Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're to startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig. All right. Welcome to episode two 44 of rogue startups. Craig, how are you doing this week?
Speaker 1 00:00:26 I am. Uh, I'm okay, man. I'm okay. It's been a, it's been a roller coaster last few weeks, but, uh, ending on a pretty high note. So yeah, it's going good. How about you?
Speaker 2 00:00:38 Yeah, it's been, it's been super busy. The freelance client has got me running circles around myself, but a recapture is doing pretty well. Um, we're closing out a month here of some pretty solid growth, which I always like to see and we're going to be launching a partnership, a formal partnership with easy digital downloads at the beginning of next month. Nice. Uh, we've been, you know, we had an integration with easy digital downloads for a long time, but we will be having like a more formal thing with them. Some blog posts actually getting mentioned directly in their plugin cool stuff like that. It's going to launch probably, you know, first week, April or so. So I've been doing a lot of documentation and updates and stuff like that. So that's good. That's super exciting. And trying to, you know, dot some I's and cross some T's and then, and then there's the whole thing about my content marketing that is basically just completely fallen apart, but that's a story for two minutes from now how, uh,
Speaker 1 00:01:43 You've been integrated into woo commerce already, right? Oh yeah. And, and how, how do you see like easy digital downloads being kind of similar or different from WooCommerce? You know,
Speaker 2 00:01:54 It's interesting, so easy digital downloads came as a response to woo commerce, not being very friendly in terms of handling the concept of licensing and downloading a digital product of some kind. So if you're selling software, if you're selling WordPress plugins in particular, this is really, I think where the first use case came from. They need some very specific things in woo commerce years ago. Didn't have him today. You can do this stuff on WooCommerce. It's not terribly, I wouldn't call it smooth. Let's put it that way. It's there. You can do it, but you have to do like all of these things to make your WooCommerce store, not like a regular product-based WooCommerce store, which is fine, but it's just more work right. And easy digital downloads was built out of the box to handle this use case. And they've been doing it pretty well for years.
Speaker 2 00:02:52 The, you know, it's interesting because as you and I both know this from our own products, you know, as a product and matures and you've got people requesting features and things like that, you're just for a while, you're kind of listening to all your customers because you're not really sure what's important and what's not. So you just start throwing everything in there. If you're like me anyway, you start throwing all, almost everything in there because you're trying to make the customers happy. And at some point you realize I fucked up, like this is not the right. I put too much shit in here that was confusing. Now it's not the right thing. And we did this with business directory. We did it with the classifieds plugin and it kind of adds this layer of complexity and both Wu and EDD suffer from this all products.
Speaker 2 00:03:38 I think if you are trying to be customer responsive, we'll suffer from this, especially if you're bootstrapped. Oh my God. Yeah, because you're, you're the kitchen sink. You're trying to meet the kitchen sink solution and please a bunch of people. And you know, I think this dovetails, well, by the way into our topic, that we're going to talk about a little later about picking a corner, but you know, easy digital downloads. They, they had this niche and then they tried to expand. So they were doing like other things like actual physical products. So, you know, now they've got some conflict, their own name says digital downloads and they're trying to sell and ship real products like this doesn't quite fit. And it took Pippin and, and the team a while to realize, Hey, this is totally the wrong direction. And you know, they reversed course at some point and said, yeah, this isn't what we're focusing on anymore.
Speaker 2 00:04:27 We're going to focus on these other things over here. That's our core space. And so, you know, woo is trying to be the opposite of that. Right. They're trying to do the physical products. They're trying to be the go-to e-commerce solution for WordPress. And, you know, that means that they kind of have to do a little bit of everything, but they're primarily focused on products. And so, you know, that means that they do a lot of things and they do a lot of things pretty well, but you know, easy digital downloads is like the specialist in this one piece. So it, for somebody who's getting started in WordPress, I would still point them at EDD over WooCommerce for that particular use.
Speaker 1 00:05:07 Yes. Yep. Yep. But, but, but I mean, for, for what you do, you'd write like abandoned carts. I would guess that applies more just because of volume and, and kind of customer shopping behaviors to, to kind of physical physical products and not digital ones. Like, I don't know. Do you expect like the, the difference in the kind of shopper behavior to come through and what you're saying
Speaker 2 00:05:32 In that sense, in the abandoned cart sense, you have the identical behavior in both platforms. And I know this because in business directory and AWP PCP, we installed at first, we used cart hook and then when cart hook was going to shut down, you know, I integrated recapture so that we could actually do that. And we were the first ones to test it. So I knew what results I was getting from cart hook. I could go compare what I got in recapture, and we were actually comparable or a little bit better. And you were, you know, I was still like getting recovery rates around 13, 15%. Um, so, and, you know, WooCommerce and EDD and Shopify and Magento, the average across all of those platforms is about 10, between eight to 12 average around 10. It kind of varies a little bit per niche or whatever, but, you know, 10% is what you expect to get.
Speaker 2 00:06:26 And it doesn't seem to matter whether you're dealing with digital downloads or you're dealing with physical products or subscriptions. Um, you're going to get the similar kind of behavior where customers come in and they look at something, something stops them from completing the sale. There's a wide variety of reasons for this, of course. And it's the emails that remind them to come back and finish it. If they really genuinely just forgot, or there was something that you can overcome, like, you're not sure that the company is legit. So you send them reviews and testimonials, or you thought it was a little too expensive. So you get a discount code and, you know, stuff like that. But the abandoned cart piece of it seems to be pretty universal. It doesn't really matter. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:07:07 That's cool. That's cool. Cause I mean, I think it's great to obviously open up like what you're doing to a whole nother kind of set of audiences and stuff. So that's, uh, that's cool. Be interested to see how it goes. Have you seen like a big kind of uptick since, uh, since like the WooCommerce integration? I know it's been awhile, but like, was that kind of a point of inflection?
Speaker 2 00:07:25 Do you know the, when we launched woo commerce and just putting it out there that by itself didn't like move the needle. But you know, we only pushed our plugin out to the repository, wordpress.org and you know, people it's kind of weird. So WooCommerce has a, you know, quote unquote marketplace, but they have insane asks for revenue share. Okay. So big commerce, Shopify, 20% and Magento, I don't have to do any rev share with them at all, which is kind of weird. I think they totally screwed that model up ages and ages ago, but that's what it was. That's what it always was. So they've kept it that way. They are very much, if it's not broken, don't fix it. Or in that case, if it's broken, don't change it. Um, but that's the, what they're doing and you know, so whew, you know, you would think, okay, well maybe they would be something similar, right?
Speaker 2 00:08:22 Or they would try to match their competitors. No. Now I've seen two different numbers. If I go and look on WooCommerce's marketplace website, it shows that it's a 40% rev share. Yikes. That's not a typo. And I've heard other people say it's 30, but either of those two numbers doesn't really compare favorably with their main competitors. And Shopify is eating WooCommerce's lunch. Yeah. I'm sorry. But you know, WooCommerce, great platform, great technology. They've got great reach, but you know, they could be doing a better job here to make their vendors more successful and happier by taking less of their revenue share and you know, to their, and maybe this is their plan. I don't know. But there just aren't that many people on the WooCommerce marketplace. And so it wasn't like a go-to place for me to, to set up. I see some free plugins on there and you know, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 00:09:22 40% of zero is still so great. You can, you can get away with that. There, if it's a super useful plugin, but you're basically giving away your work at that point, I'm not going to do that. That's not a good business model. So I didn't want to integrate with the WooCommerce marketplace. And so for me, I had to go and approach other platforms. So we saw a bigger uptick once we integrated with specific managed providers, because then all of a sudden people have an incentive to install it. And you know, now I'm seeing an upflow, but it wasn't like the spike. Um, you know, all of our integrations have been sort of slow burns. You throw it out there and then slowly people start to notice it. Like I'm starting to see more traffic on big commerce. We've been out there since August of last year.
Speaker 1 00:10:09 That's good. I mean, you put it out there, you know, seed it, let it, let it kind of get stable and then let it grow from there. That's, especially as that compounds, right. If you launch one a quarter or one a month or something like that, like that's a pretty good growth engine.
Speaker 2 00:10:22 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is that the more these I put out, even though it doesn't impact it right away, like I see the impact nine to 12 months down the line, and then it's slowly building from there. And I learned that from Shopify, but you know, it's a, some channels are better than others. No doubt. Like Shopify has been really successful, but you know, the other ones they're there, but they're slower. Yeah. And that's okay. Yeah. You know, they're not costing me a lot of extra support or extra time once we do the integration, you know, we got a handful of bugs to deal with and that's about it. You know, the great thing about having the service as the core product, we are constantly fixing the service. And so these little integrations are like, basically, how do we hook into these various events that happen on that store? And once you kind of figure that out, it's not hard to keep doing that again and again, and it doesn't take like months for us to do that. We can do it in weeks. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:11:18 That's huge. That's huge. Nice, nice. How are things with you? Yeah. From my end, we are, yeah. We've been having like a couple of really good growth months in a row, which is cool to see. I don't know that we're doing anything different, just like a little bit better, you know, like the product is better, the support is better. The marketing is consistent. And so like all of that is kind of just optimizing it little bit by little bit is, is paying off. I think. But yeah, the big thing from us is we have been hiring a lot and are still, and are still hiring. We brought on two developers in the last two weeks, which is a lot of work and, and are bringing on two other support folks in the next two weeks, uh, two and a half weeks. So yeah, it's just been a lot of my time, you know, in the last month really like, or six weeks, I guess, you know, like getting out there, job postings, interest, you know, screening, interviewing job offers, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1 00:12:19 And now like onboarding, training, product knowledge, you know, all that kind of knowledge transfer stuff. It's, it's a ton of work. But I think at this point it's been nice that we've documented things along the way, or getting closer to something like an employee handbook, which is cool. And, uh, you know, a lot of these things are becoming repeatable to where, you know, in three or six months we go hire another developer. I don't have to recreate the wheel. You know, the offer letters there, the comp is there, the computer they get, is there, you know, all that kind of stuff is figured out, at least like you're talking about with the integrations, you know, like once you do it once or now, it's like our fourth time to do it. I finally have like something repeatable that we can kind of just plug in and kind of run the process. So, but it's been a shit's on a work. I mean, just getting all that stuff for four people is just a lot to coordinate, but it's, it's cool to see. It's cool to see. And three of them are outside the U S so like all of the administrative BS has been minimal, which is great.
Speaker 2 00:13:20 Oh, that's nice. Now, how are you handling HR for all of them? Do you use a service like Gusto or so?
Speaker 1 00:13:25 Yeah, so, I mean, so for the one person that we're hiring in the States, uh, she's in Florida, so it's already like the filing with the state and all that crap is done. Cause that's where I'm a resident of. And so like, don't have to do anything there. Yeah. Just get her into Gusto, put her on payroll. She starts April 1st and she'll get paid at the end of the month. So there's nothing to do. And the other three, one is just outside London. There are other support person and developers in Mexico and in Nigeria. And so we just, you know, send them, I think we'll set up TransferWise to, to pay them and we'll start paying all of our non U S contractors through TransferWise. So yeah.
Speaker 2 00:14:07 Shout out to transfer wise. I've been using them for a long time, thanks to, uh, uh, my developer on recapture. And it has been smooth as silk. I think the most stressful thing about TransferWise is that, you know, when you're dealing with fluctuating currency rates, you always log in there and you're like, should I pay them now? Or should I wait a little bit? Would they be more favorable?
Speaker 1 00:14:29 If something blocks the Suez canal? Can I wait till fucking Monday and pay him that or something?
Speaker 2 00:14:35 That's right. That's right. Yeah. Also the currency market suddenly fluctuates because of a boat stuck in the canal. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:14:41 I use transfer wise a lot. Um, like when podcast motor was run through our French business here, um, just because we would receive money in dollars and have to transfer it to euros and want to pay it out in dollars and pay some out in euros and all this shit, but haven't set it up for Castillo's yet. Um, just cause we pay everybody through PayPal, but PayPal is a mess and if I can get away from it entirely, I think everybody's happier. It's just something I haven't done yet. Because from an accounting perspective, it is like a thing, you know, like it's a whole nother account that our bookkeepers have to keep track of. So.
Speaker 2 00:15:13 Right. And yeah, I mean, I, I simplified that since I only have like one payment for foreign currency that I have to do every month. Basically we just came upon, agreed upon rate. So I, you know, bumped it up a little bit and said, I'm going to pay you this in USD. And that will handle the fluctuations of currency. So neither of us is going to feel like we're getting shafted on this. Yeah. It makes it easier because then I don't have to think about it. I just, you know, put it in the USD amount and done. He gets whatever, you know, the amount is in euros. We're, we're okay with that. So that made it a lot easier. And now it just comes out of my account in USD. It matches the amount on the invoice. So I don't have to like try to explain, Oh, well this amount is really this amount because of the currency change. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:16:00 In the same boat, I mean, we pay in USD or all of our salaries and stuff. Run dollars. Yeah. Um, I guess like thinking about our experience here, it was jacked up because yeah. We would pay a lot of people dollars, but our currency was euros. And so like we had to take money out of the bank here to put it in TransferWise. It would be, it's just everything about doing business over here is hard and complicated and weird. But, um, yeah, so I touched on it. You know, one interesting thing that we started doing with these hires is we're buying computers for everybody, um, which has been cool. Like I'm glad we're able to do that. I think it's really like, you know, I feel like we're a big grown-up company now cause we're able to buy people, computers and yeah, it's been actually pretty smooth, like, you know, the, the one person in the U S just fucking Mac Mac store, us Apple store us, ship it directly to her.
Speaker 1 00:16:53 Uh, the guy in Mexico kind of similar to just the Apple Apple store in Mexico. Um, the new Mac books took about a week and a half to get to him. So that's not too bad. The guy in Nigeria was a LA a lot more complicated, had to go through like an authorized retailer there locally, because there's not a, an Apple store, uh, like a central Apple store in Nigeria to ship a computer to him. But, uh, yeah, worked that out. So yeah, it's been, it's been cool to kind of take that step and kind of looking forward a little bit. I think, especially for more, more folks in the U S will have to start doing more stuff around benefits, you know, like some kind of retirement package and maybe even healthcare at some point, because it's just more competitive to hire folks and us folks want healthcare.
Speaker 1 00:17:46 Understandably. So just, you know, it's on radar that like, I think by the end of the year, we'll have to have figured that stuff out because we do the Q Sarah Dino, Q Sarah, like a qualified health reimbursement, Cal fight out of pocket. I'm not familiar with that. So it's basically this program that, you know, we can pay like just under $500 a month to our employees for qualified out-of-pocket health care costs, which can include insurance premiums. And so we started doing that about eight months ago with one of the guys we hired and that's nice, but, but that doesn't even come close to covering like actual health insurance costs for a family, especially. So I'm sure at some point we'll have to do that. And that's just, I know it's super, super, super expensive, but again, we'll probably go through Gusto for that just because they do everything else well, so I assume they do that well.
Speaker 2 00:18:40 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope so. I mean, I don't have a need for them at this point, but they are definitely on my radar when I do. Cause I know a lot of people are using them and they're saying good things.
Speaker 1 00:18:50 Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. So, so we're talking about like taking a corner today, right?
Speaker 2 00:18:55 Yes. Yes. So as I alluded to earlier, you know, um, so this, this was spawned from an article that Chris lemma sent out. And for those of you that are not subscribed to this, Chris is on a daily blog tear. Like he's done 83 daily blog posts in a row. I think it's probably up to more than that. Now I just remembered the number 83 here from a recent email. So you get on his email list and every day he'll like write, you know, come up with a good blog post and you think, okay, some of these are going to be lame because how can somebody crank out 83 of these in a row? Well, Chris can do this. Chris is a content guy. And in fact, when we're talking about taking a corner, he did this article about how you should be known for something, how you should, you know, throw down a stake and say, this is the thing that we're best at.
Speaker 2 00:19:45 And so, you know, easy digital downloads, their corner is digital product downloads and software licensing. And you can look at a lot of other businesses and say, all right, this is what their corner is, convert kit, it's blogging for content creators, right? You can articulate these pretty, pretty clearly for a lot of things. And you know, another one that Chris came up with as an example, was paid memberships pro it's a WordPress plugin that does membership and gating of content, but they are known for like association websites. So like if you have a condo association or homeowners association, they have like all of the bells and whistles that are very focused on that niche. Like they do that better than anybody else. They do a lot of other things too. And you know, that's when he goes into some other stuff. Anyway, I recommend subscribing to Chris's stuff. It's really good. Chris lemma.com, C R a C H R I S L E M a.com. And you can get on his, his newsletter right there. So shout out to Chris for his great content and amazing stuff that he, you know, I certainly could not. I remember when I was regularly blogging, I struggled to come up with a weekly
Speaker 1 00:20:52 Blog. Paleo is massive,
Speaker 2 00:20:54 But daily is like, and you know, they're all really good, you know, they're not like 1200 words or something like that, but they are, they are definitely worthwhile reads. I have yet to read. One of them that's happened in the last 83 days that I was like me. So, you know, that's a talent that somebody can crank out, stuff like that. Anyway, that's an aside. But yeah, so he was talking about taking a corner and it made me think about, you know, recapture in what was the corner that we have. And, you know, because email marketing is a crowded space, right. Very crowded. And in particular, there's like, there's one of my competitors, probably the best known in my sub space. And that is Klaviyo. And they're known as, you know, email for e-commerce like, that's the, that's the thing that they threw down a long time ago.
Speaker 2 00:21:46 And if you ask anybody, Oh, who's email for e-commerce there's is the first name that comes up in conversation. Yeah. And that's great. You know, they spend a lot of time and a lot of money, a lot of energy, a lot of product development. And they are, you know, a leader in that. So I'm trying to figure out how do you differentiate from somebody like that because sameness is what is killing all of us in our products. So somebody launches a me-too product and somebody looks at that and they're like, well, why would I pick you over market leader over here? And that's a question that customers are constantly faced with. Right. So, so Craig, what would you say is your corner here? Forecast us.
Speaker 1 00:22:30 Yeah. So, so we made this, uh, we, we started this pivot because it's an evolution really like for us from a, you know, kind of grow your audience with Casos was, was kind of our tagline up until about four months ago. And, and now it is much more, you know, private, uh, you know, public podcast to grow your audience, private podcast for exclusive member only content. And so we are trying to serve to a large extent, the same kind of creator space as convert kit. So courses, membership, sites, bloggers, you know, all these kind of folks that want to have public podcasts for, you know, as a marketing channel, like this is for us and then private podcasts for their membership sites, their communities, their courses, their church group, their, you know, their company really trying to, to help that individual serve both purposes through podcasting. So, but, but it's an evolution. And as we, uh, it's an evolution a little bit, because, you know, you can say this right. But then the product has to back it up, you know? And so as we continue to focus our product efforts into different things around private podcasting, our, our positioning in our hopefully thing we're known for we'll continue to, to that side.
Speaker 2 00:23:46 Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:23:47 Yeah. How about you guys? So
Speaker 2 00:23:51 This is a, this is a place where
Speaker 1 00:23:53 I have really struggled with recapture.
Speaker 2 00:23:56 So when I first took it over, you know, recapture was abandoned carts just for Magento and they were hyper-focused on that. And Klayvio was not a space that was like super popular for Magento. Um, interestingly enough, there were some other ones that were in their dotmailer spring mail, I think, and a major mail was a big one. They were like much bigger, but they were also more complex and more expensive. And so the guys that built this, they wanted something that was easier to use. So they, they built it. You know, it's the same reason that everybody starts products or, well, not everybody, but a lot of people, you scratch your own itch and these guys scratch their own itch. Right. So when I bought it from him, I'm looking at this going all right. Well, Magento is a static slash dine market, so it's lucrative, but I see all the growth happening over in Shopify.
Speaker 2 00:24:49 So I took it over to Shopify and then of course then ran smack into Klayvio at that point. And, you know, in terms of like, I can't, you can't differentiate on features. It's really hard to differentiate on features. And the reason is you're basically one engineering cycle away from somebody copying and then you're no longer different. Right? Yup. And with Klayvio they were so far ahead of me engineering wise that I couldn't, you know, to get feature parody with them would be basically saying, all right, I have to go get funded now and build out an engineering team. And then we work our asses off and we try to achieve some feature parody and, you know, a that's incompatible with what I want to do with the business and the lifestyle I want to live. And B it was just not a, it sounded like a death March.
Speaker 2 00:25:40 I'm like, I'm not going there. So I kind of floundered on this for a long time. And it was interesting. So I think I've discovered two things on this journey. One is I I've truly gotten a feeling for what blue ocean means. Um, and I, I didn't really, I didn't really get that sense viscerally until probably about the time that the pandemic started last year and everybody in e-commerce. I mean, if you were in e-commerce and you were established to some degree, you basically started growing. I'm not saying that everything in e-commerce grew, but most of the people I talked to in e-commerce they were like, Oh yeah, we're growing month over month. And continuing, you know, six months later, they were still continuing to grow. And of course Klayvio was still growing too, but we did as well. Like it was clear that, you know, it's not a zero sum game and I knew that intellectually, but if, if you're struggling to grow your, it, it's hard to feel that and know what that means.
Speaker 2 00:26:46 But last year, you know, when I saw everybody else growing and I was growing too, I'm like, you know, there's something to this blue ocean theory. And I was able to sort of embrace that more deeply. But the second thing that I sort of understood about that, we have this question when people install, it's part of the Intercom onboarding sequence and it basically asks why they sign up. And I started getting more people responding to that last year, which I thought was kind of interesting. And the, the two most common responses were one. They said, we love it, of your reviews. And basically everybody else recommended you. So we're signing up for you too. So it was very much a social proof thing. So, you know, for those that aren't getting enough social proof get more social proof because it works like it is not bullshit.
Speaker 2 00:27:37 It is absolutely something that convinces people. When they're looking for apps on the app store, social proof makes a huge difference. And I noticed that with big commerce, we went from zero reviews to one review. And then all of a sudden I started seeing more installs after that. So yeah, that's, that's definitely huge thing. But the second reason why people signed up was more interesting to me. And that was, they said, I signed up because product X and it wasn't just Klayvio, but Klayvio got mentioned a lot was too complicated or it wasn't working well for me, it was hard to understand it was hard to use. It was whatever. And that's when it dawned on me that being less feature rich, a more simple, more straightforward UX suddenly became an advantage. And so I'm going to try to use this now as a positioning tool to find the rights set of people.
Speaker 2 00:28:41 Cause now I kinda know, like once you get past a certain MRR for recapture in their store, my store, when you get past a certain level of revenue, they kind of have to go to Klayvio at that point. Cause they're trying to do, do complex marketing campaigns. I can't support him. Yeah. But you know when you're at zero, nobody, but there's an email marketing service out there that's going to help you. So just forget it, build your stuff, use the free tools, ignore me until you reach 2000 a month. Then from 2000 a month, until that higher revenue, there's a huge slot in there where Klaviyo is fucking overkill. It is absolutely too much. And they, they pay, you know, as their customers are building up, they pay per. And so it gets really expensive, really fast as they build customers. But at the same time, they got to deal with all these workflows.
Speaker 2 00:29:32 And a lot of times it involves hiring consultants and other stuff. And all of that is great when you're a certain size and you're dealing with more complex things. You want your store to support a store at 2000 to $20,000 a month, rarely needs that level of complexity. So that's the story I'm, I'm trying to tell now, and I'm trying to articulate my corner in that way. Like we're the ones in the middle kind of like the WP engine did for mid-level WordPress hosting. We're trying to be like the mid level email marketing for e-commerce or something like that. Hmm.
Speaker 1 00:30:09 I think there's something to, I think it's, I understand where you're coming from. Cause that's definitely like a lot, it was a lot of our positioning, you know, simple, easy to use CA you know, but, but I think that the thing to watch out for that, that I just like never liked about that is that implies cheap and it implies not for power users. Um, that to some extent. Right. And so like, I, I think if you go down that road to test, to, to pivot that a little bit, maybe to say, like, I can't think of the, what I would say or like right off the bat, but like for people who just want their shit to work, you know, like, like easy to use with the features that you need to grow a store, you know, something like that, um, is I think kind of where we landed is like easy to use for starters, everything you need to grow your show, um, is, is kind of like that opens up people's mind to like, Hey yeah, this is for serious store owners to try to get some of that upper middle tier.
Speaker 2 00:31:14 Yes. Yes. That is an excellent point. That is an excellent point. Um, and you're right, because, uh, I think I've probably lost a few people in some of that simpler messaging where they're like, Oh, well, we're not sure that you support X. And then I talked to them and I'm like, of course we support X. And they're like, Oh really? So you're right. I gotta be really careful about that. And you know, so I'm in the middle of getting this whole campaign set up on Facebook. And I haven't seen any of the creatives and stuff like that yet, but I have a feeling this is gonna factor heavily into that messaging so that I can understand how do I target that exact store in there. Another characteristic I've noticed about our store is they're kind of the ones that use us most heavily are the ones that are the lowest in staffing.
Speaker 2 00:32:05 Like somebody who hires a UN agency or has, you know, a dedicated marketing person. It, we don't get a lot of those. We get some of those and you know, I've got some big stores that are doing that and they like us better than others, which is great. But I don't get a ton of those. I see people leaving for those, like, you know, they'll hire an agency, the agency uses Klaviyo's so then they drop us. I'm like, okay, bummer. But yeah, I can't do anything about that. Yeah. I'm not your target customer. Yeah. Yeah. But the ones that are using us are like store owners who are overwhelmed. So email is always in the top five priorities, never number one, they, you know, there's always something else. Customer support, inventory, order management, supply chain P take your pick. Any one of those will be top one, two or three, never email marketing, but we're always in the top things like they have to do these things. We're just never number one. So they need something that they can set up, not mess around a whole lot with not have to think too much about, but get solid results from. And we're really good at that. So, you know, I've tried positioning some stuff like that. Although, you know, we'll have to do more experimentation here with both content marketing and the paid advertising in order to really nail that position. I think there's a lot of, a lot of honing I have to do, but I think we're getting close to finding a corner.
Speaker 1 00:33:27 Yeah. Yeah. And I think the only other thing I, that, that like comes to mind when you talk about taking a corner is like, you can, you can take the corner. Right. And that's like the headline on the site or whatever, but then like how do you relay that to the market right. To, to your potential customers. And, and I think that different people do it different ways, right. You know, product led growth or co you talked about content marketing or brand and all this kind of stuff for us. We have found it resonate with our customers a lot to, you know, kind of have content marketing and then practice what we preach a lot, you know? And so like, we are, we've been doing a lot of content, uh, conventional blog content, I think. And then Matt coming on board and then some super secret stuff that I can't talk about yet.
Speaker 1 00:34:16 But we'll talk about in a couple of weeks, we are evolving more and more into like really deeply doing the things we talk about at hopefully a really high level, um, to show people, Hey, this is what good content is. This is how we do it, you know, behind the scenes kind of stuff. Because I think like in every industry, like people just want to know how to like get the solution that they're shopping for, you know? And like your tool is a path there, but, but education and whatever inspiration a little bit too, is definitely a part of that. And I think that figuring out your path to show people, you know, why the corner you took is, you know, the right one for them is, is like the other part of that. Because I think taking a corner and putting that in your home page is one thing. But then like all of the shit to get people there is, is like another part of that equation from like a marketing perspective. Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2 00:35:07 And to sort of dovetail into that the way, you know, you think you're smart and you think you understand your market and you think you understand your customers. I would contend that until you've really deeply talked with your customers or heard them say something about 35 times, you probably don't because I thought all of those things and it wasn't until my customers kept telling me over and over again, we love your simplicity. We love the ease of use. We love this. We love that. It wasn't like, Oh, we're an easy to use product. That's really quick to get started with, you know, like duh, but they were the ones telling us that. So that told me this is what they valued. And therefore that's what I should be putting on the website and saying this, shouting it from the mountaintops with a bull horn hooked up to, you know, a spinal tap amplifier turned up to 11, right?
Speaker 2 00:36:02 Yeah. So you listen to your customers and reviews, testimonials, customer support, communications, these things are gold. And you know, I now have a dedicated folder in my email client when somebody signs up and tells me one of these things, I dump it into that folder every single time. And now I can just go in there when I'm ready to mine that out and pull all of these things and say, what are they saying over and over? Why do they like us over and over? And I just look and see, and it also is a great thing when they come and they're telling me, here are the things that we don't think you do well, it's hard to hear, but now you know what to fix now, you know how you can improve it. And it doesn't necessarily mean building something. It might mean fixing your onboarding or improving your support or documentation or changing the UX a little bit. You know, we find ourselves tweaking that quite a bit. When I see something that confuses somebody and I'm like, Oh yeah, I could see how that would be confusing. And then I tweak it based on what they said, and then I stop hearing about it.
Speaker 1 00:37:00 Yep. So, yep. Yeah. Yep. It's huge. Yeah. It's interesting, man. I mean, you know, so w who were hiring the, these two support folks, uh, to, to give us three support people, and we really don't need three support people, but we call them support, you know, their titles are support, uh, customer support specialists, but they really are like product feedback, uh, community engagement, um, you know, content marketing, right. In the form of both like the help docs, but also like product release things. Um, because I, yeah, and I think that it's all, whatever, it's just a spectrum, right. When you're a team of two or 10 or something like that, it's all a spectrum. Everybody wears a bunch of different hats, but yeah, I think that optimizing the, the, the amount of information that you get from the customers back into the product and the business and your content and your stance, you know, on things as much as you can is, is never money poorly spent. I'm hoping, at least that's the, that's the bet we're making is that, you know, these folks will be real revenue generating assets for the business. So we'll see. Well,
Speaker 2 00:38:09 It will be an interesting experiment to see the result. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:38:11 Yeah. So, yeah, I hope everyone enjoyed would love to, to kind of, you know, give this a thought, right. Ponder where, where you set, like what's the corner that you sit in, uh, you know, shoot us a message podcast, erode startups.com or give us a shout on Twitter. Uh, Dave, I'm not doing Twitter at all these days, and it's great, but you can give Dave a shout on Twitter and tell
Speaker 2 00:38:33 Him all that I spend. Yeah. Ask, ask Siri
Speaker 3 00:38:36 About the screen time I use on Twitter there. So it's embarrassing and we'll see you next week.
Speaker 0 00:38:43 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.
