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 00:00:19 All right. Welcome to another episode of road startups, two 29. How are you doing today, Craig? I'm good, man. I've been a, I feel like I've been running pretty hard lately. Like just working a lot, a lot of hours. Um, but yeah, everything is going well. I think we're, we're sitting pretty relative to, uh, the shit a lot of people are going through. So I feel really fortunate at this point. How much self everything's? Well, uh, they're good. They're good. Overall, you know, um, we just had the first week of kids going to school and so we're kind of settling into a new routine around the house. Um, and my wife and I have changed up our exercise thing. So I'm getting up like way earlier than I'm used to here, you know, all summer long, it's been like get up at seven, which has been fantastic.
Speaker 1 00:01:12 And now I've been getting up at six, but I'm getting more exercise in as a result. So we're like walking at least once a day, usually twice a day. So there'll be like morning and evening. And you know, I'm noticing that that things are more focused and better for me to get that consistent, uh, exercise in there. I was getting sort of inconsistent exercise before that. Um, so that felt great. Work-wise has improved. I think quite a bit. The freelance client has kept me running around ragged still, even though the plugins are now completely off my plate. So that's, you know, one thing I just don't have to think about it anymore. And I still continue to enjoy that on a day in day out basis. It's kinda weird. Cause I realize now that I don't have to focus on that anymore, it kind of just dropped out of mind.
Speaker 1 00:02:01 Mindspace cause I've got these other things to worry about and it only appears like when, you know, Stephan, uh, or somebody asks a question and says, Hey, what about this? And I'm like, Oh yeah, the plugins shit. I haven't thought about those. And that's great. That's great. So that's kinda cool. Um, yeah, I'm uh, I'm still trying to find something to do with the money from the purchase. There's a couple of opportunities on the table, but nothing concrete yet. Um, I think I've ruled out one of them because they wanted a lot of money for it. And then we realized that we could probably re-engineer the entire solution in about $20,000 and they wanted like 120,000 for it. So I was like, yeah, you're making money, but yeah. Yeah, you're kind of in a tenuous position. This is not, this is not highly defensible stuff.
Speaker 1 00:02:52 So are you looking at Shopify apps and e-commerce related stuff? I am looking at anything that would be adjacent and supportive to recapture. Okay. So it would be totally e-commerce at this point, Shopify apps are just the most common thing that's up for sale right now. So, you know, there's another one that I'm looking at right now. It's probably a little higher in price that than I would like, but it's making some pretty good money. It's like 11 K MRR. So, you know, that's a, that's not bad. Yeah. But again, I don't know that I can totally afford that. So anyway, that would be a nice addition to recapture for sure. What else? Um, yeah, in recapture, gosh, we've got a lot of stuff going on right now. There's been, we did the big commerce release and that went really well. We picked up a couple of customers on that already and shaken out a couple of minor integration issues.
Speaker 1 00:03:51 So that's been pretty exciting. Uh, now trying to figure out how I can do more promotion along that stuff and get more big commerce customers in here because in general, I think they're higher quality stores. I think it's a platform that requires, you know, it's like Magento, right? It requires effort to get it up and get it going. So if you're going to do big commerce, you wanted to be in big commerce as opposed to Shopify where you're like, Hey, I want to open a store and they've done most of the work for you. So you can get in at that very low bar, but that means that you can also be making zero money. Right. So that's not good. That's not good. Uh, and let's
Speaker 2 00:04:31 See what else I had a question for you about integrations. Cause we, uh, we launched an integration last week, so I don't know if we talked about it on a podcast. So we launched the ability to add like individual private subscribers to a podcast. Um, so like our podcast is public, but you know, imagine that cast has had its own podcast for team members. Right. Uh, or we wanted to invite people on, I would record a podcast and everybody could listen to it. I would want only people with that. I want to give access to, to have, to have access to like a private feed per individual. And so we released that. Yeah. Super cool. So like we're, we're having conversations with a lot of really interesting companies. A lot of educators, a lot of companies would like field sales forces. Yeah. There's a lot of places this can go. And part of like our launch strategy with this was we integrated with member space. So ward from member space was on recently. And so basically the flow there is like a new member signs up to somebody's membership site. They have the ability to connect that to cast as to where that new member automatically gets added to a private podcast, someone else on cast us and gets like that. You know, member only not to be confused with the jacket, a members only podcast content, all kind of automatically,
Speaker 1 00:05:44 It's a nice eighties reference there. I'm old enough to get it.
Speaker 2 00:05:47 Yeah. A lot of the millennials will be like, what the hell is he talking about?
Speaker 1 00:05:50 Yeah. If you have no idea what we're talking about, Google members only jacket eighties and you'll see just how horrible these things. It was great.
Speaker 2 00:05:58 It was great. So yeah. So we're like really excited about this and are looking at more integrations and I would love to hear like, from your perspective, like when you've done integrations that go really well, like what did you do? Um, cause I feel like this one went well, but I, I, you know, always wanting to kinda like make sure we're getting the most that we can out of it and that our integration partners, especially if they're doing a fair bit of work are getting the benefit of integrating with us, you know?
Speaker 1 00:06:25 Oh yeah. Yeah. Cause if they're not, if they're not getting the value out of that, then they're going to question why they integrated in the first place. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's actually, well maybe you should give some more updates first. I was going to say that might be a nice segue into our topic today about integrations and affiliate programs and white label and some other stuff that we wanted to discuss, but uh, what other, what other updates are going on with Casto and uh, SSP, you don't even really separate those anymore. It's all cast those.
Speaker 2 00:06:55 Oh, cast us all one family. Yeah. It's all one slacker, you know, it's official when it's all one Slack group now. Yeah. Um, yeah. So things, things are good. I mean we, yeah, launching this integration has really changed a lot of like the types of customers that we're talking to. So we're talking to a lot of customers with businesses around content, you know, courses and membership sites and companies wanting to do internal podcasts and stuff like that. So I've been spending a lot of time on the phone, I guess like at the beginning I said, I've been working a lot. Like I had eight scheduled phone calls yesterday and that's just a lot, you know, it's just a lot, we've also been hiring for a new developers have been interviewing. Um, and we're at the, we're definitely going to over the hump there and in the last kind of third of that process now.
Speaker 2 00:07:42 Um, but, but just been on zoom a lot, like a lot, a lot, but yeah, I mean, those are the kind of big things that have been going on from us, like from a product perspective, launching the private subscribers, um, and the integrations that we're doing there is really cool. Um, and then along with that, and kind of the growth that we've seen from that, bringing on a new developer and really trying to do that. Right. Cause like, I think it's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of developers, um, that are available right now at the same time. I feel like they're kind of in high demand. So there's just a lot of velocity, um, around like hiring web developers. Uh, so for us, like trying to have the experience be really good for them so that they think we're a class operation, but for us to be able to like actually vet and screen them and like a productive way to say, like, we want somebody who is a good communicator and really gives a shit and is able to understand what we're asking for.
Speaker 2 00:08:37 Um, and writes good code, you know? And so like how to do that without just being a jerk really about like asking too many questions then is reasonable for a, a normal interview process for a startup of our size. You know, if you're going to go work for Google, like they can just ask so much more of a candidate than weekend. So that, that kind of balance, and we are much further on the kind of thorough and strict side of hiring a developer than we've ever been. And so it's just been a lot of like me accepting that and like being okay with kind of asking a lot from, uh, from our candidates, but it's been, it's been good so far. We're, we're kind of almost done. So that's cool.
Speaker 1 00:09:18 Have you come up with any magical questions or insights into the process that you weren't aware of before?
Speaker 2 00:09:27 Yeah, so, um, I chatted with Ruben Gamez a few months ago just about hiring in general and he recommended the who method is this book all about hiring and it, and it lays out like a really strict framework. It's kind of like the traction book, uh, Gino Wickman about like how to run a business. This is like, this is exactly how you hire a runt, uh, or like how you run a hiring process. And the, the most interesting one is like the first interview is one question really? And it is like the, and this is what I ask is like, why are we here? Right. Like, why am I talking to you today? Why did you want to talk to me? Why did you apply for this job? What's going on kind of in your professional world that made you want to come here because it instantly filters out people into two groups.
Speaker 2 00:10:14 From what I've seen is like people have a shitty office job and they say, I just want to work remotely. And none of those people make it onto the next round, um, because they're kind of running away from something. Whereas the kind of, I think qualified candidates say, yeah, you know, I'm kind of like maxed out at my current role where I'm, you know, working on this thing and there's not room for growth and I've kind of done what I want to do here. And I want to move on to more interesting opportunities or joined a small team where I can have really dynamic work. Um, and like those kinds of answers are exactly the people that won't because they're going towards something, you know? And so I think that just one, and it's kind of a Frank question and I just asked, I was like, so, you know, Dave, why are we here?
Speaker 2 00:10:59 And like, see what they say. And for a developer, a lot of them were like, Oh duh. You know, but, um, I, for me request, yeah, but I mean, it's just, for me, it's just a good, yeah. I mean, I, you know, a lot of people kind of start fumbling around the answer, but, but that, like for me, like I'm the, you know, communicator culture interviewer. Right. And so like, I have to be able to talk to somebody, you know? And so like that kind of weird question and really open-ended is a really good way to do that. I'm sure it's not the perfect question, but for me, that's, that's what I'm going with these days. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:11:37 Yeah. Yeah. And at what level is it screening people? Because I always, the way that I sort of look at screening questions in the past is am I getting a high signal to noise ratio when I'm done asking that one question, does it clearly indicate I should be continuing or stopping with this candidate? That's a good screening question for me. So what's your, what's your ratio of pass to fail on this? It's about a third, so only 33% are passing.
Speaker 2 00:12:05 Yup. Yup. So we've gotten about a hundred applications and have invited about 15 of them to do interviews with me. And that's the first step. So application I filter through the application, you know, cut out a lot that just don't answer all the questions or don't have the kind of experience we're looking for. And then yeah. Just invite people straight off to have a 30 minute call with me. And then that's that one question. And from there it's pretty much like 50, 50 right away. Like they, they have no idea what question I'm asking, so they can't answer it. Um, and then have the remit of the other 50%. There's a small percentage that, that can kind of figure it out and we can kind of talk and have a, a conversation that's productive because I really just want to understand, like, are you just job hunting, you know, hopping, are you job hopping? And are you going to leave cast us in a year? Which is not what I want, or are you like really interested in finding a great fit and wanting to be with someone for a long time? And can you code and can you communicate all that kind of stuff? But I think this question, I think it does, it's done a decent job. I should.
Speaker 1 00:13:12 Yeah. Yeah. Do you just ask the question and then stop and then you don't elaborate on it or do you, if they come back and ask, what do you mean? Do you elaborate more or do you just say you just repeat the question? I'm just curious as to how it,
Speaker 2 00:13:26 The question and then if they want to clarify, I'll say, well, you know, why did you apply for this job? Or why are you looking to do something different? But no, I do just ask the question and then I sit there.
Speaker 1 00:13:38 Oh yeah. I love questions that make him squirm. Yeah. Yeah. I got a, I got the reputation of bastard interviewer at a, my freelance client because I would do stuff like that. And they were, you know, other people that were interviewing felt like they had to fill the noise, fill the empty silence with something I'm like, Nope, just let them talk. And if they don't want to talk, that tells you what you need to know too. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, yeah. Interviewing is a skill interviewing is a skill. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:14:08 I feel a little, I don't know bad, but, but I feel like it's maybe not exactly the right approach because we're interviewing developers and their kind of highest skill is not talking and like thinking on their feet, they're high skill is, you know, writing code and taking care of our product. But for this step in the process, I need to make sure that they can communicate, you know, we're doing a code test, which is kind of the step right now sending like a sample project. And that's where we kind of measure there. They're kind of coding aptitude, but yeah, for me, that first one is just like, Ken, can I have a conversation with this person due to do we get each other? And if they, if they get through that, then we can see if they can code, but that's more important their ability to code for me.
Speaker 1 00:14:53 Yeah. The, the whole communication thing is I would never downplay that, especially in a remote role, because if you can't communicate on a very basic level and express things very clearly, then you you're going to run into problems. I mean, I've, I've had many developers where they were technically competent, but communicationally inept. Yep. If that's even a thing, but, but that made it hard for us to get things done because they couldn't communicate issues that they were having clarification's that they needed what was being done, what was holding them up. Like it just snowballs if you can't get that communication. So I, I applaud your, your method, that methodology.
Speaker 2 00:15:43 Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, the other cool thing that is new for us as this like coding challenge or like test project, um, we're using a really cool tool called code submit code, submit that IO, uh, to kind of manage the whole process. So it's really cool. It invites candidates to these private repos candidates can then like clone the repo, do the work, push it back to get hub, manage all the communication in this thing. We, we only have, you know, a handful, maybe 10 people that will send code tests, but it's a lot better than email. So like, it's been a really nice tool to use to manage this. And I can imagine if, you know, you're a big company that's hiring developers every month that having something like code submit to manage those technical projects is really nice because you got to do all of that stuff in there rather than like, you know, invite them to get hub, an email and email and email and all this crap. Um, so it's been a really nice tool in that respect, cause we're kind of in the thick of that part of the process now.
Speaker 1 00:16:42 Yeah. And how long of a project are you doing for them? Like what, what's your expectation on that and are you paying them? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:16:49 Yeah. So we are, uh, we are not offering to pay, uh, them because it's only, we say between two and four hours of work. Um, so it's a pretty small kind of technical project and there's no kind of time, time restriction on it. We give them a week, you know, a week to finish this thing. Um, and for this role, we have a project that's a WordPress plugin and a project that's a Laravel app. Um, because we have candidates, you know, we really need people to be able to work in both ecosystems, but, um, most of our candidates are strong in one or the other. And so we gave them the one they're strongest in, uh, so they can kind of show their best stuff. Um, but yeah, a couple hours,
Speaker 1 00:17:29 Well, I'll be anxious to hear how the filtering on that goes, cause you're still
Speaker 2 00:17:33 In the middle of that. Right? Yeah. So we're just getting back the test projects now, um, we'll review them and then the ones that, you know, look good, we'll go onto an interview with our lead developer, Jonathan, and that's the last step. So we're almost there. Yeah,
Speaker 1 00:17:47 Yeah. The thing. So here's what I've noticed when you, when you have a project and you get a good developer that kind of sets the tone for all the other developers that you want to hire based on, based on what I've seen, that was true of the, both of the WordPress plugins. And it's been true of recapture as well. So like, uh, you know, I'll talk about recapture now. So the first one, the first developer I got was Mike. And once I got Mike, Mike was also a founder in his own, right. He has his own side things going on, working on his own projects does consulting and freelancing. So I mean he and I were two peas in a pod and he very much got the communication thing. He very much got everything culturally. Like he was about unit testing and he was very anal about the code and just all of the stuff just got immediately cemented into the culture of recaptures development. And so when I hired Omar, that was, that was super important for me to make sure that there was a match in all of those areas because that had already been preestablished. So yeah, I mean, you've, you've got a strong developer. I know Jonathan, and he has probably set that same kind of culture with you, would you?
Speaker 2 00:19:04 Yeah, absolutely. And it's been an evolution, you know, like it didn't start like that to be as opinionated, I guess. Um, and I think it's him feeling comfortable to grow as that voice, you know, and a little bit me enabling and allowing him to grow as that voice, you know, when it's just him, like, he doesn't really have much to say, but now like we've been to developers for awhile and, and certainly in the last six months he has grown a lot and saying like, Hey, we're all gonna use PHP storm. You know, we're gonna do pull requests like this. And so now we've laid and he's laid up a fair bit of that structure and code culture for this new person to come in. So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 00:19:47 Yeah. I think that's super important. If you're going to have a solid development team, you need to have somebody who can have that. I'll call it technical leadership skills where you can establish things like, okay, this is our coding standard and here's the ID set up that we're using. And here's how we structure our PRS. And here's how we do our design sessions. And this is how we do our deployments and this is how we do the reviews and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all of those things make for a very successful development model. And if you don't, you know, it's hard for you as the founder to set that I found because I'm not in there doing the code. So I mean, I can dictate all I want, but if I'm not the one actually participating in that, then I'm just basically being a fascist and handing down a bunch of policies that don't affect me.
Speaker 2 00:20:31 Yup. Yup. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 00:20:34 It needs to come from somebody who's living it and you know, it you'll need to have somebody who is living it in the same way that you would want it to be lived if you were doing that at the same time, I think. Yup. Yup.
Speaker 2 00:20:48 Yup. Well, cool, cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:20:51 Looking forward to some updates on that. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:20:53 For sure. Yeah. So affiliate programs and white labeling
Speaker 1 00:20:58 Your product or service
Speaker 2 00:20:59 And uh, all these kinds of things we think will grow the top line a lot, but maybe don'ts right. Is that what we're talking about?
Speaker 1 00:21:08 Yeah. That's what we're fucking talking about. So as you can tell from my heavy side and sarcastic tone, I have an opinion on this. Yeah. So this my opinion on this goes all the way back into the plugins at this point. So I set up affiliate programs on both of the plugins at the request of various people and every single one of them always comes in and says things like, Hey man, do you have an affiliate program? I got a lot of traffic. I want to send you. Or I've got so many leads I can help you generate. Or, you know, you know, I'm an agency and I've got a lot of customers to send your way. It's always the same story. And then you get them to sign up. And then, you know, you kind of forget about it for awhile because you're busy.
Speaker 1 00:21:56 And the affiliate program is rarely at the top of your mind. So you go back and review it three, six, nine, 12 months later. And you look at this person that claimed that they were going to send you so much stuff and it's fuck all. It's just, it's crap. It's nothing, you know, they might've done a handful of things, maybe two or three in all the time that I've had. And the affiliate programs with the plugins, there was one affiliate, maybe two, if I'm being generous, no, that's not true. It is two. It is two, two affiliates that generated a significant number of leads to business directory. That's it to, and I had hundreds and hundreds of people sign up for the affiliate program. Most of them generated shit like zero. Some of them would generate one or two because we allowed it to be your own stuff. And I think that was a mistake. Uh, in retrospect, I wouldn't,
Speaker 2 00:22:58 I wouldn't necessarily do that,
Speaker 1 00:23:00 But you know, now that I have recapture, I have, we set up an affiliate program with recapture back in 2018 because I was trying to do, I was trying to capture agencies. So when I went to Shopify unite, I, you know, met with 13 different agencies and I was, you know, doing the press in the flash and trying to talk these guys up and follow up after the conference with emails, et cetera, et cetera. The number of people I got interested in that afterwards was Zen.
Speaker 2 00:23:35 Yeah. Yeah. So, so
Speaker 1 00:23:38 We called it, we shut down our affiliate program for recapture until this. So like a week ago, maybe now we'll call it two weeks ago. I had a guy who's been sending me stores and I didn't realize it at the time because he keeps signing up under these different store names. But it's a, it's a variety of his email. And he sent me like 13, 15 stores at this point and the, and they're all pain. So I mean, he's, he's one of my top customers at this point, he's like as good as an enterprise client. Cause if you add up all those things there, it puts them on the top tier. And so I'm like, Whoa. And he reached out to me and said, Hey, do you do, um, a referral program or affiliate something or other? And I was thinking, Oh fuck, here we go again.
Speaker 1 00:24:34 And then I went and looked him up and I'm like, Oh shit, this guy actually performed seems to be doing something. Yeah. Like he's actually performing. So I had to take that thing out of moth balls and set it up. We're using first, first promoter for that. And I'm now setting that up so that we can go and hook up all of his stores. But you know, I'm trying to figure out what is a good affiliate rate because, so with Shopify, they're already taking 20% off the top for me. So if I'm getting 30 bucks a month from a store, they've already taken six bucks of that. And if I take like another, you know, if I say, I'm going to give 20% of the affiliates, that's another, is that right? So you're taking 30% or 20%, 20%. So for 30 bucks, that's six bucks off.
Speaker 1 00:25:28 Right. And if I take another, you know, if I give them 20%, then that's another six bucks and I'm making 14, 18, right. 18, I'm making 18 on a $30 sale, you know? So that really, that digs into my margins pretty hard. So I can't do that for everybody. But you know, if somebody sending me a lot of traffic, I feel like, you know, I can do a little bit, like I can do a higher margin for few stores, but maybe a lower margin for a lot of stores. I don't know. I'm still kind of struggling with the terms of this. I don't know. What's fair. And what motivates people. And you know, my whole notion of affiliate programs I think is just completely out of whack because of my experience with the plugins and things so far, and then to compound all of this, I got, I had somebody reach out the other day and said, yeah, we're doing this custom thing with Shopify.
Speaker 1 00:26:26 And we'd like to embed your abandoned cart solution into our thing. Do you have such and such endpoints? And you know, I checked with my developers. They're like, yeah, we have those, no problem. So I replied back and I said, yeah, we support this. He's like, great, great. Uh, you know, do you want to do, what, what kind of a referral do you want to do? And so then I was waiting for him to respond and then he came back to me a week later and was like, Oh yeah. So the cart that we're using now, they finally said that they have this available, so we're not gonna use you.
Speaker 2 00:26:59 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:27:00 But it's the whole bait and switch thing again. Right. So, you know, money talks, bullshit walks. So you know, that, that still colors my thing of the affiliate program, but I'm willing to unmask ball it for the guy that's bringing me 15 stores and is consistently signing new ones up all the time. So I could find more people like that. That would be great. But I, you know, these people have just randomly stumbled on me. It's not like I have a solid program that says, all right, do steps X, Y, and Z. And boom, you're going to get these large agencies signing up stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:27:34 Yeah. I think, um, like we, we have decent success with affiliates. I, we don't have as much as I know, some of our competitors do. And I think part of it is we don't pay as much. Uh, so we kind of consciously say, you know, maybe I'd like to under underperform on affiliates, uh, to pervert preserve some of the like bottom line, you know? Um, but I think the approach that like that we took and like, to whatever extent it's working, I think is because of this, as we were pretty proactive about it, like reached out to all of the, you know, top best podcast, hosting blog posts out there and said, Hey, we'd love to get on this list. We'd love to do an affiliate deal. We'd love to let you guest post on our site. Um, and again, you don't get exposure to our audience and like try to help them be successful.
Speaker 2 00:28:27 But, but these are like, you're talking about like a handful of people. Like we have, you know, hundreds of affiliates and I pay six or seven of them every month and that's it, you know? And, and, but some of them are thousands of dollars. And so some of them definitely can make a difference. Like I'm paying them thousands of dollars. So the amount of business they're sending us as significant, we pay 25% recurring commission. They used to be 20. And after we moved to reward full, it went to 25%. And the thing that I think about this and I've asked some of our affiliates is like, instead of getting 25%. And so like, we, we charge $19 a month is our base plans. So you're getting $5, right. Or for something, instead of getting $5 a month for every customer, what if we gave you $30, right.
Speaker 2 00:29:18 For every new customer that started paying us and basically just like, you know, prepaid or brought all of that revenue, you might expect from a, uh, a new customer forward, but it de risks. The downside for us a little bit. I think it just trades risk. And I don't know, you know, like if that's right or not either for us or for them, for, for them, it would be like, you know, selling an annual plan version for, for us in SAS, you know, for us, I liked the idea that it just moves that risk, the downside risk, but, but maybe the dip to kind of like the risk of us paying too much if somebody churns, but I don't want to get too complicated of like, Hey, we'll pay you $30 in the first month. Only as somebody stays another two months or whatever. And that's just horse shit. Nobody, nobody wants to try to keep track of that. Um,
Speaker 1 00:30:06 Well that's what I was going to ask is how do you deal with the 60 90 day churn problem, right? Cause if somebody is, and maybe you're 60 and 90 day churn, isn't that bad. But you know, sometimes customers, in my case, if they're a bad fit, they're going to turn out in 30 to 60 days. And that usually is the ones that have really low revenue and just have this weird expectation that using an abandoned cart thing suddenly generates sales from nothing which just doesn't work. And once they realize that they turn out. So if I were to pay 30 bucks for a customer upfront, I'm basically giving away all of my revenue for that customer in that first month. And then they turn out. So now I've lost money on that customer. Cause I probably also paid to acquire them if, for example, well, I guess that wouldn't be true if they're an affiliate, they would be signed up differently. So it wouldn't be like through paid acquisition or something like that. So, I mean, how do you, how do you deal with that? Cause I've struggled with the same thing there on the 60, 90 day, you know, I was thinking, okay, we maybe weren't, we aren't going to start paying until the customer's been with us for 60 to 90 days, but like you said, affiliates don't want to deal with that.
Speaker 2 00:31:10 Yup. Yup. Yeah. Cause I mean, I think that two things about that one, like affiliate marketers are very, very, very good and conscious of conversions, right? Conversions from their blog posts to click your link and from clicking your link to signing up for a trial and from signing up for a trial to start paying. And they obviously kind of order there kind of best abandoned cart tool for Shopify blogposts based on who converts the best, you know? And so like in a lot of ways we look at our affiliates of like, you know, maybe, you know, we convert better than some of the other tools on there. Cause we're kind of like in the middle of the list, but we don't convert as well as some. And so like for us, we go back to, to our kind of product team and marketing team and say like, okay, why?
Speaker 2 00:31:52 You know, because they are in a lot of ways, like the real litmus test of us versus the market because they're getting a lot more traffic than we are. And that traffic as a whole is deciding certain things. And so they're, they're kind of an interesting, um, like abstraction of that for us. But yeah, I mean the way we deal with like, you know, refunds and stuff, so reward full kind of has a buffer period. Like somebody pays and then we basically wait two weeks to make sure they don't cancel and then we start paying after that. Um, but then like if there's a refund after a reward has been paid out, then it's kind of credited back against that affiliate balance. So it's a very smart tool in that respect. Like it has two way to integration with Stripe. So I mean, I think with the, with the kind of idea, paying somebody for paying an affiliate for the expected life value of a customer upfront for me, and this is me being just stupid is like, I kind of just have to average it out.
Speaker 2 00:32:51 You know, like we definitely have like a turn rate and we have a 30 and 60 and 98 churn rate, but I can't do that like to our affiliates, you know, I just basically have to say our churn rate is X. Our lifetime value is why I'm okay with taking, you know, 20% of Y. Uh, and just assuming that across the board, all of the people you send us will behave like all of our customers do, you know, as a whole. And, and if that's the case, then I would be more comfortable saying, you know, our average lifetime value is, you know, whatever, say it's a hundred dollars, whatever it is, we can pay you $20. The first time somebody starts paying us. I mean, we have enough data and customers to where we probably could figure that out. But I think it's a question for the affiliates to have like, is that what they want?
Speaker 2 00:33:41 You know, like, cause I think a lot of them, uh, want just like this passive income lifestyle business. And so, so for them the value of getting $20 upfront versus $20 paid out over several months, maybe an end to this is not kind of universally applicable, but like maybe isn't worth it. You know, they'd rather get the money every month, then get all the money up front and then have to go figure out what they're going to do with it. Because that would be like the upside for me is like, when we get an annual plan, we make less money overall, but we get that money right now. And so I can go invest it today to go build stuff, to make more money tomorrow. But, but I don't know that an average kind of blogger would be kind of thinking like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:34:26 And I think this is a perfect place to end it right here. So anybody who is out there that has a lot of experience with affiliate programs, if you know of somebody that we should have on the show to talk about this and educate both of us idiots about how to do this better, because I don't feel like either of us is a, you know, optimizing this for our best lives, then send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com. We'd love to figure it out. If you are an affiliate expert, we'd love to talk to you about it. Give us a, give us a shout, same email address. And as always our one ask is if you think that the podcast has been really valuable for you, please share it with somebody else you think would really benefit as well until next week.
Speaker 0 00:35:13 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey, that over to rogue startups.com to learn more.
