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 00:00:21 All right. Welcome to another episode of rogue startups. This is number two 31. Mr. Craig, how are you today? Uh, I'm good, man. I'm good. I'm feeling a, I'm feeling a little scattered these days, but there's just a lot going on and it's cool. And it's all good, but it's, it's just a lot. So trying to, trying to kind of stay sane with, with keeping track of everything. Um, but yeah, can't complain. How about you? Well, yeah, I hear ya. I feel like I'm getting pulled in a bunch of different directions. So we made the decision to refinance our house because the rates got so low. And you know, when we originally bought our house seven years ago, we had a great rate. It was like three and five eights, and now it's like lower than that. So we just refinanced and we got two and a half on a 15 year mortgage.
Speaker 1 00:01:09 So we cut off eight years off of our, our mortgage. But let me just say, and I'm going to rant for a second here. The hoops they make you jump through, if you own your own business right now. Oh, I mean, it was already bad to start with. Right. You know, you had to submit your tax returns and, you know, fecal samples in your left arm and your first born and you know, all of that was already there, but now it's like you have to do a PNL for year to date to prove that your business didn't completely tank because of COVID. Yup, yup, yup. Sure. And so basically for me, that means I had to go through the same shit I go through for taxes, three quarters of the way through the year, you know, and this made me realize two things. Number one, I have to hire a bookkeeper.
Speaker 1 00:02:01 God, Jesus Christ. I have to hire a bookkeeper. This is terrible. Um, I've been doing this for years, myself and every year I get to this point and I'm like, Oh man, I should've had a bookkeeper and now I'm like, I need a fucking bookkeeper. This is too much. I can't, you know, I'd need to know this stuff more detailed, more, uh, more accurately and more timely than I get it now because this flying by the seat of your pants thing is not working for me. So, you know, that's part of the EOS movement that I'm working on here. So I will be looking for a bookkeeper and we can talk about that in a future episode, for sure. I'll just save you the trouble, just get bench, bench.co. It's amazing. Amazingly good, amazingly easy interface, right. With your accountant. Um, yeah, I do basically zero financial work until the end of the year. And I log in and check my stuff and they send it to my accountant. So, Nope. There's no possible way. Anything is. Yeah. And it's a reasonable cost. Like
Speaker 2 00:03:02 I pay $150 a month. Yeah. Which I think is extremely reasonable. Yeah. That's chump change. Really,
Speaker 1 00:03:09 If you, if you've got a complex business and you're making five figure MRR, that's nothing. Yep. Yeah. Alright. Sold, done. Anyway. So yes, that's a, you know, that's like top of mind right now for sure. And you know, I went through and did all of the P and L stuff for recapture. And man, let me tell ya, you know, I knew that my cost to acquire a customer had gone up, but you know, some of these months have gotten really expensive and I've just looked at the per click rates that are on Shopify ads right now. And they've gone up quite a bit. So, you know, it's getting more and more expensive to pull my customers in from paid acquisition here. I mean, this is always the case, right. You get getting a popular niche and you get big competitors and they can outspend you. And you know, you have a window to acquire customers cheaply and you best jump on it while you can. But I think that window is closing for me, which sucks.
Speaker 2 00:04:09 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know we talked offline a little bit about that, uh, in the past, but it sounds like, yeah, it's tough, tough to track. And even with kind of what tracking you do have it's, it's the numbers are not working out in your favor, uh, and the kind of medium term at least.
Speaker 1 00:04:24 Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely leaning in the direction of CAC is getting on the order of LTV and that's not good. You want it less substantially less preferably. Yup. And uh, yeah, I mean, I've got to go back and redo that. And the thing that's still killing me is that I just can't get direct attribution. You know, I can't, I can't distinguish organic installs from paid installs. If I could do that, I could tell you how effective my paid campaigns are, but it seems that it's not in Shopify as interest to provide this data. Even though they said at the beginning of the year, this is our highest priority. It's clearly not their highest priority because I've seen them at about a dozen different things to the fucking dashboard, except this one piece of data. What do you see?
Speaker 2 00:05:10 What do you see your competitors doing? Like other types of marketing? Like, do they have blogs? They have podcasts. They do Google ads, like things outside of Shopify. Like any thing you see there that you could emulate. Um, yes, but
Speaker 1 00:05:26 It's not clear. Like I see them doing other forms of marketing. What's not clear is how effective they are. Like for example, I know several of my competitors do some pretty intense content marketing, but I can also tell you that our space is very inundated with content. So it's, it doesn't mean it doesn't work though. It does. It's true.
Speaker 2 00:05:47 It means it does work probably. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:05:49 Um, well I would love to see the numbers on that because I'm beginning to be a little bit skeptical given how they're pumping out there. Are they really getting an ROI on that? Yeah. I mean, are they even measuring it? Are they doing it just because they think they have to be doing it? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they are. And maybe I'm just totally naive about that, but maybe that's where I need to start spending my dollars next, but I know that that's a longterm play and not a short term play. So yeah, having done that already in WordPress, but yeah, I mean, I see them doing content marketing. Don't see them so much with Google. I know a few of them have done like some Facebook ads. I'm kind of tempted to go that direction next, because I know that they've been very successful and they're not even on the Shopify app store, for example.
Speaker 1 00:06:39 So like this is their primary means of customer acquisition. And if their, their tweet storms are B to B to be believed, you know, they're doing fairly well, so they must be doing something right. And it makes me want to go in that direction. But I have actually a, I'm engaging a marketing guy that used to actually work with, uh, somebody who's well known in our space to help me kind of sort that out on what should be our strategy next. So cool. I'm not, I'm not flying blind on this one. I'm not just going by the seat of my pants anymore. I'm bringing in some, some heavier guns, so yeah.
Speaker 2 00:07:18 Yeah. Nice, nice. That'll be interested to see what, where you land to kind of have your next experiment and kind of what that looks like. I'm of the opinion these days that almost any channel can work. Uh, if you stick with it long enough, like I think you hear stories about people making almost every kind of marketing or sales work. And I think that a lot of it is like our own preconceived notions about what works and what doesn't. And those are really hard to get over. Uh, and then like kind of tied into that, our ability to stick with something for a long time, uh, based on what those notions are, you know, like if you think content marketing is going to work, you're going to stick with it forever. And then it will work. If you think that paid ads don't work, you won't stick with it and won't make it work. I think that's a lot of it. Not, not talking about you or I, but just kind of we entrepreneurs and business people in general.
Speaker 1 00:08:14 Well, if you have an infinite budget, sure. You could probably eventually make paid ads work, but you know, I don't have that. You don't have that. So, you know, they have to work within a timeframe. And if you can't figure that out, then you either have to find some way to figure that out, pay somebody to help you figure it out, go somewhere, talk to somebody to help you figure it out, or you got to stop doing it. Like, you know, and that, you know, I'll go with the perseverance thing there and that's going to be a great transition into our topic for today, by the way. Um, and perseverance does pay off, but at some point, you know, you have to say, all right, can I afford to persevere here? Cause if you're spending two grand a month and you know, your revenue is going down and whatever your two grand a month is going to get awfully precious at some point. So you gotta be careful about that. Right? You gotta find something that's working, but maybe I, you know, I don't know. Maybe content marketing would be the right way to go to help boost me in organic results at this point. Cause yeah, the paid acquisition and Shopify was working for a while and now it's slowing down, you know, but I mean, I had a good seven, eight, nine month run almost 10. So, you know, I can't complain. Um, it was, it was cheap and the going was good for awhile. So
Speaker 2 00:09:36 Yeah, no, yeah. I count that as a win and yeah, maybe it'll come back around as more people kind of see the same thing. Those prices might dip back down, but I would guess, yeah. There's some huge players in that space. I can imagine. They'll just keep paying whatever they have to, to keep staying on top of those rankings.
Speaker 1 00:09:51 Everything's things in the podcast world. Good,
Speaker 2 00:09:53 Good. Yeah. I mean, I think the big update from our end is we, uh, we released a Zapier integration last week. Um, so, and it kinda ties into our private podcasting. So we have private podcasting, which as opposed to like this show where everybody can listen, some people like companies will be with membership sites or something like that might want to have a private podcast. That's only for certain people. Uh, and we built an integration with Zapier to allow you to connect well, all the tools that are integrated with Zapier, I think about like MailChimp or teachable or Shopify or whatever. Um, even like Typeform as like an input. So someone completes a purchase or submits a type form or whatever that goes to Zapier and they get added as a private subscriber to your private podcast. So we were having a lot of super interesting conversations with customers that are doing really cool things around this.
Speaker 2 00:10:46 And it's pretty cool. We're the only people doing this right now. So we're kind of a, not to be dramatic. We're kind of at the leading edge of this. And when that happens, like there's, there's some shit we're figuring out on the fly, but, um, it's really cool to see a bunch of people doing really different things with their podcast in this respect. So it's cool to be chatting with customers and seeing how they're implementing it and us to get into a little bit different space. So yeah, that's the, that's the big news from our end.
Speaker 1 00:11:13 Nice, nice. Yeah. I mean, you and I participate in a private podcast for the big snow folks and you know, that, I think that's a, it's a really cool way to have a conversation. I like that, you know, where you can sort of have these, we'll call them asynchronous two way conversations. I think, you know, where somebody can verbally put out a bunch of stuff, which is way easier than trying to read it and then people can respond and, you know, they can either respond with their own verbal response or they can type some stuff in there. And you know, that, that has a lot of cool back and forth to it. I think there's a lot of potential in that space. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:11:50 Yup. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yep. It is interesting. We're talking to some enormous companies and so getting into the enterprise sales game, uh, there is just different, very different than our normal kind of customer workflow. So it kind of brings me back to my old job in sales process and stuff. Uh, so it's, it's cool. It's interesting. It's different. Um, but yeah, there's, there's a lot of potential there, so it's cool. Cool to see how it goes. But uh, this week, I think we're talking about a tweetstorm you were tweet storming, uh, last week, Dave, is that right?
Speaker 1 00:12:24 I was, I was. And so first I'd like to say thank you to everybody who responded to that particular tweet there. It was just a weird sequence of events that had happened to me that week. And yeah, I mean, so we're talking about luck surface area today, and I got a second tweet, uh, from a woman whose name escapes me. Her last name is Lynn. I can't remember her first name. Um, anyway, she tweeted out this very beautiful analogy that basically said luck is like rain. And you know, it luck surface area kind of gets to a geekier version of this. But I think this distills it down in terms that are easier to understand luck is like rain rain happens and it doesn't always happen in the same amount, in the same place, in the same, uh, at the same time. Right? So your job is to go out and find ways to catch that rain, you know, you're think of yourself as a farmer, you're trying to grow opportunities and rain or luck in this case as helping you grow those opportunities.
Speaker 1 00:13:30 So she was saying basically, you know, you, you can't make it rain more. You don't have control over the rain. You don't know when it's going to happen. You don't know where it's going to happen, but you do have control over things that can make sure that you are ready for when it's happened. And that when it does happen, that you can take the most advantage of it. So like her analogy continued and basically was like, you can build a reservoir to catch the rain so that when you're ready to use the rain later, you've got it
Speaker 2 00:14:01 To you, right.
Speaker 1 00:14:02 Or you can cultivate more lands so that there's a higher likelihood that rain will fall on the land. Right? So this is what the idea of luck surface areas. And we've talked about this before in the podcast, but I thought her analogy was really awesome and it made a huge difference in understanding of it. And then my geeky explanation of it is which, you know, puts me back to the days of electromagnetic theory and, uh, flux going through fears. And you had to calculate the surface area, the spear and all kinds of crazy stuff like that. So that's where I always went to whenever I heard Luxor for Syria. But anyway, so the thing that, the story that I wanted to relate this week is something that happened to me. And this story goes all the way back to August of 2019. And, you know, I was trying to get on with a partner program of a well known hosting provider.
Speaker 1 00:15:01 And I knew the guy that was running the program. So I had that opportunity right there to start with. Right. And I had met him at PressNomics a number of years ago and at MicroComp, and we've had several conversations over the years, we've talked. So, you know, I've kind of maintained that network, but anyway, I wanted to kind of increase my WooCommerce installs. And so he seemed like a natural, um, extension of trying to get into that. So I started a conversation with him in August of 2019, and nothing happened right away. So set my follow up to talk to him, you know, he said, this is great. Let's talk some more in a couple of weeks. So I set up the followup couple of weeks I followed up. He's like, yeah, we're still not quite ready. Give us another week followed up in another week.
Speaker 1 00:15:55 No, it's still not quite ready. Give us a couple more weeks. And you know, it basically was that going back and forth for the better part of 10 months and lots of things that happened. So, you know, at first it was, we're not quite ready. Oh, now we're ready. Oh, wait, it's the holidays. Can we wait until after January, then January rolled around and it was like, Oh, we've got this other initiative. Can we talk again in like the end of February? Yes. I can do that. And to February COVID hits the shit, hits the fan, nobody's talking about anything like this, put it all off until may then come in and may and, and start the conversation again. And you know, at somewhere in there, I think I actually sat down and did a demo with them. I don't exactly remember when, but after the demo they were like, Oh yeah, this is really cool.
Speaker 1 00:16:46 This is exciting. We, we definitely would like to bring you in, but we're probably going to bring you in to this other product of some managed hosting, not the WooCommerce side, because we already have a deal over with one of your competitors. And I was like, Oh, okay. All right, well, it's not ideal, but all right, fine. Yeah. Great. It's still an opportunity. I'll take it. Let's move forward with that. So fast forward to may then, you know, coronavirus is sort of working its way through and I finally get ahold of them and they're like, yes, we want to move forward with this. Now we're ready to integrate you into our managed hosting dashboard. Here's what we need to do. And so like, my developers were on it. We dove in, got everything integrated. We got the special discount. We set up for their hosting, some marketing promotion stuff and all of that.
Speaker 1 00:17:35 We'd put it together in about two or three weeks, send it back to them and said, Hey, we're ready to go. And they're like, great. Okay. So then they did the things on their side and like two weeks later we had it turned on and it was like, all right, that looks great. That's cool. And then, you know, other stuff was going on. So I said, all right, well, when are we going to do like a, an email promotion or whatever? And they're like, okay, well, we're probably going to be doing that in a couple of weeks. And so at this point, you know, we're like a year into this whole thing here. Haven't really gotten the promotion yet. You know, there's been tons of emails back and forth, tons of me reminding them. But what was really super important here is that at no point did they ever tell me no, at no point did they ever say, yeah, we're just not going to do this, Dave.
Speaker 1 00:18:20 Sorry. So it was, the onus was entirely on me that just keep following up, keep following up. And you know, it, several times I just felt like I was bugging them all the time. And I was like, Hey man, I'm sorry, you know, to keep bugging you here. And he's like, no, no, no, keep reminding me. That's cool. Like they were busy. They had a lot of stuff going on and I was the one kind of bringing it back top of mind. And then we finally get to August ish, I guess. And then all of a sudden there's an announcement that day that the competitor of mine, that they had installed and integrated into their WooCommerce hosting offering got acquired by one of their competitors. So all of a sudden they were like, Whoa, we can't have these people here anymore. They can't be a preferred partner because now they're being used by one of our competitors.
Speaker 1 00:19:17 We just can't promote them anymore because now they're, they actually got acquired completely by that competitor. So basically they would be promoting a competitor's product. And so they're like, yeah, we gotta get them out of here now. And all of a sudden, a year's worth of badgering back and forth integration efforts, constant conversations, demos, effort, follow up, boom crystallized in one moment to bring me to the place that I originally wanted to be 13 months ago. Yeah. That's awesome. And I mean, it's a, it's, it's a lot of, kind of whatever sticktuitiveness, but also a lot of, uh, maybe a little bit of luck that, that the competitor was acquired. It's a lot of luck. No, no, no. I mean, I don't want to downplay the role of luck here because there's a great Thomas Edison quote out there and I'm not even sure this is a hundred percent attributable to Edison, but it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1 00:20:09 Success is basically where 10,000 hours of preparation meet one opportunity. Yep. Yep. And so, you know, I've been putting in that preparation all this year, trying to get the relationship, trying to get the demo, trying to get the integration, trying to set things up, get the marketing in place, get all of this left and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like if we hadn't created our plugins, if we hadn't created woo commerce, if we hadn't integrated into the WordPress space, uh, and it turns out that, that they also acquired one of the plugins that we have an integration for. And we're like the only ones that have an integration for this plugin. Yup. Yup. So all of a sudden, like we are like Tripoli valuable to this company because we replaced their competitor. We support all these things that they need on their managed WooCommerce hosting.
Speaker 1 00:20:57 And we're the only one that does abandoned carts for this membership plugin. So it's like the right place, the right time, all of that work, boom, just crystallized into a magic opportunity there, but which wouldn't have happened. Had I not been doing all of the followup and all of that hard work. So there was an opportunity that happened and all of a sudden it turned into something that is potentially very valuable to recapture him at this point. Cause this is like, I mean, this, this managed WooCommerce thing is like the best set of customers I could possibly ever hope to be in front of. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:21:33 Is this live yet? Or is it still kind of getting rolled out to customers?
Speaker 1 00:21:38 It's still getting rolled out right now? So, you know, the story is ongoing, but this was like the big thing that sort of got me, you know, close to the finish line here. We're already integrated into their other dashboards. So the integration piece, like there's no physical development, this is about marketing. At this point. I just sat down with our marketing team, uh, the other day. And we went through a whole demo. I gave him us, you know, a pitch deck on what recapture does the benefits, all of that. So they're crafting some messaging right now and they're trying to get this out because it's right before black Friday and they want their customers to see it and so on and so forth. So yeah, I mean like all of a sudden stuff just started happening cause I was in the right place at the right time and put all this work in. So, you know, luck, surface area can work. It can make a huge difference.
Speaker 2 00:22:27 That's cool. I'd love to hear like kind of looking back other than, you know, being organized about following up. Cause I think that's a hard thing to do is like you get an email from someone and then however you manage your emails, you set a reminder or you snooze it or you put it in a place to follow up. Like I would, I would be interested to hear how you organized that. Cause I think that's a hard thing. And as an easy way, I'm talking on like the sales lead side, which I think this is kind of similar to, it's easy for shit to get lost in that, in that shelter. So like how did you manage that? Yeah. That process of staying organized and following up and all that shit.
Speaker 1 00:23:05 Here's a, here's my superpower. And all of you can have the super power to it costs you nothing. So there's two services that I've used in the past. One of them is called followup.cc. The other one is follow up then.com. The latter one is free. The former one they'll do it up to a point and then you have to pay for it. So I just use follow up then.com and here's how it works basically when you're replying to somebody and you know that you want to make sure that something is going to happen with this. Maybe you're just going to follow up with them. Maybe you need to make sure that whatever your, um, whatever you're promising in that email gets done. You know, this is a thing for customer service. It's a great thing for sales. It's a great thing for prospecting and lead gen and relationship building all of these things, you can use it.
Speaker 1 00:23:55 So basically here's what I do. I'll send the email and then I will blind copy one week@followupthen.com like literally the number one week at followup, then not come after one week, follow up, then pings me back a copy of the email I just sent. And so basically every day in my inbox, I get popup reminders that say, Hey, here's an email that you sent an, uh, a reminder three days ago or one week ago or two weeks ago or a month ago or a day ago or eight hours ago, whatever it is, it just pops it right back to your inbox. So you get a chance to look at it. And I either, um, I either do those at the first part of my day. So if there's a followup I need to do, I'll just turn around and send the followup. This works great.
Speaker 1 00:24:46 Like for example, I've been using this with, uh, turned customers on recapture. So if I have, uh, so I use this as a manual thing. So some customers aren't worth following up with, like, I know why they churn their cheering because they're not making any money. And there's nothing I can do to fix that. Right. But there are customers that are in the sweet spot and they churn, but you know, maybe they were recovering money and it wasn't enough. So I use the followup then.com to manually decide when I see a cancellation, is this somebody I want to follow up with? How much do I want to follow up with them? So I will do like a six email sequence for somebody who's like a really good customer. And I'm either trying to bring them back or I'm trying to find out why they left.
Speaker 1 00:25:31 And you know, it doesn't always work. Of course, you know, the effectiveness of those campaigns is limited, but it does give me a structured way to handle it. And I use this for basically everything. If I have a customer service thing where I promise somebody that I would, you know, do their emails, I'll send myself a followup so that I make sure that that gets done. Or if I'm doing a prospecting thing and I say, Hey, you know, how are we doing with this integration? I'll send myself a BCC one week or twoWeeks@followupthen.com. So it pings me back. If I haven't heard anything, if nothing has happened, I can send them another email and say, Hey, where I didn't hear anything back. Are we still on for the integration? Is there a problem? Can I help with something? That's my superpower. That's it? That's all it is.
Speaker 1 00:26:16 It's like, my wife is amazed that I remember all these things all the time. I'm like, I don't remember shit. That's why you've seen follow up then.com. But it just constantly is telling me, Hey, here's something you got to do. Here's something you gotta do. Here's something you got to do. That's cool. Perfect to do list in your inbox. And you know, that's what I was using with this hosting company for the past year. And I was just having these conversations. I'd send a followup at the end of the conversation and have a BCC that said, you know, two weeks or one month or whatever the timeframe was that we said, we were going to talk again. I put it, you know, maybe at that point or a little bit past that point. So I don't look like I'm badgering them too much. Uh, just to let me know, Hey, you know, you gotta follow up on this cause otherwise you're not going to remember and setting it in your calendar is a pain in the butt. But if you do this follow up then.com, sending an email, it's a one line thing it's like super easy.
Speaker 2 00:27:12 Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love it. I love it. On the email front, I've been using spark as an email client recently and they have, uh, two things. They have this idea of like snoozing messages. So you can like set a reminder for it to kind of come back into your inbox later, which seems to be a similar thing they have. Yeah. It's the same idea pending, which is interesting because my, so I'm, I'm very backwards. My inbox management methodology is to leave anything that I have to do as unread. Everything else just gets read and gets kind of dropped from the main inbox view. And so I like this because I can then read or Mark some as red, but things that I know are going to take a shit ton of time, but that I don't want to have to deal with.
Speaker 2 00:27:56 Or if I just want to have something handy, I'll pin it, but it doesn't necessarily need my attention. So like we had to cancel our flights to the U S right. Uh, in April, I don't need those emails to stay open, but I need to get back to them at some point. So I penned those. And then it also has this send later thing, which is cool that I use being over here. I sometimes feel weird about emailing clients at what would be like three o'clock in the morning, their time. So I, but, but it lets me just fire through all my email and then I can set it to send an hour or eight hours later or whatever. And so I just, it's been really nice. So yeah, I mean, these tools are great for productivity and letting you kind of work like you want. Um, but yeah, like you said, seeming like your shit is together. Um, which is really cool. So I'll have to check out, follow up is a followup.cc or followup.com or follow up then.followup.cc
Speaker 1 00:28:50 Is the one that I started with, but they have a limit on their free tier follow up then.com is a totally free service. So whoever's running followup then.com. You are amazing. I really respect the hell out of your service. You should charge money for them. You should charge money for it. Cause I would totally be paying for it right now. But yeah, yeah. The way that a follow up then.com they have paid actually they do have the paid upgrade. It's just that if you want to like see what your upcoming reminders are, that's where the paid service comes in. Cause they'll only give you visibility into like a week's worth of upcoming reminders. So if you set something a month out, they're not going to tell you that that's coming up until you pay for their service, but you can set all the reminders that you want. And that's good enough for me. So,
Speaker 2 00:29:35 Yeah. Nice, nice. That's cool, man. Well, congratulations. That's super huge
Speaker 1 00:29:42 To, to land a, you know, opportunity and an integration partnership like that. I mean, that's, that's massive. That's a lot of the shit that we all work all the time for. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I'm hoping that this really sort of opens, opens the door to some more WooCommerce, like a really effective WooCommerce channel, which I've had trouble. Like there's just not an equivalent to the Shopify app store in WooCommerce. There is a WooCommerce app store, but you know, they are, I okay, rent time, they are thinking very backwards about this. They charge 60% of the revenue that you make to be on that site. 60%. Nobody does this Apple doesn't do this. Google, doesn't do this Shopify. Doesn't do this big commerce. Doesn't do this. Nobody does this. Woo commerce is not looking. You know, they're not trying to grow their partner program because the partner ecosystem makes for a rich eCommerce platform.
Speaker 1 00:30:50 And so, you know, I think WooCommerce is suffering a little bit in this regard because there isn't a single place to go to find quote, WooCommerce, plugins. You've got to go to the repository. You can go search online. There's like independent stuff and it's floating around and it's just, it's not easy to get to. And because it's not easy to get to, that means the customers aren't able to find the solutions that would be most effective on their store. You know? I mean, it's very shortsighted, like short term thinking, right? They want to make money now instead of gets the whole ecosystem so big that the whole thing is worth more later. Yeah. I don't, I really don't know what their thinking is on this one, but I really think that it's bad. And you know, I've seen discussions on this and post status and you know, people are like, Oh, thanks for help getting me in the partner store.
Speaker 1 00:31:39 Well, the only reason they're in there is because they're charging zero. So, you know, 60% of zero is still zero right now. You're not making money on it. Like, great, okay, you put this thing in there, it's on the WooCommerce partner site, you know, what are you going to do? Because if you put paid upgrades in there, then technically you owe WooCommerce 60% of those paid up. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, I'm not operating at a margin so high that you guys can take 60% of it right off the top. Like no way, no way. So, you know, I'm profitable, but you're basically making me run into the red if that's the case and I'm not going to do that. So forget it. So that's why you have to go for other, other places like this. So. Cool. Well, man, that's awesome.
Speaker 1 00:32:27 Congratulations on, uh, you know, landing that partnership and integration. Uh that's yeah. That's massive in a super lesson for all of us to stick with. It don't feel like you're annoying people. I think don't apologize if someone has given you permission to follow up. Like, I think it's a good thing for all of us to say is like, don't apologize for following up because if they asked you to, you know, so that's, that's cool that, uh, yeah, I stuck with it and, and yeah. Landed something that sounds, sounds like a game changer. That's awesome. Yup. Yup. Nice. And I would love to hear any stories about where you have followed up out there and have landed something or ways that you've found have increased your personal luck surface area. Send us an email podcast@roguestartups.com tweet at us at a rogue startups. We'd love to have a conversation about that. And as always our one ask is if you find this show valuable and you know, somebody who would benefit from it, please share it with them and give us a review in iTunes. If you have a minute, we'd love to hear from you until next week.
Speaker 0 00:33:29 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.
