somebody visits your site, set a cookie with their refer. Um, I also add like the first page that their entry page, right? So if they've never been to our site, set a cookie, and if they've never been to our site, meaning like we don't have a cookie already set for this thing for refer for the page that they entered in for campaign, if one exists, then set those cookies. Uh, so we set those and then when somebody signs up for a trial or if they sign up, we check, do those exist. All right. Add them to the database, add that information to database, add that to Stripe. You could add that as metadata and in chart mogul, you can, as soon as you add it to the metadata, it's available for you to send a segment, all your metrics in there, um, bare metrics has segmenting, uh, by, by stuff that you send it. Uh, and then we set it in amplitude to as you know, uh, user level properties, not even event level properties. So then from there you can do all the segment segmenting that you need.
Speaker 1 00:47:57 Cool. That's cool. I mean, that's, um, we're, we're just getting to this point after, I don't know how often, how long have I been talking about attribution? It's just hard. I mean, I, it's not that hard, I guess, but it's hard to take the development resources to do this. I know it doesn't take that long, but you know, we want to go build features and squash bugs and stuff. And I think for me, like convincing myself that, you know, taking a developer some time to do this, uh, instead of building a feature or a bug or something like that is, you know, maybe a little bit selfish, I should be able to take care of all the marketing stuff on my own, but I think, yeah, this is the kind of stuff that will pay for itself. Many times.
Speaker 2 00:48:37 I was really glad to have seen that from, uh, from Mike, uh, way back in the day and have implemented it. He was right. He was a hundred percent, right. It's, it's been so useful sense. And it's not that time. Like it can be time consuming, uh, tracking analytics, metric, like people do this, uh, hire people that do it full time. Uh, but uh, most of us don't aren't in that situation, don't have, uh, you know, growth people that are, they're just doing, they're focused mostly on just the analytic side and stuff. Um, but you could do very little, just like I said, like adding a cookie and getting that to the right places, it's really like less than a day's worth of work. Um, it's what it is. It's, you know, and it's so worth it. I think for a lot of this stuff, we're talking about marketing and content promoting and all that stuff. It's, um, a lot of people kind of know what to do for some of it. And, um, it's really making a priority and putting in the time
Speaker 1 00:49:41 I agree and sticking with it. Cause I think it's easy for a, maybe I'm projecting here, but it's easy to kind of get on the content bandwagon or get on the attribution bandwagon or get on the, uh, you know, promotion and backlink bandwagon. Uh, and you do that for awhile and then you stop and you go do something else. And the shiny object gets in the way. And I think that's where do you look at people that have been successful with anything really is a big part of it's. They just have done it for years and like figured out a way to make it work, because I think almost anything could work in almost any business.
Speaker 2 00:50:14 Yeah. Consistency helps a lot. Um, I've been okay with, especially when I'm in leading certain, certain things, like I'm leading our marketing effort. I don't write the content and stuff like that. I have contractors that help with that, especially when we were doing doc sketch, there's so much to do. And my, my focus needs to be on product for long periods of time because there's, there's just so much stuff there. And then, uh, jump I'm I'm okay. Nowadays with just knowing that, you know what I'm going to ignore marketing for three months, and then I'm going to jump back onto marketing for a full month and do that and ignore product for as much as I can for that time, while I, while I kick off this other effort and then go jump back basically, because I'm leading both at, at this time, but I'm going to be hiring somebody in changing that soon, but I've done that with Bidsketch did that on the early days and still doing with doc sketch.
Speaker 2 00:51:13 It's the reality for, for a lot of companies that basically don't have specialists, uh, to kind of like own or people that can own these, uh, these areas of the business, right? Like we have to kind of, uh, turn, do a lot of stuff and focus on a lot of different things. It's really hard to kind of be consistent if you're, uh, for me personally, um, if I'm focusing on marketing, uh, you know, at 30% or 40% and then 60% product, and I'm consistently doing that at the same time, I find that it's just easier to say, uh, I'm OK with, uh, ignoring marketing for a few weeks or few months, uh, to get, make real progress on product. Uh, and then do the same thing for product. I, I need to ignore it. Focus on marketing. Yeah. Yup. Yup. Yeah. I mean, I think on a surface level, it's easy to bounce back and forth, but to yeah.
Speaker 2 00:52:08 Get real work done, to really understand the problem and make progress towards solving it or making it better. I agree. It takes dedicated time, which is just hard to come by. Like good glucose time is hard to come by and to prioritize it is takes like intentionality that I think a lot of us don't have. Yeah. Cool. Reminisce. A lot of fun, man. Thanks for hopping on to chat through all of this. Um, so doc sketched.com and bidsketch.com. Uh, if folks want to check it out and on Twitter, you are, I am earthling works on Twitter. Awesome. Cool. We'll link those up in the show notes. Ruben. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. All right. Thanks.
Speaker 0 00:52:49 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.
